Feminism – Brian Crick

Makeup

Got one new Scopa card done last night, and revised another.

So here’s a new Jack (though maybe it should be Knight?) of Coins.

Going with the business attire the other coins had, I thought I’d go with a polo shirt here. It’s awfully plain; no pinstripes or layers to add interest. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

I sent this Queen of Coins to the client last month, and he commented that she looked a bit too androgynous.

While I’d prefer not to have exaggerated sexual dimorphism in my stuff, I can kind of see where he’s coming from there.

I was reminded a bit of this children’s RPG that made a point of having dignified, non-sexualized female characters, and people complained that the characters weren’t recognizably female.

A tangent: when I was a kid, I thought girls’ nails naturally grew pointy, and boys’ nails came out square. And I met a girl with square nails, and got very confused.

Yes, there are of course physical differences between genders, but a great many of the things we think of as ‘feminine’, especially with regards to people’s faces, take conscious effort to produce: styled hair, makeup, shaped eyebrows, more saturated colors on glasses and clothing.

I’d love it if we lived in a world with less gender-specific grooming, but we don’t live in that world, so let’s be practical about it: a character who doesn’t follow at least some of these conventions is likely to cause confusion. I get that.

I don’t like it, but I get it.

I’d also love it if we lived in a world where most people didn’t care whether or not another person’s gender was obvious from their grooming, but again, we don’t live in that world.

So I went ahead and lengthened the hair, enlarged the earrings, made the eyebrows arched and the glasses brighter.

But I didn’t add makeup.

Makeup is gross.

Much Ado About Purple

So I made this game a little while ago called Green & Purple, for a game-making contest. You’re a green ball, trying to make contact with a purple ball, and live happily ever after together.

I actually spent a lot of time going back and forth on the colors. I wanted pastels; I wanted two colors that were contrasting, of course; I didn’t want your usual red vs. blue selection.

But most importantly, I didn’t want pink & blue. I didn’t want players to immediately see this boy/girl dichotomy there. Even in an abstract, hastily constructed game, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t reinforcing any of those save-the-princess type sentiments out there. It’s a pet cause of mine. So I went with green and a sort of bluish purple, which I figured were reasonably neutral colors.

Despite that, hearing people talk about the game, many referred to the purple ball as ‘she’ and the green one as ‘he’.

Trouble is, you’ve only got so many options. With sufficiently contrasty colors, one color is probably going to be warm — fiery reds and yellows — and the other bluer, cooler. In the absence of any other context, I suspect people are going to see the warm color as more feminine.

Near the end of the project, I worried that I was possibly falling into some gender stereotypes despite my best efforts to keep things neutral; the cool colored ball was the one you were controlling, the one with some agency; the warmer ball was completely passive, waiting to be rescued. I considered switching the colors, but didn’t have time to do it before the contest deadline came up.

But you know what? It wouldn’t have mattered. Because this is not about color choices or thinking that people who read too much into color choices are sexist. It’s about the biases we all carry.

Had I switched the colors, and had people read the purple player as female and the green object of its affection as male, you could say it was a gender-role reinforcing game design, to play a female character whose only goal is to find a mate.

Had I started with those colors — a purple player and a green companion — there’s a good chance I would have worried about that… and wanted to switch the colors.

Because I’m biased.

While I’d love the gender roles in the world to up and disappear, I certainly can’t say I believe they’ve already done so. I expect everything I see to express gender stereotypes; I expect to be annoyed by said stereotypes. Because I am biased, I will desperately try to pull my experiences in line with my expectations, spinning said experiences as needed. I will spin my perceptions of any game I play to fit in this world view, seeing sexism where there may be none — because thoughtless, sexist characterization is what I expect to see in most games.

And that applies to my perception of my own work. I will fight to keep my work egalitarian, but my biases will have me seeing depressingly overt sexism in everything I make. In a less abstract game, in a game with recognizable human characters, I will be wont to complain that I have failed to make such-and-such a female character sufficiently stereotype-breaking. I will graft a perception bias onto a character who may very well be, in an objective sense, portrayed in a perfectly respectful way. I will likely post a journal entry about it, wondering how I can do better. In my post, I will describe said character in terms of a stereotype that is an oversimplification of who the character actually is; and in doing so I will reinforce the very stereotypes I seek to avoid.

Fighting bias is a skill. Wanting to be less biased does not immediately grant you this skill. Wanting to produce works with an egalitarian world view does not immediately grant you this skill. I know I say that a lot, such-and-such-a-thing is a learnable skill, not a part of your core being. But having bias, being prejudiced or bigoted or whatever… it’s very, very tempting to think of acting upon bias as a failure of conscience, rather than a failure of skill.

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Make a Difference

I have high hopes for the game developer’s group I’ve joined. Not just in terms of getting along with the group; sure, I was worried about that, but I’m talking about, like, the group being this positive force or something. I’ve always been hesitant to look for communities of people with similar interests — I’m worried about things getting a bit insular — but I get this feeling like, I’m watching something really wonderful take shape here.

I want to do whatever I can to help this along. To that end, I’ve volunteered to give a talk to the group — maybe with some other people — about music composition.

I don’t know where or when this will take place, but it scares me a bit . Then again, this whole joining-a-developer-group thing has been all about getting out of my comfort zone from the beginning. I’m excited to continue that trend. It’s been a while since I actively looked for things I was uncomfortable with, since I looked for more opportunities to fail and learn from those failures.

* * *

Been stressing out a bit about my Robin character model — and character models in general — for Tinselfly.

To recap, here’s what she looks like:

The odd thing about this is, in my head — if this were live action or something — I’d want the actress playing Robin to be a bit chunky. In my head, that’s how she is. She also has shoulder-length, unmanageable, curly hair, but I wasn’t sure how to model that.

But despite all that, as a stylized character in this stylized world, she’s absurdly elongated and has a simple bob.

I want the characters to look fragile. It just seemed like the right stylistic choice, the way the angular features of the characters in Samurai Jack complement the spare, action-based storytelling, or the way tile-based video game characters are frequently short and square, so the player can more easily tell what tile they’re in.

There are supposed to be elements in Tinselfly about larger-than-life people being all vulnerable, and given the 1920s aesthetic, I wanted my characters to look a little like those elongated, bronze art deco statues you see here and there.

* * *

Whatever I do, I don’t just want to make good products. I want to make good projects that feature made-up worlds that are the sort of egalitarian place I want the real world to be. That’s why Celestial Stick People has some male Lovers.

Getting some strong, layered female characters out there in the video game world is a major force driving the development of Tinselfly. I won’t argue that I don’t have an agenda here.

However, if I want that agenda to succeed, it’s imperative that I’m not preachy about it. Otherwise, the people I want to reach the most — the people who aren’t so obsessed with this whole egalitarianism thing — will simply tune me out.

* * *

So back to the skinniness.

Body image is also a hot topic in feminist discussions, and for good reason. And while I’m trying to move forward on the empowered-female-character thing, I’m kind of moving backward on the whole healthy-body-image thing.

For the most part, however, I’m comfortable with this design decision. Now, I may be completely wrong, but here’s how I’m currently rationalizing it:

It makes sense for the story, as mentioned above. If 100% of my design decisions are based on my agenda, I’m afraid I’m getting into preaching territory. I’d still argue that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with super-skinny stylized characters in a work of fiction; it’s when it’s ubiquitous that it becomes an issue. If my next project has super-skinny characters and thee’s no real point to it, then I’ve got a problem.
Everyone and everything — men and women, dogs, cats, spaceships — will be just as long and skinny as Robin here. There’s not going to be a lot in the way of gender dimorphism, either, and I think that that will drive home the idea that this is a stylistic choice, not a normative statement on women in particular. (Sure, Barbie is scary looking. But compare her to the average Ken doll, and you’ll see how the dimorphism makes her so much creepier. In contrast, I like how male and female Bratz characters are similarly oddly proportioned.)
This isn’t targeted at adolescents. I’d love to produce something fun and positive for my 10 year old sister in law; I’d love to live in a world where there were lots of products with strong, positive, non disney-princess characters that adolescents could look up to… but this just isn’t one of those products. If I were targeting that sort of age range, I’d be way more particular about what I’m including and what I’m unintentionally saying about things.

Like I said, I’m open to the idea that I’m making the wrong call here. We’ll see how this universe feels when it’s more fully fleshed out, I guess.

Pan Am, Part 2: In Which I Argue with Myself

First, a picture:

Aren’t those engines lovely? So… retro and stuff in a way I didn’t expect actual jet engines to have ever been retro.

Anyway, on to more Pan Am. I came up with a counterargument to the bit in my last post comparing this to Mad Men, and thought I’d share.

I’m generally of the opinion that it’s the job of fiction to exaggerate the crap out of the protagonists’ struggles. I’m not a huge fan of naturalism. That’s part of why I like science fiction; I like how you can take mundane personal issues and explore them through made-up technologies and discoveries.

So if the mundane issue you want to explore is sexism in the modern, mundane world, it makes perfect sense to explore that in the 1960s, so you can make things a whole lot harder for your female characters.

Now, personally, I don’t like that approach; I want to see (and write) characters who have basically the same mindset and values as modern people; I find the characters in period dramas kind of alien sometimes. (That’s mostly why I preferred the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice to the BBC one; in the former, I felt like these were modern people with modern values, and I could easily empathize with their frustrations with this whole formalized approach to courtship.)

But anyway, that’s just a personal preference, and I’ll still accept the 1960s setting of Mad Men as a valid approach to heightening your drama and presenting the world with positive role models.

Of course, this is all dependent on the extent to which the show actually highlights the struggles of the women and the extent to which they either succeed outright or grow as characters through their struggles. I’m not through the first season yet, and so far, I’m not sure I’d say the women’s stories are the focus of the show. But my understanding is that that may change later on, so I’ll try to keep myself open to that and see what I think if the show goes that way.

Friendly Skies

So I wanted to talk about Pan Am a bit.

Pilots

I really like television pilots that don’t quite know what they’re doing. I like how eager they are, how they’re all like omg omg look at all these cool ideas we have! and yeah, some of those ideas aren’t real solid, but it’s hard not to get caught up in how excited the show is at merely existing.

Pan Am doesn’t quite seem sure what it is yet, and I’m ok with that. Not knowing exactly where this is going to go is part of what makes it fun.

Mad Men

It’s sort of impossible to talk about this without mentioning Mad Men.

I’ll start by saying that calling these shows competitors is kind of insulting to both. For better or worse, Pan Am isn’t Mad Men on a Plane, nor is it trying to be.

What I think is worth talking about, however, was the two shows’ different approaches to feminism. I could write pages and pages about this, but I guess the basic idea is, if your goal as a show with a feminist agenda is to make the world a more egalitarian place by having people watch you, I think Pan Am has the more viable approach.

The show itself is easy to get into. I was pretty much sold on the show before the first commercial break. It’s fun, it’s zippy, it’s visually stunning. Whatever it’s saying, I suspect it’s at least going to communicate it to a wide audience. Yes, I’ve started watching Mad Men, but in the sort of way you’ll choke down a new food for a while so you’ll eventually develop a taste for it. Mad Men is many things, but I wouldn’t call it approachable.

Perhaps more importantly, Pan Am is trying to present some positive, strong female role models. Sure, they’re not terribly three-dimensional, but the show makes it fairly explicit that this is what it’s trying to do. There’s even a scene in the end where a little girl is staring in awe of the female leads… it’s beautifully un-subtle.

I don’t care if having women this independent and men this ok with it isn’t historically accurate. If glossing over history is what it takes to get some strong female characters out there, than I’m all for it. To the extent that television shows are consumed within the real world; to the extent that many people will connect to television characters and stories as strongly as real people and real situations, the world is a more egalitarian place because this egalitarian fantasy world was created within it.

I prefer that to littering the airwaves with a bunch of sexist male characters with sexist male dialogue. If we took the characters in Mad Men and plopped them in a show set in an ad agency in the modern world with a sexist sort of work culture, would we complain that the writers and writing were sexist? Does it matter what time period it’s set in?

To me, it feels like sitting around complaining about the problem rather than actively solving it.

Eye Candy

Not that Pan Am is all that high-minded. (Though I don’t think you have to come off as high-minded if you want to effectively advance your cause, whatever it is.) I’m in it mostly for the style, not the substance. Things as mundane as airplane cabins are beautifully lit; I love the over-saturated colors and over-designed costumes; the shots are stylishly composed and edited. Sure, the dialogue wasn’t amazing, the plotting not terribly solid and I wouldn’t call the pilot a self-contained, satisfying story, but I think I’ll keep watching the show on style alone.

Who knows, maybe it will get deeper as time goes on, but I’d be sad if it got less happy.