Pretty Pictures, the other side March 7, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
I meant to post this a lot closer to the first, but c’est la vie. This is the part where I try to elaborate the virtues I see in the “oh, you are all just taking these pictures way too seriously” response. My loyalties lie more in the serious camp, but I think there is an implicit point in the opposite response that sets a healthy limit on that seriousness.
When my wife looked at some of the discussion, she was concerned with how certain positions of the female body were so quickly coded as sexual. She does fine art drawing, has a definite preference for naked ladies. In her mind, some of those positions seen as sexual were just technically interesting. Others, less interesting technically, were still not immediately sexual but simply suggested strength and power.
What often happens is that two camps erupt at this point: those who argue that there is something essentially sexual in the social context of the images, regardless of viewers like my wife who don’t see it, and those who argue that the ’social context’ is really just in the head of a few neurotic sorts who make a big deal of it. I think we have another option. It’s going to take some unpacking, though.
It’s a truism to say we are meaning-making animals. We make meaning, though, by establishing associations between ideas, images, sensations, and so on. There are all kinds of associations that we can make. There is a temptation to say that some associations are better than others, but I think all such claims only make sense in some serious context.
What happens in most debates, though, is that we preference a very rigid, logical, if-then, sort of association. This is *either* objectification or it isn’t, it’s *either* sexual or it isn’t. In truth, though, social interactions depend upon a more flexible system of making associations.
In part, this is because there is so much history behind any term or image that is contradictory from the perspective of ’strict’ logic (yeah, I’m just not going to detail what that means, it would take forever). Its meaning can literally go both ways. Its meaning actually rests on its capacity to go both ways, it’s what gives it scope and force. Scope in that the flexibility allows it to be re-used, force because the trail of associations and its tensions means it ‘registers’ more vividly for those who share them.
Here’s an example: imagine an image of a naked woman, kneeling with her legs folded under her, thighs open, hands palm-up on her knees. Heck, have her looking up, smiling. Now, some people will jump right on board and attack how this sexualizes female submission, etc., etc. But what if the image were being used by a woman trying to explore meditation, if the submission she were emulating was not sexual but spiritual?
The cynics will say they are the same thing, that the spiritual is just displaced sex. However, that doesn’t do the image justice. The sexual connotations are there, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the spiritual ones aren’t as well. The two enter into an uneasy communion through that image, each garnering force from the other.
The sexual dimension gets intensified by the spiritual, and the spiritual by the sexual. To miss either dimension is to experience only part of the image’s force. It also shuts down some of the image’s ability to open up communication. When it operates in multiple registers, it allows someone operating in one register to access the other, to move toward the structures entailed therein.
None of this, of course, undoes the critical things said about many images. It does, however, point out an alternative avenue to simply not using images like the ones in question. It raises a challenge: find new ways of presenting the images alongside other images, alongside text, that foregrounds their multiple associations.
Sexuality, Pretty Pictures, Objectification February 23, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Cool Links, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
Okay, so there is this neat discussion going on over here at Yud’s Dice. It’s spread out all over the place, though, so I wanted to come back over here and think things through a little more coherently in my own space.
This is in part a response to what is happening over there and in part a response to a conversation with my darling wife in regards to what is happening over there (hey Kim;). For that reason, I’m just going to try and break this down into ideas rather than responses to individuals.
What I like most about the post is the emphasis on the volume of examples of objectification. It isn’t deeply problematic for an occasional bit of objectification to appear and may even be ‘honest’ in the sense that, like it or not, we are bodies and sometimes it’s nice to just have that pointed out.
However, for that to become common indicates something problematic. Like Nietzsche, we ought to find something unhealthy in any thing that seems to be repeated over and over. I also want to expand a little more on what is problematic about the forms of objectification going on.
Rather than look at the Conan covers, though, I want to look at those Exalted covers, the shift from 1e to 2e. To zoom in on the Jade Exalted Brand has already highlighted is revealing. Both versions display attractive, pleasing bodies. Both even present what look to be idealized and attractive bodies.
2e, though, reinterprets that body in a profoundly sexual manner. Her clothing, her curves, all are exaggerated to emphasize sexiness pure and simple. The sidebar images just drive that home, you see things like sexy elf lady. Moreover, their bodies are positioned so that their most sexualized features dominate the composition.
Medium and message talk is pretty important here. These are roleplaying games, and these are all supposed to be exemplars for the sorts of roles players could take. That the dominant female characters are displayed with hyper-sexualized bodies therefore sends out a certain message about the sort of female characters in the game. That they are the sexy first and foremost.
The slippage that occurs between 1e and 2e is telling. Both images are aimed at a viewer, are objects for a viewer. They are objects, quite literally, meant for visual appreciation. Both are of attractive and sexy women. However, in the 2e cover, her appearance is all about her sexuality, whereas in the 1e, her sexuality is a side-effect of her overall idealized body, not her maxed out T&A action.
The 1e version is also holding out her bow in a manner that suggests she is about to *do* something with it, that she is active and capable. This is very much in keeping with traditional representations of men in the genre. To the extent that they are objectified positively, it is as active and capable.
This is a good point to drive home. Male figures are exaggerated and objectified in the genre, but so as to emphasize what they are capable of. Rogues are willowy, suggestive of their grace and sneakiness. Soldiers are huge or armored or well-armed, suggesting their toughness and power. Wizards have white beards to show they are old and knowledgeable.
What does it say when the female character who is supposed to be their equal is exaggerated primarily in a sexual fashion? Well, if you apply the same tools you applied to the male figures, then it says the female character is really about her sexiness, really about what she has to offer as an object of desire.
It isn’t even a question of whether her body is being offered up to us or not for our fantasied consumption. It is simply a question of the values that are being instantiated in the presentation of these women. Why have we zoomed in on these very narrow, sexual elements to define these female characters?
They aren’t the only beautiful bodies out there, so it can’t be because we just want to appreciate the female form. Nor is that hyper-clingy clothing the only way to accentuate a beautiful body. Sure, nothing wrong with some pictures that playfully exaggerate sexy bits, but why so few exaggerating other beautiful parts of the body? Moreover, why so little variety on the covers, which are the ‘face’ the book presents to its audience?
[Old Thoughts] Old School February 6, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Game Design, Old Thoughts.add a comment
[This is just something from my old blog, which I decided to dredge back up and repost here as a little salvaging operation. It was first posted April 6, 2006.]
I recently picked up a copy of the old AD&D Players Option: Skills and Powers and you know what–there were some darn cool ideas in there. At its heart lies the effort to make character classes and races more modular, easier to tailor to different sorts of settings. In retrospect, I may prefer the simplicity of that to the direction customizability went in 3.0 and 3.5 D&D—namely, prestige classes.
This interests me because I used to go around thinking that we (myself and the gaming community as a whole) had moved beyond the ‘rudimentary’ efforts of AD&D. I came back to 3.0 with the notion that they had really fixed the game and freed it from its archaic clumsiness. In short, I accepted a very simple idea of what it meant for a game to evolve. I treated the evolution to be one directional, with all the bad things in the past and the good things in the present and future.
This is not the case. Evolution is a question of suitability and suitability always presumes an implicit ’suited to.’ Old school AD&D is suited to do certain things well, certain other things not so well. The same can be said for any game—the old games I grew up with are not archaic, the new ones aren’t ‘high tech.’ What has changed is not the inherent quality of the games but the expectations that I have for the game. The one good thing about us (as gamers) today is that we (as a community) have become more self-reflective about the relationship between expectation and rules. We appreciate that different rules better suit different premises and audiences.
Unfortunately, we now have a tendency to see products of a less self-reflective moment in our history as less valuable. We forget that many of those pioneers we disregard as ‘grognards’ are and were no less reflective. They struggles with premise and rules, experimenting with home brews and alternative mechanics. They may have been less theoried than ourselves, but they shared a commitment to rules that worked for their aims.
More importantly, though, we forget that self-reflectiveness is no guarantee of quality. It gives us a false sense of awareness and makes it easier for us to ignore biases that fall outside our well-crafted terms. We can be far worse than any of the grognards because we *believe* that we understand how things actually work.
