Hello there. Today is International Woman's Day, and is a day of awareness, celebration and increasingly scepticism. All of which are pretty healthy ways to mark such a day, and really I think the serious debate surrounding International Woman's Day (and International Man's day, I know there's one of those too) and what purpose they serve in an ever more cosmopolitan world, whether it is a justifiable celebration of voice unsung because they're not old, white men, or whether it is marginalising female voices, casting them aside to be remembered on one day and forgotten the rest, remaining separate from world history.
I'm aware of what people may be thinking by even mentioning this debate – I'm some kind of horrible sexist (or man haters, both the more extreme misandric parts of feminism and the ludicrous misogynists seem to agree to hate the actual debate) who wants to take away from a day celebrating unsung voices, or minority voices or whatever term they choose to use this week. The issue I have is not with addressing voices that are not usually heard and issues not usually thought about, but the fact that they are marginalised voices and ghettoised leads to a lot of problems in itself.
Several years ago, I did an essay on the representation of women in video games, both in terms of female game design staff and in game characters, and it was a hotbed of marginalised voices and a lack of expression which has only gotten worse in the last 5 years, where female voices were increasingly excluded, and then marginalised and belittled when they do appear. Outside of RPGs, Fighting games and the increasingly nebulous concept of 'Casual' games, female characters and voices seldom appear, and are typically tokenised when they are. People are increasingly concerned with blockbuster films failing the Bechdel Test (http://bechdeltest.com/), however I struggle to think of any major video game released since around 2008 which would pass it apart from maybe Heavy Rain. My point being that this shows a tokenisation around female characters which undermines and silences female voices while at the same time crying that “there are women in this, why are you complaining?”
My solution isn't really existent at the moment, maybe stop talking about it, as Morgan Freeman suggested about Black History month and concern ourselves less about what is different and separate about us and more about what is the same. What are your thoughts? We've got comment boxes below every post so I suppose we really should use them.
Stay safe and hug it out
HuggyDave
Hey man cool post.
ReplyDeleteBechdel Test is really cool too. I guess its kind of paradoxical that in raising awareness of things like women's issue over a week period it in a sense marginalizes those views by setting a week for it - all of these issues are examined over the week, and then they go away for a year. Of course you might say that a designated week would better raise awareness of certain issues. I agree the issues need to be addressed - the inequalities along gender lines are awful and charities and activists do struggle to keep these issues in the news - a recognized week is a good way to raise awareness. I suppose the question is how better would the issues of inequalities by gender across the world be raised?
14733
http://14733.blogspot.com/
I really liked the Bechdel Test too. I have never head of it and was quite surprised after reading which films fail this test. You can apply this to television adverts about women and men ans see the stereotyping. The one that gets on my nerves it the Boots Advertisement with the two sick woman who are doing everything and their husbands are in bed ill. My boyfriend and I are totally the other way around. He gets on with life and I get man flu when we're sick. You can't stereotype men and women as there will always be exceptions. When we examine the issues of women I think people are still prone to stereotyping them. All issues are important but I think that many studies still only examine women in terms of how many children they have, or what family planning education they've had.
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