Final Fantasy Sexism Part I: Why It Matters

[Raistlin]

I was prepared for substanceless criticisms of my articles based on knee-jerk emotion and sexism, but even I did not expect someone's sole critique to be forum placement, without even the slightest reference to the underlying argument.

The point of this little soapbox introduction is in the title: I wanted to explain why this issue matters. A lot of people are very dismissive of this issue as unimportant, and I wanted to preemptively rebut such arguments. Additionally, I wanted briefly overview the types of sexism I would be highlighting in the games themselves (appearance, gender roles, and male dependence). Because all of that combined is a decently long article itself, I thought it should be a separate introduction. And it's in General FF because it makes absolutely no sense to place just an intro to an article series in EoEO, of all places. This is, of course, ignoring the obvious question of why you even care.

I have not heard of the Hawkeye Initiative, but that is exactly what I was talking about regarding female appearances and poses in video games. I might have to mention it later.

Too often, I believe, sexism is confused with stereotyping gender roles. The latter can imply or lead to sexism, but isn't necessarily sexist.

I disagree to an extent, at least in the context of video game characters. Women being limited to cookie-cutter personalities and traditional gender roles when male characters are more often less limited is, by itself, sexist. As I said, one particular character falling into one particular role is not by itself sexist; it's the treatment of women characters as a whole, combined with other factors, that demonstrates an underlying sexism.

But something like warriors always being male and white mages always being female isn't directly sexist. It may be a symptom of it, and it certainly doesn't do anything to better our perceptions of gender, but it makes logical sense (in that it's a reference to traditional roles, women are healers, caregivers, men are fighters, etc, based on a traditional setting. The roles fit the setting).

As I said to Dr. rydrum, just because a video game character is an accurate portrayal of real-life sexism does not make the video game character beyond critique. The gender roles that these characters perpetuate are themselves sexist. Especially when, as said above, male characters have never been similarly limited to just the fighters.