Borderlands 2, or ‘the Accidental-on-Purpose, not-so-secret, feminist game’

There really is a lot that can be said about BL2, and although I’m not going to say it all, I’ve picked up on some points I think are more relevant for BadRep.  It isn’t, however, as hard as you might expect to find good, feminist-friendly things to say about BL2. In fact, it’s probably one of the best AAA titles in terms of its ability to give players something quite egalitarian as an overall experience.

Basic game-stuff first, though: keeping to form, Borderlands 2 is beautiful.  Hand-painted landscapes, smooth animation, great character design, brilliant monsters and, like, a gazillion-billion guns and other loot items.  It’s an FPS/RPG that combines the best of both game styles; you can recognise the colour-coded scale of awesomeness for your loot alongside the superb right-in-there combat mechanics.  You can grind, farm, explore – whatever.  It’s fun.  A lot of fun.

It’s available on the three big platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) and is big on multiplayer, though frankly it’s just as great solo. However, the one thing that annoys me with these big multi-platform titles and multiplayer is that we can’t interact with each other.

While I can play through Steam with one friend, my Xbox friend can’t join in and is left to languish alone with inferior loot.  Not the fault of the game – more the big console companies trying to keep their corner of the market isolated – but it’s still a letdown.

Anyway, these things aside, why is this such a great egalitarian game?  Put simply, it takes the piss.  Out of everyone.  On the surface of things, anyone is fair game, but(!) if you listen and observe, what I’ve noticed is that there’s a bit of a slant on the piss-takings, and it’s a positive one.  I’ll give you some examples, but from here on out, beware the spoilers.

My two favourite NPCs are Ellie and Tina. They’re both great examples of powerful, self-confident, self-reliant women who aren’t your average pin-up character and who represent integral, practical and useful components of the story & mission.

They’re not decoration over in the corner of the room; they’re key to your success.  Ellie is a mechanic (and a bit of a whizz at that) and she’s a larger woman.  She loves it, and so does the game and its creators.

In the book that came with my special edition game-pack, Inside the Vault: The Art & Design of Borderlands 2, one character artist has said:

Ellie is one of my favorites… I like that we have embraced a variety of different character shapes.

Ellie’s dialogue is snappy, funny and generally awesome.  Some examples include: “…they like skinny chicks ’cause they’s pussies!” and “My mom Moxxi always told me if I slimmed down, men’d pay me more mind.  Shows what she knows – I got these boys bending over backwards…”.

And Tina.  Tina is an early-teens girl who has been orphaned and likes to spend time having tea parties and, uh, exploding stuff.  She’s the best explosives expert on the planet. Even the man leading the resistance defers to her.

Tina’s a confusing character to meet – her speech is a little discordant with her sweet appearance – but she nevertheless maintains BL2 hilarity while being totally badass.

Tina and Ellie are just two of the female NPCs (yup, there’s others!) but I gotta say, having played through, the women are very important in BL2. They’re powerful, proactive, and practical. They can fight, build, explode stuff and save the day – they are full and proper characters and they’re equal (if not more awesome) than their male counterparts.

Even a rather minor female NPC adds to the all-round feminine badassery by “accidentally” giving you coordinates to mortar a very misogynist fellow into tiny pieces.

What’s great is that while the game’s pleasing me by being fair with its female characters, it’s also very subtly passing on the message that misogyny and sexism isn’t cool and isn’t funny.  Plenty of anti-egalitarian types rear their heads in the story, but they all get punished in-game. I think that’ll go a long way to dissuading that sort of behaviour in the audience – and hopefully show other developers that women can be awesome too.

Deadlight, or ‘the obligatory, festivity-themed title that’s actually pretty awesome’

Finally, in the spirit of all things spooky, there’s Deadlight, which recently ported across to Steam from Xbox Live Arcade (released on Steam 25/10/2012). Developed by Tequila Works alongside Microsoft Studios, Deadlight is a tense indie zombie-survival offering set in post-apocalyptic 1980s Seattle.  You play Randall Wayne, who’s been separated from his wife and daughter, battling and evading the ‘shadows’ as he navigates a ruined, hazardous cityscape to reunite his family.

It’s a simple premise by all accounts, and we’ve certainly seen plenty of zombie themes in recent years across the entertainment spectrum – but don’t let that put you off.

Deadlight is a side-scroller with a dark, moody art style reminiscent of LIMBO . It doesn’t feel too distant from the survivalist title I Am Alive, which also requires you to focus on your stamina levels to avoid falling of buildings or running out of energy mid-fight.  Similarly, you have limited weaponry and ammo (only what you can salvage on your way) so a lot of the time you have to make do without, meaning you can’t go full force forward shooting everything that moves. Nor can you charge about with an axe and splatter everything, because that runs your stamina down pretty sharpish.

Running, climbing and hiding are some of the best options, but there’s also environmental elements you can use to your advantage.  Zombies aren’t smart: if you jump over a hole in the floor, they’ll just fall in it.

Without giving away too much, zombies aren’t your only problem in Deadlight, and not every moment is spent dashing about.  It’s good fun and manages to keep up the tension without being so nerve-racking you log off (I’m looking at you, Amnesia… you too, Slender!).

At under a tenner full price (£9.99) it’s not bad value either, but if you’re quick there’s 15% off on Steam until the end of today (£8.49), so it’s worth checking out for a little Hallowe’en amusement.  For those of you who prefer XBLA, it’s 1,200 Microsoft Points.

If you aren’t tickled by Deadlight, don’t forget, Thanksgiving is nigh approaching (22/11/12) so keep a look out in November for more sales all over the place from US-centric platforms and digital management systems!

I think it’s BRILLIANT.

Sarah C lent me How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran’s recent feminism handbook/memoir, and I expected to like it. I follow Moran on twitter where she’s always deeply funny, and I thought this would be an enjoyable read even if it’s just her personal take on the issues. What surprised me is how incredibly effective the book is – and how it does some things which are amazing from a male point of view.

Of course, cis male points of view aren’t automatically important in feminism (with some arguing that they have no place in it at all). When it comes to deciding what women want their future to be, and what they feel is harmful or unacceptable to that, men don’t really need to be part of the process. And most male feminists that I know understand that.

However, when it comes to implementing feminism against the status quo of patriarchal bullshit, when women are fighting for their rights from one direction it helps if men are on board too. If men feel threatened by coming changes, they’re more likely to do the kind of heinous, disgusting, and frequently violent things that we see thrown back at women who challenge anything the patriarchy is currently comfortable with.

Which is why I think that Caitlin Moran’s book should be compulsory reading for boys.

Photo of Caitlin Moran by Chris Floyd, which won August's "Portrait of the month" at the National Portrait Gallery. Source: http://www.npg.org.uk/

Moran does two things which are absolutely crucial. She actively calls bullshit on the many forms of misogyny which have somehow become acceptable in society, and then she laughs at them.

Calling bullshit is not a small thing. It takes incredible strength to say “no” to Hollywood, magazines, posters, tv and the expectations of your friends, family, colleagues and boss. By being brutally honest about becoming a woman – periods, body hair, boobs, everything about a teenager’s brain – she humanises it and makes it possible to go against expectations. Of COURSE the idea that every single woman needs a Brazilian shave by default is stupid bullshit. Step back a moment and compare it to real life as she does, and it becomes easy to laugh… and more importantly to finish laughing and shout HELL NO.

Boys will read this. They want to know what girls think, and what the changes happening to girls’ bodies and minds are actually like. The book is full of comedy but also danger, which keeps it exciting and holds your attention. I’m always going on about how pop culture is great because it engages people and slips messages past them while they’re having fun – this does exactly that, really well.

Importantly, when talking to the male side of the equation, it also demystifies. Male readers can look at the stupidity of some conventions, see what the reality is for women and it will become easier for them to realise where the bullshit lies.

Moran speaks directly to men in the book as well as women. After telling female readers to say the words “I am a feminist” out loud, possibly while standing on a chair (“Say it. SAY IT. SAY IT NOW! Because if you can’t, you’re basically bending over saying ‘Kick my arse and take my vote, please, the patriarchy.’“) she adds this:

“And do not think you shouldn’t be standing on that chair, shouting ‘I AM A FEMINIST!’ if you are a boy. A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution. A male feminist should ABSOLUTELY be on the chair – so we ladies may all toast you, in champagne, before coveting your body wildly.”

Note to men: this is relatively true. Identifying as a feminist in actions as well as words (unless you’re a lying weasel who is just doing it to get into their knickers) will by itself put you quite far into the “not a raging asshole” category. That’s hot. I’m just saying.

I agree with Sarah on the minor disappointments. The author’s use of “retard” on page 5 really jars and stands out, just plain doesn’t work, and isn’t okay. Where Sarah found it limiting that the events are focused only on Moran’s personal experiences, though, I didn’t think this mattered as much to the message. Where Caitlin says she doesn’t feel that the word “boobs” really describes any part of her body (and “breasts” is worse), I know some women who feel comfortable with that word – but her final decision doesn’t seem as crucial as long as the reader is made aware that girls face the situation of having to find the right words for themselves. Making everyone ask themselves the question means the answer she chooses almost doesn’t matter.

There are plenty of universal truths in there. The chapter where she reveals how the word “fat” has basically become weaponised to a greater degree than previous nuclear-level playground insults, and gives examples, all rings totally true. The stories of her 16-year-old self veer between amusing and devastating, but it just helps the reader identify with the general problem. Hell, it made *me* identify with it, when my 16-year-old self was dangerously underweight, gangly, six-foot and male.

And that’s the secret. The reason I’m excited about this book is that it’s the first one I think will be hugely effective, to women but especially to the average man. There are many modes of communication which just don’t work: language is important, but I think we can frequently become so removed from daily discourse in our attempts to avoid discriminatory words that we lose the audience entirely. Caitlin Moran will change male attitudes a million times more powerfully than, say, a paper by feminist academics which would only be read by feminist academics, containing newly invented language that boys barely understand and have not been convinced they need.

You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, “And are the *men* doing this, as well?” If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as “some total fucking bullshit”.

How to be a woman engages the reader with great humour and truth, says things of interest, and is entertaining enough to do the pop-culture stealth-feminism thing. The early reaction from feminists was “This is an important book!”, but the opinions then swayed back and forth a bit afterwards. I think “important” is precisely the right word, because it’s going to work.

Teenage boys! Want to know about teenage girls? Read this book. Men! Want to read something that’s genuinely hilarious and interesting, even if you don’t ‘do’ feminism? Read this book. It’s angry without being exclusionary, very funny, very honest, and has a real shot at inspiring a new generation to become feminists.

Top marks, Moran.

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!

I love live comedy, honest I do. I spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and I’ll be there for the full three weeks this year. Some of my best friends are (very good) comedians. However, as a scene: live comedy has a problem. I haven’t been an aficionado for many years, so maybe it was always there – but if recent articles are anything to go by; it seems to be growing. Increasingly, the search for ‘edgy’ material is translating into a scene where the recoil laugh – the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that laugh – is the only one aimed for. The targets are ‘soft’ – minorities and marginalized groups – and the jokes prod at the same old prejudices. The numbers of times I come home from a comedy gig wanting to dry-clean my brain is rising.

My hackles were finally raised enough to write this article after an especially bad gig I went to recently. A sketch group of white, able-bodied young men performed a series of female grotesques which were so consistently unpleasant that – though cheerily presented – the unmistakable undercurrent to the evening was ‘we really don’t like women much.’ Most sketches involved a member of the group donning a plastic wig to ‘be a girl’ – and every female character was a Lolita, a whore, a woman giving birth or a mother who hated her children. The punchlines ranged from coat hanger abortions to incest to rape to paedophilia. At my table, from about halfway through, we didn’t laugh so much as look to each other for reaction shots and a reality check. This troupe’s final skit was a song and dance number, the ‘Cell Block Tango’ from Chicago, with the words changed to ‘she had it coming’. Had there not been other people on the bill who I really wanted to see, I would have walked out then and there.

The problem is more widespread than just one shit comedy troupe . People more eloquent than myself have pointed out this return to the bad old days. It seems like the decades of hard-earned progress, a basic standard of ‘don’t be a shit to the marginalised’, is being discarded because now it’s apparently ironic. Sexism is increasingly tolerated (after all, everything’s sorted and equal now, so just lighten up, bitch) and other kinds of prejudice are also creeping back, too. ‘It’s not racist, it’s just un-PC, and no one likes political correctness. So, while we’re at it, what about those immigrants, homos, and the disabled, aye?’

Increasingly comedians who get pulled up for saying genuinely unpleasant things (I’m looking at you, Frankie Boyle) have taken this to be their selling point and then upped the ante in general douchery. While Jordan, the gossip-magazines’ favourite glamour model, might seem a fair target, when exactly did her disabled son become fair game, too? Let alone in a joke about incest and rape. I’ll repeat that: an incest-rape joke about a disabled eight-year-old child.

While I’m sure there has always been some truly unpleasant comedy around, its apparent mainstream acceptance is a new trend. The Frankie Boyle joke aired on Channel 4. This worries me because our words do carry a power – they reflect how we see the world, but they also set our standards for what is normal, acceptable, okay. The trickle-down effect has real-world consequences. The rise of the rape joke can be a horrific trigger for those who have experienced it. In increments, these themes – packaged as entertainment – normalise these horrors and dismiss their seriousness.

This is not an argument for censorship – I had fervent arguments a few years ago with Daily Fail-reading colleagues about whether Jerry Springer: The Opera should be shown on TV (yes, yes, a thousand times yes!) – but there is a huge middle ground between Mary Whitehouse prudery and comedy which is getting pretty close to hatespeech. Please, guys: self-regulate a little by engaging the brain.

Some would argue that if I don’t like this brand of comedy, I just shouldn’t watch it. To some extent they’re right, and I do try. When I saw a poster in Edinburgh for a standup show called ‘The Lying Bitch and the Wardrobe’ (I see what you did there) I had a pretty strong inkling that this wouldn’t be my kind of thing and I didn’t go. But on a mixed bill (as almost all small live comedy gigs are) there’s rarely any warning what each person will do – so while you might have gone along because you recognise one name that you like, there is no disclosure until you’re hearing it that the third act, Joe Bloggs, will be your prejudiced asshat for the evening, berating you all with a microphone for at least ten minutes.

Oh, and you paid to see this.

I don’t think anything should be off-limits – but some topics are so unpleasant (not to mention increasingly over-mined) that if a comedian wants to tackle them they will need to be so damn funny, so ingenious, original, tactful – that 80% of comedians just shouldn’t bother. Needless to say, the 80% that aren’t up to speed don’t get this, and the 20% that can do it well often have better things to do than prod triggertastic subjects and tired old clichés with a great big stick. They’re off crafting material that makes you belly-laugh (and think) rather than just titter nervously in disbelief.

As my friend James Ross, who runs the consistently wonderful Fat Kitten Improv group and the Better Living Through Comedy night put it: “From a purely technical standpoint, shock humour suffers acutely from a law of diminishing returns: the audience build up a resistance to it, and that alone would be good reason to limit its use.”

I think the thing which is missing (besides originality) is a measure of basic empathy. In the increasingly desperate search for ‘dark’ and ‘cutting edge’ material, comedians forget that a lot of their lazily-picked targets are people. Real people. People with feelings and also (self-interest alert, guys:) people who go to comedy gigs.

The rising amount of ‘ironic’ misogyny is not creating a particularly friendly environment for a certain 50% of punters. Last year I went to the Comedy Store to see twelve different comedians being filmed for The World Stands Up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the person who’d invited me along had intended the evening as a date or not, so it was potentially awkward already. Then, as the evening unfolded, four out of twelve comedians used ‘bad fellatio’ as the bedrock of their sets. One standup spent his whole set mocking his wife for not pleasuring him correctly. In the narratives that we heard that night, women’s main role was as dispensers of sexual favours – and we couldn’t even do that right. Thanks, guys. I haven’t been back to the Comedy Store since.

For another example, I was once out with a group for a friend’s birthday when a standup did a set about making a mess in the disabled toilet and blaming it on a disabled person. While he wasn’t to know that birthday girl, sat in the front row, had cerebral palsy, why did he think this would be a good topic in the first place? How many times has he encouraged the able-bodied to laugh at this disadvantaged minority’s expense?

Example of good standup! Catherine Semark performing at Edinburgh Fringe. Photo by me.

This isn’t an argument for ‘nice’ comedy. Some of my favourite comedians are pretty darn dark and twisted – Bill Hicks, Dylan Moran, and I heartily recommend London sketch group The Beta Males – but the ‘type’ of twisted is crucial. Jokes are about status – people use them every day to agree boundaries of what’s acceptable, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. When activist comedians such as Mark Thomas or Kate Smurthwaite use humour to mock people in power for making bad decisions, that’s something very different to a middle class standup laying into ‘chavs’ for ‘talking funny and drinking cheap booze’.

Anger and humour are very often interlinked, but where you aim that anger makes all the difference. Aim it ‘up’ at deserving, more powerful targets and it’s subversive, it can hold people to account – satire has a long and proud tradition. Aim that anger ‘down’ at the underdog and it’s tired, old and – frankly – it’s bullying.

• Hannah Eiseman-Renyard is a short, fat, ginger four-eyes who nonetheless loves live comedy. She works as an editor by day, a writer/performance poet by night, and on the weekends she fights crime. She’ll sleep when she’s dead. Hannah runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.

Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck

Anyhow, on to finer things.

Now, I particularly love Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck in the revamped Battlestar Galatica. And that in itself would be a Found Feminism, if it weren’t already enormously obvious, especially after everyone (well, some bloke) got their knickers in a twist over Starbuck being played by a woman.

For reference, a good interview with Ron Moore, the director, on that decision is here.

We can rejoice in that decision, and also now in the existence of (new) Starbuck as an internet meme.

Which brings me rather meanderingly to the actual Found Feminism. This hashtag: #thingsstarbuckwouldntsay, started off on Twitter by Katee herself.

Personal favourites, hand picked by fellow Bad Repper and Sci Fi nerd, Steve:

Does this flightsuit clash with my highlights?

I’m sure you’re all going the right way, … men always have a better sense of direction.

How many calories are in this drink?

I can’t go yet. I’m finishing my makeup!

Could Things Starbuck Wouldn’t Say be a Skippy’s List for Found Feminism?

So say we all.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

Hashstag, by Rakka

Twitter hashtags make conversations and exchanges that would previously have been invisible to anyone not involved in them available to everyone. You can stick your head out of your own online bubble and peer into someone else’s. If you listen in to a conversation on a bus or in a bar you’ll often get a similar effect, and if you ever share a train carriage with a stag party you may well overhear some of the same sentiments.

There are a lot of possibilities and interesting conversations growing out of this (here’s a good Mashable post about cross-cultural conversations) but it can be uncomfortable having a front row seat for the social reproduction of gender stereotypes in real time.

Tweeting gender

[Apologies to any gender theorists out there for this next bit, in which I will be oversimplifying some complex ideas.]

[Oh and just to be clear, when I’m talking about men and women I don’t mean all men or all women, and I know those categories are far more fluid than our friends the hashtaggers would like to admit.]

Part of the Great Promise of the internet was that in the gap between your avatar and your fingertips on the keyboard all kinds of subversive genderfuck fun was to be had. And it is being had (hooray!), but there’s a tangible disappointment in some areas that the web is used as much to police and reinforce gendered ideas of appropriate behaviour as it is to undermine them. Social networks, it turns out, are simply another arena in which to enact and consolidate gender identity. Like the bus, like the pub.

And a big part of successfully Being A Man or Being A Woman is policing the behaviour of others. By laying down the rules you’re letting everyone know you understand them. In fact you’re an expert. By calling out someone else on their inappropriate behaviour (for example, women that are ‘loud’ – how unfeminine!) you’re picking up gender points for yourself. And appropriate gender behaviour points win prizes!

You can see this in action in the huge numbers of women participating in sexist hashtags and imparting helpful advice to their own gender:

#rulesforgirls stoppp being so easyyyy!

#ihatefemaleswho act like they in to sports

#agoodwoman sucks her mans dick w|. out no hesitation lOl.

#agoodwoman aims to please

Thanks for that. Now I’m all set. In another recent hashtag, #youneedanewboyfriend, large numbers of male and female Twitter users took the opportunity to remind everyone that male femininity = gay! Which as we all know = very bad indeed:

your man has more clothes with different shades of pink than you.#youneedanewboyfriend

If your man turns down sex from you, #youneedanewboyfriend

#youneedanewboyfriend If he knows all the words to every @ladygaga song out there #notnormal

It’s not just about putting women in their place, it’s about keeping men in line as well. If you can do both that makes you the Manliest Man of all, and king of all you survey. The tweets I quoted in the first post are part of this process. On the one hand encouraging traditionally feminine behaviours, and on the other boosting the masculinity points of the men tweeting, and asserting their dominance and entitlement (consider yourself lucky if you missed #itaintrape – that one was Not Nice).

What I think is happening here is that a large number of people are using a new medium to do exactly what an even larger number of people have already been doing for centuries, millennia, even. What’s different is that the isolated conversations are being collected and shared on a global platform.

What now?

"You are what you tweet" doodle by neabat

The flagrant misogyny of most of these trending topic hashtag tweets makes me furiously angry. But I don’t find them shocking. I think Germaine Greer is wrong on lots of things but right on this one: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, now we have a handy index in our Twitter sidebar. The scale of the problem is intimidating, I agree, but being shocked isn’t going to help.

The good news is we don’t need to start a cultural revolution from scratch. There’s some excellent work already going on: for example, Womankind and PinkStinks are challenging misogyny and sexist attitudes among young people (who seem like the obvious group to start with, to my mind).

There are also lots of truly wonderful online projects that are trying to break down some of these poisonous stereotypes and ideas. BadRep is one, of course ;-) .  But another of my favourites is Genderfork – follow them on Twitter for the perfect antidote to all this #rulesforgirls/boys crap.

What else can we do? Mocking the hashtags is fun. Hijacking them is fun too. It might not overthrow the sexist idiot regime, but if it makes just one person stop and think then it’s surely worth it. Another blogger on the topic of hashtags suggested getting some feminist hashtags circulating. Suggestions included #feminist and #ilovemybody. That’d be nice for other feminists, but I can’t see how they’d have very wide appeal, particularly because they don’t invite people to personalise them.

So I’m going to end with a challenge: can we come up with a funny, pro-feminist / genderfuck hashtag people might actually use?