I quite like Agent Provocateur in general – while it’s a bit ridiculous in places (this may be many things, but it is not a ‘playsuit’), I do feel like it’s positively targeted at strong, empowered women who like luxury lingerie, and their partners (the Gentleman’s Guide for boyfriends on their website is quite amusing).

This may be because their creative director is herself a female force to be reckoned with: Sarah Shotton, who worked her way up the company from an ‘apprenticeship’ when it had just started up. Now at the top, Shotton states that she tries every design she looks at on a size 8 model and a size 16, to ensure that it works on a range of shapes. No more than she should do, perhaps, but probably still more than many other lingerie designers. So I’m on side from the get-go, really.

But to the ad!

H&M’s Winter 2012 campaign

First things first, this has got to be in the minority among lingerie campaigns in that the female protagonist is active and capable. She’s not in a boudoir and she’s not being sexy for an imagined (male) viewer. I present this from La Senza and this from the M&S ‘Autograph’ lingerie range for comparison.

For a more current spin, to my right is H&M’s Winter 2012 print campaign. Oh look, it’s another woman in lingerie on a bed (/ weird sheepskin shebang), lit so you can’t actually see her face. For a more avant garde take on these same ideas, check out this bizarre mini-film masterwork from Damaris. Damaris, I love you dearly, but seriously, what is this?

Conversely, in the Agent Provocateur advert our heroine is out and about, and about to get on a bus. She’s wearing a wrap dress and plimsoles – well-dressed, but clearly not on any kind of Special Sexy Trip – and she also just happens to be wearing matching Agent Provocateur lingerie.

One effect of this decision is to make the underwear look practical. This is not true of most of Agent Provocateur’s range (or price tag). They’ve always been really into the idea of lingerie as a ‘special secret’ (not Victoria’s).

The photography on their website is lit as if by searchlight to reinforce this, and this advert refines that a little, pushing lingerie as a secret just for you, the wearer. But, they’re arguing here, it’s also something viable for every day. Our protagonist is just hangin’ out in her designer lingerie, because she wants to wear it – for herself.

Personally, I commend her: good underwear is the skeleton of an outfit, and I don’t see why, if you’re lucky enough to be able to buy luxury lingerie, it should have to languish at the bottom of a drawer until some performative Special Occasion.

But I think this ad – and its slogan, ‘sexy never takes a day off’ – is also saying that there’s something almost intrinsic about ‘sexy’. In this advert, the Agent Provocateur underwear, and the choice to wear it out and about, is just an extension of the heroine’s natural confidence and, well, sexiness.

It’s this confidence that makes her actually embark on the chase in the first place. The underwear’s not making her sexy; she’s chosen the underwear because she already is sexy. Typical advertising, of course, but isn’t it better to see someone being sexy in their day to day life than backlit in a studio, lounging on a bed?

“It’s all about the joy of creation…”

… is the song that Lego use on their website to showcase their Friends series.

Not what you were expecting? Perhaps you thought Stand By Your Man or some other such cringeworthy song might be more appropriate for a series so blatantly gendered. Well, so did I, but one happy little girl at a time, the Friends range has swayed my feelings.

Let me backtrack and give it some history.

The Lego Friends series was released earlier this year.

When the toys (and adverts) were unleashed, the internet seemingly exploded with outrage. (I am,
of course, referring to my internet – the one with feminist twitter feeds, blogs about toys and sexy pictures of Neil Gaiman. Your internet might be a bit different.)

In particular I watched Feminist Frequency’s videos on the series, but I also read blogposts from dads who want their girls to work in Silicon Valley and study at MIT.

The first few toys released were a bakery, a café, a beauty shop, a house and an inventor’s
workshop. These initial toys are made up of pastel pink and purple bricks, they only feature girls and
those roles present are mainly gendered home-keeping roles.

My blood was boiling, like many other people’s, at the narrow roles I could see girls being pushed into. At my local Toys R Us there is a vast collection of Lego from the Creator series to Cars. In fact I have never seen so much in one retailer.

However, the Friends series is not placed in their giant Lego selection. It is in a (very clearly labelled) ‘Girlz’ aisle,nowhere near the Lego corner, which has so much sparkle and glitter I thought cupcakes were
going to spontaneously erupt from the walls.

Friends is not like the rest of Lego: it’s for girls, and must be segregated.

So far, so sexist.

However, I’m slowly putting the guns down. Across the various worlds of Lego, equality is growing. As someone who has an obsessive love of toys, I frequently visit their website. Every time I find
myself riled up about Lego, I go on the site and find that a far greater balance of characters is presented there than we see in the shops.

For example, they have little character bios for nearly every mini-figure. I was angry about the lack of girl characters in Spinjitzu. But Nya (pictured right) has a  token girl description which does include phrases like “she’s no damsel in distress” and “Nya is fed up with the ninjas’ boy’s club syndrome”.

Here, the minority female mini figures I have collected become role models. Still a token, but a valuable one at that, and the question remains why we don’t see more of this outside of the website.

I recently decided to explore the Friends section of the website and was pleasantly surprised and then genuinely excited about what it offers. I believe that Lego listened to the petition from Change.org (the one that got over 50,000 signatures, the one I signed) back in April 2012, and have turned something that was completely sexist into a city of steps toward empowerment.

First of all, they have toned down the overwhelming pink tones of the bricks, and gone for more brown tones, like the riding camp. There is also a greater range of sets, including a treehouse, design
studio, bedroom set with a drum kit and the Heartlake Flying Club.

This last set was definitely the swing vote for me. It has the least amount of pink; mere touches of it on the plane. Furthermore, the stereotyped role for women in a plane is Air Hostess, and Lego didn’t go there. Stephanie is the pilot of her own seaplane, looking more Amelia Earhart than Pan Am.

The Friends themselves might enjoy traditionally feminine roles, but they also have jobs, varied interests and detailed characters that allow for diverse roleplaying. The key with Lego is that it can be as many things as you can imagine. Emma’s Design Studio, for instance, has one piece which suggests this is for fashion – but with the large desk, the ruler and the laptop Emma could just as easily be an architect or an engineer.

We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that enjoying balloons or sweets makes you weak. It’s more that giving girls only that which is sugary-sweet which is the issue. Although Lego still have a long way to go, I think there are at least positive conversations being had at Lego HQ.

In her second Lego video Anita Sarkeseesian says that the emphasis with the Lego Friends series is on traditional home-keeping play. She cites the adverts, comparing the Friends advert slogan “Drive to the newly built café” to the “You can build the castle” of another Lego advert featuring some classic father-son bonding.

She draws the reasonable conclusion that boys are offered a more active play experience that encourages them to use maths and motor skills.

However, if we look on the Lego website the section for Friends has the theme song I quoted at the beginning of this post, which accompanies all their videos:

“We can do it, we can dream a whole new way
We can do it, you can build with me today
It’s all about the joy of creation”

I think this new emphasis on building which is subtly surrounding you the whole time you shop is part of a change that encourages girls to gain all the skills and experiences that Lego has to offer.

They may not have it all, but the newer Lego Friends sets and marketing are a step in the right direction, and with these steps being echoed in other areas of the Lego Universe… watch this space.

• Ruth Coustick has yet to understand the concept of ‘growing up’. She spends her hard-earned cash on Playmobil pirates and building Lego versions of Samus, and wants to see the childish books and toys she loves become more diverse and inclusive. She works in digital rights and has a host of other nerdy interests like comics, board games and First World War poetry. She blogs about her life and fashion at Origami Girl.

In particular, I have been interested to see how the ideologies and assumptions of the real-life, modern-day gym contrast with the 80s fantasy world to which, until now, my side-bends and sit-ups have been largely confined.

Ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda

I wanted to start with a class. My local facility was offering a number of options for my preferred time of day: Spinning, Yoga, Body Attack and Body Pump. Spinning, of course, has long been a Cosmo-favourite, but it sounded a bit too terrifying for my tentative post-Christmas explorations, so I went for Body Pump because it’s on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are good for me.

Like Body Attack, Body Pump originates with the New Zealand-based Les Mills workout group. I suppose I’d always known, objectively, that someone must make up these workouts, but I’d always vaguely assumed it was the class instructor, or the gym, or something. I certainly hadn’t realised there are whole organisations dedicated to churning them out – of which Les Mills is one. Body Pump was the first of their workouts to make it out of New Zealand and into Europe, which it did in the early-to-mid-90s. It’s now pretty much a young professional gym standard, along with the emerging new trend, PowerPlate (which claims to deal with cellulite, although what doesn’t [and what does?], frankly).

Never stray too far from the sidewalk

In addition to a kind of Cartesian ‘body/soul’ dualism in their choice of workout titles, Les Mills also has about them something of the cultish air that also characterises Jane Fonda’s seminal 1980s oeuvre. Seriously. They refer to ‘the Tribe’. They’ve declared ‘war on sedentary lifestyles’. And more:

We pride ourselves on being brave – the ones who turn up their sleeves when it comes to hard work. The ones that scream ‘hell yeah’ when the instructor barks ‘ten more’. Those who view sweat on their brows like a crown of achievement. The ones who don’t just step up, they turn it up, because they want results.

– Les Mills website

This is not what it is like.

Scary stuff. The almost-militarism of the Les Mills style plays out into the actual Body Pump workout, which is a weight training class accompanied by ‘chart-topping hits’ (well… ‘Because of You’). Its use of zeitgeisty-kinda music to drive you along aligns it with aerobics more generally, but with the 80s fitness craze in particular, which was similarly interwoven with pop culture, including the emergent disco culture (the seminal Saturday Night Fever, with its all-dancing star John Travolta, came out in 1977).

But Body Pump is no leotard-wearing 80s-style ‘jazzercise’ with instructors whose hair flows wild and impractically free (my school gym teacher used to make us use elastic bands as a punishment for forgetting proper hair ties) – and, unlike the films Jane Fonda made for housewives everywhere, Body Pump’s not, primarily, about women. Indeed, it was originally designed to ‘bring men into the aerobics room’, after the female-focused group exercise trends that preceded it. Whether former female dominance in said room was because women are known to prefer exercising in nice social groups (cos, you know, that’s how we go to the toilet and choose our clothes, isn’t it?), or because instructors were targeting women as particularly vulnerable to body fascism, is too big a question to address in whole here.

Godlike Odysseus

But certainly, the class I attend has a lot of Homeric-level male muscle in it (with added grunts). And indeed, the ‘tracks’ we listen to (officially chosen by the Les Mills group themselves, who rule over ALL THINGS, and presumably have some kind of Council of Trent-style semi-regular meeting to discuss such questions) – are generally of the ‘man-rock’ ilk (well, Kelly Clarkson aside). So sometimes we do staggered bicep curls in time to that bit in Eye of the Tiger. There’s even this bit where you lie on your back on the ‘bench’ (see, I’m down with the lingo) and do some ‘chest-reps’ with ‘barbells’ while listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit. [This is a bit I’m quite fond of because I like to pretend I’m in prison or something].

This is Sparta.

What I think is interesting here is that, while dear Jane made me feel like I was sharing in an essential female, slightly body-fascist sort of camaraderie (‘this is for the wibble-wobbles on the inner thighs… gonna burn them right off!’) – with a sense of shared understanding much akin to what you might experience in the disco toilets at 2am with mascara running down your face, only with more brutalist physical pain – Body Pump is more like that bit in Mulan where that guy who never wears a shirt trains the Chinese army (including the cross-dressing Mulan) in three minutes flat.

Indeed, whereas the 80s fitness dream was one of self-improvement and the drive for the Body Beautiful, Body Pump and the Les Mills ideology is actually more like a War on Fat, with concomitantly refigured notions of gender – men and women exercise side by side, with parallel physical goals.

The Eighties’ ‘woman’s world’ of VCR, suburban living room and dance-fitness (sexualised to an often ludicrous degree for the benefit of men) has changed to a kind of militant A-team dream. This probably has a lot to do with rising obesity levels in the population at large, making pursuit of exercise rather more of a general health priority than it once was, but since the original 80s fitness craze rose at much the same time as the rise of the disco one, I wonder if our exercise trends are still tangentially following our terpsichorean ones.

Indeed, one of the things I find particularly interesting is how this class – and actually the gym itself come to that – constructs itself around the idea of maenadic levels of adrenaline, but in a kind of nightclub context. I have to NB here that I go to a rather Executive gym chain, which to be honest is probably actually constructed in the 80s power-professional mould – there’s coloured strip-lighting and everyone’s wearing matchy-matchy black lycra …and thongs. (I mean, seriously, think about the physics of that. There will be squats.). In Spinning it goes literal, as the room is darkened and there’s pounding rave music (at 7am on a Monday morning).

So where does this leave us? Much of this may seem largely irrelevant, since the numbers of women who attend the gym (indeed, the numbers who can even afford it) are relatively small compared to the population at large. And yet! What happens in those harrowing halls may reflect some curious external trends.

The Trailers

You may remember that when I first burst onto the pages of BadRep I was talking about RPG advertising and the distinct lack of women in these trailers, despite the games’ built-in capability for you to play as a female protagonist. I mentioned Mass Effect advertisements, and no sooner had I criticised them than they announced they’d make a ‘FemShep’ trailer and let the fans vote on what she’d look like. So I thought it’d only be right to address the marketing of ME3 before I tell you all about the game itself.

The first glimpses we saw of Mass Effect 3 didn’t show a female Shepard; actually, they barely showed a male Shepard either (but he was still there) – we were simply teased with the knowledge that the war was coming to Earth. Notably, the voiceover doesn’t say “if he doesn’t bring help” but just says “Shepard” to avoid any issue of gender. But then you see male Shepard… so, er, kinda redundant there.

When they first showed everyone FemShep, to me, the trailer didn’t have the same production quality that it could have had, but they made this up with later offerings, such as those below.

Next we have the Take Earth Back pair of trailers; one male and one female. These two did good. They’re the same, just with a different version of Shepard in each. There’s no making one look cooler, or more badass, than the other, and that’s great. The pity is, though, that TV channels didn’t really seem to pick up FemShep’s version – I only ever saw the male version being broadcast.

Then we get to launch day and they start pushing the ‘Launch Trailer’, and as far as I can discover, there’s only one version: Male Shepard (or BroShep)’s version. This might not be too bad; there’s a lot of female characters shown – Ashley, Liara, Jack, Miranda etc – and that’s more than a lot of games can say at the moment. The thing that ruins it, though, is the (totally unnecessary) sex snapshot of Shepard bedding Ashley, who is the woman fighting beside you in the T.E.B. trailers I linked above.

Of course, it could be argued that having that in the trailer shows how you can romance your team-mates if you so desire and that it’s an all-inclusive RPG experience. But it really isn’t necessary and is completely discordant with the rest of the trailer.

The Packaging

Here I can only talk about my box when it arrived, so there may have been people receiving differently presented games. When my game arrived the sleeve insert (that paper thing that slips under the plastic on the box) was displaying a proud BroShep on the front and back. I was a bit disappointed as I’ve never really thought much about Template BroShep’s appearance as part of my gaming experience.

It wasn’t until I had to insert Disc 2 while loading the game that I discovered FemShep hiding underneath the disc! The cover is reversible, so you can have FemShep on the front and on the back (though the screenshot inserts are still BroShep) if you take the insert out and flip it around. Obviously, I did this immediately so I didn’t have to look at his smug face anymore. The reversibility is great, but you have to realise it’s available and then you have to do it yourself.

Have they done well, then?

I think they have, but there’s a bit of improving yet to do – not for Mass Effect, as the trilogy is now complete, but for other titles following in its footsteps.

The male interpretation of an either/or, binary choice, RPG protagonist is still the default in marketing, it seems. There may well be more male gamers buying these titles, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to see all a game can offer.

I’m really very pleased that the marketing strategy has improved – at least for this game – and I’m hoping it’ll continue to do so for other releases this year and in the future. It is a real treat to see FemShep kicking some bottoms in that Take Earth Back trailer, and I hope we’ll see lots more awesome female protagonists to come.

—

As a side note: for those of you waiting to see a review, it’s coming – I’m just being extra thorough. And yes, I will talk about that ending and the ensuing furore.

Yessir, that does say VIP!

That’s correct, folks!  I trundled my way down to London last Thursday to insert myself into a world of new and upcoming games, developer sessions and general geekdom.  What’s even better is that Eurogamer were kind enough to give me a press pass to do so, and now, my dear readers, you get to hear all about it!

First of all, this post right here is going to be a general look at the whole experience, and I’ll give you some insight into what else I have in store for you in later posts.  Simple as that, really!  Shall we get started?

As I had to travel down from our second city in the morning I didn’t get into the Expo until close to midday. Even so, with a little ticket with the words “Press Pass” on I still got in without issue (even if they did give me the wrong wristband).  My brother had come along for the Thursday and was already inside, so I had a task trying to locate him.  In the end I gave up and darted straight to see Rage (coincidentally, so did he) as I am a mild id Software fanboi… don’t tell anyone!

After that I went to visit Special Effect‘s World Record Attempt and did my practice run – you’ll be hearing more about this in a dedicated post – in which you have to complete a racing track using nought but your own eye movements.  These guys were there trying to raise awareness for gamers with disabilities who need modified controls to enjoy the world of gaming.  Very admirable, indeed.  I had a nice chat with one of them on the Friday and I will be urging you all to give them a shout however you can.

After a bit of milling around I headed up for my interviews with Trion Worlds on their games Rift and End of Nations.  I had a good hour between the two and some interesting responses to questions, but you’ll have to wait for the interview posts to hear more about that.

Over the course of the two days I also got round to playing quite a few of the big names like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3 and CounterStrike: Global Offensive, as well as some of the more family-suited games like Sonic Generations and Ratchet and Clank All 4 One.  You’ll get to hear what I thought of all the games I played in my round-up post, which will include a series of mini-reviews for your delectation.

Another excellent facet to the Expo was the Indie Arcade and the Retro section – in which there was Wolfenstein 3D on no less than a Jaguar – where I had great fun playing with games I hadn’t seen in years on consoles and arcades that are likely part of someone’s private gaming museum.  This and EG’s Game of the Year for the past decade wall were a genuine pleasure to see.

Also upcoming from my experience at Eurogamer there’ll be a post on what I think about the prevalence of oversexualised women as a (meagre) excuse for marketing at these events – what does this say about how marketers view gamers? – with interested snippets from an overheard conversation between two stall workers (they weren’t being all that covert about the chat, either!).

Onwards to meet your heroes of geekery!

Another piece I’ve been brewing for a while, but held off just in case I could corner someone from id Software after their Developer Session to ask them about it: Dystopian Beauties.  Ever noticed how almost all the women in the post-apocalyptic world are pretty stereotypically hot?  What happened to all the ‘normal‘ women, hmm?  Is there some sort of “Kill the Trolls” global event that occurs simultaneously with the collapse/destruction of the world?  I will be exploring the many possible explanations for this.

On the overall experience front it was pretty great for me as a first time Expo-goer, with a few snagging points: the demonstrable exclusion of female gamers in the marketing; the assumption (several times) that I was clearly “new to FPS genre” or “new to war games” (so tedious) on the basis of what I looked like and the assumptions stall reps made about a) my gender and b) my personality; the ridiculous prevalence of consoles on the playable games – I am a dedicated PC gamer and trying to play things with thumbsticks drives me up the wall; and, finally, the fact it cost me £6 for a sausage in a roll and a bottle of water.  Otherwise, the punters were all very friendly with each other and it was a good environment full of like-minded individuals that I really enjoyed.

But what’s that, you say?  A competition?  Why, yes!  Yes there is a competition!  I have gathered a few little goodies at the Expo to give away… but more on that later my eager chums!  For now, I will have to leave you with feverish eyes filled with the fire of excitement – to be continued, fellow travellers…

But hey, that was decades ago, right? That was from a time when people held far more dubious views, hell people had only recently stopped using tape worms as a miracle diet (no, seriously). It was a less enlightened time, but we’ve moved on since then, yes?

Well, no, not so much. The world of advertising is still filled with dubious messages, awkward depictions of race and gender, and terrible division of products along gender lines (“This is a girl product! Make the packaging pink so they’ll buy it! This is a boy product! Fill the advert with explosions!”) So what we have here is a collection of half a dozen or so recent magazine adverts that have taken their attitudes straight from the 1950s.

Mr. Clean

It was Mothers’ Day in the US recently, and Mr Clean decided to run this advert for the occasion. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the advert. Maybe Mothers’ Day in the US is a bit different to the UK. Either way, the apparent message of “Get back to the cleaning! And get your daughter to help, she needs to learn!” seems a little… well, off.

Goldstar Beer

Goldstar Beer have an interesting view of how drinking works, one that manages to simultaneously insult both men and women. Women are complex and have to worry about matching their drinks (girly, fruity drinks, naturally) to their outfits, because they’re shallow like that. Men, meanwhile, are simple-minded creatures who are only capable of desiring one thing: beer. And not even good beer. Crappy mass-market beer.

Goldstar have another advert in this campaign that manages to be even worse on some levels – take a look for yourself here.

Nike

It’s not just gender that advertising fails on either. Here we get a delightful intersection of gender and homophobia from the fine folks at Nike. Because ballet isn’t manly, you see, and you don’t want your son to do something that isn’t manly. Best buy him some Nike trainers as soon as you can and get him doing something macho like soccer, before the homosexuals lure him into their sordid world of energetic dance routines and toned calf muscles. Because that is totally how reality works. Yes.

DeBeers

Women, you see, are basically like magpies, only larger and incapable of flight. So not very good magpies. But like magpies, women are innately drawn to shiny shiny things; the shinier the better. And as DeBeers know, if you feed her craving for shiny objects then she’ll pretend to like you and sate your desperate need for validation. Which, of course, is all women are good for. (That and cooking you dinner, which is a talent the common magpie rarely excels at.)

Wait no, all of that was wrong. What the hell, DeBeers? Really?

Prudential Financial

Social values, 1950s style. Cooking, cleaning, caring for your child. These all start with C. More importantly, they’re all things that the wife does, because hey, it’s not like she has a job, right? Women in the workplace? Madness! And all of those things are time consuming; why, hiring someone to do them all would be fairly expensive. When your wife dies, you won’t be grieving over the loss of your life’s love, you’ll be wondering who’s going to make dinner if you can’t afford to hire a cook. So you’d better get life insurance out on her. Or, I guess, buy some diamonds and lure a magpie, either way.

Qsol Servers

I was going to say something bitingly snarky and witty, but… I just… wow. I’ve been defeated by this advert. Just imagine I said something hilarious and cutting and you’re all very entertained.

So, defeated by that last advert, I’m going to stop here. I implore all of you to go out and get jobs in advertising and make better adverts than these, so that we can someday feature them in Found Feminism.

March saw the eagerly anticipated release of Dragon Age II; the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening (along with all the extra DLC that became available during the interim period). Dragon Age, for those of you unfamiliar with the games, is a fantasy RPG in which you guide your character through quests and the main plotline, battling all manner of nasty creatures and unscrupulous types along the way. You gather a team made up of mages, warriors and rogues who may be human, elf or dwarf, and they help you defeat the forces of evil.

One of the key features of games like this is that you can build your own character: you pick the gender, the hair style, the facial features, the class (e.g. a mage), and in some instances you can even pick the voice. I, for example, have a male warrior elf with ginger hair in Origins and in Dragon Age II my character Zakarianna Hawke is a female, white-haired rogue with a facial tattoo (you can see a visual of her below left). The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they’re still fairly comprehensive.

Other popular games that boast this feature include the Mass Effect series and the Fable series, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. I was, however, quite late to the Mass Effect party for one very key reason: I thought you had to be male. That is to say, the advertising and marketing for Mass Effect gave me no inkling that there was any other option than to be the character that features in the trailers and the stills.

Normally this doesn’t bother me (pretty much all the games I have ever played have a male protagonist) but I read an unfortunate article that suggested Commander Shepard – Mass Effect’s protagonist – was a bit of a womaniser. So I wrote it off.

I then, much later, got a little overexcited by all the sales after Christmas in which I saw Mass Effect 1 and 2 for a little over a tenner. I asked my brother what he thought of them and ended up buying the games – turns out, you can play as a female character! Plus all the womanising depends entirely on the decisions made in-game by the person directing the character (again, my take on Commander Shepard, Drakhoa Shepard, is just below left further down).

This little surprise, combined with Dragon Age II’s recent advertising prior to its release, made me wonder why games that allow you to play as male or female are only ever marketed using the preset male appearance. For illustration purposes I have collected a few trailers courtesy of YouTube:

• Dragon Age II “Destiny – Extended” Trailer
• Dragon Age II “Rise to Power” Trailer
• Mass Effect 3 “Debut” Trailer
• Mass Effect 2 “Full Cinematic” Trailer
• Mass Effect 2 “Launch” Trailer
• Fable II
• Fable III

From those trailers alone, would you have any idea that you can actually play through as a female protagonist? If you knew nothing else about these games, I doubt there’s any chance you’d be able to guess the female protagonist option from the advertising. This could be quite off-putting to gamers (not just female gamers either) as the advertising doesn’t highlight the option of choice that you get in the game; to be a character that you want to be. It certainly put me off: when confronted with the limited information and the possibility that the male protagonist was a character I wouldn’t be able to stand, I chose to look elsewhere. Even though, for me, that elsewhere was probably going back to a First Person Shooter with a male protagonist: at least most of them don’t talk, and you forget the character when you’re facing down hundreds of Replica soldiers or when a Necromorph just came bursting out of an air vent to tear you to pieces.

I’m not trying to fault these RPG games here, though they do all have some downsides – I’m just wondering why the distributors and the marketing bods decide to exclude one whole section of their demographic in one swoop. I’m sure there is some (weak) reasoning to do with demographic statistics and some blanket statements about who buys these games, but surely that’s wearing a little thin by now? I certainly got sick of seeing the preset male character’s smug face in all the Dragon Age II trailers.

Well, if we look over at Blizzard and some of their teasers for Diablo III (coming out later this year) then there are some positive developments on the horizon. They’ve begun releasing trailers relating to each ‘class’ of character for the upcoming game – all of which can be played as a male or female version – and, most importantly, they’re telling us all about it in their advertising!

• Diablo III Demon Hunter
• Diablo III Wizard

Demon Hunter and Wizard are two of the classes you will be able to play as in Diablo III; the others are Monk, Barbarian, and Witch Doctor. The latter three are automatically presented as male, but Demon Hunter and Wizard are automatically presented to us as female on Blizzard’s website for Diablo III, despite the fact all five classes can be played as either. It is interesting as well that at BlizzCon2010 the 19 minutes of gameplay footage included in the press kit featured both the female Demon Hunter and Wizard as the protagonist.

Clearly, then, not all RPG gaming advertising is male-centric, and hopefully more companies will start to follow down the path that Blizzard is taking – showing the audience the variety that is available in-game, instead of just marketing it at male gamers and assuming female gamers (should such a fabled beast exist – haha!) aren’t going to get offended at being ignored or forgotten about.

They are, as I mentioned earlier, all good games (Fable, Dragon Age, Mass Effect) so don’t let the advertising put you off playing them, but equally let’s not resign ourselves to the notion that male-centric advertising will never change. It is changing; it just happens to be very slowly.

• Rai, at the tender age of 23, has been gaming for 15 years and writing for 10 – perfect combination! Watch this space for more Gamer Diary.
• Have an idea for a guest post, or a project you’d like to tell us (and the world) about? Send us an email.

CC picture by Gerard Stolk, 2011

“Great brands tell stories. They’re a mix of truth and symbols.” Brand strategist Alison Camps kicked off the (Re)Branding Feminism conference on 1st March with an introduction to the concept of branding, and some examples from her career. The one she selected as a case study with particular relevance for feminism was Skoda in the early 1990s: the “brand from hell.”

The conference was very firmly about considering representations of modern feminism and not making plans about how best to ‘sell’ feminism to the masses. I’m a persuader by trade, so I have a practical interest in how best to present feminism to an indifferent, sceptical or rabidly hostile audience. But I also love my gender theory, so a spot of academic inquiry made a nice change from activism, and I was sad I could only attend the first day.

Mothers and daughters and sisters, oh my!

My favourite paper was Jean Owen’s ‘Of feminism born’, which looked at the prevalence and problems of using familial metaphors in the feminist movement. The political concept of sisterhood began as a strategy of resistance to masculine structures of patriarchy and ‘brotherhood’. It is undeniably powerful, especially for women that have experienced the isolation of being the lone feminist voice in their community. But sisterhood has become a “universalising metaphor” that “implies an all-encompassing, somewhat stifling organisation”. And now that feminism is intergenerational, parental hierarchies have re-emerged – we are not only sisters but cultural mothers and daughters of feminism.

Through this way of talking about ourselves, Owen argued, we risk “pandering to fantasies of a matriarchy” and create a falsely cosy, sentimentalised idea of what is in reality a diverse and radical movement. In my experience, contemporary feminism already has tremendous respect for previous generations, but by formalising it in this way we undermine our own project of equality and put in place privileged feminist ‘bloodlines’. Owen advises that “we need to remove ourselves from the trap of family” and predicate our movement on a “more involved social model”.

I agree with all of this. In fact, my main problems with ‘sisterhood’ are that this language pretty definitively excludes men and reinforces the gender binary that I want to dismantle. That’s a long-term goal, by the way. Short-term is sorting out some of the urgent problems in the current system.

Selling feminism

Catherine Redfern (of Reclaiming the F Word, and, um, The F Word fame) spoke about the cyclical nature of calls to rebrand feminism, which can be measured in women’s magazine features. The call makes a couple of big assumptions: that feminism is in crisis and that applying marketing principles will help.

Redfern calmly exploded the first theory by referencing the research for her book with Kristin Aune which showed that feminism is a growing, thriving movement, and questioned the second. Mainstream representations of feminism are too narrow, and don’t reflect the pluralism of the movement. But the F Word survey showed that women became feminists when they learned about feminism, and not when it was packaged with a free lipgloss. Who is a feminist because it’s fashionable? Surely we are insulting young women somewhat by trying to package it as something ‘cool’.

The other papers were very interesting, and included a brief history of the stiletto heel, a smart analysis of those Suit Supply ads and the ‘desire of indifference’ and an introduction to the Brinkley Girl. But the only one which directly commented on the idea of ‘branding’ feminism was from Catherine Maffioletti, who made some good points about the tension between the “wild and divided” nature of feminism and the patriarchal (and capitalist) project of naming and fixing its meaning in a saleable product. As Maffioletti said, “branding difference is an impossible project”. Feminism is “emergent”, “a mobilising force”, something alive and oppositional that can’t be pinned down, boxed up and sold.

I’m not a marketer, but…

As the day went on I started to feel the burden of pragmatism weighing on my shoulders and spoiling the fun, as it often does. There’s a little voice inside me always wanting to know: what are we going to do about this? What’s the plan? That’s not what the conference was about, but I started wondering about practical applications.

I think a serious attempt to ‘rebrand’ feminism would be madness, because it is “wild and divided”; it’s plural and adaptable, and means too many different things to too many people, and I’m nearly ready to argue that’s one of its strengths. As Catherine Redfern pointed out, feminism is a leaderless grassroots movement; who would have the audacity to try and redefine it?

But I reckon that as individual feminists and as groups of feminists, we could do a lot more to broaden representations of feminism, to counter the negative stereotypes, to make the case more effectively without letting the end run away with the means.

You don’t have to call it marketing. It’s as simple as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, understanding their criticisms and concerns and addressing them, learning what they want, and showing them how you can help.

Or if that sounds too cuddly, you can call it propaganda.