Dear Deep Silver,

I have just seen the parody ad for the collector’s edition of Dead Island: Riptide. While violence against women and graphic dismemberment are fairly cheap, extremely tasteless and far too easy targets for “shock value”, I’m impressed by your provocative attempts to further the dialogue about the sinister and ingrained misogyny of videogame culture by taking it to a disgusting extreme.

Limited Edition! Specially designed and crafted! Completely and utterly terrible!

Oh… wait, hang on, I’ve just heard from Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’re actually serious about this. This apparently isn’t just a misguided pastiche of publicity stunts. Oh. Oh dear.

You claim that this hunk of resin will:

… make a striking conversation piece on any discerning zombie gamer’s mantel.

Well, as someone who has notched up damn near 1,000 hours of zombie killing in recent years (thanks, Steam, for keeping track of that. I was starting to worry that I was wasting my life), let’s have a conversation about it. I’ll go and brew up a steaming cup of Sityourassdown while you perch on the naughty stool and think about what you’ve done.

I can hear it already, the rumbling of defensive PR managers approaching.

“But it’s a zombie game! The whole point of it is to commit heinous acts of violence against the undead in self defence! A zombie torso with its limbs severed is a trophy that represents your prowess!”

Before I address this, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I am not a qualified physician. However, from my forays into the study of human and zombie biology, I can confirm that the healthy, warm-tanned skintone, obvious freshness of the blood, the lack of any sort of necrosis or decomposition of the flesh indicates that this torso was certainly not a zombie at the time of her dismemberment.

Exposure of the lower ribs suggest traumatic chest injury; however, it’s not clear whether this occurred before or after the time of death. My working hypothesis is that her death had something to do with either decapitation or the loss of all her blood. Even without formal medical training, I am fairly confident in positing that there is no coming back from complete removal of the head.

There isn’t even any artistic merit in what you’ve created, which is almost as offensive as the glorification of horrific violence against women. You have the gumption to describe it as:

…Dead Island’s grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture.

No. Stop. Please. The skies are filled with the anguished cries of Classics and Art History students, joined by the despairing sobs of everybody with a functioning pair of eyes. There are several salient differences between your abomination and classical works of art, but I’ll set out a few of these for your convenience:

• Artistic merit. Marble sculptures are exquisite works by highly-skilled craftspeople demonstrating the depth of their abilities. Weeks of work go into a marble sculpture, creating something dynamic and evocative from a chunk of something cold and unyielding drawn from the earth. These are not pieces that can be “designed” in an afternoon by a gaggle of fratboy marketers over their weekly office keg.
• Anatomy. Sculptors who work with marble show an intimate and thorough knowledge and understanding of human anatomy. Every muscle, every curve, every millimetre of skin is honed to a perfect representation of the human form. What you have done is plonked two tennis balls on a solid block of resin, doodled in a crude cleavage with a Sharpie, then splashed raspberry sauce all over it and called it a day. Which brings me neatly onto my next point…
• Overt sexualisation and glamourisation of violence against women. Classical torso sculptures are not without limbs due to some horrible run-in with a horde of undead and a crazed survivor with a katana. If any Classics types would like to weigh in on this, I’d be interested to learn. However, I’m pretty sure that the motivations of those classical sculptors was not “Hurr, violence is EPIC. You know what else is epic? TITS! Yeah! But you know what’s not epic? Any part of a woman that isn’t tits or crotch. Let’s put, yeah, some tits and a crotch in a string bikini, and like, cut everything else off. Gamers will eat that up. Oh man, I’m jizzing my pants already. Tits and extreme violence. We’re geniuses.” (Again, classics students, if there’s any evidence of the great Graeco-Roman sculptors having had this discussion, I will withdraw this point. Let me know.)

In summary: what the hell? After the first Dead Island game failed to quite live up to its own teaser trailer, do you just feel like you need to continue along this trajectory of disappointment? Were you hoping to hit rock bottom with today’s sick display in the hope that thereafter, the only way would be up? If that’s the case, I’d be tempted to applaud your shamelessness, had it not been such a swing and a miss.

Now, I’m a feminist, but I also don’t believe that every catastrophic misunderstanding of how to exploit the “desirability” of anything that vaguely resembles a woman’s body (usually one that conforms to narrow standards of Western beauty) is born of true misogyny.

I believe it’s quite possible that you “just didn’t think” of the implications and repercussions of showing a violently dismembered female torso and selling it as an ornament. For those of us – women and some men – who actually live in bodies like the one messily represented in your collector’s edition, it isn’t possible to “just not think” about the possibilities and the realities of violence.

Women are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, both by people they know and by strangers. We are taught from childhood that our bodies are weaker, that if we don’t want to be attacked we have to dress demurely, to know our limits, to keep our mouths shut and to do as we’re told.

We live in a victim-blaming world that constantly promotes the idea that the only way to not be a victim is to not provoke those strong and burly menfolks, who cannot be held to account if they attack you because you were obviously “asking for it” if and when it happens. Although this line of reasoning was born of institutionalised misogyny, it doesn’t exactly paint men in the most flattering of lights either.

The discussion is thankfully broadening, so this is not an issue I’ll go deeper into here. But Deep Silver, consider yourselves called out. There’s a wealth of resources, information, blogs, zines, articles, and opinion pieces out there. You have no excuse for not educating yourselves about why what you have done is damaging and irresponsible.

Everybody fucks up sometimes when it comes to the way they think about or treat people less privileged than they are. What really proves whether or not they’re capable of meeting the criteria for being a decent human being, or a company with any integrity, is how they handle and learn from their fuckups. My advice? Apologise. Be humble. Be grateful to people who have called you out on this. Make the choice to educate yourselves. And for the love of all things zombie, don’t do it again.

I do, however, have one thing to be grateful to you for about this. Should I find myself romancing a fellow gamer in future, and we go back to their house, this statuette will be an immediate and unmistakable red flag that this person has questionable taste in games, décor and attitudes towards women. This information will be a clear indicator that this isn’t somebody I should be spending time with.

Perhaps your statue could replace the endless whining about “the friendzone” as the hallmark of somebody utterly clueless about human relationships and endlessly disrespectful to women. Then I would laud you for your achievement, because that shit is getting very, very tiresome.

Yours sincerely,

Mia Vee

Their executive producer was discussing the challenges this young Lara has to face, which includes violent beatings and an attempted rape, and how this would make players want “to protect her”.

The internet exploded with rage, and I got sucked up in it a bit too – it came after I’d spent hours reading and listening to accounts of female gamers being threatened with rape just because they dared to play socially.

A day later, Crystal Dynamics retracted the “attempted rape” comment and said it had been misunderstood.  Largely, I am inclined to agree, but not with the use of ‘attempted rape’; that bit wasn’t misunderstood.  Having seen the footage, that’s exactly what it is, although it is nowhere near as gruesome as much of the internet’s collective imagination has fathomed it to be.

The scene in question is part of their E3 trailer “Crossroads” (you need to be signed in to YouTube to view it as it has a content warning on it).  Naturally, I will say that it will be triggering for some – as could the paragraph after next (& other parts of the rest of this post) when I briefly describe what happens – the specific scene occurs at 2:15 on the vid.

This Tomb Raider is going to be set before the others, and is aiming to develop Lara’s character into the strong, kickass woman she is in those core, original games.  She is stranded on an island with her crew but there’s also an all-male gang who have been stranded on said island for much longer and have turned extremely savage.  They kill Lara’s friends as she watches/hears without being able to help them.  She tries to sneak away, but is found.

The guy who finds her runs his hand down her body; she knees him in the groin and tries to run; he grabs her and tries kissing her neck; she bites his ear and possibly rips some of it off; runs, gets her hands free, gets his gun; they wrestle over the gun… she shoots him in the face.

Doubtless the full scene in the game will be much longer than what we’ve seen here, but it is, at least, nothing so crass as hammering the X button on the controller to push him out from between her legs.  All clothes remain on, which doesn’t make it any less atrocious of course – but it could be much more graphic for the player.

I think where Crystal Dynamics have been misunderstood is with their intention, and perhaps they’ve misunderstood their audience when talking about this assault.

Discussing why it’s difficult to develop a female lead, Rosenberg said: “When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character… They’re more like. ‘I want to protect her’. There’s this sort of dynamic of, ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her’.  She’s definitely the hero but – you’re kind of like her helper. When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character.”

-from DigitalSpy

What I find most concerning/irksome/interesting is this idea that the player wants to protect Lara as opposed to be her. Having watched that trailer, I don’t want to be her helper and protect her, I want to jump into her skin and kick the daylights out of that guy.  Perhaps that’s just me.  What I think was ill-advised of Mr Rosenburg (the exec producer) was his move to discuss this damsel-in-distress notion at the same time as discussing the attempted rape.  It kinda oozes the idea that Lara is just an object for men: to abuse or to protect.

I suspect above all that Crystal Dynamics probably need to educate themselves on better phraseology and improve the content of their press interactions.  They don’t seem to mean that the assault and the assault alone turn her into the Lara we’re all familiar with: it’s the whole ordeal on this island.  I’m sure shooting a guy in the face not 5 inches from your own is going to be life changing, and on the flipside, for once a studio is at least trying to show the psychological effect of killing (as opposed to all the other games where you’re expected to believe the protag is completely unfazed by murder, despite being an office worker or somesuch beforehand).

But what about the inclusion of the attempted rape in the first place?

Good point.  After the initial furore, I wondered whether it could be a useful educational tool: to show the audience that rape is horrific, abhorrent and should never be permitted.  Depressingly, this is a message that doesn’t seem to have sunk in with some people in society.

Then I saw an interesting theory in a comment thread, in which one chap theorised that we could see this attempted rape symbolically.  Perhaps this potential rapist represents all the slavering, masturbatory porn-ifying by (mostly) male gamers of Lara in previous games; her escape could represent the escape from this pin-up mentality the franchise has been plagued with.  I thought that was an intriguing hypothesis at the very least.

I think their move to include this assault is bold and their intention – presumably to explore the psychological transformation of such a famous female lead – is sorely needed, because we don’t have many fully developed standalone female characters (i.e. that aren’t just an option opposite a male version).  Above all, however, they probably need to be able to express themselves in a much clearer fashion and, preferably, drop this ‘the player just wants to protect her’ nonsense.

If, when it is released, we discover this attempted rape has just been used to crush her identity as a strong, independent female character, to put her back in her place as a subjugated product of patriarchal desires, then I will stand corrected.  For now, I think we should step back and see where this goes.

Overall, however, I fear Lara will never be free of the patriarchy that created her – in both her story and her creation as a game character. At least they seem to have designed her wearing a bra this time around.

Wider Reading:

• ‘Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch’ – Laurie Penny, New Statesman
• ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. Especially when you’re made out of pixels’ – Charlie Brooker, The Guardian
• ‘Tomb Raider: why play up to the Madonna/whore dichotomy?’ – Tom Mendelsohn, The Independent (blogs)
• ‘Tomb Raider creators say “rape” is not a word in their vocabulary’ – Kotaku Australia
• ‘Ultraviolence in videogames: a defence’ – Oliver Cragg, The Independent (blogs)
• ‘Video games and the Male Gaze – are we men or boys?’ – Brandon Sheffield, Gamasutra

Picture CC Terriem, 2011

So why am I writing this at all? Over the last nine months I’ve gotten interested in the interactions between violence against women, gender roles and HIV, which I confess is mostly down to my job at Womankind Worldwide.

It struck me that even though I’ve been working with different organisations tackling violence against women in the UK for years, I don’t remember HIV ever being mentioned. It’s just not something I’d ever really thought about. But then, I had also failed to really think about, you know, the rest of the world. This job has been an eye-opener, and I heartily encourage other feminists in the UK, the US, and Western Europe to look up and see what’s happening in the places you don’t see on TV.

“This epidemic unfortunately remains an epidemic of women,” Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS said in 2010. At the end of 2009, women accounted for just over half of all adults living with HIV worldwide. In some areas of the world the proportion is much higher, for example in sub-Saharan Africa it is 60%. High levels of HIV among women in these areas are both caused by and causes of violence against women.

Violence, HIV and Women’s Health

Violence against women (you remember, that really prevalent thing that occurs in all countries in the world) interacts with the HIV epidemic in several cheery ways. This paraphrased from a World Health Organisation briefing:

• Sexual abuse in childhood is associated with risk-taking behaviour later in life, increasing an individual’s lifetime risk of contracting HIV.
• Rape exposes women to HIV, and the chances of a woman contracting HIV via a forced sexual encounter are probably increased due to the physical trauma.
• Violence and fear of violence can stop a woman insisting on condom use or refusing unwanted sex, leaving her with no means of protecting themselves.
• Fear of violence, abandonment or stigma can dissuade women from learning their status or from sharing it with their partners, and can also effect HIV control, treatment, and programmes aiming to prevent mother to child transmission.

Women’s health has been the subject of more discussion in development circles in recent years, thanks in large part to the Millennium Development Goals, one of which (MDG5) is focused on maternal health. Women’s health doesn’t begin and end with children though, so I’ve been pleased to see greater recognition of the impact of gender-based violence appearing under MDG6, which is dedicated to ending the spread of diseases including HIV infection and the associated illnesses it can cause. Next step, an MDG which is focused on reducing levels of violence against women? Something which has a pretty damaging effect on women’s health in its own right.

Ghana

Through work recently I was lucky enough to meet some of the women and men fighting to reduce violence against women and women’s vulnerability to HIV infection in rural Ghana. Although Ghana isn’t the country worst affected by the HIV epidemic, of the 240,000 HIV+ adults living in Ghana, almost 60% are women. Women in Ghana also experience high levels of violence: 1 in 3 women has experienced some form of physical violence in their lifetime, and 20% of women report that they first experienced sex against their will. (Stats)

In addition there are a number of harmful traditional practices that contribute to the spread of HIV among women, as well as the cultural acceptability of men having several partners and the right to demand sex. Traditional practices, such as widow inheritance (where a widow is forced to marry her dead husband’s relative), or polygyny (22% of married women are in polygynous unions) increase the likelihood of contracting HIV.

Women living with HIV or AIDS in Ghana also face enormous stigma and go to extraordinary lengths to find support and keep their status secret. One reason is that belief in witchcraft is widespread, and HIV infection or death from AIDS-defining illnesses is sometimes blamed on the malign influence of a witch. Incidentally if you’re interested to know more about what happens to women accused of witchcraft in Ghana I recommend watching The Witches of Gambaga:

‘Witch’ persecution is also alarmingly common in Nepal.

Reading about all this every day at work would get a bit depressing if it wasn’t for our amazing partners – health workers, educators, lawyers and activists – who are working for change for individuals, and local and global communities. Part of that change is recognition of the complex interactions between HIV and AIDS and violence against women, and the need for targeted, local, gender-sensitive interventions and support. UK feminists can help by looking up, and recognising that HIV is a feminist issue on a global scale.

Fausta and her mother in The Milk of Sorrow

There are times when I’m glad I live in such a blinkered cultural bubble, with only a dim grasp of global politics. Case in point: while I was enraptured by Mysterious Cities of Gold in the 1980s, the real-life land of the Incas – Peru – was being torn apart by a bloody internal conflict between communist guerrilla army the Shining Path and government security forces.

I was only five, of course. But when I watched it again at university (a rite of passage, surely?) only a year after the conflict had wound down, I was none the wiser. In fact, in some senses it hasn’t really ended. The latest reported attack by Shining Path rebels was in April 2010.

Between 1980 and 2000 some 70,000 people died, including huge numbers of civilians. Countless survivors are still in search of justice, including the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of soldiers.

Despite this, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a reluctance in many places to discuss the events of the war and what happened, and many women, especially poor and indigenous women in the Andean areas that were worst effected, struggle to voice the suffering they have endured, to access support and see justice being done.

The Milk of Sorrow

It is this situation that is addressed in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film, The Milk of Sorrow. The film is based on the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, which collected testimonies from women who had experienced sexual violence, including brutal gang rape (here’s an interview with Theidon). Many of the women Theidon spoke to reported a belief that the trauma they had experienced had somehow been transmitted to their children through their breastmilk. Llosa claims in this Birds Eye View interview that this is a genuine belief (hm…) but either way it is certainly a good expression of the severe psychological damage and lingering emotional distress caused by conflict to individuals and entire communities.

The film follows Fausta, a young woman whose mother was raped during the war, and who believes she has been fed on the milk of sorrow. Another character says that children like her have no souls; they have fled for fear. Fausta is so afraid of her mother’s fate she inserts a potato into her vagina as a guard against rape. Here’s the trailer for the film.

Llosa’s first film is also set in Peru, also deals with sexual violence, and stars the same actress, Magaly Solier. Madeinusa (2006) is on the one hand a bit of a fairytale, about an invented religious custom in a fictional Andean village. But on the other hand it deals with poverty, rape, incest, murder and child abuse. In the village in which 14 year old Madeinusa lives, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday Christ is dead, so there is no sin. Or rather, your sins don’t count. Beautiful scenery, gut-wrenching scenes. It’s bleak – there’s no wholly sympathetic character in the whole film, and even the everyman ‘good guy’ is happy to take advantage of Madeinusa’s teenage interest in him. She emerges triumphant, after a fashion. Here’s the trailer (in Spanish).

Explaining or exploiting?

While I think both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are stunning bits of cinema, they do make me uncomfortable, as both films and their director have been accused of racism in their portrayal of the indigenous population of Peru as superstitious, vicious and backward. Llosa belongs to the Peruvian white urban elite, and in fact now lives in Spain. The charge levelled at her is that she has used the stories and experiences of Andean women to turn a profit but without showing respect for indigenous communities or involving native people in the project in more than a superficial way. Carlos in DC sees this as emblematic of the inequality in Peruvian society:

I have witnessed the racial and cultural discrimination that our Indigenous peoples face in Peru, especially in the city of Lima where we are discriminated by our accents, ways of living and traditions. At the same time, Lima profits from our cultures and resources.

To me, The Milk of Sorrow symbolizes that racial and economical division exactly. A filmmaker from Lima and her producers from Europe are using the sad experiences and the suffering of our Andean women as a topic for their profitable film.

It’s that old chestnut again: by representing and discussing sexual violence and using real testimonies to inform your representation, are you reinforcing a message of victimhood and exploiting the women whose experiences you use? Worse still, are you at risk of producing something titillating? It’s a tough one even without the dimension of race, which clearly can’t be ignored in the Latin American context (or, well, anywhere really).

The Milk of Sorrow, more than Madeinusa, has served to raise awareness of sexual violence in conflict, and Magaly Solier has also supported an anti-violence against women campaign, so perhaps there’s the social good silver lining.

Lots of impatient IMDb reviews urge people just to enjoy the films as art and stop worrying about the politics. I think that is exactly the wrong approach. Whatever else Claudia Llosa’s films are, they are an opportunity to talk about things which don’t often get an airing; painful, complex things which need to be voiced.

Feminism in Peru

I’m trying to pay attention to things that are happening in the world wider than London, and especially learning about and learning from the women’s movement in other countries.

Happily, I got to meet women from two leading feminist organisations in Peru – DEMUS and Fepromu – at a Womankind Worldwide event in April, where they spoke about their work. You can watch subtitled films of their talks here and here if you’d like to know more about what it’s like working for women’s rights in Latin America.

There’s also this interesting article about the relationship between development, Western feminism and the grassroots women’s movement in Peru, centred around the network of comedores.

Is it schadenfreude? (or ‘leedvermaak’ in Dutch – there you go, you’ve learnt something new today) Is it innocent slapstick? Who knows. But whatever it is that makes watching people fall over so compelling has been turned into a FORCE FOR GOOD by the End Violence Against Women coalition, with their new We Are Man campaign video:

I think it’s rather splendid, especially the skier who flies into the wall of snow like something out of Looney Tunes. My only niggle is that there wasn’t a more natural way of bringing up the topic of rape in the men’s conversation. I’ve overheard plenty of examples that would do the job. Though perhaps this was actually overheard somewhere, from a particularly gauche misogynist. Or maybe it’s deliberately awkward. Anyway…

There’s no one size fits all way to challenge attitudes to sexual violence, and some people will respond more to one approach than another. I reckon this is an excellent addition to the earnest My Strength is Not For Hurting campaign and the stylish Lambeth Know The Difference posters.

Why not pass it on to some people you know, especially men, and put it to the test? If you could encourage them to get their click on here and join the campaign that would be even better.

PS Interesting comment on twitter from @PabloK about the way that anti violence against women campaigns targeted at men always invoke a model of hegemonic masculinity (e.g. ‘be a man’, ‘be strong, ‘real men do/don’t’ etc) Obviously this is to do with the intended audience, but anyone got any ideas stashed away for campaign creative that offers an alternative?