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

By Andy Marlette (http://www.andymarlette.com)

I love this cartoon. I sent it to nearly all the women I know last year. Do I need to say why I love it? It so clearly outlines the choices for young girls these days, not just at Halloween. You can be anything you want to be, as long as you’re sexy. You can be anything, as long as you look good doing it. Anything!! As long as some man somewhere thinks it’s sexy…

I mean, the first thing people say about women they’re trying to insult is usually that they’re ugly/fat/too old. That they don’t possess or inspire this all-important male approval. Just think about some of the things you’ve heard said, by the left and the right, about female politicians. Think about some of the things you might have said.

When men shout or whistle at me in the street and I walk away, what do they shout? They shout “You fat cow!” “You ugly bitch!” They’re not alone, every five year-old kid starting school learns that they can upset little girls by calling them fat.

Of course you can also be too sexy, because hey, you wouldn’t want those people you’re trying to get the approval of thinking you’re easy now, would ya? That could interfere with your appeal. But it’s all related. Be just sexy enough, show just the right amount of skin, look just submissive enough, just powerful enough, don’t look like you’re ‘asking for it’ (whatever the fuck that means), give that camera just the right look, and you too can be anything you want to be.

To get off the soapbox and back to the subject, Halloween, this day which just highlights something that’s already going on in our culture, here are a couple of seasonal links for you to enjoy:-

Website Take Back Halloween has got a hella load of costumes for you to pick from, and you won’t find the tagline ‘sexy’ on any of them. They’ve got warrior queens, goddesses and legends, and other famous women to pick from, poets, writers, saints, activists, movie stars and serial killers! They say: “Why be a fairy princess when you can be a queen?”

The bloggers at Geek Feminism, with a nod to Take Back Halloween, pick a few geekier costumes which also ignore the male gaze… they’ve got robots, rubiks cubes and Lovecraftian horrors… They say: “There’s no reason that a squid monster can’t have a feminine touch.”

Comics Alliance take a funny look at some of the most ridiculous and just plain unnecessary ‘sexy’ costumes on sale this Halloween, like the cringe-making Transformers costume below. They’ve very helpfully provided an illustration of what that character is supposed to look like – can you spot the difference? They’ve got wildly inaccurate superhero costumes, (and of course, there’s nothing that upsets this BadRep blogger more than people Doing Comics Wrong!), and they’ve got sexed-up characters from your other favourite childhood TV shows. There’s sexy Elmo, a sexy Ninja Turtle and a sexy Lone Ranger!  They say: “A sexy version of Elmo is the kind of thing that when you see it, you have to tell someone else, or it’ll just sit there in your brain slowly driving you insane as you try to figure out why it exists.”

Cracked.com also has a feature on 26 ‘Sexy’ Halloween Costumes That Shouldn’t Exist.

I think I need to step away from the internet now. When you see a sexy Transfromers costume that’s the Internet gods’ way of telling you you’ve been online for too long.

Happy Halloween, folks! I solemnly swear to leave your precious childhood memories alone next time we meet.

We regret to inform you that you have been stripped of the title of the Nation’s Wise and Cuddly Favourite Grandfather. This is due to comments that you made in your interview with Attitude, published yesterday, Tuesday 25th October.

The position of the Nation’s Sexist, Least Favourite Grandfather Who Makes Christmas Dinner Uncomfortable for Everyone and Insists that Girls do the Washing Up is currently open, if you would like to send us your application.

Yours sincerely,

The People of Britain