Tag Archives: femininity

Whose Gender is Artificial?

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Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.
 

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.
 

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Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, Katniss, and Femininity

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I linked this article by Monika Bartyzel last week. Monika showed up in comments here and has had a bunch of interesting thoughts. I thought I’d highlight some of them here.

This is Monika’s first comment.

I was quite surprised to see the responses to your piece. They seemed to decide that you have some sort of antiquated view of men and women, rather than note that the piece is speaking in stereotypical generalities. I thought you brought up an interesting and important alternative to consider.

I’m sick of the arguments against Bella because I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t try to morph the facts to fit the argument. Any agency or personality that Bella has is removed before arguments fly against her. Likewise, any blemishes sported by characters like Katniss or Buffy are dulled. The tough girls are coded in perfect terms, and Bella is made into the perfect loser. Essentially, they’re perfect because all faults can be forgiven by the overall package. People hate the romance and Meyer’s writing, so she doesn’t receive the same privilege.

Even in Amber’s piece, the similarities between K and Bella are obvious. If we boil all of this YA entertainment into checklist points, the girls are not all that different. No amount of bad writing, Mormon values, or indignation changes that.

What I thought was fascinating about Bella was that as much as the book journey was about Edward, it ultimately became about her. I completely disagree with: “Contra Berlatsky, it is laughable to read Bella’s desire for Edward as secondary to her desire to be a vampire—if Edward died, would Bella want to become undead? I think not.” She most definitely would. In fact, some might argue that Edward’s appeal is infinitely enhanced by how much his world helps Bella find her identity. The confused human klutz becomes the calm, impressively controlled vampire. Humanity was a banana peel that always kept her off-kilter.

I think there is a certain.. allergy to femininity because of its implications. Classic definitions of femininity certainly have their place, but I think many of us see that as problematic because of how those notions are fostered by the suffocating media presence around us. It is hard, if not impossible, to signify “natural” moments of femininity because of how much shlock girls get taught from an early age. I often see women act in ways that clash with their own personal ideologies, but are right in-line with the plentiful stereotypical characterizations we’re fed.

So perhaps it’s not so much a matter of hating the feminine, but mistrusting it, and finding it problematic in today’s social environment. But it’s still something we need to consider.

Also: It’d be interesting to talk about how strength fires up forgiveness. The stronger a heroine is, no matter how well or poorly she’s written, the more likely we are to forgive problematic aspects that surround her. Most Buffy fans seem to all-out deny the darker side of Buffy’s world (stalker boyfriends, forgiveness of killers, etc). With Katniss, we get a strong heroine who is literally kept out of a hearing about her life while literally watching her skin melt off, who has no choice about where and how to live, is pressured into having children she doesn’t feel comfortable having, is in a romance that still doesn’t inspire her to say “love”. She seems to never be in control of herself. If no one watched/read either Buffy or Hunger Games, it’d be easy to turn off the populace by the same methods used to turn Bella into a complete fool.

btw: I’ve got to thank you for that 2009 piece, which I hadn’t seen before. I had completely forgotten about the hideous storyline that condemned Buffy’s strength and made Riley morally superior with his blood-prostitute ways. (Much like the other Xander gem when killing a frat-massacring Anya would make Buffy cruel, but trying to help Angel made her foolish and selfish.) I imagine that I find it easy to see Buffy’s weaknesses and Bella’s strengths for this very reason.

And here’s a follow up.

I agree about Buffy. Perhaps for a little while in the beginning she was allowed to revel in her strength, but there was so much condemnation in that show. Since Xander most often lobbed the bullshit condemnation, I just funneled my hatred into him rather than the show. He seemed to act like some sort of condescending moral compass that always emotionally beat her down with flawed, self-serving opinions. There IS one moment where Buffy really flourished in her strength though – Prophecy Girl when she killed the Master. After she was resuscitated, she seemed downright gleeful about her role as a slayer. Unfortunately, the beginning of Season 2 took that all away and re-coded her as being severely emotionally damaged by the whole thing.

Funny, I was just going to type about Katniss’ failure to feel much of anything except loyalty/protectiveness and aggravation/anger … but that once again makes her more like Bella. She just gets “better” reasons to feel it, whereas Bella’s are much more realistic to people today.

I think it’s said in the book, but it’s definitely in the movie that Bella tells Edward she wants to marry him because of how she finally feels like herself. “This wasn’t a choice between you and Jacob. It was between who I should be and who I am. I’ve always felt out of step. Like literally stumbling through my life. I’ve never felt normal, because I’m not normal, and I don’t wanna be. I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong.” And then she specifically says it’s not just about him. It’s just that these points get muddled in the Edward lust.

Yes, I think Bella is attracted to that familial life, but I think that the audience is even more. Twilight might be ridiculous and in some ways problematic, but it fills holes. If your familial life is traumatic or nonexistant, you can go into the books feel the warmth of the family. If you have relationship problems, you can get swept up in the love. More than anything, the Saga speaks to the dissatisfaction and emptiness in life, or most distinctly, offers a really defined sense of reliability. The Cullens are honest and reliable without condemnations about how people live their lives; they love their family no matter what crazy choices they (Edward, Alice, etc) might make. I think that probably appeals to the readership just as much as the romance. (I know that to be true for some friends of mine who like the series.) Of course, it also means exacerbating expectations of love to inhuman forms.

And yes, there is a real problem with how loathed Bella is. If she was just immediately dismissed as problematic with a list of reasons and that was the end of the story, fine. She is far from an ideal heroine. However, the vehemence against her is strange, and not at all in line with how she’s presented in either the books or the films. I think that’s partly due to people taking up the argument from other’s opinions and not reading for themselves, and maybe some of it is the anger towards Meyer’s style making any positive point irrelevant? I don’t know…

Tween Horror

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I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.

A Brief Post on Gender and Gun-Swords

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I was playing Final Fantasy XIII recently, and I intended to write a straightforward review. Then I realized that was boring, so here’s a rambling essay instead…

The medium of video games encompass a broad range of entertainment, including puzzle games, racing games, musical performance simulators, and shooters. The latter category dominates American gaming in sales and typically boasts the most cutting-edge graphics.

Shooters are designed to appeal to a specific audience with fairly narrow tastes. That audience is heterosexual men between the ages of 14 and 35, the same audience that goes to see every summer action movie and (in much smaller numbers) buys every superhero comic. This audience, of which I’m a part, seems to enjoy stories about rugged men doing violent things. Video game heroes are quite similar to the heroes found in most action movies: muscular, laconic, and packing enough firepower to wipe out a small country. Given these characteristics, it’s no surprise that many of these heroes are soldiers.

Master Chief of the Halo franchise

Dominic Santiago and Marcus Fenix from Gears of War

“Soap” McTavish from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

The universes inhabited by these characters also reflect a masculine/military bias. Aesthetically, shooters often employ amazing technology to portray a very limited range of environments. It’s in the nature of shooters to take place in war zones. Whether the sterile, futuristic warships of Halo, or the urban battlefields of Modern Warfare, or the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Gears of War, these are locations for combat, not to admire the view.

Thematically, shooters also tend to focus on male preoccupations, particularly male-male bonding, strength-of-arms, and technological fetishism. Needless to say, love and relationships (besides straight male friendships) are secondary concerns at best. Women are present in some of these games, but generally in a supportive role, and they only rarely get to participate in the action. (I’m aware that there are plenty of counterexamples, but I’m not saying all American games are X so much as I’m simply noting a trend).

Things are a little more complicated in Japan. Japanese game developers create plenty of games just like Halo, but they can also create games that are so different it’s hard to imagine them ever being produced by an American company. And I’m not even talking about oddities such as “Nintendogs.” One of the most successful games to come out of Japan this year was, on the surface, a typical adventure about a group of heroes who fight monsters and enemy soldiers. The lead character is a laconic bad-ass who wields a gun-sword (it’s like a gun … but also a sword!). And she wears a skirt.

Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII

In a different game, Lightning (or you can use her far more awesome Japanese name, Raitoningu) could easily be dismissed as just another heroine who’s really a “man with tits.” But that criticism doesn’t apply very well to Final Fantasy XIII.

Unlike the bleak war zones of American gaming, the universe of Final Fantasy XIII is sparkly wonderland. The world is pretty for the sake of being pretty, and it demands that the player occasionally take some time to admire the view. And the characters don’t wear functional body armor. Their outfits are elaborate, colorful, and almost oppressively cute. They appeal to the cosplay crowd rather than military enthusiasts. In other words, this game is kinda girly.

Vanille

Hope (who is a boy, just to be clear)

Sazh

Fang

Snow

The gameplay in Final Fantasy is primarily violent conflict, but it doesn’t treat violence as a purely male/soldier activity. Women can kill monsters, men can kill monsters, cute girls can kill monsters, even a boy named Hope can kill monsters.

Violence isn’t gender-coded, partly because the cast is evenly split between male and female, but also because gender isn’t neatly defined. This is a universe where women can be named Lightning and Fang and men can be named Hope and Snow. But it’s more than just unusual names. Lightning and Fang are the most stereotypically male characters in the game: tough, aggressive, and, in the case of Lightning, emotionally distant. The men are actually more emotionally open. Snow is obsessed with rescuing his fiance, Sazh wants to save his son, and Hope is initially out for revenge (later he starts preaching the power of friendship). But the developers at Square Enix weren’t content to simply flip gender roles. The girliest character in the game, Vanille, is still a girl. Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t have bright line rules on how men and women are expected to behave.

The story is also quite different from the typical American action/adventure. The female characters don’t simply revolve around a male lead, they have relationships with each other. And the story actually focuses on the relationships between the characters and and their gradual development into a pseudo-family. None of this is meant to suggest that Final Fantasy XIII is brilliantly written. The plot is repetitive. The dialogue is clunky, and it’s made all the worse by an occasionally awkward Japanese-to-English translation. Character drama aims at being moving, but it often falls short. But regardless of its failings, it’s a story that’s about more than just conquest and killing the bad guy.

The genre is also worth noting. Final Fantasy XIII is a role-playing game (RPG), not a shooter. RPGs can be action-packed, but they also give the player the ability to control the gradual improvement (“leveling up”) of the characters. This control, as limited as it may be, gives the player a greater investment in the characters and their story. And since RPGs are about role-playing, they tend to emphasize the interaction between characters and their interaction with the environment. In shooters, story, character, and environment are typically just window-dressing for the action. Speaking from purely anecdotal experience, I’ve noticed that RPGs, and the Final Fantasy franchise in particular, seem to be very popular among female gamers. I’d wager that the reason for this is the the greater attention paid to relationships and character interaction. (And before someone accuses me of unfairly maligning all American games, there are plenty of American RPGs that offer gameplay similar to Final Fantasy XIII, though I would point out that many of them still embrace the techno-militaristic aesthetic of the popular shooters).

I wouldn’t go so far as to describe Final Fantasy XIII as a feminist game. For all it’s gender-bending, the game still adheres to a traditional view of feminine beauty. And just like American superheroines, none of the women get to wear pants. Nevertheless, it’s a game that actually has women front and center, and it passes the Bechdel Test (in case Erica is curious). More importantly, Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t treat femininity as something to be mocked or ignored. Instead, it’s an attribute that’s essential to the game’s appeal, and perfectly compatible with kicking ass.