BackStage

If you read the Brain Trust post below, you will see that Killa, a member of my brain trust, provided part of a post on Grand Theft Auto. Another colleague, who I often jokingly refer to as the President of my brain trust, also wanted to comment. I have added him to this blog, so he may choose to post in the future. I have tried to get Killa to come on, but she has refused thus far. So, with no further ado, here are Columbus’s comments on GTAIV:

Women are fighting about GTA. Feministing, Reverse Cowgirl – I should, and had no problem, staying far away from that one, until showed up here. Now I gotta say something to defend my precious.

Killa writes:

What is the most disturbing thing about this game to me is the fact that it is marketed to teens. I can’t say for sure, but from when I played the only women in the game were prostitutes.

Not true. They’re also skanky girlfriends and little old ladies!

The sex is not what really bothers me. I have heard plenty of arguments for legalizing prostitution and why prostitution exists, the Cowgirl makes her point. We all know sex sells. That’s not the issue. Instead, it is the fact that women in this game are disposable. It is disturbing that you earn points to kill prostitutes and women. I think there is an underlying message that violence against women is acceptable, which is extremely problematic for a game that is targeted to young males.

I think that this is part of the problem underlying this debate – most women have not actually played GTA. Killa says she did, once upon a time, in a faraway land – but I have played every GTA game from oldest-skool onward, and I can tell you that the game hardly singles out women as being disposable. Yeah, you earn points for killing prostitutes. You also earn points for killing everyone. Everyone is disposable, and it sends the message that violence against everyone is acceptable. It’s despicable, sure, but it’s more of a South Park-style of being horrible – it somehow seems a bit less awful because everyone is a target.

I think the game gets a bad rap as being particularly misogynistic because (I’m guessing) women tend to see it being played only in the first few hours after it gets purchased, when we penis-dangling thugs are still all atwitter that somebody made a game where you can have sex with a prostitute and then kill her and get your money back. Or they see videos made by some dimwit cruising around and exclusively treating women like garbage and assume that that is how the whole game is played. It isn’t. Most of the game is spent dutifully murdering legions of enemy gangsters and cops. Which brings me to my next point:

…I also think I have every right to voice my opinion about why I think the random killing of a particular group of people, in this case female prostitutes, is wrong. If this game was targeting another group in the same way (i.e. White males) people would be up in arms.

But, because the targets are prostitutes — a class of people we categorize in conventional society as being of a lower status, criminal, or (for some) immoral — it is more socially acceptable for the game to depict and allow for the murder of these women.

This, I think, supports my earlier point about women not having played the game enough to really get what it’s about (yes, insane generalization, I’m talking mostly about the women in the debate here who clearly haven’t). The game totally and completely targets white males. Cops, even. I think I killed prostitutes a couple of times in the first game to make it through a rough spot (man that sounds awful), and then I moved on. But in every single GTA game, the ultimate end game – pretty much the only reason to break out the disc after you finish the missions – is starting epic confrontations with cops. Shooting down helicopters with rocket launchers. Slicing them up with chainsaws. Burning them with molotov cocktails. Plain old cap-in-ass-busting. Glorious, epic battle. And you know what? Real cops were up in arms, and a lot of people gave them the Reverse Cowgirl treatment: “Calm the fuck down, it’s just a game.” This is misanthropy, not misogyny.

Just an interesting FYI- the scene where the guy is driving around killing prostitutes is straight out of London where Jack the Ripper killed numerous women; targeting prostitutes. No originality to the game creators.

Really, just no originality in the dude who spent the time to make that video. Feel free to worry about him.

Did you notice the racialization of the women? There were some white women but there seemed to be many Black women. Notice how the women fit the general stereotypes of their races.

Just a point of clarification, if I didn’t make it evident above: the game is horrible. I’m just arguing that it doesn’t treat women any worse than anyone else: stereotypically, instrumentally, brutally.

I dunno, y’all. The Internet complicates debate because there’s no clean line between in-group harping and arguments to convince outsiders. For example, I bitch about students all the time to my fellow grad students – and when I do, I use flimsy rhetoric, I nitpick, I make a big deal out of small stuff, because I know they get it and I don’t really have to convince them. But if I were trying to convince someone that students suck, I would not use those same arguments; I would break out the old reliables. I think that that’s ultimately what’s going on here: Feministing is basically for people who are already believers. To quote from their most recent post:

And there it is. Once again, putting the onus on women to protect themselves from rape takes the rapist – remember him? – out of the equation. Not okay.

It’s very much a post for people who get it. There’s no extended articulation of the argument; it’s unnecessary. It’s just a sort of “Check out this latest bullshit”. Blogging is extremely conducive to that style of posting – but it also facilitates outsiders (like me) wandering in and taking things all out of context.

Oh, dammit. Just read this post by Jen. As usual, someone says what I want to say in half the words and a with just an eighth of the asshattery.

I am still fairly new to reading blogs. A few weeks ago, I don’t remember how, I ran across the Reverse Cowgirl. I have been reading her blog ever since and, in general, find it interesting. A few days ago she blogged about Grand Theft Auto. Part of her post was in reply to Feministing’s blogging on GTA4. Read Feministing’s response to the Reverse Cowgirl here. Here is a small selection of the Reverse Cowgirl blog post that you can read in entirety here:

And that, in sum total, is my reaction to this ridiculous, overblown, cockamamie controversy over the Ladies of Liberty City and the sex-and-violence in Grand Theft Auto IV. I mean, really? I mean, are you fucking kidding me? What is this, the fucking 80s? Did politically correctness not die, like, last century? Did we not hunt down all the feminists and shut them up already? Are we not a culture so completely overrun with politically incorrectness that the only appropriate response to the latest incident of it is to laugh? Because while the feminists were out burning copies of GTA IV and building sex positive spaces in the sky, while Mr. Thompson was off getting his knickers in a major, anal crevice wedging twist over this, while Rockstar was in the corner counting its money and laughing hysterically at the grand spectacle of it, I was watching the video you can see for yourself here, and when the guy in the car with the commendable soul pole got what he wanted and then ran over the woman who gave it to him, you know what I did? I laughed. Because I thought it was funny. Because this whole moronic outcry against what is nothing but an unabashed and unashamed articulation of Man’s basest impulses run amok is nothing but hypocrisy. Here’s a newsflash for you. This is the way people think. This is how things are. This is the way it is.

I have never played or seen GTA (1, 2, 3 or 4). All I have seen of it is what is on the Reverse Cowgirl’s blog, and what I have posted below. (Blue’s taste in video games tends more to shooting Nazi’s or storm troopers than stealing cars and popping caps in prostitutes’ asses). I have noticed that the link to that video is no longer available from her blog. To see it, you can go to Youtube and search for Ladies of Grand theft auto IV. It will ask you to confirm your birth date. I’m not even going to try to post it here.

For an approved for all ages review of the game, you can watch this clip:

What’s interesting to me is that it is apparently not too NC-17 to watch people get shot at point blank range, but watching someone get fellatio is.

Reverse Cowgirl’s point is that men think about these things–these fantasies are reality. In her words:

The fact of the matter is that you cannot police the sexual fantasies of men. It isn’t going to happen. You can’t distill one man’s desires into some reductionist understanding of 21st century America that posits women as the victims of men once again. You can’t continue to stick you head in the sand and refuse to believe that this isn’t a part of how men really think and feel and fuck and want and love and hate and live. You just can’t. To do so is insanity.

When reading her blog, I know I didn’t like the video. I even knew why. But I didn’t know if she was right or wrong. I try to stay as open minded as possible, to think about issues, and to be always willing to change my mind. You’ve seen it happen on this blog. I say something, you comment, I change my mind after some deep reflection on the issue. So, when I read her post, it was so different from what I usually hear in my Ivory Tower, I didn’t really know what to think. I did what I usually do in these situations; I asked other people’s opinions. I am going to present you now with the comments from part of my brain trust – one of the people I frequently go to when I really don’t know what to think, or do, or how to say what I want to say. Here’s what Killa had to say (and yes, we talked about the humor of that nickname with the theme behind this game).

Take it away, Killa:

Okay, so first I feel the need to admit that I have played Grand Theft Auto before back when there was only one or two and I know you could pick up a prostitute but this game has taken that to an entirely new level. So that being said here is what I think…

What is the most disturbing thing about this game to me is the fact that is marketed to teens. I can’t say for sure, but from when I played the only women in the game were prostitutes. Because of this, I think there is a particular problem with how women are represented, not to mention the fact that you have sex with them and then gun them down. Here women here are strictly sexual objects with the sole purpose of pleasing men. They have no other means of existence in this game and when you are done with them you can throw them away. Listen to what the women say, all of them are telling the men how great they are, how good they are at sex, or how big their penis is. Everything here is about pleasing males, which is no surprise since the game is targeted to a male audience. I do think that this parallels how women are seen in patriarchal society; as a sexual commodity.

The sex is not what really bothers me. I have heard plenty of arguments for legalizing prostitution and why prostitution exists, the Cowgirl makes her point. We all know sex sells. That’s not the issue. Instead, it is the fact that women in this game are disposable. It is disturbing that you earn points to kill prostitutes and women. I think there is an underlying message that violence against women is acceptable, which is extremely problematic for a game that is targeted to young males.

The Cowgirl argues that feminists are trying to police the sexual desires of men. I don’t think that is their point, I think feminists would, however, prefer that men’s sexual desires did not involve killing women. I am not arguing that the game be removed from shelves. But I also think I have every right to voice my opinion about why I think the random killing of a particular group of people, in this case female prostitutes, is wrong. If this game was targeting another group in the same way (i.e. White males) people would be up in arms. But, because the targets are prostitutes — a class of people we categorize in conventional society as being of a lower status, criminal, or (for some) immoral — it is more socially acceptable for the game to depict and allow for the murder of these women. In short, while I think the Cowgirl makes some fair arguments, I think she is mistaken in her interpretation of the larger picture.

Just an interesting FYI- the scene where the guy is driving around killing prostitutes is straight out of London where Jack the Ripper killed numerous women; targeting prostitutes. No originality to the game creators.

Did you notice the racialization of the women? There were some white women but there seemed to be many Black women. Notice how the women fit the general stereotypes of their races.

I still don’t know how I feel. I like Killa’s comments, some of them make a lot of sense to me. Part of me appreciates the Reverse Cowgirl’s comment:

What do you think cocktails of power, money, and sex begat? What do you really think is going on behind closed doors, on street corners, in parked cars in America?

But, then again, even if raunchy sex is occurring in these places, that doesn’t mean that when the woman leaves the parked car someone runs her over. I hope it doesn’t even mean that the man behind the steering wheel is thinking about running her over. In the words of another graduate student in the department who plays this game:

Oh yeah, I get it on with the prostitutes. And when she’s done rocking my car, I put a cap in her and then take my money back! I can’t believe parents let their kids play this game.

I also really liked the conclusion from Samhita at Feministing:

And I may agree with her that we cannot “police the sexual fantasies of men,” and I am not trying to, but I sure as hell can analyze them.

Read the original post from Feministing here. Isn’t the first way to discover if there is something we can do about the attitudes that make games like this so popular to analyze why they exist? To the extent these exist? I find this even more confusing, because it seems to me that is exactly what Breslin is attempting to do in her two component blogs and research projects: Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. How is attempting to understand why men (and others) play this game different from attempting to understand why men (and sometimes women) go to prostitutes and why others work in the field? In fact, in her post about GTA4, it appears that Breslin herself is attempting to enter into this analysis when she draws on quotes from these letters to argue that this is the way it is. But while she uses some of her letters to make her points, she seems to ignore other letters* that would give her a reason to fight against this type of treatment of women. For example, in this letter the working girl comments about how she loves the work because at the end of the day she claims her body as more fully her own:

And then I’m in a cab again, driving home with a nice heft of hundred-dollar bills in my purse. I get home, strip, climb into bed, and masturbate. In part this is because I’ve got leftover lust–I orgasm easily but it takes a lot to fully satisfy me. In part it’s because the whole experience turns me on, and in part it’s a kind of reclaiming of my body. At the end of the day, my cunt belongs to me and I’m the one who gets to enjoy it. After I’m done, I lie in bed naked and count the cash. It’s crazy and surreal and beautiful.

If she feels the need to reclaim her body, it seems that for a while, it was not fully her own. If she was selling it, than the man who paid for it for the while (yes, with this woman’s consent) “owned” it for that time period. Perhaps the need to actively reclaim it makes her more aware of how much it really is hers? Anyway, the point is, why support a game that seems to agree that during the time the body is sold that it really is no longer hers–to the extent that the men who purchase it [reflected by the characters in the game] can choose to take that body in anyway they want, and then dispose of it when they are done [by running it over, or shooting it, or who knows how else]?

So, how much is this just a game? How much do we need to pay attention to the underlying messages from the game? Do we need to be concerned about the boys and men (and women) who play these games? What do all of you think?

*I have not had a chance to read all of these letters yet, although I have read many. I also think this is a very worthwhile project, and am thankful to Breslin to posting this on the internet.