Opinion: Being sexy and not sex_ist_ - a look at Bayonetta and objectification

It clicked for me with the instantaneous certainty of a camera shutter.

In both Bayonetta games, the titular character has a signature move called "Breakdance," a ballet of bullets and elegant kicks that acts as an area-of-effect attack, which culminates in a valedictory spin and feline pose before the bespectacled heroine looks straight at you and awaits the click of a camera, whose aperture snap completes the move. What clicked for me was that her performance for the camera was not only conscious but acknowledged and even owned the camera.

When we talk about "the male gaze" in media, we often liken the camera--whether in film or in videogames--to the gaze of the assumed-male viewer/player. It's why most movies and games (Bayonetta included) perform leisurely toe-to-head pans of attractive women, mirroring a gaze I've seen directed at me by men many a time in the street, sizing me up like a cut of meat on a rack. The Bayonetta games seemed to fall into the same pattern, offering a 3D avatar for men to control and consume; but there was something in the way she seemed to make the camera her own that resisted such a simple conclusion.

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I am a feminist critic but also a sociologist, which is why I approached my writing about Bayonetta with one question aforethought: why is she so popular with some women and self-identified feminists, to a degree one does not see with other objectified bombshell female video game characters? 

Something was different here, and it would have been insulting for me to chalk this phenomenon up to "false-consciousness" or internalized sexism; why Bayonetta specifically and not the others? If false-consciousness obtained, after all, you would see it with all sexualized women video game characters. Yet many of these women players, who often rolled their eyes at sexy video game cheesecake, instead found their gaze bent to Bayonetta's whims like the "Breakdance" camera lens. Why?

The answer lies in the nature of objectification: what it is, what it isn't, and how we can represent sexual agency in fiction using externalized cues. Bayonetta's presentation, which is undoubtedly a heavily sexualized one, nevertheless expresses her character in a way that separates her from the crowd of interchangeable, uninteresting portrayals of heterosexual women that clutter gaming. By contrast, Bayonetta's presentation says something about who she is. To understand this, we'll need to get a bit philosophical.

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"Objectification" is perhaps one of the most bandied-about terms in feminist media criticism, with good reason. We speak of objectifying images in much the same way sports commentators must talk about points; their ubiquity necessitates the discussion. The ability of a camera to shape how we as a society see women, and gender more widely, should not be underestimated, and the concept of objectification is crucial to understanding how. But it is a notoriously slippery word whose meaning is difficult to pin down in a sentence. Often the simplest definition that can be given is "to reduce someone to an object." It is a serviceable definition but one that still begs questions to an inquiring mind: is there only one way to do so? Is it always bad? How, then, do we define ‘object'?

Feminist philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum has helpfully supplied us with a characteristically rational and orderly answer. "I suggest," she writes in her essay ‘Objectification,' "that at least the following seven notions are involved in [treating someone as an object]:

This list is doubtlessly familiar to most women who experience routine objectification in the streets. From 1 to 7 we see differentially related facets of the sexual harasser's mindset. But applying this rubric to videogames is trickier because we move from the realm of actual human beings to portrayals of human beings. It is not enough to say, as many criticism-shy gamers insist, that videogame characters are "not real" ergo no rules apply; that sort of thinking ignores how representations of human beings are still instructive and can instill empathy, rage, or other emotions (just ask anyone who's ever shed a tear over something that happened in a game). 

But it is true that we cannot simplistically say "this character does/doesn't have agency," because they are not actual people in the strict sense of the term--and throughout we must recall that they are someone else's intentional creation from start to finish, rather than the jumble of oddities and serendipity that make up actual people.

We have to apply Nussbaum's rubric, instead, to representations of agency.

This is the best we can hope for: all videogames, and all art for that matter, are the product of their creators who can make the characters that populate their worlds do whatever they please. Looked at one way, this is the utter annihilation of agency. But if we allowed that to be our only perspective, then we could not credit a single portrayal of any character in any medium with positive qualities at all, nor discuss the ways in which fans appropriate and reinterpret the meanings of their favorite characters. We could only see characters as slaves to the will of their creator; what a dreary world that would be.

With gaming, then, we must settle for the fuzzy but more useful standard of judging how characters are represented as having agency, particularly within the universe in which they are portrayed. From here, we can then judge if they are being, say, used instrumentally by other characters, or perhaps denied autonomy.

But as is often the case with media, the audience has to be taken into account as an interacting participant as well. Videogames, in particular, are vulnerable to giving players the sense that they own the characters they play--and this can be quite toxic when it comes to portraying sexualized women, inculcating the idea that female characters are little more than sex dolls made to jiggle for the player's pleasure, or mere trophies. Certainly they're instrumental for the player, if nothing else, in that way.

These are complex issues but they have the benefit of being more specific and lending charges of objectification more philosophical heft.

I would, however, argue that one of the most useful lenses for understanding objectification in videogames is what Nussbaum calls fungibility, or interchangeability, and it's where we come back to Bayonetta.

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In a long-ago column in this space I critiqued, in passing, how games like Bayonetta often used cutscenes to portray externalized, visual sexuality in a way that was interchangeable; that is to say that the cheesy crotch shots of Bayonetta said nothing about her and their ultimate purpose (the titillation of the player) could just easily have been served by any "properly" proportioned female avatar. Most of these bog standard poses are filled by countless female characters in games who are deliberately positioned to show off as much of their derrieres as possible, a convention that stretches (pardon the term) from film, to comics, to most genres of video gaming.