The Guardian reports something incredibly stupid →

I’m going to avoid anything inflammatory here, but let me put a giant trigger warning on that link - it gets really ugly towards the end. One of the less explicit areas, which adequately summarises the article:

Sue Berelowitz told the home affairs select committee that social networking sites and the use of pornography was one of the key areas she was examining in an investigation of group and gang child sexual exploitation. Her inquiry had already revealed that such exploitation was taking place across the country in urban, rural and metropolitan areas. “It is violent, it is sadistic, it is very, very ugly,” she told MPs on Tuesday.

In fairness, The Guardian is still attempting to be objective on this by just reporting what an authority figure (Berelowitz) is saying on a subject she likely knows little about. The headline, however -

Access to online porn ‘twisting children’s view of sexual norms’

doesn’t exactly allow for the same degree of nuance.

This fucking story has been reported everywhere. The tabloids are being just as alarmist as you’d expect them to be - I’m not going to link to the stories by the Daily Mail and Express, but it’s likely what you’re already thinking of.

Here’s what’s wrong with it: it’s taking something as delicate as human psychology and reducing it to simple cause and effect. Kids watch porn, so kids sexually assault other kids. That’s stupid. It’s stupid because it ignores dozens of other factors - social class, upbringing, attempts by authority figures to draw a distinction between fantasy and reality, and honest and open sex education. The fact remains that there are millions of parents who never talk to their kids about sex (mine are part of that group), thousands of schools whose approach to sex ed is fucked (most religious schools in this country, of which there are a fuckton, can teach sex and religious education however they want), and a ton of social factors that contribute to a climate where sexual violence is on the verge of being legitimised. But obviously, we can’t talk about that. Not in the media, which is part of that social background. Tabloids can’t tell stuffy, indignant parents that they’re fucking their kids up, because then they can’t sell papers. The porn industry - largely US-based, with no financial contribution or emotional stake in the future of the news media - is an easy scapegoat.

Do I think porn’s harmless? No. Probably not. I don’t think young kids should watch porn, but I think the supposed “over-18” limit is really stupid, especially considering that the age of consent in this country is 16. I believe there’s such a thing as moderation, too. Porn can be addictive, more so than other media. It doesn’t have to be, but it can be.

Fundamental to the appreciation of any art is understanding its limits - knowing that it can throw a light on and inform our understanding of the world, but that it is ultimately a particular representation with its own biases. Most porn - even the good stuff - still thinks in terms of a male gaze, where tits and asses fill the screen and cocks are often reduced to just that - disembodied penises intended as a surrogate for the (supposedly male) viewer. And it’s endemic, too - that most people can probably name a handful of female porn stars and at most one male (I’m thinking James Deen, and yes, I know the names of a bunch of others, but I have the weird sort of fascination with porn that Hunter S. Thompson had with politics) probably isn’t great.

But what about alternative porn, or some of the work that Kink.com produces, or the wealth of queer porn you can find after a bit of digging? Sure - in terms of its prevalence it’s like European art cinema against blockbuster behemoths, but it’s still porn. That stuff isn’t harmful.

Neither is the tacky male-gaze stuff completely bad, and you’d have to be very careful to suggest that it leads to an increase in sexual violence (and not say anything that Berelowitz said). I’ve learned a lot from conventional porn. I’ve learned that pain can be fun - both to give it and receive it. I’ve learned how people’s bodies work, to an extent - watch it for long enough and you start to tell who’s faking it, and who isn’t (protip: there are a lot of fake orgasms in porn). I’ve learned how to tease and be teased. It was the combination of being in a relatively stable relationship and the ability to furtively check porn sites that made up the bulk of my sexual education, and - while I’m by no means an expert - it’s helped me get in touch with myself.

Here’s the key, though - porn does sex best. Sexual violence, as the noun suggests, is violence first and foremost. To suggest that the majority of pornography is rape is disgusting, and betrays the sort of thinking that someone who formed their opinion of a multi-million dollar industry on the back of a thirty-year-old interview with Linda Lovelace might have. And I’m not naïve - we live in a culture that blurs the distinction between the two on a day-to-day basis (oh, look, I wrote about that recently) - but there is still a jump between saying “a kid is watching some actors have exaggerated sex” and “a kid believes it’s okay to rape someone”. There are dozens of factors that encourage that line of thinking a hell of a lot more. There’ll be a lot to get through, but it might be a good idea to start with newspapers that objectify women every single fucking day.

Hitman: Absolution and getting critical

A few days ago, a trailer surfaced for a video game called Hitman: Absolution. In it, a suave-looking man called Agent 47 puts on a suit while a group of nuns walk down the road to his motel. The nuns then shed their clothes, appearing now in fetish gear and carrying a load of guns, which they use to destroy the motel Agent 47 is staying in. The camera - virtual, of course - leers at them, full of boob shots and slow-motion hip waggles, before Agent 47 emerges from the flames and kills them all. It’s incredibly stupid, misogynistic as hell and (hopefully) doesn’t represent the calibre of game that the Hitman franchise tends to present. It’s the basest-level advertising bullshit, the kind that appeals to men who think that it’s okay to hurt women, so long as they’re sexy.

This is all par for the course in video games, unfortunately. No form of media gets it right - female characters only really flourish (as a trend rather than the exception) in books, which have the advantage of centuries of development and experimentation over film, TV and games. Personally, I’m optimistic about the future of games - they’re a young format, and if you look at the infancy of film it tended more towards appealing to stupid people and less towards producing art-house classics. All of that came later, and while you still have big-budget silliness that panders to the status quo, there’s also a thriving industry that challenges commonly-held views (good and bad), and that’s great. Even better is that we tend to give awards to films that are good, rather than successful (with a few obvious exceptions).

These are all lessons that games have yet to learn. With the exception of independent-oriented ceremonies like the IGF, Game of the Year awards tend to reflect sales to a strong extent - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is by no means high art. The indie scene is starting to blur with mainstream stuff - games like Dear Esther are doing well for the first time, and bigger companies like Double Fine and inXile are crowdsourcing funds rather than having to conform to depressing marketing constraints imposed by distributors whose only interest is making money. But there’s a while to go before you can pick up any game and have it stand a reasonable chance of impressing you because it’s complex, or deep, or affecting in any way. Even in narrative-driven triple-A games, the stories have a tendency to be drivel that books and films could never get away with. I don’t want to scream about the ending of Mass Effect 3, because everyone else has done that, but it’s telling that a game like that received millions in funding, and they (apparently) were still sketching out the ending in the last few weeks.

I say all of this because video games also have some of the most ardent defenders, and not all of them are doing it for the right reasons. Video game criticism isn’t taken seriously in the sense that literary criticism is, because most games have to operate outside criticism to work. And this means that games get away with bullshit tactics like the trailer for Hitman: Absolution.

Penny Arcade, a website that started out (and continues as) a webcomic - which should give you an idea about the quality of their journalism - doesn’t have the best views on things like that trailer. This kind of makes sense - the creators also run a series of huge game conventions across the USA, and without developer interest they can’t function (and, presumably, profit). On Friday, Jerry Holkins said a few things, like this:

being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing.

And:

Only a necrophile could be titillated by something like this: by the end, it literally defies the viewer to maintain an erection.

And:

I think that once a nun produces an RPG from her habit, we have passed through a kind of “veil” critically speaking.

And:

Nobody is going to approve of the entire continuum.

The post itself is a bit longer - you can read it here - but these four quotes betray a lot. Above, we’ve got four archetypal statements that betray what we might as well call “U Mad” philosophy - the idea that getting pissed off by idiocy is never useful. There are a few other posts like the one above, but they can all be boiled down to the above four, with varing degrees of extremity.

On the idea of compulsory rage, especially against something as silly as a trailer for a video game, I can empathise a lot. I am not a person who gets angry on the internet (for the most part), and tend to veer away from those who do. What’s more, I expect that someone like Holkins, who runs an incredibly successful website about video games and has courted controversy (by making fun of rape victims) in the past, probably received a ton of emails asking for some sort of comment. In the first paragraph of that post, he mentions that he initially ignored the trailer, dismissing it as nonsense, and that should be commended - in an ideal world, everyone would do that and trailers like this would be total marketing failures.

By the same token, like it or not, by profiting off the success of Penny Arcade, Holkins is in a position of influence, and while it might be going a little far to call it his “duty” to advise gamers to avoid bullshit like this, he certainly shouldn’t be defending it. Apathy is something that just is - you don’t take pride in it, and while you can address the problems in activist groups, writing off loud and angry people as a mob is insulting - almost as insulting as having that mob demand you join the fray.

Next: the “rape culture is decided by my boner” argument. Here’s something shocking: it isn’t. There is already a culture where women exist on a continuum between culturally inferior to men and totally objectified, even in the most advanced democracies, and no more so than in video games - it’s relatively easy to name ten well-defined male characters in big-budget productions off the cuff, and considerably less easy to do so with women (it’s entirely possible that there aren’t that many in video gaming history). You don’t need to get hard to know that rape culture exists, especially if you’re a good person (though no-one’s going to convince me that Holkins is a good person). We’re not all adolescent boys who salivate at the merest flash of a boob. But perpetuating the chastity myth - the idea that all nuns are really sex maniacs, and that really no always means yes - contributes to rape culture. It deprives women - or, let’s broaden this, anyone other than men - of agency and their own minds. It’s fucking stupid, and that trailer isn’t doing anything new. It isn’t creating the culture - it’s validating the people who already contribute to it on a daily basis, and that’s shitty.

The idea of work being exempt from criticism because it’s silly is just stupid. Having just completed a three-year course at a surprisingly forward-thinking university (we spent two weeks analysing The Walking Dead and Battlestar Galactica), I’ve learnt that nothing is exempt from criticism. Sure - the critical consensus can be “this is vapid, misogynist bullshit devoid of any real substance”, but it’s still a critical consensus. Pretty much anything is culture, and can be commented on, and trailers like this are very much in the public eye - it’s not the bathroom graffiti of a fourteen-year-old boy, so criticising it is fairly important. It sounds miserable, but without negative criticism, artists don’t learn from their mistakes. This crap ends up being perpetuated.

And all of this boils down to that last quote. Here’s the thing: there is a place for offensive material in any culture. There’s a reason why excellent novels like 1984 are banned in countries with established dictatorships - it’s because they challenge the status quo, and - in that case - do so in a good way. There’s also offensive work that doesn’t do that at all - people are still writing books about how it’d be a great idea to go over to Africa and colonise it all over again and tame the wild Um Bongo tribes and confiscate their spears, but it’s weird niche literature because most of us aren’t so horrifyingly racist.

The trailer for Hitman: Absolution has nearly 500,000 views in about 4 days - and that’s just from Youtube. It is not a niche product. And here’s where it differs from transgressive work: it’s offensive, and it also feeds into the status quo. For every person who’s disgusted by it, there are likely two or three who at the very least see nothing wrong with it. There is already a climate that writes off sexual assault as a lesser crime, that blames victims, where a single event that might require decades of therapy carries jail time of - on average - less than six years. Women are paid less, have a pathetically small voice in the media on the issues that matter to them most, and are trampled over by men. Not all men, sure - we’re all aware of the reverse victimisation process that certain men’s rights activists get locked into - but a proportion that’s big enough for it to feed into legislation and mass culture to a huge extent.

In that sense, the trailer for Hitman: Absolution might be seen as a gleeful celebration of everything that’s wrong with society’s view of women. And maybe that’s deserving of curiosity from an anthropological standpoint, but don’t defend it.

To crystallise it: yes, there’s no sense in getting angry at bad art. But getting angry at bad art when it’s hugely popular is more than okay. The more voices that say “shit like this isn’t good”, slowly drowning out the voices that bay for more, have the potential to feed into video games as a cultural medium and elevate it to something better. As long as there’s room for improvement, there’s value in criticism. It makes for better books, it allows for the diversion of funds to make great films, and it can do the same for video games if it’s given a chance.