The Damsel in Distress
- By Sarah Guenther
- Nov 11, 2016
- 2 min read
Ahh, the damsel in distress trope. Everyone's heard the phrase: an attractive but helpless female needs a man to save her from a dangerous situation. The man goes through various trials to get to his woman and saves the day, becoming the hero and getting the girl. Typically, the female's main role is to aid the man in hist quest or adventure and to provide the prize at the end.
In her popular web series Feminist Frequency, media critic and public speaker Anita Sarkeesian discusses issues through a feminist lens and often dissects them to discover their underlying problems or benefits to society. In her "Tropes vs. Women" series about video games, she has examined such issues as the "Sinister Seductress" to "Strategic Butt Coverings" for female characters.
In her series of videos about the damsel in distress trope in video games, she touches on the fact that the trope has become a cliche in the video game industry and that if a female character is present in a video game (note the word if), then she is often relegated to this type of role. In three whole videos about the topic, she goes through countless examples of video games in which this trope is present and is only able to highlight a few cases where female characters are not somehow the damsel or made to be less than the male characters.
This in itself is a surprise to me because most video games simply don't feature female characters. There seems to be this idea in the video game industry that women don't play video games and if they do, they're only doing it to get a man. That's why many prominent female gamers, like Sarkeesian herself, are often met with backlash and harassment online.
When video games do feature prominent female characters, they are often shown with the same body type (i.e., small waist, big bust/hips/butt) and are typically clad in clothes that cover the bare minimum. This isn't surprising as women only account for 11 percent of game designers. That means that a lot of video games are created by men who use their male gaze to design characters.
So where does this leave us? We live in a culture that values women for their bodies and the video game industry is no exception. If we can get more women behind the scenes in the video game industry then we will begin to see more diverse female characters (in both body and roles) and less harassment of female gamers and designers.
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