week eight: stereotype and the ethics of representation

Stereotypes and representation in media is such an interesting and very complicated subject that I never put much time into thinking about in the past. I think as humans it is too easy to accept things rather than be critical about anything. I watched the videos on "Damsel in Distress," "Women in Refrigerators," "Smurfette Principles," and got interested in the subject and watched more videos relating to tropes and stereotypes represented in games and movies. I feel like many times the dangers come from unhealthy misrepresentations being excused, rationalized, or romanticized. However, I watched many of Feminist Frequency's videos and even though they do have some good points about the limited range and cliches of female representation, not all points they covered seemed to communicate cohesively about the correlation between representation and underlying message and its effects on cultural view of women. In class we talked about Will Eisner's use of stereotype in his graphic novels, as he described it as being a "language" that helps the viewers identify the characters better. I think that the over generalizing stereotyping of people and culture is not only lazy but also under many contexts, arrogant. "Damsel in Distress" brought up really interesting trope in gaming of women constantly in need of help from a male protagonist. Although definitely overused and misused, I think it is really debatable on whether this trope promotes sexism and unrealistic women standards to the culture, and i think comes down to whether it has a good writing or not. Also Feminist Frequency tended to do one sided research for most part and didn't include or was willing to hear the opposite side of the argument. I did some extra research and it turned out that despite her claiming to be a "fan of gaming," and "playing games most of her life," all her clips of game-play had been borrowed without reference, and an old video of her was found where she says the direct opposite, "not a fan of games". Even though all the videos had crowdfunded budget over $150,000 based on online data but her videos , she didn't even play the games she reviewed and therefore had incomplete information. Still, I do believe there are a lot of tropes and stereotypes that are unhealthy precisely for the same reason, because writers and artists didn't do enough research on their own. One I found especially interesting was the trope "infantilization of women" in which an innocent, childlike mind is put on an attractive grown woman. This trope usually explores male protagonist having to explain everything and developing love interest with the woman. I think this trope could be misused if the male starts to take advantage of her innocence to fulfill his desires and uses the medium to justify them which seems to be in a grey area of pedophilia, however the idea by itself isn't harmful. In movies where men are infantilized, women tended to fall in love 'despite' the condition not because of it. I think for some part evolution has the answer to why men and women perceive this differently, as men had to compete to be a better suitor through ability and women competed with physical appearance.