Weekdays at 8:30 a.m. (9 NT)Tuesday, July 3, 2012 | Categories: Episodes
Part Two of The Current
Women and Gaming: Smashing Stereotypes - Anita Sarkeesian
This half hour, we're venturing into muscle-bound, hairy-knuckled, testosterone-fueled territory with a look at one of the great bastions of male culture. The gaming world is a place peopled by female characters mainly with fabled bodies and feeble minds.
In the Batman game, Catwoman oozes sexuality in a skintight leather outfit as she he knocks out her chauvinist enemies. A cheerleader named Lollipop Chainsaw is barely dressed at all as she confronts a zombie invasion with a chainsaw and her boyfriend's severed head. There's of course, much more...
Anita Sarkeesian has spent a lot of time sizing up female video game characters ...and doesn't like what she's seen and heard. She's a pop culture critic who blogs at her site, Feminist Frequency.
And that was her voice you heard at the beginning. Just a few weeks back, she announced plans for a online video project analyzing the ways women are stereotyped in video games. She says she was unprepared for what followed. Anita Sarkeesian was in San Francisco.
Women and Gaming: Smashing Stereotypes - Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch
Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch isn't waiting for the video game giants to change the way women are portrayed. In 2010, she and her partner Kirsten Forbes founded Silicon Sisters Interactive, a Vancouver-based videogame company that tailors its games to female audiences. It's the first Canadian video game studio owned and run by women. Brenda Baily Gershkovitch was in Vancouver.
This segment was produced by The Current's Pacinthe Mattar.
Other segments from today's show: