Is LA Noire sexist? Well…yeah.
Emma Boyes of IGN wrote an opinion piece talking about the question of whether or not LA Noire is sexist. Her argument essentially stated that the roles of women are relegated to housewives, shopgirls, shallow love interest, and murder victim. Boyes mentions the case of Alice Stebbins Wells, the US’s first American-born female police officer (Boyes makes a mistake and overlooks the Irish-born Marie Owens, who was indeed the first female police officer in the US), who was sworn into the LAPD in 1910 and opened the doors for female officers across the country. She talks about contemporary works which feature strong female lead characters. Essentially, she states that it’s irresponsible for the game to marginalize women in the way it does–that it can be historically accurate and still feature more modern values of equality.
Predictably, the comments of the article are a cesspool of “That’s how it was back then and it’s okay that the game is that way!” I don’t begrudge the comments that–comments sections on internet articles are where you go if you want to lose faith in humanity. (I especially love the comment which states “who wrote this article? – a women [sic]”, as if the writer’s gender completely invalidates her entire argument–in fact many of these comments have a creepy “get back in the kitchen, bitch” vibe to them). But I found out about this piece from Ben Paddon’s blog, and while around here we’re not remotely his biggest fans, he really should know better.
“As, unfortunately, was the case in the US circa 1947. Honestly, it’s almost as if these people ask stupid questions without putting in any forethought, nor bothering to do any actual research!” is Paddon’s take on the piece. I find this fairly ironic because the quote he pulls comes from a paragraph a quarter of the way into the article–when the author is just finishing her introduction–just before she begins to discuss her research. Boyes’s article isn’t the most hard-hitting piece of journalism I’ve ever read, certainly, it’s a quick opinion piece, but she isn’t simply navel gazing, and Paddon’s shrill comment implies that he didn’t read the full article.
But more than that is the implication that because a work is set in a particular time period, it must therefore espouse all of the values of that particular time period. That is an extremely incorrect assumption because the writers of LA Noire do not live in 1947–they live today. To take Paddon’s argument to its logical conclusion, if I were to write a novel taking place in Mississippi in 1850, that novel would have to wholeheartedly embrace a pro-slavery agenda. Certainly the pro-slavery viewpoint would be depicted–I can’t deny that the climate existed–but a work which even tacitly accepted the system of slavery would be irresponsible because I view slavery as morally reprehensible. (We all should. Please never visit this site again if you don’t.)
LA Noire not only depicts a world where women are more peripheral, it doesn’t question this status. Women genuinely are relegated to the background. I guess what made this the most obvious to me was the Homicide arc, where every single victim is a woman, and every single death is sexualized. The women are naked, raped, beaten, violently killed. One rape/murder is an aberration, a violent crime which must be brought to justice. I don’t mind a gritty detective story which features that as a case. However, when every single case features the same MO, it gets a little…unnerving. After I examined the third body of a mutilated woman, I began to suspect that the game possibly had some agenda against women. After the fifth, I was sure of it.
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