(No) Power to the Pussy: We’re Not Just Dicks in Drag…Or Are We?

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about female characters and when I choose to play them and when I don’t and for some reason bell hooks’ book, Outlaw Culture, has really been haunting me. The whole book is pretty amazing and was written during the period when I, as a grad student, loved everything she wrote and had her on my Amazon auto-buy list. In the first chapter of the book, aptly titled”Power to the Pussy: We Don’t Wanna Be Dicks in Drag”, hooks laments the loss of the radical transgressive feminism that she saw reflected in the early persona of Madonna as she transforms into the 30 something year old sex kitten playing up to the fantasies of the patriarchy.

And that is kind of where I am with the female characters that I have been playing in games lately. When a game gives me character creation to work with I generally try to make a character that resembles me as closely as possible (unless I’m playing with my daughter and then we usually make a character that looks like her and that’s a hell of a lot easier). Sometimes I have to make my character male in order to get away from short skirts or generally overly feminine persona, but with the last two characters that I have created in games have been female despite being seriously limited and have ultimately left me lamenting some things myself.

Nintendo 3DS games have historically been pretty limited for me. I often find myself choosing a male character in games like Pokemon and Animal Crossing just so that I can wear pants (or not be accused of crossing dressing when I choose to wear closes that I would normally wear as in the last Animal Crossing game) and not find myself outfitted in jaunty flowered hats and kawaii little skirts. And I found myself wishing that I had again chosen the male character in Yo-Kai Watch (even the girls actually got to wear shorts) just so that I could have actually gotten a watch and not a fancy piece of neck jewelry. And heaven help you if you also want to be a person of color in these games. You could be ambiguously brown in the last Pokemon games (still with straight hair) and you could be brown in the last Animal Crossing game as long as you spent a significant amount of time standing outside on the beach every day to preserve your beautiful tan (something that they happily fixed in Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer which is more of a glorified dress up game than a full Animal Crossing release).

And with the release of Fire Emblem Fates this month I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to be able to make a character that looked anything like me. No skin color options and no variations in body type. Just male or female. And let me tell you, after seeing my sister, Camilla, I was real hesitant to choose the female option at all. She was a kittenish vixen (complete with ears) with gravity defying huge breasts that were strategically covered by strips of fabric. Definitely not the character that I wanted to run around as, but I guess that’s what women with evil despots as fathers look like in this universe (mind you this is my first Fire Emblems game).

After taking the plunge and choosing a female avatar I did find that I was dressed in full armor but my body customization options were limited to four points on a male/female, short/tall access and for hair I had a whooping nine choices on an axes labeled stylish/simple, wild/slick. You could also choose hair color, facial age (that topped out at looking like a twenty-something which is practically ancient with most of these kinds of game coming out of Japan), voice, and any identifying facial marks). One of the redeeming qualities (for me) was the fact that the breasts on all of the body types were so small that the avatar always appeared a little androgynous (especially since I chose short, spiky hair).

As I started to play the game I quickly saw my faith in my fully clothed, androgynous, kick ass woman warrior wane. And this wasn’t so much because of anything she said or did initially, but because of the way that people (specifically the female characters) interacted with her. Camilla, my sister, flirted with me in a most inappropriate way, the castle’s female staff did as well, the only woman around who didn’t was my little sister who more followed me around with a puppy dog eyed look of adoration on her face. But I did note that I did run into one guy who flirted with me a couple of hours in but it was done slyly and he quickly backpedaled on his affections when questioned on it as if it was meant to be a conversation between two men. And that’s when it occurred to me. This game was not lesbian RPG lover’s fantasy (as if Nintendo would ever do anything so un-“family friendly”).

I wasn’t really the adorable androgynous character that I had been envisioning for the first couple of hours of gameplay. I was more, simply (nay sadly) not meant to be a female character at all. When I began my character I looked at the default name that was given for the default male character (Corrin) and decided to be funny and riff off of it for my own name and named my character Corrine. In feminizing the default character I just added an “e”. That “e” was my drag. It was (mostly) the thing that made my character female. That thing that made her different from her male counterpart. She was called sister and princess and feminine pronouns were used, but that really felt like the extent of it. There was nothing else that made me feel as if there was any difference between the male Corrin and my female Corrine. It was at that moment that I lost any investment in the character as a little bit of me. I no longer felt the desire (or the ability) to make decisions as Corrine, because Corrine herself wasn’t really Corrine. She was more simply Corrin(e).

When hooks talked about the feminism of Madonna in Outlaw Culture she wrote

She was the embodiment of that radical risk-taking part of my/our female self that had to be repressed daily for us to make it in the institutionalized world of the mainstream.

And that was just what happened to Corrin(e) for a fleeting moment she was that radical part of myself who was to be a knight, a warrior, a clothed champion (and apparently a lover of the ladies), but in an instant it was revealed that (s)he is rather a digital manifestation of the mainstream whose identity (or lack thereof) had been insufficiently repressed to make her even appear to be female in any meaningful way outside of her physical appearance. She was simply a re-skinned version of the default male character (think Fem Shep). And he was the one who was to be the knight, the warrior, and the lover of the ladies. But Corrin(e)? She’s just another dick in drag.