One Last Mission: Leaving Metal Gear Criticism [BREAK] Here is a transcription of my goodbye to Metal Gear criticism over the series' sexism. I have cleaned up some of the sentence conjunctions for clarity. For context, this originally appeared at the end of a series of videos that explored multiple technical aspects of Metal Gear Solid 3. A playlist for these videos may be found on YouTube at [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvQIGYvUtmXkbApFNLUOOrdT]. The actual spoken work apart from the video walkthroughs can be heard at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEX1vU1-9I8]. Thank you. James Clinton Howell 14 March 2015 [BREAK] I want to give a caveat to what I'm about to discuss. There are plenty of reasons to enjoy the Metal Gear games, and I am not telling anyone not to enjoy them. I am announcing that they are no longer worth my time and attention as a writer and critic, and I hope that tolerance for a well-informed opinion on this topic prevails. As a consideration, I do offer a trigger warning that I will be discussing sexualized violence in Metal Gear. With that said, I think it's always good to close out any long-form project by pointing out its problems or the illusions generated in its development. The main illusion that I'd like to dispel here is that of objectivity. I maintain a focused, "verifiable" tone throughout most of my videos, and that tone can sometimes create an artificial sense of an objective view. In fact, what I've presented during these videos are highly subjective views. There's a selection process in effect for what parts of the game I choose to show and what I choose not to show. These choices reflect values and personality as much as they reflect the game itself. Critics always expose both the work and themselves. I emphasize, for instance, strategies that expose the absurd, the ridiculous, or the more technically designed aspects of MGS3, as I choose to show strategies involving rotten food, the cardboard box, or all-CQC approaches to the more challenging areas. I de-emphasize, to the point of omission, elements that I find tasteless at best, harmful at worst. Examples of these include dragging EVA through the mud during the escort sequence, as well as the use of gravure magazines as guard distractions. Those last points have a particular kind of resonance here. The Metal Gear series' handling of women and female characters is particularly problematic, and they're one of the main reasons why I don't intend to do any future critical work on the Metal Gear series: Ground Zeroes, the Phantom Pain, retrospect, anything. Steph Holliwell has written quite a bit about these problems with the Metal Gear games, and I agree with most of her observations as she highlights that the games almost universally characterize women as an ultimately untrustworthy type of individual. This is problematic because of the word "type," meaning there are general qualities attributed broad-hand to a group of people. The games do this consistently. It might be countered that double intentions and betrayal are stock qualities in the Metal Gear stories regardless of gender, and this is a correct observation. It raises the question of why these qualities are different when associated with women as opposed to with men. In response to that, I look at the range of possible characteristics allowable in men and woomen during the games. Some of the negative attributes of women in the games are attributable to male characters, but the difference is how much those characteristics determine a stereotype. Male characters are allowed to have a range of emotional and personal possibilities. Some men are treacherous and vindictive while other men mean well and lack guile. However, women consistently have a handful of negative qualities or fates dealt to them. Most women in the Metal Gear games are stereotyped as either treacherous and vindictive or as liabilities. The ones who aren't are degraded into traditional roles of sex object, domestic woman, or weeping widow, in particular Fortune on that last one. For some examples there, Mei Ling's role as young genius in MGS1 careens into her outright exploitation in MGS4, whereby her success is no longer attributed to her professional value but to her cozying up to a lecherous admiral. She's also consistently the subject of ass camera shots, which take away any dignity she had. Meryl's straight-faced personal struggles are resolved with a marriage. Rose's professional background as a military analyst disappears as she assumes her role as a mother to her son, and, because of her new role as a counselor on the Codec, as a mother to the player indirectly. And you can shake the DualShock3 controller to make her breasts bounce while she's talking to you about PTSD -- clearly not a character meant to be taken seriously. And these are the supporting characters held in positive regard. The games tend to funnel women toward these pigeonholes. These pigeonholes draw from long-attested traditions of exploitative, unfair, and unimaginative stereotypes of women. Men receive humiliation in the Metal Gear games as well, but, placing these things in a broader social context, one thing happening to a man is simply not the same thing when it happens to a woman. The same actions mean different things in different contexts. I think of my falling out with the series like this: Let's say you meet someone, and you get along with that person great. Then they say something that seems kind of awful, but it doesn't match your overall positive impression of their personality. You're willing to overlook it for the time being, chalk it up to miscommunication, whatever. Over the years, this cool person continues to blurt out awful statements on the same topic. Your ability to justify those offensive views as needing more context diminishes. You've got tons of context, and, in context, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that some part of this person's character is intolerably awful. It's not a matter of approaching them in bad faith. It's a matter of actually knowing them and having to make a decision about whether you can still respect them. To be sure, the sexism has always been there. The question for me is how to interpret that. Metal Gear Solid 1 self-consciously modeled itself as an action movie pastiche. While those movies are male power fantasies open to critique, I don't find the sexism there remarkable given that context. MGS2, my favorite, built itself on MGS1, so it built itself on genre pastiche as a natural consequence. It also used sexism and sexualized behaviors to reflect badly on the player and Raiden. Support characters actually got mad at Raiden when he indulged compulsions to injure or degrade women, including his trespassing on women's restrooms, hitting Emma, peeping on women prisoners, and so on. Arguments exist that these instances of sexism are not ironic. I find those arguments compelling and, paradoxically, also agree that they are correct ways to understand sexism in that game. They raise the question of "Why is it even in there in the first place," and could those ends have been achieved through other means. Speaking generally, being able to hold conflicting ideas in your head at the same time about the same thing is a pretty good place to end up. You know: developing abstract thought, coming into possession of nuance, things like that. Given that I find both views well-argued, I find the sexism in MGS2 sufficiently ambiguous to allow its place in the game. So, understanding that sexism has always been there, and accepting that the responsible work lies in interpreting that element, we come to MGS3. While it seems like it would merit the same genre consideration as MGS1, MGS3 shows its essential sexism when Snake escorts EVA. If you give her enough of the food she likes, she'll take off her clothes. You can punch her out and drag her through the mud while listening to her mutter about sexual fantasies. You can even check out her medical history and see evidence of anal sexual abuse with Volgin. These are unique to MGS3, apart from any action genre conventions. They reward the player for exploring and interacting with the game. The actually use videogame interactivity to communicate sexist treatment of EVA directly to the audience, without narrative mediation, for the express purposes of titillation and humor. MGS4 through Ground Zeroes confirms the pattern established by this unambiguous, exploitative sexism. Once this pattern is recognized and accepted, it grows backward and diminishes the ambiguity of the meaning of sexism in prior games. MGS4 took on grotesque proportions. It magnified everything that was essentially Metal Gear and illustrated the overwhelming bloat accrued by canon over the years. Even granting MGS4's sexism a context where Metal Gear elements are highly exaggerated, the game implicitly acknowledges that the series has had an exploitative attitude toward women the whole time. When you turn up the volume, what you hear was actually there in the first place. If a game that hyper-defines the core qualities of its series includes sticking a naked woman on all fours and then shooting her in the face, you have had some housekeeping problems for a long time. The B&B Unit are perhaps the most outlandish example of sexism directed toward the player with little to no mediation, and MGS4 tends to punish competent women like EVA and Naomi with death or give women safe, pigeonhole rewards such as a marriage or a family, like with Meryl and with Rose. Moving forward, Peace Walker had its "verification view" gimmick whereby you could peep under Paz's clothes to check out her underwear in order to "confirm that she was telling the truth" about being tortured. This amounts to an anonymous, voyeuristic stripdown of a torture victim, which, strangely enough, did not strike anyone as implied complicity in her humiliation. And Peace Walker features virtual statutory rape with the date sequence on the beach with Big Boss. Paz has aged past her teenage years on paper, which allows the game to get away with the visual molestation of a teenager. This is fairly common in anime. It's a sex scene equivalent of a five year old sticking a finger in your face and taunting, "I'm not touching you." It uses a technical definition to gratify an exploitative desire, and, unless you accept that technical distinction, which is a cheap Get Out of Jail Free card, this is still sexism in one of its worst manifestations in the series to date. And Ground Zeroes combines narrative and direct portrayals of sexism into a single horror that guarantees that I will never critically touch that game or anything after it with a million foot pole. Skullface tortures Paz and Chico by forcing Chico to rape Paz, and we get the full account on cassette tape. So we have sexism with a narrative context, using rape-torture of a woman to elicit sympathy in the audience. Incredibly, Paz's rape is not even used to characterize her but, instead, used to characterize Skullface. Because we experience these recordings from a distance, often through the menu screen at the start of the game, we also get the experience of an anonymous voyeur. At this point, we have moved well beyond the realm of pastiche. Women's humiliation is no longer merely peep-show fodder; it is now an integral part of the game, and it indicates that women continue to be diminished and disposed of to advance the story of men's relationships with other men. This is Metal Gear's essential sexism. I cannot in good conscience critically validate work that requires the humiliation of and destruction of women as part of its very function. This requires no assumption of authorial intent, which I have never cared about and which I continue not to care about. It compromises your ability to think critically. The evidence is in the games themselves, and that's all you need. I am still able to enjoy these games on my terms, which have been illustrated in detail over the course of these videos, and I will continue to do so. I prioritize the ethical representation of women in media, and I also prioritize nuanced examination of media for context and meaning. These priorities matter to me with enough force to require a moral decision, which is all the justification needed to remove oneself critically. Simply put, I will not validate something as overwhelmingly sexist as Metal Gear. I appreciate your attention, and I thank you for watching these videos. [BREAK] Here is the URL for the collection of evidence of sexism in Metal Gear, mentioned above, written by Steph Holiwell: [http://ettugamer.com/2014/07/14/metal-gear-solid-1998/] I do not agree with all of the author's conclusions, and my sharing this should not be taken as total agreement, but I support her goal to unpack sexism in the Metal Gear games.