PadMasher takes on Tropes versus Women in Video Games (Damsel in Distress: Part 1)

Well, apparently for almost a whole a year now, one of the "big issues" in the gaming community has been sexism. No really, fuck the fact that the whole industry might be tanking. No, you see sexism is the real issue here and we can all thank Anita Sarkeesian, also known as Feminist Frequency for helping us realize this. Or rather we could, if she bothered to really go into depth about why anyone should give a flying fuck about fictional females being "dis-empowered".

Sexism is one of those things that's hard to understand mainly due to how opinionated it is. Yes, to those of you who think that sexism itself exists in a vacuum, that simply isn't the case. What is sexism to some isn't sexism to others. This leads us to the topic of Anita's first Tropes Vs Women in video games lecture, because that's what it fucking was, and my thoughts on this little fiasco.

Now, I'm just going to assume that everyone watching this video already knows who she is so I'm not gonna waste time explaining it. Just google "Feminist Frequency" to get up to speed. What I'm going to focus on is the multiple perspectives of which the Damsel in Distress trope that Anita claims is harmful to women can be viewed as and ultimately hope to actually encourage people to think about the tropes meaning and usage. You know, as opposed to just pointing out a trope everyone already knew was overused and making fairly weak accusations that are based on Jean Grey levels of telepathy.

Let's start off with the first issue I have with her video. Dinosaur Planet.

I probably shouldn't even bother mentioning that the other playable character, Saber, is male and that StarFox basically replaces Saber as he is no longer in the game when it becomes StarFox Adventures. What I'm curious to know is why Anita conveniently chose to edit Krystal's introduction to General Scales as there is something truly thought provoking when you consider what that full scene was like.

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"My name is Krystal and I'm here for the princess?" What princess is she talking about? Well, if you bother to look at the first hour of gameplay for Dinosaur Planet, available for FREE, not for $6,000, on YouTube, the princess being referred to is Princess Kite, or something like that. Her exact name isn't important. What's important is that the very same game with this "strong and capable" female lead literally starts off using the same Damsel in Distress trope. No really, this shit happens within the first 5 minutes of the damn game. My question is, "Is the trope still offensive?"

Think about it. We have a female character being reduced to an "object", as Anita would put it, and the only real difference is that a woman is charged with saving her. Of course, most of you familiar with Anita's video know that her beef isn't with Dinosaur Planet, it's with StarFox Adventures.

Well for starters, this same opening scene is in Adventures as well, the only differences being that there is no longer this "Wizard" involved with the plot and the princess is replaced with a distress signal. This distress signal turns out to be coming from a bunch of dying dinosaurs so basically they need saving too. The only major difference in the two scenes is that General Scales is originally struck down with lightning which allows Krystal to take control of the ship while in Adventures, Krystal is thrown overboard, but escapes, proceeding to free the Krazoa Spirits.

Speaking of which, the way Anita talks about Adventures, you'd think that Krystal wasn't playable at the start of the game when she, in fact, is. Now, it is worth noting that Krystal fails after releasing the first Krazoa Spirit and is then trapped in crystal by Andross in order to use her to resurrect himself. This is when the game switches to StarFox who replaces both Krystal and the scrapped character, Saber as the only playable protagonist. In Dinosaur Planet, it can be assumed that Krystal takes a larger role as she not only fights Galdon, but also has to take the Test Of Fear, all of these being things that StarFox does in Adventures instead of Krystal.

The funny thing here though, is that this highlights an issue with Anita's argument. Originally, Krystal was tasked with saving a princess herself and even frees some captives in the prison break out scene, which now features Fox instead. If "dis-empowerment" is a form of objectification, what does this make Princess Kite and all the other people Krystal was expected to help? Hell, even the Krystal in Adventures was answering a distress call and once saved by Fox, she goes right back to shooting Andross with her staff. With Krystal basically doing everything Fox ended up doing in Dinosaur Planet, there is no wondering as to why Anita chose Krystal to open her video with. She was indeed "strong and capable" as she was basically the same kind of character that Saber would have been. In a sense, she was exactly that in StarFox Adventures, or rather she would of been if Andross didn't stop her at the beginning of her own adventure.

As many things that can be debated over the unfinished Dinosaur Planet, one thing that Anita makes sure that everyone recognizes is Krystal's new sexualized look in StarFox Adventures.

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For the record, the wikia pages for Krystal refer to her as a "vixen" so the sexualization can't really be argued against. The point that Anita is apparently trying to make is that now that Krystal is both helpless and sexualized, she has essentially become an "object" of desire. A prize to be won. Nothing more than a mere trophy if you will. Of course, this is the only incentive Fox would need to save someone like Krystal, right? He sees a beautiful woman encased in a crystal prison and proceeds to set her free, probably because he just wanted to fuck her, right?

See, this implication that the player's incentive is purely sexual is kinda....well...weird. I'd say it's reverse sexism, but really, it just comes off as paranoid. To be fair to Anita, she never outright says that the player themselves, as in the gamers, see the helpless damsel as a prize, but if we didn't see them as a prize, then why even mention this? Who exactly sees women in danger as objects? The characters in the games risking their lives to save them? Somehow, I doubt that's the case.

Keep in mind that in StarFox Adventures, Fox McCloud fights armies of SharpClaws, gets eaten alive by Galdon, and endures various trials in order to retrieve the rest of the Krazoa Spirits, actions that ultimately save Dinosaur Planet from both General Scales and Andross, yet I'm expected to believe that all of this is supposedly happening because the player wants to "win" Krystal. It's shit like this that helps to push negative thoughts on chivalry. I can understand not wanting to be treated like a child, but something is fucking wrong when the sheer act of helping women specifically who just happen to not be able to help themselves is seen as offensive.

Let's go deeper into why this idea is so ridiculous, but first, let's address the one relevant thing Anita brings up in ramblings about french and the origin of the word "damsel", as if that actually supports her point. Guess what? It really doesn't.

Anyway, when Anita starts talking about medieval folklore, one thing she states sticks out like a herniated disc. "The saving of a defenseless woman was often portrayed as....insert meaningless french....or reason for existence in romance tales and poems of the era." So basically, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the only "reason for existence" is to apparently save pretty women? It's kinda funny how the whole point of these "knight errands" was to prove one's virtue and dignity and rescuing women, you know as opposed to beating them to death, was considered the best way to do this.

You know, I was under the impression that protecting women was a good thing, but it's not like Anita doesn't hint as to way this idea is somehow "harmful" as she does argue that this chivalrous trope encourages "toxic, patronizing, and paternalistic attitudes towards women". Out of all the words Anita uses to describe the horrible side-effects of this trope, the ones that stick out the most are "patronizing" and "paternalistic". Yeah, "toxic" is bad too I guess, but that word doesn't mean shit unless you can explain why it should be applied. "Patronizing" and "paternalistic", however have some pretty fucking heavy implications to them.

Basically, she thinks the trope is bad because it undermines women's capabilities. In other words, the women in question have no more control over their own safety as a child. Seriously, why use the word "patronizing" and then follow it up with "paternalistic" unless we're talking about fucking babies?

I would prefer to make an entirely separate video regarding my views on feminist theory and feminists themselves so I'll make this brief, but while I'm on the topic, I want to point something out here. We all know about the dreaded patriarchy that, despite female leaders not being anything new, apparently robbed women of any kind of agency or influence in most countries. In other words, women were reduced to children and treated as such.

I think this correlation between women and children and the social construct that both groups need protection, hence phrases like "Women and children first" that lump the two together, gets ignored far too often. I say this because if most of women's oppression can basically be compared to the treatment of children, you could argue that children are naturally oppressed by default which means everyone has been oppressed at least once in their lives.

I'll elaborate on what that means in another video. For now, I wanna focus on Anita's assertion that wanting to protect women is somehow demeaning to them and objectifies them in a supposedly sexual way at the same time. Yes, before anyone mentions it, I'm well aware of BDSM. The point here is that if a male hero goes out of his way to save a woman in need of help, he is somehow objectifying her by not letting her save herself, something that, let's be brutally honest here, women aren't really expected to do in real life.

I'm still fairly new to all this "rape culture" shit, but one video of a woman named Chesca recalling her rape experience reinforces what I'm apparently expected to believe is a "sexist" stereotype.

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Okay, so let me get this straight. If I'm at a bar and I see some guys harassing a woman, guys who might possibly rape her, I should do the right thing and intervene, right? It's only fair to note that the woman in the video does specify that women can help fight against rape simply by looking out for each other. For the record, she also acknowledges that men can be raped as well.

However, and maybe it's the tone of the video that is throwing me off here, but the actual action of confronting the assailant and taking the woman to safety isn't really what women are expected to do. She's asking men to do that part. Not only that, but the "objectified" woman in this scenario is incapable of saving herself, due to drunkenness in this particular case, which I guess means she is being "dis-empowered".

It's also worth pointing out that the assailant in her examples is assumed to be male while the victim is assumed to be female. This may sound like a sexist stereotype aimed at men and I'd argue that this heavy implication that women can never rape is ignored a little too often, but the facts do support this assertion.

I'm not going to bore you with the statistics so I'll just leave the info in the video description, but women apparently get raped more often then men do. If you want to get technical, children and young adults get raped more than any other demographic.

Of course, when looking at the stats, it can be assumed that if you are ever raped, your assailant is most likely male on top of that. Hence, the whole "Teach men not to rape!" shit because women are somehow incapable being rapists. It's also worth noting that the definition of rape had to be revised to even include men so technically, men who were victims of rape weren't even considered to be rape victims, but that's besides the point.

What does rape have to do with damsels in distress? Well, here's the thing. If you actually consider the context of the most of the examples Anita uses in her argument, you can basically view most of the stories as being of a man protecting a woman from either death or rape.

For example, Popeye's Bluto is often shown to be attacking Olive Oil with undoubtedly sexual intentions.

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Folks, let's be real here. Bluto was a fucking sex offender. What he was doing to Olive Oil in practically every Popeye episode could be considered sexual assault without the slightest hint of sarcasm. For Popeye himself to bother stepping in to protect Olive from Bluto is essentially encouraging two ideas, that women can't defend themselves and that men should stand up for them because of this. Hence, the constant encouragement for men to "man up" and act as guardians of "their women". Cause you know, women are property. No man ever protects their girlfriends and wives out of love, obviously. So when I say things like "my Mother", or "my Sister", I'm talking about my property, of course.

Sarcasm aside, this Damsel in Distress trope can also be looked at as the "White-Knight" trope. For every damsel in distress, there's some chivalrous hero who apparently made the "objectifying" choice to protect the people he cares about as opposed to letting them solve their own problems.

Going back to the rape example for a second, the woman in that clip was encouraging men to step up and protect women. According to her, there is no reason for men not to do this, as opposed to Anita's argument that doing so, at least in fiction, is some form of "objectification". So with that in mind, why can't the women protect themselves? You know, since I'd be "objectifying" them if I bothered to not be a total asshole and actually intervene when witnessing sexual assault.

This isn't rare mind you. There was that Cross Sexual Assault shit with SuperYan who was "sexually assaulted" or rather sniffed, because that's all that actually happened, by her coach Aris. The response was of course to point out how much of a douche Aris was, something that shouldn't be surprising considering the state of the FGC, and to basically rush in on horseback in shining armor to defend her. The actual video itself, available here on YouTube and linked in the description, doesn't show SuperYan actually standing up for herself. This is because she didn't by the way.

Then there's the constant reminders of how women get treated online, despite the fact that being male doesn't protect you from death and rape threats by any means, through articles on gaming websites. One of the most notable being about "ganking" from some random YouTube user named ShrineNI. Cause you know, Kotaku totally isn't pushing sexist content themselves.

The message radiating from these types of incidents have been rather consistent in relaying two particular themes.

1. That women get harassed by men, never the other way around, and men in particular need to work towards making the gaming community, or any community for that matter, safe for them.

And 2. That anybody encouraging women to simply tough out their own shit is somehow "missing the point" or promoting misogyny because apparently expecting women who happen to be grown ass adults to be capable of protecting themselves is wrong.

Now, I just want to clarify that I am in no way condoning the sexual harassment and overall vile treatment of the women in these examples nor I am saying that things like rape and sexual assault shouldn't be taken seriously. They should.

However, considering that the basis of Anita's argument about the Damsel in Distress trope is that it displays women as being incapable of solving their own problems, it would be nice if there wasn't a real life deviation of feminism manifesting itself in the form of "slut-walks" and other such movements that is basically determined to send the message that women shouldn't have to defend themselves because no one should ever attack them.

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Ideally, that would make perfect sense, except the only people who need to hear that don't care who they end up hurting and when those sex offenders rear their ugly heads, it would be nice to know that the victim, most likely a woman because sexual assault never happens to men, at least knows some basic form of self-defense.

And yet, we keep coming up with excuses for why women shouldn't have to fix anything themselves, boiling down to Anita's video itself. To paraphrase the quote from the game Vigilante, "The Game Developers are producing sexist video games....Take the power into your own hands!".

But of course, that would involve doing something productive and coming up with your own storyboards and we can't have that. No, Anita has a problem with video games and she wants the presumably male developers to fix this problem for her. If she didn't, she would of used the $160,000 to give us a new video game heroine as opposed to giving a lecture about the supposed lack of such.

This is the truly horrible irony behind the whole debacle when you take the time to look at how this shit started and some of the responses from people essentially trying to shield Anita from online abuse that everyone, well everyone with a penis at least, is expected to just grin and bare.

You see, Anita herself basically plays the role of the damsel that needs saving from Internet trolls and harassment. Instead of actually addressing any of the trolls directly or just ignoring them, which is what she usually does to her credit, she publicized the verbal abuse in order to paint a picture that the gaming community itself was sexist as opposed to simply outing the trolls themselves.

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See, here's my beef with this particular standpoint. To argue that there is sexism in the gaming community that's needs to be addressed isn't a problem. Hell, it's the only real reason why hash-tags like #1ReasonWhy have the potential to help the community. If there is sexism in gaming, we need to point it out and address it for what it is so the "backwards sexist attitudes" that are apparently still rampant at the very least don't spill into our favorite hobby.

However, the context of Anita's argument regarding sexism in gaming and the apparent need for someone to change the content within the games themselves, as if they're somehow to blame for the misogyny shown in the players, insinuates that gaming itself is currently sexist. To put it bluntly, Anita is simply Jack Thompson with a vagina.

Hence, the lack of any peer reviewed studies with consistent results that prove that games turn people, mainly boys, into girl-hating maniacs. Not that I'm surprised because this is same lack of factual backing seen when Jack and the rest of the Super Censorship Squadron couldn't actually explain how video games made children more violent.

Before anyone points that such studies do, in fact, exist, may I remind you that none of those studies actually stand up to scrutiny. Nor do they actually demonstrate with any sense of objectivity how sex and violence in media are responsible for the behavior of children more so than parenting or life experiences. In other words, it's like saying that video games were responsible for Sandy Hook because video games promote gun violence. Oh wait, people are actually trying to say that.

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Anyway, unlike Jack Thompson, Anita has the glorious feminist glow to help aid her on her quest to impose her own disdain onto gaming culture. What I mean by "feminist glow" is that since Anita is a feminist and a woman on top of that, the chivalrous heroes of the Internet will defend her on the basis that this is the only real reason anyone would have for attacking her. Fuck how poorly conceived her actual arguments are.

One of the worst examples of this comes from a man I quite honestly have a lot of respect for, despite the fact that I tend to disagree with a lot of the things he says.

Anyone familiar with Bob Chipman, A.K.A MovieBob, may be familiar with his chivalrous White-Knighting of Anita in response to all the hateful forum comments regarding her first video. Which comments he's actually talking about is, of course, never specified, but it sure as fuck wasn't from his own blog because I fucking frequent it. I can assure you, he couldn't have been talking about us.

Anyway, Bob's response is a mess of reactionary garbage for two main reasons. For starters, he constantly talks down to trolls who couldn't possibly be watching his video and ultimately blows the reaction to Anita's videos out of proportion without pointing out at least a few examples, all while talking down to the actual audience.

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Lastly, Bob never actually addresses the video itself, though he insist that it's "academic" and "well-researched". Ironically enough, even Bob himself basically admits that the video isn't about shit and that's the problem.

If you're gonna go out of your way to conjure up $6,000 to make videos about sexism in video games and come out with 25 times the amount you fucking asked for, it would be nice if the "college-level" analysis not only had some kind of actual references and explanations behind how the games impact players, but was actually a fucking analysis in itself.

The actual trope itself is never really explored in Anita's video. That's saying a lot because it's not like there isn't anything there worth looking into.

For example, when Anita mentions Princess Zelda, a character that I'm sure most actual gamers can agree is far from being represented as "incapable", there is a subtle distinction between what "capable" and "incapable" apparently mean within the context of the Zelda game, Ocarina of Time.

It should be noted that this is the closest thing to actually having a point Anita presents in her video and I'm fairly positive this was done by accident because she never fully addresses it.

You see, Zelda is trying to hide from Ganon so she isn't used against Hyrule by him since she posses the Tri-Force of Wisdom. In order to do this, Zelda takes the form of a Sheikah boy named...well Sheik.

For those of us actually familiar with gaming history, we already know about the controversy revolving around whether Sheik is male or female. The reason I bothered to bring this up is because Anita claims that Zelda is at her best when in the form of either Sheik or Tetra.

What this means is that in order for Zelda to be considered a "strong female character" in Anita's eyes, she apparently needs to fulfill yet another "offensive" trope, the "Man with Boobs". Not only is this hilariously ass-backwards, this highlights an issue with gender expectations that we have here in the West and many parts of the world.

Apparently, Zelda returning to her more traditionally feminine form is a sign of weakness because if it wasn't, there would be little reason for her to be suddenly kidnapped or suddenly need protection.

At least, this is what Anita implies by bothering to highlight these incidents in Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker because revealing her whereabouts to Ganon couldn't possibly have anything to do with her being captured because it's not like that's why she was hiding in the first fucking place.

The "problem", so to speak, here is that Zelda's alter-egos are all oddly masculine, especially Sheik who is literally referred to as "young man" in the game. When Sheik turns back into the Zelda and is captured by Ganon, it is literally a transformation from masculine to feminine.

To say that Sheik is shown to be "strong and capable" may mean very little considering that the game may in fact be encouraging the "offensive stereotype" that in order for a woman to be even remotely useful, she needs to emulate stereotypically male behavior.

Considering the game's context, I get why Zelda has to basically dress in drag to escape Ganon, but the idea that femininity is somehow a synonym for weakness doesn't make much sense to me. Hence the UK Ocarina of Time ad that basically asserts this very way of thinking.

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This brings us to a real world example of how this idea is actually imposed on society, even today. I know it's apparently evil of me to dare to mention this on the web nowadays for, frankly, ridiculous reasons, but the fact of the matter is that things like the drafting process enacted by the military is a perfect example of how masculinity is prized over femininity.

Whether or not you want to accept it, only men get drafted in pretty much any society I can think of. This is because things like war along with many other physical tasks are considered things that men have to take care of because women are apparently incapable of doing it, thanks to gender stereotypes.

This is why women had to demand to be allowed to volunteer to join the army which initially didn't allow women. It also didn't allow homosexuals either and this idea of masculinity equaling power probably had a lot to do with that. Well, that and good old fashioned homophobia.

The funny thing about drafting is that it completely ignores whether or not the man being drafted wants to fight because it honestly doesn't matter. It is considered against the law to decline the draft. In short, it forces men to fight and die, regardless of whether or not they want to do so. It's not that women have never engaged in combat in the past, but fighting in wars was never considered one of women's civic duties.

What does this have to do with video games? Well, here's the thing. Anita is complaining about the lack of heroines in a world where men are the ones tasked with all the fighting. None of the knight errands Anita refers to in her video were ever expected to be enacted by women onto men.

This is most likely why, in games where killing monsters and fighting off potential rapists were the main goal of the game, that most video game heroes are designed as males. The inconvenient truth, no matter how "offensive", is that men are generally stronger than women are and this isn't a "socially constructed myth" by any means.

Again, I'll leave the details in the description, but men are typically stronger than women on average and this embodies itself in the form of sports segregation; something we wouldn't need if men and women could truly compete in physical sports on the same level. To top it off, comparisons between men sports records and women sports records show a significant difference in physical performance.

Let me put it this way. If the idea that women are weaker than men is a "socially constructed myth", why not have men and women compete against each other in sports? Why give women their own basketball league when they can just join the original NBA? The statistics would suggest that the reason, no matter how controversial, is that they really can't be expected to compete. If it was up to me, it wouldn't be like that, but gender inequality sure as fuck wasn't my fault.

So when you have games designed around fighting monsters and basically overcoming physical tasks, the cold hard truth is that it makes more sense to have a male protagonist because not only were these actions expected of men in real life, but it also makes more sense for men to do these things as they are more biologically designed to do so.

What Anita doesn't seem to recognize, despite her touching on this subject in her previous videos, is that the cultural views on femininity versus masculinity is what encourages the usage of this trope in the first place which is why such things as a female protagonist for a Gears of War game are considered "hard to justify".

Considering the fact that Sheik is simply a gender-bender of Zelda, one needs to ask themselves why femininity is automatically weak or rather, why should women, fictional or not, have to give up their femininity in order to be considered "strong and capable"?

I hardly believe that every single woman serving in the military or naval forces today is a dyke or a lesbian. Just like I highly doubt that every man in these services is ultra-masculine or even straight for that matter. This is actually kind of funny considering that, in order to portray Peach and Zelda as capable heroines, she literally shows a picture of the two damsels Photoshopped into looking like Mario and Link.

Considering the fictional settings of most games and the supernatural elements in them, why should either woman be forced to basically emulate masculinity to be "strong and capable"? Especially, since the "Man with Boobs" trope is somehow offensive as well, which is also hilarious because it enforces the idea that men and women have to act certain ways. As if to say a man "acting like a woman" isn't really a man and vice-versa.

Ironically enough, this proposed thought process imposes the same "negative" stereotyping that men often have in video games in the form of ultra-masculine meat-heads devoid of any real humanity or emotion.

Yeah, I know that it's against the rules to talk about stereotypes regarding men, but in all seriousness, characters like Marcus Fenix and Kratos kill hundreds of usually male, though occasionally female, NPCs while very rarely showing any empathy or even acknowledging the mass murders they commit throughout the game.

Hell, the recent God of War: Ascension was easily the first time Kratos showed a genuine emotion that wasn't pure anger over the loss of his wife and child. The women in his "refrigerator" so to speak.

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Basically, the Photo-shopped picture not only implies that Peach and Zelda should be more like Mario and Link, but it also insinuates that they should be less like themselves. In other words, less feminine. Again, Anita is basically trying to fix one "negative" trope by deploying another "negative" trope at it, the "Man With Boobs".

This is quite funny as Anita is no stranger to this deeply ingrained societal belief that one must be masculine in order to be considered strong. Many of her older videos point out this societal construct and though she has never really explained why it's bad beyond encouraging these "patronizing" and "paternal" views of women mentioned in the video and apparently playing a part in discouraging men from showing emotion while telling them to solve problems with violence, the point is that Anita's attempt to deconstruct video games really just ends up with her regurgitating the same old shit she has been saying for over 3 years now.

Watch her "True Grit" and "LEGO Friends" videos and you'll see what I'm talking about. If you watch those videos, the LEGO one in particular, it becomes fairly apparent right off the bat what her problem with Princess Peach essentially is. While characters like Kratos and Marcus Fenix represent the ultra-masculine stereotype, Princess Peach easily embodies the ultra-feminine stereotype.

Hence, the point she eludes to regarding Super Princess Peach, the game starring Peach as the main protagonist who is tasked with saving Mario. Using Anita's logic, this is a form of "objectification" because Mario is being acted upon instead of Peach simply letting Mario reclaim his own freedom. See how the genders of the damsel and the hero are reversed in this game? Is it still "sexist"?

Anyway, she claims that she'll go into further detail about Peach's game in Part 2 to this trope, but we all know what she's going to say. In Super Princess Peach, Peach's main ability is her emotions. In other words, she uses the powers of PMS to save Mario. This, of course, depicts women as fragile and overly emotional which is somehow "offensive" because Peach being an overly emotional girly-girl must mean that every woman in the Mushroom Kingdom is like that.

Well, expect for Princess Daisy from the neighboring kingdom, Sarasaland, who I'm sure doesn't count simply because she isn't in any of the main series games and the one game she did appear in, Super Mario Land for the GameBoy, she gets kidnapped by an alien named Tatanga just like Peach is kidnapped by Bowser.  Oh, and props to Anita for pretty much excluding all the Mario spin-off games in which both Peach and Daisy are shown to be competent participants that are more than capable of competing with all the boys in racing, sports, and party games.

Surely, since all but one Super Mario game that originally had two female characters in it had Peach get kidnapped, this means that Shigeru Miyamoto must have belittling views of women; a point that the tone of her video heavily implies though, she never outright calls Miyamoto sexist.

Of course, this makes little sense as to why such an apparently backwards thinking person like Miyamoto, a god amongst game designers, would crank out a character like Princess Daisy. Think about it. She doesn't really wear make up as opposed to Peach who wears blatantly obvious lipstick, she has rather tomboyish demeanor as shown in most of her concept art past Super Mario Land, and she's only been kidnapped once so she apparently isn't "objectified" as often as Peach.

In my honest opinion, Daisy is an example of a more ideal princess character due to the fact that she possesses many feminine traits without being a complete exaggeration of them like Peach tends to be. What relevance does Daisy have you ask? Well, that's just it. Anita acts as if Princess Daisy, along with all the spin-off games that include Peach and sometimes Daisy as playable characters, are simply not worth discussing. This is most likely do to the fact that those games don't fit into her narrative.

What's even more damaging to her argument is that these spin-off games, many of which like Super Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG have Peach in a much more active role, outnumber the main series tremendously. How much so? Well, there's 14 games in the main series while there are 7 Mario Kart games, 9 Mario Party games, countless sports games, you get the idea.

Also, since Wario is technically part of the Mario universe, you could argue that the WarioWare games featuring Mona and Ashley also count as counter examples to Anita's assertions about the Mario series. Basically, she is complaining about Peach not being an active member of the games' escapades which would have made more sense had these spin-off titles never existed. It's also worth noting that in Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario is tasked with saving 7 Mushroom Kings along with saving Princess Peach. Are the Kings being "objectified" the same way Peach supposedly is?

You see, this is why Anita's ball analogy makes absolutely no sense.

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Not only does she insinuate that the male protagonist and male antagonist have the same allegedly sexual incentives, but it also assumes that the player views the damsels as "stolen property" as opposed to people who need saving. So I guess the 7 Kings from Super Mario 3 were just Mario's "stolen property" and his objective was to save them so they could later suck his dick afterwards, right?

Anita goes out of her way to use clips from games that apparently fit this narrative without even touching the context of any of the games in question. To her credit, most of them can technically fit into the rape or death scenario I mentioned earlier, though I find it hilarious that Kid Icarus is shown in her montage considering that the main villain, Medusa, is female. So I guess Medusa wants to claim ownership over Palutena because she wants to scissor the shit out of her?

See, this "game of patriarchy" she's rambling on about can only really be played amongst two men as this is the very framing she gives this "grand game". If a female "player", so to speak, like Medusa wants to join in on the "game of patriarchy", is the game still an "offensive" tale about men trying to claim ownership of a woman or does the context magically change?

Let's test Anita's analogy by using a "game of matriarchy" as an example. What game could possibly be about "matriarchy" you ask? Well, before Yuji Naka worked on the early Sonic games, he debuted into the gaming industry with a hidden gem called Girl's Garden.

In Girl's Garden, you play as Papri, a young girl whose objective is to collect flowers for her boyfriend, Minto. The reason she does this is to prevent Minto from falling in love with another girl named Cocco. So Papri faces various hazards, and by hazards I mean getting attacked by fucking bears, in order to collect enough flowers in order to maintain her ownership over Minto's affections.

Obviously, this is a form of "objectification" because as the "object", Minto is being acted upon. You don't get to play as Minto. Hell, Minto barely does anything at all. He stays in the house in the middle of each stage and waits for Papri to give him flowers. Minto sure as fuck isn't in distress so why can't he get his own fucking flowers?

Also, the two women, Papri and Cocco, are essentially fighting over who gets to keep Minto for themselves so you can think of Girl's Garden as a "grand game" being played between Papri and Cocco. The two women are the players and Minto is the ball, you see. This means, Minto is being "objectified" because I'm doing things to him, not for him. Just like Mario saves Peach apparently not for her own safety, but to claim ownership of the "damsel ball". After all, I'm giving flowers TO Minto, which means I'm "objectifying" him because objects get acted upon.

You see how flawed Anita's revised definition of "objectification" is? Also, Anita mentions the "Subject-Object Dichotomy" which is a philosophical reference to the Cartesian model of "self". Now, I'm not gonna sit here and break down the entirety of this philosophy to you as that would take up even more time, but all you really need to know is this.

The "Subject-Object Dichotomy" is, according to the description given on Wikipedia, "a longstanding philosophical issue, is concerned with the analysis of human experience, and arises from the premise that the world consists of objects (entities) which are perceived or otherwise presumed to exist as entities, by subjects (observers)."

In other words, the observer is the subject and the entities are the objects. Notice how this definition doesn't specify who or what in particular is supposed to be the object? That's because it doesn't have too. When related to video games and even other mediums, the subject is the protagonist and the objects are...well, everything else. So, for example, in Super Mario Galaxy, Mario is the subject because the game is about his adventure and Peach, Rosalina, AND Bowser, along with all the other NPCs and enemies, are objects because they are the entities that the world of Super Mario Galaxy consist of.

So basically, Anita devalues her own argument because if you apply the "Subject-Object Dichotomy" to every video game ever made, the subject will always be the player and everything else, regardless of race or gender, are objects because they aren't supposed to be you. This defeats the whole point in pointing out that the damsels are somehow "objectified" as their captors are just as much an object as they are because they aren't the subject of the story; the protagonist is.

This explains why Anita emphasizes on having Peach and Zelda take the lead in their own games because there is really no other way for them not be considered objects since everything that isn't playable is an object. So in Super Princess Peach, you can say that Peach is the subject because it's her adventure and Mario and Bowser are the objects because Peach has to save Mario and defeat Bowser, both of these things being actions the player, through the perspective of Peach, enacts onto the objects, Mario and Bowser.

Of course, all this talk about objects is really only based around the idea that the damsel is an "object of desire" and a "prize to won". Anita projects preconceived notions on what the player incentive essentially is without really explaining how this effectively taps into what she calls "adolescent male power fantasies". Because male power fantasies and female power fantasies are apparently different so we need to distinguish the two as opposed to just calling these straight up power fantasies.

I also love how she insinuates that the usage of this trope by game developers was specifically to sell more games to not only boys and men, but straight boys and men. Fuck lesbians and transsexuals. By that logic, these games were made to appeal to white power fantasies because the hero is usually some white dude and the damsel is usually some white chick. I mean shit, the most iconic damsel, Princess Peach, is blonde and blue-eyed. Ergo, this must be a sign of white supremacy, right?

All jokes aside, the problem here should be pretty obvious because Anita is NOT fucking Jean Grey. Unless Part 2 to this trope includes some supporting evidence as to why the incentive behind the business decisions these companies made was mainly to capitalize on "adolescent male power fantasies", she's really just making the assumption that women are being subjugated for the enjoyment of the presumably male player as opposed to simply being used as a plot device to advance the hero's story arc. Because it's his, and sometimes her, story arc, the main character's trails and empowerment is what matters within the context of the game. Fuck everyone else, including the damsel. Why, you ask? Because the "Subject-Object Dichotomy", that's why.

Peach gets captured so Mario can have a "reason for existence". Minto starts looking at other women so Papri can have a lazy justification to pick flowers and feed killer bears honey. It's funny because Anita says in the video that the trope isn't really about women at all which is kind of true considering that the "damsel" is not always female. In Mario is Missing, fucking awful game by the way, Luigi has to find Mario. In the original Sonic the Hedgehog games, Sonic has to save the animals that are being turned into robots. Guess I should let them all save themselves because not doing that is "objectification" somehow.

All Anita is doing is applying the same logic she uses in her other videos like "What Liquor Ads Teach Us About Guys" and "Women in Refrigerators" to the player based on the preconceived notion that the players, you know the men, already think like this. The men playing these games apparently see Peach, Zelda, Krystal, or whoever the fuck as "prizes", not people. You can only come to this conclusion if you're a fucking psychic-type Pokémon.

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Okay, so we get that Anita is pissed about women being used as tools to advance male-driven plots and she apparently views any hint of physical beauty as objectification which is silly because there's a difference between being a sex doll and simply being attractive. But, of course, all men see women as objects anyway so there's no point in explaining how you managed to come to such a radical conclusion, anyway.

Folks, let's just get this out of the way right now. Sexual objectification isn't new. Look up sexual slavery if you don't believe me. However, the only thing that possibly hints to this incentive is making the damsel look sexy. Hence, why Anita bothers to point out Krystal's redesign and the concept art for Krystal sure as fuck doesn't hurt her case. The problem is that this doesn't say shit about how the player interprets the sexuality of the damsels in question.

For example, in Crash Bandicoot, Tawna Bandicoot has noticeably large breast and hips. In fact, the character is based off of Pamela Anderson. She, of course, gets kidnapped and Crash wants to save her to win her over only to get his ass dumped in later installments as she leaves him for Pinstripe. Or so the story goes.

There's a couple of rumors as to why Tawna magically disappears in later Crash Bandicoot games, but the widely accepted belief is that Naughty Dog was forced by their publisher to redesign Tawna because she wasn't considered "family friendly" because, you know...tits. Anyway, Naughty Dog didn't like the fact that Tawna had to be redesigned to fit into the mold of what was "family friendly' for a kid's game that has you get eaten, torched, and lacerated throughout its entirety. So, instead of compromising their artistic vision, they just scrapped Tawna altogether and replaced her with Crash's much more modestly attired sister Coco.

This is essentially the reason why Coco's appearance in Crash 2 is so abrupt and this may also explain why Coco is depicted as being an intelligent computer wiz as to show Sony or whoever the fuck had a problem with Tawna that the folks at Naughty Dog totally weren't sexist in anyway. Let's just ignore the fact that Crash is literally a fucking idiot, but at least he's the main character, right? Coco and Cortex are just objects because the "Subject-Object Dichotomy" would describe them as such. Well, save for Crash 3 since Coco is playable in a very small number of levels, but that still technically makes her the subject for a little while. Let's just ignore all the Crash games past 3 since those of you familiar with Crash already know that Anita's "game of patriarchy" logic doesn't apply to any Crash game past the first one.

So basically, we can assume that since the damsels in most of the examples Anita cherry-picks can be considered physically attractive, this is somehow the game developers way of telling the player that the damsel should be desired. That the damsel is their "prize to be won" for beating the game. However, there is a HUGE snag in that argument.

And that snag is that all the developers actually manage to do is establish the main character's feelings and incentives. This has absolutely nothing to do with the player unless you believe that "adolescent male power fantasies" is something all men are predisposed to. And if that's the case, why go after the games for something that they're supposedly projecting onto boys. The boys already think this because all men are inherently sexist, apparently. After all, how is it possible for developers to tap into "adolescent male power fantasies" if it's the games that have to project this idea of empowerment onto the boys first? Ergo, they couldn't believe in this fantasy until after they play these games.

I say this because Anita implies that there are larger "ramifications" for using the Damsel in Distress trope and that the usage of the trope in this manner normalizes "patronizing" and "paternalistic" attitudes towards women. And makes men view women as sex objects....somehow. Anyway, for any of that shit to be true, the games need to have an actual effect on the way the player interprets real-life scenarios.

Not only is any such research absent in Anita's video, there's no genuinely credible source you can find to support this statement anymore so than the constant claims that violent video games train children to become violent. Anita also doesn't cover on how this trope may effect young girls and people of different sexual orientation because the narrative she's weaving is about straight men making games for other straight men. In other words, the trope has less to do with video games and more to do with the people making them. It's almost as if the alleged sexism in video games has nothing to do with sexism in the real world. Spoiler Alert: It fucking doesn't!

Speaking of real world scenarios, let's examine more of the games in Anita's montage and apply them to a real world context. In Splatter House, Rick and Jenny end up in a demonic mansion after trying to avoid a storm. Jenny gets kidnapped by demons and Rick...well, Rick nearly fucking dies. In order to save Jenny and, you know, not die, Rick dawns the infamous Terror Mask which changes him from a meek geek to yet another ultra-masculine murderous sociopath. Like Kratos, Marcus, Ryu Hayabusa, yadda, yadda, and all the other "adolescent male power fantasy" characters.

Anyway, he eventually finds Jenny, while pissed off, and the demons apparently gave her Hell Herpes because now she's a demon too which, of course, makes Rick even more pissed off than before. Rick is then forced to kill Jenny and this little clip happens.

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Now, I'd imagine that the sad sounding music was an indication that Jenny's death is a bad thing. Rick seems to think so as he proceeds to enter the bowls of a giant fetus to kill the monster at the end or whatever. Splatterhouse had a ridiculous plot. I mean the main "villain" if you can call him that, is Dr. West and he's dead long before the game even starts so really, you're just cleaning up the fucker's mess. Then there's that thing with Hell Chaos possibly being a mutated Dr. West. It's fucking stupid.

Okay, so now that we've gotten the gist of Splatterhouse's so-called "story", let's break it down. So your girlfriend gets abducted by demons and she ends up dying anyway so I think it's safe to assume they want to kill her. In order to prevent this, you sell your soul to an evil mask that turns the wearer into the Incredible Fucking Hulk. You can't save your girlfriend so you take her out of her misery and then proceed to take out all of your rage on fetuses.

None of that sounds like the player is expected to "objectify" Jenny at all. One thing to keep note of here is that when most people say "objectification", they're usually referring to a form of dehumanization. That's what "objectification" is supposed to mean in terms of denying subjectivity.

The goal of the Splatterhouse, from Ricky's point of view, is to save Jenny because Jenny is the woman he loves. They're boyfriend and girlfriend long before the game starts and Rick obviously gives a shit about her because the entirety of the second Splatterhouse game has you trying to find Jenny's soul in order to resurrect her from the fucking dead.

And the third Splatterhouse? Well, apparently Rick and Jenny had some freaky necro-sex because now Rick and Jenny's son, David, is in the picture. And what happens in Splatterhouse 3? You guessed it. Jenny and David get kidnapped by the Evil One and Rick has to save his wife and child.

So what does this have to do with sexism in video games? You tell me because that's the problem here. It makes perfect sense for someone to risk their lives for someone they love when they're put in grave danger. This is obviously Rick's incentive and the player can interpret this in whatever way they choose.

If John Hinckley can watch the movie Taxi Driver and interpret that as meaning "kill Ronald Reagan", then I think it's safe to say whatever implications the game makes about how you are supposed to view Jenny doesn't actually determine what you think about Jenny.

Hence, why the super-sexual candid photos that Jenny leaves around as clues in the 2010 Splatterhouse remake doesn't necessarily mean that you, the player, see Jenny as nothing, but a sexy "prize to be won". Especially since you'd have no way of knowing those pictures were even in the game if you bought it blindly on launch.

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Also, would Rick's son David be considered a "prize to be won" in Splatterhouse 3 because he's in as much distress as Jenny. Hell, both characters can actually die depending on the player's actions so really, the only "prize" being "won" here is their freedom and safety since the game is telling you that's what's important. Pootang isn't the prerogative.

Now let's look at Violent Storm. In a post-apocalyptic future that takes place after World War 3, an evil group of thugs called the Geld Gang reek terror across the wastelands. 3 ultra-masculine "dude-bro" buddies come to find that their woman, since she's their property, has been kidnapped while performing one the most "sexist" things a woman could hope to do to "objectify" herself. That thing being grocery shopping.

In response to Red Freddy taking away their bitch, might as well call her that because she's my property, Boris, Wade, and Kyle go on a magical "dude-bro" adventure to do "dude-bro" stuff before finally reclaiming their stolen case of Mike's Hard Lemonade....or beer? I don't know. It had something to do with an object, not a person. That much I know.

Seriously though, when you get to Lord Geld's personal whore house, you're treated to this scene.

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See how I cropped that scene? Yeah, I did that on purpose. Why? To show you that Sheena, who I meant to refer to as bitch because she's my property, is obviously sad. She's crying. Last time I checked, objects don't have feelings. When's the last time your chair cried? And no, that time Patty Sanchez sat on it doesn't count.

You know, maybe Sheena, I mean bitch, is crying because she's bound to a ball and chain, against her will of course, and forced to be the personal sex slave of a purple rapist whose balls obviously haven't dropped.

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Okay, you see the problem here, right? If you don't then let me spell it out for you. In the final stage of Violent Storm, there is a section with these caged women who are obviously trapped and upset. They magically perk up when you break the cage door and free them.

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Now, why would Lord Geld have a cage full of women unless he had...err....plans for them after capturing them? It's almost like the only one denying these women their humanity and is ultimately objectifying them is Lord Geld? But he's the bad guy and we all know, because Anita says so, that the player is the one who views these women as objects, as "prizes to be won".

See, this is the flaw in Anita's argument. Bluto, Bowser, Ganondorf, Geld....you know the bad guys....THEY'RE the ones objectifying these women.. NOT the protagonist. The protagonist is tasked with SAVING the damsel from literal objectification.

Considering how the illegal sex trading system and good old fashioned sexual assault are still problems today, you'd think that teaching young straight males to actually fight against this shit would be a good thing, right?

I mean the subject, you know the protagonist, is meant to save the damsel from these kinds of assholes. He is not tasked with becoming one of them in these games. For people to engage in these "adolescent male power fantasies" and get the idea that women are somehow their property makes it even more glaringly apparent that the content within the games and behavior of the players are separate in virtually every possible way.

In all seriousness, how do you teach young men to view women as property if that isn't even the point of the game? Are they identifying with the villain instead? As far as the context of the games go, the message is quite the opposite. To top it off, you'd have to be pretty sadistic to not care about these kinds of damsels in distress in real life, especially when you consider their rather distressing cries for help. It actually sounds a little creepy to me because some of these clips sound as if they're already dying.

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Really, unless you're an outright sadist, which we kind of all are deep down inside if the popularity of violent media is any indication, then you would likely want to protect these people rather than hurt them further.

And yet, people like Colin Stokes seem to think media such as this apparently teaches people, specifically men, that women belong to them while at the same time denying that he's actually saying that. Kind of like how feminists tend to contradict themselves constantly while never contradicting themselves. See what I did there?

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Yeah, so apparently games that have you save women from rapists turn you into rapists because Colin Stokes said so, but they don't really turn you into rapists because Colin Stokes said so. Really, what the fuck is this shit?

By that logic, which is basically the same as Anita's, the game Double Dragon is just a story of a man retrieving his "stolen property". So since the women are "objects" and "stolen property", I should be able to replace each damsel in distress with an actual object and the story should remain unchanged. After all, if Marian is just a "prize to be won", then she should be no different from a car or a sandwich.

So let's pretend that , since my PS3 is broken anyway, Shelly the PS3 gets stolen by the evil Black Warriors.  Since Billy wants to get his PS3 back, I guess he really wants to keep his save files, he goes on a thug-thumping rampage to get it back. His brother Jimmy may accompany him, but the story is really about Billy since it's his PS3 that got stolen, not Jimmy's.

Billy will have to face....apparently a bunch of white guys with terrible haircuts and, from behind these double doors...wait, who are these broads?

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Ah, I get it now. In order to reinforce to me the idea that women are "weak and incapable", these insidious game developers are sending out a bunch of women...within the first 30 seconds of the first fucking level....to FIGHT me. Really, folks? This is the "research" Anita needed $6,000 for? Cause you know, having women stop you from saving other women totally sends the message that women are "weak and incapable", right?

And yes, that crudely animated sprite is, indeed, a woman. Her name is Linda Lash and she's been a recurring enemy in pretty much every Double Dragon game ever made. In fact, she's even in Double Dragon Neon. Hell, she's on the damn cover. Granted, she's a lot more revealing in that game, but shit. She's still in it. In fact, that opening scene where Marian...er, the PS3 gets punched in the gut has Linda there with the rest of the thugs this time around.

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Oh, and I absolutely adore how "kart-wheeling cannon fodder" Williams is referred to as...well, cannon fodder. It really highlights the whole male-disposability thing that our current drafting system practices. Or at least it would if Linda didn't show up. Again, she appears in the FIRST LEVEL.

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See, what Anita is basically trying to do here is tell us all how these games portray women as inherently "weak and incapable", yet quite a few of the games she uses as examples have female enemies that attack the player. If women are "weak and incapable" in these games, then why are they whipping you, stabbing you, and jump kicking you in the face?

Seriously, Linda isn't alone in Double Dragon Neon either. She's accompanied by skimpy female ninjas and geisha that also attack Billy.

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 The point here is that unless the damsel in distress is meant to be a representation of all women within the world the game takes place in, you really can't objectively take all of her characteristics and apply them to not only every female character in that particular game, but every woman in real life.

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Unless we just assume the player is...well, stupid, there's no realistic way that one woman being "dis-empowered" via kidnapping is going to send anyone the message that women are "weak and incapable", especially if the game has female enemies.

For the record, Violent Storm also had female enemies in the form of Liza and her recolor, Eliza.

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So yeah, even the game with the fucking sex slaves in it threw female opponents at you. While we're on the topic of fighting women, Anita's montage shows Final Fight as yet another game that apparently enforces this dreaded stereotype that women are "weak and incapable". This game, of course, had female opponents as well in the form of Poison and Roxy. Oh, and for the record, the clip I'm about to show you isn't from the first level, but Roxy does show up at the end of Stage 1. Just saying.

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To be fair, there are a lot of rumors revolving around Poison and her recolor. Supposedly, Poison was female in Japan, but due to the controversy of hitting women in America, her Western counterpart is supposedly male. This story has been challenged up and down and the gaming community has basically reached the conclusion that Poison may have always have been intended to be male.

In other words, Poison is supposed to be transgendered. In Japan, Poison is a straight up guy in drag and in America, Poison is a post-op transsexual. My point is that these characters, without knowing their past, look distinctively like women and you have to fight them. How is this game depicting all women as "weak and incapable" simply because Jessica, Cody's girlfriend, gets kidnapped? How is she an object?

Imagine that you really are Cody and someone hurts Jessica, the woman you love. How would you react to this? Cause I have a good idea how Cody would react.

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Could you imagine yourself having that kind of reaction to, I don't know, someone eating your cheeseburger. I mean really. Can you see yourself screaming, "YOU ATE MY CHEESEBURGER!!!"? Cause I doubt any normal person would react that way to losing something that doesn't think, doesn't feel, and is easily replaceable.

Jessica, on the other hand, is a person. What are you going to do if Jessica dies? Go to the Jessica store and buy a new Jessica? Also, Haggar, another playable character in Final Fight, is Jessica's father and he wants to save her as well. Is Jessica his "prize to be won"? I can't think of any good father who would view his children as "stolen property" in such a situation. No mother would either for that matter.

Also, Final Fight 2 also had a damsel in distress in the form of Rena, Guy's fiancée. Guy doesn't save her, however. Carlos, Haggar, and Rena's younger SISTER Maki are the ones that save her. Oh, and did I mention that Rena and Maki's father, Genryusai, is also kidnapped?  So not only do the main characters of Final Fight 2 have to save a woman AND a man, but you also get to play as a woman, Maki.

So if the player chooses to play as Maki, Maki becomes the subject of the game. You know, the one doing most of the action. To top if off, according to the game's canon storyline, Maki is the one who delivers the final blow on the game's main villain, Retu, which means that the one who technically rescues Rena and Genryusai is Maki. I guess Rena and Genryusai are her "reward" for stopping the Mad Gear gang.

Oh, and let's not forget Final Fight 3. Nobody gets kidnapped, but you do get to play as Lucia...you know, a woman. The reason I brought up all that shit about Final Fight is because the accusation that video games, even during the golden age, depicted women as "weak and incapable" doesn't make a lot of sense when beat em' up games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage had female opponents and female playable characters.

In regards to Streets of Rage, the second game had you save Adam, the token black character from the first game, who gets kidnapped by Mr. X. In response to having their "property" stolen, see what I did there?, Axel, Blaze, Skate, and Max have to come to his rescue. That's right. Blaze, a woman, has to help a typical "dude-bro" street fighter, Adam's little brother, and a ultra-masculine pro-wrestler save another ultra-masculine street fighter. Of course, they're female enemies trying to stop you in all 3 Streets of Rage games.

Is Adam being "objectified"? After all, objects get acted upon and the damsel's ordeal obviously isn't his own in Streets of Rage 2 because he needs to be rescued. I guess I should let him free himself from the clutches a giant tommy-gun wielding sociopath as to not "dis-empower" him.

Anyway, let's get back to the Double Dragon example. So now that we've established that a lot of these games actually had female adversaries, what does that say about Billy's incentives for saving Mari...err, his PS3? Well, at the end of the first Double Dragon game, if you're playing cooperatively, you have to fight your brother Jimmy over who gets to save the PS3. I suppose if you really want to over analyze a story that is told in its entirety through 10 second cut-scenes, then you could insist that this scenario is about two brothers fighting each other over ownership of an object.

You know, kind of like how people get mad when they find out their "property" is cheating on them. This, of course, has nothing to do with love or commitment so when Billy and Jimmy fight over who gets to keep the PS3, they're fighting over who gets to claim ownership of it. Hence, why one brother ends up killing the other. This ending has nothing to do with the actual canon storyline and only happens in the first Double Dragon game, but this totally counts as "objectification" because...I don't know, the brothers are fighting each other despite the fact that they have no realistic reason to do so. I mean really, the plot in Double Dragon is so bare bones that could of sworn I was playing a video game or something.

Anyway, after one brother bites the dust, the PS3 magically frees itself and runs towards the remaining brother to express its love by kissing the brother on the cheek. Fuck the fact that a PS3 can't move and can't display actual emotions. Not like it needs to because in Double Dragon 2, the poor thing gets shot to death which is weird because you can't kill something that was never alive.

Apparently, Billy and Jimmy, since neither canonically dies in the first game, are so pissed about losing their favorite gaming console that they go on yet another rampage that yet again includes punching women in the face. This time, they actually kill Willy, the leader of the Black Warriors and if you're playing the NES version, Shelly gets re-balled with leaded solder that brings it back to life. The Lee brothers must really love those save files.

Seriously though, I'm sure most of you find the this whole "Marian equal to a PS3" analogy stupid as all fuck which is the point. Marian isn't just an object. She's a person with emotions and desires. Unless Billy is the kind of douchebag who feels no remorse over the loss of his loved ones, chances are that he truly loves Marian. Or Jimmy does since the canon of this franchise isn't really that consistent, almost like if it were a video game.

In all seriousness, if Billy really saw Marian as an object, why even save her? He could just get a new girlfriend instead. As an object, Marian is disposable and easily replaceable. Remember, love apparently has nothing to do with Billy's motives, right?

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Oh...okay, well maybe Billy and Marian really do love each other. Not like that matters. I mean, Marian should still be able to save herself just like women who get sexually assaulted in real life should be able to defend themselves despite the fact that whenever you tell women, or rather feminists, that self defense is important for combating rape, it's somehow "victim-blaming" when you do that.

Anyway, I'm sure Marian wasn't being denied her humanity or anything. Like she couldn't possibly have been put into a situation that she couldn't realistically save herself from. Billy is just being an "objectifying" asshole, right?

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Oh...she was being brainwashed....which is basically the video game equivalent to getting slipped a roofie. Well, I'm sure Skullmageddon wasn't up to anything too bad. Certainly not anything that Billy should have to step in and save Marian from. Marian's a big girl. She can handle herself, right?

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So, mister "I've never heard of E-Harmony" apparently kidnapped Marian...to get laid? That would explain Evil Marian's metallic bikini. In all seriousness, if Billy hadn't stepped in to save Marian, she would have become the personal fuck toy for a blatant Skeletor parody. That might explain why Double Dragon Neon ends with Marian punching Skullmageddon square in the dick.

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After all, what better way to "teach men not to rape" than punching them in the dick for attempting to do such a thing could you possibly manifest? All jokes aside, the point is that saving Marian couldn't possibly be "offensive" in real life when you consider the more realistic consequences for not saving her.

See, this is exactly what I was talking about near the beginning of the video. All these damsels have their humanity stolen from the antagonist, not the protagonist, and are subjected to either death or rape as a result. At least, that's what's mostly likely to happen to them if these stories took place in real life.

Considering how much of an issue these things actually are in our world, just check the statistics I mentioned earlier, it's insanely irrational for any of the main characters in these stories to just walk away and let the damsel's ordeal be her own just because it encourages a stereotype that arguably isn't a stereotype at all, given how biology supports the idea that having an average woman defend herself against an average man is just straight up ridiculous.

I know some of you see this as "patronizing" and "paternalistic" just like Anita does, but the truth is that men are stronger than women on average. There are studies backing this up. This is not a "socially constructed myth" by any means so, based off this information, there should be no mystery as to why women are victimized more so than men in real life. Just like there should be no mystery as to why action heroes are usually male and the captives of the villains are usually female. That and well...

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Anyway, damsels in distress are more or less a reflection of real life differences in victimization rates. If that's somehow "sexist" than it sure as fuck wasn't the fault of video games. You can't blame the media for real life sexism that existed before those media outlets existed. That's like blaming the Call of Duty franchise for the events that lead to World War II. Hell, not even Birth of a Nation can be blamed for outright causing racism. The racism existed before the movie was made. It's almost like racism is what caused that movie to exist as opposed to the other way around.

This brings us to Anita's claim that these games have larger "ramifications" on our cultural ecosystem. Of course, she doesn't elaborate on what this actually means or even hint towards what these "ramifications" actually are. It doesn't help that there are no studies supporting the idea that sexism in the media has any real impact on how real people actually behave.

Oddly enough, such "ramifications" have been talked about before. A documentary by the name of "Miss Representation", miss as in Mrs. insert-surname, was basically an hour and a half documentation of sexism in the media in general and displayed how it effects people's views on women. It really didn't have any facts to back itself up either, but at least it gives viewers some good talking points as the documentary included interviews and "professional" opinions from people with actual fucking Ph.Ds.

What does that have to do with Anita's video? Well, Anita is basically trying to do the same thing except that without interviews with actual game developers or at least some peer-reviewed studies to back up her claims that these games have "ramifications" of any kind, the whole video just boils down to her own interpretation. That's fine in itself. She's allowed to have an opinion. The problem is that she is asserting that video games should change their representation of women without giving developers a reason beyond her simply being offended by content that not even all women find offensive.

 Based off of all of Anita's previous ranting on this subject, seeing as how the point she is trying to make is same thing she said in her "Women in Refrigerators" video, she wants more female protagonists that are depicted as being just as powerful as men. This is obviously the point behind showing how male characters escape on their own accord when kidnapped in her montage of typical male heroes.

[Insert Clip]

However, she fails to understand that this has nothing to do with the player being male. This has everything with characters like Starfox, Snake, and Link being, you know, the main fucking character. This is why when the main character is female, like Lara Croft for example, they're also shown as being capable of making their own escape.

Again, due to the "Subject-Object Dichotomy", everything that isn't you is an object. The perils of other characters are meant to give the player incentives for their actions. It's actually kind of funny as Anita points out herself that the damsel's entrapment is meant to be a "trail for the hero to overcome". This is exactly what the trope itself is really about.

The Damsel in Distress trope, along with the Save the Princess variant, are described by TVTropes, most likely Anita's main source of information, as being Excuse Plot tropes. This means that the damsel, the antagonist, and everything else in the game is rather redundant because they're only there to serve as context for the player's actions in order to prevent them from feeling completely pointless.

[Insert Clip]

So yeah, it's just an excuse to have something to do. Really, the only way to avoid perpetrating this allegedly harmful stereotype is to add more variety to both protagonists and captives. Yet, as I already mentioned, there's no real evidence that these games have any real impact on how the player interprets gender relations in real life.

So really, why bother? Saving Natalie and the Professor as Spike didn't impact my views of women and elderly men. Really, these "ramifications" sound more like a guise for what Anita actually wants developers to do and that's to simply make more female lead characters. A lot of what Anita says in her video sounds like a girl trying to force her way into a "boys' club" and it's hard not to get that kind of vibe from a woman who literally used the phrase "boy's club" to describe the tech industry during that Donglegate shit.

Going by Anita's logic about "objectification", you basically can't be allowed to save anyone because you're apparently only doing it to reclaim your "stolen property". So in the latest Tomb Raider reboot, when Lara has to save her friend Sam from having her body become a studio apartment for the malicious Sun Queen, this is just Lara reclaiming her "stolen property", right? Sam is being "dis-empowered" for the benefit of Lara's story arc so a woman is being "objectified" so another woman can be empowered.

[Insert Clip]

Oh, and I love all the male soldiers screaming "Protect the Sun Queen" as if you couldn't have any female opponents to shoot at. Women must be really "weak and incapable" if their shooting down hoards of male soldiers trying to kill them. Well, her as Lara is apparently a one-woman army.

See, this scene in itself shows that Lara is more than capable of protecting herself and from men no less, but Sam on the other hand is in a state of helplessness. She can't realistically be expected to help herself so Lara saves her instead. It is still "objectification" when a woman saves another woman or is this one of those "It's only sexist when men do it!" moments?

In all seriousness, In Kya: Dark Lineage, Kya has to save her kidnapped brother from being turned into a Wolfen. Frank isn't in a position to save himself so Kya comes to his rescue. Is this depicting men as "weak and incapable" or is this, oh I don't know, just depicting that Frank needs some fucking help?

Oh, and let's not forget Beyond Good and Evil where Jade had to rescue Double H from basically being a vegetable. He was kind of frozen in place too. You know, kind of like Krystal.

The problem with Anita's argument is that, when you get right down to it, it's based solely on preconceived notions of male players and a strict, blatantly gender-biased, usage of the Damsel in Distress trope. Her argument is basically that since this trope happens x amount of times too often, a message is being sent to the player about women that can be harmful in real life.

Because no one who plays New Super Mario Bros. U will ever get their hands on the Tomb Raider 2013 reboot so obviously the quantity of games using a trope that hasn't been proven to effect anyone more so than parenting and overall life experiences must be an issue.

I'm going to be brutally honest here. I totally agree with Anita and the like that there should be more female lead characters in games. That's why I usually main female characters in fighting games. However, I see no "ramifications" from a lack of female representation in games that isn't really there to begin with.

I'm not going to waste even more time listing them all, but there have been more than enough games with female heroes ranging from Alisia Dragoon to American Mcgee's Alice that this notion that too many people in the gaming industry and gaming community view women as being generally "weak and incapable" just sounds like shit that Anita is projecting onto others with the games mentioned in her video serving as a frankly bullshit justification for making those projections.

Now, I can respect that Anita has a different interpretation of the "messages", if any, being sent through the games. She's totally entitled to her opinion. However, you shouldn't need $6,000 to express an opinion, especially when a lot of people who donated honestly thought something in the gaming industry needed to be changed. It doesn't help that Anita is basically repeating the same old shit she's been saying for 3 whole fucking years.

You know, with upcoming games like Remember Me, who really thinks women are "weak and incapable"? It certainly isn't the folks behind the new Defiance game.

[Insert Clip]

With women being in fighting games, action games, and even shooters, how could one hope to solidify the idea that women are "weak and incapable" when games like Perfect Dark and the Donkey Kong Country sequels contradict the message?

Let's be honest with ourselves. Anita's argument is just a bad case of feminist-flavored tunnel-vision and the implications that the player sees all women in trouble as "objects" might actually be a little insulting depending on how sensitive you are.

If you need anymore evidence that Anita's video on damsels in distress is based on ideology rather than context, just look at the list of games on the Feminist Frequency website for this video. One of the listed examples pretty much proves that Anita's "point" is to simply tell developers to never have their female characters kidnapped.

You see, Talia, Vicky, and Dr. Baker from Batman: Arkham City somehow managed to get on this list. Those of you familiar with this game already know wants wrong here, but I'll break it down for everyone. You see, in Batman: Arkham City, you play as Batman. What does Batman do? Why, save people, of course. Oh, but he doesn't just save anybody. Oh, no. You see, Batman saves EVERYBODY. As in, this game has captives of both fucking sexes that get held hostage and he has to save police officers and just people walking down the damn street that happen to occasionally be male.

So let me get this straight. It's okay to beat up thugs that are mostly male, aside from the fucking ninjas, and save people from getting killed as long as those captives are never female? Let's just ignore the fact that the player can play as Catwoman. Let's ignore the fact that Catwoman saves Batman's ass near the end of the game. Let's ignore the fact that Commissioner Gordon found his ass in this same scenario in Arkham Asylum.

Since a minor character and two rather meaningless supporting characters who happen to be female get captured, the folks behind Arkham City apparently view women as "weak and incapable". Sorry, but that's just straight up horseshit. It's like the context of the narrative Anita is weaving changes the minute the gender of the heroes and captives change, but this couldn't possibly be the case, right?

[Insert Clip]

.....You know what.....I think I've made my point. When we're not only talking about a woman who finds sexism in FUCKING CHRISTMAS SONGS..., but also views the songs differently based on the gender of the singer, then it's pretty safe to say that objectivity has nothing to do with the conversation anymore. Oh, and I love how Anita suggests that instead of a man, because men can't be friends and family, that the woman singing the song asks for a scythe from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...a scythe being a literal object. So now we're replacing men with objects.

I really hope that those of you who donated are truly happy with what you've received. I really do because I can't help but feel like you all got fucked over. And before anyone says, "Well, what about part 2 you dumbfuck? Wait for part 2 you fucking idiot!", let me tell you that you don't need to be a member of the X-Men to know what's going to happen in part 2.

For starters, I'm 99.9% sure she'll mention Rayman Origins. I mean it was in the fucking trailer for this hot mess of a "series". You know, the same trailer with that cropped picture of Filia from Skullgirls that hides the fact that Peacock is a character that exist.

Regarding Rayman Origins, she will complain about the nymphs you have to save and how them being hyper-sexualized is a form of "objectification". Fuck the fact that they're nymphs and are supposed to look like that.

Anyway, unless she plans to add something beyond saying the same shit with more recent games as examples, that little tangent will be about how Betilla and the rest of the nymphs are being "dis-empowered" for the sake of giving the male hero, Rayman, something to do. Oh, and she'll complain about how the nymphs shake their big boobies and big booties in order to grant you powers when you save them. Not much else you could possibly hear about that topic.

Of course, Dante's Inferno will be talked about and some other games like Infamous may make the cut. The point will still essentially be the same unless Anita plans to actually prove the Damsel in Distress trope actually has any "ramifications" of any kind.

Lastly, there's the games that "flip the script on the damsel". She shows a picture of Elaine Marley Threepwood from the Monkey Island series to preview this topic. Really, if you're familiar with Monkey Island, you know what this will be about.

See, Elaine gets kidnapped in almost every Monkey Island game, but the catch is that she usually ends up freeing herself. There's already a name for this shit. TVTropes calls it the "badass damsel". So basically, Elaine would be considered a good usage of the Damsel in Distress trope because she doesn't have to rely on Guybrush to help her escape from LeChuck most of the time. In fact, Elaine plays a crucial part in the series as more of a partner to Guybrush as opposed to being nothing but a love interest who sits in the sidelines.

And you know what? That's fucking fantastic. Morgan LeFlay is a pretty good female character too. You want to know why none of this is surprising? For starters, Elaine being kidnapped or put into some other form of distress is played off as more of a joke in this series. That is to say that Elaine being the "badass damsel" is a parody of the damsel in distress trope itself. Kind of like how Princess Daphne in Dragon's Lair is meant to be a satirical take on the "Save the Princess" trope seen in so many of those old ass Disney movies...which Anita seems to take seriously. That, or she is, again, ignoring the context of how the trope is actually being used.

Anyway, another distinct trait of the Monkey Island series is that it has an actual fucking story. And I don't mean one that is told in a matter of 10 seconds like most games from the 80s and early 90s. The plot is essentially the game itself as Monkey Island is a point-and-click adventure game. The main character, Guybrush, isn't your typical hyper-masculine meathead. He's quirky, comedic, and has just enough flaws to make him human while still being a hero. Basically, he's the kind of character you'll rarely see in video games these days where every other male character is either on steroids or covered in space marine armor.

So really, it should come as no surprise that the game that actually attempted to be creative and, you know, have an actual fucking plot ended up with great characters, both male and female. If we bothered to acknowledge that most of Anita's examples are of games with bullshit storylines, we might actually come to the conclusion that the saturation of this trope is most likely due to flat-out bad writing.

Considering all the projections and "ramifications" Anita talks about, it's important to keep in mind what was actually going through most developers heads when making these games revolve around Damsel in Distress plots. It really is one of the easiest tropes to fall back on when you have limited resources for storytelling. Hence, why so many modern games barely touch this trope.

So when considering that part 2 of Anita's video on this trope only states that she'll look into more recent examples like Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, that god awful Sonic title where a woman's cries lead to the end of the world, and looking at variants of the "badass damsel" trope that may include Zia from Bastion and other "badass damsels", it's hard to think of any real reason to stay tuned for more of Anita's opinionated drivel.

There's literally nothing left to talk about unless she wants to talk to developers directly or interview gamers to see how they interpret the trope along with how they view both genders. After all, the "goal", so to speak, was to reduce sexism in the gaming community by reducing sexism in games. Yet, Anita has failed to show a cohesive correlation between the community and the games. So really, what's the fucking point?

Her argument literally boils down to "I'm offended by your artwork, now censor your artwork". What's truly sad is that if Anita had pumped her energy into making her own game or at least helping women who want to get into the gaming industry achieve their dreams, she might have actually made a point about women's independence by seeking to solve a perceived problem on her own. Instead, she gives us nearly 25 minutes worth of pissing in the wind that's ultimately about telling men how to fix a problem she has with gaming for her.

I think Anita herself sums up her own video quite nicely.

[Insert Clip]

So really, what did we learn today from Anita's unrivaled intellect?

Well, we learned that all men view women in peril as their "stolen property".
We learned that damsels represent all women's capabilities.
We learned that men should never save women as it is apparently a form of "objectification".
We learned that all men, even as young boys, fantasize about power and saving helpless women is just another way for men to engage in their inherent desire for power trips.
We learned that women never save men because Anita never addresses the trope outside of the "game of patriarchy" context.
And lastly, but certainly not least, we learned to always have female characters be the leads in video games as they can never be shown as "objects" as according to the Subject-Object Dichotomy. So all you future game developers writing stories revolving around male lead characters better stop what you're doing right now. Why? Because Fuck Men!

Seriously though, Anita's video isn't bad because she's a woman. Her video isn't bad because she's a feminist, though being a feminist sure as fuck doesn't help. Her video is bad because she literally presents an argument lacking any critical analysis that is based heavily on rhetoric and blatant assumptions that come dangerously close to being sexist themselves since she basically tells her viewers that women should never need saving and that men have possessive ambitions for helping women who should never need to be saved.

If any of this is a misinterpretation on my part, I honestly don't see why I should even feel sorry at this point as any misunderstandings between Anita and her viewers could have been addressed if the comments on the video were open. And before anyone says, "What about all the trolls who bully her you dumbass!?!?", may I remind you all that YouTube now supports a comment approval system that Anita could have easily used to filter out trolls just like she did in her past videos.

There's really no good excuse for anyone claiming to be making an academic presentation to literally block off communications with the audience unless Anita wants to create a thunder dome where only her voice is heard. It's like a professor kicking out any student who dares to question their thesis. Ultimately, no one learns anything because only the people who already agree, which are the backers of this project in this example, are the only ones who get to say anything or at least that would be the case if comments or video responses of any kind were allowed on the video.

I'm not going to even bother to question whether or not Anita is afraid of criticism. The fact that she obviously doesn't want her work criticized in any way is bad enough on its own.

I hope you backers are truly satisfied. I really do because this video really is just "Women in Refrigerators" reworded into a 25 minute smearing of gaming history. Speaking of recaps, let's look at Anita's upcoming tropes and take a wild guess as to what those will most likely be about. Let's get the least laughable one out of the way first.

The "Fighting Fuck Toy" is pretty damn obvious. It's going to be about sexual objectification and how characters like Ivy from Soul Calibur fighting other scantly dressed women is basically the video game equivalent to watching a mud-wrestling match. This is easily the best one out of all of them because the difference between sexual objectification and sexualization is an interesting topic if you can enter it with an open mind. However, I have a bad feeling that characters like Morrigan Aensland from DarkStalkers will get grouped with the Zakus from Stretch Panic. This really depends on how Anita views sexualization and sexual objectification, assuming she even sees a clear difference. Having Valentine from Skullgirls on the promotional poster for this shit sends the message that she really doesn't see a difference.

Then there's the "Man With Boobs" trope which is yet another retread. Watch her video on Sucker Punch. She basically states her case on this trope in that video. Oddly enough, challenging the "Man With Boobs" trope encourages gender stereotypes by drawing a line between male and female character traits. You can't complain about women being depicted as natural caregivers if anything outside of that is "acting like a man" or any other variant of gender identification.

The "Sexy Side-Kick" is more or less a variant on "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" so if you've watched that, you've got a good idea what this one is about.

The "Sexy Villainess" is just the "Evil Demon Seductress" again and will most likely use Poison Ivy from Arkham Aslyam as an example...again.

"Women as Background Decoration"...you know what, that one might be interesting simply due to the fact that this is even considered offensive. I mean what in utter fuck is this trope even about? What's offensive about it? Because women are being "objectified" and left out of the action? Sounds like "Damsels in Distress" all over again.

The "Voodoo Priestess/Tribal Sorceress" trope isn't too much of a recap, but it'll most likely be more about racism than sexism so it shouldn't even be on there.

"Women as Reward"...is literally "Damsels in Distress" again so let's just skip this shit.

"Mrs. Male Character"...is literally "Man With Boobs" again unless she's going to talk about how certain female characters are extensions of male characters as opposed to being their own characters. Think how Supergirl is to Superman. Fuck Wonderwoman. She doesn't exist.

"Unattractive Equals Evil" will basically be about characters like Grunty from Banjo-Kazooie and how games depict ugly female characters as being inherently bad because their ugly. It's the same shit I hear from people complaining about Ursala in The Little Mermaid. Oddly enough, this contradicts "Sexy Villainess" because the female villain can no longer be ugly or attractive.

Lastly, she'll finally talk about "Positive Female Characters" and make it sound like these characters are rare when they fucking aren't.

Oh, and she threw in "Top 10 Most Common Defenses For Sexism in Games" which will most likely be about criticisms she's already tried and failed to address properly.

So there you have it. To all you backers of this project, this is most likely going to be the future of this series, assuming it has a future at all as it has been over a month and Anita still hasn't completed her thoughts on "Damsels in Distress". Why part 2 wasn't already finished by now will be a mystery to me, but at least it gives all us naysayers more than enough time to respond to this garbage.

Yes, I said garbage because you don't take nearly $160,000 to make videos about video games just to end up repeating yourself and contradicting yourself all while avoiding any critical analysis of the context of the games or the effects of the trope on the player's views on women. Anita's entire video, hell her entire project, is based solely on her own ideologies. I'm not knocking her for having an opinion, but all this little charade is going to do is make it impossible for people to take the discussion about sexism in gaming seriously for the next couple of years.

Anita is only going to make it harder for women in general to be taken seriously in the gaming industry. If that's what you want then go ahead and keep supporting this woman. I honestly don't care. However, Anita nor anyone else is going to go after the gaming industry with their rhetorical ramblings and not expect any criticism. That's not to say Anita deserved the harassment she received, but neither did Jack Thompson. That didn't stop him from not knowing jackshit about video games and that certainly isn't stopping Anita from knowing just as much as Jack did which is jackshit.

Before anyone ask, "Why do you care what Anita says?", the answer to that is because video games and gamers are already scrutinized for shit that doesn't really apply to them as a collective. You can try to argue the same about feminists, though you'd have a much harder time proving the point. Anyway, gamers have been depicted as anti-social and prone to violence more than enough times for us to have our own stereotypes to worry about. Whether or not this is really who we are is something the community itself needs to address.

However, we don't need misogynistic stereotypes layered upon the already existing gamer stereotypes. I don't know about you, but I don't think the gaming community as a whole needs to take the fall for 4Chan trolls being 4Chan trolls. More importantly, people unfamiliar with the gaming community and video games in general won't benefit from Anita's misinformation about video game content. This isn't a war of any kind by the way. We don't need to "fight" Anita or anything like that. Like with any false accusation, gaming culture needs to stand up for itself and that includes addressing the arguments people like Anita make and proving them wrong. After all, she should have a voice and so should we. Besides, her work can only be improved based off of constructive criticism so as far as I'm concerned, I'm doing her a favor.

Anyway, I think I've ranted about this woman long enough. Feel free to share this video or even mirror it in case it ever gets taken down. If you have any objections to anything I said in this video, comments and video responses are allowed for this very reason. Also, remember to check the description for links and sources used. With that being said, let's hope "Damsels in Distress" part 2 isn't as easy to tear apart as part 1 obviously was.

Side Note: I know that the whole "save the princess" trope can be considered a form of "benevolent sexism", but I didn't really know how to fit that topic into the context of this video. I figured that's basically the form of sexism being talked about in Anita's video so there was no point in specifying that. Whether or not benevolent sexism is worth talking about is a whole other debate in itself, though if articles on the topic are any indication, that subject really isn't worth touching based on the fact that the effects of benevolent sexism and benevolent sexism itself are never really connected; at least not in the articles I've read on the subject. Feel free counter this if you have anything to add.

Update: For those reading the transcript now, but didn't read the description on the video, the actual research/writing only took 2 months (including school/off days) and I didn't feel like re-writing to whole thing simply because Parts 2 and 3 came out before I could finish the actual video. Why'd the video take so long to make? My fucking computer died and it took nearly 2 months to get a new tower. Yes, the ENTIRE tower committed suicide. Lucky me.

References

"History and Definition of Chivalry"
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chivalry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry

"Strength Differences Between Men and Women"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8477683

"The Re-Defining of Rape"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/politics/federal-crime-statistics-to-expand-rape-definition.html?_r=1&

"How the FBI Defines Forcible Rape"
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/violent-crime/rapemain

"Rape Victimization Statistics"
http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/victims-perpetrators.htm

http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/sex-offense-report

"Subject-Object Dichotomy Explained"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object_problem

"Men Vs. Women in Sports"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/we-thought-female-athletes-were-catching-up-to-men-but-theyre-not/260927/

"Anita's List of Games That Fit the Damsel in Distress Trope"
http://tropesversuswomen.tumblr.com/

"How the U.S. Draft Works"
http://people.howstuffworks.com/us-draft.htm

About Video Games Mentioned:

"Medusa in Kid Icarus"
http://www.kidicaruswiki.org/Medusa

"Peach, Daisy, and the 7 Kings"
http://www.mariowiki.com/Princess_Daisy
http://www.mariowiki.com/Princess_Peach
http://www.mariowiki.com/Mushroom_Kings

"Splatter House 1-3 Storylines Plus Splatter House Reboot"
http://splatterhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Splatterhouse_%281988%29
http://splatterhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Splatterhouse_2
http://splatterhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Splatterhouse_3
http://splatterhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Splatterhouse_%282010%29

"Elaine in Monkey Island series"
http://www.miwiki.net/Elaine_Marley

"Marian and Linda in Double Dragon series"
http://doubledragon.wikia.com/wiki/Linda_Lash
http://doubledragon.wikia.com/wiki/Marian_Kelly

"Zelda and Sheik"
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Princess_Zelda
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Sheik

"Final Fight 1-3 Plots"
http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fight
http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fight_2
http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fight_3

"Streets of Rage 1-3 Plots"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Rage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Rage_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Rage_3

"Rosalina, Mona, Ashley, and Captain Syrup of the Mario/Wario Universe"
http://www.mariowiki.com/Rosalina
http://www.mariowiki.com/Mona
http://www.mariowiki.com/Ashley_and_Red
http://www.mariowiki.com/Captain_Syrup

"Catwoman in Batman: Arkham City"
http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Catwoman_%28Batman:_Arkham_City%29

"Krystal and Dinosaur Planet"
http://rareminion.com/dp.html
http://starfox.wikia.com/wiki/Krystal

"Betilla and Barbara from Rayman series"
 http://rayman.wikia.com/wiki/Betilla
http://rayman.wikia.com/wiki/Barbara

"Tomb Raider Reboot Plot"
http://laracroft.wikia.com/wiki/Tomb_Raider_(2013)

"DKC 2 & 3 Plots"
http://donkeykong.wikia.com/wiki/Donkey_Kong_Country_2:_Diddy's_Kong_Quest
http://donkeykong.wikia.com/wiki/Donkey_Kong_Country_3:_Dixie_Kong%27s_Double_Trouble

"Violent Storm Plot"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Storm

"Girl's Garden Plot"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl's_Garden

"Tawna and Coco from Crash series"
http://crashbandicoot.wikia.com/wiki/Tawna_Bandicoot
http://crashbandicoot.wikia.com/wiki/Coco_Bandicoot

"Jade and Double H from Beyond Good & Evil"
http://beyondgoodandevil.wikia.com/wiki/Jade
http://beyondgoodandevil.wikia.com/wiki/Double_H

"Elise from Sonic 2006"
http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Princess_Elise_the_Third

"Zia from Bastion"
http://bastion.wikia.com/wiki/Zia

"Alisia from Alisia Dragoon (in the Japanese version, she is tasked with saving her tortured father)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisia_Dragoon

"Alice from American McGee's Alice series"
http://alice.wikia.com/wiki/Alice_Liddell

"The Not-So-Secret History of Super Mario Bros. 2"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/04/super-mario-bros-2/

"Kratos and Marcus Fenix"
http://godofwar.wikia.com/wiki/Kratos
http://gearsofwar.wikia.com/wiki/Marcus_Michael_Fenix

"Kya from Kya: Dark Lineage"
http://kyadarklineage.wikia.com/wiki/Kya

"TVTropes on Excuse Plots, Badass Damsel, Damsel in Distress, and Unfortunate Implications"
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExcusePlot
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DamselInDistress?from=Main.DistressedDamsel
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassDamsel