There are a lot of discussions we’ve had in the mainstream games space that, despite raging for years on end, never produced any informative conclusions. At least, not any that entered the popular consciousness. Among these discussions were the debates over women’s depiction in games. How you approach analyses of media determines the results you get from those analyses, and too often people started talking about female characters in the medium with no good faith intentions, with the incorrect idea that there is a single feminist position on women in media, and while throwing around all sorts of terminology and concepts without a solid understanding of what they entail. So, we’re going to go into this retrospective calmly and honestly, and we’re going to start by making sure we understand the vocabulary.
We define objects by the fact that they don’t have desires, emotions, or agency, whereas people have all of those qualities. If I say “You turn on the lamp” or “You button your shirt”, you can identify yourself as the person in that story and the lamp or shirt as the object because a person gets to act while an object can only be acted upon. The lamp and the shirt do not have wants and cannot exercise will over you, the same way you do over them, which is what makes them objects. When we use the term “objectification”, we’re talking about the process of taking people and treating them as objects by denying their agency and by putting them in situations where people act upon them, but they do not get to act. Sexual objectification is denying such agency and personhood within a sexual context. Catcalling qualifies as sexual objectification because in that scenario the catcallers act on the catcalled party by using them for their aesthetic pleasure and by talking openly to the catcalled person without that person initiating the interaction, willingly participating, or having their desires considered. The catcalled person is treated much like a painting or poster: there are for the purposes of consumption and nothing else. Remember, we draw a distinction between humans and objects, and so all instances of objectification, including this one, are inherently dehumanising.
Feminist literary and film theories identify that creators may objectify their female characters through failing to let those characters act under their own willpower and through setting them up to be acted upon primarily or solely by an audience or other characters. Conventionally, those are male characters or an assumed male audience. Say a film has a female character have sex with a male protagonist while making it clear that this fulfils the man’s desires, but that that film doesn’t pay any attention to the female character’s wants. This is sexually objectifying because the sexual encounter is about this man exerting his sexual will and fulfilling his erotic wishes, while the woman is treated as an effective non-character, existing in the scene only for his use. A camera which sweeps over a woman’s body and doesn’t fall on her facial expressions is sexually objectifying because it asks an audience to use her for their visual gratification without letting them see her face and therefore emotional state, the most humanising aspect of any person. The cinematography invites us to appreciate her much the same way we talked about appreciating that painting.
Some people would take a hardline stance against any sexual objectification, but the overall feminist complaint is not that media has sexually objectified a woman or a few women, but that the practice has traditionally been so common that the default, and arguably, the prevailing way that media represents women is as pornographic or aesthetic consumables rather than people. You can see this frequently pop up in the costuming of female characters in video games. Good character design and animation are about the clothing, posing, and movement of a character acting as expressive of who they are, whether that involves the hulking stride of a warrior Orc or the busted chassis of a worn-out robot. Yet, frequently, female character designs consist of an overt sexual element whether or not that character has an overtly sexual personality. Again, sexual consumability is treated as the default for women, and the design prioritises the wants of an assumed heterosexual male audience higher than the female character getting to express herself.
Additionally, feminists observe that men, on the whole, are not treated in the same manner. MMOs often provide illuminating side-by-sides that show how women are designed in comparison to their male counterparts. You’ll also notice from the above examples that as one party is sexually objectified, another is sexually empowered. The catcaller gets to realise his sexual desires as those of the catcalled woman are ignored, and the person attracted to the objectified female avatars gets to see their wants represented and fulfilled while most female players don’t. To have agency is to get to express your desires and realise them in the world, and the more ability you have to do that, the more powerful you are, and the more power you have over other people. This empowerment is not, on the whole, reserved for women. There is no high profile female-led equivalent of the sex minigames from God of War or the myriad strip club scenes in games like Duke Nukem Forever, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Hitman: Absolution.
Armed with this understanding of sexual objectification and empowerment, we can sort many video game characters into the corresponding categories of sexually objectified and sexually empowered. For most characters, you can do this without a second thought: Kratos is sexually empowered, Kitana is sexually objectified; Duke Nukem is empowered, Mai Shiranui is objectified. But when we look at a character like Bayonetta, it becomes far harder to get a solid read. Bayonetta is the titular star of a 2009 hack-and-slash title from Platinum Games. An “Umbran” witch fighting the troops of heaven, Bayonetta is sassy, self-assured, and sexually forthright. Every area of her clothing either sticks to her skin or shows it off, and her proportions are impossibly idealised. The same spells that destroy her enemies remove her clothing, just for a brief instant. Whatever your immediate reaction to Bayonetta may be, we can’t use simple heuristics to drop her into the empowered box or the objectified box, and so, we have to probe deep into our understanding of character and feminist theory to interpret her. This is a constructive exercise because it helps us not just to get closer to one of gaming’s most flamboyant personalities but also to broaden our understanding of sexuality and women in games as a whole.
Of course, certain people either don’t want anyone to perform this deconstruction or don’t believe in it. They argue that whatever you might find out by analysing Bayonetta, the analysis itself is pointless and any conclusions you come to should be ignored. I’m not going to cover every “Don’t attempt serious criticism of video games” argument here as it would need an article of its own, but we are going to look over some common arguments used to dismiss inspections of Bayonetta.
Argument #1: “Bayonetta can’t be sexist because she was designed by a woman”.
The character designer on Bayonetta was female artist Mari Shimazaki, and while the feminist opinion is that, on the whole, more women in creative positions will lead to better representation of women in media, the belief is not that individual women aren’t capable of actions that may harm themselves or other women. Feminism observes that women are brought up in a society which tends to situate men above women and propagate sexist attitudes, and so, acknowledges that it’s entirely possible for women to adopt those attitudes and echo them back through their actions; this is the infamous “internalised misogyny”. So, by explaining that a woman created Bayonetta, that doesn’t put up a forcefield against feminist complaint. We must still appraise the character to know whether she is a positive depiction of women; we can’t use her creator as a proxy for her. Although, it’s a little more complicated than that because to say “Bayonetta was invented by a woman” is a myopic way of understanding how characters in games are created and portrayed.
Yes, character artists play a core role in the creation of characters, but creative leads frequently influence such designs, designers often decide the set of actions characters express themselves through, camera programmers and directors decide the framing characters receive, writers determine how they speak and how the larger work treats them, voice actors add their own flair in how they’re brought to life, and the workflow efficiency or lack of it that producers put forth can be the difference between a vividly-sculpted character and one that needed more time on the drawing board. Even this is a somewhat simplified version of the factors that go into creating a character.
All in all, while Bayonetta is less likely to be objectified than other characters because a woman created her, this is not a guarantee of it, and while we should recognise a female character artist’s pioneering work in the medium, we cannot hold her alone responsible for who Bayonetta is and how the game frames her, whether that character and framing are empowering or disempowering.
Argument #2: “Bayonetta is not a real woman, and so her mistreatment shouldn’t be taken seriously”.
Of course, fictional characters, by definition, are not real, but no school of media criticism has ever claimed that this is why the critique of them was important. If you wanted to, you could say that none of the characters in fiction exist, and so we shouldn’t pay attention to or invest in any of them, but we understand that even though the characters we play and which artists create are illusions, those illusions have real-world implications. Even if a character is fictional, the emotions we feel when watching or interacting with them are real, they convey real messages, and they can express the perspective of real artists behind them. It’s important to explore women in games because we learn how such games make female players feel and what messages about women games communicate.
Argument #3: “It’s inappropriate to criticise Bayonetta’s dress and behaviours because every woman has the right to dress and act how they want”.
So, there’s a version of this argument that works. We should not say that Bayonetta is anti-feminist because, within the diegesis, she wears revealing clothing and acts flirtatiously; that would be slut-shaming, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a feminist critic making that point. This argument ends up with the opposite problem to #2; while #2 attempts to view Bayonetta through a lens which can’t talk about her within any context of reality, this argument can’t acknowledge Bayonetta as a fictional construct. Bayonetta did not dress and pose herself in that, as an imaginary character, she has no ability to do so; this process was carried out by her, largely male, creators. This is why the feminist criticism of Bayonetta is not aimed fundamentally at what Bayonetta has done but on the actions of the people who created her. Copy-and-paste for all other female characters in games. In the truest sense, Bayonetta, and all other female characters cannot act but can only be acted upon, and seen through this lens are all objects. But how her creators choose to act upon her carries an emotional impact and a message about women and sexual politics to the audience. On these grounds, it’s worthy of criticism.
So we’ve dealt with arguments that try to avoid inspecting Bayonetta, let’s look at some arguments which actually examine her character. If our goal is to find out whether Bayonetta is sexually empowered or sexually objectified then we need to mull over whether Bayonetta is a character who gets to use her sexuality to change the world around her, has her sexual desires fulfilled, and is recognised as having independent goals and feelings from other characters, or whether she is used for satisfying the sexual desires of others. But just as there are flawed arguments that try to dismiss any analysis of Bayonetta, there are also iffy arguments that interpret her character hard and fast without any real thought.
If we want to do the bare minimum, we could say that we can tell Bayonetta is a sexually empowered character because she is sexual and empowered, but this would misconstrue the concept of sexual empowerment. Sexual empowerment comes from a character being able to find agency through their sexuality, and while many female characters in games are sexual and empowered, their means of empowerment are often coincidental to their sexual elements. Characters like Ivy Valentine in Soul Calibur or Joanna Dark in Perfect Dark can’t evade danger and take down enemies because of their sexuality; they do it through the combat tools at their disposal and their capability with those tools. Likewise, Bayonetta kicking ass in combat makes her a strong female character, but that in itself is not a commentary on her sexuality. How her sexuality intersects with that combat skill is, however, a topic we’ll get to.
An equally shallow read is that Bayonetta is a sexually objectified character because she has overtly sexual features to her. It’s a rare complaint, and more nuanced feminist positions are often misrepresented as constituting this position, but I’ve seen genuine versions of it come up before. If you’re reading this, you understand by this point that a character engaging sexually with other characters can be objectified in that role, but as with many Bond-style playboys in fiction, they can also be empowered. I think that when any sexual representation is assumed to default to an objectified representation, it’s because some people are so used to seeing media sexually objectify women that they think that’s the only sexual representation of women that there is. In her article, Femme Doms of Videogames: Bayonetta Doesn’t Care If She’s Not Your Kink, critic Maddy Myers writes:
“Part of the bias against Bayonetta is due to our own anti-sex baggage as a society (at least, here in the States) — but an even bigger part, I think, is that videogame criticism just isn’t ready to talk about Bayonetta. You can tell, given critics’ frequent usage of the phrase “male gaze,” that we’re still a little bit far behind when it comes to understanding feminist media criticism, and the concept of sex-positivity in general might be a little too advanced in level for game criticism”.
While I think the sex-negative interpretation of Bayonetta is counter-productive, I also think it’s important to empathise with women coming from this perspective as they often reach this place by being told that their gender’s sexuality is a dirty, unacceptable aberration. None the less, this view risks running us aground because if we think that any female sexual expression in media is problematic then we demonise women’s sexuality. Putting a moratorium on depicting women’s sexuality in media denies their individual expression in the same way that making them into fetish objects does. Overwhelmingly, feminism is not against women taking a sexual role in media; it just thinks that the current sexual roles for women are mostly dehumanising.
So how might Bayonetta be fighting against that tide? The proposed answer is this: In a subversion of typical female character design, Bayonetta’s sexual fashion is not an arbitrary accessory to her personality and actions but a mirror of them. Her revealing and skintight clothing is an accurate expression of a very real sexual fearlessness in her. More than that, the dominatrix styling to her dress suggests that she is not just sexual but sexually in charge: empowered. This BDSM theming makes only too much sense for an action game looking for a sexual angle. “Action” frequently translates to violence and BDSM is at the intersection of violence and sexuality.
So Bayonetta spanks enemy angels and frequently doesn’t just defeat them but leaves them humiliatingly outclassed and trapped in medieval torture devices. The most cataclysmic of her attacks are referred to as “climaxes”, and for both standard blows and devastating finishers, Bayonetta removes her clothes and reforms them into fists, boots, and even animals which lash out at the enemy. Her striptease and her suggestive outfit are literally weapons. As Bayonetta is in control of the removal and reapplication of her clothing, it creates an image not of a female protagonist dressed by lustful male developers but of Bayonetta dressing and undressing herself according to her own desires. Writing about the title in GamePro, critic Leigh Alexander states:
“Bayonetta takes the video game sexy woman stereotype from object to subject, and it’s tremendously empowering. […] With this unique theme, the game itself is an artistic representation of the concept that female sexuality is its own kind of weapon”.
As with any character, it matters not just what Bayonetta is doing, but the attitude with which she is doing it, and she shows both pleasure in her sexual actions and erotic satisfaction in her combat. Our librarian antihero sachets across the battlefield and makes elegant, acrobatic manoeuvres as she fights. As sociologist and game critic Katherine Cross puts it:
“The lines and arches of her performance are there to communicate a dominatrix’s unique form of dominion, it is a literalization of sexual conquest but with a woman doing the conquering”.
As Bayonetta moves and acts, she also makes suggestive quips towards the angels she opposes, and there is never a scenario in which a male character manages to use her as eye candy or get one over on her. Enemies quake in her presence, her sidekick Enzo looks like a bumbling bag of nerves compared to her, her suitor Luka is always one step behind, and she and Rodin are mutually badass. In Bayonetta’s dress, speech, and combat she acts rather than being acted upon and so we can consider her categorically empowered rather than objectified. To quote game developer Alicia Andrew:
“To me, Bayonetta owns her sexuality. It seems, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that the tight pants, the flirty quips, the languid posing, are all that character’s choice. Bayonetta, the character, enjoys her sexuality. She is choosing to display it in this manner, and is inviting you in on the fun. It’s wonderfully refreshing to have a character that seems in control of her sexy bits. She’s not a [sic] inanimate object with breasts heaving in the wind, but a woman flirting. To me that’s sexy done right”.
Not only is Bayonetta’s sexual independence and her ownership of her sexuality unique in video games, but the title’s frank depiction of a woman taking pleasure in sexual conquest also breaks a long-held societal taboo. Additionally, we can see that Bayonetta does not just project an image of a sexually empowered woman but is uniquely positioned to help women feel sexually empowered by letting them step into her shoes and become one with her through the interactivity of the medium. Not every woman is going to find being Bayonetta empowering, what’s empowering is highly personal, but for those who do find themselves feeling elevated by occupying this protagonist’s towering form, they’re experiencing a kind of empowerment that would not be possible in film, literature, music, etc.
But as you may have already guessed, it’s a little more complicated than this. Bayonetta may be a domineering, sadistic woman, but many people would be attracted to that archetype of a female character without empathising with her sexually, turning her into an object of sexual desire. A potential red flag is that while most games advocating for even slightly progressive gender politics are usually met with roaring waves of backlash, Bayonetta has been embraced by the action game mainstream, so how sure can we be that it’s subverting traditional, objectifying sexual fantasies in games instead of playing into them? It’s worth reviewing some of the comments made about the character by male Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya:
“I strongly feel that women outside should dress like [Bayonetta]. Like, when she does a hair attack, you’d see the skin. I want women to wear fashion like that”. -Source
“I would say [my favourite scene] is the scene where Joy first appears in the game, with Bayonetta and her impostor getting into a pose battle. That was my way of expressing the feminine notion that, to one woman, all other women are enemies. Even women walking by each other will check out what the other is wearing, and might smolder a bit with antagonism. Women are scary”. -Source
“[You] will be able to see what everybody in the team likes in a girl from the finished project”. -Source
There are more quotes like this. Just as Bayonetta being designed by a woman doesn’t make her empowering to women by default, her game being directed by a man capable of some profound sexism doesn’t make Bayonetta sexist by default. The point here is that while Bayonetta is meant to be rebelling against typical heterosexual male fetishism in games, Kamiya’s quotes show that the character is perfectly capable of fulfilling straight male desires in the same way that other sexually objectified women in games do. I would not say that, during the regular play, the game overtly presents Bayonetta as nothing more than a focus for the player’s lust, but it’s worth keeping in mind that that’s one way the player can approach the game and that the game does little to dissuade them from treating Bayonetta that way. And while we’ve talked about Bayonetta’s dress and her power over it, my earlier statements apply more to Bayonetta’s standard outfit because the control she has over her identity evaporates as we unlock and equip new costumes.
We can fill out Bayonetta’s closet with everything from swimsuits to skimpy sportswear and while being able to dress the character may help some women players sexually express themselves through her, it does remove sexual agency from Bayonetta in that she is no longer dressing herself. These fetishistic costumes are not only applied by the player, but like the sexualising dress we mentioned above, frequently clash with Bayonetta’s personality. She loses her BDSM edge and adopts the visual markers of traditional fetish objects. For heterosexual male players in particular, they can use this feature of the game to string Bayonetta about like a sexual puppet instead of her acting as an independent agent. Which brings up a question: To what extent do we control the player character and to what extent do we embody them? The answer has always remained ambiguous to me, but it’s relevant as it decides to what extent Bayonetta is a vessel for our agency, acting as an agent in the game, and to what extent we operate on her, making her into an object.
We’ve also yet to talk about what happens during cutscenes, where the spirit of player agency leaves Bayonetta, and she is entirely under the director’s control. Remember the earlier example of how a camera can objectify a character by treating them as more of a body than a person? This repeatedly happens when control is taken away from us as the camera glides between Bayonetta’s legs and over her curves. It’s worth noting that even here, there’s ambiguity, as sometimes Bayonetta faces the camera and poses for it as it drinks her in, showing that she has at least some say in her portrayal. In other sequences, she’s dancing as the camera takes its voyeuristic shots of her, but there’s no indication that she’s dancing for the camera. In other situations still, Bayonetta isn’t trying to put on any kind of show, but the camera still crawls and swoops over her physical features. wundergeek from the feminist blog Go Make Me a Sandwich has compiled some of these potentially objectifying shots here, although it’s also worth noting that they use the term “male gaze” to describe such cinematography which is a phrase that’s generally fallen out of favour with feminists. Refer back to Maddy Myers’s article for an explanation why.
If, after all this appraisal and studying, you still can’t neatly sort Bayonetta into the category of “sexually empowered” or “sexually objectified”, you’re in good company, but the studying itself lets us peer into who this character is. Perhaps more than anything else, I hope what I’ve written here serves as evidence that the common view of there being a single feminist position or feminist theory which is applied across all art is false. Katherine Cross put it best:
“[T]hough there will always be one small cadre of feminists or another to protest [sexually empowered female characters] at every turn, that should never be cause for despair nor for a retreat into the tired old excuse “no matter what we do, they’ll complain!” If you care to look, you may find the “they” doing the complaining consists of entirely different people each time with widely disparate political commitments — even if they may all call themselves “feminists.””
In my opinion, it is not simply that it is ambiguous whether Bayonetta is empowered or disempowered but that the extent to which she’s objectified varies a lot between the different game states: whether she is in or out of a cutscene, whether she is using her default outfit or is being dressed by the player. These states are further augmented by how each individual cutscene is directed or how fetishising each costume is. But when Bayonetta is in her own clothes and has the player’s help behind her, she provides many examples of how player agency in games can not just violently empower but also sexually empower, and how the two can overlap. We just don’t receive many indications of whether we’re meant to use her sexual boldness to objectify her or treat her as an erotic avatar.
Media typically relies on its whole audience having some shared reaction or understanding that they can work from. When there is a greedy, egocentric character, the writers can safely assume that the audience will root against them. When there is a multiplayer game that scores players, developers can comfortably expect that every player will want a higher score than their opponents. Viewers, readers, or players may take different positions on the details or might find the work so boring they don’t care about it, but if the work operates as intended, audiences should be able to take a predictable stance towards the most fundamental aspects of it. But Bayonetta is an outlier. The game fundamentally hinges around you engaging with this sexually explicit character, but audiences can have exactly opposite opinions on how to view her while still remaining engaged. For some, Bayonetta is the woman they’d want to be, for others she’s the pin-up they’d want on their wall, and for others still, they have different feelings about the character at different times. Bayonetta may not be the most nuanced protagonist in video games, but paradoxically, she’s capable of provoking these highly nuanced reactions because human sexual interpretation exists in many forms. Thanks for reading.
