Leo D.M.J. Aurini - August 03, 2013


The Predominance of Male Protagonists


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

152.62418

Word count

2,783

Sentence count

190

Harmful content

Misogyny

23

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

21

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Feminists are upset that most of the protagonists in the video game shown at E3 were male. What does this say about us as a culture? Why do we prefer male protagonists? And why do we care so much about them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Recently there was some furor coming from the feminists over the fact that most of the 1.00
00:00:08.340 protagonists of the video game shown at E3 were male. Now this is not going to be a video
00:00:15.440 addressing them. Quite frankly, feminist women are just women that want to complain about 1.00
00:00:20.680 something. They go searching high and low for anything that they can take issue with 0.85
00:00:26.100 and they complain about it and they scream and they try and fill up that void in their
00:00:30.300 soul and they get free money from the government for it. They're insane. I'm not going to be 0.99
00:00:35.560 addressing feminists. However, this topic of the male protagonist is not something that
00:00:41.920 I've seen properly addressed. Notably, Maddox put out a video about this saying that essentially
00:00:50.160 if you women want more female protagonists, start building games instead of complaining 1.00
00:00:56.280 about it. Which is basic common sense, but again misses the root of the issue. And that
00:01:03.000 root is the predominance of male protagonists. Not just in video games, but in cinema, in
00:01:08.400 novels, in legends as well. Heck, right now, I'm in the early development stages of a video
00:01:14.880 game with a female developer, an old school geek girl, and she wants the game to have a 1.00
00:01:21.000 male protagonist. It's a widely recognized phenomenon, but very poorly misunderstood because we're
00:01:28.860 so incredibly miseducated about reality nowadays. Both men and women tend to prefer male protagonists,
00:01:36.380 and they tend to be harsher and more judgmental of female protagonists. So why is this? Well, let's
00:01:44.380 look at the two basic tropes for most narratives. For most simple stories with a clear protagonist
00:01:52.500 and a clear antagonist. Rescue the princess. Now, rescue the princess, technically speaking,
00:02:00.100 is a relatively new phenomenon. With Beowulf and with Gilgamesh, it used to be rescue the
00:02:05.520 civilization. But let's just stick with it for brevity's sake. Rescue the princess is a story
00:02:12.140 that goes right to the root of who we are as human beings. That the guy wants to go out
00:02:19.260 there and impress the girl and make sure she's safe and fight off anybody that's trying to
00:02:23.420 hurt her. And women love the kind of guy that'll sweep them off their feet, who will take them 1.00
00:02:28.740 on adventures, who will show them new and interesting things. It's just so innate. You constantly see
00:02:36.140 this with the male protagonist. And what happens? What happens when you flip the sexes? What do you
00:02:42.540 get then? Now, the same time that all of these feminists were getting angry about E3, there was 1.00
00:02:49.100 a guy who'd put out a video game. It was an old 8-bit. It was either Legend of Zelda or Donkey Kong,
00:02:55.340 if I recall correctly. And he was putting it together for his young daughter. Now, this guy wasn't
00:03:00.380 any sort of ideologue. He was just a loving father. And he wanted to give his daughter a game where she
00:03:05.180 could identify with the protagonist more easily than she could with Mario. The funny thing, however,
00:03:11.820 is that when he flipped the sexes on this, it wasn't a prince she was rescuing. It was her younger
00:03:20.140 brother. Women don't want the sort of prince that needs to be rescued by them. 1.00
00:03:27.100 And this guy who, you know, just trying to help out his daughter, on a gut level, he could just feel
00:03:34.780 that having her rescue the prince would not engage her. It didn't engage him. It wouldn't engage his
00:03:40.460 young daughter. There is something primal in us that guys want to rescue the princess, but the young
00:03:47.260 girl wanted to rescue her younger brother. Now, what about situations where there is nobody to rescue the
00:03:55.580 princess? What about situations where the princess has to rescue herself? Quite frankly, those are
00:04:02.140 extremely bleak scenarios. When the hero has to go rescue the princess, it's fun and it's heroic and
00:04:09.900 it's escapism. When a princess needs to rescue herself, it's dark, it's grim, it's gritty. All of us,
00:04:20.540 seeing that happen, feel very protective and defensive of the woman. We want to high-five the guy that
00:04:27.580 rescues the princess. We want to help defend the princess that rescues herself. Another major theme
00:04:36.300 that you'll see throughout all these basic narratives is the suffering and sacrifice, and sometimes even the
00:04:42.540 death of the protagonist. That this hero, this guy goes out there and suffers incredibly for his cause,
00:04:50.940 for his society, for what he believes in. And now when we see a guy suffering that much for something he
00:04:57.100 believes in, we're impressed. We admire him. We want to be like him.
00:05:03.660 What about the reverse? What about movies where a woman's suffering? We see a war movie and all of us
00:05:14.780 guys think, can I be that tough? The girls are all crying and they want to go hug a guy after seeing
00:05:20.780 that movie. What happens when we see a movie where a woman is suffering incredible amounts? 1.00
00:05:26.060 Well, look at the movie Submission by Theo Van Gogh, a martyr for Western civilization if there ever was
00:05:36.140 one. This movie, all about the treatment of women in Islamic countries, infuriates us. It fills us with 0.98
00:05:46.620 a righteous anger that anyone's treating women like this. So when a guy in a movie suffers torture and 0.59
00:05:54.940 survives, we admire James Bond for doing that. He's amazing. We all want to be that guy. Women all want
00:06:01.900 to be with him. When we see this happening to a woman where she's enduring incredible suffering
00:06:07.180 for the sake of what's right or for the sake of somebody else, we are infuriated.
00:06:15.500 There is something deep in our biology that sends men out to achieve and to build and accomplish
00:06:23.180 and drives us to be sympathetic to the woman. Men are the respected sex. Women are the sex that we
00:06:31.260 empathize with. So now let's take this and let's put these wheels on the road. Let's take a couple of
00:06:38.860 fairly well-known movies with fairly simple but very well done plots and see what happens when we swap
00:06:46.140 the sexes. The first example, Boondock Saints. This is a great movie with two male protagonists.
00:06:55.820 So right off the bat, Boondock Saints, by the way, is a fun little escapist vigilante style movie.
00:07:03.180 So these two guys wind up taking on the mob and just killing every single bad person that there is in
00:07:09.500 society. The way they get involved in this in the first place is that they're at the bar and one of the
00:07:14.620 mafiosos comes to the old bartender, this old crippled man, and starts threatening him if he doesn't pay up. 0.99
00:07:21.420 And so the two Irish Catholic boys, you know, good young men, they step up to defend the older man.
00:07:29.180 Again, this is something hardwired into our biology, that young men defend the old. 0.99
00:07:35.900 What happens if you swap the sexes all of a sudden? All of a sudden you have a couple of young ladies 1.00
00:07:41.340 defending an old man? That doesn't sit right with us. It doesn't quite process because we all know, 0.95
00:07:48.940 we all know instinctively that an old man, no matter how crippled he is, is supposed to protect
00:07:56.540 young ladies from monsters. Let alone the whole girl power nonsense of seeing a svelte 21 year old 1.00
00:08:04.940 girl take on a hardened mafioso. We also know that doesn't happen. And it takes massive amounts of 1.00
00:08:12.460 propaganda from cartoons to make us even start to believe in that. So right off the bat, you have a
00:08:19.980 very dark setting for this movie. A movie where old men are too cowardly to protect young women and
00:08:26.220 mafiosos just freely prey upon them without caring, without any sense of guilt. When a mafioso beats 0.89
00:08:34.780 up a man or tries to beat him up, that's bad, but it's an adventure story. When a mafioso tries to beat
00:08:42.220 up a woman and doesn't care about it, that's a horrid reality. And so then we see these two guys, 1.00
00:08:49.420 these two young men, go out and decide not just to kill the two mafiosos that were going to beat up 0.99
00:08:54.540 their favorite bar owner, but they take on the whole mob. They get their guns and they start taking
00:08:58.860 everybody down. And they recruit their friend, who eventually dies before the end of the movie.
00:09:06.780 Now, the friend they recruit is a bit of an idiot. He's a bit of a comic relief. 1.00
00:09:12.700 What happens if we keep this friend but have the two women? First of all, we can't make this friend 0.99
00:09:19.260 a woman because seeing a woman get shot, have her head blown open, that's not a little bit sad that
00:09:25.980 establishes how dangerous the bad guys are. That's, oh my god, that's horrifying. The recent superhero,
00:09:34.060 realistic superhero movie had that happen, where the manic girl got her head blown off at the end of 0.99
00:09:38.780 the movie. And it emphasized that this is not a game. This is not silly. This is not fun. This is
00:09:44.220 violent, brutal reality. In Boondock Saints, when their buddy got his head blown off, it made the bad
00:09:51.580 guy's a little bit scarier, but it wasn't horrible. It wasn't tragic or sickening. And the guy was a bit
00:09:58.220 of a douche that deserved it. So now, we team this douchey guy up with the two girl power girls. What do we 1.00
00:10:07.180 have now? Either he's going to be the comic relief following them around and doing whatever they say,
00:10:15.660 and then when he gets shot, instead of being tragic, he completely deserves it for being so incompetent. 0.78
00:10:21.580 That these two 21-year-old girls are better gunslingers than him? We have no respect for him. 0.98
00:10:27.500 We have no empathy for him. The fact that he's following them around and taking their orders
00:10:32.300 because he's that incompetent, that's why he got shot. He deserved it. Completely different feeling 0.97
00:10:38.380 than in Boondock Saints, where the two saints got this dumb guy in over his head, and you feel bad 0.99
00:10:46.380 for the guy. They shouldn't have let him accompany them, but he insisted. You like the guy, even though 0.97
00:10:53.340 he's a douche. Whereas with the women, you just feel contempt for him. Not to mention the, or, oh, 0.96
00:11:00.540 the other way you can interpret this character is that he becomes the valiant defender of these women.
00:11:05.580 So instead of being a douche comic relief character, he now has become a noble knight character that dies
00:11:13.180 defending them. Not the same story. Not the same lighthearted romp. And overall,
00:11:21.660 the story just winds up being darker. You have the society where two young women have to take out all 1.00
00:11:27.180 these evil mafiosos. The police don't care about young women getting assaulted by them. Nobody cares. 1.00
00:11:33.900 The very last scene in the movie, which is a reporter doing the man on the street thing. Everybody's
00:11:38.700 debating over vigilantism. That doesn't work when you have two young women. Because every single guy
00:11:45.660 that said he supported them... Pussy. Can't defend yourself. You need a couple of girls to risk their 1.00
00:11:53.100 life to defend you. Screw off. Hand back your man card. You're not part of civilization anymore.
00:11:59.020 You swap the sexes in Boondock Saints. And what was a fun little action movie becomes extremely dark. It
00:12:10.780 becomes more like Sin City, which is a fine movie, but it's not the same thing as Boondock Saints.
00:12:16.140 So that's a masculine, masculine protagonist. It's not impossible to have a female protagonist that is 0.72
00:12:28.140 loved and amazing. And the best example I have ever seen of the female protagonist is Aliens,
00:12:35.580 with Ripley in it. So Aliens, first of all, it's set in a very dark reflection of our modern corporate
00:12:44.460 era, where the corporation completely dominates. There's absolutely no spirit of civilization left.
00:12:50.620 There's no nation state. There's just the corporation. So Ripley is established as a very
00:12:59.420 devoted mother who is forced into working this soulless corporate job to support her family. 0.91
00:13:07.020 And that's how the whole first movie happens. She has to be a roughneck on a freighter, 0.99
00:13:12.540 rather than being with her children the way she wants to be. Except the movie starts out,
00:13:17.340 and we find out that she's been in her little escape pod for so long, that her daughter actually
00:13:23.340 grew old and died. And Ripley is broken by the fact that she completely missed her daughter's life.
00:13:31.180 And so then Ripley is hired to be a consultant for this batch of space marines that are going back to
00:13:38.300 the planet that she found the alien ship on. And here again, we see that we have rough men defending
00:13:47.340 her. And one lesbian. But that's the thing. She is not going there to be an action hero. She's not an 0.96
00:13:53.260 action hero at the beginning of the movie. She's going there to be defended by them. And she doesn't
00:13:58.700 get directly involved in anything until she finds Newt. Until she finds the little girl, the last
00:14:04.780 remaining colonist that's been hiding from the aliens all this time, and becomes a surrogate
00:14:09.100 mother to her. And finally, at the very end, when all the men have been killed, see, once again,
00:14:14.780 if the princess has to rescue herself, it's a really screwed up situation. Things have gone completely
00:14:21.420 pear-shaped. All of the soldiers are dead, except for one of the pilots. And she has to rescue her
00:14:27.340 surrogate daughter. She is a mother. It is a completely female role. And what more? Who is she fighting 1.00
00:14:33.900 against at the end of the movie? But the alien queen mother. It's a story of two mothers fighting
00:14:41.580 to protect their brood in a world that has been so devastated there aren't any men left. This is why
00:14:49.020 it's a great horror story. Because the killing of the space marines, and on the queen's side, the defeating
00:14:55.260 of all of her drones, establishes just how bad and costly this war is. If women need to start picking 1.00
00:15:04.140 up rifles to defend the nation state, you know the war is going terribly.
00:15:11.980 So let's bring this back around to video games, finally. Video games are primarily wish fulfillment.
00:15:20.140 They're an interactive experience. Some of them can be incredibly deep. But generally, they're wish
00:15:26.220 fulfillment. We want to see movies about a guy that we want to be like as men, and that women want to
00:15:33.020 be with. And in video games, we want to play that guy. Now in some games, like the RPGs, you can choose
00:15:39.820 a male or female protagonist. And you have to pretend you're living in some alternate reality where men
00:15:45.820 will just go up and attack a woman and feel okay about that. As opposed to Brienne of Tarth in Game
00:15:54.060 of Thrones, she might be a really tough warrior, but no man is going to feel proud for beating her. 0.95
00:15:59.900 So none of them want to fight her. It's a lose-lose scenario. In these video games, you have male
00:16:04.220 raiders, you have female raiders, and you're just killing them left, right, and center. When in a proper 1.00
00:16:10.860 narrative, the killing of female characters should be far darker and more brutal than the killing of
00:16:17.820 male characters. And that's why, in the end, so many of these characters are male. Because there can
00:16:25.500 be great female protagonists, but they are extremely rare. Either they're in an extremely desperate
00:16:32.380 scenario where there aren't any men left to help them, which is hard to establish,
00:16:36.700 or it's a very dark horror game. It's a movie like Submission. It's not a positive experience,
00:16:47.020 much like everything Margaret Atwood has written, for instance. And it really begs the question,
00:16:52.940 again, going back to Margaret Atwood, the fact that her universes, her novels, are so misogynistic
00:17:01.180 that they'd be hard to believe in if you didn't know anything about the Middle East.
00:17:05.260 But they're certainly hard to believe in in North America.
00:17:11.980 So at the end of the day, people mainly want to play an active role. They want to rescue the
00:17:18.700 princess. It's an easier narrative to write. It's an easier narrative to understand.
00:17:25.580 And both men and women prefer this story. That's the real reason behind it. It goes right down to the
00:17:34.220 base of our biology. And the fact that we don't understand this anymore, like I said, takes 12,
00:17:41.180 16 years of just constant educational brainwashing to make us think that men and women are interchangeable,
00:17:48.780 when we're so obviously not. And this really goes to show why Taming of the Shrew is the one play by the
00:17:58.140 Bard that nobody wants to put on TV anymore. Take care of yourselves, folks. The Reading Out. 1.00