Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

re: False Dichotomy — my point is that "this is bad writing" is a literary judgment, not a feminist one. If you say "establishing a character as evil purely by showing a single instance of them Kicking the Dog is lazy writing and results in villains that are flat, uninteresting characters" I can agree with you wholeheartedly, and no one has said anything about feminism at all.

re: beating up women worse than beating up men — Who said anything about beating up women being worse? I didn't. Sarkeesian didn't that I recall. Maybe it's implicit and we're supposed to assume it? But if that's what she's getting at, that seems like exactly the sort of thing she should specifically call out.

re: beating up women being shorthand for evil — beating up women is shorthand for evil. So is beating up men, children, or animals. Beating up anything for no good reason is a fairly solid indication for "this guy is a jerk and you'd probably feel pretty good about punching him in the face".

re: sexist tropes as patterns, not individual instances — I'm talking about patterns of tropes within a given game, not within the industry as a whole. That's why I said "If it's part of a pattern of all women in the work being weak and helpless victims, then yeah, that's definitely problematic" (emphasis added). I don't think it's fair to call a game sexist if it has one scene in isolation that can be viewed as sexist, but it's balanced by other scenes that are decidedly feminist. If your game implies, deliberately or not, that all women are weak and helpless and destined to become victims unless protected by men, that's absolutely not okay. If a game shows that some characters need to be helped but others are capable of standing on their own and even helping out others, and there's no gender slant between them, then that's not sexist, even if some of the individual characters needing help are female. In other words, victimized female characters are not inherently sexist. It's only sexist if more victims are female and/or fewer characters that stand on their own (let's call them "heroes" for shorthand) are female.

When you're playing a game, you're playing that game, not browsing over the content produced by the industry as a whole. If the game has an even mix of male and female victims, and male and female heroes, then the overall messages is "men and women are equal". That's good, and should be applauded. Calling a game that is even-handed with genders part of a sexist trend because it has some scenes that seem sexist when viewed in conjunction with other scenes from other games is just cherrypicking. A work deserves to be judged on its own merits, not by comparing specific pieces of it to specific pieces of other works and judging those pieces collectively, separate from the rest of the game they came from.

re: beating women and scumbags — what you were saying vis-a-vis nice guys and normalizing violence against women is that if you portray beating women as equivalent to being evil, then the general populous will believe that only evil people beat women (ie, "That nice guy I know can't have beaten his wife, he's not evil"). What I was arguing is that the opposite is true (ie, "I used to think he was a nice guy, but then I found out he beats his wife, so obviously I was wrong — he's not a nice guy, he's evil"). Your reply to that seems to agree with me (ie, hitting women makes you a scumbag, regardless of anything else) but the tone seems to suggest that you think we're in disagreement.

re: prison rape example — if someone agrees that a thing is a problem but doesn't agree that anything should be done about it, then they're hypocrites (or believe that the solution is worse than the problem, but that's not really relevant to the current discussion). "We shouldn't change bad things, because bad things are bad and that's just how it is" is stupid logic and terrible ethics regardless of media portrayals of those things, so I'm still not seeing how "normalization" of violence against women (which, as far as I can tell, means "portraying violence against women as a thing that happens", which isn't exactly an inaccurate portrayal, given that violence against women is a thing that happens).

re: inevitable goalpost moving — what? You're arguing that portraying violence against women as evil inevitably leads to portraying it as evil... except in certain circumstances? Really? That's a rather extraordinary claim for which you offer precisely no proof.

edited 27th Aug '14 8:40:39 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

What are you talking about? Not only can a minority group force the majority to except change, but history is full of cases where a small minority has actually wielded almost all the power in society, while the vast majority of the population is brutally oppressed. Feudal systems are the obvious examples, but you've also got stuff like North Korea or Apartheid South Africa. In fact, to get more on-topic, don't women make up something like 51% of the population, while men only account for 49%? That makes women the social majority, but that hasn't stopped men from seizing dominance.

edited 27th Aug '14 9:28:56 PM by RavenWilder

"Social majority" means advantaged group. "Minority"is a disadvantaged group. Black Africans are a numerical majority, but social minority. Same as women.

I'll respond to the wall of text tomorrow, if I feel like it. No way I'm doing it on a tablet.

The terms 'majority' and 'minority' in the context of social activism generally refers to the position of social influence and control of a particular group and not necessarily to the numerical amount of the demographic.

The 1% is obviously smaller then the 99% but they still possess the majority of wealth for example.

Edit: oh you beat me to it.

Well I got around to finishing the video and I think it actually makes some pretty fair and valid points.

Games like dishonoured and watchdogs take a cavalier approach to 'adult themes' and plot lines like the forced prostitution yeah still treating it as a run-of-the-mill game scenario.

While much like the stock standard 'rescue the Princess' Excuse Plots it may be an example of lazy writing, if you're going to deal with serious issues poorly you're better off just not dealing with them.

edited 27th Aug '14 9:50:18 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Still a false dichotomy. Something can be both a feminist issue AND bad writing.

I'm not repeating myself on this any further, so if it still isn't understood, I see no point in going further.

"Hitting women is code for evil" is exactly what that is. This isn't about "hitting PEOPLE IN GENERAL" is a code for evil. If hitting women is code for evil, specifically, then that implies that hitting men is not. If that's not so, then this gender distinction is a waste of time, and thus this debate is a waste of time.

Except, no. The entire point being made here is that developers specifically have bad guys beat up women to make them appear more evil than someone who beats up men. You mentioned Hank Pym before, which is a prime example of a writer who knew about this trope and tried to avoid it, to no avail. He specifically said that he didn't want Yellowjacket to "intentionally" hit his wife. Hank Pym did a lot of shady shit in that arc, including betraying his teammates and endanger people so he could pretend to save the day and be a hero. But, hitting his wife, SPECIFICALLY, is the crime that the audience hasn't forgiven.

As I said, even if your opinion is that hitting anyone is just as bad as hitting a woman, the point Sarkeesian is making is that writers do not agree. They see hitting women as a "worse crime" than hitting men, and they will have their villains do that to be more evil.

Again, there's no "sexist meter". You can't "balance" sexism by being sexism in some areas but okay in others. Again, that would be like a guy who holds doors open for women, treats his wife like a queen, but in his spare time campaigns to rid women of the right to vote.

Also, nothing exists in a vacuum. The problem with systemic oppression is NOT in individual elements. It is in a SYSTEM (thus the name "systemic"). You can't add to a problem and then try to look innocent when people call you out on adding to a problem. That logic is like saying you're not hurting the environment by throwing litter in the ocean; yes you are, but you're just one of a billion people doing it. And each individual part adds up to something bad. And we can't stop the bad thing if we can't stop those individual people who think "one more can't hurt" from doing it.

See also: Tropes in Aggregate.

You can't tell people how they can or can't judge a game. Also, the logic you present here is faulty because you're using a false definition of "equality". Equality looks at every single thing, as well as other extenuating circumstances, to judge if the same conditions apply to everyone. Just because a work has an "equal number" of male and female victims does not mean that A) they were victimized exactly the same way, B) for the exact same reasons, C) to the exact same degree. Just to name a few qualifiers.

Your previous statement seemed like you thought that seeing a person as "bad" for beating his wife, even if they're visibly good in all other respects, is wrong and shouldn't be done. It read like you were saying that it's wrong to consider someone a bad person for doing a terrible thing if they do other good things to "balance it out". To which, my point is that social justice is not a karma meter.

See below.

First of all, where's your proof for anything you've said? Don't ask me to step up and go an extra mile that you yourself haven't taken first.

Anyway, that isn't quite what I said. Your argument that "violence against women is seen as wrong" doesn't conflict with its "normalization". And normalization of a bad thing inevitably means that there are conditions in which you "accept" it. You're right in that this makes you a hypocrite, but if I had a nickel for every time a person failed to recognize their hypocrisy, I'd have more money than an oil baron.

Here's one example of it. And this is not an isolated incident. One of the main challenges that anti-violence movements have is the constant apologism that occurs when people start normalizing violence of any kind. When violence is something people consider "just the way it is", that inevitably means that there is some circumstance which, in their mind, they don't see it a big deal as.

edited 28th Aug '14 7:23:15 AM by KingZeal

You can be historically accurate without going overboard. In fact, sometimes being historically accurate is an opportunity to bring up these issues and establish some sort of commentary on how far we've come or still have to go.

I've never played it, but apparently LA Noire focuses on that.

And just because you're in a scifi environment or a futuristic environment doesn't mean that the issues of sexism, racism, and cultural norms is magically going to disappear. Deus Ex, Ghost in the Shell, and others have commented on this very well.

You can display historical accuracy without glamorizing history. And I would find it very unbelievable if issues like sexism or racism magically disappeared in some settings. Take Game of Thrones. It is a completely make believe land with dragons and magic but the relationships are very realistically shaped. The politics and social issues are based on what is recorded across cultures who are at that stage of development.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

re: literary criticism vs feminist criticism false dichotomy — I'm not saying that bad writing and anti-feminist themes are mutually exclusive, I'm saying that Sarkeesian's comments regarding fictional portrayals of violence against women was the former but not the latter. Saying that "using portrayals of violence against women to score cheap Darker and Edgier points is bad writing" is not feminist commentary because it says nothing about how portrayals of violence against women in fiction affects real-life attitudes and behaviors toward women.

re: hitting women is more evil — I'm saying, and I've been saying, that I don't think hitting a woman is worse than hitting a man, but it still makes you an asshole. I'm aware of the concept that hitting a woman is worse than hitting a man, but IIRC Sarkeesian didn't bring that up at all in the video — she simply focused on violence against women, which is legitimate when the subject is feminism. It is the case that developers are having bad people inflict violence on women more often than men because it paints the criminals as being "more evil" that way, then I agree that that is problematic, but that didn't seem to be Sarkeesian's argument. She seemed to be saying "portrayals of violence against women are problematic, full stop".

re: "balancing" sexist content and anti-sexist content — I'm not suggesting that having a sexist message in one scene and a feminist message in another scene is acceptable, or that one somehow cancels out the other. I'm saying that you cannot judge the overall message of a work by looking at one scene. I'm saying that portrayals of violence against women is not, in and of itself, sexist. It's sexist if "victim of violence" is the only role played by women in the work. It's sexist if all the women in the work are victims of violence. But if you both male and female characters as victims, and both male and female characters as heroes, then the work itself is not sexist, because it's treating both genders equally. (Assuming that it is, in fact, treating both equally — I'm fully aware that "oh, she got raped and murdered, but he got roughed up, so that's one male and one female victim of violence, therefore equality" is not legitimate.) What Sarkeesian did in the video is show isolated instances of violence against women, stripped of all context from within the games they came from, and use those to condemn the works as sexist. What I'm arguing is that this is unfair, and the content of a work deserves to be interpreted in the context of the work it is part of, rather than cutting it up to individual chunks and judging each of those independently of one another.

re: normalization of violence against women — I'm still not seeing how the message that "violence against women is wrong and only evil people do it" leads to the belief "violence against women is okay in certain circumstances." Seeing it as "a thing that happens" is a far cry from seeing it as "a thing that's okay" — especially when many of these games show (through their Karma Meter) that not only is committing violence against women evil, but allowing it to happen is evil as well. The message is not just "you shouldn't hurt women" but "you shouldn't let others hurt women, either". (Of course, if victims of violence as just as often men as they are women in these games, then the real message is "you shouldn't hurt people, or let others hurt people" rather than women specifically. But given that, you know, women are people — also reinforced by the game mechanics being identical for male and female victims — the message about women is included in the message about people in general.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

What? Wasn't that literally the entire point of the rest of the video? To explain WHY it was both bad writing and a feminist problem?

"Seemed to be saying?" So was that your interpretation, or are you talking about what she actually said? Because if it's your interpretation, I'm inclined to say you got it wrong. Because, again, the rest of the context doesn't support that.

That isn't true, either. Sexism happens in degrees, not some "all-or-nothing" like you seem to be implying. Something doesn't have to be "completely sexist" or "completely unsexist". It can have subtle sexist elements, with varying degrees of severity. What you're literally saying right now is that if we can't judge an entire work as a whole as sexist, then we shouldn't be judging any sexism in it at all, which is not productive in the slightest. Again, sexism is not an all-or-nothing, and it's not a karma meter. Something can be both progressive in some ways and sexist in others, just like a person can be.

I don't know how I can explain this in any plainer English. Saying "This is bad" does not absolve every other message your work sends. Again, what you are basically saying right now is that if a work points to something and says, "This is bad", then there is literally nothing else that can happen in the work to send a counterproductive message.

I literally DO NOT know how I can make this more clear except by again using the Prison Rape example. People can simultaneously point to it and say that it's wrong, but also say that it's "normal". Your argument right now entirely hinges on the idea that having an action marked on a meter as "evil" means that there is no normalization of it, and I'm trying as hard as I can to explain how faulty that logic is.

Zeal, I'd like you to answer a simple question.

Do you consider the normalization of violence against women an inherently negative value?

Bear with me here.

edited 28th Aug '14 2:07:10 PM by TotemicHero

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Who wouldnt?

That. I wasn't aware that was even a question.

Then let me ask one more question.

Do you believe that any depiction of violence against women normalizes it, regardless of how it's portrayed? (I think you did answer this one in an above post, but I'm asking for clarity.)

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

No, it doesn't.

Other circumstances, often ambiguous ones, are what contribute to "normalization". In this case, we're talking about violence against women (specifically women) as a shorthand for "this guy is evil". That does contribute to normalization, but it's more than simply "violence+female victim".

EDIT: FYI, in ten minutes, I have to leave my school, and as my home computer is very unreliable, I probably won't be able to make long replies.

edited 28th Aug '14 2:22:27 PM by KingZeal

She does very little explaining at all — which is what I've been complaining about this whole time. The first ten minutes of the video is essentially nothing but "here are a bunch of examples of violence against women in video games", without much else to explain why this is bad and what alternatives creators should use instead. About the only time she ties it back to real-world behavior is at the end, with the normalization discussion — and I think it's pretty clear at this point that I didn't get much out of that.

I'm talking about the message that she, as far as I can tell, is trying to pass along to her viewers. One of my consistent complaints about Sarkeesian has been that the message of her videos isn't actually very clear, so I said "seemed to be saying" to acknowledge the fact that I'm not certain I'm understanding her point correctly.

That's not what I'm saying at all. Of course there are more subtle shades than "totally 100% deplorably sexist" and "absolutely completely problem-free". My point is that depictions of violence against women are not inherently sexist. They're sexist if violence is only committed against women in the work or if all women in the work are victims of violence. But if a work shows a female victim in one scene and a male victim in another, and has both male and female heroes as well, then that work is not sexist despite having portrayals of violence against women.

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I don't see how the message "violence against women is bad" inevitably leads to the message "violence against women is okay sometimes", which is what you claimed at the bottom of this post.

edited 28th Aug '14 2:36:46 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

As I said before, that's not true. Sexism isn't a numbers game. There all sorts of factors that can make something unbalanced, unfair, or biased for or against a gender. There's danger in claiming something to be "only sexist if", because the entire problem with prejudice is that it appears in ways that people don't notice.

Because "against women" creates a new condition for its badness.

"Violence is bad" already comes with the problem of defining "violence", because people who wish to do violence and avoid consequence will redefine the term to make exceptions for themselves. For example, "it's not violence because I didn't hit them, I just grabbed their arm firmly".

Adding "against women" adds another condition that will inevitably fall into the same problem. Because people will do anything they can to dehumanize the victim, or deny her femininity, to justify their actions. This is especially problematic because if that dehumanizing and de-feminizing is accepted as justification, it then applies to all women as a whole. "She's a bitch, so I'm justified in hitting her" then creates the condition "don't act like a bitch or else getting hit is justified" for all women.

---

The previous two responses will have to wait until I watch the video again so I can see what you're trying to say.

edited 28th Aug '14 2:48:22 PM by KingZeal

Yeah, for real. As someone with a formal background in literary criticism, I can say that's precisely the point, and what Zeal is saying is and has been correct. This isn't hard to understand. Social issues do not have to overlap with structural issues, but in our academic studies, the two tend to go hand and hand.

Twilight, for example, has been critically evaluated for its structural problems (pacing, syntax, grammar, poor character development, plot holes, etc.), but it's troubling portrayal of women is closely tied to, but not intrinsic to, those structural concerns. But in my experience, people with a poor grasp of writing mechanics also tend to have a world view that could use some tidying up. And as Zeal already said, addressing the structural concerns along with the social concerns is not wrong when engaging in critical analysis. It's not going to hurt to tackle both, and doing so is a major component of literary analysis or any media analysis.

I haven't watched the video yet, but if Jovian is complaining about the derth of critical analysis (which I'm pretty sure he is) rather than the mutual exclusivity between structural integrity and social values, then I can (admittedly with some prejudice) see what he means because Sarkeesian always gives me that feeling that she's not quite diving into the subject matter as deeply as she could. When I watch her videos, I find myself thinking "yes, yes, push that idea further because you're onto something big here", and she doesn't quite deliver that finishing blow that brings the social issue full circle. I'll check out the video when I get the chance.

edited 28th Aug '14 4:24:08 PM by Aprilla

Let's approach this from the other direction, then. Do you think it's possible for a work to portray violence against women without that work being sexist? Without that individual scene being sexist? What would be required to accomplish this?

So what's the solution to that? Never depict violence against women in any form? Only depict violence against women when the woman is willing and able to fight back and overcome her attacker? Both of those solutions have seriously problems — ones that I would find more problematic than "some people will apply liberal amounts of doublethink to the work's message to justify their own evil actions".

Pretty much this, yes.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Allow me to reemphasize the point that we were discussing: namely, the pattern of women being attacked to indicate that a character is evil because it is specifically a woman being attacked. The bolded part is sexist straight out because it is specifically exploiting a gender stereotype.

If you eliminate that bolded part, you have also eliminated the scene being sexist for that specific reason. But, let me qualify: you still do not get a "now it's totally unsexist" bypass. It could still (possibly) be sexist for other reasons not discussed here.

And if the next question is "Well if it can't ever not be sexist, then why bother trying?", the answer is for the same reason you don't give up writing in the first place just because it'll never be perfect. You don't stop trying just because there's no perfect answer. You continue to do better, even if perfection may be impossible.

edited 28th Aug '14 7:55:58 PM by KingZeal

If a character hurting a woman is meant to make them seem extra-evil because their victim is a woman, that's definitely sexist. However, unless a character actually says something like, "You shouldn't hurt a woman", or the creator admits that's what they were going for, then you can't actually know whether a particular example meets that criteria.

You can look at how violence against men and violence against women is usually depicted in video games, and use that to determine the existence of sexism in the industry. And, if a particular game or creative team repeatedly portrays violence against women one way, but rarely does the same for violence against men, that is definitely evidence of sexism. However, looking at an individual scene in isolation can't really tell you much of anything.

I am writing a work in which violence is directed against my two female protagonists all the time... but that's because it's an action-suspense novel and the two women are professional security contractors. Having violence directed against them is a part of the job they pursue, and a choice they made, and continue to make. I allow myself to believe that the situations I create are not esp. sexist; even though occasionally the violence directed against them is sexual in nature, because the antagonists they sometimes go up against are sexist. Of course, a lot of it comes down to execution; a situation that appears to be sexist on the surface can be redeemed if written well enough. But it's also that I took the time to depict these women as dangerous themselves; the men attacking them are not evil simply because they are attacking these women... only an idiot wouldnt take them seriously as threats, and I dont write idiot villains. So part of the answer might be that an antagonist is evil if they go out of their way to attack people who cant or wont defend themselves, and in our society, for reasons good or bad, more women fit that description than men. But not all women, and it's enough to break the pattern across a genre to include enough exceptions that the readers cannot take it for granted that a female secondary character will necessarily be helpless. The problem is that not enough video game studios, authors, or movie directors depict even that many exceptions, and that explains the existence of the trope. More studios, directors and authors need to include such exceptions, and that's the source, however poorly expressed, of Sarkeesian's complaints.

I've concluded Zeal is talking past everyone (focusing on his specific scenario about women being (ab)used to showcase the evil-ness of the bad guy), and everyone else is talking right past Zeal (focusing on violence against women in general).

It really helps if you are all on the same page, people.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I've tended to notice that violence towards women in fiction (that have a focus on fighting) tend to go one of several ways:

girl v. girl. Safe. No worries about issues because girls can fight each other and it's not abuse.

girl v. girl, and it's super sexual and weird.

girl v guy, and the girl is always too fast for the guy to land a punch. Safe.

girl v guy, and the guy will only fight indirectly, never landing a direct punch onto her, instead fighting her with energy bubbles, falling objects, stuff that doesn't involve punching.

girl v guy, and the guy PUMMELS her, to the point it feels like a fetish fight. When it doesn't feel like a fetish fight, it might feel like a brutal beat down of psychological proportions.

I'm not saying these are the only types of fight, but they're pretty common all around.

Read my stories!

Question: have you actually watched the video in question? If so, it should be clear that they're two sides of the same coin. Sarkeesian's argument is that women are disproportionately victimized by violence in fiction for the sole purpose of adding higher stakes and/or Darker and Edgier content. She does this by showing just how frequent the trope is. Most of the running time of her video is in showing examples to the viewer.

Native Jovian has made a complaint that violence against women, by itself, is not sexist because violence also happens against men. But that isn't and never was Sarkeesian's argument. Her argument revolves around both the frequency of violence against women and other context which surround the scene in question. Things like:

• Is the woman an unimportant character?
• Is she sexually exploited?
• Is she portrayed as helpless or unable to defend herself?
• Is the person attacking her a stereotypically Straw Evil character?
• Is the event itself portrayed as an anecdote of a "dark" or pessimistic world?

If any, or all, of the things above are true, then they're an example of what she's talking about. Jovian's complaint was that she doesn't spend more time explaining, but that's largely because she wanted to show the viewer the pattern first. As I said, the vast bulk of her running time is showing one example after another, and describing common elements between them. That's important, because lots of people (like Jovian) are so focused on single examples that they're missing the forest for the trees.

That wasn't clear at all to me, which is one of the points I've raised here. That doesn't invalidate her argument, but it does call her effectiveness as a presenter into question — something that's been an issue since her first video. She spends way too much time showing example after example (generally shorn of all context) and too little time actually explaining herself. The impression that I get is that she's trying to energize people who already agree with her by showing them lots of instances of things they already believe are bad, thus showing how prevalent the problem is. That'd be fine if her videos were meant to be a call to action ("all you feminists out there, we need to do something about this!"), but it's ostensibly supposed to be about education and increasing awareness — meaning that she needs to be convincing people that aren't aware of the subject, or don't believe that it's a problem, that the issue does exist and is a problem. Which she does a generally poor job of. How many people in this thread and others have said something to the effect of "I have an academic background in feminism, and I totally get exactly what she's driving at"? If you need to have a background in the subject of an awareness/education campaign in order to understand and agree with it, then it's not a very good education/awareness campaign.

She does very little to support the idea that depictions of violence against women is more prevalent than violence against men (most of her examples are randomized open-world content, in which the victim and the circumstances of the encounter are just that — random) and mentions virtually nothing about the differences between depictions of violence against men and against women (which seems like a rather important thing to cover, given the argument she's trying to make). In a 28-minute video, she spends about 30 seconds (starting here) on how violence against men is treated differently than violence against women. And even then, she manages to compare apples to oranges in the process by comparing hostile NPC enemies (the kind that actively attack you during missions) to the randomized open-world content. All she really says on the subject is that male victims aren't subjected to sexual objectification, and the violence in question is almost never sexual or domestic in nature. Which are fair points! But that's literally all she says about it. The effect is to make it seem like she has a much bigger problem with violence against women in general, as opposed to violence against women being handled differently than violence against men.

You're still missing my point. I'm not focused on single examples at all — what I've been trying to do this entire time is say that context is more important than single examples. You just presented a checklist of items that make something sexist. What I've been trying to say is that you can't judge a scene like that in isolation — you have to compare it to other scenes from the same work to get an accurate idea of whether it's sexist or not. As you said earlier, it's about the pattern, not about the individual scenes. If the work has a pattern of sexist depictions of violence against women, then that's bad. If the work is even-handed about it (sometimes the victim is male and sometimes female, sometimes they're depicted as helpless victims and sometimes they fight back without intervention from the player, etc) then I'd have a hard time calling that sexist.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

No, you don't have to treat something in context of a whole work to tell if it's sexist. You treat it in the context of works in general and general trends to see if it contributes to sexist views. A larger work doesn't need to be sexist for a scene to be. Especially when it's repeating a trend that's repeated again and again across media.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick