Metroid was – and remains – something of an outlier in gaming. Although a 2015 Pew Research Center report53 found that equal numbers of American men and women play video games, only 3.3%54 of the games spotlighted at press conferences during 2016’s E3 (the world’s largest annual gaming expo) starred female protagonists. This is actually lower than the figure for 2015 which, according to Feminist Frequency, was 9%.55 If female playable characters do make it into a game they are still often framed as just another feature. At E3 2015 the director of Fallout 4, Todd Howard, revealed how easy it was to switch between male and female playable characters – only to switch back to the male version for the rest of the demo.56 As Feminist Frequency remarked when they released their data on E3 2016, ‘heroes are male by default’.57
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche. It is because what is male is universal that when a professor at Georgetown University named her literature course ‘White Male Writers’, she hit the headlines, while the numerous courses on ‘female writers’ pass unremarked.58
It is because what is male is universal (and what is female is niche) that a film about the fight of British women for their right to vote is slammed (in the Guardian, no less) as ‘peculiarly hermetic’ for not covering the First World War – sadly proving that Virginia Woolf’s 1929 observation (‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’) is still relevant today.59 It is why V. S. Naipaul criticises Jane Austen’s writing as ‘narrow’, while at the same time no one is expecting The Wolf of Wall Street to address the Gulf War, or Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to write about anyone but himself (or quote more than a single female writer) to receive praise from the New Yorker for voicing ‘universal anxieties’ in his six-volume autobiography.
It is why the England national football team page on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team, while the women’s page is called the England women’s national football team, and why in 2013 Wikipedia divided writers into ‘American Novelists’ and ‘American Women Novelists’. It is why a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying).60
We class the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as ‘the Renaissance’ even though, as social psychologist Carol Tavris points out in her 1991 book The Mismeasure of Woman, it wasn’t a renaissance for women, who were still largely excluded from intellectual and artistic life. We call the eighteenth century ‘the Enlightenment’, even though, while it may have expanded ‘the rights of man’, it ‘narrowed the rights of women, who were denied control of their property and earnings and barred from higher education and professional training’. We think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy although the female half of the population were explicitly excluded from voting.
In 2013, British tennis player Andy Murray was lauded across the media for ending Britain’s ‘77-year wait’ to win Wimbledon, when in fact Virginia Wade had won it in 1977. Three years later, Murray was informed by a sports reporter that he was ‘the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals’ (Murray correctly replied that ‘Venus and Serena have won about four each’).61 In the US it is a truth universally acknowledged that its soccer team has never won the World Cup or even reached the final – except it has. Its women’s team has won four times.62
Recent years have seen some laudable attempts to address this relentless male cultural bias, but these are often met with hostility. When Thor was reinvented as a woman by Marvel Comics,63 fans revolted – although as Wired magazine pointed out, ‘no one uttered a preep’ when Thor was replaced by a frog.64 When the Star Wars franchise released two films in a row with a female lead howls of outrage reverberated around the manosphere.65 One of the UK’s longest-running television shows (Doctor Who) is a sci-fi fantasy series about a shape-shifting alien who periodically morphs into a new body, and the alien’s first twelve incarnations were all male. But in 2017, for the first time, the doctor morphed into a woman. In response, former doctor Peter Davison expressed ‘doubts’ about the wisdom of casting a woman in the role of Doctor Who.66 He preferred the idea of the doctor as ‘a boy’ and mourned ‘the loss of a role model for boys’. Upset men took to Twitter calling for a boycott of the show, condemning the decision as ‘PC’ and ‘liberal’ virtue-signalling.67
Colin Baker, the body into whom the Peter Davison doctor had morphed, disagreed with his predecessor. Boys have ‘had fifty years of having a role model’, he argued. And in any case, he mused, do you have to be the same gender as someone to be a role model? ‘Can’t you be a role model as people?’ Not really, Colin, because as we’ve seen, ‘people’ tends to be read as male. And in any case, while there is evidence that women can to a certain extent accept men as role models, men won’t do the same for women. Women will buy books by and about men, but men won’t buy books by and about women (or at least not many).68 When adventure video game series Assassin’s Creed announced in 2014 that it would not be possible to play as a female assassin in their new cooperative multiplayer mode, some male players were pleased with the decision.69 Playing as a woman would alienate them from the game, they argued.
Journalist Sarah Ditum has little time for this argument. ‘Come on now,’ she chided in a column. ‘You’ve played games as a blue hedgehog. As a cybernetically augmented space marine. As a sodding dragon-tamer. [. . .B]ut the idea that women can be protagonists with an inner life and an active nature is somehow beyond your imaginative capacities?’70 Ditum is of course technically right. It should be easier to imagine yourself as a woman than as a blue hedgehog. But on the other hand she’s also wrong, because that blue hedgehog has one particularly important similarity with male players, even more so than species alignment, and that is that Sonic the hedgehog is male. We know this because he isn’t pink, he doesn’t have a bow in his hair, and he doesn’t simper. He is the standard, unmarked gender, not the atypical one.
This kind of negative reaction to the introduction of women is witnessed all over the cultural landscape. When in 2013 I campaigned to have a female historical figure on the back of English banknotes some men got so angry that they felt compelled to threaten me with rape, mutilation and death. Not all the men who disliked the campaign went that far, of course, but the sense of injustice was still clear in the more measured responses I got. I remember one man expostulating, ‘but women are everywhere now!’ Clearly, given I was having to campaign so hard for the inclusion of one woman, they aren’t, but his perspective was nevertheless telling. These men were experiencing even minor female representation as an iniquity. As far as they were concerned, the playing field was already level, and the entirely male line-up was just an objective reflection of merit.