In class we briefly talked about video games and how they influence men. But today I came across this article about the scientific connection between video games and rape culture.
A study was conducted at Stanford to examine the harm that overly sexualized avatars in video games do to young women. The researchers found that women who played these types of video games were more conscious of their own bodies afterwards but more alarmingly the study found that the subjects (who were women) whose own faces were displayed on top of these sexualized avatars demonstrated higher levels of agreeing with blame-the-victim rape myths.
One of the researchers explains this by saying, "The sexualized self might have triggered a form of self-defense: that is, participants might have attributed blame to rape victim because they did not want to image themselves in a similar situation."
While this study seems to be small and the the first few of its sort I found it to be interesting because when I mostly think of video games and how they affect women I think in terms of male gamers but this article shows how female games are affected with in their own selves as a result of the games and also how they view others as well.
Sources:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-scentific-connection-between-sexist-video-game-and-rape
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2013/fox-chb-sexualized-virtual-selves.pdf
I saw this article the other day and was going to bring this up in class when we talked about video games. Whenever video games are talked about, it's usually about violence but you never hear about how sexist the creators are in making up the characters.
ReplyDeleteIt's this idea that women need to conform to a certain image, it's so strong that it has influenced every part of pop culture and I think this is a great example of it.
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