To conclude this list of not so respectable combat sports in which women participate, male “professional” wrestlers sometimes enter the ring with their female partners in tow. The women carry imaginative noms de guerre such as Midnight, Mad Maxine, Lady Vendetta, and Black Venus. Several countries even have leagues of female professional wrestlers. Most women’s wrestling moves are the same as those of men. However, they are not viewed in a similar way. To avoid any hint of homoeroticism, in men’s performances overt sexuality is rigidly suppressed in favor of mock athletic prowess in mock dangerous combat. By contrast, women’s performances are deliberately sexualized.94 Scantily clad, made up in as provocative and as vulgar a way as possible, the women walk around displaying their charms. They engage other women in scripted fights, egg on their masters, and from time to time mount sneak attacks on opposing males. Some “professional” female wrestlers are even allowed to grab men by the genitals, something their male colleagues will never do.
Had the fight been real any of these ladies would have been beaten half dead before they could have even come close to the men. In fact male wrestlers are prohibited from hitting the women. That is why the women always work in pairs so they can hit each other. Often they do so using implements that only women carry, such as handbags. Seen from the organizers’ point of view the added value the women bring to the shows is enormous. In the words of one of the best known among them, Missy Hyatt (real name Melissa Ann Hiatt):
two guys beat each other to pulp for half an hour, slugging each other in the face, kicking each other in the groin, banging metal chairs over each other’s heads, body-slamming each other through wooden tables, and the crowd just sits on their hands. Like, Snore! But then, suddenly, a couple of chicks – I mean, ‘valets’ – jump into the ring, grab one another in headlocks, and start rolling around, and now the crowd’s on their feet, jumping up and down, climbing onto their chairs, shoving and elbowing for a better view, yelling ‘catfight! catfight! catfight!’95
One advertiser, publishing online in March 2011, says he is looking for “sexy female wrestlers.”96 Their own ads often show them posing topless or near beds. There even exists, or used to exist, something known as the Naked Women’s Wrestling League (NWWL). Individual wrestlers have had their photographs published in magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse. Events are said to have been broadcast around the world to thirty-eight countries in Europe, South America, and Scandinavia. In the videos, no attempt whatsoever is made to conceal the real objective, which is titillation through humiliation. Women photographed in a website named Airsoft Reloaded are also characterized mainly by their provocative dress.97 To this extent the strictures of Wollstonecraft and many later feminists appear fully justified. Still, since participation is voluntary, there is little anyone can or should do.
Even in a wargame as staid and as neutral as official tournament chess is supposed to be, the participation of women has given rise to new questions concerning the kind of dress they should wear while playing. It all started around the year 2000 when the advent of computers capable of beating even the best human players sent the game into a crisis. They threatened to reduce its ability to attract spectators, sponsors, and prize money; some have compared observing a match to watching paint dry. As so often when entertainment goes awry, one way out was to bring in attractive female players. For example, a “blondes versus brunettes” competition was held in Moscow on April 1, 2011.98 The stated aims of the tournament were the popularization of chess and raising the sporting mastery of female chess players. Incidentally, “blonde” versus “brunette” has long been a favorite method of pairing female participants in “professional” wrestling matches and similar events.
Following these developments, one website started rating female players not by the quality of their play but by their looks. Predictably, some of the women consider it degrading. However, many others have sent their photographs in the hope of obtaining a high rating. Without their cooperation the site could not have operated at all. In the words of Maria Manakova, a grandmaster (mistress?) who at one time used to be Russia’s fourth-highest ranked woman player: “We are not as strong as the male players; so why shouldn’t we cash in on our beauty?”99 On another occasion she explained that “when two people make moves, like in sex, like in love, they do some moves to win. Yes, not only he, but she, the woman. There are very close parallels between these two things: chess and sex. No, I don’t mean sex. I mean the game of love.” British international master Jovanka Houska agrees that chess, “the clash of wills, the intellectual battle, the power struggle between a man and a woman [is] quite romantic.”100
A case in point is Alexandra Kosteniuk, said to be one of the world’s best female players (though I was unable to find her among the 100 top-rated ones of both sexes). Russian-born, young and beautiful, she now lives in Florida and has a website operated by her husband who is a high-level chess player as well as a marketing expert. It is said that, in terms of the number of hits, no other grandmaster’s website comes close. Photographs often show her wearing décolleté dresses and even swimsuits while playing.101 She herself explains that she considers her career as a model ancillary to the one she has built up by playing chess, and that she will only engage in it if some aspect of “the wonderful game” can be seen somewhere in the background.
Kosteniuk’s double nature as both a successful chess player and a model has led to quite some debate. Some think that by putting her charms on display she denigrates both chess and women; others, to the contrary, would like her to dress more sexily during tournaments. Most women players are jealous of her and many will not talk to her. Some other female players also flaunt their beauty in and out of competition. Others still complain about their looks, claiming that the attention they receive from their male colleagues prevents them from concentrating and quashes their motivation.102 So great is the attention the media pay to young good-looking female players during tournaments that their accomplishments at the gameboard are sometimes all but overlooked. ChessBase.com, the most popular chess news source on earth, has plenty of photographs of young and beautiful chess-playing women but says little about their games. Male players too have complaints. Many resent the fact that their accomplishments at the game are overshadowed by young fresh-looking women. Others say that their women opponents’ feminine attributes interfere with their ability to concentrate, causing them to lose games.103 These problems have become sufficiently serious for the possibility of introducing a dress code to be considered.
Those who like to combine chess with sex will be intrigued by Henri Matisse’s 1928 series of paintings Odalisques. Set within what looks like a harem, the paintings are said to have been inspired by his travels in Morocco in 1912–13. They show a number of women, some dressed in oriental clothes, others nude, either in the vicinity of a black-and-white chessboard or playing in a lackadaisical sort of way. The artist’s fascination with checkered patterns apart, just what the message is supposed to be is not clear. In 1963 another famous French artist, Marcel Duchamp, had himself photographed playing chess with a naked woman.104 She was Eve Babitz, a self-styled American “antisociologist” who repeated the exercise with several other male players. One particularly nasty product is Lovechess, a series of chess sets whose pieces, molded in epoxy resin, are all shaped like nude or semi-nude men and women. In one onscreen variant, “Egyptian” figures stand about stark naked. They wear helmets, carry spears and shields, and, as play unfolds, engage in all kinds of sexual acts. Still the manufacturers insist that theirs “is not a game with hardcore pornographic scenes.”105
The place where the largest number of sexy female fighters can readily be found is in videogames. Readers will recall that most of the games in question are bought and played by men, young men in particular. Presumably this explains why, though warlike female characters form a minority in such games, when they do appear they tend to have much more bosom than muscle. Take a game named, significantly enough, SiN (1998).
It sports a long-legged, big-busted female heroine. She goes by the name of Elexis – not, for some reason, the more common Alexis. She wears a sort of shiny plastic swimsuit and high boots with heels so high they must make walking all but impossible. Dressed in this somewhat improbable costume, she leads the biotech firm she has inherited from her late disappeared father, Thrall Sinclair. Occasionally she also brandishes a submachine gun while fighting off bad characters who try to destroy the world with the aid of mind-altering drugs. In doing so, her partner is Colonel John R. Blade, the head of the largest private security firm in the city of Freeport.106
Or take Elena (Erena) the Street Fighter. Like many others of her kind she was created by a man, the Japanese designer Yoshinori Ono who launched her in 1997. A member of a small tribe from the African savannah, she has white hair and blue eyes. Armed with these attributes she is sent by her father to study first in Japan and then in France. Her attire, consisting of a white bikini and red, sky blue, gold, and purple bands that she wears around her neck, arms, wrists, shins, and ankles, is carefully designed to stand out against her dark-brown skin. It is also light-years removed from what one would expect a ferocious fighter to wear. Snake-like in her movements, she is an expert at the art of capoeira; using nothing but her long and flexible legs, she turns even the biggest, burliest, most wicked males into helpless heaps of bloody flesh.107
Other sexy heroines include Nariko (Heavenly Sword), Rayne (Blood Rayne), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark Zero), and Cate Archer (The Operative). Some, such as Tabula Rasa’s Sarah Morison, will readily strip to their underwear or show glimpses of it as they lie on the ground, helpless and apparently beaten. Some wear metal bras obviously designed to attract the players’ eyes to what is inside: had they been real, they would have directed the points of swords and spears to the wearer’s most vital organs.108 Of all such female characters the best known one by far is, or was, Lara Croft.109 First onscreen in 1996, she was inspired by various characters that had graced comic books for years if not decades previously. Her British designer, Toby Gard, is said to have set out to counter “stereotypical female characters.” If so, he does not seem to have succeeded very well. To be sure, Lara is presented as intelligent, athletic, and good-looking. The last-named quality is perhaps the most important of all: had she not been beautiful and quite sexy, then presumably neither men nor women would have wanted to play games with her or even taken the trouble to look at her. Her own mistress, unencumbered by either a husband to limit her movements or children to look after, she is an archaeologist−adventurer bearing some resemblance to Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.110 In videogames and elsewhere, too often a “liberated” woman is simply one who has been caught up in the dreams of men.
Lara has brown eyes, brown hair, and a long ponytail – the last style any combatant, real or virtual, male or female, would want to wear while fighting. She is a traveler, venturing into ancient, hazardous tombs and ruins at various places around the world in order to discover their secrets. She does so while dressed − again most improbably − in a shiny, tight-fitting turquoise sleeveless tank top, light brown shorts, heavy calf-high military-style boots, long white socks, and exposed thighs. Originally her accessories included fingerless gloves, a backpack, a utility belt with holsters on either side, and two pistols. So large and heavy were the latter that, had they and she both been real, probably she could only have fired them by using both hands. At times she also resorted to other weapons, such as submachine guns and harpoons, to kill her opponents.
As additional games built around her were published, Lara Croft developed into the kind of female character that blows men away in both senses of the word. The tank top was replaced by a kind of one piece swimsuit. She also received a variety of accessories such as black leather belts with large metal buckles as well as thongs wrapped around her arms, legs, and torso. Again the resemblance to some types of pornographic attire is obvious and deliberate. More remarkably still, even when she was made to wear clothing suitable for a cold climate or underwater exploration she still retained her sexual allure. Not only did she appear in at least thirteen different videogames, but so successful was the character that she won a considerable following.
That in turn led to a movie being made around her exploits. The first actress to play Lara was Angelina Jolie (rumor has it that Pamela Anderson had also been considered). To increase her bust size to the 36D the producer, Lawrence Gordon, and the director, Simon West, thought would be appropriate for her, she had to wear padding. Indeed most female videogame characters have large busts – notwithstanding the fact that in reality such busts, being soft and vulnerable, make it hard for their owners to engage in combat of any kind. Other regularly occurring features are wasp-like waists, long legs, and relatively delicate, slender, arms. None of these look as if their owners have ever use them to accomplish difficult physical tasks.
Though she only exists in virtual reality, Lara Croft’s exceptional popularity has caused her to be surrounded by quite some literature that seeks to understand her qualities and the place she occupies in the world.111 Some reviewers see her and her sisters as liberated women who act as men supposedly do in doing their own thing and beating up anybody who dares to stand in their way. With their “stunting bodies,” it is claimed, they “explosively take up space within a particularly masculinized landscape – the desert, dark urban landscapes, caves and tombs – and in doing so offer a powerful image of the absolute otherness of femininity within this space.” Lara’s “occupation of a traditionally masculine world, her rejection of particular patriarchal values and the norms of femininity and the physical spaces that she traverses are all in direct contradiction of the typical location of femininity within the private domestic space.” The fact that, like many other characters, she has multiple lives and will return to the action almost as soon as she is killed helps. However, not everybody would agree with this analysis. Some see Lara as a sex symbol created by young men for the delectation of other young men (which of course she was); others see her as a “cyberbimbo” who might represent a dangerous role model for impressionable young girls to follow. Pretending to forget that she is only a host of shifting electronic dots, there are even those who speculate on what she might and might not do with and to them in bed.
Thirty or so years since they made their first appearance on the computer screen, so numerous and so varied have female videogame combatants become that no single attempt at categorization and description will fit them all. What is clear is that the contrast between them and the male characters could not be more sharply drawn. With the exception of some small agile characters using speed and wit to beat the bigger guys, among the males size, musculature, and fighting strength tend to go hand in hand. While some are handsome, many − the wicked ones in particular − are exceedingly brutish and ugly. For example, Starcraft’s Jim Raynor looks as if he has swallowed a snake and is ready to swallow another. Halo’s Master Chief carries such heavy armor that he seems to be encrusted in it. Virtual though these characters are, one can almost smell their bad breath. Not so the females, who somehow contrive to combine it all – lots of exposed flesh, grace, beauty, the kind of sex appeal only women seem to have, and superhuman strength and resilience that enable them to fight and defeat opponents of both sexes who seem much stronger than themselves.
When men engage in wargames of every kind, what they put on show is the kind of strength that most other men would like to have. By contrast, so strongly sexualized are the female characters in some onscreen wargames that they can actually deter women, not all of whom relish having their avatars being drooled over by male players, from enjoying the games in question. Even those − and there are some − who are incurably wicked rarely lack sex appeal, albeit tending to be of the shrewish kind, perhaps asking to be “tamed.” They tend to come with a weird combination of long hair, snarling faces, big nude or semi-nude mammaries that never get in their way even when they perform the most amazing athletic fea
ts, impossibly narrow waists, equally impossibly long legs, shiny one- or preferably two-piece swimsuits, thongs made of black, white, or red leather, and sometimes flashy jewelry as well.
Needless to say, none of this has anything to do with reality. Even in our enlightened age, very few women see combat – in Iraq in 2003–10 just 2 percent of US military dead were female. The same applies to the smaller, but even longer war in Afghanistan. As these figures show, normally where there are bullets there are no women and where there are women there are no bullets. To top it all, in real life some weapons have had to be modified so that women can use them. Not so onscreen, where many female characters are armed with various kinds of edged weapons and firearms clearly much too big and heavy for them to handle. Often the link between weapon size and sex is too obvious to overlook. One can only wonder how on earth they manage to do it. Until, that is, one remembers that nearly all of them were conceived, designed, created, brought to virtual “life,” tested, and marketed specifically in order to satisfy the fantasies of the men who play with them.
Wargames Page 47