Sexism in World of Warcraft Clothing Options

The Border House blog has an interesting look at the way sexual stereotypes are expressed in World of Warcraft gear. What is especially annoying in WoW are items that when equipped by a male toon results in rather bland and nondescript clothing but when equipped by a female toon becomes 1337 Victoria Secret gear (see, for example, the Lofty Leggards for an example of how ludicrous this often is).

The Border House article is a very thoughtful analysis of both the issue and, frankly, whether we should even care about it,

How much does the sexualization of female video game characters matter, anyway? Why does it matter? This is ultimately part of a much, much larger conversation about images of women in pop culture — advertisements, movies, sitcoms, music videos, and so on. In “Sexuality and/in Representation,” art historian Lisa Tickner writes “Representations enter our collective social understandings, constituting our sense of ourselves, the positions we take up in the world, and the possibilities we see for action in it.” Again and again, we see women represented one way: idealized into a narrow standard of beauty, bodies put on display, (un)dressed to highlight secondary sexual characteristics, photographed and painted and animated to be admired by straight men. Now that we’ve achieved near de jure equality in so much of the world, do these images still harm us and limit us? Or have we become so enlightened, so progressive, so media-savvy that we’re immune to their influence?

Since World of Warcraft is a game, after all, I think there’s another dimension as well — do these choices by the WoW developers affect the fun to be had in the game? I’d argue they do and negatively. WoW has a marked lack of ability to customize toons, and too often the approach seems to be “your character can have any look it wants as long as it conforms to some high fantasy trope.”

The result is a homogeneity in character appearances that is a bit maddening at times — here’s this huge world where all of the residents fit into a very small number of idealized forms with little ability to customize them.