Jade Raymond is an executive producer of a very successful video game called Assassin's Creed. When I learned about her I turned to the google machine to find out more. I was surprised to see "Jade Raymond Maxim" come up as one of the top searches. Turns out she was not in Maxim, and states she never will be. It was a big rumour that spread like wildfire through the gaming world. Apparently there was even an x-rated comic made about her. One gamer blogger, Torrence Davis, notes how he has never seen any game producer get so much attention. Davis observed that her picture always accompanies any write up about Assassin's Creed and whenever the game is mentioned in online forums, men invariably starts discussing how "hot" Raymond is. To this Davis responds: "Shouldn’t we be making note that a woman produced one of the hottest games of the year? Shouldn’t we be complimenting her game producing skills and not the beauty that she’s been blessed with?"It's wonderful news that this young woman is doing so well in the male dominated gaming industry. But what does it mean that she is constantly praised for her looks instead of her talent? What does it matter that she's 'hot'? Can we say that her position of executive producer represents "equality" for genders, or does the fact that Raymond is constantly reduced / idolized for her appearances suggest a much more pervasive inequality?
It's this kind of appearance based-judgment and sexualization of girls' bodies that prevent many women from entering positions of power. As Elline Lipkin (2009) expresses in chapter 2 of her book Girls Studies, many girls experience self-consciousness from a very young age as a result of an "onslaught of images of impossibly perfect-looking, sexually contextualized female bodies" (p.42) in popular media. The fear of being sexually objectified and judged in the public sphere is a very real threat that prevents many of us from entering male dominated work spaces. I experienced this for the first time working in the shop department of a high end car dealership in a New Zealand. Without any feminist analytical skills to help me understand the situation, I resigned from an amazing position as it upset me so much to be objectified by my (male) co-workers in such sexualized ways. Without a critical understanding of how this shapes our experiences, we are prone to internalize sexual objectification, thereby limiting our own potential by building our lives in ways to avoid recurrence of such experiences.
