Saying to a woman "It’s in that mall where you were shopping for shoes" is like saying to a man "It’s in that store where you were looking at consumer electronics".
In the video game store the other day, rothko was ranting about the “girl games”. With the success of the Nintendo DS, there are dozens of the things. “Catz”, “Dogz”, “Horsez”, “Pony Friends”, “Horse Life”, half a dozen Barbie games, and “Baby Pals”, all with pink and purple cover art.
The games that induced the rant, however, were the ones in the “Imagine” series from Ubisoft. The boundaries of what a young girl is supposed to be imagining are starkly delineated by Ubisoft: “Animal Doctor”, “Fashion Designer”, “Figure Skater”, “Master Chef”… and of course, “Babyz”.
Nintendo themselves seem to understand how to produce games that appeal to women (and girls) without actually being incredibly patronizing, and without limiting the appeal only to females. “Nintendogs” was a system-seller, and managed it without pink ribbon and purple butterflies. “Animal Crossing” topped the charts, “Wario Ware” was big too. “Super Princess Peach” is dressed in pink, but the game has her fighting monsters to save poor helpless Mario.
But there’s a new brain imaging study that suggests that it may be a mistake to think that it’s possible to make video games that appeal to women as much as some games appeal to men:
After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn’t the case with women.)
It makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense that male brains might be wired to get a bigger reward from gaining territory. However, this doesn’t account for games which don’t involve territory gain at all. I don’t think anyone was particularly hard pressed to explain why guys like FPSs and Sid Meier’s Civilization more than women do; but what about 3D platformers? Fighting games? For that matter, what about the first video game to become popular with women, Pac-man?
From “Melanie Speaks!”, an audio guide for transsexuals on developing a female voice, by Melanie Anne Phillips:
One of the dead giveaways that you’re masculine is the wrong vocabulary. One word that men use more than women is “want”. Men want. Women don’t “want” things, they “like” things. They “would like” things. A guy will go up to the little speaker box at a fast food restaurant and say, “I want a Big Mac,” whereas a woman will say, “I’d like a small salad please.”
Men have power in our society. They are in control. Women are still generally brought up believing that they have less power and less control over their own lives. So when a man says he “needs” to do something, he means “I have a goal, a purpose. It is a requirement.” While a man “needs” to do something, a woman feels that she “should” do something. Because a woman has a tendency to feel that she’s not in control of achieving goals. She may not even be able to set the goals in her life, and therefore if she wants something to happen, she “should” do it. It has more of a sense of obligation than a sense of instigation, and that is a very big difference in the mental attitudes of men and women.
Women can have moods, but they can’t have opinions. For example, whereas a man would say, “I’m going to do this,” a woman would say, “I was thinking that I ought to do this,” meaning “I’m inclined to, but if you have any objections I’ll reconsider.”
Now, this is anathema to feminism, but this is not about how to break stereotypes, it’s about how to become one. For feminizing your voice, stay away from those assertive words and go with the “kinda-sorta” words, and words that don’t have command value to them, and you will find that your voice will be considered a lot more feminine.
Found in Harper’s.