On Gender And 'GTA 5'

Ever since I heard the first whispers of sexism-related controversy pertaining to GTA 5, this was a post I knew I was going to be writing eventually. It wouldn’t be Grand Theft Auto without some sort of drama, and as the initial “GTA has you torture” issue has been covered here already, it’s time to focus on what I feel is the more interesting and complex issue, how GTA 5 portrays women, or rather, doesn’t portray them.

The treatment of Carolyn Petit is not up for debate here. The response to her review was obviously reprehensible, and there’s not much more to say about it than that. Sadly, we deal with these sort of bullying issues all the time in the gaming community, and this was yet another example of readers needing to separate their disagreement with someone’s opinions from their inexplicable need to shock and hurt someone via a comment thread.

Rather, I want to discuss the points Petit actually made in her review. Expecting to see some not-so-nice characterizations of women going into the game, I started keeping a tally of all the female characters I came across. Minor spoilers follow.

Things weren’t looking good right off the bat. As errand boy gangster Franklin you quickly meet Tonya, a crackhead who offers you sexual services to cover for her boyfriend by towing cars (services which you don’t accept). There’s also Franklin’s aunt who goes on powerwalks with other middle-aged women where they run and chant “I am woman, hear me roar!” The implication seems to be for the player to think “Hah, look how silly women are when they think they’re empowered!”

The ladies in the life of Michael, the retired bank robber, aren’t much better. There’s his wife, an ex-stripper who does literally nothing but scream at him every time she’s onscreen, and cheats on him frequently off-screen. And there’s his daughter, tramp-stamped and permanently in a revealing one-piece, obsessed with nothing but making it big on the reality show “Shame or Fame.”

As time goes on you continue meeting psychotic women, like Mary-Ann, the fitness-addicted side-quest giver who you race as all three characters while she laments being 39 and childless. And of course there’s the funhouse full of strippers you can ogle as any of the three male leads, and if you’re charming enough, you can actually take them home.

Honestly, with 67 out of 69 missions complete, the only “normal” women I’ve met in the game so far have been the extremely nice wife of a Mexican cartel leader who I had to meet when I kidnapped her as Trevor, or a random Indian woman whose purse I retrieved from a mugger as Franklin, who wrote me a nice email a week later and delivered a suit from her family’s clothing company to my house.

So does this make Petit right? Yes and no. Yes, overwhelmingly the game has a terribly negative portrayal of women. But I think we’re missing the other side of the coin here. The game has a terribly negative portrayal of men too. Really, the characters of Grand Theft Auto are all pretty awful people, no matter their gender. GTA 5 is no exception.

Take Jimmy De Santa, Michael’s son who does nothing but play video gamesall day and mooch off his father. Or the eventual villains of the game, rich billionaire douchebag Devin and FIB douchebag Steven, corrupted by money and power. Or perhaps you’d prefer Wade, Trevor’s mentally impaired Juggalo friend, Simon, the scamming car dealership owner, Beverly, the creeping paparazzo or Floyd, the castrated pushover.

And of course there are the three lead characters themselves. Michael is a liar, cheat, murderer, traitor and terrible father and husband. Trevor is a psychopath who would have little issue with abducting a hitchhiker and eating them. Franklin…well, Franklin is alright I suppose, but is hardly a shining pillar of the community when he starts contract killing to make various stock prices go up and down. In short, neither gender comes off terribly well in Rockstar’s San Andreas. This is a universe of stereotypes and very bad people.

But an examination of the three male protagonists leads into the second gender debate concerning GTA 5. With three lead characters, why couldn’t Rockstar made one of them a woman?

Looking back across the entirety of the Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead and Max Payne series, Rockstar has never had a female lead in those games (though that may be tricky in the last case when their game is named after the hero). It is worth examining though, should Rockstar have switched it up and at leasttried to have a woman as one of their three new leads  in GTA V?

“Should” is a tricky word here. The fact is, Rockstar has crafted a great narrative here with its three male leads. All are pretty fantastic characters, perhaps Trevor and Michael more than Franklin, but all are likable despite their faults and I’ve loved following their adventures for the last forty hours or so.

Source : Forbes