Researching kink in the relatively new medium of video games introduced me to the surprisingly complex history of dominatrix-coded female characters.
One article identifies three phases of such characters in the Japanese video game industry, starting in the 1990s.
- enemies or side characters in beat ’em up games (e.g. Linda Lash in Double Dragon)
- playable characters in fighting games (e.g. Ivy Valentine in Soul Calibur)
- protagonist characters (e.g. Bayonetta in her self-titled series)
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Poison is a particularly interesting case. Not only did she make the transition from beat ’em ups to fighting games, some versions of her background story say she is a transwoman. Perhaps not ideal trans representation, but a character with her own charm.
In the fighting games genre, the selectable characters were based on recognizable archetypes (or stereotypes). It seemed like every fighting game had one female character based on the dominatrix, chosen for visual impact and sex appeal. One example was the whip-wielding Sofia from Battle Arena Toshinden, based on the long-standing trope of the cruel, Eastern European beauty. Sofia actually became the mascot character for the Sony PlayStation 1, appearing in advertisements with provocative lines like “Like to be humiliated by women? Here’s your dream date. Worship me.”, to appeal to adult male (heterosexual) players.
This was apparently too controversial, and Sofia was replaced by the more kid-friendly Crash Bandicoot as the console’s mascot.
Perhaps the final stage of the dominatrix archetype’s development is Bayonetta, the title character of her own series. Not only does she wear a skin tight black outfit (woven from her own hair), some of her fighting moves throw enemies into torture machines or summon giant spiked heels to crush them.
According to the character designer Mari Shimazaki’s notes, Bayonetta’s design was based on “modern witch” with “four guns”:
Since Bayonetta is a witch, her “theme color” had to be black! The other special part of her design is the long hair wrapping around her body. The hair gathered around Bayonetta’s sleeves accentuates the movements of her limbs.
When a female character appears in an action game, her limbs often seem thin and short. That is why I tried to make her more appealing as an action game character by adjusting her proportions and extending her limbs.
(IMHO, Bayonetta’s body resembles the way a small child would perceive the body of an adult woman, with exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics and elongated limbs.)
Bayonetta and characters like her occupy an unstable space between female empowerment and female objectification, and this might actually be a feature, not a bug. As Maddy Myers put it in her 2014 essay, “Femme Doms of Videogames: Bayonetta Doesn’t Care If She’s Not Your Kink“:
…the camera loves Bayonetta’s butt; Bayonetta herself often appears to be “performing” for someone, by posing in a sexual sense, but it’s never entirely clear towards whom: the player, advancing enemies, or herself? The reason this distinction doesn’t matter to me, though, is because the story doesn’t attempt to humiliate Bayonetta. She never gets tied up or restrained; she never gets “put in her place”; she never gets smacked around by a Big Bad Man in an inexplicable cut-scene. Her dominance goes unquestioned throughout the game, which in and of itself is so unexpected and refreshing that I can forgive the fact that the camera assumes I’m very interested in her butt crack. Even the fact that the camera is trying to sexualize Bayonetta feels like a subversion of sorts, given that she as a character is one who refuses to be owned or manipulated; she is the essence of unavailable. You can look, but you can’t touch—not without your mistress’s permission!
It would be easy to dismiss Bayonetta as just an image born of the male gaze, but Myers points out that video games offer their own form of identification, with the player becoming the character:
When I play, Bayonetta is me, and the camera’s glances are just the “sub gaze”—the male submissive’s gaze. Bayonetta holds all the cards.
The third-person camera view of the character does not define Bayonetta; the player’s virtual experience of being Bayonetta does.
