An investigation carried out by the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) has confirmed, after analyzing video game sales in Spain, that women appear on video game housings as a young, hypersexualized, attractive and dependent character on a male character .
So much so that in 2 out of 10 video games marketed in Spain, a woman appears on the cover with the role of sexual object . Of all the carcasses examined, 16.1% showed women dependent on another character, usually a man. The figure in 2011 was close to 9.1%.
“The fact that at present the roles of sexual object or dependent woman continue to be disseminated to youth and children is still alarming “, comments Noelia García Castillo, co-author of the work.
The work, published in the journal Prisma Social, also showed a decrease in violence in female characters, from 29.1% to 24.7% and a lower proportion of covers with hypersexualized women (19.4%, being in 2011 of 24.5%), but in the opinion of the researchers, it is still high.
Consumer complaints, contrary to the use of these gender stereotypes both on the covers of video games and in the games themselves , have probably reduced this percentage of the use of women as sexual objects. The improvement, in any case, is still insufficient.
And it is that women tend to appear in video games much less than men and in the cases in which they appear they are subject to a male character or are used as sexual objects.
Furthermore, according to the PEGI system (a European model for the protection of children), the covers of video games for children over 12 years of age show 51.4% of female characters in a seductive pose.
“An association has been observed between the sensuality of female characters and other variables such as violence and the infantilization of women that could distort the concept of sexuality among minors,” García Castillo warns.
