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[music: Bayonetta- Fly Me To the Moon (Infinite Climax)]
>>SARKEESIAN: Bayonetta is a widely popular video game that was released earlier this year in the U.S and late last year in Japan for the Xbox360 and the PS3.
It sold over a million units in just 4 months.
The game stars a character named Bayonetta.
It's your basic story of a shapeshifting witch dressed in skin tight leather
who can turn into giant cats
and has a small arsenal of weapons including whips.
[pause]
>>BAYONETTA: Come on!
[music]
>>BAYONETTA: DIE!
[music]
>>SARKEESIAN: And of course she lost her memories and there's some evil demon horde.
And...there's a magical gem of the world, something, something...so forth
But all of that is besides the point when it comes to this game.
First, the positive things about the game.
She's a single mother
Aaaaaand.....
Uhhhhhh....[seeth] That's kind of it.
So on to the negatives.
She carries with her four pistols. Two of which are strapped to her high heeled boots
Which provide the perfect oppurtunity for her to contort or body in to pornographic poses
Including spreading her legs, and doing a little flip in the air to kill the bad guys.
When she lands she does a little sexy pose for the player complete with the sound of a camera shutter snapping.
[SFX: Camera Snap]
But it gets EVEN better!
Because one of her most powerful weapons involves her stripping all her clothes off
And turning her hair into an evil demon weapon fighting machine
Did you get that?
The whole...taking all her clothes off in order to use her hair as a weapon
Cause CLEARLY, you can't use your hair to drag demons down to Hell
if you're fully clothed.
Predictably, the internet is now infested with gamer screencaptures of various ways they got Bayonetta naked.
As if this pornographic, overly sexualized, animated representation isn't bad enough
The way that Bayonetta restores her power is by sucking on a lollipop.
But I'm not really here to discuss the overly sexualized, adolescent male fantasy that Bayonetta is.
But rather about a part of the game's marketing strategy
The advertiser released the game, the marketing company placed two six foot long banners in Shinjuku station in Tokyo
This ad features a Bayonetta logo with a large rectangular space filled with small cards that entice passersby
To peel them off and take them home
The cards have a lipstick kiss on the front and Bayonetta's gunstrapped leg on the inside
Once a few of these card were removed
It was clear that Bayonetta was lying naked underneath
She only had her hair wrapped around her body to cover up her naughty bits.
Yes, that's right, not only is the game created to and encourages players to undress her during gameplay
Because it's basically a Choose Your Own Patriarchal Adventure *** Fantasy
But now the advertisers are inviting passersby to physically strip her naked in the subway station
Instead of being atleast a little bit outraged by this
bloggers all over the internet were celebrating this as an innovative and successful ad campaign.
Women's bodies are constantly used to sell products including video games specifically targetted at young men
But this interactive ad campaign takes objectifying women's bodies to a whole nother level
By asking people to actively participate in doing misogyny
The ad encourages participation of physical harassment
And this is especially alarming in context of how women are treated in Japanese subways.
In 2008, in Tokyo, alone, there were 2000 reported cases of men groping women
And that's only the amount that was reported
In another survey, 64% of Japanese women reported being groped on trains and subways
The harassment of women is so bad that the subway system even introduced women-only passenger cars as a way to curb this *** harassment
Women's only passenger cars have been introduced in many other places such as Egypt, Taiwan, Brazil, and Mexico
And frankly, I'm surprised we don't have them here in the U.S because of the levels of harassment that women face here as well
Harassment at such epidemic levels that they've even put up advertising campaigns and public service announcements in the Japanese subways
Well there's action being taken to try and curb this behavior, such as the women only passenger cars and the public service announcements
Right next door is this Bayonetta ad that is encouraging this predatory behavior
[music: Bayonetta- Fly Me To the Moon (Infinite Climax) (cont.]