ghost, call of duty, and the lacking self-awareness of diehard players.

The current trend of the week: Ghost from Call of Duty. If you haven't seen anything about it yet, let me inform you, because it's quite the controversy. From what I've seen, mostly women are attracted to this masked character, and that alone wouldn't be especially interesting considering there's a whole collection of masked men to swoon over. What's really interesting is the reaction from die-hard COD players - they absolutely hate this. It's gone as far as accusing Ghost fans of sexualising his character, which is laughable, because anyone who thinks this has never actually looked up the definition of sexualisation.

With the context that an overwhelming majority of these diehard players are men, let's examine exactly why I think these particular men are angry. They won't like the answer.

Sexualisation is exactly what it says: the act of making something sexual, mostly in reference to people. In modern terms, it's the allocation of sexual characterisation where there is no provocation or invitation to do so. See: almost every single female character in popular culture. From Princess Peach to Marge Simpson, there's a hub category for them all. And then, to bring it closer to comparison with our topic of the day: almost every single female character in gaming, because apparently its a crime to give women more than a low-cut top and slim-fitting trousers, even in a battle-zone. It would be perfectly acceptable if there wasn't just an insane lack of any female character wearing anything more - there's so little variety. And only in the past year or so have we seen any kind of progress (thank you Overwatch for giving us some bulky women with cool outfits). That is what sexualisation is - but a lot of men don't seem to have much of a problem with that. In fact, if I have the hear the words 'her age doesn't matter she's not real' one more time, I will lose faith in humanity.

The diehard players who spend their days complaining about women finding Ghost attractive are the same people that have never batted an eye at any female character being sexualised. 'But its different' - yes, because now it's about you. But here's the thing; women aren't sexualising Ghost. Like - at all. If you look up every popular image of Ghost, I can't even see one that isn't either a screencap of the actual game or just a cool image of Ghost leaning into the whole warcore aesthetic. Both of these are simply choices his character has made, a part of his identity, that women are expressing attraction for. But those aspects aren't inherently sexual, nor do they encourage it. None of these assign him sexual characteristics and people finding him attractive is not the same as sexualising - they're two different things. Otherwise, we'd be sexualising every person we find attractive in our daily lives, which would be insanely weird. Say it with me: attraction is not synonymous with sexualisation.

They don't seem to get it, though. And let me tell you why: because they can't understand how what we're doing is not sexualising, because that's what they do. The reason they cannot fathom how we are finding him attractive without sexualising him is because they can't do it with women. I'm marking it down as a classic case of projection. And for some reason, having the tables 'turned' isn't making them very happy. What I'm hearing is that those complaining admit two things are true: firstly, they cannot tell the difference between finding someone attractive and sexualising someone; secondly, they know that sexualising without invitation to do so is wrong. And it doesn't feel good. So, they don't like it. The classic hypocrite.

Look, I'd be all for condemning people if it involved sexualising someone without consent because that's objectively awful. But in this case, there's no sexualising to be seen. And, anyway, if I'm to take a page from their book: well, he's not real, it must be fine!

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