So widespread is this cultural bias towards representing men that the makers of the classic sci-fi action game series, Metroid, relied on it when they wanted to surprise their users. ‘We wondered what would surprise everyone and talked about removing [main character] Samus’s helmet. Then someone said, ‘It would be a shocker if Samus turned out to be a woman!’ they recalled in a recent interview.52 And to make sure everyone really got it, they put her in a pink bikini and hip-jutting pose.
Metroid was – and remains – something of an outlier in gaming. Although a 2015 Pew Research Center report53 found that equal numbers of American men and women play video games, only 3.3%54 of the games spotlighted at press conferences during 2016’s E3 (the world’s largest annual gaming expo) starred female protagonists. This is actually lower than the figure for 2015 which, according to Feminist Frequency, was 9%.55 If female playable characters do make it into a game they are still often framed as just another feature. At E3 2015 the director of Fallout 4, Todd Howard, revealed how easy it was to switch between male and female playable characters – only to switch back to the male version for the rest of the demo.56 As Feminist Frequency remarked when they released their data on E3 2016, ‘heroes are male by default’.57
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche. It is because what is male is universal that when a professor at Georgetown University named her literature course ‘White Male Writers’, she hit the headlines, while the numerous courses on ‘female writers’ pass unremarked.58
It is because what is male is universal (and what is female is niche) that a film about the fight of British women for their right to vote is slammed (in the Guardian, no less) as ‘peculiarly hermetic’ for not covering the First World War – sadly proving that Virginia Woolf’s 1929 observation (‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’) is still relevant today.59 It is why V. S. Naipaul criticises Jane Austen’s writing as ‘narrow’, while at the same time no one is expecting The Wolf of Wall Street to address the Gulf War, or Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard to write about anyone but himself (or quote more than a single female writer) to receive praise from the New Yorker for voicing ‘universal anxieties’ in his six-volume autobiography.
It is why the England national football team page on Wikipedia is about the men’s national football team, while the women’s page is called the England women’s national football team, and why in 2013 Wikipedia divided writers into ‘American Novelists’ and ‘American Women Novelists’. It is why a 2015 study of multiple language Wikipedias found that articles about women include words like ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘lady’, but articles about men don’t contain words like ‘man’, ‘masculine’ or ‘gentleman’ (because the male sex goes without saying).60
We class the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as ‘the Renaissance’ even though, as social psychologist Carol Tavris points out in her 1991 book The Mismeasure of Woman, it wasn’t a renaissance for women, who were still largely excluded from intellectual and artistic life. We call the eighteenth century ‘the Enlightenment’, even though, while it may have expanded ‘the rights of man’, it ‘narrowed the rights of women, who were denied control of their property and earnings and barred from higher education and professional training’. We think of ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy although the female half of the population were explicitly excluded from voting.
In 2013, British tennis player Andy Murray was lauded across the media for ending Britain’s ‘77-year wait’ to win Wimbledon, when in fact Virginia Wade had won it in 1977. Three years later, Murray was informed by a sports reporter that he was ‘the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals’ (Murray correctly replied that ‘Venus and Serena have won about four each’).61 In the US it is a truth universally acknowledged that its soccer team has never won the World Cup or even reached the final – except it has. Its women’s team has won four times.62
Recent years have seen some laudable attempts to address this relentless male cultural bias, but these are often met with hostility. When Thor was reinvented as a woman by Marvel Comics,63 fans revolted – although as Wired magazine pointed out, ‘no one uttered a preep’ when Thor was replaced by a frog.64 When the Star Wars franchise released two films in a row with a female lead howls of outrage reverberated around the manosphere.65 One of the UK’s longest-running television shows (Doctor Who) is a sci-fi fantasy series about a shape-shifting alien who periodically morphs into a new body, and the alien’s first twelve incarnations were all male. But in 2017, for the first time, the doctor morphed into a woman. In response,
