Faith Naked, the girl behind the Top 10 Hottest Guys in Gaming List, was interviewed over at
Destructoid, one of our favorite sites. This is not news. But I found this quote from Faith disingenuous enough to comment upon:
Fronz: Speaking of embrace, readers want to know if you embrace the "girl gamer" status/stereotype, or would you rather be known as simply a "gamer?" There seems to be a divide between those who would rather be anonymous and those who embrace their minority, sometimes pretty vehemently. How do you feel about this digi-feminism, and which camp do you find yourself in, if any?
Faith Naked: Hey, I?m a girl and I can?t change that. I want people to treat me as a normal gamer, but as long as there are guys who are going to send you Myspace messages like "Hey, you wanna play with my joystick?", my status as a girl gamer will always stand out.
You know, that?s an interesting thing for a girl who sprang upon the ?scene? at the tip of the quivering, dew-tipped erection of gamers? collective desperation to say.
Look, I have nothing against Faith Naked. She seems nice. She posts cool things. Her writing is passable... more than we can say about most game writers. She doesn?t take herself too seriously. She sends us tips! And hell, I?m apparently inadvertently responsible for her newfound "fame", being the Kotaku staffer who posted her Top 10 Hottest Guys in Gaming List in the first place, which was consequently picked up by Attack of the Show.
But doesn?t this sort of statement ring completely hollow when she first became noticed for posing almost entirely naked for Destructoid, with the exception of some game controllers covering her vagina with the exception of a Gabecube hovering over her pudenda and a diaphonous bra? Or when almost all of her mentions on Destructoid are accompanied by a picture of her similarly disrobed? And when I
discovered her ?Top 10 List of Hot Gaming Guys?, even I was following a link from Destructoid to see if I couldn?t figure out what she looked like pubically.
If Faith really wanted to be treated as "just a gamer" (and, presumably, as "just a game writer")... why all the nudity? Because she doesn?t want to be just a gamer or just a writer... she wants to be that hot girl gamer. That hot, naked writer.
To be clear, what bothers me is not that Faith Naked shakes it for attention. Hey, you got it? Flaunt it, baby. I just hate the entire "I just want to be treated the same as everyone who isn?t a hot, half-naked gamer/stripper" disingenuousness.