This is the last of the Social Injustice Raiden codecs, I promise. And if you stay tuned to this blog, you'll find out why MGS2 Raiden's sexism is a crucial part of his characterization - not merely a gimmick to anger/enable the Anita Sarkeesians of the world (who weren't even a thing when the game was released back in 2001).
But wait, isn’t Rose the one being sexist here? “It’s not women that are strong” – you can’t get more blatantly sexist than that, right?
Actually, you can’t get more blatantly anti-sexist than that. Confused? Then consider the following:
A man with years of military training is walking down the street with some untrained male buddies when they see a woman being mugged at gunpoint. The trained man rescues her while the other men maintain a safe distance, only for the woman to remark, “I guess men really are heroic.” The trained man and his buddies exchange awkward glances as the woman’s comment simultaneously reduces the individual man’s years of hard work to a mere side-effect of his gender and burdens his same-gender untrained friends with the expectation of life-risking heroism.
Get the picture now? Congratulations, you’ve discovered the insidious trap of benevolent stereotypes that result in benevolent prejudice, including the benevolent sexism we see from Raiden in this convo. It’s “benevolent” because it says positive things about the demographic in question, but it’s still ultimately harmful because it reduces complex human beings to nothing more than a single aspect of their existence that isn't even within their control (gender, ethnicity, etc.), and fails to respect any of those people's individuality.
So when Rose says “It’s not women that are strong – it’s me,” she’s telling Raiden to stop assuming that everyone who just happens to be female must automatically be strong or that any individual female is strong only because of her gender instead of her personal effort as an individual. This is more obvious in the Japanese version, which syntactically isolates the words "women" and "I/me" to clearly indicate that Rose was taking issue with Raiden's unwarranted generalization rather than trying to brag about how she's better than other women.
For anyone who still doubts that Rose was correcting a sexist remark by Raiden, here’s a reminder that Raiden has a documented tendency to reduce Rose’s individual actions to her gender and further dehumanize other females. Raiden can’t be bothered to get to know them on a deeper level as individuals, even for the sake of getting into their pants. Again, stay tuned for future posts to find out why he behaves this way.
As the title suggests, you can get this as a random post-save call “a while after” the beginning of the game; how long that while is, I don’t know.
(Transcript under the Read More)