TL;DR - images shape what we consider attractive and artists have, not the responsibility, but the chance to expand our and others’ horizons.
There’s been some discussion lately around this new dating sim/visual novel where you play as a “daddy”. When I first heard about it and saw the first character designs I was excited, I had thought many times of how cool a more inclusive dating game would be, and how much stuff like this is needed. Dating sims are a fun concept, but they’re always severely lacking in variety and more “real” types of people, it seems they always focus on just the one type that the target audience likes, with only minor variations within the game. Afterwards, without getting into any discussion as to why I’ve come to this conclusion, the game turned out to be just something else and I was pretty disappointed. Then I remembered this “game” that I used to play with other users in FA a couple of years back, this sort of lo-fi version of a dating sim where I’d show a cast of characters and encourage peeps to look at them and think which one they found attractive and why, and I started remembering why I did that in the first place (besides, of course, for the heck of it).
I’ve seen some discussions about racism, xenophobia and body shaming on dating apps and gay spaces, and the usual response to that is “it’s not [X], it’s just my preference”. Which, fair enough, that’s how exactly how it feels for the person who has that preference, but I think an argument can be made that those preferences were constructed in an environment that discriminates, and taught us to recognize what is and isn’t attractive by either by pointing out what is “flawed” and less attractive, or by building up very narrow ideals of what is desirable.
One of the reasons why I started drawing erotic art and posting it online was because I wanted to see different types of bodies being represented in it, to show “unlikely” people being sexual. But then I noticed that just like there’s an ideal of the young, athletic, hairless man, there were others in other subcultures which were just as constricting. Just because there are people who find heavier men attractive, it doesn’t mean the issue ends there; the ideal for the perfect bear also exists, with the perfect proportion of fat and muscle, the perfect beard, the perfect chest hair, and that keeps leaving people out, so after a while I started questioning whether I was contributing to this issue. Real people are not perfect, everyone is different, and when we build up one archetype as the desirable one, we’re pushing a whole lot of people off that cliff. … Plus it makes for some unhealthy ideas about relationships, where we end up chasing after the person who will better fit the predefined shape in our heads instead of opening up to getting to know individuals.
I don’t think you can condemn or shame people into “changing” their preferences, but I do think that, through art, games, and whatever, you can invite people to expand those preferences. You can challenge what we find attractive and you can invite people to consider others outside of what they’d normally have eyes for. I’m not trying to `shade` games and artists that focus on just one type of person, there’s a market for everything, instead what I’m trying to do is to celebrate diversity in the ways that I can, to try to keep an open mind and invite other people to consider what would normally remain outside their field of view.
BTW! I don’t intend for the image above to be representative “every type imaginable”, it’s just the collection of what I’ve done so far with this game of mine. Which also BTW, maybe one day I will design those characters for a dating sim instead of wishing someone else did it…
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
2087
jbbartram-illu
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
