Exploring the Intersection of 'Dyke Lesbians in Space' and the Quality of Your Marriage
If we're willing to spend a little time thinking about film and video games, maybe we can get there.
Trigger warning: If the idea of non-white people or women having starring roles in stories being told in various media (television commercials, film and TV roles, video game characters) is somehow offensive to you, you’re going to like me less after this. I’m not even a little sorry. - MF
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My relationship coaching work and philosophy about what makes a relationship between two people healthy and sustainable boils down to just two ideas:
1. Consideration – the degree to which you can trust me to learn about and think about what is important to you, and then be mindful and aware of how my behavior and my words affect you moving forward. How much you trust me, and how healthy our relationship can be will depend entirely on that. In a relationship between two partners, both people must be able to count on one another to do this basic thing.
2. Validation – the art of successful conversation. You have to be able to trust that you can come tell me what you think and feel—about anything, really— and that I will honor your experiences, and not attempt to discredit you, or minimize you, or defend myself every time what I think and feel is different from you. If you really care about something, and I think it’s a little silly, I think you have to trust me to demonstrate care about this thing that matters to you even when I don’t feel the same way. And when I’ve done something to negatively affect you—or worse, hurt you—you must be able to trust that you can say something about it, and that I’ll try to do better in the future with this new information, instead of defending myself and trying to convince you that you’re just thinking and feeling the wrong way about it.
That’s it. You want a great relationship? Be reliably and consistently considerate of your partner in thought, word, and deed. And be a good listener, who is open to feedback and information you hadn’t previously thought about.
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The idea of considering other people’s experiences, and being attuned to how I might affect them, is the single most important idea and relationship skill to come out of the fallout of my divorce nearly 12 years ago.
When I first started blogging, I became “blog-friends” with a woman named Gretchen Kelly. And she once wrote an essay titled The Thing All Women Do That You Don’t Know About and it fundamentally and forever shifted the way I see the world.
It was a thoughtful piece that helped me understand how radically different of an experience it was for Gretchen to leave a shopping mall or retail store and walk through the parking lot to her car than what my experience had been every day of my life. Especially at night. Especially if there were other people around.
It had never occurred to me to worry about something bad happening in that scenario—not even after confronting a guy actively breaking into my car for its stereo in a mall parking lot on my 17th birthday in 1996.
It was different for Gretchen, and for so many people who have experienced some of the unspeakable things that Gretchen had been through.
I was on a mission to do meaningful personal work, so I started expanding my consideration work to other demographics.
I want people who look different than me, who are from much different backgrounds and/or places than me, who are attracted to and love people who I wouldn’t pursue a romantic or physical relationship with, who have deeply held beliefs around faith or politics or whatever… I want all of these people (almost everyone, really) to experience me as respectful and mindfully considerate of the very different way they may experience life than I do.
That’s who I want to be in the world. But I had (and continue to have) work to do.
But First, I Had to Deal With Lara Croft
The first time I ever played a video game “as a girl” was as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 on the original Nintendo, because I hadn’t at the time completed the game Metroid, and didn’t yet know that Metroid protagonist Samus was secretly a woman, which is revealed only after beating the game. (OMG you guys, can you even believe how woke the 1986 Nintendo video game developers were?!?!)
But the playing experience that really stands out for me RE: playing as a female character is the original Tomb Raider game for the Sony PlayStation, and the debut of the now-iconic (in gaming, at least) Lara Croft character, all of which happened around my senior year of high school, when I was still very much of the mind that it’s not cool for guys to do things like a girl.
I’m not proud of this looking back here in 2024, but it was somehow strange or uncomfortable for me to play as a female character. If PlayStation had given players the option to, I would have likely chosen at the time to play as a male character as an action-hero, gun-toting, badass treasure hunter.
I got over it reasonably quickly. The game was really fun, and Lara seemed likable enough, and I could definitely be getting this wrong, and I hope someone will correct me if I am, but I think the 1996 Lara Croft debut marked the first time the main character in a video game was a female sex symbol.
Lara Croft—who would later be played in film by actors Angelina Jolie, Alicia Vikander, and is scheduled to by played by Sophie Turner on Amazon Prime in the future—for those of you who don’t know, is supposed to be this super-pretty, super-smart, super-athletic woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a delightful British accent that charms most Americans.
Early depictions of Lara Croft were all chest and legs.
The reception of, and viewpoints about Lara Croft over the years have been mixed but mostly positive. Viewpoints range from positive that we normalized women as strong, capable leading characters in games, to somewhat negative, reinforcing sexualized stereotypes about women, and that maybe not being the ideal role model for young girls.
Which brings me to the past week in the video game industry, and my further shaken faith in humanity.
The Game Awards 2024 took place December 12 in Los Angeles, and was streamed live to millions of gaming fans online.
And at the tail-end of the show, they premiered the teaser trailer for game studio Naughty Dog’s newest project, which we’ll maybe get to play in 2026, called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
A couple of quick notes for context: Naughty Dog is the studio that created The Last of Us franchise, which is somewhere close to my favorite story ever told in any medium. The two video games are all-timers, and the HBO adaptation is equally great in my estimation. I love them and want to fight everyone who says anything bad about them.
Therefore, I have a bias toward and affinity for Naughty Dog and their creative director Neil Druckmann (who the anti-woke crowd has dubbed “Neil Cuckman”).
So at the Game Awards, they show the brand new Intergalactic trailer which you can see here if you want to. (If you play games, you probably ought to.)
In a huge departure for the studio, they are making an outer space sci-fi game about a bounty hunter in that retro-futuristic style popularized in the past decade by the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
Here’s a look at the main character, Jordan Mun:
I thought it looked pretty cool. But then I started watching the reactions come in from various corners of YouTube, and I was genuinely surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t have been.
“Why can’t women be hot in games these days?” with 396 likes and 37 replies agreeing in some way.
“Don’t buy and don’t support this woke shit! We don’t need this. We need heroes and interesting characters that actually matter,” with 98 likes.
“Having a non-white, flat-chested, lesbian protagonist is not nearly as subversive and counter-culture as Naughty Dog thinks it is,” with 41 likes.
I mean take a look for yourself at the YouTube comments under the game trailer if you think I might be exaggerating.
It appears to me that a record amount of straight, white dudes who claim to love video games but seem to hate modern storytelling if it introduces them to anything new or different from their own lives are saying: Don’t make a video game or movie unless it’s a white male character OR—at minimum—a hot chick I have sexual feelings about. Anything but that is woke bullshit trying to push an agenda down my throat, and by God, we won’t spend money on it! Go woke, go broke you beta pussies!!!
This character Jordan Mun, is played by Tati Gabrielle. (Does she seem like an ugly person to you, and if so why are we judging characters in stories based on our individual standards of attractiveness? And unless we’re bringing hard abs and smoldering classic good looks to the party ourselves, maybe we can shut the fuck up about how attractive other people look? Maybe?)
The whole thing was sort of devastatingly disappointing to me. “I don’t want to play as a dyke in space!” some zitty, furious masturbator wrote.
Jordan Mun’s sexuality was not even hinted at in the game trailer, unless we’re stereotyping that all women who shave their heads are automatically gay, which seems like a pretty dumb conclusion to me when we’re talking about a fictionalized world set thousands of years in the future. Ellen Ripley shaved her head in the 1992 film Alien 3.
Oooooh, so woke, bro. Let’s get offended and boycott the Alien movies.
I realize women, and people whose skin doesn’t look like mine, are probably thinking: Gee-fucking-whiz, Matt. Just realizing there are people like this out there?! Hmmm.
And, of course, I knew, but the volume of them and their little incel, Andrew Tate-like, whiny, entitled, assholey, hypocritical, racist, sexist, ignorant, bigoted piece-of-shitness just really got to me over the past couple of days digesting all of the hate in the comment section of several reaction videos on YouTube.
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“Hey Matt! Why are you writing about this if your focus is on marriage and healthy relationships?”
There is much subtlety in the art of identifying the ways your romantic partner and your friends and other people in general are different than you. Their allergies. Their sensitivities to language and media and food. Their preferences around music. Their deeply held religious or political beliefs. Their customs and traditions. The many unique experiences they’ve had which have resulted in them being who they are today relative to who you are.
And it’s hard work to get to know the people you love so well that you are able to consistently and reliably speak and act in their best interests, and in ways that honor their diverse experiences from yours.
And I don’t know how we’re ever going to get people to do this critical and necessary relational work for one another if we have huge swaths of people out there acting oppressed and marginalized because people who don’t look like them, or who don’t meet their specific standards for “pretty” or “interesting” or “likable” aren’t in 100 percent of video games they want to play and movies they want to watch.
This can’t be about political correctness and arguments around what schools teach our kids, or whether boys should participate in girls’ sports, or whether predators should feel invited to be in the same bathroom as us and our children. I’m fully on board with people believing whatever they want to believe.
I beg you to see the distinction. I’m not championing taking your kids to drag shows here. People should have their individual values, and live by those values, and I don’t ever want to communicate that I think my values and ideas are superior to, and more important, than yours.
I AM—desperately—trying to communicate just how important it is for people in your life to be able to trust you to care about the various ways they are different than you, if you want to have trust and security in your most meaningful relationships.
And if you’re the kind of person troubled by the sex, or the skin color, or the perceived attractiveness of a fictionalized character in a video game, I have some real concerns about how difficult you may find it to consider and validate people who don’t think and feel similarly to you. And MOST people are in relationships with someone who experiences a multitude of life situations differently than they do.
I don’t know how we get to the place where we’re effective at considering other people’s experiences, and validating other people’s experiences if the very existence of people who are different than we are—and them being represented in the stories we consume—is somehow offensive to us.
I’m really sorry that there are people out there who might share commonalities with some of these fictional characters, and then have to see and hear people who look like me act like your kind isn’t worthy of being the heroes in our stories.
It’s fucking gross, and against everything I’m trying to fight for in this relationship work, and instill in my 16-year-old son.
As an experiment, I asked him to watch the game trailer with me last night.
When it was over, I asked him what he thought and felt about it.
“It looks pretty good. I’ll play it. I just wish it didn’t take place in outer space. I’m not really into space games,” he said.
“What about the main character? Anything about her? Because there’s a bunch of criticism about this game right now. People are upset at how she looks,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “I didn’t really notice.”
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF
Oh Matthew. You totally had me at: "If the idea of non-white people or women having starring roles in stories being told in various media (television commercials, film and TV roles, video game characters) is somehow offensive to you, you’re going to like me less after this. I’m not even a little sorry".
Ha!
Loved your TW. And the piece that followed definitely did not disappoint.
While reading, I thought back to a particular incident I experienced back in the late 90s. I was at a Blockbuster with a guy I was dating and we were attempting to select a movie to watch together. He replied to one of my suggestions with "no... that's a chick flick, you can watch that with your girlfriends". I can't remember the exact film I'd suggested, but I remember noting that it wasn't even a Steel Magnolias sort of sitch, it was just that the *main character* was a woman. Therefore: totally un relatable - to a male viewer like him. He seemed a bit put off that I'd even suggested it, as if the idea itself was silly or emasculating.
We ended up with some other film that was (sigh) mostly all male characters. I wondered on the drive home why a film with a female lead was "for women" viewers. But the film with the male lead (and mostly male supporting characters) was "for everyone". I mean... what?
I felt a little sick and even betrayed as we drove back to his place. Here was this person that I was supposedly involved in an intimate relationship with, who had basically just outright told me he saw *NO VALUE* in a story where the lead was someone like me (a woman). But I can be counted on to be both willing - and quite able - to relate to a story with a lead who is a man, telling the story through his POV (as a man, who was socialized as a man, living as a man, having experiences of a man).
He was right. I *could* be counted on to do that. I grew up doing exactly that, watching movies, reading books by men, about men. All the novels we read in high school, mostly by male authors and about male characters. We learned how they felt, how they moved through the world, what their experiences were. We learned to see the world through men's eyes, to relate to them.
It didn't make sense to me then, and it still doesn't make sense to me now, this idea that stories about women are "for women" and stories about men are "for everyone".
More troubling was how this registered as so deeply personal to me and very problematic on the trust/safety/intimacy front: the fact that this man who I was (seemingly) in an intimate relationship with had no interest in a film or story where the lead was someone *like me*.
I think you’re awesome. This was a wonderful post. I need these kind of articles after the election. I need to know there are white men who aren’t trying to one up everyone else. Thanks