Loosely based on Michael Punke’s The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), the film is a reimagining of the tale of real-life nineteenth century American frontiersman Hugh Glass. Yet I’m less concerned here with discussing the film itself than the bizarre discourse that has manifested around it. As documented with almost ritualistic fury across social media, the gendering of language by some around the film has been astonishing, even for those of us resigned to the constant drumbeat of casual misogyny issued by Film Twitter’s dominant dude-bro regime.

It’s worth pointing out now, that when I talk about violence in games, I’m not talking about sexual or gendered violence being perpetuated by the protagonist, but rather indiscriminate shooting or slaying of monsters (human or otherwise) regardless of the gender of the protagonist. It happens that a lot of people often talk generic game violence and feminism in the same breath, and not about the actual interactions between a player’s motivation and their game narrative.

Because the player’s protagonist character is male, players interact with the simulated world as a man. Women in the game insult the protagonist’s appearance, and men either threaten to attack him, or make sexist jokes and comments expecting his support. This is where the problems of the game begin, but it’s also the start of their solution. GTA VI needs a female protagonist. But what sort of character could she be?

Mostly I’ve been thinking about four-year-old Zeena al-Hilli, who was found in a car in the French Alps, hiding under the bodies of her murdered family, where she had apparently been for about eight hours, and her seven-year-old sister, Zainab, who was shot and left for dead. But Zeena and Zainab’s story also brought to mind the history of Australian abandoned and traumatised children – of whom there are very large numbers.

I live on the edge of a temperate rainforest. In the city the daylight hours are filled with noise, and at night things fade into silence. In the rainforest everything is reversed. During the day the forest is as silent as the grave. At night it erupts with noise.

The first time I saw UFC on the television, the experience was akin to watching a car crash. One fighter had knocked the other out. Before the referee could intervene, the fighter had launched himself onto his prone opponent and began to pummel the man’s unconscious face with ‘hammer fists’.

As one of the judges for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards for this year, I’ve been surprised in the past 24 hours to hear myself referred to as a ‘professional protester’ by the Lord Mayor – an ‘arrogant liar’ who had had their ‘little self-indulgent moment in the sunshine’ and ‘caused at least $15,000 damage’ to City Square. Because I have been active in Occupy Melbourne.

‘This is a barbaric game, this game is not for the weak. You play football, you understand that.’ Former gridiron player Marshall Faulk is blunt in his assessment of the violence involved in American football. This year, for the first time, AFL players are banned from returning to the field if they are diagnosed with […]

We are now seeing a concerted attempt to obscure and confuse the meaning of the terrorist act that took place in Tucson, Arizona. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, many people expressed their revulsion at the violent rhetoric that’s become so much a part of contemporary conservatism, particularly in the US. Since then, however, […]

In a world in which we’ve been desensitised to the shock of war and conflict, in which those two very things are normalised, you sometimes need to slow things down, step outside and put things into perspective. This year at TiNA, I saw an event that did just that. It was the publication of Westside […]

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be […]

Just as the Sydney Writers’ Festival has packed itself up for another year, the Sydney Film Festival has rolled into town to cater for the needs of those not satisfied by Dan Brown adaptations and cooking shows (thank you, Mr Carey). What a grand thing the festival is too, if for no other reason than […]