"Westworld" and the Misogynist Male Gaze (or "Leo Complains but in a Vaguely Academic Way")

I tried very hard to remain unbiased while watching this show and to “give it a chance”. From the description, it sounded like it could likely be one of those shows that are predominantly for straight white men, rampant with racism and sexism and with no queer characters. Unfortunately, my notion so far seems correct. Among the many concerns I have is the very sexist nature of the show (and the fact that I had to see an unnecessary amount of naked people in a very short time, but that’s a blog post for another day).

To focus my critique on the misogyny in this first episode of Westworld, I’ll only be discussing the apparent purposes of the show’s female characters, which appear only so far to be beaten up by the male characters and ogled at by the male audience.

Firstly, disregarding the two warehouse scenes in which there are more than a dozen nude androids on screen at once, the nude female androids outnumber the nude males by more than 4 to 1. There are only two nude men shown in this episode, whereas there are at least 8 nude females. All of these female androids are young, thin, conventionally attractive, and white or white-passing. Meanwhile, the two men are older, larger, and not what an audience would consider conventionally attractive. And this is true in general—all of the female androids are thin and “pretty”, whereas the male androids are more diverse in regards to their appearance (size and age). Why did the casting directors and writers decide to have only pretty female androids, and to predominantly feature so many of them naked? There was no plot related reason for them to be nude, besides for that’s their usual state when being examined by the Westworld staff. In fact, the two nude men were being examined as part of the plot, where as the multitudes of naked women were usually just in the background—they easily could have been replaced with some cute male androids! Since there’s no plot-related reason for this, it seems clear to me that this is a form of “drawing in” the audience that the show is for—straight white men.

The second point I’d like to briefly mention is the terrible amount of violence that the women face in the show. Besides for getting smacked around constantly, there were three implied sexual assaults or threats of sexual assault towards women in this 1-hour-long story. One is ridiculous enough. But three is honestly disgusting. There was no plot-related reason for these rapes. If one were desperate enough to protect the writers, I guess they could try to argue it was to show that the bad guys were bad. But honestly, you can definitely do that without pointing out that they’re rapists. And you especially can’t do that if you’re glorifying the bad guys—this is the wild west, where bad cowboys are sexy and cool. The show wasn’t trying to get the audience to hate the bad guys. So, there really was just three instances of implied sexual assault represented in a morally neutral way in a show that already treats women like sex objects.

Tune in next time to hear me complain about how that lesbian kiss will probably not turn into any form of respectful queer representation!