“It’s Just a Girl”: Gender, Misogyny, and Homophobia in RDR2 II

Part II: Erasure

How misogyny functions in RDR2: acknowledging only a small portion of the population, denigrating women’s art, failing to imagine women’s interiority, and more.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

Note: This essay has required me to consider — as nearly as I can — every character in RDR2. I’ve done my best to do so, but dealing with a game of its size, oversights seem inevitable. My numbers are probably not 100% correct. There is no scientific basis for race, and the characters are CGI; I’ve done my best to identify what Rockstar intended to portray, but of course I may have made mistakes. Feel free to @ (not DM) me on Twitter or Bluesky if you think I missed anything significant.

Narrow Bounds

Homophobia often shares roots with misogyny: patriarchal constructs define male homosexuality as inherently feminine, which patriarchy believes is bad, because, naturally, women are less than, other, prone to evil, etc. Rockstar’s portrayals of women in Red Dead Redemption 2 don’t significantly diverge from this viewpoint.

To begin with, the women the game bothers to portray at all come from narrow segments of the population. Tilly Jackson is the only Black female character of any significance whatsoever — in fact, she’s the only Black woman with both a name and a speaking role out of perhaps more than 150 named characters. (While it could, theoretically, be interesting to re-imagine a Clint Eastwood character as a Black woman, Red Dead Online‘s Woman with No Name is painfully ironic.) When Black women appear at all, they’re less prominent than their white counterparts: while players will almost certainly encounter Blind Man Cassidy, who appears in at least four locations, the Bayou Soothsayer (an unnamed Black woman) appears in only one or two locations and under certain conditions: off the main road in the swamp, at night. It’s common for players to never see her.

Sister Calderón is the only significant named female character who has Indigenous heritage — but even that is an assumption, as she never discusses this aspect of her identity. While characters of color certainly shouldn’t have to do so — and white characters could really stand to consider their own racial identity — taken as part of the complete picture, it’s a significant indication of the writers’ failure to consider the personhood of Indigenous women. Gloria is possibly supposed to share this heritage (she could also be white), but given her brief appearance, and that her primary narrative function is to define a point on a man’s character arc by getting murdered by him, it’s hard to consider her especially significant, or a character in any meaningful way. Antoinette Sanseverino is supposedly from Colombia, and has Indigenous and/or African heritage, but she has no lines — and her motion capture was performed by a white woman (Gaulin).

Sister Calderón, Gloria, and Antoinette are Latina; despite the game’s intermittent focus on the Lakota tribe, there are no named Native American women in the game whatsoever. While differentiating between Indigenous women from Latin America and Indigenous women from the United States is itself based on Eurocentric ideas, those groups have been victim to different colonial policies, so it isn’t an entirely meaningless distinction. Moreover, RDR2 concerns itself specifically with the United States’ genocide of Native Americans. The only time a Native American woman appears in a mission¹, she doesn’t speak — bizarre, considering the fact that her husband has just been in mortal danger, all their worldly goods are burning, and he offers Arthur what is apparently the last object of value that they own (“Money Lending and Other Sins VI”). Arthur refers to her with what the writers either don’t know or don’t care is a slur in his journal.

Compare this paltry showing with the number of male characters of color: the major characters Charles Smith, Javier Escuella, Lenny Summers, Rains Fall, and Eagle Flies, as well as at least 17 supporting characters². That’s three or four named women of color — one of whom has no lines and is performed by a white woman; another of whom only appears in optional missions — to 22 named men of color. Even more starkly, there are well over two dozen named white women³ in the game, and over 100 named white men. Even insignificant white or male characters are given names, because to name someone is to acknowledge their humanity. The writers fail to give women of color this basic recognition.

The representation of disability doesn’t fare any better. There are more than 13 disabled men in the game⁴. The only disabled women are Karen Jones, Sadie Adler, Gloria, Gertrude Braithwaite and the unnamed Bayou Soothsayer. That’s 13+ to five. Gloria is in the game for less than five minutes, and it’s likely most players will never see two of the other disabled women: Gertrude is locked in an outhouse (where she’s left to die), and the Soothsayer only spawns under the specific conditions already described. It’s not an accident that these last three women are the only ones who are visibly disabled, nor that two of them end up dead.

Finally, while Algernon Wasp, Nicholas Timmins, Bill Williamson, Charles Châtenay, Sonny, and one or two of the Murfrees⁵ are queer-coded, queer women simply do not exist in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Age-Based Misogyny in RDR2

That the visibly disabled women are locked to their particular parts of the map points to the game’s larger pattern of valuing women based on their appearance. Nowhere is this clearer than with the issue of age. RDR2 generally treats older women with derision. In one ridiculous scene at Beaver Hollow, Susan Grimshaw berates Mary-Beth Gaskill for looking at herself in her pocket mirror, viciously spitting, “I know how you girls laugh at me. I used to laugh at women just like me when I was young, and pretty, and sure of the world. . . . and you’re right to. I’m laughable. Pitiable. But it’ll happen to you, too.” With the caveat that people do sometimes internalize the very ideas that work against them, this is not generally how women talk to each other or think of ourselves. Susan keeps the camp running and enforces the gang’s rules. She’s also a madam. When she plays such important roles in her community, why would her concept of self be so dependent on her physical appearance that she believes herself to be “laughable” and “pitiable”? This is not part of a larger picture of how Susan thinks about herself: it’s the only time we hear anything about her self-image.

It would be one thing if the game pushed back on this at all. Instead, it consistently reifies what she’s saying: Mary-Beth, ludicrously, snaps in response, “Well, maybe I’ll get lucky and die first!” Not only does she agree with Susan’s absurd statement, the dramatic irony her reaction creates is the real point of this scene: Arthur is watching, and knows that he’s dying. It isn’t even about the women at all. Lillian Powell makes the same complaint Susan does (“I used to be a great beauty,” she laments, and later calls herself “a dried-up old hag” [“The Gilded Cage”; interaction at La Bastille]). Men missing prominent teeth, dirt so ground into their skin and clothing that they look like they’ve grown mold, sneeringly call older women “hags,” an insult that betrays just how much value the game places on women’s age and appearance (“The Fine Joys of Tobacco;” “A Kind and Benevolent Despot”).

While a number of the game’s older men — Hosea Matthews, Rains Fall, Hamish Sinclair — are admirable, older women are nearly always vilified or treated with derision: Susan is a wicked stepmother constantly shrieking at the girls. Catherine Braithwaite and Momma Watson are nasty and mean. Mrs. Hobbs is a freak who experimented on human corpses. The activist Dorothea Wicklow — a frequent locus of misogynistic attacks among the most pathetic portion of the fanbase — is hopelessly naive. Deborah MacGuinness is an outright fool. Gloria and the hermit woman are menacing and malevolent, witchy caricatures.

There are a few exceptions to this trend, but each comes with a caveat. The game approves of Black Belle because her only real trait is one traditionally framed as masculine, i.e., she’s skilled in violence. Sister Calderón is, to some degree, unsexed by her vocation: under the patriarchal paradigm, women’s role is to marry and have children. Her calling makes her almost holy, not quite human: an angel, as the game calls her in a mission title. She guides Arthur, magically taking away his “dread,” and is presumably the nun whom Reverend Swanson prays with, miraculously curing his struggles with addiction (journal entry after “The Fine Art of Conversation”; dialog obs. Beaver Hollow). The last exception to RDR2‘s misogynistic denigration of older women is Olive Calhoon, the suffragist. The game can go so far as to create her, but it cannot make itself comfortable with her — an independent, intelligent woman who is neither evil, creepy, nor stupid — and so makes her into something it finds more acceptable: a murder victim.

This is a pattern. While Josiah Trelawny, Simon Pearson, Charles Smith, and Reverend Swanson all ride off into the sunset, of the gang’s women, only those who are youngest in 1899 — Mary-Beth Gaskill (who’s around 21 or 22) and Tilly Jackson (who’s younger) — get endings that might be called happy. Sadie Adler is suicidal, Abigail Marston dies young and broken-hearted, Karen Jones is deeply depressed and addicted and disappears, Molly O’Shea is murdered, and Susan Grimshaw is murdered, too. God forbid a woman be over the age of 22, I suppose.

The game’s discomfort with older women in particular is not an accident: it has deep roots within the Western genre itself. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins identifies the importance of Owen Wister’s relationship with his overbearing mother, Sarah Butler Wister, in shaping the themes of his novel The Virginian. Although the Virginian’s female love interest says she’ll leave him if he does to fight a duel, he does it anyway:

The shoot-out in The Virginian lets us see the incident that climaxes most Westerns not simply as an outpouring of male violence against another male but also as a revolt against the rule of women. It is a moment of rebellion, of escape from the clutches of female authority. Why does the climactic moment in Westerns occur in opposition to a woman’s will? Because the meaning of the action lies in its opposition to female authority. . . . Westerns are not only in revolt, historically, against a female-dominated culture; they stage a moment in the psychosocial development of the male that requires that he demonstrate his independence from and superiority to women, specifically to his mother. Seen from this perspective, the Western is a giant coming-of-age plot in which the hero proves to himself and anyone else who will pay attention that he isn’t Mama’s boy anymore; he is a man.

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As it weakly rattles the bars on the cell door of gender, RDR2 troubles this notion slightly: Sister Calderón is a source of comfort and guidance to Arthur. But again, Sister Calderón’s vocation means she’s somewhat divorced from traditional gender roles. Elsewhere, older mothers rule their sons with an iron fist: Edmund Lowry’s mother tries to control his life; the writers imply she’s contributed to her son becoming a serial killer (see “To Edmund from Mother”). So thoroughly smothered, Lowry uses the most extreme forms of violence to free himself from female domination.

Momma Watson is a mean, bossy old lady. Catherine Braithwaite, too, is nasty and overbearing, such a witch of a mother that she locks her own daughter in an outhouse and has her sons give baby Jack Marston to mobster Angelo Bronte. Her death is one of the most horrific in the game and goes uncommented on. Hosea Matthews and Arthur Morgan may fret about the gang’s moral decline, and Arthur and John Marston may be deeply disturbed by Dutch Van der Linde’s murder of Angelo Bronte, but they don’t so much as acknowledge the fact that they let an old woman, deranged by grief, crawl back into a burning building to an incredibly painful death. Her corpse, burned past all recognition, can even be looted, encouraging the player to view her as callously as the characters do. Misogyny in the way RDR2 portrays the deaths of older women is also apparent elsewhere. Arthur doesn’t approve of Dutch’s murder of Gloria, but he doesn’t make a major issue of it, either. Nor does Susan’s horribly painful death excite any remark whatever — literally not one word or gesture — from men who have been her friends (and at least one of whom has been her lover), and whose comforts she’s arranged, for probably at least a decade.

In RDR2‘s minor details, it gets personal.

The first instance is in The Castle Above the Glen, one of three in-game romance novels by Mrs. Hescott Childers. The novels are parodies too desperately ludicrous to be funny, each one the same story with the names and stereotypical cultural details changed. In the novel fragment, the heroine’s lover’s title is “the Moffat of Moffat.” Sam and Dan Houser’s mother is Geraldine Moffat. Moffat was an actress, and here’s her name, rendered into nonsense, in a work created specifically to denigrate women’s art. (“In The Virginian Wister suggests that the silence that reigns between the hero and the villain guarantees that one will kill the other someday. And still he ridicules women’s language” [Tompkins 66].)

Moffat’s name appears again at Caliga Hall after the game’s third chapter. Even for such a male-dominated game, it’s an overwhelmingly male part of the map: although there are women there, they’re working in the background, unlike the aggressive men guarding the house. It’s likely that the player will never speak to any women in the four story missions that require visiting. Every named character at Caliga is male, even the ancestor who was in love with a Braithwaite: Ross, Douglas, Murdo, Tavish, Hamish, Leigh, Beau, Iain, Scott, Jock (“Gray family”). The only time a woman in the family is so much as mentioned is when Beau says he doesn’t want to marry his cousin Matilda. The Gray wives and mothers are never mentioned, never seen, don’t exist.

If the player sneaks by the men working in the fields, around the men guarding the entrance to the house, past the men sweeping the walkways, past the men patrolling around the Hall, they’ll find Tavish Gray, patriarch to a family of men, sitting dead on the back porch of his home. His means and manner of death are unclear, but on the table beside him is a letter informing him that the family legend in which he takes pride is a lie: his ancestor emigrated from Scotland because he was an informant during the Jacobite rising. The professor who wrote the letter is a Malcolm Moffat. Once again, the Housers’ mother’s name is given to a man, this time in a place devoid of women, in a letter to a man, from a man, about men. This mark of the feminine is drawn almost invisibly in its hypermasculine context, as if it had to be sanitized, or contained. But the implication is that this letter is responsible for Tavish’s death. The patriarch sits dead, the hidden mother the killer.

Interiority

Unsurprisingly, Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries show a real inability to imagine the inner lives of any of their female characters. Matt Margini’s criticism of the first game applies equally to the second: “[Red Dead Redemption] falls victim to a problem the Western has grappled with since the beginning of the genre: its inability to allow women to break out of stock types, or to extend to them the same level of moral complexity and existential self-conflict that the male heroes get to grapple with” (“Cowboy”). Around the campfire, the men — Dutch, Hosea, John, Micah, Reverend Swanson, Javier, Charles, Sean, Lenny, Bill, Uncle — often discuss their pasts, their emotions, their life philosophies, the reasons they follow Dutch. They hold forth; they command attention. The firelight is dramatic, archetypal, lending gravity and import to these moments of insight into their characters. Women rarely speak in this context.

With the disclaimer that my numbers only represent what I’ve personally observed playing the game, of the approximately 73 personal monologues I’ve recorded, only 7 are from women (2 from Abigail; 3 from Susan; 2 from Tilly)⁶. Put another way, women are given 9.6% of the monologues, while at the beginning of Chapter 2, they make up 30.4% of the gang — 33% by the beginning of Chapter 6. This is despite the fact that individual female characters are in the game longer (5.86 vs 5.19 chapters in the main story), and they’re also in camp more often, since they’re less likely than male characters to be waiting for Arthur somewhere for a mission. The 16 male gang members have an average of 4.13 monologues; the 7 female gang members have an average of 1. Nor is this a mere issue of quantity. When women do speak at the fire, their commentary is written with nowhere near the depth and consideration of the men’s. Compare Susan’s speech about Dutch with Hosea’s:

Well, I reckon we’re on the turn now. I knew Dutch would have us right. I knew it. Never doubted him for a minute. Sad business when Davey passed. Sad business when anyone passes, but … we’re going to make it. Dutch will see us right. [BILL: Yeah, of course he will.] Exactly, Mr. Williamson. Of course he will. He’s the ideal. The American this country was set up to create. He’ll see us right.

Susan Grimshaw

I wonder if we’re going to make it this time. Wonder if ol’ Dutch hasn’t bit off more than he can chew. Good ol’ Dutch. My best friend. You know how we met? [laughs] Pair of hucksters trying to rob each other, by a fire just like this, on the road to Chicago, back in … when was it? ’78 or thereabouts. More than 20 years. And we ain’t dead yet. Not quite. Oh, Dutch was something special back then. Oh, I guess he’s something special now. I thought I could con the paint off a wall, but he was good. He was good. I’d spun him this yarn about a mile long about my daddy the ambassador and would he help me find my way back to Paris, France, when all of the sudden I looked and my money and my gun had disappeared! [laughs] We laughed and said we’d face the future together. And here we’re at. Facing … something … together … I guess. Though who knows exactly what.

Hosea Matthews

Hosea’s speech is thoughtful, nuanced, and detailed. It gives insight into his character, his emotional state, and his past — his entire character arc, in fact. Susan’s speech tells us nothing about her other than that she believes in Dutch absolutely. Far from having nuance or detail, five of its sentences are exactly the same thought in slightly different words⁷.

This is typical of the few speeches the women are given. Instead of discussing their pasts, their experiences, or their life philosophies, they complain about the other women, or their speeches are treated as a punchline, as when Abigail warns the listening men not to become mothers. As a whole, the speech is nothing less than bizarre:

You feed the boy, raise the boy, do any damn thing you could to protect the boy, all the time! Does the little apple of his mother’s eyes so much as consider the words ‘thank you’? Or express anything other than utter horror at her who birthed him. Rudeness I think I could take. It’s the pity and disgust I struggle with. Breaks my heart every time, it does. So don’t any of you boys become mothers.

Abigail Roberts

Admittedly, 12-year-old Jack Marston is an unpleasant child. But Abigail gives this speech when Jack is 4: a sweet, perfectly behaved little boy. He does not treat Abigail with horror, pity, or disgust. He makes her a necklace out of flowers. Whichever of the writers penned this speech gave no thought to the actual circumstances and realities of Abigail’s life, despite the fact that she’s the most prominent female character across the two Redemption games. Speaking to Tilly, Abigail says, “We all dreamt a lot. Then we grew into women. Saw what the world was for us.” To the casual examination, this seems to acknowledge women’s experiences of inequality. But elsewhere, Abigail says she started playing piano in a brothel when she was 8 (dialog playing dominoes in camp). No child who went through that could have missed “what the world was for [women].” The writers simply didn’t consider how her experiences would have shaped her.

“This Was Really His Dream”

If the writers can’t imagine what characters they themselves created would say when they talk about what matters most to them, what — we ask with fear and trembling — do they think women care about? What, in Houser-Unsworth-Humphries’ minds, are women’s lives made up of? The absolute lack of queer women in RDR2 points us to the exhaustingly unsurprising answer: men. Consider Arthur’s interactions with Mary. In her three mission appearances and three letters, she begs him for help managing her brother, then for help managing her father, then gives him a character analysis: her only priorities in life are her male relatives and her relationship with Arthur. But why, exactly, can’t Mary approach either issue herself?

Chivalry, in these cases, is not merely helping Mary because she asks for it. It’s the presentation of Mary as someone who has to be saved because she cannot effectively exert any influence over the men in her life, and who has no interests in anyone or anything beyond those men. What does Mary like to do? What does she dislike doing and have to do anyway? What does she care about? What are her goals? Who are her friends? Who can she not stand? What does she want, beyond to run away with Arthur? How on earth did a woman who’s so concerned with behaving “correctly” fall in love with an outlaw in the first place? Why does she want to run away with him? Who is she? We have close to no idea, and this makes Mary a flat, underdeveloped character. Her love story with Arthur only has any power due to Julie Jesneck and Roger Clark’s performances.

Examples of women in RDR2 whose identities are centered on their relationships with men abound. Molly O’Shea, Agnes Dowd, and Annette⁸ all give in to some combination of despair and madness when the men in their lives abandon them, either taking their own lives or acting with suicidal recklessness. Miriam Wegner never leaves her house because the man she loved died. When Sadie Adler and Charlotte Balfour lose their husbands, they dedicate their lives to their memories. Sadie spends weeks hunting down and wiping out the O’Driscoll gang. Charlotte chooses to honor Cal by continuing to work their homestead: “I can’t give up now. He wouldn’t want that,” she tells Arthur when he offers to take her somewhere safe, and later, “This was really his dream more than mine” (“The Widow of Willard’s Rest I”). Martha, whose body can be found at Martha’s Swain, tried to stop her lover Garfield from fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War. His corpse is on the battlefield at Bolger Glade, skewered through his left side to a tree. Martha’s skeleton clutches at the left side of her chest: she literally dropped dead when he died, not unlike the way Abigail dies only a few years after John — quickly swept aside so that Jack can continue his story.

Misogyny in RDR2’s Portrayal of the Arts & Sciences

Given their own failure to grasp women’s interiority whatsoever, is it any wonder that Rockstar’s writing team insults, denigrates, and simply ignores the products of women’s minds?

While RDR2 creates brilliant scientists in Marko Dragic, Dr. Malcolm MacIntosh, and (presumably) Francis Sinclair, the only female scientist — Deborah MacGuinness — is nothing short of stupid. After the exhaustive effort to locate 30 dinosaur fossils scattered across the map, the player arrives to MacGuinness’s farm to find she’s combined the remains of many different animals into one chimerical creature. She, and her work, are a punchline. While that chauvinism is irritating, it becomes downright galling when one considers the fact that MacGuinness’s character appears to be based on a real woman paleontologist: Mary Anning. Anning wasn’t stupid in the slightest, and her contributions to her field were denigrated by men who were her intellectual inferiors more than enough during her lifetime. What call Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries heard to add their names to that list 170 years after her death is best kept to themselves.

What’s particularly noteworthy about the dearth of competent women scientists in RDR2 is that Dutch Van der Linde is partly based on George Gordon, Lord Byron. As such, the game alludes to at least five people (and their work) with whom he was closely connected⁹. The Annabelle whom Dutch was in love with is named for Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, who was a mathematician. Safe to say Annabelle was not — her only characteristics, if we stretch that word beyond its breaking point, are that one man loved her and another killed her. What’s even more striking is that Byron’s most significant contribution to posterity wasn’t his poems, but fathering the first computer programmer: Ada Lovelace. (Graphics card company NVIDIA named its latest GPU architecture after her.) It’s safe to assume that the writers knew this, but they didn’t think the woman who helped to establish the field that’s made them their fortunes a worthy model for inclusion amongst their visionary figures.

The arts fare no better. Tompkins’ argument that the Western genre was a fearful response to female-dominated popular culture in the 1800s certainly makes sense of the fact that RDR2 goes out of its way to sneer at the romance genre. The women who read the novels in camp enjoy them, but speak disparagingly of them. Sharing the news of her successful career, Mary-Beth is quick to insult herself: “The books are unambiguously awful, but they sell.”

Nor does the game stop at insulting that particular genre or art form: Charles Châtenay, Albert Mason, and Evelyn Miller are geniuses. Conversely, Mrs. Hobbs’s art is creepy and Mrs. Chester Damsen is a hack. One of the letters that can be looted from pedestrians is from a palpably insincere man trying to marry a woman for her money. He says “I love you because you are beautiful and an artist. Those silly fools at the Academy cannot judge your drawings,” from which we can only infer that they’re no good. And while Simon Pearson, Sean MacGuire, Javier Escuella, Charles Smith, and Uncle all play instruments skillfully¹⁰, none of the women play instruments in the main story. (Abigail plays piano in the epilogue — terribly, despite the fact that she’s supposed to have started doing it when she was 8 years old.)

There are no women writers of what Rockstar would consider serious or important fiction in Red Dead Redemption 2. This is precious little wonder, given Dan Houser’s comments about the creation of Red Dead Redemption: “In reading books like [Cormack McCarthy’s] Blood Meridian, when it depicts the real horror of the West, I think we wanted to get an element of that in there. We didn’t want it to feel like Little House on the Prairie” (Quoted in Onyett). As Esther Wright says, “Dan Houser’s explanation for the intended ‘tone’ of RDR implicitly diminishes the validity of women-authored Western source material, while affording authority to male-authored Western fiction” (141). She goes on:

[Laura Ingalls Wilder’s] books showed that life in America’s West was hard, and in many ways also dark for white colonists, and they continue to be appreciated by readers of all ages. Thus while Ingalls Wilder’s work has hardly been held up as a paragon of inclusivity, and displayed pejorative attitudes towards Indigenous peoples, it offered a different perspective on Western life — and a comparatively more female-inclusive picture of life in the West. However, this apparently did not have the right “tone” to be considered a valid reference point for the game; or rather, it did not legitimize the picture of Western life Rockstar had endeavored to paint.

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Wright’s contrast of the terms “source material” and “fiction” are particularly apt. It is well worth pointing out that Ingalls Wilder’s novels were based on her own experiences of life in the West, while McCarthy’s novel, written more than a century after the events it describes, takes as its loose inspiration Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, a memoir whose highly romanticized and absurdly self-aggrandizing nature is hilariously apparent. Like RDR and RDR2, it doesn’t reflect “the truth” nearly as much as it reflects certain men’s fantasies.

Unsurprisingly, in writing the game, Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries used little material by women. My research has identified allusions to 42 separate works in RDR2 (not including Greek or Christian mythology). Of these, 32 are by men. Four more are by unknown authors, but as they date from the Middle Ages, they were probably also written by men. Sixteen of these works had major impact on the game. Conversely, a paltry six works by women are alluded to. Only one of these had what might be called major impact on the game. Overall, male authors wrote 85.7% of the literary material alluded to in RDR2. Men wrote 94% of the game’s major literary sources. (More complete demographical data will be published at the conclusion of this project, so stay tuned.)

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights had the most impact on RDR2 of any literary work by a woman. While the narrative and characters show that the works by men have generally been deeply considered, Brontë’s work is treated superficially, demonstrating little understanding of its actual substance (more on this to come). Moreover, in a weird act of erasure, her last name is given to a male character. While it would be a refreshing change if this were evidence that the writers weren’t intent on defining people according to their gender, it points to something else. The writers do this frequently, but it nearly always means that in some way or another, a woman’s attributes are given to a man.

Basing a woman on Sir Kay isn’t exactly inspiring, given that his job was to look after King Arthur’s household.

If you’re going to create a project as sprawling and detailed as RDR2, and you’re not going to bother to hire any women writers, you’d be well-served indeed to study and include women’s literature in the sources you rely on in your attempt to create a world that feels real and alive. Instead, the writers all but ignore women’s writing. The thin use of material by women doesn’t merely reflect the writers’ personal attitudes. Rather, they are a reflection and an indictment of Rockstar’s company culture at large. Emil Lundedal Hammar sums it up:

Not only does Rockstar North have the worst wage disparity [among U.K. gaming companies] between their men and women, the company also structurally marginalizes women from lead decision-making processes.
The gendered wage gap, the cultures of misogynist masculinity issues, and the reliance on unpaid domestic labor paint a picture of a patriarchal context of production that also leads to games that never centralize women as player-characters in their entertainment products, and also feature numerous misogynistic portrayals of women.

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Rockstar’s money, in other words, is right where its mouth is. The misogyny in RDR2 and the company’s mistreatment of its employees are both symptomatic of minds that, far from being original (much less visionary), have deeply entrenched themselves in regressive ways of thinking about gender, race, and labor. Technological advances aside, Sam and Dan Houser offer no evidence that they can imagine what could be. They can’t even see what is. Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries barely acknowledge women of color and disabled women, seem totally unaware that queer women exist, disregard women’s artistic and scientific genius, and sneer at women over the age of 40. That way of looking at the world is millennia old.

And in denigrating the entire gender, they damn their own.

Next week: The final part of this essay, on just what women’s function in the narrative is, and what the writers’ rejection of the feminine means for Arthur Morgan and John Marston.

“It’s Just a Girl”: Gender, Misogyny, and Homophobia in RDR2 Part I: Permeability

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1. A woman who is presumably a member of the tribe at Wapiti speaks one line at the end of “My Last Boy,” off in the dark somewhere. The player could probably see her if they tried, but they’re hardly likely to while rushing Eagle Flies to his father. ↩︎
2. Anthony Foreman, Joshua Brown, Sheriff Freeman, Alberto Fussar, Nate Davison, Algie Davison, Dr. Alphonse Renaud, Máximo Cristóbal Valdespino, Wendell White, Flaco Hernández, Thomas the boatman, Jules, Hercule, Leon, Baptiste, William, and Paytah. It’s quite possible I’m missing some bounty targets in this list. ↩︎
3. Significant named characters (12) include: Sadie Adler, Abigail Roberts, Molly O’Shea, Mary-Beth Gaskill, Karen Jones, Susan Grimshaw, Catherine Braithwaite, Edith Downes, Mary Linton, Penelope Braithwaite, Charlotte Balfour, Mrs. Londonderry.
   Secondary named characters (19) include: Mrs. Hobbs, Lilly Millet, Meredith Buckley, Etta Buckley, Agnes Dowd, Deborah MacGuinness, Helen, Miss Marjorie, Sally Nash, Black Belle, Tammy Aberdeen, Dorothea Wicklow, Lillian Powell, Moira Calthorpe, Mrs. Geddes, Momma Watson, Robin Koninsky, Ellie Anne Swan, Mrs. Chester Damsen. ↩︎
4. Arthur Morgan, Hosea Matthews, Reverend Swanson, Thomas Downes, Hamish Sinclair, Bertram, Clive, Mickey, Magnifico, Joe Butler, Blind Man Cassidy, Thomas the boatman, and Baptiste. Much of the population of Butcher Creek suffers from various disabilities, but the only named characters there are male. Many of the Murfrees are also disabled. There isn’t space here to discuss the game’s ableism, but there’s plenty to say about it. ↩︎
5. Dialog overheard during one of the encounters in which the Murfrees have killed some people on a picnic. As usual, queerness is treated as a punchline. ↩︎
6. Getting exact numbers would probably require not just going through the game audio files, but cross-referencing those with the code to see what can actually be triggered in the game. There are plenty of stray audio files that are never used. If I’m ever able to get more precise numbers, this essay will be updated. ↩︎
7. If it seems like I’m cherry-picking, consider how little I have to pick from. On the men’s side, I chose Hosea’s speech about Dutch rather than Bill’s or Javier’s because the latter characters are also in RDR; it’s understandable to want to flesh out the backstories of those characters more than those of new characters. ↩︎
8. Agnes Dowd’s ghost is found in the swamp near the Trapper’s Cabin late on foggy nights. Her father apparently killed her lover, and possibly their child. Agnes’s tombstone says she “took her own life and others,” although we only see evidence of the first part of this statement. Annette’s body is found at Robard Farm. A letter she carries reveals that she was having an affair with the man who lived there, who broke things off. Annette brutally murdered both the man and his wife before taking her own life. ↩︎
9. Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Annabella Milbanke, John William Polidori, Edward John Trelawny. Possibly also Count Pietro Gamba, Lady Anne Blunt, and Edward Williams ↩︎
10. Pearson: the concertina; Javier: the guitar; Uncle: the banjo; Sean: the jaw harp; Charles: the harmonica. ↩︎

Bibliography