In this essay I will show both the radical interpretation of women in the video game tomb raider and reactionary stereotype of men shown in the Men’s Health magazine. I will be exploring the issue of sexualisation used by Eidos in the character creation and gameplay of Tomb Raider, furthermore explaining how the game can be seen as radical. Additionally, I will explore the misrepresentation of men and the stereotype of being unfeeling and having to “blast body fat” or to have “t-shirt arms”. 

In Men’s Health it uses Vin Diesel as an iconic sign, it’s that were all a meant to have muscles like him. This magazine cover makes out that it’s easy to lose weight “lose 8kg fast” and it expects all men to have lots of muscles “build a 6-pack for life”. This is a reactionary text and agrees with the stereotype that all men should be strong and emotionless as we can learn to “slay winter blues”. However, statistically suicide is more common with men and this could be partly due to fact men can be seen as weak by sharing their feelings. 

Tomb Raider can be seen as radical as it has a female character holding a gun, this is a symbolic sign linked to violence. This is radical because it’s a counterstereotype, women are seen as caring or calm. It’s normally men that enjoy violence or pictured to be aggressive. An iconic sign on the game cover is Lara and how she’s a meant to be attractive and skinny, this is reactionary as stereotypical women are pretty and skinny. On the cover she is also wearing short shorts and a crop top, this is used to sexualise and objectify her to make the game cover more appealing to men which is the games target audience. 

The audience for the Men’s Health magazine are men who want to lose weight or feel like they need to exercise or workout to look like a stereotypical man accepted by society. The uses and gratification theory developed by Bulmer and Katz states that users seek out media sources which best fulfils their needs and assumes people choose certain media for five different reasons, these are: Information and education, entertainment, personal identity integration and social interaction and escapism. Men’s Health could fall into both Information and personal identity as readers may want to learn how to lose weight or to be inspired by others. 

However, Tomb Raider falls into the entertainment section for both its sexualisation of Lara to increase the games attraction for men/ target audience and for its gameplay. 

In conclusion, both covers are reactionary as they give society an unrealistic representation of how men and women should look. In Tomb Raider, Lara is extremely sexualised and used as a way to create appeal for the game this can make people set goals to look like something can’t be. Men’s Health also causes men to set extreme targets of how they want to look and can cause low esteem of people who can’t reach these targets. Both CSPs are negative stereotypes and cause fake dominant ideologies giving people bad constructed realities of themselves.