I recognize that ass. I’ve been seeing it for seven playthroughs of Mass Effect 2. And I’m miffed.

Miranda Lawson, the character that the ass belongs to, is said to be engineered to be the “perfect woman”. She’s smart, beautiful, and very powerful. She can crush a mech with her biotic abilities, or shoot a target dead-on from a huge distance. Anything you can do, she can do better, and then some. 

But when you look at Miranda, with that skintight outfit (even an in-game female NPC comments on her outfit) and that rear end and her above-average size breasts…do you honestly think “oh, she’s so powerful, look at that strength, girl power all the way”? No. Only two words appear in your mind:

Dat. Ass.

Normally, I’d be careful before making statements such as this; but I am 99% sure that a majority of gamers use her in an active team due to her…attributes, rather than her power. Would they add her to their team if she was flat chested and didn’t have a badonkadonk that was all up in your face? No? I didn’t think so. She could be the most powerful character in the Mass Effect universe, or hell, in the entire history of video games - her power comes second after her ass.

This is what’s done to almost all female characters. Would men buy games from the Dead or Alive series if their female characters didn’t have breasts the size of their heads? Would men use Ivy from Soul Calibur if her clothes actually covered 75% of her body, as opposed to 10%? 

And how would they act, if the roles were reversed? What if male characters were hypersexualized, with only loincloths on and asses on display for the world to see, with sexy and suggestive posing? We’d have a video gamer war on our hands. Where are all the “would you have sex with Kratos or Sephiroth?” threads on GameFAQs? They don’t exist, because God forbid that male characters are treated as sex objects. Oh, the horror.

Ugh. There is no group as infuriating as the Sexually Insecure Straight Male Gamer. They just give the rest of us male gamers a bad name.