Think of the amusement park as a real-world RPG. You choose everything about your character, including your clothes, your weapons, and whether you’re the hero (the white hat) or the villain (the black hat). Then you are let loose on the world to forge your own path with each action you take affecting your karma points and story trajectory.
This is a game made by men for men. As soon as Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) begins to dream beyond the confines of her loop, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) brings her in, strips her naked, and reminds her that she lives in his dream. As a host, women can be like Dolores, something for men to rescue or for men to ravage in the worst way possible. They can be like Maeve (Thandie Newton), something for men to abuse and discard. In the rare case, they can be like Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), an outlaw with a snake tattoo, but even she is a stepping stone to further the storyline of the Man in Black.
As guests, women fade into the background. There’s Marti (Bojana Novakovic), a gunslinger who accompanied Teddy (James Marsden) on a mission, but it doesn’t look like she’ll be coming back. Then there’s the wife of Craig (Currie Graham), that guy who ruined Hector’s (Rodrigo Santoro’s) speech in the first episode by putting a bullet through his neck, but she easily grew tired of their time in the park. Why? Because this world wasn’t built for her.
This is happening in our world, too. GamerGate was coined in the gaming world after Zoe Quinn, a developer, was brutally harassed and threatened online. A quick Google search will unearth numerous other horror stories of women in geek fields facing harassment that, on a good day, includes comments like, “This is no place for a lady” and “Go kill yourself.” On a bad day, it’s much, much worse. Mockingbird comic writer Chelsea Cain is a recent victim. On leaving Twitter over online harassment, she wrote, in part, “Comics readers are 99% the best people you’d ever want to meet. The other 1% can be really mean.”
