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labingiContinuing to take some moments off from living through fascism to fangirl over Arcane, I want to discuss Arcane’s worldbuilding around gender. (Of possible interest to inhiding.) It does the common fantasy trope of presenting what would logically be a patriarchy as essentially gender egalitarian, but it is uncommon in doing a fairly good job selling it; at least, I buy it enough to suspend my disbelief, which is a high compliment. Possible spoilers for S1 and S2 behind the cut; warning for talk about violence and sexual violence.
Why Would It Be a Misogynistic Patriarchy?
Zaun and, in a different way, Piltover are both brutal, violent societies with intense hierarchy that lean on violence to maintain power. Among human beings, I expect such societies to be patriarchies because, if violence is a main tool for maintaining power, that generally favors men. On average, men are physically stronger than women, which means they are advantaged in hand-to-hand violence. On average, they also have higher testosterone, which means they are somewhat more prone to/comfortable with violence. Rape is also a tool of violent control, and it’s easier for men to practice against women than vice versa, and women have the added risk of pregnancy. And if we posit that women will always be particularly vulnerable when pregnant and will probably always be more likely to be the primary caregiver for small babies, women will also have particular difficulties protecting themselves and their young children in violent contexts.
By these measures, Zaun ought to be patriarchal given the pervasiveness of many kinds of violence. Piltover is more genteel and high tech within its own confines, and I might expect women there to have higher status, but it’s a violent, oppressive power against Zaun, and I’d expect some that orientation to bleed over into general cultural values. But this isn’t what we see.
So What Gives?
Both Zaun and Piltover are presented as almost wholly gender egalitarian. I say “almost” because there are some slight telltales of women being a bit more on sexual display: more revealing clothing, that odd little skirt female Enforcers sometimes wear, and I’m inclined to read this as some sort of historic relic of women as sexual property but a) it’s a pretty remote relic and b) as a person from a misogynistic patriarchy, I might be misreading it: maybe sexual allure is historically a sign of greater female power.
The point is it’s pretty egalitarian. In both cities, men and women can hold the same jobs and social positions, be equally powerful as political players, equally accepted as scientists (I think? actually, it's pretty weighted toward men here), and so on. How can this be?
Let me run down what I see as salient material conditions:
1) They have effective, widely available contraception (even in Zaun). The story doesn’t say this, but the evidence is compelling. Families are pretty small; I don’t think we encounter a biological family with more than two children. If they didn’t have effective contraception, there would be tons of urchins in the streets of Zaun, and there aren’t. Sure, there are orphans, but not scads of them, not like Dickensian England: that’s poor people without birth control.
They also have liberal sexual mores. No one treats any of sexual liaisons we see as a big deal: Jayce and Mel hook up; it’s fine. Vi and Caitlyn hook up; it’s fine. Caitlyn has a fling with someone else: she gets a mild lecture from Ambessa (from a third culture, I know) about not mixing work and pleasure, but there’s no sense of prudery in her remarks; in fact, she’s got toy boys galore. Felicia and Connol have at least their first child by accident; it’s fine. (And, yes, this suggests their contraceptive practices aren’t foolproof, but they don’t have to be to be pretty good.) The brothel seems a pretty unproblematic part of Zaun, and its madam pretty highly respected. Basically, a society with relatively few children and a lot of casual (heterosexual) sex has good contraception; that combination won’t work otherwise.
Effective, available, acceptable contraception is a huge gender equalizer. In one swoop, it greatly diminishes the particular vulnerabilities of women to rape; the dangers of pregnancy, in general; and differential impoverishment from being the ones more likely to be stuck as single parents.
2) They have a generous cultural space for physically tough women. The series gives us quite a few women who are dangerous hand-to-hand fighters, in part, because they are stacked like bodybuilders: Ambessa (third culture, I know—but there’s certainly some cultural cross-pollination), Vi, Sevika, Chembaron Renni, and possibly Grayson (a bit hard to tell through her uniform). These women are not regarded as freakish or surprising at all. Culturally, Zaun and Piltover both have space for women to be more-or-less as physically strong and dangerous as men. This is further equalized by technologies like prosthetic limbs and those mining gauntlets (I forget what they’re called).
Zaun, at least, also has performance-enhancing drugs, which is a further equalizer. Now, shimmer, in particular, is a Silco-era thing, which means it would not be a deep historical part of their culture. But given its vast and rapid acceptance, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were predated by other performance-enhancing drugs. I know Silco forces it pretty hard, but at some point a critical mass of people has to buy in to have that pervasive an impact.
Moreover, both Piltover and Zaun have martial arts practices that can give a wide variety of body types a wide range of physical fighting skills. We see this with Jinx (even pre-shimmer) and Caitlyn, who are both physically slight but have a lot of dangerous moves. Caitlyn’s are based on lots of explicit martial arts training, Jinx’s likely more ad hoc but relying a lot on speed, agility, and flexibility, characteristics that favor lightweight girls.
In addition, a lot of people, including men, in Zaun are fairly small and/or weak due to a combination of pollution and malnutrition. Conversely, people who have a high tolerance to the polluted air are physically advantaged in Zaun, and this tolerance seems mostly based on long-term exposure rather than, say, body mass. All of this diminishes men’s overall physical advantage over women and argues for a culture doesn’t have many a priori assumptions about how physical power and sex/gender might align.
3) I only glean this from fanfic, but it also seems that Zaun, at least, has a female deity (Janna), which also suggests there might be a fairly deep heritage of regard for female power, which might, to some extent, culturally counteract material factors that might favor men. (Certainly, their society does not have our Western society hurdle of blaming Woman for all evil.)
Some Implications of This Egalitarianism
No Homophobia
This is a pretty obvious one. In show canon, I don’t think we get overt textual evidence of a male/male pairing, but the female/female pairings are totally normalized. I think the implication is that male/male pairings are too. (I mean, we don’t get many explicit sexual pairings at all, so there’s not a large sample size to consult, and it’s seems plausible we just don’t see an overt male/male pairing, unless I missed something in the background.)
This makes sense for a society that doesn’t have pronounced gender roles. If sex is not a strong determiner of what roles you fill in your life, it likely won’t be a strong social determiner of who you “should” pair up with.
It’s interesting that Arcane doesn’t comment more on trans or non-binary identities. We see a few figures who look kind of gender hybrid, but I don’t think there’s any explicitly trans/non-binary characters. I don’t know why this might be in terms of the production. In-universe, however, I wonder if having no pronounced gender roles would tend to decrease the number of trans/non-binary-identifying people by decreasing the number and rigidity of gender boxes people might otherwise have to escape. Doubtless, there still would be people who innately identify as trans or NB, but there might plausibly be fewer than in our society.
Men As Nurturing Parents
Our pop culture loves lionize women performing traditionally male roles: superhero, warrior, captain, etc. Because we are a patriarchy and inherently value “male” roles more, it’s much less usual to see men positively portrayed in traditionally female roles.
In Arcane, though, there’s quite a bit of male presence in traditionally female roles. One of the most quintessential female roles is nurturing parent, and Arcane foregrounds fathers as caregivers quite a bit more than mothers. In the roles of father figures, we have Vander, Silco, Benzo, Caitlyn’s dad, Singed, and Marcus. (I’ll also note that buff Cat Man is the primary caretaker of a baby; plus, Ekko is in a big brother role to many.) They are mostly marked by being nurturing caregivers, often associated with younger children; they provide food and shelter (not just in terms of “breadwinner” but of presence, living in spaces together, with toys strewn around and stuff).
The primary mother figures we see are Ambessa, Caitlyn’s mom, Jayce’s mom, Felicia—and Vi and Jinx riding the line between mother and sister to Powder and Isha respectively. Vi and Jinx operate as nurturing caregivers (both partly taught by men). Ambessa and Caitlyn’s mom, however, are in traditional “father” roles, role modeling participation in the larger society and being generally tough and no nonsense. Jayce’s mom is traditionally motherly, but we don’t see much of her. Felicia gets to voice something mothers rarely get to: that she doubts she’ll be a good parent and doesn’t even like kids. She seems to go on to be a good parent, but that fact such sentiments (especially not liking kids) are acceptable to voice speaks to less social pressure on women to carry most of the parenting weight.
They Don’t Have a Rape Culture, or “What’s Wrong with My Pants?”
This is kind of mind-blowing: that this violent, hierarchical, enraged society doesn’t have a rape culture, that is, a culture in which rape is fairly normalized as expected. It surprises me for both Piltover and Zaun but especially in the geographical area of Zaun, as it has more day-to-day, personal violence. As with the absence of patriarchy, in general, I’m not 100% sure I buy it, but I buy it enough to find it a very interesting thought experiment.
On a production level, the absence of sexual violence may be a pragmatic move to create teen friendly media and stave off accusations of misogyny or exploitation. But regardless of its genesis, I think the worldbuilding is pretty plausible. As to the in-universe reasons, see above re. gender equality. I’m more interested here in the execution, which is well done.
How can we see that this isn’t a rape culture? It goes beyond just not having explicit scenes of sexual violence; it’s about daily expectations. For one thing, there’s no sign of prohibition on women dressing in a revealing way. Most of the women don’t, at least not by video game/fantasy animation standards; they’re generally not objectified and dress as suits their jobs or personalities. But for some, that means they choose a revealing style. The chief representatives here are Mel and Jinx.
Mel knows how to use flirtation as part of her arsenal (as we see in her initial moves with Jayce), but she’s also taken perfectly seriously in non-sexualized terms as a councilor in exactly the same skimpy white dress. This absence of denigration really stands out in comparison to an analogous figure like Servalan in Blake’s 7 (sorry, kids, if that’s too old a reference, but it’s a good comparison). NB: I don’t mean to code Mel as evil; she’s not like Servalan in that respect, but Servalan has in common with Mel being a skillful political player whose good at seduction in a skimpy white dress. Servalan, however, does come from a rape culture, and it shows: throughout the series, men push her around, grab her by the neck, get into her personal space; she’s explicitly threatened with rape, condescended to, etc., etc. By comparison, the total absence of this with Mel is stark. She is simply not seen as an object or a conquest.
Jinx just dresses the way she wants to, which is functional, if arguably frumpy, pants and a skimpy halter top; she also wears quite heavy makeup. I subtitled this section in honor of the small, comic exchange where her pants get criticized as clownish. It’s cute, but it also speaks to deeper reality: she’s really not used to being judged for how she dresses. Frumpy or sexy, it’s just not a topic of conversation.
I think it’s salient that Silco, as her father, doesn’t seem to register the way she dresses at all. If my teenage daughter went out into the streets in that top and makeup, I would be having a serious conversation with her about the attention she might attract. In my reality, I would be a little worried for her safety and more worried about social-emotional harm to her. Now, it is also true that my daughter is not Parkour badass with a gun and bunch of explosives who I’m encouraging to unleash the monster inside. Even so, sexual aggression is such an intimately scarring thing, even if it never goes beyond threats or denigrating remarks, that I think most parents are concerned with protecting their daughters from it, even if their daughters are pretty tough. (Of course, sons can be victims too, but girls are the paradigmatic victim.) Silco just doesn’t seem to register this as a thing, which says to me it’s not a thing in their society.
Likewise, the brothel does not seem coded as place where sexual violence is likely to occur. Vi abruptly dumps on Caitlyn the task of pretending to be a sex worker in order to wheedle information out of patrons. She leaves her to this task with no preparation or cautionary tips, which suggests to me that Caitlyn is not in any real danger. Though Vi and Caitlyn don’t know each other well at this point, Vi is a good person trying to work with Caitlyn, so I don’t think she’d knowingly steer her into danger with no help. We catch up with Caitlyn and a patron sort of cuddled up, having a conversation. There’s no implication they’ve had sex. The patron seems to harbor no suspicions. This leads me to believe that actually talking, getting to know each other, before sex is fairly normative even at the brothel, which speaks to a culture of sexual respect.
All these details fit together to sell the idea of sexual equality despite the otherwise oppressive, hierarchical, violent cultural setting. It’s interesting and well executed. I have, however, only seen Arcane once, so I’d love to hear what others think.
inhiding.) It does the common fantasy trope of presenting what would logically be a patriarchy as essentially gender egalitarian, but it is uncommon in doing a fairly good job selling it; at least, I buy it enough to suspend my disbelief, which is a high compliment. Possible spoilers for S1 and S2 behind the cut; warning for talk about violence and sexual violence.Why Would It Be a Misogynistic Patriarchy?
Zaun and, in a different way, Piltover are both brutal, violent societies with intense hierarchy that lean on violence to maintain power. Among human beings, I expect such societies to be patriarchies because, if violence is a main tool for maintaining power, that generally favors men. On average, men are physically stronger than women, which means they are advantaged in hand-to-hand violence. On average, they also have higher testosterone, which means they are somewhat more prone to/comfortable with violence. Rape is also a tool of violent control, and it’s easier for men to practice against women than vice versa, and women have the added risk of pregnancy. And if we posit that women will always be particularly vulnerable when pregnant and will probably always be more likely to be the primary caregiver for small babies, women will also have particular difficulties protecting themselves and their young children in violent contexts.
By these measures, Zaun ought to be patriarchal given the pervasiveness of many kinds of violence. Piltover is more genteel and high tech within its own confines, and I might expect women there to have higher status, but it’s a violent, oppressive power against Zaun, and I’d expect some that orientation to bleed over into general cultural values. But this isn’t what we see.
So What Gives?
Both Zaun and Piltover are presented as almost wholly gender egalitarian. I say “almost” because there are some slight telltales of women being a bit more on sexual display: more revealing clothing, that odd little skirt female Enforcers sometimes wear, and I’m inclined to read this as some sort of historic relic of women as sexual property but a) it’s a pretty remote relic and b) as a person from a misogynistic patriarchy, I might be misreading it: maybe sexual allure is historically a sign of greater female power.
The point is it’s pretty egalitarian. In both cities, men and women can hold the same jobs and social positions, be equally powerful as political players, equally accepted as scientists (I think? actually, it's pretty weighted toward men here), and so on. How can this be?
Let me run down what I see as salient material conditions:
1) They have effective, widely available contraception (even in Zaun). The story doesn’t say this, but the evidence is compelling. Families are pretty small; I don’t think we encounter a biological family with more than two children. If they didn’t have effective contraception, there would be tons of urchins in the streets of Zaun, and there aren’t. Sure, there are orphans, but not scads of them, not like Dickensian England: that’s poor people without birth control.
They also have liberal sexual mores. No one treats any of sexual liaisons we see as a big deal: Jayce and Mel hook up; it’s fine. Vi and Caitlyn hook up; it’s fine. Caitlyn has a fling with someone else: she gets a mild lecture from Ambessa (from a third culture, I know) about not mixing work and pleasure, but there’s no sense of prudery in her remarks; in fact, she’s got toy boys galore. Felicia and Connol have at least their first child by accident; it’s fine. (And, yes, this suggests their contraceptive practices aren’t foolproof, but they don’t have to be to be pretty good.) The brothel seems a pretty unproblematic part of Zaun, and its madam pretty highly respected. Basically, a society with relatively few children and a lot of casual (heterosexual) sex has good contraception; that combination won’t work otherwise.
Effective, available, acceptable contraception is a huge gender equalizer. In one swoop, it greatly diminishes the particular vulnerabilities of women to rape; the dangers of pregnancy, in general; and differential impoverishment from being the ones more likely to be stuck as single parents.
2) They have a generous cultural space for physically tough women. The series gives us quite a few women who are dangerous hand-to-hand fighters, in part, because they are stacked like bodybuilders: Ambessa (third culture, I know—but there’s certainly some cultural cross-pollination), Vi, Sevika, Chembaron Renni, and possibly Grayson (a bit hard to tell through her uniform). These women are not regarded as freakish or surprising at all. Culturally, Zaun and Piltover both have space for women to be more-or-less as physically strong and dangerous as men. This is further equalized by technologies like prosthetic limbs and those mining gauntlets (I forget what they’re called).
Zaun, at least, also has performance-enhancing drugs, which is a further equalizer. Now, shimmer, in particular, is a Silco-era thing, which means it would not be a deep historical part of their culture. But given its vast and rapid acceptance, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were predated by other performance-enhancing drugs. I know Silco forces it pretty hard, but at some point a critical mass of people has to buy in to have that pervasive an impact.
Moreover, both Piltover and Zaun have martial arts practices that can give a wide variety of body types a wide range of physical fighting skills. We see this with Jinx (even pre-shimmer) and Caitlyn, who are both physically slight but have a lot of dangerous moves. Caitlyn’s are based on lots of explicit martial arts training, Jinx’s likely more ad hoc but relying a lot on speed, agility, and flexibility, characteristics that favor lightweight girls.
In addition, a lot of people, including men, in Zaun are fairly small and/or weak due to a combination of pollution and malnutrition. Conversely, people who have a high tolerance to the polluted air are physically advantaged in Zaun, and this tolerance seems mostly based on long-term exposure rather than, say, body mass. All of this diminishes men’s overall physical advantage over women and argues for a culture doesn’t have many a priori assumptions about how physical power and sex/gender might align.
3) I only glean this from fanfic, but it also seems that Zaun, at least, has a female deity (Janna), which also suggests there might be a fairly deep heritage of regard for female power, which might, to some extent, culturally counteract material factors that might favor men. (Certainly, their society does not have our Western society hurdle of blaming Woman for all evil.)
Some Implications of This Egalitarianism
No Homophobia
This is a pretty obvious one. In show canon, I don’t think we get overt textual evidence of a male/male pairing, but the female/female pairings are totally normalized. I think the implication is that male/male pairings are too. (I mean, we don’t get many explicit sexual pairings at all, so there’s not a large sample size to consult, and it’s seems plausible we just don’t see an overt male/male pairing, unless I missed something in the background.)
This makes sense for a society that doesn’t have pronounced gender roles. If sex is not a strong determiner of what roles you fill in your life, it likely won’t be a strong social determiner of who you “should” pair up with.
It’s interesting that Arcane doesn’t comment more on trans or non-binary identities. We see a few figures who look kind of gender hybrid, but I don’t think there’s any explicitly trans/non-binary characters. I don’t know why this might be in terms of the production. In-universe, however, I wonder if having no pronounced gender roles would tend to decrease the number of trans/non-binary-identifying people by decreasing the number and rigidity of gender boxes people might otherwise have to escape. Doubtless, there still would be people who innately identify as trans or NB, but there might plausibly be fewer than in our society.
Men As Nurturing Parents
Our pop culture loves lionize women performing traditionally male roles: superhero, warrior, captain, etc. Because we are a patriarchy and inherently value “male” roles more, it’s much less usual to see men positively portrayed in traditionally female roles.
In Arcane, though, there’s quite a bit of male presence in traditionally female roles. One of the most quintessential female roles is nurturing parent, and Arcane foregrounds fathers as caregivers quite a bit more than mothers. In the roles of father figures, we have Vander, Silco, Benzo, Caitlyn’s dad, Singed, and Marcus. (I’ll also note that buff Cat Man is the primary caretaker of a baby; plus, Ekko is in a big brother role to many.) They are mostly marked by being nurturing caregivers, often associated with younger children; they provide food and shelter (not just in terms of “breadwinner” but of presence, living in spaces together, with toys strewn around and stuff).
The primary mother figures we see are Ambessa, Caitlyn’s mom, Jayce’s mom, Felicia—and Vi and Jinx riding the line between mother and sister to Powder and Isha respectively. Vi and Jinx operate as nurturing caregivers (both partly taught by men). Ambessa and Caitlyn’s mom, however, are in traditional “father” roles, role modeling participation in the larger society and being generally tough and no nonsense. Jayce’s mom is traditionally motherly, but we don’t see much of her. Felicia gets to voice something mothers rarely get to: that she doubts she’ll be a good parent and doesn’t even like kids. She seems to go on to be a good parent, but that fact such sentiments (especially not liking kids) are acceptable to voice speaks to less social pressure on women to carry most of the parenting weight.
They Don’t Have a Rape Culture, or “What’s Wrong with My Pants?”
This is kind of mind-blowing: that this violent, hierarchical, enraged society doesn’t have a rape culture, that is, a culture in which rape is fairly normalized as expected. It surprises me for both Piltover and Zaun but especially in the geographical area of Zaun, as it has more day-to-day, personal violence. As with the absence of patriarchy, in general, I’m not 100% sure I buy it, but I buy it enough to find it a very interesting thought experiment.
On a production level, the absence of sexual violence may be a pragmatic move to create teen friendly media and stave off accusations of misogyny or exploitation. But regardless of its genesis, I think the worldbuilding is pretty plausible. As to the in-universe reasons, see above re. gender equality. I’m more interested here in the execution, which is well done.
How can we see that this isn’t a rape culture? It goes beyond just not having explicit scenes of sexual violence; it’s about daily expectations. For one thing, there’s no sign of prohibition on women dressing in a revealing way. Most of the women don’t, at least not by video game/fantasy animation standards; they’re generally not objectified and dress as suits their jobs or personalities. But for some, that means they choose a revealing style. The chief representatives here are Mel and Jinx.
Mel knows how to use flirtation as part of her arsenal (as we see in her initial moves with Jayce), but she’s also taken perfectly seriously in non-sexualized terms as a councilor in exactly the same skimpy white dress. This absence of denigration really stands out in comparison to an analogous figure like Servalan in Blake’s 7 (sorry, kids, if that’s too old a reference, but it’s a good comparison). NB: I don’t mean to code Mel as evil; she’s not like Servalan in that respect, but Servalan has in common with Mel being a skillful political player whose good at seduction in a skimpy white dress. Servalan, however, does come from a rape culture, and it shows: throughout the series, men push her around, grab her by the neck, get into her personal space; she’s explicitly threatened with rape, condescended to, etc., etc. By comparison, the total absence of this with Mel is stark. She is simply not seen as an object or a conquest.
Jinx just dresses the way she wants to, which is functional, if arguably frumpy, pants and a skimpy halter top; she also wears quite heavy makeup. I subtitled this section in honor of the small, comic exchange where her pants get criticized as clownish. It’s cute, but it also speaks to deeper reality: she’s really not used to being judged for how she dresses. Frumpy or sexy, it’s just not a topic of conversation.
I think it’s salient that Silco, as her father, doesn’t seem to register the way she dresses at all. If my teenage daughter went out into the streets in that top and makeup, I would be having a serious conversation with her about the attention she might attract. In my reality, I would be a little worried for her safety and more worried about social-emotional harm to her. Now, it is also true that my daughter is not Parkour badass with a gun and bunch of explosives who I’m encouraging to unleash the monster inside. Even so, sexual aggression is such an intimately scarring thing, even if it never goes beyond threats or denigrating remarks, that I think most parents are concerned with protecting their daughters from it, even if their daughters are pretty tough. (Of course, sons can be victims too, but girls are the paradigmatic victim.) Silco just doesn’t seem to register this as a thing, which says to me it’s not a thing in their society.
Likewise, the brothel does not seem coded as place where sexual violence is likely to occur. Vi abruptly dumps on Caitlyn the task of pretending to be a sex worker in order to wheedle information out of patrons. She leaves her to this task with no preparation or cautionary tips, which suggests to me that Caitlyn is not in any real danger. Though Vi and Caitlyn don’t know each other well at this point, Vi is a good person trying to work with Caitlyn, so I don’t think she’d knowingly steer her into danger with no help. We catch up with Caitlyn and a patron sort of cuddled up, having a conversation. There’s no implication they’ve had sex. The patron seems to harbor no suspicions. This leads me to believe that actually talking, getting to know each other, before sex is fairly normative even at the brothel, which speaks to a culture of sexual respect.
All these details fit together to sell the idea of sexual equality despite the otherwise oppressive, hierarchical, violent cultural setting. It’s interesting and well executed. I have, however, only seen Arcane once, so I’d love to hear what others think.
