Editor’s note: the following piece contains frank language regarding sexuality and gender.
The most important mechanic in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is the menu you open to treat Snake’s injuries. This was a menu I became aware of about a year ago, when I picked Snake Eater up for the first time. The only game console in the house when I was a kid was the Xbox, which was replaced with a PS3 when I was teenager. Metal Gear wasn’t on my radar at all until 2015, and then for a long time, the only context I had was that I would regret my words and deeds.
In retrospect, the contemporary critique of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is incredibly frustrating. As a character, Quiet is an embarrassing object, rendered speechless and semi-naked by a convoluted plot. This is not a defense of Quiet, nor is it a defense of Hideo Kojima’s defense of Quiet. Against the entire, multi-game, nearly forty year history of Metal Gear, though, Quiet is a drop in a bucket. It isn’t accurate (or honest) to paint Metal Gear‘s appeal as strictly for avowed misogynists or only straight men.
Our economy is split along the gender line — this is universally understood by every serious person alive. Brutally simplified, men and women are paid differently for the same work — although men and women are also shepherded toward different jobs along gender lines. Purchasing is as strictly split by gender as labor is, for reasons that are as precisely artificial — you can sell a hell of a lot more shampoo if one bottle is pink and the other is gunmetal grey.
Wandering from the places nominally set aside ‘for you’ gets decidedly mixed reactions. Barbie Horse Adventure is for girls, ergo, there is no reason for girls to play anything other than Barbie Horse Adventure. Women and men enforce this bullshit with equal enthusiasm; girls are as likely to call you a dyke for wearing Old Spice deodorant as boys are likely to call you a fag for wiping your own ass. Women and men both internalize marketing and then build elaborate philosophies to justify what they’ve internalized. Metal Gear is a boy game; why are you, a good feminist and a girl, participating in your own oppression by playing it?
Art is much like reality, in that it is always more complex (and interesting) than advertising. Metal Gear is full of sex and sex appeal and sexuality and sexualizaton, but there isn’t consensus who all this sex is for, or even what all this sex signifies. Ocelot doesn’t kiss Snake; it’s a Russian taunt. I was shocked when I finally started playing Metal Gear games, because it is obvious that Snake is a sex object for women.
Raiden is usually understood to be the Metal Gear character for the female audience, as a lithe and acrobatic bishonen with beautiful hair. Raiden is sexy, and Raiden gets plenty hurt, but the audience is not witness to the vulnerability that lead him to a full-body prosthetic; he just kind of shows up with it in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The fantasy of Raiden is an ongoing conversion to invulnerability; conversely, Snake is boundlessly, endlessly vulnerable.
MGS 3: Snake Eater is largely a game of managing Snake’s vulnerability. Snake is one man in the field, surrounded by enemies, and with limited supplies. Snake is vulnerable to being shot, but also to hunger, and, cruelly, to being poisoned by what he eats. And if Snake gets sick or shot, you can pull up the Survival Viewer and patch him up.
I love the Survival Viewer. The Survival Viewer is a menu you can pull up, which displays Snake in the center, showing his injury. The screen shows picture-in-picture of his ailments, sometimes the x-ray of his fractured bone. Critically, Snake is always shown in the Survival Viewer with his shirt off.
Once in the Survival Viewer, you can open the “CURE” menu, which lists all of the first aid equipment at Snake’s disposal. If Snake’s injury is brand new to him, Para-Medic will come over the radio and issue catechism — the right tools to use to treat his injuries, and the order you need to use them in.
Does the order actually matter? Will it impact Snake’s health if disinfectant is used before styptic, if styptic is used before pulling out a slug? I don’t actually know — it matters to me that Para-Medic tells you the correct order to do these things, so that’s the order I do them in. In the survival viewer, half naked, Snake shows me what’s wrong. Sometimes, like if it’s my first time addressing that kind of injury, the Survival Viewer will enter picture-in-picture mode and show a cutscene of Snake doing what I told him to do. Shirtless (always), Snake groans and grunts, punished by my CUREs.
This is pornography.
Snake’s appeal as a boyfriend — as a romantic fantasy — as a sex object is predicted purely on his continuous vulnerability. It’s not just that he’s a pretty face (see: Raiden), it’s that the very structure of the game that he’s in puts him in constant physical peril, and sometimes the threat does come to bear.
What’s wrong with women? There’s a lot of pearl-clutching about men’s sexuality, cis-men’s sexuality, straight men’s sexuality, that casts it as intrinsically violent. Sex is commonly understood to be something men do to women, instead of something women do with men. This point of view is, somehow, understood to be both red-blooded conservatism and weepy feminism at the same time. If you believe that sex is something men do to women, that sex hurts women, it follows naturally that all sex is damaging to women. It follows naturally that any cunt is a gash.
Women and men both internalize what marketing preaches: when you’re examining Snake’s wounds — pulling bullets from him with a fork, disinfecting the holes in him and applying styptic to his bleeding, finally laying clean bandages to keep dirt out of his wounds, well, shit. Every gash is a cunt.
Do men know this is sexy? Do men know that the the Survival Viewer is a JOI fantasy in which you force Snake to examine and handle the delicate opening of his situational cunt? Do they realize Snake is a girl, cautiously and fearfully self-penetrating? It’s obvious to me.
Being told that sex is damage men do to women has made men weird (see: Andrew Tate), but it’s also made women weird. My sexuality is not some pure thing that sprung fully formed, beyond the malign influence of our culture. I was made, as much as any man was. I don’t know if there’s a version of the world that happened where sex has no negative connotations, no baggage. I don’t know what my own sexuality would look like in that world. I don’t know who that version of me would be; she is a stranger.
Your CUREs menu includes a cigar — you use its lit end to dispatch any leeches Snake picks up while in deep water. Para-Medic warns you not to smoke it — they’re highly addictive and hazardous to health. Lord, I will not live forever, though, and neither will Snake. What’s better than a good smoke after a fuck?
