Sexy, Strong, or Both? How Female Video Game Characters Are Finally Leveling Up

Let’s talk about Lara Croft. She’s one of gaming’s most iconic adventurers—diving through ancient ruins, fighting off bad guys, and somehow doing it all in tiny shorts and a tank top (or sometimes even a bikini). For years, Lara was the poster girl for hypersexualized female characters. But she’s just the tip of the pixelated iceberg.

A new wave of research is calling out how female characters in video games have been objectified over the past three decades. Dr. Teresa Lynch, a media researcher and gamer herself, studied 571 playable women from games released between 1989 and 2014. Her findings? The gaming world has a long history of showing off big boobs, tiny waists, and barely-there outfits—especially in fighting games aimed at guys. Think Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur, and other button-mashing classics.

According to Lynch, the oversexualization of women peaked in the ‘90s, but it’s still a thing today. And it’s more than just skin-deep—it affects how female characters are treated in the story, how often they appear, and how players (especially women) connect with them.

Take Ivy from Soul Calibur, one of the most sexualized characters in Lynch’s study. She’s powerful, sure—but she’s also practically fighting in lingerie. The study found that when female characters are both super strong and super sexualized, it doesn’t balance things out—it actually makes them more objectified. It’s what some researchers call the “fighting fuck-toy” effect.

Lynch and her team ran two experiments using SOULCALIBUR VI to see how players really feel about these kinds of characters. First, they had people watch clips of four different female fighters: some strong, some weak, some dressed modestly, and some not so much. Then they asked viewers to rate the characters on things like strength, sexiness, likability, and femininity.

The results? People liked the strong characters, but when they were also super sexualized, it was a turn-off—especially for women. Still, when asked which character they’d want to play as, many female participants chose the most feminine (and often most revealing) one. Why? Maybe because she was the easiest to relate to. Maybe because femininity is still tied up in unrealistic beauty standards. Either way, it’s complicated.

In the second experiment, people actually played as these characters instead of just watching them. That changed things. Controlling a strong female fighter made players (especially women) see her as more capable—but also less warm or relatable. Strength gave these characters more respect, but also made them feel less “feminine” in the traditional sense.

So what does this all mean for gaming?

Well, nearly half of all gamers are women, but they’re not exactly lining up to play games that treat them like eye candy. And while the industry is slowly changing—hello, modern Lara Croft in actual pants—there’s still a long way to go. Developers are realizing that hypersexualizing women isn’t just outdated, it’s bad for business.

Strong, well-written, realistic female characters are finally starting to break the mold. They don’t have to be perfect or pretty all the time—they just need to be people. Because at the end of the day, players want characters they can root for, relate to, and maybe even see a little bit of themselves in.