I was breathless and imperfect, nearly losing my balance from lightheadedness several times. I can tell the story of that night of sex by likening myself to Bayonetta, but instead of my hair turning into succubi, it just got in my mouth multiple times. But there’s another difference too: we were flawed. My performance in lovemaking, where I felt myself flying like the protagonist of the game I’d played earlier in the night, was similar but consensual, a moving moment in time where domination would resolve into communion. First, Bayonetta’s domination is very literal and permanent, she kills and destroys with it and it is hardly a consensual affair. There is a critical difference between this sexual congress and Bayonetta’s battles, however-and it isn’t just the lack of angels to spank. Much as it pained me to admit, I wanted to be her. She is not Miss Stern as described by Angela Carter-the dominatrix who performed for a man’s pleasure and was “most truly subservient when most apparently dominant”-she, particularly when inhabited by a woman, is an expression with one heel in that subservience but another firmly planted in pure sexual performance art of her own direction, a vision of sexual power as manifested by a particular kind of woman. The lines and arches of her performance are there to communicate a dominatrix’s unique form of dominion, it is a literalization of sexual conquest but with a woman doing the conquering. It is the quintessence of that performance that ends with a leg propped upon your conquest’s back.Īs Maddy Myers reminded us, Bayonetta is that rarest of dominatrices whose morality and sense of self is neither a subject of shame nor ridicule, and that even rarer kind whose boots you’re allowed to step into. Hers is less a dance of battle as such than one of dominion.
These are not the same eyes that possess her during cut scenes, but a goddess-eye’s view of a burlesque opera directed by Bayonetta herself. She slows down, she becomes stiller, all as the result of a presumed male player.īut the other half of the dyad matters as well not the crotch-shots but the combat itself where you are meant to inhabit Bayonetta rather than watch her, and where the camera’s gaze takes in a different audience: the targets of her wrath. In those moments, Bayonetta is almost literally frozen into the still, often prone position of supine nudity that Berger critiqued. The camera is the roving gaze that supposedly belongs to that stereotype of a lascivious young, straight boy, drinking in crotch and butt shots, titillated by the pointless moans that accompany the camera’s irritatingly pornographic caress. The question that remains: is Bayonetta enchained to the pseudogeneric male player?įor a long time I felt she was. Put another way, it’s her nakedness as nudity, a fluid expression of her character that hides nothing and yet retains the performative aspect of nudity. She performs, and that performance is at once nudity and nakedness. The performance is the thing, and that is what makes Bayonetta playfully straddle the nude/naked line. But if, in Berger’s phrase, “nudity is a form of dress,” Bayonetta is shown wearing it with pride. When her clothes dissolve into nudity during her most powerful combos, it can seem as if she is at once “a nude” and simply naked-Bayonetta. This is the line Bayonetta walks, for she is at once represented as expressing herself through her performative combat and outlandish costumes, as well as being put on display for the benefit of the player. In art critic John Berger’s pathbreaking book Ways of Seeing, he analyzes the long tradition of the female nude in Western art, distinguishing the majority of nudes from a few paintings in which women are “naked,” explaining the distinction thusly: But to leave it there would be to ignore the emotions the games provoke, particularly in women players, and Bayonetta’s own character as an elegantly presented dominatrix: the performative half of a sexual universe. A case could be made that argues Bayonetta is never shown exercising her agency but that it is, rather, a just-so story to garland her presentation. So much is made of Bayonetta’s “agency,” the counterpart cliché to those who opine on her bending to the “male gaze,” to answer that all-important question: is Bayonetta’s unquestionable sexuality hers or simply a performance for men? The answer (or at least a part of it) reveals a good deal about the very nature of sex.Īgency, firstly, must be communicated in the art’s rhetoric rather than presumed or projected onto the subject.
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