NO HOMO, THOUGH
The thing about Nate from Baby Steps is that I want to have sex with him. I like fat nerdy guys. He's not even that fat, but we live in a post-Ozempic era where a guy over six feet with a little extra something-something might as well be a beached whale. (Even before Ozempic this was a common enough view, but the window of acceptability has shrunk even smaller.) But the game does not let me have sex with him. Instead, I make him walk, and I make him fall. Painfully.
It's not necessarily rare to find a game with a fat loser who we subject to pain for our pleasure. But the result is often arcade-y and without intimacy. Lara Croft, in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot series, is infamously subjected to brutal death animations, orgasmically moaning her way through impalements, crushings, and drownings. This is hot, because the root of heterosexuality is violence against women. Gay guys are not allowed to have this sort of fun, unless it is categorized as "disgusting fetish content" that is not allowed at Pride.
But it's also hot because of our proximity to Lara. We control her. We embody her. But she's also under our protection. We guide her. We control her. We're the ones leading her into danger or around it. And we spend hours with her, growing more attached. In Baby Steps, that object of affection is Nate.
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| "The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look." – Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema |
Nate's clothes and feet get dynamically filthier the longer you drag his ass through the dirt. You can lift and rotate his feet and put them directly in view of the camera, admiring your handiwork. His boobs and butt have subtle but insistent jiggle physics. And of course, there's the pathetic groans Nate emits when you purposefully make him fall 100 metres onto a wooden beam. It's less harrowing than a Tomb Raider death scream; if anything, it's endearing. But it still lends a certain sadistic joy to flinging him onto a bed of sharp rocks.
If Nate were more svelte and womanly, all of this would smack of fetish. But being a man, and not a traditionally handsome one at that, Nate is not a culturally recognized target for fetishistic desire. We are subjecting him to ridicule. We are punishing his lack of masculinity. We are not to find his predicament desirable. We are not to find his huge rack enticing.
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| The Woke Left's answer to Sydney Sweeney? |
I think, pretty routinely, straight guys create gay fetish content simply by accident. It's funny to subject a guy to grotesque, homoerotic, and emasculating scenarios. It's funny to put an ugly fat guy in a situation where you would normally find a sexy woman. It's funny that Nate has a huge jiggling body, it's funny that he's in an unflattering onesie, it's funny that he's constantly being harassed by skinny fit men with huge swinging dicks while he's about to pee his pants. Jackass has resonated with many queer and trans people over the years.
Video games are an extra hostile place lately for queer and trans people, with recent crackdowns on "inappropriate" and "sexual" content on game storefronts. (Heteronormative desire runs rampant as usual.) Something like Baby Steps sits in an interesting place, since it's not really queer or sexual, but it's so very clearly charged with that potential. Fetish at its core is a sexual interest in things that are not sexual. So how do you police "non-sexual" sexuality? Queerness remains, even if it's denied sunlight. You just end up looking for it in weird places. I can't have sex with Nate, but I can hurt him. No homo, though.
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| "I'm Fragile, but not that fragile." |
Ultimately, Baby Steps is a game about the perils of masculinity. We aren't punishing Nate for anything: he is punishing himself. He is unaccomplished, deeply insecure, unwilling to ask for help, constantly comparing himself to others. He presses on up this treacherous moutain because he has to prove that he is worth something, that he can stand up and be a man. But what is gayer than being a man? Surrounding yourself with other men? Obsessing over their huge, swinging dongs?
I once wrote in a poem that everything I like is a joke. If you have any sort of non-normative desire, there's a hope that you can hide it, or get out in front of it, or otherwise lessen the burden of being a weird little freak. But at the end of the day, you are a weird little freak, and that's fine. It's not a hard club to get into.
RECOMMENDED READING
- I normally do a bit here by recommending stuff I haven't actually read, but I have played Baby Steps, and the only other things I could think to put here are the articles I already referenced above, which I have in fact read. I'd link to Rule 34, but unfortunately there's only one piece of Baby Steps porn and it doesn't include Nate at all. So go read whatever you want.