For decades, video games have given players larger-than-life heroes with impossible physiques. Women have frequently been designed with exaggerated breasts, hips and backsides, while men have traditionally received a different fantasy treatment: enormous shoulders, narrow waists, bulging arms and superhero-level muscle.
Now, a gaming advocacy campaign is asking developers a simple question: Why can’t the men have bigger butts, too?
The tongue-in-cheek push for what supporters are calling “butt equality” argues that male character design still operates under a surprisingly narrow definition of masculinity. According to the campaign’s premise, developers have become comfortable exaggerating almost every part of a male fighter’s anatomy — except his hips and backside.
There is real research behind the broader conversation about the different ways male and female bodies are depicted in games. A systematic review found that female characters have historically been disproportionately objectified and hypersexualized, including through exaggerated body proportions. Research examining male characters, meanwhile, found that video-game men were often significantly larger than real-world men, reflecting their own exaggerated physical ideal.
The advocacy campaign argues that those two traditions reveal something interesting about who game designers have historically imagined their audience to be. Female exaggeration has frequently emphasized sexual attractiveness, while male exaggeration has emphasized strength and intimidation.
That distinction has led some critics to raise a more serious question: When gamers are perfectly comfortable with exaggerated female curves but become uncomfortable when designers give male characters noticeably larger backsides, is some of that reaction rooted in homophobia?
The argument isn’t that disliking a particular character design automatically makes someone homophobic. Rather, supporters say the reaction can expose cultural assumptions about which bodies men are “supposed” to notice. A woman with exaggerated curves has long been treated as normal gaming imagery aimed at heterosexual male players. A male character designed to invite the same kind of visual attention can suddenly be treated as a joke, inappropriate or somehow threatening to the character’s masculinity.
That debate intersects with academic discussions about the “male gaze” and heteronormativity in gaming. Researchers have described the traditional contrast as hypersexualized female characters existing alongside hyper-muscular male characters, with both reflecting different gender expectations.
Gaming has already changed considerably. A 2026 study examining 795 female characters from 188 popular games found that female characters have become less sexualized and increasingly portrayed as capable and important, although representation gaps remain.
Perhaps the next evolution is giving male characters more variety as well.
They can still be ninjas. They can still save the world. They can still throw fireballs, fight dragons and defeat the final boss.
The advocacy group’s message is simply that none of those things require a flat backside.
If Chun-Li can save the world with thighs that have their own fan base, maybe it’s finally time for the men of gaming to bring a little more cake to the character-select screen.
