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To My Someday Daughter [Sexism in Gaming]
kedinik
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I thought this was a good read: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22786_To_My_Someday_Daughter.html
Thoughts, responses?
A lifelong gamer and game journalist reflects on the misogyny that he perceives as deeply bound within the industry.
He explores common social pressures, experiences, and personal failings that tend to promote and excuse detestable behavior towards women by the gaming community.
If you're curious about the interrelationships between games, gamers in general and men/women in particular, you will probably find it very interesting, too.
I thought he did a good job of highlighting several important social issues that frequently get swept under the rug, even if a few of his claims may have gone too far.
He explores common social pressures, experiences, and personal failings that tend to promote and excuse detestable behavior towards women by the gaming community.
If you're curious about the interrelationships between games, gamers in general and men/women in particular, you will probably find it very interesting, too.
I thought he did a good job of highlighting several important social issues that frequently get swept under the rug, even if a few of his claims may have gone too far.
Thoughts, responses?
kedinik on
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As to the misogyny in the gaming community, it exists and it is widespread. But while gamers do have to own up to their own introverted shyness and bad luck with the ladies, the rest of the world has to acknowledge that the marginalization of gamers as "creepy, basement-dwelling nerds" has to change too.
Though I agree his defense of her went too far and became unreasonable.
Made no sense to compare her favorably with women who grew tired of playing 2nd fiddle to their man's obsession with a game, as if there had been a pragmatic long-term self defense mechanism somewhere in the belligerent post that started the firestorm.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I get that Alyssa actually is unlikable and cruel, but the article struck me at its core as, "Here are a lot of systemic problems that the overreaction to this woman reminded me of; here are lots of other anecdotes and articles to back each of them up."
So I don't see his most important ideas depending on whether or not you think her behavior is defensible.
ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WITH ME IS ANGRY AT HOW RIGHT I AM!
The actual examples given that reference who the person is are either the same thing you'd hear when a person dumped your friend, ie "she's just a bitch/dick"/"(s)he's not good enough for you anyway"/"who does (s)he think (s)he is? What a loser .." etc (because they were friends with the guy through the tubes or in RL or at least fans of him) or simply not misogynistic. Calling her shallow is not misogynistic. Calling her scum is not misogynistic. Being incredulous that a tech writer would go so over the top/nasty because her date was too nerdy is not misogynistic. "Mixedknuts" never said a bad word about her as far as I can tell. "BadAlex" never said anything misogynistic. Day9's G.G. story did not become misogynistic because he used the word "bitch."
There were definitely personal insults thrown at the author, but its the internet. The fact that this response author thinks "The tragedy of Alyssa's article is that it was flawed, and because of this, the gamer community really needed to rise to a special level of perception and thick-skinnedness to respond to it in a constructive way " is silly. The internet didn't lower itself to her level, she lowered herself to the internet's level. Regardless of whether you're a gamer or not, people respond rudely, directly, forcible and insultingly to almost anything on the internet. The comments on the Washington Post or NYTimes are full of much worse things than this response article talks about. That this article kind of deserved it doesn't make it deserving of special treatment. Never read the comments.
It begins with the premise that her central thesis of not wanting to date a gamer was not only reasonable but so clearly correct that even attempting to date as a gamer was something that obviously was going to result in a mocking article or that mother's had to beware that such men were out there and didn't include the information on the OKCupid profile. The response article even equates gamers with juggalos (sic? doesn't really matter). If the original author had shown up to a date and found out he was black or short, it was within her rights to not want to date the guy. If a guy showed up and found out a girl he wanted to date was overweight or an atheist he'd be within his rights to not date the girl. The only way you could justify an article mocking someone for having the audacity to try to date with those characteristics is if you made the assumption that the mockery was at least in part correct. And the responding author does just that. is flamebaiting bullshit disguised as a portion of a "reasonable" article. So is the next paragraph That assumption is sprinkled throughout the piece "with such apparent disregard for the tolerance to which gamers felt entitled, things got nasty", "Gamers are ...the same scornful, entitled males you've been dealing with your entire life." etc
But if you wrote an article online and said essentially "how dare that black/atheist/short/fat fuck have the nerve to try date me? Fucking loser." you're going to get a backlash. And you don't really deserve a lot of sympathy for that backlash. If you express an opinion online that others find offensive, you're likely to get a response that is in part offensive. The fact that the responding author felt it important to write a what is nominally a defense of that article but actually an indictment of the community it attacked implies he believes the criticism is accurate.
If the article had been about a male saying "So you're a professional activist in feminist causes? Strike one. How often? I'm preparing for one this weekend. Strike two. Who do you hang out with? Mostly women from the movement or that I studied with. Strike Three" there would have been a huge backlash. And he would not be inclined to write about how the feminist movement needs "to rise to a special level of perception and thick-skinnedness to respond to it in a constructive way." Only by starting from a position that a women feeling that gamers are terrible partners (and perhaps just bad people in general) is not only reasonable but accurate does the defense become coherent.
Finally it throws in the old crutch of writing about gender issues by implying sexual assault/violence against women. Its not an accident he included "[Gavin de Becker] noted that the outcome a woman feared most from any romantic encounter was rape and death.." It wasn't just a convenient transition to a man's fear of rejection/scorn/mockery. It was to bring up the specter of male to female violence just as "In the romantic arena, male gamers still act like a cringing minority. This is despite the fact that until relatively recently (and still in some parts of the world) women have had little power to say “no” to a man, regardless of his unsuitability." Strange then that the only actual mention of any even theoretically violence contact was You see male->female violence is the elephant in the room that can stifle your critics by putting the implication in the back of their mind that objecting to the thesis you are defending male->female violence. Female->male violence however is funny to joke about.
Is there misogyny in gaming? Yes, although I think it is largely the baseline sexism in society in general. But this kerfuffle has little to do with it.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I think I should post the main points of consideration from the article for discussion, since they kind of just aren't getting substantively discussed by some posters.
*Thousands of MtG fans and self-identified nerds respond with an arguably inequitable torrent of sexist jokes, insults and memes.
*Author of the 'To My Someday Daughter' article noticed pronounced lack of anyone defending Alyssa cause, hey, she really is a dumb bitch, am I right guys?
*Notes that bitter socially stymied gamer men often often engage in behavior that seems a lot worse than a rude blog post about how nerdy some guy is, that this chronic and generally unpunished behavior might have a lot to do with women being uncomfortable around nerdy men.
*Author cites successful internet personality Day[9] as an example of a well-intentioned and lovable nerd who occasionally fires off thoughtless "jesus christ, fuck dumb bitches who don't understand me!" jokes in a manner common to the gaming community, in a manner that understandably scares away a lot of girls even when come on, it's just a joke.
*Explains that many gamers are understandably proud of their hobby because it's a fun outlet for mitigating prior social frustrations, but that maybe one man's proud obsession is a woman's reasonable dating red flag, and that tens of thousands of extremely bitter, aggressive, sexist insults from strangers continually reinforce that red flag in the case of the gaming community.
*Goes in detail with one of many examples that, in his professional experience, passionate gamers often do struggle with their own particular inabilities to understand and care about common emotional needs in relationships, and sometimes you even have the community oddly inspired by men who proudly eschew adult responsibilities and risk destroying their marriage in order to, really, at the end of the day, remain man-children.
*Concludes an (admittedly sometimes over-the-top) article by imploring that gaming men actually often do have entitlement complexes and should simply treat women better and be more critical of peers who fail to do so, and that he "[has] faith in you, even if you're right now feeling angry at me and mentally reserving the right to flame 'bitchy' articles written by 'bitches.' "
tl;dr yes he sometimes overreaches and condescends, but I don't think you can honestly deny that a lot of emotionally stunted male gamers with entitlement complexes channel personal problems into immature a woman insulted my hobby witch hunts while peers encourage or ignore the behavior.
That at the very least, our community would benefit from cleaning up our language and actively discouraging women, am I right guys? jokes, and from trying to understand the reasons that many women simply feel uncomfortable participating in the gaming community.
I just think these issues are both under-discussed and worth facing head-on. Even if you think in this case "the author's an ass, he goes too far because of Y and Z."
Edit: My girlfriend, who I am lucky to have, plays all sorts of videogames. The amount of flack and being outright told in some circumstances that she isn't even allowed to play because she is a woman, upsets me to no end. I am surprised she even still attempts to play online games. Period.
It is absolutely not analogous to refusing to begin a relationship with someone who is black! That is absurd. Totally, totally absurd and reflective of exactly the kind of dumb persecution complex that turns people off from entering relationships with gamers (friendship relationships OR romantic relationships) in the first place. Just, oh my god. No. Refusing to begin a relationship with a Magic player is analogous to refusing to begin a relationship with someone who is super into college football, which is a position plenty of women hold. Oh, for three-four months a year this guy is going to be totally unavailable on Saturdays? Yikes. He's going to spend hours a week checking stats and talking about what teams he wants to win/lose this Saturday to ensure the best odds for "his" team and will have lengthy conversations about NCAA policies when out in a group, ignoring his girlfriend? He's going to want to travel to Nowhere, Midwest to tailgate and go to games? He's possibly/maybe/probably/likely going to be too hungover to hang out on Sunday mornings/afternoons? The alternative to never seeing him on Saturdays is going over to his/his friend's apartment where at least one of his douchey friends will make "make me a sandwich" jokes or expect the woman to make any and all necessary beer runs, all while being bored or getting eyerolls for not knowing about the intricacies of the game and asking "dumb" questions? Any number of those things could be dealbreakers to someone.
Bereznak's article was small-minded, shallow, and incredibly offensive. It was flame-bait and I'm sure she made herself and her coworkers rich last month (Gawker Media pays its full-timers a salary plus a page view bonus based on how well the whole site does). That doesn't mean people should have posted her personal information online, or made fun of her appearance, or called her a cunt. That shouldn't be "the level of the Internet," and if it is then people have the responsibility to raise the bar, period. There is no excuse.
Mainstream culture is definitely misogynistic, but GT is totally right that the Magic community is even more so. I don't know anything about broader gaming communities, I only play Magic, so I don't know how applicable his article is to others. I suspect given the reactions that it's about the same. And that can be seen just in the demographics of people who are even talking about the article. The editor of the article posted last night on her facebook that she hadn't seen many women talking about it at all, even accounting for the small proportion of Magic players who are women. She had to delete the wall post just a couple of hours later because it got mobbed by people saying super racist and sexist things. Which IMO just indicates that GT's article was very, very necessary even if not executed perfectly.
It is bad.
Yeahhhh
You could try reading some of his ideas.
Like how chronically frustrated "White Knight / Nice Guy" complexes actually lead to bitter sexism.
Guarantee it would be an improvement over perpetuating she was probably asking for it, like so many other bitches stereotypes.
I mean if you want to say she was rude and deserved criticism, ok, but god damn.
Any ways, all due respect, but people proudly proclaiming that Yes, women who shake up my world views should be shamed and isolated en masse... they're kind of exactly the problem.
I just don't even
Aaanyhow.
The article raises interesting and important points, but yeah, not sure about how much he sticks up for Bereznak's article which was certainly an awful bit of work. The salient bits about how women are treated in gaming communities are as always worth considering.
Where did he stick up for her article? I didn't see any of that, mostly chastising people for responding to her as "some dumb bitch" rather than "a person who did something dumb."
True, 'stick up for' is too strongly worded.
Much like how he looks back on his 2002 self and thinks what an idiot he used to be, I do the same, except about being one of the NiceGuy(TM) dudes.
The night it went down, I wrote an article for Nerd Puddle trying to unpack the furor that was still burning pretty hot around the whole debacle.
How a Girl Named Alyssa Stepped on the Internet's Last Nerve
To me, the elements of misogyny that did (and still do) continue to spring up in response to this are almost ancillary. They're the first easy weapon to grab for people angry at Bereznak's implications. But the question at the heart of this whole drama seems to be "are you cool enough to be a nerd?" It's a ridiculous question on the face of it, but that's essentially what Alyssa called into question. The nerds are beginning to self-segregate, essentially, and a subsection of dorks (rightly) took offense to that. It's in how they chose to fight back where people like Tait caught some vapors. And that misogyny he's responding to seems to have derailed him a little in his article.
Geek: Remixed - A Decade's worth of ruined pop culture memories
Xbox Live - Fatboy PDX
The community has been marginalized as a whole by the vast majority of men AND women who aren't into gaming. It's just that the Revenge of the Nerds fantasy is about eventually getting to fuck the cheerleaders, not the football players. And so when the cheerleaders sneer, it's not simply anger or 'I'll show you someday', it's 'how dare you withhold your pussy, which I rightfully deserve'.
I'd say the reaction to the article was funny, but it's not, because it's wholly predictable. Been a female gamer for, geez, what, thirty years now? (Man I'm old.) The gaming community has gotten better. But the idea that male gamers are especially enlightened when compared to their non-gamer counterparts is a fantasy. ("I'm not a jock and that's why *I* am unilaterally entitled to trim! How dare you refuse me, bitches!")
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Well sure. It was a stupid fucking article, which is par for the course for Gawker, compounded with assholery because she actually named the guy instead of being a civilized human being and leaving the target of her sniping anonymous. It wasn't stupid because she didn't want to date a Magic player; it was stupid because it was written stupidly, probably with the intent of trolling the online nerd community and generating pagehits.
The point wasn't whether the original article was idiotic (I think we can all agree that it was, yes?) The point was that in utterly unsurprising fashion, the first stick the angry gaming community reached for was sexism. Surprise! Well, not necessarily a surprise if you're a female gamer and have had to deal with metric craptons of "Tits or GTFO/hey how come no women play my favorite game so I can meet them? *sob*" and variations thereof on a pathetically regular basis.
I doubt people will listen, because it's painful to think about whether there's a large part of one's beloved community that's full of shitheads. Then we might have to admit there's a problem.
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I believe you hit on the root of that problem pretty succinctly:
For the longest time, (and this is something that is also reinforced in Oswalt's WIRED article I referenced in my post) the idea that the girl was the TROPHY you achieved for graduating into general acceptance hasn't exactly gone away. It's been mitigated somewhat as time has gone on, but that idea is consistently reinforced in a large amount of pop-culture. It's so pervasive that people typically don't even think about it. Some do, and there were more than a few responses that reflected that - I don't know if the first stick that was reached for was sexism, really. But it was a pretty big stick, and it was definitely within reach for a lot of people, and a lot of those people pretty thoughtlessly grabbed at it as means to beat back the sense of empathetic rejection they felt for Finkel. As the pile-on got fully underway, people went to it more and more because at that point, it was less about expression, and more about attention-getting.
Geek: Remixed - A Decade's worth of ruined pop culture memories
Xbox Live - Fatboy PDX
I guess maybe you just think Tait did a clumsy job of it, or what?
But of course, when people are hurt like that, they'll thoughtlessly go for the strike-back, and that's where stuff like gender and race gets brought out like a brickbat.
Geek: Remixed - A Decade's worth of ruined pop culture memories
Xbox Live - Fatboy PDX
so oldddddddddd
but for reals does that mean you had an amiga