So the top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit for a time yesterday, with hundreds of upvotes, was a post devoted to the question: “Why should male gamers change their behavior?” Yep, apparently the sacred right of men and boys to harass women and girls on Xbox live is one of the most important Men’s Rights issues of the day. Here’s how the OP, IsItRacistToAsk, framed the issue:
[G]amers themselves (until relatively recently) were a 90% male community. This goes back really far if you count non-video-game games (like Dungeons and Dragons and the like). Now all of a sudden they’re expected to just behave differently because some girls want to join?
I’m not saying girls shouldn’t be welcome in gaming communities, I’m just comparing them to someone who shows up, uninvited, to a house party and demands everyone go out and get blue plastic cups because red offends her.
Well, no, it’s more like a girl or a woman going to a public event, open to everyone, and facing a small army of creepy dudes who come up to her making sandwich jokes and calling her a bitch and a whore and a fat slut and demanding that she show her tits and when she refuses telling her “I hope your vibrator shorts out and fries your fucking vagina.”
The OP’s response to harassment? Well, guy gamers regularly get called “faggot” and “n*gger,” so girls and women should just suck it up.
Yeah, it would be too much to ask to suggest that guy gamers actually stop calling each other racist and homophobic slurs as well. Because, really, how can you possibly enjoy Call of Duty without calling some guy who’s just shot you a “fag.” Seriously, gals, you need to model yourselves on the mostly straight white dudes of Reddit who really don’t mind when people call them “n*ggers” and “fags.”
The discussion (more than 700 comments worth at the moment) is about as terrible as you might expect, filled with epic shitlordery and self-congratulation and calls for the gals to “man the fuck up,” with only a handful of commenters having anything bad to say about the culture of harassment in online gaming. Indeed, most of the gamers in the conversation seem to feel proud that online gaming culture is as shitty as it is.
Some highlights:
JonLR won himself more than a hundred upvotes for this self-congratulatory assholery:
By asking to never be made fun of, they’re essentially asking for special treatment. These days, ‘gamer girls’ go on and on about wanting to be treated like everyone else, but then cry when they are?
I used to play Quake 1 online, and a lot of the players knew I was short (5’7″). I got called a fucking midget every game, haha. My asian clanmate got called a chink every game. Fat people got called fat, girl players got called sluts, everyone made fun of everyone. No one cared. It was all aimed at throwing people off their game.
What the fuck happened in the past 15 years that made it the worst thing imaginable to insult a girl in gaming? Whatever it was, it’s embarrassing to witness.
Oneiorosgrip got nearly two hundred upvotes for her special snowflaking:
I’m not a video gamer – long time tabletop gamer though…
Remembering when I was the only girl in the group, it strikes me that modern gamer girls are spoiled princesses who expect to walk a path they did not forge, without ever seeing any of the dirt along the side. Those of use who played before there was internet, before there was linking between video game systems… before there were RPGs on video game systems, for that matter… we didn’t earn our place among the gaming community by whining about shit like that. You had to be able to take it, and dish back, or you took your dice and went home.
I took my dice and went home only once, and found that to be a wholly unsatisfying response. After that, I learned to eschew restraint and mouth off in kind. That was more effective, and more fun, and I think it would be the more appropriate handling of today’s gaming environment, as well.
In other words, IMO, modern girl gamers really just need to man the fuck up.
Men’s Rights subreddit regular Demonspawn was his normal charming self:
Men take the shit to make a niche, once it’s successful women want to take it over.
This is the world order, nothing new about it. I’m just glad that gamers are finally saying “No.”
Sidetracking got dozens of upvotes for suggesting that women and girls just hide their identity and pretend to be guys, because gamer girls who acknowledge their gender online are just attention whores hungry for female privilege anyway:
When anybody plays a video game, without talking, they are pretty much concealed. Nobody really knows what gender, age, etc. In real life, girls expect this privileged talking, because people want to engage in intercourse with them, however, over a video game, this privilege is gone. In order to get the privilege back they say “Hey, I’m a girl”, not knowing that this privilege is completely removed over the internet. Then they get over-sensitized when someone calls them a bad name, when they don’t realize that pretty much everyone calls anyone out over the internet.
Daysleepin83 also got dozens of upvotes for talking about the kinds of “gamer girls” he hates the most: The ones who complain and the ones who, evidently,wear no clothes.
For the most part i really don’t give two shits about what sex my opponent is.
But there are two types of “gamer girls” that really piss me off. There are those like Anita Sarkeesian who seem to bitch and nag about all that is sexist and wrong with video games. Doesn’t really offer any solution to the problems she digs up, aside from telling us we need to change. …
Then there is the second group, they don’t so much as piss me off but more like aggravate me. The sexy gamer girl. … Could she be a legitimate gamer? Sure of course she could be. I could also one day become the Pope. Till she puts some clothing on and picks up that controller i am not going to take her serious as a gamer.
MrDorph explained that he hates those “girl gamers” who “have to shove down your throat.” (Shove what? Your own assholery?)
The issue I have is girl gamers who have to shove down your throat. I imagine the majority just don’t give a shit and tend not to talk or if they do its not provocative. The moment I hear “hey guys” I leave, I can’t be bothered with the shit storm that comes with it.
Ghebert001 told the “poor things” to get used to shitty treatment, in online gaming and everywhere else:
Bottom line is women need to learn to adapt to the “environment” (environment meaning gaming community, workplace, etc.) instead of always expecting that the “environment” adapt to them and use language like “it makes me uncomfortable” to shame others in that “environment” to accommodate them at their own expense.
Throwing in the obligatory, “women” =/= all women…don’t want to offend the poor things. Oh wait, there I go accommodating again!
Yourotherusername wins points for pomposity with this response to the OP:
Well put. Like many things, the environment of gaming has it’s own language. It isn’t the language of Shakespeare or high-finance. It’s high context communication. It’s code. It isn’t (usually) to be take at face value. The problem for the people who complain, is that the marketers who attracted them to play the game, didn’t tell them how the game is played and the vocabulary needed.
If a person hangs out with a group of people not in their normal click, they need to understand that what is being said, might not actually be what was meant, and until they grasp the context, they need to keep their mouth shut if they don’t want to look like an asshole. I’d much rather ‘learn the language’ than try to change a sub-culture.
Take reddit for example. Expect masturbation jokes. Expect memes. Expect stereotypes. But in all of that, you will find that once you adapt and understand the context, it becomes more than a middle school locker room (especially in the smaller subreddits). IF you are so bold as to challenge the nature of communication on Reddit by admonishing others and trying to get them to change their way, you will be anathema, and most likely down voted to hell. The best you can do to change the language, is to be an example of what you want, and hope to flying spaghetti monster, that it catches on.
TLDR: Go with the flow or don’t go at all.
Reddit: Awful and proud of it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Men’s Rights subreddit, someone has once again posted a link to the “The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics,” because god forbid anyone ever say anything “shaming” about MRAs for being the shitty people they are.
(Not a gamer)
Can someone explain where the whole “gamer floozy” idea came from? I keep seeing references to this idea that women gamers are slutty/doing it to attract men, and it’s really confusing given the other stereotype about male gamers being nerds who can’t get laid. The male gamers often seem to see themselves that way, so why would they think that women would play games in order to attract their attention? I know there’s tons of sexism in that community, but still, it just doesn’t make any sense to see guys complaining that no women will date them and complaining that the women who participate in their hobby are only doing it in order to get into their pants at the same time.
Oh crap, MRAL, is that you?
CassandraSays – I think guys resent the “gamer floozies” because those women aren’t sleeping with them, so their being possibly sexually available to others causes RAEG.
But it’s mostly just about “women can’t do anything right.”
I’m a gamer, but I play almost exclusively single-player or with known friends. I have no interest in getting on XboX Live with strangers, partly because of all this BS.
…Which, of course, only solidifies their idea that Xbox Live is a man’s world!
Goddamn self-sustaining system.
But given that they think of themselves (male gamers) as dudes who can’t get laid, why would a woman who wants to get laid take up a hobby she doesn’t actually like just to appeal to them, the guys who’ve defined themselves as being men who women aren’t interested in? That’s the part that doesn’t make sense.
I think it’s similar to the Reddit phenomenon in which women and girls are attention whores simply for existing and participating, whereas men are just normal people. So, you have girls posting pictures of themselves with a book they just got, or a haircut, and everyone calls them whores and threatens to rape them. But when a guy posts a picture of himself with his new book or his new haircut, he’s just a guy with a book, or a haircut.
Don’t some of these games take hundreds of hours to get through? If that’s the case, and a woman wants attention from men, wouldn’t it be easier to just go to a bar rather than buy a game system, then some games, then spend hours and hours playing them (which she doesn’t like)? When the men who play the games constantly bemoan the fact that women don’t want them anyway? I’m seeing an Occam’s Razor problem here.
Sorry, didn’t mean to blame you. It just seems average white male gamer is called a midget. Not that this excuses sexism or racism.
I think it’s an extension of “women can’t really like man-things!” and “everybody’s getting laid but meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
1. Women playing video games. Women “don’t like” video games (wat.) and thus must have an ulterior motive.
2. Seeing as hypothetical misogynist, henceforth called Oedipus, can’t think of any reason for doing feminine things he doesn’t like apart from getting laid, he thinks that the “gamer girl floozies” are doing the same.
3. Except Oedipus is playing games, but no-one is jumping on his nerdy phallus.
4. “You evil sluts having sex with everyone else but me! Why aren’t you having sex with me?!”
5. Gamer women: “yeaaaaaaaaaah, it’s a mystery…”
I’m just guessing here, because I’m not a misogynist who measures self-worth by how many vaginas are on my [hypothetical] penis per annum.
Well, these guys aren’t exactly using our Earth logic, here.
They can’t conceive of women doing anything that doesn’t directly involve men. If a woman dresses up, it’s to attract men. If she plays video games, it’s to get male attention. If she happens to look pretty even if she’s done absolutely nothing to enhance her appearance, she’s flaunting her sexuality to attract men.
There might be some influence in the fact that sexy women are sometimes used to sell game products, but sexy women are used to sell basically everything so that argument’s still bullshit.
Cassandra, on a logical level, it will never make sense.
The reasons they believe it, I think, are twofold: One, they hate and resent women, and therefore want to smear them at every opportunity. Two, they’re jealously defensive of the things they’re good at, which makes them want to “disqualify” as many people as possible as not being “real” gamers like them, and women are an easy target.
Yeah, I’m wondering if it’s somehow related to the booth babe issue, and these guys are assuming that any woman they see is some variation of booth babe. It’s just odd and interesting to me because I don’t like games but I do like sci-fi, and when I go to stores catering to that market (used to go to Forbidden Planet in London) I don’t get so much of a you’re here to get attention from men vibe as a WTF are you doing here this is very confusing vibe. And I used to drop in at Forbidden Planet in full goth regalia, ie in thigh-high boots and fishnets sometimes. Never got the feeling that the dudes who worked there thought I was trying to impress them or pick them up, they just seemed baffled and a bit pissed off at their treehouse being invaded.
@katz
Actually that makes more sense, boundary maintenance + sexualized insults being the default way in which those types of guys interact with women. Maybe they just don’t know any other way to indicate dislike of a woman than calling her a slut, attention whore, etc.
IME sci-fi dudes tend more to default to geek snobbery of the “well she doesn’t really understand X, she’s a dabbler, I bet she hasn’t even read obscure author Y” variety.
Sorry, didn’t mean to blame you. It just seems average white male gamer is called a midget. Not that this excuses sexism or racism.
Oh, gotcha. Maybe amend my previous statement to “tall white male gamers,” then. Maybe they’ll get called something, but it’s likely to be far more benign than what the men get called.
I posted a link to this post in r/gaming. So far it’s not going over well.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ygam1/gamers_im_curious_what_you_think_of_the_thread_on/
Or the women, rather. Mangled the end of that comment.
The “naked gamer girl” sounds like the twin sister of the equally fictional “fake geek girl” who only does cosplay at cons to torment sad sack male nerds and get attention ( because any woman would spend all that time and money just to get mauled by con goers as an ‘ego-boost’
[cloudiah channels a typical MRA redditor]
Most workplaces themselves (until relatively recently) were a 90% male community. This goes back really far if you count real work (like mammoth hunting, mining, corporate boardrooms, IT and the like) and not fake work (like female mining, the textile industry, and the like). Now all of a sudden men are expected to just behave differently because some girls want to work?
I’m not saying females shouldn’t be welcome in workplaces, I’m just comparing them to someone who shows up, uninvited, to a house party and demands everyone not threaten to rape her every 5 seconds. You know, totally unreasonable expectations like that.
What the fuck happened in the past 15 years that made it the worst thing imaginable to joke about females at work making you a sandwich, or calling them fat bitch sluts and saying “tits or gtfo” to them? Whatever it was, it’s embarrassing to witness.
[cloudiah hires an exorcist to expunge all traces of MRA from herself]
David, I love this bit:
Well, “David” is such an ambiguous name.
Also: the “Catalogue of anti-male shaming tactics” is now #1 with a bullet in r/mr!
It’s like they don’t get that straight white able-bodied neurotypical cismales don’t have anything like “c*nt”, or “f*g” that can be thrown back at them. I mean, my typical insult/threat list:
– Go stick your head in a bucket of hyena offal
– I hope your head is shoved up Lucifer’s arse
– Wanker
– Shitwanker
– Pantsfish (ok, that’s affectionate or mild pique)
– Tosser
– I hope you shit yourself in public
– Some reference to oozing stygian foulness
– Vile creature (possibly oozing stygian foulness)
I will admit I did remove all insults that I could think of that were sexist etc. so my list is somewhat limited at the moment. Holes, English language, drive truck through…
But yeah, I can’t think of any insult that directly attacks the SWABNTCM. Plenty that attack him by proxy of another group though. 🙁
Creativewritingstudent I think that’s probably why they get so pissed off at people saying “white guy” or whatever Steelepole is currently whining about. Because like you said, there really aren’t any slurs for them that aren’t comparing them to an oppressed minority so they have to get themselves worked up over being called some innocuous description in a “mean tone” or whatever.
Oh god followers. I can’t count how many times carefully jumped over the tripwire/walked around the floor plate, heard a ‘sproing/click’ from behind me, and turned to see Dogmeat/Lydia blowing up in a bouquet of grenade explosions/getting hit in the face with a swinging spike wall.
For Skyrim at least, if you’re interested in magic Destruction/Conjuration is pretty darn unstoppable combination: your minions are tough, easily replaceable if you need to, and several of them are immune to certain kinds of damage, so you can use ice spells willy-nilly while the Frost Atronach is out, for instance. Unfortunately I never got all the way through Skyrim; gorgeous game, infuriating bugs.
The only online game I’ve played much is WoW and for whatever reason I didn’t encounter any of the really horrible sexism I’ve heard about; possibly because I played on the roleplaying servers and usually played dwarves and gnomes? Or I was just lucky. I encountered a few jerks but none of this drive-by sandwich crap.
It’s kind of funny. It’s like if someone tried to insult me by saying “you British woman”. Yeah, OK, I am a British woman. And?