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Men’s Rights Redditor on Gaming: “It would be nice if women/feminists … f**ked off and created their own thing rather than moving into a men’s space … .”

George Eliot: Should she have been alllowed to play video games?
George Eliot: Should she have been allowed to play Call of Duty?

So the other day the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit were having another thoughtful and nuanced discussion about OMG WOMEN PLAYING VIDEO GAMES GET OUT GIRL GERMS EWWWW GAMING IS FOR MEN ONLY HELP HELP WE’RE BEING OPPRESSED and the always insightful IHaveALargePenis offered this little suggestion to the “feminists/women” of the world:

IHaveALargePenis 25 points 6 days ago (51|26)  It would be nice if women/feminists for once fucked off and created their own thing rather than moving into a men's space (after decades of berating it and the men participating in it) and demanding things change to suit them.  Remember revenge of the nerds? A movie that's about 30 years old? All those "nerds" are the ones in charge of modern technology. They're the Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' of today and people love their products. They didn't have it easy getting to where they did, they sure as shit weren't given a green light for simply being men. So why is it that women aren't walking down the same road? Hell it's not even the same road since most people don't actively insult them or tell them they can't do it for simply being women.  It would be nice if feminists for once proved everyone wrong and themselves right by getting a bunch of women together and creating a new system/industry from the ground up which men want to flock to.

Huh. So in return I guess men would agree to hand science fiction over to the ladies — after all, it was one of them, Mary Shelley, who basically invented the whole genre back in 1818 with her mad-scientist classic Frankenstein.

Mr. Penis also gets bonus points for explicitly conflating women and feminists — most MRAs do this only implicitly, and then pretend they haven’t — and wins this month’s “Really? You Really Just Said That?” MRA Irony Award for declaring in his second paragraph that “people don’t actively insult [women] or tell them they can’t [get involved in nerdy pursuits] for simply being women” after he JUST DID EXACTLY THAT ONE PARAGRAPH EARLIER.

One brave commenter responded to Mr. Penis’ screed with a detailed list of infliential women in the gaming industry. Amazingly, this comment wasn’t downvoted into oblivion, though it is worth noting that it got considerably fewer net upvotes that Mr. Penis’ masterpiece.

The thread, naturally, is full of poop from other contributors as well. Cthulusbaby not only doesn’t want women playing or expressing opinions about games; he doesn’t even want imaginary women in his games. No Manic Pixel Dream Girls for him!

Also, he seems to be under the impression that there are no men in romance movies.*

Cthulusbaby 4 points 5 days ago* (9|5)      what right do men have to claim an entire subculture as "their own space"?  When they are the overwhelming majority of consumers for it? Seriously, look at the demographics of men vs women for games like COD and Gears of War and explain how these online communities AREN'T male spaces?  I don't want female soldiers in my games about elite special forces, because in real life there are no female navy seals or SAS. Women just don't belong, there's no need for them in these games. I like my shoot-em-ups to be testosterone fuelled aggression simulators, not equal opportunity political propaganda.  It's exactly the same as a small but vocal minority of men complaining about male representation in sappy romance movies, and a shit ton of other men jumping on the bandwagon even though they've got no actual interest in it.      Also, you put an unfair and extremely skewed amount of blame on women for the amount of stigmatization placed on "nerds" back in the day. Sure there are women who berate gamers but I think mass media as a whole hasn't been doing that subculture any favors and to say that women are more to blame for that is completely unfounded and absurd.  I think you'll find that women are the primary consumers of TV media, and women are the ones who decide what is attractive and desirable in men. You'll notice that since the "nerd" archetype became more attractive to women, it's moved more into the mainstream and is no longer as socially unacceptable. You really think that is coincidence?  Upvoting you for providing an alternative viewpoint, but you're really misguided.

Acolmiztli, meanwhile, sheds a tear for the nerds that came before him:

acolmiztli 3 points 5 days ago (5|2)  Men were raised in a culture where playing video games was grounds for social pariah status and open hostility. It was amazing that anyone developed a love for computer games to the point of wanting to make it their career!!

Evidently the only way to rectify this past injustice is to do the same thing to women today? It’s the MEN’S RIGHTS WAY!

And hey, if women don’t like it, well, they can always just hide their gender identity. (On the Internet no one knows you’re George Eliot.)

poloppoyop 2 points 5 days ago (4|2)  A lot of free tools have been available for years to make games. Anyone can take the time to learn things, participate in open source softwares etc. If teenagers do it, I don't see what prevents women to do the same. Their gender? Nope, internet offers anonymity so you can participate in some project and people will consider you male until proven otherwise.

PROBLEM SOLVED!

Sometimes all it takes to solve these silly lady problems is some good old-fashioned male ingenuity,

H/T to Againstmensrights on Reddits for pointing out Mr. Penis’ lovely remark, and making the same point about science fiction.

* Note to extremly literal-minded readers: I am not actually suggesting that Cthulusbaby thinks there are no men in romance movies. It is just that the way he is framing the issue is so ridiculous he might as well think that.

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Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Brain: why would Falconer want to simulate having infants? Oh!

Followed by D’AWWWWW

kittehserf
11 years ago

Sweet pic, Falconer!

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

RE: Argenti

Okay, I can try to bring the CDs; I’m not thriled about lugging a game set with me on the road, but another friend of mine later in the trip is interested. Also, B-SOD has a working CD drive. I think a friend of mine mentioned you could download all of them from here, and they probably work better than my old CD-ROMS, honestly.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Yeah I had meant the DOSBox roms anyways, not CD-roms (do people still call ’em that?). Thanks for the link, I’ll see what magic I can work from that!

Pecunium! I haz plant for you! Sundew produced a baby with this nice long root and it’s been potted and is all cute and tiny in its oversized 2″ pot (smallest plastic I had, no terra cotta cuz it leeches minerals and carnivorous plants no like minerals) it’s been fed and everything, and I think I can get you bloodworms if I head straight from the train to your place, my mother’s freezer bags have a two hour window depending on air temp and it is FREEZING on the train. A proper plant! No seeds, no cuttings, just a cute little thing in sand and moss! *squees*

Falconer
11 years ago

they are almost seven months old! No teeth yet.

@Argenti: Oh god, changing a diaper when you only control one hand, like in surgeon simulator! jesus.

Falconer
11 years ago

Rather, @Biot.

Viscaria
Viscaria
11 years ago

I liked how Trollypants on the last page expressed his disapproval XD as if David will be disappointed to learn that he no longer has the unflinching support of the “can’t tell the difference between anti-masculine and anti-misogyny” crowd.

Falconer
11 years ago

@BigMomma: Oh yes, the little niggling fear. My baby girl has taken to falling asleep face down, folded double after she knackers herself trying to crawl. I find myself looking in on her twice an hour while she naps like that.

badandfierce
11 years ago

Ah, I always enjoy the trope of the old-school nerds who were so oppressed by the ladies in their all-male subculture of old. Remember, girls have never been nerds. Any girls you see in nerdland are a modern perversion, the “fake geek girl” out to… Well, it’s not very clear. Destroy all that is right and holy, but how that’s accomplished by enjoying comic books we’re not sure. There certainly weren’t droves of women there for the birth of sci-fi/fantasy as a genre, some of them admittedly hiding between male or neutral pseudonyms. There weren’t plenty of women at the earliest Star Trek conventions. Not sci-fi/fantasy clubs on the campuses of women’s colleges for thirty years, churning out alums who plunged into books and comics and games and movies to produce genre-defining works that resonate with us today and forever. Nope. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

RE: Argenti

Yeah I had meant the DOSBox roms anyways, not CD-roms (do people still call ‘em that?).

Yeah, sorry, I only got CD-ROMs. (And yes, I still call them that, or just plain CDs.)

RE: badandfierce

Yeah, I think those folks got their ideas about geekdom from old movies or something, where the male geeks lusted after the cheerleaders and there were apparently no geek girls.

Howard Bannister
11 years ago

Man-bashing is old, and as mature in life as pantsing a kid in PE class for a laugh. While I appreciate putting an idiot in their place, I don’t not like when someone uses it as a soap-box to generalize any type of ideal that women are somehow better or men are inherently flawed.

Wait,you messed up yournegative.

Or maybe you’re just a misandristwho likes saying that men are inherently flawed.

(projection! Asswipe!)

Howard Bannister
11 years ago

Also, my game was Age of Empires. We played the SHIT out of that, multiplayer.

Falconer
11 years ago

My Little Bathtub: Hygiene Is Incidental.

lightcastle
lightcastle
11 years ago

He is now convinced that the sole function of gaming fandom is to make comic-book fandom look better by comparison.

HAH! Sad, but funny.

And I thought this is what a female sniper looked like.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uDI_4YnQJJ0/UK171f5YsrI/AAAAAAAACsc/YIJ_eBQWJ3g/s400/westheimer.jpg

(OK, OK, ex-sniper.)

And yes, Roberta Williams, dammit.

katz
11 years ago

There’s a whole thing with sci-fi fans grasping at straws to make their genre look older than it is, which mostly hinges on equivocating with traits that are common in sci-fi but also common in other genres. eg, “Sci-fi is old because sci-fi has adventure in it and lots of old stuff has adventure in it too!”

Unsurprising that they’d apply that bad logic to exclude women.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

Who cares? Lots of genres aren’t that old. A bunch die pretty fast too — looking at YOU, trucker movies of the 1970s!

pecunium
11 years ago

S Trawnil: Second, I’m not one to appreciate when someone uses the voices of a few misogynistic idiots to justify another anti-masculine rant.

Guilty conscience much. What I read was an anti-misogynist rant. I suspect you of projecting the “woman = feminist” conflation the MRA crowd is so prone to doing.

I don’t not like when someone uses it as a soap-box to generalize any type of ideal that women are somehow better or men are inherently flawed.

Work on reading for context.

pecunium
11 years ago

re fiber arts: I’ve never had anything but supportive reactions. I’ve seen some interetsing men (biker dudes) who knit. Never have women said, “this is our stitch and bitch; for women only”.

Nor have I seen it in any of the other “female dominated” areas I’ve seen people doing (costuming, beadwork, scrapbooking, etc.).

Things like pottery seem to be pretty evenly divided (IME), and photography is strange. It’s got more men in it, but women don’t feel excluded (to me, I may be missing something) and some of the more interesting photographers I know/have worked with, were women.

I don’t know many female smiths (but a few) again, the sense I get is, “more power to ’em”, because there aren’t that many smiths. I know some women who do mail, and they don’t (so far as I’ve seen) get shit.

So I think this is an assholes with issues problem.

I suspect that men in fiber arts might get some crap, but not usually from women in fiber arts.

Mostly not. There are some who will gender police like mad; but it’s mostly men. I am sure there are some gender essentialists (often very fundie-religious) who do it, but that’s not my circles of company.

pecunium
11 years ago

Cthulhu’s Intern: I’ll see your female sniper and raise you another one: from the 1940s

That’s not in the USSR (despite the use of a modified Mosin-Nagant)but in Israel. Here are some details about her. (she’s a famous person, for things she did after being a sniper).

pecunium
11 years ago

(this time with better linking)

Cthulhu’s Intern: I’ll see your female sniper and raise you another one: from the 1940s

That’s not in the USSR (despite the use of a modified Mosin-Nagant)but in Israel. Here are some details about her. (she’s a famous person, for things she did after being a sniper).

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

By gaming making people social outcasts do they mean stuff like D&D? Because they might actually have an argument there, but the idea that video/computer gaming ever made people social outcasts is laughable. I remember when we first moved to Texas in 82. There were arcade machines in the pizza places and at KMart, that’s how common gaming was. I was exactly the kind of little girl who they probably have nightmares about spurning them in middle school, and I had a gaming console. So did everyone else that I knew.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Eh, granted I’m not the D&D sort, but VtM only ever seems to make me friends. Might just be that the reactions are either “omgs you play?!” or “huh?” whereas D&D is widely known. But the only shit I’ve ever gotten isn’t really shit but fanwanking about Fishmalks (and that is quickly killed as my Malks are not Fishmalks)

Also…*flails at pecunium* check your bloody email once in awhile?! There is stuff! For you!

guffaw-ferrets
guffaw-ferrets
11 years ago

pecunium: I had an extreme interest in smithing when I was a teenager and wanted to apprentice to a farrier. However, I got chased out of even that interest because of the sexual harassment and “physical testing*” I received from only my mentor, not to mention all the shit many customers and coworkers put lady smiths through when said women actually pursue their craft.

I think there are a lot of abusive, woman-hating idiots out there. The MRAs just have a habit of making those idiots’ thoughts more public.

* Like “hey, I wonder if this one-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old can handle this draft horse who has a habit of sitting down on his farrier? also it will be hilarious if I don’t warn her about this first. Let’s see how special she thinks she is then.” Luckily no one got hurt.

kittehserf
11 years ago

The whole “social outcasts” things seems weird to me. I’d be of the “huh?” variety if someone said they play whatever game (yeah, never heard of many outside this site) but why should someone having a hobby make them an outcast? Sure, if they want to talk about said hobby to everyone, to the exclusion of all else, they might end up as a Boring Person sort of outcast … or if their hobby is something really skeevy (in which case would they be talking about it?) or if their attitude is that nobody except people like them is allowed to like their hobby … but we wouldn’t get people acting like that, would we now? /sarcasm

pecunium
11 years ago

guffaw-ferrets: Sorry, I can’t say for farrier work; the only farriers I know ,I know in the context of getting horses shod. The smiths I know tend to be blade/wrought iron workers.