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:
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.*
Acolmiztli, meanwhile, sheds a tear for the nerds that came before him:
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.)
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.
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* 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.
guffaw-ferrets – Hi! 🙂
I kind of wish seemingly driveby troll had ever answered David’s question. Because otherwise seemingly driveby troll is seemingly driveby trolling.
Falconer’s babies (and my friend’s new son) remind me of how much is right with the world, and how it’s worth fighting for. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabies.
Even if women/feminists DID create their own place, these very same dudebros would complain about it and accuse THEM of “discrimination.”
I’ve heard men complaining about the women-only cars in Japan. Yeah. One car on the train, during certain hours of the day, as an attempt to work on the problem with men molesting women and girls.
A women’s library gets “MEN READ BOOKS TOO, CUNT” graffitied on the wall. Never mind how it doesn’t even ban men. It just mainly features books about the women’s movement and/or by female authors.
On International Women’s Day in March, I’ve heard guys complaining about a lack of International Men’s Day, even though there IS one in November. They don’t bother to look it up to see if there is one, or try to make one. Because, to quote someone else, they don’t actually want to have an International Men’s Day. They just don’t want women to have a Women’s Day.
I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve noticed a distinct difference in how I’m treated when it comes to video games versus analog gaming (tabletop RPG, LARP, CCG, etc). I’ve rarely been made to feel unwelcome playing D&D, or Vampire: the Masquerade LARP, or Magic the Gathering but I’ve gotten no end of grief from video game players offline as well as online.
I don’t video game much (I do, but single-player, offline rpgs), but the “gamer” certainly fits with respect to rpgs and ccgs. My playgroup is 50% women. Even when I play pathfinder at the local brick & mortar Ive never been subject to “girls don’t play D&D”, etc. FNM (Friday night Magic the Gathering) is a very different story. I’m usually the only woman in ~40 people, and I may have heard every possible gendered insult that group could produce.
I know I’m not from the US but in my childhood (80s-90s in a communist/post-communist country) playing video games was a status symbol (OK. nerdy too, and kind of boyish because of the “boys like technology” stupidity). It meant your parents were wealthy / influential enough to afford a computer. And it just got more mainstream later… but you could not tell this from our media. Weirdly we imported all the prejudice (not only against gaming, but tabletop RPGs and all) even if it never had any basis in reality here (if it ever had any anywhere). This phenomenon deeply confuses me. :/
Yeah, I remember having an N64 made you everybody’s best friend back in the day.
I have to wonder if these guys just assumed that their cool toys were the reason people didn’t like them, when in fact people would have loved to hang out at their houses and play with the toys if they hadn’t had been cursed with the personality equivalent of the way a skunk smells.
@Argenti 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)
A guy I knew played the ultimate spin on Fishmalk in a LARP I was in. His Malk was utterly reasonable and controlled (most thought him a Ventrue) except that he knew the Dark Secret no one could speak of openly. All the talk of the Antedeluvians was just hiding the truth in plain sight; it was the FLOOD that was the important part. The Flood had come and destroyed the early vampires. The Jihad was not Elder vs Younger, it was Vampire vs FISH! The Fish were the Ancient Enemy, but you couldn’t speak of this out loud because Water is EVERYWHERE and the Fish have spies.
He therefore very calmly and rationally approached everything he did in the light of his knowledge that he was fighting the good fight against the fish, making his methods and goals completely deranged because no one save a select few had any idea why he did the things he did.
I think these MRAs are conflating nerd culture and gaming culture. The two do intersect in some ways, but the vast majority of gamers (especially male gamers) don’t face any kind of shaming or ridicule. When I got my first handheld console ever, all of my friends wanted to play multiplayer games with me, trade games, borrow games, etc.
And even though nerds face ridicule and shaming from time to time, it’s not nearly as pervasive as people think it is. Nor is it that simple; “nerd-shaming” is a product of various sociocultural influences, including classism and sexism.
Good luck with claiming video games as man only space.
Any woman with $1000 in my country can easily get a home console and some games in a single afternoon, take them all home and plug them in. Unless every store and pawn shop is willing to card and search every would-be customer for the vaginaness, your fortress of manitude ain’t shit – you can’t stop a woman from gaming if she really wants to and has the cash.
And you’re terminally dumb for even trying, anyways.
The troof about the Fishinati/Furrinati is hidden everywhere! Even in gaming it appears.
deniseeliza said:
Yes yes YES. I have this conversation so infuriatingly often that I actually wrote a post about it recently – http://massivehassle.com/2013/08/23/girls-dont-play-real-games/
Dude: Girls don’t play games.
Me: Yes they do. Here is some significant statistical evidence that shows that they do.
Dude: Yeah, but they don’t play REAL games.
Me: What exactly are “real” games?
And after a little probing, “real games” ALWAYS turns out to be CoD/Gears of War/Halo/Battlefield/other formulaic FPS du jour… and while I have played and enjoyed some of those games, I largely find them boring and repetitive and this does not mean I don’t like games, it means I like games enough that I’ve actually formed a critical opinion on what kind of games I do and don’t like and make my gaming choices accordingly.
I am so tired of debating the definition of real games with dudebros who insist on dismissing statistical evidence out of hand because it’s incompatible with their worldview. It’s one of the most annoying and insidious forms of gatekeeping!
I’m female and I like Gears of War but yeah, it has got OTT masculinity in it (which is an element of GOW that I take the piss out of). Why is this dude so bothered that oh no Anya is in it? Or even worse, Bernie, as she’s got to be in her 50s *at least* in universe so therefore isn’t even attractive to the males that play the game…I mean I wouldn’t even call Gears equal opportunity propaganda in the slightest, anyone who’s looked at the expanded Gears verse would know that’s not the case. There’s plenty of testosterone bullshit in Gears dude, you’re not missing out just because they added a few women in the third game!
“And after a little probing, “real games” ALWAYS turns out to be CoD/Gears of War/Halo/Battlefield/other formulaic FPS du jour…”
Yeah, its very annoying when people say shooters are the only real games. What annoys me is the idea that women only play “easy” puzzle games and shit, which annoys me because, well, a lot of puzzle games are actually incredibly hard (e.g. Hexic HD, Bejeweled 2 – hardly any gamers have got the full 200G on these games for example). I mean of course, if people only wanted to play easy casual puzzle titles that’s fine I mean who cares? but the idea only shooters are “hardcore” is what annoys me. I mean I actually like shooters up to a point (though the only shooter I would call myself an actual real big fan is Gears), and I still definitely think this attitude is bullshit.
I throughly approve of that Fishmalk. As neuroticbeagle alluded to, everyone knows that fish do rule (my) world!
And yeah, not a FPS fan, I’d rather log hundreds of hours in a handful of games than a handful of hours in a hundred games (which is good since I’m perma-broke!)
Chie did a pretty good take-down of the ‘classic’ movie Revenge of the Nerds, but did miss one key bit (Trigger Warnings):
After the central protagonist does his rape-by-deception routine, the young woman in question not only compliments him on his skills as a lover (which he credits on the fact that, “The only thing nerds think about is sex,” because apparently theorizing about bits you never even get close to is enough to make you an expert*), but dumps her ‘jock’ boyfriend to become the nerd’s trophy girlfriend.
So, yeah, the movie’s on my go-to list of examples of “Rape is Okay If You Do It Right”.
Oh, and it gets a further bonus point for a white man (the sidekick nerd) impressing and inspiring the members of an African-American fraternity with his tale of nerdpression.**
*: Man, that movie really does sum up the MRA mindset, doesn’t it?
**: I mean, it’s like they use the script as inspirational gospel or something.
We killed large-scale fast freight and passenger rail in the United States! FUCK YEAH!! Let’s make a buncha mooovies.
My Mario Party brings all the boys to the yard.
“Oh, and it gets a further bonus point for a white man (the sidekick nerd) impressing and inspiring the members of an African-American fraternity with his tale of nerdpression.”
Yes, being socially ostracized in your privileged, white, upper-middle class school is tantamount to segregation, hundreds of years of slavery, the striping of your autonomy and cultural identity, and systematic disenfranchisement.
If that doesn’t make you vomit inside your mouth, what will?
I’ve been in a number of mixed gender D&D campaigns, both as player and DM. Also ran a long duration campaign – just over eight years – with an all gay male party . Players, that is, although most of the characters were as well. I suspect that idea would put a bustle in the hedgerow of the He-Man Woman Haters Club guys quoted in the OP.
I tend to think of “hardcore gamer” having more to do with hours spent than the type of game. In which case: I earned 2 of the 3 Master materia by sheer AP accumulation, and earned the level 4 Limit Breaks of all nine characters. I beat Sephiroth in two rounds, and had to actually go back in and go easy on him to even see the infamous Supernova summon.
Oh, nevermind, JRPGs are for girls.
As for M:tG, it must have depended on where you were and who you played with. I was never deliberately made to feel excluded, but I did have a couple of guys try to rip me off, and I got a shitload of mansplaining. My favorite was the young man who was probably in diapers when I started playing, trying to explain to me how Slivers worked, even after I told him I had been fine-tuning my Sliver deck since Tempest came out almost ten years before.
If the dudebros were being honest, the conversation would go like this:
Dudebro: Girls don’t play real games.
Reasonable Person: What constitutes a “real game”?
Dudebro: Any game that girls don’t play.
As others have pointed out (but I feel like repeating anyway), no one questioned the “real game-ness” of genres like platformers and JRPGs until it became evident that they were just as popular with women as with men. It’s not that girls don’t play “real games,” it’s that to misogynists, the perceived value or legitimacy of an activity is inversely proportional to the extent to which women participate. See also: fields of science.
I’ve done the RPG convention circuit, and there’s definitely a subset of the menfolk there who are determined to believe that any woman in the building is only there because she’s the girlfriend/spouse of a ‘real’ gamer (ie, one with a penis, and I’m aware that’s cis-talk, but then again, these same dudes would be utterly unable to comprehend non-cis genders, so for them, it’s their mindset).
I think it is similar to when someone finds some indie/unknown band and really gets into them and then 2 years down the road they are all over the place. You somehow want credit for knowing they existed beforehand…but it is a really stupid thing to get up in arms about.