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In case you were wondering, there are still dudes out there who simply refuse to believe that women and girls play video games. Consider the reaction to a recent Twitter thread in which a video game industry analyst announced the results of a recent survey of video game players that revealed, among other things, that women make up half of those who own a gaming PC–and more than half of those who own a Nintendo Switch.
The gatekeeping gamebros simply refused to accept the data.
Some were convinced that the people who bought the Switch weren’t the ones who played the games.
Others suggested that these women were playing games that weren’t hardcore enough for them to count as real gamers.
A surprising number of commenters decided the survey results had to be suspect because the survey makers were counting trans women as women instead of as men.
One commenter seemed to blame it all on … Chad?
I would say, “found the incel,” but I think we found a bunch of them already.
@ Carstonio
Agree, I’ve seen it in the reverse as well. Way back when they had a reddit a self-described MGTOW described how his cat is a great companion, and got a bunch of replies like “but aren’t cats a feminine pet?”, “surely its more manly to have a dog?”, “kind of feels to me like a woman would choose a cat” etc etc
To his (limited) credit the guy was like “I don’t give a shit I love my cat”. But it was WEIRD to see this bristling discomfort over a “wrong” gender choice. And from people who think of themselves as rugged individualists and brave free-thinkers. They wouldn’t get a bloody cat in case it damaged their perceived masculinity. Endlessly sad. And pathetic.
Legos used to be a pretty gender-neutral toy. My sister and I played with them. Then in the 1980s, somebody decided that Legos were for boys. Ridiculous.
@Victorious Parasol
And now they have the lego friends line specifically for girls .
i haven’t bought any yet, i have restrained myself, but i think the friends sets look better in general and the figurines have better scale to the rest of the set
So, it’s more masculine to be a foot-soldier on the battlefield than to be the general?
Last time I checked, generals outranked foot soldiers in most militaries’ strict internal hierarchies of who dishes it out vs. who takes it …
These guys are incapable of having a coherent worldview, even within the bounds of “it must be strictly hierarchical”.
@FMOx: great story!
I have terrible hand-eye coordination, but I’d like to see these chumps come up against me on a few arcade games, or the crappy one-button joysticks that came with the 2600.
I am automatically suspicious of anyone who takes “gamer” as an identity. There isn’t something more interesting at the core of your being other than staring at a screen and pushing buttons to go pew-pew?
Is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City enough of a “real game” for these losers? Cuz I’ve got me a copy here. I guess not enough shooting and other violence to count, plus it’s got a story and characters and cool retro music.
@Alan: the photo made me snerk, your commentary made me LOL.
All this running around like chickens with their heads cut off about masculinity and fear of non-straightness reminds me of the site from the earliest days of the web titled Gay or Eurotrash? Photos of men, you had to decide which category they fell into.
Anyway, this is not going to bother my Switch-loving female pal over 70. Those of us who stuffed quarters in Pong aren’t so hysterical about it. I’ve never played Candy Crush, but my husband was addicted to Bejeweled for quite a while. Of course, I’ve always been a bit more macho than him, and he doesn’t care.
@Surplus: good observation on their lack of understanding manly hierarchy.
I’ve always been deeply confused why letting someone else decide if you’re a man is a sign of “real” masculinity. It seems far more “manly” (both in the traditional and non-traditional sense) not to bow to outside pressure regarding your own identity….
Years ago when Bioware still had its own forums and they decided to stick a multiplayer option onto Mass Effect 3 for some reason, I started up a group based around happily getting together in the game playing at the easiest level and called the group Bronze Effect.
It’s one of things I’m proudest about online. Bronze Effect became one of the biggest groups on the site and I got to play regularly with other women, though there were a lot of men too, and we didn’t always stick to bronze level. We had members who happily played at every level and if someone wanted to try a more difficult setting, they could do so and it was okay if it didn’t go well. People just wanted a positive place to play in.
My worst experience, and this is how positive things were, was when one young man talked about how we were “r*ped” after losing a match. No, kid. No we weren’t. We lost a game, it’s nowhere being close to that. It’s not even on the same planet. But if the worst thing was one kid using a ridiculously poor choice of wording one time, you know you stumbled into something good.
One of the main reasons this survey came as such a shock to so many of these men is that they have perpetuated so much toxicity that they don’t even get a chance to hear other voices. So very often when women do speak up, we’re driven away by the awfulness, but we are still playing the games.
And yes, I own a Switch. And a PS4, Nindendo 2DS, Xbox 360, Xbox, and Sega Genesis.
It must be weird at this point for people whose name is actually Chad.
@Gaebolga The need for external validation is what capitalism adds to the patriarchy formula in order to give it its own sense of meaning.
The concepts have to work in tandem, because if ‘which products you decide to consume’ doesn’t factually define you as a person, then what’s the point in putting value in your own sense of identity in the first place?
@entropicdecay
“It must be weird at this point for people whose name is actually Chad.”
Honestly, the fact they reference this in Scream 6 amused me considerably.
(Note, I am not providing any context or quotes specifically to avoid spoilers for a movie that’s currently in my top 3 for the franchise as a whole, but yes, the coincidence of the Jock being named Chad Meeks-Martin gets brought up at one point.)
I guess being a Thundercock is at least better than 20-something years ago, when they were Hanging Chads?
@Carstonio, @freneticferret:
There are also men who think that men are the only ones who are intellectual. They seem to believe that women aren’t interested in doing stuff that involves thinking, we’re only interested in stuff having to do with clothes, makeup, polishing our nails, skincare routines, babies, etc. Stuff they have been told is *stupid and doesn’t involve any thought by other men for generations. And when they find out that women like a game they like, instead of going ‘wow, women DO like things that I consider intellectual’, they go ‘women like this game so it must actually be stupid!’ It’s all part of their ridiculous attempts to believe, at all costs, that they are smarter and generally superior to women.
*yes, I know these things aren’t stupid and can involve quite a bit of thought.
“Women only care about clothes, makeup, polishing our nails, skincare routines, losing weight, and other stupid stuff like that!” says man wearing all sorts of tactical black and camo and sporting a carefully trimmed military-style crew-cut and clean-shaven face, between long discussions with his fellow bros about lunges, squats, and reps, while equipped with wrist and ankle weights and a camo backpack full of dumbbells, on the way to the gym and shortly after mocking a pudgy guy with “do you even lift, bro?”
Meanwhile, I saw this cute little exchange somewhere where a liberal dared comment on some right-whinger’s post:
RWer:
Not-a-RWer (all emphasis in original):
Of course, forecasting that is like forecasting rain in Seattle. Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go buy some microwaveable popcorn to save for when Disney has Aladdin’s genie transing people who wish for sex changes or something. Not to munch during the film, but to munch during the subsequent right wing meltdown. 🙂
And when they find out that women like a game they like, instead of going ‘wow, women DO like things that I consider intellectual’, they go ‘women like this game so it must actually be stupid!’
Or sometimes they go ‘hahahaha, some girls are trying to play a man’s game — they must have penis envy!’
…and got a bunch of replies like “but aren’t cats a feminine pet?”, “surely its more manly to have a dog?”, “kind of feels to me like a woman would choose a cat” etc etc
Wow, that’s just abysmally stupid. I’ve heard of many households where the cat — even as a kitten — showed a big dog early on who was boss. But I guess those losers would only take that as further proof that cats were “womanly” ‘cuz nagging, henpecking, manipulation, blahblahblah…
What gets me is that, pound for pound, CATS are far scarier & more dangerous than dogs! There’s a reason that we don’t keep big cats (or even medium sized ones like bobcats) as pets, and it’s NOT because they are “too feminine”, LMFAO.
BTW, in my house, my husband is the cat person and I (female) am the dog person.
Our current cat has always had a certain Greebo flair to him, minus the bit about fathering kittens all over the Discworld – he’s big, he’s tough, and he understands that if he annoys me he might not get the tasty stinky food. Mr. Parasol is his secondary human (“in the event that the primary human is unavailable, the secondary human shall assume all duties….”). All other humans are suspicious and likely useless.
But our toughest cat was female and maybe weighed 8 pounds. She still could turn into a furry buzzsaw if necessary. Once when Mr. Parasol and I were taking her home from the vet, she was fussing about the slow traffic. We felt the same way, but there was nothing we could do about it. Unsurprisingly, we were passing the time by idly speculating on what the traffic trouble was, and I suggested that we could put IttyBittyKitty’s fury to good use by having her fight the cars.
Without hesitation, Mr. Parasol said, “Thirty bucks on IttyBittyKitty.”
I have just about every game console that’s come out since the 90’s. Sega, Nintendo, every Xbox and Playstation, a PC build with unique decal wrap. Have a well curated game library of all my cartridges, discs, and steam games.
Got a pretty sweet setup with a curved big screen tv in my office I can see comfortably from one of those fancy adult bean bags (when it’s put away it’s just a nice open workout space), and a projector in the bedroom for when I feel like just putting the bed in zero gravity mode. When combined with the horseshoe armrest pillow and a travel neck pillow, I don’t have to use a single muscle in my body and it’s wonderful. My dogs and cats love the whole nest situation too.
I’m also friends with other women who love to game, we do invite-only to our private servers for co-op. We don’t associate or discuss our hobbies with the riff raff because they always accuse us of wanting their attention, so we gatekeep our own community. Only feminist men permitted to enter.
@Jess: I want your gaming setup to just live in. I’ve been eyeing one of those beanbags for TV/online.
@Vicky P: My toughest kitty was a small tortie. I’d have bet on IttyBittyKitty too.
As far as the cats being feminine pets goes, I have mentioned before I am now working in the construction field. So, I work with bearded manly men who drink lots of beer (not Bud Light of course, except for when they do because they don’t give a shit), get in bar fights, and sleep with more women in a month than a MRA pickup artist type pretends to.
Although dogs do predominate, several also own cats in addition to or even in exclusion to, and some have little yippy dogs instead of anything imposing. In fact, I don’t think any of my immediate coworkers have anything like a Rottweiler or Pitbull and the little dogs are basically their best bud wingmen they absolutely adore and pamper
@Jess
You have my envy. I love video game setups, and yours sounds amazing.
@ jess
During the lockdown we had a lot of zooms to see how we were adapting to the new ways of working. Now this of course was a self selecting group of people happy to communicate online. But it transpired that whether you were from Leeds, Lagos, or Lahore it was pretty much the same thing. We were using tech a bit, but just to replicate how we’d always done stuff. So pdfs instead of paper bundles and trying to convince a webcam instead of a judge.
Except for the Singapore bar.
Whilst the rest of us were bemoaning the hassles of trying to read a document on your laptop whilst typing into Word, keeping MS Teams open, and covertly messaging your client, the Singapore peeps were all “just keep your 42″ monitor directly in front of you so you can read the documents, have the judge on a monitor above that so you can maintain eye contact, then you can have the witnesses on another monitor adjacent, then you just use your separate computer set up to communicate with your client and co-counsel….”
They showed us their set ups (because of course they could; they had multiple cameras) and it was like how Hollywood imagines a space launch.
Bit off topic, but remember we were talking about Hollywood accounting…
Well Ed Solomon, the writer of Men in Black, was on Twitter talking about his latest profit statement. According to the studio the film is still in the red.