A lot of the people I follow on twitter - mostly in the UK - have a lot to say about misogyny (see a previous blog post). I work in the theatre industry and I don't experience sexism at all in my workplace. Perhaps when it comes to physical tasks I see signs of it, but I have a scoliosis and two knees with piss-weak tendons so when a man (a trained tech who does heavy lifting for a living) offers to help me move something heavy, I sure as hell appreciate the gesture and in no way interpret it as them showing their dominance over the female of the species.
The other day while setting up for a convention, a colleague apologised for picking up a table I intended to shift and moved it for me where it needed to go. He was worried how I would react and apologised for acting like a sexist. I wouldn't even have judged him as one. Had he rolled up his sleeves, shoved me out of the way and insisted 'this is a man's job', I might've thought differently.
That's not to say misogyny isn't in droves elsewhere. Yeah it bothers me, yeah it's a problem, but there's worse that could happen to me. For the most part I do what I can to ignore them, much like you would an odorous individual sitting beside you on a crowded bus or train, picking their nose and going for gold.
See, I started very young as a gamer girl. My brother and I would constantly play games on the old Macintosh or MS DOS computers dad or my uncle had. I remember many an exciting time playing Syndicate or Doom or Frogger or Duke Nukem 3D or Donkey Kong. We had a Nindendo console and my personal best game was Duck Hunt. I pressed the gun-shaped controller to the TV screen and fired like my life depended on it. Yeah, technically that's cheating but my brother was 18 months ahead of me in age, cognitive development, and hand-eye coordination... and I was a fiercely competitive little sister.
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| My brother introduced me to Doom, Quake, Unreal and Duke Nukem... All games I really enjoyed and still do to this day. |
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| Quake was the first game where I beat my brother in PvP. |
It wasn't until I got back into gaming in the past 4 years that I noticed a few things had gone awry in the social sphere of gaming. Namely anonymity turned every other gamer into self-entitled jerks. I was raised on the Internet from a young age but I never really used it much for social interaction beyond email. Online games back in the day gave you the option of chatting - but I was too busy aiming guns at my fellow players.
It seems from my point of view every male gamer envisions themselves to be a living embodiment of Duke Nukem. Now, I am a Duke Nukem fan. Yes, he's a sexist misogynist prick of a testosterone-infused slab and born in a laboratory full of every manly cliche from every kegger on Earth, but he's a caricature, not a role model. That's why I love him. Everything in Duke's world is over the top and insanely hilarious from a sane-person-looking-at-a-whimsical-world point of view. Duke's world doesn't exist. It pays out the very kind of character gamers hold up as heroes.
It does cause an issue, I suppose. When young kids play that kind of game (and they do - let's not deny it) full of sexist one-liners, eye-candy ladies, over-the-top aliens and strippers (yes, the universe is about to end and Duke stops for strippers), does it teach them bad lessons? My brother and I played it and he's a wonderful role model and intelligent computer engineer. Me? I work in theatre but I have two degrees from university and a teacher's qualification. We are both Duke Nukem fans.
Carrying on with this theme I've stumbled upon, a couple years ago, shortly into my gamer re-discovery, I found a Duke Nukem website where they were updating Duke Nukem 3D to improved graphics. I contributed towards the project and eagerly joined the chatroom where people would discuss not just the game but anything from philosophy, history, politics, sport or theatre. I was the only female on the site but I was welcomed as part of the Duke family. I made a few friends I still keep in contact with today. I was eventually made a Moderator which gave me the ability to monitor forum discussions and caution or ban anyone behaving inappropriately. I was a part of a team where I was welcomed - an all boys clubhouse had embraced their first female member. Finally, I thought, things are looking bright.
Then came the day I closed a particular forum discussion. About 30 days of inactivity had passed and this was standard practise to keep the forums lively. However, my actions inadvertently sparked the original poster to call me out via another forum post, labelling me a bitch on a power trip. When other moderators defended me he went on to imply the webmasters were treating me differently because I was female. I didn't ban the user in the end - the webmasters did. It was still a shock to see someone I had previously chatted to quite cordially for several weeks publicly attack me for 'using my authority' to close his discussion thread, 'being where I don't belong' - and waving the 'because she has a vagina' card as a weapon in his defence.
But it happens. In just about every online gaming website I'm a member of it happens in droves. Usually moderators keep it in check but there are a few with bad reputations I wouldn't join unless I had a gun aimed at my head or my self worth reached ridiculously low levels.
When all is said and done, I don't know if the sexism in gaming will change in the foreseeable future. There are websites constantly calling people out for it but nothing changes: strong female game characters don't exist, designers constantly reduce females to eye-candy, post-game expo gossip always revolves around how female guests were treated...
And in the long run, how some boys feel regarding women invading their so-called 'exclusive' clubhouse means nothing to me.
I inhabited the clubhouse a long time before they did. Back when I played Doom and Unreal under my brother's guiding tutelage.
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| Females my age or older joined the club long before most of the angsty male gamers who would prefer us to leave. |
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