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Jen is busy with her experiments to breed red foxes with otters, so you’re stuck with me for today’s Quickies.
- Well, that’s one way to combat misogyny in gaming – From Matt G., “Organizers of a LAN party in Texas attempt to “combat” the sexism rampant in the gamer community by… banning women.”
- Geeky girls grow in numbers – From nowoo.
- The banana apocalypse is coming – From Brian.
- Nellie Vaughan: The vampire who wasn’t a vampire – From Bob.
…or making misogyny in gaming more attractive, let’s use doublethink.
And to add insult to injury, this seems the going theme in the peanut gallery:
“I’d like to point out that no one, more than likely, would raise a fuss if it was an all girls/women event. There’s a lot of hypocrisy and double standard in the world of sexism.”
…apparently a lot of strawmen as well.
Exactly. This guy, or whomever he is, fails to see the point. That it wouldn’t matter if it was a strictly male gaming get together from the start. However, to change from allowing females, to only allowing males, on the grounds that the women are treated poorly, is dumbfounding to me. Would you happen to have a hammer so I can nail this point into the center of his thick skull?
The whole, “but imagine if the genders were reversed” is a valid point, WHEN USED IN THE PROPER CIRCUMSTANCE. Except he fails to see though the sexist veil he’s been fashioned to accept as equal treatment.
I wish I could be surprised by this but… yea not so much. Kotaku is not known as the most welcoming or women-friendly of places (it’s like the anti-Jezebel). So the comments are really par for the course. I used to read Cerise Magazine (http://cerise.theirisnetwork.org/) and one of the original complaints is that the women established the blog to counter issues using Kotaku and then were bitched at for making their own community by the same commenters.
I read Matt’s submission and thought, wow. Why don’t they build a clubhouse with a sign that says, “No girls allowed”? Then I saw the image you posted.
Hey, we just won Randi’s money, right?
Thanks for the mentioning the vampire piece!
Bob
If it was a “gentleman’s retreat” to begin with, I would see no problem. However, to ban women from attending because they’re treated poorly is the exact manifestation of sexual profiling. Although I won’t call it misogyny, I will call out their sexist behavior as what it is. It seems that the male gamers enjoyment trumps that of female gamers.
What I would like to see from some of the male gamers that don’t agree with this, (and I’m sure there are) is for them to just not show up to this event.
God forbid they address the actual issue, and educate those who are ignorant of something we like to call equality. Instead, they reinforce the ideas in some of the gamers heads that it’s OK to act like a fucking douche bag. I hope that the gamers who agree with this “solution” trip over their own inflated egos.
When I submitted this story, my message read in part: “Bonus misogyny: Basically any comment on the article.” I guess you’re right that it’s not exactly misogyny.
I seriously dread when a video game website discusses anything related to gender, whether it’s this, the need for strong female characters, or Duke Nukem Forever, because I know the comments will be sexism everywhere. It’s not just Kotaku, it’s every gamer news site I’ve seen.
Stupid beliefs about yoga or crystals make me laugh. Stupid beliefs about women don’t. I’m glad you are here to tell us these things but, the sheer magnitude of male centered asshattery is just depressing. At least there are more geeky women in the pipeline so my daughter can have some cool friends to hang out with. The banana thing wouldn’t happen if we didn’t use monocultural farming. And the vampire thing is just awesome. Proof positive that clearly being able to demonstrate bullshit won’t make people accept it as bullshit.
With respect to the misogyny in gaming… I used to work on a large Honeywell mainframe back in the 80’s. Users complained that the computer ran 80% slower during peak usage times than at slack times. One solution that was seriously debated was throttling the performance at all times so there would be no difference. If you deem the problem to be the complaints rather than slowness it was the most logical solution. I can’t help but think these gamer boys had a similarly twisted reasoning process.
With respect to the Honeywell situation, the ultimate reason someone advocated throttling the computer was that they deemed customer service’s right to not get complaints to be greater than the users’ right to have access to as much horsepower as was available.
Similarly, and regardless of whatever wacky logic they used to get there, these gamers deemed that a man’s desire to not have his gaming spoiled by misogynistic comments clearly outweighed a woman’s desire to game at all.
Customer Service > User
Man > Woman
Uhh, I think that came off as more adversarial than I meant.
Please accept this picture of a dwarf hamster, in the spirit of friendship:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/texese/106442080/
Hardly adversarial at all. We have different analysis, but the conclusion is the same. Your solution probably won’t work if you don’t identify the problem correctly.
I’d like to see Ray Comfort explain banana eschatology.
Well. Obviously we won’t need them because it will be the end times.
But, God made bananas for us humans; why would he take them away?
.
Why? :_( *sniff*
like george carlin said about plastic, maybe god wants them all to himself.
I think GC was close on that, but it’s carbon nanotubes that He wants and when we make enough the jig is up.
.
Should happen around, oh I don’t know, say late 2012?
God already took the banana away from us once, he can do it again!!! ;-))
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-bananas-hubbub/
Well, there is that. Maybe we can go with the red ones next time.
@DaveW Ever notice in the 90’s that cars started having cosmetic engine covers? Manufacturing technology had reached the point where there were generally no more serious engine fluid leaks, but customers still perceived engines to be dirty…hence acres of plastic crap. The technology didn’t change, but the customer perception did, leading to higher reliability ratings. Fixing the complainer is often vastly cheaper than fixing the complaint. Its just sorta immoral. Or in this case, very immoral.
Your description of cars sounds very much like the placebo effect in action.
That or the old adage “out of sight, out of mind”.
wow. That gamer thing is either a pathetic excuse for misogyny or a mind-bubblingly ignorant act of appeasement. It would be like throwing out black gamers because other gamers couldn’t control their racism.
The way you get more women to game at events like this is to make such events more welcoming to women. The way you drive the misogynists out (or get them to shut up) is to get more women to your events.
Encourage women to come along. If you hear guys making off color comments, then tell them they’re full of shit (if you’re an attendee) or kick them out (if you’re an organizer). The girl nerd dollar is a better market than the bigot dollar.