- Image by Librarian Avenger via Flickr
There was something rather surprising about the whole RealID fiasco (and I’m not just talking about the fact that Blizzard actually listened and changed their plans).
The overwhelming majority of people arguing against it were women. As one poster said, toward the end of the epic thread: “Who knew so many women played WoW?”
Well, I did, for one. The majority of the WoW players I know are, in fact, female. But I play primarily on Roleplaying servers, which tend to have a higher percentage of women and tend to be slightly more friendly toward female gamers. However, for some people it seemed that the fact that women play the game was a revelation, especially that women play in such large numbers. Gaming isn’t just a boys club anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.
And then I read this over on one of the blogs that I happily discovered over the last week: “Geek Feminism as Opposed to Mainstream Feminism”
It brought up a lot of good points, one of which was that a lot of geek women learn to tolerate and even participate in the more misogynistic aspects of geek culture. It made me go back and review some of my own behavior. I didn’t like what I saw.
Like the writer, I have always been more comfortable around geek men than around non-geek women. I rarely find that I can even find common conversational ground with most non-geek women. It’s as if we speak different languages.
But I am a cisgendered – in fact often a very feminine – woman. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the typical things associated with femininity with being a geek, a skeptic, or a rational thinker, especially when you find a good many of the things that a lot of non-geek cisgendered women engage in or obsess over to be, well, rather shallow, boring, or silly.
But in branding non-geek women with those adjectives, am I, a long-time feminist, being misogynistic myself? Or worse, by becoming “one of the boys” and tolerating anti-female comments, slang, and stereotypes, have I given up my feminist ideals in favor of fitting in with other geeks? As Mary over at Geek Feminism writes:
It’s fairly common for geek ciswomen to remember a period of being actively misogynist, along the lines of: “I can see why men find women so bad, 99% of women are indeed trivial and annoying” or “I get treated in a sexist way, and it’s the fault of other women, for inviting sexist behaviour.”
Is it possible to reconcile being a feminist with also being a geek? I have to wonder why so many of those women protesting RealID seemed to feel it was okay to allow a misogynistic culture to force us into hiding our gender. I do understand why women might want to hide their true gender behind an avatar to avoid bias or sexual harassment, and I think that the whole RealID issue caused extreme privacy concerns beyond that. However, I have to point out that hiding your gender to avoid harassment is the rough equivalent to just laying down and taking it.
Isn’t it better to fight the misogyny than to submit to it? To go out there and admit your femininity and then show the boys that they’re wrong. The only way that anything in the gaming community will ever change for women is if we show the community at large what is and is not acceptable behavior. As long as we keep hiding our femininity away, pretending to be one of the boys, nothing will ever change.
And so now I say: If you use hate speech of any sort, I will report you. If you use slang which glorifies violence against women, I will report you. If you sexually harass me, I will report you. I will not play with you. I will not hide the fact that I am a woman to avoid any of the above, because that does more to help the problem than to fix it.
And if you assume that because I am a woman, I don’t know how to play, I will pwn your ass and enjoy doing so.
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I'm feeling a little conflicted on how to respond to this.
The first hurdle is the one which always comes with reading aggressive feminist writings when you have a penis; realizing it's not a personal attack against me and the way I act.
Second, I completely agree that women should not be lying about their gender in games. I've always felt it was cowardly, but it's not exactly the kind of thing that is well received coming from someone who 'can't understand.' We're never going to become a more inclusive culture if we're all stuck in some bizzaro-land style high school with a strict social hierarchy based on who can be the least different from the socially perceived norm.
Something I think you miss is that a large part of being a "geek" is centered on rejecting your gender identity regardless of what that is. Think your your typical male geek, now think of an image of masculinity, they're quite different things.
Personally, I've always held the view that BOTH genders have a cultural identity which is largely frivolous, selfish, and undesirable. Whether it be the male fascination with sports and stalwart refusal to accept women as more than sexual objects, or the female predilection for cosmetics and emotional manipulation. While not all gender traits are necessarily bad, male geeks tend to reject most or all of them.
Do not misunderstand my intent. The amount of overt misogyny some people display when behind the veil of anonymity staggering. It's something we should combat with fervor. That said, I don't think the rejection of general femininity is universally a response to this misogyny. I think it's simply the gender-neutral way of geeks.
And, ya know, so long as you ladies are playing WoW from the kitchen, nobody really has a problem with it.
I've always argued that a good bit of gender identity is not so much nature as nurture myself, ie: Girls like pink because they are taught that pink is a "Girl Color" and they should like pink. Boys play with trucks because that's the toys that get bought for them, because they're "boy toys."
However, when I talk about embracing my gender and being cisgendered here, I simply mean that I am not transgendered or masculine-identified. (There tends to be an assumption that a lot of geek girls are "butch" or "masculine identified", which is not true.) And the problem is not so much that women are rejecting being female as that they are hiding who they are to avoid unpleasantness – which as you say is a bit cowardly and works against inclusiveness. As long as girls are out there pretending to be guys to avoid harassment, the assumption will remain that girls don't play video games, and since girls don't play video games, they are a free-for-all for all of the misogyny anyone may want to dish out (ditto for homophobia and racism).
However, while the male-geek persona tends to be anti-jock, anti-macho, etc., there remains a tendency to marginalize women. Science, for instance, is still considered to be a very "masculine" field – so while a male geek may not be a macho jock, he can still be a scientist and be masculine. There still seem to be assumptions that if a woman buys a video game, she must be buying it for her spouse/son/brother, that if a woman attends a geek event, she must just be there *with* someone else. (Honestly, the opposite tends to be true of my boyfriend and I at DragonCon. I'm the one that gets really into the geekdom, he only really cares about the art show.) That if a girl likes sci-fi, science, video games, etc. that she must be less of a woman, that she likes "boy things."
Honestly, I think the idea of "boy toys" and "girl toys" should be gotten rid of completely. People like what they like, it has no relation to their gender. That, and the image of gamers in general needs an overhaul. The assumption is that gamers are all straight, white, adolescent boys. However, the first gamer generation came to adulthood a LONG time ago, and they didn't stop playing games, and they weren't all male.
Based on the psychological research I've see on the topic–which is spotty and lacks rigor–nature actually plays a surprisingly large role, but I think we can easily agree that a great deal of a person's identity, and inclinations comes from nurture. I also think social pressures play a large role in the way people act. People often seem apologetic when expressing interests that aren't 'normal.' Such as, for example, Women who enjoy traditionally male-dominated pastimes. It's become less true for gamers, as the community of female gamers has become strong in the past decade, but there's still a lot of social pressure not to completely turn your back on what a man or a woman 'should' be. And that's true even if we intellectually revile the idea that there are things one or the other gender 'should' do.
I think we're going to have a major issues discussing whether a girl is "masculine identified" or whether she's engaged in some pursuit which is mistakenly considered masculine, until we clear up the ambiguity of our terms. I've always had a thing for Tomboys, but if I'm not mistaken, you would say that those girls are not taking on masculine traits, they're simply taking on traits which are mistakenly considered masculine. Which, I suppose, is something I can accept. The change in day to day terminology will be difficult, but I'll manage.
Regarding, shall we say "Geek Masculinity," I don't know that I can necessarily agree with everything. Granted, I've not been fortunate enough to spend much time in the Scientific community, but the general impression I get from the scientists I've known is that they welcome female peers. If for no other reason than because modern intelligent males are looking for a mate who can share their interests. Now, there is ABSOLUTELY a prejudice that scientists are men which is prevalent in people outside the scientific community, but I'm not so sure it remains prevalent within the scientific community. Again though, I have only my own experience to call on here, no hard data.
Regarding the prejudice that a woman in a geeky situation is there "for someone else," I think you have to consider the perspective that you're witnessing these events from. You go to a con, and meet a bunch of guys who think you're only there for your boyfriend. Those guys went to the con, and met a bunch of girls who were there for their boyfriends, and one girl who glared at them when they assumed she was a continuation of that trend.
It's simple minded thinking on their part, but an excusable laziness in a social situation I think. Sometimes it's easy to forget that inductive reasoning often fails.
I agree that I'd like to see "Boy Toys" and "Girl Toys" lumped into the much more awesome "Toys" group, but speaking as a boy, I really can't see a world where toys like Barbie exist, and boys wanting to play with them. Forgive me if I'm butchering the point of such a toy, but as far as I can tell, the main draw is to match outfits and accessorize the doll's appearance, in the time before a child is able to do that kind of thing with themselves. And even if we assume Ken was re-marketed for boys, boys simply don't have the kind of role models to emulate for that kind of behavior. So unless we assume that either men, or women, are perpetuating a negative gender trait here, there will always be a market for gender based toys.
*chuckles* I think we can all agree here that Barbie is just a really lame toy, regardless of if you're a boy or a girl. :* I'd much rather play dress up with my WoW characters. Um. Ahem. Er.
And you would be right about the lack of prejudice against women within the scientific community – science related fields are actually a place where women can expect fairly equal treatment and equal pay, whereas in most areas women still average out at making about 70% of the pay that men in equivalent positions make.
By masculine identified, I tend to mean girls who actually visualize themselves (rather than are visualized by other people) as "butch" or "masculine". I happen to personally identify as "feminine". I'm a girly-girl. I just happened to prefer my Ninja Turtles (Especially Donatello! He was hot!) to Barbie as a child, and have continued to love geeky things as an adult, many of which are (often erroneously) identified as hobbies for men, both within and outside the geek community.
I think Barbie is a lame toy, and you think Barbie is a lame toy, and my girlfriend thinks Barbie is a lame toy, but I do know strong, intelligent women who look back on memories of Barbie very fondly, so it would seem wrong to disregard its effects.
I don't want to start a complete tangent, as there's already quite a bit being discussed here, but I'd be interested in seeing some hard data regarding women being paid 0.70 on the dollar compared to men. I don't necessarily believe that it's not true, but it's so unbelievable that I…well, I have a hard time believing that it's true sometimes.
I feel the need to point out, though it's completely irrelevant, that TMNT was developed with boys in mind. Perhaps this is merely interesting from a philosophy of language, or a metaphysics perspective. But the relationship between the intent of the creators to create something for boys, and our current agreement that enjoying TMNT is gender neutral, is an interesting one to me. (Though in fact, I don't know what the creators were thinking, as TMNT wasn't just a toy tie-in like most cartoons from that era.)
By the way, I'm curious, how do you express your feminine identity? We seem to have eliminated most of the forms of expression I can think of.
One last closing point that occurred to me regarding why male geeks are resistant to female geeks. For one reason or another, Geeks have always been a male dominated group. And while we all have a great deal of pride in our Geek Cred these days, none of us (I'm talking about Geeks as a whole, here) remember the persecution which came before the pride. We all know and remember that Geek was originally a term coined to ridicule us for playing Dungeons and Dragons, or playing with chemistry sets after the age of 12. For male Geeks, Women have always played a strong part in that ridicule. Either directly, by viewing us as substandard mates due to our social standing, or indirectly, in the form of taunts like "You'll never have a girlfriend." There's still a [i]powerful[/i] trend in [i]all[/i] forms of media which states unequivocally that Geeks (referring to male Geeks) will never, ever have sex. That NO Woman could possibly debase herself enough to mate with someone who thinks it's fun to go to Star Wars Celebration dressed as a Stormtrooper, or enjoys some other Geeky pastime. I could come up with new sources as fast as I could type, but I don't think this is really an issue with any contest, so I won't bother.
So much like the term "Geek" was taken by our community (again talking about Geeks as a whole here) and turned into a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, so to has the sexual ostracizing of male Geeks become misogyny. A sort of "They can't look down on us, we look down on THEM!" response. Again, it's not the correct way to think, but it's also completely understandable. And I say that as a male who has known the frustrations of being looked at by society as a substandard mate.
We need to work within the Geek community to reduce misogyny and make women accepted and commonplace members of our society. But just as important is that male geeks need to stop being bombarded with the ideas that lead to their mistrust of women in the first place.
I did wonder the same thing myself, but one of the ‘answers’ is that many women just aren’t ready and because of this, realid would simply lead to less women voicing their opinions at all. Change doesn’t happen over night, and I gradually hear more and more women becoming comfortable speaking out and talking, but part of that is making the spaces a comfortable (note I don’t mean space space) place for everyone to participate in. I certainly don’t think Real ID would be a practical way to do that in forum culture (which is somewhat different to facebook culture.)
Oh believe me, I'm fully against the Real ID thing for a multitude of reasons, and am glad that they decided not to use it, real names are an invitation to take harassment to the real world, and can prove dangerous for many reasons, and not just for women. (As I mentioned in my last post.)
But until women begin to speak out and fight against the harassment and bad behavior, and as long as we sit back and tolerate it, nothing will change.
In a way, women in gaming are at a point where the gay community once was, accepted so long as they are silent, but by remaining hidden they, in the end, perpetuate the very culture that causes them to feel that they have to hide.
Until more women step out of the shadows and proudly proclaim that they are gaming geek girls and that they aren't going to take the shit any more the cultural mindset isn't going to change. The more women who speak up the more the illusion of gaming as some "boy's club" will begin to break down, and that is a very good thing.