[ETA: follow-up here. Oh, those sillies.]
Reader The Other Patrick sent us this link: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=147426 [Ed. Note: which they have since locked so you have to join the forum to read it - 11-3-10] in which a female video gamer asks on a Starcraft2 forum if there are other female gamers interest in starting a women-only clan. The very first response is a male gamer demanding she post a picture of herself, and it goes downhill from there. Seriously.
The next response is a second demand for pictures. Eventually she says she doesn’t want to share pictures of herself, but will post a picture of her cat (and does). The next comment: “She just posted pics of her pussy! you happy now?”
Pretty much every single post is sexual harassment, until about the third or fourth page. She’s assured her community will be very small if she keeps the “vast majority” of the players out by not including men. Someone even pulls out the “What about the gayz” argument on the basis that gays aren’t allowed into “man-clans” so if the women-only clan doesn’t allow them, the poor gays will have to make their own clan. Turns out there are already gay-only clans.
Finally, a moderator tells the guys to stop trolling or they’ll be banned, but no comments are edited or anything. Someone handwrings about how folks would feel if anybody made a male-only clan, or whites-only, but it turns out there are quite a few male-only clans already – oh, the irony. Someone else questions the original poster’s actual gender, suspecting “she” is actually male.
Perhaps the most ironic comment in the thread is: “Good luck with your female only team. I remember there being a handful on west back in the day, but I don’t think any of them ever stuck around too long. Probably being too catty with one another.” YEAH, THAT WAS THE REASON. The entire thread answers a whole lot of questions about “girl gamer” behavior.
Then an administrator comes in and says: “Most girls on this site that are interested in competitive SC play with guys. DrH nailed it and i really dont see this going any where.”
Then someone suggests there should be a battle of male and female clans, and the response is: “When the girls lose the guys should say “rape”.
Anybody getting any meta-messages here? The response, including that from the administrator, is basically, “Sure, bitch, do what you want, but show us your tits and comply with all future sexual demands from all of us, and once you’ve done those chores you can do your little female only thing to your heart’s content in whatever spare time you have left, only we’ll be cyber-harassing all the other bitches, too, so they’ll probably be too busy to join your little club of whores.”
Then a woman comes in on the misogynist’s team: “There are sexists and perverts online and offline. Girls who don’t understand that already have no business being on the internet… If you ask me, she’s totally asking for it. Why would you even put a pic up there if you weren’t asking for someone to comment on the way you look?” By the way, it’s not a pic of the gamer herself, it’s a pic of someone the poster should recognize if she works at eSports, as she claims.
It becomes apparent through the thread that there’s a bit of context us non-gamers may have missed: when a woman posts something about being a woman, the first thing other posters need to establish is whether she is genuine or “an attention whore.” Quite a bit of post dissection is devoted to this investigation, because no one ever admits they just hate women. Misogynists always provide a Real Good Reason why they hate women, and in the case of gamers, that “reason” is that, they claim, most women who game court the attention of boys and men who pursue them for cyber-sex. The Real Good Reason is then supported by evidence that is interpreted anyway it must be interpreted to support the Real Good Reason.
Over and over, women are advised not to tell anyone they are female if they want to avoid harassment. It’s their job to avoid harassment, you see, certainly not, say, that administrator’s job to shut down harassment. No, the only post that gets a warning is this one: “The question is why she is not in the kitchen making me a sandwich ?”
There are actually a number of comments pointing out the misogyny in this thread, and doing it well. It’s also interesting to note that the female eSports misogynist gets picked apart and trashed almost as badly as the original poster.
This thread also brings up something you should know about: Blizzard, a major gaming forum, had plans to introduce RealID to its forums. So that posters would be easily identified by, I dunno, long lost friends and people who want to teach that whore a lesson up close and personal. If they’re thinking RealID would out the stalkers before their potential victims, they really need to talk to some law enforcement personnel. ETA: Blizzard reluctantly pulled these plans in the face of major public opposition, but never expressed the slightest concern about cyber-stalking or privacy in general.
Thoughts?
{ 155 comments… read them below or add one }
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You know, for the last few thousand years there’s been a long tradition of women passing as men in order to get a job, get a book published, join the military, become a jazz singer or marry the woman they love.
Playing a male avatar to enjoy a game sounds like holding up that tradition until we finally live in a world that’s free of sexism and all that shit…
M.C.(Quote) (Reply)
No. They would just wonder what was going on, feel mistreated, and learn nothing.
Even being on the other side of the fence for a long time doesn’t mean you’re more sensitive to such things: despite the urban legend of fat guys being so accommodating (because they’ve experienced this shit themselves, you know?), there are more than enough fat assholes around. And I recently talked to a m2f transgendered person where she came out as a total racist.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
I played a lot of Battlefield 2142 online, which has a built-in voice chat feature of dubious quality. I avoided using it for the usual reasons of harassment, though sometimes I would explode with a “line of fire you moron!” or something similar to a squadmate who was acting stupidly. It often earned me a surprised reaction, and the sound quality was so low that some male players weren’t sure if I were a woman or a child.
It should be noted that all avatars in that game are male (and indistinguishable from each other except by name) so being male by default was not just easy but required.
Lindsey(Quote) (Reply)
As a male gamer I am constantly astounded by the conduct of trolls like those in the thread under discussion. The bad rep they bring on the whole gaming community humiliates and angers me.
There are few enough women in the hobby as it is without piling on harassment and abuse until they either leave entirely or learn to hide their identity. Women see the world in a different way than men do, and having those different voices in a community makes it a richer place for everyone.
Frankly, I put a lot of the blame on the Blizzard mods. I understand that modding is a horrible, thankless job. I’ve put in my time in the trenches. But the reason the post of moderator exists is to do just that, moderate the discourse on a forum. If that means taking a firm hand with the warnings and the banhammer, then that’s what it means. People will bitch and moan for a while and call you a “Nazi.” but you’ll be helping to build a better community, and that’s the only proper reason to want the damn job in the first place.
John(Quote) (Reply)
Judging by some of the comments on that youtube video…uh, no.
I think it would probably just be interpreted as catty girls with hormones or something.
Jaynie(Quote) (Reply)
“No animals were harmed in the making of this video, but 8 females briefly left the kitchen.”
UGH. >:(
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Ick. That reminds me of a (white) gay guy I used to know who didn’t want to “be with” black guys because (and I quote):”IT’D BE LIKE SUCKING ON A ROTTEN BANANA!”
Seriously, WTF?
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Actually, that’s untrue. There are two levels of “friendship” in the Bnet interface; SC2 friends and RealID friends. For the scenario you described where you simply want to play SC2 regularly and conveniently with someone you meet in-game, you can add them as an SC2 friend and never have to exchange real names.
Your concerns however, about being able to see the RealIDs of friends of friends, is valid. That just creeps me out.
jobias(Quote) (Reply)
This level of misogyny on a game board doesn’t surprise me a bit, which is sad. Regarding the RealID boondoggle from Activision/Blizzard, I recently wrote an article about the very real danger to women, and how the policy, for all intents and purposes, would silence female gamers, in order to avoid being stalked.
Some important statistics to keep in mind, more than 1 in 12 women reporting that they’ve been stalked in real life, and more than 64% of women in a recent study reporting that they’ve been cyberstalked. And when Blizzard was approached about this new policy that would put their female base at risk, (because the only way to get tech support is to use the forum and thereby your “real name”), their response was telling:
What I find tragic, in cases like Starcraft and Wow, is that male gamers KNOW this behavior is wrong, and would be furious if it was their mom or their wives or their daughters being treated like this; which just goes to prove that in many male minds, when we “belong to a man” we deserve protection, but as independent entities, we deserve to be abused.
As feminists, we’ve come a long way, but the road ahead of us isn’t any easier than the road behind us.
DeAnne(Quote) (Reply)
This is why I never admit I’m female when I’m in an online game.
Lexi(Quote) (Reply)
Around the time Halo 2 was out, I signed up to join PMS clan after having a lot of bad experiences with random teammates. I figured that considering that creed, it might be a good place to play and not have to worry about any harassment. The first thing they did for all of the new recruits was to pit them against the veteran clan members and the male team. While no one was harassed, I heard the recruiter for the PMS clan say “She’s pretty good with a rocket launcher. For a girl.” I didn’t stick around after that.
Megan(Quote) (Reply)
@DeAnne — I was so curious about the Blizzard mod’s response that I went into the page source and dug it out.
Holy cow, is that irresponsible. They’re completely ignoring a valid concern about the potential consequences of their actions. If they were a teenager rather than an international corporation, they’d be holding up their thumbs and forefingers in a W configuration.
And that’s why I never ever go on Battle.net. (Yes, I’m still playing Diablo 2 and waiting not-at-all-patiently for 3. I want my female barbarian, dammit.)
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, sorry about messing up the blockquote there. I think I threw an extra tag in, but couldn’t see a way to edit it once it was submitted.
But back to BlizzaVision; it’s astoundingly irresponsible. As well, I discovered back when the whole RealID was being initially pushed, that it had been enabled by default in-game, for anyone not on a parental control account…even for those users who had specifically NOT enabled it.
I don’t know if it’s been fixed since I originally reported the API flaw, but at the time, in WoW, you could, at the command prompt enter:
/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,”RealID whisper from yourself..”);break end end
as a test case for how an API call could be used from an addon to grab RealID info for every account, whether they had realid enabled or not.
And it would spit back your billing name and email address, which means every single addon for the game could grab your RealID if they wanted it. Hands up everyone who thinks botters and scammers were already figuring ways to inject that into popular addons?
As well, someone on my linked blog post above reported that if you did a “friend invite”, that the game sent the person you invited your full billing name.
In other words, Blizzard/Activision don’t care about privacy, they don’t care about their users, they certainly don’t care about women’s issues…what they do care about is rolling around in the buckets and buckets of cash they’re getting from Facebook to make everyone’s information public.
Which brings us back to the issue with StarCraft and misogyny. There is no financial reason for them to care about their female gamers, so they don’t.
DeAnne(Quote) (Reply)
And this, among the gaming crowd, is not unusual. It’s happening every minute of every day, either in the forums or in the game. I have heard everything stated there before, numerous times, many aimed at me, and is one of the CHIEF reasons I stopped playing World of Warcraft. I no longer had the energy to suffer through and “laugh it off” because it’s “all in good fun” and these guys don’t “REALLY hate women”. It is tiring and depressing and so many things.
And yes, I believe RealID is complete bull. I signed up with my SC2 account, and connected to my facebook, because I actually have some decent human beings on my friend list that play. But I will not be touching the forums or venturing out into the wide world of gaming for a time.
Stassja(Quote) (Reply)
FWIW, with Starcraft 2 I have heard differing accounts about having to be on Battle.net even for the single player campaign: it might be possible just to login once with your battle.net account and then play offline, or perhaps you can play offline as a guest and not make an account in the game, and another site gave directions of how to change the hostname so the game wouldn’t require the net.
What I want to say is that it’s possible that for Diablo 3, you might be required to have a battle.net account, after all.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
I had been discussing with my father that Antonin Scalia had said something to the effect of “Well if the girl didn’t want to get raped she shouldn’t have been dressed provocatively.” This was in response to some girl, who I admit I don’t recall the name of, freaking out over the fact that she was confronted sexually because of the way she dressed.
He gave me the old 1930′s response of “Well if she didn’t want to get banged by 8 guys she shouldn’t have dressed like that.”
I told him in response “A rich man should not need to dress like a pauper just to not get robbed.” and he said “Well yeah that’s true.”
I love my dad, but as old people tend to he is stuck in his ways.
But that still brings me to your point. Make sure to note that while they are MALE gamers it is not the fact that they are male that makes them assholes. It is the fact that they are assholes that make them assholes.Editor’s note: At no point did anyone suggest such thing. We don’t appreciate strawman arguments here.The internet removes a very large layer of accountability for people. That’s why I was excited for RealID, since the few times wow trolls have given out there real life information they’ve gotten a severe ass beating (and it ends up in the news everytime).
The major problem with it is that I do feel, as was noted here, that women would get the raw end of the deal. There are, or so statistics have said, nearly as many women playing games these days as men. Some argue this is because of farmville et. all, but I have noticed through vent and teamspeak that a good half of the people in guilds I’m a part of are women.
At any rate. I’m gonna digress a million times so I’ll keep it short.
There are far fewer assholes in the world than kind people. But assholes have tons of free time because their profession requires little money to keep going.
So please don’t assume that the majority of gamers are like thisEditor’s note: here we go again. Duh! It’s merely the lowest common denominator having the largest common coverage. Which coincides nicely with politics and news (the most ignorant being the most widely broadcast).I’m not sure why, I figure there is some novelty in listening to idiots. :/
Rico Penguin(Quote) (Reply)
I’ve edited your comments because you obviously didn’t bother to read the rules. We don’t do strawman arguments here. Save your concern trolling for someplace where anyone has ever actually suggested such a ludicrous thing as that being male makes one an asshole, or that the majority of gamers are assholes.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I find this especially unbearable because I’ve recently joined a gaming society in my uni and it’s full of people (boys and girls)that have all been really nice. Only one person (a newbie like myself) brought up my being a girl as any kind of detriment, after about twenty minutes of chatting, and was actually kind of ashamed when I called him on it. Not all ‘nerds’ are like this, promise.
SarahSyna(Quote) (Reply)
I believe the friends-of-friends is supposed to be removed in an upcoming patch for World of Warcraft, but I don’t know if that will extend to SC2 as well.
Nonny(Quote) (Reply)
Honestly? No.
I do know individual men who have been stalked and harassed, much like women have to deal with on a regular basis, but the difference is that it was considered an individual problem — not a cultural problem that they should categorically need to concern themselves with. There were certain things I think they were more sensitive about afterward, but none of them ever understood why many women talk about being cautious about harassment from men.
Nonny(Quote) (Reply)
Oddly, my experience as a female playing female characters in World of Warcraft has been different. The driving assumption I have seen is that if you have a female avatar, that you are a man playing a female character, frequently for the “if I’m going to stare at something’s butt for hours, I want it to look cute” reason.
I have always been open about being a female player, yet in my first guild, after I had been a member for six months and joined a raid, someone was shocked when I hopped on TeamSpeak and spoke for the first time. “You’re a girl!?”
Sigh.
Nonny(Quote) (Reply)
I was actually thinking earlier today: what if we got a big group together, went in there with male screen names, and started demanding pics from every guy.
Just that – just pic demands. Stopping their conversations and getting in their business with pic demands.
I think T.O.Patrick is probably right that they wouldn’t get it, would feel self-pity, and would probably even see it as one more reason to hate women.
I do know of ways to get through to them. They’re just… not really legal.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I have an incriminating recording of one of the mods from the site saying to a young lady “bitch make me a sandwiche, I’m busy playing starcraft”
if you’d like a copy of the .mp3 just followup this comment
mOnion(Quote) (Reply)
I don’t mean this as a criticism at all, but it’s kind of heart-breaking to see the word “admit” there. We ARE made to feel like being female is something that requires an excuse, aren’t we?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
This post is getting circulated widely, so now I’m having to mod comments from gamers who aren’t listening because they can’t wait to have their say. The gem of the bunch so far presents the “alternate viewpoint” on “how annoying it is to have a girl come along and spend the entire time I’m trying to game, flirting with anyone who will answer her?”
Gee, I imagine it’s almost as obnoxious as starting a forum thread and having boymen DEMAND PICTURES OF YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE FEMALE and sexually harass you for page after page while THE ADMINS ARE PRETTY MUCH USELESS.
How can anyone miss the point that thoroughly? He thinks one person flirting at lots of people is comparable to lots of people sexually harassing one lone person, who’s getting no real support from any corner. It’s like if he told me he had prostate cancer, and because I can’t relate to worries about prostate cancer at all, I replied, “Yeah, but I’ve got a cold! What about meeeeee?” Jesus.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
…I bring the rope *g*
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Damn, now I realize it sounds like lynching. That’s not what I meant! I just wanted to offer my help for the interrogation/torture/brainwashing scene.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Oh, I have a Battle.net account. I just don’t use it for playing Diablo. I have a group of local friends (two of whom live upstairs) who get together for LAN parties every now and then, but mostly I just go it alone. (I’m not very good anyway, since it’s the only RPG I play, so it’s a way for me to be able to try out the different classes without being detrimental to the party.)
Hearing tales of abuse and misogyny like the ones being discussed here has made campaigning with strangers decidedly unappealing. If they do decide to make logging in necessary for gameplay… well, I’ll decide whether it’s worth the loss of privacy when/if more details are available, I guess.
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
As always, we appreciate your mighty mod-hand of troll smiting. It can’t be easy putting yourself between those kinds of comments and actual reasoned discussion, but we’re very glad that you do.
It seems that female gamers speaking up for ourselves hits a bit of a nerve among a certain, vocal group. Perhaps if they could step back and ask themselves why they’re getting so angry…
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
No worries. Debugging html (including a lot of my own mistakes) is a big part of my job, so I’m used to it. I just wanted to see if the mod you encountered was any more interested in actually, y’know, modding than the one cited in the main article. Turn out, not so much. :-\
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
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