http://kotaku.com/5868595/nerds-and-male-privilege
I remember once I was involved in a thing in a MUD where I had been the subject of insults because somebody found out I'm bi. Me and other friends (all women and known to be women) complained but people kept making excuses. I then switched to a male alt (where people knew him as being male IRL too) and made the EXACT SAME ARGUMENT, laid it out just the same, and everybody nodded and I actually changed policy, b/c after that the community made a "no gay bashing" rule and people told me how logical male me was compared to how emotional female me was.
I've had plenty of exps (as ppl who read this blog knows) of harassment in game (like being kicked out of my Starcraft clan because ppl found out I was a rape survivor and victim-blamed me and accused me of lying, and etc), and I've also had the differences of how I'm treated pre-transition (perceived as male) and now, in comic stores, game stores and in geekdom in general (people assume any guy I'm with is the expert in comics, when usually I'm the one showing HIM around). -_- And yus, that article gets it pretty bang on. And I've been complaining about the "you know I want to play a strong female character, or associate with one without feeling like I need to look like a porn star for a while in this blog. -_-
None of this is new, but it is necessary to keep republishing the message sadly, not necessarily to hammer it through the people who don't want to listen, but because there's always new people who haven't heard this before and will be swayed and realize the WTFness :)
And judging the situation solely by the comments just from the link, It would seem that we have a long way to go. [h/t Gorkon]
ReplyDeleteYeah, the comments section on that post is everything you would ever expect it to be. The remarkable thing to me was when Boing Boing posted a link (just a link!) to the post on Kotaku, and almost instantly produced 169 comments which replicated the tone and composition of the Kotaku comments thread almost precisely:
ReplyDeletehttp://boingboing.net/2011/12/16/male-privilege-vs-women-in-ga.html
If Harris O'Malley were to turn his article into an e-book, he ought to include the entirety of these two comment threads as exhibit A and B. This stuff should be preserved for future scholars.