Eventually this post is going to contain some bad language and slurs, because I’m discussing the prevalence of bad language and slurs, so, trigger warning for that.
I play games of all types and stripes. Tabletop, console, PC. So my interests have some crossover from all those communities. Every side of gaming seems to have some kind of problem with behavior that makes women uncomfortable.
A conversation erupted on G+ the other day, from some folks who frequent RPGnet. Stacy Chancellor made a limited-circles post (but here’s a public link added later) asking a simple question that provoked a lot of discussion. He started a group to play roleplaying games on-line. The idea was to run tabletop style RPGs over Google Hangouts. More than 90 percent of the people who joined the group were men.
So, he wondered: Why so few women?
My personal answers are something like: 1. I feel my gaming needs are currently fulfilled by my bi-weekly game right now and other on-line venues, 2. If possible, I vastly prefer to do tabletop at a live table versus an internet chat room these days, 3. General time constraints.
I also answered that while it’s a generalization, women feel more strain on their free time than men do. This is especially true right now, when Christmas is coming and many of us have to shop, decorate, wrap, bake, mail cards or other holiday activities. Women are socialized to put others first – work, family, general housework and upkeep – and ourselves and our own hobbies second. That hasn’t prevented me from being a selfish gamer from time to time, but, these days, it takes a concentrated effort sometimes to tell myself: yes, I’m slotting aside this time to have fun.
However, a lot of women didn’t feel that was the primary issue. Instead, they chimed in about being afraid to play games with strangers on-line. This is kind of a foreign feeling to me because I’ve been gaming with people on-line, in various capacities, as long as there has been an on-line in which to game. Generally, I gravitate toward on-line communities that are welcoming (City of Heroes, rest its soul, was one of the best) and fade out of communities that turn out to be more toxic. But I understand that toxic communities exist, that they aren’t much fun and pretty draining to be around, and that encountering those communities can make someone gunshy about approaching a new community.
I’ve written a little about harassment before for Ctrl+Alt+Defeat. Though harassment often comes from young men or children, adult men also sometimes join in on the “fun.”
An interesting pattern I’ve noticed lately is that we seem to have raised a generation that understands racism is bad, but doesn’t feel the same way about sexism or homophobia. Here’s a close phrasing of a real complaint I’ve seen about a user: “Make that tranny faggot stop telling racist jokes.” The user who made that complaint wanted another user banned for being racist. But, since the user he was talking about was a known male player using a female avatar, calling the user a “tranny faggot” was fine to him. I pointed out the problem here to the reporting user, but he didn’t see a issue with his own language. He was angry. Calling someone a transphobic slur was fine; calling someone a racist slur was wrong. When users report other users, mostly it’s about racism. Very few users send reports about sexism or other slurs. Those are just considered background noise. In the same sense, when I see comments threads complaining about women being harassed, “but what about racism; it’s worse” always seems to crop up.
I’m not saying racism isn’t bad, just that people seem more likely to point it out or call it out as bad. Of course, there are users that deliberately tell racist jokes. But the ones that are loud are doing it to troll – to be transgressive – to break a social norm in a way they know is bad and see if they can get away with it. A lot of times on the other hand, gamers can’t even tell why making a sexist comment would be considered bad. That’s “just regular trash-talk.”
So as I said before, I think women are socialized to put others before themselves. We’re socialized not to speak out about things that bother us, which is maybe why it takes a lot for someone to send me a harassment report about sexism. Women are also socialized, far more so than men, to take insults personally. I am not sure that this has a genetic/hormonal component – it might – but it definitely at least is in the social programming of a woman. A lot of times, when men hang out, casual insults, little jabs, snide “fuck-yous” are just part of the ritual. A woman can engage in that kind of personal insult-play too, but generally speaking it’s not as prevalent. Going on XBox Live, men seem to think nothing of yelling the occasional “trash” at each other. Then they get upset when women get upset by it, especially if those women want to change the policies or the game.
Personally speaking, I’m not a big fan of random trashtalk. I don’t particularly like to be hassled or harassed. I’m particularly uninterested in being harassed on the basis of my gender.
But there are a lot of men that think harassment is funny, is a free speech issue, and doesn’t actually hurt anyone. I really do think that this is a gender/socialization of gender issue.
People will tease each other if they feel safe. A man is more likely to feel safe in a situation where he is surrounded by other men. A woman is less likely to feel safe if surrounded by mostly men. Women that are teased in places that they feel unsafe can keep quiet, or speak out. Sometimes, if they speak out, they are then labeled “too sensitive.” But a woman is more likely to feel uncomfortable in these teasing scenarios because A) that kind of heavy trash-talk isn’t really in our cultural programming, and, B) of course she already feels unsafe because she felt outnumbered, so what was innocent jabbering to the man was pretty scary to the woman.
Related: today brought on a very short-lived brand-new Hitman controversy. (There’s like one a week!) Rock, Paper, Shotgun reported that, to promote Hitman, SquareEnix released a Facebook app that allowed users to place really insulting hits on their friends. So you could say things, like, for example, “you are cheating on your boyfriend and you have tiny boobs,” by leaning back and firing it off through a Facebook app, with accompanying video.
This reminded me a little of something a friend once did to me at the RenFaire. There was a little prison that you could get locked up in, and one person could go up to a guard and pay to have another person arrested for a short amount of time. At the end you got a little souvenir wanted poster detailing your crimes. The posters were picked off a list, and I was arrested for “Contributing to the Entropy of the Universe.” That was hilarious.
The Hitman app was less hilarious. I looked at that and thought: okay, I really don’t think that’s funny. But I wasn’t really outraged. I could see how someone would think that it was funny. The idea is it was meant to be sent from friend to friend, like arresting your friends at the RenFaire. And the idea, at least, is that the insults are meant to be thrown at people in an environment where it’s otherwise safe. It’s not unbelievable that an ad team would come up with this, think it was funny, and manage to get it created without vetting it by the kind of person that doesn’t think this is funny.
The thing is: on-line, people just don’t feel that safe yet. Some people do. But people are increasingly aware of on-line harassment, have dealt with it, and many just don’t feel like the internet is a safe space for that sort of teasing. And as I said before, a woman is probably more likely to take insults and threats more personally.
In a roundabout way, this leads to some men wanting to deliberately shut women out.
“I can’t deal with having a woman play at this game. When I’m standing around being insulting with my bros, that’s part of the fun. If I’m insulting to a woman, she takes it personal. She gets all sensitive. Then she might make things weird when I was just clowning around. Let’s just not allow women. Rude trash-talk is just part of what we do.”
Something else I addressed on G+ is also applicable here. Without meaning to, women can accidentally talk men into shutting other women out. This doesn’t assume malice. But if the conversation “where are all the women?” drifts into, as it inevitably does, a woman saying “women are uncomfortable here” or even “I (a woman) am uncomfortable here,” it’s easy for a majority male environment to assume that just part of a small sample of women is speaking for all women. From there, he might draw the conclusion from a small sample size that “all women” are A) uncomfortable gaming on-line B) don’t like shooters C) don’t like tabletop games; or other broad generalizations… so, whatever, it’s just too hard, we just won’t invite women.
The reality is that all women are just people, and the only thing we are certain to have in common is that we are all different. What we’re socialized to think has a big impact, but cannot dictate for certain how a woman will behave or feel in a given situation. Yes, it is worth it to continue inviting women, because women have different tastes. Some women like chain mail bikinis; some women like shooters; some women even like trash talk.
I don’t like trash talk. I am not “pro trash talk.” But there’s different levels of trash talk. In some cases it’s really meant to be hurtful. In other cases, it’s meant to be friendly joking around and is accidentally hurtful. In lots of cases, a person really doesn’t understand what they are saying is wrong. In others they are deliberately trying to transgress boundaries to see where the edges are. (This last group contains the most kids/high schoolers.)
It’s hard to reliably read the intent of on-line harassers, though, and it’s easy for an on-line harasser to cause real offense when he was “just kidding.” From the standpoint of explaining what will be punished, a zero-tolerance policy is the simplest. No harassment at all, period, is easier to explain than “some harassment is okay sometimes, depending.” However, zero-tolerance is hard to enforce and requires round the clock vigilance. Zero tolerance also ignores the realities of some interactions. If two people yell insults at each other, but both were just joking and no one got upset, was someone harassed or not?
I think the best thing to remember is that the internet is a public place, not a private one. By extension, on-line games are a public space, not a private one. But people often err toward ways they would only talk in private due to anonymity or the lack of any real way to enforce good behavior. Remember that the people you are playing with are strangers. Be a reasonable human being, the way you would behave in front of any strangers. If it turns out that the other players become comfortable with certain jokes, you probably know them well enough to know what kind of jokes they’d find funny.
Until then, maybe just not being a jerk is okay?
This is pretty disorganized, but I wanted to type out all my thoughts. Comments and discussion welcome.
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