Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6868872" data-attributes="member: 4937">Presumably I am.  Which makes it very hard for me to say anything that is in any way constructive, since the first thing I have to prove is that I'm not a "white male terrorist".I think that unfortunately, everyone is going to end up speaking past each other on this issue.  And it's not just owing to the overly aggressive tone the essayist adopts.  It's just that we come from completely different worlds.I read an essay about how a woman has been sexually assaulted, including multiple physical assaults, up to and including rape as many as a dozen times while involved in the gaming community, and I'm appalled and fully understand - even as I disagree with it - why she'd think of gamers as white male terrorists.  Seriously, all that's happened to you?  Ok, I can make allowances for your feelings in that case.  You'd have to be a saint to maintain your emotions with that sort of background.But at the same time, that's just not where I come from, either as a man who is less likely to be victimized in this way, or as the spouse, friend, or father of female gamers.  Her stats show that 25% of women gamers report sexual harassment, and a non-trivial fraction report physical harassment.  But that means that like 75% of them don't.  They may experience some sexism or discrimination in other ways, but their experience - and the experience their female friends may have - don't reflect this woman's experience.  Her experience is certainly more common than it should be, and really is inexcusable, but it isn't necessarily universal.  The sort of sexism that I think more common in the circles I've gamed in, looks nothing like what she describes.  I feel confident in saying that in either of the high school groups I was in, the way sexism would have manifested itself would have been in competing to see which of us could beat the crap out of whomever offended a woman in our vicinity to show how masculine we were.  We might not in any way conform to the SJW ideal, whatever that is because it seems to very depending on who you talk to, but you could have been quite confident that if you got harassed within arms length of any of us, that it would have provoked a roll for initiative and not silence or complicity.  Masculine posturing maybe, but not complicity.  And now, most gamers I know are married with daughters of there own, and the first thing that enters into our mind reading something like that is along the lines of, "If anyone talks to my 13 year old that way, there will be body bags."  I don't know of the culture she talks about, and that's the honest truth.  The very existence of it shocks me, coming from a background where profanity wasn't used publically except as a warning that actual violence was about to occur - and even then never in mixed company.  The closest I've ever had a brush with that was I went over to another gamer's house to play a game, and he referred to his live in girlfriend (already slightly shocking to my standards) affectionately and to her face by a word that has never come out of my mouth to refer to a woman.  The real culture shock for me was she seemed ok with this, and didn't need someone to hit him in the face.  I was terribly confused and uncomfortable, and needless to say decided not to pursue that friendship further.Traditional?  You bet.  Sexist?  In the sense that I'd probably respond at least a little differently to a woman the object of violence than I would a man, maybe so.  But I'm finding it a bit odd and ironic that there is this sudden call for chivalry after having heard for the last 20 years how darn sexist chivalry is.  And I'm finding equally odd that the essayist thinks the solution is men stepping up and speaking out against this sort of behavior when we see it (as if someone needs to tell me that you don't tolerate violence against a woman in your presence) and yet also apparently thinks calling those same men "white male terrorists" is an effectual way to rally support.If this really is this prevalent, and I walk into Origins or GenCon with a lady with me and I should expect this sort of vile human filth to come crawling out of the wood work, then I'm going to have to evaluate my future plans.  Because I suspect security is going to take a dim view of my temptation to 'smite evil', and I really don't want to subject my daughters to such a scene.  So I'd really like it if some people were honest about whether this is the real view women have of such conventions, and such places are really this dangerous.  Because hitherto, the only person I've ever known to have been sexually or physically assaulted at a convention - a story I admittedly heard in second person, but had no cause to disbelieve - was a man, by a drunk woman during a LARP that got a bit out of hand at DragonCon.</blockquote>

Verification