Women who Roleplay at Convetions: Stalking Incidents?

[Andy Kitkowski]

Re: Re: Women who Roleplay at Convetions: Stalking Incidents?

Don't place 100% of the blame on the guys.... There are also sexually maladjusted females, who may be extremely sexually repressed, and will attribute anything a guy does to perverted or deviant intentions.

Well, that was in the source that I read, too- The writer (female, but again never had any stalking done to her) was commenting that there might be a guy just trying to talk or get to know someone or just be friendly, but who comes off to a particularly uptight woman as being a Nasty Stalker.

She posted stories from her friends (and even a letter from a reader, shown above in the bottom left frame) where a similar situation happens: A guy who never introduces himself (nor plays in any games with her) spends hours leering at her, just watching, never saying anything. Then, when the girl goes home, he follows her at a shadowing distance, taking the same trains, even transferring at the same stops. Then, at the end of the line, tries to follow the girl home (usually in these stories the girl goes to a police stand, a bookstore to throw him off, or a friend's house). None of these stories progressed from there, though- the girl was at least smart enough in each case not to lead the guy back to her apartment or house.

In this kind of situation, it's hard to find the woman at fault at all. It's not like she's even "being promiscuous". Her only crime to deserve this treatment is being a woman at a gaming convention.

-Andy

 

[Doc Ezra]

Alas...

An acquaintance of mine (FOAF), who was a cam-girl, went to cons regularly in this neck of the woods (TN, AL, GA). At a convention in TN, she was attacked by an assailant who has never been caught or identified (she suffered a blow to the head and has no memory of the incident itself, just waking up in the hospital with a broken leg and head injury). There has been some speculation that it was one of her more "attentive" fans gone a little wacko, but proof isn't positive. I know she had problems with guys bugging her over e-mail and at cons, though.

The head injury is suspected of having been largely responsible for the seizure condition that she developed thereafter and that led to her untimely death this past summer.

Again, not provable as a "stalking" incident, but the circumstantial evidence has been pretty compelling to her friends, anyway.

 

[mythago]

There are also sexually maladjusted females, who may be extremely sexually repressed, and will attribute anything a guy does to perverted or deviant intentions.

"You're an uptight bint who misinterpreted me!" is the first line of defense from a harassing jerk, in my experience.

Yeah, there are some women who freak if they THINK a guy MIGHT be looking at them--but again IME, they're far less than the numbers pushy guys would have you believe. ("She thought I was hitting on her just because I made a comment about her cleavage! Twice! Can you believe it?")

 

[Nikchick]

I was stalked by a disturbed young man when I was in high school. He played D&D specifically, he ran a game for me (my first experience with D&D) but his stalking of me didn't really involve gaming. He went the whole nine yards, though, complete with following me around the town, following me around school, spying in my window at night, breaking into my house, it just kept escalating. He was a heavy-weight wrestler and quite large and intimidating, and there were no anti-stalking laws to fall back on in those days. After a couple of months of this I finally had to move to another state, where I got letters and phone calls from him for a while. It was a deeply traumatic experience.

All that happened before I got heavily involved in gaming. I'm pleased that I had the good sense not to blame gaming for this guy's lunacy, or avoid gaming because of him. But my stalker experience heightened my awareness and lowered my tolerance for such behavior. Since then, I've had a few encounters with boys/men who have taken an uncomfortable level of interest in me, but as far as I know it's always been limited to coming by my booth obsessively at a con and hasn't crossed into my private life.

Oh, and there was the guy who invited me out for a Coke at DragonCon one year who thought that entitled him to literally pick me up and take me back to his room, but I put a stop to that in a damn hurry.

Nicole

 

[Chun-tzu]

"You're an uptight bint who misinterpreted me!" is the first line of defense from a harassing jerk, in my experience.

Yeah, there are some women who freak if they THINK a guy MIGHT be looking at them--but again IME, they're far less than the numbers pushy guys would have you believe. ("She thought I was hitting on her just because I made a comment about her cleavage! Twice! Can you believe it?")

This is certainly true enough. But I think it has more to do with extremes than gender, per se. In at least some traits, males will show a far greater distribution than females. For example, in the distribution of intelligence scores, men show far greater variance, including extremely high and extremely low scores, while women women are more likely to cluster around the average range. For whatever reason, biological and most likely sociological as well (men are taught to be the aggressors, while females traditionally take the passive role), men are more likely to behave in extreme ways. And stalking is certainly an extreme and abnormal behavior.

My original point was mainly that stalking is not just a result of some pathetic deviants. It stems from our social systems of meeting, dating, getting married, and so forth. Like any system, there are a lot of cracks in it, and one result is the stalker. But seeing as real cases of female stalkers are far more rare, you have to stop and consider how the system would affect females.

 

[Sanackranib]

All that happened before I got heavily involved in gaming. I'm pleased that I had the good sense not to blame gaming for this guy's lunacy, or avoid gaming because of him.

Oh, and there was the guy who invited me out for a Coke at DragonCon one year who thought that entitled him to literally pick me up and take me back to his room, but I put a stop to that in a damn hurry.

Nicole

sounds like you have been able to control the situation, sorry you wound up having to move though. Glaad you didn't give up gaming because of a few "rotten apples"

 

[Piratecat]

I was stalked by a disturbed young man when I was in high school.

Darn it! Nicole, this just made my stalking of you and Chris a lot less funny. My apologies for that.

But I can still stalk him, right? *stalkstalkstalk*

 

[Umbran]

Hey all- This is my first post here. I'm a regular at RPGNet but I wanted to pool as much of the online connunity as possible.

You realize, of course, that this won't get you a very accurate portrayal of the phenomenon? In order to get a good picture of what happens at cons, you need to poll the congoing community, not the online community.

What you get by this sort of polling is a bunch of anecdotal accounts, not an accurate accounting of how frequently this sort of thing happens...

 

[barsoomcore]

The "social issues" that plague some gamers are unfortunate in some ways, and of course they're great things in others.

It's great that people are able to follow their happiness to such a degree that they can dress how they like, talk how they like, and even find groups of people who dress and talk like they so they can feel part of a community. I'm someone who's fairly constrained by social niceties so I'm always impressed with people who just don't care and aren't afraid to show it. Good for them.

On the other hand, when people get so wrapped up in "being themselves" that they fail to recognize the effect they're having on other people, that's unfortunate. When they behave in intimidating fashions or make other people uncomfortable or frightened, that's bad.

Of course, everyone has their own comfort zones and one person's stalking may be another person's charming devotion. Part of being a grown-up is learning to recognize and respect other people's boundaries.

Having said all that, I lived in Tokyo for a good many years and am unsurprised that women encounter stalking behaviour at gaming conventions. Every single woman I ever knew in Japan encountered similar behaviour. Every one. They'd either been flashed or groped in public or followed. Many had had men break into their homes (usually to steal their underwear).

When I say every single woman I knew, I honestly mean every single one. Both Japanese and foreign. I asked them all, once I started to realise how widespread it was. So I don't know that this indicates anything very specific about the gaming culture of Japan.

And, I wonder how many women in, say North America would not have the same experiences. Perhaps less of the flashing and getting groped on the bus, but I bet lots of women have had to deal with inappropriate attention that went further than was entirely comfortable. It just gets expressed differently here.

Wow, I'm sure in a rambly mood today, aren't I? Anyway, it's possible to get very caught up in cultural differences (whether gaming groups or national groups or whatever) -- even when those differences may be smaller than we suppose. The differences between Japan and the US are probably less than the similarities.

The differences between the US and Canada, now... THERE'S a cultural gap.

 

[mmu1]

Hmm...

One time, I was standing in a bookstore looking through some CoC supplement when a very pretty girl walked up (browsing the shelves), absentmindedly reached out and took away my book, and started talking, as if resuming an ongoing conversation.

Much to my chagrin, however, I was not being accosted, stalked or harrassed, but rather mistaken, in her preoccupation, for her boyfriend who was of the same build, height, hair color, and similarly dressed, and at the moment rolling in the isle ten feet away laughing his ass off.

She blushed, ran off, and the magic was gone...