Are you talking about specifically relating to gaming or in general?
Either way, I guess. Itâs kinda interlinked, right? The sexism in gaming particularly is just a reflection of the wider sexism in society, just concentrated by a few orders of magnitude.
Dunno⊠was kind of a lifetime of being surrounded by various family members and friends who werenât privileged to be straight white males like me, and also surrounded with clueless bigots who never let them forget it. My little sister has Down syndrome, and plenty of people I grew up around would casually denigrate âretardsâ and âcripplesâ like it werenât no big thing. One of my older brothers was gay (he died at the age of 38, when I was 22), and he certainly took plenty of grief about it both in my presence and outside it. My first wife was Mexican, and suffered from casual bigotry for that, as well as for being a woman. My mother was a left-handed Methodist at a Catholic boarding school in the 1940s, and took plenty of abuse from the nuns. She was also mistreated by her own mother and father, and her first husband as well.
Meanwhile, I was born sixth (out of seven kids total) and grew up in a very blue-collar trailer park⊠and yet even though I put remarkably little effort into improving my lot, here I am working on big TV shows and living in an overpriced house. Not because of any particular competence or hard work on my part: it was just easy.
How? Because of how I was born. White. Cisgender male. Heterosexual. American. No physical or mental handicaps. Born in 1969. How many more cards could have come up aces for me? I guess if my family had money or political influence. But then I probably wouldnât know how to change my own oil.
Having five outspoken older siblings, I learned early on to keep my eyes open and learn from other peopleâs examples, even the negative ones. Try not to reinvent the wheel. Try not to reproduce other peopleâs errors⊠just make fresh ones of my own. And try to learn.
The other thing I got out of this is perhaps an over-willingness to try to understand and forgive the failings of others, if only because Iâve had so very many of my own. But I took fairly literally the lessons that my family tried to teach me in the Free-To-Be-You-And-Me 70s. As far back as I can remember Iâve believed that all people were created equal, and that the vast majority of them were handed at birth a set of circumstances that were far tougher than my own, and that was pretty much the only thing keeping them back, not any inherent weakness or inferiority.
My older sister was always a better athlete than I was in elementary school. I was an excellent speller, but in the 1984 Scripps-Howard San Diego County Spelling Bee, I took second place to a girl who beat me fair and square. I never blamed her for beating me (though I did blame the guy who read the words for being a tad marble-mouthed), though the picture of us that ran in the San Diego Union showed me giving her some serious side-eye as she recited her final winning word.
Iâve been beaten in footraces by girls, in games of Halo, in staring contests, in go-kart races, in soccer games, in games of HORSE, in job applications, god knows what-all. Iâve also been defeated in many (if not all) of those things by people of color, and LGBTQ people too. My takeaway has never been that the playing field must always have been level (or biased in their direction) for these outcomes to occur. Iâve always felt that if someone beat me, they probably deserved to, whether through superior talent or a greater degree of hard work, and they probably had a few more obstacles to overcome just to get to compete. After all, for all my defeats, Iâve had plenty of victories, and more than a few undeserved ones, too.
And yet. With all that awareness I feel like Iâve had for all these years, I still feel I havenât done a goddamned thing to improve the situation. Awareness is such a teensy first step. I gotta actually do more.
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This reminds me of a book review I read some months back
This wasnât the intent, of course. The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence. Kafka quotes from a 1791 French administrative directory that advised that âletters of recommendation will be perfectly uselessâ in petitioning the government and âmight even become dangerous, in that they can foster the belief that one is soliciting a favor or a grace that one does not have the right to obtain through justice.â As Kafka puts it, âA world of privilege was becoming a world of rights; the personal state was becoming the personnel state.â
Paperwork was also to be the means for allowing all of a nationâs people to scrutinize government activities, an intention enshrined in Article 15 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: âSociety has the right to ask all public agents to give an accounting of their administration.â This mirrors the contemporary enthusiasm for open government and transparency among some activists and is the apparent raison dâetre for WikiLeaks. The idea was taken to astounding (and absurd) lengths by the Jacobins, who mandated that âall relations between all public functionaries can no longer take place except in writing.â
So yes-- a privilege is an exception to the general rule-- a private law that insulates a few individuals from rational scrutiny. And the solution?
(In a way itâs so very sad; to remember a book review after such time, and not have read the book in question)
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Oh, well, thatâs fine then!
As long as you find the thing cheesy, have at it.
Excuse some of us for being less than enthusiastic about it when BB posts about the intersection of gaming + feminism attracts seem to be a siren song to the MRA-#idontseesexism-GamerGate crowd.
Ya know, the type of guy who would post something like you did?
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Man, I kinda wish I had a more interesting story myself. 
I grew up playing videogames with my sisters. One year I think we played 2-player Gunstar Heroes every night on hard mode, the whole way through. Made a game for my little sister as a gift and she still talks about it. Older sister could hold her own at Doom back in the day.
Dad was an engineer and loved technology so I grew up with computers and eventually ended up studying comp sci at University. Ended up working in games. Did my stint on some small titles, other big ones.
I think the epiphany came as I got older and learned more about my childhood. Realised I was the one who got the computers. I was the one who got to go on trips with dad to see his work, look inside big machines, see how giant stuff got made, took side-trips to see steam engines. Girls arenât interested in that stuff, I guess was the reasoning, even though one sister ended up doing a minor in comp sci and the other studied 3D design. Hmm.
At the same time I saw the gaming industry head further and further in this âdark and edgyâ direction, which was a fucking clichĂ© by the tail end of the Playstation era, let alone now. Only guys play games, went the marketing mantra, letâs make them more manly! Meanwhille Iâm working with a female game designer, one of the best I ever worked with. Meanwhile I work alongside talented female gameplay programmers. Meanwhile I marry a girl whoâs a bigger gamer than I am, for heavenâs sake.
Probably it was passionate indie game developers, trying to do something new with the medium, arguing and fighting with literally everyone, that made me wake up and say, huh, I guess itâs not just me who thinks somethingâs not quite right here. Maybe the odds are stacked against women and maybe marketing is bullshitting everyone like I always suspected.
So yeah, read up on feminism, realised I pretty much already was one, and started listening. And the more I listen, the more furious I get that Iâve been made a pawn in these invisible structures, the more I want to tear the thing down.
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Welcome to BB. I look forward to more great comments. If I could give you more hearts for this one, I would.
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Youâll notice that I was responding to @scottbpâs statement, and not yours. BB was warning me about too many single posts and that I needed to combine replies into one post (so I did).
As for the video being cheesy and lame, I didnât get that. It seemed appropriate to the subject matter to me.
I dunno, heâs being cheeky but heâs got a point. Who are the videos for, exactly? Sure, theyâre educational, but if all that ends up happening is cool and sexy feminist men like me just use it as another excuse to pat ourselves on the back for being so great and wonderful and oh so feministic⊠maaaaybeee theyâre missing the mark?
I mean, starting a conversation, sure, but maybe that would be better served by something more confrontational? Educating people who are on the fence? Maybe?
I dunno. Itâs good to have someone poke fun occasionally, check your arguments still hold water.
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From the consequentialist perspective, there is no difference. Furthermore, not everyone is receptive to what you call âintellectually honest and logically sound argumentsâ. People are not wholly rational, and emotions trump logic nine times out of ten.
To add to the trouble, systemic problems are very opaque because they are so deeply embedded. If a person doesnât already believe the problem is there, it is hard to get them to see anything is wrong. When there is little incontrovertible evidence, the whole thing becomes a matter of having a certain perspective. Thatâs why Gamergate or fatuglyorslutty.com (theyâve stopped updating?) are so valuable. Concrete proof that parts of the community are shit (even then you get accusations of cherry picking).
Anyway, a bunch of dudes (?) discussing male privilege feels kind of gauche to me, so Iâm bowing out. I do urge guys to tell other guys off for engaging in the behavior described in that video. You donât have to lecture them on privilege, but changing the (male gamer) community should happen from within as well as without.
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That could be the case, but Iâm not sure cheesy or infotainment would work best in this regard. That said, Iâm all for checking out other videos people think might be more useful. I just found the enumeration of multiple issues helpful, instead of a simple, single message of âLetâs treat everyone with respectâ. I think thereâs room for many different approaches in this vein.
Come the day, cue unending semantic foofaraw over whether it should be Zathrasâ or Zathrasâs. The Internet will find a way. Itâs like the Invisible Hand, but for arguments.
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Zathraâs
Mine was going to be satire but now I feel like the entire option has been taken away from me by this.
Damn it.
Hey, totally agreed. When one sees every conversation as a win-or-lose sport, everyone indeed loses. I bowed out because there was nothing left for me to add to my original statement (and partly because you portrayed it as an âattackâ which I feel is rather hyperbolic). I have no desire to fence with you.
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Yes, of course, I get what youâre saying. You see obnoxious person, make all sorts of assumptions, then jump to unfounded conclusions because you feel justified and self-righteous enough (and frankly, probably annoyed, frustrated, and somewhat fatigued) to do so.
In a conversation fundamentally about female stereotypes and their consequences, you see no irony in throwing around stereotypes of your own! Excuse some of us for being less than enthusiastic, when in any thread anywhere about anything (but especially those about sexism) there the types of people who would post something like you did. Huzah! PS: I swear, Iâm not trying to be a dick.
This. Thank you.
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Ah. My apologies, then. Boing Boing does do that, although the way your response was phrased made your intentions opaque to me. I guess I officially retract my statement, then? Haha. Sorry again.
Re: BBS â To be honest, I understand the desire to consolidate different posts, but I find the âreply linkâ button above posts to be very useful for keeping track of conversation âthreadsâ as there are no actual threads in the BBS. Sorry to everyone if you find my multiple responses to be annoying!
You havenât been around here much over the last few months then?
Itâs been ⊠ugh.
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