Sexy Devil said:
I feel like Jim might've just stumbled upon the real, underlying point of contention for a lot of us. Warning: pity party 2013 post below. It eventually has a point but there's going to be a lot of self-pity prior to it. Just skip to the bolded bit if you want to hear the conclusion that I'm trying to establish.
I have an essential tremor, I'm autistic, I just generally look weird, and I have a myriad of other whacky conditions that are generally mocked in society. Basically what I'm getting at is that I'm the type of nerd that The Big Bang Theory mocks so relentlessly; the type of nerd that a lot of you are so adamant doesn't actually exist. The type of nerd that, no matter how much I try, will just never be accepted in society. If I try to make friends I fail miserably. If I awkwardly sit in the corner and don't speak to anyone then assholes see that and throw garbage at me (not joking). The only way that people will tolerate me is if I do nothing but viciously mock myself for their amusement.
While a lot of you got into gaming and internet culture because you liked it, I got into it because there simply wasn't anywhere else that I could go. And really, the initial idea of nerd culture was that it was a place for people like me who couldn't fit in anywhere else. Now things have changed - nerdy shit is the next big thing, and we've kind of become that irrelevant group who have been sidelined and forgotten about. So when someone like Anita Sarkeesian comes along and says to us "Hey, your refuge from the world might be pretty cool if you change everything about it so that it appeals to everyone else" we get absolutely livid. It's essentially saying that the very people who drove us to this place want to take it for themselves.
And it's not just women that we're hostile to, the frat boy type guys tend to get their fair share of shit on the internet too. The difference is that on the internet you can't really tell if someone's a frat boy, but women are pretty obvious, and seem so foreign to us that they may as well be an entirely different species. Consequently, women in general tend to be generalised as those elusive creatures from high school, and take the brunt of the shit. That "you have to answer these questions correctly or else we hate you" thing is more of a code to make sure that we can feel safe around you. That's what's really at the core of all of it - the misogyny, the fake gamer girl bullshit, all of it. People tend to ironically befriend us because it's funny to them (I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but I swear it has happened to me a whole bunch of times), and we need to be absolutely sure that you're not one of those people.
I'm not saying it's right, and I'm not saying that it's entirely rational, but the alternative is that we lose the one place in the world that we can treated like humans, instead of robots who exist to be made fun of. And if society would just stop fucking treating autistics like we're inferior, then maybe we'd stop being so fucking scared of the general populous. This is just me though; I could very well be completely off-base and the people complaining might genuinely be misogynists.
IMPORTANT PART
So what I've quite poorly been trying to say is that the way Jim and other supporters of the feminist movement in gaming have been going about it is quite poor. They're basically just telling us what assholes we are for not supporting it rather than trying to show us that the end result isn't going to be just another place where we don't belong.
And for the record, I had no part in any of the shit flinging going on recently. I've just kind of silently been pissed off about it. I really don't care what happens though, just trying to give insight into why some people might be so strongly opposed to the notion of feminism coming into gaming.
You know what, buddy? I think you hit the nail on the head. You see, why can't people like you make an article on the escapist, rather than people such as Jim, from time to time. Some of the stuff you write hits the point so hard, it fucking HURTS!
Like you, I grew up on gaming, because had nothing else. Growing up in the centre of London, I couldn't leave the house alone, so was forced to occupy myself with video games, whilst my family didn't care for me. I wasn't very social, therefore, my social skills suffered.
Then, growing up in more rural areas, kids in school were just absolute arseholes. Bullied every day, because I preferred to spend my time on video games, and films, rather than talk about girls and football.
My only escapism was video games. I swear, they literally saved my life from despair sometimes. I grew up with all these awesome games, some of which, yes, sexualise women overtly, but on the whole, it wasn't doing any damage to woman, wasn't doing any damage to me, and I wasn't doing any damage to anyone else.
And now, suddenly, over the last 2 or so years, we've had morons from both sides of the pond - people in the gaming industry, and outside of it, telling me I'm some sort of bad guy because I play Dead or Alive, or I point out that video game women are better looking, and have better personalities, than many real women.
How the heck is this our fault?
And you know what, feminists? If you don't like the way games are, then don't play them. I don't like women's bullshit fashion shows, the dumb magazines women read, or books like Fifty Shades of Grey, or Twilight, or like the same cheesy romantic stories or songs they listen to - for the way they misrepresent, and even demonise men.
But should those industries, and the people that like them, change, just because I find them offensive and ridiculous? No, of course they shouldn't. Therefore, why the heck should I and the gaming industry be haggled because people like Jim Sterling get offended by things they really don't need to be offended about?
