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[Elmund Egivand]

Okay, I think I'm being taken a bit out of context.  See below from Miriam-Webster:

an·drog·y·nous adjective \an-ˈdrä-jə-nəs\
 
Full Definition of ANDROGYNOUS

1
:  having the characteristics or nature of both male and female
2
a :  neither specifically feminine nor masculine <the androgynous pronoun them>
b :  suitable to or for either sex <androgynous clothing>
3
:  having traditional male and female roles obscured or reversed <an androgynous marriage>

Gaming culture may be, on the whole, geared towards men, but EVE isn't that game.  Essentially, EVE doesn't have a gender.  I don't see EVE players as women or men playing women, in fact I really don't make any kind of distinction between men and women in EVE.  It's absolutely meaningless.  That hard-numbers, PVP style doesn't discourage women, it completely eliminates the idea of gender, even persona, in the game.  A Dramiel is a Dramiel, it has no color, no gender, no difference from model to model.  You can't make it look like a "girly" Dramiel, nor can you make it a "masculine" Dramiel.  It's just a Dramiel, and all of them are the same until you start playing with the likewise androgynous fittings.

Maybe the weird thing about EVE is that I really don't know who is a woman or man even IN THE GAME WORLD, much less if the person in real life is playing one.  There's not an awful lot of personality from ship to ship, so everything gets obscured.  It's nothing but ships, equipment, and corporations.  It's about as sterile as it gets.

Which is sort of the point.  EVE is meant to be a sandbox's sandbox, something neutral to everything, therefore reflecting no bias.  There's actually a LOT of girls playing EVE compared to some of the other games I've been in, and the thing is that I really don't think that's a reflection of anything specific.  The game isn't brutal or masculine, it's very clinical and clean.  It's a damn sight nicer than most of the FPS games I've ever played, especially Battlefield, where the actual learning curve for someone who's never played an FPS is a lot harder to deal with than EVE's.

EVE gets a really bad reputation for complexity and difficulty, so if women aren't playing for some reason it's more than likely its reputation, but it's really just not that game.  It's very much the Eurythmics of MMO games, sort of futuristic and stripped down to undertones.  In a world of games where you get more and more customization so your personality can shine through, you can't even change the color of your ship in EVE.

It's not a matter of the game being masculine or not, it's like Marilyn Manson in his boobed bodysuit thing he wore during the Mechanical Animals phase.  There is no gender in your ship or your fit, or really anything else.  EVE's not the place where sharp discrepancies are going to show up.

Vic, you forgot that ships are usually referred to with the female pronoun. Since we are all playing as spaceships, we must therefore be Many Men Online Role Playing Girls.

[Vic Van Meter]

Okay, I think I'm being taken a bit out of context.  See below from Miriam-Webster:

an·drog·y·nous adjective \an-ˈdrä-jə-nəs\
 
Full Definition of ANDROGYNOUS

1
:  having the characteristics or nature of both male and female
2
a :  neither specifically feminine nor masculine <the androgynous pronoun them>
b :  suitable to or for either sex <androgynous clothing>
3
:  having traditional male and female roles obscured or reversed <an androgynous marriage>

Gaming culture may be, on the whole, geared towards men, but EVE isn't that game.  Essentially, EVE doesn't have a gender.  I don't see EVE players as women or men playing women, in fact I really don't make any kind of distinction between men and women in EVE.  It's absolutely meaningless.  That hard-numbers, PVP style doesn't discourage women, it completely eliminates the idea of gender, even persona, in the game.  A Dramiel is a Dramiel, it has no color, no gender, no difference from model to model.  You can't make it look like a "girly" Dramiel, nor can you make it a "masculine" Dramiel.  It's just a Dramiel, and all of them are the same until you start playing with the likewise androgynous fittings.

Maybe the weird thing about EVE is that I really don't know who is a woman or man even IN THE GAME WORLD, much less if the person in real life is playing one.  There's not an awful lot of personality from ship to ship, so everything gets obscured.  It's nothing but ships, equipment, and corporations.  It's about as sterile as it gets.

Which is sort of the point.  EVE is meant to be a sandbox's sandbox, something neutral to everything, therefore reflecting no bias.  There's actually a LOT of girls playing EVE compared to some of the other games I've been in, and the thing is that I really don't think that's a reflection of anything specific.  The game isn't brutal or masculine, it's very clinical and clean.  It's a damn sight nicer than most of the FPS games I've ever played, especially Battlefield, where the actual learning curve for someone who's never played an FPS is a lot harder to deal with than EVE's.

EVE gets a really bad reputation for complexity and difficulty, so if women aren't playing for some reason it's more than likely its reputation, but it's really just not that game.  It's very much the Eurythmics of MMO games, sort of futuristic and stripped down to undertones.  In a world of games where you get more and more customization so your personality can shine through, you can't even change the color of your ship in EVE.

It's not a matter of the game being masculine or not, it's like Marilyn Manson in his boobed bodysuit thing he wore during the Mechanical Animals phase.  There is no gender in your ship or your fit, or really anything else.  EVE's not the place where sharp discrepancies are going to show up.

Vic, you forgot that ships are usually referred to with the female pronoun. Since we are all playing as spaceships, we must therefore be Many Men Online Role Playing Girls.

I would love to see freighters or mining frigs with those dangly truck ball things hanging from the back.

[Lyn Farel]

Only in english. In french ships are male, and i'm pretty sure it's also the case in other languages as well.

Which is sexist trololo 

I mean, both could be considered as sexist. The male ships bringing no place for female ships because you know, male is only what matters in the language in question. And the female ships just because it's objectification of females. But that would be rather pushing it to ridiculous places though. 

Thank you all very much for your answers so far

I understand a few of the questions are bit ambiguous so I'm adding a specific, Eve related one of my own

"Eve is well known as a male dominated game, with approx 95% of players being men. This has led to the long running joke/tagline "there are no girls in eve (or on the internet)". What sort of impact do you think this has on female Eve players, or women just starting to play the game? For those of you who are female Eve players, have you encountered this often? Do you feel a need to 'prove' that you are female, or do you prefer to just get on with playing the game?"

Since I'm not female IRL I couldn't say, but all I know is that there was always almost more females connected than males in KotMC when I played. That girlie corp :3

Tbh Vic, the most sexist attitudes I have experienced were on Eve (platinum achievement to homophobic slurs though). The most hardcore the game... Added to the obnoxious community atmosphere in that game, can detonate very quickly when female gamers are involved.

Actually, especially regarding your last paragraph, it's exactly the contrary in my experience. I have rarely witnessed a community so disgusting as the one living on Eve. Everything is about smack, testosterone contests, taunts, tears drinking. And everything is allowed to reach your goal for that, and that usually starts with the most inventive ways I have seen to be offensive. Only matched in power by FPS games online, except the latter are rarely as insidious as the ones happening in Eve.

We may have simply had different circles we ran in?  Full confession:  for a year my "other game" slot besides WoW was taken up by Battlefield 2.  I don't know what kind of slimy bastards you ran into here in EVE to give you the opinion that this game is the pinnacle of broski bullshit, but there has never been said anything anywhere in any other game that I've ever heard that could even break the top 10 of things I've heard in Battlefield.

In the year I played that game, I only ran into two women.  Ever.  And the things said by the all-male audience was.... yeah.  I don't even want to repeat some of it.  Suffice it to say that mass online FPS games are the Cannibal Corpse of gamer culture:  so ridiculously offensive that it makes a full circle around making you feel disgusted and just starts entertaining you instead.

.... I should also disclose that I listen to Cannibal Corpse.  I think I might be a little less civilized than I thought....

Just fly around in pvp and you will see what I mean. Or just read the general section of the official forum (like any similar MMO forum really, but here especially). Look at the goon 'ideology' (not the core one of the old founders, just the common grunt one). Look at what the game community has turned into (it was definitely not like that when I started playing, it was a LOT more mature).

That's why I said only matched by FPS games, where it can be a lot more crude and terrible. But less insidious as a whole. In FPS games they are just retards, in Eve the global level is different, and that's what is scary.

As a whole, Eve deeply contributed to my misanthropy.

I think the bigger problem is that EVE is a pretty bad game to ask this in.  It's such an androgynous game to begin with since it's such a hard-numbers, PVP-centric game where we aren't really playing characters as much as we're flying around in ships.  The closest we ever experience each others' avatars in person tends to be in a still shot.  Nor is there an awful lot of style involved in flying; its not as if you can paint your ship pink and purple or put a hula girl on the dash.

EVE's not very sexy, in short.

Tbh Vic, the most sexist attitudes I have experienced were on Eve (platinum achievement to homophobic slurs though). The most hardcore the game... Added to the obnoxious community atmosphere in that game, can detonate very quickly when female gamers are involved.

Actually, especially regarding your last paragraph, it's exactly the contrary in my experience. I have rarely witnessed a community so disgusting as the one living on Eve. Everything is about smack, testosterone contests, taunts, tears drinking. And everything is allowed to reach your goal for that, and that usually starts with the most inventive ways I have seen to be offensive. Only matched in power by FPS games online, except the latter are rarely as insidious as the ones happening in Eve.

Right then.  I disagree with both of you 

I've heard a lot of people express the sentiments that 'hard numbers', the abstraction from an avatar, or that it's relatively brutal for an mmo, or that it's sci-fi - these things don't attract the girls.

But I think perhaps what gets overlooked is (when I played, which is going to be the caveat for everything I'm saying here) EVE, even for MMOs, is a highly social game.  Which also sounds somewhat sexist; that girls don't like hard numbers or brutality but they do like chatting, which is not something I believe, but just trying to give the other side of the coin of how the game is perceived. 

EVE is set up much easier to just start talking to people than other games - just clicking open a tab to evemail or pm someone, joining a channel - it's all very nice and intuitive.  When I played WoWs beta I was all like...wtf how do I talk  In Ultima Online from what I could see you could only talk to someone you encountered if they were on the same screen as you - people used ICQ to organise things.  So there's the ease with which you can communicate.

There's also the need to be sociable to realistically survive in the game world.  Even the essentially 'solo' players in school corp who hadn't joined a corp banded together to do this or that - mining ops or ratting or whatever.  You could do things alone, but it was either not profitable or comparatively very dangerous.  This was before missions became remotely viable (which to me happened when implants came in) or mining barges or anything.  You could still afk an indy but, well, that's not really playing as such.

And there's the social aspect of everyone sharing the same game world rather than individual shards - I'm finding it difficult to articulate exactly how that shared experience makes a difference, but I have a gut feeling that it does; I've certainly had the experience before of finding it difficult to play games with friends in the US because they've been forced into another version of the game.  Maybe a broader more diverse community.  I dunno.

Also, I think perhaps what makes EVE harsh and brutal (basically, the risk/reward loss element and the steep learning curve) also tends to encourage camaraderie and forge relationships because you have to rely on your friends and corp-mates - your virtual life may depend on it.  And I'm aware there's a lot of politicking, scamming and backstabbing - but the same applies, if anything it does seem to make the friendships you do make more worthwhile.  Again, not articulating well here.  Other than my corp-mates felt like brothers to me - jokey, idiot brothers but I knew they'd have my back if I needed it. 

In fact, I feel all nostalgic and maudlin now.

My experience is different in that EVE has had the absolute best people I've played a game with. I think it very much depends on who you play with, and I'm aware that the community has grown from something quite niche to quite mainstream and perhaps that changes things massively.  Not to be a snob, but also in some ways the difficulty has dropped (though the complexity hasn't) since when I first played and maybe there's more stupid around now   

(I mean, they get a tutorial now and everything.  They get a free ship at the end of it. I was given a mining laser and a rock and I had to figure out everything else for myself.  In my day, etc etc.)

I've experienced more stupidity and hate in other games, more childish tantrums in games where you don't actually stand to lose anything.  Which is not to say I haven't encountered all these things in EVE - I have, but not to the same degree as in other games and I was lucky to be in a good corp with a good circle of friends and contacts outside of that as well.  There may be a lot of random factors about experiences here. The social adhesive stuff around camaraderie re: tangible loss I talked about earlier comes into it too, I think.   Though it can go the other way as well.

It might be that the age demographic is broadly higher in EVE than some other MMOs I've played, too.  (Though I have indeed met some very immature 40 year olds  )

And EVE isn't sexy? Bah.  Even at release, to me it was beautiful, glossy and sleek in it's design.  Plus some ships are undoubtedly phallic (thorax, I look at you).

I may have not conveyed what I meant then. You speak about social private circles, I speak about the community in general. I have been in my own nice and warm social circles full of awesome people, and backstage is the continuity of this. Especially in Eve yes, you can find awesome people.

That's the community as large I despise/loathe. It directly conflicts with my own principles as a player that I can't overlook. And when I see fanfest, that seems like a good collection of cheerful and happy people all around sharing the same passion. And then I look back at what is truly ingame around, or on the forums, or even Mittens going full retard at fanfest, and Eve suddenly seriously feels schizophrenic to me.

That's mostly a perception of mine, not necessarily the truth. But you will have a hard time to make me change my mind after so many years spend on it. :/

That's sort of what I'm getting at.  I'm sort of surprised at Lyn having seen a lot of sexism and such in EVE because I can't see why anyone would ever know or care if the people they play against or with are women or men.  They could be sentient rocks for all it matters; your personal presence is sort of left behind by the vast distances involved and your in-game presence being represented by a standardized ship model, not by the character you spent all your time customizing.

Suppress the gender orientation of the art direction of the game, the community still remains. You will maybe lose most sexist comments based on avatar and personal customization, yes, but the root of the issue is located in the community, tied and influenced by the wider gaming and non gaming society at large. The player behind still exists, and has - I hope - a gender and a sexual orientation.

And Eve manages pretty well to offset completely that lack of character customization (though, there is still that character creator that was here since day 1, so that eve is perfectly androgynous is not entirely true, just less sex oriented than other MMOs). It does through the main culture of Eve, which is directly based on the macho and testosterone culture 100 times more than any other MMO I have played. Which stem partially from goon culture, but not only.

You will probably laugh since I'm no female but I find all this enormously offensive/disrespectful, and most importantly, hinting to seriously despicable sides of our current society, but maybe that's because I'm sort of a sold out paladin to the feminist cause.


Edit : but as I said earlier in my first post, sexism, while an issue, is far from being what the homophobic issue is. Sexism is still widespread in the world and western society, but it's a lot more discreet and passive these days than homophobic tolerance, which has started to appear much later (women rights started to emerge at the beginning of the last century, gay rights, are just starting to). And it can vary a lot depending on the countries people live in and are educated.

[purple]

The questions are clearly geared toward misogyny, not sexism in it's totality.   The tone seems to presuppose sexism only goes one way.  Even if not intentially malicious such presuppositions could be considered a subtle and perhaps even subconcious form of misandristic sexism.

[Jace]

The questions are clearly geared toward misogyny, not sexism in it's totality.   The tone seems to presuppose sexism only goes one way.  Even if not intentially malicious such presuppositions could be considered a subtle and perhaps even subconcious form of misandristic sexism.

Misandry is largely a joke, and frankly the concept itself is typically used as tool of traditional sexism. On any societal, metacultural, or hierarchical level, sexism indeed does only go one way. Only in a strict dictionary definition can sexism be thought to go both ways.

[purple]

Sexist.

[Lyn Farel]

Well there sure exist sexism in both ways, in video games or elsewhere and I don't see why it would not be the case. We have seen already how some so called 'feminists' can become extremist enough to actually become guilty of misandry.

As far as I understand the OP, it tries to look into 2 things :

- The case of female gamers which is usually the cause of much issues, prejudices, etc. Thus questions 1 & 3.
- The more general case of sexism in video games, which is for most of it happening through prejudices around female gamers, but maybe not necessarily exclusively. Thus why questions 2, 3, 4 & 5 do not specify female gamers. As far as I can tell, anyone is totally able to actually speak about misandry as well, even if I doubt we will find a lot of cases of that happening (especially in video games).


[edit : nvm]

[Jace]

Well there sure exist sexism in both ways, in video games or elsewhere and I don't see why it would not be the case. We have seen already how some so called 'feminists' can become extremist enough to actually become guilty of misandry.

As far as I understand the OP, it tries to look into 2 things :

- The case of female gamers which is usually the cause of much issues, prejudices, etc. Thus questions 1 & 3.
- The more general case of sexism in video games, which is for most of it happening through prejudices around female gamers, but maybe not necessarily exclusively. Thus why questions 2, 3, 4 & 5 do not specify female gamers. As far as I can tell, anyone is totally able to actually speak about misandry as well, even if I doubt we will find a lot of cases of that happening (especially in video games).

It is far more likely that the questions do not specify females because it is assumed given the topic at hand.

[Vikarion]

Misandry is largely a joke, and frankly the concept itself is typically used as tool of traditional sexism. On any societal, metacultural, or hierarchical level, sexism indeed does only go one way. Only in a strict dictionary definition can sexism be thought to go both ways.

Yeah, you're being sexist. Most reasonable feminists can agree that, even if one accepts the idea of patriarchy, men have suffered quite a lot at times due to gender expectations. Consider the white feather campaign in WW1, or the fact that there are virtually no aid programs for single, homeless men in this country (U.S), or the fact that domestic violence against men is considered a non-issue despite being at least half as much a problem as the one women faced (1 in 4 women and 1 in seven men will experience severe physical violence in a relationship, according to the CDC).

That's misandry, and you don't have to be an MRA nutter to accept it. It's why men should want gender equality as well. If you're a feminist, you destroy your own cause by asserting that men have no disadvantages, because in that case, no rational man would ever want to change anything. If this is as good as it ever gets for the male gender, we're pretty fucked as it is.

Fortunately, it isn't.

[Jace]

I don't disagree that men deal with stereotypes. I just don't believe that misandry or male stereotyping is a form of sexism in anything but the dictionary sense. It is a distinction between stereotyping or prejudice and the type of systemic oppression that denotes one of the "isms".

[Vic Van Meter]

Only in english. In french ships are male, and i'm pretty sure it's also the case in other languages as well.

Which is sexist trololo 

I mean, both could be considered as sexist. The male ships bringing no place for female ships because you know, male is only what matters in the language in question. And the female ships just because it's objectification of females. But that would be rather pushing it to ridiculous places though. 

Thank you all very much for your answers so far

I understand a few of the questions are bit ambiguous so I'm adding a specific, Eve related one of my own

"Eve is well known as a male dominated game, with approx 95% of players being men. This has led to the long running joke/tagline "there are no girls in eve (or on the internet)". What sort of impact do you think this has on female Eve players, or women just starting to play the game? For those of you who are female Eve players, have you encountered this often? Do you feel a need to 'prove' that you are female, or do you prefer to just get on with playing the game?"

Since I'm not female IRL I couldn't say, but all I know is that there was always almost more females connected than males in KotMC when I played. That girlie corp :3

Tbh Vic, the most sexist attitudes I have experienced were on Eve (platinum achievement to homophobic slurs though). The most hardcore the game... Added to the obnoxious community atmosphere in that game, can detonate very quickly when female gamers are involved.

Actually, especially regarding your last paragraph, it's exactly the contrary in my experience. I have rarely witnessed a community so disgusting as the one living on Eve. Everything is about smack, testosterone contests, taunts, tears drinking. And everything is allowed to reach your goal for that, and that usually starts with the most inventive ways I have seen to be offensive. Only matched in power by FPS games online, except the latter are rarely as insidious as the ones happening in Eve.

We may have simply had different circles we ran in?  Full confession:  for a year my "other game" slot besides WoW was taken up by Battlefield 2.  I don't know what kind of slimy bastards you ran into here in EVE to give you the opinion that this game is the pinnacle of broski bullshit, but there has never been said anything anywhere in any other game that I've ever heard that could even break the top 10 of things I've heard in Battlefield.

In the year I played that game, I only ran into two women.  Ever.  And the things said by the all-male audience was.... yeah.  I don't even want to repeat some of it.  Suffice it to say that mass online FPS games are the Cannibal Corpse of gamer culture:  so ridiculously offensive that it makes a full circle around making you feel disgusted and just starts entertaining you instead.

.... I should also disclose that I listen to Cannibal Corpse.  I think I might be a little less civilized than I thought....

Just fly around in pvp and you will see what I mean. Or just read the general section of the official forum (like any similar MMO forum really, but here especially). Look at the goon 'ideology' (not the core one of the old founders, just the common grunt one). Look at what the game community has turned into (it was definitely not like that when I started playing, it was a LOT more mature).

That's why I said only matched by FPS games, where it can be a lot more crude and terrible. But less insidious as a whole. In FPS games they are just retards, in Eve the global level is different, and that's what is scary.

As a whole, Eve deeply contributed to my misanthropy.

I think the bigger problem is that EVE is a pretty bad game to ask this in.  It's such an androgynous game to begin with since it's such a hard-numbers, PVP-centric game where we aren't really playing characters as much as we're flying around in ships.  The closest we ever experience each others' avatars in person tends to be in a still shot.  Nor is there an awful lot of style involved in flying; its not as if you can paint your ship pink and purple or put a hula girl on the dash.

EVE's not very sexy, in short.

Tbh Vic, the most sexist attitudes I have experienced were on Eve (platinum achievement to homophobic slurs though). The most hardcore the game... Added to the obnoxious community atmosphere in that game, can detonate very quickly when female gamers are involved.

Actually, especially regarding your last paragraph, it's exactly the contrary in my experience. I have rarely witnessed a community so disgusting as the one living on Eve. Everything is about smack, testosterone contests, taunts, tears drinking. And everything is allowed to reach your goal for that, and that usually starts with the most inventive ways I have seen to be offensive. Only matched in power by FPS games online, except the latter are rarely as insidious as the ones happening in Eve.

Right then.  I disagree with both of you 

I've heard a lot of people express the sentiments that 'hard numbers', the abstraction from an avatar, or that it's relatively brutal for an mmo, or that it's sci-fi - these things don't attract the girls.

But I think perhaps what gets overlooked is (when I played, which is going to be the caveat for everything I'm saying here) EVE, even for MMOs, is a highly social game.  Which also sounds somewhat sexist; that girls don't like hard numbers or brutality but they do like chatting, which is not something I believe, but just trying to give the other side of the coin of how the game is perceived. 

EVE is set up much easier to just start talking to people than other games - just clicking open a tab to evemail or pm someone, joining a channel - it's all very nice and intuitive.  When I played WoWs beta I was all like...wtf how do I talk  In Ultima Online from what I could see you could only talk to someone you encountered if they were on the same screen as you - people used ICQ to organise things.  So there's the ease with which you can communicate.

There's also the need to be sociable to realistically survive in the game world.  Even the essentially 'solo' players in school corp who hadn't joined a corp banded together to do this or that - mining ops or ratting or whatever.  You could do things alone, but it was either not profitable or comparatively very dangerous.  This was before missions became remotely viable (which to me happened when implants came in) or mining barges or anything.  You could still afk an indy but, well, that's not really playing as such.

And there's the social aspect of everyone sharing the same game world rather than individual shards - I'm finding it difficult to articulate exactly how that shared experience makes a difference, but I have a gut feeling that it does; I've certainly had the experience before of finding it difficult to play games with friends in the US because they've been forced into another version of the game.  Maybe a broader more diverse community.  I dunno.

Also, I think perhaps what makes EVE harsh and brutal (basically, the risk/reward loss element and the steep learning curve) also tends to encourage camaraderie and forge relationships because you have to rely on your friends and corp-mates - your virtual life may depend on it.  And I'm aware there's a lot of politicking, scamming and backstabbing - but the same applies, if anything it does seem to make the friendships you do make more worthwhile.  Again, not articulating well here.  Other than my corp-mates felt like brothers to me - jokey, idiot brothers but I knew they'd have my back if I needed it. 

In fact, I feel all nostalgic and maudlin now.

My experience is different in that EVE has had the absolute best people I've played a game with. I think it very much depends on who you play with, and I'm aware that the community has grown from something quite niche to quite mainstream and perhaps that changes things massively.  Not to be a snob, but also in some ways the difficulty has dropped (though the complexity hasn't) since when I first played and maybe there's more stupid around now   

(I mean, they get a tutorial now and everything.  They get a free ship at the end of it. I was given a mining laser and a rock and I had to figure out everything else for myself.  In my day, etc etc.)

I've experienced more stupidity and hate in other games, more childish tantrums in games where you don't actually stand to lose anything.  Which is not to say I haven't encountered all these things in EVE - I have, but not to the same degree as in other games and I was lucky to be in a good corp with a good circle of friends and contacts outside of that as well.  There may be a lot of random factors about experiences here. The social adhesive stuff around camaraderie re: tangible loss I talked about earlier comes into it too, I think.   Though it can go the other way as well.

It might be that the age demographic is broadly higher in EVE than some other MMOs I've played, too.  (Though I have indeed met some very immature 40 year olds  )

And EVE isn't sexy? Bah.  Even at release, to me it was beautiful, glossy and sleek in it's design.  Plus some ships are undoubtedly phallic (thorax, I look at you).

I may have not conveyed what I meant then. You speak about social private circles, I speak about the community in general. I have been in my own nice and warm social circles full of awesome people, and backstage is the continuity of this. Especially in Eve yes, you can find awesome people.

That's the community as large I despise/loathe. It directly conflicts with my own principles as a player that I can't overlook. And when I see fanfest, that seems like a good collection of cheerful and happy people all around sharing the same passion. And then I look back at what is truly ingame around, or on the forums, or even Mittens going full retard at fanfest, and Eve suddenly seriously feels schizophrenic to me.

That's mostly a perception of mine, not necessarily the truth. But you will have a hard time to make me change my mind after so many years spend on it. :/

That's sort of what I'm getting at.  I'm sort of surprised at Lyn having seen a lot of sexism and such in EVE because I can't see why anyone would ever know or care if the people they play against or with are women or men.  They could be sentient rocks for all it matters; your personal presence is sort of left behind by the vast distances involved and your in-game presence being represented by a standardized ship model, not by the character you spent all your time customizing.

Suppress the gender orientation of the art direction of the game, the community still remains. You will maybe lose most sexist comments based on avatar and personal customization, yes, but the root of the issue is located in the community, tied and influenced by the wider gaming and non gaming society at large. The player behind still exists, and has - I hope - a gender and a sexual orientation.

And Eve manages pretty well to offset completely that lack of character customization (though, there is still that character creator that was here since day 1, so that eve is perfectly androgynous is not entirely true, just less sex oriented than other MMOs). It does through the main culture of Eve, which is directly based on the macho and testosterone culture 100 times more than any other MMO I have played. Which stem partially from goon culture, but not only.

You will probably laugh since I'm no female but I find all this enormously offensive/disrespectful, and most importantly, hinting to seriously despicable sides of our current society, but maybe that's because I'm sort of a sold out paladin to the feminist cause.


Edit : but as I said earlier in my first post, sexism, while an issue, is far from being what the homophobic issue is. Sexism is still widespread in the world and western society, but it's a lot more discreet and passive these days than homophobic tolerance, which has started to appear much later (women rights started to emerge at the beginning of the last century, gay rights, are just starting to). And it can vary a lot depending on the countries people live in and are educated.

Yeah, I think we're on skew lines here, Lyn.  I was talking pretty specifically about the game, and the game itself I think is very gender neutral.  Once you get into the community, you're stepping a bit outside the game as far as I'm concerned (but not that you're wrong for thinking it's more important than I do).  I just think that once you talk about the community, you're beyond the concept of a game and into the concept of the world at large.  You'll always have forum trolls.

EVE just isn't a sexy game not because it's not pretty, it's because it's not populated by "people".  It's populated by ships.  I just don't think a Harbinger, however awesome it looks, is going to give me the same reaction as an avatar that looks like Floor Jansen in a skimpy plate metal bikini with a battleaxe.  I can't lie, there's a hopefully-not-so-small part of me that likes that.  I can't pretend that doesn't have some kind of effect on me in the back of my mind.

I don't think that necessarily makes me a sexist, but it certainly makes a game less gender-neutral for me when it's around.

With that being the case, EVE just doesn't give you enough tools in the actual game world to transmit your personality through, so your gender doesn't really ever come through.  The size of the fleets might have something to do with that, too.  I know raids in the new WoW xpack will be down to 20 people, so just few enough people that you get to know them all very closely and individually.  When you're a girl among a 1,000 man fleet, your ability to hit F1 on your assigned targets isn't usually called into question.  If you're a girl in a 20 man raid and your DPS doesn't match muster, it's a lot easier to blame it on gender.  Nevermind if you're not last, if you managed to live, if you're trying to pull support because some other asshole doesn't know how to get back to the group before mind control and DPS is lost in the six seconds it takes to turn and run over and solve problems.  It doesn't even matter if a male counterpart would just be called piss poor DPS.  Nope, it very often comes into question that it's a woman.

Honestly, the weird thing is that it doesn't mean women get kicked from the raid; sexism tends to take the form of patriarchy in WoW.  Women who can't pull their weight in their roles will be dragged through content long after men who aren't as terrible are gone.  Maybe that's because some raid leaders simply expect women aren't as good.  Maybe it's because groups of men just like having women around to break up the monotony.

It's also very possible that it happens that way because women aren't as likely to have a violent blowup and scream at the raid, thus get kicked.  Maybe it's sexist to say, but the women I play with have a tendency to accept blame and internalize angst as opposed to guys, who have a higher probability of blowing up and playing the audible victim to the raid leader.

I'm not sure about all that.  I know it's definitely sexism of some flavor or another; the expectations for women and consequences for poor performance can both be different than they are for men, for better or worse.

[Katrina Oniseki]

I don't disagree that men deal with stereotypes. I just don't believe that misandry or male stereotyping is a form of sexism in anything but the dictionary sense. It is a distinction between stereotyping or prejudice and the type of systemic oppression that denotes one of the "isms".

Well if we're throwing out the dictionary, what do you think "sexism" means?

[Vikarion]

I don't disagree that men deal with stereotypes. I just don't believe that misandry or male stereotyping is a form of sexism in anything but the dictionary sense. It is a distinction between stereotyping or prejudice and the type of systemic oppression that denotes one of the "isms".

I think that there's a very good argument to be made for certain views of men as being both systemic and operative upon most men.

That said, you seem to be essentially appealing to ad hoc definition..."if x could qualify as misandry, then I will redefine misandry until it doesn't".

This sort of thinking seems to stem from the idea that because one group is oppressed, another can't be, or at least its oppression, because it isn't as bad, doesn't matter. So, for example, we might decide that white women in western countries shouldn't matter as much, because historically, westerners have oppressed other groups. This leads to an "oppression olympics" in which the only winner can be the one most oppressed minority on earth, who are the truly oppressed ones.

A more rational approach is that of MLK: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

[Jace]

I don't disagree that men deal with stereotypes. I just don't believe that misandry or male stereotyping is a form of sexism in anything but the dictionary sense. It is a distinction between stereotyping or prejudice and the type of systemic oppression that denotes one of the "isms".

I think that there's a very good argument to be made for certain views of men as being both systemic and operative upon most men.

That said, you seem to be essentially appealing to ad hoc definition..."if x could qualify as misandry, then I will redefine misandry until it doesn't".

This sort of thinking seems to stem from the idea that because one group is oppressed, another can't be, or at least its oppression, because it isn't as bad, doesn't matter. So, for example, we might decide that white women in western countries shouldn't matter as much, because historically, westerners have oppressed other groups. This leads to an "oppression olympics" in which the only winner can be the one most oppressed minority on earth, who are the truly oppressed ones.

A more rational approach is that of MLK: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

It comes from the fact that systemic oppression must come from a place of societal power - so if a group is not marginalized, but is instead the group with dominant social power, they cannot be oppressed by definition. Stereotyped? Sure. Subject of prejudice? Sure. But not oppressed. It is taken from the perspective of society and metaculture as a whole, not individual cases or circumstances.

All that said, this is one of those topics that tends to devolve to pointlessness fairly quickly if people aren't coming at it from remotely the same perspectives. It isn't uncommon for terms to have varying definitions depending on the discipline someone is referencing from or the narrative they are speaking from, but it does tend to discombobulate discussion to an extent.

[Kala]

I may have not conveyed what I meant then. You speak about social private circles, I speak about the community in general. I have been in my own nice and warm social circles full of awesome people, and backstage is the continuity of this. Especially in Eve yes, you can find awesome people.

That's the community as large I despise/loathe. It directly conflicts with my own principles as a player that I can't overlook. And when I see fanfest, that seems like a good collection of cheerful and happy people all around sharing the same passion. And then I look back at what is truly ingame around, or on the forums, or even Mittens going full retard at fanfest, and Eve suddenly seriously feels schizophrenic to me.

Well, I'll speak about both really, as I've encountered people in my nice social private circles and the random encounters with 'the community' (plus, without knowing them in real first, the nice social private circles are going to be formed from initially unknown random people).  I think the community has changed a lot in EVE since I first started, mind - so that's a disclaimer.

I think it's difficult in some ways to talk about the community 'at large' without generalizing - but yeah as part of the 'gaming community' overall that EVE is a part of there's a lot that's fairly horrific about it as well as good.  I'll say I've encountered less shit in EVE than other MMOs (though obviously just personal experience); but the 'full retard' contingent exists as well.

sexism, while an issue, is far from being what the homophobic issue is.

I think they tie in to eachother tbh.  Or, not going to say "homophobia is a worse issue than sexism" - just that they're both crappy issues that I think tend to stem from a similar place.  Which is deep insecurity often rooted in gender roles (e.g hyper masculine individuals may feel more threatened by the perceived femininity of The Gay in other men)

I wonder, perhaps, if some of that insecurity translates to things like avatars in MMOs (most of which play as straightforward adolescent power fantasies anyways) because there's dissonance and uncertainty between representation and reality.  I mean, I've heard people be pissed off that a female avatar has been played by a guy.  Usually because they've hit on them and been rebuffed.  Which makes them fearful that they have somehow inadvertantly caught The Gay. The conservation plays out as follows:

person a) *hits on skimpy female avatar*
person b) "dude. I'm a guy."
person a) * gets all defensive, like it's the other persons fault they didn't live up to expectations* "why would you pick a girl to play then? gay."
person b) *gets defensive at accusation* "me gay? you're the one who's going to be staring at a guys ass all day.  I pick a girl because girls are hot. fag."

and so on. I take Vic's point that in EVE we *don't* have a girls ass to stare out (well, there's ambulation, but eh) and I do think that mitigates things somewhat.  But we still have idiots, and I've seen that conservation played out in EVE as well, honest to god; even if it is only a picture in a chat window.  Also, I think for the OP, a really useful thing to do would be to go on to EVE Search and put in certain key terms, as there's definitely been numerous threads about gender and avatars over the years.

(I could try and dig them up at some point if she's interested, as I'm pretty sure I posted in most of them -.-;)

Also as well as it being so normal for being gay to be an insult in games, I remember feeling somewhat dismayed that the forum mods in EVE-O forums were censoring the words "gay" and "lesbian" as offensive words.  Which changed, but I think it needed someone with some kind of cred blogging about it to do it. And I get that wasn't necessarily homophobic - I think they had good intentions there; recognized it was so normal and casual to use that as an insult and acted accordingly.  But perhaps not understanding by automatically censoring it into '***' that's saying the only way those words can be used in is derrogatory. Which is...so unhelpful. 

The other reason to censor was it's inappropriate language for a teen rated game - as if teens don't have, or aren't discovering, their sexuality 

I don't disagree that men deal with stereotypes. I just don't believe that misandry or male stereotyping is a form of sexism in anything but the dictionary sense. It is a distinction between stereotyping or prejudice and the type of systemic oppression that denotes one of the "isms".

re: definitions, my perception of the terms is...you can't have misandry or misogyny without sexism, but you can have sexism without misandry or misogyny, necessarily.
Misandry is hating men.  Misogyny is hating women. I'm painting with broad strokes, but I think that's a product of feeling angry and threatened - for whatever reason, and, (much like homophobia) far more to do with you and your own gender issues than the people you're hating.
Sexism doesn't need to involve hate (but can) - it could be antiquated views based on things that no longer seem relevant to a lot of people, gender roles that are stereotypical and restrictive, generalisations that are ignorant, habitual reinforcement from social groups...It's always going to be unfair and should be challenged, but doesn't have to be hate-based on an individual level.

I think someones earlier distinction between 'casual' and 'directed' sexism was really useful.  I imagine we all draw the lines in different places in what constitutes sexism from a community; as if asked how sexism affects me I would be purely referring to the directed sexism I've experienced or witnessed.  Other things, like certain word choices that have become part of gaming lexicon have seemed like background noise (wrongly or rightly).  Where the lines are being drawn is going to depend on the person.

I was talking pretty specifically about the game, and the game itself I think is very gender neutral.  Once you get into the community, you're stepping a bit outside the game as far as I'm concerned (but not that you're wrong for thinking it's more important than I do).

How could you talk about your experiences of sexism within a game without talking about the community who plays it, though?

edit: I'd also wonder how you can separate the two; given all sorts of things about the game is going to attract a certain audience, and how the game is played is, or allowed to be played via mechanics or rules, is going to influence behaviour of the players.  I think there has to be some sort of symbiosis between a game and its community, even at times if that means the developers and the playerbase end up being at odds due to competing interests.../ponder