Sexism in the gaming community has always been prevalent. Any woman who partakes probably has at least one story about a guy that has said or done some unsavory things. I'm bringing this up because I was reading an article earlier that my fencing coach shared - an article which truly disgusted me. The essential premise of it was that women are heavily harassed and discriminated against in the world of tabletop gaming. The community of games such as Warhammer 40K or DnD was called out as toxic, and the author provided a lot of examples of the troubles she has faced during over twenty years of gaming. From date rape at a gaming convention to being sexually harassed at the age of 13 in a comic shop, her experience was shocking, repulsive even. More than anything however, I realized that I have seen this issue in action.
That's what I'm writing about today.
I belong to an online roleplay game called Bleach: Online World. It's an online forum wherein players follow a provided template to create original characters within the universe of Tite Kubo's Bleach, a highly popular shounen manga in Japan. Players construct their characters and then play them by writing posts in forum threads describing the actions of said characters with a third person narrative perspective. We're a decent-sized community with a little over 100 registered characters and roughly half that many players.
Bleach: Online World has been running for roughly six years, and I've been a moderator for about four of those years. In that time, I've seen many examples of the problem that the article I read earlier had described. Even in an online forum where few of the members actually meet each other in person, there is blatant sexual harassment. Almost daily, female members who log into the chatbox will find themselves saturated by an atmosphere of hormones and lust, as anywhere from one to six male members will incessantly flirt with them in both overtly and overly sexual ways. Imagine if you said "I'm bored," and someone's response was, "You could have fun in my bed. ;)" Now imagine if you received that sort of comment every time you said anything. You ask how someone is and they tell you something akin to, "I'm only okay, but I think you and I can fix that. ;D" You try to make a character, and several male members devote their time to trying to get your character to have sex with theirs. It sounds tiring, right? That's the sort of experience many female members on Bleach: Online World have had.
I've even had a couple of allegedly male members proclaim to me that they're actually female and that they chose to identify as male so as to avoid the harassment. One member told me that she joined our site so that she could continue to play games of this type without having to be harassed in person by sexist tabletop gamers, who made her out to be more of an object of their unfulfilled sexual desires than a person or fellow gamer.
The forum admin and I have more than once held a conversation about our fears regarding the community's male members. We're in a precarious position where banning too many people at once will obliterate the site, and yet the current situation is highly likely to scare away any new female members. While we can easily curb harassment with warnings and minor punishments, there isn't a staff member on the chat at all times. We have lives too. Therefore, a lot of stuff can happen that goes unchecked, even if we have a complaint system in place.
Many of the males that I've confronted have said that the female members should take things less seriously, or be less sensitive. I do not agree with this. Being bombarded by sexual advances every second is hardly something anyone should have to deal with while just trying to enjoy themselves over a game.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is, but it certainly makes me want to condemn this gaming community for being so unfriendly to women who would also like to partake in the game. I've seen too many great members leave the forum over this issue, and I've received dozens of complaints over the years related to this.
It is vile. It is disenchanting. Most importantly, it is absolutely wrong and morally appalling.
Maybe this is just indicative of a greater problem in our society, though. I've encountered a terribly high number of guys that disenfranchise women as people. My first encounter with Greek life was with fraternity brothers who referred to girls they wanted to sleep with as "the hoes" and to girls they deemed less attractive as "beat hoes." Thing is, that's not the worst of it. Greek life isn't what causes this sort of attitude. In my opinion, there is a chance that Greek life encourages it sometimes, but guys who think like this are hardly exclusive to fraternities, and this is an issue prevalent in all parts of society. Men who think women are just sex objects are a dime a dozen. It's not even restricted just to guys who are easily able to convince women to sleep with them. Among more sexually frustrated men, it's common to hear complaints such as, "I'm just too nice. Girls don't like nice guys." It's an indication that these men feel that being "nice" basically entitles them to girls liking them. I'm not even sure that it can be called nice. Acting moderately decent or with slightly less contemptible behavior just for the sake of getting laid can hardly be called "nice." That's more like, "I'm not a good person, but I'm pretending to be." Being "nice" with an ulterior motive is hardly real niceness.
Yet this is all too common. On all sides of the popularity spectrum and in all social cliques, you'll find plenty of guys of all ages who treat women like toys or less than human. It's not a problem that's exclusive to the gaming community, but rather a massive problem within our current society.
Until we solve that problem, we can never truthfully say that our society is equal. Even if we fix it, problems such as racism and classicism persist as well, meaning that not even by fixing this can we achieve equality.
In my opinion, the only way we can truly reach a society where problems like this are eliminated is with a massive social revolution. Until we have that? Previously fun communities like Bleach: Online World will be ruined by uncalled for sexual harassment, and what should be innocent fun will not be.
