Sense of Humor Fail.

It’s been a long weekend.  It was the local Folk festival which meant work was pretty much insane.  And my car broke down on friday.  So maybe I am not in the best of moods today.  So when this popped up on my Facebook friends list I kinda grumped about it.

 

 

 

Ok, I maybe having a total sense of humor fail today, but this pissed me off.  For one thing, I don’t do this (there was a famous time a freind made me jump playing the first Resident Evil game and I trew the controller across the room though), and second of all I have witnessed male gamers do it just as much as female gamers, especially playing racing games.  And I realised over the weekend that even though I now have my PS3 linked to the net I have a fear of joining multiplayer games as my username is obviously female and I have read too much Fat, Ugly or Slutty to dare do it.

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Trade Chat and International Women’s Day

I made a mistake today.  I was playing Pinkamena and forgot to hide trade chat when I zoned in Shattrath to train. Oh how I regret it.

Today is International Women’s Day. A day designed to empower and inspire women. A day to promote gender equality.  And in WoW, a day for imature assholes to try and belittle girls in the game.

I try and keep Trade chat turned off if I don’t need it, which is most of the time.  There is only so much spam I can take before I want to end all of humanity, and I find if I want to enjoy my time in game it’s best I don’t read it.  But I only set Pinkamena’s UI up yesterday and wasn’t in a main city at the time, and I forgot. I dinged 64 and HS’ed back to train, but ended up going AFK for a few minutes.  This meant when I saw stuff being said in Trade about IWD me being the masochist I am I could scroll back up and read even more of it. *sigh*

It started off with one person saying about how it was IWD, and her partner had bought her flowers.  Innocent enough but it was a matter of minutes before the “Women should stay in the kitchen and enjoy it” type comments started up.  Then the obligatory “Why do WOMEN get a special day, that’s SEXIST!!”, followed by the “Women have way more rights than men nowadays it’s really unfair”.  I wanted to ask them when the last time someone treated them badly because of their gender was, but I knew if I did that would just make the trolling worse. By this point it had gotten to “In celebration of this day then I’ll allow a female player to heal me in a heroic and won’t get mad when they suck” so I trained and got the hell out of there.  I’ve now fixed my UI.

Now I’m sure a lot of people will say that that was purely trolling and none of it was meant seriously.  Maybe a lot of it WAS, but some of it probably wasn’t.  And even if it is a joke, bear in mind there are young people playing this game that might think that this is the correct way to behave around women in a game.  And I don’t know about other women, but I like to play games to get away from the crap I deal with in real life.  I don’t need more crap in game.

As for why do we need IWD, just look at what’s going on in the US when certain political factions want to ban simple things like birth control so a women can’t have a say over her own body. The world is getting better but it’s still far from equal.  One of my guildies net connection went down before last weekend, and she had a hell of a time trying to get the tech support guy to listen to her, because after all, what would a woman know about it… *sigh*  When I worked as a projectionist at a local cinema I was treated with disdain by film deliverers and even one of the assistant managers because I was female and it was ususally a male dominated post. I did my job just as well as the other two male projectionist, but I was ridiculed because with the longer films I had to sometimes make two trips when carrying the reels upstairs to the projection booth to be made up instead of carrying all the reels at once.

In the context of video games, we need IWD to deal with things like the stuff posted on Fat,Ugly or Slutty, which whilst you may laugh at some of the things posted it’s really quite horrifying.

At the end of the day when I play WoW I don’t want to be treated specially, I just want to be treated the same.

Morrigu and the Guild Princess

A blog I liked to read posted an interesting take on sexism in games and over the internet.  It’s well worth a read, and I pretty much agree with so head over to Lashing of Liam and read The Abuse of Internet Anonymity – Part One – Treatment of the Opposite Sex.

It’s true, whilst I have complained about guys treating me badly because I’m a girl, I do tend to forget the other side of things, with girls treating guys badly.  Neither is acceptable IMO.  I remember an article written by someone who had seen how far they could push things by being a girl in WoW and using that fact to get what they wanted off male gamers.  It was back in vanilla and it was quite scary.  I can’t recall what it was called or if it was an actual girl who did it, but they used ‘I’m a girl’ to get thousands of golds worth of stuff, back when that was a shed load of gold.  After the experiment they returned everything to the people they had tricked and explained about the experiment.  Damn, what was it called.  (Don’t type something like ‘Girls scamming guys in WoW’ or anything like that into Google, it brings up some horribly offensive crap).

Personally, I have experienced sexism from guys alot more than the girls using their gender to get what they want, but it did remind me of the one time I remember it happening, and it was a doozy.

It was back in Vanilla, in the days of 40 man raids,  the guild recruited a new paladin, appropriately named Princess.  Maybe that should have been a warning.  The guild had a female GM, and as well as myself 2 or 3 other female members, and there was never any issues.  Then Princess hit.  She started off by developing a ‘thing’ for one of the officers, who was happily married but had a very flirty nature, oh and his wife was in the guid too.  Princess took his flirty nature to mean he adored her, and made it known that she was his ‘favourite’, despite this officer being very polite and telling her she was just another recruit.  Princess was really only out for what she could get.  She wouldn’t run dungeons unless there was something she wanted, at which point she would beg and wheedle in gchat until people agreed to go just to shut her up (this being the days before randoms and LFG). And she would not talk to anyone she knew was female, she’d just straight up ignore any whispers or anything in guild chat.  She’d randomly whisper male guildies inane stuff and play the helpless female card ALOT, which annoyed the hell out of the other girls in the guild as we worked to get what we needed. At the time my ex was a member of the guild and I witnessed first hand the crap she’d pull when she tried /w him.  It was all coming to a head, and the officers had had enough of her, and then she did the worst thing.  She utterly messed with one of the sweetest guys in the guilds head, convincing him she was in love with him, and she would move across europe to be with him.  He was only 18, kind of naive and fell for it hook line and sinker.  Only to be called by her irate boyfriend one day and told to back off. When confronted in guild about it, she thought it was hilarious and couldn’t understand why people were upset, after all it was the guys fault for falling for it wasn’t it? And so what if she was using her gender to get stuff, girls who didn’t were obviously too stupid to realise the advantages. Needless to say she didn’t pass trial.  But the damage was done and one of my best friends in the game ended up quitting as he was so upset.

So what’s the big deal some might ask? Because one girl acts like that and all of a sudden people think ALL girls are like that.  Never mind that 99% of us do it all on our own and play just as well as guys well all MUST act like that.  After all, how else do we get our shinies.