[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I'm taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

One of the most insidious ways of normalizing and justifying gendered violence is by tying it to tradition. By portraying perpetrators as if they were enacting the accepted practices of a culture, those in power position victims of violence not only against their victimizer, but also against the weight of a culture’s history. Additionally, “tradition” is a popular buzzword that protects a practice from interrogation, hiding it behind a shield of maintaining history or honoring ancestors.

Read the rest…

Maybe it’s a little unfair to be using FoxNews as the subject of a PiA post, since that station seems to go out of its way to defend and perpetuate bigotry, but the methodology is exactly the same as people with good intentions use, so I decided that it was worth using the material.

The Hannity and Colmes section starts out with Alan Colmes giving an overview of the issue and asking president of the Organization of Chinese Americans in New York, Vicki Shu Smolin, some questions about why the Asian American community feels that the Doghouse jocks and the show’s producers should be fired. Despite the biased slant on the questions, Colmes only interrupts Smolin once, and it is during a pause in the sentence and for the purpose of segueing into the Q&A with Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers magazine. During this part of the show, Sean Hannity takes over the role of questioner.

Privilege #1: The Right to Offend

Hannity: Michael, I’m getting concerned here… like for example, both of my parents came from Ireland. If someone tells an Irish joke, am I supposed to get offended? Are we at the point where we can’t–this isn’t my type of humor, but I’m getting very nervous about the type of environment that’s being created here.

What Hannity here is concerned about is that free speech will be curbed if we put social pressure on comedians and other well-known personalities to practice self-censorship in terms of bigotry. This is actually a common argument, and the reason I put it in with “privilege” is because in this case “free speech” is being used to mean the right to insult, a “right” that is exercised disproportionately on non-privileged groups and with a disproportionately heavy impact.

When people try to use the “free speech” argument to caution against groups calling for action when they are the victims of racism, sexism, or other forms of bigotry, it’s not just about potentially curbing one’s ability to speak one’s true mind, but the collateral damage is that it implies that one should not be held accountable for one’s words. As earlbeck says, “But freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism, and freedom of speech is also responsibility for the words that one uses… People need to take responsibility for their actions, and that includes their words.”

What groups like the Organization of Chinese Americans are doing isn’t asking for these men or companies to be thrown in jail for what they’ve said, but rather making a statement that they, and all Asian Americans, have been subjected to racism (as all women have been subjected to sexism) by the show’s content, and that the show is responsible for its content and that it must face the consequences of its free speech.

But Hannity is skillfully using a rhetoric that erases that responsibility, a usage enabled by privilege. Privilege is being able to be free from responsibility in many encounters that involve a non-privileged group. Especially in cases like these, where the offense is “minimal” — meaning it was “only” words, or some other non-violent incident — the personal responsibility we have for our own words, and the corporate responsibility that companies have for the content of their shows, can be neatly swept under the rug of “free speech”, because no one wants to “walk on eggshells” or worry that maybe sometime, somewhere, they will face real consequences for a casually bigoted thing that they have said.

Privilege #2: My experience speaks for all

Harrison responds in agreement to what was said about the restrictive environment, then Hannity cuts him off to say the following:

Hannity: Anyone can make fun of me, I don’t care. By the way, Michael, as you know–we’ve been friends a long time– they do.

I hear this one a lot in real life. “People make fun of me all the time,” say the wealthy, white, heterosexual men in my family, in my school, and online. As if their experiences are universal. Privilege is assuming that your experiences give you the authority, and the knowledge, to rightfully speak for the experiences of others.

I have no doubt that Hannity is made fun of. I also have no doubt that there is some pretty vile stuff about him said in person, in the internet, through letters, and any other medium that people can communicate through. He’s a TV personality, and one on FoxNews at that. But three things are going on: 1) he’s implicitly conflating good-natured teasing (through his nod to Michael as a longtime friend) with actual verbal attacks on his person; 2) he’s erasing the distinction between receiving jokes as a person in power versus receiving jokes from a person in power when you are a person/group without power; and 3) he’s assuming that his potential feelings on this matter are the only valid ones.

Those three tactics both minimize the acknowledgment of the damage of racism, sexism, and other bigotry, while providing Hannity with a safe cocoon of rationalization in which to feel justified about his stance. The root of his argument is, of course, that he (and others) should be allowed to say whatever bigoted things that they want without being censured, but if he were to state it like that, then he would be called a racist, a sexist, and an all-around bigot.

By playing it up in the, “Well, that kind of stuff happens to me, too, and I don’t react so strongly!” He paints himself and his argument as rational, logical and correct and the non-privileged group’s reaction as emotional, illogical, and wrong. This is probably not even cold calculation on his part, but rather an honest attempt to understand the issue through his own experiences. But, when you are the one with power, you cannot assume that the situations you’ve faced are comparable to similar ones that people without power face. This is because, as I’ve stated above, the power dynamics are completely different and therefore, even taking out the differences between individuals, the situations, though similar on the surface, are in fact fundamentally different.

Endnotes: Bigotry in Action

This has already turned into a long post, but I would like to point out one thing. There is a point where Hannity’s privilege turns into actual bigotry when he addresses Smolin for the last time. Now, keep in mind, Hannity interrupted Harrison once, and that was about the time when he segued to his thoughts on the issue and began, well, the way it came across to me as a viewer, was that he began lecturing Smolin.

He interrupted her no less than three times, all of them when she was in mid-sentence, trying to answer his questions and assertions. He talked over her twice, one time of which she refused to stop what she was saying and kept talking until he gave her the floor, the other time she let him interrupt her. I can’t speak for the racism aspect (although I would suspect that it’s similar), but I know that men have a habit of interrupting women and women have a habit of letting them. I, myself, have been in a couple situations where I have literally said, “Let me finish,” and “You’ve interrupted me,” to a man and had him not let me finish what I was saying.

While this does stem from the privilege of feeling that you have the right to be heard anytime, anywhere, what Hannity did — and what was done to me, and continues to be done to countless other women — is sexist. It doesn’t matter that, since it stemmed from privilege, he probably wasn’t aware of it. It doesn’t matter that he probably intended to treat Smolin with the same courtesy as Harrison. The facts are that he blatantly and obviously silenced a woman and that passes privilege and goes straight into sexism.

The reason I bring it up here, beyond the fact that I think it needs to be discussed, is because this is a perfect example of how privilege enables bigoted behaviours to escalate. If Hannity didn’t have the privilege of speaking up anytime and anywhere nursed by our society — as a white person, a man, a TV personality, etc — then he would have a harder time casually silencing another human being.

I write this series to bring more awareness about what privilege is and why it’s important to understand the kinds of privilege that we have. I have not even touched on all of the elements of privilege that were displayed in that 6:12 minute news spot, and this one instance is only a drop in the bucket of the kinds of privileges we take for granted in our own lives. People — real people — have been hurt by not only the likes of Don Imus and the Doghouse DJs, but by the sheer number of people who have rationalized the behaviour as normal an harmless while pathologizing the responses by the non-privileged communities and their allies as anti-free speech, censorship, and emotional and therefore wrong and dangerous. And, well, if that’s not Privilege in Action, then I don’t know what is.

Via reappropriate.

I wrote about my language school for another PiA post here, but I’d like to bring it up again today. My topic here is heterosexism and it’s in similar vein to the first post and, again, about a reoccurring pattern.

We were going over a compound verb today with three different meanings: to signify a longstanding friendship, to signify a romantic attachment, and to ask to do an action together (yeah, the last one seems a little bit out of place, but that’s Japanese for you). My teacher — a very sweet and contentious woman, if a bit more conservative than I — talked about how the first meaning was between friends and wrote the word for “friend” on the board next to the example sentence. The third one was similar, although the explanation was too complex to sum up in a word so she left the right part of the example sentence blank. When she got to the second, however, I expected her to write the word for significant other (ie. the frequently used gender-neutral word for boyfriend/girlfriend) but she talked about “relationships between men and women” and then wrote the heterosexual specific word for male/female relations.

When I had an opening, I was like, “Um, sensei, wouldn’t [gender-neutral word] be a better choice? I mean, not all relationships are between a man and a woman…”

She looked at me and blinked for a split second, and then it was like a light bulb went off in her head. “Of course, of course!” she said abashedly, “[Gender-neutral word] is much better!” And she promptly changed the word on the board.

My teacher obviously wasn’t intending to exclude those of us in the class who were queer. In fact, I would wager that she never even thought that the language she was using — typical language, I believe, for adults to use in regards to relationships — could be exclusive. But, that’s just it. Privilege is having the dominant discourse be tailored to your group, to the point that you often don’t notice how certain words are exclusive of other groups.

The “normal” discourse all too often erases the experiences of groups outside what’s seen as “normal”, making it easier to ignore, minimize, and otherwise ignore/forget the existence of those groups. It’s not that most people do this intentionally; far from it. People use words which are exclusive (boyfriend/girlfriend in the context of assuming heterosexuality, mankind instead of humankind, etc) all the time, but because of privilege, these words are in such common usage that we use them as if they are all encompassing when the reality is that they are not.

For most people, when it’s pointed out to them is when they change it. This is not a terrible reaction; and most certainly is better than insisting that there’s nothing wrong with a word that has been pointed out to be exclusionary. However, in this case the best response is for us to be aware of our language as best we can, and choose the egalitarian version of a term whenever possible. Many people put down this kind of idea as being the “thought/word police” or the “PC gestapo” or somesuch, but the truth is that it’s just about using language that acknowledges and respects the basic humanity of others.

One of the points I constantly bring up as a barrier to gender inclusive game design is how women are hypersexualized — meaning that they are constructed to be characters whom presumably male characters would like to have sex with, they are often portrayed with exaggerated sexual characteristics (how often do you find a female character with A-cups? Or with a non-curvy figure?), and presented in a way (through costuming and posing) that is meant to show them as sexually available.

One of the most, if not the most, common rebuttal I get to this argument is to reduce my logical arguments to me saying that the only “acceptable” avatar is an “ugly” one. This, of course, is a problematic reaction on many different levels. I would first like to clear up the argument I’m actually making, then delve into an analysis why the dichotomy of “ugly” versus “pretty” used in the rebuttals is not a useful one, and finally offer suggestions for what companies can do to be more inclusive in their character design.

Read the rest…

Folks talk about campus violence like it’s perpetuated by a few bad apples, tgise disenfranchised men and boys who play too many violent video games. What the mainstream doesn’t talk about is campus violence like violence against women or police brutality by campus police. Why? Because these forms of violence are institutionalized, and unfairly biased against people because they are women and people of color.

Professor Angela Davis spoke on my campus yesterday about the Prison Industrial Complex and prison abolition, and at a question and answer with students she talked about yesterday’s shooting. I’ll share a bit here, typed from what I took on my digital recorder.

I’ve always been interested in what I call circuits of violence, the ways in which certain modes of violence feed into and reproduce other modes of violence. We like to think of domestic violence and intimate violence separately from military violence, or separately from state violence. I think it’s really important to think of these forms of violence together and ask how they mutually reinforce each other and how the individual agent of violence, situated in a larger context where violence is so easily used by the state, has a certain level of comfort, a certain level of feeling that this is the way things are supposed to be done.

It is a tragedy anytime anyone is murdered. I don’t know what experiences fueled Cho Seung-Hui yesterday at Virgina Tech, but he was an immigrant and a person of color living in a country where those communities are routinely victims of institutionalized violence. That doesn’t justify killing, but I don’t think we can understand one form of violence without looking at the greater culture and institutions that normalize and perpetuate it.

Mia of Phoenix Wright takes on the stereotype about girls and socializing in the court of law. We object, too, Mia, we object, too. (Thanks Revena!)

[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I'm taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

A couple of disclaimers, to start:

-First, this is not about me being angry at, or blaming, any particular individuals. This is also not about placing the responsibility for a society-wide problem on these particular individuals.

-Second, this entry is for everyone to read, even though I refer to a specific example in which only a few people were involved. The point of this entry is, again, not to pin the responsibility on anyone. The point is to raise awareness of a common, problematic pattern that we all engage in.

The other day I posted this rant to my journal concerning an incident at work. I was disturbed and angry about what seems to me an instance of sexual harassment (not because it was necessarily aimed at women, but because it was sexual and it was harassment). I was also aware of the ways in which sexism played into my reaction: my first instinct was to minimize my own discomfort and stay quiet about it, though in the end I realized what I was doing and spoke up.

Several people commented on that entry (though I have since screened the comments – again, so that attention or blame is not focused on one or two people). Here is the layout of the comments as of today, April 14:

-One short thread (one person’s comment and my reply) expressing sympathy about my experience.
-One long thread that begins with a person expressing sympathy, then suggesting an alternate explanation that would excuse the anonymous man’s actions as being something other than sexual harassment. The thread continues with two other people joining in to support the idea of an alternate explanation, and the topic of my distress leaves the conversation.

Why did the conversation end up like this?

Read the rest…

Angry Black Woman has an excellent piece on “political correctness”. In Defense of Political Correctness explores the attitudes behind disparaging PC-ness and why we shouldn’t accept them.

An excerpt:

My guess is that, since I have never been clear on what exactly “Politically Correct” is and have never fought for my particular PC label, I have not properly cemented the concept in my mind. Therefore, my opinion of it is easily, if not sneakily, swayed. I wasn’t paying enough attention. When I sat down and thought about how I really felt about Political Correctness, I decided that it really is a good thing. A thing worth fighting for. It’s not negative, it’s not a curse word, and it’s not about suppressing free speech or policing anyone’s thoughts.

I think it’s time that people started defending Political Correctness. Articulating what it is, what it isn’t, and why it’s still important. Political Correctness is about language and the power language has. I’m a writer. I believe — no, I know — that language is a powerful weapon. Changing language is one of the key ways to change society for the better. Language is one of the key ways in which people in power maintain the status quo. Changing language, by itself, won’t solve the world’s problems. No one thing will. But there are always key factors. Language is one.

Go read the whole thing.

Via kynn who found it via symbioid; some information on Acclaim’s new game, Dance, where the default is white. One of the users took issue with this and began a thread called, I GOTTA PAY TO BE BLACK?

This situation is, perhaps, one of the most clear-cut examples of how the privileged groups are normalized and the non-privileged groups are Othered. First of all, this game seems to be still in the development stage; they’re testing out game mechanics and the like. Just as with Fable, as I discussed in my gender-inclusive video game thread, treating a female option as an “extra” rather than an intrinsic part of a game that supposedly lets you be anything, Acclaim’s Dance treats white as the default and non-white as an extra feature. As one of the moderators on the board explains, “Black is an EXTRA feature. It makes your person look unique, so that is an EXTRA feature. Therefore, you having to PAY for it.”

A site administrator takes a different tactic from the “it’s a compliment because it’s unique” approach, by implying that this is the best way to handle things because the game structure won’t allow for anything else. The staff member says, “As an optional character upgrade, we must put this in the item shop for players to acquire. This is the only way to offer the African-American heads.” The “only way”? Really? Perhaps at this stage it would be so costly to make the necessary adjustments to the system that it seems like the only way is to make it a paying option (although, really, in that case I can’t see why they couldn’t at least make it 0 points instead of 1, but I digress), but if they had programmed from the ground up with diversity in mind instead of allowing white to be the default, then there would be no problem — hence framing it as something out of their hands reads, to me at least, more like a tactic for avoiding responsibility than the full truth.

A more detailed explanation of the moderator’s stance — non-white skin colour as unique — is as follows [emphasis mine]:

THE REASON, there is no available choice at the moment is because, being white doesn’t necessarily have to represent you color in game. To change your skin color in the game, IS a special feature. It makes you STAND OUT. Therefore, your going to have to pay for an extra feature. Maybe in full release, there will be a bit more leeway, but for now you have to stick with what you got and test the game, and don’t worry so much about your character they’re going to be wiped regardless… We didn’t mean for this to be a racial bash. But the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white. If you want something extra your going to have to pay. Nothing in life is free.

[From I GOTTA PAY TO BE BLACK? comment by coasterguy26]

Acclaim wasn’t aiming to be racist. I would say that no successful company — at least none that want to stay in business — tries to be racist. But the whole point about privilege is that you don’t have to try to be bigoted, but you have to actively try not to be bigoted because of the way the bigoted point of view is normalized in society.

See, privilege is about not having to see yourself as the Other. The moderator quoted above — and the company he represents — don’t see the hypocrisy in saying that they didn’t “mean for this to be a racial bash” and then in the very next sentence say that “the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white”. They don’t think of it as racist because in our society being white is “normal”, it’s the “default” and it’s certainly nothing for anyone to get worked up over.

White people, who do already have it so that the avatars “represent [their] color in game” (and in most games, movies, tv shows, comic books, books, etc), have the luxury of seeing race as an extra, as something to do to make yourself unique and stand out. People of colour, who aren’t automatically represented in this game or most other parts of society, don’t have that luxury. If they want to have their avatars represent someone like themselves — something a white person doesn’t have to think about if they don’t want to — they have to pay. They get to see themselves be Othered and then told that they should be grateful because they are seen as “unique” and something to be desired. What is a fun accessory for a white player is a necessary component for a player of colour who wants to have the same ability as the white person to allow their avatar to represent their real life self. Privilege is not having to think about how the “extras” afforded to you come at the cost of allowing non-privileged groups the same basic representation that you take for granted.

It’s certainly much easier for Acclaim to take the tactic that they have — it’s out of our hands, we’ve made it an extra feature to help make you unique (so we can’t be doing a bad thing), and, hey, we don’t mean to be racist so obviously we can’t be! — than it is for them to acknowledge that they fucked up and take the time to fix it.

Kynn has a thought provoking post making the distinction between “perks” and “privilege”:

Let’s talk about how I use the term “white privilege.”

There are certain things which are gifted to every white person, which aren’t fully afforded to people of color. I don’t have to worry about being pulled over for “driving while white.” Other white people tend to trust me more than they would a person of color of the same age and socioeconomic status. I’ll make more money, in the long run, than I would if I were non-white.

These things I think of as white perks — benefits which society chooses to bestow on white people. Society does this because it is white-dominated and white-supremacist.

Then there is this thing which I call white privilege, which is not a set of perks at all — but rather a mindset. It is a subtle, quiet ideology, that is rarely taught directly any more, but which definitely exists and its effects can be seen all over.

I suggest reading the whole thing. I’m still chewing on it and thinking about how making the distinction could impact discussions of privilege.

Two separate instances on live journal have really had me thinking about my commitment to be anti-racist. The first is a series of posts by my LJ friend kynn, which I won’t link to here because there’s, um, quite a lot of them. I may use one in an upcoming Privilege in Action post, though. The latter is this post by a friend-of-a-friend where the original poster asks, “Could anyone give me an example of how I… am racist?” in response to Rosie O’Donnel saying, “Everybody has some racism in them; that can’t be denied”. Despite being an interloper into his journal, I struck up a dialogue with him which spawned the comment that this post is based on.

What does it mean to be an anti-racist ally? Well, I think part of it is that we need to acknowledge that living in a system that favours certain groups of people means that, especially if we are part of said privileged group, we cannot escape internalizing some of the oppression (such as racism).

I am staunchly anti-racist and I do my best to be an ally, but at the same time I recognize the racist things I have said and done in the past, and I acknowledge that racism is a part of who I am because I was raised in a world where “racist” is the default. It may not be the “let’s lynch those n-words” level of racism, but casual racism is still racism.

I hate that there’s a part of me that’s racist. My whole life is devoted to fighting for equality, the purpose I feel I have on this earth is to help bring about equality, and yet I am racist. My knee-jerk reaction to people of colour speaking out about their issues is to be defensive, and to be angry or jealous or dismissive. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be so staunchly anti-racist and yet to know that there is a part of you that will always be racist? Let me tell you, it feels like absolute shit.

But part of being an ally is acknowledging my privilege and not letting it get in my way. It would be so easy for me to throw up my hands and say, “Well, I’m racist so I may as well just revel in it!” or, more likely, to say, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it, so I should just stop trying.” But being an ally means not taking the easy road. It means calling out others even if that means you get other racist white people leaving abusive comments (yes, that happened to me… just yesterday, actually). It means accepting that you may be implicated as racist, or be included in a sweeping statement that is anti-white, or any number of things that can hurt.

This isn’t a judgment on anyone else’s situation; I’m not in a place to judge that. This is me sharing my feelings and my story in the hopes of helping other white people gain understanding to what people who talk about “white privilege” and other related subjects may be thinking and feeling when they say/write those things.

And, I guess, the other thing I would like to say that, even if you accept the premise that all white people are a little racist because of the nature of being white, that doesn’t mean that white people are inherently bad.

In the end, what I think I’m trying to say in my longwinded way is that the most important thing about being an anti-racist ally is not whether or not you’re racist, but rather how well you can consider the situations and feelings of others such as people of colour, and whether or not you are willing to, at times, privilege their opinions and experiences over your own. Because if you find that you’re willing to do that (or continue to do that, if you do so already), then it doesn’t matter if you carry within you a part that’s racist or not, because the way you express yourself to the outside world will be anti-racist.

[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I'm taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

One of the first readings assigned for this class has been Albert Bandura’s “Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control,” published in volume 46, number 1 of Journal of Social Issues. The purpose of the article is to examine how, in normal and everyday circumstances, people can commit actions that they typically consider immoral. Most of the time, barring deviant individuals, we keep ourselves in check. We decide not to commit immoral actions according to what we understand as ‘moral,’ without needing other people to force us to do so.

According to Bandura, we regulate ourselves through the use of “self-sanctions.” I guess it’s like the superego, but without dealing with issues of the unconscious. For a psychological layperson like me, it’s useful just to think of it as a conscience. Basically it means that we watch and judge ourselves, and that is what determines our behavior. So if those judgments are somehow deactivated, then we can engage in behavior that we would normally consider wrong, but without making ourselves feel shame.

This is a pretty useful concept for a class on gendered violence, because it helps explain why something normally heinous (violence, particularly sexual violence) has become so common against women. I also find it useful for wider discussions about sexism in general – why something as awful-sounding as discriminating against people based on their sex is nonetheless such a widespread part of our societies. Not by a few of the absolute worst people. Not by the people who mean to do it. But by everybody.

Read the rest…

This is a bit of an experiment.

This quarter I’m taking a Women Studies course titled “Women and Violence.” The final project for this class is open to creative interpretation, and so I’m attempting to bring together my academic feminism with my online feminism by using blogging as a part of that project. Over the next eight weeks, until the final week of the quarter, I’ll be making weekly posts on the topic of women and violence. Each post will (hopefully) be inspired by the readings or discussions from class. They will be posted both here and on my LiveJournal, and can be accessed through this link.

The course itself approaches gendered violence as a continuum of behaviors that affect women, from the private to the public, the individual to the institutional, the legally prohibited to the socially permissible. This includes the most commonly discussed forms of gendered violence, such as rape and domestic violence; and also forms of violence such as war, abuse by prisons and other institutions, and indirect violence by the media. My series of posts will cover any of these topics, depending on what strikes me, or perhaps what is most relevant to the feminist blogosphere at the time.

If this all sounds kind of vague to you all, that’s on purpose. I’m actually not sure how these next eight weeks will go, or what kind of writing I will do. I’m hoping to let the writing come organically out of influences from the course and online, so I’m not putting any limitations on this series for now.

Speaking of influences – while I always welcome responses from readers, I invite them even more heartily for this project. Comments or criticism – even if you don’t have anything to add beyond, “I agree with you/Commenter A!” – please do make your voice heard. Part of the reason I’m using a blog format is so I can examine the responses I get, and how other people might connect to what I’m writing.

Cerise, the new magazine by and for gaming women, is still accepting submissions for our first issue. The deadline is April 15, 2007. What we’re looking for:

Submissions by no means have to conform to the theme of each issue. Please consider submitting–this is a wonderful opportunity to get your name out there and be part of an exciting new project.

(Cross-posted from New Game Plus.)

I just wanted to do a quick follow-up on my Harassment, silencing, and gaming communities, posting some relevant links.

First up is Lake Desire with her thoughts on my piece. My favourite part is where she says this:

I want to be able to speak up in mainstream places without being ignored, having my character attacked, or called names. But I’m not willing to grow a thicker skin, to censor myself, to have to constantly, preemptively watch my back. I’m not asking for special treatment, just to be treated with respect owed to all human beings. Until the mainstream is ready for that, I’ll continue to blog from the margins where I can call some shots.

Next is something not related to gaming, but related to the incident that spawned my post. Apparently my reference to Something Awful was closer to the truth than I knew. Richie over at Criticisms has the scoop on Lowtax’s misogynistic and downright hateful response to the Kathy Sierra incident (warning: reading through that entire thread is downright depressing).

And so as not to end on too much of a downer, I just wanted to highlight a post by m of my grown-up life, i love being a woman, to remind us why it’s so darn important to not let women’s voices be silenced:

and in the end, i am happy to be a woman. i’m happy to know women who are happy being women. i’m happy to know men who really love women. but most of all, i’m happy that there are folks out there with voices, who can teach girls and women of all ages, my little girl included, that it is a beautiful thing to be born without a y chromosome.

I’ve seen the argument come up time and time again: “feminism” as a term doesn’t reach out to men (or has negative connotations), so people are uncomfortable using it. Why not call it “anti-sexism” or just merge with equalism or humanism?

The short answer is that feminism has a deep and rich history that is important to the continued struggle for equality. To reject feminism is to cease honouring our feminist foremothers who did everything from win us the vote to help to get legislation passed that broadened the definition of rape to include married couples. To reject feminism, especially now with such a virulent anti-feminist atmosphere that has succeeded in passing off lies about feminism and equality as truths, would be to admit feminism has failed. When feminism finally fades out, I want it to be because its goals have been achieved, not because it was beaten down by a those who are all for an equal society as long as it doesn’t take away the power that they have over others.

The long answer is behind the cut.

Read the rest…

Sheelzebub has some information on how a tech blogger named Kathy Sierra is being stalked, harassed, and threatened. It reminds me of the time that I got a threatening letter sent to my house because I had banned someone from this blog. It frightened my dad (whose house my domain was registered to) enough that I thought he might make me stop blogging. Instead I ended up convincing Dreamhost to offer privacy protection services — apparently getting a threatening letter sent to my house was a good enough reason to overcome their reservations about the idea — and life continued on as normal.

Sheelzebub hits on another point that I have thought of before, especially when I used to get all those “you’re censoring my freedom of speech!” complaints [emphasis mine]:

This is silencing. For all of the whining about freedom! of! speech! what these morons in this case, what the sniveling twits over at AutoAdmit don’t get, is that harassing, stalking, and threatening someone silences them. When someone’s too afraid to speak at a conference thanks to some graphic and nasty threats she got, she’s been silenced. And for any jerkoff who wants to go on and on about how she’s “letting them win” (because I know the concern trolls out there folks) get it straight–you’re not the one dealing with this.

I also think that flaming someone silences them. Bringing it back to Kotaku for a second (and then I seriously don’t want to think about those wankers again for a long time) — you can add sites like Destructoid, though it’s not nearly as vicious in terms of editorial content as Kotaku is — these sites silence women.

Read the rest…

Inspired by this post at Feminist Gamers and this post on The IRIS Network forums, I decided to take an old post of mine and turn it into a bingo scorecard.

Basically the rules are that when you see a media article, blog post, or anything else talking about women in relation to a geeky hobby (gaming, technology, science, etc) you pull out this scorecard and mark down which points the article touches on. If you get three in a row (diagonal counts), you win! If you get blackout, you win even more!

What do you win? Well, the satisfaction of knowing that you have made fun of yet another stupid article on women geeks. You can also link your scorecard (and any post that you made in relation to the bingo — using the scorecard isn’t mandatory, but I think it’s a cute visual) on this thread and, if you do a post, I might just highlight it here or on TIN’s forums.

Via Formal Dressage Required.