Did you, by any chance, try reporting the harassment? As I have stated earlier, it’s been my experience that they do take such reports seriously. (Especially if you quote the entire offending text in your GM ticket.)

And what would they have done if I had? For the invasive tells, they would have said to use the /ignore function (which I already did; it doesn’t really do much when the /tells come from different people every time). For the crap over the general chat channel, assuming I wasn’t told that it was none of my business they would be more likely to tell me to turn off my chat channels (which is what I eventually had to do). And for the in-guild stuff, I felt that it was a guild matter that should be handled internally.

Was I wrong? Maybe. But the lack of proper moderation on the forums informed my decision in part. If Blizzard doesn’t bother to uphold its clearly stated guidelines on its own forums, why would I expect in-game GM’s to do so?

My mom did report harassment once. The GM said that he would deal with it, but refused to tell her what kind of action was/would be taken. On a whim, my mother put the harasser on her friends list for the week to see if his account got suspended or something. Since he didn’t log off after she informed the GM and he logged on the next day, it doesn’t look as if the harassing player was dealt with very seriously.

Also, your comment about “geeks” is interesting; being a part of both the gaming and the geek culture (they overlap, not surprisingly) I’ve found that the “boy’s club” mentality is pretty similar. Many of the male hardcore geeks I’ve known had a hard time looking at women as people, although I’m not sure how much of that was the culture perpetuating itself rather than a severe lack of social skills. Saying this, I’d like to point out that most of my friends (male and female) are geeks like me so obviously we aren’t a one trick breed. But, then, most of my friends are gamers, too, so the same holds true there. ^^;