"The opposite of a gamer is a feminist."
I hear that expression all the time, from both gamers and feminists alike. There seems to be a general consensus that gamers cannot be feminists and vice versa. You know, this mentality is why I for one appreciate fringe organizations like the ever-controversial Feminist Frequency that say it's okay to be both, at the same time and everything. (Not that I ALWAYS agree with them, but I appreciate the crux of what they do.) But you know, these types of groups obviously don't represent the cultural mainstream of either scene. That's why of late I've taken to gauging the opinions of more mainstream feminists and here I hope to do so for more mainstream gamers as well. In a feminist hangout of mine, I recently asked why gaming is evil. Here I want to ask why you think makes feminists evil. I hope I can bridge this gap a little bit so that, you know, maybe people like me won't be so stigmatized as traitors everywhere we go.
First off, let's clarify what I mean when I say that I'm a feminist. By that I mean that I count myself as an advocate for the rights of women and support the establishment of equal social relations between men and women and indeed people of all genders. I don't mean something other than that. (I have to say that because apparently lots of people confuse feminism for female supremacy.)
Anyway, that established, the arguments that I hear from feminists against gaming seem to basically trace to Gamergate, which gets stupidly conflated with the attitudes of the gaming community writ large. That seems to be at the root of much of this enmity from their perspective.
I'm guessing that conversely the general attitude toward feminists here is that feminists just want all games to pander to women or whatever bullshit like that. And I'm guessing that this stupid attitude is also rooted in a massive double-standard wherein the people who view feminists that way never complain when games (far more often) pander to men (or don't even recognize it as pandering because they're so used to it that it just seems like the natural order of things). Something like that. Am I right? Is that why you think feminists are evil and cannot be 'real gamers' or whatever?
(The moral of this post is that stereotypes suck ass.)
