Jaicee said:
"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.)
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Being a proponent for equality doesn't make you a feminist, it's actually quite the opposite. It is egilatarians that actually see feminism evil.
Feminism, just like any other faschist ideology, starts with a premise that there's a group of people by birth that prevent the people who the power would belong to from having the power. In feministic consept, all women are oppressed as long as one woman is oppressed, and because women are oppressed, they need special rights (that men don't have) in order to be equal. Such as being hired to a job because of one's gender, or getting paid the same for less work (productivity) because of gender. Kids custody should be based on parent's gender, and the list goes on.
From the social justice view of feminism, because women have been oppressed by men, men collectively are in debt for women, and men and women are equal only after the debt has been paid.
So, the equality part is only true in rhetorics and feminism/female view, whereas in real world and egilatarian/male view, it's just a female supremacist movement.
Now you're going to say that feminism is about men's rights too, but it's just that there are so many issues with women's rights that they need to be dealt first. Which takes us back to the beginning making the whole "feminism is equality" argument circular logic in the same fashion religious people try to prove god exists: there is a god because the bible says so, and we know bible is true because it's word of god.
