You go, girls

Oh, hiGrab some popcorn and pull up a seat for this one.

There’s been raging controversy lately about female gamers being harrassed or even threatened via in-game messages for daring to encroach on the online gaming boys’ club, to the point that you could do a Venn diagram heavily overlapping “macho” male gamers and frat-boy rape culture.

I’ll fess up to one thing: I don’t “do” online gaming myself. The last time I bothered was over ten years ago, but even then the number of guys on there trying to overcrank the macho bugged me – I’m a guy, and it took me right out of the game. These days, I don’t have time to devote to massive gaming sessions; if I’m going to be playing with someone who’s operating on the level of a child, I’m going to play some more Super Mario Wii with Little E.

The companies running the games and servers have remained deafeningly quiet on the issue. Of course they have: most of their audience is male. The last thing they want to be seen to do is let the terrorists, erm, sorry, “people who know that there’s a way you’re supposed to act toward everyone,” win. Never mind the fact that, had some of these in-game messages and harrassment been delivered via text message, phone call or e-mail, the sender would have the cops knocking on their door within a few hours.

I understand that the anonymity of the internet is a great playground for those who understand the basic rules. For too many others, though, it’s a perfect breeding ground for creepiness: people get away with saying things that they’d never get away with saying in person, most likely on pain of getting their asses kicked. I’m of A Certain Age, so I don’t really do the whole anonymity thing: if I tried to maintain a different person for every venue, I’d suffer catastrophic out-of-memory errors in record time. Too much of that real estate is taken up by more everyday concerns like “I need to fold clothes” or “I have books to write” or “Oh, I was supposed to clean litterboxes yesterday, wasn’t I?” I admire people who can “stay in character” until it becomes creepy and stalker-ish.

What the hilarious and yet deeply disturbing blog Fat, Ugly Or Slutty hopes to accomplish is to expose some of these demeaning communications, complete with the screen names of the senders. In places it’s funny. In places it makes me want to take a hot shower with lots of soap because it gives glimpses into a culture of guys who spend too much time playing games and not enough time accruing the kind of (occasionally bruising) life experience that tends to melt away the misguided prepubescent notions about women and sex to which these guys cling.

Question is… will the companies running the servers do anything about it, or are female gamers going to be told – again – to just “put up with it”? It’s bad enough that women are having to fight against ridiculously outmoded legislation – proposed almost entirely by men – involving reproductive health. Now the boys want to lock the ladies out of their secret clubhouse too?

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