Girl Gamers

[pebbles]

I only play computer games if my friends play them I see it as a way to spend time with them. I'm not great at computer games and am abit of a slow learner and won't play or practice by myself but it dose embarrass my friends when I eventually surpass them, Usually we stop playing that game then. ^_^ I don't mind.

[JessieMH]

Well lets see... on steam alone:

Valve's entire library, crysis, crysis warhead, Civ4, unreal 1, 2, 2004, 3, unreal gold, several HL2 mods, dragon age origins, KotoR 1&2, jedi knight/outcast/academy  Then outside of steam Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Starcraft 2 beta, Age of Empires 1/2/3 Age of Mythology and it continues for another 20 gigs or so

Yeah I guess I would count as a girl gamer

[PanoramaIsland]

Well, I'm a female-bodied and a gamer, but not exactly a girl. I love pen and paper RPGs and video games. I first started on Vampire: the Masquerade (ha ha I know, I actually still play it) when I was 13, and I've been rolling dice ever since.

As a transgender guy who right now presents as a girl, one of my favorite things about my (otherwise all biomale) gaming group is that they treat me like one of the guys. I don't think they'll be that surprised when I come out to them. They occasionally make fun of me for being masculine as a female, but that makes me feel good because they also accept and even like that about me. Another great thing about them is that it's very common for group members to play characters of the opposite gender-- something which more 'conservative' (i.e. NO GIRLS ALLOWED) gaming groups apparently don't allow. I usually play male characters, but also play females occasionally.

There's still a lot of sexism in the gaming community (you wouldn't believe how many guys I've talked to who put women on a pedestal and simultaneously bash 'slutty girls'), but I hope that as gaming becomes more accessible to girls over the years, more girls will get involved and break down assumptions.

Honestly, while roleplaying can be a great way to have silly and/or dramatic fun, I think that it's a real relief for some transpeople to be able to play their real gender with no discrimination. At least for me it is-- since I never pass as male, it's an opportunity to be seen and treated as male, even if it's only in a fictional setting.

Yeah, Brain - the situation in the comics world is similar. Lots of extremely unrealistic depictions of women, lots of sexism, amd female collectors and creators tend not to be taken as seriously. That's been starting to change over time, though; creators like Terry Moore and Neil Gaiman, among others, have led a trend towards more realistic depictions of women, partially by showing that female characters can be attractive without looking or acting like Lara Croft/Tarot/whathaveyou. Of course, indie creators have always been further along on that path - Los Bros Hernandez come to mind - but it's still mostly indie creators who create female characters for their personality and history, not for their bodies.



And guys still ask me why I think it is that there are so few women in comics. 

[Jester]

I read a really good article by a guy who pointed out that the depictions of men in these things isn't exactly realistic either.  It's just that men are generally less inclined to work towards being an uber-muscled extra-macho guy because a comic book or a movie implies that they'd be more awesome if they were because they lack the childhood emotional scarring required for that kind of low self-esteem.

[PanoramaIsland]

That's a fair point. However, I'd go so far as to say that the exaggeration of female archetypes in mainstream American comics (Marvel, DC, Image etc.) takes on a few dimensions that the exaggerated male archetypes don't:

-Sexualization, particularly when it is a primary trait and especially when personality traits and other non-physical attributes are molded to fit a sexy archetype (badass girl fighter, sexy big-bosomed sorceress, innocent girl next door who's actually a superheroine, etc.).

-Exoticisation, and the general tendency to depict women as an unfathomable "other." I've noticed that many mainstream American comics featuring female main characters make little effort to get into the female lead's head, to get the reader to put themselves in her shoes. Compare this to, say, Batman or Spider-Man, in which the whole point is that the reader is in on the superhero's secrets: Spidey is really just dweeby Peter Parker, constantly lorded over by his tyrant of a boss. Batman is really Bruce Wayne, a man who can afford to buy anything but is perpetually self-isolated, stunted in his emotional communication, trapped in his own fame and wealth. Lara Croft gets closer to this than other heroine leads, but in the end she's still just an Ass-Kicking Woman; other characters, like Brian Pulido's Lady Death and War Angel, don't seem to have any personality or dimension at all, and we're certainly not supposed to get inside their heads. We're supposed to stare at them, and salivate; that's what they're there for.

-Male gaze. The exaggerated archetypes of maleness are men's own archetypes, coming out of male culture and made by and for men. The exaggerated archetypes of femaleness are also men's, also come out of male culture, and are also made by and for men. These aren't exaggerated archetypes of women's ideas of what it means to be a woman. In fact, they have very little to do with female self-image as far as I can tell.

Of course, these characteristics by no means describe all major female characters in the mainstream American comics world, but they describe so many of them that it just turns me off from the whole thing.

[brainiac]

I definitely agree with your points, PanoramaIsland, and I've seen the same things happen in video games.

Another point is that in our society, women are supposed to be objects and men are supposed to be subjects. Like you said about the male gaze, the male characters are to be identified with, not for the presumed male reader to compare himself to.

And there's always the idea that women should be judged primarily on their appearance, while men can be judged by other things too, like money, job, intelligence. If people think a baby is a girl, they'll praise it as pretty; they'll praise the same baby doing exactly the same things as smart if they think it's a boy. Hell, remember how much the media focused on the female candidates' appearance (and that of the male ones' wives) compared to the male ones in the 2008 election in the US?

(And I'm not trying to argue that men don't face discrimination or that men aren't judged by their appearance. Pleaaaase don't interpret it that way.)

This stuff is so depressing sometimes.