@ShelBeast said:
There are parts that, admittedly, seem completely the result of over-exaggeration and/or pure fabrication... I don't want to marginalize the message, because it's a valid one, but yeah... Too much scare tactic. Personally, I find it very, very difficult to believe that a 13 year old girl not only gets openly told by a shopkeeper "old enough to bleed, old enough to breed", but then that a whole cadre of cronies would start chanting it like a mantra. Not unless the store just openly says "Pedophile Comics and Games" on the window. There's simply too many people, of all genders, who are very sensitive/hostile to the very thought of sexually abusing minors. Plus, it just reeks of caricature, not character, if that makes sense.
I mean, ask most women the youngest they can remember being harassed by an adult man, and a lot of them will say younger than 14. The first time I can remember getting catcalled I was probably 12. I've heard from women who developed early who got it as young as like 10. This isn't the exception; it's the rule.
To be frank, for those of you saying you've never seen it happen, or that it doesn't happen in your particular circle: that's not actually important. Because
@Arkandel said:
I am not disputing things like that happen. But are you going to say reports of them not happening should be silenced? If nothing else that could indicate the scale of sexual harassment within a community - whether, in other words, such behavior is typical or isolated. If on the other hand some of us - especially of the female persuasion - have then it would be an indication of the opposite.
It's really, really not isolated. Like, I literally don't think I know a woman who hasn't experienced some sort of harassment based on her gender within the geek and gamer sphere, and as a female geek, I certainly know a lot of them.
@ShelBeast said:
I am really curious, though, like Arkandel, about the experience of females (or perceived females) and other minorities or traditionally marginalized groups in the online community. Has this kind of behavior been the norm for you on MU*s? Is it something you experience more RL when gaming and less online or more?
The vitriol is a lot, lot higher online. I mean, I don't go a week without getting harassed IRL, and I've been made to feel extremely uncomfortable, skeeved, gross, and at the worse highly unsafe.
No one's ever told me to go kill myself or called me a cunt in real life. It's happened online for expressing opinions men don't like. (I think the worst was daring to say I didn't really think Joss Whedon's stuff was as feminist as he likes to claim.)
I can say that what I've experienced on MU*s has been less direct and more along the lines of atmospheric sexism (hah hah, let's trade sexy pics back and forth and talk about boobs). But I've also spent most of the past decade running games with other women where we generally are going to tell people to knock it off if they do stuff like that. Because that's -- kind of what women do: try to build their own communities where they can feel safe.