Posts made by Roz

Randall Bills from Catalyst Game Labs purposefully does not reference the exact article he's responding to, but it's clearly the one we've been discussing. Nice response.

@Lithium said:

On a side note: Why is SJW (Social Justice Warrior) even a derogatory thing? How did fighting for equal rights ever become a fucking /negative/?

When you're on top and don't actually want to share it.

@Vorpal I will never understand how people go, "Hm, I'm calling the director of this department and someone else in her department picks up. I will just ask for the director." I'm like, "Yes, I know you would like the director. You called her line. But you have to inform me who you are and why you want to speak with her. Have you never heard of a director not picking up their own line? Because they are busy and lots of people want to talk to them?"

@Insomnia I think to a certain extent it's just expected from BioWare properties now, although there was a hilarious infamous instance of a guy tableflipping on the BioWare forums over Anders flirting with his male Hawke in DA2 that Gaider actually responded to. I think a lot of folks who are violently opposed to the presence of characters unlike them have self-selected out of BioWare properties.

@Arkandel said:

I blame some part of this on pop culture, also. Obviously not all of it (women are treated truly horribly in places where movies aren't even played) but how many films have we watched where the guy just never gave up on the girl even though she wasn't interested? And he was the romantic hero for doing so. She just didn't see the real him until he opened her eyes to the truth.

Oh, absolutely. This woman's post actually linked a great article on just that. I could remember reading it two years ago when it came out.

@Arkandel said:

@Ganymede said:

would I feel uncomfortable if someone that I found very unattractive would did the same to me?

I agree on the rest but not on this point.

Why should it matter who you find unattractive? Molestation is not more acceptable because the other person has supermodel looks. I mean I get it but it sets the bar at a pretty bad place, you know? The guy is a creep if he's unattractive but charming and quirky if he's not?

That's not the point Ganymede is making. The point is that women are used to hearing that things aren't that bad, are just compliments, are just jokes, etc. The idea is trying to offer you a way to mentally replicate the experience we're going through in some way. Try to think of comments as coming repeatedly from someone you 100% -- 200% -- are not interested in. That you really, really don't want to hear the comments from.

It's actually a common argument I've heard that women only care when the guy commenting isn't hot -- exactly as you were kind of misunderstanding -- which is actually not at all true. Unwanted behavior is unwanted behavior and plenty of women have plenty of experiences receiving it from guys they would have found physically attractive otherwise.

It's just that guys often can't really wrap their heads around receiving this sort of treatment from someone they fervently aren't interested in, so I think Ganymede was trying to offer a sort of mental shortcut to help you better understand the feeling.

@Arkandel said:

@mietze said:

It's nice that some people can't even fucking imagine anyone saying "if she bleeds she can breed" grossness to a 13 year old. I'm going to guess though that /you don't have one/. Well, I can't not fucking imagine it, because I've seen many things like it. Directed at mine, and her friends, and at other slightly older but still very young kids in "gamer geek territory" and outside it. And fuck yes the mama bear comes right the fuck out. (And I research any new place like whoa before we do). I /envy/ you if you can't imagine it.

That's why it's important to have conversations like this. Personally I can't imagine not reacting strongly if a child - anyone's - is addressed that way, but that's where communication breaks down some. For example my first explanation here was that maybe my choice of gaming venues excludes places where that would come up, which doesn't make sense since you explicitly state you research such places ahead of time. And while I've met objectionable people during my gaming I truly can't fathom anyone who'd act that way - but again my inability to even consider it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

So how does it? I mean who does it - are they, for lack of a better term, weirdos? Do they seem to come from a particularly skewed demographic? Do they act differently (more appropriately perhaps) when other men are around?

Give us some insights and we can keep an eye out. Maybe not for your daughter but someone else's.

One of the biggest mistakes I see guys make is think that the kind of guys who harass women are all losers and weirdos. They're not. Sexual harassment and sexual assault is too commonplace. If you want to be serious in being a man on the side of women in this, get used to the idea that someone who's your friend is probably guilty of something. Someone you probably wouldn't expect. Tons of harassers have friends who would never think in a million years they'd be such an asshole. These friends are usually (but not always) other men. For every woman who's been scared off of a geek group/tabletop group/circle of friends by one bad egg, there's usually more who went quietly into the night before her.

One of the biggest things I can say is to just pay more attention if you have women in a group with you. A lot of stuff starts with comments you might find innocuous because you're not used to thinking about them. Call us SJW whiners if you want, but dumb sexist jokes pave the way for gross sexist jokes which pave the way for worse and worse. Harassment proliferates where others remain silent. Some harassers do keep their worst comments quiet until they're in private, but I think more than you're expecting happens in front of other people.

These issues don't happen because other men are absent to deter them. They happen because other men don't notice or say anything. They happen because men read a long account of a woman's history of being harassed in geek cultures, and they say things like "I'm calling bullshit" or "Well I didn't really like how it's written" or "That's probably exaggerated" or "I'm not saying she's lying, but..." or "Wow I really can't imagine that happening" or "Well stop hanging out in [this hobby that the man would probably never consider leaving themselves if they were harassed, because they'd consider it their right to not be harassed]." Commenting on personal accounts of women's harassment like that is a luxury. And it's easy. And it's just the first step in building these atmospheres in harassment.

Believe women. Believe it when all the women commenting just here are saying, "Yup, I can believe it." Believe it when the vast majority of women can say, "Yeah, I've been sexually harassed recently." Because the things that guys can't believe about what we say we experience is the fucking background noise our entire lives.

I literally just had the urge to say something like, "Sorry for going on a rant there," because women are constantly taught to apologize for the space they take up, but I'm not really sorry. This shit is important. The fact that I feel strongly about it is a reasonable, proportional reaction to the situation.

Please believe that there are truths in the world that you can't imagine but that are nevertheless true.

@Three-Eyed-Crow It would certainly match the studies that have been done in places like classrooms where the class experience women as "dominating the conversation" if they speak literally like 30% of the time. (The percentage was even lower for what they viewed as women speaking an equal amount of time.)

@mietze I wish I could upvote you more than once.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Roz said:

(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 know way off the topic but Joss Whedon''s stuff is feminist? I have never seen that at all, though I am speaking as a guy.

I don't want to get into it right now because off-topic but he certainly enjoys that reputation.

Why do guys always find it so hard to believe that events exist outside of your experience? Why is it that it doesn't matter how many women talk about these issues, there are always guys lining up to talk about how we're exaggerating?

Here's the reality: women have so much more to gain by being silent. Talking about these issues inevitably ends up with more ugliness, either to mild or horrific degrees. The only thing women have to gain here is hoping that eventually we can speak up enough that things will be better for future generations after we take a whole lot of bullshit, skepticism, accusation of lying, harassment, and death and rape threats.

Is that really the sort of attention guys think women are making these claims for?

@ShelBeast That's funny, because guys may find it far-fetched, but as a woman I find it disgusting and not at all unlikely.

@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.

@Tyche I am very, very curious to know exactly what parts you think are bullshit.

@Thenomain It's not a journalistic piece, though. It's someone's personal blog speaking about their personal experience.

Jesus Christ one of my subordinates in the department has fucking lost the privilege of not CCing me and the department director on their shit, because I no longer believe they've done a thing even when they say they have. Too much shit getting lost. People who can't organize their work drive me crazy to work with.

@Arkandel WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A WORKING URL NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

(>_> fixed)

UGH unwanted touching. Ask A Manager has gotten a few questions about this over the years and always has good responses.

@Misadventure said:

There are a lot of discussions about how to be a ST, and many of them tell you to avoid the patterns that STs and players tend to fall into anyhow.

A common example is the ST who has a single story path laid out in their mind, and keeps the players from getting off it. This is a terrible thing if your players want unpredictability, and to be able to make choices that change where the plot goes (this is called Agency).

HOWEVER, if your players aren't proactive, if they want to have the story fed to them, or just have a chance to show off their awesome strengths and quirky weaknesses, or other interests, then this may be a good fit for them.

This is a good point, which brings up another thought for me: sometimes players aren't particularly proactive, but sometimes players are actually lost and just don't know what to do. In which case, give them more to go on. It's awful as a player to sit there and you've read all the stuff and you just don't know what you're supposed to do next and the GM is kind of just waiting for you to figure out the magic action. Don't do that.

Oh hey Kamron/Sterling! I was Hardwicke/Rosanna/Banshee on S&S.

@Admiral I keep having an instinct to downvote your post just because the content it like FUCK THAT SHIT. That must be maddening and awful.