GamerGate, Misogyny, and Why it's Relevant to General DUers

[justiceischeap]

9. Yeah, between some of the gaming forums and online co-op (which more & more games are pushing)

it's hard to miss the crap end of the gaming community.

You'll see a lot of women talking about how they don't wear mics when co-oping so their voices don't give away their gender. They also tend to create gender neutral gaming names so as not to give away their gender (I do the same but don't co-op often) and when guys do twig to the fact they're gaming with a woman, there's almost always one that makes some kind of rape/make a sandwich/not a real gamer comment. I recently saw one post (from 2009) from a guy bragging about being kicked from Xbox Live forums for saying he wanted to f*ck some woman in the gaming industry. He had buddies in the same thread that thought it was funny he got booted and one guy posted he thought the woman "had a horse face."

Anyway, I sorta ran into this at my local GameStop recently. I went in to pick up Destiny (which, so far, I don't think is worth all the hype) and the kid behind the counter asked if I was getting it for a friend. I said no, it's for me and he looked stunned. I don't know if it's because I'm a woman or an older woman (to him) or both but it pissed me off. Why would he automatically assume the game was for someone else? There are so many different ways he could have asked that question, though they all probably would have offended me. I was probably playing Pong on Atari before he was born.