Trigger Warning - Rape Analogies

Consider this hypothetical scenario.  Having somehow come into ownership of a scrap of land which is not part of any country, state, county, city, or other legal jurisdiction, a group of people decide to create a new suburb, a gated community which is open only to what they consider the "right people".  Styling themselves as the Town Council, they draft a set of Bylaws which they're confident will make their town a fun, safe, and satisfying place of residence for an entire community; at first they hand-pick everyone who can come live there, but eventually those people start inviting their friends who start inviting their friends, and a large, vibrant community grows.  Because all of these people are cool and they're having fun living here together, it never occurs to any of them to, for example, commit rape against each other.  And they happen to overlook the fact that, when drafting those Bylaws, the Town Council neglected to specify anything about how rape is a crime, since they were perfectly (and sub-consciously) confident it would never happen, among the various cool people who were going to come live in their town.

Then, one day, a woman moves into the town, a somewhat disturbed woman who is absolutely phobic about the idea that she might be raped, with a completely unrealistic notion of how likely it is to happen.  And when she happens to notice that the law doesn't say anything about rape being prohibited, she flips out, and decides to hold a one-person protest rally outside the town hall.  There, she harangues every passer-by she can catch, lecturing loudly and stridently about how utterly necessary it is that every community, no matter how cool its people think they are, MUST make it explicitly illegal to rape anyone, or else they are tacitly sanctioning the act of rape even if it never actually happens.  Most people she's shouting at are good, decent folk who would never rape anyone, and to them, she's just being ridiculous and annoying.

But here's the key point.  If she keeps belting out that spiel at the top of her lungs, day after day, right outside where the Town Council are having their meetings, what does it say about them that they continue to not have a rape law on the books?  Whether they're intentionally ignoring her, or have just managed not to notice her, should not someone perhaps stop kvetching at the deranged woman's unreasonable behavior, and start trying to find out why her concerns - however little validity they have outside of the purely theoretical - are not being addressed?

What is all this an analogy for?  Believe it or not, it started with a GAME, of all things, and the original issue was pretty insignificant, but I've kept pushing the matter because I found it profoundly disturbing that nobody besides me could see a problem here.  Whether or not it ever actually happens, the ability to betray someone on the most fundamental level is an Alpha-Level Offense against the social contracts upon which gaming relies; if you can be "griefed" in the game, and have no defense whatsoever other than to stop playing with the jerk that did it, then I see that as a serious failure on the basis of the game itself.  Nobody in their right mind would want to live in a town that allows its citizens to rape each other, and a game which fails to police griefing is very much the equivalent on a smaller, more trivial scale.  But just because it's all fun and games doesn't mean it should be taken lightly; behavior in a game is a microcosm of behavior beyond the game, so if inappropriate activity is allowed to flourish, even if it never actually flourishes, the failure to actively curtail it sends a very bad message, about the people who are supposed to be taking responsibility for the space they've provided, whether that's the physical space of a city or the ideological space of a game.

Better late than never: My take on Gamergate

I originally wrote this bit in September, and while the Gamergate scandal is pretty much old news by now, it'll only keep getting older.  So since this was the soonest that my general disorganization would permit me to chime in, I thought I'd get my take on this flash-in-the-pan scandal out the gate before it became any more obsolete; I felt that I had something relevant to say, and it's just a pity I couldn't get it said sooner.

I now present the original text, without any subsequent revision.

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Let's look at the Gamergate scandal.  It's pretty obvious why women are not welcomed into the gaming community; it's because gaming is about escapist fantasy, and for men in general (excluding those who've been "tamed" by women, or were born "different" as statistical anomalies), the single most important fact of the life they need to escape is the fact that they can't get laid.  (A general lack of power in their lives is concurrent with this, and often the two are conflated into fantasies of rape or harems and such - but most men wouldn't turn up their nose at sex where they got everything they wanted handed to them but were not at all in control of the process.)  Women can't understand this, because they don't have a NEED to have sex, constantly and for brief periods which only "reset the clock" for a matter of hours; for the most part they don't need to bring sex into their games at all, but certainly if they do, it'll be more like seducing a single partner for the duration of the game until finally achieving an LTR in the good ending, and less like having slutty elf maidens drop as treasure with every sixth monster you kill so that you can regain hit points by fucking them.

The bottom line is, men want games which objectify women, for the same reason they want games which glamorize violence, minimize social strictures, and award ridiculous quantities of wealth for trivial achievements.  Women getting into the industry are likely to object to this treatment of their fictional sisters, clearly proving that they aren't adequately cognizant on the "fictional" part (though they have a point, many of them men aren't quite on top of that one either).  Men don't want their entertainment watered down and deprived of one of its key features, and so when girls try to horn in, they resist.