19th
People who grow up playing a lot of video games don’t always have the strongest emotional Theory of Mind. They’re unable to put themselves into another’s shoes and really try to understand something that they have no concept of. When you live in a world of logic and rules, some of this stuff just doesn’t gel. It’s difficult to explain to someone who wants to say ‘that’s just the way it is’ when a girl feels uncomfortable about her gender being reduced to being judged on its appearance, and that ‘special’ treatment can be just as confronting as exclusion.
When I was 22, a girl who took advantage of some serious health problems I was having at the time to force me to do something with her that I didn’t want to do. It didn’t even occur to me, until having remembered the incident, that this was actually sexual assault - my privilege runs so deep I didn’t even recognise something that would have been so obvious had the roles been reversed.
It’s not even as simple as just going ‘oh well lets be nice’. It’s difficult as well, because there ARE feminists out there who blame everything on men, and really are the ball-busting bitches the nerds think they are. Just yesterday I was reading an article about Lego releasing a line of toys targeted at young girls, and people had backed them into a corner where there was basically nothing they could do. Release a simpler clothing-and-housing themed line for young girls, insulting girls intelligence. Release a complex yet princess themed castle on par with technical skill levels for the medieval knight castles, still sexist, contributing to gender conditioning. Release gender-neutral kits, not catering towards girls, still sexist. You NEVER win anyone over by trapping them in a corner where nothing they do is right - this kind of stone-walling just makes people stop listening to everything you say.
But that’s the other side of the coin, and it’s the kind that gets the attention, so people need to start getting attention for normal, rational viewpoints, coming from normal, rational women. And a lot of them. If people feel like they’re just having their balls chopped off, they’re not going to listen - they need to be engaged and made to actually start developing that Theory of Mind. Otherwise, the argument’s already lost, and the thermostat stays up.
It makes me sad to think that if one day I have a girl, that she’ll be exposed to the world of gaming. Mute all pubs.
