Being a woman in geek culture

[satindesire]

I am well! He is excellent! My health has been awesome! I played through all of Skyrim and expansions without cheating even once and I want to marry Brynjolf 'cause he has a sexy voice! I'm replaying through all of Dragon Age and looking at what they're gonna do in Dragon Age 3 and thinking I'm totally screwed! Still playing Warcraft and EQ2 daily. Nevah! No!

And how are you?

That's awesome! I'm so glad to hear it! ^_^

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately, even more than what I used to. Mister and I decided to level Pandaren Monks, so we did that, then a bunch of my guildmates went over to the Horde side and named a guild after me (my main character, actually. The Guild's called "Legion of Theae), so I HAD to join it. We've been leveling our very first Horde-side toons. She's a level 75 Discipline Priest as of today, and the guild is already level 6 even though it's only 2 weeks old! We've been questing our asses off. Thank God they removed the limits on how much guild XP you can get per week.

Anyway...I'm disappointed by how rude people can be on the Horde side. I've gotten a lot more harassment because of my gender from the Red team than I ever did on the Alliance, it's one of the reasons I've been so reluctant to level a Horde toon. But hey, I stick with my guildmates and they'll jump on any asshole that cracks a nasty remark about me. It's not like my Horde toon will be my new main, after all.

 

[Recidiva]

That's awesome! I'm so glad to hear it! ^_^

I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately, even more than what I used to. Mister and I decided to level Pandaren Monks, so we did that, then a bunch of my guildmates went over to the Horde side and named a guild after me (my main character, actually. The Guild's called "Legion of Theae), so I HAD to join it. We've been leveling our very first Horde-side toons. She's a level 75 Discipline Priest as of today, and the guild is already level 6 even though it's only 2 weeks old! We've been questing our asses off. Thank God they removed the limits on how much guild XP you can get per week.

Anyway...I'm disappointed by how rude people can be on the Horde side. I've gotten a lot more harassment because of my gender from the Red team than I ever did on the Alliance, it's one of the reasons I've been so reluctant to level a Horde toon. But hey, I stick with my guildmates and they'll jump on any asshole that cracks a nasty remark about me. It's not like my Horde toon will be my new main, after all.

My guild in all realms for years has been "Bastion of Sanity" when I can put one together. It's just me and my husband occasionally. I have 11 chars on each realm and I think my Alliance guild is level 20 and my Horde guild level 8. My main passion is crafting, so I have to log in each day to do the farming and crafting dailies, working on faction to get recipes. I loved the battle pet system and got obsessed until I got the 400 pet achievement, and then it settled down after June and I got the Zookeeper title. My son had a great time playing with pets with me and we had a few fun months with that. Alliance is the best set up with all the crafts maxxed and I finally have enough money to get everyone the highest mount speed. The dragon mounts get on my nerves, though, because I can't see a damned thing except dragon. Overall, though, the Pandaria expansion has been my absolute favorite. I can farm! I can farm metal and cloth and leather, oh my! A real farm with dirt and everything! I like the focus on less violent pastimes.

The EQ2 community is a bit smaller and more sedate and more helpful, so I have channels turned on there. I turned off all Warcraft channels years ago and I'm the better for it. As a pretty much solo gameplayer except when I use the group or raid finder, I have a quieter social interaction. The only real trouble I get into on EQ2 channels is when they go off on Warcraft and I have to say "We can hear you..." EQ2 has done some great stuff recently, and I love being able to own and decorate houses, have a guild house all decked out with crafting stations and amenities. One of the best things they do is a system where you can change your level and go explore older content. They have appearance gear. They also put in a player workshop where individuals can make their own appearance armor and house items and sell them to the general public. You can design your own dungeons. Really creative. Everquest Next is going to come out and will have a LOT of player-made content, they're essentially crowd sourcing the development process. Can't wait!

 

[notalwaysweak]

I have a couple of links relevant to this:

http://notalwaysweak.tumblr.com/post/53995501119/reasons-i-love-seanan-mcguire - a Tumblr post I made about author Seanan McGuire, that contains links to a few of her blog posts, including ones about being a girl geek.

http://notalwaysweak.tumblr.com/post/57608043309/women-who-game - a Tumblr post I made signal boosting a survey being done for a PhD on women who game.

 

[KoPilot]

From Gail Simone herself:

I WAS TOLD

…by informed sources that I can’t reveal that attendance at last year’s SDCC was actually, for the first time ever, slightly more female than male.

I don’t know if it’s true. My signing lines and stuff have always skewed differently, so it’s hard for me to tell. But there were women everywhere, at all the comics booths and retailers, the entire time I was there, all five days this year.

Thousands and thousands of women who are at least SEEING the products and books. And they had shopping bags, they’d been buying stuff.

At what point does the question change from, “Why aren’t women reading comics?” to “What are we doing wrong that we aren’t making enough comics that women like?”

And yet, geekery is still seen as a boy's club?

 

[Recidiva]

From Gail Simone herself:

And yet, geekery is still seen as a boy's club?

Couple questions here, and some of them have to do with the way brains work. I'm not really ever going to read comic books, because I like pages with more words on them than pictures in general. Now you could say that's a female characteristic in the sense that there are "romance novels" and "porn mags" and there's a fairly clear gender bias.

To get me to buy a graphic novel it would have to be...more novel than graphic. I'm always going to gravitate toward more emotional content with talky bits. So yes, someone might have to innovate something I really like but...I already have it, it's called a novel. So there's some argument as to whether you're ever going to have a more predominantly female audience in a genre that's intended to highlight the artwork and the action, not necessarily the story. The better the graphic novel, the more men will buy it and will probably still outstrip female readership (lookership?) by the numbers.

I have encountered men, and women, that think that women shouldn't be geeks, or that anybody shouldn't be a geek, that it should be shameful and prone to humiliation. I call them "assholes." It's not gender specific.

They've done the innovation in games, at least Bioware and Bethesda and such, making games that have more complicated stories that you can influence and alter based on your temperament today or your roleplay and not tied to gender. I'm all over that. I get to slaughter stuff to my contentment and develop relationships to my liking.

Most of the assholes you can blow off pretty quickly and get on with hanging out with the cool people.

 

[Recidiva]

A couple examples of persistent gender bias that I've encountered:

People would believe I was a girl if I was a dress wearer or a healer. Mages in robes and clerics were more easily feminized. But when I was a very tall barbarian paladin in Dark Age of Camelot, wielding a ginormous Claymore and splashing through the blood of the frontlines, my character name was Edaran but people mostly called me "Ed" and assumed I was in drag. A lot of this is fixed now because the average game now uses voiceover programs and a lot of people communicate that way and proof is easy to come by.

Not just gaming geek, but skeptical community science-based geek, I know that groups of women (SkepChick one of them) boycotted TAM - "The Amazing Meeting" where skeptics met in Las Vegas, because the male conference attendees had the habit of propositioning female attendees and making inappropriate comments. I suppose I could attribute at least part of this to being drunk in Las Vegas, but it's a deal.

 

[Dyslexicea]

They've definitely managed to cultivate an entire culture of "expendable = glorious" though. Live fast and die young gets you famous and admired. Not exclusive to men, of course, but it's an "option" that's generally more easily available to them. Entertainers, athletes, etc are prime candidates. See also 'how much we love our serial killers'.



I'm talking about stuff like "men have better spacial awareness". People extrapolate all kinds of mythological shit from that like how men make better architects, physicists or better drivers or w/e.

I thought you might like this. Women Top Men in Parking Skills, UK Study Asserts Of course when you listen to the BBC reporter, who did his own study, he some how found just the opposite results. I did say HE didn't I.

 

[KoPilot]

Couple questions here, and some of them have to do with the way brains work. I'm not really ever going to read comic books, because I like pages with more words on them than pictures in general. Now you could say that's a female characteristic in the sense that there are "romance novels" and "porn mags" and there's a fairly clear gender bias.

To get me to buy a graphic novel it would have to be...more novel than graphic. I'm always going to gravitate toward more emotional content with talky bits. So yes, someone might have to innovate something I really like but...I already have it, it's called a novel. So there's some argument as to whether you're ever going to have a more predominantly female audience in a genre that's intended to highlight the artwork and the action, not necessarily the story. The better the graphic novel, the more men will buy it and will probably still outstrip female readership (lookership?) by the numbers.

That's... an immensely gross misrepresentation of the medium.

I could rattle off dozens of graphic novels that have more plot development, meaningful characterization, and "talky bits" than most movies. (And you can't tell me that you don't like movies or TV because they're just too darned visual.)

Please also tell me that your novels don't have adjectives or verbs in them? Because those are visual and action-oriented words, and apparently you don't like those.

I'm sorry, but as a cartoonist, I just can't with this.

Yes I understand that comics have a bad rap thanks to the likes of Marvel and DC, but to claim that they're all action-oriented and obsessively-rendered spectacles of machismo is just as ignorant as saying "I don't read word-books because they're for girls". Like wow, I don't even know how to address this properly.

Comics are a medium, not a genre. Jesus christ.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Not just gaming geek, but skeptical community science-based geek, I know that groups of women (SkepChick one of them) boycotted TAM - "The Amazing Meeting" where skeptics met in Las Vegas, because the male conference attendees had the habit of propositioning female attendees and making inappropriate comments. I suppose I could attribute at least part of this to being drunk in Las Vegas, but it's a deal.

And habits of grabbing, and threatening, and most importantly, a habit of being confident that the conference would make excuses for them and tell the little ladies to be nice to the big important men.

 

[BrightlyGo]

To get me to buy a graphic novel it would have to be...more novel than graphic. I'm always going to gravitate toward more emotional content with talky bits. So yes, someone might have to innovate something I really like but...I already have it, it's called a novel.

Graphic novels are just novels that substitute art for long scene-setting and descriptive passages, leaving the talky bits isolated in word balloons. A good artist can pack a lot of emotional content into an image, too.

 

[Recidiva]

That's... an immensely gross misrepresentation of the medium.

I could rattle off dozens of graphic novels that have more plot development, meaningful characterization, and "talky bits" than most movies. (And you can't tell me that you don't like movies or TV because they're just too darned visual.)

Please also tell me that your novels don't have adjectives or verbs in them? Because those are visual and action-oriented words, and apparently you don't like those.

I'm sorry, but as a cartoonist, I just can't with this.

Yes I understand that comics have a bad rap thanks to the likes of Marvel and DC, but to claim that they're all action-oriented and obsessively-rendered spectacles of machismo is just as ignorant as saying "I don't read word-books because they're for girls". Like wow, I don't even know how to address this properly.

That's an interpretation of the medium from my point of view, take it or leave it, it was intended as constructive and not insulting.

Not to be argumentative (although, I admit I am, but take my word that I'm really not interested in offending you personally) but TV doesn't compare. They have actors who have voices. I recognize actors more often by their voices than by their faces. I realize I'm an outlier and I don't claim to speak for any group. So I veer toward mediums with audio. My vision isn't the greatest and never has been, but I have superhuman ears. It's a minor superpower that mostly involves hearing what people three rooms over are saying and hearing things I wasn't supposed to hear that my kids are doing. My brain focuses on sound.

I'm not "down on" graphic novels because they're for boys. I'm just not interested because they don't engage the part of my brain that gives me the most bang for its eardrum. The neuroscience on this isn't my personal bias, it's established fairly well enough that I don't feel I need to quote the studies. There are plenty of people in the world that are mostly visual. I'm just not one of them, and from most neurological studies I've seen, I have that in common with a lot of women.

There are billions of us though, carve out the market share and more power to you. I'd love to see some good work if you have any suggestions. I'm okay with being called ignorant on the subject, because I am. But I'm not ignorant because I'm a girl, I'm ignorant because I'm a girl who hasn't seen a graphic novel that interested me. I'm also a geek who reads lots of neurological research and doesn't consider it to be sexist to find out that different genders with different brain chemistries have different tendencies.

If you can address people like me properly it'd be good for business.

 

[Recidiva]

And habits of grabbing, and threatening, and most importantly, a habit of being confident that the conference would make excuses for them and tell the little ladies to be nice to the big important men.

Yeah. That. So I'm not blind to the issues and I'm aware of them. I would have more of tendency to label individuals as assholes rather than a whole group, but when a drunken egotistical convention gets underway and the women there complain, I'm fine to not go myself and take their word for it.

 

[KoPilot]

That's an interpretation of the medium from my point of view, take it or leave it, it was intended as constructive and not insulting.

Not to be argumentative (although, I admit I am, but take my word that I'm really not interested in offending you personally) but TV doesn't compare. They have actors who have voices. I recognize actors more often by their voices than by their faces. I realize I'm an outlier and I don't claim to speak for any group. So I veer toward mediums with audio. My vision isn't the greatest and never has been, but I have superhuman ears. It's a minor superpower that mostly involves hearing what people three rooms over are saying and hearing things I wasn't supposed to hear that my kids are doing. My brain focuses on sound.

I'm not "down on" graphic novels because they're for boys. I'm just not interested because they don't engage the part of my brain that gives me the most bang for its eardrum. The neuroscience on this isn't my personal bias, it's established fairly well enough that I don't feel I need to quote the studies. There are plenty of people in the world that are mostly visual. I'm just not one of them, and from most neurological studies I've seen, I have that in common with a lot of women.

There are billions of us though, carve out the market share and more power to you. I'd love to see some good work if you have any suggestions. I'm okay with being called ignorant on the subject, because I am. But I'm not ignorant because I'm a girl, I'm ignorant because I'm a girl who hasn't seen a graphic novel that interested me. I'm also a geek who reads lots of neurological research and doesn't consider it to be sexist to find out that different genders with different brain chemistries have different tendencies.

If you can address people like me properly it'd be good for business.

It just pisses me off because you honestly couldn't get away with this for any other storytelling medium out there (except for maybe anime-- but that's usually because of misogyny). "I don't like movies because they're all too loud." "Well, there's a rich history of silent films out there for you to explore." "I don't like music because I don't like instruments." "There's vocal jazz. There's barbershop. There's electronica. There's Gregorian chants." "I don't like poetry because rhyming is stupid." "..." "I don't like video games because I don't like violence." "There are hundreds of puzzle games out there. Platformers. Titles that are nothing but world exploration. Sandboxes."

But comics are an outlier because of its reputation for being childish male fantasies. And this is a reputation that has a lot of nasty consequences-- for one, the fact that it's so difficult to make a living as a cartoonist. For two, there are very few places to go to learn the craft (all of what, 4 or 5 institutions in North America that recognize it as an artistic medium that takes years of training to grasp?) For three, nobody outside of the geek world really takes your work seriously (which can be extremely socially exhausting, at best), and you can bet your ass that getting your loved ones to actually read your labors of love is like pulling teeth. For four, your genre is considered low art by the art world (unless you also have done the work to carve out a name for yourself in the fine arts scene) unless someone sophisticated comes along and makes it palatable for normal folk a la Lichtenstein. (This personally impacted the quality of my education as a cartoonist-- I went to school for illustration, made the switch in my second year, took all the required classes, but was discouraged from officially switching majors, and my work in both majors went unacknowledged by the department chair. The department chair, by the way, oversaw both cartooning and illustration; he made it very obvious in his orientation talks, in his rounds to portfolio and thesis classes, and even in his uneven distribution of funding, that he saw cartooning as an inferior medium to his cherished illustration.)

Folks are quick to ignore how many graphic novels have made it to the NYT Bestseller list over the years, how many of them win literary awards. Not sure how much more "selling" the genre we cartoonists need to do for the general population. People are going to continue to insist that it's all inane drivel no matter how many libraries carry them, no matter how many literary courses teach them, no matter how much "legitimate" recognition it gets.

Like I said, comics are a medium, not a genre. You're going to have to give me a genre if there's any hope in recommending anything you have a chance of liking.

 

[KoPilot]

Oh, and Recidiva, if you think that men are more inclined to read comics because of brainmeat, you really need to take a gander at the webcomic scene, which, I wager, is skewed toward female creators and definitely skewed toward female readers.

Not to mention that there were the same, if not more, female students enrolled at my school's cartooning program than male.

 

[Recidiva]

It just pisses me off because you honestly couldn't get away with this for any other storytelling medium out there (except for maybe anime-- but that's usually because of misogyny). "I don't like movies because they're all too loud." "Well, there's a rich history of silent films out there for you to explore." "I don't like music because I don't like instruments." "There's vocal jazz. There's barbershop. There's electronica. There's Gregorian chants." "I don't like poetry because rhyming is stupid." "..." "I don't like video games because I don't like violence." "There are hundreds of puzzle games out there. Platformers. Titles that are nothing but world exploration. Sandboxes."

But comics are an outlier because of its reputation for being childish male fantasies. And this is a reputation that has a lot of nasty consequences-- for one, the fact that it's so difficult to make a living as a cartoonist. For two, there are very few places to go to learn the craft (all of what, 4 or 5 institutions in North America that recognize it as an artistic medium that takes years of training to grasp?) For three, nobody outside of the geek world really takes your work seriously (which can be extremely socially exhausting, at best), and you can bet your ass that getting your loved ones to actually read your labors of love is like pulling teeth. For four, your genre is considered low art by the art world (unless you also have done the work to carve out a name for yourself in the fine arts scene) unless someone sophisticated comes along and makes it palatable for normal folk a la Lichtenstein. (This personally impacted the quality of my education as a cartoonist-- I went to school for illustration, made the switch in my second year, took all the required classes, but was discouraged from officially switching majors, and my work in both majors went unacknowledged by the department chair. The department chair, by the way, oversaw both cartooning and illustration; he made it very obvious in his orientation talks, in his rounds to portfolio and thesis classes, and even in his uneven distribution of funding, that he saw cartooning as an inferior medium to his cherished illustration.)

Folks are quick to ignore how many graphic novels have made it to the NYT Bestseller list over the years, how many of them win literary awards. Not sure how much more "selling" the genre we cartoonists need to do for the general population. People are going to continue to insist that it's all inane drivel no matter how many libraries carry them, no matter how many literary courses teach them, no matter how much "legitimate" recognition it gets.

Like I said, comics are a medium, not a genre. You're going to have to give me a genre if there's any hope in recommending anything you have a chance of liking.

Everyone doesn't have to like everything, but there are plenty of everyones and everythings. It's not intended as a personal insult. I can understand and sympathize that you're sensitized to the argument. Just please keep in mind the argument is more nuanced than you're giving credit, or so it seems to me.

Let's be realistic here also. Graphic novels have come a long way toward being recognized as art, and I do think it's art. You really can't condemn me first for being ignorant (which I accept I am, but I'm not being ignorant AT you) and then speak as if I've dismissed mountains of evidence. I'm not really inclined to go further in the conversation, because it seems you're just heaping all the abuse you feel at other people on me. I didn't do nothin'. If you're going to say there's simultaneously too much good stuff to suggest and that you're not inclined to suggest any of it...well, okay. I get the feeling it wouldn't really matter anyway. I'm scum. I get it. I'm okay with it.

 

[Recidiva]

Oh, and Recidiva, if you think that men are more inclined to read comics because of brainmeat, you really need to take a gander at the webcomic scene, which, I wager, is skewed toward female creators and definitely skewed toward female readers.

Not to mention that there were the same, if not more, female students enrolled at my school's cartooning program than male.

No, I got a completely different impression that you failed to comprehend from that asshole, Dan Ariely. What a douche. We should just burn all science because it makes you irritable. Yeah.

You sure made a convert!

(just to be clear that last bit was actually sarcasm and I'm fine with offending you personally now.)

 

[KoPilot]

Okay, to be clear, you made several claims that I was disputing:

1. Comics are too intensely visual for you, and are inherently geared more towards men because of the pictures and because the quality of storytelling isn't up to snuff.

2. Men read/make way more comics than women, it will always be this way (because science).

I don't really care if they're not your bag, but you can't claim that you don't like comics because the stories aren't cerebral enough, and you also can't claim that women have significantly less interest in comics than men (because science). Clearly you are the one that's getting offended with my giving you some evidence that points to the contrary-- if one of the only schools in the US that gives out BFAs in cartooning has higher female enrollment than male, that's not something you can really argue with.

I am literally just taking apart your claims here. If you had just come out and said "I don't like comics because they're not really my thing and I've never had the time to really read them," that would have been fine. But you were appealing to some kind of objective, universal standard that doesn't actually exist, insinuating that the medium itself is of low quality, which is going to be insulting to a cartoonist.

 

[KoPilot]

And I was not being sarcastic when I said I cannot recommend you anything unless I know what your interests are. I'm not going to recommend Rosemary's Baby to everybody just in the same way I'm not going to recommend Fletcher Hanks or Ghost World.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Yeah. That. So I'm not blind to the issues and I'm aware of them. I would have more of tendency to label individuals as assholes rather than a whole group, but when a drunken egotistical convention gets underway and the women there complain, I'm fine to not go myself and take their word for it.

I would love to call it an individual problem, and I can deal with problematic individuals, but it'sa systemic problem and that's where the problem lies.

You sure made a convert!

haven't you figured this out yet? Most of us have given up on 'making converts." There is a mountain of evidence out there, easily available. Someone cares enough to look into it, or they don't care.

 

[Recidiva]

I would love to call it an individual problem, and I can deal with problematic individuals, but it'sa systemic problem and that's where the problem lies.

haven't you figured this out yet? Most of us have given up on 'making converts." There is a mountain of evidence out there, easily available. Someone cares enough to look into it, or they don't care.

Yup, which is why I don't think TAM should be canceled, but I do support the boycott. Gotta establish precedents.

Heeeey. That was out of context. I saw what you did there.

 

[KoPilot]

haven't you figured this out yet? Most of us have given up on 'making converts." There is a mountain of evidence out there, easily available. Someone cares enough to look into it, or they don't care.

Not sure how much sillier "men are built to like comics more than women" can get than putting that as a response to Gail Simone being told to stay quiet about there being a higher female attendance than male at comic con.

 

[BiBunny]

Ok, so apparently what I can get from this conversation is that I am a man. I've always secretly wondered, so it's good to know.

 

[midwestyankee]

Ok, so apparently what I can get from this conversation is that I am a man. I've always secretly wondered, so it's good to know.

While I do understand that biology isn't destiny and all that, I'm skeptical.

 

[Bramblethorn]

And habits of grabbing, and threatening, and most importantly, a habit of being confident that the conference would make excuses for them and tell the little ladies to be nice to the big important men.

Couple of major allegations of harassment and rape by big-name sceptics recently:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/12/are-we-having-fun-yet/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyng...omeone-pulls-the-pin-and-hands-you-a-grenade/

AFAIK nothing that has been tested in a court of law. But on the second one it's interesting to see how many people responded by relating similar experiences with the same guy.

Bleah.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Ok, so apparently what I can get from this conversation is that I am a man. I've always secretly wondered, so it's good to know.

Sure, me too--But every once in a while have found myself surrounded by men who were positive that I am not, in fact, a man.

Men, you see, get to pick and choose and be the chaser.

Women get to say no until she means yes, be a bitch if she says no for reals, be a slut if she does the chasing.