I wanted to take a break from criticizing (for the most part, but it’ll only be minor, I promise..) and focus, instead, on something rather positive I’ve seen happening. To be less vague, I enjoy playing a video game called Starcraft; it’s a competitive strategy game, but the details about it aren’t very important. What is important is that there is a lot of professional competition in tournaments that can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. While it is mostly dominated be geeky guys like myself, there has been a sudden surge in women competing at the professional level. Not just competing, but competing with men and being given contracts for the same teams as men. Not only do they receive a salary, but they basically have their cooking, cleaning, and other basic living needs taken care of in a team house where they live with their team mates. For any player, this sort of thing is a huge deal, and not an easy accomplishment.
While this isn’t necessarily a huge deal, I found it pretty cool to see an all female tournament, with women from all over the world traveling to China to compete. In the subsequent week or so, several female players were signed to professional teams, where they would live side by side with their male counterparts in “team houses.” Several of the players were also seen competing in several major tournaments as well. Despite my usual tendency to at least pretend I’m not an unbelievably huge nerd, I felt like all of this recent news was worth sharing.
I think the most exciting development is that there are female players who are competing and on the same teams as men; there aren’t separate leagues for men and women. With the case of the all female tournament, it seems to have been more about giving female players exposure they wouldn’t normally receive in a typically male dominated activity. The most obvious comparison is actual sports, in which you typically see men and women in completely separate leagues and no cross over. It’s reassuring to see such an open embrace of men and and women competing together.
While I’m excited to see men and women involved together in something I enjoy, I can’t ignore the ugly fact that, in most cases, video games and the internet seem to present women with more harassment and objectification than opportunities for equality. I think back to playing on Xbox Live with my friend Sam, who dared to talk on her microphone while we played. Every time she did, she was confronted with threats of rape, abuse, and any sort of attack on her gender you can think of. And, unfortunately, this seems to be the case for most women who dare to threaten the male dominated world of video games. The expectation is that women can never be as good as men at video games, and the second a woman threatens that hegemony by even trying to compete, she has to be verbally beaten down until she’d rather do something she enjoys less than bother getting on Xbox Live.
Even when trying to be supportive of women, some men are unable to even do that without making me die a little on the inside.
The comment referred to this picture.
While pretty offensive, I get the creeping suspicion that he honestly thought it was a compliment he was giving. I mean, the image isn’t sexual in any way. You can barely see the sides of their faces; all you really see is a bunch of female players practicing. To him, girls participating in the same activity him is THAT exciting. And even if I’m reading into what he’s saying too much, what he said is still an illustration of the sort of failed support of women that I see too often. Instead of offering genuine support, they manage to reduce the attempts of women to break through gender barriers to sexuality. Not only that, but it transforms what should be a woman doing something she enjoys into an attempt to be “one of the guys.”
ShoutOut! James Madison University 