N.B: This article has received some small edits since original publication, in order to add examples contributed via email or comment. I have also done a few edits to clarify certain points and correct typos etc. Many thanks to everyone who has commented. This article also appeared here and at Geek Feminism. I have also done a round up of some relevant reading and responses which I highly recommend.
When I log in to WoW, I don’t get discriminated against because I am a woman. My opinions are valued by my fellow officers and guild members (and a wider community of people on my realm.) This blog is my voice, and I have power over the comments. I am surrounded by intelligent, clever, eloquent people in the communities I have chosen to interact with. I have been educated by their words, by their examples. If I want I can exist in an online bubble and chose to believe that this way of thinking is mainstream.
And then I poke my head out of my friendly little bubble, and the magnitude of crap out there makes me wibble and want to hide away again. It’s not FUN calling out your friends on ableist/sexist/racist bullshit, especially when they held your hands through multiple dramas at University, and still persist in wanting to hang out with you after you’ve spent a morning-after dry-heaving into a toilet.
It’s not just about a statue (or bunny ears, or skimpy armor)
Not long ago there was some minor kerfuffle over the lack of a female character in the ‘Victory’ statue. This is the statue in the centre of Dalaran that commemtorates the ‘victory’ over Arthas. A lot of people (not just men) dismissed this as being over-sensitive and a bit pointless, and the story didn’t even really make it into the blogosphere. Even I didn’t bother with it.
What makes me upset about relatively small things like this is not the individual small problem, but the overall picture. Even the bitch jokes and dialogue, although they seem isolated, make up a much bigger picture that is produced by a development team that is predominatly white and male. Many women in the geek industries will adopt the mainstream geek culture in order to fit in – just as in mainstream society we accept that showing cellulite is inappropriate, and that women should wear bras because otherwise men might be distracted by nipples.
So let us have a look at context
Please bear in mind that this is not a complete list, and I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with everything on the list. Some of the examples given deserve a more completely analysis than I am able to give here, and it is very easy to disagree with or dismiss most of these problematic things on an individual basis. The specifics aren’t the point, and the intent of Blizzard is not the point, it is the trends produced by the male privilege that I am calling out here, not the game itself.
So, we have the various skimpy outfits. The quite frankly random cleavage that happens to a lot of generic dungeon sets (that gear set that covers EVERYTHING but the women’s eyes and their cleavage, for example?) A lot of women in the game do enjoy dressing up in outfits that reveal the curves of their female toon. Others just want their plate armor to cover their soft organs. We have the Queen of the Red Dragons dressed in the typical bikini outfight – surely a more regal outfit could be found for her? (A part of me feels that dragons wouldn’t clothe themselves at all in human form, but male dragons don’t show any inclination towards nekkidness.)
Moving on from skimpy outfits, we head to the language applied to anything that is sexy or shows flesh – slut-shaming, body hate. There is a difference between criticising the ubiquity of the in-game and fan art that has plate bikini and is catering to the male gaze, and directing hateful language towards the female body, or a woman who chooses to wear a short skirt. Unfortunately the two tend to go hand in hand.
While we’re on skimpy armour, lets take a look at Ysera, Alextrazsa and Sylvanas. Now, I have no problems with characters sharing models – it happens a lot in WoW. Even though (as pointed out by Dee of Azeroth Me many of the unique male characters are topless, there isn’t the same sexualisation of those characters going on. I love all three models from the shoulder up. One model (Sylvanas maybe) with the skimpy bikini top would have been fine. I can even reconcile Alextrazsa as supposedly the ‘embodiment of fertility’, but did they really need to have the same faces and armour? Maybe Alextrasza and Ysera share a wardrobe, but very few other dragons show such an interest in standing around naked.
Also Sylvanas needs to have a little extra rot going on. What with the undead thing.
Next we have the two major female characters being excised from the Lich King defeat story. Sylvanas and Jaina are there all the way through WCIII, Vanilla, TBC and Lower Spire, and yet when it comes to the Lich King fight they are mysteriously absent. There is no absolution for their interactions with Arthas, in this expansion.
Then those two major female characters are the embodiment of classic ‘female leader’ tropes, with Sylvanas being patently ‘up to no good’ and Jaina succumbing to female ‘weakness’ at every turn. Actually, take a look at this fabulous breakdown of female characters in WoW, with percentages and character archetypes. I’m not drawing any conclusions from it yet, but it makes for an interesting read and break down. One thing I do draw from it is the ‘Maiden/Lover’, ‘Mother’, and ‘Hag/Shrew’ breakdowns, which I think require some deeper analysis than I am able to give here.
ADDITION: It was noted by a commenter that the female leaders seem to be associated with rebellions and subversiveness rather than ‘rightful’ leadership. Something worth exploring further.
And Tyrande? Yes she can sit quietly in Darnassus and glare meaningfully over at at Fandrel. She doesn’t need to do anything. (Note that I haven’t explored Tyrande’s role in Cataclysm yet, but for a lot of the books her storyline is defined and couched within the way it impacts upon the two men in her life.)
Then we have the ‘habit’ of Jaina-hate, calling her a whore or a slut because she dared to have relationships with more than one man. This is not of Blizzard’s making, but it is a perfect example of sexist attitudes prevalent within the player base (and certainly not limited to men.) She needs a storyline makeover that doesn’t involve her ‘relationships’ with men. This attitude towards Jaina is prevalent in many, many WoW Communities, even in female-friendly spaces.
Then Maiev Shadowsong who, by the end, only had purpose to exist because of a man, a story thread explicitly acknowledge in the Illidan fight. Not to mention that most female ‘bosses’ will play second fiddle to a leading male character. Of 2 female ‘end bosses’, Vashj still plays second fiddle to Illidan and Onyxia (besides being dead) is arguabley outranked by Nefarion. For each expansion, the ultimate end-game entities have been male – Kel’thuzud, Illidan/Archimonde, and Lich King. Cataclysm won’t change this, but I am looking forward to a future expansion featuring Azshara (although common sense tells me that this is likely to be an expansion involving Sargeras.)
No female soldier in the victory statue. Despite there being male and female guard npcs all over the game, they are absent from this representation of victory. Not just the statue, the fact of being shouted down for having the temerity to talk about it. While, again, this feels very minor and unimportant, when viewed in a wider context it is upsetting.
And come to that, enter groups of NPCs with no female model at all – ogres, kobolds, furbolgs, Gronn. Although there could be a comment made for the idea that these are races which simply lack the sexual dimorphism of the playable races, or lack a true gender binary/human style reproductive system. Dragons would be an example of this, although they have very gendered human forms, there is always Chromie/Chromuru. Wolfshead cites this as an example of sexism against men as the ‘villains’, which would hold more weight if we had more women as ‘heros’ in the first place. But no, all the females, good and bad, play second fiddle to male protagonists. Only minor, insignificant NPCs get to pass the Bechdel test in WoW (I am unsure if this applies to any of the books though.)
I mean seriously, the Bechdel test? It is fucking scary how few games and movies pass this.
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
Numerous ‘jokes’ in the beta that play off gendered insults and stereotypes, and one joke that is either about consensual bondage/goblin greed or about rape, depending on whether you hear ‘he’ or ‘she’. I’m not saying that some of the current jokes are any better, but there are ways do innuendo jokes without buying into the more degrading aspects of being compared a female dog, or a golddigger. Not only that, but it is male designers putting these jokes in the mouths of female player characters – not the same thing as the word being reclaimed and used by women at all.
A lot of the female jokes in general will play off gender and sexuality, while male jokes will be just that – jokes with no gender related component. The female human jokes even gently poke fun at gender stereotypes (rather than merely perpetuating them) with “So me and my friends swap clothes all the time, we’re all the same size!”
The new horde leader calling Sylvanas a ‘Bitch‘. While it can be ‘explained away’ by Blizzard wanting to represent Garrosh as the sort of person who says that, the fact is that they are legitimising the use of the language. On the scale of insults towards women it is relatively low (and also cue commentators telling me they’re female and they’re okay with it) but it is a largely unnecessary step, and it comes out of the mouth of a character that the audience is apparently supposed to sympathise with.
A questline in the Goblin starter zone where the player character has to murder their cheating ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, and rip out their still-beating hearts. Again, the sexism of this is debatable (the male/female npcs involved in this are called Candy and Chip En Dale) but it’s not sitting pretty with the entire picture.
The fact that, of all the Warrior spell and talent icons, Chas points out to us that the only recognisably female Icon is for a talent called Rude Interruption. Hmm what about the other classes? Only looking at the Cataclysm tree for these talents, and not at the spell icons.
- Shamanhave only Blessing of the Eternals in the Restoration Tree
- Death Knights, Druids, Paladins and Warlocks come out with a count of 0 (although druids only have a single humanoid icon at all, so that was 50/50)
- Hunters get to be smug, because they have Kindred Spirits and Careful Aim
- Mages have more humanoid icons, and only Shattered Barrier brings the feminine to the yard.
- Priests get Rapture and Guardian Spirit.
So the ‘female icons’ for our talents, and most of them are healing/nurture related, with Hunters and Warriors at the exception to that, while 4 other classes have no female representation at all in their talent trees. As with all my other examples, this is a small thing and easily ignored in isolation (because really, icons?) When taken in context with larger trends it is disheartening. (And please don’t tell me I’m overreacting – I write a lot, it’s what I do.) I will say that Blizzard has put a lot of gender neutral icons, and I sincerely doubt this was intentional on the part of the artists, but the majority of humanoid icons are very masculine.
It’s Playboy Bunny Ears being distributed as part of Noblegarden, a holiday otherwise associated with Easter, and an achievement that requires you to put the ears on female characters of level 18 of each race – a clear reference to the general ‘age of consent’ in many parts of the western world. The ears themselves are pretty innocuous. As a sex-positive person I do not hold that all pornography is degrading to women, but I find the Playboy brand extremely problematic and unwelcome in the WoW universe, especially coming with the ‘level 18′ reference. I’m not offended by the achievement so much as worried by it.
It’s the character models all adhering to the traditional hourglass figure, even though the actual body type range is fairly broad, and yet not even modelling the boob animations with any kind of support. Playing my favourite dwarf characters always make me wince when they run – even in plate the boobs wobble around unconstrained! There is a positive angle to this, in that Blizzard changed the models of the women in game in response to the complaints of female players. As someone who adored the old female troll model, this makes me sad, but it is positive that Blizzard responded to the female voices rather than dismissing them.
And it’s all the shit that many women have to experience in game, from the player base, from internalised sexism, from other women.
“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?” is female human joke phrase repeated by a lot of female players – except that it instead refers to playing a healer, or using feminine wiles to get things from guild mates, or needing protection and help from male friends.
So, -isms and Geekery, Pewter?
Oh yes, I was talking about it in a wider context. For reasons of space I haven’t gone into detail of why something is or isn’t sexist in the list above, I’ve merely attempted to highlight an awful lot of things which add up to some problematic view points. I don’t think Azeroth as a world is anti-feminist at all, but a lot of what the designers put in game clearly come from a particular, privileged position. Even raising your voice to speak out about such things brings in silencing accusations of “Reverse Sexism” and ‘being overly politically correct’ (and even blaming the sexism on the female player for presenting themselves as female within game. What about, yanno, blaming the man for being sexist towards her?)
Wanting to change these things, wanting to talk about them, doesn’t mean sanitising the World of Warcraft. Far from it – it means enrichment, and moving beyond the tired old privileged tropes of male-gaze orientated fantasy, and a discouragement of the sort of bigoted language that has free rein in many guilds. It is not sanitising to want two major female law characters to talk to each other about something other than a man, or to want a female boss to be the focus of an expansion, or to speak out against rape culture (I really recommend reading the comments of Wolfshead’s article as well, as there is some excellent discussion/points made by Ken and Ysharros. This blog post is not a critique/answer to Wolfshead, but he does represent very mainstream opinions.)
As a geek feminist I commonly have my views dismissed because I’m directly commenting on issues that currently concern main-stream feminist (like gender representation in government, gender mutilation, contraception and body rights.) This is not a blog about mainstream feminism, about why menstrual products are taxed as luxury products or how I feel about wearing make up at work. The value of the more global battlefields do not mean that the smaller geek/culture discussions are not worth having. Games, Art, TV, they all reflect values and attitudes that we have in the real world. Science Fiction and Fantasy have long been a place for writers to speculate on topics of gender, power and sex, and Games merely continue that tradition as they enter our lives very early on in the western world. Geek things matter to me, and I’m invested in them. I chose to watch and read all kinds of things, but consumption of media doesn’t grant immunity to critique (or we’d never have game reviews.)
The idea that as geek females we should simply put up and shut up, we should be quiet, and that we are to blame because we want to participate, is extremely damaging and sexist in it’s own right. All too often male bloggers and posters on forums will pull out a female gamer friend who agrees with their point of view and use that to support a privileged point of view. As a gamer I have fallen into the trap of painting myself as ‘not like those other girl gamers who flirt and cause drama’, and that sort of internalised sexism is as much a hindrance to equality and progressiveness as anything else.
On Heteronormativity, Race and Gender Binaries
And all of the above comes from a straight, white, educated woman. There are many further discussions to be hand on intersectional topics. If women, who aren’t a ‘small minority’ have trouble enough with being told that being ‘not quite equal’ is good enough, then topics of race and sexuality (which are talked about even less than feminism) are the elephant in the room. This isn’t about men, or hating them, it’s about what is not visible already. It’s bigger and more complicated than trying to boil gender bias down to ‘boys v girls’.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jennifer, Pewter. Pewter said: I don't see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery: http://goo.gl/SBUg New blog post #geekfeminism #warcraft [...]
You know what makes this even worse is the fact that mainstream media has always seemed to market Sci-fi and Fantasy to the male audience. That seems to be the whole ideal, and the fact that women don’t care for such things.
Personally, as a woman who’s played as a man on the internet and in WoW, once I switched back on becoming female, I noticed how much attention I got. This included negative attention as well as positive, however I feel that just because I’m a woman I don’t need to be helped all of the time.
I am grateful that some (but not all) of my male friends enjoy the fact that I can play a strong female role as a DM running a campaign with lead female NPCs. I’m grateful to have male friends who aren’t just my friends because they hope to get into my pants.
They say this is a man’s world, but I really feel women are starting to get some kind of edge to it and starting to stand out more than just objects or babymakers as the case may be. Women are gaming more and with that, hopefully, we’ll be seeing more women game designers. We do know that Blizz is listening, to a point, but will they make some better changes in future expansions? That’s entirely up to them.
Great post, I’m glad someone addressed the issues at hand.
People who say that we shouldn’t portray ourselves as female to avoid the problems really annoy me. Why should we have to hide who we are? We have just as much right to play the game as any guy.
I think you make a lot of really good points. Some things I’ve noticed too, others I haven’t.
I was over at the mmo-champion forums the other day and people were having a discussion about something. I think it was casual vs hardcore. And within such a discussion which really doesn’t even have anything to do with females playing, I see people using annoying sterotype arguments like “casual players and clicker housew-wives”. Excuse me? I don’t click.. I’m not a housewife.. and even if I was.. What difference does it make? I’m sure being a housewife doesn’t automatically make you a clicker, nor does it make you a bad player – and even if you ARE a clicker.. maybe.. oh I don’t know.. you’re a male? I’m sure there’s as many male clickers as female.
About Garrosh using the word “bitch” – it is annoying. But the whole jargon of the game annoys me. People using phrases like “I got raped” or “That’s so gay” drive me nuts. There is nothing wrong with being gay, so why is it that within gaming culture we use it as a “bad name” to call people? I don’t sympathise with Garrosh though.. as we’re meant to.. nor with Varian Wrynn.. I think they’re two of the least likable NPCs in the game.
About the lack of female icons in talent trees.. I’m more annoyed that warlocks are stuck with a male demon form, even if you’re a female toon. Seriously, I don’t want to run around as a male demon. I’d rather they had made it asexual like the voidwalker than obviously male.
And the armour.. I’m a warrior tank in my guild.. I run in and tank bosses.. with my midriff bare? Seriously? I’m wearing full plate armour and a big shield – but I leave my belly unclothed so they can easily just chop me in half?
Saga´s last [type] ..The Reason I Hate Gnomes
OMG this. Just… so much of this.
As far as games go, I think WoW is still better than the majority when it comes to the representation of women, but that’s not even close to saying it’s any kind of “perfect”. And maybe it’s just me, but there does seem to be a bit of, um, how shall we say… backsliding on the issue, first in BC and then subsequently in WotLK.
And don’t even get me started on SCII; after WoL I’m starting to think the positive female representation we did get in vanilla was a fluke… :\
Incidentally, it’s interesting you make the “white male” assumption about Blizz’s devs. While that might be true of the “faces” that get bought out at BlizzCon, a lot of of the photos of their rank-and-file staff (not to mention their game cedits) don’t reflect that at all. I don’t know whether this impression holds up to, like, rigorous statistical analysis, but I remember noticing it quite strongly after seeing some employee snapshots somewhere…
Dee´s last [type] ..In which I almost had something nice to say about RealID Almost
Yeah, a lot of the problem is to do with female concerns and values being belittled or devalued, even by women (eeewww girlie), just as you say with the ‘house wife’ example. People stay at home and looking after the kids or doing the household work is not inherently a bad thing, but it was both a cage for women AND a stick to beat them with. Baby making is both devalued by society AND viewed as something that all women should want to do.
I could go on and on about the lack of prominent female characters among the neutral factions too. Take the Ebon Blade and the Argent Crusade – we see women in their ranks as trainers or merchants or questgivers (and to be fair, they’re probably ranked fairly high if they have the authority to give orders on behalf of the EB or AC), but it’s ultimately the men who lead the charge; it’s the men who are in the visible command positions and the cinematics; therefore, it’s the men who get the credit (and the recognition) for doing things like bringing down the Lich King.
As to the female leaders … argh. Sylvanas, for all that I find problematic about her as a character, has played a prominent role in this xpac and will probably do so in Cataclysm. Jaina was reduced to a teary-eyed sidekick, and Tyrande’s been completely inactive for 5 years. It’s so frustrating. :-/
Shizukera Nightfury´s last [type] ..Who Needs a Hug
On the Blizzard employee stuff, the few photos of higher ups I’ve seen has continued the ‘white male geek’ mantra, and the photos of the rank and file tends to be of people in community positions? I did some searches but my google-fu failed me, so I don’t really know about the race and gender proportions of the artistic, storyline and programming departments.
Re: books and the Bechdel test…
I am probably not the best person to talk on this subject since I have only read a handful of the books but it may please you to know that so far the WoW book “Cycle of Hatred”, which I have recently started reading, includes a lot of Jaina and Aegwynn talking about magecraft in general, as well as a lot of Jaina and a female officer (named Lorena) talking about tactical strategies and the like.
Actually the book seems to tackle the gender problem head-on, with multiple references to the above mentioned female officer being discriminated against and having to deal with it, but I am far too new to the ideas of feminism to know if the author did a good job with it or not. (Not to imply that I am anti-feminist or anything, I have just admittedly never thought about it before.)
Thinking back to my favorite Warcraft book of all time, “The Last Guardian”… I don’t think it comes anywhere close to passing the test. Kind of a sausagefest book, I do love it though. But I am biased because it is about my favorite raid. <3
Yeah. I was compiling this at work, which means I’m going to login to a lot of counter examples this evening I’m sure. I could also include the player responses to the ‘Her Tallness’ campaign on the beta forums.
Any more ‘examples’ of such trends would be massively helpful in general, if you’ve got more that I’ve missed
I think I’d also like to focus more on perceptions of gender and sexuality in a very heteronormative world, but that’s a post for another day.
I think one of the disappointments of WotLK for me is that in many ways the depiction of women has gone backwards – even though in the books, in vanilla wow, there were some much more even-handed stories going on for the female characters as well. I’ve not been able to read all the WoW books, but I shall keep an eye out for the scene you mentioned, and maybe a review of the warcraft books from a feminist view point is something I can do later on. Cycle of Hatred sounds extremely interesting, especially in regards to Lorena.
And no worries about being new. I would call myself pretty new to both geek feminism and mainstream feminism. I’ve always felt pretty empowered by my lifestyle and the education I’ve had, but never really engaged with the problems involved on a critical level until the past few years.
I can address the “Blizzard Employee demographic” question a little bit, because I have been to Blizz HQ a number of times and worked with Blizzard on a couple projects.
The “white and male” descriptor is not universal, but it does apply to the overwhelming majority of a) higher-ups (decision makes & people with final authority over various projects) and, perhaps more importantly, b) the department in charge of story development. The latter is probably more telling in terms of what we see reflected in game.
There are a lot of diverse people on Blizzard’s payroll. It’s just that the positions for who gets to determine who the WoW characters are, what they do, and how they’re portrayed, is in fact mostly straight, white males, so I think that Pewter’s conclusions in that regard are pretty spot-on.
Excellent, excellent, excellent. Also I’m really glad you said: “As a gamer I have fallen into the trap of painting myself as ‘not like those other girl gamers who flirt and cause drama’, and that sort of internalised sexism is as much a hindrance to equality and progressiveness as anything else.”
This was a problem I used to have and it took me a long time to overcome my own internal sexism even while practicing feminism. So I’m glad you mentioned it.
I really enjoy your articles; I hungrily wait for the social ones. When we first defeated the Lich King, one of my first comments was to joke about how Jaina was missing. It hadn’t occurred to anyone else (all male) in the guild. Now a (small) argument could be made that the storyline was just plain poorly written. I don’t care that it makes me sound elitist but… come on! You get billions of our dollars and that’s the best you can come up with? (And can we hire someone other than Ted and Diane from accounting to do some goddamn voice acting please?) Where’s the conclusion of Jaina’s story? She follows you up to observe Saurfang’s downfall (cries about it of course),then suddenly doesn’t want to traverse the final steps to see his face once more, the face she constantly touted as still having the man she loved hiding behind? – there’s sooooo many (and lots of non-sexist) plot holes. I hadn’t even thought about Tyrande and Sylvannas, but the more I think about it, the more peeved I feel.
I don’t mind the icons, the skimpy clothes (I like wearing the skimpy holiday outifts, Shammy gear usually leaves you feeling like a you’re wearing a sleeping bag), but hearing about the new race emotes, learning just now about Garrosh’s bitch comment, and just really considering the whole sphere of female roles in the Blizzard universe while reading this has me feeling exceptionally dissapointed. I really hope it is a stereotype that Blizzard’s main designers are white Christian (there’s soooo many Christian references in this game, but that’s another topic) guys, but then, if they aren’t, what does that mean? That there are some chicks and non-white people that design for their customer’s lowest common denominator ? – but actually that’s what’s happening either way.
I don’t have to worry about sexism really, in my real world I’m extremely stubborn about pre-defined roles, and in the game I associate with my mature, supportive, mostly male guild. When I see this kind of design though, and the especially the roles and stories the women are lumped into, it really gets my goat.
PS, I think the last expansion will undoubtedly be about Sargeras, but even if they did do something about Azshara, wouldn’t you be worried that it would just end up being like any other villified female story-arc, anywhere in the geek world? Here’s a woman who goes off the path, always for power hungry reasons, and rules chaotically (no delusional schemes of cleansing the world, just running it into the ground with self-absorbed power lust) with emotion and lack of rationality, and is finally defeated, and no one tries to save her last remnant of humanity – ever – ‘cause you know, there is none, or like, damaged women are just unpleasant to think about and can’t serve any useful purpose or be rehabilitated.
PPS, When you complete the legendary quest line, there is a small epilogue for each of the 5 main characters to whom an item is given from the Lich King’s body – 2 are Sylvannas and Jaina, who shed some “closure” on the story.
Thank you Lani <3
Yeah. I think feminism and intersectionality in general can become a big circle of self-checking for privilege and -isms of various kinds, but as someone who was always inclined to self-criticism it simply becomes a part of self-discovery ‘What do I really think about X and why do I think that?’ is so important.
Ugh, I don’t even know where to start.
I guess I could comment on the retardedness of full breastplates almost ALWAYS having a “boob-form”. I realize that as far as realism in fantasy goes, it’s one of the things that will not be changed, just like the chain-mail bikinis are probably here to stay. (Small derail: League of Legends has a character called Kayle. I love her to bits. She’s badass, she’s strong, and best of all: her breastplate is there for protection, not to show off her breasts in plate-curves.)
I also realize a lot of women like these breastplates. They like the confirmation that yes, they’re a badass warrior who can kick seven kinds of ass, and they’ll look female while doing so. It certainly drives that point home, after all, but what about those of us who simply want to play a badass warrior without focusing on the gender? So I happen to have a vagina. Why does this have to be emphasized in the uniform my crusader out for world peace and the destruction of all things undead (or whatever
) wears?
But what I really wanted to talk about was strong, female, independent characters. I mean, we all know the deal in WoW (the game, not the books.) – you’ve listed it up here quite well – but this is mirrored in the general fantasy literature. Sure, there are exceptions. There’s a wonderful book about a female paladin my brother gave me for my 13th birthday, for example, and her, along with Eowyn and a few others, ended were some of my big rolemodels growing up. (The book, not the movies.) It’s young adult, however, and while I love the genre, I like my fantasy dark, gritty and a bit more “grown up”.
I’ve work as a clerk in a fantasy/scifi-specialized bookstore for nine years, with the responsibility of finding new titles for our shelves. I’ve read a lot, I’m very familiar with what sells and what doesn’t, both in our store and a bit more generally speaking – and I’m pretty sad to say that a distrubingly large part of my customers will specifically ask for something by a male author, with male main characters. In addition to this, a lot of our best-sellers do not have what I would call “normal” female characters. They have damsels-in-distress. They have harridans. They have the nagging love-interest. (Again, there are exceptions – I said “a lot of”, not “all of”.)
What does this mean? I’m honestly not to sure. It’s like what you said about WoW – one of these things alone doesn’t really mean anything. You take all the “No, girls don’t write good fantasy, I want a male author” and “ugh, not a female protagonist”, the lack of well-rounded females generally speaking and it starts to add up. Sure, my customers can ask for whatever they want – it’s their money, after all, but are there really so few good fantasy/scifi books written by females, with female characters, that both genders can enjoy equally?
I don’t really know. But whatever we see in a game is, as you said, a reflection of the world, and perhaps we just need to get more girls into writing novels, drawing comics and becoming game developers.
I kinda feel like I wandered off-track with this. Have a giant spammy comment, woop.
Tl;dr: I AGREE WITH THIS POST D:
I have that problem too… it’s so bad, when I see techie Linux posts written by a woman I always start out a little wary. And yet here I am, a techie Linux woman. Ugh! I’m trying so hard to get over that one. I have so much respect for women in the tech industry. (I probably girlcrush on some of the more prominent ones, haha)
Yeah. I’ve developed some definite geek girl crushes over the past year or so. Even when I read about ‘empowerment’ by other women I sometimes struggle to take it seriously because of the discussion is very first steps, and involves a lot of internalised sexism about all things female and feminine. I doubly struggle in every day life because I’m a fat woman who likes fashion – and the fashion industry is extremely bad at tokenising and demeaning women like me. So I am participating and perpetuating standard ideas of beauty and femininity, even as I learn to engage with the problems inherent in them.
Feminism and intersectionality aren’t instant for anyone.
I think your comment about gritty and ‘grown up’ hits the nail on the head perfectly. Sometimes the lack of depth to female characters is simply lazy writing, and it is often mirrored in the male characters, but women (even when hypersexualised) are so reduced, and the depictions of all characters can be extremely juvenile. I don’t understand how it is radical to want women to be visible and a normal part of the world rather than special and sanitised.
Thank you for addressing such an important issue in such a calm and articulate manner! The issue of sexism (and any other -ism, for that matter) tends to get so heated that sometimes the legitimate arguments run the risk of getting drowned out by emotion.
I think the RealID fiasco really spotlighted gender and sexism issues that are so prevalent in this game- both in the society and WoW itself. If there’s one good thing to come from that situation, it’s the fact that WoW women gamers really came together and talked about these issues more openly. We realized that our experiences are not unique and that there are so many strong and talented female voices in this community. We don’t have to stay meekly silent and accept rampant misogyny as the norm.
Now the challenge is to continue our discussion of these topics and hopefully get the BlizzDev team to hear what we’re saying and alter course. This is not about knee-jerk, “hate men” attitude. This is about fair and accurate representation and creating a more inclusive and dynamic gaming environment for everybody.
Exactly. Calling out privilege or unfairness is not about dragging men down at all, but is often taken as a personal attack on men. This is not the case at all for me – I think many videogames would benefit from a greater range of male role models as well as female ones. Computer games are slowly becoming viewed as mainstream media, and I think the discussion on the responsibilities of game makers is an interesting one (and by no means clear cut.)
I find it so hard to remain calm through some of these discussions, but I try to do so here as it is on the fringes of ‘mainstream wow’ blogs and a lot of my readers don’t come to the blog with the same tools or viewpoints as me.
Off-topic for sure but Pewter do you read The Rotund or Fatshionista by chance? Google them if not, both geeks who run blogs related to feminism, geekery and fat fashion. If the term “fatshion” rings any bells for you then oh man, awesome.
Awlbiste´s last [type] ..awlbiste- @deliciasez just because it doesnt bother some doesnt mean its not an issue
@awlbiste I am a long term member of fatshionista LJ, and I used to run an FA blog (although it didn’t last very long)
A topic for later on -health, fat and gaming. I can just see the trolls now.
I read your posts all the time and very much apperciate them, and couldn’t resist posting my great thanks for postin this one. I really appreciated how you didn’t claim a simple response but still feel strongly and to speak up. Thanks for doing it. Count me in as a brother in support.
Dammit, Pewter, you could at least provide a warning of some kind:
**WARNING**
This post contains many excellent links to sites you might not have read. You will have even more reading to do in your limited time.
An excellent post.
theanorak´s last [type] ..It could end here
PPPS, Ugh, I wish I hadn’t clicked on the link to the Blizz forums regarding that woman’s complaint. I mean, I knew it would be ugly (it’s the Blizz forums afterall), but it still makes me furious to read. I don’t even have the words to succinctly describe the levels / magnitude of wrong. Deeply dissapointed in youth culture.
I just got pointed at this blog because I was the person who complained about the statue when it first appeared.
The crap I got for daring to raise the subject and complain to Blizzard about it was unbelievable. I had originally sent my complaint via email to Blizzard and got a boilerplate “take it to the forums” type response. I was personally more bothered by the response from a number of the wow_ladies Live Journal community members. I even ended up leaving the community because of the negativity and the personal hate directed at me when I posted there about it (despite at least one person being told by the mods to “not get personal” no further action was taken when it continued). I was told, by other women there (at least, I assume the majority of them were women), that I should be pleased that Blizzard are “aiming the game at enticing female players” and that’s why there are so many in-game pets and why there’s a wardrobe function, “fun holiday clothes” and now the ability to create your own “outfits”. Telling me that I – a woman who enjoys playing MMORPGs; a woman who was a female teenager into RPG in the early 1980s (and oh so much in demand for game nights); a woman who used to get so pissed off with computer games that forced her to take a male name/character/avatar; a woman who worked for more than a decade as a system administrator; telling this woman that she should be satisfied with cuddly toys and clothes? That this demonstrates an acceptance and understanding of women within the game by the game creators that went beyond females being either cute little girls (gnomes, for example), damsels in distress (particularly humans) or blow up dolls (everything except maybe tauren and dwarves). Essentially saying that I should maybe go and play dress-up dolls and cuddle a few soft toys and then I’ll feel so much better. You what!? There _were_ women there that agreed with my PoV, but I felt that I had to leave the community before _I_ got personal and before my blood pressure spiked any hgher.
Yeah, can you tell I’m still annoyed by it all?
PS… my name stems from years back when I was trying to quite smoking. I was hell to live with and so my husband purchased the megabitch.tm domain name for me as a wedding present. The name kind of stuck even long after I last had a cigarette
I’ve really enjoyed hearing you explore this subject. I’ve noticed much the same thing in theater. In almost all plays, and especially in musicals, there are tons more roles available for men, and almost all female roles are defined by their relationships to men. There are certainly exceptions, but it’s pretty unbalanced. I became acutely aware of this several years ago as I discussed possible roles my wife should be looking for.
You see much the same thing in music. How many songs written/performed by men are about relationships? Sure there are lots, but there are also lots that aren’t. Now, try to think of songs written/performed by women. Of course there are some that aren’t related to love or relationships, but it’s an almost insignificant number. Interesting, yes?
Once you start noticing these things, you see them EVERYWHERE!
What a fantastic post!
Feminism and WoW is such a complex topic, but you went through pretty much everyone I could think of and more.
I have a few rambling things to mention
- Skimpy clothes and bunny ears make me roll my eyes because they’re clearly only designed as eye candy for male players. Women’s sexuality is paradoxal though. When it’s to please men, it’s degrading, but when it’s celebrating women’s bodies (which *are* beautiful)and women’s right to sexual pleasure, then it’s empowering.
- On the Jaina thing… I’m not one to get upset over these things easily, but once a guildie of mine called Jaina a slut and it really bothered me. Yes, her story focuses too much on her relationships, but I fail to see how that makes her a slut.
- The female human jokes are something I noticed very early on too. I find gender stereotype jokes funny in moderation, but with the human female jokes, I can help but think “don’t you have something better to say?”
- I really hate the term “reverse sexism”. “Sexism” means putting one gender above the other. While it’s most commonly associated with putting men above women, putting women above men is still “sexism”. There’s no such thing as “reverse sexism”, except maybe going too far about equality and forgetting that gender differences are something to be celebrated, not ashamed of.
- When the whole Real ID crisis was going on, it made me upset to see women claiming to not talk on vent because they’re afraid of the reaction of male players. I talk on vent when I pug. I’ve never been harassed, or kicked from the group, or mocked. I have gotten an “omigod it’s a girl!” reaction once or twice, but the only problem I have with that is that it proves that women don’t speak up enough. After 5 years of playing WoW, of being open about my gender and single status, I really believe that in-game harassment is akin to being stabbed in the subway. It happens, but it’s such a freak occurrence that the fear of it shouldn’t rob you of your gaming pleasure.
- “As a gamer I have fallen into the trap of painting myself as ‘not like those other girl gamers who flirt and cause drama’, and that sort of internalised sexism is as much a hindrance to equality and progressiveness as anything else.” So so so so sadly true. I’m guilty of this as well. It’s such a stupid stereotype because the proportion of people who flirt and cause drama seems to be pretty equal from one gender from another (at least in my experience), yet I frequently still catch myself thinking “I don’t want to be like THOSE girls”.
- I’ve noticed that I’m a lot harsher on female guild applicants than male applicants. When a guy posts a crappy application, I don’t bat an eye. When a woman does, I’m quick to scream “YOU BRING SHAME TO OUR GENDER!” I am trying to get rid of that habbit because it’s really stupid.
Ophelie´s last [type] ..How I Met My Guild
Being one of the few if not only commenter here who is a dude, I honestly never saw all that until you pointed it out. As far as harrassment of women in game go, I have seen it, and in the guild I run I do not tolerate it. Probably why my guild has such a large female player base and they tell me they feel part of the club.
So while Blizzard may not be spotlighting it. There are things folks can do in their online communities by not letting certain things happen (like sexual harrassment). Whenever a new player joins I tell them you do not need to tell me if you are male or female, but if anything is ever said to you or in guild chat that makes you feel uncomfortable I want you to talk to me or an officer. I have an officer who is a female, who is awesome! I have known her for 5 years, she has seen it all and has put up with a lot, but she is also the first one to step in if something has gone too far.
So while we can all comment at the validity of these posts, I believe someone else highlighted it that it may not be until player communities step up and admit they will not accept certain behavior and to treat people as equals, as gamers.
But I agree Jaina needs a bigger role, I even tried to convince my wife if we had a girl to name her Jaina…don’t think its going to fly though.
Ceraphus (aka Avatar)´s last [type] ..Granting Guild Rep in Cataclysm
[...] Players AlikeThanks for the link – this time next year I'll be a millionaire! »Pingback: I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery | The 'mental ShamanEcclesiastical Discipline on Fortnightly Feedback #1: Friendly FireThanks for taking the time to [...]
Regarding the fate of Jaina, a blogger over at orchisharmyknife.com made the terrific suggestion that it should have been Jaina, not Bolvar, that took up the mantle of becoming the new Lich King. She is one of the few powerful enough to serve as the Lich King, plus it would have been the perfect closure to all her emotional ties to Arthas and an appropriate wrap up to her storyline. Now when I down Arthas (soon, soon!) I will be envisioning Jaina taking the throne after that final battle as our new Lich Queen.
Yus, I linked to orchisharmyknife.com somewhere in the post
I think Bolvar worked well in the role so I don’t argue with Blizz being there. A part of me also wonders if they left Sylvanas out of the LK fight because it would seem too close to the Illidan/Maeiv parallel. By removing her they can extend her story more easily.
I think both player communities and developers have to make the effort, personally. While I am quite vocal I occupy a very small area of the internet and it is relatively easy to be drowned out by thousands (millions) of voices that believe differently, or don’t see the ‘whole’ of the problem in the wider context of women in gaming, and feminism the world over.
Yeah, I wavered between ‘so many people are even less likely to be heard’ and ‘they won’t be able to erase our existence now’.
I think a difference in the music industry is that women are seen as the main audience for certain types of music, so they drive the sort of songs (Cliff Richard to Take That) that some male artists cater to. The ‘clash of gender culture’ occurs in rock, rap, metal, in the less melodic sounds, even though rock/indie can often be very genderbending and subversive.
It’s interesting to hear about theatre. It’s such a subtle thing that it is easy to be belittled by overreacting to specifics, which are symptoms of larger problems.
Yeah, I remember the thread, I think. If I recall correctly, the reaction over that post is what set me off to having this bubbling away inside me. I think I need to gather all the other examples I’ve had quoted to me here and at WL, so I can keep the list going. No one is going to agree 100% with every point on the list, but the overall message it sends is quite clear (and people miss the point if they say things like ‘it would be stronger if you didn’t have this example on the list’)
Thank you
I could add that to my feed I suppose o.O
Hmm, I shall have to hunt down that epilogue. It’s a pity there isn’t a way for it to be included in the Victory statue
Please forgive me if you saw it, but just in case, I mentioned in my comment above there is a sort of final word by her if you get the chance to do the quests with the Legendary. I don’t want to give anything away, it’s pretty short and doesn’t really give her a fate per se, but does have a final tie-in with Arthas. I think that having her take up the mantle would also have been awesome, I never thought of that! But yea, they can’t remove any of their long standing leading ladies at this point methinks, there are so few.
Oddly I was stewing over related ideas this week and blogged about them myself today… I don’t know that I consider myself a feminist as I see a lot of problems with the feminist movement (far too much emphasis on equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, IMHO) but I do know what unknowing misogyny looks like. Heck, that’s too strong a word; I think Blizz just has a few too many boys designing their games and frankly as a woman who went to computer science grad school, some of the boys at Blizzard may even be girls but a lot of us still think more like the boys. I’m guilty of that; I’ll hesitate before buying science fiction written by a woman even though my three favorite sf/fantasy authors who are writing today are female (Lois Bujold, Robin Hobb, and the incomparable in all ways Connie Willis). I have no problem playing through SC2 with my point of view in the story being the male Jim Raynor, but I still think of most WoW players as male even if their avatars are female. (Husband’s fault, he plays mostly night elf females). Not sure what the answer is, other than women making themselves more obvious consumers of video games…
Analogue´s last [type] ..Tomorrow we get our stats back
feminist is one of those labels that can mean so many things to so many people (a bit like liberal or conservative.) There is danger in calling yourself a feminist – it is easy for people to dismiss you as ‘man hating’ and ‘hairy’ and a lot of those other terms, but I think the current strain of the moment, springing from young feminists and black feminist, and geek feminism as well, can be very invigorating.
Part of my goals with this blog is to explore what I mean by feminism, and my own beliefs on certain topics – exactly what you talk about with your experience in computer science is what geek feminism seeks to address. The barriers may be less obvious, but they’re still there in the Board Rooms, and they’re all tied up in an intersectional knot.
Discrimination against women is nothing new – it happens in the real world all the time – why would it be any different on Azeroth? I don’t condone it but I’ve never heard of a society with perfect equality and respect between men and women, so I don’t expect to see it in a game either. The developers haven’t done anything wrong by creating mainly male bosses or leaving out a woman from a statue. In the real world, how many heads of states are male? Most. In the real world, how many statues celebrating a battle victory show only male soldiers and/or generals? A lot. Whether we like it or not, men dominate the world.
As for the female clothing – there are some that love it and some that hate it. Personally, my characters have probably received more compliments on their outfits than harrassment and unwelcome innuendo. It’s a matter of opinion whether the clothes are degrading or liberating, but I’m pretty sure the developers weren’t trying to offend women with the options offered.
Some women seem to say “Woe is me, I’ve been untreated unfairly by men!” QQ won’t make things better – you want to see a game that treats women as equally as men, you want to see a society that treats women as equally as men – go out and work to get to the top and be equals and then you’ll have more power to change things and make society and games the way you want.
Thank you for being an example of many of the attitudes I talked about in my post. I appreciate you taking the time to share them with us, and tell us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
Yeah I saw it, and shall go hunting down another time, but now I must go to bed!
Noting that you had already picked the title megabitch
With regard to the post I’m in almost 100% agreement with it and have a few things I’m going to write about elsewhere (I’ll trackback when I do) because there are logical inconsistencies in the reasoning given as to why there are less women in the lead roles. If there’s one thing I like doing it’s picking apart the internal inconsistencies (Blizz & the Fanboi’s in this instance).
Korenwolf´s last [type] ..and now- something completely different
I look forward to reading it!
Actually regardless of whether I know the gender of the player I refer to them by the sex of their toon, which does lead to some interesting mangling of gender pronouns over vent.
Korenwolf´s last [type] ..and now- something completely different
The last WoW magazine has a picture of the quest development staff. Care to guess how many women are on it?
In the recent forum thread about adding epicosity to the Maelstrom (which resulted in the dinosaur/shark/laser-thing), I responded to the developer comment, “After reading this post I called for a meeting with TOP TOP MEN (that’s two tops) in order to figure out a solution to the problem at hand.” with the response, “Of course you met with the TOP TOP MEN, because no women work in a design capacity at Blizzard.”
My comment was moderated out of the forums, for some strange reason.
[...] a comment » There is an excellent post by the Mental Shaman on the various issues around sexism in wow, generally I can’t find anything to disagree with [...]
[...] up: You absolutely must go and read Pewter’s post “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery“. It’s awesome, seriously. Read it [...]
I’m so awed by this post, and the comments here. I don’t even know what I could really add to the dicussion. I’m just honored and proud to be able to call you my guildmate, Pewter. This is amazingly well-written.
Awww, *hugs*
[...] This post originally appeared at MentalShaman. [...]
On intersectionalities… almost the first thing I did, after rolling a goblin in alpha, was to write feedback complaining about the game automatically assigned me a boyfriend. Apparently queer goblins don’t exist.
…eventually I should start a new goblin and see if that’s changed. Somehow, I doubt it.
It hasn’t. I can understand why they defaulted to that, but they have enough ‘parellel’ questlines elsewhere that I can’t help thinking that they could have done a ‘choosing’ moment as part of the goblin story. (And it hasn’t changed.)
One point which was not discussed in this whole hub-ub, and is rarely discussed every time the gender “issue” rears its ugly head … intent. Thus far, I’ve read nothing compelling from either side that either demonstrates or disproves that it is the actual intent of game designers to marginalize female characters within the game. Is the implication that these stereotypical white-male designers think less of women and therefore perceive the only appropriate garment as a bikini? I sincerely doubt it.
So, faulting someone for unintentionally omitting a particular race, age, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality in their own fantasy strikes me as odd, and kind of funny actually. (I got a slight chuckle thinking of someone inserting themselves into one of my fantasies about my boyfriend to point out that I was being decidedly sexist in my heterosexual daydream.) This is a *fantasy* world, as evidenced by a plethora of circumstances in game, not just limited to female characters. Where are the African Draenei? The senior citizens of Azeroth? The physically-handicapped? The minority religions? The vegan or vegetarian-focused questline? The LGBT factions? Why can’t I level as a pacifist, instead of slaughtering everything that crosses my path?
I’ll admit, there is a fine line to walk here. But when it comes down to it, I understand that I am participating in a fantasy game, someone else’s fantasy, which draws heavily from medieval literature and the like. And while my fantasy may involve incredibly large codpieces in a veritable sea of hunky body-building males all wanting to boost my 2v2 SC2 ratings while also giving me a pedicure, that is not the fantasy game that I’ve chosen to play.
As I think I said – having privilege does not make you a bad person. Not having the intent to exclude or silence isn’t really a defense or an excuse. LGBTIQ and discussions of race in world of warcraft are something I didn’t touch on, but I have made a reference to: and these are discussions worth having, regardless that the writers/developers don’t intend to exclude anyone. I understand what I am participating in as well – if I didn’t participate I would never get to play any games – but using ‘they didn’t mean to offend’ is not productive in feminist discussion (and is infact a classic derailment of feminist and intersectional discussion, and certainly not a new one.)
Thanks, Pewter – I really enjoyed this post and am now a subscriber to your blog! (well, also because I play a shaman) I’ve been lucky in my own experiences in WoW with very few instances of player instigated sexism, but the discrimination in the game does get to me sometimes – especially regarding armor/clothing. And I think the point, not just with clothes, but in general, is there should be more choice. The skimpy tops don’t bother me as much because I can tailor a shirt (lots of colors and styles, even!) or wear a tabard to cover up if I choose. But some of the leggings options are mortifying, especially for cloth armor, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. I know that some people don’t mind, but I prefer to keep my cheeks covered, thank you very much!
How many have applied? Is there a concerted effort not to represent different people on the quest development staff, or are the only people applying white males?
“Here’s a woman who goes off the path, always for power hungry reasons, and rules chaotically (no delusional schemes of cleansing the world, just running it into the ground with self-absorbed power lust) with emotion and lack of rationality, and is finally defeated, and no one tries to save her last remnant of humanity – ever – ‘cause you know, there is none, or like, damaged women are just unpleasant to think about and can’t serve any useful purpose or be rehabilitated.”
Arthas?
The true problem with Jaina is that is sold to us as being this extremely powerful Mage – an A student with promise to be as powerful as any Mage in the world. She apparently runs Theramore: one of the outermost Alliance cities right near Horde territory.
So she’s smart. Talented. Gifted, perhaps. And most importantly: capable. Practical – how else can she lead her own army and run a city?
Yet in her scripted animations and RP moments she’s just wasted! She was introduced as a love interest in WC3. Even in BC and the Battle for Mount Hyjal she *buffed* everyone and ran around with melee-ing stuff with a staff. You wouldn’t respect a player who does that so why should we respect a NPC lead character for behaving like that?
Then it only got worse in Wrath of the Lich King. She cried all through Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection about Arthas. She left the Lich King *iceblocked*. She didn’t cast one spell. She stood in the bleachers in Trial of the Crusader.
Even worse, in Icecrown Citadel, she cries and worships King Varian – possibly the one occasion in which she’s not talking about Arthas? Now she’s crying on the shoulders of another man?
I can’t respect her. If they wrote her to be the daughter of the leader of Theramore, if they wrote her to have dropped out of Dalaran during her Mage traininer… then maybe I wouldn’t mind. But her actions don’t match up to this all-powerful Mage ruler of a city background.
Arthas also happens to be a focus of the entire expansion, and there are continual attempts to redeem him by the characters who care about him. Sylvanas is sinister now, but we see (in-game) nothing of her sisters or anyone that might care enough to ‘redeem’ her.
Glad to hear from a new subscriber! I end up using the Antiseptic Soaked bandages under ‘skimpy’ tops to help with coverage, but levelling my dwarf paladin and warrior gnome has made a guild tabard sadly essential.
[...] to be a popular topic on two blogs that I have recently begun to enjoy, at Righteous Orbs and at the Mental Shaman. Being a female gamer myself, I felt extremely compelled to speak up on some of the things that [...]
Thank you for posting this.
I was running heroic TOC and I got the Argent Confessor boss. The first thing that hit my mind was “Northrend is supposed to be cold as hell, why is her outfit so skimpy? That’s not practical.” I think the skimpiness and her voice really diminish her fierceness as a powerful adversary.
From what I understand in the beta female Worgen aren’t ready yet for testing. They are probably struggling with how to make “sexy” and that kinda makes me cranky.
We shouldn’t let Blizzard off the hook with this, they are the leader in the MMO space and can do better.
-Signed a supportive Gaymer.
[...] my attention recently, and reminded me of another post I read. The first post was by a WoW blogger discussing examples of sexism in WoW, specifically misogyny. To be honest, some of the examples are pretty damning, such as how some of [...]
Whoa name check! /ego off
GREAT great article. Sad thing is I had to get here via Psychochild’s place rather than finding it on my own. How did I miss this blog for so long?
/fixed
Well to be fair I’ve not been around -that- long, and I’ve probably been easy to miss if you aren’t into Elemental Shaman
A few points I would mention, the whole Easter event with rabbits (bunnies) and similar has roots back to Pagan religion(s) and appears in the 1600s in Germany. While part of this has been adopted by Playboy and the associated culture it is not a stretch to associate it with the actual festival rather than the sexualised version. Also given that the Playboy bunny outfit actually uses satin ears in the same (single?) colour as the main corset type dress (as specified by their uniform definition) the WoW ears resemble faux playboy / actual rabbit / cosplay rabbit ears far more than the sexualised versions.
Also the age of consent is not generally 18. More typically the age of consent varies between 13 and 18 with a relatively typical 16, countries with the 18 age do tend to (legally or informally) have age differential support so as not to criminalise two minors of statutory rape. You may be thinking of the US / UK type laws where by it is illegal to record sex between people under the age of 18 which is more due to contract law than sex law afaik.
Looking at the singular hourglass body shape despite the multiple body types we must consider firstly that most humanoids within the game are pretty much the fantasy ideal for their gender, trending towards large muscular men and hourglass shaped women (both hypersexualised). The bikini and skimpy armour feed into the sexualisation of the characters, however failing to see the male (lack of) armour as sexualisation is part of the issue as well (not trying to play the think of the menz card here, but topless muscled males are a sexualised image men are told to aspire too).
Part of the issue with a large game like this is that we have a single body shape for each character gender/race combination (including breast animation)with large parts of the gear being simply art rather than physical models (1 pair of plate boots for tanks with a few skins). Providing different models means you need multiple different skins for them and making sure the models work and look right is far more work than skinning a model that you know works. Blizzard added something like 1,000 items to the game in ICC alone, it would be unfeasible to expect them to produce new models for all of these with a unique skin. The alpha had female gamers objecting to a non-sexualised Tauren and Troll models… Blizzard cannot win without creating a system more like Aion with different body types and thus upping the requirements to run the game (20 models + gear for the basic characters).
In terms of the bikini issue itself, Blizzard created a way to solve this issue through the shirt slot (though perhaps not going far enough with the options available and the lack of a similar slot of the legs or other appearance slots). To cater to the “I like skimpy outfits, it is fantasy” and the “I want realistic fantasy armour” groups this solution works (my Paladin has a nice green and silver initiate’s shirt that works nicely under many armours), the group that cannot be catered to however is the realistic armour group (which given some real cultures fought next to naked I will give realism the more modern sense of meaning as in full protection) which does tend to create androgynous people which will tend to be identified as male since our current cultures tend to view men as soldiers rather than women.
Anyway, no a bad post
.
If you don’t like the representation of women in World of Warcraft, then please stop bitching and please stop playing. That’s the thing people don’t seem to understand. You speak with your pocket, Blizzard will listen. Right now that’s likely the only way they’ll listen, especially considering Activision’s part to play in the matter.
Let me get one thing straight. I hate female warriors. I hate the skimpy outfits, I hate the garbage crap. The way I see it, if the character is a warrior, then she should look like a muscular warrior. If that drops the sexy, well, women have to sacrifice some femininity if they want to do a man’s job. Wizards and warlocks, show the midriff. If anyone I can imagine would use their sex to survive it’d be female warlocks, and wizards might hope you’re distracted by the sexy. Also notice that the cutscenes never show women getting killed in battle. That’s garbage, quit with the double standard here.
Here’s what I say, equality is a two edged sword. You want to be equal to men, you have to show that you can do what they can do without the government handouts and gender quotas. What, sorry, you can’t benchpress 150 pounds? Well I thought you’re equal to a man. Gee, that’s problematic.
I’m glad that some real women play world of warcraft, but I’ve already found the entire thing pretty sisified to the extent I want no part in it. I’m sure a troll woman could tear an alliance soldier to peices with her bare hands, if she didn’t look like a fashion model with little tusks.
And starcraft 2 was awesome for actually keeping the manly, western feel to it. It was awesome as a guy, and I’m glad women haven’t taken over the game industry like they took over the scifi channel (really, no all it is is soap opera in space), there’s no last refuge for masculinity left. I could certainly do away with how women are protrayed. We don’t need more supermodels in power armor, we need tough, athletic women who don’t care about their appearance, but are there to suppliment the armed forces.
1) The age of consent in the US varies from state to state, but I can’t believe the ‘level 18 or above’ is anything but a reference to the age of consent (in the UK the age of consent is actually 16). Yes, it is a pagan/christian thing but anyone who believes that making the Shake your bunny maker achievement soley depend on female characters over level 18 isn’t a reference to Playboy is extremely naive. The general view of ’18′ is that a woman of the age of ’18′ is free game as far as objectification and sexualisation is concerned in the US.
2) I am well aware of the ‘limitations’ and ‘effort’ argument, but I really don’t think that continue being an excuse for male developers to shortchange female models and stories. It’s reason, but it’s not a long term excuse.
3) Explaining away the individual ‘problems’ still doesn’t address the whole picture – many little things that are easy to dismiss on their own. Blizzard can do better, and giving me a laundry list that excuses individual things from my list is really missing the point of the article. (I’ve been well aware of the ‘development time/costs’ and the ‘marketing to men because that is what sells’ reasons for a long time, they may be reasons for how things are as they are now, but they are NOT a free pass for continuing down that line.)
The market is male dominated, but the female component is growing, and it’s time for the gaming industry to grow up a bit, to be honest. There has always been a streak of white straight male privilege in Sci Fi and fantasy, but it has also been an avenue for changing and exploring these roles.
I’ve loved Sci-Fi and Fantasy my whole (female) life, though to be honest I can imagine it alienates a lot of girls and women when so much of it basically claims they aren’t ‘supposed to liked it’. The closed-mindedness of much of the genre is self defeating.
Pai´s last [type] ..EQ2 Adds F2P Server
1) What age would you suggest for adulthood in the US and otherwise? At what point should people be allowed to make their own choices and indeed allow others to interact with them without having to treat them as someone incapable of making their own choices.
It might be a free for all for objectification (can you actually treat someone you do not know as an individual, you have no knowledge of their motivations or thoughts but rather can only make choices based on their physical form and actions and the results of their actions. Of course they are an individual but you cannot know them and so impose your own views onto them and their actions thus objectifying them). The sexualisation of society has moved into the mainstream and out of the darkness, however much of this is still ignored. Both men and women are sexualised from an early age and we expect behaviours from them, even when we try and stop this it still often happens.
2) The lack of resources and effort are indeed excuses for both short and long term limits to the development of other models of game play and storytelling. If we assume that any human has a finite amount of resources and capability then we must assume that this excuse is valid for any task short of a world wide collaboration. If we then assume that Blizzard wishes to tell stories and build a world they have to divide the resources they have available. So far we have had in the expansions the story of Illidan (and his lieutenants Kael’thas and Vashj), and the the story of Arthas which effectively concludes the arcs from Warcraft 3. These stories were their focus and so received their main focus, they clearly wanted to include other characters such as Jaina and Sylvanas given we see more of them (our guides through FoS, PoS and HoR at the least) than characters like Tirion himself. Even Bolvar was a relatively minor character in the expansion (appearances in dragonblight and then the wrathgate questline [where Jaina single handedly defies Varian and suffers no punishment] before appearing at the end).
If you refuse to accept the idea that limited resources and effort are excuses for limited development of things then a large proportion of feminism 101 needs to be revised to indicate this rather than assigning the resources we have (limited) to those they can help the most.
3) What sells is what makes a profit, and profit is what allows people to actually produce these AAA titles like Warcraft. There are other markets to aim for than the 18-30 male band, but doing so reduces the number of people you can sell your game to and thus your maximum profit. If you advertise and sell a game which will only appeal to 50% of the gaming population then your profit potential is halved. This is possibly not the best way to work but it is what we have, if you want more stories about Women then find a way to drive them to make it so and appeal to the larger market. If you can’t, then it is hard to see why anyone else should bother.
There is white male privilege in Scifi and fantasy, however there is privilege in all stories and actions. If the majority of authors being published are male, then there is likely a dearth of good female scifi authors you could publish. Again if it is profitable someone will exploit it, and if they haven’t then there is an area you can exploit to free up that area.
Part of the issue with this is the lenses you look at life through. If you have a feminist lens in you will see issues from that perspective. It is very difficult to explain and make things make sense to people using different lenses. This is why things like the Male privilege checklist fail because they conflate male privilege with other privileges such as wealth.
We cannot solve whole pictures, we need teaspoons and subsections to break down tasks. If we cannot break it down and solve the little issues, then the big picture is likely to elude us. Very rarely in history has any problem been solved as a whole picture without solving it’s sub problems first.
I don’t have a problem with the US (or any other states) choices for what consititutes minor status, I’m not sure what you’re trying to debate that with me there – all I’m saying is that the Shake your bunny maker achievement IS a reference to legal ages of consent.
Lack of resources can only be an excuse for so long when the interest of women in gaming is expanding. ‘Story telling resources’ is, I believe, a separate issue to the amount of resources taken for creating meshes and textures for female characters. Asking male developers to take another look at how they approach and handle their female characters is not unreasonable.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘feminism 101′ needing to be revised?
The trouble with limiting ourselves to the little problems is that it allows us to sweep all the individual things under the table, and when you step back you still end up with a systematic erasure of marginalised groups in mainstream media.
My argument there is that it is not about the legal age of consent… the age of consent is 18 in < 50% of cases, its factually wrong to claim it as a reference to something that doesn't actually exist in that state.
Lack of resources is a major issue. Blizzards art / design budget already seems stretched (we got what 2 new pieces in each slot with ICC?), increasing the number of meshes for female characters seems like a really minor issue when you could perfectly well reuse old ones with different story line progressions (Tirion is just a male paladin model, Bolvar was Grand Marshall's armour iirc). Asking them to reevaluate how the approach female characters is fine and understandable, but asking them to focus on minor characters (in the current arc) over major characters simply because of their gender is not appropriate. I personally would have liked to see more of the Dwarven contingent but they were also excluded from ICC and a lot of the story line despite their high involvement in other areas.
Feminism 101 basically points out that in many cases resources are assigned in a a gender, race and wealth partial fashion, it is often noted these resources are limited and so must be assigned in this fashion to make the most of those resources. If impartial and neutral spending of resources is the appropriate mechanism then causes need to be reevaluated.
We aren't sweeping the little things under the carpet or the table though. If we start to approach the little issues, the larger ones go away by default. The thing is we can solve the little ones, I can't solve "patriarchy", I can solve smaller issues.
I actually think they get a lot of minor characters very right – it’s the major characters that are being short changed in my opinion. Also, on the note of dwarves I think they are going to be much more important in Cataclysm – I was very excited to see a certain female dwarf in the Beta
I wouldn’t call Jaina, Sylvanas or Ysera ‘minor’ when they are THE major female characters. I am keeping my fingers crossed for Tyrande though!
In terms of resources – assigning them mainly to the white male view point isn’t making the most of these resources, in my opinion, but I get the feeling we’re talking at cross purposes about this because as I say – I am a newbie myself and trying to work through these things. I shall do some research into the point about resources and maybe I shall post more about that, because it does sound interesting.
As for age of consent, I’m sorry, it really DOES look like a reference to me and I can’t see how it isn’t when tied in with playboy bunny ears (no matter that they aren’t ‘identical’ to the real thing) and being on female only characters. Age range of consent in the USA is 16-18, and I suspect the company would have chosen 18 to be safe in any case. If you feel the number is arbitrary (for whatever reason) then fair enough. (A bit of me wishes it could have a companion question with chip n dale cuffs/bow ties to be thrown at male characters over level 18 >>)
They are minor characters though in the grand scheme of things, only really Arthas, Tirion and Bolvar played big roles in moving the story in ICC forward, the rest got dropped fast
. Not been on the beta yet, my contacts didn’t give me an inv 
.
I don’t want to give examples on the resources because it is a trigger issue and will likely offend a lot of people if I compare a game to these parts of RL.
Spending resources from a white male perspective might not be the most effective way, but it has been proven profitable. In this life profit tends to drive motivation so until making the change from this to the female model drives profits, it isn’t going to happen. This likely means we need some kind of indie breakthrough game to solidify that market enough to get the big players involved.
It is likely a reference to the average assumed age of adulthood (which is still 18 in the US despite the draconian drinking laws and similar) rather than the age of consent. Chip and dales sound fun, they had one at one point on the ogre didn’t they, that was funny
On races that don’t have female models, do we actually know if those are male models? There has only been one or two references ever to a female ogres… so maybe our ogres are actually mostly female (since few ogres have ever been named).
Well, that’s part of the issue, we get these interesting female characters and then they get painted out of the main story, for reasons of OOC expediency. I am really interested to see where they intend to go with Tyrande et al in Cataclysm, but to me Jaina and Sylvanas are not minor characters in the Arthas storyline.
Yeah there is a ‘Chip n Dale’ and ‘Candy Kane’ pair of goblins that make up your character’s arm candy in the Goblin starter area.
On Ogre females they have actually been mentioned in the books – one was mentioned as the Wife of an NPC called ‘Tharg‘ and another is Chief Ogg’ora who appeared a source book for the RPG (which means the status of her as canon is arguable). She was a mage and former leader of the Fire-gut clan. Also from the Source book is Vaxar. The Gronn are interesting because they are referred to as Gruul’s Seven Sons, but the ‘he’ pronoun may just be a default and not an indicator of a binary gendered race.
There is also the Harpy race which is all ‘female’. Harpy is a way to belittle a woman (like nag, hag etc) but the harpy race is also powerful and dangerous, so..problematic but also empowering in a way.
Most characters were painted out… Tirion’s great role was to be an ice block. In the end while following the old canon we can’t get away from a male centric view, however moving forward we have a lot we can look at breaking the mold.
But what does a female ogre look like…
Are the harpies all female?
The female ogres are in game, and yes the harpies are all female
However as far as other male characters being phased out of the narrative arc (and I don’t mean just at the LK fight) it’s also important to note that all the major arcs revolve around a male protagonist and antagonist, for the most part, and male characters being sexualised (or phased out) does not carry the same weight as phasing out female characters, because men are still generally in positions of power over women, and have not been controlled, oppressed and objectified to the same extent. A couple of men being sidelined from the story is not an issue when the company that owns Blizzard doesn’t have a single female lead character in it’s video game stable, and is unwilling to even consider female leads as viable.
As a general rule Men are not in positions of power over Women, rather the few elites in society are in power over all of us. Most men have as little in common with the people at the top as most women do, yes there are more male elites than female elites but at the end of the day the workers rarely have power over much more than what is for lunch, and in a fair number of cases even that is beyond their control. Men have been controlled throughout history, we have been fed lines like dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and given white feathers of cowardliness for not believing in it. The oppressions suffered through the ages vary but both men and women have suffered, if you look at something like suffrage there really wasn’t much difference in when the common folk actually got to vote. I believe this is covered in some definitions of Patriarchy but it really makes the concept rather pointless because it is so wide and far rooted.
The idea looking forward should not be to sideline men from the story to encompass women, or to sideline women to encompass men but rather to tell the story as it needs to be told as it evolves. In some stories there will be few women (A monastic order of Monks set during no visitors allowed), and in others few men (A religious order of Nuns set during no visitors allowed), and in others we will see both. Use the people we need to tell the story, some of this will tie into societies expectations of people and others will change it (Ellen Ripley?). What you cannot expect though is people to shift their world views dramatically, especially when the word quickly is there as well. As long as there are women who like wearing high heels, there will be men who like women in high heels (and likely if women don’t like high heels some will still wear them because men they know like them, or they can receive compensation for wearing them… mmmh lol the great high heel prohibition). Societies are sluggish because of our inertia, it takes a real exo-geneous shock to move societies quickly.
Activision’s CEO saying replace the female lead and go with a male… I can’t say I don’t play female fronted games but I can’t say what the larger trend is either, I tend to actually ignore the main character and follow the plot / mechanics since few games actually bother to evolve the character. Maybe he is right that male fronted games sell more to the primary audience they want to capture, if so then it is a profit / loss choice and his to make. As I said previously, if there is an untapped market someone needs to open it up (look at Nintendo with the Wii, it basically captured the casual market for video games consoles). Once someone sees the market exists then we will see Activision and similar plugging it… till then we will see Modern Warfare: NaN.
Maybe this is actually the cusp? Get together the group and produce an (open?) MMORPG engine and fill it with stories and people. Imagine the number of people willing to work on something like WoW for free, we could have stories and characters, lands we know and far flung fantasy realms. As long as you have a single consistent controller of content I think it could work.
As a general rule, I am privileged to live in the western world (and in one of the top 10 eglatarian societies) but millions of women live in patriarchies. Only 20% of my Government knows what it is like to be female. My bosses are all male. My local councillors are all male, or conform to very gendered and traditional roles of ‘family first’. And I am lucky enough to live in a country that at least has the laws of gender equality. There are many that do not. And at no point am I saying that the idea is to sideline men in order to empower women – do men really need to be sidelined in order for women to become more than objects in mainstream media?
Well, this is a blog post by a woman on a newbie feminist blog talking about the experiences and view points of women in the kyriarchy. ‘Humanity’ has historically been the many under the few, but that is not what is under discussion here. I’ve not posted asking for there to by faux-equality by the introduction of quotas that privileged males should try to fill when they act creatively, and I’m not asking men whether they are bothered by the lack of female leads.
At this point your comments are veering very close to ‘what about the men’ type. There are problems with historical feminism (e.g. sufferage focused on getting middle class white women the vote, while ignoring the points of view of black women) but that doesn’t mean that that women can’t discuss this issues without having to look after the needs of men as well. If I come across a post by a Gay man, or a Lesbian, it is not my place to tell them (as a straight woman) that the heteronormativey of computer games doesn’t erase their visibility, or other them if that is their experience, or that I’m oppressed by the kyriarchy too. (And likewise, it’s not my place to patronise other women and claim that they’re too engrained in the patriarchy to know any better, if they enjoy the sexuality of their toon, and like kicking butt while looking good.)
I don’t expect ideals and view points to magically shift. These things take time and effort (hundreds of years in some cases). Paradigms don’t change over night, and even though I am a feminist I don’t exist in isolation from all the social norms. I’ve got many years of reading woman’s magazines, watching tv, reading books, being told that I need to shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows in order to be ‘beautiful’, and also that my wobbly flesh is shameful etc etc. Picking up and learning about feminism doesn’t remove me from all the tangled up ideas of how society thinks I should be, or from my own sexuality and ability to be so many things.
I think things are on the cusp of change – there are more women (and of many ages) playing games than ever before. They may be something like farmville, but it is a huge market and there are indie studios that are capitalising on this untapped market – a market that is very lucrative because it is couched in something that is seen as a gender neutral space and culture (facebook) as opposed to traditional gaming culture.
And ‘design your own’ is not really a valid response to some mild criticism of a game that is widely enjoyed, both by the people who disagree with me and the ones who don’t. I’d love to design my own wildly successful MMORPG, but I have no connections, no capital, and no background in game design. I do, however, have a background in analysis and media.
In terms of gaming things like farmville and such like are expanding the female and older gamer markets. They are also not really applicable to AAA title status as games, there isn’t a realistic way to charge $60 in store for Farmville. There needs to be a breakthrough into that market, something that draws female gamers into the mainstream profit market to make the developers focus on them. Zynga are ridiculously profitable at their market however it focuses on micro payments and simplified game structures (I believe there was a spoof game about cows that received a relatively high level of acclaim). I can’t say what the gender neutral space facebook or it’s gaming section are, but then is steam, the wii store, or the xbox store actually a gendered environment?
You have a background in analysis and media, that makes you an ideal starting point for a design for an mmo that avoids the issues you find. Finding connections online and working on a game can be done with very little or no capital. No one started with experience, but you have the basis to create and avoid the mistakes others have made. Also I wouldn’t class this as mild criticism, if it was truly mild criticism then why are we worried about the larger picture? If making female worgen dog joke cannot be funny simply because they are anthropomorphic dogs and shapeshifters without considering the other connotations then surely we cannot treat these as mild.
The old defense. I shall bow out of the rest of the conversation then since no feminist will actually discuss these parts without falling back on dogma.
By mild criticism I mean that I am not crying that the sky is falling. This is an opinion piece on a personal blog, not a rallying cry. Hopefully people will read it, and think about it, and hopefully someone will look at the game in another light, but I’m not advocating that anyone quit or anything. I’m critiquing a product I like, not condemning it.
Facebook is not genderless, but women are very visibly there and just slightly outnumber men on that particular social medium. This is in comparison to the gaming community where the visibility of women is still in the growth changes – one of the comments that I did not let through the moderation queue actually told me that he hoped that women didn’t ‘pollute the gaming community in the same way that they’ve ruined the Sci Fi Channel’, and most of the advertising of games is still squarely aimed at men (and the excuse for such advertising is that men are dominant, so that’s okay) so it’s pretty obvious to me that there is a contrast between the wider diaspora of the gaming community as a whole, and Facebook which is not even gaming centric.
I think it is a mistake to deny the impact of Farmville, or the earning potential of the game (72 million users world wide). It is, I agree, not the same as the current MMO standard, but a bit like the Sims it can be a gate way into seeing games as mainstream entertainment for everyone and not just for the male half of the population. The same can be said of the Wii which was marketed at the family, and the current crop of ‘party’ games like DDR, Guitar Hero, etc. They may not turn everyone into a WoW player, but they open up the market and make gaming more socially acceptable by degrees. It may take 10 or 20 years (or more) before this filters over into the narrative games.
If ‘let women have conversations about female experiences’ is dogma, I certainly don’t have a problem with that.
The question is though how do you turn the Farmville experience into something more? A lot of people I know don’t really see that kind of game as a game but as something associated with Facebook (go figure, different lenses I suppose), they wouldn’t class themselves as actually being a gamer like say someone playing Mario or Pacman would have. The earning potential of games like these is huge, but it is a different marketing and profit maximising methodology, you can’t sell a subscription to Farmville but you can more easily sell credits or tractors in a way the traditional MMO seems to exclude (or perhaps not if TRH is an example).
So then how do we make WoW and similar games more accessible, what are our driving forces in terms of resource allocation and development to meet the objectives?
Letting women have conversations about female experiences isn’t dogma and is / should be an accepted part of life (in the same way any group should be allowed to have discussions about / with themselves). Parts of the feminist ideology however are treated as dogma, to have a discussion about the issues under discussion you must (generally) accept all of the underlying principles or be accused (and silenced) of derailing, devaluing, or being simply there to mention where are the menz. Once you move outside of that sphere you cannot expect people to know all about or understand the underlying principles (even the feminism 101 website has posts by feminists confused by the definitions
).
On the guy you moderated, good choice… people need spaces to express themselves however doing so at the expense of others seems wrong. I always liked the American view, you have the right to free speech, and I have the right to be offended by your speech
.
Feminism is a many splendored and confusing thing, otherwise there wouldn’t be so much discussion about it. This is a frontier blog, so I do try to be wary of simply saying ‘check your privilege’ and ‘what about the mens’, but when ‘what about the mens’ happens so much whenever the female view is brought up, it’s very easy to get frustrated by it. I’m not expecting people to understand all the principles off the bat
I don’t even know all of them yet!
Thats the problem, it is an umbrella term for people that actually seem to hold massively different views
. Even once you understand it it still seems confusing, in many ways its like politics… our left most parties are right wing, and our right wing parties are barely to the right of the lefties.
Privilege is one of those confusing terms since the way feminists use it is different to the dictionary definition (as with most isms). WTB a new dictionary tbh, like WoW we don’t really steal from the real dictionary but have our own terms. I know that goes against the idea of letting people define their own space, but it sure makes it easier to understand when you don’t understand.
[...] Please to be reading the original post first – yes, it’s very long, but it’s very good and some of what I say may not make sense unless you know what I’m responding to. (I also recommend the comments section, if you’re not the sort of person who normally reads them. Great discussion going on over there!) I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft, and Geekery – from The Mental Shama… [...]
I know you keep saying that you are a noob when it comes to feminism, but thanks so much for this post and others like it. You are definitely on my resources reading list
I wish I had more to say other than “good points that made me think!” but there it is. Keep up the good work!!
red cow´s last [type] ..questions i get asked
Thank you. I should stop falling back on that as a defence, it is somewhat lazy on my part
I’ve recently started branching out on the amount of blogs I follow on shamans and I came across this post first. Quite the first impression was made.
First of all, you’ve made some very good points. The teenyweenyplate bikini gets on my nerves to no end, but not because it is unfriendly to women. It just makes no sense at all. Armor is supposed to protect you, not enhance your figure (aside from muscles, that serve to intimidate in battle).
The female characters in WoW are indeed awfully underrepresented, something which is a shame. A real effort and mind set switch is needed on Blizzard’s behalf, not only their storymaking staff but also on the part of the people they hire to write the books.
But, icons? Sylvanas a bitch? Are you even half serious?
Garrosh calling Sylvanas a bitch ranckles with you? Garrosh is a lumbering oaf that has seemed to suffered from a dramatic character switch since we encountered him in TBC, going from a cowardly nannycrying idiot to a gungho, killemall idiot to the new Warchief…idiot. But have you stopped to think two seconds about Sylvanas? Why is the focus of that argument Garrosh and not Sylvanas? It seems as if you’re trying to find a problem with that conversation where the real source is a lot easier to find. Sylvanas simply is a bitch. And people calling other people names might offend. But so what?
Sylvanas and Jaina missing from ICC lore? Give me a break. It’s those two characters that serve as a focal point for all three ICC dungeons, whereas Jaina is even featured in the cutscene after Saurfang bites it. Yes, they are missing from the conclusion of the Arthas story line ie his death. But so is Muradin Bronzebeard, Varian Wrynn, Saurfang, Garrosh (especially the interaction between Bolvar and Saurfang is missing here, something that was ‘promised’ when you first step into ICC and experience the conversation between Arthas, Fordring and Saurfang on the Horde side).
Icons? Really? Are you that, for the lack of a more appropriate word, desperate for equal female representation ingame that you’re looking for inspiration in icons? Why can’t those icons be a generic representation of humans or whatnot? In my view, as a response to your earlier selfcritique in that section, yes, I do believe you are overreacting.
it’s strange that my first post here is one of such criticism, but if your aim is to provide thoughtprovoking articles and discusworthy topics, then mission accomplished. I’m looking forward to reading more from you before I make up my mind.
Again, I appreciate your initial point of view. I do however think that some of your points substract from it rather then add to it.
Interested in more,
Zorkolak
I think you missed the point of me detailing these seemingly ‘small’ things. Taking exception to the details of the list rather than the whole of the list actually proves rather than detracts from it – I make a point that I do not like how Blizzard has used gendered language, and have been told I’m overreacting.
I take a point that another blogger has made, that the only female icon in the warrior tree is called Rude Interruption, and I am told I am overreacting. For fairness I also had a look at the other trees, there were 4 trees with 0 female representatives.
These are nothing life threatening or ‘evil’, just sad examples of how game designers simply don’t think to put women into stories as anything other than extras. There’s a great article (that I listed in extended reading post) here that talks about how women simply get left out, and not even for reasons of ‘design resources’. Simply because men don’t like thinking about women being in horrific, violent situations.
I did not include a proper analysis of female characters in the game lore, it is something I plan to do at a later date, but there is an awful lot of criticism out there by women, about how the female characters are sidelined time and time again, or reduced to sidekicks for the men. So if you disagree with that point in particular I suggest seek out further reading on it. I firmly believe that Blizzard can do better with Tyrande (although so far she seems to be doing nothing in Cataclysm), and Jaina, and I am extremely interested to see where Sylvanas goes from the spoiled content we have heard about. Visibility is not enough any more.
Also, ‘overreacting’ might be harassing and abusing game staff members over the icons, or unsubscribing. Or maybe rending my clothes and pulling my hair out. Certainly not talking about how the artists and narrators of WoW have male privilege, and certainly not talking about how the lack of female representation in icon art is a symptom of the artist being entrenched in the Kyriarchy.
They are small examples (and not ones I’m calling out to be fixed OMG NAU BLIZZ HOW DARE YOU) of how the game perpetuates the invisibility of women, and reduces women to ‘witch, maiden, mother’ figures within the stories of men. I don’t know if you are male or female, but if you’re male then you need to seriously consider that many women are not happy about the presentation of female characters, and you do not get to tell us that they are ‘good enough’ because some of the many many more male major lore characters are ‘also sidelined’.
Consuming media does not grant that media immunity to criticism, having an opinion about something does not mean someone is ‘overreacting’.
Ah, the annoyance of commenting when I can’t read my original post, nor your response to it.
I believe I did not miss your point about the list rather then the small details. if I’m correct, you said that the small details themselves aren’t that important, it’s the trend that they reveal. But if those details that you mention aren’t even applicable to the subject at hand? What does that mean for your list? That’s what I was getting at with the Sylvanas-bitch point.
Regarding those female talents in the warrior tree: 80% of those have either a shield, a helmet or a kind of weapon as an icon. Most, if not all, of the other ones try to evoke a sense of battle rage, berserker or barbarity-feel closely associated with war, something which is more associated with men than with women. The popular feel, and I realize that I’m moving onto shaky ground here in regards to gender stereotypes, is that women are usually much more calm and in control of their emotions than men. We can go of on a tangent as to how this stems from the idea that women are subservient to men and that they should not be allowed to speak unless spoken to but that disturbing idea is not for now.
I do not disagree with your point that women characters are sidelined in WoW. I disagree with the fact that Sylvanas isn’t a bitch. She’s an undead, bitter, former High Elf Ranger Lord that is only bent on the total annihilation of the living. I would call her far worse things then ‘a bitch’. Calling that point out as an indication that WoW is biased towards men is really poor. There are a lot more and better points to be made, I’m sure.
Overreacting can take many forms. Canceling your subscription would indeed qualify, but so can taking the time to write about it be a form of overreacting, to an extent. Adding a superlative feel to the word is a poor way of mishandling my initial comment. I feel that the act of going so far as to look for icon depictions of women in talent trees is overreacting.
All in all, I feel that, I don’t know ( I might not be capable of fully expressing myself in the way that I would desire), your ‘rage against the machine’ is perhaps misdirected. If WoW can be seen as an expression of today’s society than you are correct, there should be a more equal focus on women as strong non-player characters. There might be a couple of reasons for this not being the case:
1. WoW is in fact not a depiction/caricature of today’s society and more one of a traditional medieval one with the associated values and ideas and orcs, trolls, elves and magic thrown into the pot. In that sense, women do take a back role to it. That’s what history teaches us anyway.
2. It’s possible that rather than being a conscious act of putting in male-prefered jokes, puns and story lines, we might be dealing with the ineptitude of the creative staff to come up with truly epic female characters for the game and setting. If this is the case, then we should try to act accordingly. What we should do however I have no idea of.
On the other hand, if WoW can be seen as a platform of societal improvement, then I would agree that articles like this are a good way forward. Not for the game, not for the community, but for our society as a whole. I would argue however that there are far better points to be made than talking about icons.
On your last note, I did not say that I agreed with the current underrepresentation of women in the game, nor would I claim that you should put up with it. I only approach it from a bad/lazy storyline point of view, not as an actual attempt to underrepresent women in games.
cheers,
Zorkolak
If you scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘newer comments’ you can read both.
What I mean by the list is that there are plenty of people who will disagree with a couple of points on it, but these are all things I have seen highlighted as examples of how women are inadvertently sidelined. Most people I have spoken to will agree on most of them, but not all of them, and the point they chose to disagree with isn’t the same one. The Icon example, Rude Interruption aside, is marginal for me because there aren’t all that many humanoid icons in the first place (and druids have no humanoid icons at all), but I included it because of the rude interruption, and because of the passion of the person who wrote about it.
I’ve never implied that any of the above was an intentional attempt to exclude or hide women. This is the point – it is a symptom of privilege NOT some sort of evil male conspiracy
I agree that my ‘soundbites’ about how female characters are handled in the game are not particularly in-depth – with an article approaching 3k words I didn’t want to include another 500 on why ‘bitch’ is misogynistic language that the game could do with out, and then have to spend yet more time explaining why women in the kyriarchy are hurt more by ‘bitch’ than men are hurt by ‘dick’ and so on. Why not just call her a monster, instead of using a word that is commonly used to belittle women and make them seem less of a threat. I fully accept that Garrosh is a nasty person, but Blizz is also pushing him as someone we’re supposed to emphasise with.
Actually, the popular ‘dismissal’ of women in games is that women are over emotional. Being assertive is to be a bitch and unfeminine, having an opinion is getting your ‘knickers in a twist’ or ‘that time of the month’. This is a function of the player base, but when a woman interrupts she is a nag/interrupting/fishwife/rude, and when a man is aggressive he is ‘manly’. The Righteous Orbs article that I linked with that point probably explains it better than I can here.
1) WoW is simultaneously a traditional fantasy world, and yet not. Ignoring the top level notable characters and power structures, we have female guards, commanders, cooks, scholars, mages, rangers, assassins. In everything but overall story arc, blizz has old, young, fat, rich poor, odd (all in a european fantasy kingdom setting) npcs going on. It’s one of the things I like about the game. When it comes to plot and notable characters, you have strong characters like Jaina ‘weeping’ over her King in Ice Crown Citadel. It’s not even that she’s excluded from the end of Arthas, but that the last we see of her is her weeping with pride over a man who isn’t even her sovereign. Now, nothing wrong with weeping women, crying is natural, but it felt incongruous to an awful lot of people, and leaves a lot of people with a completely different impression of her character. Ironforge, in beta, will go to Moira’s son and not her, in the absence of Magni – so clearly that is intended to be a patriarchal society.
2) See my above comment about none of this being intended on the part of the designers.
So, for me, it does reflect somewhat the mixed nature of today’s society – we’re no ‘feminist’ haven, but the game also reflects male privilege in the way it sidelines the female characters (and so far in Alliance Beta, it’s like Tyrande doesn’t exist, although Ysera is cool
) It is possible to write about female characters living in a patriarchy without submerging them into becoming bit parts in the stories of me, or reducing them to male fantasy stereotypes.
On overreacting:
My rage, as you call it, is not rage: I do get ragey at comments that do call my article ‘overreacting’ because it’s damn annoying and dismissive, or at comments that derail the conversation. Overreacting in a written article is more along the lines of ‘BLIZZARD SUCKS AND THIS IS WHY’. Saying that someone is overreacting, especially when you are not part of the group that is being marginalised, is also known as a tone argument. Being angry about something doesn’t make you wrong, or mean something isn’t worth discussing.
Pewter´s last [type] ..Blue Posts- Shaman Healing is the model for Cataclysm
Ok, prefixing this by the fact that this is the second try and writing this after the first was eaten by me not filling in captcha and MSIE eating my words (normally I do that so this is a change
).
I would like to know why the word bitch is considered misogynistic given that the majority of its uses as a word are not related to insulting women. Considering it misogynistic (or rather any language without considering intent) seems very much like the use of the word niggardly by Anthony A. Williams due to the words phonetic resemblance to the word nigger (another word originally considered descriptive, then insulting, then redeemed in part by parts of society) despite the lack of an etymological link between the words. Similarly the University of Wisconsin ruled that academics do not need to avoid the use of words used correctly and in context due to the responses of students and many other incidents.
In terms of using the word in relation to Sylvanas she would very much fall under the category of 3.a even if we exclude the esp.a woman clause. Even the the word has been re-appropriated by the feminist movement (though not by the dictionary yet it seems) to refer to a strong, outspoken, cunning, or some combination thereof woman. The use of the word by Blizzard seems to indicate that they are using the word correctly to refer to the character without being needlessly verbose, indeed they may be making use of both the feminist meaning and the dictionary meaning of the word indicating both a derision of Sylvanas and also respect for her.
Regarding the use of language without considering the intent of the author seems to be the root of this. Often people do not consider the alternate meanings of their language use or the potential for someone to read further into it than the author intended. Part of this does come down to sensitivity and common usage however it should not be a requirement on the speaker / author if they are using language correctly to account for specific sensitivities in the community due to the community reading into the word usage or choice.
Privilege is an interesting area especially given that it’s usage is largely a tarring of an entire group due to some similarities. The definitions of privilege note that not all (or any) points may refer to an individual within the group but are utilised to show societal benefits. This is seen as wrong generally when applied in any other context, even generalising feminists by the words of self recognised feminists often gets considered as “you cannot judge such a diverse group by the actions of a few members”. In relating the exclusion of Women in games we need to consider a much wider set of constraints than simply male privilege. It has been noted in linked articles that often men do not want to work on artfully draping female corpses across apocalyptic landscapes, it isn’t an exclusion but rather men internalising some values and not considering the need to have female corpses alongside the male. This applies more generally as well, in terms of political layout Warcraft seems relatively well balanced (multiple female leaders in their societies, strong female bad guys in lore as well as game even if they aren’t the big bad). Some of their stories (such as Jaina crying) can be seen as out of character, however in a larger aspect it actually shows some development and compassion from her character, few other characters act beyond their stereotyped role within the game even major characters such as Tirion.
In relation to ‘that time of the month’, I would expect that if women stopped utilising this as an excuse for behaviours then men would stop considering it to be so and its use. It is not all women that utilise this, and some likely have never mentioned this as an excuse, and the effects of a woman’s periods will vary individual however it is a privilege to be able to utilise hormonal imbalance as a reason to alter their behaviours from that which is accepted by society. Both men and women stuffer from hormonal cycles (men have hormonal cycles on hourly, daily, monthly and seasonally which alter the level of testosterone in the system). The use of this might be related to kryiarchy and the expectation that men will not give in to bodily issues (other than man flu…
) and that even acknowledging something like hormonal rhythms is non-manly.
Men interrupting aren’t considered manly… they are considered rude at least where I live and amongst my social groups. I know several women that do tend to be interrupted more often than others but this is largely due to their speech patterns which leave gaps that people tend to assume are the end / an appropriate break rather than due to their being interrupted (and I know some guys who never stop talking, those ones you have to interrupt otherwise you will be there all night).
Again we need to consider these little issues. We might not all agree on all of them but we can solve most of these while we cannot approach the large issue itself due to the sheer size and nature of it.
Magni’s inheritance seems acceptable given most monarchies I have seen. Under a lot of monarchies the partner of the current ruler only inherits for as long as the heir is underage (or doesn’t exist). In the UK, when Elizabeth II the Queen dies / abdicates it is not her husband Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) that will take the throne but her son Charles (Prince of Wales) with his successor being his son William rather than his wife Camilla (not sure if William or Camilla currently hold titles). So in terms of Ironforge it makes sense to pass to Magni’s son as the the heir rather than Moira assuming a traditional line of succession rather than a strange zigzag. Further information is really needed though, is Moira in the line of succession, what position does Magni’s son hold amongst the children, are there any requirements on the succession (age, gender, religious status, marital status, presence of heirs?). Without those additional points it doesn’t seem sexist at all to consider this line of succession.
I believe we can tell stories about female characters within even a very patriarchy based society, however I would say criticising WoW for this seems odd. It has strong female characters in almost all walks and aspects of life as well as in political hierarchies. We have powerful female bosses (though no end bosses that I remember) holding positions of power (LDW as the leader of the cult of the damned iirc etc). Female characters often show much more evolution than the male characters, while Jaina bursting into tears at the compassion of Varian may seem incongruous with a strong powerful female leader it does show her evolution and her compassion, which is something we don’t really see amongst male characters. Considering Tirion to be one of the major driving characters within the WotLK story his development is minimal, he can at almost all times be classified as the ‘righteous paladin’ (if righteous when attached to Paladin isn’t a redundancy).
With Tyrande I can understand her reluctance to act. Elves within the Warcraft universe seem very much to have major issues with gaining and using power. There are multiple cases of Elves gaining power and becoming effectively meglomanics. Illidan, Kael’thas, the fall of the High Elves and the rebirth and revival of the Blood Elves all point towards the society having potential power issues (similar in many ways to the Jedi of Starwars who seem to have a tipping point in power whereby they must either rule the universe or draw away from it).
It has been mentioned on linked blogs that often it is not men excluding women, but simply not considering to add them or reacting to restraints in their budget or attention. It was mentioned that men had an aversion to working with female corpses and artfully draping them across a post-apocalyptic landscape in a similar way that we as a society tend to avoid adding the corpses of children to games. I think we really do need to consider the intent of actions rather than simply their actions. I am not sure the kryiarchy or patriarchy exists as defined in feminist contexts however it seems to exclude a lot of focus on individual responsibility and intent to produce a view of society which abstractly enforces these concepts.
Anyway, once more into the captcha!
From Dictionary.com
–noun
1.a female dog.
2.a female of canines generally.
3.Slang .
a.malicious, unpleasant, selfish person, esp. a woman.
b.a lewd woman.
4.Slang .
a.a complaint.
b.anything difficult or unpleasant: The test was a bitch.
c.anything memorable, esp. something exceptionally good: That last big party he threw was a real bitch.
–verb (used without object)
5.Slang . to complain; gripe: They bitched about the service, then about the bill.
–verb (used with object)
6.Slang . to spoil; bungle (sometimes fol. by up ): He bitched the job completely. You really bitched up this math problem.
Origin:
bef. 1000; ME bicche, OE bicce; c. ON bikkja
First appears as an insult towards Women circa 1400.
[...] been thinking about what it is to be female in Azeroth. Certain posts, like this one at the ‘mental shaman, and certain experiences I’ve had in game have brought me to the point where I should address [...]
Please don’t use dictionary definitions in a debate like this. There are plenty of places out there that will discuss why bitch is misogynistic, and it’s use as a derrogatory word for women stems from the 14th century, so the fact that it is just fine to use for female dogs doesn’t make it any less harmful to women. Also note that when it is applied to men, it applies the feminine to men in a way that is ‘ewww woman’. For a man to be a bitch is to be submissive or subservient – it’s very similar to using gay or lame to describe something as bad.
Again, with the example of the corpses, it is not intentional or nasty. No one is trying to exclude women, but by the nature of ‘women and children first’ and protectiveness, and simple forgetfulness, our presence is erased or reduced. The fact that they have been taught to protect women is also an example of societal values and how they other us (and not to mention only chose heteronormative values.)
I have to catch my bus, so you’ll have to excuse me from typing out another long reply.
We can’t use the dictionary definition? So if I intend to make reference to a guy who is malicious, unpleasant and selfish it is wrong to call him a bitch? Changing the meaning of words and utilising them in non-standard ways to add or remove the intent of the author is a very bad debating tactic and it is a very privileged position to be in to be able to redefine the language we use to reflect your views. That you might see bitch as making a man submissive or subservient (another reappropriation to indicate that someone is below someone else in a power hierarchy) does not mean that its use correctly implies that. Following through if that is to be an accepted meaning of the word why not utilise it correctly and redeem the word through use.
So if a woman looks at a situation and sees it from her perspective then she is othering the other genders, races, religions etc? If we take most modern warfare men are the largest proportion of casualties and combatants and so would be more represented in these kinds of games simply by portraying reality, to change reality is easy. In terms of portraying female death even in games men tend to react badly, men are seen as expendable (and from a genetic replacement pov are compared to women due to the requirements of pregnancy). The closest we have to real information is likely “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society” by Lt Col Dave Grossman who noted that male IDF members became protective of wounded female soldiers and had resulting increased aggression (bad for the health of those around you when you lose control in a situation like a firefight).
In terms of heteronomative, seriously? Heteronormative seems to imply an active attempt to force a gender / sex alignment within the society it is within. We would need to see intent and likely a lot more relationships and how they are viewed within the game universe to decide if the universe was heteronormative. Most in game relationships hold very little plot time or value (so many fall into the “x gains angst due to death of y” plot device), so drawing conclusions from them seems arbitrary.
Ok, so if protection is othering women why is there no real feminist drive to get into dangerous, bad, or poorly paid male occupations (Refuse collectors, Soldiers, Oil Rigs etc) but there is one to get into nice fields like STEM. I do actually want to understand this, why is it ok for one side of this debate to want to retain privileges (or beneficial sexism) in some areas while erasing their matching disprivileges (which are already mostly gone legally in most ‘Western Democracies’). Similarly why is it alright to consider only recent history on one side while the other is responsible for millenia of oppression. These are the points I don’t get, at heart it seems fundamentally hypocritial.
“In terms of heteronomative, seriously? Heteronormative seems to imply an active attempt to force a gender / sex alignment within the society it is within”
In society at large, and gaming culture to an even greater degree, heteronormative attitudes are so pervasive that they are invisible. You don’t need to “force” it because the culture accepts that “that’s just the way things are.” Every argument made against objectively evaluating gender or sexuality in gaming follows a similar vein; that’s where the money is, playing to demographics, just the way things are, if you don’t like it don’t play it, etc. etc. etc., and all of these arguments serve a single purpose: they reinforce the status quo by silencing disruptive opinions.
WoW is a heteronormative game because it presents literally zero alternate sexualities, just as it is an arguably sexist game because it reinforces ridiculous fantasy stereotypes of women while providing no legitimate female perspectives. It is the definition of heteronormative; it pretends alternate sexualities do not exist. Gaming culture prefers it this way because it is a very male-centric culture, with a strong tendency to attempt to silence those who don’t fit its mold.
Pewter is not changing dictionary definitions to suit her arguments, she is pointing out that these words have loaded meanings in our culture, and dictionaries do not change that fact. The problem of privilege is that those who have it by definition have a hard time seeing it themselves because, once again, “that’s just the way things are.” Therefore those with privilege should not get to control a debate about marginalization. Don’t you see? I as a man cannot tell a women who is experiencing frustration at a lack of representation in gaming that she needs to just lighten up, because by doing so I’m trying to invalidate her experience and reinforce the message that she doesn’t matter. The exact same could be said of anyone using any kind of “deal with it” argument, whether it’s about gender, sexuality, or race.
You may not realize it, but you’re doing this yourself, right now.
2ndnin, I’ve tried to debate with you on the level but at this point a lot of your comments aren’t productive for me to debate, they’re silencing. This isn’t a debate club, this isn’t a place to come and try to debunk feminism. You aren’t saying -anything- that feminists haven’t heard before, and you’re not really looking beyond your own privilege.
Saying ‘I would expect that if women stopped utilising this as an excuse for behaviours then men would stop considering it to be so and its use’ completely ignores the fact that most women might use it to excuse being slightly more cranky than usual, but the phrasing is often used by men to completely dismiss the agency of women and to shut them up in a male dominated culture and society. Those are two very different things, and blaming women for things men do is both victim blaming, agency removing, and also deprives men of their responsibility to take a women’s opinions seriously.
If you want to debunk all of feminism please go elsewhere. I’m not interested in discussing things with you further. (And yes, I could answer your points, but I’d just be repeating the work of many feminism 101 blogs.) There is a lot of room in feminism for debate and criticism of feminist theory, but what you are doing is not that. The more you reply, the less I feel that you’re actually reading and emphathising, and the more I feel like you’re just looking for a fight so you can ‘pwn’ a feminist in her own space. I’ll be revoking your privileged posting privileges.
If people agree with your points, they stand on their own merits right now. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Masanbol: She is changing the dictionary definition of the word to add ‘cultural loading’. To anyone using the word in the actual dictionary version this is a form of privilege, to state to them that their intent and meaning is irrelevant because of some other force which adds other meaning and intent to the word. Redefining language to include cultural loading without considering the intent and meaning the author intended is dishonest at the least.
The problem with privilege is that not everyone that gets tarred with it actually has it, each of the definitions of privilege states that ‘this may not apply to you’, ‘you might not have everything on this list’ which means privilege is actually something that some people like you may have. It cannot be defined, it cannot be ranked, it cannot be honestly verified as to the interactions of this privilege. Going by definitions I have male, white, cis, hetero, fat, tall, disability, intelligent, middle class, student, gamer, and a variety of other privileges. Now I can go through the male privilege checklist and honestly say that the majority of them I do not have, the white checklist is actually a ‘person of the colour of the majority of their country’ and similar. I don’t get to control a debate on marginalisation because I am any of the above, but I do get to have views and to state that I do not / should not / can’t see other issues is a more insidious issue than privilege.
Pewter: I have asked honest questions, if you don’t want to answer please just say so rather than telling me I am silencing. I have been told this and you know what… every feminist blog says that but refuses to answer questions, they direct you to feminism 101 which isn’t about debate but about stating a point of view which is then canon. I want to look beyond my ‘privilege’, I want to understand.
I am not interested in debunking feminism, and the feminism 101 blogs aren’t places to ask questions unless you already agree with their points. However I will accept your right to shut down conversation and assume that I cannot understand.
Thanks masanbol for that last paragraph, that cleared up a lot of the problems I was having in seeing the other side of the argument.
However, I would claim that there is a difference between telling someone to lighten up and by doing so belittling their experience and trying to put those same experiences into context.
Also, Pewter, if you write an article such as this you can’t be surprised that you will get such an amount of responses. But don’t make the mistake of taking every disenting voice as one that tries to debunk feminism as a whole. Sometimes, we might agree wholeheartedly with a cause but don’t like the points the defending party is making for it.
That, in a nutshell, was what I was going for. I felt that certain points could have been made better and succeeded more in getting the idea/views accross.
cheers,
Zorkolak
I am quite aware that I will get dissenting opinions
, but there’s a difference between productive discussion and going around and around the privilege merry-go-round. If someone is coming here and trying to debunk the entirety of feminism – well I’m only one person and there’s only so much I can do (and while you personally weren’t trying to do that, well…) . Plus I am new to this type of dialogue so responding in a way that is productive to such criticism such as 2indin is not something I’m going to be perfect at and I am still learning to articulate some of this stuff. Yours clearly wasn’t debunking the whole, but others have pretty much strayed into that territory.
As for lighten up vs put experiences in context I’m not sure what you’re referring to there
Telling someone it is just a game isn’t putting something in context, it’s invalidating the value of the experience of the game and the person making the claim, for example. I did get that you were trying to critique method rather than message, but I simply didn’t agree with the critiques. I have no problems with dissenting messages (else I wouldn’t have publish 2indin, who managed to ding every note on the feminist bingo card) but there’s only so much I can take, hence the comment policy 
Me? Never!
“Saying ‘I would expect that if women stopped utilising this as an excuse for behaviours then men would stop considering it to be so and its use’ completely ignores the fact that most women might use it to excuse being slightly more cranky than usual, but the phrasing is often used by men to completely dismiss the agency of women and to shut them up in a male dominated culture and society. Those are two very different things, and blaming women for things men do is both victim blaming, agency removing, and also deprives men of their responsibility to take a women’s opinions seriously.”
I can see why you feel this way about men using the same terminology as women do to excuse other behaviour and thus make women invisible. My major point though was that by using this kind of statement women give men (and other women) the capability to utilise it to ignore them in circumstances they didn’t intend.
I am not trying to say that men should utilise the phrase in this way, but rather that the power of the phrase is derived from its usage in another sector. If someone states that ‘I pulled a calf muscle’ very few people (I can’t think of any) can use it as a tool against them because a pulled calf muscle has very few negative connotations associated with it. In contrast the ‘time of the month’ statement has been used (both in real life and in mass media) to excuse behaviours that would be classed as criminal (verbal / physical assaults). As such it becomes an offensive tool when a woman acts outside of the sphere of expectations, or acts in a way that people wish to stop. This phrase links her actions to those unjustifiable ones and so becomes powerful in a way that was originally not intended.
The same has been done with many other phrases, think of the hysteria associated with ‘pedophiles’. Now the correct usage of this phrase is worthy of large parts of that hysteria however it also get applied by the media to cases like a 16 year old having sex with her/his 15 year, 11 month, 30 day old boy/girlfriend. The power of the phrase is derived from the worst case and then linked to all other uses of the word via public perception and media influence.
I am not sure how you stop this linkage other than stopping using the phrase outside of it’s proper usage yourself and correcting those that use it incorrectly. I get called fat (probably because I am, but possibly because the person trying to insult me lacks a good thesaurus), my typical response to this is to indicate which parts are true (why yes, I am over the recommended weight for my height and that is largely due to fat rather than muscle) and to move forward with it (and what does that have to do with anything or was it merely a public service announcement?). It largely disarms the situation because people recognise that they cannot really move forward with their insult / degradation plans.
To disarm language we must use it correctly and stop the association with the worst case, if we don’t then words grow in power and become more important than the issue they describe.
Anyway, no need to actually post this, was just trying to explain my pov.
[...] “Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?”: Geek Feminism reposts an incisive critique of issues of sexism in World of Warcraft and gamer/geek culture more broadly, “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery.” [...]
[...] in the recent flurry of feminist posts started by Pewter’s (excellent and well researched) literary analysis-style post on WoW, I have written a number of blog posts about women and WoW. I’m proud that some of [...]
[...] came across a really good blog post from Pewter at the Mental Shaman, and here’s a follow [...]
An extremely minor aside, but according to the “lore,” Sylvanas isn’t rotting as much as the other Forsaken because she was able to return to her body (relatively) shortly after her soul was ripped apart from it and turned into a banshee. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Arthas kept her physical body sealed in an iron coffin to mock her further, so it would’ve stayed pretty well preserved.
Very good post overall, though. There is a decided male slant to the game’s design, that is sure. I don’t necessarily blame the developers; it’s the world in which we live that is so biased. And the only things I can think of that will help even things out are people such as yourself pushing for change, and time.
Yeah. It’s not a case of blame, it’s a case of ‘please realise this, please see what you’re doing’, I think. At least on my part.
That’s an awesome note about Sylvanas’ lore, thank you
Aymee, I’m really late to the game here, but I hope you find this comment anyway…
If you’re interested in gritty dark fantasy with a female lead, look up Lois McMaster Bujold’s “the Curse of Chalion” and “Paladin of Souls” the first is about a man using traditionally feminine means (self-sacrifice) to put a female monarch on the throne, and the second is about a middle aged queen who breaks out of her very confined life, at first simply because she doesn’t want to be constrained anymore. It’s only later that the typical ‘save the world’ fantasy themes kick in, only after you already care about her as a character.
I think you might like them.
Sounds interesting, I shall have to give it a look!
Pewter, I just want to thank you for posting this. I love to see geek feminists speak up, and I hope that the post puts some new ideas in the heads of good people who just didn’t know better (that was me, once). You open yourself up to a lot of unjustified hate by speaking up like this, and I really admire that you have the brass ovaries to do it.
“brass ovaries” made me giggle, no lie.
Well that was a boring read. Really, if you have this much to complain about in a GAME, then maybe it’s time to ya know, not play it anymore. Fantasy will always have scantily clad women and half naked over muscled men, get over it. And as a bisexual woman, I find both hot, so nuts to ya.
@Jamie – You found it boring, yet cared enough to comment, I appreciate that dedication
I love the game, and I write about the things I love – and loving something does not mean it is forever and ever safe from criticism. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many blogs grumbling about the latest class changes 
I think these things are worth talking about, and that’s why I blog about them. If you don’t want to read about them, then this blog isn’t the place for you!
I just wanted to chime in, and pardon me if the point has allready been made, but I find on this subject one of the most frustrating things for me is the reaction I get from other players when I as a male player attempt to defend or speak out for female players and harrassment. I get called more names than I ever have before in a raid when asking people to not make rape jokes, that it might offend someone, I get berated and my masculinity wuestioned when I try and ask people to think of female gamers as equals and respect them as such. Its frustrating because, and it is rare, but sometimes the insults come from the female gamers, assuming I am trying to defend them as some sort of IN to try and get pictures from them or something, or worse yet that I am insulting them by insinuating that they cant stick up for themselves. I just want people to have a good time, and to feel safe in the game, thats it, no angle, just a hope.
@Pewter – Just a quick hit here, sorry to be late to the party and all that.
In response to the discussion about Blizz’s employment diversity and especially the higher ups. I know Metzen’s second in command is a woman. I can’t remember her name off the top of my head. I think it’s Evelyn something but not entirely sure
@S.O. – Interesting to know! I think Blizzard as a company has always sounded like a great place to be an employee, and in many cases I think they do a great job, but some things just slip by no matter the gender of the editor/supervisor.
@Justin Leflar – That sucks, and you have my sympathies Justin. I’ve never been berated by another woman in-game, but I’ve definitely had my fair share of commenters and discussions with women who dismissed things as too sensitive. Partly I think because engaging with the structure of Kyriarchy is hard, it isn’t easy and no one wants to be dealing with it all the time, and secondly because they’ve not really given the issues at stake much thought, or gone beyond their own experiences and privilege. It doesn’t make them bad people (or even ‘bad feminists’, a notion I detest) it just means that they’re at a different place along the spectrum.
Please don’t let those women or men discourage you. Objecting to rape culture does not strip anyone of gender identity, and insulting gender identity is a typical privileged way to respond, imho
Pewter´s last [type] ..Harvest Festival Bake-Off- Stormwind Brie- Darnassian Bleu and Zangar Cap Fondue
Great post, that is all.
Awesome. Really. What you write here is exactly how I’ve been feeling for years, from misrepresntation of women in game to sexist rethorics both from game events and players and the blatant dismissmal of the issue when brought up.
I have occationally tried to speak up myself, when the rape jokes have been a bit too many, or men feeling insulted I corrected them when calling me a man one time too often, but usualy the oh so tired silence tactics just gets thorwn in my face. I have eventually just made a private channel where I have handpicked people who gets things like Safe Spaces, the structure of the Kyriarchy and understand how priviliges and internalized -isms work without me having a 6 hour rant, and then I just dont go outside my bubble other than for raids. I sometimes have the feeling im the only feminist in wow, but clearly Im wrong, and I haven’t been this glad to be proven wrong in a long while!
I do my wow-nerd teaspoon salute for you! Go team!
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[...] Den hjälplösa kvinnan är kanske inte så framträdande. Det är däremot den sexualiserade kvinnan, den objektifierade kvinnan och den växling mellan hora och madonna som nästan alltid förekommer. Titta till exempel på Cataclysm. [...]
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