“The thing about feminism is there’s always somebody to tell you you’re doing it wrong” – comic author Gail Simone (Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Secret Six)

 This may shock you, but I’ve been wrong some times. Many times, in fact.

Much more often I’ve been called wrong. Being called out for doing things wrong is an occupational hazard for those who launch political campaigns or seek to raise awareness of issues. Every time someone new encounters your idea, there’s a very good chance they’ll be keen to tell you what’s wrong with it. Some of them leave their comments on our Facebook page, where we try to preserve them until they become abusive.

This is, of course, precisely the way it should be. When it comes to crusades, we must follow the lessons of comic books, and be sure to Not Be As Bad As Them. The only way we can be sure of that is to constantly check and evaluate our beliefs, our goals and our practices. It’s also important not to waste our time – or yours – with ideas that aren’t helping. Unquestioning optimism or smug moralising can actively damage a cause far more than apathy.

It’s also a vital part of any philosophy or movement, to ensure it remains relevant and important. An idea as big as feminism, as revolutionary as feminism, as new as feminism must and should be constantly questioned, and analysed and examined. It is such a big, new and revolutionary idea that it certainly cannot be expected to comprise only one idea at all, in fact. It is a large concept that everyone can and should have thoughts about and reactions to, and discussions arising from.

Perhaps the best thing about being called wrong though is it can be the whetstone that sharpens our ideas. That is to say, what matters less is being wrong in the first place, and rather how we respond to it. Twitter has recently exploded into a small firestorm as some radical feminists have been accused of being wrong in their exclusion of transwomen from their movement – to the point where they lost a venue for their 2013 convention to the glee of the anti-feminist Mens’ Rights Activists. Their response in many cases has been to up the ante, and declare transwomen to be the enemy, and even state they are spies of the MRA, keen to practice “corrective rape”.

I must also point out that others provided a more measured response, which in particular talks about how the branding of the entire #radfem movement as being anti-trans has created a huge divide that in the end has just kept women away from important information and shared involvement – to everyone’s detriment. Ultimately, that is the risk here: that adding barriers to who can or can’t be a “good” or “bad” feminist ends up weakening everybody. What’s more, the moment you start erecting walls and saying who can and can’t come into your club, you are definitely heading towards being Just As Bad As Them.

A month earlier over on this side of the pond, Helen Razer, a noted feminist author used her blog to accuse Jenna Price, a noted feminist campaigner of being wrong. This was due to the latter’s “Destroy the Joint” campaign being onanistic and misplaced; a convenient middle-class rage-masturbation aimed at straw men and hollow targets, diverting effort from actually smashing the tools of patriarchy and focussing feminism on the violence of men and the poverty of women. Ms Price responded with an article of her own, providing her smashing the state credentials, and talking about how small social media rage-masturbations are part of a larger tapestry, and that each hollow target called out is a tiny victory if only for the woman marginalised by it.

Both sides made excellent points, and the real glory of this event was in the overall exchange. Ms Price’s thoughtful reply gave her a chance to clarify her position and sharpen her drive. The lively discussion made headlines and prompted discussion around the country, and all discussers were pointed back at Ms Price’s rebuttal, where she made it clearer to everyone – and to a now far wider audience – the goals of Destroy the Joint, and the context it operated within. Not only was the message improved, but it was spread further. Even if it led to a few raised voices on the twittersphere, there could have been no better outcome. Nobody was excluded from anything, and the frank exchange of big ideas left everyone more enlightened.

As I said at the beginning, I get accused of being wrong all the time, in my role of running and promoting the MESSAGE. Every time I introduce it – which is what promoting it involves - somebody will ask about our motives, or our methods, or our goals. Many of them will pick holes in these things, finding what they consider obvious flaws or clear problems (which of course we have not spotted ourselves), sometimes just as idle conversation, other times as philosophical debate, still others as outright attacks. But I welcome them all, because every time I get asked something, I get better at providing the answers. I learn more about why we’re doing the MESSAGE, and how we can make it work. And I learn more about how to explain that to people, and get our message across.

 And sometimes, the wider discussion takes things even further. On one Facebook group, a male member lamented that our ideas – while laudable – were futile, because we were always going to be preaching to the converted: that the “good guys” already knew how to treat women, and the “bad guys” didn’t. This made me realise just how important it was not to divide the world up like that, that this was putting up the same kind of fences of exclusion I desperately wanted to avoid (and I’ll talk more about that in my next blog). I gained a clearer idea of what we needed to do and how do do it. 

In his comment however he didn’t actually use the word “women”. He referred to female players as “gamer girls”. And one of his fellow members spoke up at that point, pointing out how she found the prevalence of that particular infantilising epithet to be demeaning and prejudiced. A brief discussion – including apologies – ensued. And, as they say in family-friendly sitcoms, we all learnt a valuable lesson: that sometimes when you think you’re right, you’re actually wrong.

And I learnt, once again, just how important it is to be told you’re wrong. Because it’s the only way to get it right.

A friend of mine doing gender studies just handed me a paper to read. It’s entitled “Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality during the Cold War” (Carolyn Lewis, Journal of Women’s History Volume 17, Number 4, 2005) and discusses the prevailing medical beliefs and practices of sexual medicine during the 1960s and 1970s. Primarily, it details the popular idea that vaginal orgasm was the key to a healthy marriage and a happy wife, and the role doctors were encouraged to play in helping women achieve that – and not seek sexual pleasure elsewhere. Non-vaginal orgasm was seen as the cause and sympton of unhappy marriages and unhappy women.

It’s all very distressing, but the quote that caught my eye was this one:

Linked to this inappropriate sexual outlets was inappropriate gender role behavior… Symptoms included interest in such activities as playing cards, participating in sports, traveling alone and ‘perhaps even aggressive pursuit of a career.’ (emphasis added)

There’s a lot to unpack already. It’s so easy to forget how far we’ve come, and how much we’ve learnt about sexual health, mental health, gender issues and societal perceptions over the last forty or fifty years. We should never, ever forget that – it’s when we forget things like that that we think movements like feminism are meaningless because we can no longer see what they accomplished, which also helps hide what is still going on, because it lacks context. History is not about understanding the past, but understanding the present.

There is of course a temptation to dismiss the statement’s relevance. After all, that was Another Time, and, as L.P. Hartley said, they do things differently there. We must have Comes So Far. Certainly, fifty years is almost two generations. Those were Baby Boomers, Generation Y is obviously not part of such silliness. But let’s remember that those ideas in that paper weren’t just prevailing views of society, they were accepted medical fact (although the two are intertwined). Before we changed the former, we had to change the latter, which took a generation of its own. To change the latter will take another generation. We are, indeed, now reaching a point where female sexuality is being more openly celebrated in all its forms. Some would say it is being over-celebrated, because our culture prefers to keep women as sexual beings as a way of undermining them; our repsonse to the Purity Myth is to turn women from Virgins who must be Protected into Whores that seduce the purity of men.

The evidence of that comes in the part of the sentence I bolded up there. Way back in the dim distant past, the first sign, the absolute first symptom of a woman who had become dysfunctional, had refused to take obedient, dutiful pleasure in her husband’s penetration, the very first sign that she had risen up against this and rejected, from there, all her duties and responsibilities in society, that giant flashing warning sign that tells you everything is wrong?

Is playing cards.

Think about that. Roll that around your mind for a moment. It’s not the most dramatic sign – travelling alone and having a career were far more dramatic – but it was the first sign. The first one to spring to mind.

There’s an old saw that goes if you list what a society considers a crime, you know what that society does every saturday night. We must assume these symptoms were evident. That women had begun, to the horror of proper society, to the dismay of their authority figures and older generations, to the denigration of their mental health and the order of society, in the face of all these things, that women had begun playing cards.

We tend to minimise hobbies, sports, and leisure. They’re not important, like life and liberty. They’re not food on the table or jobs or the right to vote or marry or have children. Yet if we look at history, we know that these things – the way we spend our free time, the way we play and dance and sing – these things are inseparable from who we are, and play an enormous part in our social and societal make-up. And as such, they play a massive part in revolution and political change. If nothing else, they are the canary in the mine. The thing that tells you change is coming.

The American Civil Rights movement was not won by white teenagers listening to black singers like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but that was part of that struggle -  and the authority figures knew it, and feared it because of that. It’s very difficult to make a generation hate the people who write their music. It matters when minorities become visible in art and culture. Children sneaking off to go to “black clubs” was part of that rebellion, of accepting that culture.

Games aren’t culture in the same way, but they are part of those struggles.  Jackie Robinson breaking the “colour barrier” in baseball was a massive event in civil rights. Likewise, women playing cards was an equal act of rebellion as burning bras and coming out of the kitchen. It was taking a stake in a male dominated world. Naturally, the most desirable thing, the first thing women wanted wasn’t work, but play. Fun. Enjoyment. Games. And the moment they wanted that, the gatekeepers knew it was a sign thateverything had already gone wrong. Once they start playing cards, they’ve already changed who they are – who they are supposed to be.

As I said, we like to believe that was All Long Ago. But I look around this hobby, and I’m not so sure. Women are allowed to play games, but they cannot do it without being reminded that these games are our games, men’s games. We were here first, we set the agenda, we are the largest market, and our preferences and tastes matter the most. We have let women in the door, but out of generosity, and we demand they sit up the back of the bus and be quiet – and with the ever-present assumption that it was always our bus to begin with, and always will be.

It is of course, much worse in sports, where women are allowed to play as long as they are almost invisible (how many Australians knew the Women’s World Cup Cricket just finished, with the Australian teaming wining for the sixth time in a row?) or expected to be sexually attractive before they are allowed to play (as with the world-wide promotion of Lingerie Football). But for a lot of men, the same macho parochialism is part of gaming – after all, it has the same drive to win at all costs, the same appeal to violence and strength as chief virtues, the same masculine regalia and if you’ve ever seen a gaming advertisement you know they’ll be yelling at you in a loud voice about how you must deliver the smackdown. The girls can join the Street Fight or the Tomb Raiding, but they have to do it in their lingerie.

So have we really come that far? Or, like the doctors of the 1960s and the society around them, do we still see women playing games as the first and most dangerous threat? Of a the most alarming sign of a woman going beyond her designed role in society? Looks like we still do. And if we’re still fighting that battle, we know that there are other battles still to be fought, because how we spend our leisure is part and parcel of the human experience, and making it equal is part and parcel of the struggle for equality. And it is a battle that canot be ignored.

Jackie Robinson wasn’t Rosa Parks or the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. But his success was part of a cultural  and political war, and part of winning that war. You couldn’t pretend that it was okay for black people to vote but not okay for them to play baseball – and working towards both goals helps the other, and strengthens the other. Likewise, you don’t get to say you’re a feminist, that you think women should be allowed to vote and work and have equal rights, and then go home and tell bitches to get off Call of Duty, because hey, it’s only a game.

No, it’s not. Games matter. The fights we fight in gaming MATTER. They are inseparable from political struggles. If women are playing cards, then everything is under attack, they once believed. Now they believe it of video games and board games and wargames and RPGs. But we want those things under attack, on every front, so we must have women playing games, everywhere, freely and visibly and without restraint or disdain. We cannot settle for anything less.

A lot of terrible things have happened in the world over the last few weeks. In Steubenville, Ohio, a teenaged girl was raped and subsequently footage was released on YouTube of people joking about the event and mocking the victim.

This video provides an excellent summary of the Ohio case, and includes some of the footage. It includes footage and discussion which may be distressing to some viewers. We are linking to it here because it places the event in the context of the culture in which it was allowed to happen and which excused it afterwards, a culture that we are all a part of and likely contribute to in some way. The men - or boys, perhaps – who perpertrated this crime were not evil, nor mentally ill, yet were perhaps not even aware they had committed a crime, and certainly had no conception of the imorality or inappropriateness of their actions, and they did not become that way in just a moment. 

The boys involved were football players, not gamers, but culture is powerful and important. The media is full of examples of these kind of events happening with regard to sports teams and sport sub-cultures, and in such cultures we also find the hallmarks of rape culture. That is to say, studies continue to show that rape is more likely to occur in environments that produce a “rape culture”, where women are stereotyped, objectified, isolated, denigrated and demeaned, through both overt and subtle rituals and communication.

This is information we should be very concerned about indeed. Gaming is rife with rape culture and has become increasingly so in the last decade, both in the content of the games and in the subculture’s behaviours and standards. Even if no crimes had occurred, that should make us worried at the risk this might present, based on similar cultures with similar dysfunctions where the culture does indeed lead to increases in actual events. The sad truth is, there are such events. Cases of sexual assault and physical sexual harrassment have become more and more common at gaming events, particularly conventions. If there are less reported cases of rape and sexual assault among gamers than among sport teams, we might suggest that is simply because gamers are less social in general, less likely to socialise with the opposite sex, and/or that, for computer gamers, the nature of their hobby – being mostly online – keeps them isolated.

In other words, it could be that the only reason gamer geeks rape less frequently than jocks is because geeks go to fewer parties.

That is a simplification but deliberately so; the summary allows it to be more direct, more shocking, and it needs to be shocking, because it is a crisis situation that must be addressed.

What’s also interesting about this discussion is the timing. As this article also discusses (as it dissects rape culture, brilliantly and at length, please read it) there is a familiarity to this accusation that many will find uncomfortable. For the longest time, gamers have fought against the stigma that games cause violence. Dungeons and Dragons and RPGs were blamed for murder and mind-control in the early 1980s; from the Columbine massacre of 1999 to the horrific events at Sandy Hook just a few weeks ago, media pundits have rushed to blame video games. Indeed, the residents of Sandy Hook recently gathered to perform a mass burning of violent media, including games.

Many gamers have faced great objections to their games because of fears like this. Some games have been banned or made extremely hard to find as a result. Some gamers have devoted enormous amounts of time, energy, passion and intellect to defending against these trends, and keeping our hobby, all of it, out of the pyres, and out of the shadows of fearful stereotyping and stigma. The suggestion that games make you violent – and murderous - is one that has been fought long, and hard and instinctively and repeatedly because it had to be. In voicing anything that resembles such a claim, even from inside the hobby, we should expect a vocal and ardent defence, out of long justified habit.

So is there a difference between saying games make you a murderer and saying games make you a rapist?

Yes.

For one, the claims are fundamentally different. The first draws a line directly from simulated behaviour to actual behaviour without any recognition of steps between, a line that ignores all sense of contributing culture, and a line that science doesn’t support. In the second case we have increasing evidence that rape culture – a measurable, well-defined state – exists in gaming culture, which is bad enough on its own, because it isolates, demeans and degrades women. We also know that in other subcultures, rape culture contributes significantly to the risk of actual physical assault.

The only question that remains is whether the rape culture is being sufficiently contributed to by the content of the games themselves, or simply coming from outside sources. Are men being overwhelmingly caught up in rape culture from mainstream sources, or does the portrayal (or lack thereof) of women in gaming help build and maintain that culture?

That is hard to say for sure. There is increasing evidence, however, that women are underrepresented in game content, and stereotypically represnted when they do appear. That gaming continues to market strongly and slavishly to the mindset of the adolescent, hormonal teenager. We know this because, if from no other source, women are talking about it. Because they can’t find the games they want to play.

The claims are different, and what’s more the reaction is different too. The knee-jerk response to any talk of art being dangerous is to fear the pyre, and again, there are very good reasons for that to be the instinctual response, because we humans are very quick to condemn. For some, the emotional response is equivalent: we can get on social media and label something as evil and that is just the same outpouring of collective hate that gathers around the book-burning pyre.

But there is a fundamental difference between burning books and criticising them. This is a difference not all find important: Penny Arcade’s “Tycho” believes the solution, as he explains here in response to a certain hypersexualised game trailer, should never be less art but always “more art”. But that suggests that all ideas are worthy of all attention, and that creativity produces a wild jungle where ideas of every stripe thrive in their own niche. This is not true of art and certainly not of paid entertainment. The point of the critic – whether that criticism be artistic or political – is to say that some ideas are more interesting than others, and absolutely more important than others. This is not censorship, this is an artistic winnowing that cuts down the trivial and banal, and values the beautiful and truthful; that ignores the cruel and the reactionary and elevates the better angels.

Does that risk exiling some works for being politically incorrect? Maybe so. But it also forces artists to be more interesting. More intelligent. More aware. And less lazy. Less comfortable. Less boring. Less grubbingly dependent on the visceral and the shocking, on the profitable and profligate. Criticism is not the same as censorship; criticism makes art better, in every possible sense. And in a commercial sense, it is vital: it is the consumer telling the producer what they actually want.

That it might also lead to changing the whole culture of the hobby – and thus significantly reduce the number of actual sexual assaults – is a rather nice bonus.

So here we are, and here we remain. We will continue, along with others, to point out games that fail to challenge the dominant, exclusionary, objectifying and demeaning culture, and, more importantly, to celebrate loudly and vocally, those that succeed in challenging them. Because it’s not the same as saying violent games kill people and should be banned. Because the danger is one that history has shown to be actually real – and because our response is one that history has shown to actually work.

We were busy over the weekend! The MESSAGE staff visited the preeminent game stores in Brisbane to give them their official The MESSAGE accreditation. Both Good Games Brisbane and Ace Comics and Games have been passionate about their support for The MESSAGE from the very beginning, keen to make their stores as inclusive as possible. By displaying their MESSAGE signs, they send a sign to all customers that women are part of the hobby and sexist behaviour will not be tolerated. Great work, guys!

Good Games Brisbane can be found at 74 Little Edward Street, Spring Hill, right next to the Domonios Pizza. Ace Comics and Games is upstairs of the Queen Street Mall, at 121 Queen Street. Both stores have also been added to our list of stores on our Those Who Get It pages.

Do you know a store that supports women and inclusive gaming? Or one that doesn’t? Let us know at message@gamermessage.com

Cassie, owner of Good Games Brisbane, proudly shows off her certification. Some loon looms nearby.

Pol from Ace is equally proud of his shiny laminated accreditation.