Archive for July 24th, 2011

I found this today in my Tweet list, granted I’m not Texan, nor do I plan to play BattleField3 (unless it’s really that good), regardless, I do have an opinion on the subject.

A large launch party for Battlefield 3 … women disallowed from attending to protect them from misogynistic insults http://bit.ly/pfoPHE

This actually brings a pet issue of mine that isn’t so much about this kind of events, but the women representation in video games. There seems to be a vocal player community opposed to gender parity (mens and women in equal proportion) in FPS shooters, especially those who slide toward the “military simulation” type of game.

Everytime I made a request, either for a mod, or for a future sequel of a MilSim game to include the ability for the player to pick his gender, I met some enthusiast but also a lot of hostility which could more or less be summed up into the following “bulletproof” arguments:

Female Addon for ArmA 2 OA

• Women are not allowed in active duty positions.
• Just because it is realistic doesn’t mean it has to be included in the game for the sake of realism.
• You can’t see your soldier anyway so it doesn’t matter.
• Being able to play as a girl do matter for girls.
• It’s a waste of time and money to create twice the amount of characters.
• In most cases it’s just a matter of creating an extra set of heads.
• Women don’t care about playing their own gender.
• I know a lot of girls who won’t buy a game that doesn’t let them play a girl without a valid reason.
• Games that allow you to shoot women are the kind of games mens do not want to play.
• An enemy player is an enemy player,
  

  Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

  why would his gender choice matter to you?

• Women are statistically less fit than mens for being soldiers.
• A lot of mens are unfit for active duty too.
• Random misogynist comments (women’s place is in the kitchen, etc…)
• Do i really have to answer to this one?

A few sordid facts on the state of the US Army

I cannot help but wonder if this is the kind of society that we are pushing left and right across the world? In the end is it really this much better than the treatment of women in religious extremist countries? Ultimately by allowing this sort of discriminations we only show that our so-called “gender equality” is only some sort of “gentleman concession” where we only allow it because it’s not causing problems.

Why does the US Army get to pick the rules they have to obey to? The law of equal opportunity should just be the same whether you are the department of defence or the department of education.

There is some fundamental ground work to do to reconstruct the standards under which the US Army lives, currently engaged women are pressured not to report when they are submitted to sexual assault or rape in their own unit for fear of being demoted or removed from their unit.

It’s no wonder that women do not want to engage in the army when the second pass time of soldiers, after killing people, is beating off all day. The pentagon estimate that 80 to 90% of the sexual assaults go unreported and on all the veterans sent in Afghanistan and Irak the number of female soldiers who admitted being subject to sexual assault where up to 25%.

A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. – Representative Jane Harman

What does this has to do with a LAN party?

Nearly nothing, other than in this case, one of the role models of realistic FPS players are those same soldiers, the US Army may have trouble to calm the sexual urges of its troops because of a hyper masculine ideology but it doesn’t mean that simple gamers have to copy this mysoginistic system simply because they are playing games that mimic a world whose chain of command decided that women have no place in.

There is a very well-known effect called “group of ideas” where the mind tend to more easily accept an idea that is unacceptable if it is bundled in a group of more acceptable ideas.

That’s pretty much what we are seeing here, Peoples admiring a specific ideology (enough to play video games that are all about it) who also accept the more “noxious” ideas that are bundled with it.

Denying access to women because they will be subjected to misogynist behavior is such a backward view, you should encourage good sportsmanship by sanctioning the person who is obnoxious, not silence the potential victim. Peoples who cannot comport themselves as evolved human beings in front of a woman will never realise that their comportment is inappropriate if you remove the person they are offending from the equation, if anything, this reenforce their belief that they are right. Taking such preëmptive actions is never a solution because you deny to an already small part of the community from sharing an event with the others but you also comfort obnoxious sexist jerks in their own beliefs.

But i could be wrong, maybe the organisation team actually believe that women have no place in this sort of event?

Sources:

Powergaming BF3 launch party informations
(It appears they replaced the content of the post entirely as I am writing this)

Sexual Assaults on Female Soldiers: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The private war of women soldiers

Female US Soldier for ARMA2 OA (v 3.0)