Editor's blog: I am sexist (Eurogamer.net)

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-18-editors-blog-i-am-sexist

I don't know exactly when I realised I was sexist, but I can show you how I notice historical examples of it. Yesterday, for example, I saw some friends talking about the "Dastardly" achievement in Red Dead Redemption. Do you remember this one? XboxAchievements.com, which I assume scrapes data from Xbox Live and is therefore probably reporting the developer's original wording, describes it thus: "Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train." So the objective is to locate a woman who cannot defend herself against you, tie her up and then kill her by placing her in the path of a train. You cannot gain the achievement by performing this act on a man. I am not a student of Westerns so I cannot comment on its original context (and I bet a proportion of the game's player base that it would be statistically acceptable to round up to 100% are in the same situation), so it's just a contextless act of violence against women that gamifies something that we dimly remember as being associated with a film genre.

I remember that achievement. I remember doing it in the game. This would have been in 2010. The only reaction I remember having to it is thinking it was clever and inventive, drawing on a famous Western trope. I don't remember having any conscious thought that it was troubling. If I did, I obviously suppressed it.

The things I probably find most haunting about my sexism though are the sexist things I've written and published. Unlike a lot of my friends and peers, I didn't start in print, where copy can vanish forever quite easily, and I have only worked for Eurogamer, which maintains a pretty complete live archive of content. I'm 30 now and I've worked here since I was 16. So if you go through stuff I've written in that period, you can uncover some things I find shameful and embarrassing, and occasionally they float into my field of vision again. Here's a line from my Grand Theft Auto 4 review, published in 2008, in a paragraph about attention to detail: "Women you date will notice if you dress poorly. They also nag."

<snip>

But if I had written something on Eurogamer about realising that the Dastardly achievement was troubling, and then tried to explore that, a silent majority might have found some merit in what I was saying, but I know what the comments would have looked like. 1) This isn't as important as something else. 2) Bloody white knight - you're just trying to impress women. 3) It's historically accurate. 4) Stop attacking the developer's creative vision. 5) Stop trying to censor people. 6) This is political correctness gone mad - what's next? Forcing X to do Y? 7) Bloody social justice warrior.

<snip>

The whole thing is great.

[Warpy]

1. It looks like he discovered Anita Sarkeesian's videos

about ridiculously sexist tropes in video games and realized she might have a point. That's when he grew up instead of joining all the teenagers threatening her with rape and worse.

It's a refreshing read. However, he shouldn't judge himself too harshly, most of us have memories of younger selves that can have us cringing in a corner, desperate to believe nobody else remembers it.

[Gormy Cuss]

2. The Dudley Do-Right cartoons used this device frequently enough to establish it as a trope

Last edited Fri Jun 20, 2014, 08:05 PM - Edit history (1)

but the woman (Nell) was ALWAYS rescued before the train hit and sometimes Do-Right and others were also tied to train tracks.
Converting this to a way of killing a woman character is the difference in gaming. As the link author points out, the game also doesn't reward this behavior if a man is hogtied to the tracks.


Oh look -- he describes male privilege to a T here:

... And when you have an entrenched attitude that you may not fully recognise and you are confronted by arguments that go to the core of that attitude, it's easy to get upset, because it feels like a personal attack. Your natural response is to try to change the subject, attack the speaker or frame the argument differently, rather than engaging with the thing you can't comprehend at the heart of the original point.

[Starry Messenger]

3. I'm happy he was able to recognize it, and express it so well.

I hope others will read all of that and really reflect on it.