Read it This Weekend: Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell's Admission That He is Sexist is Incredibly Relatable

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

It's tempting to let this piece from Tom Bramwell, editor over on Eurogamer, speak for itself without framing it too much -- but maybe it doesn't even need that much framing, because the experience Bramwell's writing about is a very relatable one. 

A lot of us at one point or another in our lives have stopped and realized something we were doing, a behavior or a perspective taken for granted in our routine, is actually completely wrong. Not just wrong, but potentially harmful. It's almost certainy not something started out of malice, but rather something that made perfect sense to us until that moment when it quite abruptly didn't.

That's a truth Bramwell gets at in his piece, referring specifically to those infuriating comments that trail along after any peice even briefly mentioning sexism (or racism) in gaming:

The thing about those comments - this isn't a straw man argument, by the way; go read the comments on my article about gender representation in Assassin's Creed Unity - is that I don't think they come from a place of actual misogyny. I think they are just a byproduct of the kind of casual ignorance I have personally embodied for pretty much all of my sexist life. 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.

You can read Bramwell's full post over on Eurogamer. Also, if you've never read Jenn Frank's older but still very relevant article "I was a Teenage Sexist", be sure to check it out for a slightly different but no less relatable perspective on outing yourself as a sexist.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Geoff]

Wow those links are long rambling ambiguous treatises on sexism, he doesn't give much in the way of specifics does he. I agree that sexism tends to be a sort of cultural habit that when brought into the light we see what a truly view of equality would be, but then again there is just as much insisting things are sexist when they may well not be, nor do they get at the real issues.

One example up for dispute (in reference to an objective in red dead redemption):

"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."

And this differs to the innumerable amount of innocent men that get killed in red dead repemption? or just about any relatively violent video game? I suppose if it's a man he couldn't possibly be classed as innocent.

As for Assasin's Creed not creating female characters from the get go. There is some truth to this that women are not properly represented in the games industry, but then again historically it's men that have shouldered the brunt of most of histories warfare, so it is a bit artificial to add women in to that demographic given AC is partly historical, whether they should or not is a fair matter of discussion. Though really I think the games industry could do with being less violent anyway, and both men and women's role models should follow suit. Not having the women jump in the gutter with the men.

[irihapeti]

@Geoff

warfare changed to a mans game with the invention of the shield wall where physical strength is/was required to keep the shield wall intact to negate cavalry/chariot charges. Prior to the invention of the shield wall women were active participants in tribal war which were fought and contested at longer ranges. To overcome the shield wall required close combat with heavy armor and weapons. Physical strength again

war has since changed again. Attitudes toward women engaging in combat hasnt. Dont need physical strength to command a missle battery, deploy bombs or fly a drone skyfighter from a console

if war is in the gutter then is not and should not be/remain the sole domain of men just bc killing is nasty business

+

ps. am just putting a counter-argument. I think that war suxs. But while we have it then men need to accept that they not wielding a battle hammer/axe anymore

[GEoff]

I would love that to be true irihapeti (I couldn't find much on a quick google search perhaps you could help me out?), for one it would address the cultural stereotype that men are more violent than women, but is also points to a truth that men and womens roles have evolved throughout history numerous times to meet the demands of the current economical and cultural climate.

That said by your logic women should have been involved in any war past medieval times, as soon as guns/muskets were invented muslces become less an issue. The two world wars of the twentieth century saw fit to send millions of men and only men to their deaths in actual horrific, dehumanising fighting, most of them without any choice on the matter. That silly argument that wars were chosen by a tiny fraction of rich and elite men in power falls flat on it's face when the whole culture supported the wars at the time, women included in that. The casualty count in wars over the whole of history is probably something like 99.9% men.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

In antiquity, the Scythians and Sarmatians both fielded female warriors. No Sarmatian woman was allowed to wed until she'd killed a man in battle. One explanation for the legend of the Amazons is Greek encounters with Scythian bands comprised primarily or exclusively of female warriors. It must have been a rude shock to ancient Greek soldiers, who regarded women as intellectually deficient chattel, to be slaughtered like fat swine by Scythian horsewomen.

Women have fought, died and killed in every major conflict in recorded history. War was never a gentlemanly tiff in a neatly-groomed field between two teams of smartly-dressed soldiers. War is the breakdown of civil order into anarchy. In the chaos, a woman can be a killer or a victim. Many choose not to be victims. Lacking a uniform and a rank does not make you a non-combatant. Lacking the will to fight back does.

Putting women on a pedestal to shield us from the bloody horrors of war (or the infinitely more sanitary horrors of wargaming) is just as absurd as insisting that we are inherently inferior at the business of slaughter... particularly the slaughter of pixels with mouse or gamepad.

[irihapeti]

@Geoff

if want ancient times examples of shield wall (close quarter warfare) then keyword: roman

if want recent time examples of range warfare then keywords: bosnia sniper