This is going to be a short but odd post. Mainly because
I’m not sure exactly how to explain this, but I thought that perhaps talking
about it and making people more aware of what they're saying would help somewhat.
So I was flying in an Incursion fleet a few days ago, as a
Logi. Completely typical fleet, everyone’s chatting quietly, FC is taking us
through sites well, and we’re making ISK. We’re not blitzing but we’re hardly
going slowly. New pilot joins fleet after x’ing up in TDF Channel. Not long
after that I get the Teamspeak notification “User has joined your channel”. It quietens down for a few seconds in Teamspeak, as we wait
for the new guy to say hi, like always.
“Hi guys” he says.
Except it’s not a guy. It’s a woman.
I shit you not, TS3 lit
up like freaking Christmas with guys making smart-ass comments.
“I hear estrogen!”
“Oh my god a girl?”
“Girls on the internet
are always men”
“Oh good, I was
getting hungry. Make me a sandwich?”
“ Shouldn't you be in
the kitchen?”
Now personally I was semi-shocked and embarrassed for my
fleet at this point. I have absolutely no problem with a girl being in my
fleet, and I doubt many of those in my fleet would say they have a problem
either, but seriously, those comments were verging on ridiculous. And of course when the
FC told them to quieten down (which I was
thankful for) they all claimed they were” joking”, or just “messing
around”.
Yeah you might find it funny, but what if she gets this
every time she joins a fleet and hears those jokes? It’d get old so fast you’d
probably get sick of it. And the comments didn't truly stop after the FC
intervened either. Dick jokes, kitchen jokes, sly sexual comments were all
slipped into fleet comms and I just felt steadily more awkward to be in a fleet
with these guys.
It can hardly be laughed off as a joke every time
either. If that had been a guy joining fleet, we would have said hi back and
gone back to chatting about new movies, or whatever it was before they joined.
But no, it was a woman, and by the holy sign that is a vagina, the majority of
my fleetmates felt the uncontrollable urge to make sexist comments. And some of
them were seriously offensive from my
point of view.
I don’t know if I’m really putting my point across here, but
I just have this idea that all this sexist bullshit when a woman comes on comms
is going to drive them away in the end. Why should they play EVE when they get
a load of crap from the male player base? It doesn't surprise me that they've started their own private channels for women-only, I’d probably do the same in
their position.
Maybe you guys think I’m overreacting, maybe you agree with
me. Either way, I’m not comfortable with this sort of thing in a game I love to
play. EVE should be a game for everyone to escape their troubles and enjoy
themselves. Not get told to “go back to
the kitchen”.
Good luck out there o7
P.S Also I would like
to point out that my whole fleet wasn't at fault here, just a fair few.
I've had several women in my corporation and my parties in other games and I feel the same. Sadly there are a rotten few males that feel the need to express them self's in such a poor manner.
ReplyDeleteNot only that - it just gets tedious to listen to for everybody. If you want to be sexist, at least put some effort and thought into it.
ReplyDeleteSame actually applies to smack talk.
Well, those are just guys who always wanted to say those things in real life, but just know that they are not invincible as they feel on-line. They feel some sense of security on internet that makes them not care that they are still saying those things to a real people. And usually they are young people who have never worked on equal terms with women. "Or they could just be in-bred retards talking big".
ReplyDeletePS: I'm a guy who realize half the world is made up of women, not a feminist or non-feminist woman.
While there are definitely quite a bunch of unfunny low-brow idiots in this game, it has to be said that things can be different. I have a RL friend who's a woman and plays EVE. She never even felt the need to join WGOE because she felt that the people there would get more on her nerves than the guys in her corp. Last I heard, they had a disproportionate high number of women flying with them. With all the shit going on in this game and online in general, we sometimes need a reminder that not all men are just barely past the neanderthal stage of evolution ;)
ReplyDelete