Girls Don't Play WoW

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betterthanlegos:

corbierants:

geekquality:

oatmeal:

Online gaming

TW for rape threats:

Ok, usually I love the Oatmeal, but there is so much wrong with this I can’t even. This is so completely steeped in blind Male Privilege and misogyny. It’s even pulling some gaslighting!

1) WOMEN ARE NOT INCOMPETENT GAMERS. I can’t even stress that enough.

2) What woman gamer has actually had this experience? Because there is blog after blog and countless stories of women gamers being subject to hateful namecalling, threats of rape, and horribly sexist declarations of “get off the console and back into the kitchen!”

NOT COOL, OATMEAL. Not cool.

-AM

This. In no world does this happen. In fact, the first time I glanced at this I wondered why they had the girl in the wrong panel. And then I went, “LOL nope.”

Let’s be honest, the first panel is wrong on a number of levels to begin with, but it pair it with the second, which is so ludicrous as to be hallucinatory, is just WRONG. It’s perpetuating a fictional stereotype that’s even worse than the awful reality. It’s sexist. Condescending.

I don’t expect great things from The Oatmeal, but this is just awful.

Edited to add: Even if the The Oatmeal is making the assumption that the girl is playing with other girls (a point that was rightly made somewhere in the reblogs), it doesn’t change the fact that this is still sexist, wrong, horribly inaccurate and just as damaging as if you assumed she was playing guys.

The point stands. Regardless of the sexes of any of the unseen players in either of the panels this is ridiculous.

This can fuck off, too.

Complete horseshit.

I am 99% sure that the girl gamer is supposed to be playing with a group of guys because the comments wouldn’t make sense in the context of a group of other girl gamers. Most girl gamers I know wouldn’t be as rude as the players in the first panel, but they would be firm about correcting or possibly kicking someone that was so incompetent (unless it was a training exercise). And they certainly wouldn’t be spouting off bullshit lines like “Your voice is like an angel… I love you.” No, that’s the bullshit us girl gamers have to deal with from clueless guys that feel the need to point out the fact that you have tits and are online every 5 fucking minutes during the raid.

And while I’ll admit there’s always at least one guy like the players in the second panel who feels the need to play the White Knight to even the most atrocious player just because she has a vagina, there is no way in hell the entire raid is going to put up with that shit. Furthermore, it’s all sexist bullshit any way you slice it. Playing the White Knight and never letting this Derpina realize her mistakes and learn from them is patronizing and sexist. Media constantly portraying girls as shitty gamers is fucking sexist too. This kind of shit just needs to DIAF.

Source: oatmeal