Before joining my fabulous, wonderful, awesome Potter-verse RPG, I had never gamed before. Sure, I’d played pretend (and really, an RPG feels like pretend with math) but once I’d grown up I’d stayed the hell away from gaming. Math… is not my thing. So very far from it. Plus, most video-games give me mild anxiety issues.1
For some odd reason, this has been something a couple of the guys I’ve dated have felt entitled to comment on. “Oh,” they’d say. “Gamer girls are so hot. Why aren’t YOU a gamer girl?” Or it’d be about my intellectual abilities. “The maths are so hot,” they’d say. “Why can’t YOU do the maths?” I’d look down at my backpack filled with poetry and random bits of critical theory, and feel strangely inadequate. If gamer girls and mathy girls were hot… and I wasn’t either… then what, exactly, was I doing here? What gave me the right to be? Except, wait. They’d also say that the girls they knew in their math classes got there by cheating, that the ones who didn’t cheat must never have any dates, and that their nerdy female friends were ugly for not dressing “normal.”
Now that I’m older and wiser, I know better than to date someone who says petty stuff like that. However, the tone of what they said has stayed with me. Erin at Dress A Day said it best: Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”. Their notions of “pretty” didn’t include me. I wasn’t their ideal and they thought it was okay to let me know that. They were playing a game where they got to change the rules whenever they felt like it… so that rent? For being female? It gets higher every time.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t the problem. They were. Looking back now, what I find the most startling about what those guys were saying is the heterosexism surrounding their discussion of female gamers. Girl gamers are either horny, nubile waifs who can’t actually beat their male counterparts, or they’ve failed at heterosexuality – they’re lonely, they’re zitty, they’re just… ugly. Neither kind of girl gamer is in it for the love of competition. One’s playing because she likes boys, and the other’s playing because they don’t like her.
Now that I’ve tried (an) RPG(s), I’m dismayed to report that in their fixation on the relative attractiveness of gamer girls, my old dates forgot the very real fact that games are fun! The women playing are not there to be objectified, or to tick off an item on some nerdy hotness scorecard. They’re there because they want to be. In a world where nerdboys sometimes expect you to jiggle your tits in order to prepay for your presence in their world, it’s very refreshing to hang out with a group of women who are happy to be themselves.
1Seriously – any version of Zelda is just too much pressure for me. The fairies are very stressful.
Site Administrator
tekanji