MTV's Multiplayer blog has some absolutely fantastic interviews with Jane Pinckard and Morgan Webb, both of them talking about being a woman in the industry. It's funny; I don't really consider myself "in the industry" -- I'm a journalist, I kind of stand outside it and write a bunch of stuff. But I don't often consider my gender, either. I mean, obviously, I'm aware I'm in a male-dominated industry, but that never seems particularly significant or important to me. I don't discuss it much, because "woman" is only one of a long list of words that apply to me, and when I think about what I have to say to and about the game industry, it doesn't even make the top ten. But I really like both of these interviews, because Jane and Morgan are both quite even-handed and rational on a difficult topic.Like anything, my general position is that gender and the treatment of women in the industry will cease to be an issue when we quit making it an issue. I don't really feel like there are a vast number of people who have malicious, aggressive prejudices toward females, especially in an industry where we tend largely to be a bunch of escapist, creative shoe-gazing types aside from an excessively vocal minority -- as Morgan says, "0.1 percent of people ruin it for everybody."
Definitely, there are incidents like Jade Raymond comic. Of course that disgusted me, and I wrote about it in a column. And no one can say that would have happened had Jade not been a female and attractive. But that's a sort of cruel and blatantly antisocial behavior that's horrible because Jade is a person, not because she's a woman, and that kind of behavior will attack and exploit anyone, regarding anything. One of my Australian readers once told me that there's a sort of social saying over there, something to the effect of "the tall flower will be cut down." Women stand out in the industry because they're in the minority, and as such garner the brunt of this sort of scrutiny and inappropriate treatment.
Morgan Webb points out that it might actually be more difficult for her to obtain the specific position she has (she's a TV host) if she were an equally talented male; they wanted a beautiful gal for TV, and since her qualifications fit she was plucked from the editing room and put on camera. Sometimes, after the fact, I wonder what the reception to certain of my articles -- like the one defending breast physics, or my reviews of manifold exploitive hentai games -- would be if I weren't female. As a woman I've had people say I'm even-handed, open-minded and tolerant for dealing with the subject matter that I do -- but if I were a man, do you think I could get away with it without being labeled a chauvinist or a pervert?
I don't see a situation like Morgan's or mine as fair or unfair; all individuals have their own personal advantages and disadvantages on course to their goals, and something that acts as a strength in one scenario would be a detriment in another. For every time I'm treated preferentially because of my gender, there will be an equal instance of being overlooked because of that. That's not just the game industry, and it's not just women.
If there's one thing that bothers me it's the mentality of feminist supremacy; an idea some women push, either intentionally or inadvertently, that women deserve special recognition for being women -- I despise all-girl videogame sites and the whole "grrl gamer" movement quite heartily. I'm quite in-touch with the fact I'm a girl, and even considered buying a pink DS because I thought it was cute and kinda sexy (but now I have THIS, hell yeah!). But I don't believe in willful self-segregation to delineate women from men. I don't think that empowers us or takes us any closer to achieving equal footing in this or any other industry. There are times when gender differences are relevant, allow people to share and contribute new perspectives. But I don't feel that those times are as often as lots of people would have us think.
I always feel that sure, yeah, certainly people have preconceptions about women -- but they have different preconceptions about men, don't they?
