Women in video games, destroying men's lives everywhere!!!

Women in video games, destroying men’s lives everywhere!!!

Spending your time harassing people just doesn’t seem like productive or pro-social behavioural choices.  According to a study recently undertaken it seems there is a positive correlation between unskilled players and the amount of abuse they heap on other players, especially females.

“Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.

In today’s online environment, alas, this is not an idle observation. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 40 per cent of Internet users have personally experienced harassment. While both genders are frequent victims of this abuse, women tend to get the worst of it: They are “particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking,” Pew said.“

Well that is an interesting conclusion.  Speaking from personal experience being harassed never helps one’s game.  Heaping abuse on a member of your team won’t help their performance, in most cases it will worsen the situation.  So, really we can add self-immolating to the list of qualities for loser harasser dudes.

““As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”

Like your mother always said, bullies just feel bad about themselves.”

Well, it seems like an almost tailor made explanation for sad phenomena known as GamerGate.   Low status dudes threatened by women kicking their asses in video games, perhaps getting better and competing with women might be the answer?  Of course not!  And thus the most obvious(?) answer(?) and logical(?) recourse is embarking on a epic whingefestival – made most memorable because of its harassment of women – because their male fee fees are being bruised all to shit.

It bears repeating here as this article and Gamergate illustrate beautifully the first rule of misogyny – ” is that women are responsible for what men do.”

 

Hat Tip:  @bleatmop for bringing this article to my attention.