Does Penny Arcade pass the Bechdel test?

[rax]

There are 1000 things I should be doing instead of this but it is the time of day where I've given up and am hopped up on cold medicine. So! First of all, some terms:

• Penny Arcade is a ten-year-old web comic about two men (Gabe and Tycho are their characters/aliases/whatever) who play video games that I'm actually rather fond of; it's periodically crass, periodically brilliant, and occasionally surreal. It would probably make more sense if I played many contemporary video games, but most of the time it's comprehensible, and it's actually often funny. (This is as distinct from the lesbian performance artist Penny Arcade, who used to have pennyarcade.com. I don't know much about her other than that Make/Shift magazine has reviewed her poorly and said she was offensive to trans men.) It's usually three times a week, and it's been going for 10 years, so at 52 weeks per year that's more than a thousand comics.
• Alison Bechdel is probably best known for Dykes to Watch Out For but has also done a number of other comic projects, including "Fun Home," which I really need to read, and probably some other non-comic projects that I'm not familiar with.
• The Bechdel test is a litmus test traditionally applied to film: At any point in the film, do two women speak with each other about something other than a man?
• Cold medicine should not need explanation. But just in case.

Recently, Penny Arcade decided to run three different concept comics to suggest alternate projects they might do: Lookouts, Automata, and Jim Darkmagic. [0] All of these look interesting, and Lookouts seems like it could be downright hilarious. Normally, I don't think about gender in Penny Arcade; I've been reading it for a long time and the main characters are male and that's never bothered me. In these three comics, though, there's one female character, who is accidentally burned and frozen to death on stage as part of a magic trick. I was like: Hold up, did they just propose three new ideas with no women except someone who gets murdered to further the plot? I mean, I accept that Penny Arcade is occasionally homophobic [1] and doesn't have many female characters, but I was sort of hoping the new concept comics would feature women. Why? Well, no good reason, admittedly. But the new comics totally fail the Bechdel test.

This got me to thinking. Would the whole ten years of comic archives pass the Bechdel test at all? A few people said yes, but I wasn't convinced, and so in the last couple of days of cold medicine haze I flipped through the archives. [2] I think the answer is that it does pass, but only just barely. Out of more than a thousand comics, here, in chronological order, are the ones that meet either two or three of the criteria:

• Now, Picture It Vicious: One of the main characters' wives speaks to the other about the main characters.
• Up On The Rooftop: The two wives decide to call 911, hearing noises that the reader knows are the two main characters falling off of a roof. Are they talking about a man or not?
• Red and Blue in... The Party: Two women talk about their husbands, who are enemies in a video game, at a cocktail party.
• The Speed of Thought: The two wives discuss killing their husbands.
• Probably Safer To Burn 'Em: Gabe's wife confronts a DiVX player who is in bed with a prostitute. Is she talking to the prostitute? Probably not, no.
• Fruit Saga, Part 2: The two wives discuss the "Fruit Fucker" robot who has been touching one of them in her sleep. They use the pronoun "he." Is the Fruit Fucker a man? It is a robot, but the jokes are basically just about the robot penetrating things sexually.
• Tormented, Science-Fiction Youth: A girl and her mother (and father) discuss the boy who impregnated her.
• The Scion, Part 2: A girl (Annarchy --- she's awesome) fights with her mother and father over whether or not she can go to a LAN party because there might be boys there. It's not directly about a man? Maybe?
• BFF!: Gabe and a group of young girls shout "Barbie Horse Adventures!" in unison. I don't know if that's really a conversation, but Barbie Horse Adventures is pretty clearly not a boy.
• The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two: Annarchy and her mother discuss vegetarianism and the enslaving of indigenous peoples. This is the one point at which I can unequivocally say that Penny Arcade passes the Bechdel test.
• Perfectly Reasonable: Gabe, his wife, and a (female) realtor discuss whether or not a house might contain a "spectral bride." The wife and the realtor never actually speak to each other; they both talk, separately, to Gabe.
• The Breaking Point: Gabe, his wife, and their son are trick or treating; a woman answers the door and gets into an argument with Gabe about the Star Wars canon details of the son's costume. Never do the women speak to each other. Arguably they would be talking about the son anyway, though I would be inclined to count it if they spoke to each other.
• The Sussorous Sandwich: A woman and her daughter sit at the table. The daughter is playing a Game Boy, which says "ISLAM IS THE LIGHT." [3] The woman chides her daughter. Then the woman's sandwich says the same thing, and a variety of fantastic creatures show up and overtake the last panel. I guess this technically passes the test.

I probably missed one or two, but I doubt I missed a hundred. So, while I'd be comfortable just posting this and letting it sit, I'm hopped up on cold medicine, so I'm going to take a stab at actually discussing it. If you look at these and at some of the other comics, you're more likely to get multiple women or women talking to each other in longer plot arcs or non-three-panel-arranged comics. Why is this? Well, it's a comic about two guys who play video games. Usually the main characters are either the two guys or characters from video games. The characters from video games are basically all male --- or, when they're not, it's a single woman like Samus Aran or Lara Croft. So female characters show up in speaking roles most often when there's a longer plot arc or a panel with a large number of characters in it. (The Turkey Trilogy, Episode Two has both. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's the best Bechdel buster in the bunch.) This makes sense. Of course, if the rule were "Two men who talk to each other not about a woman," it would pass at least half the time. It is, after all, a comic about two men who talk about video games.

So, why do I care? I was spurred on to caring because the three different concept comics present three alternate ideas for story universes and tropes, one or all of which could have been constructed in such a way not to minimize female characters. Admittedly, we don't know too much about them, but from the teaser comics none of them seem like settings that would feature female characters. Lookouts is about a group of boys in a Boy Scouts-like organization in a fantasy universe --- no girls there. Automata is noir and it looks like basically everyone is a gruff and gritty man in a suit; maybe there are interesting women but not on the first page. The Robots in the role of Other have the potential to be interesting, though. Jim Darkmagic... well, he kills a woman and gets away with it and is apparently the protagonist? Uh, I guess it could work out to be uproariously funny, but the concept doesn't make me think Oh Wow How Awesome. (The fanbase didn't seem to like it as much either.)

It's not like it's Gabe and Tycho's responsibility to be out there making comics about awesome women who play or might be in video games. I mean, if they did, that'd be great, but they're doing their thing and for the most part I really enjoy that thing. I just think it's worth pointing out and thinking about: Hey, how come this is so gendered? Sure, fewer women than men play video games, but even the nerdcore games I play like NetHack and Crawl are more than 13 women per 1500. (Crawl actually has a very dedicated, if small, female and gender-variant playerbase.) I I think it's more that the choices Gabe and Tycho have made are representative of larger problems that I am totally too drugged out to try to explain cogently. I know there is also a larger dialogue about women in the webcomics community --- both in terms of authors and in terms of characters --- that I'm not really a part of. Still, other webcomics pass the Bechdel test much more easily, even blatantly sexist and sexualized ones. [4] So when the Penny Arcade guys have the chance to do something different and it doesn't change anything, it makes me kinda sad.

How could they change this if they wanted to?

• More second string female characters. The two wives appear periodically, as does Annarchy, as do a number of the characters' male friends. Add more women to the list, get more women in the comic in general.
• Make more gender-irrelevant characters female. Lots of characters in the comic are once-offs who are "a Warcraft player" or "a character in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance." Often there's one or more guys and one woman; those could have multiple women without any significant change to the comic storylines. (Of course, I don't know how much this actually matters. I guess if nothing else it would have made me feel better about the comic.)
• More longer plot arcs that explore secondary characters.
• When choosing to deviate from their standard form (Cardboard Tube Samurai, Twisp and Catsby, the current three concept comics), do something about women.

What do you think?


[0] Oh yeah, everyone in all three of the promos looks white, too, and that's probably true of most of the comic as well. If I'd not been hopped up on cold medicine, I would have taken notes on that too.

[1] Homophobic in the "fag discourse" sense (see Dude, You're A Fag by C. J. Pascoe) generally. I had totally forgotten about this issue until I skimmed through the archives. I don't know that I'd tolerate it if I hadn't been reading the comic for nine years, though I probably would, because I've seen much worse and tolerated that too. How I feel about that, both the homophobia and the tolerating it, is outside of the scope of this head cold.

[2] I sometimes clicked rapidly through when I saw that there weren't two women even in the comic, but I did at least look at every image. I may have missed 2; I probably didn't miss 20. (If I did miss two, I'm happy to add them to my list.)

[3] This merits some explanation so that it doesn't sound more bizarre and bad than it is.

[4] Just picking from things I read, I know Questionable Content does, say, and Order of the Stick (which is even a male-written gamer comic). I considered making every word in that sentence a link, but checking my work there would have been a bit much. And, of course, passing the Bechdel test doesn't mean it's full of strong female characters I'd like to emulate; I'd take Penny Arcade's treatment of women, however sparse, over something like Menage a 3, even though it totally passes the test. (Annarchy is more awesome than Zii and it only goes downhill from there.)

Comments

[jadia.livejournal.com]

I am amused by your post because my immediate reaction to Lookouts was, "ugh, i can't believe how sexist this is". I voted both times *just* to vote against Lookouts. To be fair, I'm not sure if I would have had the same reaction if I hadn't been sensitized to sexism recently. I'm still waiting for that to die down so I can get on with my life without having to notice as many things that annoy me.

Anyway, so it amused me that the same series of comics caused you to think about gender as well.

Also, in general, I quite like Penny-Arcade. And Annarchy is pretty awesome. I think a lot of their comics, like you said, automatically fail the test due to the setup and their particular style (3 panels, very abbreviated). I'm not sure how much the Bechdel test is as valid for their particular style, but as a starting point for talking about gender and webcomics and gaming it's not a bad place to start. :-)

[laura47.livejournal.com]

oh, i assumed the driver at the end of jim darkmagic was female. hmm.

you're not the first person i've seen be irritated that lookouts is apparently a female-free universe.

[anacoluthon.livejournal.com]

I thought the driver was female too!

There was a female Lookout character design posted sometime after the initial comic went up - let me see if I can find it. Here (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/6/10/) is the day's posts; the image is at the bottom of the page. It's too bad it's just an afterthought.
Actually, the entire Lookouts thing is sad; the idea is something I'd like to see explored in detail, but not if it's just manly men dudeing around in the forest while the women get the short end of the stick and barely exist at all.

[rustycoon.livejournal.com]

They did a half-assed all-girls version as far as the concept art stage at reader comment. I'm sure they could have done better, but Lookouts smacks of one or both of them having BSA experience to draw upon.

[twitch124.livejournal.com]

In the Lookouts character sketches posted in the news part there was a sketch for one of the girl scout equivalents, Daughters of the Everwood (or whatever the forest name is.)

Jim Darkmagic has show up before in the news sketches and shorts. He's Jim Darkmagic of the New Hampshire Darkmagics and has a painting in an attic aging for him. Everyone's supposed to hate him, though I don't think they'd keep him as a major character without making him more sympathetic, like how the Fruit Fucker evolved.

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

When I am on a real computer instead of a mobile device, I am totally going to cite some things about women in webcomics :p

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

OK! Back at my laptop! I knew I'd read gender-in-webcomics stuff a while ago. This is webcomics-in-general not gamer-webcomics, though.

http://comixtalk.com/node/1693 - written in 2004
http://www.websnark.com/archives/2006/03/also_dont_pat_t.html - written in 2006

I am pretty sure the majority of webcomics I read are by women. I seem to remember that lists of the webcomics with the most *traffic* are usually heavy on the about-by-and-for-gamer-dudez genre, but that critically-acclaimed/"best webcomics of the year" lists usually are full of things with female writers and/or main characters. Uh, I don't think I had a point beyond that bit of contextualization :)

[perbac.livejournal.com]

In these three comics, though, there's one female character, who is accidentally burned and frozen to death on stage as part of a magic trick. I was like: Hold up, did they just propose three new ideas with no women except someone who gets murdered to further the plot?

I think it's implied that there's a dead off-stage plot-furthering woman in Automata, too, which makes the situation even more ridiculous (imo). :) I wonder if a woman got basilisked in Lookouts?

Oh yeah, everyone in all three of the promos looks white, too, and that's probably true of most of the comic as well. If I'd not been hopped up on cold medicine, I would have taken notes on that too.

I noticed this and not the gender thing, which is strange because that's not usually how I roll (I mean, if I notice anything *at all*, which I usually don't), and it made everything a little weirder (= less pleasant) for me. I guess I have been thinking about race much more than gender recently.

I still <3 robots though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Is it really a bad thing that this particular comic does not pass the Bechdel test? Penny Arcade is the canonical, genre-defining example of the "two dudes sit around talking about video games" webcomic. Everything else revolves around that.

Admittedly, the "dude in the Pac-Man shirt is kind of a fag" jokes don't endear it to me much.

But Penny Arcade is the product of what seems to be a pretty good totally-not-sexual-really-we-mean-it-I've-never-looked-at-his-butt-once male-male friendship. If guys were allowed to say "I love you" to each other in this culture without being fags then Gabe and Tycho would probably have said it. Hell, they probably have said it when drunk - a situation in which guys are allowed to acknowledge their TNSRWMIINLAHB love for each other. It is two best friends writing about the world of their friendship; all the things that come out of that creative space are coming out of an intensely male one.

Also, you prompted Nick and I to see if Five Glasses of Absinthe passes the Bechdel test. Which it does, right there on the first page. So yay.

I would also be curious to see the results of your GENDER THEORY BEAM turned upon Skadi (http://www.dummcomics.com/index?sid=365), a comic about a barbarian girl on a mission to eat one of every creature in the world and her stinky beast minion; this is the product of a husband-and-wife team. I dunno who owns the writing more, I do know that the wife does the figures and the husband does the backgrounds and the colors. Assuming the cold medicine holds out of course.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

--basically, I think my point here is that it's okay, sometimes, for male creators to do projects that are total sausage fests. Write what you know. The problem, of course, is that the more money is involved, the more pressure there seems to be to make sure it's compatible with twelve-year-old boys. And guys are in charge of most big projects because of the vagaries of our culture.

But Penny Arcade is a comic about the charmed circle of friendship that Gabe and Tycho have. If one or both of them was a woman it could certainly still be a comic about "two friends hanging out and talking about video games"; I know some women who can draw their ass off and are total videogame nerds. Their comic is about themselves; more specifically, about who they are when they're with each other. If you and neogeen got together (to mention one of those videogame nerd chicks who can draw their asses off), became BFFs, and started doing a comic strip about the two of you hanging out and talking about video games, it would have many similarities to Penny Arcade in that it would be about how this particular pair of people saw video games and the rest of the world, and about the friendship you shared, but it would have many differences in that it would be two women having that discussion.

The world of webcomics is probably better than many creative domains at passing the Bechdel Test, what with there being no barrier to entry beyond "having free time and computer access, and the obsessive aspie drive to create". I could probably come up with a lot of Bechdel-passing strips if I read a lot of them, but I don't. Although I do immediately come up with Digger, which is about a grumpy female wombat who ends up leading an adventuring party consisting of a female monk given to fits of visions-and-madness, a female hyena warrior, and a malleable blob of shadows for which no gender is ever implied.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'll add looking at Skadi to my project list though I really need to focus my energy on things I have to get done after this diversion. :)

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Anarchy is awesome, and I knew she'd save the strip from complete failure to pass even if I didn't remember a specific strip.

I'm surprised that you accuse the strip of homophobia. My memories of the strip treading into that sort of territory all seem very tame and almost as if it were giving a nod and a wink so to speak. Often the character of the artist, Gabe, is seen to have homoerotic dreams, homosexual tenancies, or simply overtly feminine qualities, and while this does drive the humor when it appears, it does not do so in a viscous way. I can recall several times where accusation of gayness in a video game has been made, but only as a reaction to highly testosterone fueled "ultra manly" sorts of video games who the artist and writer thought were just way over the top with the macho crap and could have used something to break it up. Whenever they deal with homosexuality, it usually seems to me like a tongue-in-cheek faux dislike of homosexuality.

Similarly, penny arcade is semi-infamous in the furry subculture for their anti-furry comic, which was actually pro-furry and anti-furry sex. Since then the author, pseudonym Tycho, has often made remarks in the comic's regular blog dropping great big giant sized hints that he is, in fact, furry in a serious way. I recall that following one comic con when the penny arcade table had been situated adjacent to the "club stripes" table Tycho commented on getting his hands on some of this furry pornography and having a sudden crisis of conscious because he hadn't realized how great some of it could be. I think he phrased his sudden identity crisis somewhat thusly "Did I yiff? Had I yiffed?" while discussing his enjoyment of a club stripes comic. And he's made offhand comments about furry ever since, quite often in a positive light.

And lastly, of the three new proposed projects, the one that seems most likely to go ahead is lookouts, for which even in the speculation on that day's blog included generation of a female faction and character art (http://penny-arcade.com/2009/6/10/). While I do think they're rather absentmindedly sexist, it does appear that they have the desire to develop a world and tell stories that get away from their two imaginary personas, and this may well involve much more significant contribution from female characters, which makes me happy to contemplate. They've got a very unique and powerful sense of narrative, and I think it'd be great if they did begin work on a less strictly white-male-nerd-centric project. (As if a fantasy comic would appeal less to white male nerds...)

[rax.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that the reason I'm not disturbed by the homophobia is the thing you've described. I would have to go think harder about it and I don't think I care enough to. :) My impression is that it got more nuanced and subtle over the course of the comic and started off pretty bad, maybe just because they had a nuanced view and couldn't write it yet, or maybe because they learned some things.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Things which are mostly but not quite entirely irrelevant:

1. “YES she talks to the ROBOT QUEEN about EXPLOSIONS” (http://wondermark.com/521/)

2. Today's Two Lumps (http://twolumps.net/d/20090617.html).

[jhonen-red.livejournal.com]

I liked Automata best, of the three; Lookouts didn't make much of an impression on me. Jim Darkmagic seemed a little gratuitous. My first thought when you mentioned the Jim Darkmagic comic was "women in refrigerators"; not actually a very good example of the phenomenon, but reminiscent.

It doesn't bother me that PA is essentially just about two male characters, given that the characters are the alter egos of the two male creators and they more or less never leave the house. That's most of what they're aiming for, I think. It's true that they could do something else, but I think it's important to recognize that they're not necessarily trying to write a comic that represents gamers in general. They seem to be trying to write a comic about their own lives that resonates with gamers in general.

Now that I actually read the other comics, it sounds like shatterstripes has already said this, and more clearly.

[jhonen-red.livejournal.com]

While I'm here: http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html

That strip doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but I really can't imagine it matters. (Other strips in that series do, but the genders seem irrelevant to me, as they so often do.)

[rathdei.livejournal.com]

Re: menage a 3
I don't think there are any good role models for men or women in that comic, no matter your orientation. It's pretty much comic porn without showing the sex, but you probably knew that.

Also I pieced together what a "Bechdel Test" is, just by reading this (although I looked it up on wikipedia later), and also realized that "Least I Could Do," a comic strip about a womanizer who somehow manages to become independently wealthy, stay out of prison while being a dangerous asshole, and screw every overly sexualized piece of lady that crosses his path, probably fails. It's also probably homophobic, based on the current story they're running (and some arc involving prison rape, and a bunch of other stuff). You're making me think really hard about the comics I read! Curse you and your cold meds for making me pass a judgmental eye over my mindless 20 second daily entertainments!

The funniest part was that my ex girlfriend LOVED LICD and she and her mother were both "feminists."

[rax.livejournal.com]

That's because LICD is funny. Things can be both funny and troublesome. (As an example I submit that "mow the lawn" advertisement that made the rounds a while back.) I don't read it regularly, but I've been caught by arcs a couple of times and actually laughed at it, even though there's a little bit of "OK I need to go wash the patriarchy off of me now" afterward. :)

[autumnesquirrel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. It is an interesting thing to think about.

Shakesville recently had a discussion about women and the gaming community () that I think dove tails with this in interesting ways.

Cigars, and all that jazz.

[rustycoon.livejournal.com]

This rapidly grew beyond all containable proportion (A compliment to you if ever there was one: you have prompted a response out of reader, who then goes on to write on the matter). I'm posting it to my own LJ instead.

Re: Cigars, and all that jazz.

[rax.livejournal.com]

The link is here (http://rustycoon.livejournal.com/188424.html) for those who want to follow up later (and for my own records). Thanks!

[baniszew.livejournal.com]

When I read the Lookouts strip the first time, I assumed the kid with long, dark hair was a girl. Then I read people on the internet being upset about the lack of women in the universe, and I went back and reread the comic and was disappointed to see that I'd been wrong. But apparently my subconscious likes to insert tomboys into the world.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Valve games are noticeably better than average at having some sort of gender balance.

Portal fails the test on a technicality. There are only two characters (unless you count Companion Cube) and both are female. The malevolent AI is of course genderless in reality, but identifies as female. The only reason why it fails is that the player character is mute for the entire game, so she never technically has a conversation with her antagonist. If she did however, it would not be about men.


Left4Dead has 4 speaking (player) characters, and one is female. This fails your test, and the expected real world balance would be two females and two males. I suspect that 3:1 ratio does better reflect the gender makeup of the L4D player community more accurately than a 1:1 ratio however.

While the game fails the test I mention it because it is striking to see how the female character is NOT sexualized or put into any gender pigeonhole. Her gameplay is identical to the other characters, she is dressed sensibly, is reasonably proportioned, and is no more or less emotional or afraid than the male characters. Valve even made a deliberate decision not to try to make her anyone's love interest.

I didn't realize just how rare it was to see a female character in video games be "just a person" until I really thought about how Zoey was used in this game.

Also, approximately 50% of the horde of zombies that try to eat you are women. :)


"Did you know what you can donate one or more of your organs to the Aperture Science self-esteem fund for girls? It's true!" - "Bring your daughter to work day is the perfect time to have her tested." - GlaDOS from Portal

[wildelven.livejournal.com]

Team Fortress 2 is an (apparently) all male cast, with the exception of the Announcer. Who is, admittedly, calling all the shots. For both sides of the fight.

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Shatterstripes and Ff00ff already said most of what I wanted to say, whose most important part was: it's not always a bad thing if a comic (or other work) marginalizes an oppressed group. One of the best maxims for a writer is, "Write what you know", and many (perhaps most) men have little to no extensive experience with women outside a familial or romantic context... this can be true even of men who are quite fair-minded and self-aware. And when you start trying to artificially compensate for that lack of experience, you bring in some odious archetypes.

To take this idea to an extreme, most works of literature written before the twentieth century are sexist. So what?

About the Bechdel test, specifically: be careful with it. When people started caring that black people were missing from films and comics, you started seeing token blacks. If the Bechdel test continues to catch on, you might start to see token conversations. And I'm not sure whether tokenism is any better than marginalization.

Oh, and as an example of dealing with gender in comics, check this videogame fancomic out (http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1467542). It's nothing insightful, but the subtext amused me beyond all reason. :P

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

You mean like the one in Star Trek? I'm not sure that a conversation should count if it is accompanied by what amounts to fanservice.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Cool!

(Had a longer response; lj ate it. Sad!)

But I rather like the fact that your response to illness is IndepthFeminist!Analysis. Is cool.

[rax.livejournal.com]

(a) Purr!

(b) You really need to start writing things elsewhere and copying and pasting them into LJ, this seems to happen to you a lot :)

(c) Can you explain the!Thing?

[lutris.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, there may be more female video gamers than you think. The last few studies I've seen show more females playing social online games than males. Females also tend to dominate the casual game market (although I would suspect the cause of this to be gender inequality regarding who has a career and who takes care of the kids).

Admittedly, there are more males playing video games than females in total, but it's nothing like the massively male dominated stereotype. I can dig up references for the studies in question, if anyone's interested.

[hari-mirchi.livejournal.com]

I don't read PA because I don't play enough games for it to make sense most of the time. But I think it awesome -- or maybe just scary -- that you read through a ten year backlog of comics.

[rax.livejournal.com]

When I get hyperfocused on something, I'm going to do it, even if that thing is stupid. :) (I don't think this was stupid per se, but it was totally not what I should have been doing.)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Have I mentioned that I 100% adore your theory brain?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think you are just buttering me up for the kill. :)

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

i voted against Lookouts too.

More, did you see their blog post today? I found this entry while trying in vain to find anyone condemning it, given that it made it clear to me that not only do they not appear to be aware of female gamers, I, as a female gamer who felt alienated by the post was reducible to an "angry girl". I was left angry, scared and helpless, which is all too often my experience with gaming communities. "Oh no men might be scared of me," is very similar to telling a kid that the slathering lion you want ze to go hug is really more scared of hir than ze is of it.

Your post just drove home to me how sad it is that I don't have a community I feel part of that is willing to recognize my existence.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I did see it --- krinndnz and I have been talking about it on AIM all day, in fact. I don't quite have a coherent response yet (and am working on another writing project tonight), but I'm planning to blog it when I do, because yeah, I didn't see anything either. I'm sorry that you felt reduced. I did too! The whole "It was just a joke" thing pushed my stabbing buttons, I'll say that much for free. :/

Also hi! I wonder if we've run into each other, we seem socially connected. You seem to write about gender stuff I find interesting, mind if I friend you?