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I'm finding a lot of the responses to this article disheartening. There's a common trend of "she should've said something," and while many here disapprove of the PR guys' treatment of the writer, they're still quick to defend his innocence or obliviousness. Focusing on how the author could've done better to defend herself against sexism is pretty problematic and indicative of this brand of derailing the conversation: http://www.derailingfordummies.com/education.html
The problem is that she raises two separate issues, one of which was his fault and one of which was partly his and partly hers. People are following her lead and conflating the two.
1. The guy was a sexist prick.
This was his fault, and she obviously doesn't deserve any of the blame for his broken worldview.
2. She didn't get to play the game.
This was partly her doing. He still deserves some of the blame because it's his job to represent his company well to her and he didn't do that. But she didn't so much as indicate a desire to play it, which I don't think is too much to expect from an adult acting in a professional capacity. Non-videogame journalists have to deal with much fiercer opposition to their reporting than some sexist twit making unwarranted assumptions, but somehow political stories still get written (by women, no less).
Have you though that maybe she is a video-game journalist and not a non-video-game journalist partly because she doesn't want to deal with what you describe?
Its ridiculous to demand the same amount of experience in dealing with adverse situations to people who choose to review commercial products for a living and to political or war journalists. Specially when you are demanding expertise in approaching a hostile subject in order to get your facts prior to forming your opinion.
There's women are more-stupid/less–competent than men sexism and there's women are less likely to have spent time attaining a useless (and kinda dorky) skill at first person shooters non-sexism.
I think there's a pretty substantial difference between being offered a play-through of a game and having your house robbed. That analogy just doesn't apply here. He wasn't violating her civil rights, he was just treating her like she was something that she wasn't (which, yes, was 100% his fault).
And once again, I did not say she deserves "some of the blame" for his dickish behavior. You're still conflating the two issues I tried to separate out there. I said she deserves some of the blame for not getting to play the game. If I had a reporter, male or female, who told me they couldn't get a story because the first person they talked to was uncooperative, I would ream them. And this guy wasn't exactly uncooperative (after all, she hadn't given him any direction to cooperate with), he was just dumb and in possession of a backwards worldview.
If you have trouble buying the second point, ask yourself: Was there any way, without a truly exceptional degree of effort, that she could have played the game? I think the answer is yes — she could have asked. If you agree with this assessment, then you agree with my second point.
To be clear: This doesn't make his behavior more appropriate, and it also doesn't mean that women don't have legitimate gripes both in the tech world and in video games specifically. Sadly, those are both very much the case.
> If I had a reporter, male or female, who told me they couldn't get a story because the first person they talked to was uncooperative, I would ream them.
That's fair, but she's not a reporter. She's reviewing games. A game reviewer's job is much different from a journalist's: their stories come to them, pre-packaged with ample spin that inevitably carries over into their write-ups. They aren't really supposed to be asking hard questions and digging up obscure but glaring facts to shine the light of the public eye upon.
> I think the answer is yes — she could have asked.
A friend of mine was recently charged an unexpected 400 by his dentist who asked him a question while he was under the influence of chemicals. He ended up successfully disputing it and extracting an apology from the man. This isn't exactly analogous–I don't keep many anecdotes handy, unfortunately–but the point is that you're not always at your best 100% of the time.
This wasn't a one-time deal. As noted in my other comment on this thread, it kept happening and she did, in fact, push back several of those times. She probably even got to play and properly review some of those games. But not this one; I chalk it up to sheer shock and context-shifting, personally. Sometimes you're just more prepared to stand up for yourself. Sometimes you just came out of a screaming fight with your S.O. and dealing with a misogynist on top of that hurt just makes you want to crawl into a hole and die.
I think my overarching point might have gotten lost here. I'm not trying to excoriate Katie Williams. I'm saying that there are two separate issues here, and saying that she shares fault in one of them doesn't mean she shares fault in both of them.
She didn't really do much to make sure she played that game. Maybe she had a good excuse (fight with the SO or whatever), maybe she didn't — I don't really care. I think it's fair to say that she did less than she reasonably could have in that particular instance. If she did it differently in other cases, that would seem to support this hypothesis.
But that is a totally separate issue from the guy's behavior. Whatever fault you feel she may have had in not playing the game, that doesn't make his behavior any less his fault or any more OK. It's a separate issue.
Conflating the two leads people to this odd view of the situation where it's her fault the guy was a sexist. That just makes no sense at all. So we should not conflate the two. That was where I was trying to go with my comment.
"Sometimes you just came out of a screaming fight with your S.O. and dealing with a misogynist on top of that hurt just makes you want to crawl into a hole and die."
That's kinda overwrought. Personally I'm very happy people never assume I play video games (I'm a guy, and they're right, I don't).
The interesting thing about victim-blaming is that it's paradoxical. It both presumes that the victim is vulnerable and that they're superhuman: that they can both be hurt and power through that hurt like a storybook hero without more cost than a few extra words.
This is one of the nastier side effects of the self-empowerment movement. By accepting personal responsibility and demanding others do the same, we isolate each other and make it harder to override the Bystander Effect.
But if a person doesn't take even the slightest, tiniest effort to defend themselves against something that is wrong, they're "going to have a bad time" whether that thing which is wrong is something politically charged like sexism, or simply individual malice.
Also, prejudice like this is most likely due to ignorance, and the best antidote to ignorance is education.
I like how you say "not everything is black and white" and then proceed to give black-and-white prescriptions.
From an armchair, it's terribly easy for you to say, "Well, instead of backing down, you should have told him off." Not everyone is, or should be, the strong and assertive, constantly vigilant culture warrior shrugging off the whips and scorns of ignorant simpletons. Most especially, as the Derailing for Dummies link explains, most people have finite energy and even if they are strong and assertive some of the time, they cannot be that way all of the time.
A direct quote out of the article:
Every time I protested [over "the next few days of E3"], the offender would say —
as if it were a proven fact — “Well, girls aren’t usually into this stuff, you know.”
Somehow, you and everyone else saying that she should have ripped him a new one missed this sentence. It's a very important sentence, and I'm disappointed she didn't highlight it more clearly.
By the time she starts educating, she is no longer doing her job as a member of the press reviewing games. She is doing an entirely different job, which she did not arrive prepared to do, and for which she receives no compensation except the desperate hope that one person might possibly listen.
How would you feel, if you were constantly distracted from your job in order to fill in for something for which you have no training, no interest, and no pay?
Saying that sexism is wrong and saying that a victim of sexism should stand up for herself are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and just because the former is true the latter isn't necessarily "blaming the victim".
Suppose a student leaves his laptop on a table in the school library while on a bathroom break and it is stolen. Is it "blaming the victim" to tell him not to leave his valuables unattended, just because it is clearly the thief who did something morally wrong?
Your analogy doesn't work. The student locking their computer is a preventative measure, not a reactive. Williams couldn't have prevented others' attitudes towards her. She did nothing to invite the behavior. This is more akin to telling the student they should've had a better lock when they had already locked their computer, but had it stolen anyway.
The first is that you're insisting on excerpting from the "How to React to Every Situation" book. Your claim is that "if you are oppressed, you should always stand your ground". No exceptions. No compromises. Every deviation from the right and true way is a failure.
This is wrong.
The second is that the entire condescending piece of advice is being offered as if she hadn't already done it. You seem to feel that, because her first and immediate reaction was not confrontational, this makes her a failure. It doesn't matter that, the second time, she did stand up for herself and did speak up. You only care about the first time.
Why?
Victim-blaming is reinforcing a victim's status as victim by giving unwanted and unneeded advice. It's saying, "You poor wretch. If only you worked harder, you'd be as awesome as me. Work harder." That is what you are doing.
It's not victim blaming per se. When a male has a problem, he is trained to keep it to himself. If he shares it with anyone, he is most likely told to suck it up and fix it. To live a male existence is to live without sympathy. It is little wonder that we have little sympathy for anybody else. When someone comes to us with a problem, we respond with the only advice we have ever been given - fix it.
When you are a male, every shortcoming, every bad situation is chalked up to your own personal inadequacy. There are no social forces to blame anything on.
Maybe it makes us stronger. Maybe it makes us dicks. Maybe a bit of both.
This is completely and totally untrue. You get tons of support living as a male when you encounter life problems. People readily sympathize with men when they describe issues in their life and a lot of discussion and depiction about bad situations revolves around male perspective.
How else could a tread about a woman's experience in gaming journalism turn into a discussion about how oppressed you are as a man? This very thread is an example of how male perspective dominates discussions, even about people who don't identify as male.
I certainly won't defend the jerky guys, but I will say that to be an effective journalist you have to be willing to be a jerk to people sometimes, or at least manipulative--regardless of gender.
In this case the sexism is obvious in the stories, but in general most PR reps believe it is their job to "manage" (manipulate) journalists. Journalists need to be ready to fight this--with anything from friendly persuasion to persistent confrontation.
The PR rep's job is to deliver a carefully crafted story to the public; the journalist's job is to tell the truth. The roles are inherently confrontational.
I wish that could be the case, but the journalist's goal is to help the magazine profit, like any other employee. (For more info, Robert McChesney is a good historian of journalism.) The two roles are often symbiotic: the PR rep feeds the journalist. The journalist's company generally sells eyeballs to advertisers, which have interests in common with the companies that the PR reps work for. The reviewed company may even be a major advertiser.
(Of course, there may be some differences of interest, since they're not employed in the same corporation.)
It's offensive because, even if you're on her side, you're displacing responsibility from the offender. It's not her job to individually confront and educate every condescending PR rep. That's a grind, and also only effective on a micro-level. By writing another piece on sexism at E3, she contributes to the ever-growing pool of them; the more the community is aware of such behavior, the better equipped they are to recognize it when it happens.
But isn't that just practicality? Stepping completely away from this specific case, I have found that people that are the most effective in changing things are the ones that say 'I think it's your fault, but I'm going to fix it anyway'.
Naming it like this article is obviously important and I also don't think anyone thinks she is in any way responsible or in the wrong (quite the contrary) but the most effective way to make an offender change his (or her) ways is to simply communicate with him (or her).
Yes, but there are a lot of factors that play into that communication. We make assumptions that the other party is amenable to change, or that the offended is an effective communicator in these one-on-one scenarios. I think it's unfair to think that these ideal conditions are in place for all of her interactions.
The article shares an experience of being marginalized, and we're focusing on what she could've done to feel more welcome where she felt unwelcome. By continually suggesting that she stand up for herself, we're creating an atmosphere that basically says, "It's on you," which further marginalizes her. Despite best intentions, it's treating her like a problem and distracts from the greater problem of condescension towards women in games.
I don't mean to suggest that it's somehow her fault that that's how the PR guy thinks. Obviously, that's preposterous. I'm also not saying that she needs to give a 15 minute presentation on sexism in the video game industry to every PR rep at E3. A simple "Dude! Give me back the keyboard!" would probably suffice to solve the immediate problem of not getting to play the games she needs to play.
Yes, the article is an important part of effecting a macro-level change to the industry culture, but it's of minimal help in solving the micro-level problem at hand. That's all I'm saying.
She didn't write this article to complain about not getting to play games. The point is that there is a common problem amongst male game employees, and people should know about it. I'm saying that it's legit to want to take on the macro over the micro, and that she has no obligation to address the latter. I believe in picking your battles.
I can understand the feeling. It'd be great to see these women acknowledged on HN separate from the "women in tech" angle, but it's rare to see their female-oriented areas of business highlighted here. Sincere question: would the men of HN upvote a standalone article on 99dresses? If such a thing is a frequent occurrence, I'd be more than happy to see examples and be proven wrong.
For now, I'm okay with these types of lady showcases if only because I get comfort from seeing almost any example of female leadership in this corner of the internet. It's unfortunate that focusing on gender's the most surefire way to get these women on the front page, but stories like this and articles on female struggles in the tech world are mostly the only times I get a sense of female camaraderie around here. It feels less condescending when it's so much more difficult to get acknowledgment in a community of male-dominated interests.
I'm a designer learning to code, and I'm all for devs learning design principles—I just wish that all these design guides for programmers wouldn't offer themselves as a replacement for an actual designer, or downplay the value of a designer.
You can host Google Apps on your own domain, like s.archer@isis.org, but you can't register for a G+ account using that email address. You can only use gmail addresses, and not everyone uses or wants to use a gmail address as their primary account.
I actually set up another Google profile using an email account managed by Apps, and this works fine for me. But it's not the solution I want since you have to switch users whenever you want to use Plus.
It's advantageous to have them on separate accounts in case you are arbitrarily banned from Google Plus. This way it has no chance of affecting your other services. It would devastate me if I lost my main email.
Although it's unclear that Archer is set in the modern day and would have access to Google.
<< The characters wear 1960s clothing and hair styles and several episodes feature references to the Soviet Union as a current nation (the episode "Movie Star" hinges on the assassination of "the new Soviet Premier"). The technological sophistication within the series varies, with characters using computers that are dated i.e. reel-to-reel mainframe systems, dot-matrix printers and punchcards, yet also use cell phones, GPS devices, laser gunsights, and modern day insults (such as "suck it", "screw you", and "douche bag"). Adam Reed was asked about the conflicting style, and concluded, "I just think it's ill-defined." >>
Why is there even a set number of invites left for each G+ user? I see that I still have 94 Gmail invites even, and in both cases, I'm not seeing the point.
