On Not Speaking Up
I play an online game where the most commonly-heard phrase for “destroying the enemy” is “raping their faces.” Usage notes: “we really raped face last night”, “we caught them by surprise and raped their faces”, “who’s online and ready to go rape some face?”
By no particular coincidence, the voices you hear in your headset when you play this game are overwhelmingly male. Our crew is stunningly gender-integrated; we’ve got a triple-digit number of folks who use voice communication (“voice coms”) and there are perhaps five female-sounding voices among them. This is rare enough that new people have been heard to gasp “Girls? Did I just hear a girl? This game has girls?” In fact, no: pretty much the only female players we have are adult women. But that’s a whole ‘nuther thing, yo.
The politics of managing voice coms for a group so large are intricate. The more people using coms, the more social cohesion you have and the better your gaming group will fight together. But if coms are shitted up in ways that make various groups feel unwelcome (gays, women, ethnic minorities) these people will not use coms and may not stay in your group. So when your people start using “gay” as a derisive adjective, calling the folks who aren’t combat-oriented “Jews” because they are busy earning in-game currency, or throwing around words such as “cunt” and “bitches” like the unsupervised 14-year-old-boys many of them are, or using “rape” as a laudatory verb of victorious combat, it’s important to push back. Impossible to make this sort of thing stop entirely, but if you can’t keep it to a dull roar, you silently lose too many of your more mature and valuable people.
Note well: I’m speaking purely in practical terms here. I’m talking about what you need to do to make your organization functional and keep the coms working for the people you need to be on coms. I’m (so far) leaving the ethics of the the thing totally out of it. This is just practical management shit: keep the crap to a minimum or your org will drown in it and failcascade.
My own contribution to this problem in my own org has been to pick one battle and be tenacious about it. My chosen battle is Jew-talk. “Jewing it up”, “Don’t be such a jew”, “Who’s the Jew who’s been buying up all the [game items] around here and re-selling them for twice the price”, that sort of thing. It’s rare enough that I can challenge it consistently when I hear it without spending all day ranting into coms, and challenging it consistently seems to work. Gamers being gamers, being told to go fuck myself is the most pleasant response I ever get, but these exchanges, happening persistently when the verbal behavior recurs, seem to drive up the social cost of the behavior or reduce the transgressive fun-factor. Yeah, a few mostly-unthinking racists figure me for a humorless dick. You got no idea how much sleep I lose over that.
Funny thing? Right now I don’t even know any Jews in real life. Currently I live in a town so red-state and rural that there haven’t been any Jews here since the Cohens closed their dry goods store and retired, back in the 1980s. (I am not making that up.) But the thing you gotta understand is, Jew-talk in my game is a sort of coded “you’re not playing the game right” attack by combat-oriented players on crafter-and-accumulator type acquisitive players. Squelching it has a powerful practical purpose, since any good gaming organization needs both types of players. Also … duh … we don’t, can’t, know who the actual Jews in our org might be. Stupid to maybe insult people that you will need at your back in a fight. Ethics don’t need to figure into it.
But of course they do anyway. And that’s true about face-rape talk, too.
I come from the sort of cultural place where I feel it shouldn’t be necessary to explain to anybody why rape talk should never be light-hearted and why rape should never be used as a laudatory metaphor for anything. I’m like “Dude, it’s just rude is all. You don’t shout I AM A HUGE DICKHEAD! in the halls at school or work, do you? Then why are you talking like this? It makes you look like a huge freaking douchebag, shaddup allready!”
It shouldn’t be necessary to explain that, but sadly it often is necessary. Fortunately I don’t have to (at least not out here on the intarwebs) because Shakesville has already done it better:
Following is a primer for men who are interested in learning more about the practical effects of rape humor. … [T]his post in particular is addressed to men, not because women don’t rape and women don’t make/laugh at rape jokes and not because men can’t be raped, but because, by nature of the existing gender disparity, men are in a unique position to be taken seriously when they raise objections to casual language and humor regarding rape. Men are also in a unique position to prove to rapists and douchebags that not all men rape or take rape lightly by being able to embody living proof of that fact.
…
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?
Rapists do.
They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.
Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.
There’s a lot more in that vein. And, you know, it matters. It’s not just that they are shitting up my game coms and degrading our combat efficiency. Fuckers.
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I can’t play that way, my entire time would be combating the attitudes, so it’s SP games for me thanks. And a link to Shakesville no less, everyone should read Fem 101.
I find that incredibly disturbing that rapists don’t have enough self-awareness to realize that they are the exception not the rule when it comes to unspeakable acts. I wonder if this is true among other deviants. Do murderers think all people murder or vandals think all people vandalize?
Thank you. Great link and this is, unfortunately, one of those things that needs to be said every so often.
You have far more patience than I in those situations, which is probably why I don’t game. Ever. I wouldn’t be able to deal. Thank you for pointing out to people that they’re dickheads!
I say things like “We will be as Romans to their Sabines” when the conversation turns rapesque or ethnic-slurs
… that way they cuss me specifically and I can mock their ignorance.
as a white, middle-aged, heterosexual, monogamous male who has two kids … I can take the heat.
And, as I’ve played this stuff for a lot of years, I can also head shot the bastards who get chippy.
Dude! Come to SL Gor! You would love it! Sex and combat and fun galore. I know Goreans have a bad rap but the fact is that as a GAME it’s kind of addictive. There are plenty of people like me there who see SL Gor as a fun fantasy but don’t have an interest in it as a philosophy or a reality. There are tens of thousands of Gorean players in SL and 250-350 sims (they tend to come and go very fast, in many cases). It’s completely a community effort, no corporation was involved in anything other than Lindens creating Second Life and staying the hell out of the participants’ way. It’s supposed to be some of the best roleplay going. And SL Gor Evolved, where I play, is much more sexually egalitarian than traditional Gor … they have women warriors, women can lead outlaw bands, etc. Like in RL BDSM, your particular desires and orientation determines your role, not your gender. For me, it puts other games in perspective.
[…] couple of differing viewpoints on why men shouldn’t let other men (boys, actually) get away with casually joking about […]
It’s butt-bleeps like this which inspired Kinky Friedman to use the phrase “Christian him down”. While the post is interesting, remember: if you look around and see the people you are with are acting like jerks, then look in the mirror because you are like them. We are blind to what we are even as we see the faults in others.
Cman, you don’t game, do you?
“The people around you” rubric may work in small meat-space groupings of humans. It doesn’t work so well in internet space. There, if you want to group at all, you inevitably end up with a broad mix that you don’t have much control over.
This is why your website is in my list of favorites. I grew up in a conservative family and I have conservative values so the part of me that likes sex is usually at odds with the part of me that is supposed to find sexual things gross, immoral and anti-woman. This blog continuously shows me that sex and respect can co-exist and I appreciate that. I appreciate this post. I appreciate what you do.
Thanks, Rox!
Here via The View From Hell. I’ll apologize in advance for not discussing the main topic, readers may skip this comment if that’s what they’re focused on.
“They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.”
The comments on that old post are closed and it was from a guest blogger without contact info. I wanted to know if there was a link or a cite to such studies, because I was surprised.
Note to Mack (Response #3):
What you are asking about, was referred to by Sigmund Freud as “projection”, “projection bias” or “psychological projection”, which is a mechanism by which one ascribes one’s own unacceptable attributes onto others around him.
This is what causes a wife to constantly ask her husband where he has been, whenever he is out of her sight, due to the fact that she has been deceiving him (saying she has been out shopping at the mall all day, while in reality she has been having an affair with her tennis instructor), she just assumes that when he has come home late (after working overtime at the office), that he has been with another woman.
I found a couple of noteworthy references on-line:
“Projection is a term applied by Sigmund Freud for the act of projecting one’s feelings, attitudes, etc. onto other people. Projection is one of many defense mechanisms, another term for the strategies people use to cope with situations which arouse anxiety. To make this clearer, let us consider an example. A person who always lies, according to Freud, is more likely to see others as liars too. The same is true for a thief; he might feel vigilant about the safety of his own property because he projects his bad deeds onto other people, thinking that other people may have higher tendencies to steal.”
After correcting some spelling, I excerpted the following four paragraphs from a comment I found on-line with a Google search. :
“One of the superpowers of sociopathic personalities… is that they have no honor, hence they also have no fear that they will be exposed to be lowlife.
Their complete indifference (likely because they are anonymous) to getting shown to be liars and bullies is their digital superpower.
You cannot change the behavior of people without honor by proving them to be dishonorable, folks. They already know they have no honor and most of them imagine that nobody else has honor, either. This is a very typical point of view that all kinds of sociopathic personalities share. To a liar, all people lie. To a thief, all people are thieves. This is the human nature of RATIONALIZING away ones character deficiencies.
That’s why, both on-line and in real life, the lying deceitful, spiteful, malicious, and egocentric lunatic bastards are running our world…”
Hi Dr Whiplash,
I take issue with the scope of the premise of your final words. In very large, more truly anonymous online communities, it can be very hard to keep the tone of conversation civil. However in smaller communities, perhaps up to a few dozen people, it is possible to rein in the worst excesses of foolishness. Some communities employ mods, sometimes a few people step up and put the smack down on the fools.
Tootling my own horn here, as I was just such a person in one UO-shard’s forums. People used to get into very angry fights, until I pointed out that they were both fighting about different things. This happened over and over, for a few weeks, until they learned to fight cleaner and spent less time fighting shadow opponents and more time roleplaying on the boards and fighting in the game. People Can learn, they just need role models, and a reason to learn from them. In this case, it was the shame of being shown to be foolish, and (I hope) a desire to actually settle differences, or at least have them heard.
In Bacchus’ example, gamers would respond to the leadership of a strong person, especially one who leads a successful group. If noone cares to lead on this kind of issue, people get lax and stupid, if someone is rapping their knuckles while showing them there is a better option, and there’s a reward for a different play style, they might just learn a thing or two.
Of course, there needs to be a Lot of people taking leadership roles on these issues before we’ll see a larger change in internet culture, if that’s possible.
As to the larger problem of rape, men and women, I was shocked and saddened to read an article posted on FB by my sister which detailed the kind of “is this guy likely to assault/rape me” scenario which most women have to run through every time they meet a guy at a party or club. As someone who loves sex, but prefers any rough play to be fully consensual (I love scratching, she loves spanking and grabbing), I never really had cause to consider the reality of what a woman may face. It’s just not the kind of world I was raised to live in, but it’s what the world actually is.
I would also be interested to find the source(s) for the “rapists think all men are rapists” claim, but the comments on Shakesville are closed.
It seems plausible, I’m not accusing anyone of anything shady, but I wasn’t able to find a source after five minutes of googling and five minutes of google-schoalring so it’s definitely not SO self-evident that sourcing isn’t required.
And one paper I skimmed through trying to find it (http://www.jsto...00239) shows that at least some rapists do not think all other men are rapists.
Er, note to Justin:
I’m not sure to exactly which words you are taking issue with.
My final words were “After correcting some spelling, I excerpted the following four paragraphs from a comment I found on-line with a Google search. :”
The actual final words at the bottom of my response were not my own, hence the quote marks, and the meaning of my actual final words, which were referring to that comment…
Ah, so you simply dropped them into the conversation, with no intent of telling us if you agreed or disagreed with them? I’m not sure why you would do that.
“In Bacchus’ example, gamers would respond to the leadership of a strong person, especially one who leads a successful group. If noone cares to lead on this kind of issue, people get lax and stupid, if someone is rapping their knuckles while showing them there is a better option, and there’s a reward for a different play style, they might just learn a thing or two.”
Ummmmmm … yeah.
The fact that Bacchus (or anybody) cares about a particular outcome for the gaming group doesn’t mean that outcome is shared by everybody – particularly those that are douchbaggedly-minded.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
The only recourse for gamers is allow the group to self-select into teams that are outcome-oriented or else offer a particular gaming experience (e.g. no rape their faces stuff.) In which case the standard approaches of dealing with online assholes such as shunning, banning, or causing them to lose their deposit might work.
–
As for the “Face Rape” stuff. Back in the day, the phrase was “Face Rake” … which was said in response to a gullible response … generally accompanied by a cat’s claw motion at the person.
Face Rape / Face Rake?
maybe this particular line of “rape” humor is the result of men of Bacchus’s and my generation not being glottal with our “k”s enough.
or a lot of guys, by nature and when freed of consequences, are assholes.
Rousseau’s premises notwithstanding.
fwiw – and it might not be much – I help as a chaperon/overseer for a middle school youth program.
Language stuff – especially between the genders – is something that I pay attention to.
If needed I take- usually – the young man aside and a “watch it, pal” is enough to correct the language – if not the thought process that led to the expression.
But there’s only so much you can do before the pizza shows up.
One of basic messages for the kids is “don’t be a dick” – being Sunday School and youth group, that message gets dressed up a bit.
“Saying something mean or hurtful to someone for the sole purpose of making yourself feel good” is a pretty good working definition of being a dick.
_
sb, I have a feeling the research might have been done by David Lisak, but that’s just a feeling and it might be someone else.
Again to Justin (Comment #18 this time):
I’m still not sure precisely which words you are taking issue with.
If you think that I’m taking a position in opposition to Bacchus’s, that was not my intent. I have said in the past that one of the reasons that I frequent his blog is that I find him to be exceptionally astute, which probably can be taken to mean that I tend to agree with his observations.
Whenever Bacchus and I have had expressed disagreements, it is often a semantical misunderstanding, and if not that, then I often end up learning something from him.
Also, re: “I’m not sure why you would do that.”
It may interest you that I have expressed in the past (on this blog), that I sometimes tend to be a bit of a devil’s advocate, purely in order to stimulate conversation. It seems to me anyway, to also be one of Bacchus’s main motivations …to be provocative…
I also tend to attempt to be humorous on occasion, which I’m not sure if I’ve always, or even ever, been successful in that endeavor.
Those are the first two reasons that come to mind as to why I might enter conversations here.
I’m not so certain that it’s necessary to either agree or disagree with someone’s expression in order to enter into a conversation. I’ll have to cogitate on that one for a while.
Thanks for this. I’m a female who has played online games from MUDs to 3D stuff since 1994. Some games seem worse than others as far as the “rape” comments go. Funny when I got to comment #1, the 2 biggest problems I had with EVE were the “rape” jokes/battlecries and the sexist jerks who assumed if you were female you weren’t worthy to join them on their missions (no matter what you did that proved it otherwise). Just one reason I don’t play it anymore.
I’ve spoken up before specifically about the rape language. The results tend to range from “Don’t be oversensitive” or utter silence, to having several others in the guild/group/whatever pipe up in agreement and sincere apologies. Speaking up helps me to decide if this is a place I really want to stick around.
[…] about the seriousness of rape jokes in a general real world environment. December 1st, the ErosBlog took it to the focus of video gaming and how it makes a person feel listening to their teammates in […]