egadsy:

Kate Cox: The Golden Days

Because for many of us out there who aren’t the “right” sort of gamer?  It has never, ever been “just” about the games.  From age seven, in second grade, when the boys in my class asserted that girls don’t play Nintendo.  To age seventeen, in high school, when despite using a girly alias and telling everyone I was a girl, the guys all called me “he” when I won science-fiction trivia games.  To twenty-seven, when I started to understand that just because my Lone Wanderer looked female, didn’t mean the game’s design treated her that way.

“Can we just play the video games?”  Sure.  As soon as conscious and unconscious sexism vanish from the stories, the art, and the reviews.

Culture exists, and we all must live in it.  Our culture means that if you’re the girl at the party, you might have a really hard time getting the guys to let you in on GoldenEye.  It means that if you’re the girl behind the counter at the GameStop, you have to deal with a constant level of leering and commentary that your male co-workers never get.  And if you’re the girl, it means that any time you try to talk about the uphill battle, you’re going to get smacked right back down.

The end result is exhaustion.  Swimming upstream against culture is tiring.  And journalist Tracey Lien is right: it’s not just one incident, or just one joke.  It’s every last one of them.  For many of us, life is a pile of these.  There are no “simpler days” to go back to.

a bit late on this, but it’s still a great read. check the rest at the link