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...it would figure that not too long after posting this, we'd run into something that nastily, triggerishly reminded us of those days. And remind us why we fucking hate gaming messageboards. You know, in and of itself, we can deal with a few jackasses making rape jokes. Sometimes what's worse than the jokes is seeing nobody come forward to call out the people making them, to try to minimize it or laugh it off if they respond at all. And just as bad, even if it's a totally different kind of badness, is seeing the target try to laugh them off. Where the target is a 15-year-old girl who's just been made the target of rape jokes by other posters.
Not just that it's horrible in and of itself. But because we remember being that girl. (Technically closer to 18 than 15, but it didn't really make all that much difference.) Having to pretend to laugh those kinds of things off, seeing another poster write a story about us right after we were unofficially declared to be an accepted group regular, in which male members of the group chased us around trying to get us to have sex with them. We thought that showing we were "okay" with those things was kind of a litmus test. Always having to shove down the discomfort and crawling feeling of wrongness when every female poster on the group got similar kinds of treatment.
It's not that "women don't play games," it's that they don't post in places like that because they don't want to deal with the fucking bullshit. Lurk, at best, and not even do that when the average level of discourse just gets too stomach-churning. (Literally so, in our case. Really didn't realize it would have that kind of a... visceral effect on us, until it actually happened. Bleah.)
Not just that it's horrible in and of itself. But because we remember being that girl. (Technically closer to 18 than 15, but it didn't really make all that much difference.) Having to pretend to laugh those kinds of things off, seeing another poster write a story about us right after we were unofficially declared to be an accepted group regular, in which male members of the group chased us around trying to get us to have sex with them. We thought that showing we were "okay" with those things was kind of a litmus test. Always having to shove down the discomfort and crawling feeling of wrongness when every female poster on the group got similar kinds of treatment.
It's not that "women don't play games," it's that they don't post in places like that because they don't want to deal with the fucking bullshit. Lurk, at best, and not even do that when the average level of discourse just gets too stomach-churning. (Literally so, in our case. Really didn't realize it would have that kind of a... visceral effect on us, until it actually happened. Bleah.)