Steubenville rape case. Another one.
Two weeks ago I saw my feminist crew, all awesome. We don’t talk as much about terrible things in the news like rape cases, how media treats them etc as before because we’re sadly, so used to it. Angry, not surprised.
We walked the streets. We had heated debates, we wrote thousands of pages, we met this way. I still remember the feeling of entering a bar 90% full of women and sit down there like “yes, I’d like to know more it’s interesting and I’m totally not overwhelmed and looking weird”. I was in my early twenties and it would change my life.
Learning that women weren’t coming so much with the help of a dick was amazing. Hurting like “oh shit, the power balance I’ve been told doesn’t exist! Tell me more, damn *recalculate*”, learning things that looked rock solid but in fact weren’t. Two big paradigm shifts in my head were the realization of all the work women do in this world and gets unnoticed for. Unbelievable. Massive failure of a system forgetting half of its population. The second one was realizing how much physical harassment women get and how much rape is something spread out and happening most of the time inside close circles. These twos things made me think hard.
That stuff clearly pushed me away from the classic machismo culture. Which is the only one in the game industry. I was sad to be sick of deep sexism -and thus avoiding bromancing/networking- but I was also happy to get that consistency that I love so much in my head. When news like Lara’s controversy, the lack of women in tech or terrible female characters show up I just stare at it and feel that I made the good decision. Happy to see that the message is spreading, slowly through the now classic explanation-men outrage-backlash-little progress loop.
And then there’s Rihanna and Chris. I never fucking want to hear anything about them, ever.
It’s just that sexism/racism are this big thing reducing my enjoyment in this world by a LOT™Louis CK. Like for all of us actually.