“For some men, only another man’s voice will be heard. If you’re a fellow, and you object to the portrayal and treatment of women within gaming, start saying so. You will receive abuse. And I am sorry, because it’s not fair. It really damned sucks, and it gets to me, it weighs me down. But it’s so worthwhile.”

—

John Walker has a great piece on sexism in the games industry over at RPS today. This bit got to me particularly - assuming that feminism’s viewed partially as a movement for social change, there (sadly) needs to be a varied approach in getting that change to take effect. And powerful people so down the rabbit hole of misogyny that they switch off as soon as women speak sometimes need men to wake them the fuck up.

It can be an awkward one to negotiate, this, because there are obviously aspects of the female experience that I’m never going to fully access - I’m not subject to constant objectification, I’m rarely told to shut up for having contrary views, and probability tells me that I’m always going to earn more for doing an equivalent job (depressingly, this especially applies in the arts, where you’d think it’d be the most egalitarian). So much of why feminism exists is the sort of thing that I can only access academically. But at the same time, it’s hard to really effect social change when your movement is exclusionary, and there are factions within feminism that believe that making feminist ideology open to all will somehow tarnish or sully the original message.

Some men will only listen to men. If accepting that certainty means that they eventually start listening to women, that can only be a good thing.