Sexism In Video Games And Comics

I was raised by a lower-class family in New Jersey.  I had anxiety disorders that made going to school terrifying and actually physically painful.  I later discovered that I had epilepsy which would explain several of my other problems like having little to no long term memory.  I was severely depressed.  I had plenty of friends and family supporting me but despite their best efforts, they could often times make me feel worse when attempting to make me feel better.  Throughout all of this my only escape was through video games and comic books.

Video games allowed me to enter a fully realized different world where I could take control of somebody else for a number of hours and fix all of their problems by solving a series of simple puzzles, or fight the bad guys.  Helping the protagonists in the games I was playing seemed to help me.  I felt accomplished after I would complete a game or after I would defeat a difficult boss fight.

Comic books were great too.  They offered an entirely different escape than video games did but they still helped.  Comics made me feel like I could do anything.  Whether I was reading about superheroes leaping buildings in a single bound or more independent comics about people going through the same things I was, suddenly I didn't feel so alone. But then something happened, I grew up.  I looked behind the curtain and saw that there was no magic wizard back there.  It's just a sad, lonely, old man.

Something that games and comics taught me was that, everyone is created equal.  Man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, it does not matter.  If I learned anything from Mass Effect and X-men it's that we are all the same.  We are all broken, flawed, beautiful and the same.  Which is why the amount of sexism recently coming out of the video game and comic book community is so disconcerting.

It's at least once a month where I see an article like this over on Polygon, or something like this showing up just about everywhere.  The scariest part about these articles is that they are not really news.  The first deals with women in E-sports being harassed but it focuses on one woman in particular.  I'm not saying that is a bad thing but if someone at Polygon wanted to just write about women being harassed in gaming that would not be a story because everyone already knows about that!  I used to enjoy playing Halo and COD online and communicating with my teammates but now the first thing I do is mute my teammates because of all of the hate speech out there.  The second article I posted also only focuses on one person but this time it focuses on the harasser.  A man named Scott Allie who works at Dark Horse Comics is finally being called out for his years of drunken, disgusting behavior but once again it seems once the truth comes out about Scott, nobody seems surprised.  Everybody seems to know but is just keeping it secret for the good of the company.

There are more male gamers than females and there are more male comic readers than females but it is not because men are better at games or because men are smarter than women because that is simply not true.  The reason is because of things like this, and this and finally this.  I highly recommend that you read all of the articles I linked in this article because they are written by people much smarter and more talented than I; but the point is, this is nothing new.  As I said before, video games and comics taught me that we are all equal and now the people who create and use these products the most no longer hold that belief dear.  We all turn to these outlets for one reason or another but usually because we have no other choice.  Video games and comic books are main stream now but they will always have a tiny stigma attached to them and that is what links us together as fans.  We are all outcasts in one way or another which is what attracted us to the medium in the first place.  Some of my best friends I met because of our mutual fandoms and thinking back on my childhood I can not imagine ever turning away a potential friend because they looked different.  We as a society need to change.