Are you calling me a misogynist because of what I posted? I find that rather unfair.
It would be unfair, but you're presenting a damn compelling argument that it is the case due to how oblivious you seem to be of the problem of systemic persecution of women online.
Men aren't tasked with broadcasting their gender online because their presence is so universal that the average player is presumed to be male until proven otherwise. Your "don't ask, don't tell" policy reinforces this notion by blatantly encouraging women on the internet to allow their contemporaries to assume that they're male. How is that at all conducive to progress? And if you don't acknowledge that progress needs to be made, then congratulations, you're a misogynist. The prevalence of videos like these in comparison to the prevalence (or lack thereof, as the case may be) of "I'm a male gamer" videos should make that pretty clear to you.
There is a thick and distinct line between the sort of random abuse incurred by
all players online -- including behaviorally-oriented abuse that may or may not be connected to actual gameplay -- and the non-random, directed abuse that is rooted in racism and sexism. Racism is prevalent online but it's an entirely different beast due to the fact that the proportional representation of racial minorities online is not all that different from what it is offline, whereas the number of females playing, say, online shooters, is quite visibly smaller than the amount of males despite the fact that both make up around half of the earth's population. And you know what, if I'm wrong and the difference isn't that large, it is due to people like you -- people encouraging women to conceal their gender, either implicitly through a constructed and ultimately near-endless barrage of gender-construed abuse, or explicitly by actually telling them to conceal their gender online -- that such an inability to identify these females remains to even such a thoroughly seasoned online player such as myself.
This directed and non-random abuse is preventable. It is this form of abuse that these videos are focused on, because this form of abuse specifically affects them and it absolutely doesn't need to happen. Very rarely is a man on the internet attacked because he is a man. If that happens, us men will be able to stand up and acknowledge how ridiculous that is. Right now, it's the women doing that, and it's so insanely ingrained that even the people who aren't perpetuating this kind of behavior are often too blind to see it that way.
By the way, the comics oriented towards the "THAT'S RIGHT, I'M A GIRL GAMER" character are about just that: A character. That character exists to justify harassment of attention whores, not women. Don't get the message confused.
