T'weren't Us

I was watching this video:



Her mention of how we geeks were unaccepting of girls and women rubs me very wrong.

I'm getting to be a silverback geek here.

I was in line to see Star Wars on opening day.  Notice that I do NOT say, "A New Hope"?  My opening crawl didn't even have "Episode IV" in it.  That was added to later distributions of the film.

Ashley was -4 years old.

I started before her, so I've got more miles on and I was older when the time frame she's talking about was happening.

Ma'am, we were always accepting of females wanting to be geeks.

The problem was that females didn't want to be.

Until, of course, you did.

But geeks aren't geeks any more.  Which is probably good, because geekery at the time was not exactly defined by extroversion.  There were externalities which sent the geeks to the fringes of the social order, and there just weren't girls there.

Now?  D&D is popular.  Fandom is popular.

The cool kids and the popular kids now do the stuff that the shunned and scorned did.

The beautiful people have come.

The problem she is describing isn't a geek or fandom acceptance problem.  It was the license holders not realizing that there was a huge, untapped, female market for stuff.  Stuff that Ms. Eckstein is presently marketing and selling.

She just phrases it as if it was the fandom that kept it from happening, and it was the same folks that lurved them some Weinstein who didn't cater to the female fans.

When the girls showed up and wanted to make characters we hit some snags.

Tabletop Role Playing Games are a form of interactive story-telling.  It's like writing a novel like a historian.  Like an author of a novel, you've created the world entire.  Like a historian, you're recording the activities of a few notable individuals and their affect on the world.

To join and enjoy a campaign, you have to want to be part of the genre being told.  If you're looking for epic fantasy with a romantic theme...  Traveller is not that game.  Explaining that, "we're not the table you're looking for," isn't being unaccepting.  It's trying to keep someone from hating the idea of roleplaying because they would be bored by the subject matter.

The first wave of girls were the same as us.  Ostracized and unpopular from the normal cliques.  Independent and non-conforming.  Fellow travelers.

The second wave of girls that came through, right behind their boyfriends, were popular and members of the mainstream social tracks.

Members of the very same groups that drove us to the fringes now wanted to be part of our culture and society?

It was offputting.

The lack of acceptance that Ms Eckstein refers to might just be sensing our suspicion that "the jocks" were setting us up somehow.  We'd been "included" in the reindeer games before only to find the sole reason for that inclusion was to be further isolated, humiliated and ridiculed.

I'd go out and participate in this new mainstreamed hobby more... but remember those externalities?  That didn't change.  I'm still socially awkward.  I'm still an introvert.

Plus, my world building goes where my world building goes.  They tend to the Hard R and often have racism, sexism and other nasty things because they are often created from real world examples.  There's sex, drugs, and violence.  Not for kids.  Not safe for work.  Inappropriate for using a table at the local game shop.  Self limiting.