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One of the reasons I jumped on this is because I just had a conversation with a 23 year old lad (on my other forum) about exactly that. Started out with some trite observation about girl gamers, but we then got into a serious conversation.
One of the features of gaming communities is that they tend to be primarily male, and primarily young. There are a few women there, and there's a decent contingent of over 25s, but on the whole it's a young man's environment.
The catcalling, wolf whistling, demands for pics of tits etc are to be expected, and are ironic and funny about 80% of the time. Likewise deliberate misogyny and provocation of the chicks is to be expected.
What i have found quite shocking, is the amount of these young men who really do believe that women are innately less skilled, less rational, more manipulative, more fickle, more emotional, less trustworthy than men. There are older men making the same arguments, guys my age who think that we really are that different and that measurable. They can be lovely and we talk about all sorts of stuff, but scratch the surface and have a serious conversation about it and some really troubling sentiments emerge.
The reason I find it slightly shocking is that this is something that appears to have gone backwards. I see it more now than I did when I was gaming in the early noughties.
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