But the cultural impact of work matters. It's not the only thing that matters. But it REALLY matters. As a critic, to focus solely on the cultural impact of work is, I believe, reductive. To ignore it is, as a critic, irresponsible.
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Here's a story I'm fond of telling because I think it is extremely revealing. When I started at GameSpot and first appeared in a video, there were NUMEROUS comments to the effect that women on a site like GS should be attractive to the site's core demographic of straight dudes...
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...and that by hiring me, clearly a woman who was not hired because of my perceived attractiveness or desirability to these guys, GS was in effect betraying its customers. This mindset, that women exist in those spaces purely or primarily to please men, didn't come from a vacuum.
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It was an attitude that years and years and years of video games, video game advertisements, magazines, websites, and other stuff had codified: Women in and around games should be desirable to you, the male consumer.
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Other folks, like the great Jeff Gerstmann or Greg Kasavin or Kevin VanOrd, largely got to be valued for their experience, their perspectives, their opinions. As a woman in that space, I was earmarked as having another primary purpose,...
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...one which I utterly failed to fulfill right out of the gate. And trust me, you can draw a fairly straight line from stuff like 1990s Lara Croft to a gaming culture so steeped in patriarchy and male entitlement that I, and women in general, are and were often evaluated this way
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Anti-feminist dudes are flocking to the defense of the Lara Croft celebrator, which kinda proves the point that such arguments only serve to make excuses for sexism.
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End of conversation
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