Your first impulse may have been to deny that this happens. Ask yourself, have you asked and then truly listened to your female friends and colleagues if they have ever experienced this before? Please make the effort and gather some anecdata.
So forgive the skepticism, but this woman was molested twice, 'roofied' once, and harrassed at least 5 times, encountered this stuff frequently and no authoritative body ever took notice? Or was this stuff half hyperbole?
I don't wish to dismiss this as not happening, but if this is true than it should get more attention. I mean, I've heard about some of the unwanted attention and comments women get, and some are quite frightening, but how does this relate to the number of women who attend cons regularly, wear revealing clothing, etc etc, year after year, and don't seem to hAve experienced attacks like this, to this degree and w without authorities taking notice?
You say they "don't seem" to have experienced attacks. I'm assuming then you haven't asked them directly what kind of negative experiences they have had?
In my attempt to get her into gaming, I once brought my girlfriend to an indie game store to grab a controller. The kids there were in the middle of some card tournament. There was an audible COD Twitch stream on the TVs. As we're paying for the controller, a player on the screen yells "Damn dude! He got fuckin' raped!" No one in the store batted an eyelash. The only female in the store, my girlfriend, suddenly felt very uncomfortable. In the parking lot she told me she doesn't want to go into a video game store ever again.
It's really unfortunate that a term like "rape" has become so commonplace not just in gaming but with males describing sports events. Boys in need of a superlative. Another disturbing one is males describing sexual intent with violent terms: e.g., "I'd smash her." Not sure if it happens in the US, but I hear it in pubs/bars in Australia.
Yeah, kind of a weird coincidence but I was just recently writing a song about criticizing that "hit-it" mindset. I didn't realize that even terms like that have underlying violent connotations. I began listing some terms I hear, but realized how distasteful that is especially given the article above. Here in Vegas there is definitely a lot of that slang thrown around.
Yup, like how the word "retard" became derogatory, which can be sensitive to people with mental illnesses, and "gay" changed meaning several times, etc etc.
Or, possibly, terrorism means the use of violence or intimidation to achieve an ideological goal, which just so happens to sound exactly like several incidents detailed in the article.
Good. Maybe if the term is diluted to irrelevance it will lose its efficacy as a cudgel to garner support for the latest police state action-item-of-the-month.
Tabletop gaming isn't the only place this happening. It's also happening in the video game industry and sci-if. At some point the denial about this kind of stuff (or how bad it is) will have to stop.
