I am not on Twitter, willfully so, but I occasionally become aware of a thread and check into it. Because of what my computer throws at me while I'm on it, I have come across, repeatedly, #1reasonwhy. (Today's title comes from @GooseChecka's tweet.) This is a response, spawning #1reasontobe and #1reasonmentors , to the question of why there aren't more women involved in the gaming industry. I've gone into the blog posts some people have provided, reading stories of harassment of women simply for getting a job within the industry. I play videogames, sometimes, but I have little intention of entering the field; it is an analog however for where I want to go. And let's be honest, it scares me.
I am analytical, and my interests mean I invade the "male geek culture" with my analysis because I can't (and don't want to) turn off that part of my brain that says "Hey, what's this doing?" I play League of Legends, and get frustrated constantly by the women whose body types are either 1) buxom, thin, long-haired, or 2) childlike, while the men range from childlike to thinnish young adult to muscular and fit to non-humanoid to grotesquely modified by SCIENCE!. (I may go into this more one day.) I analyze comic books. I look for how they represent positively and negatively the women portrayed within, and I hate that any conversation about women in comic books seems to start and end at how large Power Girl's breasts are, and I hate that in trying to find the story about those breasts on Wikipedia (Wally Wood, her initial artist, assumed Marvel wasn't paying attention to his work, so he enlarged her breasts each issue to see how long it would take them to notice: 7-8 issues), I instead found out that, canonically, Batman suggested that they were one of her superpowers. But most of all, I hate that #1reasonwhy seems so necessary, even now, and that as many tweets I've read scare me as encourage me. Why is my appreciation of art and storytelling, and the expectation that it actually represent the reality that it provides, seen as invasion?
