At the engineering campus i go, ask any of the guys if they want more or less girls doing this study. 95% will say more.

Ask gamers if they want more or less girls in gaming, again many will say more.

HOWEVER, i know that girls tend to look down on gaming girls, in my high schools when a girl said they wanted to study science or engineering the other girls said thing like "really, something that lame" "sound extremely boring" etc.


and yet, in all cases, who is blamed? Guys. All those things are our fault.

(and if barbie makes girls insecure, why didn't He-man make boys depressed? why don't boys seem to have existential crisis over not having G.I. Joes skills? And for that matter, why do i hear of so very few girls around me actually having an actual complex over barbie etc?)

So, is it your opinion that gender identity is learned or is it hardwired from birth?

I think it's a bit of both but to what degree it's nature or nurture no-one really knows
You'd think the innate parts for girls would be being attracted to guys and the motherly instinct towards children, it seems to me that a disinterest in the STEM fields is much less likely to be innate but I don't think anyone really knows for sure and, as I say, it's more a tendency.
But then, some girls aren't attracted to guys and some girls aren't at all motherly so maybe STEM interested girls are similar outliers? We just don't, in my opinion, know one way or the other but it would be useful to try to find out
(I'm not suggesting that those 3 outlying group are in any way connected, either BTW)

There is no such thing as positive discrimination. Whatever is positive for someone is negative for someone else. It's just as stupid as "reverse racism". It either is discriminatory or it isn't.

Yes, there are always people outside the norm and that's fine, just don't hinder them and things will work out.

And what is your suggestion? If parents don't want to let their boy play with Barbie are you going to call child services? And of course pink aisles exist, similar toys are grouped together, so just like you will find all sorts of balls next to each other among sports toys and board games among board games, so will you find dolls among dolls. Every store does it for every product category.

Just to throw in a thought that is often forgotten:
I think one of the absolute main reasons for so many "girly girls" is that fathers are very often excluded from upbringing in modern western society. The amount of mothers that have become their child because of irresponsible actions in the first place and either don't know or don't care for the father is very high in my area and in many other big cities too. The fact, that fathers always have a hard time getting to see their kids after a divorce/break-up and are usually only allowed every two weeks or less (while having to pay most for it of course) isn't helping either.

More or less every parent wants to see more of himself in the kid and will influence it in this direction, so I'm really not surprised to see all those girls today with a complete lack of genuine interest in politics, science, etc... and other stuff that was a male domain in the last two generations. Encouraging them by discriminating men isn't even influencing the percentages as much as the discriminators would like, so the whole system is wrong in every way.

Are we sure this is a 'Gamergate News' thread and not a 'rampant sexism and anti-feminism' thread?
Just thought I'd check.

I'm not talking about laws and interfering in people's lives but society is constantly changing and evolving, I'm sure we've all seen crazy sexist ads from the 50s that are good for LOLs for their sheen WTF factor such as:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/babymantis/sexism-in-30-vintage-ads-1opu
Now, no-one passed any laws about these ads or torn down any presses, no one cried 'censorship' but society has.. moved on
I'm not saying that it's inevitable that it will continue in a 'progressive', 'liberal' direction, the pendulum could well swing back the other way and things could become more 'conservative' but what I AM sure of is that attitudes will change one way or another and society will change, once more, with them
i'm just talking about the direction I think society might want to try going in

To get back to GG and Anita and all that, I know the what happened in Australia with Target hurts this argument but I think that this is what feminist critique of the arts is about too, rather than censorship and litigation

Not automatically blaming males for that would probably be a decent start for feminists to regain credibility.

don't forget the girls scared out by the mass scare tactics by anita and sorts. And the fact that in many cases males recieve abuse too, and not all that is not nice is abuse or harassment. Large portions of it is random thrash talk (or sometimes role-play within the game)

the joke seems not to insult gamer girls as tycho points out that that is bad.Its far closer to ridiculing guys whining over fake gamegirls than the game girls. The punchline is not that the girl in question is indeed a fake gamer, but simply a fake girl. The girl did not say something like "zelda's green cap is cool", no it's simply not a living girl.
more like "gamergate news & discussion of linked elements"

Oh I wasn't pointing at Penny Arcade as an offender - I actually really like PA most of the time, I was just providing it as evidence and a reminder that 'Fake Gamer Girl' type name-calling was a thing and just pre-dates the entire GG debarcle

That depends. If you can interchange sexism with misogyny; then no. And if you feminism=females > males; then no as well. So judging by the meaning you attach to those words, this is in fact such a thread!
Also; Fever, why exactly did you ask me to prove antiGG is group think-driven hive and then ignore the reply??

Here's my two cents on the whole Fake Geek Girl phenomenon. It's not just girls who get struck with the Fake Geek stick, it's guys too, but I think the main difference is that men don't tend to take those kinds of things to heart, whereas girls ARE more likely to react emotionally and take it personally, or to read too much into it. Heck, it was even parodied in an episode of Family Guy, with Peter and the Nudist Dad having a Kiss trivia throw down. It's realistically no different, but I think the amount of coverage and/or likelihood for someone to scream about misogyny being the root would come from an ACTUAL fake geek girl. That's without even considering the troll element.

Honestly it had been a long week and I was feeling pretty tired on Friday, I started reading your reply but you started using maths symbols instead of words and other people had replied to other posts and I wandered off, I meant to come back to it later but I didn't manage to, over the weekend, in the end

Sorry about that, I know it can be frustrating when you put effort into reply and they get ignored, I've gone back and read it now though, after the initial shaky start, you did put a very good case together for group think within the anti-GG / feminist camp that's very hard to argue with

Also I'd not really read a proper description / definition of group-think before so that was interesting too

However

Where I think you failed was that you didn't put up much of a case for the GG / ant-feminist side not operating on group-think itself

You seemed to being going back to this argument that Brianna Wu was branded a traitor by team fem but Brad Wardell wasn't similarly branded by team GG but I maintain that this is because Wu is the individual while Wardell represents Stardock -
It's analogous to when, during the cold war, Russian agents defected to the west - the Russian would want those agents dead while the handlers that brought those spies it would be regarded as national heroes but the same was true when Americans defected the other way - Of course you didn't turn on Wardell, he took our (tertiary) queen!
Imagine if it wasn't Wu in talks with Stardock but TB in talks with Kotaku or Gamesutra or one of those sites that caused the #GG backlash in the first place - who do you think would be calling who a traitor then?

I see a group who felt under threat by a female invasion, of things like feminist critique when applied to computer games and reacted like a group under threat with personal attacks, shaming and death threats
Then was in denial that any members of the group would DO such a thing so, of course, the females in question must be doing it to themselves with fake accounts
Then attacked by a THIRD group of group-thinkers - the journalists - who had convinced themselves that they had their audience completely in their thrall and could therefore say whatever divisive thing they wanted, banded together, as a group behind the #GG banner for defense
Then the whole 'Shafer's joke is offensive to minorities but the 'censored' joke from Pillars was just LOLs and people should lighten up' double standard, which, yeah, potentially cuts both ways for people on the other side that think the opposite but, as I say, I'm not denying the group-think over here!
I suspect that even the 'Our side is logic and reason - their side is emotion and group-think' rhetoric is the party-line group-think in itself
How messed up if that? you say 'you guys are a bunch of group-thinker' to team fem and we have to go 'errr.. sure I guess you're right' But then, when we go 'But so are you guys' you don't believe it because the group-think propaganda you're buying into is telling you that your side doesn't DO group-think!

Wut? Hell no! How do you get to this conclusion? The vast majority of gamers definitely want more women sharing their hobby, the problem are political correct fascists that are not even gamers in most cases, it isn't even important that most of those seem to be female for some reason (which in most cases may be a hate-mob created by a certain very popular branch of current feminism people like to call neo-feminism).

Gimme more gamer girls!
(Preferably not Steam or XBone/PS4 fans, but whatever).

MOTHRE ******
I just wrote a long assreply and my crappy dongle auto disconected. My slep awaaits me. GBN!