Monday, May 7, 2012

More SL misandry... justified?

They do seem to be coming out of the woodwork at the moment - obnoxious males!  Since the "hello whores" guy a couple of days ago, I've run into two more who made him look almost charming by comparison (one earned an eject from Oxbridge, the other a full-on AR, and no I am not going into details about what they said and did!).  And my friend Lindal Kidd has done an interesting and insightful post here about the effect this has on the demographics of the grid....

Now, I will bend over backwards not to be a knee-jerk man-hater, despite my own preferences... but some of these guys are not making it easy for me!  And the question in my mind, of course, is why should this be the case?  After all, I have many male friends, both in RL and SL, and they are all perfectly nice people, and only one or two of them are idiots who persuade me to let myself be called "Glorf"....

I'm inclined to think, frankly, it's down to gender roles.... There are, in my opinion, roughly as many dumb-and-unpleasant women as there are men - believe me, I have known many people whose two X chromosomes didn't stop them being massive dicks!  But, dumb-and-unpleasant often goes with dumb-and-unimaginative, and that means dumb-and-unpleasant people tend less to think for themselves, and more to conform to existing stereotypes about gender behaviour.  And, well, those stereotypes tend to require men to be more pushy, more macho, more aggressive than women.  You do meet the dumb-and-unpleasant women, and they have their own dumb-and-unpleasant ways - they are the spoiled whiny princess types, the ones who say everything is "lame" and demand to be flattered and entertained.  They are toxic in their own special way, but they stand out less than the males.  You have to talk to them before they show you how awful they are.  The awful men, unfortunately, let you know right from the start....

Lindal's suggestion, that this state of affairs drives lots of nice men into female avis... is an interesting one, and I wouldn't be the one to say she was wrong!  (Should I be angry at those men for representing themselves as something they're not?  Well, no, I don't think so, because we all do that, to a greater or lesser extent - trust me, I don't look anything like my typist, and the way I look in SL does make a difference, because it influences the way other people act towards me, and that in turn feeds back and affects the way I act towards them.)

In the final analysis, I suppose, the toxic minority make life unpleasant for everyone, each in their own way.  Perhaps we should even be glad that the dumb-and-unpleasant males are up front about it!  But there's no denying they make SL hard for the smart-and-pleasant males... and, in a world where you can be who or what you want to be, is it right to blame them for turning into smart-and-pleasant females instead?

4 comments:

  1. Sigh. As usual, you have said it much better than I could. Well done, Glorf!

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    1. Well, it was you who got me thinking about it, you know!

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  2. Has a cheap bar or something opened on the outskirts of Oxbridge? These clowns seem to be wandering in like a scene from "Night of the Living Dead"!

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    1. Ahem! Le Café Cavorit is not a cheap bar! It is an establishment catering to the discerning cognoscenti, and is only up high in the sky for the view that affords, and certainly not so that the Guvnah won't spot it.... Besides, all my bribes have been paid - I mean, all my licenses have been properly acquired.

      More seriously - Caledon and the Caledon Quest have been featured on the login screen, lately, and that always means an uptick in visitor numbers. (And, since we explicitly cater to the new and clueless, we can hardly complain if they wander in!)

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