WoW Ladies

A group of women who play Alliance on my realm recently decided to get together a "for fun" all-ladies premade.

Before I go any farther, I want to say that I think this sounds like awesome fun, and I hope a Horde version pops up. Now, I know that given the recent discussion of whether female bloggers should identify themselves as such, some might not "get" why women would want to form up a ladies-only premade. (Or at least, given some of the responses to the thread — okay, one person's responses to the thread — I can see this happening.) The long answer involves getting deep into sociological discussions about identity.

The short answer is that sometimes, it's nice to be able to group up with other ladies so we don't have to be "the girl" all the time. And even being in a guild where a big chunk of the members are female and the guys don't treat us any differently, there are still times when a girls night sounds like a lot of fun.

But that's not the point of this post.

That one person I mentioned who responded to the thread? He gave the perfect example of why women who game still need to identify themselves. In the course of the thread, he:

1. Attacked the women responding based on their arena ratings.
2. Implied that all women are bad at PVP.
3. Said it was okay for women to have a ladies' night because no guy wants to be involved, but they couldn't make that ladies' night battlegrounds, because everyone likes battlegrounds. The implication being that women can only do shit no one likes during ladies' nights.
4. Basically nerd-raged about it.

These are the kinds of guys some of us run into regularly. I know there are plenty of women who have never had to deal with sexism in WoW. I think it comes down to server culture sometimes — VeCo is a lot better than most, and I've only rarely had to deal with it there. When I was on Laughing Skull, I would never have admitted to being female, because it was HORRIBLE there. It's similar to racism — while VeCo has had a few spurts from a couple of guilds, it's pretty good on that front, but when I made an alt on another RP-PVP server to check it out, the second I stepped into a city I saw all kinds of anti-Jewish and anti-Asian jokes in trade, and promptly deleted my characters. (I'll hold back on the name of the server since maybe they were just having an off night, but still.)

This is, to put it in a way that will probably get me flamed, something that white guys don't generally have to think about or deal with. Off the cuff racism and sexism is something most white guys never even notice, or might think is funny. And I'm sure that there are a few ladies or gamers of color out there who would agree, because there always are.

But for those of us who do see that shit now and then, no matter how awesome your friends are, it's nice to have a group where you can hang out and KNOW that you're not going to hear some random sexist comment unless it's a joke that everyone's in on. Or where you KNOW you're not going to have someone talking like Mickey fucking Rooney because they think it's funny. And so you can let down your social guard a little bit, because they GET it in a way people who haven't experienced that won't.

Honestly, I don't know why people care so much about controlling where and when other people can hang out with their friends.