Gender issues

[andrewducker]

Discussing gender in society last night (as you do) and the fact that it's hard for women to be perceived as "just a writer", they're pretty much always referred to as a "woman writer". You get "Football" and Women's football", "Tennis" and "Ladies Tennis".

How long does it take for women to have equal rights in society before it ceases to be a topic of conversation that a particular writer/politician/musician happens to be a woman?

Comments

[worldforger.livejournal.com]

Indeed! I can understand, of course, dividing vocalists into categories of favourite male or female vocalists due to the different vocal quality, or possibly actors and characters, since gender CAN affect SOME roles in some aspects, but... Other than that, why should there be any distinction?

Unfortunately, sometimes the distinction must be made just in order to form enough of a support base to even the odds and counter misperceptions a bit. In fact, one of the things I've tried to make certain of in our game is that many of the prominent NPCs are female, and dropped an idea (using one of my male NPCs who works for a powerful female NPC) among our female player characers to organize among themselves so as to stop being so overlooked by the male characters. And of course, now they have to fight the misperception that, since they are organizing as a group of women, they must all be man-haters. ::sighs:: Still, we're trying.

BTW, do you have much experience coding and running MOOs, MUSHs and the like? I notice you mentioned MOOs in one of your entries. I'm curious because, although I am a novice programmer myself (I don't think HTML, Javascript, CSS and a little ColdFusion count as real programming, and I can barely write out basic textbook projects using Java IF I have the textbook in front of me) I have been thinking that after we publish later this year, it might be interesting to have a MUSH or MOO based on our game. And I'll probably, if that happens, end up having to learn enough to write the code my damn self.

Catch 33 1/3rd

[andrewducker]

Yup, it does cut both ways. Women treating women differently are seen as a negative thing just as much as men treating women are. Nobody likes to feel left out or discriminated against. The whole theme of revenge is something that needs to be disposed of, if we worked to make things ideal rather than to reverse the imbalance we might actually get somewhere idyllic.

I'm afraid my MUSH experience is fairly old and simple (about 10 years old, thinking about it. God, I feel old). I'd love the chance to get back into that kind of thing again, especially as I've been missing programming since I moved into an IT manager slot. I'm a programmer by inclination, but I've been kinda forced into a support/network admin post and it's grating on me (it's not at all creative, unlike programming). I'll be happy to offer advice if I can be helpful, but unfortunately I doubt it. Should you want to hire me, I can work for cheap if the job's interesting :->