C2E2: Snyder, Simone & More Discuss Opening the Geek Clubhouse

[CBR News]

A panel of writers, including Gail Simone and Scott Snyder, discussed how to make the geek world more inclusive, on and off the page.


Full article here.

[Ebon]

One thing I've never really seen any discussion on: of the fans that make these threats, of the ones giving a huge amount of push-back to the inclusion of women (especially), what age range are we talking here? Is it mainly the large number of older fans in comics, mainly the youngest fans, or is it spread pretty much equally among the various ages? I have a couple ideas (aka totally unscientific guesswork) on the 'why' of things, but I'm also somewhat convinced it could be mainly age-based - I have no data to work with, though.

[galaxygnome]

One thing I've never really seen any discussion on: of the fans that make these threats, of the ones giving a huge amount of push-back to the inclusion of women (especially), what age range are we talking here? Is it mainly the large number of older fans in comics, mainly the youngest fans, or is it spread pretty much equally among the various ages? I have a couple ideas (aka totally unscientific guesswork) on the 'why' of things, but I'm also somewhat convinced it could be mainly age-based - I have no data to work with, though.

While I have (luckily, thankfully) never had a threat of assault against me, I have experienced shitty behavior from people across all age ranges.

[Robert White]

The best story I ever read about reprehensible fan behavior is Harlan Ellison's excellent essay "Xenogensis." It went into brutal detail regarding Sci-Fi fans treatment of certain writers. It would do fandom of all ilks a service to read this essay.

[Lt Trouble]

Agreed with galaxygnome. I haven't had any really scary threatening experiences, but in my life I've experienced sexism and harassment/creepiness from middle-school aged boys up through elderly men.

[Arghant]

Scott Snyder made a point that really resonated with me, about how you can be sort of oblivious to the different range of abuse women receive compared to men. When I was GM of a guild in Dark Age of Camelot (an MMO before WoW), I got tired of hearing guys throw around the word "rape" in regards to RvR battles (large scale PvP), i.e. "we just raped those Hib" or "that crew from Avalon just raped our crew", so I called out the perpetrators in alliance chat (chat that multiple allied guilds could access) and said I would bring down the hammer on any of my guild members using the word in guild chat, alliance chat or any public chat where I could see it.

I didn't really think it was a huge deal, the overuse of the word just bugged me, but then I got TONS of private tells from female players in all the guilds in our alliance telling me how much they appreciated it, and how they'd mentioned it in small chats, but didn't want to bring it up in alliance chat for fear of being called sensitive. That was a major lesson for me, as regards the damaging effects of language, and how even though I was a black man who was very sensitive to racially insulting language, I was still a man, and enjoyed a certain level of privilege that female players did not, and was not as sensitive as I should have been to the language that is hurtful to them.