Week 10: “Boys will be boys, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

Not in the Kitchen Anymore reminded me why I never play with my microphone on when I play MMOs and why I go to great lengths to hide my true identity (i.e. I hide the fact that I am a woman) when I play those types of games. I am completely unsurprised by the disgusting and sexist comments Jenny Haniver receives while playing FPS games. MMOs are truly “a man’s world”*, and all civility and respect towards both men and women (but mostly towards women) goes out the window. Voorhees’ and Orlando’s “Performing Neoliberal Masculinity: Reconfiguring Hegemonic Masculinity in Professional Gaming” shed some light on how, why, and in what ways eSports gamers embody their own brands of masculinity and “how neoliberal masculinity is performed in the context of team-based games”: “[p]layful boyishness, militarized violence, and intellectualization are accepted and worked together into neoliberal masculinity because they, in combination, constitute the most effective approach to professional play, and quite possibly to marketing too.” It’s odd to see how each member of the eSports team that Voorhees and Orlando describe embodies characteristics associated with an “idealized” version of masculinity; we, as a society, perpetuate toxic masculinity by valuing and celebrating the characteristics and personalities of these very eSports gamers.

While Kingdom Hearts is not an MMO game, I did a quick search on the internet to see what male Kingdom Hearts gamers thought of the female KH gamers and stumbled across a thread on Reddit about why Kingdom Hearts has “an abnormally high female fanbase compared to other game franchises,” and many individuals commented about how “multiplayer [games are] hell for women.”

*“But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing. Without a woman or a girl.” — Tom Jones