The Myth of the Exclusionary Nerd

I'm sure you've all heard the stories. You can probably quote them by rote at this point. After all, they get shoved in our face so very often, and yet one thing they all have in common is this: Zero Evidence. For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, it's this myth that's circulated in feminist circles about how men are supposedly exclusionary to women. That we guys are gatekeeping our own hobbies, and trying to keep women out. From the stories we hear this happens everywhere in the nerd hobbies. Comics, tabletop, video games, you name it. All of these hobbies and more are supposedly just infested with awful men that hate women and don't want them to have any fun.

This is, of course, retarded on its face.

I've been sitting on this post for a while, but finally decided to write it when I saw this on Twitter today.

[archive link to the tweet in question]

This utterly ludicrous statement was made by the creative director of Dungeons & Dragons. The whole entire franchise. He also co-created the bloated abomination that is 5th ed., so now we all know who to thank for that. But before I get into this I'd just like to make sure that he understands one thing, should he ever read this post.

Much like a TV show can't decide who does or doesn't tune in, you don't get to decide who does or doesn't buy your product. You have no power in this situation. I can go to any number of online stores and buy a copy of 5th ed. and be playing it with my friends tomorrow, and there's quite literally nothing you could do to stop me. I won't, because as I said 5th ed. is a bloated monstrosity, and I also don't believe in encouraging people who want to put actual serious barriers to entry (such as a series of books you require to play the game all priced at $40 each), or giving money to people who so obviously hate me. I'll go play Moldvay, or AD&D, or GURPS, or ACKS, or Traveller, or Gamma World, or Hero System, or Vampire The Masquerade, or even Children of the Sun. There are about 500 or so other systems I could be playing besides 5th ed., and I would encourage others to look into those instead of giving Wizards of the Coast and Mike Mearls your money. But he needs to understand that he can't fire customers, and attempting to attack his customer base will only shrink the amount of people willing to put food on his table and pay his bills via buying his products, and if I were running WOTC right now he would issue a very public apology, delete that tweet, and watch his ass because it would be grass should that ever happen again. You don't insult your customers. That is a firing offense in literally every other industry. 

There's also the tiny little matter of WOTC actually passively protecting pedophiles in their Magic: The Gathering judge community until the fan outrage became so loud they were forced to respond and institute background checks on judges and refuse to work with any organization that actively hired sex criminals, but hey, that's fiddly little bullshit, right?

Stop giving WOTC your money. I'm deadly serious.

But anyway, my personal hate-boner for WOTC aside, let's get on with this post here. According to this fucking moron, the narrative repeats. The thing that really gets me is the inherent sexism in his statement. Apparently, according to Fuckstick up there, complex rules and lore are exclusionary, and women can't understand them. Therefore he has to fix the game by dumbing it down to women's level, and the guys who are mad about the dilution of their game aren't mad because everything they liked about the game is changed, they're mad because they hate women.

Obviously.

Remember, this is all according to this idiot. Now, on the other hand, and what I think is more likely, is that all of this is made up. I'd put the number of made up accounts at 99.95%. It's not outside the realm of possibility that this has happened a few times, but with nowhere near the frequency that these people claim. Remember, as the "Feminist 40K" mods have stated themselves, flat out admitting to it on more than one occasion, they assume there is a problem rather than looking to see if the problem is actually there or not. And given that there are women out there who can and have lied about being raped to get out of cab fare (no, I'm not bullshitting you), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the vast majority of these complaints are either made up from whole cloth, or come from out-of-context or misinterpreted social interactions. 

Unfortunately, and this really, truly is unfortunate, we don't have any data to prove anything. There have been no studies done on this by reputable organizations such as Pew, and whenever these people bring these complaints and stories, they never, ever have evidence of such. You'd think they would at least have audio, if not audio and video, given that damn near everyone has a high-definition camera and microphone in their pockets. But no, they expect you to just "Listen & Believe". Take what they say on faith.

Social justice is, after all, a religion to these people. They take so much on faith, they cannot comprehend a world where someone would actually want them to prove the bullshit they spew rather than just believing them outright. I mean, there are wammen to respek! We don't have time for things like methodological study, due process, or critical thinking! Just believe them, and then we'll start burning witches and tearing down everything you hold dear! Don't you want that? Because you're a misogynist if you don't!

Well, in lieu of actual evidence, all we really have to go on is what these people call "lived experiences". This basically means we listen to people who have been there, because they exist in that hobby/fandom/job/whatever and therefore are more qualified than average Joe off the street to speak incredibly broadly about it for some reason. Well, I've been here since I was a child, so my lived experience must add up to a shit ton of authority at this point. Tabletop is more recent, but about twelve or fifteen years of being in that hobby should count for something. 

I've met a lot of nerds in my day. I am one, they are my people. They're the people I almost exclusively hang out with because I find the discussions there more interesting. I don't hang out with people who talk sports because I find sports incredibly boring, but if those people are talking scifi, fantasy, tabletop, comics, video games, etc. I'll be right at home among them, because they're speaking my language and talking about things I'm interested in. I must have met or been tangentially acquainted with about a thousand nerds over the course of my life. 

Post-puberty, not a single one was even mildly hostile to women because they were women.

In fact, we actively tried to interest women in our hobbies, and the ones who were interested were treated like queens. They were invited to D&D games (and some even showed up), to get loaded and watch movies or anime, whatever nerd shit we were doing, the more women that were interested in it, the better. Nowadays I don't care so much, but when you're a horny teenager swimming in hormones who gets weird looks because he's reading D&D manuals at the lunch table, the approval of the opposite sex means a lot. So finding women who were interested in things like D&D was like wandering through the forest and stumbling upon a unicorn out of nowhere.

It's no surprise to anyone that women just generally aren't interested in games where you go into dungeons and bash goblins around for their meager gold coins. Or wargames like Warhammer 40K. Most of Dungeons & Dragons, or 40K, or Warhammer Fantasy, or other wargames and TTRPG's, is rolling dice until monsters fall down and die. Of course there are also other aspects to the game like shopping and roleplaying interactions with non-player characters, but the meat of the game is generally wandering through dungeons and slaughtering monsters. More so with wargames than with RPG's, but the point still stands. The name of the game that started all this is Dungeons & Dragons, after all. Sort of implies that there will be a fair amount of dungeoneering and dragon fighting in this game. And those are things that women tend not to be very interested in.

And it has nothing to do with sexism. As I said, women who want in on these things have always, in my lived experience, been welcomed with open arms and encouraged by the male players who were already there. I have been to comic shops, game stores, GW stores, and more all across my long years of being a nerd, and not once in my life have I seen some guy give some chick shit because she had a vagina. 

Not once.

Matter of fact, the exact opposite always happens. If a woman shows interest, the guys treat her just like they'd treat a guy who showed interest. They show her the game, what she'd need to get started, how the rules work, and offer to play a starter game with her to show how the mechanics work in practice. Whether it's Magic, D&D, or 40K, this is how it goes every time, because the people who exist in these hobbies understand that while they may be fairly popular, they're also pretty niche, so having more people interested who know what they're doing means having more people to play with, which means more fun for everyone. And for guys who are historically and stereotypically as bad with the opposite sex as nerds, it is completely counter-intuitive for them to treat women who actually want to be around them like shit. Most of these guys couldn't be mean to a woman if they wanted to.

A good personal example of this I have is from my time in college. Turned out there was a GW store a few miles from the school, and they were open on the days I had classes, so I would go to class, then drag my backpack full of models, paint, and brushes into the Games Workshop store and hang out for hours at a time and paint my armies. The manager at the time was a five-foot-nothing Asian woman, and she knew more about the lore and rules than most of the guys. She was treated perfectly fine by all of the regulars who knew this game and its lore inside out. She was also fucking obsessed with Orks. The big green fungus monkeys that reproduce via space spores and eat each others' heads off. Of course she, like everyone else including myself, lamented that the Sisters of Battle get no love from GW, but she didn't want to play them. She wanted to play Orks, and what's more she wanted to make an entire Halloween-themed orange and black army of the bastards. She could also fuck you up on the tabletop.

Now I don't know if you've ever taken a look inside a 40K rulebook, but I have, several times. Lemme give you a quick and dirty. If you buy one of the beginner boxes it comes with two small armies from different factions, a general rulebook, and a book with the different scenarios you can play to tell the story of what happens in that box (they're usually structured around some kind of story that adds to the lore of the game). The rulebook is single-spaced, double (sometimes triple) columned, with incredibly small print. It's 156 pages long. Of course there are plenty of pictures and diagrams, but the majority of this book is taken up by tiny text, and depending on how you play you need to be generally familiar with all of it. Furthermore, there are special rules for each faction (Orks, Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Eldar, etc) that each have their own books, and you need to be familiar with those as well. 

That manager damn near had the entire book memorized, and could rattle off rules from the top of her head. She was well respected, and put her heart and soul into running that store as efficiently as possible to bring in new customers. It was a fun time. 

But very rarely, at least while I was frequenting the place, did we have women come into the store. When it did happen they were usually with male friends, or their boyfriends or husbands, or they would be little girls with their parents shopping for Christmas presents and the like. When they were interested at all, they would be interested in the Lord of the Rings models, rather than the hardened militarism of the Guard or the Space Marines, or the tentacle-faced horrors of Chaos, or the gribbly nonsense of the Tyranids, or the soccer-hooligan-esque antics of the Orks. 40K is literally a game about neverending, grimdark warfare where nobody is in the right, and the only ones that are good by human standards are completely immoral space nazis that want to genocide all the aliens, because the aliens want to genocide all of them. 

It's just not something that a lot of chicks are into. The male players aren't keeping them out, I can attest to that personally. Hell, the guys in the store acted as unpaid salesmen to potential female customers more than once while I was painting my models or thumbing through a rulebook. There was only one GW employee there at a time most days, and occasionally it got pretty busy. They were mostly trying to just keep the people in the store until the manager could get to them, asking them if they had any experience, talking shop, discussing lore, the books, all that stuff, but the guys in the store helped her make more than one sale (I know this because I was one of those "more than one" sales). 

Anyway, point is, women are perfectly capable of understanding complex rules and lore, and the rules and lore don't need to be changed to accommodate women at the expense of the men who already like it the way it is. We've proven that the "Wider Audience Appeal™" is a complete myth. It does not exist. Marvel tried this for over 5 years. They hired a bunch of diverse people to write diverse comics to appeal to a "Wider Audience™" and managed to run their company so thoroughly into the ground that they've almost taken the US comics industry with them. The people they were marketing towards were simply not a sustainable market, because they were not interested and weren't showing up to buy comics. And the comics were on the shelves, we know this from testimonials from shop owners who had to throw them away or bargain bin them and take a loss because they weren't selling. The "Wider Audience™" is as much a myth as the Exclusionary Nerd™. Literally nobody was stopping these people from buying these comics. They just didn't want to.

The women that are into 40K are already playing and collecting, and the women who would get into it but don't know will find their way around one way or another. Changing the hobby to be more "inclusive" of women is just going to kill it, and if anyone is pushing this as an objective that GW should be pursuing it should be assumed that killing the hobby is their goal. We have objective proof at this point that appealing to social justice principles does not work, it alienates your regulars and it doesn't pull in the people you're condescending to. Sorry to say, but a new Sister of Battle codex and model lineup won't bring them in, nor will changing the lore. This will kill the hobby dead. I don't mean a new Sisters Codex. Honestly that would probably make GW some cash and get people buying the Sisters models again (especially if they made some tentative explorations into giving them plastic). But changing the lore and rules absolutely will kill the hobby, which is probably why GW doesn't do it. They may be one of the physical manifestations of corporate evil on planet earth, but they're also not stupid. 

So having observed this pattern in certain women wherein they will lie for attention and victim points, I think it is safe to say that this simply does not happen outside of a few isolated incidents, and the people those isolated incidents happen to need to find better friends and game shops. What I think is actually happening is that these guys are trying to figure out where these gals are with regards to lore and rules knowledge, so they can fill in any gaps that might exist in order to better facilitate gameplay or enjoyment of the medium in question. Comics, card games, tabletop, whatever. It's no secret that primarily men built these industries and hobbies, and they're to this day primarily enjoyed by men.

Given this, as well as the fact that stereotypes exist for a reason, unless a woman shows up with a full deck(s), a fleshed out character sheet and the rulebooks, or her own painted army, they're going to assume she's some level of newbie. And there's nothing wrong with that, because 9.95 times out of ten, they're doing this because if she is a newbie, they want to help her become adept as soon as possible. As I said earlier, the more people playing, the more fun everyone has, and the vast majority of nerds agree with this.

The problem comes in when these women expect to be treated deferentially, they expect everything to be changed for them, they expect everyone to worship the ground they walk on. This is, quite simply, not how things work. In these hobbies you show your ability to hang by knowledge about the setting or system. If you're playing Magic: The Gathering, and you're sufficiently able to manipulate the rules such that you completely fucking destroy anyone of any deck style that you go up against, you're going to get more respect than the guy who gets wrecked every game but is happy because he's just playing to have fun. Simply having a vagina, sorry to say ladies, does not qualify you to be respected in nerd circles, nor does the fawning adoration of sweaty virgins give you lease to start changing things to suit you. 

You need to learn your place, just like the rest of us did. I knew dick all about the 40K game when I walked into that GW shop. I listened to the friendly, more experienced people and they helped me understand the mechanics, why there were so many dice I had to roll, and the advantages and disadvantages to each army and system generation. So really what I think is happening here is that these guys are trying to be helpful and the women assume that they're treating her like she's stupid.

It's either a complete fabrication or a misinterpretation of the social dynamics of an unfamiliar place and group. This actually happens fairly frequently across all kinds of social groups, and the technical term for it is called a "faux-pas". Just a silly mistake someone made because they don't understand the group they're trying to gain entry to. There's nothing wrong with making a faux-pas or two so long as you actively work to become better versed in the thing you're trying to understand and be apart of. Nerds who dig comics and tabletop are also far more friendly about faux-pas if they know that you don't know a lot about the subject matter. 

"Fake it till you make it" doesn't apply here, because you can't fake knowing a rule set that you've never encountered before. You absolutely can not fake damn near 40 years of lore (or more, depending on the thing in question). The best approach is to just be okay with making mistakes, and listen when someone corrects you. Nobody knows all the rules, nobody knows all the lore. Just be cool, and everyone around you will be as well.

Of course I should mention that this applies to an incredibly small subset of women. The vast majority of women into nerdy stuff I've met in my life have been totally cool about everything, and usually they're just as into it as the guys are. But we're talking about a subset of a subset of a subset of a population. Allow me to get sociological for a moment.

You have all women. Then you have women who might be interested in nerd shit. Then you have the women who might be interested in nerd shit that actually go out and get into nerd shit. Then you have the women who stick around. Then you have the women who stick around and don't act cool, but instead try to turn it into their own little kingdom where they can do whatever they want. Given the numbers that we're working with (mostly unknown, but we can make educated guesses in certain directions EXTREMELY TENTATIVELY), this means that the amount of women into nerd shit who are actually shrill harpies with daddy issues is relatively small. We're talking maybe 2 or 3 out of 40, if I had to make an extremely tentative guess. I've been apart of a bunch of groups into a lot of shit and have only met one personally. This is over about 20 or so years.

However, one of the things about social media is that it allows these people to congregate, as well as garner a misguided following of thirsty orbiters. Often these people are not involved in these hobbies, or if they are it is in the most tangential fashion. They don't buy comics, they don't buy models, they don't paint, they rarely if ever game, they barely understand how D&D words as a system, they might've watched some Marvel movies and Star Wars back in the day. And yet, they think that because a woman claimed something, it must be true, therefore there's this gigantic problem in these communities that they know precisely fuck all about. Their combined presence, as well as their incessant whining, leads people to believe that these people are more numerous and more important than they actually are, which gives them a certain level of power with out-of-touch corporations like WOTC or Marvel. This happens because the people actually enjoying the thing are just quietly enjoying it like they always have been. So these people look like an even larger contingent of the customer base because nobody is countering their narrative. 

And what's more, with Gamergate, we saw that these people are more than willing to lie to advance that narrative. The FBI itself did an investigation into the movement/hashtag, and found fuck all to do with abusive behavior coming from the GG side of things. Anti-GG, on the other hand, were implicated in a lot of abusive behavior, and since the events of that fateful consumer revolt a lot of the major players have been outed as sex pests if not outright rapists. So in reality what's probably happening here is that old chestnut of, "Accuse the enemy of that which you are guilty." 

As evidenced by Shitnugget's tweet up there, he is very contemptible of women. Women like Morgon Newquist, or that GW manager just don't exist, and if we want to appeal to women and get them into our hobbies, we have to dumb the games down for them. We have to make comics unreadable preachy Chick Tracts so that the stupid blacks and browns can identify with them, because they're obviously too dumb to get white comics. When you really break these people's beliefs down, it honestly sounds like something out of an alt-right screed, doesn't it? They're white supremacists and misogynists with guilty consciences. 

But as I said, given their frequent use of lies and absolute refusal to provide a single shred of proof of these misogynistic, racist, hateful, exclusionary nerds, we can safely assume that they are lying about his as well. This is how the burden of proof works. The one making the claims must provide the proof. So to all of the people claiming that this problem exists, the only thing I can say is this:

Prove it.

Presumably this is happening in public areas. Film it.

If it's happening in skype chats then tape it with a program like OBS. Although you may want to get consent, depending on the laws in your state or country. Some countries/states require both parties to consent to a recording in a non-public setting. 

If this is such a widespread problem, if it happens so often that it's this big of an issue, prove it.

I know you can't, and you won't, because it isn't. But the time is now, because we've listened to you crow about this for too long.

Put up or shut up. 

Prove it, or get the fuck out.