Pronoun policing in hobby groups

I often use "folks" as being appropriately gender neutral.

You don't need to be much of an online gamer for men to flirt with you creepily. It happens to me playing online Scrabble, and I'm 74 with a picture that makes my age pretty obvious.

There is an argument (well, there is now 😀) that using "guys" to include men and women is a perfect way to disguise the inequalities between the sexes that persist into the 21st century.

"Have we sorted things out so that women have exactly the same opportunities and privileges in society and law as men ?"

"Well, we're now calling them 'guys'".

"Ah, I see. Good thinking Smithers. Carry on then."

I suspect when things like television are so international, it's impossible to stop language creep. There have been a few times I have heard very UK usages here in Canada recently, I think it's because so many people watch so much British television now.

But the lads thing is interesting, as is guys, because that is exactly the same way "men" used to be used. In the singular it was always a male, but in the plural (men or mankind)it was potentially mixed sex.

I find most young people now seem almost unaware of this, I've seen a few confused when using older texts, they assume something is meant to be exclusive and sexist, when it's actually intended to be universal.

But people do accept guy and guys in much the same way, and apparently lad, and lads.

Years ago when I was a soldier, they they changed the use of the word "men" to address groups of soldiers, because it was supposed to be sexist. They called us "troops" instead which always seemed a bit silly to me.

A lot of the "non-binary" women I know are really into the whole cottage-core aesthetic. They seem to divide between the ones who actually dress in retro women's clothing and are totally indistinguishable from women - and the ones who dress like odd nerdy men, but they are very into knitting, baking, and cats.

What I find off is so many of them seem to have what I would consider stereotypical female personalities, especially in terms of the kind of social games and hierarchies they seem to engage in when it comes to group settings.

This is really interesting! I've definitely seen all these arise in hobby groups, sometimes actively enforced by the organisers (eg no private meet ups, everything has to be shared on the fb page - of 2000 plus people).

Hi @Janie143 i don’t want to derail the thread but TB destroyed my mother’s family. For years I had a small table made by someone in the sanatorium that one of her brothers was in. It never met my maternal grandparents or uncles because of TB.

Those social fallacies you linked feel all too familiar! Fallacies 2, and 4 were especially prevalent in my group - a friend of mine completely cut me off when I asked him not to do something that made me uncomfortable, and I remember all too well the Facebook posts saying "if you still speak to Person X then please unfriend me now". A really interesting look at geek psychology and I can definitely see how perfectly reasonable ideas about the world get taken to toxic extremes. And of course many of us geeks are ND (I'm no exception) and have our own unusual and strongly held perspectives, which then clash with each other!

On a related note, I really don't understand the stereotype that ND people all get along - sometimes our wavelengths are at polar extremes and everything we do clashes off each other.

some BNFs (Big Name Fans) in my favourite fandoms

Was the Harry Potter fandom one of them? I'm on the younger side, so I missed the days of LiveJournal and dedicated fansites for specific fandoms, but I've heard there were some pretty toxic BNFs in there, including one or two who later went on to become bestselling authors in their own right.

That’s another thing, why do so many readers not leave comments for authors nowadays? I think the kudos button on AO3 has made people lazy 🤔

I try very hard to appreciate any form of interaction, but a comment will always feel more valuable than a kudos. My top rated fanfiction has a third as many comments as kudos, which is pretty good, but I also have some pretty depressing ratios - 36 kudos to one comment on what I thought was my best fic! I do, rarely, get private messages from readers who find my social media (which has the same username as my AO3) and those mean a lot to me.

I do wonder if maybe readers are more tentative because they're more afraid of being seen as weird, looking stupid, or offending the author in some way? But kudos definitely plays a large role - it immediately tells the author "I liked this" and if you have nothing more substantial to add, you might think a comment is a bit redundant.

I think your observation about wargamers is astute, it isn’t as much about the feelings and emotions (and perhaps social aspects) with that hobby 🤔

Yes, I definitely think hobbies with an emotional or character-based hook are more susceptible, especially anything that involves storytelling. Storytelling has always been a place for themes, messages and serious emotional investment. So fandom, video games and the roleplay scene are probably the places that get the most politicised the most quickly - whether those politics are interpersonal or follow cultural zeitgeists.

Lots of men embroider and do cross stitch

The first true trekkie was Bjo Trimble, (if I have to parade my nerd credentials). You'd have thought it would be a teenage bloke - although sadly a lot of teenage blokes were probably preoccupied with the Vietnam War and staying alive.

Also, @UtopiaPlanitia , you might like this

I had no idea there were so many DnD players on FWR. That's great! Neither did I know about the politicisation. It's interesting to hear.

I am currently running a game that is a pretty straightforward 'beat the bad guy' . We didn't really have any drama about character creation but maybe that's because we knew each other before. So we are out there, those of us who just want to kill some orcs 😀.

Yes, there has to be a happy medium between the days when RPG was viewed as an exclusively male hobby, of which males were very protective and excluding of women (and could be very sexist), and the new hyper-neurotic overcorrection that takes so long in rolling characters and negotiating conditions/rules/topics of play (and includes virtue/politics signalling) that sometimes not a lot gets done in terms of having escapist fun. If I wanted to do that type of boring stuff I’d join a committee not a hobby group.

In my day (back when this was all fields and dinosaurs roamed the earth) anyone who quibbled about the rules, or brought their own copy of the sourcebook, was called a ‘rules lawyer’ and it was discouraged for being impolite and undermining the GM.

I found so much I can relate to in your post!!!

I found socialising in gaming and scifi groups really confusing until I came across the Geek Social Fallacies https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/ and reading those made so much sense to me and helped to explain how toxic dynamics can happen in a hobby group. And sexism has something to do with it too - back in the day, I found certain male geeks were highly suspicious of women who turned up to groups, as though we could only be there for one of two things: to laugh at them or to try and trap one of them as a boyfriend 🙄🤷‍♀️

Online fandom and fanfic, when I became interested decades ago, were suffering from some BNFs (Big Name Fans) in my favourite fandoms who were encouraging their ‘followers’ to squabble and find fault with other writers’ work - very nasty stuff and highly reminiscent of current online cancellation behaviour where people were just looking for anything they could use to act offended and virtuous about. It was purity spiral stuff that I’ve learned to avoid and, these days, I just read fic and leave a polite comment for the author if I enjoyed the story. That’s another thing, why do so many readers not leave comments for authors nowadays? I think the kudos button on AO3 has made people lazy 🤔

I think your observation about wargamers is astute, it isn’t as much about the feelings and emotions (and perhaps social aspects) with that hobby 🤔

I appreciate that there is a whole conversation to be had though about what topics are/ should be off limits for RPGs

If you can't do it in an RPG, then where can you ?

I cannot stand woke D&D! I want to escape from reality for a few hours and preferably kick some orc arse. Not listen to whining about pronouns and how 'triggered' they are by pretty much anything likely to befall a party of fantasy adventurers.

I appreciate that there is a whole conversation to be had though about what topics are/ should be off limits for RPGs (do you allow eg toture to feature?) and to be fair, this is an extension of those decisions, but this seems to be all encompassing and very one way.

Sigh. It was reading the very long thread where the medication came up, and many things made more sense.

Oh gosh yes, the power dynamics and politics in my local group was awful too. There was a subset of people who'd been doing it for a decade or longer and were extremely averse to any challenge to the status quo. There was friction over LARP games where the original creators handed over control of the system to someone else, didn't like what that person ended up doing with it, and were really passive aggressive to the point of attempted sabotage. There was a whole load of polycule drama. There were creepy male "feminists". There were bullying allegations that led to people being kicked out. And of course there was a lot of real-life political discourse and an expectation to toe the line or be ostracised. I know of other people who were very involved in the group and have now stepped away because they're so sick of it.

Part of me hopes this description isn't outing and the other part of me wishes it was - sadly I think this is commonplace among LARP groups, having known people from a few different ones.

that ruined online fandoms and fanfic

I refuse to touch a lot of online fan spaces because they're guaranteed to ruin the experience for me - anything with a Tumblr following is an immediate no. I tend to stick with fandoms that are heavily male dominated - not because they're better (they're better in some respects, worse in others) but because the associated fanfiction spaces are smaller and often less toxic. I'd rather have 5 chill readers than 500 drama llamas who'll start up a harassment campaign because they didn't like something in one of your fics. Big fandoms with small fanfiction spaces also means that trouble doesn't tend to follow you into the rest of the fandom.

I wonder do the tabletop wargamers have to deal with this stuff as much?

My instinct is no, but I suspect it will come for them too sooner or later. I do think that having less mainstream appeal is a protective factor though - wargaming is more about number crunching than roleplay, so it doesn't tend to attract the same types of people.

I know what you mean, being a woman who likes scifi and tabletop gaming has led to some very weird and unpleasant experiences with men over the years. For example, I learned very early on not to play Vampire: The Masquerade with strangers because men will flirt creepily with you while 'in character'.

I gave up LARPing for the very reason that the power dynamics and politics of the local 'cool' people in the group led to everything becoming fraught and stressful.

I will admit to being very old school with the games that I enjoy in that we use old sourcebooks and rules for games like Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer etc and so a lot of developments in gaming passed me by for a long while. But it seems like the same sort of neurotic and entitled behaviour that ruined online fandoms and fanfic and crafting is happening in RPG.

I wonder do the tabletop wargamers have to deal with this stuff as much? They always seemed like a calm lot, off in the corner setting out their miniatures, when I saw them at local groups or at Cons.

Bayeux Tapestry ? Riddled with politics.

I'd watch embroidery content on YouTube instead. Nobody should be yapping about political issues on an embroidery thing.

Re tabletop gaming specifically, I think a large part of the change is due to the influence of Critical Role and the large CR fanbase that started playing as a result of the show.

Dungeons and Dragons is the main system that's been affected, and maybe (?) World of Darkness (it's been a while since I played either). But as you move away from the more popular and commercialised systems, it tends to feel more old-school. Partly because the more unknown systems are passion projects and there's less business incentive to appeal to a specific subset of the market, and partly because the sorts of GMs who run these systems take their tabletop gaming very seriously.

Of course, it's a case of pick your poison. You can either have obnoxious IRL politics, or you can be leered at by sweaty neckbeards over beer and pretzels. It's never been so exciting to be a woman in the tabletop gaming space. 🙄

For me, it’s that tabletop gaming has gone this way: the latest idea is for players to fill in forms listing their triggers before a game so that the games master (GM) can avoid these subjects when designing the plot for a quest. Also, the number of OTT ‘queer’ characters has increased. I just want to solve an eldritch puzzle that could potentially destroy humanity by releasing Cthulu or I want to fight some Orcs. I want an escape from politics, ideology and daily life - I don’t want those things following me into my escape.

The "triggers" thing has been going on for a while, at least in the live-action circles. But the live-action experience is much more immersive than tabletop, so I can understand this to an extent.

There is currently a very large festival LARP in the UK - one of the biggest, if not the biggest in the country. It's always been pretty pronouny but it's gone all-in in recent years - a lot of participants have unintuitive pronouns and even pre-Covid, it really pulled me out of the roleplay trying to remember whether someone was they/them or ei/eir or something else entirely. I'm ND myself, I can barely remember people's names or the faces they attach to, and it's very difficult to have fun when you're scared of slipping up and getting in trouble with the organisers.

The women's toilet block is also effectively mixed sex and you can't challenge males going in there. To make matters worse, there have been multiple sexual assaults on-site and one of the victims was someone I knew. The power dynamics in certain sub-groups are awful and it's generally the right-on men throwing their weight around.

Some of the women set up a private group on Facebook to warn each other about the various missing stairs at the events, but of course they didn't keep the group women-only - they let the right-on bully men in as well.

I know I'm ranting but I feel so fed up and disappointed by a hobby that I used to love.

The problem (some people have) with "Hey everyone" is that it doesn't mark them out as special and unique. As if otherwise we would be living in a world of Roberts

That might explain the anime avatar on the Discord lifeboat.

I think 'guys' can be a cultural thing. I didn't grow up in the UK (nor US) although live in UK now and 'hi guys' was very generic and not particularly gendered. I absolutely understand why a lot of people see it that way, but there are definitely people using it as the same as 'Hi everyone' and not thinking more of it.