I wasn’t on either of the servers you mentioned, and yes, the absolute worst was on the official forums, that bastion of intellectualism that it is. The snide, condescending stuff about women being inferior RPers happened on a hardcore RP server, where I had thought they’d be a little smarter than that.

Positive point: my weariness with jackholes in multiplayer NWN led me to discover the greatness that is Morrowind. :)

“We live in a world where from birth you are fed mixed messages, discrimination, hate, and we’ve now introduced anonymous public interaction where everyone can act out on everything and everyone without having to worry about a punch to the face.”

Great comment, PodMonkey. You’ve got it. There aren’t as big of consequences for acting into the gender roles we’ve been taught since birth.

Sparafucile: Gender is a social category assigned based on biological sex, not something people are essentially born with.

Sexism is sexism and it knows no bounds.

Unfortunately the sexism is only one part of the problem. I don’t think I have ever seen so many Sexist-racist-anti-gay-biggots as I do in WoW general chat. I have seen all sorts of sexist comments, comments calling people gay or against gays, racist comments. I’ve even heard someone say we didn’t bomb Hiroshima hard enough.

I really don’t think the lack of extensive character modification is a factor in the problem. I’ve seen the same behavior in Ultima Online in which pretty much every one not only looks the same, but they look like normal people. I see the same behavior on forums where there are no UI models. My wife sees the same behavior on a writers forum. How sad is that, when a bunch of supposedly educated and liberal people are making some of the most insane racist/sexist comments? A good portion of whom are women.

People feel safe when they don’t have to face someone in person. Men are probably more likely to be sexist since they don’t have to deal with it in real life. Of course when you’re a guy, you often have to grow up dealing with everyone from fathers, teachers, coaches, and even mothers telling them to stop acting like a girl or gay, and start acting like a man.

We live in a world where from birth you are fed mixed messages, discrimination, hate, and we’ve now introduced anonymous public interaction where everyone can act out on everything and everyone without having to worry about a punch to the face.

Yeah, some male gamers are cruel / rude / disgusting / creepy beyond the norm. Or seem to be. My experience was that the behavior of many junior high and high school age kids of both genders could be described by one or more of those adjectives. Ugh. I could explain further but [Transmute: Thoughts to Writing] often makes me tired.

Heh heh… and Cal, it’s amusing to me when people think that gender traits can be broken or removed through any outside force short of genetic engineering. Not to say that it hasn’t been tried: why do you think boys grow up to be Guys these days, instead of Men?