This week, Courtney Stoker of From Austin to A&M and Joseph Hewitt of GearHead RPG graced us with their presence to discuss the problem of making dude-dominated subcultures more accessible to women. In the comments, you added your own tips:

Amy on refusing to GTFO:

Quote: “When looking for online communities, I tend only to join those that are either explicitly feminist or women-friendly.”

I find that very depressing. As a woman, I’ve never been bothered by whether a site/community is ‘feminist’ or not, or what proportion of it’s users are male or female.

To restrict your access to sites on these criteria seems like a recipe for letting the boys-only clubs be, and confining ourselves to a polite little enclave. Do you also suggest that women only apply to jobs in organisations that are already ‘women-friendly’?

I know the kind of reaction (BOOBIES!) women get in male-dominated areas on the internet, but hiding away in the feminist areas isn’t going to change anything, it’s going to make the idea of male-dominated areas seem *more* normal, as women voluntarily absent themselves.

grogette on self-preservation:

Or maybe it’s a means of self preservation. I tend to restrict my friends to feminists/progressives/antiracists/etc. Why would I hang out with a bunch of *ists and make myself miserable? Hanging out on sites (or with people) that are feminist/feminist friendly doesn’t mean someone doesn’t interact with the rest of the world that’s predominantly NOT feminist friendly.

Kit-Kat on moderation:

Decide what limits you want on your site, and then enforce them. Have a posted policy about your lack of toleration for sexist/racist/otherwise gratuitously nasty comments/whatever you don’t want on your site. Call out violators. If necessary, ban them from the site. Don’t just say it’s a safe space–make it one.

PD on picking your battles:

I don’t hang out in explicitly feminist or woman-friendly forums, but I do definitely avoid the ones where the misogyny is worst (4chan, Cracked, etc.) Some times the earth is just too salted to try and grow anything there. On forums where the environment is a little more inclusive, I use it as an opportunity to encourage equality when ignorant comments do pop up. It doesn’t always work on its intended target, but at least it gets it out there.

Cat on gaming machismo:

I’ve spent a lot of time in gaming communities and there’s a really nasty, pervasive insularity there which is focused around straight, white, Anglo-American male bonding. Men who would probably never harass a woman in real life feel that gaming communities are a special boys club where they get to degrade women, complain about female game characters not being hot enough and talking about raping opponents and making other players their bitches. Machismo abounds. I’ve left many sites not because I’m a crazy over-reacting feminist but because I have frequently had my concerns about negative attitudes dismissed.

“Nobody here is seriously sexist, it’s all in good fun.”

“Nobody really believes girls can’t play computer games.”

“There’s nothing wrong with female characters showing skin, you’re being over-sensitive.”

Unfortunately, if I want to enjoy gaming, I am faced with the painful reality that my knowledge, abilities and character will be constantly devalued and ignored by a lot of other players. I shouldn’t have to lurk behind a gender-neutral handle and watch forum members wax obnoxious about my gender. I shouldn’t have to see those individuals hiding behind forum administration who protect them and refuse to moderate.

Clarisse Thorn on getting women gamers engaged in the issue:

I used to work as a writer in the gaming field but stopped for several reasons, one of them being that I felt consistently objectified, etc. I had one experience where the biggest company I worked for asked for advice on how to make one of their games more female-friendly; I emailed a request for more specifics and never heard back, which makes me think that the question was more of a tossed-off “oh I guess we should be thinking about this” and less a sincere attempt to engage the question. So it’s heartening to see real attempts to address the question.

I would take a different angle with the “take women’s voices seriously” thing, though. I wouldn’t ask “what do you want us to change?” but rather “what are we doing right?” or “can you point to places that you consider more female-friendly?” or even “is it a priority for you that this space feel woman-friendly? please explain.” It’s easier to work from positive feedback, particularly positive examples. (Before someone leaps upon me screaming, please understand that I’m not saying negative feedback is bad. It’s just hard to work from.)

I do suspect that many if not most women who are already hanging out in gaming spaces feel that:

1) The situation “isn’t that bad”, for whatever reason.

2) They’re “willing to put up with it” and “don’t want to complain”.

Which makes this question hard to develop. Certainly, if you’d asked me while I was a game writer whether it bothered me that my employers were constantly hitting on me etc etc., I would very likely have been unwilling to get into it.

Photo via The Library of Congress

I have a confession to make: I love Dude Comedies. Any film where Two to Five Douchey Guys Shirk Their Societal Obligations to Embark on a Night They'll Never Forget can probably coax ten bucks out of me. I'll even watch the Dude Comedies where all female characters are relegated to the Fun-Hating-Wife or Slutty-Sex-Object category, as long as it allows for maximum high jinks. Superbad: Loved it! Old School: Great! 40 Year Old Virgin: Totally convinced me to overlook the whole chastity message! Talladega Nights: Watched it!

I understand these movies are literred with sexism and homophobia and penises; I am simply immune to it. My condition has become so severe that this is looking pretty good to me, honestly.

But no Dude Comedy can draw me in as douchily as the Judd Apatow Dude Comedy. I am powerless to it. I have a theory: Paul Rudd is often one of the dudes. But even a Clueless pedigree can't justify my apparent obsession with man-children, marijuana-fueled Lord of the Rings fantasies, and underlying date-rape themes.

Help me.

In this week's Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown tries. We laughed, we cried, we had a shmashmortion.

SADY: hello there lady. are you prepared – prepared, that is, to debate the fine points of dude comedy?

AMANDA: i can't say i'm as prepared as you are, sady. but i am willing to confess: i believe that i enjoyed nearly all the films you profiled in your apatow series. when i saw them. in the theater.

SADY: yes, it's true: apatow has become my great white whale. he is basically all i think about these days. i dream in Apatowvision. well: i enjoyed some of them too! (shhhhhh.) I enjoyed "Knocked Up" immensely, for example.

AMANDA: i CRIED at the end of knocked up. i was on a really bad date, which may have had something to do with it.

SADY: OH GOD. YOU SHARE MY TERRIBLE SECRET. i cried too. also, broke up with the dude i saw it with?

AMANDA: same. well i'm glad we've cleared the air.

[youtube:v=lVam-fshUgw]
Judd Apatow craftily inserted this song into the film's end credits in order to make me cry.

SADY: yeah. my reactions to "knocked up" kind of define my relationship to the Apatow canon. I was totally digging Leslie Mann's character – oh, that poor lady! She is totally at the end of her rope! – and then left the theater, and discussed it with people, and realized that YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ROOTING FOR PAUL RUDD. In that particular sub-plot.

AMANDA: i think i had the same reaction as you did, honestly. i thought she was sympathetic, but totally pathetic. all of apatow's male characters are pathetic, too, but they seem to ease out of that gracefully without having to think about it too much.

SADY: right – plus, they are pathetic in a totally fun way! they get to hang out and do bong hits and fart on each others' pillows and such! so, by the end, where it's like, "sadly, we realize that procreative monogamy with one of these strange 'woman' creatures is necessary to maturation" you kind of get their sadness at giving up the pillow farts and lightbub battles. whereas women are just grown-ass-adults by the time they hit puberty, apparently. or at least they're scripted that way.

AMANDA: yeah, so the women are just haggard at the end. one thing your reviews always touch on are these coiteries of man-children that apatow scripts. and you mention the rejoinder from defenders of the movie that 'you're not supposed to LIKE or IDENTIFY with them.' and i do think that you are supposed to like these characters, and even like them for (and not despite of) their date rape punch-lines. but they're still in a context, i think, where they're there to provide a contrast to the hero of the story. their douchiness must be overcome, basically.

SADY: yeah, exactly. they're given such loving attention, and their little world of date-rape jokes and vague bromosocial lady-avoidance is presented as so much fun. so you forgive them for being immature in order to forgive your own immaturity, like, "well, my wife may be at home sobbing but i can't help it! i'm a regular bro!" and then you get a Valuable Life Lesson that sticks for maybe ten to fifteen minutes.

AMANDA: ... but they're funny!

SADY: it's true! sometimes they really really are! I subconsciously repeat Jonah Hill's pronunciation of "abortion" as "shmushmortion" at least once a week! and then i realize it's a joke about making a lady have an abortion because obviously her fetus is YOUR decision!

AMANDA: yeah. and apatow's versions of women i cannot excuse. they are either bitches or whores. but caricatures of douchebags, even lovable ones, i cannot resist. see: paul rudd in wet hot american summer. i think it's just possible to love the character and not the character if they were a real person / your boyfriend.

[youtube:v=ND7yJ7sMosk]

SADY: exactly. question: where the lady douchebags at? where are the stoned ladies that can't get it together to have an actual apartment, and get jobs that require nothing of them because they're afraid real jobs would be too much of a commitment, and pretend to be gandalf or some business when no-one's looking? the ladies who would rather watch "the muppet show," again, than do anything useful with their lives? WHERE ARE THOSE LADIES? Because I want movies about them! They exist! So I am told in a way that has nothing to do with my own personal life, at all.

AMANDA: i know, which is why I desperately want Apatow to write a movie for them. partly because i think his brain might explode, but also because i think it would be funny.

[youtube:v=V4QVGcnjZeM]

SADY: exactly. like, writing a movie about a lady that is not a sexy/stupid harlot or a knife-tongued scold would be fantastic. because the closest we've got to an Apatowomany character, right now, is Juno. I DON'T WANT JUNO.

AMANDA: sometimes i look at popular culture and i think of the female characters who have had abortions and i get really sad that like carrie bradshaw is the only one i can think of. but that's a tangent.

SADY: yes, well, my forthcoming feature movie film, "50 First Abortions," will be an exciting new direction for film, i think.

AMANDA: indeed. I think we should start a letter campaign that mirrors the request of Pixar to make a film with a heroine who is not a princess.

SADY: but, you know? i think that women have all the same maturity/commitment/not-being-an-idiot problems that these dudes have. PLUS, what with all the work we have to do to make our bodies presentable, there are many more occasions for gross jokes about our inherent schlubbiness. HUMOROUS BIKINI WAXING SCENE? I think so!

Sociological Images accuses Facebook of sexism and ethnocentricsm for using a "white and male" image as its default avatar to represent a typical user, while opting for "orange avatars of both sexes" to represent its "global connection" capabilities.

So why does this shadowy male figure look just like me?

Sociological Images writes:

So when Facebook wants to represent global humanity, the avatars are orange and of mixed sex; when Facebook is charged with representing an individual, the avatar is white and male. This is not random or accidental. Globally, as Facebook, ironically, reminds us, people are not “white.” Representing people in this way centers men, Western countries, and whiteness (because there are non-white people in Western countries, too) and marginalizes women, non-Western countries, and non-whites (though one might argue that at least ALL of the avatars aren’t white and male).

What Sociological Images fails to note is that the Facebook avatar is only as exclusively "white" as a silhouette artist's subject is exclusively black (which is to say, not at all). Similarly, the avatar is only as exclusively "male" as its haircut—short hair with a funny cowlick. Nope, can't be a woman!:

All woman.

Facebook's "global" avatars don't represent users of both sexes—they represent users with both long and short hair. As far as a vague shadow drawing of human can ever have a gender, the avatars looks pretty gender-neutral to me. I identify more with the short-haired "dude" than the more substantially-coiffed orange "lady." It seems to me that the argument for a more "female" avatar is actually just an argument that the androgyn get a girlier haircut.

Perhaps Sociological Images should be asking why Facebook is so sexist and racist, but not sufficiently heteronormative? Why, Facebook, is your default avatar so vaguely androgynous for all users—male, female, gay, straight, cisgendered and trans? Shouldn't real men be able to choose a manlier avatar (the chin could be better-defined), and women one with a less queer-looking haircut?

I am outraged.

As local blogger Tim at the 42 reported yesterday, the 2323 18th St NW spot formerly occupied by Nolan's will open again this Saturday. The replacement, "The Town Tavern," has some gender-specific rules for entrance, and they're not benefiting Adams Morgan's storied dude population.

Here are some specifics: Women 21 and over can enter, but men must be 23. "No unaccompanied groups of males" are allowed. Most of the dress code applies to both genders (No Hats, No Visors, No Do-Rags, No Tank Tops, No Cut-Offs, No Sleeveless Shirts, No Jerseys, No Sneakers, No Combat Boots), but one rule is men only: they've gotta wear collared shirts.

These rules appear to be condescending toward the neighborhood's men, but really, I think they're more offensive to women. The collared shirts, the older men, the anti-friends-groups rule; they're all made assuming that this is what women want, and that ladies will be falling over themselves to line-up to experience these perfectly calibrated hook-up conditions.

Whether Town Tavern can convince Adams Morgan to abandon its free-for-all clusterfuck hook-up culture for a more refined, collared experience remains to be seen. Drink up Town Tavern's full set of rules, after the jump:

The Town Tavern Door Policy

Gentlemen: 23 Years & Above to Enter
Ladies: 21 Years & Above to Enter

You Must Present Two Valid Forms of Government Issued Photo Identification to Enter—No Exceptions

Dress Code Strictly Enforced (No Exceptions): Appropriate Attire Required At All Times. Gentlemen, Collared Shirts Only. No Hats, No Visors, No Do-Rags, No Tank Tops, No Cut-Offs, No Sleeveless Shirts, No Jerseys, No Sneakers, No Combat Boots.

No College ID Excepted Ever, No International Student ID Cards Accepted, No Form of Expired Identifications Accepted, No Paper Temporary Licenses Accepted Without Accompanying Picture ID, Backup Photo Identification Required On All Out Of State Licenses

No Unaccompanied Groups Of Males

Door Close and Lights Up 30 Minutes Prior to Closing Time

THE GOLDEN RULE: IF ANYONE IS BEING RUDE AND/OR OBNOXIOUS AT THE DOOR THEY WILL BE DENIED ENRTY FOR THAT NIGHT AND CAN WORK THE PROBLEM OUT WITH MANAGEMENT SOME OTHER TIME. ONCE A PERSON IS ASKED TO LEAVE THEY ARE PROHIBITED FROM RETURNING FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE NIGHT. THERE WILL BE NO CONSIDERATION FOR RE-ADMITTANCE.

Please Be Courteous And Respectful Of Our Neighbors

Management Reserves All Rights

Thank You For Joining Us Please Have a Safe & Responsible Evening

Photo by rachelvoorhees

As a non-man who is nevertheless quite interested in the pursuit of manliness, I was interested to try the Genderanalyzer—which "uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman." Last time I plugged the Sexist into the Genderanalyzer, it told me I wrote like a dude. I basked for several seconds in the news, believing that I had fooled this widget through my progressive, gender-bending style of blogging. Then I plugged Danielle Steele into the analyzer. Turns out she writes like a dude, too.

Now, it looks like this ye olde online gender identity crystal ball is beginning to get rather specific. The analyzer—which I'm not convinced isn't entirely bogus—can now determine the dudeliness of your blog down to the percentage point. Just how manly am I?

We think http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist is written by a man (70%).

Seventy percent man. Not bad! But how does Danielle stand?

We think http://daniellesteel.net/blog/index.php is written by a man (71%).

It is with great shame that I must submit to the incontrovertible fact that Danielle Steel is more of a man than I am.

"Man Down" by wili-hybrid.

* Slate is all over the sex & gender beat this week! First, Jack Shafer debunks the New York Times Sunday Styles "dudes love cats" trend piece:

How to write a bogus trend story: Start with something you wish were on the rise. State that rise as a fact. Allow that there are no facts, surveys, or test results to support such a fact. Use and reuse the word seems. Collect anecdotes and sprinkle liberally. Drift from your original point as far as you can to collect other data points. Add liberally. Finish with an upbeat quotation like "My cat takes priority over the new relationship. Realistically, unless there's something absolutely amazing about [the woman I'm dating], he wins."

* Then, Explainer explains how to tell whether your 13-year-old kid actually wants a circumcision—or whether you could be pressuring him to have one. Is it so wrong to ask kid owners to err on the side of "foreskin intact"?

* And the XX Factor's Melinda Henneberger probably doesn't want your flowers. Henneberger lays out the rules for flora-purchasing significant others:

- A dozen for no reason: You shouldn't have!
- A bouquet on an actual occasion: No, really, you shouldn't have.

Speaking from my estimable position as "local blogger who sleeps on a mattress on the floor of a group house flanked by two squatter-occupied abandoned properties and counts among her possessions a bunch of old newspapers stacked in milk-crates recovered from darkened alleyways"—I, too, may never understand women.

Photo by Robyn Gallagher