Am I the only one who tried to pass for a man online?

sneeuweekhoorn · 2021-05-14T01:20:24+00:00

I always try to pass as a man in games because men are assholes every time they learn I'm a woman. It usually works until it comes time to use voice chat. If I use it they'll be able to tell from my voice and if I refuse to use it they assume I'm a woman trying to hide. There's no real winning situation there.

I just want to have fun playing games, not deal with assholes sending me pictures of their dicks or screaming at me for not playing the way they want me to play.

MarkTwainiac · 2021-05-14T12:33:42+00:00

Not a gamer, and my reddit post history was mainly confined to GC, but as you can see by my user name here online I often use male names or ones that don't signal my sex. This is not evidence of "internalized misogyny" but of practicality: less harassment and abuse from males for being female, more likely to have what you say taken seriously.

There are multiple reasons that when Charlotte and Elizabeth Bronte published their novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in 1847, they did so not under their names but under the pseudonyms Currer and Ellis Bell, as the novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin had previously done by adopting the pseudonym George Sand and as the novelist Mary Ann Evans would later do by publishing as George Eliot.

In our time, Joanne Rowling published the Harry Potter series as J.K. Rowling and her mystery series as Robert Galbraith.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200911-why-do-women-write-under-mens-names

IRL, it's been shown that in work-related emails and other correspondence, women are taken much more seriously and get much more positive reactions if they use either initials that don't reveal their sex, or male names.

I had a job back in the early 80s where I had to write/sign a great deal of letters to people who had written usually very disgruntled letters to the editor at a US major news publication, and I always used only my initials so no one could tell my sex. All the women in the department did; it was standard practice. This not only caused the letters we sent to complaining readers to be taken more seriously and to provoke less negative & angry reactions, it also solved the problem of men sending letters back inquiring how old we were, if we were married, if we were looking for BFs and so on.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/women-who-pretended-to-be-men-to-publish-scifi-books-5077952

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/06/catherine-nichols-female-author-male-pseudonym

lefterfield · 2021-05-14T04:01:01+00:00

I like playing female characters in games. But there's one I've played for a while and EVERY SINGLE female character got the same creepy messages from the same creepy dudes. My strategy is to be weird/oblivious in response, if not outright ignoring them - but there's nothing wrong with choosing to play a game in a way that's fun FOR YOU. I mean, just think about what I just said. If you have more fun playing a male, even if the reason why is because of the other males - then do that. That's called being smart and prioritizing your time and enjoyment, not "internalized misogyny". You don't owe your attention or exposing your real sex/name to creeps.

I'm more likely to pick a masculine or gender-neutral sounding name in discussion boards, myself. Always seems those "names" are treated with more respect, and I can't imagine why that could be... /s

malleus_maleficarum · 2021-05-14T02:01:10+00:00

I always played games with a male name/avatar, because who has time for a bunch of death and rape threats and dick pics? (Also, blast from the past: if you were a female toon in skimpy armour dancing on a mailbox in Silvermoon, I assumed you were a gross dude who never bathed.) 🙄 It's best to find female friends to play with if you want to use voice chat in games.

They may be sussing you out by your typing/phrasing style. There are analysis tools you can look up which are reasonably accurate at assuming if you're male or female based on the way you word things.

I know you didn't ask for advice, but: there's no obligation to engage with PMs like that. Turn em off or ignore them. You don't owe people a response.

mulherzinha · 2021-05-14T17:03:40+00:00

I always use male or neutral names in online games and male avatars. The guys automatically assume I'm a guy and leave me alone. My experiences online gaming were vastly different when people knew I was a woman.

I can make mistakes and the max I will hear is "dumb" or "stupid" or some curse words and I can answer the guys accordingly and they shut up.

When they know I'm a woman, they get way over aggressive and answering them makes everything worse. It's crazy how many guys I thought were nice only to have them yell nasty shit and misogynistic slurs at me once we got in voice chats.

I also got two weirdos following me in a game, one thought he was my boyfriend or something even though I never said anything to him that implied that, we never even talked much outside the game, and the other guy was very annoying, asked a lot of personal info and never wanted to do quests even when he invited me to do exactly that.. I ghosted them both slowly.

Anyway, that's not internalized misogyny imo, you don't want to deal with a bunch of creeps and unfortunately that's the only way to do that in mixed spaces since men only respect other men.

ShotTopic · 2021-05-14T14:53:52+00:00

I've always used very gender neutral usernames and character names because I don't want to deal with that stuff. Nothing wrong with it. If you actually develop a friendship with someone you can get more personal then. For example when I used to play GTA V online I found my way into a female crew and felt comfortable doing voice chat with them.

QueenBread · 2021-05-29T14:20:18+00:00

Yep. I do that a lot. It's not just the harassment, but being taken less seriously because I am a woman. I have noticed now that while in European forums I may get some mansplaining or some treating me like a child, in American forums I get hate and mysoginistic comments. America is particularly sexist, just like they also are particularly racist.

TheOnyxGoddess · 2021-06-26T11:10:18+00:00

I don't try to pass as anything online. I've never received creepy attention online except for that one time I asked about my vagina. When I got on reddit to ask about an issue relating to my vaginismus, I recieved some creepy messages, but it wasn't much. I used a throwaway account so it's not associated with my main account and no one is able to send me more creepy messages. One person in one short message asked for sex and actually admitted to having a fetish for tight vaginas in that message, and another was just asking for sex. None was actually rude or crazy, but it was still a bit weird and creepy. I ignored those messages.

I tend to comment on Youtube alot with a clear girl name, I've never recieved any harrassment over it, one guy did express that he thinks I'm hot because I said I'm Australian, which is not creepy and doesn't count.

I've been on Youtube since it was about a year old with a common girl's name and the creepiest person I found is a fuckboy loser (and boy I had a field day with him) having an issue with a girl stating in the Youtube comment section she wanted to wait until marriage to have sex because as he said it's 2015 or 2016 (I don't remember which one it was), I responded to him with his own whine that "it's 2016, people can choose to have sex if they want and if he wants it, hire a prostitute or use hisown two hands" (with a bit more harsher words and with the current year I was making the reply). He tried to defend himself by saying he was stoned when he read the comment and that his girlfriend's response "to remain pure" made him feel like "chickenshit" (oh gee, I wonder why/s). I pointed out that the fact he feels offended shows he's a sensitive pussy asshole and being stoned isn't a valid defence to stupidity online (and considering he still defended his actions in that same response, I doubt he was stoned at all). One commentor (who has a male profile pic if I remember correctly) thinks I'm a bit harsh, I personally, I think I was constructively fair to a chickenshit. I didn't get to see the sequel to my response because OP deleted her post (and in extension, deleted the comment chain), which was unfortunate because I was having fun expressing my misanthropic and misandristic thoughts through an online beat up of a deserving male loser.

Anyway, thats the list of weird and creepy people which I encountered online who has made made an attempt at asking for sex, flirting or happen to be a creep with problems expressing his problems to someone else (aside from a person on youtube who subscribed to me and has no videos and has "just left prison" or some crap like that on his bio). I'm not often on the gaming and technology focused sites, so I am sort of curious about the frequency of the creepy stuff will occur if I go there with a girl name.

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