Today, Feminist Frequency released a new video – “25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male” – that has almost nothing to do with Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. I say “almost nothing” because it’s pretty clear that many of the things listed in this new video are the product of many of Sarkeesian’s own experiences in playing and speaking about videogames.
The video is a series of men listing off some of the “invisible privileges” of gaming while male and is based on a post made several months ago by Jonathan McIntosh. (At the time, I wrote a response to some of the comments on McIntosh’s piece). I still agree with my assessment: that while I take issue with the comments – obviously, they’re comments – the piece itself is not really objectionable.
Upon second thought, though, I found that the video did raise my awareness about something else that’s often made invisible in gaming, and which isn’t acknowledged in the video itself. We’ve been doing a lot of talking about gender in games recently, but we haven’t really been doing much talking about race in gaming (which is kind of pathetic, given the very important conversations about race that are being had outside of games due to the events in Ferguson, Missouri). At one point in the video, a black man says that he won’t be sexually harassed at a convention – which may well be true, but just because he won’t be sexually harassed doesn’t mean he won’t be harassed for the color of his skin or his choice to wear his hair in dreadlocks.
One of the things I remember most vividly from the time I spent playing various Call of Duty games is that most of the chatter coming from other players wasn’t sexist (okay, so I wasn’t talking to them, so they didn’t know they were playing with a woman), but it was very racist. My modus operandi at the time was generally to mute everyone else in my game so I didn’t have to hear what they said, but what I caught in the few seconds that took was almost always either racist or heterosexist or both. I didn’t say anything, mostly out of concern that then the tide would turn against me for being female, but that’s always bothered me about CoD.
The video made me realize that in our attempts to rectify sexism in the industry we often end up ignoring the intersectionality of oppression – the overlap of oppressive systems that simultaneously marginalize multiple groups. Because the black man in the video has probably faced racism at conventions and while playing online, just as women face sexism in those spaces – and it’s just as important that we recognize his experience as it is that we recognize women’s experience.
Now imagine what it’s like for a woman of color, who receives both types of harassment. Now imagine being a queer woman of color.
I’m not saying this to criticize the video – we can’t always do all the things. I’m saying this because it’s important to remember that there are other systems of oppression in place that are very harmful in very real ways to multiple groups of people, and that we need to remind ourselves, even if we choose to focus primarily on one of those ways, that we can’t forget about the others (either the issues or the people they represent).
All of us need to remember that our experience is not the experience of everyone – and for some of us that means we need to acknowledge our privilege and other people’s oppression even as we are ourselves oppressed.