OMG! GC got it's first Mansplainer!

[asato_muraki]

Earlier this month, Kitchen Jedi reviewed a magazine for 'gamer girls' in A Gamer Girl E-Zine? She found it to be, well, not of interest. Others followed her link, read some articles and agreed that it was more like the swimsuit issue of a magazine for male gamers, complete with "Top Ten Reasons You Should Date a Geek Girl" which doesn't seem to be aimed at the Femme Geek market at all, because everyone knows that lesbian geeks don't need to be convinced of the appeal of their peers.

Flash forward to today, when the publisher of the mag finally followed his traffic stats back to GC. Here's what he had to say:

From the Publisher.
written by Jack R Stewart, June 30, 2010
Greetings, I am the publisher of the D20 Girls magazine. I've read your comments & concerns & would like to point out a few things.

1.) Everything in this magazine is controlled by Gamer Girls.
2.) Even the pictorials were designed, thought up, layed-out, and conceptualized by the girls themselves.
3.) All the articles are written by gamer girls.
4.) other than me being the publisher, there is no male influence in this magazine whatsoever. If a couple of the pictorials seem to be more eyecandy related, that is because the gamer girl posing for the shots is that comfortable with what she wants to do. She should not be berated because she wants & feels comfortable posing like that.
5.) All of the costumes, poses, and themes of all of the pictorials were chosen by the girls themselves, again.. no male influence whatsoever.
6.) As far as the dating article goes, that was written by E.Foley, a decently well-know Nerd & dating expert. http://geeksdreamgirl.com/
7.) This is not an e-zine, it is a print publication that we do happen to also put out in an electronic format also.
8.) The editor for this magazine is a gamer nerd herself.
9.) before you judge the magazine or the girls that put so much work into it, I would suggest you stop by the D20 Girls website & read up on what exactly the D20 Girls are all about.

Thank you for your time...

This annoyed me. I got the email notice of the comment while at Laser Tag with my boys, a couple of their friends and a mommy friend of mine, so I had time to stew over it. Our filters had required moderator approval for it, possibly because of the links. I published it from my phone but I couldn't respond until I got home and took care of other business.

After some thought, this is what I wrote in response:

written by UberWench, June 30, 2010
Thank you for YOUR time, Mr. Publisher man, but the article stands. The magazine speaks for itself, and if our own gamer girls found it to be SSDD, then they have the right to say so, regardless of the configuration of the sexparts of whoever is responsible for it.

To argue that something produced by people with a va-jay-jay cannot be sexist is not logical. The product must stand on its own. No one gets a XX chromosome pass, despite their geek cred. If you have to know the bios of the writers for something to be relevant to your interests, then it probably isn't.

It's good to know that geek women have jobs at this magazine, and we're happy for them, but let's not kid ourselves. Your audience is supposed to be gamer girls, and our gamer girls didn't find it interesting. *shrug* Them's the breaks, kiddo.

Also, gamer girls don't need to read articles about how to date each other, even from a well-known dating expert. Some of us like boys (gamer and otherwise), and those who don't can work it out just fine without help.

Thanks for the mansplainin' ( http://www.urbandictionary.com...=Mansplain ), but your magazine speaks for itself, and Kitchen Jedi's account of it is a valid one.

In all fairness, Kitchen Jedi never used the word 'sexist' in her article. That was my addition. Also, she is totally capable of defending her own opinion. I just couldn't resist.

Comments

[althea_valara]

Random thought: are any of you covering The Last Airbender movie? I still haven't found enough spoons to read GC so I wasn't sure. I think it'd be a great thing for the chicas to cover because:

(a) it has a HUGE fanbase
(b) being that it is based on a cartoon, it falls in the realm of Geeky
(c) it's getting a lot of attention in the news because they cast white actors in roles that were portrayed as people of color in the cartoon (specifically, Asian and Intuit cultures)
(d) it's getting really bad reviews
(e) the original cartoon was fully of strong, amazing women. The movie? Not so much.

I don't think I'm up for writing an article myself (see my recent posts in my journal for the reason) but I think this would fit right in at GC.

Re: the topic of this post: (1) I am squeeing because dude, you're familiar with the term "mansplaining". I wasn't sure if that term had leaked out of the online feminist blogs and into the general population; (2) I seem to recall some dude making a post on girl_gamers asking for contributors to a new magazine he was launching, and getting considerable backlash for how he worded his post. I am uncertain whether that was a digital/print/video magazine, but his comment and your response pinged me. If I feel up to it later I might go digging through the girl_gamers archive to find it, because it was a thing of beauty.

[asato_muraki]

I'd love to see that! It could be the same dude.

We have someone on the movie review itself, and I was wondering whether I could take on the surrounding disappointment with female characters and racial issues. *sigh* If I get the spoons. (What a great analogy!)