EVE General Discussion

There are biological factors hardwired into both sexes beyond the physical. Gender differences are hardwired too, like it or not. Women make children so they were hardwired to be nurturers. Men were wired for aggression simply because as the (generally) stronger sex they were set up to hunt and fight. Where the struggles come into play is in refuting it because you think that means settling for it.

I think where both genders get into trouble is in either refusing to acknowledge those non physical differences, accepting them but thinking they can't or shouldn't be altered, or knowing they can, but not being able to reconcile the fact that nature (via gender) will set up roadblocks to its original blueprint. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

I think we were meant to morph and betray the hardwiring too, it's why we're sentient beings. We were created to be uniquely capable of pushing those boundaries and altering the original blueprint. The constantly evolving animal is the surviving animal, and maybe the male versus female angst is just the most basic, hardwired survival reaction against the perceived threat to the other gender. Like another poster suggested, if our gender lines blur too much, the other gender is theoretically in danger of becoming obsolete. Add all that fluidity and uncertainty and unpindownableness to a constantly evolving game like EVE and boom, a fluid, ever changing, ever evolving clusterf*ck!

That's a sweeping generalization and not a fact. That's like saying there's no 12 year-olds playing EvE, and claiming that's a "fact".

And I'm certainly not a kid or a frat boy.

OMG dey terk er jeorbs!

Some women are allowed to have jobs now because women fought for the right to have jobs, to vote, to be treated as people. Men still complain, yes, but it's (rightfully) ignored. Maybe the young women now have more opportunity than I did, but I didn't, despite everything our grandmothers fought for. Some women, ones like me, still don't have the opportunity to have a job.

I personally would have loved to be a stay-at-home mom with a home business. Unfortunately I'm disabled and it's amazing how fast the "altruistic help" disappears when men find out I can't have sex with them.

Maybe I have a right to be angry. Maybe some things are just wrong. All I know is a man would not be treated this way, like their value is only measured in their ability to give men temporary pleasure.

Let's not get into a discussion of poverty in the middle of this thread.

However maybe a woman having a job should mean she was the right person for the job, and a man needs to get better instead of trying to step on others. Maybe jobs are scarce because human ingenuity isn't going towards making more jobs, not because women are taking "men's jobs" away from anyone.

There are these thing called "quotas" -some official, some unofficial- that sometimes get in the way of fair competition, but that's another topic.

No, actually, I'm illuminating the results of studies with a couple of personal anecdotes.

There are gender differences, although it's hard to ascribe more than a very few to nature instead of nurture. However: Individual variance overwhelms those differences, and the currently lopsided gender representation of, say, computer programmers does not indicate any intrinsic disinterest by the under-represented gender. That 's proven by the measured fact that female representation in computer science was once over 40%.

The simple fact is that if you take the machismo out of it, it's absolutely no trouble to find a goodly number of women who would be perfectly interested in sci-fi, or in computer programming, or what have you. All you have to do is look at the number of women in the pioneering days of computing and the number of women now. Then look at the cultural changes. Done.

For instance, mathematics was once considered an absolutely proper thing for a lady to study, which is how Ada Babbage wound up writing the first computer programs.



This is not about shaming people away from traditional roles, it's about not straitjacketing them into those roles. If you make no assumptions about what people can or should do, they will naturally gravitate toward their inclinations--whether they're statistical outliers or not. If you establish some general tendencies as normative, and enforce them, then all you're doing is suppressing individuality. But again--and you haven't refuted this because you can't--individual variance trumps statistical difference. "Man" isn't signing up to play EVE Online. "Woman" isn't signing up to play EVE Online. An individual is. You can assert population-wide statistics every day, but if you try applying them to any single person then you're doing statistical analysis over a sample size of one, and you are guaranteed a nonsensical and useless result.

This chat went from the prospect of getting hot sexy women in our nerdy game to just more typical Feminism banter.

If you need me I'll be in the important threads fighting for the return of the Undock button and protecting those that can't jump without vomiting on their keyboard.

So all women who play videogames have to be hot and sexy? I thought we were all fat and ugly. >.>

its like r/mensrights in here :cripes:

We have 22 pages of mostly reasonable discussion in here.

So back to the topic. Does eve need more female players? Probably. Do the women who play eve already enjoy the game? Yes, so we know that women can and do enjoy playing eve. So why aren't more women playing it? Maybe women don't know what eve can offer as a positive gaming experience. (I certainly didn't even though I knew eve existed for years before I tried it out.) Do we need to change anything about the game drastically so that more women will play it? No, but men are scared that's going to happen.

So to attract more women to eve, we might need to change how eve is perceived and make more efforts to make the community as a whole a less scary a place to be as a woman. The game is scary enough on it's own without all that other stuff!

That's the point of the thread, yes.

The question is, is that satisfactory?