Editor's blog: I am sexist (Eurogamer.net)

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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-18-editors-blog-i-am-sexist

I don't know exactly when I realised I was sexist, but I can show you how I notice historical examples of it. Yesterday, for example, I saw some friends talking about the "Dastardly" achievement in Red Dead Redemption. Do you remember this one? XboxAchievements.com, which I assume scrapes data from Xbox Live and is therefore probably reporting the developer's original wording, describes it thus: "Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train." So the objective is to locate a woman who cannot defend herself against you, tie her up and then kill her by placing her in the path of a train. You cannot gain the achievement by performing this act on a man. I am not a student of Westerns so I cannot comment on its original context (and I bet a proportion of the game's player base that it would be statistically acceptable to round up to 100% are in the same situation), so it's just a contextless act of violence against women that gamifies something that we dimly remember as being associated with a film genre.

I remember that achievement. I remember doing it in the game. This would have been in 2010. The only reaction I remember having to it is thinking it was clever and inventive, drawing on a famous Western trope. I don't remember having any conscious thought that it was troubling. If I did, I obviously suppressed it.

The things I probably find most haunting about my sexism though are the sexist things I've written and published. Unlike a lot of my friends and peers, I didn't start in print, where copy can vanish forever quite easily, and I have only worked for Eurogamer, which maintains a pretty complete live archive of content. I'm 30 now and I've worked here since I was 16. So if you go through stuff I've written in that period, you can uncover some things I find shameful and embarrassing, and occasionally they float into my field of vision again. Here's a line from my Grand Theft Auto 4 review, published in 2008, in a paragraph about attention to detail: "Women you date will notice if you dress poorly. They also nag."

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But if I had written something on Eurogamer about realising that the Dastardly achievement was troubling, and then tried to explore that, a silent majority might have found some merit in what I was saying, but I know what the comments would have looked like. 1) This isn't as important as something else. 2) Bloody white knight - you're just trying to impress women. 3) It's historically accurate. 4) Stop attacking the developer's creative vision. 5) Stop trying to censor people. 6) This is political correctness gone mad - what's next? Forcing X to do Y? 7) Bloody social justice warrior.

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The whole thing is great.