This is actually an excerpt from a longer post I wrote earlier in the month addressing some of the (crap) arguments that’ve been floating around in August’s flurry of feminism WoW posts. Sadly, that post as a whole wasn’t really doing much for me — it was pretty much just 2,500 words of rambling complaining — but there was one particular section I felt compelled to keep.
It’s about sort of about women and healing and sort of about women and progression raiding. You’ll probably get why I ditched the whole post from reading it (it’s kinda all over the place, argument-wise, which was indicative of the quality of its original source), but I still felt like it was something I needed to say, even if I needed to say it badly.
So.
Women are just naturally better at… (a.k.a. Gender Essentialism in Azeroth)
Healing. Listening. Consensus-building. I’m sure you’ve heard all these before, and more besides. You might even think they’re reasonable and fairly positive. I mean, there’s nothing bad about being considered good at something… right?
Except it’s bullshit, and it’s bullshit for three reasons.
The first one is that the things women are said to be “naturally good at” are invariably the “all responsibility and no glory” jobs. Healing isn’t easier than tanking, but it’s usually the Main Tank who’s considered the group’s leader and therefore the one responsible for its success. And yet, when the group fails? Guess how often that’s blamed on bad healing. No, seriously. Guess.
The second one is that the “naturally good at” argument is invariably pitched from a nature basis rather than a nurture one. Why aren’t there more women in progression raiding guilds? Could it be women are just “naturally” not as interested in progression raiding as men… or could it be that women are subject to societal demands men aren’t that make the time investiture for progression raiding unfeasible? Forget skill; merely having the time for progression raiding is a kind of privilege. Women just aren’t “allowed” to lock themselves in their rooms for an entire evening playing videogames — and forget doing that more than once a week — and that’s something that’s just as true (and maybe more-so) for “hardcore gamer girls” (like yours truly)[i] as it is for “casual” gamer women. Even if there’s no-one else physically around to remind us that cooking the dinner/doing the housework/looking after the kids/socialising with “real people” is more important than playing some silly thing on the internet, it’s an assumption that I’d wager has been pretty heavily ingrained into most of us, even when we try and fight it. Add progression raiding into the mix, and suddenly the double shift is starting to look like a triple.
The third one is that it’s simply not true: I’m pretty confident everyone can name both a competent female Main Tank and a competent male healer. There are bad female players and bad male players. Female GLs who rule with an iron fist and their male equivalents who prefer a consensus style of leadership. “Naturally good at” is a myth.
Let’s take the healing thing, since that seems to be a common one. Fortunately for me, WoW.com recently had a post on gender influences on class choice, which included a breakdown of class preferences based on survey answers. It was:
- Men paladin, druid, shaman, warrior, death knight, priest, mage, hunter, rogue, and then warlock
- Women druid, priest, paladin, shaman, hunter, mage, warlock, death knight, warrior, and then rogue
When I first saw this, I was actually quite interested to see how close the class-choices ran. It’s notable that the top three classes for both genders are healing classes — two of which are “three role utility” (Healing/Tank/DPS). And yes, there’s a notable difference in the positions of the two DPS/Tank classes (warrior and DK) between the genders — about which I’d refer you back to my previous two points — but other than that the order is quite similar. So you can imagine my absolute bafflement when the very next sentence in the post is:
What you might notice is that men prefer the three-role hybrids, then the two-role hybrids, then the pure DPS classes. For women, the order of popularity is classes that can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, then the pure melee classes. The results of the survey would seem to imply that women and men have entirely different ways of approaching class choice
Um… wut? You can’t make that statement; you’re not even comparing the same thing! If you actually compare the orders against the same fucking categories, rather than making shit up to confirm your initial bais, the result is:
- Men Three-role utility, two-role utility, DPS.
- Women Three-role utility, DPS, two-role utility. (With an exception for shaman.)
And:
- Men Classes that can heal, pure melee classes, classes than do ranged DPS. (With exceptions for rogues and warlocks.)
- Women Classes than can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, pure melee classes.
In other words: Hybrid/utility classes that can heal are the most popular class choice for both genders.
So enough with the “women just naturally prefer healers” rubbish, please. Everyone in WoW likes hybrid healing classes, not just women.
- Tangent: Despite the fact that I spent vast swathes of my free time playing videogames — frequently very seriously and obsessively — and have done so since I was a child, I’m still generally not considered to be a “hardcore gamer” by most male geeks. Why? Because I don’t play “masculine” games in a “manly” way. Apparently playing a game solidly for a good week after release — even to the exclusion of eating/sleeping/spending time with your SO (as Mat will attest to I’m sure) — doesn’t qualify you as “hardcore” when that game is, say, WoW and not [insert-name-of-FPS-du-jour]. Go figure. ↩