LunarKat Harassed on Stream: The Struggle of Women in Gaming
There’s a lot of irony in the world of gaming. They’re created as a way for their players to escape reality, yet esports connects these players more to reality. We’ve made them to let us explore fantastical worlds that we can’t see in the real world, yet we are constantly trying to make them look more and more graphically realistic.
And, sadly, while games have pushed the idea that all players are equal, we still see players being treated like items or trash. While many different groups suffer, none have it quite as bad as female gamers.
LunarKat’s Harassment
If you’re wondering just how bad girls have it in games, take a look at this clip from streamer LunarKats the other day.
As you can see in the video, LunarKat is just playing the game, and yet when her teammates realize she’s a girl several of them begin harassing her. They tell her to suck their dicks, and when she refuses to start calling her gay, or that she must be a dude because she won’t do it.
Even later in the match, after one of them fails to clutch a round, they begin blaming her, saying that if she’d just sucked the guy off they would have won. Thankfully some of her teammates came to her defense, and the players were eventually banned, but the fact that defense was needed at all is the problem.
Gaming’s lack of accountability, it’s anonymity, leads to players acting like this. Because their real identities aren’t generally attached to their accounts, they can be misogynistic and harass women this way. They may get their account banned, as did happen in this case, but it’s always easy to make another, and at most they’re only a few dollars out of pocket if they need to buy another copy of the game.
There are no real-world implications for acting this way: they won’t lose their jobs, they won’t face lawsuits, and their friends and family won’t judge them, because they don’t know.
Women shouldn’t have to live in fear that they’ll be discovered in a game, or need people to defend them constantly. They should be treated like any other player, like human beings and not sex toys. Until we as a gaming community mature, this isn’t going to change. As a community, we need to make female players feel comfortable playing, and not afraid to be found out. It’s not a change that will happen overnight, but one that needs to.
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