On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words.
I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue.
I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait.
If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice.
Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective.
We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association.
We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal.
Now all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when critiquing Artesimo for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But Artesimo's sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like Artesimo is refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and Artesimo was clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so.
|
EPT
