I was surprised when I saw the recent Kotaku article on Sexism at Riot. To be clear, the contents didn’t surprise me, I just never really thought any of it would be addressed. I was excited that this might be breaking new grounds, but unfortunately I’ve been seeing arguments and denials tossed around online in the vein of “Oh these are disgruntled women who couldn’t hack it, got fired, and want revenge”. I’m normally a really private person, but I felt that my position as a woman who was pretty successful at Riot and left on good terms, will have weight in backing up the validity of their claims. I hope sharing my experiences will be constructive, and help Riot create a healthier, safer, and better place for women.
As a woman, I rolled 20s with most of my teams and leads. I was really lucky. My Art Directors all looked out for me and deeply cared about my career. I got to work with some really solid men who respected and supported me. Some of my favorite human beings are men that I met at Riot, however, my experience living in the ecosystem of Riot and interacting with random Rioters, made me realize that my luck was atypical, and even my incredible fortune didn’t completely protect me from how exhausting and perpetually insulting it is to exist as a woman in a sexist culture.
I’m not sure how to go about writing this, since I’ve never really done it before. How do you talk about 5 years of awful, painful, mosquito bites so that people who have never been bitten can understand? I don’t know, but I’ll try starting at the beginning. When I joined Riot I was almost religious about my devotion and love for League of Legends. This was my dream job, and also my first real non-freelance job. I was a baby drinking some strong kool-aide, there are things I put up with then, that I absolutely wouldn’t now.
I was a 20-something year old junior employee, and one of my first not-so-great experiences was at a company party where they were awarding a Rioter for his achievements. This senior leader who won the award later stumbled upon me trying to hide in a dark corner because I hate nightclubs. For context; he is way older than me, and he was very drunk. He started asking me questions and coming uncomfortably close. I can’t remember what brought it on, but he started aggressively asking me “Do you know who I AM?!” Then his friend found him, apologized, and dragged him away.
I’m sure a lot of women can relate to feeling completely safe one moment, and then the next moment something happens and you experience the crushing realization that you’re still just prey. That’s what Riot felt like from then on. It felt like I was a deer trying to thrive while constantly surrounded by wolves. This feeling was validated over and over again. I got pretty good at pretending to be a wolf though.
Not too long after I started at Riot, the topic of sexual harassment came up in a conversation among a few Rioters on the art team, I was there, just listening. They were talking about something that had happened to a woman there, and I had no context for it, but was surprised when one of the guys on the team claimed that “she liked the attention”. The subject was then laughed off. I later found out what actually happened, a female employee received super inappropriate texts from a lead. This group of dudebros laughed it off and made her the villain. I still think about that, and it still makes me sick to my stomach. Riot tells women to be brave and come forward. For what, though? For their male coworkers to snicker behind their backs and diminish their suffering? What kind of justice is that?
While on the job at Riot I generally felt pretty empowered, my Art Directors were really supportive and trusting, they acknowledged my work & potential, and they rewarded my achievements. They always took me seriously, genuinely listened to me, and answered every question I had. I can’t, however, ignore the fact that striving for those achievements was harder as a woman than if I was a man. I feel like the road would have been easier if I wasn’t interrupted, ignored, or spoken over much more than my peers. If men didn’t cut me off mid-sentence in meetings to mock the way I said “Sorry”. I was on a team full of people from diverse backgrounds, I didn’t see any of them get their thoughts kicked aside for the sake of entertainment the way that mine were. (Poking fun at Canadians seems like a bit of a sport for Americans, and when I expressed some of my frustrations to Canadian peers they were aghast at how nasty it gets if you’re a woman).
I also can’t help but think I would have felt more empowered if I wasn’t told by a male coworker that “Women don’t fit into a male hierarchy.” Maybe I would have been more inclined to strive for greatness if I wasn’t dismissively called a “pretty pretty princess” when my first champion, Jinx, did so well (among a bunch of other thinly veiled jealous verbal barbs). I actually went to a lead to express my frustration over this and he said “Yeah I can see why he’s acting like that, I mean I’m kind of jealous too.” What was that about women speaking up again?
I probably would have helped push the bar of quality if some of my male peers didn’t go behind my back to call me “vicious” when I gave them feedback on how to improve their craft, or have 1:1s to discuss how “intimidating” I am. Would I have burnt out so hard trying to improve champion reworks if a few male coworkers could handle their AD suggesting that they use my designs? Some of them couldn’t swallow that pill, and instead attempted to stir up rumors about how impossible I am to work with. What would I have done if I didn’t have a team of supportive men to deny those claims?
Not too long into my career one of my male coworkers might have thought he was giving me a compliment when he decided to tell me about how great some of the guys thought my breasts were. I had made the foolish mistake of going to a Riot pool party, wearing a swimsuit, and swimming. I hope I don’t have to explain how violating that felt, at any rate I learned my lesson, and I never attended another. Was I supposed to make noise about this when I was already finding it difficult to just do my job in peace?
My days might have been a bit easier to manage if I didn’t have to stifle my rage when a male coworker would explain to me how to make designs for women, and how to be a feminist. Realizing that they believe their opinion as a dude meant more than, I don’t know, my entire lifetime of experience as a woman?
Life probably would have felt a touch less exhausting if I didn’t have to also deal with unsolicited male shit-takes. There are too many to list, but here’s a fun one; I was chatting with my husband (who also worked at Riot) about how I didn’t like to go to the gym at lunch because I was too lazy to redo my makeup, a random Rioter felt the need to jump into our conversation and inform me that I should give men more credit that they’ll like me even without make-up. Oh right, my coworkers think I wear eyeliner so they think I’m fuckable. Cool. Glad I get to take those thoughts with me to my next meeting.
I remember venting about my grievances to some coworkers, and a lead took me aside and said it seemed like I was trying to spread rumors. This is what happens when you speak up, even a little, as a woman. You’re not raising awareness, you’re disturbing the peace.
Even the Riot Dames email group didn’t feel like a safe space, when we were discussing the lack of female characters in esports promos a senior lead decided to chime in and question whether women deserved to be represented, they haven’t really earned it yet, as pro LoL players were all male. Oh, and on the topic of men thinking women are inherently lesser and must prove otherwise, let’s discuss another gross habit: saying “you’re really good at _______ for a chick.” The “compliment” that allows men to feel like they’re being gracious, while reminding us that we’re fundamentally inferior. (I should have started a swear jar for this one.)
One of the final demoralizing experiences I had close to the end of my time at Riot was during a mandatory leadership training workshop. This was long past the point in my career where I had learned to adopt a faux-alpha personality, I could survive, and I did great in the workshop. I hated it, but I did great. There was another woman there who didn’t have an alpha-type personality, one who is incredibly thoughtful, smart, responsible, talented, and genuinely amazing. I heard advice given to her that was something along the lines of “She’s great and will be even better when she finds her voice!” Finds her voice? I couldn’t understand what they meant, because to me she had a voice, and I could hear her plainly whenever she spoke. I puzzled over it for a while. It wasn’t until much later, when another female colleague left Riot, and called me out to thank me for being someone who would listen to her. That was a painful realization, a fair amount of men at Riot just didn’t listen to women, and the solution wasn’t to teach men to listen, it was to teach women to overcome the unchangeable status quo of men ignoring them. The solution was to put the burden of being ignored on women and train them to shout and scream until they were heard, and willfully ignoring the fact that women face consequences for behaving in the very ways they’re being trained to act, just so that the men won’t have to do anything.
If you’re wondering what consequences I’m talking about, during an anonymous round of feedback my male coworkers decided to give me notes like “she lacks empathy” and “she seems like she’s only in it for herself.” That’s what women get for having a voice.
A lot of the realizations I’ve been able to have came to me after I left Riot. I look back on my own behavior, and hope that in my quest to succeed as a Rioter I wasn’t forced to unknowingly perpetuate a horrible environment for other women, women who aren’t like me, women who didn’t have the shields of protective and caring managers, and a handful of really supportive peers. I also look back and finally understand why I was so, so tired, why I found a safe R&D team to just hide on and pretended the rest of Riot didn’t exist.
I’m assuming I’ll get a lot of “why didn’t you speak up when you were there?!” comments (you know the ones that attempt to shift the blame of a toxic environment onto the victims). Honestly, at the time I didn’t know how deeply problematic a lot of this was. There was probably a healthy dose of stockholm syndrome required for me to be successful there. It took me a good two years after I left, and joined a studio where this behavior is non-existent to appreciate how messed up the first 5 years of my career was. My current coworkers immediately say “oh sorry I interrupted you” when they get excited and talk over me, and we actively weed out people who can’t deal with women in positions of authority while we interview them. In fact, I had to start un-learning some of the survival tactics I adopted at Riot because frankly, they’re just rude. It turns out you don’t need to bully people into listening to you when all of your coworkers respect and support you from the start.
Despite what I’ve detailed (and I could go on, but I’ll stop before this becomes a memoir) I am optimistic about Riot’s future. When people argue “oh the games industry is like this, it’s not just Riot” yes, that is true, and we should hold them all to higher standards. Riot is one of the most forward thinking studios, and one that I believe is incredibly capable of change. The resources and talent they have can move mountains, if they’re collectively willing to set aside their egos, to listen, learn, and make the sacrifices necessary to be better. This is a difficult task, and I don’t envy the work ahead to them. That studio is the size of a small town, and it’s going to take a lot of work to retroactively dig out the weeds that have been ignored and allowed to develop roots, but when has Riot ever shied away from difficult tasks?
Writing this has been therapeutic in a painful, anxious, embarrassing, and infuriating way. I’ve cried over the article, and over my female colleagues’ posts since the article. Five years of pain and insult that I tried my best to stifle and ignore for the sake of success are finally validated, and feeling all of the hurt at once is overwhelming. It’s simultaneously frustrating and empowering, and there is no way to properly thank the incredibly brave women who stepped up first. Thank you for shedding light on this problem, and inspiring other women with your courage.
P.S. I also wanted to thank all of the supportive Directors and peers I had at Riot. On several occasions these guys would chase down men who interrupted me or otherwise treated me like a lesser human. You know who you are, I’m not being dramatic when I say those actions were life-changing for me, I wouldn’t be where I am today if most of my leads didn’t treat me like their equal, and force others to do the same. I hope someday Riot will be a place where that isn’t necessary, and the default setting for everyone is mutual respect.
the only thing i knew about sex at the age of nine was that
1) it was for mommies and daddies who were married;
2) it made me, my five year old sister, and my baby brother.
i learned everything i knew about sex from the internet while secretly browsing grownup sites on my 4th generation ipod touch i earned for doing so well at a piano recital. because of the nature of, you know, men and their internet porn, i learned that my sexual role as a woman was to be slapped and pissed on and tied up. i didn’t know what healthy sex was. i didn’t know it should be mutually consensual, or that it was okay to want sex with girls. i didn’t know that sex should be good for both people. i learned that sex would hurt, and that sex was about men and men only, and that i would be forced into sex whether i liked it or not, and that it was normal to have sex with big, burly, grown men as a teenager. i learned it was normal to cry during sex. i was scared of sex for so many years because of that, and the way i was exposed to sex at a young age led to the inappropriate and traumatic sexual encounters i had (occasionally with older people) later on in my teen years.
the day i got my first period, i was ten-and-a-half. i was swimming in the river with my best friend, and when i got out to go to the bathroom, i noticed brown blood on the inside of my mint-green tankini bottom. i knew what a period was, but i hid it from my mother in shame. she found out, eventually, of course. she told me, you have a woman’s body now, and if you have sex, you could have a baby. all i heard was, you have a woman’s body.
i started shaving my vulva when i was eleven, because i saw memes on memegenerator about how disgusting “hairy pussy” was. i wanted to be sexy. i was eleven years old, and all i wanted was to be sexy. it hurt, and it itched, and it made me uncomfortable, and i’d sometimes nick my labia with the razor, but i did it anyway, because i didn’t want to have a nasty, “hairy pussy.”
eleven was the age i first started getting pinched on the EL. i was an early bloomer: i had B-cup breasts already, and my menstrual cycle was regular enough that i could keep a calendar. i started wearing a full face of makeup to school and buying shorts that rode all the way up my skinny twelve-year-old thighs. i remember the day i stopped jumping off the swings the summer after fifth grade. skinned knees weren’t sexy. smooth, flawless legs were sexy, and i was a sexy girl. i was probably the sexiest little girl in the whole world. my parents hated it. they told me i was too young, but i knew the truth. my body was older, maybe 17 or 18, so my brain must be, too.
when i was twelve, i had a secret kik account that my parents didn’t know about. i used it to message strangers. i made all sorts of friends. i wasn’t stupid. i used a fake name. never showed my face. one of my friends asked me for a bra picture. i was a cool girl, right, i was sexy, so i sent him a picture of me in front of my bedroom mirror in my little white training bra with the blue butterflies.
sexy, he said.
that was all i wanted.
i’m not typing out all this bullshit because i think it’s something special. i’m typing it out because it’s not. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to my little sister. i’m typing it out because i see the same thing happening to that little millie bobbie brown, sexiest actress at thirteen. i’m typing it out because i’m sixteen years old now, a girl in the eyes of the law and a woman in the eyes of men.
mothers, talk to your daughters. tell them to jump off the swingset and skin their knees. tell them to get dirt on their dresses. tell them that they’re a woman on their 18th birthday, not at ten-and-a-half on the first day of their menstrual cycle. the world is confused. the world is sick. if your daughters don’t hear about how to treat their bodies from you, they’ll hear it from the sick, sick world, and they’ll do the things i did.
“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls,
pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a
position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known
as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The
Perfect Storm”
Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of
readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should
be.
On Monday, this went down:
That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event
way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.
On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location –
that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The
eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people
responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people
responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should),
the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand
leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain
leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A
few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their
receiving managers, but not many.
Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The
unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.
People.
We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers.
This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time
employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career.
Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was
their sole source of income.
seeing as i never last more than 3 days when i try to do Inktober seriously, i decided to just draw my usual nonsense instead. here’s day 1 to 6. i….what else can i even say. i’ll be posting new pages on twitter? please don’t tell my family?
Hold up - you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
I mean, his doctrine of radical individualism is a sham that ultimately reduces his followers to faceless conformity. This isn’t deep metatextual wankery - it’s the literal text of the film.
How do you see the film and not get that?
My ex didn’t get this. He loves Tyler durden. I’ve never seen fight club so I DIDN’T KNOW.
Yeah, in the film he’s a total con-man. His grand speeches sound good if you don’t think about them too deeply, but they’re not meant to be insightful - they’re meant to be a snake-oil salesman’s patter, calculated to bamboozle dumb, angry young men into doing his bidding.
Trouble is, they’re sufficiently well-written that apparently they work on the dumb, angry young men in the audience, too.
I’ve actually written about this academically! There’s a really specific genre I call bro cinema that includes fight club, all of kubricks work, some Scorsese, and Tarantino (all of which I love TBH.) These directors don’t explicitly condemn toxic masculinity and instead trust the audience to have COMMON SENSE and realize that Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Tyler Durden or Travis Bickle are horrific misogynists. But without the film telling the audience how to feel about these characters, men misinterpret the objectivity as glorification. Fight Club is about how shitty masculinity is, but it’s been warped by men grasping for justification for their misogyny
The real issue here, I think, is the passive consumption of media, and moreover, creators and critical viewers underestimating just how passive the average audience member is in their consumption of media.
In the book Nurture Shock, which is a child psychology book that identifies common parenting mistakes, the author spends a chapter on children’s television. The author specifically talks about how media designed to teach morals often backfires – children who watch morality lessons express *more* behavior problems and become *more* cruel.
Now the author says it’s because of how these programs are structured. First they depict bad behavior, and then they explain why the behavior is bad, showing consequences, and tying up the program with a moral.
Small children aren’t smart enough to understand the moral. Small children learn by emulating behavior they see. They see a bad behavior and they learn the bad behavior. Just exposing children to bad behavior is enough to make them internalize that the behavior is something lots of people do, and therefore something acceptable for people to do to do.
If you try to explain to them after the fact that the behavior is harmful and to be avoided, that message is too complicated and goes right over their heads. You can’t tell little kids “do as I say, not as I do.”
Now the author of this book says “small children aren’t old enough to understand the moral.”
But honestly? Adults have the exact same problem.
Tyler Durden loses in the end. That’s the moral of the movie. Unfortunately that moral is too complicated for the vast majority of the audience. The typical adult audience member does not think critically enough about film media to process this moral.
A critical viewer thinks – the point is that Tyler is wrong! The point is that Tyler is doomed by his own hubris! HOW CAN AUDIENCES HAVE MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT IF THE MOVIE?!?!?
Easily, considering the movie only really devotes 5% of its screen time to explicitly denouncing Tyler’s behavior, and that explicit denouncement only arrives at the very end of the film.
The other 95% of the screen time is spent watching Tyler Durden jerk off.
Look – you can’t film two hours of bareback sex followed by a five minute tutorial on how to correctly use a condom and a 30 second montage of miserable teen parents changing diapers, then call your film a safe sex PSA.
You did not make a safe sex PSA.
You made a porno.
You can try to argue that the bareback sex is an ironic subversive metaphor, and that the “real point” of your film is proper condom usage and an anti-teen pregnancy message, but the fact is, the majority of your audience is going to change the channel the moment the cumshot finishes.
Audiences, outside of our special little corner of fandom discourse, are by and large just straight up lazy. They can’t be bothered to think that hard about the media they consume.
This is why I loved Fury Road so much, and also what I felt was so profoundly revolutionary about the movie. Fury Road is a movie about women escaping violent misogynists. Yet editor Margaret Sixel had the SHEER BRILLIANCE and AUDACITY to cut all the footage of misogynist violence out of the movie.
Mad Max: Fury Road proved that it is possible to denounce misogynist violence without depicting it.
Mad Max: Fury Road showed that refusal to depict misogynist violence isin and of itself a denouncement of misogynist violence.
We don’t need to show what victims went through to make victims sympathetic. In fact, voyeuristically depicting acts of cruelty only further objectifies victims. George Miller and Margaret Sixel understand this.
Similarly, George Miller made a point of using telling his videographers to use camera angels that focused on the action of the scene, instead of voyeristically zooming in the female castmember’s breasts/asses/legs – because he understood that when the camera ogles the female characters in an objectifying manner, the audience, who views the movie through the camera’s lens, is forced to ogle and objectify. George understood that sexist camera work creates a sexist perspective, and a sexist perspective tells a sexist narrative.
The thing is that the narrator is always sympathetic. Intimacy and familiarity breed sympathy. The audience is primed to feel sympathy for the narrator simply because they are speaking more than any other individual character.
No matter how unreliable, or morally dubious you make the narrator, they are still the hero or the story. Every villain is the hero of their own story. And when the villain is the narrator, the audience is hearing the version of the story in which the villain is the hero, and the audience is moved by that perspective.
We can give Fight Club the benefit of hte doubt and look at Fight Club as an intellectual experiment to see whether or not it’s possible to tell a story from the villain’s perspective and still denounce the villain’s actions.
But the fact is, the experiment didn’t work. It was a statistical failure. The vast majority of the audience did not recognize the film as a criticism of toxic masculinity, but rather, a romanticization of it.
Perhaps the author’s goal was for Tyler Durden’s death to be interpreted as a cautionary tale, but the author failed in that goal. He failed. Because by the time Tyler Durden dies in the movie, he has already been painted a hero in the eyes of the majority of the audience, and heroes don’t become cautionary tales when they die; they become martyrs.
quoting my favorite part:
Yet editor Margaret Sixel had the SHEER BRILLIANCE and AUDACITY to cut all the footage of misogynist violence out of the movie.
Mad Max: Fury Road proved that it is possible to denounce misogynist violence without depicting it.
Mad Max: Fury Road showed that refusal to depict misogynist violence is in and of itself a denouncement of misogynist violence.
And speaking of gross bros thinking of nerd girls like fucking unicorns…
I was actually talking to a female client once about cannon-fannon and how much I love listening to her talk comics, and had a male client interupt us to tell me he has never met a chick that is into comics before, he’s never even heard of a girl being into comics before, and he has always wanted a nerdy girlfriend and that i absolutely MUST give him her number.
I actually had to explain to him that I wasn’t joking when I said she was out of his league. Yes, she is incredible, she is beautiful, she is intelligent, successful, highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about comics, and she’s also not even going to look twice at you because literally all you got is that she fulfills a fantasy of yours.
Yes bro i get it, she’s your ideal girl. Trust me, she’s a lot of people’s ideal girl. And you’re not even on her radar. You’re not special because you’re into comics. She has a very wide range of potential partners to choose from and ‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women. Or zero women have trusted your creepy ass with the knowledge that they are into comics.
The most concerning part of that entire conversation was his complete inability to grasp the concept that she wouldn’t date him and his insistence that she would.
He insisted that I give her name/number/fb/actually call her and ask her to come to the studio (wtffff???) because he needed to meet her. And then just could not fathom that I refused. He seemed to be running on this idea that if she met him, she would like him. For no other reason than that he was into comics and he wanted a nerd girlfriend.
And I was somehow out of line for refusing to give my best freinds deets to this creepy nerdbro because I couldn’t possibly know that she wouldn’t be into him.
He got really upset.
He was in my studio for 45 mins arguing with me on and off about this and trying to push me into giving her number.
Out. Of. Your. League. Not on your level. Too fucking good for you. Not a possibility. You’ve got nothing she wants. You’re one of literally thousands who would want her. You have nothing to offer her. You tick zero of her boxes. You do not even meet the minimum requirements for me to even ask her.
NOT
HAPPENING
MATE.
This is why women don’t say they’re women in WoW, this is why women don’t say they’re into games irl. This is why women don’t hang out in comics stores. This is why nerd women hide one of these two aspects of themselves when interacting with nerd men.
Because you creepy as FUCK about us.
‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women.
