Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities
Here's an anecdote for y'all, possibly apropos of nothing...
At this point anyone in this thread knows I weigh in heavy on the Feminist team. Adamantly and vocally.
I also, however, once ran one of the most historically accurate Renaissance Faire Actor's Guilds in California.
Which put me on the horns of a dilemma... how to make playing a historically accurate woman at Faire NOT suck.
I ended up giving the direction for the "Proper" women over to my costume director, and the Camp Followers (Dubh Challie "Black Wives") over to my co-guildmistress, but getting past the "But we want to really FIGHT" point was always heartbreaking. And never stopped participation at guild events, after hours, or at what I used to call out "Pagan Summer camp". Actually, designing cool looking, practical leather-wear for running around in the woods and whacking each other with wooden swords is how my business got started, because period-accurate women's clothes aren't great for such, and I was trying to find good looking, but practical outfits. Amusingly enough, a lot of my designs are compared to the costumes from Xena, because we worked up from essentially the same core principles. Eventually, we sat down and figured out good period appropriate ways to integrate the women into choreographed fights (Camp raids, for instance, rather than pitched battles), which led to some of our most gruesome effects... like the cauldron of "Boiling" soup in the face (dry ice supplied the bubbles... cold supplied the shock... the poor guy would'a done better with boiling water I think, after fighting in a full mail coat in Fresno heat...), or the lass driving off the assailant who tore her bodice-laces with sweeps from a full sized, dual sned scythe. And Brush-hooks are no joke either....
Honestly, playing historically accurate games may have helped us come up with ways around the social rules of the day we were portraying, rather than just ignoring them as inconvenient, as so many do.
Just felt like sharing that. Rum, eh?