One thing I have noticed about LARP are there are often two attitudes to it.
One is ‘game’ focussed – the players that see it as just that – a game.
The other is composed of participants who see it more as an ‘experience’ rather than a ‘game’ in the classic sense.

Certainly I have no shame in admitting I am in the latter category, I have little interest in game theory, I am far more interested in atmosphere and story and, while I applaud an ingenious game mechanic, I frankly find the ‘gamey’ aspects of LARP to be jarring and tend to spoil the wonderful atmosphere and plot that can develop.

I think because of this, and because I tend to associate with people of that inclination, I see less of the overt sexism when I am at LARP. Indeed, I am a professional entertainer and usually only attend LARP for that purpose, these days.

The ‘gamers,’ however, tend to be more competitive, aggressive, ‘masculine,’ in fact – and many of the male-members of that crowd (because lets remember there are increasingly more women who like the ‘game’ element of LARP,) express that male sense of entitlement, and I have heard of several examples of the shocking level of aggressive sexist behaviour (with violent overtones, though almost never overt violence,) that some of my female friends, who are more into the ‘game’ of LARP, have experienced.

The nature of patriarchy means men often feel threatened and act aggressively if they are insecure and feel ‘lesser’ or ‘weaker’ than women and (painting broad strokes, again ;) nowhere outside of the football/rugby scene will you find a higher concentration of insecure men than in LARP.

I’m extremely sorry that that happened to you. I’d love to be able to say I’m not aware of enough very similar stories to find what you say completely believable. All I can say is that there are LARPs out there, run by both women and men with a zero tolerance attitude to anything even remotely like your experience.

Any LARP worth bothering with will have a defined policy for dealing with these sort of things, and won’t be at all bothered if someone asks what it is.

Take my experience with the Camarilla (now minds eye society or midnight dance). After a few years of being treated like a second class citizen, regulated to “girlfriend” roles even though I joined single. Ostracized when I wanted to play something not so so girly. I got the worst treatment you could ever imagine.

See I met my boyfriend there and we both played. When the SOB abused me for 4 years. Going to far as to throw me down stairs and then raped me when I broke up with him? You would think the community would react poorly to him after that? Oh hell no. Despite legal action against my attacker the organization did nothing to keep him from playing. In fact they shunned me for it.

Now almost 10 years later the entire organization is still in a healthy level of victim blaming. Imagine my surprise when I went to check it out again and the same damn people were there trying to tell me he’s the nicest guy in the world. That I need to forget about it.

My advice? Don’t Larp. Just don’t. It may be fun but unless your going to start your own ran by women who know how to deal with real issues just forget ever being treated right. And gods forbid something truly bad happens to you. Whatever it is- they will blame you for it.

Hi,

The ‘female trader’ comment was actually from North5 not myself, but I certainly did say I haven’t seen sexism in larp. And I really am very aware that my perception of it will be vastly less due to male privilege, which is why if I encountered it happening even once or twice to others I would assume it’s much more frequent than I saw.

But I’ve never seen it at all, and I spend many hours in the same room and the same conversations as the women it would happen to. Now I’m *still* going to assume there’s sexism occurring, but (in the context of a system often designed specifically to let anyone adopt any role they like without restraint) it is so rare that I don’t believe it can be associated with Larping as a whole. There will always be individuals, different behaviour in private, and subtle differences in how men treat women due to societal pressures, but for me to make such a bold statement as ‘I’ve never seen it’ means I feel I’ve put the time in and believe I would have come across some just on average if it wasn’t vanishingly rare.

So, apologies if it read as male privilege. I know Miranda has commented before about experienced ‘healer girlfriend’ syndrome and other aspects, but I was really shocked to read Ribenademon’s statements about the overt and extreme speech. Larpers are in my experience mostly a crowd of shy, polite and liberal geeks who wouldn’t tolerate those kind of comments.

We thought it would help to get our Sarah C posting on this topic as a sort of conclusion – she has crewed a number of LARP events. We had an unexpectedly lively response to the first post and we thought it’d drop the ball somewhat if the female-identified members of Team BadRep – since we are (some of) the “women in LARP” being discussed – didn’t respond ourselves. We really enjoyed both posts but really felt we’d be missing a trick not to feature women directly talking about these issues – so that’s gone live today over here, for anyone following this.

Al, when you say: ‘if I regularly found the elements you describe in a game, I just wouldn’t play it’ that’s a choice I’ve had to make quite a few times, whereas it’s probably something that hasn’t really come up for you.

That’s not to blame you guys for stuff not happening to you, that would be really unfair, I just think that in order to be the awesome feminist allies you want to be, first of all it’s really important to focus on believing the things that people tell you happen. Because as a straight, white, cis male, privilege means you won’t experience most of it.

We live in a world where we’re often told that women have it all, nothing is sexist anymore, things are all sorted out, etc, and one of the most political acts a feminist man can do is often to believe the women and other people in his life who are telling him that things are not ok.

I wanted to post some links that I thought would be helpful as well, I hope that’s allowed.
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/
http://radgeek.com/gt/2000/07/11/what_you/ – this has a really good first point, and then loads of links, as well as 2 more articles attached.