23-year-old British female chess twitch streamer lularobs (Tallulah Roberts) reported several incidents of harassment during her first international event, the Reykjavik Open.
23-year-old British female chess twitch streamer lularobs (Tallulah Roberts) reported several incidents of harassment during her first international event, the Reykjavik Open.
20 comments
I’m just here to point out that the article mistakenly calls Jersey a part of the UK.
As a woman who has attended a few “geeky” events in her past this, sadly, comes as absolutely no surprise to me.
The way women are treated from within the community is essentially a barrier to entry in TCG, tabletop and competitive gaming settings, and this is a direct contributor to these being male dominated hobbies and spaces. And it sounds like chess has these problems too.
Her accounts are all so depressingly familiar.
I am not saying that this is not due to her sex but it happens to male players, too.
Especially, when someone who is perceived to be far weaker spanks the player ranked much higher.
Heck, there were similar shenanigans even during the Spasky Fischer games
its very bad behavior, but is this specifically because of her gender?
I have a working theory that abusers start small and gain confidence, leading to more serious forms of harassment, if they are not stopped. So while this might look like fairly minor forms of harassment, putting a stop to it now could stop these people carrying on and possibly inflicting more serious forms of abuse. So well done to Tallulah Roberts for taking a stand.
I see Chess players are pretty left of centre when it comes to politics…..this is pretty shocking to read at how pathetic chess players can be.
Unsurprising. I’m a geek who happened to born female. I’ve been gaming since before I left nursery school. I can’t remember a time since I haven’t had a board splayed out in front of me, or a controller in my hand, but what I can remember is around the time puberty began to slap, I suddenly found myself gated out of the community I’d been a participant of since I was a toddler, by sweaty little boys whose first gaming experience was limited to Avp2 and Battlefield.
Hands up how many women here still actively use voice chat in online video games? You should share what has been your incidence of harassment in VC, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of stories. You show yours I’ll show you mine.
The more “geeky” environments are breeding grounds for “Incels” and “nice guys”.
It says more about society’s obsession with sexual gratification and objectification.
Let’s not kid ourselves, we see it all over Reddit too.
I’ve been an avid gamer and active on gaming forums for a long time and I must say the gaming community is full of strange little men. Just check out a few gaming subs on Reddit. Never leaving the house other than to go to streaming/gaming cons probably doesn’t help.
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Being a Twitch streamer probably won’t help either. There’s such a culture of women streamers as sexual objects on twitch that violate rules, but they allow because it makes them so much money (like hot tub streams) I’m not surprised if some people who watch Twitch think she’s supposed to be eye candy for chess players and that she’s there for their gratification. Chat in some streams can get genuinely worrying to read sometimes.
In no way is that her fault though, she just wants to stream chess games and bring attention to the sport she enjoys, and being from ‘nerdy’ hobby circles like this myself when I was younger there’s always been the odd few that just don’t know how to interact with women without being inappropriate, but Twitch as a platform has probably made at least some to think its ok even in the real world.
Unfortunately those traditionally more nerdy hobbies will likely attract more socially challenged people. Ofc women exp this everywhere but its kind of weird when its like theyve never seen a girl before.
We went to one ages ago and left because my gf was just uncomfortable with groups of men stopping turning and staring, like a western saloon.
She said its different where other women are there and its a kind of way she’s experienced countless times, but to be the only one with that amount of staring was just too much
A quick glance down the page, and the number of hidden comments depressingly demonstrates why this is still an issue.
I’m a man, but have attended many geeky events with my wife and women friends – ComicCons, collector events, tabletops and others. Every single one of them has a story from these, ranging from someone following them around the venue to oggle (this one is super fucking common), to groping, to outright aggression at them being in that space.
As someone who is super geeky themselves I would absolutely love to defend the communities, and for a good majority I can, but the amount of open harassment I’ve seen in these spaces is almost certainly far more widespread than in other hobby areas I’ve attended. A couple of good posts as to why elsewhere in the thread, but it’s so depressing.
It sounds all too familiar, apart from the bit about being a decent chess player. 😅
I have been gaming since before I could walk. I’d play anything from the Sims and Stardew Valley to Dark Souls, Wolfenstein, Quake, LA Noire, Fifa and Skyrim. My interests have always been very diverse. Most recently I have been on a Minecraft server with my friends.
But online gaming? I don’t do that anymore. Not when there’s voicechat. On forums and reddit boards you constantly get unwanted messages, either from Nice Guys or from dudes who want you to know you’re not a “real gamer”™. I sometimes get messages from dudes who claim I lie about playing certain games for male attention, and that I am not a real gamer because “animal crossing doesn’t count” (bitch I don’t even like animal crossing).
My boyfriend is always very surprised by this, as he always wanted to be with a girl who plays games too. He thinks to most men it should be appealing, and I guess it probably is. But there are some d*ckweeds who think gaming is an exclusively male space that is being invaded by the wamz.
Sad.
> Myself (sic) + other female players were consistently disrespected by a minority of men at the tournament.
sounds like normal life unfortunately. I knew a strong player who took it badly ‘cos he was beaten by a kid, although the kid was already rated as high as he was.
I imagine there is a lot of pent up sexual aggression at places like chess tournaments
It’s awfully common in nerdy communities, my SO doesn’t go anywhere Warhammer World for the express reason that the place basically exudes “Women not Welcome”.
This is so sad. As a self confessed nerd I had hoped that we were better than this.
its horrible – but on the flipside- its great PR – watch her subscribers grow
Wow sounds like Iceland has some work to do.