Purity at the Gates

Once again it's time for my annual blog post! Welcome friends, enemies, and frienemies alike as I type vigorously at you, challenging your sensibilities, comfort zones, and the depth of your lexicon! I'm also going to post some really stupid shit as usual, so there's that!

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Back on task, today's topic is one which infuriates me to no end: Gatekeepers and Purity tests. As always, let us define our words so we're on the same page. The first word of the day is Gatekeeper, and the definitions, compliments to dictionary.com, are as followed:

Gatekeeper: noun

1. a person in charge of a gate, usually to identify, count, supervise, etc., the traffic or flow through it.
2. guardian; monitor:
   

Either definition will work for us today. When I mention gatekeepers, I am referring to them in a social and cultural sense. You know those people: the vocal people who attempt to safeguard their social and political cultures from "Outsiders." Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with protecting your personal and cultural spheres from those who wish to do them harm. More often than not, however, gatekeepers aren't so noble. Not only does unnecessary gate-keeping prevent many socially inclined phenomena from growing and gaining the people such phenomena need to remain sustainable, but it also acts to portray said phenomena in a negative light.

I get it. It's cool to be a part of something special that idiots can't ruin, and most people are idiots. Sometimes special information needs to be safeguarded. That's why secret societies, sorcerers, and intelligence agencies work in secrecy, have special membership rules and require a level of discretion that keeps their memberships low. But we're talking about social and political phenomena here, where the information is LARGELY public. This means that gatekeepers are attempting to hold a monopoly on public and readily available knowledge for no reason but to stroke their own fragile egos and to exert a irrelevant sense of power over others.

Now where have I heard of that before....

This is where Purity Tests come in. There's not a good web definition here so I'm just going to explain it to you in the best way I can. A Purity test is basically a challenge to a person's ability to exist in a sphere in which a gatekeeper wishes to refuse membership. I'll give an example in the community I want to focus primarily on: the Gaming Community.

Imagine that you're a young woman who's played video games all your life. You've had every Nintendo system known to man. You like Mario games and have played most of them. You're talking to guy and he says to you. "Oh you like Mario, huh? Well did you ever play Hotel Mario on the CDi? If you like Mario so much, what is his top run speed in Kilometers? I bet you didn't even know that The US Super Mario Brothers 2 was actually a game called Doki Doki Panic because the original Super Mario Brothers 2 was too hard for American Gamers!"

"I bet you don't even know how big Mario's dick is. NO WAIT!"

Isn't that stupid? Is that not the stupidest thing you've read today? (Trump's still president, so probably not). But that's how people are! How would you feel if every time you tried to buy something from a store you had to pass a fucking test about who invented it and how many child laborers died making it?

There is a very thin line between gate-keeping and cultural appropriation. There are plenty of people who wish to exploit and appropriate social and cultural spheres for their own gain. There needs to be some level respect and appreciation for cultural phenomena. It's one thing to be upset that you were denied a job for wearing a particular hairstyle normal within your culture while the media proclaims it as a "new" fashion trend. But it's another to claim I can't I have an opinion about a comic book movie without reading every fucking comic book ever released about that character.

No amount of comic reading will make this look any less stupid.

This is especially bad for women who attempt to enjoy gaming. Until recently, society as a whole frowned upon comics and gaming, and women, making up more than half of society, may have participated in the frowning. But I haven't seen any handsome male twitch streamers being shit on and being told they are not real gamers because they are too handsome. I mean, heaven forbid a woman to actually have breasts while she's streaming Outlast. I know there are so called "tit streamers" who take advantage of their racks to get more followers. You may think she's taking viewership away from "real" gamers, but if you want to get more followers than a buxom Red Dead player, perhaps do better than going 0-12 as Position 3 in a game of DotA, Doug. No one wants to see you feed.

The real problem, in my opinion, with gate-keeping, especially in the gaming community, is that it doesn't strive to make the community better. It would be something different if gate keepers were trying to reduce the amount of controversy and toxicity, but more often than not, it's to preserve it. People act like being verbally harassed in a Call of Duty match is some kind of right of passage for being a "true" gamer. I for one, am sure that being called a nigger because I decided not to suicide with you into a group of enemies does not enhance anyone's gameplay experience. I am certainly sure that women do not enjoy the lewd comments they receive for having a lighter voice-box and DARING to use the game-provided voice chat. I mean how dare they?

The best way to combat gate-keeping is to realize that our communities are what we make of them, and that we are not shaped by our communities, but the opposite. Our communities are stronger with heterogeneity, otherwise, we just get more of the same and nothing ever changes or grows.