Woman’s Counter-Strike. Let’s get it out of the way now: there are no rules stopping
women from playing in Counter-Strike events. The reason they don’t, is because they don’t
qualify. Simply: they aren’t good enough. The not-so-simple is why that is.
A big part of it could be because fewer women play the game, so it’s to be expected that
fewer ascend to ‘pro tier’. But then we have to ask the question: why do fewer women
play the game in the first place? Is this nature? Is it nurture? Possibly a bit of both?
Are guys wired to be more competitive? More aggressive? Does this translate to an advantage?
I’m sure everybody’s got their own theories about this.
Whatever the reasons, the burden will always be on the women in the scene to prove that
they can keep up with their male counterparts. But the rest of us can do our bit by ensuring
we don’t put up artificial barriers, or to make it about anything other than their
Counter-Striking ability. And right now, there ARE barriers. You probably
haven’t seen them. I know I hadn’t. Until I had.
I have to admit, my experience of being a woman in Counter-Strike is very limited. Personally,
the most alarming moment for me and when I discovered there was a problem was back in
2015 when I was watching VeXXSie playing a match and out of nowhere, other people on
the server broke their match-long silence simply to post sexist things to her. Not to
do with her Counter-Striking ability, nothing to do with anything about the game being played.
Things were posted, simply because she was a woman. And still is. And these comments
were so STUPID, so thoughtless, and served no purpose other than to belittle her, or
to make her angry or upset. I couldn’t believe that there were players who, upon encountering
a woman in a match, would immediately jump to such mindless, sexist abuse for no apparent
reason. I don’t think VeXXSie was even paying attention
to these, but when I spoke with her about it afterwards, she told me it was fairly normal
to receive that kind of treatment in the game. And I was horrified by this- and has changed
how I’ve perceived the game ever since. A lot of people meming about ‘female CS’
are probably equally oblivious about this. Because, being a guy, I don’t receive this
kind of abuse. I wasn’t even aware that this was a thing, because it had never crossed
my mind before to insult somebody in a match just because they were a woman. For all I
knew, I could have played a thousand matches with and against a thousand people who would
have abused me, had only I been a woman.
‘Freaking… kitchen. She got the lowest ADR on the team and… she’s falmering on
top. She’s fading so much. How can you get 17 kills?’
‘I did that really cool clutch. Did you not remember… the cool… 3 k?’
‘You’re fin like an emo girl. You’re franking… you girl playing videogames? Go..
blkghnlhophoj’ ‘That’s a bit sexist, you know?’
‘Just trying to play CS!’ ‘fralking ho! Sell yer ferking pussy somewhere.
Don’t care. Go to the kitchen, shut the fork up and stop playing Counter Strike’
And this kind of sexism frustrates me because there are so few repercussions to those who
do it, and because I am so powerless to do anything about it. When it’s posted on social
media, I see other people trying to reassure victims of this sort of abuse that the nasty
comments just come from players who are bad, or jealous, or that it’s great the women
can laugh it off in such a positive way. It’s good there are people out there to support
them, but that just isn’t good enough. That isn’t doing anything to address the problem,
and sometimes it makes it even worse, especially when I see victim-blaming going on. Presumably
from people who are angry that it’s going on, but powerless to do anything about it
themselves, they blame the victim as an easy way of washing their hands of the situation.
Sexist abuse shouldn’t exist in the first place, and while I’m sure it’s not the
only reason, it’s a very good reason for why women don’t feel welcome in the scene.
On the face of it, Counter-Strike is the ideal platform for gender equality. It isn’t about
physical strength, which removes one of the very real advantages that men have over women
in conventional sports. And it being online, you can exist as nothing more than a nickname,
profile picture and character model in-game. People don’t know who you are, or whether
you’re male or female. Until, of course, you open your mouth to speak, which opens
you up to all sorts of abuse. Valve have taken steps to try and improve
things. Trust Factor tries to separate the worst players from the rest of us. Abusive
players eventually get auto-muted, and it’s easy to mass-block interactions with other
players on the server. However, after speaking with women about this, it’s apparent that
bad stuff still happens, particularly at lower ranks. A new trend is for people to ask for
their Only Fans page, stuff like that- with the intention being to objectify them. Bit
like when they use the phrase ‘get back to the kitchen’ as a universal response
to whatever a woman is trying to say or do. It’s demeaning. And I think there are two
sides to this- yes, the stuff they’re saying is nasty, and unwelcome. But also, you know
the people posting this abuse don’t care, probably don’t even think about it, yet
ultimately, it inflicts great damage to the female-scene.
You can say they should just ignore it. But they have to ignore it every time. And sometimes,
it gets the better of them. Kira told me about this one time on Rocket League, where simply
because her name had ‘girl’ in it, an opposing player started spamming generic,
misogynistic lines at her, over and over again, and something about this encounter was enough
for her to lose her cool. She told me she was tilted, and that she ended up saying some
things back to that person that she regrets. But it just happens sometimes, you know?
And what’s the phrase? Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. So if you see this happening
in your match, do something about it. Speak up, call out their behaviour and let the women
in your game know they have your support. It means a lot not to go it alone. Especially
when it’s still going on. Yes, you can disable profile pictures. You
can mute people, but at the end of the day, Counter-Strike is a team game and if you shut
yourself off from everybody on your team then you’re not going to play at the best of
your ability. Lucy told me she gets around this by NOT going into matches in anything
less than a pre-made team, simply to avoid the risk of encountering nasty, toxic behaviour.
Which it might do- but requiring a 5-stack puts up yet another barrier for women trying
to play the game. She told me she doesn’t feel anger- only
hurt, and disappointment towards the people responsible. She knows it’s the internet,
and that there are no repercussions for this kind of behaviour. Sure, she reports those
people for verbal abuse, but it doesn’t feel like it makes a great deal of difference.
When making this video, I tried to look up past discussions about this on reddit to get
a feel for how the community feels about this, but I just stumbled across posts making fun
of the female scene. Likening pro woman CS to low-rank play, another being upvoted for
suggesting they remove woman-only events completely. And this just seems backwards to me.
And I think could even be making the problem worse! Aby thinks that the ‘female cs’
meme is taken literally by some players, who use it to justify their attacks on the female
players that they meet. Even when in a ranked game, they look down on their female peers,
and set out to put them down. Essentially gatekeeping the higher tiers of Counter-Strike
from anybody other than other men. So if you ask me, the reason there aren’t
top female players in Counter-Strike comes down to a lot of reasons, which when combined,
CAN make a big difference. They do get more abuse. This will make them less likely to
play, or will force them to play in a way where they can’t perform optimally. And
even if they have the ability to become the best… do they even want to, in a scene that
dismisses and belittles them every step of the way? Where every misstep at every level
is turned into a meme that’s upvoted on every mainstream internet platform? And this
is on top of all of the challenges that men already face when trying to go -and to remain-
pro. Female player models were added to the game
recently. And this meant a lot to the women I spoke with. For Kira, it was exciting to
finally be able to play as a character which kind of resembled herself! It wasn’t like
she expected them to be added, though did mention that she missed the character selection
feature that was in earlier Counter-Strike games. For her, a lot of gaming’s appeal
is about being able to roleplay a character. Not necessarily one that’s her- more like
one that’s her idealised version of her, without real-life restrictions and limits.
It is gaming, after all. And the inclusion of a woman character wasn’t so much adding
women for the sake of it, so much as it was about addressing an odd omission which had
been overlooked for years. For a game to have such a range of character models, but for
them all to be for just one of the sexes. Imagine if there were only female characters
to choose from- it would seem like such a glaring omission to not have at least one
male model. You know, just because. Lucy told me the same- she was also really
excited when woman player models were added to the game, and pointed out the resistance
these things receive when they’re first rolled out. Battlefield 5’s female agents
were a prime example. Counter-Strike’s were more warmly received. She says the first was
met with some edgy comments, but now there’s half a dozen or so, it’s becoming accepted,
and she sees people using both. So while some players might not have cared, these character
models broke down one of those little barriers that many of us never even noticed existed.
And it might have been a bigger barrier than I thought. Kira told me she considers Battlefield
5 to be inferior to Battlefield 4 in many areas, yet still enjoys 5 more because it
has such cool character customisation features. She told me she would love for Counter-Strike
to give you base ‘guy’ and ‘girl’ skins so that you don’t have to pay money
to play as a woman, and then for the game to add customisation in the form of cosmetics.
Maybe even introduce hats! How else could Counter-Strike encourage women
to play it? Lucy thinks that RIOT have done a great job with Valorant in the form of the
‘Gamechangers events’, which is a series of top tournaments with large prize pools,
for female gamers, with the goal being to build a ‘champions tour that better represents
the diversity of their community’. Indeed, she told me that a lot of women have
already left Counter-Strike because there are more opportunities for them elsewhere.
And this isn’t just happening to the players- she tells me that women are mostly hired on
as hosts or as interviewers, and says how disappointed she is when a major is announced
with only male talent. This is an esport. People watch it. And we’re alienating half
our potential viewership by having so few women represent it! It doesn’t send a great
message when all of the people on stage are men, as was the case with PGL recently until
they added Freya to the roster. So this is why I see the value to woman-only
events, like the recently announced ESL Women’s CS:GO circuit, which was actually the reason
for me making this video, as I scrolled down the responses to it and saw hundreds of bitter
comments from people claiming that it’s unfair.
‘Why should women have a women-only league? One where they can earn more, while playing
at a lower level than in an open tournament?’ Hopefully, this video has given you some reasons
for why it should exist, and why it’s good for Counter-Strike if it wants to remain a
dominant esport. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need women-only
events. But rather than seeing them as being the problem, see them as a product of a problem
that needs to be fixed. And in the absence of any better solutions, I suggest we go along
with it. My idea would be that we all pretend to be women, firstly to dilute the abuse down,
and secondly, to get a better understanding, first-hand, of how abusive an environment
Counter-Strike can be. Finally, I found this post. She was shown
beating her enemies. She was a woman. And she only had one hand. Indeed, she of all
people has had to overcome many barriers to achieve what she has in the game. After so
many Female CS memes, how do you think the community responded to this?
The top comment: ‘Gender is irrelevant’.