you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Not a gamer, and my reddit post history was mainly confined to GC, but as you can see by my user name here online I often use male names or ones that don't signal my sex. This is not evidence of "internalized misogyny" but of practicality: less harassment and abuse from males for being female, more likely to have what you say taken seriously.

There are multiple reasons that when Charlotte and Elizabeth Bronte published their novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in 1847, they did so not under their names but under the pseudonyms Currer and Ellis Bell, as the novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin had previously done by adopting the pseudonym George Sand and as the novelist Mary Ann Evans would later do by publishing as George Eliot.

In our time, Joanne Rowling published the Harry Potter series as J.K. Rowling and her mystery series as Robert Galbraith.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200911-why-do-women-write-under-mens-names

IRL, it's been shown that in work-related emails and other correspondence, women are taken much more seriously and get much more positive reactions if they use either initials that don't reveal their sex, or male names.

I had a job back in the early 80s where I had to write/sign a great deal of letters to people who had written usually very disgruntled letters to the editor at a US major news publication, and I always used only my initials so no one could tell my sex. All the women in the department did; it was standard practice. This not only caused the letters we sent to complaining readers to be taken more seriously and to provoke less negative & angry reactions, it also solved the problem of men sending letters back inquiring how old we were, if we were married, if we were looking for BFs and so on.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/women-who-pretended-to-be-men-to-publish-scifi-books-5077952

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/06/catherine-nichols-female-author-male-pseudonym