Spoiler:

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: articles about gender issues in Magic, and specifically community responses to those articles, are miserable at best, and I hate them. That said, I can't stop myself from writing this. I feel too strongly about these topics and become too outraged reading about them to stay silent.

There is a problem with gender in Magic. The numbers are simple. According to Hasbro's market research, over a third of Magic players are women, yet you can count the number of women at any given Pro Tour on one hand. With two to five fingers cut off. That's a hell of a conversion rate.

So why is that? Magic has plenty of female players, but those that choose to play competitively are a statistical anomaly. Some would choose to simplify it down to something along the lines of "women aren't interested in competition", which is horribly misguided and frankly offensive. The problem doesn't lie with them, but rather with the men that compose the community and our extremely passive attitude towards the issue.

I was deeply infuriated by the community response towards the Zach Jesse issue. The comments on Reddit and Twitter were dismissive at best, and glorifying rape culture at their worst. Slippery slope fallacies were everywhere, and, as usual, we seemed more interested in talking about absurd hypotheticals and screening players for felonies rather than discussing the matter at hand. Nobody talked about the people who actually matter in the case of rape: the victims. The community was more interested in championing Zach's response post aggrandizing himself as a person than they were discussing the impact of the situation on people with PTSD.

I should add a disclaimer - despite his heinous history, Zach is currently a pretty reasonable and non-threatening individual from what I can tell. This really isn't about him. I don’t really care if he’s banned or not. He’s a violent criminal, and it’s up to Wizards to decide how they want to deal with it. I do commend them for, in some way, dealing with it. The reality of the situation from their perspective is that it looks very, very bad for them to have a convicted rapist playing on the Pro(motional) Tour. The community freaking out on them for making a fairly reasonable decision is pretty absurd.

What really drove me off the hook was standing in line for Starbucks at GP Charlotte and overhearing a conversation about Zach in the lineup behind me. One player was talking about how cool Zach's deck was - which it is - while another commented that it was the guy who made Twitter explode because of the whole rape thing. Another guy commented that it was probably a load of crap, and that the girl probably didn't want to press charges against him anyways, as she was probably lying. I was already on full life tilt from losing my win-and-in for top 8, but this drove me insane. I'd seen this kind of behaviour on the Internet, but in person? In my community?

The conclusion is pretty simple. Magic desperately needs some feminism.

I can see some of you being upset already. Calm down, and put your fedoras away. I’m not demanding that you start a social justice blog and study up on otherkin pronouns. You don’t have to start writing angry notes on Tumblr whenever Marvel casts a white male actor, and you definitely don’t have to write any fanfictions based on your headcanons. All you need to do is have some humility and respect.

One of the big issues that modern feminism focuses on is fighting against rape culture - the idea that our behaviours and speech passively trivialize the act of rape. Victim blaming, denial of the act, trivialization of the consequences… these are all things that widely took place as a part of the community response to the scandal. As a group, we say and do things that implicitly cause people to commit violent sex crimes. Then we wonder why the victims of those sex crimes don’t feel welcome in our community. Are we dense?