Subject: Girls in Magic! Date: Mon, 06 Jul 1998 16:59:45 -0400 From: Raymond Russell To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com Frank - Many interesting points have already been raising on this issue, and based on the dates of the articles I read, the storm has essentially passed at this point, but I did want to add a few thoughts of my own on the issue of girls/women in magic. While there are many separate issues here, I believe you can boil down most of it to the following two questions: 1) Why do more men than women play Magic? 2) Should more women be encouraged to play Magic? With regard to question 1, I believe there is little debate on the fact that more men DO play magic than women. While some people shout "foul" when any attempt is made to answer this question, I believe the simple fact that more men play than women shows that the hobby has a different appeal to the two genders. Otherwise, why would the discrepancy exist? This leads to the related question of why does Magic appeal more to men than women? To answer this question, you must state a difference between men and women. For those who say none exist, I return to the original fact - more men play magic than women. Unless you attempt to posit this as an example of statistical drift, there MUST be a difference. Of course, this difference could be caused either by society and/or genetics. I believe that it is a complex combination of the two. Since we do not currently have good scientific models of the brain or society, one can only speculate what the components of this mixture are. Personally, I think they are the following: A) Men are attracted to situations where they can demonstrate their superiority vs. other men. The fact that this is done to attract women is often lost somewhere along the way ( :) ). Magic, like chess, is an opportunity to do this in a fairly abstract form. B) Men enjoy the zero-sum nature of a magic game; i.e., for me to win, you have to lose. How can you prove yourself to be superior w/o this? However, there ARE ways of playing magic that do not involve this as much, and in fact my own experience has shown that women are more drawn to these kinds of games. C) Men do not fear being on the "fringe" as much as women do. Men are more naturally risk takers, and individualistic. Since Magic is a new activity which is usually made fun of by the rest of society, this tends to repel women. D) Women are attracted to situations where they can find the "alpha" males. Men with wealth. Men with power. Men with superior intellect. One would think this might cause them to be attracted to Magic games, based on the last of these criteria. However, as Cathy herself pointed out, a great deal of Magic is luck, and the ability to dedicate yourself to something which drains your money and does not improve you as a person. Women, with their superior social skills, are better able to see Magic as the major time-waster that it is and steer clear of it and the people involved. All of the statements above are generalizations, of course. But that does not make them untrue - in general. Now, on to question 2. Should more women be encouraged to play Magic? I believe the answer to this for us, the (male, in general) players, is no. Why should we? It is not particularly difficult finding opponents, and as many posters have pointed out, throwing sexual tension into a game complicates things a great deal. While the few women players who exist would probably be happy to see more women play, I think most men realize that the more women players there are, the greater the chance for wasted time and humiliation. For if you beat a woman "in a fight" you are behaving inappropriately, while if you lose to a women in a fight you are pathetic. It is a lose/lose situation. Besides, how can you prove your superiority to other men while you are fighting women? The only people that it makes sense to to get women involved is WOTC, since this would increase their sales. However, pushing the Pro-tour has had the opposite effect by increasing the competition and visibility. I believe this was a mistake on the part of WOTC, but sometimes mistakes are made. C'est la vie. The driver behind all of these arguments is that we have evolved to be efficient reproductive machines. Everything else is window dressing. Sexual selection remains the most powerful force in human evolution, not natural selection. All of this said, I would like to add that I'm sure that women are just as capable of doing well at Magic as men, if they so desired. However, for the most part, they do not. Raymond Russell, PhD.