Dan Matthews, one of the owners of the Girls of CS, emailed me shortly after we wrote about his clan dedicated to tearing down sterotypes through gaming and nude pinups. Matthew asked is he could respond to the post and I invited him to write up a full reply for posting on Kotaku.

Today he emailed to say he decided to just post his reply over on Wonderland, where dear Alice had originally unearthed the GoCS site.

I've posted his in-forum reply on the jump, but I want to add that one of the female gamers also emailed to point out that female gamers do exist. I think we all have that figured out, so posing in the nude, while edifying, may not be exactly necessary as proof.

I don't mind that a site like GirlsofCS exists, but I do mind that they try to hide behind the whole "tearing down stereotypes." If you want to have hot gamers post nude on the site, go for it, just don't tell us it's about empowerment.

To anyone interested,

I am one of the owners and founders of both LANFusion and GirlsofCS. I have read some very interesting observations on both this blog, and the other blog listed above. I'm going to take this opportunity to try to give you all insight into why we're doing this and what we hope to accomplish. I probably won't respond again because my time is completely absorbed by running my businesses.

For starters, this website is owned and operated by three of us. We're all guys and our ages are 21, 24 and 25. We don't have a lot of money and there are no corporate backers. Everything we do is done by and paid for by the three of us. We run all of our businesses out of our home.

We started LANFusion in January of 2005 because we were unhappy with the communities and servers that already existed in CS:S. Our servers quickly grew and are some of the most popular CS:S servers in the country. We set out to build a more mature and friendly environment for fellow gamers, a task which has been a constant struggle. One of the things we noticed as our servers grew was that every time a girl came to play, people would give them all sorts of shit. Stereotypes, such as "girls don't play video games unless they're fat ugly losers" and "Girls don't play, it must be a 12 year old boy!!!11!11!" appeared very quickly. We came up with a way that we might be able to reverse the trend.

We figured that community would be the key to reversing the stereotypes. Female gamers aren't real to the people making these statements. I've seen some of these sentiments echoed in the comments on both blogs. We believe that we can alter these stereotypes by showing everyone the reality. They will come to the site, most likely, to for naked girls. That is actually part of the plan. Our goal at that point is to get them to stay because they see that the models are real people. Upon talking to the models, they actually self-alter their perception. All of a sudden it's reality that real girls do play video games. Furthermore, a good number of girls who play these games are hot and aren't idiots. They're people that the member can see themselves being with and being friends with. Reach enough people like this and all of a sudden the perception has been changed.

Along the way, I expect that there will be flaming and disagreement. Those are the people who don't have to participate, and probably won't. I can't change people's views, but I can put a situation in front of them that forces them to unconsciously reconsider those views.

The obvious next conclusion, as many of you have pointed out, is that we will create another stereotype. It will take the form of "all girls who play games are cam whores". There are a number of problems that come along with this statement. The perception that women who post nude are whores is outdated and hypocritical. Men can get nude without any sort of public reaction, but when a woman does it, she's a whore. This is a perception that comes out of a number of different things. We've all been taught our whole lives that our bodies are something to be ashamed of. Women get the worst of this idiocy.

The USA is very primitive when it comes to things like this. In a lot of other countries around the world, nudity is not automatically shunned. We happen to be way behind the curve here in the US. Nudity is only negative when it objectifies the subject, in my opinion. What constitutes objectification is something that is defined on both a societal and personal level. The actual definition of objectify is below (found at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=objectification):

ob jec ti fy - 1. To present or regard as an object: "Because we have objectified animals, we are able to treat them impersonally" (Barry Lopez).

Everyone involved with this project, from the three of us who own the business to the models who are posing, agree that this website is not objectifying the models. We encourage and insist in the contract they sign that the models be an active part of the community. We also screen each model until we are comfortable both that they are part of this because of the idea, not the money they receive, and that they have no problems with having nude images of themselves posted on a website. If the potential model likes the idea, but does not want to be naked for the site, we invite them to be part of the community anyway. If this is objectification, then it is objectification by the user, not the website. As I said above, I cannot force someone to change their opinion, only present them with a situation that forces them to reconsider it.

I invite you all to check out the website once it launches and see what we're about before deciding that what we're doing is a bad thing. We're currently in beta while we upgrade features of the site and get more models. The myspace page is run by one of our main models, Hillary, and is designed to spread the word and find women who are interested in being a part of the site. Once we feel that we've built the community we're trying to create, the site will launch fully.

I hope this has helped clarify what we're doing to all of you. I completely respect your right to disagree with anything that I've written. Only conversation can change the reality of our individual societies and world.

Girl Gamers in the nuddy? [Wonderland]

Send an email to the author of this post at editor@kotaku.com.