Sexism in Asia is the real reason IeSF decided on gender-separate tournaments

The gaming world recently gotten all flustered over the now-retracted International e-Sports Federation (IeSF) ruling that a certain IeSF-sanctioned Hearthstone tournament could have a no-girls-allowed rule. Words like “unfair”, “fucked up”, “sexist”, and “discriminatory” were thrown around until IeSF put its hands up and said, okay, the people are right, the tournaments need to allow women to compete against men.

Although the ruling has since been overturned, the sting of sexism still remains. Ask any female gamer from the Western world and I’m sure they are going to tell you that the IeSF did women in gaming a bad turn. We’re equal to men in gaming, they’ll say. We can do anything as well as they can.

As a female gamer myself, I agree. But as a female gamer in Asia, here’s what I think: you guys and girls in the West have no idea what you’re talking about.

What it’s really like being a woman in Asia

Although an international organization, the IeSF is based in Korea. Korea is an Asian country. And every corner of Asia has a patriarchal culture it looks like people in the West aren’t even aware of.

Let’s take a look at this mock conversation a commenter on the IeSF Facebook page thought up:

It sounds so absurd it’s funny, and 29 people had found it amusing at the time of writing this. It is funny if you’re brought up in the West. But if you’ve grown up in Asia, you’ll just see that it’s painfully and uncomfortably true.

I’ve been lucky enough to have grown up in cosmopolitan Singapore, where the East meets the West, but it’s still in Asia. Even though both my parents are well-travelled and work in multinational companies, they didn’t allow me to stay out late or spend nights out with my co-ed class when I was younger, and they still frown on me spending nights with my long-term boyfriend. I stopped listening to them once I turned 21, but these behavioural expectations have been schooled very hard into my upbringing, and it took a while to stop feeling guilty for spending private time with my significant other.

It’s not just me or my family. There are still women today in Asia who believe you cannot wash female underwear in the same water as men’s clothes. In the Philippines and in Singapore, female undergarments can’t be left where men can see them. I feel a pang of guilt each time I share a photo on social media with a bra hung in the background.

You can’t even see the full bra and I felt bad.

Social rules like these are strong and rarely broken. Granted, this is changing as the world gets more globalized, but even in very Westernized households, old-fashioned gender roles and beliefs still come into play. My Philippine colleague, Xairylle, is the breadwinner of her family, and shares that both she and her husband receive a lot of flak because of that.

Women are simply expected to have dinner ready on the table, or at least to buy some back home. Men are the ones who fix your Ikea furniture and leaking taps, and bring home the dough. Even in matriarchal cultures—Peranakan culture, for instance—the matriarch still bends over backwards to keep the men in the household happy, even if it means cooking entire extra dishes at mealtimes just for them.