Nah. It comes down to respect for the lived experience of others. Something I learned from reading Patricia Hill Collins.
Do I have a naive understanding of feminism that says women are always oppressed by men? No, reality is much more complicated. The truth is that for most of human history, just about everybody regardless of gender was oppressed by a very small number of powerful men (and sometimes powerful women also). The hierarchies aren’t strictly linear. But generally women have had far less economic freedom while taking on more domestic responsibility, and have generally had less self determination. There are also issues that affect men more such as suicide, work related injuries. A popular one to cite here is warfare, but I wouldn’t try to measure the impact of war on men vs. on women (see wartime sexual violence, “spoils of war”, and other pillaging that happened in most warfare throughout history). Suffice it to say that war is terrible for everybody involved.
The trap all of these young people, and intellectually young people, are falling into however, is trying to apply real world mores to a roleplaying game.
In real life would I spit on somebody? I sure as hell wouldn’t without consent. It’s invasive, disrespectful, and completely immoral.
In a virtual world would I /spit on somebody? Absolutely. My WoW character is a ruthless murderer that has slain hundreds of thousands of other players, not to mention NPCs.
That doesn’t mean that feminism has no place in WoW, by any means. I’ve known women who hid their gender online to avoid harassment, and those who received horrible harassment, stalking, and abuse because they didn’t.
In retrospect, I regret bringing this up at all in this thread, because while I’ve maintained from the beginning that I don’t think this is a feminist / social justice issue, I actually don’t think Blizzard is approaching it that way either. I did at one point, simply because of the timing being highly suspicious, but at the end of the day this is all about protecting the whales who utilize the cash shop.
And if Blizzard is using the timing to try to sell the playerbase on this horrible change, then that is particularly pernicious and disingenuous.