A few days ago, Halo Infinite streamer Grenade Queen revealed some of the disgusting behavior she has to deal with while playing Halo Infinite. Her team was losing, and rather than accept the fact that the other team was just a little bit better than they were, the male members of Grenade Queen's team decided to instead blame the lone female player as the source of their failure.
"Get the f--k off of Halo," one mindless cretin said, while another chimed in with "yeah, this is not for you." Another noted how "Master Chief is never a woman," while one of the earlier misogynists demanded to see Grenade Queen's breasts.
As a brief aside, there is at least one good point in this sea of toxic masculinity. Why isn’t there a female Master Chief? Halo really should take a page out of Mass Effect and make male and female versions of Master Chief.
To many of you, and especially to too many women, this sort of toxicity is all too common. It's also too often ignored. However, Grenade Queen's stream seems to have struck a chord with Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley, who responded to the video with a call to action on Twitter (with thanks to VG247).
"This wasn’t the future for Xbox Live we envisioned,” Blackley responded. “As a community and with the help of Microsoft this needs to be highlighted and stopped. It will take teamwork between players, devs, and console manufacturers to change this and it’s time. It’s past time."
Blackley went on to say he understood the anger here because "nothing has been done for a long time." But rather than just acknowledge that anger and then shrug as has so often happened in the past, Blackley actually told another Twitter user what first needs to happen to clean up Xbox Live.
"First we need Xbox and Microsoft to openly talk about it and address it as a problem. It limits the audience and impacts their profits. It’s morally wrong," Blackley explained. "And it’s something they can show leadership on by working in good faith."
Blackley's strategy here is probably the right one. Too often, ideas that create toxic masculinity trickle down from the top, so getting the people in charge to take a more active role in combating that toxicity is the best way forward.