The unicorn thing... Are you treated well and they give you food and affection, or do they want to capture you and put you in a zoo? (to be consistent with the unicorn analogy)

It's more like if you found one in the wild and just stare at it and can't believe it exists. This behavior from male gamers is usually punctuated by being asked my age, when that age is given they finally come to the possible theory that I'm a female and the discovery of which will make their scientific career and then denial that I'm a woman like I'm lying.

Ok, I see what you mean. And to a certain degree, I might be guilty of that as well. I am in my mid 20s now, and grew up with gaming being very male dominated. And it definitely still is. The SNES was my first console. So, the only association I had with higher pitched voices for quite some time, were the so called 10 year old Squeakers in CoD. Thus, when I met the first female gamer online, I was a bit shocked tbh. Females weren't part of the gaming subculture for 10s of years. None of my RL female friends were truly interested in gaming back then either. At best something like Mario Kart. Now, this happened some 10 years ago and the gaming world finally starts to welcome female gamers outside of games like "The Sims". I'm also not confused anymore when I find a female gamer, I much rather think that it's pretty cool most of the time. The thing that confuses me nowadays, is much rather that a lot people still don't know that girls/women play video-games as well.

Personally I feel the reason why women playing video games isn't believed is because for people like me I used to never use a mic or the female game model because I didn't want to be harassed. This means that plenty of women are silent players or play with different character models. Sometimes I still play male models if I find the female models too sexist. I mean I've got no interest in my characters bits and pieces hanging out. The mics don't really help the age issue as they do make the two groups sound similar. It's just annoying that when I tell people I'm in my twenties they first deny it and assume I'm lying rather than I'm just female. He important this is that you realized there are women playing. As recently as less than a month ago some people joined a party I was in and after asking my age, refused to believe it, and then treated me like it was some sort of genetic mutation that I was a female. It's the sad truth of gaming when you're female. But sometimes I join groups and they don't even bat an eye about my gender and I play and they treat me the same as everyone else. Things are changing but because some people don't there's still challenges for girl gamers.