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Preliminaries
First: I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT ENDORSE HARASSMENT OF ZOE QUINN OR OF ANYONE ELSE. DO NOT HARASS PEOPLE. DO NOT BE MISOGYNIST AT PEOPLE. DO NOT SEND DEATH OR RAPE THREATS TO PEOPLE. DO NOT DOX PEOPLE. Even if someone is an abuser, they are entitled to not being harassed, doxxed, or subjected to misogyny.
Second: apologism for harassment or abuse will get your comment deleted and I will consider banning you.
Third: I do not have an opinion about most Gamergate-adjacent issues, because the only video games I have played in my entire life are The Sims and a bunch of Twine games mostly themed around mental illness, transness, or transhumanist BDSM. I cannot imagine a world in which it would be reasonable for me to have an opinion (Incidentally, this game is neat and contains none of the above.) The Gamergate opinions I have are:
- Anita Sarkeesian is almost painfully liberal feminist and anyone who calls her a radical feminist needs to read more Dworkin
- “Five Guys” is a slut-shaming and misogynist joke and people should be ashamed of themselves
- Many Gamergate people are not motivated by fighting abuse, but instead by anti-feminism; notice how quickly Anita Sarkeesian got tied into the whole thing, and that she (a) is not involved in the Zoe Post (b) has never abused anyone but she is (c) a fairly prominent feminist in video gaming whom a lot of people hate for no discernible reason.
- We should all ignore Christina Hoff Sommers and hope she goes away.
- #NotYourShield certainly contains some sockpuppets, but claims that they are majority sockpuppets seem to be less motivated by evidence and more motivated by the desire to believe that no women, LGBT people, and people of color disagree with social justice.
- Gamers are probably sexist and gaming is probably an environment hostile to women, because to a first approximation everyone is sexist and every male-dominated environment is hostile to women. (Not a gamer, have no opinion about specifics of whether it is more hostile than anywhere else.)
- People need to stop Internet-diagnosing Zoe Quinn with borderline personality disorder, because I have BPD and it makes me sad.
- Please stop calling misogynists fat Aspie neckbeards. I know many fat people with Asperger’s and poor grooming habits who would never dream of being misogynist.
- I agree with Ken White, who is a very sensible human being
- and, most crucially for this post, Zoe Quinn is a textbook emotional abuser.
The Evidence
Cheating is morally wrong, but it is nonabusive. Similarly, lying to your partner is morally wrong, but absent a relationship in which you establish power and control, it is nonabusive. However, Zoe Quinn’s response to Eron Gjoni figuring out that she was cheating and lying does enter the realm of abuse.
Eron describes his relationship with Zoe in the Zoepost:
This was part of a fun little emergent two player power / head game she decided to play with me. The gist of the rules seemed to be as follows:
- If boyfriend relates observations that lead to a correct belief, girlfriend is to make up false reason to explain observations. If boyfriend backs down, girlfriend wins.
- If boyfriend doesn’t back down, and notes girlfriend’s reason conflicts with other observations, girlfriend must get angry and demand boyfriend trust her unconditionally. Boyfriend must then choose between trusting girlfriend, or trusting his own ability to so much as reason clearly.
- If boyfriend chooses to trust girlfriend, girlfriend must demand he trust her about something that contradicts something else she demands he trust her about. When boyfriend cannot possibly act in any way that doesn’t violate one of her principles or claims, girlfriend must establish he is going insane. If boyfriend succumbs to additional bouts of anxiety spent questioning his own sanity — girlfriend wins: multiply points by number of hours longest panic attack lasts.
- If boyfriend does not back down, and decides instead to trust his own ability to think clearly, girlfriend must threaten to break up with boyfriend. If boyfriend backs down, girlfriend wins.
- If boyfriend continues trusting simple reasoning, girlfriend must actually break up with boyfriend (for a period of time no shorter than 1 hour and not exceeding 2 days). If boyfriend does not bring up the subject again, girlfriend wins.
- If boyfriend does not back down, and figures that since the relationship is over, he might as well try to get the universe to make sense, girlfriend must figure out some way to break up with him *even more*. If boyfriend drops the subject, girlfriend wins. If boyfriend does not drop the subject, repeat step 6 — point multiplier for number of times step 6 is repeated until girlfriend wins.
- If boyfriend calls bullshit on the whole thing and breaks up with girlfriend, boyfriend wins. This is the only winning condition for boyfriend.
It is not normal behavior to get angry at your partner unless they believe mutually contradictory things. It is not normal behavior to convince your partner that they are going insane in order to cover up your lying and cheating. That is gaslighting, and that is abusive.
Zoe Quinn attempted to isolate her partner by demanding that he stop being friends with someone who had previously expressed romantic interest in him, even though the relationship was platonic, she had no reason to distrust Eron, and the friend was going through a hard time. The use of romantic jealousy to isolate people from their friends is a tactic of abuse. Although she did not manage to isolate Eron completely (but then they’d only been dating for a few months, give her time), the fact that she tried to do it once is a major red flag.
Furthermore, throughout the logs, Zoe engages in a repeated pattern of shifting the blame from herself to Eron. She blames her cheating on Eron not loving her; she blames her lies on Eron not trusting her immediately after he had discovered her cheating. She guilt-trips Eron when he tries to set boundaries. She constantly lies and withholds information, far beyond what would be necessary to cover up her cheating– from claiming to be tested when she hadn’t to contradicting herself about her emotions and desires. It’s important to note that, while blame-shifting, guilt-tripping, and lying and withholding are unhealthy, everyone engages in unhealthy relationship patterns sometimes, particularly when they’re angry. However, in nonabusive relationships, both partners eventually take responsibility for their part in problems, respect their partners’ boundaries without guilting them, and tell the truth before they get called on it. Zoe Quinn, on the other hand, blame-shifts continually and with no self-awareness about what she’s doing and no taking accountability.
Zoe Quinn repeatedly threatens suicide when her bad behavior is brought up and at one point attempts suicide in the middle of an argument. This is inherently abusive. That is not about mental illness: I myself am a person who sometimes becomes suicidal when people criticize me and I am speaking from a position of knowledge. No one wants to do something that makes someone they love feel suicidal. That gives suicidal people and people willing to fake suicidality a tremendous amount of power to shut down criticism, push their partner’s boundaries, and convince people not to leave them. This doesn’t mean not talking about your suicidality, not taking care of yourself, or not leaving situations that make you suicidal. It is possible to responsibly be like “this conversation is making me feel suicidal; I’d like to continue discussing it, but can we take a break for an hour?” and then seek support from someone else to get yourself in a good place. Telling your partner “I should kill myself” when they are talking about how you hurt them is not that. It is an act of abuse.
Finally, Zoe Quinn received a restraining order to keep Eron Gjoni from speaking up about his abuse, thus using the legal system to silence her victim. In her affidavit, she used Eron’s “admitted mental instability”– a self-diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder– as evidence that he was abusive, which is absurdly ableist (particularly given that people with SPD are no more likely to abuse than anyone else).
(Note that the restraining order contains disturbing allegations that Eron Gjoni has called hotels he suspected Zoe was staying at in order to dox her, an act of stalking. I have been unable to find evidence about whether these allegations are true or false and will update this post if I find any such information. If true, I consider it to be an act of abuse and harassment as well. ETA: A friend of Eron’s privately contacted me to say that a person had claimed to have met Zoe at a hotel and Eron had called the hotel to find out if Zoe had made a reservation during the time period the person claimed; however, I have no way of knowing if this is what happened.)
For further information, see the Zoe Post and this excellent video series which goes extensively through individual logs to show the patterns of Zoe’s abusive behavior.
Why Doesn’t Anyone See It?
Why the pro-Gamergate people didn’t see it seems fairly obvious to me. Early on, a lot of the discussion of Gamergate occurred on 4Chan. While 4Chan has many excellent qualities, such as such creative and abundant use of the word “fag” that “gayfag” had to be coined to refer to the ordinary homosexual, nuanced and sensitive discussion of the complexities of emotional abuse is not among them. Furthermore, the Gamergate story was taken up by prominent members of the misogynist asshole community, such as Roosh V and Vox Day, whose previous contributions to discourse around abuse include ““No” when you try to take off her panties means… “Don’t give up now!”” and “the concept of marital rape is… an attack… on the core foundation of human civilization itself“.
(#NotAllGamergaters, of course.)
So perhaps it’s not surprising that the narrative became largely “she CHEATED on her BOYFRIEND with FIVE MEN, that SLUT.” And, to their credit, many Gamergate people do seem to recognize that Zoe Quinn is emotionally abusive, although they phrase it in the traditional way of their quaint local dialect, namely, “that bitch is crazy.”
(“That bitch is crazy”, unfortunately, is a homonym, with the other meaning being “that female has needs and desires!” I never said it was a very good quaint local dialect.)
But for feminists, abuse is sort of their whole gig. So why didn’t feminists get it?
First: a lot of feminists uncritically accepted the Gamergate framing. Let’s be real, the Zoe Post is long and no one wants to read through the endless, endless logs. If what people seem to be leading with is “Zoe Quinn cheated on her boyfriend!” with a sprinkling of “Zoe Quinn is a slut!” for taste, it’s really easy as a feminist to conclude that the allegations against Zoe Quinn are nothing more than cheating and sluthood, and then to respond with “there is nothing wrong with being a slut, and whether she cheated matters primarily to her romantic partners, not to the Internet-going public.” This narrative, for obvious reasons, was supported by Zoe Quinn herself, who has an obvious interest in allowing everyone to believe the only issue was her cheating.
Second: arguments are soldiers: “once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.” People line up on the Yay Zoe Quinn and Boo Zoe Quinn sides, and the Yay Zoe Quinn side has some important points about feminism and the treatment of female game devs and maybe not calling people sluts. If you acknowledge that Quinn gaslit Gjoni and that maybe he is not just a “jilted ex”, you weaken Team Yay Zoe Quinn. Indeed, I myself have been assumed to be pro-harassment simply because I think that Quinn probably abused Gjoni. (WHICH I AM NOT. HARASSMENT IS WRONG.)
Third: people don’t take abuse of men seriously. We live in a culture in which studies of rape prevalence still consider a cis man forced into PIV sex with a woman to not be raped, in which reproductive coercion is talked about as something men do to women even though it is the only form of abuse men are more likely to suffer than women (NISVS; search for “control of reproductive or sexual health”), and in which Lundy Bancroft can characterize women abusing men as “couples where the man is the nice guy and the woman is the not-nice person” and still be heralded as an anti-abuse advocate. While feminists are better than most groups about acknowledging abuse of men, a phrase which here means “the majority of feminists at least acknowledge it can happen”, feminists have not totally overcome patriarchal conditioning.
Fourth: people don’t take emotional abuse seriously. All too often, people consider “emotional abuse” to be a synonym for “bad relationship.” But emotional abuse isn’t the same as fighting a lot or even calling each other names; it’s the systematic establishing of power and control over your partner through psychological means. And the consequences show it. Emotional abuse survivors suffer from poor physical and mental health. Even after controlling for physical violence, level of emotional abuse affects basically every kind of mental health consequence of abuse from depression to low self-esteem to stress level, and may even be a better predictor of PTSD and depression than physical abuse. Once again, this is something that feminists should in theory be better about, but not everyone is.
Fifth: people think that it’s a private matter. I agree that many sorts of relationship misbehavior are private matters. If Eron Gjoni were actually a jilted ex who was upset his partner cheated on him, he would have no call to tell the Internet about it. But abuse is not a private matter, as feminists have discussed endlessly. Abuse has serious physical and emotional consequences for the victims. The majority of abusers repeatedly abuse. An abuse survivor who is public about their experiences– and this is a tremendously private decision and I would never say it should be mandatory– allows future partners to make an informed decision and potentially avoid being abused themselves. If you would like your abuse not to be public, then I recommend that you not abuse people. After you have abused someone, your right to have others not know about this is revoked.
In conclusion: I believe the balance of evidence shows that Zoe Quinn emotionally abused Eron Gjoni. This does not justify harassment against her or invalidate critiques of sexism in gaming. However, I think we should at least acknowledge her abuse in our condemnations, reconsider making her a Perfect Flawless Feminist Hero, and stop fucking calling an abuse survivor a “jilted ex” or accusing him of being a narcissistic misogynist for outing his abuser.
So, one reason I’m sort of hesitant to label Zoe (or Eron, for that matter) an abuser is that there is basically no unfiltered information anywhere, about any part of their relationship.
Eron’s complaints against Zoe make Zoe seem abusive, but its hard to know how much of that information was selectively released.
Similarly, Zoe’s restraining order against Eron makes Eron seem to be stalking her, which, as you say, is abusive in its own right. But again, thats obviously selectively released information.
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Well, here is a nice example of what I’m saying lower in this thread: the (rather large amount of) evidence provided by one person is given the same weight as the (as far as we know) unsupported allegations of the other person.
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You can’t actually get a restraining order without a lot of supported evidence. While we haven’t seen it, a court has, and agreed to it.
So on the one hand you have (filtered) evidence made public.
On the other hand, you have (also filtered) evidence that was not made public, but convinced a neutral third party (the courts).
I don’t know why you wouldn’t weight these similarly?
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No, you do not need evidence to get a restraining order. You have to fill forms, and there is an hearing where you have to convince a judge, but evidence is not necessary (and that is, IMO, a good thing on average). Doesn’t mean it would not be useful, of course.
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I’d say the zoe post has tons of unfiltered information in the form of verified (he showed them on video too) screenshots of their facebook conversations
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No, it’s still filtered – it’s not like he put up 100% of everything, and it’s not like what he showed is a random representative sample. Selection is a form of filtering.
I did read the Zoe post, ages ago. At the time, I thought that the most damning accusations – the things that would justify the claim that Zoe was actually an abuser, rather than just a cheating lover lying to cover up her cheating[*] – weren’t actually established very well in the logs themselves. Rather, they were in Eron’s interpretation of the relationship (for example, in the long passage Ozy quotes in their original post). Those interpretations might be absolutely true, or they might be hyperbole, or they might just be false.
[*] I would call cheating and lying hurtful and wrong, but I wouldn’t call the person who does it an abuser.
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Last week I was writing something like that:
Always nice to have more examples.
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Both sides have an incentive not to talk about the abuse — anti-GGs want to preserve Quinn as a martyred heroine, and pro-GGs want to focus on a narrative of corruption in games journalism to avoid the charge of misogyny.
That said, the more thoughtful pro-GG enclaves, like the /r/kotakuinaction subreddit, have discussed exactly the same things you mention in this post (gaslighting, etc.).
My own view, as an avid gamer and pro-GG who does not condone harassment or abuse, is that the lot of us should have done something less obviously self-destructive and doomed to fail than taking on feminists in social media, such as suiting up against the Green Bay Packers.
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Thanks for writing this.
From the reactions to the zoepost, we had a clear example of an unsolvable situation for some victims of abuse.
Solution 1: do not provide evidence, claim abuse, trust the “believe the victim” narratives, and hope you will be believed and supported. For some victims, this is unlikely to happen, usually because a) the abuser is a high-status person or b) the victim is perceived as belonging to a non-abusable part of the population. Using 1, you will be accused of being a liar and an harasser.
(you might also not like solution 1 because you think that accusations should be supported by as much evidence as possible, even if it costs you (and your abuser) some privacy)
So solution 2: you provide evidence, as much evidence as you can, so that a) and b) will not be usable against you. Wrong. This will be seen as a breach of your abuser’s privacy, harassment and enabling/condoning harassment by third parties. Using 2, you will also be accused of being a liar and an harasser.
Another point I find intriguing about this matter : I have seen almost no-one, even among the people who conclude that Zoe Quinn is an abuser, comment about the unprotected sex while having undisclosed partners. I do not know if it should be weighted more on the “disregard for partner’s choices and health concerns” or “subtle attempts to manipulate partner’s trust”. Too icky to touch ?
(“Anita Sarkeesian is almost painfully liberal feminist and anyone who calls her a radical feminist needs to read more Dworkin”: mmm, recent tweets by here and her co-writer seem to indicate that they are not above making ad hoc mixtures of lib fem and rad fem rhetoric when it suits their purposes… but then, having played some of the games A. S. used in her video I have a low opinion of her intellectual honesty and integrity. Due to, you know, repeatedly making false statements. I may not be very charitable in weighting what she says know.)
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I’ve played a lot of the games Anita Sarkeesian’s used in her videos, too, and in my experience she is pretty on point. What false statements are you thinking of?
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Let’s use something very obvious and recent.
“The player cannot help but treat these female bodies as things to be acted upon,because they were designed, constructed and placed in the environment for that singular purpose. Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters.”
and
“I should note that this kind of misogynistic behavior isn’t always mandatory; often it’s player-directed, but it is always implicitly encouraged.”
In a game that specifically punishes you if you harm a non-target NPCs. Comments about only female bodies disappearing in games (nope, all bodies do after a time in most games, for technical reasons). I agree she is usually harder to corner as she is fond of irrefutable statements and vague quantifiers.
The horrible thing about A.S. is that her general points are correct (with caveats, the damsel in distress trope has been played with and inverted since the 80s and Double Dragon, very different tropes behind the Japanese and the American products, etc), but her examples and arguing are generally awful.
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I agree that the thing about games encouraging you to perform violence on women was one of her weaker points. Although there is absolutely a class of games that trades it (or at least an irritating tendency to make the option into a dumb joke), here examples were pretty poor. That being said, I wouldn’t call this a ‘falsehood’? (And in a game about being a literal hitman, I am fully prepared to believe that part of the appeal of going into a strip club is the chance to enact some sexy violence. If my understanding is correct, you don’t even lose points if you bother to hide the bodies.) The worst I’ve ever known her to do is present borderline cases as stronger examples then they are. As for the thing about games implicitly encouraging violence towards female characters, you can disagree with her if you like, but it’s an interpretation. It’s not a lie. I’m sure Anita believes it.
I’m sorry to get on your case about this, but the response to Anita has been so bizarre that I’m kind of hyper-sensitized to that sort of language. I don’t really disagree with you, I think, I just kind of had a knee-jerk response.
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@Princess Lasergun
“And in a game about being a literal hitman, I am fully prepared to believe that part of the appeal of going into a strip club is the chance to enact some sexy violence”
Do you have any evidence to back up this belief? The Hitman series of games are about playing a complete professional, right down to the suit and tie on the boxart.
“If my understanding is correct, you don’t even lose points if you bother to hide the bodies.”
No it is not. Here’s a quote from IGN’s scoring guide: Killing an unarmed person (civilian). There is no means to recover from this penalty.
http://uk.ign.com/wikis/hitman-absolution/Scoring_Guide
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I don’t much care about video games and therefore have no strong opinion on the specific case of AS, but this is a really problematic claim in general. Part of the whole point of Robin Hanson’s homo hypocritus argument is that one of the best ways to be a convincing liar to others is to first convince yourself of your own lies.
Anecdotally, my abusive ex-wife is sincerely convinced that she was the victim in our relationship, because she literally edits her memories in the most self-serving way possible. That’s an extreme case, but the use of selective perception to create a desired narrative is more or less a human universal.
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@Forlorn Hopes
No, I don’t have any “evidence” beyond having been peripherally aware of the Hitman franchise for several years. From what I’ve seen, it’s a game where you infiltrate some mundane venue and impersonate the staff in order to kill someone for reasons. You can’t tell me that part of the appeal for something like that isn’t the allure of lurking in plain sight, holding the power of life and death over perfect strangers. When you add in the strip club venue, well . . .
What I’m trying to say is, from where I’m standing, Anita’s interpretation doesn’t seem that far out of left field? I certainly wouldn’t call it a ‘fabrication’.
I don’t really want to get into an argument about whether a game I’ve never played does or does not subliminally encourage players to kill in-game strippers, so I’ll leave it there. And my bad on the points thing. I heard it (or thought I heard it?) at one point during yet another iteration of the Hitman sub-debate.
@Matthew
Fair enough, I suppose. I mean, you’re right. But I feel the need to remind you that we’re talking about some really fuzzy areas of media criticism here. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to call people who say potentially untenable things about media liars, unless you’re prepared to throw the entire field of literary criticism under the buss. As far as I can tell, the worst Anita has done is call ambiguous examples in ways that fit her narrative. Which is, I think, utterly typical of the field (and, as you noted, of human cognition generally). Again, I wouldn’t be bothering to make this argument if it wasn’t so common to hear Anita accused of all sorts of misdirection and malfeasance for vaguely defined cynical reasons.
It’s dangerous to say something can’t be a lie if the person saying it believes it’s true, but it’s also dangerous to say that someone’s lying because they disagree with your interpretation of the facts.
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If you don’t want to get into a discussion I’ll let this be my closing thoughts.
Saying that something someone put years of effort encourages misogynistic behaviour is an absolutely horrible thing to do to anyone.
And yet you still should do it, if and only if, it actually does encourage misogynistic behaviour. So far I am far from satisfied with the evidence people have presented against Hitman Absolution.
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It seems rather non-horrible to expose a piece of mass-culture media to feminist critique. The critique should be respectful and logical. However, such a critique will naturally presuppose feminist social models. Likewise, they will be stated in feminist vocabulary. If you disagree with those things, then you will disagree with the critique, which you are allowed to do. At that point, however, it becomes a debate about feminism itself, which is much bigger than this-or-that bit of analysis.
Anyway, all that said, to try to silence the critique because you find it “mean spirited” kinda misses the point. It fails to engage the critique on its own terms.
Which again you are allowed to do, but at that point you aren’t really part of the conversation.
Of course this has little to do with the responses to Sarkeesian, which have mainly been temper-tantrums.
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The main problems i have with sarkeesian’s vids were implying that being able to harm women encourages violence against women which is bad in a way that it isn’t when the same is applied to men, in worlds where women and men are treated as exactly the same thing with no differences apart from the character models.
Basically that ‘encouraging violence against men is acceptable, extending that to women by including women in a world where it is possible to kill whoever you want is encouraging violence against women and that’s bad mmmmk’.
If she was just talking about the inclusion of strippers in videogames at all i would probably be fine with that, But there was a general undercurrent of ‘violence against men being possible is fine but violence against women being possible is sexist, even if violence against women isn’t encouraged any more than violence against men is’.
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@veronica d
I’m not trying to silence anyone. I explicitly said it’s ok to make that criticism, if the accusations are true.
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Seriously, thirqual, please read the Popehat link in the main post. His take on the Sarkeesian issue is probably the best way of putting it I’ve yet seen. She’s simultaneously irrelevant and brilliant, in that she’s managed to parlay rather tame and unconvincing critique into large amounts of money and exposure through the careful use of other people’s outrage. If you dislike Sarkeesian, ignore her; she cannot exist without the oxygen you give her. Personally I rather admire her skill at PR.
You’re on the ball with the whole thing about undisclosed unprotected sex, though. Whether you consider it abuse (or as Quinn apparently has stated she believes, a form of rape) or not, it’s still incredibly skeevy.
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I read the Popehat article. I am not sure I agree that she is irrelevant. My point was more about dubious intellectual integrity and bad faith arguments.
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I don’t expect intellectual integrity or good faith arguments from Anita Sarkeesian or her writer. That’s not the business she’s in.
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Her critique is unconvincing, but it isn’t tame.
One point of disconnect I often encounter, when discussing things like FemFreq with my feminist acquaintances, is the emotional impact of the charge of misogyny. Sarkeesian throws the word around like it’s nothing, and to her, it probably isn’t. (Insert snarky comment about misogyny in Super Mario Bros. here.) But to me, being called a misogynist is an extremely nasty slur. I hear it as “You literally hate your mother, your grandmother, your wife, your female friends and coworkers, just because they are women. The fact that you play video games proves it.”
Ozy’s comment that “everyone is sexist” also hit this nerve. I don’t perceive misogyny/sexism as random cultural background noise. I perceive them as specific, ugly attributes of some deeply misguided people, and I am going to bristle at being called one of those people.
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Okay, but what term would you like me to use for, e.g., my dad’s belief that I shouldn’t mow the lawn because he believed I was a girl? I certainly don’t believe that my dad is an evil person, or even an exceptional person, but that is a belief that certainly seems, hm, unfair to people based on their perceived gender, perhaps?
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Good question. I don’t know, and my intent is not to police anyone’s language, just to point out that words can have very different meanings to different people. I’m an old fart by internet standards, and I grew up in an era when “sexist” meant “sexist pig”, e.g. Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5. Today, it’s in much wider use, and maybe it would be appropriate to describe your dad as a sexist.
I do think that watering down words like “misogyny” and “sexism” has unintended consequences; they will eventually lose their punch from overuse, as is happening with “racism”. (I’ve seen efforts to replace “racism” with the much stronger, and frankly bizarre, “white supremacy”, in SJW circles. Random insensitive white guys on Twitter are not David Duke.)
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To be honest, my problem with the whole thing is just that it’s bad feminism. I think that they need to go back and reread their Nussbaum to see what she’s really saying.
Unfortunately it’s all too common. Most of this gender analysis, unfortunately, tends to be worse in terms of objectification than what they’re analyzing. It’s all about fungibility.
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“in worlds where women and men are treated as exactly the same thing with no differences apart from the character models.” HAHAH no such world exists. Sorry, but you can’t make art that is separted from reality.
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I don’t know the full details of the Quinn/Gjoni story (specifically the stalking charge, which effects a LOT of whether this is a narrative of one abuser or two), but thank you so much for bringing up how emotional abuse is brushed off. I know this is true because it’s only been in the past year or so that I realized my family was emotionall abused by one of my parents for YEARS. I’ve been diagnosed with a form of PTSD from it, and all this time I thought it could be summarized as “my dad’s a jerk.” Emotional abuse is REAL and it does a number on you, and I’m here for anyone else who wants to talk about that.
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Another complication is that there’s decent evidence to think Eron Gjoni was emotionally abusive himself. Even if the Zoe Post itself had to be presented as-is to document Zoe’s abusive behavior — and I’d argue that a lot of the private information made public hurt discussion of the abuse rather than help — there’s some amount present in a number of the smaller details and self-descriptions of his behavior and mindset, and echoed in a lot of his behavior since.
Officially, we’re not supposed to allow for abuse to justify abuse, but there’s a very human tendency to assume abuse is one-sided, and to shy away from more complicated discussions.
It’s probably worth noting that Zoe Quinn may not have intended this result: “not providing information to me” could have easily intended to be “not dox me” as much as anything so expansive as was granted. There’s not a lot of space on those forms. This was a Massachusetts restraining order hearing: rather than the conventional rules, these orders are applied as if in civil court, subject to a “preponderance of evidence” standard, and standards for acceptable evidence are pretty low. The court does not and can not seriously consider quality of evidence and usually won’t review exculpatory evidence.
There’s an open question whether this meets constitutional standards of due process, but it’s a messy situation.
The claimed scope of the restraining order is broad, but not unusually so. You see higher courts having to tamp down restraining orders that prohibited speech about a person every so often.
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Please enumerate the “decent evidence” in question. “There’s some amount present in a number of the smaller details and self-descriptions of his behavior and mindset, and echoed in a lot of his behavior since” stinks of motivated reasoning.
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By his own admission, Gjoni described a few “do this, or we break up” discussions. This is most prominent in the case of chat logs to Arnott, which also hits the “limiting or monitoring access to people outside of the relationship”. Perhaps understandable given Quinn is accused of cheating with Arnott before that point, but still potentially abusive. Some of the snipped discussions also touch on unacceptable levels of needing to know where the significant other is and details of what they’re doing : again, in retrospective justifiable by what it discovered, but potentially abusive nonetheless.
The behavior-pattern lists Gjoni presents are also pretty big red flags, especially when the format is “x wins” and “points”.
It’s not nearly as overt as Quinn’s alleged behavior, especially if we leave public disclosure of private fact out of it, and don’t read any of Gjoni’s posts as threatening to do so. But it’s still present enough to give people an excuse.
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By that standard pretty much every public accusation of emotional abuse I’ve ever encountered is de facto evidence of abuse on the part of the accuser. You’ll forgive me if I prefer a somewhat more restrictive standard?
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Can I add a Sixth? I, and, I think, a lot of people, came into awareness of the whole mess through the Anita Sarkeesian angle. I’ve been following her on-and-off since even before she started her Tropes Vs. Women project, and she’s been receiving absurdly vicious harassment for the longest time. In the wake of her most recent video, the abuse ramped up (again), this time to the point that she received credible death threats and had to leave her house.
It was in this context that I learned about the Zoe Quinn affair. And the framing was thus: “Hey, you know how a lot of creepy internet men have been hounding Anita Sarkeesian for no particular reason? Here’s this other woman they’re doing the SAME THING to~!” I think you can probably understand why I was super prepared to accept that framing.
When I first learned about the Eron post, my inclination was to dismiss it as more vicious mean spirited lies — and there were a LOT of vicious mean spirited lies. I didn’t READ it, because it’s long and in any event I didn’t feel inclined to read every single bit of anti-Quinn propaganda. At the time, I did not realize that it was the Seminal Anti-Quinn.
Ozy was the first person I’ve seen who called Zoe an abuser. Actually, the only people I’ve seen make this argument are in Ozy’s circle of friends. You certainly can’t blame me for never learning that from the Gamergate people: as far as I’ve seen, they haven’t mentioned abuse at all, so much as that Zoe Quinn _slept with a journalist_.
Now, speaking for myself, I never made any anti-gaminggate posts because I am barely an online presence (seriously, commenting on this blog is, like, the most public thing I’ve done in years). But, if I were a slightly different person, I could easily have waded into the fray.
The point is that different people come by information in different ways, and depending on what you know and your perspective on the facts, different things might seem reasonable. A lot of feminists came into this having already seen a lot of situations like Zoe’s, and didn’t bother to learn the details.
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I myself wouldn’t have known about the abuse except for Multiheaded, so yeah. It’s pretty easy to overlook, because no one is talking about it.
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I read the Zoe papers because of a mention that they were surprising at Making Light, but otherwise, I don’t think I would have bothered to research that far.
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I think the point I was trying to make is that people aren’t mentioning it because, by and large, THEY don’t know about it, either. And not in the sense of actively ignoring it; it just isn’t widely known, on either side. To borrow a phrase from the esteemed classical philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, it’s something people don’t know they don’t know.
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My introduction to this was similar, except I was familiar with Zoe from even before GG started, as this is not the first time the -chans have gone at her. (Plus I know people who know her, like face-to-face friends. It’s complicated.)
Thing is, as a woman-in-tech and a woman-on-the-Internet, I could easily end up in the crosshairs of this hate-mob, so thus I feel kinda obligated to at least kinda take Zoe’s side. It’s a strength-in-numbers thing. Plus there are ongoing efforts to find strategies to combat this stuff, and Zoe is part of that. Likewise, it is amazingly helpful to have allies dealing with the same shit you are.
In short, I support the broad efforts of folks like Anita, Zoe, and Brianna to defend themselves. I could be one of them. If I ever am, I will reach out to them.
All that said, I think we need to give Eron a fair shake. He’s been demonized as being no different from the chan-trolls, but this appears not to be the case. And if he is going to go on to work in tech, he will need to salvage some sketch of his good name. I don’t think he deserves the crap he’s going through.
So yeah, it’s really fucking important that folks like Ozy push this issue.
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By not the first time, you mean last December stuff with wizardchan? Because there has been some concerns that the reporting on this (originally) in the Escapist was not exactly perfect. Leading A. Macris, the publisher, to write the following:
“But to explain is not to excuse. Our editor-in-chief, Greg Tito, having reviewed the facts at hand, concluded we ourselves have been imperfect in maintaining journalistic standards. A particularly problematic article, the one which generated his review, was about the alleged harassment of an indie developer by a forum community which denied the allegations but was itself victimized as a result of them. The article failed to cite the harassment as alleged, failed to give the forum community an opportunity present its point of view, and did not verify the claims or secure other sources. Mr. Tito has personally updated the article and spoken to all our editors about the importance of adhering to standards that will prevent such bad incidents from happening again. We, as a team, apologize for this error, both to our readers and to the forum community that suffered as a result. I, personally, apologize for this error, as well.”
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Sorry, http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
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One thing that absolutely has to be mentioned about GamerGate is that it is a classic example of the Streisand Effect at work.
The Zoe Post originally came into existence as a long text post intended to be put on SomethingAwful, since a significant chunk of the West Coast games industry Quinn hangs around with live there. It was almost immediately deleted. The same thing then happened on another forum.
Unhappy about this and after discussing it with a (female, also feminist) friend, Gjoni decided to put the info up as the blog post which became the Zoe Post. It spread like wildfire… but again, community after community after community banned discussion of it. Including 4chan! … initially. The next day, the mods reversed their position on it in the face of the firestorm that was brewing,
So by this point, you have a situation in late August where there is pretty much only one place on the Internet the Zoe Post can be discussed. 4chan. The “Cathedral of Misogyny” itself. None of the more thoughtful places were allowed to discuss it. Is it any wonder that the discussion of Zoe’s painfully obvious abuse was virtually non-existent?
It didn’t take long for Quinn’s friends to rally to her side and denounce her victim as being a “jilted ex-boyfriend”. Of course the only discussion of the subject was goblin-horde chittering from 4chan – no-one else was allowed to talk about it!
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+100. Yes!
We should have talked about this. Leave nothing to the chans.
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The censorship happened on Reddit too. Admins started shadowbanning people for discussing the incident, even when they had nothing to do with doxxing or brigading. Relevant /r/subredditdrama post.
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In reality where it blew up IMO was the mass deleting in the thread linking to TotalBiscuit asking for a moderate/wait and see stance on the whole mess.
That and the whole “Gamers are Dead” thing.
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Funny how SomethingAwful keeps coming up in cases like this, isn’t it?
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Oh, and on the subject of harassment… can we add syringes and white powder mailed to people’s houses, abusive phone calls, calling the police to people’s houses and what may very well have been a young man physically assaulted and forced out of his apartment by his (now ex-)girlfriend’s friends because they decided he was an “Internet Misogynist” to your list of things no-one here endorses?
I know most of the readers here won’t have heard of any of that, due to the near-total media blackout on all bad behaviour on the part of those opposed to GamerGate, so I figured it needed mentioning.
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Well, most of those could have been faked, after all, or the act of a few extremists not representative of the rest of the crowd. Accusations of faking harassment have been flying back and forth for 3 months now.
What is glaringly obvious: the tweets, interviews and articles by high-profile individuals. Like Biddle, Wheaton, Chu, Fish, Dreyfuss, and so on.
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Just an aside, the title of this post — it makes me hesitant to forward this to my friends. Simply put, I would appear to be adding to the attack on Zoe, which would anger my friends. The reaction might not be worth it. Nor do I think we need to lay more shit at that woman’s feet.
I don’t see how we hold her accountable for this without adding to the damage done.
On the other hand, I very much believe that Eron Gjoni deserves a fair shake. The man deserves his name back. If I wrote this article, I would title is something like “Eron Gjoni deserves a fair hearing” or “Stop beating up Eron. Listen to his story.”
This is harm reduction.
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I don’t know. It seems like, since she’s an abuser, she deserves to be known for an abuser. The fact she’s been harassed doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say anything about the fact she’s an abuser. It doesn’t even mean we should be really gentle about saying she’s an abuser (though, of course, we should take the very reasonable step of making sure our comments won’t fuel the harassment, which ozy does in zir first paragraph.)
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I think a better title would be something like “Wilhelm’s Germany was awful, but The Archduke did not deserve to die.”
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Something of a side note, but on your reference to Anita Sarkeesian as “almost painfully liberal feminist”- I think she actually is a radical feminist, in the sense of ideology, not the “radical = extreme” sense. In one video she used the phrase “prostituted women”, which is strongly associated with the sex work abolitionist branch of radical feminism, and her recommended reading list on the Feminist Frequency site includes “Pornland” by Gail Dines and “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity” by Robert Jensen. And then there’s this anti-Slutwalk piece she wrote:
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/05/link-round-up-feminist-critiques-of-slutwalk/
which includes a link to I Blame the Patriarchy as well as a link to a piece from rabble.ca which argues that Slutwalk is an example of “the palatable ‘I can wear what I want’ feminism that is intentionally devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.”
All this is anything but liberal feminist, IMO- at the very least, it seems fairly clear that Sarkeesian agrees with the radical feminist view of pornography, whether or not she is one herself, though I don’t see anything to indicate that she isn’t- there’s no sign she’s a TERF, certainly, but of course not all radical feminists are. I think this does inform her video series to a considerable extent (her view of sexualization and objectification is very much in the radical feminist mold, IMO), though that’s another can of worms and would probably be a derail. I’ve seen others refer to her as a liberal feminist before, and I’ve always been sort of curious where that impression comes from- everything I’ve seen from her has always seemed to be pretty clearly a sort of entry-level radical feminism to me, but I could be missing something.
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She’s definitely a SWERF and gets mentioned as such by sex-worker twitter.
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Woa, woa, why is cheating not abusive?
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Mostly depends on the motives and consequences for the cheating. If it is in an already abusive relationship (physically, verbally, emotionally, etc.), or if the person being cheated on is then made responsible for the cheating, or if it is done to hurt the person, or make a point to the person, then (in most of the documentation about abuse you will find) it is abuse.
The key point is that abuse behavior is intended to hurt/demean/control the other party. Cheating is a betrayal of trust, but not necessarily abusive behavior if it is not done to hurt/demean/control.This view is not universal.
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This is not unfair, but I am *inexorably compelled* into taking the bait and defending (a segment) of gamers anyway: PC gamers who use Steam seem to be disproportionately gender-weird and other types of socially unacceptable weird, except that unlike, say, (my sterotype of) tumblr users, we mostly seem to like rather than hate each other (possibly because the social features are just accessories to the end of playing games together).
So there’s a huge number of such people that I know through gaming that are decidedly uninterested in having their identity attacked in *any* manner, who *instinctively* took up their torches and pitchforks to fight for GamerGate (yeah, yeah, they’ve internalized so much misogyny that they consider “gamer” part of their identity instead of “victim”, I get it). I consider this highly unfortunate because social media shitstorms will never amount to anything besides self-righteous sound and fury. But I’m also not really interested in concern-trolling my friends out of their justifiable anger – they’re independent god damn people, they can tweet or whatever if they want to.
Do I have to disclaim that I don’t condone harassment or whatever? Probably: I do not condone abuse or harassment, I do get enraged at abuser-logic because of personal bad experiences, I try my best to keep that rage under control, I lose sleep over whether I’m a terrible abusive person *all the time*.
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“While feminists are better than most groups about acknowledging abuse of men”
That feels like a particularly bizarre and untrue claim to me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a feminist blogger that isn’t you acknowledge that without being explicitly prompted to. Furthermore, when prompted, they will almost always immediately start trying to minimize by claiming that female perpetration and/or male victimhood of abuse are statistically negligible.
Maybe you’ve just been reading saner feminists than I have.
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I recommend The Pervocracy http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/ , a feminist blog that’s very good at remembering abuse of men exists. This post, about why people stay in abusive relationships, is excellent and one of the most quoted. http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-does-she-stay-with-that-jerk.html
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It is also my personal, subjective experience that (some) feminists have a major blind spot regarding abuse of men.
I was in an abusive relationship, once, many years ago (mid-90’s; back when I was still engaged in offline pro-feminist activism). Apart from psychological abuse (some aspects of which seem eerily like what Gjoni wrote Quinn did), my ex (who, it should be noted, was not a feminist) would sometimes hit me in the face during disagreements and she would sometimes throw things at me. There also was one (albeit relatively minor) instance of sexual violence. I never hit her back, and never defended myself physically.
First, while it was going on, I *did not even acknowledge that what was happening was abuse*, because of faulty pattern matching: Abuse is something men do to women, after all. And this was *before* the campaigns to replace the term “domestic violence” with the term “violence against women”. I would try to convince myself that she was *in the right* to do as she did, because {insert stupid, strained cliche about the violence of the oppressed being very different from the violence of the oppressor and therefore totally all right here}.
Second, after the break-up, I was very afraid to admit what had happened. In feminist circles where I live, it is commonly asserted that men who are subjected to violence invariably become violent themselves, so if I admitted to having been hit and having had things thrown at me, I would basically be outing myself as a future abuser, a creature to be regarded with suspicion.
I generally kept it to myself until relatively recently (and on the semi-anonymity of the Internet). When I have mentioned these things to feminists, the typical response has been (with very few exceptions) to give me a lecture about how women abusing men is totally different due to structural power differentials (as if that would magically stop the nightmares or cure me of automatically entering a panic state whenever a woman raises her voice) or flat-out accuse me of lying. In fact, the *first* person who ever used the term “abuse” about my descriptions of my experienced was an *MRA* — people I entirely expected would simply label me a wimp for having been beaten by a woman. Instead, they generally treated me with apparently genuine compassion — even though I was (and still am) vocally opposed to their politics — whereas *feminists*, people I regarded as “my side”, would regard me with suspicion and hostility. I am still incredibly bitter about this.
So I am not at all surprised that a large number of feminists rally to defend a female abuser and blame her male victim — I have seen it before. I think it is due to an ideological blind spot rather than due to malice or callousness, but the effect is still there: Thousands of people are praising an abuser and denouncing her victim.
Ozy is one of a grand total of three feminists I have seen openly referring to Quinn’s behaviour as abusive.
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I think it is fair to say that feminists do little concrete to address the abuse of men. But then, neither does anyone else.
I get the distinct impression that the Redpill crowd will crow about the abuse of men, but they seem mainly to bring it up when they want to dismiss a feminist. This is a pretty broken discourse pattern. But then, everything about the Redpill is broken.
Anyway, I think there is a trend these days in feminism to take men and masculinity more seriously, by which I mean they critique contemporary masculinity while supporting men. I cannot give many examples right now. Certainly we can include Pervocracy, which was mentioned above. Others include Clarisse Thorne and (in her new book) Laurie Penny.
Oh, and Ozy
I hope to see this trend grow, as I think it is important.
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😦
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wait, no, wrong one
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You _might_ be conflating two groups here. Redpill-folk will tell you that if you got abused it’s because you’re too “beta”, and that she really wants you to put her in her place, because women want men who will dominate and control them. MRAs will tell you that you’ve been horribly abused and deserve sympathy and care, but you can’t get any of that because a horrible feminist conspiracy controls all the services for abuse victims and they deny that men can be victims so you should really donate some money to AVFM.
I hope this is a real thing. I have not seen as lot of it, but I really hope it’s real.
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@multi — She’s certainly anti-GG, and I think she (and most feminists) are wrong about Eron, which is kinda the whole point of this post. But her book has much interesting to say about men.
Plus wasn’t Aug 28 kinda the height of GG failure mode? I think you should be sympathetic to women as they dealt with this shit. It was fucking terrible.
(I’ve also spoken to her about this stuff in person, and well after Aug 28. She and I seem to have similar attitudes.)
(It’s going to be difficult to convince my people that Eron got a raw deal. This will take time.)
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Okay. Point taken.
I get it that apologies are even harder than usual in a mess like this, but… has she at least quietly backtracked re: Eron?
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@mcmillansean — Yeah that sounds about right. However, in either case I think these groups are driven more by anti-feminism that by concern for the wellbeing of male abuse survivors, at least that is how I see the discourse play out.
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I would be very interested to see a relevant quote/excerpt from that book of hers, btw? (I used to like her a whole lot; not that I actively dislike her now.)
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There are two very different discussions happening about justice and and integrity right now. At the very least. It doesn’t surprise me that Penny is only aware of one of them, because myopia is a professional requirement for her. Penny’s tribe have decided their opinion and the last thing Laurie Penny wants to do is anger her bread and butter.
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P.P.S. (sorry, swear I’m done spamming for now)… Veronica, would you agree that calling men “boys” (in a derogatory manner), or “crybabies”, or referring to “male tears” in any context is – in function if not always in intent – a sexist patriarchal slur, as it relies on tropes of emasculation?
Like, at best it’s as fucking stupid as saying, “a *real* man would never hurt a woman”, all the while “real men” can effectively insult one another by calling each other effeminate but hardly ever by calling each other a rapist? (Good unrelated example that stuck with me.)
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@mutli — I believe that mocking male nerds is “using the master’s tools”. And yeah, we should stop.
“Male tears” is a bit more complicated, as I think a lot of feminist discourse gets derailed with “about the menz” — and we do need to talk about men, but not all the fucking time, and no feminist conversation can happen on open forums without the normal parade of manosphere jackasses.
And most men are not nerds.
So anyway, you end up with a very broken discourse from which you can cherry pick any narrative you please.
On Penny, her latest book (Unspeakable Things) has a whole chapter that details her take on the crisis of masculinity. It focuses less on NAT nerd-types and more on the men she encounters in radical spaces. (These are guys you’d dismiss as “hipsters” I guess. She does not dismiss them.) Also, she takes a leftist view of the issue, whereby the economic slump has denied these men some important markers of the male life plan, compared to women who have done relatively well.
All in all it is situated in the contemporary “crisis of men” conversation, but with a particular flair. I found her view insightful and sympathetic. I don’t think I can summarize w/ quotes.
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Derailing is a derail. Or a canard, if you prefer.
If your discussion of rape excludes male victims, you’re not talking about rape, you’re talking about female victimhood.
If your discussion of DV excludes male victims, you’re not talking about rape, you’re talking about female victimhood.
If your discussion of anything not explicitly gendered excludes male victims, you’re not talking about anything except female victimhood.
“Male Tears” mugs are a giant neon sign saying “I Don’t Care About Male Victims”. They’re the tribal colours of traditionalist views of male gender roles. They’re the most regressive thing imaginable.
There are no excuses. Either we believe men are human beings that deserve compassion or we don’t. “Male Tears” makes the answer abundantly clear.
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Where is it common to talk about “Male Tears”? I haven’t seen it before this discussion.
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The only reason I’m able to define myself as a rape survivor at all is because of the intervention of 2 close friends, both of whom identify as feminists.
I think the key to understanding this is that feminism threw open the door to questioning a LOT of the expectations of traditional gender roles. Unfortunately it then proceeded to throw a different set of doors very firmly shut in male victims’ faces by defining women as the victim class.
So you get feminists redefining rape as “sex without consent” rather than the older definition of “forced penetration”. Men like me then say “well I’ve had sex without consent too” and feminists immediately cry “WE DIDN’T MEAN FOR YOU!” After all, I’m not a part of the victim class, so their definition isn’t for me.
Same with DV. Prior to feminist intervention, the primary means of understanding DV was that as long as it remained out of the public sphere, it was nobody’s business. Feminists changed this to “hurting your partner physically or mentally is bad!”, men say “my partner abuses me” and lo, here comes the response “WE DIDN’T MEAN FOR YOU!”
But the idea is out there, and less doctrinally-minded feminists (such as the friends I mentioned earlier) will be willing to put forward the idea that maybe any given man can be a victim. And I’m grateful to the two women who helped me with that, immensely so.
The fundamental problem is the assignment of a universal victim class. As long as that’s a part of feminism, then even those feminists who put forward the concept of mutually-broken gender roles will still be stuck trying to find loftier and loftier excuses as to why gendered abuse of men is fine because women are the victim class. The cognitive dissonance of doing so has broken feminists before and it will do again.
I realise it’s rowing uphill to try to get men and women alike to feel empathy for men outside of their immediate social group. It’s not like we don’t have studies about it. But it’s the only thing that fixes this.
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My impression of the bad feminist default is more like “we aren’t going to pay attention to men getting abused because if we do, men’s concerns will cause women’s concerns to get ignored, and we are also going to attempt to make sure that no one pays attention to men’s concerns for the same reason.”
For what it’s worth, the only time I’ve ever been threatened online (and I’m not going to be more specific about when, where, or who) was for saying that men get raped, too.
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Zorgon:
All I can say is “hear, hear”.
Well, actually, I can say lots and lots of other things, but it is all I can say that is appropriate for your post.
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Nancy – I don’t really distinguish between “women are the designated victim group” and “paying attention to male victims will distract from female victims” because to me, the latter has an unspoken “and they’re the only important ones because women are the designated victim group” immediately after it.
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In my experience feminists are better at acknowledging abuse in general.
Where everyone else is “Well, I guess it exists.” about abuse of women feminists are like “No we’re talking about this RIGHT NOW.”. And where everyone else is like “What? That’s impossible!” about abuse of men, feminists are like “Well, I guess it exists.”
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Agreed! I guess it’s a matter of charity to frame “better than everyone else, still not nearly good enough” as the context being awful and hard to break from, as opposed to the bar just being too low.
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I have a trouble with the concept of emotional abuse. I accept that it must be a viable concept since so many smart people do accept it, but I can’t differentiate between “emotional abuse” and “being an asshole”. Supposedly the former is a serious accusation and the latter is a private matter.
Does it depend on the victim? Of course it does? Or does it not? Could some behaviour be abusive when directed to one person but not abusive when directed to another? Does it depend on the outcome? The intent?
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The difference is very easily measurable through effects on the victim, but hard to detect otherwise. I’m going by Lundy Bancroft’s theory of abuse in _Why Does He Do That?_, which I’ve found very useful, minus his insistence that women don’t abuse men.
According to Bancroft, abuse isn’t about hurting the victim, so much as controlling them. Shouting insults at a stranger may ruin their day, but it gets you nothing long-term; shouting insults at your victim gets them to comply with your demands so you don’t do it again.
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One of the problems with the whole area of DV is that due to getting horribly overrun with radfems in the 80s, the study of domestic violence is mired in assumptions regarding the primary drives of abusers that aren’t actually supported by evidence (since evidence is to radfems what garlic is to vampires; it’s not fatal, you just never find them in the same place).
Bancroft’s hypothesis is interesting, but he does seem to think that simply recounting emotive anecdote after emotive anecdote is the same as providing evidence for it, and that’s… well, that’s not how evidence works.
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To be clear – I’m also not suggesting it’s a disproven hypothesis, either.
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I’d have said that the difference between being an asshole and emotional abuse is the quantity of assholishness suffered by someone, but the intent? effect? of control might be relevant.
Tapio, I’d say that the reason being an asshole is bad is because it’s hard on the people around the asshole. What do you think is wrong with being an asshole?
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I’m with you there. We’ve all done annoying things in relationships, and there doesn’t seem to be any clear line between the normal and the “emotional abuse”. Case in point: in today’s Savage Love, a man claims his girlfriend was abusive because:
“She isolated me from my friends, refused to come to my apartment (except on rare occasions), made fun of what I wore and ate, regularly yelled at me for imagined slights, interrupted me at my office when she wanted to talk about relationship issues, but never had time to talk when I wanted to, etc.”
Which of us hasn’t made fun of a partner’s clothing, interrupted them to talk about relationship issues, or yelled at them when they didn’t think they deserved it?
So what we wind up with is having to blindly accept the word of someone who claims to be a victim of “emotional abuse.” It’s not a robust concept.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/11/17/sl-letter-of-the-day-ex-primary-screwing-up-next-primary
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Let me rank the red flags in order of seriousness here:
1. isolated me from my friends
2. regularly yelled at me for imagined slights
3. made fun of what I wore and ate
4. interrupted me at my office when she wanted to talk about relationship issues, but never had time to talk when I wanted to
5. refused to come to my apartment (except on rare occasions)
1 is a clear and huge red flag, to the extent that it’s often THE red flag that differentiates an abuser from an ordinary sort of asshole. Isolating someone from others is a clear attempt to control them that a non-abusive asshole would not do.
2 is a very bad red flag. This is sort of the payload of emotional abuse: the actual abusing of your partner. Particularly the “for imagined slights” is the problem here: yelling at your partner sometimes happens in an ordinary relationship, and regularly yelling at your partner is common in many failed relationships, but yelling at your partner for things you just made up is abusive and indicates a desire to control them through fear of your made-up demands instead of any desire to actually fix anything.
3. This is at least a very bad sign for a relationship. In a relationship that’s abusive in other ways this is almost certainly part of the abuse; it again indicates a desire to control your partner, this time by making fun of them whenever they make a decision they don’t approve of. Even in a relationship that’s otherwise not abusive this should not be happening with any regularity: if you don’t like your partner’s taste you can constructively criticize them but to make fun of them or to insult them demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for your partner.
4. This could go either way. Bits of minor selfishness like this can definitely be part of the abuse in an abusive relationship but it’s still very circumstantial.
5. This is totally normal. Lacking further detail this is not a sign of abuse.
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The problem is that all of that is completely subjective. With 1), it is really forcibly “isolating someone”, or is it just, I don’t like your friend, or I don’t feel like going out? With 2), is it yelling often for imagined slights, or yelling rarely for serious offenses? With 3), is it mild occasional teasing or frequent controlling criticism? I’m not willing to accept one person’s self-serving assessment of the situation.
And even if it is as bad as you suggest, why conflate meanness with physical abuse?
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Um, I don’t think I’ve ever made fun of a partner’s clothing, and I’m sure I’ve never interrupted one at work to talk about relationship issues. Sure, I’ve done a bit of yelling (in the context of an argument; I also don’t think I’ve launched into a tirade out of nowhere, which is likely what was meant), but still I wonder if you have an excessively pessimistic view of people in relationships.
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And even if it is as bad as you suggest, why conflate meanness with physical abuse?
Substitute “child” for “romantic partner” here and see if that sentence still sounds reasonable to you. (If yes, then I’m just going to back away slowly; otherwise…) If you can understand how “meanness” can inflict lasting trauma on a child, why would you dismiss the possibility for an adult?
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“why conflate meanness with physical abuse?”
Because it’s what fucks you up.
Ade Dawner made a very good case that almost all harm of abuse is due to emotional abuse: If your abuser breaks your arm, everyone would expect you to be traumatised; if you break your arm skiing, it’s rather unusual to have any lasting psychological response. So the trauma doesn’t come from the physical harm. I don’t know of a good study that compares rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of different types of abuse, though.
People clearly get lasting trauma from emotional abuse. Physical abuse is easier to report because everyone understands it, whereas tiny actions or words or even looks become absurdly huge inside an abusive relationship. And anyone who’s ever thought “Hit me and get it over with, already” knows psychological pain isn’t somehow less bad than physical pain.
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I think physical abuse includes emotional abuse– the physical abuser doesn’t just cause pain/fear/injury– if the abused person doesn’t at least appear to take the abuser’s desires more seriously than their own, there will be more abuse as a result.
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I agree that you can make someone feel bad without hitting them. I don’t think meanness is as bad as physical abuse, even with a child.
Plus, it seems impossible to prove alleged “emotional abuse”. As leopoldtal says, the “abuse” might be something very small, and people have very different perceptions of the same things. It seems very risky to me to make unfalsifiable allegations, especially given that we have this cultural idea that we have to believe self-proclaimed “victims” without question.
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I want to clarify that “the “abuse” might be something very small” is not what I said. What I said could be better phrased as: Abuse is a complex, overarching pattern of bad behaviour. That pattern is what causes most of the damage. It can’t be conveyed easily, because it’s large and confuses the victim. If parts of the pattern are obviously bad to outsiders (e.g. hitting), people will talk about them; if every single part of it would be minor in isolation, the victim is out of luck.
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Here’s the one that really, really bothers me: why do we believe that she was yelling at him for “imagined slights”? What is the difference, from the yellee’s perspective, between someone “abusing” them by yelling at them for something that didn’t happen, and someone legitimately upset with them for something they don’t get, say because they’re thick?
I was in a relationship once with a guy who accused me of abusing him because I often got upset with him for subtle acts of rejection. He felt incredibly distressed and disoriented by this, and kept repeating, “I’m not trying to hurt you.” I ran this by all my friends and they were like, “this is ridiculous, just because someone doesn’t think they’re trying to hurt you doesn’t mean they’re not being an asshole.” But of course, all his friends validated the “she’s mad about imagined things” narrative.
This applies to pretty much everything people want to include under “emotional abuse” these days. Rather than use the term to refer to a deliberate attempt on the part of the abuser to control and harm the victim, it seems we want to use it to refer to “things that make a person feel bad that can maybe be framed as irrational because we don’t understand them”.
This is not apologism. I fully acknowledge that people can fuck with people’s heads. But these criteria have shit specificity. Can we just stop trusting victims’ perception of potentially-assholic behavior so blindly, particularly if said behavior is perfectly contiguous with relatively normal/understandable behavior?
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I do not make fun of how my partner dresses or eats.
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@Katie: [cw: extended description of bad relationship dynamics from the perspective of one of those involved, ableism]
This descriptions makes me twitch. Because it sounds a lot like (part of) the dynamic in my last relationship. And let me tell you, if the allegedly “subtly rejecting” partner actually cares about the other person’s feelings? It is hell.
Because for someone with a poor grasp of social dynamics, or who doesn’t really do conventional connotations, or who has unusual body language and/or doesn’t read other people’s body language well (or the same for faces), “subtle rejection” = doing a totally natural thing with no secret meaning, or honestly answering an apparently innocent question, and then getting accused of all sorts of bewildering shit. Or, worse, not getting accused until months or years later, after the person has had plenty of time to stew — or, still worse, adjust.
My at-the-time girlfriend eventually attributed her having ceased to practice her primary musical instrument partly to the feeling of rejection and disinterest she got from the one time she played it for me privately, during which I lay down (on the floor, as there was not a couch or bed there) and closed my eyes as I habitually do when listening intently to music, because it allows me to focus on it more strongly. At various points after that, I asked her to play for me again some time, but since I never asked her to do it right now, specifically, she took this as perfunctory gestures that didn’t reflect what I actually wanted, in light of my previous “rejection.” Do you have any idea what a mind-fuck learning that is? I appreciated something and desired more of it, and expressed that desire, but was perceived as actively rejecting it, because some messages that I wasn’t sending but she was somehow “receiving” anyway outweighed what I was actually saying. A bit of a microcosm of what was wrong with the relationship as a whole, right there.
And for someone with ADHD or other pathologies causing poor self-discipline and/or a tendency to forget things despite caring a lot about them, “subtle rejection” = trying so. fucking. hard. and maybe actually doing significantly better at keeping on top of things related to the relationship than you’re doing at keeping on top of your life as a whole, and still being told that you obviously don’t really care, because if you cared, you’d be able to do it.
And for someone who needs (physical) space when freaking out, it’s having to try to decide whether not having a panic attack (or worsening an existing one) is worth having your partner completely implode emotionally because you needed to take a walk to cool down, and that’s somehow “abandoning” them, even if you explicitly say that you’ll be back shortly, you just need to get some air.
Her friends apparently also backed her up. I suspect there was a lot of typical-minding going on, combined with a tendency of people with similar vulnerabilities to cluster.
And, so that I’m clear none of this is me accusing you of being an abuser. Hell, none of this is me accusing my ex-girlfriend of being an abuser. I don’t think she was trying to control me in any general sense, or even consciously trying to manipulate me on specific issues. She was depressed, and insecure, and seriously messed up by a history of emotional abuse that she’d suffered. And I did and said some shitty things too, and frankly, her emotional needs and my capabilities were just not compatible. (Probably a little bit of the reverse too, but I think that that could have been made to work, while the me to her direction was really just not workable.) We’re still friends.
But . . . Geeze, man. “Subtle rejection.” Can we just remove that phrase, and all the associated concepts, from the collective knowledge of the planet? Or at least, its persistence in the face of explicit non-rejection/acceptance/embrace/whatever? Because I have yet to see a relationship that was improved by one partner reading that sort of shit into what the other partner said or did.
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I want to play Twines games themed around “transness or transhumanist BDSM”.
Would you please tell me where to find them, Ozy?
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Porpentine, Life in Neon, queer trans mentally ill power fantasy.
Have fun!
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Thank you!
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Porp is amazing.
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I really wish people felt comfortable calling Twine products “interactive fiction” rather than “games”.
I understand the political arguments around it, and I support the idea of democratizing game production (I would, after all) but… well, they’re not actually games? Y’know, from a game theory context.
And we used to have a well-loved and well-respected sub-medium of Interactive Fiction, mostly in the form of a specific kind of descendant of the text adventure genre, and most of the Twine things would fit very nicely in that category.
Of course, now the Goblin Hordes are associated with the backlash against Twine games, it’s going to be impossible to reinvigorate the IF genre in this way. And it’s a huge shame.
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The IF people are, I believe, happy to claim them; I know that Jimmy Maher over at filfre.net talks about the recent resurgence of choice-based rather than parser-based IF, and I’m guessing this is the sort of thing he has in mind. But I think most people just aren’t familiar with interactive fiction, so…
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It’s really a shame that interactive fiction isn’t better known. There’s some really great stuff – the conversation in photopia… I think it was the purple section, talking with the queen (I won’t say more because spoilers) still haunts me to this day. In the best possible way.
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As a feminist AND a hardcore gamer AND a very casual IF player in the past (try Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin! probably impossible without a walk-through, but completely mind-blowing!)… I have extremely complicated feelings about the Twine fad (not the games themselves, the fad) and this cold culture war in general.
I really kinda suspect that some of the people on the “progressive” side just take a perverse pleasure in conspiciously denigrating the old values of mechanically complex gameplay and low-fiction narrative (see: X-Com, the original game, not the 2013 parody). I would really be amazingly happy for “us” and “them” to coexist, but I can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that the “old” hardcore gaming culture is becoming too convenient a target for hipsters and social climbers. I want more diversity, more representation, different voices… but I am unnerved by some trends that can exploit these noble motives.
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My impression is that it comes down to the arguments are soldiers thing again.
The arguments that depression quest is not a game are absolutely terrible – most of them would define classics like Monkey Island as not a game. I hope it won’t have too much of a long term effect.
Also, while I’ve never played the vanilla 2013 X-Com; only the warspace and then the Long War mod. I think Long War is just stunningly good.
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@multi — “Hipsters” and “social climbers”?
Like, “hipster” is a completely empty insult. Mocking “social climbers” is just nerd sour grapes. Which, there has always been a pecking order in nerd-space, and it kinda sucks, but on the other hand it is also kinda human nature. But enough barbs get thrown that perhaps we could throw fewer barbs.
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Oh and Porpy is fucking amazing and gorgeous and I have a mile-wide Internet girl-crush on her. Go play her games.
Regarding calling Twine stuff “games” — the term “game” was literally the example Wittgenstein used of a word no one can agree on.
People call them “games.” Deal with it.
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“the term “game” was literally the example Wittgenstein used of a word no one can agree on.”
Meanwhile, Morgenstern and the entire history of game theory happened.
Two Cultures, ladies, gents and nonbinaries. Two Cultures.
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>Like, “hipster” is a completely empty insult.
In this context, meaning smth like “appropriating aspects of a subculture once it’s sufficiently tame and fit for consumption, while exempting oneself from the shared experiences formative to the ‘unironic’ members’ subcultural identity’
>Which, there has always been a pecking order in nerd-space, and it kinda sucks, but on the other hand it is also kinda human nature.
I know, but the pecking has always gone many ways and only some of them harnessed actual structures of oppression – like the misogyny of it, sure. Like, grognards and JRPG fans usually care very little for each other, but I don’t think nerds can oppress each other as nerds – they oppress queer nerds, non-male ones, non-“white” ones, sure. But outsiders *can* oppress all nerds as a class.
>sour grapes
Sure, but the thing is, we have always been a subculture focused on creations, mechanisms, experiences and not on relations between people. In an important way, we are united by being… solitary – in a specific, rather socially unacceptable way. And I feel that the legitimacy of being this devoted to anything so… asocial is kind of under attack today. Which often ties into ableism, hint hint.
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P.S. Veronica, I’m really kind of annoyed that you would even classify “hipster” or “social climber” as characteristic of the “barbs” being thrown. “Attention whores”, that’s a barb. “Fat yaoi-loving bitches”, that’s a barb. “Sperglord man-babies”, that’s a barb.
*These* are the horrible mean things that need to stop. A relatively civil accusation of insensitivity and illegitimate pretension does not feel to belong in the same category to me.
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P.S. depression quest is good.
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Depression Quest is rather excellent IF, if perhaps a little entry-level. But entry-level isn’t a bad thing, especially when you’re trying to help people understand depression.
What it’s not is a game. There is no reward mechanism, no definable moves besides “advance the narrative”, no win/lose condition even in the most abstract sense, and, importantly, there is no barrier to advancement whatsoever.
You will note that this list does not exclude Monkey Island or any other title generally considered a “game”, but does exclude pretty much everything made with Twine.
It also doesn’t exclude Gone Home, another title generally considered a “non-game” but which I think neatly fulfills the criteria for both a game and IF. Another title that manages that feat is The Stanley Parable.
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multi (and veronica, for that matter):
I was considered a nerd when I was in high school (and bullied for it) and elementary school (and physically beaten up for it), but these days I no longer think I am one. The term seems to have changed: When I was young, “nerd” was a socially stigmatizing term that denoted someone with an all-consuming intellectual interest, a poor physique and poor social skills. Eg. I was a nerd because I spent all my time writing assembly code on my Amiga, but was weakly and asthmatic and socially clueless. A friend of mine was a nerd because she spent all her time painting Warhammer 40.000 miniatures, but was clumsy and just as socially clueless. The first time I experienced any kind of “nerd community” was when a little group more-or-less spontaneously accreted in my high school’s computer lab (do high schools still have computer labs?), where we’d sit at the computers and nerd out on the primordial Web — back when everything was full of spinning GIF skulls and blink tags and terrible colour schemes — or play networked Doom. Our little group consisted of four boys (including one transboy, who chose that particular little group to be the first people he came out to — even before he told his family, in fact) and two girls. We developed our own weird in-jokes and slang, as such groups are wont to do. In the beginning, we’d only meet in the computer lab during recess (or when some of us skipped classes to go to the computer lab, which we probably did more than we should have), but after having known each other for a year we’d sometimes start meeting outside school too. We started playing a tabletop RPG together in the weekends, and sometimes we went out to see terrible movies together to make fun of them.
This was the first time in my life where I felt any kind of belonging at all. Prior to that, my only experience with peers was that they either wanted to make fun of me, beat me up, or tolerated me in order to gain access to my home computer (there weren’t many of those around in my childhood).
But I think “nerd” means something entirely different now, and I think nerds of today have an entirely different experience of what it means to be a “nerd” than we did back then. I mean, as an example, look at this:
http://io9.com/what-are-the-nerdiest-states-in-america-1567796688
Judging from that table, the current definition of “nerd” means cosplay, LARP and watching TV shows based on more or less “prettified” versions of the kind of terrible science fiction literature old-school nerds liked. The mainstream “nerd” identity conspicuously does not include obsessive computer programming or an all-consuming interest in science. And that seems to me to be more or less reflective of what “nerd” means now. Many of the younger people who self-identify as nerds today seem to associate the word primarily with something else than I do entirely. Many of them are attractive, socially competent and have a wide variety of shallow interests rather than a narrow variety of extremely deep ones.
I am not sure where it leaves people like me (and my old friends from the computer lab), because by the current apparent meaning of “nerd”, I am not one. So I get frustrated and distraught and confused over no longer having a community in which I feel I “belong”, and I get even more frustrated that the only community I *had* in which it was acceptable for me to be *me* — with all the social dysfunction that entailed — is now gone. It feels like my subculture has been gentrified beyond recognition, like someone bulldozed my favourite disreputable library and erected a giant noisy confusing shopping mall in its stead.
Because I have a very introverted personality structure, my coping strategy is to get very sad and nostalgic. But I think this is why nerds with more extraverted personality structures get angry and defensive. They feel that outside forces are colonizing their spaces, and this is why you get some really ugly expressions of that defensiveness, like the “fake geek girl” accusation, or how something like Gamergate turns into such a huge messy explosion from which nobody escapes with their dignity intact. To me, it is very obvious from the way nerds on the GG side talk about these issues that they feel they are engaged in a battle to defend a bastion of nerdhood from mainstream media and respectable academia — “the establishment” or “the Man”, if you will. And on the other side, you have people who feel *they* are engaged in a battle to allow them (or people with similar identities to them) to enter an entrenched patriarchal nerd culture that tries to keep them out — “the establishment” or “the Man” as well, in fact.
However, I do not think that my generation of nerds have any more right to the nerd identity than the new generation (another reason why I tend to just get sad and nostalgic rather than shouting at the newcomers to get off my lawn, as it were). It sort of bugs me that there are no more spaces where I can be as weird and socially dysfunctional as I am without having people turn it into a huge social issues flamewar, but such is life. The closest I have is the death metal fan world, where everybody is typically too drunk to care how weird someone is acting (and which has a surprisingly large overlap with old-school nerddom), but it will never be a community that is “mine” in the same way that nerddom-of-yesteryear was.
But yesteryear is gone, and so is that nerddom.
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@moebius — Your story is super familiar, so yeah. On the other hand, was your tight-knit circle of friends ever the whole of nerd-dom, even then?
I mean, I don’t know how old you are, but The Sandman came out in ’89 and Vampire the Masquerade in ’91. But even more, there were precursors before the products. For example, I remember gothy LARP-like things well back in the mid 80’s. Many of those players were attractive and socially apt. (I didn’t always get invited, btw, which made me sad.) Moreover, I recall the “grognards” mocking them, such as the old men who liked to play The South in Civil War miniatures gaming, who freaked out at the kids with funny hair.
Except I was a kid with funny hair who like to Civil War miniatures games. Which was awkward. Some of those people had very unpleasant politics.
But I digress…
Anyway, my point is this: nerd-dom was always a pretty big place. Since those days it has gotten bigger, sure, but that has never bothered me. I like clusters of people who are all weird in different ways.
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moebius: thanks, excellent comment! I really really sympathize with your concerns, even if I can’t say anything too intelligent or insightful about it!
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There are definitely parser IF snobs who think Twine isn’t “real IF” – just letting you all know. I trust Emily Short for my IF criticism needs and she’s down with Twine, so I’m down with it by default I guess.
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Veronica:
My experience is different. Perhaps this is due to regional/cultural difference.
Obviously my old gang was not the whole of nerdhood, nor did I ever claim it was. It was, however, the first time in my life that the nerd identity, which had largely been foisted upon me by people who despised nerds and called me one while beating me up or humiliating me, led to something *good* — in fact, it led to something I have never experienced before or since, namely a sense of belonging. A sense of actual connection to a *group* of other human beings. Due to a quirk of my neurology, feeling any sort of connection to other bipeds is not something that comes easily to me, so I hope you have some impression of how much I treasured this.
I have a theory about why I (and some other nerds I know who felt the same way) felt like this in such little nerd gatherings: It is a combined function of the *smallness* of the group (nerds, it seems, generally do not thrive in large numbers), and – more importantly – the *exclusivity* of the group. That is to say, nerd culture in that day and age seemed to me to be a rather exclusive affair, in which only a rather specific kind of person thrived, and other people generally felt (and to some extent *were*) unwelcome. This kind of exclusivity is, of course, a terribly politically incorrect state of affairs, but few seemed to mind that, since few people actually *wanted* to be a nerd; most people made fun of us and thought we were a rather sad bunch of weird losers. We, in turn, made fun of them (from a safe distance), or just lost ourselves in programming or RPGs.
If there is any trait that seems to me to define what *I* think of as a nerd, it is a combination of the aforementioned very deep (but narrow) intellectual interest and poor social skills — and thus, particularly in school environments where popularity is very hard work and functions along bizarre and arbitrary rules made up by children, nerds are almost unpopular by definition. Some nerds have poor social skills because they are naturally poor at working out social intricacies, others have poor social skills because they have little to no motivation for *developing* social skills — typically, because they preferred to do things like writing a Scheme interpreter, drawing a homemade superhero comic or painting an army of Tyranids to doing things like keeping track of which celebrity currently had the nicest hair, or which articles of clothing were currently considered fashionable to wear, or who was currently having sex with whom. A lot of nerds, it seems, were autistic (in my little group from high school, only two do not have an autism spectrum diagnosis today), and if you are the kind of person who likes to view things in terms of identity politics, you might say that neurotypical nerds in that particular era largely functioned as a kind of “autism spectrum allies”.
But now, that exclusivity is mostly gone, for better or worse. When you have a community that is largely composed of socially inept people, and lots of socially apt people successfully enter it, well … you do not really need a careful study of Machiavelli to figure out who is going to end up calling the shots.
In the open thread, for example, you mentioned it as a problem that male nerds are clueless about who gets to date whom. I am personally extremely fortunate that I have barely any sexual drive at all (an extremely useful characteristic for a very unattractive and socially inept person), but ARGH! I do not want that kind of high school politics in my nerd spaces! I miss nerd communities full of people who talk about Lisp and D&D and ancient warfare and pointer arithmetic and terrible Isaac Asimov novels, rather than everybody bickering about dating and (nerd media) celebrity gossip and clothing style and posturing for status.
This used to be a community in which I could be *me* without fearing unpredictably proportioned social repercussions because someone chooses to take offense over some transgression I barely understand, or ending up being entangled in what a friend of mine calls “chimpanzee politics”. I spend all my time relentlessly self-policing when in polite society (because I *know* that autistic behaviour are not accepted), and nerd culture used to be the one place I could let go and relax. Now, huge internet shitstorms are started due to a nerd committing a social faux pas.
I understand why you appreciate that nerdhood has become more inclusive, but I hope you can also understand why I do not. To me, this process has felt like being ousted from the only cultural home I ever had, the only place that functioned according to values and practices I could *understand*. As I said, it is as if someone bulldozed my favourite disreputable library and erected a giant noisy confusing shopping mall in its stead.
And again, I am not saying that this is *wrong*, I am just saying that it sucks *for me*. To use a terrible metaphor born of sleep deprivation and melancholy: Although it was probably globally best that the Cro-Magnons won in the end, I am fairly sure it probably sucked to be one of the last Neanderthals.
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Some nerds have poor social skills because they are naturally poor at working out social intricacies, others have poor social skills because they have little to no motivation for *developing* social skills
Or anti-motivation, because they consider social skills to be something dishonest people do.
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@Sniffnoy–I definitely have some of that remaining in my mind.
@Moebius: Your stories are good and interesting.
This stuff is complicated, because, as Moebius said, part of the expansion has been an expansion of socially-adept/average people coming into nerd/geek spaces. (And yeah, although I’m not that far below average in social skills, I do feel somewhat threatened by that.) And that has coincided with an increased number of non-cis-het-white-male-etc. people. But part of that is also that the non-cis-het-white-male-etc. people who were already there are becoming more visible and less willing to second-guess their objections when they don’t like something. And a lot of the anti-SJW/fake geek girl etc. stuff targets them, too. And it’s not exactly fair that I’ve been wanting more female playable characters in video games since the early 90s (and reading sf/f books before that), but wanting that gets framed as something the “new people” want.
I’m reminded of an experience from when I was growing up. ‘Gentrification’ is something associated with urban environments, but it is certainly a phenomenon in rural environments, too. And it’s been happening for decades in Vermont. And a lot of new people have come in and changed things around to be the way they like it, and it’s understandable that people who’ve been in Vermont for generations don’t like that. So I think that a lot of the emotions behind “Take Back Vermont” related to that. But what “Take Back Vermont” was responding to more specifically was civil unions for gay people. And my ancestors had been in Vermont as long as just about any white person’s, and I didn’t want to get rid of civil unions. And I know one gay guy who, in casual conversation, seems like pretty much a stereotypical rural Vermonter, accent, plaid flannel, and all.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I am sympathetic to concerns about interlopers/gentrification, but it’s also frustrating when people assume that you’re an interloper when you’re not.
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closetpuritan:
I also understand your concerns. I know several “classic nerd” women who are sick and tired of being assumed to be SJ activists out to gentrify everything, even though they have been in the community for longer than the internet SJ movement has even existed. Being subjected to suspicion purely on grounds of how you happen to have been born is not fair. It is also something I can relate to on a personal level, from my own experiences in activist communities (where *I* was the object of suspicion, for obvious reasons).
I recently talked to one of my old computer lab friends, from way back when. She said she wished I had some kind of safe space to reatreat to (and she *knows* the value of safe spaces; apart from being a huge nerd, she is a lesbian with a minority ethnicity). That set off one of the aforementioned bouts of nostalgia and sadness, because well… I had one, once. Unfortunately, it was only safe *because of* its exclusivity, and given that inclusivity is good and that other people wanted in, well… there was no way it could possibly last.
This leaves me without anywhere to go, and that makes me sad and nostalgic.
I am not saying that anybody must (or even ought to) change their actions, I have no right to say that. And I think that in the end, there is *no way* to secure safe spaces for classic nerds – they tend to be clever, technical and creative, and thus they create really cool stuff, and thus other people want in. If exclusivity is bad, then it logically follows that there is no defensible way to allow for “safe spaces” for such people. And so, I am not condemning the “gentrification of nerdhood”, I have no right to, but I do reserve the right to be sad about having lost my home, so to speak.
PS: I am completely clueless about “Take Back Vermont”; I am not American. I did live in a low-income “ghetto” neighbourhood for most of my adult life, though, but that was most certainly *not* gentrified — it never became a trendy place to live for rich people, so it retained its largely working-class and multiethnic area identity.
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@moebius:
I really sympathize with you.
I don’t think what the millennials are doing is making nerd culture any more open to me (or the general group “female nerds of the old-fashioned type”) than it was back then.
I wanted to be a nerd, back then, but I couldn’t because they were too sexist for me to feel comfortable around.
So, like you now, I just quietly felt sad.
Do you know the Toby Keith song “I Love This Bar”?
I like the song. I find “This Bar” appealing, and I can see why the singer loves it.
But I could never go safely into “This Bar” the way an average-sized man could. (Meanwhile, I respect those who can be this…but I never could do that either.)
It’s the same with nerd culture. I could see that I as a woman could never fit in among the nerds. I remember the day when, reading alt.geek, I finally accepted that fact. (I no longer remember what it was that made me accept it. I do remember it was alt.geek, though. It was a “much as I like this culture it’s just plain too sexist for me, oh well” moment.)
Your “favorite disreputable library” is somewhere I wanted to go but never could, because (come with me here on the metaphor) it’s in a very high crime neighborhood and has no security guards. I mean I could’ve gone, if I’d wanted to take the risk, but it was a way higher risk than a man faced, and I chose not to take that disproportionate risk.
(And I did feel it was a choice that I made…but at the same time, it *was* unfair that I had to make that choice and the men didn’t. But I’m not a fan of ranting and raving and viciously attacking; it’s just mean and doesn’t help. It’s just I do think, or maybe just wish, that someone could’ve/should’ve said/done something. But that someone wasn’t me…another choice I made.)
I agree that, “It is as if someone bulldozed my favourite disreputable library and erected a giant noisy confusing shopping mall in its stead.”
I mean. If we go back to the “This Bar” thing, then it seems to me the young folks are tearing down “This Bar” and replacing it with a Starbucks. The new place is less dangerous to/uncomfortable for women (I imagine)…but it’s less attractive to me as well. Though I was sad I couldn’t join the nerds then, I’m not sad I can’t join these “nerds” now. I’m glad they’re having fun but…it’s not nerddom, to me.
I haven’t weighed in on #ShirtStorm because I’m on both sides of that as well. He’s a nerd being bullied, and making him cry on TV is horribly cruel and doing no good…but yes, it was exactly that kind of thing that *did* deter me from science, back when I was a 15-year-old girl who’d just tested out of the first two years of university.
I’m not Sarah “no woman who was really interested would be deterred by cheesecake” Hoyt. I’m…the *other* kind of Odd woman.
😦
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Back in the 70s, I found fandom. It was home.
I was sexually harassed now and then, but it was a level that I could shake off. (I’m not saying that anyone else had the same experiences or did or should have the same reactions.) It was enough harassment that when I tried to add it all up, it started making me sad, so I stopped.
Racefail made me acutely miserable for months, and pretty miserable for years, though I’ve been gradually recovering. if we only judge people by the effects of what they do, then racefail was a failure as far as I’m concerned. The gender material didn’t do me a lot of good– for whatever reason, I don’t feel a deep sense of satisfaction at the modern batch of kickass heroines. I liked Modesty Blaise and Jamethiel very much, and I’m quite fond of Marla Mason (Tim Pratt), but for the most part, I’d think that I’m a woman, the huge contingent of modern heroines should make me feel good, but it just doesn’t work and I have no idea what’s missing.
I realize there are problematic elements in older sf about women, but at the time I pretty much dealt with it by identifying with male characters. This may have done me some subtle damage, but I really can’t tell. If my gut is any guide, I think there’s something deeply unhealthy about ticking off the genders of the authors you read in the hopes of getting something right.
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nancylebovitz:
I am not sure if there is any pattern to sexual harassment in vs. outside of nerd spaces. My girlfriend, who is a nerd (tabletop RPGs, sf/f fandom, video gaming, general interest in science), says that she consistently has had *less* harassment in nerd spaces than in general society. At least one of my old computer lab friends has had the same experience. But I have also met women on the Internet who have experienced *more* harassment in nerd spaces.
Obviously, given my sex, I have not had the same kinds of experiences with sexual harassment. The only experience I have had that I think would qualify as a kind of sexual harassment was at an old job (in software development), where a female project leader would very often touch me – never below the waist, fortunately; she would just stroke my shoulders or back – while talking to me about work. I absolutely hated it (due to a neurological quirk of mine, being touched *hurts* if I am not ready for it), but I put up with it because I was afraid that reacting to it would be interpreted as the kind of inappropriate resistance male subordinates can have to female leaders (I had read an article about just that kind of resistance and insubordination a few days before she started working there). I have come to think that that was probably a terrible idea on my part. She probably did not even know how much I hated it; I tried my best to not let it show, so essentially I put her in a position where she was violating my boundaries without having any chance to know that she was doing so.
Personally, I think a lot of older sf is rather terrible when it comes to portrayal of women. A few cases in point: In Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” (1970), the primary female character has no useful skills (and no discernible personality), and is literally only brought along for the mission as a combination good luck charm and sex companion for the protagonist. In David Brin’s “Sundiver” (1980), the first female character shows up about 70 pages into the book, and the first thing she does is to loudly proclaim her sexual availability to the protagonist (and then she goes on to be a bumbling incompetent in dire need of a big strong man to hold her). I am not a woman, and this irritates *me*. Both because I hate that kind of bigoted representations of people and because it utterly shatters my suspension of disbelief: How the hell could anybody in-universe ever think it would be a good idea to give these two people A) an important role in the greatest scientific expedition ever undertaken and B) command of a military starship, respectively? It also made many of the sequencing involving said characters almost painfully ridiculous to read.
But I actually see very little of it in more modern sf, at least the stuff I read. Two of the strongest and most memorable characters in Alastair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” series were women, the assassin Ana Khouri and the starship commander Ilia Volyova. In his novel “Pushing Ice”, both the lead characters (essentially the hero and villain of the story) are women, and they seem to live in a society in which gender has no bearing on social status. I think Paul McAuley rolls dice to determine the genders of many of his characters; in many of his future societies it seems to be not a big deal. The most important character in his “Quiet War” series is a woman — although in her case, her gender *is* an important aspect of her character; she rises to prominence in a heavily patriarchal and conservative society (due to her brilliance as a genetics specialist). Stephen Baxter wrote a sympathetic and competent lesbian couple into the spaceship crew in “Titan” — they were sort of boring cardboard cutout characters, really, but Baxter’s het male characters are like that too
So what happened in between? Obviously, sf written in the 1950s reads like something written in the 1950s, and gender attitudes have shifted since then. But what also happened was Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh and other women like them. By showing everyone that women could write sf that was just as good as the stuff men wrote (frankly, all of the aforementioned wrote considerably better than Larry Niven), it got a bit hard to take it seriously when male writers were pretending that women were idiots or only regarding them as potential sexual conquests. They raised the bar for everybody, *and* established that women could have a place in the community.
I personally have as much trouble identifying with both male and female characters (I am, to be perfectly honest, not very good at identifying with humans at all — this is why I like xenofiction and stories with robot or computer protagonists; I am at no special disadvantage compared to other people when reading about those). I also have little like for most modern kickass heroines, much as it is probably terribly politically incorrect for me to admit to that. This is because I think most of them seem like the kind of bland, generic superhumans that 1970s sf authors wrote their male characters as, just in a gender-flipped version.
However, my favourite SF kickass heroine is actually not from literature at all, but from the movies: Ellen Ripley, from “Alien”. She is working-class, brave, intelligent and resourceful, but is also a very human character: Her bravery comes not from being some kind of stoic übermensch, but instead by overcoming her fear, and her story is one of a regular person rising to meet exceptional circumstances (as is evidenced in how she primarily uses her wits and her competence with heavy industrial tools to defeat the aliens, not superpowers or superweapons). She is therefore a much better character than any boring superhuman action hero, and I think many of the modern crop of female sf heroes are, in fact, just the usual superhuman action heroes (who I find endlessly boring regardless of their genital configurations). I have trouble thinking of any male action-sf character I like as much as Ripley.
I actually took a break of several years from reading sf myself, because after some interactions with SJ activists (during the events of Racefail), I started thinking that my reading habits were probably hugely problematic and that I should feel terrible for reading sf. I finally got into a good reading rhythm again this year (although, as I wrote elsewhere, I have given up on my hopes of writing anything myself; I am too afraid that any kind of nerd creative expression on my part will make me a public bullying victim. Also, my writing was shit; see my problems with relating to humans😛 ).
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Lizardbreath:
Part of this post will be terribly difficult for me to write. I hope you forgive me if I ramble. This is a very hard subject for me, for obvious reasons.
First of all, I also really sympathize with you. I hope you have some kind of “cultural home” or “shared identity” (even if subcultural or obscure) outside of nerdhood, and that you do not feel as hopeless and homeless as I do.
To stay in the metaphor, which I suppose is getting stretched rather thin now, I think the best thing that could have happened for you was if some non-criminal but street-savvy and respected native of aforementioned neighbourhood came out, showed you around the place, taught you to hold your own in the place and helped you build respect with the other natives, until you eventually became a familiar and respected figure that nobody wanted to mess with — and one who could be sure that the others would have your back if some unsavoury type decided to do so. It makes me sorry that that was not what happened.
You say that it was unfair that you had to make your choice to stay out, when the men did not — and it was; I agree. But I did not have a choice to *go in*: I was born in that neighbourhood, and I cannot leave. I never “wanted to be a nerd”; the epithet of “nerd” was something people applied to me while they were either physically beating me up or subjecting me to public humiliation, because they despised me for having the characteristics then considered “nerdish”. That was the shared experience of aforementioned little computer lab gang in my youth; none of us had wanted to be nerds, we were called nerds because people hated us. The girls (and transboy) had that experience too, the primary difference they had experienced was that the nature of the bullying they had been subjected to tended to be lighter on the physical violence, but heavier on the social humiliation. We thus tried to make “nerd”, originally a term of derision, mean something *good* to us — none of us had the social skills to be anything *but* nerds, even if we had had the desire (which we did not — we would rather code and play video games and write terrible fiction).
I want to stress that I do not regard “wanting to be a nerd” to be something bad, or unauthentic, or anything like that. I am also not saying that my experience is less fair than yours. But wanting to be a nerd *is* something I have a lot of trouble understanding. To me, it seems exactly equivalent to saying “I want to be a social reject that everybody hates”, and I cannot understand why anybody would want that.
This made modern “hipster nerdhood” (to paraphrase multiheaded, above) an almost incomprehensible phenomenon to me, until I figured out that they wanted the *trappings* of nerdhood, even if they did not want the characteristics of the people who created all that nerd culture. And now that a lot of socially apt, popular, attractive people have moved in, well… the library has become a shopping mall and the seedy bar is now a Starbucks. The neighbourhood itself is probably less uncomfortable, as you say, but only because the streets are now patrolled by heavily-armed police thugs.
Now comes the part that is going to be difficult for me. It relates to the police thugs, so to speak.
Like you, I sort of have a foot in both camps in the ongoing culture war between feminists and nerds (this is a war in which I have chosen to be a conscientious objector, in keeping with my general pacifist principles). You see, while I am a nerd (in the sense explained above), I am *also* solidly Red Tribe in the European sense (that is, the kind of Red that reads Marx, celebrates May 1st and uses antiquated terms like “class solidarity”), and am sympathetic to feminism. I grew up in a feminist household, and I spent part of my youth engaging in pro-feminist political activism, to the extent that I thoroughly alienated myself from all non-feminist friends (including some of the aforementioned nerds) for a while. To me, criticizing feminist activities feels like violating a terrible tribal taboo. It is not just that I fear repercussions, it is that doing so *feels terribly uncomfortable*. And I feel terribly conflicted, because one side of me *really does not want to criticize feminism*, but another side of me is *really extremely terrified of modern feminist activism* — and in that culture war, there is precisely one side that consistently targets people like me with all the weapons they have.
You mention ShirtStorm, and that is a perfect place to bring up a point about the domestic cat. Because housecats descend from mostly solitary animals, their neuroanatomy does not let them naturally make connections between the cat’s activities and social interventions or punishments from humans. In other words, if a cat starts sharpening its claws against a favoured piece of furniture and the human
shouts at it or spritzes it with water, it has no idea that those two events are even connected. From the cat’s perspective, it shares its home with a giant unpredictable ape prone to completely random bouts of shouting violent rage.
This is largely how I perceive the “outrage activism” that seems to be a
favoured modus operandi of (not all) feminists on the Internet now. It took
several days (and a rather embarrassingly confused conversation with a friend)
before I figured out what it even *was* that Matt Taylor had done wrong. In the
beginning, I was absolutely puzzled why everybody was getting so worked up
about the fact that he wore an outlandish Hawaiian-style shirt to work. It took
a considerable amount of explaining to get me to understand that people were
offended because the shirt had pictures of gun-toting scantily-clad cyborg
women from terrible 1980s cartoons on it. I can understand *that* people are
offended by that, but I cannot understand *why*. There is no way I can put
these things into a coherent system that I can use to make reliable predictions
about what people will get outraged over and whether the outrage will warrant
a stern talking-to, a few angry emails, or a giant angry mob demanding that
I get fired or that I commit suicide.
If Matt Taylor is like me, then his experience must have been rather like that of the exasperated housecat beset by the inscrutable primate. He picks his favourite shirt (a birthday gift from a friend of his) and heads to work, lands a spacecraft on a comet, and suddenly the Internet is calling for his head on a spike.
I own a large collection of heavy metal band t-shirts, and looking at them, I
*have no idea* which ones of them might be considered an outrage worthy of inciting a giant mob bullying campaign. “Oh, just stay away from those that are an expression of sexuality!” is one attempt I have gotten as a rule of thumb, but I have barely any understanding of others’ sexuality at all (and feel no sexual attraction to most humans or, indeed, cartoons), and I did not even recognize Matt Taylor’s shirt as something particularly sexual.
And so, I dress in plain t-shirts, I do not joke, I do not make wild speculations about human nature, I never tell others about even a tenth of the weird and hugely entertaining stuff that goes on inside my head. I am too afraid. The few expressions of actual *personality* I allow myself take weeks of deliberation. This is a *hideously* depressing and stressful state of affairs for me, and nerd culture used to be the *one* space I had where I could act like the person I actually am, rather than trying to emulate a poorly-constructed and extremely boring faux-neurotypical. Nerd culture was the one place where I didn’t feel *socially* disabled (I still have sensory and executive function issues, obviously, but at least I did not have to relentlessly self-police because I have trouble figuring out what is considered inappropriate). And while “hipster nerdhood” was what made me lose my connection to the “shared identity” of nerds, it was SJ activism that made me afraid of performing nerd activities or expressing nerd-related creativity at all. What if my latest piece of terrible fiction offends someone for some absolutely inscrutable reason, and this marks me as a terrible ideological foe who has to be bullied into submission?
I understand and I sympathize with the fact that you do not have the mental
resilience of Sarah Hoyt — in fact, as I hope to have just explained, neither
do I.
But I have no idea what to do. It is unfair that nerd culture is full of socially incompetent men who do things that make women feel unwelcome. However, I am at a loss as to what people want to *do* with those men once they have been evicted from their spaces. I mean, “re-educate them” is in many cases precisely equivalent to saying “cure autism” (which, in turn, is equivalent to saying “exterminate a particular type of human mind”). It does not work. At best, you get self-hating and sad losers like me; at worst, you get GamerGate.
I can think of a positive story of nerd incomprehension of social expectations,
though, and I think it is also pertinent to the rest of this discussion. Susan Sons wrote an article (http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software) about her experience with nerdhood, and how the nerds (in this case, open source hackerdom) treated her as an equal: She coded, fixed bugs and wrote docs like any beginning open source hacker, so why would they care that she also happened to be a 12-year-old girl who lived on a farm? “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria”, as the hacker ethic has held since somewhen in the 1950s.
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Two comments:
1. Why do you dislike Christina Hoff Sommers? I don’t agree with her on GamerGate, but in general I appreciate her work as one of the few sane voices who is critical of the negative aspects of contemporary feminism without being a raging misogynist lunatic.
2. Why do you consider cheating to be a private matter? It is a clear indication of a person being dishonest and untrustworthy, which I think is important information for anyone who might have future dealings with them. And although I don’t agree with “mob justice,” without exposing a cheater, the cheater suffers basically no repercussions besides maybe losing a relationship that they evidently didn’t care that much about anyway. (Note, though, that I think exposing someone privately among their own social circles is a much more reasonable response than posting about it on the Internet. [In Eron’s case, though, I can kinda see why he did the latter given that Zoe refused to come clean to her boss’ wife.])
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Alas has a good summary about CHS’s misrepresentations of feminism. I also hate the equity feminist/gender feminist distinction; “believes in the legal equality of women” is not “feminist”, it’s just “not a raging misogynist.” I’m not really sure why “people who identify as feminists but don’t think sexism is real” is such a thing– are there that many people who have positive affect about feminism but don’t believe in sexism?– but it is.
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Thanks. I read three of the posts on equity feminism from your link; I’ll try to read more of them later when I have time. I concede that Hoff Sommers can be, to paraphrase Scott, selectively demanding of rigor, and overzealous in her application of the equity/gender feminism distinction. But with respect, having read “Who Stole Feminism?,” I think the criticisms presented in the three posts I’ve read so far are somewhat narrow and not particularly charitable to Hoff Sommers’ position.
I’m also immediately skeptical when I read something like “Republican activists and think-tankers, like Hoff Sommers herself.” I see this all over the place, and it seems like a bit of ad hominem/guilt by association with conservatives who tend to oppose progressive/feminist values. But despite her employment with the AEI, Hoff Sommers is a registered Democrat (according to her, anyway), and in any case I’m not sure why her party association really matters when one is discussing specific positions of hers. I also take issue with describing her as “anti-feminist.” Who is the gatekeeper for feminism? Are TERFs also “anti-feminist” because they hold views that many other feminists find abhorrent?
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I don’t think it’s that mysterious. Its the same reason why in China you’ll find “people who identify as communists but don’t think the state should own the means of production”.
CHS Isn’t any kind of feminist. She’s an anti-feminist. She’s probably the most prominent anti-feminist in America. The fact that she finds it necessary or advantageous to claim that she’s really just a different kind of feminist, while disagreeing with actual feminists on more or less everything is significant.
If she made the exact same arguments, but called herself “anti-feminist” instead of “equity feminist”, what do you think would happen to her?
If feminism is a Scrappy Underdog Activist Movement, then CHS calling herself a feminist doesn’t make sense. If feminism is the Officially Established Ideology, then it makes perfect sense. It would be career suicide for her to do otherwise.
I realize I’m getting close bravery debate territory here. That’s not my intent. Official Ideologies have been known to be better than Scrappy Movements. Knowing which one feminism is doesn’t in and of itself tell you if feminism is good or bad (on the current margin) or if particular feminist ideas are good or bad. But it does let you avoid being surprised by what CHS calls herself.
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So, obviously feminism can’t be totally taboo or CHS wouldn’t have any motivation to call herself a feminist. That’s true.
But on the other hand, it can’t be completely dominant either, or she wouldn’t be arguing against feminism. Or at least, she wouldn’t be arguing against feminism and getting mainstream attention; people who argue things like “maybe women shouldn’t be able to vote” get tabooed by the mainstream so hard they have to go slink around the LW and SSC comments sections. (Sorry, NR snark.)
What’s happening, I think, is that feminism has two senses: a broadly accepted one where feminism means “women should be equal”, and a much less widely accepted one where feminism means a list of specific currently controversial political positions. (Scott from SSC calls this “motte and bailey”, and I don’t really like the implication which that term creates that both positions are being argued by the same people as a deliberate and dishonest tactic. But for convenience I’ll be calling the broadly accepted position the “motte” and the controversial one the “bailey”.)
Christina Hoff Summers is a person who likes the motte of feminism, as most people do, but dislikes the bailey. There are many people like this who have problems reconciling the two different emotional reactions they have to the term “feminism”. CHS gives them a convenient exit by, essentially, pointing out the problem and explicitly claiming only the half of feminism that they already like.
The problem with doing this is that, although it’s a simple and obvious solution, the bailey has all the actual content of feminism as an ideology, including the parts that allowed it to win enough to have a motte in the first place. So in practice CHS is an anti-feminist, since she’s against everything feminism actually does and only claims the label to extract what positive emotion she can from it. She’s like someone who claims to like Coke but who really dumps the actual cola in the sink and just carries around the can.
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(Same Platypus, but I decided to make a WordPress account since I comment here and on SSC frequently enough to warrant it). In reply to Lawrence D’Anna, I think you make a good point. In fact, I’ve long suspected that the reason Christina Hoff Sommers is employed by the AEI, despite ostensibly being a Democrat, is because liberal institutions either actively oppose or simply wouldn’t want to be associated with her writings on feminism. Of course, this is just conjecture on my part, but I don’t think it’s an out of the realm of possibility.
I’m sure Hoff Sommers is well aware that she’d be a complete pariah (at least among liberals) if she called herself an anti-feminist, and that is part of the reason she calls herself a feminist. But I think she also sees herself as trying to reform feminism to be more focused on equity for both men and women, and uses her labels to distinguish her goals from those of feminists who seem solely focused on patriarchal oppression of women by men. To the extent that that is true, I think it’s a bit unfair to call her “anti-feminist” – but I admit that I may just feel that way because of the negative connotations that term holds. It is certainly fair to say that she opposes much of feminist orthodoxy.
I’m quite tired so apologies if none of this made any sense.
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The policing of the feminist identity is often puzzling, to say the least. Right now Julie Bindel is arguing for moderation and recentering of feminist energy…
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Well, have you ever heard, “feminism is the racial notion that women are people?” Well, then there you go. That’s why people who “just” believe in legal equality would think of themselves as feminists.
Remember also that the “wave” divisions of feminism retroactively identify the suffragettes as “first-wave feminism,” though that to me seems more like flagrant fort-and-field efforts by the self-identified second-wave to legitimize their “feminism.”. To oppose that, it would indeed be a good idea to stop calling people feminist who oppose legal inequality and nothing else, but you can bet that feminists themselves would fight you tooth-and-nail if you tried to take away their ability to use the quoted line above!
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>Well, have you ever heard, “feminism is the racial notion that women are people?” Well, then there you go. That’s why people who “just” believe in legal equality would think of themselves as feminists.
I used to think that that phrase was transparent motte-and-baileying (albeit before I had “motte and bailey” in my conceptual vocabulary). Now I think it’s something a little different. I think most of the people that use the phrase — certainly the people that coined it — actually think that “women are people” is, quite literally, a radical notion: that it’s a sentiment totally outside the mainstream worldview and that implementing it can be expected to require precipitous social changes, operationalized for example as the list of controversial political positions mentioned upthread.
Legal equality, meanwhile, is assumed as background by everyone involved — though if you’ve got it into your head that personhood for women is going to require a long uphill social battle, it’s not much of a stretch to conclude that it’s in danger if the battle lines happen to shift in the wrong way.
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Certainly some people think that, but I’ve never heard it in a context for which the natural interpretation is not along the lines of, “you should identify as a feminist if you think the 19th amendment was a good idea.” Having gotten somebody to identify as a feminist, the “feminists support Policy X” or “X-ism is a feminist issue” can come latter.
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Platypus wrote:
“But despite her employment with the AEI, Hoff Sommers is a registered Democrat (according to her, anyway), and in any case I’m not sure why her party association really matters when one is discussing specific positions of hers.”
In the post of mine you quoted, my point was that Sommers and other so-called “equity feminists” are an ideologically and numerically narrow group of conservative feminists, while the people who Sommers calls “gender feminists” are a hugely diverse group – every feminist who isn’t a conservative, basically – who often have little or nothing in common. This (I argued) makes the “gender vs equity feminist” lens of viewing feminism intellectually vapid, because it obscures far more important differences than it reveals.
In this context, it was relevant to be able to place CHS and other “equity feminists” ideologically, and noting that she is a Republican activist (by which I meant, she actively campaigns and editorializes in favor of Republican candidates) was part of that ideological placement.
If I’ve ever argued that CHS is wrong about a policy position because she is a Republican activist, then that was a bad argument on my part. But I doubt I’ve ever made that argument, and it was wrong of you to imply I had.
* * *
Why does CHS describe herself as a feminist? My theory is that CHS is a “strategic feminist.” Anti-feminist arguments seem more credible if they come from a self-described feminist. However, that is pure speculation on my part; CHS’s true motives are known only to herself. And they really don’t matter.
* * *
“I also take issue with describing her as “anti-feminist.” Who is the gatekeeper for feminism? Are TERFs also “anti-feminist” because they hold views that many other feminists find abhorrent?”
I addressed these questions at length in this post. But short answers:
1) I don’t think there is any gatekeeper to feminism. CHS is entitled to her opinion that she is a feminist; I am entitled to my opinion that she is an anti-feminist.
2) I think TERFs are bigots, assholes, wrong on the merits, bad at feminism, and incredibly harmful to people and to feminism. But yes, I think they’re feminists, by my definition of the term (which is in the post I just linked). To say otherwise, it seems to me, would be the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
Then again, if people want to say TERFs aren’t feminists, I won’t be inclined to argue. Pick your battles and all that.
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Ozy, thanks very much for the link! I’m hoping to return to blogging rebuttals to CHS in 2015, but right now I’m too busy drawing comics.
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One thing to be aware of is that CHS works for the American Enterprise Institute, which is the most transparent arm of the Republican propaganda machine that I’m aware of.
I don’t dislike her exactly, but a lot of people seem to think that she’s some kind of genius just for trotting out some tired old talking points that have been made a million times before. I think it’s more the fact that she exists – a woman who is feminist who is on “their side” – that leads people to like her. That’s irritating for people like me who actually care about the quality of argumentation.
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Oops. You’re already aware of that. Sorry, I wish we had edit buttons (HINT HINT OZY).
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“Why the pro-Gamergate people didn’t see it seems fairly obvious to me. ”
The pro-gamergate side saw it, was called misogynists and slut shamers for ever bringing it up, so stopped to try to repair their movement’s reputation.
I remember the start of Quinnspiracy (Thank fuck there’s a secondary name for it than ‘five guys’) and all of that shit that started gamergate. There were plenty of people talking about her abuse, at least on tumblrinaction which is where i saw it. I don’t particularly care about the games journalism side of things since i don’t really use those types of sites, even if i’m a gamer. The reason i was interested in quinnspiracy/ gamergate stuff was mainly zoe quinn’s behaviour and her defenders. These days bringing up anything negative about zoe quinn gets you labelled a misogynist so i just don’t bother.
A little background on tumblrinaction: It’s a subreddit about ‘SJW’ish hypocritical behaviour or silly behaviour, mostly on tumblr but occasionally from elsewhere, and people being stupid on tumblr in general. Basically extreme stuff on the social justice side of things. Stuff like TERFs, ‘gay men are actually misogynists’, comments from self proclaimed feminists cheering on abuse from men, trivial or non existent problems being blown out of proportion or attributing meaning to things that aren’t there, frivolous trigger warnings, blaming everything on the patriarchy and overly silly personal pronouns etc. (obviously when you have a subreddit like that some of the posts are going to be posts about reasonable stuff as well, you can’t control what every member of the subreddit does).
TL;DR it’s meant to be about extreme ‘SJW’ type stuff, but what counts as extreme varies person to person so you get some normal stuff showing up and getting made fun of there too.
The main talking point was that she was emotionally abusive and a hypocrite (she said something along the lines of ‘if you cheat on someone and then keep having sex with them without telling them, that’s rape. Then she did it herself. That’s where saying ‘shes a rapist by her own definition’ came from), and the fact that SJWs were defending this behaviour and calling anyone who said anything about her a slut shamer or a misogynist. Which proved that they don’t care about male victims of abuse and would protect abusers if they were female, and so that’s proof that they weren’t for equality but for female supremacy etc., in short the usual circlejerk since this type of thing where people are laughing off male abuse/victims and supporting female abusers/ victimisers wasn’t unheard of to be posted there.
She previously had an incident involving wizardchan, a chan site for literally depressed virgins, where she accused them of attacking her on twitter, and it later turned out not to be true. This is all i knew about her when quinnspiracy hit, and it seemed that’s the only thing most of the people on tumblrinaction knew.
If you read the zoepost it’s ALL ABOUT how she’s abusive, the games journalism bit was a a tiny mention towards the end. But gamers cared about the games journalism bit, so they hooked onto it. Most of the rest of reddit wasn’t allowing any discussion about any of it, and tumblrinaction was allowing it, but it was kind of overflowing the sub, so they made kotakuinaction to redirect all of the gamergate and zoe quinn stuff.
Some people were still talking about zoe quinn, since obviously that’s where it started, and presumably there would be some discussion about how she was an asshole/dick/cunt/bitch/[insert occasionally misogynistic insult here], and some people mainly cared about the journalism stuff, but the other side kept calling gamergate a misogynist movement because it still cared about zoe quinn so gamergate made an effort to just stop bringing her up.
Gamergate is not about fighting abuse, it’s officially about ethis and nepotism in journalism, with a litte bit of ‘journalism is too SJWy’ thrown in. The reason for the SJWy section of it has to do with it’s origins in how the ‘too SJWy games journalism sites’ handled reporting of the zoe quinn situation and downplayed all of the negative things she did, and about ‘calling sexism when there isn’t any’ in general.
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I think people also see the abuse as a piece of evidence suggesting her allegations of doxxing and harassment can’t be trusted, which is IMO reasonable. If someone is an abuser, they probably behave very unethically in other ways also.
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While I don’t know how representative it is, I’ve seen feminists/SJWs discussing abuse or possible abuse by Zoe Quinn (Mostly here and in comments here), and their position has been either “I don’t know if Zoe Quinn is an abuser” or “Zoe Quinn may well have been an abuser”, sometimes with the addition of “I think Gjoni was also an abuser”, but it seems like whether Gjoni is bad is not their primary focus in the discussion, but rather, whether Gamergate is bad.
Their main point has been, “If Quinn is an abuser, it is not a defense of Gamergate, because that doesn’t justify the harassment of Zoe Quinn/most of the people talking about it are being disingenuous and nobody cares about emotional abuse when feminists talk about it happening to women”.
I think it makes a certain amount of sense that the harm caused by Gamergate would get more attention than the harm caused by Zoe Quinn personally, since Gamergate is a bigger story/bigger phenomenon than any one abuser–it is targeting several other women besides Zoe Quinn–because at this point criticism of Zoe Quinn seems like piling on, to put it mildly; and (as Ozy notes) the same recognizable opponents are taking up the cause of Gamergate (including some who are not part of the gaming community and had even recently mocked the gaming community), so it’s sort of continuation of an older battle.
I would say that, like putting someone in jail, a widespread harassment campaign requires a high standard of evidence. Except putting someone in jail can actually help current victims feel safe and prevent future victims, and I’m not sure what the point of a harassment campaign is from my utilitarian-leaning POV.
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Hello! I stumbled across your blog post today, and I just wanted to say – thank you so much for this. I’ve been extremely discouraged by the ways in which many people across the GamerGate issue have sanitized Zoe Quinn’s abusive behavior. It’s extremely depressing for me, as a survivor myself, that many people STILL refuse to take Gjoni’s experiences seriously. Not just is it extremely hurtful, but it raises serious questions as to the extent that abuse is sanitized and erased within our society and culture (let alone within the gaming industry).
Your overview of GamerGate is also spot-on, and perfectly explains some of the main reasons I ended up leaving the movement and distancing myself from it.
As a sidenote – thanks as well for linking to my Zoepost video series, I’m glad you appreciate my analysis. Your post is definitely a morale boost to get me back to working on it :)!
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(Hugs again, m8!)
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I’m getting a little tired of the whole “Terrible Person X is in favour of Movement Y, therefore Movement Y is Bad!” thing.
I’m relatively sure RooshV respires oxygen and requires liquid water to live. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna give up being a carbon-based lifeform any time soon.
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Thank you for addressing this. Though in my experience, framing it as a blind spot might be generous. My attempts to discuss it, as a non-binary abuse survivor starting out in the games industry, was met with threats personally and professionally (e.g. blacklisting, losing access to distribution platforms, etc). To the point I’ll only speak about it anonymously now, and have been questioning whether I should still identify as a feminist. The people and places I thought were safe, aren’t. Even those who haven’t immediately become hostile, usually pull out the “mutual abuse” myth (which I see is present in the comments here, too). I’d rarely spoken about my experience publicly before, I don’t think I ever will again, now. I don’t think I could survive my abuser being whitewashed to the lengths I’ve seen happen during this. Though maybe what you and a handful of others are doing with posts like this, will change things in time. I hope so.
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I highly doubt I’d fit in well with the usual community here, but I wanted to mention how much I appreciate this article, and to offer a brief data point, for what it’s worth.
I arrived late to the GG controversy, coming in around the fourth week. My default position was strong sympathy with the anti-GG narrative, since I considered myself a feminist and was a big fan of the games journalism community.
After two months of GG, I will not ever call myself a feminist again, and I am actively studying what can be done to fight back against the “social justice” movement. Hearing that I should “listen and believe” on one hand, and that Eron’s evidence should be dismissed out of hand on the other, was the first and biggest hit to my former views.
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I also arrived late. My experience was
1. Initial gut rejection of GamerGate.
2. Find out more about GamerGate, get irritated that most articles on them omit important details like the “death of gamers” article, become sympathetic to GamerGate and defend its members against charges of blanket misogyny and ableist autism insults.
3. Find out even more about GamerGate by browsing /r/kokatuinaction, realize that the majority of people currently associated with GamerGate have slightly dumb beliefs and are more angry than they ought to be (perhaps due to evaporative coolling), disassociate myself from the movement.
4. Continue to defend them against particularly vehement charges of blanket misogyny and harassment, but mostly stop caring about them because even if they don’t deserve to be hated, they’re still flawed enough that defending them doesn’t seem worth it.
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> disturbing allegations that Eron Gjoni has called hotels he suspected Zoe was staying at in order to dox her,
That literally makes no fucking sense at all. How would calling hotels help to “doxx” her at all, when after months in a relationship, Eron already knows her legal name, her home address, and tons of personal information already that he never once shared online? What information he *possibly* have to gain that would constitute doxxing that *he wouldn’t have already*? You don’t need “evidence” to disprove this allegation, you just need logic and actually taking the time to think about it for two seconds before citing the allegation as if it had any plausibility at all. If Eron wanted to doxx her, he wouldn’t have to call a hotel to do it.
Also, note that the affidavit you link *never once technically says ‘doxxing’*, it says ‘personal info’, which is conveniently vague and misleading, given the context.
Now how would Zoe even know Eron’s motives for calling a hotel, let alone that he called them at all, or what he said when calling them? By reading his public postings about it. Which means we should be able to find the same evidence that she based her claims on.
When thezoepost was a few days old, someone claimed to be a Sixth Guy, and [that he and Zoe had hooked up at a Comfort Inn in Virginia in January](https://imgur.com/a/gCXDW) (4chan screencaps: warning for typical standard of commentary on 4chan).
So that “personal info” she said Eron was seeking and that was so scary it’s somehow relevant to an affidavit in support of a restraining order that she claimed to be so urgent it had to be granted *ex parte*, without giving him a chance to contest it first? Was whether she cheated on him with 6 guys, or 5, months in the past.
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harrassment and death/ rape threats are never acceptable (cause you need this obvious disclaimer whenever discussing this topic apparently)
One of the reasons i sympathise with the gamergate side, even if i don’t particularly care about gaming journalism (I haven’t been keeping up on the news for a while, since close all of the zoepost stuff), is that what i have seen from the anti gamergate stuff when i know about the topic has often been misleading or outright false, so i doubt most of the rest of what i hear from that side. It has often been this type of thing: http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/103325934813/when-i-was-a-lot-younger-journalism-used-to-be
Where calling anyone saying anything in support of gamergate is assumed to support death and rape threats, and treating them as horrible conservative (where does this even come from? i’m pretty sure most of gamergate, where they’re american, are not conservatives) misogynists. (and when you have an amorphous anonymous leaderless online movement, you’re not going to be able to control everyone who identifies with the movement).
At the start, before it was gamergate and just zoe quinn stuff, i had actually read thezoepost, i saw reporting that that made it evident that the writers hadn’t even read what started it all, or if they had were just making things up for the heck of it. Turning ‘she cheated on and abused her boyfriend, and her boyfriend wrote a post mostly about being cheated on/ abused and mentioned a game journalist being one of the people she cheated on him with as an aside, and other people ran with the ‘she slept with him for reviews’ thing ‘ to ‘a jilted ex said she had sex to get positive reviews, and thinking she’s a bad person for cheating on him is slut shaming’ or similar.
I still can’t believe how fucking big this whole thing has gotten. It should’ve been a post or two here or there, people going ‘yeah people/ journalism can be shitty’ and and moving on. If reddit/ 4chan/ other sites hadn’t decided to ban all discussion about it when it was first breaking, i doubt anyone would care about this all anymore.
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Turning ‘she cheated on and abused her boyfriend, and her boyfriend wrote a post mostly about being cheated on/ abused and mentioned a game journalist being one of the people she cheated on him with as an aside, and other people ran with the ‘she slept with him for reviews’ thing ‘ to ‘a jilted ex said she had sex to get positive reviews, and thinking she’s a bad person for cheating on him is slut shaming’ or similar.
Huh. I got most of my initial news from either anti-Gamergate leaning blogs or actual journalism pieces, and I completely understood that Gjoni had not only NOT said she had sex to get positive reviews, he had explicitly denied that that would make sense based on the timeline.
Abuse (or workplace sexual harassment) is one thing, but I thought most of us decided during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that other people’s cheating was none of our business.
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To add a data point here, I’m looking at a piece in The New York Times Magazine (Nov 23rd 2014) which says:
“A jilted ex-boy-friend of hers posted a nearly-10,000-word screed that accused her of sleeping with a journalist for positive reviews”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/magazine/twine-the-video-game-technology-for-all.html?_r=0)
So this idea is definitely out there.
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I admit I’m disappointed in the New York Times. Does this mean that We Hunted The Mammoth is better at journalism than the New York Times? (No. What it most likely means is that people who cover actual wars probably don’t put as much effort into covering stuff like this/don’t consider it as important as people who specialize in it.)
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It pretty much started with Cracked IIRC.
Then the usual lazymedia carousel happened; one outlet describes him as a “jilted ex”, then another lifts that copy, then another, then another…
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Yeah, about that ETA. You do have a way of knowing that that’s exactly what happened:
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Pingback: 13 Notes About #GamerGate | Alas, a Blog
I have just now linked to this piece on reddit yet again, and have a minor remark to add: Eron was not the one who made the “five guys” joke, that was a female friend of his. I agree that looking back it was a bad and misogynist joke – but I would frankly say that one sees such incidents at times, where a woman off-handedly makes some joke steeped in misogyny, and a man doesn’t care to argue whether she’s being oppressive to her own gender, and just uncritically goes along.
Not that it’s an excuse, but yeah, they’ve both made this one mistake.
(https://medium.com/@srachel_m/gamergate-launched-in-my-apartment-and-internet-im-sorry-not-that-sorry-13e5650fd172)
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I’m still not convinced that the idea “She not only fucked around on him, she fucked around on him with five guys (Burger and Fries!); dirty little thing, isn’t she?” is intrinsically misogynist. Like . . . some ways of being “slutty” are actually vicious, and worthy of public scorn — including cheating with numerous outside partners — regardless of the gender of the person engaing in them. That women have often been scorned (or worse) for ways of being “slutty” that not vicious does not change that;
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She lied to her partner about her sexual behavior, which included her cheating on him without protection then lying to him about that in order to have unprotected sex with Eron. That is not a minor breach of trust and it put her partner’s person’s health on at risk. It’s not just some one night stand but someone you are trying to build a relationship with. Eron has every right to speak up about that.
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Pingback: On Not Believing Eron Gjoni Versus “Believe The Victim” | Alas, a Blog
“Anita Sarkeesian is almost painfully liberal feminist and anyone who calls her a radical feminist needs to read more Dworkin”
Look up #FullMacintosh.
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“Many Gamergate people are not motivated by fighting abuse, but instead by anti-feminism; notice how quickly Anita Sarkeesian got tied into the whole thing, and that she (a) is not involved in the Zoe Post (b) has never abused anyone but she is (c) a fairly prominent feminist in video gaming whom a lot of people hate for no discernible reason.”
The FemFrequency team works in a PR that is part of the same Media/Journalist/PR bay area hipster clique as Zoe Quinn, in fact Quinn and Maya Kramer – aka “legobutts” on twitter – are good friends and have even slept with one another. Zoe Quinn and Silverstring media are pretty well connected in the Media Industry as well as the video game indie-dev/academic scene scene so… yeah Sarkeesian is *directly* linked to GamerGate before she took on an active antagonistic stance against it; before it even began.
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“….yeah Sarkeesian is *directly* linked to GamerGate….”
I think the word “directly” may have a different meaning to you than it does to most English speakers.
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My Bay Area hipster clique contains all sorts of awful people, and yet if a Twittermob forms against Moldbug it would be absurd for it to also be directed against me. (Also, don’t harass people– even if they’re abusers, and definitely not if they happen to be in the same social group as an abuser.)
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Sarkeesian was already a part of a tight nit group of friends at the center of the GamerGate controversy i.e. SilverString Media PR team which was engaged in damage control trying to spin a narrative in favor of Zoe and shut down conversation before the #GG hashtag even began. She is directly linked to GamerGate before it even started.
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So, no, Ampersand I don’t think you understand the meaning of that word.
ozymandias you’re post makes no salient points whatsoever. Anita is a close part of the media group and bay area hipster clique involved in GG from the start. She knew *exactly* what was going on before the hashtag which is why she quickly jumped into the fray and started her media tour about online harassment right as GG was going on. Why is this a hard concept for you to grasp? Anita is part of a PR team that helped spin narrative projecting GG as a hate mob to deflect attention away from Zoe’s abusive behavior and the unethical behavior of the indie games trade press, which were substantial. Even Eron didn’t realize how bad the ethical situation really was when he wrote the Zoe post. This isn’t some crazy conspiracy theory, lol, I mean these guys admitted to covering for their friend Zoe in the leaked mailing list. Believe it or not those are the starting facts in the GG controversy.
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Oh and SilverString Media was in bed with these guys, rigging indie game contests for their friends i.e. racketeering.
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The quotes included in this hashtag are all beliefs typically held by liberal feminists; radical feminism is an actual ideology with actual beliefs and not a synonym for “feminist I don’t like”. I prescribe one readthrough of Dworkin’s Woman Hating.
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Eron, quite frankly, is an emotionally delicate wimp.
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That he may be, but among a group of emotionally delicate wimps, you usually don’t get to call out one in particular.
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