“…stop being a pathetic passive aggressive gamergate apologist.”
Ok, that is not all gamers but you are in the same arena as people who claim anyone who disagrees with them is a misogynist or a racist (or whatever) as the case may be.
Arguing the other side is “apologism” to you and that is not correct.
There is hardly a story about Gamergate that doesn’t bandy about “misogyny”.
I’m not doing your research for you. Feel free to point me to these “many articles” and leave me to defend the point.
Sarkeesian and Quinn and others are very forward about all the threats they receive. As has been pointed out “threats” are part and parcel of living online (see The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory).
There has been nothing to suggest they are special or unusual in this regard. Indeed, Sarkeesian in particular, makes her living off of controversy. Is it any surprise she becomes a lightning rod for this sort of thing?
That IS the point. The defenders of Quinn unilaterally declared gamers are dead. That of course was news to most.
There are billions of gamers and billions of Muslims in the world. I would suggest your experience is too narrow to say.
From my experience I definitely have run into creeps amongst gamers. I have also seen other gamers (the majority) berate the jerk for being that way (indeed a couple months ago was playing with a female Doper…one guy made some off color remark and everyone else (all strangers) immediately got on his case).
Anecdotal? Sure. But then so is your experience.
Bottom line there are good and bad apples in every bunch.
This is what I really wonder about.
In my time gaming (pretty much since the dawn of computer games) have have been berated, yelled at, had my sexuality questioned, my parentage questioned, my mother labeled a whore who dozens of gamers fucked, called a pussy, a wimp, a bitch, an asshole, a dick…the list is a long one. I’ve been threatened too…people will hunt me down and fuck me up, they will doxx me, they will hack all my accounts, etc.
Do I like any of it? No. Of course not. I don’t freak out about it either. I don’t call the police. I do not stay awake at night holding a gun. 99.999% of it is bullshit and we all know it. If I called the cops about it they’d probably laugh at me.
That said I will note in Sarkeesian’s case, as a public figure, she has to be more wary and this latest one she was right to cancel her appearance. As I said I also hope the FBI takes it seriously and tracks the asshole down who did it.
Personally I have gotten tired enough of it that I just don’t play that many games online anymore. I will here and there but it is more tiresome than its worth for me but that is my decision.
Shouting down anyone just shows your own weakness. The people who do this to Quinn and Sarkeesian are wimps with no ability to engage in serious debate. I am all for free speech and Quinn and Sarkeesian (and whoever) should be able to speak their mind…whatever it is. I am likewise free to say why I think they are wrong (or right as the case may be).
She doesn’t make people threaten her. Why should she keep quiet about the threats she has received? Her goal is not to minimise the amount of threats she gets, but to highlight the toxic culture that exists amongst gamers (#notallgamers). People don’t have to be arseholes on the internet. They choose to be, and many people choose to allow it. That’s the problem, from her POV (and from mine, in fact).
Sarkeesian is a shit stirrer. Like Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh (or many others) she makes her living off of controversy. Keeping people riled up pays her bills.
It kinda surprises me that you were harrassed so much online that you decided not to play any more, but don’t see that as a problem that might be worth fixing.
To me, this is an issue about sexism, because women typically don’t relate to each other like that. Not that women are perfect, or never mean or whatever, but they don’t have this culture of abuse. From what I have seen, men who protest against this culture are labelled sissies, pussies, fags, etc, i.e. not real men. I don’t know what men are thinking when they behave like this, but from the outside it looks like they feel the need to assert their masculinity in this specific way. It’s hard for me to comment about whether men are comfortable relating to each other like this (some are, some aren’t, probably) but it seems sexist to me.
You said before that you think ‘misogyny’ is overused. I am not sure what that word is specifically supposed to mean, but it seems like ‘sexist’, ‘chauvinist’, ‘misogynistic’ are all kind of used interchangeably (‘chauvinistic’ seems kinda old-fashioned to me). I call all that stuff ‘macho bullshit’ but that’s probably not going to be the preferred terminology. What do you call it?
I think you must still have missed the part where the terrorist threatened to target other women and women’s organizations on the USU campus, not just Sarkeesian and/or her audience.
The guy is clearly saying that unless the event is canceled, he will commit terror attacks not just at the event itself, but also against other people whom event-specific security measures cannot protect.
It’s possible to make a case that it would still be worthwhile to hold the event anyway in order to avoid giving in to terrorists; I’m not debating that point. But you need to stop using the fallacious argument that simply taking event-specific security precautions would reliably allow the targets of this threat to “choose how safe they want to be”.
Please don’t insult our intelligence or your’s by trying to say you weren’t trying to imply that Sarkeesian was behind this.
That said, yeah I’ll agree that it’s a hoax in the sense that I serious doubt the guy was serious. If he had been, he’d just do it, he wouldn’t send a letter claiming to do it.
I can’t remember who it was who said, “I’m not afraid of the nuts who send threatening letters. I’m afraid of the ones who don’t.”
As for the idea that he’s “highly educated”, what’s the surprise? He claims he’s a student there. I’m also not sure what odd about the idea of a student at the U(if his letter is genuine) having access to the e-mail addresses of university members associated with the talk?
Finally, if he opened his front door tomorrow, saw Anita Sarkeesian standing there offering him a knife while daring him to stab her, I’m guessing he’d probably just run away while desperately trying to cover up the fact that he had an erection rather than doing anything violent.
I’ll admit that, while if I was in her position I’d be terrified and call off the talk, from the outside the letters make them look like comic book villains.
“If you and your little boy wonder don’t let me rob the Gotham City Bank then these puppies will be thrown into this vat of acid! YOUR MOVE, BATBRAIN!”
To be fair, Sarkeesian was told they couldn’t prevent people from bringing guns there or having pat-downs or making people go through metal detectors because of Utah’s “Right-to-Carry” laws, so, if true, their hands were metaphorically tied.
I play video games but I don’t call myself a “gamer” really because I don’t get irate at “game journalism ethics” and think people who voted Electronic Arts as worst company in America over their DLC practices* need to get their heads examined.
Of course, I wouldn’t call myself a feminist either since I don’t start going apeshit when I see a link I don’t like and accusing others of being secret sympathizers for not agreeing with me lockstep. Both sides strike me as full of god damn lunatics. Admittedly, the feminist ones aren’t making death threats so that’s a huge point in their favor but neither is a bunch I’d want to associate myself with.
*If you haven’t played games since Ms. Pac-Man this is probably meaningless to you but believe me when I say it’s exceedingly trivial.
You know, I think that most of us agree that there are probably at least a few people “on the Gamergate side” that really, really do want to discuss ethics in video game journalism (even if they’re misguided and it’s a nonissue). People that abhor the death threats and are generally cool with women in gaming. IMO TotalBiscuit is one of those. I still think he’s absolutely dumb for wanting to die on that hill, because of the people he’s associating with, but I don’t condemn him as a misogynist by proxy.
Vivian James too. She has a neat design, and taken out of content she’d actually be pretty cool. It’s all the context around it that makes her hard to swallow.
That said, the movement is largely about misogyny. To the point that if after all this time you continue to associate with it, barring evidence otherwise you have to question the motives of the people defending it. Again: this is more or less a “not the hill you want to die on” situation. I’m sure there’s any number of good issues we could theoretically discuss that came from the whole debacle, but they’re so lost in the massive shit built up in the whole thing that it’s not even worth digging through to find them.
At this point joining gamergate to discuss journalistic ethics is like someone who joined Hamas because they like the name and have killer bake sales. Not as severe, obviously, but the same general idea.
…it quite clearly was not targeted at gamers. I never stated that everyone on the other side is a misogynist or a racist. I never said anyone who spoke out for Gamergate is an apologist. I stated that Jophiel was an apologist. And I base that on his words in this thread.
So you couldn’t be more wrong.
A single example from this very thread over the debatable premise of whether or not James Bond is either a misogynist or a male chauvinist? I think you massively overstate your case.
And yet the best example you cite is not one of these “stories” but a lame disagreement over whether or not James Bond is a misogynist or a male chauvinist. If what you say is true (and it actually is bullshit) then you need to show that these stories are using misogyny incorrectly.
Then I simply call bullshit on your statement. When blanket statements have been made about Gamers, they have been very specific in context.
Your cite is a cartoon?
Sarkeesian does not make a living off controversy. She managed to lead a rather uncontroversial life discussing tropes in comic books, film and television up until she decided to also talk about video games. It is no surprise you are repeating yet another Gamergate talking point. The action of critiquing video games should not make you a lightning rod for abuse, thats just a silly assertion.
And your claim that there is nothing special or unusual about what is happening right now defies belief. I’m not doing your research for you. But this isn’t just about Sarkeesian and Quinn. Threats should not be part and parcel of living online: and the escalation in both threats and abuse since the start of gamergate is not something that you should just shrug your shoulders at and go “meh.” Your indifference to the suffering of others is really very sad.
The defenders of Quinn are not a hive mind, and they did not unilaterally declare anything.
As I stated (and as you have now cited) many of the articles that talk about “gamers” give very specific definitions of what gamers they were talking about. Those articles are very nuanced, and not blanket statements. I suggest you read beyond the headlines, read the actual articles you are complaining about, and be specific about what parts you disagree with.
Well to be honest a big part of my withdrawing from online games is that I generally suck at them (as some here on the SDMB will happily attest to). :o
The harassment itself did not run me off. It made online gaming less fun for me. I endeavored to play online with people I like but turns out that is harder than one might think. In the end all of it added up to “not really worth it” for me.
So yeah, sure, I would love it if the online communities were more amiable but, for me, it is far from the only problem I have with online gaming and in and of itself would not bring me back if fixed. As such I don’t feel a lot of compulsion to “fix it”.
That said some people love it and more power to them. To each their own.
I am not a woman so I cannot say for sure but my experience is women can be downright awful to each other. In some ways, from my limited experience watching it, they can be much more “mean” than men. It generally is more subtle than how men go about it but it is there and can cut all the deeper for it.
Well, not sure what to say. Words mean things. Chauvinism may seem archaic to you but that is usually what people mean when they accuse someone of misogyny.
I would submit that there are a lot of chauvinists but relatively few misogynists.
Groups of course like to paint their opponents in the worst possible light so language matters and in this case they use a word that is far too strong in most cases. Consider the flip side, is Sarkeesian or Quinn misandrists?
Sure, but that is beside my point, which is that verbal abusiveness is a signal of masculinity in some sections of online culture, including a lot of gamer culture.
If chauvinist is the word you are happy with, I can go with that.
I haven’t watched any of Sarkeesian’s videos (I’m not big on videos, I’d rather read an article) so I don’t know. My impression is she is not misandrist but there are specific things she doesn’t like men, or game developers, (or internet trolls, I guess) doing. When gamers are chauvinist towards me, it’s not usually something I did that upset them - they just don’t want me there, or hit on me, or whatever, just because I am female.
Actually, that’s male chauvinism specifically. In its original sense the word refers to national chauvinism (sense of superiority of one’s nation over all other nations), after the possibly apocryphal French hypernationalist Nicolas Chauvin. American feminists appropriated the word in the 1970s to refer to male sexists.
