That's you! That's how dumb you sound!

Ridiculing SJW and other hateful humans with bias-exposing replacements and such. No hate gets a pass. "Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet." -- Maya Angelou

[feministwhobites]

it always struck me as viscerally disgusting when i was underage and had grown men who knew i was underage hitting on me. it was their complete disregard for basic decency that informed me from a young age that social norms and laws do no protect me.

more than that, it was who those men were. aside from the strangers who acted in such a way, there were also presidents of charity organisations; religious community leaders; family; husbands and fathers; school teachers and close family friends.

women and girls are not born with an innate fear of men, it is learned. at times it is partially taught by our male role models who then turn around and show us why we must be cautious with men. they are not are protectors and never will be. the same goes for the systems they uphold which nominally protect us.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

This is the exact same 'logic' white supremacists use to justify hating all black people: ignore the huge majority that are normal and decent, hyperfocus on the worst of the worst, and extrapolate that onto the entire demographic.

Pathetic.

[canichangemyblogname]

Look. Because some of you need this spelled out for you.

Men are not oppressed for being men. That includes trans men.

Imagine this scenario:

A young boy skins his knee. He begins crying. His father tells him to suck it up because “crying’s for girls; boys don’t cry.” Later, they’re playing t-ball. Same father tells his son that he throws “like a girl” and no son of his is going to be a “sissy.”

Is that boy being oppressed for being a boy?

Spoiler: no.

Has he just faced misogynistic oppression?

Spoiler: no.

Has he faced the negative consequence of a patriarchal ideology predicated upon the idea that women and men are fundamentally different with different “natural spheres” of behavior and norms? Yes. Has he faced the negative consequences of a patriarchal ideology that holds preconceived notions about women and believes them the “lesser sex” due to a myriad of factors like “being emotional” and “being weak?” Yes. Are his father’s words a reflection of his own misogynistic beliefs about women? Yes. He lives under a patriarchy, his entire worldview is constructed through misogyny. Is that boy being oppressed by an system that upholds male dominance and the domination of women? No. Is he facing misogynistic oppression? No.

Imagine a new scenario:

A TERF tells a trans man that he’s just a hysterical little girl who needs to be protected from predators trying to brainwash him into “trans ideology.” The TERF laments his “mutilation” of his “god-given” body and fertility, imploring him to become a mother and fulfill his “natural duty.”

Are the TERF’s words a reflection of her own reactive, reductive, and misogynistic ideas about women and girls? Yes. The TERF’s worldview under the patriarchy is also constructed through misogyny. Her ideas about everything— from race to queerness to women— is influenced by misogyny. Is the man being oppressed for being a woman? No. Is he being oppressed for being a man? Also no. He’s being oppressed for being trans. Has he faced a negative consequence resulting from a worldview that believes that men/males and women/females must be fundamentally separate and different and keep to their “natural” spheres? Yes. Is he being oppressed for being a woman? No. Is he being oppressed for being a man? Definitely not.

Do trans men face unique oppression because of the intersection of their queerness and their man-ness? Yes. Does that mean they’re oppressed for being men? Fucking no. Everyone has their own unique experience of privilege and oppression. Intersectionality is the study of how oppressions and privileges intersect at the socio-political level. It refers to the interconnectedness of social categories.

Trans men are not oppressed for being men; they simply face a transphobia different from that of trans women on account of how the privilege of being a man interacts with a trans man’s transness. They also aren’t oppressed for “being women.” When a trans man faces barriers to things like proper cervical care, it is for reasons different from why women face barriers in similar care. A practice or idea can be rooted in a misogynistic worldview under a fundamentally misogynistic system and society, but that doesn’t mean men face misogynistic oppression. It especially does not mean that men face oppression for being men under the patriarchy.

Transness and man-ness will also be affected by things like class, race, place of origin, immigration status, and even whether the man is gay (in the sense he likes men). Man-ness is complicated by various marginalizations. Man-ness (“being a real man”) under the patriarchy is defined very narrowly, designed in a way so that most people lose. Straightness is a feature of being a “real man” under the patriarchy, but we wouldn’t claim gay men are treated “like women” or being oppressed for “being men” when the definition of man-ness is weaponized against them.

This is not that hard to grasp.

Men are not oppressed for being men. That goes for ALL men. Misandry is not real. It has no political or societal consequences. The same goes for transmisandry.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Imagine this scenario:

You are a 14 year old boy. Your female adult teacher rapes you, and becomes impregnated. Then not only is that literal child molester allowed to keep full custody of the baby, but she pursues, and achieves, legally-enforced child support from the boy she raped, which he is forced to pay, including 'back child support' to when the baby was born.

Ridiculous hypothetical, right? Well, yes and no. It is ridiculous, but it's not hypothetical. Society really hates males that much: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/02/statutory-rape-victim-child-support/14953965/

You are a dumb bigot desperate to rationalize your pathetic sexism away.

This is not that hard to grasp.

[st-just]

Every so often someone makes a (variably serious) post about how gamergate explains the last decade of politics or whatever and I feel like I should actually try to figure out what it was beyond a vague outline, but I also have this incredibly strong intuition that just asking on any public social media might as well be pouring chum into a shark tank. So.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Once upon a time a male coder and a ~female indie game developer fell in love. This was not a great move for either of them, and eventually after breaking up the coder (Eron) alleged that the game dev (Zoe) had cheated on and emotionally abused him. He then detailed and substantiated these allegations in a very very long callout post few people seem to have ever actually read in full

Among the insinuations in The Zoe Post were that she had essentially slept her way into a favourable review from Kotaku. This was not a central component of the story told in TZP, but it was seized upon by a group of gamers as an opportunity to voice discontent both general and specific with certain trends they saw in the gaming industry. These included nepotism like that alleged between Zoe and the Kotaku reporter (ethics in gaming journalism!!), an intrusion of feminist politics into previously apolitical portions of the gaming industry and community, a devaluation of “objective” criteria of gaming quality (graphics, mechanics, etc) in both reviews and industry direction in favour of ephemeral artsiness and political messaging, and an overall perceived shift in the industry and surrounding community away from catering specifically to gamers who saw themselves as the true fans of the medium. The movement engaging in this direction of the controversy became known as “GamerGate” or “the gamergaters”

These accusations were often accompanied by a range of hostile behaviours, including death threats/curses and doxxing, against both Zoe and other perceived champions of the opposing feminist cause in gaming. There were also, unsurprisingly, common undertones of misogyny. These more aggressive tactics on the part of some Gamergaters were denounced by many prominent figures generally on “their side” (including Eron himself), and were met with a very successful media campaign depicting both Eron and the GamerGate movement as vicious sexist trolls. Many figures in the industry vocally took sides, some promises were made to secure against possible ethical pitfalls like those alleged against Zoe, and several careers were launched and sunk

This is an incomplete version, and I avoided the front lines when it was ongoing, but I don’t think it’s wrong in any of the essentials

[st-just]

Okay, that’s quite helpful as far as overviews go, thank you.

Though, okay, some followup questions. Feel free to ignore if you don’t have the time/energy/interest, obviously.

So, appreciate the primary source link but wordcount says it’s 10k words and that is in fact more reading than I’m willing to commit to for background on decade-old internet drama. But, like, ctr-fing for the helpfully labelled tl;dr, it does seem to be a guy venting about a shitty ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and lied about it? Which, sure, time honored tradition (if usually not in writing). But, well, maybe my irl social circles have been unusually bleak, but seems sufficiently unremarkable that I’m a bit confused how it could possibly warrant a bonafide cultural moment in response to them. Like, I can name at least a few comparably bad partners just at the home depot I worked at before the pandemic.

Was Quinn…important somehow? Newsworthy? Or I guess just, beyond the whole games journalism crusade, why did people care? (did they?)

Though, okay, so for full disclosure going through the things I knew about gamergate this morning and how they do don’t match up.

-Giant internet hate mob thing on twitter (and that ‘ethics in games journalism’ was the meme for when fanboys had apocalyptic metldowns when someone got recast as black in an adaptation or w/e for a while, which I was pretty sure was related). Which seems like it was, like, part of it, then? -I honestly thought it was about Antia Sarkesian? I remember there being like a whole thing with bomb threats about a kickstarter for a feminist media criticism series on video games anyway. (Also she was mentioned by name in the post that started the train of thought which led to me posting this). Was that a different-but-related thing, or something? -the whole also-the-word-for-a-type-of-ant-thing, though I’m not sure if that was an injoke for whoever came up with the name or just a coincidence. -People reference it when talking about why the guy who played Jayne in Firefly is an asshole?

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

Quinn was a moderately well-known indie game developer at the time, so it’s not like this was purely about somebody’s private drama, but I think it’s worth thinking of it more as a “spark that ignited the powder keg” moment than being solely or even primarily about Quinn. The whole firestorm pretty quickly became about a bunch of people, including Quinn, Sarkeesian, and various other individuals and organizations (Brianna Wu, Felicia Day, Kotaku, probably a lot I’m not recalling offhand). I think it was fairly apparent that there was a growing cultural split within a lot of video game-related circles at around that period, and there were many smaller conflicts in the years leading up to 2014, though I don’t think any of us predicted that this would be the particular way the whole thing blew up.

As far as I can tell the ant thing is just a coincidence, and I didn’t see anyone pointing it out until years afterward.

[loki-zen]

In my experience of the discourse (which was mostly watching it from the geeky liberal feminism side of proceedings) things changed course and got a lot more murky when there was explicitly a domestic emotional abuse accusation in the mix. This was always going to be a devisive powder keg - an accusation of a form of wrongdoing that’s a pet feminist issue, but which flips the gender script and is directed at someone people have just gotten entrenched defending on feminist grounds. So at least from that side of the aisle, I think

..kinda misses something important

[earnest-peer]

Kinda? The big problem with the Zoepost is that at the time, Eron didn’t know about the concept of emotional abuse (a much more common position to be in in 2014) and could only point at behaviors he found harmful but not mobilize the relevant language (like gaslighting, or isolating, or provoking panic attacks), so while the emotional abuse angle got picked up after a while, initially the rage about the post really was more about the allegations of cheating and trading sexual favors.

[isaacsapphire]

Here come the sharks, lols.

Seriously though, the ant thing was noticed pretty promptly, and used at the time because even saying the word online reliably drew hordes of negative attention, so people who wanted to discuss it without attracting attention referenced the ant thing. Heck, I have it as a tag for that exact reason, check out the old posts.

Like, I have to emphasize that I still have an intense “sticking my hand in a bear trap” aversion to writing “gamergate” online.

I was probably a couple or three degrees of separation from the events at the time, and I’m slightly closer now due to a couple of acquaintances since then. The whole thing was a traumatizing experience that left me no longer identifying with or interested in being part of the feminism or video-game fandom communities, and shortly thereafter the Puppies thing did the same for Science Fiction.

Part of the problem was that video game journalism has pretty much always been a joke, like several other kinds of journalism. They depend on early, free access to the product to do reviews, so they’re inherently compromised by needing to not piss off the companies into revoking that access, so they can’t be honest and say a product sucks if it does.

Heck, automotive journalism is obviously more economically important and even more subject to this issue, cell phone reviewers are in the same situation. But a lot of magazines always did “cool new products” “articles” for stuff they never even physically got their hands on. My own experience as an intern writing for a special interest periodical and realizing that the product they wanted shilled was safety equipment that worked so poorly it took no imagination to see it was likely to cost lives in an emergency situation, talking to my editor, and being told that I had to write a puff piece on this product. I hadn’t been told that journalism was half rewriting ad copy in college, and I didn’t pursue other jobs in the industry after that.

Anyways, since the time several further call outs for the ladies involved have been published, including by victims more sympathetic to sjws like transwomen, and some of the more outrageous accusations were proven true, please skim the tags here.

Gamergate was after Racefail and before the Puppies, but it was definitely a notable pebble in the landslide that creates our modern culture war landscape.

[brazenautomaton]

How is everyone leaving out literally the entire genesis of the problem and the reason it was called Gamergate and the most important aspect of it? How are you skipping the step where THE ENTIRE THING HAPPENED? Oh, right. Because even the people who want to be even-handed are utterly in the thrall of liars and sociopaths and cannot help but be called to them.

Eron Gjoni makes The Zoe Post about what a psychopathic abuser Zoe Quinn is, and details her misdeeds. This is not the first or the last time this kind of thing happened. People on imageboards and forums were mocking it with the hashtag #fiveguysburgersandfries because of the five dudes she slept with at whatever place. This was the same level of reaction people had against Brad Wardell when the allegations of sexual misconduct came out against him. (Those turned out to be false, filed by someone who was fired after stealing a bunch of shit.)

But then something odd happened that hadn’t happened with Brad Wardell or anyone else before. Every single forum where people discussed video game news suddenly had every single thread about this deleted with no comment. Even fucking 4chan, you know, the shithole that doesn’t moderate at all. If you posted about the Zoe Post, it went away, and if you kept posting about it, you were banned, and nobody said why, and nobody acknowledged they were doing it.

Then, within the span of 24 hours, eight (I think? around that number) major gaming websites all published editorials about how “Gamers” are bad people who are misogynist racist trolls and should be rebuked, how “gamers don’t have to be your audience, gamers are over”. Gaming journalism sites, a whole bunch of them, in what was CLEARLY a concerted effort, all came out to say that gamers were stupid misogynist neckbeards who hated women and were threatening to women and loved harassing women.

I cannot possibly overstress the importance of this. This is the event. People were not mobilized by the Zoe Post. People weree mobilized when the entire, as in the entire, as in all of them, the entire indie game and game journalism community united to delete threads where people talked about the awful things Zoe Quinn did, and then said taht gamers all hate women and should be reviled.

Cannot possibly stress this enough. If you think you understand Gamergate and your understanding is not focused on this event, you are wrong.

The accusations of the harassment campaign came BEFORE IT EXISTED.

Everyone involved denied any coordination, of course, it was just obvious that these things were true! The reason it was about ethics in games journalism was all of thesre game journalists forming a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy to use their outlets to gin up outrage at their own customers in order to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn. That’s why it was about ethics in game journalism, because of the unethical conduct of the games journalists in defending Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who has never contributed anything to the world other than the abuse of other human beings.

This was the coverup. This was the thing that turned heads. Before it was drama. Now it was a literal conspiracy. #Gamergate was coined by one of the Baldwins, in a tweet about THIS EVENT. Not a nebulous concept of women who haven’t been harassed enough, but a specific and ludicrously damning event that has been forgotten.

They claimed to have not coordinated, and guess what! That was a lie too! They were all collaborating on a mailing list called “GameJournoPros,” which was later released to the public. On that list, you can see them talking about what could make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, and then they decide that what they should do, on the games journalism sites they control, is say that gamers are dead as an audience because they hate women. That was the plan they formed to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who would years later drive Alec Holowka to suicide with incontrovertibly false accusations of abuse that she made because people weren’t paying attention to her.

This was a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy. It is the entire thing that happened. You cannot discuss gamergate without discussing this event that is gamergate. Okay? 

A literal and not metaphorical conspiracy who literally and not metaphorically control output of information and public opinion decided, in e-mails that are now a matter of public record, that they should accuse gamers of being misogynists who harass and hate women, so they can get gamers to stop talking about all the awful things their friend Zoe Quinn did. 

They created the story they wanted to see happen. They defined the harassment before it occurred. They defined it in terms of what would be most useful to them. And they were caught again and again and again and again falsifying harassment of themselves in order to point to gamer harassment as a reason they should be given social power. Sarkeesian screencapped mean Tweets about her… from an account that had never tweeted before, one second after the tweet was made, while she was logged out, while there was no way to search for it. She made them herself and screenshotted them. There were harassing comments posted as proof that had the red spellcheck lines under them, meaning they were screencapped while being written. 

Candace Owens, insane conservative black woman, went insane because she had an “outpouring of gamer harassment” after having talked to Zoe Quinn about her dumb “Social Autopsy” idea, realized that the harassment was coming to an e-mail she never associated with the project and figured out “wait this entire wave of online harassment is coming from Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper.” Everyone in the media she went to instantly fell in line, telling obvious lies to defend Quinn, even having never been in contact before. you know what? That’s the kind of thing that drives someone insane in our political system! You would completely rebuke every single thing the liberal media stood for after that!

What are the odds that this literal and not metaphorical conspiracy, whose existence is public record, would come up with a plan to say how nasty gamers were in order to cover for their friends’ misdeeds, and then it would turn out that the lie they made up to feel good and cover for their friend, the lie they decided to tell everyone, would just so happen to become true after they already told everyone in the media that lie?

Gamergate is the event that didn’t decide the political future, it just showed it. People lie to defend psychopaths for no other reason than to defend psychopaths. They side with liars for the joy of siding with liars and no other reason. Lies are told openly, blatantly, and people who know they are lies will say “Well, but the lie DOES feel good to believe…” People will say “well nobody looked good” comparing “the evil deeds of one side” and “the lies told about the other side from the same side who did those evil deeds.” The media is wall to wall shameless liars with agendas who enjoy hurting people for not being their own feelings. Journalists should always be assumed to be lying even when there is no material gain because they lie just to be in the club of liars.

Once the existence of GameJournoPros came out, the game journalists all went from “that is an insane conspiracy theory” to “well of course we were on a mailing list, that’s normal, why would anyone object”. The narrative, told by the liars, has completely omitted the step where the entire event happened, and the liars have told you that it was this spontaneous inexplicable overreaction to The Zoe Post and not their malicious intentional actions.

All is lost and death is the only escape and this is why. These facts cannot find purchase on the surface of the brain. I have told people IN THIS VERY CONVERSATION about this before and they forgot, and they went back to the story the liars told, because social power is definitionally invincible and social power does not diminish and all are enthralled to social power. This. This is the entire thing that showed that the grinding of social power was all that would ever happen again, and cruelty would be all humanity ever makes again, because it is not possible for people to form the intent to oppose the socially powerful, social power rewrites their perceptions to align with social power no matter what.

Everything that has happened since has only proven me right. This is the only thing that will ever happen again. Social power is invincible, everyone will betray you just for the joy of betraying you, and the only respite is the grave.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

LNS >These included nepotism like that alleged between Zoe and the Kotaku reporter (ethics in gaming journalism!!),

The fact that you included this sarcastic aside and a sly reference to a meme used to mock GG, when Kotaku admitted there was an undisclosed relationship at the time of the controversial coverage, and continued to employ Nathan Grayson up until he left earlier this year, is…rather telling.

https://www.deepfreeze.it/outlet.php?o=kotaku

>These accusations were often accompanied by a range of hostile behaviours, including death threats/curses and doxxing, against both Zoe and other perceived champions of the opposing feminist cause in gaming. There were also, unsurprisingly, common undertones of misogyny.

Ah, there it is.

No, there weren’t. The FBI investigated, and found none of that crap was GG’s fault, IIRC. There were a grand total of three “victims” of GG, yet every women in game production, journalism, or gaming fandom “needed” to be afraid.

GG went out of its way to actively report people harassing others in their name. Oh, and to show it wasn’t just cishet white men like they were stereotyped. Which was ignored or rationalized away, of course.

Also, GG regularly criticized gaming journalists specifically, who were and are mostly male.  Same with journalists in general, actually. Who also came under a lot of fire.

It’s funny how people blame GG for Trump, when all it did was show the Emperor had no clothes. It helped destroy a lot of people’s trust in journalism. The journalists themselves were mostly to blame, of course.

[st-just]

Every so often someone makes a (variably serious) post about how gamergate explains the last decade of politics or whatever and I feel like I should actually try to figure out what it was beyond a vague outline, but I also have this incredibly strong intuition that just asking on any public social media might as well be pouring chum into a shark tank. So.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Once upon a time a male coder and a ~female indie game developer fell in love. This was not a great move for either of them, and eventually after breaking up the coder (Eron) alleged that the game dev (Zoe) had cheated on and emotionally abused him. He then detailed and substantiated these allegations in a very very long callout post few people seem to have ever actually read in full

Among the insinuations in The Zoe Post were that she had essentially slept her way into a favourable review from Kotaku. This was not a central component of the story told in TZP, but it was seized upon by a group of gamers as an opportunity to voice discontent both general and specific with certain trends they saw in the gaming industry. These included nepotism like that alleged between Zoe and the Kotaku reporter (ethics in gaming journalism!!), an intrusion of feminist politics into previously apolitical portions of the gaming industry and community, a devaluation of “objective” criteria of gaming quality (graphics, mechanics, etc) in both reviews and industry direction in favour of ephemeral artsiness and political messaging, and an overall perceived shift in the industry and surrounding community away from catering specifically to gamers who saw themselves as the true fans of the medium. The movement engaging in this direction of the controversy became known as “GamerGate” or “the gamergaters”

These accusations were often accompanied by a range of hostile behaviours, including death threats/curses and doxxing, against both Zoe and other perceived champions of the opposing feminist cause in gaming. There were also, unsurprisingly, common undertones of misogyny. These more aggressive tactics on the part of some Gamergaters were denounced by many prominent figures generally on “their side” (including Eron himself), and were met with a very successful media campaign depicting both Eron and the GamerGate movement as vicious sexist trolls. Many figures in the industry vocally took sides, some promises were made to secure against possible ethical pitfalls like those alleged against Zoe, and several careers were launched and sunk

This is an incomplete version, and I avoided the front lines when it was ongoing, but I don’t think it’s wrong in any of the essentials

[st-just]

Okay, that’s quite helpful as far as overviews go, thank you.

Though, okay, some followup questions. Feel free to ignore if you don’t have the time/energy/interest, obviously.

So, appreciate the primary source link but wordcount says it’s 10k words and that is in fact more reading than I’m willing to commit to for background on decade-old internet drama. But, like, ctr-fing for the helpfully labelled tl;dr, it does seem to be a guy venting about a shitty ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and lied about it? Which, sure, time honored tradition (if usually not in writing). But, well, maybe my irl social circles have been unusually bleak, but seems sufficiently unremarkable that I’m a bit confused how it could possibly warrant a bonafide cultural moment in response to them. Like, I can name at least a few comparably bad partners just at the home depot I worked at before the pandemic.

Was Quinn…important somehow? Newsworthy? Or I guess just, beyond the whole games journalism crusade, why did people care? (did they?)

Though, okay, so for full disclosure going through the things I knew about gamergate this morning and how they do don’t match up.

-Giant internet hate mob thing on twitter (and that ‘ethics in games journalism’ was the meme for when fanboys had apocalyptic metldowns when someone got recast as black in an adaptation or w/e for a while, which I was pretty sure was related). Which seems like it was, like, part of it, then? -I honestly thought it was about Antia Sarkesian? I remember there being like a whole thing with bomb threats about a kickstarter for a feminist media criticism series on video games anyway. (Also she was mentioned by name in the post that started the train of thought which led to me posting this). Was that a different-but-related thing, or something? -the whole also-the-word-for-a-type-of-ant-thing, though I’m not sure if that was an injoke for whoever came up with the name or just a coincidence. -People reference it when talking about why the guy who played Jayne in Firefly is an asshole?

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

Quinn was a moderately well-known indie game developer at the time, so it’s not like this was purely about somebody’s private drama, but I think it’s worth thinking of it more as a “spark that ignited the powder keg” moment than being solely or even primarily about Quinn. The whole firestorm pretty quickly became about a bunch of people, including Quinn, Sarkeesian, and various other individuals and organizations (Brianna Wu, Felicia Day, Kotaku, probably a lot I’m not recalling offhand). I think it was fairly apparent that there was a growing cultural split within a lot of video game-related circles at around that period, and there were many smaller conflicts in the years leading up to 2014, though I don’t think any of us predicted that this would be the particular way the whole thing blew up.

As far as I can tell the ant thing is just a coincidence, and I didn’t see anyone pointing it out until years afterward.

[loki-zen]

In my experience of the discourse (which was mostly watching it from the geeky liberal feminism side of proceedings) things changed course and got a lot more murky when there was explicitly a domestic emotional abuse accusation in the mix. This was always going to be a devisive powder keg - an accusation of a form of wrongdoing that’s a pet feminist issue, but which flips the gender script and is directed at someone people have just gotten entrenched defending on feminist grounds. So at least from that side of the aisle, I think

..kinda misses something important

[earnest-peer]

Kinda? The big problem with the Zoepost is that at the time, Eron didn’t know about the concept of emotional abuse (a much more common position to be in in 2014) and could only point at behaviors he found harmful but not mobilize the relevant language (like gaslighting, or isolating, or provoking panic attacks), so while the emotional abuse angle got picked up after a while, initially the rage about the post really was more about the allegations of cheating and trading sexual favors.

[isaacsapphire]

Here come the sharks, lols.

Seriously though, the ant thing was noticed pretty promptly, and used at the time because even saying the word online reliably drew hordes of negative attention, so people who wanted to discuss it without attracting attention referenced the ant thing. Heck, I have it as a tag for that exact reason, check out the old posts.

Like, I have to emphasize that I still have an intense “sticking my hand in a bear trap” aversion to writing “gamergate” online.

I was probably a couple or three degrees of separation from the events at the time, and I’m slightly closer now due to a couple of acquaintances since then. The whole thing was a traumatizing experience that left me no longer identifying with or interested in being part of the feminism or video-game fandom communities, and shortly thereafter the Puppies thing did the same for Science Fiction.

Part of the problem was that video game journalism has pretty much always been a joke, like several other kinds of journalism. They depend on early, free access to the product to do reviews, so they’re inherently compromised by needing to not piss off the companies into revoking that access, so they can’t be honest and say a product sucks if it does.

Heck, automotive journalism is obviously more economically important and even more subject to this issue, cell phone reviewers are in the same situation. But a lot of magazines always did “cool new products” “articles” for stuff they never even physically got their hands on. My own experience as an intern writing for a special interest periodical and realizing that the product they wanted shilled was safety equipment that worked so poorly it took no imagination to see it was likely to cost lives in an emergency situation, talking to my editor, and being told that I had to write a puff piece on this product. I hadn’t been told that journalism was half rewriting ad copy in college, and I didn’t pursue other jobs in the industry after that.

Anyways, since the time several further call outs for the ladies involved have been published, including by victims more sympathetic to sjws like transwomen, and some of the more outrageous accusations were proven true, please skim the tags here.

Gamergate was after Racefail and before the Puppies, but it was definitely a notable pebble in the landslide that creates our modern culture war landscape.

[brazenautomaton]

How is everyone leaving out literally the entire genesis of the problem and the reason it was called Gamergate and the most important aspect of it? How are you skipping the step where THE ENTIRE THING HAPPENED? Oh, right. Because even the people who want to be even-handed are utterly in the thrall of liars and sociopaths and cannot help but be called to them.

Eron Gjoni makes The Zoe Post about what a psychopathic abuser Zoe Quinn is, and details her misdeeds. This is not the first or the last time this kind of thing happened. People on imageboards and forums were mocking it with the hashtag #fiveguysburgersandfries because of the five dudes she slept with at whatever place. This was the same level of reaction people had against Brad Wardell when the allegations of sexual misconduct came out against him. (Those turned out to be false, filed by someone who was fired after stealing a bunch of shit.)

But then something odd happened that hadn’t happened with Brad Wardell or anyone else before. Every single forum where people discussed video game news suddenly had every single thread about this deleted with no comment. Even fucking 4chan, you know, the shithole that doesn’t moderate at all. If you posted about the Zoe Post, it went away, and if you kept posting about it, you were banned, and nobody said why, and nobody acknowledged they were doing it.

Then, within the span of 24 hours, eight (I think? around that number) major gaming websites all published editorials about how “Gamers” are bad people who are misogynist racist trolls and should be rebuked, how “gamers don’t have to be your audience, gamers are over”. Gaming journalism sites, a whole bunch of them, in what was CLEARLY a concerted effort, all came out to say that gamers were stupid misogynist neckbeards who hated women and were threatening to women and loved harassing women.

I cannot possibly overstress the importance of this. This is the event. People were not mobilized by the Zoe Post. People weree mobilized when the entire, as in the entire, as in all of them, the entire indie game and game journalism community united to delete threads where people talked about the awful things Zoe Quinn did, and then said taht gamers all hate women and should be reviled.

Cannot possibly stress this enough. If you think you understand Gamergate and your understanding is not focused on this event, you are wrong.

The accusations of the harassment campaign came BEFORE IT EXISTED.

Everyone involved denied any coordination, of course, it was just obvious that these things were true! The reason it was about ethics in games journalism was all of thesre game journalists forming a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy to use their outlets to gin up outrage at their own customers in order to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn. That’s why it was about ethics in game journalism, because of the unethical conduct of the games journalists in defending Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who has never contributed anything to the world other than the abuse of other human beings.

This was the coverup. This was the thing that turned heads. Before it was drama. Now it was a literal conspiracy. #Gamergate was coined by one of the Baldwins, in a tweet about THIS EVENT. Not a nebulous concept of women who haven’t been harassed enough, but a specific and ludicrously damning event that has been forgotten.

They claimed to have not coordinated, and guess what! That was a lie too! They were all collaborating on a mailing list called “GameJournoPros,” which was later released to the public. On that list, you can see them talking about what could make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, and then they decide that what they should do, on the games journalism sites they control, is say that gamers are dead as an audience because they hate women. That was the plan they formed to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who would years later drive Alec Holowka to suicide with incontrovertibly false accusations of abuse that she made because people weren’t paying attention to her.

This was a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy. It is the entire thing that happened. You cannot discuss gamergate without discussing this event that is gamergate. Okay? 

A literal and not metaphorical conspiracy who literally and not metaphorically control output of information and public opinion decided, in e-mails that are now a matter of public record, that they should accuse gamers of being misogynists who harass and hate women, so they can get gamers to stop talking about all the awful things their friend Zoe Quinn did. 

They created the story they wanted to see happen. They defined the harassment before it occurred. They defined it in terms of what would be most useful to them. And they were caught again and again and again and again falsifying harassment of themselves in order to point to gamer harassment as a reason they should be given social power. Sarkeesian screencapped mean Tweets about her… from an account that had never tweeted before, one second after the tweet was made, while she was logged out, while there was no way to search for it. She made them herself and screenshotted them. There were harassing comments posted as proof that had the red spellcheck lines under them, meaning they were screencapped while being written. 

Candace Owens, insane conservative black woman, went insane because she had an “outpouring of gamer harassment” after having talked to Zoe Quinn about her dumb “Social Autopsy” idea, realized that the harassment was coming to an e-mail she never associated with the project and figured out “wait this entire wave of online harassment is coming from Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper.” Everyone in the media she went to instantly fell in line, telling obvious lies to defend Quinn, even having never been in contact before. you know what? That’s the kind of thing that drives someone insane in our political system! You would completely rebuke every single thing the liberal media stood for after that!

What are the odds that this literal and not metaphorical conspiracy, whose existence is public record, would come up with a plan to say how nasty gamers were in order to cover for their friends’ misdeeds, and then it would turn out that the lie they made up to feel good and cover for their friend, the lie they decided to tell everyone, would just so happen to become true after they already told everyone in the media that lie?

Gamergate is the event that didn’t decide the political future, it just showed it. People lie to defend psychopaths for no other reason than to defend psychopaths. They side with liars for the joy of siding with liars and no other reason. Lies are told openly, blatantly, and people who know they are lies will say “Well, but the lie DOES feel good to believe…” People will say “well nobody looked good” comparing “the evil deeds of one side” and “the lies told about the other side from the same side who did those evil deeds.” The media is wall to wall shameless liars with agendas who enjoy hurting people for not being their own feelings. Journalists should always be assumed to be lying even when there is no material gain because they lie just to be in the club of liars.

Once the existence of GameJournoPros came out, the game journalists all went from “that is an insane conspiracy theory” to “well of course we were on a mailing list, that’s normal, why would anyone object”. The narrative, told by the liars, has completely omitted the step where the entire event happened, and the liars have told you that it was this spontaneous inexplicable overreaction to The Zoe Post and not their malicious intentional actions.

All is lost and death is the only escape and this is why. These facts cannot find purchase on the surface of the brain. I have told people IN THIS VERY CONVERSATION about this before and they forgot, and they went back to the story the liars told, because social power is definitionally invincible and social power does not diminish and all are enthralled to social power. This. This is the entire thing that showed that the grinding of social power was all that would ever happen again, and cruelty would be all humanity ever makes again, because it is not possible for people to form the intent to oppose the socially powerful, social power rewrites their perceptions to align with social power no matter what.

Everything that has happened since has only proven me right. This is the only thing that will ever happen again. Social power is invincible, everyone will betray you just for the joy of betraying you, and the only respite is the grave.

[sometimes-men-need-help-too]

It's not "weird" for a man to like to be around kids, to be seen with kids (like if he takes them to the playground), to be affectionate with them, etc

You're the weird one if you automatically think something must be going on

[gnuclear]

thinkin’ about the insistence on referring to women with their first name in circumstances where a man would be referred to by his last name,,, when my debate partner gets called “Mr.” and his last name while I get called by my first,,, “Hilary” Clinton and Donald “Trump”,,,, the emphasis on gendering who they view as men in an official manner to put them above women,,,, also the snide “Mister”s thrown at trans women and trans girls in order to misgender them,,,,, >:(

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

People used “Hillary” because “Clinton” on its own was already associated with a former President, her husband.

Same reason George W. Bush’s middle initial was emphasized, while Hillary Clinton’s never was; to differentiate from the other “George Bush” who was President.

Not everything is a sinister act of bigotry. Stop living life in the role of a hammer.

[gnuclear]

WHY DO THEY ALWAYS FIND ME

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

A normal person would be happy to learn that something they thought was an act of bigotry was in fact completely benign.

Outrage junkies hate it, though.

Life is more enjoyable when you don't spend it nailed to a cross of your own construction. Consider it.

[zaedniara-deactivated20240524]

Birth control aka Women’s Suffering

Not sure how many girls even realize this but throughout history women have ALWAYS been the ONLY one to put themselves through HELL in order to prevent pregnancy. Not men, nope. Just women.

And even now 2021, there are COUNTLESS horrible contraptions that women have to shove into themselves just to stop pregnancy. What do the men have to do? Oh just the same old stuff they’ve been doing for 1000000000 damn years! Condoms, that’s it, couldn’t be anymore less-invasive, yet they still bitch about having to use them.

My sister got a copper iud, it somehow got smashed into her inner walling. Causing her pain for months she didn’t understand, then finally she goes to get it out, and they just reached inside and RIP it from you. That’s right, no pain meds, nothing, just tear it out. Then she tells her boyfriend her horrible experience and the first thing he says is “you’re going to get another one right though?” Girls speak out against this, demand something be changed about this because this is ridiculous that you have to shove foreign objects up your crotch. It takes two to make a fucking baby.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Speak out against who? Nature is not sentient, and will not hear your complaint.

The fact is that it is dramatically easier to make a female temporarily infertile than a male; not only are you dealing with a relative handful of ova versus millions and millions of sperm cells, but the female body literally has a built-in 'mode' (pregnancy) that naturally disables fertility, a fact that can be 'harnessed' by pharmaceuticals--'trick' the body into thinking it's already pregnant, and voila, reliable disabling of fertility.

Just think of it as one of the tradeoffs for living five years longer than the males. You'll have to make peace with it somehow.

[arcticaoutloud]

I had a dream where Camille Paglia was telling me to be responsible for myself

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Must have been a short dream, if she spoke the way she usually speaks.

[shadychocolate]

Oh god one guy literally almost started an argument with me about how internalized misogynt doesn't exist and that things like "I'm not like other girls", "I'm one of the dudes" "girls are too much drama" are not fucking forms of internalized misogyny.

He literally got pissed because internalized misogyny insinuates "women hating women is a man's fault" in his perspective.

I'm gonna say it one time.

Misogyny is "hatred or contempt of girls in order to keep the male gender's status high". It in no way means misogyny is only practiced by men. Many women put down other women because of internalizing the man > woman dynamic and it is not because of men.

It is not entirely men's fault for the birth of misogyny but it is a man's fault when he practices it.

Internalized misogyny IS a thing and its not always a man's fault. Stop fucking warping things because your stupid egotistic ass wants to badly be against feminists.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

"Internalized misogyny" is nothing but being so unwilling to accept that a woman may simply disagree with feminism's propaganda/conclusions, that you'd sooner believe they have been brainwashed into self-sexism, than simply accept that they have a different viewpoint. Or, as Sommers once put it:

https://twitter.com/CHSommers/status/492405608810033153?s=19

[gnuclear]

thinkin’ about the insistence on referring to women with their first name in circumstances where a man would be referred to by his last name,,, when my debate partner gets called “Mr.” and his last name while I get called by my first,,, “Hilary” Clinton and Donald “Trump”,,,, the emphasis on gendering who they view as men in an official manner to put them above women,,,, also the snide “Mister”s thrown at trans women and trans girls in order to misgender them,,,,, >:(

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

People used "Hillary" because "Clinton" on its own was already associated with a former President, her husband.

Same reason George W. Bush's middle initial was emphasized, while Hillary Clinton's never was; to differentiate from the other "George Bush" who was President.

Not everything is a sinister act of bigotry. Stop living life in the role of a hammer.

[terftaro]

Looking for Books by Women/Female Authors

Most of the books I own were acquired in my teen years, so my bookshelf is disgustingly male.

I'm not looking for feminism oriented books since I have quite a handful in my reading list. I'm looking for authors you love or fiction novels of any genre except for romance, really.

If you ladies have any suggestions, I would be very grateful. <3

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

The only thing disgusting here is your misandry.

The words are more important than the genitals of the human who wrote them.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

if I wrote a dystopian novel where the corrupt evil megacorporation that controls society has a fucking smirk for a logo, my editor would tell me to use a less heavy-handed metaphor

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

and yet

[twinkiefairy]

I love this because if I were to write a literary novel in the Western cannon that described the image of an apple with a chunk bitten off, any high school English student would tell you it is a Bible reference meant to represent the source of all evil and downfall of humanity and YET 

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

It was originally a reference to the tale of Newton’s apple, silly human. This is the original logo.

P.S. It’s spelled “canon”.

[cotl-betrayal-sacrifice]

Although the irony of Apple’s logo having that link to the judeochristian source of corruption and sin is amusing, got to admit

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

There is no link, outside of a few delusional imaginations.

Also, the Bible never even states it's an apple in the Garden of Eden story.

[moved-to-empresscaress]

I hate the entire concept of rehabilitating a rapist. Rapists aren't ill. Raping is not a symptom. It is a misogynistic hate crime. Stop letting violent men pathologize themselves out of consequences. They're not the ones suffering from what they've done.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

You don't want people who do bad things to stop doing bad things?

Also, no significant number of people have ever absolved rape by just shrugging their shoulders and going "that's just how that person is, oh well." Please return to the real world.

[iamxueyang]

dead rapists don’t continue raping tho..., killing rapists would make them stop :)

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

dead shoplifters don’t continue shoplifting tho..., killing shoplifters would make them stop :)

[iamxueyang]

are you seriously saying shoplifting is somehow equivalent to rape?

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

No. Please learn how analogies work before continuing to try and maintain a discussion with an adult online.

But since your logic train is so easily-derailed, I'll try a simpler example:

Do you believe women who strike their children should also be immediately put to death? Why or why not?

[darkredgirl]

not to interrupt but @iamxueyang​ if you execute anyone that commits a crime you run the risk of an innocent person being accused of committing a crime and then you’ve killed an innocent person. there’s a REASON most people are against the death penalty. someone who has committed a crime can and should be rehabilitated to the best of our ability bc they can’t be put to death and the prison system is so fucked that keeping someone in prison for the rest of their life really isn’t good for anyone either.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Yes, the reality that humanity's ability to determine guilt is demonstrably imperfect (to say the least) is very relevant in reality, but my point stands even if you were to assume no innocent is ever convicted.

It's the difference between being a civilized society and being a mob of bloodthirsty savages.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

if I wrote a dystopian novel where the corrupt evil megacorporation that controls society has a fucking smirk for a logo, my editor would tell me to use a less heavy-handed metaphor

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

and yet

[twinkiefairy]

I love this because if I were to write a literary novel in the Western cannon that described the image of an apple with a chunk bitten off, any high school English student would tell you it is a Bible reference meant to represent the source of all evil and downfall of humanity and YET 

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

It was originally a reference to the tale of Newton's apple, silly human. This is the original logo.

P.S. It's spelled "canon".

[moved-to-empresscaress]

I hate the entire concept of rehabilitating a rapist. Rapists aren't ill. Raping is not a symptom. It is a misogynistic hate crime. Stop letting violent men pathologize themselves out of consequences. They're not the ones suffering from what they've done.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

You don't want people who do bad things to stop doing bad things?

Also, no significant number of people have ever absolved rape by just shrugging their shoulders and going "that's just how that person is, oh well." Please return to the real world.

[iamxueyang]

dead rapists don’t continue raping tho..., killing rapists would make them stop :)

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

dead shoplifters don’t continue shoplifting tho..., killing shoplifters would make them stop :)

[iamxueyang]

are you seriously saying shoplifting is somehow equivalent to rape?

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

No. Please learn how analogies work before continuing to try and maintain a discussion with an adult online.

But since your logic train is so easily-derailed, I'll try a simpler example:

Do you believe women who strike their children should also be immediately put to death? Why or why not?

[moved-to-empresscaress]

I hate the entire concept of rehabilitating a rapist. Rapists aren't ill. Raping is not a symptom. It is a misogynistic hate crime. Stop letting violent men pathologize themselves out of consequences. They're not the ones suffering from what they've done.

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

You don't want people who do bad things to stop doing bad things?

Also, no significant number of people have ever absolved rape by just shrugging their shoulders and going "that's just how that person is, oh well." Please return to the real world.

[iamxueyang]

dead rapists don’t continue raping tho..., killing rapists would make them stop :)

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

dead shoplifters don’t continue shoplifting tho..., killing shoplifters would make them stop :)

[nobodyknowsimaradfem]

This is an incredibly heavy handed way to admit that you see women as objects!

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Your reading comprehension leaves a massive amount to be desired.

Civilized societies seek to rehabilitate criminals into productive members of it. Barbaric knuckle-draggers care only for pointless retribution.

There is a reason Norway's recidivism rate is one of the lowest on the planet, and the USA's one of the highest, for examples.

[therearenogirlsontheinternets]

Say it louder for the people at the back

[thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound]

Yeah, men have this issue where a woman can assault them, and yet the man who calls the police on her, being afraid to defend himself physically, is the one who gets arrested anyway.

https://thatsyouthatshowdumbyousound.tumblr.com/post/612282918717587456/key-word-is-back-their-right-to-defend

The fact that violence comes up so readily in these discussions shows just how common female violence is, and how often it's gotten away with.