Today, a quick quiz to see how closely you’ve been following controversies in the world of video gaming. Well, a quiz that’s sort of been shoehorned into a poll. The correct answer(s) come after the bump. Enjoy!
Category: antifeminism
Pity poor Paul Elam! The Men’s Rights elder has spent, by his estimation, nearly half of his life ranting and raving against the supposed evils of feminism, and for what?
The movement he claims to lead has had no tangible victories in the real world beyond sullying its own name; traffic at his website has stalled out; and his latest publicity stunt – appropriating the name of the White Ribbon antiviolence campaign for his own dubious ends – has put him and/or his allies at legal risk without garnering him much of the attention he clearly craves.
You may remember woman-hating white nationalist F. Roger Devlin as the guy who invented “hypergamy” – or at least the misogynistic cartoon version of the concept popular in Men’s Rights and other “red pill” subcultures.
Well, Devlin also has some thoughts on domestic violence, and they make even less sense.
By all rights, the furor over rocket scientist Matt Taylor’s cheesecake shirt should have died down by now. After being chided earlier this week for marring the celebration over the landing of a space probe ON A GODDAMNED COMET by doing interviews in a tacky shirt covered with half-naked ladies, Taylor offered a brief but heartfelt apology. You would have thought we’d all be able to move on.
Not so fast. Because these days apparently no controversy can ever be over as long as it serves someone’s interest to keep it going. And so a loose but very familiar coalition of reactionaries and antifeminists and angry techies have started flogging an amorphous cause they call #Shirtgate or, more popularly, #Shirtstorm, purporting to be outraged that Taylor was “humiliated” into apologizing.
Categories
#gamergate a woman is always to blame antifeminism creepy entitled babies evil sexy ladies evil SJWs friend zone gamebros hypocrisy imaginary backwards land imaginary oppression irony alert men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA nice guys okcupid oppressed white men playing the victim reactionary bullshit reddit twitter
#GamerGate's new champion is a wax replica of Patrick Bateman who thinks gamers are a bunch of dateless nerds
Watch out, Milo Yiannopoulos, you’ve got competition! #GamerGate has a new journalistic champion — and this one, like Milo, seems to have come straight from central casting, a virtual embodiment of every snooty reactionary preppie stereotype from every bad 80s movie.
A libertarian think tanker and erstwhile journalist with the unlikely name of Mytheos Holt, this new contender has one great advantage over young Milo: as you can see in the photo above, which I have not photoshopped in any way, he appears to be made entirely of wax — which means that unless someone accidentally sets him near a heater he will last forever.
Very cool: We humans have landed a space probe on a goddamned comet!
Not cool: when one European Space Agency dude gave an interview about the landing, he was wearing a shirt festooned with cheesecake images of scantily clad women.
Even less cool: when Atlantic magazine science writer Rose Eveleth pointed out that this choice of attire doesn’t exactly broadcast the message that women (other than scantily clad ones) are welcome in STEM, she received a torrent of abuse from angry Twitter dudes, including requests for her to kill herself.
The cherry atop this crap sundae? The nastiest Twitterer of the bunch, who not only went after Eveleth but her defenders as well, is a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
Do you remember when #GamerGate was young? You know, back before #NotYourShield and Vivian James and bizarrely complicated conspiracy theories involving Gawker, Weird Twitter and some sort of international Jewish conspiracy?
Remember when #GamerGate was still called #BurgersAndFries, and the angry gamebro army was focused on the real enemy of all that is good and true – a young game designer by the name of Zoe Quinn?
If you’ve been feeling nostalgic for those good old days, you’re in luck. A sprawling blog post by a female friend of Quinn’s obsessive, accusatory ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni takes us back to the dog days of August when his even more sprawling thezoepost was unleashed upon the world.
"we're inclusive and accepting!" says #gamergate, before drawing racist caricatures of women they dislike. pic.twitter.com/zbFnWBOmdn
— Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) November 1, 2014
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
Here’s the original, in all its crapitude:
It’s perhaps not altogether surprising that a writer at Return of Kings, a site run by someone who has openly admitted to raping a woman too drunk to consent, has come out in defense of Jian Ghomeshi, the Canadian radio personality recently fired from CBC in the wake of serious accusations of violent sexual assault from an ever-growing list of women.
For most of those who have been following the scandal, the fact that numerous women have come forward with strikingly similar stories of abuse at the hands of Ghomeshi only increases the credibility of the case against him.