Category Archives: misogyny
Zoe Quinn’s screenshots of 4chan’s dirty tricks were just the appetizer. Here’s the first course of the dinner, directly from the IRC log
Sorry, guys. I actually read the logs.
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A couple of days ago, embattled indie game designer Zoe Quinn embarrassed some of her biggest critics by posting screenshots she’d collected from a 4channer IRC channel, showing an assortment of hateful and duplicitous #GamerGaters literally conspiring to wreck her reputation and create the illusion of a vast grassroots uprising against alleged corruption in the gaming business.
Her critics, put on the defensive, tried their best to dismiss her screenshots as “cherry picked,” and a few even accused her of writing the very messages she screenshotted and posted. Oh, there might be a few bad apples in the bunch, some were willing to concede, but they were in the minority.
And then they pulled out what they thought was their trump card: the full chat log from the IRC channel #burgersandfries from when the Zoe Quinn “scandal” first erupted in mid-August up until September 6th. All anyone had to do, they suggested, was to read the log, and they would soon see that Quinn was presenting a distorted picture based on out-of-context, “cherry-picked” quotes.
Of course, reading this particular log is a bit easier said than done: it’s 3756 pages, in 10-point type, of chaotic overlapping IRC conversations.
This is a classic case of what’s come to be known as “doc dumping,” which Wikipedia helpfully defines as
#GamerGate Showdown! The Lavender Menace vs. the Somewhat Socially Awkward Young Men
In the future, young men will be forced to play all video games as Fat Lara Croft.
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Of all the loopy manifestos that this whole #GamerGate fiasco has inspired, I think this loopy manifesto, posted several days ago to the Men’s Rights subreddit to a smattering of upvotes, is probably my favorite.
Take it away, trudatness:
Think about what really went down in gaming journalism – not on the micro level, but on the macro level.
The most left-wing journalism companies happily filled the gaming journalism void. Think about it…
The most virulent lavender menace feminist laced industry on the planet began covering an industry whose target audience was comprised of somewhat socially awkward young men.
Hey what could go wrong?
Answer: Everything.
Woah, hate to be a stickler for stuff that actually makes sense, but if you’re going to use a homophobic slur to describe your opponents, make sure you pick the correct homophobic slur. The phrase “lavender menace” originated as an insult aimed at lesbians in the feminist movement; the term was later reclaimed by lesbian feminists. Whether as as a slur or as an honorific, I’m pretty sure the term is not a terribly apt description of the dude-dominated world of video game journalism, as dudes cannot actually be lesbians.
Do you still think that #GamerGate is a spontaneous movement against game industry corruption? Zoe Quinn has some screenshots to show you.
4Channers discover that Zoe has been spying on the #IRC channels where they’ve been planning and coordinating their “raid.”
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Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.
Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.
That finance douchebag on Tinder is a perfect example of pickup artistry gone wrong
Mystery has taught you well, young douchebag
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By now you’ve probably seen the latest set of creepy PMs that’s making the rounds of the internet — you know, that series of sour-grapey insults some random finance asshole sent to a woman on Tinder who had gently rejected his crude sexual come-on. If you haven’t, I’ve pasted them in below.
Well, it turns out that this would-be Romeo is not only an asshole, but a wholly unoriginal asshole at that. Thinking that more than a few of his angry negs sounded vaguely familiar I did a bit of Googling and discovered that a couple of his more, er, polished insults came straight out of the pickup artist playbook. Quite literally.
That bit where he tells the woman he messaged that she’s “not hot enough to be acting like this?” An old PUA neg he literally may have discovered by cruising the message boards at VenusianArts.com, the website of everyone’s favorite PUA peacock Mystery, where one commenter described it as his favorite line to use with “highly egotistical women” he met in the club:
You’ll never guess what misogynistic gamebros did to these two women in gaming! (HINT: Drove them out.)
Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.
Congratulations, assholes! You did it! Your threats and harassment have driven game journalist/designer Jenn Frank and game designer/media critic Mattie Brice to leave the gaming world.
Frank, an award-winning writer and sometime game designer, came to the attention of the misogynist mob after writing a brief opinion piece for The Guardian decrying the widespread and vicious harassment of women in gaming. In addition to writing about the harassment she’s gotten — including someone trying to hack into her email account — she (as you might expect) also highlighted the misogynistic rage directed at feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and indie game designer Zoe Quinn.
The new rule seems to be that any woman who writes about online harassment will herself be harassed, and in this case it didn’t take long.
Gamebro Redditor laments: “I’m not going to get the job … Cause I’m a penis, and that’s all I am.”
How women get ahead in the workplace, according to men who hate women and don’t know shit about anything
A bitter gamebro wandered into the Men’s Rights subreddit last night to deposit an angry little manifesto on the evils of women and Social Justice Warriors. He didn’t get a terribly friendly reception from the regulars — last I checked he’d been voted down to zero — but his manifesto is such a classic example of self-pitying gamebro misogyny that I sort of felt obliged to bring it to you all here.
Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then let’s begin.
You won’t believe what Reddit’s Red Pill ALPHA DOGS are saying about the stolen JLaw nudes. Or maybe you will.
Well, the denizens of Reddit’s TOTALLY ALPHA Red Pill subreddit have weighed in on the stolen celebrity nude pics that have so many Redditors — and other skeezballs — so excited. And they have some, well, intriguing explanations for why feminists are troubled by the widespread dissemination of stolen nude pictures that were never supposed to be seen by the general public.
In a thread with the lovely title Why are the feminazis so buttdevastated about the leaked nude pics?, a RedPill dude with the lovely handle trpmdsrfggts explains that said feminazis are angry because the pics — some of which show the celebrity women looking like, you know, actual women — are driving down the “price of pussy.”
I’ll let him explain, because his logic is obviously more sophisticated than anything I learned in my pussy economics classes in college:
Program note: I will be on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered today [UPDATE: Transcript up, audio soon]
Kids listening to the radio. Or perhaps an armoire.
So I was interviewed a while back by All Things Considered for a segment on men’s rights activism. The segment, part of their “Men in America” series, will be running today. All Things Considered starts at 4 PM — at least in my time zone (Central); you’ll have to do the time zone math to figure out when it starts for you.
You can listen online here. The segment will also be archived on the “Men in America” web page; it should go up sometime this evening.
Hopefully the segment will include some comments from me. But you never know. Should be interesting regardless.
EDIT: The transcript is up here; audio will be posted on the same page at 7 PM eastern. They included a couple of quotes from me.
I haven’t heard the segment yet, but reading the transcript i have to say the piece is pretty poor, giving MRAs in general and Warren Farrell in particular way too much credence. More on this later.
Men’s Rights Redditor: Let’s convince the world that we aren’t violent by sending feminists bloody feathers
Hat of choice for the discerning Men’s Rights Activist
Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.
One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.
He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.
Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.
Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:
JLaw’s leaked nudes: For men who hate women, the violation of privacy is part of the thrill
Scumbag Reddit strikes again.
If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.
You might think this would be enough.
But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.
No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.
Hence the popularity of “leaked” celebrity nudes.
