I’m back from a brief vacation in Migraineland, and thinking about the ways in which Men’s Rights Activists love to appropriate the language of feminism and other progressive movements, usually in ways that are face-palmingly ass-backwards.
Take this recent discussion on the Men’s Rights subreddit of the dire threat of “fake gamer girls” invading the “male space” of gaming. The generically named guywithaccount sets up the discussion with this post:
![I want to talk about "fake geek girls" (self.MensRights) submitted 9 days ago by guywithaccount For those of you who don't know about this, there's a bit of a controversy in what I'll call the geek community. Apparently, when women attend geek conventions (that is, those celebrating e.g. video games, comic books, sci-fi and fantasy), some men accuse them of being "fake geeks" or demanding that they prove their "geek cred" by correctly answering trivia questions made up on the spot. Here's one article (of many) that talks about it: [1] http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2013/08/08/the-fake-geek-girl-nonsense/ My concern for this issue is that, like anything else that involves gender, feminists and feminist sympathizers are attempting to dominate the discussion and frame the whole thing from a feminist and gynocentric perspective. The prevailing analysis might be summed up as "geek culture is deeply misogynistic, and the people complaining about fake geeks are just sad little losers who hate women." IMO, the geek subculture has provided a somewhat-safe space for many men who have been snubbed by the rest of society, where they are not expected to prove their value to each other by carving notches in a bedpost or exemplifying traditional masculine traits. The increase in mainstream appeal and female participation over the past decade or so threatens the safety and exclusivity of this space, and the backlash from male geeks is a somewhat-predictable response to the invasion of their space. Of course, there are few spaces just for men, and when someone tries to create or preserve one, they're accused of misogyny. I suspect that some of you don't give a crap about any of this and see the whole thing as petty, but realize that it's not happening in a vacuum. I believe it's merely a symptom of the fact that men have almost no voice in gender discussions and their needs are routinely denied or ignored.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fakegeek.png?resize=573%2C541&ssl=1)
Now, there is a teensy bit of gold in this pile of bullshit: the notion of a “safe space,” where oppressed people can come forward and discuss their issues without fear of being talked over or shut down by those outside their group — who have more power in the world and who may not have their best interests at heart (or who may just be Blabby McBlabbypants types).
But there are a couple of giant problems with this notion when it comes to gamer dudes declaring gaming a “safe space” for men. The first is that, despite lingering resentments over being “snubbed” in high school or wherever — evident in the OP and in comments throughout the discussion — these guys are not actually an oppressed people by any measure that really matters.
Indeed, many of them — as tech dudes in a male-dominated tech world — are in fact in fairly privileged positions. For them to claim they need a “safe space” to protect themselves from the evils of “fake gamer girls” is a bit like Klan members claiming they need a “safe space” to protect themselves from blacks, Jews and Catholics. (Which is more or less what Klan members have argued over the years, albeit in less PC language.) No, I’m not claiming that all MRAs are the equivalent of hood-wearing Klan members. Only some of them are.
The second problem with the “game world as safe space for men” aregument is that YOU CAN’T JUST DECLARE BIG CHUNKS OF THE WORLD TO BELONG TO MEN. Yes, men dominate the gaming world in sheer numbers, both as game-makers and game-players. (While women make up nearly half of all game players — 47% — men tend to dominate the “serious” games that many geek dudes claim are the only ones that really count.) But gaming doesn’t “belong” to men any more than, say, novel-reading “belongs” to women — even though surveys suggest that women make up a staggering 80% of the fiction market in much of the English-speaking world.
Yep, that’s right: Women dominate “noveling” much more dramatically than men dominate gaming. Yet you don’t find women denouncing “fake noveler boys” or declaring that the male brain isn’t wired to understand the subtleties of written fiction.
No, in fact men are actively welcomed into book clubs. And my best friend, a woman, has spent much of the 18 or so years or our friendship trying to get me to read this novel or that novel, though over the years she’s only succeeded in getting me to read maybe one or two of her suggestions, which were pretty good, I have to admit. (I do plan to read some of the others, really.)
If you’re a socially awkward guy and want a safe space to discuss that, find a therapist, find a support group. Don’t pick on women gamers and pretend this is somehow your right because you’re oppressed as a socially awkward guy.
Anyway, here are some other dumb comments from the Reddit thread. YetAnotherCommenter warns feminists that they may lose some powerful allies if they continue acting so feministy.
Speaking of nerds who can’t get laid — which we weren’t but which these guys keep bringing up (and identifying themselves as) again and again — guia7ri seems to harbor some lingering resentments from high school, and who better to take that out on than attractive geeky women?
Hey MRAs, if you wonder why feminists sometimes describe MRAs as bitter men who hate women because they can’t get laid, it’s because MRAs like gui7ri so often EXPLICITLY DECLARE THEMSELVES BITTER MEN WHO HATE WOMEN BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET LAID.
Meanwhile Byuku blames it all on evil feminists pretending to be geeks in order to make trouble. Because that’s what feminists do.
That’s how they get you!
EDIT: Added a sentence to temper and clarify my assertion that men “dominate” gaming.
Forgive me, I still have three more pages to read to catch up.
Wait, how is {“If nerd-dom is such a defining identity then a woman isn’t probably a nerd if her sexual activities don’t involve cavorting with nerd men.”} and {“I’m sure that it’s possible to be a lesbian nerd and if that lesbian happens to have a sex life it’s probably with another lesbian nerd.”} both true at the same time? Using your logic I thought women proved their nerd cred by sleeping with men, so how does the lesbian nerd in this situation get HER cred?
This is something a little different than what you said earlier. So… if something is central to your identity, you prove you’re not faking it by having sex with people with the same identity, or you choose to have sex with them more than any other group of people. What if you have multiple things making up the core of your identity and you’re monogamous with someone who doesn’t have all those things? Asexuality is a central facet of my identity – do I need to… go have sex with other ace people… to prove it? ._.
Really? You have received hundreds of death and rape threats, had all your videos flagged on youtube, had your face photoshopped into porn, had your wikipedia page vandalized, were called every slur in the book, and someone made a game about punching you in the face? Regularly? Because you disagreed with someone online? (And that’s just the experience of one woman mind you.)
Asher, stop jerking off in public and go away.
Man, these ” It’s not that I really believe or, for that matter, don’t believe it” types can fuck off forever.
Asher, what is your point? Because right now your self-description of “reactionary” seems relatively appropriate. You react to what people say while ignoring context, going on about thirty tangents at once and then pretend you’ve been arguing one thing the whole time.
And no, this conversation does not demonstrate that outsiders are automatically assigned a “badness” attribute. People aren’t frustrated with you simply because you aren’t part of the group. You’ve earned that attribute by being tedious, self-important, long winded, and pedantic.
Said the cis straight white dude at the top of the pile.
You made absolutely no distinction you meant political identities, and have yet to address my actual comment regarding gender identities.
Re: not limiting your statement to political identities — “I already addressed this. The act of establishing identity is an inherently exclusionary one because it excludes the things that are different.”
Re: linking exclusionary identities to “badness” — “The term “leftist” is exclusionary because it excludes non-leftists. All identities are exclusionary, every single last one of them. What you are doing is relying on current, general sentiments to to establish a notion that some identities are “bad”, in an Absolute sense, but that others are okay. But since your notions of “bad” are simply rooted in current, general sentiments that means that they are subject to change and not some timeless, universal Absolute.”
Combining the two we are left with all identities, full stop, being exclusionary. And these distinctions being based on current notions of “badness”.
Nice try on the “grow up” though, troll harder if you think you can press my buttons, cuz petty insults don’t even register. No that’s not quite true, they register as humorous.
Funny, here’s what I hear whenever you start talking:
Ooh… are we playing, argumentem ad google-em?
Norm
Asher is (still) wrong (again would imply there were interruptions in that state of being).
E.g. It’s not question begging because the original claim that “women have, generally, been historically oppressed” is false,
Wrong… because that wasn’t at a part of your argument. You argued that they can’t have been oppressed, because oppressed people don’t contribute to society, and they did, ergo they weren’t oppressed.
This defense you are attempting to mount is just adding to the begging, because you have concluded, in advance, what the answer is.
That oppressed people have contributed to society (because of the presence of negative incentives, at the very least) invalidates your argument in the larger world, but purely as an example of construction it’s logically invalid (in addition to it’s being incorrect).
Asher: The first, not all geeks are members of the Klannish aspect of the culture<.
Assuming facts not in evidence, which the was the problem with David’s initial analogy. Now, if David’s analogy was accompanied by evidence for Klan-like elements among male geeks then this would be a valid objection.
Liar: Let me refresh (with another quoting of Dave’s only analogy [initial would require a subsequent analogy from Dave])
It’s been many hours now since I made the initial observation and no one has attempted to substantiate where the Klan and male geeks are functionally equivalent.
Liar. I have, others have. Examples have been given, citations have been made (links I presume you didn’t follow, certainly not all the way back to the parent studies on which those stories were based).
Not terror and nothing even remotely resembling what the Klan did.
Called it. I said you’d dismiss it out of hand.
Intellectually honest my ass.
Asher: More hyperbole. A one line observation isn’t what people usually consider a lecture.
No. Not Hyperbole. In that paragraph you pretended to tell me what it was like to live in the military. You attempted a weak appeal to authority (based on the bothers you claim to have, and the service you say they performed) and then made shit up about how military spouses come to identify with the military, all the while ignoring that it was irrelevant to the argument you made.
So yeah, you tried to pontificate (if you like that better than lecture) as you moved some goalposts.
Intellectually honest? No.
Both of them. Who got the money? He did. Who owned the money? He did.
De jure? Sure. De facto? Almost certainly not. What you are implying is that the average guy in all of human history held money over his wife’s head in a power struggle between them. That’s just absurd.
Take a look at South Korean divorce rates. In 1990 they were around one percent. Today they are around forty-five percent. What changed is that the divorce laws went from men taking everything in a divorce to divorce laws looking like what they do in the US. Presumably,men could have divorced their wives on any whim but did not do so. Why not?
Yes, you can say because they got to exercise power over their wives but this ignores the reality of human psychology which is that people rarely exercise power solely for the sake of lording over others. Yes, there are individuals who are like that but they are very much an aberration.
The simplest explanation for the low historical divorce rate is that those men valued the relationship with those women, and not for the purposes of simply exercising power over them.
Who was oppressed? She was. She may not have felt downtrodden
Ah, yes, the old “false consciousness” assertion rears it’s ugly, hideously dishonest, head.
“And no, this conversation does not demonstrate that outsiders are automatically assigned a “badness” attribute. People aren’t frustrated with you simply because you aren’t part of the group. You’ve earned that attribute by being tedious, self-important, long winded, and pedantic.”
So much this. Honestly, I’m questioning what the hell pecunium and I would come up with if we attempted to list identities we share…I’m coming up short here, besides morality. And y’all know this doesn’t bother me (quite the opposite really, I enjoy a friendly round of opposing views)
Nope. You made the postive assertion he was wrong. You need to prove it, or withdraw the claim.
Wait, did you just assert that I needed to prove a negative? Yes, yes you did.
Asher: go look in the mirror before calling someone else dishonest.
Why are you reading things into comments (thought that was a no-no to you)? Pecunium never brought up false consciousness.
@Falconer:
I have been off and on, much more off than on. I find the troll threads more fun, but I always seem to miss them. 🙁
@Asher:
Then you’re kinda missing out on a central tenent of social justice. It must all be very confusing for you. You should retrain your ears at some point, things will start making sense again.
Another observation; the people who disparage the term “oppression” are kinda like the people who call feminists “shrill” or think racism is talked about way too much. They’re the kind of people who are very comfortable with the status quo, and are annoyed that they are asked to make some sort of effort to change their views. They paint the opposition as “babbling” or “hyperbolic” so they can dismiss the whole thing and stay in their little bubble.
David is the only making the argument and using an analogy to try and seubstantiate it. The onus is on him to demonstrate that the premises are valid and not on me to demonstrate that they are invalid. he needs to come out and provide evidence that male geeks, or some gatekeeping portion of them, are the equivalent of the Klan.
The thing is, though, we are using additional standards to determine which forms of exclusion are morally acceptable
Not really. The closest thing you’ve come to this is to imply that some portion of male geeks engage in systemic and willful terrorizing of others.
“Intellectually honest my ass.”
Indeed, there isn’t much of either XD (Thank you for dealing with him, I didn’t sleep at all and am still spent from last night’s discussions)
Asher: David doesn’t need to do shit other than ban your tired ass, BECAUSE THE KLAN IS NOT WHAT THIS FUCKING POST IS ABOUT.
surely the fact that we are using additional standards was clear to you from the beginning?
Then you need to state what they are and just not assume their acceptance by everyone.
Because you don’t related exclusionary identities to badness?
I don’t. You do. I’m just pointing it out.
Now we have to spoonfeed him. Christ.
“It’s easy to be copacetic about something when you know the bastards are never going to burn a cross on *your* lawn.”
Burning crosses on lawns was pretty common and much Klan behavior went far beyond burning crosses on lawns.
Can you specify the male geek equivalent of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls?
pecunium — Sophia’s chorus:
I knew you’d risk your mortal life but…”even though it cost me my very lifesblood, and loses me the taste of Paradise”
I am honestly gobstruck.
@Asher:
From the OP:
You are demanding that David defend an opinion he does not hold. If you actually want to tackle the OP, ignore the Klan stuff, that’s irrelevant. Focus on the idea of a privileged group demanding a “safe space” from non-privileged groups.