Sometimes it seems like the internet, or at least huge portions of it, is essentially a giant harassment machine, directed primarily at women.
This week, the target of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine is game developer Zoe Quinn. Quinn, best known as the creator of the text-based Depression Quest, faced down two previous waves of harassment from gamer dudes who were angry about her game, for some gamer-dude reasons I can’t claim to understand, and who grew even angrier after Quinn spoke publicly about being harassed.
Her harassers claimed that she was lying about being harassed previously, and apparently figured there was no better way to prove that she hadn’t been harassed in the first place than by harassing her about her claims of harassment. I’m sorry if that’s confusing, but the “logic” of internet assholes tends to be a bit circular.
The latest wave of harassment is on a whole new level of viciousness. Because this time her haters have what they see as proof that she is indeed the evil [insert favorite anti-woman slur] that they’ve always claimed her to be. Their alleged smoking gun consists of a series of excruciatingly detailed blog posts by a vengeful ex-boyfriend describing how she allegedly cheated on him and lied about it; at roughly 10,000 words in all, not counting all the screenshots of online conversations presented as proof of his claims, his story is nearly the length of a novella.
You might ask: why is any of this any of our business? It’s fucking not. Some have tried to claim this is about “ethics,” accusing Quinn of trading sexual favors for a positive game review. But the journalist she allegedly slept with never actually wrote a review of her game.
Of course this has nothing to do with any real ethical concerns on the part of her attackers. As Quinn has pointed out herself, the people who are gleefully sharing her personal information, posting nude pictures of her, sending her threats, and otherwise trying to destroy her life don’t have any fucking ethics.
No, this is just another excuse to go after an outspoken woman on the internet, and a chance for misogynistic gamer dudes to score a symbolic victory against any and all women who are trying to enter what these guys want to see as a clubhouse where girls aren’t allowed. Anita Sarkeesian has been dealing with the same sort of shit ever since she first set out to examine sexism in the gaming world.
I honestly don’t have the psychic energy to collect together examples of the horrible shit people are saying about her; just type her name into Google along with your favorite anti-woman slur and you’ll have more proof than you need. Or go to Reddit and make your way to any of the numerous subreddits devoted to gaming and/or misogyny, where many people will be thrilled to tell you all about how “the video game industry is being fucked over because of these women.” (Actual quote.)
Quinn has said all I think she needs to say about this in an eloquent blog post of her own. Here’s a portion of it:
I am not going to link to, or address anything having to do with the validity of the specific claims made by an angry ex-boyfriend with an axe to grind and a desire to use 4chan as his own personal army. This is not a “she-said” to his “he-said”. The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.
What I *am* going to say is that the proliferation of nude pictures of me, death threats, vandalization, doxxing of my trans friends for having the audacity to converse with me publicly, harassment of friends and family and my friends’ family in addition to TOTALLY UNRELATED PEOPLE, sending my home address around, rape threats, memes about me being a whore, pressures to kill myself, slurs of every variety, fucking debates over what my genitals smell like, vultures trying to make money off of youtube videos about it, all of these things are inexcusable and will continue to happen to women until this culture changes. I’m certainly not the first. I wish I could be the last.
Because I’ve had a small degree of success in a specific subculture, every aspect of my life is suddenly a matter of public concern. Suddenly it’s acceptable to share pictures of my breasts on social media to threaten and punish me. Suddenly I don’t have any right to privacy or basic dignity. Suddenly I don’t get to live out normal parts of life, like going through a bad and ugly breakup in private. I have forfeited this by being a blip in a small community, while those who delight in assailing me hide behind their keyboards and a culture that permits it, beyond reproach.
My life and my body are not public property. No one’s life and body are public property.
Sexuality is one of the most personal, hurtful, and easy things to demonize a woman over, and also has nothing to do with my games. Yet large swaths of the gaming community are either unable or unwilling to separate the two. I’m convinced that my ex chose 4chan as the staging ground for his campaign of harassment and character assassination because he knew this; he knew that someone claiming to be “from the Internet” has shown up at my house once already, and he is counting on the most reviled hubs of our community to live up to their sordid reputations. This is another example of gendered violence, whereby my personal life becomes a means to punish my professional credentials and to try to shame me into giving up my work. I’m still committed to doing my small part to create a world where no woman is at risk of experiencing this.
I don’t have anything to add.
This is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAS thread. Anyone posting any doxxing shit in the comments below, or adding to the harassment against her in any way, will be banned.
Thus Spake Zara:
It’s still quite doable. In fact, pretty much every online game has some kind of anti-harassment policy in the EULA; it’s just a question of where the line is drawn.
redpoppy, I saw gingery kitty – adorbs! 🙂
I love reading WoW insider talk – it’s like reading the bridge column in the newspaper. Either completely understandable or thoroughly opaque, no middle ground.
I would absolutely prefer to have moderators than karma systems.
The problem with a lot of forums and commenting systems is that the people in charge throw up their hands and say “free speech”, and only moderate obvious spam, excessive profanity, or posting of personal information type stuff. So what ends up happening is the trolls and the assholes take over, and the people in charge recognize that it is a problem but are unwilling to fix it because they think that “free speech” is the most important value.
What I want to see is forums where they say “fuck free speech, I’m going to moderate this community in order to attract the kind of users and conversation I’m looking for”. And if that moderation policy doesn’t attract me, then so be it. No moderation inevitably results in shit I hate anyway, so I can’t see how moderation will make things worse.
I’m sick of seeing ostensibly liberal sites with horrible comment sections, and people throwing their hands up and saying “well that’s just free speech!”
Some enterprising WHTM’er should start a WoW guild. Or tell me the WoW guild you’ve already started so I can join.
MMOs could totally police their userbase if they really wanted to. They keep records of everything you type into the game. They know the types of words their users are saying. They could absolutely give you a small automatic penalty for using more than X profanities/slurs in public channels in a period of time. They choose not to.
WoW has gotten better about reporting abuse, as you can now right-click on an offending chat and there is an option to report language. But it’s too little, too late, as everyone who gives a shit has already left all the public channels, or has grown adept at ignoring the bullshit (kind of like how nobody scrolls to the YouTube comments unless they’re a terrible person or want to be reminded of the terribleness of humanity).
@gilshalos *fist bump * to a fellow St. Andrews graduate.
@deniseeliza
I was just talking with redpoppy about that. Would love you to be involved as well. I figure the guild could just be called We Hunted the Mammoth (and go on mammoth walks – does that happen on your server? People will start mammoth trains at a walk until there are loads of people in a line all walking slowly on their mammoths? It’s weird but amusing) and if you’re waiting for a raid to start, and a couple of people mount up on mammoths, people will slowly join in. The power of the mammoth compels them.
I’ll ask Dave to send you my contact details too. Or maybe we could start a discussion on the mammoth forums.
All this chat, and then the mention of Guild Wars 1, had me go back into Guild Wars 2 for a few hours. After a 2.2Gb download – it has been a few months since I played. GW2 also has no monthly fees to play.
deniseeliza- I report when I can but it is ever so tiring to see general chat. But when I do, I try to report people who say the “c” word, the “f” word (anti-gay slur if not clear) the “n” word (they REALLY love that one as well as the “c” word.) and any others I can catch. Free speech people would hate me. Good. I don’t care.
You can join the private discussion me and Kim will probably have soon if you wanna discuss coordinating a mammoth guild!
Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth! It comes with vendors. I am quite partial to the Grand Expedition Yak because the yaks ARE SO CUTE OMFG.
@phoenician
Uhhhhhh …
I personally don’t like the look of the system you proposed. My family was very patriarchal and authoritarian and basically, if I complained, I lost my right to be treated reasonably BECAUSE I complained. Very efficient silencing mechanism that.
As a result, this set-up itself makes me really wary, so if I were in this system I would not complain at all because I know that my reputation (and my likelihood of being taken seriously next time) will be harmed by complaining. And given that I was told my reputation was always borderline and my complaints were years apart and very polite and hedging, this feeling will occur even if my “kudos” level is full. Also, I can see how a system like this could lead to many vs one targets getting harassed and then victim-blamed.
So yes, there are people whose voices won’t count much as they try to block everyone who isn’t like them but there are also people whose voices won’t count much as they are trying to defend themselves from being badly triggered while being attacked en mass, and people whose voices won’t count, as, while they have opinions, they won’t vote, or will only do so incredibly rarely, as e.g. they believe the act of voting renders their vote invalid.
So, I am not a fan of the system you proposed.
@deniseeltza
The major problem is that corporations, being purpose-built, money-harvesting automatons, don’t have the human empathy to want to go the full mile in keeping their social platforms clean out of moral obligation. Some do it anyway because of strong-willed people fighting against apathetic shareholders, but most only care some finite amount that balances costs between public good feels. Some services like Twitter are actually incentivized to encourage harassment, which is discussed in this article. We have to convince them it’s not economically viable to skimp on this topic before we’ll see some real change.
Extra Credits also discussed some programmatic approaches towards harassment (mostly Xbox Live).
I just started a thread on the manboobz forum about the potential wow guild.
I just registered but am awaiting the green light from a mod. 🙂 If it is not done tonight, I can come back tomorrow and discuss then.
Katz: your adamant defense of how perfect it is
Cite please – I don’t think I’ve even suggested it was perfect.
And i don’t think we’ve seen suggestions from you yet regarding the initial problem..
AL3H – you make good points, but I’ve seen moderated spaces turn totalitarian too. the objections you raise can well apply to any curation scheme.
Er…the forums are dead. They kind of exist only as a museum of Bad Things That Can Happen.
Ah, ok. Well, David sent me your email, Kim. I will email you tomorrow!
@deniseeliza:
Exactly. The “free speech” defense is so stupid. A private forum, like a bar, is not maintained by the government, and is under no obligation to allow every jerkass to wander in drunk, make a scene, harass and upset customers, insult and call people names for expressing disagreement and leave a giant turd in the sink for the cleaners to pick up. Not doing anything to fix shit like this is sending a clear message to the people who are targeted or otherwise affected by the behavior: “We don’t care enough about you to do anything.” OTOH, if you wish your bar (or forum) to be a nice place where the kind of people you like want to hang around, you don’t go easy on people who want to be shitheads to others in the name of their own bloated egos.
Which is, incidentally, why I love WHTM – the moderation’s just right. Yes, assholes are allowed to post*, but they’re required to show a certain level of decency and civility if they wish to keep posting. Eventually, the ones with a persecution complex and/or entitlement issues crack under the pressure, and down they go.
A tip of the hat to David, kittehserf and emilygoddess for what they’re doing here. You’re awesome.
*Which is a good thing, as long as it’s ideas, not people they’re attacking. The validity (or lack thereof) of the criticism of ideas tells a lot about the logic (or lack thereof) of the critic.
Like katz said, the forums are dead. I’d suggest asking David for a thread about the idea. As for registration if the forums are used, that’s something he needs to do – drop him an email.
Kim, where did you find the link to the forums? ::squints::
Anarchonist, aww, thanks! 🙂
@BigMomma Hey there! What years ? I was there ’88 to ’92, so a few years before our Royal attendee. (I did share a Latin class with Crispin Bonham-Carter, and friends knew an heir to a Scot’s title)
>Aaaand Phoenician is apparently going to make the karma system he claims he just thought of off the top of his head his hill to die on.
We tried that mechanism on a board I frequent. The basic result was that people started playing the karma-game rather than posting and some folks teamed up to push their ratings, but it didn’t improve overall quality. We honestly had better luck with a team of people who were in charge of publically shaming shitposters occasionally.
@kitteh
I googled. http://manboobz.forummotion.com/ It’s hibernating, but it’s still in working order. I can see why it’s not really used. It’s public even if you’re not logged in, and we can say just about anything right here. 🙂 But an extra layer of obfuscation when talking about identifying details is not a bad thing around the misters.
On a slightly different subject I’ve been having great fun with the #feministgamingilluminati hashtag. It seems to be pissing off the right people. 😀
@gilshalos 1988 – 1993! (I did a year out in France). Far out, I vaguely knew Crispin too – I was friends with one of his girlfriends!
Mammoths on Parade