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 Zarastrivingally:
What you suggest is possible, but it would create an unrealistic administrative burden — every single member would need to be friends with a moderator on Steam, then vetted and invited by a moderator. (This is typically how small guild or clan groups are set up.)
With a larger group, I think it makes more sense to create an open group (“open” in this case meaning a group any user can join) and then simply kick and ban anybody who can’t play nice.
If you’ve posted here and I haven’t sent you an invite, it’s probably because I either couldn’t find you or couldn’t tell which user you were among multiple similar users. (Steam’s user search is terrible.) Here’s the link again, for anybody who wants to join the Steam group:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/WHTM
Fair enough. So the plan is to just prune aggressively. 🙂 Sounds good!
Aylia: After about a week he started hitting on me and making obscene comments to me whenever we were online together. I got sick of it and threw him out of the guild after 2 weeks of that garbage. This time all the officers agreed with me except for one, who threw a huge collasal fit that destroyed the guild. He’d registered the domain name for our forum, and his response was to kick every non-officer out of the guild and then shut down the forums. Afterwards people accused me of breaking the guild by being “too PC”.
…and THERE’S a major problem with curated spaces illustrated.
Mind you, is it hard to set up an alternative guild with a new domain name? (serious question – I have no experience here)
Last year, there was that girl who dressed as a Boston Bombing victim for Halloween and shared the pics on Twitter. I sent her a Tweet that was strongly-worded but not, in my opinion, abusive, saying something like she lacked compassion or sympathy. I don’t think I swore (I’m not going back through all the hateful tweets to check), but if I did, it wouldn’t have been gendered.
I was immediately (and for about a week) inundated with tweets from dudebros telling me I was a humorless bitch, a cunt, should kill myself, so on and so forth.
So many guys online just can’t wait to shit all over a woman who speaks her mind.
Piator,
I imagine that once the original guild was blown up, no one necessarily had contact info for all the members. It sounds like there was enough of a rift that the admin who blew it up would have at least some supporters, so you’d want to careful about who you invited to your new clubhouse, although some of them would have friends they wanted in that you didn’t, and so on.
Every community has internal tensions; potential conflicts between members that are suppressed by the structure or conventions of the group. Once broken it can’t really be put back. You’re effectively starting a new guild from scratch. You’ll have the advantage of having a bunch of pre-existing friends, but so do other people trying to start guilds.
RE: Kakanian
Roberta Williams counts as underapreciated these days?
Judging by the number of fucking doofuses who don’t know she existed and think women in games are a new thing, yes. Yes she is. There’s a reason I felt the need to make this post.
RE: katz
A neutral setting like this one that doesn’t give any participant special privileges over any other is better because, while it still has the initial problem of people in the community behaving badly, at least it doesn’t introduce new problems as well.
One of the things I actually really appreciated about Mammoth was when folks came to bat for me. Remember when kladle tried to use my multi to claim I was co-opting the gay experience or some such shit? You guys came to bat for me. It was the second time in my entire online existence that that had ever happened. (And the first time, there were still a decent number of folks who tried to call for Golden Mean Fallacy shit.)
RE: Luzbelitx
I wondered why it didn’t keep going.
That is oooooold Mammoth drama of yore. Suffice to say, it exploded and died, never to be used again. I missed the drama itself, because I was busy being crazy at the time.
RE: Anarchonist
…through your video, I somehow ended up watching some animated Homestuck troll doing a sexy dance? It was. Uh. Very well animated too. Huh.
Not caught up on all the replies yet, but I wanted to share that the mod queue is unusually busy right now. Not only is this post attracting trolls like flies to shit, it’s attracting trolls who are too dumb to understand “no trolls, no MRAs”.
David, if it makes your decision any easier, I was browsing the pending comments earlier and chose not to let Jake’s through. I vote “delete”.
Yeah, I’m with emilygoddess. Dude is just spewing the same tired old shit we seen before.
He doesn’t seem like he has any amusement potential, so I vote for the hammer.
I joined on Steam. Meepfrog there. Of course, while a Mammoth group solves one issue with multiplayer (abusive other players), it doesn’t cure my other reason – lack of belief in my playing skills leading to me feeling I’d be letting other players down.
Ah, don’t worry, gilshalos. I can cure that one, because I’m not very good at playing games. See? Perfect.
emilygoddess, I just shot through the comment queue and moved most of them to the trash. Only about one that wasn’t a troll.
Left Woody’s latest fail in pending though. Precious.
i’m really disgusted by all the flames and irrational hatred and stuff, but also quinn’s ex-boyfriend has made some pretty solidly-backed allegations of emotional abuse/gaslighting on quinn’s part, and dumbass antifeminist/sexist trolls shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow what i think is a real, serious issue (that is, abuse)- flaming, harassing, and otherwise attacking quinn is horrible, and i can’t but condemn it totally, and if she were a dude i’m certain she wouldn’t be getting a tenth as much flack over the issue, but still: i don’t buy that someone being an abusive partner is totally a personal issue that doesn’t deserve public airing
i’m disgusted and disappointed by almost everyone involved- the assholes who think it’s okay to publically harass someone, and the people who should know better who are willing to discount claims of abuse just because they’re being championed by awful people
@googoojoob, I have a similar opinion. My opinion as of now is that Quinn is genuinely a horrible and manipulative person. While I disbelieve the story of trading sex for a journalist review, I still think that she had sex with him and cheated on her boyfriend. I do also believe that she censored YouTube videos and other things against her. I also think she doxxed and shut down a program that genuinely sought to give female voices in games a boost.
While I don’t believe Quinn to be a good person overall that hardly excuses the constant harassment, threats, and doxxing that all too many women have to deal with. There’s also the fact that a lot of the people who do that harassment are very loud and part of some very vicious groups online that unfortunately have a wide popularity.
Also, I hardly believe the people against her to be pure in any way. Her ex-boyfriend aired his dirty laundry (and I believe gave out some information on her also) on 4chan. I’m pretty sure he knew what the consequences of that would be. The people outraged against Quinn are not crusaders for a noble cause like “freedom of speech” or “journalistic integrity”. No. They’re a mob of ignorant yahoos who are brandishing their pitchforks at the latest internet folk demon.
Overall message is people are messy and complicated. Ugh.
If anyone was wondering, the Pretty God Troll was born in the late 80’s and strongly dislikes doing the washing up.
The only game I play on steam is civ 5, and even then I turn off barbarians and city states and am vaguely annoyed to have to have an opponent at all. So I probably wouldn’t be very good playing against others!
I was playing swords and potions 2 for quite a while before I realised you need others, then when I did become part of a city I didn’t like the responsibility. I was in the top 3 members (wipes dust off shoulders) but I didn’t like feeling beholden.
The overall message seems to be that women aren’t allowed to be complicated and messy. I’ve never heard of any guy game developer being nasty and cheating on his partner because it doesn’t matter and no one would care. The way people are talking about this woman is flipping biblical. STRIKE DOWN THE HARLOT!
I know. It’s funny. They keep obsessively stating how IT’S NOT ABOUT WHO SHE SLEPT WITH BUT ABOUT HER USING A JOURNALIST TO GET AHEAD (the big favorable review isn’t even there) AND ABOUT JOURNALIST CORRUPTION!
Personally, I really doubt it and I think their reaction is far more visceral than that. All the crap that happened to Sarkeesian (and the huge bigotry problem certain extremely loud and obnoxious gamers put in the industry) is a huge reason why I don’t trust those claims. There are way too many examples (Sarkeesian, Watson, Richards) of how little a woman has to do to kick the hornet’s nest. *sighs*
Yes, and I especially agree with this. If the woman has any blemishes in her past and character than clearly she is the Red Dragon from Revelations. Even with Zoe Quinn, who I clearly don’t like at the moment, there are better ways to deal with the problem than a mass of deranged peasants.
Thus Spake Zaraemilygoddess:
“Hello! You’ve reached the We Hunted The Mammoth moderation queue. Your call is important to us, so please stay on the line. A moderation representative will mock, ignore, or ban you shortly.” ::muzak plays::
Thus Spake Zaragilshalos
I worry about that too sometimes, but I try not to. “What if I let my teammates down?” is a reasonable fear when you’re playing in the World Cup… but not so much when you’re playing a casual game with friends. 🙂
yeah i think the fact that the people flaming quinn and her associates simply don’t care about ethics is illustrated amply by the fact that a) they’re attacking people unassociated with the issue, and b) they’re noticeably NOT attacking nathan grayson or joshua boggs, who are the people who most egregiously violated the ethical standards of their trades: the people making this into a horrible flamewar really only care about A WOMAN DID A BAD THING TO A MAN!!!!!!!
i don’t think her ex is perfect or noble, but honestly i’m not sure what i would’ve done in his situation: keeping silent would potentially let an abusive person continue in their ways; going to a journalist might encounter trouble, in that i’m not sure a journalist would want to run abuse allegations about a fairly obscure video game developer, and risk putting themselves in the middle of a flamewar; taking it to court would be expensive and wouldn’t really gain anyone anything
in the end, although the ex is bitter, i think it’s best that he spoke out about the issue, though i don’t necessarily agree with the way he did it. publically naming your abuser, and attaching your real name to the allegations, is a pretty risky thing to do, and even if his motives weren’t totally pure, and even if he knew that he’d start a tremendous clusterfuck by doing so, i can’t help but admire the courage needed to come out and call someone out on abuse
i’m still really disappointed that nobody seems to want to talk about the abuse claims, though, even with the ample evidence given for them: sexist trolls just want an excuse to attack a woman, and quinn has used the attacks on her and her associates to twist the issue into being one entirely about sexism and internet harassment, glossing over the serious issues of abuse and journalistic and business ethics that the situation raises; and all too many people are willing to buy into the twisted version of the situation, either because they are sincerely misguided about the issues involved, or because they don’t have all the facts, or because they’re afraid of getting associated with mras and other unsavory sexist asses, or because they want the situation to be in clean black and white terms, or because they’re afraid of the implications the situation has for games journalism and the independent games industry, or any number of reasons
and because the discussion about the situation has become so polarized, it’s difficult or impossible to take a reasoned stance on the issues- which is in the interest of both the trolls and zoe quinn, because on the one hand it allows for more flaming and hatred, and on the other hand because it distracts everyone from the very serious issue of abuse
Bingo. If the real issue is nepotism and corruption among journalists, then go after those guys with all guns blazing. But if the main target of your rage is a woman, and your main thrust is “But she had SEX!!!”, congratulations — you’ve just engaged in slut-shaming. If you let the men off the hook for their part and just go after her, because SEX, that’s sexism. Plain and simple.
Dear trolls: this isn’t about how Zoe Quinn is a perfect person who never did anything wrong. This is about a campaign of harassment against her – one that has gone beyond even the “normal” level of Internet harassment (which was already pretty indefensible ffs) to include IRL harassment and malicious attacks against her friends and family (including deliberately targeting a minority who are already at high risk of harassment and violence). At this point, nobody fucking cares whether Zoe cheated on her boyfriend or had sex with a reporter or was mean to another developer – NONE OF IT JUSTIFIES THIS LEVEL OF HARASSMENT.
And yes, it is fucking sexism that those relatively minor “offenses” are being met with this level of aggression. Nobody launches campaigns of harassment against male journalists who trade reviews for sex, or for free copies of the game (which, BTW, is such a well-known practice that even non-gamers like me know about it). Nobody gives a fuck when men cheat on their girlfriends, or even abuse or rape them. Nobody shows up at a man’s home to threaten him because he had a YouTube video about himself taken down. We keep hearing people basically argue that they’re not harassing her because she’s a woman, but because she did bad things. But the fact is, both are true: you’re harassing her for doing bad things because she’s a woman.
This bullshit happens every time David writes about a woman being harassed in this way. There are still people popping up on that thread about the Toronto protest, whining about how it’s all OK because she was just so meeeeean! We fucking know, and it doesn’t fucking matter.
The thing is, abusive men often make false claims of abuse as a tactic to discredit and silence their victims. It makes it hard to jump right to the defense of a man claiming abuse unless I know him or if someone I trust vouches for him. It’s terrible because actual victims don’t deserve to be treated with skepticism. However, given the history of misogyny on the internet it is next to impossible for me to trust a total stranger who takes to a site that’s a known den of virulent misogyny and trolling to talk about how awful a woman is while using her real name.
This isn’t the fault of feminists. This is the fault of misogynists who have made the internet (and every other aspect of life) unsafe for women. As the group that is both the most privileged and the most guilty of internet harassment, it is up to men as a group to fix this. It’s not fair to expect feminists to suddenly give the benefit of doubt to a man that has set off a chain of internet harassment.