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.
RE: Save the Queen
it seems to be purely about raising awareness about depression.
That’s what makes them mad. Not only is a woman being on the Internet, but she’s talking about mental illness, a mental illness she might have, without apology! She’s taking up space! SHE’S BEING DEPRESSED ON THE INTERNET!
Seriously, I’m impressed she’s holding up as well as she is.
RE: cerberustheasexual
it’s no secret that admitting to any form of mental illness or struggle with depression on the internet when you are a woman is reacted to like one just put on a dripping hunk of meat at a starving dog conference.
YUP. I sometimes wonder if it’s my gender that has helped keep me from getting the mass trolling that most multis on the Internet get. Seriously, I’ve only ever gotten torn apart by people I knew, never the faceless anonymous horde most people think of with trolling.
What is particularly disturbing to me is what happened at r/gaming
The tone was immediately anti-Quinn, and spent a weird amount of time calling Depression quest “not a game”
But once the mods stepped in and started to, y’know, enforce cite policy they were all accused of sleeping with Quinn in exchange for “censoring” the information.
Icky icky icky icky icky.
icky.
In the late ’80s my Uni’s gaming society (WARSoc – St Andrews University Wargaming and Roleplaying Society) was accused of being a benign matriarchy Well, it was accused of being a malign matriarchy 🙂 At that time the older members had been around for a while, and one of the most prominent was a female. The Uni ran a system where 3rd/4th years acted as ‘academic parents’ to younger students. It worked out that all the society officers were academic ‘children’ of that female. And all the officers of the SF&FSoc. Scandal! Corruption! (nothing to do with all the members being her academic children)
Anyway, apart from that idiot reporter for the student paper, women were happily accepted in the societies.
BrandonSP:
So you acknowledge that everyone who is saying that she slept with a writer to “get a positive review” is, in fact, a lying fucking shitweasel?
Of the two stories you link to, one named Zoe and her game in a group of three “standouts” that were pulled out of a much larger list of games on Valve. The other was a long article about a failed reality TV show on which Zoe appeared with many other folks, talking about what went wrong. In the second case, the writer might be faulted for failing to disclose a conflict of interest–to-wit, that he and Zoe had a personal relationship, which I have no doubt the author used in getting info for that story. However, that story doesn’t even do much to paint Zoe in a positive light, much less her game–at best, she’s one of several people who got pissed off about the sexist attitudes of the show operators.
That’s not a smoking gun you’ve found; it’s more of a gerbil shitting in your palm.
Is there anything positive that can be done to help Quinn? I’d love to massively overfund any Kickstarter campaign she has going. Let’s spin up Sarkeesian, round II.
Ken: I really don’t care if these gamers don’t have good social skills. If they can work a controller, they can learn.
Brandon, that’s all you got? ANYONE in the gaming industry could get two barely mentions by having a drink next to a reviewer and bringing the game to their attention. They wouldn’t even have to buy the drink!
Using it to justify the horrific and disgusting attacks on Quinn makes you an asshole. Period.
I’d also like to point out that Quinn’s game got good reviews from people she’d never met because it’s an innovative gaming concept and a brilliant way to bring attention to a very common but very misunderstood issue. She’s legitimately talented and that’s what pisses these losers off the most.
RE: Ken L.
My sisters were gamers. I am well-versed in the knowledge of what douchey gamers are like, and don’t particularly care for you coming down to explain to us as though we can’t figure it out.
Seriously though, the massive victim complex a lot of straight white geeks have needs to fucking die.
@YoullNeverGuess: She does have a Patreon you can check out. (And yes, some of the stupid harassers are already claiming that this whole thing is a false flag for more Patreon money, because of course they would)
A very timely NYT article on “underappreciated female video game pioneers” is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/arts/video-games/those-underappreciated-female-video-game-pioneers.html
Ken L,
Don’t. Don’t start that “Poor beleaguered gamers and their assumed poor social skills” shit in this thread. First, Geek is Chic right now. Cons are booming. Gaming is a huge mainstream industry and nerdy interests like scifi and comics are common place. Second, you are trying to garner sympathy for men terrorizing and threatening a woman and that is not OK. I’m so sick of men’s supposed poor social skills being used to suggest that women should pity them when they are abusive and misogynist, rather than being angry and outraged as they have every right to be. Also, by you comment you are talking about gamers as if they are all male. They are not. They never have been. If you don’t have anything to add to this discussion but how sorry you feel for the people harassing this woman for being a woman, don’t comment at all.
Incidents like this are going to keep happening so long as the majority of heavy Internet users are middle to upper class (which means white people, especially white dudes, generally speaking). That is, for the foreseeable future it’s going to be as hard to be a woman on the Internet as it is in the rest of the world, if not harder. This is why I haven’t participated in the “gaming community” for years; as cool as it is that people like Quinn and that lady who heads up the Assassin’s Creed dev team want to be involved in creating new and less shitty games, trying to reshape the community they work in so as to encourage more non-dudebros to join feels too much like shoveling back the douche-tide for me.
And then they turn around and accuse Quinn of playing victim. Fuck them.
QFFT
We already know why these guys act like this. What we’re saying is that it doesn’t matter why they do it, they need to stop.
Also, gotta love Anita Sarkeesian’s recent tweets on gamers-acting-like-rabid-badgers:
http://twitter.com/femfreq/status/501851564915453952
and
http://twitter.com/femfreq/status/501905602658840578
Ken L. – You might want to go look at the stats before you start talking about “gamers.” What you are referring to is a bunch of whining entitled brats who hop on any woman-hate bandwagon because they haven’t been issued the mute, subservient supermodel they feel they deserve.
These piddling twits aren’t gamers. They don’t read reviews, they don’t follow development, they don’t play indie titles, they don’t fund Kickstarter games. They just spent their days on masturbation, vile misogyny and the latest FPS.
ROBERTA WILLIAMS! YESSSSS! QUEEN OF MY CHILDHOOD!
*prostrates self to NYT article*
I guess that’s one possible scenario, but there are lots of others.
What if the journalist initiated the wrong-doing, by hinting that he was willing to accept bribes? Or, worse, what if he’d threatened her with negative reviews unless she acquiesced to his demands? There’s no evidence that this actually happened, but it’s certainly happened to other people, and they don’t always go public afterwards. In this scenario the journalist is inarguably the villain.
Or maybe they just made a connection based on mutual attraction, and agreed that they’d keep it separate from their professional lives. The journalist could have decided that it would be a conflict of interest for him to review her games, and that’s why he hasn’t reviewed them. In that case there wasn’t any inappropriate behavior at all.
I could probably dream up even more scenarios, but really that last one is the one that seems most likely to me. I’m a bit puzzled as to why you immediately latched onto the scenario where Zoe Quinn is the villain. Has she been bullying you? Would you like to talk about it?
Just wanted to say thank you for posting this.
Street harassment? Maybe he’s awkward or has Aspergers. Why can’t you be nicer to the poor maaaaaan?
Women are afraid of men killing them? Well, do you know how hard it is to face rejection as a maaaaaan?
Women are afraid of being raped? Well, how about my fear of being accused of rape as a maaaaaan?
Every damn time.
@cloudiah: I love anita sarkeesian. I don’t agree with her on everything, but I have HUGE amounts of respect for her. The fact that she still persists (hell, thrives) far past the point where everyone else would have quit is just amazing to me. She has to be one of the single strongest people on the planet.
Seriously, I get it, poor beleagured geek boy. You never got the head cheerleader. You got shoved into lockers as a kid. I know. BECAUSE IT HAPPENED TO US TOO.
We had the shitty social skills, the bullhying. Been there, done that, didn’t use it as an excuse to send death threats and shit onto people. Now stop using it to score pity points and grow the fuck up; high school is over.
(I might have a chip on my shoulder from the years we got used as Head Cheerleader Substitute by geekboys around us. I’m not your sexual fantasy, random dude. Fuck off.)
Its gotten SO STUPID that some of them are blaming a evil feminist conspiracy behind the 4chan mods deleting posts (historically the mods also nuke anything related to Sarkeesian), despite said posts being against the goddamn rules.
not really surprising though, the racist element on 4chan blames jews any time their shit gets deleted for rulebreaking too
I really dont know why I even still go on 4chan sometimes
at least the less popular boards are okay i guess
Do men really not realize that unlike them with us women already know how they think about things, what their motivations for being shitty are, and so on, because we HAVE TO. Our entire society is set up in such a way as to force us to see things from your perspective. We also need to be able to do so for our own safety.
Seriously, dudes, we know why you do stuff like this. We don’t need you to explain it to us, we just need you to stop doing it.