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.
…Countdown to whiny gamer-bros claiming that “Sarkeesian actually for real threatened to take away their video games and that this was part of her dastardly plan all along” commencing….
Thanks, @BreakfastMan. I am now a patron!
LBT-
I don’t know. I do know, however, that the instant dismissal and mass grief one often gets for talking about being multi is one of the reasons I tend to play that part of myself very close to the chest even though I’m super open about being ace, poly, and trans*.
Ken L-
I’m reminded of the geek social fallacy list and the one that talks about how a lot of male geeks seem to think being bullied in high school or belonging to a subgroup where the internal mythology is of having been bullied in high school (even if you weren’t or were one of the bullies) gives a free pass to all bad behavior because the geek is one of the good guys and the victims, therefore they can’t ever be the abuser in another aspect of their lives.
And how that feeds into demonization where every slight is synonymous with that apocryphal bullying and all enemies must be the “bad guys” because the geek is the “good guy”. So the random woman they hate for being a woman must a) not be the victim in any way, because they are the victim and b) must be the real abuser and evildoer who is trying to do harm to the geek because why else would they be an antagonist.
And it means that hating sad random woman because you are lonely and don’t feel like women are giving you the porn sex you deserve and assume everyone else is getting is something that should reflect poorly on her, because it must be wholly equivalent to that bullying or those enemies that really are against the hobby and want to treat it like every youth interest ever.
Furthermore, if anyone ever calls out the geek, then that person must be trying to destroy the medium of interest and do violence unto the geek and any mainstream support is fictional and so on and so forth.
It’s more of a mythology than anything else. And I can say as a geek with a number of affiliations overrun with these wannabe martyrs that it’s long since time they grow the fuck up already and start living by the ideals they want to pretend to instead of freaking out over not fulfilling the toxic masculinity standard and making everything worse for their presence.
cloudiah-
I fucking love her. The way she’s risen to the challenge of the unending abuse and has mined dark humor out of it while keeping up her work is a fucking inspiration.
Oh swell, another story about idiots in the gaming community trying to chase half the interesting developers away.
Saw “Depression Quest” on Steam – didn’t buy it, but may drop a few dollars her way now.
s / idiots / malicious whining idiots /
@sparky, if someone makes hay from online harassment, I say, more power to them. I love how much it must bother 4chan to think that they helped launch Sarkeesian.
PSA to asshole online harassers: if evil women are twisting your beautiful harassment into something ugly for their own financial gain, I guess maybe you could stop harassing people online? That would really show them!
Funny how female gamers and other assorted nerds are never included in this, “…but they feel persecuted and they’re so awkward, we can’t expect much from them”. Shit, they’re put on trial for being harassed, for being sexually assaulted at cons, for what they wear, for not being nerdy enough, for being “too fat” for cosplay, for only liking popular comics or for supposedly only pretending to like the things they like for attention. Fuck that noise so much.
I saw a lot of attacks on Sarkeesian because of that time she said she “wasn’t a gamer”. Because it somehow meant she knew nothing about video games and was totally unqualified to analyse them.
In context, she’s actually saying that she’s not a fan of the shooters that currently dominate the market.
[Content note: sexual assault]
I was under the impression that tabletop gaming was better than the gamer horde until I ended up in a new town looking for a new group. I found three groups in a row where in my first session there was either (I) the rape of one of the player characters by an NPC or (II) one or more players decided to have their characters brutally rape and murder an NPC.
While I’m aware that that’s not the case for the vast majority of tabletop gamers, it was enough to drive me away from the hobby.
Actually, all this stuff reminds me of an old joke post I made about The Most Terrifying Horror Game Ever. (Only it wasn’t actually a joke.)
RE: cassandrakitty
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.
They’re like the supervillains who require us to listen to their evil plan every fucking time. Maybe they’re hoping to bore us to death.
RE: cereberustheasexual
Yeah. I also think it helps that I’m older and, disgusting as it is, am considered to have “legit enough” trauma. Also, I’ve been plugging away at this shit long enough publically that people can’t really claim I’m just doing it for the lulz. Still, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Also, I am well familiar with that kind of geek mythology, and it actually actively angers me. Dudes, you’re not oppressed. You’re just packaged as the socially acceptable form of victims, specifically because you don’t conflict with many cherished beliefs about the social order.
Why these people would want to live in a perennial state of adolescence boggles me. At least actual adolescents are growing the fuck up!
@Phoenician in a time of Romans
the steam version is still free.
which is part of why the whole “SHE SLEPT AROUND FOR GOOD REVIEWS” thing is so ridiculous.
also Valve is now a member of the feminist cabal by removing abusive user reviews and banning said users from using the community features steam has.
Depression Quest is free on steam at the moment in wake of Robin William’s death. But she’s totes sleeping with reviewers to make mad monies..
I think I’ll throw a donation her way too. Glob knows she deserves it after this fiasco.
.
@cloudiah
I’m nabbing those images from Anita. That’s good stuff! XD
Long time lurker, occasional commenter. I’ve been thinking more about this and following Zoe’s twitter feed, among other things. Her reactions, at least on twitter, have been beyond excellent. I swear she must be half way to sainthood with how well she’s handling it there.
Anyway; I’ve been a gamer all my life, ever since I was a wee lad of 4 with my old school Atari. I’ve a great passion for it and see it as a medium with a lot of untapped potential for worthwhile artistic expression. As a writer by trade (and ambition), I take a lot of inspiration from the possibilities and actualities the medium contains. I’ve also invested a lot of emotional energy into games, in a varety of ways, while still being conscious enough to realise that they carry with them a great number of serious problems, misogyny prominent among them. It’s why it disgusts me so much that I’m frequently ashamed or embarrassed to call myself a gamer, and doing so while still being an active feminist is an increasingly difficult thing to justify to others.
These misogynist men, the so-called gatekeepers of this thing I love so much, are a bigger destructive force on the medium’s growth and potential than any other single thing. They are brutal, ignorant, disgusting people who think nothing of abusing or harrassing women then flippantly disregarding opposition to their claims as people being oversensitive or ‘too PC’.
Things are improving, slowly. Jim Sterling is an excellent example of a well liked, respected games journalist who take a strong stance against misogyny and other issues that occasionally rear their heads (racism is another one, though less common). But of course, this is not enough on its own and the speed at which things are improving is frustratingly slow.
I’m not sure if I had a point here. It just that it angers me incredibly that such ridiculous, hateful men are able to do these things without suffering any consequences, even continuing to receive support for their actions long after the fuss has died down (see: any comments thread or blog that so much as mentions Anita Sarkeesian; prepare to rage vomit).
RE: maistrechat
I had a similar experience with tabletop. I’ve only played D&D a few times, in part because the first time I played, both male players wanted into my pants and were using the game as an excuse to make their move. They were HORRIFIED that I chose to play a male character, because that meant hitting on me in the game would’ve been GAY OH NO.
How did they cope? After trying to nag me into playing a female character (lol nope) they introduced an absurdly overpowered magical item to forcibly genitalswap my character, who they then happily went on to hit on and encourage to use feminine wiles on other male NPCs.
It sucked. And so I haven’t played since 2009. (The only time I had fun, it was a tiny anarchist group run by a trans woman GM, so no sleazy sexual stuff, just fighting the power and ignorant sheeple! That was a blast, in part because I played a Lawful Neutral bureaucrat.)
Seriously, what the forking fork.
I’m a gamer, and it has been upsetting to watch my hobby’s community become so toxic. Man, what the hell happened to us? Twenty years ago we were a bunch of teenage outsiders and twentysomething bohemians; now we’re a bunch of privilege-drenched conformists who see the mere existence in “our” space of anybody who isn’t white, male, het, and cis as a threat to all gaming everywhere. (This is not an exaggeration. Gamerbro spaces are full of angry screeds about how gaming has been or will soon be “destroyed” by those horrible Others.)
I’m trying to think of more and better ways to push back against the hate and xenophobia. (Beyond the obvious, such as not silently pretending it’s cool when people I’m playing with act like bigots.) Any ideas?
Yeah, that’s about as credible as the time JB was just super worried about that teacher she definitely didn’t want her fellow MRA’s to harass.
A decent person who goes through a shitty break up goes out and gets drunk with their friends, or runs a few laps around the block, or sends a few angry drunk texts, or eats a pint of ice cream. A decent person doesn’t go all cyber-stalker, “Hey internet guys, I don’t *wink wink* want you to harass my already popular harassment target ex-girlfriend, but here’s some baseless accusations that definitely won’t send you into a man-baby tizzy,” and sit back and giggle while she and her friends and family get threatened and harassed. He’s an abuser. I would compare this to the type of men who make fake craiglist ads with their ex’s phone numbers, encouraging men to come to her house to act out bdsm fantasies. They may not personally be engaging in the abuse, but they know damn well what they are doing.
>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 remember her making videos about sexist tropes used in video game storylines, but the gaming world and its sexism is not a topic she has ever covered, as far as I’m aware. Surely she did suffer massive harassement, but I can’t remember her ever bothering to look into the root causes of sexism in this particular subculture or the mechanisms that perpetuate it.
Didn’t even slow down the Internet hate machine, of course. Can´t have women point out the obvious or put a name to what’s explicit already anyway.
>What Brandon and Emily aren’t acknowledging is the tendency of our society to demand that members of marginalized groups be perfect in order to not face bigotry.
It’s exactly like how the current President has to tread very carefully around the issue of race, yes.
RE: Pocket Nerd
I dunno about twenty years ago, but I was in those circles ten years ago and I remember it being just as bad as it is now, just in a different way. Back then, in my area anyway, the ‘fake geek girl’ wasn’t a thing, but it meant that a lot of geek boys sexualized the everloving fuck out of us, with the weird assumption that since we shared a couple goddamn hobbies, that meant we’d want to be their Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Yeah, this pretty much sums up my thoughts. I cannot believe anyone thinks this is the appropriate way to handle relationship problems. It doesn’t matter if you get dumped, cheated on, rejected, divorced, whatever. Going to the internet with names and details is always going to be fucked up and potentially really dangerous as well. What the fuck.
All I can say here is, speaking as a gamer, I’m honestly disgusted by these misogynistic assholes. Fuck ’em. And, btw, seconding Ken L. on this: I, too, hope that Zoe doesn’t give up as well.
Thus Spake ZaraLBT:
I agree it was bad ten years ago… but I think it’s even worse now. I seem to remember gaming circles (or at least the ones in which I moved) being a LOT more accepting of difference and diversity in the mid-1990s. Maybe it’s just the rosy tint of memory… but regardless, the current state of gamer culture is absolutely horrible, and I wish I could do more to fix it. We need more people like Zoe Quinn, and more games like Depression Quest and Gone Home.
@cerberustheasexual
exactly. You understood what said.
@Lea
I never once said I felt sorry for them in anyway. In fact the fact they maybe victims should make them more tolerant and understanding.
I have iffy social skills. Yet somehow I’ve managed not to harass people, be a bigot or use my privilege (white, straight, cis) to bully people who lack my privilege in order to feel better about myself.
Just saying.
Seriously, the whole WARSoc and SF&F laughed themselves sick about that ‘matriarchal’ accusation, and I never played in a game or heard of a game in the whole Uni that even mentioned rape. Is this just another example of me being stupidly privileged ?
Yeah, I agree. Their harassment is just so sadly predictable, though.