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.
I’m old enough that my first attempt to play D&D at age 9 was just over 30 years ago. It was already like this then.
If anyone wants some cheering up, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was asked about the recent odd comments of dim-witted young starlets such as Shailene Woodley and Katy Perry trying to distance themselves from feminism, and he had a great response.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/14/joseph-gordon-levitt-on-sin-city-and-why-he-considers-himself-a-male-feminist.html
To be clear my last post wasn’t a request for a cookie. Just noting that poor social skills is no excuse for being an asshole.
Doh, why are my links always linking back to this page? Do I not need to do the a href tag or what?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/14/joseph-gordon-levitt-on-sin-city-and-why-he-considers-himself-a-male-feminist.html
*late to the party* I am also with Breakfast man. I am a gamer, have been since high school, and I just cannot fucking stand this shit. This is one of many reasons why I never considered myself part of the “community” of gamers. Most of them seem to be entitled, white dude, turds who have a vested interest in keeping the gaming industry all to themselves. They want people like me, (since I’m a woman) Anita, and Zoe to disappear because we upset their delicate fee fees and whatever bullshit entitlement issues they have over games. Games are NOT just for them. Games are for ALL OF US. And I’m happy to see people, many women, going out there and making independent games. We’re not going away. Not now, not ever. Get the fuck over it, losers.
>ROBERTA WILLIAMS! YESSSSS! QUEEN OF MY CHILDHOOD!
Roberta Williams counts as underapreciated these days? She was like one of the most productive and profilic creators during the 80s and 90s. Anybody’d end up playing something made by her, even if you didn’t agree with the obvious glee with which she kills her main characters over and over again over the course of her games.
>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.
Specks, logs ect. Being a victim doesn’t immunize you against victimizing other people yourself and excuses for your own awful behaviour are always plentiful and ready at hand.
…People who get victimized sadly often turn around and victimize others; that’s an unsavory but typical human thing.
What I find really, REALLY fricken’ weird is that these guys feel a need to collectively punish someone’s (alleged) behavior.
Let’s say she did cheat on her ex. So fucking what? Maybe she did so because he was a total douche, and she wanted to break up with him. Or she wasn’t ready for monogamy. Or whatever.
It DIDN’T INVOLVE THEM!
The immaturity involved in this just blows my mind, honestly.
If some random guy/ girl/ etc. came to me with a ” cheating ho ” story, I’d say, well, now you’re free to find a better partner.
And the more the cheated-upon refused to move on, the nuttier I’d think the cheated-upon was. Going to harass their ex for them? Hell no.
If your relationship didn’t work out, own what you did wrong so that you won’t do it in the next relationship and move the fuck on…your PSA from Sanesville.
(I have been drinking, for the first time in a while)
But seriously, I was a maladjusted introvert all my life. The people who actually connected with me, those who understood me (introvert, cis, female, depressive, self-hating), who helped me…were gamers. They were the only people who treated me like a human. And they, in this case only, were male.
It’s like finding out your whole clan are quiverful MRAs without you knowing it!
@redpoppy
Exactly. They’re repulsive assholes who feel like they deserve all of it to themselves. It bothers me to think that I might have become like them. Games are for everyone and should be enjoyed by anyone who wants to take pleasure in them. By trying to force gaming culture exclude others in this manner, they’re simultaneously denying the truth of it (that people of all kinds play and enjoy games) and seriosuly damaging honest attempts to improve it.
Keep in mind that A) I came up Southern Baptist during the Satanic Panic B) I was dating a White Wolf player and living in western KY after the Ferrell murders C) my husband (before he met me) was actually thrown in jail under suspicion of being an arsonist because he was caught trespassing and D&D and ROTC books were found in his trunk. Even after being found innocent, the judge ordered a psych eval because of the books. When one of his friends died in what was reported to be a suicide, but may not have been, the fact that he played role playing games was blamed for his death. After that, the library stopped letting teens meet to play table top games there. I remember just how much stigma was attached to gaming. Stores took Count Chocula off the shelves as it might lure children into the occult.
That was over 20 years ago.
Now LARPers LARP in the park every Sunday and it’s considered good clean fun. The cops don’t think they’re dangerous. My daughter plays D&D with her friends and one of the boy’s mom DMs and hands out candy for in game achievements. There are all night lock in’s for teens who want to play video games held at stores that specialize in group gaming parties. Teens I know plan their cosplay together with their families approval and their parents drive them all over creation to attend cons. I took my kid to one this summer. It was packed and adults there seemed to think it was delightful to see a new generation expressing an interest in what, in our day, was considered taboo and strange.
I remember what the local comic shop used to be like. Even in the boom that followed the popularity of Spawn and Sandman it was tiny and smoke filled and the guys who worked there could not always be bothered to stop gaming and eating pizza to work the register. The same shop today has had to move to a much larger location. It’s a brightly lit, family friendly shop with no smoking and attentive employees. Comic shops used to be where you could buy or sell weed and they looked like places you could buy or sell weed. They were shady and I admit, sort of awesome for it. But those days are long gone and so is the stigma.
Nerds are not the weird kids anymore. They haven’t been for a while.
Women were being treated like shit then and they are still being treated like shit. That’s a problem that needs attention and compassion, not middle aged dudes who are still angry that the prom queen wouldn’t give them the time of day and their mom through away their classic Spiderman collection when she was cleaning out the attic, the Philistine!
Get over it, nerds.
threw…oops.
Ken,
They are not victims.
FrievonFrieburger, It also chaps my hide when they complain about trans, non-binary and gay characters. They say how it’s “unrealistic” for so and so’s character to be that way or it’s just unrealistic in general. Oh? And fireball spells, resurrection spells, dragons and unicorns are totally realistic in game? Fuck right the fuck off. Some of us really enjoy variety of humans represented in games. Whether it be race, gender or sexual orientation. They don’t seem to realize this but the way they want games to be are rather fucking boring.
This was a few years back, but did you hear about the geek in Japan who set fire to the house because his mom (who he was living with) threw out some of his enormous collection of merchandise because she was so tired of it cluttering up the place and he refused to help out at home in any way?
He was in his thirties iirc.
Shows like Big Bang Theory should be bloody cancelled, I find it unwatchable as it is so full of tropes that support and validate male nerds acting like misogynist dudebros. It’s not funny, it’s not satire, it’s not even clever.
I gave up WoW about 3 years ago for many of these reasons, and also because the game hand turned into more of a gear grind than it used to be. Vanilla WoW was fun – I used to play with family groups, in a couple of 5-person dungeon runs, three of the players would be husband, wife and teenage child. We used to chat to each other over headsets, we got to know what each other was up to IRL, we made real, deep, social connections. I used to play a lot with people with physical or mental health issues, who were really nice people and fucking excellent gamers, and these people felt accepted and cherished. It was so social and so positive and in some cases WoW was the only place these people felt they had friends.
And then it changed. It changed slowing. Racism, sexism, and gayphobia comments, which had always been there but to a small degree, starting swamping general chat, made worse when all the general chat areas were linked in game. So I turned off general chat. Then the comments were being made in dungeon chat too so if I pugged a dungeon, I could expect that I would have a miserable time with fun dungeon runs being in the minority. They cross-linked servers so that naming and shaming player characters stopped being the method of dealing with this and levelling ingame social penalties on players. There was also an ingame mechanism of notifying Blizzard about these issues so they could take action against players – my impression is that the number of complaints must have risen so high that behaviour that was bannable in the past stopped being bannable. I noticed fewer family groups playing. I noticed more whiney spoilt brats playing.
I stopped playing. Blizzard send me emails about getting free expansions, free time to try the game again, and I delete those emails. The environment is not safe for me mentally, and I refuse to allow myself to be in an unsafe gaming environment again.
pallygirl, I still love and play WoW but I get what you mean. I just don’t even freaking bother with general chat. It’s basically 4chan but for WoW. And I hate that. I can still find really nice people on WoW, I’m still friends with a few Australian players I used to game/guild with a few years back. And I love the game for that reason. I also really like the lore. The lore isn’t perfect and could use more female characters overall. But I really hate that horrible element that just poisons the atmosphere in WoW. The misogyny, the racism, the homophobia. The gratuitous use of the word “rape” to mean someone just beat you at PvP or ganked you in game. It’s ugly and I hate it.
I am sorry if I seemed more like a dick then normal, Their is some stuff going on today personally, and before I take it out on anyone here I gonna take a few day break.I maybe coming a little involved with this issue as while. I really do like you all, even if I don’t see eye to eye with everyone. I thank you of challenging my thought so they keep evolving, So sorry again and have a good couple days.
Thus Spake Zararedpoppy:
This, incidentally, is why I lost interest in The Morrow Project, despite it mashing my post-apoc and sci-fi happy buttons: Its writers and most ardent fans used “realism!” as code for “This is a game about Manly White Men doing Manly White Man things.”
I don’t play WoW, mainly cos of monthly fees. I play Guild Wars1, all versions, because you don’t need to play with others.
By the way, you folks are all awesome. I wish I could game with you. 🙂
pallygirl, I agree with you about the Big Bang Theory. I don’t watch it regularly, but I have seen some reruns lately and I am amazed at the sexism. I used to think the show was cute, but the more I see, the more it bothers me. The same thing happened with How I Met Your Mother. I thought the show was great and could relate to the characters, but the more I watched the harder it became to enjoy. I just couldn’t stand the way that they used Barney’s sexism and manipulation as a source of humor. Yes, lie to women to get them into bed with you. It’s funny! (Yes, that was sarcasm).
But, in all seriousness, putting these kinds of actions in a positive light makes them seem normal and acceptable when they clearly are not.
cassandr kitty,
No I didn’t. The Spiderman collection bit was actually something my dad got mad at my grandmother about. Only it wasn’t an attic. It was a hay loft.
Pocket Nerd, my husband frequents several different game forums. He doesn’t post, he just looks for posts of interest. Because of this, I’ve seen every stupid “white dude” excuse to bash and wave away any sort of in-game diversity as unrealistic, pandering, or just plain “gross.” They, the REAL fans, Did Not Approve (TM).