Though Men’s Rights activists devote an enormous amount of their time denouncing feminism – or at least the imaginary version of feminism that exists only in their own heads – they’re happy to appropriate feminist concepts when it suits them. One that many MRAs seem especially eager to claim for themselves is the idea of the “safe space.”
Of course, their version of the “safe space” bears only a slight resemblance to the feminist original. Feminists seek to create spaces for discussion in which say, rape survivors can discuss their experiences without being triggered by insensitive arguers and trolls and mansplainers in general.
When MRAs talk about “safe spaces,” by contrast, their goal is often to exclude women not just from discussion spaces but from full participation in society, essentially declaring giant arenas of work and play, from STEM fields to video games, to be places where feminists, and women in general, should fear to tread.
And so it’s hardly surprising that more than a few MRAs are arguing that the Zoe Quinn “scandal” proves that women and gaming don’t mix – or, at least, that they shouldn’t.
Consider the little manifesto recently “pinned” as the top post on the Men’s Rights subreddit, in which a fellow calling himself mradiscus lamented what he called “a pattern of female feminists migrating to formerly male spaces, demanding to be accommodated and eventually causing conflict and alienation.”
The “male spaces” he has in mind – the “hacking scene,” atheism, and the video game industry – won’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the current state of nerdboy rage, but might trouble anyone who thinks that women are, you know, equal to men and have the same rights to choose their own careers and have their own interests and beliefs.
Not only that, but there is just a teensy bit of irony in that the way that MRAs and others are trying to drive off the feminist, er, invaders is by harassing them. That is, MRAs are appropriating the concept of “safe spaces” — designed to protect those in them from harassment and abuse — and using it as an excuse for … harassment and abuse.
But let’s step back a bit, because we still don’t have an answer as to why any of these “spaces” should be defined as male in the first place. How is atheism – the lack of a belief in god or gods – only a dude thing? When did guys get the right to call dibs on the gaming business?
Well, as mradiscus sees it, these “spaces” have traditionally been essentially nerdboy preserves, and should be protected from the pernicious influence of “female feminists” who, presumably, have no real interest in hacking or gaming or skepticism and whose real goal is just to make life hard for already beleaguered nerd dudes:
A scene predominantly populated by rather introverted young males becomes popular and attracts, among others, young women with a feminist mindset. Some of these women then go on and demand to be accommodated. Their demands are mostly met, and so we see the emergence of “gender awareness teams” at hacking conferences, no-means-no campaigns at anime conventions and a whole lot of conference panel slots devoted to “feminist this” and “gender that”.
Mradiscus then offers what I can only call a “revisionist” history of the harassment of feminist women from Rebecca Watson to Zoe Quinn:
What we also see is a whole lot of scandals. What seems to spark them most of the time is a overreaction to a minor offense, blown way out of proportion by a semi-popular feminist and her fan base who then proceed to launch an attack on the whole “misogynistic” scene. The young men feel cornered and unfairly attacked and retaliate with inappropriate and infelicitous measures which only leads to the feminists seeing their prejudices confirmed. Rape threat allegations are launched, there’s doxxing and name-calling all-around and new-found fame for a brave and courageous young feminist who may or may not proceed to make a career out of her struggle.
I should point out that none of the women who have allegedly “made … career[s] out of [their] struggles” actually asked to be harassed and demonized. If the harassers are angry that their harassment allowed Anita Sarkeesian to raise a lot more money than she asked for, they really have only themselves to blame.
Mradiscus ends with an ominous prediction-slash-threat that young men aren’t going to remain “patient” for much longer – and that things could get much worse for feminists venturing into these “male spaces.”
I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if the patience of these young nerdy men turns out to be a shallow well that’s drawing to a close. I sense quite a bit of alienation in the hacking and gaming sub-cultures when it comes to feminist topics. What do you think?
I think that you have a very strange notion of “patience.”
Naturally, MRAs being MRAs, mradiscus’ little manifesto – dripping with unexamined misogynistic assumptions and a quiet, curiously passive-aggressive rage – won praise and more than one hundred upvotes from the subreddit regulars.
The most extraordinary response to mradiscus’ rant was also the top-ranked comment, a long screed from a fellow calling himself a0i that argued, with complete seriousness (and occasional very confused references to the theories of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci), that
The logic of how feminists target predominantly male spaces is very similar to the pattern of locust swarms.
Yep. Feminists are LOCUSTS.
Wherever there are men, there are targets for false accusations, male scapegoats, and fake victims. False accusations can’t happen without men, and neither can feminism. When there are too many women somewhere, you can’t claim that the environment is dominated by men, and feminists have nothing left to justify their presence. Feminists can’t thrive because they lack a scapegoat. They seek out a place where men are, and fabricate outrage at finding too many men in once place, at one time.
They have to find fresh environments with concentrations of male majorities, for “structures of misogyny” to pretend-struggle against. Thus, nerd culture being targeted, video games being targeted, Anita Sarkeesian making up being attacked, etc.
Yep, apparently all those hundreds of thousands of comments you might have seen attacking Sarkeesian all over the internet are nothing but a mirage. That Flash game in which you could cover her face in bruises? You must have dreamed it.
It’s telling that a major feminist concern is for “women’s exclusive space”, while another feminist concern is for “women’s inclusion in male-dominated spaces”. They fight to get in, just to kick the men out. …
Feminists demand unlimited access for women, as proof of men’s commitment to equality, but demand limited access for men, to prove men’s concern for safety.
Wat? I’m pretty sure no feminists are talking about excluding men from video gaming.
This works, despite the irony that — if you believed in their equality, you wouldn’t make special accommodations for their safety.
Uh, no, because if one group faces systematic oppression because of prejudice, the only way to ensure an egalitarian society is by making “special accommodations for their safety.” That’s why we have hate crime laws.
In the case of gaming, and atheism and tech in general, the only “special accommodations” feminists have asked for have been, you know, protection from sexual harassment and assault. Protections that also apply to men.
If there is one principle to understand about the tactics used to engineer women’s privilege over men in society, it is this:
- “what you intend to do to an opponent, you must accuse them of doing to you” …
Frame your victim as your victimizer, put them in a position to want to prove themselves innocent. Frame your attacks as self-defense, frame your transgressions as righteous. Frame the enemy as using propaganda, make this part of your propaganda. Frame the enemy as a threat, before you launch your attack. Pretend to be a victim, while attacking the accused.
Apparently MRAs are utterly oblivious to irony.
Okay, I’m still raw over this so I am watching myself extremely carefully as I type this as I don’t want to (a) restart a conversation that appears to be upsetting more than just me and (b) there is a more general issue at stake rather than the use of one word – the issues in this thread are a symptom and not a cause, and as was done earlier, the suggestion to people new to this to read this other thread (https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/08/21/is-war-machine-the-mixed-martial-arts-fighter-accused-of-brutally-beating-his-ex-a-mens-rights-activist/#comments) to understand is a good one.
The reason I shut up and just disappeared was because of the personal attacks in this thread on me. To add insult to injury – especially as the regulars here know I come from some history of psychological and physical abuse, although I am safe now and have been so for a number of years – it has taken me a while to realise why I was treating certain comments as attacks on me because they weren’t clearly stated as attacks but were in the passive aggressive category. As any abuse survivor knows, it is really easy to blame oneself for abuse and then accuse oneself of overreacting. It has taken me a while to parse through that situation. I’m not saying that what I write is always correct – the regulars know threads where I have been wrong, have been called out for it (sometimes I have asked questions because I don’t understand why I was wrong, and I need to work out how that happened so I don’t do it again), a couple of times I have slipped and been called out – and that’s all fine and it didn’t stop me commenting here either later in threads where I was called out, or in other subsequent threads.
But those other call-outs were strictly on what I said and never attacked me as a person. In this thread, I’ve been personally attacked. I consider myself (and I hope others do) to be a good-faith commenter but I got such negative responses from two people in this thread that I just couldn’t be here. This appears to have stopped.
So, to explain why I felt under attack:
– Incognita Secunda has personalised my disagreement over the word “stupid” being a slur. If you’re still reading this, your comments have been in the same vein as your last comment:
This is what I mean by passive aggressive attack on me, and now others. All hell didn’t break lose at all, in the comments where people are talking about why they think the word is okay to use/ is not okay to use. People disagreeing with your viewpoint on the acceptabilty of a word, especially regulars who have used the word in the past and do not agree with your definition of what the word means, is not all hell breaking loose. When you got some pushback and then repeatedly came back with you didn’t like the word being used (and therefore you wanted the word not to be used), hell yes that is policing and schooling.
When you kept equating stupid == low IQ, which is not the definition of stupid, and is never how stupid is used – at least by regulars on this board (e.g. because a number of us laugh at the idea of IQ meaning intelligence) you were asserting that the word was being used in an ableist sense. There is no other logical way to read your objection.
Which makes your last two sentences even more emotionally laden. Not only do you not want people to disagree with you, but you also equate disagreeing with you as you needing to “know your place”. WTF? You were “bringing up a point of discomfort for discussion”, but people disagreeing with you means you “are expected to know [your] place and shut up”. I’m not bringing in quotes from earlier in the thread (page 4 onwards if anyone wants to go back), but I and others here engaged you in discussion. But when a commenter engages in behaviour like this comment
In this comment (https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/08/26/mens-rights-activists-video-gaming-should-be-a-safe-space-for-male-nerds/comment-page-4/#comment-567494) you said my comments towards you were dismissive and later, by implication, that I among others were being passive aggressive and talking “over your head as if [you] weren’t there about [your] concern being a non-concern”. FFS, this is an open thread. I asked a question about the acceptability of the word because I thought I could be misremembering a discussion on this exact same bloody topic that occurred a few months ago, and I wanted to be sure I was correct in my memory. This was done openly, in this thread. So not only me disagreeing with you is being “dismissive” but also me asking for clarity is me being “passive aggressive”.
You’ve been insulting in your comments “I see I failed the test of agreeing with every single thing every single mammotheer says, ever, however much general support and agreement I offered elsewhere. I guess it’s that kind of club. Gotcha.” and “Enjoy the echo chamber.” among others. Not once have I insulted you.
So that was the situation when Athywren started commenting on this topic in this thread.
Me disagreeing with another commenter was a hill I was going to die on, apparently (https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/08/26/mens-rights-activists-video-gaming-should-be-a-safe-space-for-male-nerds/comment-page-4/#comment-567817). This comment was made hours after my last one in this vein, and the conversation had moved on. I don’t appreciate having this phrase being used against me here. How else was I supposed to interpret this other than as an insult? That phrase is used specifically in a pejorative sense to tell another than (a) their argument/belief is shite/pointless and (b) therefore that they should just back down/shut up. For someone who is so concerned about the feels of others, it’s a really weird way to come into a discussion – by using an in-your-face phrase.
Later Athywren said:
I’m supposed to be the entitled one? I’m raw from a language battle on another thread, completely backed away from this one because there was the same word policing and general attacks on disagreeing people. If I fucking back away because I’m upset, I’m doing it to protect my mental health. No one fucking gets to use the word “entitled” against a person who is having emotional issues and has backed off to protect themselves. If you want an example of “entitled” then posting – unasked, with no consensus – one’s own list of “acceptable words” in an environment where words have been used as WMDs and without assuming that others may having differing views is fucking entitlement. And you’re a man. On an anti-misogyny blog. I think that is an example of irony.
So I don’t treat comments like this from Athywren in good faith:
FFS dude, if you’re so concerned about not hurting people, maybe not insulting them would be a good start. Using indirect insults instead of directly calling people slurs is still fucking hurting people.
I don’t know how well I’ve expressed where I’m coming from. This has taken about an hour to type and I need to go out.
I agree with the paladin.
pallygirl:
http://reactiongifs.com/?p=2412
@kirbywarp @Janora Feuer (pardon the late reply)
I assumed it had to do with marketing, but it’s still incredibly annoying. Video games were how my brother and I bonded when we were siblings. Video games brought my best friend of almost 20 years and I together. Video games were one way my boyfriend and I connected. Although, yes, the rampant misogyny is off-putting, they’ve been such a huge part of my life and brought about a lot of good for me. If you ask me, the boys are in MY space. But not really, because my mommy taught me to share.
Then again, as was pointed out earlier, they’re trying to claim atheism for themselves as well which makes sense only in the La La Batshit land they live in.
@Johanna Roberts
Fuckin’ A, right!
test
(I’m never gonna get the hang of when first posts go through and when not now)
Anyhow I just popped up to say Yes, AC IV Black Flag player here! 🙂
Kinda towards the end of my first playthrough. I only bought it a few weeks back when it was really cheap. I’d hated the ‘boat’ bits on earlier games in the series..in fact not wanting to get the ship read on III is prob why I’ve never finished it. I’m going to go back and try again after finishing IV. But I really loved the sailing in this one.
(What language debate. I see no language debate)
Hope this is coherant, just back from a very good meal out celebrating my parents’ wedding anniversary where I ate far, far too much.
Plus, *squee moment* I’m fairly certain Andy Hamilton was at the next table!
(from The News Quiz, Have I Got News For You, Old Harry’s Game and Chelmsford 123. Bonus points if anyone else knows or remembers Chelmsford 123)
Pallygirl, fwiw, I get where you’re coming from and don’t want to see you go. I meant to comment on that shit about calling you entitled, but forget it in my reply, and I apologize to you for that oversight. Stepping out of a conversation can only be called entitled when it’s something like, idk, white people deciding that they don’t have to worry about police brutality, so they won’t. Taking a break, or leaving, or whatever, to protect your mental health, nope, not entitled.
Everyone, afaik Athywren joined me in the non-binary ze using corner. I know ze said some really fucked up shit, but can we refrains from misgendering people? Not saying ze doesn’t have a background of male privilege, or whatnot, but that AMAB =/= he and male now. Thanks guys! (I’m assuming this just wasn’t common knowledge, not that anyone was intentionally mis-gendering Athywren)
@Argenti, I think I missed that thread, good to know – the downside of lurking. 🙁
@pallygirl, I hope I didn’t come across as being another voice against you, that wasn’t my intent.
If you want to read it, it’s the first link the pallygirl’s comment. Please manage to fumble through it all before commenting though, lots of heated emotions made thinks go all over the place so you should prolly finish it and see what happened before commenting on it all.
>>A couple of weeks ago, this blog was full of people who took one another’s good intentions as a given
Hah!
Piss off, BlacBloc.
So much for you sticking your oh-so-indignant flounce.
That’s a real helpful contribution, BlackBloc.
Okay: I promised myself that I wouldn’t do this, but I saw the response before I managed to delete the thread, and I’d like to soothe over whatever I can before I really do just disconnect entirely. I am sorry you felt insulted, pallygirl, and I can see why. I was feeling very defensive, primarily because I was accused of policing people, when that was never my intent–and never, in fact, part of what I said. What I said about feeling that I was being punished for not agreeing with every iota of what everyone here said sprang from my perception of a pile-on–and yes, it did very much feel like a pile-on–in response to my bringing up some discomfort with the way a particular word was being used.
This was all the more bewildering to me because I did not, at any point, tell other people they could not use that word because it made me uncomfortable, and it did very much feel as though all hell broke loose–and I was not referring exclusively, or even primarily, to you when I made that statement. I was referring to the entire thread suddenly exploding over a comment that I felt was fairly inoccuous and which I explicitly said was not something I wanted to pick a fight about–just something I wanted to register as a concern on my part. I also was not referring only to you (or consciously to you, personally, at all) when I brought up the use of the word, but to a general tendency in the discussion. You were not the only person who used the word.
Your asking whether the word was permissable and getting responses that it was did seem passive-aggressive to me, because I didn’t have the context that would have helped me understand the request. People were suddenly not even talking to me about what I’d said, but talking over my head about it to see whether it was permissible to say something that I’d never said wasn’t permissible (as if I’d have tried to claim the authority to do so, anyway). That was how it looked from my vantage point.
Your assertion that I brought ableism into the conversation is, I suppose, inferentially correct, but that was *not* my intention. It truly wasn’t. I was thinking broadly in terms of intelligence and how the word stupid is used to designate people whose intelligence, however you wanted to measure it, was being designated as relatively low. I was using the term IQ colloquially, rather than clinically, and probably sloppily. Discussions of ableism came into play after my original comment–I did not make claims along those lines at any point.
I never, at any point, said that the word couldn’t be used. Not a single time. I said the way it was being used in that particular context made me uncomfortable, and I tried to explained why as clearly as I could, because it was obvious that my intentions were being misunderstood, and I was trying to avoid the misunderstanding. I did not demand that everyone agree with me, nor did I expect it. I’m still genuinely bewildered that what I did say is being interpreted in that way. Attempting to clarify a position is not policing, nor is it a demand that everyone else agree.
I also was not referring to you when I said what I did about its having been made clear that those of us who were relatively new or infrequent commenters were expected to know our place. That was said in response to another commenter declaring that she was angry that we would try to step in and “school” the more regular commenters–which, I’ll repeat, was never, ever my intention. I simply wished to state a point of discomfort and let others take it up or not as they chose, agree or not as they chose.
Honestly, pallygirl, relatively little of what I was saying was directed at you. Certainly, my first comment about this issue was referring to a broad tendency in the conversation, not to what you had personally said. Your reacting as though I was directly attacking you led me to become defensive, and I’ll admit that I should have handled that better. I am sorry I did not. I did object to your repeated assertions that I was policing when I was not, that I was bringing ableism into the conversation when I certainly did not do that on purpose, and your characterizations of me as launching passive-aggressive attacks on you, when I truly was, in most cases, talking about the content of the conversation in general.
So, okay. I’ve done that. I hope it’s helpful in some way.
Good luck to you all–this blog is doing good work, and I wish you well in it.
I’m not the only one who finds it funny that BlackBloc has apparently been lurking waiting for an opportunity to post a smug little bon mot like that, right? As the song says, dude, let it go.
Is BlackBloc a grown-up?
I’ve already commented all I wanted to in that thread, lol. Though I will go read through it again, since I’m clearly missing things non-controversial things like gender announcements (too focused on the big boom, I guess).
Puddleglum, my apologies for assuming you hadn’t! As for Athywren’s gender, that was months back and just kinda tucked in a thread, I’m not surprised it was missed.
Oh hi BlackBloc, still bitter that we doesn’t think there’s a good faith way to read “I agree with defacing art?” -15/10 on the flounce.
Yeah, BlackBloc surfacing after months just to complain is kinda sad. OTOH, I don’t remember what finally drove him out – was it really the art thing?
QFT!
Stick the fucking flounce, BlackBloc.
pallygirl, standing ovation, and I’m with you up on that there hill. I thought the “entitlement” rubbish was aimed at me, but it didn’t sting because I’m not coming from a place of abuse, and I just felt scorn for it – as in, yeah, I’m a regular member of the teal deer herd here, I do side-eye strangers or people who hardly comment language policing, Boo Fucking Hoo.
LOL it’s classic trollish behaviour, isn’t it?
emilygoddess, it was that thread, but iirc it also went back to people being terrible and evil during the Great Divorce, or something like that.
I was trying to express my support of pallygirl and I feel like I did it really badly. Argh. Words! Why must they be so difficult some days? I’ve been worried that I sounded… arglebargle, I don’t know, too clinical when I made my own very tiny teal deer. I really, really need to not post while at work (at least nothing bigger than a sentence).
*Sigh* I have a problem with the idea that slurs should be avoided because of the possibility of hurt feelings. Because that is one of the reasons we just had a big boom in the War Machine. So seconding the QFT! kittehserf posted above. I try to do my best to avoid intentionally hurting other commenters’ feelings. But I want to avoid the trap of being too afraid to say anything because it *might* hurt someone’s feelings. Let’s not do that again? Please? It ends up silencing too many people.
Also if we’re being honest I feel like the idea that words should be avoided because potential hurt feelings in an individual sense rather than because slurs could only be proposed by people who’ve never actually been targeted by slurs. If/when you have the difference between the two and why one is more of a problem than the other is pretty damn obvious.
Yes, there’s a pretty big difference between slurs, words that are specifically attacking a whole group of (usually marginalised) people, words intended to do just that, and that can be fairly assumed to have that effect on that group; and words that are general insults, snark or mockery *not* aimed at at specific, let alone marginalised, groups, but which *might* be uncomfortable/needling/bring up rotten memories for hypothetical individuals.
And it’s not like this community is averse to making adjustments for people’s comfort. I remember once when someone posted a spider video, and a few of us mentioned having arachnophobia, so the people who wanted to continue discussing spiders posted content notes before their videos/links. Nobody demanded it – I, for one, wouldn’t think I had the right – but people were nevertheless happy to make that adjustment in order to make others feel comfortable.
I told you that story to tell you this story: WHTM commenters who object to language policing probably aren’t doing so because they don’t care about other people or are blase about offensive language. They probably have good reasons for objecting.
This.
*shudders at the thought of that video* yeah, I’m glad we won’t be having that happen again. But I’m all “kill it with fire!” about spiders.
In cuter things, TOMORROW IS AXOLOTL DAY!! Prepare for unbearably cute pictures!