So what do you do when a fondly held fantasy crumbles? That’s a question that both Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen have had to ask themselves this past week, when something they both desperately hoped was true – that Anita Sarkeesian had lied about contacting the police about death threats she’d gotten on Twitter – was shown convincingly to be false.
Both Aurini and Owen have personal and even professional reasons for wanting the terrible things people say about Sarkeesian to all be proved true: they are, after all, the two bumbling would-be filmmakers who are trying to raise money for a feature-length “documentary” targeting Sarkeesian.
And both had a personal stake in this particular story. Aurini, as I noted in a previous post, wrote a blog post a week ago titled “Did Anita Sarkeesian fabricate her story about contacting the authorities?” in which he reported a conversation he had with a San Francisco Police Department spokesman who said he could find no record of her reporting these threats. While Aurini didn’t directly claim she had lied about reporting the threats, his post was positively dripping with insinuations:
Did Ms. Sarkeesian report this to the FBI instead of the SFPD? Did the Officer who she reported to hate women, and throw her report in the garbage? Did she eat some bad burritos, and was this all just a fever dream?
None of the above, actually: The police spokesman looked harder and discovered that Sarkeesian had in fact reported the threats to the SFPD, which had then passed the case along to the FBI. Oops.
Owen had gone a bit farther, declaring the charges against Sarkeesian to be “LEGIT” on Twitter, and posting a now-deleted YouTube video in which, he now admits, he “jumped the gun” a bit, “getting overly excited and exuberant … when it looked like we had Anita cornered.”
So how did the two react to the news that they were wrong?
Aurini went uncharacteristically silent, trying his best to avoid the subject. It wasn’t until nearly a week later – yesterday – that he bothered to respond in a blog post that is a model of desperate duplicitousness.
Instead of frankly admitting that he had attempted to smear Sarkeesian using information that had turned out to be untrue, he deflected, saying blandly that “details have changed,” and going on to attack those who suggest he take some responsibility for his earlier smear job:
Some voices in the peanut gallery have been demanding that I apologize, or that I retract my allegations (funny, that – I don’t seem to recall making any allegations), but this just goes to show what sort of child-like minds we’re dealing with.
He then tried to argue that the “revelation” that Sarkeesian had in fact told the truth somehow muddied the water even more:
This revelation about the FBI doesn’t answer all of our queries, rendering GamerGate nothing but a tinfoil-hat in neck-beard chic – quite the contrary, it compounds them!
After rattling off a list of questions he thinks still need to be answered, and a list of publications he thinks have mishandled the story, he tries to convince his readers that “[t]his doesn’t undermine GamerGate – this vindicates it!”
Jordan Owen’s response was a bit more human, and a lot more interesting. The fact that he had been wrong about Sarkeesian actually seemed to plunge him into something close to an existential crisis. Well, the fact that he had been wrong – combined with the fact that the fundraising for The Sarkeesian Effect has not been going as well as he and Aurini had hoped.
Last Saturday, while his partner was still maintaining radio silence, Owen posted a bizarre video on YouTube in which, lying on the couch in an apartment that looked like it had just been hit with a tornado, he admitted that he’d jumped the gun, declaring Sarkeesian a liar before all the information was in. And he somehow managed to spin the whole story into one in which he was the primary victim.
In the angry, rambling, and nearly hour-long video, Owen described how worn down he was by the constant criticism he’s gotten on the internet since he and Aurini launched their fundraising appeal, lamented how little the two have managed to raise thus far, and pondered quitting the project entirely. He complained that the project had taken him away from his true passions – music and writing – and left him feeling drained and belittled. “I know that I am sincere in my opinions,” he groused.
This is not some bullshit fabrication. I know that. And I have to tell myself that and I have to be resilient every single time I sit down and comment on this because if I waver for even an instant everything will crumble around me. And the social justice warriors will just say, “see, I told you so.” And that’ll be that.
Think about that level of pressure before you have the gall to take me to task for getting overly excited and exuberant in one of my videos when it looked like we had Anita cornered.
Yes, that’s right, a guy trying to raise money to make a film attacking a woman who’s already under attack from seemingly half the internet is complaining that people are attacking him on the internet.
And he seems to feel not an ounce of empathy for her.
While Aurini seems to be a bit of a snake-oil salesman – a bumbling con artist, but a con artist nonetheless – I have no doubt that Owen is indeed, as he says, sincere. A man who’s spoken openly about being bullied as a child, he honestly believes that he is the victim here – and that Sarkeesian and her allies are the bullies.
He’s also angry at and openly envious of Sarkeesian for being able to raise the money she did for her videos while he and Aurini have had to struggle to raise the money for theirs.
His rambling video is a fascinating psychological document. If you don’t have the patience for the whole thing – which you can find here – I suggest you at least watch the much shorter video below, which offers some notable selections from Owen’s lament along with some commentary which is sometimes on the mark and other times a bit presumptuous in its psychological deconstruction of the man on the couch.
TRIGGER WARNING: The video contains images from a Flash game that depicts Sarkeesian with cuts and bruises on her face.
Oh, SPOILER ALERT. Owen didn’t actually shut the project down. He managed to put this little psychological meltdown behind him. He and Aurini are planning to go ahead and start filming – even if they don’t get all the money they claim they need for the project.
It’s all faintly ridiculous, and I almost feel a little bad for the two of them. Until I remember that the two are contributing in their own way – with their videos and their “journalism” – to the harassment that Sarkeesian has been facing ever since she first announced she would be talking about sexism in video games – harassment that we now know included bomb threats sent to organizers of the Game Developers Choice Award when they presented Sarkeesian with an award last March.
Aurini I think is hopeless. But Owen, for all his rage and self-pity, seems at least to have a tiny bit of humanity left in him. He knows what it’s like to be bullied. Maybe at some point in the next few months he’ll come to understand that he and his collaborator are doing the same thing to Sarkeesian that the bullies did to him – and pull the plug on a video project that, however farcical it is, still has the potential to do real people real harm.
I doubt it, but I guess I can still hope.
A good example of “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you get eaten by a tiger”
The gamergate movement is filled with this false equivalence. There’s a Tumblr page I was directed to by a gamergate follower (Or whatever it is they’re called) which showed similar lack of awareness. I think it was called “Gamergate harrassment” or “abuse” or something like that. The follower told me it was showing that yes, there was abuse from gamergate, there was also equal and equivalence abuse towards gamergate.
Now putting aside the attitude of “Well, they do it too!” which is complete and utter bullshit (Other people doing things you think are wrong does not justify you also doing wrong-get some frickin’ ethics!), I had a look. And guess what I found?
No death threats (The closest they came was a guy saying the internet eould be better if all gamers are dead)
No rape threats
No posting of personal information
No bomb threats
No hacking
Instead they filled this tumblr, claiming to show how anti-gamergate people were conducted the same personalised and individualised attacks, with comments of people pretty much saying “Gamers are sexist/childish/misogynists/etc” and then claiming abuse. Oh, and other posts showed someone responding on twitter dismissivley (As in “Go away troll” or something like that).
Now, this isn’t always the best behavior, and I’m not going to act like these comments were the acts of angels….but to the gamergate followers, the idea of someone saying “I don’t like gamers” was equivalent to “I’m going to rape you, and I already have your address, and your family’s address”
It’s been fucking priceless watching the backflip from all these CRUSADERS FOR INTERGITY going from
to
… since it turns out there actually was a bomb threat.
It’s a wonder they’re not all in hospital with whiplash. 😀
RE: seraph4377
Second question first, because it’s easier. RE: “can I find an artist for my webcomic script?” YES! It’s very common. If you live in a big city, there might be a meet-up for comics professionals; when I lived in Boston, I was part of the BCR. If you’re a small-towner, you can put out an open call on your blog or online hangouts, or try stuff on say, Craigslist.
Be ready to weed through a lot of applications, and remember to pay a reasonable rate, though! Drawing comics costs a lot of time, effort, and therefore can be expensive. (I know a start-up rate can be like, $20 a page, but that is generally lower than I’d be willing to work for.) You also would definitely want to be able to work up a contract; no matter how good a friend the artist is, once you start getting into royalties, things can get pretty sticky pretty fast. This book has good down-to-earth ideas on contracts!
(Complicated? Yes. There’s a reason I’ve never collaborated with anyone for money.)
LBT: What kind of legwork makes for a successful crowdfunding campaign? The last campaign I attempted failed.
I’m not sure exactly what you were attempting to crowdfund, so my advice will be general. First: what exactly is your goal? Different people seek different things. A Kickstarter/IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign usually means raising thousands of bucks in a short time. A Patreon is a slow burn of little trickles here and there. You have to be very clear on your goals to pursue them effectively.
Here are a couple posts on Kickstarter-type campaigns by people more knowledgeable than me! I have yet to try and pull something large; I’ve focused on raising a couple hundred bucks on a regular basis, rather than thousands in one go. By my modest standards, I have been successful, despite using “old-fashioned” platforms like LiveJournal, and I’m still seeing gradual growth. Slow, but I’m okay with that.
If you have more specific things, I can give more specific advice. This comment’s getting long enough!
JM: It’s true. The best argument they have is “you’re no better than we are”.
Tweeted at Jordan offering hugs and suggested he was on the brink of an epiphany. Then I tweeted this image at him.
https://twitter.com/yezzer/status/508013445506424832/photo/1
Let’s hope he figures it out.
Fuck it. I’m going to spit some venom here.
I have zero fucks to give for Jordan Owen and existential crisis and boohooing. That tool pouch has been driving one of the larger Anita Sarkeesian hate trains and doing his part in whipping up frenzied rage against her. There’s audio of him and some other tool pouch by the name of Mundane Matt having long Skype conversations about Anita and how she has cultivated a “white smile” to, I dunno, hide her ethnicity or something. What that has to do with fuck all, I don’t know. Also, apparently since Anita’s skin looks a little different when she’s photographed in natural light as opposed to in her videos where she’s under studio lights, it somehow proves she’s up to no good.
This is the same monotoned, hairy jackass that made freaking DOZENS of Gail Dines videos because Gail Dines was coming to take his beloved porn away. Yes, Dines is problematic, but Jordan Owen was completely obsessed with every little thing she said or did. I swear, the woman could have sneezed and Owen would have made an hour long video about how Gail Dines was trying to spread SARS.
The whole time he was doing that, he was hawking his self-published book about the porn industry (surprise surprise). Eros Empire I think he called it.
And now that the poor lamb has received just a tiny fraction of the shit that Anita Sarkeesian and other feminists have had to endure for years, he takes to his couch to cry and whine about it. Don’t look for him gaining any sense of empathy though. He is a self-deluded creep with a completely overblown (and undeserved) sense of entitlement.
Not to mention he’s a fucking Randroid and worships Ayn Rand and believes that Atlas Shrugged is an unimpeachable source of morality.
Fuck him. Fuck. Him.
Oh, and I love how he’s laying on his couch in his pigsty of an apartment, whinging but at the same time going GIBS ME MONEYS! Y U NO GIBS ME MONEYS?!
JFC. I’m going to have some alcohol now. Owen, however, can go eat a bowl of shit.
Wait, they already raised $5000? Judging by the video’s style of pointing a camera at the conch, and watching him lie there, silently, for a full minute, before he finally breaks the silence by sighing, then more silence, then more sighing, and then finally ranting…
Yeah, their campaign is over a third of the way to its goal. I guess they’d convinced themselves it would immediately outfund Tropes vs. Women, thus proving… something… and when it turned out to be just a mildly successful crowdfunding campaign they were totally demoralized.
Really, it’s done pretty well for a vaguely-defined project by people with very little filmmaking experience and no clear plan. When Sarkeesian launched her Kickstarter, she’d been making Tropes vs. Women videos for years, so people had a clear idea of what to expect from her. She was clear about how the money would be spent and presented a realistic schedule for rolling out the videos.
This is just two guys saying, “Do you hate Anita Sarkeesian? We hate her too. Give us money and we’ll make some kind of film out of that.” Considering the minimal effort and planning put into the campaign, $5,000 is a good haul.
True, but Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, so if they don’t make their goal, they don’t get anything. That mope is the mope of a grifter realizing he should have set more modest goals.
Asides from this guy seeming like a total tool, part of what aggravates me is how BADLY they’re running their crowdfunding. A lot of people seem to think that all they have to do is get an idea, put it on Kickstarter, magical money appears! It’s not that easy. You have to be clear, you have to motivate your audience.
Hating someone online is easy. Most people are not devoted enough in their hatred to pay MONEY for hate content, because so much of it is free! I’m just saying, if you want to peddle hate, you have to be have an actual motivated audience and be willing to put out a way higher quality product than what’s already out there. These guys don’t seem to be cutting it, and are blaming their audience, which is a surefire way to drive them away. (Why pay money to someone who whines at or insults you?)
Seriously, guys. Just because you’re crowdfunding doesn’t mean you can be sloppy about it.
Applause! Well said.
True, but Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, so if they don’t make their goal, they don’t get anything. That mope is the mope of a grifter realizing he should have set more modest goals.
They’re doing it on Patreon, so they’ll get the money. I’m guessing Kickstarter rejected the project.
Foo.
Patreon is basically Kickstarter for total shitheads.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for this guy? Because he’s finally realizing that, hey, if people don’t like you and they tell you so that can make you feel bad? Yeah, no. If he’s unwilling to pick up the clue phone when it’s ringing this loud then there’s pretty much no hope of him ever turning into a decent human being.
I agree with the people here who don’t sympathize with him at all. David, you are a patient person to at least sympathize a little with this fuckface. I don’t wish him any physical harm or death or anything like that, but I would like him to cry himself to sleep then shut up forever. Also, like Jordan Owen, I was bullied A LOT in school. Especially in my formative years. High school was actually a relief for me because I experienced all of my bullying from K-8. It’s nice when you’re 6 and everyone in the school hates you. However, I don’t fucking go around like a narcissistic asshole bullying others because that’s wrong. Bullying is wrong. Having dealt with hardship doesn’t give you an automatic get out of jail free card. Jordan Owen can cry and whine all he want, but this fellow victim of bullying, neither sympathizes with him or cares. Sod off.
@Jody
i used to comment on gamergate articles (Hey, my phone just corrected it to gamerhate- what a smart phone!) but my “Fuck it. I’m done!” was in an article about the letter sent around to people involved in the gaming industry, declaring that all people should be allowed to play, create, discuss and criticise games regardless of who they are, and that no one should be harrassed or abused because of their beliefs and all should call out abuse when sighted.
a pretty fair letter i thought, with no direct comment about gamers or anyone. Bug the comments, oh my god, they were all “But they do it!” “You’re all feminists” “This is you trying to trick us so you can abuse us and we can’t fight back” and of course “all the abuse is made up”
This is why people should be taught the philosophy of ethics. Not because it’ll get you a good job but you will end up a better functioning adult.
I mean, i didn’t study ethics or philosophy much but it was enough to understand that to have any sort of moral code means to know the right course of action regardless of whether anyone else is doing it.
other thing i got tired of absolutely, the complete double standards when it comes to definitions. a word like feminist endz up being defined by them as “anyone who calls themselves a feminist”, but the word gamer doesn’t means “nog just someone who calls themselves a gamer or someone who plays games, but someone who obsesses over them, plays them for hours, plays only particular games (because anything outside of consoles doesn’t count), and has the like of games at a core of their being, and preferably has a penis or is a literally fictional woman we create”
a vast and varied school of philosophical and political thought and movement, which has changed the way we live in the world, can be applied to anyone without any review, consideration, or question, but the word for people enjoying a fucking hobby needs a thesis to define a distinct group. Really, fts.
As entertaining as Owen’s pity party is, I find Aurini’s response in some ways even more amusing…finding out that Anita’s claims were valid actually raises even more questions?!?
WTF!?! Does this guy have ANY shame at all?!? Ok, that answers itself but still…it is interesting how they never bother to apologize when proven wrong, and while its sort of OT but about the same mind set check out Melissa McEwen’s open letter to people who defended Richard Dawkins for years and are only now, (when his behavior has become too embarrassing to remain in denial anymore,) starting to distance themselves. What are the chances they’ll admit they were initially too dismissive of the concerns raised by women and persons of color all those years?
A bit of backstory on Owen I didn’t see mentioned elsewhere in the comments: A few years back, he had this great series on his channel debunking the PUA movement. It was all handled in that same EXTREMELY thorough, detail-obsessed way you’re all familiar with these days. (According to other videos he did that are no longer available, that’s because he’s got Asperger’s Syndrome. He specifically explained that’s how an Aspie gets when they’re interested in something, so this is a close to a quote as I can provide with the vids no longer being there.)
Anyway – he did criticize the cult aspect to the movement a great deal, but the focus, at least in the vids I managed to watch before they disappeared, was on the fact PUA is problematic not because it does or does not work, but because it teaches men how to be manipulative, abusive creeps to women. He seemed genuinely upset by that. Also, in other videos I managed to watch dealing with christianity, atheism, satanism etc, he’d often come across as someone who might not describe himself as a feminist now (I never heard him do it, anyway), but is on his way there whether he realizes it or not.
When he suddenly pretty much flushed his channel, I moved on. It’s been years, basically. Seeing his name here in THIS context… Well, it’s more of a shock than I can describe. I’m not writing this to defend him because I did check out his new content and I’m appalled. I’m writing to share what I remember, and to agree that yep, it seems fear of losing his precious porn has helped him figure out his priorities, and the picture ain’t pretty. At the time, I naively decided I’d come across a young man who’s been smart enough not to fall pray to the utterly self-centered, misogyny rationalizing attitudes our culture drills into men. I suppose I’m grateful to circumstance for setting me straight.
RE: katz
Patreon is basically Kickstarter for total shitheads.
Aw, hey, I’ve got a bunch of friends on Patreon. Thinking of starting up one myself, just then the Kid swamped everything.
RE: il.vel.05
Well, that’s sad. What a dweeb this Owen guy sounds like.
I’m reminded of a scene from the series Ally McBeal. The title character has gone on a rant, and another character asks in exasperation, “What makes your problems so much bigger than everyone else’s?” She looks dumbfounded and replies, “They’re MINE.”
Apparently, online harassment was an abstract concept to this guy – until it happened to HIM.
Wait, he was using being in the spectrum as an excuse? Shove it, dude. Society might be hard as a ton of bricks, but that doesn’t mean you get to be a rude piece of…
…well, dung is a good fertilizer, so he can’t be that. But still, people like him give us a bad name. Yes, I’m going to have meltdowns and bad days and ask people to clarify, but at least I don’t act like MY BRAIN IS MADE OF GENITALS.
…I don’t know. Swearing is just too good for some people.
Yeah, my brother is autistic and while he does get obsessive about things, hatred of women (or any other demographic group) isn’t one of them. Because he’s not an asshole. I hate it when people use my brother as a shield for their reprehensible behavior. He doesn’t deserve that.
Re: Owen being on the spectrum
In the past, he has tried using his Asperger’s as an explanation as to why he’s so obnoxiously pedantic and obsessive about shit. For example, awhile ago, there was a disturbed, young fundamentalist Christian kid on Youtube who went by the name of VenomFangX. Thunderf00t made a name for himself by going after this kid and his videos. It provided a lot of the content for his ‘Why Do People Laugh At Creationists’ series.
VFX got upset with Thunderf00t using some of his clips so he started filing DMCA’s against Tf00t which started Tf00t taking up the mantle of the “FWEE SPEEACHH!” warrior.
Long story short – for whatever reason, Jordan Owen interjected himself into the drama and started going after this kid too. The videos have long since been deleted, but he used to rant, rave, and scream on camera at this kid, with vague threats about being made to pay for his dishonesty.
Like I mentioned, this VFX kid was a little emotionally disturbed.
Owen, Tf00t, and a few others, managed to find this kid’s meatspace identity which necessitated the kid’s parents getting involved.
When people started criticizing this shitstorm, that’s when Owen used his Asperger’s as an explanation as to why he was hounding this kid.
Yes, VFX was an obnoxious little shit, but the whole thing was a trainwreck. I’ve likened it to a bunch of chickens pecking a weaker one to death.
Um, no. Being an Aspie is an explanation as to why you spent 30 minutes telling someone who most people would have noticed was a bit bored about your underwater basket weaving hobby. It is not an explanation, much less an excuse, as to why you harassed someone on the internet.
@cassandrakitty
Exactly. He basically tried saying that his Asperger’s made him obsessively focus in on the kid and when he does that, he has trouble backing off or using good judgement. Or some such shit. It was a weak excuse then and it’s still a weak excuse now.
Ladyzombie: I was a bit sympathetic towards him until I read your post. Using his diagnosis to justify his shitty vindictive behavior? Yeah, fuck him.