#GamerGate and Men’s Rights: two terrible tastes that taste terribler together.
Ok, maybe that slogan needs a bit of work. But it’s true that when you combine the poor-oppressed-me-we-hate-AnitaZoe-Sarquinneesian narrative of the #GamerGaters with the poor-oppressed-me-feminazis-rule-the-world narrative of the Men’s Righsters you get some amazing outbursts of indignant self-dramatizing self-pity.
Take, for example, this melodramatic email sent by A Voice for Men’s “operations manager” Dean Esmay to … a grocery chain that advertises on the game site Kotaku, a bete noire of the #GamerGate movement. I’ve highlighted some of the Esmay-ist bits:
Greetings. I have been a Kroger customer, with a Kroger value card* me and my family use, for about 20 years. I have been grossly offended by the insults by Kotaku to me and my son, who have played video games together since he was about 3 years old (he’ll be an adult soon). Kotaku has been spreading hateful messages about people like me and my son and has been involved in what looks like blatant journalistic corruption. Please stop supporting this hateful publication with your advertising. If you do not, I will look to shop exclusively at your competitors in my area, including Meier, Bush’s, and Hiller’s.Stop Kotaku’s abuse of my family. Thank you.
That’s right, Esmay thinks Kotaku is literally ABUSING his son, and the rest of his family to boot, by spreading “hateful messages” about gamers.
What sort of terrible hatred does Kotaku promote? Consider these ABUSIVE quotes from the site’s Editor in Chief:
I’m the editor-in-chief of a large gaming site with millions of readers. I consider myself a reporter. How else do I define myself? I’m a gamer. I don’t mind the term. If you do, that doesn’t bother me. I’m confident in who I am. If you’re a gamer who harasses? Who sends rape threats or stalks Twitter feeds or terrorizes people from their home or gloats at others’ struggles? Find a new hobby. If you’re a gamer who wants better games reporting? Be specific about what you dislike. Please seek, support and celebrate those whose work you do like. …
Gaming is better when it’s diverse, when it lets marginalized people find their creative voice or their escapist outlet or a social circle that welcomes them.
What a disgusting hatemonger!
Oh, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Consider this list of the most popular stories now up on Kotaku:
Live game footage of Final FantasyXV? Gameplay tips!? Pictures of Japanese people dressed up like video game characters!?!!
It’s as if the site were literally run by FEMINIST HITLER.
But all hope is not lost! Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit one angry and ever-so-slightly melodramatic gamer tries to rally the troops:
Sorry, I got a little carried away with the highlighter there, but almost everything he wrote is pure gold. If by “pure gold” you mean “the most ludicrous pile of crap I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m someone who reads Men’s Rights sites pretty much every day.”
H/T: Mancheeze, r/againstmensrights
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NOTE: Just in case anyone missed it, this post contains
Well, sarcasm from me. I’m pretty sure those other dudes are serious.
“SJWs won’t be happy until male culture as we know it has vanished.”
Well, the (generously highlighted) drama generator has actually managed to get ONE thing right. I’m almost impressed.
I think the funniest thing is that most of us are proud to be called Social Justice Warriors. It makes it sound like being a badass world-saving superhero. I’m not sure why the MRAs and gamebros consider it an insult or a slur, because no one else would ever think so.
I’m not sure why the MRAs and gamebros consider [SJW] an insult or a slur, because no one else would ever think so.
Originally, the term referred to the sort of people who used social justice concepts as a bludgeon in personal disputes or as a method of self-aggrandizement. I’m not positive, but it might be a reference to biker culture’s “weekend warriors” concept, i.e. people who only show up when the real world doesn’t require them and don’t live the lifestyle, as it were. A sarcastic term for parasites, basically.
Unfortunately, the term was seized upon by anti-SJ people and has become generalized to the point of meaninglessness.
Oh dear. This is alarming.
I think Feminist HQ should terminate their agreement with the SJWs. They’re obviously letting out the details of our sooper seekrit plans for world domination.
Didn’t Esmay try to randomly slander some reporter by all but throwing his handicapped kids at him somehow…I’ve seen his posts and he comes across as someone who has justified ANY means to get his end
I’ve read this sentence ten times and still doesn’t make sense. It’s so completely and perfectly wrong on so many different levels its almost a thing of beauty.
Have none of these caught to the -fact- that women make up half the video gaming audience now? That POC gamers outnumber white male ones? That black male gamers alone spend more on video games than white males? That the bigoted white gamer types they hold up as the primary gaming audience are absolutely tiny in comparison to everyone else who’s playing?
It’s almost as if they’re ignoring everything that doesn’t confirm their bias! Wowee, imagine that!
I’m sure the fucks Kroger gives about losing Esmay’s business is right around zero.
I didn’t know he had a son, I feel sorry for that kid.
But… but Kotaku is. a. gaming. website.
As in, “People like me and my son” (people who like video games) = the entirety of Kotaku’s readership.
Now, “Straight white dudes who like video games and also deeply resent anyone who is not a straight white dude”–okay, that’s not 100% of Kotaku’s readership, but I think it’s going to be a tough sell convincing Kroger that this is a demographic they want to side with.
Sometimes I ask the manager of my local Krogers to start carrying something that they don’t currently carry. I once ran the numbers and there is about a 0.8 probability of my later finding that item on the shelves.
Maybe Esmay thinks that getting the fifth largest retailer in the world to change its corporate policies is that simple.
I have to admit that I liked this part:
That makes it sound like Kotaku ran a story with the headline, “Why Dean Esmay and his son are poopyheads,” with a later followup, “If you meet Dean Esmay or his son in the street, you need to pitch rotten vegetables and day-old roadkill at them.” Doesn’t quite match the reality.
Kotaku’s editor makes an excellent point about gamergate and the inability to take them seriously as they are right now. Obviously harassing other people won’t win you popularity points in the real world. You won’t get anything done about “corrupt” gaming journalism if you’re not specific, in fact the more times you ignore a request for details the more it looks like you’re just trying to cover up your real goal of cyberbullying whoever you want.
Ha! Laughing at seeing this post here. I actually work for Kroger’s support team, and deal specifically with folks who send in emails.
For the last month or so, we’ve absolutely been flooded with emails. To the point where we set up a separate folder to specifically respond to a highly-politically-charged issue, and the addition to our backlog has forced us to temporarily disable the comment page and take other steps to catch up.
Yeah, it’s a pretty tricky thing, politically, and I imagine we were getting about 25-50 emails a day about… open-carry and concealed-carry policies in our stores.
In comparison, emails mentioning Polygon and other #GamerGate type stuff… we got maybe 10 a week, and that’s a generous estimate. Contributing to, by my rough estimation, 0.0001% of our email load.
But you keep fighting the good fight, GGers. You’ll get there eventually.
Like my gamerbro Facebook “friend” (who I keep on there because his meltdowns amuse me) who blew up at how corrupt and biased Cracked.com – not a news or information but a humor site – was and then immediately proceeded to post that American Enterprise Institute – I would be hard pressed to call them news, but they definitely try to dissemate information – “video games aren’t sexist” video with no comment.
The irony killed me more than the Cracked.com screed alone.
The aggrieved entitlement is strong with this one.
Newsflash: It is not YOUR hobby, OR the hobby of your hapless diversity-hating gamebros. The individuals who want to see games evolve beyond depictions of harmful cultural stereotypes and tired sexist tropes also, wait for it, Play. Games. I play games. I am so excited by the recent footage released for FFXV that I could puke. You do not own them, and you do not speak for me.
(… ever so slightly vexed that the main party for FFXV so far consists of four young white dudes. Come on Square Enix, you’ve been better than that).
@ Redcap – Probably not. You know how white, rural, heterosexual, Christian conservatives have been told for the last forty years that they’re the only Real Americans, and they cling to that belief even now that demographics have reached a point where you can’t win elections without some of those “fake” Americans voting for you? They talk about Barack Obama only winning because of the Black Vote…and the Hispanic Vote…and the Single Women’s Vote…essentially the everyone-but-them vote…as if those votes were less legitimate?
It’s like that. It doesn’t matter if they’re outnumbered (not that they really believe they are; everyone they know hates those SJW’s), they’re the only true gamers, and everyone else is a newcomer SJW who can be driven out if the true gamers just try hard enough.
Memo to the Social Injustice Couchpotatoes:
Women have been playing video games since they first became available on the mass market. That’s longer than a lot of you bozos have been alive. Your arguments are invalid. Now put down the joysticks and back away from the console. Slowly.
>evil laughter<
oh the humanity!
so insulting!
Yay! I blockquoted! (that is a verb, right?)
btw, the quotes are from Kotaku.com
teacat,
You might want to innocently post the following on your friend’s wall:
He’ll fall to pieces all over the place, special effects included.
@Bina – you said what I was going to say. We’ve been here since the start and now that the industry is at least pretending to listen to us more the dudebros who were always the loudest are having a meltdown. And after all the abuse they’ve heaped at me over the years all I can do is laugh.
Well, I can’t speak about “the SJWs”, whatever they’re supposed to be, but I certainly would be happy if we concepts of “male culture” and “female culture” were to vanish forever.
Trouble with GGers getting specific is that one’s supposed concern with “corruption” has to be more than a smokescreen for that to happen.
Kroger’s also supports unions and covers comprehensive women’s health care for employees.
I think I’ll go shop there today.
@Bina & @Johanna Roberts – for fucking serious. I’ve been playing video games literally since I was old enough to hit the buttons on a Pac-Man machine – so about thirty years – and now a bunch of adolescent boys are whining that I’m invading ‘their’ hobby? No, how about you get the fuck out of MY hobby.
Also, ‘politely commenting that sending rape threats isn’t very nice’ is the most, er, interesting definition of ‘abuse’ I’ve ever heard.
This hasn’t been posted here in a while, but it seems appropriate: