#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.
Isn’t SJW just the new PC of the 21st century?
In other words, aren’t the primary users of the term SJW the ones who are least likely to be concerned about social justice just the primary–if not exclusive users–of the term PC other ones least concerned with being politically correct?
@michael MgM
It is. The same kind of people that whine about SJW are the same ones that throw a fit over anything they perceive to be PC. Hell just the mention of sexual abuse is enough to piss them off
“SJW” appears to be replacing the old saw “PC Police.” They seem to be used the same way. Strangely, it’s a much less effective insult.
It seems as well those who are applying the most criteria to the word “gamer” (You have to be playing the right games, for at least as long per day as me, if not more, you need to have it as a core part of your identity, more important than friends and family, you need to play everything in multiplayer) are the same people who are accepting Hoff-Summers as a feminist “because she says she is one”
Meanwhile, I can be confident that my wife, who plays electronic games ever day, averaging at least an hour per day, will far less likely to be considered a gamer than me, who may play a game every now and then because:
1) She plays on an ipad and sticks to one game repeatedly until she tires of it, and I play on consoles and computers and ipad
2) She plays the wrong “sort” of games (Puzzles, plants vs zombies, ipad games) whereas I play a variety of games including shooters
3) She is a woman, I am a man.
Of course, neither of us would call ourselves gamers. We wouldn’t call ourselves Whovians, and we spend much more of our attention and time on Doctor Who than we ever have games.
Hello folks. Shut up, Woody.
Just a lurker here dropping in a side-comment about the lineup of the new Final Fantasy game. As other folks have pointed out, characters that might appear as racially white in J-RPGs are usually designed that way because Japanese people look largely homogenous and sometimes it just doesn’t make characters easy to tell apart. The practice itself has a name in Japanese, mukokuseki, which translates literally to “stateless” or “without nationality.”
That aside, I do agree that the newest Final Fantasy is a step down in terms of diversity because of both the mukokuseki and the gender imbalance. Previous major titles, FFXIII, included characters that were very clearly coded as very young, middle aged, black (not just dark-skinned but black) and dark-skinned. The new group looks like a bunch of tall, pale-skinned dudes in their mid-20s.
This has been stressing me out for months now, I’m a huge FF fan.
@Michael McG & jojo – yep. “Oooh, the SJWs will kill me for this…” is the new “It’s not very politically correct to say this, but…”
I actually kind of resent being referred to as an SJW; I have some issues with the social justice movement, especially the online variety, so it kind of bugs me a little. But fuck it, between social justice activists and these assholes, I’d rather throw my lot in with the SJWs every time.
All this goes hand with hand with the misogynist “gamer” idea: “they’re taking away our videogames!”. This is what two sides of the same coin looks like.
And by “this” I mean their ideas of a feminist conspiracy and “gamer” starting to be a bad word, mainly because of those types of gamers that think women are evil and must be stopped from… wanting to be respected as equal human beings and be represented better. Wow.
Dan Golding wrote on his Tumblr an article called “The End of Gamers” that nails this exact point really well: http://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers
The Editor in Chief of Games.On.Net also released a statement recently (http://games.on.net/2014/08/readers-threatened-by-equality-not-welcome/) and defined himself as a Social Justice Druid on his signature (nice touch if you ask me!). Right now, the whole staff has zero tolerance for any kind of misogyny and doesn’t allow any discussions about it (and I don’t even feel sorry for the trolls).
So far, I feel the industry has become a bit more supportive… but will they show it in their products? Or will they simply go for what they’ve always done?
Will they recognize their huge responsibility on this? Expressing the will to change is great, sure, but look at everything you’ve done…
Did it have to come this far for them (both industry and videogame journalists) to realize that the female representation in videogames has always generally been very poor and did nothing but cultivate misogyny on male players for decades? None of this is an “accident”.
Did a woman have to get threats or even “revenge porn” for them to admit they have to change?
Better late than never, sure, but it’s still late. Misogynist “gamers” are a moster created by the industry itself.
Rather than supporting, the industry must take responsibility of what they’ve done and do something to attempt to fix it.
So… gamer culture is the same thing as male culture? All men are gamers? All men have the same culture?
Is gamer a nationality now? I’d be excited, but I’m not allowed. Because, well, I’m made of boobs and vaginas and rainbows and angry evil womanhood.
…I am a sex unicorn.
Oh, but of course! It infringes on their “rights” to violate women. Or threaten to do so anyway, which is Totally Not Nearly As Bad.
Nah, for my money they’re heading towards Glenn Beck territory.
Inability to point to specific things that piss them off, but a hell of a lot of insinuation and innuendo? Check!
Playing on the deep-seated prejudices and resentment of reactionaries towards inclusiveness? Check!
Chalking up the large numbers of disinterested people who disagree with you to a vast, shadowy conspiracy theory, instead of the fact that your claims are superficially ludicrous? Check!
As I said on Twitter, all they need is a chalkboard and a FOX timeslot to complete the journey. 😀
@Tessa
Well I was playing Mass Effect 3 so maybe it was for the best,
You’re paying for my brain bleach after that one, AndIExist.
That sounds like a line from a truly awful MLP clopfic.
Thing is, I’m a gamer. From when “gamer” meant paper, pencil, funny dice, graph-paper dungeons stocked from Monster Manual random-rolls, and calling in pizza missions at 2 Ayem. Back when gaming was almost exclusively geeky white boyz like me, with three little books plus Greyhawk.
And we had a lot of a-hole gamer types back then who were “No Gurlz Allowed”. Including urban-legend horror stories of what happened to the first girl gamers when they started trickling into otherwise all-guy gaming groups. Didn’t happen in my regular group (but then, to us being gamers trumped being male or female — common interest), but when you introduce a female gamer to an all-male group who have never interacted with a RL female, a lot of dumb and clueless things can happen. But these guys are beyond dumb and clueless to flat-out hostile.
What I find so ridiculous is the fact that these guys act as though women playing/creating games is a new thing. I’m 3-freaking-6 years old. I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600. I OWNED a copy of the ET game – yeah, that same one that most of those putzes only got to read about being discovered in a landfill in whereverthehell.
I’ve been a part of gaming allllll this time. Just because they didn’t want to recognize that or acknowledge my existence or the fact that I was right there, the entire time, playing in the WoW beta, playing in the Guild Wars beta, playing in the City of Heroes beta — that’s not my damn problem. They were the ones living in their own happy little penis-centric, he-man girl-gamer-haters club while I was over here, doing my own thing and having fun.
Their obliviousness is nobody’s fault but their own. Save the qq for somebody who gives a crap.
A sex unicorn sounds like the height of irony.
A sex unicorn sounds like the height of irony.
Robot Chicken did it already.
>>“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.
well, if you recall, they did kinda adopt that eventually. There’s even a few rock songs about it.
>>That sounds like a line from a truly awful MLP clopfic.
Hey, I’d be down for reading it, or at least the Fanfiction Friday reprint.
>>even though she’s played dozens if not hundreds of games.
[citation needed, and not John McIntosh’s stock photos]
also we know exactly what Milo is doing. He’s trying to leap off this and restart the Kernel. And if he has to travel the same path to get there, well, more power to the guy I guess.
Also he seems to have purchased his own boytoy along the way, heheh.
I haven’t been gaming for quite as long as some of the other women here, but I first picked up a keyboard in 1989 and a controller in 1990, so it’s certainly been a while. Sure, I prefer single-player to multiplayer, Nintendo to PlayStation or Xbox and platformers, RPGs, pet sims and puzzle games to shooters, but I do consider my hobby to be a large part of my identity, so other gamers are usually (not always, but usually) willing to count me as one of their own…
… Until they discover that not only have I committed the cardinal sin of being born with a vagina, but I’m only interested in others who’ve committed the same sin. Then all of that flies out the window for rape threat after rape threat after rape threat.
Sigh.
I don’t want to destroy their hobby, I just want to enjoy our shared hobby…
Welcome respectorcist, have a welcome package
That’s really interesting re: the practice of mukokuseki. I didn’t realise it but I’d just been assuming that Japanese game developers/character designers were simply trying to appeal to an increasing western market, and/or were being influenced by the current popularity of western culture within Japan itself. I’m going to have a read.
For a long time I didn’t think of myself as someone who even ‘played games’, because I only liked RPGs and hidden object point-and-clicks, not ‘real’ games like Far Cry or Call of Duty or Halo. Never mind that each of my save files are in excess of 150 hours, or that I spend a stupid amount of time on forums just to get that 100% completion.
Hey Misha, andiexist, headless unicorn, ruby, M. the Social Justice Ranger, would you mind if I quoted you in a post? I could keep your name/nym out of it if you prefer. (I probably won’t end up quoting you all, but I wanted to ask permission first.)
David: Oh, absolutely! Feel free to use my name or use it anonymously, it’s all the same to me. =)
Awesome! Go for it, very happy to be quoted on here, name and all 😀
I’ve been gaming since the days of Pong, ELIZA, Merlin, Space Invaders, and Pac Man. Back then it was something both boys and girls did after school. It wasn’t seen as nerdy – in fact, the arcades were where the delinquent kids hung out.
It seems like today’s crop of misogynist gamers have their core identity way too wrapped up in being the coveted marketing demographic. They want to be pandered to and flattered with hypermasculine characters and alpha storylines.
It’s kind of hilarious that they’re treating this whole thing like it’s a RL video game, complete with black ops, sockpuppeting “missions”, evil shadowy enemies, rallying cries of threats to individual liberty, and an anything-goes mentality of inflicting maximum damage on opponents. Except the consequences of stalking and harassment are real, and permanent. In their imaginations they’re a group of beleaguered rebels taking a brave stand for freedom, but they’re actually the bad guys. They’re fighting against social justice and ruining a lot of people’s lives in the process.
It’s just a hobby, fercrissakes. I can’t imagine, say, model railroad enthusiasts getting all bent out of shape about more people taking up their hobby, and embarking on a hate campaign to define it as for old people ONLY. These guys really need to grow up and get some perspective.
@David Futrelle
I don’t mind at all! And sure, you can stick my nym on it!
Not my human identity, though. The one I use to buy my cat food. 😉
(We’re all cats, right? I think I heard ferrets at one point…)
Thanks for the permissions!
Hey, Buttercup,could I quote you as well?
Exactly, Buttercup! Many of us have been gaming longer than most of these hatemongers have been alive. I also grew up in the arcades, playing Centipede, Pac Man, and later Duck Hunt. There was also a Simpsons game later on that I loved. My first console was a Colecovision, with Burger Time and QBert being my favorite games. I’ve been gaming for over thirty years. And the funniest thing is how they try to define us out by claiming we don’t play “real” video games, when the first video games were as “casual” and low tech as any social media game you can name.