Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?
How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?
Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.
And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?
It’s easy enough to see where it comes from in a general sense: the author of the email repeats a lot of the standard language of the new misogynists online, castigating “misandrist harpies” and railing against the alleged evils of feminism. But it’s only when you begin looking at the specific and sometimes peculiar phrasings in the email that you really begin to see just how familiar the author is with the misogynist tropes of the manosphere, broadly defined.
I went through the email – the full text of which I found in this Pastebin – cutting and pasting some of its more memorable phrases into Google to see just where – if anywhere – these phrases showed up online. And I found that quite a few of them are phrases that are used almost nowhere else but in the misogynistic subcultures I write about on this blog – specifically, in the Men’s Rights and “Game” subcultures. This is someone, like Elliot Rodger before him, who has been reading if not actively participating in these subcultures.
My first discovery was that the author doesn’t only see Marc Lepine, the antifeminist mass murderer responsible for the Montreal Massacre in 1989, as a “a hero to men everywhere for standing up to the toxic influence of feminism.”
No, the author actually seems to think of himself — and I can only assume the author is male, given his obsessions and the gender breakdown of mass killers –as a latter-day Lepine. When he writes that “[f]eminists have ruined my life,” this is in fact a direct quote from Lepine himself: it’s what he reportedly said before opening fire and gunning down his victims, and a phrase he also included in his own manifesto/suicide note.
Some of the specific phrasings he uses seem to be almost exclusively used by MRAs . He writes, for example, of the “toxic influence of feminism,” a phrase that only turns up 47 results on Google.
If you set aside links to news articles about the threats directed at Sarkeesian, two of the top results are links to the artwork used in a promo video for A Voice for Men’s Honey Badger Brigade. The headline? “The toxic influence of feminism in comic.” The topic of the Honey Badger Radio Show being promoted? The “invasion” of geek culture by “social justice warriors” and feminists. The show is a recent one, from this past August.
Other uses of the phrase “toxic influence of feminism” can be found in two separate posts on an Irish MRA blog called “Not A Feminist,” which links to A Voice for Men, Angry Harry, Shrink4Men and other familiar MRA sites. The phrase also shows up in an essay by Henry Makow, an early MRA-turned-conspiracy theorist; his quote shows up on numerous sites online and accounts for a sizeable number of the results. The phrase appears as well in a debate over Men’s Rights on a site called TheDiscussionist and on several other MRA sites.
It also pops up in a couple of discussions of video games — once on a Grand Theft Auto V forum, and once, chillingly, in a post about Anita Sarkeesian on the Tumblr blog of an 18-year-old German right-winger, attacking her as an “attention whore who does no research, knows jack shit about the subject and [whose work leads] to even more of a toxic influence of feminism on gaming.”
In other words, virtually the only time this phrase seems to have been used in the history of humankind – or at least that portion of history accessible to Google – it’s been used by MRAs and video gamers. Mostly MRAs. This isn’t proof of anything, but I do find myself wondering if the writer of the threat letter might be a fan of the Honey Badgers.
Other phrases the email author uses aren’t quite as unique, but they too seem to be used almost exclusively by Men’s Rightsers – and in some cases their critics as well. “Misandrist harpies” is a surprisingly common phrase amongst angry MRAs and other manospherians; you can find it (naturally) on the openly misogynistic Antimisandrist.com, in the comments on A Voice for Men and Captain Capitalism and on the old school MGTOW site Mirror of the Soul. You can also find feminists ironically appropriating the insult as a label for themselves – including a commenter on the AgainstMensRights subreddit and a few of the regulars on this very blog.
It also makes an appearance in a long tirade about, yes, Anita Sarkeesian in a comment on the site Topless Robot.
The author of the threatening email also refers at one point to feminist “poison.” He may well have picked up this formulation from MRA-adjacent atheist videoblogger Thunderf00t, whose video Why ‘feminism’ poisons EVERYTHING has racked up more than half a million views on YouTube; Thunderf00t, who used to direct most of his ire towards creationists, now devotes most of his videos to attacks on feminist women, with Anita Sarkeesian being a central obsession.
MRAs and PUAs are similarly obsessed with the notion of feminism as a cultural poison. You can find dire warnings about “feminist poison” on in the posts and comments on sites ranging from A Voice for Men to Exposing Feminism to Antimisandry.com. The self-proclaimed “counter-feminist” Fidelbogen is especially fond of the formulation, making it the central theme in a long and turgid manifesto with the title “Feminism Poisons Women.” The tedious MRA troll known, a little misleadingly, as genderneutrallanguage manages to work “poison” into both the title and the subtitle of his blog The Poisoned Well: The Poisonous Language of Feminism.
PUAs, especially those who fetishize the alleged cultural innocence of Asian and Eastern European women, also pontificate regularly about the dangers of the “feminist poison.” I could multiply examples almost endlessly.
In one of the more lurid and disturbing passages in his threat-cum-manifesto, the email author declares that Sarkeesian “is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.” Something about the phrasing seemed familiar to me, so I tried searching for “craven little whore.” It appeared only in a tiny handful of discussions, none of which seemed to have anything to do with feminism or Men’s Rights.
But the phrase “whore that she is” is everywhere, it seems. If you eliminate the porn links from the results and narrow things down a little more, you find that the phrase is quite popular amongst PUAs and Red Pillers, who are forever recommending that their compatriots treat whatever woman they’re with “like the whore that she is.” It shows up repeatedly in the comments at Chateau Heartiste and in this post on Captain No-Marriage.
Now, as I said before, none of this is proof of anything, but it is highly suggestive. The email author not only seems to share the general beliefs of Men’s Rightsers and misogynist Manospherians; he also, even in the course of his short email, falls back repeatedly on some very specific phrasings that seem to be native to the misogynistic subcultures of Men’s Rightsers and pickup artists.
I think it’s safe to say that this is a person deeply steeped in this subculture – and frankly, more interested in the antifeminist crusade of the Men’s Rightsers than in video gaming as such.
Indeed, the email author says virtually nothing about video games as such in his little manifesto; he seems to have picked Sarkeesian as his target because, to him, she represents all the evils of feminism in one convenient package. He more or less says this outright, declaring that “I’ve chosen to target … Anita Sarkeesian [because she] is everything wrong with the feminist woman.”
In this, he is following again in the footsteps of Marc Lepine, who targeted female students at the École Polytechnique, killing 14 of them, because they to him seemed to symbolize the feminists who , he wrote in his suicide note “have always ruined my life.”
In its original article reporting on the threats, the Standard Examiner quoted a school official as saying that the authorities had “determined the threat seems to be consistent with ones (Sarkeesian) has received at other places around the nation,” which, as depressing as that statement is, does at least seem to suggest or at least hold out the hope that this threat may have come from a serial threatener, not an actual Utah State student who was, as he threatened, armed and ready to go.
Whether he is a sadistic fantasist or another Lepine in the making, it seems clear that whoever wrote the note is steeped in the Men’s Rights world online. He may or may not identify as an MRA, but he seems to have absorbed much of the ideology, and the hatred, preached and practiced by MRAs on the internet every day.
That’s pretty close, but I’d replace “antisocial” with “xenophobic”.
Anti-social and introverted people don’t care who plays video games, as long as they themselves aren’t forced to interact with them. Xenophobes can enjoy socializing with their own kind, but they’ve also got an attitude of, “Yes, I know I don’t have to interact with Those People, but even if I don’t interact with them, they’re still there. How much longer must this injustice be tolerated?”
Now that I think about it, “safe space” doesn’t seem quite right, either. A “safe space” is supposed to be safe for everybody. I’d probably say “enclave” instead.
What the fido-fucking hell would an 18-year-old know of research? Even a relatively bright one doesn’t know jack shit about it until they’re well into uni, ferchrissakes. I certainly didn’t, and I wasn’t dumb. The amount of it I did in school at that age (and was required to do) seems laughably modest, in hindsight. This toxic Nazi-shit spouter (an attention whore himself!) had best keep that in mind (not that he would, as Nazis tend to be none too bright, obviously.)
And where is this “toxic influence of feminism on gaming”? Could the little shit please produce some evidence, if he’s gonna spout generalizations like that? The only toxic influence I can see is that of the He-Man-Woman-Haters Club, who fucked it all up at some point in the 1990s. Prior to that, gaming was relatively neutral and there were no games directed specifically at one gender or the other. Ads for early video games showed both boys and girls (and adult men and women!) playing them, often together!
(Yes, I am An Old. Wanna make somethin’ of it?)
Also, and this is a bit of a quibble, but no, Marc Lépine did not shout “feminists have ruined my life” as he burst into the École Polytechnique. He actually said “Je lutte contre les féministes”, which means “I am doing battle against feminists”. He saw himself as an antifeminist crusader, to be sure, but the “ruined my life” bit actually stems from his combination suicide note/hit-list of women he wanted to kill after he got done with his spree at the engineering school that wouldn’t admit him (on account of him not being competent to attend, which has of course nothing to do with feminism, although he undoubtedly blamed the female students for taking what he saw as rightfully male slots, one of them presumably his). It’s not a huge deal, but it is a point of some importance, because the truth is less dramatic than the drama llamas of MRA Land would like to make things out to be.
(Again: yup, I’m An Old. Who has done her homework on this subject, seeing as it went down just when I was at uni, and volunteering at the Queen’s Women’s Centre, to boot. Yes, I WAS scared shitless…but oddly enough, it did NOT make me consider giving up feminism, or my schooling, for one hot instant. So, AntifemCrusaderFAIL!)
See: Richard fucking Dawkins.
Jordan Owen (of The Sarkeesian Effect) thinks these threats somehow prove Anita Sarkeesian is a horrible person. Video is forthcoming.
@Master of the Boot: I can assure you that humans remain humans regardless of how much toxic bile they spew on a daily basis. You’re correct in that these people have been so consumed by hate that they’re seeing others as objects instead of real life individuals with complexity, but at the same time, you’re sorta doing the same thing to them. Othering toxic people as being subhuman keeps us from having to address that they’re operating in the same spaces as everyone else, that their attitudes have been directly impacted by culture driven by other human beings. They’re not monsters, they’re just awful human beings. We counter that by standing up for what’s right and not perpetuating hate.
I’m not too familiar with Deadspin, but was linked to this article yesterday about Gamergate, which the author sees one of the latest manifestations of the Culture Wars:
http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844
He compares the GGers to the Tea Party and other reactionary groups that have historically not been happy with progressive changes to society, and perceive such changes as threatening.
(Tea Party: “We need to take ‘our’ country back!”)
(GGers: “Feminazis and SJWs are going to ruin/take away ‘our’ video games!”)
He doesn’t specifically mention the manosphere, but:
(Manosphere: “Feminism’s turned modern women into man-hating harpies. They need to be put back in their place and another thing is that they need to stop having sex with the ‘wrong’ guys and start having sex with me instead!”)
Essentially groups of people who’ve historically benefited from privilege fighting to maintain that privilege while simultaneously painting themselves as the real victims of women, minorities, LGBT folk, etc.
Has anyone seen how GG is trying to connect #StopGamerGate2014 to ISIS? Because I’m really excited to show you.
https://twitter.com/JaredBrickey/status/522524165002493952
This dude kindly told me that I was supporting ISIS by tweeting the hastag. Seriously. This is what they’re doing now. Check out the hastag conversation and any responses to anyone earnestly tweeting it.
At this point, I think that Paul Elam, GirlWritesWhat and Judgybitch could vandalize a Women’s Studies department on live national television while wearing AVFM t-shirts and chanting “MEN’S RIGHTS! MEN’S RIGHTS! MEN’S RIGHTS!” and mra’s would just go, “Well, I don’t see what the mrm has to do with any of this this. How do we even know these people are mra’s? If anything, their vandalism just proves how evil feminism is. Plus, false flag!”
David, that’s a very interesting analysis.
Donovan, your comment is insightful but I don’t see how that relates to the post or David being ‘silly’.
I read somewhere that one reason these gamers are so outraged at women criticizing and “invading” their hobby is that, unable to achieve traditional masculinity, gamenerds put their masculine worth in the gamer identity. And they feel questioning the everpresent boobs and male-only agency in games as emasculating. So gaming for them is an eminently masculine activity (they may tolerate women, yes, as long as they stay silent and accept the ‘art’ as it is) they attach very strongly to and it makes it easier to relate how they think they are ‘under attack’.
They’re still misogynist entitled assholes, but this interpretation helps me understand why they are SO VERY angry at women in games.
Just another case of ‘dude you would benefit hugely from feminism deconstructing traditional gender roles but you choose to be a resentful scumbag instead’
That escapist reviewer supported a Gor RPG!? I mean, someone in this day in age wanted a Gor rpg. That Gor has an actual fan base. That want to RP it. Now, Gay Nazi Bikers of Gor or the Houseplants of Gor I get. Now I get why Escapist make that godawful article about GG where they interviewed GG random a for cookies with their movement. Ew.
Falconer, babbies!
That’s a gorgeous picture of your little girl in the tunnel. Love her expression.
Look, a Mick Aston stripey jacket. Mini archaeologist!
@ryeash, Yeah, I’ve seen that ISIS claim. Here are the facts, for anyone who is interested.
ISIS has made a twitter spambot as part of a viral marketing campaign. (Yes, it’s a strange world we live in.) This bot seeks out any trending hashtags, and starts tweeting at it. When #StopGamerGate2014 started trending, the bot started tweeting at it. It is also apparently tweeting at the Irish footballer John O’Shea. Gators started claiming that the anti-GG “movement” (which doesn’t exist, except as this hashtag and one sub on Reddit) paid money to ISIS to spam the hashtag; in other words, feminazis are literally funding a terrorist group, according to them. You can see this parroted over and over, approvingly, in their main gathering place on Reddit: /r/KotakuInAction. Gators apparently do not understand how the internet works.
TL;DR: The ISIS spambot latches onto any trending hashtag without regard to its content, and no one using the hashtag can do anything about it. All this “proves” is that #StopGamerGate2014 was very successful. Anti-GG is no more supporting ISIS than John O’Shea, Irish footballer, is.
As one of the people you linked, I have something to say.
It is not some dictionary definition of Feminism that is problematic. Concepts like gender equality and breaking down stereotypes are great. The problem is the language.
Domestic violence is an issue. Domestic violence needs attention. Framing domestic violence as “Violence against Women” erases the half of victims of domestic violence that are not women. Framing domestic violence as “Violence against Women” erases the half of abusers that are women. I don’t know of any one that thinks there should be more child abuse, but framing domestic violence as “Violence against Women” makes it just that much harder to talk about Mothers that abuse their sons.
Rape is an issue. Framing it as “The rape of women” does the issue a dis-service. Rape isn’t only an issue when it happens to women. Rape is rape regardless of the gender of the victim. Regardless of how often women rape or how common rape of males is in the general population More men are raped in prison every year than women are raped in the entire country. By making Rape an issue of victimized women, feminism has made addressing prison rape even more difficult.
Everything in the language of feminism suffers from this problem. Everything from “The Patriarchy” to “Privilege” to “Rape Culture” to “Victim Blaming”, everything. It is unclear if this language problem is because the foundations of feminism are hateful sexist bigotry or if poor phrasing from early feminists just got perpetuated and expanded upon. I strongly suspect that the original framers of the language of feminism where hateful bigots that intentionally made a sexist framework for the language they used. Most feminists are not bigots, but by using the language of bigotry they are indistinguishable from the bigots.
So, it seems as if the deflectors and useful idiots have been given their latest marching orders.
http://i.imgur.com/ERyrHUB.jpg
Yep. Calling out a targeted misogynistic hate campaign for being a targeted misogynistic hate campaign is now the same thing as Islamophobia! *rolls eyes*
…which will no doubt prove (in case there was ever any doubt) that Jordan Owen is a terrible person.
I can’t believe this myself, but GamerGate bullshit on my goddamn facebook wall has seriously triggered me and destroyed my view of more than one people I know, one of which I consider a friend.
I’m losing sleep over a conversation that I did take part in (and which lead nowhere, as only the people who did not have their heads up their butts cared to keep reading anymore at the point I arrived, I guess. Which was at least somewhat reassuring, in a way. At least the person who started the whole shitfest never responded – and I don’t care if he ever will. This was not related to GG but did involve the guy who I am so, so disappointed in atm.)
And right when I was trying to get to sleep (my depression and stress are srsly screwing over my sleep patterns anyway), a friend pointed out move GG related crap involving mostly young kids, whom I at least used to believe were sensible. I fear that they may be just as deep in the misogyny barrel as a lot of other people.
I did find this, which did make me feel a little better.
http://chezapocalypse.com/gamergate-isnt-even-about-that-anymore-its-about-ethics-in-journalism/
I have really tried to keep away from GG but I srsly don’t have any blogs that I follow that would either not talk about things like this, social justice stuff, or just plain aren’t active anymore. If they are, they don’t post often enough to keep me occupied. I need something to read, something to distract. I can’t even study because I feel like my brains might implode if I do anything. I can’t draw either, I just produce crap that I’m not happy about and feel even worse because I just can’t get anything work and seriously I need help.
On the plus side of things, I’m getting into proper treatment therapy for other issues – first sitting this Friday.
I know I started rambling besides the issue but I can’t sleep and I’m just sort of feeling numb at the moment. GG isn’t even a thing I really care about, but it relates to a lot of goddamn problems that most people in my life just don’t understand or care about.
I want to identify as a gamer, but it feels like dirty word right now…. Same happened with identifying as brony just this summer and ah screw it, I’ll just shut up now.
Yet meanwhile, a feminist/social justice blogger said something they don’t like, which just proves that feminism/social justice is evil Evil EVIL and destroying the world.
I think the essence of the MRM is to be cover over and obfuscate the fact that they exist for the purpose of hating women. All their rhetoric about men being the really real oppressed ones is to let them have the glee of being obsessive hate-bullies without admitting what they are to themselves or others. “No, see, we’re the good guys!”
There is some appeal to their cover story, and unless you actually look beneath the surface rhetoric (looking into either what they say or what they do will suffice) you can get taken in and just think they want to help men. The fact that society in general has weird misconceptions about and dislike for feminism doesn’t help, nor does the fact that redpill talking points are just a repackaged version of the same sexist tropes that a lot of people already believe.
Oh, and many people just laugh them off as not a real threat. Maybe hating women isn’t seen as as dangerous as other forms of hate?
So, yeah, they fit the description of a hate group, but it can be hard to get people to see it.
@cloudiah
I was definitely curious. Not enough to look it up on my own because I knew it was something ridiculous, so I’m glad you laid it out. I just laughed at them, because seriously how much more could they look like the Tea Party? “We don’t like something so connect it to [insert current boogeyman here]”
Another image they’re posting to prove #StopGamerGate2014 is wrong:
http://i.imgur.com/dBh9ISQ.png
@ryeash/cloudiah If they would take a moment to think about what kind of twitter bot that is and compare trends, they would realize that pointing something like that out is basically like asking for a bottle of aloe for a self-inflicted burn.
@Catfish yeah I’ve seriously had to hold back on not commenting on this guy who is basically spamming GamerGate videos every 5 hours now 🙁 (he shut up for a while after maybe one or two people liked his stuff and nobody ever commented, but is MEGA double downing now)
this guy sent me a really long Facebook message for saying something bad about Ron Paul in 2008, so I’m really firm on that resistance because he can only have gotten worse. I’m tempted to preemptively block him before he notices me liking all those Cracked articles. He used to be a cool guy, but it looks like he went full NICE GUY between high school and the upcoming 5 year reunion.
So, anti-GG people are like Muslims when they do something bad, and GG people are like Muslims when they are victims of persecution.
Dear #Gamergate people:
Adam Smith is also dead, and can’t pronounce himself for or against something, let alone lead a movement.
Is donovandigital for real? Is this a real person who decided to come ‘splain to all of us these super-obvious things that have been covered on this blog and elsewhere, over and over, for weeks?
@Sarah, I’m always disappointed when otherwise smart people are “confused” or “shocked” claude raines style by stuff that is obvious if you pay a modicum of attention.
That having been said, I think you and I are saying the same thing in different ways.