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.
Maybe we could get this guy to do a more in-depth automated search of those phrases:
https://storify.com/MorganRamsay/how-often-do-video-game-journalists-write-about-fe
Also, I saw theyoungturks’ video on the shooting threats today. I think it’s their first video related to Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate, and I was pleased that they got it pretty much right. Most of the news outlets (well, I haven’t seen many cover gamergate, really) I’ve seen have tried some form of appeal to moderation, as though Gamergate was just one side of two extremes. I’m glad TYT didn’t take #gg arguments (journalistic ethics!!) at face value, but the ggers are PISSED. The dislike bar on that video, damn.
And I mean, it’s not like TYT was particularly opinonated on the gamergate nonsense. They focused the video on the ridiculousness and inflexibility of gun control laws, and basically only mentioned the rest, well, maybe not in passing, but it was secondary.
What saddens me is that any video not praising #gamergate 100%, even if it’s only mentioned in passing, gets dislike bars and hate/defensive comments like no other, and any video that DOES praise them, negligeable amount of dislikes. When I see that, it makes me wonder if they DO represent the majority, rather than just an agressive minority, and it’s a little upsetting.
Adam Smith also advocated for zero growth (or stable economics, as it’s also known) because he believed (essentially) that infinite growth on a physically limited plane was impossible.
But I still have to deal with people who swear that the only honest measure of economic vigor is the growth of GDP over time.
Adam Smith also advocated for the improvement of jobs, the bettering of the people and the happiness of the population by virtue of inducing as much positive content into the daily life as possible, since people neccesarily tended towards becoming that which they did a lot.
But I still have to deal with people who argue that work always improves the soul.
Adam Smith also advocated that every single attempt at any kind of division of labour would ruin the market place, destroy people, turn them into stupid gainless creatures bereft of any kind of moral support, and further, that any activity undertaken with the notion of “The public good” in mind was essentially impossible, because it was a sham meant to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
But I still have to deal with the fact that social security is a pretty good system, so it’s a bit of a wash in the long run.
Oh, here’s an Adam Smith quote that applies to Gamergate:
Anyway:
Rogue was created in 1980.
Nethack was created in 1987.
The first King’s Quest was released in 1984. 1984!
I point this out because one of the people responsible was Roberta Williams – incidentally, a woman.
So the notion that games have been a safe-space for anti-social white males for “more than a decade” is, unfortunately, while a decent explanation if it were true, so much bunk. It’s not true. Antisocial white men hasn’t owned gaming for more than a decade, because people have been playing games ever since the development of our species ludomania, and videogames since at least 1977, with commercial releases in 1980 (Mystery House).
That’s 34 years.
That means at least 3 generations of full teenagers + extra, or one very precocious toddler growing up to be a very game-playing person.
It doesn’t mean that antisocial white men have somehow taken over gaming somewhere in between, and we should now accept their idiotic demands for any random thing. This is, will continue to be, and remain, little more than the same sort of thing that happened with the Mass Effect 3 ending (uproar!), the introduction of Blood Elves into the Horde faction in World of Warcraft (Uproar!), the shut down of City of Heroes (Uproar!) and any other random thing.
It’s uproar. Unfortunately, it just so happens to be uproar that specifically and somewhat perniciously targets women. But it’s not new. One of the story writer of Dragon Age 2 quit in 2013 following death threats over… something or other. That was before all this “Gamergate” nonsense.
And every year, you’ll find the same, if you look. Quit! Death threats! Rape threats! You Did Something Wrong Die, You Person! You Woman! It’s nothing new.
This is nothing new, nothing special, and is only really interesting because of the mix up between their normal, day to day hatred of everyone and everything and the strange focus on anti-feminism, which I take it has also been gradually developing online for the last few years. Then you mix the two, and suddenly, you have a hate-mojito .
I need some insight. This is not an easy question to ask, but am I worng?
Dude who wrote the terrorist e-mail stated outright that if he were denied entry to the venue he would just shoot up the campus. Yes, gun laws need to change. Yes, people should not go armed to these kind of talks (seriously wtf is it about USians and guns, it make *no* sense whatsoever). But I think we’re ignoring what I believe to be a very pertinent fact…had the police and/or school denied entry unless people checked their guns it would not have aved lives because *dude was going to shoot anyone he fucking saw*, abd cancelling, while tragic, was the *only* moral choice to make anyway, so for the purposes of this event gun laws etc are immaterial. Am I wrong? Because I see *no one else* saying this everyone’s jumping on gun control and schools need better security (which are both true but they don’t really need to overshadow the threat to people who ujust happened to be in the neighbourhood).
Thus Spake Zara
I don’t think they’re a majority. If you read the IRC logs released by the movement’s leading lights (or most persistently backwards lights, if you prefer) they carefully instruct their supporters in how to create the illusion of widespread. Create several false accounts each, coordinate with each other, and use these talking points, so when the “balloon goes up” anybody critical of gamergate is quickly swarmed and shouted down. Isolate dissenters; make them feel overwhelmed and unpopular. Downvote comments that make them look bad (on most sites, they’ll be auto-hidden once they go beneath a certain threshold) and upvote each others’ friendly messages so they dominate the discussion.
But if the gamergaters had the widespread grassroots support they’re trying to feign, they wouldn’t need to fume and rage about those eeevil anti-GG websites, because there wouldn’t be a significant number of anti-GG sites — there just wouldn’t be a market for them.
I guess I see it as a lack of empathy for potential innocent bystanders, and it’s frustrating because I *know* gun law reform is important, but this seems like a callous way to have that conversation? I look at the tweets and I’m actually angry that this is being ignored.
Hey, the shutdown of City of Heroes sucked — that was a great game with a great player base, and my partners and I had a lot of fun playing it. And while I certainly remember people being disappointed and upset, I’m pretty sure there were no threats of violance or doxxing involved.
Oh yeah, I loved City of Heroes. Great stuff, great game. Loved the descriptions of all the various (criminal) factions and the joy. I was in the original alpha beta, the beta beta, the actual game, the beta for city of villains, actually in city of villains…
Still, there was posts and arguments and discussion and uproar about it and people going on to try and establish their own servers and so on. Just an example of the kind of thing that tends to happen in any community.
I don`t have anything to add to the discussion an GG.
But this post reminded me of one Latvian guy I came across ~2 weeks ago – in one paragraph he reflected all the main legends from MGTOW ideology (used the acronym as well): women just using men for money, marrying just so they could stay at home and spend husbands money, sperm-jacking, so they could be single mothers and get money from father and government etc.
Now, if I wouldn`t know about MGTOW from reading this blog, I would just thought “Whaaaaa? This guy lives in a parallel universe, weird” and moved along. Because in Latvian social context this is exactly contra-reality. One of the biggest social problems is male alcoholism, there are many, many families where the husband frequently spends his salary on alcohol, then loses his job and it takes him several months to find knew one, and then it starts again, while the wife works in two or three jobs to earn living for the family. Also, due to Latvian economics, even if there are no alcoholism problems, very few families could afford one stay-at-home-partner, so majority of women have to work, even if they would prefer to stay at home. Single mothers – another big social problem, stories of men leaving women while pregnant or with a small child are common. Currently, being a single mother means poverty (state support is ridiculous; alimony system is still in its baby steps), unless the woman has her family support or exceptionally well-paid job.
I`m sorry for the long inside in Latvian social-economic situation, but I wanted you to see how totally absurd and grotesque MGTOW ideas are in Latvian context, but still there are one guy out there (I hope he`s the only one) who believes them despite the reality all around him. Sadly, I guess, if one wants to hate women, no pile of facts and reality will change your mind.
I retweeted this @femfreq tweet which of course has been retweeted over 500 times:
The troll who replied? This time he was a TEA Party gun-rights type critizing Anita (and me, the formerly pro-gun liberal) for taking the anti-gun (i.e. “anti-freedom”) stance of a president with armed bodyguards. I know how irrational those TEA Party types can get when their “freedom” (read: privilege) is threatened, so I didn’t reply back. But I’m not surprised that she’s now offending them too. A nest of vipers, this American right wing…
Fascinating aside though, thanks.
Ughh. I actually knew (vaguely, I don’t want to wander there) about the IRC logs and the fact that they do at least SOME planning. I still fell for it (the illusion that this is more widespread than it really is). Guess there’s something they’re doing well.
I also was a little queasy about the fact that, even if they HAD added security measures, well, if and when the guy shows up with his guns, what can security guards really do? Probably stop him from getting to Sarkeesian. But everyone else? The audience, waiting in line behind (or in front of) the guy? The security guards themselves? It’s…a delicate situation.
And it just scares me that there’s a possibility that someone might actually go through with it, without issuing a warning first and…just, the whole situation is really scary.
@ Jess
I didn’t like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind either. Do I deserve death threats too?
(People who don’t like the things I like, oh no! We must kill them all! I’m embarrassed for you, tbh.)
Robert O’Hara has invented a new form of punctuation! Five dots and a period. We should play a game and try to guess how it’s meant to work.
I made a meme in honor of GG’s new arguing tactic:
https://twitter.com/weirdwoods/status/522579294371852288
P.S. Twitter bots are definitely this movement’s kryptonite. Someone set an Eliza bot on their hashtags, and GGers have been arguing with it. It’s pretty hilarious.
“Where does the anger come from?”
I have been this angry before though with different targets, having spewed some truly heinous things towards some anti-gay people I was chatting with in Disqus awhile back. As a relatively masculine gay man, I am free from many slings and arrows but I tend to be attracted to and befriend effeminate men so I wind up lashing out on their behalf. That is not entirely true; I also hate the climate of hatred that makes many of them leery to date me for fear I am a closet case boiling with potential violence if they give me a chance.
For many of these red pill guys, they feel lonely and have watched women break free of their gender constraints while trying to dwell within their own. Ironically, feminism is the thing working to free them but they lash out because feminism is complete crap at selling itself. Sorry, but it is. I say this as someone who is anti-gender roles.
The male gender role creates stratification. It creates “Us” and “Them”, even with genders. Men stuck in this hogwash system approach women as a platoon of soldiers approaches an enemy fortification. The poor bastards don’t even realize that the Nice Guy act is manipulative in and of itself. They don’t realize that their view of women and men as enemy armies rather than on the same team is what kills their dating life.
I am a man. I am the same as them. I lash out at my foes, treating homophobes as if they were opposing armies of enemies to be destroyed rather than wrongheaded people in my own outfit to be engaged. And out spews the hate.
That is my hypothesis, anyways. What do I know? I am a security guard in junior college.
I’ll leave you all with a scrap of the hilarity for some brain bleach.
https://twitter.com/Yagimoth/status/522496577097584641
Didn’t post the way I wanted, but I’m too tired to fix it. Find @elizarbarr, you will not regret it.
I still only have two polite responses to my anti-GG tweet. Seems I can’t even get terrorised. :/
Good article from Jennifer Allaway who researches hate groups for a living.
http://jezebel.com/gamergate-trolls-arent-ethics-crusaders-theyre-a-hate-1644984010
And she got trolled by Gamergaters, anyone surprised?
@gilshalos:
They’re too busy arguing with people on #StopGamerGate2014. You’ll need to go there to find quality trolling now.
@ryeash:
I must admit I’ve resorted to a low level of counter-trolling of sorts:
https://twitter.com/StrivingAlly/status/522651385779613696
(I know I have this in two threads, I promise this is the last time I’ll post it!)
And now the GamerGaters are making a big deal of bringing this doxxing fucker to everyone’s attention: https://twitter.com/StateOfAllah/with_replies
The fact it’s happening just as they’re getting creamed in the press, and the #StopGamerGate2014 counter-tag is making it impossible for them to whitewash the worst of their actions, and I’m hearing now that GGers are actively trying to get SGG2014 re-trending, makes me a little suspicious of the provenance of a brand-new account popping up doing bad things that GamerGate can claim they helped take down…
I did watch the TYT video and I do like the way Cenk broke it all down to : harming Anita Sarkeesian, in any way, exactly proves her point about misogyny. An irony that thoroughly and completely escapes the people making the threats.
Making her a martyr would be the surest way to bring their own movement to a screeching halt. The delusional bubble these people live in is simply mind-boggling to me. I’ve really tried but I absolutely cannot wrap my head around their motivations. If I could, would that make me one of them?
In the “analysis” of the threat trying to prove it’s a false flag @cloudiah linked to, it’s cute that he thinks
is evidence that is wasn’t written by an MRA.
Re: hate crimes against women.
Thank you for clarifying something for me (all of you who talked about it). I live in Sweden. The enormously famous trilogy written by Swedish author Stig Larsson, best-seller in the whole world, features a first novel (the most famous of them all) entitled, in Swedish, “Men Who Hate Women”.
In the English-speaking countries, this title was changed to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. When I found out, I was furious, and I couldn’t quite pin-point why. Now I know. A title like “Men Who Hate Women” is “controversial” in the US. It’s not “proper” to suggest that yes, there actually are men who hate women. It’s not mainstream. We’re not supposed to acknowledge the hate that (thankfully a minority of) men feel for women.
I hate this stuff.
If the writing was a thing of beauty, then I’d assume an MRA couldn’t possibly have written it.