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.
Its hard to sympathize even with the “good GG supporters” when their responses to the problems within their movement (regardless of the history of its formation) are usually either
1. acting like the people who make threats are not affiliated with them in any way
2. excusing them as fringe, vocal minority of assholes who do not represent them as a whole
3. simply not caring.
And in way too many of any of the above examples, the same people tend to bring up Sarkeesian’s “dishonesty”, thunderfooot, Quinnspiracy, and if not then they at least tend to blame feminism or media for corruption if they disagree with anything they say. I rarely seen them actually condemn the harassment either – they act like it doesn’t happen that much if at all or as if it not being “what its about” means they don’t need to care – as if you can only care about one thing at a time.
I can’t take GG seriously in any form.
Acting like a few bad apples won’t ruin a bunch is a false notion. Those apples will rot the rest if you don’t pick them out soon enough. I don’t care if majority of them are decent people or not – you can’t save it anymore. There are a lot of other venues to address the issues they claim to care about. If the shitholes won’t dissasociate themselves from you, you have to denounce your affiliation to them. At this point, the only way I can see to do that with any dignity is to abandon GG and start anew. This is what the decent supporters of “the cause” have all ready done.
GG people want to believe that the harassment talk is just a way to distract from the corruption of journalism. Others claim that its the other way around. I personally stopped caring a long time ago. GG will destroy itself with time.
“One of the story writer of Dragon Age 2 quit in 2013 following death threats over… something or other”
That was Jennifer Hepler, and thanks for reminding me, because that incident is incredibly relevant to Gamergate, in fact, I’d go so far as to say that the rage at Hepler then was the primordial slime of the entire movement.
Basically, she admitted that she didn’t like the gameplay aspect of most games, because aspects such as hand-eye coordination and inventory/map management are challenging for her, which is all well and good – I have Aspergers and ADHD so I actually share some of these issues (which is why I rarely play shooters and fighting games, and even though I enjoy League of Legends due to the tactical aspect, the mechanical aspect makes it tough for me). However, the gamer community got absolutely LIVID that someone who works in gaming doesn’t like the fast twitch aspects of gaming or the micromanagement of gaming as opposed to liking games for the story and characterization.I believe she also advocated that combat instances in games be skipped, just like dialogue be skipped (which actually sounds…fair though I don’t believe that it was a good answer to “how to make gaming more accessible to women”)I believe she also emphasized homosexual relationships in DAII, which was one of the first instances of the whole “SJWS ARE INVADING GAMING” thing, because tolerance of homosexuality is summed up as “we support gay people as long as we don’t have to see them!” Essentially, gamers had an image of their mind of what “real gaming” is, a highly exclusionary image that rules out anything other than what they grew up with Thus, the death threats and online harassment and remarks about her weight.
It was in the Hepler incident, as well as Sarkeesian’s initial videos and articles, that really served as the dry run to Gamergate.
@Catfish
I personally believe that there ARE no good GG supporters at this point, or if there are, they’re extremely naive, otherwise they would have dissociated from the movement and the tag long ago. There are far, far more egregious instances of game journalism corruption than an indie game developer having a relationship with a Kotaku writer. Even if ALL of it was true, there are far more serious instances of corruption. But it’s just a coincidence that the “movement” has largely targeted women and feminists, not say, big “defense” corporations colluding with game devs (play a modern shooter, the level of detail in the more exotic weapons would actually be copyright infringement without an agreement), or the massive, massive amout of product placement these days, or the fact that major game companies pay for journalists to go to events, shower them with gifts, etc etc. But instead we’re focusing on Zoe Quinn for making
Also I had an interesting argument with a gamergater on Twitter. Basically he argued that “Depression Quest” isn’t a game which is the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever seen. Even the moderators on /v/ have explicitly said “choose your own adventure games” are games (the most prominent example of these in that context are Japanese visual novels), and he actually argued that Depression Quest is fundamentally different from visual novels because it doen’t have pictures.
I can’t even. GG can’t into logic.
*Edit:
But instead we’re focusing on Zoe Quinn for making a game about depression and being feminist and having had a relationship with a Kotaku writer.
Perfect. Who better to engage with tedious, repetitive trolls than a tedious, repetitive bot?
Do I understand you correctly? He’s saying it doesn’t have graphics, it’s just text-based decision trees, therefore it’s not a real game?
Those of us old enough to remember Zork and similar games ought to laugh this twitch-gaming digital-eyelash-rendering-worshipping neophyte off the internet. 😉 Does he dismiss Roguelikes as non-games, too, because their “graphics” are text? Honestly, what a joke.
Yep.
That boggled my mind at the time – her argument was essentially:
“I play a lot of games for the story and the interactivity in telling that story, and I find that sometimes the segments in-between that story being told are tedious / boring / problematic / not my kind of thing, so I’m thinking of including some options to skip that”
At which point I was like:
“Well, you can already skip cutscenes, so I guess if you played a game specifically for the choices you got to take and the ensuing dramatic pay off (the cutscenes emphasis those choices?) that seems pretty reasonable. I do so hate having to grind through pointless stuff to get to the things I enjoy. Let’s do more of that!”
only apparently Hepler’s actual argument was to water down gaming for the casual masses because as a woman she is too frail to handle the high awesome action of shooters and thinks games are no different from books and also the gays.
Or… something.
@Kittehs:
Thank you, Kittehs! My mom knit those two stripey jackets. They’ve fit now for two winters — I don’t expect they’ll fit next year. And my mom wouldn’t know from Mick Aston, but archaeologist is a wonderful career.
@cloudiah: Re the Adam Smith picture. Wat. How. Where. I. … I got nothing.
Thus Spake Zarastrivingally:
Sir or madam, I am stealing that, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
@pecunium:
They got their first pairs of shoes yesterday! Not just Crocs, but actual shoes with tongues and Velcro straps. They went to daycare in long pants and shoes and socks this morning. A helped put his hoodie on with enthusiasm, but S didn’t want hers on, and pulled at it and said “all the way off!”
Yes, they’re talking too. S is gaining a couple of words a day. She said “knuckle” yesterday at dinner, and “cow” the day before that. A is a bit behind, and a bit less distinct, but they both talked about “fork” at breakfast today.
When S burps, she feels the need to talk about it: “I bup. I bup.” And she won’t go to sleep these days without her (awkwardly large) penguin plushie. “I want duckie! I want duckie!” is what I think she’s saying, although it comes out “I ya guggie! I ya guggie!”
And A discovered he can drink from a straw.
Yes. That is exactly what he argued. He also stated that “I’ll acknowledge it as a game the day I can pull off a sick noscope”.
I think the AAA gaming companies who pay the salaries of the big journos (aka actual gaming corruption) are laughing all the way to the bank. The big grassroots movement against gaming ethics? When they’re done sending death threats to outspoken women for having ideas, they’ll happy eat up whatever over-pixelated under-developed dreck EA and Microsoft shove out.
With that said, I didn’t really like Depression Quest, or more like, I liked the idea but I felt the execution was flawed (I liked the idea that being depressed took away choices from what you were able to do, but the choices you WERE able to make didn’t seem as impactful as they could have been, and given how depression varies between individuals, there isn’t enough variety in the scenarios), but the concept was sound, the intent was great, and it absolutely is a game.
There’s actually a somewhat similar game called Hikikomori Manager 2012, which has a lot of the same elements, if a lot less realistic – you’re a lonely Japanese shutin who survives off allowance from your parents, and plays games, watches anime and reads manga to self-medicate. The goal is ostenibly to get to the point where you can go outside and be a member of society again (though you can also play to see how long you can last) , and you lose the game when you die of eating bad food (cheap ramen satisfies your hunger but makes you less healthy, healthy cheap food tastes nasty and makes you feel depressed, the good food is expensive), or get depressed to the point of suicide. It’s also possible for your allowance to fluctuate, or to get to the point where you can no longer pay your rent.
I think that HM2012 doesn’t have quite the educational intent or chops as DQ, but I think it has some of the depth that DQ could have had. But the point is that it’s possible to criticize a game on reasonable grounds without going on a hatefest against it because it doesn’t fit a corporatized, masculined, exclusionary model of gaming.
@Fibinachi
“only apparently Hepler’s actual argument was to water down gaming for the casual masses because as a woman she is too frail to handle the high awesome action of shooters and thinks games are no different from books and also the gays.”
The issue for me was that it was asked in the context of “how to make games more accessible for women”. There’s sort of a paternalistic misogynistic subtext that I’m sure she didn’t mean but sorta came out anyway – that women were somehow essentially predisposed to not be able to play or enjoy the combat portions of the game. I think adding more options for people that play a game for the story is a GOOD thing but the context makes it a bit questionable.
Remember how Larry Summers said that we needed to dumb down college because women were bad at STEM? Maybe I’m seeing it the wrong way but Hepler’s comment seemed reminiscent of that. Of course it didn’t deserve fucking DEATH THREATS. And that’s the thing that Gamergate refuses to understand – you can make rational, reasonable criticisms of Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian or Jennifer Hepler or any other person – but harassment and death threats are not that.
Disagreement does not justify fucking terrorism!
@Falconer
“And A discovered he can drink from a straw.”
Today, he discovered that he can drink from a straw. Tomorrow, he will discover that he can use it as long range liquid projectile artillery (speaking from experience)
Thanks for a great bit of linguistic research, David.
Re: Neckbeards raaaging at the possibility of skippable action sequences, this dovetails with some of my own observations, thoughts, and wild-ass speculation, thus:
A significant fraction of the self-identified “hardcore gamer” subculture consists of white males under 45 having a tough time finding meaningful employment and accomplishment. This isn’t generally their fault; the root problems include a sluggish economy, high unemployment, stagnant salaries, and decreased access to higher education. I want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying gamers are lazy, stupid slackers. They’re just screwed by the political and economic circumstances they inherited.
In the absence of other social metrics of success (no promotions, no job security, damn near zero disposable income) many of these people get deeply invested in their status in the gaming subculture. “Keeping up with the Joneses” now means playing and winning enough games that nobody will think you’re a casual. Achievements, trophies, and Gamerscore points give you the kind of social cred you used to get from having a nice house with a new car parked in the driveway. Therefore those achievements and trophies become possessions to be jealously protected; I’ve seen countless “hardcore gamers” fuming about achievements getting too accessible, and the devaluation of Gamerscore points by games that award too many points with too little effort. After all, a sports car in the driveway isn’t terribly impressive if everybody has one.
And therein lies the rub: When a developer who doesn’t like twitch-based gameplay talks about making action sequences optional, they perceive this as threatening not merely their status within the subculture, but the entire system by which their social status is acquired and maintained.
[/wall of text]
Whoops! That’s the sound of Colossal Cave, Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging and the entire roguelike genre being thrown under the bus.
Maybe. The context, though, makes it clear that it’s a taste argument – making games accessible to women means making games that women actually want to play, and there’s nothing wrong with preferring things other than combat in general.
I see a disturbing trend in how quickly the level of violence is rising and being considered a viable and good option by the MRA community. I occasionally rifle through entries on ROK or Heartiste (because, know thine enemy) and there was a story recently about how Mahala shouldn’t have received the Nobel prize because she “ran away” from Pakistan. Aside from the disgusting comments about how she’s “hit the wall” at 17, there were some calling her a c**t and praising the way the Tailban kept their women in line. One super special snowflake named Firewing wrote “I hate Feminists and I hope the Tailban or Ebola or ISIS kills all Feminists. Every last motherfucking one of them.” He goes on to praise the Tailban for “keeping their bitches in the kitchen” and then calls Mahala every nasty name you can think of. It’s easy to dismiss Firewing as a basement dwelling troll, but the reality is- he is probably out walking around in public and is a total danger to every single woman he encounters. He is a dangerous ticking time bomb and he embodies this whole movement. We’re not talking about (in my mind) legit social issues like fathers rights. We’re talking about straight up sociopaths who seek to harm us and encourage others to do so.
THe oh so tedious GNL popped by, upthread, to favour his with his latest shitty comments about how feminism is so bigoted. Feel free to point and laugh.
A six dot ellipsis. That’s new. Or is this a typical MRA two dot ellipsis tripled for extra intensity and passion? Come back and tell us Robert O’Hara!
I’m not going to read the link and give AVFM clicks. Perhaps David will make a post mocking it at some point and then I’ll read it.
I think I can guess what it says though. Something along the lines of “we don’t condone death threats and mass shootings and how dare you say otherwise. How dare you!?” Never mind that the threat maker used all the same language as MRAs. Never mind that you only find this type of language in the manosphere.
Hey! That’s one of my favorite movies! Not that I’ve found out you don’t like it, I’m gonna…
chalk it up to different people having different tastes and get over it. Not throw a temper or make death threats.
Wow. I never knew that. I guess misogyny is so prevalent and acceptable in the US that the real title would piss men (and some women) off enough that the book wouldn’t be a hit.
In a thread about how a feminist was targeted with terror threats by someone using MRA language and buzzwords, you’re arguing that feminists have a language problem?
Fuck off, you worthless trouser stain.
Well, there goes everything that isn’t a shooter or has shooter-like elements. Like Civilization, Diablo and StarCraft. I’m pretty sure StarCraft is a Real Game, judging by the hype around the release of StarCraft II a few years ago.
Here the title became “The men who didn’t love women”. Wrong in a different way, but still wrong.
Geez. It’s fun to figure out what’s not a real game anymore. Street Fighter! Mario! Amnesia! Gran Turismo! Final Fantasy! Tetris (but then again Tetris has been already stereotyped as a ‘girl game’ for a while now)! SimCity! Pokémon! Dark Souls!
Your babies are adorable, Falconer!
Maybe the variable sizes of ellipses are from rolling a d6 to choose a pointless dismissal?
Which of the sources quoted there contradict the language analysis of this article? The penultimate paragraph even acknowledges that
And I see that AVfM are still using the word “claimed” about the death threats, at the bottom of an article discussing a widely-distributed death threat. Like they’re refusing to rule out the possibility that all the USU staff who received it, including the one interviewed, are making it up.