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.
@vaiyt: I guess Dungeons & Dragons is still a real game because all your missile fire in a D&D session is no-scope.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a real game. Twilight Princess isn’t because you can get a scope, despite the fact that you have to pull off a “sick no-scope” to get it.
“Real Games” are games that make people with an insecure sense of their own manhood feel more manly.*
*as defined by Hollywood, dudebros and the Military Industrial Complex
@genderneutrallanguage:
*sigh*
Framing clearly gendered issues like rape, domestic violence and the like as “gender neutral” is highly problematic because it ignores the reality that women are frequently the victims and men the perpetrators. This is a statistical fact, and facts cannot be hateful. Feminism doesn’t shame men for being men, but challenges our society to try to understand why things are as they are; Men are not violent by nature, but because our society teaches that a “real man” is violent and domineering. It also teaches that everything associated with the feminine is weak and inferior that the masculine is allowed, even encouraged, to dominate. This is the crux of the issue.
Men hurt women. Men also hurt other men. This is not in our genetic makeup, but in our culture. Men who rape other men in prison are the sort of men who rape women out of prison, because rape is about power and dominance, not about attraction, misunderstandings or “losing control”, or whatever is the Men’s Rape Apologists’ flavor of the week.
Feminists are not to blame for any of this. I’d dare to say that without the small victories feminism has gained in the ongoing fight against fucked-up social values, men would be even more cruel towards each other (and, naturally, against women). I know that without having studied feminism, I would lack the language to communicate how ill-fitting the traditionally masculine persona is to me (and how fucked up it is that many MRAs celebrate said misogynistic macho identity instead of condemning it. Compassion for men my butt).
Women are capable of violence, too, no one is denying that (least of all feminists, whose main message is that women are people, equally capable of both heroic and villainous behavior as men). However, there is nothing in our culture that instills such deep-seated entitlement in women as it does in men, so the MRM rhetoric about feminists supposedly calling all men violent rapists by nature (FYI: This is not, in reality, what feminism is saying) while themselves promoting the image of women as inherently evil harpies only serves to highlight the facts that they haven’t bothered to understand what feminism really teaches, and that they themselves are a parody of their own view on feminism. In reality, feminism provides answers and ways to combat the toxic culture; all the MRM provides is an echo chamber for misogynistic douchebags who hate women for the fact that they’re women.
Bottom line: Gender roles hurt everyone, but seeing that men are expected to dominate and women to be dominated, gender roles hurt women more. Your point is not sound.
That said, it’s true that exposing and eliminating the violent, power-obsessed patriarchal value system that to this day defines much of human interaction will free men from their restraining gender role as well. Feminism is the answer here. The problem is that the likes of MRAs with their regressive, conservative ideas are doing their best to counter this development. Anti-progressives are, unsurprisingly, the biggest threat to social progress.
It is important to identify the oppressor and oppressed in a power dynamic. While it sounds inclusive to claim that everybody is oppressed in equal measure, it is blatantly untrue, and it damages all attempts to rectify the situation. Feminists expecting men to acknowledge their male privilege is not hateful or anti-men, it’s absolutely essential in order for men to identify the problem as well and to get everyone to work on correcting it. This is not a zero-sum game. We are in this together. The pay-off is a more equal, a more inclusive and a happier society, and all it takes is men* losing a few privileges they should never have had in the first place.
*Note that all this applies to white people, straight people, cis people, neurotypical people etc. as well, but that’s a rant for another day.
Not that I expect you to pay attention to any of this stuff, GNL. You’ve shown in the past that you’re disinterested in actually learning and understanding anything about feminism, instead opting to get your information from anti-feminists, who are notoriously ill-informed (and deliberately so, since their anti-feminist identity matters to them more than the actual truth). Just felt like ranting, I guess.
tl;dr: No, genderneutrallanguage, it is not hateful of feminists to point out the statistical fact that men commit the vast majority of violent acts in our society. However, ignoring the gendered nature of violence is doing a great disservice to equality and progress, so you can take your “men are oppressed too” shtick and shove it.
My favorite ElizaBot quote to a confused GGer:
https://twitter.com/weirdwoods/status/522661665754456064
@strivingally
https://twitter.com/weirdwoods/status/522572374529826816
I’ve been heckling when I’m bored 😛 I can’t help myself. It’s hard not to poke fun at them when they practically write the jokes for me. I think I struck it pretty lucky with my androgynous name, because they all think I’m a guy. I haven’t gotten harassed at all.
Oddly, I’ve found two with senses of humor about themselves. Poor, sweet useful idiots.
Prove Adam Smith wrong? Of, if only there was a two century plus old academic discipline dedicated essentially to just that. What’s that? Econowhatnow?
(Yes, I know that #NotAllEconomists think Smith is wrong, but even the neo-classical economists aren’t hewing strictly to The Wealth of Nations.)
I’m particularly torn on gamergate now because of the video of three women defending it. It’s like how I used to find Coon songs and Minstrel Shows racist until someone pointed out that Stepin Fetchit was black even underneath the makeup, and surely then Minstrelry can’t be racist because a black guy’s doing it. Just like how I know there’s no misogyny in porn because if that were the case, then all the “women” in porn would just be guys with their penis tucked between their legs. (If you are still wondering, yes, this is sarcasm)
Sorry, mostly just blowing off steam here at all the stupid on the internet today. Hopefully I’m not contributing to it too much.
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,
But buried in that is a whole lot of “Male Brain/Female Brain” “men are violent, women are peaceful”nonsense.
I know lots of people (men and women) who don’t do shooters.
Making more games which appeal to that market would be swell. Me, I’m mixed on shooters. If the story is just window dressing for shooting people… enh. Also, FP shooters can be hard for me. I have some joint problems and lots of minor mouse movement can fuck me up.
I, actually, just had a bit of private chat with a developer from Dragon Age Inquisitions about this because I downloaded DA (it was being given away for free by EA as a way to induce people to buy DAI), and without a scrollwheel mouse (I use a trackball) I can’t play it. I know him (didn’t know until recently he was a member of the DAI devteam) and was very apologetic; because it seems that didn’t really cross the radar while they were working on how to make the game. Too late to fix on DAI, but they will be thinking about it in future.
So a lot of people who might enjoy that aspect of games, may be (by virtue of tech-support, be excluded. Increasing that would be good too, but that’s all SJW nonsense.
@ktrantingredhead, when you wrote this:
“I’ve come to a simple conclusion… Men can be black, men can be gay, men can be transgender, therefore what happens to black people, gay people, and transgender people affects men so that means it’s important. Men can’t be women, so nobody really cares what happens to women.”
it pretty much completely ignored the actual reality of the trans* experience on Earth in the year 2014 and just how poorly we’re treated by just about everybody. If we’re not being shut out, we’re being targeted. There is not a single outspoken trans person on the Internet who does not have at least one web site dedicated especially to hurting that person. Do you think that Carolyn Petit has it any easier than Anita S. or Zoe Q. because she’s not a “Woman Born Woman?”
@pecunium I don’t mind shooters but they need an interesting setting and a good story. Generic War Simulator 4: Electric Boogaloo doesn’t do it for me.
Seeing so many disturbing arguments from my fellow gamers about how she “deserved” to be threatened with death, and even “wanted” to be threatened. That somehow, her stating her opinion means she should be willing to die for it.
@cassandrakitty No, as I said though it’s very hard to have sympathy alas you’d still deserve it. *sigh*
So…mean or funny? One of the GamerGaters I found arguing with ElizaBot responded to me tweeting the conversation and asked to debate me. Zie is now arguing with AutoFill.
Arguing with AutoFill? I may be a terrible person, but I find that hilarious.
Slight derail, City of Heroes was an awesome game and I’d sign up again in a heartbeat if it came back somehow.
I’m mixed on shooters, but that’s because of my personal history. I was in the Army for a long time (i.e. I was a “career” soldier), and the tactical aspect of a well structured shooter was really useful/relevant.
I spent a lot of time in a friends coffee shop basement, because we ran LAN-Parties and several of my compatriots (he among them) would run drills. But those games (e.g. Rainbow 6, etc.) never moved me playing solo. The Early CoD were ok, because the story aspects were adequate, but it was the teamwork, and bellowing sit-reps, and calls for help I really enjoyed.
And… when it came time to put things into practice… that helped a lot.
We call it “interactive fiction”. I myself have a couple IF games I’ve been working on the last year or so, though I’ve been procrastinating them while I’ve been editing my novel. I prefer IF to visual novels because of its superior and far more developed input method (word parser vs. multiple-choice choose-your-own-adventure). However, VNs have prettier pictures, more moé even, and a built-in otaku fanbase…
I was holding back my prediction that the Islamic State will eventually worm its way into the MRM, but there it is, an MRA already calling for MRM solidarity with the IS while hating on Malala. (Who, by the way, is also a socialist; this socialist approves.)
Actually, “Men Who Hate Women” sounds like the title of a self-help book (such as Women Who Love Too Much, an actual title). Even Larsson’s Swedish publisher tried to persuade him to change his chosen title from Män som hatar kvinnor to something snappier, but he refused, as it’s a precise definition of what we would later call “MRAs”. He hated the men who hate women with a passion which he otherwise reserved only for Nazis, whom he also insisted on calling out.
Incidentally, the Swedish title of the (unfortunately) final novel translates to “The castle in the air that exploded”, which I like to retranslate as “Exploding Castles in the Sky”. I don’t actually know much Swedish (despite my name, I know more German), but this is what I learned…
I’ve played a bit of VNs, IF, AND ASCII roguelikes from back in the day! (Haven’t yet played the text-only versions, ala Adventure!) I actually quite like their set-ups and enjoy what all those genres have to offer.
(Me and inurashii talked briefly about using Twine to create the most terrifying horror game ever, but it never quite panned out. Just as well, I think I’d have a really hard time doing that.)
Pocket Nerd said:
Pretty sure MRA’s & PUA’s also draw heavily from this demographic. Guessing there’s a whole lot of BLAME THE WIMMINZ overlap…as in they blame their lack of success, at least in part, on women’s gains. Not changes in the job market that are down to the Capitalist Overlords (who are still majority white guys, of course, at least in North America, and Western Europe. Not sure how mileage varies on other continents. )
@ Friday Jones:
Transmen generally are accepted post-transition, and I think that’s what RR was referring to. I doubt ranting red meant to invalidate transwomen?
But that having been said, transwomen, specifically transwomen of color, are at extreme risk in all categories of violence. To put it bluntly, they get murdered a lot, and I don’t imagine I need to tell you that. Nor do I have to tell you they get fired/discriminated against a lot.
IIRC, transmen’s wages also tend to improve slightly post transition, which ought to tell you something.
Transwomen are often rejected by women (why I do not get) and are looked at with horror by men. The men probably think who would want to be a woman when you were not one to begin with???
Never mind that you *really were a woman*, you just happened to be an xy-chromosome woman with a penis, or with ambiguous genitals that got surgically altered WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT and not to the correct sex (Looks royally pissed).
(That by the way is how I came to be against circumcision; if it is a human rights violation to alter an intersex child to please the parents {it is}, it really should be illegal to surgically alter a baby or child’s genitals for any non-urgent or cosmetic reason.)
Alrighty, done.
Oh, my statement contains sweeping ovegeneralizations too. Not all men hate transwomen nor do all born women hate all transwomen, and, Ok, I wasn’t trying to piss people off. If you don’t hate anybody on a non-individual basis, this wasn’t meant to apply to you.
…I don’t hate MRA’s /PUA’s as a group either, they just make me want to thump my head against something.
I’m tired. If what I say hacked you off, you probably have a right to be.
*Inserts US size 10 foot back in mouth*
@Skye
I always wanted to play that :- it looked so fun.
P.S. I hit a comedy gold mine with this person. I’m about to ramp up the nonsense and see just how dogged this gater is. I already had one earnestly argue with me when I suggested “gate” implied “fence” which means #GamerGate is a crime syndicate. I just…I can’t NOT fuck with them when they make it that easy.
@ Daeran…
I played Depression Quuest… It does have pictures. And music and some sound effects. I’m not a huge fan of choose your own adventure or mostly text based games myself because my concentration skills are horrible. It was an ok game, and really hit some chords with me (since I suffer from depression myself).
I’d love to see a point-n-click game made in the same vein.
Sorry about the double letters sometimes – my keyboard has issues.
Yikes. Sorry you went through that. I’d be pissed too.
Ryeash, It really was.
“crime syndicate.” That’s beautiful. 🙂
Thus Spake Zarablahlistic:
Yup. And libertarians, too — there’s a lot of overlap between the groups, because their fundamental grievance is essentially “I’m reasonably smart and I work damned hard. Why can’t I achieve the success and security my parents had?”
It’s always tempting to blame a nefarious Other for your own hardships, and that’s exactly what these groups are doing. Hey, guys, don’t feel bad about your dead-end job and lousy prospects for the future — it’s because wimminz are diluting the labor force. Or maybe because statist market regulation. Or welfare queens. Whatever, it’s not your fault. You’re just hard done by. (And being hard done by is the shit.)
In a way, the Dork Enlightenment guys represent a sort of syncretism between all these various white guy anxieties: “Feminists, socialists, and the untermenschen have all conspired together to steal my affluence and success — which is my birthright as a
white heterosexual cismaleSuperior Person! But soon we’ll overthrow the Cathedral and their multiculti Equalist HBD-denying running dogs, and then I, personally, will of course be a member of the new aristocracy!” (This last part is a bit like saying “Sure, I’m flat broke right now, but I spent my last ten bucks on lottery tickets, and once I win I’ll be super-rich! Just you wait and see!”)“It’s always tempting to blame a nefarious Other for your own hardships, and that’s exactly what these groups are doing.”
That is literally the last 300 years of reactionary “thought”. From the KKK to the NSDAP to ISIS to to Gamergate. For the most part, reactionary extremist groups draw their manpower and ideological passion from down on their luck young to middle age men who feel like they’ve been cheated out of something, usually money, power and sex, that they felt entitled to due to their culture. Instead of looking at the underlying causes of their frustration, they turn towards some kind of other – people of African descent, Jews, the West, etc and now social progressivism itself (not to say that those other movements weren’t misogynistic or hateful in other ways or twoards other groups)
What I’d love to know – ISIS, KKK, and National Socialism were funded by really rich people (Middle Eastern oil barons, Prussian aristocrats, plantation owners who lost their slaves but kept their land) who had a lot to gain from turning all that male anger and perceived lack of power and frustration at loss of privilege and status to ends that wouldn’t threaten them like say, socialism or at least greater democracy in the vein of OWS. I really do wonder if there’s a Man in the High Castle supporting Gamergate to keep those frustrated white guys from getting angry at them, or at least to keep them buying their crappy, banal, mass-marketed products which are examples of what Gamergate is supposedly against.
300 years? I’d say the tendency to project all one’s problems onto the nefarious actions of Those People Over There probably goes back for as long as humans have been sorting ourselves into groups, certainly at least as long as we’ve been organizing ourselves into tribes or nations.