Sexual harassment: it’s not just something that dudes do. And here’s a little story from the GamerGate wars on Twitter to demonstrate this.
Yesterday, an anti-GamerGate Twitterer known as @Auragasmic directed a question to Adobe Software. And got an indignant reply from a GamerGater known as Cameralady.
https://twitter.com/The_Camera_Girl/status/524654719982391297
Now, this response is interesting for several reasons.
For one, Cameralady on Twitter, called that because she is the, er, camera lady for the YouTube channel ShortFatOtaku, is the same Cameralady I ran across repeatedly when going through those logs of the #burgersandfries IRC channel, one of the main organizing hubs of the campaign of harassment that became #GamerGate.
Cameralady, one of the angriest commenters in that angry bunch, showed up in the IRC channel on August 23rd ready to do battle with Zoe Quinn, who she claimed had once “belittled me for having autism.”
She turned out to be an indefatigable researcher, digging up a great deal of dirt about Quinn’s past, including what she said was a photo of Quinn at age 13. And she passed along lurid gossip from Zoe’s terrible ex about her sex life.
Here’s the charming way Cameralady introduced herself to the IRC channel, the log of which you can find online here. (I’ve removed some unrelated comments, indicating cuts with ellipses. )
Aug 23 01.51.50 <Cameralady> fuck zoe quinn
…
Aug 23 01.52.08 <Cameralady> she’s not interested in equality she’s interested in stuffing her flappy cunt with flaacid boy penises
Aug 23 01.52.14 <TechPriest> So your in this to take her down, and dehumanize her because she deserves it….
Aug 23 01.52.38 <foTTS> To be honest, I wouldn’t credit her with depression quest since she only provided 75 lines for it, Cameralady
Aug 23 01.52.54 <Cameralady> that’s less than the lines of cum she’s swallowed…
Aug 23 01.53.26 let’s al capone her
On another occasion, she thought about releasing all the dirt she found on Quinn to the world.
Aug 23 18.57.47 <Cameralady> there’s a part of me that is evil and says MAKE A BIG DOXX AND RELEASE IT AND SHIT ON ZOE MOOOORE …
Aug 23 18.57.57 <Cameralady> but the rational part of me is “what no what will that even do”
Aug 23 18.58.18 <W334800> exactly, give her more attention her current monstrous form craves
Aug 23 18.58.34 <rd0952> attention is not the same as punishment
You may also recall in one of my previous posts about the IRC log that I quoted someone fantasizing about starting a relationship with Quinn just so she could “dump her in the most brutal, heartwrenching way possible.” That was Cameralady.
So that’s one of the interesting things about this alleged opponent of harassment.
The other one?
Well, shortly after Tweeting about how only anti-GamerGaters harass people, she sexually harassed an anti-GamerGater.
https://twitter.com/The_Camera_Girl/status/524660916810678272
When someone called her on it, Cameralady accused him of homophobia:
https://twitter.com/The_Camera_Girl/status/524668632476176385
No, I’m pretty sure what we’re talking about isn’t lesbianism (or misogyny) but harassment. When you say, to a woman you’re having an argument with on Twitter, that you want her to prove something “preferably in a post-coitus conversation with me, grrl,” that’s harassment, not a clever pickup line. Regardless of your gender.
Especially since this isn’t the first time that Cameralady has crudely “propositioned” Izzy Mariana on Twitter. Indeed, a week ago, they had this exchange:
Indeed, to even call these “propositions” is a bit misleading. These are attempts to rattle Mariana by addressing her in a crudely sexual way, not serious attempts to ask her out.
Are any GamerGaters calling out Cameralady for this behavior? No, they’re trying to pretend that she’s being oppressed as a lesbian — for sexually harassing a woman who already told her to get lost.
GamerGaters always deflect accusations of harassment by saying that “we don’t know if the harassers are GamerGaters.” Well, here’s an example of a rather prominent GamerGater sexually harassing a woman in broad daylight on Twitter — and all her GamerGater comrades can do is deny and deflect and throw out accusations of homophobia.
Oh, and give Cameralady virtual high-fives for her harassing tweet — which at the moment boasts seven favs and retweets, all of them from active GamerGate supporters.
Such ethics. So anti-harassment.
EDITED TO ADD: According to this Storify, Cameralady has done this to at least one other person.
Wow. Sounds like she has some real “issues”…I”m thinking anger management might be one of them. And pretty low self-esteem. And sociopathic levels of lack of empathy.
All in all, just your average GGer.
Now there is someone that has swallowed the patriarchy empanada whole.
Here’s more evidence of her using sexual harassment https://storify.com/strictmachine/keep-your-pants-on
You people are mocking an autistic person with a whole article and a comment saying that “she has issues”.
I hope you’re real fucking proud of yourselves.
… umm….
…
Ethics in game journalism?
I was involved in the comment thread yesterday, and what sickened me the most was how much pleasure camera lady was getting from the fact she knew her sexual comments were making Izzy uncomfortable. It was borderline sadistic.
Every gamergater that was involved in the thread tried to make excuses for her behavior (Either with “This isn’t enough proof”, “She’s just flirting with you, are you a homophobe?”, or “It’s not sexual harassment, she’s a lesbian”).
Here they are trying to explain it away: https://mobile.twitter.com/CelticSteelNY/status/524663395497558016
Yeah, I’m not sure the shirt in that title picture is the best way to say I’m a Radiohead fan!
Like I mentioned in the last post..GG is dissolving to it’s core and just the genuine sadists,)feeding like fleas upon human misery) … and obsessively desperate remain (desperately trying to fill a void)
Ugh. CameraLady is on her twitter channel as well, vehemently asserting that she was simply flirting, and that flirting was not harassment, and that calling it harassment was being sex-negative. FFS.
I had experience with that today when someone tweeted #stopgamergate2014 asking for an example of harassment, because he didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about, so I tweeted him some of what I’ve experienced directly as a result of being a woman in gaming. He proceeded to discount every one of my experiences with slightly worse examples of treatment he said he had gone through – which included a gaming stalker leaving dead animals in his mailbox apparently – and saying that because he didn’t believe any of what he’d gone through was harassment, nothing I had was harassment either.
I see that “what I believe is harassment and what you believe is harassment is different therefore you’re wrong” is today’s party line to obfuscate and dismiss anyone who is trying to show examples of harassment.
So, sadist as well. Good to know. Building a profile of the typical GGer.
Sociopathic tendencies (we all have some; they have them in spades).
Poor impulse control.
Anger management difficulties.
Sadism.
Check. What else? Other than raging sexism, of course.
Being a lesbian does not give you carte blanche to harass women.
It’s funny. Anti-feminists think feminists want women to be held to lower standards than men. But when feminists hold a woman to the same standards as men by saying “don’t sexually harass women” they’re the ones who are insisting that it’s somehow OK for a lesbian to harass someone. So much projection.
They really have no idea what misogyny or homophobia actually is, do they?
She thinks she’s the Schroedinger’s Cat of #shields.
But she’s still up for murdering kittens.
Fuck off. Being on the autism spectrum is not an excuse for harassment. It’s insulting to autistic people to say that it is.
As the sibling of an autistic person, fuck you. Go step on legos.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
All they know is that they are words that make them feel bad, which are invoked occasionally when women or gay people are involved. And they’re desperately confused about why the same words don’t make the other side feel bad.
They actually hold her up as an example of someone who has been bullied or harrassed. Scroll to the bottom.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/from-gamergate-to-unicef
This smells so much of a regular male misogynist impersonating a lesbian… do we know for sure this is actually a woman?
I guess they think they’re slurs against “normality”?
Oh, and apparently that image showing Brianna Wu harassing cameralady is fake.
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2jylzd/re_twitter_and_false_accounts/
Okay, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, lady, and assume everything was done with pure intentions.
In that hyper-generous framework, you make stupid-as-hell generalization fallacies and should stop.
She also propositioned Zoe Quinn a few days ago. (Which TOTALLY was an actual offer and not a thinly-veiled excuse to find more dirt on her/give her more shit to deal with, I’m sure.) Cameralady really isn’t a very nice person!
This is not a post mocking an autistic person for being autistic, or even for being oblivious in social situations and not picking up on cues or what have you. It’s a post about someone causing deliberate harm through harassment. No one here is claiming that behaviour is caused by autism.
Also, it doesn’t matter the root cause for the harassment. The harassing behaviour needs to stop. (I can’t find the link to the post about stepping on feet, but I think that it applies here, does anyone know what I’m talking about?)
Seconding Luzbelitx. The GGers have a lot of sock puppets, the belief that claiming membership in a marginalized group armors them against all criticism from lefties, and no idea how to actually behave like anything other than privileged white dudebros on the net. The construction “I’m a (member of not one but three marginalized groups) and it’s anti-gamergaters who are the real harassers” makes me suspicious as hell.
Of course, Judgybitch is no sockpuppet, despite being a living caricature, so it’s not impossible…
Cameralady keeps saying that being called an aspie is a derogatory insult. But it’s not. It’s how the majority of people with asperger’s and who work & live with them refer to them, it’s a fond term for it. All of my aspie friends use the term to describe themselves and actually prefer being called an aspie. Just googling the term “aspie” and your first page results will include individuals, therapists and support organizations using the term to identify themselves.
Her asperger’s is NOT the problem here, she’s just a jerk. She’s just using her various diagnosis and labels to try and hide her TRUE identity.
I had to leave and go to the bus stop so wasn’t able to expand on my earlier reply to ggiddyupdude.
Saying that autism excuses or explains harassment is wrong on several levels. It’s used often as a silencing tactic when women speak out against harassment. It belittles autistic people by suggesting that they are incapable of learning right from wrong or modifying their behavior. It also throws autistic people who are kind and don’t harass people under the bus and adds to negative stereotypes about them.
To my knowledge, my brother has never sexual ly harassed anyone, but once, years ago there was a man at the gym that he teased and bothered. It seems that he found the noises this man made while working out hilarious. Once my dad caught wind of the situation, he talked to my brother, told he was bothering this guy and told him to knock it off. And he did stop harassing this guy. He may not have understood on his own that the behavior was inappropriate, but he was able to learn that it was and change his behavior.
My brother is also probably far lower functioning than Camera Lady. His IQ is far below average and he can barely even use a computer. If he can learn right from wrong, so can she.