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.
Oh look, His Assholiness Richard Dawkins is still acting like a clueless piece of fermented poop. Except that the poop kinda just sits there and doesn’t go out of its way to fling itself at people, so the poop wins the “Better at Acting Like a Decent Human Being than Richard Dawkins” award cookie of the hour.
In other news, water is still wet.
Today in “words mean things”.
Also side note – do we even still *use* Asperger’s? I heard that it was basically folded into the greater spectrum, and no longer exists as a seperate diagnosis. I feel that “high-functioning autistic” feels clunky as fuck though.
By my understanding, it’s no longer used clinically / has formally been folded into the ASD spectrum.
It’s such a wide spectrum, though, that I’m not going to blame someone for continuing to use the term, especially informally.
Personally, I find it still find it useful. If someone says, “high functioning ASD” I’m left wondering or asking what defines that (not as any kind of gate keeping mechanism, but so I can adjust my expectations for interaction and conversation accordingly – as I explained to my oldest about a boy firmly on the ASD spectrum in her martial arts class, he doesn’t ask her repeatedly about her birthdate and her middle name to be rude but because he wants to reach out to her and knows that those are things that you can ask other kids).
If someone says that they have an Asperger’s diagnosis, it tends to be useful shorthand for “will probably be bothered – or even overwhelmed – by visual/audible/tactile dissonance (or work very hard not to be); may misinterpret or may have to work to interpret emotional cues; may be overwhelmed by their own emotional responses; and if you want to know about any of their areas of interest, buckle up because they can probably tell you *everything* about them”.
Had* an Asperger’s diagnosis.
And they’re trying to pin that on “anti-gamergate” (whatever that’s supposed to be). I legit saw somebody tweet at Chris Kluwe while he was rage-tweeting about this, to ask him to consider that somebody might have done it with the gamergate hashtag as a false flag to make gamergate look bad. (Uh, gamergate already looked bad. That was actually the point of Felicia Day’s blog post.) There was a screenshot of a tweet from a gamergater who asked “you know it’s a hashtag and any random troll can use it, right?” (Ye goddess, the lack of self-awareness from these people is astounding, what the hell happened to our educational system?!) And I saw a screenshot from somebody who was monitoring the 8chan boards in the aftermath of the doxxing and rage-tweeting. They were talking about spinning the fallout. “If anybody says it was gamergate who doxxed her ask them for evidence!” This is all so depressing and sickening.
Dawkins is the use women’s rights as a beats tickets against religious people, particularly scary brown religious people, but never have to clean up your own backyard kind of “feminist.”
Beats tickets. Thanks, new phone.
@Sarah
(Ye goddess, the lack of self-awareness from these people is astounding, what the hell happened to our educational system?!)
Would I be exaggerating to say that NCLB and other neo-liberal educational “innovations” happened? My elementary school years were entirely pre-Bush (and I skipped a grade so at 25 I’m one of the youngest people who can realistically say that), and while I don’t know the age demographics of GGers, I’m pretty sure they’re in the 16-24 range. I do remember a lot more emphasis on empathy, sharing, and feelings in elementary school than now. I have a sneaking feeling that a lot of that stuff went by the boards in favor of more testing.
“Yes, we can no longer get funding to ask a question that has been asked OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN*…
….*generally by psych, not bio, but whatever”
Viscaria, I personally was led to believe that large parts bio didn’t touch certain things about humans because1. The general population disliked being compared to animals and 2. Generally felt icky when told “biology drives everything about you” 3. Human test subjects can be hard to find outside of the college demographics 4. Humans tend to have a lot of confounding factors that are hard to account for when testing.
Also, we already have psychology. The only reason I could see someone really pushing for moarz is for the lot that uses biology as a way to feel superior or for the social darwinism lot.
I used to read Popehat occasionally, it wasn’t perfect but I enjoyed some of Ken’s posts. But… Clark’s GG post was enough to turn me off the site forever. His comments towards his detractors are even worse (“Here are the names of three women, one of them is a narcissistic liar but because I’m not saying which one it is I’m not attacking anybody” – seriously.) and Ken has dropped in with a bit of hyperbole defending Clark.
Bleargh.
Clark’s claim that this is all about some centuries-old culture war and the anti-GG people obviously think that everyone who disagrees with them doesn’t deserve to live was really the last straw for me.
I did enjoy the typo in the title though.
So true.
Him and a host of other atheist dudebros.
This part is almost insightful.
@sunnysombera, No, didn’t mean to come off all snarky at you. Sorry to have come over that way. I was genuinely grateful you’d asked.
I admit there was supposed to be a smidgeon of snark about whether I should care about Ken, Clark, etc, since I’d never heard of them before and didn’t particularly like what I was hearing now. Sorry to have overdone it.
Thanks everyone for clarifying. /sincere
IQ tests don’t measure anything biological so why would biologists study people using IQ tests anyway? The only thing I could think of is that they might look at brain imaging scans and check for differences in people who get high vs. low IQ scores.
Of course, we’re now discovering that environment can impact the brain. So a study like that would have to be longitudinal and start at a very young age if it wants to have a chance at measuring inherent intelligence that is free of the influences of poverty, sexism and racism.
Clearly Cameralady harasses in exactly the same way that a man might-whether she is actually a woman/ lesbian (sounds like it might be still open for conjecture) or not. It makes not a bit of difference, those remarks are pure horrible harassment, designed to undermine and humiliate her target.
BTW – are a lot of people in US on the ‘spectrum’? It seems that this is discussed a lot, but in the UK this is really not something that comes up. It certainly seems that a lot of people use it as an excuse for utterly obnoxious behaviour, which is a bit like assuming all schizophrenics are violent, or all people with Tourettes use abusive language.
Yeah, Ken has a long history of signal-boosting and helping arrange legal support for people being hit with SLAPP lawsuits; he certainly realizes that corporations don’t need help with their free speech rights, but that individual people on the receiving end of lawsuits often do. Some of his work tracking and cataloging various actively vexatious litigious corporations has been very useful; for some long-running lawsuits from fraudulent organizations, Popehat is the best place to catch up thanks to his work at collecting all the reports together in one place.
On the down side, Ken has no problem sharing a blogging platform with Clark, and Clark is practically the epitome of ‘I am so very smart and rational, and you are a poopyhead if you don’t agree with me’.
Since mental health diagnoses are as much an art as a science, there are cultural factors that influence it. In the US the psychiatric culture has a tendancy to diagnose elementary school boys with ASD that may be more pronounced than it is in the UK.
That does not mean that those diagnosed with ASD don’t “really” have it, just that behavioral and mental traits that a UK psychiatrist might see as leading to some other diagnosis, or to no diagnosis at all, are more likely to lead to an ASD diagnosis in the US.
Yessss. Thank you Viscaria.
In my experience, conservatives are quite happy to appropriate the gains of progressives from 40 years earlier, in order to justify their attacks on others with a ‘well our culture is intrinsically superior so we must beat them into understanding this.’
(Also Dawkins should take a fucking good look at his fellow travellers, by now he must have more religious right people agreeing with him than atheists…)
Dawkins is about as much a feminist as I am a formula one driver.
Can you be a feminist and a raging sexist rape-apologist asshole at the same time?
Dawkins appears to be trying his best to square that particular circle.
If Richard Dawkins is a feminist, I am smörgåstårta. Because saying stuff makes it so.
(/sarcasm. I am not a cake).
Would be a church so broad the roof would fall down, that.
As your resident Swede I must point out to Misha that a smörgåstårta is rather an enormous sandwich then a cake. 🙂
But no, Dawkins isn’t a feminist. I remember how he chimed in with the Rebecca Watson-haters, going something along the lines of “Watson has no reason to complain about anything, because she lives in the US where women aren’t oppressed, unlike in MUSLIM countries where women REALLY have reason to complain”.
The belief that IQ can be more properly measured by biologists is stunning in its Dunning Kruger construction. There’s no one IQ test (setting aside the ones targetting either extreme of the curve) because psychologists don’t agree on what IQ is – best definition I have seen is that IQ is what IQ tests measure.
They are incredibly culturally specific (language of the test, content changes depending on country, e.g. a person in NZ won’t be asked to name 5 US presidents), and you can train for parts of them. The scores are age-standardised because otherwise IQ would increase with age, which gives the lie to it being some type of fundamentally unchanging property.
And IQ tests have to be adjusted every 10-20 years to make them more difficult because otherwise subsequent generations score higher than earlier generations. So unless you think that students in the 1940s, say, were particularly stupid, and students in the 1920s were even more dumb, something cultural is going on.
Any any test affected by culture is not objective.
It also omits factors such as moral reasoning, authoritarianism and altruism, which I would expect to be related to how well a person fits within their society – surely a huge signal for intelligence.
As you can tell, I’m not impressed by anyone who boasts about having a high IQ. It’s not a badge of honour.
And nth’ing everyone else who is appalled at the conflation of Aspergers and like conditions with arseholeness. Being an arsehole is not actually one of the diagnostic criteria for any of them, which does strongly suggest that being an arsehold is entirely unrelated to one’s mental/cognitive capabilities. That people would use it as the go-to defence completely disgusts me, because it – again – tosses people with particular mental/cognitive states under the bus.