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.
I was not certain where to put this, so I figured I would put it in the most active place at the moment. My apologies if this was the wrong thing to do.
I was going through my email today when I ran across these little gems that are, on closer inspection, pretty scary. The MRA mindset seems to be filtering up.
The first explains that young women are just too stupid to vote and serve on juries. It is from Media Matters:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/10/21/right-wing-media-discourage-young-women-from-vo/201259
This one, which the MRA community could use to “prove” that only mothers abuse and kill children, has a petition with it. It is from Change.org:
https://www.change.org/p/ross-a-atstupenas-arrest-raymond-rivera-for-the-crimes-against-his-children?alert_id=bWXYGTjrDG_D2a5h0BXJeJ5bsZryBWQKTGwHBdwi5t6d1LmalpFUI4%3D&utm_campaign=165289&utm_medium=email&utm_source=action_alert
I have been spending a bit more time looking at the mainstream news sources, and those groups that comb through them, in order to get some idea about where the not-necessarily-internet culture seems to be going with some feminist issues.
Oh, I knew that. And I admit that it is very painful, but I keep telling myself that Joss Whedon KNEW that Baldwin was an asshole and hired him because it was not a stretch to play that part.
And then I shake my fist in the aur and wail JAYNE!!!! HOW COULD YO?!?!
But the rest of the cast still makes my ‘verse shiny. 🙂
Not to mention self-reflection and personal insight. The whole concept of IQ turns into a trap: the idea that intelligence makes them immune to error.
It doesn’t help that we have a somewhat authoritarian view of great minds in science in school. We memorize the successes of scientists, but not the failures. Smart people can be dead wrong, ignorant dreamers can make lucky guesses, but only the methods of science can tell the two apart.
@leftwingfox: and empathy. 🙂
I was simply trying to point out, and probably not very well, that free speech has limits. There are things that, if said, can create harm. All freedoms come with the responsibility to use them within certain limits.
Sending death and rape threats comes to mind. Even if they were not illegal, which I believe they are, they can cause intense stress and damage to the people to whom they are sent. The yelling fire in a theater came to mind because my grandmother told me, when I was a kid, that it had happened a few times and people were trampled trying to get out.
THIS is what the true Sarkeesian effect IS in a blog comment nutshell; “I like this particular piece of popular culture even though I’m aware of (and understand) some problematic content.”
@twincats:
If I ruled the world it’d be illegal to start criticizing Sarkeesian until you read AND UNDERSTOOD this article: How To Be A Fan Of Problematic Things.
(disclaimer: do not actually want to force people to read things. do not actually have dictatorial ambitions. ignore the doomsday device behind the curtain.)
I had to take a GenEd psychology course as a college freshman almost 50 years ago, and the principal instructor quipped that IQ could best be defined as “that which is measured by IQ tests” — just what Pallygirl said. Yes, IQ probably has some rough relationship to that elusive quality we call “intelligence.” But leaving aside issues of social and cultural biases, the idea that “intelligence” in all its various aspects can be accurately measured and then reduced to one integer value between 1 and 200 is, if you think about it, not very intelligent. What about creativity, flexibility, etc., etc,? How do you decide the relative weight given to spatial skills vs. verbal skills? A test with, say, 10 spatial questions and 5 verbal questions will probably give you significantly different scores than a test with the reverse proportions. And then, by and large, you either make a test that has “right” answers, which has obvious limitations (since IRL you mostly have to solve problems for which the answer is not already known and definitely not presented as multiple-choice), or you use a more subjective test that may elicit more creative responses but is, well, subjectively scored.
The irony in my personal experience is that one of the professors who gave a couple of lectures in that class, R. J. Herrnstein, went on to co-write the famous racist book “:The Bell Curve”, which used relatively small differences in IQ test results to argue that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to whites and therefore doomed to be an underclass forever.
I suppose that there might be a tiny difference in intelligence between men and women, but any test developed to identify such a difference would have its results predetermined by the decisions made about what weight to give to various intellectual skills. In other words, you’d get some bright shining numbers but they would be invalidated by baked-in biases.
The thing about average results is that, well, they’re averages. They don’t tell us anything about individual prowess. If the bell curve for women’s IQ peaks 10 points behind men’s, there’s still a large subset of women who are more intelligent than most men.
It’s like the racist “argument from sports”, that misses spectacularly the fact that the best white basketball player still plays basketball better than 99.99999999% of humanity.
” If the bell curve for women’s IQ peaks 10 points behind men’s, there’s still a large subset of women who are more intelligent than most men.”
If the bell curve for women’s IQ peaks 10 points behind men’s, that almost certainly means that there is a horrendous bias in the test.
@seraph4377
… Every last one of them. Hah. Problem solved.
I have Asperger’s as well (an explanation, not an excuse!) and I still get confused to all hell by what I see as being illogical thought processes, so thankyou for explaining it for me! ^^;;
The IQ bell curves for men and women have essentially identical means, but the men have a larger standard deviation (the bell is wider for them). I’ve seen this parsed as men having more geniuses but also more mentally handicapped people, whereas women are all just kind of average. I don’t know how that explains Marilyn vos Savant.
My point is that there are both obvious and subtle social and cultural biases in these tests, which are almost impossible to eliminate — you can possibly compensate for ones you’re aware of, but what about the the ones that are so deeply embedded in the culture that you don’t even notice them. For example, how do you balance spatial skills (at which men are traditionally better — possibly for mostly cultural reasons) against verbal skills (at which women are traditionally better — possibly also for mostly cultural reasons).
And then you have the problem that if you need to come up with a numeric result, then you are forced into questions that have right/wrong answers. The analogy I have used is that of driving offenses. Reckless driving is more dangerous than speeding, but it’s more or less impossible to quantify — while speeding is very easy to quantify. Spatial/mathematical skills are generally the easiest to quantify, so one would expect IQ tests to have a bias in favor of them. My main point is that it is folly to express an extremely complex phenomenon like human intelligence as a simple three-digit integer and expect that integer to have more than a very rough relevance.
There is a misconception that if you can come up with a numeric result for something you are practicing real science. Quantification is not everything.
This does remind me of the awful “scientific” reason for keeping women and ethnic minorities out of universities: their brains were, on average, smaller than the average for white men, so clearly higher education would do nothing for them.
This is the sort of shite you get when STEM people think they can do social sciences, with no training.
When one is doing social science research on, just for example, the distribution of intelligence between men and women, and between people of different racial categories, the null hypothesis, the one that is actually being tested, should always be, “There is no difference and there is nothing to see here.” It’s only when a correlation is not only observed, but all potential reasons why the correlation might be spurious have been eliminated, that we can set the null hypothesis aside.
There are a lot of reasons why the correlation between IQ scores and racial categorization could be spurious. If someone wants to claim that this is a genetic trait, then that person needs to systematically examine and reject all of those other explanations. I have yet to see anyone actually do this.
There are a lot of reasons why the standard deviation for men’s IQ scores might be greater than the standard deviation for women’s IQ scores. Until someone examines and eliminates all of those possible alternative explanations, the null hypothesis, that there is no real underlying difference, remains unrefuted.
But if the scores don’t mean a bloody thing, then there’s no point doing the measuring in the first place. It comes back to the tests being reliable (e.g. high test-retest reliability), but not valid.
It’s like me trying to use a formula to estimate height from the length of people’s feet. I’ll get the same result every time for the same foot length, but it’s hardly an accurate measure of height. When then begs the question of why even measure in the first place, let alone do any type of comparisons/statistical tests.
They solved that problem in the SATs I understand by reducing the value of the verbal skills section. Or did they remove it entirely? I don’t remember.
The scores are not completely meaningless, but the meaning has to taken from the context of the test. The test is biased. The choice of what factors to test, and the choice of how to measure those factors, are culturally-biased choices.
This means that the top end scores are going to correlate pretty reliably with intelligence. If you meet someone who scored 160 on an IQ test and talk to them, you are going to find that this is a quite intelligent person.
The middle portion and bottom end scores, however, do not correlate well at all. People who are both culturally matched to the test and quite intelligent (in the “correct” ways, see: cultural bias) are going to get top scores. If someone doesn’t get a top score, that person might have failed the test, or might have been failed by the test, and there’s not any good way to categorize which failure occurred (or if there was a combination).
My point of view has always been that someone claiming that observed differences in intelligence or skills or personality between women and men (or racial/ethnic groups) are biological rather than socially-conditioned must bear a quite heavy burden of proof. I’m very skeptical about such claims. I’ve never questioned that IQ tests have some relevance — after all, I was one of the winners in that game. But that you can use IQ scores to “prove” that one group is intellectually superior to another seems like hogwash (technical term) to me.
I’ve always been interested by the group called Mensa, which is composed of people who do very well on IQ tests, but a very large portion of them have very modest real-world accomplishments. I have a feeling that a lot of intellectual abilities are not being measured by standard IQ tests.
I always scored in the top 0.1% on standardized tests, and I feel that puts me in an ideal position to criticize these tests — nobody can accuse me of sour grapes. The principal argument made in favor of the SAT* has been that it correlates well with success in college. Well, duh. People who come from college-educated parents and excellent schools do well in college. Who’d ‘a thunk it! All that they really have proved is that the SAT and colleges have similar cultural biases.
*For non-USians, the SAT has been the principal college-entrance exam for US students for many decades.
Stating that IQ tests measure intelligence, and then claiming that a high IQ shows greater intelligence, is circular reasoning.
IQ tests were created to predict success in school, so that students at risk of lower scholastic achievement could receive early intervention to help them. They do that very well. But that is differen to intelligence.
Researchers in intelligence disagree over what intelligence is.
Excellent points, GrumpyOldMan. There is, however, also the issue of defining intelligence itself. We tend to think of intelligence as belonging to “left-brain” activities – language, math, logic, etc. How do you measure “right-brain” intelligence – musical, artistic, dreaming, intuitive, etc.?
Those in the “right-brain” are considered not really, truly intelligence and are, furthermore, considered “female.” (I am putting concepts in quotes that I consider rather hinky)
Then there are emotional intelligence, social intelligence…I could go on. As a culture we have so narrowed the definition of “intelligence” that it effectively leaves out so much of who and what we really are. We throw away and devalue so much, and then we say that those things we do not value must be “female,” when the truth is that we are ALL different mixes of all of these and more.
I believe that the urge to quantitize things like intelligence is at least partially explained by the fact that you can run statistical analysis on a set of numbers. You can’t do it if you don’t first reduce the trait to be analyzed (like intelligence) to a number. There are sophisticated statistical software packages available these days for not very much money, but they only work with numbers so of course that means everything needs to be a number.
If Richard Dawkins is as wise as he thinks he is, he’d know that the concept is ill defined and researchers disagree about it. I learned that in my undergrad psych classes ffs.
This, but also another less sciency need for it: in bureaucracies (both public and private), a number looks nice in a report, even if the number is completely meaningless and in fact obscures the complexity of the problem. IIRC the concept is called being ‘exactly wrong’.
That said, it ties in with the STEM worldview too: they pretend to know how the world works if they can put a number or a logical theorem behind it, and any other knowledge isn’t ‘really’ knowledge (just wishy-washy liberal arts), and attempts to critique that number is also invalid because they aren’t presented in the right form.