Do you remember when #GamerGate was young? You know, back before #NotYourShield and Vivian James and bizarrely complicated conspiracy theories involving Gawker, Weird Twitter and some sort of international Jewish conspiracy?
Remember when #GamerGate was still called #BurgersAndFries, and the angry gamebro army was focused on the real enemy of all that is good and true – a young game designer by the name of Zoe Quinn?
If you’ve been feeling nostalgic for those good old days, you’re in luck. A sprawling blog post by a female friend of Quinn’s obsessive, accusatory ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni takes us back to the dog days of August when his even more sprawling thezoepost was unleashed upon the world.
Rachel M, who describes herself as an “engineer, designer, accidental writer,” recalls the months she spent with Gjoni as he began to process his breakup with Quinn and marshal his arguments against her. She was there when he posted thezoepost, making her a sort of midwife of what became #GamerGate.
It’s no secret whose side of this controversy she’s on. Her depictions of Gjoni are written with affection and indulgence; her portrayal of Quinn is brutal and a step or two beyond unfair. When Rachel M pretends for a moment that she’s not “someone with an ax to grind against Zoe,” that’s because her little hatchet is already buried in Quinn’s back.
If there is a point to GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry (Not that sorry) beyond making Gjoni look angelic and Quinn look like a demon, I’m not sure what it is.
After presenting us with a series of uninteresting and unnecessary details of her own life, Rachel M repeats a number of largely discredited myths about Quinn and even seems to have made up a new myth of her own, accusing Quinn of “telling Eron she believed I was lying about my PTSD” in an online chat.
Never mind that the chat log itself, which Gjoni pasted into his zoepost, and which Rachel M also pasted into an earlier post of her own, suggests that Quinn was dubious not about Rachel M’s medical diagnoses but about Rachel’s intentions towards her then-boyfriend.
As I searched through the screenshots on Eron’s site to see if Rachel M’s recollections of this exchange matched the evidence, I was struck again by the utter surreality of #BurgersAndFries and its successor #GamerGate.
Because, the thing is, I don’t want to be reading these chat logs. I shouldn’t be reading these chat logs. These are private moments between two people at a vulnerable moment in both of their lives. They shouldn’t have been posted on the internet in an act of petty revenge against an ex-girlfriend. They shouldnt’ be on the internet at all.
The fact that the details of Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni’s sex lives and their messy breakup are so central to the conflicts now roiling the video game world that I have to turn to these screenshots to fact check this post is weird and wrong and rather depressing. Zoe Quinn isn’t the president, caught pantsless in flagrante delicto with a Haliburton lobbyist. She’s a video game developer, and the details of her sexual history are none of our fucking business.
None of this matters much to Rachel M, who seems to have become trapped in Gjoni’s reality distortion field, borrowing some of his narcissism for herself. She describes Gjoni’s decision to “go public” with the ugly details of his breakup with Quinn and her various alleged infidelities and lies:
Eron talked about going public. He talked about panic, about awareness, about making sure that people knew what they were getting into, about taking a hit – there’d be a hit, for speaking publicly against a woman in any field, but especially against a woman with Zoe’s position and friends in progressive indie gaming – for the good of all, eventually.
This is so perverse and backwards and wrong it’s hard not to wonder if Gj himself wrote it.
He talked about evaluating the risk to his current job, his future jobs, his family, himself. You know, whether he’d get stalked or murdered for this. He talked about the danger to Zoe, about how he could minimize personal harm toward her, whether he could effectively defray harassment towards her.
Well, he did a bangup job of that, huh?
He settled on a few plans toward that end, and decided the risk to himself was worth it. Even the total loss cases for him still meant greater than zero public knowledge about Zoe’s manipulative behavior, her role as an abuser, and the number of lies she’d told. Anything was better than the way it was now.
Really? Because for a lot of people, not just Quinn, things have gotten a lot worse since Gjoni launched his attack against his ex.
Rachel M is actually quite aware of this; indeed, she notes explicitly that the movement that was born out of Gjoni’s long post has directed much of its fury towards women.
Zoe received floods of hate and threats within hours of the post going live. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic, was forced to cancel a speech at USU after receiving death threats referencing the École Polytechnique Massacre … Brianna Wu, Liana K, and anyone who identifies as a feminist within gaming — they’ve been getting smeared.
Women in games, creators and critics alike, are working through a tide of hate that’s reached the front page of the New York Times. Each new story makes me a little sicker.
Yet somehow she’s still “not that sorry” she helped Gjoni to launch the movement that caused all this. She thinks it’s all somehow … good for women. Because people now know what she thinks is the truth about Zoe Quinn. She ends her post with these bizarre assertions:
I want more women in tech and media, at all levels—in development, in journalism, in the games and books and comics themselves.
I want those women to be as safe, respected, creative, and supported as any man, and I do not want them unprepared in an industry with Zoe Quinn.
And this, I guess, is how someone who helped Gjoni to usher in a hateful, spiteful, reactionary “movement” that has left numerous women fearing for their lives convinces herself that she’s on the side of the angels after all.
EDIT: I corrected Rachel M’s name. No idea why my brain turned her name into Sarah.
@M. the Social Justice Ranger
Made my day <3
Sean Wednesday:
Nope, you’ve misread. The OP is referring to Rachel M., who includes a number of boring and unnecessary details of HER life before launching into her lavish defense of Gjoni.
So I read Rachel M’s post, and what really struck me was that she seems like someone who on some level knows that they were involved in a petty, cruel and meaningless thing, and they really want to find a way of making their actions seems less awful.
I think that we all do a bit of that when we’re misguided teenagers, but not as adults.
Wow. Tribalism sucks.
ZQ acted horribly. Just admit it.
Yep, sleeping with some guy when not in any kind of relationship with anyone sure is a horrible act. Except for the part where it isn’t.
And yes, Abuse victims have a right to publicly call out there abusers. It should happen more often.
@Policy,
No. What is horrible is hitting most of the bullet points in the Emotional abuse checklist (like the one that has been posted here).
When assholes like Heartiste do it, it’s all condemnation. But because this was a girl who is getting harassed, you want to pretend she is nothing but 100% victim and can’t even apply the same standard to her behavior that you do to others.
She emotionally abused Eron. She is an abuser. End of story.
@libarbarian: *ZQ is alleged to have acted horribly. Fixed that for you.
Even if every last one of the allegations was true, we know for a fact that Gjoni has been acting horribly, because he’s being doing so very loudly and publicly. The resulting hate campaign that *drove Quinn out of her ever-lovin house*, along with other notable women in games, is objectively horrible, and way out of proportion of anything that Quinn is alleged to have done.
Now, there is of course also the tiny detail that some of the allegations against Quinn have been flatly disproven, some are unproven, some are weird (i.e. “oh no she was intimate with other dudes when we weren’t together”), and the vast majority are not a matter of public concern. There is also the tiny detail that the people lobbying the allegations against Quinn are not demonstrating themselves to be particularly integrous in how or why they’re doing so.
But sure, not censuring her for vague, unproven accusations while in the middle of being horrified at her harassment is tribalism. Got it.
And let me states that threatening suicide to manipulate your partner is just contemptible. I watched a friend get tortured for years by a boyfriend who threatened to kill himself everytime she even hinted at the fact that she wanted out. It took her 4 years to finally get the strength to say “I won’t be responsible for your decision”. Guess what … he DID kill himself several years later. I shrugged. Any sympathy was buried by years of watching him use that threat to drag down other people too.
No one “deserves” to be the target of an internet hate-mob, but this situation has no good guys. It just has a bunch of bad people (ZQ, EG, and the GGers).
OK, libarbarian. Zoe Quinn acted horribly. She is an emotional abuser. I have not read thezoepost and I have no intention of ever reading it. But, as Michelle said, let’s assume every single thing Gjoni said about Quinn is “absolutely, 100%, undeniably, completely fact-checked and certifiably true”.
It still does not justify Gjoni mobilizing a hate mob against her. Because that’s what he did. He wasn’t just “calling out an abuser”. He wasn’t just doing a feelingsdump on his blog to get it all off his chest. He was spamming internet cesspools like Something Awful with his post before he made the WordPress account. 4chan “found it” my ass, 4chan didn’t just “find” a random post on a brand new blog within an hour of publication. He made sure they found it, because he knew 4chan long and colourful history of launching harassment campaigns against women, particularly women in the gaming industry. And he was right there in burgerandfries coaching the hate mob after the shit hit the fan. It’s all there in the chatlogs he assumed would never see the light of day.
Zoe Quinn is an alleged emotional abuser. Eron Gjoni is a verified emotional abuser.
Except that wasn’t the end of the story, was it? If that had been the end of the story, we wouldn’t be talking about it right now. The story hasn’t actually ended yet. EG decided to not merely “call out” ZQ, he decided to ruin her life. And his stated motive:
This is his stated motive, in his words, when he was asked, in words, why he was trying to ruin ZQ’s life.
Frankly I don’t believe EG’s version of events, but even if I grant everything he claims, his reaction is hateful, vengeful, vindictive and ruinous, and not proportionate to anything she may have done to him. And you are defending a hateful, vengeful, vindictive and ruinous person … why?
(blockquote)When assholes like Heartiste do it, it’s all condemnation. But because this was a girl who is getting harassed, you want to pretend she is nothing but 100% victim and can’t even apply the same standard to her behavior that you do to others.(/blockquote)
Yeah, and when assholes like Heartiste do it, they also get constant death and rape threats for several months, they get doxxed, they privacy violated etc., because that`s how our society fairly and proportionately punishes abusers regardless their gender. Right? No.
If some girl would publish a theheartistepost, she would be the one getting harassed and Heartiste would get high-fives for “screwing over that crazy bitch”.
Also, I have really hard time to believe that you sincerely care for abuse victims.
Drdg-
Yeah, that’s one of the red flags, ain’t it (the biggest being that he was actively shopping for harassers to “get revenge” on the woman who slighted him and dare fall of his pedastal and the second biggest being his disingenuous bullshit he sold everywhere about being the clueless berk whose innocent tale begat great evil until it was revealed that he was actively directing the evil and showing it where to concentrate fire)?
My ex used to have an abusive partner that played this same game. Going on breaks and then getting incredibly angry when she dared treat a break like a break (i.e. not dating and a time to explore with other people to figure out if the on-hold relationship is worth going back to and repairing). Usually he would be pissed not only because what he still saw as his property was daring to date other people even though they weren’t together anymore (I really really don’t understand the creepy possessive thing people do with their exes where they think the person who is no longer with them is still under their control and they get to decided when that ex is allowed to date and who they are allowed to date or even be friends with unto perpetuity), but also because he personally wasn’t getting any during the break and he thought that would be easy. So suddenly, the break was interpreted by him as not a break and after he set an ultimatum and threat to date her again, he started using the “evidence of her betrayal ‘while they were dating'” to justify even stronger abuse.
And that’s pretty much the stench that wafted over the passages of her “betrayal”. She dared cheat on me, thus justifying the monstrous level of abuse I do now, well maybe not cheat, maybe I’m counting breaks and the period after we had broken up and had no contact, but I FELT CHEATED so therefore it was real cheating and I was cuckolded for real and how dare she not be my sexual plaything for all eternity even though all of the things I post to try and prove her evil reveal me to be a sad pathetic and entitled douchebag who has never really accomplished anything in his life?
It’s almost as strong as the stink that clings to the whole “the world must be warned about Zoe” thing, which unless we forget at the beginning and in the post were sold as it being about her supposedly betraying her activist inclinations because she dared cheat, well, not really cheat, but I’m willing to overblow anything to make it seem like I was the aggrieved party. Because yeah, that’s totally how feminism, queer rights, and intersectionality work. Oh, hey, you’ve been doing great work on fighting for equal pay and the right of trans* people to not be murdered walking down the street, but what’s this? You have cheated on your rightful owner? Begone harlot, and take your faux-concern about equality with you!
I mean, even if we were going to pretend that he really was cheated on and that Zoe really was the worst girlfriend ever despite the fact that Eron has already revealed he views romantic partners only as perfect do-no-wrong creatures or horrible evil harpies out to destroy him personally, that doesn’t really mean needing to shop his break-up story everywhere. It means maybe sending an email to her current beau going “hey man, I know you probably don’t give a shit about my opinion, but this happened when I was dating, be careful”, but more often just letting them walk. Toxic people are best out of your life and it’s not worth getting more entangled with them.
And I think the fact that Eron’s whiny post where he drips red flags and complains about the horrible fact that his romantic partner once went out with other people when they weren’t together (another red flag is the fact that assholes tend to assume that broken up equals “on a break” when they want to get back together with the person) is treated with more seriousness and concern by people than the accounts of women carefully noting the behavior of a serial rapist or how they were abused by them reveals everything about our fucked up society.
What? An internally contradictory mess of minor romantic drama? Let us be your army of righteousness! A corroborated and nervous sighting of facts in your rape, which is proving to be just one in a long series for the rapist? What? How dare you slight such a good person, were you even there? Also, you use a contraction in sentence 5 but not one in sentence 16, so therefore you are a liar and we are justified in doxxing you and sending you endless death threats for your petty evil life-destroying drama!
@libartrollian
Even if Zoe was the literal reincarnation of Hitler cackling atop a throne of male skulls and Eron was a completely innocent butterfly swept up in the typhoon of Zoe’s evil schemes… What does any of that have to do with Anita, Brianna and the dozens of other victims of the terrorist group that Eron started? You idiot.
@tinyorc,
1) Like I said – this is a matter involving only “bad guys”. ZQ. EG. And the pieces of shit on 4chan/8chan/whatever-chan. ALL of them are manipulative, vindictive, bad people.
You’ve allowed yourself to see the evidence that EG and the Channers/GGers are bad people. You haven’t allowed yourself to see the evidence that ZQ is also a very bad person too. It’s easy to doubt evidence when you refuse to look at it.
If you did you would see that, in her treatment of EG, she hits MANY of the points on the “Emotional Abuse”, “Isolation”, and “Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming” sections of the Power and Control Wheel (http://www.ncdsv.org/images/powercontrolwheelnoshading.pdf).
Seriously. I would hope that you recognize that You literally CANNOT GET MORE STEREOTYPICAL-ABUSER than the old “It’s your fault I hurt you by doing X because you made me feel Y” bullshit .. which she pulls constantly. That’s not even mentioning the MULTIPLE SUICIDE THREATS (which are a real pet peeve of mine).
2) What would you think if someone told you that “I didn’t watch the Ray Rice elevator footage because it is a private relationship matter” and then proceeded to call him an “alleged abuser”? Personally, I would think that person was an enabler who was deliberately keeping himself ignorant in order to protect a pre-existent opinion from being challenged. That’s exactly what I think you (and others here) are doing.
You rightly see ZQ as a victim of online harassment by asshole misogynistic trolls and understand that reading the Zoepost or seeing someone lay out exactly how manipulative and abusive she was to him (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_UKErD0uGQ , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM6u-ZPVmSw) might complicate things and turn a black-and-white picture into a black-and-dark-gray one. It’s purposeful ignorance and it’s nothing to be proud of.
“Anita, Brianna and the dozens of other victims of the terrorist group that Eron started”
WTF are you talking about? Anita was getting harassed before this. EG didn’t “start” online misogynistic harassment.
Yes, because “EG said this thing” is exactly like “months of hard evidence from IRC, Twitter and the Chans.” Those things are precisely equivalent.
And, lest we forget, “ZQ threatened suicide” is exactly like “months of rape and death threats, doxxing, and being run out of her home.” Those things are precisely equivalent.
Such rational. So logic. Wow.
“threatening suicide to manipulate your partner is just contemptible”
So, trying to manipulate a man is the only possible explanation you can come with for why someone might talk about suicide? You seem 100% sure that was her motivation. Since she was manipulating him to stay with her, he must feel really relieved that she left and he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore. Oh, wait, he’s violating restraining orders and goading on freaks who keep telling her to kill herself. Something doesn’t make sense.
It ethics in journalism, guys! Even though no journalist has ever been fussed at by these goobers, it’s allll about ethics.
Boring troll is boring.
Thus Spake ZaraM. the Social Justice Ranger:
Amusing that gamergitz can’t even stick to their own narrative. I’m reminded of similar discussions with creationists, same-sex marriage opponents, and pretty much anybody else whose argument consists of a few shallow talking points with no real substance. Since they can’t defend any given item, they have to play a shell game and keep changing the topic. Sooner or later they loop back to the first talking point, and around and around we go.
(I know I’ve posted the following before, but it still seems appropriate.)
GGer: “Zoe Quinn had sex with FIVE GUYS so they’d give better reviews to her terrible indy game!”
Me: “Actually, none of the alleged ‘five guys’ reviewed her game, so whether she had sex with any of them is immaterial. And it’s not generally stranger’s business who a woman sleeps with.”
GGer: “Why are you SJWs so hung up on Zoe Quinn? This isn’t about Zoe Quinn! We’ve moved past Zoe Quinn! This is about JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY!”
Me: “So why doesn’t GamerGate have anything to say about The Escapist’s Alexander Marcis, who has provided relentlessly positive coverage for indie developers he likes and has backed — like James Desborough, of ‘Chronicles Of Gor’ fame — or male ‘indy reviewers’ like John ‘TotalBiscuit’ Bain, who has accepted money from the publishers of the games he reviews, without disclosing that financial relationship?”
GGer: “Stop trying to change the subject, libtard! What this is REALLY about is FFEEEMALES trying to invade male gamer spaces! Censorship! Fascism! ANITA SORKEEZAN IS A WHORE AND SHE WANTS TO TAKE AWAY MY VIDEO GAMES!”
Me: “Women are not new to gaming spaces; there have always been girls and women who game. Some of them have been gaming for longer than you’ve been alive. Nobody is trying to take away your video games. Feminist critics point out systemic misogyny in the hope that this will produce BETTER games — deeper, more interesting, and more fun for everybody, including you. Nobody is arguing that Grand Theft Auto should be illegal or that developers shouldn’t be allowed to make exactly the kind of games they like. And it’s spelled ‘Sarkeesian’, by the way, and her sex life frankly isn’t your business — it’s just indicative of serious misogyny on the part of you and other ‘gamergaters’.”
GGer: “Fuck you and your White Knighting! This isn’t just misogyny! Zoe Quinn had sex with FIVE GUYS so they’d give better reviews to her terrible indy game!”
Me: ::sigh::
Thus Spake ZaraKiva:
Okay, I’ll bite: Sea lions? I’m assuming that you aren’t being aggressively mansplained by carnivorous aquatic mammals.
@M. the Social Justice Ranger
OMG. SO CUTE.
libarbarian,
If she abused him, why is he fighting the restraining order?
Why is he still trying to insert himself into her life against her will?
Care to provide some examples of the evidence of the “abuse” done to E.G.? Try to remember that fucking men who are not him isn’t abuse. Telling your abusive bf that he’s triggering your depression and that it’s making you want to harm yourself is not abuse.
E.G. is not a put upon, abused man trying to move on with his life. He’s an obsessed ex with an ax to grind and he’s purposefully using idiots on 4Chan to punish a woman for escaping him.
Thus Spake Zaralibarbarian:
And that would be relevant, if anybody were claiming EG “started” online misogynist harassment. But he did sow and nurture the movement that came to be known as gamergate, and while Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn were already targets of misogyny-fueled harassment, Gamergate quickly adopted them as its favorite targets.
Pretending not to know this suggests you aren’t arguing in good faith.