By all rights, the furor over rocket scientist Matt Taylor’s cheesecake shirt should have died down by now. After being chided earlier this week for marring the celebration over the landing of a space probe ON A GODDAMNED COMET by doing interviews in a tacky shirt covered with half-naked ladies, Taylor offered a brief but heartfelt apology. You would have thought we’d all be able to move on.
Not so fast. Because these days apparently no controversy can ever be over as long as it serves someone’s interest to keep it going. And so a loose but very familiar coalition of reactionaries and antifeminists and angry techies have started flogging an amorphous cause they call #Shirtgate or, more popularly, #Shirtstorm, purporting to be outraged that Taylor was “humiliated” into apologizing.
So many of the angriest voices in this, er, conversation are #GamerGaters it looks a lot like a sequel. Call it GamerGate Part Two: The Straw Graspening. And it’s not just me making the connection: #GamerGaters and #Shirtstormers, often one and the same, are making the connection:
So radical #shirtstorm SJW have attacked my games my #gamergate revolt and now they are attacking #science. Am i allowed to be mad ?
— Anti-ProcrusteanBed ☀️🏴 (@antiprocrustes) November 16, 2014
I am a man. I'm sick of hearing that because of my gender, my opinions don't count and sexism towards me isn't real. #GamerGate #shirtstorm
— Lord Inquisitor Ineptus Astartes (@AstartesIneptus) November 16, 2014
https://twitter.com/Scrumpmonkey/status/533409838207078400
Heck, our old friend Milo is making the connection:
Note to those infuriated by poor Dr Matt Taylor and #shirtstorm: this is what #GamerGate has been fighting against. Are you getting it yet?
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) November 15, 2014
Oh, it’s a veritable #GamerGate Old Home Week! GG mainstays Thunderf00t and Mundane Matt have rushed out videos about The Shirt.
People are making graphics covered with hard-to-read text:
There are giant complicated conspiracy theory graphics covered with red lines and angry red text. This one notes that Chris Plante, who wrote an article criticizing Taylor’s shirt, also wrote one of the now-notorious “Gamers are Dead” pieces.
https://twitter.com/Reyeko_/status/533482641774100480
Apparently there were a few dudes who were none too pleased with Plante’s story on The Shirt:
https://twitter.com/plante/status/533244307105648640
#Shirtstormers wrote angry “letters” in too-small-type. (Click here for larger, more readable version and here for one with angry graphics, too.)
https://twitter.com/Alpha_duck1/status/533698520100777984
While others tried to draw a parallel between Taylor’s alleged “humiliation” and … rape.
#shirtgate #SupportMattTaylor #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/L8s1GrOow7
— Mark 🐸 🗑 Samenfink (@MSamenfink) November 16, 2014
#ShirtStorm #shirtgate Matthew 7:1 pic.twitter.com/bRXr7bA1Si
— Be Just & Fear Not | Let None Survive (@SuperNerdMike) November 16, 2014
Neo-reactionaries and “Dark Enlightenment” types see opportunity in the #Shirtstorm hashtag.
https://twitter.com/voxday/status/533336186535030784
Don't judge me because of what I'm wearing – unless I'm a guy. Then you can define my personality and try to ruin my life. #shirtgate #NRx
— VDARE (@vdare) November 15, 2014
https://twitter.com/antidemblog/status/533341319184531456
https://twitter.com/BernardChapin/status/533628518077186049
As do MRAs:
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/533758421158227969
As does this familiar name:
Women do not face a hostile climate in science. And they can handle seeing a guy in an edgy shirt. #GamerGate https://t.co/8gvTyo0bg6
— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) November 16, 2014
They’re all there, all hoping to turn a debate over a shirt into another endless internet Benghazi.
I personally like to take Matt Taylor’s apology at face value and his tears an expression that he gets it. I hope we someday know how he feels about shitstorm (oops) but I appreciate he has bigger things on his mind. The lander has gone dark but they have lots of data to work on.
Err, and his Twitter profile has a picture of a woman holding a pro-#GG banner with what appears to be two black eyes – probably just really bad lighting, but TW anyway.
zennurse, #OPskynet is a devious plot to get all GGers to follow one another on twitter so that they can … actually I don’t know what they hope to do except to flood each others timelines with more gg crap. I don’t know what section 6 is,
Thanks David, so its a circle jerk. Got it. That explains the ” You guys are my brothers in arms” bullshit on KiA.
This just gets stupider by the day.
There’s an opinion piece by Glenn Reynolds on this at USA today. Predictably says this will set back feminism. PJ media must be so proud.
That’s a name I remember from my politcal days. Yuk.
Sorry, *political*.
When I was in college one of the professors favored Hawaiian-like shirts made out of fabrics he found. If he had any lewd or bawdy ones he had the good sense to not wear them on campus, but the Escher print (tessellated birds and fish– before Escher’s art got routinely licensed for clothing) was much admired by we geeks.
I suppose this makes me a bad feminist, but I was a little sorry Taylor’s shirt wasn’t comprised of “space babe” pulp fiction covers, like this:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/26/2b/18/262b1815d60c31ea18b2ef79159d6316.jpg
http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Sci-Fi-Cover-Women.jpg
Oh yes, it still would have been problematic but it would’ve at least struck me as humorously fitting to the project (SPACE!).
Pulp covers with aliens (unless they’re doing the “carry off a woman” thing) or retro-rockets would’ve probably bypassed the sexism problems– though it’d still be damn gaudy and maybe not the best shirt to be interviewed in.
You know, the “can’t take the heat? get back in the kitchen” comments are particularly idiotic considering women in STEM already have to be twice as tough, twice as thick-skinned, and twice as smart to get the same credit as their male colleagues. Men in STEM fields don’t face the same barriers and institutional disrespect as women. These morons are trying to argue circularly that making it harder for women to do their jobs somehow “proves” that they’re not as good, when in fact it’s just the opposite. Any woman who can put up with a hostile work environment and still be even halfway effective is hyperqualified.
Maybe these delicate hothouse flowers should stay away from women, since mild criticism causes them to pitch such a sustained, frothing tantrum. I mean, it’s just further proof that they aren’t naturally cut out to be the dominant gender.
What really struck me about the abuse she was getting was that some of the tweets weren’t conventional first-person rape threats, they were “I hope Ched Evans rapes you”.
That’s Ched Evans, the guy these people are trying to convince the world isn’t a rapist, despite the slightly awkward fact that him being a convicted rapist is a matter of legal record.
So how exactly is making rape threats on his behalf supposed to help his image as a grievously misunderstood victim of feminists?
A woman complains about a man’s sexist actions = a “dog pile” akin to rape.
Men send rape and death threats to women = logic and reason.
*all the facepalm*
Did anyone else notice that it’s “my games”? All of gaming belongs to him you guys. Why do we think we are allowed to talk about HIS games?
Also, one man’s stupid, sexist mistake= all of science ever.
They are actually trying to frame this situation as feminists vs. science. Ludicrous!
Everything needs to be theirs or about them or they will loose their shit and tantrum for weeks and years on end. This has not changed since Elevatorgate. In fact alot of those same people have been actively supporting the misogynist “gates” since. In that case they said that a woman saying, “Guys don’t do that.” was the same as her claiming a man tried to rape her. They claimed that sexual harassment policies at events where women were being harassed was feminist radicals trying to destroy sex. The hypersensitivity to having their male privilege confronted and criticized only demonstrates the need for more feminists to speak up.
I’m sure these shitsacks are completely aware that we reacted to that idiotic shirt with nothing more than snark and facepalms and that their spittle-flecked rage is mind-bogglingly out of proportion – their goal isn’t to stop women from being angry, it’s to stop women from having opinions at all. The message they want to give is “Every time you step out of line, this will happen.”
I came across a comment on Imgur reverse-gendering the situation and saying, of course they’d be okay with a woman on the team wearing a shirt plastered with images of half-naked buff dudes. Of course they would be.
Same here! I thought it was a Hawaiian shirt, and now, that it’s an anthropomorphized Hawaiian shirt.
Bad italics.
Feminists: Your shirt was in bad taste.
Scientist: Oh shoot, sorry about that.
Rageboners: WHY CAN’T WE WEAR TITS IN PUBLIC OUR LIVES ARE RUINED. SUMMON THE TROOPS IT’S TIME FOR 1v1 WAR.
Yet they persist in calling us irrational?
…Shirtgate? o_O
This is some kind of joke, right? Some kind of elaborate prank, right? Any second now, someone’s going to jump out with a camera and shout “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” Right?
Right?
Because this is just ridiculous.
Funny how fast they dropped that whole “ethics in game journalism” bit though, isn’t it?
I want to know something.
If feminists pointing out sexism is so horrible, awful and detrimental to all the things, why do the misogynists have to lie?
Why do they have to pretend a woman talking is the same as her raping? Why do they have to say a woman giving gentle criticism is the same as her making a false accusation of rape? Why do they have to pretend that women are now destroying science? How can they make up such preposterous lies and still expect to be taken seriously? If the actual actions they oppose are really that bad, why are they obfuscating those actions by inventing different actions whole cloth?
I think they know that they are the baddies.
Okay, I know this is kinda nitpicking, but… Anti Democracy Blog? Seriously?
Did someone confuse “Democrats,” the political party with “Democracy,” the style of government?
To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the women on the shirt. I would have registered ‘gaudy Hawaiian shirt’ and studiously paid no more attention to it whilst I listened to the SCIENCE!
But it was still a stupid shirt to wear, a mild comment was made, he apologised, and GG had hysterics.
Are we /sure/ it isn’t men that suffer from ‘wandering womb’ when they don’t get sex ?
Oh, and… please tell me that that sign is photoshopped. If he actually did that, I can’t even.
2 Kinda off topic questions.
1. I don’t really follow gaming news, but sometimes kinda want to…is there a list somewhere of sites that Gamergaters think are the worstest things ever, so I know where to go?
2. David, is it possible to get rid of the video ads? I really want to whitelist your site, but Im on limited bandwidth and every time I turn off my adblocker it plays a video in the sidebar and sometimes also in the article itself and I have to turn it back on.
“The dogs of logic and reason”? Yeah, a pack of snarling, baying, saliva-flecked hounds doesn’t exactly connote intelligent debate.
Logic and reason’s spirit animals are actually marmots in tiny horn-rimmed glasses.
The train wreck quality of this is the opportunistic involvement of people like Milo and the PUA/MRA and other righty extremists. I am absolutely sure there are 18 year olds in college who are completely unaware of how toxic these people are but are impressed because others are impressed. I really don’t get Sommers at all, I’ve tried to watch her on YouTube and can’t last more than a few minutes. What a waste of an education. But you know these young people are just eating up the drama and rhetoric. And its all online forever for them.
Ah yes I forgot. Actual rape is equivalent to rough sex, a vehicle break-in, or a straight up false accusation.
I stand with Matt,
Even though he apologised and seemed to show genuine contrition for his actions thereby ending any concern I am going to stand next to him and use him as a puppet for my outrage!
The tweet about not judging ?
What about Shoshanna’s jeans and T-shirt or Anita’s earrings or Zoe’s hair?
Tone deaf knee jerk bullshit.