We Hunted The Mammoth
#GamerGaters have been spending a lot of time lately trying to convince the world that they’re really quite reasonable people, actually, and that the “movement’s” reputation as a hotbed of hateful bullying is undeserved.
Today on 8Chan’s /gg/ board, for example, one enterprising anon announced the start of “OP FIREHEART,” a combination of “Operation Firefly + Operation Lonely Hearts.”
YouTube garbage blabber Internet Aristocrat — you know, the guy that helped to kick off #GamerGate with the first video attacking Zoe Quinn but who’s since broken from the “movement” for reasons — has been working himself into a lather over Women, Action & the Media’s Twitter reporting initiative.
So he’s decided to take a principled stance against this terrible threat to free speech — or at least free speech that includes targeted abuse and bigoted slurs — by posting a series of detailed, logical essays elucidating the dange …
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 that was A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam’s response to a recent post of mine talking about Christopher Cantwell, an AVFM contributor who also likes to tell people to kill themselves.
In an AVFM post also titled David Futrelle: Please kill yourself, Elam waxed eloquent upon this theme:
David, please go kill yourself.
You should, however, before you slip away into the dark void that resembles your capacity for logic, consider that you may want to get out more. A lot more, actually.
“Please kill yourself,” in the context of Twitter and a lot of other internet exchanges is par for the course.
That is sadly true, Paul. I see that as a problem; you apparently see it as an excuse for the harassment and abuse you and your followers so enjoy heaping upon your opponents in the name of “Men’s Human Rights.”
Apparently, in Elam’s world, the best way to fight male suicide is by telling other men to kill themselves.
Oh, but one of Elam’s fans has an answer to that, too:
Human rights advocates at work!
Very cool: We humans have landed a space probe on a goddamned comet!
Not cool: when one European Space Agency dude gave an interview about the landing, he was wearing a shirt festooned with cheesecake images of scantily clad women.
Even less cool: when Atlantic magazine science writer Rose Eveleth pointed out that this choice of attire doesn’t exactly broadcast the message that women (other than scantily clad ones) are welcome in STEM, she received a torrent of abuse from angry Twitter dudes, including requests for her to kill herself.
The cherry atop this crap sundae? The nastiest Twitterer of the bunch, who not only went after Eveleth but her defenders as well, is a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
Oh, Twitter, how I love you and hate you. On the one hand, Twitter can be a powerful grassroots organizing tool, a personalized media aggregator, a way to meet and interact with friends and colleagues, and of course one of the world’s most effective distributors of cute cat pics and fart jokes.
On the other, it can empower harassers — from individual stalkers to virtual mobs — and provide a way-too-easy way to send anonymous threats.
And unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t made much of an effort to deal with its abusive users. It can take days, weeks, sometimes months for the site’s harassment cops to do anything about persistent harassers, and all too often the suspended harassers pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go right back to harassing their enemies with brand-new accounts — a blatant violation of Twitter’s rules that seems to be very seldom punished.
But there’s some good news on this front. Twitter is teaming up with Women, Action and the Media (WAM), a small feminist nonprofit, in a pilot program designed to fight this kind of harassment. WAM! has some experience here; this is the group that pressured Facebook into taking hate speech more seriously.
One favorite tool in the misogynist’s toolkit is the old “if women want to be protected from violent men it proves they need patriarchy” argument. It’s a rather silly argument, but those making it tend to do so with enormous smugness, feeling that they’ve got the ultimate “gotcha” to use against feminists.
Cast in point: A post today on Roosh V’s reliably horrendous Return of Kings blog arguing that, as its title puts it, “#TakeDownJulienBlanc Shows Feminists Need The Patriarchy To Protect Them.” Never mind that the woman-led campaign against the abusive pickup artist seems to be doing pretty well already.
“Well feminists, I’ve been waiting for this a long time, and it’s finally come,” the ROK contributor who calls himself runsonmagic writes. “I’ve been waiting for the day you’d ask us to bring back patriarchy.”
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
So you waited until the last minute to pull together your #GamerGate Halloween costume. And you’re lazy as crap.
Well, you’re in luck! Here are seven totally half-assed, no-effort #GamerGate costumes you can pull together in a few minutes with stuff you have around the house!
When women, in conversations online, point out the ridiculously tiny percentage of video games that feature women as protagonists, they tend to get flooded with responses from indignant gamebros telling them that if they don’t like the games out there, they should just make their own.
The gamebros mean their comments to be conversation-enders. Just as Vivian James, #GamerGate’s imaginary girlfriend, tells game critics to “shut up and play,” these guys are telling critics of the retrograde gender politics in gaming to “shut up and make games.”
It never occurs to them that some of the women they smugly tell this to … might already be doing this.
