We Hunted The Mammoth"we're inclusive and accepting!" says #gamergate, before drawing racist caricatures of women they dislike. pic.twitter.com/zbFnWBOmdn
— Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) November 1, 2014
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
Here’s the original, in all its crapitude:
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.
GamerGaters like to loudly profess that they oppose harassment. They also like to claim that most if not all of the harassment that has occurred comes from people that aren’t “real” GamerGaters.
So what do GamerGaters do when they’re confronted with evidence that someone in their ranks — not an anonymous nobody but someone with some standing in their community — is harassing someone?
Well yesterday we had an opportunity to see just that. I wrote about a couple of instances of sexual harassment from a GamerGater known as Cameralady.
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.
Zoe Quinn has had it.
Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.
Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of everyone connected to her.
And she’s not the only one. The newest target of #GamerGate wrath? Indie game developer Brianna Wu, who, as I noted in my last post, got death threats … for posting memes on Twitter.
Meanwhile, two creepy obsessed assholes are still begging for money to make a documentary they hope will ruin Anita Sarkeesian.
Oh, but #GamerGate is about ethics.
I’m just going to paste in a bunch of Quinn’s Tweets here, because they pretty much speak for themselves.
The memes above? A fan of indie game developer Brianna Wu made them, using the text from some of Wu’s acerbic tweets about #GamerGaters. Wu thought the memes were funny, and posted them to Twitter.
My post about Heartiste and the sour slut grapes the other day inspired the following highly ironic series of Tweets from Mr. H and one of his fans.
Speaking of harassers, as I was in the previous post, everyone’s favorite PR maven and serial libeller, Janet “Judgy Bitch” Bloomfield, has been suspended from Twitter — this time, one hopes, for good, as she’s a prime example of someone using Twitter as a “hate amplifier,” which she has stoked in the past with deliberate and malicious libel. She also made a second account to get around her previous suspension, which one would think would in itself be enough of a TOS violation to justify permanent suspension. The real question isn’t why she was suspended; it’s why she wasn’t suspended for good a long time ago.
EDIT: Removed portions of this post so as not to further inflame the situation.
Sometimes when I post links, they’re simply interesting things I’ve run across. These, though, are essential reads:
Why the Trolls Will Always Win, by Kathy Sierra, Wired
A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.
