GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
Over the last several days, the #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter has been speckled with self-contragulatory Tweets by Gators boasting that they have “found Anita’s harasser.”
Men’s Rights activists are the only ones asking these tough questions about the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian and other outspoken women in gaming.
The screencap above shows a discussion on the still-active #burgersandfries IRC channel about the media coverage of the recent death threats directed at indie game devveloper Brianna Wu.
Apparently any publicity is good publicity, even if your “movement” is getting media attention for being the likely source of death threats against a female developer.
Before some stray GamerGater comes by to inist that this guy “isn’t really a #GamerGater because that’s on IRC,” this seems to be the guy’s Twitter account. As you can see, @Thidran regularly Tweets and retweets comments using the #GamerGate tag or the abbreviation GG; he’s also obsessed with Zoe Quinn. BUT IT’S NOT ABOUT HER WE’VE ALL MOVED PAST THAT.
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.
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.
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.
Janet Bloomfield: Unapologetic asshole. Profile picture for one of her Twitter accounts.
EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook. Details below.
Janet Bloomfield – A Voice for Men’s compulsively lying “social media director” – is at it again.
A couple of months back, Bloomfield – who goes by JudgyBitch1 on Twitter – decided for some reason that she could best serve AVFM’s social media directing needs by straight-up libeling feminist writer Jessica Valenti – by making up inflammatory quotes and attributing them to Valenti in a series of Tweets. She later boasted in on her blog that the quotes – which she admitted she’d conjured out of thin air – had inflamed hatred of Valenti and caused her to catch “a bit of hell.”
Now Bloomfield is pulling the exact same stunt again. This time, her target is feminist cultural critic and #GamerGate bete noire Anita Sarkeesian.
On Saturday, Bloomfield tweeted an obviously doctored “screenshot” of a tweet that Sarkeesian never made.
