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#gamergate 8chan a woman is always to blame anti-Semitism antifeminism boner rage evil fat fatties evil sexy ladies evil SJWs evil ugly women harassment hypocrisy irony alert memes men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny sarkeesian! sexual harassment sexualization zoe quinn

The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #GamerGate Memes

 

These things are actually ironic.
These memes ARE actually ironic.

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.

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#gamergate 4chan a woman is always to blame anti-Semitism antifeminism conspiracy theory creepy doubling down emotional abuse empathy deficit entitled babies evil sexy ladies gamebros irony alert men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny playing the victim post contains sarcasm zoe quinn

Actually, it's about Zoe Quinn. The midwife of #GamerGate has no regrets.

ZoeQuinnPS

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.

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#gamergate 4chan 8chan a woman is always to blame antifeminism creepy evil SJWs hamstering imaginary backwards land literal nazis men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny racism sarkeesian! threats twitter

Why are #GamerGaters so quick to excuse an anti-Semitic caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that's literally derived from Nazi propaganda?

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:

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#gamergate 8chan a woman is always to blame anti-Semitism antifeminism conspiracy theory crackpottery doxing drama kings entitled babies evil SJWs gamebros grandiosity gullibility hypocrisy imaginary backwards land irony alert literal nazis men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny sarkeesian! schadenfreude

The Top 22 Most Ridiculous Things Said by 8channers About Anita Sarkeesian's Appearance on the Colbert Report

#GamerGate's worst nightmare come true
#GamerGate’s worst nightmare come true

Last night, as you may have heard, the woman known to #GamerGaters as “Literally Who 2” pulled off a bit of a media coup, appearing on The Colbert Report for a brief interview by the sympathetic Colbert, who gently satirized some of the sillier “arguments” of the Gaters with a series of deliberatly obtuse questions. You know, his regular schtick.

When Anita Sarkeesian posted the picture above (well, a non-blurry version of it) to Twitter yesterday evening, thus alerting the world to her upcoming appearance on Colbert’s show, it set off a wave of panic and despair on 8chan’s /gg/ board, one of the central organizing hubs of the GamerGate “movement.”

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#gamergate gamebros harassment misogyny oppressed men patronizing as heck twitter

Angry GamerGaters Telling Brianna Wu to Shut Up and Make Games, Not Realizing That's Already Her Job

Screenshot from Revolution 60, the game with women in it that Brianna Wu already made
Revolution 60, the game with women in it that Brianna Wu already made, dudes!

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.

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#gamergate advocacy of violence alpha males attention seeking creepy domestic violence drama kings emotional abuse empathy deficit entitled babies evil sexy ladies gamebros gaslighting hypocrisy internet tough guy irony alert matt forney men who should not ever be with imaginary women ever men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny none dare call it conspiracy nonpology post contains jokes post contains sarcasm PUA reactionary bullshit red pill revenge of the nerds SJWs the c-word

Presenting Matt "How to Crush A Girl's Self Esteem" Forney, the new king of #Gamergate!

Hail the king!
Hail the king!

GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.

As the “movement” stews in its own conspiratorial rage, a small army of reactionary misogynists, sensing opportunity, have joined the cause. Sure, right-wingers like Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos have long been Gaters, but it’s only in recent days that they’ve been joined by some of the better-known manospherians, from angry lawyer and juice seller Mike Cernovich to the charming Roosh V.

The latest manosphere douchebag to take up the GamerGate cause is the lovely and talented Matt Forney, who has promptly claimed for himself the mantle of GamerGate leader and hero.

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#gamergate a voice for men a woman is always to blame advocacy of violence antifeminism boner rage consent is hard domestic violence drama kings evil sexy ladies evil wives evil women harassment men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA nice guys paul elam rape culture taking pleasure in women's pain why can't men punch women?

Is the Men's Rights Movement driven by the rage of the rejected?

Memorial in Marysville
Memorial in Marysville

Was Marysville school shooter Jaylen Fryberg trying to exact revenge on a girl who had rejected him? Various news accounts suggest that Fryberg was reeling from a recent breakup; a number of angry, anguished, and frustratingly enigmatic recent comments on Fryberg’s Twitter account seem to back this up.

So it may be that the shootings on Friday were yet another reworking of an old story.

It’s no secret that many men, for an assortment of reasons, react badly and often violently to romantic and sexual rejection. This can range from self-described “nice guys” of OkCupid sending vicious messages to women who say no all the way to angry men who stalk and harass and sometimes kill ex-wives and girlfriends. Women who leave abusive relationships often suffer greater violence at the hands of exes unwilling to let them go.

I’ve written before of the striking ways that Men’s Rights Activism recapitulates the logic of domestic abuse; it’s no coincidence that so much MRA “activism” consists of harassment of individual women. So the question naturally follows: does the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes?

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#gamergate ableism advocacy of violence antifeminism antifeminist women boner rage bullying douchebaggery emotional abuse empathy deficit entitled babies evil SJWs FemRAs gender policing harassment homophobia hypocrisy internet tough guy irony alert men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA not-quite-explicit threats rape culture sarkeesian! sexual harassment things that aren't fascism threats trigger warning video games

On Friday, Anita Sarkeesian called out "toxic masculinity" on Twitter. Here's what happened next.

Anita Sarkeesian's Twitter notifications (Artist's conception)
Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter mentions (Artist’s conception)

What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.

Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:

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#gamergate harassment sexual harassment twitter

Presented with evidence of one of their own sexually harassing a woman, GamerGaters deny and deflect and offer excuses

tales-of-top-ten_1296972951

 

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.

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#gamergate bullying creepy harassment twitter zoe quinn

#GamerGater declares "the only harassers are anti-GGers." Then sexually harasses an anti-GamerGate woman

This shirt available in men's and women's styles
This shirt available in men’s and women’s styles

 

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 directed a question to Adobe Software. And got an indignant reply from a GamerGater known as Cameralady.