Woman's call to end video game misogyny sparks vicious online attacks
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
Here is the author's blog, which has a lot of updates about the harassment she has received as a result of it: http://www.feministfrequency.com/
There are some truly shocking and disturbing things in here, like the screenshots from the "game" someone made where you can beat up a photo of her face: http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/07/image-based-harassm...
One person. They're obviously troubled. Are we really going to let the actions of one person change the frame of the whole discussion?
A game allowing you to beat up a woman is, I hope, repulsive to any HN reader. But its existence, especially when it's so easy these days, means nothing in and of itself. You could probably feed in any picture you like, man or woman. It's not a weighty factor in a discussion.
edit: papsosouid was unwilling to provide evidence. You can skip this subtree and not miss anything.
I did not say this.
"You are also welcome to believe that I posted a "hateful screed" and it was deleted"
I did not say this.
I asked for evidence. You're trying to divert attention from your failure to back a claim up.
I am not trying to back up a claim for you. I do not care what you believe, you are not required to be rational. Believe whatever you like. But do try to at least be constructive if you wish to converse. Deliberately ignoring the words of the person you are responding to, and responding to the opposite of what they said is not productive.
This entire thread of "prove the sky is blue" has not been a contribution to the discussion, your post included. So, why continue it? I simply pointed out that looking at the comments that were allowed through does not necessarily reflect on what comments were posted. This is incredibly obvious, and it is rather sad that "durrr prove it" is the level of hypocritical non-discourse here.
Anyone (yourself included) can look at how there is rational, polite criticism of her work on independent channels like twitter. And anyone (yourself included still) can look at how there is no such criticism on channels she controls. So painting the response to her work as being only trolling bullshit by pointing only at the channels that have been wiped of other responses is dishonest.
Did you see the other stuff on that page? There are a lot of violent and nasty things being directed at her, by (very likely) more than just one person.
> A game allowing you to beat up a woman is, I hope, repulsive to any HN reader. But its existence, especially when it's so easy these days, means nothing in and of itself.
I think it means a whole hell of a lot to a person who was targeted by it.
The purpose of the discussion, in my view, is not to pass judgement on whether the gaming community is good or bad, but to highlight the way that women are actually being treated, so that anyone with a sense of decency can be very clear that this behavior is not tolerated and shun/shame anyone who acts in this way. But I think that explaining it away as just the actions of one troubled person runs counter to this goal. Condemning it doesn't mean you're condemning yourself or your community, just the people who act in this way.
The fact that it was a post about misogyny that sparked it was probably just incidental. It's the fact that she demonstrated sensitivity to language and had an online presence made her the perfect target for such an attack.
Mainly because the most that these kids can do in a raid is posting offensive things on web sites.
If you want to see how pervasive the problem is, there's a subreddit called ShitRedditSays which records horrible (and highly upvoted) submissions and comments. This is a real problem with real attitudes.
Edit: Ah yes, I should have known that mentioning SRS would garner such a reaction... people really don't seem to like being called out on their crappiness.
Edit: It doesn't exist in my post history anymore, so I'm pretty sure that entire thread was purged.
[1]http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=346...
I feel this is important because I've used Reddit for years and I don't think it's fair to associate them with child porn, because they have never tolerated child porn.
/r/SRS is a really bad example to bring up, given that 95%+ of the stuff they post is just hypersensitive whining about politically incorrect jokes or obvious trolling. Normal people don't care about politically incorrect jokes. The 5% that are actual bad posts are almost always in the negatives, not "highly upvoted".
Regarding them not being highly upvoted, are you kidding me? There is serious crap that is both highly upvoted and discussed. It's terrible.
As for the content of that subreddit, go look for yourself. Current front page:
1. Obvious joke 2. Pretending it isn't possible for women to be privileged 3. Being offended at the notion that teenage girls are attractive 4. Obvious joke 5. Being angry at finding a woman attractive 6. Obvious joke
I think the pattern is pretty obvious here.
You could say much harsher things about people watching horror movies in theaters.
Second, SRS is... well. SRS is actually kind of a good example of that problem: it started out as a bunch of guys parodying (among other things) stereotypes of radical feminism for the lulz, and then picked up some people who went along because they took the posts seriously and as a sign that it was OK, and also picked up some true believers. Now it's impossible to tell those groups apart, and it's mostly just as shitty as everything else these days.
SRS parodies how feminists are usually portrayed by others – that doesn’t mean they think the vile shit linked there really isn’t shitty. How can you not understand that?
"I'm not a violently hateful person but I act like one, and that's the joke" is not something that helps; it's something that makes problems worse. And I certainly "get it" enough to know that if I said that there I'd receive a response of "LOL TONE ARGUMENT BENNED!!!11one", which just kinda proves the point in my original comment, y'know?
In all seriousness, if people want to do good and fight evil, donate to/volunteer at a shelter. SRS is, at best, the equivalent of a yellow-ribbon bumper sticker, and accomplishes about as much as those do. And at its worst, it's people who either are in need of or are pretending to be in need of a whole lot of counseling.
The point of SRS is not to change the world, it’s to have a place where you can laugh at idiots and have no one spoil that fun. And that’s perfectly alright.
These two sentences do not go together.
It’s like a tumblr making fun of fundamentalist christian screeds. It’s not intended to convince any fundamentalists that they are wrong, but it’s a place to vent and laugh together with like-minded people.
If "no-one understands" a typical SRS'er, why do they have I-don't-even-know-how-many-now subreddits with healthy numbers?
If it exists solely for the purpose of venting (not a downvote brigade, wink wink, don't touch the poop!) and not for accomplishing anything else, then why do SRS'ers so often seem to be charging into other parts of reddit and getting into such dramatic arguments?
Finally, if you really just want a place to make fun of stupid crap? Try /r/worstof or /r/subredditdrama, both of which actually do that.
http://breakfastcookie.tumblr.com/post/26879625651/so-a-girl...
As to rape jokes, I think George Carlin said it best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FsfLPohZ_c
Or it is her fault because she "demonstrated sensitivity"?
Sad that someone on HN would post this as honest analysis. No wonder this community has so few women participants. I wonder what percentage of the commenters in this thread are male.
But if you read my comment, I'm just analyzing the motives of the raiders. The point being, it takes very little to spark them as we've seen this same type of thing happen a hundred times in the past over petty things.
I don't think it is helpful to gloss over the legitamately serious issue of outsized misogyny and threats against women with a presense on the internet. I think it is likely that this sort of behavior inhibits female contributors to open source software and the tech world.
a) misogyny of the gaming community b) the online raiding culture that has little regard for who the target is - as long as they will react to offensive language and accessible via online channels
Which was the thesis of my original comment and, I believe, a valid question to ask before taking out our pitchforks.
I've seen 4chan trolling before, but this is a very different beast. 4chan tries to get your goat, and will resort to any level of childishness to do it. But it's all done in order to make the person look foolish and laugh at them. These attacks, on the other hand, were filled with bile and hate and uncontrolled rage. Death threats are no laughing matter.
Note that this is not necessarily the misogyny of the gaming community, but rather of the much wider demographic who encounter her writings. That is far more troubling.
It's akin to blaming a woman for getting raped, because "she shouldn't have been wearing that outfit".
It doesn't matter that it takes very little to spark them. It's a terrible thing that people behave this way, and the fault lies solely on those who behave in this manner.
You comments are demonstrating perfectly the pervasiveness of the problem.
These people find pleasure in harassing people, pure and simple. The fact she's a woman doesn't matter much - it's just the particular flavor of the attack. They'd be just as happy to go after any other obviously sensitive group of people (race, religion, gender, sexuality, emotional teens on youtube, etc). Ultimately, if we want to address these attacks, then that's the problem that needs to be fixed.
Yes, I have some insight, I believe, into the responses she received. There is an internet culture which violates taboos and cultural sensitivities in the most shocking way possible. This culture is rooted in centers like 4chan, somethingawful, ebaumsworld, etc. It is very much "trolling".
The goal is to spark the outrage. Mission accomplished. It is a mistake to think that the ideas they express are deeply held. Rather than reflecting the personal beliefs of the troll, they are calculated to attack sensitivities. The exact nature of the sensitivity is a reflection of the victim and not the perpetrators.
This is explicitly not blaming the victim. The point is, it would be misleading to extrapolate a targeted campaign to make one person feel bad, in terms of that to which she is most sensitive, to society at large.
If she were a minority in some other respect, or had a physical disfigurement, or she had expressed some other sensitivity, it is my belief that the internet trolls would choose the most shocking violations of that other sensitivity to send her way. If I am correct, and you want to extrapolate this behavior to a larger society, focus on the aspect of "trolling" and not the specific manner in which this troll was executed. It's my belief that there is no there there.
It's rather interesting to note that as a society we have advanced enough to the point that we can donate the resources to support roughly 3 average size families for a year to a "pop culture critic" to study video games.
No condemnations or moral objections, just merely stating an interesting observation.
The harassment proved her point, before she had any chance to.
At least she is attempting to advance society. If you want to feel depressed, 209 million USD was spent on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(film).
209 million.
> The film has earned $64,372,300 in North America, as of July 9, 2012, and $236,650,220 in other countries, as of June 28, 2012, for a worldwide total of $301,022,520.
You could make this observation about an awful lot of Kickstarter projects, honestly. Here's a random example from a recent campaign I donated to:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/JoshuaACNewman/mobile-fr...
"It's rather interesting to note that as a society we have advanced enough to the point that we can donate the resources to support roughly 2 average size families[1] for a year to a "game designer" to make a tabletop game about Lego robots."
Honestly, your scare quotes and italics kind of hurt your claim of "no condemnations or moral objections" and make your post come off as kind of judgmental.
[1] just guessing that $40k might be enough to support an "average sized" family depending on the part of the country
"Pop culture critic" is in quotes, as that is how the author describes herself in the kickstarter video. I italicized "video games" to emphasize the triviality of what is being studied, not to trivialize the actual study (Though you could argue that's still what I'm doing).
[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/566429325/tropes-vs-wome...
There's a line between criticism and what happened to her. Are you seriously comparing a cartoon mocking non-specific trolls* to sustained abusive material (and doxing) aimed directly at an individual target?
*One of the trolls in that picture is most likely male, the others (smaller ones) are really non-descript and genderless. Are you sure this isn't just a case of you using "male" as the default gender for an androgynous picture?
Where does that come from? A knee-jerk reaction to the concept of 'feminism'? A primitive tribal association with a gender?
In any case, it is disconcerting to see.
Shame on you, sir. Shame on you.
The woman, Californian blogger Anita Sarkeesian, had her Wikipedia page locked after it was hacked repeatedly with profanity, lies and pornography
You can't "hack" a Wikipedia page. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and the actions described above are vandalism, not hacking.
Attacks are of course going too far, but not expecting some form of legitimate resistance is naive, at best. Combine that with the outrage the internet tends to generate, and this behavior, while reprehensible, shouldn't come as a surprise.
Morals never have, never do, and never will dictate art. The sooner people recognize that the answer to something offending your sensibilities is to move on from that particular thing, rather than writing screeds which will be ignored by the perpetrators at best and heckled at worst, the happier we'll all be.
*edit Guess that's what I get for not reading the link. Site's being websense'd, so I can't actually see it. Thanks for the editorialized, BS headline, submitter > : (
"This video project will explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of female characters in games. The series will highlight the larger recurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders."
If she's trying to highlight a disgusting trend of misogyny in gaming culture, I would say she is doing an excellent job.
Exasperation, because, for me at least, you see more and more of the label being thrown around, and the response turns from "Hmm, this is a bad thing, good to know!", to "Jeez, I GET IT ALREADY. Sexism is bad! Enough!"
To use TVTropes terminology, anvils are falling from the sky like raindrops. One of my favorite webcomics, Sinfest (http://sinfest.net) has been beating this drum non stop for the past month or two.
Same applies for any form of art who's also a form of massively popular entertainment. Like movies. If women or blacks where always represented like dumbasses with big boobs or big dicks, even if it was art, a call for change would be welcome.
Sure, she wants to just "research" it, but by the position taking in the proposal the outcome seems already quite "expectable".
The outcome of her exploration is 'expectable' because it's self-evident. I'm an avid gamer. To put it mildly, in comparison to video games, Isaac Asimov's portrayal of female characters had more depth, grace and truth in them.
Considering how abysmal Asimov was in this matter...
As I read and understood it the misogyny in effect is for instance female players being sent pictures of mens penises. Not that different from what we know from the chat roulette experiment.
Now that is obviously bad style but it's definitely not something that only exist in games and media and thus treating it as if it's something specific to media or games is probably what created the outcry (not defending it just explaining it). Try and go to a disco and see the hot ladies being hit on from all sides.
In some countries they suppress this behavior by forcing the women to wear vails so no one can see them and stoning them to death for adultery.
Whether receiving "dick shots" is the other side of men and woman having equal rights I am not sure, but calling an end to misogony is like calling and end men.
I wish her luck.
Uh, this project has nothing to do with blaming sexism on media and games. The project was designed to be an examination of those areas and how they relate to sexism. If you are suggesting that examining an issue is just cause to harass someone, you are most certainly silencing those you disagree with.
> In some countries they suppress this behavior by forcing the women to wear vails so no one can see them and stoning them to death for adultery.
This is just straight up islamophobia. This whole situation indicates you don't need to look any farther than your own back yard to find people willing to attack, harass, and silence others.
> Whether receiving "dick shots" is the other side of men and woman having equal rights I am not sure, but calling an end to misogony is like calling and end men.
You can be a man and not be a misogynist. Heck, you can be female and be a misogynist. What you are saying is that you consider misogyny to be the norm and that we shouldn't change it nor discuss it. In other words, you yourself are admitting to being a misogynist and you have no problem with that.
Islamophobia? Silencing those who disagree with me. I am a misogynist?
Sure you didn't forget anything?
Rather, there is simply little new to be said about this in a vacuum: yes, there is a problem with sexism and yes, the reaction to her project is disgusting (regardless of your stance on the issue) but all that is clear from the article. What more to say about it? I suppose people could offer sympathy--certainly a nice gesture--but not with much substance. Since she probably does not read HN, those types comments would not be very useful at all.
So most of the people agreeing with the article do not really have a good reason to post at the top level. On the other hand, they have plenty of reason to respond to other people. So the sympathetic posts are all framed as responses to others' comments largely because there isn't much to respond to in the article.
Further, these people are not anyone's ally, least of all the person who is being attacked. You are very deliberately saying that she deserves what she gets and that it is her fault that she is being attacked and doxed. This is 100% victim blaming and you yourself are not only siding with the mysoginistic aggressors, but being one.
Yes. And you agree in your next sentence, the reason it blew up is because of all the trolling.
>You are very deliberately saying that she deserves what she gets and that it is her fault that she is being attacked and doxed.
I said nothing of the sort, what on earth are you talking about? I said she doesn't ignore the trolls as the parent poster suggested, because the trolls are how she got so over funded, and how she is trying to further this event into a career. How exactly is "she is being smart and taking advantage of the trolls, so it is not in her best interests to ignore them" blaming her for being attacked? Glad you can tell I hate women from your imagined version of me saying things that don't even vaguely resemble anything I said though.
Why do you seem to think it is some kind of sinister plot? If you were trying to get funding, and someone threw a golden opportunity to generate a ton more publicity and exposure into your lap, wouldn't you take advantage of it?
If someone who is embarking on a project to expose and discuss misogyny suddenly finds themselves on the receiving end of vicious misogynous attacks, would it not make sense to bring that to the fore? After all, the sheer viciousness of the attacks only serves to prove that misogyny is alive and well, and most importantly, damaging.
Bringing inconvenient truths to light goes to the very heart of journalism.
My entire post was exactly that, that it does makes sense. Again, why do you think this is something sinister?
The piece has a lot more details plus interviews with women working in the gaming industry.
Your argument, is a fallacy.
The same can be said of people of colour, of LGBTTIQQ2SA people, of all minorities.
Please, do not diminish a problem because it is common (or in this case ubiquitous). That only makes it that much more of a problem.
Women are portrayed the way they are because it makes straight white men happy, but it destroys the agency of women as equal beings.
If you try to talk about misogyny on a forum that is 98% male, you're going to have a bad time.
This story is now on page 4. Incredible.
You need to narrow it down to more than "a forum that is 98% male" - but I'll grant you that the sample size is really, really small.
the article title is exaggerated linkbait: Sarkeesian's project is a sociological exploration of the representation of women in video games, NOT a call to end videogame misogyny. while i'm sure that she'd like 'end video game misogyny', that's not the immediate point of this project
Also, it is sad and ironic that losttrap (the guy who made the game) has gotten just as much abuse from the feminists as Anita got in the first place. They thought it was terrible when it happened to Anita, but are perfectly happy to do the same thing themselves. It is especially bad to see how much of their abuse has focused on his sexuality.
What do you mean it's a "big deal"? Is it a "big deal" because people are talking about it? Are you not cool with that?
Someone is doing a cultural study and is getting attacked for it. Some of us think that's worthy of our attention.
You've written 11% of the comments of this thread (13 comments out of 117), and they are mostly angry/poisonous. If you don't agree that this has importance, why don't you move somewhere else? You'd do a favor to this thread and trust me, yourself.
There is no cultural study involved here, someone is making a series of videos where she reads tvtropes pages. You are correct, she was attacked for it, but that's not what this article is about. This is about the "game" that was made of hitting her, which was not in response to her making videos, but rather a response to her (quite successful) attempts to portray everyone critical of her as a lunatic. The "if I am going to get accused of being crazy, I am going to act like" approach. Not a very effective approach I don't think, but characterizing it as an attack on her for doing a study is inaccurate.
None of my comments are angry or poisonous, one is frustrated with the strawman repeating troll. While you are counting and categorizing my comments in this thread, perhaps you noticed how many are responses to people directly asking me questions? If you want me to post less, why did you also directly ask me questions? Do you not want me to answer them?
I'm not sure why you are so upset that I don't share your opinion on something, so much so that you would like me to just go away so you aren't inconvenienced by my presence. But your arrogance and condescension is very impressive, I am pleased to know that you have my best interests at heart and know what is best for me. I will be sure to refrain from sharing my opinion in the future before consulting you on its correctness.
There is no cultural study involved here, someone is making a series of videos where she reads tvtropes pages.
That's what I meant. You clearly don't care about this study (yes, it's a cultural study) or about its author.
Beats me how someone who doesn't care about something can be so invested on it, and I usually don't try to give advice to strangers, thing is, I'm tired of seeing people like you hijacking debates about misogyny, by completely missing the point from the top of a pedestal of "I'm beyond all this" yet injecting negativity in the discussion with a disproportionate amount of energy.
Maybe I'm projecting a way too big and way too ugly pattern on you, which might be unfair. But then, tough luck man. You're all over this thread (17 comments, you must be going for the record) basically pounding the same key.
If you want me to post less, why did you also directly ask me questions?
You might find it liberating to not reply to every reply, even if they contain critiques and/or question marks.
Why do you think that because I don't find her as valuable as you do, that I have no interest in the reaction to the kickstarter, and the reaction to the "game" this article was about?
>Maybe I'm projecting a way too big and way too ugly pattern on you
It is interesting that you are aware of it, yet continue to do it. And again, hypocritically trying to shame me into silence because you don't like my opinion, while also being "all over this thread" saying the same thing. Oh no! Contrary opinions! Save me!
>You might find it liberating to not reply to every reply, even if they contain critiques and/or question marks.
I don't find conversation to be stressful or otherwise detrimental to my well being. It is actually quite a common phenomenon, and really nothing to be concerned about.