The Terrible Misogyny in the Games Industry

If you tweet to your enemy "I'm gonna use my orbital laser to incinerate you from space, so that you're wiped clean off the map!" Your enemy will not be actually, literally scared. Because your threat is obviously imaginary. You do not have a space laser, and anyway few people have ever been incinerated by space lasers at all.

If you tweet to your enemy "I'm gonna toss a molotov through your window while you sleep, so that you and your family are cooked alive", they might be legitimately scared. Because that threat is not obviously imaginary. It could feasibly happen, and it is exactly the kind of thing that has been done by hate groups before.

So a threat only becomes a Threat when, in context, it's sufficiently plausible.

That context is key. The plausibility of a threat changes based on who makes the threat, and whom they threaten. If a misogynistic troll on the internet says that he's going to rape me (a man), I can pretty easily laugh it off. I feel safe in assuming the troll is a hetero-male, and therefore probably has little interest in actually raping me, and besides there's relatively little precedent for guys like me being stalked and raped by weirdos.

If the troll says the same thing to a woman, it's interpreted differently. Very many women are raped in our society, it is a constant real fear. And it's not at all unbelievable that a weirdo might seek to stalk and rape a woman he's become obsessed with. Rare, sure. But real enough to be scary.

Point being, yes both men and women are threatened with rape. But while to men it's obviously just an especially colorful way of expressing hatred, to women it can constitute a real and serious threat.

This post sets up and knocks down a strawman quite expertly. You're right, it's not just Anita Sarkeesian who gets death threats, threats of rape, etc. leveled at her by idiot troll gamers. That's gaming's culture of harassment and embarrassing childishness due to anonymity.

What the author conveniently ignores is that while Jack Thompson woke the gamer troll machine by being a living caricature of game-hatred, Anita Sarkeesian invites the same wrath by creating level-headed, well-researched videos whose only "incendiary" call to action is for the creators of games to be more thoughtful and inclusive in their use of female characters in video games.

The misogyny isn't in the harassment itself, it's in why the harassment is occurring.

> All these horrible comments, just because she’s a woman

Huh ? Are you kidding me ? She's not just nobody. She's a feminist, who is very vocal about her opinions, has tons of viewers, and obviously have very polarizing opinions about video games and the place of women/girls in it.

Claiming she's "just a woman" is ridiculous. When you expose yourself, become popular and have lame opinions about some stuff (yeah, obviously I think most of what she talks about is BS), of course you will get a certain number of people who are violently opposed to you, and not just because of your gender.

It's like saying "people don't like Phil Fish and want to murder him just because they are jealous" or something.

All this link proves is that 'gamers' treat everyone who threatens their childish world-view with childish responses.

Nothing has changed. Gamer still equals douchebag, crybaby man-child.

The misandry is a much bigger problem:

http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...