Thiiiiiisssss!!
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For the last muthafucking time, that’s NOT what the fuck that word actually means, so your chosen phrasing is hyperbolic at best.
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Yep. Not only are you a social outcast from “normal” people, but the people who should be embracing you as one of their own also reject you, because they want a “normal” girl!
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That is not the meaning I know, understood or intended
What the hell is going on in this topic?
Sure, fine, there was initial confusion over which attack was being referred to here. It’s absolutely clear from the responses that the poster was referring to the attacks on the victims.
So, can we seriously stop selectively reading between the lines about a poster’s intent? And further, are we really arguing here that the attacks on Zoe Quinn that drove them from twitter wouldn’t be called by everyone an example of “mob mentality”?
Can we please focus on the incredibly shitty issues here? You know, how someone with a reported history of abusive behaviour is being white-knighted by a predominantly-male crowd while his victims are blamed and attacked by an online group of thugs - again - even after the alleged abuser absolved his victims of blame??
Seriosuly. Perspective!
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Then you have now been informed repeatedly by various people, and maybe perhaps you’ll consider endeavoring to be more careful about your phrasing going forward.
Good day.
ETA:
Mob mentality, mob justice and an actual lynch mob aren’t the same things, Oren.
Words and their meaning still MATTER.
What happened (and is still happening) to Zoe Quinn is horrific; it’s misogynistic harassment and hatred, no doubt.
I hope it never escalates to the point that their haters attempt to actually literally mob them, as the online harassment, death threats and psychological abuse are already atrocious enough as it is.
*Edited again, to correct the pronouns used.
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Your post was very ambiguous. It wasn’t clear who the attackers were, who they were attacking, whether they were the mob or someone else was the mob.
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I’ve been reading a number of articles since this abuse has been brought to light and nathalie lawhead’s [content warning] blog post [content warning] about the physical and mental abuse she has suffered and calling out her rapist is upsetting and enraging to read. There is a section in that post which i found to be incredibly disturbing which i want to paste below but this is a trigger warning so please don’t reveal it if you feel you will be affected by it. I’m not sure i can ever play the game in question again after reading this, to know that the source of this creativity stems from abuse and control makes me sick.
What made this hard for me was that I used to be a fan of Morrowind. I loved that game. It was one of my favorite games. When Skyrim came out I couldn’t play it, knowing where his music came from.
He makes songs about sex. It’s about what he does to women. To him it’s some sick twisted old-school romanticization of women as muses. To me, that type of boy-genius is something I view as incredibly destructive. That type of manbaby genius can do whatever he wants, harm whoever he likes, walk over whoever he wants, all in the interest of making “brilliant” work, and people will defend him for it.
Jeremy told me where the inspiration for his music comes from. It was broken down in graphic detail by him. Skyrim came out after what he did to me. Part of me wonders how much of me is in that music too… I can’t listen to it. I can’t play these games anymore.
When Bethesda announces anything at E3 it’s a personal nightmare because his music is part of it and I can’t tune it out.
He can’t bullshit about that. He talked so much about his music being about sex and women (women that, to my knowledge, he hurt).
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And of course, he’s threatening to sue her.
(thread continues)
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Having been one of those poorly adapted guys, I’m certainly not making excuses for them. In fact, you’re (more eloquently) making the point that I was trying for.
This is much like any area where “normal” society is making inroads into what was previously an outcast group. They found their “safe place” and resent the interlopers.
(of course they could have grown up to some degree at any point and realized that the safe place wasn’t really necessary at all).
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I agree, and didn’t mean to imply that this was a male only situation.
I went to a very small school, so we (males and females) banded together in our nerd-dom, which probably helped a lot of us not go the incel route in the long run.
I can easily see a situation in a large enough school where groups separate by sex and piss on each other (because if you can stand on someone else, then at least you’re not the bottom of the pile…).
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I didn’t take you as making excuses for the white male nerds at the heart of this problem – if anything you were harsher in your assessment of them than I was.
The interesting thing is that in reality there aren’t any interlopers: their “safe places” (e.g. SFF fandom, software coding, gaming) just expanded beyond them into mainstream (what the old-timers called “mundane”) society, and in the process had to appeal to people other than middle-class cis-het white males when it came to content and functionality hiring practises. In this way there’s an unspoken resentment that they won in business and culture, because in their triumph they were no longer special and unique members of an exclusive club.
As a side note, this sort of thinking informs a lot of conservative “we’re the real victims” false martyrdom rhetoric we see these days – people who set the tone of the American mainstream in terms of economics and political ideology whingeing that they’re somehow oppressed.
At least, not necessary after a specific point in both history (I’d say the late 1990s) and in individual human development (say, some at point between age 18 and 25). The gaming industry and gaming culture have been preserved as that safe space for white male nerds who have insisted on preserving their own extended high-school victim status.
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Well, except that they were never, ever, “white male” spaces to begin with. Women and people of color of all genders and LBGQT+ people were always part of the fandom. It was never an exclusive white male space, no matter how they acted towards the rest of us. It’s OURS too, and that’s what I take exception with. I and others didn’t jump on geek culture because it was the latest fad, it was full of culture that appealed to us and spoke to us, just as much as the white male nerds.
They NEVER were, is the point, though.
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That’s super evident in how the image of a “mainstream interloper” is almost always gendered.
A guy can start watching something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the first time, tomorrow, and they’re in almost no danger of being called “fake” in their interest or enthusiasm. Women can have a life-long engagement in some cultural product and always have it framed by others as superficial.
(Obv. I’m not saying anything new here.)
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Oh, I agree. But they thought it was theirs, and the corporate and amateur gatekeepers in those days – Campbell comes to mind, but there are many other examples – not only didn’t disabuse them of that notion but often actively encouraged it. Nothing that follows is unknown to you, but I’ll lay it out to clarify my position for others.
Adolescent white cis-het males of all ages were considered the core target market by the gatekeepers until relatively recently in SFF fandom, in comics, in the tech industry, in RPGs. Capitalism’s boundless need for growth has “officially” expanded the target market to be more inclusive and general-interest starting in the 1990s, and has prospered because of it. The AAA video game industry and culture is the last holdout, which is why the Gators are a particular problem and why “missing stair” behaviour like Holowka’s is still very prevalent in the industry, even as it’s slowly being rooted out in other sectors of geekdom.
One of the great things about geek culture is that the inherent primacy of unfettered imagination within it ensures that, despite that situation, anyone could be a so-called “interloper” in that culture. That’s the tension we’re seeing here – between the white nerdy guys who ran the various “shows”, trying to keep them exclusive even though they never were.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, I’ll tell two stories. When I was about 11, I remember spending part of a summer playing D&D at a particularly well-run Friendly Local Games Shop. The group was an even mix of boys and girls my age, and it was a very welcoming atmosphere where the focus was on the characters and adventure, not the players. It wasn’t an exclusive realm, it was (as you put it) everyone’s, and as a result was a wonderful experience.
But, far more frequently, I’ve heard truly horrific stories of young geek girls being totally put off by much less Friendly Local Games Shops. The stories in this (potentially triggering) 2016 article are particularly poignant, and until very recently have been more the rule than the exception. A key quote to give you an idea (the author is a woman who was always an RPG geek):
I am thirteen years old and in a game store for the first time. I examine their selection of dice and take them to the counter to pay.
“How old are you?” asks the balding, middle-aged man behind the counter.
“Thirteen.”
“Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed!” he chuckles in glee. The Warhammer 40K gamers at the table behind him take up the refrain. “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed! Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed!”
I run.
It gets worse as she gets older. And I’ll bet that other women have similar stories from other geek-dominated industries and cultures.
What has to be smashed here are those kinds of barriers, set up by white male nerds who think these “safe spaces” belong to them first and foremost.
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I’m not surprised there’s a cease and desist and it’s an intimidation tactic to silence her as someone in that thread points out. I just fear that if it goes to court he’ll be able to cover his legal costs easier than her. Glad she’s sticking to her statement though.
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I don’t think we should be surprised at all, as perpetuating cycles of abuse often is the prescribed solution.
I don’t think we should lose track of the fact that capitalism is a system defined by hierarchies of abuse and that we are all, to varying degrees, victims of it. The “privileged” are any people who are marginally less abused than me, who in turn choose to perpetuate their own cycles of abuse as a (poor and ineffective) coping mechanism for their own traumas. But that’s sorta what we’ve all been taught to do – not dismantle systems of oppression, but to climb up high enough to be marginally less oppressed. Shifting the heavy lifting to abusers sound great, but the problem by definition is that they have don’t have the tools to cope to begin with and have learned self-destructive coping methods. So we have to be careful not to fall into the same trap of perpetuatnig cycles of abuse, which is why shaming of abusers is kind of imperfect tactic.
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You had me right up to that point. No, the decision to harass or rape is not, in most cases where the person is not mentally impaired to an extreme degree, a passive one but an active and willful one. This is even more so the case with Quinn’s harassers. What we’re discussing here is patently unacceptable behaviour, and those perpetuating it should be shamed (which, I will add, is not the same thing as their being abused).
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I can get around this by turning the music off while playing the games in question. I actually bought the Elder Scrolls soundtracks a couple of weeks before this news, and now I don’t feel able to listen to them.
I guess there are former fans of Gary Glitter and Lostprophets who feel the same way. I know that the other members of Lostprophets also felt that way after Ian Watkins crimes were revealed.
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Somewhere, Seanan McGuire has a story about learning (as many women did) which of her dice were balanced such that if she threw them a certain way would give a certain result, and how to make it look like a normal roll.
Because you knew that if you failed that roll, your character was getting sexually assaulted and it would probably be described to you in detail. Because you might be well into the game before you realize this about the GM you sat down with. And if you run or protest, you’re the fragile girl who can’t hack it. So you have the special dice and the special roll, which to the table makes it look like you got lucky. And you make a note never play with that GM or his buddies again.
Me, I just got gaslit for protesting the boys freezing me out of games (somehow it was never my turn) and then later the group that I was one of the founding members of.
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