Well yeah, with many games after a time playing them i usually either turn the music off or turn it way down. Pretty sure i did this with skyrim after the many hours of playing it. I suppose it’s the question of whether you can separate the art from the artist, it’s why i’ll never pay money for an orson scott card book for instance. But that’s a solo effort so it’s an easier decision to make, with something like skyrim you’re supporting a huge creative team.
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And oftentimes, by the time the audience finds out, they’ve handed over the money, anyway.
Then it becomes having to police the companies to make sure the offender isn’t working with them. Wash, rinse, repeat.
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Yep. We nerdy / Geeky girls and women are and have been around. A lot of geeky groups didn’t want us. The ones that did were the ones we stuck with. I was a wee little nerd who grew up to find a nerd husband and lots of nerd friends.
Geeks claiming to be poorly socialised, especially with women, don’t get any sympathy from me. They pushed us away.
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I wanted to respond to this thought from the OP with a (for me) really insightful video by Contrapoints.
To prevent misunderstandings I will first have to say where I’m coming from with sharing this video. I think Zoe Quinn and the other developers that dissociated themselves from Holowka share absolutely no responsibility for his suicide. Suicide or the threat thereof in situations like this is IMO one of the most disgusting types of emotional blackmail imaginable.
What I am interested in bringing up is the group of harassers, (I think a mob is a apt term for them but I will refrain from using it) that made life for Zoe Quinn and many other targets almost impossible. I think this is a relatively small group of disillusioned men that adopted a toxic world view and lash out according to that view. I don’t want to, in any way, defend or absolve them of blame but I’m interested in what drives them in order to maybe prevent more men from joining them.
I really like Contrapoint’s video about men in relation to this.
Feel free to ignore my ramblings and only watch the video, I have strong feelings on this and I’m having a hard time making this post more concise.
This is how I see it.
Our toxic media and culture implicitly promises (more so to men then to women because men are much more often the hero/focus of the story) that life will be great, and everything will work out for you. When this promised future doesn’t line up with the reality, those men go looking for a world view that explains this discrepancy.
Either you join the incel, pua, gator, mens-rights (or even alt-right) community, they help you blame “the others” for your reality not lining up with the one the media has “promised” you all your life. It’s not your fault, but someone else is to blame for whatever you are unhappy about. These guys even offer a vision of what it means to be a man, it’s just the old stereotype that the toxic media always fed us, the macho, strong, emotionally stunted man, turned up to 11.
I think, these men would personally benefit from making a different choice, it’s certainly not in the worlds interest that they become embittered internet trollies that ruin people lives, but it’s not in their own interest either. I think most of their unhappyness can be explained by exactly the same forces that feminism is fighting against. The toxic media and culture created a male image that makes it hard for for them to express their emotions, it gave them false expectations. With a common enemy maybe they can join the right team? We end up with less trollies and they end up with a happier life?
So the other option these disillusioned men could choose: you start believing in the intrinsic goodness of most “others” again. You learn capitalism and the mass-media have shown us a worldview that is not accurate, that the current systems aren’t fair and that it’s mostly people with your gender (and usually skin color too) that are responsible for all this unfairness. As a result you could ally with feminism.
But feminism tells you, usually without much sugarcoating, that men are shitty. (Let me be clear, I’m a man, I agree with this statement and I don’t think it needs sugarcoating) This can be a really big mental hurdle. Obviously belonging to a shitty group doesn’t mean you are shitty yourself but that can be a challenging bit of mental gymnastics, especially for someone raised on a culture that implicitly tells them, at every turn, that they are special, deserving, etc. Especially when you already feel like you are the victim and not the oppressor.
In order to win more people over to “our” camp it could help to have a alternative vision of manhood. Some positive image. I mean, when you think of manhood you don’t necessarily think of Mr. Roger, Bob Ros, Terry Crews, but I think those are the type of examples we should be getting more of. I was actually surprised I could think of so many examples.
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I understand, but I personally view shaming as a form of violence. Yes, absolutely we must punish and deter abusers, but in my view shaming perpetuates a cycle of abuse, as surely as locking offenders in prison where they’re subjected to sexual torture does. Any recovering addict or abuser knows that one of the hardest things to break out of are cycles of guilt (“I did this terrible thing; so I don’t deserve to heal and I’ll continue to abuse myself and others”) and shaming redoubles that. I also think someone is less likely to come forward and admit they have a problem if they expect to be shamed.
I just don’t see Internet tr0lling and harassing women in general as an addiction or compulsion on par with substance abuse.
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I’m not sure you fully digested what Natalie said in that video then, if this is one of your take aways. That’s not really what most feminists have written and said, not even remotely. By definition, the feminist movement has been focused on improving the lives of women by pushing for the exact same access to the rights that men have increasingly enjoyed over the modern era (basic shit, like the right to vote, to own property, to be treated as an equal in a court of law, to have full control over our bodies, access to work and protections in the work place, etc, all things we’ve routinely been denied in history, and to some extent are still denied today…). You really have to go pretty far out out in the weeds to find those “feminist manhaters” that the PUAs and MRAs are always screaming about. they are pretty much straw ladies that have no bearing on the reality of the feminist movement. More rights for me and other women is NOT less rights for you and men. That’s righting a historical wrong.
But ending patriarchal structures and redefining manhood (as Natalie describes in the video) would go a hell of a lot further in fixing the very real problems that men face then shutting down feminist arguments with straw ladies that rarely are part of the actual arguments that feminists are making…
If you’re really concerned about the mass media peddling bullshit (which I agree with), then maybe be concerned about the bullshit that everyone believes about feminists and their actual arguments, which are just as silly, and in many ways more dangerous than, as the bullshit they put out about what it means to be a man. Because if you honestly believe that’s what feminism has largely been about through it’s long and storied history, then you really need to bone up on your history and stop listening the lies being promoted by mass media.
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This needs a lot of context and nuance.
Shame leads to the worse forms of abuse when the balance of power is unequal.
Women are shamed all the time without unavoidably becoming as toxic as their abusers.
Calling for an end to shame of bad acting people is completely pointless if it also involves keeping them in powered relationships or scenarios where they can perpetuate more harm.
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That’s fair. I guess I’m thinking of cases where the abuse is long-standing and systematic, where the behavior or perpetrators does seem compulsive.
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Those alternatives are offered in the media, and have been for almost half a century. Dwayne Johnson is another example, and there are plenty of fictional ones, too. The thing is, it takes real work to break out of our society’s multifarious forms of deeply entrenched toxic masculinity. A lot of guys just aren’t willing or even incentivised to put in that work, especially when it’s easier to go with the traditionalist flow and listen to the blandishments of gender essentialists and misogynists of various stripes.
The media can do only so much to attain inroads, and it has to be explicit. For me, the most effective cultural product in that regard was 1972’s “Free to Be… You and Me”, which I really wish had some modern analogue. But even then I also had real-life male role models who, if they weren’t exactly Mr. Rogers types or Alan Alda feminists, still managed not to be male chauvinist pigs and who knew how to treat women (and children – there’s a correlation here) as fellow human beings who deserved respect. I try to model these same behaviours and convey these same lessons ( further refined, I hope) to the young men I know. This is one of our jobs as men, one we can’t palm off on the media.
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Well, that’s physical vs mental addiction I suppose (which is confusing enough given endorphin-highs and the like), but I absolutely believe that there is a subset of trolldom where a user is addicted to the act itself and the attention it creates, as much as any other attention-seeking behaviour could be.
Sure it is, just as much as robbing someone of any freedom could be construed that way as well - jailing someone is definitely a form of violence. We as a society do it, though, when “talking to the individual and helping them to understand the effect of their actions” fails. Because at some point, the lesser violence of incarceration (or shaming) needs to be weighed as the lesser of two evils versus the violence the person is committing.
Some future us will view our “rehabilitation” programs as violent barbaric, to be sure, as will they view mass-shaming and the effects it has on individuals as well. But that all has to be weighed against the costs to the innocent to do anything less, IMHO.
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I’ve definitely seen compulsive behaviour in some Internet tr0lls over the years, and you’ve no doubt seen many more. Still, I don’t see shaming them over that attention-seeking behaviour (and whatever physical rush it gives them) as counter-productive in the same way shaming an opioid addict might be.
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if this guy was an abuser, he had emotional problems and should have gotten help instead of killing himself.
yes, it’s VERY tragic that he killed himself. I’m sincerely sorry about that.
But it’s not anyone’s fault.
I’ve long suspected there is some kind of dopamine loop type thing in there. People do it because… it feels good. They can’t have what they want out of life but they can shit on someone and that’s something.
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He was an abuser who also happened to have serious emotional problems and mental health issues. Those aspects of his life were likely connected, but some abusers and harassers are just mean-spirited bullies and entitled arseholes and hatemongers who get a rush out of their behaviour.
You’re correct that Holowka’s suicide wasn’t anyone’s fault but his own.
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I really wasn’t trying to strawman any argument but I totally understand how it came off that way. This isn’t something that I have taken from the video but something that I believe separate from it. I think you may be right that it’s never explicitly put in this way but I believe it follows from the facts.
This is how I come to this conclusion: Most of the problems feminism is (and has been) fighting against boil down to “shitty things men do” or if you want to be less harsh “shitty things that our society and culture keep perpetuating” but then still most of the power to influence that society and culture lies with men so that gets you back to the same conclusion. I guess that is why I put at least some blame with men, and call them, as a group, shitty.
I wasn’t trying to make a straw lady (thanks for the links by the way, I should really read more of Kate Beaton’s work) I honestly think men as a group can be quite shitty. Just like humans as a species are impressively good at being shitty. The way we harm our fellow humans, other animals and the environment…
I guess if you hear about a lot of bad things being done, and time and time again it’s either your gender performing the bad things, or benefiting unfairly from it. It isn’t that surprising that you take some of that personally.
I added this paragraph to my comment to explain what I think is part of the reason so many men get pushed to the “other” side. The reason I think a strong counter narrative could be very helpful.
Does that clarify my stance a little?
Because some men indeed DO shitty things. They rape and sexual harass women (and sometimes, men, too), because they are on a power trip and often know they can get away with it. That’s not conjecture, that’s a fact. If you think that actual fact of reality reflects poorly on YOU as an individual man, that’s on you, I think, not on feminists who are working to ensure that these things happen LESS often, and that the people that do these actions are held responsible for their actions, instead of getting a slap on the wrist because they are “from good families” or “they give money to good causes” or “they have a bright future, we don’t want to see ruined”, etc.
This is also true. Again, if you believe it’s reflecting on you specifically, I can’t help you there. It’s on you.
It’s more about what perpetuates shitty things, which is both a case of some individual men doing so in order to retain their social/cultural privilege, but also particular people in power doing all they can to maintain the status quo.
All YOU can do is to know what you’ve done, and know when something being talked about applies to you. YOU can also work to ensure that men around you aren’t perpetuating that shit, either. YOU can’t change an entire system, but YOU can act as a positive ally and work to improve conditions for both the women in your life, and for the men in your life (by calling them out when they are being THAT GUY). You are not responsible for “all men”, but you can make your corner of the world a bit better for those who do not have your cultural and social privileges in this world. And perhaps don’t ASSUME that when we talk about these things, we mean YOU specifically. Again, you know your actions, and what you’ve done in this world.
I think that if they react like that, and join the MRA side because women talk about their experiences, and they assume it’s about them (even if it’s a woman talking about specifics of HER life, even if it’s someone he’s never met and never will), that’s really on them. Like Natalie said - women can’t do the work to create a more positive masculinity. Only men themselves can do that work. It’s not our job to soften our tone or soft-peddling our oppression to make men feel better.
It did. Thanks. I still disagree with you here, but I do understand a bit better.
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