How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate

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Motivations don’t have to follow strong internal logic to exist. I’m pleased that some money went to TFYC, but my respect for the donors suffers more than a little when it seems clear that the support is strategic rather than ideological.

I would be a lot more wary about judging a real person’s motivations, but mascots, icons and the like are designed for a purpose, in order to achieve a specific effect. While it may be hard to predict what effect they may have on different groups, the intention is not such a mystery when it’s spelled out by the group adopting the character. The reason that she’s a woman is not because most of the people behind her development were women and she’s not an empty character that you can just place whatever meaning you want on; she was designed by a group known to have a high number of people who are hostile to women, for the purpose of disarming critiques of this hostility by representing an opinion mostly held by men who play video games. Or not? I’m not sure that there is a lot of doubt, given the summary of her development that I posted (especially the list of the most important aspects of her character).

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It achieves greater understanding on my part, at least.

It also reminds me that, absent these specifics of her development, Vivian can - and has been - used to represent pretty much everything ‘good’ the GGers wish to project, and everything ‘bad’ those turned off by it feel GG actually represents. By virtue of the fact she is a pure construct, she can and does mean many things outside of her original “official” definition (sprung from the forehead of a group of channers). And, therefore, and additionally ironically, she can also mean nothing.

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I had support from other people on the internet which is more than I was getting from anyone IRL. As far as I know the people attacking me were also fascists, one of them put BNP posters in his window even though they weren’t standing in any elections.

One of them eventually got himself arrested for trying to break into the mayor of Carlisle’s house (the mayor and mayoress for that year were that areas city councillors) while ranting about the gay agenda.

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Carlisle? Yup. Seems legit.

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It blows down the straw women she’s opposing! Like all dem feminazis and fake-game-designer girls. Here’s a real game designer and player!

…

They also should have given her a pony.

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Thanks for the follow-up; your first post was confusing, stating things about Vivian James and her creators that also seemed to be your opinions.

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Uh, do we refer to this fictional female entity by first and last names, last name, or what?

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That Occulass and Vivian picture is just asking for détournement.

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To me, this article points to not what is an understandable difference in communication styles, instead it shows that the chan message boards are an echo chamber of nasty, contemptuous conversations among people who value being right over creating any form of relationship.

People who have attempted to point out the most common sense issues with gaming culture are being targeted maliciously by participants on these boards.

That the people on these chan boards act like this to each other as part of their “culture” is not an excuse for the way they treat the women who have criticized the legitimate issues with gaming culture.

Critics are right to point out that this mean-sprited, anti-social behavior is always UNACCEPTABLE.

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Here you go: http://agoodcartoon.tumblr.com/post/100252550140/this-seems-appropriate-given-your-recent

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I suspect you might be thinking of Leo Traynor discovering that his harasser was his neighbor’s son. All the worse for the monstrous things the kid did to him:

I ripped it open and there was a Tupperware lunchbox inside full of ashes. There was a note included, saying, “Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz”. I was physically sick.

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Beeficide

Oh shit, I’ve been outed with my real name.

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Wait, you’re Banksy?

I thought Banksy was a women’s collective?

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OMG! @Cowicide is a women’s collective!

# #mindblown

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Looks like they got a flesh-and-blood figure in the fray.
http://www.vocativ.com/culture/media/gamergate-anita-sarkeesian-princess-kora/

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Huh. Parody is parody, and something like it was always inevitable, even without rule 34. At least Kora is a real person with real opinions and motivations. But the irony continues with her GG fanbase.

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I guess I can’t be surprised that there is a porn parody of Sarkeesian, since there is a porn parody of everything.

But wow is this thing contemptible. First, making a porn parody of a person who is probably still getting real threats from misogynists is at best poor taste. Second, this is pretty deeply pathetic on the part of the gamergaters who hate Sarkeesian but get off on a sexualized portrayal of her - there isn’t much that confirms misogyny like wanting to have sex with a woman because you hate them.

What I find interesting about it, though, is how deeply credulous gamergaters are. It’s one thing that doesn’t really fit with the given description of chan culture and how it shaped gamergate. At the same time as gaters criticize people for being “taken in” by Sarkeesian’s “feminist outrage for money” act, they basically fall head of heels for anyone who supports them, no matter how suspicious. Milo Yiannopoulos openly called gamers pathetic losers, but as soon as he said Sarkeesian was full of it he was a gamergate hero. Others speak openly about profiteering off of gaters and still manage to profiteer. I’ve got nothing against sex work, but you shouldn’t consider a sex worker a hero of your movement because they are selling you what you want to buy - selling people what they want to buy is what business does.

So there is another side of the coin opposite the bad faith arguing and complete mistrust, and it’s readiness to completely trust even when ordinary people with normally functioning smell tests wouldn’t. There a sort of desperateness to the wanting to hear agreement.

Also, that #SexPositiveAnita tag is stomach-turning. I’ve never seen anything in Sarkessian’s videos to suggest she isn’t Sex Positive (well, except maybe the “prostituted women” thing). I like the term “Sex Positive” and “Sex Positive” is a phrase that I would rather misogynists don’t co-opt. There is nothing sex-positive about wanting to rape a woman you hate.

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I wish I could add something to this that would make it even more impactful, but it’s pretty perfect just as it is, so I’ll just try highlighting it.

This is the really gross part about the whole “Nice Guys ™” phenomenon too - (“hot,” for some arbitrary value of “hot”) women are mean, spiteful, shallow, selfish, hateful people with terrible values and no character to speak of because they only like “alpha” men with looks and money rather than Mr. Nice Guy. Who really wants to fuck these terrible, awful, spiteful, shallow, selfish women like WHOA.

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And now there is an interview with Princess Kora… Her beef with Sarkeesian essentially comes down to the fact that she dislikes that Sarkeesian points out that how some sex workers are portrayed in some games means that Sarkeesian thinks that all sex workers are victims, which I’m not sure that Sarkeesian has ever said… She quotes Gloria Steinem to prove her point that all feminist think that all sex workers are victims. So, basically, let’s forget that the 3rd/4th wave ever happened, and of course gloss over the fact that yes, some sex workers are sometimes coerced…

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I think her complaint about Sarkeesians’ portrayal of sex workers is a legitimate beef - I also don’t like Sarkeesian’s use of “prostituted women.” Of course it would be a female sex worker (rather than a horde of gamergaters) who would be offering criticisms of Sarkeesian I can get behind.

I agree with you that stopping your understanding of feminism at Steinem isn’t exactly digging deep, but I can see how women who do sex work could have been put off of what they perceive to be feminism by women (and men) who want to criminalize their profession to “protect” them. Of course some sex workers are coerced, but I’m pretty convinced the best way to minimize that is to properly treat sex work as work.

“I hear all of this talk of ‘sex-positive feminism,’ and how sex-worker and transgender exclusionary radical feminists are the minority,” Kora says. “I simply do not buy it."

This presumably comes out of her experiences in interacting with feminists. I’m not even sure she’s totally wrong, in a way. I could easily imagine that the majority of self-identified feminists have negative views about sex work but at the same time I would bet that negative views about sex work are less prevalent among feminists than among the general population. That’s the tricky part, society has big problems with sex work and with transgender people (not to lump those together, just responding to her mentioning both), and feminists are part of that society, so that will be found among feminists too.

So it would probably be pretty easy to have interactions with feminists that left you with a bad feeling without really stopping to think about whether the views they described are really part of feminism or whether they are simply part of our culture. Feminists who don’t like sex work may frame that as protecting women, misogynists who don’t like sex work frame that with words like ‘whore’. A big difference, I guess, is that feminists who don’t like sex work probably, for the most part, don’t use the services of sex workers while misogynists who don’t like sex work probably, with reasonable frequency, do. Those men who came to her channel to get off while they thought about a woman they hate probably mostly have egregious views about sex work, agree with her only insofar as she is willing to make herself available as a sexual object to them, and feel entitled to her body rather than respecting her. I imagine a lot of sex workers have very ambivalent feelings about this, like an ethnic convenience store owner and the racists who buy cigarettes from them.

Anyway, I didn’t think she came off terribly in that interview. I still think that a sexual parody of Sarkeesian is in poor taste given the rape threats.

I made jokes about ‘crushing the patriarchy with my boobs’ as the tips came rolling in.

And then there’s that.

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