Great story, but a genuine question I have is this:
Would someone with a vagina who essentially is trying to get rid of it not classify as the most literal form of misogynist?
Iād say that the desire to make oneās physical appearance match their sex/gender (sorry I always seem to fail at using the correct term no matter how hard I try, so hereās both) identity has little to do with whether they hate men or women.
Itās not mys-beardist of me to shave because I hate having a beard. My beard is something that causes me intense discomfort daily if I donāt shave. I canāt ignore it. I donāt care about beards generally. Some people have very attractive beards, some people feel more confident with them, others wear them out of obligation to a custom, some people canāt have them due to custom but really want one. My beard is definitely not what I want for myself. But saying I hate beards is not true.
This is a very trivial example of course, but possibly something thatās not totally 100% off the mark.
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I have offered to listen so many times. I am willing to listen to you. I want to know what gamergaters want to happen, what they would like to see be different in the world, but, no joke, every single time I ask that the people defending gamergate just disappear (except the one time that they responded by saying Zoe Quinn was a whore, which didnāt really answer my question, but it answered another question). Iām not being sarcastic, Iām not joking. What is is that you want, how is it that you feel? Why is gamergate important to you? Iāll even have a reasonable conversation over private message. For my own edification I would love to know.
My only information on what members of gamergate want is that they rejoiced when Intel pulled ads from gamasutra. They had pushed for that in response to what I felt was a really reasonable and mostly fact-based article. We could disagree on that point. Is that what gamergate as a collective wants? To have advertisers pull out from sites that print things they donāt agree with? Other than harassing a certain group of women, that is the only thing Iāve ever understood gamergate to want, and I have actually tried very hard to listen - itās just that no one will actually talk.
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I think the only answer is obvious: they want certain voices to be silenced. Look at the phrase āundeserved attention.ā
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Well, like I said, I am totally willing to listen to someone who wants to say that they want something else, that they are involved in gamergate for some other reason. I just never hear it. People who come here to defend gamergate say a lot about what gamergate is not about, and never anything about what it is out. Well, at least after āactually, itās about ethicsā¦ā became too much of a joke to use anymore. But even when it was about ethics if you asked, āOkay, what would you like to actually happenā (since āmore ethicsā isnāt an actionable idea) there was just nothing behind it, or at least nothing anyone was willing to say.
I read hundreds of gamergate related tweets at one point, trying to figure out what it was actually about. I got nothing. It was entirely devoted to talking about how the anti-gamergate crowd was out to get them. If the XYZ club exists only to talk about how people donāt like the XYZ club then thatās not a very flattering thing to say about XYZ. The only thing I saw that wasnāt that was someone organizing a charity donation to an anti-bullying charity (which seemed like a legit organization). Hey, thatās great, but I didnāt understand how it was connected to gamergate, which clearly doesnāt define itself as a charity-donation organization like, for example, Awesome Games Done Quick (or if the purpose of gamergate is to organize people to donate to charity then I donāt understand why no one has ever said that).
I just wish that one person could come on here and say, āI support gamergate and I would like X to be different about the worldā, or āI would like people to understand that I feel Y.ā Instead itās arguments about form, saying that gamergate is not X and not Y, and (too often) people devolving into just saying bad things about Zoe Quinn.
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This is the most surprising aspects of theseā¦ people to me. Is it really that invisible that he just described GG, point for point? I see it all the time. Is there a name for this behavior?
I do not dabble in questions of transgender, itās a radioactive subject.
I have a friend who that has happened to at least three times because he was good at raising money then getting his throat cut. He eventually took that experience and became an employment lawyer.
I think he is claiming he has no personal responsibility for what he chooses to look at and pay attention to.
A recurring theme I keep finding is that a sizable portion of the movement just wants to be left alone with their vidya.
Like social reactionaries in other domains, this subgroup enjoys the status quo and want to opt out of (if not outright resist) the social evolution of their culture.
To get to that perspective, I think most need to buy into the misapprehensions that
- critique inexorably leads to censorship
- video-games is a zero-sum game, and if there are more games SJWs like it will mean that there will be less of the types of games they like
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If they want to be left alone with their hands, why are they making so much noise in public?
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Who isnāt leaving them alone?
Who is taking Call of Duty Part Eleventy Billion away? Is Grand Theft Auto XI being banned?
They want to be left alone, but they want games to be considered art, and also free from criticism. They want ethics in games journalism, like it was when they had all those āOfficialā magazines.
I donāt get it.
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The compulsive personality types that would undoubtedly exist on both sides, not everyone, but definitely there. Keep in mind that everyone is some sort of personality, but what we see is the really primitive stuff that emerges when there is a struggle for control. Thatās when apparently normal people start acting like lunatics.
The gamers would be the compulsive personalities (doesnāt ācompulsiveā describe gamers pretty well?) with the typical compulsive desire for power struggles and having the last word. On the other side are the SJWs, and the stereotype there is that their thirst for justice is the displacement of their anger over other stuff, so their involvement in some cause has a fetish-like abstract quality. And keep in mind that IT people tend to be compulsive. In the compulsive, the urge for justice is a reaction formation against their own aggressive urges. If both parties are compulsive, neither side will let go of the issue, and the intensity of their mutual hatred reflects their similar natures and the degree to which self hatred is present. Karen Horney said something like āBehind all hatred is self hatred.ā And compulsives can either typically worship the status quo or they can tirelessly (compulsively) reorganize the system. The onlooker is left with the impression of two bulimics trying to settle an argument by puking at each other.
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@OtherMichael @daneel Iām just talking of one sub-theme Iāve seen repeated within GG. Certainly, GG means different things to different people (some use it as a platform to launch harassment campaigns, some have latched on to profiteer - the motivations and goals both of those wings have been well-discussed.)
@PrestonSturges What you describe sounds like a post-Hegelian dialectic. 
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Of course, there is thisā¦
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Thereās a lot of truth in that, since dialectics is attractive to people that want to have endless sterile arguments about the nuances of different schools of dialectics, leaving onlookers puzzled and bored.
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Having a vagina and/or liking vaginas does not exempt one from misogyny. Vagina cmes from the Latin for scabbard. Misogyny comes from the Greek for hating womyn. Misogyny is about hating people, not hating body parts.
And trans men have no special claim on womonhood.
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Itās about ethics. In games journalism.
Or maybe games. In ethics journalism?
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Probably also worth mentioning Zoe Quinn & Alex Lifschitzās awesome Crash Override project, which provides assistance to targets of online harassment
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