I read what you originally wrote, and I get that you meant “if people have some kind of beef with Zoe Quinn then maybe that’s legit or maybe it isn’t” which is a very neutral statement that I don’t think anyone disagrees with. However, there’s a larger context and in which it comes across as inflammatory. I’m sure it sounds like I’m saying this topic is a word minefield, but suggesting there is any doubt as to whether Zoe Quinn used her sexual powers to gain unfair advantage is problematic in itself.
Like you say, it’s been discussed to death on these boards, so if you or anyone else doesn’t care for my addition to that then that’s fine. But the problem is that “not being on one side or the other” is being very firmly on one side. It’s like taking no position on whether evolution is real. It’s so settled that it is real that refusing to admit that it is real is giving credence to the idea that it isn’t. If I took no position on whether the sun was going to come up tomorrow, then that would be taking an extremely firm and rather drastic position. Gamergaters claim the Zoe Quinn slept with someone to get a review for her game but that person, in real life, simply did not review her game. Gjoni’s original post got the timing of the relationship wrong to try to make it look like something had happened that didn’t (whoops, right?).
Entirely besides all of that, framing the entire thing as “Zoe Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson to get a good review” rather than “Nathan Grayson is giving out favourable reviews for sexual favours” is also taking a side. That kind of behaviour, where one person with a public platform or a position of power leverages that to get sex, and blaming the person of lesser power who relents to that structure is obscene. In the absolute worst case, where a person intentionally seduces another person in an attempt to persuade them into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do, with no coercion on the part of the “seducee”, it’s still absurd to focus attention on the seducer, who tried to convince someone to do something wrong, and not on the person who actually did the thing that was wrong for sex - as if they couldn’t possibly have made another decision.
The storyline of women taking advantage of helpless men who are powerless in their face of their sexual wiles is kind of a nonsense storyline. It presupposes that the man has a position of power (that’s why the woman wants him to do something for her) but then basically absolves him of responsibility because when offered sex for misdeeds a man simply can’t say no. It’s something that gamergaters seem to fully buy into.
