Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War

boing
124

I’d say you’re over-stating (or at least over-dramatizing) a bit on the Freudian angle, but it’s not a bad model. I’ll roughly try to restate with less contempt: This is a birds-of-a-feather effect, people [mostly male in this case] built themselves a space where the norms and conventions made them comfortable, and now that their space is a popular space, the people who felt safe there are being told they can’t keep their comfortable conventions.

Sports and TV fandoms and hobby communities and the like are all examples of weird people (hint: we’re all weird in one way or another) carving out safe spaces based on shared aesthetic, it shouldn’t be surprising that they tend to break on other major factors of socialization like race and gender. (Since we’re talking about gender: Hackers and Sports fans are both male-dominated examples where there are both longstanding female minorities who, for whatever individual reason, really like the space, and other women who feel excluded; I take that as evidence that it’s a case of a larger aesthetic that tends to appeal to a gender, not discrimination). If you get the “ladies night” idea of environments within cultures and sub-cultures where the conventions are dictated by the prevailing conception of femininity (possibly crossed with another subculture’s values), you should get the idea that everyone sometimes wants to be in spaces where they don’t have to worry about “outsiders.”

People get desperate and mean when you take away their safe spaces. Our natural inclination toward tribalism and framing things in terms of empathy (which is weighted toward self-similarity, as opposed to compassion) makes things extra ugly.

To preempt, there is no “Separate but equal” argument here, this is a simple “everyone deserves safe spaces to retreat to, and safe spaces are not the same for everyone.”

Interesting aside: You were fully onboard with the current convention that it is acceptable to validate women who feel [more than rationally] threatened by men, and harass men who feel [more than rationally] threatened by women. I don’t think either is particularly healthy.

Edit: It took me a while to think of where some of this is familiar from because I wasn’t thinking cross-cultural, your model is invoking the hikikomori phenomena adjusted for America?

2 Likes
125

I never said anything about some people being born awful or bad. Abusive, aggressive behaviour is rooted in thinking/belief systems and has very little to do with emotions. It is a learned behaviour (see: many studies that document the effect on children who witness their mother being assaulted by a partner. There is a much higher incidence of abusive relationships as teenagers and adults among these child witnesses). Most abusive people are smart enough to understand that most people will negatively react if they begin to abuse a person in public - especially at the level of antagonism and contempt they display online towards their targets. If this was an uncontrollable aspect of their personality they would be abusive to everyone, for the slightest of reasons, without exception. However - they are covert and selective in who they abuse (NOT the police officer or their boss, for example).

Brain scans of psychopaths DO show structural differences - and many psychopaths had stable loving homes with no abuse present in the family home - and have a history of antisocial behaviour since the time they were very young.

Do I think these online misogynists are all psychopaths ? No, though a few probably are.

1 Like
126

Except women have been well represented in video gaming since its inception. This idea that “games are for teh boyz” is itself a recent construction based on the gendered toy advertising concepts of the 80s. Have a read of this.

6 Likes
127

True Dat. My grandmom was the vanguard for video games in my family, introducing us all to the atari 2600, the coleco vision, and the first to own a soundblaster card.

Moms used to spend all day trying to beat my River Raid score, and left it up on screen when she finally did.

Grams resisted me giving her an iPad…until she found out about candy crush.

5 Likes
128

I don’t know if it was created by their opponents, but it’s certainly used that way, the way “MRA” is used to describe unsavory dudes, for example.

I see it used to describe people who are kind of like the Almost P.C. Redneck meme: someone saying something that some people might think is right, but for all the wrong reasons. Or worse, people who say shitty things in the name of a cause, who may or may not represent a group, but end up being used by opponents as a reason to hate the group as a whole.

Reddit, the site of about a billion different sections, has one called Stormfront or Social Justice Warrior, and sometimes it’s hard to tell. http://www.reddit.com/r/StormfrontorSJW/

1 Like
129

Okay, most of that I agree with. I’m not sure why you were adamant that abusers weren’t part of a cycle of abuse, though, when you’re now saying the opposite.

130

Problem I have with Ms. Anita S. was that…

I don’t think anyone’s arguing that her work is definitive, as much as saying, “Seriously? You get some NPR style media criticism, not particularly targeted at any one person or company and yet that’s somehow a red line for a $25 billion/year industry?”

2 Likes
131

I think there’s an excellent article waiting to be written about ggers and how much they resemble the tea party or catholic extremists. They even use the same tactics, including the constant projection.
(“We are being bullied!”) I mean, take a glance at this shit:

or this; they are way too transparent:

tumblr_nct8tsCVe41tkhroeo1_1280.png1024×550 491 KB

3 Likes
132

Well, when they are finished crushing equality and empathy in the games industry, they could always get work at their local cinema. That’s some weapons grade projection. >.<

133

Don’t forget weev and his fellow victims-of-everyone.

134

You’ve given a somewhat gentler and probably fairer assessment, as yes, my writing was slightly amped up for impact. I was also trying to highlight the utter contempt that society has for these men and boys, and not just the abusers, but all young men who are not particularly socially successful.

And I do have a lot of sympathy for wanting a boys-club. 35 years ago I had the benefit of being in a boys-only environment until I matured out of my teens and could actually interact with women. While I cannot imagine I’d ever have taken to the misogynistic extremes that we’re seeing here (I’d have glumly accepted integration), I do understand where the impulse comes from.

(Indeed, when I was in university, my D&D campaign was forcibly integrated by my players against my concerns it would change the nature of the campaign. Of course, 8 years later, I ended up marrying the young lady the players had insisted be allowed to play. But by that point, I was no longer incapable of treating girls as people.)

So, my personal objections are not to the desire for a safe-space, but to the utterly unacceptable attacks made by some members who are losing their safe space. Sorry, but nothing justifies that. I have sympathy for men (or boys) who are losing their safe space, but lets face it, we got all the good safe spaces, so it’s expected we’d eventually have to share.

More relevantly, attacks on men are usually a matter of social harassment, while attacks on women are threats of actual violence. The truth is that as an aggregate, men just are more dangerous, so their threats are more threatening and thus less acceptable. Biology is unfair that way.

And as far as hikkomori, the Japanese culture is weird in all sorts of ways. The amount of Japanese innovation that goes into allowing people to avoid any close interaction with the opposite sex is stunning (to me). They seem to be a culture where each sex is willing to go without rather than even slightly modify their culture to make interaction easier.

At least the female-hostile gamer culture in North America tends to revolve around the quite young (14-18 being prime turf), and is mostly an attitude of “no matter what I do, I’ll be rejected, so I might as well do what makes me happy”. When male gamers get mature enough to realize they might have a chance with women if they actually wise up, most of them do (at least to some extent).

Of course, I’m no expert, so I may be completely wrong, but boy, both the Japanese I talk to and the articles one reads about Japan (written for the Japanese) leave that impression very strongly.

2 Likes
135

Where?

How?

1 Like
136

True, but irrelevant. The kids who are causing much of the stink were born in the 90’s, and the FPS, which is the dominant game model of that time) is pretty male dominated.

In other words, as far as the boys are concerned, it is a boys club, and now they feel that people like AS are attacking that club.

Realistically, her chance of changing things is small, but quite a number of these boys and men are quite sensitive to the (perceived) fact that not only are they rejected by women, but then they’re told that they have a bad attitude towards a group that despises them. (Note, their perception, not reality.)

Hence the insane and destructive defensiveness of some number of them.

1 Like
137

First, it’s not millions who are actually abusive. It’s a very small minority.

However, there are millions of angry men and boys, and it’s mostly called being a socially unsuccessful teenager. And most will gradually mature into a reasonably socially acceptable human being.

The main thing is that they’ve always been with us. It’s just that there hasn’t always been an Internet for (1) adults to have to rub shoulders with them and (2) to allow them to meet and commiserate in huge numbers.

Unfortunately, the greatest danger to their maturation is finding too many peers and having the anger and immaturity reinforced, leaving them permanently crippled.

138

I get it, boys will be boys . . .

3 Likes
139

Yep. Looks like we should just give up now. Silly us for thinking we could make things better.

FFS

1 Like
140

Boys will be boys, but we can choose if they can do so in their own spaces (that they can come and go from, which is itself an important skill to learn) while they figure themselves out like any other juvenile animals playing, or insist that it happen in shared spaces where their games “might” (read: will and do) do real harm. None of us want “boys will be boys” as an excuse in shared spaces, but if we insist that all spaces are shared spaces, it’s going to happen.

Edit: Came up with the exact study I was thinking of. It’s on puppies, but the finding is that inter and intra sex play appear to have different developmental functions, and cites similar results on some other species. We have reason to suppose the same is true for humans.

I’d also like to stress my distinction above that “Boys will be boys” is only an acceptable idea when all the participants can walk away and know it; the point is about safe, escapable spaces for people to sort themselves out in different contexts, and learning about contextual appropriateness. I’m really afraid of the erosion of people’s understanding of contextual appropriateness, I think treating all spaces as shared spaces with uniform values that we occupy with a single identity per person is extremely unhealthy for individuals and society.

2 Likes
141

Not to veer too far off topic but as a long term resident of Japan I always cringe a bit when I see these “Japan is weird” things. Yes, it is different here but trust me, the Japanese also see lots of Western cultural stuff as “weird”. To keep this relevant to the topic, I’ve heard many women here wonder why Western women want to act like men. This isn’t from uneducated women or women unaware of the concepts of patriarchy, etc. Its just a different perspective. As shocking as it may be to say, gender concepts just arent the same everywhere. But as for hikikomori, thats a very different social problem that affects both genders and honestly isn’t about gender interaction but complete social withdrawal from nearly all interaction.

Please note I’m not trying to attack you or your opinion or make any statements about your knowledge of Japan or Japanese culture, just offering something based on my 18 years here.

5 Likes
142

I find it basically impossible to pick a side in this whole “GamersGate” war thing.

On one side, there are some gamers who are treating “Gaming Journalism” like some sort of monolith and a little bit of relationship drama between a few members of the industry as proof of endemic corruption. On the other side, there are some feminists who are treating “Gamers” like some sort of monolith and are taking (admittedly foul) trolling by a few of members of the community as proof of endemic misogyny.

143

I’ll quote Rich McCormick here, from his piece at The Verge:

The #GamerGate hashtag is inextricably linked to campaigns of harassment and its proponents have been demonstrably manipulated by a small number of people who want to hurt others for fun. Until now it has had no major successes, but by giving in to its demands and pulling its advertising from Gamasutra, Intel has legitimized a movement that has shown itself to be anti-feminist, violently protectionist, and totally unwilling to share what it sees as its divine right to video games.

So, saying that you find it “impossible” to pick a side says a lot about you.

5 Likes