It would be unwise to disregard the experiences of the people who are speaking out. Your company might be great, but if you are interested, do speak with your co-workers. You may be shocked by some of the experiences they’ve had. Talking about any -isms and harassment are generally not things brought up in idle water cooler conversation.
Judging by the number of terrible articles that keep on circling, there is a problem with the industry.
In addition to what @Mister_Eppy said, I was also referencing that in this particular case the woman and her husband were forced out of their house because of the death threats, so the cowards’ misogyny is also impacting a man.
You calling women being driven from their homes a strawman argument is the most transparently vile thing in this thread, and that’s saying something. No matter how you phrase it or obfuscate it, you can’t get away from the fact that the misogyny is the point from which this further bile originates.
The only wider narrative one can take from these “strawmen” is that that these obvious and despicable examples of men abusing women are bubbles in the plaster of a society that does this to women so pervasively that it’s taken as a given; focusing on the “wider argument” of a campaign conceived to drive women from a community you participate in legitimizes the behavior of the abusers. You may as well say robbing a bank is justified because Wall Street is corrupt.
FYI, the threat is even worse that that, as insane as that is. A ka-bar is a large marine-issue sheath knife.
I’ve complained about gaming journalism in the past, complaints I’ve reiterated around here a few times recently. And they’re familiar complaints to most of the people who are being attacked. Ben Kuchera, for instance, wrote some excellent articles for Ars Technica about the ethically dubious practices of game publisher marketers interacting with journalists; he also has a history of criticizing misogyny and sexism in games. He’s been targeted for abuse by the #GamerGate crowd; anyone who was serious about the issue of corruption would at least mention the good work he’s done before criticizing him.
From the first time I heard about #GamerGate, it was closely associated with misogyny. The first tweets I saw that insisted that it was really about corruption – including one from someone I knew – had hundreds of responses full of misogynistic slurs and threats of violence. This has persisted. There’s no way anyone of good conscience could fail to notice this.
Indeed. There’s problems with harassment and women and other minorities not getting a fair shake in all sectors, but tech is particularly bad. A lot of comments that I see of “oh, well I don’t see it” are people who aren’t looking at what is in front of their faces. Commonly no one who isn’t in HR/management will know that the women engineers are getting paid less, and often far less than the men engineers (the classic example).
Mr. Smith, please talk to people, especially the women, about this (granted they are comfortable with it). Ask them if the’ve felt they’ve been harassed in the workplace, or if they have been paid less. And the big thing is (and I can’t stress this enough): LISTEN.
This is the big thing for men. All men. YES ALL MEN. You need to listen. Open your ears and listen. And whatever you do, do not get defensive. Do not say things like “No, not all men” or “But I’m not like that”.
For one, you may have been like that unwittingly. Brains are funny things. Biases are odd little beasts that we have very little conscious knowledge of. Start keeping your actions in mind. Think about what you do, how you acted. This is how we can fix the problem, or at least make it better. By making ourselves better.
I guess I’d like to see a concerted effort to reach the “for the lulz” portion of the crowd. Something like the campaigns against domestic violence that encourage people to speak out against it when they see it.
I’d like for gamers, when they encounter a friend or a stranger engaged in this vile behaviour, to call them on it and tell them to stop doing that shit.
If enough of us in the gaming culture started to do that, it might reduce the noise factor. It won’t stop the hard-core misogynists and racists, but it will perhaps lessen the sheer weight of numbers that victims of harrassment have to deal with.
Are you saying that she deserves this? It sounds a lot like you are saying she deserves this. Fuck THAT noise.
No links to her words originally that started this?
I see links to threats. I’d like to read what she said originally.
At this point, there isn’t
++NO UPDATE: DUPLICATE ENTRY 345BlameTheVictim++
I moved 27 posts to a new topic: Derails from 'Yet another female dev targeted w/credible threats…" I may have missed some. Just let me know.
Does it matter?
Yup. This. Socially beneficial frogboiling.
Everyone knows the sudden influx of hot topic trolls are just sock puppets designed to lul the community into a false sense of security then, BAM! Real and undeniable criticisms of our rationality will begin to haunt the boards, regular members will flee en masse, leaving a withered corpse of free thought as a reminder to other communities which value such affectations, The ‘Jesus-gun-man-gaming-police-state’ will always win, Always!, right?
From this account, she started getting threats after she satirized #GamerGate with graphics she posted on Twitter.
Oh, no doubt,# gamergate is plain old misogyny masquerading as a discussion of ethics in the gaming industry.
But now, you can’t really talk productively about ethics in the gaming industry. That whole cause has been coopted by misogynists for now and is toxic… in the meantime, we have people being forced to sign branding agreements for review code for Shadows of Mordor and no one talks about that, it’s not that important, right?
Secondarily, speaking as a man, we must stop being defensive. This is something that’s shutting down the conversation left and right, and making things worse.
Yes, this hurts. This hurts everyone. And I know how the defensiveness helps one as a defense mechanism, I’ve been defensive on everything my whole life; but I’ve started to open my eyes to how it’s shutting things down and I’ve gone and tried to fight it within myself at every time I see it. When I do get defensive and it leaks through, I go back and apologize and try to go back to the listening position.
I can see it would complicate the discussion, as you’d have to take #GamerGate into account. But, you could start out with, “Here’s an example of real corruption, not the BS that #GamerGate is going on about.” And you’d have to have some tight moderation of the discussion thread, so it actually remained on topic.
I read it as “rebar” I guess because “ka-bar” isn’t a word I recognize.
That’s…I don’t know what to say.
