Last week, I put up a very long article about the stories of harassment I could find. I’ve made some minor corrections based on additional details I’ve gotten. I have an open invitation for more women to send me their stories, and will correct any bad information I’ve gotten. As I’ve mentioned before, the stories from the gamergate side are much sketchier and less detailed than the ones on the other side, largely because the other side has endeavored to document their harassment in long form.
One question I’ve gotten over and over again has been ‘what about the men?’
Surely some people, including JonTron, have gotten harassment, and in many cases, it’s gone over the line. And I’ve been accused of sexism for leaving out their stories, and implying that women are weaker.
I’m not saying women are weaker. I’m saying that the harassment women get is much, much more frequent and much more vile. This is something that I will personally vouch for from working in MMOs for almost 20 years and seeing harassment logs that could curl paint. If you don’t believe me, then read this article here: Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet. Then read this here: There’s No Comparing Male and Female Harassment Online (which addresses this rebuttal to Hess’ article). Or this article: Scholar thinks online harassment of women is a civil rights issue. Particular notes:
- Much of the harassment women (or other minorities) get is ABOUT them being different, and has specific discriminatory goals.
- A much higher percentage of the harassment women gets involves descriptions of sexual violence.
- 89% of domestic violence cases now include cyberharassment as a component (texts, emails, etc).
- 70% of cyberstalk victims are female, and 80% of cyberstalking defendants are male.
- 90% of revenge porn cases had female victims.
- 70% of women in multiplayer games have played as male characters online to avoid abuse.
Here’s a fun scientific study:
In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.
So in a neutral environment, women are 25 times more likely to receive harassment! The differences in levels of harassment are stark enough to see plainly. As the following reader comment on a GiantBomb article pointed out sarcastically
This has NOTHING to do with GamerGate! It’s merely a coincidence that 3 women have fled their homes, a handful of female game journalists have left their careers, and female game devs have had to speak out but only under the cover of anonymity all while gamergate happened! A BIG COINCIDENCE!
#Gamergate DOES have a bodycount, but it’s a bodycount that has hit MANY more women than men – despite the fact that women are, as a whole, vastly underrepresented in the industry!
Online harassment is such a big issue now that the limitations as to how threatening you are allowed to be is going on the docket of the supreme court. (As a side note, here’s a fun article about how the defense is hilariously going to have to explain hip-hop lyrics to the supreme court). And most of the time, online harassment that rises to the level of hate speech and crime is aimed at minorities.
So if someone else wants to write an article about how certain men in the movement have been harassed, be my guest. All harassment is bad, and is a problem that needs an addressing. But compared to what the women have endured, it’s a fart in a hurricane.
Tell someone who’s been swatted that their ordeal was a fart in a hurricane with a straight face. Do it.
Claiming that all harassment is bad while dismissing some harassment because it doesn’t meet your standards of bad enough to be bad is somewhat hypocritical. You’re not wrong, but you’re an asshole.
Most of what you’ve said is correct. The issue we’re examining is how women have beem attacked recently. Dismissing other harassment as “not important,” however, is a piss-poor way of telling your readers why you are focusing on a specific subsegment of harassment. Focus is good. Dismissal isn’t.
I think you are misunderstanding the application of the metaphor.
Here are some true statements.
Domestic violence is wrong.
Domestic violence against men is believed to be under-reported for cultural reasons.
Domestic violence against women is still estimated to be significantly larger than domestic violence against men and men are far more likely than women to put their partners in the hospital. Men are far more likely to kill their partners in a fit of rage then women are.
That does not mean that a man who is seriously injured by a woman in a domestic violence dispute is anything but a victim of domestic violence. It *does* mean that in aggregate, one problem is larger than the other and impacts more people.
A thing can be wrong and still be objectively smaller than another thing that is also wrong or bad. That does not diminish the size of the wrong done to the individual but it *does* diminish the scope of the wrong and its widescale impact on many people at once.
Someone dig up Matthew Shepard and explain to his decaying corpse that what happened to him is just a fart equivalent. (Or sub in any number of male suicide victims)
The last paragraph of the blog post is totally unnecessary and awful.
It’s fine to point out that women are the targets of more harassment and more gendered harassment but I don’t see the point of then minimizing harassment against other people. Not sure why liberal orthodoxy is to turn everything into a contest and be dismissive of whoever isn’t winning.
You probably also don’t want to invoke a famously stupid Ben Kuchera line when trying to make a point.
What happened to Mathew Shepard was grisly, gothic murder. Absolutely nothing compares to that, so I am going to have to assume that you’re only bringing him up to stir the pot.
Quit trying to out-bleeding heart everyone else. You’re being an asshole. Stop that.
So wait. This is actually really funny.
Because a man was once beaten and left to die on a fence post for being homosexual, Damion’s point — that women face vastly higher risks and are far more likely to be assaulted both online and in real life — is untrue?
Wow, dude. Just wow.
As an aside from this, SWATting is an absolutely despicable thing to do to anyone and deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, no question, no ifs, ands or buts.
I still agree with Damion. Doesn’t mean I think this behavior is anything but despicable.
It’s too easy to spoof caller id. That needs to change.
Online harassment and threats today are like abuse of children decades ago, in that basically every institution wants to ignore it. Progress won’t be made until all of those institutions–government, business, online communities, all of us–are shamed, sued and prosecuted into facing up to the problem.
There’s always going to be corners of the internet that flout the law–the dark cryptoweb. But we aren’t talking about Tor, we’re talking about Twitter–there is absolutely no excuse for failing to track down these folks who aren’t even really hiding.
I actually view SWATting someone as far more dangerous than an Internet death threat. Without minimizing the fear and psychological distress that is inflicted on the victim, the chance of that person actually suffering an attempted murder or rape is very small.
There have *already* been cases in which police, responding to a SWAT call, have injured or (I think) in one case killed someone in a home. Swatting someone may actually have a higher chance of causing injury or permanent bodily harm than threatening them online — in addition to the flagrant misuse of police resources.
Definitely agreed that swatting is basically the worst phenomenon we’re talking about here, though I don’t think the problem is that police don’t take investigations of swatting seriously so much as that our telephone infrastructure makes it too easy to do it without getting caught.
/gg/ and KotakuInAction (GamerGate as a whole, presumably, but I am only aware of those two) have codenames to refer to certain industry figures – near as I can tell, they call them “Literally Who” to try and prove that the movement isn’t about them, which is sort of undercut by having nicknames so prevalent and widely understood that you can abbreviate and number them and be perfectly clear.
Literally Who 1 is Zoe Quinn
Literally Who 2 is Anita Sarkeesian
Literally Who 3 is Leigh Alexander
Literally Who 4 is ????
Literally Who 5 is Devi, I think (she might be six, in which case 5 is ???)
Literally Who 6 is ????
Literally Who 7 is now Brianna Wu.
All seven of them have something in common.
Can you guess what it is?
Why does GG need codenames to refer to people?
Because they think it makes it seem like they aren’t talking about Zoe/Anita/etc and are instead focusing on Teh Ethics.
(This is, of course, stupid.)
Literally Who 6 is @deviever, according to this.
https://twitter.com/TripleSK7/status/518929851776917504
“against infighting”. Better movements than GG have been led astray by that logic.
Wow, that is crazy. At what point do they have a “Are we the baddies” moment?
I dunno, maybe the doxxers/swatters are hacker trolls, or maybe they’re true believing idiots, but either way they’re doing what they’re doing for the attention of that audience, the people crazy enough to throw around LW code numbers and stitch together elaborate conspiracies. If GG is calling out harassment, that’s good. They need to call out the crazy, too.
The rank-and-file GGer does not overtly condone harassment, and will claim to call it out whenever he sees it, and yet… he will confess that it is “worth looking into” whether Anita really called the cops, or Brianna is playing up her own harassment, or Phil Fish doxxed himself. Perhaps he is not even conscious that he is helping sustain an atmosphere that normalizes harassment, trivializes its effects, all gives cover to those who actually carry it out. But make no mistake: he is doing exactly that.
I no longer care if he is a foolish tool or an overt misogynist; the damage is the same either way. Fuck Gamergate.
Well said.
I just want to say that I appreciate how dedicated you have been to this issue over the past several weeks.
In case you haven’t heard it from others, you’re doing good work.
Regardless of what happened to a bot in an IRC chatroom in 2006, in real life virtually equal numbers of women and men say they’ve been harassed or threatened online (see the studies I quoted in my Time article which you linked).
Oh, and “90% of revenge porn victims are women”? Wrong. Actually, men are more likely than women to be victims of revenge porn. That’s according to that notorious haven of far-right MRAs, the American Psychological Association.