Why is someone acknowledging that a woman is pretty and saying so considered cat calling? I full on get “yo girl you fine as fuck” is messed up to say but people are taking someone simply saying “youre pretty” is offensive nowadays.
Because, as almost any woman could tell you, “you’re pretty” or “hey how are you” from a strange man you’re passing almost ALWAYS is the start of an interaction that devolves into them telling you how sexy you are or something. That is why there’s been such a visceral reaction to this video from many woman - because so many of us have these experiences and KNOW where the conversation would have gone had that woman responded to those men. Is it fair to assume that about every one of those men? No, but it also isn’t fair that those men decided that woman’s body is public property worthy of commenting on without her doing absolutely anything to illicit those comments.
I want to point out here, many of those men that said something like “you’re pretty” got really pissed off when she didn’t respond. That should clue you in on those men’s intentions - it wasn’t about making someone’s day better by paying them a compliment, because if it was they would have been content whether she reacted or not. It was purely about getting power over a woman and her attention. How DARE that woman not respond to them? Pay attention to them? Doesn’t she KNOW she’s supposed to be grateful for any man - even if it’s a strange man she doesn’t know at all - validating her?
Honestly, I really don’t think a man that’s never experienced cat calling can ever understand how these kind of seemingly innocuous comments can cause SO much anxiety. I’m not even being hyperbolic when I say watching this video legitimately stressed me out. It reminded me of all the times I’ve been in situations like that - faced with a strange man that’s decided he DESERVES my attention . A man that could easily overpower me if he decided he was pissed off at me ignoring him. Men grabbing my arm asking me how I’m doing. Men touching the small of my back and whispering in my ear how good I look today. Men threatening me and demanding my attention simply because I am a woman. It’s absolutely terrifying.
I read every word (I just stayed up for an hour+however long I’m going to be writing this comment when I shouldn’t have stayed up to do so), and I’ll spread this via the various channels I have. For the record, I probably wouldn’t have seen this so quickly if you hadn’t put me in the post as a specific call out either; I was reading what you wrote while it still had four notes.
I have no idea if you’re going to see my comment, but I will say; the reason I was inclined to give the original post credit is a combination of how “truthiness” impacts human psychology and that I was already primed to believe negative things as a consequence of my own anxiety about you both. Because make no mistake; you and Mel are two of the maybe four people on this earth that I genuinely feel anxiety (not anger, sadness, or some other emotion about) whenever I see a reminder that you exist, and that our social circles only barely no longer overlap. I sincerely don’t even really remember WHY I feel so consistently anxious about you two; it’s been an appreciable fraction of a decade since we’ve been in any sort of direct contact. But it’s a real emotion regardless of its origins and it has real impacts, in this case being to jam up what are usually fairly astute bullshit detectors.
I will also say, for the record, that even though I am/have been uncomfortable with and around you guys for a long time, I have always tried to be a voice defending you in anonymous spaces, regardless of what I thought or felt and expressed with my name attached. Whatever criticism there was, and for whatever degree of validity I felt it held or lacked, it was always overridden in those internet-sewer spaces by raw unvarnished misogyny and I tried to treat that exactly the same as I try to with other expression of it, regardless of who it was addressing. I recall in the past (during an incident long before mike’s grossness) you guys feared I was doing the opposite, and I want to reiterate once more that that is not the case.
Well, I stayed up for… far too long writing that and mulling over what I wanted to say, and adding and removing a few more paragraphs than that . I have no idea if you’re going to see anything I’ve just spent two hours writing and mulling over, but I’ve put it out there anyway. As penance for contributing to harm, against the backdrop of another ridiculous storm sparked by an ex’s tremendous flawed callout post.
If you want to talk to me, or yell at me, about any of this and my gullibility or culpability in its spread, I think we’re still friend-ed on steam. You’re a far more busy person than I; if you wish to, contact me at your leisure and I will always be available unless I am asleep. I had a few other things I wanted to say, but I don’t think they’re in any way appropriate for public spaces or the current context of Shit.
well hey this is pretty big of you and i appreciate it. thank you.
i’m surprised you said this explicitly:
the reason I was inclined to give the original post credit is a combination of how “truthiness” impacts human psychology and that I was already primed to believe negative things as a consequence of my own anxiety about you both.
i didn’t really drive it home in the doc, but i assume it contributes to why a fair number of people so readily believed the original: the contingent of people who have “bad vibes” were eager for something more juicy to justify how they already felt.
“MEN, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
I’m not a games industry professional. I’m not a journalist. I have my hands full with unrelated creative projects and in my precious moments of leisure time, I have Nuclear Throne to beat. Realistically, I have no time for this. ‘This’ being a social media smog monster going by the name of ‘#gamergate, which, like the antagonist of Godzilla versus Hedorah, is a rancorous, shape-shifting cloud composed of every kind of pollutant dumped into the ocean of the internet, driven by a malevolent sentience.
Okay, enough metaphor, Jon. What is #gamergate, literally and specifically? It’s a Twitter hashtag. What else? What else indeed. While various patterns of behaviour coalesce around the hashtag, #gamergate’s protean nature resists attempts toward summary and narrative. It readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of continual regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes and moralisms. Say that it began as a harassment campaign targeting a female indie developer, as reported by credible news sites, and you are subjected to contradictory objections - “No, #gamergate began after that, as a reaction to biased reporting” and “No, #gamergate has been building up for years" - as proponents jostle for the story that paints them in the best possible light:
It’s barely a movement and it’s more than a controversy or consumer pressure group; it’s a creature. And the only way to understand a creature like this is to look at the kind of material that circulates within it.
Taking it as read that much of that has descended, at this point, into post-hoc justification and mantra-like repetition, to begin with, here are some of the comments posted on early articles covering #gamergate:
The developer Zoe Quinn is repeatedly brought up, with references to her promiscuity:
Here’s a particularly unpleasant lie that is aggressively perpetuated. It deviates even from the gossip on which it is based in order to exaggerate its claims:
Ignorance, in its various forms, is also plentiful. Here’s the reaction to finding out professional games journalists use a private mailing list to discuss the handling of potential stories with each other:
(At this point, #gamergate became extremely excited that it had found proof of ‘collusion’ among the journalists it had targeted).
A favourite running theme is the rejection of any discussion of sexism in games:
Here’s a widely distributed boycott list, targeting social progressives for ‘ruining our hobby’, promising to ‘hit them where it hurts most’. A similar list was made targeting developers.
It’s worth noting that both hit lists were drawn up well before material was uncovered to implicate any of the above journalists in the wrongdoing they have subsequently been accused of. At this point, the #gamergate argument was simply that ‘SJWs’ (social justice warriors) are unwelcome.
But beneath protestations that #gamergate is about ‘journalistic ethics’, the attacks on feminists continue. Here’s Twitter over the past week:
Sometimes a more extreme political subtext creeps into the open, unguarded. This Twitter user later confirmed to me that he believes ‘the gay agenda’ is part of ‘cultural Marxism’ too.
#gamergate discussion for a long time revolved around high-pitched hostility toward prominent feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Like Zoe Quinn, Sarkeesian has received death threats, but the tactics employed to make her disappear are wide-ranging. Here’s one of many, many attempts to discredit her:
(The ‘gamers are dead’ message refers to a series of articles in the games press exploring the death of the traditional ‘gamer’ identity as the gaming audience diversifies and sexism becomes less acceptable. These articles have been seized on as a pretext for targeting some of the journalists in the above hit list).
One man, Ben Spurr, created a game in which the player is invited to bruise and bloody Sarkeesian. Without a trace of self-awareness, a tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter page reads “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil. #gamergate.”
Here’s Davis Aurini, who is crowdfunding for a film that will ‘investigate’ Sarkeesian.
This is a quote from the video this still is taken from:
"And then we have the women themselves. Women, in our culture, have become the most decadent sluts since the fall of Rome … we have the most fat, disgusting women that have ever existed in history and who still think they’re hot stuff … Women have become like dogs that were never trained.”
He appears to have no serious interest in gaming, but he has been a fixture of #gamergate since close to its inception.
Then we have Christina Hoff Summers, who has made a profession of apologising to men for feminism. Her books include The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She has capitalised on #gamergate by releasing a video positing the question ‘Are games sexist?’ In it, she berates ‘the video game gender police’, her accusation being: “They want the male video game culture to die.” She appears to have no serious interest in gaming but she has been embraced by #gamergate, who have even given her an affectionate nickname, ‘Based Mom’.
Another youtube personality, Thunderf00t, is the author of the video ‘Why feminism poisons EVERYTHING’. His popular diatribes against Sarkeesian are one of his sources of income. As well as providing ad revenue, they direct viewers to a donations page. He accused Sarkeesian of personally engineering the suspension of his Twitter account, and made two more (again, profitable) videos articulating his outrage. He has no evidence to back up his claim. He appears to have no serious interest in gaming but his views have been embraced by #gamergate.
There are numerous other youtube video essayists engaged in the project of continually re-invigorating and re-arming the mob, hyperlink-shuttling their enraged audience from one inflammatory call-to-arms to the next.
Here is Milo Yiannopolous, a right wing journalist and probably #gamergate’s most popular and visible supporter:
Before #gamergate, his views on gaming were this: “Personally, I don’t understand grown men wasting their lives playing computer games. It seems a bit sad to me. I mean, we’ve all been sucked in to a few rounds of Candy Crush, but if you want to shoot a gun, why not go to a rifle range?”
Here’s another right wing journalist, James Delingpole, creepily courting #gamergate:
These agitators seem to recognise what #gamergate supporters repeatedly deny: that the driving force behind #gamergate is a reactionary conservatism that seeks to shut down and shut out socially progressive voices in gaming. Of course, in the manner of reactionary conservatism the world over, it seeks to frame this as a rebellion against a censorious ‘political correctness’ imposed by shadowy cabals and corrupt networks of power. If you search the #gamergate hashtag, this is the narrative you’ll find being pushed most concertedly. That and ‘journalistic ethics’, which has become all but the slogan of #gamergate.
However, this shift in emphasis is the result of realising that the anti-feminist angle isn’t very popular. Here are some excavated 4chan chat logs, courtesy of David Futrelle at We Hunt The Mammoth:
Aug 21 17.23.31 <sarahv> The problem is that making it about Zoe sleeping around amounts to a personal attack which, while funny and something she totally deserves, will hurt our chances of pushing the other point … Aug 21 17.23.38 <rd0951> ./v should be focused on the implications of gaming journalism … Aug 21 17.23.47 Because SJWs will cherry-pick the /b/ shit posting and say “See? It’s sexist MRAs!”
Aug 24 15.16.10 <PaperDinosaur> Also Zoe is no longer the target to be focused on Aug 24 15.16.13 <Josh_> ^^ Aug 24 15.16.14 <sarahv> ^^^^^ Aug 24 15.16.18 It’s about the 5guys Aug 24 15.16.21 <sarahv> It always has been Aug 24 15.16.28 <Josh_> It’s more about the journos Aug 24 15.16.33 <PaperDinosaur> She’s done, we’ve wrecked her in a professional manner. … Aug 24 15.16.42 <sarahv> Unfortunately most of the people involved in this seem to be interested in destroying Zoe Aug 24 15.16.46 stop digging up shit on zoe’s past Aug 24 15.16.47 <PaperDinosaur> Now we have to wreck her shield, the people who tried to defend her
Aug 25 07.18.18 <Logan> Any chance we can get Zoe to commit suicide? Aug 25 07.18.29 if we can get more daming evidence Aug 25 07.18.29 I think the [doxxing info removed by DF] is a good shot. Aug 25 07.18.33 <temet> like her fucking a train of lack dudes … Aug 25 07.18.39 <PaperDinosaur> fuck off Logan Aug 25 07.18.39 <temet> black Aug 25 07.18.51 <Logan> Nah 21st century doing a train is so 90s. … Aug 25 07.18.59 <PaperDinosaur> If she commits suicide we lose everything … Aug 25 07.20.34 <PaperDinosaur> If you can’t see how driving Zoe to suicide would fuck this entire thing up then you’re a fucking idiot Aug 25 07.20.41 Imagine the kotaku article … Aug 25 07.20.48 <temet> PaperDinosaur is right Aug 25 07.20.51 <temet> not the right PR play
Meanwhile, #gamergate’s witch-finder generals are out in force, furtively trawling through websites and documents to prove a malignancy, talking of ‘exposing’ - an exposure which they hope will act as intently as the flames that lick the stake. Yet another youtube video essayist, Sargon of Akkad, has set out to prove that feminists have taken over DiGRA, a non-profit academic thinktank with a focus on games. He began his investigation, of course, forearmed with the conclusion.
Other #gamergate protagonists coach each other in avoiding debate, a response to efforts by journalists to talk to them:
‘Do not engage order’ is also stamped in bold and red across screenshots of people’s Twitter profiles and disseminated.
They also constantly remind each other of the need to be polite, having learned now that overt aggression is ‘not the right PR play’. The order of the day is instead character assassination and pretext-hunting. Thus, an Asian journalist is pilloried for racist comments he made as a teenager which he has repeatedly, sincerely and profusely apologised for:
And even though the mantra of ‘journalistic ethics’ is now being employed like a foghorn, it can’t quite drown out the underlying consumer revenge fantasy that has taken hold:
(Note, however, that gamers are not even the intended audience for one of the sites whose advertisers have been targeted. #gamergate is going after journalists its proponents have never even read).
So why even engage with such collective madness? Especially when the arguments made are ranging, fluctuating and hugely reliant on mischaracterisation of others’ opinions and arguments. Think endless variations on Sommers’ “They want the male video game culture to die” - a straw man shooting gallery. Now add in every conceivable objection, however wildly irrational, to several years’ worth of journalistic content, because all of it is dredged up to support a claim of endemic corruption. Individual missteps and past controversies are linked to a general demand that games journalism be liberated from a socially progressive ‘agenda’, as if everything problematic about a constantly evolving industry were being orchestrated from behind the scenes.
It’s admitted that in amongst the wide array of trumped-up charges a plethora of genuine issues have been touched on. So a small number of journalists and developers suggested these be discussed under a different Twitter hashtag, to divorce it from the anti-feminist rhetoric. Did this fly with #gamergate? Of course not - because it would have involved abandoning a juggernaut with vicious momentum and having an open, honest conversation with the ‘opposition’.
Again: why engage? Firstly, there are those who can’t exit the battle, who find themselves set upon repeatedly as part of a deliberate and concerted effort to wear them down, force them to abandon their careers, their passions. Unsurprisingly, and despite the composition of the hit lists, the most consistently targeted and spat-upon individuals are nearly all women. At the very least, I think it’s worth drawing attention to this.
I also want to resist #gamergate’s arrogant attempts to position itself as representative of ordinary consumers who play games - as representative of me. I would like people outside of gaming culture to know that this ugliness is the spittle and spite and self-immolation of a cornered minority, joined by the callous excitement of others who are seduced by the music of revolt and aren’t particularly scrupulous when it comes to picking a side, while others still hitch their own misgivings, prejudices and grudges to an irresistible bandwagon.
Then there’s the third thing: the grim fascination with how language is weaponised and used to obstruct, rather than facilitate, understanding, how every tool that has been effective in making social media a progressive force is repurposed as a method of obfuscation and provocation. It’s like watching intelligent animals work out how to maim each other with writing implements, and it gives a disturbingly sharp insight into the limitations of reason when dealing with a collective mania.
There’s no creativity to #gamergate’s methods. It copy and pastes what has been seen to work elsewhere, whether for good or evil. Boycott campaigns, infographics, memes, petitions, sockpuppet accounts, hacking, doxxing, vlogging, dogpiling. On the level of daily interactions, every word or phrase that ever had a modicum of power is employed as bludgeoning instrument. The authors of the aforementioned diatribes drench themselves in the language of scrupulous philosophical investigation as if that in itself imbues them with moral authority, while displaying nothing close to real consistency, rigour or intellectual honesty. To anyone other than those predisposed to ardently agree, these essays and videos are appallingly unpersuasive - but then, they aren’t intended to persuade. The effort is one of blunt force - to wield any tool available in order to club the enemy, and in particular to stoke the confidence and fury of the mob so that it attacks with greater ferocity. The death threats Sarkeesian receives reflect the agenda of hate preachers who simultaneously wish to position themselves as several steps removed from the worst excesses.
Sarkeesian turned off the comments under her own video series - something which is alluded to repeatedly with fierce disapproval. Why such ire? Not because this constitutes censorship (nothing #gamergate dubs censorship is really censorship) but because it robbed them of one of the forums in which they could freely wield their cudgels - by endlessly and irresponsibly repeating unfounded accusations against her.
Once a new word or phrase enters the collective vocabulary and is recognised as having some potency, it is chanted, chorused, abused and misused. “Shill, shill, shill,” parroted the #gamergate collegiate, once they had got hold of a word that they understood could be used to undermine the intentions of apparently independent commentators. “Fallacy!” they cry, as if revealing the identity of a murderer, whenever an unflattering comparison is made. They understand the general moral pallor of any particular word all right - ‘diversity’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘integrity’ are good, ‘hate’, ‘bias’ and ‘agenda’ bad - but then go about using them with reckless inconsistency. Their enemies are ‘colluding’ but they themselves are merely ‘like-minded’. Feminists are ‘ideologues’ and ‘extremists’ but the neoliberal utopia they espouse - naked of cultural criticism, ruled by consumer frenzy and corporate wile - is somehow apolitical and ideology-free. A mixed race female journalist is repeatedly described as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ on the thinnest of premises, but the term ‘misogynist’ is objectionable:
And of course, the word ‘ethics’ - repeated at every available opportunity, cherished for its aura of respectability.
Meaning is abandoned; only import matters.
This applies too to the metaphors #gamergate drapes itself in, right down to the absurd, hyperbolic soubriquet itself. I refer back to the tweet pinned to the top of the Twitter account of the man who made a game simulating the physical battery of Sarkeesian. It bears repeating: “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil.” Metaphor allows #gamergate to target and hurt individuals under the guise of fighting ‘evil’.
It’s indicative of the level of commitment to a warped vision of the world that is uncompromising and - temporarily, at least - unswayable. There is no authority, moral or otherwise, so high that its opposition to #gamergate is perceived as a genuine indictment or reason for a sanity check. Games journalists, mainstream journalists, academics, Wikipedia editors - even the founder of Wikipedia - all become enemy collaborators when they refrain from endorsing the #gamergate narrative:
So too the owner of 4chan, one of the very online communities where the movement was incubated, as soon as he decided #gamergate had had its day and forbade further discussion.
What it speaks to is a failure of reason to penetrate through means of language alone. The language of reason is instead perceived solely as an aggressive force, and crudely wielded as such. The moral highground is a territory cynically - not sincerely - sought. How does #gamergate deal with the negative perception caused by the death threats against Sarkeesian and harassment of female journalists and developers? By conjuring up similar tales of victimisation perpetrated by its enemies. How does #gamergate react when a piece of cultural criticism is genuinely searing? By complaining that the critic is guilt-tripping (and thus attacking) their audience. #gamergate thinks critics should be using their powers of persuasive rhetoric not to call games culture to account, but to battle outsiders:
So what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster’s lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz’s Meddlesome Ratbag:
#gamergate is a madness that dreams it’s a revolution.
Further reading:
Here is a concise list of genuine ethical concerns surrounding gaming and the coverage of gaming by Leigh Alexander.
Here is the developer Damon Schubert, trying to engage with #gamergate supporters.
I wrote a bunch of words and then hated them so let me try this again.
This all started with the announcement of the death of “gamer”, right? I think we’ve all forgotten about that, when it’s the key to understanding what’s going on.
Did you know Zynga has a bigger market cap ($2.47B) than Ubisoft ($1.41B)? How many more people play Zynga’s games, too? Yet Ubisoft’s games are “video games”, and Zynga’s are not. I’m not sure what they are, but this line in the sand has been drawn so successfully that I doubt most average (read: not on Twitter 10+ hours a day) people would consider FarmVille to be a “video game” — even people who play it. It’s certainly not what first comes to mind when you say the phrase.
What about The Sims? Is that a video game? Well… yeah… probably. Still not what comes to mind as a “video game”, though.
What do you think of when I say “movie”? Probably a recent blockbuster like Lord of the Rings or one of the superhero adaptations. Everyone’s seen them or at least knows about them; they’re basically pop culture. And they raked in zillions besides.
What do you think of when I say “video game”? Why is it not The Sims, one of the best-selling games of all time? Why is it not a mobile phone game, when over a billion people play them? For many people it’s probably not even Mario, who is basically the mascot of video games.
Gamers have successfully defined a “video game” as a very, very narrow thing that involves fancy graphics, either twitchy reflexes or extreme patience, and probably some sort of gun that wobbles at the bottom of the screen. In turn they have defined “gamer” as a person who regularly and enthusiastically plays those kinds of games. I doubt you could find me anyone who exclusively plays Zynga games and self-identifies as a gamer.
The very identity “gamer” is thus, in fact, about control of itself.
I read death-of-gamer articles and I saw a cry of exasperation. “Why is this word reserved for such a small subset of people who play games?” they asked. “Everyone plays games. Let everyone into the clubhouse.”
By the way gamergate talks about those same articles — as alienation and stereotyping and mocking — you’d think they said we don’t need anyone to play games any more. Get rid of them all.
Well, of course. If the clubhouse is open to everyone, is there really any difference? For people who actively pride themselves on being gamers, who actively preserve the barriers of entry, what would it mean to be in the same category as your dad who thinks Candy Crush is super cool? Especially for people who identify solely as gamers, who’ve built their entire identities around the video games they play.
Video games. Video games. All of this over video games. Pong. That’s what this is all about.
What other form of entertainment has such a striking contrast between the core audience and the long tail? Hell, it’s usually the other way around: those blockbuster movies are the cheap accessible junk, and if you want something of real quality, you go see obscure/foreign/indie films. And you call them “films”. Yet in gaming, the conversation is dominated by an endless onslaught of games that appeal to a very specific demographic, who gladly consume every single one of them. The real mass-market stuff is way out on the fringe, so far out it’s barely considered “games”, despite being played by a fifth of the entire human race.
This is how much power gamers have over their own industry.
Power. It’s all about power dynamics. The “fake gamer girl” trope. The guy on every CoD server who calls you a faggot. The rape jokes, the trans jokes, the gay jokes, the outright vitriol that nobody ever seems to call out. The in-game rewards for obsessively scouring for secrets or whatnot, ensuring that nobody who doesn’t have ten years’ worth of FPS experience will never collect everything. (I note that Mario Kart 8’s hardest achievement is just a variant kart, which you get for getting one star on every course. Three stars on every course gets you nothing at all. Nintendo gets it.)
These are all self-reinforcing barriers to entry. Everyone who truly wants to get into games has to prove their mettle by enduring this hazing: the slurs and abuse, the assumed knowledge of tropes, the reflexes and/or tolerance of tedium. If you can get past all that, you must really want to be a Gamer. And once you are, your sympathy has been somewhat worn away; if you can put up with it, why can’t everyone else?
I asked several gamergate randos about multiplayer abuse. All of them said they find it distasteful; all of them said the people doling it out are jerks; one of them even said it had deeply bothered him when he first started playing online. And yet all of them asserted that the onus is on the target, the newcomer, to suck it up. None of them had ever chastized some asshole for being an asshole, and they were all adamant about not ever doing so.
Why? Because they don’t want to be the buzzkill. They don’t want to risk being the target. That one asshole has control over them, like they have control over gaming.
And this is what gamergate is: a display of that control, against the people suggesting they may lose it, and the people actively working to wrest it away from them. It’s thinly about corruption, but if that were really the issue, why wouldn’t they go after the publishers who hold early game access over reviwers’ heads? The excuse is cracking, anyway. They so adamantly want this to not be about Zoe Quinn that they’re now calling her “Literally Who”, so they can continue to talk about her without talking about her, because it’s so much not about her. I’ve seen more than one list of targets (of boycotts, of emails to advertisers) based not on particular corrupt incidents, but on the handwave of “SJW influence”.
It’s all a power play to preserve the status quo. Because it benefits dudebros in their mid-20s. (Yeah, I know, you’re not-my-shield. But you’re their shield, playing the role as the token minority, because you’ve already been hazed.) That one asshole is loud and obnoxious so you’ll either leave or show how desperately you want to fit in, and now gamergate is doing the same thing to games journalism en masse.
It’s been a month and little has come of all this, except that even 4chan has gotten sick of their crap, which you’d think would be a bad sign. Sadly nothing has happened in the other direction either; gaming is still kind of a cesspool, and anyone who asks “why are 90% of games about men?” is still called a cunt and lambasted and driven out of her house.
Like a lot of big-media problems, I’m hopeful this will all eventually be solved by the increasing ease of just making a game oneself. But we’re a very long ways from being able to cobble together an AAA game with just a couple people and pocket change, so in the meantime, it’s a question worth asking.
And to the gamebros: relax. Nobody cares that you enjoy Call of Halo. Nobody cares that every game you play has a straight bald white buff cis male protagonist. Nobody even cares that you get off to the vapid chesty love interest you need to save. It’s fine for different things to exist.
People care when this is the vast majority of what we have. People care that gamers have twisted pop culture to think that this is what games are. People care that a huge bulk of money in gaming goes towards pumping out a lot of the same kind of thing. People care that poor attitudes towards women and QUILTBAG people and other races and the minorities are given such a huge stage, yet so many of the privileged core group come out in droves to demonstrate the very reason this is a problem when anyone points it out.
This isn’t a zero-sum game. But by waging war against feminists and casuals and anyone else not in the core demographic, by explicitly seeking to purify your own insular group, gamers are making it one.
I know. It’s not individual gamers. Individual gamers only leave the one kinda-mean comment, or let the one slur slide, or buy the one game. But this is the impact the group is having, and if you care so much about being part of that group, the burden is on your shoulders.
Knock it off. You don’t need to own an entire medium. Let everyone in the clubhouse.
Zoe “Social Justice Rogue” Quinn has been lurking in 4Chan’s raiding IRC channels the last couple of weeks, gathering chat logs.
Turns out, the ENTIRETY of #GamerGate was completely manufactured by 4channers, and they played EVERYONE that joined in on the #GamerGate tag and the #NotMyShield tag. Everyone. None of it was true.
Favorite tweet from this?
I make video games, did y’all really think I didn’t know how the internet works?
well this is way fucking scarier than anything else, and damn there’s enough evidence to convince me it’s true and that i was wrong in not believing zoe quinn. if she didn’t abuse anyone she hasn’t done anything wrong - video game journalism is still, however, bullshit.
the only thing i wanna see is that the other person had video evidence of what was supposedly their former chat logs, any kind of actual video stuff in terms of evidence would even the playing field. either way this is horrifying and really fucking scary
welp i’m sold, 4chan fooled me and is scary as hell.
Yep. It’s scary as hell, and I’ve been seeing it unfold for the past month and a half, and it’s enough to scare women out of game development, and they’ve also been driving out freelance journalists (also women) as well.
And Zoe’s going to be uploading a vid that one of her friends took while her tumblr was attacked.
i am shocked — shocked — that this was all a narcissistic power play by /b/ losers who want to feel powerful by messing with people
my favorite part is “don’t tell me you actually buy the corruption in journalism thing”
lol
Anonymous asked:
Close. There were no reviews -- in fact, almost no one, anywhere, actually reviewed it. However the timeline is a little off. Grayson wrote about the game less than a week before the ex alleges he was sleeping with Quinn. And Quinn and Grayson are on video sharing a hotel room at GDC at least a week prior to said writing.
“turns out i’ve got nothing so i’ll just suggest her game sucks instead”
so unless i’m missing something in the whopping two gaming news outlets he has worked for this year: you are completely wrong, try again
oh i see you already tried again
Even if the start of this was a little shaky (I’m fairly sure it wasn’t) it’s evolved into something much bigger. We’re not concerned with Quinn’s antics anymore, we haven’t been for a while. We’re mostly dealing with nepotism and corruption.
rofl “we’re not concerned with quinn’s antics any more” and then you open with quinn’s antics, jesus christ.
so, you’re “fairly sure”
you have a whole big clusterfuck of people here running around leveling accusations carefully designed to threaten whole careers
and you are “fairly sure”
it also turns out you are “completely fucking wrong”, just like almost everything i’ve been told is the root of this circus. just like every idiot who’s approached me on twitter to tell me i’m wrong, then mumbled “ummm do your research” when pressed for concrete detail
nepotism? corruption? like the accusation that zoe quinn doxed TFYC, which never happened? like the positive reviews for depression quest in exchange for sex, which don’t exist? like the condemning of leigh alexander for the crime of owning a side business? like the disparaging of jenn frank for writing an article supporting someone she knows?
that is an exact exhaustive list of the examples of “corruption” i have been given, and wow, hey, what an incredible coincidence: those people are all women.
giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not just a raging woman-hating misogynist, i’m sorry to have to tell you: you have been had by some raging woman-hating misogynists. they have framed their crap in terms of Our Tribe Is Under Siege Oh No and you have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
it’s basically the same tactic the republican party uses to keep racism alive: just use the word “welfare” instead, along with the traditional stereotypes of laziness and inferiority and worthlessness. people will practically turn it into us-vs-them for you. it’s like magic! if you’re lucky, they’ll even spice it up with some moral panic!
this isn’t about the generalization of gamers, or corruption in journalism, or whatever slimy excuse 4chan is puking out now. it’s about a bunch of maladjusted teenagers who have absolutely nothing going for them except that they know how to move a crosshair with a joystick, and they are fucking terrified that no one’s impressed by that any more. even girls can do it now! what happened! CORRUPTION
don’t get me wrong, there’s totally corruption in the game industry. but most of it lies with the publishers. strange, isn’t it, that this flash mob is going after the journalists instead of the people who have all the actual power and control? why do you think that is?
i have a guess: because doing a goddamn thing about the real sleaze in gaming would require not playing a popular game. and for a group of people whose very identity revolves around suckling the teat of big publishers, that is literally unthinkable.
tl;dr you and all of gamergate are completely full of shit
Anonymous asked:
what is this quinnspiracy / gamergate thing i keep hearing about and what does it have to do with jontron? do you have an opinion on it?
oh christ
ok i think it goes something like this
a jilted ex posted a bunch of chat logs and a kinda spiteful-sounding story about how a female game developer, zoe quinn, had cheated on him with a few people in the game industry
reaction 1 was “omg what a dirty slut” because, y'know, gamers. but that turned out to not be popular rhetoric. this is the only place jontron is relevant: he retweeted a comic someone drew that starred zoe graphically in the middle of a gangbang. (probably because he was also in the comic, presented as the voice of reason. but wow.)
a couple of the accused people were writers for internet video game websites, so reaction 2 was a rallying cry for more ethics in game journalism. which on its own would be okay except
(a) the worst dirty laundry by far in game journalism imnsho is how review scores are kept artificially inflated effectively by extortion — if you give a game a bad review, the publisher can just not give you early access to its games any more. which is possibly why only 3% of games have a metascore under 33, versus 9% of movies. but that’s a problem with the publishers, really, and not something journalists can directly control.
(b) none of the journalists zoe had a relationship with gave her game a good review, as was a common refrain. as far as i can find, only one of them wrote about her game at all, and it was months before they were supposed to have hooked up. even the jilted ex confirmed this.
so reaction 2 was kind of complete hogwash as well.
reaction 3 was to devolve rapidly into conspiracy theories and general mudslinging like: zoe was in cahoots with a reddit mod (evidence being that he tweeted at her asking to DM), explaining why tons of posts were deleted from /r/gaming (which the mods claim was to remove personal information); that zoe had actively doxxed and destroyed a gaming charity (based on a reddit comment from someone involved with the charity) (but the charity now explicitly says zoe was not involved); or that zoe had faked being hacked and doxxed (????) because the posted phone number was from a place she’d never lived (my phone number is from pennsylvania where i’ve never lived, welcome to cell phones).
meanwhile, with spectacular timing, anita sarkeesian released another “women vs tropes in video games” video, which i guess showcases a bunch of examples of women as decoration or sex objects in video games, and everyone exploded anew.
faced with all this, basically everyone with a voice shook their heads and tut-tutted at gamers for being big whiny woman-hating baby manchildren. and then there came some murmurings that it might be time to hang up the “gamer” label altogether, because it’s become toxic and insular, and who never plays any games whatsoever?
which brings us, i think, to #gamergate. i’m not actually sure, because its origins and goals and contributors are all incomprehensible. i’ve been told two completely different things:
1. that #gamergate is about journalistic ethics, i.e. doubling down on reaction 2. i was talking to someone last night and asked for an example of “misconduct” he was tired of; he linked me to an article by leigh alexander, one of the people suggesting “gamer” is obsolete. apparently the problem is that she’s a journalist but also runs a consulting firm for game developers, but has never disclosed this “potential conflict of interest” in her articles. i think that’s fucking ludicrous, because if she’s not writing about her clients, there’s not even potential for conflict of interest, right? also, surprise, she’s a woman.
2. that #gamergate is about we’re not gonna take this disrespect of gamers any more. some feathers got ruffled by the fact that the people with an audience in the gaming community are making fun of the people who think they are the gaming community. (this is one of those awkward problems where, well, whose responsibility is it to ostracize toxic members of a group? if anyone’s?) my response to those people is that maybe they should try playing a game online with strangers for two minutes. i tried getting back into tf2 recently and very clearly recall joining a server just in time to hear an exchange of rape jokes. riot has had to pour untold manhours and UI tricks into tricking its players into not being complete assholes. and xbox live is basically infamous. navigating a minefield full of this kind of sludge is not really what i consider a good relaxing time, which is why i basically never play worldwide multiplayer anything. (but thank god for mario kart.) anyway given the long-running reputation self-labeled “gamers” have for being xenophobic and generally hostile to anyone who’s not a straight dude who loves FPSes, being taken aback when journalists point this out is kind of bewildering to me.
the one thing they do seem to agree on is that this isn’t about hating women, except a few thing it is about fighting “SJWs” or something, i don’t know.
a curious observation: most of the people replying to #gamergate tweets (and believe me, if you use the hashtag, you will get replies) are using accounts with a handful of follows/followers, three digits of tweets, and basically nothing except #gamergate replies and retweets. so it’s a bunch of people who don’t even use twitter trying to do twitter activism over a thing they can’t decide the meaning of.
oh and naturally several of the accounts i looked at were also retweeting misogynistic garbage. because gamers.
anyway stay tuned for further developments as the core gamer demographic burrows itself ever deeper up its own collective asshole
I’m probably gonna get a lot of flak. but I really don’t care. Jontron does not deserve the shit hes getting on twitter right now. people have the gall to claim getting harassed is so horrible and immoral and then turn around and call this man human filth. scum. make fun of him and treat him like…
hello yes i am here to deliver the flak
this is, like, really apologetic
the irony being that jontron is not
Jontron is an honest man. he can say things the wrong way sometimes. a lot of people do that. but ultimately you can see if he truly feels he is wrong by logical standards he will back down and apologize, any reasonable person would.
but he didn’t. or, at least, he didn’t feel he was wrong by logical standards. instead he went off about ‘censorship’, which i guess he has confused with 'compassion’, because someone asked him to not use a rude word.
me and my friends usually make jokes. I make black jokes in front of my black friends and they make white jokes about me and we both laugh because we’re friends. if they are ever offended I apologize.
maybe that’s because you’re friends and not, say, one person broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of other people.
you should probably not make cracks about oppressed groups unless you are really sure your entire audience will be in on it with you.
and again, jontron did not apologize. he doubled down. (and then drew a naked comic of a female game developer, as i understand it. what a charming young man.)
they prefer to attack small jokes and friends because they’re easier than paying attention to actual issues that have an effect on minorities.
maybe having public figures constantly crack small jokes does have an effect on people. maybe. let me ask them.
ok i just checked and it totally does
they have no forgiveness in their hearts and it makes me sick to watch them treat people who do like trash and hurt them like it’s okay to treat anyone like that for having an opinion.
forgiveness? he didn’t apologize. he has shown no remorse. he has given entire interviews about how right he thinks he is on this.
hurt them? what if his words hurt someone else? why is only the backlash invalid, but you excuse his original actions — even almost-implying that he apologized or regrets them, multiple times?
for having an opinion? calling someone “retarded” is hardly an opinion.
i know the whole point of your post is to try to offer perspective, so fyi: immediately after reading this post, i glanced at twitter to discover that apparently someone has made “some very scary threats” against anita sarkeesian and her family. that is what is going on in the game industry right now. threats of violence over an internet documentary about video games.
but what really gets to you is that some famous youtube douchebag can’t be a dick without having people call him a dick.
maybe we’d be better off if people got called on being dicks more often.
“ There are very few circumstances in which the rights to your own work are automatically owned by someone else.”
You are exactly correct in this! Except you seem to be applying it backwards. The rights to use Pokemon were ALREADY in place before she used them. You are acting as those she creating something and I am saying that someone else now has the rights to it. That is not how it works. This is how it went:
PIC: has rights to Pokemon characters
purplekecleon drew some Pokemon
Poprageous wants Pokemon on a dress.
It all comes back to BOTH parties needing PIC’s permission. Because copyright grants EXCLUSIVE derivative use to the copyright holder.
EXCLUSIVE.
As in no one else is legally allowed to use it.
This is where are you are confusing "legally allowed” with “owns the rights”.
By drawing some Pokémon, an artist creates additional, new work not covered by any existing rights: the drawing itself. The Pokémon are inextricably linked with the drawing, yes, but the art is a new creation that didn’t exist before, and it belongs to the artist.
An image of a Pokémon is not automatically copyright to PCI; that’s ludicrous. Consider: if PCI had granted permission for an artist to draw Pokémon fan art, would PCI then still own the copyright of the drawing? By your reasoning they would; after all, they’d still own the rights to Pokémon.
Also, if PCI granted permission to Poprageous to print and sell Pokémon clothes, Poprageous would still not be allowed to sell someone else’s art.
Incidentally, as Pokémon are designs rather than single works, the status of copyright over them is somewhat fuzzy (which is why PCI holds a lot of Pokémon trademarks as well). A small handful of court cases have handwaved characters as having some sort of copyright protection, but these are species, not even characters. I wouldn’t suggest anyone actually fight them over it, but it’s slightly grayer than, say, adding a chapter to someone else’s book and selling it.
I am basing this on US law. I am well aware a lot of fanartists like to just, you know, IGNORE the law, and get their legal information from other people who are also ignoring the law…. but if you actually read the laws, you’ll find that people creating deritivative works have zero rights.
OK, let’s ditch the back-and-forth and go with the law, then. I’ve been giving Chapter 2 (about copyright ownership, which pretty clearly states it goes to the author) and Chapter 5 (about copyright infringement and remedies, which fails to mention anything you’ve said) a reading through, and I’ve found no mention of what you’re saying.
For reference, here are some mentions of derivative works in Chapter 1:
A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
…
The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material.
So even mere edits to existing material are covered by copyright — the author just doesn’t own all the existing parts.
Now, we do also have this:
The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
This is the only mention I’ve found of how copyright interacts with unauthorized derivative works.
My reading of it is that the part you create is still covered by copyright, but there is one court case that would seem to indicate you just don’t get any copyright protection at all: Anderson v. Stallone, in which a scriptwriter sued Sylvester Stallone after the plot to Rocky IV turned out to be eerily similar to an unauthorized fan script the writer had come up with. The judge admitted that there was nothing solid to go on here and that the law and prior cases and even Congressional reports about the law were a bit murky, but ultimately erred on the side of Stallone, in the interest of not setting the precedent that the infringer could come back and hit the infringee with a copyright lawsuit. (See section IV.A.4 of the opinion.)
Incidentally, I did find an article about fan works on io9 which mentions this case, and claims that the court said Stallone owned the copyright to the “fan” script. But the court opinion, as far as I can tell, says absolutely no such thing.
I observe a few things here.
For one, this case doesn’t exactly have a nice tidy ending: the court also found that Rocky IV wasn’t actually all that similar to the fan script in the first place, and it was appealed and then ultimately settled out of court.
Now, at worst, this ruling sets the precedent that you don’t have copyright protection on fan work at all, period. Notice that both 103(a) and the judge’s opinion talk about copyright protection of derived work, rather than copyright. I take this to mean that you still own the copyright, but you can’t expect to take someone else to court over it. (The alternative is ludicrous: you wouldn’t know whether you owned the copyright over your own work until you went to court and tried to demonstrate fair use.)
But this is still fuzzy for what’s happening here. Consider that you can own copyright even over arrangements: if you take a bunch of public domain poems and put them in a book and sell it, you own the copyright to that particular arrangement of poems. The opinion even mentions this explicit case as a hypothetical: if one of those poems were still covered by someone else’s copyright, it shouldn’t invalidate your protection for the arrangement as a whole.
What does this mean for Pokémon, which are only covered by the copyright of their designs and lore? A drawing of all of them still produces brand new art of each one, and that art is arranged in a unique composition. The part that infringes PCI’s copyrights is something ethereal: the ability for them to be recognized as Pokémon. Is that more like the Stallone case, or the poem anthology?
Of course the real answer is: it doesn’t matter! Because these questions only matter in court — everywhere else it’s just so much hot air. Part of why this is all pretty murky is that as far as I’ve been able to find, there has never been a single case of a creator taking a fan artist to court. Not once. Anderson v. Stallone is the closest I could find, and that was the other way around!
It’s obvious why this might be the case: fictional universes thrive on fan work — it’s the fucking lifeblood of Tumblr — and to start suing your own fans in the days of the Internet and social whatnots would be utter suicide. Plus it’s basically free advertising, and keeps your thing in people’s minds for far longer than the source material would alone, with absolutely zero cost to you! Why mess with a good thing?
There’s the occasional cease and desist, of course, but those are very few and far between, and usually target fan work that’s getting a little too similar to something the creator has done or would like to do in the future. Which is why it tends to happen to, say, entire polished free derivative games, and not so much to artwork. It’s not like Nintendo is bleeding cash from all the people buying Pokémon prints from Mel; what else are those people going to do, buy Mel’s art from Nintendo?
So! Does Mel have copyright protection over Every Single Pokémon?
That doesn’t matter either!
Do I even need to spell this out? Look what’s happened here: the clothes were gone in a matter of hours, and thirteen thousand people are incensed over this story. There were no courts involved here. Nobody called a judge or a lawyer. Nobody sent a DMCA takedown notice. Nobody even wrote the phrase “To Whom It May Concern”.
Because as it turns out, people care about respecting the ownership of others’ work, and most of us have the same general understanding that fan work is just as deserving of respect as the material it’s based on. If you were trying to get a fledgling Internet business off the ground, which would you be more immediately concerned about? Going to court, or having tens of thousands of people pissed off at you?
a while back i stumbled upon “dontneedfeminism” which had a lot of long posts of gripes about how hard men have it and links to back them up
i read a lot of the links (because hey wow this stuff is interesting) and mostly found a whole lot of serious twisting of statistics. i am pretty interested in math so this got me all fired up
i’m still seeing the originals get reblogged with comments like “heh and some people think we still need feminism” though so i’m shamelessly signal-boosting my responses
these cover a broad array of MRAish issues like custody battles and punishment for crime and education and so on
spoilers: almost all of the issues (or at least the linked research) boiled down to other factors, including gender stereotypes, racism, and classism. at least, the ones that weren’t outright fabricated. which sort of reinforces my suspicion that MRAs and anti-feminists don’t really care about solving or even examining these issues; they just collect them so they have something to flaunt at feminists. which is, you know, utterly repulsive.
…i’m also curious why there are almost twice as many homeless women with children as homeless men with children. does this mean about half of homeless families have both parents, and half have only a mother? where is the father?…
feminists see things that are worse for women, and want to make them better for women. you see things that are worse for men, and apparently want to make them worse for women.
are men not choosing to take far more dangerous jobs? they could be nurses and secretaries.
are men not choosing to commit more crimes, and ones that are more severe to boot?
something that strikes me about this
it reminds me of that brony story a while back, about the dude who was allegedly stalking some little girl at a family-friendly pony convention
and the brony community went into super damage control mode
much like a lot of dudes are doing right now
i don’t understand why the reaction is to deny all association rather than to come out and say “who the fuck is this asshole, we are going to root him out and make an example of him so this never happens again”
there’s so much pride in one’s group identity tangled up in all this, but it’s never used to make the group better; the lines are just shuffled around a bit to make the individual look better
i must point out that we don’t tend to think of “brunette” and “blonde” as social constructs, even though those aren’t perfect labels either
in which case we’re just wrong. in American culture redheads have an entire mythology dedicated to them (“soulless gingers” etc.; I have one friend who dyed her hair just because she couldn’t put up with the endless tirade of ginger jokes and people fetishizing her hair); the “blonde as airhead” trope is a pretty clear indication that it’s a distinct social category as well. if you’re trying to say that these groups aren’t a construct because colors are some sort of “objective” measure, well, colors are a construct too. different people even within a culture will disagree about what etic expression of color falls into which emic category, and between cultures and languages there’s massive variation in how things are categorized. some cultures (ostensibly including the Pirahã though that depends on how much you trust Daniel Everett) even have a binary color distinction between “light” and “dark”. making it actually quite a good analogy for gender :p
ah, but this is conflating several things again, as we are wont to do
“brunette” and “blonde” still (try to) refer to objective measurements, even if our choice of how to segregate the spectrum is entirely cultural.
though i doubt cultural differences in color vernacular come into play too strongly here. all the ones i’m familiar with are about where to draw the line between blue/cyan/green, pink/red/orange/yellow, and the like; much hair color is split between the pretty distinct categories of light, dark, and redhead. (i observe that even english doesn’t have separate words to distinguish between dark brown versus medium-light brown hair, or to describe black hair.)
we do have the separate and entirely bogus concepts of the soulless ginger and blonde airhead, yes. (where the hell did the ginger thing even come from?) but that’s pattern recognition and reuse of known categories gone awry. it’s a general habit we should be breaking ourselves of. it doesn’t mean hair color doesn’t exist or isn’t a useful qualifier; hairstyle is one of the most obvious ways to find or describe a person. (another being apparent ethnicity, something else we’ve gone and cocked up.)
so we have descriptive labels and then we build stereotypes on them and then we start to enshrine those stereotypes in the culture. we should really stop doing that.
it seems like the blonde airhead trope has lost a lot of its appeal in recent years, at least
specifically it was the agrarian stage of “development” where social stratification showed up. unsettled hunter-gatherer cultures were/are mostly egalitarian, so any understanding of gender they had would be completely alien to a modern western perspective, and they certainly had no knowledge of genetics so they’d have classified an “XX-male” (quotes because it’s an unfortunate cissexist and binaristic term but a technical one) with the rest of the people who had the right bodies for tiger-punching without a second thought, even though you or I would probably call that person intersex.
you can be egalitarian and still notice that human beings tend to come in two general shapes. especially when most of the species is only interested in having sex with one of those shapes. first we notice the categories, then we start to invent conclusions
hm. even with our knowledge of genetics it’s not like we karyotype every newborn. i do wonder, are we even aware now when a baby expressing male physiology is an androgen-insensitive XX? i used to know someone who only found out she was XXY when she was 17 or so, and iirc it basically had to be self-diagnosed.
i have no idea what this says about our labeling. what were we even talking about here.
well, yeah, it was written by western authors for a western audience. not sure how you’d talk about gender without using the terms “male” and “female.” it’d be like trying to explain verb tense to someone who only speaks Mandarin without using words like “yesterday” or “soon” or “tomorrow.” it’s certainly not the right conclusion to draw that this means all cultures have a male/female distinction at least; what you can say is that all cultures have at least two genders (just like all cultures have at least two terms for color.)
it’s certainly possible that a culture could, say, never develop the idea of referring to people by apparent sex at all. i just expect that this would be pretty rare, especially if the society grew to have settlements larger than a small tribe, because it’s one of the most obvious ways to narrow down a description of another person. we seem to be pretty well-wired to guess from a glance whether another human is someone we could perhaps make babies with.
likewise it’s rare for a culture to not have words for colors, just because they make for such clear distinctions. but there is at least one!: the Pirahã, who i believe are the same people that have no words for individual numbers, and no interest in developing any.
trying to define one as male and one as female doesn’t really make sense because traits that are assigned to one gender in one two-gender culture are almost guaranteed to be split up among both in another culture. there’s some general trends in terms of “people capable of reproducing generally wind up getting fucked over and land on the bottom of the social ladder” but even that’s not universal.
hmm. some cultures have genders that are either subsets of the binary genders, or include people who don’t really fit the binary genders.
but are there any cultures where gender is radically and completely unlike our notion of gender and can’t be mapped to ours at all? and if so, would it even make sense to call those distinctions “gender”?
the words aren’t the ideas; if they’re divided along the same lines, we’d still use “female” to refer to the group that carries the babies, because that’s what the word means to us.
in the story in your linked post, the student goes wrong by asking how to say a word rather than how to express an idea. in japanese you don’t really say “i wonder X”; you express it with a sentence suffix that changes the mood of the sentence. “male” and “female” are words we can say, but as long as another culture has groupings that express the same concepts, we can still reuse the words.
you made the claim that intersex people’s bodies were “trying” to be one sex or another and failing, and that’s what I’m taking issue with. I’m not saying intersex people are super common, but I am saying that defining them in terms of their noncomformity with a male/female sex binary is privileging that binary purely because most people can be sorted into one category or another without a lot of difficulty. there’s no intellect driving human development, and if something suddenly killed off all the non-intersex people on the planet, a lot of traits that we see as intersex would be established as the new normal; it’s not like we’d necessarily gravitate back to a notional male/female sex binary over the generations as things got back into order or something. tl;dr making gigantic ontological claims is completely pointless; as a linguist my field is very full of those and I’ve never once seen them be useful *cough*CHOMSKY*cough*
i apologize for anthropomorphizing human development; it’s a very tempting habit :)
the semantics are wacky here since everything we’ve got resulted from natural processes, which don’t have any deliberate goal in mind, or even a mind in which to store one.
and it’s even worse because of all the moral baggage we tack onto words like “wrong”. and american culture, with its competitiveness and its worship of winning, thinks pretty poorly of “fail”.
i don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that intersex results when something interferes with the usual process — the process human biology is most accustomed to experiencing and has evolved alongside. we even say intersex, literally between the sexes.
but certainly that’s not bad. it says nothing about the resulting person. it may be unfortunate if it results in infertility or other practical problems. but i cannot even wrap my head around the idea of judging a person, morally or naturalistically, on the grounds that biology is not a perfect machine that produces identical “perfect” individuals every time. we wouldn’t be here if that were the case; our very existence resulted from an ongoing comedy of errors.
eh. from what I saw it had more to do with the creation of a distinct social category that gay people could be slotted into to preserve gender norms, which is very visible in terms of the gay/straight binary it established (it’s instructive that biphobia is still all over the place, and even gay people are very likely to be biphobic.) which isn’t to say that those factors weren’t what drove that reconfiguration, just that it’s important to look at the structural shifts themselves. simplifying things down to “acceptance/prejudice” is kinda not very useful? I digress, though
most of the vocal arguments were moral or naturalist. granted most people probably aren’t even aware of how perceptions of gender affect them, but we’ve gone from “it’s gross” and “it’s just wrong” and “this book says it’s evil” to a surprising amount of acceptance and support in relatively little time.
it is a shame that half the letters in LGBT have been left in the dust. but i feel the goalposts have moved, that something fundamental has shifted ever so slightly. i’m optimistic.
well, also their social environment and the constructs that define it weren’t challenged the way that happened to people who moved to urban areas, which was an alien environment and called for a lot of new structures to be established.
yeah. i think that’s ultimately the same idea. in an urban area, the very concept of encountering the unfamiliar itself becomes familiar.
that’s definitely how I tend to assume dysphoria works; ever since I learned from body-modders that cis people can experience (non-gender-related) dysphoria too I figured it was probably the exact same mechanism. certainly my own experiences suggest my brain hadn’t been getting the signals it developed to expect and was trying to cope with crappy generic drivers :p
you should upgrade to linux 3.11 for workgroups i hear it’s got drivers for everything
also wow what an asshole of a doctor
on top of that I was seeing her specifically for an HRT consultation, like my trans-ness was exactly why I was there. I’m really sorry for the other people who wound up working with her. :/
lol what? how did she even get into this position. like why would she want to work with trans people and then condescend
…yes? labels are the most visible outward manifestation of a construct. much as I’d love to you can’t just drive your Gayroller 9000 over an abstract concept that lives in people’s heads, you have to do something to make them dismantle that construct and attacking the labels they use is one of many ways to do it. basically I think we’re in agreement on this and are just kinda talking past each other
it has been known to happen
i feel like attacking labels is just attacking symptoms and if successful would lose us words that really are useful sometimes, but i’ve been wrong about how people act before haha
oh i know. i was trying to paint a picture of a person who didn’t want to switch religions, but who was being pressured to do so purely by outside forces. i imagine someone who feels very strongly about religion would be far more likely to see the problem as being with everyone else.
not in my experience. even the strongest beliefs need support and external validation from time to time, and if you’re not getting any of that, but you are getting massive negative feedback, it’s almost impossible for most people to keep them from diminishing. otherwise religions wouldn’t need temples and rituals. and people very rarely deconvert all on their own without any external factor pushing them. on the other hand trans people tend to know something is wrong even in horribly cissexist societies where being trans isn’t even culturally a thing, let alone something looked kindly upon.
hmm that’s interesting. i’ve always thought it funny that christianity has grown to be so focused on its churches, when to my understanding it caught on in the first place because its focus on the individual was so different from ritual-oriented paganisms, or something
catholicism, bringing you zero sense of irony since the year of our lord 300
this isn’t news, but still genuinely surprises me. not that i remotely believe anyone decides to be trans, but the brain is a very flexible organ, and i would expect that at least occasionally it would notice it’s really bumming its owner out and adjust itself accordingly.
I mean, if we had the mechanisms to do that, depression wouldn’t even be a thing.
which would be nice.
or maybe some people really do “just get over it”, but those are the people for whom it never blossoms into a serious problem in the first place
but it would also probably make things really easy for totalitarian dictators and abusers in general. which might explain why we don’t have that kind of mechanism; it’s not necessarily pro-survival. but that’s just idle evo-psych speculation and I don’t think anything good has ever come of that.
i love evo psych it tells me that i’m great because nature wanted it to be so, something something hunter-gatherers
I absolutely do not have time for anyone who starts off any argument with telling someone how not to be a victim. Fuck that.
i was just thinking about this moments before i saw this post, and i think there’s a distinction that’s been lost in recent years
proactively avoiding being a victim (of anything), or advising other people how to do so, is all well and good. risk aversion is a thing; telling someone how not to be a victim is ok. lock your doors. back up your hard drive. don’t visit detroit.
you should probably wear a seatbelt, right? sure, telling people that is fine.
say your friend doesn’t one day, for whatever reason, and someone else hits her and shatters her spine and she’ll never walk again.
when you walk into the hospital room, is your first reaction to stick your nose in the air and say “well, that’s what you get for not wearing a seatbelt”?
probably not because only a complete twat would do that
you might lament that she didn’t wear a seatbelt, or you might be inspired to start a campaign suggesting that other people wear seatbelts. but you don’t rub it in the person’s face because what the fuck kind of person does that? you’d be taking someone else’s pain and twisting it so you could pat yourself on the back for three seconds.
but now we have the internet, where it’s super easy to express our grunting caveman urges of oneupsmanship and conceit. this brings us the kinds of people who will respond to anything negative that happens to anyone by telling them what they ought to have done to avoid it.
this case wasn’t even as clear-cut as the seatbelt. you didn’t do anything wrong. you not only signed the artwork, but also added your tumblr url, expecting exactly this kind of thing to happen. you saw problems coming and actively strove to head them off.
but it doesn’t matter to people who just want to say “i told you so”. it doesn’t even matter that they didn’t tell you so. they’re only here to gloat that something bad happened to you and not to them, and look how smart they are for knowing in hindsight what would have avoided this problem.
after all, the alternative would be that the dude they already idolize has done something wrong. unthinkable. even if he admits he was wrong, there must be something they can hold against you. so they go for the easiest possible thing: pick a random event from the story, and claim that the story would’ve gone differently if that event had gone differently. wow! you don’t say.
effectively these people are eike kusch.
anyway i don’t think victim blaming is about considering how to avoid problems. that’s just the weapon being wielded. it’s really about being the kind of numb asshole whose first instinct, when learning of a stranger’s plight, is disdain rather than sympathy.
Anonymous asked:
luvlysmilk:
this is an important thing but it’s kinda fucked up that they edited out all the white dudes
notice that almost everyone talking to her in these gifs, except the last one, is black
whoops