Feminism Thread

[Ksandra]

Abandoning a label because zealots have infiltrated your camp is exactly what *not* to do as it cedes ground to them. They're the ones that need to GTFO, not you.

You misunderstood. He generalized the GG movement as a bunch of misogynists, then admits it's a select few and claims they need to fix their movement from within. This is the same thing that many people who don't associate with feminism say about the feminist movement but are countered with "it's only a small few!"

Basically the feminist movement has the same issue, and people should recognize both or they are being hypocritical.

[Blubbartron]

food for thought:

This is the same reason many people don't associate with feminism because of the spoiled eggs ruining the whole batch. So, if you want that to change with feminism, you might not want to perpetuate that same kind of reaction to other groups.

Fucking this.

Also, what we really need is for people to stop being so eager to don a label in place of having real, human conversations about their beliefs. Trying to express the complex amalgamation of beliefs, thoughts, and ideas that make up a person with a single term is an impossible task, and a fool's errand.

[Kuya]

I can't even say GG movement with a straight face. Talk about SJW!

[RKenshin]

I've stopped being tolerant of it despite being an 'everyday occurrence.' I no longer accept that dealing with and accepting the aforementioned daily sadism as an inevitable part of the internet. Where it matters I'll call it out and I'll never be okay with it anymore. It's no longer okay with me to just shrug and go along with the toxicity. That's really my only answer to how to fix a seriously corrosive problem with a community.

Well, it's one thing to accept/not accept it, and another thing to say it's something more than what it really is. I do still agree it's terrible and unacceptable, but there are certainly different levels of that.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine it doing anything but getting worse with time... the only way something like this is going away is if they add some sort of accountability/punishment, and the only way I see that happening is by removing anonymity/privacy and/or enforcing rules of internet use.

As much as people fighting with the extremists of both sides damages honest causes and productive change, I'd still take that over some big brother situation where the internet is policed by a set of rules/code of conduct.

[Correction]

food for thought:

This is the same reason many people don't associate with feminism because of the spoiled eggs ruining the whole batch. So, if you want that to change with feminism, you might not want to perpetuate that same kind of reaction to other groups.

Here's the story with feminism, it's the intersection of a social movement + the body of writing that has accompanied it for several decades. It has changed, it has adapted, it has splintered just like anything else and it's taken every single one of those years of existence to do so. If people refuse to associate with feminism that's fine, but it's not really this all-or-nothing doctrine with ten commandments that you are either for or against. You can for example support the social movements that intersect with progressive feminism while not being involved in the academia. That's what things like improving family leave in the private sector and better access to reproductive health services are about. You can similarly just drown yourself in the writings without volunteering at an abortion clinic. It's not strictly about associations or identity. I might try to 'fix' whatever perception problem you personally have with what you think feminism is, but first I'd need some sincere engagement, something I get in maybe one out of every thirty to forty posts in here (and those numbers are not improving). But it's been a while since I've trusted you to supply that since you clearly regard this entire subforum as a dumping ground that saves mods from having to do anything.

Here's the story with gamergate. It's a hashtag spawned by a libertarian lunatic and cheered on by ultraconservative wingnuts after reading about a guy whose girlfriend had sex with another guy, and then backpedaled to the whole 'journalism' angle when the misogyny got a little too transparent. Its constituents crow about censorship but then cheer a sponsor who pulls ads over content they don't agree with. They form boards that leave doxxing threads up for months despite a statement from its founder that 'oh doxxing isn't cool guys.' They dismiss the very roots of the campaign, from Milo's conspiracy mongering about faked death threats to the Internet Aristocrat's five guys slanderfest as 'oh that's just twelve year olds pretend it doesn't exist.' An disproportionate amount of the visibility GG has is directly tied to the threats and harassment, so much so that it's incredible anybody still says with a straight face that it's a movement to improve journalism. GG has earned the reaction it gets, and it is neither mature nor serious enough to get the benefit of the doubt.

As much as people fighting with the extremists of both sides damages honest causes and productive change, I'd still take that over some big brother situation where the internet is policed by a set of rules/code of conduct.

It's honestly not a policeable thing on a wide scale. It's up to individual communities to set standards for themselves and wall off poisonous behavior. It's not 'big brother' to say members who threaten other members are no longer welcome in a community.

[Priran]

You know what's a real bitch? For all the people saying Eron Gjoni, his post about Zoe Quinn, and the people who first took it up were all misogynist there's a pretty good argument that Zoe Quinn was an emotional abuser.

...I first became an intersectional feminist activist after spending time on the feminist internet sphere. I fell in love with social justice, and felt like intersectional feminism confronted many of the questions that my high school education fell short of answering. However, over time, I began to realize that social justice has major problems simmering under the surface. Especially within online activism, social justice often struggles with identifying abuse and harassment directed at others: both outside of the community, and among our own.

Last month, Boston computer scientist Eron Gjoni posted a call out about his former girlfriend, Zoё Quinn, a video game developer and a former inspiration of mine. I read through his call out, and I was taken aback by his ex-girlfriend’s behavior. The more time I read his receipts, the more I realized that Zoё Quinn shows the classic signs of an emotional abuser. Throughout the handful of chat logs Gjoni posted in August, Quinn utilizes lying, half-truths, blame shifting, guilt tripping, isolation from others, withholding of past abusive behaviors, gaslighting, and suicidal threats in order to control Gjoni.

A month later, I began studying Gjoni’s call out for a video series exploring emotional abuse. I began by focusing on two prevalent patterns of abusive behavior found in many emotionally abusive relationships: shifting blame and responsibility for feelings, and withholding information from an abused partner. I was astonished to find nearly 100 examples of Quinn utilizing these two behaviors alone, within a mere snapshot of their entire relationship. Indeed, Quinn’s behavior in Gjoni’s receipts are damning to any abuse survivor...

It's pretty irrelevant to Gamergate, but I think it's cute in its reductiveness when people try to say this all started with a bunch of men who hated women for no reason other than the fact they are women.

[NynJa]

Here's the story with feminism, it's the intersection of a social movement + the body of writing that has accompanied it for several decades. It has changed, it has adapted, it has splintered just like anything else and it's taken every single one of those years of existence to do so. If people refuse to associate with feminism that's fine, but it's not really this all-or-nothing doctrine with ten commandments that you are either for or against. You can for example support the social movements that intersect with progressive feminism while not being involved in the academia. That's what things like improving family leave in the private sector and better access to reproductive health services are about. You can similarly just drown yourself in the writings without volunteering at an abortion clinic. It's not strictly about associations or identity. I might try to 'fix' whatever perception problem you personally have with what you think feminism is, but first I'd need some sincere engagement, something I get in maybe one out of every thirty to forty posts in here (and those numbers are not improving). But it's been a while since I've trusted you to supply that since you clearly regard this entire subforum as a dumping ground that saves mods from having to do anything.

Here's the story with gamergate. It's a hashtag spawned by a libertarian lunatic and cheered on by ultraconservative wingnuts after reading about a guy who's girlfriend had sex with another guy, and then backpedaled to the whole 'journalism' angle when the misogyny got a little too transparent. Its constituents crow about censorship but then cheer a sponsor who pulls ads over content they don't agree with. They form boards that leave doxxing threads up for months despite a statement from its founder that 'oh doxxing isn't cool guys.' They dismiss the very roots of the campaign, from Milo's conspiracy mongering about faked death threats to the Internet Aristocrat's five guys slanderfest as 'oh that's just twelve year olds pretend it doesn't exist.' An disproportionate amount of the visibility GG has is directly tied to the threats and harassment, so much so that it's incredible anybody still says with a straight face that it's a movement to improve journalism. GG has earned the reaction it gets, and it is neither mature nor serious enough to get the benefit of the doubt.



It's honestly not a policeable thing on a wide scale. It's up to individual communities to set standards for themselves and wall off poisonous behavior. It's not 'big brother' to say members who threaten other members are no longer welcome in a community.

k, explain

(When you're done looking for it because it doesn't exist, here's a gamergate figurehead getting doxxed+death threats from an explicit anti-GGer.)

[Ksandra]

Here's the story with feminism, it's the intersection of a social movement + the body of writing that has accompanied it for several decades. It has changed, it has adapted, it has splintered just like anything else and it's taken every single one of those years of existence to do so. If people refuse to associate with feminism that's fine, but it's not really this all-or-nothing doctrine with ten commandments that you are either for or against. You can for example support the social movements that intersect with progressive feminism while not being involved in the academia. That's what things like improving family leave in the private sector and better access to reproductive health services are about. You can similarly just drown yourself in the writings without volunteering at an abortion clinic. It's not strictly about associations or identity. I might try to 'fix' whatever perception problem you personally have with what you think feminism is, but first I'd need some sincere engagement, something I get in maybe one out of every thirty to forty posts in here (and those numbers are not improving). But it's been a while since I've trusted you to supply that since you clearly regard this entire subforum as a dumping ground that saves mods from having to do anything.

Here's the story with gamergate. It's a hashtag spawned by a libertarian lunatic and cheered on by ultraconservative wingnuts after reading about a guy whose girlfriend had sex with another guy, and then backpedaled to the whole 'journalism' angle when the misogyny got a little too transparent. Its constituents crow about censorship but then cheer a sponsor who pulls ads over content they don't agree with. They form boards that leave doxxing threads up for months despite a statement from its founder that 'oh doxxing isn't cool guys.' They dismiss the very roots of the campaign, from Milo's conspiracy mongering about faked death threats to the Internet Aristocrat's five guys slanderfest as 'oh that's just twelve year olds pretend it doesn't exist.' An disproportionate amount of the visibility GG has is directly tied to the threats and harassment, so much so that it's incredible anybody still says with a straight face that it's a movement to improve journalism. GG has earned the reaction it gets, and it is neither mature nor serious enough to get the benefit of the doubt.



It's honestly not a policeable thing on a wide scale. It's up to individual communities to set standards for themselves and wall off poisonous behavior. It's not 'big brother' to say members who threaten other members are no longer welcome in a community.

I like how you claim you want an honest discussion then attack me for my modding decisions. Fix your own shit first before you point fingers at others.

I am not even part of either movement, but I see you being a pretty big hypocrite who is trying to justify why one is ok and the other isn't.

[Lyall]

Here's the story with gamergate. It's a hashtag spawned by a libertarian lunatic and cheered on by ultraconservative wingnuts after reading about a guy who's girlfriend had sex with another guy, and then backpedaled to the whole 'journalism' angle when the misogyny got a little too transparent. Its constituents crow about censorship but then cheer a sponsor who pulls ads over content they don't agree with. They form boards that leave doxxing threads up for months despite a statement from its founder that 'oh doxxing isn't cool guys.' They dismiss the very roots of the campaign, from Milo's conspiracy mongering about faked death threats to the Internet Aristocrat's five guys slanderfest as 'oh that's just twelve year olds pretend it doesn't exist.' An disproportionate amount of the visibility GG has is directly tied to the threats and harassment, so much so that it's incredible anybody still says with a straight face that it's a movement to improve journalism. GG has earned the reaction it gets, and it is neither mature nor serious enough to get the benefit of the doubt.

Gamergate was spawned and immediately forked. There were the wannabe internet trolls who raged about someone cheating on her boyfriend with multiple dudes including her boss, who was cheating on his wife. We don't know the details, so that's whatever. At the same time, there were people who started looking into the "sex for writing" allegations. While there was no "smoking gun" review of Depression Quest, Zoe was talked about by someone she was in a relationship with. The people who stepped forward to decry the loudest were the people who supported her via Patreon. Those voices were tied together in the GamesJournoPro list that had multiple people, all friends but working "against" each other in the click-bait era of online tabloid-blogism, discussing how to handle the angle.

The death threats Anita received were posted in a strange light. 11 seconds after posting an unlogged account without a search entry capped them. Just enough to fit on one page. It's suspicious, as if her behavior to immediately ask for money a day later after going against ALL logic when threatened with a credible threat online (something Anita's allegedly gotten for years and years).

Finally, asking Intel to pull ads is not censorship. They didn't tell Gamasutra to pull the article. The right to free speech doesn't guarantee you listeners. Gamasutra (and numerous others, all also targeted) wrote articles proclaiming the gaming identity dead. Intel markets to the gaming identity. It doesn't take someone from academia to realize that, when your customer you are paying tells you you have no demo, it makes business sense to stop paying them.

[RKenshin]

It's honestly not a policeable thing on a wide scale. It's up to individual communities to set standards for themselves and wall off poisonous behavior. It's not 'big brother' to say members who threaten other members are no longer welcome in a community.

When said community in question here is the entire world wide web though, again, how do you really tell troll4lif3lol@u69 that they're no longer welcome?

Sure, you can disable comments, ban the IP/user, etc... but that doesn't stop them from going to their own public forum of some sort and saying the exact thing they were going to say.

[Priran]

Insofar as GamerGate has leaders, they unequivocally denounce doxxing and harassment.

Insofar as twitter/tumblr feminism has leaders, lol the pissbabies deserve it screenshot any personal data so I can signal boost it

[Correction]

I like how you claim you want an honest discussion then attack me for my modding decisions.

yeah lets' just lock this thread so people can yap about it all over the forums instead.

So this isn't you saying 'I don't want to deal with an argument about feminism in more than one thread?' You think this one thread is good enough for an honest discussion, peppered as it is with awful trolling, stupid image macros and insultingly bad youtube videos presented without elaboration?

I'm not attacking you, I'm saying your actions as a mod do not instill me with a lot of faith, don't take it personally. You want to put it on me to help feminism improve its image, and it's a real mixed bag with where those standards lie. You post some fantastic articles on transectionalism but you continue to characterize feminism as if it didn't encompass an enormous of breadth of opinion. I can't make people accept conservative radfems any more than I can convince them Milo's a level headed fella who just wants honest journalism, but as gamergate does not encompass anywhere near that breadth I don't think the 'both sides' equivalence holds up to the faintest scrutiny; On balance I'm perfectly comfortable saying GG is 'not ok,' while feminism is 'ok,' if we want to get all After School Special with our judgments. Further discussion on the matter requires more specific examples I guess. Show me where feminists are saying or doing things I disagree with and I'll express my disagreement, I don't pretend to defend the circumference of a huge, decades-old movement.

When said community in question here is the entire world wide web though, again, how do you really tell troll4lif3lol@u69 that they're no longer welcome?

You don't, you can't. You chip away at it one sub-community at a time. It's not unlike quarantine, you follow successful, smaller models of stamping out useless/poisonous behavior and hope it spreads.

[Ksandra]

So this isn't you saying 'I don't want to deal with an argument about feminism in more than one thread?' You think this one thread is good enough for an honest discussion, peppered as it is with awful trolling, stupid image macros and insultingly bad youtube videos presented without elaboration?

No, but think logically. People wanted this locked why? Because they don't want it discussed anymore. Talking about feminism is not against forum rules. It would do jack shit.

I like organization. Including things like the random complaint threads for games. Before we added one for ffxiv, every goddamn thread in that section was people bitching and it was hard to have a conversation about anything. people can still complain in other threads, but now it's specifically (or we tried to mod that way) about the content of the topic rather than, "fucking rata didn't invite me to his pt." or some shit.

If you want to make a specific thread about a specific feminist/gg/misogynist/whatever issue, go forth and fucking do it. This one is the sort of catch all thread.


With that said, you need to take a breath if you can't handle the posts you don't deem worthy. This is BG. We are not a political-based forum, we are a gaming forum, that have people who have been hear for years and years and have found common grounds in areas that don't just include gaming. When we decide what rules to have and which not to we base it on what we want out of the forums and what the members want out of us. What I do want is a place that people can chew the fat and freely speak their mind as long as it doesn't go to what the collected staff have decided on as being extreme. I do not want to coddle people. This isn't the forum for that.

If you want to have a discussion with carebears you will have to go to another forum to find it. Stop trying to demand it of here, it isn't going to happen. If you want to suck it up and pick and choose who to respond to and get through a discussion honestly, then fucking do it and ignore those you don't want to respond to. But do it knowing they are going to respond in the manner they choose, not the manner you or I choose for them.

[Correction]

If you want to suck it up and pick and choose who to respond to and get through a discussion honestly, then fucking do it and ignore those you don't want to respond to.

This is exactly what I've tried to do. I don't want carebear land or to be treated with kid gloves. My expectations were already low on BG site conduct. Good to see we're on the same page here.

[Kuya]

And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the Rebel Alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level.

Is it a crazy leap to imagine that this deeply-rooted tolerance of terrible behavior might drive people away?

Our toleration of asshole behavior must end, and it’s such an integral part of nerd culture that nuking the entire thing from orbit is the only way to be sure.

http://qz.com/279823/nerd-culture-is...ilicon-valley/

[Priran]

Speaking of things correction doesn't want to address,

http://i.imgur.com/Ipd1xf5.jpg

but GG is a "tainted hate movement" right

Edit: Woops, that was an old version

[Correction]

Speaking of things correction doesn't want to address

You talk as if I approve of doxxing based on whether or not I sympathize with the target.

I don't.

Next question.

[Priran]

You talk as if I approve of doxxing based on whether or not I sympathize with the target.

I don't.

Next question.

But you said Gamergate is existentially tainted by doxxing and needs to be stopped, whereas feminism isn't and doesn't. So actually, how aren't you are doing that thing you said?

[Correction]

But you said Gamergate is existentially tainted by doxxing and needs to be stopped, whereas feminism isn't and doesn't. So actually, how aren't you are doing that thing you said?

Gamergate is characterized by the entire history of the people who operate under its banner. Given that such people have carried water for InfoWars, returnofkings, Milo Yiannopoulus, Adam Baldwin, thunderf00t, Internet Aristocrat, etc. then yes, it's safe to say its very existence has set down roots in toxic waters.
Feminism enjoys some privilege via seniority here, being a much older and diverse movement that encompasses so much more than the bitter campaign shrouding GG, and it's much easier to find progress and constructive thought as fruits of the social advocacy part and the academic debates that have emerged from it. If someone has doxxed someone in the name of feminism then that's shitty and I condemn the doxxing, but not feminism.

I explained this in a much longer post earlier. Squealing 'both sides both sides' over and over isn't an argument and falls short of the requirements to overturn what I've said about GG.

[Kuya]

I find the very need to even compare GG with feminism suspect. We've been told time and time again GG has to do with ethics in video game journalism but then the feminism comparisons and arguments keep cropping up. Are GG advocates really sure GG has nothing to do with anti-feminism?