Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn just turned online harassment into a woman's problem

[RepentantSky]

http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/25/9399169...-zoe-quinn

What's worse is that Polygon is helping them do it. I just went on a long rant about this on my facebook fanpage so I don't want to repeat it again. If you want my thoughts you can see them here: https://www.facebook.com/RepentantSky 
And this video about it is also pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ5Zrnksh3M

[CLXcool]

I tried bringing this up on tumblr, it didn't end well on my end. Needless to say I don't like the idea of this either.

[RepentantSky]

I tried bringing this up on tumblr, it didn't end well on my end. Needless to say I don't like the idea of this either.

That was not a good move. Tumblr just isn't able to handle things like this at a mature level. Hopefully things will go better here.

[CLXcool]

I called it bullshit, and next thing you know it ended up in flames. I ended up getting rid of the post.

[RepentantSky]

I called it bullshit, and next thing you know it ended up in flames. I ended up getting rid of the post.

It's because of things like this that I actively avoid the site. It's always the same with them.

[SamuraiGaiden]

I read into the article differently than you, apparently. Although I do agree with your point that it doesn't mention anything about other forms of harassment such as harassment of LGBT members and the likes. That being said, it's also somewhat true.
Anita and Zoe get flak, even death threats, because they dare to be women game players or game makers. I'm not saying that men aren't harassed online, and neither were they contrary to what you seem to be implying. But my online harassment is generally not anywhere the same level as even non-celeb women I've seen undergo.
Sure in Halo 2 I'd get called a faggot, or a pussy, a or a little girl. That was because I sucked. If I was winning (miraculously) I'd get called a cheater, a lucky noob, or a cheap player. You could argue some of those insults are gender based...I'm called a gay man or a woman's genitals because they believe that those gender-related identities are less important or worse to be than what I am: A man.
But when a female player of the same game that I played alongside would be losing as bad as me (okay, so maybe not as bad as me, but also not winning) she would get a totally different kind of insults: "Get back in the kitchen, you don't know how to play games!" "What is your period too strong, you can't concentrate?" "This is why I hate the auto-team generator in the lobby, it always pairs me with little kids and girls, that's why my win-loss rating is so bad!" Or they'd call her a cunt, a bitch, or a dyke.
If she was winning then they'd claim she was having sex with someone on their team that she kept getting the drop on because there was no possible way she could be better than a crappy male player on their team, she had to have flown seven hundred miles to Arizona to give him a blowjob and convince him not to play effectively in the thirteen seconds it took for the map and teams to load.
The different here being that when I had gender-based insults thrown at me it was by comparing me to the opposing gender. Insinuating that I wasn't good at a certain game, so I must therefore either be a gay man or a woman; which they equivocated to the same thing, basically. Or I'd be insulted for my style of game play that it wasn't manly enough or I wasn't skilled enough and therefore didn't deserve to win.
But my female associate who was playing the same game (and significantly better than I) got gender-based insults because she was a woman. The difference in me getting called a bitch compared to her getting called a bitch is the difference that we're both being called women, essentially.

Let's look at another scenario. I come around the corner and get slashed with the sword. The sword-wielder steps over my corpse's head and taps the crouch button repeatedly to tea-bag me. He then says over his mic, "You probably like that, don't you faggot?" Because he feels that calling a straight male player a gay male will eviscerate him emotionally.
Same thing, but with the female player. He gets the drop on her, kills her with the sword, then tea-bags her avatar. Only this time he says, "God I wish I could actually do this to you. I'd hunt you down and jam my nuts down your throat." Because he feels that as a woman, she should be subservient and passive to him. He claims I'd enjoy giving him a blowjob because I surely can't be a real man if I lost to him; but at the same time he claims that she won't enjoy giving him a blowjob, but he'll make her do it anyway because there's nothing she could possibly do to stop a great machismo like himself.

There is a strong anti-woman core of people online, in the real world, and in gaming. Pointing it out doesn't necessarily mean that they believe there is no harassment of other people. And if you actually Zoe, Anita, or many of the others who spoke in that meeting, you'd see that they do voice the fight for LGBT people, non-white races, and even male gamers.

The point is...they are women getting harassed simply for being women. So what do they fight for? To stop the harassment of women.
If you were a U.S. Marine in Fallujah would you cry foul that your unit was called to protect another U.S. Marine unit, "The full-birds just turned combat into a Marine problem! Now this will make it that much harder for Army lieutenants get attacked harassed to call for reinforcements, because they will be looked at as weak for trying!"
I would think not. Pointing out how an issue affects one group of people - especially a group who may statistically get more vitriol than others - does not necessarily mean that you are ignoring the other groups the issue affects.

[Psychospacecow]

Samu man, I get what you're saying, but I don't necessarily see it like that. Fact of the matter is, this is an issue that openly affects any given individual on the internet today. Its not an issues of gender. Its an issue of bigotry.
We don't agree with people who do such things, but to be divisive in whosoever should be seen as a victim is discriminatory and draws from the same line of bigotry. The problem with this is the same problem they're trying to deal with. They think that there are people who unjustly target them. Their response is to make this about them.
They're discriminating against every other individual who suffers from the same problem by making it a "woman's problem" and not a "human problem". Its a needless distinction that ultimately leads to needless tension and arms the individuals you are actively campaigning against.

The other issue is, this really won't accomplish anything outside of ulterior motives. Bigots will bigot. That's just how it is. That's not going to stop. Why, the very basis of "bigot" in itself is such a loose term that it can be all encompassing based purely on emotion. The problem is, anything that ends up happening affects everyone else. Its like DRM for pirates. Pirates are still pirating. DRM doesn't do anything to them. It just makes it harder on everyone else.

[SamuraiGaiden]

Oh I agree with you, divisiveness is bad. But a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction. Like the article stated women are 27 times more likely to be harassed online. So if we just ignore that fact and target the bigots as a whole, then...nothing will happen.
The flu can cause a wide variety of symptoms, such as fatigue, achiness, clogged sinuses, and nausea. Let's assume that you have the flu and that you have all three symptoms, but the nausea is the worst of the three making you vomit constantly. Are you going to puke-propel your way to the store and buy antibiotics to try to cure the flu but not anything to treat the associated symptoms? Well congratulations, you died of dehydration because you kept vomiting and couldn't keep enough liquid in your system to get better.
No you recognize the problem is on many levels. You take the antibiotics to try to cure the flu, even though antibiotics won't actually do much to the flu since it's a virus (as you pointed out, "bigots gonna bigot"). You also pick up some anti-nausea medication to treat the nausea.
Just because the problem is bigger than one thing doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to treat any of it. And just because you treat the nauseating symptoms, doesn't necessarily mean that the achiness will be worse. It may seem worse, yes, but that's because you've improved the nausea. Next you can start treating the achiness until in the end you're all better.

The key is to try to fix something. If it doesn't work or it makes something else worse, either revert or try a new stance. To play devil's advocate, let's use my example on your side of things. You take the anti-nausea medication, but it has the side-effect of making your congestion worse.
You now have to look at things logically. Which was worse? My nausea before the medication or my current sinus congestion? I had a near-fatal amount of nausea, so I don't want to give up the medication. But now I can't breath and my sinuses are draining into my throat, causing me to almost drown (hyperbole, it's really just turning into a bad cough) any time I try to rest. I can't get any sleep, so I'm not getting better. What can I do?
I can asses that the solution to the nausea is making another problem worse and I buy a decongestant. Now I've actually improved two situations to be better than they were before I sat back and did nothing. I am no longer nauseated or congested. I am still achy and fatigued, though, so I want to continue taking the antibiotics in the hopes that I can get over the flu entirely.
And maybe, some day, I'll come up with the idea to actually get an anti-viral medication and won't be sick at all anymore. In the context of this debate, that anti-viral would be to change the education of the culture so that it is not treat a certain subsect like an inferior type of person.
I.e. we need to eventually educate our society that women are not inferior to men in everything, black people are not all uncultured swine, muslims are not inherently violent, gays are not virally infected promiscuous clods, and elves are not all mute psychos who murder chickens.
Progress is progress. If we start by doing something about harassment against women, maybe we can make online harassment lessen over the entire populace. And if not, well...better than not trying anything at all, right?

And like I said before, too, if you are a person being targeted because of a specific type of bigotry...that is what you would fight against. If you are a woman who is harassed and threaten with death because you are a woman, you would fight to help women. If you are a black man who makes Youtube videos about reviewing anime and is harassed for being a black anime fan, you would probably fight against harassment of black people (and maybe against anime fans). If you are a gay man who reviews combs and are being harassed because you're gay...you would probably fight against anti-LGBT harassment.
You can't really fault someone for trying to stop the people who are harassing them, just because they don't have any ideas or experience on how someone else might be getting harassed. I'm sure that super-wealthy people have problems, too, but I'm more likely to help out a homeless person because I understand his problems better and feel I am more apt to help him. I'm better at giving a guy by the side of the road a poptart than understanding the difficulties of keeping a four million dollar mansion from sliding off the cliff it was built on when rain causes mudslides. I still understand that having your house slide off a cliff sucks, but I don't care for your plight nearly as much as the janitor who had his house burn down. They're both homeless, just one of them is hurt worse by the homelessness in my personal shell of a world. So if I'm a harassed woman, I'm going to try to fix the harassment of women. If bringing it to light means that millionaires with cliff-side houses aren't getting news coverage or something, then hopefully when there are fewer homeless poor people we can help to address the homeless millionaire issue that is beginning to pile up.

[RepentantSky]

For all that you said, unless I missed it, which please correct me if I did, you missed one major point. They get that kind of heat for being as popular as they are. The guy who's video I posted has had people send him death threats, The Lizard Squad straight up threaten to shoot up an event if he were to show to it, and several people try to sabotage him just because he thinks differently than they do. Anita and Zoe deal with that just the same as he does. The bullying and threats aren't limited to a person by any other thing than by how well known they are, and that's only true because the more people who know about a person, the more their are that want to threaten them. Even with that, it doesn't mean that several people aren't bullied for other stupid reasons that lead to suicide. That happens more than it ever should, and gender has never had anything to do with it. Anita and Zoe will get harassed while people hide behind gender-based insults, but those same kinds of insults would still come at them using different words if they were men.

[SamuraiGaiden]

It's not necessarily just celebrity, though.  Put the same celebrities on equal footing and it will generally be the female celebrity who gets gender-based harassment, and harassment in general, more.  I find it highly doubtful that Arin Hanson gets nearly as many threats of rape as Anita Sarkeesian.
Now, does that mean that Arin doesn't get anything?  No, of course not, he recently said that he gets enough flak for stuff that he doesn't even read comments anymore because there's too much vitriol.

And you could easily argue that Arin is the bigger celebrity.  Anita's last video on Youtube has 335 thousand views; posted a week ago.  One of Arin's video on Game Grumps, from around the same time a week ago, has 856 thousand views.  Even if we assume 50% of the people are watching for Danny and miraculously mute the video any time Arin speaks so have never even heard of him, even though they watch his video, that's still 428 thousand to 335 thousand.

Does Arin have an entire community who actively plot to try to get him to leave the internet and possibly even kill himself?  No; at least not the size that GamerGate is.  Even that video you linked to is just a GamerGater, near as I can tell.  If Anita made a video where she said that Bananas were yellow guys like him would make videos talking about how she's wrong and show a bunch of unripe bananas to prove they're actually green.

Celebrity breeds vitriol in jealous people, you are 100% correct.  But to pretend or claim that male celebrities in gaming and female celebrities in gaming get the same amount of vitriol?

You said...

Anita and Zoe will get harassed while people hide behind gender-based insults, but those same kinds of insults would still come at them using different words if they were men.

Zoe Quinn had an entire anti-Woman movement start up because she made a successful game and had the audacity to not die a virgin.
Meanwhile Terrence Howard beats his wife (wives, actually, plural) and his coworkers jump to his defense.
To some people success is a reason to hate others.  We all have that inside us a bit.  You look at the guy who was born into wealth while you're digging in your pocket to see if you can buy two packets of Ramen noodles today, instead of just one, and you hate him.  Sure, it's gonna happen.  The difference is why you hate him.
You hate him because he is wealthy and you are not.  He is not successful, he simply had wealth and power dumped on him.  You resent his opportunities he was born into wealth.  You don't really hate him; everything you read about him makes him sound like a half-decent guy, actually.  But boy-oh-boy do you hate his lucky wealth!
A woman makes a decent video game and its popular and you look at her and see the game you've never had the courage or fortitude to make...and you hate her.  She's just a woman and she did something I couldn't?  She sold a thousand copies of her game?  I'm a man and I only sold eighteen copies of my game...and two of those were to my mommy.  What's this?  She's not a perfectly infallible person?  I had better start building a guillotine just for her, because she deserves for having a vagina and a mind!
Now, as I continue to say...harassment is wrong.  Just plain wrong.  But if you stand two people in a room and give people the opportunity to throw rocks at them and one of them gets 27 more rocks thrown at them than the other...you have to start thinking about how to address the rock-throwers to help alleviate that bias.
I would argue that not doing something makes it far worse.  Let's assume you are absolutely correct...young men and boys (the ones who are most susceptible to harassment and suicidal thoughts of the male gender) who are being harassed will be less likely to do anything about it because they'll feel it's a women's issue and they're just not man enough to exist online.
Is that worse than these young men and boys growing up watching their peers and elders harass women and being taught, "It's okay, nothing will happen to you because these bitches deserve it".  Then they start to harass as well...and that's where we are now.
Even the conversation we're having a difference in vitriolic value based on gender.  Anita says Feminist things, she gets death threats.  Skallagrim says Feminist things...people threaten to unsubscribe.  Arin Hansom says Feminist things...and people threaten to unsubscribe.  See the difference?  There are far more people in the world who believe that women shouldn't have a voice and for that matter, women need a voice.

Edit: BTW...the Lizard Squad you mentioned. These are the same guys who falsely claimed they hacked Taylor Swift's computer and threatened to release nude photos of her if she didn't pay a ransom, right? So tell me...how many naked photos of the guy in the video you linked have they threatened to release?

[BumblebeeCody*]

I tried bringing this up on tumblr, it didn't end well on my end. Needless to say I don't like the idea of this either.

That was not a good move. Tumblr just isn't able to handle things like this at a mature level. Hopefully things will go better here.

Nor is anyone on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, [insert gaming forum]...

[Melcadrien]

This is one of the many hurdles we, as a human race, are held up by. Not by the fact that these two are making it into a problem for the females only but the fact that when there is change people are hard-pressed to fight back into their comfort zone.

[CLXcool]

I tried bringing this up on tumblr, it didn't end well on my end. Needless to say I don't like the idea of this either.

That was not a good move. Tumblr just isn't able to handle things like this at a mature level. Hopefully things will go better here.

Nor is anyone on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, [insert gaming forum]...

Ironically, I brought it up on facebook, and some of the people I know seem to have taken it well.

[Psychospacecow]

That was not a good move. Tumblr just isn't able to handle things like this at a mature level. Hopefully things will go better here.

Nor is anyone on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, [insert gaming forum]...

Ironically, I brought it up on facebook, and some of the people I know seem to have taken it well.

That's because its not so much an open forum as an echo chamber, like tumblr, but you have more control on who sees your content.

[G-Haven]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Zoe quinn a part of Helldump like 6+ years ago, which was a SA board specifically for doxxing/harassing other people? Which is the exact topic the UN presentation was about?