(My apologies to Dog)
By David Futrelle
I think a lot about this Tweet from Zoe Quinn:
It just dawned on me that I had a breakup go so badly he got mad and helped usher in a new era of American fascism over it
— ℤombië ℚueen 🔜 NYCC (@UnburntWitch) January 31, 2017
Obviously, Quinn exaggerated a little for comedic effect. But not by much. The reactionary “populist” movement known as Gamergate began as a harassment campaign against Quinn kickstarted by her angry ex; Gamergate, in turn, helped to kickstart the broader alt-right movement that took off in earnest in the runup to the 2016 election. Virtually everything that is desperately wrong with American politics today can be connected back to Gamergate.
And that includes the Brett Kavanaugh debacle.
A couple of days ago, a Twitterer called @LasagnaGarden noticed that back in July 2015 Kavanaugh’s pal (and alleged attempted-rape assistant) Mark Judge had written an article for a little-known, now-defunct culture blog called Acculturated attacking Anita Sarkeesian and praising her Gamergate critics.
Attacking Sarkeesian as a “bully” bent on shutting down critics by “express[ing] a lot of rage and personal hurt” — a slightly ironic critique in the wake of his buddy Kavanaugh’s tantrum on the stand last week — Judge declared that
gamers’ cogent counterarguments have made Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency irrelevant. Gamers keep gaming, and game makers keep making games. The controversy is ebbing, and soon the name Anita Sarkeesian will be a footnote in pop culture history.
So insightful!
If Judge’s first Gamergate post was a bog-standard Gamergatey “rebuttal” to a drastically and misleadingly simplified caricature of Sarkeesian’s arguments — pretty much the dictionary definition of a straw man — his second post on Sarkeesian was far worse, a creepy defense of male gamers’ sexual fetishization of pixelated hotties that looks even creepier in the wake of the Kavanaugh revelations.
As you no doubt recall, Christine Blasey Ford says that Mark Judge was not only in the room when the then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh allegedly tried to rape her; he also helped to hustle her into the room in the first place and stood there laughing at her distress as Kavanaugh held her down and tried to rip off her clothes. (For the sake of journalistic integrity, I will add an “allegedly” to all that, though I have no doubt whatsoever that Ford is telling the truth.)
If Ford’s story is true, Judge’s November 2015 post “Why Do Feminist Video Game Critics Want to Ban Male Fantasies?” isn’t just a cringey bit of male oversharing; it reads like a man with a guilty conscience trying to justify his complicity in a near-rape some three decades earlier.
Judge begins his post by falsely accusing Sarkeesian — “the feminist critic of alleged sexism in video games” — of “want[ing] to ban men from having sexual fantasies.”
He bases this exaggerated accusation on one of Sarkeesian’s videos examining the trope of “woman as reward” in video games, a trope that, in Sarkeesian’s words,
frames female bodies as collectible, as tractable, or as consumable, and positions women as status symbols designed to validate the masculinity of presumed straight male players.
That this trope is a real thing in video games is utterly undeniable, as Sarkeesian’s numerous examples in her more than half-hour video make clear.
Judge’s response? A big “so what!” Literally.
So, when guys play video games, they like to fantasize about enduring hardship and making it through difficult obstacles to be rewarded at the end (or sooner) with the attentions of a gorgeous, sexy woman? And this is a problem?
Well, it’s a huge problem if these guys have trouble seeing women as anything more than their bodies, and if they see these bodies as little more than prizes to be won. Or simply to be taken, as Brett Kavanaugh seemingly did on that July night in 1982.
Judge goes on to protest (too much) the notion that men fantasize about controlling and using female bodies for their own selfish pleasures.
Sarkeesian assumes that video games portray women’s bodies as collectable, tractable (easy to control), and consumable. In reality, the male fantasy can be an expression of the exact opposite. Rather than representing women as a reward that a man can control, a woman, and particularly a woman’s body, can represent his greatest challenge and most intoxicating opportunity for genuine freedom.
Yes, I suppose a woman’s body presents a “challenge” to a man if she’s literally trying not to be raped. I’m not sure how “genuine freedom” comes into it unless that’s some sort of grotesque code for a man’s “freedom” to do to women what he wants, their desires and rights be damned.
Sarkeesian is absolutely right on one count: men do fantasize about consuming women. We dream about consuming their beauty, their tenderness, their spirit, and their goodness in the hope that it will make us better human beings, not to mention good fathers and best friends.
Female beauty, tenderness, goodness? Is that what Brett Kavanaugh was (allegedly) trying to “consume” that summer night?
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
It’s telling that Judge — who in his teen years was even more of a hearty partier than even Brett “I LOVE BEER” Kavanaugh — uses the word “intoxicating” to refer to women’s bodies.
Because if something is “intoxicating,” can one really help but be intoxicated by it? When men speak of women’s bodies and/or “beauty” in this way — and this is something that Warren Farrell, intellectual granddaddy of the Men’s Rights movement, has been doing for decades — it makes it all the easier to justify male sexual violence. There’s very little difference between using “he was drunk” as an excuse and using “he was intoxicated by her beauty” as an excuse.
If Ford’s account of the night she was (allegedly) almost raped by Brett Kavanaugh with Judge in the room is true, it’s hard not so see this post by Judge as something close to a Freudian confession of the crime.
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No, she doesn’t ASSUME that. She DEMONSTRATES that, with ample evidence from the games themselves.
Uh, that doesn’t sound like you’re actually refuting her, dude. You’re just confirming that she was right.
Also, YUCK.
Yo, Mark? You wanna know what would really make you a better human being, father and friend? Not talking about women as “intoxicating” substances that you consume in order to MAKE you someone you’re not. Because that’s spelled O-B-J-E-C-T-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N. You know, that thing Anita Sarkeesian had to put out a whole series of videos on because it was so goddamn prevalent in videogaming? That thing you’re so peeved at her for exposing so overtly? Yeah. THAT thing.
Try treating them as human beings first and foremost. Ask before you do anything. And also, KEEP YOUR GRUBBY HANDS TO YOURSELF.
I mean Jesus Christ, dude…we’re not fucking drugs, we’re PEOPLE.
“gamers’ cogent counterarguments”
ugh i’m hungover and this made me laugh so hard my head hurts.
but yup this dude doesn’t see women as humans, just objects upon which he can impose his will. when i read stuff like this, i wish i could just be a disembodied spirit with no physical form.
also, it’s hilarious how he says anita sarkeesian became irrelevant when dudes like him treated her like the most important woman in the world and made her famous
(emphasis mine)
…that is fucking gross.
If I consume the most gorgeous roast chicken what comes out is still shit. It doesn´t make me any more like a roast chicken than I was before.
Creepy guy. Oh, but he’s a Christian, so that’s ok.
@KindaSortaHarmless
It’s oddly honest, though. I mean, I imagine spending any sort of time with this guy would destroy anyone’s looks (if nothing else, from the constant eye rolling), leave one so infuriated that you couldn’t be tender to anyone for a while because you’d be too busy foaming at the mouth, leave one utterly dispirited (just in general or about the human race overall), and destroy one’s goodness once one lost it and smashed multiple wasp nests on this guy’s head.
What he’s got wrong is his weird insistence that Manly Men are vampires who acquire all their victims’ goodness by draining it out of them, as opposed to just draining their victims and remaining just as big assholes as they were in the first place.
Said the eldritch horror from beyond time.
Thanks for digging this up, because we damned sure won’t be seeing it from the FBI “investigation”.
Consuming them before any other man can tuck in, I’m assuming? Ew.
Is Mark Judge one of those good men we lefty women are supposed to be pining for but unable to get because we aren’t marriagable? Yeah, I don’t think I’m missing out on much here.
this is so fucked up I don’t know where to start… I was raised with the idea that I should learn how to do those things BEFORE we cannibalized
our mate….
So, we’re supposed to civilize these men, make them better human beings, and build them families, right? But I thought men were the only ones capable of building civilizations? But if they are uncivilized and have no families they can carry on their work without the distraction of the ebil wimmenz? And build civilizations?
No wonder they are so strong with the cognitive dissonance.
It’s these women going around being aggressively attractive who are the real villains… / sarcasm.
I grew up with the information that how men behaved was my fault, that my appearance was what made the difference between success (men fancying me ) and failure (men not fancying me) or disaster (men fancying me “too much”). and that any attack or aggression from men to me was my fault not theirs.
Then one day a neighbour of ours was raped. She was at home, in her bed, and was over 80s years old. The rapist, a stranger, broke in. She died a few weeks later, almost certainly from shock and injuries.
For some reason, after that, the “overcome by your attractiveness in a moment of madness” excuse never seemed plausible again.
@Marshmallow Stacey
Ugh, how awful. I’m so sorry that happened to her (and by extension to you)
Dave, you missed the point. Kavanaugh is a white man, and therefore entitled to be angry and hurt. Sarkeesian is a woman; anger is unacceptable, like it is in a person of color. Only white men are justified in their anger. I learned this from years and years and years in the “loving” bosom of my family.
Marshmallow Stacey, I was taught the same thing. I was the black sheep of the family because I insisted on getting a college education and didn’t want to spend my life having babies for a man who would tell me what to eat, what to wear, when to crap or not, and when to have sex or not. Everything that men did was because I dressed wrong, sat wrong, walked wrong, or spoke wrong. Everything I wore was supposed to meet with the approval of the male gaze, while not turning them on so they would want to have sex with me – I was expected to do and say just the things that would inspire them to marriage, but not to sex. If they wanted sex, well, that was my fault.
My brother molested myself and my sister (maybe all of my sisters). My parents continued to cherish him over all the rest. He was male, he was first born, he was going to be the pride of the family. Now that I am 58 years old, and my dad is in his 80s, he seems to have finally realized that I am the only one of his children he can trust or expect to succeed at what I try, but he still cannot actually come out and say “you’ve done well” or “how did you manage to do all that against all the obstacles I, and everyone else, put in your way?” And he never will. The most he will do is ask me to be executor of his estate, which is his way of saying “I know you can handle this and none of my other children can”. He cannot, even with all the evidence, recognize that his oldest son is a rapist, a violent bully, and a mean brute.
That ‘consuming’ sentence is truly disturbing. He makes heterosexual contact sound like a Sime absorbing selyn from a Gen.
It fits with the misperception that ‘sex’ is something women have that men take from them.
@Robert:
Wow, that’s the second Sime~Gen reference I’ve seen in the last couple of months, after having not heard or thought much about those books in a couple of decades.
(The first reference was on File770, where somebody responded to the typo ‘get sime friends’ by saying ‘but I only have Gen friends.’)
I read most of those back in University, and actually met Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah at a convention once.
That said, the Sime~Gen books had a pretty significant current on ‘how do we make this actually work to everybody’s benefit’; Judge really doesn’t seem to care that much about anybody’s benefit other than his own and by extension his similarly-minded friends. He’d have been one of the old-school Simes who don’t care that Gens die in the process and would be mad that the Channels are upsetting the ‘proper order of things’.
2 things.
Thank you for reminding me it’s been a while since I checked in with Feminist Frequency.
This evening, I watched John Oliver (catching up). Amongst many other excellent points, he noted Orrin Hatch thought that things that happened 36 years ago were irrelevant. I can only assume therefore that Hatch didn’t ask Ford any questions (because any testimony would be irrelevant) but I can’t find the relevant transcript to check. But I’ve had some wine, so maybe I’m just being incompetent.
So, if anyone wants to do my homework for me, I’d be grateful.
@Iknklast:
I’m sorry your brother molested you, and that you have to put up with that sort of attitude from your father. I can commiserate with some of the “dad” parts of your story, the difference with me being my father eventually realized he’d treated me unfairly, and apologized.
@Marshalow Stacey:
How horrible for that poor woman, and for you.
@Robert
@Jenora Feurer
Dang, I was reading that Sime/ Gen comment and went “whoa! Somebody else read them!” too. Read a few in my early teens.
And way to go, Mikey, denying women their humanity and agency by relegating them to comestibles. >:(
I was just reading some articles about Republican women and whether they’re pro or anti Kavanaugh, and one thing that struck me as really weird was seeing a lot of them parroting the “it’s a scary time to be a guy” line.
I mean, I’m a guy and I don’t think it’s that scary out there, but then I’ve never tried to rape anyone. And even if I did find it scary, I don’t think it’s likely to be that much worse than the constant Schrodinger’s rapist scariness women have to put up with, and that surely even these women know about? I suppose you could make a parodic argument that it’s just women being properly supportive, knowing what being scared all the time is like, and wanting to protect we fragile men from it, but I’m pretty sure nothing even vaguely approaching that is going on. I just see them saying this, and all I can think is 1) No it’s not, 2) Even if it is, I’m not saying it’s fair payback or men deserve it or anything, but considering what women have to live with it’s surely not that high a price to pay? 3) That being the case, why the hell do you care? and 4) Hey, guess what, if men didn’t go around assaulting people, not only would no one be afraid of false accusations, no one would haev to be afraid of being assaulted, either! Win-win!
I don’t know. Is this weird bemusement I’m feeling what it’s like for women hearing men explain things about them? Not major mansplaining or anything, just tiny everyday “Oh, you know what it’s like for them?” things that are completely baffling and not even worth disputing?
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie:
In the process of determining that the band in your photo actually exists, I happened upon this:
http://loudwire.com/bruce-dickinson-reacts-all-female-tribute-act-the-iron-maidens/
@Robert:
That ‘consuming’ sentence is truly disturbing. He makes heterosexual contact sound like a Sime absorbing selyn from a Gen.
It fits with the misperception that ‘sex’ is something women have that men take from them.
An attitude whose repercussions are discussed here:
http://faerye.net/post/the-puzzle-box
This guy told a former girlfriend that he and his friends took turns raping drunk women – he said he felt shame, but had convinced himself they consented. I’m finding myself fantasizing about sending the girl with the dragon tattoo after this stinking piece of human excrement.
And would probably not believe Zelerod’s (sp?) numbers even if he could be convinced to look at them. (Confession: the Sime~Gen verse was just a name I’d heard until the original, Livejournal incarnation of the milliways_bar RP comm got a Suzi Darley. She’s not around anymore, and the comm has moved to Dreamwidth.)
I’m betting judge is a regular on incels and trp,and possibily other manuresphere reddits
And clicking on the puzzle box link, I found this link to an old Cliff Pervocracy post that’s both on topic for this site, and the month of October too.
The Myth of the Boner Werewolf.
Meanwhile, also.
And yet, I’m guessing that he also thinks that if a woman drinks, she’s “consenting” to whatever the hell he and his buddies decide to do to her.
Glurrrrrghhhhh.
@Bina
Wow, this particular piece you’ve quoted here sounds to me like Judge was (is?) a raging alcoholic.
A lot of alcoholics talk about some variation of “switches flipping in their brain” that causes them to behave in horrible ways (I have seen this happen personally, to an old friend of mine; you could actually tell, just by watching her behaviour, when she’d drunk enough to flip her switch. With experience, I learnt acting right at that point could head off a punch-up. The next morning she would be genuinely deeply distressed at her own behaviour. Of course not distressed enough to actually stop drinking though; so eventually we parted ways)
I’ve been thinking about Trump lying about the rape victims being ‘crisis actors’.
It seems to me that Trump would not be immune from a defamation suit as that surely must fall outside “official acts”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-1853.ZS.html
Now obviously it’s entirely up to the women how they proceed with all this. There’ll no doubt already be people targeting them, in addition to the president of the electoral college.
But if they did want to sue him I’d certainly support a crowdfunding thing.