We Hunted The Mammoth
So you waited until the last minute to pull together your #GamerGate Halloween costume. And you’re lazy as crap.
Well, you’re in luck! Here are seven totally half-assed, no-effort #GamerGate costumes you can pull together in a few minutes with stuff you have around the house!
Last night, as you may have heard, the woman known to #GamerGaters as “Literally Who 2” pulled off a bit of a media coup, appearing on The Colbert Report for a brief interview by the sympathetic Colbert, who gently satirized some of the sillier “arguments” of the Gaters with a series of deliberatly obtuse questions. You know, his regular schtick.
When Anita Sarkeesian posted the picture above (well, a non-blurry version of it) to Twitter yesterday evening, thus alerting the world to her upcoming appearance on Colbert’s show, it set off a wave of panic and despair on 8chan’s /gg/ board, one of the central organizing hubs of the GamerGate “movement.”
When women, in conversations online, point out the ridiculously tiny percentage of video games that feature women as protagonists, they tend to get flooded with responses from indignant gamebros telling them that if they don’t like the games out there, they should just make their own.
The gamebros mean their comments to be conversation-enders. Just as Vivian James, #GamerGate’s imaginary girlfriend, tells game critics to “shut up and play,” these guys are telling critics of the retrograde gender politics in gaming to “shut up and make games.”
It never occurs to them that some of the women they smugly tell this to … might already be doing this.
So a new Redditor has wandered into the Red Pill subreddit, that bastion of enlightened male thought, bringing with him a tale of woe:
I don’t know about you, but I would totally watch that sitcom.
In the Red Pill subreddit, though, the fellas didn’t see much humor in his situation (and only a select few even suspected a troll).
GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
Over the last several days, the #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter has been speckled with self-contragulatory Tweets by Gators boasting that they have “found Anita’s harasser.”
Who, this guy?
Return of Kings contributor “Billy Chubbs,” whose previous contributions to the wisdom of the ages include posts titled Men Should Not Help Sluts, Bangable Women Can Still Be Gross, and Unmarried Older Women Need To Go Away, has outdone himself in the awfulness department with a post this week attacking 17-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai as “A Coward And A Hypocrite.”
Apparently inspired by Chubbs’ bold move, the Sarkeesian-hating, Anton LaVey-looking far-right nitwit Davis Aurini has junped on the bandwagon with his own blog post dissing Malala.
We’ll get to him in a minute. But first, Chubbs.
Men’s Rights activists are the only ones asking these tough questions about the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian and other outspoken women in gaming.
Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?
How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?
Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.
And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?
Utah State University has just announced that Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a talk she was scheduled to give at the school tomorrow after receiving a threat of a “Montreal Massacre-style attack” by someone promising ““the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the cultural critic was allowed to speak.
Here’s the official announcement:
Anita Sarkeesian has canceled her scheduled speech for tomorrow following a discussion with Utah State University police regarding an email threat that was sent to Utah State University. During the discussion, Sarkeesian asked if weapons will be permitted at the speaking venue. Sarkeesian was informed that, in accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms, if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.
Emphasis added. That’s right: the school received threats from someone promising to shoot people at a public event, but because of Utah’s gun laws, authorities would not be able to prohibit audience members from BRINGING GUNS to the talk.