The problem with pointing out problems
The other day I was posting on an internet forum for folks who like to play games when a topic involving women came up.
No, this is not the start of a really bad joke.
I’ve been posting online since the good old days when AOL was the shiny new thing cutting edge tech geeks used. I’m a little too young to remember the really early days in the 80s when things were something you’d see portrayed in a remake of Hackers but, suffice it to say, I grew up posting my opinions and sharing my life and thoughts with people online. I’m comfortable here.
And by “comfortable” I mean “because I’ve spent my entire life posting online, I know what clusterfucks lie at the end of every rabbit hole that is an internet debate.”
When I was younger, sassier, and had far fewer tools at my disposal to discuss difficult issues online without someone throwing out a personal attack or threatening someone, I’d wade into a lot of these battles. I made a lot of enemies in the places I posted frequently, in part because they were male-dominated spaces focused on gaming and tech with a healthy smattering of regular “life talk” thrown in.
I try to portray who I am in the real world through my words when I post online. Working at gaming and social media companies, I know that’s often not the case for people who wade into the digital world. Online, we have the opportunity to be anyone and anything. We can present a facet of ourselves or make up a persona entirely: the internet is our oyster to try out styles and opinions and see how they fit before we take them out on the street where folks can look us in the eye. For me, though, I am who I am and I’m trying to be me as fully and truly as possible (and that comes with definite cons as well as pros.)
That’s why it was surprising (and a little amusing, and a lot disturbing) to see folks discussing me and my mental state in a forum thread a couple months back. The question a person had posed was “what was up with me?” My “passionate threads” about the reddit meltdown (oh boy, totally different article) and an instance where I told a guy he was creepy for making a creepy comment about my cleavage when I posted a picture of myself made people “worried” about me.
Here’s a summary of what someone responded to in regard to what was, indeed, up with me:
dahanese is a bit unstable i think, its a tricky situation because she is very intelligent and often makes insightful, interesting posts but its obvious she has some issues and a really skewed/twisted worldview. i also suspect she is far more a “man hating bra burning” feminist than an “equality for all” one, and is in denial about it. i can remember posts from her in the past where she was very clearly stating her intense dislike of males, and anything that can be construed as a masculine viewpoint or interpretation of whatever topic. i wish i could bring up a specific post but i remember once she just plain stated that she hated being around men and found no value in them or something, and i think it just kind of got lost in the shit storm of whatever drama was playing out at the time.
it troubles me. i can remember being super impressed by her years ago, because she was in the [video game] industry and was a woman and i thought that was just fucking great, because she is also super articulate and participated in things with us lowly consumers. she was involved in fucking DUKE [Nukem Forever] for gods sake (but NEVER mention when she sponsored the trip to the strip club in a dahanese thread, just trust me on this, unless you want to get banned dont ever mention that event) so to me that gave her a certain legendary status. i have always mentally noted the folks who work in the games industry(aided by the handy name colors) and she stood out as one of the the few female ones, but more and more, gradually either she changed or her true nature became more apparent.
she has a serious hardcore hate boner for anything that she perceives as objectification or an attack on women, or women’s issues, and unfortunately her radar for such things seems to be massively out of calibration. she seems to have no ability for humor and even the most innocuous jokes or comments that involve anything remotely female as the punchline can drive her into a fury. that post was just one of the examples of it, and honestly im not sure why she still stays around [the site we post on]
she has left before, a couple times i think, and i wonder if it wouldn’t be for everyones benefit if she just left for good.
she is also one of the protected posters, so any time you call her out on something you risk getting in trouble. its unfortunate because more and more often, her participation in a thread is just poison and derails it into a hellish place of absurdity and hate spewing.
*note: i like dahanese. i wish she would stop being so fucking miserable. i wish she would leave [the site we post on] because it obviously gives her no pleasure and seems to only provide a mechanism for her to be outraged constantly, have some sort of come to jesus moment, and stop hating the world around her and be happy.
I could spend a lot of time unpacking this pretty long assessment of myself. I’ve never said any of those things about hating men, for example. I’ve worked on a bunch of games that definitely do not portray women in the best light. This fact seems to be both one of my best attributes to some folks on the internet and, in the same breath, the reason why I’m hypocritical when I speak about women’s issues.
But the heart of the above post isn’t about the details of what’s said: it’s the persona others have built of me in reaction to the times I post about difficult issues and wade into those uncomfortable (and sometimes downright hostile) internet discussions that happen all-too-often.
If you read my articles here, you know that I’m a woman who has worked in gaming and tech for over a decade in public-facing roles. I’ve had my fair share of shitty situations both within companies and with the public that stem from the fact we, as a society, still have a tough row to hoe before we attain equality and mutual respect for both men and women in the workplace and specifically in these two industries. While years ago I stayed far more silent about these issues, both out of fear that it would impact my career and because I was scared to deal with the repercussions in my regular life for speaking up, I now feel exactly the opposite about the state of affairs and my role in them: I have expertise and insight that can help people. I have a background that allows me to get the message out more effectively than others. I am articulate and I care a lot about making tech and gaming more equitable not just for women but for anyone who is something other than the majority: anyone who is a marginalized group. It’s scary to have an opinion or a life that isn’t the norm, that goes against the grain, that might make people think uncomfortable thoughts or reflect on themselves and how they might not be the best. We need to stop attacking the things that scare us or make us feel like less than perfect, embrace those feelings of discomfort, and grow from them.
But if you try to do that, if you even bring it up, you’ve got a good chance of painting a target on your back.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem with pointing out problems.
Do you want to talk about women’s issues?
Do you want to talk about gender identity or transgender people?
Do you want to talk about mental health or taking medications for mental health issues?
Do you want to talk about anything sensitive that has been discussed either in the mass media or only in niche groups in the past handful of years?
Good luck. The chances of that going well for you is slim to non-existent, at least if you’re trying to speak to a group that isn’t exclusively made up of folks that already agree with you — and I think echo chambers are bad places to be.
There are a thousand ways to shoot down, belittle, and deride a topic a person cares about and only a couple (usually uncomfortable) ways to listen and respond respectfully. The former gets upvotes, shares, likes, and laughter from other like-minded people. The second takes time, effort, and sometimes introspection into yourself about issues you probably don’t want to talk during your lunch hour or while you’re browsing the internet from a bathroom stall.
I don’t want to make the internet a super serious place, but I cannot stand the fact that right now it’s a mean place. I build internet communities for a living, for god’s sake: I am in this line of work because I love the connections the digital world has given us and I think it is hugely powerful and essential for us to move forward in the future. I see the broad expanse of what internet culture and connectivity is doing to us and while I do see immense good, the ugly snarl of negativity, hate, and anonymous shittiness is a normal fact of life that humanity needs to stop accepting. “Have you been on the internet?” should not be a rhetorical question that means “of course bad shit is going to be said.” And we should not laugh when that statement is uttered: we should all be really, really fucking depressed with ourselves and our fellow humans.
I’m going to purposefully forget some of the best advice a mentor ever gave me and fall into the “Nixon trap” where instead of asserting a statement of what you are, you fall back into a defensive (and much weaker) positive by speaking in the terms of what you are trying to refute, generally express in statements of “I’m not / I don’t.” In normal circumstances, I would tell you what I am: A woman working in tech who is passionate, outspoken, and wants to make the internet a better place for everyone — the disenfranchised and the trolls alike. But in this instance, I’m going to speak in the words of those who have problems with me pointing out problems — because in doing so, I’m pointing out a problem we so desperately need to solve.
I am not a bra-burning feminist. I am not a man hater. I do not have a hate boner for anything perceived as an attack on issues I am personally invested in. And I am not (I find it amusing I even have to assert this) unstable for thinking that we need to point out problems when they happen in online spaces. It’s all right to hate a status quo without actually hating the world: it’s all right to acknowledge there is an overwhelming swath of ugliness online while also being a happy person.
We need to stop dealing in absolutes when we talk about these issues. We need to think of these discussions as conversations, not debates. No one is ever going to win but we surely will all lose if we keep piling on the hostility, backhanded comments, and purposefully try to hurt and attack folks who don’t have the same opinions as our own in an effort to make them stop saying things that make us uncomfortable.
The problem with pointing out problems is that by expressing an opposing opinion, you expose yourself to attack while simultaneously pulling the conversation off course until you are fighting about the right to talk about problematic things rather than the problematic thing itself. It’s circular and insane logic.
The problem with pointing out problems is that it forces people who do not have those problems to think about them or, perhaps, do something differently.
Yes.
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