You Need To Stop: An Open Letter to @femfreq, @freebsdgirl, Et. Al.

You are hurting women, and you need to stop.

Since the Caroline CriadoPerez drama, I haven’t had much to say about Twitter “feminism”. There have been several opportunities to speak out on the matter for basically any reason at all, but regardless how passionately I’ve tweeted about #GamerGate drama in particular over the past several months, I’ve seen no real reason for me to offer my own personal opinion outside of Twitter.

Until, that is, I realized that Randi Harper has been diligently at work creating a Twitter block bot designed to silence people who have spoken out in support of Gamergate and whom she deems a “miserable excuse for a human being”, out of having their opinion heard by anyone who’s decided that they agree with her, or anyone else waving the Feminazi Flag of Self-Satisfaction.

Oh, yes, ladies. It is about to be like that.

Look, I’m not a gamer, and before you anti-gg’ers immediately spout off about how this fact unilaterally bars me from having even a semblance of qualitative opinion concerning gaming or gaming culture, let me tell you why you’re wrong. Not being a gamer allows me the outsider view, unadulterated by the amorist fog that beguiles those who write “journalistically” of their own culture and therefore also self-identification. I’m not biased by all the years’ worth of nostalgic memories and an unyielding fondness for the battles won and friendships forged through countless hours of epic digital engagement. When video games are blamed for the latest wave of violence or misogyny in a nation which could very well soon find itself having produced an entire generation of first-time voters who have never known the function of their government during a time of peace, those accusations don’t feel like a personal attack on the hobby and, in the case that I am also a game developer, the career to which I have dedicated the past several decades of my life. The way in which the public and media perceive, understand, discuss, or even think about gaming or the video game industry bears absolutely no weight whatsoever on the conscious morality of my being; nor does it wound me emotionally or egotistically to think for even a sliver of a second that anything I have helped create could have a measurably negative affect on any one of a number of societies or, goodness forbid, an entire half of humanity. Succinctly, I just have zero fucks to give about it, personally, and I have exactly none DogeCoins in the gamer culture fight. However, since feminazis have decided that they’re going to shove their way in and position themselves as the judge, jury, and executioners of a society which has in the past, via Twitter, demonstrated to me such a deep capacity for love, understanding, compassion, and change in ways previously unfathomable, I have decided that I have every right to judge the feminazis, as well.

I AM a feminist, and I DO LOVE the concept of video games, the sociology of gamers, and what I anticipate will be the poignant role that digital games will play in our future, and it is with that belief that I present to you the following argument: Games, and the gamers who play them, are in fact the furthest thing from dead. They’re immortal. More so, the efforts of “feminists” such as Zoe Quinn, Caroline CriadoPerez, Anita Sarkeesian, and Randi Harper are divisive, manipulative, willfully ignorant, and just generally over the fucking top. They need to stop. This whole … *thing* needs to stop, because feminism isn’t just about The Other Side understanding women, and the so-called “feminist approach” these women are taking is more harmful to women trying to both get in and fit in to gamer-tech industries than it is helpful.

Now, because I’m aware of the tactics of those who oppose #gamergate, as well as people who passionately fight on the internet in general, let me just dissuade anyone from forming the opinion that I, as a self-declared feminist, condone the sometimes admittedly frightening harassment that has befallen these women as they waive proudly their aforementioned flags. Nor do I reject the idea that the industries of gaming and/or technology are generally sexist. For fuck’s sake, the Consumer Electronics Show gets in bed with the Adult Entertainment Expo every year; you guys ought to at least be able to acknowledge the fact that this might be (read: IS) a barrier to women who have interest in the tech and/or gaming industry, simply by way of sexual intimidation. Honestly. There are understandable technological reasons for the correlation, but if you can actually say it has no affect on women, society, or the gaming-tech industry in general while keeping a straight face, you can just get up and get the fuck out.

Warning: This author may be from the Internet and is possibly some sort of comedienne. Some of this material may be fucking offensive. You can deal with it and learn something, or you can close your mind to any and every thing with which you immediately and heuristically disagree, and still just get the fuck out, anyway.

What I also will not condone is the blanket characterization of *people* in the industries of gaming and technology as neckbeard, basement-dwelling losers. I mean, at the very least, I would just love it if these women would decide if internet harassers are confined to their mothers’ basements; stuck in a world of perpetual virginity, or if they’re actually going to fire up some kind of real-world rape train in order to “teach a lesson” to all of these women who are speaking up about the gender bias of their professional worlds. All I’m asking is that these ladies make it one or the other, so that we can at least have a cohesive unproductive national argument. Please.

I want to make clear to men in the gaming-tech industry, gamers, and the internet in general that there are women who not only support #gamergate, but who love you for who you are. Could there be more female character options? Yeah, that’d be nice. Would it really impress women of the gamer-tech persuasion if there were a few bold and innovative companies out there who were willing to take the risk of finding passionate women educated outside of the industry but with great ideas and who are fast learners, and then investing in those women in order to help speed up the statistical and representational adjustment of prejudices past? Oh, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. But rest assured: There is no need to entirely uproot your base by bending to the will of a small faction of women who claim to be speaking on behalf of feminists and women everywhere, because that is simply just not the case. A national spotlight does not a social justice warrior make, and you do not need to be made to feel as though every creation you have ever conceived is hated by all women and must be ditched completely and then redrawn, lest you be doomed to political incorrectness for all of virtual time. Do not feed the trolls. Most importantly, Gamergate should not be allowed to affect negatively the existing co-ed relationships within your company. Not all of us feel threatened by all of your culture all of the time because we’re not all frigid, self-serving cunts.

Sociologically speaking, the biggest harm that these women could possibly do comes to other women, in the form of awkward work environments. How excited do these women think this die-hard feminist stance makes men feel about taking on more women in their industry? What kind of “cultural fit” does it seem like women who claim the title ‘feminist’ will have at a tech or gaming company, should one simply Google the tag #gamergate? What do you suppose goes through the mind of a man who is labeled a “neckbeard” one night, and has to go to work at his tech-related job the next day, wondering if that’s how all the women around him think and feel?

I bet it feels a lot like wondering if every guy at the gym is staring at your ass.

Which means that the answer to boosting women’s voices in the gaming-tech industry isn’t to shame men into behaving the way “we” think they should, and it sure as shit doesn’t involve writing a terribly designed program to automatically block people on Twitter just because you think they’re associated with people you don’t like. Yes, this is a sexist industry. Also, we live in America, which has been strategically located in the world which we commonly associate with all of human history, and if you know anything at all about the world, it is that it is a sexist, racist place. So, maybe what would be nice would be if these “feminists” addressed actual barriers to progress for women, instead of focusing on the nature of trolls and deliberately trying to skew the cultural relativity of the backlash they’ve been experiencing and in some cases provoking. Humanity help us, anyway, women are better represented in the tech and gaming industries than they are in the US Congress. So the trolls have the internet, and the Internet has trolls. So, what? Welcome to The Internet. This is what it looks like; this is what it grew to be, over years of shutting out the female half of society and developing unchecked in the annals of the intertubes. This is the world these women say they want to be a part of, but they are making no effort to integrate themselves, and seek only to recreate that world in their own image. That’s not feminism. That’s a coup. And while it is very true that gamer culture is aggressive, sexist, violent, and just basically immature, it is still not fair to paint all #gamergate supporters — or men in general — as “violent misogynist neckbeard sexists” who would act on their words in real life. Some of those men are, I am quite positive, happily married, and I’m definitely aware that a large number of them are actually women.

Furthermore, I’d just like to point out that there are not that many public figures who have never been threatened or harassed. Jesus. For example. I mean, they killed the Kennedys. What? You don’t think President Obama gets death threats because people think he has no right to be in the White House? You bet your butthurt ass he does, but he doesn’t let it stop him, does he? He is still the fucking president, and he hasn’t spent the last six years bitching about the dangers of being the center of scorn held by a relatively small and harmless group of crazy trolls. People who speak out about almost anything are threatened, harassed, and made to feel like what they should do is just give up and go home. It’s not because you’re a woman, it just comes with the territory. So put on your boots and get back into the field, soldier, this is what democracy looks like. Twitter itself doesn’t have enough resources to stop bots, and co-opting the feminist label for your own whiny agenda is only serving to stifle real, productive conversation. Which brings me, finally, to an eloquently framed closure, if I may say so, myself.

Stop it. Stop your autoblock bot. Stop being divisive. Stop shaming men and entire industries into agreeing with you. Stop even presuming that you may speak for me as a woman; ew, it’s gross. Stop using the media as a profit platform to demonstrate how unbelievably little you understand about the culture you claim to be trying to be a part of. Stop ruining it for the rest of us. Just. Fucking. Stop. Stop creating an automated program to blanket-block people who form opinions that you plain just don’t like. You are actively blocking progress for women, and deliberately provoking the trollish behavior you claim is damaging your life so deeply by invoking censorship: the one thing The Internet hates more than bacon shortages. Stop. 22,000 mentions and you think they’re all real people? Stop. Just stop it. Stop being the people who turn every dongle joke into a reason to get people fired. A DONGLE IS A REAL THING! Stop coming up with anything but a solution, and stop being a bunch of bitches. Just stop it.

You’re not helping anyone.

p.s.: On behalf of anyone who’s looked at Ms. Harper’s autoblock (autolist, actually, in its current form) code and was easily able to recognize the serious flaws in implementation and just the fucked-up nature of the entire project in general, but who is scared of saying so for being labeled whatever kind of insult these girls come up with next, I’ll say it first: Your stupid code is shit, and I find the use of the word ‘sheeple’ to be a laughably ironic description of any poor soul convinced by the likes of you that this is, in any way, how women should be pursuing equality. Good day, sir.