Shirtstorm and Gamergate
[Since I’ve got too much work on to write any of the articles I’ve got knocking around in my head, here’s another blast from the past. This originally appeared on the main Sensible Marks of Ideas website, which got destroyed this summer and has still only partially been rebuilt. I’d thought this was one article I’d failed to back up or locate on Way Back Machine, but then when searching my hard drive for something else, I stumbled upon a draft. So if 2016’s proving too stressful, let’s go back and revisit some of the absurd nastiness of 2014.]
One of the signs you’re getting older is it seems the world used to be simpler. Back in the 1970s, Tom Robinson could sing “When Left is right and Right is wrong, you’d better decide which side you’re on,” and we’d all go “Right on!” Of course the world wasn’t simpler; we were. Even then, though, my comrades would sometimes accuse me of sitting on the fence, usually because I refused to support the liberation movement du jour because of some technicality like blowing up children. If anything at all has changed, it’s that there are more fences to be caught sitting on. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that not only do I still end up sitting on a lot of fences, my position on one issue may put me one the opposite side of some fence to my position on another issue. This seems to be the case with the two great embarrassments of 2014: Shirtstorm and Gamergate. A glance at my tweets on those issues would show me to be alternately a libertarian lampooning political correctness and a Social Justice Warrior.
For those who somehow managed to miss Shirtstorm, it started with a woman making a shirt. The shirt had pictures of women on it. She gave this shirt to a man. The man wore it. Some women didn’t like this. The man said he was sorry. There was also something about landing a probe on a comet.
Is this oversimplifying? Not much, because the complexity is all in the minds of the people who objected to the shirt, or objected to the objections. Yet even this complexity can be simplified a little if we apply the right tools. The wrong tool is “feminism vs. anti-feminism”. It is true that the women who objected to the shirt were feminists, and a lot of those who defended the shirt were anti-feminists, but that isn’t the interesting divide. Whenever feminists say something is sexist, there will be talk of “political correctness run riot” and so forth. The interesting divide is within the feminist camp; Shirtstorm is like a litmus test for second vs. third wave feminism.
The basic anti-shirt argument is that it portrays women as sex-objects, which in turn creates a hostile work environment for women, which is particularly bad here because women are already under-represented in STEM in general and space sciences in particular. This is a classic second-wave argument, and the underlying logic is that if women appear in a way that is sexually attractive to men, then men will see them as sex-objects, which doesn’t just mean the object of someone’s sexual desire (since all of us manage to be that at least occasionally) but that they are nothing more than this. Put as baldly as this, it’s an obviously bad argument, but it is nevertheless grounded in a certain amount of reality. Portraying women in an exaggeratedly sexual way certainly is something that some men do to belittle women. A classic case is to superimpose a photograph of the head of some woman you don’t like onto a porn-model’s body. This gives the message “You are just a cunt.” It’s a rare and extreme case, but it does happen (in fact it happened where I work), and you could make a case that sometimes pin-ups of nude women are used — consciously or unconsciously — to define male space and thus — intentionally or unintentionally — discourage women from working there. The problem is in jumping from these examples to the conclusion that all sexually attractive images of women are of this type, and even that actual, flesh and blood women are propagating this image of women if they dress and act according to “male-defined” norms of attractiveness. This leads to an intellectual form of slut-shaming, as well as to silliness like Shirtstorm, where the shirt was thought to be in the same category as the examples I mentioned earlier simply because the women were attractive and were showing more flesh than would be legal in Iran. Some even objected to the fact that the women were carrying guns. So women are OK so long as they are modestly dressed and unarmed?
This reductio ad absurdum of late ’70s feminist theories of sexuality is in part what gave us third wave feminism. I don’t think this solves the messy problems of sexuality and oppression perfectly, but its arrival did allow us to talk about them in a slightly more rational and less guilt-inducing way. If nothing else, it has much more of an empirical basis; rather than imposing an ideological interpretation on popular images, as much second-wave feminism did, it looks more at what real people actually do and listens to how they feel about it. Of course, this talk of waves introduces an artificial historicity to what is really just one set of attitudes gradually becoming more popular than another — a forerunner of third-wave feminism was Nancy Friday’s collection of women’s sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, which came out in 1973, when second-wave feminism was just starting to get in gear. But at the risk of oversimplifying, let’s just sum up the third wave view as “sex isn’t rational, but we can be.” And as an aside, let’s not forget in all this talk of waves that 90% of feminism is just feminism — the very straightforward belief that the current system discriminates against women and that something should be done about it (to paraphrase Janet Radcliffe Richards).
Looked at through second-wave glasses, Shirtstorm was all about male exploitation of women’s bodies and the staking out of STEM as male territory. Through third-wave glasses, it was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I side more with the third wavers here, and in particular I was angry about what seemed to be nothing more than self-righteous bullying. The people who laid into Gray were misguided and boorish, and yet they were not 100% wrong. There is a fair amount of sexism in STEM and in nerd culture. I don’t think Gray’s shirt was in any way an example of that, but it looked close enough to things that were to let a lot of people jump to the wrong conclusion in such a dramatic way that they provided anti-feminists with a ton of propaganda material.
In short, Shirtstorm was an own goal for feminism. The image that sticks most in people’s minds after the shirt itself is of Gray breaking down and crying while apologising for his supposedly insensitive behaviour. Yet this needs to be seen in perspective. Gray’s critics may have been stupid and hurtful, but that’s as far as it goes. Gray was not threatened with violence, his accounts weren’t hacked, and even the verbal abuse he received was pretty mild. The same cannot be said in the case of Gamergate, an issue I probably wouldn’t even have got interested in had it not been for its extreme nastiness.
Gamergate is about two things: ethics in games journalism and misogyny. You’d think that the people who supported ethics in games journalism would also be strongly opposed to misogyny because, you know, ethics, but this appears not to be the case. People who find it outrageous that some game might have got better reviews than it deserved seem to be able to shrug off death threats as something that happens to everybody.
Again, a short summary for those who didn’t wade through the depressing morass of tweets, articles and comments. Gamergate, as far as I can tell, started life as a hashtag and grew into an amorphous movement of libertarians, conservatives, anti-feminists, apolitical gamers who don’t like gaming being politicised, and maybe even a few people who care about ethics in games journalism. It is united less by common ideas than by hatred of a few key individuals who represent everything that good gamers are opposed to, chief of whom are Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian.
DISCLAIMER: Since we’re so concerned about ethics in journalism, I should point out that I have not slept with any of these people. I don’t even know them offline. I do follow them on Twitter. I do support Brianna Wu on Patreon, but this is more of a token gesture of support after this whole thing started; the actual amount of money is neglible, and no money has ever flowed the other way. Sarkeesian is the only one I had even heard of before Gamergate: I watched a couple of her videos, though I wouldn’t describe myself as a major fan. In other words, I’m only defending them because I think what is being done to them is outrageous. Either that or Sarkeesian is right and I’ve played too many games with the damsel in distress trope.
Back to our monstrous regiment of women. Zoe Quinn was the first target of the grudge that became Gamergate. According to the ’gaters, Quinn’s game, Depression Quest, received better coverage than it deserved because, her ex-boyfriend alleged, she had been doing the dirty with Nathan Grayson, a journalist for Kotaku. Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned, one is tempted to say. But let’s assume just for the sake of argument that Quinn and Grayson really had left the friendzone, and that maybe Grayson was thus a bit too fulsome in his praise of Depression Quest. Well, that certainly would be a breach of journalistic ethics, just like if I slept with one of my students then gave them an “A” for a “B” paper. I would lose my job if I did that, and maybe Grayson should too, in the unlikely event that any of this actually happened. But is this enough to launch a whole movement? Is games journalism rotten to the core because a horde of game designing floozies are jumping on journalists? And more to the point, even if Quinn were guilty as hell, would that justify threats of violence, rape and death? If these people plan to do that because of dodgy journalistic ethics, how would they respond to a serious crime? Nuclear weapons? Biological warfare?
On to the next of the trinity, Brianna Wu. Wu’s claim to supervillain status seems to rest largely on her support for Quinn, and, perhaps being another female indie game designer. She has accordingly received rape threats, death threats, and the usual tweeted abuse. Even people who support Wu have apparently been harassed, so there’s a kind of domino effect going on here. By the way, far be it from me to accuse anyone of sexism, but I don’t notice anyone making rape threats against men.
Anita Sarkeesian, as I mentioned, is the only bête noire I had a prior interest in. I sometimes teach a course called “The Philosophy and Psychology of Games”, and last time I did it, a student posted a link to the first of Sarkeesian’s “Women vs. Tropes” videos. I resolved to use it the next time I run the course, not because I agreed with every word, but because I thought it would be good material for my students to practice their debating skills. That’s debating skills as in finely honed logical argument, not as in death threats.
Sarkeesian is also a good example of how Gamergate can be seen as a culture war. Some folk obviously hated her before the whole Gamergate thing started; when she was invited to receive a Game Developers Choice award in March 2014, there was a bomb threat. (No bomb was found and the award ceremony went off without a hitch.) Not everyone who dislikes Sarkeesian is a misogynist, or an anti-feminist, or a Gamergater. If you search around, you will find some thoughtful critiques of her work, including plenty from women, and even from feminists. That is how it should be. I could probably pen some criticisms myself, were I not so busy with stuff like this. What is interesting here, though, is the middle ground between this kind of reasoned criticism and the death threats.
The anti-gaters in general, and Sarkeesian in particular, are despised as “SJW”s: social justice warriors. While I would have thought a social justice warrior was a pretty cool thing to be, most Americans apparently think otherwise. Ignoring the two extremes of reasoned criticism and death threats, I’d guess that the hostility to Sarkeesian’s Women vs. Tropes videos is largely the result of the kind of rhetoric that’s normal in humanities departments being dumped on apolitical or right-wing gamers. Feminist criticism of games has been around for a long time, and generally draws its methods and language from feminist criticism of other cultural phenomena, such as advertising, which in turn is influenced by literary criticism, anthropology and above all, neo-Marxist social criticism. Some of it is insightful; some of it suffers the tendency mentioned earlier to seize on an image, assume it is typical without collecting quantitative data, and slap an interpretation on it without any criteria for determining the validity of interpretation. In other words, it suffers from a Humpty-Dumpty approach to culture — words (and images) mean exactly what I say they mean. There again, that’s an inherent problem in the humanities and social sciences; feminists are hardly unique here. In left-wing circles, we’re used to this, and the reaction varies from “Hmm, interesting” through to “Pffft.” In right-wing and apolitical circles (i.e., nearly all of America), the reaction varies from incredulity to outrage, especially when the object of such criticism is something people love. A person who thinks feminist criticism of advertising is merely absurd may be driven to fury when the same methods are applied to Tomb Raider. “DON’T TOUCH LARA! I LOVE LARA!!!”
I suspect that it is this outrage more than deep-seated misogyny that is behind most of the Gamergate venom. That’s not to say there is no misogyny amongst gamers, just that I doubt that there’s much more than in the general population. Misogyny is like racism: there are very few people who genuinely hate the whole of the opposite sex, just like there are very few people who genuinely hate other races, but when someone is seen as threatening something you love, you use any weapon you can lay your hands on, including all the sexist (racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic etc.) tropes that have been gathering dust in your cultural arsenal. Everyone has a tendency to do this; most of us stop ourselves at some point on a line that starts with comments that hurt the recipient and embarrass the person making them and ends with lynchings, pogroms and ethnic cleansing. We may stop ourselves because we are rational and compassionate, but reason and compassion are in short supply when we feel threatened; more importantly, we stop ourselves because we have internalised rules about these things. Unfortunately, we don’t always play by the same rules.
So to any ‘gaters who reading this: please consider the rules you are playing by. It’s particularly pertinent considering that we’re talking about games, and it’s rules that make games (even if they’re buried in the software). If you really think that ethics in games journalism is such an important cause that the end justifies the means — the means being hacking, doxing, swatting, rape threats, bomb threats etc. — then go ahead, and don’t be surprised if you lose friends, get banned from lists or receive legal notices. If you think that principles of civilised behaviour and the right to personal security are a bit more important than whether a certain game gets distributed on Steam, then we can probably get along OK. Fair play, and all that.
I would also suggest that anyone who really cares about ethics in games journalism, freedom of expression etc. simply lose the #Gamergate tag. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Gamergate movement really did start from serious concern with ethical standards and later got associated with a few misogynistic nutters. Why should the true Gamergaters hide their identity just because of a radical fringe? After all, we don’t expect people to stop calling themselves Muslims because of ISIS and the Taliban. But there is a difference. Islam is a religion with a history and culture going back over a millennium. #Gamergate is a hashtag that’s been around under a year. Like Shirtstorm, it will probably be forgotten in a few years. Except, of course, by the people whose lives have been damaged by it.
