Okay, there’s a meme floating around that I want to take a pot shot at here if you’ll bear with me for a moment. It goes something like this: “How can you say that GamerGate even enters into the threats against Anita/Zoe/Brianna/etc? Where’s the proof? Where’s the evidence? Did they support this? Did they applaud this?”
Right. So that’s the meme. You’ve seen it around, right?
Here’s my answer:
Well, there’s been the months long pattern of escalating harassment that has proven links to a lot of GG incubators like 4chan/8chan, certain closed IRC channels, etc. There’s the fact that multiple specific threats have been made against more than one woman, all of whom have been sucked up into this bullshit tornado at one point or another, and the threats against their lives just happen to coincide with new waves of outrage among GamerGaters. There’s the fact that at least one of the specific threats mentioned GamerGate in its text, and probably more but I can’t be arsed to run down an exhaustive list just because you whine at me. There’s the fact that Adam Baldwin, the guy who coined the term GamerGate and is pretty much its most high profile booster, has a history of trying to dismiss threats as fake threat, or saying that Anita was somehow milking it or anyhow it wasn’t actually a big deal or if it was a big deal it had nothing to do with GG and she was still vile slime who should just shut up.
I mean, other than that, no, there’s not much to go on.
Look, this shit doesn’t happen among car enthusiasts or music fans. Movie buffs and sports geeks don’t do this kind of thing, at least not in any world I’m familiar with. But this *does* happen in gamer communities, and it happens frequently. It’s been happening for years. It keeps happening no matter how many times the respectable moderates post about how shocked and horrified (did we mention horrified?) they are that someone would make death threats against those women they’d been calling skanky hagcunts for months on end. GamerGate itself isn’t new or unique or really even that different than anything that’s come before it; it’s only a crystallization of a lot of really horrible trends and patterns that have been around for years. So if you really, really want to, you can draw neat lines and pretend that GG has nothing to do with (certain) threats. That’s not a real credible position, and you’re going to have to make some untenable arguments, but you can try. You can clap your hands make believe.
But that doesn’t change the fact that gaming, as a subculture, is showing itself embarrassingly childish, nasty, and cruel, or that these threats grow out of that environment. GamerGate embodies that. It was founded to shame a woman for having sex, and any claim to the contrary is chaff and propaganda. These threats are the logical, perhaps even deliberate, outcome of those first early planning meetings held in an IRC Channel. To claim otherwise is to, at best, be a useful idiot for some of the most hateful, bigoted people on the Internet.
And that’s a shitty place to be in life.