The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: oh shit you're all up in gamergate aren't you?

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I think I’ve written approximately zero posts that even mention Gamergate. I also haven’t participated in discussions about it elsewhere, other than fact-checking certain claims.

My Gamergate opinions, though I really don’t think anyone cares: everyone sending harassment and death threats is terrible. Both ‘sides’ included people sending harassment and death threats, and for some reason the statement ‘both sides included people sending death threats’ got tagged as a thing the Gamergate apologists were saying, which is really unfortunate since people I know and care about, on both sides, in fact actually did get death threats. There’s this phenomenon where saying anything negative about one side comes across as expressing support for the other side, and I’m not really sure how to avoid it. 

Based on Eron’s description, he got out of an abusive relationship with someone who specifically used his mental illness and his friends’ mental illnesses to make him doubt his own perceptions and his right to have friendships. His partner deliberately drove him into panic attacks and then used them to convince him he was too mentally ill to trust himself or trust his doubts about her behavior. I have a ton of sympathy for him because I’ve seen that sort of abuse and it’s an evil, inexcusable thing.

He wrote up an account of what he’d experienced and was relieved and encouraged when it got picked up on 4chan, which is not Perfect Survivor Behavior but I’m super duper uncomfortable with policing for Perfect Survivor Behavior.

4chan, instead of jumping on the abuse, jumped on ‘she’s a slut’ to attack his ex-girlfriend. This is the sort of terrible bullshit that happens in a misogynistic community and fuck everyone who took part in it (Eron did not.)

Some feminists noticed that 4chan was calling Eron’s abuser a slut and decided to come down in wholehearted defense of Eron’s abuser, saying she had done nothing wrong and that Eron was an abuser for posting the information online that let 4chan slut-shame her. I think this was the wrong response and I’m really disappointed by it. 

Gamergate grew out of the ‘calling Eron’s abuser a slut’ side of the whole thing and I disagree with their complaints, their methods, their engagement, and their goals. I’m pretty sure I have the exact opposite vision from them about what video games should be like, and I do think that many of their complaints were motivated by sexism. Also some of them sent harassment and death threats and that’s inexcusable. Also also, some of them received harassment and death threats and that’s also inexcusable. There are some non-sexists hanging out in Gamergate as a reaction against anti-Gamergate’s misrepresentation of the whole Eron thing, and I sympathize with that decision, but I do think they vastly understate the sexism on their side.

Emotionally, people dismissing male abuse survivors is one of the things that bothers me most and the only respect in which I’m at all invested in the whole thing. Intellectually, I don’t think anything of value came out of the argument on either side. I really really hope that the whole situation doesn’t empower Eron’s abuser in continuing to abuse people.

• 21 May 2015
• #gamergate cw#abuse cw#Anonymous
• 97