On March 17 2015 02:48 Millitron wrote: There ARE systems in place though already. Not just the mute button either. If women are being harassed at live events, they need to talk to the event's organizers. Making a documentary about it solves nothing. The people who cause these problems are the exact kind of people who will ignore any documentary you can show them.
Of course! Making a documentary makes people aware of a problem they could otherwise dismiss. Public pressure can make the difference of an organisation positioning themselves against sexism. And if you wanna make the point of: Well, why not just write an article. Answer: Well, why not just make a documentary.
Aris Bakhtanians: "This is a community that's, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community—it's StarCraft,"
TwitchTV community manager Jared Rea: "(....) the fighting game community is home to many players and spectators who have created an environment that "is just not friendly towards women." He recalled a number of instances where players and spectators hurled misogynistic or homophobic comments in a crowded tournament hall, at one point forcing Rea's girlfriend to leave the one and only tournament she'd ever attended."
I mean, come on!? How do take actions against a crowd? What systems are you thinking of?
You have to start by telling people that this is bad. They have to learn that this is bad behavior. Opposing this effort is just... I don't know. I really do not comprehend why someone would invest energy against that.
edit to add to Slaughters post:
Hunter - gatherer ? You really haven't paid attention in your archeology class, have you? Do you also think there weren't any female fighters? This whole notion came into being with the presumption that women stay at home. It's like saying dinosaur could hide themselves in the forest, because their skin was green. How do you know their skin was green? You don't! How do you know women were not hunters / fighters? Well, there have been graves found with women and weapons. Earlier, scientists just thought of them as men, because of the weapons. You get the drift?
edit2: sry for being rude in my edit
There are far more men found buried with weapons than women. Yes, there were some rare occasions of female warriors, but it was nowhere near a 50/50 split. The reason the ancient Greeks talked so much about Amazons was that having any female soldiers was mindblowing to them, and they exaggerated the shit out of it until we have the current version of the Amazon myth. If women really did fight very often, it would've been no big deal to them and they never would've mythologized it.
This isn't to say women had no power, quite the opposite. In day-to-day affairs women had a great deal of power. Because they were at home more often than the men, they often ran the household. Women hired and fired servants, women handled the household budget, women managed the house's food supply, and most importantly, they gossiped. Gossip gave them a great deal of power even outside the home. They had a great deal of influence over the government in that they were basically an ancient version of CNN. They spread news and rumors.
Here's a few videos on the topic by an archaeologist and a generally cool dude:
I wouldn't exactly say that guy is considered too credible after doing a quick search on him credential wise but *shrug* I will watch the videos when I get home.
But archaeology has been moving away from the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer" narrative for decades now. They actually keep finding more and more evidence of women being actively involved in fighting. (not just from mortuary offerings because those have been found to be often misrepresentative of the status of the dead). Early hunter-gatherer societies are now thought to have gotten the bulk of their nutrition from women/children gathering then from hunting. It really depends on what part of the world you look at though, but females being invested and engaged in war efforts is not uncommon at all despite the fact that generally difference in body size could lead men to be more common in such things. But our sexual dimorphism compared to other primates is pretty low.
Well, Lindybeige brings up that there's more to why men were more often soldiers than women. Look at population growth. A society that loses a huge number of men will regain its population much faster than a society that loses a huge number of women. Men were more expendable back then. Physical size is definitely a big factor though. Not just strength either, but more importantly height and arm length. A person with long arms can land a sword blow at a greater distance than someone with short arms. A person with long arms can also get a greater draw length on a bow.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're right that most of the nutrition stone age people got was from gathering, but that doesn't exactly go against my statement that women ran the household. Gathering would be done within a few hundred yards of camp, essentially still within the household. Hunting expeditions could last weeks and would venture many miles away.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
On March 16 2015 13:12 lastpuritan wrote: there is something called encephalization quotient. larger brain = more intelligent. man has %8 - %13 larger brain than woman thus he is superior. you cant inject your liberal thoughts into nature where harsh facts lay. it is desperate and i'm not happy with this even if it does not apply to every human. we are in an era that we think we can create equality which nature will never have. same thing happened when vegans tried to feed cats with plant based cat-food.
There is simply no data supporting that among humans bigger brain size correlates with higher intelligence, so on that you're clearly wrong to make such an assertion. Allow me to direct you towards Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), Sexing the body, in particular chapter 5 which deals with the biology of the brain and what it tells us about genders. I'll also quote the following excerpt from Janet Shibley Hyde, Nicole Else-Quest (2013), Half the human experience: the psychology of women (8th edition), from pp. 213-124. They mention Fausto-Sterling's contributions:
Brain Size A century ago, scientists discovered that human males had somewhat larger brains than human females. In the culture of the time, they concluded that this brain difference was the cause of the well-known lesser intelligence of women. The hypothesis was later discredited when other scientists found that males’ larger brain size was almost entirely accounted for by their greater body size. Elephants have pretty big brains, too, but you wouldn’t want to use that as a basis for putting them in charge of the space program. Amazingly, this same brain-size hypothesis resurfaced in the 1990s. Two different scientists found that men’s brains were larger in volume and weighed more than women’s, and they argued that this brain difference had an impact on gender differences in intelligence (Ankney, 1992; Rushton, 1992). Interestingly, the same scientists also claimed that Caucasian Americans had larger brains than African Americans and that Asian Americans had larger brains than either group (Rushton, 1992)—so the argument had racial dimensions as well, but here we will focus on the argument about gender. Feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling provided a detailed critique of this work (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000). First, there is disagreement among scientists about how large the difference in brain size is—estimates range between 10 percent and 17 percent. Second, some of the studies have not actually measured brain size directly. Some have measured the inside volume of skulls, but there is more inside the skull than just the brain, so this isn’t a good measure of brain size. And Rushton, the leading proponent of the brain-size argument, actually just measured the outside of people’s heads. Third, Rushton used a complicated and questionable formula that indicated that men had larger brains relative to body size than women did; however, according to Fausto-Sterling’s computations, if you simply take the ratio of brain size to body weight, women actually had relatively larger brains. Finally, the question still remains whether brain size has anything to do with intelligence. No one has good evidence—pro or con—on whether it does. Therefore, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to stay awake at night worrying about women’s somewhat smaller brains.
they say it in a shifty way so that gender equality believers wont get hurt, like woman has bigger volumes which are related to emotions, while man has better parietal cortex, meaning they "plan" better and have larger spatial intelligence which is defined as a human computational capacity that provides the ability or mental skill to solve spatial problems of navigation, visualization of objects from different angles and space, faces or scenes recognition or to notice fine details and works for solving problems in areas related to realistic, thing-oriented, and investigative occupations, WHAT IS INDEED: THE LIFE OUT THERE; science, technology, math, art, construction related works, anything related to survival and advancement. Of course cultural factors will affect such decisions - e.g todays Islamic culture - but first thing is NATURE. Thanks to testosterone, men are far more competitive and motivated for success than women.
edit: you cant fight sexism, human race will always be sexist, but we need to fight violation of sexism.
The contribution by Richard Lynn that you cite is very misleading: he defends the idea that there is greater variance among men than among women, and that there are therefore more very intelligent and very stupid men than there are very intelligent and very stupid women. According to him, this explains why there are considerably fewer female Nobel winners, university professors, etc. There are two big problems with this: first, the role of culture and institutional barriers has already been extensively demonstrated with regards to the proportion of female professors and scientific prizes winners. Second, and more to the point, the idea that there is greater variance in intelligence among the male population is a debated one in neuroscience. In recent years, several studies have pointed towards the role of culture, not "nature", in the degree of variance in IQ scores, maths scores in standardized tests, etc. Indeed, these studies found that males did not have greater variance than females in maths tests in several countries, or among specific populations. This points towards culture influencing variance rather than biology. See for example: Machin S, Pekkarinen T (2008) "Global sex differences in test score variability", Science, No. 322, pp. 1331–1332. Also, in Janet S. Hyde, Janet E. Mertz (2009), "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance", PNAS, Vol. 106, No. 22, pp. 8801–8807:
Thus, gender ratios in the upper tails of actual distributions were calculated using data from the Minnesota state assessments (13). Results were analyzed separately by ethnicity to ensure that the findings were not limited to the predominantly White samples that have been the mainstay of U.S. research. For students scoring above the 95th percentile, the M:F ratio was 1.45 for Whites, close to theoretical prediction. At the 99th percentile, the M:F ratio was 2.06, again close to theoretical prediction. However, the M:F ratio was only 0.91 for Asian-Americans, that is, more girls than boys scored above the 99th percentile. Analysis of data from 15-year-old students participating in the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) likewise indicated that as many, if not more girls than boys scored above the 99th percentile in Iceland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom (18). The M:F ratios above the 95th percentile on this examination also fell between 0.9 and 1.1 for these above-named countries plus Indonesia, that is, were not significantly different from equal variances (19). These findings challenge the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, which, if valid, should hold for all representative populations, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
Two recent studies directly address the question of whether greater male variability in mathematics is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Machin and Pekkarinen (19) reported that the M:F VR in mathematics was significantly >1.00 at the P < 0.05 level among 15-year-old students in 34 of 40 countries participating in the 2003 PISA and among 13-year-old students in 33 of 50 countries participating in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). However, these data also indicated that the math VR was significantly less than or insignificantly different from 1.00 for some of the countries that participated in these assessments (e.g., Table 2), a finding inconsistent with the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis.
Penner has performed a detailed analysis of the distributions of math scores obtained by boys compared with girls in each country that participated in the 1995 TIMSS (20). Striking was his finding of considerable country-to-country variation, not only in the magnitude of the difference between mean male and female scores, but also in the shapes of the distributions, ratios of males-to-females scoring in the right and left tails of the distributions, and difference in standard deviation (SD) between males and females. We have normalized these latter differences to overall within SD for each country such that the numbers >0 in the rightmost column of Table 2 indicate greater male variability. Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. Neither the 10th-grade 2003 PISA nor 12th-grade 1995 TIMSS data gave any indication of greater male variability in mathematics for either Denmark or the Netherlands. As Penner concluded, “The common assumption that males have greater variance in mathematics achievement is not universally true.” Given the absence of universality, the occurrence of greater male variability and scarcity of top-scoring females in many, but not all, countries and ethnic groups must be largely due to changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.
I wouldn't worry about it too much bardtown, most of these "internet feminists" as I like to call them are about as mature as the kind of person who insults stranger's mothers in a game of Counterstrike. Needless to say engaging in discussion with either group is asking for a headache.
Poor behaviour and harassment is not an issue for specifically female gamers or male gamers, but an issue for gamers period. I would really like this to improve, but I think that notion is screwed if the type of people who are going to take it on are manginas on a crusade and internet feminists with special snowflake syndrome.
On March 17 2015 06:45 KrOmander wrote: I wouldn't worry about it too much bardtown, most of these "internet feminists" as I like to call them are about as mature as the kind of person who insults stranger's mothers in a game of Counterstrike.
On March 17 2015 06:45 KrOmander wrote: ... that notion is screwed if the type of people who are going to take it on are manginas on a crusade and internet feminists with special snowflake syndrome.
Because you're clearly living up to a much higher standard. Have you read through the thread? The main arguments aren't that men aren't getting harassed, but it's that women in gaming deal with an additional layer of harassment solely because of their gender.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
On March 17 2015 06:45 KrOmander wrote: I wouldn't worry about it too much bardtown, most of these "internet feminists" as I like to call them are about as mature as the kind of person who insults stranger's mothers in a game of Counterstrike. Needless to say engaging in discussion with either group is asking for a headache.
Poor behaviour and harassment is not an issue for specifically female gamers or male gamers, but an issue for gamers period. I would really like this to improve, but I think that notion is screwed if the type of people who are going to take it on are manginas on a crusade and internet feminists with special snowflake syndrome.
Jeez, people seem to bring so much baggage to these discussions that it's tough to even tell what they're about...
Anyway, I know much less about the subject than other people who have been posting, but I do have an anecdote to share which I think is relevant.
One time I was in a 1v1 Obs game (10 people or so take turns playing 1v1s against each other while everyone else watches), and somehow it came out that one of the people who was playing was female. Immediately afterward several people began spamming comments in the chat asking how big her breasts were, was she ugly, was she fat, did she have a boyfriend, etc. She left the game pretty quickly after that.
Like most people, I have been harassed a lot online over the years, but never like that, and never because of my gender. It seems like women have it worse to me.
I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
On March 17 2015 02:48 Millitron wrote: There ARE systems in place though already. Not just the mute button either. If women are being harassed at live events, they need to talk to the event's organizers. Making a documentary about it solves nothing. The people who cause these problems are the exact kind of people who will ignore any documentary you can show them.
Of course! Making a documentary makes people aware of a problem they could otherwise dismiss. Public pressure can make the difference of an organisation positioning themselves against sexism. And if you wanna make the point of: Well, why not just write an article. Answer: Well, why not just make a documentary.
Aris Bakhtanians: "This is a community that's, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community—it's StarCraft,"
TwitchTV community manager Jared Rea: "(....) the fighting game community is home to many players and spectators who have created an environment that "is just not friendly towards women." He recalled a number of instances where players and spectators hurled misogynistic or homophobic comments in a crowded tournament hall, at one point forcing Rea's girlfriend to leave the one and only tournament she'd ever attended."
I mean, come on!? How do take actions against a crowd? What systems are you thinking of?
You have to start by telling people that this is bad. They have to learn that this is bad behavior. Opposing this effort is just... I don't know. I really do not comprehend why someone would invest energy against that.
edit to add to Slaughters post:
Hunter - gatherer ? You really haven't paid attention in your archeology class, have you? Do you also think there weren't any female fighters? This whole notion came into being with the presumption that women stay at home. It's like saying dinosaur could hide themselves in the forest, because their skin was green. How do you know their skin was green? You don't! How do you know women were not hunters / fighters? Well, there have been graves found with women and weapons. Earlier, scientists just thought of them as men, because of the weapons. You get the drift?
edit2: sry for being rude in my edit
There are far more men found buried with weapons than women. Yes, there were some rare occasions of female warriors, but it was nowhere near a 50/50 split. The reason the ancient Greeks talked so much about Amazons was that having any female soldiers was mindblowing to them, and they exaggerated the shit out of it until we have the current version of the Amazon myth. If women really did fight very often, it would've been no big deal to them and they never would've mythologized it.
This isn't to say women had no power, quite the opposite. In day-to-day affairs women had a great deal of power. Because they were at home more often than the men, they often ran the household. Women hired and fired servants, women handled the household budget, women managed the house's food supply, and most importantly, they gossiped. Gossip gave them a great deal of power even outside the home. They had a great deal of influence over the government in that they were basically an ancient version of CNN. They spread news and rumors.
Here's a few videos on the topic by an archaeologist and a generally cool dude:
I wouldn't exactly say that guy is considered too credible after doing a quick search on him credential wise but *shrug* I will watch the videos when I get home.
But archaeology has been moving away from the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer" narrative for decades now. They actually keep finding more and more evidence of women being actively involved in fighting. (not just from mortuary offerings because those have been found to be often misrepresentative of the status of the dead). Early hunter-gatherer societies are now thought to have gotten the bulk of their nutrition from women/children gathering then from hunting. It really depends on what part of the world you look at though, but females being invested and engaged in war efforts is not uncommon at all despite the fact that generally difference in body size could lead men to be more common in such things. But our sexual dimorphism compared to other primates is pretty low.
Well, Lindybeige brings up that there's more to why men were more often soldiers than women. Look at population growth. A society that loses a huge number of men will regain its population much faster than a society that loses a huge number of women. Men were more expendable back then. Physical size is definitely a big factor though. Not just strength either, but more importantly height and arm length. A person with long arms can land a sword blow at a greater distance than someone with short arms. A person with long arms can also get a greater draw length on a bow.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're right that most of the nutrition stone age people got was from gathering, but that doesn't exactly go against my statement that women ran the household. Gathering would be done within a few hundred yards of camp, essentially still within the household. Hunting expeditions could last weeks and would venture many miles away.
This is straying off topic but one last post on this! My main point was that archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that this isn't necessary the case in hunter-gatherer societies. They didn't quite have very rigid division of labor systems along gender lines in a lot of these groups. Hunting itself doesn't necessarily have to make men be absent for large chunks of time depending on the particular environment. It changes a bit once sedentism begins to become more common and things like craft specialization and farming come into play. However, such large cross-cultural generalizations tend to break down because of the very diverse ways people have organized themselves.
Biologically speaking, the whole nature vs nurture thing is only beginning to become more nuanced as researchers move away from the dichotomy. It also doesn't help that we still don't know the exact way these two articulate with each other and how much influence they have. Epigenetic studies and an increased awareness of natural and social environments on individuals as they grow are revealing an increasingly complex picture of how "a human is made". It has been hard to exactly pin point what and how epigenetic factors are at play that influence the expression of the genotype in an individual. Not to mention the phenotypic plasticity that our species has shown. Where one begins and another ends still needs a lot more work and some scientists still cling to models that heavily favor nature or nurture (IE socio/cultural scientists vs biologists). It will take quite a bit more work for the exact nuances of this process to be revealed. As this relates to men and women, well both sexes have been shown to be relatively plastic. Its also harder to strictly define gender roles when they are pretty variable across cultures, and even a lot of cultures have had more then 2 genders defined in their group. A lot of what people in this thread are arguing from is coming from a western perspective on these two genders and can be completely irrelevant if you try to apply it to other groups.
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
She does, but they keep trying to explain feminism to her. Its weird, its almost like she a place holder for them. And a new one always shows up once the old one leaves or is blocked.
And if you don't like women explaining toxic masculinity, Terry Crews will explain it to you. Its not a complex concept really.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
You seem to like to nitpick a lot of the more extreme parts of feminism in an attempt to discredit the whole concept. It is not some homogenous idea. The majority of feminists would probably say to the bolded part that what they are arguing for is not punishing and/or ridiculing those who choose to be a more feminine man or a more masculine woman. A lot of them would argue that they simply want to remove the restrictions on both men and women that heavily push both genders into their "acceptable role" so people can be who they want to be.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
She does, but they keep trying to explain feminism to her. Its weird, its almost like she a place holder for them. And a new one always shows up once the old one leaves or is blocked.
And if you don't like women explaining toxic masculinity, Terry Crews will explain it to you. Its not a complex concept really.
This is the face of a feminist we can all get behind:
Terry Crews seems like such a cool fucking dude, and I love him in that stupid, wonderful movie. That was a cool interview. Articulate guys explaining this shit probably would resonate a lot better.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
The difference is the majority of the shit slung the way of a woman online will be exclusively based on their gender. Guys will not get that.
To each other, guys toss around bitch and faggot (think about this for a sec - why are these pejoratives?). Race gets tossed around too, but that's fucking weird because dudes online love to toss out horrible racist shit across the board at everyone but their own race.
I mean, given that online gaming has a ton of little teenage dweebs, I do think on some level some of this shit is more shock value than actually believing the hate behind it. But on the whole, the way women are treated online should very obviously be a problem to anyone who looks at it and spends as much time as everyone here.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
You seem to like to nitpick a lot of the more extreme parts of feminism in an attempt to discredit the whole concept. It is not some homogenous idea. The majority of feminists would probably say to the bolded part that what they are arguing for is not punishing and/or ridiculing those who choose to be a more feminine man or a more masculine woman. A lot of them would argue that they simply want to remove the restrictions on both men and women that heavily push both genders into their "acceptable role" so people can be who they want to be.
I know, I know. Not all feminists. Two things to note. First of all, I cannot respond to the individual views of everybody who identifies as a feminist. I have no choice but to go with general trends. My stance is that if you don't agree with core concepts in feminism, then you should not be identifying as a feminist, but instead as a humanist/egalitarian. The central problem is that it's called feminism and yet claims to support the plights of all genders. This is justified by saying that men are innately privileged, which is the starting point for more or less every mistake they make. If you don't believe this, I'm probably not arguing with you because I don't think you should be identifying with the label/core group. The equation of 'feminism' with 'equality' is a lie put out to give momentum to a core group who do not believe in equality in any real sense of the word. If you're identifying as a feminist and disagree with the core group, you're part of the problem because you're giving them a platform to spread their bigotry (primarily, I might add, to impressionable young girls).
Second, even in very moderate feminists there is rarely any pretense of letting people identify as whatever they want to be. Just try telling them you're not a feminist. The concept of privilege results in people disliking straight white men above and beyond any other demographic. Masculinity is depicted as the root of all evil - see above, apparently it's the cause of all war, so on, so forth - with absolutely no reference to its benefits. Look at this Terry Crews guy telling people to drop their pride, neglecting to mention how pride has driven advances in sciences and arts for thousands of years.
Further, men have no voice in feminism or gender discussion in general - despite what they say to the contrary. If feminism cared about all genders, they would work together with MRAs. They wouldn't picket events discussing male suicide.This tends to spring from the notion of privilege, too, which is now really deeply ingrained in society. Karen Straughan is the most viewed/subscribed MRA and she's a she. That's not a coincidence. Men have no voice, and their issues are either seen as a joke or something to be manipulated to benefit the agenda: masculinity bad, femininity good.
Could we perhaps stop discussing completely distorted strawmen of feminism (which is about equality, contrary to the utterly wrong picture you're trying to paint of it)? This is clearly off-topic, to the point where I have a feeling this thread is going to be closed if this continues much longer. If you have a problem with feminism or if you need some people who actually know what they're talking about to walk you through feminism, its goals, the different waves of feminism, and anything else you might want to be enlightened about, perhaps you should go make another thread.
On March 17 2015 09:58 kwizach wrote: Could we perhaps stop discussing completely distorted strawmen of feminism (which is about equality, contrary to the utterly wrong picture you're trying to paint of it)? This is clearly off-topic, to the point where I have a feeling this thread is going to be closed if this continues much longer. If you have a problem with feminism or if you need some people who actually know what they're talking about to walk you through feminism, its goals, the different waves of feminism, and anything else you might want to be enlightened about, perhaps you should go make another thread.
I've tied in everything I have said to the topic at hand. Your baseless assertion that feminism is about equality is a truly worthless contribution, though. So well done.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
She does, but they keep trying to explain feminism to her. Its weird, its almost like she a place holder for them. And a new one always shows up once the old one leaves or is blocked.
And if you don't like women explaining toxic masculinity, Terry Crews will explain it to you. Its not a complex concept really.
This is the face of a feminist we can all get behind:
Terry Crews seems like such a cool fucking dude, and I love him in that stupid, wonderful movie. That was a cool interview. Articulate guys explaining this shit probably would resonate a lot better.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
The difference is the majority of the shit slung the way of a woman online will be exclusively based on their gender. Guys will not get that.
To each other, guys toss around bitch and faggot (think about this for a sec - why are these pejoratives?). Race gets tossed around too, but that's fucking weird because dudes online love to toss out horrible racist shit across the board at everyone but their own race.
I mean, given that online gaming has a ton of little teenage dweebs, I do think on some level some of this shit is more shock value than actually believing the hate behind it. But on the whole, the way women are treated online should very obviously be a problem to anyone who looks at it and spends as much time as everyone here.
It's much less of a difference than you make it out to be. You do realise that being called a faggot or a bitch is a gendered insult because the goal is to deny somebody's masculinity, right? Anyway I have acknowledged that there are differences. Women may have it worse - there is not any real data to support this however - but all minorities get it worse. We've already said: that is the nature of trolling. They latch on to whatever they can know about you from just your name/voice. If you have an accent, you will get targeted abuse too. The fact that this only becomes a discussion when some vocal female minority bring it up is really an evidence of our own bias in favour of women. There are multiple studies showing that men receive more abuse than women do.
What I really want to see is all of you accepting your bias instead of asserting - with absolutely no evidence - that women have it worse than men or any other minority group (in gaming where women are actually a minority).
yeah, despite the admittedly not good name, the basic premise of feminism is that everyone should be treated equal. Obviously the means to reach this and the end goal differ wildly person to person.
But what it boils down to is that you think that women (and everyone else) should be treated as equals, should have the same opporunties, should be able to get the same pay for the same work/experience, should not be subject to discrimination based on their gender, etc. that is the basic tenant of feminism. if you wanted to enlighten yourself about it more you could read about the different waves and stuff like kwizach is saying.
but really when someone asks you are you a feminist, they are saying 'do you believe in equality'. it should be a very very simple answer. the problems arise when trying to how to make everyone equal after years and years of men having an advantage. That's where you occasionally see the really whacky offshoots of it that detractors like to paint as your every day feminist
So is it actually not a majority view that these attacks on women(or anyone else) are mostly coming from little kids? Like, little boys. Not physically(or definitely mentally) mature males. Because somehow this discussion has transcended into a full on discussion of feminism.
I really don't know any guy that can grow a beard that wouldn't want girls playing their games.
On March 17 2015 09:58 kwizach wrote: Could we perhaps stop discussing completely distorted strawmen of feminism (which is about equality, contrary to the utterly wrong picture you're trying to paint of it)? This is clearly off-topic, to the point where I have a feeling this thread is going to be closed if this continues much longer. If you have a problem with feminism or if you need some people who actually know what they're talking about to walk you through feminism, its goals, the different waves of feminism, and anything else you might want to be enlightened about, perhaps you should go make another thread.
I've tied in everything I have said to the topic at hand. Your baseless assertion that feminism is about equality is a truly worthless contribution, though. So well done.
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
She does, but they keep trying to explain feminism to her. Its weird, its almost like she a place holder for them. And a new one always shows up once the old one leaves or is blocked.
And if you don't like women explaining toxic masculinity, Terry Crews will explain it to you. Its not a complex concept really.
This is the face of a feminist we can all get behind:
Terry Crews seems like such a cool fucking dude, and I love him in that stupid, wonderful movie. That was a cool interview. Articulate guys explaining this shit probably would resonate a lot better.
On March 17 2015 08:58 bardtown wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:24 RuiBarbO wrote:
On March 17 2015 06:19 bardtown wrote:
On March 17 2015 01:17 RuiBarbO wrote:
On March 16 2015 22:41 bardtown wrote:
On March 16 2015 21:49 Joan_of_Arc wrote: The general level of discourse in this thread is deplorable, containing everything from victim blaming ('You shouldn't reveal that you're female then; it's asking for it') to false equivocation of experience ('Men get harassed too! If we can deal with it, obviously they should be able to') when the fact is that, overwhelmingly, the perspectives supplied in this thread and the criticisms of the documentary are presented by people with no experience with being a female, or being a female who experiences harassment online.
While it is true that men and women both experience harassment online, the harassment could hardly be said to be equal in scope or depth. How often do men get harassed throughout a game because of their voice, or have their play derided due to their gender? How often do male progamers have their fanclubs filled with vitriol and rape threats? We don't even need to look far afield to see that the level of harassment experienced is far from equal - if anyone else was around for the first days of Scalett's fanclub, I'm sure you remember it well enough.
You are deplorable, for wholesale buying into a paradigm of nonsense. When somebody blurts out 'victim blaming' and 'false equivocation' their feminist indoctrination is beyond blatant. There is nothing deplorable about rational discussion that doesn't fit with your bigotry, and there is nothing deplorable about people who think women are not so frail as to need special treatment at all times. You are deplorable, for ignoring the actual evidence and going with your own bias. Did you see the study somebody posted about how men are much more likely to receive abuse on twitter? That's not unique. Incontrol probably got more abuse than any other progamer in the scene, and we're not just talking about cholesterol jokes (you're using an anecdote, right?). We have a deepset biological disposition to care more about women than men.
But women can handle themselves. This documentary is not a representation of women in gaming, because actually most women do just get on with it, like men do, through abuse and trolling and all of it. This documentary is a representation of entitlement in modern western feminists, because they have a platform so why not? I do not have experience being a female, but I have a lot of experience of playing with females (and also with males who pretend to be females because they know it gets them special treatment) and I have experience being male. I have (and you can too!) compared experiences across the divide, and realised that there's not a lot in it.
It's not victim blaming to tell somebody to use the mute function. Is there anybody here who isn't forced to use it sometimes? Also the amount of times I have seen young boys getting bullied for the pitch of their voice by much older boys is beyond counting. They either shut up or they deal with it. Having your 'play derided because of your gender' is not a very serious offense, sorry. Certainly no more serious than a male being called a retard for being bad at a game.
Isn't it a bit problematic to say you support "rational discussion" while dismissing feminist social theory as "indoctrination" and "a paradigm of nonsense" in virtually the same breath? I think I understand where you're coming from---here we're having a "rational discussion" and then someone comes in and starts calling people "deplorable"---but is that really an excuse to do the exact same thing to them? The mere fact that they called the discourse in the thread "deplorable" does not mean that their points are not worthy of any consideration, even if the manner in which they brought them up is a bit combative. If you dismiss people (and their theoretical backgrounds) off the bat for getting incensed, how can you ever have a discussion about an emotionally charged subject? Also, "false equivocation" is not a feminist term, it's a kind of logical fallacy. The appearance of "false equivocation" is not evidence that someone is a feminist, or that they are just always wrong.
"Victim blaming" is also a more useful term than I think you give it credit for being. It refers to a situation in which someone suffers abuse and is criticized harshly when they bring it up. If you agree that people suffering abuse should be allowed to bring it up, then "victim blaming" should seem problematic. And if the documentary is an example of people suffering abuse bringing it up, shouldn't we then be hesitant to attack the makers of the documentary for being "indoctrinated" or sensationalist, etc?
I agree that it's important to try to "compare experiences across the divide," although I'm not so sure that it's fair to use your own observations in this regard to dismiss the documentary off the bat. If the documentary and your observations conflict, is it really helpful to assume that "there's not a lot to it?" Or is it more helpful to think carefully about why these differences are present? Moreover, you can't dismiss the documentary's conclusion (which, incidentally, is hard to know without actually watching it) just by claiming that it's false, which you seem to do in your post. You have to show how the premises that led to that conclusion are flawed, which again no one can really do if they haven't watched it.
It's not irrational to call something irrational irrational. I know what 'false equivocation' means. Here is a brilliant example taken from an idiot in this thread:
On March 17 2015 02:37 Jelissei wrote: RuiBarbO, I like you. -----------------------------
I never quite understod why people argue against... yeah, what exactly? That you should treat women as actual persons?
And this is what rational people are up against: the notion that arguing against something a feminist says is equivalent to hating women. This is an irrational line of argument that is intended to make people like me seem bad without addressing the content of what we say in a rational manner. As for my manner, calling western feminism a paradigm of nonsense: I know it's not helpful. I'm not a patient person in situations like this: coming in and throwing around feminist terms and accusations as though they bring anything to the discussion is not at all useful, and I do not feel inclined to respond to them as though they are.
'Victim blaming' is a hugely overextended concept that goes hand in hand with entitlement. Funnily enough it only ever comes up when the conversation is about women: when some guy bites a troll's bait and everyone calls him an idiot for biting, nobody calls it victim blaming. Why is it suddenly victim blaming when a woman gets involved in some dumb argument with a troll instead of just muting them? This is just another example of the perpetual victim narrative. Women are not always victims, fuck off with that nonsense. People are responsible for their own actions. It's not victim blaming to recommend people stay with friends when they are drunk for their own safety, for example. It is victim blaming if somebody gets raped and you say "it's your fault because you weren't with your friends". Totally different things. That's false equivocation too. 'False equivocation' is a term which has been hijacked by feminists (so is suspect when placed right next to 'victim blaming') to mean 'your experiences are invalid because you are male'. This is not down to an incapacity in men to appreciate women's struggles, it is the complete opposite. Feminists deny that men's experiences are relevant because they have an agenda and those experiences conflict with that agenda. It is a way to make their own opinions completely invulnerable to reason, because nobody has the exact same experience as them.
I haven't seen the documentary, but there are signs that it follows this conventional feminist narrative. I can not dismiss their conclusions, but I can question their motives and the ideas presented by others in this thread. I very much doubt they will have a more in depth/balanced discussion within the documentary than has occurred in this thread, at any rate. If it is just a collection of anecdotes, as it seems to be from what I read, then it is more or less worthless. I could, if I felt so compelled, create a documentary detailing the special treatment women get in MMOs as a result of their gender. I wouldn't, because I have no agenda.
My experiences are not necessarily contradicting those expressed in the documentary. This will depend if they have men - and not just feminist men - in their documentary, and if they have women who have no problem with the atmosphere, because I know they exist. I suspect it will be made to look as though these trolls target women exclusively, as opposed to anybody not a part of their homologous little reality. If so, I will consider it dishonest and void of integrity.
I definitely agree that feminists in the public sphere often make broad claims ("there's no such thing as sexism against men") without giving enough attention to how they got there, and that this does not contribute to a very helpful discussion for anyone. I think it's safe to say that some people who oppose feminism are guilty of the same thing. It's unfortunate because I do think that certain forms of feminism (it's a fairly broad term) could play a very helpful role in examining things like "power" and "entitlement," if people could just figure out how to actually talk about them constructively. Also, not all feminist scholars "deny that men's experiences are relevant"---in many of the social sciences, people (some of whom describe themselves as "feminists") are recognizing that studying masculinity and men is just as important as studying femininity and women, since the two categories are pretty closely intertwined.
I'm not referring to extremes like that (no such thing as sexism against men), which no reasonable person could believe. The problem is much more subtle and pervasive, and serves to invalidate the opinions of men, even in (or particularly in) scenarios where they are the dominant demographic.
So, a woman says she has received abuse in a competitive game and is bothered by it. A man says he has received the exact same abuse in the exact same frequency and isn't bothered by it. What if he says he prefers the rough atmosphere? It is irrelevant. His experiences are utterly meaningless, because the agenda is not there for balance, it is there for the benefit of women, even in predominantly male spheres of interest. He's automatically a chauvinist and she's a victim. The risk in allowing this narrative to go unchecked is that a vocal minority of women and henpecked men will cause the changing of a system that the vast majority of its demographic are satisfied with. Now if you can show that a significant majority of gamers think more punishments for offensive behaviour are needed, then we can talk. Women are not, after all, forced into playing competitive games. They do so willingly. If you move country, you do so on the understanding that you are moving to a new culture with different expectations. If you choose to work in a profession dominated by the opposite sex you can expect differences in conversation. It's all the same concept, except that in gaming you have failsafe methods of getting away from people, so you're already safer than in any of the other scenarios I just mentioned.
As for feminists recognising the importance of masculinity - please stop. The vast majority of feminist literature about masculinity is about how it is toxic, how boys should be taught that's it's okay to cry and be more feminine in general. Please, credit us some agency and accept that, for the majority of us, we are who we want to be. Traditionally, men aspire to masculinity and women to femininity. Now we should all aspire to femininity, apparently.
On March 17 2015 08:47 Plansix wrote:
On March 17 2015 07:47 Slaughter wrote: I find it extremely distasteful that some posters in this thread are trying to use or turn into variations on the words "feminism" and "feminist" as an epithet
One of my friends put it best when she was talking about discussion feminism with some men online: "At a certain point you realize that they are not arguing with you at all. Rather they are arguing with the feminist they created in their head."
Hey, she has to find some way to ignore the things they say.
The difference is the majority of the shit slung the way of a woman online will be exclusively based on their gender. Guys will not get that.
To each other, guys toss around bitch and faggot (think about this for a sec - why are these pejoratives?). Race gets tossed around too, but that's fucking weird because dudes online love to toss out horrible racist shit across the board at everyone but their own race.
I mean, given that online gaming has a ton of little teenage dweebs, I do think on some level some of this shit is more shock value than actually believing the hate behind it. But on the whole, the way women are treated online should very obviously be a problem to anyone who looks at it and spends as much time as everyone here.
It's much less of a difference than you make it out to be. You do realise that being called a faggot or a bitch is a gendered insult because the goal is to deny somebody's masculinity, right? Anyway I have acknowledged that there are differences. Women may have it worse - there is not any real data to support this however - but all minorities get it worse. We've already said: that is the nature of trolling. They latch on to whatever they can know about you from just your name/voice. If you have an accent, you will get targeted abuse too. The fact that this only becomes a discussion when some vocal female minority bring it up is really an evidence of our own bias in favour of women. There are multiple studies showing that men receive more abuse than women do.
What I really want to see is all of you accepting your bias instead of asserting - with absolutely no evidence - that women have it worse than men or any other minority group (in gaming where women are actually a minority).
Yes. What are you doing when you deny someone's masculinity? Implying that being gay or a woman is bad.
There have been many things examining how women are treated online, and it's pretty much universally agreed upon by anyone who pays attention that women are treated very differently. No one is denying that trolls say horrible things to people, usually based on the limited info they can find. The difference is that people think these are things that are ok to say to women any time.
Here's a fun little experiment to illustrate this: go find a female friend, have her hop on your xbox with a headset and play GTA. Let me know how many times people say they will rape her (or do whatever sexual thing or something based on her gender). Then you play and let me know how many times people say they will find you and creampie your ass and then teabag you.
Then go hop on OKCupid, and both of you make a profile. Then compare the types of messages you get, and the kind of response you both get when you ignore people. Make sure you keep count of how many dick pics you each get, and how many times people threaten to rape you and wear you as a hat for not replying to their dick pics
Seriously, no bullshit, no snark: I challenge you to go do that and still hold the same views you are saying now. That goes for anyone else harping on about how women are not treated differently. If that can't convince you that there is some kind of issue, nothing probably will.
On March 17 2015 09:58 kwizach wrote: Could we perhaps stop discussing completely distorted strawmen of feminism (which is about equality, contrary to the utterly wrong picture you're trying to paint of it)? This is clearly off-topic, to the point where I have a feeling this thread is going to be closed if this continues much longer. If you have a problem with feminism or if you need some people who actually know what they're talking about to walk you through feminism, its goals, the different waves of feminism, and anything else you might want to be enlightened about, perhaps you should go make another thread.
I've tied in everything I have said to the topic at hand. Your baseless assertion that feminism is about equality is a truly worthless contribution, though. So well done.
Once again, arguing with the feminist in his head. He has creating a fictional avatar and we are all place holders.