What constitutes Misogyny?

[vanlose kid]

Apparently the Westboro Baptist Church is going to attend our Slutwalk in Seattle this weekend.

http://slutwalkseattle.com/protesting

Project Willow – making friends and influencing people.

*

[Joe Hillshoist]

off topic update just to get it off my chest:

I HATE being the squeaky wheel but I have to admit I willingly keep doing it. I do it because I like the end results. Time after time it works. This world is bananas.

Yesterday after that little incident on video, I went home and wrote a notice for all the neighbours and handed them out. I took lots of pictures of the dangers and filth at the site (which is open to the public and really, I think, should have been closed.) Anyway.. After having waited a full month for a response from the City to my previous call and email (just one of each) suddenly everything sprang into action.

After weeks of there only being two or three men on the site, there were many more last night and a whole crew this morning.

God damn though. Some of my neighbours saw fit to chastise me for being argumentative even though everyone I have casually spoken to over the past two years while walking my dog has been furious over the whole thing.

You'd really think I'd have a thicker skin by now but I still feel slightly ashamed when in some ways I should be proud.

Perhaps it is the social messaging women get when they stand up to be counted. Nice girls don't, you see.

Good one tho.

[Canadian_watcher]

^ thanks Joe. a little encouragement goes a long way.

I feel like a complete freak though, since I've heard more from people who think I'm the bad guy in this (wtf? HOW?) than I have from anyone who thinks I might have helped to get the site cleaned up and work done. You should see the difference there since I took action. I'm sure everyone thinks it is a coincidence and maybe it is. Seems very highly improbable, but maybe it is.

[Project Willow]

Project Willow – making friends and influencing people.

[Joe Hillshoist]

^ thanks Joe. a little encouragement goes a long way.

I feel like a complete freak though, since I've heard more from people who think I'm the bad guy in this (wtf? HOW?) than I have from anyone who thinks I might have helped to get the site cleaned up and work done. You should see the difference there since I took action. I'm sure everyone thinks it is a coincidence and maybe it is. Seems very highly improbable, but maybe it is.

Asking questions in public with a video camera ... I'd say you contributed to getting the site fixed up.

Its a pretty awesome effort cos as my brother just mentioned its pretty hard to get road crews to hurry up. Mentioning legal issues helps.

[Canadian_watcher]

Asking questions in public with a video camera ... I'd say you contributed to getting the site fixed up.

Its a pretty awesome effort cos as my brother just mentioned its pretty hard to get road crews to hurry up. Mentioning legal issues helps.

[Stephen Morgan]

I wonder, did anyone hear about the man who burned himself alive the other day?

[wintler2]

I wonder, did anyone hear about the man who burned himself alive the other day?

Relevant, or trolling? You decide.

[wintler2]

"The problem is that the mining industry is being pussy-whipped by [prime minister] Julia Gillard," Mr Randall, the member for Canning, told guests, according to witnesses.

One Liberal said the choice of language was disgraceful.

Another said Mr Randall's comment was particularly ill-advised, given Labor's recent accusations of entrenched misogyny within the coalition.

Among those attending were Nationals leader Warren Truss, Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop, frontbenchers Bronwyn Bishop, Ian Macfarlane, Kevin Andrews and dozens of back-benchers, including chief organiser of the lunch, WA Liberal MP Barry Haase.

Mr Randall said that if his comments had offended any of his colleagues, none had raised it with him.
link

[JackRiddler]

Wow, I forgot about this extremely contentious thread. 146!

Self-quoting a bit that is as true today:

"the mere description of gendered violence meets with resistance, changes of subject, and swift personal attacks on those who speak of it..."

[Zombie Glenn Beck]

35 pages into this thread. Holy fuck, Ive seen some forum drama in my time but this, this is in the top 20. Right up there with when Roko convinced Less Wrong that robots were going to torture them in the future if they didnt give Ray Kurzweil money.. Thank you Jack for making my day.

[Project Willow]

Yep, for some weird reason, that women should want to be treated as full human beings rather than objects or "others" is a radical, controversial, and/or inconceivable request, even here on RI.

[Searcher08]

Canadian_Watcher and Stephen Morgen reminded me of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple. I miss them both

[Luther Blissett]

I should have cited this in addition to the War on Women on the Santa Barbara shooting thread!

[Iamwhomiam]

In the Documentary ‘GTFO,’ Female Video Gamers Fight Back

By ROBERT ITO MARCH 6, 2015


Shannon Sun-Higginson, the director of “GTFO,” a documentary about sexism in the video game industry. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

In the documentary “GTFO,” Jenny Haniver is relaxing in her living room in Wisconsin, thumbs on her Xbox controller, settling in for another session of Call of Duty. But when her fellow online combatants discover that the shooter in their midst is, to their chagrin, female, the comments commence. One player takes potshots at women — they are poor game players, they can’t drive — before commanding Ms. Haniver to leave the game. “You’re useless when your hymen is broken,” he tells her.

Over the years, Ms. Haniver has endured all sorts of abuse as a female gamer. You must be fat, male players tell her, or ugly, or a slut, or own a lot of cats. Several have threatened to rape and kill her. “One guy said he was going to impregnate me with triplets and then force me to have a late-term abortion,” she said in a phone interview. “Then he giggled.”

Ms. Haniver’s story of online harassment is one of the creepier moments in the film, which has its premiere March 14 at the South by Southwest Film Festival. While online harassment in the video game industry has made headlines of late — most notably, with the so-called GamerGate controversy, in which anonymous players threatened to rape and murder the game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others — “GTFO” (an acronym for an obscene dismissal) makes the case that these are not isolated incidents, yelled or texted today and gone tomorrow.


Jenny Haniver endures abuse from male online players in the film. Credit Shannon Sun-Higginson

“I do worry that the general public will focus too much on GamerGate and say, ‘Look at this crazy thing that happened,’ ” the film’s director, Shannon Sun-Higginson, said. “It was a terrible, terrible thing, but it’s actually symptomatic of a wider, cultural, systemic problem.”

The treatment of women in gaming — as players, developers or cultural critics — is being explored in new documentaries, some begun long before GamerGate and inspired by events and conditions that have been well known for years within the gaming world. In addition to “GTFO,” which tackles issues like images of women in video games and the low numbers of female programmers, there’s “GameLoading: Rise of the Indies,” about indie game developers, which had its premiere in San Francisco on Thursday. “No Princess in the Castle,” a feature-length documentary about the experiences of female gamers and developers, is in the works. And the media critic Anita Sarkeesian, host of the current web series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” recently announced plans for two online video series about gender representations in video games, set to begin this year. Even TV procedural writers have taken notice: A recent, much-maligned episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” featured a female developer who is abducted and tortured by mask-wearing gamers.
Continue reading the main story

Ms. Sun-Higginson first started work on “GTFO” in early 2012, after she had seen a clip from Cross Assault, a live-streaming competition series in which a player, Aris Bakhtanians, sexually harassed his teammate Miranda Pakozdi for several minutes during the show, commenting repeatedly about her thighs and bra size, telling her to take off her shirt, and pretending to smell her. Ms. Sun-Higginson initially planned to focus on this sort of harassment, but her approach broadened as she spoke with more women. “I decided to take a step back and explore what it means to be a woman in gaming in general, both the positive and the negative,” she said.


The game developer Zoe Quinn. Credit GameLoading

One of the challenges was figuring out how to make the admittedly sedentary activity of gaming visually compelling. “Pretty early on, I realized that shot after shot of people looking at screens wasn’t going to work,” she said. The film includes amusingly animated intertitles, screen shots of typo-filled texts and footage of computer techies from the dawn of the information age, with nary a woman in sight. “It’s actually pretty easy to find footage of a bunch of white dudes hanging out together, making stuff,” Ms. Sun-Higginson said.

In the scenes with Ms. Haniver, you hear the messages in all their stark awfulness. In 2012, Ms. Haniver, now 26, began recording live comments and voice mail messages directed at her and posted them on her website, NotintheKitchenAnymore.com. The messages range from sophomoric to vile; the speakers sound like characters on reality shows about American jails. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s just a bunch of 13-year-old boys,’ ” she said. “The voice recordings let you hear it’s not just kids. You can tell these are adult men.”

In one scene, Maddy Myers, the assistant games editor at Paste magazine, describes growing up playing video games and suddenly discovering that no girls were left in her circle of gaming friends. “I went to a tournament a couple years ago, and there were only two women who entered,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Boston. “It’s really demoralizing. How many women decided not to enter because they’ve had bad experiences, or didn’t even know about it, because there wasn’t any marketing of it for them?”


An image from “GTFO.” Credit Shannon Sun-Higginson

“I don’t think that women just naturally aren’t interested in gaming,” she continued. “I think gaming culture itself has driven women out.”

When Lester Francois began talking to indie developers for his documentary “GameLoading,” similar stories arose unprompted. “We’d talk to these women about game design and whatnot, and when we weren’t filming, they kept mentioning different aspects of harassment in the workplace,” he said. “Early on we realized, hang on, there’s something going on here.”

Originally intended as a short about the indie game scene in Mr. Francois’s native Australia, “GameLoading” soon transformed into a feature about indie developers worldwide. Among the interviewees are Ms. Quinn, who created the free, text-driven interactive fiction game Depression Quest in 2013. Instead of battling dragons and demons, players fight clinical depression. Ms. Quinn’s creation enraged some gamers, who objected to its subject matter and to the fact that, like more conventional video games, it was being released on Steam, a popular digital store. Anonymous trolls sent her rape and death threats and posted her home address and phone numbers online, prompting her to relocate.

Mr. Francois has struggled to understand why fans of mainstream games would feel threatened by an indie like Depression Quest, since they’re hardly in competition with one another for fans. “The reality is, we’re going to see more games, and more variety of games. Obviously, Activision isn’t going to kill off their first-person shooters.”

The interviewees in “GTFO” and “GameLoading” offer possible remedies for the industry: more female coders and game creators, and a wider range of female characters; more peer pressure on the small minority who ruin things for everybody; and more women attending gaming events — as horrible as many of these events may be for female attendees now.

“My biggest fear for this movie is that it scares young women away from this industry, which is really growing and thriving right now,” Ms. Sun-Higginson said. “Obviously the more women and the more diverse people in general who join the industry, the better.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/movies/in-the-documentary-gtfo-female-video-gamers-fight-back.html