Randomosity

With Trump’s election and the threat of fascism, Twitter user Raphael Bob-Waksberg reminds us of Martin Niemöller’s words after WWII:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Guys, my new personal trainer is kind of a jerk. 

There are times when someone forcibly will not let you stop dealing with their bullshit. In the case of Carl Beijer, he’s got some spectacularly weird bullshit, which he’s been flinging at me like an enraged softball pitcher with beer shits since November. There is no actual purpose to doing it any more – his candidate, Bernie Sanders, already lost the primary, so “politically discrediting” me or blacklisting me or whatever isn’t going to save him from the terrible fate of witnessing a general election run by Hillary Clinton –  I still live in a world where a joke about Carl incurs a furious, wilfully inaccurate blog post and a bunch of @-replies about how someone told them I love baby murder. Worse things (much, much worse things) have happened to his other targets. But Carl cannot seem to let me go. To Carl, I am like the huge weights Carl must carry up his driveway each and every day to lift: A burden, yes, but also a choice, and a way of life. 

(I know, I know, it’s probably not him. Allow me my simple joys, will you?)

What’s also fun is that, in a year full of increasingly bizarre lies to and about me, Carl’s latest is that I’m a “liar.” Meaning, for the sake of the few people of good faith who might choose to punish themselves by reading Carl Beijer, that I now have to debunk him and provide evidence of my claims.

Carl haaaaaaaates it when I can provide evidence of my claims. Because I always can. Because they’re true. This should be fun!  

Sady Doyle is lying again. This is what she does. I would like to be able to simply ignore this, but Doyle is also a vindictive person who uses her platform to get people fired. 

There are three lies in three sentences here. Sorry, but we have to unpack them. 

Lie #1: Sady is out to get Carl and 

Lie #1a: Carl is an innocent lamb of God, whom Sady is punishing for no reason

The success of this argument – and, let’s be clear, all of Carl’s arguments about harassment – rests on the basic, violently misogynist assumption that undergirds rape culture, responses to domestic violence, and every other form of violence against women in a misogynist culture: Women who report being harmed by men are “vindictive,” evil, “crazy,” lying, and out to ruin some poor man’s life. This is called “blaming the victim,” and it is widely regarded as Very Bad. 

In this instance, the victim-blaming mythology is being played out via the claim that I’m a “vindictive” “liar” who specifically lies about being harassed by Carl and friends of Carl. Which our entire, very public history of interaction disproves. 

Again: I’ve directly interacted with Carl once, in November of 2015. He sent me a GIF; I told him the GIF was funny; he yelled at me about Hillary Clinton. I said he was not obligated to like Hillary Clinton; he yelled at me some more about Hillary Clinton. I said he was freaking me out with the yelling about Hillary Clinton; he said “I don’t care how you feel,” yellingly, but (in a shocking display of personal growth) did not mention Hillary Clinton. That was pretty much it. So: Carl was aggressive from the get-go; Carl initiated our interactions; this is the only time I’ve talked to Carl, it was unwelcome, and it was weird as hell. 

A quick Twitter-search of Carl’s feed for the word “Sady” turns up a tiny fraction of the bizarre, personally aggressive bullshit he’s aimed my way since. 

Couldn’t help it. One more text from Hillary.

Oh boy it’s another totally unedited blog post about my legal proceedings because apparently I don’t learn!

Last time I wrote about my legal entanglement with Eron Gjoni, the man who started GamerGate after I walked away from him, it was after asking the DA to drop the criminal harassment charges that the state wanted to bring against him.

I touched on the ongoing appeals process for the restraining order, and how it ironically tied me to my abuser even more, and became another tool for him to control my life and send the mob after me. The detective on my case had warned me that this might be an outcome with someone as chronically abusive as he is. While I had successfully persuaded the DA to drop criminal charges because the courts involvement was making everything worse, his appeal was still going. Despite his flat out refusal to abide by it (he actually started actively siccing people on my partner at the time immediately afterward), and despite my move to vacate my own restraining order to get him to finally fuck off, he was determined to milk it for everything he could - both the attention from GamerGate, the renewed harassment against me and my family, and the money he was soliciting. 

What this meant for me is that for the last year or so, despite having relocated and completely reorganized my life to keep him and his new friends away from me, I’d have to deal with the legal proceedings. This essentially turned this man I had spent two years trying to get away from into a pop-up ad in my life. This is really bad news for someone with PTSD who has to take pills to stop having nightmares about their abuser. It constantly interrupted any kind of recovery or closure I could make for myself, and a call from a lawyer about some new bullshit he was pulling, or a flood of gross links to his diatribes on Kotaku in Action from his new best friends in my mentions would hamstring whatever I was trying to do. Just before I had to take the stage at XOXO, I had to talk with my lawyers about asinine legal moves that he was pulling. I was on the other side of the country and I still couldn’t get away from him. 

I’ve been in a holding pattern since the appeals court heard oral arguments on a restraining order that had not only been destroyed, but would have already expired on it’s own months prior. My pro-bono counsel was optimistic, since the courts seemed to see that my ex was using them as a talking point since he had long since had any legal relief they could have granted him. I was told to expect a phone call, probably, in the next 3 months, though sometimes courts take longer. I’ve been holding my breath ever since.

The good news is that it’s finally over. The courts ruled that I acted within my rights, and dismissed his appeal as moot. I had gone into this asking that the court drop this and let me move on with my life, and they reassured my legal right to do so. My ex wanted to use me to set first amendment case law - what happened was a ruling that reassured the rights of domestic violence survivors to modify and terminate their restraining orders if they’re causing more harm than good. This was the outcome I wanted - not just for myself, but for anyone else that’s tried whatever they could to get away from their abuser without fully realizing how the legal system might make everything worse.

Quoth the court:

“We agree with Quinn’s argument that this rule does not apply in the sui generis context of c. 209A abuse prevention orders. Pursuant to statute, an abuse prevention order that has been issued can be modified “at any subsequent time.” … This provision serves to protect victims of abuse by allowing them to tailor the terms of abuse prevention orders as (often rapidly) developing circumstances may warrant… “A victim of [domestic] abuse is in the best position to decide what course of action will provide more safety. At a given time, an abuse prevention order might exacerbate the plaintiff’s danger”. With the parties having a recognized statutory right to seek modification of existing orders, it follows that a pending appeal of a 209A order does not deprive the trial court of its ability to modify the order.”

The courts found the “deluge of harassment” to be “uncontested”, that despite my ex’s constant bullshit claims “nothing in the record suggests that Quinn committed a fraud on the court”, and that my ex still has to obey court orders even if he doesn’t agree with them.

I’ve uploaded the court’s opinion here. It’s not too heavy on the legalese, and has a pretty good tl;dr of this last of the legal battles.

Naturally, his fan club is trying to spin this as a win because of a single footnote that lower courts should generally care about free speech, despite the court stating that the entire appeal is moot. I find my ex and his ilk clinging to a single footnote as a victory in a 12 page document detailing his complete failure to be nothing more an apt metaphor for his role in the last two years. 

They’re trying to claim it a a loss because I’m choosing to walk away from a legal battle that hasn’t protected me, but an end to this is all I’ve ever wanted from the beginning.

I cut contact with Eron because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he launched GamerGate. I didn’t retaliate against him because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he invaded every digital space that I occupied to spread his hate & yell at my friends and fans. I got a restraining order because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, so he used it to solicit funds from GamerGate while promising them more nonsense about me while “joking” in their raid IRCs about breaking into my house while I couldn’t go home. I dropped charges and gave up on having to see or hear him ever again because I wanted an abusive creep out of my life, and he doubled down in spite of that. 

Now that the courts have said “no thank you”, I’m hoping that this is finally the end, and that maybe we *both* can move on with our lives. I’m hoping that I finally have the abusive creep out of my life, even if it won’t undox my friends and family, cure my ptsd, undo the harm caused to my friends and the industry, or fix the fact that to this day, strangers still claim that I fucked a writer at a press outlet that I *already had written for* simply to obtain coverage (that never existed) of a free game about mental health. 

But it’s a pretty fuckin big milestone in the healing process. 

By all signs, this marks the end of nearly two years of having to bag and tag my ex’s abuse against me for courts, judges, and law enforcement officers who have a loose understanding (at best) of what they’d even be looking at, and a seeming lack of resources to obtain any of that themselves. I don’t have to plan my life around court dates anymore, or get calls about what new stunt the man who ruined my life is pulling this time that I absolutely have to respond to or face legal repercussions. That alone is a tremendous weight off my shoulders. The Abusive Ex Popup Ad feature on my life is hopefully disabled - or at least this aspect of it is. His abuse is still a perpetual motion machine, and the threats and harassment is still the background noise of my life and likely always will be. I still have a way to go before I’m what I’d consider out of the woods, both in terms of unfucking my personal situation, healing the mental and emotional scars the last two years have left, and fully being able to talk about GamerGate in a past tense way. Creep Throat can still file for additional appeals, and after the last two years I’m not going to assume anything is impossible.

I can’t unfuck the last two years, not for me or anyone else he’s hurt. But this is at least one win. This is regaining control over my life and being able to finally ignore bargain bin Kilgrave. This is me being able to joke about how shitty my ex is without being afraid of how his lawyers will use it to justify what he’s done to me as they have previously. This is reaffirming the rights of domestic violence victims to walk the fuck away when they choose to. This means more energy for Crash Override and my ridiculous comedy games and the people I love.

Finally, I can move on from this ridiculous legal battle and focus on my energy on my ridiculous unicorn smut games. 

IT’S STD AWARENESS MONTH. WHY AREN’T WE CELEBRATING?

(via

brosandprose

Anita Sarkeesian, Remembering Forgotten Women of History to Elevate Perceptions of Women Today [entrepreneur.com]

We’re less then a week away on our crowdfunding for our new series Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History! Please donate today to help us share stories about these amazing women’s lives and inspire young girls to defy the status quo and do extraordinary things! Visit: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story

it takes time to cook all that shit. time most of us are spending at work earning that $20. add the time it takes to get to/from work and kids to the equation, and it’s time that most of America DOESNT FUCKING HAVE.

I wish people would stop trying to make others feel bad about their food choices when they have no idea what it’s like. few people have time to cook a full meal every night, help their children with homework, AND clean before going back to work (notice how I didn’t include sleep? that’s because many people have to sleep on the bus/train, or during breaks at work). if buying a bucket of chicken makes that a little easier, then guess what’s for dinner?

Chicken breasts are $3.49 per pound. That makes 2 pounds of chicken $6.98

10 lb bag of potatoes is $3.99 (admittedly these are almost always on sale here so it’s really $2.99 most of the time)

Corn is out of season but the frozen equivalent is $5.99

Peaches are $2.99 a lb

A gallon of skim milk is $4.99 

Ground chuck (which is the only lean option) is $4.49 a lb

The 32 oz yogurt (which is only available from Dannon, I think Yoplait dropped that size) is $3.99

Oats are $3.29

2lbs of frozen sweet peas is $3.79

Beans are $1.79. 

I’m not editing this, so I apologize if it’s long and rambly and messy. It needs to be. I’ve been measured and silent and obedient for so, so, so long, but if I’m going to write about denied humanity it needs to be like this. You need to see unsanitized, reckless honesty just as much as I need to write it. Targets of mob abuse take a risk every time we’re brutally honest in public, so we usually don’t, but I’m too frustrated to give you PR and I’m working against the clock. If I’m gonna get hurt for an update in my court case, it’s about fucking time it happens on my terms instead of his.

I just hung up from what I hope will be my last phone call with the District Attorney assigned to my case, and I choked back tears as she told me that I’d conducted myself with grace through this whole nightmare. I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m writing this and examining it as I go through the fog of someone with PTSD. I don’t know if the tears are out of frustration of having sunk a year and a half into this awful system for seemingly less than nothing, or if it’s out of relief.

My ex, who we’ll call Creep Throat because seeing his name makes a knot of anxiety rise in my throat, will be notified soon that the charges were dropped, but not why. I’m sure he’ll launch another salvo of flat out lies and spun truths to make it seem like the last year and a half was a byproduct of me “asking for it”, that the courts saw through it, while making him seem like a downtrodden hero of free speech. He managed to do that with previous court dates, leaving out things like a judge flat out stating that she believed he had physically assaulted me during the last time we had sex, and that he’d gone through my friends social media feeds of the day afterward to prove that I wasn’t “acting like a victim” by spending time with friends.

So, instead of just watching this happen for the who-knows-how-manyth time, I’m going to talk about it. It’s not really about me as much as it is an attempt to dispel some common bullshit assumptions the average person has about the justice system, and what it means to “press charges”.   

One of the biggest myths that needs to die is that your first response to being abused should be to go to the police and seek justice. Leaving aside the fact that the police flat out murder unarmed citizens for their race all the time, and that sex workers are likely to be incarcerated when reporting crime done to them, and a myriad of other things I can’t get into, I have a certain amount of privilege and a well-documented case. I have one of the most public abuse cases out there, it started a hate movement that’s swept up my industry and hurt dozens of bystanders, and got international media attention. A lot of people don’t think of it in terms of domestic violence, they forget where the flashpoint of GamerGate came from - you might not even know the man responsible’s name. To make matters worse, I was unable to speak up during that time period out of fear of reprisal from the judicial system (more on that later) and watched as he was washed out of history (along with a lot of other people targeted). I was on my own on this front, until the Boston Magazine article was posted by a journalist who had been following everything and speaking with my ex. Shortly after, I got a call from the DA telling me that I shouldn’t have been told to simply go offline, and that she knew we had a very strong case worth prosecuting.

So why am I dissolving it then?   

Ironically, getting a restraining order against Creep Throat was the least effective thing I could do in terms of getting him out of my life for good, and for protecting myself. I’ll discuss the hot mess of problems around that experience at a later time. Without getting into a long, complicated blow by blow, every time something happened or the case was updated, he’d run back to the mob and make promises and jokes and pleas for more money. The mob would respond by going after me, my family, and anyone else they decided was involved. The mythology surrounding me would expand, conspiracy charts would “prove” I am secretly rich and really deserved it all along, and inspire more threats, stalking, and abuse. The cycle repeated itself endlessly. People kept getting hurt for being close to me, for a poorly worded restraining order that did nothing.

This cycle was so vicious that I even vacated the order myself once he appealed, hoping to make it end. I gave him the legal relief that he’d asked for. It might sound weak but I’m not made of stone, I’m a scared person trying to escape her abuser in spite of the fact that he’s created a self-perpetuating faction within my own industry to continue to punish me for walking away. It wasn’t about him fighting a powerful evil woman, or gaining his oh-so-crucial right to sic a mob on me, it’s always been about punishing me. It was about using it as a way to hurt me further, so when I gave him what he ostensibly wanted he actually *showed up to object to my motion to vacate the order and hand him a win*. The court dismissed him, and the order has been dead for months, and yet he’s back on Kotaku In Action chumming the waters about the oral arguments they’re hearing on a nonexistent order next month.

He gets paid, he gets attention (he even brought a date to court once), and the cycle continues. All the while, shit gets worse and worse for me and my family. The simple fact of the matter is the criminal justice system is meant to punish, not protect. I don’t care about seeing him punished - I would rather he get better. And they’ve done nothing to protect me - it’s only made things worse and become another weapon in his arsenal, and the arsenal of the people out there way scarier than him.

This is the last email I sent to my DA.

It was a reddit thread that showed up in my Google Alerts for my name, that I had set up to help grow my indie dev business before all this started like so many people in my industry. The title was “if eron goes to jail, I will hunt zoe quinn down and rape her”. Alerts and direct contact like this, specifically discussing the court case, was only escalating and becoming more common. I’m used to things like this at this point, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect me. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect anyone close to me who becomes collateral damage in this sick crusade my ex started against me. The continual escalation only ever increases the chances that someone will make good on something like this. Trying to get the law to protect me has only continually put me in harm’s way.

Why, then, would I ever want to sign up for more years of my life spent flying back to Boston, a place where it’s not safe for me to be, to continue another chapter in this nightmare? Why would I want to keep digging at a giant scar?

“Establish legal precedent!” you might think. I did too. Then Elonis v United States offered little hope that a court wouldn’t skirt the issues of how domestic violence manifests online. Then Steph Guthrie and her co-defendant lost their case, the transcripts showing equal parts “she was asking for it” and “how did this get in there i am not good at computers”. Going to court is like rolling the dice, the precedent you established isn’t up to you, and I didn’t want to risk becoming a tool in the next Creep Throat’s arsenal if we lost. I have have worked with enough lawmakers, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and judges at this point through our work with Crash Override to know that education is sorely lagging behind on these issues, not to mention the cultural biases that come with any cases like that.

You probably know that judges and juries can be biased and hold backward views and assumptions, given that you’re a human in 2016 reading this blog and have probably seen at least one news story about a cop getting away with murdering an unarmed black citizen without so much as a trial. You may have seen it in any reporting on how unlikely it is for rape survivors to see justice combined with how backward everyone is about talking about it. This is at least partly because the US has a very specific idea of who is worth protecting, doubly so when the person in question is being victimized while marginalized.

When you seek charges, you’re on trial as much as the other person, if not more. The “asking for it” defense is alive and well even in 2016, and you have to be a “good victim” in order to give your case the best shot it has. “Good victim”, when it comes to women in domestic or gendered violence cases like mine, tends to mean a lot of loaded, even conflicting things. The courts do not favor a lot of women simply for being who they are - women of color, trans women, sex workers, I could go on. Even beyond that, you have to be well behaved and silent about the proceedings, or risk pissing off the judge and giving the defense attorneys ammo to work with. Even my Cracked article was waved around in court by my ex’s lawyers, citing it as “the most disgusting thing that happened during GamerGate” despite my almost one foot stack of threats and photos of me that people had printed out, jizzed on, and sent to my family. The defense, so far, had hung a hat on trying to prove I deserved all of this.  

I have been open about my depression and my history in sex work. I have not gone out of the public eye during all of the abuse, and I don’t regret that. I believe in standing up for sex workers and people living with mental health concerns and anyone else I can, and I don’t know what would have happened if I had kept my mouth shut when I was targeted two years ago. But this comes with a cost - everything I have said and done will be held against me and spun by my abuser. The cost of being who I am in defiance of the abuse was sacrificing being a good victim.

The spin is even more successful in these cases, because of how disconnected judges, lawyers, police, and juries often are from the internet. One told me to simply give up my career and stop going offline if I didn’t like the abuse. He barely bothered to look at my huge stack of evidence before declaring he had no idea what the internet was about and didn’t want to know.

All the while, it’s hard to explain the indignity of having to sit through this and try to be a “good victim”. To sit in the same room as the man who did this to you and so many others and not appear too emotional or shaken, because the last time you said “uh” too much it became “proof” that you were lying instead of reliving trauma on command. To hide your anger and your outrage and your hurt so you don’t look like you’re seeking revenge, but to also not hold back TOO much because then you look robotic and unaffected like you haven’t been in fear of this man or in fear for your life for almost two years. To have to sit silently while everyone messes up basic facts of the case because they can’t tell the difference between usernames. To leave little bloody half moons in the palms of your hands from squeezing your fists tightly to try to look like you aren’t shaking from being in the same room with him.

What good does any of this do for anyone? It’s been almost two years now, and I desperately want to move on with my life. Even if I did win, I doubt locking Creep Throat away would do anything. Even putting aside my huge misgivings with the US prison system, he’s not going to change. The people who support him would see him as a martyr. I’d probably be looking at years of appeals and court dates and apologizing to my family for MRAs screaming at them in the middle of the night.

I’m tired. I have been trying to pick up the pieces of my life for almost two years at this point, and I’ve done a lot of healing, a lot of building what I feel like are more workable pushes to improve the lives of people being abused online, and a lot of self-improvement. I’m getting to a place where I’m kind of ok even while the abuse hasn’t slowed down. But every time I have to touch this festering part of my life, it drains the energy out of me. I have less energy to do casework at Crash, less energy to meet with tech partners to tell them how to do better and the ways they’re fucking up, less energy to make my goofy video games about feelings and farts, less energy for my friends and family and loved ones that have been helplessly watching me torn apart by this man for years.

In my opinion, it’s not time yet. I’m not the right person to win this fight or set this precedent. It’s too early, and I’m a messy complicated artist who has a hard time keeping her mouth shut while she watches other people hurt. I’m not the platonic ideal of a good victim because I’ve had a long past. I don’t even have any faith in the system to not totally fuck it up every step of the way even when it’s working as intended. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m less useful to the world as someone who fought this case, win or lose, than someone who can throw all hope of winning away to be honest with you, to educate you, to try and call for reform so I can set the next girl up for a spike instead of falling on my face. That’s even assuming the process doesn’t kill me - I’m still someone who was already living with depression, that now has complex PTSD on top of it.

I’m scared of posting this, but I’m tired of hiding and keeping my head down and plodding along. I know it’ll kick some shit up, everything does, but I also know he’s going to try to twist this stuff like he always has. I’m tired of letting him control me. I’m tired of being afraid of being honest. I’m tired of watching people hand out “just go to the police they’ll protect you” while I silently scream and bite my tongue, because I know the advice-giver is giving horrible, ignorant advice. It’s so much more complicated than that, and if someone decides to go to the cops about their abuser they should be doing it with a more informed and prepared plan than I ever did. They shouldn’t have to have their lives hijacked for years to find out that that’s what they were even risking in the first place. I wish I had those two years back. The least I can do to make that right is to be honest and open with the world while trying to reduce the cost of maneuvering through these systems. The least I can do is try to succeed at getting my life back where the courts have utterly failed.    

I won’t ever get my life back, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live in the meantime. Hopefully the next girl won’t have years stolen from her in the first place.

Years ago, a friend went to a party, and something bothered him enough to rant to me about it later. And it bothered me that he was so incensed about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It seemed so petty for him to be upset, and even more so for me to be annoyed with him.

Recently, something reminded me of that scenario, and it made more sense. I’ll explain.

The party was a house party. One of those parties people throw if they’re renting a good-sized house in college. You know the type—loud music, Solo cups of beer, and somebody doing something drunk and stupid before the end of the night.

At some point, my friend had occasion to use the bathroom. When he went into the bathroom, he was disgusted to see that the hostess had left a basket of feminine hygiene products on the counter for guests to use if needed.

Later, when my friend told me about it, he wrinkled his nose and said, “Why would she do that? Guys don’t want to see that!”

When I suggested that she was just making them available in case a woman needed them, he insisted that they could be left in the cabinet or under the counter. Out of sight, anyway.

I wish I’d had, at the time, the ability to articulate what I can now.

To me, this situation is, while relatively benign, a perfect example of male privilege.

A man walks into the bathroom and sees a reminder that women have periods. And he’s disgusted. He wants that evidence hidden away because it offends his senses. How dare the hostess so blatantly present tampons and pads where a man might see them? There’s no reason for that!

A woman walks into the bathroom and sees that the hostess is being extra considerate. She gets it. She knows what it’s like to have a period start unexpectedly. The feeling of horror because she’s probably wearing something she doesn’t want ruined—it is a party after all. The sick embarrassment because someone might notice, especially if she’s wearing light-colored clothes, or worse, sat on the hostess’s white couch. The self-conscious, semi-nauseated feeling of trying to get through a social event after you’ve exhausted every avenue to get your hands on an emergency pad or tampon, and you’re just hoping to God that if you tie your jacket around your waist—you brought one, right?—keep your back to a wall, clench your buttcheeks, squeeze your thighs tightly together, and don’t…move…at…all—you might get through the evening, bow out gracefully, and find an all-night convenience store with a public restroom.

Or maybe she came to the party during her period, but didn’t bargain for her flow to suddenly get that heavy. Or she desperately needs a tampon, but her purse is in a room where a couple is not to be disturbed. Maybe she doesn’t know the hostess well enough to ask if she can use one. Or she doesn’t know anyone at the party well enough to ask. Or she figures she can make do with some wadded up toilet paper or something.

Whatever the case, she walks into the bathroom, and she hears the hostess saying “Hey, I know what it’s like, and just in case, I’ve got your back.”  She sees someone saving her from what could be a minor annoyance or a major embarrassment.

The hostess gets it. The woman who just walked into the bathroom? She’s either going to see that the person throwing the party is super considerate, or she’s going to be whispering thanks to Jesus, Krishna, and whoever else is listening because that is a basket full of social saviors.

But to the guy who wrinkled his nose, it’s still offensive that those terrible little things are on the counter, reminding his delicate sensibilities that the playground part of a woman is occasionally unavailable due to a gross bodily function that he should never have to think about.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a tiny thing. It’s a tiny annoyance for the man, and a more significant but relatively tiny courtesy for the woman. After all these years, my friend has probably forgotten, but I never have.  As a woman whose life is partially governed by a fickle uterus that can ruin an evening faster than a submerged iPhone, his story has stuck with me.

How can you be so offended by a small gesture that has zero effect on you, but could make such an enormous difference to the person who needs it?

It occurs to me now that this is a small but effective illustration of how men and women see the world. It’s part of the same thought process that measures a woman’s value through her bra size and her willingness to have sex with him—that everything about us is displayed or hidden based on how men perceive them or what he wants to get from us. Unattractive women should be as covered as possible, while attractive ones shouldn’t be hiding their assets from male eyes (or hands, or anything else he wishes to use).

A woman who isn’t smiling is an affront to him because it detracts from her prettiness, despite the fact that there might be a legitimate reason for her not to smile (or more to the point, that there isn’t a legitimate reason for her to smile). Her emotional state is irrelevant because she’s not being pretty. It’s the line of thinking where a man blames anything other than cheerful sexual consent on the woman being a bitch, being a lesbian, or—naturally—being on her period. Everything we do, from our facial expressions to our use of hygiene products, are filtered through the lens of “how it looks to a man.”

It’s the line of thinking where a small gesture from one woman to another, an assurance that someone else understands and will help her without question or judgment, a gesture which could save a woman’s evening from being ruined, is trumped by a man’s desire to see an untainted landscape of pretty, smiling women with visible cleavage and vaginas that never bleed.

A few months ago, I posted a series of tweets about some of the most disturbing and vile sexual harassment I receive online.

(Read my entire series of tweets here)

Because the behaviors of online harassers are often so predictable, I feared that doing this would result in a flood of similar harassment, but I felt it was important to speak out about it precisely because men use tactics like this in an effort to silence and disempower women, and because I know that gendered online harassment of this sort is hardly unique to me. It is important that people understand just how ugly and horrifying the epidemic of online harassment can be. This is not something that can be dismissed or ignored; being the target of such sustained, widespread harassment tactics can and does take a very real mental and emotional toll. Nobody should simply have to accept this as the price of participating in social media.

The tweets you see here represent just a small fraction of the responses I received within the first 24 hours of my comments about this particular online sexual harassment tactic. The responses number well into the hundreds and continued to pour in for weeks. Please note that while I’m not sharing any of the copycat responses that included pictures of genitalia or other explicit imagery, I did receive a great deal of those in addition to the responses below.

Content warning for misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, sexual violence, sexual harassment, and threats.

It’s a Compliment

Prove it!

Just Stop Internetting

Victim Blaming

What About The Menz!?

It’s No Big Deal

Kerry Washington gives a perfect three part course on how to handle yourself when you are called out for making an offensive statement:

1) Don’t push back 2) Apologize sincerely and quickly 3) Learn from the feedback

I had an interesting weekend on Twitter.

I follow Randi Harper, a well-known feminist, OS developer and pioneer of anti-online-harassment initiatives. One tequila-fuelled night some months ago, she rattled off “GGAutoBlocker,” a few lines of automated script that produces a list of a few thousand twitter accounts that follow prominent GamerGate ringleaders, which you can then plug into your twitter settings to auto-block them.

And she is right at the top of GamerGate’s MOST WANTED list - she is regularly doxxed and SWATed, and receives credible anonymous rape & murder threats every single day. This just makes her fight harder, and she’s a phenomenal badass.

So this GGAutoBlocker tool she made is bad news for GamerGate. They *hate* it. It allows the (mostly) women they utterly swarm with harassment to reduce their twitter feed from an endless hateful roar to a normal gabble. GG have been impotently trying to stop it through any possible means ever since its creation, and make constant vague references to its illegality.

After watching this for months, I finally bit. Mark Kern - a team lead for World Of Warcraft and GG ringleader - was making yet more vague insinuations, regarding free speech, censorship, constitutional law and libel, and so I challenged him to plainly state his legal argument. I just wanted to know, once and for all, what the hell he was getting at.

This was a truly eye-opening experience.

Against all evidence, I honestly expected directly challenging one of the biggest, most vocal names in GamerGate to lead to some kind of drubbing, a schooling in some unpleasant and poorly defined point of unfortunately applied law, but the opposite was true. Mark often mentions his law degree, but consistently avoided the legal question or fudged his replies. There was nothing to his case.

I kept pressing for something specific, turning his replies back with a calm and consistent refusal to go off-point, (and some support from other interested twitter folks) and I even started to feel bad for him after a while. I felt like a cat batting a mouse around, boxing him in more & more. It became clearer and clearer that he had no argument at all, and finally, I pinned him down to the following statement:

“the blocker is being used to screen potential hires by at least 2 companies I know of”

“if the list is aiding such illegal activity, there are grounds for potential legal liability by the list maintainers”

“certain states make conspiring to black list illegal. That would be the legal theory on those states.”

Just to be clear, then:

if Randi Harper were actively curating a list (which is in fact auto-generated & updated by a short script)

and if it could be proved she were doing so in conspiracy with a third party company

with the clear purpose of keeping a person from being hired

and if it could be proved the potential hire was refused a job for being on that list

and that they would have otherwise been hired over other potential hires

and it could be shown that the social media activity that got them on the list would not have otherwise led to their non-employment

and if this all took place in one of the states that legally prohibits blacklisting

…then there might be a civil case against Randi Harper. Not against the list or the script, mind you, which Mark admitted is legal.

Which is to say: there is no legal case whatsoever.

All this is by-the-by, and the lack of reason and proportionality betrayed by GamerGate’s advocates is no surprise. What shocked me was just how pitiful Mark was, with his argument and his response. I felt bad for him.

But that realisation was as nothing compared to the the sheer VOLUME of the vitriol that accompanied the exchange. For every tweet Mark or I posted, I received ten or a hundred mentions from the seething morass of his followers, the avid rabble of GamerGate. It was deafening. At its peak I was receiving notifications every few seconds.

Bear in mind, in Privilege Poker I was dealt a straight-flush (pun intended). I’m an educated white cis-het able-bodied man, with no skin in the game and no financial reliance on the web. I am literally the least viable possible target for these trolls, and I was facing a fucking *deluge* of bile and rage.

It was staggering.

And I *know* that what I faced was but a tiny fraction, in volume and severity, of a percent of the shit that gets flung at women, PoC, industry members, journalists, or anybody with something to lose or something to say, whether or not they directly engage these hateful children.

I felt the furthest, most fleeting, feathery edge of the stunning, endless tapestry of constant noise and terror that smothers Randi Harper, Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Ellen Pao and other figureheads of feminism in gaming. I’ve read some of their stories and I still cannot even fathom, emotionally, how extreme their experiences are. It’s a hallmark of privilege that I will never experience anything like that.

However valuable that peek of insight is to me, though, it’s not what stuck in my mind. What really stays with me is what GG is actually doing. The argument itself, the stuttering half-thoughts of a misogynistic luminary, was completely forgettable. Debating with Mark Kern was like having an argument with an angry tween: a barely-coalesced bundle of opinions and convictions crammed into the ostensible mould of adult words, draped in the trappings of any rhetorical sledgehammer that might shut down further dissent.

But the noise *around* the argument, the braying mob of hate and rage, was endless and overwhelming. If it were to continue for days or weeks, I’d be forced to leave twitter. If it spread into the rest of my web-presence, I’d give up on the web. The arguments are nothing, but the noise…

THE NOISE IS THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THEIR POWER. That’s literally all GG has - its ability to shout and scream and threaten and terrorise, without end, beyond reason or appeal. If only someone would invent a tool to shut them out of my twitter feed…

And THAT is why GamerGate is so *terrified* of Randi Harper and GGAutoBlocker. The Noise is the only weapon they have in their desperate pursuit to keep the world of gaming in its cultural infancy. They have nothing to say that can’t be shot down with a moment’s rational thought, but fuelled by the fear and fervour of the cult, they can say it louder and longer and angrier than anyone else. Take that away, and they have nothing but each other.

i bet john green thinks people don’t like him because he’s a “dork” or a nerd or whatever

Consider this: John Green is a widely published author, a grown ass adult (like many of his supporters including those at uplifttogether). A grown ass adult should be able to shake this off. 

All of this “Oh, I don’t agree with the harassment though” is bullshit when you know goddamn well how the fucking internet works. Famous dude with a follow and a huge platform gets respect, the teenager who said something uncomplimentary about him gets run off and silenced.

Fuck all of you dickrats into the center of the sun. 

Edit: They added the following:

“We do not want anyone to take our response as a sign that any person should not voice their experiences. We know that often - and in cases we know have existed within our own communities - what happens publicly isn’t always a true representation of the private. What we want to get across is that it’s imperative that we’re careful what words we use to describe people, because they have enormous impact. “

Take your own advice. You’re twisting this CHILD’S words into something they are not. It’s imperative that YOU are careful with the words YOU choose. She never accused him of being a pedophile. Take your own fucking advice and stop contributing to the silencing of a kid. You’re acting like bullies. YOU’RE THE GODDAMN ADULTS HERE. 

And by the way? If I was a teenager and being abused, your fucking mealymouthed bullshit edit would NOT give me the confidence to come forward. And when kids are being abused but don’t have the language for what is happening (because they only know they don’t like what’s happening), bullshit like you just pulled keeps them silent and gives cover to the abuser.

Okay I was civil with you before but now you’ve got me riled up. How dare you say that abortion will never concern me or affect me. Men are the fathers of children, who can actually be fucking aborted WITHOUT THEIR GODDAMN CONSENT. The mother actually has a right to kill their child even if the husband wants to keep it. And if he doesn’t want it, well then he just has to fucking put up with it and pay child support like a good little slave.

Plus, the aborted children are little boys and little girls. As a human being, I consider it my fucking duty to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.

He just said that men are slaves.

You also likened yourself to a slave. Get the fuck over yourself. Paying child support doesn’t make you a slave. To say that erases the actual horror of slavery. I suggest you start reading history books and current news to learn more about slavery before making histrionic comparisons.

There’s a lot to adhd that most people don’t realize. While attention issues and hyperactivity are well-known, the majority of people don’t know most of the symptoms. Here is a partial list.