Tag Archives: anita sarkeesian

How Critics of #GamerGate Are Silencing the Voices of Women

gamergate

Either #GamerGate is about ethics in journalism or it is about harassing women. Thus proclaims Taylor Wofford in a recent article for Newsweek. Operating under this presumed dichotomy, Newsweek surveys the tweets and finds that:

[U]sers tweeting the hashtag #GamerGate direct negative tweets at critics of the gaming world more than they do at the journalists whose coverage they supposedly want scrutinized.

Therefore, concludes Wofford: “GamerGaters care[] less about ethics and more about harassing women.”

In Wofford’s mind, “direct[ing] negative tweets at critics of the gaming world” necessarily equates with “harassing women.” This erroneous equation arbitrarily homogenizes women, assumes that agreement with social justice critiques of the gaming world are an essential element of being female, and silences the voices of all women who disagree with those criticisms.

What Wofford and so many others fail to recognize is the existence of Secret Third Option C: #GamerGate is not about journalistic integrity or about harassing women, but is a backlash against social justice fascism. In a wonderful article, I encourage everyone to read, Cathy Young, writing for Reason summed it up as follows:

This is an anti-authoritarian rebellion, not an antiwoman backlash.

Yet Wofford and his ilk do not even recognize this as a possible motivation. Or perhaps they do, but treat it as the equivalent of “harassing women,” an assumption that only works if one presumes all women march lockstep with the likes of Anita Sarkeesian.

I don’t.

I don’t have a problem with violence against fictitious women as props in video games. I don’t have a problem with fictional women being sexualized as background scenery in video games. If I did have a problem, I just wouldn’t buy the games (or, since I am not a gamer, the books and movies). I think other people should be free to buy what appeals to them. If they like space, then they might want to play one of These games, for example. If they like horror, there are plenty of games out there for all their zombie-killing needs. If they want to play games with background violence and sexualization of female characters that don’t even actually exist in the real world, then they should play those games. I do not think that because women are capable of other roles, they must never be portrayed as damsels-in-distress. I do not think that portraying women (or men) as objects of sexual desire implies they lack other value.

What does rub me the wrong way are people who want to sanitize the world, who want to dictate how we are allowed to interact with each other, and what sort of fantasy lives we are permitted to augment with fictional books, movies and video games; who want to remove all the darker fringes and seedy nooks from our mental landscapes and herd us all into a more civilized and domesticated imaginative realm; where every fictional woman must be treated as representative of all real women and heresies against the enlightened orthodoxy are not permitted.

Since this is how I feel, it seems logical to me that a not insignificant number of #GamerGaters might also feel this way. Since I am not misogynist or interested in “keeping women in line,” it seems logical to me that a not insignificant number of #GamerGaters could be motivated by a desire to push back against social justice crusading without disliking women in general or wanting to “harass” them.

When critics deny these alternative motivations exist, or insist that they necessarily equate with misogyny, they are in effect silencing my voice and the voices of all women who feel as I do. When the critics insist that hatred of one woman or one group of women equates with hatred of all women generally, they treat us as a homogenous class without distinction or individuality.

They should know better.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.

Why FIRE Is Wrong To Criticize Utah State For Anti #GamerGate Speaker’s Cancellation

sarkeesina

Let me get this out of the way before we get started. For the most part, I like the work that FIRE does on free speech issues on university campuses. Universities are meant to be a place where ideas can be expressed freely, and all too often that’s no longer the case for many reasons.

I also deplore death threats and believe they have no place in political discourse, on either side of any political issue. Anyone who issues death threats for the purpose of silencing speech should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for terrorism because that’s what this is.

Now that all that is out of the way, let’s get into the story. A couple of weeks ago, Anita Sarkeesian, who is a feminist speaker and opponent of #GamerGate (if you need a #GamerGate 101, read Christopher Bowen’s piece on the topic) canceled her scheduled lecture at Utah State University due to death threats and the fact that Utah universities allow concealed weapons at universities.

The Salt Lake Tribune has more:

In a phone interview from San Francisco, Anita Sarkeesian said she canceled Wednesday’s lecture, not because of three death threats – one of which promised “the deadliest school shooting in American history” – but because firearms would be allowed in spite of the threats. Threats like these should be taken seriously, especially if it puts people’s lives ar risk. So it would come as no surprise to find that some venues, schools and other facilities may want to find out what is the best brand of turnstile, in the hopes of finding a way of increasing security. It is always best to be safe than sorry. If there are ways to prevent a potential shooting from happening, no one would vote against it.

“That was it for me,” said Sarkeesian, who has kept multiple speaking engagements in the face of death threats, including one last week at Geek Girl Con in Seattle. “If they allowed weapons into the auditorium, that was too big a risk.”

She also pledged never to speak at a Utah school until firearms are prohibited on Utah’s campuses and called for other lecturers to join her in boycotting the state.

The USU police and the FBI determined that the threats against Sarkeesian were not credible. Also, Utah passed a law in 2004 that banned universities from restricting guns on campus. Whether or not you like that law, that is the law in Utah.

USU police though offered to tighten security at Sarkeesian’s lecture:

Sarkeesian said she asked for metal detectors or pat-downs at the entrance of the Taggart Student Center auditorium, but USU police said they could not prevent those in attendance from carrying weapons into the lecture if they had concealed weapons permits. Though she said, “in hindsight, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with any weapons in the auditorium.” The police instead promised more officers and a backpack check at the doors. Sarkeesian said she asked whether police could screen the audience for guns and let them in if they had permits, but Vitale said campus law enforcement officers believed that would have been needlessly invasive for the audience.

“If we felt it was necessary to do that to protect Miss Sarkeesian, we absolutely would have done that,” Vitale said. “We felt the level of security presence we were putting into this was completely adequate to provide a safe environment.”

In this era of where we read about police officers violating the rights of the citizens they’re supposed to protect and serve, it’s good to see the USU police try to balance Sarkeesian’s safety with the rights of the audience. However, this wasn’t good enough for Sarkeesian and she cancelled her speech.

It’s clear that Anita Sarkeesian canceled her speech to make a point about concealed carry on campuses and this is a political stunt, not a threat to free speech because the university tried to work with her on security. The university did their job. For more on the gun control implications, read this.

Now enter FIRE’s Gina Luttrell who on their official blog criticized the university for not doing more to prevent the cancellation.

Regardless of the specifics of Utah’s open carry laws, universities do absolutely have an obligation to make sure that reasonable steps are taken to protect speakers-particularly when credible threats are made against them or when there may be violence toward them for their speech. Utah State should have worked harder to ensure that Sarkeesian would be safe speaking on its campus. Frankly, it’s difficult to believe that this would not have been possible to do while also staying within the bounds of state and federal law.

What more does Luttrell and FIRE want USU to do? They tried to work with Sarkeesian on a security plan that would’ve been compliant with Utah law against a threat that the FBI and USU police deemed to be non credible and Sarkeesian rejected it in favor of a political stunt against guns on college campuses. Instead of attacking the university, FIRE and Luttrell should be attacking Sarkeesian for trying to frame her attacks on the Second Amendment as a free speech issue. At the same time, you can’t force someone to speak somewhere they’re not comfortable speaking for whatever reason.

The answer to attacks on freedom is not to restrict freedom. It’s truly disappointing to see organizations give the cover of defending civil liberties to those who are attacking freedom, in this case giving the cover of defending free speech to a woman who is trying to restrict the right to keep and bear arms on campus.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

#GamerGate: The Microcosm of the Culture Wars

As a games writer by trade, it’s been funny watching mainstream news sites pick up the story known simply as “GamerGate”. Everyone from Reason to The New York Times has picked up on the story, with some doing a better job of reporting a two month old story than others. Naturally, the articles have a slant of their own for the most part that goes along that site’s political lines, and the signal-to-noise ratio at this point has gotten so poor that it’s hard to even remember what caused all of this in the first place.

When looking at GamerGate, it’s important to remember a couple of points:

1) Ultimately, it’s really not about video games, it’s about culture. GamerGate is a microcosm of the culture wars.
2) Everyone is missing key free-market solutions to all of the issues brought up.

I will preface, in the interests of full disclosure, a few things about myself in this that people will want to bear in mind as they read everything below the cut. First, I have been, on my video game Twitter feed (@gamingbus), 100% anti GamerGate. Also, as previously mentioned, I spent a while writing about video games, centred around the industry itself, for a living, a perspective I believe few other political sites have, so a lot of the smoke regarding issues with women – particularly opinionated ones on both sides of this issue – has a fire that I’ve personally witnessed. With that in mind, I will do my utmost to keep this one down the middle. » Read more

Christopher Bowen covered the video games industry for eight years before moving onto politics and general interest. He is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, and has worked for Diehard GameFan, Daily Games News, TalkingAboutGames.com and has freelanced elsewhere. He is a “liberaltarian” – a liberal libertarian. A network engineer by trade, he lives in Derby CT.