I'm so sorry that happened to you Lavender. I haven't read the messages, but based on cloudpuff's description it would shake me too. I hope you're okay. Thanks for calling it out and speaking up. It's never okay to talk to women like that. If you disagree, say you disagree, if you think someone is an idiot or an asshole, say that, but there is never, ever a good reason to bring up someone's sexuality in a discussion about games. It's sad to me that you even need to point out how reasonable you were, though I completely understand where you're coming from. But the fact is, even if you had been a jerk and had posted something like "this game sucks and it isn't even really free because it has ads" it would still have been totally over the line to use the word slut towards you. Women should not have to be totally perfect super friendly all the time if they want to avoid having their sexuality brought up. Thanks TA for letting this thread stand.
The misogynism on the internet is HORRIFFIC lately. I absolutely stand against this treatment of women. That Matthew Raftery should better work at his poor development skills instead of harrassing people.
I think the simple rule is just to treat people like people, not genders... because if you do you've already made a judgement orientated around your own perceptions, be they positive or negative. It's not okay to talk to anyone like that.
I take people for people until they start using words like slut and other mysoginistic words. Then I will judge, if someone can throw slut around and think it's ok then I'll ignore anything else they have to say, because if they think that's ok then there's probably other dodgy stuff they think is ok too. Like I say there is a lot of childish people on the net who seem to enjoy winding people up, but then there is this other gendered aspect, I've come to expect heated debates around certain topics, and you see lots of namecalling from both men and women, but then there's this other stuff that happens, where a woman simply using her voice gets bombarded with mysoginistic Insults. Most men are decent and wouldn't dream of speaking to women in such a way, but the ones who do are frightening and make some women think twice before speaking. I know I do after some of the stuff I've seen. Every single day my twitter feed has women receiving sexist crap, I've seen three rape threats today, and if they point out the problem, they receive more of the same, they are told it's a compliment!!! to stay offline. I know many lovely women who won't speak on subjects that affect them now because of the treatment they've recieved, three women had swat teams sent to their homes, one had someone follow her home after sending rape threats to her. There's a young girl trying to stop FGM and talks about how it's affected her life, the comments she gets on a daily basis are vile I can't repeat them. The internet has been great for giving people who wouldn't have had voices a place to speak, but it's also given arseholes a place to be arseholes annomously. I could talk all day about this, share links if anyone wants them and am happy to do via PM if Eli doesnt think it's appropriate for TA.
It's crap isn't it. I think women should be able to speak on the net without receiving the shit they do. I might not agree with everything they have to say, but some if the abuse they get is vile.
To be fair I'm a male and I've also been raided by armed police simply because someone had a grudge and made a load of crap up. My situation was escalated by the fact they didn't go to the police they went to the Mayor and got him to go to the police. Situation basically was police seemed determined to nail me for anything to keep the mayor happy this included moving me around dozens of stations, making me take medical evaluations, ridiculously number of interrogations (with same answers because I actually didn't know what they were on about, they refused to tell me I had to work it out on my own), this went on for quite a few weeks never mind the fact it was a pack of lies and no evidence even existed so they couldn't charge me with anything. Cost me a fortune defending myself from that legally (felt I had no choice or they'd just make something up) and was probably my lowest point, still don't really feel comfortable discussing it but the accusation was along the lines of "going to go on a shooting spree". Not that I'm diminishing female problems but I don't see it myself here or online if I'm honest it seems a big thing in America only and some of the feminist stuff I do read from there would make me not want to deal with females at all if I'm honest. That said nobody deserves to put up with any type of online or offline abuse.
Crap, they SWATted you or what? Oh, and don't confuse feminists (of which I met a ton on Twitter) with some misandrist women, which just pretend to be feminist and spew the same hate as some misogynists do.
Yeah I'm not in America but it's the Northern Irish equivalent I guess lots of armed police, warrants, questioning and me completely clueless as to what's going on, really just a very crazy situation and one I wouldn't wish on anyone, it really turned my life upside down at the time. The whole thing probably left me shellshocked for a few months and I never did find out exactly who was responsible or what exactly was said just the rough gist of it.
Sorry you had that. Sounds horrible. Abuse towards women online not an American thing though. Its the same as abuse to anyone. It's a worldwide thing and happens all over the place. I've had someone on here tell me "stop crying like a bitch" when I pointed out a games faults, I called him out on his use of language and then others defended him and joined in. He was correctly banned as were the people who joined in. They didnt think calling a woman a bitch is abusive and sexists. My brother used to think it wasn't a big as an issue as it is, because he didn't see it and didn't mix with people who think that type of stuff is ok. I've seen a lot of feminists get crap for speaking on things like street harassment, the shitty rape conviction rates in the UK etc get absolutely flamed. These are things that need discussing. I know there are some crazy very anti men women online, they don't represent all feminists though. I don't judge all men on the few that have been verbally and physically abusive to me. Feminism isn't the dirty word it's made out to be, and I'm sorry if a few of the crazy ones have put you off females altogether. I need to go out and won't be back for a little while, but before I go, I'll say again, men get shit online too, I know they receive nasty messages too, and what you went through sound horrible, there's also this other form of abuse online where women are insulted and threatened based purely on her sex. Both situations are shitty.
People who use gender to abuse someone else are weak, just like race doesn't define a person, neither does their sex. Thinking that way only adds to the problem. I fully understand the implications and would struggle to name a female close to me that hasn't been both sexually and verbally abused. Hell, even I've had a neighbour try it on me when I was a boy and the cops did jack. All I am saying is if people respected their counterparts firstly as people and not genders their might be a lot less ignorance and bigotry, no one should be abused, no one should have to think they have to shut up and accept it either, regardless of what vitals they're born with.
My apologies, I misunderstood, I thought you were saying to see the people who use gendered insults as just people and not sexist.
Dunno about "sharing links", but I guess that Eli doesn't mind at all about this topic, because it affected himself a while ago, iirc. I try to get together what happened a while ago. Eli was trying to get (more) female writers on board of touchArcade, and even just announcing this plan made the shit hit the fan. There was also a female writer (don't remember her name now) posting articles at the front page, causing another shitstorm in the comments. There were a ton of idiots suddenly popping up, complaining and harrassing Eli and that writer. It went SO FAR that they had to close down the whole comment section of that article. In the aftermath, Eli heavily complained on Twitter about that. Hey wait, just found it. Her name's Brittney and this was the article: http://toucharcade.com/2015/07/09/where-are-all-the-women-in-mobile-game-journalism/ It's unbelievable, in 2015(!), how many self-righteous male gamer dorks are still trying to keep women out of gaming and gaming journalism. https://mobile.twitter.com/hodapp/status/619287146596298752 Looks like some angry nerds have to defend the "last true male bastion" with teeth and claws. Disgusting.
I remember that article, but the comments had already been closed down before I read it. My heart sank because I knew it must have gone really bad. It's pathetic isn't it?. I genuinely don't understand what anyone found threatening by that article. Just the other day I was reading a young girls story about her experience with online gaming, she was pretty awesome at some cod type game, but she got a lot of requests for nude pictures in exchange for guns in game and a lot of anger when she said no, told she had no business playing, and a load of other crap, she's really good at the game and had great equipment and gear, which she'd be told she only has because she's a slut, she couldn't possible have earned her stuff etc, any success would be out down to "teamwork" wheras any failures were because "there's a girl on the team" She often uses a male sounding name now and doesn't speak when playing, which is a real shame. I'm glad that hasn't stopped her playing though but she shouldn't have to pretend to be a male in order to taken seriously and treat with respect.
Exactly what I've meant. As soon as you're male, you're o.k. While women are generally accepted in MMOs (ok, there are always a few exceptions), it's really different in online FPS and strategy games. Maybe the males fear to get beaten by a girl and that would cause serious damage to their manliness. Back when I was playing tons of Unreal Tournament, I was really good, but the best beatings I received were by a woman, maybe because females think and play different. I enjoyed it a lot because I've learned some new strategies and different ways to handle the game's environments.
Funny you mention Unreal Tournament one of my favorite gaming moments was actually getting a server ban for supposedly cheating, what really happened though is I found a hidden spot on a level that let you basically pick off anyone who passed and I was getting the commentator voice basically going crazy with the killing spree, godlike, multi kill, mega kill unstoppable kinda quotes. The only online moment I liked better was killing a player battleship and about four other players solo in Freelancer (discovery mod online) I was in a gunship which isn't mean't to stand a chance. Personally when I game online I don't communicate with anyone anyway even in teamplay I find it kind of weird people buying headsets just to really insult everyone elses mother etc. Probably just a personal thing.
I'm much the same when I play, I prefer to just play and mute everyone. I think that stems from playing Quake/QW, while it only had third party voice options I would turn off text messages in the console - that was one truly abusive game if you could play it at a decent level.
http://www.sxsw.com/news/2015/sxsw-statement-hugh-forrest Just read this today and thought would share here. A talk on the gaming community and overcoming harassment in gaming has had to be cancelled because of ....harrassment and threats from people not wanting it to happen. The irony. I can understand if the organisers couldn't guarantee safety of those attending the talks and the need to cancel but I can't help but feel it's giving in to the bullies, they are getting what they want by threatening violence.
I'm really kind of blown away by this. Although, the only forums I hang out in are TA forums and that is because I am not harassed at all here (mostly just ignored), but I see a lot of the people who (I think, I'm pretty sure) are women here getting respect: Appunwrapper, Appletini, Lavender, etc. Also I think a lot of the harassment is from younger males-I have noticed that most of the older guys and they are pretty respectful. I'm probably older than most of the gang here anyway and I used to work in an auto shop in another life so I've been insulted by experts. We're out here, we play, and we spend money!
http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/sxsw-harassment/ Here's another article about the SXSW thing. Looks like a couple media organizations might pull out because SXSW is canceling the panels. Seems that members of Gamergate made the threats. Never heard of them before but, if I understand correctly, they apparently have some conspiracy theory that feminists and some journalists are trying to bring down the video game community. Unbelievable.
