“You go from your friends on the computer to a class where you’re the butt of every joke, where girls won’t even look at you….
“They can't understand that there are women who are also socially awkward weirdos who might truly be into comic books/video games/Dungeons & Dragons.”
Here’s what they’re missing: those socially awkward weirdo women who are really into comic books/video games/D&D have always been there and (with a handful of exceptions) have always been invisible. Personally, I fixed this issue in my life in high school by refusing to participate in nerdy things and donning what I considered “the guise of a pretty girl.” I didn’t get credit for being a nerd as a girl and I was more invisible than the male nerds, so why not?
Before that, I was pretty invisible, and not just to popular boys. Before that, I was chided for my lack of social skills by male nerds. I occasionally found a pocket of male nerds who saw that I was one of them and celebrated it, but more commonly, I was insulted by nerd guys unless those nerd guys were stalking me. (And I mean the crime, seriously.) Then I grew up and now I’m a Fake Geek Girl because “women have never been geeks before” and that means that we can’t be now, even if the reality is that we were before.
“For people who have never been real outsiders, who have never known what it’s like to sit in a room full of humans who treat you alternately as invisible and a target for nasty harassment, it’s hard to understand why the gamer identity matters so much….”
And this is exactly how GamerGates are treating women in gaming: alternately invisible and a target for nasty harassment. And the harassment that they dish out is far worse than what most of them got. If you want to see real outsiders who get extremely nasty harassment, GamerGaters, look at the people that you are harassing. We're adults and we get it at work (if we work in tech) and in our hobbies (if we're gamers), and if we stand up for ourselves, we might get it in our mailboxes, our phones, our parents' homes, etc. to a degree that we have to flee our homes or cancel engagements.
Most of the young men engaged in GamerGate were born after I programmed my first game and they keep talking about how they are the most picked on in high school, that girls didn’t even see them. It can’t occur to them that girls like them would have had it worse because if that ever came up, everyone would see what a fraud their persecution complex is. I am still invisible to them because if they refuse to look around, they can't discover that in fact, they aren’t the bottom of the social ladder. They’re educated, middle-class white guys who are at the bottom of the educated, middle-class white guy social ladder, which is about 12 stories above than the rungs with poor, black, female, and disabled geeks. Straight white male is easy mode. Even when it's not particularly easy, it's still easier than everyone else in the same situation while not straight, not white, or not male.
Some of the women who are being harassed because they are “infiltrating” gaming, wrote their first game in the 80s. Like me, some of them were into gaming before these guys were alive. But because female geeks have always been denied the geek label by them, it doesn’t matter what our credentials are. All women are fake geek girls to them and the reason is that they’re too narcissistic to realize that they were never actually the bottom of the social ladder. They were merely the bottom of the social ladder that has people on it, to guys who don’t consider poor, black, female, or disabled people to be people. It was the bottom of the ladder that they were on, several stories above the ladder that girls got.
What the bloggers are still missing is that GamerGaters are harassing and threatening women who they think should be invisible, where women belong, so they can use the women’s invisibility as proof of non-existence. We’ve always been gamers. We’ve always been programmers. You don’t get to be pissed off that some women are “infiltrating” gaming by refusing to leave once this generation’s misogynists came of age. You don’t actually know everything and you especially don’t know every single gamer who is twice your age.
Those girls who are siding with GamerGate? You’ve showered them with attention while complaining that feminists are standing up to you just looking for attention. You insult men who agree with feminists because they're "White Knights" just trying to get laid, even though the girls you're showering with attention are more likely to be doing what you claim. Your "allies" aren’t invisible to you guys now! I highly recommend that you ask them out because they can apparently put up with you, unlike the rest of us!
As a reminder to the GamerGaters of the world:
“For male geeks there’s a disconnect with what they’re told - be a nice guy and you’ll get the girl - and what they see in action around them….”
Nice guys do get the girl, although maybe not the hottest girl in high school. They get the smart girls, the nerdy girls, the girls who are invisible to everyone else, the girls standing right in front of them crushing hard without those guys ever noticing, the girls who aren’t physically ideal and thus aren’t good enough for guys who are far enough away from the physical ideal that they have their own standardized, assumed physical description.
Those guys treat girls like them the way that they complain all girls treat them. And they still think that all girls should be abused because of the things that other girls did to them-- because women are a monolith to be hated, say the guys who also say #NotAllMen whenever a feminist uses "men" as a demographic marker. The nice guy gets the girl but if you harass women, you are not a nice guy and never were. I hope someday these guys figure out what niceness is.
I know that they don't realize how hypocritical they are and how ironic most of what they says is-- but I don't care.
One last thing about this post:
“For male geeks there’s a disconnect with what they’re told - be a nice guy and you’ll get the girl - and what they see in action around them…. This leads to a horrible cycle where socially awkward weirdos who dress like garbage get rejected by attractive women, which cause the socially awkward weirdos to start blaming women in general for their problems and reinforce their social awkwardness.”
Yet the same guys use “fat” and “ugly” to insult women even when they don’t know what the women look like-- and claim that feminists are fat, hairy, smelly chicks who are telling people that “it doesn’t matter what you look like; it’s what’s inside that counts” because the only way that a guy will ever fuck them is if they can con men into believing that it's true. Because again, it’s fine for guys but not for girls.
