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Authors: James Goss
Tags: Fiction
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wrong.
DUSTER: Says the man who bumped off a woman for annoying him in a bar.
ME: That was... different. Wasn’t it?
DUSTER: Wasn’t that the tiniest bit sexist?
ME: Then, surely, if I go after some men, that’ll even up the score?
DUSTER has left the conversation.
F IRST OFF, I thought about taking revenge on everyone who’d had a go at Amber. But that was an idiotic plan. The first thing they’d look at is what everyone had in common.
So I did a little bit of research. And hooray, these people did this kind of thing a lot. There wasn’t a shortage of this kind of stuff. On Twitter, on Facebook, on Xbox. Often with a background of a football team’s colours. Basically, it seemed as though, if you were a woman daring to use any form of social media, it was inevitable that, at some point, you would be called a slut, a bitch, or a whore.
Rape also became boring. The abuse was really dull. I could compose it for you like it was a choose-you-own-adventure game or scrabble or bingo:
Hey [Bitch/Slut/Whore], [STFU/get back in the kitchen/fuck off back to Candy Crush/die] before I [rape/kill/rape and then kill/fuck you up/bomb u] you [stupid/fat/ugly/cunty/bitch] [whore/slut/bitch/cunt]. [Get a boyfriend/Play Farmville/Seriously, die].
Given this matrix, it was possible to allocate scores. Maximum points went to ‘cunty cunty bitch cunt,’ but really, there was rarely the opportunity to impose such a rigid structure on the sentences. It really all boiled down to:
“Hey Woman. I don’t like you. Cos. Signed, Man.”
A really weird Venn diagram overlap emerged where sometimes these same people who liked games (especially the ones with strong female characters with big tits who also shot guns nicely) also loathed women who played the games, were on quite a lot of dating sites (with the same username, rookie move), and also used Twitter to express their terror at what it would be like when ‘the Islams ruled Britain/America.’ (Presumably meaning that they didn’t care for what would happen when a severe form of Sharia Law was imposed which would severely curtail the rights of women to have jobs, vote, or have big tits, short skirts and wield guns. Kapow. #Irony.)
So, basically: I like girls, I hate women, I loathe foreigns.
W HAT WAS SO curious about the expression of all this was that, when challenged upon it, the reaction was, essentially, to talk about the internet as a boys’ club. When asked why women were abused when playing games, one commentator genuinely told a news site: “It’s like going to a strip club as a female and getting upset that the chicks are all naked. This is just guys being stupid guys.” He was referring to a specific incident. A group of gamers were playing a game on a streamed TV show sponsored by Sodobus. The host (a man, obvs) constantly belittled the only female player, and then instructed everyone to sniff her. He also physically sniffed her. She’d been playing well up to that point, but shaken, her game play deteriorated. As the other players rounded on her, the host shouted “Rape her! Rape that bitch!” In public. In front of a live audience. When asked about it afterwards, he’d shrugged it off. “Sexual harassment is part of the culture.”
In other words, and I’m really sorry to be so boring about this: games are for boys, and girls should run off back to the kitchen if they don’t like them. Which was odd, because nowadays a lot of gamers are female. They’re not doing it to pretend to be blokey, or to learn how to run a farm. They’re doing it because they like them.
Which a lot of men seemed to find baffling and unfair. Things were so much easier when the ladies weren’t around. Like with GamerGate, which may have been about ethics in games journalism, or it may have been about female games writers getting death threats which they then took way too seriously. Which raises the question, how seriously should you take a
DUSTER: Says the man who bumped off a woman for annoying him in a bar.
ME: That was... different. Wasn’t it?
DUSTER: Wasn’t that the tiniest bit sexist?
ME: Then, surely, if I go after some men, that’ll even up the score?
DUSTER has left the conversation.
F IRST OFF, I thought about taking revenge on everyone who’d had a go at Amber. But that was an idiotic plan. The first thing they’d look at is what everyone had in common.
So I did a little bit of research. And hooray, these people did this kind of thing a lot. There wasn’t a shortage of this kind of stuff. On Twitter, on Facebook, on Xbox. Often with a background of a football team’s colours. Basically, it seemed as though, if you were a woman daring to use any form of social media, it was inevitable that, at some point, you would be called a slut, a bitch, or a whore.
Rape also became boring. The abuse was really dull. I could compose it for you like it was a choose-you-own-adventure game or scrabble or bingo:
Hey [Bitch/Slut/Whore], [STFU/get back in the kitchen/fuck off back to Candy Crush/die] before I [rape/kill/rape and then kill/fuck you up/bomb u] you [stupid/fat/ugly/cunty/bitch] [whore/slut/bitch/cunt]. [Get a boyfriend/Play Farmville/Seriously, die].
Given this matrix, it was possible to allocate scores. Maximum points went to ‘cunty cunty bitch cunt,’ but really, there was rarely the opportunity to impose such a rigid structure on the sentences. It really all boiled down to:
“Hey Woman. I don’t like you. Cos. Signed, Man.”
A really weird Venn diagram overlap emerged where sometimes these same people who liked games (especially the ones with strong female characters with big tits who also shot guns nicely) also loathed women who played the games, were on quite a lot of dating sites (with the same username, rookie move), and also used Twitter to express their terror at what it would be like when ‘the Islams ruled Britain/America.’ (Presumably meaning that they didn’t care for what would happen when a severe form of Sharia Law was imposed which would severely curtail the rights of women to have jobs, vote, or have big tits, short skirts and wield guns. Kapow. #Irony.)
So, basically: I like girls, I hate women, I loathe foreigns.
W HAT WAS SO curious about the expression of all this was that, when challenged upon it, the reaction was, essentially, to talk about the internet as a boys’ club. When asked why women were abused when playing games, one commentator genuinely told a news site: “It’s like going to a strip club as a female and getting upset that the chicks are all naked. This is just guys being stupid guys.” He was referring to a specific incident. A group of gamers were playing a game on a streamed TV show sponsored by Sodobus. The host (a man, obvs) constantly belittled the only female player, and then instructed everyone to sniff her. He also physically sniffed her. She’d been playing well up to that point, but shaken, her game play deteriorated. As the other players rounded on her, the host shouted “Rape her! Rape that bitch!” In public. In front of a live audience. When asked about it afterwards, he’d shrugged it off. “Sexual harassment is part of the culture.”
In other words, and I’m really sorry to be so boring about this: games are for boys, and girls should run off back to the kitchen if they don’t like them. Which was odd, because nowadays a lot of gamers are female. They’re not doing it to pretend to be blokey, or to learn how to run a farm. They’re doing it because they like them.
Which a lot of men seemed to find baffling and unfair. Things were so much easier when the ladies weren’t around. Like with GamerGate, which may have been about ethics in games journalism, or it may have been about female games writers getting death threats which they then took way too seriously. Which raises the question, how seriously should you take a
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