Geek Culture – Shoshana Kessock

Gaming Communities And The Bystander Effect

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Geek Culture, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This is a post written back in 2018. At the time I was too nervous to put up this post due to the intensity of my feelings. I think now it’s as important as ever to talk about and so I’m posting it.]

I owed someone an apology, and it wasn’t my fault.

There’s nothing worse than being involved in a situation where due to someone else’s actions, your very presence caused a problem or harmed someone else. You might only be tangential to a situation, but through the confluence of events, you’re suddenly aware that for your sake, someone else was hurt. For you, someone else was put on the spot.

I had this happen to me recently. I was put in a situation where due to my needs, someone else was put out. Not only put out but hurt, where they should have been cared for and their needs met. I felt the need to apologize, even though the situation wasn’t my fault. And it gave me a great deal of insight into a problem I’ve seen going on for some time but didn’t have a chance to articulate until now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and start again.

We have a problem with safety in the gaming community. And that problem is complicity.

We live in an era of pretty awful social breaches within our communities, social breaches which run the gamut from rude and inappropriate behavior to all-out situations of sexual harassment, assault, and violence. From politics to Hollywood, from bigger cultural institutions to our own gaming backyards, online movements like #MeToo and other online threads have brought out stories of harassment, degradation, misogyny, mistreatment, and more, leading me to wonder sometimes if there’s any place safe from the predations of bad actors (the answer, my pragmatic side replies to my oh-so-innocent inner naivete, is no).

Yet in the face of all this ongoing horrific disclosure from men and women who’ve suffered some truly horrible nightmares, we’ve seen communities responding in positive ways. Safety policies are being developed and organizers and leaders are finding ways to safeguard their populations by recognizing bad actors and weeding them out for the safety of everyone. The arrest of people like Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood and the indictment of actor Bill Cosby have given people hope that justice, albeit slow and often full of compromise, is possible. Slowly but surely, we’re hopefully climbing towards a better tomorrow.

The fact is, however, there is still a huge stumbling block in the face of truly transforming the spaces we inhabit. Though our communities are (usually) full of well-meaning and positive individuals, whose aim is to be in a social space with others of like minds and interests for the purpose of finding unity of purpose and commonality, there are those who are around because they want the community to fulfill their own destructive, selfish needs. They bring damage in their wake, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes consciously and sometimes based simply on a view of reality so different from everyone else it boggles the mind. These people are the abusers, the manipulators, the tragically thoughtless, the hopelessly deluded. And they are within every community, acting in various degrees of inappropriateness, from the simply hurtful to the downright criminal.

We all have them, in every community, in every space.

And we still put up with them.

Sure, the most egregious bad actors are easier to recognize and target for removal. Those who act for example in an overtly aggressive manner or are violent or caught in a flagrant bad act are easier to target for exclusion from the community. Yet for every bad actor extracted from the community for safety, there are a thousand other little infractions, cuts of various sizes inflicted, which go unaddressed and unattended. These are not simply the sort of slights one does to a single individual, but rather a pattern of systematic abusive or selfish actions which harm others over and over. Often, these individuals are recognized, their behaviors identified as problems, and they garner a label as a ‘problematic’ person. And yet-

And yet these people don’t receive any adjustment in behavior. And yet the bad behaviors continue unchecked. That is until things become so bad they can no longer be ignored, often coming to a head in an action which causes intense harm to one or more people.

How does this happen? How do these ongoing bad actors and their harmful actions continue on and on until things get out of control and implode into traumatic and hurtful events?

The answer, in my mind, is complicity. And we’re all a part of the problem, each and every one of us, one and all.

I had to explain to my father about the internet the other day. Or specifically, the realities of being a woman on the internet.

I was busy trying to listen to the announcements about video games announced at E3 and at the same time trying to explain to my father what some of the terms I mentioned about video games meant. When I expressed my dismay that a particular game was going to have an online multiplayer mode, my father didn’t understand what that meant. I told him about online play, about teaming up with others and getting a chance to play together remotely. He said that sounded like a fun thing to do, playing with others instead of alone.

So then I had to explain to my father about the internet and how it treated women. I had to explain online harassment, the term incels, and Gamergate. It branched off into a discussion about SWATing, about the harassment of women like Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn, of death threats and unsolicited sexual advances, and of rampant misogyny. I had to tell him the story about coming back from speaking at PAX back in 2013 and finding my inbox full of death and rape threats and pictures of decapitated animals and people because I’d been on a panel about feminism in gaming and nerd culture.

It wasn’t the first time I tried to explain things like this to my father, who sometimes just seems boggled by the issues of modern communities. This time, he was horrified and furious. He didn’t understand how this stuff happens today. As he’s often said when I tell him about awful things going on, he’ll blurt out, “But it’s 2018! How does this happen?”

And every time, I keep coming back to the same answer, over and over.

“Because we let it happen.”

With that answer, I in no way mean to blame victims for what happens to them. Far from it. The ‘we’ I mean when I give that response is the collective we of communities at large, who see issues going on and remain in said community without causing disruption to protest bad actors or horrific events. Faced with reports of bad behavior, plenty of communities choose to turn a blind eye or refuse to engage with individual problematic events, or even escalating patterns of bad action, for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Instead, we fall back on the idea of “it’s not my business” or “there’s two sides to every story” or my favorite, “I don’t want to get involved.”

When trying to explain this to my father, I was reminded of a situation from my childhood. There was a family I knew growing up who had serious problems. The father was a violent person who abused both his wife and daughter on a regular basis, while the mother had mental illness issues to contend with while trying to raise her child. The husband’s malicious actions were widely known among both the adults around me and, as I discovered later, the community at large. But no one did anything. In the end, the wife was so badly damaged by the events she was forced to be institutionalized, while her daughter finally ended up in foster care for her own safety. The trauma went on for years with so many people aware of the problems going on. Yet no one acted, because to act would involve them in another bad situation outside their own lives. Members of the community were complicit, and the damage was done.

And back in the gaming community, the damage is being done. And we are all complicit too.

The gaming community has seen an escalation of toxic masculine behavior, fueled by the anonymity of the internet and the lack of repercussions against those who harm others. From verbal and written harassment to stalking, death threats, and harm against property and data, behaviors which many consider harmless have led to real and lasting damage to marginalized populations and women, in particular, to name one group.

Yet with every outcry, there is a larger policy of deaf ears to overcome, a general epidemic of see no evil, hear no evil to contend with. When presented with the stories of harassment and harm, repeated over and over until a larger pattern of toxic encouraged behavior becomes apparent, the population at large seems unable or unwilling to stand up and in one voice say they simply will not abide this behavior. Everyone has heard the same stories, seen the same social media posts, and yet the behavior continues unabated. And those fighting to make it stop happening, who work to mitigate the damage or present new options to change the community for the better, are fighting a downhill-flowing tide of tireless work and horrific situations intending to bury them whole.

They’d have a better chance, however, making a difference if they weren’t surrounded by people unwilling to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to help make a change.

There’s a very famous story out of New York about a young bar manager named Kitty Genovese. Back in March of 1964, the 28-year-old woman was on her way back from work when she was stabbed repeatedly in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens by Winston Moseley. Kitty Genovese lay dying in the chilly night air outside her building, crying for help, and receiving none. The New York Times later reported that 38 people were witnesses to the event, either hearing Ms. Genovese crying out for help or seeing her lying on the pavement, but each chose to do nothing. The incident became the origin of the term bystander effect, a sociological phenomenon in which people are unwilling to offer help when others are present for fear of taking responsibility or ‘becoming involved’ in the trouble.

Years later, researchers have discovered many holes in the Genovese story casting doubt on the validity of many of the details of that night. But the concept of the bystander effect has remained a replicatable sociological phenomenon. When presented with a situation that is difficult or requires direct action, people will often decline to act because they either believe others will take care of the problem instead or else they don’t want to get involved out of fear of reprisal or simply due to indifference or lack of willingness to become involved. People don’t want to complicate their already complicated lives by involving themselves in the problems of others, in disrupting their status quo to introduce an unstable element that might end up causing them trouble.

Looking at the gaming community, we have a hell of a lot of bystander effect going on. Because we, like many other communities, are either full of folks who are simply deeming themselves too busy to get involved in standing up against problems, or believe someone else is going to fix the situation for them, or feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming negativity, or are the victims of it themselves. And many are simply too frightened to stand up and make a change, afraid of being targeted themselves or perhaps even having their own actions picked apart and targeted.

So we all sit back and wait, wait for someone else with the power to make the decisions, or for someone else to seize that power to change things up. We hear the cries of the women harassed by Gamergate, or harmed in our tabletop RPG communities, or in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction world like those bombarded during the Sad Puppies debacle. And rather than speaking up in one voice, we do not seek action. We remain complicit. We continue to enjoy our social activities and communities without taking an active role in solving the problems at hand.

We may not agree on solutions, or even if the problems are necessarily what they seem to be. Communities can disagree over problems, but as long as they engage with them in a direct manner, they are breaking the chain of disinterest which allows problems to fester. By bringing them to the forefront they allow the problems to go from being problematic to being recognized problems with the possibility for solutions. By burying problems instead and avoiding conflict, we leave the work to a few individuals to make the change for us. And when it doesn’t happen, we bemoan the difficulties in our world. But in the end, we did little to nothing to change things for the better.

This makes us complicit. And therefore, in our own way, part of the problem.

And yes, I’m saying we. Because I am certainly, in my own way, part of the problem.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m someone who knows how to speak up for myself. When I need to, I’m capable of making a lot of noise to raise awareness of an issue, be it personal or otherwise. And yet faced with the situation I mentioned at the article’s opening, I didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the damage done in my name. In fact, I sat there quietly and profited from the experience. I was complicit.

During an event I attended, I needed assistance from a member of staff. To provide me with assistance, that staff member callously brushed aside the needs of another person who was in crisis and needed, at the bare minimum, to be left alone. But instead, my needs were put ahead of this person’s and they were hurt. Now, I could go on about how that situation needed to be addressed, and what the staff member should have or could have done to not harm another person in question to help me out. Yet the part I keep coming back to since the event isn’t what this other person could have done in the situation – but what I could have done better.

Instead of speaking up at the time, I remained silent in the face of someone else getting hurt. I saw someone’s feelings get ignored by a person in power, someone whose job it is to look out for others at an event. I don’t know that it was done maliciously – in fact, I believe it was a thoughtless action brought on by short-sightedness. Yet that is no excuse for the harm caused, and I’ll do you one more: there’s no excuse for me not speaking up. By keeping my mouth shut, I made myself complicit in the actions taken. By not speaking up, I was implicitly aligning myself with the bad behavior.

To twist the NYPD slogan: I saw something, and didn’t say something. And I profited from the situation at another person’s expense.

And so we’re back around from my experience to the larger bodies involved. Take my experience and expand it to how many other incidents, how many other safety questions and harmful situations ignored. How many issues exist, some as tiny as mine and some massive problems that cause life-threatening incidents in communities, which go unresolved, festering and growing, until they boil over?

“But Shoshana,” you may ask, “how can we make change? We’re just little tiny parts of a larger system? A larger body that drowns out little old me?”

Well sure, it can drown you out. If you’re only one voice, it might. But if we changed the culture of complicity, if we really took up the idea of “If you see something, say something” and stood up for our fellows, we would disrupt the power structures enough to see real change on a faster timetable. We might be able to disrupt things enough in fact so things can change on a more permanent basis and quicker so as to make sure fewer people are hurt as we press towards a safer and more progressive tomorrow.

How do we do that? There’s some simple ways to disrupt rather than be complicit:

Speak up about larger issues: If you are aware that your community has a problem that is systematic and widespread, take a stand publicly against it. You don’t have to be on a soapbox and yelling constantly about it, but in the face of harmful behavior, if you stand up and say something it might encourage others to do the same.
Vote with your dollars and presence: If an event, a product, a community or a team does not address toxic situations, removing yourself or protesting will hit their bottom line if you remove yourself and therefore your contributions. That includes not buying products whose communities or companies don’t address bad actors or situations.
Intervene on a personal level: Bad behavior on a wider scale is perpetuated onward when small incidents are allowed to fester and remain unaddressed. Bad actors can be identified and either situations resolved or individuals removed but ONLY if people curb their conflict avoidance and instead engage the problem directly. Speak up and handle the situation or else seek help to mediate out the issue. If your problem is harmful and even dangerous, seek community leaders for backup. But don’t let your unwillingness to confront difficult situations help make you complicit in the harm they’ve caused.
Recommend solutions: Identifying problems is only one step in the process. But making sure once you stand up you contribute resources to solving the problem? That makes it all the better. It might take some energy to get involved (and you should not feel obligated to put out more energy into a situation than you can handle) but with what energy you CAN spare, help present possible solutions to the problem to your community leaders. This is an active step not only beyond complicity all the way to becoming a community reformer.

And above all: do what you can. Not everyone’s ability is going to be the same. Not everyone has the same physical ability, emotional bandwidth, psychological make-up, time, responsibilities, or wear-with-all to take on problems. We’re all different and have different restrictions to keep in mind and respect. We can’t judge how much someone else is doing necessarily in terms of hours put in and content. But every person can do SOMETHING at a minimum to confront problems in their community, each within their own capability. Together we can take on issues, each in their own way, supporting one another and aligned towards a goal of a better tomorrow.

I hope I’ll get the chance to someday to make up for being complicit in that uncomfortable situation I mentioned. I’ve already made my apology, but I’m not sure that’s enough. Instead, I’m using the situation as a reminder that the communities around us are made up of individuals, and if each person stood up for what they believed was right, then we could transform our spaces towards a shared goal of social and justice evolution.

Nostalgia Warriors And The Backlash Against Progress

April 25, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Feminism, Geek Culture, Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

I recently saw a video online taking pot-shots at an academic whose studies included deconstructing the representation factors in older roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. The video by Michelle Malkin is a screed against the supposed politically correct ‘party poopers’ intent on ruining games like D&D by bringing ‘social justice warrior’ politics into the picture. I won’t link the video itself (because it’s from a Facebook channel that’s pretty horrendously conservative) but I think the tag below it on Facebook…

Social Justice Warriors are the biggest party-poopers on the planet!

Is there no realm safe from the diversity police?!

… that really says it all.

It’s no secret the last few years have seen an ongoing march towards progressive creation in the creative arts. The fight for better representation in comics, film, television, toys, and games have sparked debates that have reached from the smallest communities to the largest stages of media coverage. You can tell how big the discussion is when films not yet released are dissected for their representation of minority groups and feedback is received by companies immediately from consumers. And whether you like this immediate feedback loop or not, it’s clear the days of companies simply producing material without considering the economic ramifications of a growing progressive demographic are over.

Still, in the face of such creative evolution and representational progress, there has been a significant backlash by those who believe progressives are trying to ‘ruin fun.’ People calling for better representation in creative fields are labeled ‘liberals’ and ‘social justice warriors’ and far worse terms. They’re called crybabies, party poopers, people out to turn everything into a political debate rather than just letting others have a little harmless fun. (Clearly, they never ascribed to the idea that everything is inherently political, but that’s a debate for another time). Instead, their response is to decry any discussions about progressive feedback so we can all just sit back and have a good time without interrogating what we’re enjoying.

The funny part is by making this very discussion, they’re doing exactly what they rail against: they’re looking critically at the material they’re being presented with and making an opinion on its content. They ARE questioning the politics of their media. They’re just choosing a different response than progressives. They’re choosing a different view, an opposition to growth, which I’m calling protective nostalgia. They put down ‘liberals’ for being social justice warriors when they’re taking up their own warrior mantle themselves. These ‘traditionalists’, these ‘conservatives’, are what I like to call Nostalgia Warriors.

Picture it with me: a new game hits shelves, and the hordes are attacking. They come with their banners of ‘Better Representation Now!’ and chants of ‘What About Us?’ They bury fun new products in political discussions, drowning out the chance of escapism with constant reminders of blah blah representation and blah blah stereotyping and blah blah blah. The noise distracts from the chance to just sit back and have fun, like in the days of yore, when no one assaulted the fun! When it was just about basements and friends, sitting together and enjoying without complications or political rhetoric! Yes, these fun times and beautiful memories are under assault by the SJWs and are in need of defending!

And lo, the defenders arive, with their cries of ‘Party Pooper!’ and ‘Can’t It Just Be Like It Was?’ Their shields are the memories of times gone by, when things were simpler, and media was just fun. They are the Nostalgia Warriors! Ready to tell you you’re wrong for having progressive opinions! Ready to insult, degrade, and dismiss any idea challenging the status quo! And all armed with the greatest cry of all…

These Nostalgia Warriors stand on their ramparts, zealously protecting new media in the name of what’s come before. They use the happy memories they have of simpler times, when people didn’t talk about the politics of media creation so actively, as proof that such conversations are ruining fun now. After all, they had fun in the past with their TV shows and comic books without these silly discussions about race and gender representation, why would it be needed now? In fact, looking back at the media before and criticizing it only defiles the memory of their beloved favorites. And how dare those pesky Social Justice Warriors go after their favorites, entwined so deeply with the sugar-coated memories of the past.

To take a step back for a second, I don’t want people to think all nostalgia is bad. Nostalgia can be a good thing! It gives us a chance to look back over our lives and see the good things amid the bad, the positive experiences we had cleaned up so they provide bright spots in otherwise complicated lifetimes. It lets us hold up things we find beautiful, things we find important to our identity, and present them with all the love we had for them when we were younger. Nostalgia can be beautiful, our memories can be beautiful, and the way they formed our fundamental years is a testament to experience building the people we are today.

To my people, those who hold fondly to the television shows and comics and films of the past with love and true nostalgia, I embrace you as brothers and sisters! The past gave us amazing, wonderful, fantastic things that should be cherished. This argument isn’t here to dismiss or attack all Nostalgia, or all media in the past that is important to people or beloved.

But.

It’s hard to accept that our pasts are as fraught as our presents and that our futures are going to be just as hard. So we shine up our best experiences and hold them up as examples that in the past, everything was better. Everything was easier then and our precious favorites had no problems, or else those problems didn’t matter, because we loved them. And they gave us joy. And no one can assault our joy without assaulting a fundamental part of ourselves.

This progression into nostalgia defense is when nostalgia slips into toxic territory. When defending our sacred cows becomes a roadblock towards creative evolution.

It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that our society is evolving away from shitty behaviors we once found acceptable in the past. I think most middle-road Nostalgiacs (new word again!) would recognize things like systematic slavery, for example, is an institution we thank god destroyed over a hundred years ago. Most would even say things like the civil rights movement, the evolution of the rights of women, all these things were great. Heck, most would say going across the ocean to punch Nazis and stop their genocidal reign of terror was a good thing! These were all examples of Good Progress.

So why is it when talking about the continued progress of our society in media, we see such a vicious backlash, even from people who would otherwise say Big Issue Progress (like those listed above) is a good thing?

This is where Toxic Nostalgia comes in.

(Sure, there are people who would question whether these were good events. They’re called Ultra Conservatives, Neo-Nazis, Misogynists, Racists, Bigots, and all around Backwards Problem Children. And this article isn’t going to find a solution for them, so we’re just going to move the heck on from THAT giant problem. Instead, to them I say this).

Look, change is difficult. Change makes people look at themselves and the world around them with a critical eye and makes them question what they really believe. It makes them wonder if they’re complicit in big bad things like racism and intolerance, in systematic oppression and institutions of privilege. It makes people feel like they might be the bad guy, or part of a bad group, make them feel vilified and ashamed and attacked.

And when the whole world seems to be talking about rectifying centuries-old systems of oppression, people start taking a good long look at where they are on the power pyramid and all these complicated feelings start coming up. They have to ask ‘am I really profiting from oppression?’ They get defensive, responding: ‘But I can’t be privileged! My life is hard, I suffer too!’ They bring out words like reverse racism and tout the suffering of the white lower classes, of the nice guys being ignored by ‘militant feminists’ and cry about how ‘All Lives Matter.’ And this is in response to the Big Issues being brought up across the media, across the internet. It’s everywhere they live. They can’t get away from it. They have to consider it.

And then, just when they’re sure they’ve had enough attacks on their identity and their status quo, the progressives come for their fun.

And so they cling to the last shreds of safety, the last places where they felt they were comfortable and could forget the politics of progress for a little while. When they watch TV or a movie, when reading a comic, they don’t want to think about the Big Issues. They want to escape for a little while. But unbeknownst to them, the progressives are looking at these media and questioning loudly whether the status quo was representing them well or at all. Whether the people whose representation was always there have taken a look at their privilege lately. Progressives are asking for equality, and to the Nostalgia Warrior, that is a challenge to the last bastion of escapism they’ve got.

And so, the backlash begins. The outright dismissal and attacks against those calling for critical analysis of media has been unbelievably harsh. But what’s worse is it’s often without substance too. Instead of engaging with the Big Issues being presented in the context of media critique, Nostalgia Warriors deny the need for discussion outright and banish anyone trying to have a dialogue with labels like ‘party poopers.’ And to those who agree with them, it’s the best defense, because who wants to have party poopers around? No one! So get rid of these SJWs and their party pooper ways, ignore them! There’s no need to have an actual conversation about issues! We can just label them with names you’d throw at kids on a playground and call it a day.

Because that’s all the conversation is to the Nostalgia Warrior: a throwback to days gone by, when you could talk about fun things with the simplicity of school age name-calling and maturity. Why be an adult when talking about play? Simply regress to those childhood feelings and defend your stance with the same playground mentality. Hold tight to your play as the last vestiges of childhood you’re allowed and don’t let anyone damage that with talk about Big Issues. Because that would require the adult in the Nostalgia Warrior to have to face change and its complexity.

Some of the worst offenders in this progressive backlash in entertainment have unfortunately been creators whose work is being critiqued. Whereas these creators, still relevant and important to the evolution of their mediums, could join the new generations of artists and contribute in new and fun ways, they often doggedly cling to the work of the past, defending their creative choices against critique and driving away new thinkers with their derision. What they fail to realize is their defensiveness about their nostalgia, fed by fear of being vilified and becoming irrelevant, is driving them TOWARDS irrelevancy as their mediums march on towards a progressive future. Simply put, the harder they cling to the past, the easier the future and their part in it slips through their fingers.

The sad part about the backlash against progressive thinking by Nostalgia Warriors and conservative thinkers is the ultimate damage it does to creative evolution. Creative mediums have come a long way since the days of cave paintings, Shakespeare, the Rennaissance and even the beatnik generation. Every wave of creation builds upon what came before, informed by the politics and social movements all around them. The fact that each generation has also participated in the see-saw of progress towards greater equality has informed said artistic creation, and to ignore those influences in favor of nostalgia only stunts the growth of new ideas and new forms of art.

They say there are no new ideas under the sun, only new ways to express them. Yet if we’re only ever looking back to those so-called ‘better days’ thru the lens of willfully ignorant nostalgia, we’re cutting new creative expressions off at the knees. People yawn at remakes and rehashes of the old, asking for new movies, new television, innovative creations, and then complain when those new expressions involve evolving social thematics.

You can’t have it both ways, Nostalgia Warriors. Either you want new ideas or you want things to stay the same. And I have some bad news: things won’t stay the same, no matter how much you shout about it. Progress happens. The world moves on. And your sacred cows lose their shine under the scrutiny of the future. The only question is: will you put aside your blinders and accept the complexity of media and the critical analysis around you, or hold on stubbornly to the past?

The battle for progress continues across all mediums. And wherever people believe fun is under assault, the Nostalgia Warriors will be there, ready to refute every claim with childish rhetoric and nay-saying. And all the while, they don’t even realize they’re already involved in the political conversation: they’re just not doing a very good job at it.

SaveSave

Your Progressive Media Needs Criticism

August 4, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Film, Geek Culture, Politics, Speaking Out, Television

I unfriended someone on Facebook the other day. That might not sound like such a big deal to some, but to others you might be going “oooooooooh” right now, because it takes a lot to get defriended from my Facebook. Something fairly monumental. And this wasn’t a stealth defriending either, a “I knew you in grade school but now you’ve become a Trump supporter so bye Felicia” kind of defriending. This was a digital face-to-face over a thread, telling the other person “It’s been fun, but goodbye.”

And it was over, of all things, Twin Peaks.

170203_10_093_RGB(2).JPG — “I’ll see you again in 25 years.”

Folks might not know, but I’m a huge fan of Twin Peaks. Been watching for years. I must have seen the original show three or four times over, plus read the books, and absorbed so much of the lore around the show I’ve got theories that have already proven true. I’m such a big fan, I’m planning a tattoo for the next time I get the chance saying “Fire Walk With Me.” I’m THAT big a fan.

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the criticisms I’ve got of the show, particularly about women characters on Twin Peaks. And while the show is meant in many ways as a parody of both itself and melodramatic television and 1950’s small town culture, therefore offering it a strange and unique space for characters to be archetypes rather than entirely characters all their own, there are issues with the treatment of women in my eyes and always have been. And I’m not the only one. Reviews and articles coming in about the new Twin Peaks have echoed a lot of my feelings, from The Wrap, Refinery29, Bustle and, of all places, Haaretz. They all say what I’ve been saying too: David Lynch has a woman problem in his work, and in Twin Peaks it is glaringly obvious and very, very sad.

So after one particularly egregious episode in Twin Peaks: The Return (Episode 10), I put up a single line text about how much I love the show, but how it had a serious sexism problem. And within a few minutes, I was under attack. Not a “I disagree with you” friendly debate. I love those. But a full knock-down gaslighting, insulting, mansplaining, nightmare, complete with “you just don’t understand the series” and “do you even watch the show?” nerd checking. The person in question was clearly agitated, posting rapidly and pointing out how Twin Peaks was full of archetypes (yes, it is), how it is part parody (yes, it is), and if you think that David Lynch is sexist, he can’t be, because he included one of the first trans characters (thank you, yes, not the point) and is asexual himself (um, okay, sure… what?).

It turned out over the course of this bizarre conversation that the truth came out: this show had deep sentimental value to this person, who felt because of that it needed defending. And when I pointed out that their attachment didn’t make it immune from criticism, the comments got nasty. So I said goodnight to a person I’d known for seven years, and unfriended them. Simply put, I don’t need that negativity in my life.

But it brought up an interesting series of thoughts from me, which culminated last night after seeing The Dark Tower. Because boy, do I have a lot of feelings about that movie.

(And here is where I post about a new film in a spoiler-free way. If you don’t want to read about The Dark Tower movie at all and want to see it cold, you might want to stop reading.)

There are few things I’m a bigger fan of than Twin Peaks. X-Men. American Gods. Buffy. The Dresden Files. And then, there’s The Dark Tower. I’ve read the entire book series three times, along with nearly every Stephen King book out there. I’ve seen almost every Stephen King TV show and movie, even the bad ones, multiple times. I’ve tracked the connections between King’s other works and The Dark Tower series and waxed on for HOURS about theories and possible other connections. I’m planning another tattoo, and yes, it’s of the Dark Tower and the words “There are Other Worlds Than These.” Every time someone would talk online about rumors that The Dark Tower was becoming a movie, I’d flip out and wait. And wait. It took years to get the series to film, so when they announced it, I bought tickets the day they went on sale. I was ready.

I watched everyone flip about Idris Elba being cast as Roland because of the color of his skin and rolled my eyes. They made a great choice there, I thought, choosing a man of color for such a traditionally Clint Eastwood, square jaw white guy role. He would rip a hole in the scenery with Matthew McConaughey as The Man In Black. He would be the iconic man on his way to the Tower. He had the perfect gravitas. I would recite the Gunslinger Creed over my popcorn bucket and watch him do the reloading trick and be so happy. I got my friends together, those who were big fans and who weren’t, and I made a day of it. As I said to my friends, to a fan like me, it was like going to church.

And then. I went to the movie. And I walked out so mad. So. So mad.

The Dark Tower movie is bad, y’all. It’s really, really is.

I won’t go into specifics, but other than a few pieces of nerd-dom tossed in that made me satisfied, the film was a run of the mill, fun urban scifi-fantasy film that could have been original if it was anything but named The Dark Tower. It harkened back to the comic book adaptations of the 80’s and 90’s in its surface-level-only understanding of the material, a slick transmogrification of a complicated, gritty, compelling series into a shiny action film full of hackneyed dialogue and atonal characters. Idris Elba, the man who brought you such nuanced, intense performances as Luther was wasted on this movie, and scenes where he and the powerful McConaughey, seemingly ready to flex his muscles but tragically held back by the weak writing, fall positively flat. The two, along with the rest of the cast, are given no room to move in the too-quick, badly edited rush to cram a huge amount of material into a tragically short hour and a half film. An hour and a half for a seven book series ‘sequel’ which reads like a comic book spin-off one shot gone horribly wrong.

I walked out of the film, furious. I sat down with friends afterwards and listed the myriad ways the movie had failed not only Dark Tower fans, but folks in general. My friends who didn’t know the books said it came in as a solid ‘okay’ action movie without the context of the original material, which I suppose gives it some salvation. But for a fan like me, it was like watching someone piss away the opportunity to make a new Lord of the Rings. Give me a Peter Jackson three movie trilogy, each three hours long, where you have to race to the bathroom in between scenes because you’re sitting so long watching it. Give me the depth of Mid-World, the Tet Corporation, the Gunslingers of Eld. Give me the epic battle between titanic forces I’d been waiting for. Instead, I got a cartoon.

deadpool-2-domino-zazie-beetz-twitter-01-480x520 — She looks awesome and people were complaining about her hair. That’s some coded racist BS there folks.

I went online to put up a single lined comment on my Facebook: “This movie has forgotten the face of its father.” A lament to what could have been. And I got the most curious response to a friend in private messenger. It said I shouldn’t complain, because at least the movie cast a man of color as the lead. That made it important. To which I agreed yes, it did make it important. Actually, in the age of white washing roles, just days after the internet flipped its collective trolling shit over the awesome Zazie Beetz, a woman of color, being cast as the traditionally comic book pasty Domino in the upcoming Deadpool 2, seeing a man of color playing this iconically white as heck role was powerful. I mean, Roland Dechain is meant effectively to be the descendent of Arthur Eld, the King Arthur of his land. He carries guns made of Excalibur. He is THE iconic hero. Choosing a man of color for the role was a great, progressive move.

It didn’t save the film, however, from a) just being bad and b) from sucking in other ways regarding progressive representation. For example, towards women. It’s not like the original material was super amazing towards women to begin with. I’ll tell you there’s some shit about fridging women in it that could make your hair stand on end, and some sexual violence that’s way, way unnecessary in my eyes. The film flinches away from a lot of the worse stuff because of its shiny, not-too-violent-but-cartoon-violence veneer, but it fails the Bechdel Test and the Fridging Tests like a kid who didn’t study for finals. It found its way to progressiveness in one way, and flunked it so epically in others.

And you know what? That’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay that it failed. It’s not okay that the movie overall was a colossal disappointment.

It’s okay to look at a film like The Dark Tower and point out that while it was progressive in one way, it failed epically in others in terms of representation.

Because just because a piece of media is progressive does not make it immune to criticism. Even, and especially, if it’s your favorite.

I had my own run-in with what I call Favorite Bias when reviews for Wonder Woman came in. On the list of things I’m more of a fan of than Twin Peaks is Wonder Woman. I’ve read almost every Wonder Woman comic up until the New 52 run (which I forgoed because I felt it betrayed the character on pretty much every level). I was planning, you guessed it, a Wonder Woman tattoo (you see a pattern here). I have Wonder Woman t-shirts. I have every graphic novel I could get my hands on. I think I remember more about Wonder Woman comics than pieces of my childhood because, hey, that’s how the human mind works. So when the movie was announced, I was ready to be disappointed. I was nervous, ya’ll, that we’d have another Catwoman on our hands, another Elektra, and that movie execs would use its flop as an excuse to say “Women led comic book movies will fail!” even when women-led movies with kickass protagonists were doing work at the box office (say hey, Furiosa and Katniss).

And then Wonder Woman came out. And it was a joy.

Sure, it had its problems. Heck, I went over its problems in a long, long article. I laid out all the issues it had and why, in many ways, it had come short of true greatness. But all in all, I sat in the dark opening night with tons of my friends and bounced with joy when I saw Themyscira. Once again, take me to church, silver screen. I was home.

593ff1b91d00002900cc2ac9 — They couldn’t give Artemis any lines? Really?

And then I got home, and started talking to other folks, looking at Facebook, reading reviews. And the one thing I noticed over and over were comments about the representation of people of color in the film. Specifically, how nearly all of the non-white Amazons had non-speaking or servile roles. The film, it seemed, had managed to pass the Bechdel test with some flying-ass colors while leaving its representation of POC way, way in the dirt. (And for more on this, check out Harper’s Bazaar’s piece as an example of the conversation out there). A lot of people were lauding the film while commentators, especially POC, were citing the problems the film had. And they were getting a lot of responses saying what I said about The Dark Tower: while the film achieved progressive aims in some ways by being a hella strong representation of a powerful woman on the big screen (and at the box office), it was a massive problem for its intersectional representation.

When I first heard those criticisms, something kicked in my stomach. A nagging rationalization crawled up out of me, saying, “But look! It’s Wonder Woman! It’s a hell of a progressive film! Look at Themyscira! Look at it! That’s woman paradise! The warriors, the culture, just look!” And then I did look. Harder. And I saw the way women of color were being represented. I listened to what people were saying, what women of color were saying. It wasn’t a woman’s paradise. Not for all women. Pretty much just for the white ones.

I shut up. I listened. And (I think) I got it.

These experiences echoed an old fight I had with a friend over Star Wars years ago on my birthday. Star Wars, to him, is his Take Me To Church, a deep abiding nerdy kind of love that nigh transcends understanding. So when I made the mistake of pointing out the shortage of women in the original Star Wars universe during my birthday party one year, I nearly ended a friendship. Because that was his Sacred Bunny, just like Twin Peaks had been my ex-friend’s Sacred Bunny, and Wonder Woman was mine. And though each one of these pieces of media expounded on some serious progressive ideals, it didn’t make it less regressive in other ways.

Plato's_Stepchildren_kiss — We forget this was mind-controlled, y’all.

Did the original Star Trek‘s progressive moments, such as the famous interracial kiss between Uhura and Kirk, erase the fact that it happened on an episode where they were basically mind controlled into having the kiss, making it a product of unwanted sexual attention? Nope. Did the great trajectory of Mako Mori in the plot of Pacific Rim take away from the stereotyping she received as both a woman of Asian descent and as a woman in general? Nope. Did the great representation of queer characters on The 100 let us ignore the tragedy that was the destruction of its most stable queer relationship in the tradition of the Killing Queers trope, ala Buffy‘s Tara? Nope. Did the unbelievable awesomeness of the John Wick series ignore that the protagonist’s wife is (spoiler alert) Fridged for his story to have emotional trajectory (and y’all, it’s not all about the dog)? Nope. And don’t get me started on the Orthodox Jewish banker stereotype from John Wick 2, just don’t.

It is okay to like something and find it problematic. But moreover, it’s okay to recognize that a piece of media can be progressive in some ways and deeply problematic in others.

In fact, I’ll go one further. Progressive media should not and cannot be immune to criticism. By allowing ourselves to be caught up in a piece of media’s progressive moves in some areas, while blatantly ignoring or downplaying the places where it fails in intersectional representation, we let ourselves be lulled into the false ideology that progression can only occur slowly and that representation is a battle fought for in drips and drabs, as individual causes whose battlefronts often cannot intersect for fear of scaring the conservative whole.

We look at a film which supports a single minority group or underserved population and laud its achievements and sweep under the rug its failures, afraid to rip apart a one-step-forward kind of progression that has clawed our media representations to where they are now. “What, you want it to be everything?” we say, not realizing it echoes the snide comments by alt-right conservatives, who sneer about how the next big movie will replace their tried and true white male protagonist with a queer disabled woman of color just so it can be politically correct. (And yes, that’s some of the bullshit the conserva-trolls online say). We say things like, “We’ve got this far, what else do you want?”

I guess the answer is: more. I want more.

I don’t see why we can’t shoot for the moon, for a movie that not only excels in a single area but serves a better view of the world by being progressive in all intersectional ways. I want movies that have people of color in positions of power, forget just speaking rolls. I want queer representation presented as normalized, for trans characters to have visibility and recognition as part of the world as it is without qualifiers. I want women to have power and agency and representation and for disabled characters to comfortably exist. I want religious diversity and body diversity. Yeah, I want it all. Maybe that makes me a greedy liberal media nerd, but that’s what I want.

But when a piece of media fails us in those ways, when it only comes in second or third in its representation, when it soars to the moon and only lands among the stars, giving us one or two of those representations and lacks the others, I want us to be able to look at it and recognize that fact. I want us to say, “yes, but” rather than “yes, and let’s take what we can get.” It might be infuriating, and to conservatives outside it might look like liberals being divisive within their own camp. But if progressive action in media is not intersectional, just like in other forms of progressive action, then it has not truly achieved its aims. And we can only learn how to improve by recognizing those places where pieces of media, and indeed those places where we creators have failed in our own media, have fallen short of a better, more ideal form of representation.

Despite all this, I’m still going to be a giant nerd for Wonder Woman. I’ve come to embrace Star Wars as a huge part of my geek life thanks to better representation in the new era of films, books, and toys. I watch John Wick with my friends, and love the shit out of The Dark Tower books. I’ve lauded the movements of comic books and comic book films and television to be forward thinking on its representation, loving on my Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel and new, better Wonder Woman storylines while still criticizing the places where things fall through the cracks. I put forward my own work to others and take criticism too, because if I don’t practice what I preach as a creator of media, I’m just a hypocrite. I like my problematic favorites, like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead. I still turn on Twin Peaks every Sunday night, even though I groan into a pillow over some of the choices David Lynch makes.

I’m still a fan. But these days, I expect more. And I’ll keep saying so, until it’s not necessary anymore.

Gal Gadot And The Hope Of Jewish Representation

June 8, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Criticism, Film, Geek Culture, Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

Candles hold a special place in my heart. In my mind, they’re a symbol of serenity, peace, focus, and prayer. They’ve stood as a testament to the flame one holds in their heart for a connection to the divine since I was a little girl. For as far back as I can remember, my mother would stand before the candles on Friday night, her hair covered and face solemn, as she covered her eyes and recited the blessing to invite the Shabbat into our home. I remember standing with her, or in the home of a friend on Friday night, all the women standing before the candles, covering their eyes to say the prayer.

‘Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.’

‘Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light Shabbat candle[s].’

The blessing of the Shabbat candles has stood out to me as one of the most humble, beautiful, and soulful practices of the Jewish faith. It ties Jewish women to a tradition meant for us alone, a task meant to usher in the twenty-six hours from Friday to Saturday evening when the family dedicates themselves to take time and rest, just as God supposedly did after the six days of creation. I grew up knowing that Jewish women for generations, going back into time immemorial, have been standing before similar candles the world over on Friday nights, putting their hands over their eyes to welcome in the Shabbat every week. I remember standing with my mother to learn how to say the prayer, covering my hair just like her, knowing I was a part of a long chain of tradition, held by the light of the candles and my faith.

It’s been years since I was what you’d consider very religious, but the ceremony of lighting Shabbat candles has stayed with me. It’s so important in fact that I chose to write a Larp about it for my contribution to the War Birds anthology by Unruly Games. Keeping the Candles Lit tried to capture not only the importance of traditions like the Shabbat candles, but the relationship of passing those traditions down from one generation of Jewish women to another. I tried to capture that importance, that beauty, when explaining it to non-Jewish players, or even my non-Jewish friends.

And every time, I wasn’t sure I could. The practice couldn’t have the same meaning, and most of my friends had no cultural context, no experience with the practices I grew up with. And that was normally okay: I love the diversity of the people I know, how we come from such disparate backgrounds. But every once in a while, I wished my closest friends could understand that feeling the candles inspired in me, and understand my culture with the same familiarity I’ve been forced to understand Christian culture.

Living Jewish In A Christian World

By virtue of living in a predominantly Christian oriented society, I’ve become intimately familiar with the trappings of the religion. It dominates popular culture, the iconography of everything from our holidays to stores in which I shop. I know the story of Christmas and all the songs as they’re blasted over the airwaves every year, every year getting earlier and earlier. I know the story of Jesus, of the Apostles. I know about some of the saints, how they go marching in, and the difference between different Christian groups. I hear conservatives scream about wars on Christmas and how Christian values in America are being challenged every day. And I snort, because I was at least raised to believe America was a land for all, not one with an official religion.

I also grew up being told to keep my head down when I tried to voice those ideas. My grandmother once told me one Shabbat, “Non-Jews won’t want to hear that from you. They’ll put up with it, with you, but don’t forget – they don’t understand.”

I remembered that lesson as I grew up, and watched every game, every TV show, every movie, and its implicit western Christian bias. Its morals baked into every piece of art, every bit of our society. I remember wishing I could share my favorite music growing up with my non-Jewish friends, and realizing they wouldn’t understand a lick of it. I remember realizing when I heard music and it talked about faith, or God, or losing their religion, they weren’t talking about my faith. The icons were always of a man with his arms spread out, a lonely look on his face.

I remember being confused and a little heartbroken when I was told The Chronicles of Narnia was a Christian story and Aslan, one of my favorite characters, was really Jesus. I remember the Jewish holiday of Purim being called “the Jewish Halloween,” as if that represented the beautiful tradition at all. I remember being told The Ten Commandments was an Easter story, even it was literally the story of Passover being shown over that very holiday.

ten_commandments-moses — Literally where the holiday comes from, folks. Moses did this, and we walked through some water, ate some really dry matzah and got away from that pesky Pharaoh.

Most of all, I remember the Shabbat and lighting the candles, and realizing so few people even understood what the Shabbat really was. And this was among those people I knew, forget about in the media.

And then, there were the exceptions. The beautiful, beautiful exceptions.

Finding Your Heroes

Claudia Christian playing Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, who lit the Channukah candles and sat shiva for her father, all while being a commander on a 23rd century space station.

Felicity Smoak on Arrow answering her friends asking what she was doing on Christmas with, “Celebrating Channukah” and sharing cultural understanding with Ragman, a gay Jewish boy wearing an ancient, nigh sentient Egyptian burial shroud.

Rufus on Supernatural telling Bobby Singer he couldn’t dig up a dead body yet, because it was still the Shabbat. (Okay, and maybe taking advantage just so he wouldn’t have to dig).

Jews — **Chanukah shared by many of Marvel Comics’ most famous Jewish characters including The Thing, Shadowcat, Sasquatch, Songbird, Wiccan, and Moon Knight.**

Kitty Pryde in the X-Men wearing a Star of David and proudly declaring herself Jewish, comparing the discrimination against mutants with the discrimination faced by Jews.

Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, standing tall and villainous against the bigotry that ended his family’s lives so long ago.

Willow Rosenberg on Buffy straddling the line between growing up Jewish and embracing the Wiccan inside to become one of the most powerful magic users in the Buffyverse.

And yet these were characters on TV shows and in comics, amazing and affirming as they were. I was looking for real life media figures who could tell me that Hollywood wasn’t just full of stereotypes of Jews. We weren’t all Woody Allen or Barbara Streisand. We weren’t comedians and nerdy people, known for lack of athleticism and a cynical, dry wit. We weren’t The Nanny and Annie Hall. I kept looking for more Ivanovas, more Felicitys, more Willows. I found Natalie Portman and discovered Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan were both Jewish. With some Googling, I found a list of Hollywood actresses who were Jewish.

And yet, in their interviews, in press junkets, I didn’t hear anything about their identities. While other celebrities thanked Jesus non-stop, I didn’t hear anything so outward about these women. In the age of social media and celebrity openness to the world, these women’s media image was so devoid of anything indicating they were Jewish I had to go Googling to find notable Jewish women in Hollywood. And that was okay, because their choices were their right, and their right to privacy was absolutely valid. But still, in a world saturated by the Christian identity, I yearned for something I could identify with.

And then, I saw an Instagram photo of Gal Gadot.

Representation Matters

In the photo, she stood in front of a pair of candles along with her little girl. Both of their hair was covered as they prayed before a pair of Shabbat candles.

Gal Gadot, who would be Wonder Woman.

They say representation matters in media. They say it’s important for people to be able to see those who look like them in the media. For a Jew, that issue can be a complex one, as many Jews of Eastern European descent largely blend into the overall white population. And though Jews were not considered as white until very late in the US and world history (we’re talking somewhere between the 1940’s and the 1970’s), we receive the same advantages in many ways as those who are perceived as white by the population at large.

Instead, Jews face different oppression based on our religious backgrounds, called anti-semitism, which has remained a constant and insidious form of discrimination throughout history. But at the end of the day, those Jews of largely Ashkenazi descent (meaning those whose ancestors migrated during the Jewish diaspora to Europe and got way, way pastier than our brethren who settled elsewhere) are perceived as and grouped into being white, with all the baggage and privilege and advantage that comes with it.

Still. Representation matters. And we all want to see someone in our media who is like us. As a little Jewish girl, I wanted to see characters in things who were Jewish. I cheered when I found out there was an Israeli-Jewish super hero in Marvel Comics called Sabra, a kickass woman super-soldier who defended Israel against her enemies. I worshiped the character of Susan Ivanova as a model for a strong Jewish woman on television. And I looked for actresses who showed me you could be Jewish and be a media star and still have a proud, public relationship with your culture.

And then that photo. Gal Gadot, in front of the candles, with her daughter.

Gadot’s Jewish Identity And Controversy

I remember my eyes filling with tears as I read a quote from Gadot, stating:

“I was brought up in a very Jewish, Israeli family environment, so of course my heritage is very important to me,” she said in an interview with Totally Jewish. “I want people to have a good impression of Israel. I don’t feel like I’m an ambassador for my country, but I do talk about Israel a lot — I enjoy telling people about where I come from and my religion.”

Here was an Israeli-born woman of Ashkenazi descent (her family was from Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria), who was proud of her heritage. She spoke openly about her religion, her culture, her home. And yes, that included speaking up about Israel and her feelings about the politics there. That has drawn heat from many pro-Palestinian groups, including BDS, who have called her out for supporting the military actions of her home country and for serving in the Israeli military.

(I would point out that military service in Israel is mandatory at the age of eighteen for everyone who is able. Gal served her two years as a fitness instructor, teaching gymnastics and calisthenics).

Many have called for boycotts of the Wonder Woman movie because of her pride in her homeland. Many have pointed to the Wonder Woman movie as being fairly white washed and lacking in diverse representation. And while those issues are very, very valid (I’ll point to this article expressing some very serious issues about the lack of or poor representation of women of color throughout the film), I’ll point out there is one minority who did get to be represented in Wonder Woman in a real and fantastic way.

Shattering Records and Expectations

You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed it, but Wonder Woman has defied the Hollywood trend of bad women-led comic book films. It has come away with critical acclaim and a massive fan response. And it has catapulted Gal Gadot from little known actress into a household name all in the span of a few weeks. This insta-fame has brought much of the aforementioned controversy into the limelight. And though I’m all for discussing political questions and issues of representation, I’ve had a foul taste in my mouth when looking at the way Gal Gadot’s actions and media presence has been scrutinized. In the end, the only thing people have been able to find to diss her portrayal is that she served her country as a soldier in mandatory service, that she looked like a model, and that she is part of a film which has sadly stereotyped people of color and other nationalities.

And while I acknowledge all those issues as valid to discuss, I also acknowledge that a film can have problematic issues and still have a supremely important contribution to the representation of another group. In this case, Jewish women. And that contribution is profound and important and cannot be ignored.

Because somewhere, there are little Jewish girls able to point to Gal Gadot in her tiara and silver bracelets, holding her sword and shield and lasso, and say there, there is our Jewish warrior, there is the ashet chayil (in Hebrew a “woman of valor”) we sing about every Shabbat. There is a powerful feminist actress who is proud of her heritage, passing down our traditions to her own daughter, who trained to fight and did her own stunts in both Wonder Woman and the Fast and the Furious franchise. Here was a woman who is proud of her heritage and who is representing our people, an often forgotten minority group, as one of the world’s most recognizable and lauded super heroines in a film that has shattered movie release records in its opening week.

Wonder Woman is a hit, and Wonder Woman’s actress is Jewish. My inner little girl is so proud I can barely express it. Because when I point to the screen during Wonder Woman, I can say now: see, see there, we aren’t all the yente and the nag, the funny girl and the nerdy weakling, the shady lawyer and money grubbing business person, the Jewish American princess and homely intellectual. We aren’t the hidden, overlooked group, our celebrities laughed at when they go to a Kabbalah Center or talk about their kosher cooking in public. See, in that woman, an ashet chayil at last, a proud, powerful woman, standing tall on the screen.

And somewhere, little girls can see that and believe they can be proud Jews, standing tall to be whatever they want to be while still being part of the traditions of our people. Representation matters to Jews too, and Gal Gadot has given us that representation, complicated as it might be in terms of politics and other problems with the film. And from everything we have seen in the media she is a positive role model both as Princess Diana and in her own life, a true ashet chayil in so many ways.

I am proud to be around to see my comic book idol played by such a woman of valor. Because I’ve finally seen representation that gives me hope that we Jewish women can be seen, really seen, in all our facets and strengths and traditions at last.

And all it took was one Instragram photo to instill that hope, that pride in me too.

Yes, HYDRA were Nazis and No, I Will Not Forget It

May 29, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Geek Culture, Uncategorized

[[Spoilers ahead for Captain America: Steve Rogers #1]]

So apparently, Captain America is a HYDRA agent now. And everyone seems intent on telling me how I should or shouldn’t feel about it.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. Captain America, the star-spangled hero that’s graced the comics since the 1940’s, has had a rough time of it in recent years. First, Cap got aged to an older man thanks to some shenanigans, and had to retire from being Cap. Steve Rogers handed the shield to his friend Sam Wilson aka Falcon. For a time he became the head of SHIELD and even went on to still try to be cap, even in his elder years. But events in the comics recently gave him back his vitality and youth, and he took the name Captain America again to kick some Hydra ass.

Except it turns out, thanks to the new comic Captain America: Steve Rogers, that Cap isn’t the Hydra ass kicker we thought. You see, according to the first issue written by Nick Spencer, Captain America is apparently a Hydra agent.

captain-america-steve-rogers-1-marvel — “There’s also no Santa Claus.”

Now, I know what you’re going to say. “But it’s a comic book! There’s clearly some mind control going on, or reality changing, or whatever nonsense is going on. This is a gimmick, a ploy to sell first issues!” And yes, all these things may be true. Cap’s youth was returned by an incarnated cosmic cube named Kubiq, and that may account for the odd changes to Cap. But it isn’t just the modern Cap that’s apparently jumped on the squid-faced bandwagon. No, Captain America #1 has a flashback sequence through the book that shows little Steve Rogers with his mother when she’s rescued from her drunk, abusive husband by a woman who radicalizes her into Hydra. The indication then is that not only is Cap a Hydra agent, but he has been for a very, very long time.

The first issue of this Spencer run landed on shelves with a proverbial bang in a week when Marvel needed to score serious press attention. DC was launching the rebrand of their entire company through their event Rebirth and might have otherwise dominated the news cycle. But thanks to this huge heel turn, Marvel drowned out DC’s launch in a big way. And of course they did. Because the hero of America has become the vehicle of a fascist organization, a tool of everything he ever fought against. So, the internet went nuts.

The fan response has been, to my eyes, almost completely negative. A great example of the responses I’ve seen comes from TC Curly, a friend of mine, who said:

I wouldn’t mind a marvel character heel turn, but having cap join hydra is like having aqua man join the Aryan nation. It’s bizarre, It’s drastic, and it just feels really dirty.

Even Chris Evans, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Captain America himself, got in on the concern about the recent reversal, stating on Twitter:

There’s been quite a lot of articles about how this is a desecration of everything that Captain America stands for. Plenty more are talking about how this is a gimmick that will just be reversed, although Time magazine’s interview with Cap’s creative team basically says it’s not. Still others point out, rightly so, that having Cap turn into an agent of an organization that were associated heavily and born in the comics from the Nazis is spitting in the face of the origins of the character. Specifically, Captain America was written by two Jewish men, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. And now, he’s being retroactively written as being a tool of the regime that supported Hitler’s Nazi regime.

And this is where the conversation online has taken an interesting turn. Because while there are thoughtful articles pointing out the problem with associating Cap with Nazis, other articles have taken the time to distance Hydra as an organization from the Nazis and their activities. Specifically, they point to the origins of Hydra in fascism across the globe rather than in the Nazis in specific. And it’s this attempt to bend over backwards to save face for the Spencer storyline that’s got me frustrated and a little angry.

Like this new storyline or not, the Spencer storyline has given people a chance to discuss a really difficult situation: the use of Nazis in a major plot arch through Marvel comics. Like it or not, Hydra was introduced as a major fascist bad guy faction that had its start associated heavily with the Nazis. One only needs to think hard about the very first major HYDRA bad guys and the first one that probably pops to mind would be The Red Skull. Who, in the comics, looked early on a lot like this:

Yup, that’s pretty blatant there. Swastika and all. Nazi.

3750327-img_8254 — That armband ain’t just a fashion accessory.

Then there’s Baron Von Strucker, a major Aryan ‘purity of races’ kind of guy who was a major part of HYDRA for years. While comics tried to back-track away from Von Strucker’s Nazi associations too over the years and dropped a bunch of his white-power motivations, the guy still sported the ol’ red armband for a long while.

Over the years, Hydra did branch out to back other fascist regimes worldwide in the comics, but a huge part of their past remains with the Nazis. Red Skull remained that swastika wearing presence in the comics, a constant reminder of the genocidal birthplace of the group in comics. Later writers tried to back Hydra away from the Nazis too, but the presence of them in Hydra’s past remains. And while the Marvel Cinematic Universe worked hard follow that distancing tactic, going as far as having Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull give a diatribe about how Hydra was only using the Nazis in Captain America: The First Avenger, that cannot divorce the history of the Nazi’s fictionalized presence in the comic book organization.

[[On another note, the MCU doesn’t always separate the Nazis from HYDRA so much. Agents of SHIELD bad guy Daniel Whitehall actually was a Nazi scientist named Rinehart who experimented and dissected people on the show. All while looking like this.

Daniel_Whitehall_Marvel — “I just got this Iron Cross from a re-enactment event weekend. Really!”

Still questioning whether Hydra is associated with Nazis? No? Me neither.]]

Apparently people can try. Because articles are taking their time now to do so, making it very clear that Hydra is more than just Nazis. But why now? Why have this in-depth discussion about how these genocidal, world-dominating, fascist-supporting aren’t really Nazis now? Because Captain America is now being associated with Nazis. And if they can’t deny the storyline is happening, then at least they’ll deny that the organization is that bad.

It’s this hair-splitting that is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Guys, Hydra were Nazis. Red Skull was this guy for years. This guy. Right here.

And instead of just accepting that Marvel is associating our star-spangled hero with the Nazis, people are bending over backwards to explain how its not that bad and mincing whether or not Hydra itself is Nazis. That might be even more insulting to me than what’s going on with Cap. People are having legitimate emotional responses to seeing their beloved hero becoming a Hydra agent. Some of those reactions have to do with the horror of seeing Captain America be associated with the Nazis. For Jews especially, it smacks of an emotional ignorance about the hero Cap was to those who look back at WWII and see the specter of the Nazi holocaust overshadowing their families.

Plenty of folks are having legitimate emotional reactions and saying no, it’s not okay. Instead of acknowledging that emotional response and how it might be insensitive to Jewish readers, people are in a rush to say “They aren’t Nazis! You’re over-conflating it!” It’s comic-splaining at its best and bordering on gaslighting. “You’re seeing Nazis where they aren’t!”

Ahem. Really? So that swastika is just a tibetan good luck symbol on Red Skull there, huh?

This response smacks of so many cases of people white-washing and ignoring the legitimate concerns of Jews over representation and insensitive treatment that it infuriates me. While I don’t necessarily think the situation is anti-semetic exactly, it feels careless in its consideration of how this plotline might impact those for whom Nazis have a more personal hatred.

I remember showing my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, Captain America in the comics when I was younger. I told her in the comics that he first showed up punching Hitler in the face. I remember her laughing and shaking her head at it, in this kind of bitter way. I wonder if she thought how funny wish fulfillment art is, though I never asked her how it made her feel. I wonder now how this comic would make her feel, seeing Cap turned to the dark side. Mostly, I wonder how all these “well, actually…” articles about Hydra would make her feel. “Well, actually they’re not Nazis. They just wore swastikas and supported Hitler’s actions in World War II before moving on to be fascists elsewhere. But they’re totally not Nazis themselves. Really!”

822279-dark_future003 — Yup. No Nazis here.

My grandmother passed away when I was sixteen, so she’s not here to ask how she feels. But I know how I feel about the Captain America thing. I’m going to keep reading so I can see where Nick Spencer and the Cap team is going with this plot. But mainly, I know how I feel about these articles trying to drive away any feelings of discomfort by Jewish readers by comic-splaining away the Nazis. As opposed to listening to those fans’ feelings with compassion and understanding, people would rather we shut up and stop associating Cap with one of the most genocidal groups of all time.

Funny, I would like to stop associating him with them too. Only now, thanks to the comics, I can’t. So let me have my feelings, thanks, without explaining to me why I should sit down and be quiet about it. My comic nerd rage is valid too, especially when it’s fueled by personal history and real-world religious bigotries.

LARP Traveller Diaries: Just Fly

May 17, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Geek Culture, LARP Discussion and Theory, LARP Traveller Diaries, Uncategorized

Hello blog readers! It’s your old friend Shoshana Kessock returned to her website from a long hiatus away from blog writing. I’ve had a lot of projects on my plate keeping me away (which I’ll cover in another post) but right now I’m debuting this brand new idea I’ve had for organizing the thoughts that I toss out there into the internet-world.

A while back I came up with a heading system for the blog, with a series of posts called Not Ready To Make Nice about issues I wanted to speak about. Well, here’s the second heading, called LARP Traveller Diaries. Here I’ll toss out some ideas about LARPing and experiences I’ve had at conventions and games wherever I find them. I’ll share thoughts on individual games, experiences, and larp theory that comes up in my head.

We’re going to start right off the bat with my first post of the series. Let’s dive in!

Calendar fragment with half-opened sheets in different angles — “I can schedule a freak-out five days from Sunday.”

I have a crazy looking calendar. These days with a lot going on, I schedule my life down to the hour sometimes. 8AM wake-up, groan for ten minutes about waking up, medication self-care time, up to breakfast, on to work, etc. As someone who used to be very willy-nilly about their time management, I learned the uses of scheduling and it’s improved my appreciation for my time and everyone else’s. Scheduling taught me the value of a little preparation giving me the jump on all the things I want to do in my life.

So it’s a little surprising even to me that when it comes to going to LARP events, I like to approach things completely the opposite.

I enjoy going to big event LARPs, the Nordic or Nordic-inspired LARPs that provide big budget experiences for one weekend. They’re the equivalent to me of going to a five-star restaurant as opposed to going to a favorite joint or cooking at home. With these big-budget LARPs costing a pretty penny, most people will only go to one or two in a long while, and the LARP becomes a major experience. It becomes an event that I look forward to on my calendar, the weekend when I go and immerse myself in a weekend of BIG LARP FUN. And of course, other folks start to get excited too. Months in advance people online are talking about the game, getting hype for the fun we’ll have.

And then… then for me comes the anxiety. See, for me, hype can go over the line from fun to anxiety.

I recently signed up to play New World Magischola, the wizards-and-wands Harry Potter-inspired American LARP created after the monumental success of College of Wizardry in Europe. The company behind NWM, Learn LARP, has worked diligently to create a hell of an experience, and for months in advance there’s been Facebook groups, applications to fill out, and character connections to make. There’s not a single day I’m not waking up to a new message about the event on Facebook, especially as the game date approaches. At first, the messages helped build up excitement in me. Everyone else is so into this, I said, it’s going to be great! I saw players I knew from LARP communities around the world were signed up for my weekend, and I started to read more about the setting, the costumes. I got picked to play a professor, and I was jazzed to bring my brand of Magical Ethics class to the unsuspecting students, mwahahahaha.

1414833290132_wps_10_Film_Harry_Potter_And_The — Not this evil. I promise. Really. Don’t be afraid.

But as time went on, and there were more and more posts, I found myself falling behind. I’d recently got a new job with John Wick Presents writing full-time and I was working on a myriad of other creative projects including my own LARPs. I cut down on the time I spent on Facebook and focused on work and friends. Then, when I had time, I’d check in on the NWM prep, only to find so much information I’d already missed. People were playing scenes online, plotting previous character relationships that lasted years. I started to get a creeping feeling in my stomach: was I going to be unprepared for game? Was I going to come in at a disadvantage?

I started to feel like I was actually a kid heading to a new school for the first time.

Nobody wants to be the kid who forgets their homework, or the kid who doesn’t have a place to sit at lunch because everyone’s already with their friends. And nobody wants to be the LARPer who travels to a brand new game only to find everyone’s already buddies and you’re on the outside, looking in at the fun. As time went on, the New LARP Butterflies started to kick in.

It’s about then that I instituted my handy-dandy anxiety-busting New LARP rule list.

Was I excited about the game? Yes.
Did I like the premise? Yes.
Did I have any concerns about the safety of the game? No.
Was the game accessible to me? Yes.
Did I have any other conflicts that would make me concerned about my experience? No.

With these questions answered, I instituted Emergency Anti-Larp-Anxieties Answer #1:

Just Fly.

The quote comes from the first Christopher Reeves movie, when Superman catches a distressed plane in his very first heroic act. The co-pilot is freaking out trying to figure out what’s going on, how they’re not crashing, wants to know all the details. The pilot, who spotted Superman under the wing, can barely believe what’s going on. But he’s not going to look a gift flying-man in the mouth and tells the co-pilot, “Fly. Just… fly.”

LARP anxiety, especially in new groups, I believe is rooted in the old performance anxiety with a dash of first day at a new school-itis. You don’t know what to expect, not only from the game setting and mechanics or from your own roleplay, but you don’t know how you’ll interact with those around you. Will they accept me? Will I have a good time in this new place? Is it going to be worth all the work I’ve put in? Will I be disappointed?

It’s been my experience that disappointment usually occurs when reality and expectations don’t meet. When the hopes I’ve had about a LARP experience don’t mesh with what actually goes on in game, I walk out with a sense that something was missing. Except perhaps there was nothing missing at all! Maybe I just wanted one thing and got something that was equally awesome, but I was so busy worrying about what I wanted that I didn’t embrace what I had. Planning before a LARP for me then becomes a series of ways to set expectations which then distract me from what happens, right then, in the moment. It makes the game about what will be, instead of what is during play.

I had this issue during College of Wizardry and I wrote a lot about it in my article about how LARP can turn you into an asshole. A lot of my difficulty with College of Wizardry is because the adventure of the weekend didn’t meet my rosy-cheeked optimism of playing in a Harry Potter world. I wanted to be the plucky heroine, and ended up playing the kid who got picked last for dodgeball. Instead of embracing the play right then, I got stuck on what I’d prepared for and thought of and worked for before game. I questioned whether if I’d prepped more, played more scenes with others, built more relationships, if I wouldn’t have had a better time. In the end, I recognized that it was expectation that had soured my experience, and that’s where my rules of New LARP were born.

cow3 — It’s understandable. I mean, admit it: we all want to be Harry Potter. Above: The minute you realize you are not the LARP protagonist.

I’m going to New World Magischola with just enough prep in place to be comfortable. I have to prep lesson plans, sure, because I’m faculty. I’m going to talk to a few people about how we know one another in advance. But that’s about it. I’m going to read the game document. I’m going to chat online a little. But otherwise I’m approaching play with a “Just Fly” attitude. I’m shucking any comparisons to College of Wizardry because this game is its own creature, and I don’t want to set false expectations by equating the two falsely.

I’m just going to go to New World Magischola and be Thessaly Kane, professor. I’ll show up and I have no idea what’s going to happen. None at all!

And that’s okay. In fact, that’s great for me.

Because otherwise, I turn into THIS.

stressed-about-wedding-planning — Except maybe a little less put together.

Now for some people, the “Just Fly” attitude makes them anxious. Showing up this way makes them feel unprepared and nervous, so prep helps them. That’s cool. As a friend says, you do you, boo. As long as there’s room for both our prep styles, we can both have a kickass time at the game. As long as there’s no expectation that you HAVE TO prepare so much in advance. That one is better than the other. And nowhere have I encountered anyone saying you have to do tons of preparation for New World Magischola. When we arrive game day, we’re all equal in the eyes of the LARP gods, ready to have a kickass weekend.

New World Magischola is coming up in June, and I’m ready to fly. But in the meantime, I got other stuff to do. I’ll pack my bags maybe a day before I get in the car. I ordered a couple of new props and read the rules. And I’m chatting online a little. But otherwise, game will happen for me at game. I’ll come in a blank slate, ready for whatever comes. And that’s what makes me a happy LARPer. Everyone else should do what makes them happy LARPers too, and it’s going to be a great game. As long as we all remember: nobody’s way is better. We all prep for our fun in different ways.

Besides, we all have one worry we can all agree on anyway: how am I going to pack all this stuff for game?!

431019_783250233253_2048161822_n — “Just one more bag, guys, I promise!”

Ah well, some LARP worries can’t be solved by cool movie quotes. But one problem at a time.

The Black Widow Controversy, Criticism, And How We Are Failing Our Creators

May 6, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Film, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

It’s getting harder every day to be a creator in the age of the internet.

It’s never been an easy thing to put your work out in public, at least not for most people I know. Sure, maybe there’s some folks out there, funny humans with indomitable wills and stomachs of iron, who aren’t petrified by the notion of getting their work in front of an audience. Maybe there are some folks who don’t publish a piece of work, or a blog post, and get that tightness in their tummies, that shortness of breath, that little flop sweat that says, “Please, this is my work, don’t judge it too harshly.” Most people I’ve ever spoken to have some degree of anxiety sharing what they’ve created though, and never has it been harder than in the age of the internet.

Over the last few years, however, it seems like more than ever sharing your work with the world has become a minefield. Put something out for public consumption and be prepared for a tidal wave of backlash, ranging from cutting comments and blog posts to threats of violence and rape. Take a moment to process that. A person creating something today needs to be worried about threats of violence ranging from beatings to home invasion, rape to swatting. They can be doxxed and have bomb threats sent against them. We’re a hell of a distance away from someone throwing a rotten tomato.

Take this week’s latest controversy. Avengers: Age of Ultron debuted this past weekend to stellar numbers in the box office. The movie was a huge success financially, but received some critical responses regarding its pacing and the coherence of some parts of the plot. Overwhelmingly, however, the biggest noise about the film has been regarding the treatment of its heroine, Black Widow.

Critics and fans of the film were vocal about the way the MCU’s biggest heroine at the moment was relegated to the role of love interest opposite Bruce Banner in the film as part of her personal subplot. While other members of the Avengers explored complex issues of guilt and past mistakes through flashbacks and interactions with one another, Natasha was given the love plot as her major character development throughout the film and issues with mommyhood instead. When she was also kidnapped by the villain halfway through the film and turned into a damsel in distress (albeit briefly), this raised the eyebrow of some fans. Those criticisms, along with Marvel’s unwillingness to support the women of Marvel with any action figures or merchandise of the women characters in the film, build a solid backbone for a conversation about Marvel’s difficulty understanding or serving its women characters and therefore their fans.

evansrenner — Correct face, Chris Evans. Not funny.

All of these, in my opinion, are valid criticisms. A discussion in my eyes ought to be had about the necessity of these plot points included in the film, and the inherent issue that comes from every film pigeon-holing their main woman character as a love interest or sex object. I think there’s validity to fans getting angry over casual comments by actor Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans when, during an interview about the film, they called Black Widow a “slut” and a “whore.” (Renner later doubled down on the mess after Evans apologized, which was even worse). I think its all indicative of a way that women characters are seen in Hollywood and within comic book films, and that there is a real discussion to be had about how to tackle diversification of roles for women in the action film genre. All of these are thoughts I’ve had, that I support, and I’d love to explore further.

What I do not support is threats. Which is not something I should have to say, it’s kind of obvious.

Joss Whedon, director of Age of Ultron, faced a firestorm on Twitter that included threats of beatings and murder for the way he portrayed Black Widow in the film. Though the fact is the film went through revisions based on input from Hollywood execs and worked around Black Widow’s pregnancy, despite the fact that Whedon doesn’t control all the aspects of the film, Whedon became the face of the anger many fans felt over Black Widow’s portrayal, and they got aggressive. Articles published streams of Tweets (many since deleted) aimed at Whedon threatening to “beat his ass” for the direction of the film.

It’s not like this is anything new. We live in a world today when creators can be the targets of the worst kind of hate when consumers disagree with their work. This has become especially true when issues of social justice are involved, or when those creators or speakers are people from marginalized backgrounds. Anita Sarkeesian has received years now of the worst kind of hatred because of her work on Feminist Frequency and her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games web series. Women game developers like Brianna Wu have been targeted by this kind of harassment for the inclusion of more diverse content in their material at the hands of the Gamergate movement. This hate movement has spread to other parts of the geek media world where fiction authors, comic creators, and television creators have received harassment for their work as well.

The list of those affected include those on both sides of issues, from progressives to conservatives. The stances may be different but the tactics are the same. And while I do not believe in the equivalency of ideas (meaning, I do believe that in some arguments one side is more right than the other), I believe that the kind of harassment and bullying creators now face online has got to stop.

Why should it stop? We can start from the top by saying because it’s just wrong!

There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. Harassment of another person, on the internet or otherwise, is just wrong. You can have differences of opinions all you like, but the moment you threaten another person with violence, the moment that you step over the line into belligerent bullying behavior, you are now at best a vulgar nuisance and at worst a criminal. You become part of the screaming mass of people on the internet who believe that anonymity behind a keyboard makes them powerful and drives them to say anything they wish, believing there are no repercussions. Let me say it one more time: Harassment on the internet for any reason is wrong. End of line, no further discussion needed, period.

But okay, maybe there’s one more reason why this needs to stop. And that’s because of the state of criticism itself in the world.

The arts and criticism have always had a tense, contentious relationship to begin with. Artists would live in mortal fear of waking up to read bad reviews of their plays or art shows or books. People would sniff and make snide comments about how “those who can’t create become critics.” As someone who is both an artist and a critic, I’ll tell you that’s bullshit. Sure, anyone can sit down behind a computer screen and type out a screed about how they hated a piece of television. But there are people who actively study media, the history and execution and presentation and social context, and who are capable of presenting valid media criticism from a place of education and experience.

I went to school and got my degree in film studies so that I could produce not only better works of art in the future based on knowledge I gleaned from studying film as a medium, but also so I would have context for criticism I provided. True criticism isn’t about simply emotional response but contextual understanding of an art form, of the society in which it is created and the manner by which it is executed. It takes understanding and in depth consideration. It does not, however, require high-brow consumption and snooty reviews. And it certainly doesn’t require threats.

The era of mass threats to creators, however, has begun to drown out real criticism in the field. Creators can’t hear legitimate conversation when inundated with a barrage of hate-filled noise, and that kind of ratio of good critical content to nightmarish abuse can make a person shut down to any input. Criticism serves a purpose, folks: to respond to media, discuss ideas put forward, and help creators learn from their work and perhaps improve or choose differently in the future. It is not meant as an opportunity to abuse those who have put their hearts into their work, no matter how much you dislike or disagree with them. Hate filled terrorizing of creators is counterproductive and shows no respect for them as a producer of content or as human beings. It also defeats the purpose of trying to get yourself heard, because you won’t be. And neither will anyone else.

What suffers alongside our creators at the hands of these hate mobs is our ability to have discourse about anything relevant. Issues of representation, content, or execution are pushed to the wayside, drowned out by the threats of beatings, the instances of doxxings and swattings, and the bomb and death threats. You have creators afraid to put their work forward, for fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones. Their creative cycles are eaten up by the stress of dealing with such hate-filled sound, and their inability to engage with their fans is damaged. And our world becomes just a little less capable of learning from one another in an age when we are so much more capable of reaching one another then ever before.

We are not bystanders in this issue. Everyone who is a fan, who reads or posts commentary online, who engages in social media, is complicit in this ecology of hatefulness, if not as contributors then as witnesses. We say “don’t feed the trolls” or “don’t read the comments,” telling us to keep our heads down, don’t encourage them, and maybe they’ll go away. But the fact is, they don’t, and the silence only encourages a lack of repercussions and an allowance for bad behavior to continue. By staying silent when we see such behavior, we are allowing ourselves to stay safe while our creators twist in the wind and endure these hate-filled tidal waves alone. We don’t want to attract the attention of the mob, so we hope if we ignore it, it’ll go away. It won’t. They won’t.

You may not have the bandwidth in your life to always engage. I’m not saying you should all the time. That’s how burnout occurs, how you get consumed by the hatefulness and negativity that surges around the internet these days. What I’m suggesting is that we must all take little steps, as we see fit, to combat this environment of hatred. We may not agree with the ideas or creations we fight over, but we can at least agree that threats of violence and hate-mobs against someone are wrong. Right folks? Right? I sincerely hope so.

This Isn’t Your Community, Gamergate, It’s Ours

October 17, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Geek Culture, Speaking Out

Tonight, I want to write about Gamergate.

Actually, let me be clear. I don’t really want to write about Gamergate. I wish I’d never heard the term. I wish we could get in an epic Doctor Who TARDIS the size of the planet and go back to before two months ago (by god it’s been that long already) when all this madness started. If that’s when it started. Some folks say the Gamergate controversy was just brewing, waiting in the wings for an incendiary incident to drag all those feelings of misogyny and rage and resentment to the surface. I personally agree, that there’s been a lot of awful beneath the surface as the gaming community goes through its adolescent growing pains. As it grows from a haven for interactive technology, play, and those who sought to turn that into an identity, gaming has come to mean a lot of different things. And now, Gamergate has become that bone-rattling clash of cultures as what was once a subculture rockets towards the mainstream and the intrenched majority suffers from change-shock.

I’m not going to rehash the discussions about Gamergate here. There’s been a dozen analyses done by gamers, game scholars, thinkers, news mediums, and even cable news networks. The mainstream media has caught on and if you want to go through the entire history of this debacle, there’s plenty of timelines to catch you up. I would suggest this article talking about the knee-jerk rage of movements and even my own discussion about the decrying of the term gamer from a few weeks back. I’d also suggest this brilliant take-down by Brianna Wu, who went on HuffPo Live after she was threatened out of her home, where she takes on the so-called issues of Gamergate. But in talking about Gamergate, reading about it, seeing it go on for so long, I’ve become full up on it, saturated to the gills. I realized upon trying to write about Gamergate today that I don’t know what else needed to be said. It had been analyzed in relation to the Men’s Rights Movement, defended as a reactionary movement based on fear of change and deconstructed on the front page of the New York Times. The Verge has practically been camping out on the issue. Compared to all that, what else do I have to say?

Something. I need to say something. To get out of my system the feelings rising up whenever Gamergate is discussed. Whenever I see some ridiculous tweet or the comments section rebuttals to articles. Or worse, when I see a friend stand up and defend gamer-gaters as part of our gaming community. There is a feeling that goes full circle, back to the fundamnetal issue that most Gamergaters seem to ignore.

Guess what? I’m against the Gamergate movement and I’m a gamer too.

I’m a gamer. I’ve been one since I was old enough to have a gaming console, since I got my first computer, since I played Mortal Kombat in arcades and played online roleplaying games in chat rooms. I made gaming my business and loved every second of it. Still do. I call myself a gamer, proudly. I’ve been a gamer for twenty years and in half dozen different mediums. I don’t need to spit my cred and I don’t cred check others. I don’t decry the title or say that now is the end of gamers. I share my community proudly and speak loud and proud about my love for games.

But I am also a woman, and until recently, the tension between those two parts of my identity- that of being a woman and that of the community I love- were always at odds. For every ten great experiences in the community, there were awful moments. There were feelings of exclusion, of ridicule. There were moments of outright harassment and earnest moments of terror, of feeling unsafe, of feeling alone. This is not an unusual story. I’ve heard it from gamer women from the video game world to the LARP world, from tabletop RPG conventions to playing in D&D in the home of a friend. So I stand up to be counted with those who speak against inequality, who are demeaned and maligned and called Social Justice Warriors. I laugh like hell when people use that term as an insult because I wear that title proudly. Yeah, what?! I am a Social Justice Warrior. What’s wrong with being a warrior for a cause you care about? I don’t shout at people, I don’t harass. I stand for zero tolerance on bullying and harassment and for representation of all kinds in our community. That’s how I am a gamer, with social consciousness in my mind and happiness in my heart.

Then Gamergate happened. And all that awfulness just under the surface, all that mistreatment and harassment and misogyny that’s been there for years, it comes bubbling up. And because it’s couched in the language of some kind of ‘ethics’ discussion, because it’s hidden behind a supposed defense of the gamer hobby based on ‘assaults’ by those nasty, evil SJWs, then the real disgusting behavior gets marginalized. “Well that’s not us,” says the poor, maligned Gamergater. “We’re here to defend the gaming hobby and talk about journalistic ethics! We’re not about death threats!” And suddenly, they’re an equal part of the conversation. They get an entire segment on HuffPo Live to defend their ‘stance.’

And it makes me furious.

Their stance is built on supporting maligning women. In maligning any critic who stands up for unequal treatment in games. They stand to be counted with harassers – or they did, until the mainstream attention to those threats made them start looking like a lynch mob. Then suddenly, the language changed to “please, listen to us, we’re just misunderstood.”

And I’m just so tired of it. If I could, I’d wish it all gone.

I wish it was back before this pseudo-movement/ consumer revolt/ journalistic integrity thing / hate mob was born. I wish we were back in a time before I knew the name Eron Gjoni, before I knew that boyfriends could be so hateful as to record their relationships and pour them out on the internet to become the springboard for a malicious campaign against a woman designer. I wish we were in a time before I knew what the hell a false flag was, before I knew something called 8chan existed, before I knew they were the folks so bad they got knocked off 4chan. Before I had to learn about sock puppet twitter accounts made to feign actual discourse in an effort to troll. I want to go back to a time when misogyny in the gaming industry didn’t have a movement that got a B-list Hollywood actor like Adam Baldwin to use his social media reach to malign women and perpetuate attacks on social justice.

I wish I didn’t know that this post might attract all kinds of negative responses. I wish I didn’t know that I might get threats. I wish I didn’t know that somewhere, someone might read this and wish me harm.

I wish a lot of things about the gaming world. But right now, I wish this more than anything: I wish I knew what to say with more delicacy about a horror show of consumer superiority complexes and entitlement gone rampant. I wish that I didn’t go online every day and read about another person who has been harassed, about infographs full of half-truths and conspiracy theory language pointing to women in the industry and saying “Hah! I deny your experiences!”

I wish more than anything that I could put up my hands and say, “Jesus Christ, people, we are talking about a community of making games that has room for criticism, that has room for discussion, that has room for evolution of ideas! That has room for a better day where everyone can find themselves represented and respected, not just a target demographic! Where women can feel safe at play and at work within the gaming world! And where you, you over there, you with the angry look on your face and your hashtag full of hate, can accept social justice as a THING without flinging the internet equivalent of monkey shit.”

I wish I could just say: I’m a gamer too, and my opinions are just as valuable and valid as yours. And my opinion is that we need some change up in this community. And you don’t get to say no because this community isn’t yours. It’s ours.

So tonight, I wanted to write about Gamergate but I really wish it didn’t exist. I wish people could find some other way to express their concerns about journalistic integrity, if those are actual issues to be explored, without couching it in a language of hate. And I wish people could see that any actual conversation about issues was long ago tainted by the horror of rape and death threats, by the sad reality of women forced from their homes in fear.

By the real possibility of a goddamn school shooting because a woman criticized video games.

I want to write about Gamergate because there is some horror coming off this upheaval that gets lost in the news stories and the fighting on Twitter. It lies in the cracks between the MSNBC coverage and the New York Times article, the death threats and the IRC chats. It lies in the silence that fills up the minutes when you write a post about games, when you post that Tweet, when you say something on Facebook. It lies in that moment when you wonder, “Is this where someone on my feed comes and tells me I should die? That I should be raped to death? Am I going to be next?”

It comes in the conversations with your friends at IndieCade about who might be targeted next. Or who has been targeted. Who has gotten threats and who got things thrown at them. Who is going to be doxxed and who is afraid to walk alone.

It comes from waking up in a cold sweat in an LA hotel the night before IndieCade, wondering if you’re going to get into a dust-up with someone who read your Twitter account and thinks you should just die.

It comes from wondering if it’s all worth it, in the end. If this community is where I want to be.

Well here’s my answer: Screw that noise. I’m here to stay.

I’m a gamer. I’m a game designer. Brianna Wu stood up and said she is the Godzilla of bitches to those who would take her on. I might not be a kaiju, but I’m a gamer woman. I’ve taken slings and arrows all the damn time since I joined the community. I’m not afraid to be told that I don’t belong here because I’ve ALWAYS been told that. What else is new? So you’ve got Adam Baldwin on your side, Gamergate. I’ve got Chuck Wendig and Joss Whedon, Wil Wheaton and Patton Oswald. I’ve got women like Anita Sarkessian and Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu to look to as examples of women who have continued on after you’ve tried to warp their public image and destroy their lives. I’ve got people whose talent knows no bounds telling me that this is OUR community, ours and not just yours. And there’s a new day coming when maybe I can get on Twitter without hearing about someone I care about getting harassed into hiding.

I’m a gamer woman. I’m here to stay. And that’s all I gotta say about this damn Gamergate.

Gamers, Gatekeepers and the Golden Rule: Gamergate and the Real Ludic Century

September 8, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Geek Culture, Geek Social Fallacies, Speaking Out

I was at lunch the other day with my mother when a woman came by the table. She stopped to say that she loved my t-shirt, which had the Portal-inspired logo for The Mary Sue on it. I thanked her and she hesitated, looked at my mother, before saying, “It’s just terrible about Gamergate. I can’t believe it!” I perked up immediately. Out in the real world, outside of the household of other game designers I live with, I never expected to hear the word Gamergate used aloud. The woman told me upon further prompting that she ‘wasn’t a gamer’ but she’s on the convention circuit and knows people who are. She’s heard about the things that have happened, and she’s disgusted.

While we both nodded knowingly, my mother looked on perplexed. After the woman left, my mother looked up and said, “Gamergate? What are you talking about?”

Then I realized. She didn’t know. She didn’t know that for the last few weeks, along with working, I had dealt with death threats over vocally standing up for Zoe Quinn on Twitter. She didn’t know that women I respected, like Mattie Bryce and Jenn Frank, had quit because of harassment. She didn’t know about any of the insanity that has become Gamergate because my mother isn’t a gamer. To her, it was Thursday. To anyone embroiled in this nonsense, it was Day #Whatever since this craziness began.

In the past few weeks, the gaming community has been under siege, embroiled in an invented scandal that has turned into its own internet movement. It’s called Gamergate, and if you haven’t heard about it, I wish I could say you weren’t missing anything. Because to most of the world, you’re not missing anything. You’re only going about your life while the gaming community goes through some of the most serious growing pains I could have ever imagined. If you aren’t a gamer, or aren’t working in the games industry in some way, then Gamergate is just another strange word to you invented by the internet. But to those people who take these things seriously, who either associate with the gamer community or develop and write about games, Gamergate is nothing less than the catch-all word for a cesspool of rage, lies, and hate that erupted a few weeks back.

I won’t go into a full breakdown of the events of Gamergate, because this article did a fantastic job of it for me. But I will give the basics and go from there. Once upon a time, before we ever knew what the hell a Gamergate was, a jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn (the developer of Depression Quest) decided that it was all right to created a blog to vent his spleen about his break up with Zoe. This guy’s exhaustively long post included insinuations that Zoe Quinn had slept with reviewers and even her boss to receive professional advancement and good reviews for her game. The fact that these reviews did not exist was irrelevant. The fact that this is a typical tactic often employed against women to discredit them, by insinuating that they could not achieve anything without doing so on their back, is pretty obvious. However, this blog post set off a monstrous response by so-called seekers of ethics, who loudly decried Quinn’s behavior as an example of the nepotism going on in the game design world. And by loudly decried, I mean they threatened her life, harassed her, doxxed (spread her personal information to the internet), harassed her family, and hacked her accounts. All in the name of ethics in games.

If you see the sick irony in this, you’re not alone. Many designers, journalists, and game enthusiasts rose to Quinn’s defense, and so touched off a back and forth explosion across the gaming world. Gamergate supporters targeted anyone who they deemed ‘Social Justice Warriors’ for harassment on social media if they dared stand up to speak out about the behavior of the internet mob. People from designers like Tim Schaefer and Elisabeth Sampat down to folks like little ol’ me spent countless hours dealing with folks who ‘just want accountability in games journalism!’ Or so they say. It’s hard to hear what point they’re making over all the abuse, the hate, the harassment, and the death threats. I got six. Zoe got thousands. Then Anita Sarkeesian put up her latest video on Tropes vs. Women and received death threats so vile and serious, she had to flee her home.

But sure. This is about ‘ethics.’

And so it went on. And still is going on today. Even though Zoe Quinn has gone online and proven that much of the so-called truths about Gamergate were created by some folks with WAY too much time on their hands from 4chan, coordinated in IRC channels that Zoe watched and recorded, the vocal offended party of gamers who believe that Gamergate is actually a thing. They feel that the games world is under attack by a group of ‘social justice warriors’ out to change their community, open it up to all kinds of games that don’t fit their definitions and aren’t what they grew up with. They talk about a conspiracy of these SJWs to take away their way of gaming and change the face of games.

It’s too bad they never got the message: that change has already been happening. And it didn’t take a conspiracy to do it.

Contrary to popular belief, the gaming world has never been what is stereotypically believed. First, gamers were never all male. Sure, they were predominantly male for a long time and of a specific demographic, but it was never universal. They were also never predominantly western/American, though that’s the only narrative we seem capable of digesting. To hear people talk about it, games only came from America or Asia, and that’s about it. And finally, despite the overwhelming discourse to the contrary, gaming was never predominantly digital. There was a whole group of gamers that did not just play digital, that were board game, card game, wargaming, tabletop RPG and LARP enthusiasts. However all these people did share one title, now so badly covered in filth that it might never recover. They were all gamers.

In a recent article by Leigh Alexander, she gives a brilliant break-down of the rank stagnation that has overtaken large portions of the gaming world. Marketing towards the perceived male demographic long ago created the idea that the world of gamers was occupied and defined by men, for men. Women and anyone outside of the normative were just outsiders, objectified, marginalized, and ultimately inconsequential to the overall market and culture of gaming. She paints the picture of Gamergate as the death throes of a festering heap of glass-eyed, vacant, culture zombies, unaware of the way they have been turned into rapt consumers of a vapid ethos backed by a marketing machine. And she’s got a lot of points about the consumerism, the lack of exploration of anything outside of the normative, the disgusting rage aimed at anyone trying to change the status quo.

But one thing about this article bothered me almost as much as the shouts of the haters on the internet. In the article, Leigh Alexander says that ‘Gamers are Over’, an idea echoed by many since this nonsense began. I get that what she means is that the long-since static culture of male-dominated, consumer driven gaming world is dying a slow death, and that Gamergate is just the death rattle. However, in the same breath as people have begun speaking about this new world of gaming, they spew victrol against the gaming community that was based on the stereotypes that have plagued games forever. And in that same breath, those declaring gamers and gamer culture as over are becoming the very gatekeepers they are railing against. Except now, the gaming world that was before, full of “young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls” in their “listless queue” (quote: Alexander), is relegated in all its facets to something meant to be burnt to the ground and left behind, a relic of this new ludic century (a term created by Eric Zimmerman his a manifesto about the future of games). And the conversation becomes a shouting match of absolutes, all over one issue: what will the gaming world look like going forward?

This isn’t a conversation of absolutes. It can’t be. Because the gaming world was never JUST a world of young men in their basements banging away at the latest AAA shooter. The new gaming world isn’t JUST going to be a world where every game is inclusive and thoughtful (although wouldn’t that be nice). It is going to be complex, full of different kinds of people playing games and exploring what different play spaces have to offer their lives. It’s going to be the casual gamers and the LARPers, it’s going to be the people playing League of Legends and Magic professionally alongside the people designing personal stories on Twine and in Unity. It’s going to be Warhammer 40K and Farmville, Dystopia Rising and Destiny, World of Warcraft and Fiasco. And it’s going to be all these games in conversation with journalists, thinkers, scholars, writers and critics. It’s going to be Anita Sarkeesian and John Romero. It’s going to be Eric Zimmerman and the Nordic LARP scene. It’s going to be hardcore fans of Killer Queen rubbing elbows with NERO players and hardcore Netrunner players.

It’s everyone. It’s all of us. And nobody gets to define games because they’re all games.

And you’re all playing them. And whether you want the term or not, that makes you a game player. A gamer. What have you.

That’s the future of gaming in my eyes. That is the real ludic century.

So yes, this new world is full of a lot of different kind of people. However, mark me on one thing:

This new world has room for all kinds of games. What it doesn’t have room for is harassment. It has no room for discrimination or othering. That is the kind of socially-regressive, morally bankrupt bullying and soap-box insensitive rhetoric that we have seen throughout this Gamergate and perpetuated, hopelessly unchecked, for decades. In the past, the kind of angry internet ranting or socially unacceptable behavior that has become equated with gamer culture has been swept under the rug with a sigh and a ‘what can you do.’ Well, we can do a lot actually. We can speak out. We can create the community we want and make sure it has room for everyone to be treated well. We can make sure that games don’t perpetuate that culture by creating a hostile environment for people based on race, gender, religion, sexuality, body type, culture, ethnicity or economic standing. Those are the ground rules because they are, in my eyes, the lowest common denominator for a society that is evolving and growing in the twenty-first century.

This new expansive gaming world has no place for definitions on who can be a gamer, but it does need a golden rule. And that golden rule is: don’t be a dick.

(And it should require no explanation that being a dick includes harassment, threatening, discrimination, objectification, exclusion based on identity, or perpetuation of shame culture. But since this hasn’t been a no-brainer in the past, it bears repeating.)

These horrible few weeks, full of harassment and fear, are the growing pains of a culture long ago poisoned by its own fears of inadequacy, of a medium and its supporters struggling for legitimacy and battling for supremacy of identity. And these fights have cost us so many who just walked away, shook their heads and said ‘the hell with THOSE guys.’ Or worse, folks who have come to hate this time of change because of the fear that the good they’ve had from being a gamer in the past is now being cast in a negative light by the screeching voices of the trolls and harassers on the internet. But I refuse to look at this new age of gaming as a place where anyone, not the haters and not those shouting that ‘gamers are over,’ can take the lead to sanitize gaming of the corners they don’t like. This is a big sandbox. We can all play in it.

But just remember that Golden Rule. Because it’s the difference between rational conversations, and Gamergate. And I for one am getting tired of the latter and could do with some more of the former.

Because It Really IS A Problem: Turning A Blind Eye To Inequality In Games

August 27, 2014 by Shoshana, posted in Geek Culture, Speaking Out

Just yesterday, I watched the second part of Anita Sarkeesian’s brilliant analysis of ‘Women As Background Decoration’ in her series Tropes vs Women. It depicts the various, often graphic, ways in which women are included in games as background characters to be brutalized, demeaned and murdered in the course of video games. Her video (which I will link to below) shows examples of these female characters, faceless and often nameless, being used as props to depict scenes of extreme violence in an effort to make a game seem more ‘gritty’ and ‘dark.’ It’s not an easy video to watch, as the violence is pretty awful, so viewer discretion advised.

This video viewing came on the heels of multiple conversations I’ve had in the last few weeks about inclusivity in the gaming world. It seems that, more than ever, the divide exists between those who believe there is an issue with the status quo in the gaming world right now and those who are striving to sustain it. The more advocates stand and speak up for inclusivity within game narratives and within game design and development, the more they are rebuffed by vocal voices in the gamer population. Worse, these advocates are often belittled, attacked, harassed and even threatened for speaking out. Even those who do not advocate but instead offer support have come under attack on social media for being public allies. One needs only to look at the response to Anita Sarkeesian’s work, and the people still raging against her work, to know that the haters are still out there. And they can get LOUD.

One example: a hateful Patreon called “The Sarkeesian Effect” in which two YouTubers, Jordan Owen and Aurini, plan a slanderous documentary telling everyone about a mythical conspiracy perpetuated by the ‘social justice warriors’ to push their advocacy agenda upon the unsuspecting population. Tune in next week as they create videos about mind-controlling high fructose corn syrup and the secret of the Lindbergh Baby. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

We’re still having the fight about whether or not being inclusive is important in the gaming world.

And I don’t get it.

How is it by now that people STILL think that the status quo is okay? How, after all these conversations being had and stories told about people silenced and pushed aside, can people still believe that ignoring the inequality in our world is all right? I’ve heard all kinds of excuses and statements, so here’s a breakdown of a few of them.

“We don’t have an inequality problem, this is the modern day!” Yes, and there has been civil rights and women’s movements forever trying to gain reform for groups that have been pushed down and created as the minority. And in all that time, we still have women making less money and being told they don’t belong in industries like technology and game design. Anyone who looks around and doesn’t see inequality is probably not listening, as there are countless stories out there about racism, sexism, queer and trans phobia, anti-semitism, fat shaming, ect. If you don’t hear those stories, it means you aren’t trying hard enough to open your ears to another’s experience.
“Well I don’t see race (or other differences).” That’s nice for you. And that’s a way of saying “I don’t discriminate,” an homage to the melting pot that is the United States and our modern world. However, not seeing race doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It also doesn’t mean that others are colorblind and that they don’t discriminate. Also, it doesn’t mean that the identities of others should just be considered blanket ‘human’ and that’s it. Identities are made up of the things we take on as markers that define who we are. Part of that is our culture, our religion, our race, our sexuality, and so on. Those things help define us and impact the way people treat us. Some folks can’t escape those contexts, don’t want to just be seen without their differences, because that shouldn’t have to be the case. What makes a person different doesn’t make them lesser automatically, or wrong, or bad. And by denying a part of their identity by saying ‘you don’t see it,’ that means you’re ignoring it as though it doesn’t mean anything, isn’t important enough for you to acknowledge and respect, or that you are simply looking past it because you still consider it a stumbling block to interacting with the person. Please stop all of these, please. People are complex. What makes them up is potentially important to them. Step outside yourself and wonder how you’d feel if someone said to you: “Oh it’s okay, I just don’t see you as a man.”
“Well, I’m of a minority group, and I haven’t been discriminated against! So this isn’t a problem.” I’m really glad that you haven’t experienced these issues, be you a woman, a person of color, or what have you. That’s awesome and I’m happy for you! However, listen to the stories of others around you. There are others who HAVE experienced these issues. And by saying it’s not a problem, you’re ignoring their life experiences and minimizing the issue.
“People keep saying I’m privileged because I’m white or cisgendered or straight or whatever! I’ve had it hard too! I resent being called privileged!” I get that. It’s hard out there for a lot of people, for many reasons. But one has to step outside of themselves for a second to look at the system in place that we’ve existed in for so long. It puts certain people in default positions of acceptance as ‘normal.’ Consider then, in that context, whether you’re part of those groups and what that means. Then look at the story of other people of different groups, see how they’re treated differently. Compare. Contrast.
“Well how do we address this? It’s not fair to just reach out to minorities and bring them up! That’s just reverse prejudice.” Okay. Let’s get one thing straight here. There is no such thing as reverse prejudice, not as an institution. Some people of minorities can be angry and resent and even hate majority groups and their members. But the kind of prejudice and bigotry we’re talking about here is based on the long-standing institutions of racism, sexism and all the other -isms that have made minorities just that – minorities, not the majority. This othering of groups has been around for ages as part of the way society works while those who are not among the minority inherently profit from their place in society. Let me say that again: because you’re part of a majority group, you have privilege. You might not have asked for it, but you’ve got it. I as a white woman have privilege of my own because of my race. I have other parts of me that put me in minority positions however, such as being a woman in a male-dominated society, or being disabled. But overall, I have privileges I must be aware when I navigate in the world. Ignoring them do not make them less so.

Those are the major things I keep hearing about when we talk about advocacy. When we talk about the plurality of voices out there in the nerd and gamer community. We talk about how to advocate and then hit a hard wall with people who just won’t hear it. Who are dedicated to ignoring problems.

And worse, there’s people out there who are dedicating their time and effort to battling those who are trying to bring about social justice work. They label them ‘social justice warriors’ and ignore the work they’re doing. Or even worse, they attack them. They harass. They send rape, death and bomb threats. They use anything they can to discredit, shame and silence.

No, we don’t have a gender problem. That’s why we have so many women designers harassed. So many women designers who get death threats. I get them. I’m a tiny fish in my side of the gaming pond, and I get death threats. I got three when I spoke out against sex being used against someone in their professional life recently on Twitter. I stood up for Zoe Quinn having the right as a female dev to not be harassed, to not be trolled, to not receive death threats and such. And I got three emails that I buried in a folder with the other ones and try not to remember they’re there.

Harassment has no place in gaming.

It will only continue for as long as we say ‘this is just the way things are’ and ignore it.

We say it’s just 4chan. It’s just reddit. It’s just those guys over there. It’s an Over There Problem.

But there are plenty of people who aren’t Over There folks, who are the folks every day who look around and say the things I listed above and do not recognize the problem for what it is and do not engage and keep silent.

If you knew someone getting death threats for doing their job, what would you do?

If you knew someone who got emails with pictures of beheaded women in it threatening rape, what would you do?

If you knew someone who was told they have no business doing their job because of their gender, what would you do?

Well guess what?

Now you know one. And I’m not alone. And it’s time for this bullshit to end.

UPDATE: The day I post this, the horseshit gets real. Anita Sarkeesian was threatened so badly she had to flee her home to protect herself. Here’s the link to the article talking about it and before the video is a link of just a few of the tweets she received. Naysayers that complain ‘there is no problem with harassment’ or ‘where’s the proof?’ – well here it is. And this is absolutely the most disgusting thing ever.

WARNING: The image below is VERY Graphic in its description of violence. But it bears being held as an example of the horrible sickness going on in the gaming community.