That is just astounding!

Colombia Women's Cycling Team Uniforms Cause Controversy

I'm not sure if I'm more upset by the person who's idea it was to put them in a uniform that made them look half naked or the responses of the people.

This is BEYOND disturbing. I can't imagine any of these women are happy about ONCE AGAIN being turned into sexual objects, rather than athletes. Makes me sick. I can't even imagine what they are thinking. They spent their lives focused on using their bodies for sports, working them as machines, and yet, here they are being REMINDED that what is MOST important about their bodies is that they are sexually appealing to others.

I am blown away by how obvious this is.

Iceland Running a Gender Equality Conference---Without Women

Innovative or business as usual?

Sexy breast cancer campaigns anger many patients
 

Many breast cancer survivors say a crop of pink-ribbon campaigns have hit a new low -- by sexualizing breast cancer.

An online porn site this month has been using breast cancer to increase its Web traffic by offering to donate 1 cent for every 30 views of its videos. The intended recipient for the donation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, rejected the offer and instructed the site to stop using its name.

Yet pornographers are only the most extreme example of a disturbing trend: using sex to sell breast cancer -- or simply get attention, say Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues. Sulik, who recently lost a friend to the disease, notes that magazines and advertising campains now routinely use topless young women to illustrate a disease whose average victims are in their 60s.

"I don't see the porn site to be much different from the 'Feel your boobies' T-shirts," says Sulik, referring to the Pennsylvania-based Feel Your Boobies Foundation. "It sexually objectifies women, trivializes breast cancer . . . and uses the objectified woman as window dressing for the profit-making machine."

Newer cancer groups are embracing slogans such as "Save the Ta-Tas" and "I Love Boobies" in the name of humor and reaching out to a younger, less conservative audience. Other groups say they're trying to stand out from the crowd of public service announcements that arrive every October, during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

A poster for the "Save 2nd Base" fundraiser at Tao restaurant in Las Vegas last month, for example, depicted a curvy model in a string bikini, noting "everyone in pink bathing suits receives open bar." An online version of the ad went viral, spread by outraged cancer survivors. The Las Vegas restaurant did not return phone calls for this story.

Although proceeds were to benefit Komen, the cancer group's spokeswoman Andrea Rader says Komen hasn't heard how much was raised, and won't accept the donation. Rader says the Las Vegas restaurant was supposed to get Komen's approval before launching the ads, but did not. "We would never have approved that," Rader says. Rader notes that Komen, which has been criticized for its "cause marketing" partnerships with companies such as KFC, disapproves of coy language for body parts. "We just say 'breasts,'" Rader says.

Breast cancer survivor Kathi Kolb used her skill with computer graphics to create an alternative "2nd Base" poster on her blog, the Accidental Amazon. Kolb's version makes the bikini model look more like a real cancer patient: with a catheter port in her chest, a prosthesis in her bra and a compression sleeve on her arm to prevent swelling.

"It's thinly disguised prurience," says Kolb, 58. "The average guy may be moderately obsessed with breasts, but any guy who's ever known any woman with breast cancer, the last thing he thinks is that breast cancer is sexy."

Kolb says she's been disgusted by sexy breast cancer campaigns for years, noting that many companies are manipulating customers' compassion for commercial gain. But this year, she says, "is worse than ever."

But Kimmy McAtee, spokeswoman for the Keep A Breast Foundation, says its "I Love Boobies!" campaign aims to "speak to young people in their own voice about a subject that is often scary and taboo." T-shirts and bracelets "speak directly to our target audience in a way that is authentic, inspiring and refreshing. We always want to take a positive approach to breast cancer awareness, rather than a funny or sexy one."

Even mainstream groups, such as the American Cancer Society, are using humor to get their message across. "It's OK to look at our chests," the society announces, with videos showing close-ups of women's chests. On a site called makingstrideswalk.org/boobs, the society announces that a fundraising walk "was created to focus on breasts, and women are glad their chest has our undivided attention."

The American Cancer Society says the "boobs" video was created to get people's attention. In a written statement, the society said, "People are exposed to a wide variety of breast cancer information during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, and this video was intended to break through the clutter to capture the attention of social media users, who we want to encourage to spread the word about an important message: empowering women to take control of their breast health and fight back in their communities."

Breast cancer survivor Lani Horn, 41, from Nashville, says these groups are missing the point. "All of us are really fed up," Horn says. "Save the tatas? No, save the women. A lot of us had to give up our tatas to live."

Karuna Jagger, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, an advocacy group, says, "The implicit message in these campaigns is that it is breasts that are sexy; sexy is what is important; and we should care about breast cancer because it takes those lovely, sexy breasts out of the world . . . Every October, the stunts just gets more bizarre and further removed from what's needed for this epidemic."

Horn, who blogs at chemobabe.com, scoffs at the notion that campaigns such "Feel Your Boobies" educate women about breast self-exams.

While many women with cancer do find breast lumps themselves, that tends to happen more by accident, such as while getting dressed, than during formal self-exams. Medical authorities such as the American Cancer Society and U.S. Preventive Services Task Force no longer promote monthly breast self-exams.

Overall, teaching women to do structured monthly self-exams causes more harm than good; it doesn't save lives, but does cause needless worry, says physician Virginia Moyer, chair of the federal task force. "This doesn't mean women shouldn't be 'breast-aware,' but it does mean that we know that clinicians spending time teaching the techniques of breast exam and promoting its uptake is a poor use of time," Moyer says.

Yet ogling-as-fundraising isn't limited to the USA.

A British group, Coppafeel!, urges women to do a "boob check." In an imitation of Janet Jackson's infamous Rolling Stone cover, Coppafeel has been promoting its campaign with images of a topless member of the Spice Girls, Mel B, and her husband, Stephen Belafonte, who clutches her breasts.

A French website called Boobstragram encourages women to post photos of themselves in a bra, advising, "showing your boobs on the web is good; showing them to your doctor is better."

Writer Peggy Orenstein, who has been treated for breast cancer twice, says she's appalled at what is being marketed on behalf of "women like me."

The new campaigns do real harm, she says, by reinforcing the image that breasts are a woman's most valued asset. That only increases the pain suffered by women who undergo mastectomies, Orenstein says.

"On one hand, women with cancer are told -- or have to learn -- that we are not our breasts, that our sexuality, our femininity are not located in the mammary gland," Orenstein says. "That's a complicated, sometimes painful reckoning. Then these organizations come along and reinforce the notion that boobs are the most important things about us, particularly if they're hot and apparently most particularly if they're actually fake."

When diagnosed with aggressive cancer at age 38, Horn says, saving her breasts was the last thing on her mind. All she could think about, she says, was staying alive for her three young children. "Every time I thought, 'I can't climb back into that chemo chair,' I thought, 'I have to be able to tell my kids, 'I did everything possible.'"

The new breed of ads is especially cruel, Horn says, because breast cancer strips women of many features associated with femininity and beauty. Chemotherapy and surgery to remove the ovaries can both improve a woman's odds of survival, but at the cost of plunging her into instant menopause.

Chemo can make women lose their hair, eyebrows and eyelashes. Radiation can leave women's chests feeling, as one survivor has described it, like "a raw piece of meat."

And beyond the chemo-induced nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, Horn says, long-term hormonal therapy can cause severe vaginal dryness, making intercourse too painful to contemplate. While many cancer survivors want more information about preserving their fertility and alleviating sexual side effects, very few get help, Horn says.

Cancer "doesn't make you feel terribly sexy. Pain is not terribly sexy," Horn says. "There's a cruelty to this, when you're in danger of losing the very sexuality that they're selling."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...ancer/1630911/

Microsoft's CEO and the Worst Career Advice Imaginable
 

Discuss gender in the workplace and there it is, stubborn, infuriating, impossible to avoid: the pay gap. For every dollar a man earns, professional women earn only 78 cents.

The pay gap holds across and within professions, including some of the highest-paying. It is real, and it is persistent.

So at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing—a conference on women in tech in Phoenix, Arizona—it was likely to be a common topic of conversation. And when Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, interviewed Satya Nadella, the recently installed CEO of Microsoft, it was bound to come up.

And, indeed, it did. Klawe, academic, asked Nadella, CEO: How should women handle the pay gap? How should they secure fair and equal pay?

Now, before continuing, let us review some statistics.

We know first of all that there is that stubborn, shocking pay gap. It persists across jobs and careers.

And we know, what’s more, that however bad things are in the workforce generally, they are particularly bad in tech, where women hold just 25 percent of the jobs. (They make up 57 percent of the entire workforce.)

Ann Friedman recently (and excellently) compiled all the dismal numbers about the state of women in tech. Hunt for the root cause, she writes, and you have to “look at who’s holding the purse strings”:

" Only 4 percent of senior venture capitalists are women, and 19 percent of U.S. angel investors are women. Is it any wonder that men are 40 percent more likely to be funded by venture capitalists, and only 4 to 7 percent of startup founders are women? (Well, that number is disputed, but almost everyone agrees it’s single-digit.) Software developers, the darlings of the tech gold rush, are only 20 percent women. A third of female tech entrepreneurs reported facing “dismissive attitudes” from their co-workers. […] Even when women break into tech, they don’t stay. More than half — 56 percent — end up leaving the industry."

That’s right. Even once they get to tech, most women don’t linger:

https://s-media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com...2c8d4d4000.jpg


So. This is the state of things. Sound and well-sourced data suggest that women face additional hurdles in tech at every juncture: in college, as an entry-level employee, as a manager, as a VC—and as a CEO (only three tech CEOs in the Fortune 500 are female).

One might even say that something, something big, something systemic is biased against women.

How should women handle that systemic bias, Satya Nadella?

“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,” he told the attendees, according to Selena Larson of ReadWriteWeb.

“That might be one of the initial ‘super powers,’ that quite frankly, women (who) don’t ask for a raise have,” he added. “It’s good karma. It will come back.”

Larson continues, with delicious detail:

Audience murmurs suggested confusion and displeasure with career advice that both goes against everything women are told in the Lean In era, and seems woefully out of touch.

And how.

So out of touch, in fact, that Nadella quickly walked the comments back. In an email to all Microsoft employees last night, he wrote:

Toward the end of the interview, Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises. I answered that question completely wrong. Without a doubt I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap. I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.

And that’s good advice for everyone—not just women. Still, though, the story remains remarkable. You can omit the specific gender element of this, view it as abstractly as possible, and you get this story:

A powerful CEO was asked how individuals should act in a system stacked against them, and his literal answer was, have faith in the system.

If you think he’s the only person who sometimes thinks that way, well, I have a raise to give you. But only if you don’t ask for it first.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...inable/381312/

The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women
 

ISIS Is Now Bragging About Enslaving Women and Children
 

In its English-language magazine, the organization argues a religious justification for its treatment of the Yazidis.

n the newest issue of Dabiq, the English-language magazine published by ISIS, the extremist group for the first time confirmed and justified the capturing, enslaving and selling of Yazidi women and children. The article surfaced as a new report from Human Rights Watch said that hundreds of Yazidis are being held captive in makeshift detention facilities in Iraq and Syria, including forcing some young women and teenagers to marry the group's fighters.

“The Islamic State’s litany of horrific crimes against the Yezidis in Iraq only keeps growing,” said Fred Abrahams, special adviser at Human Rights Watch. “We heard shocking stories of forced religious conversions, forced marriage, and even sexual assault and slavery—and some of the victims were children.”

In the article, "The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour," the magazine stated that "the enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers," adding that, "the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations."

"May Allah bless this Islamic State with the revival of further aspects of the religion occurring at its hands," the article says.

Referring to the Yazidis as "pagans" and "infidels," the article said, "Their creed is so deviant from the truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages considered them devil worshippers and Satanists, as is recorded in accounts of Westerners and Orientalists who encountered them or studied them."

Publication of an article like this is obviously part of an intimidation effort. Elsewhere in the magazine, ISIS spokesperson Mohammed al-Adnani threatens, "We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women."

But ISIS is also boasting about what they see as the revival of important institutions, such as slavery. "Before Shaytan reveals his doubts to the weak-minded and weak hearted, one would remember that enslaving the families of the [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Quran and the narrations of the Prophet, and thereby apostatizing from Islam," the article says. "... May Allah bless this Islamic State with the revival of further aspects of the religion occurring at its hands."

The United Nations estimates that at least 500,000 Yazidis fled their homes in northern Iraq after ISIS waged a major offensive in August on Sinjar, pushing tens of thousands into Mt. Sinjar where they were stranded for weeks.

Researchers with Human Rights Watch, who interviewed 76 Yazidis that fled to the Kurdish region of Iraq and 16 Yazidis who manage to escape ISIS detention, said that none of those who had been detained said they had been raped, although several said they had fought off violent attacks.

"As much as we could, we didn't let them touch our bodies," said one young woman who had been abducted but managed to escape. "Everything they did, they did by force."

However, fully disclosing assault may be curbed by social norms among Yazidis.

"The biggest taboo is not being captured, it is being [sexually] assaulted," Tirana Hassan, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch's Emergencies Division, told Vice News. "The Yezidis are a small, conservative community and women will go great lengths to ensure this is private, to make sure they are not ostracized by the community. Virginity is a very important concept."

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...rticle/381394/

I would have posted this in another thread, if not for the fact that the previous post in this one is kind of what prompted me to post this.

http://www.alternet.org/world/isiss-...women-fighters

ISIS's Nightmare: Fierce Kurdish Women Fighters
In the battle for Kobani, Syria, Kurdish women warriors are said to terrify ISIS.

DailyKos / By gjohnsit
October 10, 2014

On Monday the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that the isolated Kurdish enclave of Kobani was "about to fall" to a massive, sustained assault from ISIS.
Also on Monday, Rooz Bahjat, a Kurdish intelligence officer stationed in Kobani said the city would fall within "the next 24 hours." By now ISIS was expecting to be slaughtering civilians by the score.

Instead, something totally unexpected happened - ISIS has been forced to pull back.

A local Kobani official, Idris Nahsen, told AFP that fighters from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) had managed to push ISIS fighters outside several key areas after "helpful" airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition

"The situation has changed since yesterday. YPG forces have pushed back ISIS forces," he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, confirmed that ISIS fighters had withdrawn overnight from several areas and were no longer inside the western part of Kobani. They remained in eastern parts of the town and its southern edges, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a network of sources inside Syria. The number of dead in the overnight fighting was not clear, but Mustafa Ebdi, a Kurdish journalist and activist from Kobani, wrote on his Facebook page that the streets of one southeastern neighborhood were "full of the bodies" of ISIS fighters.

Kobani has been under attack by 9,000 ISIS jihadists, armed with tanks and heavy artillery for nearly a month. This is the largest manned assualt by ISIS in its short existence.They are being opposed by just 2,000 Kurdish fighters with the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), without access to any heavy weaponry and short on ammunition.
To put this into perspective, 800 ISIS fighters routed 2 divisions of the Iraqi Army, totaling 30,000 heavily armed soldiers, in June.
In other words, the Syrian Kurds of Kobani weren't supposed to stand a snowball's chance in Hell.

My father used to say, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters. It's the size of the fight in the dog that does."

And now, here we are. Two days after Kobani was supposed to have become just the latest victims of ISIS terror. The difference is obviously the motivation of who is fighting.

"We either die or win. No fighter is leaving," Esmat al-Sheikh, leader of the Kobani Defence Authority, told Reuters. "The world is watching, just watching and leaving these monsters to kill everyone, even children...but we will fight to the end with what weapons we have."

Some people have more motivation than others. Those people include women. A very large percentage of the YPG fighters that have been so good at killing ISIS jihadists are women.

I asked her about YPG’s women’s wing, the YPJ (Women's Protection Units), and the women fighters coming from Turkey. She said Kurdish women were as equally involved in defense affairs as in social services. “We have set up training camps for women in all three cantons. Women are active in all fronts,” she said. “Of the first 20 martyrs we had when IS attacked Kobani, 10 were women. Last year, of our 700 YPG martyrs, 200 were women...

I reminded Nimet of the legends we hear of IS militants fearing to encounter women fighters. She replied, “This is not a myth but reality. I personally met IS fighters face-to-face. Women fighters infringe on their psyche. They believe they won’t go to paradise if they are killed by women. That is why they flee when they see women. I saw that personally at the Celaga front. We monitor their radio calls. When they hear a woman's voice on the air, they become hysterical.”

Kurdish women have traditionally been part of the resistance forces. At Kobani, one woman in particular, Arin Mirkan, showed just how far they are prepared to go to defeat ISIS.

The woman, who is reportedly a commander in the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, known as the YPG, broke into an Isis (also known as Islamic State) bastion on the eastern outskirts of Kobani and clashed with militants before detonating herself with a grenade, a monitoring group said on Sunday.
Mirkan, a mother of two, is rumored (but not proven) to have killed 23 ISIS fighters.

Another female YPG fighter, Ceylan Ozalp, killed herself with her last bullet rather than be captured by ISIS.

It's still far to early to determine how this will turn out. The Kobani defenders are running short on ammo, while Turkish tanks sit just a few meters across the border doing nothing. Instead, the Turkish military is arresting Kurdsfleeing the fighting in Kobani.

18 ethnic Kurds have been killed in violent protests in Turkey, demanding that the Turkish army help the brave defenders in Kobani.

The Pentagon still expects Kobani to fall, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is more concerned with ISIS marching on Baghdad.

Speaking specifically about cities in western Iraq, he said, “There are places where [the Islamic State] continues to make gains in Iraq. We talked about Hit. We talked about Ramadi. We talked about Fallujah, which is still in contention right now. That’s worrisome, because it’s close to Baghdad.”

8:46 AM PT: It's complicated.

Kurds insist that Turkey should allow Kurdish fighters, supplies and weapons to enter the encircled town through its territory. Turkey refuses to do so unless the Kurds meet certain demands, including distancing themselves from their allies in an outlawed Kurdish separatist party in Turkey.

As an indication of the complex political currents, however, she made it clear the Kurds would not welcome military assistance from Turkey, asking instead for free passage of Kurdish fighters from Turkey to reinforce those in Kobani.

“We would view Turkey sending its troops without an international decision as an occupation," she said.

Anwar Muslim, a lawyer and the head of the Kobani district, echoed those sentiments, saying it was illogical to ask the Kurds to denounce Mr. Assad and join Syrian insurgent groups fighting against him.

9:12 AM PT: Meanwhile in Anbar, Iraq:

Iraq’s restive western province of Anbar is on the verge of completely falling into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unless urgent action is taken to address military failures, the Anbar Tribal Council warned on Wednesday...

“It is strange that while ISIS is developing its presence and capabilities on the ground in Anbar, military and security leadership are not doing anything new to address this. As a result of this, most parts of Anbar province are now completely in ISIS’s hands, including Ramadi city center,” Ibrahim told Asharq Al-Awsat.

It was Anbar’s police force that was protecting citizens from ISIS, he said, adding that military forces were actively hindering efforts to combat the extremist group. “Unfortunately, the military has become a source of assistance for ISIS because for the most part ISIS is able to attack and defeat the military, taking control of their arms and equipment,” said Ibrahim.

11:10 AM PT: Dramatic new development

It appears that the Kurds have finally picked up an ally.

Kurdish sources inside Kobane say that the YPG (Syrian Kurdish Popular Protection Units) have advanced in the east and that a group of Free Syrian Army fighters moved behind IS lines causing heavy losses.

---

I think this is really important. I keep hearing people talk about the world needing women's peace and harmony and blahdy-blah, but--at the risk of saying something batshit insane about this whole "violence" thing--I often find myself thinking that what the world (and particularly women) need is women's force.

14 October 2014 Last updated at 12:55 ET

GamerGate: 'Press must tackle misogyny,' says developer

By Kevin Rawlinson & Leo Kelion

BBC News

More video game news sites must place a spotlight on the misogynistic abuse that could drive women from the industry, a developer has demanded.

Brianna Wu, whose firm is behind the Revolution 60 game,who said she faced death threats after speaking out, said the sites could help change the industry's culture.

A debate is raging in the sector about claims of corrupt relationships between some developers and reviewers.

But it has also regularly veered into the issues of feminism and misogyny.

"Every woman I know is terrified that what happened to me will happen to them next. And this is a true campaign of terror on women in the field," she told BBC News.

Ms Wu fled her home on Friday 10 October after graphic sexual threats were made against her.

The next day, she shared screenshots of tweets from one user who had threatened to murder her and her family, and had posted her home address to prove they knew where she lived.

The abuse came after she shared pictures on Twitter mocking players with sexist attitudes, who had used the Twitter hashtag GamerGate.

'Drive women out'

Her latest comments coincide with Ada Lovelace Day, an annual event celebrating women's feats in technology and science.

Ms Wu, head of development at games company Giant Spacekat, also said that internet services needed to do more to help police trace those who posted abuse.

"As it currently is, when crimes occur, law enforcement frequently cannot locate the people that are doing it," she said.

"We need to get more serious as a culture about making it possible for law enforcement to act in very serious situations like this.

"GamerGate could very seriously drive most women out of the industry. I realise that's a very strong statement and I absolutely mean it. I don't know a single woman in this field who is not asking herself if she wants to stay."

Ms Wu's experience was similar to those of games reviewer Anita Sarkeesian and developer Zoe Quinn, who were also on the receiving end of abuse.

Allegations about Ms Quinn's personal relationships with journalists were presented as evidence of "possible corruption" in the industry.

Ms Sarkeesian was hounded after releasing the latest in a series of video blogs that criticised bestselling games for propagating sexist stereotypes.

In response to the treatment meted out to Ms Sarkeesian, thousands of people signed an open letter calling on the gaming industry to change.

Ms Wu singled out IGN and Giant Bomb as two popular websites that she said had not drawn enough attention to the abuse aimed at women.

"They are choosing not to cover this story, or Zoe's story, or any of these stories. This has a real silencing effect," she told the BBC.

"These are video game sites that are tailored towards men, so the people that most need to understand the harassment and culture that's being created, the sites that speak to them are not covering this."

While Giant Bomb has not covered the debate in depth, it did report Ms Wu's story on Monday. Readers of both IGN and Giant Bomb have also discussed the wider debate on their forums.

Neither of the two sites was able to comment when asked for a response.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29616197

Anita Sarkeesian Cancels Speech After School Shooting Threat At Utah State
 

Prominent feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian has officially canceled a speaking engagement at Utah State University after a threat was emailed to the school promising a mass shooting targeting her and anyone who attended the event.

The email said there would be “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if Sarkeesian’s speech was not canceled by the university, and goes on to detail exactly how the attack would be carried out.

“If you do not cancel her talk, a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as students and staff at the nearby Women’s Center. I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs.”

Originally, despite the threat, Sarkeesian was still planning to go ahead with the speech, but after learning from campus law enforcement that Utah’s concealed carry laws meant it would be possible that guns would indeed be at the event, she changed her mind.

The threat is the latest in a series of escalating attacks targeting prominent female game critics and developers. Anita Sarkeesian and developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu have fled their homes in recent weeks after their personal addresses were posted online and death and rape threats were made against them. Sarkeesian has endured these kinds of attacks for years ever since her “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” video series was attempting to raise funding on Kickstarter. Recently, matters have escalated however, culminated in this exceptionally graphic and detailed school shooting threat. The “ Montreal Massacre” mentioned in the email refers to the crimes of Marc Lépine, who killed 14 women, injured 10 and also killed four men in order to “fight feminism” in 1989 before committing suicide.
Fanboy Wars: The Newest eBook From Forbes
The Fight For The Future Of Video Games is a warts-and-all look at the clashes between the video game business and its passionate fans.

The obvious elephant in the room is that these threats and attacks against specific female developers have escalated as the popular #GamerGate movement has gained traction in the gaming community. The #GamerGate community is exceptionally defensive when being tied to “fringe” elements who directly threaten and harass women in this way, but it’s getting borderline impossible to extract what the movement claims to want to be with what it actually is.

Zoe Quinn was the figure who in effect spawned the hashtag movement, who accused her of sleeping with members of the games press for positive coverage for her game (when in reality the press members in question barely mentioned her game in passing, and did not review it). Developer Brianna Wu, who fled her house as recently as this week, was targeted by 8chan, the 4chan spin-off ousted from the site, because of her harsh words for #GamerGate and those who claim to march under that banner. And Sarkeesian has been a consistent target for years, and her repeated and public disdain for #GamerGate has escalated attacks on her as we see today.

While it’s true these threats aren’t being signed with a #GamerGate hashtag, we’re past the point of pretending that it’s a complete coincidence these threats have increased as #GamerGate members have gotten more fervent. The stated goal of #GamerGate, a movement concocted on Twitter TWTR -4.08%, Reddit and 4chan, is the pursuit of a more “ethical, professional and unbiased” video game press. Yet, whatever reasonable elements of the group there may be, some members have taken it upon themselves to threaten “unethical” females in the industry and everyone who supports them. This has happened so often and the threats made are so personal, graphic and unsettling, that it’s overshadowed anything that could have ever been productive about the movement. Whether or not the “goal” of #GamerGate was to literally chase prominent women out of the industry, that’s the effect its now having. Each day seems to bring a new low, and it seems like only a matter of time until a woman is physically harmed when someone follows through on one of these hundreds and thousands of threats. In Sarkeesian’s case, she wasn’t willing to risk speaking at an event that allows concealed weapons after the looming threat of a massacre. It’s hard to find fault with that logic, unfortunately it comes with the side effect of the person who made the threat getting exactly what they wanted.

It’s no longer possible to defend #GamerGate. For every member that unequivocally condemns these sorts of attacks against women, there’s another explaining why it’s completely unrelated from the movement, while yet another is cheering the harassers on. #GamerGate is an amalgam of a million different goals raging from the valid (better disclosure!) to the insane (death to feminists!), and it’s become bloated and grotesque with hate. Perhaps it’s too bad the sane members of the movement are caught in this tidal wave, but there’s no avoiding getting swept out to sea at this point.

The police need to be heavily involved as these threats escalate. The games press needs to unite with fans to condemn this sort of thing outright, and not pretend that ethics in games journalism has absolutely anything at all to do with…whatever it is this has become.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...at-utah-state/

A Brief (and Recent) History of Sexism in Tennis
 

It happened on a Russian television show.

"I was at the Olympics and saw Maria Sharapova play her… him…," said Ivan Urgant, the host of an aptly named nighttime interview show, Evening Urgant.

"…One of the Williams brothers," Shamil Tarpischev finished.

This would just be ugly if run-of-the-mill sexism were it not for the fact that Tarpischev is head of Russia's Tennis Federation and the director of an annual professional tournament in Moscow. Now, he faces a one-year ban and a $25,000 fine from the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) for his comments.

"I am sorry that the joke which was translated into English out of its context of a comedy show drew so much attention," he has said since in a statement. "I don’t think this situation is worth all the hoopla because those words were said without any malice." He later added the event "was hyped to an absurd level."

Serena Williams will kick off defending her WTA Tour Finals championship in Singapore this week. The WTA's swift action seems to have kept the comments from becoming a distraction.

"I think the WTA did a great job of taking initiative and taking immediate action to his comments. I thought they were very insensitive and extremely sexist as well as racist at the same time," Serena Williams said in a press conference Sunday. "I thought they were in a way bullying."

Even Maria Sharapova, a Russian who had her share of run-ins with Serena Williams, spoke out against the comments made by the man who has been her team captain in Federation Cup competition.

"I think they were very disrespectful and uncalled for, and I'm glad that many people have stood up, including the WTA," she said. "It was very inappropriate, especially in his position and all the responsibilities that he has not just in sport, but being part of the Olympic committee. It was just really irresponsible on his side."

Part of the reason Tarpiscehv's comments stood out is because of how the WTA has led the way for women in many other sports. Indeed, thanks to Billie Jean King and her allies who pioneered the modern tour, women's professional tennis went from a fledgling, ad-hoc affair to a global business that offers players a pick of tournaments nearly every week of the year. At this year's U.S. Open, each singles champion took home $3 million with the potential for bonus money—a long way from when Wimbledon and the U.S. Open first began in the 19th century without a women's event at all.

But sexism—sometimes institutional—has still reared its head recently in the sport.

During Wimbledon this year, when Andy Murray hired his second female coach (the first was his mother, Judy), Australian player Marinko Matosevic said, "For me, I couldn't do it since I don't think that highly of the women's game."

At last year's Australian Open, French tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga said the reason that the women's tour, with just a few exceptions, is so topsy-turvy is because, "You know, the girls, they are more unstable emotionally than us. I'm sure everybody will say it's true, even the girls… No? No, you don't think?" He added: "But, I mean, it's just about hormones and all this stuff. We don't have all these bad things, so we are physically in a good shape every time, and you are not. That's it."

In 2012, Gilles Simon, another French tennis player, told reporters at Wimbledon that he thinks "men's tennis is ahead of women's tennis," that they "provide a more attractive show," and that they "spend twice as long on court as women do at Grand Slams." And because of all that, he intoned, nothing justifies equal prize money.

When Ernests Gulbis, a Latvian player who has reached the top 10 in the world tennis rankings, was asked earlier this year whether or not he would like any of his sisters to join him on the tour, he seemed to think he was doing them a favor by saying: no.

"Hopefully they're not going to pursue a professional tennis career. Hopefully," said Gulbis. "Because for a woman, it's tough. I wouldn't like my sisters to become professional tennis players. It's tough choice of life. A woman needs to enjoy life a little bit more. Needs to think about family, needs to think about kids. What kids you can think about until age of 27 if you're playing professional tennis, you know. That's tough for a woman, I think."

But tennis journalist Lindsay Gibbs, who developed a guide to keep sexism out of tennis coverage ahead of Wimbledon this year, says that the media is just as much to blame as anybody else. Ironically, she was inspired by Gilles Simon, who said, "What got to me was finding myself in the big press conference room at Wimbledon facing media that were asking me to justify myself, while they themselves had been writing six pages on men's tennis for every two pages on women's for years."

"C'mon guys, take some responsibility!"

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...tennis/381645/

With mid term elections in mind.......
 

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Anya and Kobi already posted two articles here about GamerGate, which kind of shames me, because it occurs to me that as someone who's been playing video games for the past 25 years or thereabouts and who is actually in communities where GG and anti-GG factions are clashing, I should have been on the ball about posting GG-related news here. It's just, there's so much that has been written on it, and most of it in the gaming press rather than the mainstream press, that I wasn't sure where I'd start. Still, that's no excuse on my part.

So yeah, I'm someone who's actually part of the subculture where this conflict is raging. That, and as a lifelong gamer whose first memories of the medium are flitting visions from before the onset of childhood amnesia and who was one of the many children who had crazy nightmares about enemies that keep coming even when you pause the game(!!), I also feel that video gaming is fucking well my hobby to "invade" with feminist values. So for those reasons, I'm going to offer not just links and articles but also a bit of commentary, at the risk of meandering somewhat from the original purpose of the thread, and some of the following links will be from small-time bloggers and other non-mainstream sources that those of you who aren't part of the gaming subculture (or, well, who don't follow wehuntedthemammoth) might have missed. I hope this is all right.

Part of the issue is--as was touched upon in Kobi's post--that GamerGate is a dual-layer movement, built upon a core of original agitators whose motive is right-wing anti-feminist backlash, surrounded by a humongous shell of useful idiots who actually think this is about journalism, despite the fact that the movement's biggest "accomplishments" thus far have been driving numerous women out of the industry and making gamers look like psychopaths to outside observers. That core hides behind the nebulousness of this leaderless movement and uses the outer shell as a shield to deflect criticism and disown responsibility for their actual goals and deeds.

Some links related to the last paragraph:
this exposé of the conspiracy at GG's core is comparatively bite-sized, so I'd recommend starting here
What GamerGate's manifesto really means
An example of the deflection of responsibility: one of the "anti-harassment" GGers is actually the same asshole who created the "Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian" flash game a few years back
L. Rhodes writes an open letter to GamerGate's misguided outer shell.
More detailed evidence of the GG conspiracy follows:
Evidence of core GGers using sockpuppets to pad their outer shell and get the ball rolling, and further links to articles that pissed them off
Zoe Quinn posted screenshots providing evidence of the motives of core GGers
Further evidence of the conspiracy at GG's core, from their own IRC logs
Good golly more evidence

This is about more than just video games: video games are a major cultural institution now, bigger even than television, music, or movies, and thus the medium is a major fortress in the cultural war between feminism and patriarchy--and supporters of patriarchy, even outside the gaming press, are absolutely treating it as such and fighting to maintain patriarchy's hold upon it. GamerGate has gotten a fair bit of right-wing--and also specifically MRA--support from outside that gamer press. That right-wing garbage mill Breitbart (to think a movement allegedly about journalistic ethics was happy to receive support from fucking Breitbart) was one of the first non-gaming-press outlets to write in support of GamerGate--the author of the piece even thinks gamers are losers, but supports GamerGate because he and GG share the goal of defending patriarchy. False-flag "feminist" Christina Hoff Summers wrote that GamerGate is a reaction against feminists trying to, allegedly, destroy male culture (if the behaviour of GamerGate is representative of this male culture, maybe it's about fucking time it get destroyed). And even carnival-of-misogyny A Voice For Men has jumped on the bandwagon, apparently defending video games as an alternative to marriage for men (what the christ).

Some links for the last paragraph:
On Milo Yiannopoulos, the guy who wrote the Breitbart piece
On Christina Hoff Sommers's piece on GamerGate
I was serious about A Voice For Men defending video games as an alternative to marriage and oh my god you have to see this image
Because it really is about misogynists trying to keep video games a patriarchal stronghold
MRAs appropriating the concept of "safe space" to declare that entire swaths of culture, like video games, are supposed to be "safe space" for male nerds who are apparently traumatised by women's refusal to give them sex or some stupid shit

A further observation: the "corruption" that was used to justify GG was the allegation that Zoe Quinn had traded sex for positive reviews (check out the very first link in this post for some very gross defenses of this position), and the fact that major games-press sites deleted such accusations, which was supposedly censorship. Thing is, it later came out that no, Zoe never traded sex for reviews, and her game was not actually reviewed by people she'd slept with (one of them mentioned it in passing in some article or another). And moreover, the journalists in question knew she never traded sex for reviews, meaning that they rightly saw these accusations as baseless harassment and not a legitimate indictment of anyone's journalistic integrity, and that the deletion of these accusations was thus a normal response to harassment and in no way censorship or corruption. And yet, despite this original accusation being found false, the GamerGate ball keeps rolling. (Because it was never about corruption.)

Another observation: Anti-"social justice warrior" gamers who line up in defense of GamerGate on the one hand whine and moan about how games aren't taken seriously as art, and on the other hand the moment someone critiques games as cultural artifacts rather than simply meaningless entertainment, they start screaming about how THEY JUST WANT TO PLAY VIDJA GAMES KEEP YOUR SOCIAL JUSTICE BULLSHIT OUT OF IT. hypocrisy much

I'd like to thank Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian for standing their ground against GamerGate. I'd also like to thank David Futrelle for making wehuntedthemammoth.com and doing such a good job of tracking GamerGate; it made providing sources much easier. I'd also like to thank the headwiz of one of my other Internet hangouts for putting his foot down and telling GamerGate supporters that they can get the fuck out because he wasn't going to be "neutral" about a movement orchestrated as an attack on women. And I'd also like to thank all the journalists who act like grown-ups and accept that it's time for the medium they love to grow up, and don't straddle that hypocritical fence mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Lastly, here's an MSNBC video in which Zoe Quinn herself is interviewed and gets to speak on the subject.

Allison, thanks so much for your explanation of what GamerGate really means, your links, and, in general, providing context for those of us (like me) that did not know enough to know what we did not know!

Much appreciated!

PS: I am sorry I left out the "i" in the spelling of your name in my rep comment!

I don't think anyone here had any delusions that Republicans are anything but moustache-twirling villains that hate women for rebelling against old white male dominance, but:

Right-Wing Media Discourage Young Women From Voting

Conservative media personalities have discouraged young women from voting as the midterm elections near, claiming that they are "too dumb to vote."

Fox's Kimberly Guilfoyle: Young Women Shouldn't Exercise Civic Duties Because "They Don't Get It." During the October 21 edition of Fox News' The Five, the co-hosts discussed the impact of women voters in the upcoming midterm elections. After co-host Greg Gutfeld suggested that young women lack the wisdom to vote as conservatives, Kimberly Guilfoyle suggested that they should be excused from jury duty, because they lack life experience and just "don't get it." Instead, she said, they should "go back on Tinder or Match.com." [Fox News, The Five, 10/21/14]

Fox's Tucker Carlson: "Do You Want Your Government Run By People Whose Favorite Show Is Say Yes [To The Dress]?" During the October 2 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered, network host Tucker Carlson criticized a Republican campaign to encourage young women to vote Republican by asking whether or not the young women targeted by the ad should vote at all:

CARLSON: I don't think as a general matter you should be encouraging people who don't know anything about what they're voting for to vote. That's what the Democrats do, giving Newports to the homeless to get them to the polls. That's literally true. Republicans shouldn't follow suit on that. You shouldn't pander to people. Tell us what the candidates are for, what they're against. Attack the other guy, that's fair too. I'm all for attack ads, but you're targeting people -- you're targeting people who are watching Say Yes To The Dress? You want your government run by people ... who's favorite show is Say Yes To The Dress. [Fox News, Outnumbered, 10/2/14]

National Review Online: Five Reasons Young Women "Are Too Dumb To Vote." In a September 28 post challenging Lena Dunham for encouraging young women to vote in an article for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NRO's Kevin D. Williamson provided his "Five Reasons Why You're Too Dumb To Vote." Calling voting a "shallow gesture of citizenship" which women use to say "I want," Williamson urged those who do not agree with his political values to not vote at all:

I would like to suggest, as gently as I can, that if you are voting as an act of self-gratification, if you do not understand the role that voting in fact plays in a constitutional republic, and if you need Lena Dunham to tell you why and how you should be voting -- you should not vote. If you get your politics from actors and your news from television comedians -- you should not vote. There's no shame in it, your vote is statistically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and there are many much more meaningful ways to serve your country and your fellow man: Volunteer at a homeless shelter; join the Marine Corps; become a nun; start a business. [National Review Online, 9/29/14, via Media Matters]

Fox's Harris Faulkner: Do We Want Young People To Vote "If They Don't Know The Issues?" On the October 8 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered, co-host Harris Faulkner responded to Rock The Vote's "#TurnOutForWhat" campaign by questioning whether or not young people should vote "if they don't know the issues." [Fox News, Outnumbered, 10/8/14]

One in six female MIT students a victim of sexual assault -survey
 

BOSTON (Reuters) - One in six female undergraduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who responded to a survey has been sexually assaulted, but fewer than 5 percent reported a sex crime, MIT said.

Five percent of female undergraduates said they had been raped and one in five knew a perpetrator of unwanted sexual behavior, according to the MIT poll, which had a response rate of 35 percent from undergraduate and graduate students.

"Sexual assault violates our core MIT values. It has no place here," MIT President Rafael Reif wrote in a campus email Monday accompanying the survey results.

MIT, which urged all its students to take the survey on attitudes towards sexual assault, is one of the first U.S. schools to release wide-ranging data on sex crimes on campus.

Lawmakers, activists and students across the United States have been urging a crackdown on sexual assaults on campuses.

MIT emailed the survey to all of its 10,831 undergraduate and graduate students on April 27 - two days before the White House called on colleges and universities to ask students about these matters.

The White House has declared sex crimes to be "epidemic" on U.S. college campuses, with one in five students falling victim to sex assault during college years.

The survey also asked students about how widely unwanted sexual behavior occurs on campus, and how likely victims were to discuss it with friends or others.

"We are interested in learning about the problem, measuring it and solving it," MIT Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart said on a teleconference call with reporters.

She said the school was expanding prevention and education efforts as it continued to mine the data, and that it planned to conduct follow-up surveys.

Barnhart noted a certain sense of confusion about what constitutes sexual assault and said the school released the poll to intensify the discussion about it while seeking ways to curb such incidents.

According to the poll, nearly two-thirds of respondents who had encountered an unwanted sexual experience said they had told someone about it, but less than 5 percent reported the incident to an official.

Barnhart said only a small number of sexual assaults were reported at MIT and that the school was adding new resources to help students who had experienced an assault.

Over the past few months, more incidents have been reported, she said, noting that raising awareness about the problem was paying off.

MIT began taking steps after an alumna wrote anonymously in the student newspaper, saying she had been raped on campus.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/one-six-fe...--finance.html
---------------------------------


Have to wonder how many surveys, how many times women have to address this issue before they are believed. Male sexual violence against women is rampant on college campuses.

Registered Sex Offender Emerges as Star College Football Player
 

A registered sex offender has emerged as a star player on a top tier college football team, resuming his athletic career after being expelled from the Air Force Academy where he was court-martialed for sexual assault.

No NCAA rule prevents a person with a criminal conviction from playing college athletics, a spokesperson told ABC News. It is left up to the individual college or conference to determine eligibility.

Jamil Cooks, 23, enrolled at Alcorn State in Mississippi, a Division One NCAA school, after being found guilty in April 2013 of abusive sexual contact in a court martial proceeding at the Air Force Academy, which required him to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Cooks' lawyer, Richard Stevens, says he is appealing the conviction.

The ability of Cooks to continue his football career despite being a sexual predator is only the latest example of distorted priorities that involve sexual violence, said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York.

"I think it’s wrong that they’re allowed to continue to play," she told ABC News.

Officials at the Air Force Academy said the court-martial and dismissal of Cooks was part of an effort to end a culture in which sexual assault had gone unreported or tolerated.

“It’s disappointing,” said Air Force Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson about the ability of Cooks to continue to play high-level college athletics. "That’s not what we tolerate here.”

Cooks was one of two members of the Air Force Academy football team court-martialed for sexual assault as part of a sweeping, controversial investigation that also led to the resignations or dismissals of 15 other cadets. Johnson was appointed superintendent after the investigation.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/registered-...ry?id=26491067

Military sex survey draws complaints
 

WASHINGTON — Shocked and offended by explicit questions, some U.S. servicemen and women are complaining about a new sexual-assault survey that hundreds of thousands have been asked to complete.

The survey is conducted every two years. But this year's version, developed by the Rand Corp., is unusually detailed, including graphically personal questions on sexual acts.

Some military members told The Associated Press that they were surprised and upset by the questions, and some even said they felt re-victimized by the blunt language. None of them would speak publicly by name, but Pentagon officials confirmed they had received complaints that the questions were "intrusive" and "invasive."

The Defense Department said it made the survey much more explicit and detailed this year in order to get more accurate results as the military struggles to reduce its sexual assaults while also encouraging victims to come forward to get help.

The survey questions, which were obtained by The Associated Press, ask about any unwanted sexual experiences or contact, and include very specific wording about men's and women's body parts or other objects, and kinds of contact or penetration.

Here is a sample question, one of a series of 11 graphic questions out of 34. Some are even more detailed:

"Before 9/18/2013, had anyone made you insert an object or body part into someone's mouth, vagina or anus when you did not want to and did not consent?"

"We've had a number of complaints," said Jill Loftus, director of the Navy's sexual assault prevention program. I've heard second- and third-hand that there are a number of women, officers and enlisted, who have gotten to the point where they've read the questions and they've stopped taking the survey. They found them to be either offensive or too intrusive — 'intrusive, invasive' — those are the words they used."

About 560,000 active duty, National Guard and Reserve members were invited to fill out the questionnaire — about five times the number the survey was sent to two years ago. Officials will not say how many responses they have received so far.

Early last year, a report on the 2012 anonymous survey results set off a furor when it estimated that 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted or subjected to unwanted sexual contact. Exasperated members of Congress complained that the Defense Department wasn't doing enough to combat sexual assault and tried, largely unsuccessfully, to force changes in the Pentagon's legal and command procedures.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has pressured the military to deal with its sexual assault problem, said changing the questions could skew the study over time.

"I am concerned the new survey was done in a manner that not only prevents comparing apples to apples from previous years. ... I hope this isn't a case of, 'If you don't like the answer, change the question.'"

In addition to the Rand questions, Loftus said the Navy sends its own survey to sailors and Marines that doesn't get as specific. She added, "We think we've done a very good job of trying to make people aware of what sexual assault is."

But Rand analysts say the more detailed questions are necessary. So does Nate Galbreath, the senior executive adviser for the Pentagon's sexual-assault prevention office.

"This is a crime of a very graphic nature," Galbreath said. "For us to improve our understanding, it sometimes requires asking tough questions."

He said the Defense Department hired Rand to develop and conduct the survey this year, based on new direction from Congress that the effort be fully independent of the Pentagon. He was aware of the complaints but said that he more succinct the questions are, the more accurate the results will be.

"Research has told us, if I ask someone, 'Have you ever been raped?' they will say, 'No,'" Galbreath said. "If I ask that same person, 'Have you ever been forced to engage in sexual activity against your will?' they might say 'Yes.' It's because of the loaded terms like rape and sexual assault, that it's not very clear to a lot of people what we may be asking about."

The survey begins with questions about sexual harassment, asking about jokes, "sexual gestures or sexual body movements," requests to take or share sexually suggestive pictures or videos or efforts to establish "an unwanted romantic or sexual relationship."

Kristie Gore, one of the project leaders at Rand, said participants were told they could skip questions they found upsetting, or simply not take the survey. In the end, she said, Rand received a "relatively small" number of complaints.

She said research suggests that "the discomfort from being asked about prior trauma in a confidential survey is temporary and that such questions cause no additional long-term harm to previously traumatized persons."

Andrew Morral, the other project leader, said the questions were based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

"If you don't use precise language to describe different types of sexual assault and harassment, people define those terms for themselves in different ways, which leads to ambiguous results," he said.

The report on the 2012 survey, which was released early last year, showed sexual assault incidents rose from about 19,000 in the 2010 survey to 26,000.

Those totals far outdistance the number of sexual assaults that are actually reported by members of the military.

According to the latest report, the number of sexual assaults jumped by 50 percent last year as the military worked to get more victims to come forward.

Over the past two years, the military services have tried to increase awareness. Phone numbers and contact information for sexual assault prevention officers are plastered across military bases, including inside the doors of bathroom stalls. And top military officers have traveled to bases around the world speaking on the issue.

In the 2012 anonymous survey, about 6.8 percent of women who answered said they were assaulted and 1.2 percent of men. There are vastly more men in the military; so by the raw numbers, a bit more than 12,000 women said they were assaulted, compared with nearly 14,000 men. (Statistical math is apparently beyond the scope of the military)

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pb...039924/-1/NEWS
-----------------------


Sexual assault is not that complicated a concept. Seems to me, some man speak military people without a clue are getting their jollies at the expense of the very people they are supposed to be protecting.

More keeps happening on the Gamergate front, but the thought of making a new post about it gets awfully daunting, just because of the sheer volume of shit out there--I'm just up and making myself do it, here. The border skirmishes in the communities I'm in finally started to die down, but before they did, I got to see a whole lot people standing up against Gamergate. Also that fun thing where the folks on my side (myself included) provided evidence and sources and whatnot and the folks on the other side pretty much just whined and frothed, which I think contributed to the die-down. Seriously, though, it was pretty messed up for a while--there were people doing shit like calling me a TERF (is this real life?), and saying that feminists should shut up because if we're in a BDSM community (which was the locale) we must be hypocrites, and actually trying to draw false equivalence between WeHuntedTheMammoth (a site that tracks misogyny in the online "manosphere") to ReturnOfKings (a hyper-patriarchal PUA site from the bowels of the manosphere that does everything from teach men how to commit date rape, to engage in active rape apologism, to advocate for total male dominance of society). It was crazy and stupid, but thankfully it's cooling down. No telling when there might be another flare-up somewhere, but.

Before I continue, that site I mentioned. No, not ROK; don't go there unless you want to be sick with rage. I mean WeHuntedTheMammoth. I want to shill it to you. It's quickly become one of my favourite sites, and I believe it should be one of yours if you want to keep track of the new misogyny movement of the Internet "manosphere." Not only does David Futrelle tirelessly track the movements of these groups (including, more recently, Gamergate), but he breaks the news in a largely supportive environment where you don't have to feel like you're alone behind enemy lines when you're learning about this stuff. Highly recommended.

Now, some good news; you should absolutely check this out, especially if you've been worried about this lately--it'll help. Maybe you heard that Anita Sarkeesian appeared on The Colbert Report, maybe you didn't. This was a glorious development that sowed absolute chaos in the Gamergate ranks. The responses to it ranged from defeatist melancholy to an absolute spiral into delusion in which GGers went so full bullshit that they told themselves that this monumental blow against them somehow meant they were winning. Even better, it's just a milestone in a long list of entities coming out against Gamergate--virtually every non-gaming, non-reactionary media outlet has come out against Gamergate, and even the geek sphere is mostly against them. Geek heroes are coming out against Gamergate. GGers are starting to act like the world is against them because it is. Hell, even Playboy magazine (I won't link that one, but I'm sure you can find the article if you really want) published an article critical of Gamergate.

Let's have some more feel-good. Chris Kluwe ripped Gamergate a new one with some of the most brilliant and colourful profanity the Internet has seen yet. He also went on to summarise the reactions of Gamergate to Anita Sarkeesian's appearance on The Colbert Report, and it was funny. And this is probably the single funniest thing about GG on the Internet.

For about a month or two straight I was sick with anger. My limbic system wouldn't stop screaming about the enemies lurking in my own tribe and cutting off the blood flow to those parts of my brain that actually try to deal with things in rational terms. The fights were ugly, especially when these people were in communities I'm part of, and really laid bare the awful nature of those enemies. I don't want to get into further into the gory details of those clashes than I already have; I do hope that's all right.

But now, after all that's happened, there's a part of me that's hopeful--only part, granted, because Gamergate has been successful at driving far too many women out of the hobby, and I can only hope that they'll come back. But those gamers who stand against Gamergate's ideals really stood up. I got to see non-trans women and trans women (the latter, interestingly, are insanely common in both the hobby and the industry itself), and awesome allies, standing together against GG and doing great things: I can only hope the next is to reach out to those women who were driven out by Gamergate and draw them back in. Gamergate even succeeded at making feminism in games mainstream by catapulting Anita Sarkeesian all the way to The Colbert Report and exemplifying our society's misogyny problem so clearly even the mainstream media can see it. It brightens my day a little every time I hear someone say that before Gamergate they didn't understand why feminism is still important or that misogyny is alive and well, but now they're starting to see it. Even 4chan, the place where the conspiracy against Zoe Quinn that became Gamergate was originally hatched, wised up and banned Gamergate from its midst after years of tolerating all kinds of horrific toxicity, from misogyny to racism to anti-Semitism, on its boards. Gamergate called itself the "sleeping giant" that had finally been awoken by "feminist invasion," and then it provoked the actual sleeping giant.

I suppose I can only hope that something good comes of this in the end, and that it's not just the antidepressants talking.

I could continue in this post, but I want to finish this one off and post it. In the next post, the bad news. I'm not looking forward to this.

Yeah, the bad news. Here I'm going to be putting Gamergate and some of its bullshit in context, and shedding some more light on who--and what--is behind Gamergate, and some major fears about what gotterdammerung may yet result from this.

To start off, you may have heard of Vivian James, the fictional young woman who has become the Gamergate mascot. Or perhaps you haven't. Either way, David Futrelle provides a little more context on her and how Gamergate uses her, including the rape joke meme built into the colour scheme of her hoodie (it's complicated, and needless to say, trigger warning), should you choose to follow his links to the details. Just wanted to put that out there for no particular reason. I don't even know why.

Now. I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir when I say that the fundamental downside of Gamergate exposing the reality of modern misogyny even to the mainstream is obviously that the reason the mainstream can see it is because extreme misogyny really does exist and it's being vocal and going on the offensive. But the rabbit hole goes deeper. Way deeper.

Have any of you heard of Operation Lollipop? You probably haven't. How about #EndFathersDay, the so-called "feminist" campaign to end Father's Day? It was a false flag campaign, undertaken by misogynists using sockpuppet accounts to pose as feminists with the goal of making feminism look bad, which has been tied to Operation Lollipop. I suggest you read both of these articles, and bear in mind that Operation Lollipop is from the same community that later hatched the conspiracy against Zoe Quinn that went on to become Gamergate. Gamergate's antifeminist agenda precedes it; Gamergate is merely its latest incarnation. And already their work continues. Notice the instructions to (mis)use language used by feminists and other advocates of social justice in order to attack feminism and make the bizarre claim that a game having a female protagonist constitutes male rape of women's bodies. (Because Gamergate is about ethics in journalism and objectivity and honesty, don'tcha know.)

You should also see this. It's a list of tweets by one a_man_in_black (I like the work he's doing and wanted to make sure people saw it, OK?) arguing that Gamergate isn't a misogynistic movement unto itself so much as the latest outburst of a misogynistic movement that's been going for years. Like I say, Gamergate's antifeminist, misogynistic agenda precedes it. Here, he also argues that Gamergate "moderates" are a myth on the grounds that all Gamergaters benefit from the harassment committed by more aggressive Gamergaters. (Also, contains sadness about Gamergate driving a teenage girl who was passionate about gaming offline. :( )

TRIGGER WARNING JESUS CHRIST TRIGGER WARNING I DON'T EVEN HAVE TRIGGERS AND THIS FREAKED ME THE FUCK OUT! Now that I've shown you 4chan's involvement and just what kind of people festered there, I want you to see some other important communities behind Gamergate, including 8chan, which was created in response to 4chan banning Gamergate. TRIGGER WARNING!

I'd also like for you to have just a little look at who Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend who made the Zoe Post that begat the conspiracy against her, is. His name is Eron Gjoni, and this is him in a bite-sized nutshell.

I want you to know what kinds of people are connected to the Reddit board KotakuInAction, which is supposedly the "respectable" wing of Gamergate (spoiler: it's not).

TRIGGER WARNING! I want you know what the moderators of KotakuInAction--which, again, is supposed to be the "respectable," "moderate," "anti-harassment" wing of Gamergate--get up to outside of KIA. FNVG provides info here, including a link to an article on the subject and listing even more offenders than are listed in that article, including the note that KotakuInAction shared a moderator with a board called Philosophy of Rape. Which, unlike many of the other boards, makes no pretense of being about "fantasy," as the creator flat-out claims that he is as serious as a heart attack. If you have a strong stomach, WHTM goes into greater detail on one of the boards, "Break Feminazis," here. TRIGGER WARNING!

I want you to know what kind of people "lead" Gamergate, insofar as it has leaders--it claims to be leaderless, and yet many of these people are, in fact, major figures in the movement. Don't worry too much about the article being written by one "Poopsock Holmes"; "poopsocking" is just a joke about spending too much time playing video games (i.e., that someone is not even getting up to poop).

Here, have some more sadness about what Gamergate's prominent figures really think about women.

And some more sadness about what GGers think about "SJWs" and gender. Way to deride exactly the people this world needs. (Note: Gamergatetxt isn't the original poster of that awful comment; rather, Gamergatetxt is a feed that archives the worst statements made by Gamergate.)

You wanna know who else is jumping on the GG bandwagon besides MRAs, rape apologists, open racists, anti-Semites, and yada yada? Stormfront. I am fucking serious. Fucking Stormfront. Literal neo-Nazis. (Granted those are open racists and anti-Semites, but this is kicking it up to a new level when you get open and proud neo-Nazis involved.) Gamergaters still aren't asking themselves why the literal worst people in the world today think the GG banner represents their interests while virtually everyone who is not a complete piece of shit stands against it. Additionally, you may notice two terms commonly thrown around in GG's rhetoric, particularly when they're not running PR: "SJW" ("Social Justice Warrior," which now pretty much refers to anyone who opens their mouth in opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., despite some GGers making bizarre claims like "SJWs are known TERFs") and "cultural Marxism" (Marx's theories of class applied to race, gender, and sexuality). Both of these terms originated in neo-Nazi circles. "SJW" escaped from neo-Nazi circles quite a while ago, granted, but "cultural Marxism" is much newer to me, and leads me to suspect that Gamergate is even more strongly influenced by neo-Nazi thought than many of its members are willing to admit.

So yeah. This is all leading into one big clusterfuck at the centre: Gamergate isn't "just" inextricably linked to the harassment of women. It is also inextricably linked to an active agenda of misogyny and a desire to keep women disempowered in our culture that extends far beyond one harassment campaign--and also to the even more extreme neoreactionary movement. (If you wish to know more about the mouth-breathing degenerates behind the NRx movement, please read RationalWiki's article; it's depressing and I don't want to talk about it myself.) I fear that, with a lot of Gamergaters feeling like the world is against them--and the prominence of manosphere misogynists and neoreactionaries in GG--this is prime time for these foul movements to scoop up angry young men. This is a perfect recruiting campaign for the Men's Privilege Movement, for redpills, for neo-Nazis, for PUAs and other rape advocates, for neoreactionaries. Even if Gamergate has largely alienated most and awoken many to the need for feminism and social justice in general, it's still very convenient for the literal worst people in the world to bring more people into their particular folds. Ayn Rand's philosophy of pure greed was supposedly (I'm only 28, so my knowledge is limited) just a fringe thing for anti-hippies in college fifty years ago, and yet now that philosophy is actively corroding civilisation as we know it. I worry that in fifty years the NRx--something so heinous and blatantly evil that Ayn Rand actually manages to look almost tame in comparison--could pick up that kind of steam.

I'm upset. I'm angry and I'm scared and kind of want one of those strawberry daiquiris my grandmother picked up for me the other day even though I don't generally like to drink.

...But, before I go, I'm going to end on a tangent. Some Polish developer named Destructive Studios released a trailer a few weeks ago for a game they're developing called Hatred. (FNVG article here; critical Polygon article which includes the trailer--trigger warning, natch--here) It's a murder simulator in which a white male protagonist who hates the world goes out and hunts innocent people to kill, with a special focus on things like the victims pleading for their lives before you murder them in extremely graphic ways. The cherry on top is that someone actually looked into the political connections and affiliations of some of the developers and oh look they're neo-Nazis! And do you want to know what these neo-Nazis had to say about the game and why they were making it? They were making it because they wanted a counterpoint to today's "political correctness," and to make a game that was "honest" and not "political." We have officially reached such a fucking political nadir that there are people who can claim with a straight face that a neo-Nazi genocide simulator is the definition of "apolitical." But why do I bring it up? There's no direct link to Gamergate. It's just, this, right here, despite any actual connections, it just smacks of everything Gamergate is about. Teenage white male rage and entitlement. The idea that said teenage white male rage and entitlement is "apolitical" (see also: Gamergate's demand for an "apolitical" gaming press) and that anything else is a "political agenda." Hatred of everything from "political correctness" all the way on down to "basic human decency." And, y'know, actual neo-Nazis. That the trailer was released in the middle of the Gamergate shitstorm was just icing on the sadness cake.

I will say, I might be a hypocrite. I look at Hatred as a perfect example of what's wrong with gamer culture at the moment and something that should probably be kept out of respectable stores (not simply because of the violence, but because of the extremist political connections and implied agenda of the devs), but you know what? If someone were making a murder simulator about a woman venting her rage and hatred upon society in a horrific burst of ultra-violence, I would be all I'M THROWING MONEY AT THE SCREEN BUT NOTHING IS HAPPENING right now. But, of course, that would be "political." Also probably "misandry," somehow.

fuck it I need a drink

A little update on GG again. Yes, I saw something new since my last post; there's just no end to this madness. That daiquiri tasted awful but I'm glad I had that drink anyway because seriously fuck this bullshit.

That Gamergate has been harassing women opposed to it into silence isn't news. But now, when male allies speak up against false-flag "feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers telling GG that everything they do is peachy and they don't need to change the way they treat women or think about women at all and that feminists are evil people for bringing their cooties into their treehouse, this shit happens. Yes, that is a graphic accusing male allies of being The Patriarchy for not buying CHS's claim that she represents feminism. This, after harassing anti-GG women into silence to keep them from speaking up against this. It's as a_man_in_black said: "moderate" Gamergaters are bullshit because they are still cashing in on the benefits of more aggressive Gamergaters harassing women into silence. I'd also like to take this moment to reiterate that appropriating and misusing language used by feminists and other advocates of social justice has been part of GG's plan from square one, and that this is just a picture-perfect example of it.

Gamergate calls Christina Hoff Sommers "Based Mom." It's fitting, seeing as they use her to wash the poop out of their collective underpants.

BONUS! Remember my mention of anti-Semitism, racism, and neo-Nazis in Gamergate? Here, have some brand new anti-Semitism and racism in Gamergate.

Christmas came early this year
 

Sorry about being a little quiet the past several days. Some goings-on in another thread made me feel a little uncomfortable/unwelcome, but the less said about it the better.

Gamergate hatched a plan to try to make a move on Tumblr, but I wouldn't be too worried about that if I were you. There aren't a lot of neutrals left for them to convert, especially on Tumblr. I'm not even sure why I'm reporting on this.

Gamergate's lawyer, however, is still a disgusting, sleazy fuck, and my god he needs to be moved to a remote island far far away before he actually does something, because he's already justified nefarious things to himself. That is not a good sign.

Here, wash that last link out of your brain (warning: peak Gamergate at 3:13-3:20).

Anyway, while they're pretty clearly in their twilight and there's not really much of anything they can do to make a comeback at this point, they're still going on with bizarre conspiracy theories. (Also bizarre: what qualifies as "creepy research" to them.)

But speaking of conspiracy theories, on to the reason I broke my hiatus to post this in the first place. Christmas came early this year, folks. One of the major players in GG, also an anti-Semite and MRA, abandoned the movement due to its infighting. It's gotten so bad that even their hero Milo doesn't see this going anywhere good. Because, as is to be expected from a bunch of conspiracy-theorist maniacs who see enemies everywhere they look, they are now eating their own.

I see a lot of GG's major female players (such as they are) on that shill list. I wonder if now they understand what the movement is really about, or if they've found some way to keep themselves in the dark.

Pregnant, and No Civil Rights
 

WITH the success of Republicans in the midterm elections and the passage of Tennessee’s anti-abortion amendment, we can expect ongoing efforts to ban abortion and advance the “personhood” rights of fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses.

But it is not just those who support abortion rights who have reason to worry. Anti-abortion measures pose a risk to all pregnant women, including those who want to be pregnant.

Such laws are increasingly being used as the basis for arresting women who have no intention of ending a pregnancy and for preventing women from making their own decisions about how they will give birth.

How does this play out? Based on the belief that he had an obligation to give a fetus a chance for life, a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a critically ill 27-year-old woman who was 26 weeks pregnant to undergo a cesarean section, which he understood might kill her. Neither the woman nor her baby survived.

In Iowa, a pregnant woman who fell down a flight of stairs was reported to the police after seeking help at a hospital. She was arrested for “attempted fetal homicide.”

In Utah, a woman gave birth to twins; one was stillborn. Health care providers believed that the stillbirth was the result of the woman’s decision to delay having a cesarean. She was arrested on charges of fetal homicide.

In Louisiana, a woman who went to the hospital for unexplained vaginal bleeding was locked up for over a year on charges of second-degree murder before medical records revealed she had suffered a miscarriage at 11 to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Florida has had a number of such cases. In one, a woman was held prisoner at a hospital to prevent her from going home while she appeared to be experiencing a miscarriage. She was forced to undergo a cesarean. Neither the detention nor the surgery prevented the pregnancy loss, but they did keep this mother from caring for her two small children at home. While a state court later found the detention unlawful, the opinion suggested that if the hospital had taken her prisoner later in her pregnancy, its actions might have been permissible.

In another case, a woman who had been in labor at home was picked up by a sheriff, strapped down in the back of an ambulance, taken to a hospital, and forced to have a cesarean she did not want. When this mother later protested what had happened, a court concluded that the woman’s personal constitutional rights “clearly did not outweigh the interests of the State of Florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”

Anti-abortion reasoning has also provided the justification for arresting pregnant women who experience depression and have attempted suicide. A 22-year-old in South Carolina who was eight months pregnant attempted suicide by jumping out a window. She survived despite suffering severe injuries. Because she lost the pregnancy, she was arrested and jailed for the crime of homicide by child abuse.

These are not isolated or rare cases. Last year, we published a peer-reviewed study documenting 413 arrests or equivalent actions depriving pregnant women of their physical liberty during the 32 years between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005. In a majority of these cases, women who had no intention of ending a pregnancy went to term and gave birth to a healthy baby. This includes the many cases where the pregnant woman was alleged to have used some amount of alcohol or a criminalized drug.

Since 2005, we have identified an additional 380 cases, with more arrests occurring every week. This significant increase coincides with what the Guttmacher Institute describes as a “seismic shift” in the number of states with laws hostile to abortion rights.

The principle at the heart of contemporary efforts to end legal abortion is that fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses are persons or at least have separate rights that must be protected by the state. In each of the cases we identified, this same rationale provided the justification for the deprivation of pregnant women’s physical liberty, as well as of the right to medical decision making, medical privacy, bodily integrity and, in one case, the woman’s right to life.

Many of the pregnant women subjected to this mistreatment are themselves profoundly opposed to abortion. Yet it was precisely the legal arguments for recriminalizing abortion that were used to strip them of their rights to dignity and liberty in the context of labor and delivery. These cases, individually and collectively, highlight what is so often missed when the focus is on attacking or defending abortion, namely that all pregnant women are at risk of losing a wide range of fundamental rights that are at the core of constitutional personhood in the United States.

If we want to end these unjust and inhumane arrests and forced interventions on pregnant women, we need to stop focusing only on the abortion issue and start working to protect the personhood of pregnant women.

We should be able to work across the spectrum of opinion about abortion to unite in the defense of one basic principle: that at no point in her pregnancy should a woman lose her civil and human rights.

Lynn M. Paltrow is a lawyer and the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, where Jeanne Flavin, a sociology professor at Fordham University, is the president of the board of directors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/op...=fb-share&_r=0

Rape and death threats are terrorizing female gamers. Why haven’t men in tech spoken out?
 

They’ve taken down women I care about one by one. Now, the vicious mob of the Gamergate movement is coming after me. They’ve threatened to rape me. They’ve threatened to make me choke to death on my husband’s severed genitals. They’ve threatened to murder any children I might have.

This angry horde has been allowed to wage its misogynistic war without penalty for too long. It’s time for the video game industry to stop them.

Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.

The movement is not new. Two years ago, when Anita Sarkeesian tried to crowdfund a series of videos critiquing the hypersexualized female characters of video games, they threatened to kill and rape her. The movement reached fever pitch – and got its name — when a jilted former lover of indie game developer Zoe Quinn published transcripts of her life online. Gamers who were outraged over charges that Quinn’s game Depression Quest had received favorable reviews due to an alleged romantic relationship with a journalist, seized the opportunity to shame and terrify her into hiding. Now, Gamergate is a wildfire that threatens to consume the entire games industry.

The fact that Gamergate supporters went after Quinn and not the journalist says everything you need to know about the movement.

I became Gamergate’s latest target when I tweeted this joke about supporters of the movement. (Unable to copy the image. See article directly.)

The next day, my Twitter mentions were full of death threats so severe I had to flee my home. They have targeted the financial assets of my company by hacking. They have tried to impersonate me on Twitter. Even as we speak, they are spreading lies to journalists via burner e-mail accounts in an attempt to destroy me professionally.

We’ve lost too many women to this lunatic mob. Good women the industry was lucky to have, such as Jenn Frank, Mattie Bryce and my friend Samantha Allen, one of the most insightful critics in games media. They decided the personal cost was too high, and I don’t know who could blame them.

Every woman I know in the industry is terrified she will be next.

The culture in which women are treated this way by gamers didn’t happen in a vacuum. For 30 years, video games have been designed by men, marketed to men and sold to men. It’s obvious to anyone outside the industry that video games have serious issues with the portrayal of women. It’s not just oversexualized examples, such as Ivy of the Soul Caliber series. Games are still lazily falling on the same outdated tropes involving women. Princess Peach, of Nintendo’s Mario games, has been kidnapped in 12 separate games since 1985. Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the propensity of games to have women thoughtlessly murdered as a motivation for the male hero, such as Watch Dogs.

The consequence of this culture is male gamers have been trained to feel video games are their turf. In stopping Gamergate, the men who dominate it – not just women — must address the culture that created Gamergate.

Some have. But many more have been silent. In the male-dominated video game media, many have chosen to sit by and do nothing as Gamergate picks us off, one by one. IGN has not covered Gamergate. Game Informer has not covered Gamergate. Ironically, the people who most need to hear this message are not hearing it, because of an editorial choice to stay on the sidelines.

There are many straightforward steps we can take to change this.

First, major institutions in video games, which happen to be dominated by men, need to speak up immediately and denounce Gamergate. The dam started to break this week as Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb broke the silence at their publication on Monday. Last week, the industry’s top trade group, the Entertainment Software Association spoke out against Gamergate, saying “Threats of violence and harassment have to stop. There is no place in the video game community for personal attacks and threats.”

Secondly, I call upon the entire industry to examine its hiring practices at all levels. Women make up half of all gamers, yet we make up only a fraction of this industry. While it’s possible to point to high profile women in the field, the fact remains. Women hold a shockingly disproportionate number of high level positions in game studios, game publishers and particularly in leadership roles. There are just 11 percent of game designers and 3 percent of programmers, according to The Boston Globe.

Game journalism also plays a critical role. It doesn’t matter how many women we get into game production. If the only people evaluating the work we do continue to be men, women’s voices will never be heard.

My friend Quinn told me about a folder on her computer called, “The Ones We’ve Lost.” They are the letters she’s gotten from young girls who dream of being game developers, but are terrified of the environment they see. I nearly broke into tears as I told her I had a folder filled with the same. The truth is, even if we stopped Gamergate tomorrow, it will have already come at too high a cost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/postev...ch-spoken-out/

--------------------------


The feminist analysis of this would be, GamerGate is another tickle down effect of the real problem. The real problem is we live in a patriarchal world, made by and for males based on the concepts of male superiority which cannot exist without female inferiority; male dominance which cannot exist without female submission; male entitlement which cannot exist without female lack thereof. All of this is reinforced thru ritualized, systemic, and institutionized methods to keep women, oppressed, victimized and objectified. The biggest weapon used is the threat of violence and "corrective rape" to those who dare expose the system for what it is.

The system, from time to time, allows things to occur which appear to be "progressive" and "empowering" for females. Nothing is allowed to happen in an oppressive system which does not enhance or reinforce the power or whims of the oppressors. Nothing. The oppressed may be operating under the illusion they have gained something or made headway but in the final analysis, the benefit to the oppressor far outweighs the crumbs the oppressed mistake as progress.

Much time, energy, and resources are wasted by reinventing the wheel, issue after issue in the trickle down effect. GamerGate, the rape of females, domestic violence, wage inequity, and every other trickle down issue comes from the same source. These issues will remain until the source of these horrors inflicted on females is dealt with with.

The silence of males on these issues and the use of "not all males" are both methods of distancing oneself from the reality and responsibility. Silence implies consent and agreement. "Not all males" is saying there is a difference without demonstrating there is a difference. To expect those who benefit from such a system to speak to the inequities of such is not exactly realistic. It takes strength and courage to stand apart from the protection afforded by the whole.

Feminism is about always keeping the bigger picture in mind when looking at the trickle down effects. It is about speaking to the truth over and over. It is about living the truth and modeling the truth to others. It is about not being complicit in ones own oppression and educating others about this as well.

Feminism is not a laundry lists of trickle down issues which are wholly unsolvable at the trickle down level. It is a way of seeing the world for what it is and being committed to changing it 24/7/365. It is also about feeling you are banging your head against the wall.....cuz you are.

And, you know you are doing a damn good job as a feminist when people attack you and threaten you for speaking out, for telling the truth, and for being committed to the truth. Being threatened means you are speaking to something that is very threatening to the person(s) who are threatening you. Thats a crapload of threatening.

It is stone age mentality but threats and violence are all about instilling fear and forcing people to be silent because they are paralyzed by fear. Threats and violence are just methods of control, like any other methods of control females face every single freakin day.

History has proven over and over the methods of the oppressors. It has also shown the methods the oppressed have used to lessen their burden including bargaining, colluding, appealing to higher senses, using logic etc.

History will keep repeating itself until the oppressed finally say no and back up that no with appropriate, definitive action.

Is the world starting to turn against Bill Cosby?
 

The man once known as “America’s Dad” is too radioactive for daytime television.

Bill Cosby, who was scheduled to appear as a guest on “The Queen Latifah Show” to promote his new comedy tour, is no longer going to be on the show.

TMZ initially reported producers rescinded the invitation, but updated the story with a statement from the show’s spokesman saying Cosby’s appearance was “postponed at his request.” The change came just days after the Daily Mail published Barbara Bowman’s account of the alleged sexual abuse she said she suffered at Cosby’s hands.

These allegations have been reported for years — before Bowman spoke to the Daily Mail, she spoke to Newsweek in February. Cosby has said almost nothing about the accusations. His publicist told Newsweek: “This is a 10-year-old, discredited accusation that proved to be nothing at the time, and is still nothing.”

Tamara Green spoke to Matt Lauer on the “Today” show in 2005 about her alleged experiences and in February to Newsweek. In 2004, Andrea Constand filed suit against Cosby for battery, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, alleging that Cosby had drugged and raped her. Thirteen women came forward with their own allegations and agreed to testify as witnesses if the suit went to trial. Cosby settled in 2006.

In recent years, Cosby has executed something of a career revival: He did a special for Comedy Central, “Bill Cosby: Far From Finished.” He is developing a new show for NBC slated for summer or fall of next year.

But it seems actor and comedian Hannibal Buress’s willingness to openly criticize Cosby finally tipped the scales against him.

Buress is on tour performing a new stand-up act. In it, he calls Cosby a rapist while voicing disagreement with his more recent role as public scold to black people.

“Bill Cosby has the f—ing smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said. “He just gets on TV — ‘Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches.”

During his act, Buress expressed incredulity at what he calls Cosby’s “Teflon public image.” “I’ve done this bit on stage, and people don’t believe me. People think I’m making it up,” Buress said. “If you didn’t know about it, when you leave here, Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ It’s not funny. That s— has more results than ‘Hannibal Buress.’”

What was strange was the mushroom cloud of controversy Buress set off repeating something he had said before — not about new allegations, but about the same 13 women who signed on as witnesses in Constand’s 2004 lawsuit.

Without intending to, Buress became a perfect example of the conundrum of male allyship: It wasn’t enough 13 different women accused Cosby of drugging, raping and violently assaulting them. It was only after a famous man, Buress, called him out that the possibility of Cosby becoming a television pariah became real.

Last month, Cosby was a guest on the “The Colbert Report.” Colbert remained in character, but was unambiguously deferential. In August, Cosby appeared on “The Tonight Show” and got similar treatment from Jimmy Fallon.

Author Mark Whitaker omitted rape allegations from his new biography of Cosby, and the book was still widely praised for giving a comprehensive look at Cosby’s life. When HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill asked Whitaker why he failed to mention the rape allegations in the book, for which he had Cosby’s cooperation, Whitaker answered: “In these cases, there were no definitive court findings, there were no independent witnesses, and I just felt, at the end of the day, all I would be doing would be, ‘These people say this, Cosby denies this.’ And as not only a reporter but his biographer, if people asked me, ‘What is the truth? What do you think?’ I would be in the position of saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and I just felt uncomfortable.”

Cosby is hardly an outlier when it comes to popular figures given the benefit of the doubt when accused of abusing women. When fired CBC host Jian Ghomeshi posted on Facebook Sunday night he was being targeted by a “jilted ex-girlfriend,” fans and even those unfamiliar with Ghomeshi immediately rallied around him. The post drew more than 100,000 likes.

Owen Pallett, a friend of Ghomeshi’s, pulled a Buress: He chose to publicly condemn Ghomeshi, who is accused of sexually assaulting and battering women. “Jian is my friend,” Pallet wrote in a rather damning Facebook post. “I have appeared twice on Q. But there is no grey area here. Three women have been beaten by Jian Ghomeshi.”

Pallett chose to speak while only two of nine women who came forward to accuse Ghomeshi — actress Lucy DeCoutere and lawyer and author Reva Seth — were willing to reveal their identities. The others requested anonymity out of fear of harassment, threats and retaliation. At the time Pallett published his post, only four women had come forward. Since then, four more have spoken to various Canadian news organizations. Many Ghomeshi supporters dismissed them as liars, as has Ghomeshi.

But somehow, Pallett’s willingness to speak bolsters the women’s claims. The problem, argued Salon’s Katie McDonough, is that people were shocked Pallett chose to believe women:

Is there anything that scandalous about Pallett’s decision? After all, what Pallett is doing is what a lot of people have already done — taken sides. Pallett just happens to have taken the side that says that women are not vindictive. Women are not liars. Women are not out to destroy men for sport.

On one hand, having male allies such as Buress and Pallett, who are unafraid to speak up, has been instrumental in amplifying women’s voices when they make accusations against men more powerful and famous than themselves. On the other, there’s a question why this is necessary at all — and why there’s such a reflexive reaction to dismiss them.

The sexual assault allegations by Bowman, Constand and Green were all over the Internet when Queen Latifah’s show decided to book Cosby. Quite possibly, it took Buress’s words to make Cosby so unpalatable the best decision for both parties was to cancel.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...st-bill-cosby/

Your Irregular Gamergate Update
 

I've been putting this one off, but I think there's sufficient mass for another update on what GG has been up to.

First off, on entities (and men) in tech condemning Gamergate, Blizzard's CEO, Michael Morhaime, did so at the start of Blizzcon on November 7. It was fairly gentle as condemnations go, but still. For some further context on Blizzard: Blizzard is the company behind World of Warcraft, whose playerbase is now like 60% women, because Blizzard actually punishes harassment on WoW servers. Because they were smart and realised that letting dudebros drive women away was leaving money on the table. (And that's what Gamergate is angry about: women's money is green and game developers are starting to look for ways to get women to buy their products. Which involves putting the interests of women ahead of the interests of toxic little boys who want to keep "cooties" out of what they mistakenly believe to be their treehouse.)

Some more good news: one of Gamergate's early successes, such as they were, that wasn't harassing women out of vidya was getting companies like Intel to stop advertising on sites they don't like. Like getting Intel to stop advertising on Gamasutra. So what's the good news? Intel reversed its decision and is advertising on Gamasutra again. So not only is Gamergate stalling out, but it's actively losing ground it once held.

Video game critic and cultural commentator Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition left The Escapist (an online entertainment magazine, mostly about video gaming) to go independent. I don't think he actually declared a specific reason aside from getting enough support on his Patreon to be able to safely go independent, but I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that Alexander Marcis, general manager of the Escapist, gave preferential coverage to Gamergate by actually getting his sources for an article on Gamergate from 4chan. The writers Alexander Marcis invited to comment included Slade Villena, a guy who previously had actively advocated for "black hat" (criminal) tactics against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, and James Desborough, whose Gor RPG (about a massively misogynistic setting in which women are sex slaves, I wish I were making this up) Alexander Marcis was financially backing at the time (I actually saw that kickstarter and promptly donated all of my NOPE). Because it was never about ethics in gaming journalism. Jim Sterling, on the other hand, has ended up on the anti-GG side by virtue of people accusing him of being a "social justice warrior" because he's stated that better representation of women and minorities in video games is both morally and financially the correct course of action. (His response to this accusation was to ask if he's allowed to be a social justice bard. Thank God for him.)

Now for some half-assed "bad news" that doesn't actually seem to mean anything positive for Gamergate:

Gamergate lost Milo, but it picked up a new sad excuse for a champion, who, as David Futrelle says, looks like a wax replica of Patrick Bateman and thinks gamers are a bunch of dateless nerds (and Gamergaters don't seem to be disagreeing with him very hard on this point).

Roosh V (who one of my friends nicknamed LR1, for "Literally Rapist 1") started a "gaming site" for Gamergaters called Reaxxion (presumably a reference to "neoreactionary"). Of course, he openly declares that his stake in this is 'protecting the interests of heterosexual Western males,' but that gay men and 'attractive women' are still allowed. One of the first articles up on the site ended with the note that in further columns it would explore how video games are a fundamentally male activity. I'm not even kidding. I wish I were.

Remember that thing with Matt Taylor's shirt covered in half-naked ladies? Gamergate is jumping on that because the #Gamergate hashtag is losing steam, and of course they're talking about how this is the exact thing they've been fighting all along. (Because it was never about ethics in gaming journalism.)

The guys making The Sarkeesian Effect, who are, of course, Gamergaters, decided to bring on Jack Fucking Thompson as a source. I'm old enough to remember when Jack Thompson was actually trying to destroy video games, and so I always found the comparisons of Anita Sarkeesian to Jack Thompson to be ridiculous and disingenuous. But now, Gamergate has passed comparing Anita Sarkeesian to Jack Thompson and actually progressed to inviting Jack Thompson--who not only actually did seek to destroy video games, but also got disbarred for severe ethics violations--in to call Anita Sarkeesian a "censor." (Because it was always about attacking feminism, and not about ethics of any kind, or even really about video games, particularly for the open misogynists behind The Sarkeesian Effect.)

Now, this next one is a fair bit heavier--trigger warning, definitely a trigger warning for this link. Remember how I mentioned in an earlier post that /r/KotakuInAction actually had to drop several moderators from its board for their extremely inconvenient connections, like that one moderator they happened to share with /r/PhilosophyOfRape? I didn't go into more detail on that board at the time, but if you actually want the messy details, here they are, from The Mary Sue. Again, TRIGGER WARNING.

Here, wash that out of your brain. Have a nice picture of Vivian James being liberated from being Gamergate's mascot and getting some good pro-woman games and even a new hoodie so she doesn't have to wear a dogwhistle rape joke.

Now. Lastly, some shitlord told Brianna Wu that "respects is earn." You know, that thing where dudebros claim that it's OK to disrespect women because women haven't "earned respect" but men supposedly have. The way this guy butchered the phrase, however, invited a delightful new meme. Enjoy!

PS: on women in STEM fields, and computer science and vidya specifically, god dammit Mattel