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Attack on Women: The Real Horror of GamerGate

12/31/2014

By Paige Cober
Earlier this year, when I took my fourteen year old little brother to see the second installment of the recent X-Men prequels, X-Men: Days of Future Past, I wasn’t expecting to get quizzed on “just how much” I know about the Marvel universe.

We were talking about the differences between the Marvel Universe and 20th Century Fox’s casting of the Maximoff twins. I won’t get into the whole debate between the two studios and the absolute clusterfuck that ensued due to studio rights issues, because in that moment, what I knew didn’t really matter. What mattered was the fact that whatever I said caused a ruckus of laughter in the otherwise quiet seats behind us, and ended in a boy barely my age telling me, “The twin’s name isn’t Quicksilver. It’s the Silver Surfer.”

I had two options: either calmly tell him to mind his own business and that no, Pietro Maximoff is not in any universe the Silver Surfer -- film franchise or otherwise -- or ignore him and continue talking.

I ignored him.

In retrospect, I wish I had the courage to tell him the former, but I’m not that surprised that I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I was in a theater full of men wearing Marvel memorabilia who were just as big fans of the franchise as I was, if not more. It was reminiscent of the few times I attempted to venture into this seemingly “exclusive” world: when I went to New York Comic Con for the first time at fourteen and got dirty looks from the creative team of Justice League when I asked for a signature on their newest issue, those few times as a young teenager I found enough courage to walk into my local comic book shop and browse my favorite issues, or even that one time when I was ten and tried to play Yu-Gi-Oh in my local Toys R Us only for a boy my age to tell me I wasn’t good enough to play.

It doesn’t take a seasoned comic book fan to understand that Pietro Maximoff is Quicksilver, but to this boy at the theater, because I was a woman with an opinion on comic books, I had to be wrong. So I had a split second window to react and, within that split second window, even I believed him.

Because I identify as a woman, there is absolutely no way I could understand even the most basic comic book information.
As ridiculous as these situations are, my own experiences are the lesser side of the hostility toward women within Nerd Culture. Fortunately, most of this hostility doesn’t go further than these types of microaggressions, but sometimes -- just sometimes -- more extreme cases make their way into the limelight.

What I’m talking about is what has been recently dubbed the “GamerGate” controversy. It has received wide attention upon the attack of indie video game developer, Zoe Quinn, after she was accused by an ex-boyfriend of dating Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson to get positive reviews on her new game, Depression Quest. Users on anonymous forums 4chan and Reddit ended up attacking and threatening her to the point where she felt that she had to leave the internet, and eventually, her own home -- all for her own safety. These accusations, of course, were later proved impossible, as Grayson hadn’t even reviewed her work in the first place.

Despite this, GamerGate didn’t stop with Quinn. Anita Sarkeesian, host of the webseries Feminist Frequency, was attacked for her feminist commentary in pop culture, particularly surrounding women in video games. Like Quinn, Sarkeesian also had to leave her own home due death threats. But these threats weren’t just on her own life -- in the beginning of October, just days before her planned talk in Utah State University, a threat came out against the university itself. A terrifying manifesto was written through email by someone claiming to be a student at the university.

Among the cluster of threats directed at the student body, Sarkeesian, and a nearby women’s center, he wrote, “Feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they've wronged,” and promised to cause “the deadliest school shooting in American history.” Finally, he wrote, “you will never find me, but soon you will all know my name.” Sarkeesian later cancelled the talk because of the police’s refusal to check for concealed firearms during the event.

As terrifying as this was, unfortunately, this extreme hostility toward feminism isn’t a new occurrence. According to the Pew Research Internet Project, women aged 18-24 are significantly likely to experience “severe types” of harassment. To put this in perspective, over one-fourth of young women were either stalked or experienced online sexual harassment. Among these women, most are unable to escape the harassment even in their everyday life, i.e. -- GamerGate.

Felicia Day, an actress that has appeared in Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a webseries about her life as a self-identified gamer, The Guild, wrote an entire blog post in response to her silence about GamerGate. Titled, “The Only Thing I Have to Say About GamerGate,” she describes her fears of being hacked, harassed, and threatened both online and in person if she spoke out about the recent events within the gaming community. Within days, it received over 45,000 notes on Tumblr – an exceptionally positive reaction within the Tumblr community.

Despite this positive reaction, within the first few minutes of the blog post, Day was doxxed and her personal information was posted all over the internet for anyone to see.

In other words, her worst fears had come true. Within her blog post, she states, “I have not said many public things about GamerGate. I have tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent? Self-protection and fear.”

Unfortunately, this issue with women in Nerd Culture goes a lot deeper than empty threats and not because those within the subculture are particularly abrasive toward women. It’s because comic books, video games, card games, MMRPGs, and this whole wide array of media are traditionally written and produced by men. But the problem resides in the fact that women are a part of the Nerd Culture too and a huge chunk of it -- enough so that when any change is proposed to produce equality for that audience, or even content creators, it is met with a mix of both general hostility and violent threats.

In other words, the sex issue that exists in Nerd Culture reflects the culture of the outside world where women are coddled, de-legitimized, threatened, and told to shut up and deal with it because -- in the end -- our opinion doesn’t seem to matter.

Paige Cober is a Writing, Literature and Publishing major who grew up just outside of New
York City, between a prison, train station and a cemetery. Now going to school in Boston, she
enjoys iced coffee, sleeping and copious amounts of TV.

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Revolution Kim Style Now!: Hip Hop Feminism and Putting Riot Grrrl To Rest

12/26/2014

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I think it can be agreed by anyone who supports women in the music industry that the question “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” has reached its expiration date. And not only because it’s supremely patronizing, but also because it’s just been answered too many times, as if a woman playing a guitar was the highest feminist statement. In a recent interview with Billboard, musician and activist Annie Lennox discussed the role of women in music, referencing Beyonce’s recent adoption of feminism, stating, “Twerking is not feminism… It's not liberating, it's not empowering. It's a sexual thing that you're doing on a stage.” When people talk about feminist representation in music, most of the time they’re only referring to women in bands, and, since the onset of the Riot Grrrl movement in the early ‘90s, specifically white women in punk bands.

Female-centric music festivals like Ladyfest and Boston’s Smash It Dead Fest (which profits the city’s rape prevention center) are composed almost entirely of punk bands, and the same goes for the music highlighted by the female artist collective The Le Sigh. While it is great that these support networks exist, the hyper-specific-celebration erases the merit of the work done by ladies in rap and hip hop, or, in Lennox’s case, derides it. Why is the band Perfect Pussy considered radical while the rapper Junglepussy is just raunchy? It’s both the result and the cause of a deeper problem surrounding the devaluation and erasure of women of color in feminism.

Conversations about women in hip-hop and rap typically prompt a discussion of the communities’ perceived misogyny, consequently forgetting, and effectively erasing their actual contributions. In 1999, Joan Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” with the intention of defining a place in hip-hop culture for female MCs. It legitimized the art created by women like Lauryn Hill, Salt-N-Pepa, and Lil’ Kim, all of whom worked toward female empowerment outside the realm of mainstream feminism. With her debut solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Hill gave an intimidatingly intimate look at motherhood and love from a woman’s perspective. On the other hand, Salt-N-Pepa unleashed a new form of feminine toughness with Very Necessary (1993), on which they assert themselves as “ladies that are clever” and aggressively denounce slut-shaming.

Salt, Pep, and Spin may have been some of the first to make tiny cracks in the sexual glass ceiling, but it was Lil’ Kim who busted it the fuck open in 1996 with her appropriately-titled debut album Hardcore. Kim’s lyrics are as belligerently violent and sexually explicit as any of her male peers, like Biggie and Junior M.A.F.I.A. While male sexuality rarely draws any attention--and not just in rap, but in any medium--Kim asserting that she doesn’t “want dick tonight” while complaining about a boyfriend who won’t go down on her is still jarring nearly 20 years later. Few can claim to have created art so radical.

One of the only people currently living up to that legacy is Nicki Minaj. The “Anaconda” video is the most prevalent instance of Tearing It Down From The Inside in recent history. Minaj has appropriated Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”, our country’s most beloved song about ass, and turned it into an undercover critique of the male gaze and the hypersexualization of black women. She lures the masses in with catchy hooks and skimpy outfits, but slaps our collective hands away at the last second. She makes sure you know that, no matter how much of her body she shows off, none of it is for you. How is this any different than Kathleen Hanna lifting up her mini dress on stage and shouting “This is my ass!”, other than that Minaj’s tactic is at least a little bit more nuanced?

At this point, women in hip-hop and rap seem to be accomplishing more feminist visibility than any other genre. While Beyonce’s brand of empowerment has often been criticized and could be considered still “in development”, who else is attempting to explicitly address issues as controversial as feminism and sexual ownership from such a high position of pop cultural power? She certainly isn’t as aggressive as other politically-minded female artists, but few others have the ability to burn the word “FEMINIST” in big, bold letters into the minds of millions of young people. As Roxane Gay, author of the book Bad Feminist, tweeted after the notorious VMA performance: “What Bey Just did for feminism, on national television, look, for better or worse, that reach is WAY more than anything we’ve seen.” The idea that feminism is punk is harmfully exclusive and almost violently boring. A woman shredding a guitar has no more political value than Lil’ Kim squatting in a cheetah print bikini and is, at this point, a lot less revolutionary.

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Why We Should All Be Angry: A Review of Dear White People

12/1/2014

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By Meaghan McDonough

I first gained interest in Dear White People just after it reached its funding goal on Indiegogo, and the film turned out to be both nothing and everything I expected it to be. Initially, I assumed the film would be like an essay--an argument, offering a daring thesis, prove something about the world that I had been blind to. However, the film ended up seeming much more like a diorama: a pretty presentation of information with nothing more than what meets the eye. Halfway through the film, I thought this was a bad thing, especially if the film was intended to “change the conversation about race.” It wasn’t until the credits rolled and I was walking back to my dorm that I realized the true genius of the film.

As much as the film was advertised as a satire and does use irony to express the complicated dichotomy between racial ideology and personal identity, it also uses satire as something entirely unfunny. Although the black-themed party in the film is supposed to be a satire to expose the stupidity of the Black Student Union, it becomes apparent very quickly that the party, though meant in jest, is not a joke at all. The black-themed party turns into a bunch of white students wearing black face and mocking icons of black culture. Similarly, though Dear White People is advertised as a satire, it also becomes clear that there is nothing truly ‘over-the-top’ or ‘ironic’ about the way these students act and react to what is happening to them. The only irony in this movie— save a few one-liners and small throwaway moments— is that of the situation for the audience. The audience goes in expecting a big joke that we can all have a good laugh about. For some, they’ll come out still seeing the humor in all of it: poking fun at white privilege, black character tropes, and college education. For others, however, they’ll come out seeing that this really isn’t a joke at all. They’ll see that this film is not only an observation of race relations on a college campus, but also of the complexity of black identity from a member of that community.

The moral ambiguity of all of the black characters of the film is the second proof of the film’s genius. It’s easy to create a film that points out the inherent racism perpetuated by white culture: it’s obvious, it (very unfortunately) happens every day, and it’s constantly shown to us. Like the TV producer says at the end of the film: “The only thing audiences love to hate more than a black person is a really racist white guy.”

It’s much harder to create a film that turns the mirror on the race in question, showing what goes on within the race that is also problematic. Some people don’t want to be black, while other people only want to be black. Some people see blackness as one thing, while others see it as something else. Some people can’t separate their racial identity from their personal identity, while other people can’t seem to reconcile the two. This movie brings up questions of blackness not only in relation to the white majority in which all black people live, but also within the minority from which blackness springs. This movie presents questions that are purposely left unanswered to give the audience something to think about. What is blackness? Who defines what it is? How does it fit within (both black and white) society?

Very much like Sam White doesn’t want to speak for her whole race, neither does this movie. The film isn’t the Black Student Union: it doesn’t aim to police what we think blackness is or isn’t, how black people should or shouldn’t be. It merely holds up the mirror and has us take a look for ourselves. We, as viewers, are left to do the rest.

Dear White People is not without flaws. There’s an arguable amount of misogyny in the fact that it takes a white male to make Sam White comfortable enough to do what she wants instead of what is expected of her. There is plenty of dialogue that is forced, though mostly for the purpose of explaining complex ideas (i.e. racism vs prejudice) for the sake of the viewer, and some of the characters leave a lot to be desired. There are parts of the film that are laugh-out-loud funny in their cynicism or backhandedness, but there are plenty of parts that are just uncomfortable in the ‘bad joke writing’ way. Dear White People wasn’t perfect in many ways.

But Dear White People does something that it’s very hard to do well in racially driven pieces of cinema. Dear White People holds everyone accountable. It shows the damage that white people do, why it’s bad, and how deliriously apathetic we are towards the whole behemoth that is racism. And it makes me (a white person), both ashamed and determined to be better. But it also reveals a little known secret of blackness: that black people can be prejudiced against each other as well as themselves. It shows that we all have a moral gray area that we must carefully examine as individuals, rather than criticize as groups. Dear White People lets no one off the hook. It’s not just white people that have to be better. We all have to be better. No one is responsible for teaching us what to think or how to think it; we need to hold ourselves accountable if we want to move forward.

Love it or hate it, Dear White People is a daring debut film from a new director that we’re going to have to watch out for. Justin Simien knows our secrets and is willing to cook them up, serve them to us, and give us something to chew on. It’s not easy, it’s not clean, and it doesn’t leave us sure of anything. For many people, it’ll probably be hard to swallow, never mind digest. Despite that, it makes us work our jaws, trying to glean something out of the mess. Justin Simien isn’t afraid to show the world in its all-too-real and least flattering light: no heroes or villains, just what is left of humanity as we create it.

Meaghan McDonough is a sophomore WLP major who spends more time watching TV and movies than she does actually doing school work. When she manages to leave Emerson's campus, she's most likely exploring Boston, on the hunt for her new favorite restaurant.

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