Feminism is exactly about equality. Holding women down, because there are also some areas where patriarchy turns against men, is totally non-constructive. You should be joining the fight, not sabotaging it.

Still it pays to look for that collaboration, instead of turning it into a battle of the sexes. Most importantly, we should be attacking the very concept of gender roles; they're holding everybody down.

Par for the course in GamerGate, I'm afraid. They love sharing irrelevant links to distract from the real issue, and then claim it was always about that. I have seen the behaviour often enough that I often don't even bother clicking anymore. Every time I do click, I end up wasting my time looking for the thing they claimed was supposed to be in it.

I admit it. I can't get the story of GamerGate straight. And do you know why I can't get GamerGate's story straight? Because GamerGate themself can't get their story straight. GamerGate's story keeps changing every day. (Of course every time it has always been their story, like the war with Eastasia.)

I assure you, this is absolutely the first time I've heard anyone from GamerGate even claim that they have addressed corruption around Shadows of Morder. When I addressed this in a conversation with a GamerGater a few weeks ago, he said exactly that it was okay, because it was a good game, and that it was the terrible corruption around Depression Quest that was the real reason for GamerGate. I've heard other GamerGaters explain that it wasn't really corruption because it was marketing and surely a company should be free to do that sort of thing? I have never seen this addressed in the name of GamerGate, I have never seen anyone claiming affiliation with GamerGate address this. And you are the first person I've met who claims that GamerGaters have addressed this. But maybe they have. Still, they're not giving remotely as much attention to it as they're giving to Depression Quest.

As for slurs, you claim that all the slurs come from the anti-GG side, and yet all the slurs I've seen first-hand, have come from people defending GamerGate. A post about random racists on the internet (props to the person who addressed that, by the way) recognizing an image apparently related to GamerGate (I admit I wouldn't have recognized it as such) doesn't exactly prove that they are representative for people opposing GamerGate. Everybody I know who has criticized GamerGate (and of all the gamers I know, nobody supports it) is quite the opposite of that.

I'm not claiming that all critics of GamerGate are perfect. Every random group of internet people has its fair share of bastards, but the bastards don't dominate as much as they seem to dominate in GamerGate. There's a very good reason why GamerGate has such a terrible reputation. That didn't come from nothing; it is exactly because of the behaviour associated with GamerGate. Read Ken White of Popehat has to say about it. The only people who claim to have a positive impression of GamerGate are the GamerGaters themselves. And their story is honestly not very credible considering the chat logs where they discuss how to sell their story to the outside world, and what stuff they shouldn't be doing anymore. The end result is that by now, their story sounds quite reasonable to anyone not familiar with the history. But most people have a better memory than GamerGaters realize.

Are you aware that they have a website? Read it. They confirm the threat, and they increased the security, but they also say that, according to Utah law, they can't ban weapons.

Because they are harassed for it, yes. Does not an unjust attack require a defense?

What surprises me is how many men get defensive when harassment of women is addressed. As if they consider that a personal attack.

Everybody, man or woman, who wants equality between men and women, and recognized that this still requires work, is a feminist.

That is absolutely wrong, but that is just as much a feminist issue as women who want to work. Men being regarded as unsuitable as parent is because of traditional gender roles: women take care of children, men make money. Men should of course have equal rights to guardianship of children as women, and if they don't, that's just as much a sign that feminism isn't done yet as the fact that women make less money than men.

I'm not aware of any job where men are actively being kept out (though I don't doubt they exist), but I know a lot of jobs where women are actively kept out of. Of course both are problems, and both need to be solved, and they are in fact both the same problem. But you are delluding yourself if you think this issue is worse for men than for women.

I'm a straight white man, and I'm certainly not being harassed constantly. Have you ever really taken a good look at the kind of harassment that almost every woman faces on an almost daily basis? What we face is really truly nothing compared to that.

But I'm not denying that there are idiots on the feminist side. Particularly bizarre are the "all sex is rape" people, but they are widely recognized as idiots, and when necessary, criticized appropriately. But I've also had some guy turn me into a bigotry strawman, putting words in my mouth, and finishing off with advice that was actually worse than anything he falsely accused me of. Those things do happen, I am well aware of that. And if you find that hurtful, you should really take another look at all the crap that's often directed at women, because really, you've got to be blind if you don't see what an order of magnitude that's worse than what we face.

So you're against requiring a driver's license before you can drive a car?

Sometimes the license isn't just about permission, but about showing you have mastered the skills necessary to do the thing without endangering anyone.

I can certainly understand the desire to do away with anonymity, particularly in light of crime, but also harassment, threats and doxxing that are plaguing some communities. But as usual, there's two sides to these kind of things. Not every government is equally benevolent, and dissidents and whistleblowers also need anonymity to be able to leak the information necessary to address the abuses by the powerful.

It's certainly what they like to claim, yet they're mainly concerned with the massive corruption surrounding a little indie game that's free and not making anyone any money, while they're ignoring the very large scale corruption surrounding major publishers demanding positive reviews in exchange for money and review copies (Shadows of Mordor anyone?). I have addressed this with GamerGaters before, and they defended it, stating that Shadows of Mordor is objectively good, while Depression Quest is objectively bad. And that apparently makes one type of corruption okay, and the other type a really serious problem.

And yet it's the women that keep getting attacked. Who even knows the names of the men involved? GamerGaters keep harping on about Zoe Quinn, despite her being supposedly irrelevant to what their cause is really supposed to be about.

And yet GamerGate started with attacks on women, and any woman that speaks up about GamerGate gets doxed (see Felicia Day), whereas men don't (Chris Kluwe, for example).

That is not exactly my experience with the ones I've tried to argue with. Every single one started with these exact same arguments, and every single one came up mostly with irrelevant arguments, ended up talking about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were killing their hobby, and when they ran out of arguments, slipped up with a dose of homophobic and misogynist slurs (which at least one of them then tried to cover up).

I haven't seen any calm arguing like a reasonable adult yet.

That kind of hyperbole is not exactly helping you acquire the image of a calm and reasonable adult.

None of it, expect of course that the University of Utah confirmed it, and a lot of people there have received this message. Read it for a fine example of crazy reactionary misogyny.

So it is about Zoe Quinn after all.

Of course it's not acceptable to demonize the entire demographic of gamers. Is this from the Leigh Alexander article? That was absolutely a really stupid article (though the right way to handle that is to criticize the content, not to harass the advertisers to drop the entire site). One pretty big sign of the article's utter nonsense is that it equates gamers and "game culture" with GamerGate, which is ludicrous. GamerGate is just a tiny fraction, and most of their targets are also gamers. In fact, more gamers criticize GamerGate than support it. Most gamers are actually a very inclusive, progressive and egalitarian bunch. GamerGate is hopefully just a last reactionary uprising before that attitude finally disappears from gamer culture.

That not true in the case of feminism. Feminism is incredibly large and diverse, and toxic voices in it absolutely do get addressed by other feminists.

I've never really noticed GamerGaters really address problems within their community (except when it involves PR risks, it seems). But that's probably also because GamerGate is a really tiny group. The best estimate I've seen was about 4000. That's a lot of people if you've got them all in one place, but negligible in comparison with something like feminism, which is global, and the principles are fairly universally supported by most men and women in most western countries (even if not everybody likes the label). 4000 is also tiny compared to the game community. It's even less than just the numbers of supporters for Sarkeesian's kickstarter. It's just that those 4000 people are really loud and put a lot of effort and organization into it.

Like Chris Kluwe?

True, but it's often used to shut someone up. It's harmful to people's ability to express themselves freely. Harassment can happen for many other reasons, and all of them are bad, but I think harassing someone for having an opinion you disagree with is among the most harmful. (Though harassing someone for belonging to a group you consider inferior (women, minorities) is also right up there.

No, it is never okay to harass, threaten of dox anyone. However, women are most definitely harassed for being women more than men are harassed for being men.

The fact that men are more prevalent on some internet forums is at least partially the result of women being made very unwelcome in those places.