Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
There's this amazing article describing an incident at Vidcon where a bunch of MRA pieces of shit organzied to take up the first three rows of Anita Sarkeesian's panel with the sole purpose of,
as they describe it, literally real life shitposting, aka straight up harass and derail the panel so that no real discussion could be had.
And before we get the usual suspects saying "Maybe they actually were there to have a debate?" Not having it ITT!
If you think both sides are even remotely equatable in this situation.
There is a LOT more in the link in the OP. But this just serves to show as an example of how rabid these people are, that their rhetoric is not something that we need to "engage" with. And hopefully, since this was brought to light, further measures can be taken in the future to ensure that this doesn't happen again so that a REAL discussion can be had and that women can feel safe at these events.
If you want more context on who this guy is, recommended viewing is Hbomberguy's multiple takedowns of his rhetoric.
as they describe it, literally real life shitposting, aka straight up harass and derail the panel so that no real discussion could be had.
A phone camera is trained on Anita Sarkeesian as she prepares to speak on a panel. In footage later posted online, the camera wobbles slightly. Its setting is on high zoom. It follows her every move.
After so many public appearances, Sarkeesian has grown accustomed to speaking in front of a few hundred people. But today she feels a certain intimidation. A crowd of her most vociferous critics, including YouTubers, sit together in the front rows, their phones pointed at her.
The camera carefully follows her as she acknowledges her co-panelists, as she checks her surroundings. Then she looks directly into the camera, she looks at the man holding the camera, sitting in the front row.
Carl Benjamin is a British YouTube personality in his late 30s. He has spoken vituperatively, many times over many years, about Sarkeesian and her work. Some of his videos are thumbnailed with ludicrously Photoshopped imagery of Sarkeesian. At the time of writing, his Twitter page is bannered with a picture of Sarkeesian.
Benjamin has made his name dismissing her feminist documentary work such as Tropes vs Women in Video Games, which details the cultural biases of video games. He is a hero for many in the hate group GamerGate, a rough assemblage of misogynists, racists, conspiracy theorists and right-wing ideologues who have spent years harassing Sarkeesian and anyone who publicly supports her work.
Most of his YouTube videos follow standard reactionary protocols, excoriating the supposed evils of political correctness, shady liberal elites and the media. His most frothy content is reserved for feminism, a hot topic for men who feel afraid and threatened by progressives, who they dismiss as ”the regressive left." He has more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. He makes more than $5,000 a month from Patreon.
Today, he is surrounded by a group of his supporters, who have planned to come in force and take the front seats of this VidCon panel, which is focused on the lives of women online.
The panel's first question drops. It's about why feminism — online and in games — is an issue worthy of discussion.
Sarkeesian notes Benjamin's presence and begins speaking.
"If you Google my name on YouTube you get shitheads like this dude who are making these dumb-assed videos," she says. "They just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you're a garbage human. These dudes just making endless videos that go after every feminist over and over again is a part of the issue of why we have to have these conversations."
The crowd gives her a positive response, with some whoops and cheers.
On the front rows, Benjamin and his retinue rock back and forth, as if they are watching a comedy show. He yells back that he be allowed to debate with her.
But she won't debate him. She understands that he's not in the least bit interested in what she has to say.
And before we get the usual suspects saying "Maybe they actually were there to have a debate?" Not having it ITT!
Dave Cullen lounges on what appears to be a bed in a hotel room, pointing a camera at himself. He looks tired and slightly pleased with himself. He is an ally of Benjamin's, a fellow YouTuber who makes a full-time living feeding the internet's appetite for masculine fear and hurt.
He was there, he says, at the VidCon Sarkeesian session. As he speaks, he claims that the first three rows were taken up by allies. (These allies have co-opted an internet term of derision to describe themselves: shitlords. They are generally identified by their hostility to progressives and to "social justice warriors.")
He goes on to talk about how these allies coordinated among themselves at the event. "We carefully organized this so that on one side of the audience we would all make up the top three rows," he says. ”We would all be sitting there filming it," he adds, before naming several allies. "Anita spoke. And they were asking about why is it important to still have women talking about sexism or some victim bullshit in video games." He recounts Sarkeesian's comments.
He repeatedly claims the group is there to "engage" with Sarkeesian, but later, he says something very different.
"We had a blast with this. It was such an adrenaline high to be there in the situation, to shit-post, in this trolling kind of way." He goes on to claim there was "no malice" in their actions and that it was ”playful."[
If you think both sides are even remotely equatable in this situation.
"In the midst of the predictable flood of hate that has come my way from Carl's supporters, there have been a number of really wonderful messages of gratitude and support.
"So many of us have spent so long internalizing this expectation that we don't confront this kind of abuse directly, we don't openly acknowledge it, we suffer it in silence, and these men just go on spewing their bullshit without any consequences.
"As women, we're always told not to engage, not to 'stoke the fire,' and that forces us into silence, it forces us to be quiet in the face of harassment. That silence helps perpetuate a culture in which harassment is permissible or even accepted as 'normal.' And so I think that for some women who understand what I've been through or who have been through it themselves, it was cathartic to see me not stay silent, to see me call him out directly like that, to acknowledge in front of all those people what he's done."
Sarkeesian's brief and public ownership of Benjamin is unlikely to alter the toxic dynamic of gaming's reactionary core. Too many people are enraptured in their own blind rage. They carry with them a curiously self-defeating notion that fairness and common decency spell their own disenfranchisement and marginalization. Their rage is considered by some to be self-validating. Others see it as entertainment. To a small cadre of YouTube blowhards, it is also extremely lucrative.
When confronted with the consequences of appalling behavior, those organizations that host abusive activities — including VidCon, YouTube, Twitch and Twitter — offer little more than pleasantries and useless palliatives. They are ignoring their own urgent duty to show some courage, to fully confront these awful displays of bullying.
If individuals like Anita Sarkeesian can stand up to such aggression, why can't these huge and powerful organizations?
There is a LOT more in the link in the OP. But this just serves to show as an example of how rabid these people are, that their rhetoric is not something that we need to "engage" with. And hopefully, since this was brought to light, further measures can be taken in the future to ensure that this doesn't happen again so that a REAL discussion can be had and that women can feel safe at these events.
This is essential reading:
"They can skip right to bashing my ideas, and their followers will eat it up no matter what I say. It's a losing game. I'm not going to change anyone's minds debating with any of them. More importantly, I shouldn't have to debate the fact that I am a human being who deserves basic respect, and in fact that is in itself a core issue with all of this: how degrading and exhausting it is just to have to keep arguing for and fighting for and begging for our own humanity."
Think of this next time you say some bullshit about "dialogue" and "freedom of speech" and whatever with these white failsons
If anyone want further reading, I recommend this awesome twitter thread
https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/status/879835209990107136
Yeah they basically manufacture an outrage to win money .... exactly what they said Anita was doing.
If you want more context on who this guy is, recommended viewing is Hbomberguy's multiple takedowns of his rhetoric.