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Roderick

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I've not posted here in a while (yay work) but this new stuff about consent I find profoundly disturbing. The idea that someone is effectively taking sex confuses me, it's not something you do to someone, it's something you do with someone. I find the whole yes/no weird and repulsive because it's so fucking obvious when someone wants to have sex with you (or not). 

 

I just don't see how it could come to needing an affirmative statement or answer for a sexual encounter to not be rape, because an affirmative statement or answer has happened in literally every sexual encounter I've had. 

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I've not posted here in a while (yay work) but this new stuff about consent I find profoundly disturbing. The idea that someone is effectively taking sex confuses me, it's not something you do to someone, it's something you do with someone. I find the whole yes/no weird and repulsive because it's so fucking obvious when someone wants to have sex with you (or not). 

 

I just don't see how it could come to needing an affirmative statement or answer for a sexual encounter to not be rape, because an affirmative statement or answer has happened in literally every sexual encounter I've had.

Good job! The law is on your side. The idea is that it will no longer be on rapists' side.

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So the other day I was out and about, and noticed a 50 year old white man just up ahead who was quite unashamedly ogling a well-dressed young minority woman as she passed.

 

I probably shouldn't have but I locked eye contact and then very intentionally checked out his package as I walked by.

 

 

Later on, I realized that I was still a massive misogynist.

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This is all so very depressing. Thanks Thumbs for being a bubble bastion of not-horrible people on the internet.

 

Thanks for the article Nachimir. God this internet, take it you vile people, I'll go look for one that isn't broken.

Sierra mentions a Verge article I found to be even a bit uplifting, as it just clearly states (and acknowledges) the assholery and hypocrisy of people involved, and kind of gives a small silver lining.

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I haven't been in this thread much lately, but I though some of you might enjoy this comic by Elizabeth Simins about her experience of loving video games as she grew up and how cultural gender-norms affected how she perceived her passion.

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In response to weev being released from prison, a blog post about troll culture and trolls policing women's behaviour, that probably won't be up for very long:

http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point

 

The most fascinating thing about this to me is the divide between how much the author and people on my Twitter feed who are not the author seem to love it.

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I haven't been in this thread much lately, but I though some of you might enjoy this comic by Elizabeth Simins about her experience of loving video games as she grew up and how cultural gender-norms affected how she perceived her passion.

Awesome comic, it really spoke to me. Maybe it's growing up 6 years earlier than her or maybe it's the fairly luddite area I grew up, but I went through a lot of the same things (though obviously not as difficult) she describes as a guy. Instead of being told to be more girly, I was being told to be more manly, play sports, etc. The thing that really struck me is that I was eventually able to find a few other guys like me around the age of 14, while she wasn't able to find anyone and gave up on the whole thing about the same time.

I'm struggling to make this not sound like an anti-feminist "I went through that too" sort of a post, so I'll just go back to my first comment and say it really spoke to me, both because of the similarities and differences.

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I haven't been in this thread much lately, but I though some of you might enjoy this comic by Elizabeth Simins about her experience of loving video games as she grew up and how cultural gender-norms affected how she perceived her passion.

 

This is going to be a long, boring, mostly pointless post about me, so TL:DR that comic also spoke to me and made me think.

 

Reading through this gave me some pause.  I didn't have the same experience as her, even beyond the fact that I'm a guy.  I've been playing games all my life but that wasn't even the thing that made me stand out, its the fact that I'm Asian and grew up in predominately White communities.  But that's beside the point. 

 

What I really started thinking about while looking at that comic was how I would have perceived her when I was at that age.  I didn't know any girls who played games and at the time I thought that was normal because games didn't seem like a thing that girls did unless they had a brother or something.  But now I'm wondering if that was actually true.  Do I really know that there weren't any girl gamers?  Or was I just seeing what I wanted to see?  The only girl that I can recall showing any interest in games was my high school girlfriend.  She liked playing Mario 64 and Myst but usually handed me the controller when things got tricky and I'd end up finishing the level for her (I never took the controller from her, she always handed it to me of her own will).  That was what I'd call casual playing.  I never thought of her as a gamer and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have described herself that way. 

 

Thinking about Elizabeth's comic I don't think I knew anyone like her, but in retrospect I also never made an attempt to either.  I recall thinking at the time how cool it would be to find a girl who liked games as much as I did but now I question how I would have actually treated a girl gamer at that age.  It did seem weird and uncommon to me.  I like to think that I wouldn't have looked down at her but I suspect I would have found it strange and maybe a little unwelcome.  While it wouldn't have been anywhere near a typical GamerGater level of reaction, I'm pretty disheartened to realize that there's a good chance I would have been dismissive and patronizing.  Not because I was consciously misogynistic but because the norm was that "girls don't play games".  Which is of course a bullshit thing, both then and now.  I wish I could tell that to my younger self.  I wish the past was such that it never would have occurred in the first place.  I wish the PRESENT was like that.

 

End of meaningless ramble.  Please resume actual discussion.

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I got really excited reading a couple of articles about the developments of the all women Ghostbusters 3 movie (writer of The Heat hired!)...then I read the comments and wanted to puke. 

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This is going to be a long, boring, mostly pointless post about me, so TL:DR that comic also spoke to me and made me think.

 

Reading through this gave me some pause.  I didn't have the same experience as her, even beyond the fact that I'm a guy.  I've been playing games all my life but that wasn't even the thing that made me stand out, its the fact that I'm Asian and grew up in predominately White communities.  But that's beside the point. 

 

What I really started thinking about while looking at that comic was how I would have perceived her when I was at that age.  I didn't know any girls who played games and at the time I thought that was normal because games didn't seem like a thing that girls did unless they had a brother or something.  But now I'm wondering if that was actually true.  Do I really know that there weren't any girl gamers?  Or was I just seeing what I wanted to see?  The only girl that I can recall showing any interest in games was my high school girlfriend.  She liked playing Mario 64 and Myst but usually handed me the controller when things got tricky and I'd end up finishing the level for her (I never took the controller from her, she always handed it to me of her own will).  That was what I'd call casual playing.  I never thought of her as a gamer and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have described herself that way. 

 

Thinking about Elizabeth's comic I don't think I knew anyone like her, but in retrospect I also never made an attempt to either.  I recall thinking at the time how cool it would be to find a girl who liked games as much as I did but now I question how I would have actually treated a girl gamer at that age.  It did seem weird and uncommon to me.  I like to think that I wouldn't have looked down at her but I suspect I would have found it strange and maybe a little unwelcome.  While it wouldn't have been anywhere near a typical GamerGater level of reaction, I'm pretty disheartened to realize that there's a good chance I would have been dismissive and patronizing.  Not because I was consciously misogynistic but because the norm was that "girls don't play games".  Which is of course a bullshit thing, both then and now.  I wish I could tell that to my younger self.  I wish the past was such that it never would have occurred in the first place.  I wish the PRESENT was like that.

 

End of meaningless ramble.  Please resume actual discussion.

 

I was also ashamed to think of what high school me would have thought of her, but in a different way. She and I are the same age, so our middle school era was the same. Thinking back to myself and my gamer friends at the time, I absolutely wouldn't blame a girl for having covered up that she was interested in games. Not because she would have been viewed as "different" in a bad way, but because of the extent that our group would likely have fetishized her. "Oh my god! A girl who plays games?!?" would have instantly got her a LOT of unwanted attention from a lot of guys who felt entitled to reciprocity because of their obvious (SARCASM) intelligence (hey there internet communities, sound familiar?). Hell, maybe this is just what happens when you mix puberty and early attraction with the general desire for people to have the same interests as you that she expressed herself in the comic. I now kind of enjoy having a hobby separate from my partner. She has comic books, I have games, and we are both content to have that place to go when we want alone time with occasional crossovers when something is of particular quality.

 

The point: The realization that even if she was LIKED for liking games the attention would likely have been creepy and overbearing really bummed me out.

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I think high school me would have handled it well because I definitely assumed that most boys liked sports instead of games, so people who liked games were this weird club. High school me really didn't give a shit about gender, which I think bothered some of the girls I tried to befriend.

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socialjusticewarrior.club is obviously the best.  I'm shocked that socialjusticewarrior.exposed isn't already taken.

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socialjusticewarrior.cologne

 

Pour homme... et pour femme.

 

 

 

More for fun times:

 

socialjusticewarrior.republican

 

socialjusticewarrior.directory

 

socialjusticewarrior.cooking

 

socialjusticewarrior.christmas

 

socialjusticewarrior.boutique

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socialjusticewarrior.republican

(aaaaaaargh).

 

socialjusticewarrior.pro

socialjusticewarrior.bargains

socialjusticewarrior.cool

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Other Ideas

 
justice-warrior.com
friendlyjusticewarrior.com
socialmagistratewarrior.com
socialjusticeknight.com

Hover gets it!

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And then this happened, close to the world of video games.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/10/09/354964666/microsoft-ceo-backtracks-on-suggestion-that-women-shouldnt-ask-for-raises

 

'It's not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,' Nadella told a confounded (and predominantly female) audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday.
Ascribing to mortals the fictional abilities of comic book heroes, Nadella advised that women embrace their innate "super powers" and confidence, and trust a system that pays women 78% as much as men. ...
"That might be one of the initial 'super powers,' that quite frankly, women (who) don't ask for a raise have," he told the straight-faced Klawe. "It's good karma. It will come back."

That was his original statement. He did backtrack it with a tweet, but y'know.

 

Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias #GHC14

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Wow, he said that at the Grace Hopper Celebration? Like, it's pretty eye-rolly at the best of times, but that's just offensive.

 

That's like if someone gave a speech at a Martin Luther King remembrance that said that if black people committed less crimes, white people would like them more. 

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Long, but great article that explores how social media and the internet in general attack and harass women. 

 

If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it. Once largely hidden from view, this brutality is now being exposed in unprecedented ways.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/?single_page=true

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I'm getting really impatient with all the "#GamerGate wasn't built on harrassing women" people, because I followed this whole affair from the start, and I witnessed that it was. Maybe those people came late to the party or they try to gaslight people, I dunno. It doesn't help that The Escapist tries to rewrite history.

I have yet to see something worthwhile come out of #GamerGate. Maybe I look in the wrong places, but I doubt it. Maybe some people that identify with the "movement" have the sincere belief that it's a force capable of good. But to those I would like to say that they should tackle the mess in their own house first before criticizing disorder elsewhere.

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