The headline pants, “I’m Brianna Wu, and I’m Risking My Life Standing Up to Gamergate.” It’s a good headline. It is, in fact, clickbait, because it would be hard to resist a Lifetime Movie pitch like that. Just who is this brave woman? What is the insidious menace that is “gamergate”? And in what way can white heterosexual males be blamed for the life-threatening crisis in which Ms. Wu now finds herself? To answer these questions requires that we back up a bit.
In the very technologically connected worlds of gaming and social justice – two universes that are more intertwined than you might think – there could be no debate, there could be no controversy, if it were not for the Internet. It is through the Internet that online gamers interact and rate the work of producers in the gaming industry. Similarly, it is through the Internet that “social justice whiners,” or SJWs, ply their hand-wringing tradecraft.
An SJW is a busybody whose entire existence is devoted to harming the interests of others in an attempt to make the cosmic scales balance. The Internet is critical to the activity of SJWs because without the screen of distance and pseudo-anonymity afforded by the Internet, most SJWs would be laughed out of the room or punched in the face. To put it bluntly, the typical SJW is a shrieking, hysterical fool who is convinced that something isn’t fair, and this is the worst crime that any human being can inflict on another. To redress these imagined wrongs, SJWs will embrace any progressive scheme of reallocation, realignment, redistribution and reparation. An SJW has no problem with any policy or methodology that harms your interests as long as this furthers the interests of someone the SJW believes has been – directly or indirectly, immediately or historically – wronged.
Where the two worlds have come together most notably is in the “gamergate” controversy. “Gamergate” is a hashtag that refers to an online movement. Feminists and liberals despise “gamergate” and consider its activists persona non grata in the way progressives always categorize their ideological foes as unpersons. To put it simply, the world of gaming – online games especially, but also to include console gaming and the playing of video games generally – is male dominated. Yes, there are female gamers, but gaming fans are overwhelmingly male and thus the industry caters to predominantly male tastes. In the world of the SJW, this is unacceptable, because to social justice activists, every predominantly male space must be rooted out, torn apart and eradicated, its denizens reeducated in the bold new world of neutered progressive propriety.
“Gamergate,” as a movement, came about online in social media (such as at micro-blogging site Twitter) as a response to what gamers saw as unethical journalistic practices. It seems that a woman named Zoe Quinn, a typical feminist, progressive, and SJW, released a terrible game called “Depression Quest.” The game was evidently promoted by certain industry figures in a way that was disproportionate to its appeal, and when rumors began to circulate that Quinn was somehow exerting influence on industry figures to promote the game – and that her fellow SJW Anita Sarkeesian allegedly manufactured death threats to help swing support to their mutual cause – a movement decrying these practices was born. To hear the progressives tell the story, “gamergate” is a sordid tale in which well-meaning feminists critical of misogyny in the gaming industry have been subjected to terrible harassment for daring to be strong, empowered women.
The reality is that progressive women – and their liberal male eunuchs – hate the culture of gaming and are happy to subvert its technology. In so doing, they hope both to remake the industry in their own politically correct image, using games to further their cause and spread their propaganda, and to destroy those politically incorrect and “sexist” games that appeal to the gaming industry’s traditionally male, heterosexual audience. This is an audience that likes what it likes. It isn’t going to change its collective mind simply because a bunch of bleating feminists demands that it do so – but this reality won’t stop the SJWs from continuing their attacks on gaming as a hobby and on anyone specifically critical of their shenanigans.
That brings us back to Brianna Wu and her brave struggle against a bunch of people who don’t agree with her. Ms. Wu is a feminist who hates gamers. In response to her often expressed opinions, she has apparently received a death threat. We know, because she won’t stop talking about it. Death threats happen all the time online. For the same reason SJWs continue to mount their hysterical attacks on anyone whose lives, ideas and behaviors do not conform to the fascist political correctness social justice activists espouse – without, you know, getting the taste slapped out of their mouths – most death threats are that and only that: threats. It is easy to make threats online, just as it is easy to run your mouth without fearing the consequences. The Internet insulates all of these people, who would be humiliated if they tried, in daily life, to treat the people they meet as they treat vast numbers of people online. They would be ignored or even run out of most physical venues if they demanded, in person, that strangers “check their privilege” or otherwise conform to PC edicts.
Social justice activists hate the fact that gamers enjoy entertainment progressive women do not. Therefore, that entertainment is bad and must be changed. Social justice activists hate that gamers, who are overwhelmingly heterosexual males, like looking at attractive women. Therefore, games are “sexist,” and the employment of attractive women at gaming trade show booths is misogyny. Social justice activists hate that gamers refuse to embrace as entertaining those things that SJWs say the gamers ought to enjoy; therefore, the gamers are wrong and don’t know what is good for them.
Ms. Wu and her fellow SJWs aren’t “risking their lives.” They’re simply running their mouths. Disagreeing with what comes out of those mouths isn’t misogyny, and it isn’t harassment. It is simply reality, a condition with which far too few social justice activists are themselves acquainted.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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