Feminist Kickstarter Project gets Harassed/Threatened

[Kahunaburger]

if all the other party wanted was an apology, that is one thing. quite honestly they probably would have gotten it without much fuss.

Uh, they did want exactly that. Penny Arcade responded in various [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] petulant [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] ways, [http://penny-arcade.com/2010/08/13] none of which constituted much of an actual apology.

except they didnt want an apology, or just an apology.[citation needed] They wanted PA to bow down before them.[citation needed] I would not apologize either to those poor excuses for human beings who have zero respect for anyone, I would treat them in the exact same fashion as they treat everyone else.

Do you have evidence for this extraordinary claim that the people who were asking for an apology were secretly asking Penny Arcade to "bow down before them?"

http://superopinionated.com/2010/10/19/here-is-a-shirt-dickwolves-survivors-guild/

The person started off rather reasonable. people make mistakes.

then you see the options and you see the persons complete utter disregard for basic human decency. Even better some of those people against the dickwolf joke then started to make their own dickwolf shirts for their own benefit, hypocrisy at its finest!

This doesn't really relate to your point - it's one individual who is posting this after the Penny Arcade guys have spent quite a while acting unprofessional.

But in the interest of fairness, let's look at the post.

Option One: You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation?s specifics, ?I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I?m sorry.?

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. That's pretty much what a professional would have said in their situation.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

if all the other party wanted was an apology, that is one thing. quite honestly they probably would have gotten it without much fuss.

Uh, they did want exactly that. Penny Arcade responded in various [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] petulant [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] ways, [http://penny-arcade.com/2010/08/13] none of which constituted much of an actual apology.

except they didnt want an apology, or just an apology.[citation needed] They wanted PA to bow down before them.[citation needed] I would not apologize either to those poor excuses for human beings who have zero respect for anyone, I would treat them in the exact same fashion as they treat everyone else.

Do you have evidence for this extraordinary claim that the people who were asking for an apology were secretly asking Penny Arcade to "bow down before them?"

http://superopinionated.com/2010/10/19/here-is-a-shirt-dickwolves-survivors-guild/

The person started off rather reasonable. people make mistakes.

then you see the options and you see the persons complete utter disregard for basic human decency. Even better some of those people against the dickwolf joke then started to make their own dickwolf shirts for their own benefit, hypocrisy at its finest!

I don't even get why people found this one comic so offensive.
They were perfectly fine about the comics about racism, murder, necrophilia, actual rapists... But one comic that was making fun of the idea that in an MMORGP you only help people if they're part of a quest, so if there were 6 prisoners and you tasked to rescue 5, the 6th guy would be left in prions... that's when people became offended. About rape culture. Even though the person in the comic was definitely a guy.

I... I don't get it. I laughed at the comic, because I recognized the behaviour of not doing anything in a game unless a reward was given, not because the word 'rape' was mentioned once.

 

[Ryotknife]

if all the other party wanted was an apology, that is one thing. quite honestly they probably would have gotten it without much fuss.

Uh, they did want exactly that. Penny Arcade responded in various [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] petulant [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] ways, [http://penny-arcade.com/2010/08/13] none of which constituted much of an actual apology.

except they didnt want an apology, or just an apology.[citation needed] They wanted PA to bow down before them.[citation needed] I would not apologize either to those poor excuses for human beings who have zero respect for anyone, I would treat them in the exact same fashion as they treat everyone else.

Do you have evidence for this extraordinary claim that the people who were asking for an apology were secretly asking Penny Arcade to "bow down before them?"

http://superopinionated.com/2010/10/19/here-is-a-shirt-dickwolves-survivors-guild/

The person started off rather reasonable. people make mistakes.

then you see the options and you see the persons complete utter disregard for basic human decency. Even better some of those people against the dickwolf joke then started to make their own dickwolf shirts for their own benefit, hypocrisy at its finest!

This doesn't really relate to your point - it's one individual who is posting this after the Penny Arcade guys have spent quite a while acting unprofessional.

But in the interest of fairness, let's look at the post.

Option One: You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation?s specifics, ?I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I?m sorry.?

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. That's pretty much what a professional would have said in their situation.

i love how you cut out the rest of the options which proved my point. Cherry picking does not make your argument look better.

"Option One: You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation?s specifics, ?I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I?m sorry.? Then, you go and do some research at the library or in some corners of the Internet you apparently haven?t spent time in before, and you educate your damn self. If you?re polite and catch them on a good day, you might even ask the person who originally informed you of your fuck-up for more resources to use in your self-education. Generally, though, you pry open your brain and dump in some new information about the world and the people in it who aren?t exactly like you, and you come out the other side a better person.

Option Two: You act like an asshole. You try and derail the dialog your fans are attempting to have with you via the classic ?misunderstanding? that rape culture means forcing men to become rapists. You try to dismiss the fact that rape culture is part of a larger culture of oppression by claiming that people are ?choosing? to be offended by your work. You try to make fun of rape survivors and people with PTSD via mocking trigger warnings. You even make a t-shirt using the original rape reference, thus literally profiting off of rape culture."

the fact that the person only gives THOSE two options speaks volumes. basically, agree to all of our demands and bow before our superiority or you are an a-hole. No, "hey, lets have a calm dialogue where both parties come to an agreement".

companies that have ruined lives have gotten away with a more simpler apology.

All that was needed was "We are sorry that the comic offended you, it was not our intention. We will be more careful with this subject in the future."

Bam, done. Not that option 1 bullcrud. PA did not do anything morally wrong. That vocal minority did not need to come at them guns blazing when a simple dialogue would have sufficed. but no, they wanted a CRUSADE! Or more likely, arent used to people who refuse to roll over dead the moment they demand anything.

hell, if they came at me that hot i would not apologize either, and i apologize and take the rap for things OTHER people did just to get people to stop fighting with one another (IRL).

 

[GoaThief]

This is the face of someone who has just been given a blank $160,000 cheque to complete a Youtube video project that will probably cost no more than a couple of thousand at most leaving the rest as pure personal profit. This is before receiving sponsorship money and the like. Happy? Understatement.

Anyway, I don't buy her spiel at all. Just consider the Lego fire-fighter example she used; somehow it's sexist because the firemen came to the rescue, where was the female representation? Well, seeing how there's 3 female fire-fighters for every 100 male fire-fighters (at very best) we'd need to see 34 little Lego firemen before we came across one little Lego firewoman.

The [Trigger Warning] stuff is extremely pretentious and irritating to boot.

 

[Kahunaburger]

if all the other party wanted was an apology, that is one thing. quite honestly they probably would have gotten it without much fuss.

Uh, they did want exactly that. Penny Arcade responded in various [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] petulant [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/13/] ways, [http://penny-arcade.com/2010/08/13] none of which constituted much of an actual apology.

except they didnt want an apology, or just an apology.[citation needed] They wanted PA to bow down before them.[citation needed] I would not apologize either to those poor excuses for human beings who have zero respect for anyone, I would treat them in the exact same fashion as they treat everyone else.

Do you have evidence for this extraordinary claim that the people who were asking for an apology were secretly asking Penny Arcade to "bow down before them?"

http://superopinionated.com/2010/10/19/here-is-a-shirt-dickwolves-survivors-guild/

The person started off rather reasonable. people make mistakes.

then you see the options and you see the persons complete utter disregard for basic human decency. Even better some of those people against the dickwolf joke then started to make their own dickwolf shirts for their own benefit, hypocrisy at its finest!

This doesn't really relate to your point - it's one individual who is posting this after the Penny Arcade guys have spent quite a while acting unprofessional.

But in the interest of fairness, let's look at the post.

Option One: You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation?s specifics, ?I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I?m sorry.?

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. That's pretty much what a professional would have said in their situation.

i love how you cut out the rest of the options which proved my point. Cherry picking does not make your argument look better.

"Option One: You say, pretty much verbatim and regardless of the situation?s specifics, ?I am sorry. Upsetting you was not my intention. I clearly need to educate myself more about this issue. Thank you for telling me about this and raising my awareness. And again, I?m sorry.?

Above: the apology they needed to give, more or less verbatim. This is 100% reasonable and what Penny Arcade should have done at the first "hey, not cool bro."

snip

Stuff that isn't the apology they were suggested to make. And, btw, criticism that is basically correct and (by this time) well deserved on Penny Arcade's part.

PA did not do anything morally wrong. That vocal minority did not need to come at them guns blazing when a simple dialogue would have sufficed.

Which exactly is what people asked for - see the quote that you yourself posted. The criticism that went along with the request for an apology was well-deserved after PA had spent months pissing/moaning when they should have apologized and moved on.

hell, if they came at me that hot i would not apologize either

See, it's not about "oh noes someone said a mean thing to us after we were douchebags to rape survivors for months, rendering us incapable of acting like adults" - it's about being a professional. A professional would have apologized immediately, and possibly would have yanked the offending strip.

 

[Kahunaburger]

The [Trigger Warning] stuff is extremely pretentious and irritating to boot.

The trigger warning is there because people are traumatized by traumatic shit, and would often prefer to be able to avoid content that sets them off. It's a basic courtesy along the lines of not posting flashing .gifs everywhere.

 

[Ryotknife]

This is the face of someone who has just been given a blank $160,000 cheque to complete a Youtube video project that will probably cost no more than a couple of thousand at most leaving the rest as pure personal profit. This is before receiving sponsorship money and the like. Happy? Understatement.

Anyway, I don't buy her spiel at all. Just consider the Lego fire-fighter example she used; somehow it's sexist because the firemen came to the rescue, where was the female representation? Well, seeing how there's 3 female fire-fighters for every 100 male fire-fighters (at very best) we'd need to see 34 little Lego firemen before we came across one little Lego firewoman.

The [Trigger Warning] stuff is extremely pretentious and irritating to boot.

I sincerely hope that money isnt going to be pocketed. I dont want to see kickstarter turned into a place where people troll bait in order to become rich (not saying she did).

hell, with that money she could MAKE a game that fits her ideals. That would be more productive for the video game industry than another video reposting things we have heard dozens of times on a subject that has been argued to death awhile ago. If done correctly/well, it could be used as a benchmark for which all other games should aspire to when it comes to the sexes in video games.

Course i would not exactly blame her for pocketing it, that is one hell of a temptation. it would kinda invalidate her position though.

 

[Kahunaburger]

None of the criticism they received was warranted. They weren't rude to rape survivors

Except for the non-apology strip, a wide variety of petulant comments on various forums and social media, and t-shirts on the subject, you mean? As an outside observer, they did not come out of that one smelling very fresh.

or making light of the subject.

Actually, that's exactly what they were doing.

Seeing as they are the ones campaigning a boycott of PAX on the grounds that it was a hive for rapists.

 

[Gnoekeos]

She really ought to put an annotation bubble at the end saying something like "If you're still not sure that this video series is necessary check the comment below to see how people raised with a negative attitude towards women have responded"

 

[Kahunaburger]

At any rate Courtney Stanton was leading the group that most seem to recognize as head of the anti-PA/dickwolves movement, is the one that equated PAX to a room full of rape supporters, all being on team rape. So not a strawman

Oh, so you're not strawmanning, you just missed her point. Gotcha.

They didn't make light of rape,

That's not what it looked like from the outside. I saw them making an unfunny joke involving a triggering subject, then making fun of rightly angered fans for having triggers. Of course, they stopped making fun of people with triggers for having triggers and ended up being petulant and hostile, but that was after they spent a couple of months getting called out on their unprofessional behavior.

eat my ass you fucking troll.

Hmm... sounds like our jimmies are a little rustled.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Because rape was not meant to be the joke

Yep. But it was part of the joke's set-up, and when they got called out on that, they absolutely started making rape trigger jokes, as well as jokes at the expense of people who experienced a negative reaction to their comic. If they had responded to the initial "wtf man" reaction with an actual apology, I would certainly have a much higher opinion of their professionalism.

So i fail to see how any of the hate PA received was warranted.

Because they actively antagonized rape victims and allies of rape victims for "having the nerve" to not find jokes involving rape funny?

such a vile piece of hatred that PA deserves to have their tongues ripped out with rust pliers.

Wow, between that and

eat my ass you fucking troll.

I'm seeing a lot of hyperbole. I don't think Penny Arcade hates rape victims, I think that they reacted thoughtlessly and unprofessionally when presented with reasonable criticism.

 

[Kahunaburger]

In any case the use of rape was not meant as a controversy trigger, rather an empathy trigger. To the reader that this person is going through hell daily. It was not to demean rape victims but it was taken as a rape joke. And they did not apologize because they viewed it as an overreaction to the use of rape in a joke. Not as comedy fodder but as an overblown statement to how they were being tortured.

Intentions are just intentions. A professional, when finding that something they had made triggers rape survivors and angers both survivors and allies, wouldn't say "but you're wrong for being triggered/angered by this" - they'd say "sorry, our bad."

They antagonized 'rape victims and the allies of rape victims' because they antagonized PA over not pulling the comic, over not apologizing, and because they did not take it seriously.

A) False equivalence between rape survivors and allies getting angry because a comic uses rape as part of a joke (i.e., something it makes sense to get angry about) and Penny Arcade getting angry because people didn't like their joke.

B) Penny Arcade is ostensibly run by professionals who should know better than to get into emotionally charged arguments on the internet, particularly when they're so clearly in the wrong to any outside observer.

 

[Erttheking]

Really? I do fall into the category that sexism in video games isn't as bad as most people say that it is but really? Did it really warrant this response? This is why gamers are commonly considered childish you know, we have idiots like this running around. Aw well, I suppose we can only do two things here, don't feed the trolls and give the video a fair chance when it comes out. Fuckwits like this are always going to be around...and that's pretty sad.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I see we're talking about Dick Wolves now. Blast from the past, yo!

I still fail to see how using rape in the joke is horrible no matter the context.

If I remember correctly, Stanton was pretty clear in pointing out that she understood the joke, and didn't necessarily have an issue with the joke. She wanted trigger warnings on the joke, and she used the joke as a stepping off point to have a dialogue about rape culture.

Not blaming them for being victims or saying they have no right to be angry about rape, but the mere utterance of the word sets them off and leaves them unable to think clearly?

That's what the whole concept of "triggers" suggests, yeah. If you're familiar with PTSD you'd know it's not exactly a voluntary process. I have a family member who suffers from fairly severe PTSD, and I've had a first hand look at just how debilitating and disruptive it can be for them. This is really not something you should be making light of, regardless of where your opinion fell on the whole Dick Wolves issue.

And PA kinda floated above this for the most part. The two sides(those against PA and those for them) mostly duked it out with PA only commenting rarely. They didn't get into the melee, they didn't do much legwork. This whole thing kinda unfolded around them & they only engaged when it came around to them.

They most certainly did not. I think both sides of that ludicrous debate were guilty of profound opinion polarization, and spent most of their time tilting at windmills rather than addressing one another as human beings. But the guys at PA most assuredly played the role of provocateur early in the proceedings, particularly Gabe. I think they like to imagine that they're still guerrilla journalists shooting from the hip and holding court for a small and fervent audience, but their brand has grown past that many times over, and they showed a remarkable unwillingness to be open minded towards unfamiliar points of view.

I still want to know why the use of rape in a joke is so wrong. Especially when the joke itself is not about rape, not about making light of rape itself, & not about belittling victims. Because with all the articles i find on this subject its the same thing. 'how dare they mention rape in a joke' or 'as a rape survivor i find this offensive' but not any telling what is directly wrong about this. Context is wholly ignored in this matter.

The theory behind "rape culture" is that the more it's joked about and trivialized, the more normalized it becomes as an act. While I'm on the fence about whether or not I endorse this concept of a "rape culture" as valid, there is plenty of anecdotal and statistical evidence to support rape victims not being taken terribly seriously by law enforcement, and plenty of victim blaming and shaming by society in general. I can see why people, most particularly people who are themselves victims of rape, would be concerned about trivializing the issue.

For the record, I found the comic amusing, and I found the furor overwrought. But I do understand both sides of the issue. Underneath all the name calling and personal attacks and knee-jerk fundamentalism, there was actually an interesting discussion to be had regarding the Dick Wolves fiasco. It's sad that precious few people were actually having it.

 

[Vault101]

[spoiler/]

[/spoiler]

I swear this issue is more hot than Mass Effect 3

well....its at least good to know people care about sexism I guess?

i love your image.

thanks..TBH I think I was just looking for an excuse to use it

 

[Paradoxrifts]

All that happened IRL in the Penny Arcade fiasco was that people got reasonably upset with PA for using a triggering topic as a throw-away gag and PA became very hostile and defensive about it, then responded with a string of dick moves that were (rightfully) called out by the community as a whole. PA (rightfully) lost fans and some speakers at PAX, then issued a non-apology. I have no idea why some of their fans use such apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what essentially amounted to a learning experience for two man-children.

The folks over at Penny Arcade are the only people with an accurate headcount on the amount of unique page-views that they receive every year. So whether or not the loss of all those 'supposed' self-declared former fans has made any difference to their bottom-line is a matter of pure conjecture on your part. However judging from Gabe's cheeky support for the Sodapop Miniature's new Tentacle Bento card game, a game about tentacles, female college students and 'cram sessions' none the less, I sincerely doubt that they're feeling any consequences for their actions at all.

Now the fact that you can get nearly seven thousand people to spend almost $160,000 on a ideological circle-jerk doesn't really surprise me all that much, when you're dealing with human beings this sort of thing is really to be expected. What does surprise in fact surprise me is that she and her followers must think that publicly shaming gamers on the internet is going to do anything to change gamers and the wider industry as a whole. We're pretty much inoculated against shame tactics.

 

[Batou667]

I'm late to the party, so very little of this will be original or insightful, but...

- Most of this woman's beef with female representation in games could be levelled at society at large. Some may say she's found a nice little niche to milk dry with the usual self-fulfilling feminist "investigating".

- Videogames have poor, clichéd and single-dimensional female characters. This sentence is also true if you remove the word "female". There honestly are more important things feminism could be rallying against right now.

- Begging for money on the internet is the kind of thing you do in the knowledge that people will be lining up to call you a cheat, fraud, and worse.

- She got several thousand dollars for a few minutes begging work. In the heirarchy of people who have a right to complain about their lot in life, she's behind several billion people.

- Nobody deserves threats of death and rape. That's plain distasteful.

- Does this vindicate her original premise that the gaming community is systemically sexist? I don't think that's a valid conclusion to draw. All it really proves is the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is alive and well.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Not blaming them for being victims or saying they have no right to be angry about rape, but the mere utterance of the word sets them off

As BloatedGuppy said, this is the reason behind trigger warnings [http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning] - people with PTSD and the like can experience a very strong response to "triggers" that can seen innocuous to others. An extremely flawed, over-simplistic analogy would be a Penny Arcade comic without a "seizure warning" tag that includes a strobing .gif.

This is why I have a very hard time seeing the controversy from Penny Arcade's point of view - there's no real equivalence between people who are psychologically "set off" by something and the people who refuse to apologize for setting them off and make fun [http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3205] of them for being set off.

 

[Kahunaburger]

publicly shaming gamers on the internet

And here I was thinking that "Tropes vs. Women in Gaming" was going to be examining sexist tropes in games. Apparently a series about a particular kind of bad writing in vidya gaems is an attack on the people who play those games. Who knew?

 

[Evil Smurf]

Also some find it relaxing to troll. I poke my brother to relax some times.