If the women won’t do what the harassers tell them to, maybe there are other methods – like going after the advertisers. Amanda Marcotte at Slate:
Gamergate, a diffuse but relentless online anti-feminist movement aimed at drubbing feminist women out of game development and criticism, continues to expand the scope of its attacks. First it started as a traditional anti-feminist campaign, targeting individual women in hopes that they’d quit the industry rather than suffer any longer. When that didn’t work, they moved into targeting advertisers of websites that hire feminist women. They were sadly successful when Intel pulled its advertising from a website Gamasutra, which had offended the Gamergaters by running a piece that argued video games should be for everyoneinstead of just for angry white guys. Now the circle of victims has expanded even beyond just the gaming press, as the website Gawker is being threatened with the loss of its Mercedes advertising after Mercedes got a deluge of emails from Gamergaters who take offense at the multiple pieces Gawker and its sister sites have run criticizing Gamergate.
So…what is Mercedes thinking here? That the people behind Gamergate are very very likely to rush out at any minute to buy a Mercedes, unless they decide not to because Mercedes advertises on Gawker? That the kind of people who buy a Mercedes – which is people with many tens of thousands of dollars to squander – are the kind of people who spend all day hassling women on Twitter?
Really? Does that seem like sound consumer research? I think people like that are way too busy either making the money that buys them a Mercedes or playing golf by way of post-money-making fun and relaxation.
Marcotte thinks much the same thing; she finds it “confusing to see companies like Mercedes, Intel, and Adobe give any credence to a bunch of squalling from an online army of mostly teenage boys and social maladepts who are worried that girls are going to ruin the experience of playing Call of Duty.”
Seriously. People who spend all their time doing that don’t have the cash to buy anything besides an occasional bucket of fried chicken. So why are the advertisers squawking and running away?
The likely truth is they don’t want the hassle. Most of these big corporations desperately want to be perceived as floating above the ugly fray of politics. Intel pulled its advertising from Gamasutra and then issued a mealy-mouthed apology after the fact, saying, “Our action inadvertently created a perception that we are somehow taking sides in an increasingly bitter debate in the gaming community.” Adobe pulled a similar stunt, rushing to agree with Gamergate attacks on Gawker while claiming some kind of general anti-bullying stance.
Yeah that’s horseshit, that claiming to be against bullying while you’re in the very act of enabling or even encouraging bullying. We’ve seen a lot of it in these parts, and it’s horseshit.
Gamergate doesn’t have good arguments, which is why they dissemble and hand-wave rather than engaging in honest debate about the role of women in gaming. But the power they do have is what a colleague of mine characterized as “asymmetrical warfare”: Gamergaters, particularly since they recruit so heavily amongst teenagers and young men, have nothing but time and nothing to lose, making it relatively easy for them to target advertisers with these campaigns.
Many feminist writers know this phenomenon very well, having been targeted for over a decade now by an online guerrilla campaign of “men’s rights activists” and other anti-feminists who dogpile individual women with harassment in hopes of driving them to quit writing.
But now they’re making economic war, and that might do the job.
Which is why Gamergate is so worrisome, because it represents a shift away from targeting individual women and towards targeting notoriously skittish advertisers. It does mean it will be harder for the harassers to deny that they’re actively working to silence feminists online, but the tradeoff is, as we’ve seen with Intel and possibly Mercedes, it might just work.
If the advertisers are supine enough and cynical enough and self-protecting enough to do the “we oppose bullying but we’re withdrawing our ads from anti-bullying sites anyway because no reason just because” thing, then yes, it might just work.
Maybe next, they could boycott gaming?
Already happening, sort of:
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/14/operation-krampus-the-gamergate-grinches-who-want-to-steal-christmas/
That the kind of people who buy a Mercedes – which is people with many tens of thousands of dollars to squander – are the kind of people who spend all day hassling women on Twitter?
What does Dawkins drive?
Someone should draw Mercedes, et al. a Venn diagram or something, because they don’t seem to get it. At. All. Who do they want to side with, those who subscribe to the radical notion that women are people too, or those who don’t? Actually it’s worse than that – they are siding with those who are actively engaging in bullying and harassing behavior targeted against women and feminists.
We would like to take action, but we are unsure how to push back against what seems like overwhelming misogyny and a culture of both rhetorical and real violence against women.
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I thought “GamerGate” was, like, a term for someone or some group caught doing something illegal or career/reputation destroying in the gaming realm, along the lines of “BridgeGate” for Chris Christie, or as a reference to a “you’re totally f-ed” scandal a la Watergate. Another example would “WeinerGate”, referring to US Representative Anthony Weiner’s predilection for sending pictures of his crotch to women and his hobby’s chilling effect on his prospects.
In other words, “-gate” describes a shameful, scandalous event. Why are these angry white boys using it as a badge of pride??
In theory because the ‘scandal’ part of it is about the sleeping your way to good reviews part, even though that never actually happened.
In practice, because these people have no real self-awareness or self-reflection. If they did, they’d be looking around them and wondering how things got to this point.
Jenora Feuer at 6:
They’d probably chalk it up to their mom not making their lunch fast enough. She knows how they can be when they get a little peckish.
Normally, I think your analyses are fairly spot-on, Ophelia, but that last line and the overall sentiment gave me pause. In reality, we really don’t know much about them. There have been some informal, non-scientific self-surveys of, say, the people who frequent reddit, and those admittedly biased surveys do indicate a preponderance of young men. However, my (also admittedly biased) anecdotal experience of people involved in gaming communities is that there is a significant component of professional adult men who have internalized misogynistic messages. (I am not a gamer. I just seem to run into them a lot.)
I’m not saying that these people have purchasing power or influence that should be feared by those companies, but I do think that it’s at best premature (without more information) and definitely unwise to discount them as a bunch of teenagers without the cash to buy more than “the occasional bucket of fried chicken.” These people do cause real harm. The internet is a signal booster than can amplify the harm of even previously impotently sidelined nobodies.
If anything, I think we’ve seen in the last few years that the rate of online attacks against outspoken women (and anyone who supports them) is increasing. We do ourselves a disservice and danger by minimizing the ones behind that, in my opinion.
MrFancyPants @#8:
On the purchasing power aspect…
Just remember that the person who actually first coined ‘Gamergate’ and started pushing the Twitter hashtag was actor Adam Baldwin. Some of the supporters, at least, do have a fair bit of money.
The world of advertising is a strange one. Ah fuck it, I’m going to pull a made-up law out of my arse. Let’s call it Fortran’s Law: any sufficiently long-lived advertising campaign will forget what it’s actually advertising and why it even exists in the first place.
Here in the UK we have animated meerkats selling insurance. It started as a pun (compare the market/compare the meerkat) but turned into a sort of soap opera about the lives and loves of these fucking meerkats. At the end, the TV ad says “oh, and you might want to buy some insurance or something.” The campaign has somehow got away from the people selling the actual insurance. For some reason, insurance advertising is particularly insane. The Gocompare campaign is based on the supposed backstory of a fake opera singer. “Backstory” doesn’t really do it justice. The advertising company has made up an entire insurance-based town in Wales for EXACTLY NO REASON. It’s the fake town the fake opera singer came from and we’re supposed to care about… well, not even the fake residents of the fake town based on the fake backstory of the fake opera singer. We’re supposed to care about the fake *tourists* fakely visiting this place. We’re supposed to identify with them, presumably. While we’re delving into stupid, the fake opera singer is actually a real opera singer.
As long as I’m ranting, I’ll take a little more time to get to my point. There’s another insurance ad – I think they’ve taken it off air now – where there’s a runaway car. It is (for unclear reasons) rolling down a hill smashing into other cars and posing a danger to pedestrians. But the guy with LV insurance doesn’t care about that. He has – for some reason – a magic button on his keyring. He presses that button and his car heals itself. He gives the camera a smug smile and goes back into his house, despite the fact that the runaway car is presumably still causing mayhem.
So, finally to my point. Advertising is usually about selling advertising services to companies, not about selling products to people. Generally, advertisers do every single thing they can to avoid mentioning the actual product. They’re selling a perceived lifestyle or inventing a goal that people will probably think they want to achieve, entirely regardless of whether the product will help that to happen or whether they actually wanted to achieve that goal in the first place. Those companies actually selling things are clearly bamboozled by advertisers. They seem to care more about their brand being recognised than anyone knowing what they actually sell. Do advertisers advertise? I doubt they need to.
In this context, it’s easy to see why companies like Intel and Mercedes react badly to issues that matter. They’ve – they as a corporation – have been trained to believe that the only thing that matters is the brand. Not, you know, what they actually do. I think the marketing department of Mercedes (which must have hundreds of people) have forgotten that they’re selling cars. I think Intel has forgotten that its customers are manufacturers…. or they’re trying to keep us terrified that we might have a slightly worse processor or graphics card than someone else.
This is the environment in which huge corporations endorse sexist bullshit advertising and clumsily not-pologise their way out of it. They’ve forgotten what they’re selling and who they’re selling it to.
I meant to say that we shouldn’t stand for this. That if there’s anything we should be skeptical of, it’s people telling us what we should want.
Ophelia,
You might like The Scalzi’s take on this here:-
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/10/23/how-to-boycott-me-i-mean-really-boycott-me/
Interesting. When humiliating, sleep-depriving, disease-cauing, lethal garbage is spewed at women for bloody years, that’s a joke or not-serious or something any mature person would just ignore.
But when a few messages are directed at Fortune500 corporations it’s the end of the world and a good reason to abandon any activity that irritates bullies.
latsot, I think, explains why pretty well. But it’s still a rather stark contrast.
I suspect a lot of the actual emails that companies like Mercedes and Intel get are not ‘We hate women so you should stop advertising to them.’
Even gamerbros aren’t that stupid (well, maybe some of them). Probably, a few of them composed well thought, completely fabricated emails tangentially related to the issue, but completely wrong, factually. The bros then send the same message by the thousands, using all their sockpuppets. The company doesn’t really see the real issue, and no on at the company can really be bothered to look. Hell, they probably have a round file that they don’t even notice complaints until they reach a certain threshold.
So it’s not that crazy that even large companies that advertise at these sites might react this way. It’s even worse for them, in the long run, I suspect, to pull their advertising without doing due diligence, but they can probably make it up with a new ad campaign. Sadly….