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A post-Gamergate Gen-Z core retrospective
I can't be the only one with this exact same experience. The worst thing to ever happen to my high school dating life was watching that first “feminist owned” compilation by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Thirteen-year-old me was recruited from the Minecraft let’s plays and dropped into the hardened battle lines of what we now call the culture war.
Since I was a young boy, my enemies and friends were already decided for me. People nowadays often make jokes along the lines of “this is what radicalised me.” But I can, honest to God, say it was videos of ladies with dyed hair throwing hissy fits at a supposed patriarchy.
But how did I get to this point? This was my conception of the state of internet politics circa 2013 at the time. Between 2008–2013 there was an event called Gamergate. Akin to World War I, I arrived after the ossification into trench warfare was already complete. As a person late to the party, the commentary I saw was very confusing and never actually touched on what caused the big shitstorm in the first place. I even tried to watch an explainer video, after which I was left even more confused, because it all seemed so inane and random and everyone kept having Very Strong Opinions about little nuances of the situation that I still am confused about to this day.
My vague understanding: a female indie video game developer slept with a journalist to get a good review for her game. She was also annoying about it or something. (Fun fact: I came across Brianna Wu on Twitter recently, who was also involved, I guess. Turns out she has always been a fairly likeable, nuanced, low-key trans woman. Don’t really know how that fits any narrative.)
At this point it had all become, by my estimation, more about feminist influence in gaming than what actually happened (whatever that was exactly). As an avid consumer of video game reviews at the time, I had the vague understanding that, of the people whose videos I watched the more respectable sort, like TotalBiscuit (RIP), AngryJoeShow, and Jim Sterling (WTF happened there, am I right?) I was supposed to be on the other side. These guys always came across as if they really didn’t want to talk about the topic, treating it as a toxic cesspit.
I’ve set the stage. Drum roll please. Come in:
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. It all starts with this guy. Pioneer of the political video essay format. Progenitor of the low-effort news commentator. Prime user of the still stock-image background picture.
The “This Week in Stupid” series was the succulent roast-dinner to the “feminist pwned” appetizer. A menagerie of this week’s most epic fails, most ludicrous feminist lies, most egregious overreaches, righteously torn asunder by the smooth, scornful, and eloquent voice of reason.
This man didn’t avoid talking about Gamergate; he bravely confronted it full force. He even had a reaction video to Angry Joe’s video on the topic that honestly was impossibly hard to follow. I don’t understand how people who actually went through the whole Gamergate saga don’t start tweaking when they hear “journalistic ethics in gaming.”
Suffice it to say, embarrassingly so, he was a role model for a young lad like me. (If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes: he was also solely responsible for Jordan Peterson getting discovered.)
You had to be there. Imitators popping up left, right, and centre, today uncharitably called grifters, amassing large audiences rapidly. It was a golden era. Anyone with a microphone and vocal cords could make it big. There was a voracious, previously uncatered-to appetite for this content, and I feasted.
I started adding Kraut and Tea (now just called Kraut), Armoured Skeptic, and dozens more to my rotation. I saw them go from a few thousand subscribers to tens of thousands (YouTube wasn’t as big back then; a hundred thousand subs made you a Big Deal).
The content expanded from video game politics to IRL politics. The Establishment joined in as a canonical enemy and ally to the feminists, ruthlessly deplatforming these new up-and-comers left and right. It was literally 1984. You had to be there. Free speech became the core load-bearing belief. But the good times couldn’t last forever. At some point the explosive growth slowed down, people started circling the wagons, collabs were handed out jealously. Production values increased along with the drama.
At this time I noticed the prevalence of a certain type of channel in the network: the Skeptic™ cadre. Names like “The Amazing Atheist” and “Armoured Skeptic.” I started connecting the pieces to a deeper origin story for the whole Gamergate thing. It all invariably led to New Atheism and Atheism+. Fourteen-year-old me didn’t know what New Atheism was, but it clarified to me what the fault lines were. Why was one side of the gamer army so hung up about the sexual proclivities and false statements of an, by all accounts, irrelevant developer, and the other side hated them for it?
Basically, the group with the beef was clearly the disenfranchised remains of New Atheism. These people were veterans who had debated internet creationists from before I was born, hyper-vigilant about correct argument and debate. After winning that war, they had been ruthlessly discarded over… something to do with people being busybodies and entryists making it a feminist thing with Atheism+. The important thing was that these same guys, perceiving that gaming was next, didn’t want a repeat. They dusted off their AOL majigs and went to war. (Sorry, don’t know what AOL is; I’m not unc-coded.)
And then I think they lost that battle too. And they realized the problem must be attacked at the root: the birthplace of the totalising feminist menace, universities.
And whatever your thoughts on these people are, they changed the world. This is a bit crazy to say, but I think they started and defined the online-era culture war.
I have a million more things to say and will maybe make a follow-up post on my view of the continued evolution to the present day. I want to go deeper into my shameful ̶P̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, red-pill era, and how the skeptic-to-Nazi pipeline had more than a grain of truth to it.
Nowadays I feel a lot of resentment for all the broken trust between me and my childhood idols. I fought this war alone in my classrooms. They gave me the forbidden fruit of knowledge, only for years later to become what they taught me to hate.
But really, am I the only one who went through this live?
I think the true boundary between gen-z and millennials isn't a specific year, it's whether or not someone is able to remember 9/11. If you remember 9/11, you can point to a specific point where the world changed. Otherwise, all you remember is that the world has always been like this. Gen-z movements should be understood in that framework. Millennials and gen-x-ers are fundamentally revanchist. They might be left or right wing, but fundamentally they want to return to the pre-9/11 world of optimism and progress. Gen-Z assumes the world is its default, persistent, shitty state, and it's up to them to change it. In particular, where harsh truths conflict with what their elders told them the world should be, gen-z-ers perceive this emotionally as betrayal and deception rather than elders simply having obsolete beliefs. This explains the rage about gamergate, incels, "capitalism", "chopped men", and any number of other gen-z-complaints.
Now, being on the very oldest end of the gen-z agerange, I'm inclined to the same emotional response to world conditions. But a childhood in a largely pre-smartphone/pre-social-media world means that millennial media formats (which means no short-form videos, no non-anonymous social media, no podcasts) do a better job at appealing to me. That means I only tend to be partially captured by mass movements like gamergate. I sympathize with some of their arguments, but I simply can't immerse myself in them. Ironically, that leaves me with a complaint that's perpendicular to yours: I have no idols, and therefore can't join shared communities based on idolization. In particular, my antipathy for any sort of celebrity has grown so large that I've taken to telling people (and working to make myself believe) that "celebrities aren't really people." Meaning: it is an absolute, complete waste of time to care about any "named character" I do not personally interact with. Actually, I've got this whole theory about how Dunbar's number implies that having any sort of parasocial connection to non-local people (including fictional characters) inhibits your ability to make durable social bonds. I think one of the chief evils of stratified/hierarchical societies is that the compel you to invest your limited emotional resources into the lives of high-status people who will never care about you in return.
In the end, the irony is that after all my introspection, all my epiphanies merely serve to replicate a piece of ancient wisdom you'll perhaps recognize... that ancient Jewish prohibition against worshipping false idols.
I share this view with you and I was an adult when 9/11 happened. Maybe it's just the way we're wired versus the environments we grew up in.
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This is the dividing line I've always used, and the dividing line between X and millennial is remembering Challenger. I'm brushing 45, but I don't remember Challenger, so millennial I am.
I remember Challenger and I think it was not 0.001% as traumatizing as 9/11. Maybe others my age feel differently, I dunno.
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I wouldn't say this is quite accurate. I'm technically in the zoomer bucket, and can't remember 9/11, but I absolutely remember a time with more optimism than we have now. Perhaps it's just that I grew up in a conservative part of the US, but the George W. Bush hate especially after Iraq just wasn't really present in my childhood. He was kind of buffonish sometimes, but obviously all my evangelical Republican family members loved him. I remember being impacted by the great recession, but I was young enough that it didn't seem to matter very much. The idea of patriotism was just real, people believed in it.
And even as I grew older, Obama's election was a moment of massive optimism on the left and center, a black guy named
"Osama""Obama" was elected president of the United States.The smartphone (and before that the iPod) were actually a big part of the optimism of the time. We remember these changes as negative, but people were massively excited about them at the time in a way they just aren't for technological changes today.
I place the turning point
USAaround the time that the Black Lives Matter movement started, that's where the left abandoned the narrative of Obama being the signpost of full racial integration and brotherhood. The modern culture war can be traced back to that, IMO. Feminism and gamergate and that kind of stuff were fellow travelers, but around that time that stuff was just a few weird girls on Tumblr and hadn't hit the mainstream yet. I guess in some sense it never did, I can't imagine the left legitimately scrawling "KILL ALL MEN" in all caps like an Umbridge punishment the way the Tumblrinas used to do.I guess in some ways this was true, particularly as we look at prices for major expenses. But I'll say that my elders are just as flabbergasted at cost disease in healthcare and ballooning house prices as any young person. My parents are shocked at how much the family home is worth, and my mom is kind of a YIMBY.
But the big thing I think that's changed is just social trust. My dad was a hippie back in the day, and hasn't gotten a raise as an associate professor in a decade; he's no evangelist for institutional loyalty. My mom is, but she trusts everyone, so that's just her personality.
I actually think the boomers have a good counterpoint when they say that young people just aren't willing to do low-tier work and consider a hard day's labor beneath them. I think that's true. I think about the kinds of things my dad put up with before he got hired as a professor -- 12 hour days, cleaning buildings in the middle of the night, saving all week to buy a movie ticket as his weekly entertainment. I'm pretty sure zoomers would call that a human rights abuse. But many, many boomers did things like that.
If there's one thing where I feel resentment about the scripts I was handed not fitting reality, it's that the depictions of flirting and romance in popular media were almost calculatedly misleading about how you actually develop a relationship with a woman. Lots of friends-to-lovers arcs and will-they-or-won't-they nonsense. That makes for good TV. But real relationships usually require some level of approach and some kind of status display, even if we're polite and we don't call it that.
I think a lot of our intimacy crises kind of go back to that, we never taught young men how to flirt and young women how to intelligently discern flirting from offense, and hence we're in a place where lots of young people don't know how the fundamental human mating ritual is supposed to work and either fear it or smash through it like a bull in a China shop. I guess we assumed it's instinctual -- it isn't. Turns out our prefrontal cortexes were actually a load-bearing part of human reproduction after all.
If culture as a whole doesn't teach this, that's how you end up with the PUA subculture and redpill bros doing it. They're winning the social game among young men because they actually give actionable information about how to achieve an intimate relation with a woman. The honest truth is that it's not so different to court a woman passionately as it is to seduce her, at least in terms of the feelings of attraction and interest you have to create in her for it to happen.
Regarding low-tier work I reckon we have discussed it multiple times both here and on the subreddits, and for a good reason. I think it bears repeating here that lots of types of low-tier work that Western societies currently employ immigrants to perform was normally performed by high school or college students on weekends or nights or during the summer. It was sometime during the '90s that Western societies seemed to have collectively decided that prep school and after-school activities are a better use of the free time of sufficiently gifted high schoolers than working. And I do think that society did end up losing something significant with that.
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This is an amazingly long post that doesn't say much. Okay, you feel resentment for broken trust? They became what they taught you to hate? How so? You're just gesturing at something, perhaps consensus building, but never making a claim therein.
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Gamergate, thankfully, occurred during the period where I was less online than I had been both before and after. Like many, I was a New Atheist during it's heyday, before the split of Atheism+. Thankfully, the split just made the space boring to me, and I avoided joining either the proto-alt-right or the proto-woke factions that emerged.
The impetus for the split really was Elevatorgate. At the time, I remember being sympathetic to the feminist side (and was very much a feminist at that point). In retrospect, I still think they were right on the object level. It involved one female atheist blogger (Rebecca Watson) sharing a video talking about her experience at a recent atheism conference. She recounted a story in which a guy (with whom she hadn't really interacted with) was in an elevator with her at the end of the night and invited her back to his room for coffee. Her message was (I believe I'm quoting directly) "Guys, don't do that." And, at the end of the day, I think that's perfectly good advice. It is a pretty lame move, and while not worthy of strong social sanction, I think it's worth telling a bunch of guys (many of whom are nerdy, maybe autistic, and too-online) that it's not a great way to get a girl to like you or to invite women into your movement.
As the feminist side tells it, this spawned a surge of hate mail and complaints from guys, threatening sexual violence etc etc. Who knows how profound that was, but the fact is the internet did seem to react pretty strongly to what seemed to be like relatively mild chastisement.
However, the feminist side pushed back hard (irrationally so, imo). I remember eyerolling at the essay "Schrodinger's Rapist" asserting that, due to rape being a statistically male-dominated practice, any guy in an elevator was potentially a rapist, and thus making a proposition/move in a confined setting like that understandably triggers a woman's fears of getting raped. The other side had a lot of fun writing a parallel essay about black people and crime-- which, to be clear, was trying to show that such statistical discrimination was unfounded.
Like Gamergate, the event spiraled into a discussion about whether/how this male-dominated subculture treated women poorly, and whether/how entryist women were ruining the culture. Richard Dawkins even chimed in with his satirical letter "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the plight of an American woman being asked for coffee to the brutally patriarchal culture of Islam.
Soon after that, Atheism+ was explicitly founded, with a number of the popular blogs adopting the logo and claiming that reason not only tells us to disbelieve in God, but furthermore should guide our behavior on other aspects of life and society (read: social justice). For me, the blogs just became boring at that point, but I was still feminist/SJW enough that those who dug in their heels on the other side didn't really resonate with me either. By the time Gamergate rolled around, I was still online but just not that into it. Several years later, a friend sharing a Scott Alexander post brought be back into the world of online discourse.
Despite the similarities, I think it's really important to see one crucial difference between Elevatorgate and Gamergate: Elevator Guy remains anonymous to this day. The goal of Watson's video was not to punish this guy in particular. Whereas Gamergate, to my best understanding, involved lots of doxxing on both sides, and aimed to hit people where it hurt: in "real life." This is why I'd say there is a strong case to be made that Gamergate is a time to flag as the starting point for modern culture war. Before then, internet conflicts were internet conflicts, and insane level to which flame wars could be taken was a humorous badge of honor for nerds. After Gamergate, the stakes started to become real.
I’ve read a detailed account of this a long time ago. Recalling from memory, originally this Watson woman briefly described the elevator incident in passing during a presentation she was delivering at another atheist event which was posted online, and another woman in this atheist subculture decided to argue against her accusations in a blog post, which in turn generated a cascading feminist backlash, which in turn elicited the Dear Muslima letter you mentioned. It was this latter event that drew mainstream media attention to this whole trainwreck.
This actually isn’t that self-evident in retrospect; in fact, I’ve seen the observation on the SSC subreddit once that it’s actually difficult to pinpoint the one decisive event which propelled the Gamergate scandal to mainstream exposure. Was it one of the blog posts? One of the youtube response videos? A tweet? It’s difficult to tell, especially because most of the first-hand sources related to Gamergate have been purged from the internet.
Anyway, this is all in the past by now. I think the most important facet of Elevatorgate is that everyone involved ended up escalating the scandal instead of trying to calm it down. First of all, it was Richard Dawkins who did the most to fan the flames instead of making all those involved cool down. I think it’s fair to hold this against him.
... that's probably truish, but I'd give better-than-even odds that, had 4chan not banned the post, it would have gotten little more than a few sages and some 'not your personal army' posts (possibly 'i ain't reading all that sorry/happy' meme?). There's a hole-shaped gap in the narrative because the actual contention is about a thing that never got visibility, rather than the stuff that did.
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I had a similar path. I was a 4channer (mostly /b/ and /pol/) in my late high school/early college years. I was already pretty libertarian (although, even then, more of the Matt Zwolinski/bleeding heart kind) and probably got pushed a bit further rightward. It was a gateway into a lot of MRA/MGTOW spaces. I was never too deep into redpill stuff (probably because I was in a relationship) and I never really fell down the youtube rabbit hole in this space. There were a few people whose early videos I enjoyed. Karen Straughan comes to mind (that's a name I haven't thought about in a long time!)
I suppose I find it a little funny I ended up a woke-liberal-type today. There's definitely a kind of "there but for the grace of god go I" when I see people who were clearly radicalized in similar spaces.
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There was really a coalescing of many different online communities that had previously been largely (not entirely but largely) independent around that 2013-2017 period. Ron Paul libertarians, hardcore gamers and gaming content creators, neoreactionaries, Stormfront types, aspects of the Tea Party movement, the remnants of the Pick up Artist and MRA movements, these were all previously largely independent and had their own forums. If there was overlap, it was at the individual level (someone liking both PUA stuff and video games), not at the communal level.
Slowly, this became a Very Online Coalition that was at first tentatively and later solidly behind the ‘right wing’ side of the nascent online culture war.
A Myopic History of the Alt-Right is an interesting post from 2017 on a now-defunct NRx blog that talks about how those threads came together.
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Gamergate is the one thing I don’t understand from my absurdly online time from day 2004-shit still kinda now.
I’ve had people explain it to me, I’ve watched videos, you just mentioned it, but I have zero idea what happened.
I know - vaguely - someone slept with someone for a good review and then we started talking about how video games are catered to men.
And now you say it started the online culture war ??
I wasn't really into Gemergate itself at the time, but it was multiple things at a time.
Games journalism being untrusted (for instance, Jeff Gerstmann being fired because he gave a mediocre review score to a game heavily advertised on the site),
Zoe Quinn allegedly sleeping around (which wasn't a review but her game was covered by the site)
Anita Sarkeesian was promoted on multiple sites for feminist critiques of video games, despite knowing nothing about video games and using incredibly old and simplistic evidence.
When the journalists tried to disparage and stop discussion of the above, that just fanned the flames.
Yeah, I remember her supporters were denying that such a review was ever published and obviously thought that this is a clever argument, but unsurprisingly it seems the truth is more nuanced.
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The pot had been simmering for a while before Gamergate, honestly - that was just the pebble that started the avalanche. Before then, the vast majority of gamers didn't even know there was a culture war, or if there was, their only point of reference was people like Jack Thompson trying to ban GTA. And it wasn't any surprise which side of that debate the gamers came down on (this guy's trying to take away your games!).
For years it had been known (Dorito pope et al) that the gaming press and the gaming industry were in bed together; the journalists traded good press for access. Although the wider implications of this were not commonly connected and the cynical backbone of marketing had not been exposed fully, there was a naivety about gaming in general. The biggest shockwaves and outrage happened when a site gave a good review to a terrible game, or a terrible review to a good game (the IGN God Hand review is infamous to this day). Where as movies at the time had gotten to the point where outrage baiting was just generally ignored, gamers immersed themselves so fully online that people who were Wrong had to be Corrected, otherwise they clearly had no taste/Weren't A Real Gamer.
But money talks, bullshit walks. The Eye of Sauron had noticed, especially with the exponential growth in gaming. Money was there to be made, and like anything in that era that showed a chance of dollar signs, the grifters showed up in droves. This was around the time where the understanding the entire field of marketing eventually grew to realize: outrage drives engagement more than anything else - had just started to rear its head. You got way more clicks, and ad revenue, by saying something clearly controversial and wrong, because nerds would crop out of the woodwork to scream about it. Anita Sarkeesian somehow turned complaining about hot girls in video games into thousands of dollars in free software and donations.
The other thing is that the field of gaming journalism was changing. One of the key inflection points was the New Games Journalism movement. Rather than churn out formulaic game reviews talking about packaging box quotes, they championed a reviewing and writing style that felt personal, that gave the writer more of an identity and talked more about their relationship with the game. Of course, their intentions were fundamentally kind of good, but naive. They had little clue that this would be used to amplify the most toxic, unpleasant, agenda-driven people in the relentless drive for eyeballs. One of the key people in the New Games Journalism movement is Tim Rogers. Tim Rogers wouldn't hurt a fly. He's the sort of harmless nerd who gets stuffed in lockers and laughed at by girls but fundamentally still doesn't believe in real violence. What gets more clicks, a thousand words about how Doom isn't something a mom can show her daughter, or a bog standard review of Doom talking about its gameplay mechanics?
The other thing is that these people all talk to each other. They are in their own little social club, they go to the big events to drink and party with each other, the same press tours, etc. This was naively, but correctly, perceived as collusion. To which the response is, part of the job is socializing and schmoozing with the industry to get access. And the relationship went both ways. They got all-access tickets, perks, gifts, game publisher's marketing budget trying to find something to spend itself on. The journalists and games media increasingly saw themselves as part of a privileged class, people who got to work closely with the games industry (and seek career opportunities further down the line), whose job it was to explain the more baffling or more controversial things a games studio does to the unwashed masses.
Somewhere along the line, as with everyone who creates content for an audience, contempt sets in. How can it not? The public is an unfeeling, unthinking mob, a senseless monster that doesn't give a shit about the writer other than what information can be communicated to them. And the worst aspects of the public become representative of it. Gamers are not the most socially aware as a class, and the internet only amplified these tendencies, especially when coupled with topics and games that were formative experiences for a lot of young people. An attack on a game I like is an attack on me.
Then came the Zoe post, the five guys scandal, etc. Honestly, the post was more of an indictment on Zoe than anything to do with video games. Zoe, exposed as a serial abuser, cheater, "woman of ill repute", and quite possibly a sociopath, played the game perfectly. She knew what would happen, and the internet didn't let her down. She turned a story about her ex exposing her poor behavior into an indictment on misogyny in gaming, and the gamers fell for the trap. Worse, she was excellent at the social engineering part of the game; her friends and colleagues all fell to defend her in lockstep, and those who weren't only saw the internet bullying a woman. Who the hell was going to read a thousand-word jilted ex blogpost to figure out why it even happened in the first place?
Of course, this only had the effect of setting off a huge brawl and thousands of hitpieces about misogyny in gaming. Gamers who had no idea what the hell was going on suddenly perked up and went, "wait, what? You mean me? But I'm not a misogynist! What the hell!" rallied around flags and started fighting. Worse, Zoe had proved so good at playing the social engineering game "you're either with us or with the misogynists!" that the battle lines were drawn in clear bold 20 point font. It wasn't enough to stay out of it. You had to condemn the gamers, make a statement on
Ukraine Israelhow gaming wasn't welcoming to women. Which the gamers then took as evidence (it was) that the gaming media was all colluding and reading from the same rap sheet (it was), leading to them only becoming further entrenched.Bean counters didn't give a shit, they were trying to crack the elusive female audience for more $ growth. Females deemed most profitable by the faceless corporations, must find ways to get them into gaming to unlock more $. So it's no surprise that Corporate Woke started stretching out of its amniotic caul here.
It sparked the culture war because an area that previously thought itself immune from the culture war realized it had been in the culture war all along, and that there were deep, fundamental disagreements about who gamers were as a group, what sort of games can and should be made, and what the people making and writing about the games wanted vs what the people buying the games wanted.
Nowadays it's interesting as a piece of internet history, but the bombed remnants of a once relatively consolidated gaming media and the cratering efforts of the bloated game developer and publishing industry tell a story of how everyone failed to learn anything at all from the entire experience.
Thank you !
I think that clicked all the pieces together for me finally.
It's actually a link in the chain re: marketing as well, with it being timed at the tail end of the realization that identity marketing worked better.
The golden age of marketing (late 80s, 90s) was marked by the selling of ideas. Concepts. Celebrity marketing. Be Like Mike, Da Bomb, Wazzzup, Got Milk, Obey Your Thirst. It was aspirational marketing; you bought the product because you wanted to be like X, or because you liked the idea.
The thing that really changed this was Starbucks. Suddenly they weren't selling an idea or an aspirational goal but an identity. People wanted to be seen as the kind of person who hung out and "worked" at Starbucks, with the complete Starbucks yuppie kit - smart casual or nerd casual clothing, grande latte, iPhone, Macbook. Young people sitting in Starbucks chairs pretending to work or to be creative with their expensive laptops. The decor, environment, chairs, everything built to make it an attractive environment that furthered the illusion. That was the real secret sauce behind Starbucks' success, not $10 lattes. The shift is noticable: you bought the product because you were that type of person. Instead of selling what you could be, they sold you something based on who you were (or who you thought you were).
"Gamer" was both a term for someone who played video games and a marketable identity. If the marketers could identify what that was and cater to it, then make money off it, then of course there would be fights about who gamers were.
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The actual sleeping around wasn't the trigger. That was mostly just a minor scandal that a few people were embroiled in. What kicked off Gamergate was the unified response--the circling of the wagons--that all the established videogame websites and forums engaged in. People were getting banned and punished for even mildly critical takes as all the institutions suddenly acted like a hivemind to attack and ostracize dissenters. As that happened, more and more people piled in to see what was going on and quickly found themselves branded as sexist, misogynist, and probably racist too for some reason.
It was a pattern that would go onto be repeated in many online and offline communities. The sudden imposition of extreme left-wing idpol ideology that would split fanbases, denominations, supporters, hobbyists, and everything else, with all the established mainstream institutions and power centers neatly lining up on one side, and often against the majority.
It also happened shortly after Anita and Feminist Frequency had gotten the pot nice and stirred up.
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This reminds me of a passage from one of the later Song of Ice and Fire books, where Tyrion is learning about some of the deep secrets of his family that started even before his father was born:
This stuff goes back, and back, and back. There's never a single clear point where it all began. When people try to say it all started over a single forum post, of course that makes it look trivial, but it was never really about that at all. The vast majority of people who got mad about it online had no idea who any of the people mentioned in that post were. This was just yet another battle in long, long-standing arguments like:
Many controversial issues here with no clear answer! It's pointless to try to trace any of them back to just one specific incident. If you decide that it all traces back to that one forum post, then it makes the chud gamer side looks really bad, which is why the feminist side usually frames it that way. If you trace it back like "game reviewers have been wildly crooked ever since the start, and it's time we finally had some honest professional reviewers who aren't being paid off by the game companies" then it sounds a lot more reasonable, but also kinda dodges the more contraversial questions.
This is not my impression at all; it seems to me that exactly the opposite of this is true. The feminist side is the one that tries to obfuscate the specifics of the incident and make it a general culture war thing, because the specific incident did look really bad for them, and it pains me to see their opponents buy into that frame.
It was a one-off event about random people that no one had ever heard of before, which hinged on personal details that we have no evidence of at all. That's why it seems odd that so many millions of male gamers got so mad at it- unless of course they were just using it as an excuse to hate women. (at least, that's the feminist interpretation)
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I don't know what exactly is your point with this post. A lot of people presumably went through similar phases that you did, although I doubt anyone had a nearly identical path. I remember GamerGate vividly as well as New Atheism, but I never seriously watched people like Sargon of Akkad or Peter Molyneux. Is your post just to talk about that entire vague blob? Sure, OK, I'll add my 2c.
GamerGate didn't start in 2008-2013. The inciting incident was in 2014, although it's functionally irrelevant other than as a red herring for people to describe what the "movement" was "really about". I'm sure some people were genuinely concerned about ethics in video game reviews, with the reviewers being a little too cozy with the developers and not making that clear. In practice, the movement always really was primarily concerned with feminist/leftist encroachment in video games. Anita Sarkeesian's breakthrough kickstarter in 2012 ought to mentioned alongside that. There were likely smaller events as well, but Anita Sarkeesian was when I first really started noticing the culture war battle lines being drawn. In any case, there was a lot of embarrassment in polite spaces about being seen as "against feminism" in the days of proto-woke, so people liked to pretend GamerGate was about something else, but no, that was never really true in practice. I'm glad we can all just drop the guise and talk about that stuff openly now. It's perfectly valid to push back on the types of cultural changes that Feminists would want, which is mostly redesigning characters so they don't appeal to male sexual preferences, as well as accepting sectarian leftist propaganda as a passive backdrop.
Indeed I'd admit quite shamelessly I don't much care about "ethics in journalism" as much as I do about gatekeeping male hobbies ("core" gaming is still male dominated). There’s a basic principle of cultural reciprocity that seems to go only one way. If it would be unreasonable for me to enter kdrama forums and demand that it pivot toward Bayformers style hyper CGI excess and calibrate to the male gaze, then it’s equally unreasonable to expect male dominated hobby spaces to continually reorient themselves around themes that were never their core appeal.
Different subcultures form around different aesthetic and narrative preferences. Why should I pretend to be fascinated by female empowerment arcs, resistance narratives, or the deconstruction of heteronormativity, as if these tropes haven't been endlessly recycled and widely represented across mainstream media for decades? Personally, the "appeal" around "strong independent women heroes" always felt like artificially imposed social pressure rather than organic interest. Star Wars was also a fundamentally boys' IP, and feminists/woke activists seek to rewrite that. Boys loved Star Wars because it centred on what boys disproportionately enjoy: spacefaring civilisation, starcrafts, galactic battles, trench runs, lightsaber combats, training hierarchies, rivalry, sacrifice, and a classical male hero growing into responsibility and status. The latter part is being treated as a cardinal sin now.
Call it contrarian instinct, but I deliberately steer clear of works that centre on what have become fashionable ideological tropes, regardless of how critically acclaimed or “well executed” they may be. I would rather watch a badly choreographed, mid budget action film unapologetically featuring charismatic leads and glamorous, attractive women for 12 hours than engage with prestige projects framed as culturally virtuous “queer literature”. Like, I do not care how technically refined Brokeback Mountain may be or what stellar performances the leads put on or how many awards it won, it simply does not align with the thematic and narrative sensibilities I personally value.
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Did the Fable guy had some venture into the culture war I'm not aware of, or are you guys talking about Stefan?
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I suggest delineating GG from Atheism+, as those were scandals that took place in different timeframes, with different opposing groups. But Atheism+ and Elevatorgate, for example, can safely be put into the same bucket.
Speaking of the Atheism+ movement, Scott had an interesting article on that
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
You would think the atheist skeptics who were anti-feminists would align with the alt-right (or at least anti-woke given their previous anti-feminist stances) but a large number of them ended up on the side of woke social justice.
Yeah I remember this happening. I think a lot went woke because they'd spent their whole lives arguing against the conservatives and had eatablishes social and family links to left wing groups. Aronra seemed to fit this bill when he (briefly) began turning his atheism attention to the new culture war. It seemed like his wife, or something, was a big feminist and he tried to migrate his audience into a pro feminist sphere. Didn't work, he lost a lot of support and just went back to debating creationists.
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I didn't go through what you're describing, but I began browsing 4chan in 2013 at the age of 17, largely /v/, /vr/, /vg/, /tg/, /his/, /an/, /r9k/ and /lgbt/, which is what set me on the path of the chud. Initially I found a lot of the content quite shocking, but partly convincing, at least the notion of what here would be called HBD, and the equivalent for gender, and incorporated it into my worldview which at the time was mainly apolitical but leaning pre-woke liberal, if that makes sense. I'm less sure of it now... clearly innate racial and sexual differences exist to some extent, but I'm unsure how complete an explanation they are for inequality. It isn't something I ever rigorously investigated anyway, I just suspected it was probably true because the sociological explanations all sounded like total cope.
I recall following Gamergate on /v/ at the time, not directly participating, but I'm not sure I fully understood the stuff about Zoe Quinn even then. All I knew was I already didn't like the weird turn left-wing politics had taken into supporting minority idpol and wanting everything they considered problematic censored or changed, so movements which opposed that, I generally liked. I never really watched Skeptic YouTube but I certainly still agreed strongly with that whole ethos of being socially liberal, rabidly pro-free speech and anti-censorship, and anti-progressive idpol/DEI/special treatment/whatever you wanna call it.
At the time that seemed like the dominant strain of liberalism so I had no reason to call myself anything but liberal. As late as 2019 I can recall being out drinking at a gay bar and feeling completely comfortable there, it wasn't like enemy territory or something, I didn't feel like an infiltrator who had to hide his beliefs. Today I doubt I'd feel the same way, after the riots in 2020 made it clear that the fringe woke ideology everyone used to dunk on had just become what liberalism is now. Which is an issue for me, because I don't want to think of myself as conservative. I'm not some Red Tribe guy (doesn't really apply to my country anyway), not religious, I don't care about promiscuity or sexual degeneracy or abortion. To the extent I was ever anti-trans it was always on account of opposing compelled speech, not some moral pearl-clutching about guys acting like fags.
All the same I've been in effect a chud since like 2015--that's the earliest I can remember thinking importing massive amounts of third-worlders into Western nations was probably a bad idea, anyway. And I was a free speech maximalist and thought trenders were giving trans people a bad name and all the rest of it. I've been trying to hang on to that while reconciling it with liberalism, but it seems an impossible task. I've tried to moderate my views on things like trans or immigration, but I feel like it's just binary now, pro or anti, anything that isn't transwomen are women/open borders will just be seen as total opposition.
And emotionally seeing some smug Redditor advocate for hate speech laws or deplatforming or celebrating when it happens will always set me off. I can't really feel comfortable with modern liberalism if that's what it is now, to the point contrarian spaces like this are the only places I feel normal in. And even though intellectually I still think racism is bad and all that, I feel like I've lost the capability to be offended by it or any other form of bigotry.
This is just what polarisation feels like, I guess.
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I think in a way both sides were right about Gamergate. On the one hand, it really was about women entering into a "boys' club" space, not ethics in gaming journalism. So at the level of literal claims, the feminists were basically correct. However, I don't think it was wrong to oppose women entering a men's space and seeking to change it, just the pro-Gamergate side didn't have the language to frame this in a sympathetic way so they avoided saying it.
What was happening to gaming and online nerd spaces (like Reddit itself) was essentially a form of gentrification. You had a "marginalized" community (nerds) that had made something interesting in their ghettoized spaces (videogaming, online forums like Reddit, open source software, tabletop games). The mainstream that had previously stigmatized them decided they wanted to move in, force out the original communities and sanitize them for mainstream consumption. The same process that happened to Reddit is what leftists complain about when it happens to some neighborhood in Queens.
Anyway, as for my own personal journey through it, I was a bit older than you. All of this happened after I had already graduated college, and so I never really got invested in the whole Youtube debate/criticism sphere. I never watched Sargon of Akkad or Jordan Peterson or whoever. I think it was around that time, 2013 or 2014 that my brother sent me a link to one of the more popular SlateStarCodex posts which became my entry point.
Status 451's Social Gentrification post is an absolute must-read, if you haven't already.
Wow, now that's a blog I haven't thought of in a long time. I'm pretty sure the creator was a regular on the Motte subreddit (or even the old /r/SSC CW thread?).
I can also vaguely recall a commenter with that username but couldn't find it on Reddit.
His username was different than the site name. And I think he was a pretty high quality poster back when he posted. Can't remember who it was.
I also noticed that he is the author of the Days of Rage review I came across ages ago. Dejá vu indeed.
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I would say that both of these things were instances of a broader problem. It spread from the latter to include the former because they were instances of a broader problem.
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There were always women into gaming. What happened during gamergame that we get entrysts. And the game journalists bowed to them declaring practices and parts of games "problematic". Now gaming was always egalitarian - you either can consistently railgun someone from half a map away or you are pathetic subhuman. And if you are pathetic subhuman you shut up. Now suddenly we had whining about trash talk in chats and not having black people in medieval poland. And the game developers and journalists took their side. Now the ruin did came for the AAAA industry, but it was completely avoidable. Just give the people that consume and pay for your fucking products what they want.
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No, it never was.
Well, I think it was a factor -- with some nuance. The reality is that women have always been welcome in male-dominated hobby spaces, such as computer gaming; chess; and so on. Provided that those women are genuine enthusiasts.
But what happens -- sometimes -- is that a hobby which was formerly low status; something for basement-dwelling losers, suddenly increases in status and respectability. That's definitely happened with computers. What happened next was that status was a magnet for women who weren't necessarily interested in the hobby itself but rather the status, money, and male attention which would come from getting involved. Thus, the "fake geek girl." When men inevitably (and reasonably) object to these interlopers, it opens the door for grifters like Aneeta Sarkesian to play the role of damsel in distress.
What's especially infuriating about these types is they typically attempt to re-write history. They insist that in the past, women were excluded from these spaces -- a lie which is about as wrong as wrong can be.
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Citation needed. She’s recently started playing the reasonable centrist, but she was absolutely a far left progressive extremist during gamer gate. She also still has yet to apologize to Jesse Single for lying about him or own up to her past bad behavior in any real way.
Indeed. For example, she lied about having to move to a different apartment as a result of the dozens of death threats she supposedly received from evil sh*thead gamers, and she claimed this while streaming from her old apartment (the background was the same). I remember reading this on the SSC subreddit, where GG was somewhat extensively discussed on multiple occasions.
Yeah, that's kinda GG all over. The horrible toxic gamergate harassers were all anonymous randos, while all the anti-team's lying propaganda and victim playacting came from, well, Named Elites with fancy health bars.
Ultimately, gamers as a community were test subjects for outrage-click journalism. In the lead up to GG, outlets and individual actors were discovering that if you shit on nerds, half of them will get mad at you, and the other half will knuckle under and get mad at the first half to prove they're "one of the good ones." Before white guilt was found to be WAY more volatile and easy to extract, they were going after nerdy male guilt.
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We also know that Brianna Wu manufactured at least some of the "hate", because GG caught Wu forgetting to switch to a sockpuppet on the Steam forums.
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Ah, my bad, I wanted to change that to *'is currently' not always has been.
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"The Zoe Post" which served as the catalyst for Gamergate was published in August 2014.
This is true but I don't think it's the whole story. This is anecdotal, but if you were online and involved in gaming discourse in the late 00s and early 10s you would probably remember that gamers and journos already had a kind of culture war going on at the time, but it wasn't yet political. It was over things like day-one/on-disc DLCs, microtransactions, always-online requirements, streamlining in search of a "broader audience," shoddy reboots, and who could forget the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco? Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff. It wasn't until a little later that the Great Awokening happened and hit gaming journalists early, so they started complaining about immoral content in gaming and calling for it to be censored or changed the way conservatives had a few years earlier, and that was just another rift that opened between the two sides. I think among some gamers, they actually felt a sense of betrayal that journalists would do this after dunking on Jack Thompson with them years earlier.
Anyway, I think Gamergate was really just the largest battle in this already-existing war between gamers and journos and the point it became political, and for a lot of participants on the gamer side it was as much about stuff like this as it was about Zoe Quinn or feminism. Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles were about, journos had seen gamers quarrelling with them and the industry for years at that point, acting entitled in their view, and this Zoe Quinn thing was just the latest flareup.
I think that's part of where the ethics talk came from as well--because journalists had a track record of defending anti-consumer practices in the gaming industry, a lot of people may've suspected it wasn't just about one dodgy review, but that journalists were probably shills being paid off by the industry to dismiss legitimate criticism of their business practices. To my knowledge no evidence for that was ever uncovered, but it was a suspicion I'd wager a lot of people had.
These were when I first became aware of any of the controversy and I think did more to create the feeling of an us vs them mentality out of the whole thing. I couldn't have been made to care about any of the precipitating events like the depression quest review or whatever, gaming journalism was always terrible slop that no one read. Both the gamers knew it and the people who wrote for the outlets knew it. I think a lot of the anger on that side of the fence came from them not really wanting to do the job, they would much much rather be doing, what we would now call woke, activism but they didn't have the chops to get a spot in any of the outlets that specialized in it. Declaring one of your identity markers is "dead" however is a very provocative move and it did provoke. A wiser and less teenaged aqouta would have recognized this as the false choice that it was but I was prepared to side with basically anyone against the kind of smug jerks who were writing those gamers are dead articles.
‘Gamers are dead’ articles in places like Polygon was the first I heard of the culture war as well. I never realised that Gamergate was a specific thing until I read about it many years later but ‘suddenly the people who make games all gate me’ was a signal even I couldn’t miss.
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This is not my recollection. Some sites probably did this, but there was always a significant chunk that decried this sort of stuff either implicitly (e.g. consistently highlighting bad industry practices) or explicitly. I remember Oblivion Horse Armor being pointed out by journalists as a bad omen. I don't recall them doing any sort of concerted, major push for "you need to just accept this, losers!" The Xbox One reveal was similarly panned. Heck, some former journalists became full time commentators calling all that stuff out, like Jim Sterling.
Probably the biggest difference between the mainstream gaming press and regular gamers was the reaction to Mass Effect 3's ending. I recall most sites at the time going "meh", like it was bad but not terrible. Eventually they basically got bullied into adopting the popular view that it was the video game Crime of the Decade, but there was indeed that initial week or 2 where they underplayed it.
There were pro-consumer journalists at the time, of course, but I do think there was a perception among a lot of the people kicking up a stink about this stuff that their concerns were often not taken seriously by mainstream journalists. Admittedly though I was a teenager back then and not following it super closely, so it's hard to recall the sequence of events perfectly. I just remember that at the time Gamergate definitely didn't feel like an isolated event, but rather part of an ongoing series of consumer revolts or, less charitably, nerdrage episodes that were pretty common in the gaming space back then.
Regarding Mass Effect 3's ending in particular I definitely remember journalists being quite adamant that calls to change it were illegitimate and that it would be an affront to the game's artistic integrity to alter the ending to appease angry fans.
You would be correct. The reason is because their jobs depended on schmoozing with and connecting with those they were covering, and they wanted to keep access as well as open further career doors.
Enthusiast journalism around consumer products very rarely can be separated from a marketing budget. That gamers conflated it with actual journalism was an honest mistake, but indicative of the general age of the gaming public.
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Oh sure, I'm aware that the Zoe Post was just the catalyst for a whole bunch of cultural issues which had been stewing for years prior. But I still think it's misleading to say that there was an event called "Gamergate" which took place in the period 2008-13.
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To add to OP's reply I think it's clear in retrospect that the social factors that propelled Gamergate to mainstream visibility had been brewing for a long time up until 2014. For one, online journalism had also been in a sorry state for a long time, one consequence being that those who were picking up PC game journalism as a job were increasingly urban liberal normies who originally dreamed about working for famous mainstream publications and felt that they had to settle for something much less as they lacked other options. They usually had an antipathy for gaming and gamers, especially hardcore male gamers. and basically resented the whole subculture that was now providing them with a meagre livelihood. Also, feminist culture warriors had been aware for a long time that unlike television, movies, literature and science fiction, PC gaming was 'off the reservation', not yet subjected to feminist influence and transformation, populated by many sexist failson dudebro fans yet unaffected by the culture war. The Blue Tribe in general was increasingly characterized by radicalization, desperation and bitterness during those times. The Tea Party happened, OWS seemed promising but puttered out, Obama was increasingly seen as a disappointment and a bummer by many leftists, the Dems lost seats during the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.
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This is supposed to reflect the feeling teenage me had at the time. Gamergate was such a quiet behemoth in the sphere that it could have happened yesterday or years ago. I'm also not being entirely exact with the references to my age for opsec reason.
This seems like a completely irrelevant response. I'm not asking you to dox yourself or disclose any more identifying details than you already have. I'm just pointing out that it's factually untrue that Gamergate occurred in that period. You literally did not hear the word "Gamergate" at any point between 2008 and 2013.
I think OP is trying to recount his impressions as someone who stumbled onto Gamergate in, say, 2016 or so. Especially if you're a kid with a poor sense of time who hasn't looked into the details, I think it's fair that you might've gotten the impression that it had been going on for longer than it really had been.
A bunch of stuff that happened prior to The Zoe Post, like the backlash to the 2012 "Tropes vs Women" Kickstarter, kind of ended up getting rolled into "Gamergate" in retrospect -- people on both sides saw value in either joining the popular/trending movement, or painting all their critics as members of the same hate group.
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Unless you were researching rare ant species, which many of us learned about later.
"Reproductively viable worker ants" was one of the best euphemisms to came out of Scott's censorship campaign.
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And you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It was merely a colourful way to express that I didn't know when it occurred because the whole thing was so impenetrable for me back then. I wasn't "online" before 2014.
I should have written 2008-2014 for clarity.
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Good write up, entertaining. I went through a similar journey but a few years before your time. My major thing was internet forums, mostly /redpill on reddit and other similar types of 'manosphere' forums.
Unfortunately what I've found is that while they get a lot of things right, those forums, and probably many of the youtubers you watched, are also drowned in cynicism and rage. To the point where they aren't quite healthy role models for young men. However, they are indeed often the only ones willing to speak truth to power, as they say. Makes for a bad mix, imo.
I used to hang out on those sites as well and it seems to me in retrospect that the Manosphere was already losing whatever relevance it had by the time Gamergate exploded. (It also happened at a time when the man/woman question itself was being shelved as a culture war issue as it was getting overshadowed by the race question. And whatever amount of energy was still present in the Manosphere in 2015, the Trump phenomenon quickly siphoned it off.) That scandal generally bewildered them because they didn't care for the gamer subculture, were either ignorant of it or looked down on it. I remember the cringy incident when a bunch of columnists of the Return of Kings site decided to launch a parallel gaming-focused website in order to publicly take a stand in the ongoing scandal. It fizzled out after a few months or so; it should have been clear from the beginning that these guys are putting on an act, as they never saw gamers as their allies, never cared for gaming as a whole and knew scarcely anything about it.
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Drowning in cynicism is a good way to put it. The older I've got, the more I am confident a lot of the motivation to spend the effort to disseminate the Red pill's somewhat accurate read on gender dynamics is simply pure envy that women in real life can have lots of casual sex if they want and, worse, there is little punishing them if they do. There is a desperate need to seek some kind of "justice" for their actions. Vicariously delivering this is the main content of things like the "Whatever" podcast.
(I encourage people to look up how body count actually effects women's dating and relationship prospects)
It never gets more complex than that imo.
While there is certainly an element of truth to this statement, it's missing the irony that while the average woman could do this, said average woman doesn't want casual sex anywhere near as much as the men thinking this do (certainly counterexamples exist). There is a lot of comic/tragic source material in "men are annoyed that women could be having lots of casual sex (which they don't want), while women are annoyed that men keep propositioning them for casual sex (which they don't want)." Lots of jealousy to go around, and a relative dearth of happy outcomes.
That's exactly the problem. Plus, when a woman does have the same level of sexual desire as a man and sleeps around, then of course she's a cock-carousel riding slut. Men think it'd be great if women wanted sex as much as they do, but in reality they don't like that. Women think it'd be great if men were as interested in a relationship and not sex as they are, but in reality again the sensitive, always checks in at every step for affirmative consent, type is not what they want.
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I suspect a synthesis where women are having less casual sex than a redpiller believes and more casual sex than a normie conservative man believes.
It's sort of a funny subject. Women will readily admit that they do desire casual sex as long as the circumstances are right. When pressed on the issue, they, just like men, will admit that they want to casually fuck only those whom they are not planning to marry. And this truth, for completely opposite reasons, makes both men and women angry.
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I very much agree, it’s pure ressentiment in a Nietzschean sense. Envy and jealous turned rancorous and pushed into the core of a person’s psyche.
Ultimately I do think a lot of it comes from a genuine imbalance with how the sexes are treated. Also, at a more fundamental level, the core of Indo-European society and really all civilization truly is patriarchy, and the rule of the father over friendship. This religion of patriarchy was shared by not just the Mediterraneans and Christians, but by Islamic cultures, Hindu culture, Chinese, etc.
In a way, the attempted destruction of the patriarchy is a deeper and more profound attack on the core of civilized culture than angry atheists loudly decrying how evil Christianity is. The religion of the father goes back farther, and in many ways is the foundation Christianity was built upon.
Not to say there weren’t problems with patriarchy, but I think that men rightly intuit that for all of civilized history, we enjoyed a certain respect and dignity in exchange for the burdens we bear. Now we are asked to bear the same burdens, not only without the respect, but often enduring outright vitriol for being men. It’s simply not possible for many young men to hear that and not grow up pissed off, and the easiest target in this sort of situation is, sadly, women as a whole.
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