No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

If I looked at my email unfiltered, I'd think one in three of the people sending me messages in the past day were unusually concerned about the state of my penis.

From a not-adding-anything-to-the-discussion perspective, dead baby pictures and random threats of rape or acts of violence are even less useful than those adds telling me how to work at home. From a cost-benefit perspective for the people involved, it's very easy for someone relatively unimportant to get an outsized influence on social interactions if they can easily reach people who actually matter with harassing comments, at virtually no cost to themselves.

So why don't we use tools to shape the online discussion and feedback mechanisms, the same way we do with our email inboxes?

Perhaps I'm just too out of the loop to see it being done.

Yes, some women streamers do flaunt their sexuality (wearing low tops while streaming for instance), and while many view this as perpetuating objectification of women, I view this type of decision as a marketing decision. I think these women are intelligent enough to know sex sells, but aren't so shallow as to actually believe their attractiveness defines who they are.

Unfortunately, the average person is a moron, and it doesn't help matters when group-think is rampant in chat rooms.

Why do you think so? Personally, I think it's the other way around - the cause is that people (not just men) respond better to "shallow" things - i.e. pretty things/landscapes/photos/people, which is why marketers/companies create things that are pretty. If your target audience is males, then it makes sense to use what males most powerfully respond to in your ads - pretty women.

The trouble stars when a specific kind of odious and socially toxic person encounters an attractive person. The first thing they do is ignore the "person" and focus on "attractive" as though they were dealing with an inanimate object which can be owned, controlled, manipulated, and eventually discarded. Their response to the presence of the attractive person reflects their basic lack of regard for the other's humanity. These responses are both abusive in their own right, and - if unchecked - contributory to a culture in which the targets of this treatment are freely abused.

In other words, the problem isn't about your immediate, natural response. The problem depends on whether you're a respectable human or an contemptuous creep, and thus, how you respond. Needless to say, the assholes make themselves known pretty quickly. The problem gets out of hand when they're allowed to dominate a space or situation.