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

polygon.com

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

#191

Post by chillingeffect »

chaostheory wrote: post #55
chillingeffect wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: Form an all-female software company. Gender-discriminatory hiring practices don't apply to small companies. See Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000e and following). Title VII applies to employers that fit into the following categories: private employers with at least 15 employees. 14 Women can get together and not hire any men if they want. They can make software for women and get rich a…

Reverse discrimination isn't much of an answer. It's just a temporary hack that doesn't fix the real problem.

Yes, and plastic doesn't conduct electricity well, so why keep trying to force electricity through it?

The problem as stated was "How can I make everyone in my game studio behave the way I want?" That is like sending electricity through plastic.

The real problem is: "How can I earn a living to feed my family doing what I love to do in a safe environment?"

My answer is the answer to the real problem. If you think you can keep sending electricity through plastic and make it work, it's worse than my "temporary hack" which is only "temporary" as long as the Constitution is in effect.

My answer brings new information to the table which most people don't know. I'm sick of these threads coming up over and over again and I've offered a fresh formulation with new ideas that people can start to use right away.

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

#192

Post by Zikes »

sp332 wrote: post #186
Zikes wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion. > A male friend of mine that develops AAA games told me, "When a woman criticizes me, it goes to a different part of my brain than when a man on my team does. I get defensive really quickly. I’m trying to get better about it." I don’t think his is a unique experience. > We live in a society that’s sexist in ways i…

OK, actually, I agree with some of this. I didn't think labeling that behavior as "primal" was accurate or helpful. It's certainly social, and bound to be more or less strong depending on the person and situation. Calling it primal is defeatist, plus it assumes that men have to fight against their base nature to be decent people. On the other hand, I don't think the article says men don't get rape threats, just that…

> Also I think society really doesn't understand how sexist it is.

Oh I absolutely agree with you there. This article is largely sexist against men, but few people are willing to admit it because it's buried in a legitimate rant about sexism against women.

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

#193

Post by tonypace »

Torgo wrote: post #141
NotAtWork wrote: post #112

I always find it very strange that we don't apply spam filters and recent machine learning techniques to the problem of filtering comments. 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 vi…

I would love to see an analysis on a site by site basis of what they consider trolls and what they consider highly-rated comments. I suspect however it would be found it would align more closely around in-group/out-group than content.

It seems likely, but the whole point of censoring extreme comments is to make those commenters an out group. Comment filtering would have edge cases, just like spam and porn filtering does. Do the dangers outweigh the value of pushing people who speak like this into an out group?

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

#194

Post by golgappi »

eli wrote: post #146
cheez wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anonymous woman in tech is not the same as a woman publicly writing about her perspective on women in tech. Change "woman in tech" to something like support for/against gay marriage. I may have my own opinion, but once I voice it, I'm a target.

I don't think I agree with your premise, but even if I did... what's the point you're trying to make? That women would be safer if they never voice an opinion?

as an anonymous woman in tech, I guess what he is trying to say that women need to stop thinking that all the unfairness in the tech world is directed to them. Men suffer too. Yes, women mostly suffer because they are women and because stereotypes suck. But that doesn't mean that women should be segregated as a group that is the only victim of harassment.

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

#195

Post by coldtea »

frio wrote: post #47
coldtea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "its banter, get over it. Men deal with it all the time". Just shows how deep the problem goes I guess. Why, isn't it true? I mean, if one's going to argue one is much worse than the other, then some citation is needed. Empirically, men don't (usually) get rape threats. But they do get death threats. And they don't usually get sexual comments on their looks. But they do get comments that they're "fat", "dorky", "id…

> "Women are the niggers of gender," the email said. "If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t even fuck the corpse." That's the first line of the article. That's banter? That's equivalent to being "fat" or "dorky"?

>That's banter? That's equivalent to being "fat" or "dorky"?

First, I find this "words in my mouth" thing infuriating. Have I written anywhere that this specifically is "equivalent to being fat or dorky?" Why not respond to what I DID say?

As for banter, yes it is. 99.99999% of such talk is BS bravado from kids that would never do anything to act on that, and in fact would go to bed crying if someone told their parents what they said.

Second, is that kind of talk like the one you quote constrained against women? In the gaming forums males say things like "I'll kill you and piss down your neck" all the time. And lots of males (and maybe females) uses such threats over the internet anonymously to other men too. Including the words "rape", "nigger", "kill", "faggot" and tons of variations on maming, killing, hurting, etc.

I used to get a few of those per month as a simple general topic blogger, not even related to games.

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

#196

Post by buzzcut »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #163

I'm a male in the software industry, and I never really know what to make of these sorts of articles. It's terrible that someone should have to go through this. The anonymity of the internet is a great and terrible thing -- some people really get off on being horrible to people, and unfortunately when that person is a male, and they know they're talking to a woman, the low-hanging fruit is base sexism. But what is su…

It's about combating injustice and miscreant behavior where we find it. You don't act that way. Super. Neither do I. Criticizing the behavior in others (which, make no mistake, is all motivated by gender) doesn't push you into some sort of solidarity of villainy. The instant recourse to "not all men" and "not my friends" is a kind of solipsism that's not helpful. Yes, a two-year-old can tell you "not all men." Now that we have that observation out of the way, what's next? Are we done? Are you more upset at the tone of the article you don't quite like, or at the rape threats?

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

#197

Post by byerley »

Why can't we get any sensible articles about this problem? Do they just not get any attention on aggregation sites?

Call this "victim blaming" if you want, but I'm going to critique the article because it's bad. I'm not commenting on any of the surrounding events because, honestly, claiming you've been harassed in the past doesn't excuse bad journalism -

She starts the article by alienating her intended audience: Leading with a "triggering content" warning and the worst example she had may be eye-catching, but causes both men and women who might be sympathetic but ignorant to immediately write it off as extremist hysteria. I had a lot of trouble pushing myself to read the rest of the article.

Her evidence is severely lacking: Again, case studies are good for sensationalist articles, but they don't hold up to any amount of skeptical scrutiny. She presents 4 brief accounts and two of them are relatively anonymous. You can collect four respectable people who believe just about anything if you try.

She uses sweeping generalizations: All men feel this way, all women feel that way, all women are censored, ect. Even more insulting to an intelligent reader is that she backs up her assertions with hack psychology.

She refutes statistical trends with anecdotes: "The Myth: The game industry is a field men are drawn to more than women." I'm sorry, but the male predisposition towards video games and game development is just a statistical fact. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, it's less true now than it once was due to advances in technology. Don't lie to your reader and tell them it's a myth, rather, explain why it doesn't excuse the behavior.

I think this is a problem in some places. I want women to feel comfortable in game development and journalism. I want women to feel more comfortable in a lot of industries. This article is the wrong way to spread awareness.

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

#198

Post by cheez »

golgappi wrote: post #194
eli wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with your premise, but even if I did... what's the point you're trying to make? That women would be safer if they never voice an opinion?

as an anonymous woman in tech, I guess what he is trying to say that women need to stop thinking that all the unfairness in the tech world is directed to them. Men suffer too. Yes, women mostly suffer because they are women and because stereotypes suck. But that doesn't mean that women should be segregated as a group that is the only victim of harassment.

Hopefully you don't mind me responding here. I appreciate your attempt to understand what I was saying but I was only saying that the experience of an anonymous woman in tech is going to be different from the experience of a public writer on the Internets, when it comes to abusive language.

What is your day-to-day like?

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

#199

Post by Bahamut »

Geekette wrote: post #126
jarin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because there are also plenty of excellent reasons to have anonymity as an option online.

Oh, I absolutely agree there are. Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough: these types of harassment makes me willing to forgo the legitimate opportunities for anonymity, just to be able to be able to have an environment where such harassment is minimized and traceable when it does happen. It might seem extreme, but when you've been on the receiving end of numerous vile messages a day, including rape/death threa…

I've been on a similar end with different types of threats as a male and have friends that have had similar types of threats (male and female).

I agree with you completely that anonymity should not trump accountability. That does not mean that they have to be mutually exclusive goals, but I too am at the point where I believe people should be held accountable for their actions.

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

#200

Post by enraged_camel »

tomp wrote: post #180
enraged_camel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well. You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, therefore receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple. Rape threats are significantly worse than death threats, for a similar reason that…

Funny, for most things that you wrote, one could say the exact opposite, with equivalent validity. > You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, but it doesn't automatically follow that receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple. > Death threats are significantly worse than rape threats, for a simila…

You seem to be missing the important part, where we are comparing death threats made against adult male sports players and rape threats made against women.

Death threats against players are made as a way of voicing displeasure with the player's performance or the result of the game. The intent is to air frustration. Since competitive sports themselves are a way of bringing out the human primal side, being the target of threats or other displays of hostility is perceived and treated as part of the culture (even though it still sucks).

Rape threats against females are made as a way of mentally and emotionally damaging them. The intent is to harm, oppress and silence. This alone makes them way worse than death threats made against players, because women are targeted specifically due to their perceived weakness and inferiority.

P.S. I'm very disappointed by the down-votes. If people are disagreeing with what I'm saying then the situation is much more hopeless than the anecdotes in the article suggest.

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