From “fake geek girls” to Gamergate, a certain demographic seems constantly, causelessly angry. But are you sure it’s the demographic you think it is?
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Like a lot of folks, I’ve spent the last couple years shaking my head in bafflement at the vicious, reactionary antics of a certain segment of what we might broadly call “geek culture”. That’s the subculture I grew up in, and I’ve got the mid-90s convention badges and costuming prize from Forry Ackerman to prove it. And yet today, a lot of guys seem to want that culture to be associated primarily with exclusion, harassment, and a fanatical cruelty toward anyone they deem “outsiders”, i.e. 99% of the world. Their greatest hatred is reserved for women, and their abuse is beyond the pale.
This subgroup, this fanatically furious bunch of geeks, is usually identified as being straight white guys fearful of the loss of their cultural hegemony. That isn’t strictly wrong, but I’ve come to realize that it’s also missing the point.
The key defining element of all the wild-eyed Gamergate lunatics and all their unhappy ilk is not that they’re white and male. It’s that they’re socially nonfunctional.
The key defining element of all the wild-eyed Gamergate lunatics and all their unhappy ilk is not that they’re white and male. It’s that they’re socially nonfunctional.
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That sounds like I’m just insulting them, but I’m not. That is just a simple, even sympathetic description of what’s going on with these guys: they cannot function socially. Anger is just the mask worn by pain and fear, so to understand these guys’ anger, we have to understand their pain, and their fear. Yes, this will involve extending understanding toward people for whom rape threats are practically punctuation. Nobody ever said social justice was always going to be pleasant. Buckle up.
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When Nate Silver went and formed his own numbers-driven nerd club, he received some pushback from critics who pointed out that it was basically a white male nerd club. He, mistakenly but understandably, interpreted this as being accused of being a bully, and responded thus:
…the idea that we’re bro-y people just couldn’t be more off. We’re a bunch of weird nerds. We’re outsiders, basically.
That, that right there, is the key. How is it the key? Let’s look at two layers of response to that quote. First, we’ve got Zeynep Tufekci, who cites Silver’s defense and says:
In a nutshell, I think this paragraph helps explain a reasonable chunk of Silicon Valley’s gender problems. Many tech guys, many young and recently ascendant, think something along these lines: “Wait, we’re not the jocks. We aren’t the people who were jerks. We never pushed anyone into a locker and smashed their face. We’re the people who got teased for being brainy, for not being macho, the ones who never got a look from the popular girls (or boys), the ones who were bullied for our interests in science and math, and… what’s wrong with Dungeons & Dragons, anyway?”
She’s not wrong. That notion that one is either the bully or the bullied, and it’s impossible to be both, lies deep in a lot of thinking, and it’s a trap. Indeed, it’s one of the primary intellectual sins of social justice movements, when we imply one is either the oppressor or the oppressed, but never both. We’ve learned it from a million movies: the underdog is always morally right, so if you can cast yourself, in any way, as the underdog, you need never question your rectitude again. That makes it very easy for guys who were once bullied to imagine that they’re never hitting first, they’re always hitting back.
However, there’s a deeper and more important layer, and that can be seen in a critique of Ms. Tufekci’s piece by Meredith L. Patterson, and seriously, if you read no other link in this article, read this one. She talks about how finding hacker culture helped her feel like there was a space for people like her, and sums up the problem nicely here:
Even so, science, technology, and mathematics continue to attract the same awkward, isolated, and lonely personalities they have always attracted. Weird nerds are made, not born, and our society turns them out at a young age. … When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter, we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school. No one’s offered evidence to the contrary, so what incentive do we have to play that game?
Ms. Patterson goes into greater depth about how the culture she describes functions, and then raises this vital point:
The assertion that we should “not be so defensive” is problematic because it denies that hackers have anything to feel defensive toward. People get defensive when they feel like something important to them is in jeopardy, and our community is important to us because it’s where we find people who share our values. … For those of us who experienced operative ostracism and public shaming, the protectiveness that runs through the entire stack has nigh-infinite fuel to draw from, and at times it doesn’t take much poking to turn a resource that many of us have transmuted into a source of productivity fuel into a tactical nuclear egghead.
That is what underlies nerd rage, a sense of being invaded by outsiders in a space they believe to be their own. A place where they don’t have to play by the rules that mean they never win.
That is what underlies nerd rage, a sense of being invaded by outsiders in a space they believe to be their own. A place where they don’t have to play by the rules that mean they never win.
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The existence of such spaces has genuine worth. We have always had a percentage of people who can’t get the hang of other people. The folks who will always say the wrong thing, always misread the social cue, always be the last to get the joke, always make things awkward without meaning to. And growing up as one of those people sucks. It’s easy for them to get the impression that the whole world’s against them because, in a fairly real sense, it is.
These folks tend to create spaces for themselves where they can play by rules they understand. Consistent, comprehensible rules. Computer programs, role-playing games, literature that’s notably short on things like abstract metaphor, complex symbolism, and unreliable narrators. The great thing about science fiction and fantasy is that they explain their internal rules for how the world works, and then they have to abide by those rules. If you haven’t felt it, it’s impossible to explain how comforting that is when you’re thirteen and getting mocked for not understanding which shoes or singers or slang are uncool this week.
That mockery lies at the heart of nerd rage. It hurts knowing that you don’t “get it”, that you’re looked down on and excluded because you don’t understand a bunch of unwritten and inconsistent rules. And as seen above, with that experience of being the victim comes the self-assurance that one cannot ever turn out to be the bully. That’s a consistent, comprehensible rule, after all.
How does this turn into the constant, screaming, and creepily consistent misogyny that we see in practice? Because for guys in this group, women are bullies just by existing. Scratch misogynist anger, and you’ll almost always find rejection. As I’ve written before, rejection is a huge and powerful part of the straight male experience.
Assume you’re a straight or bi guy. You’re going to be interested in women. Assume you’re perpetually socially awkward. You’re going to be rejected a lot, and that’s going to hurt enormously. Assume you’re steeped in a culture that tends to consistently cast women as a monolithic Other group, and that you like simple, comprehensible rules. Your takeaway from your experience is going to be Women hurt me. Therefore, women are bullies just by existing. Quod erat demonstrandum.
So how does this pain and rage manifest in practice? And most importantly, what can be done about it? Stay tuned for part two.
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Photo—Thoth God of Knowledge/Flickr
How does the #notyourshield aspect fit into this twisted little narrative you’ve created Noah? I mean, the fact is, the GG’s aren’t actually all straight white males. (in fact, I daresay the anti-gg are far more homogenous from what I’ve seen.)
What’s actually more plausible, that a leaderless movement, consisting of thousands of people from literally all walks of life, spontaneously formed merely to harass women… or that media sites are using their platform *as media* to control a narrative to cover up their own shitty behavior?
This is just Jack Thompson all over again.
People clearly forget the “boy” once we physically look like a “man”. 🙁
I think Billy Corgan had some good insights. 😉
The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game
Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage.
Nice. I had this going through my mind:
“Clearly I remember picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth and bit the recess lady’s breast”
Surely there are also women who have had similar such experiences? Presumably there are both male and female socially awkward young people who find solace in gaming. Are women socialized to respond differently to the sense of being an outsider or is there something else at play?
Of course there is and that’s the rampant misandry in our press being passes off as progressive social justice when it’s the furthest thing form it.
Yes. I think it goes to how boys and girls are socialized to deal with their feelings: how girls are allowed to express their feelings and talk about them, while boys are discouraged from that, and expected to deal with their problems by conquering them. Some problems are too big, and some boys are not well-equipped to “conquer.” It’s a matter of bottled emotions and unfair pressure. It’s a shame, though, because girls being understanding with boys, maybe through gaming alongside them, would go a long way toward healing this problem. Maybe the gaming world, though, being a world of… Read more »
Well said. I think this is the kind of approach that is missing from many social justice arguments: one that recognizes that if there is a phenomenon of perceived injustice that exists in greater numbers than might be expected in a normal society, maybe there’s a legitimate reason for that increase. We should try to understand the motivations behind such behavior, not because we want to excuse the phenomenon of violent backlash against females in the gaming community, but because understanding it is the way to find a solution for the problem. It speaks to the larger issue of misogyny,… Read more »
Something you ought to read: “On October 16th, Sam Biddle of Gawker posted perhaps the most revealing pair of tweets ever written by an anti-Gamergate journalist. “Ultimately #Gamergate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades,” Biddle sneered in the first tweet. “Nerds should be constantly degraded and shamed into submission.” Not a minute later, Biddle tweeted “Bring Back Bullying.” Since Biddle’s tweets, the Gamergate movement has turned on Gawker Media with the fury of Captain Ahab chasing the white whale and have successfully gotten both Adobe and Intel to distance themselves from the network, much to Gawker’s… Read more »
Rejection is big part of it, but I also sense that another part of it is that there are certain people who have constantly fled from political correct society and see it as a bully that refuses to leave them alone. In a very real sense, it is. They lash out because they don’t know what else to do as their safe spaces grow ever smaller.
This brilliantly articulates what I was actually considering writing an article on. But there is a missing piece of the puzzle, crucial to understanding this phenomenon (perhaps it will be in part II) – the oppressed nerds sought refuge in a subculture of their own design, to the exclusion of everyone that ever hurt them, physically or emotionally. The author correctly points out how women, by virtue of their sex, are effectively among the perceived oppressors of these nerds (and, in some cases, they genuinely are). However, what is behind the current scandals is the fear that this subculture, by… Read more »
A nit to pick in an insightful, empathetic comment: I’d say they have reacted vehemently, not violently. The rhetoric is of violence, but has anybody actually carried out these threats?
Exactly, brilliant stuff here Will. This is where I hoped Noah was going to go. And may still. Where do these people lay their heads. Of course society thinks they’re loser/jokes and could really care less.
Except when this stereotype is just that, a stereotype. This description of geeks fits people on the autism spectrum, not geeks in general. The group of geeks I hung around with in high school 1) were equally mixed guys and girls 2) didn’t have problems understanding social norms 3) didn’t have problems attracting the opposite sex The same holds true to the guy I dated in college and his geeky crew, the geeky friends and roommates I had in college, and the geeky engineer I married.
Chickenpig: Are you and your friends lashing out with nerd rage? No? Maybe this article isn’t about you, then. In fact, read the article that Noah recommends above. From your description, it sounds like your group consists of “popular nerds,” rather than “weird nerds”/social outcasts who feel threatened by popular nerds moving in to throw them out of the cultural space they’ve created, now that it’s lucrative and hip.
Moving in, maybe not “to throw them out” as much as continue the harassments and bullying from the mwatspace? I don’t know, but that’s happening too.
True, FlyingKal, it is a movement to continue harassment and bullying from meatspace. But I was also thinking about the instances mentioned by Meredith Patterson, in her essay, where the “weird nerds” who created the technology that built Silicon Valley get outnumbered at their places of employment by the “brogrammers,” the socially-adept men who enter the field now that it’s lucrative, and get forced out of the company.
Jonathan G: Chickenpig: Are you and your friends lashing out with nerd rage? No? Maybe this article isn’t about you, then.
Sorry but you don’t get to dictate what he should feel outraged at.
This is a magazine for men, presumably. That means men like him can comment on it.
Let him express his counterpoint.
Oh my. I’m not sure what I’m dictating, considering I have no control over who comments here or what they say. I thought I was pointing out solipsism when empathy is called for.
Wow, much better article on the underlying issues. Thanks, Noah. Part 2 will be interesting. I’m guessing your solution will be different than mine. We will see.
The “gamers are over” pieces did the same thing that the more egregious trolls do. They found a group’s weak spot, stabbed it and twisted – in this case, the social awkwardness, and applying an arbitrary, unfair rule. They described gamers in the same fashion that wasn’t being tolerated when directed at women.
Except unlike trolls, this got them accolades of supposed bravery rather than denunciations.
If people want to change this, then you’re absolutely right Noah, they need to buckle up. You will not change people by shaming them into submission.
I am interested in where this is going. Isn’t all this gamer rage the same things that drive men to purchase information from men like Julien Blanc, revenage porn or simply regular porn that’s grown more angry to women? I don’t think male anger at women is exclusive to “nerds” or even just the gaming community. It’s become a regular experience for women to be threatened with rape, death or other sexual violations. When I talk about issues in other areas of the internet, other then GMP, I’ve been told to “go gag on c*ck”, “get raped in the a$$”,… Read more »
The intent behind such comments is to psychologically wound the target. The trolls deploy words like that against women because they tend work. They use different words to try to hurt men. Whatever they think is most effective.
Jonathan, who and what kind of things get said to men to hurt them? Are other women attacking men? Other men? Yes, these comments are designed to “psychologically wound the target”. They are also designed to silence the “target”. Because I never receive as much a backlash for my comments as when I’m speaking out on social or political issues. This doesn’t even get to how men have grown a ravenous appetite for hardcore sex that shows clear distinct lines of abuse toward women physically and psychologically as well. Where you loose me a little is over-simplifying the issue to… Read more »
“Are other women attacking men? Other men?” You are a women and you’re attacking men right now with the usual tactic of implying they hate women because that brings great shame to men. Meanwhile a misandric women will do so out in the open with great pride and expect to be embraced by men nonetheless. These are the sexist double standards modern men have to live with because our culture hasn’t evolved under the dominant feminist narrative on gender that even encompasses a site like this dedicated to men. “Yes, these comments are designed to “psychologically wound the target”. They… Read more »
An atomic truth bomb. Thank you for saying what I couldn’t quite put into words.
The insults marshaled against men are pretty much what you’d expect, basically shaming tactics about how he doesn’t fit in the “man box.” That includes disparaging his ability to attract women, insinuations of homosexuality, presumptions that he’s small/short, and suggestions that he’s ineffectual. That’s where online bullying against men differs most significantly than against women. Men are more concerned about social hierarchy and dominance, so to hurt a man, the trolls or flamers try to demonstrate that he’s stupid/incompetent/wrong, thus putting him at the bottom of the hierarchy. When that’s not working, they’ve been known to step it up to… Read more »