Women, Trolls, and the Killer Hypothetical

Scott Sharplin isn’t White-Knighting or duped by Sarkeesian’s feminine wiles, he wants us to remember to engage critically of the media we consume.

The Facebook thread began innocuously, with a shared link to an article about Anita Sarkeesian, the producer of feministfrequency. Apparently, after posting her latest video analyzing the ways in which video games objectify and exploit women, Sarkeesian found herself subjected to threats and harassment, much of it deeply misogynistic in tone. This is not the first hate campaign she’s suffered, but this time it got so bad that Sarkeesian, fearing for her safety, fled her home.

The caption accompanying this link said something world-weary like, “Aren’t we lucky we live in a post-feminist world?”

I’ve chosen to paraphrase, rather than quote this private thread verbatim; this tactic runs the risk of misrepresentation, but as I argue later, this conversation was far from unique. It’s the intent that counts.

The sarcastic salvo prompted some replies in kind, while other responders were sincere and aghast. “Jesus F–king Christ,” they’d post, trusting other readers to understand what, exactly, was appalling them about the article. Even if you didn’t know that this poster and her friends were mostly liberal feminists, you could still read between the lines to conclude that Sarkeesian was the victim in this story.

But one guy went against the grain. “Let’s be skeptical of these accusations,” he urged the crowd, “Anita is not an honest person.”

Despite using her first name, it quickly became clear that Skeptic Guy did not know Sarkeesian personally. He based his character assessment on the usual hearsay: she misled Kickstarter backers; she “cherry-picks” her examples when compiling video materials; she is not a “real gamer”; she gets off on the sympathy and support that follows each troll attack; she’s only in it for the money. Collectively, these shaky arguments added up to reasonable doubt, in Skeptic Guy’s eyes, that Sarkeesian faked the harassment to boost her popularity “at a time when her relevance was at low ebb.”

Screenshot from Feminist Frequency’s “Women as Background Decoration Part 2”

I read it like a checklist, a textbook, a synthetic, lab-hatched specimen of male privilege. Yet throughout Skeptic Guy’s condescending explanation via increasingly voluminous truckloads of text, he remained civil. He called no one else any names, as he hastened to point out (at length). He was merely stating his opinion, and shouldn’t the rest of us all feel ashamed for our increasingly heated opposition? “I’m a human being,” he reminded us. “This isn’t Twitter.”

♦◊♦

Finally, another poster tried one last time to put it into perspective for him. “I watched the video that showed games where dead strippers get used as doorstops and bullet shields. It felt like a punch to the gut. Everybody else on this thread seems to feel something similar, or at least they can sympathize. How does it make you feel?”

It looked like a great tactic. It was not. “Mostly, I feel sick that, when I simply try to raise a bit of healthy skepticism about Anita’s claims, I am subjected to insults and judgments from her followers. If there’s a reason to dislike Anita, it’s because of how she makes all this happen.”

With every threat I wonder why the hell I keep doing this, but I do it because it’s so much bigger than just games. This is about justice.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 4, 2014

A startling number of women I know are quitting games writing or considering quitting due to the ongoing torrent of misogyny and harassment. — Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) September 4, 2014

And where was I in this teapot tempest? I was flailing about in the storm, lurching between the safe, high moral ground and the sick, persistent need to prove somebody wrong. I was alternating between logical appeals (“What actual evidence do you have of her dishonesty?”, “How can you compare cribbing from Wikipedia with lying about death threats?”) and sarcastic zingers designed to shut down the argument (“So, one woman fears for her life, but everybody shut up, because one man’s feelings have been hurt. And notice how it’s all her fault somehow?”). The more I tried to restrain my outrage, the angrier I became. One Facebook thread, now effectively hijacked by Skeptic Guy, became the biggest preoccupation in my life.

At one point, I thought I had the perfect rejoinder. Skeptic Guy had just posted a justification for his skepticism, along these lines: “As a hypothetical, suppose somebody does some research into Anita’s harassment claims, and it turns out she did make up the whole thing. Now we know something important about her character; and that discovery would never have been possible without the skepticism fueling the investigation.”

Here’s the reply I scribed in my mind:

“Here’s another hypothetical. Suppose it turned out that Sarkeesian’s claims were 100% true. Suppose she actually ends up getting raped, or worse. The skepticism from ignorant commenters like you doesn’t go away; it lingers, everywhere your privileged, defensive little fingers have been typing. As a matter of fact, the more ‘healthy skepticism’ you spread around the internet, the harder it becomes for Sarkeesian—or any of the other women who get persecuted mainly ‘cause they’re women—to maintain credibility. When women appeal to (mostly male) agents of law enforcement for protection or justice, they face a wall of skepticism, erected by rubberneckers like yourself ‘for the sake of argument.’”

♦◊♦

I didn’t post it.

It was flawed from the start. I couldn’t shoot down Skeptic Guy with “another hypothetical” because, well, hypotheticals were the whole problem. Skeptic Guy and I live in the same bubble of privilege, where every attack against women is hypothetical, and always will be. As men in Western culture, we’re encouraged to be skeptical of anything hypothetical. We’re expected to subject all claims to the scientific method, and the rigors of logical analysis before deciding how to feel. What we’re not taught is how damaging that hesitation can be to the people for whom these issues are all too real.

That’s what the “punch to the gut” commenter was trying to overcome. She was gently soliciting empathy from Skeptic Guy—not even empathy for Sarkeesian, who was (in his opinion) “a celebrity,” for whom harassment and stalking was a hazard of the trade. No, she just sought his empathy for her response to watching a video. Because, if you are a male viewer, then you might indeed see Sarkeesian’s videos as nothing more than a collection of “cherry-picked” examples of misogyny in video games. But, if you are a female viewer, you are watching avatars embodying you. You are watching them beaten to death. You are seeing their bodies casually discarded, or else degraded further, hauled about or flung aside like rag-dolls.

In his urgent, insightful article on Badass Digest, Andrew Todd asks, “Is there some sense that the consequence-free world of gaming is bleeding over into the real world?” I’m not willing to blame video games for misogyny, but I know that games are escapist. So are films, television, and books. So, in my case, was getting needlessly embroiled in Facebook arguments. Escaping is self-indulgent, but sometimes it’s necessary, and it can be healthy for our own peace of mind. But if we don’t pause once in a while to ask ourselves what we’re escaping from, then our pastimes cease to be harmless; they undermine our roles as citizens of the real world, suppressing empathy in favor of the killer hypothetical.