3996: Dirty Picture

[jen_aside]

I'm not cutting any of this to be obnoxiousmake sure at least some of it catches your eye. If you don't like that, I reiterate that you can unfollow/filter me out. Would have liked to post something fun again like yesterday's, but it's hard to find the material lately

Comments

[jimboomega]

I don't quite understand the controversy or the meta-controversy. It sounds like
1)Woman meets guy from OkCupid
2)Woman discovers he's an M:tG champion
3)Woman writes a very public and identifying article about how she feels she like he was "lying" in his profile and calling him "champion dweeb", which editors eventually shuffled around
4)Followers, friends, fans, etc, write a lot of twitter comments calling her, in essence "a stupid b****"

I don't really see what the problem is; this seems like a predictable series of events. I think almost any online community has people that will shout stupid stuff over the walls.

Moreover, I can see a very similar situation occurring without the gender issue. Imagine that he is hanging out with some new friend, and then it's discovered that he's a huge magic geek and can't come to (whatever manly activity) because he has to play magic. So the friend writes a long article about how magic geeks make terrible friends.

I don't doubt that there'd be people saying very similar things - accusing the friend of being a beer-swilling, football-watching, jock stereotype, along with typical sexuality(e.g., f**) and etc slurs. Saying that they'd love to have Jon as a friend and what a waste it was, etc.

Now of course, I think the whole idea that being a champion magic player makes him a "catch" is empty. The idea that any given trait makes somebody a catch for EVERYbody is wrong. I'm not going to support the idea that she must be stupid, or shallow, since she doesn't like the guy. Writing an article using terms like "champion dweeb" is almost epic trolling, and that people would shout all sorts of stuff over it? Just not a surprise.

So, if you take the responses as being more than the shouting of angry chimps - and a reflection of how the community feels - then, yes, they do like shallow chumps. It starts to seem that their dream is to get rich and be a champion at Magic someday; and surely, they think, their wealth and other trappings of success should have women throwing themselves at them. This is inviolable; being the best should get you laid with whoever you want. That's a very stupid and shallow position, of course.

But that they have such a naive viewpoint doesn't really surprise me. Let's not forget, too, that it's the loudest, most obnoxious voices to be heard. I like to think that most gamers aren't shouting sexual slurs the whole way through the game when chatting.

To adress your indented quote, there are two different viewpoints that exist within my family; my mom's attitude is "[You should ask because] the worst they can say is 'no'", to which my Dad has said, "no, they could say, 'no, and f*** you, ***hole'". (Which is, interestingly enough, gender reversed).

[jen_aside]

The controversy includes but is not limited to

1. Ms. Magic Date claimed [but has since edited] that Magic Champ lied on his profile, when the "lie" seems to be purely that of omission of what he perceived as irrelevant even though she clearly did not [this was my original, non-"Let's see what the Internet has to say about it!" complaint about the article],
   
2. Every gamer and his uncle hopped on the "She's a stupid bitch" bandwagon basically out of herd mentality, that one woman insulted "all of Magicdom" with her not-quite-thought-out article saying that Magic-playing makes a poor dating candidate.
   

I just threw in the sexism-in-DC-comics bits because they were going around and just another symptom of a subversive trend.

Of course, it's quite possible that Ms. Magic Date's original intent WAS just to make people mad, in which case, Mission Accomplished, but if it was trying to be informative, there were much better ways to get her point across; i.e., the Strike Three element didn't need to be there, as that comes across as Holier-Than-Thou and Always a Deal-Breaker, but pointing out how his being a champion vs. playing as a hobby = "This activity takes up all his free time" = "no time for me" = "we aren't compatible" is perfectly fine and exactly how I would have written it myself.

But the main controversy is that this predictable series of events is humiliatingly normal, that a group of people can lash out at someone who's done nothing to them more than make fun of them and that is okay. It's wide-scale bullying, and that it's okay "because it's the Internet" shows how far we still have to come as a society. You can't even say, "Well, they're just insulting her back," because--as Tait's article demonstrates--where she stopped with the one article [as far as I'm aware], her bullies have created memes dedicated to putting her down for being stupid, ugly, etc., because they can't take the high road and leave it as, "Well, her loss," and that's that.

Yes, it's all "First Amendment" crap--everyone has a right to say what they said. It's just ridiculously degrading and shows that the subset of society that engaged in this fight has no sense of scope, no sense of what matters. In defending Magic Champ by flaming Ms. Magic Date, these bullies, in fact, demonstrated EXACTLY why gamers make poor date material. [ALL gamers, no. THESE gamers, yes.]

I should note that I also considered the gender-reversed insult variants, and at least to me it seems that the same insults ["asshole/motherfucker/etc."] are thrown at women to the same effect; that is, all insults are used approximately equally at both sexes, but it affects women more, because guys can't take being called a "bitch" seriously, which may be why they're so quick to hurl said insults. It's unthinkable for a woman to do the same, unless she's a "bitchy dyke" or similar.

[This is purely my perception as a woman, though, and part of why my diatribe isn't much of an improvement in terms of writing quality over Ms. Magic Date's article. I have no idea how men actually perceive being called by the same slurs as women, though in my experience most of said slurs get used so regularly in gaming that they almost lose their meaning--thus, it impacts non-gamers, especially non-gamer women, more so.]

tl;dr: Why is it so easy for everyone to degrade each other for, ultimately, no reason? I'm not saying we should all be happy sappy Sesame Street, but the entire exercise just makes EVERYONE look pathetic. Getting this riled up over one woman's experience [and not even a BAD experience from what it sounds like] isn't worth the venom that was spewn.

[jimboomega]

There are a whole set of male-specific insults, typically insulting sexuality or masculinity. Listen to the chat in a Halo game and you're sure to hear them.

I hesitate to argue the proportionality, but I would say, that on the internet, it seems like you sort of have to be hardened to this sort of thing. As penny arcade discussed long ago. You have whole communities dedicated to trolling, and now that they have what they feel is a legitimate beef ("She insulted our hero!"), they go crazy.

It goes back farther; there's the question of "what do you have to accept to be a celebrity?". In a world where celebrity can really be thrust upon you without you making a choice, the harsh reality is that people are going to write all kinds of nasty stuff wherever they can once you're famous. I remember reading a comedian (I think?) in an interview talking about it was hard to entirely tune it out, and to never read it, and not let it bother you.

Hatemail is certainly older than this incident.

Now granted, I think the bullies and friends have demonstrated nothing good about themselves through it; as I said I think it shows mostly that Finkel is living their dream, and they fully expect women to throw themselves at the bullies if they ever reach that level of success.

[jen_aside]

The bile and hatemail [haha, I typoed "hatemale"] element is an obvious hazard of putting oneself in the public eye, which is why I thought her article wasn't a good idea--and, as I said, if it was her intent to rile people, then I guess there's nothing else to be said. [Don't feel as though you have to censor things in my LJ, incidentally--it's not supposed to be searchable, so I don't care--unless you have a reason for doing that that isn't coming to mind...?]

But what's interesting[?] to note is that the most behaved person was Finkel himself--saying in response to the hubbub that he and she didn't see eye-to-eye, and that should have been the end of that--so when the fans rush in where their hero fears to tread makes me think, "I sure wouldn't want THOSE people as my fans."

But I've gone over the stalker aspect before [I think, though not on this specific subject], and it's true that no one can chose his/her fans, either. I personally would feel humiliated to be in the same position, where my "fans" behaved in a manner completely contrary to who I was [see: Jesus]. So there's that element as well.

And going back to the sexism [also addressed in Tait's article], wanting women to throw themselves at the Champion Nerd is exactly the double-standard I was getting at. Without even knowing who Alyssa Bereznak was or what she looked like, these bullies foamed at the mouth over her dismissal of their Alpha dog. Then, when she turned out to be homely [in some opinions--I think she looks decidedly average], this became further fuel for their fire. Why does it matter that an ugly woman insulted you[r hobby]? Wouldn't you be relieved instead? "Oh GAD NO, our hero is dating an uggo!" An eye-roll still seems more than sufficient.

I'm trying to imagine the inverse, and what would happen if a guy dated then slammed... the... author of Twilight? See, I don't know--I'm not girl enough to rally behind some supposed champion of girlkind, and I'm not butch/troll enough to get the bully mentality. I kind of imagine it would be a subject within circles, but hardly an Internet phenomenon, if only because "girls don't use the Internet." *eyeroll*

I do recognize that girls kind of in-fight as it is, though, so perhaps girls wouldn't rally in remotely the way guys do.

So, my position needs some refining when put to words, but I guess I'm kind of mortified that trolling is such a pervasive Thing that people will do it even under their very public names [though some of them at least try to make it a sociopolitical statement, like George Takei has been prone to doing], or maybe more that the vitriol is over something as trivial as who decides not to date what Gamer Celebrity nearly so much as the collapsing job market and how rich people blame the poor's poverty on said poor people being "lazy" and how the U.S. is falling behind on education and about a billion things that seem to matter significantly more. Where are we on THOSE fronts?