How Penny Arcade Made It Worse
Originally posted as a comment by me at metafilter:
)TRIGGER WARNING for discussions of rape, requoting of rape humor, and rape survivor shaming)
( Cut for triggers )
)TRIGGER WARNING for discussions of rape, requoting of rape humor, and rape survivor shaming)
( Cut for triggers )
Do I agree with how the editors of the site have conducted themselves? No, and I'm not surprised by it, either. Penny Arcade is a tasteless strip by two self-centered, nouveau riche brats, and even its charities are enormously self-serving. From all you learned about these two and their strip over the past twelve years, you should have expected this kind of behavior.
A little common sense is in order here. This comic isn't Garfield, and it isn't Marmaduke. The title characters kill each other on a regular basis, and jokes about misogyny, pedophilia, and every other hot button cultural issue have been mainstays for over a decade. If you're the kind of person who gets a hearty laugh over the politically correct comedy of Elayne Boosler, maybe Penny Arcade isn't for you. Maybe you should have picked up on that years ago, rather than being stunned and dismayed by it now. Maybe you should just stop reading the comic, instead of turning this whole affair into a never-ending very special episode of Blossom.
The authors of the strip are under no obligation to obey you. Make your grievances known, and if they fall on deaf ears, MOVE ON. Honestly, this is crossing the line from legitimate dissent to outright harassment.
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"Honestly, this is crossing the line from legitimate dissent to outright harassment."
Are you fucking KIDDING me?
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What you're doing is trying to impose your will on others with aggressive emotional manipulation, and I do not respect that, especially under the conditions. This isn't fucking Rosa Parks fighting to ride at the front of the bus; it's an objection to a nerdy web comic that you don't have to read. It's not a public service; your involvement with the comic is strictly voluntary and optional.
What frightens me most about the way you're acting is the notion that words and ideas can not only offend someone, but TRAUMATIZE them; literally do them grievous emotional harm. What does that mean for free speech? If you can't say X because X will make someone curl up in a ball and cry themselves to sleep, X quickly spreads to Y, then Z, and so on until the topics of discussion are limited to "How's the weather?" and "Boy, I hate Mondays."
Penny Arcade isn't a "safe" comic. It never has been. If this bothers you, the only rational response is to stop reading it, rather than starting a righteous crusade which could snowball into the total emasculation of the comic.
I don't have anything more to say about this. Call it a "victory" if you want, but I've said all I care to about this and I don't want it to escalate into something ugly. You're a friend, but your sanctimony has been absolutely infuriating, and I won't be reading more of your posts until you get all this out of your system.
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... what the FUCK? Do you not understand how PTSD can work? Do you not understand what falshbacks are?
While you're busy being shouty and dismissive of personal triggers of myself or bridgeport (two people you treated like friends until tonight), since PTSD can seriously fuck someone up mentally from anywhere from hours to days, yes, I will use trigger warners, out of consideration and empathy forothers whom I care about. It's not a magic bullet, but is a tiny thing I can do to help.
Also, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from conseqeunces-- and while you are free to do or say any sort of fucked up thing you'd like... others are also free to call someone out on shitty behavior.
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I get the idea behind trigger warnings but from what you and BPC are saying it sounds like the mention of the word "rape" is enough to trigger an episode.
If that's the case, how effective is a "trigger warning?" Generally whenever I see the words "trigger warning", I immediately assume that a discussion about rape will follow. Would just knowing that there's rape talk under a cut also be enough to trigger an episode?
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Well, survivors aren't a monolithic entity. I can only speak for myself (for example, most of my severe triggers are physical), and my general understand which is also limited by my own view.
For me, knowing there is content I can choose to skip or scroll by or engage if I'm up to it.
If you think about it, we all do stuff to help feel safe (or safer, I guess) in life. Just like tv shows may sometimes have something like "the following show has graphic or disturbing content, viewer discretion is advised", same idea. It could something as simple as not watching horror movies, or skipping past parts of something on cable that have graphic rape scenes, or if you're reading your livejournal friends list, if you see someon has given you a heads up that hey, this post has graphic depictions of violence or sucidal ideation or whatever, you skip past that and read instead about something else.
Maybe it means that today you are ffeeling up to it, so instead of skipping it, you read the post with the “trigger warning” on it. You aren't blindsided about it going in, so you can choose to engage.
I don't think that trigger warnings are supposed to mean THE ANCIENT AND MYSTICAL ORDER OF NO HOMERS SURVIVORS. I think that trigger warnings are one of many tools that survivors can use to decide in the moment, what they are going to voluntarily expose themselves to.
And sometimes, stumbling across some rape description or graphicness out of nowhere can be jarring... or if I've had a long day or are feeling emotionally worn or something stumbling across that unexpectedly can mess me up a bit. Like I was reading this story linked from metafilter a few weeks ago that was about a psychologist talking down a hostage, and the hostage talking about time travel and stuff and then, without any warning or lead up or anything there was a 'graph that went into great detail about the child being jumped from behind in her own room and violated. And coming out of nowhere on the tail end of a long day where I had let my guard down and just wanted toread something about time travel and psych thrillers, I got that little surprise. It felt awful, it sucked.
If I had a heads up on that blind link, I could have chosen to skip it that day. Maybe come to it later when I was feeling up to it, maybe not.
Anyhow, what it kind of comes down to for me is that I don’t want to hurt, or mess with people who care enough to read my stuff. A warning is a small thing thing to add, a cut isn't that much extra effort and those who don’t like them can skip right over them no harm no foul, you know?
Man, I hope I'm making sense here. I don't want to come off as shrill or anything. Please if you have further questions please ask, I want to help.
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I wouldn't think your post is really offensive since you're just kind of academically discussing how perpetuating a rape culture is bad, but it sounds like that's enough to trigger some people. If the mention of words relating to sexual violence -- even in a context where you're clearly taking a stand against sexual violence -- is enough to be a trigger, I don't see how that can be avoided.
I get that any mention of rape could be enough to recall distressing memories for some people, but, in that case, it seems like a trigger warning wouldn't help. If such a person sees the phrase "trigger warning," I would think that their first thought would be "There's something involving sexual violence after that," since I've rarely seen a trigger warning used to warn against anything else. And it seems that, if seeing the words are enough to trigger an episode, then thinking about it might have the same impact.
I'm not trying to argue against using warnings, because, you know, an imperfect solution is still better than nothing at all, but I don't see how putting this particular post behind a cut would help.
Then again, I am coming at this as someone who has thankfully never experienced any form of sexual violence so I'm pretty ignorant here. If survivors feel that using a trigger in this case helps, that's good enough reason to use one. I don't want to be all WELL WHY TRAUMATIZED PEOPLE CAN'T BE MORE LIKE NORMALS LIKE MEEEEEEE, I just don't see how traumatizing certain people is avoidable if you want to write about this topic at all.
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One thing I hadn't even considered but was explained to me-- is that livejournal friends feed pages don't work like say, comments or single entries on a web page. Livejournal doesn't really have a way to tab through individual entries when viewing a friends list. If this entry is between two others, you have to scroll through my stuff to get to the next one, and while a single line of text near the top of an try can be easy enough to accidentally miss, even if it's not it can be easy to totally try and scroll past a wall of text and get tripped up.
So following that, by using a cut, those parts are placed behind a cut, giving the reader a way to choose to click and engage or scroll though-- but without the risk of acidentally triggering someone.
So while it's not possible in every single case every where, it was effectively communicated to me a way I can do my best to make sure I don't. In a way a cut is kind of a combo of a a NSFW decriptor on a blind link, and sectioning potentially triggering content behind a link one must actively click to read more.
I hope that makes sense. I can't speak for any one else but my understanding, but I hope this helps.
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a lot of the problem is that pa not only is it popular (pa gets millions of hits a month, and sometimes surpasses fark.com in daily pageviews as percentage of the internet traffic, for the entire globe, according to Alexa) its also considered a major arbiter of opinion in the gaming industry, and they were named one of time magazines 100 people that influence our world last year.
you seem unaware that both pax west and pax east have attendance numbers close to the level of E3 and the Paris Game Show.
you seem further unaware that sexual harassment is not infrequent at gaming cons, and that this is considered quite a problem among female gamers or geeks who have frequently felt their safety threatened at these events (you can google it, even). this is why it’s upseting that a con that had previously seemed to work harder than most to make itself an open environment with anti harassment policies, lots of enforcers (pax security) a mere whistle away, and not having booth babess was being aligned with the dickwolf merchandise and the message that shit carries.
when you take all of that into mind, plus the horrible shit that's been flung at the people that have dared to speak up (multiple death threats, harassment in twitter campaigns, raids from /v/, demanding proof of being raped, etc) and then add in your ddenial of post traumatic stress disorder triggers, your comment comes across as callous, and you seem not at all to perceive the extent of the problem nor the reason people are upset.
there's a tumblr set up that's been document the whole thing, with links and pictures at debacle.tumblr.com .
theotherbaldwin, i can only imagine how stepping forward both as a survivor and as someone who works with video games must have been incrediby hard. i am not there yet-- both due to some of the examples of behavior above that contribute to me feeling scared to say something and also a bunch of other reasons i don't want to go into.
but from one survivor to another, thank you from the bottom of my heart for speaking up.
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Though I've covered some of the ground you do in the article I wrote and another earlier entry, thanks for bringing up the poit that it stop being about the comic itself a long while ago and more of how two very influential things in gamer culture have worked counter to the inclusive spirit of their own conventions and just how much influence they wield. The figured for the web traffic for one were new to me and pretty fascinating.
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THIS! THIS SO FUCKING HARD.
THANK you, mneko! If this "writer" wants everything so politically correct as he seems to here then no wonder I've never heard of this asshole before.
Seriously, it's just a comic, and by talking about your feelings rather than facts, you are just making your side look bad. Its like you can't argue with facts, so you'll use feelings instead.
"instead of turning this whole affair into a never-ending very special episode of Blossom."
ROFL OMG YES.
Seriously, you sound like such a whiner! "OH BOO HOO I GOT RAPED. BOO HOO THOSE MEAN PENNY ARCADE PEOPLE ARE MAKING MY HOBBY LOOK BAD.BOO HOO THEY ARE TROLLING PEOPLE AND HURTING THEIR FEELINGS. BOO HOO THEY ARE MAKING THEIR CONVENTION THAT THEY RUN UNSAFE BECAUSE SOMEONE MIGHT SE A DICKWOLF SHIRT AND BE 'TRAUMATIZED'.
If you don't like it, go back to your tea parties and tree huggings. Don't turn comics into Blossom, no one cares. By writing about it, you are no better then the EEBUL MEAN PENNY ARCADE TROLLS.
If they make you and your friends "REALLY" feel unsafe, good fucking riddance. WE DON'T NEED YOU. Go fuck off to your Wii.
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I have an article that goes deep into facts and figured a few entries back. When I'm writing on a personal blog or a comments that's supposed to touch on my personal feelings, I'm going to use personal language. And recounting the abusive and flame-fanning Mike engaged in on twitter? All that happened. True-facts, bro.
The remainder of you comment shows a pretty stunning lack of empathy, and jeez, way to help me show how much exclusionary bullcrap is bubbling under the surface of a culture/fandom whatever. Like I've said here and elsewhere, I owe a lot of the friendships and relationships and professional contacts and ideas and stuff I have today to video games and video game conventions. So of course I'm going to be upset-- two influential pillars may not be better than this, but I know that the gaming community can be. I know that every voice stepping forward counts.
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