After about ten thousand misogynistic and a ton of FACTUALLY INACCURATE comments (trash me if you will, but do a little research first), they finally got to me. I’d been making videos for five years at that point. I’ve seen animated GIFs of myself doing . . . you don’t wanna know. Some involving very forward dolphins.
The comments spread like a fungus across my self-confidence. It devastated me to see people dismiss my career because of one four-minute video. I felt ashamed for creating it and everything else I’d ever made. I thought, Is this what people have been thinking for years? How stupid was I to think I could sing? I don’t want to be SEEN ever again.
For months I stopped putting my heart into the things I made. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t write the last Guild season without feeling crippling self-doubt on every page.
Sad but true, I did what I have told so many people over and over not to do:
I let the trolls get to me.
I didn’t realize at the time how much that incident affected me, but I stepped away from gaming in a lot of subtle ways. I still considered myself part of the world, but I turned down a ton of jobs and event appearances. And those changes in my behavior all led me to stifle myself when I felt the urge to speak up about #GamerGate.
The timing was particularly bad, personally, because a few weeks into the uproar, at the end of August 2014, the infamous “Celebrity Hacking Scandal” happened, where dozens of prominent actresses and performers had private nude pictures stolen and exposed to the world. (Wow, jerks were really busy that fall ruining lives online! Also: the stolen pictures were first posted on 4chan. So much great stuff originates there, huh?)
As someone nowhere NEAR the victims on the celebrity-importance ladder, imagine my surprise when I was contacted by several hackers via my HACKED phone number warning me that I was a future target. My name was on a request list for compromising photos, and people were supposedly offering big dollars to back it up. I counted myself lucky that I had fans in the hacker world. (How cool, right?) But being hunted for boobies? Slightly terrifying.
So, while Zoe and other people were being ripped apart online, I was holding my tongue, trying to erase anything from my online accounts that I didn’t want made public for the world to see. Any picture, Is that too much side boob? I’ll erase it. Any email, OMG why would I think that was funny?! Delete. I spent a week ripping out pieces of my digital life that I didn’t want people poking around. I’m sure I missed a lot. When you examine your underwear close enough, EVERYTHING looks a little bit suspect.
I knew sharing my thoughts about the situation would burn me. So I stayed out. And with other prominent people, men and women, jumping in to take a stand against the bullying and hatred, I honestly thought the whole thing would go away soon. I think everyone sane in the gaming world did.
But it didn’t. It got worse. Because the issue somehow morphed from attacking a single woman over a messed-up revenge post to a quasi-conservative movement striving for “ethics in game journalism.” A large segment of the newly anointed “#GamerGate movement” decided that as a result of “the Zoe post” there was corruption running rampant in the game journalism world. And THEY were the people to fix it.
They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as “Social Justice Warriors.” (That label was always so weird to me, because how is that an insult? “Social Justice Warrior” actually sounds pretty badass.) It turned into a mob. One that was disjointed, with lots of differing agendas, but all surfing the wave of vengeful emotion together. Like the French Revolution over that cake thing.