In 2013, the left-leaning Guardian proudly proclaimed the “fourth wave of feminism” was upon us, and that it was “defined by technology: tools (that) are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online.”177 In other words, now women can bitch about their existence to millions of strangers online, rather than just crying while ironing like they’re supposed to.
A good example is the “Donglegate” scandal, in which tech evangelist and ardent feminist Adria Richards overheard a couple of men making lewd jokes about “dongles” at a tech conference, tweeted a picture of the two men, and got one of them fired. When the internet reacted with outrage against Richards, WIRED magazine cited the scandal as evidence of “misogyny in tech culture,”178 rather than what it was: an insane overreaction cooked up by a professional malcontent and grievance-monger.
The existence of fourth wave feminism and its supposed reason for existing has created a chicken and egg type of conundrum. With so much of their activism linked to the internet, they unavoidably encounter dissent. Sometimes a great deal of it, considering how unpopular feminists are. #YesAllWomen, intended to protest “misogyny,” was met with the parody #YesAllCats. Comment threads under notorious feminist provocateur Jessica Valenti’s column regularly attract thousands of critical comments. Critics of feminism on YouTube began to attract as many views as the feminists themselves, while dissident communities like Reddit’s Men’s Rights hub ballooned in size.
Upon seeing how many people disliked them, feminist activists started complaining that online harassment was giving them PTSD.179 They used politicians, activist groups, and sympathetic media outlets to apply relentless pressure to social media companies, demanding they clamp down on “harassment,” by which they meant people with opposing views. Any criticism of fourth wave feminism became known in the media as “trolling,” “harassment,” “misogyny,” and “abuse.”
Anita Sarkeesian, once an unknown vlogger who whined about alleged sexism in video games with cherry-picked data, rose to prominence after she tapped into the trolling panic. After trolls from 4chan and other communities mocked her in 2012, posting rude comments underneath her YouTube videos and photoshopping her into porn, Sarkeesian attracted massive media attention.
An online fundraising project for her series on women and video games soared past its targeted $6,000, ultimately receiving almost $160,000 in donations. Sarkeesian was invited to speak at the video games studio Bungie, and to TEDxWomen 2012.
In 2013, game creator Zoe Quinn was having business problems. Her new game, a rudimentary point-and-click adventure called Depression Quest, needed thousands of votes from gamers to be “greenlit” for publication on Steam, the largest digital distributor of video games. Guess how she got that publicity?
Quinn said she was being tormented by trolls from a little-known online community called Wizardchan, a 4chan clone populated largely by men with social anxiety. She claimed they had sent her harassing phone calls, of which there was no real evidence provided, but still, articles appeared in the games press claiming that Quinn was facing “extreme harassment because she’s a woman.”180
Less than a year later, transgender game developer Brianna Wu, deliberately antagonized GamerGate with a trolling campaign, and used the resulting backlash to claim that she, too, was a victim of online harassment. Claiming to have “fled her house” because of anonymous death threats, she then did what any traumatized victim would do. She went on a media tour, talking to MSNBC, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and any other media outlet who’d listen to her. Previously a nobody, she’s now running for Congress.181
Isn’t it weird how these women all end up far better off after their trolling ordeals?
Feminists in gaming capitalized on the buzzwords and campaigns that had appeared in the “fourth wave” of feminism. Fake threats, trolling, and lewd remarks on the internet weren’t just flippant jokes by teenagers; they contributed to “rape culture.” Criticizing feminists for being too rude or obnoxious was “tone-policing.” Feminists, by 2014, had an entire arsenal of buzzwords to help them sideline dissent and paint any and all critics as bigots.
No matter how legitimate the criticism, gaming journalists were committed to their narrative: it was feminist heroines versus evil misogynist trolls who just wanted to terrorize them. If a single troll from 4chan sent a single death threat (and let’s be clear, all of these “threats” were hoaxes) to a feminist, then that was the story, not the legitimate concerns of gamers.
The only logical conclusion to the feminist-led campaign against “online harassment” was censorship. Unless, a new hero could emerge, one with the power to stop this draconian crackdown on free speech.
BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT
The Joker fell into a vat of chemicals, which drove him insane. Magneto was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he saw the worst in human nature. Doctor Doom decided to take over the world after a vision of the future revealed humanity destroying itself.
My supervillian origin was GamerGate, a bitter war between gamers, anonymous internet trolls, hectoring feminist scolds, and left-wing journalists. If you only follow mainstream media, you probably only know GamerGate as grown men playing videogames all day and harassing women on the internet. In reality, it was the first battle in an anti-leftist, culturally libertarian, free speech movement that led directly to Trump’s election. Let me tell you the real story.
GamerGate, often considered a bewildering topic, is in fact relatively simple. In early 2014, Nathan Grayson, of the Gawker-run gaming blog Kotaku, wrote favorably about Depression Quest, a game for which he acted as a consultant, without disclosing his involvement in the project. Grayson’s connection to the game and his romantic relationship with its creator, Zoe Quinn, was discovered after an exposé from Eron Gjoni, one of Quinn’s ex-boyfriends.182 Upon reading Gjoni’s story, gamers began to suspect that game developers and journalists were literally in bed with each other.