Aram Zucker-Scharff

“The games that concern me are the games that will never get made— the ones women would make if they saw that anyone had their back. The games that don’t get made because women quietly leave because they feel like nothing will ever change. The games that don’t get made because women don’t think about games as a thing THEY can make, or because they don’t want to leap without knowing that someone will catch them.”

– I’m a “Woman In Games.”

“

So why all the anger?
What gets them really angry is when a feminist closes the comments on their YouTube videos or on their website. To them, that is an assault on free speech. So they harass her because she won’t let them harass her on YouTube, basically.

The extent of the vitriol is something that I don’t fully understand. My basic explanation, if I have one, is it’s a backlash against the successes of feminism since the 90s. Feminism has made progress redefining some things that men took for granted, such as sexual harassment and date rape. So I think it’s a backlash on what a lot of these guys see as restrictions on what they can say, how they can interact with women in a sexual way, and the idea that there may be consequences if they commit domestic violence. It’s mostly sexual resentment, the fact that they can’t get away with what guys used to be able to get away with with women, and that makes them very frustrated.

”

– Do we have to worry about someone actually killing or raping a feminist activist?

“There’s no point in blaming the internet for this. All the technology has done is to reveal a deeply unpleasant truth: when you remove the social constraints on behaviour that operate in the offline world, then a darker side of human nature emerges snarling into the light.”

– Celebgate: it’s not the internet we need to fix but men’s squalid behaviour.

“”The more I’ve looked at the details of the threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some of them seem to fit into the old patterns of prejudice and assumption that I have been talking about […] It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact that you are saying it.””

– Mary Beard: The troll slayer.