Aram Zucker-Scharff

The Rise of the Professional Cyber Athlete:

Ben McGrath profiles Scarlett, StarCraft’s most compelling player.

This Canadian woman is one of professional gaming’s most accomplished players and riding the leading edge of e-sports’ rise. As the US joins other nations in officially recognizing competitive gamers as pro athletes what creates a pro gamer and what can we learn from those fast-clicking Dota and Starcraft masters?

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Feminists have always been accused of hating men because it is a very effective way of silencing a very threatening movement. In a society where women’s value is based on our ability to please men, and where men hold almost all the cards, the worst possible thing we can do is hate them. So when feminists point out and object to the oppression, abuse and discrimination perpetuated by men against women, this is framed as man hating in an attempt to silence us, in an attempt to ensure that we are vilified and ignored by the rest of society, so that male oppression of women and male privilege can continue unchecked.

No matter how we frame our arguments and no matter what kind of image we seek to project, as long as we highlight, object to and fight misogyny, feminists are going to be called man haters.

So I’m not going to waste my time trying to prove that I’m not.

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– “Man haters?” by Laura on The F Word blog (via fuckyeahfeminists)

“Suddenly, discussions of street harassment were all the rage, with cable news chauvinists gleefully denying the problem and more liberal media guys seeming shocked by its very existence, even going so far as to call it a “crisis.” This, in turn, surprised and irritated me — are the lived experiences of women so invisible to men that this could be construed as news? Or was I a bad feminist for taking such a fact of life for granted and not making more of it?”

– No, we don’t need a law against catcalling.

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Gamergaters demand to be seen simultaneously as a 70-million-strong market force, too big for the industry to ignore, and as a persecuted minority. They warn advertisers it’s “racist” and “sexist” when a gaming site dares to point out that most angry gamers are young, white, and male. At the same time, they argue that angry, young, white males are those sites’ “target audience,” and writers offend them at their own risk.

It’s ironic, then, that #Gamergate is also spamming advertisers with links to Leigh Alexander’s highly controversial piece arguing that the stereotypical gamer is no longer the only audience available to the industry.

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– What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks.