There seems to have been an awful lot of outbreaks of really hardcore misogyny in the tech/geek world of late. There have been too many incidents of women in the games scene in particular suffering enormous levels on online abuse by anonymous trolls purely for expressing an opinion not everyone agrees with. Some people have suggested that this sort of behaviour can be found in all walks of life, it does seem to be worse in certain subcultures. Maybe it because the frequently overlapping games and IT worlds tend to attract a disproportionate number of people with very poor social skills?
The latest firestorm concerns a deeply unpleasant individual by the name of Aris Bakhtanians, who justifies some deeply unpleasant and disturbingly creepy behaviour with the following words, here quoted by comic writer and blogger Chris Sims:
Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?
Bakhtanians: You can’t. You can’t because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, 15 or 20 years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community
I had never heard of this so-called “fighting games” community before, and if this Aris Bakhtanians is in any way representative of it, it’s not a community which deserves any respect in the wider world. His insincere non-apology doesn’t really change that.
Chris Sims doesn’t mince his words.
“If your community can’t introduce a baseline of respect for another human being without being destroyed, then your community should probably be burned to the ground and have salt spread on the ashes so that it’ll never come back.”
Bakhtanians had ranted about “This is not North Korea” when challenged. It’s exactly the same behaviour you hear from violent knuckle-dragging white nationalists, who claim that they and only they stand between “white culture” and oblivion. For situations where the arrogant, hate-filled jerk tries to play the victim card, China Miéville says it far better than I can.
Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very [expletive deleted] complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy?
Quite.