Walking in the street, particularly in a city like New York, every single day, I am reminded of how objectified women can be. Being catcalled every day, multiple times a day, all the time... it just constantly happens.
I have an unfortunate history with Ethan Ralph. Like many women in the game industry, I've been doxed by him multiple times.
One of the speakers asked how many women had been harassed or abused sexually in their life? There were thousands of women in the audience, and almost every one of them raised her hand.
Online harassment, especially gendered online harassment, is an epidemic. Women are being driven out; they're being driven offline. This isn't just in gaming. This is happening across the board online, especially with women who participate in or work in male-dominated industries.
Most members of Gamergate, the alt-right movement best known for harassing women in the game industry, operate under a veil of anonymity.
As a woman, absolutely, I have had to deal with people making advances at me, but not just people from the business of film industry but people across different professions and different strata. I think it has a lot to do with power; it is not only limited to the film business.
The struggles of dealing with online harassment is the same harassment that women have been dealing with, it's just a new medium in which it's happening.
I feel like if you know any women who's an essayist or a writer or a public speaker or just a public person, and they have any presence at all in any kind of social media, or any place where men can voice at them, you have to be pretty amazed at the level of special provocation and sort of violent speech and misogyny that comes at them. Any woman that's really in the public sphere has experienced this. It's kind of shocking how universal it is.
I take great solace in the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote. Hillary Clinton got over 2.5 million more votes than Donald Trump got. So I can't say in any way that the people think that harassing women is appropriate. So I don't think we should read into his victory the fact that, you know, women's rights are going to be diminished.
I could do with more mobbing. Particularly from women. I'd like to be treated like Ricky Martin.
Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex?
Game studios, developers, and major publishers need to vocally speak up against the harassment of women and say this behavior is unacceptable.
