A gender-neutral thought

I totally get where this article on sexist video-gamers being terrorists is coming from. Nearly everything in that article is true. But I feel that there are two issues here, and mixing them up that way isn't all that helpful. One is sexism, which most certainly exists, and the other is video gamers behaving extremely badly under the cover of internet anonymity, which also most certainly exists. But if you drew a Venn Diagram of this, you would find that while there is a substantial overlap, the overlap isn't total.

For example the terrorist accusation has as example the bomb threat called in on a plane carrying SOE's John Smedley. Which is certainly an example of extreme video-gamer behavior, but not motivated by sexism. So is the example of the gamer calling a SWAT team to the house of his opponent after losing at Call of Duty. I mean in no way to excuse the abominable behavior recently shown by gamers that *are* based on sexism. But I think that it would be better to separate those two issues. If we would magically end sexism tomorrow, the problem of video gamers calling in bomb threats on video game executives would still remain.

Feminism is a broad church that is not speaking with one voice, but with millions of them. Many of those voices speak out against actual discrimination and are totally right to do so. But some other voices are fueled by hate against anybody with a Y-chromosome. And just like you can be a true Christian without supporting everything the extreme Christian Right says, you can be for gender equality without supporting everything the extreme feminists say. And in the above case it becomes very hard to stand up against video gamer hate if that means having to subscribe to feminist hate to do so. We could get a much broader support, especially from men feeling uncomfortable with some parts of some feminists' agenda, if we considered the two issues here separately. That doesn't mean you can't fight for both issues, but we should accept the two issues as different and quote sexism as an example instead of the underlying motivation for all video gamer hate. The kind of video gamers we are talking about really just hate about everything, not just women or feminists.

That brings me to the gender of the video gamer spewing hate on Twitter. Twitter has 271 million monthly active users. And increasingly the tweets are hateful in nature. There is something about the format that makes it easier to fire off a short hateful remark than a balanced, reasoned opinion. And sorry, but that isn't limited to male users of Twitter. Even on videogames you can find extremely nasty tweets written by women. While I am pretty much convinced that the majority of video gamers spewing hate is male, again it wouldn't be correct to paint that 100% as a gender issue. I am also pretty sure that the majority of the video gamers spewing hate is under 35 years of age, but it wouldn't be helpful to dress this discussion as a generational issue either.

We live in a civilization based on laws and certain rules of civilized behavior. Some people have discovered how internet anonymity can sometimes allow them to act outside of these laws and rules without consequences. The long-term effect of this will most certainly be that we will lose our right to remain anonymous on the internet. Everybody who uses that anonymity for a fake bomb threat or similar illegal activity makes it harder for the rest of us to insist on our right to privacy on the internet. As video gamers, regardless of gender, we need to speak out against the lawless sub-culture of video gamer hate. Because we don't want to mention at the water-cooler that we play video games and get a reply "Video gamers? Isn't that this terrorist outfit I hear so much about in the news?".