My Thoughts on Jonathan McIntosh, his ilk, and Charlie Hebdo

Two days ago, I wrote a blog on Jonathan McIntosh's stance on the need for games that are "not fun". McIntosh, for those lucky enough to be unaware, is one of the writers for Feminist Frequency, an online video series that offers feminist critique of pop culture. The series has gotten some well deserved infamy for its poor research practices, it's misinformation (Krysta was not going to be the sole protagonist of Dinosaur Planet in spite of what the show claims, in Hitman the player is penalized for killing strippers, not rewarded, etc) it's plagiarism (it's been proven that the show has stolen Let's Play footage and artwork for its Tropes vs Women in Gaming series) among other claims. And I, of course, wrote about his right to say such idiocies. I may not agree with it, but he has the right to say it.

Yesterday, tragedy struck France. A group of Islamist fanatics attacked a newspaper's office, killing eleven people and injuring eleven more. Why? Because the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, continuously runs (yes, I am using present tense) cartoons that can be seen as offensive to religious sensibilities. I have seen some of these cartoons, and in all honesty I can say I can see how anyone, be they Muslim or Christian, can be offended. I will not be pasting any images from Charlie Hebdo, because I try my best to keep this blog Safe for Work. That said, I do not approve of a cover with a cartoon of Muhammed (PBUH) saying "Either you die of laughter or you get 100 whip lashes!" Yes, I know it's in jest, but considering the realities of anti Muslim attitudes in not just France but all of Europe, I question whether the intention was to laugh at Muslims or to push buttons for the sake of pushing buttons. For those not in the know, Charlie Hebdo is a satirical French weekly newspaper,

You may be asking yourself, "what does this have to do with video games?" Well, it has a lot to do with the current cultural debate regarding video games. You have two camps: gamers who wish to play games and allow developers to develop what they want, and authoritarians that wish to limit what developers can do, all in the name of "progressiveness". You have people who complain about misogyny in gaming: they hate how female characters (allegedly) all have one of three roles (Damsel, fucktoy, background character), how they are designed with the male gaze in mind, how there's a shortage of female characters in gaming that are strong and independent, etc. These people call gaming "hostile towards women", and for that they come up with several campaigns to try and make it less so, among them being #1ReasonWhy, a Twitter campaign where several people in game developing gave the number 1 reason why there weren't many women developing games (ignoring the fact that there ARE plenty of women who not only develop games, but they are the heads of their own game companies, proving that there are no real obstacles to women getting into gaming.)

Yes, they are full of it, but the thing is, they have a right to spew their idiocy. Do we have to agree with it? Hell no. Just as they have a right to an opinion, so do we. Do we have to respect it?

Aha, that's the tricky part. All our lives, we are told to respect others. Respect other people's ideas, respect other people's beliefs, etc. Respect, respect, respect. And it wasn't until recently that I seriously started considering what that entailed. To find out why I had to respect other people's ideas, even if I didn't agree with it, I needed to look up "respect" on the dictionary. And what I found was that respect is "a positive feeling of esteem" Positive esteem, that was something I had to mull over. Did I have positive esteem for the idea that gaming was infested with misogynist elements? Did I have positive esteem for the notion that gaming culture was toxic and full of male privilege?  Did I admire people like Jonathan McIntosh, who tends to say things like this?

And what of Charlie Hebdo? Yes it is a satirical print, but does that mean I have to respect its choice of satirical style? Should I respect, for example, their cover of a Muslim getting shot to death while he's trying to stop the bullets with a Koran, with the cover saying "The Koran is shit"?

Then I realized something: dictionary definitions can only go so far. Perhaps it's not positive esteem that's being asked, but more likely, simple recognition and tolerance. Maybe that's what they mean when they say "respect others": tolerate it, don't attack it, leave it be. Leave it be.

But what if I'm offended? Have I not the right to be offended? Yeah, I think I do. But as I read once, in a quote by Salman Rushdie, "If you're offended, that's your problem. No one has the right not to be offended." Emphasis mine. I have the right to be offended by a work, but I don't have the right to not be offended.

And that's the problem with a lot of people today, particularly the feminists and the Islamists that concern us. They believe in their imaginary right to not be offended, and to them, gaming culture and Charlie Hebdo are infringing on those rights. The feminists and their allies believe that gaming's in need of an authority to decide what's offensive and what's not, and that what's offensive should be dealt with. Likewise, the Islamists decided that Charlie Hebdo needed to be dealt with, because their imagined right to not be offended superseded that newspaper's right to print and sell its content.

That right there's the big problem with the imagined right to not be offended: eventually, you start imagining yourself judge, jury, and executioner. And if you think this is hyperbole, that it is unfair to compare feminists with Islamists, let me share a few pictures:

Fair to compare Islamists that kill people to feminists that harass people on the Internet? No, I admit it. But the hate's the same. The hate that comes from self righteousness clashing with an inconvenient reality, of self sanctification confronting a message you disagree with, it's the same no matter what's the cause. It's the same hate, disguised as righteous fury, that leads someone to gun down a man you disagree with, that also leads to a fourteen year old girl to send anonymous death threats to a woman who drew cartoon pony porn.

A man's Patreon account was deleted permanently, just because people didn't agree with his website's content. They accused him of harboring child pornography, in spite of the fact that his own website's rules banned such things. The man needed that money to pay for medicine. It was the feminists that oppose Gamergate that did it. A man with a serious medical condition lost a valuable source of income to people who valued an ideology above a real human being.

Eleven people lost their lives to radicals who valued the religion they hijacked over the lives they took. That's the truly sickening part of it all: lives are being thrown away in favor of abstracts.

It's OK to oppose an idea you find sickening. It's OK to boycott a publication you find offensive. Gamergate itself is a giant boycott against publications that lie, cheat, and disrespects its readers. We don't have to take people like Leigh Alexander saying our identity is dead, or Anita Sarkeesian accusing us of being anti women, or Adam Sessler calling us worse than  chemical weapons dealers. We don't have to tolerate an outsider like McIntosh calling us misogynists just because we don't cater to his feminist tastes.

That sounds like mental gymnastics, doesn't it? On the one hand, no one has the right to not be offended, but on the other hand, we have the right to boycott that which offends us. If it's OK for me to be offended by Gawker, then it's OK for John McIntosh to be offended by Bayonetta's design. Wait, no.

No, no it isn't, because our boycott isn't because we're offended by content. We're offended by practices, actions, that we find disagreeable. We're offended by Gawker making money off of slander ( https://archive.today/0zFHk ) or off of stolen material ( https://archive.today/usTWx ). We're offended that the people whose careers we made are acting like they can insult, belittle, ignore, and sell out their audience. For that reason we're aiming to bring down these publications: because their actions are despicable and they need to stop.

Charlie Hebdo was no Gawker. They don't just make fun of Islam, they make fun of everything: Europe, France, Christianity, it's all fair game to them. Ultimately, however, they're hurting no one. Gawker, on the other hand, is. As is Gamasutra, and Polygon too. These publications continue to support and employ people who bully gamers, such as Geordie Tait, or Ben Kuchera.

I need Gamergate because Ben Kuchera still has a job writing for gaming sites.

In the end, though, it's one thing to be offended by something, but if you want to take down something, it has to be for a bigger reason than "it offends me". That's what the feminists and the Islamists did. Feminists took down Hotwheel's (the person, not the toys) Patreon because his site, 8chan, offended them. The Islamists attacked Charlie Hebdo because they felt offended. In the end, though, such a thing is a petty and disgusting reason to try to destroy one man's life, or end the lives of eleven people.

If you're offended by something, deal with it. But don't go around trying to censor it, because you're no one with any right to do that. You don't have the right to not be offended. And if you think it's OK to harass people for thinking differently than you do, or if it's OK to pick up a gun and shoot someone just because they made a cartoon that made you mad, then FUCK YOU!