GMRG8 and Censorship

The equation is simple: Those who have power get to censor, and those who lack power get silenced. If you find yourself in a position to demand and get censorship, you can be sure you are among those who have the power, and you are acting to oppress others.—Feminists Against Censorship

The GMRG8 activists, despite all denials, are acting to silence their targets. They are moderately successful in doing so, though they have not yet silenced Sarkeesian, Quinn, and Wu. But terrorists terrorize.

Every woman I know in the industry is scared. Many have thought about quitting. Three of us have been the victims of death threats, and some of this have been driven from our homes.—Brianna Wu

The GMRG8ers have persuaded Intel and ASUS to pull advertising from major sites which published pieces critical of the GMRG8 agenda, whatever that is. Part of the motivation here is the marketing aversion to association with controversy in any form. But if it were a plague of man-hatred instead, I doubt the marketing departments would have acted similarly.

GMRG8 has been recognized by the mass media now. There is a huge generational divide. Most people under age 35 have at least played computer games, over, not so much. And I fear a backlash; an expansion of the existing game ratings board that suppresses a broad range of sexual and violent content, making impossible engagement with these subjects. One may imagine something like the 1930s Motion Picture Production Code, which for many years prevented the showing, even, in movies distributed in the USA, of a married couple just sleeping together. Homosexuals were unpersonned in US movies of that period—they were never even shown. And all the while the enormous hypocrisy of the period, with all its covert sexual relations, conceived as evil, a source of pride for men, a reason to blame women.

Since that time, US culture has swung to another extreme, going from prudery to prurience in a generation, never stopping at a moderate place. What marks both positions is extremism. At one extreme, sex, sexuality, and women are things to be feared, suppressed, and associated with violence. At the other extreme, women are intensely sexualized, while violence against sexualized women is widely embraced. What there is not in either extreme is a rejection of violence, an acceptance of sexuality as a normal and healthy part of human life, and a recognition of women as people with their own needs and wants. When extreme and hateful voices dominate discourse, all moderate voices are silenced, yet it is the moderate voices which have the most to say to everyday life for, after all, who wants to go through life hating their sexuality, hating their sexual partners, or surrounded by violence?

I fear the the victory of one or another faction of extremists. We might end up in a place where women and girls are terrorized with images of violence directed at them, and all critical voices silenced. We might also end up in a place where sexual hypocrisy is again the norm, and sexuality and women's agency are again erased from popular discourse. Or we might end up in a place with the worst elements of both, where popular prudery suppresses all images of violence against "good" women, while at the same time threatening women with brutality if they step out of line, even a little bit.

I fear the terrorists are winning.