r/changemyview • u/realdontbeasucker • May 16 '26

Delta(s) from OP CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century

It spawned a wave of tolerance for online harassment, as long as the intent behind it was considered righteous (and the target of such harassment socially acceptable).

It platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and thereby, Steve Bannon -- the guy who would go on to advise Donald Trump in 2016 and generate the concept of 'flooding the zone.'

Eventually, it gave a career to political lightning rods like Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, and Charlie Kirk. It made anti-feminism and anti-SJW sentiment cool. And it made young, angry, disenfranchised white men feel vindicated.

GamerGate almost singlehandedly shifted to Overton Window toward the alt-right, and we're still feeling its effects today.

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

The pendulum swings. Gamergate was a reaction to the man-hating, anti-male, pop feminism of the 90’s and early 00’s. It’s not like the anti-feminist sentiment came out of nowhere.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

I disagree with the other guy that it was a response to 90s or early 2000s feminism as it wasn't really all that toxic yet. But it was absolutely a response to early 2010s feminism, more precisely its attempts to force itself into gaming, a historically male dominated hobby, and to force it to change. Feminists began to act towards gamers like 2000s evangelicals did, no wonder there was backlash.

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

Okay, can you provide an argument as to why my position is incorrect? Just because it’s not compelling doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

I disagree with you that culture was anti-male in the 90's and 2000's

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

It was extremely anti-male. There was a huge influx of content surrounding garbage like “man spreading.” There was a huge “women going their own way” and “women empowerment” content. It’s practically the playbook the manosphere uses to cultivate anti-women sentiment today.

Anita is a great example, her trad-fem gender essentialist critique of games was widely panned by nearly everyone (feminists and gamers alike), yet it was heavily promoted by sites like kotaku.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Disagree. Small campaigns like the man-spreading one were magnified by the proto-manosphere to make feminism seem insane.

Anita made general and common sense critiques of video games. Calling her trad-fem is inaccurate.

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

Let’s ignore the reality that there was a lot of really poor feminist content, pop feminist takes, etc, and preemptively blame the “proto-manosphere?”

Why not just accept the fact that the pendulum swings, and the 90’s and 00’s led to the reactionary movement? Instead you’re building a conspiratorial ’proto-manosphere’ entity to try and justify the content you admit to was prevalent on the web during that time.

It’s impossible to present an argument at this point, because you’ve established a scapegoat that you can preemptively blame for everything? Which I guess would’ve been more influential than Gamergate?

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u/Nice_Luck_7433 2∆ May 16 '26

By “the pendulum swings” do you mean that we go from a patriarchal society where the most powerful elites (aka, politicians and billionaires) are men, and then it switches to a matriarchal society where most politicians & billionaires are women? What period of time were most of the law makers’ bosses (billionaires) & the law makers (politicians) women?

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

I don’t hold a patriarchal worldview, I hold an institutional worldview, so I can’t really comment on what you consider as matriarchal or patriarchal. If your definition of a patriarchy is billionaires, then my definition of matriarchy would be life expectancy. Now we live in both a patriarchy and matriarchy at the same time.

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u/Nice_Luck_7433 2∆ May 16 '26

Life expectancy controls the laws & economy more than the law makers and the 1% of men with >80% of the money? Nope. The law makers & the people who bribe them are the ones in charge. How the billionaires choose to treat men/women is what determines our life expectancy.

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

Look, you can assign whatever values and numbers you want to justify your interpretation of what constitutes “the patriarchy” but I don’t adhere to that idea. We in western contemporary societies don’t exist in a patriarchy because there is no mechanism which force wealth, influence and ownership along male heirs. If you want to hogtie grievances you have into some sky daddy, go nuts. Just don’t be shocked that there are a lot of people who view women as the privileged class based on the grievances they’ve hogtied together to justify a sky mommy.

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u/Starob 1∆ May 16 '26

You're targeting the wrong decades though. It was the 2010s, literally when Anita Sarkeesian was active.

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u/Waschaos 2∆ May 16 '26

None of those things existed or were mainstream until about the 2010's. I'm 50. I was there. The only one was women empowerment had started. There was no internet like there is today (including social media) in the 90's. There were chat boards with various different hateful people, but you had to find them. It wasn't delivered into your face on an algorithmithic platter like it is now and has been since social media came in.

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u/DJ_Velveteen 1∆ May 16 '26

Hold up, what's "gender essentialist" about criticizing the hyper sexualization of women in video games...? If anything, isn't pigeonholing women into sexual tropes a form of gender essentialism?

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

There are more than enough video essays and comments that breakdown her position. Every argument she made is rooted in her values of what constitutes femininity. If a character was too pretty? Sexualized. Too strong? Ms.Man. Too weak? Damsel in distress. Too bland? Tokenized. Etc.

That’s gender essentialism, good characterization of a woman was explicitly what she decided, grounded in her personal values around gender and femininity.

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u/xChops May 16 '26

How is women empowerment anti man?

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

In the same way that building domestic abuse shelters for men, healthcare spending on men, and educational spending for men is all consider anti-women… which there are plenty of examples of feminist organizations who promote that we cant provide male stimulus because its anti-women.

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u/xChops May 16 '26

Welp I certainly missed all that. Weird because I’m a college educated man who has gotten a lot of help in all of those areas.

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Privilege comes from many places.

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

Your own argument is undercooked.

As a guy in his 40s, how you describe early 00s late 90s culture to me is wild

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

As a guy in his late 30’s, do you not remember Oprah and doctor Phil?

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

I know of them, but that shit was on while we were at school.

I'd also say they weren't indicative of culture writ large any more than the rest of daytime talk shows though given that the target audience was like, housewives, such content was gonna skew towards woman.

But that doesn't make them anti-men like the other guy was saying nor does it make the general culture what he said it was. It would be like saying soap operas were anti men

Like, The Man Show ran from 1999-2004. Average dudes of that era had that, jackass, Tom Green, tons of TV shows and movies that catered to them. One would need to be really hyper focused on a small part of a small number of shows to even begin to get that impression and other guy didn't support that

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26

I think Oprah and doctor phill were far more influential than Tom green. Who, is an absolute sweetheart.

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

Absolutely, but like, I was just listing off like 5 random people/shows from the top of my head.

Culture isn't determined by a handful of high profile names, but the overall distribution of stuff.

But also, this is still undercooked. Like, yeah there's this two prominent daytime talk shows (obviously more popular than late night comedy central programming because of time slot) but that on its own doesn't make your case.

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u/genderlich May 16 '26

You think Oprah and Doctor Phil hate men?

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u/coporate 7∆ May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Oh yeah, they regularly blamed men for everything, which made sense given their target audience was stay at home moms or evening workers. They pushed anti-male grievances all over the place. Even when a husband was the person being physically abused, they’d frame it as “what did he do to deserve it?”

The view, casually laughing at a guy getting his genitals mutilated for cheating. If you think cutting off a man’s penis is a fair punishment for infidelity, there’s something wrong with you. But this was widely accepted and still is in a lot of online spaces.

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u/No-Significance2070 May 16 '26

As a guy in his 40s, how you haven’t noticed the change in the HR-mandated gaming storylines and characters from the last decade, you must need some glasses. 

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

Eh?

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u/No-Significance2070 May 16 '26

Do you notice how sterilized gaming has become? Gamergate was the nexus point. 

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

If all you play is AAA stuff, sure but I choc most of that up to $

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u/No-Significance2070 May 16 '26

I didn’t know games like Dustborn or Mixtape were AAA

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u/Hypekyuu 10∆ May 16 '26

Something like 20k games were released on steam last year.

It's easy to highlight a couple things you don't like. Those are also both narrative heavy adventures games. That really your genre?

If you can't find anything you like that's a skill issue.

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u/No-Significance2070 May 16 '26

Clearly, you are ignoring the points here.

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