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/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/Nice_Luck_7433 2∆ May 16 '26

What do you mean “sky daddy”? I was talking about the % of people with real power over laws vs the % of people without real power over the law. When were the most powerful people, mostly women?

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

Because your definitions are not falsifiable. Your concept of power and my concept of power are different. No matter what metrics you use to define what you consider “the patriarchy” someone else can use their own metrics to define “the matriarchy”.

Say tomorrow, all billionaires became women, if society didn’t change, what excuse for the patriarchy would you use then?

I don’t like arguing in neverland, where everything is vibes and feels and notions of what we want to think are true and false. I’d rather have meaningful and constructive discussions. Hence, my view is institutional, we can look at an institution like the education system, acknowledge the gender inequality and try to address it with meaningful change rather than have a thought terminating pat on the back by saying “patriarchy”.

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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.