TRIGGER WARNING: Harassment, violent subject matter, Gamer Gate, self-harm.

(If anyone wants to leave comments, feel free. If you are disrespectful or confrontational, I'll block you because I need to take care of my own mental illness at this point. I'm not interested in discussing gamer gate with hostility, so if that's your vibe, go away -- I'm not going to engage with you at all. I talk about Gamer Gate, not to Gamer Gate... not anymore.)

My Experience With Gamer Gate

Greetings again. I'm not very productive but I'm doing better now than I have been in months. It's a long story but ultimately I think i'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, in terms of having ideas and excitement about the future, and about other people.

The last few weeks, and especially the last few days have been incredibly stressful, as well as overwhelmingly relieving. A true roller coaster of emotion that I'm concerned might be leaving me somewhat manic in the wake of surviving this.

The Run-Up

Long story short: first teacat posted a delightful Moomin-sona meme and I posted it on my twitter. A few ppl came out of the woodwork to admire it and mention that to me, and one or two folks in the area-ish even suggested that my husb and I should maybe hang out. :3

Then, the next day, I threw a rock at a hornet's nest, figuratively speaking. I got harassed by Gamer Gate.

The Transgression

I tweeted in response to a message that said "If your abuse doesn't leave a scar or bruise, it isn't abuse." I called that out as a destructive and wrong thing to say. Then the swarm descended.

In the end i suddenly had a couple shit-follows, several DMs, about 6 - 12 accounts harassing me for hours, and hundreds of notes showing every last like, retweet, and empty, chiding responses afterward.

I deliberately antagonized all of them, but wound up not being able to shake two accounts, so I insisted that if they want a real conversation (which they didn't) then they should DM me so we can get this worked out. One of those accounts DMd me and that's when shit got really harrowing.

The Deeply Disturbing Part

The person who DMd me asserted that he is gay and mentally ill. I told him I will take his word for it, and that I'm gay and mentally ill as well. But his reaction to this was to A) belittle my illness and my treatment, B) somehow assume I was denying his illness and orientation, and that I was refusing to believe him because "I wanted proof." I didn't. I told him telling me was good enough for me.

So he sent me part of his porn collection. This was done in public. He sent 3 really really gay images (two of them scalies). I was confused. He thought he needed to do that for some reason. He kept insisting to me that I wanted proof.

In the DMs, I dropped my bullshit. Out in the public area, I had been deliberately shape-shifting between relentlessly compassionate to intense anger and childlike temper tantrums. I did that because nothing makes a malicious "empiricist" more angry than deliberate inconsistency. But since he bothered to DM i stopped with that and let myself be vulnerable with what I valued.

Every last one of his rhetorical points did nothing to me. I wanted to focus on the subtext of the situation. He had no idea how to engage with me in that conversation, so he lashed out with his anxiety over not being able to shout down a "mentally ill SJW with an opinion."

This guy is a mentally ill (OCD, Aspergers, possibly bi-polar, he claimed), gay (he claimed) individual who has been convinced to fear and loathe "SJWs" so intensely that, upon me refusing to budge from my position even a bit, he did the next best thing he thought he had to defeat me: he started self-harming.

He sent me a picture of a fresh burn mark on his forearm. He claimed I was the reason for this injury. He tried to tell me that "I did this to him," and then he took that picture and posted it in public with the caption, "I'm speaking to him. He tried to deny my mental illness."

I then responded to tell him, "I'm very sorry you think 'I am also mentally ill' means 'That means you can't be mentally ill'. That would be a horrible thing to claim. I really hope these pics are yours and not lifted from somewhere else on the internet because that would be really fucked up and i don't want to think of you that way."

The Last Straw

He kept insisting that I was hurting him, that I am responsible for that burn, and then he threatened to walk over fire "for me."

It was at this point that I told him, "You need to stop being so emotionally co-dependent on your enemies that you hurt yourself if you can't intimidate them badly enough. Your decision to self-harm was your own, and I refuse to let you make me responsible for that." I told him I hope he brings this up with his therapist, told him I'm going to separate the two of us now, and report him for self-harm, because that's what you do when someone threatens to burn themselves at you on Twitter. I blocked him and his "friends" and reported him for self-harm, and his friends for harassment. I also got set up with a GG auto-blocker and now I feel a lot safer.

Wait, didn't I mention subtext? What was the subtext of this situation? Well... see how I put "for me" in quotes up there? He kept saying the pics were proof "for me" of his position and status. But that's not true. I never asked for or cared about "proof" because GGers use "proof" as a distraction tactic exclusively. I chose to believe him, but that didn't matter. He was proving to Gamer Gate that he was gay and mentally ill. That's why he posted those pictures.

The Subtext

There is a guy within Gamer Gate ranks has been so indoctrinated against SJWs that he thinks he has to weaponize his mental illness when he can't intellectually brow-beat an SJW into submission. He is honestly so frightened of the mere presence of a person like me that his mental illness was triggered so vividly by the mere act of trying to hurt me with his words that he could not stop from hurting himself instead.

On top of that, an openly neo nazi piece of garbage stepped into my DMs and demanded that I visit red room and cut myself so he can watch, and threatened me to "be careful what I say next because you don't want to fuck yourself." Needless to say I blocked reported him immediately.

This occurred after several hours of being called "ableist" for... believing when someone tells me they are ill (of course they interpreted that as me denying his illness, because that's how committed to the narrative they actually are). They tell me my opinions and way of thinking is the result of my "dementia" or "psychosis" or "delusions." When I dare to tell them about why they think, feel, believe and experience, all of a sudden that approach is disrespectful and off-limits... because I'm the evil entity here. The individual who DMd me literally burned his body just to intimidate me, and yet somehow I'm the one who is mentally unstable in this scenario.

The End of Non-Radical Kerplunk

I had no respect for Gamer Gate before my experience. I hated Gamer Gate before my experience. But I used to think there would be one rational person with a terrible misunderstanding. Needless to say I'm 100% correct about this.

I can't find an appropriate word to describe my feelings about Gamer Gate anymore, but "revile" is about as close as I can get.

GGers apparently honestly think that every SJW is one sock puppet account: I kept getting called "Chelsea" by multiple people. They kept calling me "fam," sending me smilies and love hearts and hugs as if no one in the world could tell that these are deliberately abusive, deeply condescending remarks. They told me I hate love, that I hate humanity, that I'm a deeply unstable person and have no right to make any comments about an issue that affects "no one," aka LITERALLY EVERYONE.

What they don't realize is how much stronger I've become. My depression, which has been life-long, forced me to confront people just like this. Except the voices of my depression knew my life story, they knew my darkest secrets, they knew what would psychologically dismantle me to the point where I feel very much like my life lost all meaning and purpose.

I lived like that for 30 years, and I survived that. I am still living like that, and I'm still surviving.

Honestly the experience was terrifying for me while it was happening. That's the goal of their behavior: overwhelm you with negative reinforcement that has been designed to make them appear to know my life story, my darkest secrets, and what would psychologically dismantle me.

But no external human being is as good at hurting me as I am. None of their words has any power over me.

Even burning himself, that individual has not deterred me from speaking out at all. Quite the opposite.

Do not assume that Gamer Gate is a place where you can make friends. You probably will. We can make friends in literally any environment, in any social group.

Game Gate is Conservatism gone horribly, horribly wrong. Gamer Gate is a form of Hyper-masculine Conservatism that has utterly detached itself from any pretense governance, policymaking, and the democratic process. They only believe in the freedom of their own speech, and want to silence and censor anything that they determine to be...

Progressive

Gamer Gate is just Right Wing versus Left Wing, but pretending that politics is irrelevant and doesn't exist. Yet GG adopts every last tactic used by the republican party and the most popular and well-know talk-radio blowhard, just not focused toward producing political outcomes.

Because actually engaging in political struggle is the hallmark of a responsible adult in a democratic society.

Gamer Gate is a fascist force of directionless bigots and hyper-anxious misguided little lambs who burn with such self-hatred that they believe psychological torture is a pleasant and appropriate way to deal with a problem.

But like that poor man I mentioned earlier, all of their attempts to hurt "SJWs" only hurts themselves. And I'm angry about that. Because that guy is a human being who is suffering.

All I wanted to do was talk about our feelings and give him the benefit of the doubt.

As of today, I feel like Gamer Gate has probably radicalized me against this kind of behavior. I think, after being accused of being a Social Justice Warrior (when all I ever did was talk to people), I'm beginning to feel more and more justified in taking on that mantle, and going out and fighting harder and harder until no one can be co-opted by that movement, and persuaded to harm themselves for the benefit of that "movement."

My name is Kerplunk. I am a Munk. I am a white human being of european descent. I am a radicalized martial artist of compassionate communication and rhetorical annihilation: I set up a false subtext, I wear a person down, and then I talk to them one-on-one, where I completely demolish both subtexts and speak direction to the pain we both feel.

In the past, I have made very close friends out of vicious, committed enemies by fighting like this. This method is not at all for everyone, but it helps me reinforce my worldview.

But now... now I simply want to dismantle Gamer Gate and its influence over innocent people, so that we can all start unpacking our trauma and learning to own the pain we carry with us everywhere, so that no one else has to bear more pain than they can take.

Honestly, we lose a lot of good lives because of that... a lot of good lives. And I think the best way to fight back is to spread the word about what Gamer Gate is, what it actually does to people on a daily basis, and most importantly: no one in gamer gate can have a conversation in good faith.

They don't even understand how to communicate in a straight-forward, honest way. They don't teach each other how to be good people. They teach each other how to win, or if not win, how to force an ugly stalemate on vital issues.

Know this, and go with strength into the world of fire. Think cooling thoughts, and stay safe, everyone. Just BLOCK Gamer Gate. Don't talk to those people. Talk about Gamer Gate, not to Gamer Gate.

Gamer Gate is a plague on modern humanity. It needs to be constrained, and if we build ourselves up and ready our minds, Gamer Gate can have no foot hold in the cultural Zeitgeist. It is using its foothold to destroy and disrupt lives for its own incoherent non-purposes (something about spreading chaos and lulz because 4-chan et al is the basis for all of this cannibalistic rhetoric). If we don't allow it to move us, it can not move the world either.