It’s hard out here for a girl who wants to game. Just ask Twitch streamer Anne Munition, who has more than 335,000 followers on Twitch and about 33,000 subscribers on YouTube. Anne was playing Rainbow Six Siege, and as soon as her co-players heard her voice they began verbally abusing her. No stranger to gaming abuse, she posted a video on her Twitter that immediately went viral, with over half a million views and nearly 2,000 comments, many from fellow female gamers who have endured harassment as well.
"Why don't you use voice chat?"
"Why can't I find a girlfriend who plays video games?"
"Why do you mute people who ask you if you're a girl?"Gee, I dunno.
[Warning: extreme language and monumental stupidity] pic.twitter.com/TO4VzU44YF
— Anne Munition (@AnneMunition) May 23, 2018
Players in the game repeatedly asked Anne “Are you a man or a female?”, before launching into tirades against the gamer, saying “You stole my fucking content. You’re shit at the game. Get out.” The men continued the verbal abuse, saying “We’re not being like this because we don’t like women, we’re being like this because you’re shit, by the way.” The players continued with anti-trans slurs, death threats, and other insults that I don’t need to repeat here because we’ve heard them all before.
“As you saw in the video, that’s all it took for them to devolve into toxicity,” Anne Munition said. “While I understand everyone, of all genders and backgrounds, can often be the subject of toxicity online, I really feel like people underestimate just how bad it can be for women or people who are recognized as ‘other’ over voice comms.”
The greatest gift misogynists ever received was the anonymity of the internet. Abusive, alienated men have flocked to the internet for decades now in the hopes of spewing every vile and abusive thought in their heads without fear of any consequence or retaliation. And the internet has welcomed them with open arms and blind eyes towards the abuse that anyone who is not a straight cis white dude endures online. This kind of behavior is celebrated on the internet, as it is everywhere else. I mean, look who is sitting in the oval office. There is no greater metaphor for the proliferation of trolls than Trump.
Women endure constant abuse online. I’ll most likely get some just for writing this article. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can and must demand online platforms that have zero tolerance for abusive behavior. All it takes is the will of the Powers That Be to give a shit about the treatment of women and everyone else under siege on these platforms we use daily.
“I’m just sick of sweeping this behavior under the rug and pretending it’s all fine and dandy,” she said. “It’s easy to sweep things under the rug; it’s hard to ask people to be better. Especially when so many people are just resigned to accepting the fact that online gaming and toxicity go hand-in-hand.”
(via Kotaku, image: Youtube)
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