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[El Sloth]

Saira Mueller goes into the constant harassment, both physical and otherwise, she faces just being a woman occupying space with other dudes in video games

The night was balmy, and the streets mostly empty. It was, after all, quite late. I'd had a long day covering a convention and networking at after parties—I was exhausted. All I wanted was to get to my hotel and rest.

"Oh, I didn't know you were single," the esports organization owner, who just happened to be walking in the same direction as me, said nonchalantly. "Otherwise I would have made a move on you."

This wasn't the first inappropriate thing he'd done. Every other time I saw him at an event (which was a lot—he owned one of the biggest brands in esports) he would continually touch my waist, lower back, and butt. Apparently the only reason he didn't do it at this event was because he thought I was in a relationship this time around.

It's hard not to reflect on your own experiences of sexual harassment when every social media platform is flooded with women (and some men) posting #MeToo to show how prevalent the issue is globally. And while it all started with The New York Times' exposé on film executive Harvey Weinstein, the campaign has exposed how prevalent the problem is everywhere. And that includes esports. So why aren't the ladies of esports coming forward in droves?

The problem lies, most likely, with just how deep sexual harassment runs in esports. It's everyone from owners of well-known organizations, to team managers, pro players in every game, casters, even esports staff at game developers and publishers, and esports journalists. It's the norm. Many women in the industry have shared their experiences of sexual harassment from men in esports with me, and we've almost become desensitized to it.

Sexual harassment is also an issue in the livestreaming community. While I haven't had any personal experiences with broadcasters, I know of many women who were harassed by both Twitch and YouTube streamers alike—some of whom are the most popular streamers on their respective platforms.

Off the top of my head I can recall 11 different men at all levels of the industry that have sexually harassed me in some way, and I've only been covering esports for just over two years now. There have been many more incidents, from the various faceless gropings at after parties, the inappropriate passing comments, or the sexual messages on social media—but there have been so many that I've become used to it, these are just the few that stuck with me.

Speaking out about these issues is the only way the industry will change. So that's what I'm here to do. While I won't give names, I want to share my personal experiences to show just how rampant it is, and hopefully help people feel more comfortable about coming forward with their own stories.

Before I go into my personal experiences, let me lay out sexual harassment for you (just in case you're not aware). It can include "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature," according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

So sexual harassment is more than just unwanted physical attention—it's a wide range of behaviors that make women feel uncomfortable. Take, for instance, my experiences with rumors.

Let's start with the professional Heroes of the Storm player who told his teammates and manager that he'd slept with me (he hadn't). I found out about it much later through mutual friends.

Another rumor could have had an impact on my job itself. This time it was a much younger employee, who told our coworkers that we were dating (we weren't). My coworkers only told me after he'd left the company, and while they didn't believe him, it still hurt that someone could be so naive about the consequences of their actions. It is never ok to say things like this, especially when it can affect someone's job.

And then there are the more direct and hostile interactions, from inappropriate propositions to unwanted physical contact.

One of my first interactions with the esports industry included a team manager telling me he wanted to have sex with me. He then messaged me later to say that if I acted "weird" around him the next day he would unfollow me on Twitter.

There was the esports community manager at a game developer, who messaged me at a convention asking me to "bring the girls" to his hotel room, with the implication that he was after some sort of orgy. Oh, and he was in a relationship at the time.

A recent experience included an esports lawyer telling me he wanted to make out with me. He specified that he didn't want to have sex, just wanted to kiss.

One professional Call of Duty player randomly slid into my DMs a while back to ask if I was single, then proceeded to say I was "gorgeous, educated, and adventurous." He then followed this up with, "You aren't a bum like 99 percent of females in any esports community." Thank you for the unwarranted validation, my friend. Let me lay this out for you right now: Friendliness does not equal permission.

Then there was the esports video producer who confessed his love for me, and told me that if he wasn't married he'd try to get with me. Then got upset when I told him he wasn't my type.

The esports organization owner that I mentioned earlier? He wasn't the only one that touched me inappropriately at events. The owner of another big esports organization also recently did the same thing, as did a professional Smash player.

My most recent experience was an employee making public, inappropriate comments about me, both on social media and our general Slack channel.

What makes all of this so bad? None of the men seemed to think they were being inappropriate, or sexually harassing me in any way. And none of them have apologized for their actions. I still talk to many of these men, some of them are my friends, and some I have to interact with for work. Part of the problem is that we often don't address the issue when it's happening. We need to learn to speak up. That's what started the #MeToo campaign, actress Alyssa Milano asked women to start tweeting with the hashtag to show the magnitude of the problem. And the responses have been overwhelming, across every industry in many countries around the world.

This needs to stop. The industry needs to change. While women speaking out about their past experiences, and directly when it happens, will help, we also need the men of the industry to do their part. Wise up, guys. And start treating women with more respect.

Honestly it's crazy how widespread the problem of dudes being fucking shitty morons is

 

[El Sloth]

This is pretty gross. What is going through people's heads http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/08/11/someone-live-streamed-themselves-sexually-harassing-me

Live streaming has opened up a whole world of creativity, unique personalities and, most of all, 24/7 video games - meaning that we can now plug ourselves into games at any time, even if we can’t play them ourselves.

That’s a romanticised version, anyway. In reality, give humans nice things and watch them do horrible stuff with it. Recently Twitch introduced the IRL category, which collates ‘In Real Life’ streamers — people filming themselves playing board games, or making something, or whatever else. A new strain of streaming culture has emerged around this, aimed solely at targeting and harassing women in front of their live audience.

Last week, following a full-on day at work, and a torturous journey home through central London, I was frazzled and stressed so decided to skip my regular Breath of the Wild stream. Instead, I set up an incredibly shoddy stream in my kitchen featuring me trying to complete a 1000-piece cat puzzle with metal music in the background. It was dumb, but it was also awesome, and my regular crowd seemed to enjoy the change in pace of relaxing in the IRL category, and leaving the Bokoblins for another day.

Although I’ve streamed a lot, this was the first time I had ever streamed in the IRL category. I thought there might be new viewers and oddballs popping by, but what happened next left me shocked. My channel was raided by a self-proclaimed “troll militia” with the purpose of bullying my stream, all of which was being livestreamed on their Twitch channel, with accompanying commentary.



Here’s how it went down
As I was puzzling away, a new person popped up in my chat asking me to “give a shout out to the #JazzBoys.” I like to say hello to all new viewers and ask how they are anyway so, as this viewer had asked so nicely, I said “Hi” to the Jazz Boys and thought nothing of it.

Within seconds more people descended on the chat shouting about the #JazzBoys, and boasting that they were live streaming my stream on their own channels “in the pursuit of spreading the love to lower tier IRL streamers.” I was like 3 pieces away from finishing a cat I’d been working on for an hour, and I’d had a hard day, so figured the best thing to do was shrug this off for the moment and finish the puzzle.

Here’s the thing: I knew at once that I was being raided by a troll group, because I’ve had previous experience with this behaviour. As has probably any woman who’s streamed. But knowing that the camera was pointing at my face and being broadcast to numerous channels I couldn’t watch, engage with or prepare for, I knew I had to be incredibly careful with every single movement to ensure they didn’t ‘win’, they didn’t get the reaction they were looking for. It was paralysing.

The #JazzBoys, these modern heirs of Oscar Wilde, began their campaign by typing about my general appearance and asking why the heck I was solving a puzzle on Twitch.

Fairly swiftly, this descended into someone asking me to shove puzzle pieces up my ass. Then they started asking things like why I felt it was appropriate to be a “slut" on Twitch to get viewers and donations. I have an incredibly small viewership compared to the majority of people on Twitch, which the #JazzBoys had literally doubled in just five minutes, and because of this I like to remind my real viewers that they should never feel pressured to donate.

Do I really need to type out the other things they called me? Every woman in this industry has seen it all before. Every opportunity they saw to sexually harass, insult or belittle me and my small community of regular viewers, they took. I tried to shoot everything back with a smirk and some sarcasm, which helped control my anger and confusion. It was exhausting, but I knew that a confident and cool persona is something these idiots can’t handle.

Sure enough, the harassment went on for about 30-45 minutes before one of them typed “this chick is boring, let’s find someone else”, and they were gone. We had a few more of their members appear throughout the rest of the stream, but we all caught on pretty quickly to what they were trying to do.

The Twitch IRL category

It wasn’t until after my stream had finished, and I took the time to thank my Discord group for supporting me throughout the whole ordeal, that I went to find the channel that the ring leader of the #JazzBoys had apparently been broadcasting me on. Not only had they streamed my broadcast without permission, but I wanted to see what exactly they were saying about me.

Most of it was mindless ‘banter’ and crappy suggestions about what they should say to make me angry or ashamed. I was genuinely shocked to see I got a few laughs from the host, and even some compliments that seemed non-sexually revolting, because it was a reminder of just how mundane these people, who can act so terribly, are in every other respect. The real shock came at the end: once they grew bored of trying to embarrass me for entertainment, they went back into the IRL Category and found their next target.

I watched this next portion of their stream and was stunned in the most awful way. As you may have gathered, I can handle myself pretty well in these situations — because I’ve done streams, YouTube, Live and pre-recorded TV and generally tried to be a forward-facing personality. This was far from my first time facing attempted sexual harassment and bullying in the games industry. I don’t say this with any particular pride, because the world should be better than this, but I’ve developed a tough skin.

For their next target, the #JazzBoys had chosen to bully a disabled streamer. They did it with such fury that I was shocked to the core. This streamer (who I have left anonymous for obvious reasons) was visibly and audibly distressed by the random assault on her channel. The death threats, vulgar suggestions and downright repulsive things being thrown into her calm and friendly community were seen plain as day across her face — and she didn’t know what to do.

I feel like I can look after myself, but being exposed to the public humiliation of women on the internet in front of a live audience… I was speechless. The IRL Category of Twitch was being used like its own game by this “militia", as a means to attack and discriminate against women simply existing in the same space as them. It is unforgivable. It is ghastly. It is 2017 and it is something Twitch should be absolutely ashamed to enable.

In this situation, the ring leader who was broadcasting was banned overnight, even though I hadn’t hit that “Report” button myself. Luckily I was able to watch back his footage before it was removed, but reporting and taking down that one channel is not going to stop this behaviour. I’m almost glad this happened, in a way, because now I’m aware of this culture.
Seeing women hunted like sport because they have an interest in video games and the culture around them is not something that spawned on Twitch, but a long-time industry curse that reflects wider social problems. Nevertheless, the practical question is simple: how can we stop this?

Sure, Twitch banned the bully, but he’ll be back with a different channel*. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was attacking some other innocent streamer as you read this. I appreciate Twitch can’t police every single stream happening simultaneously, they can’t be expected to be in the right place and the right time to stop every instance of harassment. But then, this company’s business is in being of the moment. They sell to advertisers on live streaming’s strengths, of which there are many, and the audience’s clear passion — but when it comes to the bad stuff, Twitch wants to automate its processes as much as possible.

Show me the algorithm that can look at this kind of behaviour and, within seconds and with decent accuracy, IP-ban the ring leader and all their followers. Because if you haven’t got that then, as so often in our high technology age, you need human moderators to be on-call and available to review this stuff as it’s happening. A ban hours after the event is, in Twitch’s case, no solution at all for what’s going on.

It may also be an idea to stop channels from broadcasting other channels, which is against Twitch’s Terms of Service anyway. Whether you’re commentating or bullying, streaming someone else's hard work is bullshit and shouldn’t exist.



While we wait for Twitch to act, all that decent-minded people can do is support women. I can guarantee that if you know a woman who has talked out loud about games, streamed them, wrote about them for a living, created content about them, played them as a hobby, then you know someone that’s probably been the subject of sexual harassment and bullying.

The hate women get online for being involved in games is vile, and anyone you know may be drowning in an ocean of abuse or dwelling on that one time someone said something so offensive about their gender they can’t forget it. We cannot allow scum like the #JazzBoys to dictate the way women interact with video games or sites like Twitch.

Support women as they join an industry that welcomes them with open arms, but does nothing to shield them from what’s through the door. Defend women when they share something they’ve created, and the haters bring the focus back to their gender. Protect and help women when they cower away from the things they love the most, because some fucked-in-the-head boys think it’s fine to livestream sexual harassment for laughs. Support women in this industry, and kick against the pricks.

I’m not the first victim of these attacks, and I won’t be the last, but you can be damn sure I won’t be silent about it. It’s all very well for Twitch to talk about behaviour it won’t tolerate, but the simple problem is that those words are meaningless when your product is enabling it. Get on the right side of history, and shut these wankers down.

*UPDATE: His channel has now been reinstated, with my bullying broadcast sitting proudly on his profile page. I have contacted Twitch Support for advice, but this message has been left unanswered for a week now.

It seems to be a problem in general with Twitch. I had no idea: https://kotaku.com/harassment-livestreams-on-twitch-are-multiplying-and-ea-1797767263

Earlier this week Kotaku UK ran an article from Charleyy Hodson about the sexual harassment she recently faced on Twitch while livestreaming in the site’s IRL category. Everyone seems to agree there’s a problem, but it’s not so easy to find consensus on how platforms like Twitch should be tackling it. Given the focus of many online platforms on creating automated mod tools, we thought we’d run an experiment. How easy is it for a human to track down Twitch accounts that either focus on, or regularly engage in, verifiable instances of targeted harassment on the platform?

As it turns out, incredibly easy. And that’s without any access to Twitch’s support accounts or report logs.

We spent 90 minutes looking for harassment and were able to identify and document 25 accounts on Twitch that regularly engage in harassment of other users, either via in-stream chat or by re-streaming people’s livestreams and commenting on them. Every one of these accounts is still active at the time of publishing, though we’ve passed our findings on to Twitch support.

How did we find so many so quickly?

Depressingly, most of these harassment-focused accounts were found by looking at Twitter users who had tweeted at Twitch’s official support account about their harassment. These users received no public response, and their harassers remain on Twitch. People were giving Twitch the exact information we used, and within minutes of investigating each case we’d found clear proof of what they were flagging.


Twitch archives the chat on livestreams. If you know when harassment took place, you can find the accounts behind it from the chat. From there, you can check each user’s page and further evidence of their behaviour is right in front of you, particularly for those users livestreaming their harassment of others.

In 90 minutes we found users threatening to rape women, users mocking disabilities, users throwing around homophobic and transphobic slurs, users spamming sexually explicit comments at streamers, users threatening to doxx streamers mid-stream, and users harassing the followers of streamers to quit their channel.

Of the 25 accounts we found, seven of them had engaged in livestreaming their harassment of other Twitch users on the IRL section of the site. Of those users, all of them had streamed harassment since the start of August. Most of these channels featured between five and ten videos in the IRL section of the site. It’s all still available for the public to watch.

People often discuss human moderation as if it’s some impossible task, like the sheer volume of traffic that a service like Twitch handles is too much for even an army to handle. Is that really true? It’s not Kotaku UK’s job to moderate Twitch, but in 90 minutes we’ve seemingly done more to look into information sent to the company’s support account over the last few weeks than anyone at Twitch itself.

We contacted Twitch earlier today for comment, before publication of the Charleyy Hodson story, and have subsequently followed-up with calls. So far the best we’ve got back is a brief holding statement promising a comment at a later time.

Twitch does have a report function on its site. It does seem to respond, sometimes, to these reports — though in the case of Ms. Hodson’s harasser, the account was suspended and then, bizarrely, re-instated. This all suggests that Twitch needs to start taking harassment in general, and in particular the livestreaming of it, much more seriously. Responding to users in a timely manner would be a start. We found these harassers easily and without any access to Twitch’s own support tools, and weeks later their accounts are still active in every case. Which suggests, frankly, that dealing with this problem is not a priority for the streaming giant.

Good thing that's not a problem we have to deal with here

 

[Fried Food]

Bunch of loser degens that can't survive in society

 

[PSKnown]

Lol, the banhammer. Keep that stuff away from here.

 

[Permanently A]

A whole group dedicated to bullying disabled people. What pieces of shit.

 

[see5harp]

I would publish their names and out them “IRL.” Guarantee you this shit gets cleaned up real quick.

 

[kess]

The OP was banned for this post?

 

[cirrhosis]

The OP was banned for this post?

Yeah, wow.

 

[Croatoan]

Ban them from your stream? I realize this is an issue with small twitch streamers who don't have mods. I have made most of my friends mods so that whenever one of them is watching I have a moderator that can ban on site.

I am not sure what to do about this other than banning. It sucks.

 

[Mohonky]

I find it ironic; Holywood going down the shitter with the years worth of harassment claims, that wanker photographer Terry Richardson or whatever his name is just got dropped in the past week by numerous magazines after years of sexual harassment, numerous Tech / Gaming companies and developers getting exposed with nothing being done....

Marilyn Manson finds out a few days ago about an incident with Twiggy and a former GF and Manson dumps drops his ass within hours. Americas public enemy number one in the 90s and early 00s quicker on the ball than any of them.

 

[Anion]

Just band them from twitch. So disgusting

 

[Theosmeo]

Wait why did this thread get shut down? it's a gaming related issue

 

[Palliasso]

The OP was banned for this post?

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

 

[Subpar Spatula]

Wait why did this thread get shut down? it's a gaming related issue

It veers too far into social discourse.

 

[Krixeus]

Good thing that's not a problem we have to deal with here

 

[jufonuk]

Poor mods must be run ragged with all the imploding accounts, not sarcasm just an observation.

Random threads pop up and either it’s legit , but mostly it’s some kind of account suicide or necrobump madness

 

[doctorcdcs]

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

huh

 

[CharmingCharlie]

huh

I imagine the op of this topic and the other topic posted these then requested a ban so it would look like the mods here were banning people for posting this kind of news and get a "OMGZ da mods are worse than nazi's and stiffling all discussion".

 

[Theosmeo]

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

Really? the only thing i found in their post history were these two posts and another thread on a similar issue: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=252876598&highlight=#post252876598

They havent said anything else since the 20th though

 

[Palliasso]

Really? the only thing i found in their post history were these two posts and another thread on a similar issue: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=252876598&highlight=#post252876598

They havent said anything else since the 20th though

In this case, "requested a ban" = "posted inappropriate material in a suicide thread". The offending post of his was deleted, as is our policy in these instances.

 

[Omegasquash]

Really? the only thing i found in their post history were these two posts and another thread on a similar issue: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=252876598&highlight=#post252876598

They havent said anything else since the 20th though

Thinking the same thing. I didn't read the entire quotes from OP, so maybe it was buried in one of them?

 

[Theosmeo]

In this case, "requested a ban" = "posted inappropriate material in a suicide thread". The offending post of his was deleted, as is our policy in these instances.

Thank you for the clarification

 

[tkscz]

I imagine the op of this topic and the other topic posted these then requested a ban so it would look like the mods here were banning people for posting this kind of news and get a "OMGZ da mods are worse than nazi's and stiffling all discussion".

I would hope not. This is a serious issue they posted. I hope they wouldn't go to another forum just to say "LOOK! I GOT BANNED FOR POSTING HARASSMENT!" Just not a cool thing to do.

 

[see5harp]

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

I really hope that wasn’t intentional because that’s some bitch ass behavior. Man some of y’all need to take a deep breath.

 

[jaybe00]

Thought we were sticking to game discussion for a period of time?

 

[Revolutionary]

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

lol I was wondering why they would post the suicide thread immediately after this one.
I honestly didn't even think of this possibility. Just wow. These are the kind of people I want off the site so good riddance.


As for the topic at hand, Twitch seem to be completely hands off as far as policing goes. This kind of behavior (streaming yourself harrassing others) is vile, though.

 

[kess]

Thought we were sticking to game discussion for a period of time?

Gaming is a mirror of society, so good luck with that.

 

[Permanently A]

In this case, "requested a ban" = "posted inappropriate material in a suicide thread". The offending post of his was deleted, as is our policy in these instances.

That's legit keikaku from him

 

[CornBurrito]

Thought we were sticking to game discussion for a period of time?

Aren't esports games?

 

[tkscz]

Thought we were sticking to game discussion for a period of time?

This is games related. Male or Female, no one should feel unwelcomed from eSports and streaming. Sexual harassment shouldn't be happening in these communities.

 

[kess]

This is games related. Male or Female, no one should feel unwelcomed from eSports and streaming. Sexual harassment shouldn't be happening in these communities.

It should be perfecrly clear how morally insidious "only gaming" posts really are.

 

[jaybe00]

Seems more about sexual harassment than games, esports just happening to be the context where it occurred. But I think you guys can figure out the difference and prefer to be coy about it.

 

[Pai Pai Master]

Seems more about sexual harassment than games, esports just happening to be the context where it occurred. But I think you guys can figure out the difference and prefer to be coy about it.

Most women in the games industry or who take part in games as a hobby in public spaces are victims of sexual harassment. You can't separate the two.

 

[see5harp]

When it is about legit bad behavior, I don't understand why we can discuss that. I don't know how anyone could seriously be okay with that type of behavior, regardless of your political viewpoints. What type of idiot would even spend the time to get a group of people together with the sole purpose of harassing some person doing a puzzle? How is that even a worthwhile activity?

 

[jaybe00]

Most women in the games industry or who take part in games as a hobby in public spaces are victims of sexual harassment. You can't separate the two.

Likely most women in and out of the games industry are recipients of unwanted sexual advances. Do we need a post for everyone slighted?

 

[Rushersauce]

Lol, the banhammer. Keep that stuff away from here.

NeuGaf indeed.

 

[Resolution]

The OP requested a ban in another thread, possibly in an attempt to manufacture controversy over this one.

I read his post history and he did not even say anything about wanting to get banned

 

[Carpe Carnim]

Likely most women in and out of the games industry are recipients of unwanted sexual advances. Do we need a post for everyone slighted?

"Stop shining a light on the septic tank I'm swimming in"

 

[Pai Pai Master]

Likely most women in and out of the games industry are recipients of unwanted sexual advances. Do we need a post for everyone slighted?

I guess you can continue to stick your head in the sand if you'd like. You could just not read or respond to sincere threads that shine a light on how pervasive sexism is in the games industry and culture.

Literally nothing changes by ignoring an issue.

 

[jaybe00]

I guess you can continue to stick your head in the sand if you'd like. You could just not read or respond to sincere threads that shine a light on how pervasive sexism is in the games industry and culture.

Literally nothing changes by ignoring an issue.

Seems more Off-topic though rather than Gaming and I'd rather not see Off-topic posts in the Gaming section. I don't mind taking the time to call out that it should be categorized in the appropriate location to clean up the quality of what is actually posted in Gaming.

 

[krov87]

I read his post history and he did not even say anything about wanting to get banned

He posted a nsfw thread so it was deleted

 

[Panther2103]

I read his post history and he did not even say anything about wanting to get banned

It was a super deliberate post on another thread about suicide. It's weird, I wonder if it was the intention to get controversy about this thread. Kinda weird.

 

[Angelus Errare]

Likely most women in and out of the games industry are recipients of unwanted sexual advances. Do we need a post for everyone slighted?

You don't have to post in these threads. No one is making you.

 

[Wireframe]

Shoutouts to the mod team working with a skeleton crew. Much appreciated!

 

[jaybe00]

You don't have to post in these threads. No one is making you.

Or I can speak up on the things I don't like. Would you rather I be complicit?

 

[HStallion]

Likely most women in and out of the games industry are recipients of unwanted sexual advances. Do we need a post for everyone slighted?

After decade's of silence for the most part I hope we never stop hearing about it until things actually and permanently change... which who knows if that will ever happen.

 

[Ryan_MSF]

In this case, "requested a ban" = "posted inappropriate material in a suicide thread". The offending post of his was deleted, as is our policy in these instances.

Can't have discourse without making your boss look bad eh

you're just as scummy as he is at this point

 

[hodgy100]

My flatmate works in the industry. And while at a industry party some guy walked up behind her and whispered "I want to put my babies inside you" and then repeatedly aproached her through the the night despite telling him to do one.

 

[formasymphonic]

Or I can speak up on the things I don't like. Would you rather I be complicit?

If you understand this, then you should understand why people keep feeling the need to keep raising issues like the prevalence of harassment in the first place.

 

[Ri'Orius]

Obviously the vast majority of the events mentioned in these posts are awful, but I have a question about this one:

One professional Call of Duty player randomly slid into my DMs a while back to ask if I was single, then proceeded to say I was "gorgeous, educated, and adventurous." He then followed this up with, "You aren't a bum like 99 percent of females in any esports community." Thank you for the unwarranted validation, my friend. Let me lay this out for you right now: Friendliness does not equal permission.

Is the second half of this exchange (ragging on women) the only problem here? Or is hitting on her at all considered harassment?

Because while on the one hand I understand that it can suck getting unwanted attention (and the gender imbalance in these sorts of communities can get overwhelming), as a lonely single guy it always feels like any sort of advance I might consider making could be problematic.

What sort of permission do I need to approach a woman?