This is a weird situation.
A big part of why I've gravitated almost solely to Gaf for gaming news/discussion over the last few years is BECAUSE it has such a low proportion of/tolerance for gross shit (e.g., gamergate). There's literally almost no other place on the internet w/ such breadth and depth of discussion that's so relatively clean.
Given that, it's totally understandable that so many gaffers have reacted so strongly to the possibility that the site founder is a creeper/doesn't always comport himself in the most gentlemanly manner toward women.
This is a unique (and mostly good) cultural moment in that there's a critical mass of women coming forward and calling out truly gross (and often criminal behavior) from men in power, and we're not just brushing it under the rug. Of course these sorts of cultural movements will sometimes have unfair collateral damage, but surely that pales in comparison to all the damage women have suffered at the hands of nasty men.
One thing I'm a little wary of is collapsing the personal and the societal -- stuff like what Harvey Weinstein and his ilk have done definitely deserve a hearing in the court of public opinion (and very obviously and probably more importantly serious legal consideration as well).
But a lot of questionable behavior is still far from rape/assault/serious harassment. I'm not sure the court of public opinion is best suited to adjudicate messy, local, personal situations where there's no clear crime (nor accusation of crime) and the details are hard to clear. If I were friends w/ Tyler or people he's friends w/, his behavior w/ the woman in question would totally be fair game for discussion. We'd probably say things like "damn, going up on a drunk lady in the shower? Creeper move...." and "what's up w/ her marriage that she was on some epic drinking one-on-one road trip w/ another guy? Is she in an open relationship? Was she giving him vibes?" We'd know something about the people involved, and have a better sense of who trust, what actually happened, and we'd use the soft power of social context to try and address the situation "I don't think I can hang out w/ him anymore..." or "dude, don't date that guy you're asking for drama..." Whatever. Surely almost every adult has had similar situations/discussions in their friend group.
But because I take the alleged behavior by Tyler (assuming for now it's true) to be not that rare (not saying it's not creepy or somewhat inappropriate), it's not clear to me that the absence of such behavior should be a criterion for interacting w/ a cultural institution. Like, there is a vanishing probability that you couldn't find examples of equally questionable behavior among the the leadership/influential people in literally ANY cultural institution. This will surely be the case for ResetEra, when it comes online. Is it believable that none of the folks involved will have never: kissed someone w/out first asking, put some kind of soft social pressure on someone to get a date, had an awkward frisson w/ someone in another relationship that got a little messy/weird, cheated on someone, made comments w/ friends that might come off as insensitive, etc.? No, it's not.
None of that excuses creepy weird behavior, but there needs to be cultural space to recognize the difference between serious crime (rape, assault, patterns of harrassment) that should be dealt w/ at the public level, and creepy/juvenile/immature shit that should be dealt w/ at the personal level. Because no cultural institution will survive if we have a hard criterion against the existence of any of that.
The fact is, if Tyler actually raped/assaulted/harrassed someone, didn't take no for an answer, went out of his way to creep on people who he WASN'T already involved in a complicated relationship with, that would rise to my personal criterion of not wanting to support a product he was involved in. But absent that, I don't really feel like I even should be thinking about, or have an opinion on, his messy interpersonal shit. As the woman who posted the allegation on Facebook has subsequently said, she didn't even want it to go public. She thought it was creepy (and if her story was true, it is), and she shared it with her friends, which would seem to be the right context for airing creepy-but-non-criminal stuff.
I'm an old-school de Beauvoirian feminist. That is, I fundamentally reject objectification of others (male or female) as a precondition for social interaction. But I can't see that tanking anything where someone involved has done what Tyler was accused of comes close to meeting the categorical imperative. It's a sure road to burn-it-down chaos in all corners of life. Some of the most gleeful voices over Neogaf's implosion have been just those chaotic hateful voices (because, potentially ironically, they were expelled from here for being disrespectful toward women).
All that said, my interest in Neogaf was the community. If they go somewhere else, I'll go somewhere else. If they stay here (and further issues don't come to light and the site isn't overrun by the garbage that used to be kept out), I guess I'll stay here.
