First of all, thanks for participating in the discussion and you very polite tone, it's much appreciated. I'd like to give you an answer as to why all this is happening, but it's a rather complex problem that is not easy to boil down into a single post. I'll try my best to make it somewhat palatable.
From my point of view, there is some kind of
McCarthyism that's being cultivated by radical left ideologies. It's definition describes quite aptly what you've been experiencing:
The cognitive framework constructed out of notions of radical feminism, intersectionality, critical theory (not critical thinking), the progressive stack and identity politics is creating a tribalistic group-think mentality that is highly divisive and extremely retributive. In these closed-minded communities, anybody who's deemed not being ideologically pure enough is met with utmost hostility and quickly ostracized. This created an atmosphere of fear, that makes it impossible to engage with these notions in a critical manner, thus further radicalizing its members.
This extremist mindset that's being cultivated on English-speaking campuses is slowly seeping into hobbyist communities through politicization efforts by members of these close-knit circles. They often seek to abuse the vulnerabilities of minority groups in order to weaponize them for their own political gains. The reason why these ideological groups proliferate so rapidly is because they divide people by easily identifiable external characteristics, like gender, age, disabilities, skin-color, personal pronouns or ethnicity. They operate on the premise that everybody who belongs to these ingroups through one or several of these characteristics is put into a status of victimhood, i.e. the oppressed, while everybody else belonging to the outgroup is considered the perpetrator of some kind of sexism, racism, homophobia, abelism, ageism or islamophobia, i.e. the oppressor.
This creates a very black-and-white '
us vs. them' mentality that makes it a moral obligation to '
punch up', which means to dehumanize, to shame, to silence and to violate anybody who could be perceived as the opposition. These groups emanate an
extreme sense of belongingby providing a positive feedback loop to those acting upon their moral obligations. Hence why it '
feels good' if you engage in these kinds of activities by
shunning and vilifying those who do not belong. Even more so, these groups fabricate the hysterical persecution-complex that if you do not act on these self-righteous principles, you
literally risk dying.
If you think I am exaggerating, take a quick look at what happened to
Nicholas Christakis at Yale,
Bret Weinstein at
Evergreen,
Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto or
Lindsay Shepherd at Laurier. If you want to know more about the ideological underpinnings of these radicalized movements, I recommend
Benjamin A. Boyce who does a really good job
accounting and investigating these happenings from an academic and reasoned point of view. Of course there's also the interviews with
Weinstein,
Peterson,
Jonathan Haidt,
Camille Paglia,
Sam Harris and many many more. There's also this academic yet uplifting lecture by
Gad Saad on how political correctness is stifling the exchange of ideas.
Now for the sake of the argument, let me add that I'm not bashing the left. In the past, the religious right applied much of the same methodology, albeit for different political reasons. Be it the aforementioned McCarthyism,
creationists or other religious fanatics like the Westboro Baptists Church and the lesser known
Gloriavale Christian Community. There is also the
Jesus Camp,
Tipper Gore and Bill Maher's comedic yet comprehensive documentation
Religulous. It's just that the the ideological outgrowths that are making the news nowadays have been cultivated among the left. Much like the right was mostly blind for the authoritarian tendencies within their own political circles, the left seems to have a blind spot for the growing radicalization within its own ranks. They are slowly waking up to that fact, but not without much criticism from the opposition shining a light upon these problems. Hence why diversity of thought and the presence of opposition is a necessary social and political mechanism in order to keep people from going off the deep end.
It's not some grand conspiracy, just another form of mass hysteria accelerated by the interconnective power of social-media. Through the notion of
intersectional feminism and identity politics,
Anita brought much of the same
ideological baggage to the
gaming community. It's not hard to see since she cites the same literature, uses the same vocabulary and promotes the same ideological core values. It's only natural that most gamers reacted strongly to that kind of rhetoric. It has nothing to do with misogyny or any kind of phobia, it's just how multi-pluralistic democracies tend to auto-correct themselves. Unfortunately for many young gamers Anita was their first contact with feminism and uncritically supported by the gaming press, she has largely poisoned the well for any kind of reasonable debate pertaining to the representation of women in video games. It also lead to the side-effect that other feminist voices were swept under the rug, like Camille Paglia, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Erin Pizzey and yes even Christina Hoff Sommers. I take umbrage to the fact that the gaming press propped her up as the single voice of feminism in video games, while either completely ignoring other feminist voices, labeling them as fake-feminists or borderline
smearing and
misrepresenting them.
Anyway, my argument is not whether Anita is still popular or not and honestly, I don't give a rat's ass about how many likes, views or followers she has. She's fallen down
railing against butts in video-games, so make of that what you want. My argument is about what she and her company has introduced into the gaming community, a particular set of far-out core ideologies that have torn the community asunder. The mindset that I've been trying to explain above is still going strong among colleges, certain gaming communities and internet personalities. There's no denying the fact that there is still a particular subset of very vocal and aggressive ideologues among the gaming community that's constantly out for blood and honestly, that kind of mindset frightens me.
What angers me the most is how these social authoritarians claim to speak for all individuals of the social group they seek to represent. They prey on the emotional vulnerabilities of those who oftentimes feel excluded in order to prop up their ranks. They then proceed to make
outlandish demands in order to underline their '
otherness' only further isolating these groups from the rest of society. It's a vicious cycle that does incredible damage to the public perception of these minority groups essentially reinforcing their isolation. The demand to be treated differently is in direct contradiction to their wish for inclusivity.
Cult-like groups often behave in the same manner. They identify the outside world as a threat in order to strengthen the social cohesion between its members by making people afraid to leave the group. Hence why they also react very strongly if outside forces are penetrating their domain. By principle, that's what '
safe spaces' do to you. I agree that safety is a
basic human need but these spaces are your homes, your friends, your partners, not the public domain.
It's as you say, if you treat people the same as everybody else, that's when they can feel truly integrated. People don't want to be obsessively reminded of how different they are, because that's when alienation effects appear. Of course, any community should strive to be as accommodating as possible, that's why most social groups reduce adherence to a simple set of common denominators. For the gaming community it's the shared interest in games, for sports-fans it's a specific sport, for interest groups it's a common policy and for your work-group it was a professional task. You simply cannot expect a whole social group to bend to every specific individual need, that's not how socialization works. Like, it's fine if you express your needs and discuss differences, but it's not fine to make demands through social extortion by going "
do/say X, or you're an -ist and -phobe".
What intersectionality and identity politics do is basically introducing
more and more differences, further
balkanizing the gaming community. Because now you have gamers not only identifying themselves as gamers, but also as male/female, black/white, left/right, hetero-/homosexual, cis/trans and any combination in between, essentially splintering the community into smaller and smaller tribes that tend to become very hostile to each other because everything outside of your ingroup is considered evil. If we take the GAF exodus for example, we now have gamers who basically divide the community into two camps, the 'alt-right GAF' and the 'progressive left ResetERA' and that's what these ideologies do to ya. It goes without saying that that's not how diversity works.
That's why I'm happy to see people disagreeing with me, no matter if I approve of their arguments or not. Because that's when I know that I'm part of a healthy community. Sorry for the lengthy replay, but there is a lot to unpack in order to kinda maybe explain what's going on.