The GamerGaters, though? I’d spent two years flying under the radar of these fine, upstanding gentlemen internet terrorists. I’m no stranger to a good hate pile-on-I do work on the internet, after all, and writing for the queer community often means antagonizing some harsh critics, both without and within. When I was first alerted to the thread, I was scared.
A place that I’ve spent years researching in service of my fiction I often say it is the butthole of the internet, and I’ve spent the last four years giving the world wide web a proctology exam. A place so toxic that its creator recently tried to shut it down, calling it a “viral cancer,” and Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, decided to save it. A place on the internet that’s part of the Manosphere and also includes Pick Up Artists, Incels, and Men’s Rights Activists.
Kotaku in actio full#
It’s full of (mostly) dudes with no sense of culture or community outside their homogenous gaming forums these rootless young men long to be a part of something bigger, something greater and so, Kotaku in Action it is. It is synonymous with the alt-right (and strategically so). It’s the Reddit forum that perpetuated GamerGate, a place to coordinate targeted rape- and death-threats against women in the games industry - when a user says “Kotaku In Action Action,” it is likely to these types of activities they are referring. I struggle to explain Kotaku in Action every time I have to, because it truly defies explanation and has the many heads of a hydra collective. I often say it is the butthole of the internet, and I’ve spent the last four years giving the world wide web a proctology exam. The gamers on Kotaku in Action apparently thought it was more egregious than that - perhaps the worst offense in the entire world: that I might not be a "real nerd" at all. I’d thought my biggest crime with this piece was writing it just a bit too saccharine I was lavish with my compliments. At Autostraddle, I’d written an essay in 2016 praising one of the central targets of Gamergate for doing as much good as can possibly be done in the wake of a harassment campaign against her, and then moving on with her gosh darn life like a woman on a mission. My entire first novel? It was (and still is) about the phenomenon of weaponized nerds, radicalized young men (primarily white and western) terrorizing women over games. I’d both written about Gamergate and assigned others to write about it. I’d been the Geekery Editor at Autostraddle, a popular website primarily by and for queer women and non-binary folks, for some years. The email problem no one is talking about: mistaken identity Sorry, something weird and bad is happening right now?” We need a Kotaku In Action Action, a user typed. I don’t know, exactly, what she’d said, other than the paper didn’t work, because I was preoccupied. “Does that make sense?” my adviser asked, or something like that.
It was titled Masculinity and the Making of the Modern Nerd. I was discussing the critical thesis component required for my graduate degree, an MFA in creative writing. It was snowing pretty hard and though there was a window with some theoretical light streaming in, I felt like I was under a blanket, the flashlight of my attention pointed at a screen that I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. I was locked in my friends’ bathroom on the phone with my thesis adviser and staring at Reddit.
Kotaku in actio series#
This post is part of Me, online, Mashable's ongoing series digging into online identities.