Gamergate and Masculinity

Five months have passed since a rogue tweet by Adam Baldwin gave form and fuel to the misogynist pyre of “Gamergate”. It took a month for a million tweets to accrue to the hashtag, as many as 100,000 a day. One estimate made two months in put the participants in the “movement” at 10,000 unique members. In a world that contains a reported 700 million PC gamers (without factoring in consoles or “casual” gaming), that’s a drop in the ocean. Gamergate is perhaps most interesting as an example of how easy it is to build social cohesion in the modern era; it shows us that hashtags can instantly instantiate “movements”. These 10,000 are a lockstepped phalanx of concerted dudebros, mounting a Thermopylae-like defense of masculine privilege.

Let’s talk about gamers and masculinity.