Oh! Sorry. The attribution lines got confusing (too-similar colours) and I thought you were responding to gegil.

No troubles. And thanks for understanding.

They said “men” and “women” two times each. Without putting quotes around them. Then in the last sentence they used “male”. With quotes around it.

I wonder why the quotes were around that final usage? Surely it’s not at all a characterization of the way the toxic people refer to “males” and “females” in gaming circles…

Nah. They must have meant “male” all along and “men” was just a typo.

You mean like they used in their first sentence? Without the “scare quotes”?

I can’t speak for video games (because I loathe most of them and don’t even bother looking at them any more) but I can take a step to the side and talk about (pencil and paper) RPGs.

I started that hobby early. 1978, while it was still punk AAF and full up with the DIY ethos. Back then women were a significant fraction of the player base; I mean really, it was practically catnip as a game for theatre nerds and drama flakes, and a huge fraction of those (probably majority) were women. Hell, one of the most influential forums for game players and designers to hang out, Alarums & Excursions (still in operation last I heard!), was an APA run by a woman: Lee Gold.

But things changed from the '70s and into the late '80s until a lot of women were driven out of the public view (myself included). Pick-up games, hanging out in the games/comic shop, attending conventions … women just vanished because sexual harassment and gatekeeping and all the other obnoxious toxic masculine behaviour came to the forefront. There was a brief upsurge in the '90s with the release of White Wolf’s line (Vampire, et al), but it was still very small compared to the number of women at the beginning.

And who wants that shit in their recreation.

I still play RPGs. I still talk about them in some circles. Hell, one of my two Mastodon accounts is a gamer community. But I don’t go to conventions. I don’t hang out at gaming shops (well, OK, right now because I’m half a world away from any, but before I moved here). I don’t do pick-up games with strangers (the rule is “friends first, then the fun”; it applies to RPGs and sex both). By any metric used by people observing the hobby, I don’t exist.

But I do. And at my peak I had more RPGs (not supplements: core game rules) than most people can even name.

But hanging out with poorly-socialized men in someone else’s home? Not gonna happen.

Would you mind terribly much reading the rules for this group, please?

Some women are judgmental of the hobby. Some men are judgmental of the hobby.

There’s marketing studies of video games and show a very strong feminine presence. But as @Taleya says, they stay under the radar because a feminine voice is a magnet for the worst of the worst in male behaviour.

Backpedaled or whined about how they were attacking the “free press” for “Just Asking Questions”?

China.

What was so shattering to me was the bit that “meh, she drank voluntarily so the rape is fine”. That’s in the lawbooks.

I decided in 1999 that I would never set foot on American soil again. I heard the jackboots around the corner back then and got spooked.

This? Makes me wish I hadn’t made that decision 27 years ago. So I could make it today.

“Man” (purportedly)	Bear

The choice is clear.

I came here to type exactly that.

The #iamjanedoe movement seems to have been born out of an attempt to protect Jane Doe’s identity after an independent journalist put out a public call Monday to name her “so we can all evaluate her veracity … since her lawsuit didn’t hesitate to name and shame seven of her peers as gang-rapists.”

“Independent journalist” is usually code for “angry crank with a platform”.

So let’s name this asshole. Michael Tracey.

Let’s look over his history:

Started with the Young Turks (you know, the “leftist” outlet cofounded by this asshole). While working with them already showed his colours in how he deals with women. Citing Wikipedia:

In June 2017, Congresswoman Maxine Waters walked away from an interview with Tracey and pushed aside his hand and microphone. The incident was captured on video. Tracey said that Waters had “initiated unwarranted physical contact” and “shoved” him, but that it was “not a violent shove”.

And here you can already see the manosphere rearing its ugly head. He harrasses a woman. She pushes aside the hand he shoved in her face. He has a whiny conniption. The pattern begins: a woman did something dismissive to a man, so he freaks out.

The hypocrisy of this toad becomes more apparent when you read the next major incident:

In 2019, Tracey criticized an article by Kevin Poulsen in The Daily Beast, which revealed the identity and criminal history of a man who had allegedly created a modified video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made her appear drunk.

So apparently exposing the ID of an asshole who attacked a woman with deepfakes is bad, but exposing the ID of a rape victim is just fine, eh Mikey?

His manosphere credentials are already finely polished and we’re only at 2019.

But it’s not only women he hates and men he loves. He also apparently loves war crimes.

In April 2022, Justin Ling wrote in Foreign Policy that Tracey had questioned the authenticity of photos relating to the Bucha massacre as potential “war propaganda”.

I can already hear the bleating voices of war crime deniers. “He only said that it was potential propaganda.” We here in the trade call that “JAQing off”. Just Asking Questions. Questions meant to derail conversation. It’s never done for anything other than nefarious purposes.

But it’s OK. It’s not like he stopped hating women. That continued on:

In September 2025, Tracey was ejected from a news conference featuring survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse after Tracey questioned the veracity of Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre.

JAQing off again. This time to a rape victim. The manosphere pattern is secure.

If you have the stomach for it, just perusing the headlines of this rabid piece of manosphere shit’s Substack will show you a distinct pattern of questioning rape victims, questioning women with authority, and excusing or denying the crimes of men in power committing atrocities against women and children. (Yes, that’s an Epstein reference.) This living, walking, unfortunately still breathing pile of dysentery effluent is exactly why “Man or Bear” became a thing: bears don’t punch down on women to prop up the kings.

I’m Jane Doe from Cornell.

🫂 If you’re not in the space for it definitely don’t read it. Get better instead.

It is absolutely maddening, it is. I was ranting half the evening when I read that.

It’s a toss-up between getting the tools together to make a really good cup of tea or getting my tools together for carving a chop.

What? And make the American public suffer more from his subsequent tantrums? …

Great idea!

Wut.

“It’s actually sad because it just shows you (how) people really want to hate on women,” Nathan texted a coworker.

And you’re helping them, Melissa. Why are you helping them?