NeoGAF Implodes

I do want to take a moment to call out something that should be considered in this discussion.

This is happening in the same time-frame as the Weinstein stuff.

That doesn’t mean anything other than it’s really active in the public mind right now because of that high profile stuff, and that does tend to be a time when other people decide it’s time to speak about their own experiences. So, maybe there’s more stuff about to break loose.

I just can’t understand how the Weinstein predation was so bold and so well known, and yet… well, everybody who knew and didn’t push for some action I would consider an accomplice in later offenses. If not legally, certainly morally.

Power.

(this is supposed to be nested under what I’m replying to - but apparently I have no understanding of how to message board anymore.)

I agree with you both. Absolutely treat it as legit until proven false. But treat the person as innocent until proven guilty.

The problem with the court of social media is the you’re fucked as soon as your name is mentioned. 100,000 tweets down the pile, eventual innocence or guilt doesn’t matter because the mob already has them swinging from a tree.

The sane thing for society to do is to excercise restraint and compassion, and not light the torches and grab the pitchforks at the first spark.


A thought - given what I’ve learned about what’s going on out there in this crazy world of PUA’s and predators and shit… wouldn’t it be maybe the best idea to teach GIRLS the PUA school tactics? I would think that would make them a heck of a lot more resilient to it, confident about shooting it apart, and generally more apt to spot this sort of predator before he can even start his game. Maybe that’s the education we need to be giving… teach them “the game” so they’re immune?

It’s nothing new: the majority was silent, or at least not as vocal before, but it was exactly the same in reaction to any sort of media output or rumours.

That said, I don’t find it really appropriate to discuss the hardships of rape victims having the guts to go against their tormentor (which, more often that not, is somebody the victims know) in a NeoGAF thread. And it’s never as simple as a “game”.

Are you fucking kidding? Teach women how to to avoid predatory males? You think that a woman could learn something about PUAs? Here’s a clue. THEY KNOW. And they are fucking exhausted by it. There is no fucking counter to The Game. How about that they just want to be left fucking alone?

Imagine yourself in the same position. You hang out with a wolf pack. You know that the wolves might, at any time snap at your Achilles tendon to hobble you. But you have to hang out with the wolves. For some reason the wolves, the pack, help you to hunt. They give you warmth when you sleep. They bring you to food when you are hungry. But you don’t get the first bite. You don’t even get the second. You get the remains. The guts. And when you finally get a chance to eat you are mounted from behind by a wolf. No more food. Time to fuck.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

Please, continue.

In my perfect world, there would be no sex, no sex drive, and thus everyone would be Left Alone for the most part. But then we’d have a Children of Men type scenario, so…

I feel a big part of the problem is the vast asymmetry between male and female sex drives (3x - 5x difference) such that dudes are constantly bothering women everywhere at every opportunity in order to potentially get sex.

Screw you, evolution!

I’ll tell you what, Wumpus… now that I’m approaching 50 and all that testosterone has chilled out so I think with my brain and not my dick, I look back on my 15-30 years as just pure chemical torment. Not even sex, but about acceptance, emotional rollercoasters, the ache of just being subject to constant emotional chemistry. I don’t miss it a bit, that’s for sure.

Men aren’t alone in that. Nature wants girls to want boys too. I think males just get the worst of it. Anybody who disagrees hasn’t seen two stags gore each other to death trying to see which one can get laid.

On the other side of that, now that I’m chill, married, and comfortable with life I can actually enjoy sex.

Well I am 47 and I do not feel its intensity has subsided much.

Rich got into this beforehand, but also went someplace that you seemed to find bewildering, so I’ll take another stab.

I don’t think anyone would suggest we send young women out into the world uninformed of the many dangers for them it holds. Being aware is good, being wary is necessary. But the thing is, it’s pretty tough to be a woman in 2017 and not be intimately and utterly aware of how likely you are to be harassed, abused, or raped at some point in your life. The heart-wrenching #MeToo thing is a great illustration of how widespread those issues are, and just about every woman I know basically walks around with that terror wringing their heart 24/7.

So basically, yeah, women know. They know full well that there are way, way too many skeevy, pushy, demanding men out there desperate to take advantage of, mislead, and hurt them for their own sick needs. So just on level A here, letting them know that a subset of men has devised a new toolset for ruining the lives of women is sort of shouting at the tides.

But to go a step further, your post can easily be read as suggesting that on some level, the onus for avoiding that behavior is on women, and not on the men in question maybe just maybe not being gigantic rapey assholes all the fucking time. AKA, it has all the appearance and form of victim-blaming 101. You let the PUA creep wear you down and devalue you into weepily fucking him and being thrown out like trash when he was done thrusting away, so it’s clearly your fault.

Now, not knowing the first thing about you aside from your contributions to the GAF threads and the fact that your name’s familiar enough on some subconscious level to understand you are, in fact, one of them Old Posters (the “one of three founders” thing you dropped earlier was a total surprise to me!), I don’t have any reason to think or not think that is what you intended to say. So I’m not gonna jump up your ass for it.

But I will say that on this topic, that particular choice of words in that particular order is insensitive at least. That may not bother you, and this isn’t the kinda board where you’d be made to pay for that unlike, well, say, GAF, but I’d like to think you could take this criticism under consideration and continue the discussion thoughtfully.

And because I just spent 45 seconds trying to figure out a way to word that that didn’t sound threatening, then figured I’d failed anyway, I’m seriously not trying to be a dick to you or call you a dick. So mea culpa if that happened anyway.

@RichVR’s post, while a bit of an overreaction to @aszurom1’s fairly innocent post (I think his intention was from a good place), was in fact a very effective illustration.

And thanks to @ArmandoPenblade for taking the time to explain it a bit less vehemently.

There are so many things to consider in this discussion, that it’s a bit like walking a tightrope.

Unfortunately, asynchronous, public, text-based media is a terrible format for nuanced conversations, even when everybody involved is arguing in good faith. I’ve mostly stopped engaging in these sensitive topics as a result.

I don’t have a problem with your reply, I know you’re not familiar with me and really given the way the internet is… well, people are pretty difficult to deal with and you never know who’s going to get weird no matter what you say.

The reason I suggest that maybe we not just tell girls to be careful, don’t hang out with the wrong crowd, beware of creepy dudes, etc. and actually teach them the techniques and tactics that are taught in the actual PUA seminars should kinda be obvious, at least I thought so. Let me explain that.

Per my story, I got called a MRA pro-rape shitbag by some people. Well, I’m not pro-rape but I don’t even know what an MRA is. So I went looking. Well, there’s the “I’m a man, please don’t persecute me for it” nice guy crowd who are sort of bewildered at being constantly under assault for apparently being unaware that they’re a rape tornado that hasn’t happened yet - and then there are the PUA types. I fall into the former, but what the hell are these PUA dudes? So I started reading.

I picked up Neil Strauss’ “The Game”. I was fascinated by the grossness of it. Now, I was born in the 70s, had my 20s in the 90s, so I’m from a different place than the 2017 guy who might have been exposed to this via the internet. This is all news to me. But I used to go out with a mixed crowd, and I’m observant and I never could understand why a particular sort of guy that I found really distasteful. It’s the old “omg why are all the women I know in this groundhog day loop of dating some guido jerk who treats them like shit, then they come cry on my shoulder about it, then repeat it with the next asshole?” thing. I think unless we ARE one of those guys, the rest of us just observe this and can’t understand it. Worse, I think some “nice guys” decide that well, if that’s how the game is played… I’ll be a dickbag too.

So I’m reading this book and watching some youtube videos of PUA seminars and it’s just fascinating because I’m thinking back to everything I’d seen in the clubs and at parties and stuff - and it’s apparently effective enough to be packaged and sold as hot knowledge to be weaponized against their targets. And the more I read, the more I understand it, and the less I like it. It’s psychological manipulation boiled down to a professional stage magician level. Actually, PUA and magic tricks share a lot of commonality in that way.

Since all this understanding of the mechanics of sexual psychological manipulation as applied predatory pack hunting is 100% news to me, I would assume that average “mon and dad” out there in suburban USA don’t know it either. They can say “Honey, be careful around men” but they can’t say “Here’s how to identify when someone is trying to psychologically manipulate you by PUA tactics. Here’s what they’re teaching each other, and their terminology.” I think a young woman who knows what they’re taught formally is at a great advantage compared to her friends who just “get a creepy vibe from that guy”. The educated girl can say “Hey, I read The Game too. Negging me isn’t going to work and your insecurity and desperation are showing.” is going to fare a lot better.

When I was a kid, my parents had some friends who were professional hypno-therapist types. I was too young to care what they actually did medically with it, but I intently listened to them discussing a lot of subconscious manipulation and behavior, what made people tick, and how things like neurolinguistic programming work. Subliminal ads on TV and in magazines were the hot scandal back then, like sexual imagery hidden in ice cubes in a whiskey ad, etc, so I think that’s how that conversation got going. I was like 10, so I didn’t have a lot of context for everything - but I was a smart kid and understood the whole psychology and marketing and induced urges things about television, so I sorta got it.

Well, having some background understanding from knowing those folks as a kid, I had a perspective on the stuff I was reading and how it actually worked, even if the author didn’t. And it’s super gross, mainly because it’s so obvious, directed, and goddamn effective. But, if someone is aware of how it’s done you’re instantly aware when someone is trying to do it… and it seems like the vast majority of people simply aren’t perceptive of it at all.

Seeing PUA used like that here, it was like stepping in a time-warp, as in decades to before when I was born. So yeah, I’m with Rick on this one, you come off like not just a victim blamer, but a classic one, whether or not you intend to. And your additional explanation right up there, it’s not making it better.

Have you ever tried a different approach like say… assume that most women are told to be careful about men at the ripe old age of ten and twelve and stop trying to have men teach women how to be women and spend more time helping men teach men to be be respectful men?

If you don’t understand what I mean… you may be one of the problems.

I don’t know how you interpret that as “victim blaming”. Must be your koolaid intake.

That shit works on everybody, male and female. I’m not saying it’s the victim’s fault, unless it’s their fault for having a primate brain - because that’s the culprit here. You don’t see women going to seminars to learn how to psychologically manipulate men into being sexually taken advantage of. Men go to those, taught by other men. I said it was gross.

Explain how that’s victim blaming?

Oh, and fuck yourself Nesrie.

Is that step one or two after one of your recommended PUA classes for GIRLS?

Thanks @ArmandoPenblade. That was a good way to explain it. Women know. They live it every single day. We men generally just can’t really see it.

In a vacuum, the idea of raising awareness of aggressive and manipulative tactics is a reasonable suggestion. I would support efforts like that. But in the context of a thread on sexual harassment it comes off as focusing on the wrong party. Akin to going off on a speech about the evils of binge drinking and how we should educate people about it when someone reports they were raped in a club while drunk.

The first thing I want to say is that we’ve seen true allegations and false allegations before. In the end, folks have a right to believe what they want to believe about allegations. Public opinion is not a court of law. Allegations like these in particular have to be taken seriously, there is a massive problem with this in society, seeing #metoo pop up among a bunch of friends makes it clear.

From what I’ve seen so far, my prediction is both NeoGAF and Resetera will end up being toxic as hell. Resetera seems a lot like it’s going to be a cliquish board- gotta remember that much of the issue people had with NeoGAF was the mods, and these are the same mods. I don’t think they’ll change their behavior.

As for the issues around Tyler Malka, folks can make their own conclusion and go on that. We’ve seen true accusations and false accusations before. My own personal judgement is that he’s a bad person, based on his history and what has been said and done so far.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad this place exists so I have a good place for game talk, and I’m glad the people are good here- even the folks I disagree with heavily feel like good folks I’d want to get along with IRL. Hopefully they feel the same about me.