lydtheway:

In the hours before the DC GamerGate meetup, I received two phone calls and an email from the manager and owner of Local 16. They were nervous about the event. As they explained, they were facing “aggressive opposition” in the form of angry phone calls, hostile twitter chatter, and strange communications from someone named Arthur Chu.

I assured them that it would be a calm gathering of exceedingly nice people. I tried to make light of the attacks. It’s all just a prank, I said. Internet nonsense. For a moment, I worried the owner was going to cancel the get-together. (Just to be clear, GGinDC was not a formal affair. The bar offers an upstairs room to any group that can commit to running up a $500 bar tab.) When I asked the owner what he wanted me to do, he said he would appreciate it if I and others would answer the angry tweets and explain that Local 16 was a neutral party and had no knowledge or opinion about controversies among gamers. I was relieved and touched when he told me, in what I took to be a Middle Eastern accent, that he would not turn away any group from his bar. “How could I? This is America.”

I sent out a tweet making it clear that the bar was a neutral party, and I alerted others to the odd little rage campaign against our meetup. I found it all so silly. In one tweet I urged Arthur Chu to take a break from Twitter and join the party. It’s hard to demonize people while sharing a drink with them at a bar. Had he shown up, I can almost guarantee the group would have been civil to him. They were exactly as I had told the owner—calm, polite, and nice. I should also add diverse, friendly and about as remote from the cartoon villains of Mr. Chu’s imagination as any group could be.

It was a joyful gathering—Milo gave a hilarious speech and Caroline Kitchens (aka Deputy Factual Feminist) toasted all the “ internalized misogynists and neck-bearded basement dwellers” in the room. I had recently given talks at Georgetown and Oberlin—where dozens of impassioned gender activists protested my presence on campus, issued trigger warnings, and even set up “safe rooms” for anyone panicked by my arguments. I thanked the GamerGaters for not being triggered—and for making me feel so safe, so validated.

I spent the next several hours laughing, talking and taking selfies with people who felt like old friends. I can’t count the number of men and women who told me they shared my commitment to reasonable equality feminism. What they reject is today’s authoritarian, censorious third wave feminism—with its trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, and carrying on about the capitalist patriarchy. They thanked me for my many books and articles showing that one can still be a strong proponent of gender equality without buying into the madness.

By midnight, I was exhausted and heading toward the door when I noticed that everyone was filing out. I tried to make sense of it—closing time? Then word began to spread that it was a fire drill. A fire drill in a DC bar on Friday night at midnight? That would be a first. It has now been confirmed that someone sent a bomb threat. As with the many threats the media reflexively blamed on GamerGate, no one knows the source.

Many Gamers call me based-Mom. The critics of GamerGate finds this bizarre–even sinister. I think they are projecting their own frenzied mindsets onto the sweet people who came to the DC meetup. What a pity that the journalists who have caricatured GamerGaters as a misogynist hate mob were not there to meet them. The actions of Arthur Chu and his cohorts should give them pause. In the battle for the soul of gaming, they may be allied with the wrong side.”

(source)