Annemunition, a variety streamer who plays games like Rainbow Six, PUBG, God of War, and Overwatch, was playing Rainbow Six in her off time last week, away from the sometimes pressurized environment of her Twitch channel. The people she was playing with had no idea who she was, but they knew she was a woman, and that’s all they needed to know. Over the course of several rounds, they laid into her with a series of increasingly vile insults, calling her everything from “gamer girl” to “tranny bitch.” She continued to play like normal, dying in some rounds and clutching others for her team. When she did well, one guy said she stole his kill. When she did poorly, they used that to justify their attacks. “We’re not being like this because we don’t like women,” said one of the men. “We’re being like this because you’re shit, by the way.”
“Are you playing the right video game, miss?” the same man said later. “This isn’t like League Of Legends where you can just flash your titties on stream. It takes skill.”
“I hope you die,” another man said immediately afterward.
Annemunition kept her cool and finished the game. Then she decided to make an example of the people involved. She posted a video of the incident to her Twitter.
“‘Why don’t you use voice chat?’ ‘Why can’t I find a girlfriend who plays video games?’ ‘Why do you mute people who ask you if you’re a girl?’ Gee, I dunno,” she wrote.
The response was huge. As of now, the video has over half a million views and nearly 2,000 comments, some of which share similar online horror stories. Annemunition told Kotaku in an email that she posted the video to make a point. This is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened to her, she said, and if it’d been during a stream, she would’ve just muted them. Since she was on her own, though, she decided to see how the situation would play out if she did nothing except make useful comments and help her team.
“As you saw in the video, that’s all it took for them to devolve into toxicity,” she said. “While I understand everyone, of all genders and backgrounds, can often be the subject of toxicity online, I really feel like people underestimate just how bad it can be for women or people who are recognized as ‘other’ over voice comms.”
She added that streamers often feel a pressure to just roll with the punches when it comes to verbal harassment or other serious issues, but she worries about the kind of example that sets.
“I feel like there are a lot of expectations for streamers not to complain about anything ever and that we should just be positive and ‘good vibes’ only,” she said. “When these types of things happen, I just think about all the young people (boys and girls) who experience this type of abuse online and don’t have the tools to stand up for themselves other than to mute people and pretend everything is fine.”
After Annemunition posted the video, one of the players who’d given her gallons of shit tried to apologize. In a sense. “I am extremely sorry for the way you feel, ” he wrote in a tweet from an account that’s since been deleted. “[K]now that the words I used were meaningless and have no substance.”Annemunition, a popular Twitch streamer with over 300,000 followers, was just trying to be a decent teammate and call shots in Rainbow Six Siege. Then, over voice chat, came the questions: “Are you a man or a female?” And the accusations: “You stole my fucking content. You’re shit at the game. Get out.”
“I appreciate that you want to apologize,” Annemunition wrote back. “But man, you went HARD just because you heard a woman’s voice… You called me a ‘fucking tranny bitch’ and told me to kill myself. Over nothing. All I did was exist.” However, she went on to write that she sincerely hopes the guy learns from this and wants to better himself.
“I don’t necessarily want to crucify people when I feel like there’s the potential for them to walk away from the situation thinking ‘Wow, I messed up. I said something really awful and it came back to bite me. I won’t do that again,’” she told Kotaku, explaining why she chose to respond so kindly to an apology that was dodgy at best. “I wanted him to understand the gravity of his actions and the fact that words can be hurtful and that your actions have consequences.”
In online games, she continued, people can tell others to kill themselves and face no real repercussions—or at least, not the sort of repercussions that’d convince them to cork it for more than a handful of matches. Meanwhile, the people being harassed are encouraged—both by their peers and the way many games’ reporting systems work—to just shrug it off in the moment, no matter how much it’s worming under their skin and writhing around.
“Gamers have learned that they can do these things without blowback because the solution so many people suggest is just to mute them and move on,” Annemunition said.
That’s why she decided to post the video, risking even more harassment from eager-to-pounce internet mobs in the process. If nobody creates consequences for this sort of thing that are immediate and consistent, yet also impactful in a way that’ll encourage them to learn rather than doubling down, nothing will change.
“I’m just sick of sweeping this behavior under the rug and pretending it’s all fine and dandy,” she said. “It’s easy to sweep things under the rug; it’s hard to ask people to be better. Especially when so many people are just resigned to accepting the fact that online gaming and toxicity go hand-in-hand.”
“Maybe that makes me a naive fool,” she added, “but I refuse to accept that we can’t treat each other with a little more kindness.”
You go girl.
Like this is why i feel like making every game multiplayer is antagonistic towards a lot of women gamers who literally don’t have the energy to deal with possible harassment every time they want to play a game
When I was 15 I got harassed by a bunch of guys on multiplayer asking for my nudes and shit just because they heard my voice. Literally only used private voice channels from then on in Teamspeak
Also why do we constantly mock and scold women for being stupid because “dumb bitches aways think they can change a man,” when women are taught from day one that it’s our moral duty to ~fix a man~ and ~stand by your man~ to clean up his messes, both literally and figuratively, and to ignore our own discomfort and second thoughts while we do it.
How can we keep telling girls that you have to kiss the frog to get a prince, then turn around and act shocked and smug that so many women feel trapped with slimy, cold-blooded reptiles
John Boyega got racist internet hate when he was revealed as a new Star Wars protagonist
Daisy Ridley got sexist internet hate when she was revealed as a new Star Wars protagonist
Kelly Marie Tran got racist and sexist internet hate when she was revealed as a new Star Wars protagonist
and Daisy and Kelly both eliminated their social media presences for it.
idk what to even say, entitled white male Star Wars fans are absolute trash and have no place being fans of movies about hope and compassion for others.
if your focus is on having more women in computer science, you’ll find yourself surprised in 20 years when programmers have the salary, working conditions, and prestige of secretaries. the whole prestige of comp sci is that it has few women.
we’re seeing this process also in hospitals: as there are more and more men who are becoming nurses, the salaries and powers of nurses are increasing; medicine itself is being associated with women, and so people are now questioning their high salaries. same thing happened with lawyers and computer scientists and school teachers and so on.
oh no this post has gotten around to terf tumblr, too bad op’s a trans woman, fuckers
Its funny because in a sense jordan peterson is right, that womens relative increase in social status is in many shocking ways because of technological breakthroughs with birth control and abortion. Obviously being freed from forced reproduction was crucial for advancing the cause of womens liberation by freeing women from the ways that such reproduction creates dependency on men, etc.
But, because peterson is a moron and a fascist, this isn’t seen as a good thing for him. He uses this as an example of how biology means patriarchy makes sense, and says “oh hey look you have to suppress biology to overcome patriarchy so patriarchy is natural” but its like bitch fuck nature, fuck biology, yeah we overcame that shit. We made cool new technologies that have changed how biology functions because biology and nature aren’t the static things just like out there that we either ignore or comply with, they’re things we are always already participating in. Birth control is a biological modification. It is us as natural creatures interacting with natural processes. It’s not us “ignoring nature” but rather us participating in nature by changing it, which is something that most animal life does in various ways.
He’s literally just so fucking stupid and so wedded to the idea of a deterministic biology and nature outside politics somewhere, secretly haunting us through myths or whatever, that he can’t see that we are creatures who natural alter and interact with our world and that sometimes that leads to new social formations and thats not a bad thing just because it threatens his social power as a man.
“Plenty of gay guys in HS get bullied, play video games, & get rejected for dates. And yet we don’t hear about them going on killing sprees after getting turned down by a boy they like.
This is about misogyny & a society that tells men they are entitled to women’s bodies.”
“adults shouldn’t be in fandom” discourse is the funniest shit to me especially coming from 16-18 yr olds. you really think ur gonna stop liking things in the next 2 or 3 years? get real.
“adults in fandom have a responsibility towards younger fans to not be creepy and keep a respectful distance especially when the fandom in question is for a piece of media meant for a younger audience”
“there’s something inherently predatory about adults being in fandoms that also have minors and adults thus shouldn’t be allowed to participate in fandom in order to keep minors safe”
I mean, yeah, but I wish tumblr would stop acting like this is a Real Problem, and in the process ignoring the fact that teenagers don’t have any real social or structural power to keep adults out of their spaces or hobbies, while adults on the other hand have immense power to exclude young people and do so on a regular basis. go outside of places like tumblr (where demographics skew younger) for five minutes and this *should* become obvious. like do you know how often I’ve heard adults complain about the fact that there were kids at midnight premieres of the Harry Potter movies? and guess what, no theater would ever have an “under-18s-only” screening but there are PLENTY that have daily adults-only screenings of movies whose ratings in no way require it, solely because adults get pissy and entitled when asked to share space with youth. so yeah, teens who try to push adults out of fandoms are doing a shitty thing but like, context.
I think the harm in it doesn’t come from what the teenagers are actually doing because, yes, adults have always been in fandom and teenagers don’t have the structural power to keep them out but instead the messages that teenagers (and adults in their early 20s) are internalizing about what women should do when they are past 30. People who are constantly hearing “women who have non-domestic hobbies when they’re of parenting age are childish and cringeworthy” are going to have a harder time transitioning into that age in a way that doesn’t involve internalizing sexism and beating themselves up over it.
The messages can be annoying for fans over 30 but they could be more than that for girls and younger women especially when combined with the “forever young” messaging they’re also getting from the rest of society outside of fandom.
Rush's tumblr archive 