It's disappointing that the writer felt it was necessary to hyperbolize and make a number of definitive statements that are inherently unprovable, in addition to taking such an unnecessarily divisive stance on gender issues. I feel that doing so distracts somewhat from the core issue and makes the article less persuasive to those who would be skeptical to the topic upon beginning the article, as well as directing the discussion around the article to a more combative tone.
First off, having a main point of the article be "Many men believe women have no worth in the games industry beyond appearance." is problematic in many ways. First off, the point doesn't do anything to inform or persuade about the issue at hand. Second, the statement inherently puts men on the defensive by presuming the odds are greater that a man thinks this way rather than not, as well as telling women to assume that men view them this way more likely than not. I firmly believe that statements like this that pit the genders against one another and try to create suspicion between the genders are counterproductive and actively harmful to gender equality.
Furthermore, it is impossible to prove or measure in an objective manner. And while the examples provided in the article are pretty deplorable and clearly indicate a problem that needs addressing, they demonstrate nothing about the frequency of such attitudes of the gaming audience at large, let alone half of humanity.
Along the same lines, saying "Ive personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion." is a bone-headed and obnoxious thing to say, for plenty of reasons that should be pretty clear (and oh god I really don't want to expand on this any more), while not being necessary to illustrate the point that women get sexually-related threats more often than men do.
There are a few other statements like this in the article that weren't worth expanding on much due to having similar issues as what I listed above, but were along these lines of being controversial gender-related statements that didn't seem to serve any purpose in the article aside from being controversial.
Second, I think it's disingenuous to title the article as it is when the article doesn't really contain what is promised. From the title, I was expecting some idea of what the average woman in the games industry faces day-to-day at work, but instead we largely got a bunch of online harassment from larger public figures. I remember hearing a lot of disappointing stories and anecdotes when the #1reasonwhy thing was happening from what it was like day-to-day for some women in the games industry, but what is presented in this article is little like that. It's orders of magnitude worse. I think that if the average woman in the games industry experienced things like that from coworkers every day, either this industry would've seen huge reform some time ago or there would be no women who would be willing to work in the industry.
Again, if you approach it from the perspective of someone who is skeptical of the premise upon starting the article, they will be more likely to dismiss the content because it isn't as bad as what they may have expected from the headline. Also, for persuading these people, it would be helpful to better provide a proper frame of reference for the effects that online harassment can have, specifically on women in such a position. People inherently relate the things they read to their own experiences, and absent a proper frame of reference, online harassment can seem pretty minimal. I could easily see plenty of guys reading this, thinking along the lines of "Oh, they're just getting smacktalked by some random asshole," and thinking back to when that happened to them while playing DoTA because that's what they have to personally relate to it, and thinking "That's it? That's not so bad."
The core of the article is dealing with an extremely serious and pressing issue (anonymous online harassment) with a focus on what women might uniquely face, and this is certainly worthy of a detailed and honest discussion, but in addition to not being particularly well-written as a persuasive article for those who need persuading, it seems to me that the more pressing issue to the writer was to generate clicks with controversy. Considering the source, I'm sadly inclined to believe this is the case.
I may have laughed in the past when I was incorrectly viewing neogaf as a boy's club. I've become very aware as a result of this thread that it's just not.
and threads devoted to dissecting a woman's appearance are going to invite this sort of stuff. which is why I'm calling into question the value of those threads existing at all.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of those kinds of threads either. I'm not really sure what kind of proper discussion could take place in a thread like that.
Whenever I click on one of those threads, my reaction is usually, "Yeah, huh, I guess so. Well, good to know." and the thread gets closed. As for the replies, well, after several years on GAF, you know what you're likely to see in a thread like that.
I know the inverse discussion w/ straight women/gay guys tends to make the guys uncomfortable.