If You Want To Understand Gamergate, Look No Further Than The McEnroe-Serena Williams Dust-Up

Gamergate is basically the McEnroe-Williams dust-up. Behold the lefties and lefty journalists madly spinning McEnroe's comments into sexism (or "misogyny"...'sexism' is passe because there's anti-male sexism too.) McEnroe was 100% right. His critics are 100% wrong. And yet they are undaunted. They are convinced that his entirely true comments--comments he made only because prompted to by Lulu Garcia-Navarro's ridiculous prompting--have to be sexist. And they're willing to just flat-out make shit up in order to prove it.
   Now... Imagine that the issues were more complex, and not easily mastered in 30 seconds. And imagine that a chorus of drooling jackass McEnroe supporters decided to start harassing Williams because of the incident. (Actually to make the cases really parallel, you'd have to also assume that Williams was a terrible person and kiiiinda deserved it...). And imagine that Williams herself were unscrupulous, and exaggerated the harassment as a means to career advancement. And imagine that a few other vaguely Williams-like female tennis pros were similarly unscrupulous, and they got into the act as well...
   And what you'd have then is basically Gamergate. It was not a "campaign of harassment" against women in gaming--though there was, undoubtedly, harassment involved. It was, first and foremost, a backlash by gamers against shitty, incestuous, politically correct games journalism. But, as we know, one shouldn't quarrel with those who buy ink by the barrel... Shitty games journalism struck back by painting Gamergate as inherently and primarily misogynistic. Since nobody outside that world knows nor cares what's going on, and the kinds of guys who categorize themselves as gamers don't matter, socially speaking...well, the lie stuck.
   For the record, I wouldn't characterize myself as a gamer. I play video games sometimes--but it's not a community I identify with. So I have no independent reason for defending them on this.
   Gamergate is one of the reasons I've come to fear bias in journalism.  Another reason is the bullshit promulgated about the UNC academic AFAM scandal...which, as it turns out, sells way, way, way more papers if you tell people that it was about cheating and athletics... But I'm not going to get into that one right now.

[God, Vox is dreck.]