It's not about communities, it's about people who think that they can mask naked misogyny and abusive, abhorrent behavior behind a community and behind some flimsy excuses.
This is always how it's been. Always. The Jews weren't persecuted in Germany without justification. And there were always pretexts for every lynching of a black or asian person in the US. But those justifications and those pretexts always skipped more than a few steps of logic. In every case the "out group" is made to live up to impossible, unrealistic standards of perfection of which failure to live up to serves as justification for them being ostracized and segregated, nevermind that those standards aren't ever applied with the same intensity for members of the "in group".
You can't just blithely use this "oh, everyone is at fault in this whole mess, tut tut" excuse to remove the blame from the people who deserve it.
The fact is that women have long faced double standards that were impossible to live up to. Moreover, they have long faced a heightened level of abuse, especially online. This whole thing is nothing new, it's just an escalation, an intensification, for what's been going on, often without much publicity, previously. I have numerous female friends who've been avid gamers for, in some cases, decades, and they all have stories that I have not experienced. Stories of creeps, stories of unwarranted excessive abuse and intense threats of violence. I've only had one semi-serious threat made against me online in my 20 years of using the internet, but women have routinely faced such threats for years and years.
This is not at all a recent thing. Kathy Sierra spent years maintaining a low public profile due to online threats against her. She's just one of many similar examples. There is a pervasive sub-culture of misogynist assholes who have been actively fighting the influence of women in "tech", and there is an even larger group of idiots who don't realize that's what's happening and pretend like it's just a small problem or some sort of schoolyard tussle where everyone is at fault to some degree.
This is always how it's been. Always. The Jews weren't persecuted in Germany without justification. And there were always pretexts for every lynching of a black or asian person in the US. But those justifications and those pretexts always skipped more than a few steps of logic. In every case the "out group" is made to live up to impossible, unrealistic standards of perfection of which failure to live up to serves as justification for them being ostracized and segregated, nevermind that those standards aren't ever applied with the same intensity for members of the "in group".
You can't just blithely use this "oh, everyone is at fault in this whole mess, tut tut" excuse to remove the blame from the people who deserve it.
The fact is that women have long faced double standards that were impossible to live up to. Moreover, they have long faced a heightened level of abuse, especially online. This whole thing is nothing new, it's just an escalation, an intensification, for what's been going on, often without much publicity, previously. I have numerous female friends who've been avid gamers for, in some cases, decades, and they all have stories that I have not experienced. Stories of creeps, stories of unwarranted excessive abuse and intense threats of violence. I've only had one semi-serious threat made against me online in my 20 years of using the internet, but women have routinely faced such threats for years and years.
This is not at all a recent thing. Kathy Sierra spent years maintaining a low public profile due to online threats against her. She's just one of many similar examples. There is a pervasive sub-culture of misogynist assholes who have been actively fighting the influence of women in "tech", and there is an even larger group of idiots who don't realize that's what's happening and pretend like it's just a small problem or some sort of schoolyard tussle where everyone is at fault to some degree.