I suppose that title doesn’t really do much for you if you haven’t heard already. Allow me to clue you in.
So recently, a YouTube user under the alias of KSIOlajidebt made a video detailing his wacky adventures at Eurogamer, where he would say outlandish things to put people in an awkward situation, much like many other videos he has done in the past. Now the video itself is nothing spectacular but because of a particular 5 seconds, gaming journalists have exploded, starting an online witch hunt for the man in question- who from this point we’ll be calling from his real name, JJ.
The 5 seconds in question? Well, JJ approached a booth babe and asked her if he could motorboat her. She said yes, he asked again to confirm it, she once again gave the go ahead and he plunged his face into her bosom. After this video was released, there have been outcries of this being an example of “sexual assault”. The first charge was lead by an article on gameranx, written by one Ian Miles Cheong, spouting about trigger warnings and such.
Now I don’t know about you but I’m pretty sure an assault is without consent. The woman herself, named Brandy Amy Brewer, gave consent and has confronted the author of the article about it. She said that there is no issue as she said it was okay and that his article was wrong, misleading and insulting to her intelligence. The reply that she received was that apparently the article was never about her, despite no one else being even so much as touched by JJ- at least not directly.
What follows this is a string of comments on twitter about how that, even though she did consent, that doesn’t matter and it was still assault. Her opinion on the matter is irrelevant, due to her “indoctrination into the male patriarchy”.
Now of course, we all know where this attitude of holier-than-thou, pseudo-feminism has come from. Events such as the Jennifer Hepler controversy, the comments made against Felicia Day on twitter and most recently, Anita Sarkeesian’s “Tropes Vs Women in Video Games”. I’m not saying that there was no harassment taking place in those examples, in fact some of the cretins of the gaming community have crawled out of the floorboards once more to make gamers look bad. Still, this time it’s just ridiculous and incredibly backwards.
We’re at a point now where even the victim of a supposed crime has no say because she has been “brainwashed”, meaning that her consent is literally meaningless. This just seems insulting to not only Brandy but women everywhere and really, seems more misogynistic than the video these journalists are criticising. To make things worse, plenty of these people, Cheong included, are ranting on about how much of a victim they have become because of this.
I won’t deny it, besides that incident, there are some rather distasteful samples of speech that JJ directs at women gamers. The thing is, those incidents were not what caused this fuss. At the most, they are sexual harassment, not sexual assault. Still pretty bad but not worth the outrage that this video has caused.
Since the posting of the video, JJ has released an apology on twitter for offending those groups. He has also been banned from any future Eurogamer events.
In a nutshell, yes, plenty of gamers need their perspective of gamers readjusted and yes, we have a long road to get there but that doesn’t excuse putting down even the victim to establish an apparent feminist dogma.
