Geek Girls Rule! #154 – Stay Classy Penny Arcade
Yes, I know I’m taking my sanity in my hands posting about this. But hell, I’m already getting comments on the old Penny Arcade Dickwolves post telling me I need to be raped, so I got nothin’ to lose here. Don’t worry, oddly they never get through moderation.
This was the closest I could get to a wolf "Fail" picture
Yes, that’s right. I’m getting people telling me I deserve to be raped because while I defended the original comic, I pointed out that the apology comic was so full of fail and bullshit you could have used it to fertilize fields. As I said before, I happened to agree with Gabe and Tycho about the original comic: It wasn’t a rape joke, it was a joke about the morality of videogame quests. However, if you’re going to apologize, then fucking apologize, and don’t essentially negate that apology by being asshats in the final panel.
Ok, fast forward. Penny Arcade puts out a Dickwolves t-shirt. Sigh. Tasteless, tacky, whatever.
This year, prior to PAX East a scheduled guest backs out of her panels at PAX East and and posts her reason. Basically that the Dickwolves t-shirts are offensive, inflammatory and insensitive to sexual assault survivors. Your mileage on this may vary, but since this is how she feels, she has every right to back out.
In response, the Dickwolves shirts get pulled from the store. A nice gesture, accompanied by a statement by Gabe, saying that while they are leaving all the comics up, they do want everyone to feel safe at PAX,and if you’ve already bought your tickets, they’ll refund the money. Then, again, he fucks it up at the end by saying, “I’ll even put you on a list so that if, in a moment of weakness you try to by a ticket we can cancel the order.” And when a fan tweeted to him about whether it would be ok to wear his Dickwolves shirt to PAX East, Gabe responded that he’d be wearing his. Tycho has been conspicuously silent during this whole thing.
If you want the full timeline, please check out Jet Black’s post.
But, Gabe… Seriously, Dude. If you’d just shut up while you’re ahead.
Now your fans are telling female bloggers all over the web how they need to be raped, should be raped, that their rapist (if they’ve outed themselves as sexual assault survivors) should have killed them.
And Gabe’s bullshit is egging them on.
Yeah. I’ve enjoyed my times at PAX, and I’ve been ecstatic with their “no booth babe” policy. However, this past year they kind of sucked at enforcing that policy, as several vendors did indeed have booth babes, which was kind of disappointing because the year before had my hopes so high.
I don’t know if I’ll go this year. The Penny Arcade guys do a lot of good with their charity, I agree. And in the past they’ve been real supportive of female gamers. But this bullshit with Gabe is getting old. Like I’ve said before, the worst part about being a female blogger on any subject, but most especially surrounding subjects like misogyny and sexual assault, isn’t the out and out trolls. It’s the people you like and respect who demonstrate how very little they actually think of you just because you happen to be female.
For the record, I am a sexual assault survivor.
Update: The last two updates on the bottom of this page are the latest Gabe and Tycho responses. And while I appreciate the apologies, you don’t get to just decide that it’s over. I’m glad they’re urging people to reel back the hateful bullshit, but this sort of thing does still bear talking about. Because the casual misogyny which this brought to the fore is endemic in gaming of all sorts. Please see Exhibit 1: Fat, Ugly or Slutty.
Edited: Because I can’t ever remember which one’s Gabe and which one’s Tycho, so I’ll just stick with those names instead of trying to be all clever and add real names. Gah.
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