Abusive attacks on women of color tend to involve more violent language, occur more frequently, and be far more overtly racist and dehumanizing, by orders of magnitude. Twitter is a notoriously unsafe space for women, but it’s even more toxic for women of color.
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Though multiple attempts have been made to paint the Ghostbusters backlash as a product of what is perceived ( largely inaccurately) as a more general trend of fan entitlement, the nature of Jones’s harassment is very clearly and overwhelmingly a product of extreme racism that has nothing to do with the Ghostbusters franchise - or with fandom in general.Īs the only black woman prominently featured among these recent examples of diverse casting in franchise films, Jones is easily the most vulnerable target for this kind of attack. But the racist bent of the harassment aimed at Jones has been remarkably targeted and vicious. Yes, other members of the Ghostbusters cast, notably Melissa McCarthy, the only other member of the film’s central foursome active on Twitter, have also endured misogynistic harassment. Though members of those casts received their share of sniping on and off Twitter, the targeted brigading in those cases was primarily directed at boycotts of the films themselves, rather than at individual actors. The anti- Ghostbusters backlash springs from the same gatekeeping, anti-diversity impulse. Last year opened with a similar, though smaller, anti-feminist backlash against Mad Max: Fury Road from longtime fans and men's rights activists, then closed with waves of protest against the diverse cast and woman-focused storyline of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. These practices and emphasis on anti-diverse stances have merged into not only the internet’s larger alt-right culture but into other areas of geek culture as well, such as the Sad/Rabid Puppies campaign, which rigged the nominations for the science fiction/fantasy community’s fan-voted Hugo Awards. Gamergate’s tactics included "brigading" - the act of a group targeting specific subjects and strategizing ways to collectively harass or threaten them - and sustained negative focus on any media product deemed to be pandering to feminism or progressive calls for diverse representation. It overlaps with large swaths of 4chan, men's rights activism, the online atheist movement, pickup artist culture, Reddit, and Tumblr. Since then, the movement has effectively become a cornerstone of the alt-right, and still continues to influence everything from the presidential election to major tech conferences. In 2014, Gamergate - the anti-feminist harassment movement that surfaced in gaming culture and spread into larger internet culture - also fought against many gaming franchises that sought to be more diverse.
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Geek culture has witnessed Ghostbusters-style backlashes against diverse reimaginings of beloved franchises more and more frequently in recent years. Diverse franchise reboots and the spread of a geek subculture war
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That factor doesn’t fully explain Yiannopoulos’s role in the harassment of Jones, but it’s a crucial component of the culture Yiannopoulos is spearheading. Though many franchise fans have claimed to be upset for varying reasons, the most evident cause - one brutally manifested in the abuse against Jones - is sexist dislike of the all-female cast. The harassment against Jones follows more than a year of sustained backlash against the new Ghostbusters remake. Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick.