Tech Culture and Everyday Sexism

I've finished reading Loathe at First Sight, which is packaged as a romance novel but is really a fictional look at American women in the computer gaming industry.

It's not a bad book. It reflected my own workplace, broadly speaking as a workplace in the technological sector that mainly employs younger people, 'through a funhouse mirror'. The Jira tickets, the 'deliverables' and project managers in charge of them, stand-up meetings, etc. were all familiar.

What I found less believable was that all of the heroine's projects were always ready on time; this is the exception rather than the norm in my experience. That said, I've only worked at one technological company so my ability to compare and generalize is tightly limited.

But as a romance the book rather failed, considering that what the leads know of each other is as much as someone could find out in a 10-minute conversation.

And from a psychological perspective I would say that it's frightening if people in their late twenties — as the main characters in the book are — still have such nuance-free views on personal relationships and professional behavioral standards.

(Note: I've been reading so many books lately that this one has faded in my memory a bit; sorry if I get any facts wrong.)

***

I'm not sure if the book is just written for teenagers and so it makes sense that adults think like high-schoolers, or if the book reflects the culture of the Pacific Northwest.

(I seem to remember that the book is set in Seattle, which I've never been to but is of course not that far away from Victoria and Vancouver.)

For example, I was appalled that the main character, Melody Joo, seems to dislike her colleague Asher because of his 'bro' persona and his weight at first. She is disgusted by the way he takes up room and air in their shared office space.

Even the author apparently believes that you can tell if people are 'good' or 'bad' through their appearance and mannerisms. There are finer-grained meditations about weight and other traits in the rest of the book, however; Melody herself considers that she is not thin enough, too, so that's a direct motivation to be more woke.

As an additional sign of immaturity: my mind boggled at how many times Melody missed workplace meetings on purpose, even as a project manager. Her interactions with her fairly awful boss also didn't have much decorum; there are much politer ways to satisfyingly insult people.

Outside of the work, the conspicuous consumption in the book bothered me. For example, every time we hear of a car we hear the make of the car; and at the end Melody buys herself a Fiat with a customized license plate as a sign of her success. However, Melody is also highly resentful of a few other book characters who are wealthier than she is.

But this is a mindset that's familiar to me growing up in middle class western Canada — I'm not sure if it's a Pacific Rim thing. I was happy to leave it behind, because of course it sucked me in too; and I was pretty happy when a Facebook friend who had a particularly heavy habit of seeking material happiness and never finding it, un-friended me. (As I found out after I posted a video of a song from the French Revolution, a rather amusing irony that I think is however unrelated.)

But what the book addresses first and foremost is the GamerGate controversy a few years ago. I am not well informed about GamerGate. Most of what I know of it was what I overheard and discussed with my siblings, who were regularly listening to computer game commentary on YouTube at the time. Although I did also watch a panel discussion in a Women in the World Conference broadcast from New York City a few years ago, with Anita Sarkeesian and other famous names.

***

Melody Joo works in a computer game company. Irritated by the sexist elements of games they already produce, she jokes to another female colleague in the office that they should develop a game where male strippers fend off paranormal enemies while warrior women help them out, so that women also have attractive characters to ogle. The boss overhears this and, hounded by the company's board to be more women-friendly, desperately pitches the idea to the board. To his dismay, they love the idea. For public relations reasons, he also puts Melody in charge of the project.

(The romantic hero is a colleague who's the heroine's intern. What makes the beginnings of a relationship between them less disturbing is the fact that he is the nephew of the boss; the power differential is in his favour. But the author is aware of the potential ickiness, and it is a tribute to her that I could bear to read the book: I've found that now that I'm working in a traditional office workplace, I've soured on the idea of relationships between colleagues. While I think that saying that it's 'gross' to even think of having a relationship with people whom one likes and respects is a little weird, there's just no way one wants to ruin a nice rapport by adding an unnecessary element. Aside from the chance of a power differential — and I am 100% against any relationship between people who report to each other —, the preference to keep professional stuff professional and private stuff private, and the claustrophobia of the workplace as a romantic environment, the thought of becoming fodder to office gossip is appalling too. The author agrees about the power differential aspect.)

One grievance in GamerGate was that female characters in video games are often 'eye candy,' like Lara Croft, with skimpy shorts and an ample chest. Showing women wielding guns or martial arts moves (thereby being 'strong women') while being eye candy is not necessarily the feminist valhalla, either.

I don't play many games, so neither Lara Croft nor anyone else is at the forefront of my mind. But it is a conscious choice when playing games whether to pick a male or female avatar, and whether to adapt their behaviours according to gender or not. For example, when I played Age of Empires back in the day I was quite careful to make sure that the genders were equally distributed across tasks from wood-chopping through building towers to farming.

But Loathe at First Sight argues that the sexualization of female characters is uncomfortable 'behind the scenes' for women game developers as well. In one memorable scene in the book, male colleagues who are not trying to be offensive ask for advice on how to render a female character's appearance for the 'feminist' game, using a developer's tool to adjust a character's bust size.

I wasn't entirely happy that the answer to the objectification of women seemed to be the objectification of male strippers... a phenomenon whose popularity and ethical logic I don't really understand. Presumably the author felt that because strippers are voluntarily employed to show off their physique, it is not degrading to feature them in gaming.

*

Loathe at First Sight does not address everything that was discussed during GamerGate.

It does not discuss greater representation of visible minorities in computer games, and historical accuracy. (For example, did ancient Egyptians present as White or as Black? in a game with ancient Egyptians, how should the characters look?)

Also, in GamerGate, personal relationships between game developers and game critics/journalists of opposite genders were dug up as symptoms of behaviour that compromises the industry. In the book, I don't think this is addressed as such.

(Which is fine by me. I was not really interested in hearing the salacious gossip and moral outrage about that part of the debate. It was impossible to convince myself that the soap opera antics of three to four private individuals were any of my business, and also impossible to convince myself that it was a widespread problem that needed addressing. The youth and inexperience of GamerGaters in my view made the dialogue more Manichean than it had to be; it's a little easier to be shocked and dismayed if one hasn't seen more of adult life to put everything into perspective.)

*

Aside from its relevance to GamerGate, I thought that the portrayal of online harassment in Loathe at First Sight was highly current now. 'Doxxing,' where people's private information, like addresses, are released on the internet, is practiced as much as ever. 'Swat-ting' — requesting a SWAT team to put down a non-existent violent threat at a target's home — has also been known to happen, with deadly consequences. But I haven't heard of cases lately.

The book explains well, too, how traditional police departments are helpless or indifferent when it comes to dealing with online harassment, even with online death threats. Suzanne Park's description seemed like a fair documentation; it fit exactly with what I'd heard in the roundtable discussion with main GamerGate figures.

*

Ignoring the technological job environment in e-commerce and gaming for a moment, the book was a timely read for wider sociopolitical reasons. As everyone knows, (what many people have called) an attempted coup in the United States just happened and was organized over the internet.

There's always the debate about whether to take the current American president (or any other loudmouth) 'seriously but not literally.' The problem is that even if you see through his rhetoric and don't take him literally, of course there are likely going to be gullible people who will take it literally, so that the loudmouth is setting a crass, violent or hateful example.

Even without political coup attempts, things of course spin out of control on the internet in a way that they rarely do in person. A few years ago I posted a political question beneath a Twitter post by an American celebrity. I was sure that only two people would read it, and no one would respond. Suddenly I had hundreds of notifications in my inbox, a few people called me 'stupid,' and over 700 people approved a right-wing reply that disagreed with my premise. I felt the disapproval of that many people like a shockwave. That was a piffling, one-time case of facing online hatred; I don't think the experience left me scarred and I forget about it most of the time. But of course many people face mountains of abuse every day. At times I can't bear to read through the responses to Twitter posts by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example.

It also feels hard to know how to handle the abuse. If you pass off the 'hate mail' to someone else, they might be traumatized instead. Or there might not be anyone to hand it off to... A journalist or other expert — I've forgotten who — recently mentioned that platforms like Facebook have an enormous problem with moderation. If you have 1 billion users, how can you possibly regulate everything that these users write?

I don't think that Loathe at First Sight presented a complete answer to the problem of online harassment. Maybe because there isn't any.

*

Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 is a Korean book that takes a far grimmer view of the role of women in society than Loathe at First Sight does. Its main character worked in the marketing industry, and the book is far stricter about feeling that every man is complicit in sexism. I finished listening to the audiobook recording a week or two ago.

I found this book hard to read because I recognized the experience in a broader sense. A female colleague once told me and another female colleague that talking about sexual harassment is difficult for women because we are all so traumatized by it. And on some level this is true.

But I didn't recognize the male psychology in the book: a few men in my life have been pigs, the majority have been supportive and like brothers to me in the best possible sense. Their ethos seems to be that I am not more vulnerable because I am weaker, but rather that I am more vulnerable because the position I am in is weaker; and so they feel bound to protect me in a way that doesn't put into question my value or autonomy. It was something that I think was taught in my family: protect the younger, find the person who is disadvantaged in any situation and watch out for them, etc. I still try to watch out for the disadvantaged wherever I can, and so it seems fair and equal if other people do so for me.

Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 also tries to make clear the harsh emotional and professional costs that everyday sexism might have.

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An example of everyday sexism determining life decisions that I can think of from my own life is when I stopped attending a university lecture here in Germany because the professor unsettled me. He made more eye contact than I thought was normal before the class began, and made a risqué anatomical joke later on ... on the first day. My academic career was tanking anyway, and this lecture wasn't for credit, but it still felt as if dropping this lecture made things worse. I wasn't 100% sure that the professor was a lecher, but I didn't want to take the risk and ignore instinct.

I'm unwilling to risk harassment not just because it's unpleasant in itself, but also because it's made worse by a propensity to blame myself for everything.

Every time I was chatted up in the street by men far older than me, or outright sexually harassed, I kept replaying it in my head and thinking what I should have done differently — not make eye contact, etc. It's soul-sapping, and it has changed me.

It's not clear to me if the self-blame is instilled by social attitudes and what feminist theorists call rape culture or not. Is it my personality instead, or the 'just world hypothesis' that presumes that if you do everything correctly, nothing bad happens to you? Or something else?

I've just observed that I don't make eye contact with people I see in the street (several times, siblings or colleagues have had to call attention to themselves) except if I am in an eye-contact mood and think I know them. For months or years when I was younger, I wore coats or jackets outside even if it was warm, because I didn't want to feel little, exposed, and unshielded.

For a while I would not go outdoors at all except if one of my brothers went with me. In 2016 or 2017 I must have greatly disconcerted poor Gi. (who very politely obliged, however) when I asked him once to accompany me to a grocery store, perhaps two minutes away from the office, because I had a weird feeling. The lack of fresh air and exercise further worsened my physical and emotional health, so that was another cost I paid.

I think the instinct is weaker and I ignore it whenever going to/from university or the workplace or shopping, but I still want a brother along when I go for a walk to the park. It annoys me, as I've mentioned before, that there are hijab or burka bans in the world and that these are supposed to be 'progressive,' when many of us women already wear a cage of the mind from which nobody is liberating us by making it unnecessary. Unlike a hijab, however, this cage is neither a tradition that any woman would celebrate (hopefully), nor a conscious, clear choice.

Of course I am fortunate that I haven't gone through anything worse than verbal harassment and some PG-rated physical contact, and also fortunate that I haven't faced the blame of other people for being assaulted.

*

It's also weird how split the world is. Safe though I feel in the workplace, and felt in school, it's not a fix or shield against the 'real world.'

Most recently, a man in the U-Bahn reached over, clasped my hands, and smeared his hands over them, twice, when I was reading a magazine on the way back from my gender-egalitarian workplace in early 2020 or in 2019. It disgusted me so much that once I got home, I recycled the magazine I was reading and washed my hands and wrists until I felt that I (so to speak) had my own hands back again.

In the workplace, I'm also on edge when things happen that aren't harassment, but that mimic what could be harassment if the colleagues were strangers. When a colleague whom I trust put his hands on my shoulders while standing behind me, it made me unhappy; and I freaked out a bit internally when he said on another occasion that he liked the dress I was wearing. I also didn't like it when a colleague sat beside me at a party so that our legs were touching. It's calming to have people ask my permission before taking the (to me) drastic step of passing into my personal space. (Or when other people also seem hesitant or weirded out about un-agreed-upon contact, for that matter!)

If anyone wants to argue that it's sad that, because of unresolved social preconceptions and failures regarding gender, regular and friendly human interactions become so fraught and complex — I won't disagree.