Read Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why for Free Online Page B

she’d refused to let him search her private message archives for the word “love.” At one point, he even started calling hotels for “evidence” that she’d been there with other men.
    About those hotel calls: Those, actually, were not inGjoni’s original post. He wrote about them on 4Chan , one of the most powerful and virulent sources of online harassment for women, where Gjoni went to rally support for himself. He also posted the entire contents of “thezoepost” to Something Awful and Penny Arcade ; Quinn alleged, when she filed her restraining order, that Gjoni knew them to be primary sources of previous harassment.
    Still: He published it. He published the Facebook message in which she wrote “I should kill myself.” He published the fact that one of her partners had been married. He published her pleading with him not to tell that man’s wife to “go public” with the affair. In 2014, as in 1798, it was enough to burn a woman down to the ground.
    Where Godwin’s disclosures were motivated by foolish love, Gjoni’s came from knowing and calculated hate. (He would casually admit on Twitter that he calculated the odds of Quinn being harassed at 80 percent when he published.) But both had the advantage of cultural momentum: The communities Gjoni courted were already powerfully angry at “SJWs” (“Social Justice Warriors,” or, generally, leftist women) and feminists who criticized their beloved videogames. They leapt at the chance to take their anger out on one of these women, under the premise that she’d been immoral. These men quickly proceeded from crowing about Gjoni’s post, to concluding that Quinn’s career was entirely due to sexual favors, to (of course) leaking nude photos she’d taken and/or posting her address online, to,finally, theorizing the existence of a vast feminist conspiracy to destroy video games as we know them.
    Gjoni’s gesture was vile, but it was also silly: It was overwrought interpersonal drama from a small subculture (independent video game developers) that the mainstream rarely thought about, let alone tracked. But, as with Wollstonecraft’s disgrace, the chance to publish something embarrassing about a feminist woman, and therefore to discredit feminism itself, was an opportunity that got right-wing types salivating. One of the primary exponents of GamerGate, as the phenomenon came to be known, was Milo Yiannopolous, a “journalist” ensconced in the far-right hive mind of Breitbart.com, who published dispatches from the movement with titles like “Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Gaming Industry Apart,” eagerly repeating apocryphal charges that Quinn“cheated on her boyfriend for calculated professional advancement” with men who “know that they will be rewarded with sexual favours for promoting substandard work by some female developers.”
    And so Gjoni’s Gjrudge Match leapt past the bounds of the subculture, into the deep waters of general far-right sexual outrage. Quinn began to receive a torrent of rape and death threats:“Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retardedto fear us,” ran one threat, quoted in The New Yorker . Other long-standing female targets of the “gamer” community, including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, began to receive credible death threats and cancel their public appearances. If a publication criticized “GamerGate,” its advertising sponsors soon received waves of threats and harassment that sometimes caused them to withdraw support from the publication. And even this wasn’t the worst manifestation of the backlash: Several of GamerGate’s enemies, including web developer Israel Galvez, strayed GamerGater Grace Lynn, and critic Randi Harper, were subject to “SWATing,” a uniquely horrific tactic in which harassers