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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6179331" data-attributes="member: 3400">In their defense, everybody does this. Seriously. Everybody brings their own perspectives to everything they experience. If being the target of rapists, fanboy gatekeepers, sexual harassers, and whatever chauvinist crawled out of the woodwork is part of their experience it will color their perspective of many things they see - including web comics and comic authors whose instinct is to react kind of like a punk when faced with criticism. So of course they talk about it in those terms. Those are the terms that form the lens through which they see the issue - just as a lot of guys will see the issue through the lens of being privileged to rarely have to worry about rape at all, much less rape by dickwolves.I do think there are corners of the internet that try to sensitize people to issues like these and the effect they have is often to over-sensitize, particularly when the internet also tends to act like an echo chamber that amplifies the message (for good and bad). For example, a lot of the fanboy gatekeeper issues started cropping up quite suddenly over the last year or so on the internet. Of course, it had always been there, but the posting, reposting, sharing, and re-sharing of blog after blog over social media caused the appearance of the issue to snowball to the point that my wife was genuinely concerned that my 15 year-old daughter would be at serious risk at Gen Con. As it turned out, she had no troubles at all from fanboys trying to ferret out fake geek girls. But the huge buzz the issue was getting made it look like women couldn't turn around at a convention without facing the issue.</blockquote>

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