Blake Lively Becomes the Latest Target of the Harassment Tactics Developed by GamerGate.

The never ending attacks on women in public have been a slowly rolling snowball gaining more mass year by year ever since Gamergate.

Like everything else that came out of that clusterfuck, the now metastasized harassment program of women is just one piece of a larger problem.

It doesn’t feel like an accident that the path they are leading their new followers down goes straight to the far right at a time when women’s rights are as precarious as they’ve been in decades.

This article does a great job exploring what is happening and how it is deeply tied into right-wing politics and culturewar content online. The author, Stephanie McNeal, gives the goals of this side of the movement plainly:

Once you dehumanize one woman, you can dehumanize them all. And that impact is far greater than any celebrity legal battle.

What we still seem to not have is a countermeasure. This exact program and bundle of tactics around rallying normal people to dehumanize the targets of a fundamentally fascist agenda is clearly going in only one direction: the suppression of the freedoms of anyone who isn't part of the in-group of rich white men. We've seen this happening to dehumanize women, trans people, people of color (as DEI recipients), and eventually the Viral Dehumanization Movement will find and harass you too.

It's clear that this has been happening, will keep happening, and will only happen more.

What's not clear is what we do about it. I don't have an answer either. We really need one though.

The only thing I can start with is to build and encourage radical empathy. We need to start at the position that the bare minimum requirement is to acknowledge everyone's humanity and validity to exist as they are. But how we can even get these people harassing Blake Lively to realize that what they're doing isn't justified and could never be justified, much less acknowledge that this one person is just as human and deserving of peace as they are, I don't know.

I’m just going to say it: This isn’t normal. And it’s about more than just Blake Lively. Since #MeToo exploded into public consciousness in 2018, an online war has succeeded in erasing many of the gains made by the movement. If those against #MeToo can’t stop famous women from speaking out against sexual assault, abuse, or harassment, they can, apparently, slowly erode their credibility until they are pariahs, the target of such an unrelenting campaign of hate and misogyny that their public image is incurably damaged. The hardest part of this to swallow is that women—mostly civilians—are the ones falling deepest down this rabbit hole, being convinced by TikTok to turn on one of their own.

#MeToo was an attempt to change the narrative, to believe women when they say they have been victimized by men without caveats. It was an effort to shed the idea of a “perfect victim,” to accept that a woman can be sexually or physically assaulted no matter how powerful she may be. But less than a decade later, it’s never been more dangerous to accuse a high-profile man of abuse. Lively’s reputation is in tatters. Amber Heard, whose case has often been compared to Lively’s, faced such unrelenting online torment when she battled her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, in court over assault allegations that she left the country.