@Roz said:
@Derp Witness testimony is, in fact, evidence in a trial. And multiple witnesses all corroborating the same story is pretty strong evidence.
Are you saying that if a woman you were personally close to came to you and said, "I've gotten groped and harassed at multiple geek gatherings," your response would be, "Okay, prove it?" This isn't a freaking legal trial. If people were being charged with crimes, then yeah, let the court and its requirements for proving beyond a reasonable doubt rule. Do guys just think there's a massive conspiracy women are running to -- what, even? Take away the boobs in their video games? Just have guys notice when someone in their vicinity is being harassed and support her in shutting it down? Just being more aware to the experience of people outside themselves?
No, I don't have evidence of every instance of my daily life. I haven't happened to be recording my whole day to catch the times I've been sexually harassed.
If something shitty happened to you on a regular basis, and happened to the majority of your friends, and you all spoke up to say, "This shitty thing keeps happening," wouldn't you feel fucking shitty to get laughed at and said, "Okay, I know a huge group of you is saying this, but prove it?"
Yeah, it is fucking shitty.
Except as others have mentioned, this doesn't happen to some of us. @Arkandel, for instance, expressed his bafflement at some of these things. No, this has not happened to me. This has not happened to any of my friends. I know multiple girls in gaming circles, and they're all treated respectfully --- well, except for chats and things in FPS games, but that's different ... everyone gets treated like shit in those. That's equal opportunity shitheadedness.
No. My experience of this thing differs greatly from the experiences being expressed. It differs greatly from the experiences of my friends, male and female, who do this. It is so alienated from my conception of gaming groups in general that my first reaction is 'what?' And then, I follow up on that 'what'. I ask my friends. And if their reaction is also 'what', then yes, I express some skepticism.
I'm not saying that I don't think it happens. I'm sure it does, somewhere. I think it should stop. I'm saying that people should stop tearing down the people asking for evidence of these things, because a) you're not helping your cause in doing so -- you're alienating the very people you're asking to take action in the first place and worse, you're setting them up to disbelieve you in the future by creating a negative rapport. And b), their viewpoints are valid too. This doesn't happen everywhere, to everyone, on the massive scale that the internet would have you believe it does. It is not so wholly pervasive that you would have to be a blind drooling monkey to miss it. And if you're going to convince the people that have no experience of this, in any form, either among themselves or their friends, then when those people say 'I'm going to need something more', you should say 'I can respect that', and then work to find it, instead of getting angry that they would dare ask for such a thing in the first place, those insensitive blind bastards.
ETA: And @Roz, as much as you say this isn't a court of law, American culture is an adversarial culture, and has been since the country was founded. Some of the earliest writers on American culture commented on the legalistic mindset of american relations, and how very formal we as a culture are when it comes to things like evidence of wrongdoing.
And remember, the Civil Rights movement was settled in courts too, with notable cases like Brown II, so when people start talking about Social Justice, it's not unreasonable to think in terms of legalities and evidence.