Less than a month ago, FatUglyorSlutty.com was just a twinkle in our #fragdolls IRC. gtz, a beloved friend and community member, and two of our amazing Cadettes, Jaspir and likeOMGitsFEDAY, brought the site into being with the help of jon’s master programmer skills and ERRRskate’s idea for the scandalous domain name. The concept seemed simple enough. They wanted to make an easy image+caption blog dedicated to publicizing (and laughing at) the hilarious/disturbing messages that many female gamers receive while playing online games. The attention their site has gotten in the past week (including a front page on reddit.com, a feature on Kotaku, numerous blogs mentions, and hefty comment threads) proves that they created something more. Gaming culture at large is taking note, expressing appropriate shock and dismay. But I, in turn, am shocked by their reactions. I am fundamentally surprised that this is news. I keep asking myself “How could they not have known?!”

Let me explain. We Frag Dolls and our female gamer friends know the FUoS messages all too well. We know them well because we’ve been getting them for years. In fact, we’ve written several blogs about the kinds of things that are said to us in online gaming venues, including one blog written by Fidget just last week. We’ve seen countless similar blogs and references on other gaming sites. Excessive harassment by male gamers - be it in the form of rude, hostile, disgusting in-game chatter or creepy personal messages - is common enough that we’ve often use our tales of such treatment as an icebreaker when meeting other female gamers. On a personal level, this kind of negative attention pisses me off and motivates me to whoop up on the harassers in-game (not an uncommon reaction among competitive female gamers). But socially, I’ve found that laughing about it with my sister gamers has brought us together as a community and helped us to cope with what would otherwise seem like a barrage of abuse.

All of that is to say that we’ve been talking about this phenomenon for a long time; YEARS, even. We’ve described it, joked about it, mentioned it in interviews, talked about it in videos, and referenced it on panels about girls and gaming. We’ve been talking about it for so long, in fact, that we figured it was common knowledge. We interpreted the lack of shock as a sign of cultural acceptance, thinking that this was just one more form of internet behavior to learn to ignore or laugh at. So we learned, and mostly got good at ignoring and laughing at it. In some cases, we’ve even reappropriated the abusive language for our own amusement, unwittingly emulating the style of other traditionally harassed minority groups. One specific example that comes to mind (again from our Frag Doll community) is of a female player who adopted the handle “FatDyke” after being called similar names enough times that it was worth embracing it to nullify such future attacks. The domain name for FatUglyorSlutty is only the most recent example of such empowering appropriation.

When fatuglyorslutty.com hit the front page of reddit, I was thrilled for my friends and proud of their accomplishment, but I was not surprised by their success (all three staff editors are all-round badasses). The popularity of the site itself did not surprise me. The content is legitimately shocking and funny; perfect internet fodder. The clamor of support from many other female gamers did not surprise me either. They’re the ones who live this experience daily while playing online with randoms. Again, it was the shock expressed by most of the bloggers and commenters saying that they couldn’t believe it was this bad, that they didn’t actually think female gamers got messages like these sent to them in online games. THAT is what surprised me, and it surprised me because I feel like we’ve been talking about this for years. How did our years worth of describing this very issue get so terribly lost in translation?

I’ve had the privilege of talking to the FUoS team about this a lot in the past week, and gtz’s description of her own realization process helped us to begin tracing the disconnect.

“Honestly, from what I’ve seen in all of the reactions we’ve had, I don’t think [this kind of harassment] is well known. That’s the whole point! This is related to how the site idea came about. I play games in a friend-only bubble. The other two ladies don’t, and one day Jaspir put a few creepy messages online for some friends to laugh it. They were definitely funny, but it was also weird—intellectually, I knew that these creeps were out there, but it was so different seeing them from the point of view of a friend. I can’t really define it. It got real? When I say that I don’t think it is well known, I mean both for myself and for the many people I’ve since seen say “Holy sh*t I knew this happened but I had no idea it was this bad.” Everyone else seems to now be having the same “it got real” reaction that I did. I, and others, had this mental disconnect about knowing this happened and actually seeing it happen. FatUglyorSlutty simply puts the evidence front and center, and for its part, seems to be starting the discussion that many people thought we already were having.”

We’ve theorized several possible reasons for why FUoS’s content has had such a distinct impact in mere weeks when our years of paraphrasing in blogs and interviews didn’t communicate the true nature of what we were describing. It could be a matter of timing or of audience. It could be a matter of a corporate sponsored team having a very different kind of voice than that of an organic blog home-grown by core gamers. It could also be the fact that male gamers suffer plenty of hostility online as well, so maybe everyone assumed we were complaining about the normal trash-talk that any gamer has to deal with. My favorite theory at present is that the medium makes all the difference. FUoS is yet more proof that a picture is worth a thousand words. “pics or it didn’t happen”.

I’m recovering from my initial surprise and starting to fully appreciate that FUoS has sparked an important conversation. We’d hoped that this conversation was already long underway, but in this case, it’s definitely better late than never. For the record, we girl gamers don’t expect to be mollycoddled and babied in online games. It’d simply be nice to be treated like peers and not have our gender become a lightning-rod for misogynistic harassment and creepy come-ons. Most of us are well prepared to deal with (not to mention give back) a modicum of trash-talking. But FUoS is public evidence that we are often subjected to way worse than run-of-the-mill gaming banter. The next time I see the critique that there is no good reason for female gamers to congregate in all-female (or more gender balanced) teams and communities, I will be quick to send them to fatuglyorslutty.com as a starting point for my rebuttal.