Edit III: I’m being accused of misrepresenting the story, so I present the Twitter conversation here for you to judge for yourselves.

Jim Sterling of (but presumably not representing) Destructoid, on Twitter, in response to a feminist he has a rather childish argument with.

[Edit: Some back-story - Jaffe compared the NGP to a vagina, and Jim Sterling said he shouldn’t have done. This led to daphaknee supposedly writing gay porn about Sterling and Jaffe together as well as the drawing of some pictures. This then led into a Twitter argument between the two in which they played the parts of two butthurt five year-olds.]

I’ll defend Jim’s review scores. I’ll defend his Jimquisition videos. I’ll defend a lot of the shit he gets up to. But I won’t defend his rampant sexism. I also can’t defend some of the comments that the feminist herself made, which come across as unashamedly homophobic and patronizing. Both sides of this argument behaved in a childish manner and said some stupid things, but as far as I know Jim is the only one in the industry and so he’s my primary focus here.

Let’s just make this clear: It is NEVER okay to use sexist language in a conversation. Ever. “Feminazi slut” is just one of the terms Jim used to describe daphaknee, and is probably the harshest term he used in the entire conversation. He also called her “sweetcheeks” at one point, as if that’s the sort of thing that’s okay to say to a woman during an debate an argument if at all, and refers to her as a cunt at least twice. Yikes.

I don’t care how edgy Jim thinks he’s being, you don’t use sexist language like this. Certainly it undermines his point when he’s talking about “real” feminism which, under his definition, seems to exclude things like body image issues and only includes issues like “countries where women have acid dripped on their faces” as if only the big issues are the ones that deserve to be addressed, as if the smaller issues aren’t worth fighting about because there’s bigger shit going on.

This sort of shit is inexcusable.

Additional: A lot of people seem to be taking me to task for not mentioning what it was that led Jim to his raging misogyny fit - drawings and “fan-fiction” depicting Sterling and Jaffe engaged in gay sex. By constantly mentioning  this a lot of people - and, fo’ ref’, they’re all guys - seem to be yelling “Well SHE started it!!” as if that somehow makes his language okay.

A lot of people also seem to think that I’m ignoring daphaknee’s side of the argument. On the contrary - she was no better than Sterling was. However she is not, to the best of my knowledge, a game journalist. If she is feel free to let me know and I’ll gladly cover her side of the conversation as well.