Saahil Arora · @UniverseDota
24th Jun 2020 from TwitLonger
Bullying and Women
Let me start this by saying I'm not perfect by any sense of the imagination and we can all try to be better.
Bullying
With the recent events surrounding Grant I felt the need to address some things. After reading the stories, I can say I was incredibly shocked and the story of assault was disturbing to say the least. I see the posts on reddit about Grant and can understand them, people are upset and feel a sense of betrayal. Another thing I see are posts dredging up all of the bad things Grant has done in the past, and basically painting him as a terrible person who has no redeeming qualities at all. A specific post is about Grant bullying Purge about 8 years ago. Bullying is an awful thing to do and what Grant did was terrible, make no mistake about it. However all of the people dogpiling on top of Grant and writing posts that have nothing in them other than a visceral hate for Grant, are doing the exact same thing Grant did 8 years ago. Just because you are bullying a bully does not make it okay. I see this alot in online forums and reddit in particular; people have a nasty habit of painting others in black and white. When you do that it’s very easy to hop on the hate train and ride it until you and your fellow posters are essentially bullying another person online.
Women
Reading about all of the recent stories from women in esports has been eye opening. This may come off as ignorant but to me I had no idea the sheer scale of how often women are harassed or assaulted. This may be because I am a man -- I have no idea what it’s like to be a woman, and I will never understand exactly what it is like. I’m sure many other men are exactly like me, and cannot put themselves in women’s shoes, so let me ask myself a different question. How would I feel if I learned that my girlfriend, mother, sister, or niece was harassed or assaulted? I would be fucking angry, so angry that I wouldn’t be able to see or think straight. This emotion would come just from someone close to me experiencing something like that. I cannot even begin to imagine how some of these women feel. This is something so basic, the feeling of being safe and it is on men to make sure women feel safe around us. So the next time you read about another woman’s story, I invite my fellow men to ask yourselves the same: how would you feel if it was your girlfriend, your wife, or your sister? .