Meet the community at Magic: The Gathering - where cheating is grounds for a lifetime ban, but raping an unconscious 18 year old virgin is something everyone needs to get over already.

As someone who is also a part of many nerd cultures, including the MTG one, the reddit MTGers' vigorous defense of a rapist makes me nauseous and angry. The fact that mods on that sub, which I regularly browse, are actively deleting and banning users who criticize the rapist is... beyond.

In light of this horrorshow, it may seem like nitpicking, but please do not conflate the abject antipathy displayed by this batch of nerds with autism. Autism does not cause any deficiency in empathy. It only makes it more difficult for some people on the autism spectrum to read the subtler emotional cues and hints in social interactions. It doesn't make them any less likely to sympathize with another's suffering. If anything, someone on the spectrum may be more immune to the rapist's manipulative framing of himself as the victim, and more likely to read about the case and then be horrified. I know people with varying emotional sensitivity on the spectrum. The most sensitive autistic guy I know would have been 10 times more horrified and disgusted than even I am now if he heard about this. He physically and mentally recoils at people being cruel, and this rape and its subsequent defense would've made him ill.

The stereotypical nerd characteristic on display here isn't autism, but simple misogyny. These people hate women. They understand what this person did to a woman. They delight in it. They find it gleeful that one of their own got away with brutalizing a woman, and they wish to make sure he continues on his merry way as he is now their proxy of vengeance on all the women who rejected them and the mothers who didn't drive them to their Friday Night Magic local tournament and so on.

Misogyny crops up way too often in any heavily male-skewing online communities. For people like you and I, who still wish to interact in such communities, the most we can hope for is that the mods/leaders involved happen to be saner than their worst members. That was not the case here. r/magicTCG is unsalvageable.

/r/circlebroke Thread Parent