GamerGate was a highly partisan political controversy on the internet within the games community. It involved a deluge of accusations and counter-accusations focused on specialized niche content. As a result, despite a good deal of mainstream press, many people are still unsure about the exact nature of GamerGate and its legacy. So it’s worth reiterating the basics.

GamerGate was a misogynist hate campaign. Under the banner of keeping games pure, large numbers of gamers formed online harassment mobs to attack women critics and silence them.

GamerGaters deny this. They say GamerGate was a consumer movement. They argue, as Arc Digital’s Cathy Young repeatedly has, that there were women on the side of the GamerGaters, which suggests that GamerGate participants didn’t—and don’t—hate women.

But this demonstrates a misunderstanding of misogyny — a misunderstanding which, by design or otherwise, obscures and ultimately buttresses misogyny. As philosopher Kate Manne says in her book Down Girl: “Misogyny is a problem that…tends to resist its own identification or naming.”

In order to understand GamerGate, you need to define misogyny. And to do that, it’s important to first understand what misogyny isn’t. Misogyny is not uniform hatred of all women at all times everywhere. The fact that GamerGaters didn’t attack all women, or praised some women, or that some GamerGaters were themselves women, is irrelevant when discussing GamerGate’s misogyny. Women are half of humanity; everyone on earth has women they care about, women who are their mothers, their daughters, their wives, their friends. If having some sort of human connection with some woman at some point in your life means you’re not a misogynist, then misogyny doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, it does exist. That’s, again, because misogyny is not universal antipathy toward all women. In fact, as Manne explains, misogyny isn’t really about the feelings of its perpetrators at all. Rather, Manne says, “misogyny is what misogyny does to women: it takes women down for having ideas beyond their station.” Misogyny is “the system which polices and enforces” patriarchy.

William T. Sedgwick in 1914 said that it would be “a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber” if women were allowed to vote. Sedgwick was married to a woman. But his love for one woman, or all women, doesn’t matter—he was pushing misogyny by trying to prevent women from voting; he was trying to ensure they would be subject to the will of male voters.

Similarly, it doesn’t matter how people in the GamerGate movement felt about some women, or all women. What matters is that GamerGaters kicked off a harassment campaign which terrorized women whose speech, or actions, or presence was perceived as threatening male dominance and male prerogatives.

As The New York Times reminded us in its retrospective coverage this month, GamerGate began when indie game developer Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni published a massive screed accusing them of a range of iniquities, including lying and infidelity. The specific charges didn’t matter—the point was that Quinn had exerted sexual autonomy and extricated themselves from Gjoni’s life and control. Worse, Quinn had developed an indie text game called Depression Quest about their experience with depression and mental illness. It had garnered good reviews, angering gamers who felt it was feminine and boring and a threat to the swaggering, adventure-based shoot-em-up big game aesthetic.

Resentment of Quinn’s sexual autonomy and resentment of their games combined into a single vat of toxic sludge. Quinn was quickly accused—falsely—of sleeping with critics, their evil out-of-control sexuality threatening the masculine system of merit in which women never leave men, and the video game community which upholds patriarchal values.

As they documented in their book Crash Override, Quinn received a deluge of death threats, their online accounts were hacked, and family members were also targeted. The message to women in games was clear. Don’t make games that challenge patriarchal preconceptions of how games should be. Don’t discuss aspects of video game culture you find morally troubling. Don’t be so successful you make men envious. Don’t leave abusive boyfriends. Or else.

That message was reiterated over and over throughout GamerGate. It wasn’t just Quinn who was on the receiving end. Other targets were identified and also made to suffer. For having the audacity to produce videos identifying sexist tropes in video games, Anita Sarkeesian received so many death threats she was forced to flee her home and cancel a speaking engagement. Video game developer Brianna Wu spoke out against harassment in the games industry and she too was dogpiled.

Numerous other women were singled out by Breitbart writer, GamerGate agitator, online bully, and fascist sympathizer Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos’ rabid anti-feminist screeds were popular with both GamerGaters and alt-righters. He quickly became a bridge between the two communities. That meant GamerGaters could identify a woman who was out of line, and then Yiannopoulos would target that person in a column or series of columns, bringing them to the attention of a larger reactionary audience that reveled in hate and abuse. Everybody in video games quickly realized that to question the treatment of women in the games community meant that Nazi-sympathizers would try to find your address.

GamerGate claimed to be a free speech movement, fighting against censorship of games. But it’s entire reason for being was to shut women up.

It’s obviously true that not every person who used a GamerGate hashtag or aligned with the movement wanted Sarkeesian to receive death threats. Not everyone who claimed Quinn was an evil, deceitful woman and the queen of lies wanted their accounts hacked. But misogyny is not about what misogynists want or don’t want. It’s about what happens to women when they are singled out for threatening patriarchy. And it is about how individuals, by aligning themselves with a movement intended to preserve a subculture’s patriarchal underpinnings, end up implicitly granting permission to threaten, torment, terrorize, and punish women, while keeping their own hands, and hearts, supposedly clean.

This is the context in which GamerGaters created the character of Vivian James—a cartoon female gamer who was “meant to represent young women who love gaming and don’t want politics in their video games,” as GamerGate advocate Cathy Young explains.

But as a mascot Vivian’s inclusion within GamerGate is telling. She is possible, as an object of admiration or even just acceptance, precisely because her views echo the views of the male GamerGaters. Vivian is, of course, no threat to the patriarchy, because she rejects politics and feminism. She just wants to sit and play whatever games the male-dominated video game community says are cool. Good women, docile women, women with no ideas in their heads, women drawn with their mouths shut — they’re fine. It’s only the bad women (or sometimes other people who speak up for bad women) that GamerGate wants to punish. The goal of misogyny isn’t to kill or destroy all women. It’s to keep all women in their rightful place: subordinate.

Vivian was also intended to provide deniability. The historian and writer Ibram X. Kendi has said that “the heartbeat of racism is denial,” and that’s the heartbeat of misogyny, too. All bigotry is predicated on the denial of bigotry, since all bigotry is based on the idea that the bigots are simply rational actors, who have been driven to cruelty and even to abuse by the iniquity of their inferior, loathsome, ungrateful targets.

This is why people are so eager to switch the focus of misogyny from the experiences of those who suffer it, which can be confirmed and documented, to the emotional and mental states of perpetrators, which are interior and unknowable. Not every accusation of misogyny is accurate or fair, but denials based on the presupposition that no accusation can be made in good faith are themselves intended to perpetuate misogyny.

Thus so-called GamerGate neutrals would insist that both GamerGate and their targets were in the wrong. GamerGaters had overreacted, but on the other hand, all those people challenging patriarchy were in fact uppity SJWs who had gotten above their station, weren’t they? If GamerGate was not a misogynist harassment campaign, then why were the targets expressing fear, anger, and pointing out systemic problems and cruelties? They must be deluded. They must like the attention. They must want it. Misogyny erases itself, so that its crimes and its hatred can appear to emanate from its targets.

That is why GamerGate can never admit its faults, or acknowledge its motivations. To do so would be to make misogyny, and patriarchy, visible. It would be to acknowledge that the feelings of the oppressor are less important than the experience of the oppressed. It would be to see women not just as players in someone else’s games, but as creators of their own worlds, and of ours. That would be the end of patriarchy, and therefore the end of GamerGate as well.

Noah Berlatsky is a writer whose work has appeared in NBC Think, The Atlantic, and other places. He is the author most recently of Death Panels: Comics Criticism 2004–2019. Follow him on Twitter @nberlat.