If this is any indication, this year’s con season is going to be long, painful, and full of assholes headaches. The Men’s Rights Group Honey Badger Brigade is currently causing issues and harassing panelists at the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo which began Thursday and runs through Sunday. The convention has pretty well laid out policy and procedures when it comes to harassment, bullying, and abuse. You can read the entire policy on their site.

The Honey Badger Brigade, which affiliates itself with GamerGate, raised money to set up a booth and is currently going to panels that highlight women and diversity to cause issues…. because it’s all about ethics in journalism as is the mantra of the GG community.

From the fundraising page set up by the Honey Badger Brigade:

In April of this year, the Honey Badgers plan to put on a booth at the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo! We plan to infiltrate nerd culture cunningly disguised as their own. Each of us has been carefully crafting a persona of nerdiness through decades of dedication to comics, science fiction, fantasy, comedy games and other geekery, waiting for this moment, our moment to slip among the unaware. Once there we will start distributing the totalitarian message that nerd and gamer culture is… perfectly wonderful just as it is and should be left alone to go it’s own way.

That’s it folks.

As men’s issues advocates and defenders of creator’s rights to create unmolested, that’s what we have to say to the nerds and geeks and gamers. You are fantastic as you are, carry on.

Yep, in today’s political climate that’s considered an extremist position. Just letting creative communities create; consumers consume what they want; and gamers get down to the business of vidya without being judged.

So if you share our vision of a world in which nerds and geeks and gamers roam free and unfettered, help us spread that message by throwing a few shekels our way to attend the con.

Nerds, geeks, and gamers can roam free… unless you’re a woman with an opinion, differing experiences and interests, or different viewpoint from the Badgers. Pot meet kettle.

The situation raised its ugly head when I saw the below Tweet:

The Honey Badger Brigade booth is sporting a GamerGate logo, using imagery championed by the organization, and is attending panels that feature feminists and women just to disrupt them. I think any last vestige to the argument this is about “ethics” is out the window, not that I believed it for one second anyways.

The “hate group” has spurred an outcry from attendees and others towards the Calgary Expo team who stated in numerous Tweets “they take safety seriously and are investigating the situation.” Of course pro-GamerGate individuals immediately accused the Expo of a double standard and sent a barrage of Tweets their way condemning the convention that wanted to make its con-goers feel safe and has a pretty clear policy linked above.

It looks like it didn’t work, as it has been Tweeted that the booth and individuals have been kicked out of the convention.

I’ll address the misunderstanding of “censorship” some other time.

The group at the convention attended the “Women Into Comics” panel last night. Panelist Brittney Le Blanc recounting what happened:

We were about fifteen minutes into the panel when a woman in the second row stood up and identified herself as a Men’s Rights Activist. She and her male companion both came to raise issues they felt would not be covered by our panel. Raising points about the way men are portrayed in comics struck a note with all the panelists, as we agreed that we want to see a diversity across body types, characters, races, etc in mainstream comics. Not everyone wants to see a hero who looks like he’s built like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. They also accused us of presenting all women as victims, which was an outright lie and derailing tactic.

Their questions did take up quite a bit of time at the panel and served to derail the topic onto another tangent, which was frustrating for the panel and for those in the audience. It’s what they came to do, and in part, they succeeded. I would say that it brought up some great discussions though, allowing us to talk about the lack of representation for people of colour in comics and to give well deserved props to artists like Sophie Campbell, who has done an amazing job in showcasing a broad range of bodies with her art in Jem and the Holograms.

It’s disappointing that they weren’t there to have a conversation or to listen to what we, and members of the audience, were saying. They wanted to stand up and have their say, but not to listen or try to understand the points of view other people in the room had. This was further proven by the video discussion they posted later last night, in which they mentioned our panel and that we were “donning the ball gowns of our victimhood”, which I’m not even entirely sure how to take. I will admit to not watching the whole video, and I think anyone who attempts to watch it would understand why.

I truly believe in freedom of speech, but coming to a panel with the entire purpose of derailing it and shooting down the voices on the panel isn’t constructive. It appears that was their plan for the expo, to come and to loudly take over the spaces of other people – although it was not violent or threatening, it’s disrespectful, disappointing and offers a prime example of why these panels need to exist in the first place.

Remember, it’s about ethics in journalism…. repeat that enough….

This is the latest dust-up in the “culture war” that has raged in the geek sphere between exclusive individuals who cling to a retconned misunderstood past, and those who recognize geek fandom is a diverse community, expanding in inclusion, and should reflect the heterogeneous reality.

We have reached out to the Calgary Expo for a statement. We’ll update this post as necessary.

Update: The Calgary Expo has posted the below to their Facebook page: