Here's one of a veritable plethora of examples:

"College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate "V-Day" (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs."

The remainder of the article can be found here. There's loads of other examples I could cite, and many so-called 'inequalities that women face' type arguments that I could destroy (without much effort), but there's just far too much to list. So instead I'll rant about the largest problem facing the UK today. The single equalities bill. This is bill you may or may not be aware of, currently being passed in the UK. It brings many changes to the UK's equality laws and consolidates all current equalities laws into one bill. However it also sneakily brings in positive discrimination and potentially economy ruining feminist policies. One such example (all examples herein are cited from http://www.stammeringlaw.org.uk/changes/sea.htm):

"Work with others to develop a 'kite-mark' scheme for employers who are transparent about reporting their progress on equality, as a further means to encourage greater openness in the private sector"

Essentially this means private sector companies will be forced to produce financial reports detailing the amount women get paid. Such company-wide reports have already been labelled "ineffective" and "resource heavy" by many major companies operating in the UK. With such massive negatives for operating in the UK already (ludicrous emissions targets, high operating costs, high tax etc) do we really need another reason for companies to say "screw it, let's all go to India - it's cheap there"?

Yet it gets worse. Under the proposed bill (I say proposed, parts of the bill are already in place as of June 2008 ) women and ethnic minorities will be granted affirmative-action positive discrimination (and we all know what kind of reception affirmative-action has already received). The following quote was pulled from here, as the times is unbiased enough to avoid suspicion of trouble-stirring (Daily Mail we're looking at you):

"The Government was today outlining its plans to cut discrimination and promote equality at work, including allowing companies to favour female and ethnic minority candidates if there is a tiebreak for a job vacancy."

This is all despite the fact that "Positive Discrimination is unlawful in the UK and quotas/selective systems are not permitted." (that's from wiki).

So what's the conclusion? The white working-cl4ss (won't let me write the real word – Gamespot are so retarded they've banned that word in case someone makes a javascript exploit) male is now the most denigrated and despised cl4ss in the whole of the UK. Ironic, considering it was these very 'Tommies' that fought and won filth like Harriet Harman the right to make biased feminist laws. It was these brave men that threw themselves at German machine guns for two wars running. I wonder how they'd react if they could see what our society has become.

I realise that to most of us this is probably VERY old news, but there are a lot of morons still charging around acting like those of us protesting are just pulling ideas out our backsides. This is the anonymous comment that we're arguing in favour of:

[[Much of below will be filtered, if you would like to see the original copy there is a link below.]]

" Anonymous comments. Given the writing style and in-depth analysis, I doubt it's a plant/fake. Comments pulled from Valleywag.

No one wants to be named because no one wants to get **** fired! This management team has shown what they're willing to do. Jeff had ten years in and was **** locked out of his office and told to leave the building.

What you might not be aware of is that GS is well known for appealing mostly to hardcore gamers. The mucky-mucks have been doing a lot of "brand research"over the last year or so and indicating that they want to reach out to more casual gamers. Our last executive editor, Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson, who had no editorial experience and was only involved on the business side of things. Over the last year there has been an increasing amount of pressure to allow the advertising teams to have more of a say in the editorial process; we've started having to give our sales team heads-ups when a game is getting a low score, for instance, so that they can let the advertisers know that before a review goes up. Other publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game's getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it'll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.

I was in the meeting where Josh Larson was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were "multiple instances of tone" in the reviews that he hadn't been happy about, but that wasn't Jeff's problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that "AAA" titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.

I know that it's all about the money, and hey, I like money. I like advertising because it pays my salary. Unfortunately after Kasavin left the church-and-state separation between the sales teams and the editorial team has cracked, and with Jeff's firing I think it's clear that the management now has no interest at all in integrity and are instead looking for an editorial team that will be nicer to the advertisors.

When companies make games as downright contemptible as Kane and Lynch, they deserve to be called on it. I guess you'll have to go to Onion or a smaller site for objective reviews now, because everyone at GS now thinks that if they give a low score to a high-profile game, they'll be **** Everyone's **** scared and we're all hoping to get Josh Larson removed from his position because no one trusts him anymore. If that doesn't happen then look for every game to be Game of the Year material at GameSpot.

The main problem here is that no one in the entire editorial team was aware that this was about to occur, least of all Gerstmann. We're very clear in our review policies that all reviews are vetted by the entire team before they go live - everything that goes up is the product of an entire team's output. Our freelancers are especially guilty of making snide comments, but those are always yanked before the review goes live, because everyone in the office reads these reviews and makes sure they're up to our standards before they get put up.

If there was a problem with his reviews, then it would've been a problem with the entire team. Firing him without telling anyone implies that anyone else on this team can be fired at the drop of a hat as well, because none of us are writing any differently or meaner or less professionally than we were two years ago before the management changed. I'm sure management wants to spin this as the G-Man being unprofessional to take away from the egg on their face that results after a ten-year employee gets locked out of his office and told to leave the premises and then no one communicates anything to us about it until the next day.

Also, despite the fact that this occured two weeks ago, there was no way they were going to fire him then; the last big games didn't come out until just before Thanksgiving, and there was no doubt that management knew that the rest of the reviewers would refuse to write any reviews after his termination, which is indeed what is happening. After thanksgiving nothing major comes out in games; everything is either before thanksgiving or comes out in January. They waited to fire him until they knew that any strike or walkout by the rest of the staff wouldn't have much of an effect.

Also, keep in mind that these salespeople do have axes to grind with editorial. I know a lot of people busted their asses to get not only this large deal with Eidos done, but also other huge ad deals. The salespeople and the marketers are the ones who have to deal with the publishers when a heavily-advertised game gets a bad review, so obviously they like it if every game that comes out is peachy keen and gets a 9.0 or above. If a salesperson knows anything about unprofessional review practices, then that says a lot about the management team that we have in place because not a single other member of the editorial team had heard word one about this until Jeff was fired. Surely site management would want to let us know about their concerns before firing the most senior staff member and one of the most respected game critics in the industry? If they're sharing their concerns with the salespeople and not with us then that says a lot about their priorities.

(emphasis mine) "

It's from this website.

Now I'll sum up some of the arguments from us protestors since a lot of people don't really seem to understand what it is that we are arguing:

1) EIDOS pulled advertising from Gamespot as a direct result of the review. Whilst EIDOS may not have requested Jeff be fired it is pretty much the exact same thing. Advertising, as IGN always tells us, (You'll understand if you are, or have been, an IGN subscriber) is the largest source of income for websites such as these. Essentially removing payment from sites that won't give a positive review means that EIDOS can filter reviews by using their monetary muscle. Naturally Josh, being a businessman, saw the loss of profit resulting from Geff and fired him. In effect EIDOS's removal of funds is directly responsible for the termination of Geff's position at Gamespot.

2) This sacking was made to serve as a warning to other reviewers: Don't piss off our major contributors. As such future reviews will be dishonest to the point of us not really bothering to watch/read them. This has nothing (and I really want to emphasize this, because a lot of moronic posters have got the wrong end of the stick) to do with Geff. We don't love Geff. We don't hate Geff. We don't work on the Gamespot review team, so to us Geff was just another reviewer. This isn't about Geff. This is about the fact that we can no longer trust the integrity of Gamespot's reviews.

3) Neither EIDOS nor Gamespot have made an official statement. This sends out the message that they either do not care about the customers (because a lot of us have demanded answers) or that they are guilty and won't admit it. Either one is bad and either one is a reason to unsubscribe.

4) The way in which Geff was fired was humiliating and demonstrated a clear lack of work ethic. If a senior reviewer can just turn up to work to find his door locked and be escorted out by security, then we don't really want to support the company that thinks this is acceptable.

There are several different ideas of what should come of this whole debacle. Here are a few:

1) Geff should be reinstated to his old position.

2) Josh Larson should be fired for his breach of work ethics.

3) EIDOS should be boycotted for selective advertising.

Now I don't necessarily agree with any of this, so don't bother flaming me. The points I do agree with are points 2 and 3 from the arguments section. I don't really want to say what I think should come of this at the moment because I just don't know all the facts.

Hope that helps some people make their minds up.

PS If you've unsubscribed as a result of this whole thing please say so somewhere in your post so that the staff can see we're taking this seriously.

I've also seen this on the boards:

[QUOTE="LumpiniAssassin"]Eidos said they were pulling future advertising as well? Can I please see a source for that?Mindchamber

"After Gerstmann's savage flogging of Kane & Lynch, a game whose marketing investment on Gamespot alone reached into the hundreds of thousands, Eidos (we are told) pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of future advertising from the site."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/30/

these guys are pretty much in the know, and have their sources