Anita Sarkeesian

[Metal Vendetta]

I promised bumblemus I'd start a topic about this 'cause facebook's not really the place to get into a proper debate about this.

So, for starters, am I the only one who sees a massive irony in a bunch of guys white-knighting her after she tweeted that she'd received some threats and oh, coincidentally, she'd like you to give her some money. From the lady that made a whole video about how the "Damsel in Distress" meme is a bad thing? Don't you guys know that - according to Anita herself - rescuing a damsel reduces her to the level of an object? In her own words, the "ball" in the "patriarchy's game"? It's not like she hasn't used this kind of thing to her advantage before - when she started her "Tropes vs. Women" kickstarter, she posted on 4chan/b/ asking for donations, then thanks to the surrounding publicity from the abuse she received, got 25 times the amount of donations she asked for. For any male who thinks that this is just a problem with misogyny on the web, here's my challenge: post your real name, a photo of yourself and a link to your kickstarter on 4chan/b/. If it passes without incident and you don't receive any abuse, I will concede the entire argument forthwith.

I mean, I'm not condoning the death threats that she conveniently managed to screencap just a few seconds after the last one was posted while not logged in and which she then publicly tweeted herself, potentially jeopardising any investigation into the threats and against the advice of basically any agency that has to investigate these things, right before tweeting a link to where you can give her money. I think the matter should be investigated fully, and whoever sent those threats should be punished accordingly.

I don't think that anyone should be threatened, I'm just questioning the value of a "voice" that points out "Hey, in Hitman, you can kill the strippers! That's sexist!" when in Hitman, a game about killing people, you can kill everyone. Which is, let me check, the very opposite of sexist. After all, feminism is all about equality, right?

[Computron]

There is a fine line between well executed marketing and straight up exploitation. I really can't hold it against her for capitalizing well on getting her message out.

As for 4chan, you are right. They are equal opportunity offenders and if you want to showcase a societal ill, using 4chan is an easy way to prove your point. But does the fact that they devalue everyone and will harass everyone mean that their specific actions against one group is less deserving of concern? Now obviously 4chan does it to itself by promoting an anarchic and anonymous atmosphere where people can do and say almost whatever they want without repercussion, but just because its designed to be a cesspool doesn't mean we can't critique it for being a cesspool.

But as to the greater point, video games do have a misogyny problem. I don't think individual game designers are woman hating man-children, but as a whole, women are generally reduced to thin supporting characters that exist as a plot device (Princess Peach) or sexualized wank material. (Bayonetta through Lara Croft and then some.) It's the same problem a lot of comic books have, from Frank Miller through that recent controversy with Marvel's Alt cover of Spiderwoman.

Very few video games have female characters that are not in one of the above two categories. Heck, if you took away all the Bioware and Black Isle games, I think you'd be left with Metroid and the Eldar Farseers from the various Dawn of War games. (In fact, I'd be willing to bet that if you take away sci fi games, you'd have essentially zero female protagonist games that pass the Bechdel test.)

Again, I don't think this is done on purpose or ill will, but is a natural result of having the industry dominated by men who also think 16-22 year old men comprise the vast bulk of video game players.

[bumblemusprime]

Yah, I'm with Compy--not that I agree with everything she says, but this is AMerka, damn it, and she's got a right to capitalize on her audience. I don't know if anyone follows Mormon news, but it reminds me a good bit of the current mess with John Dehlin. http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2014 ... e_joh.html Not his potential excommunication, but the fact that he set up a blog and podcast and is now making a grand total of, wait for it, 40k a year from it, which is his primary source of income. Dehlin has caught a lot of flack from both the usual suspect (homophobic xenophobic hyperactive orthodoxy) but a lot from ex-Mormons, who seem to think that he shouldn't have capitalized on the thing, and who have some issue with his fairly modest living. I don't see why not. The man provides a service and people are willing to pay for it.

There are a whole lot of college professors taking major sabbaticals to essentially write the same thing she's saying, publish it at a teeny university feminist press, and have it read by exactly five people. And really, she's opened up an interesting conversation. That's key for me. I don't have to agree with her. I don't have to like her. But I like that she has people talking about systematic misogyny in video games, and that's a conversation that should be happening for the sake of the kids coming into the gaming community.

She may have been pretty calculated, and capitalized on the death threat, but having been the receipt of a serious threat from a psycho on the Internet myself, I can see why she was careful about how she revealed the info.

[Metal Vendetta]

that recent controversy with Marvel's Alt cover of Spiderwoman

Oh yeah, I remember that. "They'd never draw Spider-Man in such a sexualised pose!" shouted the SJWs. Um, yes they would, said anyone with an ounce of common sense. "That's different!" they said. Because let's face it, feminism is all about equality, so if you draw a male superhero and a female superhero in exactly the same pose, that's somehow sexist. Never mind that that Spider-Man cover is far more sexually suggestive than the Spiderwoman one since she's climbing over the edge of a building rather than three guys stuck together with sticky white fluid. Let's not let that get in the way of a bunch of people who don't read comics getting upset about comics.

But I like that she has people talking about systematic misogyny in video games, and that's a conversation that should be happening for the sake of the kids coming into the gaming community.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK there was this woman called Mary Whitehouse and she launched a campaign to ban what she called "video nasties", in other words horror films with gory or violent content. There was an attendant moral panic that these movies were somehow corrupting the youth of the nation and that they should be pulled from the shelves - she also had a massive bee in her bonnet about swearing and nudity on television. Fast forward to the present day and almost everything she stood for has been discredited - those movies she tried so hard to ban are all now available on DVD, most of them reduced to a 15 certificate by the BBFC, because guess what, the nation's youth was never in any danger from the Evil Dead.

Then there was the Columbine shooting and commentators everywhere were blaming Marilyn Manson and video games. People have been trying to link violence to video games for as long as there have been video games, yet the evidence is inconclusive:

There is no question that journalists need to stop perpetuating the tenuous and unsubstantiated link between extreme violence and video games...Until the research community decides that generating real answers matters more than winning arguments, the media will happily fill the vacuum with sensational nonsense.

I'm led to understand that there's a guy in America called Jack Thompson who has been trying to get violent video games banned for years now. Pretty much everything that's happened to Anita Sarkeesian has happened to him - there are video games where you can beat him up, people wear T-shirts that say "I hate Jack Thompson", he's received death threats. No-one cares because his argument - that video games cause violence - is obviously full of crap. Oh, and he's an old white man and you can pretty much say what you like about him, because feminism is about equality - it's just that pretty young female SJWs are more equal than others.

I have no idea why this idea that video games cause sexism - based on, you know, absolutely no evidence whatsoever - is seen as credible. because it's exactly the same of moral panic perpetuated by Jack Thompson, Mary Whitehouse and all the rest of them. Basically, Sarkeesian's entire argument relies on her cherry-picking some bits of nasty-looking footage from a few games and then using that to write off an entire industry and its fanbase as misogynists. It's not difficult to do - Thunderf00t has just posted a new video where he does exactly the same thing - using Anita's own Tropes vs Women standards he cherry-picks The Avengers and Firefly to "prove" Joss Whedon is a misogynist, because when your standard of evidence is that low you can prove pretty much anything.

And really, she's opened up an interesting conversation. That's key for me. I don't have to agree with her. I don't have to like her.

The point is that she hasn't opened up a conversation - ratings and comments are disabled on her videos and any criticism of her argument is written off as misogynist trolling. There's a UK academic called Susan Greenfield who has been saying much the same thing for years now and no-one takes her seriously either - sample argument: "This study proves that playing video games causes changes in the brain!"... just like reading a book causes changes in the brain, or thinking about something causes changes in the brain. Or indeed, doing anything at all.

Heck, if you took away all the Bioware and Black Isle games, I think you'd be left with Metroid and the Eldar Farseers from the various Dawn of War games.

I don't know, maybe I play the "wrong" sort of video games but say I just got through playing Lego Marvel Superheroes and I must have imagined the 30-odd playable female characters in that. And the entire Resident Evil franchise and all the Street Fighter games and all the Aliens franchise games and Streets of Rage and Golden Axe and Mario Kart and even Super Princess Peach... all the way back to spending hours playing The Great Giana Sisters as a kid. As someone who likes to play female characters in games (and I have spent weeks of my life wandering around the Sword Coast as a female half-elf Bhaalspawn) I get that there could be more of them but exaggerating the case and then calling it misogyny isn't helpful.

[Brendocon]

Let's not let that get in the way of a bunch of people who don't read comics getting upset about comics.

Did you catch the recent "sack Rick Remender" campaign?

Basically he's the devil because he:

- "fridged" three female characters (short answer: one of them was only presumed dead and anybody with a clue about narrative structure could guess that the other two were clearly going to be retconned back to life anyway - all three are now confirmed as being alive again)

- had Falcon commit statutory rape (by having sex with a character who was confirmed IN THE ISSUE as being definitely over 23).

These things of course combine to provide irrefutable proof that Remender hates women and should be set on fire.

But yeah, people should never let the facts stand in the way of jumping aboard a manufactured outrage bandwagon.

[Computron]

I I don't know, maybe I play the "wrong" sort of video games but say I just got through playing Lego Marvel Superheroes and I must have imagined the 30-odd playable female characters in that. And the entire Resident Evil franchise and all the Street Fighter games and all the Aliens franchise games and Streets of Rage and Golden Axe and Mario Kart and even Super Princess Peach... all the way back to spending hours playing The Great Giana Sisters as a kid. As someone who likes to play female characters in games (and I have spent weeks of my life wandering around the Sword Coast as a female half-elf Bhaalspawn) I get that there could be more of them but exaggerating the case and then calling it misogyny isn't helpful.

I suppose I should really call it more of a lack of agency problem. The Lego series of games mirror the plot of their underlying franchises, so the agency of their female characters rises and falls based on the underlying property. Having played a few of those, while fun, they aren't exactly exemplars of deep characterization and agency.

The same problem affects the other games you mentioned, as they tend to be story light, aside from Resident Evil.

The way I look at it, we have games like Thief, Dishonored, Halo, Metal Gear Solid, Team Fortress 2, any number of Calls of Duty, and they tend to be driven by male leads. I'm not saying any of those individual games is misogynistic, but when taken as a whole one wonders why there aren't more games with female leads.

Again, Bioware is one of the huge outliers that allows you to have a fully developed story from either gender. Most games give you the generic male lead perspective and that's it.

Now believe me, I do agree with you that video games no more cause violence than reading a novel does. I also don't think playing a video game will suddenly make you hate women. But I do think that the gaming market is underinclusive when it comes to strong female leads.

On another point, in a previous life of more free time, I played WoW quite a bit and was an officer in a large raiding Horde guild. We were pretty strict on making sure our female members were treated fairly, and I booted quite a few people out for rudeness. However, in my experience there addressing those issues, I came to realize just how pervasive anonymous misogyny is in online gaming. Again, some of those people who were rude to women were also rude to everyone else, but for a large percentage of the troublemakers, they were more or less fine in dealing with other males, but just could not behave themselves when a woman's voice got on voice chat.

I don't know the cause of that. I know WoW itself didn't cause that behavior since I can't imagine that killing mobs for their gold pieces is misogynistic, but the ease in which such behavior can proliferate is particularly acute in online gaming and can prevent women from wanting to even play these games, which I consider to be a shame.

In short, do I think Anita Sarkessian is right? Not entirely. Do I think there is a problem with the portrayal and treatment of women and female gamers in gaming? Yes I do.

[Metal Vendetta]

But yeah, people should never let the facts stand in the way of jumping aboard a manufactured outrage bandwagon.

It's times like this I try to count myself lucky that my favourite franchise is about asexual alien robots and there free of manufactured social justice warrior bullsh- hey, wait a minute...

[Metal Vendetta]

So since none of this is going away on the wider internet, I got linked to this piece on Vice which I think is the best thing I've read all of this so far.

But I will say this. I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately and if there is a platform where people can engage with one another, it's on YouTube. I've watched all sorts of debates on YouTube lately on the Drunken Peasants podcast. I watched "feminist vs MRA" and I found myself agreeing with the feminist. And then there was this whole think with "Tim the Homophobe", where they were slinging the most vicious insults at each other until Tim eventually came on the show and was so chilled that they sang "Can you feel the love tonight" before him and TJ judged a competition of readers' drawings of the two of them having sex together. That may have been the show after, I'm kinda stoned right now. I watched VenomFangX the Uber Creationist and The Amazing Atheist debate each other into utter civility the other night and that's two hours I'll never get back.

My point is this: I believe in an open and free society where debate is welcomed. I have never seen Anita Sarkeesian take part in a debate. That's all.