Many of you are no doubt aware of this already, but I just wanted to highlight a recent appalling example of the rampant misogyny in the gaming community online: the harassment that feminist pop culture analyst and video blogger Anita Sarkeesian has gotten for her Tropes Vs Women Kickstarter project, a video project designed to “explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of female characters in games.”
Her YouTube page has been inundated with comments calling her, among other things, a “Dumb ass nazi [obscene gender-related slur],” “faggo.. I mean lesbian,” and “the reason why womens are the inferior gender for the whole history of mankind.” IRONY ALERT: while some are calling her a Nazi, or comparing her to the KKK, others are denouncing her as a “bolshevik feminist jewess” and a “fucking ovendodger.”
And still others are defacing her Wikipedia entry with all sorts of vile shit. (Here’s a screenshot.)
Here’s her discussion of the harassment, which includes screenshots of some of the comments.
An Escapist piece on the harassment, which is where I got the quotes above.
A Jezebel piece, “When There’s So Much Bullshit Online, You Forget How to Feel.”
A piece on The Mary Sue, “The All-Too-Familiar Harassment Against Feminist Frequency, and What The Gaming Community Can Do About It”
Kotaku also weighed in, leading one commenter there to note that similarly misogynistic comments appear there all the time.
Meanwhile, over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, temple117 garners 138 net upvotes for a post urging poor oppressed men to “Fight back! Sexism exists for males too, support these men in their expose of gender tropes in video games!”
And, joy of joys, Men’s Rights buffoon Bernard Chapin has weighed in on the controversy as well. After dismissing the harassment — using a “funny” voice, apparently the most powerful weapon in his rhetorical arsenal — he suggests that women complain about video games because games are a male thing, and women are jealous that men are paying attention to something other than them. “Whatever the male is enjoying himself at,” he says, “it diverts him from taking orders; that’s got to be the focus of their ire.” Then he accuses Sarkeesian of being without “honor” because she’s asking for money to fund her project. (Might want to take that critique up with your pal Paul “Donate Today” Elam, dude.) His video is below, if you want to waste your time with it.
But before you get to that, here’s something a bit more encouraging on the gamer misogyny front: Comedian/actress/gamer Aisha Tyler’s take-no-prisoners takedown of the misogynist assholes who attacked her for allegedly ruining an Ubisoft press conference at the recent E3 gaming extravaganza, apparently by being too female or something. Here’s a screenshot of her comments, and a surprisingly un-disgusting Reddit discussion of the controversy.
Here’s Bern:
TL;DR: There’s no sexism in gaming! You stupid bitch, you probably have sex and opinions!
I noticed the ovendodger thing in the author’s response to the harassment, but I thought it was a “get back in the kitchen” thing, which would be bad enough. Only now do I realize it’s an anti-Semitic slur, and one that is a reference to the Holocaust to boot.
I’m glad sexism and racism are dead, or I’d think this was bad. /sarcasm
Her Kickstarter was already well over its goal when I donated because I think it’s an interesting concept and the volume of hate-filled comments spurred me onto supporting her idea in an obvious way (i.e. putting my money where my views were).
I read some of the comments on the Kickstarter, and noticed a couple of people saying ideas along the lines of “now you’ve got lots of money, what about the menz”. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised any longer than if a female-oriented project is successful, some people come along and want some of the attention/resources diverted to man issues. WTF? Do these people not see the irony of wanting a feminist to do a thoughtful piece on male issues (and the lack of credibility it would have), let alone that the person is possibly not interested in doing that sort of analysis as they never mentioned it in their project scope?
I also found it interesting that a couple of the backers commented that they didn’t think that having no female avatar/character options in a game was important. In one game I have backed, I asked reasonably early that, if the project exceeded its goal, whether the developers could add in a female option for the sole game protagonist (the story underlying the game isn’t sex-specific).
Ok, the #misandryinvideogames twitstream is fucking gold. 😀
Sarkeesian raised $158,917 for Tropes Vs. Women! Nice!
#MisandryInVideoGames Waluigi creates an unrealistic standard of beauty for men
#misandryinvideogames SimCity ordinances don’t allow player to ban child support
#misandryinvideogames carmen sandiego keeps stealing all these phallic landmarks??? its a symbol of castration, guys!!!
#misandryinvideogames in most ww2 games, Hitler (most evil person) is depicted as male
#misandryinvideogames Sakura wears a schoolgirl outfit. What, are you trying to say the male street fighters aren’t educated?
#misandryinvideogames project feeds the unfair stereotype that men are whiny idiots.
“#MisandryInVideoGames Waluigi creates an unrealistic standard of beauty for men”
Who needs a neti pot when you have this phrase and a cup of coffee?
Interesting to note that they can’t enjoy themselves without putting other people down.
Ami Angelwings’ #MisandryInVideoGames tweets inspired some hamster memes:
http://qkme.me/3pqc5n
http://qkme.me/3pqc09
http://qkme.me/3pqc3q
@Valerienorth: They apparently cannot enjoy themselves without making rape and death threats.
There is, of course, a counter-project now called Misandry in Video Games. I don’t think the description DIRECTLY mentions the Tropes Vs. Women project, but it does take several NOT VERY SUBTLE jabs at it. I really, really don’t want to look around for it, but I’m sure it would be pretty easy to find the Google Doc and Steam chat log that led to its creation. Both are horrifying.
http://www.indiegogo.com/misandryinvideogames
“me too!”- the official rallying cry of the mrm
“Ovendodger” was the point where my “fuck it, let’s just nuke the earth from orbit, humanity is irredeemable” rage kicked in.
Or, rather, it wasn’t so much “ovendodger” itself, much as that makes me want to vomit. I can sort of deal with the idea that there are a very few people in the world so utterly vile as to use a slur like that. What really broke me was the sexist douchebags who showed up in those comments to express their utter outrage at a woman having opinions and stuff, but could not work up even a tiny bit of outrage to say, “Dude, maybe trying to insult people by saying that everyone of their ethnicity should be brutally murdered is a little bit over the line?” I do not honestly believe that all of those guys are neo-Nazis. I think they are just more okay with someone being awful to ANY group they do not belong to than they are with any suggestion of respect toward the particular group they actively hate, and that depresses me more than the hate itself. When “kill the Jews” is less offensive to someone than “women are people,” I don’t even know how to deal with that.
i think this was linked in another thread, but in case anyone didn’t see it, kotaku also documented the hilarious trainwreck the counter-video became
http://kotaku.com/5918217/these-guys-made-a-list-about-sexism-against-men-in-video-games-are-they-trolling
Polliwog — “When “kill the Jews” is less offensive to someone than “women are people,” I don’t even know how to deal with that.” — that’s when I remind myself that more people would scream at them than agree with them. For the sake of my remaining sanity I assume that everyone not going “now that is some shit right there” are just afraid of being on the receiving end of it — yeah I realize that’s exactly how the Holocaust managed to occur, but it’s less infuriating than thinking they actually agree, then I’d also want to nuke us.
couldiah — I wish I could +2 that last one more than once. Took me forever to explain to my best friend that he kept loosing at Smash Bros. because I was suiciding and costing him the point for killing me XD
Now to decide if Chapin can have my brain for 5 min.
Is she Jewish, or do they assume she’s Jewish because she looks kinda Middle Eastern (that being where they keep Iran), or do they assume she’s Jewish because they consider her existence fundamentally wrong and she’s not black?
hershele, the was my question too. her wikipedia page doesnt say anything about it, so i’m going with ‘yeah, they just assumed she was jewish because of how she looks’
She’s Armenian. I think the second half of your sentence explains the assumption best.
Oh, and while there are Jews in Armenia, most Armenians are Christian.
yeah, i assumed from the name that at the very least she had one armenian parent, but you never know. nobody would guess from my last name that im jewish.
Here’s a comment from the Jezebel article that was linked.”
Anonymous misogynists swarmed over Sarkeesian to try and silence her voice through harassment and intimidation, but she stood her ground and now her Kickstarter has surpassed its initial goal of $6,000 to the tune of $140,000 and counting. Fuck yeah, ladies.”
She did what women have done throughout history, cried like an infant until someone else made it better. Kissed her boo boo and got her way. What’s the monetary value when a pampered princess gets her precious feelings hurt? 140K and counting. Since this never happens to men who have had their feelings hurt, it must be the patriarchy coddling women because they’re less than men. Shouldn’t you be ranting about the evil patriarchy? Or does this somehow fall outside the realm of patriarchy theory?
Yes, except I confused Armenian and Farsi.
I used to edit gaming mags and still write a little in this industry. The prevalence of these kind of attitudes is so depressing it’s not funny.
On some level, I’m glad this is being brought up and discussed by rational gamers and that the horrorshow trolls are being exposed.
On another level, this is why I’m ashamed to call myself a gamer. (and why I use a comment blocker on gaming sites.)
@Argenti Aertheri
“Now to decide if Chapin can have my brain for 5 min.”
He’d need your enlightened brain to come up with the 1 in 5 college stat. Are you going to just parrot the stat or will you prove it? I’ve given you the links for Berkeley college crime stats and population. Here’s another.
http://www.american-school-search.com/safety/berkeley-college
This is from the college itself, which states from 2007 – 2009 there were 000000000.00000000 forcible and non forcible sex offenses. Since you pride yourself on your excellent math skills and my poor math skills. All I ask is for you to explain how you can get 1 in 5.