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:
Men talk, and women squawk. You could also say that a group of women talking is the same as a bunch of hens clucking. Either way shows you’re a misogynist that disregards anything women say based on the fact that they’re women.
I don’t care if you like Feminist Frequency or not. You can express your opinions without ableism, though.
By the way, it annoys the crap out of me that StupidFeminist’s randomly created avatar looks so similar to mine. I may have to figure out that Gravatar thing and make mine look different if he sticks around very long.
Kendra — hover over the W in the top left and click settings, then public profile, changing your avatar should be simple from that point. (the more you know)
I actually have a friend who totally did abuse serial clauses. I mean, not just adding more clauses, in a colloquial sort of way. I try to type the way I speak! It seems to flow better that way.
I mean that he actually filled a whole page of an essay with one sentence, one grammatically correct clause-filled English-abusing sentence. On purpose. And he was proud of it.
That… that’s harsh.
Writing in a way that reflects the way you speak, stacking clauses together, well, y’know… this is English. The base mechanics are not nearly as important to me as the question of clarity. Does it make sense? That, above all else, is to be preferred.
But I don’t expect trolls to understand that.
Argenti, I’m thinking it’s not HWSNBN, but one whose name is never typed out all the way. Starts with a “B” and ends in “completely full of shit.”
Kendra, I feel your pain. I went to gravatar because my image was very similar or B___’s. 😉
“That… that’s harsh.”
That’s lovely. If there’s anything 4 years of Latin taught me it’s how absurd English can be sometimes, might as well take advantage of it! And construting a sentence is beyond many of our trolls (the rest just make up nonsense sentences, see most things NWO says for examples) so yeah, I doubt the whole “does it make sense?” thing makes sense to them.
hellkell — could be B____ — I don’t think I’ve had the (dis)pleasure yet, so I can’t say. Considering there was exactly one potential point in all those words, you could well be right.
All right, I went to gravatar and uploaded a picture, so hopefully I will look different from SF.
I’m confused. The W here on manboobz?
Nevermind, I figured it out, but it will take up to an hour for my changes to take place.
Thank you, Argenti Aertheri.
No problem, are you going by just bionic mommy now?
I go by either Kendra or bionic mommy. I think it changed my name when I signed in with a wordpress account. I didn’t realize it did that.
Kendra + Internet = Confusion
Proof once again that beauty is a socially constructed ideal.
I think making sense is against their religion. I’m pretty sure. Evidence suggests.
@Brown University Student er, Stupid Feminist
Get a fucking hobby. This is the height of sadness.
Hmmm…I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that it’s because (1) it’s misogyny and (2) he mocks misogyny.
One of these days, I really hope you guys will manage to sound out the big words at the top of the page.
“Kendra + Internet = Confusion” — it happens, I just didn’t want to call you Kendra if you’d prefer bionic mommy
Howard — “Proof once again that beauty is a socially constructed ideal.” — no argument there, nor at the suggestion that not making sense is a religious doctrine for trolls.
Polliwog — it’s like they can’t grasp that one can mock something without being upset by it (though this one is upsetting as well) — for example, 80s hair? I will mock that shit until you stop doing that to your poor hair; am I upset? Not in the least.
I like how people are assuming the male members of the commentariat here (hi!) are all self-hating, rather than just people who go “Hey, people are cool! Let’s respect the ones who don’t spew forth torrents of bigoted bullshit like a broken pipe in the plumbing of woe and unhappiness!”
Argenti! You would mock 80s hairstyles?!?! How dare you?!? They are so fabulous! I think you’re just jealous.
[cloudiah goes off to make sure all 80s photos of her have been expunged from the internetz]
[while crossing fingers that none of her links break]
It’s really worse than that, when you think about it. Trolls come in to spew hate. They find women here, and somehow, naturally, the men here are ignored.
THEY TARGET WOMEN WITH THEIR HATE.
But they would like to take this time to assure you that they’re just sticking up for men, and there’s really no misogyny there, and they’re not a hate movement.
cloudiah — that last one might be so bad it cycles back into good in a campy way, hair horns are pretty cool I suppose. The backcombing just kind of makes me want to go “your hair! it doesn’t do that!”. As long as the 80s hair stayed in the 80s I guess it’s fine though.
I kinda like number two. It looks good on her.
And when they *do* (can someone tell me which formatting the site uses so I can bold and italicise stuffs? Lack of a preview button frightens me) choose to acknowledge our existence, they do it via insults in the form of the “classic” woman = bad insults, and implying we only do it for the attention (instead of, you know, that we prefer to be reasonable human beings).
They care about men, totally, except the ones they don’t (and only when they agree with them.. sometimes not even then!).
<b>bold</b>
<i>italic</i>
Thanks! Though i’m not sure i’ll even attempt blockquoting, considering all the times experienced blockquote users use it and it comes back to bite them in the arse. 😛 Blockquotes seem to have a will of their own sometimes.
…IT EXPLAINS SO MUCH.
I blame spellcheck’s will for that, blockquote errors, so our brains get used to seeing the squiggly line and ignore it, even when we’ve typed “blockqutoes” or something. Ymmv may vary on that, idk if every browser does that.
And I use <em>emphasis</em> and <strong>strong</strong> because I’m a pedantic geek and they’re more accessible (some screenreader balk, or used to anyways, at <b> and <i> because they aren’t rendering them in print at all).
The strike-out trick is
<del>delete</del>btw.*grumbles at html character entities* It doesn’t look like I typoed any of them…
Men talk, and women squawk.
No, no, no. We squak. It’s a special word that only men know because of their superior intelligence.