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:
Seriously. Can we not ever have a discussion without a deliberate BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ derailment off the port bow?
Silly me. Of course we can’t.
Upholding the patriarchy, you say? Like you’re doing right here?
Thank you for the enlightenment.
From the Misandry in Videogames IndieGoGo:
‘Well’, you may ask, ‘How much money will go to production costs?’ – A well-calculated, yet non-official estimate yields that we’re going to use a whopping total of $0.00 for production/administrative costs. ‘But!’, you say now, ‘That means you’re not spending money at all on the project?’ You’re absolutely right! This is because it doesn’t cost us (and anyone, really) money to produce bona-fide web video episodes.
Whether or not you think a male tropes video series is an interesting idea, I think this clearly shows that they have no idea what they’re doing, and what they’re trying to “respond” to. Anita very clearly lays out what her money is going to– that the misandry video fundraiser doesn’t know what to use the money for makes it very clear that whatever comes out of this is not going to be much of anything interesting.
“I wasn’t aware that the comments policy here was so strict on staying on topic.”
I wasn’t speaking to the comment policy but basic politeness — we were discussing how this one woman was shamed for her idea (and shamed is the polite term) — not the content of her idea. Were this actually a discussion of tropes in the first place, it would at least not be a total derail. But derailing is technically allowed, despite the fact you’ll piss people off if you derail onto something we’ve done 100 times over already. (Yes NWO, that is the official feminism statistic, we have definitely discussed this at least 100+ times)
katz — thank you, that was exactly my point (before I started playing Spot the Fallacy on the glossary, again)
Oh, now it’s a “timing” issue? fuck off.
Idylle, good, I’m glad you understand why everyone here finds that annoying. If you want to hang around and talk about the topic (Sarkeesian, her project, and the reaction to it), you’re welcome to. If you want to talk about men in video games, you could wait for a post about that, or start a forum thread, or do what I do and start your own blog so that you can post about whatever you want, whenever you want.
(Just don’t start your own blog and then come around begging people to read it because people don’t like that, either.)
“Just don’t start your own blog and then come around begging people to read it because people don’t like that, either.”
Oh idk, he could manage to become a funny troll if he does that (don’t try, please)
It’s like if someone tried to go on a Mac tech support forum, complain about the problems they’re having with their PC, and then complain about how the Mac people aren’t doing anything to help them out with their PC problems.
Amnesia — oh gods that happens so often. (Your example is perfect in other words) *mac user who will not fix your PC, go away*
Idylle, have you considered getting a Tumblr? Or do you have to derail, specifically; it’s not enough to just say your piece?
Also that they’re just begging for money so that they can have money. Maybe I should start a “help me teach myself trumpet” or “help me paint my miniatures” Kickstarter.
Idylle: We’re not strict about comments here. But there are two things you should bear in mind that are common courtesy, not rules specific to this blog:
1) If that particular kind of derail is particularly unwelcome on that particular site, don’t do it. For instance, Cute Overload hates it when people say “First post!”, so that would not be a good place to do that.
2) If you are new to a blog, you don’t yet know what is and isn’t considered acceptable, so it’s smart to follow the lead of the other posters and not just barge in and decide what the conversation is going to be about (if only I followed my own advice!).
@Idylle: Wow, it takes you a long time to get the point!
I strongly suggest you take your concern for the menz over here:
http://goodmenproject.com/category/noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz/
Has anyone actually given the trolls money, even after they admitted that they’re just going to keep it? People give Elam money, after all.
Yep. They’ve raised 2000 dollars out of a requested 3000. I have no idea why, when the people running it have been clear that they have no clue how to make watchable, interesting videos.
Presumably the “fuck your shit up” principle. Not that they have any concete plans, but tell MRAs you plan to do something anti-feminist and they’re all for it, no specifics required.
I doubt any video will be made and if it is, it’s going to be so pants-shittingly (is that abelist?) embarrassing and stupid, everyone except for most MRAs will laugh at it.
Anita very clearly lays out what her money is going to– that the misandry video fundraiser doesn’t know what to use the money for makes it very clear that whatever comes out of this is not going to be much of anything interesting.
I’ll be pretty surprised if they bother to make a video.
The Mystery Box is only worthwhile if it turns out to be this:
(Yes, I own one of these. My friend Liz worked on the production. It is awesome.)
Shaenon: that was awesome even though sound hasn’t worked on my computer in months.
“I just wish female characters weren’t so overly sexualized. Jessica Rabbit comes to mind. No, I don’t think she was a video game character, but she was in a very popular movie that kids saw. She’s an embarrassment to the female gender.”
Jessica Rabbit is awesome 😀 She is sexy and certainly knows how to work a crowd, but she is also strong and brave. Also I like the side idea that cartoons are attracted to how funny someone is rather than their looks, so everyone thinks she is super lucky to be dating her boyfriend (who is not sexy)
Also Roger Rabbit really isn’t a kids film, I got that impression from what I knew about it, but it gets very dark and scary for kids and I think they’d find the plot boring… I only saw the movie recently and loved it..
Ahhh that comment was horrible, too much ‘also’ and a typo of the dreaded two-dot ellipsis! Apologies.
Sigh. Here are my feelings on the idea that cartoons/game characters with lots of curves are the biggest issue as far as sexism in animation/games is concerned.
http://bustygirlcomics.com/post/16865448396/video-game-proportions-thanks-for-your
On the topic of violence and sexism in video games, the Media Education Foundation released a documentary about 12 years ago: “Game Over: Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games.”
The film is a over decade old, referring to games of the later 1990s, but the analysis is still relevant:
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=205
Yeah, I’ve never cared as much about “these characters have disproportionately large breasts” as “roughly 400 times more attention was paid to making sure these characters’ disproportionately large breasts jiggled a lot than to, say, giving them actual personalities.”
Or, for animation and comics rather than games, the boobs and butt pose. Boobs and butt pose, how do I loathe thee?
First of all, I think it was wrong, Ithiliana, to put Idylle in the “TROLL” (ALL CAPS!!) category. I can certainly understand if you think ze is missing the point in a particular ironic way, but ze never said anything deliberately disrespectful or mean, and I don’t think ze deserves to be referred to that way. Honestly, I think Idylle was treated in ways that ze did not deserve by a few different people on this thread – as if all our righteous anger at Owly somehow spilled over onto this polite poster, as well. You can argue all you like that Idylle was misguided, but ze was always polite, and I don’t think I could always say as much for some of the people who responded to Idylle’s posts.
It’s definitely understandable that people around here want to speak about women’s issues specifically, since there is not nearly enough space to do so IRL. However, the feeling I got from reading this comment thread was that NOTHING OF (non-MRA) MENZ SHALL BE MENTIONED ON THIS SITE EVER (yes, I resorted to all caps, too) – or if such discussion is ever to occur, it can only happen after David introduces it in a post. I’d like to put the idea out there that women’s issues are inextricably intertwined with men’s issues, and that if we are to actually shut down (shout down) all mention, ever, ever, ever, of men’s issues at all, we are cheating ourselves out of the best feminist discussion we can have. Of course, our main purpose here is to discuss women and misogyny, and that’s mainly what we should do. But if we treat this site like a pure-clean all-woman-all-the-time zone, in which any comments about men’s problems are treated as contaminants, then I think we have a problem.
If you’re curious, I’m a woman, by the way. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m saying what I’m saying because I’m a guy.