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:
If you can read German, here’s the book:
http://www.amazon.de/S%C3%B6ldnerleben-Drei%C3%9Figj%C3%A4hrigen-Sozialgeschichte-Selbstzeugnisse-Neuzeit/dp/3050010088
Amazon says it’s unavailable, but you should be able to get it at a university library.
There are excerpts of it in this book, but (1) it’s not complete and (2) the translation bugs me. It’s not wrong, it’s just a lot more…meh than the original.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Thirty-Years-War-Documentary/dp/0872209393
The latest book on women in early modern armies is John Lynn’s Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe. It’s very good, but since most of his stuff is taken from secondary sources or published primary sources, his hypotheses remain preliminary, which is something I hope to remedy in my own research.
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Armies-Warfare-Modern-Europe/dp/B007MXXUHI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339927771&sr=1-1&keywords=john+lynn+women+armies
:
Tulgey Logger, I have a comment in moderation where I address your interest.
It sucks she’s taking all this flack but she’s gonna have the last laugh seeing as how, last I checked, she’s raised over $100,000 more dollars than she originally asked for, meaning she’ll be able to make way more pro-feminist content than she planned on. I’d love to see these MRAs try to raise that kind of money for anything. They’re such slacktivists.
She’s awesome though. I love bitch media and her previous tropes videos. Such a great source of information and inclusive discussion.
I like how you assume it’s due to hurt feelings and not due to an overwhelming amount of people who are interested in both the topic at hand, and funding her future videos. Her former videos about movie tropes were very well done and popular. Of course people want to fund even more. She has already put out a bunch of videos prior to this. Many a kickstarter project with lots of interest gets way overfunded and that’s a GOOD THING! This shows the people running the media that individuals on the outside are a force to be reckoned with. We’re voting with our wallets about what type of film/tv/music we’re interested in and helping people who otherwise couldn’t afford it get a leg up to compete with the big boys. I for one am psyched when I see projects that interest me gain so much funding.
If anything the backlash only alerted people to the project who weren’t previously aware that it existed. That’s not a response to her feminsitting, it’s just an extra boost of advertising. So if you MRAs don’t want to provide free publicity to causes you don’t support, you might want to consider being less douchey next time.
No, it’s an extension of the patriarchy, you fuckwit. It’s a system that hurts men, too. Any men who are unwilling or unable to maintain the culturally mandated level of “masculinity” face social punishment for that behavior. The dumb dad trope would not be culturally understood as “funny” unless it was culturally understood that it’s ridiculous for men to perform women’s labor.
The Inept Buffoon Dad in sitcoms is actually the role of power, since they’re the Funny. The wife is the Unfunny. Rarely do you see the husband playing the “straight man” and the wife goofing off. Considering the point of the sitcom is to make you laugh, the silly dad is the most valuable person in the show. Not to mention he’s the title character yet and allowed to be “tv ugly”, but the wife usually isn’t either of those things. Really, I don’t see how the buffoon dad in sitcoms is at all, however fictitious, misandry.
Anyway, came to the comments to see if any talking about video games was occurring, but nope. The usual MRA and pony show.
Yeah, the Dad character is always ugly and lazy, whereas his wife is thin and gorgeous. This even carries over into cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy, where in-universe Marge Simpson is said to be very attractive but Homer is fat and nearly bald. It definitely seems to be part of a common fantasy that all men deserve supermodel-like wives.
Speaking of the c-word, let me make sure you saw this: http://articles.petoskeynews.com/2012-05-19/foster_31781156
It’s different when a man does it. Jeez, isn’t that obvious?
Dev: this here blog is for mocking misogyny. Thanks or the concern trolling on the men’s behalf, I’m sure there will be cookies galore back at the clubhouse.
Jrockford: somehow I don’t think NWO would have a Ralph’s card for ID. Too much gov’t intrusion.
Actually that’s a good point. How does someone that paranoid manage to get through the security required to board a plane? He claims to fly a lot for work, and I’m not seeing how he hasn’t been stopped at the gate for ranting about Big Daddy and refusing to show ID because it’s somehow connected to the Rothschilds yet.
The response of these scum should be no surprise. On a brighter note there are hints of change like this:
http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/banning-e3-booth-babes-isnt-good-manners-its-good-business
Penny-Arcade is a fairly popular voice in the gamer community and while some of their humor has been bawdy they have skewered the misogyny in the industry in the past. Ben Kuchera’s above article is a much needed breath of fresh air. Hopefully young gamers will listen to him and not the Reddit freaks this post calls out.
NWO: Would the patriarchy be where all things that are bad come from men and all things good come from women?
No.
See how easy it was to correct the basis of your misunderstanding?
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble but women have been running the show for quite some time
No, they haven’t (I wish all misunderstandings were so easy to clear up).
If men as a whole were running the show than men as a whole would be residing at the top.
They are.
Polliwog: When “kill the Jews” is less offensive to someone than “women are people,” I don’t even know how to deal with that.
Yeah… That’s my problem. I know what my initial reactions are, and they aren’t nice. The problem is I can’t really see anything better to do with that sort of adult.
And that makes me sad.
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.
That makes me sad too. It’s not that I don’t make stands against that sort of shit, it’s not that I’ve never done it in person. It’s that I can’t spend all day, every day doing it.
And that I that I could.
There’s that 1 in 5 number again, you quoted the party line. Can you even comprehend thinking for yourself?
Said with no sense of irony.
And since you’re never going to admit how frequent, heinous and life destroying false accusations are,
Quick… show us the cases? Show us the legions of men who had their lives destroyed by these ubiquitous false accusations?
We’ll wait (after all, we’ve been waiting for more than a year on you doing this already).
It must be a shock to womens universe encompassing ego to be ridiculed in return.
Not so much, more SNAFU.
So words on a screen, unverified, makes for sound methodology?
You have to do better than this. Your slam against Berkeley was just words on a screen. If we assume that all words on a screen are equal (I don’t, but work with me here), she has three sets of words; from large research groups, which have no vested interest in minimizing the rapes on college campuses.
You have one set, from a place that does.
Which set of words should I believe?
Ah right, I should believe you; since we know you are all sweetness and light, and would never think leaving a room and coming back with a pipe to beat a woman’s skull in because she slapped you is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
No turning the other cheek for you. Nope. If she slaps you, kill her. That’s the Golden Rule according to NWO, the proud christian.
Hypocrite.
I loved Super Mario RPG.
That all-or-nothing thinking that is the hallmark of the manosphere is really defective at dealing with the nuances of reality. Right now on the front page of The Spearhead there’s a piece about one Canadian court outcome that seems odd, so how has Price reacted? That contract killing is now legal, in all cases, everywhere, in Canada, as long as the person ordering the hit is female. While there is sometimes an outcome in court that seems wrong to the public, I seriously doubt as if this case law will serve as a predent that sees murder for hire legalized in Canada for females.
Actually, this is incorrect. Patriarchy does not mean “rule of men,” it means “rule of The Father.” If you can’t figure out the difference between those two phrases and what that means when applied to social institutions in our society, that’s not my problem.
Topics about the problematic elements of video games always makes me have a sad. 🙁 Add to that all the shitty elements (although “elements” sounds like a bit of an understatement sometimes) of the gaming community who come out of the woodwork when stuff like this come up. I only ever hear about this stuff second-hand for that reason (it’s not the only reason, but it’s an important one), I just keep away from most gaming-related sites.
This whole Tomb-Raider-attempted-rape thing is stupid as well, it’s not going to get to the root of the problem. For a segment of the gaming community that can’t identify with female characters, making the character more vulnerable isn’t going to fix anything. That’s pretty much the opposite of what needs to be done and just feeds into the existing setup. Not to mention, certain things are very hard to do “tastefully” and non-offensively (in my opinion, rape and torture being at the top of the list).
I’m not even convinced making more strong, developed and reasonable female characters would fix it either (maybe i’m just being too pessimistic about the ability for the gaming community to change itself), but that’s obviously the way to go regardless.. if we could stop developers themselves being part of the problem.
Starting with them actually listening to people making the reasonable arguments, and not either making up shit ways to “fix” the problem (reminds me of a man who knows there’s a problem with sexism, but refuses listen to a woman’s perspective on it, and instead tries to “fix” what he thinks is the issue), or kowtowing to the loudest, most sexist members of their fanbase.
Making decent female characters isn’t even hard! I’ve been doing it in RPGs (D&D specifically) for as long as I can remember, and that was even before I was a feminist!
Did I just type all that? Sorry about the wall-o-text. 🙁
Idylle: @Argenti – how am I proving your point? This doesn’t have to be looked at in a zero-sum mentality; just because I mention that we could also shed a bit of spotlight at some of the tropes involving men doesn’t make the topic of Sarkeesian’s work any less admirable and important. Equality isn’t quantifiable, there’s enough to go around for everyone, as silly as this sounds.
Because to every criticism of your position your response is, “Yes, but what about how the women make it worse. Those poor men are doing the best they can.”
Just to be clear, I’m not defending ALL the menz. If the issue is worth looking into, like the dumb dad trope, I’ll defend. I am certainly not defending the men who hurled slurs at Ms Sarkeesian in a pathetic attempt at activism.
Actually, you are. You are doing it by trying to change the subject.
“I wasn’t aware that the comments policy here was so strict on staying on topic.”
It’s not (see the FAQ). But you aren’t actually adding a new topic, rather derailing this topic about how women are treated, and asking us to think about making the lives of men easier/better.
Also, typically, I hit post and within half a second I notice a typo. 🙁
And besides, we don’t really need to speculate what would happen if the philosphy of the NWO’s of the world ever became law for society. We already have a model that shows us where this sort of thinking goes. Just look at the FLDS, the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists that withdrew from general society and set up their own society under their priesthood government. What we have learned from this experiment in our lifetimes is that it is a) arbitrary – one man can be lenient with his wives and children, while another may be obsessively strict and controlling; b) it judges by hierarchy not facts – men are listened to more than women, and high-ranking men more than lower-ranking men, etc.; c) the power relationships take away most recourse for the lower ranking person in any dispute with a higher-ranking person; d) the higher-ranking person gets to define what is reality; e) the well-being and even survival (in terms of continued group membership) of lower-ranking people is more frequently threatened. Excellent reading for those interested here: http://flds101.blogspot.com/
Also, we have another model for the sort of society I frequently see called for in the manosphere: 18th century America. Yes, some good things were happening there, but subsequent decades showed a need for a lot of alteration and refinement of that society, to put it mildly.
So, many of the ideas put forth as solutions by MRAs have already been tried out.
@DevTROLL:
Rutee already did a bang-up job smacking your post around, but what the heck, I’ve got time no my hands, no desire to clean house any more, and plus, it’s fun to play what the troll.
First of all, I don’t give a flying fuck whether you think I am wrong or right, Dev. My definition of TROLL is probably different than yours. I put Idylle in TROLL category because of continued missing of the point, despite lots of explanation, and the insistence upon trying to use certain phrases associated with social justice work in regard to (white) men (more about this later).
I’m not sure about all the “we” and “our” usage in your post, Dev. I don’t recognize your name, though I have a lousy memory for names. But you do not speak for me. I feel no “righteous anger” against NWO. I feel a combination of disgust, boredom, and nausea. I also do not assume that being “polite” means “not being a troll” or “not being a misogynistic”: DKM (if you’re a regular here, you know all about him) never uses cuss words. He’s also one of the most viciously misogynistic shitheads of all time. You are coming perilously close to being a TONE TROLL, btw. So, fuck off with your etiquette manual.
*points up*: The purpose of this blog is to MOCK MISOGYNY. The problem wasn’t that Idylle was talking about “men’s issues” but that they were doing so in a post focused on how an individual woman was harassed on the internet. If you would like, I’ll be glad to link you to some politely written posts by men (John Scalzi and Jim Hines specifically) about how male bloggers are never treated the same way as female bloggers. That post–yeah, it was FUCKING OBOXIOUS to keep talking about TEN MENZ.
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.
You know, I have identified as a feminist since the earl 1980s. I’m a queer woman, who didn’t realize it until late in life because omg the fucking fifties. I have been teaching, writing, and thinking about feminisms for decades (and I don’t really trust anybody who uses the terms “women’s issues” instead of FEMINISM especially when they try to equte men’s issues with women’s issues). There are a number of ways in which the kyriarchical ideology oppresses men: on a spectrum, however, straight, white, men as a class are not facing that much oppression–not compared to men of color, men of alternative sexualities, and men in lower socio-economic classes. The enraged video gamer dudes are not very likely to have many men from those classes — not saying all games are white straight men, but I read a lot of blogs by marginalized groups in gamer culture, including women, and yeah, lots of straight white men who think they’re being oppressed by being asked not to call people cunts and faggots and “n-gg-rs” (full word will result in moderation).
And just who is “WE” white girl? You’re spouting an awful lot of bullshit that doesn’t seem to connect to the reality of this community: for one thing, not every here is a woman. A lot of the people here are NOT in fact women. Nor are the only things discussed those approved by women–there are several MRA/TROLL women here. Do you even READ over here, or do you just swan around looking to try to womansplain to strangers on the internet what they’re doing rong?
I’m not curious.
I don’t give a flying fuck.
I learned decades ago that “woman” does not equal “feminist” (Margaret Thatcher). There are many women who actively support the MRA, and women are as capable of misogyny toward other women as men are. (There are also men who are feminists).
Your arguments are not made stronger or more persuasive by your genital configuration.
If it comes to that, I assumed Idylle was a woman (something about “we” used in their posts, and hmmmmm sort of this “we must be nice to the poor men” tone in their posts). And that doesn’t matter either–they were pushing shit, just like you are.
Google “No Seriously what About Teh Menz”–that is the blog you’re looking for, perhaps.
Oops, my long response to Dev is in moderation!
Ah, well.
OK: I’ve tried twice to post about The Border House Blog and both times my comment has disappeared (i.e. not even noted as held for moderation).
Texting…