Yesterday I wrote about a vile online game in which players were invited to “beat up Anita Sarkeesian,” the feminist cultural critic who’s faced endless harassment because she had the temerity to ask for donations to fund a video project looking at sexist tropes in video games.
The game, which (happily) has been removed from Newgrounds.com, where it was originally posted, was put together by a young Canadian gamer named Bendilin Spurr. On the game’s page, he offered this explanation as to why he created the game:
Anita Sarkeesian has not only scammed thousands of people out of over $160,000, but also uses the excuse that she is a woman to get away with whatever she damn well pleases. Any form of constructive criticism, even from fellow women, is either ignored or labelled to be sexist against her.
She claims to want gender equality in video games, but in reality, she just wants to use the fact that she was born with a vagina to get free money and sympathy from everyone who crosses her path.
That doesn’t really explain much, as asking people for voluntary donations to a video project is a far cry from “scamming,” especially since she’d asked for far less, and that the misogynist backlash to her project began long before she’d collected anywhere near this amount.
It also doesn’t quite explain why Bendilin felt that a Sarkessian-punching game was the best format to make this, er, critique.
Last night, after learning from the comments here that young Bendilin had a profile on Steam and a Twitter account, I decided to peruse both to see if I could find more clues that might explain his foul game.
On his Steam profile, he’s set forth his basic philosophy of life, video games, and how much women suck:
I think it’s just adorable how absolutely no girls are any good at video games, just like how no woman has ever written a good novel. They are nothing but talk and no action, probably because girls are such emotional creatures and base everything they do on their current feelings and then try to rationalize their actions later. How pathetic.
You know what’s priceless? When a gamer girl posts a pic of herself looking as slutty as possible and then throws a fake fit when people talk to her like she’s a whore. What did you think was going to happen, you dumb broad? Lose thirty pounds.
Sadly, these aren’t terribly rare or original opinions for a young male gamer.
Over on Twitter, Bendilin has offered a number of conflicting explanations for why he felt so much hostility for Sarkeesian and her video project that he felt justified in creating a video game devoted to punching her in the face.
There’s the fiscal argument:
There’s the laziness argument:
There’s the rather strange argument that Sarkeesian is not taking the proper time to research the subject, although she has not yet started the project. (Also, one of the reasons she was asking for money was so that she could take the time to research the subject properly.)
The “nuh-uh you’re wrong” argument:
The “she won’t listen to me argument.” Part one: The Lego Incident
And Part 2, in which our hero explains that making a video game about punching someone in the face is a great way to open a dialogue with them:
Naturally, Bendilin, like most misogynists, fervently denies that he’s a misogynist:
Yep, that’s right. The guy whose Steam profile claims that “absolutely no girls are any good at video games” and that “no woman has ever written a good novel,” and who decided to express his criticism for a video project that hasn’t even started by making a video game in which players punch the woman behind it in the face, is angry that anyone might conclude that he hates women.
Well, Bendilin, if you wanted to defend video games and the gaming community at large from charges of sexism, you’ve done a bang-up job of it.
UPDATE: Bendilin is also an artist! Here, Virgil Texas takes a look at Bendilin’s erotically charged Sonic the Hedgehog art.
That last paragraph and the update contained
Speaking of dropping things, I didn’t get why he called Jeff Fecke an extremist feminist out of the blue. Is there context I’m missing or is Steele just that ridiculous?
But I’ll repeat myself, mostly because I’m interested- is hating men as a group okay? Beyond that, is hating individual men okay?
You know something, Steele, I think it would be pretty OK for you to hate my guts if I publicly opined that you’re an attention-seeking “cum whore” who really needs to have some sense raped into him. Because that’s pretty damn hateful.
Steele:
I’m more wondering why the burden is always on the oppressed to be super-nice, not the oppressor. You ever notice how the only good anti-colonialist or anti-racist is the guy who never makes his masters feel bad about themselves? And how, if he did say some fiery shit, it’s carefully scrubbed out of later accounts of his life and movement? Why the fuck is that?
OH WAIT I ALREADY KNOW THIS ONE
“My point, if you’d bothered to read critically, was not that conscription was actually an example of specifically misandrist violence.”
Our point, if you can think critically, is that it’s not “hatred of men” if men are the perpetrators.
I had a history teacher in middle school who was a rather hard-core old-school feminist. She joked nearly every day of the year about how girls were better than boys. Did it bother me? Nope. Did it bother any guy in the class? Far as I know, nope.
It doesn’t surprise me that a feminist man, being inclined to sympathize with feminist worldviews, would be okay with external misandry.
Who are you to speak for the other boys in your class, though? That takes some arrogance and a rather telling lack of empathy. Did you interview each and every one? Even if you joked about it with some of them, you don’t know their personal feelings regarding the situation. It’s well-documented that when confronted with bigoted “jokes”, a lot of people who are targeted will feel pressure to play along, so as not to ruin the “fun”.
Steele:
Did. You read. My post. I study this shit for a living. Universal conscription was regarded as a privilege, just like voting. And only people who did the second could do the first.
…because it’s pretty clear to me, barring any further context, that Steele just chose to single out Fecke at that point because Fecke is identifiably a man in an environment where most commenters’ identities are gender neutral. There’s lots of The Men Are Talking wrapped up in that behavior.
Merely that… it’s an example of ignoratio elenchi, or a red herring of sorts
This is in fact a stunningly accurate description of basically every comment Steele has posted. I think it’s the only rhetorical move he knows.
Steele, do you concede that it is possible to both condemn an (actual or hypothetical) instance of something while still maintaining that that something is not as bad as something else?
For example: I condemn instances of street harassment of men while still maintaining that they are less serious than instances of street harassment of women, because the latter reinforce existing systems of oppression which shape women’s experiences in ways that the former do not.
If you do understand the distinction between saying “This thing is not as bad as that thing” and saying “This thing is perfectly acceptable,” why do you insist on asking people if they think it’s okay to hurt men when all they’ve indicated is that they don’t think men are subjected to the same sorts of violence, harassment, and pressures as women? Is it because you honestly think they’re going to say they support violence against men? Is it because you’re trying to equivocate between the two distinct positions established above so as to discredit other posters? Or is it just that you’re really pretty stupid?
I know which one I’m betting on, but you’re welcome to prove me wrong.
And yesterday I was saying I missed being here because I miss out on all the trolls.
How fortunate am I? ^_^
Shame that the “fortune” is always bitter-sweet: sweet in seeing someone extraordinarily dense, and bitter in trying to communicate to said person.
do you have anything that isnt an excuse?
The problem with a phrase like “fundamentally different worldviews” is that it’s in the context of Steele thinking that he’s arguing with people who believe that hating men as a group is fine and dandy.
So is it this wholly imaginary worldview that’s “fundamentally different” from his own, or our actual one?
Sorry, my story is real. By the time he had that teacher, he had done a lot of soccer (French commenter here), a fair amount of badminton and a bit of tennis. He even had trained some younger kids in the local soccer team. His life goal was to be a professional soccer player, so that he would earn millions of euros like the (all male) people he saw on tv.
I really don’t see how his reaction is surprising.
Now I can’t tell you that no boy was hurt by this teacher’s behavior (theoretically, it may have happen) and I’m not saying her behavior was ok. It’s just was nowhere near as bad thing as what would have been if the genders were reversed.
Because context matters.
Steel, a stupid example doesn’t prove other examples are stupid.
And this is Manboobz! We have MRAs coming here to tell us that conscription is misandry twice a day! How are we supposed to know which ones are serious or not?
@Kyrie:
We should have a “Manboobz Theme of the Day”
Today’s theme, “Context Matters.”
kirby: can we really do a “Context Matters” day without “THERE IS NO CONTEXT!” B____on? (unless it’s another troll, my memory is bad)
@Troll of steele: Ah, it’s happened to you SEVERAL times. In very specific locations.
Not daily, not in broad daylight, not multiple times a day (oh yes so reasonable “it happens more to my female friends”), not an an ongoing grinding THING. Several times.
Wow, aren’t you an ass.
Oh it was ion, why am I not surprised?
I had a history teacher in middle school who was a rather hard-core old-school feminist. She joked nearly every day of the year about how girls were better than boys. Did it bother me? Nope. Did it bother any guy in the class? Far as I know, nope.
It doesn’t surprise me that a feminist man, being inclined to sympathize with feminist worldviews, would be okay with external misandry.
Who are you to speak for the other boys in your class, though? That takes some arrogance and a rather telling lack of empathy. Did you interview each and every one? Even if you joked about it with some of them, you don’t know their personal feelings regarding the situation. It’s well-documented that when confronted with bigoted “jokes”, a lot of people who are targeted will feel pressure to play along, so as not to ruin the “fun”. I can say that certainly would have been the case with me, at that age.
I’m more wondering why the burden is always on the oppressed to be super-nice, not the oppressor.
Deflection. No one here is arguing whether misogyny is okay or not- it’s not. The only point of contention here is whether women- more specifically, feminists- should be held to the same standards they demand of men. Or are you arguing that it’s okay to hate individuals because they are members of some nebulous “oppressor class”? If that’s the case, it seems to me everybody has “license” to hate everybody. Seems a shitty world.
Universal conscription was regarded as a privilege, just like voting. And only people who did the second could do the first.
Maybe in the past. Not in modern times.
Our point, if you can think critically, is that it’s not “hatred of men” if men are the perpetrators.
Incorrect, but again, I was not saying that conscription was “a hatred of men”. Read for comprehension, please.
t’s just was nowhere near as bad thing as what would have been if the genders were reversed.<
This is not true, especially given that it was an authority figure talking to impressionable children. Actually, I'd say it was disgusting, and if I was her superior I would have fired her. I say again, your brother, being apparently a skilled soccer player, was likely confident because he was a skilled soccer player, knew the game, knew he was good. Not every male student (ie, almost none) would have that background.
We might be talking past each of because I believe misandry exists, and also I do not believe misogyny is as pervasive as you all say it is. But I simply don’t agree that women such as Kyrie’s coach should be given a free pass because their bigotry is somehow, in some nebulous way, “less bad”.
Boys aren’t a monolith. Some boys are confident, some boys are insecure. Some boys will be able to shrug off the crap that Kyrie describes; with others, it could lead to some dark places. It did for me. The same is true for girls, of course; if you want to argue that it would be, on average, more damaging for girls to hear a misogynist coach, that’s a discussion that can be had. But it’s really not all that material in a practical sense, in my opinion, because impressionable children aren’t “all average”.
And modern America does not have a draft. Your point?
@Kirby I was just thinking the same thing.
@Weatherby,
You see, Steele’s worldview and our world views really are fundamentally different because Steele lives in one of the Twilight Zones where you wake up with your head in bandages and the doctors tell you your face was horribly disfigured but when they finally take off the bandages it turns out MEN ARE OPPRESSED! whereas we live in the real world.
If you check his IP, it’s actually mxy.zpt.lk.
Steele, since you’re back, can you please substantiate or withdraw this claim?
Re the ongoing claim that feminists hate men, blah blah blah misandry.
I don’t hate men — I am mostly indifferent to them in my personal life and affairs, work collegially with a few of them. What I am against is the kyriarchical system that gives so much privilege and power to a small percentage of men as a GROUP (not saying individual men are not suffering), and that holds out that same promise to a bunch more men (straight white cis) as rewards for marginalizing everybody else.
But I’ve seen great changes in the last 50 years — and I believe that a lot of this mra bullshit is a sort of last gasp flailing around (still liable to be individually violent and horrific in many cases).
Even the attacks on Sarkeesian: years ago, when Kathy Sierra was driving off the internet (not even for being an EVIL feminist, just being a woman writing about tech), there wasn’t that much interest outside the immediate online groups — the attacks on Sarkeesian have gotten mainstream media attention.
You, Steele, are not important enough to hate.
Wy too late in the discussion for this, but I have come across nursing hazing/bastardising other nurses. It was men and women doing it to men and women, thought. Not one gender doing it to another. (and i wondered, if they do that to each other, what the hell do they do to the patients!)
I’m totally using that the next time I can’t answer someone’s argument. Brilliant!