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
On the other hand, you are very tired.
On the other hand, hentai is a thing that exists.
Ah ha! Found it! [NSFW]
My day is now success. I can sleep happy. G’night all!
First reaction to thread: D:
Do I need to read it all or can I assume it’s just Steele missing the point about 50 times in a row?
I also kick a lot of ass, if you’re interested in that. And I’m modest, too!
Well I read the first half of the first page before I got distracted (watching someone on YouTube play the Slenderman game, because i’m too cowardly to play it myself 😛 ), but arguments about the word “misandry” always make me wish the concept of using entirely separate words for institutionalised prejudice and personal prejudice would take off more than it has (making “misandry” permanently a nonsense word).
Then we wouldn’t have to deal with all the bullshit false equivalence that comes from the privileged side of things. Of course, hoping that MRAs would stop it is probably expecting a bit much.
I’m thinking backwards here. I meant the first half of the previous page. 😛
I never did find out why Steele called Fecke a feminist extremist.
Farewell, Steele; on behalf of the Humanities, let me say that we do not miss you one bit.
Oh look, yet another thread taken over by a narcissistic asshole who wants to talk about himself. No point wading through 700 comments to try and find any discussion that might have happened about the actual post.
Also, DEBUNCTED. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
It was reasonably engaging when it was on-topic, but then Johnny_M80 was unmasked as a sockpuppet and banned (again), leaving Steele as thread’s main troll.
And like most tediously oblivious trolls, he then decided to make the thread all about himself, which was a bit unfortunate for the rest of us, since he turned out to be even more boring than B_____n (who at least had a possibly fictional girlfriend who was fond of giggling and the occasional light spanking).
@Indifferent sky: I think (based on a whole lot of factors including what students say and do, given that I teach women’s and multicultural studies) that these women were not feminists–but were perhaps protofeminists. They realized they were treated unfairly by the men in their lives–but they had not moved to think about the systemic issues. They were treated unfairly: and not only by the men, but by the legal system in Texas (judges are elected; it is one of the most sexist–and racist! and homophobic–cultures/systems in the country). (There’s some research out there arguing that the attempts made by Southern states to exclude African Americans from education resulted in really horrific treatment of poor white people as well–so there’s been a sort of boomerang effect, in regard to education, social services, etc.). Texas routinely rejects federal money for social services because they don’t want to conform to federal guidelines. So the male and female students in this incredibly poor part of the state while being denied access to health care (literal physical access as well as any hope of paying for it), decent education, other social services, can still see themselves as full on Republicans and support the whole horrific corporation privileging mess that is Texas.
The angriest most “man hating” (by that I mean ONLY expressing verbal hatred of men, without threatening specific men) women I know (and have known since I’ve been teaching here) are just that group of women–and they can often come out with full-blown hatred of feminism (and some personal attacks on me in both evaluations and recently a case of graffitti in the women’s bathroom) when they are assigned to read anything by women. I’m not going to go into any of the personal details of their stories–they’re not mine to tell–and there are complicating factors for me here (I’m a northerner; I’m a professor; I’m an out queer woman — there were some really nasty slurs against me that ratemyprofessor finally took down; I teach all the weird non-canonical stuff: I actually had an evaluation that said “I didn’t expect to have to read lesbians or black women in a Women’s studies class”).
So yes, totally agree on their anger (which is completely valid), but am uneasy calling them feminists (although quite a few of my women students generally are in the “I’m not a feminist, but” category), in part because they would reject the label.
What I learned from the situation was microaggressions (such a useful term) are possible in any context, and do not always follow the larger macrostructures.
@Indifferentsky: OOPS! I misread–you’re saying that you don’t think they were feminists (I misread something there). I totally agree! So um pretty much ignore the whole last comment.
In case it was missed in the trollery of the thread, Ben Spurr’s Twitter account has been suspended, thanks to @amirightfolks. See the storify here: http://bit.ly/LIWqSD
Hey quick question: do you think there are any women in the gaming community?
Bolded for emphasis. I’ll bold this for emphasis also: fuck you. But thanks for showing once again that clueless privileged folks almost never confine their bigotry to only one group of marginalized people.
Viscaria, is that a racial epithet? I don’t know what that word means and I’m too afraid to google it.
Found a story on how the news about this game has spread beyond the internet:
http://storify.com/WiTOpoli/why-is-this-conversation-necessary-ben-spurr
HA! Ninja’d by Effie!
Should refresh before posting.
@blitzgal: Nothing racial, no. To “sperg out” is to react irrationally, as a “sperg lord” (someone with Asperger’s) would do.
To be clear, I’m not saying that people with Asperger’s behave irrationally, I’m saying that’s what the use of the term assumes.
Ah, ableist speech. So sad how they keep coming up with new ones when they can’t get away with casually using the old ones anymore.
I was going to post what Viscaria said, but I check for ninjas now!
There’s also apparently a second meaning for the word (ejaculation) that would make sense in context, though considering his attitude overall i’m willing to assume he’s insulting people with Asperger’s rather than just making a disturbing sentence.
HOLY SHARK SPRAY BATMAN! This thread is absurdly long, and since most of it has been covered repeatedly, I mostly just have snark.
I think it’s caused a rip in the space time continuum by now (I’m tempted to post “2 minutes ’til Belgium” again)
That’s the theme for July it seems. That and this — “Haha, way to lie about something that anyone can scroll up this same page and read for themselves.”
KathleenB re: Portal — try the flash version, it’s a linear style game like the old Mario games.
kirbywarp —
You want & nbsp; for multiple spaces (without the space after &) — and nice job breaking bold, that was hilarious.
Now, onto Steele —
I’m going to assume everyone missed that last line as he seems to be implying the same as Ruby — prison rape is just fucking hilarious. It isn’t — we’d be all for throwing said person in jail, but next to a serial rapist (in hopes he gets raped)? Fuck no.
Note the plural there.
“What about the moonz!”
Now I’m going to go decapitate some Nazis while mocking the boob jiggle and try to forget this thread happened. (Ahhh BloodRayne, actually somewhat on topic — you can have a female lead, she can kick ass, but only if her boobs jiggle)
I thought the one for ejaculate is “spooge,” although obviously there are a lot of terms for it.
I think by this point, we’ve (as in humans generally) come up with about 50 bazillion words for it. 😛 I’m just going by what I found when I put “sperge” in the Urban Dictionary. I’ve never heard of it used that way either, spooge (or maybe splooge) is what i’d think of too.
I will add a clarification note to my previous comment though and say that since its primary meaning is as a slur, I can’t personally support its use to mean anything else.