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
@Ithiliana: wow, that Blackwell’s thing is interesting. I’m going to adopt the phrase “World Englishes” as my theme this week, and try to work it into every conversation. I like it a lot.
(More probably, I’ll cool down and think more clearly, and realize I’m being a bit loopy right now…) Still, thanks for the link.
“Didn’t we already establish that logic is MISANDRY! (I’m having way too much fun with this.)”
Well obviously, but he’s taking literature classes despite the humanities being dominated by misandry, so I’m sure he’ll be able to cope.
PS – Whatever databases Ithiliana is searching are also misandry, as is the fact that she has access to them and Steele doesn’t.
How MISANDRIST of you to imply that logic, a purely masculine virtue, is MISANDRY!!
@Unimaginative: it is!
The comma discussion the other day, um, night, between US and UK comma rules–an example of World English differences. One legacy of the colonial history is that there are a bunch of different “standard” Englishes (with support from different national goverments and university systems). “World Englishes” is a category in linguistics (one of my colleagues works in that area). Anybody who tries to bambooble anybody into thinking there is one correct English should be smacked (metaphorically) over the head with WORLD ENGLISHES!
Linguistics joke: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
I am a female english teacher, therefor MISANDRY!!!
Fun story: the first time I was called for jury duty, in the voir dire, the defense attorney asked me to confirm I was an English teacher. I said yes, I taught English. He said “my mother was an English teacher.”
A bit later, three people related to police and I were kicked out of the room, ahahahahahahahaha.
MOMMY ISSUES!
Watch out, Steele is going to start holding you personally responsible for that one teacher who told him not to pursue the humanities back when he was a kid.
I was excused from jury duty for teaching, but only because my course was going to be in conflict with the first 2 or 3 weeks of the trial. Thank fucking dog. It was a murder case, where one gang shot the wrong brother (in his mother’s driveway), and the brother they had meant to kill hired some other tool to kill them (for $30K or something), all in an otherwise quiet, suburban neighbourhood.
Turns out my best friend was one of the many witnesses who saw the aftermath while driving home from work, so I would have been ineligible anyway (I think… The rules confuse me).
@CassandraSays: OF COURSE I am responsible. As part of the englishteacherhivemind, I spread MISANDRY throughout the profession! Nay, the world!
@Unimaginative: Yes, if you knew anybody involved in the case, you’d be ineligible (that was one question that was always asked–I’ve been called in three or four times).
Hey, Steele, I’m still waiting for the evidence of systematic misandry that I asked you for last night.
I have Asperger’s, as do my boyfriend and (probably) mother, and I’ll actually use the term “sperging out.” I’m not telling anyone else they have to be OK with it, though.
But the thing is, I thought it referred to getting obsessive about your Special Interests. So, when I was talking about military history, I was sperging out, but not when I was telling Steele he was thick as a whale omelet.
Until the two categories briefly and beautifully collided, when it was revealed that Steele believes that the Vietnam war was history’s costliest example of draftees getting killed.
That’ll never get old, Steele buddy. It’s the perfect encapsulation of (1) your solipsism (since America in the late 20th c is obviously the whole of history) (2) your idiocy (since HOLY SHIT MAN)
Mmmm. Whale omelettes….
Christ. I’m Canadian and I know that Vietnam wasn’t the deadliest conflict for Americans. And here I thought American history was drilled into the kids heads over there.
Well..at least the white American history…
White Americans outnumbered for the first time in history. The stupidity of that statement made a lot of jaws drop amongst my friends. And Canada aint no bastion of native understanding and acceptance either.
It is, he’s just a dumbass.
Also, Vietnam did usher in a national conversation about the draft that was heavily disapproving, which is probably what he remembers. Americans were drafted in World War 2, but so far as I know there was no widespread outrage. (There was outrage in both the CSA and the USA over the draft during our Civil War, but that doesn’t fit the narrative full of SEPIA-TONED PORTRAITS AND SAD VIOLINS.)
It’s easy, if you’re a dumbass, to elide the memory of that outrage with the fact of the draft itself.
To be brutally honest, my impression (especially over the last 20 years) is that a lot of Americans get their history education from John Wayne movies. (Mind you, this impression is mostly gleaned from things like Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans and Jay Leno’s thing where he talks to people on the street, so maybe that’s not a fair impression.)
I mean, I’m no great scholar, but if I learn something historical-ish from a movie or a novel, I double-check its accuracy against dramatic effect before I file it away in my How the World Came to Be mental box.
There’s a commentor on Spreadhead calling for single mothers to be whipped with cat o nine tails. Exceptions made for widows of course.
But its not a hate movement.
And these guys whipped into a fury by one woman calling men a financial support system for children and telling them their happiness no longer matters once a child is born. That’s not nice, I’ll agree. So…maybe now some of them will change their viewpoint on women being ambulatory lifesupport systems, and who gives a shit if the women are unhappy once they become mothers? Shall I hold my breath?
The HIstory Channel.
History teachers blench when students tell them how much they LOVE the History Channel.
*sigh*
No, you’ll only succeed at turning blue.
@Unimaginative: I’ve had students who insisted Texas won the Battle of the Alamo!
So in some cases, John Wayne movies would be BETTER than the coaches teaching history (only recently has HISTORY been added to the list of standardized exams students must pass to get a graduate degree which means that more schools hire people who are qualified to teach HISTORY rather than hire coaches who are also assigned history classes).
@Kirbywarp: I suppose, in the end, I really only have one thing to say. You don’t get to speak for other men. You don’t get to proclaim that bullying and abuse from an authority figure “doesn’t carry much weight” or “isn’t so bad” due to the Feminist 401 theory that you’ve learned to parrot on the internet. You don’t get to make blanket statements about how the boys in your class felt- or how any male feels in the presence of misandry. Some will not be bothered; others, it will hurt very badly indeed. Your attempts to erase other men’s experiences is mind-bogglingly presumptuous.
If you found your teacher’s bullying to have an unexpectedly positive result, that’s awesome for you. But the buck fucking stops there. You don’t get to make grand, sweeping proclamations about how bullying and abuse from a teacher is “a good thing”, or “justified” in any sense of the term. You speak for yourself and no one else, you lying, arrogant, presumptuous sack of shit.
That’s right, Kirbywarp! Only STEELE is permitted to make grand, sweeping proclamations of systemic abuse totally extrapolated out of his fee-fees being hurt by a mean teacher that one time!
Hey Steele, how do you feel about hard wooden chairs?
Hey, Steele, weren’t you going to show your humanities chops and prove that institutional misandry is a real thing?
@Ithiliana: if it makes you feel any better (it probably shouldn’t), the reverse also happens. My best friend’s first year of teaching (high school), she was assigned to be the cheerleading coach. We were like “Buh? Cheerleading is a sport?” It was a humiliating year for her and her team.
Because our town only had one high school until about the year we started grade 10, and the next nearest high school was a 4-hour drive away. So inter-school rivalries weren’t really a thing for us, even if we’d been into sports.
(She became the yearbook advisor the next year, to everyone’s relief.)
Hey, Steele, weren’t you going to show your humanities chops and prove that institutional misandry is a real thing?
Nope. It would be a waste of time to dialogue about that with you extremist feminists, eager to dismiss bullying, abuse and harassment unless it’s the “right kind” of bullying, abuse and harassment. You are terrible individuals.
Bigotry, prejudice and Misandry in no way imply institutionality. In a certain context, they may, but in a general context, they default to the dictionary’s definition- the simple, layman’s term. This is reality.
That’s right, Kirbywarp! Only STEELE is permitted to make grand, sweeping proclamations of systemic abuse totally extrapolated out of his fee-fees being hurt by a mean teacher that one time!
Nope, again. Read for comprehension. I merely question Kirbywarp’s assertion that he can make such proclamations; I do not pretend to know what the boys in his class felt, or any male feels in the presence of Misandry. I simply acknowledge the possibility that some are hurt, and based on that possibility, it seems we should condemn instances of Misandry.
Didn’t realize condemning bigotry was a radical notion.
Why are you now capitalizing misandry?