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
In the meantime, several pages ago, Steele said:
We trotted out several incidents. Did he ever reciprocate?
@Anathema:
Apparently misandry is like bubble-gum that’s stuck to your shoe. Once it gets stuck on, it never ever comes off yet is only ever a slight nuisence.
You’re a disgusting person, Steele. You’re a nasty little toad, you refuse to see what’s in front of your face and you’ve devote your life to helping out the more fortunate. You argue like a wife-beater, you ask others to prove your own points for you, and when one person hurts your precious little feelings you scream about it for the rest of your life. You’re grotesque, you’re deliberately idiotic, and you think the Vietnam war is the costliest conflict that ever involve the draft.
Ignoring Steele’s ongoing refusal to provide any evidence of systemic misandry (because he doesn’t have any), can I just say how much the use of “dialogue” as a verb annoys me? Yes, I know that it’s now technically considered acceptable, but it just doesn’t sound right to me at all.
@VoIP:
I love how this is your most biting, final insult. ^_^
So basically this is what Steele considers to be “misandrist jokes”: light-hearted joking about how girls are so much better, explicitely described as being used for the purpose of countering harmful messages towards girls.
Firstly, you’re saying female students were explicitly told they were inferior to men by authority figures- figures they were trained to respect, believe and obey? That’s bullshit, or if not, you went to a terrible school. I would certainly be in favor of stopping teachers from saying misogynist crap as well. Unacceptable.
If that’s what counts as institutional misandry? Color me uninterested.
I made no claim regarding institutional misandry. All I’m saying is that it was an example of misandrist rhetoric. Based on what you’ve actually said, there’s no denying it, even if you insist upon arrogantly claiming that the misandry was harmless.
And again, you don’t get to decide what it “harmless, light-hearted” bigotry and bullying and abuse and harassment, and what is “serious” bigotry and bullying and abuse and harassment.
@CassandraSays:
If this is a dialogue, who would be Salviati, who would be Sagredo, and who would be Simplicio?
Still no reciprocation, huh? No examples of men being attacked simply for being male. And yet, Misandry is at least as big a problem as misogyny.
you ask others to prove your own points for you
The rest of your post is ad hominem, so I’ll ignore it thank you very much, but let it be known this is bullshit. I’ve enlisted the dictionary to prove my point for me.
*jaw-drop*
No wait… *jaw drop*
No wait. *jaw drop*
…
JUST A LITTLE GOD-DAMNED SELF AWARENESS! IS THAT SO MUCH TOO ASK FOR?
WORDS FAIL ME AND I DON’T EVEN CARE BECAUSE THEY EXPRESS HOW FLABBERGHASTED I AM AS DO THE CAPITAL LETTERS WITH WHICH I AM EXPRESSING MY FLABBERGHASTEDNESS
@Kirby: Right? At comment number freaking 860-ish!
Holy shit, he’s still going?
So I did my homework, helped a friend move, went to a munch and back, slept, went to school and back, went out for dinner, am just about to go to sleep again… and this whole time, Steele’s been at it.
Is he the pen name for a team of MRAs working in shifts? Because this endurance is unbelievable.
Backing up things I said about the existence of systemic misandry? You know, the thing that, if it was real might actually justify the existence of my movement? Totally unnecessary!
Arguing that my interpretation of someone else’s paragraph long anecdote is more correct than the interpretation of the person who told it? THIS IS THE HILL I WILL DIE ON!
My mind, it is boggled. Can we call him No Self-Awareness Man from now on?
Steele, what is the official definition of “ad hominem” and can you explain exactly how that comment fits the definition.
@cloudiah:
I think an ad hominem is when you take a property of a person (“is a feminist”) that is unrelated to the argument (“whether a particular experience is evidence of misandry”) and use it to dismiss said argument.
[…] you think the Vietnam war is the costliest conflict that ever involve the draft.
I’ve been ignoring this bullshit up until now, because you’re not really worth debating- but let’s deal with it.
You’re wrong.
Way back when, you said:
Universal conscription was regarded as a privilege, just like voting. And only people who did the second could do the first.
I responded:
Maybe in the past. Not in modern times.
You said:
[…] Modern America does not have a draft. Your point?
We can see here that it is you who specified the discussion was to be about America.
Registering this, and obliging you, I said:
If we’re talking about America, the draft existed long after women won the right to vote. The most costly use of the draft (that is, Vietnam) was over fifty years after the Nineteenth Amendment.
Since you were the one to bring up the US, I switched to that frequency. And if we limit our scope to America, I am correct. Your accusations of Amerocentrism are even more boneheaded because I do not hail from the US, although I am admittedly a citizen now. Given that you originally brought up America, I assumed that was what you, presumably as an American, were interested in.
I obliged you.
Yes. After dropping a huge fucking bombshell of obliviousness, now is the time to go back and shore up old arguments you’ve been ignoring.
Wait! Does this mean you’ll finally get around to justifying the existence of your movement? Like… the only thing that is really worth talking to you about on this blog?
@kirbylovelykirby, I was asking Steele. 🙂
So, Steele? Hint: “Kirbywarp is a scumbag and a bully enabler.” This is NOT ad hominem.
*jaw-drop*
I’m sure you’re rushing to copypasta the Wiki link to that Larry Summers dude from the ’90s or whatever, who postulated that perhaps men were as a group better suited to the higher echelons of mathematics, and was promptly eviscerated for it.
Talk about unimpressive.
Did you miss the part where VoIP explicitly and completely (and hilariously) proved you incorrect?
Since you’re such an obliging fellow, howzabout you trot out some reciprocal examples of men being attacked for being male. You know, on par with the examples we gave of women being attacked for being female.
Steele, America had the draft during the Civil War. America had the draft during both world wars.
All of these wars had higher American casualties than the Vietnam War did. Even talking about the US alone, your argument is spectacularly wrong.
Is Steele a dalek?
Unimaginative, all examples of women being attacked for being female are isolated incidents, no matter how many of them there are. But every time a woman was mean to Steele is proof of widespread misandry.