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
Johnny_M80
Dude, this isn’t gibberish. Lacan, Sontag, and Foucault are writers who said things, just like Plato and Aristotle were. You’re just making yourself look stupid. (OK, stupider.)
Lacan is a French philosopher/psychologist who was active from the mid 50s until the early 80s. He was interested in Freud and early childhood development. Influential ideas of his include the Mirror Stage, in which a child forms his/her idea of what his/her self should be like by comparing his/her frustrated, semi-competent reality to an idealized image of him/herself as though seen from outside (the “mirror” of the phrase “mirror stage”).
He also coined the use of the term “phallus” to refer to the symbolic power of the masculine in a patriarchal society: “possessing the phallus” means having the social power which accrues to the masculine. One of the reasons this is interesting is that his analysis of the “phallus” is a re-reading of some of Freud’s ideas (of how the sexes relate to each other, for instance, or how a little boy grows up to think of himself as a separate entity from his mother) but in terms of how people fit into the social order instead of how they deal with their biological difference.
Lacan cannot promote the use of “Sontagian camp” to “analyze society” because (1) he is more interested in psychology and abstracted ideas of interpersonal relationships rather than the concrete analysis of any one society, (2) as far as I know, he did not know who Sontag was.
A video game where you punch a woman in the face is not an example of the mirror stage. The mirror stage is a process by which a young child figures out how to live by trying to live up to idealized images of him or herself, and a video game in which you punch a woman in the face presents a debased image instead of an idealized one.
A video game where you punch a woman in the face is probably an example of phallic authority, more specifically an act taken to reestablish that authority when it is felt to be under threat. Since “playing video games” no longer signifies “male” quite so simply to those who keep track of such markers, people who care about their phallic authority need to come up with ever-more-violent ways of signifying masculinity through video games.
Sontag is an American essayist, journalist, and cultural critic, not a philosopher. She is known for her blistering critique of white racism, her analyses of the different symbolism attached to different diseases in modern American and European culture (both tuberculosis and cancer will kill you, but one of them is the “romantic,” “tragic” death of the “aesthete” while the other is “punishment” for being a “type-A personality”–why is that?) and her essays on “camp.” There, she discussed camp as a means of cultural critique which makes use of artifice, detachment, and irony.
A video game where you punch a woman in the face is not camp; such an artwork is not the ironic, detached expression of a subordinate group using playful irony and beauty to dissect the pretensions of the dominant group. Since the woman in the video game s an actual human, known by name, who is speaking up against bigotry, this artwork is, instead, a threat.
Foucault is a philosopher whose descriptions of the way that power works in a modern society have been highly influential in philosophy, political theory, and my own discipline, history. One of his central claims is that power is less about specific, discrete acts in which one individual exercises his will upon another, such as making a video where he punches her in the face, and should be thought of more in terms of contexts or networks in which domination takes place.
The ironic thing is that there is no unsullied position outside the power relationship; everyone in it is deeply shaped by it, right down to the concept that the dominated have of themselves. For instance, Foucault claims that the “sexuality” that people championed as a means of liberation while he was writing in the 70s is itself a product of power structures created by modern medicine.
At first glance, this seems extraordinarily pessimistic, and his work has been criticized for its futile cast—an analysis of the way in which the social order screws us all is not conducive to revolution. However, some writers have seen his late work as pointing the way to new kinds of social orders. My roommate is writing her dissertation on this.
Foucault cannot advocate “cultural neotextual theory” because there is no such thing. However, a video game where you punch a woman in the face is definitely taking place within a context of unequal power relationships between men and women.
@Dani Alexis:
Proof that misandry exists! Where the is Escher Boys?
HAHAHA. Sure, Steele. Someone here is a damn fool, and it’s not me.
@Kirby: my point was that there is context that makes the games different, not that over-the-topness makes a thing a universally obvious joke.
hellkell and Cliff:
See, here’s where actually knowing about theory comes in handy–there’s a difference between a SYSTEMATIC CONDITION or CULTURAL NORM and one or two ANECDOTES.
It is such an outrageously unfair comparison: One, sole, lone game beating up stalkers/harassers that is 8 years old verses like a million beat up every kind of woman game, pregnant, specific to Sarkeesian, grand theft auto on and on and on.
So, just no.
I either accidentally or accidentally added the a word…
MISANDRY!
And context that answers Johnny_M80’s whole reason for posting the game which he promptly forgot so that he could start grinding his axe: no, one would not be worried about the creators of that game.
@Tulgey Logger:
I see. Fair enough. Of course, we already know Ion/Johnny is rather oblivious to context…
VoIP: Steele is vigorously, and with much foot stomping, going to disagree with us and claim institutionalized misandry exists.
He will proceed to trot out some arglebargle about dating and family court, and much lulz will be had all around.
Cliff, well then fine, let’s speak on your semantical terms, because that sort of seems to be what it boils down to. I’d certainly disagree that misandry is as infrequent as hating “people with hats”, but obviously I’m not going to change your hyper-feminist worldview here, so I see no point in engaging on that level.
But I’ll repeat myself, mostly because I’m interested- is hating men as a group okay? Beyond that, is hating individual men okay? What if this leads someone to be actively cruel, to verbally abuse or even to do violence to an individual man; I assume most people here would think that is not okay, but is it less bad than if same was done to an individual woman?
Hershele:
He has to remember not to wash them in chlorine bleach since it’s bad for the elastic, but otherwise I’ve seen no evidence in this thread that he’s not probably fine.
Nevertheless, the street harassment game is not the same as, to use your example, Modern Warfare. The MW grunts are all male for two reasons- it’s a war simulator, and the vast majority of soldiers actually are male in real life, and male is the default template in a male-dominated gaming industry. The street harassment game is explicitly targeting men as men. Big difference.
…
I’m sure someone must have pointed this out. But this is such a mindbogglingly stupid comment that I could not stop myself responding.
THE VAST MAJORITY OF STREET HARASSERS ARE ALSO MALE IN REAL LIFE. How can you possibly not be aware of this? How is it that you imagine this is any kind of difference, let alone a “big difference?”
Also, “explicitly targeting men as men”– not so much. It is explicitly targeting street harassers as street harassers.Unless you are incapable of seeing a difference between the group “men” and the group “street harasser?” Which does seem to be the most logical explanation of your words.
That would be a fairly typical bit of MRA misandry, but I have news that will rock your world: not all men harass women on the street. Really.
Observation: A lot of MRA misandry seems to stem from assuming all men are as shitty as they are.
Steele:
”
We’re not talking about the feelings any one person has, we’re talking about a context in which one group of people are systematically benefited at another group’s expense. I know you types are always so emotional, but specific people’s feelings are more or less irrelevant to this discussion.
@Kirby
And oblivious to his own criteria. A violent game made by sexist for sexist reasons is okay because it’s about someone that “annoys people,” but a violent game about street harassment—which annoys and intimidates mostly women in public spaces—is not okay because TEH MENZ.
No, but it does not carry the same weight as hating women as a group.
Also, hating catcalling men is not “hating men as a group.” Not unless you think catcalling is innate to manhood.
Yes. I’m not a big fan of hatred in general, but, c’mon, like, Hitler was a man. It’s okay to hate Hitler.
At the point of actual violence to individuals, that’s terrible no matter what. I don’t think you can quantify how bad violence is.
…And what the FUCK does this lovely little FAQ have to do with whether it’s okay to make a game about punching a woman in the face because you don’t like her Kickstarter project?
AlexB:
This is also the sense I get from MRA critiques of anti-rape-legislation as “targeting male sexuality”–they appear to think that male sexuality = violence.
CLiff:
What About the Men, that’s what.
This is the point. It’s so obviously not OK from any reasonable perspective that you really have to tie yourself in knots trying to justify it – using words like “whimsical”, for instance.
And I can’t stress enough that this “game” isn’t just about punching a woman in the fact – it’s about punching an actual, identifiable, already extensively-targeted woman in the face.
Anybody who can’t see what’s wrong with that is either disingenuous to the point of being actively amoral, or part of the problem.
And so we say adieu to Johnny_M80….. Logic. Reason. Common sense. Blasphemy is what it is. Tools of the patriarchy.
DEMON!!! You. Have. Been. Cast. Out.
@Cliff Pervocracy
“But I’ll repeat myself, mostly because I’m interested- is hating men as a group okay?”
“No, but it does not carry the same weight as hating women as a group.”
Down on the farm we’re all equal, except the pigs are a little more equal than the rest.
Ah, but Steele would rather make all about him and his feelings and how we’re being mean to him. Therefore we must hate all men.
HAHAHA. Sure, Steele. Someone here is a damn fool, and it’s not me.
You’re a real charmer.
At the point of actual violence to individuals, that’s terrible no matter what. I don’t think you can quantify how bad violence is.
But where do you draw the line? What if a woman (or a self-hating man), say, verbally harasses or bullies an individual man because he’s male? Is that okay? Is it less bad than if it was done to a woman? My point is, at what point does hating an abstract group (which, admittedly, does no direct harm) pass into attacking individuals (which does)? To me you can’t really make a clear distinction. And of course this is assuming I even agreed with your feminist view that hating men as a group is okay, which I don’t, because I’m an MRA.
Also, I see Steele’s taking up Johnny’s confusion as to whether games about violence based on real-life gender politics are good are bad.
If they are good, you should not mind the “kill the catcallers” game!
If they are bad, you should condemn the Sarkeesian game!
If you haven’t thought this through but just know you don’t like women, then your “the Sarkeesian game is harmless fun, the feminist game is a misandrist atrocity” position is perfectly logically consistent!
There is not one regular commenter on this blog who thinks that hating men as a group is OK. Not one. And I’m hard pressed to think of any irregular examples either.
If you think differently, please feel free to identify the individual concerned and provide supporting evidence – but I suspect you’ll struggle.