So Anita Sarkeesian, who apparently didn’t run off with all her Kickstarter money to found a Misandist Gynarchy in the wilds of Canada, has released the first video in her Tropes vs Women in Video Games project. (I’ve embedded it below.)
Naturally, this is causing great consternation in certain corners of the Internet (*cough* Reddit *cough cough* everywhere else that misogynistic nerds congregate *cough*). In the Man Boobz forum, Katz has started a contest to see who can find “the whiniest, brattiest, most entitled response” to Sarkeesian’s video on the Internet. So far Katz and Myoo have found a couple classic comments from irate Sarkeeianaphobes:
[H]ow does one go about stating that genders and gender roles are social constructs? I mean is evolution nothing to her? Does the patriarchy make male peacocks dress provocatively?
Yes. Yes it does.
And:
I’m gradually losing respect for the opposite sex. I’ve unfollowed people on tumblr who talk about how great she is, because it actually causes bile to rise in to my throat.
Yeah, that’s a totally reasonable response to a woman making a video about video games.
So anyway, I’m thinking we should bring the contest over here.
See what you can find! Consider it a sort of scavenger hunt.
Here’s my contribution, from the Men’s Rights subreddit, complaining that Damsels in Distress are the truly privileged ones:
Amazingly, this acutally got called out on r/mr as being pretty damn stupid.
Also, I have another question, to add to the stack of other questions I’ve been asking lately: Just why do you think so many guys get so angry when girls and women invade what they consider a male sphere, like gaming? (Also, why do they consider gaming to belong to boys and men?)
Oh, and here’s the video that’s causing all this hubbub:
@melody
Best of luck. I know how much worrying about money sucks. Ideally, no one should ever have to face a decision like yours. I hope you’ll be feeling better by tonight.
Michael Søndberg Olsen — you new around here? ABNOY is logic proof, don’t bother trying, you’ll just give yourself a headache. I mean, you can try if you want, but he’s really not worth the headache.
Second, if you are new, here are your complimentary SCENTED MOTHERFUCKING CANDLES, matching towel set, and a misandrist hard chair — *delivers the, via female penguin courier* — watch out for those female penguins, they’re whores! (We really need citations for the respective rants, it makes little sense without them)
Third, can we call you Michael? And what are your pronouns of choice? Figure I might as well ask these things while already addressing you! (Argenti is fine for me, and ze/zir)
Enjoy your stay with us, we have baked goods and cute animals!
Marie — you aren’t spamming when you reply! We don’t bite 🙂
Melody — yuck, good luck deciding whether to call in sick, and with being sick. Healing thoughts sent your way, along with internet (and thus germ free) hugs, if wanted.
I’ve heard people discuss this in comics fandom and one of the rationales is that these dudes are largely geeks who were judged for being geeks when they were younger, both by other guys and also by girls. Comics/games/whatever become not only something they love but also a space where they could escape other people looking down on them for being a geek. So whenever anything they love becomes mainstream, or becomes popular with women, they hyperreact like an autoimmune disorder at the prospect of their safe space being invaded and taken from them.
This is, obviously, not nearly a universal answer. There are also issues of both comics and games enforcing extremely rigid gender stereotypes in their content in many ways. Does that draw guys who are already tilting toward misogyny to them in the first place? Are those roles absorbed through reading/playing? Who knows. I doubt there’s a single answer for the hysteria that always erupts from male fans of anything as soon anyone voices a critical opinion.
I’d feel sympathy for the hypermasculine depictions of men in games and how that could potentially impact young boys and their body image if these guys didn’t try to make it equivalent to depictions of women, which it’s not. No guy walks through the world feeling like every person who sees him is unfavorably comparing him to those guys, or worse vocally telling him he’s failing to live up to that image at random. It just doesn’t happen, whereas women live with that every day.
@drst:
Not to mention two of the most iconic male video game characters ever, Mario and Sonic, aren’t exactly the musclebound meatheads oft cited as examples of how video games also portray men with unrealistic standards of attractiveness (I mean, one’s short and chubby and the other’s an anthropomorphic hedgehog with noodle arms, for cryin’ out loud). While, on the flip side, iconic female characters, even heroic ones, tend to be conventionally attractive.
(Hi everyone, been lurking for a little while now. Of course it’d take talk about video games to get me to come out in public. >.>; )
I’m just here to hand the “Whiniest, Most Entitled Responder” crown to CiaoBaby. While my entries were worthy contenders, they just don’t hold a candle to his raging KEYBOARD SMASH tantrum of whininess.
And hope you feel better Melody!
One of the best responses when the Kickstarter was announced was from Charlie Brooker m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/17/sometimes-hard-woman-made-pixels who essentially said Sarkeesian was right.
His article got a lot of dismissive what about the men comments. In repines, on Twitter he pointed out that he’d written an article ages ago about the negative portrayals of men in video games and got not one what about the women comment.
Thanks all.
I agree I wish folks didn’t have to make that choice.
I check this site constantly lol. Get to work and check manboobz on phone and get home check manboobz on computer.
I love the takedowns on this site!
@ Augochlorella
Sorry about your friends being jerks.
@anboy
I’m glad all of our media will be divided into boy and girl categories. How I will watch videos with my family, or play video games with my brother (something we do together) I don’t know.
@xiaobaobao
If sex sells, why aren’t men being more sexed up? Women have money (and so do gay men and other people attracted to men). Why is it only in one direction?
@weeboy
Clearly you’re a magina, or something *rolls eyes* Though in serious, I would not be opposed to sharing a clubhouse with you 😀
I should tell my brother he’s playing video games wrong. I mean, minecraft hardly has any boobies (that I’ve seen. He’s the only one who plays it.)
…and if there were boobies they’d be really pixelated square boobies. Sexy!
@khantron
*giggles*
ohmygod, a real life checkmate feminists person! My life is complete, I can now die.
trolls confuse me.
but…but…but…cooties! (I’m not making any sense today :/)
why did my brain miss the eating cats part! I am so disappointed.
*giggles* Also, I bet it’s really hard to have sex in zero G. Why am I thinking about this?
he could be that really boring bond villian in the movie that michelle yao was in. (why was she in a bond movie! she’s too awesome for that. Anyway, because of misandry I can only remember bond movies by the bond girls, not the titles. But I’m thinking of the bond villian who had that whole media shtick going on.
And I’m going to post this comment before it gets too long, but bad marie was commenting before finishing again. Sorry if the comment is a little all over the place, I just woke up.
Now I know that’s a lie. ;p
@melody
Sorry to hear that you’re sick 🙁
Hard to have sex at zero G’s? Yeah, someone’s working on that already — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2suit
Leave it to humans to figure out how to build a space station while in orbit, and nearly immediately start work on how to have sex aboard it. Priorities, we’ve clearly got ’em! (Note the lack of “because straight men want this” and the image of a pregnant woman in one of the suits)
@Marie
xiaobaobao was a particularly bouncy troll who crashed around a bunch of dead (or nearly dead) threads before landing here. The threat to eat our cats was made here.
He has certainly been reading here a lot without commenting for a new troll. I vote sock.
hmmmmm. Seems like one would really need good birth control for that, at least if it’s between sperm and egg people*
*idk if that made sense? because not all girls have eggs and not all boys have sperm, but I really didn’t know what to say. So feel free to call me out if I said that offensively
@some gal
well…i have now seen the ‘I’ll eat your cats bit.’. How strange.
Strange how xiaobaobao keeps going on about white liberals, when whites are the biggest problem liberals have. I mean, if it were up to whites Romney would have won a ridiculous landslide victory.
@WeeBoy:
Your words. I like them.
When entitled little manchildren come by to tell us that we need to stop whining because video games are for boys, okay, and we should just make our own stupid girl games for girls if we have a problem with it, we tend to address how women actually do make up a fair portion of gamers and we could comprise more of it if the industry listened to us a little more. What we don’t tend to do is question why games that disempower women and turn them into consumable objects should appeal to so many men in the first place.
My perfect fantasy LadyGame for Ladies doesn’t turn men into sexual objects. It’s not in a world where literally everyone except the love interest is female. It’s just a place where people like me (and other marginalized people) get to have a little taste of being the hero! It doesn’t require setting women up as better and more fully human than men.
If some dudes can’t enjoy their fantasy worlds unless women don’t get to have any power or agency in them then, um… those dudes are massively sexist? And we get to call them out on that even if we create our own games?
This is long and rambly on account of all the phlegm invading my brainspaces, sorry.
Marie — I’d go with sperm and egg people there, since those are the conditions needed to make a baby without medical interventions.
As for our likely sock, idk, he’s got randomness down in a way Pell could never manage, isn’t pulling a Br____n, and idk on the rest of the set of return trolls. Looks to me like what would happen if ABNOY and Owly had a love child — then again, incoherent insistence he’s from a specific place while not really sounding like it? You sure you aren’t French xiaobaobao?
If the male sex drive is an unstoppable force and the hierarchy is inevitably here to stay, why does he care so much about crushing feminism?
I’m imagining him like this.
@argenti aertheri
Alrighty. I just thought I’d see if it was fine 🙂
@viscara
My perfect game world also wouldn’t have men sexualized, for a couple reasons.
-It’s icky and dehumanizing
-I’m not attracted to men
-and the sexualized stuff for girls I don’t really like, it’s much less ‘how sexy’ and more ‘how creepy’. even if I did think it was attractive, it’s got way to much creep factor.
-oh, and one more I almost forgot, it distracts you from the game.
/preaching to the choir.
I’m way to rambly today….
Oh, you so win the thread with that nickname.
“Also, I have another question, to add to the stack of other questions I’ve been asking lately: Just why do you think so many guys get so angry when girls and women invade what they consider a male sphere, like gaming? (Also, why do they consider gaming to belong to boys and men?)”
I’m not sure they do. I think they just hate women and hate feminism, and can easily find other people who do under those banners, and they can screech to one another and it spirals. Same thing happens with other things that aren’t as clearly “male spheres,” like atheists/skeptics… it’s just easy to find other people who agree with you, which means you can easily make an echo chamber. Then, post-hoc, you can make up some reason why women don’t belong, but I don’t think that was the start of it.
Another issue is that this is all happening on the internet, and a lot of it is the horrible South-Park-inspired notion that anyone who cares about changing society must be a smug, self-righteous jerk who deserves to get taken down a peg. This attitude festers hugely online, because you can so easily not actually think about the motivations of the people you’re talking to. So now people who “don’t really” hate women can join the choir, because they’re going Good by sticking it to them Uptight Feminists.
And finally, I think a huge thing is illusory immunity. A lot of these guys grew up geeks and are still forever stuck in high school. They CAN’T be misogynist, because it’s those JOCKS who are the real bad guys!
It appeared as as if he was trying to get the last word on the six or so dead threads.
My take on his “answers” was that he was replying to David’s thread titles, but not actually reading the threads.
The “cat” remark was almost insightful. I don’t think he realizes he is just a chew toy for the all the kittehs here.
“Just why do you think so many guys get so angry when girls and women invade what they consider a male sphere, like gaming?”
I think one thing is that guys who have a bit of a hard time socially (in meatspace) sort of assume that the reason they seem to do better socially in virtual spaces is that there are few women there. This isn’t really true but that’s their assumption. So when women show up they become very frightened.
Anger is usually either a tool of aggression (you get angry in the process of acting aggressively and the stimulus is just a useful way of getting there) or a response to fear and insecurity, or some mix of the two. There are lots of straight-up jerks in virtual spaces who get angry and scream at women because getting angry and screaming are what they do all the time, and doing it to women is even better because there are fewer social consequences (“Can’t you take a joke?!?!”). But there are also guys who treat women badly because it’s a socially acceptable (alas) way of dealing with fear and insecurity surrounding their ability to behave appropriately in social situations.
Was this submitted already?!?
http://popsych.org/tropes-against-video-games/