So I found the meme above on a Facebook page called “Feminist Hypocrisy.”
I also found this familiar pic posted there as well.
And this highly edifying discussion underneath it:
Huh. I’m seeing some hypocrisy here, but it doesn’t look much like feminist hypocrisy.
scott | March 6, 2015 at 8:21 pm
Glad to see there’s someone else in this particular camp. I’ve only watched the first episode of TvW, and I feel like she rags on Princess Peach a bit too much, but other than that, I didn’t see anything particularly heinous.
Also, I watched this video today, and it’s got a bunch of dislikes because “Games aren’t racist! Whaaa! Stop asking me to change!”
I just feel like sharing this:
I’m still at a loss as to what Anita has to do with video game journalism. People have been criticizing video game journalism for years, and GamerGaters seem to hate the people who are actually trying to reform game journalism. Historically, game journalists have been careful to not give negative reviews to popular games because they were afraid to offend players who liked the games. You’re not going to give a low rating to a game with 80% 10/10 user reviews on Metacritic, or you’ll start losing your reader base. Hence, shallow and thoroughly mediocre games get rave reviews.
And speaking of fascists, Bootleg Girl has come up with an interesting explanation of neo-reactionaries and Gamergaters:
http://www.bootleggirl.com/neoreaction-plato-and-the-latter-day-philosopher-kings-or-why-cant-justine-tunney-be-the-empress-of-the-world/
Oh, Anita has nothing to do with video game journalism. The whole ‘Ethics in video game journalism!!’ bit only started after Zoe Quinn was singled out by an ex-boyfriend who claimed she’d slept with somebody who’d reviewed her game. (A claim which was easily proven false, at least that the reviewer she may have slept with never actually reviewed her game.) Really the ‘ethics in video game journalism’ is just an official cover story by the people who are at least smart enough to realize that actively saying they hate women in games doesn’t sound good. They’re just hating on an amorphous glob of feminism in the form of Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu, because those are the nails actively sticking up that have refused to be nailed down yet.
Like others have said, she picks poor examples sometimes, and she sometimes overstates her case. And she could definitely stand to put her work out faster. You can’t really hit her with the “where’s the money going” paranoia anymore because Feminist Frequency is officially a nonprofit now and thus releases annual budget data. She did technically steal artwork for her tropes vs. women banner (which she’s since resolved), as well as some let’s play footage in her earlier videos. But, I mean, no moreso than the original artist was stealing a character design or the LPers were stealing the games they recorded. Hell, you could argue the LPers are more at fault because LPers collect ad revenue off videos of them playing other people’s video games, while Anita doesn’t profit off her work. Even so, definitely less-than-ethical practice.
Other than that, pretty much all the other criticism I’ve seen of her is obvious strawmanning, taking stuff out of context, or just wacky conspiracy theory nonsense. The vast majority of their arguments are thoroughly refuted in the very videos they’re responding to. The level of hate towards her is just insane in any case.
It’s not quite as baffling as with Rebecca Watson, because at least Sarkeesian goes out of her way to criticize stuff her harassers like, but there’s just no accounting for it without acknowledging an incredible degree of misogyny within the gaming community.
So what exactly are the units for “amount of criticism” and “amount of harassment” in those pie graphs? How do they calculate it?
So anyways, I’ve been kind of out of the loop: Are they still trying to pretend that this movement’s about ethics in journalism?
So let’s see, this thread of people who generally like Sarkeesian have criticized her by saying things like “She occasionally uses bad examples” the related “Sometimes it feels like she’s reaching” and “She’s kind of dry and I don’t really like her style”. Meanwhile the people who flaunt their “Legitimate criticism” seem to sum up their points with “I want to kill that Greedy Jew just like the Nazis”. I think that really does say it all.
Yes Cthulhu’s Intern, they really are still saying that.
You’ll occasionally see “I’m not a Gamergater, I’m totally neutral but Anita Sarkeesian is a fraud and Zoe Quinn is a slut and they actually deserve the harassment” types talking about how “critical discussion of FemFreq is not allowed, you can’t criticize Anita without being called a misogynist.” That’s nonsense. People can and do Anita without being called misogynists. Anita’s haters are called misogynists because they’re misogynists, not because feminists blame any critique of a woman on sexism.
For what it’s worth, I like her academic presentation style myself, because I find her a strong speaker and I think it lends a nice professional polish to the videos, though I do understand where the people who find them a bit dry are coming from. I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that with any large-scale discussion of sexism in media, particularly one with as many examples as she uses, there are going to be ones that are more contentious. Gender roles can be pretty contradictory and perfectly like-minded feminists will often disagree on whether particular things are sexist or not. I also found some of her examples a little weak, but she uses a heck of a lot of examples, so a few iffy ones are pretty forgivable.
*can and do criticize Anita, gah.
Erm… isn’t Sarkeesian an Armenian name? How the fuck are these people EvilJewifying her? I am confused. Then again misogyny in general confuses me so take that as one would.
Actually, I do think there’s room to be more critical than that. I think she has dogmatic and narrow-minded ideas about art, and that when she does speak prescriptively about what she thinks games and movies ought to be like, I’m not impressed.
Fortunately, she’s not running for public office and she hasn’t started a petition to repeal the first amendment. It would be really bad if people needed her permission for everything they wanted to make, but that’s an absurd paranoid self-delusion, so whatevs. I quite like tropes vs. women as a journalistic or a documentary project. I don’t really see it as an academic or critical enterprise, but the amount of data she collects and organizes is really impressive and would be a really useful source for a critic to work from.
Really? What sort of ideas do you mean?
The best example that comes to mind is her review of True Grit. I’m going to go re-watch it to verify my recollection and get a good quote, but basically she praises the execution but says that she won’t call it a “feminist movie” because it’s too violent. Ms. Sarkeesian would rather see us rejecting the tropes (honor, revenge, aggression) that feed into toxic masculinity, rather than expanding access so that girls are participating too. That’s a reasonable preference but I see no reason to be so hardline about. If you’re a pacifist in real life, I’m with you. If you think our media glorifies violence too much, I’m with you. If you want to say that you personally are more interested in seeing stories that celebrate non-butch virtues than stories about butch women, that’s a perfectly reasonable preference. Declaring that art which argues for equality in a way you personally dislike is non-feminist seems a bit presumptuous.
There’s a transcript hereThis is the most salient quote:
I’m a huge fan of these values and I wish we saw them played out on screen more often, but I’m not willing to say that a characterization *must* be concerned with these issues to count as “feminist.”
My URL tags brke. http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/03/true-grit-mattie-ross-and-feminism/
Orion: Oh, interesting. I haven’t seen that video.
I think her professional, fairly flat affect, keeping-myself-out-of-it style makes it a useful asset. If I were running a media/ women’s studies course at 101 level, I can quite see myself including one, of more, of these videos in the list of resources students could refer to when doing a project.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/08/damsel-in-distress-part-3-tropes-vs-women/
In the third video game damsel video, she pitches a hypothetical game called “Legend of the Last Princess,” as an example of a “true subversion.” It’s terrible. Here’s her mission statement:
And here’s her pitch:
This really frustrates me because I don’t think this game does subvert damsel tropes. In fact, I don’t think it’s even relevant to a discussion of damsel tropes. This is just a completely generic action-adventure story that happens to have a female protagonist. Yes, she’s locked up for a few seconds, but a jailbreak scene or level is a standard trope in thriller movies or action games that male protagonists get all the time. Even busting your way out of prison during the tutorial level is a standard thing. The classic damsel trope is about a woman in need of rescue and a male rescuer. A critique or subversion won’t necessarily have both elements. You could look at what happens if the woman doesn’t need a knight in shining armor but he shows up anyway. You could look at what happens when she does need a white knight but he doesn’t show. You could change the genders of any of the participants, and so on. However, I think that if you’re going to talk about damsels you need to have at least one of the two roles covered. The Last Princess doesn’t need to be rescued and no one is trying to rescue her, so it’s just not part of that conversation.
Later in the video, Ms. Sarkeesian says
, but when she had the opportunity to pitch a story, that’s the story she gave us. She never does drop the other shoe and show us the story about a vulnerable or victimized woman she would find acceptable. It’s pretty ironic, actually, because she’s basically doing the same thing she didn’t like in True Grit. Also, I find it hilarious that Ms. Sarkeesian makes her princess abolish the monarchy at the end, because it just comes out of nowhere. There’s nothing in the plot that suggested we were building to that, and it doesn’t have anything at all to do with themes about power, peril, prison, and princesses. I’m pretty sure it’s only there because Ms. Sarkeesian is terrified that someone might think she was endorsing monarchy because she sympathized with a character who is a princess in a video game that doesn’t even exist. I think that basically sums up my critique. Ms. Sarkeesian uses “feminism” and “truth” to mean “the sum of all of my social and political values” and her critical project is basically about drawing boundaries to exclude everything that isn’t a direct and faithful replication of her values.
@Orion
She’s not a censor every game has to please before it can be made. Why in the hell should she have to find any story about a victimized woman acceptable? What the fuck? Just because she doesn’t like it doesn’t mean you can’t buy the damned game.
Also,
No. This misperception is why everything you think is so fucked up. Her project is about pointing out numerous intentional and inadvertent boundary violations and telling publishers, “tens if not hundreds of millions of people share these general boundaries, if you try to be more respectful of them at least some of the time, you will make more money by selling more games.”
Even if she completely changed the market so that every major publisher stayed within those boundaries on all of their games, there will always be a huge supply of any product that intentionally breaks boundaries. Creative people will still make misogynistic games that you enjoy.
@Orion:
The way I see it she’d find some of the current ones acceptable if they weren’t the vast majority of plots involving women. That’s how I feel about it anyway.
The whole point is that there are a tiny minority of stories that are about women in any other capacity. Male characters get a wide range of roles – pretty much everything that doesn’t involve being vulnerable and/or pretty and/or the motivation for a male character. Male characters occasionally get those roles as well, whereas women pretty much only get those.
The “damsel in distress” trope is really old. My disagreement with Anita is mostly that it can make melodrama more interesting because people tend to care more about the protagonist saving someone he or she loves. Historically speaking, most protagonists in melodramas have been heterosexual males, which is problematic in itself. You could argue that a female saving a male is just a reversal of biological sex that doesn’t challenge implicitly assumed gender roles, but somebody (probably not Anita) will probably have an issue with gender roles regardless of how unconventional or complex the characters are.