MEMEDAY continues with the pic below that I also found on the Twitters.
While not technically a “meme” per se, it’s one of those things that antifeminists like to pass around amongst themselves — and that no one outside their little world will really understand, largely because it makes no damn sense.
Ok, so, a couple of Channers are talking about the eeeeeevil Anita Sarkeesian:
rekt pic.twitter.com/Ekxk0rO2Fw
— Victor Zen (@VictorZenMHRA) October 23, 2015
The first delightful thing to point out about this little exchange — and I’m using the word “delightful” to mean the total and complete opposite of delightful — is that Anita’s haters apparently really think that her speeches, videos and whatnot are little more than than excuses to say bad things about men.
She might say something like, well, to pick a random example from a recent blog post of hers about the Netflix show Jessica Jones:
To its credit, as one critic observed, Jessica Jones conveys the horror of Jessica’s past without ever depicting it. In this way, it avoids sensationalizing sexual assault, acknowledges that trauma leaves a lasting impact on people, and relieves the audience of the burden of having to bear witness to the worst of what Jones has endured.
But what Anita’s haters apparently hear is something like this:
Men are bad. Blah Blah. Blah They are all a bunch of patriarchal poopyheads. Blah. They should be put in jail just for being men. Bla Blah. Did I mention I hate men? KILL ALL MEN.
The second delightful (see above) thing about this little screencap — and the one that prompted Mr. Zen to post that triumphant “REKT” — is that supposed racial “gotcha.”
Anita’s haters (and internet antifeminists generally) have such a poor understanding of the basics of intersectional feminism that they think they can trump anything an SJW might say by accusing them randomly of racism.
If she says bad things about men, ask if she means black men as well.
Well, that would kind of depend on what she said, wouldn’t it?
Some things are true of all men. Some things aren’t. Sometimes race makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn’t.
It’s certainly not racist to say, for example, that men generally benefit from unexamined privilege — at least if you acknowledge that this is not the whole story, and that other things (race, class, sexual orientation, and so forth) affect men in huge and complicated ways that can overshadow gender.
But the belief that feminists aren’t allowed — according to some imagined SJW rulebook — to include men of color in their analyses because that would be RACIST is a fairly common one amongst internet antifeminsts.
Take, for example, the case of one Dean Esmay — Twitter “activist” and former A Voice for Men managing editor. Several months back he posted a series of Tweets in which he essentially tried to argue that feminists who include men of color in their analyses are inherently racist.
He put it a bit more bluntly than that:
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/616223240642408448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Even aside from the jarring line about “their women” — suggesting that black women are rightfully the property of black men — this is a bizarre claim. Feminists aren’t the Klan. They don’t argue that black men are uniquely violent; they simply note that, yes, there are black men who rape and beat women — just as there are white men and indeed men of every complexion who do.
As Esmay sees it, his charge not only applies to white feminists allegedly throwing shade at black men. It also applies to black feminists who criticize black men in any way.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/616222039578296320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
And black feminist men as well.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/616222290758373376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The weird thing about Esmay is that he doesn’t seem to be playing a game of “SJW gotcha” here; he seems to actually think he’s making some sort of rational argument.
Internet antifeminists are weird.
Oh, a bit off-topic but a finnish man has been fined 7500 euros for constantly mistreating women employees. He referred to them either as ‘old hags’ or ‘little girls’, constantly commented on their looks and even groped someone’s breasts and behind. The guy’s 70 years old so it would be very easy for some people to put it in the “he’s of a different times” bs category, but this man wasn’t granted an excuse and I am so happy about it.
If you have to ask a troll-infested message board how to make a logical argument, you probably are not a logical enough person to be entrusted with the task of debating a professional critic.
Did anyone ask Esmay why he thinks a non-white man who ‘turns feminist’ is more pathetic than, presumably, a white man who ‘turns feminist’?
I don’t suppose you have the original link to that screen cap from: was it 4 chan or 8 chan? They may have posted examples of Anita’s speeches talking about men. I think it would have been an interesting response from her if she at all was distinguishing between white and black men it would have been very telling.
In my experience today, it’s to be the assumption that when many feminists are criticising men today it’s the evil white man devil they’re really talking about. They wouldn’t dare drag other poor minorities into their arguments and risk exposing themselves like that.
I can provide many examples of what exactly it is I’m talking about am I able to link other sites here?
the “best” (and by that i mean “dumbest”) thing about that screencapped tweet is that, in fact, no one was “rekt.”
i’m no expert on “pwnage”, but i’m pretty sure you’d need to have some kind of evidence of the proposed tactic actually “rustling her jimmies” before declaring her “rekt.”
but i guess not in this case? apparently the technique of “do you mean black men too?” is so clearly unstoppable that victory can be declared without knowing whether it was even actually deployed, let alone what Anita’s response to it was?
Sarkeesian said that she has inadvertently become the end boss of a video game. It’s interesting to see that the players of said video game are crowdsourcing their tactics. Interesting and sort of sad: they seem to believe that “if you include black men you must be a racist” is a “logical” point which destroys her “flawed views.” I somehow doubt that this person is going to go down in history as having been the one to defeat Sarkeesian and win the game once and for all.
Weirdly, they seem to always avoid the weak points of her positions. If they confronted her on her pacifism or her sex-negativism, then they might be able to make headway: those are things that some people genuinely have trouble with. However, trying to cast her as a racist is absurd. The only people who would see that as good grounds to attack her on, well, they already hate her. Such an argument isn’t going to persuade undecided people of anything except that the arguer is a tool.
Dear MRAs, please repeat after me: politics is about winning over undecided people, not about energising your base.
Also, is Esmay still on his Spank A Feminist thing? Because if so, I believe autosoma had invited him to come and spank him (complete with a tweeted arse pic) and Esmay had not yet taken it up.
Goddamnit, I didn’t want to agree with Tomm Hulett.
Though, if Tomm Hulett says you’re way off, that’s fucking something.
Agreed, EJ. I don’t agree with several of her analyses, particularly what she thought of Bayonetta, but generally the only anti-Anita people I see bring up stuff like that are a handful of Not Your Shield people. Really from my days looking at that sort of thing, it seemed like some in NYS was at least actually watching her videos, unlike GG who were talking total crap about what they thought she was saying.
Why did Victor Zen use a screenshot from a thread on 4chan’s /pol/ – politically incorrect board? A board that believes black people are inferior to white people?
I just watched her entire back catalog a couple days ago. Funny story — When Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games came out, I thought I was a longtime fan of hers, but it turns out I was thinking of someone completely different.
I can safely say that she has not ever “said bad things about men” as a group.
On the other hand, it’s *really* obvious that nobody from GamerGate has watched them, because you could mine some really good scary quotes from her early stuff, and if there’s one thing anti-feminists love, it’s swapping scary feminist mini-quotes.
Saying bad things about men? That’s what they think pointing out tired sexist tropes is?
…and they think they’re inherently rational.
I (and Frank Torpedo) are proof positive that a person can care about more than one issue at a time. I’m black and a woman, with -Get This!- a disability! So take that, you dumb, angry manospherians. That’s 3,- Count ’em – 3, things i can care about at one time.
And you know what, I’ m gonna add some more stuff to this list, so nyahh!
I care about: white people, even though I’m not white. LGBTQ rights, even though I’m not gay or trans,; Men, even though I’m not a man; Ageism, even tough I’m not old; the Earth, even though I’m not a plant or an insect; and pandas and the white rhino, even though I’m not white, a panda or a rhino.
Take that! you mean ‘ol misogynists.
I’ve always wondered how the fuck anyone could be this dense and not understand words like “racism” “men” “sexism” “trope” “fiction” “inequality. The only possible explanation is anti-feminists are simply too egotistical to actually look up a word in the dictionary and only listen to the sources they want to hear.
OMG, that was my exact reaction too. I would debate with some Gaters and literally half of their arguments I could refute with her own video series of tropes vs women
I’ve had an asshat on facebook try to argue that “well there’s actually no such thing as sexism in the geek world at all, I’m a board/card/game store owner so I should know that”
Yeah, it was depressing to see someone who’s basically a geekdom community leader make the following arguments:
“what? women face harassment? Well whatever, men face harassment as well, I’ve gotten 3 marriage proposals in my entire time spent playing MMORPGs!”
Funny tangential story, I learned what male priviledge was the day my sister told me the amount of daily harassment she receives.
“Well Anita Sarkeesian says that GTA series is sexist cuz you can kill women. But it’s not, because you can kill men too!”
At this point I really did start to question if he’d actually watched the videos. Because anyone who’s seen “women as background decoration” could easily tell you that Anita Sarkeesian’s problem with GTA was the specific in-game sequences that depicted (often sexual) violence against women. Of which there were no male equivalents.
I couldn’t straight up accuse him, but I decided to lay a trap: I presented Anita Sarkeesian’s opening argument that ‘even as far back as super mario brothers we’ve seen the overuse of Damsel in Distress trope’
His response, predictably, was “well that was a thing of the past, video games are no longer sexist like that”
There’s a sequence in Anita’s “Damsel in Distress” video where she lists off the number of modern (2010 or later) video games that have a plot of “Your wife/girlfriend is killed and you must rescue your daughter*”. It’s a sequence that lasts for long enough were I was safe concluding that this asshat had never watched her “damsel in Distress” videos, and most likely none of her other videos either.
A few of his other ridiculous arguments:
-“Anita Sarkeesian wants video games to have a feeeeeeeeeeemale mode” (he had told this blatant strawman argument to a friend of his, and then used her negative reaction to his strawman as proof that there are women who disagree with Anita! CHECKMATE!)
-“Anita says gendered identifiers are bad but LOOK, SHE’S WEARING MAKE UP AND JEWELRY”
That one is in a popular infographic that can be refuted by Anita’s own videos. Specifically the part where she says “now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with feminine accessories or ‘identifiers’ but when they’re used as the defining aspects of the character then it becomes a problem” (she, of course, lays out the argument much better than my quick summary)
-“If Anita dares make these criticisms about board games, I’ll be there”
This last one is so revealing and had I thought about this at the time, I would have completely called it out, but holy shit: Without ANY indication that Anita Sarkessian is going to share an opinion on “sexism in board games”, he was already preparing his rebuttal. This is how these people work. They aren’t actually listening to her arguments, they feel that they ‘must’ defend their pwecious wittle hobby against the evil feminists.
These kind of people are usually very comfortable handing out criticism (I want to walk away whenever someone in my game store says “well that’s because people are idiots”) so it’s always puzzled me how they can be so repulsed by criticism but I think I have a theory: The idea of applying a ‘sexist’ label to their hobby completely terrifies them. Some probably feel that they even live vicariously through their hobby so calling their hobby sexist is (in their mind) calling them sexist.
I think the reason they haven’t watched her videos is because they are, literally, too afraid of hearing her arguments. They are afraid of the possibility that she could be right!
*but apparently if you do have to rescue your son, then his name is Shawn.
Oh and their bizzare belief of “if you talk about black people then you’re RACIST” is totally projection of “well whenever I talk about black people, I get called a racist”.
Weird fact: I’ve made my black male friends through being a feminist. Something about learning about oppression that brings like-minded people together.
Moocow:
LOL!
You’re right. The point of her sexism in videogames topic was discussing the sexualization of violence against women in the games. Men are just killed in the games, which is bad enough, but their deaths are not tied to sex. (Really, someone needs to do a Hawkeye Initiative version of videogames.)
Another theme she didn’t touch on (and she easily could have) is such games often blatantly teach the players that sex workers deserve no regard once their function has been fulfilled. And no human respect is owed them because of their work. They are often killed in horrendous ways, often for performing sexual activities, or just being present in places where such activity is meant to occur.
Note: I know right! Its entirely possible to talk about PoC without being a racist. I do this all the time. Just like its possible to talk about starvation on the African continent, without being hungry, or talk about rich people while being poor.
@lkeke35
Indeed! Man’s death = “heroic, noble self-sacrifice” Woman’s death = “sexualized, used to develop a male character and show how cutthroat the world is”
Actually she did kind of describe the cruel attitudes towards sex workers when discussing strippers in Hitman (and how the player was not punished in any meaningful way for killing them), and boy did so many assholes miss the point on that one. Ugh.
@Leonard Anderson
Here, let me Google that for you:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22this+degenerate+is+speaking%22&l=1
@sbel
Yikes. The reply in the screencap is actually one of the less reprehensible ones in that whole discussion.
Tangentally related as it’s about the same Jessica Jones series Sarkeesian mentions in the quote in the OP.
This review from Slate may have been linked in another thread, but I found this to be interesting:
Allow me to use this unstoppable Gamergate rebuttal to tear down the rest of that article by Sarkeesian:
“I was intrigued by the first episode, which introduces Jessica as a tough, flawed private investigator, and in so doing flips the male archetype of the haunted, hard-drinking noir PI.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
“Of course, we need stories about survivors, models of women (and men) who do the heroic work of putting one foot in front of the other and trying to heal after suffering traumatic experiences.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
“In fact, Jessica’s neighbor Malcolm might just be the most heroic character on the show. Also one of Kilgrave’s victims, he’s the one who maintains the support group. Recovering from the abuse he suffered under Kilgrave, he resumes his plans to become a social worker, and he has a genuine interest in helping Jessica.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL (Note: Malcom is a black man.)
“Played expertly by David Tennant, Kilgrave radiates charisma, as do many real-world purveyors of psychological abuse, but while their actions may be monstrous, those people are human, and we need to understand that if we’re ever going to examine the cultural and environmental factors that contribute to their behavior. Being able to write off such people as purely, intrinsically evil doesn’t get us anywhere.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
Feminism: defeated!
@Lkeke, rest of the thread
I’m gonna go a step further, and if any of the non-black people in this comment section want to bop me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper for being Afrocentric or whatever, they are at liberty to do so.
It’s my belief, as per the Out-of-Africa origin theory, that we – the Black Man and the Black Woman – are like the Forerunners from Halo, in that we precede the larger narrative of Humanity, and that the others owe us quite a lot, for, if the African Origin theory is fact, every great nation, every empire, every hegemony, every legendary monarch, sprang from between our thighs.
Our story is one that spans 100,000 years – from the start of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species in the Great Rift Valley of Africa. Upon our shoulders rests all the hopes, dreams, triumphs, and achievements of the human race. We are, essentially, the mothers and fathers of all humans.
Because of this, I think it is our duty to protect, to care about people who are not black. We are strong enough and powerful enough to protect not only ourselves, but others as well. There is nothing we cannot do. I have nothing but the utmost confidence in my people, and when I criticize my people, it is only because I feel they’re wasting their limitless potential on trivial and fleeting nonsense.
I refuse to be limited by people who say we must do for us, or we should self-segregate, or that we should stay in our lane and take care of ‘fam’ first. We should take care of all of our ‘children’ of other races, and be involved in their lives, and intervene on their behalf – yes, I will intervene on the behalf of a white person, or an Asian person, or a Muslim person (in fact, I am a staunch ally of the Muslim people).
I hope that by saying this, I have also thrown this argument in the teeth of the Manuresphere and the White Nationalists/White Racist ideologues who scream about how all black people want to rape and kill and destroy the White Race (and the Asians who insist that black people only care about themselves, and the gay people who don’t think black people like them, which I can’t wrap my head around, being a bisexual black man, myself).
We are more than capable of taking action on the behalf of non-black people. It matters very little. It’s not even a big issue for me – I don’t think twice about intervening on the behalf of a white person, and I’m willing to bet Lkeke does not, either.
Wait, it works even better against Sarkeesian’s post “Five Ways Men Can Help End Sexism”!
“For many men, it can be hard to know exactly what role we can or should play in working towards an end to sexism.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
“As bell hooks writes in her landmark book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, ‘Like women, men have been socialized to passively accept sexist ideology. While they need not blame themselves for accepting sexism, they must assume responsibility for eliminating it… Men are not exploited or oppressed by sexism, but there are ways in which they suffer as a result of it.’”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
“So while men, as a group, are afforded gender-based privileges at the expense of women, a byproduct of patriarchy is that it also causes real harm to men’s well-being.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
“It’s especially vital to listen to women of color, particularly black and indigenous women, because as feminist scholars have long pointed out, sexism is compounded when it’s combined with racism and/or other forms of oppression.”
DOES THAT MEAN BLACK MEN AS WELL?
@Shaenon
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/kllm.gif