Cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian may have moved on from videogames, but Gamergaters (yes, they still exist) haven’t gotten over their obsession with her.
Earlier this month, Sarkeesian put out a video on the legendary Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese woman who wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, a thousand years ago. The four minute video, a slick production featuring elegant Japanese-art-inspired animation, is part of Sarkeesian’s Ordinary Women: Daring To Defy History series, her followup to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games.
A video about a female writer who lived over 900 years before videogames were invented might not seem like an obvious target for the inhabitants of Kotaku In Action, the main Gamergate (or perhaps post-Gamergate?) hangout on Reddit. But it’s Sarkeesian, so the fake novel-reader boys on KiA rev up their outrage engines.
In a thread inspired by Sarkeesian’s video, a dedicated Sarkeesian-hater called SupremeReader stirs the pot with a trolly claim that Sarkeesian is guilty of “Armenian appropriation of Japanese culture around the Samhain holiday).” In a followup comment, he posts a photo of Sarkeesian in profile to show off her allegedly distinctive Armenian nose.
Others are outraged that her video, which they hated, wasn’t long enough for their tastes, a complaint that brings to mind the old joke about two diners at a restaurant grousing that “the food is terrible—and such small portions!”
“3 f*cking minutes is a joke of a historic video,” complains spatchbo.
Holy shit are people being seriously scammed by this. My professor from Tokyo Broadcasting is going to lose his shit.
Anita you are a horrible historian. Please do more work. This is so bad its a joke of itself. I can actually say I have a far better education on this than she had 30,000$ to come up with. You are a sad state of whatever you are trying to be. Besides a con-artists.
Rygar_the_Beast offers a similar, and similarly badly written, assessment.
You are trying to bring this women up to the light you think they are not in? A f*ck less than a 4 minute video isnt helping.
F*ck, for 3.50 i can give a person the wiki address to the page for this woman that probably has at least as much info about her in the introductory paragraph.
Sarkeesian’s video, while short, is in fact packed with information. It makes no pretense of being the final word on Murasaki, but rather serves as an intellectual appetizer of sorts, inviting viewers to pick up a copy of The Tale of Genji and read it for themselves.
But apparently Gamergaters find it hard to understand videos that aren’t meandering six-hour monologues over still pictures.
Paradoxy:
Even people covered in shit still like dogs. If they pet your dog, you now have a dog covered in shit. That probably wasn’t their intention; it’s just a side-effect. Of course, if you’re upset about it, that’s a bonus to them, because they’re a shit-person.
Unless there’s a variation I’m not aware of (which is entirely possible), no. Thorn/Thurs/Thurisaz normally looks like this:
Perhaps you’re thinking of Algiz/Eolh/Yr?
http://runelore.it/images/runa%20algiz.png
(Not sure why Thorn got eventually got replaced by Y…)
Valentine:
I could never get the hang of “shch”, for some reason.
Ah, Wikipedia to the rescue:
@Valentine
Probably you were looking for PoM’s thing, but if that’s not quite it…
‘Th’ and ‘sh’ are fricatives, if that’s what you’re looking for. Consonants made by forcing air through a small space. ‘Ch’ is an affricate I’m pretty sure, which is second-half fricative and first-half stop – a stop being a consonant formed by completely blocking the airway, and then letting the air explode out all at once, like T or D or P.
Re: thorn looking like ‘y’. When written in calligraphy it often does look like a ‘y’. I submit for evidence The Bors Hede Inne logo:
http://camlann.org/text%20images/bors%20hede%20inne.jpg
If you know of thorn, it looks like Þe. If you don’t, it looks like ye.
Dipthongs are combinations of two vowels (ETA I’m late!); don’t know what the term is for combined consonants. Les Luthiers would have it that this is a consonantongo, but as a gauge of their reliability in such matters they famously explained that when two characters are conversing one no longer has un monólogo but un biólogo.
@EJ (The Orphic Lizard)
“Samhain is a Celtic (read: Celtic Revival) festival. As anyone who’s played Black&White 2 or any Civilisation game past the first knows, Japanese people are not Celtic. They normally don’t even start adjacent to one another.
Do these fake gamer boys not remember their classics?”
From my experience as an actual “hardcore gamer” (according to the criteria that these guys go by pretty much) and collector that grew up owning every major console starting with Mattel intellivision and the NES… I can assure you, plenty of easily triggered gamer guys don’t know nearly as much about their hobby as they think they do…. :/
Which is obnoxious, because I’m normally the one who is questioned due to my gender and appearance. :/
@feartheminotaur
The first thing you said was:
This was what first alarmed me. You said nothing about hearing them say it. All you said was that they pronounced it wrong. Reactions from others included ‘Fuck them!’ for doing so. That is what alarmed me. Nothing to do with them ‘trying to impress others.’ Nothing to do with them ‘insisting that what they said was right.’ Just a hypothetical mispronunciation and berating them for mispronunciation. Nothing more and nothing less.
Your next comment on the subject was:
Which didn’t link, because again the original comments were not about ‘impressing someone’ but were simply about mispronunciation. You’ve added this bit to dismiss my concerns. This was not something I contested, because you added these points afterwards.
You continued by saying
I didn’t ‘excise’ anything. I was pointing out that your point here was not ‘he was insisting he was right so we mocked him,’ but ‘he was rightly mocked for mispronunciation,’ and then said ‘especially when…’
This is a distinction between two different points, situations wherein he was mocked and situations when he was mocked while claiming he was correct. Perhaps you didn’t mean it, but that was how you put it. Please don’t dismiss my concerns by pretending you didn’t say what you did. Perhaps you didn’t mean certain things, but I am not misrepresenting how you actually worded it. Your tone seems (imho) to be worryingly similar to the ‘stop being so offended’ mentality.
@ Policy of Madness
That’s a great little tidbit of information. I think I may have known that before at some point, but certainly didn’t recall before you mentioned it.
@Weird Eddie
This article gives a decent overview. You might also have a look at Heselton’s Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An Investigation into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft and Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival..
OMG the Stonehenge song is hilarious. I wish I’d known about it when I was working there….
I completely agree with Uther Pendragon about reburying the bones—I don’t think their presence in the new museum adds at all to our understanding of the site; their display is both pointless and disrespectful.
Re ‘pay to pray’—Stonehenge is completely open to the public on two days of the year (I was at the winter solstice a couple of years ago) but otherwise costs money to get near (you can actually go inside the stone circle outside visiting hours if you book with English Heritage in advance; a friend of mine arranged for us to do this on my birthday one year). I’ve been told, however, that the entry fees of the millions of overseas visitors every year are what keeps English Heritage afloat, so it’s hard for me to begrudge them their £20. (I do think it should be cheaper, or free, for UK residents, since we’re already supporting English Heritage with our taxes.)
@Weird Eddie
Possibly because the spelling rules for Old Irish tended to ignore certain features of the language; it seems to have been something of a “best effort” system rather than trying to capture the exact sounds. Modern Irish spelling is more systematic but it looks weirder because you have consonant clusters like bh, dh, mb, etc. that are unfamiliar to English speakers. The thing to remember is that unless it occurs at the start of the sentence, the letter “h” is more like an accent mark in Irish than a standalone letter, modifying the sound of the preceding letter in much the same way as it does in English for th, ch, sh, etc. In fact, in older Irish orthographies, it was an accent mark, indicated by a dot over the letter.
An example being Alan’s Aunt Medb, which would be more usually spelt “Medhbh” or “Maebh” nowadays (or “Maeve” in Anglicized spelling)
Actually, Russian and Irish have certain similarities in that they have a contract between velar and palatal articulation (what the Russian grammars call “hard” and “soft”, the Irish grammars call “broad” and “slender”). A lot of the Irish sound system didn’t make sense until I studied Russian in university!
@nparker
In the context of this article, the remark about mispronunciation is clearly not meant to be referring to mispronunciations as a whole, but to the people who inexplicably (and, honestly, appropriatively) invoked Samhain in order to add some kind of additional cachet to their claim that Sarkeesian is somehow “appropriating” Japanese culture by making a video about an author. The indication – which is clear to just about everyone else, it seems! – is that these misogynists who are already misapplying progressive terminology likely know so little about the observance they invoked as to not even know how to pronounce it. Everything feartheminotaur has said since then has been further imposing their point that people who use a term condescendingly and, simultaneously, incorrectly are worthy of derision.
Tone arguments don’t further discourse, and even if you’re not intentionally concern trolling, that’s what it’s going to feel like to the people you’re condescending to for daring to say something derisive on a blog with a subtitle of “The New Misogyny, Tracked and Mocked” (emphasis mine). We might not always agree about what forms of mocking are appropriate or should be allowable, but “you’re being mean” is not a conducive starting point for discussion of that issue. Additionally, the hat tip to PoM is practically torn from the concern trolling playbook – excoriate those who speak ill of you in one sentence, praise those who meet your desired tone in the other.
@Samhain chat in general:
I’ll admit I’ve gotten really tired of the Wiccan Wheel of the Year being used for everything as if it’s the definitive historical treatise on European pagan religious observances. I’ve had a handful of Fluffy Bunnies attempt to tell me that my Celtic Reconstruction friends (who live in Ireland and are much better read on historic pre-Christian religion than Silver Ravenmoon) are idiots for celebrating Samhain on any day other than October 31st as marked on the Gregorian solar calendar (and yes, one of the Bunnies pronounced it “Sam-hane”). A lot of the modern “generic” neopagan scene is horribly appropriative in and of itself, taking elements from other cultures’ religions in a way that goes beyond mere syncretic synthesis into actually denigrating the religions by telling the original or reconstructive practitioners that their deities and observances are fair game for reinterpretation and misrepresentation. ‘S why I’m an unaligned Chaote!
@HawkAtreides
That isn’t clear.
I’m not sure of your point about PoM either; I mentioned nothing about their tone.
It also isn’t ‘tone policing,’ it is similar to the discussion of problems about mocking people’s appearance, which I think has been established in this community as wrong, over the past year and a half at least and reaffirmed only a few days ago in the Cassie Jaye article.
There’s enough to mock and criticise about the manospherians without resorting to things that just don’t matter. This is a point that has been stated here countless times before and it shouldn’t need repeating.
@nparker: It is clear. People are saying that if someone comes into a space, and ‘samhain-splains’ to actual practitioners, they will make fun of them.
If someone pronounces it wrong, and isn’t a condescending jerk about it, people might shrug or they might correct them.
Mispronunciation is not always a reason to mock someone, because there are reasons that things would be mispronounced (talk to me about the word ‘chasm’, I didn’t learn how that was actually pronounced for yeeeears). But when someone corrects the wrong pronunciation, doubling down is bad.
Honestly, that is what is being said.
@Rhuu
That is what is being said now, it wasn’t when I originally brought my objections up.
@nparker: Okay, so the original statement was not clear, for you. It has now been explained. What are you hoping to achieve here?
Also, I was reading some of your objections as tone policing. According to Everyday Feminism:
What you said:
I was working and i only just saw all the response i got! I love this website. Yes i think digraphs is the word i wanted, but Viscaria also i like that explination too about fricatives. I guess щ/shch is a mega fricative then. Although really it’s purpose is just to avoid writing шч all the time.
i agree with moggie that some sounds like щ can be a challenge when learning but at least shch will always be shch and it’s not going to change its sound all the time depending on its place in a word. That’s what i like about russian alphabet, generally a letter makes one sound and seldom changes and even then it is easy to guess. Not like english XD
Also Scildfreja now im not confused anymore i agree entirely with your fluttershy now 😀
http://pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw8248-32180.gif
Thanks for the heads up about the new dog whistle for “Jewish” being “Armenian.” It’s a bit like the old “Central European” used to be used.
Thanks to this discussion, I now know how to pronounce Samhain. Thanks all!
Please have a happy star of friendship.
http://astropixels.com/stars/images/Castor-01w.jpg
@nparker
This isn’t about you. This is about the people attacking Sarkeesian; in fact, the first post on the matter was literally only referencing the GGers involved in making this attack by misapplying progressive terminology and invoking a religious observance as a non sequitur. The fact that you divorced the argument from its context means you either misunderstood the intent or that you’re not arguing in good faith. Neither means that the explained intent didn’t exist, nor that the explanations you’ve been given are to dismiss you personally. You don’t get to tell other people what they meant when they said something, and that’s exactly what you’re doing to feartheminotaur by claiming that the intent not only wasn’t “clear” but that the explanation of intent has changed to dismiss you personally.
And if you want to bring up the Matt Forney body-shaming issue, go right ahead. Because in that thread, after IP called Axe out for attempting to define not only IP’s statements but the intent thereof (emphasis mine):
You want to draw parallels, go right ahead – I’ll draw this one in for you: telling people what their intent was is not OK, and even among the contemporary and still-current disagreement over the issue, Axe didn’t turn around and tell IP “No, you changed your argument to dismiss me”, which is exactly what you’ve done here. Since you can’t seem to stop trying to tell people what their real intent was, I think I’m done walking this road with you. It’s going nowhere.
I can probably just copy and paste this, really…
@nparker,
I’ll take you at your word, that you’re not trying to make trouble, you just hold a different opinion – we all do that. I honestly believe this to be the case, too!
There’s a major perspective clash going on right now. The proper thing to do is to put on the other person’s glasses, as it were. Find the perspective of the person or people you’re arguing against. Try it on, see how the world changes when you look through those lenses. Understand how and why they’re prioritizing the way they are.
You’ve inadvertently hurt or offended in the argument that was happening. Find that hurt, find how and why it happened. That’ll be the key to the disagreement that’s going on here. Give that a try, cool down a bit, and then come back once you’ve figured out the difference in perspective.
I hope that helps!
My digraph thing had a tone? o.O
PoM, B# maybe?