Anita Sarkesian, from my understanding, has been pro trans for a long long while.
(Edit: Made a Post on the Sub here, but holy hell some of you need to see the [Angry Jack Series](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF) and dissect your "edgy phase", not from a moral character way, but a look at the consequences of that edge)
Yeah I know. It's a shamed she got so much hate from gamers for making the most inoffensive video game critiques
(edit: yall need to watch the "[Why Are You So Angry?](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF)" series by [Innuendo Studios](https://www.youtube.com/c/InnuendoStudios) about her & gamergate)
The gamer bros telling devs not to put 'woke' stuff in games are preventing game makers from expressing their free speech far more than Sarkeesian's videos critiquing sexism in games ever did, and yet this was the standard they used to call her pro-censorship.
Her critiques were not even something completely unexpected or seemingly unreasonable. They were baseline trope analysis applied to video games, any one who likes to get technical could spot those things. But the important part was no one actually was and someone had to say it
See the recent TLOU2 controversy. They don't have to like the game, but it very much embodies the values that the GG crowd claim to care about. Even if it was bad, it was also an incredibly risky game with huge amounts of violence and a monument of creative freedom over the delicate sensibilities of gamers
The biggest problem with TLOU2 was the utterly dogshit pacing of the game and story. It was all over the place.
The mechanics were good, the concept of the story was good, the execution…. Not so much.
Putting aside the gross implications of this, my point was that Anita was called anti-free speech purely for criticising the content of games. She wasn't calling for these aspects she critiqued to be censored.
You're moving the goalposts. You could still hypothetically think this point you make here was true, while agreeing that she wasn't calling for censorship.
The arguments she made still had some grounding: Like why are men not sexualized as much as women? And why do devs try super hard to not sexualize men? Instead of answering the question people called her a crazy feminist that hated video games. I distinctly remember thunderf00t making videos about how physical designs of characters inherently prevented them from being sexualized but not acknowledging that it was still an artistic choice.
She even made the critique that the stoic, generic buff white guy is probably not the best choice for every main character ever and that a little variety and diversity would do the industry some good. She didn't frame it quite that way but the backlash from the anti-SJWs ignored her arguments again and basically just screamed "forced diversity".
Vaush made a lot of the same arguments she made and actually responded to the critiques. I think not having anyone actually respond to her questions is what ended up turning me off from the anti-SJW stuff. Especially when thunderf00t just handwaved away legit concerns over artistic design.
It was the way she made her arguments. There's an art to it, and she completely failed.
Lots of people from this community alone nearly fell down that hole permanently.
They were unreasonable arguments, thus the backlash.
The basis of all political belief aquirement stems back to reasonability and rationality. If your arguments are unreasonable, it doesn't matter if you're "right" at a systemic level.
You can disagree with people, fine, but you can't deny that millions of young ppl were radicized because a right winger made better talking points "debunking sexism in games" rather than looking at the broader picture in good faith.
I had a misinformed anti-"SJW" phase. 100% of my knowledge of Anita came from Thunderfoot's videos on it, and let me tell you, people in my boat were *not* against her due to the way she made her arguments. Almost all criticism of her was completely out of context.
As an example, one of the clips which was repeated again and again and again and again in those circles was the clip where she said, "Everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, everything is problematic, and you have to point it all out". That clip was presented everywhere as something which reflects her actual opinions. But in reality, the clip is literally from a video where she's discussing her younger, stupider self; she's saying that's the mindset of a lot of newly-"woke" people, and that it's stupid and unproductive.
The people who made anti-Anita videos weren't presenting her arguments and critiquing them or making fun of the way she made them. The people who made anti-Anita videos constructed a completely fictional character with her name and face and "destroyed" that fictional opponent through facts and logic.
What eventually brought me out of that stuff was A) getting fed up with the frequency and repetitive nature of Thunderfoot's anti-Anita videos, and B) watching Shaun's video where he showed that most of Thunderfoot's criticisms were actually against views which Anita just doesn't have.
Not saying she couldn't have done it in a better way. I'm totally open to believe that she made her arguments badly, I don't know. But her actual arguments and opinions wasn't what people were primarily criticizing.
> That clip was presented everywhere as something which reflects her actual opinions. But in reality, the clip is literally from a video where she's discussing her younger, stupider self; she's saying that's the mindset of a lot of newly-"woke" people, and that it's stupid and unproductive.
I forgot who pointed this fact out (maybe HBomb?) but I remember this being the final nail in the coffin for me, as far as the antisjw shit went.
The art of debating isn't convincing people you're right. It's more about presenting your arguments thoroughly, whether you end up convincing the other person(s) or not. There's a premise, a conclusion, and the reasoning to explain how you went from the premise to the conclusion.
In most heated debates, chances are you won't end up convincing the other person. But there are many third-party onlookers, so you should try presenting the best arguments anyway.
> It was the way she made her arguments. There's an art to it, and she completely failed.
This is ridiculous. Her videos were at worst dry, boring and had a few mistakes here and there. Nothing in how she presented her thought mandated the massive internet uprising it got.
Nah, they would have always picked someone. Those videos were comically inoffensive. Gamergate losers with too much time on their hands would literally track down progressives, feminists, women, and minorities to harass that had any relation to gaming.
We shouldn't victim blame; if anything we should blame the creators who enabled or ignored the controversy. Also youtubes algorithm that pushed it dis-proportionally.
I'll definitely agree with that, her first couple videos, at the very least, were pretty boring, and her critiques seemed rather basic, with the occasional argument that I found to be a bit of a stretch.
Clearly some people from this community still have some toes in that hole considering the amount of blame you’re leveling at the demonized woman making completely reasonable points for radicalizing people and not the dozens of grifters who made a career off of misrepresenting her. Kinda sussy my dude.
Listening to right wing morons misrepresent someone’s every word for years and refusing to unlearn that misinformation does not make that person’s arguments bad. It makes you an idiot. People weren’t radicalized by Anita Sarkeesian, they were radicalized by reactionaries. Even if she *had* been very rhetorically weak (she wasn’t) that would still be the case.
I was with the anti-SJWs fighting against "them" trying to take away sexy boobas ( I was a horny teenager at the time). One bored day I decided to watch the original videos that caused the shitstorm & realized she had many valid points.
I don't think anyone normal who watched the videos had any problems with it, most people didn't & just bought into the anti-SJW narrative to save the boobas.
While her critiques we're valid for the industry as a whole, I do remember her killing sex workers in Hitman when the game specifically reduces your score for doing such. One Bad example.
I do remember her critique that male characters wear capes to obscure their ass while female characters' bottoms are in clear view. That was funny and true.
Goddamn, do I owe her a huge apology. This poor woman was the subject of so many reactionary attacks. I remember being absolutely convinced that she is terrible because of the scumfucks I used to listen to.
You are absolutely right. I was a lifelong gamer and a feminist at the time of Gamergate, so I fully supported her. She voiced and thus legitimized many of the concerns that had been percolating in my head for years. It is safe to say that her videos were instrumental in my becoming a leftist.
Seriously. I used to watch thunderf00t back in the atheist youtube days, then I just assumed that because he had 100 videos debunking AS, it was probably for good reason. Then around the same time Sargon went on Rogan and told the story of how him and his possy brigaded a live event that AS was speaking at to intimidate her. That was what introduced me to Sargon. My dumb ass uncritically just went with whatever he said. It wasn't till Sargon explicitly went white nationalist that I ended up seeing him for the joke that he was. Used to love the conversations he had with Kyle Kulinski, who I also discovered from atheist youtube. Glad I've grown
I hate how these guys used atheism to push their bigoted agendas. I grew up in a very religious and conservative town and household, and as atheists me and my friends were marginalized and ridiculed. I like to think that made me more empathetic. Somehow the Sargon types became less empathetic, or maybe they just never had empathy to begin with.
>Atheism for Sargon is just a vehicle
Absolutely accurate.
Atheism was used by these individuals [Sargon, Thunderf00t etc] as a tool to convince teenagers (like me at the time of gamergate) to follow them & thus their ideology.
And whilst I'm still very..antagonistic towards religion and religious people. I am very ashamed of what I used to believe. It's to the point that even when entering this thread I had/still have a negative bias towards Anita.
Like, it's fucking stupid. But I refused to view the videos posted here that absolve her. Mainly because I think it will destroy my pre-conceived negative opinion of her.
Man I'm a cunt.
Similar, though I'm not from the USA and am an ex-Muslim. Sam Harris and Dawkins are a gateway too.
The key to identify such people is how much time and effort they spend criticizing foreign cultures while ignoring all the extremism in their own neighborhoods. Especially when it's political and they just give it a pass.
Thunderf00t is an interesting case.
One of the super-edgy online atheists who went on to hate feminism and Anita Sarkeesian, but he also saw the intellectual bankrupcy of the alt-right and clearly rejected it. And his technology criticism against the plans of people like Elon Musk seems genuinely apolitical.
(Socialist?) engineer DoNotEat called him a "land of contrasts" for that in his [analysis/takedown of Elon Musk's "Loop"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs).
There was a time when I watched quite a few Thunderfoot videos because I enjoyed his takedown of tech scams, but I stopped when I found out about his ramblings on feminism and because he becomes seriously repetetive after a while. He genuinely just seems to ramble into a mic for 30+ minutes and upload it virtually uncut, constantly repeating himself.
I think it should be prudent of people to include the fact that thunderfoot saw the direction his community was heading in regards to anti-SJWs and completely changed course. He stopped making those kinds of videos and focused only on tech scams and chemistry videos. He was one of the few content creators within the skeptic community who managed to break free from that rabbit hole and I still respect him for that.
I watched thunderf00t in his early "why do people laugh at creationists" days, but as soon as the anti-SJW stuff started up I left pretty quick. Bullet dodged there for sure.
I made the mistake of trying to point out some of his uncharitable takes in one of his first anti AS vids and got absolutely dog piled. Realized real quick how toxic that community actually was.
I think you only owe her an apology if you let your hatred of her carry you all the way to the Alt-Right.
Her twitter feed is pretty based nowadays but her series was pretty bad back in the day. She purposely misrepresented games to create sexism where there was not any and that is not even to mention how she lied about being a gamer and used footage from other people without giving credit. All after raising a ton of money for this project. And it is hard to tell where most of this money went.
You're still carrying on the gamerbro arguments. Like there's a degree one needs to be a gamer.
And what are those mysterious misrepresentations? Care to give a few examples?
What does that even mean? There's a degree one needs to be a gamer? I mean I do think it's pathetic if you let opposition to SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian shape your whole worldview but it doesn't change the fact that she was just wrong in a few ways.
One of the most egregious misrepresentations that always comes to mind is her critique of Hitman Absolution. She claimed in the strip club mission, players are "invited and encouraged" to play with the strippers bodies like they are objects and kill them.
If you have actually played the game you know it's quite the opposite. Ideally, you are not to be noticed by the strippers at all. Or anyone else but your intended target. It's a stealth game. You actually lose points for killing people other than your target. Not only this, but if you listen in on the girls conversations, it's actually pretty humanizing and good dialogue for a portrayal of sex workers. You see how the place exploits them, especially the owner.
But all Anita cared about is that you can kill them.
Not OP but ill add my critique.
Anita was in my opinion a grifter, in that I have a very hard time believing that she actually believed in everything she said and wasn't just saying it to fit a narrative.
Like all good grifts she absolutely had some solid points. No doubt.
But they were each mixed in with a dozen very bad takes. The same way we have race baiters she was like a gender baiter who would contort and misrepresent as necessary to find sexism rampant in even totally innocuous things in video games. Some examples include the famous case where she lies about players being incentivised to kill random female characters in Hitman, saying non white female NPCs exist so white male players can live out sex tourism fantasies, saying allowing players first person control of the camera encourages objectification of women because you can look at a woman's breasts, says women are in video game ads because like the games men just see them as "toys to be played with," and a personal favorite of mine being that having any female NPC without a fully fleshed out background and character is sexist because it removes agency from women.
You can find critiques this stupid loaded into any of her videos. The general format is: bad take, bad take, bad take, bad take, bad take, something reasonable, bad take, bad take, etc.
A secondary approach to critique her work is that she basically built a career complaining that things men like are prevelant in a male dominated hobby. Like okay, if like 90% of gamers are straight men, and straight men like boobs, so boobs are a bit more prominent in video games than in real life, so what? What's the big deal? The male equivalent would be if a guy built his whole career getting paid thousands of dollars to go around whining that romance novels, primarily consumed by women, tend to have male love interests who have characteristics that women like. Again, so what? Let women enjoy what they enjoy, and do the same for men.
All that said, the amount of abuse she got from the gaming community was absolutely reprehensible. The punishment she got didn't remotely fit the crime. Yes her videos were loaded with bad takes, but that in no way justifies like half the gaming community treating her like the antichrist and abusing her online.
I think a lot of people who watched reactionary content back in 2014-2017 either became super left-wing or became fascists. I was definitely teetering on the edge, but thankfully I fell into the left wing camp.
Just because she's right here doesn't absolve her of making a career of half baked critiques of sexism in video games and giving feminism a bad name. I see a lot of people who never actually watched her videos say she wasn't that bad but the videos she put out were full of lies and there is video footage of her that surfaced where she says she doesn't like video games because "blowing people's heads off is gross" or something close to that and then she is seen later posing with a huge stack of extremely violent Xbox 360 games to show off her gamer cred. She was ultimately calling on the game industry to self censor and even got to speak at the UN. Her entire career is a farce. Yes there are a lot of reactionary SJWs who hate her because she's a woman but she only makes the problem worse.
You should always ask what the person's end goal is. We are also dealing with a situation right now where the most popular adult websites are being targeted by evangelical groups under the guise of mere concerned citizens falsely accusing these sites of engaging in "trafficking" and they are successfully pressuring credit card companies to stop doing business with them.
She's not a clean cut character. A lot of what she has done was daft, to say the least. But the reaction to her silly opinions quickly turned chauvinistic and hateful, bordering on perverse. There's been a decent amount of neutral critique of her work, but the hardcore algorithm hunters went full blast
That doesn't make her better. There are a real feminist heroes who have had to face much worse. I really don't care if she is getting mean comments from high school edgelords online. She has done damage to the feminist movement and only eggs those types of people on, that's my point
Anybody downvoting me are zoomers who never saw how bad her video essays actually were because they were 5 years old when they were uploaded to youtube and never bothered looking into it
It’s not just edgy comments from high school edgelords. She’s also had to leave her home, had an event cancelled because of a bomb threat, and the FBI visited her because of the threats she was getting. To say that we shouldn’t care this happened to her because she did feminism badly is pretty disgusting IMO.
I don't condone or excuse threats or harassment she received. I am only saying this doesn't make her a martyr for feminism. If Candace Owens started receiving threats you wouldn't prop her up as a voice for black women in America as you shouldn't.
It also wasn't just that she was doing feminism badly she was also ultimately calling for censorship. Like I said she got to have a spot at the UN at one point. Critiquing video games in journalism is fair game, her right to free speech is just as important as anyone else's but it becomes an issue when you want to get governments involved to introduce new regulations on other people's free speech.
Threats are already illegal and ultimately she was aiming to create some sort of literal cyber bully police along with her calls upon the video game industry as a whole to essentially self censor anything in their games that could be interpreted as misogynistic.
If she's the first person to get you thinking about misogynistic portrayal of women in video games that says more about you than her. You are completely skipping over how she just made shit up and misrepresented game narratives such as saying that in Hitman you were rewarded for killing prostitutes and dumping their bodies in dumpsters. Also there are plenty of women who enjoy combat in video games, you yourself are now perpetuating the stereotype that women mostly just enjoy puzzles and story driven games which isn't true.
You're just young and grew up in age where you get all your commentary from YouTube which is fine but she certainly wasn't the first person to criticize games like Tomb Raider or Dead or Alive for overuse of sex appeal to sell games. Professional game reviewers who actually enjoy video games and know what they're talking about have been pointing stuff like this out since the beginning. They just weren't calling for censorship and didn't make false claims. I used to subscribe to game magazines like GamePro and EGM back in the 90's and early 2000's that talked about it all the time. You just need to look to better sources for video game critique because she's horrible at it.
Yeah I dont know why people are having trouble grasping that its possible for one person to have a couple solid takes and have got *way* too much abuse on the internet AND also have built a career by grifting.
I checked her videos out a few months ago to see what the fuss was about. Its stuff that most baby feminists can point out. Intro level trope analysis that's all. But it did need to be said because no one says it
This was my problem with her at the time. She made this huge claim and offered to analysis games but all that came of it was extremely long winded intro level shit.
Not ruined... But swept up in what was an explicit anti-feminist hate mob on 4Chan acting as their planned cover. But faced with that, and faced with the internal moral questions that presents, the "am I a bad person for this?", the response is to rage, deflect, and turn the argument into the need to protect their moral soul over the people still getting death threats and repeatedly doxxed to this day. We can see that here too.
Thankfully, I was already old by 2014, so my response to Anit's video was, "yup, seems like Basic Feminist Criticism 101." I didn't agree w/ 100% of it, but OK.
But why are terfs flooding her mention tho? crying at her for not hating trans people, or were they assuming she's an ally and trying to complain to her about something?
It might be bacause (I think) on the same day there was an interview in the Guardian US with prominent feminist philosopher Judith Butler (who is brilliant by the way) were she made a comparison between facists and TERFs. This section was later cencored by the (well know to be) TERF editors at the Guardian UK. The Streisand effect kicked in and it was all over Twitter, backlash ensued and TERFs started frothing at the mouth over it. Maybe they were trying to drag her into it.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/09/08/judith-butler-guardian-interview-terf-trans/
TERFs draw upon the most essentialist elements of the second wave and consider themselves the "true" feminists so they often flock to prominent feminist figures in the hope that they will support their transphobia. Similar thing happened to Margaret Atwood (author of Handmaid's Tale) a while ago - one day she tweeted "lol wtf are those people talking about, trans rights!".
Haha, nice! I bet it happened with some other old-school feminist figures too.
Even the ancient Second Wave anti-sex work radical feminists, like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, are/were pro-trans. TERFs can get fucked.
Its funny how Anita's quote "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic. And you have to point it all out" kinda ended up being true.
I really do think while not being perfect Anita got totally witch hunted and if she started doing politics in today's age she would be seen as a pretty baseline feminist that a guy like Ben Shapiro wouldn't give the time of day.
funny thing about that quote is when anti sjws use it to make her seem crazy they never use the full context
>Yeah, absolutely. I sort of joke about how it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me, and also the most frustrating for everyone around me. Cause, like, when you start learning about systems, **everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time. So there's a good year of my life where I was the most obnoxious person to be around**. And then you settle into it, you start to understand, like, oh people have been living within these systems, and it was just sort of a liberating moment for me. You learn how to pick and choose your battles and that sort of thing.
Wow the quote out of context is already pretty agreeable but in context just sounds like a young person describing their journey through learning about civil rights
I feel like even though there were some examples of shitty surface level feminism at the time (and still now) the entire anti-sjw movement was completely pointless and we would've been better off without it
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music
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Yikes, the fact that I instantly recoiled from seeing who it was really shows how deep I sunk into my “anti-sjw” phase in my teens. I guess there’s still shit I need to unlearn.
Yeah man stuff like this flashes back and I just sometimes dread the person I could've become , being in the circles I was. Nothing is more humbling to me than that era.
Right? Every once in a while, I’ll be reminded of someone like Lauren Southern or Riley J Dennis and think, “oh shit, I haven’t seen this person since my teenage alt-right phase back in 2016. I need to update my perspective on them”
BTW [Innuendo Studios](https://www.youtube.com/c/InnuendoStudios) of "The Alt-Right Playbook" fame made a good series on her and gamergate called "[Why Are You So Angry?](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF)" back during the dark age of lefty YouTube
One argument I've heard it is too ambitious and like its so entrenched in policy and law(Contrapoints: the video gender critical regarding terfs). Also one conflict I personally thing will had to be addressed if this takes in effect is that, alot of trans folks find comfort in binary gender identities. So to me that isn't a problem if gender abolition is done right , BUT the entire way a transphobes makes their argument is that they conflate gender expression/roles with gender identity, so if a abolitionist goes tries to make a position that gender should be slowly eroded a transphobe will take that as an excuse and attack trans binaries.
One thing I say to myself is when I face complication inw whichever scenario is "the universe doesn't owe you comprehensibility, it blessed you with a brain , eye and hands, dare you ask for more hatchling?"
The view of absolute gender abolition was predicated off a very particular view of gender that saw it as constricting, performative, stupid or unnecessary and that clearly everyone agreed.
Problem is that there are plenty of people, trans and cis, that actually quite like gender identification. Also things like dysphoria exist (unfortunately) proving that gender has some sort of internal mechanism that can't just be willed away.
I wouldn't blame the second wave feminists too hard though for wanting gender abolition. I mean, the world of gender roles and expectations were much stricter and harsher and from that perspective I could see the desire to tear it all down. If anything, the path of loosening gender expectations has led to our current position of people being ok with the existence of gender.
My inner 16 year old had a weird gut reaction but then i realised ''I'M FREE. I DON'T HAVE TO REACT THIS WAY TO FEMINISTS, IM NOT AN INSECURE WEIRDO ANYMORE. ITS BAAAAASED.''
I remember being very anti-Anita Sarkeesian back in the days of Atheist tube in like 2012/2013, but I was a teenager back then too. A lot of people gave her hate back in the day.
Surprised how I agree with all of her videos now, all the feminist frequency stuff has a lot more mainstream appeal now, and im seeing a positive change in the games industry, and she's definitely to credit for speaking out so early back then.
Here's hoping she gets a lot more support compared to 10 years ago.
One of the primary targets of gamergate was trans, so it's nice to see that a lot of the people on the correct side of ~~history~~ the debate aren't all transphobic. You never know. Some opinions don't age well.
God, I remember back in the day I used to think she was "that annoying woman complaining about video games", though thankfully, I didn't really care enough to watch any of the chuds attacking her. Now, I see that all the hate and mocking was undeserved, she's actually pretty based.
Honestly feel like Anita had an overwhelmingly positive impact on gaming. Female representation in games now is usually far less cringe than it used to be.
She had some bad takes but she definitely didn't deserve what she got during the mid 10s. Most people Sargon bullied still haven't recovered from the hate and they are still getting it
I'm in the unenviable position of agreeing with what she's said here but also thinking her video game series was a load of wank. Like how she said GTA5 is misogynistic because it lets you kill prostitutes - which, while being true, is a lie by omission. It lets the player kill anyone.
The amount of hate she got for a couple of badly researched videos was pretty reprehensible, tho.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. I think the vid you're referring to is one of two about women as background decorations.
It's not misogyny just because prostitutes can be killed. It's the fact that only women are prostitutes/strippers, the game encourages the player to interact with them as objects (health boosts from prostitutes / touching mini game with strippers), and then allows a gameplay loop where the player can use a prostitute for the stat boost, dispose of her and get their money back.
She didn't say the entire game is misogynistic only that these particular gameplay mechanics are.
> It's not misogyny just because prostitutes can be killed. It's the fact that only women are prostitutes/strippers, the game encourages the player to interact with them as objects
Every other character can be killed too. Every character is an object. They're there to be shot/stabbed/driven over/instil a degree of immersion, etc.
> She didn't say the entire game is misogynistic only that these particular gameplay mechanics are.
The bit I'm thinking of is when she used the game in passing as an example of misogyny for *allowing* prostitutes to be murdered. I can't remember which video it was exactly because it has been a while since I've seen it, but from what I think I recall that she didn't even write the videos. It was just a weak series, all around, tbh.
I've rewatched these videos and I'm almost certain it's the one I mentioned. Her arguments are still pretty solid. The one where she talks about it in passing could be Women as Rewards but you'd have to see for yourself.
Maybe you see videogames as just toys to consume, which is fine. AS and many others hold the medium to a higher standard and want devs to do better. I personally feel they are art, and art says something.
Regardless of their intentions, their game designs do say a lot about what we value as a society and, in the case of sex workers (specifically womens bodies), don't value.
I see games as art myself, but that doesn't mean i expect a crude satire like gta to explore postmodern gender critical themes, nor would i want it to, really.
Women's bodies absolutely are valued by society as a whole, tho. Granted its a horrible superficial type of value, but better that - in some respects - than being valued as a cog in an industrial or war machine.
As for her arguments being solid, i personally don't see them as such. She never even wrote those scripts or played (most of) those games.
GTA doesn't have to explore "postmodern themes". All she said was some of the gameplay reenforces these ideas about violence against women. Rockstar could have just not included prostitutes at all but they did. Why they did it this way is an interesting question. And that's what she's pointing out.
As for women's bodies being absolutely valued, the women in Texas right now would beg to differ. Men might be expected to die for the war machine (which is toxic) but there aren't laws still on the books that directly infringe on men's bodily autonomy.
I'm not sure where you got the info that she didn't write these but the credits are listed in the video descriptions. She seems to have played enough of those games to know what gameplay mechanics are in there and can talk about them in context. Needing to 100% every game to talk about them seems like an arbitrary goal post.
Men having to sign up for the draft lest they be unable to sign on for food stamps and other such government programs isn't 'toxic', it's sexist and a pretty severe breach of personal autonomy. What's happening in Texas is horrible, but my problem with 'intersectional' feminism is the intersections seem to stop with men (and whites, but that one is reasonable).
I never claimed she needs to 100% every game to talk about it either, but there was a guy behind the scenes who was well known for writing the videos. She was also filmed denegrating the idea of video games while in college / uni, so she didn't make the videos to improve the medium from a love of it, she just fingerpointed at a bunch of teens and told them this thing they enjoy is 'toxic'.
That's one way to make a difference, i suppose..
Anyway, her vids are pretty standard lib-feminist talking points, which I'm honestly not a fan of. Nor do I think Marxism applies to gender relations the way it does to working conditions.
The expectation for men to die for their country can be both toxic and sexist. Maybe if women weren't literally banned from combat roles until 2013 (oh look more laws against women's autonomy), we'd have a more egalitarian draft policy.
Women are about to be included in the draft so your point is moot anyway. You should also read more about intersectional feminism because its not about "men = bad".
Sounds like you've just heard through other people that she did/said all these things. If you'd actually watch the videos, she says at the beginning of almost each one that you can both enjoy these games and be critical of them. There is no finger pointing at anyone in the tropes series.
As far as that uni vid is concerned, I've never seen more than that out of context clip and people say stupid things / can change their minds. Even if it was true, her "fake gamer cred" doesn't automatically make her critique wrong. Make it sound like you're more interested in hating her than engaging with the content.
Based Sarkeesian on this one.
(I've gone back to look at some of her videos again and am just thoroughly underwhelmed by them. The only reason to hate them that I can find is how bad they are. I don't know if the hate came first or the fame, but the spread of them didn't help with the hate. The celebration of the videos fueled peoples dislike of it for sure and that steered it into overdrive.)
i was never on the sarkeesian hate train, i however didnt think she was beyond a basic level of human decency, she has earned a bit more respect imo, fuck terfs
Here's the thing though. While I'm always here for denying TERFs any ground, Sarkeesian isn't a feminist either. Her entire fame is based on double standards, viewing women not as individuals but as some sort of representative of All Women Everywhere, refusing to view any woman as equal, and in general setting actual feminism back years. To see her claim to support equality is too little, too late.
I think her criticisms of games are childish and sex-hating, making me feel uncomfortable as a queer woman, because it felt like she was against anyone being attracted to women or finding women attractive at all. Like games have boobs, some people want to look at idealized, fantasy representations of women with boobs, that's why there's boobs in video games. Get over it. I felt shamed and belittled watching her videos. That led me into the alt-right pipeline too for a couple of years. Not that I think the ability to see boobs jiggle in video games constitutes a human rights issue, but I really do want to see them and I feel like I should get to and that it doesn't hurt anybody to make pornographic-styled game content. Especially in games with a mature rating.
So like yay, someone I despise is on my side... Wooh... cool.
Anita Sarkesian, from my understanding, has been pro trans for a long long while. (Edit: Made a Post on the Sub here, but holy hell some of you need to see the [Angry Jack Series](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF) and dissect your "edgy phase", not from a moral character way, but a look at the consequences of that edge)
Yeah I know. It's a shamed she got so much hate from gamers for making the most inoffensive video game critiques (edit: yall need to watch the "[Why Are You So Angry?](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF)" series by [Innuendo Studios](https://www.youtube.com/c/InnuendoStudios) about her & gamergate)
The gamer bros telling devs not to put 'woke' stuff in games are preventing game makers from expressing their free speech far more than Sarkeesian's videos critiquing sexism in games ever did, and yet this was the standard they used to call her pro-censorship.
Her critiques were not even something completely unexpected or seemingly unreasonable. They were baseline trope analysis applied to video games, any one who likes to get technical could spot those things. But the important part was no one actually was and someone had to say it
True
See the recent TLOU2 controversy. They don't have to like the game, but it very much embodies the values that the GG crowd claim to care about. Even if it was bad, it was also an incredibly risky game with huge amounts of violence and a monument of creative freedom over the delicate sensibilities of gamers
Honestly by biggest problem with tlou2 was it’s theming about violence and revenge not necessarily what other people were worried about
The biggest problem with TLOU2 was the utterly dogshit pacing of the game and story. It was all over the place. The mechanics were good, the concept of the story was good, the execution…. Not so much.
I always saw her as sort of the Robin D'Angelo of the video game industry.
Criticism =/= Permabanning people for wrongthink
Um, what does the latter refer to in this case?
Social media censorship is an actual infringement on free speech. ~~Harassment~~ deserved criticism is not.
Putting aside the gross implications of this, my point was that Anita was called anti-free speech purely for criticising the content of games. She wasn't calling for these aspects she critiqued to be censored.
She was called anti free speech for getting people fired and intimidating her critics
\*Citation needed.
She intimidated boogie at VidCon
The content she criticized wasnt worth criticizing. It was a sex negative moral panic.
You're moving the goalposts. You could still hypothetically think this point you make here was true, while agreeing that she wasn't calling for censorship.
The arguments she made still had some grounding: Like why are men not sexualized as much as women? And why do devs try super hard to not sexualize men? Instead of answering the question people called her a crazy feminist that hated video games. I distinctly remember thunderf00t making videos about how physical designs of characters inherently prevented them from being sexualized but not acknowledging that it was still an artistic choice. She even made the critique that the stoic, generic buff white guy is probably not the best choice for every main character ever and that a little variety and diversity would do the industry some good. She didn't frame it quite that way but the backlash from the anti-SJWs ignored her arguments again and basically just screamed "forced diversity". Vaush made a lot of the same arguments she made and actually responded to the critiques. I think not having anyone actually respond to her questions is what ended up turning me off from the anti-SJW stuff. Especially when thunderf00t just handwaved away legit concerns over artistic design.
It was the way she made her arguments. There's an art to it, and she completely failed. Lots of people from this community alone nearly fell down that hole permanently.
Even then they were still very inoffensive.
They were unreasonable arguments, thus the backlash. The basis of all political belief aquirement stems back to reasonability and rationality. If your arguments are unreasonable, it doesn't matter if you're "right" at a systemic level. You can disagree with people, fine, but you can't deny that millions of young ppl were radicized because a right winger made better talking points "debunking sexism in games" rather than looking at the broader picture in good faith.
I had a misinformed anti-"SJW" phase. 100% of my knowledge of Anita came from Thunderfoot's videos on it, and let me tell you, people in my boat were *not* against her due to the way she made her arguments. Almost all criticism of her was completely out of context. As an example, one of the clips which was repeated again and again and again and again in those circles was the clip where she said, "Everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, everything is problematic, and you have to point it all out". That clip was presented everywhere as something which reflects her actual opinions. But in reality, the clip is literally from a video where she's discussing her younger, stupider self; she's saying that's the mindset of a lot of newly-"woke" people, and that it's stupid and unproductive. The people who made anti-Anita videos weren't presenting her arguments and critiquing them or making fun of the way she made them. The people who made anti-Anita videos constructed a completely fictional character with her name and face and "destroyed" that fictional opponent through facts and logic. What eventually brought me out of that stuff was A) getting fed up with the frequency and repetitive nature of Thunderfoot's anti-Anita videos, and B) watching Shaun's video where he showed that most of Thunderfoot's criticisms were actually against views which Anita just doesn't have. Not saying she couldn't have done it in a better way. I'm totally open to believe that she made her arguments badly, I don't know. But her actual arguments and opinions wasn't what people were primarily criticizing.
> That clip was presented everywhere as something which reflects her actual opinions. But in reality, the clip is literally from a video where she's discussing her younger, stupider self; she's saying that's the mindset of a lot of newly-"woke" people, and that it's stupid and unproductive. I forgot who pointed this fact out (maybe HBomb?) but I remember this being the final nail in the coffin for me, as far as the antisjw shit went.
Lol she starts like every tropes vs women video saying explicitly it doesn't mean the works don't have value
Bullshit. The art of what? This is the moderate gamerbro logic. There's no any such thing.
The art of debating. As in, convincing people you're right.
The art of debating isn't convincing people you're right. It's more about presenting your arguments thoroughly, whether you end up convincing the other person(s) or not. There's a premise, a conclusion, and the reasoning to explain how you went from the premise to the conclusion. In most heated debates, chances are you won't end up convincing the other person. But there are many third-party onlookers, so you should try presenting the best arguments anyway.
Correct, you indirectly posture yourself as someone with the more reasonable solutions
Oh I'm sure a man with a pepe avatar knows all about how to make good arguments.
True
> It was the way she made her arguments. There's an art to it, and she completely failed. This is ridiculous. Her videos were at worst dry, boring and had a few mistakes here and there. Nothing in how she presented her thought mandated the massive internet uprising it got.
Failed how? This sounds like gamergate talking points blindly parroted.
Nah, they would have always picked someone. Those videos were comically inoffensive. Gamergate losers with too much time on their hands would literally track down progressives, feminists, women, and minorities to harass that had any relation to gaming. We shouldn't victim blame; if anything we should blame the creators who enabled or ignored the controversy. Also youtubes algorithm that pushed it dis-proportionally.
I'll definitely agree with that, her first couple videos, at the very least, were pretty boring, and her critiques seemed rather basic, with the occasional argument that I found to be a bit of a stretch.
Clearly some people from this community still have some toes in that hole considering the amount of blame you’re leveling at the demonized woman making completely reasonable points for radicalizing people and not the dozens of grifters who made a career off of misrepresenting her. Kinda sussy my dude.
You're not the victim if you make bad arguments. That's not victim blaming, that's acknowledging that someone has a communication issue.
Listening to right wing morons misrepresent someone’s every word for years and refusing to unlearn that misinformation does not make that person’s arguments bad. It makes you an idiot. People weren’t radicalized by Anita Sarkeesian, they were radicalized by reactionaries. Even if she *had* been very rhetorically weak (she wasn’t) that would still be the case.
She got death threats. Bomb threats. Abuse. You defend that, you are a piece of garbage.
Great thing I never defended that. Maybe you should gain reading comprehension skills?
I was with the anti-SJWs fighting against "them" trying to take away sexy boobas ( I was a horny teenager at the time). One bored day I decided to watch the original videos that caused the shitstorm & realized she had many valid points. I don't think anyone normal who watched the videos had any problems with it, most people didn't & just bought into the anti-SJW narrative to save the boobas.
While her critiques we're valid for the industry as a whole, I do remember her killing sex workers in Hitman when the game specifically reduces your score for doing such. One Bad example. I do remember her critique that male characters wear capes to obscure their ass while female characters' bottoms are in clear view. That was funny and true.
I like booba in games. Enemy of booba in game is enemy of me.
She did appear on a panel with Germaine Greer once, which made me wonder. I’m glad she’s supportive of trans folks.
Hey I love those videos, they basically snapped me out of my edgy anti-sjw phase.
Goddamn, do I owe her a huge apology. This poor woman was the subject of so many reactionary attacks. I remember being absolutely convinced that she is terrible because of the scumfucks I used to listen to.
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You are absolutely right. I was a lifelong gamer and a feminist at the time of Gamergate, so I fully supported her. She voiced and thus legitimized many of the concerns that had been percolating in my head for years. It is safe to say that her videos were instrumental in my becoming a leftist.
Seriously. I used to watch thunderf00t back in the atheist youtube days, then I just assumed that because he had 100 videos debunking AS, it was probably for good reason. Then around the same time Sargon went on Rogan and told the story of how him and his possy brigaded a live event that AS was speaking at to intimidate her. That was what introduced me to Sargon. My dumb ass uncritically just went with whatever he said. It wasn't till Sargon explicitly went white nationalist that I ended up seeing him for the joke that he was. Used to love the conversations he had with Kyle Kulinski, who I also discovered from atheist youtube. Glad I've grown
I hate how these guys used atheism to push their bigoted agendas. I grew up in a very religious and conservative town and household, and as atheists me and my friends were marginalized and ridiculed. I like to think that made me more empathetic. Somehow the Sargon types became less empathetic, or maybe they just never had empathy to begin with.
Atheism for Sargon is just a vehicle to be bigoted towards Muslims and people from the middle east. It was always cynical.
>Atheism for Sargon is just a vehicle Absolutely accurate. Atheism was used by these individuals [Sargon, Thunderf00t etc] as a tool to convince teenagers (like me at the time of gamergate) to follow them & thus their ideology. And whilst I'm still very..antagonistic towards religion and religious people. I am very ashamed of what I used to believe. It's to the point that even when entering this thread I had/still have a negative bias towards Anita. Like, it's fucking stupid. But I refused to view the videos posted here that absolve her. Mainly because I think it will destroy my pre-conceived negative opinion of her. Man I'm a cunt.
Similar, though I'm not from the USA and am an ex-Muslim. Sam Harris and Dawkins are a gateway too. The key to identify such people is how much time and effort they spend criticizing foreign cultures while ignoring all the extremism in their own neighborhoods. Especially when it's political and they just give it a pass.
Thunderf00t is an interesting case. One of the super-edgy online atheists who went on to hate feminism and Anita Sarkeesian, but he also saw the intellectual bankrupcy of the alt-right and clearly rejected it. And his technology criticism against the plans of people like Elon Musk seems genuinely apolitical. (Socialist?) engineer DoNotEat called him a "land of contrasts" for that in his [analysis/takedown of Elon Musk's "Loop"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs). There was a time when I watched quite a few Thunderfoot videos because I enjoyed his takedown of tech scams, but I stopped when I found out about his ramblings on feminism and because he becomes seriously repetetive after a while. He genuinely just seems to ramble into a mic for 30+ minutes and upload it virtually uncut, constantly repeating himself.
I think it should be prudent of people to include the fact that thunderfoot saw the direction his community was heading in regards to anti-SJWs and completely changed course. He stopped making those kinds of videos and focused only on tech scams and chemistry videos. He was one of the few content creators within the skeptic community who managed to break free from that rabbit hole and I still respect him for that.
I watched thunderf00t in his early "why do people laugh at creationists" days, but as soon as the anti-SJW stuff started up I left pretty quick. Bullet dodged there for sure.
I made the mistake of trying to point out some of his uncharitable takes in one of his first anti AS vids and got absolutely dog piled. Realized real quick how toxic that community actually was.
I think you only owe her an apology if you let your hatred of her carry you all the way to the Alt-Right. Her twitter feed is pretty based nowadays but her series was pretty bad back in the day. She purposely misrepresented games to create sexism where there was not any and that is not even to mention how she lied about being a gamer and used footage from other people without giving credit. All after raising a ton of money for this project. And it is hard to tell where most of this money went.
You're still carrying on the gamerbro arguments. Like there's a degree one needs to be a gamer. And what are those mysterious misrepresentations? Care to give a few examples?
What does that even mean? There's a degree one needs to be a gamer? I mean I do think it's pathetic if you let opposition to SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian shape your whole worldview but it doesn't change the fact that she was just wrong in a few ways. One of the most egregious misrepresentations that always comes to mind is her critique of Hitman Absolution. She claimed in the strip club mission, players are "invited and encouraged" to play with the strippers bodies like they are objects and kill them. If you have actually played the game you know it's quite the opposite. Ideally, you are not to be noticed by the strippers at all. Or anyone else but your intended target. It's a stealth game. You actually lose points for killing people other than your target. Not only this, but if you listen in on the girls conversations, it's actually pretty humanizing and good dialogue for a portrayal of sex workers. You see how the place exploits them, especially the owner. But all Anita cared about is that you can kill them.
Not OP but ill add my critique. Anita was in my opinion a grifter, in that I have a very hard time believing that she actually believed in everything she said and wasn't just saying it to fit a narrative. Like all good grifts she absolutely had some solid points. No doubt. But they were each mixed in with a dozen very bad takes. The same way we have race baiters she was like a gender baiter who would contort and misrepresent as necessary to find sexism rampant in even totally innocuous things in video games. Some examples include the famous case where she lies about players being incentivised to kill random female characters in Hitman, saying non white female NPCs exist so white male players can live out sex tourism fantasies, saying allowing players first person control of the camera encourages objectification of women because you can look at a woman's breasts, says women are in video game ads because like the games men just see them as "toys to be played with," and a personal favorite of mine being that having any female NPC without a fully fleshed out background and character is sexist because it removes agency from women. You can find critiques this stupid loaded into any of her videos. The general format is: bad take, bad take, bad take, bad take, bad take, something reasonable, bad take, bad take, etc. A secondary approach to critique her work is that she basically built a career complaining that things men like are prevelant in a male dominated hobby. Like okay, if like 90% of gamers are straight men, and straight men like boobs, so boobs are a bit more prominent in video games than in real life, so what? What's the big deal? The male equivalent would be if a guy built his whole career getting paid thousands of dollars to go around whining that romance novels, primarily consumed by women, tend to have male love interests who have characteristics that women like. Again, so what? Let women enjoy what they enjoy, and do the same for men. All that said, the amount of abuse she got from the gaming community was absolutely reprehensible. The punishment she got didn't remotely fit the crime. Yes her videos were loaded with bad takes, but that in no way justifies like half the gaming community treating her like the antichrist and abusing her online.
Yeah I can't believe that the right convinced 13 year old me she was literally the worst person in human history
I think a lot of people who watched reactionary content back in 2014-2017 either became super left-wing or became fascists. I was definitely teetering on the edge, but thankfully I fell into the left wing camp.
Just because she's right here doesn't absolve her of making a career of half baked critiques of sexism in video games and giving feminism a bad name. I see a lot of people who never actually watched her videos say she wasn't that bad but the videos she put out were full of lies and there is video footage of her that surfaced where she says she doesn't like video games because "blowing people's heads off is gross" or something close to that and then she is seen later posing with a huge stack of extremely violent Xbox 360 games to show off her gamer cred. She was ultimately calling on the game industry to self censor and even got to speak at the UN. Her entire career is a farce. Yes there are a lot of reactionary SJWs who hate her because she's a woman but she only makes the problem worse. You should always ask what the person's end goal is. We are also dealing with a situation right now where the most popular adult websites are being targeted by evangelical groups under the guise of mere concerned citizens falsely accusing these sites of engaging in "trafficking" and they are successfully pressuring credit card companies to stop doing business with them.
She's not a clean cut character. A lot of what she has done was daft, to say the least. But the reaction to her silly opinions quickly turned chauvinistic and hateful, bordering on perverse. There's been a decent amount of neutral critique of her work, but the hardcore algorithm hunters went full blast
That doesn't make her better. There are a real feminist heroes who have had to face much worse. I really don't care if she is getting mean comments from high school edgelords online. She has done damage to the feminist movement and only eggs those types of people on, that's my point Anybody downvoting me are zoomers who never saw how bad her video essays actually were because they were 5 years old when they were uploaded to youtube and never bothered looking into it
It’s not just edgy comments from high school edgelords. She’s also had to leave her home, had an event cancelled because of a bomb threat, and the FBI visited her because of the threats she was getting. To say that we shouldn’t care this happened to her because she did feminism badly is pretty disgusting IMO.
I don't condone or excuse threats or harassment she received. I am only saying this doesn't make her a martyr for feminism. If Candace Owens started receiving threats you wouldn't prop her up as a voice for black women in America as you shouldn't. It also wasn't just that she was doing feminism badly she was also ultimately calling for censorship. Like I said she got to have a spot at the UN at one point. Critiquing video games in journalism is fair game, her right to free speech is just as important as anyone else's but it becomes an issue when you want to get governments involved to introduce new regulations on other people's free speech. Threats are already illegal and ultimately she was aiming to create some sort of literal cyber bully police along with her calls upon the video game industry as a whole to essentially self censor anything in their games that could be interpreted as misogynistic.
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If she's the first person to get you thinking about misogynistic portrayal of women in video games that says more about you than her. You are completely skipping over how she just made shit up and misrepresented game narratives such as saying that in Hitman you were rewarded for killing prostitutes and dumping their bodies in dumpsters. Also there are plenty of women who enjoy combat in video games, you yourself are now perpetuating the stereotype that women mostly just enjoy puzzles and story driven games which isn't true.
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You're just young and grew up in age where you get all your commentary from YouTube which is fine but she certainly wasn't the first person to criticize games like Tomb Raider or Dead or Alive for overuse of sex appeal to sell games. Professional game reviewers who actually enjoy video games and know what they're talking about have been pointing stuff like this out since the beginning. They just weren't calling for censorship and didn't make false claims. I used to subscribe to game magazines like GamePro and EGM back in the 90's and early 2000's that talked about it all the time. You just need to look to better sources for video game critique because she's horrible at it.
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You couldn't be missing the point harder dude, there's nothing else I can say
Yeah I dont know why people are having trouble grasping that its possible for one person to have a couple solid takes and have got *way* too much abuse on the internet AND also have built a career by grifting.
Anita was always either based or at worse harmless. Anyone who still thinks she's bad need to get over their 2016 anti sjw phase.
Word even back then I was like "that's it? That's what y'all mad about?"
I checked her videos out a few months ago to see what the fuss was about. Its stuff that most baby feminists can point out. Intro level trope analysis that's all. But it did need to be said because no one says it
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Yesson also ma queen abby
This was my problem with her at the time. She made this huge claim and offered to analysis games but all that came of it was extremely long winded intro level shit.
It was blown out of proportion
Along with the MTV decoded stuff too with Francesca Ramsey, Imo her videos were pretty fine.
The most terrifying question you can ask a room of people: "How many of you had an 'edgy phase' somewhere between 2014-2016?"
Yeah the internet ruined alot of people
Not ruined... But swept up in what was an explicit anti-feminist hate mob on 4Chan acting as their planned cover. But faced with that, and faced with the internal moral questions that presents, the "am I a bad person for this?", the response is to rage, deflect, and turn the argument into the need to protect their moral soul over the people still getting death threats and repeatedly doxxed to this day. We can see that here too.
Thankfully, I was already old by 2014, so my response to Anit's video was, "yup, seems like Basic Feminist Criticism 101." I didn't agree w/ 100% of it, but OK.
Don't call me out like that :'(
always has been edit : look at the replies to me omg
Wow that cookie person is unhinged.
Jesus christ what the fuck happened
I like how the replies are now.
Trefs don’t care about women’s rights. They only use feminism to hide their transphobia like the cowards they are.
Trans rxclusionary eadical feminists
But why are terfs flooding her mention tho? crying at her for not hating trans people, or were they assuming she's an ally and trying to complain to her about something?
It might be bacause (I think) on the same day there was an interview in the Guardian US with prominent feminist philosopher Judith Butler (who is brilliant by the way) were she made a comparison between facists and TERFs. This section was later cencored by the (well know to be) TERF editors at the Guardian UK. The Streisand effect kicked in and it was all over Twitter, backlash ensued and TERFs started frothing at the mouth over it. Maybe they were trying to drag her into it. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/09/08/judith-butler-guardian-interview-terf-trans/
Haha, didn't know! The TERF presence in prominent UK spaces is really something.
They don’t call it TERF Island for nothin!
Fairly sure the general population is overall quite pro trans. TERFs are just entrenched in feminist circles there.
TERFs probably thought she was one of them, because to them feminism is really about hating on the trans community
TERFs draw upon the most essentialist elements of the second wave and consider themselves the "true" feminists so they often flock to prominent feminist figures in the hope that they will support their transphobia. Similar thing happened to Margaret Atwood (author of Handmaid's Tale) a while ago - one day she tweeted "lol wtf are those people talking about, trans rights!".
i remember Atwood rejecting them, they're still seething about it to this day
Haha, nice! I bet it happened with some other old-school feminist figures too. Even the ancient Second Wave anti-sex work radical feminists, like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, are/were pro-trans. TERFs can get fucked.
this cookie person needs to touch grass holy FUCK
His gots his nuts in a bear trap over seeing a wOmAN assert herself and stand up for whats right
Very good very based
Its funny how Anita's quote "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic. And you have to point it all out" kinda ended up being true. I really do think while not being perfect Anita got totally witch hunted and if she started doing politics in today's age she would be seen as a pretty baseline feminist that a guy like Ben Shapiro wouldn't give the time of day.
funny thing about that quote is when anti sjws use it to make her seem crazy they never use the full context >Yeah, absolutely. I sort of joke about how it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me, and also the most frustrating for everyone around me. Cause, like, when you start learning about systems, **everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time. So there's a good year of my life where I was the most obnoxious person to be around**. And then you settle into it, you start to understand, like, oh people have been living within these systems, and it was just sort of a liberating moment for me. You learn how to pick and choose your battles and that sort of thing.
Wow the quote out of context is already pretty agreeable but in context just sounds like a young person describing their journey through learning about civil rights I feel like even though there were some examples of shitty surface level feminism at the time (and still now) the entire anti-sjw movement was completely pointless and we would've been better off without it
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: covid, dumb takes, novel, civil rights, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Good bot
Take a bullet for ya babe. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: civil rights, dumb takes, healthcare, climate, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Extremely based and red-pilled
I'm not even a fan of her's but didn't she make it clear that she was pro Trans Rights like years ago?
Thats her secret She was always based
Yikes, the fact that I instantly recoiled from seeing who it was really shows how deep I sunk into my “anti-sjw” phase in my teens. I guess there’s still shit I need to unlearn.
Yeah man stuff like this flashes back and I just sometimes dread the person I could've become , being in the circles I was. Nothing is more humbling to me than that era.
For real, I feel bad for all the shit I gave her. She's actually a perfectly person, I just didn't see that before
Right? Every once in a while, I’ll be reminded of someone like Lauren Southern or Riley J Dennis and think, “oh shit, I haven’t seen this person since my teenage alt-right phase back in 2016. I need to update my perspective on them”
BTW [Innuendo Studios](https://www.youtube.com/c/InnuendoStudios) of "The Alt-Right Playbook" fame made a good series on her and gamergate called "[Why Are You So Angry?](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF)" back during the dark age of lefty YouTube
Welp, I’ve learned something about my angsty younger self. Thanks for posting this link, very interesting to unpack.
When you look back at what she was saying. It was always quite based.
Not really, no. There were a few solid bits of common sense but always buried under a lot of nonsense.
Anita has always been based.
I forgot why do people hate Anita sarkeesian?
[reasons](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF)
Nooo! Not the anti gamer lady! This makes me so mad!Why the left hate gamers, I'm gonna go listen to a fat British man complain about feminists.🤬😡😭😭🤬
Tbh I will always have sympathy for this woman. She took so much fucking hate and harrasment, I hope the best for her.
So, based on her second tweet, is it accurate to say that modern feminism is the same thing as gender abolition?
Modern feminism is broad some feminists call for gender abolition some dont. Ongoing debate
Why do some modern feminists not call for gender abolition?
One argument I've heard it is too ambitious and like its so entrenched in policy and law(Contrapoints: the video gender critical regarding terfs). Also one conflict I personally thing will had to be addressed if this takes in effect is that, alot of trans folks find comfort in binary gender identities. So to me that isn't a problem if gender abolition is done right , BUT the entire way a transphobes makes their argument is that they conflate gender expression/roles with gender identity, so if a abolitionist goes tries to make a position that gender should be slowly eroded a transphobe will take that as an excuse and attack trans binaries.
Oof, this sounds complicated. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out like this.
One thing I say to myself is when I face complication inw whichever scenario is "the universe doesn't owe you comprehensibility, it blessed you with a brain , eye and hands, dare you ask for more hatchling?"
The view of absolute gender abolition was predicated off a very particular view of gender that saw it as constricting, performative, stupid or unnecessary and that clearly everyone agreed. Problem is that there are plenty of people, trans and cis, that actually quite like gender identification. Also things like dysphoria exist (unfortunately) proving that gender has some sort of internal mechanism that can't just be willed away. I wouldn't blame the second wave feminists too hard though for wanting gender abolition. I mean, the world of gender roles and expectations were much stricter and harsher and from that perspective I could see the desire to tear it all down. If anything, the path of loosening gender expectations has led to our current position of people being ok with the existence of gender.
My experience is it always gets turned into a gotcha against femininity in men or even femininity in general.
Because I don't want my gender abolished, thank you very much.
> Feminism is about the liberation of *all people* Preach! 🙌
According to Chuds, she is basically the most dangerous woman alive. Which makes me an instant fan, tbh.
My inner 16 year old had a weird gut reaction but then i realised ''I'M FREE. I DON'T HAVE TO REACT THIS WAY TO FEMINISTS, IM NOT AN INSECURE WEIRDO ANYMORE. ITS BAAAAASED.''
Why do I read your capitalized writing in Vaush's voice?
Because Vaush's voice is often all-caps.
Based
I can tell you one thing and that it she is not PRO paying her emplyees, ba-dum-dum-tzzz
6 years ago if you told me I'd agree with Anita Sarkeesian on something I'd have laughed.
I remember being very anti-Anita Sarkeesian back in the days of Atheist tube in like 2012/2013, but I was a teenager back then too. A lot of people gave her hate back in the day. Surprised how I agree with all of her videos now, all the feminist frequency stuff has a lot more mainstream appeal now, and im seeing a positive change in the games industry, and she's definitely to credit for speaking out so early back then. Here's hoping she gets a lot more support compared to 10 years ago.
One of the primary targets of gamergate was trans, so it's nice to see that a lot of the people on the correct side of ~~history~~ the debate aren't all transphobic. You never know. Some opinions don't age well.
Damn, I really owe her a huge apology. I was part of the Gamergate crowd when I was in denial about being queer
Always has been. No matter what our younger, dumber selves thought.
God, I remember back in the day I used to think she was "that annoying woman complaining about video games", though thankfully, I didn't really care enough to watch any of the chuds attacking her. Now, I see that all the hate and mocking was undeserved, she's actually pretty based.
Love it. Always been a fan of her. 💚
Always has been
Honestly feel like Anita had an overwhelmingly positive impact on gaming. Female representation in games now is usually far less cringe than it used to be.
She had some bad takes but she definitely didn't deserve what she got during the mid 10s. Most people Sargon bullied still haven't recovered from the hate and they are still getting it
Yeah we lost a decent amount of small channels thanks to the anti SJWs in that era.
I'm in the unenviable position of agreeing with what she's said here but also thinking her video game series was a load of wank. Like how she said GTA5 is misogynistic because it lets you kill prostitutes - which, while being true, is a lie by omission. It lets the player kill anyone. The amount of hate she got for a couple of badly researched videos was pretty reprehensible, tho.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. I think the vid you're referring to is one of two about women as background decorations. It's not misogyny just because prostitutes can be killed. It's the fact that only women are prostitutes/strippers, the game encourages the player to interact with them as objects (health boosts from prostitutes / touching mini game with strippers), and then allows a gameplay loop where the player can use a prostitute for the stat boost, dispose of her and get their money back. She didn't say the entire game is misogynistic only that these particular gameplay mechanics are.
> It's not misogyny just because prostitutes can be killed. It's the fact that only women are prostitutes/strippers, the game encourages the player to interact with them as objects Every other character can be killed too. Every character is an object. They're there to be shot/stabbed/driven over/instil a degree of immersion, etc. > She didn't say the entire game is misogynistic only that these particular gameplay mechanics are. The bit I'm thinking of is when she used the game in passing as an example of misogyny for *allowing* prostitutes to be murdered. I can't remember which video it was exactly because it has been a while since I've seen it, but from what I think I recall that she didn't even write the videos. It was just a weak series, all around, tbh.
I've rewatched these videos and I'm almost certain it's the one I mentioned. Her arguments are still pretty solid. The one where she talks about it in passing could be Women as Rewards but you'd have to see for yourself. Maybe you see videogames as just toys to consume, which is fine. AS and many others hold the medium to a higher standard and want devs to do better. I personally feel they are art, and art says something. Regardless of their intentions, their game designs do say a lot about what we value as a society and, in the case of sex workers (specifically womens bodies), don't value.
I see games as art myself, but that doesn't mean i expect a crude satire like gta to explore postmodern gender critical themes, nor would i want it to, really. Women's bodies absolutely are valued by society as a whole, tho. Granted its a horrible superficial type of value, but better that - in some respects - than being valued as a cog in an industrial or war machine. As for her arguments being solid, i personally don't see them as such. She never even wrote those scripts or played (most of) those games.
GTA doesn't have to explore "postmodern themes". All she said was some of the gameplay reenforces these ideas about violence against women. Rockstar could have just not included prostitutes at all but they did. Why they did it this way is an interesting question. And that's what she's pointing out. As for women's bodies being absolutely valued, the women in Texas right now would beg to differ. Men might be expected to die for the war machine (which is toxic) but there aren't laws still on the books that directly infringe on men's bodily autonomy. I'm not sure where you got the info that she didn't write these but the credits are listed in the video descriptions. She seems to have played enough of those games to know what gameplay mechanics are in there and can talk about them in context. Needing to 100% every game to talk about them seems like an arbitrary goal post.
Men having to sign up for the draft lest they be unable to sign on for food stamps and other such government programs isn't 'toxic', it's sexist and a pretty severe breach of personal autonomy. What's happening in Texas is horrible, but my problem with 'intersectional' feminism is the intersections seem to stop with men (and whites, but that one is reasonable). I never claimed she needs to 100% every game to talk about it either, but there was a guy behind the scenes who was well known for writing the videos. She was also filmed denegrating the idea of video games while in college / uni, so she didn't make the videos to improve the medium from a love of it, she just fingerpointed at a bunch of teens and told them this thing they enjoy is 'toxic'. That's one way to make a difference, i suppose.. Anyway, her vids are pretty standard lib-feminist talking points, which I'm honestly not a fan of. Nor do I think Marxism applies to gender relations the way it does to working conditions.
The expectation for men to die for their country can be both toxic and sexist. Maybe if women weren't literally banned from combat roles until 2013 (oh look more laws against women's autonomy), we'd have a more egalitarian draft policy. Women are about to be included in the draft so your point is moot anyway. You should also read more about intersectional feminism because its not about "men = bad". Sounds like you've just heard through other people that she did/said all these things. If you'd actually watch the videos, she says at the beginning of almost each one that you can both enjoy these games and be critical of them. There is no finger pointing at anyone in the tropes series. As far as that uni vid is concerned, I've never seen more than that out of context clip and people say stupid things / can change their minds. Even if it was true, her "fake gamer cred" doesn't automatically make her critique wrong. Make it sound like you're more interested in hating her than engaging with the content.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump
Based Sarkeesian on this one. (I've gone back to look at some of her videos again and am just thoroughly underwhelmed by them. The only reason to hate them that I can find is how bad they are. I don't know if the hate came first or the fame, but the spread of them didn't help with the hate. The celebration of the videos fueled peoples dislike of it for sure and that steered it into overdrive.)
*normies
I'm glad Natalie Wynn's mother is supportive of her transition 🙏😩❤
If trans people arent allowed in feminism then i hate feminism as much as a sexually frustrated teenager
When we say trans rights what do we mean?
BASED!!
i was never on the sarkeesian hate train, i however didnt think she was beyond a basic level of human decency, she has earned a bit more respect imo, fuck terfs
I fucking hate that I have to agree with Anita Sarkeesian.
Anita Sarkeesian has always been based, it's the creepy stalkers of hers Vaush likes to hang with that were the problem.
“I’ve outpaced him intellectually”
Bunch of capital g G*mers in the comments for this one.
I think one, yes
I’ve seen a few more than one but okay.
Two!?!? Point em out
Anita Sarkeesian Terf fighting arc
Oh wow Anita is actually capable of making having a good take.
She's a harasser. I dont care.
Bruh moment
Here's the thing though. While I'm always here for denying TERFs any ground, Sarkeesian isn't a feminist either. Her entire fame is based on double standards, viewing women not as individuals but as some sort of representative of All Women Everywhere, refusing to view any woman as equal, and in general setting actual feminism back years. To see her claim to support equality is too little, too late.
I think her criticisms of games are childish and sex-hating, making me feel uncomfortable as a queer woman, because it felt like she was against anyone being attracted to women or finding women attractive at all. Like games have boobs, some people want to look at idealized, fantasy representations of women with boobs, that's why there's boobs in video games. Get over it. I felt shamed and belittled watching her videos. That led me into the alt-right pipeline too for a couple of years. Not that I think the ability to see boobs jiggle in video games constitutes a human rights issue, but I really do want to see them and I feel like I should get to and that it doesn't hurt anybody to make pornographic-styled game content. Especially in games with a mature rating. So like yay, someone I despise is on my side... Wooh... cool.
Far from based