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Anita Sarkeesian, Creator of "Tropes vs. Women," Driven From Home By Trolls
Sonny Yatsen writes: Anita Sarkeesian, the creator of Tropes vs. Women — a video series exploring negative tropes and misogynistic depictions of women in video games — reports that she has been driven from her home after a series of extremely violent sexual threats made against her. Her videos have previously drawn criticism from many male gamers, often coupled with violent imagery or threats of violence. The Verge story linked has this to say: The threats against Sarkeesian have become a nasty backdrop to her entire project — and her life. If the trolls making them hoped for attention, they've gotten it. They've also inexorably linked criticism of her work, valid or not, with semi-delusional vigilantism, and arguably propelled Tropes vs. Women to its current level of visibility. If a major plank of your platform is that misogyny is a lie propagated by Sarkeesian and other "social justice warriors," it might help to not constantly prove it wrong.
Is there anything to corroborate this? Sounds like great publicity.
Yes the subject is uncomfortable and no she isn't completely correct. Her arguments open to plenty of valid criticism that the female gender is not always misused in video games.
The problem is and will always be a reactionary subset of people who cannot be peer pressured into behaving like sane human beings on the Internet. You don't respond to a feminist critique by sending her death threats.
Trolling against her proves many of her points. Many take trolling as a sport to revel in their anonymity, but the threatening comments are extreme.
(https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504718160902492160/photo/1)
In my opinion, her videos are, in places, poorly researched with many leaps of logic mixed with heavy opinions. But, they still contain very valid points and can be civilly debated.
Evolve, people. At least keep the trolling to a respectable severity.
Hopefully the lessons are not the ones that surfaced in this story...
It seems to me that the first few comments made to Slashdot about this story is indicative of the problem at large. The first comments (made by anonymous cowards) immediately conjectured that Sarkeesian is to blame, that she concoted the death threats as a publicity stunt.
You must ask yourself honestly : Why is it, when faced with stories like this, is your first instinct to claim that the woman lied or made it up?
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I don't say this as some male mysoginist. I say this as someone who watched their videos hoping for what was promised in her over-hyped Kickstarter: A real exploration of themes in a historical biased industry.
What I got was the same old feminist bleating that dominates the discussion. It's shallow, reductive, and, in many cases, insulting to those of us who are fighting for true equality and recognition.
Toxic trolls versus shrill SJWs. If we're lucky, they'll annihilate each other and the rest of us normal folks will be left in peace.
Her entire career is based on being harassed. She is a bit like Westboro Baptist Church that way.
There are people (both men and women) who are truly in an exposed position and are being harassed without having provoked it, my sympathy goes to them.
As for Sarkeesian, the best thing we can do to reduce her harassment is to ignore her. The less focus that is drawn to her the less she will be harassed.
Unfortunately she might need to get a real job then and I doubt her personality will allow for that.
The topic, which you might get if you read the summary, is that she's received credible death threats. Do you think it's okay for people to receive death threats when they say something you don't agree with? E.g., was it okay when they put a price on Salman Rushdie's head?
Someone, somewhere said something mean on the *internet*, you say? Do tell!
There will be lots of sexist comments here that will receive high scores as insightful and interesting. Always disappointing to read the comments on this topic. Hopefully there's one genuinely decent comment that doesn't explain how women are really the sexist ones and that men are under attack.
I think this woman is a liar and an attention seeker, but she certainly doesn't deserve that sort of attention. An violent mob is morally repugnant, a self promoting professional victim is simply a pitiful individual.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If this is a publicity stunt, then she has a lot of free time or lots of help in creating accounts, posting crap and the imagination to sound completely different in every post.
But as far as the death threats, I wouldn't take them seriously. It looks like they were made by a bunch of cowardly dorks from their parent's basement and wouldn't have the guts to even talk to this girl - or ANY girl, for that matter - let alone actually harm her. And posting their crap, they are actually helping her case.
The shame about this situation, other than the harassment Sarkeesian had to personally endure, is that she and her defenders will never have to address serious criticisms against her work and game journalism at large. Diminishing the real merit of those criticisms by lumping everyone together as trolls, as the Verge has done, is simply going to encourage more trolling by playing into the narrative that the media is playing favorites or operating with an agenda that should be outside the scope of journalism.
Can we split the definition of trolls?
I mean, trolling in my experience is playful, like feigning ignorance in order to induce a reaction from someone else who is being completely serious. It is harmlessly "messing with someone."
But this unrelenting cyber bullying is something different altogether.
So can we call them cyber bullies instead of trolls? They make trolling not fun.
Where does it say (in the summary) that the threats are credible? It only says that she has reported that there have been threats. It doesn't mention confirmation by anyone else.
Thinking threats are bad and thinking she was actually threatened are two different things.
And of course they are all posting as "Anonymous Coward."
I think Slashdot ought to consider that some articles, especially those about anonymous internet trolls going open loop, might be set to not allow anonymous posting.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
There's this relatively conflation of negative female stereotypes and feminists among MRA types that helps drive this. So they like to take all the bad things old-school misogynists about women, and pretend it's just true of (all) feminists.
"Emotionally manipulative liars" is one of those old school stereotypes about women, and so AC here takes that typification, and extrapolates it onto Sarkeesian without any sort of evidence to bear out that she's actually like that. It's sad that some people become tentatively aware of gender issues, and immediately turn that into overwhelming sexism.
Really? She insulted a whole gender? I'm male, and last i checked she hadn't said anything that insulted me. And that's aside from the whole point that death threats are an entirely different kettle of fish from just insults.
"I disagree with your argument, your points are stupid and you are an idiot" is not the same as "I am going to come over to to your house and rape you and kill you."
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Or, you know, you might do a little introspection on the fact that a criticism is not an insult, and perhaps there are more than a few grains of truth in what she might have to say.
Obviously such behavior is abhorrent, but it doesn't do to claim that most people that fit in any category are psychos publicly and then be surprised when a few people exibit the behavior and say essentially: See that proves it!. I could easily say all republican are, or all democrates are $INSERT_VOLATILE_CLAIM and then act surprised when a few of them behave that way and say "See! I told you so!", and it would be a similiarly foul conclusion.
News flash: A lot of people who play video games are immature and / or kids, and a subset of them will behave in this manner when provoked.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this, assuming it happened as described, is: "Hey, this is what happened". Anyone surprised it happened doesn't understand the human race at all. It was pretty much guaranteed to happen.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You must ask yourself honestly : Why is it, when faced with stories like this, is your first instinct to claim that the woman lied or made it up?
Come on, we all know why it is. Just fucking tell them. Tell them that it's their first instinct because they don't want to believe that they could be part of the problem, however slightly. Tell them that they don't want to believe that people they know and call friends are actually acting like complete shitbags. Tell them that you know that they've been hurt, that they feel worthless and useless and powerless, and that you know they feel more powerful and thus more worthy and useful when they make someone else feel even worse about themselves.
And then tell them that the only way that they're ever going to feel better is by helping to create a world where we don't just shit all over one another. Because you've got to tie it into their self-interest.
Naturally, most of them won't listen right away. But perhaps eventually, after continuing to try making the world shittier as a way of making it a nicer place to live, they will start watching where they shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the stereotype of gamers, and men in general, are perpetuated.
Stereotypes exist for a reason folks. Keep giving reasons to use them.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Huh. I'm male, and I didn't feel insulted. I am also concerned about the issues she raised, and support her exploration of them, although I do not always agree with her conclusions. Why is it "insulting the entire gender" to say "gosh, you might want to consider whether using dead female bodies posed in necrophilic-erotic positions is really a healthy or appropriate thing to do." Personally I find it insulting to my gender that the creators of the game thing I would willingly tolerate such imagery. Essentially what the game producers are saying is "men are brutes with no compassion, let's pander to that." It's disgusting and insulting.
And, of course, she didn't do that. She insulted some common lazy writing and setting shortcuts that are used in fiction that also (sometimes) happen to be rather sexist.
There's no war on men, and in her latest series(I can't remember her older work perfectly, I seem to recall it's true there too, but let's keep it recent) she never makes even one even vaguely oblique reference to men as a collective. Not one. Neither positive or negative. She talks about assumptions of male audiences a bit, but that's clearly in reference to the thought processes of the developers.
Don't mistake this as an endorsement of her points all being correct, just none of them are this gendered insult strawman you're using to excuse inexcusable behavior.
That you posted this AC tells us everything we need to know about you.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Oh FFS. RFTA. The threats are credible enough to take seriously. They contain information no sensible person would willingly post about themselves in such a context.
How can you tell when you receive a lot of death threats whether any of them are credible? Some people are very angry about what she has been saying, probably most of them don't think it would be a god idea to kill her, but in this case most is the operative word, especially when the people giving them know where you live....
This is EVERYWHERE amongst gaming circles right now, it's really hit the goddamned fan.
There's this line drawn in the sand and both camps are insisting you MUST be either on side A or side B, there's no middle ground.
Let it be known, trolls threatening people or harassing them is lame, it's stupid and they deserve mockery. No one should have to endure that.
The vast vast majority of the politically correct camp, arguing for equality are certainly correct.
However,... much like religion and many other things in life, there are hardcore fundamentalist type nutcases hijacking things. Pushing it to the extreme.
If you're a gamer who keeps your finger on the pulse, be it forums, podcasts, news articles, etc, you may have noticed there always seems to be someone, somewhere looking for a reason to find a flaw with what is being said, specifically to the political correctness of it. Something being said is offending someone. It honestly comes across to me like there's some kind of merit badge for being the most guilty, "No,.. no it's *ME*! I'm the one most aware of these issues and *I'm* the most offended on behalf of X Y or Z demographic"
These people then go on to belittle others and they are endlessly finding new ways to be offended, they've been labelled "SJW's" and honestly I hate to say it but it's a fitting description for some of these people.
I listened to a recent Eat-Sleep-Game podcast about 6 months back and one of the people on that, who is, well infamous for his excessive guilt tripping (mainly of himself) was discussing something regarding a game with a fellow journalist, something was said and he basically said something along the lines of "well that was clearly due to racism" (or sexism or homophobia) or some such. The problem was, what was said wasn't, it had nothing to do with it, it was completely off the cuff. You could basically hear the person he was talking it with do a o_O wtf. (sorry I don't recall finer specifics) This endless race to be *THE* best person and endlessly thinking about X Y or Z agenda.
I don't know where the line gets drawn, it seems any little thing is promoting "rape culture" or sexism or some such. I don't want to offend people, I genuinely, honestly do not want to - I don't want to be ignorant and just point and laugh or say stupid things. However I feel like the goalposts are constantly moving. What's not sexist according to politically correct group A, may be a "trigger" for politically correct group B and therefore I'm some kind of scum.
I really tire of reading my twitter feed and feeling guilty, or feeling like I'm supposed to feel guilty about something or other.
This post may read like I'm either condoning the actions of the idiot harassers or at least sympathising with them. I'm not. I can say I feel frustrated posting online for fear that *something* I say will offend someone, I'm expressing the frustration through anxiety, keeping my mouth shut and avoiding discussion about the topic. I'm not exploding at people, I'm not threatening, I'm hot even REMOTELY condoning the behaviour of those attacking others. I'm simply saying both sides aren't perfect.
It's not often I post using anonymous on slashdot but on this topic, I have no choice, because it seems, you're with or against us, I can't begin to argue in any way that hey, maybe both sides are being a bit nutty, unless I outright 100% admit, NOPE YOU GUYS ARE 100% RIGHT AND THEY ARE EVIL or some such. Honestly this is now worse than politics.
I've got no doubt this post will offend someone somehow, there's no intention to, I don't take delight in offending whoever you are, I'm sorry it offends you. All I can say is, I'm not surprised someone, somewhere is offended, that's life, you can't be everything to everyone.
God help us slashdot, please take note of dupe news articles though and please let us only discuss this particular event the once this month, I can't take much more of this, it's killing the internet.
A) She didn't insult a whole gender
B) This is more the insults.
Perspective, Gets Some!
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This is terrible, naturally. No one should be threatened for political or social views. Let's hope the coppers bust these people so they can explain themselves in front of a judge.
That being said, her videos are frankly awful. Her mile wide inch deep 'analysis' is really stuck at a first semester undergraduate level. She once did a video analysis of christmas songs and went after songs like 'I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus' and 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' as being creepy and anti-feminist respectively because, in the latter's case, a woman shouldn't need a man to be happy.
Anita has a history of crying wolf. Her disciples, such as Zoe Quinn, tend to do the same thing. She needs more sympathy money, and some of us feel so guilty about the actions of a few that we buy her stories hook line and sinker.
But I do know that the way most SJWs wield it would, in a civilized society, result in civil and criminal action for defamation. Most of it is just a way of saying "you disagree with me, therefore you are a bigot." That isn't harmless speech. You are attempting to destroy someone's stance for the non-crime of a disagreement.
The fact that these threats have been made is more than enough to prove her point. Not all of us men are bad, but there are plenty of stupid males that I have known that add fuel to this fire and show that there is at least some truth to it. It is my fellow men like these ones that really make me mad, and I wonder why any of them would treat a woman like this. I do think that some feminists go over board since some think all men are bad, however there are perfectly reasonable ones as well who get harrased and threatened like this poor lady.
I watched some of her videos last night. I don't see where she insulted a gender at all. At most, she takes game developers to task for using cheap, clichéd tropes about women as decorative or damsel in distress because they want an easy (or lazy) shorthand for character development or to get a cheap emotional response from the gamer.
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Because she has a history of lying and being manipulative, and making up exactly these types of attacks on her.
And of course they are all posting as "Anonymous Coward."
But of course. No one wants to risk getting Eich'ed or doxxed because they don't toe the SJW/leftoid/women-as-perpetual-victim line. And yes...I'm posting this with my username. I'm sure some extremist feminist will dox me as has been seen to be the "best defense is a good offense" approach to dealing with said transgressions in the Zoe Quinn case.
Heck, no. But that still doesn't mean she is right unless you consider a small fraction of nutbars to be representative of an entire gender, a generalization that is fraught with problems no matter which gender we're talking about.
In the U.S., when you say something that offends me I sue you for 8 bajillion dollars "emotional damages." In the Middle East, when you say something that offends me I just kill you.
Is the West more civilized? We smile as we ruin someone's life over ego but leave them alive. On the other hand, killing someone for drawing a picture of Mohammed is gross overkill.
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Did you ever notice that in every commercial the dad is the stupid one?
That the white guy is always the burglar?
That the mom is always the smart savior?
I am really ok with the fact that men are not the weakest and stupidest characters in a video game.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's reasonable to expect all people to refrain from credibly threatening the lives of others.
Insults yes, death threats no, how are the two the same exactly? when are death treats ever an appropriate response to insults?
Of course she is not actually insulting all men, at least not deliberately, so even just the level of insults she is getting is beyond the normal, to the extent that in at least some cases people must feel that she is cutting close to the bone. This does not mean that she is correct in her assertions, but people get away with a lot worse in terms of both offence and incorrect assertions and get little or no response. Even if you work on the assumption that she is totally wrong, this goes so far beyond that that at the very least many of these people lack in perspective possibly also sanity.
I'm not insulted either. Mostly because, like you, I'm male.
That's not the gender she insulted...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
She's free to sue those people.
Damn I feel foolish now I've RTFA, she's complaining about YT trolls, there's no actual violence. One person posted a death threat with her address attached. Everyone from climate scientists to Exxon executives get that sort of shit continuously, it's (sadly) part of being a public figure.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I personally have been somewhat critical of Sarkeesian, but hearing this really makes me feel bad. I would never want anything like that to happen to anyone, and I hope things get better for her. Even if I think she's a bit nutty she should have the right to speak her mind without threats of violence.
once more into the breach
It's reasonable to expect all people to refrain from credibly threatening the lives of others.
Do you mean that literally in all cases? For example, I'm okay with people having threatened Hitler's life (which obviously isn't what's going on here, but I'm just using an extreme case to make my point.)
What makes them credible?
She's a proven fraud, a complete huckster -I won't believe a word she says without corroboration.
If any member of the gender is not insulted, the entire gender was not insulted. And honestly, the idea that an appreciable subset of members of the gender would feel insulted by her videos is insulting to the gender, because it is an actual gender stereotype, directed at all members of the gender. Whereas her videos did not engage in gender stereotyping at all, but rather criticized specific game tropes in a way that was entirely compassionate and respectful of that same gender. IOW, she did not say "these tropes work on men, so men suck." She said "these tropes work on men, and promote an attitude toward women that is unnatural and not normal for men." So I would say she's being a lot more generous toward the gender than you are.
Let's hope you never have children.
Yes, even don't send them death threats.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your agreement or disagreement is irrelevant. Death threats break the law and can be punished by jail time. Whether you agree or disagree has no bearing on that.
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Posting AC to keep mods--I get what you're saying. I'm not lumping you in with the trolls. I don't like what you're saying, but I understand. It is unreasonably to expect everyone on the internet to act civilized. Not every one is mature or has normal adult-level impulse control in spite of their age.
How about we agree that stereotypes of any sort in fiction hurt people, and not let that be a fucking excuse for this case of stereotyping real people.
When your a man..
Man up, Harden up, Just get over it. thats what the cops tell you.
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Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
If you insult a whole gender, getting insults back is kind of expected.
Yeah, but did she insult them back? As far as I know, the insults are entirely one-sided here.
If you find depictions of hookers being abused and murdered, or the dead bodies of women posed seductively, as life-defining, you are not typical. And while I do feel for you, the right thing to do is start redefining your life now, not just accept that where you are at the moment is where you must always be. We all experience some fucked up shit when we are growing up. It doesn't have to define us.
Did you ever notice that White Anglo Saxon Protestant men still make up the vast majority of workers in American IT and Media corporations? And that White Anglo Saxon Protestant men are overwhelmingly CEOs, Presidents, and VPs of said corporations? White Anglo Saxon Protestant men are the ones signing off on those commercials. You need a reality check. Women aren't to blame for any of this, we men do this to ourselves.
Whatever individuals made that work that she's accusing of being shitty, and only if their ego is invested in their work having no criticism.
That's not an entire gender. Is this the level of discourse you really want to be having?
I think the Tropes vs Women series does a good job of highlighting a cultural problem, one that especially shows up in comics and video games. The series make me think a lot about how I handle female characters in my writing. So I give Anita Sarkeesian a good deal of credit. However, some of the claims she makes are also either false or strawman (strawwoman?) arguments and I can understand why that upsets a lot of people. It did eventually cause me to stop watching her videos.
But that is as far as I would take it. I mean someone on the net disagreed with me, so what? I would never threaten another person, man or woman, with violence because they have a different view on the world and how video games should be designed. That is completely idiotic. The people who are behind the threats against Sarkessian are horrible people and should be prosectuted (by the law).
But most people's immediate reaction is to going to be to doubt the pure innocence not of "the" victim", but "THIS" victim. The cynicism is based within the very specific context of a specific situation, not in the general context of "sexuality".
Yeah, and thus we throw those who go too far in jail. This is kinda how living in a society works. There are limits.
I don't care if they think rationally or not. Death threats are not acceptable. The people sending them are some really low scum. And we rational, level-headed people should work together to make sure the angry irrational people don't gain any more ground.
The fact that this makes slashdot rather than the mass censorship of reddit/4chan troubles me.
She only insults people's intelligence, not entire genders.
No, my worldview really does allow for a little flexibility when stakes are extremely high.
Let's just all agree that Sarkeesian is not Hitler. She posted videos with opinions.
I'm still fuzzy on what constitutes a "credible" vs. non-credible death threat. Specific details?
"I'm going to murder you at your house, 123 Broadway Avenue, Littletown, Missouri 22817 at 9:17am on August 31, 2014, using a sawed-off 22-gauge shotgun loaded with..."
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How can you tell when you receive a lot of death threats whether any of them are credible?
I've had a dozen or so death threats over the years, and two of them have mentioned where I lived and/or worked at the time. Nobody's showed up to kill me yet.
"When all is said and done, a great deal more is said than done."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I post this not to diminish the validity of any possible threats, or to say anything about this debacle at all, but her address and her parents names were probably really easy to find using Google and social networks.
I personally have shown friends how much info about them I can get online with less than an hours with of research and most are surprised at least.
If a group of people are all trying to pull her info at the same time it could probably be done much quicker.
While I don't think anyone should have threats made against them for making videos online (our for pretty much any reason), I wouldn't put it past the denizens of 4chan to organize and do this. She's recently come back on their radar, from what I hear, because one of the boards is funding some kickstarter for girls making games, and she was upset that 4chan was donating, and that the kickstarter was going to accept the donations.
I don't care for her videos, but I hold nothing against her personally.
Not seeing that anywhere. It just says she called the Police. It doesn't prove she did, and it doesn't state the Police deemed them credible (and it's the Police that make that determination, not some crazy attention whore).
Threatening someone's life is generally a criminal matter.
No, really. I'll probably be banned just for mentioning her, but I think she's the one stirring all the hate due to her scandals with the gaming press.
It's reasonable to expect all people to refrain from credibly threatening the lives of others.
Sorry, but it really is unreasonable to expect ALL people from credibly threatening the lives of others. After all, these are people we are talking about. Maybe you don't have a lot of experience with people, but some are really messed up. Since we are talking about credible threats, it's reasonable for us to kill anyone who makes these credible threats.
As a disclaimer I'll point out that the above threat is not credible.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
should she not be held to the same standard? She deletes comments that are nothing more than pointing out her inaccuracies and blatant lies about content of games and cries "TROLL TROLL TROLL, see men are evil!" Criticism is not an insult, unless its at her work right?
and that sort of coarseness, misogyny, etc is part of the reason why.
Anyway, checking the links, it's not clear if the threats are a result of her video and stances vis-a-vis the gaming community, or just some whacko obsessed over a cute woman.
Your argument is basically:
I'm really ok with this being shitty because it makes the world EQUALLY shitty.
Lovely. How about being the better person and not accepting shittiness in your life instead?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Unless you have an issue with signing your life over to Google+
They have no choice. If they made the the woman look bad in any way, they would get a huge backlash. Just like that recent ad for Veet that said "Don't risk dudeness". Women control the balance of power.
Yes, and this is gender stereotyping, and if you read more feminist writing, you will discover that feminists are just as opposed to the stereotyping of men in these commercials as they are the stereotyping of women.
There's a huge leap from "men are not the weakest and stupidest characters in a video game" and "brutal depictions of violence against women," and "the use of scantily-clad female corpses as decoration." If men were being depicted as weaker and stupider than women in the game that would also be gender stereotyping.
Death threats are more than just insulting and the fact that this had to be explained to you says something about your character.
That was an insult btw.
"When was the last time some woman wrote a single line of code ?"
Hmm, let's see *checks SVN logs*
Okay, i'm not sure who's currently using the "Tester" or "Build" accounts at our company, but the last line of code written by someone who was definitely a woman was checked in at 12:34 AM, about 8 hours ago. (Hey, it's still pretty early in the morning right now, _i_ haven't written any code yet, much less checked it in.)
Of course i can look around the office and see a lot of other women who _might_ be writing code right now. Or they might be reading slashdot at work like me *cough*
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It worked before to the tune of $160K.
Assuming the posts are valid, I always doubt the 'sincerity' of someone who threatens like that. I figure that the average stalker/murderer type doesn't announce their intentions for the world to see. They post them in their little circles like the lunatic who won't be named in California not too long ago, but I lean towards the idea that direct and over-the-top threats against a relatively high profile person via twitter is for intimidation and show.
I suppose she can go stay with some of the other shallow SJWs until this all blows over.
And Zoe Quinn was recently caught fake doxing herself. I'm telling you, they manufacture their own threats. Just Google Meg Lanker-Simons.
You sound like one of the Muslim idiots who think that if they are criticized that they can retaliate with killings. If that is your position, then you will have a war between those who are civilized and idiots like yourself who thinks it is okay. I am fine with that war as your side will lose.
Have a nice life.
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I think the $160,000 she raised from the last victim parade ran out before she could make the rest of the videos.
Surely you don't think that, do you? You must realize this is criminal matter, right?
Cool. Then similarly if any fictional member of the gender is misrepresented, the entire gender was not misrepresented.
I don't care about feminism in video games because I don't care about murder in video games. I simply fail to see how this impacts the real world, and if there is one - let's address the murder thing first because holy shit people's lives are at stake.
I think this over-the-top PC trend is mostly shallow self-crongratulatory (or self-flagellating) mental masturbation - and the groups engaging in it are in their own feedback loop, in frenzied agreement with each other. It's like blaming domestic volence on old silent movies where the good guy saves the woman ties to the railroad tracks.
BUT
Threats and intimidation are wholly unacceptable responses to pretty much *any* idea or (non-violent) opinion or position. Such a response to something that might seem shallow and silly is not only unacceptable, but has the unintended consequence of giving credibility to the silliness.
Somehow, when she wasn't logged in on twitter she was able to screencap the rape threats within 12 seconds of it being made, without getting a notification.
Holy shit, man. What is your problem? Man hating? Read the story, it involves a pretty disgusting case of woman hating. If addressing that counts as "man hating" in your book, you've got some serious mental problems. Seek help.
Yeah, it only says she called the Police. There's no mention of the Police investigating. Maybe she didn't even call them? If she did, they might discover that she sent the threats herself, just like Meg Lanker-Simons.
I found her Youtube channel about a month ago and watched a number of her videos. They were informative, entertaining, and well written. I didn't see anything that I disagreed with and thought she was spot on in many cases. It is ridiculous that she has to suffer abuse for just stating the obvious, that there flaws with the way women are depicted in media and video games.
Anyone who gets so defensive about a video game they didn't develop or take any part in really needs to re-evaluate their mental health.
Hey, why stop with games? Why not just eliminate everything we don't agree with from every form of art? It'd be a hoot! That way everyone is happy! Of course, we get some REALLY fucking boring art, but hey, at least everyone is happy!
Understandable? What's understandable is that only cretins would think that threats of violence are a reasonable response to a percieved insult. Reciprocity is reasonable--you insult me, I insult you. Escalation is not.
Where "expect" means failing to do so merits punishment for failing a socially necessary moral standard.
Not that it won't happen. But that it's a level of decency people should be compelled to meet.
Sorry for the ambiguity in phrasing.
Last I heard, we didn't threats of bodily harm as "insults".
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Article is a troll, there have been shitloads of troll articles posted like this for months now. What the fuck is your problem that you can't see it?
Foolish people must be provoked with pointing the fallacies in their thinking and she's doing an excellent job, this doesn't mean she should be getting death threats.
I'm pretty sure it's a civil one, then again, IANAL.
Obviously, if you don't see how threatening to commit a capital crime can be a capital crime in itself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's not ok, but it can happen. Better be safe than sorry.
I think the issue most people have with her "work" is that for every "[hooker] being abused or murdered" there are orders of magnitude more men being abused and murdered. When Jack Thompson brought up all the killing in video games and said they were bad he was run out of town. Slashdot and the whole of the gaming community rejoiced. But now that the focus is on women it is all of a sudden something worth considering.
Also the fact that she deliberately does these things that are possible in a game but not encouraged or central in any way and paints them as centre-points to the narrative.
It shows their intelligence. The SJWs are out in full force here today, modding down any comment that is critical of Feminism. Honestly, Feminism is already dead if it has to resort to censorship to survive.
Death threats are not "undertandable". They are simply out of line.
Though she has managed to manipulate the inevitable* death threats far better than he ever did.
* It's the internet. You'll get death threats from "Christians" if you argue on the internet about evolution v creation. You'll get death threats from American Football fans if you argue that soccer is a better sport. You'll get death threats if you argue that New York pizza is better than Chicago pizza. Who would have thunk you'd get them if you pick a topic close to the heart of teenage boys.
Not that she should, she should simply have expected it.
It should never have been a surprise to her.
You are free to criticize her, you are not free to issue death or rape threats. It's that simple.
I'm a professional game developer and a life-long gamer, so perhaps it's fair to say that I've got as vested an interest in videogames as most. I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
I'm fine with having our industry challenged from time to time. For example, there are worse things in gaming than a "save the princess" plot device, but let's face it, feminist issue aside, it's a horribly cliched trope that could stand to be re-examined. Even if you don't agree with her, I think she raises some interesting points of discussion. I'm watching some of her videos right now actually, and am actually finding them fairly interesting. A direct quote from her video:
This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it's both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it's more problematic or pernicious aspects.
It takes a certain moral fortitude to listen to criticism of something you care deeply about. Game developers deal with this all the time when a reviewer writes a scathing review of the game you just spent the last two years of your life working on, or when gamers casually dismiss the problems you've spilled blood and tears to solve. It's really hard to put your ego and indignity aside and ask how you could have improved your product rather than lashing out at the one criticizing your work.
It's not like I'm really expecting the general public to restrain from criticism and outright name calling, but I seriously wish it wouldn't devolve to the level of death threats.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's just harassment, which apparently can be both criminal and civil depending on jurisdictions.
This may be fake. We only have her word. And we know that she has gotten a lot less attention lately than she wants...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Clearly you must be new to the Internet.
It is not anything, it just is.
You do a bunch of shady things, insult people, act all dramatic and you end up drawing similar people into your orbit.
No reasonable person is going to say that there is nothing wrong with these people giving these alleged death threats, or that she deserves death threats. But you brazenly scam a bunch of people, and repeatedly insults billions for profit and power and you attract the hate of other bad people.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What makes you say "credible"? TFA says that death threats are par for the course on the internet. Nothing in the article or in Sarkeesian's tweet says that the police or anyone other than Sarkeesian, maybe, believe this to be anything more than typical Internet Tough Guy fair.
"I'll drink your blood out of your cunt after I rip it open" certainly sounds like bad news out of context, but in context wishing that people would die in a fire is so common that there's an acronym for it. The internet is rife with this kind of crap. It'd be nice if people were more polite, certainly, and I don't begrudge Sarkeesian one bit for taking this to the police (that's the appropriate response) or for her tweet showing some of the threats, but the article tries to inflate this into something it's not and this Slashdot story and these comments are taking it even further.
No one has said that these threats were credible but you and the other posters here.
I would rather have people spend less time finding ways to be professionally offended.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
That is how a coward lives their life.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
everyone should get death threats. it's fun and people need to stop taking words seriously.
How is that reasonable. You really except that it is reasonable that taken a practically infinite pool of people (the Internet) that you expect all of them to act generally decent to each other all the time?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
A femme-butchy?
So is she femme curious, or butch curious?
Really? Your reponse is "everyone does it so we shouldn't even try to change it"? An extension of the "everyone else does it" defense that every kindergarden child can tell you won't get them off.
It's not the community of gamers that's objecting. It's the small, virulent subset that sees it as an attack on themselves. The ones who can't conceive their attacks are exactly the problem and prove her right by doing what they do. People who say "what should you expect" are the enablers.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Threatening a misandrist social injustice warrior is not misogyny.
Shit, I've been threatened online. It wasn't misandry. So stop making this a fucking gender thing and treat it as the simple stupid criminal behaviour that it is.
I'm sick and tired of reading bullshit from 4th wave "feminism" hate monger SJWs such as Anita Sarkeesian about how, because some "bros" acted like pigs to them in college, all men and everything "male" is horrible and evil.... until proven otherwise, and even then, under tight surveillance. It's 100% the same as telling a black person that "they're one of the good ones".
I totally get that people struggle for identity in their 20s, and it's easier to dedicate yourself to the "cause" of feminism rather than getting off your stupid tumblr bullshit and going out to do some REAL work to improve the world, but hey, at least you're a snowflake.
Meanwhile, internet trolls from 4chan make "credible" death threats, and this poor little blogger needs to flee her house (please, send ad clicks and or bitcoin!)
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
You make me laugh. I was on the Internet when the BBS was the most happening thing going on. Clearly you do not understand that the rules of polite society do not go out the window just because you are posting something on the Internet, at least not in the eyes of the law and not in the eyes of the vast majority of society. Threats of bodily harm are the same whether made on the Internet, in the newspaper, in a hand written letter, or to your face.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
If you mean in the sense that you can understand what makes religious extremists irrationally angry about some perceived slight, or what makes a mass murderer kill so many people, then sure.
Often "understand" is taken to mean that you believe there's a rational line of thought behind it. But I hope you mean you understand that some people do utterly despicable things for irrational reasons, and you have some idea what their triggers are. If so, I can get agree with that, I suppose.
Call me when the cops actually start making arrests. Right now all we have is her word. And for all we know the "mass of threating emails" she received could have been two vaguely threatening emails from a 14-year-old making a bad joke.
But that is not the case, a good number of male game charterers, even main ones, are stupid thugs or clueless fools in emotional situations. Strong yes still stupid and insensitive, why does this happen? and how can it be stopped?
The answer to the first is deceptively simple, groups of people don't like to think that they are strictly inferior to other groups, and even those on the positive side of such prejudices don't tend to think that they are better in every way. So for each positive stereotype there is a partial counterweight negative stereotype.
People often assume that the strong/physically vigorus are stupid, so men being strong as a gender implies that men are stupid as a gender. See some of the slave era assertions about black men VS white to see this in reverse. It is also common to think that those who are mentally resilient and strong of will are also in other ways resistant to normal feelings and metal input, callus, or oblivious to or clueless about emotions. You can see this sort of trade/feed back in the assessments people make about soldiers.
So if men are seen as physically and mentally "stronger" than women then they are also foolish stupid and clueless when compared to women, and visa versa that if women are cleverer than men then the are also weaker etc. The problem with this is that it is a feedback loop, or can be devalue someone's intelligence and they will prop up their self esteem by asserting their strength as important, feeding back into insulting the strength of the other group, which then leads to further assertions of stupidity.
To solve either you have to solve both, if most computer games continue to produce almost all male uber-hulk heroes, rather than a balanced mix, and in doing so portray women as week, then there will be a reaction. As such other media will assert that men are stupid as people prop up their self esteem with the inbuilt counterweight. If you do not give up the male supremacy in the video games you spend money on then we, as a gende, wont get thought of as smart, until you and people like you become a minority.
So from now on should all the players in NBA videogames be white? I mean it's a stereotype that all NBA players are black, and so it's hurting people and we shouldn't perpetuate that, right?
Yes, but that argument kind of falls apart when the only people mentioning 'all women are untrustworthy' are the people defending her, and many of those casting doubt on the claims explicitly point out they are doing so because they believe evidence she has done so in the past.
Are gender inspecific -- anyone who has ever spent time in the CSR trenches of any online gaming service can attest to that.
The difference between Ms Sarkeesian and everyone else who has to deal with the flood of ichor is that the rest of us realize that most trolls are teenagers in mom's basement with no ability to actually follow up on their threats.
If I could leave work every time I took a call from some kid threatening to "eff me up the ass with a rusty chainsaw" because he can't get onto one of our servers, I would never be at work.
Ms Sarkeesian has the privilege of being able to monetize her discord, while most everyone else who has to deal with this has to grin and bear it.
No.
What I am saying is that the world is controlled right now by politically correct, professionally offended people. Everything everywhere is a stereotype.
Most decent people that are not praying on the simple for the existence of their jobs move on about their lives. You just do not see a bunch of men with real jobs and families to raise waste their time bitching about the horrors of ADT commercials.
90% of the time you see a person standing up yelling about inequality you can bet that the person doing the yelling is profiting off dividing people and pitching them against each other. Governments entire job right now is putting people into groups and getting them to hate each other while the whole time the politicians use it to gather more power for themselves.
What people should do is join their communities, use their communities instead of laws to fix the issues in their communities and be as responsible as they can be for their families, their friends and their neighbors. When 60 or 70% of us are doing this in an ongoing basis most of our other problems go away.
Though it is easier by far to stick a letter or a label on everyone you meet and judge them by that and then instead of getting involved to fix problem you see you can just look to your matching letters and tell them to pass a law to fix it. When it is not fixed you can then look to the letter that is not on you nad blame it on all the people with that damned letter.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I enjoyed and agreed with almost everything she says in her video, but at the same time couldn't help but noticing how much makeup she is using! Not complaining though ;)
Because video games do not have "brutal depictions of violence against men?"
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
What people should do is join their communities, use their communities instead of laws to fix the issues in their communities and be as responsible as they can be for their families, their friends and their neighbors.
Is this not exactly what Sarkeesian is doing? She seems to have garnered significant influence with notable game makers in the community.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Actually it will be solved as soon as "people like you" stop being hyper sensitive to every perceived slight against what ever you are currently defending.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Again you are completely missing the point she was making and the point of this slashdot article. The point she was making is that women in the games she's reviewing are uniformly depicted in these sexualized death poses and sexualized death scenes, and men are not depicted that way. That is gender stereotyping. And the point of TFA is that whether you agree with her about this or not, it's not a reason to threaten her and her parents with torture and death.
I would *so* love to get together a study to interview the people who are attacking Ms Sarkeesian.
All this name-calling, back and forth, doesn't solve anything. I completely don't understand the violent, angry response at all. I suspect many people don't. I believe it is so important to find out why those people feel threatened and what it is they think they are accomplishing, with their attacks.
I doubt that this problem can be solve by further attacking people who already feel, rationally or otherwise, threatened. We need to understand what's going on here.
> If any member of the gender is not insulted, the entire gender was not insulted.
No, no. We're going by feminist rules, just being fair and applying them to men as well.
Kevin Dobson is impotent not important!
Who are *these people* who cannot be provoked? People that play video games? Are we really going to say that we cannot even talk about video games now without signing our own death warrants? Is that your point?
Take her work at face value or call it part of a conspiracy - all she's doing is speaking into a camera on the internet. Ms. Sarkesian is *not* a legislator, she's not out there suing companies and telling them what to do or what not to do. She's just stating her opinion and raising what she considers issues with the messaging of video games.
WTF is wrong with you?
Report this to the FBI, if those are credible threats they should look into it.
If a misogynistic asshole is responsible and gets outed, it's a win, if a different kind of asshole gets outed, it's also a win. There is no reason not to report this, let there be a proper investigation on the matter.
I think the threats against her are retarded. The only way to kill her is to stop giving her attention. She would shrivel and die if no one listened to her nonsense.
I do not think that she is doing anything of value though. I think if she is worried about the women in her community they would be better served in other ways. Ways in which she lifts up real women instead of worrying about video game vixens,
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You're bullying, Mellon. It's like this:
A. Tell me something you love.
Maybe you love the Bible. Maybe you love science. Maybe you love The Last Unicorn, by Peter Beagle.
B. Find something in it that you could make an unseemly story about.
If you love the Bible, get the story about the guy who had sex with his daughters.
If you love science, get the story about alpha silverbacks and how they dominate the society.
If you love The Last Unicorn, get the story about the red bull pushing unicorns into the sea.
C. Now accuse the fuck out of a person.
"If you love the Bible, then you define incest as life-defining, and you're not typical. You need to redefine your life, right now."
"If you think science is true, than you believe that controlling women is the Natural Order. You need to rethink the merits of science, and redefine your life, right now."
"If you get your rocks off watching the Red Bull dominate unicorns, you're not typical. You need to redefine your life, right now."
Forcing YOUR interpretations onto others is psychic/emotional violence, and it's also the behavior of a bully.
It's too bad that some teenage boy somewhere has rushed into Anita's damsel-in-distress gambit, but gamers everywhere and gamer culture are NOT the problem. Attack that kid, DON'T attack gamers as a culture -- which is what she's been doing.
Have you seen ye olde XKCD, where if a boy does poorly in math, it's "Damn, you suck at math," but if a girl does poorly in math, its "Damn, girls suck at math?" Well, the same here, but in reverse, and then further, socially embraced: When women are acidic towards men, it's "Damn, you're an aggressive individual." But when some teenage boy is acidic towards women, it's "Damn, gamer culture is to blame, and we need to re-engineer the thoughts and feelings of gamers everywhere, using social bullying."
Well, no, she shouldn't receive death threats.
But she still ran away like a woman, and she's still a delusional d-bag.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Those ones must be productive because they are not on the internet to speak endlessly about their gender identity.
On the internet everyone is a dog. If you're a woman or a black on the internet you're definitely doing it wrong or your nickname reveals too much.
It is just random pandering to sjw, that has next to do gaming. Case and point;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuRSaLZidWI
What does the Malaysian Republican Army have to do with this?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
So, she has provoked harassment by critiquing development trends, and because she criticized HER critics, she's making a career out of being harassed.
And apparently I'm supposed to ignore her. Why should I do that? She seems to think that there are people waiting for a niche genre, and apparently a lot of people agree with her. That's easy sales, why shouldn't I be interested in that perspective?
Cool - it's not an issue for you. You don't agree with her point. Your response appears to be "that's not important to me." That is a perfectly acceptable response.
Can we agree death threats and rape threats are not an appropriate response?
Sometimes pulp fiction is fine.
I don't always want to read War and Peace.
Yes, those expectations are formally structured and called "laws".
Men would obviously be using GIT instead of SVN. Nice try, vagineous beings.
No, they're not.
The modern feminist movement is one of "rape culture" and "privilege" not equality.
She's a feminist advocate and a video director. She's SUPPOSED to seek attention you nitwit.
Like Jim Carrey being an attention seeker because he's advertising his movies. Well, no shit. Maybe you should call him and threaten to kill him for overacting.
But I haven't seen anything that indicates she's a liar. Everything she's said is either a plausible claim or a defensible argument. What makes you think she's lying? About what?
No, you should be differentiating between trolling and practical jokes, not trolling and bullying. There's no difference on the internet, if you're not paying attention to your victim trolling puts you on the side of a bullying mob of assholes regardless of your intent.
Is there anyone here who makes death threats against someone they don't know personally (and who would know if it was or was not a joke), and does not expect them to go to the authorities, or expect a knock at their RW door by people with badges and a warrant?
I mean, really? If so, I think they think they've uploaded their brains to a video game. Sorry, guys, the RW *always* wins.
mark, whose duaghters and son would probably be able to track the poster to their home for the cops... oh, or
since it's over the wire, the FBI?
These are no longer 'trolls' - they are criminals committing criminal harassment.
So this is a threat, and if you could be tracked down, you'd be arrested and sent to prison.
Assuming the stereotype is negative to begin with. How many contortions do we need to go through to make "Asians are good at math" into a stereotype that hurts people?
A) The stereotype may in practice make it harder for them to go into other fields.
B) The stereotype may disadvantage other groups.
I would say that stereotypes exist to make communicating easier, but I suppose it sounds dumb to claim that my ease of use trumps discrimination. It's about what meanings we attribute to the words more than the words themselves. I don't feel that "Jap" or "homo" should have any negative connotations since they're simply shortenings of the official term (how much less offensive can you possibly get?) but since we're all a bunch of hateful twats, they are anyway.
P.S: Yeah, you said "in fiction" so this whole post is a bit offtopic.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Also ...
I would rather have people spend less time finding ways to be professionally offended.
In no way states that I think we must stand and prevent her from doing what I think is wrong. I only stated that I would rather she not do it.
It was a single line clearly written. So either you never read my post and just attacked "because", or ...
You could find no way to attack what I said but really needed to attack anyway and just attacked me for for stuff I was very clear that I did not say.
This is not a very efficient way to get to the truth of a thing. I am leaning toward the assumption that getting to the truth of the subject here holds no real interest for you.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Two kinds of /. articles keep my killfile topped up: those about global warming (deniers), and those with "men's rights advocates" who engage in victim-blaming. Neither sort of person's comments are worth reading.
Related: it's dumb that we're limited to 200 friend/foe relationships. I ran into that limit earlier this week and had to spend an hour trimming out users who don't post any longer.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I agree, but it isn't surprising. When you make a career out of hate-mongering, you will eventually hit on targets that will make threats. Jerry Springer receives death threats too.
Only in the imaginary world of Thunderf00t and the MRAs.
Required reading for internet skeptics
If you think she insulted a whole gender, perhaps you are the problem she is speaking of.
What exactly are "MRA" types?
A lot of people are frothing nutjobs. Those frothing nutjobs have convinced people to provide Anita Sarkeesian with financial support. Why bother defending them? Why bother criticizing her for it? It's not like she's actually done anything to deserve getting frothed at by nutjobs.
None of her rhetoric has done anything to diminish or encourage the diminishment of anybody's quality of life, so it wouldn't be fair to say that she has encouraged the abuse she's received in response. Until we live in a world where people can do what Anita Sarkeesian does without setting off a bunch of crazy assholes, I'm not going to criticize her for making money off it. She's actually been following up on what she said she was going to do, so she's earned her patron's donations.
Its not surprising. She is using force, there will always be counter-force.
Good-bye
This is a credible threat.
Seriously, if you think this inane whining about "video games are doing " ____"
bullshit is a problem, you need to go to a war zone where people are dying.
THEN you will understand what a REAL problem is.
The above goes for the idiots who "trolled" the woman who is wasting time caring ......
about how women are depicted in video games. I suppose that stupid cunt didn't notice
any of the films which have been made in the last 100 years, or the existence of porn,
or strip clubs, or any of the rest of it. It's REALITY, and one thing about reality is
that it will never ever be completely pleasing to ANYONE. But only idiots and whiners
complain about it. Adults make their own part of the world as good as it can be within the
limitations of the resources available to them and ignore the bullshit they cannot change.
Overall, it's a fairly safe group to criticize.
I'm sure the FBI agent that is right now being assigned to investigate the death threats she received will agree with you completely.
My hobby does not hate women; The vast majority of people who play video games do not hate women. Please, Sarkeesian's of the world, turn your attentions to the people who do.
The vast majority of gamer's don't hate women, but they do love escaping into their power fantasies, where they are tough, strong and desirable and where females (you know, the other 50% of the planet) are treated as objects and she has called you out for it. If this isn't the absolute stark truth, then why is it even a story? There are plenty of nut jobs on the Internet that are ignored by everyone because they are crazy and nobody cares what they say. The fact that she is getting all this negative attention from misogynistic bullies shows just how utterly correct she is. She is telling the truth and that scares people.
If gaming is so squeaky clean and there isn't any truth in what she has to say, why wouldn't you welcome shining a bright light on the industry and behavior of gamers? She is 100% correct in all her analysis, and I'll even go farther and say what she hasn't said, that the hobby is crawling with shit bag women haters who can only have some self-esteem because they are bullying others.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I personally have been somewhat critical of Sarkeesian, but hearing this really makes me feel bad.
Well, then it looks like her marketing campaign (because that's what this is) seems to be working. The YouTube comments don't look like anything worse than you can find on many YouTube videos - it has to be the most inane set of commenters anywhere on the Internet. The set of threats from the one Twitter account certainly justifies calling the authorities, but there is no evidence it is a real person and not part of her marketing campaign.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sorry, but decisions about what version control software we use are made by Management. I'm not entirely sure they're even human, much less in possession of either a male or female gender.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I can't possibly be the only one astute enough to see your blatant attempts to play a straw man for what they are, can I?? I'd bet dollars to donuts you have the same IP address as the person you appear to be arguing with...
You know, I think it's pretty fucking hysterical that 'social justice warrior' has become a perjorative. Yes, fighting for social justice is the WORST THING EVAH!
I was cool with everything she said in the video until she mentioned Earthbound. Don't fuck with Earthbound; that game's my jam.
Anybody that would consider her being a hate-monger is out of touch with reality.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I did not actually do much research beyond internet searches of official (.gov .edu or legitimate news) websites, and I am not a psychologist, but here are some thoughts.
Some think she is doing this to herself, some think this immature men behaving with irrational hatred, but I think this is more like the statistics of a large population. She is a public figure in gaming and some would say a public figure against gaming. According to USA today article back in 2012 there are 212 Million gamers in the US. Through various articles I found that 4% to .2% of the population is mentally ill with violent tendencies. This is roughly 424000 potentially violent people with mental disorders. Then use whatever reasoning you like for Anita to grab their attention in a negative way (Tribalism, misogyny, or that "Anita is a phoney.") Death threats, credible ones, were inevitable.
I'm somewhat skeptical about the credibility of the death threats.
The last time she was brought to my attention for receiving death threats over her work she appeared to be crying wolf (here examples were 4chan posts that included the word "rape" or "kill" but were otherwise tame for 4chan). Which leads me to suspect that she's either attention whoring or has delusions of grander (her work isn't as important as she thinks it is and it's unlikely anyone is willing to kill her over it. She's no Dr King).
If you insult a whole gender, getting insults back is kind of expected.
Or, the people who feel insulted could just, you know, rise above it and decide not to respond with threats of death and rape. Really, are we males so emotionally fragile that any accusations of misogyny must be met with threats that prove the very point that was being made in the first place? Aren't we better than this?
So, in other words, we have another Slashdot story that is blown way out of proportion with absolutely no proof behind it and the subject is that men are evil shitbads towards women.
Is anyone else getting ridiculously tired of this weekly event?
Somebody email DICE or something, the hate towards men on here may be hilarious to some people but it's not good in the long haul. Jesus, now I know why they had to agree to put a net under the Golden Gate Bridge. Too many more stories like this and I'd fling myself off too.
A death threat isn't credible until an actual attempt has been made. And even then words are just words. Nobody has to listen or react in any way towards them. We're looking at another case of widespread attempted censorship here. She may be a fake, but the wannabe dictators will run with it.
Yeah, it's okay to put a price on someone's head. Governments do it all the time and few people complain about it. Now, the person who takes up the offer and tries something should be locked up tight. Everybody goes at this from exactly the wrong angle.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Credible"
In other news, yet another video game streamer on twitch.tv was the victim of swatting this week. That's when someone calls the police and reports a horrible crime that is occurring at the moment where you are, so they break down your door and point guns at your face, because they believe you have murdered.
But, no, someone receiving shitty tweets and emails - *that's* the real harassment and travesty.
Oh, and someone having the sweat team called on them (it happens a lot, now) is just "the internet being shitty", because it happens to young white males playing videogames by people who are just bored and want to be shitty jerks. The moment something even a fraction of that happens to a woman, it's suddenly not just people being jerks, but people being *misogynist sexist jerks* and a whole political and social agenda is applied to the actions whether or not it is intended by the assholes perpetrating them.
Also, sorry if I've stopped buying into this bullshit. There have been enough "I'm being harassed by the internet! Help me! Misogny!" situations where it was later uncovered that the perpetrator of the harassment (the FAKE harassment) was the "victim" themselves.
Understandable? What's understandable is that only cretins would think that threats of violence are a reasonable response to a percieved insult. Reciprocity is reasonable--you insult me, I insult you.
Actually, I think that in this case even reciprocity is not reasonable. It would be stooping to the level of the lowest common denominator. A much better approach is to calmly and rationally state that you disagree and here are the reasons why you disagree. What is so godawful wrong with rising above such petty offenses?
You gotta be fucking kidding.
HAND.
http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg Yup..shes TOTALLY trustworthy...NOTHING suspicious here at all...
The world is in need of a technical solution to extreme trolling. It's a social problem, but it's significantly exacerbated by the internet, web,etc. Something like a spam filter is in order, where one could set the level of accepted negativity, and it should give the user confidence that *serious* threats were being passed through or dealt with. I don't care enough to start a company, but I'm just saying, there's a business opportunity here...
Let's all agree that Brendan Eich is not Hitler. His voting record was posted which reflects his opinion.
Stereotypes are just pattern matching, a critical step in child development. But now you tell me we need to regress to an infantile state.
Sure, they should act - by rationally and calmly debating her points with facts, counter-examples, and sound logic.
Do you really believe that death, rape, and dismemberment threats are acceptable responses to somebody saying something that "kinda maybe hurt your feelings, a little bit, but not really, because their comments weren't even directed at you?"
It's funny that so many here keep whining about Sarkeesian being "professionally offended" - she seems far less offended by the stereotypes of women that she's criticizing than the people responding to her criticism with, "Oh yeah? Well I'll fucking MURDER you and your WHOLE FAMILY." Which person is the thin-skinned one in that calculation, again?
Thank you, Slashdot, for all the years of awesome tech news. As of today, I will no longer be checking this website or supporting any of your advertisers by purchasing items directly through ads place here. Slashdot has rushed too willingly to the arms of the feminazi. What used to be useful and meaningful links is now littered with, well, crap telling men that they're evil, useless, and so on. I for one believe in equality of the sexes, and putting down one sex to bring up the other is NOT EQUALITY. May you join Digg.
You're free not to care about certain discussions, but for decades there have been discussions about the power of media and how culture is employing it and whether this is actually a good idea.
Incidentally, it is possible, when millions of people are in communication with one another, to work together towards addressing several problems at once. So why don't you get on with solving murder while Sarkeesian focusses on the negative portrayal of women in various media such as computer games? You may even cooperate with one another at some point, but for now I suggest you work with whoever is fixing racism, or domestic violence.
A month ago, Cards Against Humanity creator was accused of rape by an anonymous internet post. He was attacked by people like and including sarkeesian. Even though he is known as supporting social justice causes and feminist causes a *lot*. They said things and wrote long blogs saying he was guilty of rape, because women don't like about that. Note the accusation was anonymous and it was not a police report. Just a comment on the internet. Kotaku and RPS wrote long articles tearing him open and Kotaku's writer flat out implied he was guilty. This wasn't one or two people. This was everyone in game journalism and the game industry. He was harassed and his reputation totally wrecked based on an anonymous accusation.
Zoe Quinn was the victim of a vicious rumor this month. All of those same people came to her aid... and she wasn't even accused of anything even remotely as damaging as what the card game guy was accused of.
So, tell me again how there's no "war" or "agenda" against men. What would you call it if men went around saying "it's clearly a lie because she's a woman and all bitches are liars"? If all women were just assumed guilty of every accusation, because of their gender?
The contrast of these two almost the same but for gender events and the response by the same people in the industry to each one made it clear to me that everyone is full of shit and there is no "good" side. There are just agendas and they each like to play victim and tear the other apart.
That's one hell of an echo chamber you've built for yourself. Do you own a pair of Zaphod Beeblebrox's glasses as well.
I have not seen her work, but a game with " dead female bodies posed in necrophilic-erotic positions" would be disgusting, and would not appeal to me at all! I would not even consider buying such a game. And before anyone thinks that I am a prude, I used to play Leasure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizzards! The object for that series of games was to get the main charactor laid.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think reciprocity is *best*...but at least it can be defended as a "rational" action. I completely agree that de-escalating a situation (e.g., responding more calmly than you perceive the other person to be acting) would be even better. But escalating the situation is absolutely not rational or reasonable.
The pieces of work she characterizes as "vile" are life-defining to some people.
Then some people are desperately in need of a "redefinition" of their life. Seriously.
Surely you see where the insult lies.
As a man, I feel that those who would "define their life" according to these "pieces of work" are an insult to males everywhere. Again, they seriously need to get a new "life". Just sayin'.
So are you saying that when she claimed to be a gamer, loved games, etc and then got caught on tape saying she doesnt play games and would love to start but they're too violent, that was all just imaginary? Or the argument that TF made about her concerns in her the video about Hitman that the two strippers werent correct and the developer actually put them there for the sexual perversion of male dominance of a woman because you can kill them and shove them in a box with zero penalty in the game. Got it!
Dear God,
I've never asked you for anything. Literally ever. But I'm asking now:
Please let it become known that she threatened herself for attention.
Anon
> I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
Is one case of a "saving the princess" game worth outrage? No.
Are there any "saving the prince" games? Are there any games where you *are* the princess, and you have to save anything at all? A few. Many fewer than the reverse.
If it were *only* an issue of bad writing and not of sexism, you'd expect as many "save the prince" games as "save the princess" games.
If you didn't feel insulted, you missed her point. Her job is to insult men. No, the game producers are not saying "men are brutes with no compassion, let's pander to that." They are saying "This is pretend. Lots of people like horror fiction. Lets pander to that." In fact, horror fiction is popular among women as well as men, and yes, frequently it involves sexual mutilation of men as well.
The fact that you think this is a "male" problem does not make you "one of the good ones". It just means that you have been convinced half the population was born wrong.
Yup, a few posts that were modded down for troll, or flamebait, that were actually insightful.
And your comment about censorship is correct. Anita practices it, instead of allowing comments on her videos she denies them. She will only allow comments in a controllable area where she can control the comments she wants people to see. That means also allowing the more vile comments to bubble up so she can use it as justification while also removing comments that are well-formed and thoughtful for the mere reason that they call into question her points.
So I say to the SJW, where is the social justice there if you are supporting someone that wants to suppress information just because it makes them look wrong?
Analyzing tropes in video games put in there by developers is not insulting a whole gender.
Unless of course you're one of those people who thinks Video Games as a whole are "Boyz Club: no girlz allowed" sort of thing and thusly any criticism of games = criticism of men.
By that weak standard any death threat against a creationist makes creationism "true" and proves his point. This is a stupid irrational response by people. Death treat or rape threat do not prove a point. facts and evidence demonstrate or at least consolidate a point. She does not have that. Her video have been shown to be ill researched and she ignored fully what went against her point. Still threatening her only proves there are idiot which get a kick of threatening other people. It does not prove at all anything about videogame and damsel in distress.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm still fuzzy on what constitutes a "credible" vs. non-credible death threat. Specific details?
If it is phrased as a joke, then it is not credible. If it is an impossible scenario, then it is not credible. "If you don't shut up I'm going to send a bunch of Cardassians to your planet!" Or if they admit they don't know where you are, then it is not credible. "If I knew where you lived, you'd be toast!"
You can get the whole thing from the semantics of the words "credible" and "non-credible," by checking if it is non-credible. If it has something as mentioned above that makes it "non-credible," then it is not credible. If it doesn't contain only of those things, and is just a threat, without anything to discredit it, and it contains claims of having access to you, such as knowing your address, then it is clearly credible.
Note that "credible" doesn't say, "actually planned and they're at the door" or anything like that. If it is not non-credible, then it is credible; if they make it sound like they might really do it, then that is clearly and indisputably a "credible" threat. But if you can't tell, then it is credible as a threat.
Dictionary gives "able to be believed; convincing." And: "capable of persuading people that something will happen or be successful."
Synonyms are: believable, plausible, tenable, able to hold water, conceivable, likely, probable, possible, feasible, reasonable, with a ring of truth, persuasive
A threat such as, "I know where you live in Sometown, Somestate and I've been tracking your location and I'm gonna [felony] and [felony] you!" Clearly plausible as a threat; you'd have to know independently if they are or are not stalking you in order to determine it. But the claim itself is that they are stalking you, so the stalking part is plausible, and if they are stalking you, then the rest is even likely.
"You're so lame, if I met you I'd totally [felony] you." Not very plausible as an actual threat.
I've not followed her a lot, but what I've seen is not misandrist - what has she done to be misandrist in your mind?
The reason this is a gender thing is that it's women writers and speakers who are receiving sexualized threats whenever they say something that a subset of men find objectionable. It's not often the other way around. If it was, this wouldn't be a 'fucking gender thing', but as it turns out, its almost exclusively women that face this experience and it's almost universally when they talk about the portrayal or men or women in movies or books or games or whatever.
People are trying to treat it as stupid and criminal, but unfortunately (predominantly men it seems) are trying hard to minimize it is as being serious or even suggesting it's all crafty witch's illusion (Burn her!)
Damnit. I was going to use some mod points, but I feel like I need to respond here.
Yes, a lot of men die in games. It's not really up for debate.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
I'm a (veteran--13 years, 3 companies) game developer, and I watch each of her videos with a lot of interest. She's not trying to make me feel bad, she's trying to make me pay attention to what I'm doing. I make games to entertain people, not to make a broad swathe of the population feel bad.
I'd like to stop using women as props in our games. I'd like to see more women as protagonists or just interesting characters in general. If there's a good reason to show a woman or a man dead in the game, that will still be okay. But when it happens, I'm going to be running through a little checklist in my head from now on. Was it necessary? Does it advance the game? Is it really a crucial bit of atmosphere, or could we do without it? Would it just be a good idea to hold off on showing this bit of violence given what we know about rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers?
From my perspective as a game developer (even though I'm a programmer), she's not blunting my ability to tell a story, but honing my desire to focus on the important parts of a story and make it better for everyone. This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world. AAA games are huge and expensive to make. We can't afford to be sloppy with our storytelling any more. Players are interested in next generation graphics and AI and all that fancy stuff, but we need more strong critique and scrutiny to bring us up to the next generation of narrative and storytelling that I think they also desire.
(And to the trolls that seem to be lurking in the thread, do you notice how two people can have a discussion without it devolving into name calling and threats? There's zero need for any of the shit she's had to put up with. Adults can have discussions.)
How can you tell when you receive a lot of death threats whether any of them are credible?
Having done my stint in various online games, I've probably received more death threats than senators have received blowjobs from congressional pages.
I'm pretty confident in my current system, which is something of an inversion of the USPTO policy: When you add "over the internet" to the description of the threat, its credibility drops 99%.
This sounds very similar to comic book covers where the women are invariably drawn in highly suggestive poses while the men aren't. (As if women could twist their spines just right so as to best highlight their rear and chest areas.) Somewhere, someone draw an alternative poster for The Avengers movie where Black Widow was drawn in a normal post and the rest of the cast drawn in the kinds of poses women typically get. It looked utterly ridiculous, yet the "normal" version looked fine because we've been conditioned to expect this sort of thing.
Now, if someone calls attention to it and someone else happens to disagree with them, pointing out the flaws in their argument is fine. Calling them names isn't helping their case at all. And threatening them with real physical violence is showing that the criticism is but the tip of an iceberg sized problem.
Side note: Some are claiming that the threats probably weren't credible. However, her address was posted online by some of the people. If someone insults me online, I shrug it off and continue with what I was doing. If someone said "I'm going to kill you" and then posted my address online, though, I'd take that threat seriously. I wouldn't just say "Internet Trolls are going to be Internet Trolls."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's reasonable to expect all people to refrain from credibly threatening the lives of others.
Sorry, but it really is unreasonable to expect ALL people from credibly threatening the lives of others. After all, these are people we are talking about
It is reasonable to expect people not to commit murder. Knowing that humans are humans, we can only expect that some will be unreasonable, and do it anyways. It is then reasonable to expect them to face Justice. Knowing that humans are humans, we can only expect that some will escape Justice.
Reasonable expectations are what those with Reason are likely to do. It does not mean any sort of guarantee, or imply a believe in absolutes, or claim that all humans are or will be reasonable.
Yes, every single country(with a standing government) has some kind of laws against actionable threats.
Every. Single. One.
A death threat isn't credible until an actual attempt has been made. And even then words are just words.
That's not how the law views it.
Often "understand" is taken [by mcvos] to mean that you believe there's a rational line of thought behind it.
Repeatedly using faulty definitions for words, does not confer validity to said faulty definitions.
Anon7: "I'm glad you approve."
Spock: "I do not approve. I understand."
Without running out of doses of penicillin.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And your comment about censorship is correct. Anita practices it, instead of allowing comments on her videos she denies them.
Censorship is practiced only by governments. What she is doing is called "moderation", the same sort of moderation that has been done on USENET, mailing lists, message boards, and IRC by administrators of various types over the years. Their forum, their rules. Her channel, her rules.
Because it's sexist to respond to market forces? Save the prince games won't sell as well as save the princess. Due to undisputed skew in the gender of gamers.
Of course you dismiss Laura Croft, due to all the discussion of polygons/tit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But when some teenage boy is acidic towards women, it's "Damn, gamer culture is to blame, and we need to re-engineer the thoughts and feelings of gamers everywhere, using social bullying."
Well that's the problem, if it only were just A boy you would be correct. There is widespread racism, homophobia, and misogynous behavior in the gaming community, and yeah, there needs to be a change.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
As a dad, I've noticed the "dumb dad" stereotype. However, I wouldn't say "I'm ok with it so long as men aren't badly stereotyped in this other medium." Instead, I'd be working to get rid of all stereotypes be they "dumb sitcom dad" or "helpless video game female."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
She doesn't say men are evil, she says that neckbeards are destroying the gaming experience for both men and women.
I'm a man, and I love my wife, therefore I wouldn't participate in any community that is full of misogynists. It is disgusting and games do not provide the level of benefit that would be required to get me to spend time in a culture that hates me and hates my family and hates me and my family for loving and respecting each other.
If you spend time reading your game "friends" saying these nasty things, you're a neckbeard, not a man.
"Emotionally manipulative liars" is one of those old school stereotypes about women, and so AC here takes that typification, and extrapolates it onto Sarkeesian without any sort of evidence to bear out that she's actually like that
Have you actually managed to sit through any of her inane dribblings that pass as videos? Plenty of evidence there.
Hell, just the fact that she took a 150k kickstarter and used it to make a video series full of self-contradictory bitching and bullshit accusations rather than, say, making a game that she claims everyone wants (and 150k is plenty to make a good indie game these days, don't let the blockbuster budgets fool you).
It's safe to assert that "intending to shame others into doing things your way" falls safely inside the boundaries of "emotionally manipulative."
The "liar" part is trivially proven, but plenty of others have already gone after that, so finding them will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Oblig: http://xkcd.com/385/
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Watch the videos. When video games show violence against men, the men are not half naked in sexual poses.
No, but everybody in their mother gets death threats. I've gotten death threats over forum posts. Just because she says she gets death threats doesn't mean all criticism of her is invalid like some people here seem to think.
Sadly, "perceived slights" can spill over into the real world. For example, there are plenty of stories where people freaked out because a dad was taking photos of his children. Why? Because "man taking photos of child" = pervert! Call the cops!!!!
If you disagree with someone's position, by all means, argue with it (as you appear to be doing), however lobbing death threats and revealing personal information about the person isn't debating their position. It's committing illegal acts in order to scare your opponent into submission.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Some of the "problems" can be attributed to someone not wanting their personal information to appear in a screen capture. Given the death threats involved, I couldnt' blame them. You never know when threats might become real.
Positive stereotypes about one group are implicitly negative stereotypes about every other group. Them being minorities or majorities just has to do with how power is exercised in the name of those stereotypes, but doesn't change the amount of prejudice involved.
That does not matter. Threatening someone because you find their points silly or a sham is never acceptable. You missed the point.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Never heard of her or her series. I just checked it out and appreciated/agreed with some of it. The last time someone did me that kind of favor, I read with relish the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Congrats, trolls. You've made it to the big league...I mean the Catholic League.
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
What I am saying is that the world is controlled right now by politically correct, professionally offended people. Everything everywhere is a stereotype.
You do realize that "politically correct, professionally offended people" is a stereotype, right?
I don't agree with all of Sarkeesian's criticisms, and find much of her analysis doctrinaire and tendentious, but for all of that her work or something like it is clearly needed, as evidenced by the backlash against it.
She isn't being "professionally offended": she's engaging in legitimate, deep analysis of an important artistic medium. Even granted that I disagree with some of her theoretical positions, he work has tremendous value even at the level of raw empiricism. Her episode on "the damsel in distress" trope is a compelling argument that sexism makes for very bad art, and that the way women are used in a large number of video games is lazy and stupid.
In a well-ordered world she would be getting a PhD for work of this depth and quality. And again, in case you missed it: I don't particularly agree with a goodly chunk of her theoretical frame, and she often says things that I think are simply wrong. I would love to see a cogent, relevant critique of her positions, but people who are driven by simplistic stereotypes of "professionally offended people" are making that impossible. There is so much noise that any rational discussion is simply impossible to maintain.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
That's cool, but that's irrelevant. You're not everyone.
He's more important than you are, you're still wet behind the ears. Look at his user id, he's probably been playing games since your parents were in diapers.
Oh, and protip: you're not everyone, either! He spoke for himself, and you can speak for yourself. And as somebody who spent the 80s playing "Moon Unit (cracked by the Nibbler)" on the Apple ][, I totally agree. In the old days game designers assumed gamers were nerds, and showed respect for our intelligence and basic decency. Now they accuse us of being disgusting, mindless brutes.
If game designers respected the male mind, I'd have games other than Civilization * to play. Luckily there is internet chess. Men are such brutes though, only half of them say "good game" after winning. ;)
No, you need to grow up past being a fucking child, and recognize that humanity is made of individuals.
(Not to mention most stereotypes are completely misrepresentation)
And they are scientifically proven to cause people to treat each other worse
But if you look past all that, and use some extremely simplistic logic about cognition, and throw in a dash of naturalistic fallacy, then your conclusion makes perfect sense.
It isn't gender stereotyping. It is heterosexual male titillation. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I don't fantasize about androgynous or non-sexual women. Video games offer the opportunity to simulate a more idealist reality. Yes, in my idealist reality, all women are beautiful, buxom, scantily clad, and randy.
No. I don't understand their behaviour. I know why they are acting that way. But that doesn't mean I understand them. I think they are exactly the type of person she complains about rightfully.
She is notorious in her circles for attention seeking, witchhunting, and wild exaggeration. And she's managed to cause damage to others already (ie shutting down their kickstarter). While credible death threats are not cool, this just goes to show her claims bother in general and in this situation should be taken with a grain of salt.
But if you can't tell, then it is credible as a threat.
You could have dropped half that comment and just put this as the first sentence. And I find it funny how much you use the word "clearly" when we're talking greyscale.
"If I knew where you lived, you'd be toast!"
...doesn't mean that they won't try to *find out* where you live. So whoop--it could happen! Therefore that one's credible.
Considering how notoriously hard it is to tell on the Internet whether someone is being serious, I would only exclude those threats that are physically impossible (your Cardassian example). In which case it's possible to end up with 90% of threats received being "credible." Maybe not likely, though? It is Internet trolls we're talking about here, but SWATing is a thing, too.
You can get the whole thing from the semantics of the words "credible" and "non-credible," by checking if it is non-credible. If it has something as mentioned above that makes it "non-credible," then it is not credible.
I'm not finding extracting an objective definition from this circular definition as "clearly" easy as you claim. Saying A = everything !B doesn't work when A and B overlap, because you can argue that B = everything !A and now we have an incompatible center of the Venn diagram which is both A, therefore !B, and B, therefore !A, which was kind of my point (in retrospect ;)
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how about we are adults and realize what the word "fiction" means
Er, when I say "A and B overlap" I mean that you can't tell for certain whether they're being serious or making a joke. Being both at the same time is rather difficult.
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If you find depictions of hookers being abused and murdered, or the dead bodies of women posed seductively, as life-defining, you are not typical.
Getting arrested for making death threats is also not "typical," and I have no problem believing that these people hold both of these characteristics.
I agree with what you're saying, but I did want to point out that in the "Goth" and similar communities it is common for both men and women to role-play necrophilia, and they generally associate that with their whole personal and artistic sense of self; fake necrophilia is part of being a [whatever group they are], and being a [group] is how they define themselves.
Of course, threatening people with death for disagreeing that it is healthy is usually NOT a defining trait in any of these groups. In fact, there is a word for groups that add that sort of thing to their collective sense of self: gangs.
"I'm going to murder you at your house, 123 Broadway Avenue, Littletown, Missouri 22817 at 9:17am on August 31, 2014, using a sawed-off 22-gauge shotgun loaded with..."
Well, that is essentially the level of detail (including her home address) which was included in the threats, so even by your overly detailed requirements for "credible", yeah, they were credible.
For example, there are worse things in gaming than a "save the princess" plot device, but let's face it, feminist issue aside, it's a horribly cliched trope that could stand to be re-examined.
You can see the change in Disney. In Tangled, Wreak-It Ralph, and Frozen.
Watch Thunderfoot's commentary on her before you judge. He points out that the game where she demos the "necrophilia", a) it was HER playing it and b) players lose points for killing innocents.
"I disagree with your argument, your points are stupid and you are an idiot" is not the same as "I am going to come over to to your house and rape you and kill you."
..in some circles, actually, it is.
You conflate having an opinion with "forcing" it on people.
1. You have an opinion ...
2.
3. violence!
Notice the whole claim of "violence" is predicated on the word "forcing," which in this case is a verb. Notice the complete lack of action though. So just from that we can see it is a false accusation; the only action taken was giving his own opinion. But you lie, and claim he took an action to "force" his opinion on you. But you're not forced to believe every opinion you hear; that is silly, and shows a misunderstanding even over the word opinion. Then you double down on the lie, by claiming the "force" not only exists, but was violent.
I didn't realize grognard was a gender now.
Asexual basement-dwelling loser is on the cutting edge of genders.
Well, you know, of course it is human nature to feel a little temporary [whatever] when the critics talk.
But like another artist once said; the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
So they really "have no complaint" about the critics being, uhm, critical. The work either sucks, so who cares, or it is worth talking about, so critics talking about it provides just desserts.
Hmm...upon further reflection, please ignore all my jaw-flapping (in this thread ;). I've argued myself around in a circle and I can't even make up my mind what my original point was.
Sorry to waste your time and braincells :P
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She's not a hate-monger, she's a money-monger.
"Did you ever notice that in every commercial the dad is the stupid one?"
Every commercial? No. William Shatner in those Priceline commercials isn't stupid.
Protective, yes, but not stupid. In the following Cheese commecial, just a victim of a kid's prank.
And the shaving commercial? Seems to be about him.
"That the white guy is always the burglar?"
Every burglar I see in a commercial is dressed up in a black ninja suit, and unidentifiable.
"That the mom is always the smart savior?"
There's the one where the wife (and mother) is pretending she made "scrumptious bars" of some kind, and her husband calls her out on it.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
Men die in the same way! And in much more gruesome and jovial manners. I think when this occasionally happens to women and it's considered more important is more of a reflection of our attitudes of men's lives being less important than women's than any negative view there is of women. You can't honestly believe that male video game characters do not die in heinous ways more than female characters. You don't think it's interesting that you find that totally normal for men and something that needs to be stopped for women? Women cannot be the same part of a narrative as a men unless they can actually be put in the same part. Which according to Sarkeesian and yourself they cannot be because *reasons*.
I'd like to stop using women as props in our games. I'd like to see more women as protagonists or just interesting characters in general. If there's a good reason to show a woman or a man dead in the game, that will still be okay. But when it happens, I'm going to be running through a little checklist in my head from now on. Was it necessary? Does it advance the game? Is it really a crucial bit of atmosphere, or could we do without it? Would it just be a good idea to hold off on showing this bit of violence given what we know about rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers?
Given that we know men are far more likely to be murdered or die in war would it not be a good idea to hold off on this bit of violence? You can do what you want in your games. But when you're trying to tell other people they're being bad or "insensitive" based on the games they create or like to play you actually are trying to make them feel bad so that they stop.
The worst part about her criticisms is that she actually doesn't understand the tropes she's talking about. Or she just makes up new tropes. Tropes are pretty much a necessary part of storytelling. That's why we call them tropes. They've been around since the advent of storytelling. All stories are just rehashes and variations of old ones.
This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world.
I really can't agree with that. Using her same irrational argument style you could paint that same problems onto any media. You think playwriting needs to respond to this criticism if it wants to be credible in the world? Shakespeare the misogynist! The gaming community tried to respond with the appropriate "you're going to have to do better" and explained why to her. She chose instead to focus on people making fun of her for saying stupid things. Everybody with civil disagreements went on and did their own things because she chose to ignore them and make a spectacle out of crazies instead.
This is criticism that the industry needs, and needs to respond to if it wants to be credible in the world.
Every AAA title made in the past 20 years disagrees with your assertion. Every AAA movies as well. Every AAA book. Unfortunately mass appeal appears to correlate extremely strongly with mass stupid.
Some people really aren't playing games for the story telling. Some people are. Games should not be limited to targeting only one of those groups.
You talk about trolls again like there has not been plenty attempts to discuss this in a civil manner. The reason Anita focuses on trolls is precisely so she can ignore actual criticism. She has literally ignored it all while waving her hands and screaming "look at all the hate! This is proof I'm right". A lot of us have seen this behaviour before and know that it has zero credibility.
Given that she has said that commercials depicting fathers playing with their sons are bad, and that products should not depict testosterone inspired activity, you would be wrong that she is not at war with men. I just pulled up her site and randomly picked one of her videos. It happened to be a bit about Lego. It was 13 minutes of man hate.
I'm not excusing people who make threats, but much like Jerry Springer, if you are a hate-monger, it shouldn't be a surprise when the mentally unstable make them at you.
and you are everyone, funny, your profile says loufoque.
I usually skim and ignore death threats, but I find the way he alternates between threats and endearments quite alarming.
Cheap storage VM.
Notice the whole claim of "violence" is predicated on the word "forcing," which in this case is a verb. Notice the complete lack of action though. So just from that we can see it is a false accusation; the only action taken was giving his own opinion. But you lie, and claim he took an action to "force" his opinion on you. But you're not forced to believe every opinion you hear; that is silly, and shows a misunderstanding even over the word opinion. Then you double down on the lie, by claiming the "force" not only exists, but was violent.
If the opinion is in line with reality, there is a sort of "force" involved - one is "forced" to accept the opinion is true, or deny reality itself.
However, if believing the truth causes violence to oneself, there are some important issues that need resolving. I suggest that that is good "violence".
What I don't understand is why we're down on the "Save the Princess" games when yeah, there's much worse stuff out there to be dealt with. A lot of people mention GTA, but how about games like good ol "Duke Nukem." Yes, DN3D is old, and we all know that the newer game was bad from a gameplay aspect as well, but seriously the intro scene has got to be the biggest piece of sh** even.
If you've got stuff like that out there, going after "Mario" is kinda like trying to bandage up a papercut when you've got a gunshot wound to the head/chest.
p.s. I don't agree that "save the princess" is inherently bad to the point that it should be eliminated entirely. Somebody needs to be saved, after all. It's more that it's generally lopsided in favour of helpless female "props" and male protagonists. Maybe we need more Princess Fiona types that can kick ass in their own right
How about like, having testosterone, or taking a road trip with your dad. These are things that she characterizes as evil.
Saying that testosterone is bad most certainly is insulting the whole gender.
Realy zippy? She insulted an entire gender? More like a bunch of pathetic losers took her criticism of how women are depicted in video games out of context. But yeah keep thinking that.
mellon never claimed he thinks this is a "male" problem - he pointed out that no, it isn't a "male" problem, because plenty of "male" people don't have it. That means it's not a "male" problem. It's an "uncivilized idiot with no ability to comprehend the world outside of their own prejudices" problem. The point he was making there is that the claim that "an entire gender was insulted" is false - there are several members of the gender being referred to who are not insulted at all, which means that no, the entire gender was not insulted.
If you feel personally insulted by someone saying "hey, this is a bad thing that happens, here's evidence, and I don't think it's a good thing, and this is why", then maybe you need to look at your own activities and attitudes, and perhaps reevaluate your life? Maybe do some real research about what's actually happening, and if you find that it's not what she says, present actual reasoned evidence instead of shrieking rage, rape and death threats, and hate filled tirades falsely accusing her of hating all men? And sadly, claiming "Her job is to insult men" is just hyperbole and a martyr complex speaking. If you want to counter her researched and presented facts and opinions, you're going to have to present some actual research and facts of your own, that deal with the actual claims she makes, rather than the claims that the "mens rights" idiots are pretending she made so that they can debunk something. (This is what's called a strawman - where you can't actually disprove the real claim being made, so you pretend they said something else that actually is not what they said at all, and disprove that.)
Oh noes, a content producer made a six figure lump sum for several years work - she must be criticized for not representing the games industry in its entirety, using a small set of unrepresentative examples to represent the whole - clearly she is open target for vicious criticism.
The games industry aren't content producers, never make any money and so are definitely blameless in the content they produce and should not be subject to negative criticism of any kind because so doing makes you a hate-baiter who is insulting the people that consume the content.
Her videos aren't about how gamers hate women. They are how women are commonly portrayed as sexual targets or victims in the games industry, to the point that it has a whole forest of tropes associated with it. That isn't because women are hated, it's that game designers seem to think without sexual imagery that appeals to men, they wouldn't sell as many games. Which is usually true only because big games tend to actually suck and they need to be visually appealing. There are plenty of games which are neutral or otherwise fine - but there are too many (big sellers) in which women exist only for the aesthetic appeal of men.Do you have any evidence of her saying that gamers are haters? Or have you conflated criticism of people involved in making games you enjoy as criticism of your group and therefore of you? That would be a little foolish, I think, so I hope that's not the case.
Incidentally, there are plenty of other people tackling the news, film and religious groups - so you don't have to worry that Sarkeesian is alone. I'm going to be frank - some of the ugliness that comes out of the gaming and tech industry is pretty damned ugly. If you want to see what women get for criticizing men in a religious-based discussion then you might look to Jen McCreight,Greta Christina, Aayan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie. They tend to get death and rape threats for pointing out that the religious (and irreligious) cultures are still too infused with misogyny. It's not all that different than with the game industry, only gamers have less excuse than religious people because Assassin's Creed 2 is not a central part of (most) gamers' identity.
And you're an ass-hole. No one was pushed but hey if words are threatening to you, hire a body guard.
To deranged lunatics perhaps...
No they would not. Most people would not be insulted. But thanks for defending this type of behavior.
Citation needed.
Also, "With a Standing Government" is goes against the entire point. What about people on the Internet who do not have a standing government?
But, that us not really the point. The law does not expect all of its rules to be obeyed by everyone at all times. It is illegal to run someone over with your car, but some number of people blindly run out into the street, and some percentage of them get run over by cars.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Neither do you speak for the deranged lunatic fringe...wait...maybe you do...
Translation: I don't want to hear from other people about what they don't like so I express disdain for them by casting an aspersion that they financially benefit from seeking matters on which to express complaint. Thus their complaints and criticisms aren't legitimate and can be dismissed.
It's a standard practice. You can see all the cases of the "Al Sharpton" card being played already in this thread.
Still searching for a cogent argument....keep looking you might find one...
I watched one video, and it was 13 minutes of man hate. I'm pretty sure that saying testosterone is a negative trait is in fact insulting an entire gender.
If it were *only* an issue of bad writing and not of sexism, you'd expect as many "save the prince" games as "save the princess" games.
Why would you expect as many "save the prince" games as "save the princess"?
Do you think girls dream about swooping in and saving their romantic love interest from danger, demonstrating their strength in body and character?
Do you think men and women are physical equals?
Who are you to judge someone else's lifestyle choices or sexual orientations?
A sane, rational, non sociopathic human being with the capacity to feel empathy for others? Don't pull the " YOU CAN'T JUDGE ME!!!!111one1! " crap, it's pointless, and stupid. Every human being judges every other human being they encounter, every time they encounter them. You're judging the person you're responding to by trying to claim they aren't suited to make judgements about others. And yes, if you get off on looking at mutilated, naked, dead women, I'm judging you to be unsuited to belong in civilized society. So will any other sane, rational, non sociopath. Deal with it.
Those games are perfectly legal.
There are plenty of "perfectly legal" actions which are flat out disgusting and immoral. If the only defense you can come up with for disgusting hateful behavior is that "it isn't specifically illegal!", then you're admitting that you've already lost the argument.
You are right, there is no excuse for threats of violence. That being said, she is is absolutely trying to insult men. The video I watched had her saying that commercials that show fathers playing with their sons, and father son road trips are wrong. She also says that testosterone and facial hair are negative traits. Basically the video I watched was 13 minutes of man hate.
When you make a high profile career out of hate-mongering, it should not surprise you that someone is going to behave badly towards you.
if you read more feminist writing, you will discover that feminists are just as opposed to the stereotyping of men in these commercials as they are the stereotyping of women.
True, but if you pay attention, you will discover that's typically little more than lip service, often included as a coda, or twisted to blame the victim.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You do realize that "politically correct, professionally offended people" is a stereotype, right?
Actually, no it isn't. It is a description for a group of people that actually defines group membership.
A stereotype would be to say that liberals are all politically correct, professionally offended people. You see how that works? A group defined by some other property is claimed to have another potentially unrelated property assigned to it.
For another example, there is a group of people who play online or video games, called "gamers". To then say that "gamers are misogynists" would be stereotyping.
No, you can choose to agree with the opinion, or not to.
Force requires an actual action. If you decide your only choices are to believe, or deny reality, it sounds like you already agree with the opinion, and have some cognitive dissonance because it conflicts with what you expected to believe. Notice how the other party isn't involved in any of that? Those actions are all your own.
These are not threats coming from fucking Somalia. Who do you think you're kidding?
In a large number of jurisdictions, "uttering a threat" and "uttering a death threat" are capital crimes completely separate from harassment, and as capital crimes, charges can only be filed by the authorities, and not by the affected target. This was a major case in the city I used to live in, as someone was given death threats repeatedly from the same source, reported it to the authorities, who ignored it, and then the person making the threats followed through on them. (cue rapid ass-covering on behalf of law enforcement and the psych ward of the hospital that had certified the threat-maker as stable and not a threat to anyone, even after they knew about the threats)
Markets can be sexist, making the response thereto sexist. We can maybe say that that's an example of sexism without animus or overt chauvinism, but it's still sexism.
Besides, Sarkeesian's critiques start from the proposition that video games are a creative art form, just as movies or books are. Movies, books, artworks aren't made to slavishly respond to market forces -- they're made because, to some extent, some artist or artists wanted to make them, and to make them in just the way they are.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This is a woman who has been caught lying about this kind of thing in the past. She's getting criticism, she doesn't like it, or know how to deal with it; so she makes up stories like this. She's done it before. She's been caught. Don't buy into this woman's attention whoring.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Is awful. Her "points" are silly, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a sham put on by her to get more attention.
Whose word do we have on this other than hers? Answer: Nobodys.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
And why do so many care what this woman thinks? Can't she just be ignored like every other person with an unqualified opinion?
she's hiding out with male friends, and the majority of those "authorities" that are going to protect her are male? Way to go, strong woman who doesn't need men.
Actually, no it isn't. It is a description for a group of people that actually defines group membership.
Which is pretty much a stereotype. With the caveat that the definition may or may not be accurate.
But really, stereotypes are about doing exactly that. Unless you're talking about the printing technique.
A stereotype would be to say that liberals are all politically correct, professionally offended people. You see how that works? A group defined by some other property is claimed to have another potentially unrelated property assigned to it.
And your stereotype is that the people controlling the world is a group of "politically correct, professionally offended people" whose characteristics you have previously described.
You've categorized them, by ascribing to them a certain set of characteristics.
It's a pretty common stereotype. A stereotypical one you might say.
Considering how the cops are behaving lately (see Fergusson), anything they tell me, I'll tend to not believe, and not do unless they're pointing a gun up my nose. (And even then, only until I can get the hell away from them. Cops aren't your friend anymore man.)
I have yet to hear a SINGLE rational objection to her critique of video game genres. Lets's play a game, called 'spot the hate-mongering'. Which is it:
1) "Women are often portrayed as helpless and passive in common video game tropes."
2) "Jews are filthy money grubbers, who are out to take over the world."
Now, one of theses statements is ignorant, racist hate-mongering. The other is a neutral observation of a fact. I don't expect you to correctly identify the one that is actual hate-mongering because of your prior posting, but for the sake of the game, give it a try.
Calling what she is saying 'hate-mongering', illustrates that you are TOO FUCKING STUPID TO BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK EVER AGAIN. So, please for the general quality of life on the planet earth, run your balls through a meat grinder and french kiss a wood chipper.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Video game makers professionally do everything as "lazy and stupid" as they can get away with and still sell games.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I'm still fuzzy on what constitutes a "credible" vs. non-credible death threat. Specific details?
Perhaps you were looking for a legal definition of the term?
As Ms Sarkeesian lives in California, State Penal Code Section 422 would apply:
(a) Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat, even if there is no intent of actually carrying it out, which, on its face and under the circumstances in which it is made, is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to convey to the person threatened, a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat, and thereby causes that person reasonably to be in sustained fear for his or her own safety or for his or her immediate family's safety, shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.
If you ever find a woman who is attracted to you watch her body language.
She will arch her back and stick her butt out. Men take on different poses to send the same signal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well if Al and Jessie were not such great examples of this the world would be a better place.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"I disagree with your argument, your points are stupid and you are an idiot" is not the same as "I am going to come over to to your house and rape you and kill you."
..in some circles, actually, it is.
And what is the term we use to refer to a member of those circles? "The Defendant".
If somebody threatens you and leaves it ambiguous, then that is a credible threat; it leaves you having to act as if it might happen, because you're left thinking it might happen.
There is actually a lot of really aware and sophisticated legal history of this stuff, because of organized crime taking such threats to the level of an art. "You don't want `something' to happen to your family, do you? Nobody wants anything bad to happen to their family. When little Billy goes to Famousname Elementary School every morning, you want him to know he is safe. When he takes his lunch break at 11:35am, you want to know he is safe." That is totally actionable as a threat, especially in the context of trying to coerce a behavior, like, "Big John doesn't like it when you write bad things about him in the paper. Then his mind is all full of bad things."
Interestingly, the same is true if you want to make a joke about yelling fire in a theater while actually in a theater; it is ill advised, and it is your responsibility to make sure that it is clearly a joke. (to a normal, reasonable person like the other real people in the theater) If it is ambiguous, and people are left to think, "wait, is there really a fire?!" then all it will take is one of them running for the door and you "yelled fire in a theater."
A similar thing with threats; if you tell the joke to somebody who is NOT the target of the threat, that is pretty safe. Even if they can't tell if you're joking. But if you want to tell the target of the threat the... threat... it is up to you to make it clear as a joke if it is indeed a joke.
Did Brendan Eich receive credible death threats? I guess he might have, but I didn't hear about it and wouldn't condone it.
Did anybody offer Anita Sarkeesian a job as the head of Firefox? No, not at all.
With Eich, the debate was over a sort of flash-boycott over him becoming CEO, not his continued breathing.
By that standard the markets for just about anything mostly bought by woman are equally 'sexist', whatever that means.
Is the market for 'butt hurt' sexist because it plays to the prejudices of women?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
At the end of the day, whether or not you play video games is a choice. You have the right to decide not to buy a game. You have the right not to agree with the context or subject of the game. What Anita does is assume that since she's offended, that the games have no right to exist.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I thought death threats were the way communities expressed extreme displeasure.
like when Facebook bought oculus rift.
like when someone made a League of Legends fan film.
like when the popular Anime "Attack on Titan" had generals that looked like WW2 generals.
like when George Lucas released The Phantom Menace.
like when Jack Thompson was trying to ban violent video games.
like when Kristen Stewart cheated on her that other actor that she was in those movies with.
like when an actress was in the Harry Potter movies.
like when Amanda Abbington was in Sherlock.
and this list could go on for a while.
Testosterone is also the hormone that makes women horny. So she is saying only frigid bitches are not evil.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And yes, if you get off on looking at mutilated, naked, dead women, I'm judging you to be unsuited to belong in civilized society.
Unless, apparently, that society is Japanese. Those cats are into some seriously weird porn, a lot of which qualifies for what you refer as material that only an insane, irrational sociopath would enjoy. Aside tentacle porn (never seen it, but know it's a big part of their culture), but I remember a manga called Crying Freeman that had one or two rather graphic depictions of brutal rape/murders.
Personally, I found those scenes disturbing, yet I don't consider the Japanese insane sociopaths. A little twisted, maybe, but not insane.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And dead?
When Jack Thompson brought up all the killing in video games and said they were bad he was run out of town. Slashdot and the whole of the gaming community rejoiced. But now that the focus is on women it is all of a sudden something worth considering.
That's some revisionist history there. Jack Thompson wasn't run out of town because he opposed violent games. He was run out of the legal profession because his conduct was unprofessional, uncivil, and harassing towards opposing counsel and judges. He made unsubstantiated claims against others, outright lies, and never responded to questions asked by courts.
For example, in Strickland v Sony, he was granted temporary permission to practice law (pro hac vice) in Alabama as his licensed state is Florida. Normally this is a procedural formality when a lawyer wants to take on a case in another state. Part of the pro hac vice application to the Alabama Bar specifically asks if the lawyer has had any disbarment proceedings (question 8) and any suspension proceedings (question 9) and to list them. Thompson responded "None, but please see the attached letter" to both. In the attached letter, Thompson described how he had been reprimanded 13 years earlier. Thompson however failed to mention that the case 13 years ago involved disbarment and suspension proceedings. Because of this and Thompson violated a gag order, Judge Moore revoked Thompson's pro hac vice status; he was no longer on the case. Despite being thrown off the case, Thompson continue to send emails and faxes to the court about the case for at least 2 years afterwards.
During that same case, Thompson harassed the lawyers of Blank Rome, the law firm representing Sony. Now it's one thing to oppose counsel in court but he attacked the lawyers including the gender of one of the attorneys. He also accused the law firm of participating in pornography and killing of police officers.
In an unrelated case, Thompson went after Al Cardenas, a partner in Tew Cardenas by accusing him of pornography, racketeering, and other criminal activity. What was the relationship between Cardenas and Thompson? As crazy as it sounds, almost none. Beasley Broadcasting Group owned a number of radio stations, and Thompson had issues with their programming. Normally their lawyer Norman Kent dealt with Thompson, and his dealings led to the point where Kent sued and won $50,000 from Thompson for defamation. Beasley also had Tew Cardenas on their retainer for other legal matters. Kent and Tew Cardenas had no relationship other than they represented the same company on different legal matters. Al Cardenas was a partner in Tew Cardenas but did not work the Beasley account. The attacks on Al Cardenas started one week when Norman Kent was out of town and did not respond to Thompson's letters and demands immediately.
These are the reason why Thompson was run out of the legal profession; not his stand, but his conduct.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The reason Anita focuses on trolls is precisely so she can ignore actual criticism.
What actual criticism? Can you find it in the surging ocean of troll-spewed filth? If you get one intelligent comment, and twelve thousand screaming threats of rape, death, and dismemberment, what are you going to focus on? When they include things like your home address and your parents address, and vivid descriptions of the specific rape and dismemberment they're going to inflict?
Try actually being honest here, I know it's a stretch, but just try.
Are you going to shrug it off and ignore the weirdos walking down the street, or are you going to think "Gee, someone who just stated that they know where I live and work just made horrible threats against me and my family, and now there are people I don't know wandering around, I wonder which one of those people is one of them, planning to actually follow through on it?" Since the people who are making the (very feeble, and poorly examined) arguments against what she's saying are generally also either pretending those threats don't exist, or in some cases actively encouraging them, is it any wonder she's focusing on the immediate threat to survival?
The arguments you yourself make against what she's saying? She's already debunked those arguments in her videos. Yes, all of them. Especially the "men die in the same way" argument.
Sounds like in practice all the victim has to say is "I took it seriously" no matter how obviously it wasn't serious in order to win in court. Partially because of "tough on crime" but hey.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
MRA stands for Men's Rights Advocates. Be warned that as reasonable as that might sound, often the actual examples of these people, particularly online, are not so reasonable.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
He got more vitriol form this "community" than Sarkeesian could ever hope for for saying basically the exact same things. That was probably due to ageism, right?
Yes, a lot of men die in games. It's not really up for debate.
But when women die in games, they die as props or as a kind of sick joke (and it's usually a really unintentional joke, honestly). It's more a reflection of our attitudes at large about what a woman is worth than something solely limited to games per se, but that doesn't make it okay to have it in games.
I think that this is about what a woman is worth, but I'm not sure if it's the way you mean to imply. We, as a society, put more value on the lives and bodily integrity of women than of men. That's why we sentence men more harshly than women for the same crimes, why we spend more money on researching female-specific versus male-specific diseases, and why we're more concerned with violence against women when violence against men is more common. And it's why, when a man dies in a game, it's considered meaningless; and when a woman dies in a game, it's considered meaningful.
To have laws is one thing. To apply them... well, that's a different thing.
Some countries are almost purely reactive, meaning that if it hasn't happened, they don't give a shit.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Or the world might be a better place if there wasn't such an investment in ridiculing those who protest.
Been done to those who speak for minorities, unions, religious groups and more.
I'm sure it's at least as old as the Bible. The Old Testament, not the New.
It is evident from your posts here that you have some personal issues to deal with.
It is NOT normal to lash out with a vitriolic tirade of graphic sexual threats under ANY circumstances, much less being "provoked" by inflammatory speech. It is sick, and it should not be tolerated or even expected in a peaceful civilized society.
You don't let a thief go or belittle the victim because the door wasn't locked at the time or there were no bars on the windows so a break in should have been expected. You don't defend a rapist and blame a rape victim because she wore a bikini to the beach on a hot day. And yoy certainly don't threaten someone with grave injury or death because what they say offends you. Actions of this sort are those of sick, twisted people...not always evil people as they could be victims of their upbringings, but sick people who need help nonetheless.
Watch your mouth, or I shall crush you with the power of my MIND
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Dreamworks, too - plenty of strong female protagonists in How to Train Your Dragon.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yes, I know. But let's be honest. This is idiots(and yes, they're idiots) trying to justify people being awful on account of the fact that people are terrible.
I don't know if I could come up with a more self-fulfilling prophecy than that if I tried.
It's like "murder happens, so murderers aren't so bad". How far up your own ass you need to be before you start seeing that as good logic, it just invites contempt.
You are right, there is no excuse for threats of violence. That being said, she is is absolutely trying to insult men. The video I watched had her saying that commercials that show fathers playing with their sons, and father son road trips are wrong. She also says that testosterone and facial hair are negative traits. Basically the video I watched was 13 minutes of man hate.
Link, perchance? Please and thank you.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Force requires an actual action. If you decide your only choices are to believe, or deny reality, it sounds like you already agree with the opinion, and have some cognitive dissonance because it conflicts with what you expected to believe. Notice how the other party isn't involved in any of that? Those actions are all your own.
I think we're talking about force in different senses. You're talking about the opinion holder forcing someone to agree with him.
I'm talking about the opinion hearer feeling a force to agree with the opinion because it's true (reflects reality). The conflict involved in cognitive dissonance has a type of force exerted by the two competing beliefs.
However, it is unfair to blame that "violence" (cog. dissonance) on the person who shared the opinion; the problem is the original expected belief that contradicted reality, and reality will correct that sooner or later.
Hmm, interesting. That's not how I interpret the phrase "It's reasonable to expect..." at all. I interpret it as "Reason tells me that a certain outcome is the most likely to occur." I think we should take a poll to see which is the most common interpretation.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
What I am saying is that the world is controlled right now by politically correct, professionally offended people. Everything everywhere is a stereotype.
You do realize that "politically correct, professionally offended people" is a stereotype, right?
Actually it's not, because it's not "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing."
Now, claiming that the people who control the world are all members of the aforementioned group? That is stereotyping.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You know, I think it's pretty fucking hysterical that 'social justice warrior' has become a perjorative. Yes, fighting for social justice is the WORST THING EVAH!
In fairness, much of the chagrin towards people who self-label themselves in such a manner is a result of their apparently contradictory behavior.
Consider that many people here consider "Christian" to be a perjorative, even though the classical meaning of the term implies a person who lives by the teachings of a man once known as the Prince of Peace.
Same shit, different flies.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And your comment about censorship is correct. Anita practices it, instead of allowing comments on her videos she denies them.
Censorship is practiced only by governments. What she is doing is called "moderation",
A duck is a duck, regardless of whether you choose to call it a fowl or a mallard.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A death threat isn't credible until an actual attempt has been made.
Someone making death threats is a fucking deranged idiotic imbecile. You have to be a fucking deranged idiotic imbecile to do that. You also have to be a fucking deranged idiotic imbecile to kill someone. So how is someone being threatened, or a police officer trying to help, distinguish between the one fucking deranged idiotic imbecile and the other? You can't.
Every death threat is credible.
So you're trying to pretend that these screaming asses shouting death and rape threats and things like "all you cunts deserve to die" are defending the honor of women? Wow, you're pretty damn delusional.
Come on, we all know why it is. Just fucking tell them. Tell them that it's their first instinct because they don't want to believe that they could be part of the problem,
Or...or....people are just fucking tired of EVERYTHING having to be about narrative/progress/social justice, and we just want people who have made their lives about such things to get some kind of new hobby/career, and stop destroying everything in the name of ideology.
I would like to see a full investigation. If it's true, the person needs to be outed and prosecuted. If it's publicity...well, then she needs to be outed. I don't support her work, and personally feel she's a con-artist. Still, no one deserves to be harassed.
Thanks, I thought it was funny, too. Wasn't looking for up mods, but I think whoever modded down must be having a bad day.
Whatever. His conduct and his statements were not that of a reasonable person. It's one thing to argue against violence in video games but his tirades includes personal attacks on everyone. For example when Thompson reneged on a $10,000 donation to charity, Penny Arcade emailed him about it and called him out on his hypocrisy. So they donated the money themselves as Thompson said he wouldn't do it. Thompson then sent a complaint to the Seattle police to arrest the members for "extortion".
Actually, Jack Thompson is the worst person that the movement could use as a spokesperson.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Really? If I go on my favorite message board and make derogatory comments at the owner and then my comments are deleted it's censorship? Really?
If you were to go to the YDL forum and flame YDL in every thread there and make huge posts about how changing one's hosts files would protect one from the evil of YDL, when people are wanting help....and if I had deleted your comments and banned you...that's censorship?
That all has nothing to do with his arguments against video games nor the abuse he got because of those arguments.
Well, she did kind of cherry-pick the most violent examples. I also doubt she'll really explore the side of gaming that is positive towards women, because she has a specific agenda...and it's not the betterment of the gaming community. That being said, she doesn't deserve threats and harassment; no one does. It's sad that her critics can't have a rational debate, and resort to violent threats. I'm hoping there's a full investigation. I think it's become easier and more acceptable to be a troll. Personally, I think more forums need to push for a cleaner community. If you can't discuss a game's merits and failures in an adult manner, you should be banned permanently with your IP blocked. There were portions of her latest video that I did agree with. Sadly, she followed the typical failure of modern journalism. Instead of showing both sides of the issue, highlighting her stance, and allowing the reader/viewer to choose their own, she opted to only show one side. I could describe a cup of coffee as being brown, staining your teeth, and having sediment floating in it. While that description is correct, it only shows one half of the issue. She’s transferring the burden to the viewer, and I feel that is wrong. By repetitively showing the most extreme examples of violence towards women, she’s able to whip her audience into a frenzy and polarize the situation. Talking about the “violence in games” as a general concept, she’s pushing the assumption that all games are violent and that the industry is ruled by misogyny and patriarchy. Granted, there is misogyny in the industry, so she does have valid points. I just have problems with how she’s presenting it.
You haven't offended me, and I don't think you're scum. Honestly, it's a bummer you're worried about being seen that way. I'm a man, and I'm seeing a lot of the same articles/tweets/etc you are. They don't make me feel guilty though, they make me outraged. I don't identify with the trolls here. When I hear about them it's like hearing about radical jihadism. Radical jihadists are usually young men, but that doesn't put me in their camp. So why would I feel guilty? I feel outraged because we're doing something about radical jihadism (regardless of our effectiveness), but I don't see what's being done about these online harassment campaigns.
As far as over sensitivity goes, I haven't seen much of that, but it makes sense to me. It's probably happening. I certainly wouldn't want to be accidentally associated with misogynists. As a member of the privileged (male) class, it's easy to take the privilege for granted. The default assumption isn't that you're pro-feminism, so you've got to prove it a bit. If that's inconvenient, irritating, or boring, sorry about that. If the misogynists vanished (or diminished to, say, American neo-Nazi levels), then we could all get on with things and relax about this issue a bit.
I'm worried that I see a bit of false equivalence* in your comparison of the feminist vs misogynist divide. Let's be clear here, there's cultural debate and shifting norms and people are speaking out against certain parts of our society. All of that is true, but only one side of the issue is engaging in a scorched earth hate campaign. It's like the Pro-Life people who bomb abortion clinics or the KKK burning a black church. It doesn't matter where you stand on issues of reproduction or race, we all need to condemn those behaviors. Really there are never 2 sides. There are always many sides. Still, I think we should all try not to be on the side of the hate crimes.
I don't have the solution, but we need to make the internet a safer place for women. It's the right thing to do, and we'll all be richer for it.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
hitler also did a lot of videos with opinions.
I don't think Sarkeesian is hitler though. Lot of things aren't hitler. There are a lot of actual brutal dictators that fall way short of hitler as far as fucked up.
and then Sarkeesian isn't a dictator, she never murdered anyone or sent anyone to jail.
She's obnoxious, thats it. Death threats are a little overboard, but some trolling.
Well shit, this is the internet.
Her complaint is rather that the brutal depictions of violence against woman in video games always seem to have clear sexual subcontext, while violence against men does not.
Which I think is a valid point, but then isn't this also the case in real life? So she's complaining that the games accurately reflect how things are (in many cases that she's referring to, in fact, to draw attention to that problem even)?
Because it's sexist to respond to market forces?
It may be, when the market forces basically demand sexism.
It's more like twelve thousand intelligent comments for every "threat". But keep waving your hands and ignoring criticism. I never said ignore threats; just don't pretend that the only criticism you've received are threats from "males defending their male privilege".
She hasn't debunked anything. Her videos are appallingly biased and the lack of objectivity in them makes them totally useless. The problem with her kind of "analysis" is that it can be used to legitimize any bias you could possibly dream of. I would love to hear how she debunks the fact that a million male characters die for every female character pretty much proves that deaths in videogames are not designed to "punish women's sexuality".
> she's received credible death threats
That's highly debatable. The screenshot she posted with those tweets look more like PR fabrication. It's not like this clique of "social justice warriors" lied before for attention ... oh wait, they did.
Some games feature men in interesting outfits that pretty clearly seem to be window dressing for the women. The one that comes to mind is Monster Hunter 3 Tri, no those men in "Moga Village" aren't beefcake at all, really...
I enjoy pulp fiction as much as anyone. Asking it to be better pulp fiction doesn't mean I'm asking it to become War and Peace.
Because there have been so many instances of these SJW types lying and cheating to further their cause: faking getting doxxed, viciously attacking people that don't agree with them, lying about getting mugged for donations, having sex for publicity, attacking people who objectively sum up facts and so on and so forth. The only thing indicative of a problem is that this group of people still has any credibility left.
Trying to frame this as "she's only getting attacked because she's a woman" is disingenious and a pretty good example of the underhanded way some people try to shut down discussions.
Almost 100% are purchased by a woman, so I'm not sure how guys giving women bigger breasts in a video game are somehow misogynists.
But then you probably hate all of the women getting boob jobs, but that's okay, right.
"undisputed skew in the gender of gamers"? Are you really still trying to flog that dead horse?
Too bad for you that the Entertainment Software Association (for one) disputes the hell out of that tired old pile of bull.
FYI, 48% of gamers are female. http://www.theesa.com/facts/ga...
rape statistics and the deaths of sex workers
...caused by SJWs who further criminalize prostitution, because legal prostitution "sends the wrong message about women's value" and it's better for the whores to be raped to death. A useful idiot like you is begging for a fabricated sexual harassment allegation, enjoy your early retirement
Yes yes, the latest wave of feminsim is all about censorship. "Shut down everyone who disagrees with us." We've seen that often enough in the last few days.
That's a good reason to remain anonymous: SJW types are radicals who viciously attack anyone whose opinion they don't like.
What we don't know:
- Is this real or fabricated?
- If real, is the person behind it a male?
etc, etc, etc
Never heard of Anita before and I will promptly forget her name now.
Owww, owwie, ohhh, ouch, umph, it hurts...
No, can't see it. If we remove stereotypes, there would not be a lot of fiction left in the world.
And you can bet that if Donald Trump (an actual money-monger) got this level of threats and abuse leveled at him, the police would actually be out there arresting people. Because it's just some "hysterical woman", (and even worse, she's not white, or rich despite your claim to the contrary) it will be ignored until there's an incident, and then they'll shrug and say "well, you can never predict these sort of things, where was clearly no sign that anyone would attack her!"
A lady in Lincoln Nebraska made up worse, and later admitted to it. She went so far as to fake a kidnapping and torture. She cut slurs into herself and claimed she was tied up for being gay.
http://journalstar.com/news/lo...
I haven't watched this gal's TED talk or any of her videos. I really don't see why anyone would get mad about a person making an opinionated video anyway. Maybe that is why I find it hard to believe that people are making crazy threats against the author of some opinionated video.
From personal experience being targeted by a pathological liar, I can say that some women really do make up crazy crap to get attention. It blows up in their face sometimes, like the one who targeted myself and a few of my high school buddies, and the woman in Lincoln. Sometimes they get away with it. Unfortunately there is actual violence happening too. Every claim should be treated as real until disproved, and if the claims were bogus, the liar should be punished. If the claims are true then obviously the bad guys deserve punishment. The one who made false police reports about myself received no punishment, but I'm content that karma will reward her throughout her life. My friends and I were the victims, and did nothing wrong. We told everyone about what happened so she will never live it down.
Also from the tweets "I want to drink blood from your C***" Seriously, who says that? I am inclined to think its a fake. But it would be best to actually prove it, or catch a seriously dumb and violent nut.
Men die in the same way! And in much more gruesome and jovial manners. I think when this occasionally happens to women and it's considered more important is more of a reflection of our attitudes of men's lives being less important than women's than any negative view there is of women. You can't honestly believe that male video game characters do not die in heinous ways more than female characters. You don't think it's interesting that you find that totally normal for men and something that needs to be stopped for women? Women cannot be the same part of a narrative as a men unless they can actually be put in the same part. Which according to Sarkeesian and yourself they cannot be because *reasons*.
So if you watch the latest video, she does touch on that somewhat. I'm going to assume you haven't (or at least, that someone reading our discussion hasn't) and point out the salient bits.
First, that when men die in these games, they're generally an antagonist or actor that actually has a measure of agency. They're killed because they were involved in a conflict that revolved around more than just their gender or their victimhood.
Second, part of why you're gruesomely killing the men in these games is often justified by the violence that the men are (arbitrarily) enacting against women. The women die as props to show off how bad someone is in a wild caricature of evil. She's right in pointing out that violence against women is most often perpetrated by 'normal' men. A woman is FAR more likely to be raped by a friend or family member than a random bad man on the street.
Third, men die in ways that aren't overtly sexualised. Women die on beds in lingerie with their legs spread and their tits hanging out. They're still T&A even after brutal violence.
She's right that sexual and sexualised violence is used as a lazy shortcut to show how bad a person is. You can instantly justify murdering someone brutally (to bring it back to your complaint) if we've just shown them as hitting a woman or raping them. It's not the nicest cycle.
Given that we know men are far more likely to be murdered or die in war would it not be a good idea to hold off on this bit of violence? You can do what you want in your games. But when you're trying to tell other people they're being bad or "insensitive" based on the games they create or like to play you actually are trying to make them feel bad so that they stop.
The worst part about her criticisms is that she actually doesn't understand the tropes she's talking about. Or she just makes up new tropes. Tropes are pretty much a necessary part of storytelling. That's why we call them tropes. They've been around since the advent of storytelling. All stories are just rehashes and variations of old ones.
I don't think people have to stop doing anything. But I think they DO need to think about what they're doing, understand whether it's appropriate narratively, and make those decisions with open eyes. Speaking personally, for the first ten years of my career, I definitely didn't think about this stuff as much. Maybe I would've spoken up more about certain things if I had.
I understand that the word 'trope' actually has several meanings, but in this context, she's using the word 'trope' as 'cliché'. You DON'T need to write something that relies heavily on clichés. At the very least, you don't need to write something that heavily relies on the sorts of tropes that may be damaging to our ideas about women.
I really can't agree with that. Using her same irrational argument style you could paint that same problems onto any media. You think playwriting needs to respond to this criticism if it wants to be credible in the world? Shakespeare the misogynist! The gaming community tried to respond with the appropriate "you're going to have to do better" and explained why to her. She chose instead to focus on people making fun of her for saying stupid things. Everybody with
And what the hell is wrong with BIG BOOBS? I like BIG BOOBS. I don't feel ashamed about that. Nearly 100% of boob jobs are received by women, are they misogynistic cause they also like BIG BOOBS?
She is a hater and you are a hater. I love BIG BOOBS and love always is stronger than hate.
I'm pretty sure they're purple and green.
Did I mention I've not played any consoles after the Atari 2600?
Ironically, having read War and Peace myself, I wouldn't say it's an overly good example of feminist literature as most of the female characters IIRC are mostly concerned about their husbands.
Having said that, I wholeheartedly agree. A lot of TV these days is too dark for me to watch much of in a single sitting.
Pulp fiction that is aware of its pulpiness isn't the problem; fiction that is unaware of its pulpiness and the reasons for it is the proposed problem.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Both her and Zoe Quinn have lied about harrasment and being "attacked" in the past to drum up massive amounts of free press.
Whos to say this is even true? Its awfully convenient that right as the argument against her sensationalist agenda and misrepresentation starts to gain traction everyone gets distracted from the issue with this most likely bullshit story.
If this were true does that mean she is now going into hiding forever? If someone actually wanted to do her harm they could easily just wait till she's home. Any sensible person wouldn't have sent this story to every publication under the sun until the threat had past.
Instead she runs and hides and tells everyone she's done so? Wouldn't it make more sense for this supposed threat to be carried out thinking she was home so they could be arrested? Nope!
Its propaganda.
I watched that video because you mentioned it and you appear to have failed to understand the central point. It's not "commercials depicting fathers playing with their sons are bad", it's only having "commercials depicting fathers playing with their sons" alienates girls from playing with Lego by emphasizing that it is a "boy" toy. Additionally, it not "that products should not depict testosterone inspired activity", it's that Lego shifted their commericals from creative activity which has larger cross-gender appeal to boy-centered play themes like blowing stuff up, which again, alienates girls from playing with Lego because that type of play is generally les appealing to girls. In both cases, it is not the advertising that is the problem, it's the fact that there is no counterbalancing advertising. There are no mother and son, father and daughter or mother and daughter commericals, and there is no marketing focus on play that appeals to be both boys and girls or focus on play that specifically apeals to girls. She is not critcising the toy or even the company really, except that she is pointing out that for two decades, they made marketing campaigns aimed at boys and only boys.
And for that, you appear to believe that she and her family deserve to be threatened with rape, torture and execution...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
He can't, the stuff he claims is false, and he's referring to the Lego video part 2 on the site linked from the article description. I watched the video and can recognize enough of the real video through his darkly twisted lense.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Anyone who values freedom will fight her (and you) to the death.
Ahh, so because I didn't disagree with her and think that there are indeed flaws in the way women are depicted, I deserve to die too? Do you even have a clue as to how childish and overly dramatic you appear with comments like that?
every problem is a nail.
If the only tool you have is outrage about mistreatment, every problem is mistreatment to be outraged about.
Seems interesting that all those who can only make a name for themselves by pointing out injustices, always seem to find it?
and those most outraged, always seem to find the worst case to be outraged about?
for without it, they'd have nothing. No drama, no recognition. No ad support. No speaking engagements. Definitely no press mention.
If this were some oil exec pointing out the health benefits of oil spills, his "cause" would be ignored because of blatant self interest.
tragedy miners, victims, the outraged however, are rarely questioned. No such thing as drama queens, Munchausen by proxy, or White Kights/Ladies according to the defenders.
Skepticism needs to go both ways, or it's merely suspicion at best and deliberate sabotage at worst.
Literacy, get some!
I found her Youtube channel about a month ago and watched a number of her videos. They were informative, entertaining, and well written. I didn't see anything that I disagreed with and thought she was spot on in many cases. It is ridiculous that she has to suffer abuse for just stating the obvious, that there flaws with the way women are depicted in media and video games.
Anyone who gets so defensive about a video game they didn't develop or take any part in really needs to re-evaluate their mental health.
Wait.. are you talking about Anita Sarkeesian getting defensive about a video game she didn't develop or take any part in? Or, are you referencing some other person or instance that you forgot to include in your comment?
I have yet to hear a SINGLE rational objection to her critique of video game genres.
Thunderf00t made videos full of them. So many of her points were absolutely ridiculous. You can't have meaningful relationships with random background characters who are women? You don't say! But you can't do that with the male background characters, either.
Which video was that? I've watched a couple now, and while I have issue with some of the logical leaps & context of the examples provided, the overall message seems reasonable.
You must ask yourself honestly : Why is it, when faced with stories like this, is your first instinct to claim that the woman lied or made it up?
Because I watched her presentation about the death threats she was receiving and the best example she could come up with was uncredible echo-chamber shouting from 4chan.
I have no doubt that she receives hate mail. She makes a living by criticizing popular entertainment. However I also do not believe she has made anyone mad enough to pose a real threat to her life or property. And I don't subscribe to the assumption that because she's female she's easily frightened by obviously on-credible threats (like the ones from her presentation).
That leaves the most likely explanation as she's making a mountain out of a mole hill for the publicity (it apparently works as her presentation regarding her hate mail and the surrounding publicity is the only reason I know who she is).
Now, if the news was that she's been taken into protective custody by the police, that the police have begin an investigation to track down the perpetrator of a specific threat against her, or that she was actually attacked or harassed prompting the move. Then it'd be a different story. When it's juts her saying she received threats and decided to move, well I'd be more inclined to believe she was actually frightened if she didn't stand to gain so much form the publicity.
You haven't watched her videos then. She is very clear that men are bad. Even going so far as to say that men playing with blocks with their son is proof of men being bad. She also decries the evils of razor stubble and testosterone as more evidence of the evil that is man.
And for that, you appear to believe that she and her family deserve to be threatened with rape, torture and execution...
I like how you completely ignored his final sentence.
How about we agree that stereotypes of any sort in fiction hurt people, and not let that be a fucking excuse for this case of stereotyping real people.
Is that a stereotype about stereotypes hurting people? How about you put a band-aid on your hurt, use your own free will to decide if you want to a part of a stereotype, or apart from it, and not get all butthurt about stereotypes that don't apply to you?
<out of breath>
Here is where I offer an apology to those readers who are not actually butthurt, but are offended that I stereotyped them as being so. Want a fucking band-aid?
Is there any evidence that this abuse is anything more than the antics of a single, obsessive, autistic, 15 year old boy?
Just wanted to get some basic facts established before considering this story to be anything more than a quarrel between fools.
Yeah, sue random people who make death threats. Before long, the courts will be full of people who made fake death threats over the Internet and beyond.
What I am saying is that the world is controlled right now by politically correct, professionally offended people.
Yes. The Conservatives fucked it up for everyone.
Learn to love Alaska
Are you seriously trying prove your point with a false dichotomy and then calling me stupid? Really?
How about her call to Lego to remove any facial hair from their characters because showing men with facial hair is bad.
How about her call for companies not to show men playing with their sons because that is bad.
How about her claim that testosterone is bad.
http://www.feministfrequency.c...
Because pointing out a hate-monger is darkly twisted now, eh?
I'm not so sure I would take that wager.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Legality has little to do with it.
If you push people, it is expected that they will act, regardless of the law preventing certain actions.
You'd be foolish to provoke people.
Nobody is pushing anybody. If you are offended by reasoned words, then respond with reasoned words. You may have this idea in your head that bringing guns to a reasoned debate always wins, but bigger economies have meant more guns for a while, and big economies are built with reasoned words.
Me: I'm not excusing people who make threats
You: you appear to believe that she and her family deserve to be threatened with rape, torture and execution
I suspect that it isn't a reading comprehension problem, but that you are so on board with "men are evil" that you ignore anything said that doesn't fit your women are victims, men are evil narrative.
Compare: (male characters as victims of brutality / total male characters) with (female characters as victims of brutality / total female characters).
The claim is the latter ratio is much higher than the former.
It's a pretty well-done parody of a fairly egregious poster:
Avengers Parody Pose poster
(Hulk is the most over the top, and thus, my favorite)
That being said, I never say the poster on the left which is being parodied. The posters for the movie had a similar layout, but different body poses. The two I've seen the most either featured Black Widow in a frontal shot (kindof a bland pose compared to everyone else...) and one where she's facing left but head slightly turned to viewer. Butt is covered up by Thor's hammer in that one.
What force did she use? I don't understand.
Learn to love Alaska
"IF" is a powerful word, and can trick one into presuming that the predicate is true. Have you actually watched any of her videos?
Finding God in a Dog
Is that a fact?
The death threats are not credible. They're also obviously orchestrated by someone in her circles. This is how these people work.
You keep on saying this. Could you perhaps enlighten the thread with a link to the video wherein she makes this claim?
Credible threats? Coming from the internet video-gaming community? If all threats made under the influence of nerd-rage were credible, there wouldn't be a man or woman alive anywhere on the planet. Sarkeesian is a damsel in distress, but the primary issue is that dissenting opinions are being actively suppressed via threat deletion on sites like r/Gaming and even 4chan. Internet archive entries are being deleted without question because the cry of misogyny has been made, etc. That's the issue. Censorship in gaming due to PC. This is the prohibition of our era - you are taking the one thing that keeps lots of us nerds complacentÃ"escapism. It is denying and publicly humiliating all of the quests that gamers over the years have made and connected with. "You enjoyed saving the princess in Super Mario World? You disgusting pig, how dare you? You haven't even considered the perspective of women whothroughouttheyearshavebeensoopprressed Ican'tbelievethatyouwouldbesooppressivetomedoyouevencareaboutmyfeelings lookatthisrapewhenmarioriskshislifetosaveyou ASIFINEEDEDTOBESAVEDIAMNOTAVICTIM IAMSTRONGHELPMEGAMINGCOMMUNITYHELP" Of course there are people who are angry. Half of us choose video games because we don't want to DEAL with this kind of shit. >inb4 well this is reality, get used to it. You can't sit there and enjoy what you enjoy if it triggers me. Well, misogyny, bigotry, and *anger* are reality, so get used to it. This is not a "tech" issue. It happens all over the world, over every conceivable topic. It is part of the human condition. All Sarkeesian is doing is profiting off of it - she is a twitter-war profiteer.
FYI, 48% of gamers are female. http://www.theesa.com/facts/ga... [theesa.com]
Does it break down by genre anywhere? My mom loves to play Solitaire, Solatile (sortof like Mahjong ), and some other similar types of puzzle games, but as much as I love my mother, I'm not sure I'd classify her as a "gamer," and certainly not an a multiplayer gamer.
Police report or it didn't happen.
This is what she actually says - and is the only mention of testosterone in the entire thirteen minutes: (from her transcript)
They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat, and create universally appealing sets that include occupations and adventure scenarios for children of all genders.
I am struggling to understand how this is suggesting that testosterone is evil. She additionally - and correctly - notes how women do not appear in their advertising playing with lego. She most certainly does not suggest that fathers and sons playing together is a bad thing - she instead suggests that there is a very strong gender bias going on in the Lego world. And she is right of course - with an 18-1 ratio of male to female minifigs I fail to see how any other conclusion could be reached.
There was one thing that annoyed me though - she kept on referring to Lego as 'Legos'. Americans. Please stop doing this.
Maybe people should get over it and be happy.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I AM NOT GOING TO RAPE YOU
is this much different from movies ?
charlie chaplin, rambo, batman... or just take any random set of movies and compare the male vs female set. men are ok bo get hurt or killed.
i suspect part of that might be rooted in the "disposability" of men - a woman is valuable, it's nine months until the offspring. males have been disposable - wars, exploration, scientific experiments...
so we have popculture products killing males left and right and we perceive that as being ok - because it is ok as proven by genetics and history
Rich
First, your math is way off if you've got your comment/threat numbers that far backwards.
Second, if you actually watch her videos, instead of just the clips of them interspersed through thunderf00t's angry ranting, you'll find that yes, she actually does debunk them, and covers the "numbers game" you're taking about with your "a million male characters die for every female character" thing. "Random ninja being shot/chopped down in a fight" is not the same thing as "mostly naked woman splayed out on a bed with a knife in her as a prop". Those random ninjas? They're wearing masks and could just as easily be very flat chested women. Yes, that's sarcasm. I'm not suggesting that anyone actually believes that they're female, but really, there's no way of knowing, and their gender isn't related to why they're being killed, and the game would be the same if they were male, female, or genderless robots in costumes. The sad part? If they were intended to be female ninjas that you're mowing through? Instead of the full ninja armor/pajamas they're wearing, they'd be mostly naked.
Now take that nude female corpse on the bed, not even killed by the player - killed by the antagonist as a "see how evil he is?" prop. How many male victims are portrayed in the same way? No, the answer isn't "millions", it's "nearly never".
Your constant claims that she won't address these points are sounding like Fox News complaining that Obama won't fight the ISIS groups that he's currently bombing the shit out of.
I do not think that she is doing anything of value though. I think if she is worried about the women in her community they would be better served in other ways.
Perhaps, but as the GP pointed out she has become a significant figure within the community through the actions she's taken. This would imply that there is a significant portion that DOES think her work has value.
Blizzard tried next-generation narrative and storytelling with Diablo III. The overwhelming response from video gamers was that they should have made sure that the character classes, abilities, monsters, loot system, levels, in-game economy and service model were up to snuff first, and then not tried next-generation narrative and storytelling at all.
You're getting plenty of strong critique and scrutiny. You're just ignoring it and listening instead to a professional attention whore who, by her own admission, doesn't play video games. But while you're reading what I have to say, cut it out with the storytelling crap. Give me a game with a good setting and I'll tell my own stories.
It's more like twelve thousand intelligent comments for every "threat".
Evidence?
I've yet to see an intelligent comment about one of her videos. Can you find even one? All I've seen are insults and threats!
I'd be very interested in seeing a thread consisting of mostly intelligent comments, burying the moronic insults and threats.
I have serious doubts, however, that such a thread exists.
Required reading for internet skeptics
You do realize that "politically correct, professionally offended people" is a stereotype, right?
Sometimes, some people actually fit a stereotype.
That's the biggest problem with a stereotype -- it's an picture that is true a not-insignificant amount of the time, but not enough that it should be the default assumption.
if you read more feminist writing, you will discover that feminists are just as opposed to the stereotyping of men in these commercials as they are the stereotyping of women.
True, but if you pay attention, you will discover that's typically little more than lip service, often included as a coda, or twisted to blame the victim.
There's feminism, and then there's radical feminism.
Many feminists in the 1970s were against gay rights (for homosexual males) because it would be lifting a group of men up from their current situation, and they wanted only energy that lifts women up to be spent.
Permit me to reply to myself.
I have now watched the entire video, and you know what. She is absolutely and completely right in every single point she made. Regular Lego is marked to boys. Girl lego is completely barbie-doll and rubbish. In the toy store down the road here, the 'boy' and 'girl' lego is even on display in different isles. This is not a good thing.
I do not understand how you can have missed this point. And if you didn't miss it, I do not understand how you could disagree with it. Please enlighten me.
the lives of how many women have been improved by her actions? Other than her.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
The problem with Anita is that she made her subject/focus the negative aspects of gaming, rather than the good aspects and what changes she would like to see.
When you approach a subject from a negative prospective you automatically put people on the defensive. You're less likely to get people to see your point of view that way.
She would be better off promoting those games that do show strong female characters and story telling. Highlight what makes them good examples and then talk about what changes she would like to see in the industry as whole.
She is not professionally offended. She doesn't receive money for the videos, except as donations, there are no advertisements on her page. So she's not 'professional'. And she is not 'offended' either - she is very intelligently pointing out very real gender stereotypes in a series of extremely articulate videos. Watch the one that other guy linked, the one about Lego. It's so on the money that it's not even funny.
Put more simply. She is right.
What I am saying is that the world is controlled right now by politically correct, professionally offended people.
What a completely extraordinary thing to imagine. If this were the case, there wouldn't be any gender stereotyping in video games and Lego and all the rest of it. But there is - the medium is awash with it even though in your imagination it's all run by politically correct and professionally offended people.
Wut?
In a well-ordered world she would be getting a PhD for work of this depth and quality
Hear hear.
I don't particularly agree with a goodly chunk of her theoretical frame
Which parts? I couldn't fault it myself.
I think most people who would identify themselves as "warrior" regardless of the cause they are "fighting" for is someone to be watched. It tends not to actually foster debate, understanding, and yes, justice.
I suspect that it isn't a reading comprehension problem, but that you are so on board with "men are evil" that you ignore anything said that doesn't fit your women are victims, men are evil narrative.
Sure I am. Go ahead and tell yourself whatever it takes to justify your actions and to dismiss any and all criticism.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
It is if the person you're pointing out is not a hate-monger, isn't it?
You're like that guy who denounced Tinky-Winky for being gay. Delusional and convinced of your righteous ways.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Credible? http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg
self-contradictory bitching and bullshit accusations
Please - stand up behind your accusations and show us all which parts of her videos are self-contradictory. Because I've watched them, and found her position to be extremely considered, consistent, and much more intelligent than I was expecting.
And I really don't understand your complaint about how she spent the kickstarter money. She asked for donations to make a series of videos, alot of people donated with the understanding that she would make the video series, she made the video series. Are you suggesting that she should have taken that money and done something else with it? Wouldn't that be borderline fraud? Would you do that?
The "liar" part is trivially proven
Actually, from what I've read on this thread, no-one has 'trivially proven' this. If she'd made the a game instead of the videos, that would have made her a liar. But she didn't, she stuck to what she said she was going to do. So again, please, back up your idle accusations with quotes from her (helpfully transcribed) videos.
Er. She's using words. There are now threats of force. You appear confused.
That makes no sense. A death threat isn't a threat any longer once an attempt has been made. It's become an attempted murder.
A credible death threat would be a matter of opinion to some extent - but there are plenty of crazy people out there, and judging by many of the comments on this thread, there's a extremely disturbing undercurrent of anti-women sentiment going on. I mean all this woman has done is made a series of videos that suggest that strong and harmful gender stereotypes exist in the videogame world. I thought that this was pretty much the accepted wisdom, but apparently not only am I wrong, but to claim so would make me an 'attention-whore'.
And what's that about a 'price on someone's head'. What governments do that? I don't understand that at all.
What the fuck did you just fucking rape about me, you privileged white male? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Privilege Checkers 101, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on the patriarchy and I have over 300 confirmed rape accusations. I am trained in crying when I don't get my way and I'm the top feminist in the entire US of A. You are nothing to me but just another privileged white male. I will wipe you the fuck out with feminism the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with raping that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, rapist. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of feminists across Tumblr and your privilege is being checked right now so you better prepare for the storm, you privileged white male. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, rapist. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and thats just with my extremely annoying rants. Not only am I extensively trained in deafening people with my shrill whines, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Tumblr Feminist Statistics and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little rapist. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "rapist" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have checked your fucking privilege. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn rapist. I will shit privilege all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, you privileged white male.
From my research into the Tomb Raider, Metroid and Mass Effect* series of games, I conclude that the video game industry is extremely woman-centric and that there need to be more games in which men are portrayed as strong, capable protagonists. See? I can cherry-pick examples to support a narrative, too.
*Stop trying to tell me that you can make male characters in Mass Effect, your patronizing womansplaining ways are triggering me, and that's rape.
And that is untrue, mr AC. Let's see your source before you continue to spam this thread with slander.
So she's removed your well-formed and thoughtful comments has she? Perhaps you could post them here where they will not be removed. And then we can have a well-formed and thoughtful discussion about your position.
better be safe and cow to the retards, and better be safe and vex them into exposing themselves then blow them away? that is a good way for us to be safe.
I can't help but question how serious these death threats really are.
After all, we're hearing about them from a person who thinks that talking about something is the same as doing something. That's why she's making a bunch of videos complaining that she doesn't like how video games depict women - she thinks that if she talks about it enough, the entire world will magically bend to her will and stop liking things that she doesn't like. For comparison, if she really wanted to make a difference, she would lead by example: take that $150,000 Kickstarter and make a video game that depicts women properly. But she'll never do that, because Anita Sarkeesian doesn't even play video games. (Why would she? They're misogynist!)
You want to know what really is misogynist about the video game industry? A female indie developer has to sleep with game "journalists" to build fake hype for her locally-hosted webpage, while a male indie developer could just pay them.
Considering that I'm married with two kids, I've already found a woman who is attracted to me. She's never arched her back and stuck her butt out. And she's certainly never twisted her spine so that I could see both her chest and rear at the same time. Honestly, if she did that pose, I'd be concerned about rushing her to the hospital, not thinking "Boy, does that look sexy."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Thanks. That's the one I was thinking of. And, yes, Hulk is the best. Though Captain America managed to pull off the "here's my rear and chest facing in the same direction" pose. Must be that super soldier serum.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You know what, "the power is in your hands" - there is nothing compelling anyone to *make* a death threat.
> Markets can be sexist, making the response thereto sexist. We can maybe say that that's an example of sexism without animus or overt chauvinism, but it's still sexism.
I suppose the companies should just make unprofitable games and go out of business, then.
Yeah, no. For whatever reason, men have always been the dominant force in non-casual video games. Women didn't start coming in in larger numbers until later, after it started to become more popular, and they still trend towards casual games. You want more save-the-prince games? Go get women to buy them.
Why "wouldn't you be be surprised"? If you think the moon landing was a hoax, then I guess this fits the same pattern. But you know, if baseless accusation with zero evidence are your thing, I also recommend FOX news and encourage you to examine the legitimacy of President Obama's birth certificate
I just watched her Lego video. I missed the spot where she called on Lego to remove facial hair from their 'minifigs'. Can you point me to the timestamp where she makes the claim?
Sorry, but it didn't account for gender breakdown on casual vs hardcore gamers. I think we all know why, so don't dance around it. If you've got one that actually shows we've got 40% women playing Call of Duty or Skyrim or whatever, I'd like to see it.
Please - stand up behind your accusations and show us all which parts of her videos are self-contradictory
One example: Lara Croft. Originally, she was oversexualized, a sign of an inherently female-hostile game industry. Then, later, when later games toned down her sexuality, that was female-hostile because it apparently meant that the game makers felt that, in order to be taken seriously, a female protagonist has to be more "mannish."
And I really don't understand your complaint about how she spent the kickstarter money. She asked for donations to make a series of videos, alot of people donated with the understanding that she would make the video series, she made the video series. Are you suggesting that she should have taken that money and done something else with it?
She set out from the startup to make videos bitching and moaning and trying to shame others into doing things her way, rather than doing anything herself. Her intentions were ignoble from t=0.
Actually, from what I've read on this thread, no-one has 'trivially proven' this.
Check out Thunderf00t's response video, for starters. There are many others.
Oh, wait, I get it -- saying that violence in video games leads to violence in real life is stupid, but saying that violence against women in video games leads to violence against women in real life totally makes sense! Thanks, guys, I finally understand! I mean, it's not like we could all agree that adults should and can tell the difference between fantasy and real life, right?!
Wait.. are you talking about Anita Sarkeesian getting defensive about a video game she didn't develop or take any part in? Or, are you referencing some other person or instance that you forgot to include in your comment?
I'm writing about anyone who gets so defensive that they make death threats, you know, the topic of this thread.
First, that when men die in these games, they're generally an antagonist or actor that actually has a measure of agency. They're killed because they were involved in a conflict that revolved around more than just their gender or their victimhood.
Completely false. Men die for every reason in video games. The fact that they are considered the main cannon fodder and leave every other type of deaths as a rounding error doesn't mean they don't die other ways as well. And you better believe that them being the targets is because of their gender. Could you just imagine how Anita would react to a game where you just gunned down women the whole time? Oh the misogyny!
Women in video games do not die in "sexualized" ways any more so than in other media. Plenty of movies feature strip clubs. Strip clubs are a real thing and, yes, they are sexualized. Are they for some reason off limits to a video game? Care to explain that?
She's right that sexual and sexualised violence is used as a lazy shortcut to show how bad a person is. You can instantly justify murdering someone brutally (to bring it back to your complaint) if we've just shown them as hitting a woman or raping them. It's not the nicest cycle.
So you are disagreeing with her and saying it is not done out of a hatred of women? And is there some reason why this "cliche" as you put it is off limits? You say it's lazy- who cares? It's not like every video game uses such a plot point. And I'd love to have it explained why games aren't allowed to use the classic heroic epic that has literally been used in every form of story telling since before the dawn of civilization?
I don't think people have to stop doing anything. But I think they DO need to think about what they're doing, understand whether it's appropriate narratively, and make those decisions with open eyes. Speaking personally, for the first ten years of my career, I definitely didn't think about this stuff as much. Maybe I would've spoken up more about certain things if I had.
You don't want people to stop.. You just demand they think your way and decide they shouldn't do it.. And stop. Passive aggressive much?
This is really just an appeal to tradition, and as such, it really doesn't carry much weight.
Not an appeal to tradition at all. You said things have to change; clearly they do not.
It's not a joke to be laughed off, this thing where a man is threatening to hit his wife so hard he sends her to the moon. I'm not sure why we think it's okay to glorify violence against women in video games.
Not a joke! Oh the misogyny! I'm sure you have no problem with similar "threats" of violence against a man.
I think that playwriting HAS responded to the changing times. I think that if we saw a play with the same sort of violence that's in games we'd be horrified. And I think that we can look back at stuff done in the past and see that things WERE misogynist and the product of their time.
You keep trying to police people by asserting your morals. I'm sure it will turn out great. Maybe you can get people to consider the violence in chess next.
And, as she's repeated so often, just because you're critical of something doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. Nothing is perfect. I'm just happy she's making these videos so I can recognise the bad stuff and think about it more.
Just because I'm critical of her and her shallow critiques doesn't mean I'm a troll.
I also think that philosophically, her ideas have merit.
They do not; they are sophistry.
She's making videos and putting her opinion out there, and it's up to us to watch the videos and make sense of her position, whether we agree or disagree.
Her opinion is not sacrosanct. I am perfectly free to call it as st
Evidence?
Evidence to the contrary? There are probably hundreds of thousands of people talking about why she's wrong. The fact that you only hear about "threats" and insults is because those are the only people she and her supporters will respond to. If the majority of those people were doing nothing but insulting her it would be pretty visible and she wouldn't have to play up painfully obvious trolls.
I'd be very interested in seeing a thread consisting of mostly intelligent comments
I have serious doubts that you would behave any different from her. Any detraction is obviously not intelligent. Which is why so many people just insult her. Why bother giving a thoughtful response when you'll just get labelled a misogynist or ignorant and subsequently ignored.
http://www.videogamessuck.com/... http://kotaku.com/death-threat... http://kotaku.com/5904367/anot... http://www.develop-online.net/... I'm sure all of you Social Justice Whiteknights modded 5:Insightful want to line up to support these men who received similar threats and insults, right? I would link donation pages, but unfortunately those people are busy making their living making video games instead of being professional victims, so there are no pages. Somehow, women are the only people who can be victims in this industry—I wonder if it's your internalized misogyny that makes that the case. Women are always victims, because they are weak and vulnerable to men, who have "power" am I right? "Poor women, they will never get a break" is an EXTREMELY misogynistic statement, and it's what the majority of the upvoted comments are stating. I hope the disgusting irony does not escape you. Where's Roberta Williams' donation page? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So ... No evidence then?
I'm not surprised.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Her complaint is rather that the brutal depictions of violence against woman in video games always seem to have clear sexual subcontext, while violence against men does not.
That's how she always shows it in her videos. Cherry picking isn't valid criticism.
Depends who you ask. In this case it's "anyone that disagrees with anything a feminist says".
I AM GOING TO RAPE MYSELF
It IS a scam. She collected $150k to make ~10 vlogs. Not high-production-value videos. 10 ranting videos you can find on any random vlogging site.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If you push people, it is expected that they will act, regardless of the law preventing certain actions.
Well, then pretty soon those people so lacking in self control will do all their acting behind bars.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Your games offend me and I don't want to play them. Therefore you have to make games that nobody wants to play".
Apparently they don't have a problem with the industry then. Why are you ignoring their voices? Is it because they are female?
Maybe I'm actually more misogynist than I think, but there was a screenshot posted a while back of the "credible threats" in question.
I'd recommend finding that screenshot and maybe corroborating a little before continuing this discussion. I'd also like to introduce you to the recent trend of viral images that turned out to be produced by the claimant to drum up support. As far as I'm aware, these threats exist only in PII-redacted form published as screenshots on her account, somehow captured by an anonymous viewer within 12 seconds of posting her family's purported home address. So..?
Forgot the worst part of this - I don't disagree with her stated points, even as presented here. Games (and popular mass media in general) have a serious problem with violent representations of women - enough to inspire the "women in refrigerators" trope of discussion.
I just can't help but smell a too-convenient story.
There's two possible interpretations to the circumstances you describe.
Actual opposition to the homosexual rights for gay males, and resistance to spending the effort on it.
The latter, while lamentable, is reasonable enough.
Professional victim that scammed people of $150k is back for more money.
Apparently people are dumb and she likes to fleece them.
Liberty.
Aside from the bullets, I don't give a shit about the law.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
To "Anita Sarkeesian is out of money, lies again to get more well-intended naive people to give her money for nothing".
http://i.imgur.com/zHPLIan.jpg
And what's that about a 'price on someone's head'. What governments do that? I don't understand that at all.
A very short memory you have.(aside from the fact you might not know what a "bounty" is) I just got done looking it up to refresh my memory, and I'll do the same for you, and remind you of a pretty famous guy who had a 25 million dollar reward put on his head. (don't know if that was ever paid out, heh, any more than we know if he's not on some swank Black Sea resort out there with Saddam) Let's see if if you know who I'm talking about. Of course there are many others. If you ever visit a post office, you just might notice the list, with pictures and everything.
And furthermore, words are bullshit. Only the reaction means anything at all. That is the target. Always the follower, they are the danger to contend with.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's extremely unlikely that it would work that way. The threat has to be credible before the police would even waste their time with it.
If you spend time reading your game "friends" saying these nasty things, you're a neckbeard, not a man.
No True Scotsman is so popular.
And wait... what is a "man"? Do you think gender roles are good? Or were you making some point?
Someone making death threats is a fucking deranged idiotic imbecile.
Sounds perfectly electable to high office then. I mean, so what? That kind of behavior is frequently given big rewards. The big deal here seems to be the target, not the act. So, it's either cool, or it isn't.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
is insulting to the gender
Nothing can be insulting to a gender. Individuals are insulted.
So will any other sane, rational, non sociopath. Deal with it.
That's just silly. Just because someone does something in a video game that would be considered bad in real life doesn't mean they're a sociopath, irrational, or not sane. I hope this is just a misunderstanding on my part.
In a well-ordered world she would be getting a PhD for work of this depth and quality.
She'd be getting a fucking PhD for these opinion pieces? Is that all a PhD is to you?
That just means that men are regarded as having no value (not even sexual value) whatsoever to these developers. Almost no time needs to be spent on their appearances or their backgrounds; they're just objects to be discarded once their purposes are fulfilled.
The claim is the latter ratio is much higher than the former.
I can't even count the number of male characters that are constantly slaughtered in video games. Whoever would make such an assertion is an idiot. Most of the random thugs in video games are male.
I've watched all of her Tropes videos (from both series) so far. Admittedly this isn't her entire body of work, but I haven't yet seen a mention of razor stubble. [citation needed] on that one
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You have got to be shitting me. His "critiques" basically boil down to "I dislike that one 30 second example from your 30 minute video, therefore everything you say is a lie".
Thunderf00t is the perfect example of the kind of Internet intellectual who thinks that "critical thinking" is memorising lists of classical logical fallacies. Ed Glaser is spinning in his grave.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Please find me the exact place where she said that those games have no right to exist. While you're looking that up, here's a free clue.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Even in Japan, that's considered a weird subculture.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Anybody that would consider her being a hate-monger is out of touch with reality.
I find your statement to be offensive. You come across as a hate-monger.
She said "these tropes work on men, and promote an attitude toward women that is unnatural and not normal for men."
Everything else aside; I'm curious as to her definition of "unnatural".
Don't put words in my mouth please. Your Spock quote is exactly what I said. That quote shows that it's common for "understand" to be taken as approval, and also that it can mean other things. The word "understand" is used to mean slightly different things in different situations, just like many other words.
Citation Provided thanks google A bit harder to find info on Quinn but I guess that's not really surprising considering the implications to "journalists".
Game mechanics are often set up to devalue women. For example, a lot of "dark" games have female prostitutes. Paying them for services, and occasionally a sex mini-game, often has the mechanic of restoring the player's health or boosting their stats somehow. It is the same mechanic that is applied to other things in the game like vending machines or med-kits. Essentially those women are a combination of tool and decorative sex object.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I find that sex in real life isn't like that and doesn't give me a health/stat boost, so I wouldn't say these mechanics reflect reality in any way. I doubt that most of the developers implementing them are overt misogynists either, they just build on harmful tropes that have developed over decades of gaming without really considering the wider implications.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
She does actually point out that many of the games she criticises are actually quite enjoyable, fun games that she liked playing. It's just that they are also full of harmful tropes and sexism, and don't need to be that way to remain enjoyable.
Would Mario be any less fun if he wasn't trying to rescue Princess Peach? In fact in the US version of Mario Bros 2, the only game in the core series where Peach isn't kidnapped at the start, you can play as Peach and it isn't any less fun because the goal isn't the Smooch of Victory.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I didn't notice her saying "testosterone is a negative trait". Can you link to the specific video and time where she says that?
It all seemed well researched, thought out and not at all man-hating to me.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just as there is no war on women just the democrats war on a woman - Sarah Palin.
At trial your right to face your accuser would be handled by bringing in a large mirror.
You don't seem to see the big picture here. That's how Anita does it! It's all about the money and attention, and Anita plays Internet trolls and the hearts of feminists like fiddles. The only YouTube video she has ever posted and allowed comments on was the one she did for Kickstarter. Everything she's made before or since is intentionally locked down so no one can discuss it, but for some "strange" reason she happened to allow comments on that one single video. By doing so, she was able to vent all the frustration out of people who were critical of her videos and allowed the usual Internet trolls in.
Trolls be trollin' and the nasty shit some of them say (most of them 13-year-olds or actual manifestations of a basement-dweller stereotype, mind you: obnoxious behind a keyboard but totally and pitifully harmless in real life) gives Anita massive evidence to show to sympathetic parties to encourage many and/or large donations to combat the abuse. She isn't stupid. She fooled both sides and played them against each other masterfully.
The people who gave her money are the stupid ones here, though. They gleefully tossed out thousands of dollars without even noticing that Anita played the comment game like she did to maximize their sympathy feels (and convert some of them into cash.) Legitimate criticism of her series and her behavior to get that money in the first place can be found far and wide, and the people who make videos about it often do so respectfully. Of course, no one in media pays attention to legitimate criticism, but when a Twitter account of questionable credibility "runs her out of her home" that's sensational, exceptional, click-grabbing, and therefore "newsworthy." We'll never see an article about how Anita is a professional salesperson or how the content of her "Tropes" series is often quite contradictory against itself. That's not sensational, it's just rational, and rational things have no place in the "news."
You have got to be shitting me. His "critiques" basically boil down to "I dislike that one 30 second example from your 30 minute video, therefore everything you say is a lie".
That's not actually what happened, or what he claimed. He used many clips from her videos. She simply made a number of stupid arguments in her videos that can't be overlooked. She could've also said that 1 + 1 = 2 somewhere in her videos and she'd still deserve lots and lots of criticism.
Thunderf00t is the perfect example of the kind of Internet intellectual who thinks that "critical thinking" is memorising lists of classical logical fallacies.
Does that actually describe him, or is that your own delusion?
You're welcome. Don't forget to watch criticism videos of her stuff as well, though. Most of those are NOT trolls, but people who have legitimate criticism and can't comment on the video since she turns off all comments on all of her videos (except the Kickstarter one that made her $150K, that is.)
This sounds like an argument of the form "if the KKK protests against it, it must be right." That's no different than "people disagree with me, therefore my cause is the good one." It is logical fallacy.
If I go on my favorite message board and make derogatory comments at the owner and then my comments are deleted it's censorship? Really?
Yes. Your problem seems to be that you think all censorship must necessarily be bad or done by the government, but that is not true and has never been true. The idea that censorship can be used by entities other than the government is to well established in our ever-evolving language by now that you should probably just give it up.
No, that is pretty much exactly what happened, unless you caught the one video where he made a relevant point rather than the dozen or so that I saw where he missed the point completely.
Part of the problem here, and it's also evident in the comment thread here, is that a lot of science-minded geeks don't understand the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.
You can understand an atom pretty much perfectly. You can understand a star at the level at which you can observe it, because you can treat it statistically. You can't really understand a war in the same way. There are so many aspect and so many levels that you can't really capture the whole thing at the level at which you can observe it.
The things that the humanities study are so inherently complex (because they deal with the human experience) that there is never going to be an exact theory which applies all the time. Instead, you come up with models (sometimes called "narratives") which try to capture generally what's going on at one level. If a historian is studying a war, they might focus on the general trends and forces in one theatre, and in doing so gloss over details which may contrast with that. Or they might focus on what happened in one town, and in doing so simplify some of the wider context.
That is what Anita Sarkeesian is doing with the video game landscape. In doing so, of course she is going to gloss over details, because there is no other way to understand the landscape as a whole. Chipping away at a few points doesn't invalidate the argument. Just because North America had a cold winter doesn't mean that the global trend is towards warming. Just because killing civilians is penalised in one particular game doesn't mean that there isn't a general theme of abused women being used as decoration in video games.
It's an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's only a slight exaggeration. What actually describes him is that he is a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And yes, I've seen way too many Thunderf00t videos for my own good.
I don't know if you've ever been in an undergraduate-level critical thinking class, but the field is very, very different from what most people think. You know how you go into topology thinking it's going to be all Klein bottles and toruses, and what you actually find is weeks of open and closed sets and metric spaces? Well, critical thinking mostly isn't about logical fallacies. It's mostly about how to understand an argument. It's all about the Principle of Charity, diagramming arguments, and so on.
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She's a professional victim and loves all the attention she gets.
Do you pronounce your name "low fuck"?
Gaming is not more than wanking neckbeards without lives pretending they are what they ain't, no matter how you dress it up.
Why anyone not utterly dysfunctional would want to be part of that culture other than to exploit it for pay is a mystery.
That's an apologist attitude: his conduct was why he got abuse, not his stand. Or is that not clear to you? It's the same reason people detest Rush Limbaugh because he's a bully. Again, the absolutely worst person you could have brought up was Jack Thompson when it comes to violence in video games.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Does anyone else still remember this crackpot?
How is the scorn and treatment given to Anita any different to what was directed at him?
The only difference here is Anita's status as a professional victim and as a female.
A.S's "point" is that there is a malearchy running the world.
All THIS proves is that there are arseholes in the world.
Because if it doesn't matter if a woman is BUCK NAKED, then showing her tits on a daily newspaper is double not a problem, right?
Oh, except it isn't.
Why remains a state secret...
Look women wear revealing clothes to attract male attention. Unstated as to WHICH male the attention is wanted, but THAT IS WHY IT'S WORN.
And some people take it as an invitation TO THEM.
Hence, it's a risk to take, and a risk that doesn't need to be taken.
What you are describing is just "noise" and everyone sees it. You cant go anywhere and without see the "noise" but what I was speaking about is civilized discussion that is critical of her work. We can speak critical of her work in a civilized manner and as you have seen there are some in this thread but this is not where all people are viewing it. Its not centralized and will vary depending on the demographic discussing it.
And yes, if you are a moderator and delete comments (and go as far as banning), it is censorship. Not all censorship is bad. As I described "noise", deleting them is not negative censorship as it is more of a filtering of junk. Now when you prevent people from being able to openly criticize work, even if its done in a manner that is civil, that is still censorship and that is a negative. People will not know to go to say slashdot (poor example but lets just go with it) to discuss her videos and find out why people disagree with them. The term "troll" is also a very loose term with her and pretty much anyone who doesnt agree with her conclusions are "trolls" in her eyes.
By definition, a feminist isn't for male equality, only in the progression of the female race.
It used to be claimed that women made 1/3 less than men, now it's 16% less (23% for management jobs). Yet, somehow, this is never noted as being an improvement.
If not, then who are you asking?
Or is it just sufficient that the poster has made a claim or statement you do not like therefore you feel better able to ignore them (and make yourself a hero into the bargain) by making as if they have done so?
Because I believe the GP knows that they an criticise her. But you are doing to them for it what you claim is done to Anna for it.
Demonise them and ostracise them, making them undermencshen.
"weird" as in "we don't talk about it in public, not "weird" as in "only a certain tiny subset of the population engages in this activity."
From what I've seen, even 70 year old Japanese grannies are picking up tentacle-porn manga, albeit not openly.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How was she "Driven from Home"; did she post her address and other persona details somewhere easy to access? I get death threats on the internet all the time, none of these people know where I live, so who cares?
Those of us who started the worldwide gaming industry are fighting back against the 8 yo boys issuing death threats.
Steve Jackson, Wil Wheaton, people like myself who created this are having panels at DragonCon, PAX, and other cons worldwide.
No, it is not ok to be a misogynist. Ever.
No, it is not ok to issue death threats online. Ever.
Flame on, baby trolls who stew in hatred, we know how inadequate your sad pitiful lives are.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm pretty sure nobody labels THEMSELVES as SJWs. if they do, I've never seen it. I suppose it's possible that there are a few, but I can't see there being enough to justify the common use of the term as a perjorative.
I belatedly realize that you were likely making a joke. I've noticed that both you and I have this "not sure if serious" problem at times. Perhaps I should make an effort to use emoticons wisely.
God your dumb. Who cares if she says things you don't agree with. Grow up man boy.
Cowards threaten and odd others anonymously.
And that's to go loot a convenience store
I happened to watch one of her videos last week, and I do share the opinion of the first +5 poster: "her videos are, in places, poorly researched with many leaps of logic mixed with heavy opinions. But, they still contain very valid points and can be civilly debated."
Specifically, and though she clearly does make some points about the way most female NPC are limited to eye candy, her general attitude towards sandbox games reminded me heavily of the Dungeon&Dragons-bashing of the early 80's: "Can you imagine that? In this foul game players can invoke demons! What would be a better proof that it's a satanic plot to enroll our younglings in the Army of Darkness?" without, of course, ever explaining to the alarmed parents that a RPG allows player to do anything they can think of, and that if they don't have a particular interest in the evocation of demons there is no reason for them to do it (BTW at least in AD&D first edition I don' think there even is a rule about demonic invocations)...
In Sarkeesian's videos, it translates as "Female NPC have no agency": Well, they're NPCs - maybe she should figure what the word means. And yes, female NPC are often not treated in the same way than male NPC and when she explains that she has valid points - but it's maybe 10% of her discourse, 90% being "women are NPCs in video games, oh the humanity!".
She even goes as far as saying that no woman NPC is depicted having her own agenda and personality - hellooo, ever heard of Sarah Kerrigan? I'm still in love with her as are probably half of all male geeks ever born, and we have only seen her face!
Similarly, one of her points is that in Sandbox games the hero is allowed to kill female NPCs: does she even understand the concept of a sandbox game?
Or when RedDeadRedemption makes fun of the Pulp trope of rescuing a lady bound on the railway, she uses it as a proof of how vilely misogynistic the game world is, without even acknowledging the parodic intention.
You know that the vast majority of prostitutes -are- women. That's not a trope, that's reality. Men pay for sex, women, in most instances, don't, upscale japanese date hosts notwithstanding.
I did not put words in your mouth. They were quoted verbatim from your post. I was simply pointing out that understand != approval. Understanding is meant to convey comprehension. I was wrong, however, to single you out for making this mistake, since everyone else in this thread thinks understanding = approval too.
As a matter of fact, the simplest theories often - but not always - provide the best and most robust explantations. Your theory is the simplest forwarded yet....
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
and subject them to the very things they threaten...just for fun!
I mean, it's all just a game...right?
Well, violence and death speaks to a different portion of the male psyche. But sure, might as well make the corpses smoking hot too.
what a farce social justice is. c
Speaking publicly is using force via persuasion. Force doesnt need to be forced to be force. There are people who feel her force is wrongly applied and they counter with speech (counter-force).
Good-bye
If you watched her latest video all the way to the end, she does cover this. It's not enough to merely show suffering if there's no path to rectify the suffering. It's not really doing its job of drawing attention to the problem so much as making it a prop so that we have a reason to shoot someone. The violence that we commit becomes justified through the superficial application of the abuse of a woman in the game.
Besides, games DON'T accurately reflect what's going on. First of all, most rape and sexual assault is perpetrated by a relative or a friend or someone close to the victim. It's rarely a bad guy lurking in an alley. So that type of violence is over-represented in games. Second, in this case, there's some merit to the argument that we don't depict domestic violence against males enough. If what we're trying to do is draw attention and be accurate, we should probably include that more often.
But most importantly, there's a question as to the value of this 'realism', even if it were accurate. A lot of terrible things happen in the world that we see fit to ignore. Physics, for one thing. We also don't seem to care about going to the bathroom, cancer or getting oil changes. We're willing to suspend disbelief; this is probably an area where we could live without the casual gendered violence that we've really become accustomed to.
You know what, you're right. It's awful to feel silenced, to feel like you can't express yourself honestly without being attacked. Try to imagine how much worse you'd feel if instead of simply expressing offense, the people who disagreed with you responded by posting credible rape / death threats. This is what it's like to be a woman on the internet, at least in gaming circles.
When people express offense, they're not trying to get you to feel guilty, generally speaking. They're trying to get you to consider the context and consequences of your speech. You can disagree with their assessment. You can also simply apologize and try to change your behavior, guilt-free. We all sometimes hurt other people without intending to, it's what we do once they've let us know they're hurting that defines us.
Im not sure the male gender has much to feel insulted about considering what it as done. I cannot think of an insult that is worse than that history. Or, a man can choose to not identify with that stereotype and strike out on their own and try to be a good person. To do that, they must keep an open mind, and herein lies the problem.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
How can you tell when you receive a lot of death threats whether any of them are credible? Some people are very angry about what she has been saying, probably most of them don't think it would be a god idea to kill her, but in this case most is the operative word, especially when the people giving them know where you live....
The fact that you're receiving a lot of death threats tells you that none of them are credible.
When you receive one death threat, it's worth looking into. The police will investigate, offer protection, and determine if it's credible.
Also, if you're getting death threats over the internet in response to some stupid shit you said, then it's not a credible death threat.
Well--- the whole point of something being an art is that it tells people what they want. If you make a game that's creative, it shouldn't matter who's rescuing who, or what clothes they're wearing, or how big the breasts are on the NPCs. If video games are an artistic medium, it means they have something to offer besides that.
When someone like Sarkeesian points out misogynist tropes in video games, that means that they're just that, tropes. They aren't essential to videogame storytelling and can be swapped out like building blocks. That what tropes are: conventions that have only minimal semantic purpose.
If you take the position that games are only worth playing if they obsequiously cater to player's expectations and demands, down to what the female characters must look like, what they must say and do, and what roles they must play in the story, that kinda means that video games can't be art. People don't go watch Lars von Trier's Antichrist because it's popular, or because it flatters their base demands for titillation --- and I don't think people play BioShock for this reason, either.
I get the feeling that a lot of gamers (1) don't really understand the purpose or method of media criticism, (2) think any criticism of a video game is directed at the people who play it, personally, and (3) are raging philistines who don't really understand the value of art apart from popularity or "the market."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's not enough to merely show suffering if there's no path to rectify the suffering.
It's a bullshit argument, sorry. Not every piece of entertainment is supposed to be a full-fledged women studies teaching material.
But most importantly, there's a question as to the value of this 'realism', even if it were accurate. A lot of terrible things happen in the world that we see fit to ignore. Physics, for one thing. We also don't seem to care about going to the bathroom, cancer or getting oil changes. We're willing to suspend disbelief; this is probably an area where we could live without the casual gendered violence that we've really become accustomed to.
Different games draw the lines differently here. There are some where dying of old age is a possibility, say, and racing games do include oil changes sometimes. With respect to physics, many games are actually trying to make it as real as possible.
Ultimately, the value of this particular bit of realism as a whole is drawing attention to the problem. You can complain that it's not sufficient, but it's way better than nothing.
Yes, and this is gender stereotyping, and if you read more feminist writing, you will discover that feminists are just as opposed to the stereotyping of men in these commercials as they are the stereotyping of women.
That hasn't been true of feminists since the 1970s.
Most of the feminists of the 1970s consider modern "feminists" to be an offensive disgrace to both genders. Modern "feminists" like to talk about 3 waves of feminism, but really, the first "wave" was the only legitimate one. The second wave was in the 80s and early 90s - hijacking feminism to become a vehicle for the advancement of women with no regards for equality under the term "empowerment". The third wave started in the late 90s and continues today - the continual enshrinement of "feminism" as a political force and the portrayal of women as perpetually disenfranchised, victimized, etc. under the term"awareness".
Modern "feminism" looks nothing like feminism from the 1970s.
There's a huge leap from "men are not the weakest and stupidest characters in a video game" and "brutal depictions of violence against women," and "the use of scantily-clad female corpses as decoration." If men were being depicted as weaker and stupider than women in the game that would also be gender stereotyping.
There are far more depictions of far more brutal violence against men in video games. Violence against one gender is no worse than violence against another gender. Regardless, violence in video games is not a problem. They're fucking video games.
In fact, in the real fucking world, men are many times more likely than women to be the victim of violence crime. Yet all we hear about is a culture of violence against women. The opposite is true - violence against men is widely accepted and even considered entertaining. That's a culture. Something that the majority of people don't like and work against is not a culture.
Same thing for sexy characters in video games. So fucking what? Sexy things, both male and female, are used in all forms of media to cater to the target audience. Have you ever seen a magazine? Unless someone is being forced into these depictions without their consent, it's not a problem. For every Carls Jr. ad that offends women by portraying them as sexy, it also offends men by treating them as mindless sex fiends who will buy whatever a sexy woman tells him to. For every style magazine with a half naked hunk on the cover that offends men, it also offends women by expecting them to be idiots who'll buy the same recycled "REAL GUYS tell us their TOP 10 sex fantasies" trash "articles" every month because of the cover.
To say that depictions of violence or sex in video games are a problem is fucking retarded. They're video games. The only problem with those depictions is the fact that they're often laughably bad and tacked on to an otherwise shallow, terribly-written, or generally shitty game.
To say that they're a problem specifically for women is just so far beyond the pale that you should rightfully expect to be mocked and ridiculed whenever you try to trot that horse out.
So if force (or the initiation thereof) is wrong to the Libertarians, and speech is force, then all libertarians must be against "free speech", Right?
And yes, you are the first person I've seen who asserted that speech is force.
Learn to love Alaska
I am not making a statement on moral or ethical grounds. Please put away all your thought-terminating cliches. I merely pointing out the MECHANICS involved here. I dont care who is right or wrong, only pointing out that force is being used and countered.
Good-bye
Problem is guys (particularly dads) are usually treated as idiots in most commercials and sitcoms these days. If you don't think so, I don't know what else to tell you. Yet how many feminists do you see complaining about this? Exactly. Between that and the non-gender neutral law that is VAWA, I semi-reluctantly call myself an MRA now instead of a gender egalitarian. Sorry, but society in general cares too much about women to the exclusion of men these days. Somebody has to try to make up the difference.
Who said it was credible? Who really gives a sh*t on the male side enough to thteaten? Reads like ,"look at how impotant I am" to me.
The whole point of the video was to list the things that Lego is doing wrong. Did you not get that? If facial hair were not bad, why would she say that Lego should get rid of it? Lego did not decide that pink was "for girls". People like Anita did. Lego makes pink toys for the same reason that the store who sold Anita her sweater makes pink sweaters. Because that is what people like Anita buy. She is trying to lay the blame for her own behavior at the feet of Lego.
Sure, Lego sees their primary demographic as boys, and that leads to them using boys in ads, but this is the world we live in. She doesn't just ask Lego to start advertising to girls. She doesn't just ask Lego to start making toys that appeal to her view of what girls should want. She wants Lego to stop making toys that boys want because she finds masculinity to be offensive.
Unsubstantiated claims? Outright lies? Never responds to questions? Sounds familiar...
You lied. You got called out on lying, and your response is to call that it me justifying the behavior that you just got called out for lying about. Like I said. It doesn't seem to be a reading comprehension problem. It seems to be simple deceit.
>Her videos have previously drawn criticism from many male gamers.
Male gamers? How about just "people" in general? As if bullshit can't be found out by women?
.
The "cliche" is the person that asserts anything they don't like is "force" and everything else is justified after, merely "counter-force" and not an initiation of force in response to speech.
Learn to love Alaska
Says the person defending a woman who's career is built on denouncing the evil ways of others, and calling for everyone to follow her righteous ways. Your insult applies to your hero, not me. She is the kind of feminist who would tell a stay at home mother, that she is "Only" a housewife.
It's in the Lego video.
It is in the second Lego Video.
Posting AC to keep mods--I get what you're saying. I'm not lumping you in with the trolls. I don't like what you're saying, but I understand. It is unreasonably to expect everyone on the internet to act civilized. Not every one is mature or has normal adult-level impulse control in spite of their age.
What you and GP are saying is accurate and relevant. Given that there is a small fraction of Internet denizens who are not stable, sane, rational and/or civilized, it's inevitable that some will speak and (potentially) act in socially unacceptable (threats of violence, in this case) ways.
Here's where I get off that particular bus: It is not unreasonable to expect that any specific individual on the Internet will act in a civilized manner. Those that do not should be roundly criticized and, if the behavior warrants it, prosecuted.
Having such expectations is critical, as it creates a bright line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, IMHO. Will those expectations keep everyone from spewing bile? Of course not. But if we excuse such behavior with tropes like "Internet anonymity makes people act like idiots, what can you do?" we encourage such behaviors -- again, IMHO.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
should she not be held to the same standard? She deletes comments that are nothing more than pointing out her inaccuracies and blatant lies about content of games and cries "TROLL TROLL TROLL, see men are evil!" Criticism is not an insult, unless its at her work right?
So that makes it okay to threaten her life and well-being? Did I miss something here?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
It is expected. It is not legal though. Those that perpetrated this crime should be caught and punished.
That said. She is a stupid fucking bitch that should, nevertheless feel safe from physical threats of violence as she makes her way through her pathetic, retarded life.
It's sad that this was modded "flamebait." It's exactly the kind of comment which, while some may find objectionable, isn't threatening or intended to provoke fear in its subject. As I said, some may find it objectionable or even disagree with the poster's assertions. Nonetheless, it's a perfectly reasonable (if obnoxious) use of the freedom of expression.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
It shows their intelligence. The SJWs are out in full force here today, modding down any comment that is critical of Feminism. Honestly, Feminism is already dead if it has to resort to censorship to survive.
Not sure what an SJW (straight jewish woman?) is, but I'm a middle-aged, atheist, male who considers himself to be a feminist (one who holds the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities) and I believe that rape/death threats (even if they can't be immediately verified as credible) can be quite frightening and intimidating. Those who make such threats are using the tactics of terror and should be roundly criticized and, if the threats are found to be credible, prosecuted. This holds whether or not the subject of those threats is a demagogue, a liar or someone just trying to get their point of view out there is irrelevant, IMHO.
No censorship coming from me. I firmly believe that the solution to offensive (to anyone) speech is more speech.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
'justified' is a moral concept, which i have quite clearly stated i am making no comment on. Ms Sarkeesian, by virtue of her gathering resources to build a platform and speak from it against an entrenched position is force. She is the focal point of the Kickstarter donators, to speak in their name.(voting with their wallets). She is gathering allies and making enemies, causing introspection and a re-examination of how games are made. THAT is force, change, etc. Of course some people's interests are going to conflict with this position and feel the need to counter it with force of their own. Im not sure exactly what bothers you about this concept. Care to explain?
Good-bye
I watched it and just checked a transcript, she doesn't say testosterone is a negative thing.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What are you doing on /.?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
She played Tetris and Pacman and now she is a "gamer". Actually anybody can be an "expert" looking at You Tube Videos and poking Wikipedia around. :P Since she didn't made a bang as she want, now she curiously play the tropes that she hates: She is the "Princess Peachy" and want a Mario Police to save her.
Why is this modded Flamebait? It's a blunt expression of opinions on her work, which is not objectionable, with some insults, which aren't that bad. It also insists that she should be safe from threats of violence, and that those who make them should be punished. Seems perfectly legit to me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I too was driven from home by trolls. And I am greately satisfied with their service: They charge a decent price and bring you quick an safely to your destination. The only min point is that they only drive by night a they have this little problem with sunlight. In any case I would highly recoomend the Troll Taxy Service, exellent IMO.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I'm sorry about this. I am not responsible but I'm apologising anyway because it is just damn wrong to say stuff like that.
As a male I'm glad to have you in the dev industry, we have damn few females as it is. It still pisses me off that people post this sort of rubbish which helps confirm IT as a misogynistic, male-dominated industry.
Well, in general I'd say that it's not, but I do wonder how much more outrage he would have garnered had he posted "When was the last time some black person wrote a single line of code ?"
Astoundingly, it seems sexism is more acceptable than racism.
I actually tend to agree with most of her points. As a white male gamer I don't feel threatened or offended, and looking at women in my life, I can see how the tropes she observes serve to exclude or discourage them from playing games. Although my oldest daughter is still much better at Call of Duty than me. As an older gamer I can also say it's boring to always be served the same narrow range of narratives as well, one reason I guess I play mostly indie-style games (whatever that means). From a purely selfish reason I'd love to see more variety in protagonists and narratives. Also, I love playing games and I'd love to be able to share gaming with more people, so again, having more variety would only be a good thing. Am I wrong? Am I missing something?
There's two possible interpretations to the circumstances you describe.
Actual opposition to the homosexual rights for gay males, and resistance to spending the effort on it.
The latter, while lamentable, is reasonable enough.
These were women for whom men, any men, were really the enemy. Fortunately it seems like most of those ideas have been run out of feminist circles.
If enemy npc's who are female join the ranks of cannonfodder in games, would that be a step toward reducing the problem?
Or would gaming execs view having to make alternate skins for them be an unacceptibe extra cost like happened in the Assissins Creed game?
OK, found it. The mention of razor stubble is there. The "[decrying] the evils of razor stubble and testosterone as more evidence of the evil that is man" is completely absent.
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Anyway, as fun as it was to watch you fail to construct an argument allow me to do the work for you.
Damsel in Distress, Part 1, Anita Sarkeesian
Double Dragon's opening vignette contains a woman being beaten and carried away - the male heroes must rescue her!
Double Dragon Neon starts with same vignette, this time in HD.
That's it. That's all she said. It's completely true. The plot of the game is to rescue a damsel in distress, who is shown right at the start. This is not undone by a credit sequence where after the bad guy is defeated by the guys, he sings a stupid song about how he wants the girl to be his girlfriend but the heroes were too awesome for him as he falls towards the girl who during a 7 second sequence punches him in the balls. Then you are treated to a screen with one of the heroes holding the damsel in a stereotypical hero pose. This does not undo the fact that the woman's only role in the game is to be kidnapped and rescued by the male protagonists, meaning it fits the trope.
How does this few seconds of animation wherein the damsel in distress has the bad guy defeated for her and then gets the last punch in for comedic effect, undermine Sarkeesian's point about it being a game about a damsel in distress again?
No, that is pretty much exactly what happened, unless you caught the one video where he made a relevant point rather than the dozen or so that I saw where he missed the point completely.
Since he was responding directly to clips from her videos, I seriously doubt that.
Part of the problem here, and it's also evident in the comment thread here, is that a lot of science-minded geeks don't understand the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.
Both are garbage, and neither are science. I require actual concrete scientific evidence before I'm willing to believe someone's silly narrative. When that is absent, I have no reason to take people's opinion pieces anymore seriously than anyone else's.
Just because killing civilians is penalised in one particular game doesn't mean that there isn't a general theme of abused women being used as decoration in video games.
Then she shouldn't make invalid points like that to begin with. Why didn't she show an example of what she was trying to demonstrate? Better yet, why doesn't she get a grasp on reality and realize she's playing a video game, and that males in video games are seen as being absolutely disposable? But add in some sex, and somehow it's 'bad.' I simply don't think she has a valid point to begin with.
It's an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's only a slight exaggeration. What actually describes him is that he is a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And yes, I've seen way too many Thunderf00t videos for my own good.
I'm not seeing it. He made some arguments, and if you want to actually debunk them, then go ahead. Spewing forth buzzwords and attacking him won't do anything.
Well, critical thinking mostly isn't about logical fallacies.
Maybe not, but pointing out people's logical fallacies is perfectly valid.
It's mostly about how to understand an argument.
Yes, and that's fine. Maybe you don't understand Thunderf00t's arguments.
"Random ninja being shot/chopped down in a fight" is not the same thing as "mostly naked woman splayed out on a bed with a knife in her as a prop"
Right, because that involves sex, which, in our idiotic puritan culture, makes it 100% different. Men are so worthless in video games that they're not even useful for sex; they're just nothing at all.
Both are garbage, and neither are science.
That the humanities are not science is obvious. To say that the social sciences are not science is crazy, and to say that they both are "garbage" is the bad kind of weird. Admittedly, it does help explain why you think Thunderf00t is rational.
Science limits itself to dealing with only things that are falsifiable and testable. This is precisely why science is so successful and reliable, because it limits itself to things that it can succeed at. However, some things that are important for humans to understand do not currently satisfy one or both of these criteria. For that, other methodologies are required.
Art is important. History is important. Music is important. Literature is important. Morality is important. Languages are important. The law is important. These things cannot be analysed with the same tools that you would use to analyse an atom, or a cell, or a galaxy, but they must be analysed nonetheless.
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Look for Thunderfoot (or similar) on YouTube. He made a series of videos about Anita's criticism of the gaming industry.
He's sort of rough around the edges, but he makes some good points on her videos. He mostly criticises the modern ultra-feminist movement (of which Anita is a part of) and highlights how she cherry picks her examples while conveniently ignoring that male characters in gaming are also sometimes exagerated and oversexualised.
I saw some of Anita's videos and on the whole thought that she made a few good points, but on the whole she's really taking things out of proportion and pushing a bit too hard on the victimization button.
It's also a bit hard for the cynic in me to ignore that she's milking a lot of money out of the whole ordeal.
I have seen the video to see what the fuzz is all about.
For some reason, I can not understand why people are getting so enraged about the video at all. Everything presented seems to make sense. It seems that some people on the internet don't like analysis on subjects like this one.
It escapes my mind why some people would send death threats to someone reporting on issues like this. Are these Taliban's of the internet? Some people have really no moral compass. Do they also view their mother like this?
Really sickening.
See this? This is why you come off as a lunatic nutjob with a paranoid obsession about feminists.
You have repeatedly lied and distorted the truth, and when confronted with your paranoid delusional twisting of facts, you focus on one tiny aspect of the commentary so you can ignore the substance of the argument. It is not me who is lying here, friend. It is you. Frankly, it looks like you need serious psychiatric help. Go get some.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Ok, so who are the patriarchy? I guarantee you wont have an answer or it will be so abstract that it can encompass everything like some conspiracy theory. I got another one for you. How can you tell if a character in a narrative is being sexually objectified? I guarantee you wont have that answer either.
Ok, so who are the patriarchy? I guarantee you wont have an answer or it will be so abstract that it can encompass everything like some conspiracy theory.
Your reply makes little sense. There is no "the patriarchy". That's like asking "who are the democracy"? Patriachy is a potential aspect of a society, as opposed to matriarchy and gender-neutrality.
I got another one for you. How can you tell if a character in a narrative is being sexually objectified? I guarantee you wont have that answer either.
Whether or not a character is being sexually objectified would likely be a subjective evaluation, though there are times where there is near unanimous agreement that it is happening.
If you are under the illusion that I'm some sort of gender crusader, you've been misled.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
No - there's an objective element to this test as well. Where is says "reasonably to be in sustained fear", that creates a test with two limbs:
1. Was the victim actually in sustained fear?
2. Could the statements have put a reasonable person in the position of the victim in sustained fear?
A threat that obviously wasn't serious would fail the second limb.
(Source: I am a lawyer (although not in this jurisdiction) and this is a common way to formulate criminal laws.)
This point has been made further down the comment thread, but just to point out: this claim is untrue.
Belial6 has said that the video in which the comment is made is the second part of the video on Lego. You can watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe65EGkB9kA. You can also review a full transcript at http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/02/lego-gender-part-2-the-boys-club/.
From both you will see that the statements that Belial6 is relying on are never made. This claim is just not true.
I'm not trying to argue you don't know what you're talking about or you're not right, but those 2 "limbs" sound very shaky to me (IANAL).
1. How do you prove someone is fearful? They might not be showing it outwardly but be terrified in their mind. Can CAT scans detect fear, and differentiate it from other emotions?
2. "Reasonable" is the bane of all our laws these days. "Reasonable suspicion" seems to translate to "someone in authority said they felt like it."
I realize that I sound pedantic saying all this, but I have a hard time seeing how any of this can be quantified objectively. Sorry.
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All this marketing is inescapable and young people and adults alike internalize these deeply harmful and limiting messages. Although we don’t wanna believe it, the truth of it is, is that advertising actually works to manipulate us and it works really well, or else corporations wouldn’t do it. What LEGO should have done if they were serious about expanding the LEGO universe to include girls is to actually include them in a meaningful way, not segregate and separate them into their own pink enclave. In the future here are two suggestions that LEGO can use as a starting point to think about producing and marketing new products. First, they’ve got to integrate more female minifigs characters into their themes and make them the focus of those sets. Then they’ve got to completely drop “ladyfig” doll thing from the entire LEGO universe. Secondly, LEGO needs to go back to the drawing board and create products that foster creativity and imagination that children of all genders will adore. They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat
Again. You sum up your position perfectly well in this exchange:
Me: I'm not excusing people who make threats
You: you appear to believe that she and her family deserve to be threatened with rape, torture and execution
All this marketing is inescapable and young people and adults alike internalize these deeply harmful and limiting messages. Although we don’t wanna believe it, the truth of it is, is that advertising actually works to manipulate us and it works really well, or else corporations wouldn’t do it. What LEGO should have done if they were serious about expanding the LEGO universe to include girls is to actually include them in a meaningful way, not segregate and separate them into their own pink enclave. In the future here are two suggestions that LEGO can use as a starting point to think about producing and marketing new products. First, they’ve got to integrate more female minifigs characters into their themes and make them the focus of those sets. Then they’ve got to completely drop “ladyfig” doll thing from the entire LEGO universe. Secondly, LEGO needs to go back to the drawing board and create products that foster creativity and imagination that children of all genders will adore. They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat
All this marketing is inescapable and young people and adults alike internalize these deeply harmful and limiting messages. Although we don’t wanna believe it, the truth of it is, is that advertising actually works to manipulate us and it works really well, or else corporations wouldn’t do it. What LEGO should have done if they were serious about expanding the LEGO universe to include girls is to actually include them in a meaningful way, not segregate and separate them into their own pink enclave. In the future here are two suggestions that LEGO can use as a starting point to think about producing and marketing new products. First, they’ve got to integrate more female minifigs characters into their themes and make them the focus of those sets. Then they’ve got to completely drop “ladyfig” doll thing from the entire LEGO universe. Secondly, LEGO needs to go back to the drawing board and create products that foster creativity and imagination that children of all genders will adore. They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat
It does require that you are able to follow more than three sentences when someone is trying to make a point. Her call to "deemphasize" testosterone was not some random suggestion that she was making without thought, she was quite clear that it was "deeply harmful and limiting".
So, yes. the statement is absolutely true. No matter how much you would like to sweep it under the rug. You should read the transcript before you claim it does not say something.
Incidentally, where did you get her 'job' description from? Her Kickstarter says she'll play games and do some research and produce a series of videos to 'explore five common and recurring stereotypes of female characters in video games', when funding exceeded the initial ask the video series was expanded. She doesn't say she will perform academic standard research and present her findings. She used her previous series about women in mainstream media as an example of the kind of work she will be doing. So she's doing exactly what she was being funded to do.
Lego did not decide that pink was "for girls".
Do you have a cite? Seriously. You obviously haven't worked in retail (at least as anything other than cashier). The stores have categories they wish to fill. They ask Nerf for "girls toys" and nerf either sends their boy toys to the girl isle, sends nothing, or sends girl toys. Given that "regular Nerf" ends up on the boys isle, and "Nerf Rebelle" ends up only on the girls isle, Nerf, not the store, decided that "Nerf" is boys only, and "Nerf Rebelle" is girls only. The store didn't object, but didn't make that choice themselves.
For your statement to be true, the distribution network for Lego would have to be unlike every other toy on the planet.
Outrageous claims demand at least some evidence. I think you made a large number of simply wrong assumptions about retail, then are relying on assumptions (that the store places items, regardless of the wishes of the distributors) that are wrong, and coming to the wrong conclusion based on wrong assumptions. Your logic is sound, which is why you are unwilling to listen to anyone else, but your assumptions are based on common sense, not fact.
Lego makes pink toys for the same reason that the store who sold Anita her sweater makes pink sweaters.
So stores don't go to makers and request "girs clothes" and get sent pink? The store would ask makers for "girls clothes" and get sent boys clothes in a girls cut/sizing, then the store, fed up with the options given, go out and make their own?
Reality conflicts with your opinion. I know which one I believe more.
She wants Lego to stop making toys that boys want because she finds masculinity to be offensive.
I never saw that claim.
Learn to love Alaska
When you are getting so many death threats, you are obviously doing something wrong.
That none of them were followed through on doesn't make them not credible. Credible is a measure of possible, not likely. Just because there was a low chance, doesn't mean it wasn't a threat that was impossible to carry out.
Learn to love Alaska
Wow, nice bit of selective quoting there.
They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat, and create universally appealing sets that include occupations and adventure scenarios for children of all genders.
So she clearly doesn't say that testosterone is bad, merely that if Lego really want to appeal to both genders they should stop trying to just shoe-horn women in to male oriented scenarios and develop ones that appeal universally.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's reasonable to expect all people to refrain from credibly threatening the lives of others.
An internet troll spewing shit on the comments is about as credible a death threat as saying you'll kill someone when you find out they ate the last biscuit.
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Why is it "insulting the entire gender" to say "gosh, you might want to consider whether using dead female bodies posed in necrophilic-erotic positions is really a healthy or appropriate thing to do." Personally I find it insulting to my gender that the creators of the game thing I would willingly tolerate such imagery. Essentially what the game producers are saying is "men are brutes with no compassion, let's pander to that." It's disgusting and insulting.
If your talking about the hitman bit, that was purely fabricated by her. She picks a game that you can do that to anybody, male or female, picks a very small section in a strip club where you're stopping a sexploitation ring, then kills them and drags them around the floor like that's the whole point of the game. Watch any playthrough of that level on youtube and practically everyone completely ignores them other than mention one of them will move later to a place you need to be so watch out and sneaks on past. She filmed that part purely to exaggerate the point that was completely made up to begin with.
"Essentially what the game producers are saying is "men are brutes with no compassion, let's pander to that." It's disgusting and insulting." No, that's what she's saying they're saying and basically she's saying YOU are a brute with no compassion and love nothing more than fantasising about dragging female corpses around and putting them in boxes. That is what is disgusting and insulting.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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So where's the bit where she calls testosterone "deeply harmful and limiting"? It's certainly not in the bit you quoted.
I read that quote as saying that they should get rid of the stereotypically girly-girl "ladyfig" series and get rid of the stereotypically male, testosterone-charged macho combat, and make "products that foster creativity and imagination that children of all genders will adore". I.e. she's talking about the lego playsets not men. I think that's obvious from the transcript, but you can also tell that because when she talks about the "macho testosterone" she puts up a picture of a lego figure in combat, not a picture of a human male.
She's pretty outspoken and not afraid to make a point. If she was really saying that testosterone was a negative trait in males don't you think she would have said it, rather than leaving it as an inference that, reading the replies to your comments, nobody except you is picking up on?
And if you're still sure that she meant to denigrate all men, if the most egregious example you've been able to find is an, at most, ambiguous and oblique reference to testosterone, don't you think you might be blowing this out of proportion?
I think that those are perfectly reasonable questions. It's not something that you think about a lot as a lawyer - at least not explicitly - because you get so used to this pattern.
Thinking about it, it might be easier to explain this by taking the two steps in the opposite order.
Reasonableness
I don't agree that reasonableness is the bane of all our laws. It's an important safeguard - the point is that we are dealing with subjective judgments or subjective feelings, but we want a safeguard so that someone can't be liable because someone completely overreacted to an innocent remark, or a police officer completely overreacted to very minor evidence.
The question that this is asking is "could a reasonable person, in the position of the victim, have been put in sustained fear" (or in your police example, could a reasonable police officer put in the position of the officer in question have suspected X). The reasonable person is assumed to be of reasonable firmness and resolve, to take sensible logical decisions etc. Note that the question is could a reasonable person, not would they - the person does not have to act in the way that the court thinks a reasonable person would probably act, they just have to act in a way that falls within the spectrum of actions that the reasonable person might take.
In practice, where the person is an expert the court will be slow to find that they have acted unreasonably, especially if they act within the bounds of normal practice in their profession. In principle I think that is sensible - the court is meant to check excesses, not ensure that every officer meets absolute best practice. However it does seem like the pendulum has swung too far at present, particularly in the United States, and I wonder if the fact that US judges are highly politicized means that you are likely to get judges who are more likely to side with the police (I don't mean that they are being swayed by thoughts of rewards for siding with the police, just that the executive is likely to appoint judges who they know take a more pro-executive view).
The subjective limb
This is a straightforward evidential point - straightforward conceptually, that is, not necessarily easy to prove. Subject to the applicable rules of evidence, anything that is relevant can be used to prove that the person was fearful - I'm not aware of CAT scans having been used, but expert evidence from psychiatrists, therapists, police support officers and so on are all used.
Proving that someone was fearful is obviously difficult since it requires the court to try to establish what was in their mind. There are three points though that I think tend to mitigate that problem:
1. This is not an isolated difficulty - the courts are frequently required to establish what was in someone's mind (did she intend to stab him?) and have a lot of practice at it.
2. The criminal standard of proof applies - so the prosecution has to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the person was fearful.
3. They aren't looking at this as an isolated question - they can look at all the circumstances. If, in answer to the other limb of the test, the court has concluded that the defendant's behaviour would have put a reasonable person in sustained fear, they are going to find it rather easier to conclude that this victim was, in fact, in sustained fear. For example, if you make repeated and plausible death threats that the court thinks would have terrorized a reasonable person, and the victim claims that he was left fearful by them, you are likely to find that the court is not very receptive to the argument that the victim is faking it.
As a final point, I don't think it can all be quantified objectively. That, however, is true of an awful lot of criminal laws, even the seemingly straightforward ones. My view is that it's an inevitable product of the fact that we live in a confusing and complicated world.
Thanks for the info :) Ever since NewYorkCountyLawyer left I haven't seen much in the way of professional legal data around here.
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*NewYorkCountryLawyer
Hmm. Apparently he's still around and posting, actually.
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You just won. @Kielistic
I don't see where you got "the evil that is man". Just "the evil that is LEGO marketers".
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To say that the social sciences are not science is crazy
No, it's accurate. Good science is rigorous, objective, and unbiased. Much of the research that comes out of the "social sciences" is a fucking joke compared to a field like, say, physics. And no amount of, "But being rigorous, objective, and unbiased is too hard!" will change that. Until this is fixed, they should not be called "science." You can continue researching them all you like, but don't insult science with such trash, and don't try to push through your crappy laws without real science backing you up.
Admittedly, it does help explain why you think Thunderf00t is rational.
No, it doesn't. But it's convenient for you to think that it does, so that won't stop you from thinking it.
Art is important. History is important. Music is important. Literature is important. Morality is important. Languages are important. The law is important.
X is important (which is subjective) != X is science. Most of those are not science.
OK, you didn't understand what I said. That's okay, so let's go through this again.
The social sciences are fields like anthropology, sociology, psychology, and behavioural economics. These fields are just as experimentally-based, data-driven, rigorous, and objective as biology.
The humanities are fields like art, history, music, literature, and culture. These are often informed by science, but they are not science. They are still important to study.
Anita Sarkeesian is doing humanities, not social science. If you pay attention to her videos, she does report results from social science, because this is part of the methodology. But she is not doing science, and she would be the first to agree with this.
Did that help?
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Not necessary. I can think for myself ... been working on critical thinking skills for a lifetime.
Wrong. That was her suggestion on how to get rid of the "deeply harmful and limiting messages". The testosteron what the thing that was deeply harmful per her description.
Clearly, you don't know what testosterone is.
I see you've chosen not to engage with any actual argument, and chose instead to make a vague claim of superiority with no explanation. An excellent strategy for when you have no arguments to make but don't want to admit it, such as if you made up a disparaging claim, but got called on it.