Post by trashcanman on Mar 11, 2013 6:12:13 GMT 2
Feminist video blogger Anita Sarkeesian put forth a request to women everywhere to raise $150,000 for a project that was going to study and expose misogyny in video games. It worked, and an internet controversy was born. Feminism is now the hot button issue of the cybercommunity and Sarkeesian's shrill call to arms came at just the right time. I find feminism as unnecessary as masculinism in the modern era seeing that I have yet to witness a woman being genuinely oppressed against her will in real life beyond what men also put up with, but I'm not really here to argue that. What I'm here to argue about is whether this project (which appears to have cost nothing more than Ms. Sarkeesian's time) is worthy of the money they took for it.
This is her first episode.
An overlong, droning 23 minutes of ancient mythology and video game history that serves as nothing more than stating the obvious over nearly half an hour. Honestly, all of the necessary information is actually in the title of the video. The rest is just cut-pasted video game footage and the verbal equivalent of this:
Now let me point out that most of her information is not necessarily wrong. It's just really fucking obvious at worst and common knowledge at best. What's the point? Everybody knows the plot to Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda. EVEN NON-GAMERS. And yeah, the DiD is a lame trope. But in most of these shitty old games, the idea was to make a game that was fun. The story was bullshit. Always bullshit. The point was to run, jump, kill, repeat. Most game designers being men, and being that the most desirable thing a man can ever obtain is a woman's love, they simply stuck this "plot" in because it was the easiest excuse they could think of. No hate crimes there.
Now let me point out that the objection that women should never be portrayed as "frail, fragile, and vulnerable" or in need of protection kind of flies in the face of the notion that a man should never hit a woman. I'd simply have to ask why it is considered worse to hit a woman than a man if women are not in any way weaker. In the physical sense, they are objectively so. What I would argue rather than flatly denying the obvious, is that this simple fact of life does not in any legitimate way render women inferior. Physical strength is useful for many things, but unless you are a blue-collar laborer or a professional athlete, it really doesn't have a lot of practical value in a modern, civilized society. And yes, if a bunch of gang members decide to assault and kidnap a lone average woman on the street a-la Double Dragon, it's probably going down a lot like that. Giving women superpowers is awesome if that's the game you're playing (and I often choose to play a female character over a male given the choice), but insisting that every woman non-character in gaming have fighting skills to take out any number of musclebound men or else it's sexist is a bit much. Also, for $150,000, I don't think it's to much to ask that we point out that this is one of the oldest and most prominent vidya protagonists of all time:
Then again, I'd say Samus's awesomeness may well have been canceled out by Princess Daphne in just this one scene.
That is legitimately one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Still not as super-sexist as it looks in context, though. Look at Link in 1993.
The problem isn't that video games (or male gamers) hate women or seek to keep them "in their place", but that the developers are often too stupid to care. And as can be seen in this rebuttal video where somebody questions Sarkeesian's rather gutless decision to disable votes and responses to her videos, a lot of these "feminists" aren't exactly playing with a full deck on these issues.
Furthermore, there is the fact that Ms. Sarkeesian is playing up being the victim of bullying by crying about all of the comments of her getting raped and whatnot. In fact, this what led to such a massive amount of donations as her plight became publicized. Makes her come off like a hero don'it? Enter our friends at 4chan. You know, the site that exists primarily to troll the ever-loving shit out of any target they can find and spends a lot of time posting over-the-top hate against women and minorities just to see if it's still possible to shock each other? Yeah, she (or someone on her behalf using her name) went there to beg for money, thus kicking off a hate campaign that she then used to gather sympathy to beg elsewhere.
archive.foolz.us/v/thread/139813364/
And let me tell you, that thread is shockingly polite by /v/ standards. After that it kind of got out of hand as things usually do there. So really, internet trolls probably have only themselves to blame at the end of the day. They got trolled into making her
One hundred and fifty....THOUSAND DOLLARS!
to play fucking video games and then bitch about it on the internet. I am SO in the wrong line of work. Thoughts? Feelings? Rants?
This is her first episode.
An overlong, droning 23 minutes of ancient mythology and video game history that serves as nothing more than stating the obvious over nearly half an hour. Honestly, all of the necessary information is actually in the title of the video. The rest is just cut-pasted video game footage and the verbal equivalent of this:
Now let me point out that most of her information is not necessarily wrong. It's just really fucking obvious at worst and common knowledge at best. What's the point? Everybody knows the plot to Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda. EVEN NON-GAMERS. And yeah, the DiD is a lame trope. But in most of these shitty old games, the idea was to make a game that was fun. The story was bullshit. Always bullshit. The point was to run, jump, kill, repeat. Most game designers being men, and being that the most desirable thing a man can ever obtain is a woman's love, they simply stuck this "plot" in because it was the easiest excuse they could think of. No hate crimes there.
Now let me point out that the objection that women should never be portrayed as "frail, fragile, and vulnerable" or in need of protection kind of flies in the face of the notion that a man should never hit a woman. I'd simply have to ask why it is considered worse to hit a woman than a man if women are not in any way weaker. In the physical sense, they are objectively so. What I would argue rather than flatly denying the obvious, is that this simple fact of life does not in any legitimate way render women inferior. Physical strength is useful for many things, but unless you are a blue-collar laborer or a professional athlete, it really doesn't have a lot of practical value in a modern, civilized society. And yes, if a bunch of gang members decide to assault and kidnap a lone average woman on the street a-la Double Dragon, it's probably going down a lot like that. Giving women superpowers is awesome if that's the game you're playing (and I often choose to play a female character over a male given the choice), but insisting that every woman non-character in gaming have fighting skills to take out any number of musclebound men or else it's sexist is a bit much. Also, for $150,000, I don't think it's to much to ask that we point out that this is one of the oldest and most prominent vidya protagonists of all time:
Then again, I'd say Samus's awesomeness may well have been canceled out by Princess Daphne in just this one scene.
That is legitimately one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Still not as super-sexist as it looks in context, though. Look at Link in 1993.
The problem isn't that video games (or male gamers) hate women or seek to keep them "in their place", but that the developers are often too stupid to care. And as can be seen in this rebuttal video where somebody questions Sarkeesian's rather gutless decision to disable votes and responses to her videos, a lot of these "feminists" aren't exactly playing with a full deck on these issues.
Furthermore, there is the fact that Ms. Sarkeesian is playing up being the victim of bullying by crying about all of the comments of her getting raped and whatnot. In fact, this what led to such a massive amount of donations as her plight became publicized. Makes her come off like a hero don'it? Enter our friends at 4chan. You know, the site that exists primarily to troll the ever-loving shit out of any target they can find and spends a lot of time posting over-the-top hate against women and minorities just to see if it's still possible to shock each other? Yeah, she (or someone on her behalf using her name) went there to beg for money, thus kicking off a hate campaign that she then used to gather sympathy to beg elsewhere.
archive.foolz.us/v/thread/139813364/
And let me tell you, that thread is shockingly polite by /v/ standards. After that it kind of got out of hand as things usually do there. So really, internet trolls probably have only themselves to blame at the end of the day. They got trolled into making her
One hundred and fifty....THOUSAND DOLLARS!
to play fucking video games and then bitch about it on the internet. I am SO in the wrong line of work. Thoughts? Feelings? Rants?
