Dragonbums said:
Finally. Now the non supporters can finally shut up about the damn woman being the greatest con artist and scammer of the 21st century.
Never seen so much outrage and hair trigger reactions to the most bland potatoes YouTube feminist in my entire internet life.
She's as much of a 'feminist' as she is a 'gamer'.
Anyway, scam wasn't targeted at gamers and gaming in the first place. Gamers were pretty much live bait she used. Gaming community acted the way she needed (predicted), when she took a huge dump on it. She expected insecure reaction from community of constantly berated and falsly accused geeks and got it. All that was needed was the right angle to draw a division line and she picked sex/gender - yet another cliche thing geeks are insecure about. F#&*ing sad thing is it worked.
Her goal (as every con-artist's ever) was money. Not making few people upset (that would be just trolling).
That translates to people, that would take defending her out of proportion, NOT ones that would take attacking her out of proportion (thou both were needed). In short, she saw potential in making money out of petty, social media fueled tribalism and she brilliantly played this out.
She got her 'small fry' campaign funded - sure, meaningless but hey money is money.
People can scoff at that all day long but she also carved out a sizable chunk out of large social movement and made their interests spin around her. That's no small feat. Especially if you consider that this hardly could have been planned in the first place. Anita played the cards whe was given and adapted ceasing a lot more both money but also influence which can be cashed in.
Only marketing dept. of huge corporations are able to plan and spin campaigns on planted social media outrage and actually milk money out of that. Something Anita did on her own. How is it not worth recognition (mind you, not admiration)?
She is now well set on just taking a fee for 'telling her story' to followers,
maybe accepting some donations playing the victim card. Most importantly, she isn't in position where she's 'done' (ie. lost credibility with movement she hijacked and mass media).
Are games and players really hurt by that? No.
It's unnerving to be crapped on like that with false accusations. It's annoying to watch distorted problems of actual problems game industry and gaming media have (shallow characters, re-usable tropes/scenarios, constant copying of 'that game that hauled so much money', cronyism and nepotism among creators and supposed critics etc.) but that is it. Gamers as community had already retarded image in mass media, that didn't get any worse (mass murderous, virgin, obese, jobless cretins are now also white, male misogynists. Oh noes!).
Is feminism hurt by her? Nope.
Vocal, social media driven part of it got pretty much hijacked by a con artist. That's it. No real harm done.
It wasn't credible to begin with.
TLDR;
Anita is 'a great' con artists. How many of them started with few hundred bucks and crowdfunded 'project' and ended up having UN as their platform? I honestly do recognise that, as an achievement, few people are capable of. Unless you can name few matching that?