rbstewart7263 said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI&feature=g-hist
kahuna you wanted a clear and concise youtube video debunking her views.
here you go.
Watched it, was unimpressed.
There were a few glaring issues that jumped out at me.
His analysis of her thesis was kind of cringe-inducing, because it became abundantly clear that he was either strawmanning, skimming, or unable to understand the paper. Saying, for instance, that he's unclear on whether she thinks traits broken down in a diagram are negative or positive makes me wonder why he didn't read the actual analysis the diagram was supplementing. As far as I can tell, he also appears to believe that a Master's thesis featuring citations is a bad thing. This indicates to me that he either has very little experience writing in an academic context or assumes his audience has very little experience writing in an academic context.
Combined with other bizarre mistakes, like not understanding what the word "fetishize" means outside of a sex/porn context or not realizing what a reading level calculator is used for, this makes the video come off as pseudo-intellectual.
Finally, the fact that he is dredging up a Master's thesis in the first place is very Kagan confirmation process. What someone wrote in years ago in an academic context is not particularly revealing: theses are more "show me that you've earned your degree" and less "describe, at length, your entire socio-political philosophy, from which you will not deviate after graduation."
Now, although a dredged up thesis is weak evidence, this thesis could be used as part of a more intelligent critique. Basically, what he should have done is opened up with "Tropes vs. Women is inherently flawed, because it relies on a reductionist quasi-troper mentality we see elsewhere in Sarkeesian's work," and gone from there, discussing how analyzing media in terms of recurring tropes is reductionist and robs things of their context. He comes close to starting this at multiple points in the video, but it never coalesces into a coherent critique.
A weaker argument that could nonetheless incorporate higher-level analysis would be an actual reading of her thesis. I'm not convinced this guy has what it takes to do this, but on the off-chance that he was being disingenuous instead of simply missing the point, he could have theoretically have done the first five minutes of the video in a serious, non-strawmanning fashion. This probably wouldn't work as a youtube video.