Kickstarter Video Project Attracts Misogynist Horde

[SNCommand]

I do admit that games haven't been the best source for good female main characters, but then again I would say games aren't doing that much worse compared to movies.

Yes, women are portrayed as unrealistic, but so are the men, and if the game industry is able to create female protagonists such as the one in the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls I do think the issue is smaller than some would believe.

Then again the responses to this project clearly proves that some people are screwed up and that they represent the worst of society when it comes to gender discrimination.

 

[PiCroft]

I didn't want to read through the whole thread, how many pages did this thread last before someone brought up "but EVOLUTION" for why men are naturally the superior sex?

 

[Kahunaburger]

Games in that vein and most of them, yes.

Games in the vein of Farmville? So, in other words, Diablo and F2P MMOs? (Naw man this game is totally hardcore look it even has teh devul on the box!)

You really think that pretending that by Farmville I mean Games like Diablo is going to help your case? No, I'm talking about them making up the majority of the (to use the esa pdf) 42% playing Puzzle, Board Game, Game Show, Trivia and Card Games online. That kind of thing, not that you didn't already know that.

But most puzzle/board/card games aren't games like Farmville, because they aren't skinner boxes. More to the point, I'm not sure why, if you had to group the games Civ 4, Risk, Farmville, and Diablo 3, you'd group them (Diablo 3 Civ 4/Risk, Farmville) and not (Diablo 3, Farmville/Risk, Civ 4).

So, now you are pretending the criteria is skinner box? Yeah, whatever dude.

Not really, no. I'm just curious as to A) what criteria you use to determine if you think a game is casual/hardcore, and B) why you think the casual/hardcore distinction would be more useful in grouping (for instance) Farmville, Risk, Civ 4, and Diablo 3 than, say, the skinner box/strategy distinction.

 

[LiquidGrape]

On a related note, ironically enough, modern feminism believes that men are more than capable of transcending these institutionalised roles to which they are expected to adhere. Feminism actually acknowledges the agency of men, and their status as equals.
And yet feminism is accused of misandry.

But have you SEEN how many people actually abuse feminism to support their sexist agenda?

Hell for example my brother who was living in his college apartments with two women and everyone gets along fine. A third woman moves in and suddenly my brother is out of the blue by the third woman accused of "sexual harassment" to which the reason why the third woman moved into that apartment(one of the women was an RA) was cause she wanted his room cause it was the bigger room.

I can get into more detail but note the core problem, you had a woman who was abusing her equal rights in an overall feminist culture to destroy my brother's good name and have his entire education record end in "is a sexual harasser". Do you honestly think that is right?

The unsubstantiated claims and (understandable, don't get me wrong) lack of specifics regarding your brother's situation aside, conflating isolated incidents with systematic oppression is a rookie mistake. And if you think the behaviour of individual self-professed members of a group can be held as representatives of the fundamental ideal, everyone is an extremist.
As for "overall feminist culture"...where do you live, exactly? Granted that feminist theory is more widely acknowledged than it's been before, but it's also more widely misunderstood and vilified.

There are too many people who openly abuse feminism for their own personal gain and that is more certain what this kickstarter project/youtuber is doing. She is profiting under the guise of feminism while all she is doing is subjecting her opinion as fact instead of actually doing hard research all over subjects of pop-culture that she will be complaining about the video game industry of 2011 using characters, games, genres, and narratives of 1980's and 1990's. I doubt she won't even mention for one second how ancient in terms of how the damsel in distress in terms of age in relation to grim fairy tales and even older texts where you have both male and female characters as the damsel. We will get nothing but Zelda and Peach and have her complain about how she specifically wants women to be addressed instead of the actual narrative to tell the story and how much of a difference a gamer gets when playing through a narrative needing to be told from generation to generation instead of just reading or listening to the story from Ben Stein.

You're accusing a person of stating her opinion as fact, and then proceed to make unfounded claims as to what her opinions will be.
Also, what the hell does rape apologist and sexist extraordinaire [http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/17/presumed-innocent-anyone] Ben Stein's got to do with this?

I think there is quite a legitimate reason to "rage" at her. She is more or less abusing a demographic and her character to basically con people out of their money to which she has not actually proven that the content is actually going to be any different or superior to her previous videos.

...

She doesn't have a clue on what she has gotten herself into but instead saw that she could easily cash in with the standard internet rage and play the victim(kinda ironic a person playing a character of a "feminist" is playing a victim) as journalists and opinion based internet stars related towards the video game industry are not backing her getting her more money instead of actually doing the due diligence to see her content and actually demand transparency.

I'm going to be completely honest, I have no idea what deluded point you're trying to make.

She's been treated with threats of death and rape.
Her wikipedia page was altered to showcase hardcore pornography and describe her as a "feminist c**t".
She's been inundated with hate for the crime of asking for people to invest in her project; money freely given by people with an interest.

How you can so utterly twist this matter into making her the culprit of some prospective scam is beyond me.

 

[Zeckt]

I'm all for gender equality, but I think she's wasting time. She can drone on for hours all she wants but it wont change that it is ridiculously hard to create a perfect female character (strong, not too strong. Pretty, not too pretty smart but not too smart) that they don't even bother anymore.

She's not part of the solution, she's part of the problem. She intimidates everybody in expecting everybody to create the perfect female character without flaws in every video game ever. You know what? not going to happen. She should stop whining about it and create HER perfect ideal female game character. And you know what? she would find the same problems that developers do. It would either be too perfect and be boring as hell or have too many flaws and be dependant. It's so much easier to make guy characters for a reason. No one gets criticized for making male characters but female? you get crap like this which will in turn make it even HARDER to make female characters! AARGH!

In my opinion I think its feminists like her that put female characters in the sorry state they are in now by being so critical of every single one in existance which in turn will mean less female characters in favor of the much easier to make male ones.

 

[Exterminas]

Mhm, leaving aside the sexism:

Does it strike anyone else as odd that this lady wants 6.000 bucks of funding for a video series that probably will boil down to the content of TV-Tropes? Seems like a lot of dough for that kind of "research".

 

[Kahunaburger]

She intimidates everybody in expecting everybody to create the perfect female character without flaws in every video game ever.

Honestly, I think "female character that doesn't fall into one of these blatantly sexist tropes" is a pretty low bar to set.

 

[LiquidGrape]

I'm all for gender equality, but I think she's wasting time. She can drone on for hours all she wants but it wont change that it is ridiculously hard to create a perfect female character (strong, not too strong. Pretty, not too pretty smart but not too smart) that they don't even bother anymore.

She's not part of the solution, she's part of the problem. She intimidates everybody in expecting everybody to create the perfect female character without flaws in every video game ever. You know what? not going to happen. She should stop whining about it and create HER perfect ideal female game character. And you know what? she would find the same problems that developers do. It's so much easier to make guy characters for a reason. No one gets criticized for them and thats JUST what she's doing! AARGH!

Thats's something of a strawman. Nobody's asking for flawless female characters. (Well, possibly some, but those people are demonstrably out of touch.)
People are asking, however, for three-dimensional female characters independent of suspect authorial intentions.

 

[Legion]

I do not agree with her views, simply because I see the stereotypes used in regards to females nothing more than 'playing to the teenage male fantasy' as opposed to anything as extreme as sexism or misogynistic tendencies on behalf of the developer.

But how is this right in a time where the young teenage male just makes out 13% of the gamer audience? Woman aged 18+ count 38% of the audience and are nearly the triple of the "target demographic".

What has that got to do with anything?

The target demographic is whomever the companies want to aim at, not whomever plays the most games. Most shooters are aimed at drawing in a teenage/young adult male audience, it doesn't matter how many females make up the overall player base, they are not the target audience for these games.

Just look at Mass Effect, despite the fact that a female option for Shepard is available, much more time is put towards the male Shepard in the second two games. The animations are all modelled on a male Shepard, the main box only shows a male Shepard, the merchandise released is almost always showing male Shepard.

Even a game that has the option to play as a female tries to steer people towards a male character, it is still aimed at a predominately male audience. I am not saying it is right, but that's what happens when a companies first priority is to sell as many units as possible.

 

[Zeckt]

I'm all for gender equality, but I think she's wasting time. She can drone on for hours all she wants but it wont change that it is ridiculously hard to create a perfect female character (strong, not too strong. Pretty, not too pretty smart but not too smart) that they don't even bother anymore.

She's not part of the solution, she's part of the problem. She intimidates everybody in expecting everybody to create the perfect female character without flaws in every video game ever. You know what? not going to happen. She should stop whining about it and create HER perfect ideal female game character. And you know what? she would find the same problems that developers do. It's so much easier to make guy characters for a reason. No one gets criticized for them and thats JUST what she's doing! AARGH!

Strawman. Nobody's asking for flawless female characters. People are asking for three-dimensional female characters independent of suspect authorial intentions.

But THATS the problem! developers are terrified of making female characters because they have to be JUST RIGHT! flawed, but not too flawed, strong but not too strong etc etc when they can easily make some male dumb ass bulletstorm type character and not have to worry about it and have fun and relax. But their female characters are monitored on a microscope by people like her which will simply mean less of them being made because its just not worth the risk!

If her documentaries actually had good intentions, she would address that problem instead of being so disgustingly one sided. I have nothing against feminists and I'm all for gender equality but not in the way she goes about it which is no better then the people she criticizes.

 

[Schadrach]

But have you SEEN how many people actually abuse feminism to support their sexist agenda?

Yes, but you see "feminism is not a monolith", which allows one to essentially pull a no true Scotsman without technically doing so.

Hell for example my brother who was living in his college apartments with two women and everyone gets along fine. A third woman moves in and suddenly my brother is out of the blue by the third woman accused of "sexual harassment" to which the reason why the third woman moved into that apartment(one of the women was an RA) was cause she wanted his room cause it was the bigger room.

I can get into more detail but note the core problem, you had a woman who was abusing her equal rights in an overall feminist culture to destroy my brother's good name and have his entire education record end in "is a sexual harasser". Do you honestly think that is right?

That isn't a matter of "equal rights", that's a matter of biased examination and lowered standards of proof. "Do what I want or I can end your education with an unsupported accusation" is according to some perfectly reasonable fallout. They accept a reversed version of Blackstone's formulation, wherein it's perfectly fine to punish the innocent to make it easier to get at the guilty, but usually only so long as the innocent are male (personally, I'm waiting for a "mutually drunk" sexual assault college case in which the man doesn't question the events except to point out that he was drunk and incapable of consent, accuse her of the same things, and threaten a Title IX suit if they aren't treated equally -- I think it would make a few people's heads explode).

What about that college football player that we all just found out that he served FIVE years in jail all cause the woman LIED!? Lied under oath and it took someone doing an undercover video to discover the truth.

He's not even the only case like that (I have several examples, even in just the past few weeks[footnote]http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2012/05/cuyahoga_prosecutor_bill_mason.html[/footnote][footnote]http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/06/06/cabbie-vindicated-after-sex-assault-charge-dismissed[/footnote][footnote]http://www.cotwa.info/2012/06/kelly-peretzman-adds-lying-about-rape_03.html[/footnote][footnote]http://www.cotwa.info/2012/05/false-rape-threat-caught-on-tape.html[/footnote]), merely the one that got national attention because of, well, an actual video in which the woman openly confessed that she lied and that she was only holding with her lies because she was worried about having to pay back the money she fraudulently won from the state. Note that she is not being punished (or even tried) for lying, sending a man to prison for half a decade based entirely on her lies (and then another 5 on an ankle monitor and registry as a sex offender) and fraudulently suing the school for a great deal of money.

One of those facets of "women are people too" that many feminists like to pretend doesn't exist is that women are capable of extraordinary cruelty, manipulation, and malevolence. Not because they are women, but because they are *people* and that capacity isn't gendered.

The typical argument for why someone like that isn't being punished is that somehow punishing those who are clearly lying makes it more difficult for those who are real victims to be taken seriously. I would suggest the opposite is true; if lying about such accusations was taken seriously, it would make people take accusation more seriously -- after all why would you risk lying about something like that if it could seriously bite you in the ass. As opposed to being about as bad as a speeding ticket and rarely actually pursued.

There are too many people who openly abuse feminism for their own personal gain and that is more certain what this kickstarter project/youtuber is doing. She is profiting under the guise of feminism while all she is doing is subjecting her opinion as fact instead of actually doing hard research all over subjects of pop-culture that she will be complaining about the video game industry of 2011 using characters, games, genres, and narratives of 1980's and 1990's. I doubt she won't even mention for one second how ancient in terms of how the damsel in distress in terms of age in relation to grim fairy tales and even older texts where you have both male and female characters as the damsel. We will get nothing but Zelda and Peach and have her complain about how she specifically wants women to be addressed instead of the actual narrative to tell the story and how much of a difference a gamer gets when playing through a narrative needing to be told from generation to generation instead of just reading or listening to the story from Ben Stein.

You're probably about half right. Look at her first Tropes vs Women to get an idea of what she was proposing when she was asking for $6k.

I'm actually surprised that there isn't an organized campaign to get Kickstarter to cancel it. After all, pushing Kickstarter to cancel a project that disagrees with your political sensibilities in some fashion was apparently entirely the correct thing to do when the project was something that pissed off feminist sensibilities, some of whom still seem to be mad that they can't push PayPal around as easily.

I've seen a lot of the disgusting and vile stuff spewed at female players in online games described as 'just smack talk' by male players, and that the recipients should 'toughen up'.

Not nearly as gendered as you make it sound. I've seen a lot of disgusting and vile stuff spewed at players in online games and described as smack talk. Usually coming from teenaged boys, usually using whatever detail regarding you they can pick out as a focus point. It's especially bad on Xbox Live, for some reason.

 

[Kahunaburger]

But their female characters are monitored on a microscope by people like her which will simply mean less of them being made because its just not worth the risk!

Developers take into account the opinion of feminist critics to the point that it influences design decisions? News to me.

 

[WindKnight]

But their female characters are monitored on a microscope by people like her which will simply mean less of them being made because its just not worth the risk!

Developers take into account the opinion of feminist critics to the point that it influences design decisions? News to me.

I think the nearest is the female playable characters in gears of war 3, who wore the same armour as the males, used the same weapons, and could be just as snarky, tough and fallible as the male characters. And we even got an older, gruff and tough lady to counterpoint hoffmans bad-ass old dude stylings.

Of course the GOW fans reacted to them by screaming and raging they were gaying the the game up with those grody women.

 

[LiquidGrape]

But THATS the problem! developers are terrified of making female characters because they have to be JUST RIGHT! flawed, but not too flawed, strong but not too strong etc etc when they can easily make some male dumb ass bulletstorm type character and not have to worry about it and have fun and relax. But their female characters are monitored on a microscope by people like her which will simply mean less of them being made because its just not worth the risk!

If her documentaries actually had good intentions, she would address that problem instead of being so disgustingly one sided. I have nothing against feminists and I'm all for gender equality but not in the way she goes about it which is no better then the people she criticizes.

But it really isn't that hard to please people. Not in a general sense. Naturally there'll always be some measure of contention regarding matters of sex and gender because of people's varying sensitivities, but in a general sense it really isn't that hard.

Just abstaining from crass exploitation removes a major chunk of the problem. Jade in Beyond Good & Evil is by no means a complex character, but she was presented in such a positive and unassuming way that she stands out as something of a model female character regardless.
Or take Alyx Vance. Or April Ryan. Rochelle in Left 4 Dead. Decent, non-problematic female characters aren't unheard of, they're just underexposed.

And hell, it's not even like you'd have to give up titillation entirely.

Isabela in Dragon Age II was a very knowingly sexual character, but what separated her from the likes of Rachel in Ninja Gaiden was her unwavering sense of self and independence.
That didn't mean she was bereft of flaws or couldn't be portrayed as vulnerable. It merely meant she wasn't subjected to a developer's potential leering and victimisation.

 

[Smeatza]

The bottom line is that her series of videos will change nothing.
Because everyone who may be supporting (either intentionally or unintentionally) sexist ideals in the gaming industry will never watch it.
You can see from the overwhelming negative response that many males feel vilified by this so called documentary. Do you think that they will even watch it? let alone take it seriously? when they feel like they are being demonised?
If she were to look at things from a fair, objective point of view, rather than making her own bias blatantly obvious from the start, then this might of had a chance of reaching an audience who actually needs to see it. As it stands, only people who are already aware of the issue and have picked her "side" of the debate will watch it.

 

[PiCroft]

The bottom line is that her series of videos will change nothing.
Because everyone who may be supporting (either intentionally or unintentionally) sexist ideals in the gaming industry will never watch it.
You can see from the overwhelming negative response that many males feel vilified by this so called documentary. Do you think that they will even watch it? let alone take it seriously? when they feel like they are being demonised?
If she were to look at things from a fair, objective point of view, rather than making her own bias blatantly obvious from the start, then this might of had a chance of reaching an audience who actually needs to see it. As it stands, only people who are already aware of the issue and have picked her "side" of the debate will watch it.

You're right, the issue here is of course to make sure that we don't offend the sensibilities of misogynist ogres who make rape threats, sexist slurs and random anti-semite bile.

God forbid we demonize people who vandalize a woman's wiki page because she wanted to make a documentary about sexism!