DizzyChuggernaut said:
Really? "Around here"? I find The Escapist forums to be more level-headed than most, so I am very skeptical of this. If you were on some masturbatory pro-masculinity site like The Return of Kings then I'd agree with you. But here I think people would have a better grasp of what counts as moderate/extreme/disingenuous feminism.
I'm not sure I'd call Anita Sarkeesian a "radical" feminist, but she does seem to be a feminist that doesn't respect the voices of other feminists. Much like Christina Hoff Sommers actually. She does make wild assertions without evidence though, claiming that media influences society rather than the other way around. It's very much Jack Thompson-style rhetoric, as much as I hate that overused comparison.
Calling Sarkeesian "non-confrontational" is kinda inaccurate. Her series is called "Tropes vs. Women". As in "media is attacking women with sexist tropes". It is an indication of the direction her videos take too, illustrating a sort of malicious intent on behalf of game designers. "X, Y and Z are misogynistic" or "rooted in misogyny" are very sensational claims to make. Hatred of women and misrepresentation of women are two very different things and by conflating the two it muddies arguments. I'd say it is quite an extreme view that avoids nuance or any suggestions for improvement.
I personally think that the conflation of the intentions behind terms like "feminazi" and "SJW" with feminism and social justice as a whole is doing more harm than good. I think it's an indication of a lack of discussion. Why do they use the term "feminazi"? Is it just because they dislike feminism as a whole? Is it because there is mistrust due to a few feminists co-opting a legitimate cause for narcissistic and antagonistic reasons? I don't use the word purely because I don't want people to think I mean feminism as a whole when I use it, and because the person who coined it was a bigoted asshole.
Also fun and probably irrelevant fact: The only person I personally know who likes Sorceress' design is a female game designer.
I've seen some other gaming sites that completely blow the Escapist out of the water in terms of sexist posts, so it's certainly one of the better places. It's still got some massive polarization issues though. Too often an extremist feminist seems to be "a feminist I disagree with". If I looked at the "7 Female game developers speak about gamergate" thread I'm sure I'd find people calling them extremists.
I've never considered Tropes vs Women to be a confrontational title, and I don't think it's intended to be either. I also think that a lot of people misunderstand what exactly misogyny means, which is probably not helped by the vague and misleading definition. This is the one most people are probably using when they speak about misogyny.
Misogyny said:
Dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women
As opposed to the one most people who have an issue with the term go with, which is "A hatred of women". I don't really watch her videos much because I find them bland and non-committal as well as not particularly insightful but I don't think those that I have seen even use the word misogyny. I'll search through the scripts of her episodes to see though.
Said once in Damsel in Distress part 2 - Says that sometimes the use of brutalized women to inject "mature themes" into a game can cross the line into blatant misogyny
Said once in Women as Background Decorations Part 1 - "A line can be drawn from the crude sensationalized misogyny of Duke Nukem"
Said twice in part 2
- "female prostitutes are assaulted and murdered by johns amid a torrent of misogynistic slurs"
- "These games also tend to frame misogyny and sexual exploitation as an everlasting fact of life, as something inescapable and unchangeable."
This is just from her videos, I don't follow her twitter accounts, but she mentions the word in only half of her videos, and in the final two uses she's referring to misogyny that the game is trying to portray has misogyny. She's never accusing gamers who play these games as being misogynistic, and as far as I'm aware Duke Nukem is supposed to be a sensationalized mysoginistic womanizer.
As far as I've seen, she never really criticizes people, she criticizes tropes and uses of women that she thinks are objectionable. That's why I used the term non-confrontational.
Speaking about that Jack Thompson bit, I think it's really hard to claim that media doesn't influence people's attitudes. I'm not saying that if you watch misogynistic drivel then you will go off and beat women. However, when certain tropes are universally painted as normal or in a positive light I have a hard time believing that it won't influence your perception of it in real life. Media is the main thing that connects people who have never met each other before, and it no doubt plays some role in what cultural similarities they will share.
I think that violence is a lot easier to rationalize away because so often it's painted as so absurd you wouldn't assume it has any grounding in reality. How people act around each other or treat each other tends to try to appear grounded in reality though.
As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, I share your opinion on throwing dismissive labels at people. If you're looking for any sort of discussion with someone you should keep as far away from personal attacks as possible. If your goal is to get them to shut down and stand over their corpse as the victor, sure it could maybe work. But if your goal has anything to do with convincing them that what you believe is right then you're shooting yourself in foot
As to your last comment, that's one thing that I think depressingly gets lost in all of the talk about her objectification (something I have an issue with myself), just how
god damn awful her design is in the first place