So, I agree with pretty much everything in Anita Sarkeesian's Damsels in Distress video.

REZNoR_greed

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Kmadden2004 said:
REZNoR_greed said:
aaand it's morning, and I'm tired, so I can't think of a good segue. here's this...
I... I... Wha-!?

Is... is she joking in that tweet? Please tell me she's joking...

I just... dammit, I need that Prof Farnsworth "i don't want to live on this planet anymore" gif...
I did a quick scroll-through of both their twitters. DerMarc did indeed ask that. if Anita did give that answer, she's deleted that particular tweet since then.
 

Abomination

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Kmadden2004 said:
REZNoR_greed said:
aaand it's morning, and I'm tired, so I can't think of a good segue. here's this...
I... I... Wha-!?

Is... is she joking in that tweet? Please tell me she's joking...

I just... dammit, I need that Prof Farnsworth "i don't want to live on this planet anymore" gif...
I think it's one of those half-sarcasm statements.

One the one hand she's kidding but on the other she's not - depending on your opinion of her cause.
 

Uhura

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REZNoR_greed said:
she pretty much brought that on herself, really; spamming her videos on places like 4chan. unless you're new to the internet, you can't say you don't expect that kind of reaction from those people. or maybe she did legitimately think that place would be a good outlet to get viewers.
Do you actually have any proof that she did this?
 

Chemical Alia

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Of course they don't. For as many times as I've seen this claim, I've never seen anyone offer concrete proof of it. People have little trouble believing something if it suits them, and if enough people believe it, it becomes an INTERNET FACT.

 

Bifford

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I am not too concerned about women in games. Either way is fine with me and I'm too much of a loner myself to really care about gaming being a male domain.

What profoundly disturbs me is the campaign of harassment many Internet gamers have waged against Ms Sarkeesian. These include photoshopped images of her bruised and battered and one of her being gang-raped by a bunch of videogame characters. In many rural parts of India, Pakistan, Africa, etc., many village cultures actually sanction gang-rape as a form of punishment. For instance, if a boy from a neighbouring (and perhaps lower-caste) tribe is seen flirting with one of their girls, the elders may order the gang-rape of that boy's sister. Here's a case in point:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/19/world/asia/mukhtar-mai-pakistan-gang-rape

You can dismiss this as shocking, symbolic of a backward culture and people with degenerate morals, but the campaign against Anita shows that the sentiments that lead to such crimes exist within our cultures too. Anita has only been gang-raped vicariously, but in my book thinking seriously and approvingly of a crime is about as bad as actually doing it. She hasn't been physically assaulted only because these gamers don't want to go to prison.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Uhura said:
REZNoR_greed said:
she pretty much brought that on herself, really; spamming her videos on places like 4chan. unless you're new to the internet, you can't say you don't expect that kind of reaction from those people. or maybe she did legitimately think that place would be a good outlet to get viewers.
Do you actually have any proof that she did this?
Someone did post the link to her kickstarter and to her youtube channel. In "feminist conspiracy land" that's the same thing as "she did it herself to piss people off". You know, just like those two women who reported Assange for sexual violations and/or rape but are in fact not just common women who might have been violated by Assange but are, in fact, CIA shills hired to shut Wikileaks down by abusing Swedish law.

Are these two really related, you might ask? Yeah, I think they both serve to show just how crazy these ideas about "feminist conspiracies" really are. Instead of the possibility that some 4Chan-goer found Sarkeesian kickstarter and passed it on to his online buddies, it is much more likely that she tried to incite threats of violence (sexual or otherwise) against herself and have her youtube-channel flooded with enough vitriol so that she had to pre-approve all comments as to not have the comment list filled up with rape threats, death threats and accusations of her being a terrorist.

If someone honestly believes Sarkeesian "brought this on herself" they need to seriously reconsider what they think is an appropriate reaction to someone saying something they disagree with. They also need to consider if they really think it is likely that someone would do something they know will end up with them being threatened in just about ever conceivable manner (because, let's own up to it: These kinds of "reactions, resorting to threats and lynch mob mentality, are pretty common place when it comes to feminists or female rights proponents these days, see the Assange case for another stellar example).
 

JellySlimerMan

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LiquidGrape said:
And as for the Double Dragon point, Thunderf00t's video (which I'm assuming is where you found out about it, pardon if it isn't) takes that 20 second sight-gag and tries to argue that it somehow contradicts the hours of gameplay prior to it wherein the female character is very much reduced to a reward for the player to attain. It doesn't really work that way.
I never understood why would ANYONE consider rescuing the girlfriend as a reward. Sure, the story WANTS US to save her, but if we save her, then the game would be over and the fun would end, after all people are there for the game not for whoever they have to save.

And even if people cared about the story, its clear that you are rescuing a LOVED ONE and not an object. If women are soooo disposable to the males, wont it make sense to have the option to just not give 2 fucks about her and find a replacement? I mean why not? she is supposed to be an object (not an unique human being) and objects are everywhere for the males to pick up and go on with their lives because they are replaceable, right? There should be a gameplay implement where you walk to the left instead of to the traditional direction of right, so you can visit different places to pick up women to replace the one you lost. Why not? games are made for males, so CLEARLY there is plenty of innovation in the area of gameplay around shopping for your next shiny object for you to show off to your buddies, and much as the innovation of desensitize us around the loss of our loved on-SORRY I MEAN- objects, right?

Uhura said:
REZNoR_greed said:
she pretty much brought that on herself, really; spamming her videos on places like 4chan. unless you're new to the internet, you can't say you don't expect that kind of reaction from those people. or maybe she did legitimately think that place would be a good outlet to get viewers.
Do you actually have any proof that she did this?
Sadly, no. It may even be possible that her followers wanted to "help" her by posting the videos themselves on 4Chan so she can get leverage to push the Kickstarter. The only option available was to compare the time where the videos when the videos of 4Chan were posted to this graphic of her Kickstarter:



It may not say it was her, but it may imply that attracting the trolls to her video on Youtube was certainly helpful to make everyone believe that there is mysoginists in gaming culture IN SPADES, and that the Kickstarter is a worthy cause against the eeeeeeeeeeevils of males, rather than being just a small fraction of assholes that EVERY SINGLE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE ALWAYS HAS, EVER. Her comments on the TED talk where she mentions that the attacks were "organized" may even alude to the fact that she KNOWS of the sudden torrent of people insulting her video, but not that it may be the videos being posted on 4Chan that attracted in the first place when nobody even noticed she existed (as the graphic may imply with the low numbers, at first).

The last step would to confirm how many negative comments are there compared to the ones giving constructive criticism pointing out the flaws on the project, and to take note in what date were those negative comments made. After all, if the videos on 4Chan lured those people that will eventually be used as "PROOF" of mysoginism in gaming, then it should be after the videos were posted on 4Chan and not BEFORE them, where constructive criticism may have existed at first but were ignored in favor of focusing on the negative comments as the ONLY kind of comments she received.

But sadly this cannot be done anymore because the Kickstarter video closed ALL comments permanently. She didn't make the comment section restricted to "Comment Pending on Approval of Video Poster" as her previous videos, instead she CLOSED IT down with all the comments gone forever.

We may never know the truth anymore.
 

Insanely Asinine

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JellySlimerMan said:
And even if people cared about the story, its clear that you are rescuing a LOVED ONE and not an object. If women are soooo disposable to the males, wont it make sense to have the option to just not give 2 fucks about her and find a replacement? I mean why not? she is supposed to be an object (not an unique human being) and objects are everywhere for the males to pick up and go on with their lives because they are replaceable, right? There should be a gameplay implement where you walk to the left instead of to the traditional direction of right, so you can visit different places to pick up women to replace the one you lost. Why not? games are made for males, so CLEARLY there is plenty of innovation in the area of gameplay around shopping for your next shiny object for you to show off to your buddies, and much as the innovation of desensitize us around the loss of our loved on-SORRY I MEAN- objects, right?
No lets make it so that you have the option to go to the left and call the cops. After that you play him doing his normal every day life stuff. Like working as an accountant in his usual attire. All with quick time events with Mike Tyson's punch out training theme attached to it in all its 8bit version. I bet all the gamers would buy this. Hey its gender neutral to a point so all gamers can play this where the male protagonist has no agency other then his job.
 

Kmadden2004

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Gethsemani said:
Are these two really related, you might ask? Yeah, I think they both serve to show just how crazy these ideas about "feminist conspiracies" really are. Instead of the possibility that some 4Chan-goer found Sarkeesian kickstarter and passed it on to his online buddies, it is much more likely that she tried to incite threats of violence (sexual or otherwise) against herself and have her youtube-channel flooded with enough vitriol so that she had to pre-approve all comments as to not have the comment list filled up with rape threats, death threats and accusations of her being a terrorist.
You are aware that she's been pre-approving comments since the day she first started making those YouTube videos, right? And that she's known to delete perfectly reasonable criticisms of her work?

If someone honestly believes Sarkeesian "brought this on herself" they need to seriously reconsider what they think is an appropriate reaction to someone saying something they disagree with. They also need to consider if they really think it is likely that someone would do something they know will end up with them being threatened in just about ever conceivable manner (because, let's own up to it: These kinds of "reactions, resorting to threats and lynch mob mentality, are pretty common place when it comes to feminists or female rights proponents these days, see the Assange case for another stellar example).
Sorry, but having a bunch of trolls send you nasty messages over the internet is not the same thing as two women being sexually assaulted by a slimy toad-of-a-man. if one of those trolls showed up on her doorstep, or started sending her their crap bottled up in jars, then there'd be some common ground.

But complaining about trolls on the internet is like going to the Arctic and complaining about snow.
 

LiquidGrape

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JellySlimerMan said:
LiquidGrape said:
And as for the Double Dragon point, Thunderf00t's video (which I'm assuming is where you found out about it, pardon if it isn't) takes that 20 second sight-gag and tries to argue that it somehow contradicts the hours of gameplay prior to it wherein the female character is very much reduced to a reward for the player to attain. It doesn't really work that way.
I never understood why would ANYONE consider rescuing the girlfriend as a reward. Sure, the story WANTS US to save her, but if we save her, then the game would be over and the fun would end, after all people are there for the game not for whoever they have to save.

And even if people cared about the story, its clear that you are rescuing a LOVED ONE and not an object. If women are soooo disposable to the males, wont it make sense to have the option to just not give 2 fucks about her and find a replacement? I mean why not? she is supposed to be an object (not an unique human being) and objects are everywhere for the males to pick up and go on with their lives because they are replaceable, right? There should be a gameplay implement where you walk to the left instead of to the traditional direction of right, so you can visit different places to pick up women to replace the one you lost. Why not? games are made for males, so CLEARLY there is plenty of innovation in the area of gameplay around shopping for your next shiny object for you to show off to your buddies, and much as the innovation of desensitize us around the loss of our loved on-SORRY I MEAN- objects, right?
Perhaps I should clarify: reward for the player character. Player by association. But please, do tell me how that character is elevated beyond Endgame Acquisition. I certainly haven't seen it, but I'm willing to consider that I've missed something crucial. Unfounded and undeserved calls for empathy, however, won't cut it.
As for that second paragraph of yours which is little more than posturing and semantic nonsense, I'm not going to address it. You've clearly decided to not argue honestly anymore.

Kmadden2004 said:
You are aware that she's been pre-approving comments since the day she first started making those YouTube videos, right? And that she's known to delete perfectly reasonable criticisms of her work?
Source please.

Sorry, but having a bunch of trolls send you nasty messages over the internet is not the same thing as two women being sexually assaulted by a slimy toad-of-a-man. if one of those trolls showed up on her doorstep, or started sending her their crap bottled up in jars, then there'd be some common ground.

But complaining about trolls on the internet is like going to the Arctic and complaining about snow.
"Trolls."

Really?
You're going to reduce this to a matter of "trolls"?
Threats of rape and other violence?
Wikipedia page systematically vandalised to feature graphic pornographic content?
A flash game wherein the player is encouraged to beat a photo of her face bloody?
Attempts to hijack her accounts on various social websites?
Repeated efforts to acquire and distribute her personal contact information?

Yes, truly this is merely the quaint work of trolls. How silly to take harassment, defamation and explicit threats on ones person seriously.
 

Uhura

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Aug 30, 2012
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Gethsemani said:
Are these two really related, you might ask? Yeah, I think they both serve to show just how crazy these ideas about "feminist conspiracies" really are. Instead of the possibility that some 4Chan-goer found Sarkeesian kickstarter and passed it on to his online buddies, it is much more likely that she tried to incite threats of violence (sexual or otherwise) against herself and have her youtube-channel flooded with enough vitriol so that she had to pre-approve all comments as to not have the comment list filled up with rape threats, death threats and accusations of her being a terrorist.
Yeah, I agree. It is a bit surprising how gullible people are. This eagerness to believe every negative thing said about Sarkeesian is also evident in the way people believe all the rumors about how Anita has spent the Kickstarter money on a new car, shoes etc. You can come up with pretty much anything and there will be people who lap it up without a second thought.

Gethsemani said:
If someone honestly believes Sarkeesian "brought this on herself" they need to seriously reconsider what they think is an appropriate reaction to someone saying something they disagree with. They also need to consider if they really think it is likely that someone would do something they know will end up with them being threatened in just about ever conceivable manner (because, let's own up to it: These kinds of "reactions, resorting to threats and lynch mob mentality, are pretty common place when it comes to feminists or female rights proponents these days, see the Assange case for another stellar example).
This is perhaps the thing that bothers me the most about these threads. I think it is pretty frightening that there are so many people who seem to think that the death threats, rape threats, racist comments etc. were somehow justified or that "she had it coming". No one deserves that kind of treatment and trying to play it down with "well, that's internet!" is imo also pretty sick.
 

Faraja

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Here's where I stand on Anita and her supporters; they're ultimately shouting at the sky. Companies don't honestly care how much you ***** and yell about an issue. They can drown you out while they stare at their sales figures. That's all they care about. Until things go south in the numbers, the likely hood of them looking to change things like gender representation are pretty slim. Even then, the chances of gender representation being a critical issue effecting sales are going to be even smaller.

That actually ties in with what I felt about her video; you can say one thing or ten thousand things, but your actions are all that matter. Indeed, you can say that you can like, and even that you personally enjoy, things with sexism and sexist attitudes in them; if, however, you spend the next half hour of your video deriding and condemning those very things, you come off as a bit disingenuous.

You can say that the Mario games are glaring examples of women having their power stripped and being pushed into the rolls of objects in games, and that that should change, but if you're still buying them; I have to wonder how committed to your cause you really are.

If Anita and her supporters really wanted to make a change in the industry, then they should be pushing people to not buy into these things.
 

REZNoR_greed

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LiquidGrape said:
"Trolls."

Really?
You're going to reduce this to a matter of "trolls"?
Threats of rape and other violence?
Wikipedia page systematically vandalised to feature graphic pornographic content?
A flash game wherein the player is encouraged to beat a photo of her face bloody?
Attempts to hijack her accounts on various social websites?
Repeated efforts to acquire and distribute her personal contact information?
like I said, 4chan.
I'm going to feel really stupid in talking about them like they're some mythical creature, but the truth of it is; the more you provoke/challenge them, the worse they get. or really, if you just acknowledge that they're there in any way.
threats of rape and stuff is just how it starts. and yes, that is just trolling. not very good trolling, but still trolling. they only say it to get a rise. maybe only 3% of them would really think about trying to go through with any of it, but none of them will anyway for one reason or another.
she could have just left comments open, endured the first couple volleys of troll comments without feeding them, and they would've got bored. instead, she had to moderate the comments, and then disable them altogether. to them, that's just a challenge to try harder.
 

generals3

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Tenmar said:
I would disagree with your last statement because that's basically what Anita has been advocating which I find only limits the creativity of developers. To me a more proper solution would be a more live and let live approach. There really is nothing stopping anyone legally to actually start developing games that a developer would think that they could attain a female based demographic.
This is actually something i don't get. People get/give funding through kickstarters to make low quality videos most do for free but yet they don't bother trying to get (or give to someone who wants to do it) funds to hire devs to make a game which allegedly has a huge market (how often don't feminist gamers claim that the reason why so few women play "mainstream" games is because they're all male oriented, obviously if that's the case there are millions of dollars to be made)
 

generals3

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TheKasp said:
generals3 said:
This is actually something i don't get. People get/give funding through kickstarters to make low quality videos most do for free but yet they don't bother trying to get (or give to someone who wants to do it) funds to hire devs to make a game which allegedly has a huge market (how often don't feminist gamers claim that the reason why so few women plain "mainstream" games is because they're all male oriented, obviously if that's the case there are millions of dollars to be made)
*sigh* The same as last year:

Please show me where people do videos of such quality (technical quality since the quality of the content can be argued) for free. I haven't seen any.
Sure i can. There is lots of fan stuff around better than that, think of Clear Skies. The amount of work they needed for that was probably far superior and didn't ask money to make it. And the main point was: why don't they put money in actually making the feminist's wet dream game instead of BS propaganda videos?
 

LiquidGrape

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Tenmar said:
Couple of things.

The "pornographic" content. Yeah the resources for that also came from wikipedia. No joke on that one. So if you are offended by that then start asking wikipedia to not have that "pornographic" content.
I was under the impression that it was only on *one* of the revisions that the edited content was from wikipedia's own pool of resources. I will concede I might have misunderstood the information, but as far as I was aware there were other revisions which were far more graphic.
Regardless, it's still a fairly damning indictment of the people who thought it was an acceptable means of expressing their discontent., wouldn't you say?

The flash game? Yeah want to ignore the entire disclaimer before hand where the creator makes a nice big announcement disagreeing with her before ya even get to the flash?
I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make here. You refer to this disclaimer?

Anita Sarkeesian has not only scammed thousands of people out of over $160,000, but also uses the excuse that she is a woman to get away with whatever she damn well pleases. Any form of constructive criticism, even from fellow women, is either ignored or labelled to be sexist against her.

She claims to want gender equality in video games, but in reality, she just wants to use the fact that she was born with a vagina to get free money and sympathy from everyone who crosses her path.
How does this in any way lessen the disturbing contents of the game? If anything it merely emphasises how the person responsible has relied on conjecture and misinformation in his desire to discredit and digitally abuse her.

As for the rest, yeah it is trolls. Wanna know what that's called for me? Tuesday. Honestly if we took every online threat seriously then you'd see the US prison state just explode ten fold. Also if they were serious then why didn't Anita actually take legal action against said threats? Coming from a background of law and order one would not go across the country and posting all the threats but to go to the authorities and actually file legal action towards getting said individuals arrested. So far no one has been arrested or charged. So basically Anita didn't take those threats seriously either, all it was for her was more marketing.
I sincerely doubt you have received a fraction of the threats Sarkeesian were treated to in the wake of her announcing the kickstarter. But it's good to know that you keep proportionality in mind.
As for the filing of reports with regard to the threats, I believe she, like most rational people, realise just how hard it is to initiate process if those threats haven't been substantiated in a more direct fashion. Had her personal information successfully been leaked out, I wouldn't at all have been surprised had she pursued legal recourse. The fact that they were never acted upon doesn't render the threats any less vile or serious. To threaten another being with rape and other means of violence? That demands a certain amount of deliberation. And it should be treated seriously.
Did the reprehensible reaction to her announcing the project help generate publicity for her and her project? Of course! And she would've been a fool not to take advantage of the platform the morons provided her. They are the ones responsible for her notoriety.

In either case only 7k people actually put in money to her so it isn't like it is some big movement because honestly if we go by your logic of what rewards are in video games then you like herself would objectify everything because by say saving the world I should then own the world.
What in the world are you even saying here?

EDIT: I should also ask, did you actually read the comments made when "anita" started to advertise her project on 4chan? Yeah most people for the most part were actually civil and actually asked for her posts to be taken down cause believe it or not 4chan actually one rule. NO SOLICITING!

Guess what "anita" was doing, soliciting and there were quite a few posters simply reporting and asking for a mod to remove the post. Honestly ya should actually do your own research before you actually believe any sort of hype about a website and the people that post there.
Why the first name in inverted commas? Simply acknowledging that it has never been confirmed it was actually Sarkeesian? I'm asking genuinely, I'm not entirely in the loop on that question. Regardless, when did I ever refer specifically to the doings of 4chan? It seems you are inferring an awful lot from very little.
 

briankoontz

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The problem with Sarkeesian has some similarities to Christian groups of the 1980s calling Dungeons & Dragons "satanic".

The purpose of making Sarkeesian the spokesperson for feminism is that she isn't a very good one. Thus she gets the attention while more serious and effective feminists are ignored.

Likewise, early effective criticism of fantasy roleplaying was nonexistent since ridiculous hyperbolists dominated the discussion.