Comprehensively addressing the stupid, intellectually dishonest critique of Anita Sarkeesian

boing
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Wow, the Straw manning in this article is hilariously pathetic and uninformed. Unless you know how a proper debate works, you probably shouldn’t try to counter an argument, don’t you think? Kinda embarrassed yourself with that article. The fact is most of Anita’s opposition aren’t these sexist’s that you claim they are, I have seen women and men alike speak out against her with valid arguments. This has been well known for quite a while now, the fact that you don’t know this, makes you look incredibly lazy. Have you ever checked her sources? You are a “journalist” so you should have, unless you can’t do your job, but if you did you would see that she only uses scholarly sources in one video. If you went to high school and college and actually got a journalism degree, then I shouldn’t have to explain to you what a scholarly source is. One of her videos doesn’t even have any sources whatsoever. So her arguments are baseless, pretty much. Like what Christopher Hitchens said “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Now I’m not completely dismissing everything Anita says, she is right that these tropes exist, and that they are used a lot, but her arguments for why they are bad, would fail high school.

That’s not all the problems with her videos either, Anita doesn’t seem to understand basic economics. The reason women are portrayed the way they are in video games, is because it’s mostly men who buy those titles. Yes, women make up a large percentage of gamers, but they are mostly on mobile phone games. Anita expects developers to change for her, this is not how it works in a capitalist society. There is a thing called supply and demand, a change in supply does not create a change in demand, the demand stays constant, but a change in demand, can cause a change in supply. What Anita should be doing is encouraging more females to buy the kind of games she wants, and creating a bigger demand for the kind of games that support her views. Until she does this, nothing is going to change, at best. At worst, a company is going to take the time and resources to release a game she wants, but is not what is demanded, and the company will end up taking a major loss. This also goes into the problem with her not being a gamer, why should a company take the time and effort to make a game that she wants, when she isn’t even going to buy the game when it is released? Also, when she makes arguments, she doesn’t play the games she talks about, so she ends up taking a lot of flak for misrepresenting, and outright lying about the games.

TL:DR Anita’s sourcing isn’t even up to high school standards, which makes her arguments baseless. Her solutions completely ignores the concept of supply and demand and makes everything she is doing pointless.

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What I find strangest about many peoples responses to Anita Sarkeesian is how aggressive and adversarial they are. Even if you don’t agree with all her points, or you think there are flaws in her methods, surely that doesn’t mean you need to respond with such vitriol? Where is all this rage coming from?

It seems to me the core problem is that a lot of people are perceiving her criticism as an attack on both gaming in general, games they like in specific and even themselves as gamers and/or as men.

She is not saying any of the following things:

  • That because games often feature sexist tropes that gaming is a bad or sexist hobby.
  • That because a particular game features one or more sexist tropes that it is a bad or sexist game.
  • That because an individual gamer plays and enjoys a game that contains sexist tropes that they are a bad or sexist person.
  • That because these sexist tropes are targeting a perceived male demographic that all men or all gamers are sexist (she’s also not saying that the actual audience of these games is solely or even mostly male, just that these sexist features appear to be primarily aimed at men).

Her videos are not an attack on gaming, are not an attack on any particular game and are not an attack on gamers and/or men. They’re a criticism of certain tropes in gaming that she believes are sexist. She’s just saying that games could even better than they are now by relying less on these tropes and in general by aiming to take a more balanced and diverse approach to gender and sexuality. I think she’s right, but your mileage may vary.

If you don’t agree with her general point, or with some of the individual points she makes, that’s fine. But just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean you need to attack her personally or feminism in general. She’s not your enemy, she’s just a game critic that you happen to disagree with.

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I suppose I’m late and missed all the fun as I slept. Came to point out the unfortunate grammatical ambiguity in the headline, which I read as:

Comprehensively addressing the stupid, intellectually dishonest critique [which is the work] of Anita Sarkeesian

I kind of blew a fuse for a moment there.

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Thank you for taking that bullet for me frog :smile: I was wary of evening opening it.

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I’m noticing a shift in the tone and style of the attacks on Sarkeesian, and I’m beginning to wonder if some game publishers are paying people to post attacks on Sarkeesian.

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Sarkeesian’s detractors infuriate me, yet there does seem to be a distinct lack of logical thinking used when dismissing them.
It’s simple to undermine these idiots and everything they stand for by interpreting what they’re really saying.

Have you noticed how hardly anyone is criticising what she’s actually saying, but choosing to attack her instead?
This means they have no real argument, and I suspect that a lot of these misogynists understand that if they were to say what they’re truly thinking (women aren’t equal to men in society and should stay scantily-clad and subservient), they’d be laughed out of society and possibly locked up.

The other thing is, Sarkeesian isn’t saying that existing works should be changed, so she’s not taking away the misogynist’s toys.
Rather, she’s bringing to the world’s attention examples of how poorly portrayed women are in contemporary videogames so that developers can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
And gloriously, developers and publishers are sitting up and noticing.
The best thing about this?
Future games will gradually change to better represent women, and there’s not a damn thing these obnoxious dickheads can do to change that fact.

The stuff about women pretending to be into games for the attention?
Yeah, let’s break this down too.
A lot of male gamers, and we don’t like to admit this, but we’re lonely types with poor social skills, so exposure to actual real-life women is limited.
So when we encounter a woman gamer online, there’s a low-level thrum in our brains blarting out as subconscious background noise “POTENTIAL MATE. MINE.”
And of course, when our advances are quite naturally rejected because the woman’s simply playing the game to enjoy herself, not be hit on, we go into the whole rejection spiral and start blaming her for our inadequacies.

This is all low-level, lizard-brain stuff that civilisation has evolved to try and get away from. That these guys have no control over these impulses just labels them as the evolutionary throwbacks they really are.

The trick is to realise that not every woman exists to be bred with and that they’re just here, like you, to enjoy a game.
You know, basic human mutual respect.

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That’s exactly what I was talking about in previous threads about lumping her critics together as a single group and blaming the group as a whole for the threats and sexism of some. You seem to be saying that because you don’t think there are any valid criticisms of Anita Sarkeesian’s arguments, anyone trying to criticize her is a sexist. How is that any different than George Bush’s “With us or with the terrorists” or Vic Toews trying to push his internet surveillance bill “stand with us or with the child pornographers”?

It’s possible to disagree with both George Bush and with terrorists. It’s possible to disagree with Vic Toews and be against child pornographers. And it’s possible to criticize Anita Sarkeesian’s arguments and not be a sexist.

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Let me guess, you never actually looked up any of the real arguments against her, you just saw one youtube comment and assumed that was the attitude of everybody who disagrees with her. Most people do not care that she doesn’t like how girls are portrayed in games, nobody cares that she doesn’t want that to change, nobody cares that she is a women, most people wouldn’t care about a change in games as long as the game is still fun, and the story is still good. What people do care about is people like you ignoring everything they taught you in school and just believing in whatever people say. Anita’s argument has major flaws and a little bit of source checking will show it. What makes it worst, is these journalists forgot what their job was and didn’t do any critical analysis on her videos, they just thought it was 100% correct and milked it for as many clicks as they could get. Then when you do bring up the problems in her video, you get called a sexist or misogynist, no matter how valid your argument. The one argument from people who defend Anita, that I think is absolutely moronic is: “the threats she gets shows that there is an issue in gaming”. Since when did someone getting a bad reaction to something they said make them automatically right? Sounds like a cop out to avoid doing any real critical thinking. Just because you saw some people say something stupid, doesn’t mean you should assume Anita is right, your brain is going to be with you till you die, you might as well use it.

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Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that Sarkeesian’s whole point is: Look at how this thing has to make a token appearance in pretty much every game, even when it has nothing to do with the story.

And the criticism is: But, that’s only one part of the game, and it has nothing to do with the story!

[facepalm]

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Honestly, my takeaway from this is that gamers are assholes.

Seriously. Video games were always something I had a mild to moderate interest in, but seeing this kind of response play out over the last couple years has convinced me that I just want nothing to do with the hobby at all. I just don’t have the time to waste being in the company of that kind of dicknozzle.

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It’s a contested space, and part of what’s going on is that the dicknozzles are losing territory and feeling threatened.

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Looks like I caught one fellas.

I have watched some arguments against her, and not one has struck me as being more than frothing-at-the-mouth, bat-shit insane, woman-hating, scared and badly thought-through drivel.

From my perspective, Anita occasionally misses a few beats and can get a little repetitive, but her core argument is never successfully rebuffed in any of these rants.

But I’m not sure why I’m responding to you, as your incredibly badly formatted post that is ridiculously hard to read thanks to being a single paragraph, is simply yet another ad hominem attack and lists problems with Anita’s content without actually describing what these problems are.
As I previously said, I’m guessing that you know deep down that if you do describe these so-called “problems” in detail, you’ll only reveal yourself to be the barking-mad misogynist that even your mother couldn’t love.

Please, if you want to be a part of the discussion and taken seriously, outline your criticisms of Anita’s video.
I keep hearing about these legitimate criticisms, but I’ve yet to see one that is genuine.

Tip: to appear even more incandescently insane in the future, I suggest hitting the caps lock key.

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Why not just play single player games, then? Also, in my experience a lot of people who watch movies, listen to music and read books are big assholes too. Maybe you ought to give those media up as well.

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There are dicknozzles in any community, don’t judge all gamers by the handful who are sexist arseholes.

A lot of the reactions to Sarkeesian’s work have been really positive - it’s opened up a whole conversation about sexism in gaming which has seen a lot of positive and heartening responses, but of course some people are upset by this - and some of those who are upset are arseholes about it.

My take away from this is that gaming is starting to realise that it has some issues with gender and is, generally speaking, starting to improve - which is a good thing, and makes this a good time to get into gaming.

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Joined today, posts just in this thread - back to Destructoid, you.

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Okay Mr. Scholarly sources, what makes you think that for source material to be valid that it must come from an academic publication ? See: information gathering in sociology, anthropology, social sciences, etc. Research the concept of primary sources. Would I value information gathered from a first hand inspection of the source materials, ie the inspection of an artifact - or with an academic “expert” pontificating on the subject for good or bad ?

Much of what A.Sarkeesian is talking about is her ANALYSIS of what she sees in games.

You are dreaming if you believe that what she is talking about is for the developers to make a game “just for her”. What kind of narcissistic lens are you looking at this subject through ? Plus your stance that women don’t spend money on games (sigh).

You lost me at referring to girls and women as “females”

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[Citations needed.]

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Even if your premise were true, that simply isn’t how a logical argument works.

That is especially true when many of her sources for sexualized violence against women in video games are my own damn eyes looking at scenes of sexualized violence against women in video games.

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It’s possible to drink from a poisoned well too, but inadvisable.

When the ugliest side of the problem she addresses obviously & openly attacks her there is little harm & much to gain in showing a unified front.

Such a stand does not demand, imply or infer that her work is beyond any valid criticism, if simpletons think it does let them educate themselves or continue to bang their heads on a brick wall until their problems resolve themselves as a red stain on that wall.

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I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

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