That may be so, but it’s more than obvious she thrives on the divisiveness. Not only that, but she encourages her audience to disparage anyone who disagrees or tries to look damaging media representations of men. There’s a boat load of bias in her work which is why she gets as much disdain thrown in her direction. If she were a bit more scholarly and a little bit less divisive, if at least a tiny bit, she may not get as much thrown back at her - especially from people who look at the world with a wider lens.
You can learn more about things with context than without and it’s plain that Sarkeesian is either intentionally or unintentionally ignoring a plethora of context. In that limited view, of course the world is in an active role fully intent on oppressing women and only women instead of the fuller reality that stereotypes and tropes are lazy mechanisms for communication and progression (albeit not always positive) to capitalize on what’s already there in society’s consciousness. That includes stereotypes and tropes about women, men, races, religions, cultures, etc.
Sarkeesian is fighting a battle at the margins when she thinks she’s fighting a war. While the rest of the world is intent on women being in a better place and in a better position of power instead of positions of servitude, she’ll still be talking about video games.
And another reason I take issue with Sarkeesian’s feminist methodology is she is making no attempts, at all, to court the empathy of anyone other than women. Watching her videos, she’s speaking for and primarily to other women as if women need a reminder that their place in society still needs work and maintenance. What she, and other feminists, need to work on is courting a wider audience and limiting herself to video games, of all things, and ignoring (and even pretending it doesn’t exist) the tropes of males in video games isn’t helping.
There really are very few general rules in public speaking:
The first one is know your audience. If you don’t know your audience, you won’t know how to make them empathize with your message.
That leads into the second: speak their language. Do not speak in your own language if the audience will not understand a word you say. You don’t go before a French-speaking audience and speak Swahili. Likewise, you don’t go before an non-women’s studies audience and expect to be understood when you use lingo reserved for 2nd and 3rd year women’s studies (especially Internet feminist group lingo).
One of Sarkeesian’s intentions, other than to educate, is to inform a wider audience. If you want to widen your audience, beyond the above two rules, you also have to make sure to not offend the audience but you also have to give them reason to even begin listening to your message. Relying on simply the good nature in every human being alone isn’t enough. Why should anyone be listening to this person who they’ve never heard of? Give them reason to. Tug at them by making a video about the male tropes in video games and the media and how damaging they are to men and, coincidentally, the fight for women’s rights. If you want to court more men into feminism - a feminism that is supposedly about equality between the sexes and not just about women empowerment for the sake of empowerment, you’re going to have to bother to represent them as well.
And that goes back to the issue of context. Sarkeesian is not the person feminists want to get behind. She has decided to remain in a very, very limited scope of human studies. Context is everything and ignorance of another kind is still ignorance.
