Jake

Idle Thumbs 173: Ridonkulous Rift

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But who was this guy?

 

It could be anyone.

 

It could be you.

 

It could be ME!!!

 

*scream*

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"She revels in it"

http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkeesian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats

Yeah, I bet she loves it. Not feeling safe in your own home is awesome, I bet. A revelatory sensation.

Let's, for the sake of insane argument, say she does "revel in it." How much of a sin would that be, relative to the nonstop abhorrent harassment her most vocals perpetrate?

Although, for the record, I don't believe for a second she welcomes or invites any of it. Her tone and language is immeasurably more moderate and calm than that of her rabid opponents.

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You can type how much she's been attack, driven out of her house and other fucking heinous things that have/continue to happen to her, but it seems to go out one ear (or eye) and out the other.

 

It seems those facts are lost on them and continue their drive to cherry pick shit critiques of her. 

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That's what I thought. Nothing says 'respect my opinion' like multiple layers of anonymity.

 

Though it might be bad for discourse, the ability to express a less-than-popular sentiment without attaching it to one's public persona is valuable in situations where the subject of debate impassions to the point that people might draw negative conclusions about a person's character based on a single argument. And that guy definitely was talking a lot of shit that would be reputation destroying here.

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Though it might be bad for discourse, the ability to express a less-than-popular sentiment without attaching it to one's public persona is valuable in situations where the subject of debate impassions to the point that people might draw negative conclusions about a person's character based on a single argument. And that guy definitely was talking a lot of shit that would be reputation destroying here.

 

In his case? I really don't care. If he thinks his opinion will destroy his reputation here, I'd hope he would take that as a sign that either he's wrong or this isn't the forum for him.

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Is it that it’s not enough to obey him, You also must love him. 1984 George Orwell

Nice forums mate.

This is a privately owned site, buddy. You can say whatever you want on the forums that you own. It's 100% our right to moderate such that we cultivate the kind of community we want to be responsible for.

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Imagine what would transpire if Anita or Danielle or anyone in their position wore a mask.

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I think you guys are so wrapped up in this whole mess that you're not recognizing just how little value Sarkeesian is providing. She's pointing out gruesome things that happen to women in games, and you guys are losing your minds over it as if this is causing scales to fall from your eyes. You're also pretending like people want to silence her because she is bringing this critique to light, because her critics are misogynists. In reality, games are brutal generally, and Sarkeesian is just cherry picking examples that fit her agenda without providing the necessary context to actually understand what these tropes mean. She'll point out a woman who is brutally murdered in Red Dead Redemption, but totally ignore an equally brutal killing that happens to a defenseless male character in the same game. Same for Assassin's Creed, where almost all of your victims are male, yet she picks out the few women who are brutally killed. Those two games just happen to be very brutal, and pointing out that some women are killed in terrible ways while ignoring all of the men killed in terrible ways isn't interesting or beneficial critique, it's a hack job. Violence against women isn't especially used to create realism, violence generally is. 

 

You clearly have no idea what academic criticism is. What she set out to do is a study of representations of women (or in this most recent case, violence against them) in video games. OF FUCKING COURSE that's what she focuses on, that's what she set out to look for in the first place. She's not trying to make a blanket judgment that: video games have violent scenes against women, they're terrible! Instead, the point is: hey, I studied gendered violence in games, and here's what I found - a lot of it is really gross, and used in a completely mindless way that exploits gendered violent imagery for cheap world/tension building. Could it be that you could say something similar about how violence against men is in games (not the sexualized part, as feelthedarkness pointed out)? Absolutely.
 
But that's a complete non sequitur. It's not her responsibility to analyze the totality of games from whatever random perspective every gamer happens to think is important. She wanted to study a few issues, and has done so honestly. The points she makes, in the context she makes them, are completely robust.
 
Welcome to how adult criticism works for media. This is how it has worked for decades for books, film, etc.
 
 

Then Sarkeesian draws her inevitable critique for this cherry picking at the expense of gamers, and people are shocked. I think it's terrible to threaten or harass anyone online, but it's not like Sarkeesian's experience is unique. Almost every personality online draws some flak, particularly those who are controversial. At this point I honestly think Sarkeesian revels in the hate, because it's what makes her relevant. If she wasn't being attacked, I doubt she would have nearly the following she does now. I think she uses this to draw sympathy, which results in people exclaiming how valuable her work is, when in reality she's just cherry picking and providing almost no insight whatsoever. I think you've been suckered, and it's painful to watch. Chris, you talked about how you've worked hard to develop your ability to critically analyze your beliefs, no matter how deeply they are held, and if necessary to change them. I think that's precisely what is called for here. 

 

This is probably not even worth commenting on, because it's so transparently ludicrous. I seriously doubt you believe that she wants sexually explicit harassment and death threats on an ongoing basis for several years in order to achieve fucking piddly internet 'fame'. SHE WAS ALREADY PAID FOR THE SERIES. The kickstarter is over. At this point, all she's doing is the work she promised and was paid for. Obviously, she hopes people watch it because she thinks it's important.

 

It makes me very sad for you that your disagreement with her conclusions makes you so incapable of empathizing with her position. 

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That's what I thought. Nothing says 'respect my opinion' like multiple layers of anonymity.

That's actually a very important factor in all this. Not many people on the... I dunno how to describe that 'faction' or group of people... are willing to put their own faces and names up, to stake a responsibility in their beliefs.

 

Edit - Like as far as I know, JonTron and sorta Adam Baldwin are the two faces + names attached to all that. The latter though is mostly just seeing shit and ranting about Communism or something so I'm not sure he counts.

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If Anita revels in all the harassment she gets then gamers should really piss her off by being super nice and respectful to her.

 

 

we hacked your bank account and DID YOUR TAXES FOR YOU

 

 

 

I was going to make a snarky comment about dead hardware but it struck me that the rear touchpad could actually be used for some pretty interesting stuff when utilized by smart people like everyone working at Campo Santo.

 

The Vita's been super great for indies! Possibly because AAA publishers have all but abandoned it and they don't need to compete against them directly. There's so many cool little independent games and weirdass Japanese imports on that system. I really recommend it.

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If Anita revels in all the harassment she gets then gamers should really piss her off by being super nice and respectful to her.

 

 

we hacked your bank account and DID YOUR TAXES FOR YOU

 

"I hope you get your DEDUCTIONS MAXIMIZED for that article!"

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The Vita's been super great for indies! Possibly because AAA publishers have all but abandoned it and they don't need to compete against them directly. There's so many cool little independent games and weirdass Japanese imports on that system. I really recommend it.

I wonder if the Vita would get more traction if Sony started to make a big push from the indie games angle. They've already partnered with a lot of indie devs to develop for it, now they just need to talk about it.

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This is probably not even worth commenting on, because it's so transparently ludicrous. I seriously doubt you believe that she wants sexually explicit harassment and death threats on an ongoing basis for several years in order to achieve fucking piddly internet 'fame'. SHE WAS ALREADY PAID FOR THE SERIES. The kickstarter is over. At this point, all she's doing is the work she promised and was paid for. Obviously, she hopes people watch it because she thinks it's important.

 

I'm reminded of this comic about street harassment when reading comments like the one to which you're responding. Like it says, the patriarchy means that women in public spaces are seen as needing to be controlled by men, prompting the latter to make sexual or violent comments to assert their control. If a woman is with a man, for whatever reason, then control is already seen to have been asserted, so women who appear in public with men do not receive the same level or kind of harassment, which sadly makes it harder for men to believe that harassment is really happening.

 

By virtue of her videos, which are popular because they're good in some important ways, Sarkeesian is a woman very much in a public space, which leads her detractors to try to assert control just as if she was walking alone on the street. Within their schema, she very much "revels in it," because it's a given that a woman appearing alone in public wants and needs to be controlled. The fact that she isn't, and moreover the fact that her videos explore some of the very mechanisms used to control women, is what makes the attacks on her, those attempts to control, reach such hysterical levels. In a way, the internet gives men a unique window into what it's been like for centuries to be a woman walking around or having a conversation without a man present.

 

And now I feel filthy for typing that out.

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I'm reminded of this comic about street harassment...

 

Thank you very much for typing it out. I hadn't seen that comic or that idea before, and it seems very useful in understanding the psychology behind this stuff.

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There is a part of me that thinks that if we were more able to be visibly critical of whatever aspects of Sarkeesians videos we disagreed with, while still visibly & explicitly supporting her, then some portion of these people would see that it's actually okay to disagree with her while still supporting what she is doing. That you don't need to internalize absolutely everything she is saying 100% uncritically and still be able to think she is doing something valuable and admirable.
The other, more cynical, part of me thinks that this could never work & people would misinterpret any kind of disagreement or criticism as endorsement of their harassment & permission to continue shut her down however they can.

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Thank you very much for typing it out. I hadn't seen that comic or that idea before, and it seems very useful in understanding the psychology behind this stuff.

 

It's very new for me, too, so I've been having a lot of A Beautiful Mind moments lately where I realize that the way I'm engaging with a girl friend at a bar is marking her as within my space and control, for instance. There's only so much you can do, but it's still good to try to apply it here, to understand the processes at work behind harassment. But also to get mad rather than even sometimes, too.

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Just chiming in to say great episode. "It's like if Dadaism was just invented to hurt people" is a spectacular sentence.

 

It turns out I'm really glad I'm not going to PAX this weekend despite missing the Thumbs and Campo Santo stuff, because there's a non-zero chance that I might have Buzz Aldrin'd someone by the end of the convention. 

 

(that last sentence was a joke, but I'm honestly a little worried about PAX this weekend)

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(that last sentence was a joke, but I'm honestly a little worried about PAX this weekend)

 

I get the impression that PAX is gonna be super hostile this year, both because of this and because PA set themselves up to implicitly okay this kind of thing at PAX through the whole Dickwolves fiasco a few years back.

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Isn't this the first year of PAX Prime since the whole safety-zone thing they came up with, which is shit because they should be making the entirety of the event a safe zone? That's a whole other can of worms.

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Oh man. Oh. Man.

 

(A) What a great episode! I think that Sean's description of the feeling that must occur when someone has the ability to bring a plane out of the sky (or

) was particularly apt, because that's the reason a lot of bullshit occurs on the internet. Just because it's a lazy way of enacting power by manipulating the trust that society puts in people to not be assholes. AND THE BEST IS THAT THEY ARE ERODING THAT TRUST A++ EVERYONE, COOL, COOL

 

The moment that Chris said that AAA game developers can completely ignore this whole issue was kind of a sad one, since they shouldn't ignore this issue. I'm sorry, people who are angry that feminist critique might change the games you play, but as was mentioned on the cast, a lot of the shit that goes on in video games is shitty to not just women, but a broad swath of human culture. Like, Grand Theft Auto IV, one of the most popular games last year, is completely offensive on every possible level, and fuck if I want that to be the thing that represents video games in this day and age. So it sucks that perhaps nothing will happen to games. I want things to happen to games. I want culture to change

 

(B) If you ever want to watch a thorough and complete dismantling of stupid, insular, orobourus-of-poop arguments, this thread delivers. Nice job, everyone in this community, for just standing up and doing the important work of patiently, non-snidely (for the most part) deconstructing a bunch of nonsense from people who's opinions may not actually change / they'll just take their ball and go home. Because it throws out idiots and makes people who's opinions may be underrepresented feel more comfortable talking about games and the things they like.

 

© 

 

Man this video still makes me excited to play Donkey Kong Country.

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Though it might be bad for discourse, the ability to express a less-than-popular sentiment without attaching it to one's public persona is valuable in situations where the subject of debate impassions to the point that people might draw negative conclusions about a person's character based on a single argument. And that guy definitely was talking a lot of shit that would be reputation destroying here.

I doubt he really cares.  He made a separate account to say something he thought might get him banned, and it totally did, but he still got to say what he wanted.  So it pretty much did exactly what he intended it to.

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