theswedishelf:
Welcome to the grand masterlist of shit Anita Sarkeesian has gotten wrong, only told half the story of, spontaneously changed her mind about, contradicted herself on, cherry-picked or just plain fabricated over the course of her ongoing Tropes vs Women in Video Games series. In this list, I'mma go ahead and break down for you, in order of occurrance, exactly what’s wrong with the videos, aside from the fact that she’s an oversensitive plagiarist fraud in general, for those who are either curious to know, still don’t get it, or just want to have such a list handy, starting of course with the first part of her little “documentary” series, Damsels in Distress.
Before getting into the series proper, one thing really stands out about her campaign video, aside from the part where she plays around with a 360 controller while the console’s off and the lie that she’s always loved video games and considered herself a gamer: She apparently views even strong, positive, well-portrayed female characters as patriarchal abominations, if her little “ZOMG TEH PATRIARCHY” montage featuring such characters as Nariko, Arkham!Catwoman, Cerebella and Juliet Starling is any indication. Cause as we all know, women being physically attractive = sexism. But then, I guess we already knew she thinks this way, given her ludicrous past, present and inevitable future statements about Bayonetta, who’s also included in the montage.
In Damsels Part 1…
She changes the history of Star Fox Adventures’ development, claiming that Krystal was the sole protagonist when it was still Dinosaur Planet and that Fox replaced her just to avoid having a female lead. The reality is that Krystal was ALWAYS a secondary character, and Fox replaced Sabre, the main character, the original idea for Dinosaur Planet being that Sabre has to save two royals and takes Krystal along as his helper–Sabre rescues Prince Tricky while Krystal rescues Princess Kyte. See that? The girl rescues the girl. Sabre looked almost exactly like Fox, which is why they decided it should be a Star Fox game. They had also planned to make Krystal much more present and helpful, with her actually speaking telepathically to Fox through the staff while trapped–all of her dialogue being in English, which would’ve made far more sense–and serving as a genuinely helpful NPC partner throughout the entire final level, a segment before the fight with Andross where the player controls her to fight General Scales to the death, and an actual explanation for why she joins Star Fox in the end, how the hell she got to Sauria in the first place, and what actually happened to her home planet Cerinia, but it was all cut out due to severe time constraints. To put it into perspective, if they had finished the game and submitted it for bug-testing just ONE DAY LATER than they did, Krystal and everything else introduced in that game would be property of Microsoft right now–Rareware literally finished it one day before Microsoft officially bought the company. In short, it was never Krystal’s game to begin with. Anita also ignores, might I add, that Krystal became a capable and valuable full-time playable character in the very next game, Star Fox Assault–she talks as though Krystal’s sole purpose was being something for Fox to decide he wants to fuck.
She straight-up says that Mario, Link and other such heroes are only in it to “conquer” and “win” a woman as their prize and that they’re competing with the villain over a sex partner. In reality, Link has, Word of God, never actually been romantically interested in Zelda, and Mario’s relationship with Peach is unclear by this point but what’s VERY clear is that he deeply cares about and respects her. In some way or another, we know he loves her, whether that love is romantic or otherwise. Both of them are doing what they do because they feel they need to, Mario out of the aforementioned love and “Mamma mia, what’ll-a happen to-a the kingdom without her?!”, and Link out of, y'know, being the eternal reincarnated keeper of the Triforce of Courage whose destiny is to keep the kingdom and its ruler safe. But you’ll never convince Anita of this, of course.
She uses KID ICARUS as an additional example of the above bullshit, a game where Pit, who at the time is a little boy, has to save Palutena, a powerful goddess and basically the closest thing to a mother Pit’s ever had, from Medusa, a female villain.
She also basically calls Sonic a patriarchal sex fiend scumbag for saving then-8-year-old Amy from being roboticized in Sonic CD. In the same breath, she also makes the ludicrous claim that Amy is nothing more than “a female Sonic”, talking about her as though she’s a palette swap of Sonic with no unique abilities or talents of her own.
She tries to dictate which Mario games do and don’t “count” for the sake of making Shigeru Miyamoto look like a total shitbag, curiously including Super Princess Peach as a game that “doesn’t count”, and claims that Peach was playable in SMB2 “by accident”. This self-proclaimed expert also conveniently neglects to acknowledge that Doki Doki Panic had two playable female characters to begin with.
She admits that Zelda can get herself out of trouble on her own perfectly fine, but in the next breath openly elects to ignore this simply because she’ll usually be captured in time for the final confrontation with Ganon. She instead decides to just call Zelda weak, with a totally straight face, diminishing her worth and strength in ways that the games NEVER FUCKING INTENDED, while also ignoring the fact that, despite being a hostage, Zelda actually ends up joining the final fight against the villain in some of the games, usually the ones involving Ganondorf, most notably Twilight Princess (the game Anita likes using clips from the most despite it revolving so much around awesome, powerful, important women that Link is basically a secondary character plotwise) and Ocarina of Time (another game featuring a large number of awesome, powerful, important women). See, she would know this if she had actually done any research about the series. Or actually played the games.
She claims that men on average having more physical strength than women is a myth when it’s been scientifically proven that the average man has far more upper body strength than the average woman, who has more lower body strength. Face it, you are not goddamn likely to see a real-life woman pick a fucker up and throw him across the room. It’s awesome when they can, but it ain’t exactly a common sight.
In Damsels Part 2…
She shows a montage of clips of female characters getting captured or killed out of context and claims with total seriousness that the characters were captured or killed just because they were women.
She bitches about Ico and Pandora’s Tower and goes on about how the love interests in games are supposedly love interests because of how powerless they are. So for everyone who would point out that love is the reason why Mario continues to save Peach even after it’s become clear that maybe she doesn’t need or want saving all that badly, Anita would probably respond by stating that Mario, this beloved cultural icon and hero to look up to for children around the world, just loves a weak woman he can push around easily.
She talks about women being killed as a means of developing the male hero’s character and says the opposite situation with a guy being killed is almost nonexistent and has to be over-the-top, choosing to reference Calhoun’s wedding tragedy in Wreck-It Ralph of all things. Oh yeah, cause that event and the resulting trauma were just so ridiculous and hilarious. HAS SHE NEVER HEARD OF METROID? Yeah, Samus is largely following orders, but her missions tie in with personal reasons, like killing the space pirates that destroyed her home and slaughtered her family. And what about cases where it IS a guy that died–a brother, a father, a best friend–and it ISN’T anywhere close to comedic? Nice to know she only cares when it’s a woman’s life that’s lost!
She talks about scenarios where a character’s girlfriend is killed and you have to save her soul, and calls it misogynistic. So she fails to see the point of how the hero will literally GO INTO HELL or to the ends of the world to save his girlfriend’s soul or at the very least make sure that she can go on happily in the afterlife.
She conveniently leaves out any mention of the fact that Maria is available as a playable character in Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles and is actually quite useful when the player knows the most effective way to utilize her. While ignoring Maria’s role in the story, she also ignores that Annette’s vampirization and death are non-canon and thus completely preventable in the game. You see, admitting this would destroy part of her nonexistent point, and knowing this would require her to have actually played the game or done proper research, neither of which she did.
She makes it very clear that she would rather a female character live an agonizing, tragic and meaningless life mutated into a 50-foot pulsating mass of giant organs, transformed into a hideous creature used as a puppet by gods who want her son dead, or grafted onto the back of a monster’s corpse than see a man who loves her have to reluctantly kill her because she begs him to. In particular, she uses footage from Prey, or rather, someone’s Let’s Play of Prey that she stole footage from and pretended she captured herself with the equipment she didn’t actually buy with the donation money she scammed her loyal ass-kissers out of. In the game, there’s a sequence where the male hero, the player, finds his kidnapped girlfriend, discovering that she’s been surgically attached to the back of a monster that then attacks you. Anita points this out, saying that you have to kill the monster, no surprise there, then she shows a clip where you finally finish it off, leading to a cutscene. She then cuts away, saying something to the effect of “And now that you’ve slain the monster, you also have to kill the woman in order to advance–the game won’t let you advance until you kill the woman, which just goes to show how horrible the game is, because it’s encouraging violence against women. The game even has the woman herself encourage you to do it. To the male gamer, she’s just a +1 to his kill count.” She then cuts back to the Let’s Play, showing the woman begging to be killed, then the cutscene ends and the player shoots and kills the woman. Guess what was edited out of that cutscene? The bit where the player character says he’ll try to save the woman. Then she says it’s too late and she can feel that she’s dying as well, asking to be killed quickly to end her suffering. The player character then actually refuses, getting all sad and mushy. That’s when she starts to beg for it.
That kinda changes the context for the character shooting her, doesn’t it? But that didn’t suit Anita’s agenda, so she felt no need to show it.
She references Bionic Commando 2009 and how the catalyst for Nathan Spencer’s bionic arm is his wife’s soul. And literally facepalms at it! Why? What is so bad about that? Especially with the scene she showed of Nathan listening to a recording his wife left for him and she’s saying “I told you I’d always be by your side, Nathan.” Yeah, it’s a cheesy line (Ha ha ha, she’ll always be by his side, cause she’s his arm now, get it?), and the plot twist itself is kinda dumb, albeit foreshadowed properly (since it was suggested earlier in the game that another character’s husband had his soul used as the catalyst for her bionic legs), but Nathan’s wife is providing invaluable help from beyond the grave, and she chose to be the catalyst herself because she loves him so much. They are quite literally together forever, and it’s all thanks to their deep, lasting mutual love and trust. If that’s not a bond worth admiring, I don’t know what is.
She mentions examples of the protagonist having to fight someone close to them, including Twilight Princess and Resident Evil 5. Now, Anita, being a clueless passive-aggressive radfem, sees that as brutality against women, while I see it as building up that massive moment of relief when the person you care about is safe. It’s the same end result as with the standard “rescue the girl” thing, but it means way more when you have to personally free them from being possessed or brainwashed or whatever. It has a bigger impact and is NOT being used as an excuse to make the player hurt a woman. Oh, and that RE5 scene? Yeah, here’s the thing about that: JILL, ONE OF MAIN CHARACTER CHRIS’ CLOSEST FRIENDS AND LONGTIME ALLIES, IS BEING CONTROLLED BY WESKER, THE VILLAIN OF THE GAME, AND YOU’RE TRYING TO FREE HER! In order to get a moment to pry the P-30 device off of her chest, you first need to hit her enough times to stun her, because without doing this, she’s fast and strong as fuck and impossible to hold down. And if Jill dies or you run out of time, you get an immediate Game Over and have to try again, so contrary to what Anita suggests, you are required to make sure Jill survives. Of course, whereas any normal person or actual fan of Resident Evil sees this as rescuing a beloved video game icon from the brainwashing control of a mutant psychopath bent on world domination and mass human extinction, all Anita sees is “justification of domestic violence to get an out-of-control woman back under control for her own good.” That’s almost her exact words.
She handwaves the narrative reason for why violence against women is used, and then takes games too seriously. Okay, no, you can’t do that. If you’re going to take the use of violence in a fictional game dead fucking seriously, then you have to treat the story you’re given and the circumstances behind the violence just as dead fucking seriously and accept the explanations given.
She tries to tie real-life female victims to video games. Really, instead of “think of the children”, she’s basically crying “think of the women”. Yeah, because video games where your girlfriend is possessed and transforms into a vampire/ogre/mutated abomination/demon/whatever else is SO MUCH LIKE THE REAL WORLD AND IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL FROM REALITY ITSELF! Then she backpedals to make it clear that this isn’t what she means, so what’s her point?
She eventually goes back to repeating herself from part 1, claiming that the woman is just a possession, except now she adds on “her death was more important than anything else.” I’m starting to think this woman has never loved anything, because the simple concept of love as a motivation seems to escape her ENTIRELY.
She goes on to say that these games are really about loss of masculinity. And back to grasping at straws. No, the men suffer because they know they’ve lost the one they love–they aren’t just tormented by their own failure, but the cost of their failure as well. It seems like the one person in the world who’s trying the hardest to write off the importance of the women in these games is this woman herself.
In Damsels Part 3…
In the interest of fairness, I will say this: She at least decided to exclude fighting games from any of her arguments, reasoning that since everyone is of equal power and none of the noteworthy female characters ever need rescuing, she can let them off easy even though many of them have lots of half-dressed women. Smart move on her part. Now let’s count all the dumb ones.
After her fighting game disclaimer, Anita decides the best way to open this video is with more bitching about Peach. We get it, Anita, you hate Peach. I had a feeling Super Princess Peach would show up if enough people pointed it out to her. My main issue with how she represents it is that she’s completely and inexplicably changed her opinion of it, having once stated that she liked it in spite of how often it was accused of sexism, and what she says here isn’t even remotely true. The mechanics of the game revolve around Peach controlling her emotions and using them strategically and at will to accomplish goals. That is not “uncontrolled”, which automatically means it’s not “a PMS joke turned into a game mechanic" either.
Of course she has to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because I guess no 30-minute internet feminist rant about women in media is complete without a Buffy reference. But even though she once bitched about Buffy and called its titular character awful for some reason, she now seems to be talking about it positively. Inconsistency, thy name is Anita Sarkeesian.
She also mentions the Spice Girls in a positive light. Really? You complain about Peach and Zelda but see nothing wrong with the Spice Girls?
She says that even though there are games with the guy in distress, it’s not the same as the damsel in distress. Okay, I’m probably jumping the gun on this but, FUCKING HELL, BITCH, WHAT DO YOU EVEN WANT?!
I was unimpressed by her statement that Beyond Good and Evil is a good example of trope subversion, seeing as her criteria for being a Damsel in Distress was for a female character to be overpowered and require a man to rescue them, for any amount of time and any reason. Saying it’s a good example because Jade rescued a guy at one point is also incredibly self-contradictory, since she dismissed women saving men not even two minutes earlier.
I was also unimpressed by how she said choosing the woman, chippendale dancer or pug as the character you rescue in Spelunky was still sexist all three ways, claiming that the game is equating women to dogs and somehow teaching the audience that men are better than women. Then she proceeds to talk about it while using the woman as if the others don’t exist and ignoring the fact that several playable character options are female, one of them being available right from the beginning, just to support what she’s saying. In spite of this, she later claimed to love Spelunky. Yeah, sure you do, Anita, just like you loved Super Princess Peach?
She says we should break away from the stereotype altogether, provides no examples, and goes on to bitch about indie games reusing the formula. She then lists enough games to cover up the screen and her face. Well, that’s about the best thing she’s done so far.
By calling Fat Princess a load of fat-shaming, objectifying garbage and complaining about games that use the “I know that you know that we all know this is an overused and kinda sexist plot point” joke, she proves once and for all that her sense of humor has long dried up.
She takes a shot at Ghost Trick. Oh, go fuck yourself right to Hell and back with something sandpapery, Sarkeesian. Many people in general are in danger in that one, not just women. Hell, Sissel has to escort a GUY for part of the game. While you’re at it, why not bitch about the Ace Attorney series because some of Phoenix Wright’s clients are female?
By the way, notice how little time she actually spends talking about role reversal and how much of this video is more of the same complaints with new examples? Could’ve sworn she had intended to put all her focus on role reversal and strong female protags for this one, but I guess she was distracted from this by all the evil patriarchal damsel business.
I still can’t figure out what the fuck she means by “ironic”.
She references Earthworm Jim…and thinks Princess What’s-Her-Name (who she claims is named such because the creators are misogynists who see no value in women) is killed by a random cow. No, she isn’t killed, she appears in the sequel, and that cow is not random, it’s the same cow you launched in the very first level. GEE, SOMEONE DIDN’T DO HER RESEARCH ON A GAME THAT’S ALMOST 20 YEARS OLD! 20 YEARS OLD, VERY WELL-KNOWN, GOT SEQUELS AND HAD ITS OWN TV SERIES, AND THE BITCH CAN’T EVEN GET THAT ONE RIGHT!!
She mentions Braid and Secret of Monkey Island, making a point of the fact that even though the women can take care of themselves just fine, the games are still about a male character. This isn’t even about damsels in distress or women in refrigerators by this point, she’s just pissed that there’s such a thing as a male protagonist at all.
She goes into her personal fantasy of a damsel escaping on her own. Which includes stealing a male soldier’s uniform. Hey, isn’t that the exact thing she bitched about Mulan doing when she made her infamous master’s thesis about how women and men “should” and “shouldn’t” behave and why Mulan is a terrible, misogynistic movie for “trying to turn women into men”, the same master’s thesis where she, as mentioned before, called Buffy a terrible portrayal of women AND said the same about Ellen Ripley? MAKE UP YOUR MIND!
Also, I guess we know where most of the money went, paying someone to draw up that animation and hiring Jennifer Hale to do narration for it. And might I add, while we’re on the subject of Anita’s ideal games, I’ve never liked Zelda fanstuff that just transplants Zelda into an identical role to Link’s. At all. There’s no fucking need to just turn her into a female Link. By doing that, you’re changing nothing and only reinforcing the notion that being a hero and being a princess can never be done at the same time. Zelda also has a number of canon skills of her own that could easily be put to use, like archery, disguise and magic.
But then this raises a very good question: If she cares so damn much, why doesn’t she make this game a reality? She clearly has the money, connections, resources and following to make such a game and have it turn out a decent profit. If she can shell out enough money to convince Jennifer freaking Hale, a high-paid big-name voice actress who typically only does union work, to do a 30-second voiceover for a short, independently made Flash cartoon (and knowing Sarkeesian’s massive laundry list of trickery and lies, Hale, who’s one of those rational feminists that Tumblrinas hate with such burning fury, probably thought it was going to be used to promote an actual game), then she can sure as hell pay some indie developers and programmers to make a game, right? But no, even though she easily could, of course she won’t, cause she thinks she can just make a series of what basically amounts to extremely patronizing rants about things she hates, present a short hypothetical of a game she’d like to see someday, and just sit back and watch everything magically change to suit her desires.
She says she’s not asking for every game to have a female character that “pulls themselves up by the bootstraps* and doesn’t need anything from anyone.” Could’ve fooled me. Then she backpedals and goes on about how “it’s not bad to help others, it’s only a problem when it’s in heavily gendered ways.” Wanna stop moving the goalposts there? Finally, she says it’s time to break the cycle. And that’s it. The end.
She also uses the phrase “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” COMPLETELY incorrectly, might I add.
Seems she also saw the criticism being raised of her stealing Let’s Play clips, cause now she’s included a note in the credits basically going “IT’S FAIR USE, SO THERE!”
AND SHE STILL NOT ONE FUCKING TIME MENTIONS METROID! Fuck, she didn’t even mention Portal or Borderlands and only mentioned Beyond Good and Evil like once! She absolutely does not want to talk about the positives, she just wants to bitch about games she’s never played and never will play not giving her exactly what she wants!
When it comes right down to the core of her complaints, it’s not about how often these things happen or forcing drama or whatever else, it’s simply because a female is in need of rescue or being attacked or killed, and Anita feels it’s solely because the character’s female, and therefore, in her mind, it’s misogyny. That’s what it’s boiling down to.
I’m skipping over the Ms. Male Character video because it’s basically just her reiterating the same point over and over, that being she hates characters who are or appear to be female palette swaps of male ones, and even then she manages to get shit wrong. And keep in mind that by Anita’s insane troll logic, even games like Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Awakening and Elder Scrolls and many other games where you can play a female character as easily as a male one wouldn’t be allowed in her ideal gaming industry and community, because by her reasoning, a woman who’s even the least bit interchangeable with a man is not really a woman, just a man disguised as one. Many beloved female superheroes would also have to go, because according to Anita, they’re all nothing but inferior photocopies of male superheroes with boobs added.
And yet she advocates the idea of making a game where Zelda is nothing but a female clone of Link. But also hates Mulan for having a woman in a traditionally masculine role.
No, instead of boring you all with that repetitive shit, I’m skipping right ahead to Women as Background Decoration Part 1.
In Background Women Part 1…
She talks about the first arcade game and how the ads for it featured a woman standing next to it to show it off. Oh fuck off, EVERY FUCKING ADVERTISING AGENCY DOES THIS. This lead to women being considered as objects. Again, fuck you.
She goes on to complain that video games imitated life and used girls as eye candy in the games as well as the advertisements. Yes, because God forbid real life be imitated by showing pretty girls in tight outfits, like you’d normally see at drive in places and whatnot. Not saying all the games depicted how real life works, but come on…
She at least defines what she means by “background decoration”, I’ll give her that. She then defines NPCs and says she’s only concerned about the ones that piss her off. So once again, rather than acknowledge any good examples of female NPCs, we’ll go for the easy targets.
She begins complaining about prostitutes. Again, look at real life. Then she complains about Asian prostitutes in particular and comments that this usually means men are sexual subjects and women are sexual objects. All I’m seeing so far is “Wah wah wah, I don’t like real-world elements in my M-rated games.” These games involve large settings and when you sell to an older audience, even if they don’t care about any sexual content, they expect to be immersed in the environment. I don’t know who started the prostitute thing, but once that idea has been set, everyone else is going to follow it. That’s how ANY sort of product or media works, if something sells well, everyone plays follow-the-leader. It’s why we have so many games that ape Cawl uh Doody.
She claims that because it’s a game, it has more impact than how this is used in other forms of media. Bullshit. It’s the old “vidja gaem violence makes them dumb ol’ gamin’ kids crazy” argument with a new coat of paint.
She complains about Darkness II using a tutorial to objectify women. Anita, for fuck’s sake, it’s a cutscene making fun of stupid mob enemies and you’re looking at a busty secretary.
She mention’s someone else’s work on “objectification theory”.
…
Okay, Google break.
Alright, so Wikipedia does show a few different things under “objectification” similar to what Anita lists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification Maybe she just screwed up the names, I dunno. Although the article lists six items and Anita mentions five, so I wonder why she left one off. Let’s see where this goes.
For instrumentality, she talks about what you can do with hookers and stuff, and mentions Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea. Well, now we know why that was on the list of hers that was found awhile before the video’s release. Probably why most of the games she chose were on the list. Back to complaining about hookers, mentioning how GTA and Sleeping Dogs reward the players with powerups for having sex with women. And yet she doesn’t mention God of War and how every game in the series except Ascension has a powerup-granting sex minigame.
She links this to fungibility, or as she calls it, “interchangeability”. Yeah, she changed the names for some of the terms. USE WHAT YOUR FUCKING PRECIOUS PHILOSOPHER USED AND STICK TO IT! It just means treating something the same as something else. Like women = powerup drink.
She complains that the NPCs are so generic that they copypasta the same character model all over the environment. And I’m calling bullshit on that one. NPCs in any sandbox game–hell, most games in general–are copypasta’d all over the fucking place. Men, women, kids, bad guys, animals, cars, it doesn’t fucking matter what it is. They can’t make every model unique. This has been a staple of game design since FOR-FUCKING-EVER!
She begins complaining about sleeping with strippers in GTA5. 16 MINUTES! 16 MINUTES IN AND ALL SHE’S DONE IS BITCH ABOUT FICTIONAL PROSTITUTES! THAT’S ALL THIS IS!
Oh wait, I’m sorry, she calls them “prostituted women”. Every single time. Suggesting that no female sex worker can make her own choice regarding such things. She seriously finds it completely ridiculous and inconceivable that any woman would choose to do such a thing or enjoy being sexually active. Another one she likes to use is “non-playable sex objects”, thus degrading and dehumanizing women far worse than the evul vidja gaems she crusades against ever have. She’s treating these characters, and by extension the real-life sex workers of the world, the exact same way she accuses male gamers of treating them, particularly by saying they only serve one purpose in their existence. Good going, Anita.
And then when actual sex workers called her out via Twitter, and even her fellow radfems began telling her she done goofed, she pulled the “internalized misogyny” card and claimed that every woman who has no problem with such things is only thinking that way because the patriarchy told them to. No, seriously, she literally said that they’ve been influenced by the patriarchy and harbour internalized misogyny. She says shit like this and then wonders why people hate her so fucking much. Guess what, Anita? They don’t hate you because they’re the Patriarmy sent to keep you from telling the truth, they hate you because you’re a hypocritical, sex-negative, self-contradicting, venomous misandrist bitch who constantly says things many times more damaging to women than any male gamer or industry figure you’ve ever hated.
She thinks this is all reinforcing the idea that a woman’s role is to satisfy men. Making some pretty big assumptions that the people playing these games are that stupid and basic there, Anita. I think she forgot that these games are for adult audiences, who know it’s just a game and, regardless of what you do in the game, you treat people with respect in the real world, or at least should.
Here we go again, she says “It’s not really about sex, it’s about selling a male power fantasy with control over women.” In particular, she’s talking about Mass Effect, which I guess in Sarkeesianland has no women aside from FemShep who aren’t background NPCs, because this is a claim that she honestly makes with a tone of complete seriousness. Even though you can have the exact same interactions with the lapdancer as male or female Shepard, and even though plenty of players, both male and female, of all sexual orientations have chosen these actions, with either version of Shepard, and FemShep is actually the more commonly-played of the two among all people who’ve played Mass Effect, she goes on to claim that “non-playable sex objects are still specifically coded to pander to a presumed heterosexual male ego.” Y'know, Anita, if you really believe that these games are that shallow, you need to stop stealing out-of-context footage and actually play the games yourself, YOU FUCKING FRAUD!
She goes onto talk about how you can kill hookers in sandbox games and says this is two other terms of objectification, violability and disposability. The second one isn’t mentioned under her beloved philosopher’s terms in any way, shape or form. So now she’s making shit up. No, seriously. She lists Nussbaum’s definition for violability, but doesn’t list one for disposability. Then she’s back to complaining about how you can kill hookers, adding that you can get money for it. Just like you get for killing ANYONE AND ANYTHING in such games.
Oh, and NOW she mentions a definition for disposability. WHICH CAME FROM THE FUCKING DICTIONARY, NOT THE THEORY OF OBJECTIFICATION!
She outright lies and claims that Red Dead: Redemption gives you the option to either pay hookers for sex or tie them up, carry them off and rape them. You can’t have sex with, let alone rape, any of the hookers in Red Dead: Redemption. As a matter of fact, one of the game’s missions even has you slaughter a criminal gang who viciously beat and gang-raped a nice young woman you’ve helped out around her ranch throughout the course of the game. And of course prostitutes are everywhere, it’s the Wild goddamn West. Once again, anyone who’s actually played it or done even an ounce of research knows this.
She says that these women are really considered disposable because the bodies often simply disappear. Yeah, hey, guess what? SO DOES EVERY FUCKING DEAD BODY FROM SOMEONE YOU KILLED! IT’S HOW GAMES WORK! IT’S DONE TO KEEP ALL THE FUCKING CORPSES FROM MAKING THE GAME LAG! Piss-poor reasoning and reaching for things to whine about, and YOU KNOW IT!
Oh, now here’s a fun one. In Hitman Absolution, you’re penalized for killing innocent civilians, or in fact anyone who isn’t your target, and there are strippers in like one quick part of the entire game, so of course Anita feels the compulsive need to whine about it. During the mission that takes you through the strip club, no gamer I’ve seen playing this game has gone out of their way to not only kill the strippers but also play around with their corpses, drag them across the floor and hide them in boxes. This is also FAR from the objective of the mission, which has seven parts, that footage being from part TWO, and most gamers seemed to prefer taking the shortcut that has you avoid the strippers, as you’re actually intended to do, seeing as the main character is a fucking hitman who’s supposed to focus on stealth and finishing the mission properly. The strippers are in an out-of-the-way spot that you’re supposed to sneak past. One look at the scoreboard in the corner also shows that Anita has managed to earn herself a grand total score of NEGATIVE 3,847! So Anita finally captured her own footage, but only so she could bitch about the scene that she herself crafted. On top of this, she also fails to note that you can drag and hide male NPCs’ corpses as well, and you can even steal their clothes and leave them in their underwear, something the game doesn’t let you do to female NPCs.
She goes with the absurd logic that “a player can’t help but kill a hooker because they were put in the game for that purpose.”
…They’re random NPCs. They’re not important to the story, you admitted that yourself. We’re about as forced to do anything to these characters as we are to eat tons of food at McDonald’s every day. That is to say, we’re not forced at all. Don’t try to pin this on game developers being misogynists. I’m pretty damn sure there are also plenty of male NPCs that run away and cower and yell for help before you slaughter them. It’s called equality, deal with it. You’re just looking for any reason you can to make men the villains in this scenario, especially male gamers, or as you call them, “misogynistic fedora-bros from 4chan and Reddit”. I’m completely unsurprised, by the way, that the queen of the radfems has latched onto such Tumblr-born trends as demonizing a fucking hat.
She then says it doesn’t even matter if a player chooses to kill the hookers or not, because they were placed in the game to be used. No, they were placed in the game to add life to the environment, to give more choices you can make, to set a particular mood. Once again, the one that chooses to see the worst in this is none other than Anita Sarkeesian herself.
She claims that even though you can kill men as well, “it’s different.” She then shows a scene of someone killing a guy just standing around in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It really doesn’t look that much different when she shows a player suddenly stabbing a hooker in the same game. The GTA5 clip with the player shooting a hooker also wasn’t as dramatized as she’s making it out to be. I’ll meet her halfway on this one, however, some games do make bigger a deal out of it than others. But hey, maybe that’s because we’re supposed to feel like monsters for killing them? Also worth noting is how she actually claims that games like Assassin’s Creed give you extra points for killing women. And naturally, the reality is that, just like with Hitman, none of these games encourage you to kill women, or any NPCs at all besides your assigned target. It’s not a requirement or the focus of any missions in any of these games, and doing so gets you a hefty penalty. You are actively DISCOURAGED from doing it via the points system.
During this, she also makes a big deal out of God of War 3 containing a part where you kill a sexy half-naked woman to open up the next area and receive a sexually suggestive achievement for performing the completely optional action of going back and examining her corpse. This is of course ignoring the fact that the scene is continuing a trend in the games of using someone’s body as a sacrifice to open up an area, the countless men slaughtered by Kratos and the related achievements, and the achievement you get for literally kicking cerberus puppies. God of War is a horribly violent, sadistic series in general. Kratos mercilessly kills fucking everything in his path, good or evil, innocent or guilty, male or female, god or mortal, strong or weak, man or beast. The entire series is about Kratos mercilessly slaughtering every single legendary figure of Greek mythology. But naturally, Anita and her fellow radfems only care when it happens to one innocent female. And just as naturally, they ignore the importance and power held by a number of female characters throughout the series, most notably Athena.
She goes on to claim that whenever a male sex worker shows up, it’s almost always played for laughs. What the fuck ever, I’m so fucking sick of this video by now, I don’t even care enough to point out how stupid this statement is. Oh, and of course she doesn’t call these guys “prostituted men”, she just calls them what they are, male sex workers. Because according to her and all other sex-hating radfems like her, only men can ever willingly become prostitutes.
She starts talking about the real-life effects of this. Women self-objectify and don’t see themselves worth as much, men view women as less intelligent, etc. These are the exact same arguments you can apply to any fucking media. And again, these are M-rated games. People playing these games need to be at least 17 before they can legally buy them, and most adults already have a solid grasp on how to act and view others in society. You can’t play the “Think of the children!” card when most parents understand that children shouldn’t even be touching these games, Helen Lovejoy.
She then goes into some nonsense about “third-person effect”, where people think they’re immune to media’s effects but the ones denying it the strongest are the most influenced. FUCK ME WITH TUNA, WHERE DOES SHE FIND THIS SHIT?!
This whole video literally boils down to bitching about prostitutes in sandbox games and what you can do to them, from fucking them to killing them, just like how you can kill anyone. That’s all it is. Oh, and repeatedly dehumanizing female sex workers and pretending they’re all unwilling, cause hey, everyone knows that no woman would ever willingly become a sex worker or even desire sex at all unless a man brainwashed them first, right?
In Background Women Part 2…
Since she’s still yammering on about “background decoration” and “non-playable sex objects”, I’m gonna go ahead and predict that Anita still doesn’t understand how NPCs work (you don’t give them more depth, development, and personality than the main character, you fucking retard), she doesn’t understand plot convenience and characterization (a character killing or mistreating a woman to illustrate that he’s a colossally cold-hearted villain, for instance), and she’ll probably try to double down on the ludicrous claim that male gamers are all depraved, insane perverts who revel in the idea of killing and mutilating women for the testosterone-infused lulz. Also, I predict there’ll be at least two utterly insane claims in the video that further cement her as a legitimate crazy person, and the whole thing will be filled with fancy screenwipes and pseudo-intellectual, faux-academic rhetoric to make her bullshit seem like insightful, educational findings discovered after many weeks of intense research and many combined hours of suffering through horrible, evil, woman-hating games all for the sake of delivering a warning to the poor, vulnerable females of the world.
So Anita’s bone to pick this time is with dead women. Again. Surprising no one, she detours way the fuck around the simple concept that human female bodies are sexually attractive to heterosexual human males and rants about them being eroticized even when dead. The evidence she uses to back this up is the fact that, as with a lot of fictional media, scenes with dead women tend to appear somewhat more glamorized than similar scenes with dead men. Nevermind the fact that this doesn’t automatically equal the game designers wanting the male audience to start lustfully salivating over a corpse, because fuck logic, this is Sarkeesianland! She then goes looking for sexy characters in strip clubs and whore houses and balks at the idea that normal, non-sex worker men aren’t posed similarly, therefore misogyny.
I also find it odd that she keeps using games like Bioshock Infinite and Metro and The Darkness, games that depict apocalyptic, dystopian or hellish worlds where EVERYONE is dying or suffering in some way. And it’s particularly fucking stupid to talk about women getting raped or killed in front of the player as a generality instead of something occurring in specific games for the specific reason of setting the tone. She even acknowledges the idea that these scenes are created for narrative reasons directly, but still uses it to bemoan all the horrible things done “on the backs of women” and pretend these scenes exist for the evil male gamers to jerk off to, presumably right after bathing in freshly-spilled hooker blood, beating a dozen orphaned girls to death and eating a plate of kittens for dinner, specifically female ones, cause they hate and fear anything without a Y chromosome so much. That’s right, at the same time as being a narrative device, it’s also a grave insult to all women, who are sacrificed digitally for the sake of telling a story.
Basically, in Anita’s twisted mind, it’s totally awesome when mowing down a small town’s worth of male NPCs with vicious abandon is shorthand for heroism and badassery and glorifying mindless violence, but it’s disgusting objectification and misogyny when a single worthless female NPC is killed or beaten as shorthand for villainy and evil. That’s Anita’s bullshit in a nutshell: Horrible when it happens to women, forgettable when it happens to men. She thinks games trivialize violence against women but doesn’t care that games think nothing of wanton slaughter and murder of men. If anything, it says far worse things about society that men being murdered and beaten has so little narrative impact that they have to throw in some bad shit happening to women just to make the killing stand out. There’s so little impact, for that matter, from men being killed that Anita sees it as insulting when a game tries to show it in remotely the same light as a woman being killed. She also very openly sees the life of just one woman as more valuable than those of dozens or hundreds or thousands of men.
Let that sink in.
Yeah, tell us again about how disposable women in games are, Anita. Oh wait, nevermind, I know you will anyway.
She tries to rope in real-world issues, throwing out ridiculous claims about sexual violence and domestic abuse being at all-time highs and epidemic levels when they’re actually lower than they’ve ever been, and then continues demonizing men and trying to frame it like an academic observation. And at this point, I can’t bring myself to care enough to keep watching, so I just stopped right there. She met each and every one of my predictions within minutes, and even when she directly explains why her own points are stupid and misplaced, she jumps right back at it, performing some amazing mental gymnastics to keep things rolling.
It’s really not even laughable anymore. It’s sad. It’s pitiful to watch her set up these moronic strawmen only to kick her own ass with them.
Oh, but we should all take her seriously and consider her a gaming expert, guys! She skimmed TV Tropes and Wikipedia, showed off a bunch of game boxes, played around with controllers for the camera with the consoles turned off, showed a bunch of out-of-context game footage stolen from YouTube Let’s Players and edited to twist the truth that she pretended to capture herself, purposely fished for insults and threats on /v/, and conned people out of 160 grand so she could sit there and talk out of her ass no differently than she ever did before, so that means she’s legit!
And don’t ever forget, she’s the victim here! These nasty games have made her feel, in her own words, victimized, so we all need to be told by a stereotypical radfem hipster speaking in a condescending deadpan tone why these games are disgusting, unintelligent piles of derivative, woman-hating shit made for unsophisticated, dimwitted dudebro trolls who think women belong in the kitchen, also known as the entire male gaming community, and every game that isn’t is hated by all male gamers because she says so and that means it must be true! It doesn’t matter that she admitted on-camera that she’s not a gamer, would never consider herself one and doesn’t even like games, only to later claim that she’s been gaming her whole life, it doesn’t matter that she thinks women are too weak and stupid to handle the same controllers and control schemes as men and has suggested that there should be entirely different ones made for the poor fragile women trying so hard to play with the big oppressive man-hand hardware, it doesn’t matter that she openly ignores things that nullify her arguments to artificially strengthen her nonexistent points, it doesn’t matter that she thinks the GameBoy is sexist for having “boy” in its name, it doesn’t matter that she attended a video game industry conference just to give a speech about how evil and misogynistic the industry is, it doesn’t matter that she trashed Bayonetta and tried to spread falsehoods about it and called it a “choose-your-own-patriarchal-sex-fantasy porn game” after seeing a 30-second gameplay trailer, it doesn’t matter that she stated in her master’s thesis that she prefers women in media to be emotional and cooperative while lacking strength, confidence, rationality, self-control, decisiveness and independence, calling the latter exclusively male traits, all while complaining endlessly if a female character lacks so much as one of those so-called “male traits”, SHE IS THE HERO THE INDUSTRY NEEDS! Truly she speaks for all female gamers, feminists and women in general! All hail the Ambassador of Gaming! Give her awards and honours and game development consultant jobs and interviews and money galore!
I seriously hope there comes a day when all of her loyal supporters realize what fools they’ve been and finally notice how terrible their messiah is. Anita Sarkeesian is to both feminism and gaming what Ann Coulter is to Republicans. And come to think of it, Jack Thompson tried selling the same shit as Anita, that video games, regardless of their actual content, fuck with people’s minds and turn them into remorseless monsters. In Jack’s case, they were murder machines, while in Anita’s case, they’re brainwashing tools of the patriarchy. Why was Jack cast out and called a fucking idiot by everyone who heard him spew his bullshit, including game journalists, but Anita gets to be honoured as a fucking gaming ambassador for calling all male gamers evil, stupid, woman-hating man-pigs and making shit up about games she’s never played? Regardless of what she and her friends may claim, those with her mindset ARE the new Jack Thompson, the new Joe Lieberman, the new Tipper Gore, and the only thing that’s changed is what video games supposedly cause. And as a matter of fact, both Anita and her fellow Feminist Frequency writer Jonathan McIntosh have in fact claimed at different times that video games cause violence and that this has been scientifically proven.
Oh, and as a bullshit bonus, McIntosh, who hates games to the point of believing they shouldn’t even be fun and somehow being able to find misogyny in motherfucking Pikmin 3, is the co-writer of this video series, which means Anita can’t even come up with this shit on her own. Yeah, it takes at least two people to think up the lies and out-of-context nonsense for these videos, and one of them is a man. Kinda makes the ol’ noggin gears turn, don’t it?
Hell, don’t forget, when she started her Kickstarter, she went on 4chan’s /v/ board and intentionally stirred shit up so trolls would come after her. She had been disabling comments on her videos for ages already, it was only her Kickstarter promo vid that suddenly had comments open again. Of the various negative comments she got, she cherry-picked the best and nastiest in order to parade them around the media and claim that the evil patriarchy was trying to shut her down. Nevermind that for all her claims of threats of violence and death, there’s never been any police reports made on the topic. But that’s how radfems like her work. They love it when they can claim the victim role, because to them, that’s automatic moral highground.
Her next video at the time of writing this will be the classily named “Fighting Fuck Toys”, in which she bitches about Bayonetta for the 9,001st time–despite still having never played so much as one second of it and having never watched more than 30 seconds–and breaks her vow to not go after fighting game girls, during which I’m sure she’ll make certain to undermine each and every single one’s strength, intellect and character in a manner as unbelievably cuntish as possible, reduce their worth to nothing but what they’re wearing or the size of their tits, insist that no man ever plays as them and generally make shit up left and right as usual. And if she actually plays any of the games they’re in, it’s a safe bet that she’ll stage some battles and sneakily cut the footage up to make it look like the female characters are hilariously weak, have barely any moves and can only be beaten up by men, who she’ll likely claim female characters can’t defeat at all because she has no idea how to keep her own lies consistent. And mark my words, she’ll top it all off by saying no female gamers like these characters or want them in these games, or that no gamers except straight male ones even play these games at all, because it wouldn’t be a Scamkeesian video without erasure of LGBT gamers and telling the very same women she claims to fight for that they can’t have an opinion that she doesn’t approve of or else they either hate themselves or couldn’t possibly be real women.
Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t want to improve things. She doesn’t want to teach. She doesn’t want to raise discussion. She wants to preach to the choir. She wants to lecture. She wants to tell her followers what they’re supposed to be angry at. She wants the world to know how she feels about all this stuff she knows jack shit about, and you’re all expected to shut up and listen, you patriarchal man-scum!
Oh, and wanna know the scariest thing of all? She’s threatened to have a mandatory school curriculum made out of this by the time she’s finished. No clue when or even if she’ll get around to it, considering she’s already over two years behind schedule on her stupid fucking videos despite receiving 25 times the budget she intended, but she wants this bullshit taught in schools. She wants to indoctrinate kids into hating these games and thinking just like her. Don’t believe me? It’s listed as one of the stretch goals on her Kickstarter, and it was also confirmed by her to have been reached.
Yeah.
Will read later