Or that she doesn't want to be debunked on her own channel.
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Anita Sarkeesian called someone "a garbage human", but before we talk about that....
- Thread starter Arctish
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Or that she doesn't want to be debunked on her own channel.
Given that 1 is a simple fact, that she has outright stated this as the reason to turn off comments, and that most efforts to "dubunk" her claims were risible...I think we have what we need to come to a conclusion
The big difference I see in discussion regarding Sarkeesian is that the people who rush to her defense generally provide some context to what the whole drama is about, whilst the likes of Sargon, Raz0rfist etc feel no way compelled to back up their diatribes with facts or and context whatsoever.
Thank you Arctish, for providing a little detail into the whole thing so people who weren't invested in Gamergate (i.e 99% of the human race) have some idea what the discussion is about. Generally when I see/hear Anita Sarkeesian being mentioned it's an indication the discussion is heading towards 4chan-land where fuckwits (or the alt right as they prefer to be called) thrive in their own echo chamber.
Thank you Arctish, for providing a little detail into the whole thing so people who weren't invested in Gamergate (i.e 99% of the human race) have some idea what the discussion is about. Generally when I see/hear Anita Sarkeesian being mentioned it's an indication the discussion is heading towards 4chan-land where fuckwits (or the alt right as they prefer to be called) thrive in their own echo chamber.
Let's not forget, Sarkeesian has admitted that she was indoctrinated into and
believed that "everything is sexist, everything is racist, and you have to point it all out". She's realized and stated publicly how unbearable that makes her (though oddly she hasn't said that statement is false), but this is her background and training before she launched into this profit making sexism-in-videogames business. She took her past "education" (if we can call it that) and turned it into a more palatable and enticing product, which shouldn't be terribly shocking.
believed that "everything is sexist, everything is racist, and you have to point it all out". She's realized and stated publicly how unbearable that makes her (though oddly she hasn't said that statement is false), but this is her background and training before she launched into this profit making sexism-in-videogames business. She took her past "education" (if we can call it that) and turned it into a more palatable and enticing product, which shouldn't be terribly shocking.
barbos
Contributor
I think gamers are pissed off at two things, amount of money she received for such a low quality "work", and that she did it at their expense by lying. And based on evidence they provided so far I agree with them. She is in it solely for the money. Maybe she was not planning to intentionally trigger them with her crappy "research" but now she is clearly milking it.
Those are two other objections:
"Anita...didn't do all this for free or something." Um...so? I also assumed this of every kickstarter I've funded - folks can't live on $0/month, after all.
"Anita's research is awful!" Well, the truth is, people are able to make their own video replies, and do so many, many times. One of the better ones it THunderf00t: *some* of his criticisms are, themselves, criticised in the video below:
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bVqfQvXP2o[/YOUTUBE]
Clearing up *all* of these distortions, misattributions, and other lies would take quite a bit of time. It's worth noting that Thunderf00t, himself, abandoned the "skeptical" movement due in large part to Sargon's odious behavior, including mocking a recently murdered woman.
"Anita...didn't do all this for free or something." Um...so? I also assumed this of every kickstarter I've funded - folks can't live on $0/month, after all.
"Anita's research is awful!" Well, the truth is, people are able to make their own video replies, and do so many, many times. One of the better ones it THunderf00t: *some* of his criticisms are, themselves, criticised in the video below:
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bVqfQvXP2o[/YOUTUBE]
Clearing up *all* of these distortions, misattributions, and other lies would take quite a bit of time. It's worth noting that Thunderf00t, himself, abandoned the "skeptical" movement due in large part to Sargon's odious behavior, including mocking a recently murdered woman.
repoman
Contributor
Phil Scott
Member
The events in the OP took place nearly a year ago, and feature a group of youtube celebrities who would probably rank in the equivalent of the C-list. In other words, they're nobodies. I'm not sure why this is being brought up now.
The situation wasn't remotely asymmetric with Anita holding all the power, and the front-row of self-described shitlords were there for a spectacle.
The situation wasn't remotely asymmetric with Anita holding all the power, and the front-row of self-described shitlords were there for a spectacle.
LordKiran
Veteran Member
Yeah fuck that guy. I try my best not to be envious of others but I do relish Sargon getting a taste of his own boorish medicine from the alt-right over the last month or two. Hope it gave him a new perspective on things.
As for Anita, I went back and looked at the initial kickstarter campaign. I dunno it says you're right so I'll concede the point I just could have sworn there was more to it. I guess it is possible I too got swept up in the initial frenzy.
ruby sparks
Contributor
Ok if true that'd be Sargon taking a 2:1 lead in the personal insult competition.
Do you have a link?
LordKiran
Veteran Member
Ok if true that'd be Sargon taking a 2:1 lead in the personal insult competition.
Do you have a link?
Is it really any worse than any of the other shit he's said over the last few years? Would this really be the thing that cements for you what a nasty resentful man he is?
ruby sparks
Contributor
I have not been following his output or exchanges. I'm only doing an informal in-thread count.
ruby sparks
Contributor
Maybe you could post a video by him?
Arctish
Centimillionaire
We talked about this before.
She was not indoctrinated into thinking "everything is racist, everything is sexist". That is a gross distortion of what she was actually saying. Mumbles provided the video clip here. It's obvious that people like Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) mined that quote out of it's context in order to attack her.
Which brings us back to the incident in the OP. Carl Benjamin and his fellow abusers sat in the front rows where Ms. Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak with their cell phone cameras trained on her. What do you think they were hoping to record? Might it have been another series of words they could pull out of context in order to attack her, to lie about her, to give others (bullshit) reasons to dislike her? I think it might've.
You asked if I ever watched some of Benjamin's videos. I have.
I've also watched Sarkeesian's. I was interested in the topic of tropes and saw several of her videos before the Gamergate shitstorm broke. I've occasionally rewatched segments to see if her critics are fairly representing her points. Sometimes they are, but more often than not their 'rebuttals' are deliberately deceptive paraphrases, distortions, or outright falsehoods.
One of the videos criticizing Sarkeesian linked in this thread (8 Anita Sarkeesian FAILS ) starts off with a criticism of something she said in her Ms. Male Character installment. I think you might be especially interested in what Sarkeesian says at the 9-10 minute mark, but what the critic is talking about is near the end. If you have a few minutes to spare, you should check it out and decide for yourself if the guy was being fair.
How so? She said she learned to do this while "studying systems", she admitted it made her unbearable, and she didNOT say she no longer believes it, only that she no longer points it all out. Did you watch the clip in context that you linked to? What Sargon did was fail to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it was not as dishonest as you claim. He attributed something to her that she did once believe and didn't say she believes no longer. If she had later said in the same speech "of course not everything is sexist and racist", then you'd have a solid point here, but she didn't.
He could have gone further and used her full clip in a rant about how "women's studies" and "systems" indoctrinates to see everything as sexist and racist, and he would be right to. He actually probably did make such a video.
About the critic video, that's actually a pretty good and fair take down. How do you think it's unfair? At the 9-10 minute mark Sarkeesian talked about women lacking in video games and being overly 1dimensional. That's a fair point. In making it she claimed there are few female characters and only one in a particularly game franchise. Her better (actually perfect) example of this in culture would have been girl smurf, though that takes us back a number of years.
Critic points out women are actually pretty common, and specifically that there are more females in the game she is specifically referring to, while saying she doesn't know video games and then pointing to her saying so herself, her disabling comments, and her changing her mind on if she knows and likes videogames right when it profited her to do so.
And as for Benjamin at her event, notice how he and those with him didn't pull the fire alarm and accost her other attendees on the street like Chanty Bind and her group. He and others sat quietly in the audience to see first hand what she had to say, and maybe they could have had a conversation at the end during a question period if she felt like it. It would be the first time they directly spoke on any sort of media, since she disables the comments on all of her videos. She didn't take the opportunity, nor did she simply ignore him, and instead she called him out, while he was sitting there quietly, calling him a "garbage human" and giving him no opportunity to respond (she had the mic on a stage). And no, he didn't react by pulling a trigglypuff (which was ironically happening as Christina Hoff Sommers was on stage calmly trying to reel her in) nor a Chanty Binx.
Many have commented on the Sargon and Sarkeesian "Garbage Human" encounter since, and here are a few:
"Some Black Guy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOV2fHifvY
Joe Rogan (with Sargon there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mt0KkQVXsA
Jordan Owen (who thinks the whole thing is a stupid distraction and is harsh on both sides): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mt0KkQVXsA
Sargon Himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vyvv7P6Ldo
The incident itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-40spFCqLs
This fellow who apologizes to Anita: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qEwRZ0PziA
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Have you considered that, just maybe, she doesn't consider cats, rainbows, and plastics to be racist and sexist? That just maybe she's being hyperbolic in order to joke about how she was, for a moment, the overly strident college student who figured out how to communicate her concerns, and maybe she wasn't considering the reaction an overly-literal, wildly hostile, and hypocritically over-sensitive audience to shriek over for ...what, 5 years and going now?
Personally, I got tired of Chanty Binx long before anyone in any video I watched actually stated her name - she was just "random woman reading a screed outside that I'm supposed to hate for no apparent reason."
But it's not like it was a Woman's March or anything...
[YOUTUBE]i313vY4vtEI[/YOUTUBE]
(I have to admit, I do love Sargon freaking out over this.)
And by the way:
I'm familiar with Boogie - enough to know that, for many reasons including what he describes as a horrendously fucked up childhood, he has a variety of anxiety issues. I'm not a fan of his "Francis" character, but you can't please everyone, and I do watch some of his other stuff. Basically, he was overly anxious when he met Saarkesian and reacted badly to her when she criticized him...and then they talked it out and that was that.
Ok if true that'd be Sargon taking a 2:1 lead in the personal insult competition.
Do you have a link?
Here's THunderf00t himself discussing it - he includes a link to the roundtable as well.
Arctish
Centimillionaire
Oh, so it's a rant now? Anita Sarkeesian talked about how, when she first stated studying sexism in our society she saw patterns and connections she hadn't noticed before, and for a while she felt the urge to talk about them at every opportunity. She joked about how hard it was on her friends until she learned how to choose the right time and place to have those discussions. If that was ranting what do you call the speechifying Brendan O'Neil was doing in that video you linked to in the thread you started, an hysterical shitfit meltdown?
And what did you expect Sarkeesian to do with her new-found realization of the pervasive sexism in our society, keep it to herself? Pretend she never noticed it? That's like asking a deconverting Christian to not mention what they've recently discovered about how belief in Biblegod warps American domestic and foreign policy. If she's like normal people, then it's perfectly understandable that she would go through a phase where she talked a lot about her current interests, especially the ones she feels passionately about.
She presented a 25 minute video on the subject of 'new' female characters in established games that are nothing but the original male characters with bows and eye makeup. She noted example after example. And she talked about the Smurfette Principle, aka the token chick, apparent in numerous video games. But all that critic got out of it is that she said there was only one female mushroom character in the Mario series when there's like, 5 of them. And that's supposed to prove that the entire Tropes vs. Women in Video Games installment was bogus?
At the 9-10 minute mark Sarkeesian pointed out how character designers using visual stereotypes like the color pink and hair bows for gender signifiers "tends to reinforce a strict binary form of gender expression" that "erases the continuum of gender identities that fall outside of the rigid masculine-feminine false dichotomy". She calls it a negative consequence. I thought you might agree with her on that point.
And BTW, it's apparent you didn't actually watch the video since Sarkeesian didn't just mention Smurfette, she devoted several minutes to discussing her and similar lone female characters.
Stalkers don't usually pull fire alarms. Harassers don't always shout. Abusers like to torment their victim, and what better way to do that than to show up at their work, or outside their home, or at events where they know the victim will be so that their victim will be forced to interact with them?
In my OP I asked "was Anita Sarkeesian wrong to call out one of her harassers like that? Was it acceptable, unacceptable, understandable, unforgivable, or what?" I believe it was both understandable and laudable. If an apology is owed, it would be owed by Sarkeesian to the organizers of the event for breaking a rule, and by the event organizers to Sarkeesian for allowing Benjamin and his fellows to use the conference as a means to harass her.
That's a lot of material to go through. I'm game, but I think it's important that we both do our part to advance the discussion. So here's the deal: I'll watch all of these videos and do my best to fairly and accurately summarize the points being raised. I will even post direct quotes. Then I will comment on the content. Meanwhile, you watch the first 6 installments of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games and do the same thing. Summarize the points she makes, quote her, etc., and then comment on what you just saw.
Deal?
barbos
Contributor
Watched "gender signifier" youtube from Sarkeesian. Whole lot of nothing if you ask me. I did not even get impression of Anita herself being passionate about her project. She goes around and meticulously search for evidence of sexism and gets paid for it. I doubt any man gives a crap about gender of character he plays for. Tomb raider had a female hero, it did not cause any reaction from male gamers, they just didn't care about that. Men don't care about gender of the game character. Anita should think about that. And she does not offer any practical solution. What would she have done with pacman? - nothing. When I played it first I did not even think about it having gender, it was just a thing you control on the screen. Now, I understand and accept that women view the whole thing differently, but they should understand and accept that men just don't view it the same way.
Same problem exists everywhere. Men and women just have different views on things. They like different movies. Men like SciFi, women don't, they really don't. Creators try really hard to get women into SciFi but they fail almost every time. Buffy Vampire Slayer had a female main character and creators were not hiding their desire to attract female viewers, they largely failed, at least during original run.
Women like "The Bachelors/Bachelorettes" and men could use it as vomit helper. By the way, Anita should make a video about that show
Of course there is 10-15% overlap but it is mostly constant. I myself like watching figure skating and even ballet, but not stupid Bachelors.
Same problem exists everywhere. Men and women just have different views on things. They like different movies. Men like SciFi, women don't, they really don't. Creators try really hard to get women into SciFi but they fail almost every time. Buffy Vampire Slayer had a female main character and creators were not hiding their desire to attract female viewers, they largely failed, at least during original run.
Women like "The Bachelors/Bachelorettes" and men could use it as vomit helper. By the way, Anita should make a video about that show
Of course there is 10-15% overlap but it is mostly constant. I myself like watching figure skating and even ballet, but not stupid Bachelors.
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