Feminism Thread

[Quicklet]

care to elaborate?

For starters, publishing a photo of Anita standing next to a stack of several hundred games that were bought using Kickstarter funds in order to imply that she has played the majority of them seems like an abdication of the most basic fact-checking.

Also, this doesn't help me take the author seriously.

EDIT [18:06 28/08/2014]: The title of this piece originally contained the word "lame" as a pejorative, and has now been removed.

[Correction]

Those are relatively minor points though and you called the entire article terrible, as if it were saying something unfounded about the nature of her critiques or the characterization of the backlash against her. The 'not a real gamer' ad hominem is itself an abdication of discussing the merits of whether or not the tropes in popular video games are themselves evidence of lazy, pointless sexism

[Waraji]

A problem with that is one of integrity. Claiming to be a gamer while evidently Not really being a gamer, doesn't help much lend to her credibility on anything of substance on the topic.

[Correction]

A problem with that is one of integrity. Claiming to be a gamer while evidently Not really being a gamer, doesn't help much lend to her credibility on anything of substance on the topic.

Did you watch the last video she made?

[Quicklet]

BG ate my post because I included a bad word that was in the title of one of Anita's pre-Kickstarter videos I wanted to reference, but it was getting too long anyway. It's still too long.

Basically, all three of the arguments that were rebutted in the article are valid arguments if you can avoid making unnecessary ad hominem remarks. Many YouTubers cannot do that, so authors such as this one can point at them and say "Look at these people trying to disparage someone trying to do something for a good cause." Nevermind that she lifted footage from other people without initially crediting them, or that she likely did not play many of the games she showcased. Perhaps it's no coincidence that her latest video is the one I felt came closest to making a coherent argument, since I believe she personally played at least Hitman for that video.

With regard to the general tone of the article that the common arguments against Anita stem from simply being against anyone who supports feminism, I don't find that to be a convincing argument. I can support breast cancer awareness/research while decrying Susan G. Komen for their shady administration and intellectual property enforcement. I can choose to support an alternative to Livestrong if I think Lance Armstrong is a fraud and a cheat. Likewise, I can be against sexism while viewing Anita as an opportunist who makes videos of dubitable veracity. My personal opinion (which nobody has to agree with) is that Lindsay Ellis does a much better job as a media critic than Anita ever has. That doesn't preclude Anita from making arguments in the future that I might find stronger than what I've seen so far, but I'm not exactly expecting it based on what I've seen.

Finally, with respect to the cherry-picking argument, the cherry-picking argument is not necessarily that she's only using examples of sexism and trying to represent them as the whole picture. It is that a significant number of the examples she has used are bad examples and lack the proper context to show that they are bad examples. The typical responses to the context issue are either "even in context it's misogynist" or "satire is not an excuse". These people would probably also tell me that the movie Fight Club promotes violence.

Anyway, I doubt any of this will move the debate at all, but I will say that I'm not unsympathetic to interesting analysis of video games, particularly insights into trends across genres or developers that aren't just snapshots of gameplay states, but I personally don't see that in Anita's videos and find most of the defenses of her arguments to be tired apologies.

[Mazmaz]

Related to OP: http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/

[NynJa]

So, let me get this straight, she's upset because her job as a project manager, that required her to go on business trips (and I'm assuming required it before the maternity leave also), doesnt allow her to be a stay at home mom.

How does this have anything to do with feminism? She knew what her job entailed before she decided to have a baby. Does she expect to have her tasks reduced and expect the same pay?

[Quicklet]

Or, you know, the U.S. could join the rest of the world (including Russia, lol) in offering paid maternity (and in some countries paternity) leave.

Edit: And while a few months of maternity leave doesn't solve everything, it's better than nothing. There are absolutely some industries (academia, for one) where having or wanting a family is considered career suicide.

[Teryu]

So, let me get this straight, she's upset because her job as a project manager, that required her to go on business trips (and I'm assuming required it before the maternity leave also), doesnt allow her to be a stay at home mom.

How does this have anything to do with feminism? She knew what her job entailed before she decided to have a baby. Does she expect to have her tasks reduced and expect the same pay?

Whoa whoa whoa there buddy, check your privilege.

[Tarage]

I don't really get it. I understand that pregnancy sucks for ladies, and that in addition to months and months of having to lug around a weight that loves to fuck around with your internal organs and make you feel like this, nature dictates that after this creature has been excised from you, you have to work even harder to cater to it's whims and deal with not sleeping and losing all hope of sanitation. And if there was any way that pain could be mitigated in some way, I'd be all for it.

But sadly this is not the case. Companies, especially smaller tech companies, simply can't stay afloat if they do not have everyone working at near optimal capacity. The company I previously worked at gave out a Christmas bonus of $500, then folded not three months later. That's how fast they went from "We have money to share" to "We can't pay rent". And it's not like they were hemorrhaging money or had bad business practices. For small studios, if one contract fails, the entire company can go down. Having a person simply not be there for a stretch of time beyond a few weeks simply isn't feasible. Now granted this may be different at larger corporations, but it's seriously a real issue in the tech industry. If we have problems where people are working too hard and taking too much overtime(EA Wives anyone?) just to get by, how can the opposite be supported?

Clearly the tech industry is not the industry you should be trying to raise a family in. I'm sorry, but it's true. Shit sucks.

[Mazmaz]

Did you read the sections after pregnancy? Or did you just scan the first 1/4 of the article? We can debate maternity leave if you want, but there was more and better points in the article.

[Vandalhart]

I can't say I have a unique perspective on the article. It was good and they all did what they thought was the right thing for their family. That's what being an adult and a parent is all about. I think most responsible parents, especially new ones, would bend over backward to make their children's or family's lives better in the long run.

For the women that left because they didn't feel they fit in, I would think that's more about the individual company than the industry.

[archibaldcrane]

If tech wants to be the white and asian male dominated industry it is, whatever, but they can't claim to care about any sort of diversity while failing to incorporate a policy as rudimentary as family leave. And the idea that tech is "the ultimate meritocracy" is odd if they are telling nearly half the population "here is our rigid culture, adapt or fuck off".

[Correction]

Finally, with respect to the cherry-picking argument, the cherry-picking argument is not necessarily that she's only using examples of sexism and trying to represent them as the whole picture. It is that a significant number of the examples she has used are bad examples and lack the proper context to show that they are bad examples. The typical responses to the context issue are either "even in context it's misogynist" or "satire is not an excuse".

I thought the examples picked from AssCreed, RDR, Watch Dogs and God of War III were well-chosen since they are pretty much examples of disposable female lives in service of nothing in particular, and the context is kind of irrelevant when showing examples of a trope isn't it? Most of the time, the context is 'here's an opportunity to solve a puzzle, gain experience points or unlock a door! oh and by the way bad guys are bad.' The examples from Bioshock felt thinner since there is a more integrated narrative approach to it instead of random encounters with women getting murdered.

[Gokku]

why hasnt this been brought up in the cherry picking topic?


Hitman she had this to say about it :
Anita Sarkeesian:
"The player cannot help but treat these female bodies as things to be acted upon,because they were designed, constructed and placed in the environment for that singular purpose. Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters."

this is in reference to strippers she claimed you had to kill and defile when in reality depending on how you played that stage you never saw them in that scene or that the game punishes you for killing civilians or that even if you do see them your in no way obligated to interact with them at all to complete the mission.Yet in the scene she shows her dragging the body's around sexually whilst claiming men cannot control themselves form doing this.

video in question : See 21:26

[Charismatic]

Because there's no reason to bring it up.
The people who are defending her BS have already decided that she and they themselves are correct and no amount of facts will change their minds.

Anita's cherrypicking is called what it is because that's what it is.

[NynJa]

All I can think of at that is "the bigger the hoop, the bigger the ho"

[Gokku]

can someone define wtf a sex object is to me? i think bucket full of dildos and pocket pussys when ever she throws out the term or at least Dead or Alive.

not stripper in background of a STRIP CLUB ? does that imply that at any time i pass the strip club on the way to taco bell i am objectifying females as back ground sex objects?

[Correction]

this is in reference to strippers she claimed you had to kill and defile when in reality depending on how you played that stage you never saw them in that scene or that the game punishes you for killing civilians or that even if you do see them your in no way obligated to interact with them at all to complete the mission.Yet in the scene she shows her dragging the body's around sexually whilst claiming men cannot control themselves form doing this.

She doesn't actually say this.

The Hitman example is a treatise on objectification at a very basic level. Every person, man or woman, in a Hitman game is an object useful for cover, a distraction, or as a means to an end, so in a way every person that isn't your target or an auto-fail state in Hitman is in the same boat. The 'cannot help but treat as things' phrasing is a clumsy way to say it but that's what she's saying. It probably falls flat to say one is meant to derive perverse pleasure but I laughed my ass off the first time I stomped a guy's head in in GTA 3, so maybe there's something to it. Hitman is certainly if nothing else a game built around trial and error puzzle solving, so no doubt more than one person went into the dressing room thinking, 'hey what happens if I do X to these helpless, cowering strippers?' As this is an exercise in deconstructing how game designers build their worlds, it's not above pointing out that such designs are a conscious act by a group of people making a video game in a genre known for catering to casual sociopathy. That's where sandbox games get their appeal, after all. Give no fucks, blow everything up. Who doesn't like Just Cause?

[quannum]

moral of the story is, be glad jack thompson was a male.