Anita Sarkeesian

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She is not a fan of ''[[Twilight]]'', calling Edward "a creepy, manipulative, overprotective stalker."
 
She is not a fan of ''[[Twilight]]'', calling Edward "a creepy, manipulative, overprotective stalker."
 
==Crusade against video games==
 
 
Sarkeesian cannot seem to admit that she's wrong on this particular issue and instead treads further and further outside her area of expertise. In March 2013, she released a video in which she attempted to assert that video games carry an anti-women perspective by the pervasive damsel in distress trope.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q The original video]</ref> Sarkeesian's attempt to say so relies rather heavily on trying to claim that women are portrayed negatively in video games frequently because she can find [[Cherry-picking|a few examples where this may be the case,]] Seriously, Samus never even came up. Not to speak of all the video games like Mass Effect where you can chose to play as a woman or a man. The video also contains a number of mined quotations and misrepresentations showing just how far Sarkeesian has plunged. <ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLMj6DMy-4U Response by The Completionist, ProtonJon, and Lucahjin (a female let's player who thinks it was stupid *GASP*)]</ref>
 
 
  
 
==Sarkeesian becomes a target==
 
==Sarkeesian becomes a target==

Revision as of 23:15, 1 June 2013

OMG, a woman!
Part of a series on

Gender

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Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist social critic whose work explores the portrayals of women (and to a lesser extent sexual and racial minorities) in popular media such as video games, movies, and television. She produces a YouTube series and website titled Feministfrequency which hosts resources about feminism, especially as it relates to women in popular media.

She is fairly well known in online feminist circles, and her work has been used in university classrooms.[1] She is also among the most hated human beings among so-called "men's rights" advocates.

Contents

Personal background

Sarkeesian was born to Armenian parents in Toronto, and later moved to California. At California State University, Northridge she earned a BA in Communications, then went on to York University for an MA in social and political thought, where she wrote a thesis, titled "I’ll Make a Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television," in which she developed her critique of portrayals of women in geek culture.[2]

The beginning

She entered the world of feminist vlogging on May 20, 2009 with a vlog post discussing the renewal of Dollhouse and the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Typical for many of her videos, her analysis focused on the narrative and the characters and what these tell about the use of stereotypes in popular culture. Some highlights:

  • She has hailed sci-fi series Caprica for outing a gay character without making it some pointlessly huge deal (but lamenting that he is, nonetheless, a murderer),[3]
  • Spent time explaining that sexy beer-serving fembots are, by their very nature, sexist (like we didn't already know that),[4]
  • Pointed out showing men as lying sexist idiots in the media is bad for men as well (how anti-male!)[5]
  • Why HuffPo needs to stop the pseudoporn linkbaiting and "articles,"[6]
  • Explains why just because 'sex sells' doesn't mean it's OK to use half-dressed women to sell crap,[7]
  • Pointed out that just because an actress is an adult, if she's known for playing a child, it's still fucking creepy,[8] and
  • Pointed out that from 1960 to 2010, only 7 winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture featured a male and female ensemble cast, 4 were primarily about a woman, and the remaining 39 were about one or more men; as well as the incredibly low levels of represenations of women in film production,[9] and that there is a very low pass rating for such Oscar-nominated movies even today.[10]

How particularly controversial!

Other stuff

She did a run of videos titled 'Tropes vs Women' that further focused on stereotypical portrayals of women in movies. It lasted a few videos before it was scrapped for the much larger, in depth and longer series of the same name, which focused on video games. The run included: "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl," "Women in Refrigerators," "The Smurfette Principle," "The Evil Demon Seductress," "The Mystical Pregnancy," and "The Straw Feminist."[11]

Another major video series was her talking about childrens games and advertisements. The three videos[12] are nearly a half an hour in total run length and focus heavily on the differences in the way boys and girls are targetted by ads and toys themselves. She focuses on how ads and toys for girls focus on being pretty and fulfilling old stereotypes (often cooking, cleaning, and raising children), while toys and ads targeted at boys focus on either violence or creativity.

She is not a fan of Twilight, calling Edward "a creepy, manipulative, overprotective stalker."

Sarkeesian becomes a target

On 4 June, 2012, Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of a series of videos. Soon thereafter, she became the target of numerous threats and a sustained campaign of cyberbullying from the...let's say, uncivilized part of the gaming world and other Internet denizens. She was threatened with physical abuse, rape, and murder, failed attempts were made to hack her various accounts and find out her personal information (such as phone number and home address), and her videos were mass reported for everything from piracy to terrorism. Worse, someone actually created a game called Beat up Anita Sarkeesian which allowed players to simulate doing exactly what the game's title implied.

In addition, the Wikipedia article about Sarkeesian has been the target of a persistent vandalism campaign, and she has had to deal with literally millions of insulting comments, many of a profoundly sexist nature, as well as some driven by misplaced anti-Semitism.

Sarkeesian has taken ownership of the abuse and marshaled it to demonstrate the prevalence of sexism in the gamer community.[13]

Continued attacks

As recently as April 17, 2013, her Twitter account reported an attempted DDOS[wp] attack on her website. There are also several YouTube videos in response to her with titles generally to the effect of "FeministFrequency is everything wrong with feminism" or "Anita Sarkeesian is a lunatic."[14] Additionally, because of the attacks on her she has disabled the like/dislike feature and the comments on all of her YouTube videos, and strictly censors her Twitter account.

How did MRAs take this? Well, one of them illegally downloaded her videos and uploaded them to a channel creatively titled "nasty opinions." If you want to see why Ms. Sarkeesian needs to keep working, just look at the comments on them.

See what you did?

There are two major bits of hilarity arising from the men's rights movement losing their minds over Sarkeesian:

  1. The rabid attacks against her are probably a major reason why she managed to get so much money from her Kickstarter, which has allowed her to make a living as a feminist activist and commentator.
  2. There's is now an adage called "Anita's Irony" (probably should be called Anita's Law) that exists because of her:
Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.
[15]

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References

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