adifferentname wrote:
Jono wrote:
Whose fault is that exactly? Perhaps the people who started harassing her with rape and death threats after she proposed the Kickstarter project? If it wasn't for them then we wouldn't have this issue. I started this thread precisely to have a rational discussion of her work. There are some legitimate criticisms, however there's so much BS from her haters as well that takes almost forever to sift through all the BS in order to find the legitimate criticisms.
I'll repeat, Sarkeesian received zero legitimate rape or death threats. Guthrie (one of her supporters) allegedly received "thousands of rape and death threats" on twitter, and yet only one person was arrested and subsequently charged because he was in breach of a Canadian 'peace bond'. Sarkeesian clearly did not feel threatened by any anonymous abuse that came her way. Remember that Sarkeesian herself referred to the posters of "threats" as "trolls", which sums up precisely how little threat she felt. Amongst the posts she labels "threats", are a bunch of harmless if ill-directed jokes about 'making sandwiches' and 'going back to the kitchen'. By polarising the audience, she achieved exactly what she wanted, and the entire thing has been blown monstrously out of proportion.
Yes, because putting a flash game on newgrounds.com where you have to beat her face until the screen turns red (where the image actually progressively starts showing lacerations and black eyes) is not legitimate harassment apparently. Among the posts that she got also included images of her being sexually assaulted and someone also vandalised the Wikipedia article on her and posted pornographic images on it.
adifferentname wrote:
In reality, 4chan (who the fudge takes 4chan seriously?) users - who are most definitely not representative of any gamer with a mental age higher than their shoe size - were largely responsible for the 'cyber-terrorism'. This was not a worldwide campaign of abuse against women (or indeed, woman), rather it was the stupid response of an immature community with a batshit crazy concept of what passes for 'humour'.
I'm not really interested in 4chan. Also, there was far worse harassment against her than a "few immature jokes".
adifferentname wrote:
What I find appalling is the disgraceful manner in which any detractor of Sarkeesian is automatically tarred with the same brush, regardless how balanced their criticism of her work might be. It doesn't matter how many idiotic things have been said on either side of this debate, as with all 'journalism', Sarkeesian's work should stand or fall based on its merits. By turning it into a polarised media circus, this has been rendered near impossible.
I haven't really experienced that. Although, a lot of the criticisms often miss the point that she was making.
adifferentname wrote:
Quote:
I disagree. I don't agree with everything she says and she does make some mistakes, sometimes specific details about games that she may not of played or not completed but I find that some of her points are quite valid.
Which points do you agree with? Please give details as I'm sure this would be a much more productive topic of debate.
Well for starters, my entire opening post was talking about what I thought of her latest video. With regards to her "Damsel in Distress" videos, I don't think the "Damsel in Distress" trope is always a problem in and of itself but when she got to the "Euthanised Damsel" variant, where the protagonist actually has to end up having to kill the damsel that he was trying to rescue, then that definitely is something that I've seen in a few video games which I find disturbing and I hate it. In fact I don't like it regardless of which gender gets "euthanised" but it's most commonly a woman while a male is extremely rare. I was glad that they managed to avoid that in Starcraft 2, regardless of many other Starcraft fans complaining that they avoided it because Raynor did not go through with his vow in Brood War that he would one day kill Kerrigan (yes, this would of been an example of that trope if he had gone through with it).
adifferentname wrote:
Quote:
As per the linked to article, yes, I do think that it's quite unfair to call the whole community misogynistic, despite the amount of harassment that she received. Let's not forget that most of her backers were actually gamers themselves who donated to the project in protest of the amount harassment and threats of violence that she received in response for simply proposing it.
Let us also remember that 'gamer' covers a massive range of different people from different backgrounds, despite still having the connotation of "spotty geek in darkened bedroom" attached to it.
Yes, that's true. Though not all of those geeks are misogynists either.
adifferentname wrote:
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I actually find your statement about ignoring her quite hilarious, considering that this thread has now got 6 pages in just a few days with me hardy needing to post anything in it at all. I have actually posted another thread in PPR only a few days before this one and it hardly got any replies, so now it's buried and pushed back to the second page of the PPR forum. Yet, simply because I mentioned Anita Sarkeesian's, this thread now has 6 pages due to you and Sephardic-Male not ignoring it.
Sarkeesian didn't create this thread, ignoring it does not constitute ignoring Sarkeesian. The subject has been put on the PPR table and so those of us who have an opinion on the topic are going to discuss it. I don't have a policy of ignoring posts on WP, especially when the subject matter touches on my personal interests. There have been a lot of active threads on PPR recently, so it's not surprising that some have been lost in the mire. Alternatively, it's possible that the other post wasn't interesting enough to inspire further comment.
As for Sephardic-Male, while I find his posting 'style' to be abrasive, hostile and incredibly badly written, he has made a number of valid points. Sadly they've been neutralised by his combative approach to dissenting views.
Funny, you cut out the post you made that I was replying to and that was important for context. In it, you said that you were "disappointed" to see a thread about Anita Sarkeesian on WP, yet you now say that you have enough interest in the topic to reply to it? If you are interested enough in the topic to participate in the discussion then how can you be disappointed to see the topic on WP? I thought that that was the whole point of discussion forums.
05 Dec 2013, 1:05 pm
