Pretty much everything, but let’s get some background on who she is first. Anita Sarkeesian is a pop culture critic who is most known for her website and YouTube channel ‘Feminist Frequency’ in which she discusses issues prevalent to modern feminism. She is best known for her video series ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games’ which examines the role of female characters in video games. She looks at everything from the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope to the ‘Miss Man’ trope.
Lots of people online have discussed the problems with this woman and her series, so I’m probably not going to bring up anything new. I’ll discuss my main issues with her.
What conversations?
Her channel is supposedly ‘conversations with pop culture’ yet she disables comments and ratings for her viewers. When I started this blog, part of it was to DISCUSS opinions. What’s the point of having controversial opinions, especially if you’re a well known public figure, if you’re not going to fucking talk about them with people in the first place? If you’re not going to be open to debate, discussion, challenging viewpoints, even listening to people who might AGREE on some things. I’ve watched a lot of her videos because I think they’re interesting, even if there’s a lot of stuff I disagree with. It makes me angry that there’s no way of commenting because it seems like it misses the point of free speech. Why bother making a channel or a blog or any kind of discussion-based platform if you’re not going to allow people to converse with you in the first place?
Everything is sexist.
I don’t understand this lady’s agenda at all. There is literally no pleasing her. The ‘damsel in distress’ women are too dainty and ladylike. The ‘strong, dominant’ characters are just female-men. Women wearing sexy outfits are objectified and over-sexualised, yet feminists claim to be anti slut-shaming. We all fall into hypocrisy and self-contradiction from time to time, but for Gods’ sake have some bloody consistency! I don’t understand how feminists can claim to be against slut-shaming, have a bunch of women participate in the slut walks, yet get angry about porn, not want to legalise prostitution, and bitch about women being ‘objectified’ in games and films? I don’t really understand what ‘objectification’ is if I’m honest. Don’t we all objectify each other all the time? When you check out someone on the street and think their hot is that ‘objectifying’ them? What is that besides perfectly normal and natural? What is with this inconsistency? Either you’re all for sex positivity like Laci Green and want people to express their sexuality in whatever way makes them comfortable, or you want all women to keep their vaginas in a box till they’re married and walk around in fricken burqas. Which one is it? Because you can’t be for and against ‘both’ at the same time, that makes no sense.
She’s not even a gamer.
I’m not a gamer, so I’m not going to start talking about stuff I know nothing about. If I’m going to talk about something I make sure there’s been some interest/research involving it first. For example, I talk a lot about religion, but I’ve read The God Delusion and parts of the Bible and the Quran, and read blogs like ‘Atheist Republic’ and read up on the topic and watch atheist YouTubers. It’s no use talking about something without knowing much about it first. Granted, she ‘claims’ to have played a lot of video games in order to research her series, but she’s clearly looking for confirmation bias in order to confirm that everything in games is racist, sexist, homophobic and problematic, not to mention contributes to ‘toxic masculinity’, whatever that is. The gaming community have expressed their outrage towards her and I don’t blame them. People are always bad-mouthing video games like saying they make people more violent, when studies have shown they actually make people LESS violent because they’re taking out their ‘violence’ on the games rather than in real life.
She’s a con artist.
The woman raised almost $160,000 on Kickstarter to make this fricken one-sided series, then hasn’t even finished it yet! What the hell? It was meant to be done in December 2012 and is STILL NOT DONE. I can’t understand this at all. People literally paid her money to hear her opinions, and she’s not even giving her audience what they paid for or allowing them to converse with her! That would make me very angry indeed. It also makes me wonder who’s even paying her. Who’s contributing to her fund to get her to make these videos? Oh right, social justice warriors that treat her like a feminist icon. Those poor suckers.
Overall, this woman is a pain in the arsecrack who can’t find any happiness at all in female game representation. The reason characters are dressed ‘sexily’ is because of marketing, dummy. These games are aimed at young men and boys who guess what, don’t want to see a fat frumpy woman running around their screen. And as I mentioned in my post ‘I’m done with feminism’; people play games to play games, not to wank. They’ll spent a few seconds checking out how hot Lara Croft and Catwoman are and then on with the bloody game. And if you bothered to look at the actual characters, you would see that plenty of female characters are strong and badass. Real gamers probably don’t care about all the crap Anita bitches about. They just want to have a good time.
Some other comments on her: