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March 9, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
25:22
Feminist Frequency's Finances and Anita Sarkeesian's Honesty
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The truth is, literally everyone and everything is problematic.
everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out.
So before I get into this one, I just want to recommend a crowdfunding campaign that The Amazing Atheist is doing called Extraordinary People, Daring to Actually Help Women.
He's doing this in response to Anita Sarkeesian's brand new crowdfunding campaign, Ordinary Women Daring to Defy History.
She's decided to, I guess, cease work on the Trips vs. Women project, of which I believe she's only done three actual videos for, and decided to instead move on to this project, which is her choosing select women from history and then documenting their lives.
Now, I'm actually really not against the idea of this project, and it's possible she will do a good job of it.
She doesn't have to specifically make a pig's ear of it.
Previous uncompleted projects notwithstanding, she's specifically set out individuals from history that she's going to talk about.
So it's not like she's going to be able to cherry-pick and then say, oh, all of history is sexist.
Despite the fact she probably does think all of history is sexist, and to be honest with you, a lot of history is sexist.
So it's not like you can turn around and say there's no validity to any of these claims.
But my point is, there are going to be lots of people condemning her for this, and I'm not going to be one of them.
Personally, I don't actually think she'll be able to do damage to historical communities, like medievalists and classicists and whatnot, in the same way that she has done to video games.
These people are generally of a different stripe, and I wouldn't think that this would be something that would fly in these communities.
However, it might, and, you know, in six months' time I might be eating my words.
But, again, I really do think that benefit of the doubt is important, and frankly, I'm just glad to see her leaving the video game industry.
I really am.
I'm glad to see that she's no longer going to be fucking around and lying about my hobby.
And not just my hobby, but an industry in which I've designed to have a career for a very long time.
I mean, I'm not going to sit there and point fingers saying, well, she hasn't finished her Kickstarter, because I'm sure there'd be numerous people saying, well, you haven't finished yours.
And I haven't.
But at least mine is in progress.
But it's more than that.
It's more that I don't think her backers care.
The ones that care have made it very vocal that they care, people like Leo Pirates.
And they are, I think, overwhelmingly a minority of her backers.
I don't think they're ever going to get satisfaction in that regard.
But again, what can you do?
I mean, maybe there is legal action they could take.
And if there is, they probably should.
But either way, I think that if she's just going to dump it and leave, that's on her head.
You know, that's going to reflect on her reputation and her record for, well, ever, really.
And so it really looks like what she's doing is finding a way to sort of pass feminist frequency on to other people.
Maybe sell it off or something.
I don't know what you can do with non-profits, but, you know, pass the torch, as it were.
What I'm saying, though, is that simply pointing out that she's not completed her previous Kickstarter isn't something she's ever going to acknowledge, and it's not something her supporters are going to give a damn about.
So I don't think it's worth getting hung up on.
This new project has already been promoted in the Los Angeles Times, The Verge, Time magazine, Cosmopolitan, USA Today, L and The Washington Post.
So, I mean, they don't care, her supporters don't care.
It's beating a dead horse, I think.
And I'm not one of her backers on her Kickstarter, so she doesn't have to answer to me for it.
I do find it interesting how she has set the desired goal for this project at $200,000.
This is very interesting to me because it implies that she thinks she's going to get that without presumably claiming any more harassment.
And I assume that she thinks this because I think it's going to be very difficult to claim that the history communities that are out there on the web are A predominantly male, B predominantly white, and C interested in harassing women out of their communities.
I mean I've spent a lot of time in some of these communities under different aliases, just posting stuff on message boards generally, and I wouldn't in any way describe them as people who really understand gender politics.
This is not something that was ever a feature of these communities when I was sort of swanning around in them.
And they're generally made up of older people who don't go to 4chan and shitpost, you know, so her regular tactics are going to be very difficult to employ in this scenario.
So she, I think, probably thinks she can raise that money wholesale without claiming any kind of special victim status, just on her name alone.
However, I could be entirely wrong, and there could be, oh, I don't know, another allusion to an obscure shooting that affected only feminists.
And on the heels of this non-credible threat, there may well be a flood of donations, which is what happened in 2014.
And it's interesting to compare this to the 2015 revenue for Feminist Frequency, because at the end of the year, they again got a huge donation of over $200,000.
But we have an explanation for this one.
So in late 2014, they say that we received a few large gifts, which enabled us to increase our operating budget and laid the groundwork for new programming to come.
And with the help of a generous corporate donation in quarter 4 of this year, we can make programming that lives up to our vision.
So I'm guessing that that's money from Intel.
And given that they make roughly 30 grand or less a quarter, I'm going to guess that the donation from Intel is about $200,000.
But the thing is, we know that this isn't actually the sum total of the money Anita Sarkeesian makes.
Back in February, Anita was being covered in another feminist puff piece, and they said, as a result of this relationship, Sarkeesian waived the majority of her standard $20,000 speaking fee, allowing the associated students to schedule her appearance for $5,000 instead.
How generous.
For some reason, this was quickly edited when people noticed, and instead it just edited down to she agreed to a discount on her speaking fees.
Unfortunately, the cat's out of the bag.
We've seen that she makes 20 grand per engagement.
If I had thought of this in advance, I would have actually taken a note of the number of times someone tweets me a photo from within their classroom or their auditorium or wherever they are, saying, oh my god, Anita's speaking here.
So I at least had a rough estimate of how many of these she did a year, but I'm guessing it's at least one a quarter.
And given that these speaking fees are clearly not showing up in the donation revenue from her website and any other fundraising she does, I'm guessing she does these speaking engagements not on behalf of Feminist Frequency the Non-Profit, but as a private individual.
And I just want to stress that she is completely entitled to do this.
There's nothing wrong with that at all.
I'm sure she pays her taxes and whatnot, so this is nothing to be concerned over.
This is probably completely normal.
So maths isn't my strong suit, but I added up all these numbers and got $752,269.51 as gross income for feminist frequency over 2014 and 2015.
The gross expenditure for the same period was $306,187.29.
This leaves Feminist Frequency with $446,082.22 in their coffers right now, presumably, and assuming that I can operate the computer's calculator acceptably.
So unless there are some massive expenditures I'm not aware of from her financial reports, she doesn't need to crowdfund to raise $200,000.
She has that money already.
Given that Feminist Frequency only makes videos, and people have been donating vast sums of money to Feminist Frequency, one would presume that the money in this non-profit, which she can't take as a dividend, is for creating new projects like this.
I mean, I would have thought that everything she had done up until this point was the crowdfunding campaign.
So you're going to have to forgive me for being a little bit cynical of her thinking, oh, I need to crowdfund another $200,000.
Actually, Anita, I don't think you do.
However, people are going to doubtless give to it, and that is entirely their prerogative.
If they want to donate money to Anita Sarkeesian, that is completely up to them.
I am in no way going to try and stop them.
I would, however, recommend that maybe it'd be worth donating money to women who might actually need help, which is what the Amazing Atheist is trying to do.
Anyway, like I said, I only brought that up because I actually wanted to support some actual women's rights activism.
The real thing I wanted to talk about with this video is, should we accept what Lacey Green and Anita Sarkeesian literally say?
The truth is, literally everyone and everything is problematic.
Everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out.
So it really seems to me that they are actually being serious with what they're saying.
I mean, Lacey Green literally says, honestly, literally everything is problematic.
And Anita was talking about systems.
She learned to view the world as systems, ignore individual agency, and then suddenly everything became sexist, racist, and homophobic, and she became insufferable pointing this all out to everyone who, as she then later on goes to say, has been living in these systems and therefore does not necessarily see them as being racist and sexist, and so they just find her annoying when she's consistently picking it out.
It really seems as if Lacey Green and Anita Sarkeesian think that, and they're being hyperbolic when they say everything, I'm sure, but I think what they're talking about is any kind of social interaction, any kind of system that women or minorities find themselves operating within is sexist.
Now, the reason I think this is because I don't see why I should be second-guessing their words.
I mean, why would they be using these public platforms to express themselves poorly in this way?
Why wouldn't they be able to tell us exactly what they think?
They're both intelligent and articulate women.
They are capable of getting a message across clearly, or at least I thought so, which is why I was taking them at their word.
However, this is Zenistrad's opinion.
And Zenistrad, again, go easy on him because he's not a bad guy or anything like that.
But I think that it's very interesting to see how he perceives it in comparison to how I perceive it.
What Thunderfoot was doing was basically he was taking a clip of Anita Sarkeesian of saying everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out, and presenting that as though it was proof that she actually believes that everything is racist, sexist, or homophobic, etc.
Now this is Zenistrad's contention that that's actually not the case.
And he gives, I think, three reasons, but he focuses on one aspect in particular, and I think that's the really important one.
But again, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't take them at their word.
I mean, especially with like Lacey Green's propaganda video for MTV, Anita was speaking to a packed house of feminists, so maybe she was being a bit lax in what she was saying, but the sentiment is so closely mirrored in what Lacey Green was saying.
In a serious video, she was trying to convert people's opinions with.
I really have trouble believing that's not her actual state of mind.
Now, Zenistrad can see exactly why Anita and Lacey are wrong.
And I'll let him describe it to you, in fact, because it is so on the money.
When you're talking about social systems, you're talking about generalities.
A social system is a broad pattern of interrelationships and institutions.
And when you're talking about broad patterns, it's something that will be useful in predicting certain behaviors or certain social interactions, but it's never going to be 100% able to predict every single person's behavior.
So, right away, if you're talking about a social system, it is not something that you can be used.
A social system is not something that can be used to predict patterns 100%.
It is not something that can be used to claim that everything is sexist if you're talking about a social system that perpetuates sexism, because if you do that, then you are taking something that is by definition a generality, a broad observation, and applying it to be universal.
You're applying it universally to every single thing individually.
And that's not how social systems work.
I couldn't have put it more concisely myself.
A generalization is not a universal statement of truth.
Therefore, asserting that a generalization applies to every individual universally is obviously wrong.
This is why Anita and Lacey are wrong when they say everything is racist, everything's sexist, everything's problematic, blah, blah, blah.
Now, this is Zenistrad's reason for thinking that this can't be what they actually mean.
And this is where I guess our opinions diverge.
And I really think it's worth looking into.
And again, it's not that he's wrong.
And it's not that I'm right.
It's not cut and dried like that.
This is now becoming a bit more of a speculative exercise.
And I'm not saying I have all the answers.
I'm actually really interested to see how other people respond to this.
Because like Christy Wintys was saying, we should be as charitable as possible.
And I do think we should be charitable.
But anyway, I'll let him explain his position.
And that's not how social systems work.
And I think anyone who has studied social systems would know that.
So he automatically assumes that Anita Sarkeesian and Lacey Green, people who have studied social systems, presumably already know you can't apply the results of these studies to individuals, despite the fact that that's what they do all the time.
They're constantly doing it.
I mean, Anit Sarkeesian's entire career is her choosing a system and saying this system is sexist, and here are a cherry-picked bunch of examples to show you why.
Even though, like Xenistrat says, you can't do this.
You know, she never gives you...
These are the number of video games released in 2015.
These are the number with male protagonists.
These are the number with female protagonists.
These are the number of, you know, X, Y, and Z.
She never gives you that.
She gives you a bunch of examples, individual examples, and then makes a generalization based on that.
Despite the fact there are so many examples that counteract what she's doing.
Anyway, Zenistrad uses his third point to expand on this, and I'll let him again explain it.
And the third reason that is that If she thinks that literally everything is sexist, would she argue that cutting your hair is sexist, that wearing a jacket is sexist?
And I don't think she has, because if you're actually going to make the claim that she is unironically claiming that everything is sexist, then you have to mean that as everything.
That's what everything means.
And when I see people try to back up the claim that she really does think everything is sexist, they usually do this by pointing to her series.
And I'm like, no, that doesn't prove that she thinks everything is sexist.
That only proves that she thinks there are a lot of things that are sexist that you do not think are sexist.
That is not the same thing.
And if you actually think that's the same thing, then you're fucking wrong.
I'm sorry.
Well, I don't think these are necessarily the same things, but I think it's a bit of a slippery proposition Zenistrad has made there.
Let's just take the first half of it.
When I see people try to back up the claim that she really does think everything is sexist, they usually do this by pointing to her series.
And I'm like, no, that doesn't prove that she thinks everything is sexist.
That only proves that she thinks there are a lot of things that are sexist.
And technically he's right.
I mean, this does only prove that she thinks that there are a lot of things that are sexist.
And when he said, well, does it mean that wearing a jacket is sexist?
Well, maybe.
She thinks that Miss Pac-Man's bow is sexist.
So, you know, whether I think it's sexist or not is irrelevant.
I'm interested in what Anita thinks.
And if she actually does think that the bow on Miss Pac-Man or the strategic butt coverings are also sexist, I mean, maybe she does think that clothes are sexist.
There have been times in videos where she has complained about female gender signifiers.
So anything that could be considered a female gender signifier presumably could be considered sexist.
But the thing is, like he said, this just proves that she thinks a lot of things are sexist.
And she does think a lot of things are sexist.
And then in this roundtable at the Sydney Opera House, she literally turns around and says, everything is sexist.
Why wouldn't I think that she thinks everything is sexist?
Why wouldn't I think that this is something that she believes?
I'm trying to figure out why I would second-guess her, and the only reason I can think that Zenistrad thinks that is that he said...
And that's not how social systems work.
And I think anyone who has studied social systems will know that.
So his argument there is basically an argument from authority.
She has studied this, therefore she can't think this.
Now, I don't think that's correct.
I think that she is perfectly capable of misunderstanding systems.
I don't think that everyone comes out with the same understanding, a full understanding, and I think that it's quite obvious that she appears to misunderstand quite a lot.
I think the problem she has is that she views it through a feminist lens, and suddenly everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything's homophobic.
But that doesn't mean that she's viewing the world correctly.
In fact, I would say she's viewing the world dramatically incorrectly.
And I'm really trying to reconcile the argument that she doesn't think everything is sexist.
I mean, she goes on about everything, and if you look at the nonsense on her Twitter feed, you know, the things she criticises, just, I'm really trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I just can't find the rationale for it.
And the thing is, if that was the case, if you genuinely didn't think all of these things were sexist and racist and problematic, again, this is not an uncommon thing to think as far as I can tell.
There seem to be a lot of feminists and social justice warriors who put on their social justice feminist lens and then say everything's problematic.
I've heard everything be called problematic by a social justice warrior at some point.
They're all following the same ideology.
And then they get up on these stages, they make videos and say, honestly, everything's problematic, everything's racist.
And is it not really irresponsible on their part to presuppose all this information, all this knowledge and education in systems on behalf of their audience that they are trying to proselytize to?
I mean, you can't possibly think that you're going to change people's minds if you say things that sound ridiculous and then claim, well, you should have just known what I meant.
If these people actually meant something other than everything is problematic, is the onus not on them to explain that more clearly?
Is it not their fault if they are saying these things that people would take them literally?
I mean, I'm very careful with what I say these days, because I have realized that people will take these things literally.
And unless I'm making a joke, I often find myself, especially in live streams, passing what I'm about to say several times over before I actually speak, and then I end up kind of stuttering or stammering.
And I think people think that this is because I'm nervous or something, and it's not at all.
It's because I'm making sure I don't speak out of line or out of turn in a way that people are going to misinterpret.
Because I understand that there are people listening and they are taking what I am saying literally.
And so I have to make sure I mean it literally.
And if these people are up on their platform speaking and they don't mean literally what they're saying, then that seems to be a, I mean, either dishonest or completely irresponsible.
And at what point do we say, okay, look, guys, right, you're causing a lot of confusion with what you're saying.
Please just say literally what you mean.
And then I honestly suspect we'll end up with Lacey Green saying, well, literally everything's problematic.
And Sarkesian giving an approximation of her own to that effect.
And then, then what?
Will the SJW community then just condemn these people and say, okay, well, they're nonsense.
They're full of shit.
They don't understand systems.
They are charlatans.
And you know what?
You guys, just because you're on the same side as them, just because you believe the same things that they do, doesn't mean that you have to defend them.
These people are individuals.
They do not actually have to represent your community if you don't want them to.
You can speak out against them, or at least you should be able to.
Maybe it's different than the social justice community.
But you should be able to speak out about these people if this is the case.
And to his credit, Zenistrad does do this.
But it's always, you know, he didn't tweet any Sarkeesian saying, hey, look, here's my problem with your work.
You know, I don't ever see anyone in any of these forums or anything like that ever be challenged on what they're saying.
They're always just given license to say everything is problematic and nobody cares.
Everyone just applauds.
They smile.
They go, yeah, well, we know it is.
We've all studied systems too, you know?
So, like I said, I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts in the comments because I'm not trying to make any definitive statements with this video, apart from perhaps the first half, which seems to be mathematically definitive.
But yeah, so I'm really looking forward to hearing what people think because I'm trying to be intellectually charitable here, but it's really hard to not still come to the same conclusion after being intellectually charitable.
So I'm looking forward to everyone's thoughts on the matter, and I really hope that this can open a dialogue on the issue, because I'm really tired of people assuming that taking them literally is strawmanning them.
It's not.
Them speaking literally is what everyone assumes that they are doing.
And if they're not doing that, they should really make it clear that they're not doing that.
Don't you think?
Um, now, I actually do have some criticisms of Anita Sarkeesian myself, um...
For example, I'm not particularly fond of the way in one episode she refers to sex workers as prostituted women.
I think that she, a lot of the times in her series, she tends to focus on female characters that tend to be white.
She is not really particularly good at exploring, I guess, the intersection of how, for example, a black female character or a female character from another ethnicity might be sort of treated differently or exoticized or something like that.
Another criticism I have is that she tends to rely too much on tropes, and tropes are difficult to use as a basis for critique because they have poorly defined boundaries and they can be subject to all sorts of different subversions and it's easy to argue whether or not something even counts as an example of a trope.
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