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Feb. 23, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
39:32
Anita Sarkeesian and the People Who Like Her
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So it's the current year, 2019, and apparently there are still people who want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian.
Today I'm going to talk about Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist game critic who became incredibly famous on the internet around 2012.
So Anita Sarkeesian is, without a doubt, one of the most divisive figures I can think of.
At least within a very specific cultural context.
Honestly, I don't really know why we're doing this.
Who cares about Anita Sarkeesian?
Her channel is dead.
To the skeptics and anti-SJWs, she's seen in all ways as a force for bad.
A dishonest critic, an opportunist, a scam artist, an ideologue, a huge dick.
Yeah, but all of those things are actually demonstrable, so why wouldn't we say them?
I'll call the internet left, however.
She was broadly understood as an all-around decent critic who was unfairly maligned, harassed, and abused because she was a woman who spoke about feminism and about her unfair treatment on the internet.
I don't agree that she was generally considered even by the internet left to be a good critic.
Anita Sarkeesian was a bad critic because she was critiquing something she didn't really understand, but she had a particular feminist agenda that she wanted to impose on an industry that really didn't have much to do with feminism.
Now, I feel like I'm coming off right now like I'm a weird internet reasonable man, and that's really not how I feel.
That is, I side firmly with the internet left on this issue.
You've just said that the left isn't reasonable.
Carry on.
I genuinely like Anita Sarkeesian.
I agree with lots of her points and thought she was pretty cool before I knew she was somebody who everybody hated.
Honestly, I'm not really very surprised because Anita Sarkeesian seems to generally hate the concept of masculinity and you don't look like you're very well served by the concept of masculinity.
So I can believe that you think she makes good points and I can believe that you find her very likable.
And to be honest with you, when it comes to likability, she seems kind of likable, except that she keeps acting like a dick to everyone.
And this isn't just, this isn't me.
I mean, I don't care if she acts like a dick to me, but she acts like a dick to a lot of people that I spoke to when I was over in VidCon, and they were like, yeah.
And I mean, it wasn't just me that she was acting like a dick to at VidCon, was it?
Even if I didn't like her, though, I still wouldn't think she deserved the ire of the public.
You know, threats and harassment from people who hated every fibre of her being.
Well, then that makes two of us.
I really wish people wouldn't threaten or harass her, because that's how she makes her bread and butter.
She's not known for her criticisms.
She's known for being the victim of the internet.
I made many videos in which I said, please do not send her harassment on the moral argument.
It's wrong.
And from a tactical point of view, it's foolish.
Please stop doing it.
And yet people still apparently did.
So what do you want from me?
As an internet person myself, I've probably tasted less than 1% of the shit she has.
And honestly, even that much is enough to send fear right through my whole bod.
The thing is, part of her marketing strategy was about courting harassment in particular, making a big deal out of it, and getting the other feminist and SJW activists to promote her because of this.
This is entirely bad, frankly, for her.
Because of the tepid nature of her criticism, no one watches her channel anymore.
No one cares about her opinion.
But the second she's a victim, the spotlight's on her and everyone's paying attention.
Really weird how that works.
This video is about one thing.
It's about the way that art is interpreted and about how it's given meaning.
Okay, well then that means that literally nothing that Anita Sarkeesian has to say about video games is very useful to anyone outside of her particular ideological bubble, is it?
If you don't view the world in the same way that Anita Sarkeesian does, she literally can't say anything useful or meaningful to you about the video games that you're playing because you aren't playing them for the same reasons that she plays them, allegedly.
I'm going to be looking closely at a few people, mostly Thunderfoot and Sargon of Akkad.
In the first moments of the first video Thunderfoot ever made about Anita Sarkeesian, he looks at what she says about the game Double Dragon and tries to refute it with two pieces of evidence.
So I'm going to skip his bit about Thunderfoot's critique.
I just don't care.
So why have I spent like five minutes now discussing one argument from a strange man on the internet?
Are these points really deserving of all that attention?
Have I said something that surprised you?
Well, maybe not.
This is a very old series of arguments that have been hashed out a long time ago, and you pick the ones you like because they happen to be the ones that make you feel good.
Unfortunately, that's generally what happens with internet arguments.
But these positions are going to get interesting when we realize this refusal to engage with obvious and readily apparent interpretations of art, this failure to understand that we can interpret games differently from real life.
This isn't some bad outlier in a sea of more coherent arguments.
Rather, it's the main idea that these people rely on.
It's what they're trying to sell us.
Dude.
Everything you've just said there can be accurately applied to Anita Sarkeesian and her critiques.
Any feminist critiques, in fact.
In fact, at least Thunderfoot's critiques are not adversarial towards women and bigoted because of that.
Unlike Anita Sarkeesian's critiques.
Part 2.
What's really at stake here?
Okay, that's the first main position that Anita Sarkeesian wants to make.
That games have a tendency towards centralizing male narratives and toward using women as either props or afterthoughts in those narratives.
So here's her second and much more important position.
That games being like that, that's a problem.
No, it's not.
It's not a problem at all.
It's caused no problems.
We don't see rampaging murderous gangs of men hunting down women and taking them as slaves or something.
Women aren't being affected by this at all.
It's not a problem.
At least, you know, objectively in the real world.
It might be a problem subjectively to Anita Sarkeesian's feminist sensibilities.
But frankly, who gives a fuck about those?
Anita isn't just here to make a bunch of neutral statements about what video games are like.
I don't think she's ever made a single neutral statement about what video games are like, is she?
She wants to say that video games have some relationship to things like sexism, misogyny, the patriarchy, negative and pervasive stuff she sees in our culture.
Yeah, but the thing is I'm not religious, and I don't really care about her religion, and I don't care about her opinion on the things that I enjoy.
I have decided for myself that these things are not overtly harmful, at least in any way that is directly quantifiable, especially with Anita.
I mean, she never quantified any of the harm that was apparently done.
It was all conceptual in her mind.
I mean, she never gave any statistics that backed up the number of women killed by video gamers or something, you know, nothing that might actually make a case.
All she did is parrot feminist rhetoric through the lens of video games, really.
It's not even the other way around.
She's analyzing video games through the lens of feminism.
So, no, I don't care about her opinion.
And if you do, great.
Go and enjoy her complaining that toxic masculinity is ruining the Doom franchise or something.
I don't care.
And this second claim is really where the meat of Sarkeesian hate came from.
See, people like Thunderfoot or Sargon like to make little arguments against Sarkeesian's descriptions of games.
Made the silly points we've talked about before or nitpicked small errors in her analysis.
Yeah, the thing is though.
You say that we're nitpicking small errors in her analysis, but if her analysis is consistently filled with small errors, what we could describe these as is misrepresentations.
And if she is continually misrepresenting the thing that she is trying to describe in order to make it fit a particular predetermined feminist ideological narrative, the reason that people had to continually nitpick and correct all of the minor mistakes she was making is because her videos were nothing but a series of minor mistakes based on this misinterpretation.
But, I mean, I don't want to have to go over it again.
Why do we have to go over this again?
See, she spoke too broadly about Hitman.
Her general observations about video games must be totally off base.
But when we look at these people's videos, we can usually find a common gesture, one that's presented either explicitly or implicitly.
Sure, they say, maybe games are often constructed around male ego fantasies, and maybe women are often subservient to those fantasies.
But so what?
Well, so what?
And what's the alternative?
Let's assume that every critique of Neith Sarkeesians was completely true.
Well, okay, why?
Why do we care?
There's not doing any harm for people to have ego fantasies.
She never proves any harm for people having ego fantasies regarding male fantasies.
And the alternative is what?
Create them around female fantasies?
Why should we do that?
If the answer is to get more women into video games, I don't give a fuck how many women are in video games.
I just don't care.
Why is that bad or sexist or anything like that?
What's wrong with the hot ladies in my video games?
And as we're gonna see, in order to sustain this attack on Anita Sarkeesian's work, in order to make her look as bad as humanly possible, these YouTubers are going to give us a very bent, unnatural vision of what media is and of how we can interact with it.
Well, in the same way that Anita Sarkeesian gave us a bent and unnatural vision of what was going on in the video games themselves.
I mean, look at the double dragon example that I've probably cut out of this video.
Sure, you can say that the woman is not an actor in the story.
She is the subject of the object of the story.
And it is the men who are the actors, the subjects who are working their way, fighting their way through, you know, hordes of enemies in order to save her.
Okay.
Anita Sarkeesian will frame that as patriarchal oppression, but a normal person would frame that as a love story.
In fact, that's what Thunderfoot does.
A story of personal heroism and self-sacrifice in order to save someone whom the agent cares about.
That's the difference.
One way is interpreting it maliciously, and the other way is interpreting it, I guess, charitably.
But the charitable interpretation is obviously how the designers of the game intended it.
Because, I mean, it just fits into all of the heroic narratives that men have told one another since the dawn of time.
If this was a hypothetical scenario, if this is a thought experiment, that is the double dragon narrative.
What happens to the girl if you don't go and save her?
It's probably not as good as being saved by the patriarchy, isn't it?
So let's start with our main example.
The thing we're going to talk about for the longest, the way these YouTubers discuss cultivation theory.
Cultivation theory is an area of research and psychology that attempts to study and demonstrate the impact that media has on people, the sorts of behaviors and dispositions it cultivates.
And when these YouTubers talk about this theory, it is always to point out that the research has proven it false.
And apparently a four-fold rise in the number of people playing video games has not led to any kind of increase in violent crime whatsoever.
It has in fact coincided with a decrease, a dramatic decrease in these crime rates, and this is despite the overall trend of increasing population.
That games have no negative impact.
No one said video games don't have any negative impacts.
What we said was that video games are not causing violence.
In particular, I suppose in the case of Anita Sarkeesian, violence towards women.
As all of the trends are down, well, the use of video games are up.
How could you create a congruent argument with the facts that we have the data for to suggest that somehow video games are causing violence against anyone, let alone women?
After the game Burnout was released, you would have expected to have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people trying to cause as much damage as possible in a suicidal car wreck.
And we didn't.
That we have the science, and the science proves that Anita Sarkeesian is wrong.
Well, I mean, that is kind of what the data said.
I mean, she was saying things that just run contrary to our empirical observation of reality.
She was trying to impose a particular ideological interpretation of what was happening that just didn't match up with what we were recording.
And no one's telling you.
Sarkeesian is wrong.
Because I am from Gamergate, and I care about facts and evidence and reason.
BTFO'd by facts and logic.
God, it was a different time in like 2014, I tell ya.
Now, this argument is really fascinating to me because it seems to rely on an understanding of art that is both totally wrong-headed and a bit gross.
I don't care about your value judgments, about my opinion of the interpretation of data that shows that Anis Sarkeesian's assertions that video games are making us more violent towards men or women is just not true.
Whether you consider that gross or wrong-headed doesn't change the fact that that is the fact.
And so why would you come to me with your opinions on this if there is just nothing to back this up?
It's just your feelings you're going to tell me about now.
So go on.
Like, okay, let's say for the sake of argument that these people are absolutely right about their science.
Every study we've done shows that video games cause no shift in behavior or disposition.
No one said that.
No one said that video games cause no shift in behavior or disposition.
Again, like, you'll say, oh, well, this is a pedantic nitpick of what I've said.
No, that's the problem.
The problem is that you are fundamentally mischaracterizing the thing that you are trying to critique.
Just like Anita Sarkeesian.
Now, assuming all this, let's ask a question.
What exactly would these findings mean to Anita Sarkeesian's claim that video games can be harmful?
Again, I don't really believe that that is her claim.
That's incredibly broad.
She was being very specific.
It's harmful to women in particular situations for particular reasons, none of which that she proved, and nothing that the science, as far as I'm aware or I can remember, ever bore out.
But again, nobody is saying that video games cannot be harmful.
I mean, there are people who have died playing video games because they were playing for too long.
There's obviously the capacity for video game addiction.
But the question is, are they in and of themselves the problem?
Or is it something regarding them?
Can these things be enjoyed responsibly?
And the answer is, of course they can.
Well to these YouTubers, it seems like it would mean everything.
Mean that her entire work was a sham.
No matter how much Anita needs there to be a connection between playing video games and their behavior in reality, because let's be real.
If there wasn't the entire premise of the series that she got feminists to give her $160,000 to explore, would be bullshit.
Thunderfoot makes a good point, doesn't he?
If she's not demonstrating her claims and it can be demonstrated that the opposite of what she is claiming is true, then it does seem that she's full of shit and is essentially pushing a religious worldview for the benefit of folks like you.
But to me, it would mean absolutely nothing.
Then why provide any evidence at all?
Imagine so bold-facedly saying, you know what?
You know, I mean, Anit Sarkeesian is making a bunch of claims.
These people have provided evidence that seem to run counter to those claims.
In fact, refute those claims.
But to me, that means absolutely nothing.
Why do you think I'm describing this as a religious worldview?
And why is that?
Well, here's one big reason.
I don't think that science is actually capable of disproving obvious facts about the way people work.
So you aren't actually talking about the way people work.
You're talking about the way that you feel about what you are seeing.
It's your subjective interpretation that you are going to refer to here, not someone else's.
There is nothing objective about what you're going to say because you've just dismissed science as a method of analysis and observation.
Bold move, let's see if it pays off.
Media's ability to cultivate behaviors, emotions, and dispositions isn't some incidental point about it that requires further proof.
Rather, it's the entire reason why media exists in the first place.
People seek out art to be affected by it, to learn things or feel things.
People make art to give others those experiences, to connect with their audience or persuade them or whatever.
Media is cultivation.
It is the process through which the ideas and imaginations of others can be made somewhat available to us so that we can understand and be affected by them.
That's quite great, isn't it?
Instead of accepting that Anit Sarkeesian's assertions aren't correct, we're now getting down to the very concept.
Well, I mean, you're not saying that media doesn't affect people, are you?
We're saying that media doesn't make people more violent.
Yeah, but you're not saying it doesn't affect them.
I mean, if it didn't affect you, why did you watch the media at all?
Well, brilliant.
Yes, yes, there is an effect on my body and brain when I consume media.
But that effect is not to make someone violent, as Anis Sarkeesian was suggesting, or make someone sexist, or anything like that.
Nobody has proven that that's been done, but you are assuming it now that, oh, but media changes you.
I guess it does.
It changed my memories of having watched that media at the bare minimum before anything else.
But you've got to remember that people aren't just unthinking, uncritical zombies that are trapped in just a single room with a projector screen and they can't see anything else like in Plato's cave.
And science might be able to describe and quantify the impact that art has, but it can't be used to deny the fact that art exists or that what it says matters to us.
You don't know that it matters to us.
What something says matters subjectively and differently from person to person.
There is no universal meaning to art.
That's the problem, in fact, with critiquing art, isn't it?
The connect with their audience or persuade them or whatever.
Media is cultivation.
It is the process through which the ideas and imaginations of others can be made somewhat available to us so that we can understand and be affected by them.
And science might be able to describe and quantify the impact that art has, but it can't be used to deny the fact that art exists or that what it says matters to us.
How did we even get here?
You can't deny that art exists.
Who is doing that?
The claim by Anita Sarkeesian was that video games are making people sexist or violent, or possibly both.
She's failed to demonstrate these claims, and after her failing to demonstrate these claims, you are saying, yeah, well, I mean, you're not saying that art doesn't exist, are you?
And we're saying, no, art definitely does exist.
And you're saying, well, we're definitely allowed our subjective interpretation of that art, even if it doesn't fit the facts, aren't we?
And we're saying, yes, you're definitely allowed that.
And so you're going, well, this is sexist then.
The only response you could expect from someone who does not already share your worldview is, I don't agree, and you don't have any method of persuading me.
You openly repudiated the idea of a factual statement coming from Anita Sarkeesian, and yet her statement was purported to be factual.
Video games will cause X.
And when it is proven that video games do not cause X, you default back to, well, this is just like our opinion, man.
But, okay.
As much as I like this sort of utopian talk about how art is inherently meaningful, and as much as I think that's true.
How could art be inherently meaningful?
Art means absolutely nothing without a viewer that has a worldview and a perspective with which to appreciate that art.
There is no possibility that art has an inherent meaning because it would have to have an objective, inherent value.
It would have to have something there that was undeniable to every single person.
Or good God, why would it even be limited to people?
You know, why would it be limited to only people that would have the inherent understanding of art?
I mean, animals have an inherent understanding of the meaning of what it is to be chased by a predator, for example.
Like, there's no reason that you could, by what distinction would you make between that and art if you're saying that it has itself an inherent meaning?
It doesn't really resolve Thunderfoot or Sargon's challenge here.
Sure, they might say, art is by its nature an act of cultivation, but how were we supposed to know what it's cultivating?
And more than that, how can we possibly tell when that cultivation is bad?
How can you even define what bad is in this situation?
You have no objective standard for bad, so anything that you say is bad, I might say is good.
So when you say it's bad for the dungeon of the Double Dragon characters to go and find this woman because the woman is being portrayed as an act of patriarchal oppression or something, I will say no, it's absolutely good for the woman to be portrayed that way as an example for young men who are growing into manhood to know what they should do when a woman finds herself in trouble.
We would have a diametrically opposed opinion on this, and yet you're sat there going, yeah, but this thing's bad.
No, it's not.
It's demonstrably good.
In fact, my contention is it is a moral good that Double Dragon and all of these other games have young men saving young women because ultimately that's real life man.
That is what really happens.
Women are simply not the physical equals of men.
And so when another man does something to a woman, yes, it requires another man step in.
Well, to these tubers, to make the claim that any work of art is cultivating bad stuff, we'd have to look at the way that work of art is received by the surrounding culture.
Study the impact that it's had, and find out if it's causing real people to do terrible things to each other.
Which is what we did when Anis Sarkeesian raised the same question, and we found that it didn't.
In fact, we went through it.
You in fact went through it yourself in this video.
There is no evidence whatsoever that video games are inspiring anyone to go on killing sprees or to be is raising the general level of violence of society or anything of the sort.
We're back to square one and once again Anita Sarkeesian's arguments have no empirical validity.
So I guess we're back to using science and cultivation theory to prove our points about media.
And since the murder rate isn't up and since sex crimes aren't on the rise, I guess that the pattern Sarkeesian is pointing out in video games can't really be a bad thing.
Yep, it certainly does seem that way.
This was a wasted five years, wasn't it?
Now, I can honestly see why this argument was compelling to people.
It seems to make a lot of sense, right?
If you want to say that art is bad, you gotta make sure that it causes bad stuff to happen.
That isn't necessarily why art would be bad.
That would be why it'd be something harmful or dangerous or something like that.
But you keep using the term bad just interchangeably with things you don't like, I suppose.
But yes, you seem to have proven that Anis Sarkeesian was wrong.
Thank you.
But even though I'm sympathetic to the people who bought into this logic, it is still, as far as I'm concerned, terrible logic.
And that's for one reason.
When people say that art has destructive or toxic messages, they are almost never referring to the literal destructive impact that the art had on the real world.
Okay, so if it's not having an impact on the real world, what world was it having an impact on, and why should I care about this fantasy world?
Instead, they're making a claim about the work itself, about what it says to us.
So to show you what I mean by that, let's do a little thought experiment.
Say a film is made that is unabashedly Nazi propaganda.
Let's call it Lubenschluben.
Every moment in this film conveys an unironic love for Nazis and an explicit hatred of Jews.
Let's say that this film is so horrendously racist that nobody in society can possibly be influenced by it to become Nazis.
The vast majority of people watch it critically, tear it apart, maybe even reflect on how silly and gross Nazism is.
The remaining minority might enjoy and agree with the film, but those people are incapable of becoming more Nazi than they already are.
They are peak Nazi, already agreeing with all of the film's messages before they ever saw it.
Now, if what Sargon and Thunderfoot says is true, if the only way to say a work of art is toxic is to look at its literal impact on society, then we would be unable to condemn Lubenschluben, since the film has no tangible effect on anyone's behavior.
Then Lubenschluben is not a dangerous work of art.
It might do a really great job of showing Nazis exactly what they want to hear.
In fact, it might just be exactly like a feminist frequency video critiquing video games.
It might, in fact, be turning the entire world anti-feminist, but really pander and really stimulate feminist sensibilities.
But see, that position makes no sense at all.
Everybody with a brain knows that this movie is bad politically.
Not in a way that means we should ban it, but in a way that is worthy of our scorn and disgust.
Ah, that's a very interesting word that you added in there, isn't it?
It's bad politically.
Now you're not even critiquing it on the merits of it being a work of art.
Unless, of course, everything is political, which I'm sure you think it is.
But that's the only method of critique you're approaching with this, isn't it?
I mean, you're not giving it an aesthetic critique.
You're not giving it a storytelling critique or any other kind of critique that you could apply to a work of art.
No, you're giving it a political critique, which is entirely dependent on your own political bias.
Which is, again, once we come back to, yes, people who like it are going to like it because they already happen to believe it, because it already plays into their biases.
But anyone who doesn't already have that bias, who's looking for actual harm done by this Nazi propaganda film, might find nothing.
In the same way that I don't believe the actual harm done by feminist frequency videos amounts to anything either.
In the exactly the same process with you and feminism as your hypothetical Nazis and Lubenschluben.
And it's not bad because somebody might become a Nazi when they see it.
No, it's bad because it advocates bad things.
This is your value judgment.
And honestly, if you can say this about your hypothetical film, then I can say this about Anit Sarkisian's critiques.
There is absolutely nothing that prevents me from turning this back on you, on Sarkeesian, or anyone else, because I hold a system of values that considers feminism to be a bad thing.
Nazis are evil.
Lubenschluben likes Nazis, so Lubenschluben is evil.
Evil is a moral word, and a piece of art is not a moral agent.
The propaganda may be the tool of propagation of a particular set of ideas.
And these ideas may have come from a moral agent, but the propaganda itself is not a moral agent.
And we as moral agents are the ones who decide how we interpret the propaganda we receive.
Yours is precisely the same line of reasoning that the Inquisition used in the Cathar heresy.
This is why they burned books.
Because they believed that the books themselves were evil, contained evil, would transmit evil because of a fundamental lack of faith in the people receiving it.
But more importantly, what you're doing is making a religious argument.
You have already discarded science.
You do not care if your reasoning is circular.
You do not care if the facts do not bear out your thesis.
You want to continue it anyway through faith.
Lubenschluben likes Nazis, so Lubenschluben is evil.
That's it.
Our burden of proof has been met.
Your burden of proof didn't require you to do anything.
Your burden of proof just required you to have a feeling about a thing and then say, you know what, I feel a particular way about a thing.
I'm going to call it evil.
And honestly, this is just a new form of theology.
I don't care whether you find this to be a find a feminist critique about something to be in some way spiritual.
I don't care if you find it to be transcendently good and you consider other things to be evil.
I just don't care about your concept of good and evil.
I don't know who you are and your opinion on these things is just not true.
It just doesn't reflect reality.
To be in support of Anit Sarkesian's opinion of what video games do to people is just not something that we can demonstrate.
She failed to demonstrate it.
The evidence seems to demonstrate the opposite.
And now you're reduced to sounding like a preacher telling me what good and evil are.
Now, watching Anita Sarkeesian's videos, she does cite cultivation theory a few times.
Says there's a causal relationship between video games being the way they are and people being sexist.
And to be honest, I kind of wish she hadn't said those things.
Like, I think they're probably valid to some extent, but I do genuinely believe that cultivation theory is a huge, confusing red herring and a waste of a media critic's time nine times out of ten.
I'm sure that's true, but more importantly, I don't really care what she thinks is sexist, because what she's essentially saying is that thing is sinful.
I can enjoy media that openly goes counter to my own personal values and walk away from it knowing that the media itself was not a representation of what I believe.
But that said, when you look at the trajectory of Sarkeesian's work, you can see that she means something very similar to what we described in our thought experiment.
We can see this whenever she talks about games.
It's pretty obvious, but let's just look at one example.
In her discussion of Double Dragon, she calls the game's treatment of violence against women regressive crap.
Most recently, Double Dragon Neon in 2012 reintroduced new gamers to this regressive crap yet again.
And it's not like she had some data to back that up, right?
Obviously not, that's a value judgment.
Based on her position as a feminist media critic.
Not being a feminist media critic, I don't share that value judgment.
Right?
She didn't wait for the double dragon studies to come in and prove that the game causes regressive behaviors.
And of course she didn't do that, because she doesn't have to.
She is a person who experienced this work of art, and she's claiming here that what she saw in it was bad.
Yeah, but what does it mean for Anit Sarkeesian to say something is regressive crap or as you put it, bad?
It's just her saying, I don't like it.
And I don't care if she doesn't like it.
That it normalizes the idea that women should be used as passive props in the narratives of men.
That it's this is just her feeling on the issue.
Stipulates that violence against women can be understood as erotic.
When Anita Sarkeesian sees these things in society, she thinks they're awful problems.
Yes, when Anita Sarkeesian sees something, interprets it in a particular way because of the particular ideological lens with which she interprets everything and decides that she, as a feminist, is going to create a value judgment about that thing, that value judgment is fucking worthless.
Because we know by the very nature of the lens by which she is looking at it and the things that she is looking to critique, the points she is trying to prove, regardless of the data, she is seeing what she wants to see.
And if that's the way the game is played, if they are the rules of the game, I'll see what I want to see.
And lo and behold, it's not the same as Anita's, and there is no valid way for her to argue against it, as you have laid it out.
Well done for literally destroying her career.
And for that reason, and that reason alone, she also thinks they're awful when advocated for in media.
Who cares?
Nobody cares what her fucking opinion on anything is.
Literally, no one watches her channel.
She gets like 2,000 views on a 200,000, 250,000 subscriber channel.
Her opinion is worthless.
So you saying, well, Anita Sarkeesian thinks this, okay, that doesn't make it that thing.
That just means that her subjective interpretation is batty.
So looking at all these arguments that these guys made to try to show that Anita Sarkeesian's points were bad, we've been trying to figure out if what they were saying in these videos was true.
But now that we've shown that they're not true, at least to my satisfaction.
Dude.
You also agreed that they were not true.
You showed the clips and the data that showed there was no increase in society's violent tendencies.
In fact, there was constant decrease.
Despite massive increase in video game usage, you have gone over these old arguments and just gone, well, I don't care about the data.
And so now, the thing that can be proven to be true by the numbers is not true because I simply don't care about the numbers.
That doesn't make it not true.
That means you are in denial.
It only makes sense to ask a different kind of question.
What are these arguments here to do?
What do they want from us?
We want you to go away.
Do you, I mean, imagine, imagine the fucking, okay, imagine this.
A group of Muslims decide that they are going to start a Quran study club.
And every day, they go down there and they study their Qurans and they discuss it.
And they have, you know, various other sort of activities that they might do.
And it's a big social gathering and it becomes really popular.
And people from all around the area start coming.
And some non-Muslims start coming just because it's interesting to hear what they have to say.
It's, you know, good food for thought, etc, etc.
And then one day a group of Christians turns up and they say, can we come in your club?
And everyone says, well, if you want to discuss the Quran.
And they whip out a Bible and say, no, actually, we're going to discuss a Bible.
And if you don't want to discuss this Bible, you're Christian phobic.
You're in fact bigoted towards us.
You're all bad people.
You actually hate us secretly.
And we knew it.
All of these Muslims just hate these Christians.
And the Muslims are like, dude, what the hell are you talking about?
We're just here to study the Quran.
And lo and behold, the Christians are like, nope, boom.
We're discussing this Bible or nothing.
You are terrible people.
And imagine after years of doing this, everyone in the Quran study group just doesn't go near the Christians.
They are the only ones left in the hall.
And the people who wanted to study the Quran have gone to other locations to do this.
Imagine the Christians in the hall going, well, why do these guys keep doing this?
What is it that they want from us?
And that's why you're going to come to the conclusion that we don't want to talk to you.
And the answer is simple.
These arguments whittle away at our ability to interact with media as media to prevent us from making any kind of claim about the impact or importance of art.
Whether it's because the science hasn't come in yet, or because we can only talk about the explicit message of a work, or because capitalism functions as some kind of safety blanket against criticism, the point is always the same.
You may think that you can talk about the worth of art from a political or moral perspective, but in fact, that's just a mirage.
Yes.
Anything you say about media is just an unverified and likely unsupportable position, and you should probably forget about it.
But where does that leave us?
Hopefully far away from me.
Honestly, I don't, I really don't care if feminists find video games problematic.
Sinful, evil.
I don't care.
I, as a consumer, did not want this.
The consumers that I saw around me on the internet in the spaces where I was enjoying video games also agreed they did not want this.
But the journalists, the political class, the elites of the video game industry muscled their way in and made us talk about it.
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