Ab56 v2 aka Ash

My comment was directed specifically toward Malaki, whose girlfriend wants to critique Sarkeesian on a blog. So when I say "expose," I mean "expose to a broader audience in an appropriate public forum." As much as you have deconstructed Sarkeesian's points and launched counterarguments, a blog or a video is much better format for exposing her arguments' weaknesses than posts sprawled across 120+ pages of an online message board. I don't think anyone has a problem with her identifying tropes. That's not a huge point of debate: the tropes do exist and I can accept that her examples fall into them. I'm interested in the subtler argument she makes about these examples' actual or potential harm, which she makes by omitting a holistic analysis. It's arguably not much of her videos, but it weakens her overall product and is a point worth critiquing. On the other hand, it might be a huge part of her videos because it answers the question, "so what if these tropes exist?" Again, I'm unclear if this is a big point or not because, like I said earlier in the thread, I'm not sure if she's trying to create an expository or opinion piece. For what it's worth, a ton of people seem to infer that her underlying arguments are hugely important. My problem with all the other critiques I've seen of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games--aside from on this forum--is that they mostly commit the same sin I critique Sarkeesian for. They affirmatively argue that no harm exists without seriously considering her point that there might be some specific harm. I'm not asking to people to prove a vague negative, but choosing a few of the strongest arguments for why using or overusing these tropes might be harmful, and thoroughly deconstructing those points would be helpful. I also want to see some acknowledgment that there isn't a clear answer either way because with "harm," we are dealing with something we can only guess at rather than know for certain or with reasonable probability. That is, unless they have some academic studies to offer up as evidence. Overall though, all the public critics I've seen have failed muster any of this substance. I think it would be hypocritical of me to give them a free pass while critiquing Sarkeesian.

Honestly, the best way to expose weakness in Sarkeesian's argument is to thoroughly explore her argument better than she does, address counterarguments, and acknowledge limitations and faults. It involves putting in a lot of effort and giving a fair shake to the possibility that her conclusions may be correct, while also pointing out other conclusions that could also be correct. I haven't seen anything like that.

I meant what I said, but my being skeptical of all her detractors doesn't imply that I think all her detractors necessarily think the same way or are motivated by the same things. If by "prejudicial" you mean that I am more suspicious of Sarkeesian's detractors' motivations rather than that of her supporters, you may be right, but I think "prejudice" entails an unreasonable belief. I think my greater skepticism of Sarkeesian's detractors is reasonable because it seems more likely to me that her detractors rather than her supporters could be motivated by an animus for women or gender equality. That's not to say I think the arguments from people on any side of the debate are automatically qualitatively better or worse depending on which side of the fence you land though. Moreover, a good argument can convince me to put my distrust of a detractor's motivations aside. e.g. I don't think you are motivated by an animus toward women or feminism even though you are one of her detractors because your arguments have been clear enough for me to see that.

It's not unreasonable though. Although we don't have a monopoly on understanding ourselves--women included--people have good reasons to be very skeptical of Sarkeesian's detractors' motivations on this issue.

Your inability to appreciate the nuance here has me in awe. Please do go on about how we live in a post-racial society.

I have low expectations. Man of Steel, despite its good casting, was a steaming pile of garbage. The crossover will only serve to bring down that version of Batman.

Sorry to respond to something way later than it was posted, but life's been busy. My issue is more that I don't understand whether Anita intends for her video series to be expository or persuasive. On her Kickstarter page, her thesis was, "This video project will explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of female characters in games. The series will highlight the larger recurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders." The thesis makes it sound like it could be either expository or persuasive. If she is creating an expository piece, it makes sense to argue that certain tropes are prevalent. However, when she explains these tropes, she uses language that suggests the audience should interpret the tropes and examples of them to have specific meanings or characterizations. For examples of what I mean, you can see one of djp's posts from much earlier in the thread. In discussing her examples, she does not thoroughly analyze the entire context surrounding a game to explain the competing interpretations of these examples. Nor does she use academic research or anything else substantive to explain why the audience should agree with her interpretation more than any other. Moreover, she does not concede that there is the slightest possibility of ambiguity in how someone should interpret the trope examples. Instead, by offering one conclusory interpretation after the next, she has created an unsubstantiated opinion piece rather than a well-argued and fair opinion or expository piece. As a result, I ended up very confused about what the goal of this video series actually was, aside from getting people to talk about women in video games. You could say that I'm just complaining about form over substance, but in my experience, they really do go hand-in-hand. I mean, my whole career is about crafting persuasive arguments. P.S. Before anyone calls me on it, yes I did change my opinion a bit from earlier in the thread. However, I still don't have any ill will toward Anita. This is only a critique of her work, not of her.

I have no issues with her output or quality of the videos, but her argument does not feel complete to me. A lot of her points are overly conclusory because her analysis of each example of the trope is very cursory. I want to see her do more of what she did in this second video by anticipating common counterarguments and dissecting them more thoroughly. Although I think her conclusions are probably correct, what bothers me the most is that she cites absolutely nothing that would give the viewer a good reason to agree these depictions are harmful. Is there research that shows media predisposes men and women to think in certain ways? If so, it's a pretty important thing that shouldn't be left out--or at least be put into a list of references. If she is doing actual social-scientific research herself, I want to see it. As it is, I don't consider her to be an authority of anything more than her anecdotal experiences, and that does not make for a compelling argument to me.

I fundamentally disagree with your idea of merit. This video touches on how I try to understand the idea:

I won't pretend I'm entirely familiar with the academic view of what "whiteness" is, but yes, I agree the meaning is circumstantial. When I said "historically," I was distinctly thinking of the history of African Americans, who were contrasted with "white" people. Admittedly, I might be revealing that my education has been fraught with similar oversimplified labels, but I'm not sure how to practically talk about what I mean without writing a book about what I mean by short-hand labels like "white." I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "tearing down" demographics or why that's desirable.

Frankly and generally speaking, straight white men will always find a way to feel persecuted by or resentful toward any attempt to reverse the effects of harmful discrimination. Historically, it's been par for the course when making any actual social progress. I would gladly have more enthusiastic women developing games today if the sacrifice for it is no longer pacifying men who have problematic definitions of merit anyway. We can go the idealistic route of trying to change individuals' attitudes rather than making systemic changes, sure. That sort of solution is very palatable to people who already benefit from a system as it is. But it does little good to minorities who ought to have greater access now. I just don't see it as pragmatic.

Actually there's going to be at least one more part to the Damsels in Distress episode.

Except I already acknowledged that my use of that term was not tactful many pages earlier, and what I said literally weeks ago isn't relevant here. You're just deflecting. If for whatever reason you only have a problem with changing the "plot/characters/settings" in Zelda, fine, let's stick to Zelda. I play Zelda games for the action/puzzle gameplay, unique world environment, music, and sometimes for the story. If the game had the option of making my main playable character a girl, it wouldn't brother me at all because the main character's gender has no bearing on my gaming experience. Link doesn't have enough character for a change in gender to even affect the story. As far as having an optional female playable character in the game, I can think of some reasons why it would be beneficial, and I can't see any good reason why not.

I don't know why anyone would have a legitimate problem with a female Nintendo character having a more active role in the game. It wouldn't take away from my enjoyment at all if Peach were playable or did something other than get kidnapped in a mainstream Mario title, and I'm a guy. I actually think it could make the game more interesting if they did it right. "Raging feminist" is a really meaningless label to put on anyone.

Good post. I'll be thinking about this more in-depth when my law school finals are over in late May. Regardless of what you think of her approach, I don't think her delay in releasing videos is for lack of content she finds objectionable. She posted this on her Facebook page: http://tropesversuswomen.tumblr.com

DJP: I'm interested in your thoughts on this. I guess I'm not sure how to ask this question in a smart way, but could you elaborate on what a more modern feminist critique of video games would look like? Structurally and content-wise, how could Anita's presentation improve? I don't particularly agree with how Anita structured her argument because I don't completely understand precisely what she is trying to do. But on other fora, I've been completely shot down as a sexist for suggesting there's room for improvement in her presentation and methods of persuasion (or instruction, whichever she's going for). I haven't gotten good insight about how she could improve elsewhere, so I thought I'd ask you out of curiosity.

There were a few questionable points in there, and I think KiteTales suggests she's more objective than she is, but overall that was mostly a fair critique. My main critique of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games was the lack of quantitative evidence too. I agree that it's better to have that kind of factual data available to preface analysis and conclusions. Structuring her argument wasn't Anita's strongest point. Though I think part of the confusion for me is that I don't understand precisely who Anita's audience was meant to be, or if she intended to create an academic argument. Not being able to figure that out was another issue I had.

I'm not trying to sweep aside your argument. I just don't think it's valuable to pick apart how she framed the video even if you are making a substantive point, unless you are directing the commentary to her personally in a place where she would read it. I think people's arguments would be a lot easier to parse out and understand if laid out separately from their commentary on Anita's presentation. For the record, I do agree with some of your points.

I'm still occasionally reading this even though the end of my week-long break prevents me from contributing much. Goodness, this thread is taking a nosedive in quality with pointless bickering about the timeliness and quality of the videos and how much you hate the author for foreclosing people's harassment of her. Content-wise, I thought Moguta had the best actual critique of the video's substance in this thread. More discussion of those nuances he/she mentioned would be great, and I hope future videos include that kind of material. I suppose everyone could read tea leaves about what Anita is "actually" saying by looking at her presentation style, diction and tone, but I'm not sure that's actually valuable speculation. All anyone can really do is wait for the rest of her videos and other commentary she has about it. Either way, I don't know how fruitful it would be to look at only one person's thoughts and presentations when you all have your own thoughts to share. Feel free to disagree, but I think that rather than debating semantics and style of her video, a more interesting discussion would focus on what, if anything, is problematic about portrayals of women in gaming.

My free time to spend on this thread has ended, so this will be my last comment here. Snark aside, all I have to say is that comparing what Anita is doing to advocating censorship is disingenuous. Censorship occurs when the government restricts the freedom of speech and expression of ideas. The freedom of expression is not freedom from the consequences of that expression, which includes criticism. Anita is literally fighting developers' creative expression using her own speech. She is not silencing developers or preventing them from creating any sort of game or story they want. She is not even saying "you shouldn't be allowed to create games that promote sexist ideas." All she has offered to the table is her perspective on what she sees as a problem in gaming culture in order to generate more discussion on it. That discussion and inevitable disagreement is what will get developers thinking, paving the way for more creative characters and plotlines--be they more or less like whatever Anita envisions as a positive game character, or maybe something completely different. If anything, this is the opposite of censorship. Anyway, that's all I had left to say. Thanks for the discussion. I'm out.

Saying that I would accuse a person of sexism "regardless of what the actual insult was" would be presumptuous and pretty insulting to my intellect. Respectfully, I don't want to attribute that position to djp, who has not made personal attacks so far.

Calling those men "dudebros" is not the same as calling women sluts, cat ladies, or whatever the implication was. The social context is different. The most you can fault me for is being tactless, which I will accept.

Optimism? I'm confused. I believe if anything, men would move the goalposts further to make it harder to argue that something is sexist. I'm being more pessimistic here than anything. This happens in discussions on any sort of -ism constantly. Frankly, I'm okay with -ism words like sexism or racism overlapping a bit into the territory of being a feeling. I'm interested in the idea of what people mean, not the semantics of whether something is or isn't sexist. As for the deference issue, if the harmed group in question is women, then we should pay some deference to them as opposed to men when it comes to issues involving women. Where I think you misunderstand me is that you believe I mean we should automatically accept what women say and dismiss men. I never made that argument. I fully agree people who argue something is sexist should make a cogent argument as to why it is sexist. That may entail citing to social psychology, which is necessarily driven by studies on how actions make people feel. I simply believe that that we should be putting greater scrutiny on arguments men make, while being more open to listening to women, the harmed group. We should acknowledge that the phenomena we are discussing may be outside the realm of men's experience. Thus, we should measure our comments accordingly. If a woman wants to call something sexist, I'm okay with that. I don't really care about the label, so I'm not as worried about "diluting" it as you are. I'm interested in her argument as to why she thinks that is. Anita Sarkeesian offered her rationale, and I'm not saying we need to unquestioningly agree with everything she says. I know about Justice Stewart's opinion and Miller. I've read both, as law is my trade. It is inappropriate to apply the same standards used in law to academia or casual discussion. Rules created in constitutional law take into consideration many, many factors that the outside world is not limited to, including how a decision would impact courts and the role of the courts in our complicated system of democracy (federalism, separation of powers). The rule that replaced the "I know it when I see it" idea was not especially less vague: The words I bolded are all subject to interpretation, and I would bear down on the case law surrounding that vagueness if I were looking to argue an obscenity case. True, perhaps "I know it when I see it" is not an appropriate standard for a Supreme Court Justice to use, since he or she does not represent the community or its subsets. However, the first part of the test essentially amounts to the same thing, but replaces the judge with the jury in defining the "I" of "I know it when I see it." For the record, while I'm not as smart as these Supreme Court Justices, I will never shy away from challenging their opinions. They are not always as robust or consistent in principle as one might think. While they often do give persuasive opinions, several other Justices and attorneys just as smart as they are will reasonably disagree. I would like to say that even in this discussion here about sexism, I believe reasonable minds can disagree and arrive at opposite conclusions based on sound reasoning. There does not need to be a clear-cut answer. We are not talking about censorship here. I insist that we don't go down this path. I'm not buying this false equivalency, but it's beside the point nonetheless. I want to emphasize that I am not dismissing their opinions. On the contrary, throughout this thread, I've still watched and heard their opinions. However, I have looked at them with greater scrutiny and suspicion because they are not part of the group I believe is harmed by the DiD trope. I have not automatically agreed with everything Anita Sarkeesian has said either, but I am indeed trying harder to understand her perspective on this matter.

How else would you critique a work for being sexist? What I take issue with is the idea that we should not argue that something is sexist if we see it that way unless it is the most obvious possible example of sexism possible. I don't really know where that line is, but I'm pretty sure the goalposts can be moved easily even if we were to find it. I don't believe there can be an intensional definition of -ism words like sexism, racism, etc., where we list out each element of what constitutes the thing. There don't need to be such definitions either. I favor more ostensive definitions that involve a "you know it when you see it" approach, using examples to create a better understanding of what we mean, even if it is not precise. For example, no one knows how to precisely define "burgundy," so the best we can do is point to burgundy-colored things until one gets a functional understanding of what the idea means. Similarly, no one will be able to precisely define the elements of sexism. People who experience the harm first-hand will gain a better contextual understanding of the idea, and of course use the word "sexism" as a more loaded term. Some people necessarily have a truer understanding of what sexism or racism mean than others because of first-hand experience. Unfortunately, such people using these ostensive definitions sets up a subclass of people who just don't understand as well, and feel vulnerable to being labeled “sexist” by those with first-hand experience. This is why less privileged groups like women and other minorities have to work extra hard to make their arguments palatable to more privileged groups. But frankly, I don't believe that requiring less privileged groups to tip-toe around offending privileged groups is constructive to any sort of progress in the grander scheme of things. If a woman like Anita Sarkeesian explores this medium and notices patterns that she feels are harmful, I think we should be more deferential to her and other women who feel there is a problem. In this area, the impact on their demographic is more directly relevant than some dudebros like ThunderF00t and The Amazing Atheist.

I feel like your first paragraph, in one fell swoop, dismisses the entire fields of sociology and social psychology like they are worthless drivel. Like any sort of social science, that kind of information does not give us perfect answers, but it's the best we have to understand the world around us. I don't see why we should ignore it and give up on social progress because our information is imperfect. We don't need to have a precise vision of the world we want; there can be incremental progress in meaningful ways even without that (see: civil rights movement). I'm really not sure where all this stuff from your second paragraph and on is coming from because literally no one in this thread is asking for a quota or forcing a choice in gender in all games. No one's advocating to force developers to do anything but think more critically about their own preconceived biases, so they might create more varied characters and plots. Picking apart cliches that reinforce archaic patterns of thinking makes people more self-aware when they create works of art. This doesn't mean that there can never be a female damsel in distress.