Anita Sarkeesian - Women as Background Decoration

Feminism has done great things for women over the years. It's brought a better quality of life for your mothers, sisters, and daughters. Please do not disrespect something so important because of extremists who besmirch the name. Much like Christianity gets hate for its extremists, feminism is under the same fire. Many of these women who parade around waving feminism as their banner make me embarrassed and frustrated. At the same time, the men who counter valid arguments with "misandry exists too" also frustrate me. Yes, misandry does exist; and no, it is not right. However, why should we not work to rectify wrongs just because other wrongs exist? Just as there are extremist feminists, there are extremist masculinists. Don't let those people turn you against the other gender. Not all of the other gender are like those extremists. Should I, a woman, think that all of masculism is idiotic hatred for women because I see some man on youtube calling women "animals too stupid for anything but kitchen work"? No. All this hate burying real feminism is such a shame.

my problem with parts of her argument is she;s picking out bits to suit it, now im fine with the prostitution is objectionable its an opinion(im too liberterian to agree with anything between consentual adults being illegal personally though), she then goes on to use then you can beat the prostitute up for a refund, now seen as how you can beat up nearly all npc's in GTA for a cash prize thats where she loses me, either all assault/murder is bad or its not, in my mind theirs people and they get all the same rights when they reach majority(children cant have the same exact rights for obvious reasons)

She doesn't seem to realize it but she is hampering the feminist movement by a nice amount.

What an idiot.

Nothing cash views like controversy. Oldest trick in the book.

So, I watched the entire thing, but I can't help but feel her focus is too narrow. Almost every example of a "hyper-sexualized" woman in her video are sex workers or strippers. In many cases, they are not slaves in this role but women who chose this profession. As well, they are never out of place or seemingly on screen for no reason. They are in a seedy area of town, a brothel or a strip club. These places do exist in real life, game devs are not fabricating these scenarios in order to simply demean women.

The video then goes on to say that the NPC are either disposable, interchangeable or inconsequential to the story but only points to open world sandboxes as examples. I'm sorry, but how many random male NPCs walking on the streets of a GTA game don't fit all of these characteristics? All sandbox NPCs fit this role; to simply give the world a sense of "life".

Then we get into the part about how violence against women is encouraged? The video shows more sandbox gameplay of the player just randomly beating up women for no reason. This is just the player choosing to do this, there is no specific reward for doing anything shown, nor is the activity limited to women. One could just as easily punch a dude in the face or shoot up a car full of men. To say the violence is targeted to women only seems to make little sense as this is purely player driven.

As well, over all of my time playing games I have likely killed 100 men for every 1 woman. Men are the faceless, nameless grunts of every evil corporation and mafia. They are the drug dealers, the thugs and the "bad guys" of nearly every game.

Are women in games used as "eye candy" or "decoration"? Sure, about as much as they are in real life. Go to a racing event, there are woman dressed like she shows in her video. Go to a strip club, it's about what you would expect. Brothels do exist in poor areas! Games are simply acting as a mirror to reality.

Sex sells

Doesn't this scam artist have better things to be doing than complaining about video games? Of course, that applies to pretty much every one of these tumblr-feminists and other SJWs that take to the internet and complain about all the inane shit that is hurting their butt or making them burst into an episode of PTSD on that particular day.

for years and years. "we want/need games to become more adult" it happens "omg too much adult things we cant handle it"

its not just games its EVERYTHING, games have just caught up to the rest of the world around it.

The real question that everyone is forgetting to ask here is will they be able to mod her into GTAV as a stripper?

It seems everyone forgot she scammed a lot of people a huge amount of money with a fundraiser to make a show , a show where she stole every piece of footage , and bought a crappy camera, no content (not like im going to watch that stuff , she doesn't even know anything about the games she talks about or else she would have never attacked Zelda's image).
She also claimed she didn't like videogames at her univ , while on the internet she claims she's a gamer.

Treating women as less than human is nothing new, and even goes back into ancient times. Such as, common law practice back 2000+ years ago, women weren't seen as much. Men could divorce them for the slightest things, and common law said the man owned everything, even the clothes on his wife's body, and he could take everything in full support and protection of the law; this was LONG before video games were even an idea, and many countries today are not much better. Is Anita correct when she talks about studies linking such to such, or is this all just a part of the much bigger problem at hand?

I'm all for equality of the genders, races etc, and I'm happy about women's suffrage, their right to vote in the last century of the US & etc, but I think Anita should do a lot more research, spanning back to the beginnings of people(s) on this Earth before she draws her conclusions.

She made around US$ 158.000,00 on her kickstarter.

Now even i want to be a feminist!

All her talk about Tropes vs Women in Video Games makes me wonder, if she were to design a video game, what would it be like?

Too bad we can't have a complex discussion about this. I'd like to be able to actually critique her videos without "SHE'S A FEMINIST DON'T PICK ON HER" or "RETARDED BITCH NEEDS TO GET BACK TO THGE KITCHEBN SANDIWHCES DON'T MAKE THEMSELVES".

I'd love to talk about why and where she's wrong, why comparing treatment of men to treatment of women in games does not work, and how her videos could be better, but it's not happening. And I sure as hell am not going to try here. Y'all motherfuckers are a waste of time. Though I might stop by to laugh at the drama every once in a while.
Now if y'all will excuse me, it's the 17th, which means I've got a bank heist to prepare for. A big, beautiful, benevolent
one. Try not to embarrass yourselves too much. Cheers~

i don't want to argue since, every side have each of their own point, but i only want to point out a simple fact that everybody try to swept it under the rug, that is "EVERYBODY IS LOVE SEE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE", that a fact, i love to see manly man with a splendid mustache much & a splendid body much as see a pretty sexy or "kawaii" depend on what i see . So game, book, movie ONLY TRY TO SATISFY THAT DEMAND , so that really is such a sin ?.

There is gender injustice , no question about it, but the way those feminist movement make me feel like they simply want to turn the world into a amazon kingdom where woman take charge of everything, instead of blurring the different & the unfair between gender

"Let's package our women like pieces of meat, train them to display themselves as pieces of meat, teach our men to see them as pieces of meat, and then complain when our women get treated like pieces of meat."

Idiocy in action.

Somewhere, somehow, xarabas has posted in this thread, and I agree with him.

In other news, I really hate when the prompt to a discussion is nothing more than a link to a video :|

I thought this was going to be about that.

I'm not even going to click on that link because giving her views is almost as bad as giving Kotaku page hits.

Both of them are sensationalist bullshit.

At this point she's not even a feminist, she's just an attention whore who is practically grasping for straws for things to complain and bitch about.

These are the same people who think that video games are art, and at the same time they want to make someone else's "art" conform to their expectations and pander directly to them.

For fuck's sake, if it's an art medium you don't complain to Picasso about how his woman in the red armchair doesn't represent her equally as the violin player he drew.

LOL Geez who cares, seriously I don't give a shit about both sides. Stop hating on her you guys just embarrass yourselves.

(P.S. I'm a guy who dated a radical feminist)

The problem is just censoring something that you don't like doesn't solve the discourse. If you have a problem with how games portray women, communicate that in a way that matters. Simply telling people to hide it doesn't change how people think, and demonstrating the vileness of something by whining about it rarely solves the problem. If you really want to change something, make a cogent argument about the harmful effects RATHER THAN just shaming people for enjoying content you don't like or telling people to sequester it away.