Women Are More Innocent (and more on Anita Sarkeesian)

Women aren't as evil as men. Everyone knows that! Although in case you didn't, game developers have a helpful way to educate you; if there's a female villain in a game, she's the most likely of the bunch to switch to the heroic side or she'll have been hypnotised or brainwashed into being evil instead. One of the two.

Although I try to avoid referring to TV Tropes too often -- I'm a fan of the site but I know Anita Sarkeesian is criticised for taking it at its word a few too many times -- but it has some information on this on the "High Heel Face Turn" and "Females Are More Innocent" pages. The "Sorting Algorithm Of Face Heel Turning" is also worth a quick look ("face" and "heel" are the professional wrestling terms for "good guy" and "bad guy" respectively, in case you didn't know).

The "High Heel Face Turn" trope gets the basic point across but I think it's missing something; going by the definition on that page, the female villain would have to be the lone female on a team of villains to qualify. Not that it's incorrect or any better when it's only a single female villain rather than several but I can think of a game series where all the female villains either switch sides, aren't as villainous, are coerced into being evil via brainwashing or repent how evil they are shortly before death. If you don't want to be kept waiting, I'm thinking of Metal Gear Solid.

Let's start with some others though. Back when I blogged about Batman: Arkham City, I wrote the following:

"There are barely any bad women in the game. Catwoman is an anti-hero. So is Talia Al-Ghul and her all-female army of assassins. Poison Ivy keeps to herself. Harley Quinn is the closest thing to "evil" a woman gets in the game and she plays the comic relief role."

Meanwhile, Mr. Freeze is the closest the game has to a male villain switching sides. He's a lot like Poison Ivy, in that he wants to keep to himself. Even so, he acts pretty selfishly; while Poison Ivy only attacked when Catwoman entered her territory, Mr Freeze shattered a vial of a cure that could save Batman from the illness that plagues him throughout the game purely out of spite. Well, leverage supposedly -- he wanted Batman to help get his wife back but there was nothing to suggest Batman wouldn't have done so anyway -- but clearly spite.

One of the traits that is always present in Mortal Kombat's messed-up canon is Kitana shaking off her brainwashing and joining the good guys. She's raised to believe that she is the daughter of the villain, Shao Kahn, but it doesn't take long for her to find out the truth; that Shao Kahn killed her father, forced her mother, Sindel, into marrying him and adopted Kitana himself. Kitana switches sides, as does her best friend, Jade. Jade was only siding with the villains to keep watch over her best friend. Depending on the timeline you look at for the Mortal Kombat games, Sindel may follow suit and join the heroic side too (but in that particular timeline, so do Ermac and Smoke ... and Raiden turns evil. It's a bit of a mess as the series continues). Kitana and Jade's side-switching is a mainstay of both the old and new Mortal Kombat timelines though, so it looks like there's no way of keeping them evil.

Even in games where the male and female villains are evil for the same reasons, there can be subtle differences. Take the first Mass Effect game, for example. Saren (a male Turian) and Matriarch Beneziah (a genderless Asari but physically female, like all Asari) are both evil because they're in the thrall of Sovereign, a massive ship-slash-AI with mind-controlling powers. Even then, however, Beneziah is given a more sympathetic backstory than Saren.

Then there's Metal Gear Solid, a series where all the female villains have excuses for being evil. In Metal Gear Solid 2, Olga Gurlukovich switched sides because her daughter had been taken from her by the real bad guys (which is an oversimplification but for the sake of this blog, a longer explanation isn't needed). Fortune also turned against at least one of her former villainous colleagues, going so far as to save the good guys' lives before dying of a gunshot wound. In Metal Gear Solid 3, we had The Boss. Long story short, she was never evil. She posed as being evil but the actions of one of the villains led to her plan spiralling out of control and she eventually had to be killed. In Metal Gear Solid 4, there's an all-female team of villains called the Beauty & The Beast Corps. All four women share the same backstory; they all suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Their fragile mental state was exploited and they were each given hi-tech suits to make them deadly soldiers. They're tragic figures more than anything else (or they would be, with a bit more character development).

Sniper Wolf from Metal Gear Solid is the only female villain who didn't either switch sides before dying or get her start by being coerced or brainwashed. Even she is given the noble death that she wants and isn't as much of an extremist as some of the other MGS villains. A few other male villains receive treatment along the same lines as Sniper Wolf -- Vulcan Raven, for example, and Grey Fox is probably more of a tragic figure than anyone in the B&B Corps -- but none along the same lines as, say, Olga or Fortune. Even characters who are supposedly doing good things resort to extremist tactics to do so; this turned out to be Revolver Ocelot's schtick by the end of the series.

This isn't to say that you won't find male villains switching sides or female heroes crossing over to join the bad guys. These few examples aren't the be-all and end-all of female turncoats either. All the games listed do have examples of male characters either switching sides or being coerced into being evil ... but often, the subtle differences between the male and female villains send out different messages. On its own, a female villain switching sides wouldn't matter very much but it raises questions when male and female villains are evil for the same reasons -- like Saren and Beneziah -- but the woman comes across more sympathetically than the man. It's hard not to wonder if there's a motive when, in a game with an even split between male and female villains -- like Arkham City or the Metal Gear Solid series -- the male villains are more evil than the female ones. There's no real reason for it and it can feel like a slightly insulting gesture.

Anyway, onto other things; there are two big important pieces of news this week. Firstly, the blog has a banner! It doesn't fit properly! I'm too lazy to fix it!

Secondly, a blog called Vicsor's Opinion rooted out something surprising about Anita Sarkeesian's damsel in distress videos; none of the game footage shown in the videos were recorded by Anita herself. They all come from Let's Play videos on Youtube and the owner of the blog, Vicsor, has comparison screenshots to prove it. He also made sure to contact some of the owners of the channels hosting the Let's Play videos and posted a reply on his blog to confirm that Feminist Frequency did not contact them to request permission to use their videos in her series.

So what does this mean for Feminist Frequency? Well it doesn't confirm anything except for the fact that Anita didn't use any of the $158,922 she received from Kickstarter to invest in a capture card. It throws up a lot of questions about how the money is being spent, however; we don't know whether there's been any investment in audio/video equipment at all, given that there's no visible or audible change in the quality of Anita's videos. The only difference is a new introduction logo. We also have to wonder if the many months in-between Anita's videos are spent playing games or simply watching Let's Plays. I know it sounds cynical and before this information came out, I wouldn't have even suggested it but hey, who's to say now that it turns out Anita didn't use her own footage?

This is just another addition to a long line of Anita's screw-ups. Questionable money-making methods. Flawed, occasionally sexist arguments with cherry-picked examples. Complete bastardisation of a study to fit the point she wanted to make. And now, stolen footage.

Anita's supporters may think I'm being too harsh. Maybe she doesn't own the games she took footage from. Maybe some were too old to get hold of and it wasn't wise to invest in dated games and consoles. Maybe they were released after she went on the initial spending spree that produced this famous picture. Even so, none of those points explain why she didn't ask permission to use other footage from other people's Let's Play videos. The only explanations for that is that she was either hiding behind "fair use", she didn't think she'd get caught or she arrogantly didn't think she had to ask permission. It's also worth mentioning that on Feminist Frequency's Kickstarter page, Anita states that she plans to reward large donations with a DVD featuring all the episodes of her Tropes Vs Women In Games series. It isn't clear whether she actually plans on selling these DVDs -- personally, I doubt it, considering how large a donation it takes for just one to be given away -- but even giving them away will probably be difficult if even one person takes offence to Anita using their footage in her series.

You know what else this means? Any one of the people whose footage was taken has a legitimate reason to flag Anita's videos as inappropriate and have them removed. I don't believe their case will be watertight but as far as I can see, they may have a chance with factor one of the fair use guidelines. Time will tell.

As always, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me at themalesofgames@gmail.com

The Problem With Patriarchy

I'd like to take a short break from writing about video games specifically and focus on another often-mentioned feminist theory that is constantly brought up when discussing gender issues; patriarchy theory. I thought I'd switch to a different topic because (a) this blog is meant to be about gender issues and video games, albeit focusing on one more than the other and (b) I'm having trouble finding a video online of a cutscene -- and obscure postgame (I believe) cutscene from Star Ocean: The Last Hope -- for a topic that I wanted to write about. I could write the blog without it but it wouldn't be as good.

I normally steer clear of using any feminist/men's rights activist terms on this blog because I want it to feel accessable to the average reader. "Hypoagency". "Privilege". "Rape culture". I've probably mentioned a couple of them before and I know I've brought up "agency" a few times but generally, I stay away from those terms if I can. Although I know that my main traffic comes from people interested in gender issues in the first place, I want the average gamer to be able to take something from it too.

"Patriarchy" is a term that comes up time and time again when discussing gender issues and, irritatingly, it's a term I've heard about half a dozen definitions of. It's a system designed to keep men in power and oppress women. It's a system designed to keep men in power and oppress women and some men. At its least offensive, I've heard it described as "a social system where men act as primary authority figures central to social organisation" (although this was immediately followed-up with the short-sighted "as a result men have privilege and control, and other men and women are subjugated"). I've also heard it described as intentionally malicious or just accidentally oppressive. Thankfully, I was linked to "A Basic Definition Of Patriarchy" yesterday, so maybe that can clear things up a bit.

When it comes up in conversations about gender issues, patriarchy is the umbrella that other gender issues fall under; rape culture is part of patriarchy. Objectification is part of patriarchy. Unequal pay is part of patriarchy, etc, etc. In gaming circles, you might hear phrases like "patriarchal gender roles" or the damsel in distress plot device being due to patriarchy.

Let's get this out of the way now; patriarchy theory is an attempt to put a face and a name to oppression. While both men and women have suffered in different ways throughout history, it's supposedly not enough to say that's simply due to the way society evolved to treat the sexes or because of our culture. There has to be an oppressor ... and the face and name that the oppressor has been given in this case are both male. Using patriarchy theory in an argument has a ton of benefits for the person making it; it frees the person from any acknowledgment of female privilege while simultaneously arguing that males have been swimming in privilege since the dawn of time ("men have the privilege of not knowing they're privileged" sometimes comes up). It also frees up responsibility from any other factors, such as the class system, nationality (Irish, for example) and religion (being Protestant under Mary I springs to mind). It's a huge, cookie-cutter oversimplification of a string of issues concerning social standing and privilege. It's anti-intellectual, shows an ignorance towards historical context and the different definitions of patriarchy only muddy the waters while debating gender issues, rather than clear them.

I think those are sensible enough reasons to rule out arguments about patriarchy but even without them, the real reason I couldn't take it seriously is because it has absolutely no bearing on real life.

A couple of months ago, I watched this video, featuring Erin Pizzey -- founder of one of the world's first women's shelters in 1971 -- discussing domestic violence. She talked about how, in her case, it was generational. She made an effort to get to the root of the problem in a way that simply saying "it's because of patriarchy" doesn't do. I took a few minutes to make a couple of images showing how I would examine men's issues to how someone who believes in patriarchy theory would examine women's issues. Here's mine, first of all:

It's not in-depth or comprehensive by any means -- it had to be small enough to fit in the blog column -- but there's a few men's issues and a few possible causes, or at least possible reasons why they're perpetuated. Lots of different possibilities. Some speculation and uncertainty. With a gender issues board for someone who believes in patriarchy theory, on the other hand:

... There is only certainty. If you think that picture is an exaggeration, take a look at this article from Jezebel. Or maybe you'd prefer hearing it read out at the University Of Toronto protest a few months ago, with added abuse! If you frequent Tumblr, you probably saw it reposted thousands of times too. There's a stereotype of men's rights activists that says they blame all their problems on feminism, which isn't the case, as you can see above. So it's surprising that there are feminists who legitimately do the same thing with patriarchy.

Of course, they have good reason to; passing everything off as the result of patriarchy, feminist groups -- or any other perpetrator of gender issues, for that matter -- don't have to take responsibility for their own role role in perpetuating or even helping to cause gender issues. It's much easier to say "it's patriarchy's fault" than acknowledge intolerance against men instigated by feminists, such as the Duluth model of domestic violence, which treats domestic violence as something solely done by men to women. Or the tender years doctrine, which set a precedent for mothers gaining sole custody of children. Or the National Organization for Women's opposition to a "shovel-ready" stimulus program after the recession hit simply because the workforce would be predominately male (since male-dominated industries were the most badly affected). "Patriarchy hurts men too" is, as well as being an oversimplification, an attempt to rewrite history.

In short, people need to stop using patriarchy as the go-to scapegoat to attack when wanting to fix gender issues. "Demolishing the patriarchy" is like "stamping out the plague of vampiric chickens". It's not something that can be done because it doesn't exist and, even if it could be done, "patriarchy" is such a vast, overarching term that it'd be better to focus on individual gender issues anyway. Instead of saying "patriarchal gender roles", just say "gender roles". It's not like people won't know what you're talking about, you just won't be conjuring up an image of a cackling bogeyman, tapping his fingers together while oppressing women.

Comments welcome. E-mail: themalesofgames@gmail.com. You know what to do by now.

Actually, although I don't respond to all of them, I really do appreciate receiving comments. In fact, if I don't respond, it's usually because I agree and don't just want to add "yep, you're right". So a big "thank you" to everyone who has left a comment in the past.

The Sexism Of The Last Of Us

This post contains major spoilers about The Last Of Us. Only read on if you've already completed the game or don't care about knowing what happens.

I wasn't looking forward to The Last Of Us while it was in development. I've bought games based on the promise of a good story and beautiful environments in the past and been disappointed with them. Lately, I've stuck to Japanese RPGs, solely based on the fact that I know they'll last longer than ten-to-twenty hours. I feel like I've moved past the stage where I can be impressed by developers showing off their graphics, story or environments. Oh, and if it has a cover system, count me out.

So like I said, The Last Of Us wasn't thrilling me during development but a friend let me borrow his copy a few days ago, I played it and I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I was impressed with the way Naughty Dog combined the cover system with the stealth, much like they did in Uncharted with the climbing/platforming. They're one of the few developers I can trust to do cover systems well. I really enjoyed the item crafting, scavenging and weapon upgrading. They added some depth to what I figured would be a very linear game and I wish I'd heard more about it during development.

The story, on the other hand ... hit-and-miss.

To fans of The Last Of Us, I will say that it isn't really sexist against men. Comparing it to something like Heavenly Sword or Lollipop Chainsaw, it's not even in the same league. There were a few things that stood out though. I don't want this to seem like a review of The Last Of Us but I feel like I have to criticise a few things about the game in order to properly explain my points.

First of all though, the story; the game stars Joel, a father whose twelve-year-old daughter is killed on the first night of a zombie outbreak. Twenty years later, when the world is in a post-apocalyptic state, he meets Ellie, a teenage girl who is immune to the infection that has consumed the rest of humanity. Joel is tasked with taking Ellie to a group called the Fireflies, who have been searching for a cure to the infection.

One of the problems I had with The Last Of Us is that almost everyone in the game is a scumbag. Almost everyone. The only real exceptions are Joel's brother, Tommy, some friends and coworkers of his that he's trying to rebuild a small town with and a young boy called Sam. Everyone else, for one reason or another, has an unpleasant quality or two that makes them hard to like. It isn't all bad though and, in fact, in a world where everybody is a scumbag, Joel comes out of it rather well. That's a credit to Naughty Dog's writers; Joel may murder people in cold blood and torture others with knives before killing them too ... but in this world, where everyone is a scumbag, the fact that he eventually grows to show a fatherly instinct towards Ellie actually makes him surprisingly relateable. It's a remarkably positive portrayal of fatherhood.

The Last Of Us does a good job of switching gender roles for the most part. While Joel is a compassionate character (eventually; he's stony when we first see him twenty years after the outbreak but he softens over the course of the game), his female partner at the start of the game, Tess, has some of the qualities of typically (but not always) male anti-heroes, such as stoicism, resourcefulness and facing death with determination and anger rather than fear. She also doesn't bat an eye at killing helpless, unarmed enemies that she dislikes but that seems like a given in The Last Of Us. Later on, Joel and Ellie meet a pair of brothers called Henry and Sam. By this point, Ellie has already handled a gun and saved Joel's life but Henry -- the older brother -- refuses to let Sam do the same. In most aspects, Sam is a male version of Ellie, being born after the outbreak began, being unable to swim but he's also more shy and reserved. It's been noted that it's usually female characters occupying Sam's quieter, more passive role. Plus, the final character killed in the game -- and main "villain", if you can call her that -- is female. Her death is just as graphic as anyone else's too.

It's certainly not perfect though and I had as easy a time spotting the differences as I did the similarities. For one thing, the game falls into the old trap of featuring both men and women as heroes but the only female enemies we see being fought (not including zombies) are Marlene, the aforementioned "villain", and a surgeon that the player can choose to kill at the very end of the game. For the entire rest of the game, men make up the murderers, enemy scavengers and cannibals that the player is tasked with killing. People have put forward the idea that the enemies likely rape and/or kill any women they find, so they're kept out of sight and off the front lines but isn't it just a lazy cliché to assume that all the bad guys are murdering rapists and use that as a justification? There was a lot of hype over at least one positive female character during development -- and the game certainly provides several female characters on the good side who are handy with guns, such as Ellie, Tess and Maria (Tommy's wife) -- so why fall back on a typical stereotype when it comes to deciding the sexes of the good and bad guys?

Then there's Ellie.

One of the big appeals of The Last Of Us during development was the promise that Ellie would be a strong and relateable female character. Since the game's release, reviews have been praising her as "likeable" and a positive portrayal. Personally, I couldn't disagree more.

I came to a few realisations about Ellie; one of them was that female characters can get away with a lot more than male ones and still be considered likeable. There are lots of little qualities that Ellie has that I suspect would have a gender-flipped version of the character branded as a burden or an annoyance. Being unable to swim. Being foul-mouthed. Making snarky comments about a man's weight (and imagine if he was gender-flipped too and it was an attractive male teenager mocking a woman's weight instead).

Speaking of which, that was the moment Ellie stopped being likeable to me. Joel and Ellie are travelling to meet up with a man called Bill, a paranoid survivalist who they think will be able to help them acquire a car. They meet up in the middle of a chaotic scene with a dozen zombies or so and, since this is before Ellie learns how to use a gun, Bill helps the duo fight their way to his safehouse. Once inside, he handcuffs Ellie and begins searching Joel for zombie bites (which Ellie has on her arm, but she's immune to the infection). Ellie escapes her handcuffs quickly and starts beating Bill with a pipe, simply because he handcuffed her. Obviously she was petrified about her bite mark being discovered and if it was just that single attack, I'd be fine with it ... but she maintains her snarky attitude until Bill disappears from the story. This, in spite of the fact that he saved her and Joel from zombies, gave them shelter and helped them find a car. This wasn't pointed out during the game. Later on, I also felt like she ignored Joel's wishes and overstepped her bounds when talking about his deceased daughter, Sarah, so my opinion of her dropped several notches when that cropped up too.

The thing is, while female teenage characters may have a reserved personality like Sam's more than male ones do, it doesn't necessarily mean male teenage characters more frequently have Ellie's brash and snarky personality either. Or if they do, it can instantly make them unlikeable (specifically, I'm thinking of John Connor in the first half of Terminator 2. Not that Ellie was as unsociable but she certainly had a few choice curse words here and there, as well as a rather unpleasant description of something she found in a pornographic magazine).

Then there's the whole chapter with David. While Joel is injured, Ellie searches for food and antibiotics to help him recover. She meets up with a man called David, who, long story short, turns out to be both a cannibal and a pedophile, with an attraction towards Ellie. Ellie ends up killing him after a stealthy boss fight by violently -- although the camera focuses on Ellie, to spare us from the gore -- slicing away at his head with a knife shortly after David tries to rape her. Joel, now on the mend, arrives in time to pull Ellie off him and comfort her.

Now, I'm not one of those people who says that rape doesn't have any place in video games. While I don't think it's as good a threat as death during gameplay -- it'd be a very dark game that had the player escaping rape instead of escaping death -- I think it has its place in a story. Looking at it in the larger context of The Last Of Us though, I think it comes off worse than if it was on its own. For one thing, although The Last Of Us isn't crawling with villains, the male ones, especially David, come off worse than the lone female one; believing that she can find a cure for the infection by operating on Ellie's brain, Marlene authorises some of the Fireflies' surgeons to do so, knowing that it'll kill her. However, not only does she think that curing humanity is worth Ellie's death (which is possibly justifiable in itself), she agonises over it. She's sincere when she talks about how much it hurts her, because she's known Ellie since she was born and was a close friend of her mother's.

The male villains, on the other hand, don't get any sympathetic or morally justifiable reasons for doing what they do. We have Robert, a gun-runner who was supposed to sell guns to Joel and Tess but sold them to the Fireflies instead. He opens fire on them when they came to talk to him, runs away like a coward and makes excuses for why he sold their guns. He ends up having Tess hit him in the leg with a pipe, Joel break his arm and finally gets shot in the head while he's unarmed, injured, helpless and pleading to make a deal for his life. See what I mean when I say that almost everyone in the game is a scumbag? They're supposed to be the good guys. The only other notable villains who receive any focus are an all-male group who fake injuries in order to mug and kill unsuspecting travellers who take sympathy on them. They can hardly justify their actions morally and David, cannabilistic pedophile that he is, speaks for himself. The only hint we get that David is perhaps an extreme example is an enemy conversation that can be overheard that describes how tired his "townspeople" are of indulging him.

David's death irritated me too. People have been saying that it was good that Ellie could handle herself and that, I agree with. She was never a damsel in distress. However, hacking away at David's head with a knife just before he intended to rape her was far too reminiscent of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, in my opinion. Again, on its own, it would be fine but combined with the fact that David was a pedophilic cannibal who attempted to rape Ellie right before being killed makes it seem a bit ... cheap. A bit too blatant an attempt to make the player feel something, if that makes sense.

It's interesting because I had an idea about what I thought would happen that the game's writers decided not to go with; this is off-topic but at one point, David goes to strap Ellie to a table in order to kill her and use her to feed his community and Ellie bites him. She shows David the bite mark on her arm in order to try and trick him into believing that she's infected (and therefore David would be too) but David is too smart to fall for it; not only has he known her for too long that she would've shown signs of becoming a zombie but, as he says, "nobody infected fights that hard to stay alive". Ellie manages to escape in the kerfuffle. Now, I figured that Ellie biting David would lead to his townspeople turning against him and killing him to make sure he didn't become a zombie, while Ellie stealthily made her escape. David's friend, James, had already shown himself to be more gullible than David regarding the bite on Ellie's arm (and given that he'd never met anyone immune to the infection, understandably so) so it wouldn't be a big stretch to assume the townspeople could feel the same way. Even Joel and Tess doubted Ellie's claim that her bite mark was three weeks old when they met her. All that didn't happen though.

I don't want it to seem like I'm too down about The Last Of Us because, like I said, it actually exceeded my expectations. It even has a positive portrayal of a father in Joel and, if feminist gamers and critics are happy with Ellie, fine with me. There are a few pitfalls that the game stumbles into though and at least one of them -- all-male enemies but male and female heroes -- seems very basic to me. Still, it flips a few character archetypes on their heads ... and who could be annoyed about that?

Why, Carolyn Petit, of course! Dismissing the deaths of male characters because they damage her argument that women die to fuel a man's story. Sam. Henry. Robert. David. James. The two guys Joel tortured and murdered (and how likely do you think it is that we'll ever see women receive that treatment in video games?). The many, many male enemies. I'm not going to go into it any more than that but I highly recommend reading the comments (and sorting them by popularity). Aside from the occasional transphobic comment (which I do not approve of at all), members of Gamespot aren't short on common sense. This is another no-win situation Carolyn Petit has created and the long-time members who've seen this from her before are happy to call her out on it. She's basically sending the message that no matter how hard a developer tries -- and believe me, Naughty Dog tried their hearts out -- it'll never be good enough for her.

For a better feminist opinion on The Last Of Us (albeit one that I still don't entirely agree with), Memoirs of a Soulless Ginger has a more balanced, less entitled viewpoint.

Oh, and before I forget, a new anti-feminism-and-gaming blog has made an appearance that is a fantastic read. It's called Virtually Anti-Feminism and it's written by a female programmer in the games industry. Check it out. Her first blog post was about an Anita Sarkeesian happening that I didn't write about because it seemed to slip under everyone's radar and I thought that was a good place to leave it. As it happens though, the post she wrote was longer, more in-depth and better-written than mine would've been, so I highly recommend it and I've already added a link to her blog in the sidebar.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that The Last Of Us is basically a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested version of The Happening? Think about it!

As always, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an e-mail at themalesofgames@gmail.com.

My Dealings With Feminist Frequency

Perhaps "my lack of dealings with Feminist Frequency" would be a better title, since getting into contact with either Anita Sarkeesian herself or any of the colleagues she works with on her video series is more difficult than performing brain surgery, but I think it's worth writing about my attempts to do so. It's probably more accurate to say that this blog post is about Anita's propensity to silence her critics not through rebuttals and counter-arguments but through stonewalling and dismissal.

Why is this so important to spotlight? Well, Anita has made a lot of self-congratulatory statements about how the abusive comments on her video "failed to silence her", such as at her TEDxWomen talk and on her blog. Let's put aside the fact that Anita faced an obligation from Kickstarter to continue with her project or she could've faced legal action according to the site's terms and conditions -- so she could've ended up on the receiving end of a lawsuit if she was "silenced" -- and focus on how Anita and/or her Feminist Frequency colleagues don't have any issue with silencing others.

There are a few problems with this; Anita's fans probably think it's petty of me to bring this up and are sure that Anita only silences people who send abusive messages in her direction. Anita's critics, meanwhile, have probably already seen that the comments on her Youtube videos have been disabled, so there's no point in writing about this. I'm preaching to the choir.

Well to Anita's fans, I promise I'm not pointing this out to be petty. There is a serious point to be made and I have proof that Anita does not only silence abusive messages. As for Anita's critics, I understand why you'd be skeptical but there's a lot more to Feminist Frequency's censorship than disabling Youtube comments, so maybe there'll be some new information you're unfamiliar with.

Let's start with that though; if you've been following Anita's videos at all, you'll know that she disables comments on her Youtube videos, ostensibly because she doesn't want to receive abusive comments. She does the same on feministfrequency.com too.

You probably already know about those two but that's just the start. There's a contact page on feministfrequency.com where, obviously, you can get in touch with Anita. In the middle of last year, before I started writing this blog, that's exactly what I did.

Since this was before I knew I'd be writing a blog like this, I didn't take any screenshots of my message to Anita (and because contacting Anita involves filling out a form, there isn't a record in my own "sent" folder). Basically, I wrote a message to Anita that was very respectful and asked if she would be interested in answering a few questions and I did make it clear that they would involve facing some of the criticism that had been sent in her direction. Also, because Anita specifies that members of the press and people who want to book her for lectures and workshops should say so in their messages, I wrote that I was interested in reading her answers to a few questions because I was hoping to get a job with my regional newspaper. At the time, that was true; my regional newspaper rarely updated its "Games & Technology" section, so I figured I'd be a good fit. As it turned out, neither they nor Anita responded to my e-mails, so it was all a moot point anyway.

As it stands now, nothing I've written above sounds like too big a deal; Anita is free to do what she likes with her videos and website, so disabling comments is her prerogative, isn't it? As for the e-mails, perhaps Anita's inbox was so clogged with messages that she never had a chance to read mine, or maybe she read it and wasn't interested, so she never sent a reply. She doesn't owe me a reply, after all.

While that's all true, things take a darker turn when we look at the Feminist Frequency Facebook page. The Facebook page is significant because it's the only place online that's run by Anita or her Feminist Frequency colleagues where you can actually comment on Feminist Frequency. The comments are open, unlike on the Feminist Frequency Youtube videos and feministfrequency.com. Unfortunately, they're also heavily moderated and very quick to start blocking people and not just to stamp out abuse.

The first time I noticed the comments on the Feminist Frequency page were open, it had just been updated with a link to an article on "Mansplaining" and I decided to stop by to voice my opinion. I was blocked after three comments. Once again, I'm sorry, but I didn't take any screenshots of my comments; it was only after this that I realised I should keep a record every time I was in contact with Feminist Frequency because it might not be there the next time I looked. Firstly, I asked if it was "mansplaining" to suggest that Anita answered the criticism that had been directed towards her. I received a reply saying that Anita didn't have to answer my criticism, to which I responded that I was actually referring to criticism from LeoPirate -- one of Anita's backers that left criticism of her on Youtube -- and not my own criticism. That was the first comment to be deleted and the person that responded to me deleted their own comment.

The third comment I left was in response to someone else, a male commenter called Nick -- his comment has since been deleted but I managed to find mine in my history -- who was full of praise for Anita but disagreed with the term "mansplaining". He felt like it was too confrontational. He would've preferred it if it was called something else, something more gender-neutral. Immediately, Nick was leapt on, he was called a mansplainer himself, I believe they questioned his right to have any say, since he was male and "mansplaining" was a term that described him perfectly according to the responses. I decided to come to his defence, with this:

"'Scuse me, Nick, I have to mansplain your response to the people below you ...

All Nick was doing was questioning if the word was helpful to the feminist movement. Are you really all jumping on him for not falling in line and pledging unquestioning allegiance to a word? That sounds closer to fascism than feminism."

I'll admit that my comments were a bit snarky but I thought it was on-point. This was the comment that ultimately got me blocked from the Feminist Frequency Facebook page. Nick replied to my comment before it was deleted and said thank you for understanding, which I was pleased about, and also made sure to repeat that he was a feminist. His comments were removed too before long and I haven't seen a comment of his since.

After this, I started keeping an eye out for any other comments that were likely to be removed but weren't abusive. I'm very happy to say that I found some. Spot the difference between these two screengrabs from Facebook. For the sake of privacy, I've blocked the identities of the people listed (blue for comments by men, pink for comments by women, purple if I wasn't sure):

It seems like "Annie NoMous" is a pseudonym -- not only does it sound very close to "anonymous" but I checked this person's profile at the time and it was completely blank -- but still, I can't see any reason why their comment was deleted other than the fact that it dared to question Anita Sarkeesian. "Annie" isn't alone either. Take a look at this. The first picture was taken on the 27th of May and the second one was taken yesterday:

Jason Wilkins here is an interesting case because even though his original comment was deleted, he wasn't blocked from commenting on the Facebook page. Anita -- or, if not her, whoever runs the Feminist Frequency Facebook page -- took issue with the suggestion that the Tropes Vs Women videos could be improved by (shock! Horror!) pointing out violence against men in the games featured in the video series. Incidentally, if you're interested, the video he linked to in his comment (twice, accidentally) was KiteTales' rebuttal to Anita's second Damsels In Distress video.

Regardless of how you felt about the comment from "Annie NoMous", can you honestly say that Jason Wilkins' comments deserved to be deleted? He was nothing but courteous and showered Anita's goals with praise. However, because he pointed out that Anita could be doing a better job than she was -- and a more equal job at that -- his comments were quietly, unceremoniously deleted. So how does it work? If Anita is showered with praise, her critic gets off with a warning but if they outright oppose her, they're given the full Stalin-esque "unperson" treatment?

For all of Anita's boasts about abusive comments "failing to silence" her, she has no qualms about silencing others at the drop of a hat. It's about as hypocritical as it gets but it's also no secret why she does it; if it makes Anita look bad, it's getting deleted. Think about it:

• Youtube comments
• feministfrequency.com comments
• E-Mails
• Facebook comments

Oh, and case you didn't know, Anita Sarkeesian's Wikipedia page is completely missing a "Criticism" section, unlike the vast majority of other public figures who analyse anything, not just popular culture. I'd also like to post the relevant part here, just on the off-chance that her page is updated with a Criticism section in the future but someone happens to read this blog afterwards.

(Left-click for a larger view.)

As if all that wasn't enough, Anita has censored herself on occasions when she feels like she's made herself look bad; she removed her Bayonetta video from Youtube after she realised that her dumbing-down of the story, missing the point of the main character's sexualisation and clear lack of experience actually playing the game made her come off poorly. It seems to be a similar case with her university research paper, "I'll Make A Man Out Of You: Strong Women In Science Fiction And Fantasy Television", where her famous take on masculine and feminine traits came from. It was once hosted on feministfrequency.com but she has since removed it. Feel free to download it here!

You see, Feminist Frequency is built on censorship and silencing. It's very image-based, with Anita portraying herself as an almost-flawless central figure. On its own, without Anita's boasts about the abusive critics "failing to silence her", disabling Youtube comments and not answering e-mails seems fine. That's up to her to do. With those boasts, however, censoring perfectly polite and rational criticism is the most hypocritical thing Anita could've done. People telling others that Anita's aren't all cracked up to be? That's a failing on her part, sure, but it's one that can be fixed. Censoring the people who are bringing that up, after singing your own praises about failing to be silenced? Hypocrisy.

Let's finish with something fun. After I was blocked from Facebook, I took a screenshot of the comments section of the "mansplaining" article that Anita linked to and it's interesting to see the comments that made the cut when mine were deleted. If you thought the comment Jason Wilkins was replying to above was ridiculous -- I was astounded to find that someone out there actually uses the word "womyn" -- take a look at a selection of the others that made it. I'd post all of them but the picture would be far too big:

Yeah, criticising Anita is off-limits but "going crazy with a baseball bat" is welcomed under the Feminist Frequency banner. You should see some of the comments I had to cut.

As always, feel free to leave a comment below (you won't be silenced!) or send me an e-mail at themalesofgames@gmail.com (I ... might ignore that. I don't check it every day).

The Microsoft "Rape" Joke at E3

This isn't what I planned to write but I've been thinking about it all morning and I've got more to say on the subject than I realised. For those of you who don't know, Microsoft showed footage from the upcoming Killer Instinct reboot (sequel?) on stage for its conference a couple of days ago and during a match between a man and a woman, this joke was made:

Basically, the female player was losing heavily and her male opponent at one point uses the phrase "just let it happen, it'll be over soon". Cue internet outrage.

First of all, although I didn't find the "joke" funny, I didn't think it was about rape either. That, however, was the conclusion that legions of gamers and game journalists came to immediately after it happened. The idea being that the phrase "just let it happen, it'll be over soon" sounded like something a rapist would say during a rape.

Or possibly something a torture victim would be told during torture. Or a doctor might tell you during an uncomfortable medical procedure. Or a colleague might jokingly tell you during an awkward lunch with your boss. I can recall being told something similar by my parents when I went to a wedding as a kid and got bored during the speeches.

People are free to interpret that line as a rape joke if they like though. Even though it shows an unwillingness to accept different interpretations and give the benefit of the doubt, the phrase being interpreted as a rape joke isn't what bothers me. It's fine and, if that's how you feel, I'm also sorry if it offends you. I hate being offended myself and don't enjoy other people feeling offended. What does bother me is people thinking it's indicative of a larger epidemic of sexism in the gaming industry. That's what these two articles claim, unfortunately.

On its own, I probably wouldn't have much to say about the claim that rape jokes represent sexism against women in the games industry. At this point, I think we've come to expect that reaction. What I want people to take note of is just how low an opinion of women the writers of those two articles have decrying the rape joke.

Personally, when I saw the Killer Instinct gameplay, I figured that maybe the female gamer hadn't played it before. Maybe blocking in Killer Instinct is a fiddly thing to do; I found blocking to be tricky when I played the Injustice: Gods Among Us demo, so my mind immediately went to that. I thought the female player's difficulty was either to do with her opponent's experience, her own inexperience or Killer Instinct itself.

Those two articles I linked to, on the other hand, decide to bring gender into things. Take a look at these quotes:

"In this scripted event the man, of course, kicks the woman's ass at the fighting game. "I can't even block correctly and you're too fast," she says, playing a video game like a girl."

"There's another layer of troubling to this - bringing out a man who worked on the game to beat on a woman (the only woman presenter, I've read, but I did not watch the entire presentation to be sure) feels an awful lot like an attempt to reinforce the 'girls can't play games' elitism that permeates the lower strata of game culture."

These two articles, from The Atlantic Wire and Badass Digest, are quick to try and brand the woman a victim, as well as judge her skills as a gamer and enforce gender stereotypes about the way she plays. They're quickest to draw conclusions about Microsoft's intent, the male player and the male audience members who laughed at the joke:

"That this is the trash talk that a man feels comfortable directing at a woman on a stage in front of thousands of people says an awful lot about that man. That people laughed says an awful lot about that crowd."

"And even if it's not conscious, there's a boy's club mentality to gaming that ends up making women feel very uncomfortable."

Essentially, the writer of the Badass Digest article, Devin Faraci, is quick to brand people sexists because they laughed at something he didn't find funny. Nothing more.

I'm not defending a rather petty, unfunny joke but I am willing to defend a bunch of innocent people from being victimised for enjoying some playful trash talk. Faraci writes about elitism and goes on to say that the rape joke was "indicative of a larger cancer eating away at the gaming community". The only cancer eating away at the gaming community is the game journalists who feel increasingly comfortable insulting people who they disagree with, whether it's George Kamitani of Dragon's Crown fame, the male player of Killer Instinct at E3 or even the portion of the audience who enjoyed the joke.

As for the female player, Ashton "Vulcan" Williams, what did she think of the joke?

I came across the Williams' name in this follow-up article from The Atlantic Wire, which is a mess of contradictions; the writer, Rebecca Greenfield, acknowledges that Williams doesn't care. She quotes this progressive female poster from Reddit, who didn't care. Yet Greenfield, still has the gall to write, "this kind of 'smack talk' not only alienates female would-be gamers but also mimics the rampant sexual harassment in gamer culture". She still makes assumptions about why Williams doesn't care with, "so maybe Ashton Williams doesn't mind the rape joke because she's so used to putting up with that kind of stuff just to make it in the gamer world".

Greenfield's justification for this attitude?

"Yes, gamers talk like this all the time. Others responding to the Xbox exchange, particularly on Reddit, note that gamers — even girl gamers — tend to use similar phrasing all the time while playing, which by their logic makes the E3 incident acceptable."

Okay, so why is their logic wrong but your logic right? They're both opinions so why does Rebecca Greenfield's call for a moratorium on rape jokes make more sense than simply telling people not to care about a throwaway phrase between friends while playing a game? Given that the person on the receiving end of the "rape joke" didn't care, that seems like the more sensible option.

There's a tone involved in articles like these that suggests if you don't agree with their opinion, you're wrong. No room for negotiation. Personally, I don't mind if they're offended by the joke and if that was all they criticised, I could sympathise with them. Unfortunately, their stance being "our opinion is fact" and their insistence on insulting anyone who disagrees has diminished any sympathy I could possibly have for them. Here's a few facts that Rebecca Greenfield and Devin Faraci might want to take into account; men aren't all sexists if they laugh at something you dislike. Women aren't helpless children who need to be mollycoddled even when they don't want to be. Although you can say a lot about the XBox One -- and trust me, I have -- Microsoft having a male player defeat a female player in an on-stage demonstration doesn't mean they're horrible people enforcing a "boys' club" in mainstream gaming. Quite the opposite, actually; they're encouraging female participation of mainstream games by featuring a female player during their biggest conference of the year.

Speaking of that, back when Sony announced the Playstation 4, they were criticised for having no female presenters. Does anyone else find it a little odd that when Microsoft does feature a female presenter, they're hugely criticised for not being a good enough gamer. Not only is it very reminiscent of the supposed attitude towards "fake" geek girls -- having to prove their worth as a gamers (or knowledge of whatever fandom they enjoy) before being accepted by other gamers -- but it comes across as moving the goalposts. There were no claims from the critics of the lack of female presenters that the female presenters had to be good at gaming (and I'm not saying that Ashton "Vulcan" Williams isn't) so this is another case of feminist critics -- you guessed it -- creating a no-win situation. While also being far more critical and judgmental of Ashton Williams than the supposed "boys' club" that they speak out against.

Still, both Greenfield and Faraci are fans of Feminist Frequency. I think we know where they get it from.

As always, feel free to leave a comment below or write to me at themalesofgames@gmail.com

Just a short post for today

Hey all. Sorry that I didn't update sooner. I've been very busy over the past week but I'm pleased to report that my last post was the most-read that this blog's ever had! Not that it's been much of a horse race but nevertheless, it gave me a thrill to look at the pageview stats, so thanks to everyone who contributed.

I'm working on a longer post but here's a short webcomic for today, courtesy of For Lack Of A Better Comic:

Author's comment: "If your Privilege stat is above 20, you are forced to roll a Privilege Check before each conversation."

As always, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail at themalesofgames@gmail.com

Damsel in Distress: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

Anita's back again, with the second part of her three-part series on the damsel in distress. Let's jump right back into it. Since this video deals with the deaths of characters, there will be spoilers throughout this blog post, mostly for older games but for some as recent as Bioshock Infinite. So read at your own peril.

I'm not a fan of Anita Sarkeesian. That should go without saying. Without going too deeply into why, let's just say that it's been a rocky road for Anita over the last year. She made a few too many questionable decisions for me to trust that her video series would be anything but one-sided. To my surprise, her latest video -- part two of three in her damsels in distress series, focusing mainly on damsels in distress who are killed, sometimes by the main character -- was one that I didn't find completely disagreeable. She hasn't won me over. I'm not convinced that Anita is a force for good in gaming and the negatives continue to outweigh the positives. What I am convinced of is that, when it comes to gender stereotypes, her heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, other points put forward by Anita are so biased and outright contradictory at times that having her heart in the right place doesn't help her case in the slightest.

Let's keep it positive though. I'll try not to quote Anita too much this time around and just give some basic summaries but at this point, I'd like to. Talking about male video game characters who lose their wives and daughters -- Max Payne and God Of War's Kratos are the two examples used -- Anita puts forward the idea that the reason these characters go on their roaring rampages of revenge is not because they're trying to avenge the loss of their wives and daughters, whom they loved very much.

"I’d argue that the true source of the pain stems from feelings of weakness and/or guilt over his failure to perform his “socially prescribed” patriarchal duty to protect his women and children.

In this way these failed-hero stories are really about the perceived loss of masculinity, and then the quest to regain that masculinity, primarily by exerting dominance and control, through the performance of violence on others.

Consequently violent revenge based narratives, repeated ad nauseum, can also be harmful to men because they help further limit the possible responses men are allowed to have when faced with death or tragedy. This is unfortunate because interactive media has the potential to be a brilliant medium for people of all genders to explore difficult or painful subjects."

That last paragraph is the important one. The one that I have plenty of praise for. Anita takes note of the fact that male gender roles are very limiting; aggression, dominance, protectiveness, chivalry, resourcefulness ... it's a risk for men to step out certain gender roles and can be frustrating for the ones who don't feel that they can.

One of the problems, however, is that Anita only seems to be stating this because she believes it supports her idea about women being objects rather than fully-rounded people that the protagonist cares about. They're property to get angry about being "taken" from them rather than people to miss. I don't think one guarantees the other. If I also might state the obvious for a moment, another problem is that these are video games. Revenge stories tend to work far better for gameplay purposes than stories about mourning and how to deal with loss. Max Payne and God Of War are based on film noir and violent Greek revenge-stroke-tragedy myths; not the kind of genres that have the heroes reaching for boxes of tissues. At the end of her video, Anita gives a few examples of games that she believes handle the subject of death in games more maturely (specifically Dear Esther, The Passage and To The Moon). Not that I hold anything against these games for doing that but they're not likely to become the standard. I adored To The Moon but haven't touched it ever since I completed it and I'm more likely to play Max Payne before I go near it again.

I'll come back to this later on but there's a much more significant reason why my goodwill towards Anita over acknowledging this hurtful gender stereotype didn't last. The big chunk of the video revolved around what Anita described as "the Euthanised Damsel". This is what happens in a game where a hero manages to catch up to a person he/she has been searching for -- usually a damsel in distress, as the name indicates -- only to find them begging the hero to kill him/her. Perhaps they've been turned into a monster or altered in some other way by the bad guys and they don't wish to live anymore. They'll beg for their rescuer to kill them and the rescuer will respect their wishes. That's the Euthanised Damsel in a nutshell.

The problem is that, while I don't want to say Anita was moving the goalposts at any time, it was a very large pool she was drawing from, based on a varied list of criteria. At one point, it was just women who were beyond saving. Then it was love interests who were too far gone and had to be killed. Then it was family members, mostly mothers. Then it was love interests who didn't have to be killed but did have to be fought to break them out of whatever spell or ailment it was that made them attack the heroes.

We have to wait for Anita's next video to hear her talk about male examples but I have a tendency to pick out a few male analogues to Anita's accusations while she's discussing them. Each time the Euthanised Damsel definition was expanded, there were a few examples that immediately sprang to mind, be they characters like Sinclair in Bioshock 2, Jecht from Final Fantasy X, Steve's father from Resident Evil: Code Veronica and plenty who only had to be attacked, rather than killed, such as Leon in Resident Evil 4 and Baralai in Final Fantasy X-2.

However, there were very few examples I could come up with featuring a male love interest being killed by a female hero. That's partly because, as Anita points out, there are so few female protagonists but even fewer with male love interests. This is slightly off-topic but I think the inclination to place female protagonists in the "strong, independent woman" archetype is a reason why male love interests aren't often featured; perhaps the belief that the heroine is motivated by a man betrays the "independent" part of that archetype. On-topic, however, I read a suggestion on a Youtube video that made me think that a woman euthanising a male "damsel" isn't the real analogue to men euthanising a female one. No, the real analogue is male heroes who die to save their damsels in distress; just like the female characters Anita brings up who request death rather than live as an abomination, male characters are often expected to have no thought for their own safety as long as the female characters are okay.

Capcom is very fond of doing this. In Onimusha 2, one of the story branches features Kotaro sacrificing himself to save Oyu, a woman who he has been largely antagonistic towards for most of the game. In Devil May Cry 4 -- which Anita brought up to point out the damsel in distress, in spite of the fact the game also features Nero being captured -- has Credo betraying his religious order in an attempt to save his sister, Kyrie, and it costs him his life. In Resident Evil: Code Veronica again, Steve is turned into an invincible monster at the end of the game but manages to fight off the transformation, his love for Claire Redfield is so strong. He dies shortly afterwards. This one is quite close to the love interest being killed by the heroine, in that Steve was a "damsel" moments earlier but he dies because his body can't take the transformation rather than because Claire pulled the trigger herself.

Then there's the huge sacrifice made by the hero of Shadow Of The Colossus (although he doesn't die). In Bioshock 2, the hero, Subject Delta, dies regardless of the ending the player receives, while the young woman he set out to save, Eleanor Lamb, lives on. Bioshock Infinite features a similar story, with many different incarnations of Elizabeth drowning her father, Booker DeWitt (who accepts his death willingly), so he doesn't go on to become the game's villain and kidnap her in the first place. That probably sounds confusing if you haven't played Bioshock Infinite and trust me, it's hard enough to understand even if you have.

One of the flaws in Anita's argument is also making the assumption that developers only use the Euthanised Damsel when they wish to shock people. I find that hard to believe. While there are doubtless examples that do exist just to be edgy, it seems like Anita isn't willing to consider the possibility that the writers wanted to create a tragic storyline. Or a storyline with a twist. I can't help but think Anita came to the conclusion that being edgy was the reason why the Euthanised Damsel existed before she looked at her many examples and then just found a way to make them fit her viewpoint.

Those are my thoughts on the "main" portion of Anita's video but in spite of my criticisms, I don't see much of a problem with Anita's dislike of the "Euthanised Damsel". Unlike her first video, Anita isn't as judgemental. There isn't any demonising of Shigeru Miyamoto, for one thing. The attitude is still there though; Anita explains why she dislikes the Euthanised Damsel -- and don't get me wrong, I completely understand why -- but I'm not really given a reason why I should care beyond conjecture and guesswork. The Jack Thompson parallels are still there, this time with regards to domestic violence. More on that later.

That's the important thing -- and, more to the point, the reason I can't get behind Anita as a force for good in gaming -- Anita states, "one of the really insidious things about systemic & institutional sexism is that most often regressive attitudes and harmful gender stereotypes are perpetuated and maintained unintentionally". Unfortunately, Anita herself had already reinforced and condoned harmful gender stereotypes herself at this point. Long story short, she talked at length about domestic violence but her definition followed the Duluth model.

If you know about domestic violence, that should say it all. For those of you who don't, however, the Duluth model is the assumption that domestic violence is "patriarchal"; domestic violence is an act done by men against women and children. If you've been following me for a long time, you'll know that hearing statistics about male victims of domestic violence on television was what interested me in men's rights in the first place. So domestic violence against men is a very prickly subject for me and I do not appreciate having male victims dismissed with gendered language in sentences like "people of all genders tend to buy into the myth that women are the ones to blame for the violence men perpetrate against them". Aside from ignoring male victims and female abusers, it also ignores violence in same-sex couples and doesn't acknowledge reciprocal violence. It is not a healthy, intelligent or accurate image of domestic violence to promote.

Aside from this major problem with Anita's argument, I find her videos peppered with smaller ones too. While Anita's latest video didn't have me shouting curses at my monitor, I did find myself sighing and shaking my head a lot. Her heart may be in the right place -- albeit deep, deep down -- but her solutions are impractical, biased and based on questionable logic and outright contradictory statements. For example, she criticises and dismisses Devil May Cry 4 (and others) for being a "crude, unsophisticated male power fantasy" but also does the same for Ico with "the most decidedly patronizing examples depictions of female vulnerability are used for an easy way for writers to trigger an emotional reaction in male players". That, in particular, made me cringe. Some time ago, Anita removed her video on Bayonetta from her channel because she thought she came across badly in it -- she shrugged off the story and dumbed it down to make it seem insignificant -- and as far as I'm concerned, she's doing the exact same thing with Ico here, with regards to the main gameplay element. You've probably already noted, as I did, Anita's inability to consider that perhaps female players could feel emotionally attached to the characters in Ico.

At one point, Anita repeats the same sentence over and over, wanting to get a point across about a trend: "In [game] your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter." She seems to believe that the trend of daughters being captured is disempowering to women but apparently doesn't consider the possibility that the reason daughters are so frequently kidnapped instead of sons (and possibly husbands too) is because female characters are automatically more sympathetic than male ones, simply because they're female. Games like Heavy Rain, featuring a kidnapped son, are very rare. We feel more for Max Payne and Kratos because they lost daughters, not sons. In Bioshock 1 and 2, the reason for Little Sisters rather than Little Brothers was because it would be more difficult -- and morally questionable -- for the player to sacrifice little girls rather than little boys. In Bioshock 2 and Infinite, the protagonist's main mission is to find mistreated female characters, not male ones. It's the same principle behind "missing white woman syndrome", where the media is more willing to spotlight missing people if they're middle- or upper-class white women than if they're, say, a poor black male.

While it might seem like a good idea for Anita to decide against including violence against women who are treated as equals -- female soldiers and fighting game characters, for example -- there are a number of reasons why it carries some unfortunate implications for men. Back in February, I wrote about the sexism in Heavy Rain, comparing and contrasting two death scenes in particular; one of playable character Madison Paige, having a drill used on her genitals and one of Leland White, the villain of "The Taxidermist" DLC story, who has a chainsaw used on his. White's death is much more violent than Madison's, showing the genital mutilation in full, gory detail while Madison's is treated with more sensitivity; instead of showing the death, the camera cuts to the outside of the house and we hear a scream. The problem is that under Anita's definition, White's death is actually more acceptable than Madison's because he's not a damsel in distress at the time. The grisly nature of his death becomes irrelevant because he still has his agency. While Anita may believe helplessness is required for her definition of "violence against women", I'm afraid that I don't.

Time and again, we're asked to trust in Anita's word only because we're supposed to. We're told to believe the Euthanised Damsel is done for the sake of being edgy, just because that's what Anita thinks is the reason for it. We're told to see the damsels as objects instead of people, since that's the conclusion Anita has come to. While she points out that playing the games she features will not "magically transform players into raging sexists", she also says "media narratives do have a powerful cultivation effect helping to shape cultural attitudes and opinions". There's no explanation why she thinks video games/the trend of damsels and Euthanised Damsels contribute to these cultural attitudes though and that is when we get back into Jack Thompson territory.

This is becoming longer than I intended but I didn't want to leave anything out, so I'll wrap it up. Even without Anita's stance on domestic violence, I wouldn't be able to accept this video. There are just too many little details, too many conclusions drawn from questionable logic for me to support it. That's a shame and I genuinely mean that because, not enjoying depictions of violence against men, I can sympathise with the fact that she is so strongly against the idea of the Euthanised Damsel. However, when Anita says something like "violence against women is a serious global epidemic; therefore, attempts to address the issue in fictional contexts demands a considerable degree of respect, subtlety and nuance", she doesn't seem to realise that she's demanding special treatment. I agree that violence against women deserves to be treated respectfully but she's reading too much into a few too many situations; for example, I'm not sure how many people compare the hero having to kill his fused-with-a-monstrous-alien girlfriend when she asks him to do so in Prey with domestic violence.

Finally, it has to be said ... these are video games. As it happens, there are many important real-life issues that aren't treated with subtlety and nuance. War, for example, has been glamorised ever since Wolfenstein. To ask that all game developers consider how they treat the deaths of soldiers, however, isn't practical for video games. When all is said and done, I could be the most ardent anti-war protestor on the planet but not have any say in what developers should be doing with their own games. The final say is theirs, and rightfully so. The same goes for Anita and her feeling about violence against women in games. That's about all there is to say about it.

Addendum

If you only care about video games, you can stop reading now. This is where I put my investigative hat on and check out the resources Anita used for her video.

Anita posted the list of resources she used for this video on the Feminist Frequency site and they are very telling. Anita's sole resource for the idea that game developers must feature the deaths of women to be "edgy" is this blog post and video. If she actually believes the statement Daria makes in the video then she's actually being more judgmental than I gave her credit for earlier.

While I can't find anything that goes against the claim that "every 9 seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States and on average more than three women are murdered by their boyfriends husbands, or ex-partners every single day", the Every 9 Seconds website states "there are over 4700 U.S. women incarcerated for defending their lives". Let's just say that the founders of Every 9 Seconds may be playing fast and loose with their definition of the term "defending their lives"; I live in the UK but if any of you have been following the trial of Jodi Arias over there in the US, you may know that she claimed she was acting in self-defence and was a victim of domestic violence. Having followed a few cases of women on trial for murder or wounding charges over the years, Arias certainly isn't the first to make this claim.

One of the other resources Anita posts a link to is for the Wellspring Alliance, which looks fine. In fact, on their FAQ page, they mention that they take everyone, "regardless of race, color, national original, gender, sexual orientation, disability or age". Likewise, on the page linked to on Feminist Frequency's website, they state "Men are also victims of domestic violence, as are couples in same-sex relationships". Apparently, Anita decided to ignore that part when she talked about domestic violence herself.

The resource I'd like to focus on the most is "The normalization of violence in heterosexual romantic relationships: Women's narratives of love and violence" by Julia T. Wood. It's from looking at this study that Anita comes to the following conclusion, which she states in her video:

"Research consistently shows that people of all genders tend to buy into the myth that women are the ones to blame for the violence men perpetrate against them. In the same vein, abusive men consistently state that their female targets “deserved it”, “wanted it” or were “asking for it”."

Looking at the study itself, that is not what was said. First of all, this is a single study, with twenty heterosexual women who used to be in abusive relationships. "Consistently" and "people of all genders" are completely misleading. Nothing of the sort is written about this in Wood's research. Secondly, abusive men are not shown to have stated that their female targets "deserved it", "were asking for it" or anything similar. When these phrases come up in Wood's study, they're actually used as reasons why the female abuse victims stayed in abusive relationships:

"The women in this study described their partners' violence against them as understandable at the time it occurred. They justified it using a variety of reasons: 'I deserved it,' 'He didn't really mean it,' 'He was drinking,' 'It could have been worse,' and so forth."

It's very unpleasant, yes, but this isn't what Anita said. She made a claim about how "people of all genders" view abuse that research "consistently" shows but none of the sources provided on feministfrequency.com confirm Anita's claim. I don't know if Anita or her team at Feminist Frequency can provide sources that back up her claim but this, at least, is an outright fabrication.