Anita Sarkeesian and the People Who Hate Her | Big Joel

hey everybody uh today i'm gonna talk about anita sarkeesian a feminist game critic who became incredibly famous on the internet around 2012. so anita sarkeesian is without a doubt one of the most divisive figures i can think of at least within a very specific cultural context to the skeptics and anti-sjws she's seen in all ways as a force for bad a dishonest critic an opportunist a scam artist an ideologue a huge dick and they say everyone hates you because you're a dick so what i'll call the internet left however she was broadly understood as an all-around decent critic who was unfairly maligned harassed and abused because she was a woman who spoke about feminism and about her unfair treatment on the internet now i feel like i'm coming off right now like i'm a weird internet reasonable man and that's really not how i feel that is i side firmly with the internet left on this issue i genuinely like anita sarkeesian i agree with lots of her points and thought she was pretty cool before i knew she was somebody who everybody hated even if i didn't like her though i still wouldn't think she deserved the ire of the public you know threats and harassment from people who hated every fiber of her being as an internet person myself i've probably tasted less than one percent of the [ __ ] she has and honestly even that much is enough to send fear right through my whole bod so why am i bringing up all this stuff so early it's because none of that stuff is really what i'm here to talk about this video isn't about condemning the people who hated on or harassed sarkeesian nor is it a defense of her work i mean don't get me wrong lots of the stuff i say here will be related to both of those things but they're not really the point no this video is about one thing it's about the way that art is interpreted and about how it's given meaning i'm going to be looking closely at a few people mostly thunderfoot and sargon of akkad people who strongly disagreed with anita sarkeesian and who made a series of arguments attempting to disprove her work and my basic position here is that underpinning their work is an understanding of art that is both fundamentally misguided and ultimately pretty harmful so if you're ready for some of that i'm ready for some of this me talking to you for like 30 minutes about this stuff are you ready cool part one what's at stake here so over the course of her work anita sarkeesian made her fair share of videos about games and she covered a pretty wide variety of topics but looking at her work altogether we can see that it tends to revolve around two simple points that were both incredibly controversial on youtube and we're going to be spending like this entire video going through these points and seeing how people reacted to them so here's the first big argument that anita sarkeesian wants to make that looking at games we can see a general tendency toward centralizing narratives of male and particularly straight male empowerment and what's more that this narrative tends to place the women of video games into some pretty weird positions women are less likely to be the protagonists of games they're more likely to be presented as sexually appealing to have their bodies put on display they're more likely to take on passive or victimized positions as damsels there to be rescued by predominantly male heroes you know things like that the basic idea is that within many games women are used as a prop so that the mostly straight male audience can fantasize about attaining various forms of power now the vast majority of anita sarkeesian's work is spent giving examples to support this position and not being an expert in games myself i can't really go through her work fact-checking each and every one of those examples besides that's not really something that interests me anyway so instead let's just go through some videos made by thunderfoot where he tries to argue that everything about anita sarkeesian's claim here is ridiculous in the first moments of the first video thunderfoot ever made about anita sarkeesian he looks at what she says about the game double dragon and tries to refute it with two pieces of evidence first anita's idea that men are empowered and women disempowered by the story of this game is blatantly wrong because at the end of the game the damsel gets to punch the bad guy pattern of presenting women as fundamentally weak ineffective or ultimately incapable has larger ramifications beyond the characters themselves and yeah that's right the game that ends with marion breaking a 20-foot tall super space-lit man in half like a toothpick by punching him in balls is apparently the pattern of presenting women as fundamentally weak ineffective second that this story isn't about male power or female victimization at all it's about love i mean let me just give you a couple of scenarios here anita billy's girlfriend gets punched in the stomach and abducted by a gang of thugs which of the following options defines the healthier relationship that he immediately sets out risking his own safety to try and protect his loved ones or that he decides she's a grown adult and can look after herself so looking at both these bits of evidence we can see a sort of interesting tendency in them in a nutshell it's the refusal to engage with art as something that is fundamentally different from the real world like he approaches the events of double dragon as though they really happened and given that approach his arguments against anita sarkeesian kind of make sense the woman who was kidnapped wasn't some passive object who needed saving actually she acted like quite the badass dealing the final blow against the bad guy and our protagonist jimmy he's not trying to gain power his girlfriend was violently taken and he acted nobly risked everything to save her if all these events really happened they would tell the story of a hero and of his capable gf who was put into a bad situation and it would seem almost crude to use words like male power fantasy or female objectification to describe a story as beautiful as that this argument from thunderfoot is of course ridiculous it goes without saying but games aren't the same as real life events because what happens in games is a choice made by people who wanted the experience of playing to be as fun or pleasurable or interesting as possible jimmy's girlfriend didn't need to get beaten up we didn't need to see her panties as she was taken away and while it may be somewhat empowering when she punches the bad guy we can recognize that this action is not central to the game over the course of playing you are always jimmy a bro who punches other bros and your job is to rescue a woman who is entirely passive and who has no control over what you do in the game double dragon might be a story about heroism in some broad sense but it's also a male power fantasy it makes you feel good because you get to play as a badass and part of that fantasy is obviously achieved through violence against and sexualization of a female character and we can see a few more examples of this kind of argument popping up in thunderfoot's videos like at one point anita wants to say that mario games are generally male-centered narratives that are structured around women losing agency but thunderfoot has this to say one problem with a mario example mario just so we are clear is an italian plumber it really is hard to think of a more underrated underprivileged disposable and instantly forgettable male peach on the other hand is a princess well no privilege there then oh i'm sorry did your pop culture critic feminist and womanly skills miss that and again if mario games happened in real life he'd be correct we would have to account for peach's princess privilege and for mario's blue-collar job and it would be strange looking at all that information to say that mario is the one with power here but clearly this doesn't really work looking at mario games it might be interesting to point out that peach is of a higher social strata than mario is but as far as the game is concerned this fact never means anything for the entire game peach is a princess in name and dress alone her character exists only so that agency can be taken from her so that the protagonist can save the day and win the lady back so is this game a story about social structures well maybe i mean i kinda like that idea but no matter what it's also a story about dudes getting and exerting power one that's facilitated through women losing power one final example and i'll try to keep this one short because i know this is getting old in a video called women as background decoration anita sarkeesian points to this scene as an example of the things we've been talking about sorry all booked up too bad too because i would have given a stud like you a free sample and thunderfoot disagrees with her by saying this now for anita that's just turning a woman into an object however i see a different image in this video game scene this woman is not only in control she's the one calling the shots she's the one making her sexual intentions plain which personally i think is entirely healthy now again if this lady were a real human thunderfoot would be right that she was exerting agency here women wanting to have sex with hotties is not male-centric it happens all the time and for that reason thunderf00t can't see any male centrism here but no this isn't the real world it's a game and while this character's actions can certainly be read as sexually liberating and while i wouldn't blame anybody for reading it that way we also have to acknowledge what this scene does and how it appeals to people this woman probably doesn't have many other lines in this game she doesn't seem like a person who has a number of character traits outside of her desire to have sex with the protagonist she exists to say this line to be sexual and to only be sexual to make the player character feel powerful and cool too bad too because i would have given a stud like you a free sample so why have i spent like five minutes now discussing one argument from a strange man on the internet are these points really deserving of all that attention have i said something that surprised you well maybe not but these positions are going to get interesting when we realize this refusal to engage with obvious and readily apparent interpretations of art this failure to understand that we can interpret games differently from real life this isn't some bad outlier in a sea of more coherent arguments rather it's the main idea that these people rely on it's what they're trying to sell us part two what's really at stake here okay that's the first main position that anita sarkeesian wants to make that games have a tendency toward centralizing male narratives and toward using women as either props or afterthoughts in those narratives so here's her second and much more important position that games being like that that's a problem anita isn't just here to make a bunch of neutral statements about what video games are like she wants to say that video games have some relationship to things like sexism misogyny the patriarchy negative and pervasive stuff she sees in our culture and this second claim is really where the meat of sarkeesian hate came from see people like thunderfoot or sargon like to make little arguments against sarkeesian's descriptions of games made the silly points we've talked about before or nitpicked small errors in her analysis see she spoke too broadly about hitman her general observations about video games must be totally off base but when we look at these people's videos we can usually find a common gesture one that's presented either explicitly or implicitly sure they say maybe games are often constructed around male ego fantasies and maybe women are often subservient to those fantasies but so what why is that bad or sexist or anything like that what's wrong with the hot ladies in my video games and as we're gonna see in order to sustain this attack on anita sarkeesian's work in order to make her look as bad as humanly possible these youtubers are going to give us a very bent unnatural vision of what media is and of how we can interact with it so let's start with our main example the thing we're going to talk about for the longest the way these youtubers discuss cultivation theory cultivation theory is an area of research and psychology that attempts to study and demonstrate the impact that media has on people the sorts of behaviors and dispositions it cultivates and when these youtubers talk about this theory it is always to point out that the research has proven it false and apparently a four-fold rise in the number of people playing video games has not led to any kind of increase in violent crime whatsoever it has in fact coincided with a decrease a dramatic decrease in these crime rates and this is despite the overall trend of increasing population that games have no negative impacts and after the game burnout was released you'd have expected to have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people trying to cause as much damage as possible in a suicidal car wreck and we didn't that we have the science and the science proves that anita sarkeesian is wrong because i am from gamergate and i care about facts and evidence and reason now this argument is really fascinating to me because it seems to rely on an understanding of art that is both totally wrong-headed and a bit gross like okay let's say for the sake of argument that these people are absolutely right about their science every study we've done shows that video games cause no shift in behavior or disposition our research into cultivation theory has given us nothing but a bunch of bummed out psychologists now assuming all this let's ask a question what exactly would these findings mean to anita sarkeesian's claim that video games can be harmful well to these youtubers it seems like it would mean everything mean that her entire work was a sham no matter how much anita needs there to be a connection between playing video games and their behavior in reality because let's be real if there wasn't the entire premise of the series that she got feminists to give her a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to explore would be [ __ ] but to me it would mean absolutely nothing and why is that well here's one big reason i don't think that science is actually capable of disproving obvious facts about the way people work media's ability to cultivate behaviors emotions and dispositions isn't some incidental point about it that requires further proof rather it's the entire reason why media exists in the first place people seek out art to be affected by it to learn things or feel things people make art to give others those experiences to connect with their audience or persuade them or whatever media is cultivation it is the process through which the ideas and imaginations of others can be made somewhat available to us so that we can understand and be affected by them and science might be able to describe and quantify the impact that art has but it can't be used to deny the fact that art exists or that what it says matters to us but okay as much as i like this sort of utopian talk about how art is inherently meaningful and as much as i think that's true it doesn't really resolve thunderfoot or sargon's challenge here sure they might say art is by its nature in active cultivation but how were we supposed to know what it's cultivating and more than that how can we possibly tell when that cultivation is bad well to these tubers to make the claim that any work of art is cultivating bad stuff we'd have to look at the way that work of art is received by the surrounding culture study the impact that it's had and find out if it's causing real people to do terrible things to each other so i guess we're back to using science and cultivation theory to prove our points about media and since the murder rate isn't up and since sex crimes aren't on the rise i guess that the pattern sarkeesian is pointing out in video games can't really be a bad thing now i can honestly see why this argument was compelling to people it seems to make a lot of sense right if you want to say that art is bad you got to make sure that it causes bad stuff to happen but even though i'm sympathetic to the people who bought into this logic it is still as far as i'm concerned terrible logic and that's for one reason when people say that art has destructive or toxic messages they are almost never referring to the literal destructive impact that the art had on the real world instead they're making a claim about the work itself about what it says to us so to show you what i mean by that let's do a little thought experiment say a film is made that is unabashedly nazi propaganda let's call it lubin schluben every moment in this film conveys an unironic love for nazis and an explicit hatred of jews let's say that this film is so horrendously racist that nobody in society can possibly be influenced by it to become nazis the vast majority of people watch it critically tear it apart maybe even reflect on how silly and gross nazism is the remaining minority might enjoy and agree with the film but those people are incapable of becoming more nazi than they already are they are peak nazi already agreeing with all of the film's messages before they ever saw it now if what sargon and thunderfoot says is true if the only way to say a work of art is toxic is to look at its literal impact on society then we would be unable to condemn lubenschluben since the film has no tangible effect on anyone's behavior but see that position makes no sense at all everybody with a brain knows that this movie is bad politically not in a way that means we should ban it but in a way that is worthy of our scorn and disgust and it's not bad because somebody might become a nazi when they see it no it's bad because it advocates bad things nazis are evil luben schlubin likes nazis so lubenschluben is evil that's it our burden of proof has been met now watching anita sarkeesian's videos she does cite cultivation theory a few times says there's a causal relationship between video games being the way they are and people being sexist and to be honest i kind of wish she hadn't said those things like i think they're probably valid to some extent but i do genuinely believe that cultivation theory is a huge confusing red herring and a waste of a media critic's time nine times out of ten but that said when you look at the trajectory of sarkeesian's work you can see that she means something very similar to what we described in our thought experiment we can see this whenever she talks about games it's pretty obvious but let's just look at one example in her discussion of double dragon she calls the game's treatment of violence against women regressive crap most recently double dragon neon in 2012 reintroduced new gamers to this regressive crap yet again and it's not like she had some data to back that up right she didn't wait for the double dragon studies to come in and prove that the game causes regressive behaviors and of course she didn't do that because she doesn't have to she is a person who experienced this work of art and she's claiming here that what she saw in it was bad that it normalizes the idea that women should be used as passive props in the narratives of men that it stipulates that violence against women can be understood as erotic when anita sarkeesian sees these things in society she thinks they're awful problems and for that reason and that reason alone she also thinks they're awful when advocated for in media okay i can already feel some comments coming in objecting to the things i've said here and that's fair enough so let's move on to some other anti-anita sarkeesian arguments like here's a thing that these youtubers might say sure it's maybe the case that certain nazi propaganda films can be condemned on their own merits because they explicitly call for harmful acts to be done but that same logic cannot be applied so easily to the games that anita says are problematic because those games don't all call for harmful acts like sarkeesian criticizes the use of prostitution in games but as thunderfoot points out prostitution is not inherently any more immoral than is any other labor exchange we're all selling our bodies in one way or another so why are we gunning after sex work here you see the core here is anita wants women to be ashamed of selling sex or sexual imagery and i think that if they want to make an informed decision to sell sex or sexual imagery then that's fine or sarkeesian criticizes the use of damsels in video games but as the amazing atheist points out in his cameo in this video when women are damseled in these games it's usually posed as a negative thing something that the protagonist must put an end to i could perhaps understand that attitude if the games anita was attacking were advocating such a thing but these acts are almost universally committed by the bad guys who the hero must then defeat now honestly i think this is a really lackluster argument it just doesn't make sense to reserve our judgments of media to only those things that the work is actively calling for we also have to look at subtext and coding and the way that the work creates meaning in the wider worlds of art and culture and keeping with our nazi propaganda theme which i guess we have here uh let's use let's use this boy as an example now if we were all living in some kind of post-bigotry utopia that never had any concept of anti-semitism it's hard to see why this image would be a problem there's nothing wrong with having a greedy character in your media so why would it be wrong here and yes this guy is recognizably a grotesque rendering of various jewish characteristics but why is that a problem isn't it okay to draw people jewish people included in a grotesque manner and besides what harm is this image advocating he's just a boy an innocent boy minding his own business hunting for turnips but no this image obviously sucks because in the society it was used in it conveyed terrible ideas it served to implicitly justify racial hierarchy and to normalize the idea that jewish people were sub-human it is because we recognize that this piece of art is a reflection of the culture that made it and because the opinions expressed by it are still present in modern society that we say this art is harmful it's not all about what happens on the surface level and because of this when we're presented with these games we'll sometimes have to answer complicated questions for instance what perspective does this game have on prostitution oh hello honey looking for good time i can give you a good deal too bad you have friends around i'm not into groupting come around next time i might even give you freebie to make up for it does it make us reconsider our puritanical sex negative biases give us empathy for the people who work these jobs or does it sort of thoughtlessly glorify a series of bad things portray sex trafficking and tourism as fun and goofy and alluring play into a historical tendency to treat asian people as exotic and subservient i haven't played whatever game i'm pulling a clip from here i can't answer this question and the answer might be very complex but when anita sarkeesian says that the second answer is more true and gives evidence for the idea that that's a common theme in video games responding with the statement but in a vacuum prostitution is perfectly fine is not a real argument it doesn't actually deal with the work at hand or the society that made it all it's really saying is i don't see anything wrong with this drawing i can't see what you're finding a problem with here and it's like cool you know got him dude alright uh one last super quick argument thunderfoot sometimes says that games can't be sexist or harmful because they're sold under capitalism and people buy them notice how the camera moves how it focuses on and zooms in on specific body parts to highlight the aspects of women meant to be the most important my god this pop critic is sharp skills yeah that's quite right anita the camera focuses on the sexual nature of the women because in reality the audience is mostly man he says that like a fair amount and i think these other guys do too it's almost as if these games are designed primarily for men and boys isn't it yeah it's almost as if they had a particular demographic in mind and they catered to that demographic claim 3 the video game industry is dominated by male perspectives surprise [ __ ] surprise but what he seems to have forgotten is that you can buy cigarettes under capitalism and you can buy an apple under capitalism cigarettes kill 400 000 people every year but apples they don't do nearly that much damage it's actually said that they keep the doctors away you might think that cigarettes should remain legal and i'm sympathetic to that idea but you'd have a hard time convincing me that they're not harmful to the people who use them thus i have proven that not everything sold under capitalism is equally good for us okay so looking at all these arguments that these guys made to try to show that anita sarkeesian's points were bad we've been trying to figure out if what they were saying in these videos was true but now that we've shown that they're not true at least to my satisfaction it only makes sense to ask a different kind of question what are these arguments here to do what do they want from us and the answer is simple these arguments whittle away at our ability to interact with media as media to prevent us from making any kind of claim about the impact or importance of art whether it's because the science hasn't come in yet or because we can only talk about the explicit message of a work or because capitalism functions as some kind of safety blanket against criticism the point is always the same you may think that you can talk about the worth of art from a political or moral perspective but in fact that's just a mirage anything you say about media is just an unverified and likely unsupportable position and you should probably forget about it but where does that leave us part three so what's at stake here do these people thunderfoot and sargon do they really believe any of the stuff they've been saying well no of course not these guys like to pretend like they hate anita sarkeesian not because of what she says but because of who she is and the damage she causes they talk about how she sucks because she released her videos slowly and didn't like being harassed on the internet talk about how she's a fraudulent grifter who gets her lackeys to phone in bomb threats so she can make more money she's actually a con artist who fakes and orchestrates her own harassment in order to gain sympathy which she uses to scam people into giving her money it's it is kind of funny because it's so ridiculous is that ridiculous though because i mean you have benefited from threats made at you about how she's a fake gamer and so she shouldn't be talking about games about how she's a hypocrite because she's pretty and uses her clothes and makeup to look even prettier because it's not like you in real life would ever use appearance enhancing cosmetics you know like like bright red lipstick to imply arousal or eye makeup to draw people's attention to your eyes do you think that if i had sex with her she'd [ __ ] me and while i'm sure that these guys really believe all of those things we can still read between the lines here a little bit these guys are unapologetically anti-feminist and because of that they see no reason to change media to make it more feminist and they don't criticize anita sarkeesian's work because of cultivation theory i mean where are the studies that show that these videos are causing murder rates to increase and they don't criticize anita sarkeesian's work because she explicitly calls for immoral actions all she does is give her opinions about media right and they don't criticize anita sarkeesian's videos because they exist outside some benevolent capitalist structure i've got some hot news for you anita sarkeesian's work is actually facilitated by capitalism no they hate anita sarkeesian's work mostly because she says stuff they think is bad she's a feminist who wants various things about games to change and they disagree with her vehemently about it it's the same basic reason why she criticizes games they just hold the opposite position and saying all this it kind of makes you wonder why i'm even making this video i mean i've spent god knows how long now giving my case against these arguments that were said like five years ago they center on a feminist critic who's a lot less relevant than she used to be and meanwhile the people making these points don't even seem to believe them how is this not just me wasting my time well here's why i'm making this video because people like these use arguments like the ones we've talked about to try to control your mind intentionally or unintentionally they are alienating you from one of the most fundamental things about being a human your ability to understand and interpret art as a person who lives in our culture your capacity to recognize messages and to treat the minds and ideas of other people as important you give all that up and what do you even get in return a big slab of dirt that says [ __ ] feminism on it a meaningless token that reminds you that your games are fine and that nothing should ever change about them and that anybody who says different is just an unenlightened snowflake sargon and thunderfoot and whoever else these people want to convince you that they're offering a good deal here that they are giving you more than they are taking away but they're wrong and it matters that they're wrong so uh that's the end of that incredibly long video i hope you enjoyed it if you did go ahead and like comment and subscribe and give me money on patreon if you want to or whatever uh now it's time speaking of patrons for my patreon question of the video miles tufts asks hey mr joel how much thought do you put into your costuming set design for the camera plus narration segments in your videos uh hours and hours to choose that blank red background and put on that sweater but i did get a haircut for this video uh to look better for it so maybe that counts for something so all of the time it took to get that haircut uh that's it alright uh thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 593,155

Keywords: Anita Sarkeesian, sarkeesian, sargon, sargon of akkad, thunderfoot, thunderf00t, thunderf00t anita sarkeesian, sargon of akkad anita sarkeesian, sargon anita sarkeesian criticism, amazing atheist, amazing atheist anita sarkeesian, sargon feminism, thunderf00t feminism, thunderfoot feminsim, gamergate, damsels, anita sarkeesian damsels, big joel, anita sarkeesian and the people who hate her, analysis, video essay, sarkeesian hate

Id: aKaiq1rnSMw

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

It's really facinating the obsession the right wing gamer culture has with her. By the amount of videos made about her, you would think she had a huge channel or was super radical. But her channel only had a few hundred thousand subs- big, but not huge. And from what I've seen her videos are really pretty entry level and not particularly radical. I remember seeing a funny clip where Joe Rogan mocks Sargon for being obsessed with her and he defends himself by saying he's "only" made 40 videos of her.

I've never been able to get into her content, personally. I'm not a gamer so I don't really get most of what she talks about and her style is a little too "BuzzFeed" for my tastes to watch her more broad pop culture videos, but I just don't get why they zeroed in on her so much. She's a medium sized channel with pretty middle of the road feminist views. Seems so strange.

[u/TastyDuck]

Her and her videos became something of a litmus test for me. If a YouTuber I liked started endlessly complaining about her, thatd be a yikes and it signaled their decline into alt right idiocy.

I mean her videos werent great, but acying like shes thr cultural antichrist was extreme to say the least.

RIP non-idiotic skeptic YouTube:(

[u/SaharanMoon]

Big Joel has been doing some great videos lately. First the PragerU video, now this one.

[u/hallflukai]

If Big Joel happens to swing by the comments:

Your audio sounds way, way better with whatever change happened for a bit toward the beginning of the video.

[u/Vilkans]

I feel there are many things misinterpreted, generalized, or simply not researched enough in her work, but these mistakes are hardly a justification for the living hell she had to endure. Makes me uncomfortable knowing I at one point shared the point of view of her detractors.

[u/justhereforalaughtbh]

I've been gaming since I was 3. I've never felt empowered by decorative female background characters who punch one bad guy, my idol as a kid was Lara Croft.

[u/LizardOrgMember5]

This felt like an extension of Dan Olsen’s Thermian Argument video.

[u/justhereforalaughtbh]

Ughhhhhhh @ when men think a woman punching a bad guy=empowering, great example of equality

[u/FictionalGirlfriend]

It started as "but muh vijee gaems" but then Sarkeesian became the target of transference for the weird mommy issues that people who self-identify as "gamers" have. Don't @ me