Feminism

[Humane Hominid]

I agree. People such as Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian and Suey Park are a disgrace to the world, in my opinion. Fortunately Thunderfoot is doing a great job at debunking modern feminists.

Not really. Most of his "debunkings" are non-sequiturs , at best. He mostly attacks straw women.

[brimstoneSalad]

Most of his "debunkings" are non-sequiturs , at best. He mostly attacks straw women.

Or low hanging fruit. Every movement has its nutters, and they're often the most visible.

But I don't know if he has even been trying to attack feminism in general, so much as the radical and irrational extremes?
Sorry, I have only watched a few of his videos on the subject, but that has been my impression.

[Twizelby]

I find the feminsit movement to be very valuable. I consider myself a feminist which is under the umbrella of equalist. I think that as brimstone said a few rotten apples spoil the bunch. I think that here in the US there is very real inequality amongst gender and especially amongst the POC community. I think that as a man I try very hard to keep in mind that terms like patriarchy seem like a personal attack and that we need to not lose sight that we (white men) are the group in power, and that we do not share the same life experience. that being said it does worry me when I see that men have stopped getting degrees in higher education and no one seems to care. I fear that focusing on the most vocal group today (feminists) is leaving out ethnic groups and even the concerns of white men . Though we have few worries they are real and legitimate concerns.

[Humane Hominid]

Or low hanging fruit. Every movement has its nutters, and they're often the most visible.

But I don't know if he has even been trying to attack feminism in general, so much as the radical and irrational extremes?
Sorry, I have only watched a few of his videos on the subject, but that has been my impression.

I've only watched his "debunking" of Anita Sarkeesian all the way through. In it, he completely (and I think deliberately) misses the entire point of her analysis, and "debunks" arguments she never made. Thus, kind of proving her point for her. And Sarkeesian is not by any measure a radical or nutter feminist... except to morons who don't know what feminism is, can't be bothered to find out, and have no interest in learning.

The rest of his anti-feminist videos are too headache-inducingly stupid to watch in one sitting.

[brimstoneSalad]

I've only watched his "debunking" of Anita Sarkeesian all the way through. In it, he completely (and I think deliberately) misses the entire point of her analysis, and "debunks" arguments she never made.

I don't think it was deliberate, but a product of his being in the sciences rather than the arts, fueled in part by that departmental hostility, and irritation at the amount of money she got for it.

I've watched her videos. From an academic perspective, what she's doing seems like an undergrad student project. And as an undergrad student project, I'd have given her an A (although the bar for that is pretty low in most schools). Her videos were generally watchable, and outlined some general trends in feminist criticism without going very in-depth.
She's not doing science, or even a real critical analysis; she's just trying to illustrate certain concepts in feminism using video games.
But therein is the problem- what she has done is, from a more rigorous academic perspective, and particularly from the context of the gaming community, something that falls far short of the expectations she created.

Should she be blamed for that? Well, some have accused her of outright fraud, but I don't think that's right either. She's guilty of youthful stupidity- who hasn't had some grand idea he or she wanted to realize, only to discover the reality of doing just that?
Sounded great in theory, but in practice, doing stuff is hard.
The end result was rather forced- reminiscent of long nights at the library the night before a paper is due, pawing frantically through books to try to find any random line to use as a reference so it can be cited as a source to reach the obligatory quota.
It is what it is.

The critics may have misunderstood what she actually created, but they weren't wrong that the end result fell far short of expectations- and so far in some places, they could be forgiven for making the assumption of fraud if they'd never tried to do anything like that before.

[Humane Hominid]

I don't think it was deliberate, but a product of his being in the sciences rather than the arts, fueled in part by that departmental hostility, and irritation at the amount of money she got for it.

His background in the sciences is what makes me think it was deliberate. He's trained in critical thinking. He ought to be able to recognize and understand the substance of an argument on its own terms, whether he agrees with it or not. He also ought to be able to engage an argument on its merits, rather than resorting to straw men. That he does neither in any anti-feminist rant of his I've seen tells me something a bit more than confirmation bias is at work here.

I've watched her videos. From an academic perspective, what she's doing seems like an undergrad student project. And as an undergrad student project, I'd have given her an A (although the bar for that is pretty low in most schools). Her videos were generally watchable, and outlined some general trends in feminist criticism without going very in-depth.
She's not doing science, or even a real critical analysis; she's just trying to illustrate certain concepts in feminism using video games.
But therein is the problem- what she has done is, from a more rigorous academic perspective, and particularly from the context of the gaming community, something that falls far short of the expectations she created.

I think it is a fair criticism of her work to say that it is superficial and a bit amateurish. But that is not the criticism leveled at her by the likes of thunderf00t and other detractors. The fraud accusations are more along the lines of "she's not a real gamer because lady parts" or "she is a tool of her boyfriend" and other such nonsense. And that's just the polite stuff. Most of the negative reaction spewed at her has been vitriolic and misogynist, including rape and death threats. Which proves her point.

Should she be blamed for that? Well, some have accused her of outright fraud, but I don't think that's right either. She's guilty of youthful stupidity- who hasn't had some grand idea he or she wanted to realize, only to discover the reality of doing just that?
Sounded great in theory, but in practice, doing stuff is hard.
The end result was rather forced- reminiscent of long nights at the library the night before a paper is due, pawing frantically through books to try to find any random line to use as a reference so it can be cited as a source to reach the obligatory quota.
It is what it is.

Or... maybe she intended it to be a beginner's-level primer on feminist thought, because her target audience is, for the most part, unfamiliar with the foundational concepts and analytical categories.

The critics may have misunderstood what she actually created, but they weren't wrong that the end result fell far short of expectations- and so far in some places, they could be forgiven for making the assumption of fraud if they'd never tried to do anything like that before.

No, they can't and shouldn't be forgiven, because the accusations of fraud had nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with dismissing her as a person. Again, she's accused of being a fake gamer (as if it's impossible for someone to accurately analyze a culture from the outside) simply because she's female, or of being a mouthpiece for her boyfriend, and any number of other bizarre claims that have nothing at all to do with expectations. The male gamer community, for the most part, never had high hopes for her project, and their behavior towards her and her ideas proves her point in spades.

[brimstoneSalad]

His background in the sciences is what makes me think it was deliberate. He's trained in critical thinking.

He's also trained to value rigor, and in a non-rigorous field, that works against him - he sees deliberate bullshitting where bullshitting is part of the status quo (and I say that with every love of the literary field). It's not Anita Sarkeesian who's breaking from the norm here, but a quality of literary and artistic criticism in general - politically flavored varieties even more so than historical, but none the less all highly subjective and inherently biased. It's not feminist criticism that's bullshit, it's the entire genus of academic criticism in the arts (not to say that bullshit can't be useful, and can't encourage people to think).

I think it's not that he doesn't understand Anita Sarkeesian and the species of feminist criticism specifically, but that he is at odd with the entire Genus of modern politicized literary criticism.

Always assume incompetence before malice; it's the same reason I assume Anita is not committing fraud here. Thunderf00t has never demonstrated a grasp of the academic humanities to my knowledge, and a strong grasp of science and critical thinking isn't going to help him there, but instead work against him.

He ought to be able to recognize and understand the substance of an argument on its own terms, whether he agrees with it or not. He also ought to be able to engage an argument on its merits, rather than resorting to straw men.

That's the problem. It's not a scientific argument. It's not even a logical philosophical argument.

It's her trying to point out tropes in video games, and often stumbling in the process due to insufficient research- chiefly, her failure to grapple with the fact that video games are already notorious for making fun of themselves, and self criticism.
It is what it is - a novice project - and there's not really much to engage with, and frankly the whole thing should have probably just been ignored for what it was, but it wasn't ignored, and it exploded on the internet - and for better or worse, Thunderf00t chose to respond to it.

I think it is a fair criticism of her work to say that it is superficial and a bit amateurish.

That's what made it so insulting to gamers -- particularly when she used bad examples.
She may not have realized this, but mistakenly using a bad example without explaining otherwise in no uncertain terms was the equivalent of accusing a video game designer (the designer behind the example) of sexism. Of course she didn't mean it that way (she meant to say that society is still sexist and this is an unintended and unconscious byproduct of that), but that doesn't matter- what mattered was perception, and she should have taken pains to make it clearer than she did. If this was just a private student project with a low budget, that would have been fine- but this was a widely advertised web series.
When you're going to make an accusation like that, deliberately or not, you owe the accused party a little more due diligence than she did - I think most of it came down to ignorance of how her claims would be perceived.
If she had been sensitive to that fact, and thus more careful about which examples she chose, or had tempered her presentation of those examples a bit better, this whole thing might have been avoided.

We can say that's not her fault, because she's a novice and didn't know better. She also didn't know the audience this would reach. But at the same time, I'm not sure if she learned from the experience. Her failing to learn from it may be the fault of the trolls and the bad criticism she got - causing her to mistake it as a reaction against feminism - but still, it's a shame. There was a whole dialogue here that could have happened, and that was a missed opportunity.

Most of the negative reaction spewed at her has been vitriolic and misogynist, including rape and death threats. Which proves her point.

The reaction of the gaming community was first a reaction to accusation of beloved properties (actual or apparent). And the reaction of a limited number of trolls within the gaming community to those accusations don't prove those accusations. If the video game makers she accused came out and said those kinds of things, then it might have.

The trolls shouldn't have done what they did. But trolls shouldn't do much of anything that they do. Their behavior isn't misogynistic, they just say whatever they think will push buttons - they're mostly equal opportunity assholes. When it's a feminist talking, the things they think will push the most buttons just happen to be misogynistic things to say.

She could be forgiven for mistaking it for a misogynistic reaction, because that's what it looked like. But there were a few more articulate and even handed critics in the mix too, and I would have hoped that she would have learned something from a few of the valid points being made among all of the noise.

But that is not the criticism leveled at her by the likes of thunderf00t and other detractors. The fraud accusations are more along the lines of "she's not a real gamer because lady parts" or "she is a tool of her boyfriend" and other such nonsense. And that's just the polite stuff.

That was the worst of the actual criticism. The rest of the nasty things you mention were trolls.

People on the internet see fraud and ill intent everywhere, and they fancy themselves protectors of the realm, rallying together to expose injustice. And that's actually a good thing, because it makes the internet a very hostile environment for would-be fraudsters, but it also results in a few false positives now and then.
Anita made a few critical mistakes that raised red flags, which opened the flood gates:

1. She collected a lot of money. This isn't anything in itself, but when a lot of money is involved, it raises red flags and increases both scrutiny and expectation.

2. She apparently used play-through video from Youtubers without permission. Was this fair use? Maybe. But it seemed to many viewers that she was representing that video as her own, which is much more questionable, and my understanding is that she also claimed to need all of the money to buy video games so that she could play them herself. This was seen as fraud.
She probably didn't play the games, and this comes from basically over-promising. When she made the proposal, I'm sure she intended to play all of the games, and thought it would be fun- until realizing it would take years, and she'd never finish the video series if she did. Amateur mistake, but one that should have been obvious, and that looks like fraud from the outside.

3. It was superficial and amateurish. If it wasn't, the above - both collecting large amounts of money, and the mistake of taking those videos - might have been forgotten. The depth and qualities of the resultant videos wasn't commensurate with the money she took, and the fact that she 'stole' those videos.
She also made numerous mistakes, in some cases using examples of deliberate trope subversions as the tropes themselves (which is just about the worst thing you can do, and provides evidence that you didn't do due diligence). This stems in part from just not doing the research, and possibly in part from games just not having as many readily available examples of sexism as she had expected to find.
She over promised, and she was stuck between a rock and a hard place here- I understand that, and the need to deliver something, but the effect of reaching for examples, and even more so the implicit accusations of sexism where none was present were ultimately a bit insensitive, and made it harder for people to forgive these mistakes as honest ones, alleging deliberate shoddy work/bullshitting instead.

4. Her game idea. This could have saved everything, but it fell flat and made things worse.
Everybody and their dog has an idea for a game, and that's fine- it means they're fans (and to her credit, that she has an idea for a game that she's thought about kind of proves she's a gamer)- but hers involved a number of the same tropes she was criticizing, which opened up the flood gates for accusations of hypocrisy. The fact is that the tropes she was criticizing were so broad and encompassing, that it's nearly impossible to conceive of a game that includes human beings in any way and doesn't rely on at least one of them.

If it includes men but not women, that's bad.
If it includes women, but not as player characters, that's bad.
If it includes playable women, but they are just copies of men with different graphics, that's bad.
If it includes playable women, but they're shown as less strong/capable/or actually different from the men, that's bad.

It wasn't particularly clear what she actually wanted, and it may be that she wanted something the technology just can't do, but her hypothetical game concept did nothing to clear this up.
She needed a strong counter-example, a hypothetical game that would avoid all of those pitfalls, but in failing to provide one the whole thing ended up looking like a sham.
This stems from the whole project just not being very well thought out, which shows what it was: a novice effort. But people took it to prove she was a hypocrite, and a fraudster.

Add up all of this, and I'm not surprised that people chose to believe she was committing fraud. I think they were wrong, and from an academic perspective I can understand where she was coming from and why she made the mistakes she did, but I don't think it's fair to expect the vast majority of the internet to automatically understand and forgive all of her mistakes when they have no experience in that field, and haven't made similar mistakes themselves.

Or... maybe she intended it to be a beginner's-level primer on feminist thought, because her target audience is, for the most part, unfamiliar with the foundational concepts and analytical categories.

What was her target audience?

If it was an introduction to feminist criticism for gamers, she should have been more sensitive to her audience, and more clear on the point that these are just ideas, and not accusations. Her wording did not convey that well. She did not explain feminism very well at all.

If it was an introduction to video games for feminists, it should have been more in depth into feminist issues (rather than so superficial), and explained unfamiliar concepts of gaming better.

Anybody who understood it well enough already not to be offended by it, or to have any idea of what was going on, had pretty much nothing to learn from it.

One of her biggest problems was lack of vision and understanding of what her target audience was, and consideration for that audience.
It's a novice mistake, derived from inexperience (and one we all make to some degree), and it's hard to really blame anybody here.

No, they can't and shouldn't be forgiven, because the accusations of fraud had nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with dismissing her as a person.

They were triggered by her violations of expectation (the red flags I mentioned). The attacks against her once she was perceived as a fraudster ranged from the more rational expositions of those mistakes, to the more irrational attacks you mentioned, and presenting her as the kind of person who would commit fraud (to back up the fraud claims, which was not meant as an attack against her work).

People jumped the gun on that, and they should have taken what she did in context. She made impossible promises, and generated impossible expectations- but that is not in itself fraud. Fraud is deliberate. She was just naive. Anybody who pledged money to her made the same mistake she did.

If the people who pledged money to her wanted a refund, that's one thing. The internet over-reacted in this case, and identified a false positive.
The whole thing was due to ignorance on both sides- and nothing but ignorance was really to blame here, with both sides trying to do the best they could given the circumstances.

I think everybody should just calm the **** down.

Again, she's accused of being a fake gamer (as if it's impossible for someone to accurately analyze a culture from the outside) simply because she's female, or of being a mouthpiece for her boyfriend, and any number of other bizarre claims that have nothing at all to do with expectations.

These accusations were largely leveled after people had already decided she was committing fraud.

She's committing fraud -> therefore, she's a fake gamer trying to milk the gaming community of money.

Much of it also comes from this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afgtd8ZsXzI

Because we all know that gaming is genetic, and it's impossible to not be a gamer, and then become a gamer by starting to play games more and getting more involved in the culture.
She chose to focus on video games because she was interested in it. She didn't know how much money she would get.

To me, the part of her video where she was describing the video game she wants to make proves she's a fan. The way she talked about it was oozing with "fan girl" enthusiasm (in a good way); it was naive, but sounded sincere. Her idea was also far too silly and unnecessarily detailed to likely have been invented from anything but fandom - as such ideas tend to be.

So no, I don't buy the "not a gamer" arguments at all.
But that's not the basis of the fraud claims; a misattribution to malice what was caused by incompetence was. And that is forgivable in the same way your assumption that Thunderf00t was malicious rather than honestly mistaken is forgivable.

Assuming the best of each other goes a long way to preventing unnecessary and unproductive conflicts like this.
I took the whole ongoing fiasco, from Dear Muslima to this, as an interesting case study in human nature.

[tkks]

Just some of the things feminists do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWxAljF ... wCiaqjSulc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peK_5J6QvBQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyjhbep ... lc&index=8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KPeMcYsuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lug2S0HzY40

[bobo0100]

Just some of the things feminists do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWxAljF ... wCiaqjSulc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peK_5J6QvBQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyjhbep ... lc&index=8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KPeMcYsuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lug2S0HzY40

You have posted links to videos made to debunk the crazy shit that feminist do. No one is saying any of that is good right or pro equality. However your sample is clearly cherry picked.

Why do you let those people represent the movement when there are perfectly sane rational people whom actually care about equality through the movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwJRFClybmk

[brimstoneSalad]

Why do you let those people represent the movement when there are perfectly sane rational people whom actually care about equality through the movement.

Because they are the most visible.

Unfortunately, crazy stuff gets uploaded and shared more than sane and rational stuff. People are reasonable most of the time, it's not news, and it's not interesting. When a nut-job comes out of the woodwork, though, that's sensational and gets spread everywhere.

It's up to the sane and rational people in any movement (feminism, MRM, veganism, etc.) to fight and alienate the nut-jobs among them so the clear and reasonable voices can be heard through the noise. When movements fail to do that adequately, they suffer the bad publicity and misunderstanding as consequence.

Of course, on the flip side, coming down overly hard on deviation from the norm on otherwise productive topics can be stifling, and the movement can be seen as whatever-nazis.

It's a careful balance to maintain, and requires both organization and strong oversight.
Most of the largest movements lack that.

As it stands, if you want to be heard over the noise, you need more extreme moderate viewpoints (sounds like an oxymoron, right?)

You need things that will get press, like:

"Popular Feminists who are against equality aren't actually feminists, but Poes who are sexist men dressing as women who have infiltrated the feminist movement to discredit it. True feminists are for equality, nothing more, and those men who are posing as feminists such as _____, _____, and _____ should be arrested for fraud and sent to prison to rot."

Yeah, it's a little out there, but that's a message that would carry on the wind and reach the same ears the nut-jobs are reaching.
You can later say, of course it's a joking exaggeration, but to make a point- that they aren't real feminists, they're nut-jobs and people need to know how extreme the divide is, and that those people don't represent feminists.

You have to know how to manipulate the media to get the right message where it needs to be, otherwise the nut-jobs WILL represent the movement due to publication and sharing biases.