The biggest push feminists had in the 2010s onwards was feminism in video games, something spearheaded by Anita Sarkeesian but supported by many folks among the journalistic left like Steven Colbert, and what we would later see as Breadtube, like Lindsay Ellis. Essentially, Sarkeesian was whining about sexism in gaming and how it appeals to a male fantasy while ignoring female demographics. Which is kind of strange, given that many straight women like strong men, as was evidenced by the Twilight and 50 Shades franchises being powered by female fanbases, and there's no shortage of strapping young lads who displayed strength in video games. In the same vein, all the sexy chicks in video games not only attract straight males, but also lesbians and women who are into other women, so you'd think gaming would get a break for appealing to many different tastes. But not to Sarkeesian and her peers.
The thing is, they want to complain that video game sexuality was aimed primarily at young boys, which had an inkling of truth in the earlier years; in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was no shortage of games with hot chicks trying to appeal to men. Some games like Elder Scrolls Battlespire would try to get away with putting in naked chicks, even, while other games like Dead or Alive pushed their resources into realistic breast jiggle physics. It was a young man's paradise back in the early 2000s, where they really didn't hold back in trying to attract men with pretty girls. But by the time Sarkeesian showed her face in the 2010s, things have calmed down. What was once seen as hip and cool during the beginning of the decade was becoming a thing of the past. If Sarkeesian and her feminist friends made their crusade 10 years earlier than they did, they might've had a leg to stand on. Instead, they came off as loonies complaining about a problem that the games industry had solved by moving on.
Think of the female characters of the late 2000s and early 2010s, more and more of them were veering away from pure sex appeal and more towards character depth. Female Shepard from Mass Effect, Miranda Keyes from Halo 3, Lightning from FF13, Kat from Halo Reach, their threads were more along the lines of functional over being pretty. Lightning's uniform was more of a functional dress rather than a pin-up, and Miranda Keyes wore a typical dress uniform. Outside of the short sex scenes with crew members, female Shepard refused to show skin and was more modest when not wearing combat armor, wearing a selection of comfortable civilian outfits or uniforms. Kat was wearing full-body armor the whole time. Even a game like Soulcalibur IV which had women as attractive as they were in DOA had Hilde, a woman who wore full-body knight armor the entire time. Hell, even female characters from the early 2000s like Bastila Shan and Juhani of the KOTOR games were rather deep and complex in terms of characterization.
Games and gamers have grown up by that time, and things like adding hot sexy chicks to your game was beginning to be seen more as a blatant way to pander to short-sighted fans rather than something that was seen as innovative. I'm getting the feeling that if Sarkeesian didn't make such an aggressive push to demonize games for being sexist, she'd have gotten her ideal woman in video games where they're treated more like characters and less like fashion models. The problem is, the aggressive push for puritanism when it came to depicting women in video games had the opposite effect; suddenly, gamers suddenly began to treasure older games like Soulcalibur IV and DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball where the girls had melons the size of their heads and costumes so skintight, they might as well be wearing nothing. The fact that the feminists tried to pressure game studios to make less sexy characters meant that sexy female game characters became a valuable commodity. Suddenly, it became hip to rebel against the feminist overlords overtaking the media by buying games with sexy characters, and the hentai game makers who would've been laughed at back in the late 2000s and early 2010s became heroes in the eyes of a public wary of feminist influence.
In short, the feminists were their own worst enemies. Like with the SJWs who unwittingly become the advertisements for why people voted for Trump, the feminists who focused on video games became an advertisement for Japanese games and western games that didn't hold back on the sleaze. Think about Street Fighter 6 or Witcher 3; those games got a lot of men buying them because the women looked and acted like women and were attractive. And given that manga/anime culture is making an advance over the western capeshit culture that the feminists have dominion over, it won't be that surprising if future feminists or leftists discard the likes of Anita Sarkeesian and the Third-Wave Feminists as if they were used tampons, and went with a more loose definition of feminism that wasn't so afraid of pixelated boobs. They might even find such sexual displays empowering, like the Second-Wave Feminists did. Or maybe they'd focus on real-world issues that don't involve fictional women from pixelated worlds. Just as I said before, the Left always eats its own. And with the Left seeking to break bread with communities far more traditional than the West, they might make that shift again.
