I was never on their side for one second, I saw right through their bullshit the moment it took off around 2012.
It all started with Anita Sarkeesian, it just struck me as so damned strange that you simply could not disagree with a single word out of her mouth without someone jumping up your ass about "muh sexism" no matter how respectful and carefully crafted you made your arguments, it always, without fail, would lead to some asshole going "yeah, but you're sexist"
As a gamer that shit coming after years of Jack Thompson doing the same thing and every last person who touched a video game controller wanting him to fuck off, only to have have many of these same people turn around and vehemently defend Anita Sarkeesian no matter what literally felt like reality itself warping, it simply made no fucking sense, it didn't make any sense then and almost ten fucking years later it still doesn't make a lick of sense.
The Anita Sarkeesian stuff in 2012/2013 was something like a Proto-GamerGate event before GG actually happened.
Something wonderful happened on the internet this week. And something horrible happened at the same time. A Californian blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, launched a Kickstarter project to make a web video series about "tropes vs women in videogames". Following on from her similar series on films, it...
www.newstatesman.com
Like you, I quickly identified her as the new Jack Thompson, yes. But it was even worse than that. If you read her thesis, you’ll see what I mean. See, back in 2013, I was really surprised when I went over that shit and saw that SJWs were lapping it up uncritically, for one very specific reason that I did not expect to be the case at all.
Anita Sarkeesian is incredibly, blatantly sexist.
Against
women.
Attached to this post is her thesis, entitled
I’ll Make a Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television.
Let me go over the choice bits. I did a blow-by-blow of this thing like 8 years ago, and SJWs whined that I “MST3Ked it”, and they insisted that no part of my critique was valid.
I actually pulled my punches, then. I tried being polite and amiable about the whole thing, despite how utterly fucktarded her thesis was. I will not make the same mistake twice.
This is the Abstract:
Heroic women in science fiction and fantasy television shows have done much to represent strong, successful women in leadership positions. However, these female roles that are viewed as strong and empowered embody many masculine identified traits, maintaining a patriarchal division of gender roles. This paper analyzes strong female characters within nine television shows by deconstructing their stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” gender specific attributes and cross referencing how they play within and against traditional archetypes.
Employing texts from cultural criticism and feminist theory, I explore how representations of groups in popular culture and mass media messaging uphold structures of power by giving higher value to masculine attributes as observed in patriarchal discourse. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of why it is critical to foster television media that supports feminist ideals and breaks out of traditional oppressive gender binaries in order to promote, encourage and envision a just future society.
Immediately, the fragrant waft of rank, festering bullshit reaches your nostrils. This is not your ordinary cow pie. This is fermented dung, sun-baked in a field.
Anita Sarkeesian is telling you, right out of the starting gate, exactly what the rest of the paper will entail. After all, that is the purpose of an abstract, is it not? However, unlike most papers, where the abstract gives you the general gist of it before you delve in, it doesn’t really get any more detailed or elaborate as you read. Really, this abstract on its own contains a complete description of everything hence. It makes it unnecessary to read the rest, which is the same point but repeated a dozen different ways and with irrelevant citations.
The point being this, of course.
If you happen to be a fictional character with a vagina, and you solve your problems by pulling a pistol and shooting those problems into nonexistence, guess what? You’re actually a man. That part could not possibly be written for a woman. No woman could ever relate to a female character in a story who chomps cigars and kills people. Women are soft, meek, demure, and non-violent. Any time a woman is stoic, confident, macho, or aggressive, she’s just performing masculinity and reinforcing the superiority of manhood.
This is the crux of Anita Sarkeesian’s entire argument. It’s the basis of her entire thesis.
I want you to imagine if Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan said “I don’t like that new Laura Crawft movie. What is it again? Tomb Raider? There’s too much gunplay in it, and really, is showing women shooting people a good... is that a good role model for our daughters? Women belong in the home. Women are caretakers and shouldn’t be doing that violent stuff.”
Anita Sarkeesian’s thesis is page after page of that same exact sentiment, just coming from a woman who is ostensibly feminist.
By this point, you probably think I’m exaggerating. There must be some mistake. There is no way SJWs could possibly be this stupid.
This project began as I was watching TV and found myself identifying with and rooting for the strong female heroes. As I looked critically at their roles, I noticed that many of them were replicating the traditional male hero archetype and ‘masculine’ defined values. I wanted to explore what this meant for women’s representation and the impact it has on the existing patriarchal division of gender roles.
Nope. She actually means it.
I would like to thank my supervisor Jennifer Jenson for her wisdom and enthusiasm. Her support and confidence in my work and in my graduate career was invaluable. I would also like to thank Celia Haig Brown for her willingness to serve as my second reader, which has made this effort possible.
Without the support of Julia D'Agostino and Nis Bojin, I would not have been able to complete this project. And finally I would like to thank Jonathan McIntosh for spending countless hours watching and critically analyzing television shows with me.
Ahh, Josh McTosh. Anita Sarkeesian was that guy’s mouthpiece and basically parroted everything he ever said, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Popular stories rely on archetypes to draw viewers in, to create something recognizable, and often quickly ‘readable’. Most science fiction television programming is heavily based in action; nearly every week there is an evil villain to combat, and the shows that aren’t action-based seem to always include physical brawls. The women that are identified as strong and tough, nearly always possess physical strength, rarely ask for help, and hardly ever show emotion unless forced. Strength remains a central attribute to female characters, and is seemingly highly valued both by society and within fandoms. For example, fans rave about how Buffy Summers is the strongest woman in Sunnydale, how Farscape’s Aeryn Sun will go in guns a-blazing without ever batting an eye, and how Battlestar Galactica’s Starbuck is being a smart ass even when she doesn’t know if she’s going to win the fight. These characters triumph on-screen, but is their physical prowess the only determinant of strength? While there are instances of female ‘braniacs' and scientists, and of sensitive women who help devise plans, or are good wives, daughters, mothers or teachers, these traits are often reserved for supporting characters, not starring roles. The strength in these women is displayed through loyalty and courage, but the hope they provide is nearly always trumped by those who can throw a serious punch. Heroic women in science fiction and fantasy television shows have done much to demonstrate women’s capabilities to play strong, successful leading characters. In fact, as Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) demonstrated back in 1979, strong and brave female leads are very much archetypal characters that North American (and other) audiences connect to (Gallardo & Smith, 2004).
Imagine someone complaining that the characters who actually fucking do things are the ones who get the most screen time. Nobody wants to see someone filling out Excel spreadsheets to do the family budget, changing baby diapers, knitting and ironing clothes, or any other boring busywork. It’s irrelevant to the fucking story. It doesn’t move the plot. Violence moves the plot. Why does violence move the plot? Because it involves killing and coercing people, which is one of the shortest paths to any given goal in a story.
Anita Sarkeesian wants to redefine pacifism as power. Maybe, instead of beating the villain up, the ideal female protagonist would care for the villain, tidy up his castle or whatever, and all but suck his fucking dick, and he’d eventually be guilt-tripped into renouncing his evil ways. This is wishful thinking. Power is what gets results, and violence gets the fastest and flashiest results.
Waaaaah, the caretakers and mothers are side characters and not main characters, waaaaaaaaaaah. Cry me a fucking river. Or better yet, stand aside and let the belt-fed machine guns and bricks of C4 do the talking. After all, it worked for Michael Bay.
Basically, Anita Sarkeesian makes it clear, right at the outset, that she’s disturbed that action movies and TV shows like Aliens, Mad Max, The Expanse, or Firefly are not Hallmark-channel-grade soap operas with more talking and slice-of-life bullshit and less shooting and fighting.
The genre is fucking
action, dipshit. It’s right in the fucking name.
For the past few years I’ve been actively seeking out television shows with strong female leads, with female representations that I could bear to watch and I did find some shows with wonderful, complex and rich characters. I especially gravitated towards science fiction and fantasy programs because as I was attempting to imagine a future economic and social system that is rooted in social justice values, I anticipated that science fiction was a place that would portray futuristic societies with different values. Unfortunately, I did not find much of this: many futuristic shows still identify with the same value systems that western countries have today such as individualism, hierarchal institutional and political structures, meritocracy, and most often still exist in a capitalist economic system. I also began to notice that I identified with and enjoyed watching the women who I was viewing. They have many commonalities: they were strong, in charge, capable, confident and intelligent. As much as I admired many of these traits I realized that if these characters had been men, I would have been bored and would feel like the story was the same old heroic masculine tale. Even today it is still exciting to see strong women taking control and kicking butt, but that role isn’t really very different from their male counterparts. Strong women are indeed sexualized and “feminized” in sometimes degrading ways, but generally the aspects that are viewed as positive such as leadership, courage, and independence are deeply identified as masculine.
Oh no, not all science fiction is Star Trek. Capitalism, meritocracy, and competition actually still exist in some of them. What a tragedy.
Female roles in science fiction and fantasy television that are viewed as strong and empowered embody many masculine identified traits, maintaining a patriarchal division of gender roles. For example, values adopted by female characters in the television shows I will examine in this major research paper maintain that traditionally masculine attributes such as rationality, cool-headedness and physical strength are superior and preferred over traditionally feminine attributes such as cooperative decision making, and being emotionally expressive and empathetic. For the purposes of this paper, I will examine female characters in nine popular television shows and compare them with traditional masculine and feminine value systems.
If women perform male behavior, then get this; it’s now female behavior. You see how easy that was? But that’s not good enough for Anita.
Anita Sarkeesian thinks that women are better represented by “cooperative decision making and being emotionally expressive and empathetic”. I could use less charitable terms. Cliquishness, whininess, and hypersensitivity are all practically synonyms.
God forbid a woman show anything resembling individuality, self-reliance, stoicism, or strength of character. No, in Anita’s world, she has to obey the fem-hive collective and submit to peer pressure from other women in order to be respected as a woman, and she has to be ready to bawl her eyes out at the drop of a hat. Again, picture Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan making these same assertions about women, and the kind of reaction that would garner.
This is the precious feminist that SJWs will clamber over each other to defend.
I borrow from hooks’ elucidation of gendered value systems to observe how even if gender roles are swapped (e.g. women adopting typically masculine heroic roles) women’s representations on television still uphold patriarchal values. hooks’ theory is further illuminated by Laura Mulvey’s work on the “male gaze” (which has played an important role in feminist film theory). Mulvey (1973) explains:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (Mulvey, 1973)
This text was written in 1973 and still has relevance when analyzing films and television today. Some contemporary female characters are more than simply passive, but even in their active roles they are still created and cast for “erotic impact” and “to-be-looked-at-ness”. Even when representations of strong women use traditionally masculine archetypes as sources of strength, they are still subject to the male gaze and usually the heterosexual male fantasy. The relevance of the male gaze on strong female characters is pronounced in action films such as Charlie’s Angels or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider where the protagonist’s ultimate role is to have “erotic impact” and be hypersexualized as opposed to carrying on a genuinely interesting storyline. Alien’s Ellen Ripley and Terminator’s Sarah Connor are two of the most notable strong female action heroes who attempt to subvert the traditional male gaze by becoming the traditionally male hero, but as Diana Dominguez (2005) observes they, “...eventually repudiate the feminine, becoming, in effect, sexless and less ‘human’ mirrors of male action heroes” (Dominguez, 2005, para. 6) instead of fully complex female action heroes.
Ahh, yes. The Male Gaze. The horrifying notion that somewhere in the audience, a man might pop a boner and tent in his pants because some female character on the screen was wearing tight clothes while kicking ass. How awful, the male erection. All that blood filling the corpora cavernosa. All that stiffness.
Never mind the obvious heterosexism implied by this. Clearly, lesbians do not exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t want to catch sight of Lara Croft’s sweet, sweet ass.
While these female action hero roles are welcoming over the ‘damsel in distress’, placing women in traditionally masculine roles without disrupting the male value systems associated with them maintains male dominance. Female action heroes, although not helpless, are still subject to the male gaze in a way that male heroes are not. Placing women in these non-traditional roles makes it more acceptable for women to emulate masculine power dynamics, not necessarily a positive step towards solid, complex and positive representations of women. Lara Croft, for example, is the star of a video game and movie series who emulates masculine behaviours through violent conflict resolution and a tough emotional exterior. So while there are now female heroes that fit within patriarchal norms and adopt masculine traits, it is still not acceptable to have a situation wherein feminine qualities can be transformed as heroic characteristics.
Nobody wants to see a character break out knitting needles and knit the villain a scarf with a smiley face in a fucking action series. They want to see those knitting needles go through his eyeballs and into his brainpan. What part of action does Anita Sarkeesian not get?
Many female television viewers long to see more strong women in our media landscape and cling to the few representations provided even if they subscribe to a patriarchal model. For example, Ariel Levy’s introduction to Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCP) (2005) provides a landscape of some of the backlash the feminist movement has received. She finds that FCP are those women who “get it” and who can be just as raunchy as “one of the guys.” They can objectify women at strip clubs while simultaneously creating a sexualized cartoon like persona of themselves. Levy argues that these women behave like their counterparts, the “Male Chauvinist Pig” because doing so provides them with a sense of power, albeit a pseudo sense of power that is rooted in exploiting their own as well as other women’s sexuality (Levy, 2005). Not all the examples in this paper are of “female chauvinist pigs,” however the underlying premise of Levy’s theory is that women replicate masculine behaviour in order to attain power. Strong women on television are acceptable to networks, advertisers and audience members because they subscribe very closely to traditional power dynamics. Usually strong female characters can be put into something leather, revealing, or otherwise “girlie” which grounds their identity as essentially feminine and thus makes it acceptable for them to exude a masculine attitude without challenging their sexuality.
Right. That’s a lot of words to say “Tomboy bad. Girly-girl good.”
Johnson (2005) defines patriarchy as a society that “promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women” (Johnson, 2005, p. 5). When these four tenets work simultaneously, they reinforce patriarchy and the effects are widespread and reoccurring. This is often observed in news media, where there is a lack of coverage of specifically women’s issues such as reproductive rights or sexual harassment and assault. Even women who do attain positions of power such as politicians are subject to overt sexualization in a way that their male counterparts typically are not4 (Wakeman, 200
. Women are statistically underrepresented as guests on news debate shows (“Who Makes the News”, 2010), and anecdotal evidence suggests that when they do rarely appear, they are interrupted more often and given less time to speak. Jennifer L. Pozner, founder and executive director of Women In Media & News (a media analysis, education and advocacy group), has experienced this treatment firsthand and found that the majority of her experience appearing on popular news networks such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, she has been the only women on a panel of all men. And while she is often introduced last and given less time to speak she is, “...typically interrupted with more frequency than the male guests, sometimes within mere seconds of answering [her] first question," (personal communication, May 14, 2010).
What the fuck do guests on debate shows have to do with FICTION?
This is Anita rounding out her fucking references with irrelevant bullshit, so that this comes across as an actual paper and not her uninformed and frankly idiotic personal opinion.
Patriarchy coupled with race and class is used as a lens through which institutional oppression can be understood. Institutional oppression is the way in which people are subjected to widespread and systemic oppression as opposed to an individual model that places blame on singular selves. Television reflects these structural phenomena through its representations, or lack thereof, of social groups. For instance, people of colour and queer people have a far higher chance of being killed than their white counterparts (see appendix). It is not just coincidence that writers and/or directors decide to kill off the oppressed characters, it is the exception that they survive, and are considered good and noble. Additionally people of colour and queer people are hardly ever chosen to star in heroic roles.
It doesn’t matter if the showrunners are progressive or not. If Star Trek: Discovery taught us anything, it’s this: if you’re a fictional fag, get your casket ready.
A key aspect of patriarchy is maintaining the illusion that men and women fit within predetermined gender norms and that these norms are biological and fixed (Johnson, 2005). Stereotypical gender-specific attributes are often identified in opposition to one another with the “masculine” traits valued over “feminine” traits. For example, masculine identified traits such as being strong and in control are valued and feminine identified traits such as being weak and out of control are devalued. These essentialist gender stereotypes of men and women have been discredited by gender theorists but are still maintained in mainstream television. Even though men and women in reality are far more complex than a list of traits, television show writers and viewers still celebrate “masculine” values as positive and tend to be dismissive of those deemed to be “feminine.” For the sake of clarity, I will identify these categories as “masculine” and “feminine” although I do not believe these are essentialist or biologically determined. However, much of western society and specifically our media place men and women into these categories. Regardless of how much they are disrupted it is generally believed that men and women encompass particular personality traits the other gender does not.
This is a self-contradiction. If gender-essentialism is false, then why go out of your way to criticize it as if it were real? Let things take their course. If women do manly things often enough, if they barbecue in the backyard and ride their Harleys enough, then—get this—they’ll become womanly things. Problem solved.
Waaaaaaaaah, Sarkeesian whines.
Waaaaaaaah, I don’t wanna watch tomboys or bulldykes doing things I don’t do, because I’m not a tomboy or a bulldyke, I’m a girly-girl!
Although in the real world men and women are more complex then a simple binary of gendered traits, television characters tend to be more static and traditional. The male dominated television industry introduced (pseudo) tough female characters because it opened up another profitable market of potential consumers. To maintain ad revenue, they created the “empowered woman” that would appeal to women desiring female characters beyond housewives and maids and also to male viewers by putting the characters in sexy outfits and giving them fancy weapons. Women would be happy to see a butt-kicking badass on TV each week and men could ogle the “hot chick” in skimpy clothes. Although, superficially there may be some subversiveness to the gender reversal, the basic patriarchal value system remains unquestioned through most of this television programming.
I want you to consider how sexist against women this actually is.
Any time you have an archetype like a female soldier, or a female bodyguard, or a female mercenary, or a female adventurer, guess what? That role was written for a man, but they cast a woman so a guy has some tits to ogle while he enjoys his usual ultraviolence.
That’s it. That’s Anita’s argument.
This is a table that actually exists in the paper.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. I feel vulnerable all the time. Why don’t they portray vulnerable and emotionally compromised do-nothings as the heroes? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Page. After page. After page. Of this eye-searing fucking drivel.
Let me tell you something,
@Dom Cruise.
I like Revy and Roberta in Black Lagoon.
I like The Bride in Kill Bill.
I like Ellen Ripley from Aliens.
I like Samus from Metroid.
I like Alita from Battle Angel Alita.
I like Casca from Berserk.
I like Lorraine Broughton from Atomic Blonde.
I like Trinity from The Matrix.
I like River Tam from Serenity.
And many, many, many fucking more.
If Anita Sarkeesian had her way, none of these characters would exist. They would be replaced by an asexual blob in a burkha who nags the villain to death, which is the only kind of protagonist that SJWs approve of.
Someone as pathetic, as sexless, and as much of a worthless, nagging fucking scold as them.
This is straight from Anita’s YouTube channel:
Imagine that. A fucking whiny fucking scold with bottles of sleeping gas. This is the ideal SJW hero. Of fucking course.
I know why though, it's because Jack was white, male and a Christian, Anita on the other hand is female and Jewish, therefore you can never disagree with a single word of her mouth, that right there is what it all comes down to, that was the only Red Pill I needed.
To my knowledge, she’s not Jewish, but Armenian. You know. Like, SOAD, or Maddox, duh.
Speaking of SOAD, this intro is more relevant than ever before.
