Vile foes of feminist game critic miss mark

We can assume that the men threatening to rape and murder Anita Sarkeesian were not doing so because they wanted to disseminate her observations about sexism in the video gaming world to as wide an audience as possible. But that is what is happening. Like many, I had never heard of her until she showed up on the front page of The New York Times last Wednesday, after she canceled a speech atU tah State University, not just because of threats of amass shooting but because Utah’s concealed carry law for bids audiences from being screened ( if you thought, “Why, that’s insane,” then there’s two of us).

The Canadian- born Sarkeesian has a blog, “Feminist Frequency,” offering dissections of the pervasive misogyny of video games.

When I was a lad and played video games, they were primitive arcade consoles that for 25 cents allowed you to blast asteroids or repel relentlessly advancing alien invaders.

The past few decades, however, as gaming developed into a $ 70 billion industry ( larger than the world movie industry and all U. S. pro sports combined), the typical adventure involves a well- armed hero wandering a complex fantasy landscape, one that, as Sarkeesian repeatedly points out, is inevitably chocked with scantily clad women.

After watching a half hour of her “Women as Background Decoration” lecture, it’s difficult to see what the fuss over Sarkeesian is about. As someone steeped in the 1970s, all- men- are- rapists extremism of Andrea Dworkin et al., Sarkeesian is tame, practically Holly Golightly as she sedately narrates between clips of the wooden, puppetlike hookers and dancers in popular video games, images no doubt erotic to 14- year- old boys and workers stranded on North Sea oil platforms, but stiff caricatures to us adults.

Given that men in these games are there mostly to be bloodily mowed down with a chain gun, focusing on the women and their roles as sex objects who “almost never get to be anything other than set- dressing or props in someone else’s narrative” seems to miss the point. I couldn’t tell whether Sarkeesian is calling for the women in these games to be given some clothes, or for the creation of new games where female heroes visit death upon cringing, semi- nude men.

Although, discussing her argument seems secondary, given the echo chamber of malice it touched off, blending into an ongoing online brawl over computer games and journalism called “gamergate,” a bolus of ill will that Gawker aptly describes as “a tone- deaf rabble of angry obsessives.”

Since society is less sexist than it once was— glance at any magazine from the 1970s to confirm that— we can safely assume that it is still more sexist now than it will eventually be, and activists like Sarkeesian help nudge us toward that happy day, drawing attention to overlooked aspects of our culture in need of overdue adjustment.

Those who would intimidate and harass and silence her, however, also tend to silence those who take legitimate exception to certain arguments she makes, and would poke holes in her thesis, but are reluctant to even seem to be on the side of her vile enemies. ( Sarkeesian notes that, having gunned down women, the player is “free to go about [ his] business as if nothing had happened.” Which had me asking: “As opposed to what? Standing trial at the Hague?”)

How she differs from Tipper Gore railing against rock music or Congress investigating comic books in the 1950s is a matter of style— it’s all censorship disguised as moral righteousness. She leaps to lay real- world problems at the feet of video games—“these systems facilitate violence against women by turning it into a form of play, something amusing or entertaining” offering no evidence, ignoring the fact that women get the worst treatment in the most underdeveloped regions, places generally free of Xbox. Those who claim violence in video games fosters real violence are like those who claim the fluoride in our water is poisonous— were it true, we’d all be dead.

Sarkeesian is urging a kind of game world purdah— she isn’t quite saying the ladies are too delicate and feminine to be blown apart like the guys, but she comes close.

She calls online carnage “especially sad because interactive media has the potential to be the perfect medium to explore sex and sexuality.” She’s right, but give it time. Just as the crude technology 30 years ago only let players blast penny- sized pulsing aliens, so the simplistic, sexist bloodsport of today will be seen as a coarse interval. Someday, games will involve a player struggling over a long weekend to seduce Scarlett Johansson — or, with a button click, George Clooney — putting up with all the setbacks and frustrations such an endeavor might involve. Maybe at the point I’ll have to start playing.