SummerOtaku said:
You can include sexist/racists/hate of any kind into any artist media and not have the biproduct itself be sexist/racist/hateful. She mentions in one of her videos how she enjoyed the few games that had a sexist theme/trope subverted. (I believe it was one of the women in distress ones). Like you started out as the kidnapped princess and make your way out of the situation on your own. Woman in distress can also have the woman given agency and ability to be the hero as well.
The thing is, this is not the sentiment that Anita wants us to take from her videos. In all three of her DiD videos she presents a conflicting and shifting viewpoint on how this trope interacts with the rest of the world.
She says this quote in her second video
immediately after she highlights how some games use violence as a means to bring female characters back to their senses, or to end their suffering is analogous to domestic violence.
It's especially troubling in-light of the serious real life epidemic of violence against women facing the female population on this planet. Every 9 seconds a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States and on average more than three women are murdered by their boyfriends husbands, or ex-partners every single day. Research consistently shows that people of all genders tend to buy into the myth that women are the ones to blame for the violence men perpetrate against them. In the same vein, abusive men consistently state that their female targets ?deserved it?, ?wanted it? or were ?asking for it?
She then goes on to say a few minutes later
Likewise engaging with these games is not going to magically transform players into raging sexists. We typically don?t have a monkey-see monkey-do, direct cause and effect relationship with the media we consume.
She will juxtapose information and statistics with the clear intention of trying to demonstrate that x leads to y, but will fail to correlate this information to the problem at hand. As with Jack Thompson and violence, the same is true for Anita Sarkeesian and domestic violence in video games. Their is
no direct link between the instances of violence we see in media and it's occurrence in real life.
This same phenomenon of flip flopping on terms and statements can be seen throughout her entire video series so far. She will make generalizations about the gaming community and then say that not all people are like that. She will say that the DiD trope is terrible because it forces women to need help, but then says that helping people is a good thing.
And as far as Anita has told us, the only time that being a damsel is acceptable is when the trope is being subverted and the woman is able to free herself. She tries to say that this is because subverting the trope gives agency to the damsel, but them by definition of what a damsel in distress which, as defined by Anita, is:
the damsel in distress is a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and then must be rescued by a male character, usually providing an incentive or motivation for the protagonist?s quest.
So if the damsel is able to free herself and exercise agency independent of the player character is she really a damsel in distress or just a woman who got kidnapped?
There is another sentence behind the one you quoted from my post. It said basically the same as you just did?!? I have not read yet all of the thread and I was just wondering if there was already a lot of threats and hate here again... That's all what I was wondering about.
