A decade ago this week, an hitherto obscure cultural criticism project called Feminist Frequency -- created by a Canadian-American woman named Anita Sarkeesian while she was studying at New York University -- launched an extensive web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium. That web video series was called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and it made Anita and Feminist Frequency famous for a time, becoming the site's flagship series. (You can find the entire series here.)
Like most people who did, I discovered Feminist Frequency through Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The series was announced as a developing project on Feminist Frequency that was intended to be composed of several parts, each about five or ten minutes in length and examining a separate female trope commonplace in video games; Anita's biggest project up to that point. She requested $6,000 on crowd-funding site Kickstarter to finance it and was reportedly stunned to receive the entire requested sum within 24 hours, so unexpectedly high was the demand for this particular work. Then the backlash began.
A large-scale harassment campaign was mounted against her over the project. I like to highlight that point of origin to point out that the opposition campaign began here, well before the publication of the first video in the series; a fact that highlights the reality that, to many of Anita's detractors, the contents of her work didn't actually matter. Simply knowing that she was a feminist who was to critique portrayals of women commonplace in video games was enough on its own to start sending rape and death threats, rape porn depicting her as the victim in massive quantities, hack her social media accounts, saturate her Wikipedia page with pornographic images and anti-lesbian and anti-Semitic slurs, and even create a computer game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian and anyone who dared criticize any of this could be and often was treated similarly, moreover. (For example, when Toronto feminist Stephanie Guthrie criticized Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, she received rape and death threats as well.) The campaign was of a scale and viciousness sufficient to generate some notice and coverage in the gaming press. That coverage is how I first learned about the project and, through that, discovered Feminist Frequency.
At the time, nothing like such a project existed and I was personally at a place of feeling highly alienated from gaming culture in general and drifting toward abandoning video gaming as a hobby for reasons I felt much more deeply than I understood and felt even more scared and ashamed to try and voice. The second I saw a picture capturing the essence of the project, I instantly knew that it concentrated those feelings I often couldn't find the right words to explain myself and greatly sympathized with Anita's plight, to which end I contributed what little I could toward increasing the fund for Tropes vs. Women in Video Games beyond the requested sum. Many others did the same, resulting in the eventual donation of a total of nearly $159,000 from just under 7,000 backers. The entire series had originally been planned for publication in 2012, but got pushed back because the additional resources allowed Anita to drastically expand the scope and scale of the project. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to explore earlier Feminist Frequency content, which in turn only made me more excited for the Tropes series. The first Tropes video was released on March 7, 2013 (the day before International Women's Day) and the series wound up spanning the subsequent four years.
The first four videos in the series, all of which launched in 2013, focused on the damsel in distress and "Ms. Male Character" tropes and were all viewed over a million times and positively reviewed by the Boston Globe and the New York Times and generally up-voted contemporaneously (there was a like-to-dislike ratio bar attached to YouTube videos at the time). Early the following year Sarkeesian received the Ambassador Award at the annual Game Developers Choice Awards on the grounds that these videos helped the medium "advance to a better place", becoming the first woman to receive the award. I highlight these points to make it clear that this initial body of work was contemporaneously well-received not only by feminists, but also by most gamers, video game developers, and media critics in general, perhaps because these initial commentaries focused on points that were both glaring and pretty easy for most to agree with.
The next several videos in the series though centered on the sexual objectification of women in the medium in ways that were, to my view, ahead of their time in that they included critiques of "mainstream" pornography and the prostitution of women, thus drawing the ire of liberals and praise from the radical feminist community to which I belonged. (No more awards for you!) The infamous 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign against female and "pro-feminist" video game developers and critics was in part a direct response to the first batch of these videos, called Women As Background Decoration. Anita was forced to flee her home more than once during this window of time. I was harassed online by this movement contemporaneously for speaking out in defense of Anita and its other victims. To me, the ferocity of this reaction, if anything, proved the importance of those sorts of critiques. Over-sexualization of women in the gaming landscape was, and to a much more limited extent remains, a problem that most women ourselves I think find more demeaning and alienating than patriarchal chivalry and such, and also clarifying of the cultural battle lines; clarifying of who is really on your side and who is not.
It may be worth noting that, in larger feminist politics, Anita had notably been an early critic of the $#@! Walk movement, liberal "choice feminism", and to some extent hook-up culture itself. These positions would've fit her in much better with today's movement landscape than it did with that of 2014-15. On the flip side though, Anita's work was always trans-inclusive in nature (although gender ID stuff was hardly the focus of her work), thus evading a stray too far in the radical direction. She was never a radical feminist, but appeared at this point influenced to a degree by radfem theories of the case. My own contemporaneous acceptance of trans ideology was largely owed to Anita's because of how attached to her character and work I felt as a rare and fairly isolated radfem hardcore video gamer. I didn't want to be associated with people who opposed her in any way.
Anyway, the general tone of Feminist Frequency changed after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, and that tonal shift was for the worse, IMO. From this point forward, Anita and the rest of what was now her Feminist Frequency non-profit organization just simply converted to what I like to call wokeness, which is to say extreme social liberalism, in direct response, and you could feel this tonal shift in the subsequent final two entries of the Tropes series that launched early the next year. In Not Your Exotic Fantasy, for example, which incidentally is overall an excellent and recommended critique of the sexual fetishization of women of color in video games, she uses the term "sex workers" for the first time in the series instead of "prostituted women" or "women in prostitution", thus implicitly accepting the sex industry's own preferred terms for its chattel instead of ones that originate in the women's movement. And in The Lady Sidekick, Anita explicitly weighs in against criticizing the political far left on the grounds that they can't be as bad as rightists.
The subsequent post-Tropes era for Feminist Frequency was marked by a shift away from both video games and women's issues as central topics of the organization's attention, to which end public interest quickly waned and donations dried up, resulting ultimately in the organization's reduction back to obscurity. It still exists today, but it's now just a widely forgotten audio-only podcast where she, co-hosts, and occasional guests discuss $#@! politics and the importance of abolishing the prison system and such like this in the context of critiques of mostly obscure films and TV shows that few others will have even heard of before. In short, from my standpoint, Anita and Fem Freq have gone from feeling ahead of their time to feeling behind the times. I miss her awesome feminazi era!!It made a difference.
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games has had a profound impact on the medium over the years. As Colin Campbell wrote for gaming publication Polygon shortly after the final Tropes installment was released, "video games have seen a rise in the number of positive women and minority protagonists and a decrease in the tropes [Sarkeesian] discusses" since the launch of the project. Indeed, during a Game Developers Conference talk referenced in Axios last year, Sarkeesian herself said "making [Tropes] videos today might be 'not impossible, but harder,' as there are fewer examples and 'the pattern is less egregious.'" The question of whether a game character today is a subject or an object no longer breaks down half as neatly along gender lines as it did a decade ago and titles centering on female subjects, ranging from the Horizon series to The Last of Us Part II and the new Tomb Raider trilogy to even the little indie platforming gem Celeste that's referenced in my avatar, among others, have been known to sell millions, and sometimes even tens of millions, of copies. It's a different gaming world today and one that I'm now happy to be a part of.Anita Sarkeesian herself may not be someone I still follow very much, but the legacy of her flagship work, the Tropes series, lives on in the best possible way. I just wanted to honor that legacy with these reflections this morning.
If you've never seen Tropes vs. Women in Video Games before, here is the first and most widely-viewed video published in that series as a primer and a powerful glimpse into the origins of the damsel in distress trope both across history and, in a specialized way, in the very foundations of the video gaming industry and at exactly how it empowers men at the expense of women. It's about 23 minutes.
That's all!
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by NoisyBoy
