Well, gentlemen, it’s all over. Anita Sarkeesian has finally emerged from the kitchen–sandwichless, natch–and released part 1 of her gaming documentary, Tropes vs Women, upon us. Clearly, as has been foretold, this is the end. It’s been a good run. We no longer run jack shit. The women are in charge, being paid more than us, making all the games, winning all the Oscars. The time of man and our once grand penile glory is ended.
How dare this chick come at this beautiful artform, sacred as it is, with her fucking logic and measured tones and visual proof and extensive research and in-depth history and college-educated opinions and well-put demands for fair gender treatment and obvious love of games and just her fucking BULLSHIT, right? THEY’RE FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. I don’t need some estrogenical supertyrant telling me I should feel bad because Dinosaur Planet got dickwashed into becoming a Star Fox title, or Marion from Double Dragon gets sexually assaulted every game, or Princess Peach gets kidnapped a couple measly times over the course of 30 years interfering with my good time. Besides, she was asking for it. Bowser’s probably a nice guy, right? He probably buys her presents and gives her coins, and puts her up in castles and shit, and listens to her cry about being taken away from home and missing her mushroom buddies and her guido boyfriend ALL THE FUCKING TIME, and she still won’t put out. Ugh. Whore.
You can view this shit right below. Now, excuse me, I need to watch this Redbox of Ted two more times before I get charged another buck twenty. Shit’s expensive.
**Behind the scenes trivia: My soul tried to separate, grab a knife, and stab itself in the balls 8 times while trying to write this article with a straight face. Then I kept thinking of Bowser in a fedora, and was glad again.**
Face me on the Twitter
Tweet me on the Facebook
7 comments
The fact that they had to disable the comments on the you-tube page makes me sad.
All she needed to do to get the point across was make a montage of nothing but screenshots of the thousands of death and rape threats she’s received for daring to suggest that perhaps women aren’t treated equally in video games. She is a class act.
And as much as I love watching reddit prove that it’s a prime candidate for being a SPLC designated hate site, I think it’s going to be too awful to be entertaining over there.
She was just voicing a reasonable opinion. The responses she received made me feel ashamed of my gender.
I would hope that if I risk my life battling 100’s-1000’s of monsters, working my way out of death traps, avoiding being killed at almost every moment of my journey, that there is a hot little fox in a bikini trapped in a crystal waiting for me at the end. I mean the lengths that most men go through in real life to get a girl’s attention, pale in comparison to defeating an entire army of foes single handedly AND having to hold a job down as a plumber. As a man, I’d kind of prefer that to a woman complaining that she is not getting equal time with the Staff of Doom. I’ve already got that in real life. Games are fantasy, an escape, and as much as you are like “Women are equals duuuude!!”, most men want to be badasses that get the girl. Y’know what, I take that back, I would definitely like to see a game like Let’s Organize the Closet!, We Need to Spend More Quality Time Together, or Here’s Your List of Chores. If women played more games, the market would adjust(and I have no problem with more strong female lead characters in games), but making games just to stake some moral high ground does not equal sales, and $$$ is what drives the production of any product. Attitudes would have to change at a societal level, and something like this, even though it is very well made an intelligent, is not going to change the way games are made. Before you jump on me for being a pig-headed man, I am taking my wife out to a special dinner to celebrate international women’s day, buying her flowers, showing her appreciation, etc. This doesn’t mean I want to do this while playing a game. That’s why I play games, to take a break from reality for a bit. If your girl was in trouble, wouldn’t you feel great as man that you did everything to help her? For balance, check out Conan O’Brien’s Clueless Gamer review of the new Tomb Raider. Is he an enemy of female empowerment in video games? Nah, he’s just saying what most guys would say when hanging out with their guy friends. All in good fun. http://teamcoco.com/video/clueless-gamer-conan-obrien-reviews-tomb-raider
And does it not stand to reason that just maybe, if girls didn’t feel like their only place in games was being trapped in crystals, getting the shit kicked out of them, kidnapped, or as acarrot to keep some guy going, it might MAKE more female gamers?
Sarkeesian’s whole point isn’t that the trope should go away, but it is, at this point, lazy, because it requires nothing of creativity to make a woman an object, “the ball” as she put it. I’m all for escapism, but look no further than Mass Effect for what it does for a game’s entire experience to have a ballsy, brainy female to inhabit once in a while. I have a Tomb Raider review that’s going to be all over this, but there’s Exhibit B for how great it feels to see the other side of the species earn her heroism, instead of being there to facilitate it from some guy, especially if that guy is me. It’s nice to feel like the knight, but there is not a god damn thing hotter than when a girl does it herself. That doesn’t happen often enough in my escapism.
I would totally play Let’s Organize The Closet.
>If women played more games, the market would adjust
The movie industry used this same line for *decades* in response to complaints that women were being ignored as an audience. I really hope it doesn’t take the games industry that long to realize it’s an empty justification.
Comments are shown as archived from the original site; new comments are closed.