I’m curious about what standards Christina Hoff Sommers relies on to call a piece at Breitbart.com “fantastic,” so I’m reading it. That tweet, just in case you don’t believe me:
Christina H. Sommers @CHSommers 3h
Fantastic article by @Nero on #GamerGate, feminist melodrama, lazy journalists. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/11/27/An-open-letter-to-Bloomberg-s-Sheelah-Kolhatkar-on-the-delicate-matter-of-Anita-Sarkeesian …
I’m finding it not fantastic. I’m finding it very bad. I would find it bad even if I agreed with the politics of it.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the author (“Nero” on Twitter), is addressing Sheelah Kolhatkar, who wrote a profile of Anita Sarkeesian for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Since you have failed to perform a basic survey of the literature surrounding the GamerGate controversy, or, worse, purposefully elected to exclude it from your reporting, and since you have placed your critical faculties on ice in the manner the “listen and believe” feminists are always so insistent on—largely, it turns out, because their claims don’t stack up—allow me to sketch out the real reasons Sarkeesian is controversial in the video games industry, and, to fill in the blanks in your writing, to explain why her ideas are so universally loathed among gamers.
That’s not a promising start. It’s tendentious, it pretends “GamerGate” is a serious academic subject with a serious literature that journalists are supposed to survey, it’s rude, it’s horrendously badly written, and it ends up in just vulgar abuse.
Sarkeesian, however, believes in an old social-science myth, long since debunked, that culture creates behaviour. This idea is on its way out in academia, having been mortally crippled by the “cognitive revolution” epitomised by the works Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman, which emphasises the innate drivers of human behaviour.
Nope.
Sarkeesian, like many of her followers, believes gamers create an environment in which “women are excluded”. But the facts tell a different story. GamerGate, lazily stereotyped by the media as the highest expression of misogyny in gaming, successfully green lit a female developer’s game on the Steam marketplace via a Twitter campaign while opponents of GamerGate want to boycott her, just because she has “the wrong opinions.” GamerGate has also contributed over $20,000 to the Fine Young Capitalists, a feminist movement.
Feminists say they want to help women, but it’s always someone else—in the gaming world, usually a man—who gets their wallet out to do it.
In reality, it’s not women that some gamers have a problem with: it’s people like Sarkeesian and McIntosh. They have claimed hatred of them and people like them is tantamount to hatred of women. But it isn’t. People don’t hate Anita Sarkeesian because she’s a woman: they hate her because they see her as a disingenuous, divisive, sociopathic opportunist.
That’s enough; I don’t need to read the rest. It’s garbage; trashy, hack-y, MRA-ish garbage. It’s beneath the notice of a serious academic and philosopher – yet Sommers calls it “fantastic.”
I’ve read Pinker, and I’m currently reading Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and, whether they’re right or wrong, I’m pretty sure they don’t say anything so simplistic as Yiannopoulos attributes to them here.
I know I’ve shared this before, but perhaps even CHS would find his article from May, blaming video games for Elliot Rodger’s violent rampage, execrable. On the other hand, the thesis of his article is that misogyny is not to blame, so maybe she though it was fantastic too.
Culture doesn’t create behaviour? Really? Then why do people from different cultures behave differently? Unless of course Yiannopoulos has a rather more narrow definition of culture than I do.
FailGaters/anti-SJWs and creationists both share an extraordinary ability to analyse individual or collective writings on a given subject and draw opposite conclusions than those intended (or explicitly expressed) by the writer/s, as well as to simply hold up a mirror and present the reflection – the complete opposite scenario – as reality. They also share the propensity to attribute either rank ignorance or sinister motives to those who don’t subscribe to their official talking points – because it’s of course obviously entirely impossible for a feminist/scientist to actually have a salient point (much less be right) about something they’ve spent a great deal of time observing, studying and analysing (in a far more honest way than someone who starts from the position that it’s all lies and that it’s their job to Tell The People).
It dismays me that someone like Dawkins signs on so willingly to bafflingly dogmatic contrarians like Sommers, who appears to go out of her way to find anti-fem screeds to endorse. Well, correction: it would dismay me if I had the slightest respect for him as a public intellectual anymore. He broke a champagne bottle over that ship (The SS Dear Muslima) and sent it on its merry way a long time ago.
The fine young capitalists are about as feminist as CHS is.
I find it rather ironic that someone from breitbart.com calling another person a sociopathic opportunist. But then projecting one’s negative attributes onto another is an immature defense mechanism. CHS is not very good at logic if she thinks that piece of writing makes any sense. I would have failed college if I had written essays like that
There’s a kind of cognitive bias we have in which we kind of assume everyone around the world sees the world pretty much the way we do and is motivated by the same values, but simply use weird words to describe it and wear funny clothes while saying so. Most people have no idea just how varied human cultures can be. But the general idea that I’m just a straight up normal human being and other peoples are essentially versions of me with strange food, is fairly common. It’s fairly true about basic aspects of life—we all solve the question of “How can we not starve?” by shoving food in our faceholes, though what we count as food can vary dramatically, but when we get to the more difficult questions, like “What is the appropriate way to live?” and “What are my obligations to my people and how do I fulfill them?” shit goes all over the map.
It’s a kind of ethnocentrism, much like how moderate believers will say “We all believe in the same god, we just call it by different names” and omit the coda “…but my priests have the details down correctly.”
Yeah, just like all the people that would eventually be known as GamerGaters tried to get people not to support Sarkeesian’s kickstarter campaign to raise money for her project. Ultimately, from what I could gather, someone pointed out the game was developed by a supporter of GG and not to support it. I couldn’t find any demands it not be allowed or anything like that. Beyond that, he sort of forgot to include stories about what happens to women developers who have earned the ire of GG. I guess Yiannopoulos was too busy patting himself on the back for calling out lazy journalists who “failed to perform a basic survey of the literature surrounding the GamerGate controversy” that he couldn’t prevent himself from being one of them.
I’m just playing with Yiannopoulos. We all know he’s not a journalist.
Because money is the only way to help, right?
Well, women are all golddiggers, right guys?
‘Cept CHS. She’s alright. Practically one o’ the boys. She worked for her money. Not like all those other women.
Well, as SCOTUS reminds us, money is speech and, from what I’ve seen of the USA, it speaks mighty loudly.
Curious about Fine Young Capatalists, I googled.
http://cathodedebris.tumblr.com/post/97997079313/gamergate-exposed-the-corruption-of
anthrosciguy @11
Thank you for that,
“Innate drivers of human behavior.” Oh, dear dog.
Is it just me, or do others find this focus of CHS and others (like Andrew Sullivan!) on “innate differences” between men and women to be strange? They repeat things like this over and over, often trying to claim that feminists believe there to be no difference at all between the genders. I have not personally encountered a feminist who has ever expressed this belief. I think everyone acknowledges that men and women exhibit differences, both biologically as well as sociologically/culturally, and indeed many men enjoy “traditionally female” pursuits, and vice versa, as well they should have the right to do. There’s a spectrum of behaviors, and nobody I know is trying to reduce that spectrum to a single model, but rather we’re trying to focus on behaviors that are harmful in some fashion, and pondering ways to go about addressing that harm. The problem is not the behavioral spectrum, it’s the stupid, hidebound, and ignorant thinking that “boys will be boys” and that there is something real behind the notion of “women’s work.”
Al Dente @ 12,
One thing these fools have in common with the rightwingers that the likes of Dawkins et al. have also chosen to align themselves with is that they’re chumps and suckers, and so attract scammers like the phoney FYC. It’s like the gold sellers and survivalist supply sellers who swarm around Fox News and other rightwing outlets.
Some of it is to do with thinking we’re all adamant eyes-closed fingers-in-ears evo psych denialists, aka yes people who think there are no differences.
But hey – they have the deep sophistication of Sam Harris’s claim that maybe women don’t go to his talks because we don’t like being critical of bad ideas, so, you know…don’t expect them to make a whole lot of sense.
We don’t like being critical of bad ideas yet Sam Harris goes off like a siren if we object to HIS bad ideas.
Maek you think.
I get the feeling from Harris that he has adopted the mantle of Wise Holder of a PhD and pushes back against any objections to his ideas. Which, to me, means that his research advisor failed him. I’m sure that he would object to anyone trying to correct him about his area of research expertise, which he presumably studied for 4-7 years. So why does he try to explain to women who have lived their entire lives experiencing life through their eyes why they must not like skeptical groups/movements? (Obvious answer is obvious.)
“Fantastic” means “not credible, made of fantasy”–no?
an old social-science myth, long since debunked, that culture creates behaviour
Oh, really? So internet trolling is an evolved-in behavior? Are internet trolls’ parents also internet trolls? Have they isolated that gene, yet?
It is, however, nice to see that “gamer culture” doesn’t exist – because it must really be a “gamer gene” since culture doesn’t create behavior.
Randomfactor
yup
google definition
fan·tas·tic
fanˈtastik/
adjective
1.
imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality.
“novels are capable of mixing fantastic and realistic elements”
synonyms: fanciful, extravagant, extraordinary, irrational, wild, absurd, far-fetched, nonsensical, incredible, unbelievable, unthinkable, implausible, improbable, unlikely, doubtful, dubious; strange, peculiar, odd, queer, weird, eccentric, whimsical, capricious, fantastical, Seussian; visionary, romantic; informalcrazy, cockeyed, off the wall
[meta]
Well yes, my first reaction was to sarcastically employ the semantic shift.
chigau, you left out the second Google sense, which is the one obviously intended:
2.informal
extraordinarily good or attractive.
"she's got a fantastic body"
“We’re not sexists! We hate her because she’s an asshole, not because she’s a woman! But look at them! Boycotting that woman because they think she’s an asshole! They’re the real sexists!”
From the article:
*snorflechortlecough*
Wait, so there’s some “literature” on the subject – as in results of methodical study of GamerGate (a cultural phenomenon) and that should be rightly mocked?
Oh I get it, you only get to mock feminist writing. Anti-feminist writing is all serious literatury stuff.
Right! Because, look, if there is an innate driver for some human behaviours, then it stands to reason that all human behaviours are innate. Obvs. Certainly, there’s no possibility that culture could have any influence over our behaviours, which is why humanity is such a homogenous set which marches in lockstep. Multiculturalism? It’s not bad because it mixes diverse groups, making racists and xenophobes afraid that the monsters will eat them; it’s just nonsense, because there are no diverse groups. Advertising doesn’t work, because our behaviour is innately driven, and cannot be influenced by outside elements. Peer pressure? Nope. No such thing. You were only pretending to have different preferences in order to appear cool (which also never happens, because culture doesn’t influence us).
Seriously, much as I hate the idea that “the truth is always somewhere in the middle,” there actually are times where the truth is in the middle. Yes, there are going to be innate drivers that lead us to act in certain ways, but culture also influences us. It’s like looking at a river’s tributaries and asserting that they exert no influence over the main river – I’m pretty sure that a particularly silty tributary is going to raise the silt levels in the main river. Just sayin’.
No, playing Doom won’t, by itself, originate the desire to shoot up a school. But uncritically consuming games that contain sexist messages when you associate with sexist peers in a sexist society actually could nudge you toward considering sexism normal, reasonable, and not a problem because, even if we really are meat robots, we’re not read-only. Our minds are plastic to some extent, and that means that we can be influenced; it means that education actually takes, it means that debate can change our minds, and it means that cultural artefacts can and will influence us.
Even if we ignore his strawmanning of Sarkeesian’s views regarding culture’s influence over our behaviour, simply flipping to the opposite position – that we’re somehow preprogrammed by our genetics and cannot be influenced by the things by which we’re constantly surrounded – is fucking irrational nonsense.
John Morales
[more meta]
It was deliberate.
I don’t believe in teaching the controversy.
My way or the highway.
Is it okay if I repost my Facebook comment?
I’ll do that.
—————————————————–
No no no no no! That behavior is *cultivated, refined, and reinforced* by culture (which was always the claim), has never been debunked by Evolutionary Psychology (which is what he’s talking about but won’t say, for some reason). Instead, what’s been learned is that behavior has roots within an evolutionary framework, which culture then takes hold of. And just because behavior has roots within an evolutionary framework doesn’t mean it can’t be changed on a societal level.
If anything, the cultural view of behavior has been enhanced and reinforced by these discoveries. Bigots who insist on replacing the the Bible with Evo-Psych as their excuse for bigotry really need to actually learn about it.