It’s a half-hour of his latest obsession, and it’s dreadful glurge that will make his fans happy, since they won’t actually think about what he’s doing. A short summary:
The first few minutes are the usual complaints that the threats against Anita Sarkeesian are not to be taken seriously, and that she was really dumb for publicizing them. This makes no sense, of course; many of the threats are public, we can see them on twitter and youtube comments, and they constitute a flood of hate. You can’t address that by calling out the FBI — what are they going to do, arrest every stupid man-child with an XBox? — you deal with it socially, by calling attention to it, and getting individuals to pay attention to what they’re doing and call each other out for it. But Thunderf00t is one of those binary man-children who seems to think the only two possible responses are arrest or applause.
But then he shifts gears, and the bulk of the video is an attack on…Joss Whedon. I guess that brief public rebuke from a celebrity really stung. It’s a really weird attack, too — he accuses Whedon of using sexist tropes in his movies. At length. Repeatedly. Repetitively.
There’s the scene of the Black Widow in the Avengers movie, tied to a chair and getting slapped around by Russian interrogators. Torture porn! There’s the scene where River Tam is smuggled onto the Firefly in a box. Women in Refrigerators! There’s Saffron, using her feminine wiles in Firefly to trick the crew into thinking she’s a nice person. Sexist stereotypes! There’s Zoe, making her husband Wash a sandwich. Do we even need to mention how trite that is? And look, Cabin in the Woods…it’s using the whole battery of sexist tropes from teen slasher movies! OMG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer wore makeup and had breasts! It’s bizarre, prolonged, and dishonest, and he seems to be playing it straight.
Never mind that minutes later, it’s revealed that the Black Widow is leading the interrogators on for information, and she breaks out of the chair and defeats the bad guys. The Women in Refrigerators trope is about killing women in stories to motivate the heroic men; River Tam was the fierce hero in the show. Saffron was a venal, wicked thief…and a very strong character who almost defeated the Firefly crew. Zoe, the loyal soldier and reliable badass? It’s somehow demeaning that she has a mutually loving relationship with a man? Cabin in the Woods entire conceit is an undermining of the stereotypical characters and sexist action in the slasher flick — of course it has a promiscuous woman in it, because the movies it is sending up always do.
And I hate to break this news to you, but sometimes women wear makeup and pink clothes and heels, because they want to. It’s OK. They also get to have sex and enjoy being women and have differences from men.
But wait, before you get all upset at how dishonest Thunderf00t was, that was his point. At the very end, he briefly declares his point — too briefly, given the 20 minutes of repetitive Whedon-bashing — that he was just doing what Anita Sarkeesian does, taking short bits of video games and displaying them out of context to make it look like they’re horribly sexist, just as he has done to Whedon’s work. Ha ha, smug laugh, see how awful Sarkeesian is?
Except he left out an essential part of the argument. You don’t get to lie a whole bunch of times, admit that you were dishonest, and then point to someone you don’t like and say “I was just lying exactly like her.” We’ve now confirmed that you are a self-confessed liar, but that doesn’t mean that you now have a valid example to demonstrate lying in others. What you have to show is that she similarly took examples out of context.
For instance, Sarkeesian points out that video game scene where the character sneaks past a room full of slavers, where naked women are put on display. You want to claim that’s taken out of context? Then show me the scene a few minutes later in which the women rise in rebellion and do all that kick-ass video game fighting stuff to defeat the bad guys. Sarkeesian shows a hit man beating up a bunch of strippers and then dragging their inert bodies around the room, boob physics on proud display, and then dumping them in a box. Context? Show me the part of the game where the women regain consciousness, team up, club the hit man into unconsciousness, and turn him over to the police.
It would also be nice if you demonstrate where all the misogynistic gamers are actually just doing a coordinated satire of sexist tropes, showing their fellow brave egalitarians a bad example, so that they all know not to do that.
If your argument is that context excuses all those examples of misogyny, it ought to be easy to show that. The absurdly truncated use of well-known scenes in Joss Whedon TV shows and movies is a great example — every one of those could be easily exposed and are trivially known to be dishonest to anyone with any acquaintance with them. So how come we’ve got all these videos accusing Sarkeesian of lying, with no good examples of context exposure, and now the only thing Thunderf00t can do is lie himself and claim it’s just like her?
Does he believe in sympathetic magic or something? Will his next video be an overlong demonstration of Thunderf00t sticking pins in a Barbie doll made up to look like Sarkeesian?
What an arrogant display of stupidity. I can’t believe this Phil Mason thinks he’s smart.
Thanks PZ. There is no way I could sit through that.
Wait, so his cutesy example of “OMG, someone totally not sexist can look sexist if you mine all their stuff” is…Joss Whedon? Own goal, man, own goal. Yes, Joss is an outspoken feminist ally. But he’s also made some pretty sexist shit (and transphobic shit) and has been called out on it many times by many people. So, not the best way to try and make his point?
Beyond any doubt, Phil Mason had proven himself to be a jackass. Too bad, he could have done well in life if not for his misogyny. Now he’s just pandering to the MRA’s and other idiots.
Yeah, there is no such thing as perfection. Whedon is flawed, like all of us, but his overall efforts are in support of feminism — but Thunderf00t couldn’t even find lazy, sloppy things Whedon has said, but instead brought forth a parade of easily refuted bullshit.
And then he thinks he’s clever because that was precisely his point!
carlie @ 2
Yeah, I had the same thought. There are some really good feminist criticisms of Whedon out there. This…is not one of them. Hell, it’s not even a send-up of those criticisms. It just sidesteps them entirely to flail in random, stupid directions so he can then go, “Look at this random, stupid flailing!”
“Look at this random, stupid flailing!”
….can I use that for discussion of the internet in general?
That was a fantastic breakdown of Mason’s bullshit; particularly how you demonstrated what context means. It never ceases to amaze me how people will contort themselves in an effort to not have to admit they’re wrong. Public speaking is supposed to be the number one phobia of humans, in general; but I think it’s really a fear to admit one has made a mistake. What would that be called Errorphobia? Or maybe it could be called “pulling a Thunderf00t.”
After reading up on Whedon comments I don’t know if I would use the word flawed as some of the stuff he’s done is inherently misogynistic to the point where I have to wonder why he thought it was such a good idea to even attempt such a thing.
It’s funny because while Thunderf00t is more popular than ever on Youtube, his subscriber base has substantially changed. He used to have a ton of hard thinking, science loving people watching his videos. However, his popularity exploded and his base changed to ignorant, racist, sexist fucktards once he moved over to Muslim and feminist bashing. Interestingly, as I recall the shift came after he made a video or two speculating about monetizing his Youtube channel. Not to say that I don’t think his attitudes are genuine; the vitriol when South Park wussed out on showing Mohammed in an episode was real. That’s when he thought the Muslims had gone too far, and when he kicked his hatred of them into full gear, btw. Not over any of the real violence and other shit Muslim fanatics pull; shit got real for him when South Park got threatened by a group of 20 Muslims who faded into obscurity soon after.
It moved pretty quickly from there, quote mining Dawahfilms (who in his video basically mirrored what Thunderf00t said in his video raging about the South Park censorship) and then coming here, only to take the MRAs’ side in Elevatorgate.
It’s been really sad seeing Thunderf00t’s descent into total assholism in real time. I used to genuinely respect the guy, but now…now I can’t even recommend his old “Why do People Laugh at Creationists?” videos.
Moreover, he doesn’t actually seem to grok Sarkeesian’s point, which is not that each of these individual games is sexist or misogynist, but that there are common sexist/misogynist storytelling and gameplay tropes that game developers rely on across many games, often as shorthand or in lieu of more complex characterization. It actually wouldn’t be that hard to do the same for Whedon’s works, but Tf00t is too clueless to even understand that that’s what he should have done to make a similar rhetorical point.
Of course, the response would be “yes, we know those works have problems and have said so before. Welcome to the club.” Getting right back to demonstrating just how ill-informed and out-of-his-depth Mason is on this subject.
@thelastholdout #9
Yeah, if you look back at WDPLAC, you can see many of his same tendencies – yes, he happens to be right of course, but he still always manages to be an asshole about it.
I’d recommend AronRa’s Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism series for anyone instead.
Even as a huge fan of the Hitman series (seriously, I even bought and completed the first one when it first came out) I don’t see how anyone can possibly not get that it has a serious issue, especially lately, with the representation of women. Just about all the women you kill in the game as specific targets as sexualised or objectified in some way, as opposed to the men (who are more likely to try and kill you themselves).
I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstanding that the complaint is these games basically feature women that you can kill. They then go on to make the point ‘Well, but ah, yeah, you can kill one or two women, but MOST of the people you kill in games are MEN, why isn’t she making her videos about that? Isn’t that the real sexism?’ And yes, that’s obviously true (though it does of course come across as complete ‘whataboutery’).
There is a problem with the way men are represented in the media, games included. I’ll note first that no-one is making THAT video together with ways of solving the problem, secondly that it wasn’t the issue that Anita set out to discuss in the first place, and that finally the issue isn’t simply that you can kill women, it’s that they’re particularly portrayed as sex workers, objectified, with no place in the game other than titillating set dressing to make the world ‘gritty’ or as targets of casual violence.
I don’t get it. If Sarkeesian’s crititique of games is so flawed, then surely the most effective way to demonstrate that is by refuting the actual points she makes, referring to actual games? If, instead, you attempt to show what’s wrong with her work via a laboured analogy with a different medium, the obvious conclusion many people will reach is that you’re unable to honestly critique her videos.
I wonder if Mason would appreciate the irony that he’s so far out of his depth when it comes to discourse on sexism as Kirk Cameron is when he tries to refute evolution? He really does sound like someone who thinks a whole video ranting about “why are there still monkeys” is an incisive gotcha that tears down the entire structure of evolutionary theory.
@9 thelastholdout I don’t think it’s necessary for him to have had a literal “sell out” moment to notice the correlation between his increase in revenue/subscribers and the racism/sexism. I imagine that what happened was that he joined FTB, made some idiot comment and doubled down, got kicked out, and posted a rant which turned out to be more popular than much of his better-researched work in the past. It’s a pretty simple positive feedback loop, then, to see where he is increasingly incentivized to make more stupid, uninformed stuff (which probably also takes far, far less time to compose than the anti-creationist stuff he used to do). Then, he can more or less ignore all his detractors as “haters” and “social justice warriors” and live in the echo chamber he’s created for himself.
It’s something we all run the risk of doing, frankly, and it’s hard to prescribe a good way of preventing it other than to be wary of the possibility.
And let’s face it: The fact that the people he went after were the extreme low hanging fruit played no small part in his success. As we learned from TF’s short stint here, he can’t argue worth shit, his research is sloppy, and his ethics have more holes than my socks.
thelastholdout @ 9
Riffing on “retarded” as a synonym for “asshole” is not cool. Please don’t.
Going after Whedon on this issue is laughable. He is responsible for some of the strongest female characters out there, not to mention the fact when he has complete control he tends to a very even handed treatment of what roles people are filling in the cast. An excellent example is Agents of SHIELD where there are three distinct types on the team: leadership, science, and tank. For each type there is a male and a female character. The Whedon’s seem to strive for balance wherever possible. They’re not always successful but they’re pushing pretty hard against the industry norms.
Wasn’t he 3 posts deep into his rants here on FTB before he even deigned to look at the anti-harassment policy that he’d already decried as no fun and draconian and whatnot? He functions at a level of willful ignorance on this topic that he certainly wouldn’t accept from anyone discoursing on science, and I suspect it comes from the same dismissive, misogynist position as his sneering at communications majors. Research and learning and reason and evidence aren’t techniques and ideals we should apply to every aspect of our lives, they’re to be reserved for stuff that matters, like science. You know: man stuff.
Debating Sarkeesian-haters is a truly bizarre experience, not dissimilar to talking to particularly aggressive creationists. I’ve just spent an evening or so doing it (on some online forum), and in case anyone wants to know, the only “arguments” that were repeated over and over and over again were as follows:
– “But what about the men?”
– “AS does not play computer games herself, therefore she cannot possibly be able to have an opinion about them.”
– “She collected a lot of money to do her videos, therefore she is not credible.”
– “She did not film all the game sequences herself, therefore any argument she might make is futile.”
– “AS has been in the same room with Rebecca Watson and Zoe Quinn (who hate all men), therefore she is not credible.”
– “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEN?”
The only “argument” that actually touched upon the content of the videos is the tired old claim that AS misrepresents the stripper-sequence in “Hitman” (which is readily refuted by actually quoting from the video). It’s fairly obvious that the Sarkeesian-haters never even bother to watch her videos, they only parrot the claims that people like Thunderf00t make about them…
Oh come on. It’s not that hard to criticize Whedon using sexist tropes. But River Tam as a ‘Women in Refrigerators’ is fucking hilarious. The trope name is a slang term arising from a Green Lantern comic. That’s like accusing Sharknado of “Jumping the Shark.”
Worse, there IS a trope name for River Tam coming out of stasis like that: Girl in a Box.
Oh Thunderf00t. Such fail.
@Paul Turnbull #18
I haven’t seen Agents of SHIELD, gotta check that out. In Buffy there were plenty of examples of strong female characters and males viewed as sexual beings, not just the standard strong males and sexy females. Angel: all those times he just happens to be walking about topless? A highly sexualised male character (alongside Xander of course.. oh and Spike) ;) Odd how these kinds of things didn’t put off me and my two teenage brothers when we had a Buffy marathon weekend on discovering the DVD’s at our relatives. None of us were like “Why doesn’t angel take control of the situation! Why is Willow the clever and powerful one and Xander the silly weak one?” Also why was it so funny? (I’ll say: breaking gender roles is entertaining in a very fulfilling way.)
It’s also not a binary thing. Joss Whedon can write some things intelligently and have sexism issues with other things. And hell, we can even have fun watching the latter. There’s no law against that and indeed folks like Anna Sarkieesian aren’t even telling you that you shouldn’t consume this product. Just *be aware*. Is that really too much to ask?
=8)-DX:
Breaking gender roles is a fab way to enlighten people, too. That was one of the most enjoyable things in Stross’s The Jennifer Morgue. All that said, it’s more important for people to understand that women are people, and as such, they can enjoy wearing heels or making a sandwich, etc. It’s one thing that those mired in sexism do. not. get. at all, that everything a woman (or a woman character) does is not for the happiness of the male gaze, but for the happiness of herself.
doublereed:
Yep. It’s easy to see why Whedon went with that trope though, it was wonderfully dramatic, and it was fun to see Mal’s auto-assumption of sex slavery slapped in the face.
The thing about Joss Whedon… it’s true that he’s created some incredibly strong women characters. If you’re a cis-gendered woman, Joss will represent you extremely well. Zoe was a brilliant example of a strong woman of color, but Joss still has major issues with race (the near complete lack of any Asians in Firefly, for example, despite the ubiquitous use of Chinese throughout the verse). And he’s not one to shy away from misogynistic tropes (he loves fridging, for example [Thunderf00t would have been better off using Willow’s girlfriend, here; she was definitely fridged]). He also tends to punish sexually liberated women by portraying them as bullies and then having them disgraced (Chordelia). He tends to play fast and loose with rape, as well.
And don’t get me started on Xander and Anya.
There is one thing I tend to defend Joss on, and that’s Anara. She was never in the original proposal. Joss actually never intended to portray prostitution in Firefly (except maybe as an occasional backdrop). Fox basically told him they wouldn’t air Firefly without a “space hooker”, so he created Anara and the concept of Companions to attempt to make a “space hooker” that didn’t revolve around tropes and wasn’t explicitly sexualized. Whether he succeeded in that or not is a different question, but there you go.
As to Thunderf00t, fuck him. He’s utterly useless at this point.
Nate:
Inara.
So… I’m a little bit confused on Thunderf00t’s actual point. Does he like Joss Whedon or not? If he was pointing out supposed hypocrisy, then pointing out that wasn’t his point, does that mean he thinks Joss Whedon is a hypocrite? Or does it mean that he thinks Joss Whedon is NOT a hypocrite?
Because if his point is that Joss Whedon is not actually sexist, then it kind of undermines his own point when Joss Whedon likes Anita Sarkeesian’s stuff and says it makes good points.
I don’t think he thought this one through.
@ phlo
RE: Similar behavior and motivated reasoning.
I posted this in an older thread but it still applies here so modifying it was easy.
Fallacious reasoning comes in many many forms because of the specific details, but they all have similar root purposes and forms that satisfy the persons emotions and work in terms of social conflict and “winning” as a goal. Think about it in “fight/flight/freeze” terms relative to the substance and associated persons, groups, or symbols.
If they don’t like what a person is saying in the immediate moment (or as a general way of dealing with a particular issue of conflict), but can’t or won’t deal with the substance, they do what they can to minimize their opponents effectiveness while squirming around the substance. I consider a persons emotional reality substance as well, for example the lived experience of racial minorities or women in gaming. That can be tricky when it comes to explaining how the emotions of the person being fallacious are not relevant to reality.
So while the details change you see the same minimization of harm (retreat from substance), attacking of credibility (attack the person and retreat from substance), changing of subjects (retreat from substance), implicit dishonesty about substance, and many other common behaviors.
The second one is that a person running off of these “primate chess” rules and engaging in these behaviors unconsciously (best case) assumes that their opponents are doing the same so they also engage in projection. We all self-reference by nature and it takes deliberate effort to create methods of understanding what is really going on with one’s opponent. The best way to hide one’s own tactics is to (often preemptively) paint the tactics on your opponent, and it’s natural to think that if one can do a particular thing than others can too.
So you see racists giving in to their base nature pretending the other races are doing the same. You see right-wing terrorists who hate the government and want to destroy it become convinced that the government wants to destroy them double down and try to start the war themselves. You see misogynists that act like “all women do X” pretend that all women act in a similar ways as them. And here you see,
Assumptions that talking about women’s problems mean one does not care about men’s problems when it’s more likely they don’t like themselves or anyone else talking about women’s problems.
Assumptions that this other person can’t talk about games when it’s more likely that this person can’t talk about what AS is talking about.
Really stupid assumptions that funding of projects by interested parties is wrong when it’s more likely that they want to see projects they don’t like get no funding.
Assumptions that using the work of others in a project is wrong when they are fine appealing to the work of others in a social conflict.
Assumptions that because “group of people I don’t like are together” means they can be dismissed individually when they are probably fine with groups of people they like talking about issues of mutual interest.
It’s a problem with thinking in categories and being unable or unwilling to account for the actual diversity of people. One of the best things I ever did was to work on being able to talk about both characteristics of broad groups, and treat individual members of those groups as if they don’t fit any larger patterns.
In #29 this,
…should have said this,
Well on Thunderf00t’s planet, nothing short of throwing acid in a woman’s face is actually sexism, right? So I don’t think he’s trying to make any point at all about whether Whedon is sexist or not. I think the point is that he can do exactly* what Sarkeesian did with the games she highlighted to anyone’s work and produce the desired result. I think he knows that Whedon is widely considered to be a feminist ally and therefor, if Whedon’s work can be made to look sexist to feminists, it necessarily follows that anything anyone calls sexist is not actually sexist. From which it follows necessarily that Anita Sarkeesian is a lying liarhead who lies and deserves everything his fans dish out.
*for values of “exactly” equivalent to “completely different”
My 31 is in response to doublereed @ 28
Are there pills available on the internet to make me sneer that long and hard?
Mexico?
It really is painfull to see, even second hand, T-f00ts descent into stupidity. I could not watch his new videos after he left FTB and I will not watch this one either, even though as a Good Skeptic ™ I probably should have. It is bad, after all, to believe P. Z. Meyers ™.
For example, even if Whedon (from whose work I know only The Avengers), used sexist tropes en masse in every single work of his, it would not be valid criticism of his support of Anita Sarkeesian videos or a proof of his hipocrisy. At best it would be proof of Whedons ignorance. All Whedon would have to answer in such a case would be “Yup, mate, you nailed it, I wrote some pretty sexist shit in the past. I realised this after watching Anitas vids on youtube. Mea culpa, will try and make amends.” and T-f00ts point would crumble.
Of course Thunderf00t does not even try to go for charge of hipocrisy. He demonstrates the trivial point, that quote mining exists.
“I say! No shit, Sherlock!”
Nope. Unless the woman was literally stuffed into a refrigerator, he wouldn’t be able to see it. The man has revealed that he is remarkably incapable of recognizing metaphors.
@31 Seven of Mine
Wow. Thanks for the explanation.
So he’s basically arguing against feminist criticism as a concept? That’s both insane and banal.
And of course we actually have examples of game developers whose work has been commented on in Sarkeesian’s videos doing exactly that:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/saints-row-dev-responds-to-feminist-frequency-crit/1100-6422014/
I can’t speak to how well Jaros and his team are doing when they say they are working to improve their product with regards to sexual objectification, but the fact that they acknowledge the problem and are expressing regrets and tryiong to do better is encouraging.
PZ,
Thank you for reviewing Phil Mason videos so that I don’t have to. His pompous, condescending voice makes my skin crawl.
I’ve watched Thunderf00t’s “career” on Youtube since back in 2009, when VenomFangX was still his arch-nemesis. I actually got into a Youtube PM debate with a VenomFangX partisan over the charity scandal. I watched for updates on T-f00t’s & DPRJones’ channels every day. I was *involved*.
And then I saw T-f00t engage in the same Manichean Epic Struggle For Rightness with… “How the World Works”, was it? And DawahFilms. And watched the middlin’ videos about engaging in “research” and trying to “find a new direction” for the channel as the Attack The Idiot Creationists material sort of fizzled out, and I realized that T-f00t, despite his passion and his knowledge, can’t really generate content on his own. He has to *respond* to content. He has to have an enemy, a nemesis, someone who is Wrong and must be Corrected.
But it isn’t even that. He didn’t want to Correct VFX. It was pretty clear to anyone watching that VFX was, to put it charitably, dealing with some issues of mental stability. And was a teenager still dependent on his parents, while T-f00t was an adult academic. VFX was an easy, I’d even go so far as to say lazy, target. T-F00t went after him deliberately, and hounded him into deranged and criminal behavior. And never once stepped back and said, “Hey, this kid may have some problems that probably don’t need to be exacerbated, maybe I should take a step back and let this cool off.” No, it was Attack, Attack, Attack! Until the Enemy is Defeated. Pwned. Driven off the internet in shame and humiliation, Never to Return. This is not that “balanced and reasoned debate” we keep hearing about.
So now Anita Sarkeesian is his new chew toy. Only she won’t play his game. She won’t make response videos, she won’t engage with specious arguments, she won’t change her focus to cover what T-f00t or anyone else thinks is “really” “important”. She just keeps delivering her material, as promised, on the topics she selected over two years ago. And it just drives him batty. She HAS TO respond! His fanboys spam her with “dares” to “acknowledge the arguments” and she laughs them off. I can’t help but grin that Thunderf00t is finally gaining mainstream media coverage, and it is as one voice of a sexist, lazy, deranged lunatic mob threatening a feminist academic with rape and death. Take a step back, LOOK at yourself.
So, the next time he wants to convince the scientific community that somebody published falsified data he will publish falsified data and then say smugly: look, I told you so!?
I unsubscribed TF when he started doing his anti-muslim stuff, which was bad enough. His recent anti-feminist crap is much worse still. Thinking about it, I’ve come to realize his Why Do People Laugh at Creationists videos weren’t actually any good either. He was just picking easy targets, going over well-trodden ground and the whole thing now seems mostly like an attempt to make himself feel superior to other people. The guy’s an asshole, and he probably always was.
Kestra @ 39:
It’s as though he really believes he’s some sort of comic book superhero. It’s disconnected and deeply creepy.
I wish Thunderfoot would drop his feminist-takedown videos and get back to taking down creationists and other anti-science people, which is the reason I found him in the first place. I wish PZ would do the same (i.e cut back on the “feminist-hero” angle and get back to basics)
Never gonna happen, I know. Still, one can wish.
I mean, he did sort of try to do more with his platform. Remember those embarrassing Ray Comfort “debates”? And he realizes his limits, I think, and made a conscious choice to stick to what made him popular in the first place: attack films. Thunderf00t is no skeptic: his position on an issue is the Right One. So he looks for someone who is Wrong (not “has another view” or even “the other side”, just the Wrong One) and he attacks them. That’s why his “research” is so lazy, to the point of being laughably transparent. He doesn’t need to prove his point, really. He already *knows* he’s right, he just has to make it clear how Wrong the Enemy is. So sad.
Oh really? Well, fuck you too.
danishdynamite:
PZ is not a feminist hero. He’s a feminist. The rest of us feminists aren’t batting our eyelashes at PZ riding in on a white horse, and the fact that you don’t seem to grasp that is a good indication that he’s right to keep on blogging about feminist and other social issues. There really isn’t anything more basic than a large amount of people being treated as not fully human.
Dear danishdynamite,
Piss off.
Yours sincerely,
pentatomid
danishdynamite @ 43
Right, because PZ couldn’t possibly be writing about feminism because he actually cares about it. He’s obviously just playing an angle and should get back to “basics” i.e. teh menz.
The metaphor game is another fun part of primate chess.
Non-literal comparisons are very useful in getting things across, but since a metaphors are like an equation with variables with shapes when graphed personal perspective can lead to all sorts of switching of those variables. A person that has problems thinking in categories (or just a category) is when they take a metaphor and can’t actually use it or show that they understand what they other person meant by it.
Now maybe Willow’s girlfriend was killed in some dumb way that qualifies as a trope, but I seem to remember that being a means to explore the idea of Willow abusing her power because of something terrible happening to her.
@danishdynamite
Well that all depends on what you mean by “basics”. Whatever that means to you is “basics” to you but not to the community broadly. People become atheists and skeptics for many reasons and not all of them are because of creationists. That would be people becoming skeptics and atheists because they don’t like the effects of religion and other bad social structures with bad characteristics on education, science, critical thinking, government…
Plenty of others became atheists and skeptics because of how religion and other parts of society (if the reality of religion is false it is just a manifestation of society after all) affect women, race, gender, mental illness and more. You need to learn to share, and figure out how the harm is really being spread around.
Brony:
The way someone is killed has nothing to do with the Women in Refrigerators trope. It’s very easy to look up.
The fact that Whedon changed things up a teeny bit with Willow, using two women, doesn’t make it a case of not fridging. It was definite fridging.
Um…feminism is the basics.
And if you don’t understand that, well, the internet’s a large place.
@ Iyéska
I’ll think about that for a bit. If the term does have a wider use outside of just a female character being killed and unceremoniously discarded in order to advance plots involving male heroes and villeins that bears thinking about.
Why is the fact that Willow is a woman not relevant?
Brony:
No, it damn well does not.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I think I see part of it. Willow’s girlfriend was killed by a man. But the death was not particularly gruesome. Was there a problem in how the plot involving Willow was advanced? What would a better way of arranging the narrative have looked like?
@ Iyéska
That seems unfair. Part of the larger social disagreement involves a dispute over what people want the atheist/skeptic community to be focused on. How is it bad to acknowledge that there is disagreement over what is considered the basics while supporting the side that wants a wider community focus on issues?
I’m going to back out for a bit. I can admit that I’m probably mistaken in how Women in Refrigerators Syndrome is applied and missing relevant aspects of how women are treated in entertainment. But I’m pretty sure you are misreading my response to danishdynamite.
Brony
The problematic bit has basically nothing to do with Willow, per se; it has to do with the larger trope of female characters whose principal plot relevance is to be a victim, and thereby inspire action on the part of another person, rather than having agency of her own (and I will note here that aside from occasional flashes of competence, Tara actually didn’t have much agency of her own even before she stopped a bullet.) The ‘men are the ones who go on Roaring Rampages of violent Revenge’ trope is a separate (and also misogynist) trope, which wasn’t followed here, but doesn’t really affect whether Girl in a Refrigerator is in play. If, for instance, it had been Riley who got shot (I forget if Buffy was still seeing him then or not, though; if not, then nevermind) and Buffy who went on a rampage, or (to leave the main character out of it, although I think it might have made a better story, but anyway), Xander who took the bullet and Anya who went on the rampage, then we could talk about how he’s totally subverting misogynist tropes, etc. (Take the above with a grain of salt, it’s not really my field.)
Brony @ 56
There is no definition of “basics” that would render “cut back on the “feminist-hero” angle” not absolute fuckwittery. It’s dismissive of PZ and it’s dismissive of feminist concerns no matter how worthwhile a cause danishdynamite’s personal definition of “basics” is.
It involves the definition of “basic” inasmuch as danishdynamite may regard feminism as not “basic” if he’s using a definition of “the basics” that’s completely fucking wrong. Even if you look at it from the vantage point of a science and biology enthusiast, ensuring your hobby or fandom doesn’t perpetuate bigotry is basic.
One day I hope that F00tinmouth has a moment of clarity and realize that all of those people he obsessively attacks as being feminastys and FTBullies are doing exactly the kind of thing he used to champion.
Applying and upholding skepticism, science and critical thought. Rebecca Watson at Skepchick still does skepticism. PZ Myers, still critiques creationism-Sarkeesian is applying skepticism and critical thinking in her videos.
Who isn’t doing a thing to promote skeptical and scientific thinking in his public utterances? Bloody Phil Mason, all he’s done ever since getting booted off Freethought Blogs is have a years long tantrum about feminism existing! While doing so he’s been guilty of the same muddled thinking over and over again of the creationists he used to despise.
Physical Evidence and Reasoned Logic anyone?
I understand that PZ and his fans (his regular commentaters here) are now more into Feminism rather than Atheism, just as seems to be the case for Thunderfoot, which disappoints me. The fight for gender equality is a fine thing, but it is not what I was looking for or what stood out for me in these two gentlemen. What attracted me was their Atheism. Hence my current disappointment.
I’ve never understood “I wish blogger so-and-so would write about X and not Y,” or “I wish s/he would go back to more Y instead of all this X” (or “the basics” whatever the fuck that means). Because a blogger is just a writer basically. The blogger’s persona pretty much is what s/he writes. The blog is that persona plus a community. Same with ThunderF00l’s odious schtick. Read it or don’t, go somewhere else if you like “the basics” where that equals creationist bashing or crocheting tips: whatever it is, it’s out there. But simultaneously “wishing” that you liked what the blogger writes while not liking what the blogger actually writes is just sort of… incoherently entitled or something. “I want this association [with blog X, not of my creation], but I want the content to be different.” What are you claiming to like, or want?
That PZ and Thunderfoot return to their roots, i.e. why religion is bullshit.
Brony @49
You’ve quite neatly described exactly how Tara’s death is Fridging, so it’s a little confusing that you don’t seem to get it.
danishydynamite:
Fine. You’ve said your piece. You’ll be fucking off now, right?
I’m glad PZ blogs about human rights issues, and so are a great many others.
danishdynamite #61:
If you want to be an “Atheist”, full stop, and go live in a mountaintop cave, fine by me. Go live your chosen life by your own lights.
But your engaging of us here seems to imply that you are interested in being part of a society of atheists. And it seems to me that any society that excludes certain people based on some intrinsic characteristics they happen to have is a very shrunken, withered kind of society.
I think Rush Limbaugh has done more damage to America than Osama bin Laden, Tojo, and Robert E. Lee combined, but if he came to my atheist club and said he was starting to question his past comments and would like to join us in a discussion, I would welcome him with open arms. But, ONLY if he said he questioned his past comments!
My questions to you are:
1. Do you want to belong to a society that excludes some people based on their intrinsic characteristics?
If not, then:
2.Would you welcome people who want to do that to other people?
If your answer to either question is yes, then I DON’T welcome you to this society!
Any religious subjugation of women is bullshit.
How’s that?
PZ can blog about anything he wants. He just used to blog about the idiocy of theism but now seems to blog only about feminism Just like Thunderfoot. Hernce my disappointment.
That is all.
danishdynamite
Religion is bullshit. There’s no evidence for religious claims and considerable evidence against most of them. There’s not really much more to say. There’s numerous websites that catalogue all the religious ‘arguments’ and their rebuttals, and the religious never come up with any new ones, so that discussion’s pretty much over. Now we’re discussing evidence-based solutions for existing problems (especially those based on evidence-free thinking, including misogyny).
From moarscienceplz:
“My questions to you are:
1. Do you want to belong to a society that excludes some people based on their intrinsic characteristics?
If not, then:
2.Would you welcome people who want to do that to other people, “N
No and No.
I’m just an atheist, not a joiner of societies.
danishdynamite
Your disappointment has been noted, written on a piece of toilet paper, and flushed into the nearest sewer. No further comments from you on this subject are needed, or wanted.
danishdynamite @ 68
We understood the first time, no thank you very much. And the second. And the third. You gonna fuck off now or is this going to become the How Many Different Ways Can danishdynamite Say The Same Fucking Thing thread?
danishdynamite
Did you actually do a count of recent thread topics?
Glad to hear it. Now SHUT THE FUCK UP!
honestly, everyone must answer this question affirmatively.
even you.
but then, it’s really an entirely inane bit of rhetoric to begin with.
moarscienceplz: “Your disappointment has been noted, written on a piece of toilet paper, and flushed into the nearest sewer. No further comments from you on this subject are needed, or wanted.”
Thank you for your contribution. Just wanted to raise a point . Sleep well everyone.
danishdynamite doesn’t join societies; societies join him….
Taking it to the Thunderdome with respect to the issue of “basics” and community disagreement.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/08/29/thunderdome-53/comment-page-1/#comment-846306
Naturally if I screwed up with the Women in Refrigerators Syndrome that is quite on topic and I can take some criticism.
@marcmagus
I’m confused too. That’s why I asked questions and am just going to read replies for a bit. I’m not a woman so of course it will take some time to get my perceptual filters to get more accurate.
@danishdynamite
Instead of being a whiny, derailing, entitled asshole, why not just set your bookmark for the site exclusively to the “atheism and skepticism” tag?
first rule of fight club…
Ichthyic
sshhh
Be disappointed then.
My primary concerns are reason, science, atheism, etc. But what I’ve seen growing over these years is a serious obstacle: that way too many people use atheism as an excuse to be assholes. I don’t support a misogynist atheism. I support a progressive, egalitarian atheism that will make the world a better place.
My disappointment is in people like you who seem to believe that just rejecting religion is sufficient, and that war, racism, sexism, and environmental degradation are secondary issues to the important issue of pretending to be Vulcans and debating philosophy — because if you’re not going to respect the necessary underpinnings of civilization, you’re not going to be able to defeat religion.
c’mon PZ
Would it hurt to do the occasional post like:
“Haha. Religious Statues Don’t Really Bleed, You Dummies”?
@danishdynamite:
I’ve been reading Pharyngula since it was on its own server, and I’m pretty sure the tagline has always been “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” If you didn’t want to read random or liberal things (feminism being a major component of any reasonable liberalism), you’re in the wrong place, and always have been. The good ol’ days to which you want to return never really existed.
I did a quick survey of the last 20 Pharyngula posts in my Feedly. Of them, 7 were arguably about feminist issues (I counted Renisha McBride and the Sarkeesian Effect posts, even though those focused more on race, and the DJ Grothe post, even though it’s only tangentially related and doesn’t mention Grothe’s history of problems with women’s issues in the OP). That’s 35%. I wonder if this is related to that effect where a group that is 30% women is perceived as being majority female.
Speaking of that effect, I know I’ve seen the citations, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it online. Anyone here have better research skills and a link?
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean amother.
Back in the good old days, when you could overlook Phil Mason’s pompous, dramatic voiceovers because his content was decent and his snarling contempt was directed at fundamentalist lackwits, he would frequently refer to VenomFangX as the “Poster-Boy for Creationist Stupidity” – PCS for short.
Might I suggest, as a reward for his exemplary work opposing women who’d like to be treated as human beings and proving Lewis’ Law with his every recorded word, that we bestow upon Phil the title “Poster-Boy for Misogynist Stupidity”?
Oddly enough, it abbreviates to PMS, which works on two levels: firstly and obviously, as many lads feel compelled to fallaciously cite pre-menstrual stress as The Reason™ for a woman’s irritability/lack of tolerance for bullshit, it seems appropriate to appropriate this classic, ignorant misogynist trope and slap it on a classic ignorant misogynist.
Secondly, the initials PMS can then be expanded back out to “Phil Mason Syndrome”, which could be defined as: “a condition of extreme and irrational irritability brought on by listening to a woman say something you don’t agree with, but as you don’t quite have the neurons to explain why or raise a valid objection, you experience acute fear and loathing & can only express yourself via incoherent tube-rage.”
Dalillama, Schmott Guy @ 57:
I get what you are saying, but I think you are off the mark with these suggestions. Let me tell you why :D
She wasn’t dating Riley at that point, but even if she was the whole thing with their relationship was that she really wasn’t that into him. Also, a lot of people would not have been sad to see him eat a bullet, myself included. We were kinda relieved when he flew off in the helicopter and didn’t look down to see her asking him to stay. Irrelevant since they weren’t dating at the time of Willow’s meltdown, but still not really a good option. You can’t set up a revenge freakout if half your audience doesn’t care about the victim.
Xander taking a bullet? Are you out of your freaking mind? Hell no. Also Anya would rampage for way less that and with very little prompting. Really, she would probably have been more likely to do it if someone had paid her. Totally unnecessary to invoke Xander’s death. Maybe for Willow to rampage, but then we would have lost a core scooby and it seems like they were hoping to avoid that. Who’s left?
Willow might have flipped her lid for Oz, but they would have needed a new storyline and would have had to work him back into the show. I could see that, but he wasn’t on the show and it didn’t happen. C’est la vie! Maybe Giles. But he still had some Buffy mentoring to do.
Buffy would have been the best option, really, but I think by that point she’d already died twice. Aside from the fact that I am not comfortable calling Tara a refrigerator girl because I don’t think her character was weak, she was really the only option left.
Also, Warren was a super misogynist d-bag and a coward. That an innocent woman would get caught in his crossfire is kind of a pattern with that character (except it wasn’t always accidental crossfire). It is fitting that a woman would flay him for it. It doesn’t make sense that it would be Anya or Buffy. And for once Xander, a man, got to save the world with sweetness and crayons. You have to admit that was awesome :)
PS Phil Mason is a fucking fuck.
lol @ Phil Mason.
why do I lol @ Phil Mason?
His basic desperate straw person trolling. He literally just invented a bunch of fictional complaints about sexism, and declared Sarkeesian to be just as absurd as the absurdity he invented.
@Tom Foss
It’s apparently from research done by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media.
From a transcript of a discussion hosted by Jacki Lyden (of NPR News) with Geena Davis:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=197390707
Well if Tara’s “fridging” serves as a plot device for a female revenge tale, then that’s a decent alteration of the trope, especially in terms of its misogyny. Then it’s not a story about men with disposable women.
It’s not really a subversion, but I wouldn’t call it a straight-up example either.
@Ibis3, Let’s burn some bridges: Thanks, I think my problem stemmed from remembering 30% instead of 17%. It’s actually way worse than I thought. I still can’t track the study back any farther than that NPR interview, though.
Regarding the Women in Refrigerators trope, note that it’s not, in and of itself, an indictment of the works that employ it (or even necessarily a wholly negative trope). The term comes out of superhero comics, where the idea of a motivating tragedy is part and parcel of the whole origin story motif: Spider-Man lost Uncle Ben, Superman lost Krypton, Batman lost his parents, and so forth. Where it becomes especially problematic is when (especially) female characters are created only to provide that source of pathos; it becomes a darker, even more demeaning version of the damsel in distress. There, the woman is an object to be rescued by the hero; the WiR trope makes her an object that the hero failed to rescue, so he fights on to avenge her death, or becomes inspired by her, or whatever. She doesn’t exist as a character, but as a way of making the male character feel feelings.
There are ways, I think, to do this well, and they all revolve around making the to-be-fridged woman a full-fledged character, and not just a placeholder. Gwen Stacy’s among the most prominent examples in comics, and she was a supporting character for almost a decade before her death. By contrast, Alex DeWitt (Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend, for whom the trope is named) existed for scarcely six issues. One was a character, introduced to be a character, for whom death was a decision far down the line; the other was created to die and give the main character a sad.
It’s the overuse of especially the latter trope, but also the related problem of raping, depowering, driving crazy, or otherwise injuring female characters to drive (generally) male characters into action, that led to the original “Women in Refrigerators” list. It was, interestingly enough, not entirely unlike what Anita Sarkeesian is doing now for video games. If there were gender parity among what characters are killed/otherwise diminished to drive others to act, or if Gwen Stacy and Alex DeWitt were the only examples, there’d be no Women in Refrigerators list, just as we wouldn’t have Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games if not for designers and writers consistently going back to the same well for plot devices and characters. It’s the ubiquity and inevitability of these lazy, sexist tropes that makes them especially problematic and deserving of scrutiny.
A Hermit at 37: thanks for that link. That’s a great example of taking criticism well, and using it to
make what you do better.
That slaver scene from Watch Dogs just wallows in abuse against women. Here is a particular moment that stuck with me in how “dark” they wanted to go (and not resolve any of it in a responsible way).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BrVvIsEIQAAPS6x.jpg:large
danishdynamite @68
PZ can blog about anything he wants. He just used to blog about the idiocy of theism but now seems to blog only about feminism
You have got to be joking. I’m a sometime lurker and skim-reader and I know PZ blogs about a whole heap of things. Atheism, science, racism, feminism, gorgeous sea creatures, underpants …
How many anti-religion articles do you really want one person to write? PZ writes plenty of stuff, particularly as it hurts people in the US, but ferfuckssake, why should he be a one-note song just for you? It’s not like there aren’t a squillion* blogs out there writing about much the same thing.
Also, as has already been pointed out, your atheism does fuckall for society if you’re perfectly happy to stick with unjust social systems, whether or not they’re religiously derived.
(Is this adding to the deraily derail? Sorry, can’t contribute to the Thunderfool/Whedon discussion, but danishdynamite’s whinge made me splutter.)
*Should that be squidllion, here?
Carlie @92:
And of course, the comments of that article are filled with “Sarkeesian is a lying fraud” and “Saints Row is dead, it’s gonna be crap from now on”.
Very few seem to have noticed Steve Jaros said “Yes the original saints Row is listed here. Yes it should be”, and that they’ve already been taking steps to improve their representation of women throughout the series.
In this HAWP video, Ash nominates Saints Row 3 for “best portrayal of women” in 2011, because it lets her play as an overweight black woman, and how many games give you that choice? Fair point…
(Oh, I’ve just discovered they have a podcast now. Subscribed!)
Tom Foss @91: “Gwen Stacy’s among the most prominent examples in comics, and she was a supporting character for almost a decade before her death.”
Actually I just re-read most of the Gwen Stacy issues and man, if there was ever more of a 1 dimensional character in Marvel comics I don’t remember them. Gwen existed exclusively to provide Peter angst, 1st for pining angst, then girlfriend angst, then, finally, “my g/f is dead!” angst. Gwen had virtually no presence in the comics, practically no dialogue, whole issues would pass with Peter angsting over her yet she never appears once…
Gwen Stacy is the Perfect Example of the Girlfriend in the Fridge trope and so many others.
That said, I don’t care how well developed your g/f character is, if you kill her off and write umpteen issues dramatizing your male lead angsting over her, she’s been fridged.
As an aside, I don’t think Willow and Tara count, because the trope is used to illustrate how Women are reduced to backstory to motivate stories about Men. You can’t just change the gender of one of the players and argue that it means the same thing. Do do that is to deny that sexism has a role in creating these tropes. It’s no more the same thing when a woman catcalls a man than it is the same thing when a woman’s death is used to motivate another woman.
@danishdynamite #43
@Kevin Kehres #42
I always failed to understand how atheists could fail to understand that. Perhaps this is just because of my RCC upbringing – but when I slowly moved away from religion, I gravitated towards equality because apart from religious gender roles I could see literally no reason to discriminate between people of different gender identities and behaviours. After I let go of religion, all the excuses for gender-role-based sexism (God’s plan for men and women, Adam and Eve, Man as the head of the family, woman as the body, Christ and the Church, Mary and Joseph vs. Jesus, Mary Magdalene vs the Apostles), faded away leaving me with the simple result: if there’s no divine plan, it’s up to us individual humans to sort out societal roles as we see fit.
When I started reading PZ, feminism WAS basic. Of COURSE atheists would automatically reject what I viewed as religiously motivated bigotry! Feminism was not an issue for me because I EXPECTED feminist women to sort it out and tell us men what parts of our behaviour we needed to change, which we’d do, because DUH we couldn’t see things from their perspectives. (Just as women would listen to men when we talked about OUR issues calmy and rationally). When I heard Rebecca Watson’s “guys, don’t do that”, I thought to myself: “gosh, I’ve considered how difficult it is to proposition women, thanks for the good advice on what could be much more uncomfortable for the woman than the man asking! I really don’t want to come of as a creepy objectivising asshole.”
Then all these past years of shit happened and I realised: feminism should be basic, but it isn’t. And it needs all the men involved to take an active part in it, because those feminist women are getting ignored, shouted at, not listened to, threatened. Because of all those atheists who drop the belief in gods without looking to see what other baggage was attached, without reexamining their basic assumptions to see if other things with just as flimsy evidence ought not be dropped as well.
danishdynamite
People not setting their priorities to please your wishes? How horrible a life that must be for you!
Me? I just belong to the group of people who needs to take precautio when leaving home after dark and who gets told:
-to take more precautions
-get raped for daring to point that out
Can’t imagine how hard your life must be.
I’ll also bet a fiver that you haven’t gone to TF’s place to make the same complaint.
Was anyone else squicked out by danishdynamite’s phrasing in “The fight for gender equality is a fine thing,”? Okay, language differences maybe, but to me that reads like it’s not essential, it’s icing on the cake, nice to have but not nearly as important as … stuff that matters to danishdynamite.
2kittehs
Well, obviously it doesn’t affect them much, therefore it’s exactly that: something extra, something not really important, something you can concern yourself with when the really important issues like nativity scenes are dealt with.
@2kittehs #99
Yeah, like “the fight for racial equality is a fine thing”… but he’s just here for the atheism. I mean if you’ve got your head screwed on right as far as atheism is concerned, I guess you being a racist doesn’t matter. (Hint, hint, a certain Sir Pat Condell.)
In fact danishdynamite is also being completely disingenuous – feminist issues have always overlapped with atheist issues – all the first New Atheists™ and from the very start the Atheist Youtuber Community™ have all dealt with religious bigotry, legislation and twisting of reality concerning the position of women in society.
Why is complaining about and criticising the “quiverfull” movment an atheist issue, but saying that women should be in control of their reproductive systems, saying “get out of my uterus” is suddenly crazy raging feminism? It’s bad to tell women what to wear if it’s muslim women being forced to veil, but it’s ok for atheists to tell women how short their skirts can be for them to get raped?
Danishdynamite is essentially saying: “If religious people are doing it, it’s bad and I’m interested in that. But if it’s atheists doing it, shut up I’m not interested because religion isn’t involved.”
it’s possible Danishdynamite is still trying to work the religious bugs out of their own system.
also just as possible that they are entirely narcissistic.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-, =8)-DX, Ichthyic:
::nods vigorously in agreement::
I’m really not sure I can agree with that. It either requires that g/fs never get killed off, or that people don’t suffer significant emotional trauma from the loss of their loved ones. Neither of those requirements seems particularly reasonable. The problem (as I see it) with the “fridge” trope is the use of disposable characters purely as a means of providing motivation to the main characters. Killing off a fully-developed character and then having their loved ones suffer emotion trauma is perfectly reasonable story-telling, because that actually happens in real life.
Dear PZ so called Mjguhz,
Why oh why oh why can’t you do more of what I want and less of what you want? I used to like you before it was cool and before you gave a shit about lesser people like Wimminz/Feminazis and the Gheyz (WITH THEIR AGENDA!!!!!). This blog that you write yourself, in your own time, and for small/moderate financial gain after doubtless years of funding it yourself is not adequately focussed on my needs. Please could you spend more time on things that matter to me. Obviously the things that matter to me may or may not be covered by this blog, but I am in no way going to support or reference my claim because that is for girls and foreigners to do.
Also, this recent use of rational enquiry to examine social topics causes me to have a small pain in the dong. This is because I am a rock, and island, I need no one. I’m the Enigma, no one understands me. I bootstrapped myself into existence without the need for parents or indeed, a species to belong to. Every road I drive on I made. Every device I use, I designed and built. I have no need for this thing you laughingly call “society” because I am entirely a self made winner and other people make my testicles ache. I may have written poetry to express this which I recite to women and/or girls in the street to make them realise my Nice Guy prowess, but still they don’t sleep with me. This is obviously because of the Lesbian Feminazi Agenda because Lesbian Feminazis only like Bad Guyz who treat them like shit, not like I would do by worshipping them on a pedestal and stuff.
Please do more stuff I like or I will comment on the blog using technologies I developed and are in no way a social benefit derived from cooperative effort over generations telling you that you used to be cool when you were mean about theists. You never do that now so I’m breaking up with you and keeping the record collection. Also, if you could give me tips on how to get laid that would be super.
Yours atheistically
Several commenters I am deliberately taking the piss out of.
Dunc @ 104
Because the only alternative to spending umpteen issues on it is not bringing it up at all.
Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm, @106: I guess that depends on what sort of timespan “umpteen issues” covers.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that it’s very often used as a lazy, hacky way of providing motivation for a character and that it’s hugely problematic. I’m just not sure that absolutely all instances of male characters being motivated by the deaths of female loved ones automatically qualify. Most, though? The overwhelming majority? Sure.
=8)-DX:
That’s much like my experience. In politics, I’ve had a similar shock on the issue of torture, being surprised how regularly there’d be trolls defending the practice.
They complain when we focus on their failure to live up to the standards we thought were basic, the bare minimum of civility. They’re berating us for requiring basic social and safety needs be met before we can comfortably talk about more complex issues.
Err… but didn’t Peter accidentally kill Gwen Stacy? Doesn’t that automatically mean it doesn’t fit? There’s no motivation-pushing forth afterwards. It’s just an accident.
The point of the Women in Refrigerators trope is that often the bad guy does something to deliberately hurt the good guy, and the disposable generic woman is the result. It’s using violence against women as a lazy plot device. Having a character dying gruesomely isn’t the trope. Having the character be angsty afterwards isn’t the trope either.
FWIW, that comes across entirely differently in the movie version. there, they make it entirely obvious it’s a “fridge moment”
doublereed
From Wiki:
Why was she killed off?
Ibis3 @ 89 and Tom Foss @ 91,
If you are looking for data beyond that NPR interview, maybe you want to see this page: http://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/ At the bottom there is a brief series of findings, followed by “All facts are supported by research conducted by Stacy Smith, Ph.D. at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism”.
Smith is also cited in one of the links from that page, the second article linked to:
The link is to a PDF which seems to be the source of the data that Davis described in the interview. It’s even more interesting because the study also looked at character’s occupations, including in the STEM fields.
Smith’s biography at the Annenberg website is here: http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication%20and%20Journalism/SmithS.aspx Near the bottom of the page are links to some press releases about her work, and beneath that are the actual research reports.
What a strawman!
Firstly the grounds at which he discredits her threats is that the police department or FBI would have told her not to tweet about it and that she asked people to donate several minutes after she tweeted about it. Secondly the Joss Whedon portion was meant to show that Anita’s vague tropes can apply to even feminist approved works. Yes, some of the examples are out of context, but that’s because most of Anita’s examples are out of context and the whole video was satire towards Anita’s work. For example in her video where she complains that Hitman Absolution encourages you to kill the strippers, when in reality the game penalizes you for doing so. At the end of the video he admits to this and clarifies that he doesn’t think Joss Whedon’s work is sexist.
“For instance, Sarkeesian points out that video game scene where the character sneaks past a room full of slavers, where naked women are put on display. You want to claim that’s taken out of context?”
The people with the slavers are the bad guys, you are supposed to aid them in their escape. The game condemns the slavers.
“Sarkeesian shows a hit man beating up a bunch of strippers and then dragging their inert bodies around the room, boob physics on proud display, and then dumping them in a box. Context? ”
Doing this will result in consequences for the player. You are condemned for this. Saying that the game encourages you to do this would be the same as saying the game encourages you to jump off a cliff, since both entail near identical consequences.
If you or any other Anita supporter played these games or even watched some of the long plays she took her footage from you wouldn’t need contextual clarification, but in tf00ts other videos he does give context to the very example of Hitman Absolution. While I do think he should’ve clarified within that video or at least linked to that specific video describing that it was contextual clarification, he still made it.
His disbelief is not discrediting the accounts. It is merely being an asshole to essentially tell her to shut the fuck up. But t-foot-in-mouth is the one who needs to shut the fuck up unless he can provide solid and conclusive evidence to back up his misogyny. Which doesn’t exist. It is all his own bigotry.
Given your inability to understand this basic bit of scientific thinking, I won’t bother to read the rest of your inane screed.
Emerson Braith
Wow. That just makes everything all hunky dory, doesn’t it? Sure, women are being used as sexualized background decoration, but that’s okay because BAD GUYS.
Seriously, the title of the video you are complaining about is WOMEN AS BACKGROUND DECORATION.
Speaking of ignoring fucking context, you pig ignorant little fucker.
Also, on the subject of Sarkeesian Derangement Syndrome: A lot of faux outrage from the manosphere and Troo Gamerz has focused on “she is wrong about Hitman Absolution”. You know the video that she is wrong about that in? One of her six videos on the subject? It references about 30 other video games. The time spent on Hitman Absolution is 36 seconds, from 22: 16 to 22:52. Out of 31 minute long video.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/2014/08/women-as-background-decoration-part-2/
Why do I bring that up? Well, let’s look at what Thunderfoot says in his video description in defense of Hitman Absolution:
And yet he pitches a shit fit over 1.9% of her video, or 0.3% of the content of Tropes vs. Women so far. It’s almost like he is an absolute hypocrite, has absolutely no principles, and just wanted to find whatever excuse he could to yell about how WRONG Anita Sarkeesian is, while not actually having a significant point!
Clueless assholes like Emerson and Thunderf00t are what make Feminist Frequency necessary viewing, even for non-gamers. So we can all know just how fucking over the top, foaming at the mouth sexist they must be in order to loudly wring their hands over such minutiae and pretend as if this means that Anita is a filthy liar who MUST BE STOPPED.
Bonus side note: Sarkeesian in part one of the Women as Background Decoration talks about the “punishments” you get for killing female characters. I’m pretty sure “lowers your score” counts as one of those “punishments” she was talking about. In fact, the very fucking sentence she says right after the Hitman Absolution clip ends is “In game consequences for these actions are trivial at best”. What was that about context again!?
First the title: “I watched the latest Thunderf00t video so you don’t have to”
Need I point out what is wrong with it? Right, don’t watch it, just read his words and take them for granted. Very skeptic-like.
Next is the whole approach, he only criticizes the parts where you can feasibly spin thunderf00t’s words into something disagreeable. He doesn’t address the actual factual claims thunderf00t makes in the video. Why is that?
If thunderf00t is so wrong wouldn’t it be the smart thing to do? Just get a transcript of his video and dissect his words as he says him rather as you prefer to spin them. If he is wrong surely you can show that using his own words in their context? If he is wrong you can show that by demonstrating how every claim he makes is wrong.
But you are not doing that, I came here after hearing some vague stuff about how thunderf00t is anti-feminist or something. Haven’t watched his videos in months. The way in which you addressed one of his videos here set off alarms, it’s as though it was written by a particularly sneaky creationist. But about a different topic.
It’s pretty disgusting. Especially after watching some of his videos, pretty good arguments and it seems like a vast majority of those who watched his videos, agree. Why is that, I wonder…
@Alitar Mehnagen, #116:
1. He feels that they are self-refuting or already refuted
and/or
2. Holy cannibal crackers, batman: It’s a fucking personal blog, not the NYTimes. PZ writes what he wants to write. This type of title is completely in line with how he speaks about creationists: sometimes he fisks them mockingly, sometimes he mocks them fiskingly, and sometimes he’s just pure, dismissive snark. If you don’t want PZ’s personal take and style, don’t read it.
@Crip Dyke
Self-refuting implies a logical fallacy in his own words. Would be nice to see at least one example of that.
Already refuted… Right, so why not mention that he makes arguments x,y,z which are btw, already refuted, look here for evidence: *link*
I know it’s his personal blog, so what you are saying is that I should not expect the slightest ounce of objectivity on his part? I see, my bad.
Because it’s so very important for us to be objective towards an anti-feminist misogynistic asshole, amiright?
We have thunderturd’s number, we know what he is like. I have absolutely NO desire to listen to more of his vile drivel. Fuck you for saying I should, as if it would magically be different than all the shit he has spewed forth before.
Go be a bloody sycophant to his anti-women-ness elsewhere. I’ve had a REALLY shitty week and fuck you.
@Rowan vet-tech
Thank you got clarifying what kind of place this is. You will not see me again.
Enjoy your echo-chamber.
Alitar Mehnagen, I doubt if you’re objective about the thunderingfool in any way. The Mason’s shown himself to be a sexist pig and your support of him does your street cred no good at all.
Oh and “echo chamber”, lol. Look in the mirror Alitair.
This is a place I come to to get away from shit like what thunderturd produces, because there are times I simply can’t deal with it. I’m sick of being told that I should accept the status quo.
So stick the goddamn flounce.