To me it seems like any time a woman holds a position of power and/or tries to assert herself, she is subject to a lot of vitriol over anything remotely "wrong" she does.
It would explain so many things. It would explain how Harvey Weinstein has been able to get away with his predatory behavior for decades. It would explain why Hillary Clinton is so hated (mostly undeservedly IMO). It would even explain why Anita Sarkeesian refuses to acknowledge her critics as anything other than harassers. She knows this tends to happen to any woman who speaks out, making it hard for her and her supporters to avoid tarring actual criticism in the same brush. It would also explain the scapegoating people like Amy Pascal and Kathleen Kennedy are getting for certain controversial decisions.
I'm not saying that men in society inherently have a problem with strong women. That ship has largely sailed. But whenever women try to speak out against men or wield power over them, they are subject to a particular seething hatred that I will never understand. While I think Anita now deserves every ounce of online harassment she gets, that's only due to some godawful stunts she pulled last year which angered me more than anything Trump has pulled off, such as publicly defaming someone at a convention and comparing herself to a Harvey Weinstein victim. Until 2016, she just seemed to be some uptight moral guardian, no different from Jack Thompson. Watching Troy Leavitt's videos debunking Anita's analyses and reading Liana Kerzner's five part essay titled "Why Feminist Frequency Almost Made Me Quit Writing About Games" recently after having not monitored Anita after so long just made me wonder to some extent why I was ever so angry with her until last year. Yes, for as much as I've made it plain that I hate Anita, I never really started keeping watch on her shenanigans until 2016, and she never truly got on my nerves until last year. While lots of people have been working hard to debunk her analyses from the very beginning.
There are two sides to this conversation. The first is that a lot of moral guardians simply do not know much about the video games they're attacking. They think that video games are primarily a kids' thing, a more and more laughable assertion as time passes. They also think of video games primarily as arcade or linear experiences, like Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros. So they completely lose it when it comes to stuff like Grand Theft Auto (yes I watched an LP of GTAIII and got into it quite a bit, got me thinking about this) where the player can go on a murderous rampage and kill tons of innocent people in cold blood. Because they don't know any better, they assume this is the point of the game!
The second side is that reactions like this help me to understand how Trump's rise happened. I only really starting paying attention to social justice movements when James Rolfe, of AVGN fame, got attacked by feminists just for not wanting to see the Ghostbusters reboot (fortunately James himself seemed to take it in stride, only addressing it at a convention in September 2016 and briefly at that). I was never surprised that the initial trailer got so many dislikes, but then the whole "you're a misogynist if you don't see this movie". I would not be the least bit surprised if tons of Americans have had to deal with this BS for years. It took me until only about a month before the election to connect the dots between social justice backlash and Trump's popularity. In hindsight I'm more surprised he didn't win more easily, which goes to show that at least much of America still has sense.
Yes I felt like ranting and letting off some steam. Thank you for hearing me out on this.
