Professional Victims: Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, et al.

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Getting all the information necessary for this thread will be hard, but bear with me and let me know if I leave any gap.

Anita Sarkeesian, for those who are unaware, is a kickstarter and donation-funded feminist who has worked on a series of videos on Youtube called "Tropes VS Women" which depict and criticize videogame use of women in misogynistic ways. This thread is not to talk about the work in itself (but if you must know my opinion - there are a few good points vastly overclouded by fabricated and out-of-context evidence, with ridiculous assumptions of the media on a whole).

Now, as a women feminist with a public face, she's an easy target for online harassment. Nobody is denying that. There are bad eggs online and we should do whatever we can to educate them or as a last resort - silence them.

However, it turns out the plus side of being harassed is that part of the audience will empathize with your plight, and as a means of showing their sympathy, will donate money to you. I cannot give you evidence of this happening to Anita, because she uses the Paypal system. I can, however, show this sympathy in effect for the following women who were also target of harassment recently:
a) Zoe Quinn:
- July 24th: http://web.archive.org/web/201407241735 ... on.com/zoe
--- 183 patrons, $ 1,100+ per month
- September 12th: http://www.patreon.com/zoe
--- 573 patrons, $ 2,900+ per month

b) Jenn Frank (not accusing as a professional victim, just showing the sympathy donation effect):
- July 24th: http://web.archive.org/web/201407241735 ... /jennfrank
--- 230 patrons, $ 1,300+ per month
- September 12th: http://www.patreon.com/jennfrank
--- 338 patrons, $ 2,000+ per month

It seems Anita noticed this effect and used it to her advantage: On the 29th of August, she claimed to have received phone death threats so serious that she contacted the authorities and moved out of her house. Previous screen captures of some threats were a bit suspect (click), but nobody could seriously claim she was committing any sort of fraud. What she didn't count on was the increasingly skeptic critics of her work to not bow down before shouts of "victim blaming" and actually investigate the legitimacy of the threats later on (this was brought on by consumer revolt against gaming journalism, called #gamergate). As it turns out, Anita was playing the victim for money, as evidenced by the below video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaXDLpjG3XU

Question: What should be done to public figures who profit from false death threats?

I don't know that there's any legal recourse that can be taken against them (bearing in mind that isn't my field of expertise), but they should certainly be shamed and shunned for their behavior whenever the opportunity presents itself. I kind of think YouTube, being a privately owned entity, should remove her channel, as well.

I'm having a hard time deciding what is more depressing:

- The amount of effort Anita Sarkeesian spends on trivial video game issues
- The amount of effort other people spend on trivial Anita Sarkeesian issues

Their linguistic flourishes belie a faith in superficiality over the providence of empirical reason that must be an all-pervasive theme in this society of darkest slight... Damn it all,now I'mdoing it too.

Why the f**k are police talking to people who just phone them up to ask about cases that don't affect them? Surely there's some confidentiality issues there?

If these threats have been faked, then that's a bad thing. The point remains that all of these people have been the victims of real threats, and that's much worse. I'm not familiar with Jenn Frank, but Anita's "crime" is "being a bit annoying" and Zoe's is "cheating on her boyfriend". Neither of those things warrant the backlash they're getting. Put simply, this disproportionate focus on Anita and Zoe, rather than on the people who are actually doing something wrong, is perverse.

This.

And yet another reason I don't participate in the "gaming community."

The real "professional victims" are these people who send their sob stories to tee vee shows like "Ellen" or Ty Pennington in hopes of coming on tee vee and given a bunch of free sh*t.

I was shocked at the amount of hatred and abuse thrown around by all parties during the Gamergate thing and how quick every one was to resort to stereotyping of their opponents.

I've had no issues with the content of Anita Sarkeesian's videos. I'm not sure how reliable the evidence is that she is scamming and/or manipulating. The sending of rape and death threats to various parties was just foul (if they were genuine).

The biggest surprise for me though was how quickly a large number of games journalists turned on their own audience (and therefore customers), branding them all "neckbeards" and "misogynists". To me it felt like they were coming out and admitting that they actually aren't interested in gaming/geek culture and view their readers with contempt. This could be a mis-step of Gerald Ratner-esque proportions.

Sorry for the off topic.

"[...] In its findings and declarations, mindful of the right of individuals' privacy, the Legislature declared it was the publics right to access information concerning the peoples business. "


That is disingenuous, but that is neither here or there.

Falloy: Yep, that's what brought gamergate up and about. It would have been limited to just "haters gonna hate" had the media not suspiciously slandered their target audience all in the period of 24 hours within each other

I will only comment on Anita Sarkeesian, as my wife is a big time gamer who got sick of getting harrassed while playing Call of Duty and quit playing FPS games online and a became huge fan.

Even if you don't like Sarkeesian, you can verify independently the most of the numbers she cites (which has been done by plenty of groups). I personally find her to be quite repetitive, but also find her points to be entirely valid. Have you played that many games where female characters are anything more than almost anime like little girls or women with ridiculously diproportionate breasts? And have you been to gaming conventions? I haven't for a few years, but last time I went there were an awful lot of booths manned by women wearing very little clothing, even for games being promoted that had no women in them at all.

I have very little doubt that threats were real. Threats like these are not exactly uncommon when it comes to vocal and visible activists of all stripes, with some particularly graphic threats to feminists in particular. And just go ahead and read the comment sections on any of these stories for a very upsetting view of what some people say about rape that they feel is perfectly acceptable free speech. The only public figures who seem to be calling these threats fake are the the same ones who lump all feminists into the violent feminist camp and/or deny that sexism exists in any form other than discrimination against men.

As for industry response, perhaps they are starting to wake up to the changing gamer demographics. While the specific FPS games are still dominated by male players, women now make up roughly half of the total video game market.

Any opportunity to suppress feminism is always good.

There is so much inequality that needs to be resolved against both women and men.
Extremists that seem to think that men should be repressed and labeled as predators just cause more problems for society.

We need to bring men and women together as people. Feminists want to widen the gap just in the other direction.

Down with feminists! Justice and equality for all!

Just for the record, this is what the vast majority of feminists want (myself included).

This thread isn't about feminism.

So, Verax, you could start another thread about what feminism is or isn't.
[There are men who identify as feminists, actually. ]

I don't think there is legal precedent for it, but isn't it a kind of fraud, really? I think there would possibly be legal precedent if an individual profited directly from a charitable organization [not entirely sure, I am sort of brainstorming here], but since it is from public charitable ["charitable"?] donations, I don't think that would apply.

Legal penalties for fraud could apply though- I mean in an ideal world- if the allegations could be proven.

I'm inclined to agree - if there is a penalty for that kind of fraud the SFPD has the duty of proving without a doubt there was malicious intent. From there on I don't know what could happen in terms of consequences.

Anita for all intents and purposes seems to be a scam artist, she raised how much money and what did she actually do with it? A few youtube videos which she has been caught a few times lifting game footage from, it is pretty obvious she hasn't played many of the games that she criticizes. I'm not sure how anybody can really defend her at this point.

Zoe Quinn I sympathize with a bit more as she at least made some sort of game, she used what she had to get ahead and further her career so it's hard to blame her more than the corrupted so called video game "journalists".

I air on the side of skepticism when it comes to online threats, I use to play the COD games on XBL a few years and I was threatened many times by random 12 year olds whose voices hadn't cracked which I imagine the vast majority of these online harassers are the equivalent of.

The whole video game gender war stuff is stupid to me, if there is such a huge untapped market of female gamers(women who play games on facebook not included in this) then the market will take care of the problem. Actually try to fix the problem and inequalities you allege instead of just complaining about them.