I consider myself a feminist. I mean, first and foremost I consider myself a skeptic, followed closely by humanist. And if you're a humanist without being a feminist, you're doing humanism wrong. Women should be treated equally with respect to the rest of the population, just as any other group should. Having conversations about areas where inequality exists is a good thing.
I also own an embarrassing number of video game consoles, from Pong to PS4 including all the major machines in between (and quite a few of the more obscure ones), and my Steam library boasts over 300 titles--and I'm proud of that collection. I like video games, is what I'm getting at.
So when someone does a video series dicussing the portrayal of women in video games--long considered to be a heavily male-dominated industry--my ears perk up. That happened back in 2012, when Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign for her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series.
She was asking for $6,000 to fund production of five videos. $1,200 apiece seemed a little bit steep for 10-to-20-minute-long videos that would consist largely of gameplay footage and Anita talking in front of a green screen, but if she was going to do a lot of research she would need to take a lot of time to do it, and there are expenses involved in any kind of video production. I wasn't surprised that she surpassed her $6,000 goal within 24 hours.
By the time I heard about the campaign it had already hit its goal, and Anita had posted a set of stretch goals. These goals were a little more iffy, since each additional video was going to cost backers another $1,500. The startup expenses should have been covered by the original $6,000 ask, so why was each of these going to cost even more? Regardless, these stretch goals were all also achieved. Cool, six more videos to enjoy.
The next stretch goal was to "bump up the production quality" of her videos, and it was set at an additional $5,000. Anita listed buying a beefy new computer with large hard drive capacity, upgraded studio lighting, a wireless lav mic, and Adobe After Effects as the upgrades in question. That stuff is expensive, and $5,000 should just about cover it, but... I had assumed that some of this was going to be purchased from the initial $6,000. After Effects alone would account for more than $1,000 of the upgrades, but by this point Adobe CC was available as a service, drastically reducing the cost to a relatively small monthly payment. But maybe she was going to be doing this as her full-time job until the series was completed and just needed the money to pay her bills. That'd be cool, she gets to spend some time working on a project she's passionate about while not having to worry about another job at the same time, and we get the videos more quickly. Win-win!
The third set of stretch goals included the development of a Creative Commons-licensed set of mini lesson plans for use in education and another video. The curriculum would cost $4,000 and this 12th and final video was $2,000. Wait, what? Why do they keep getting more expensive? All of the expenses--including the hardware and software upgrades--have already been taken care of! Eh, it's only 500 bucks more than the original set of videos, not worth quibbling over when the total ask is $26,000. In my neck of the woods, that's approaching the average person's yearly wages.
Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian became the focus of a huge amount of harassment. I want to be clear: this harassment, while not unexpected, was absolutely sickening. The only silver lining is that in the end it served to bring much more exposure to the campaign. By the time the Kickstarter closed on June 16, 2012, she had gotten $158,922 in pledges from 6,968 backers.
Whoa. This series was going to be awesome. Some folks might even want to pick it up on DVD, which was actually a reward option on the Kickstarter!
...For the low, low price of only $250. $500 would get you a DVD collection of all of the videos from her Feminist Frequency project. Now, I'm not saying that the DVDs should have gone for bargain basement prices, but last I checked, even at the highest possible video quality, a DVD can still hold an hour of video. Assuming Anita Sarkeesian would settle for nothing but the highest resolution (but was nonetheless inexplicably unwilling to do a Blu-Ray release) the series would need to be spread across four DVDs. This is assuming 12 videos at the greater length of 20 minutes each: 240 minutes (4 hours). $62.50 per DVD, each containing a mere 3 episodes of content that would be available on YouTube for free, seems just a tad steep.
In total, 51 backers opted for one or the other of these DVD reward tiers, accounting for $16,000 of the raised funds--about 10%. The estimated delivery date for the DVD tiers was understandably a bit later than the others: December 2012.
So Anita expected to complete this project--including time for DVD authoring and distribution--within 6 months. How'd that go? Well, it's August 2015, and of the 12 promised videos we've gotten eight. Okay, so it's like three years late, but at least she's almost done, right?
Not really. Each of the 12 videos she promised in the Kickstarter campaign covered a different subject. She spent three videos covering the first subject, two covering the fifth, and two so far covering the 11th. The series has only addressed four of the 12 promised subjects, and while the multi-part videos are longer than expected, it's still a far cry from fulfilling her obligations. Oh, and that 11th subject? That's "Positive Female Characters," which she has announced is a whole new series. Huh?
So, nearly 7,000 people paid her nearly $160,000 three years ago to make some YouTube videos (which, presumably, are also monetized) and they're still waiting. 51 of those backers paid a ludicrous sum to also get the videos on DVD... and they're still waiting. Surely there must be a good reason for the extreme delay?
Of course there is. Anita Sarkeesian has been concentrating on her increased commitments to public speaking engagements. For which she receives about $10,000 each.
I'm willing to grant that she probably uses that money to fund her 501(c)3 organization rather than pocketing it directly, but Kickstarter's policies require her to fulfill her pledge rewards. And since she hasn't completed the series that was supposed to serve as the bulk of those rewards, she can't possibly have done that. If someone pays you $160,000 to do a job, you don't just get to put it off while you do other jobs--especially when you're the one who proposed doing the job and came up with the time frame in which to complete it. Even if the Kickstarter policies aren't legally binding (which they very well may be, actually), she still made a promise to the people who gave her money and then didn't fulfill it.
Okay, putting all that aside, the videos she's done so far are well-researched and thought-provoking arguments against sexism in video games, yes? Well, no, not so much. In fact, she often seems to be drumming up controversy where there really isn't any.
For example, she cites a mission in the game WATCH_DOGS--in which women are being sold as sex slaves--as an example of women being used as background decoration. After all, you don't get to interact with them in any meaningful way; they're just chained up naked on a stage, under spotlights, being auctioned off. What Anita misses, though, is that this is an extremely negative depiction of human trafficking, is unequivocally cast in the game as the worst kind of human rights violation, and your mission in this scenario is to shut down the trafficking ring and free the women. Women needing to be saved by a bunch of men is also a red flag for her, since her first series of videos was on the "Damsel in Distress" trope, but this is a portrayal of a scenario that actually happens in the real world, and yes, THE VICTIMS NEED HELP. Somehow Anita Sarkeesian managed to look at someone busting up a sex slavery ring and conclude that it was sexist.
Another example she uses comes from the game Hitman: Absolution. It is entirely possible for the player to find some strippers, knock them out or kill them, and drag their bodies around and hide them. The game does actually allow you to do this. Anita cites this as blatant objectification of women as sex objects and the fulfillment of a desire to punish these women for depicting female sexuality.
It's been discussed to death that this was a very minor portion of the game, and that killing innocent characters in Hitman games nets you a penalty. But the real point is that you can also do all of the same things to any character in the game. It would have been extremely jarring to suddenly take away the player's autonomy just because the current venue contained depictions of women who earn their living by being sexually objectified. And again, this is a depiction of a scenario that actually happens in the real world. When the player encounters these strippers, they're having a casual conversation with each other. They're depicted as real people living their lives, not just exposed flesh.
Art often imitates life; sometimes it does it in a subversive way, and that's often the kind of art that gets the best critical response. But sometimes it merely imitates, and that's okay too.
These would probably be great points to bring up in the comments section of her YouTube videos. They (and many others) probably would have been if Sarkeesian were interested in a dialogue, but sadly, comments are disabled on all of her videos. She's also disabled ratings. This is ostensibly due to the volume of harassment she receives, but it also serves to censor any legitimate criticism in the forum where it's most likely to be seen.
I'm kinda glad I was strapped for cash back in the summer of 2012. Otherwise I might have given Anita Sarkeesian some money. As far as I can tell, she wasn't honest or realistic about what she could accomplish with the money people were giving her. I don't think the work she has done on this project is particularly worthy of so much funding. If somebody else took up a similar project and actually treated the subject honestly I might go for that instead.
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