Idle Thumbs and Anita Sarkeesian

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***
I don't think I've ever seen Anita Sarkeesian directly answer critics of her work. She hardly ever has to account for any of the rather silly things she says in her videos, since she closes
all comments on her YouTube channel and her feminist frequency blog. A rare opportunity to hear her answer a critical question came up on Idle Thumbs 176 "The Classic Alien Form", a podcast hosted by Jake Rodkin, Chris Remo, Danielle Riendeau and Sean Vanaman, when she appeared on it to talk about the recent XOXO festival.

As a side note, I am a regular listener of Idle Thumbs, I supported their kickstarter in the past, and enjoy their work. Their discussion with Anita wasn't about her criticism, although there were several little asides about sexism and harassment. One of the things I felt as a long time
listener was how careful the hosts were to caveat everything they were saying. The lengths that Chris Remo goes to apologise for daring to ask a question of a cultural critic about her long running theme is astonishing. I'm in science, and academics *love* to talk about their work usually. It's their life and passion project rolled up in one. I think it shows the extent that AS has this sort of invisible shield against even mildly critical questions from supporters. Although it could just be Remo tangling himself in knots again, it's not an unusual event, although the extent of it here *is* unusual.

The question asked was an absolute classic. Short, to the point, and devastating.

Here's a transcript of what went down. Any mistakes are my own, the podcast itself is available from iTunes to check this transcript. I recognised most voices. I'll put in time stamps so you can find it but they seem to be buggy in iTunes, changes everytime I play the file. I stuck some comments at the end.
***

From ~1:32:54

CHRIS REMO
"Our first reader mail, I'm sorry Anita this is totally pigeonholing you for reading this now, but it's the top email in our "To Read" folder..."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"Wait...is it about..?

CHRIS REMO
"...so..."

SEAN VANAMAN, in "asshole" voice:
"When Anita Sarkeesian shows up, I have a question (I dunno what this is)"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"Does anyone know I'm going to be on the show?"

CHRIS REMO
"No they didn't, I'm gonna prove that I'm not modifying this. In our "To Read" folder I'm about to read the top email in the folder..so..I'm not, I'm not..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"There are no shenanigans happening, basically."

CHRIS REMO
"This says..."

JAKE RODKIN
"'Dear Anita,'"

CHRIS REMO
"Ah no, no way"

Laughter

CHRIS REMO
"Oh wait! I'm sorry. This is not the email I meant."

Laughter

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"After all of that!"

CHRIS REMO
"This is actually a fascinating email"

JAKE RODKIN
"Let's just hear it then"

CHRIS REMO
"Okay, I'll read it anyway. This is fascinating but, not - I didn't mean for it to sound as...exploitative...as I just did because now I sound like an asshole given..."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Don't worry you..."

CHRIS REMO
"..given what this email's about it's actually quite heartwarming."

[email irrelevant to this subject]

***

returning to it ~1:35:25

CHRIS REMO
"Well here's the second question in this "to Read" section, also ermmm I can prove to you second email..."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"I believe you."

SEAN VANAMAN / sarcasm
"It's *impossible* to change that information on your phone"

CHRIS REMO
"It's the date the email came, I can't change it."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"Read the email, you totally just built this thing up."

CHRIS REMO
"Because I... because it felt really...this is an email about sexism in games and it just felt very, like, I didn't want it to come off like I'm just scouring for emails..."

JAKE RODKIN
"You're coming off as something else..."

CHRIS REMO
"I know"

JAKE RODKIN
"..so just read the email!"

SEAN VANAMAN
"What you're saying is that you're not 'holding it', it just happens to be the one we would have done anyway."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"Yes"

CHRIS REMO
"LOLFACE writes.."

SEAN VANAMAN
"of course"

LAUGHTER

CHRIS REMO
"'Violence in videogames leads to violence' is something the videogame industry has rallied against as a whole for years now. So why, when you replace the word "violence" with "sexism" is it so widely accepted? I love listening to the podcast and I'm interested in the discussion that could come from this, especially from Idle Thumbs as I think your podcast has the best
discussions...er...of any podcast when it comes to serious matters.' Ermm. Anyway, that's the email."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"So are they saying..."

CHRIS REMO
"This is a fairly important topic"

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"...sexism in games leads to sexism in real life?"

CHRIS REMO
"No. no"

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"...like people weren't..."

CHRIS REMO
"No. No. What they're saying..OK, so what the person is saying. OK. I'm going to say what the
person is setting up..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"I see, yeah sure"

CHRIS REMO
"...as opposed to my read on this. The situation the person is positing is, it is universally disputed by videogame people, by the videogame industry, that violence in videogames leads to violence. Ermm."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"I think I've figured it out but yeah go ahead."

CHRIS REMO
"However, when violence is changed to sexism, errm, there is like an outcry, ermm, I'm sorry, when, heh..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"When you change those terms..."

CHRIS REMO
"When you change those terms..."

JAKE RODKIN
"When you say sexism leads to sexism, that is ostensibly"

CHRIS REMO
"That."

JAKE RODKIN
"...directly being said by the same people who decry violence..."

CHRIS REMO
"Right"

JAKE RODKIN
"...leads to violence as invalid."

CHRIS REMO
"Yes. Yes, exactly"

JAKE RODKIN
"So why is that allowed?"

CHRIS REMO
"Right"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"I'm sure this question is being presented in good faith but its..

CHRIS REMO
"I believe it is"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"...it's a fallacy"

CHRIS REMO
"I agree, yeah, yeah"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"Like, comparing those things is a complete fallacy

CHRIS REMO
"I don't think this person is like covertly being shitty

JAKE RODKIN
"I agree yeah"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"Yeah I don't think so either."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Yeah. I think this is just knowing that we would talk about it."

CHRIS REMO
"Yeah"

dead air.

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"Well, it's a fallacy." Laughs awkwardly. "You know, uh..."

CHRIS REMO
"I, I mean they're different in material ways for one thing, like, I mean, there's differences in the parallels that were set up but there is also differences in, like, literally what sexism and violence are.."

JAKE RODKIN
"But also I don't think people make the claim that sexism in games leads to sexism... I don't think that people are making the same... that's... I think that direct correlation is..."

CHRIS REMO
"I agree."

JAKE RODKIN
"...is not present."

SEAN VANAMAN
"I mean I think it's, It's not a direct arrow, it's a swirling arrows of..."

JAKE RODKIN
"It's probably just a problem in general."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"It's a distortion of what I think has become very reactionary in gaming, so there's like a hardcore backlash against any criticisms of games..."

CHRIS REMO
"Right."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"that comes out of this like Jack Thompson era of violence causes violence type thing..."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Right."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"...which I don't think that anyone actually thinks erm... that's been disproved many times, but it's more about erm.. when we're talking about sexism like media has an impact on us as human beings like the things..."

CHRIS REMO
"It normalises things."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"we engage with in the world, so it does normalise certain erm ideas and norms and expectations err... it's not necessarily saying like "oh if you play a game where you are beating up women you're going to go beat up women' like *nobody* is saying that, even though lots of people try to claim that I'm saying that. Erm...but that it does start to normalise these behaviours and make it seem less err... awful and make it seem like, well that's..."

JAKE RODKIN
"It's just a thing people do..."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Well, the more you..."

JAKE RODKIN
"...huge quotes..."

CHRIS REMO
"Well also I think there's a big difference in that v-, in that violence in games frequently is pre- this is what I mean by material difference- violence in games is frequently presented as, like, extremely over the top and ridiculous and, like, in ways that most people wouldn't even have the capacity to enact whereas sexism is not an act, sexism is- like violence is an act. You can have a violent mentality as well but sexism is, like..."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"It's a manifestation of..."

CHRIS REMO
"an assumption."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"...oppression.

CHRIS REMO
"Yes. Exactly. Like it's, it's a, it's a component of a world view it's not like a thing you do, and so it's, it's, even on purely material grounds it's not the same thing to say that like 'I see violence therefore I become violent. I see sexism therefore I do sexism.' Like that's..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"Yeah."

CHRIS REMO
"They're very different because one of them, one of them is more insidious than the other like, violence is by nature like a physical, like, act of aggression, sexism *can* like cau- like be a factor in producing that but it..."

JAKE RODKIN
"Sexism is a, a, superset of things.."

CHRIS REMO
"Yes..."

JAKE RODKIN
"which include..."

CHRIS REMO
"...but it is also a filter that like, like, causes you to interpret signals that you see in the world in certain ways very subtly and like a culture in which, like, sexist imagery and ways of interpreting things is just, like, blanket unquestioned..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"Mm-hmm"

CHRIS REMO
"that just feeds into all the signals you're taking in because you're taking in the same signals from the world like, in a lot of cases your brain will interpret them very similarly to the way that you take them in when you're playing a videogame."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"The other piece of this too is that ermm... you know we are living in a society that is deeply patriarchal right, that like inequality and inequity among men and women is very real.."

CHRIS REMO
"Mm-hmm."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"...but there's this sense that, well, we've already reached equality there's this huge backlash against feminism saying that it doesn't exist, we've reached equality etcetera but any way that you sum it up we have not, right, with the statistics on violence against women, the statistics of pay ermmm pay gap between genders, with ermm...the amount of property women own, the positions of power that women have in the industry like any way that you sum it up, and so when we talk about these images as well, it's not just like they exist in a vaccuum it's not just one game or one movie, it's a product of our society written by people in our society that are internalising these messages and perpetuating them. Erm, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not so when we see that and where we live in a society where the sort of dominant myth is that everything is equal, it helps perpetuate how problematic these notions are about internalising these messages of sexism without realising it."

CHRIS REMO
"And it like, when you're saying intentionally or not, like, a *lot* of the time it is unintentional which actually makes all of this harder..."

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"...makes the problem much worse."

CHRIS REMO
"to discuss because like, going all the way back to something I said when we were talking about Disney shit, like, good intentions are like one thing, but not everything. Like, you know, you can mean well and still..."

SEAN VANAMAN
"...be thoughtless."

CHRIS REMO
"Yes, exactly"

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"...ruin everything!"

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"So, I would say, I would, like, I very much in my sort of anecdotal experience ermm... think of it's very much both intentional and not intentional ermm... because I've heard stories about ermm.. publishers and higher ups at studios being like 'you need to slut up that character'."

CHRIS REMO
"Oh sure."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Of course."

ANITA SARKEESIAN
"So that's, that's very intentional or examples of erm there was a woman in Hollywood who talks about, whenever she pitches stories about women they're always asking, repeatedly 'Why can't it be a boy? Why can't it be a boy?' right, and so that of a female character so when it's a boy they never ask that. But ermm.. there's so many, because it's insidious and because we all live with right, even women live with internalised sexism ermmm... there's so many times when this happens unintentionally, right, where you reproduce these things and you didn't even know it and that's part of why, it's kinda exciting that there's so many voices right now specifically in gaming who are talking about this stuff, right, as a way of being like 'we can make this better' we can do better and if you can identify it and learn the language of how to talk about these issues and recognise them then we can start to change that."

dead air

CHRIS REMO
"Totally"

DANIELLE RIENDEAU
"Amen"

CHRIS REMO
"There you go."

SEAN VANAMAN
"Thanks for the email, LOLFACE."

Laughter

***

***

OK, wow. Firstly, weird discussion of how asking a straightforward question "this appears to be an inconsistency - how do you explain it?" is someone trying to be 'shitty'. How can posing a legitimate question ever be shitty? It doesn't presume anything about the people it is asking, except that they assume sexism in videogames leads to sexism in real life, which isn't a illegitimate assumption that would render you a bad person. "How often do you beat your wife?" is a shitty person question. The one posed is fine.

So, right off the bat, it's mostly Remo answering this, with AS very quiet except when she is forced (IMO) to come in when Rodkin starts asserting "I don't think people make the claim that sexism in games leads to sexism," because that *is* actually something that AS seems to believe, both here "but that it does start to normalise these [sexist] behaviours and make it seem less err... awful" and in her video series.

It must be something AS believes otherwise she is saying that sexism in culture leads to a perpetuation of sexism in culture, but nothing else. If something only perpetuates itself, but doesn't lead to negative behaviour, then why would you care if culture is perpetuating harmless 'norms'? It's like devoting your life to exploring ways that culture asserts Santa is real, and perpetuates that myth - no-one would waste their time because believing in Santa isn't harmful.

Chris is particular, struggles with several facets of the question. He begins several thought strands then at some point seems to become aware that what he is saying could be equally argued for violence, and then he changes tack. Firstly he argues that sexism and violence are not definitionally the same thing. This is true, but the factual bearing on the question is not clear here. What is being asserted is that the more pervasive and extreme thing - violence- is not causing any detectable behavioural change, so why would the less persuasive and moderate thing -sexism, specifically sexist tropes- cause a behavioural change.

He attempts to explain this by saying violence is over the top and beyond the capacity to act out - neither of which are universally true for games. There are plenty of examples of subtle violence you could act out from games, not everything is ridiculous physically impossible fatalities, many games feature shooting a gun or punching someone, both acts which are readily available to the general gaming public. Realising this is unsupportable, he shifts into "sexism isn't an act" but seems to realise it's pretty much is as much of an act as violence itself.

Finally, Remo posits a special character for sexism it's "insidiousness". That violence could be insidious and lead to more violent behaviour too is one obvious counter. "Insidiousness" is a very ropy idea anyway - consider this: if you plotted a graph of the subtlety of a "-ism" in a given culture vs. its effects, if you accepted Remo's hypothesis, then the graph would be down sloping - very subtle things would have massive societal effects, and huge obvious "isms" would have no effect. So playing a game with ultra violence and hidden sexism would have almost no violent effects, but playing an obviously sexist game with subtle violence, would have no sexist effects in culture but would lead to violence?

AS should be arguing for more sexism in games, since overt sexism isn't insidious so would have no effect. It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as an idea.

So on to AS. Firstly, she seems to go off on a tangent. She asserts that there is a "hardcore backlash against any criticism of games". Most youtubers who make a living from serving their audience sometimes very severe criticism of games would find this funny

Then she says the problem with sexism is that it normalises behaviours. So it follows then that making bad things seem not so bad would mean people do the bad thing more because they don't realise it isn't bad. I mean, sexism in games either has an effect or it doesn't. If it has no effect then, again, what are you complaining about?

"[Sexism is] a manifestation of oppression." "We live in a society that is unequal...etc." Even if we accept what you say is correct, and there is academic dispute over many of the things she asserts as truths here, what has this to do with games, or the question? She seems to be saying that cultural signals, including from videogames, cause people to at least perpetuate sexist views. OK, that is a re-statement of your thesis. Why don't they act in violent ways, since violence is more overt in games? Never answered. Sexism is special, violence isn't, I guess.

"...it's insidious and because we all live with right, even women live with internalised sexism" Now she just sounds like a Scientologist, insisting on the presence of invisible Thetans you must cleanse yourself of. It's a kafkatrap isn't it? You're either a sexist, or you're an unconscious sexist. That you might not be a sexist at all is an impossibility.

What I got from this question is how AS is very good at filling dead air with plausible sounding language. If her work was ever academically validated, submitted to experts for hard questions, it seems as though it would struggle. It seems like a very obvious question, given the research and interest around videogame violence, that I would obviously have expected her to come across it before and to be equal to taking it head on and arguing it out.

This is the danger involved when you refuse to put your work out for public scrutiny. You don't develop the ability to answer obvious criticisms. I mean, the strategy can work in some ways, you might develop a devoted following or insular community that reinforces you, but you will always be contained and imprisoned in that space, and any contact with the outside world will send you fleeing back to its safety.

~troushers

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