And it's kinda funny how folk react to Anita. Personally, I think she's a cool chick that a bunch of beta gamers don't know how to deal with because they care too much about shit they shouldn't care about. Like...you can point out sexualization in media and have differing feelings personally...I mean, I never got prude from her vibe.
That's a rather over-simplified view of the main arguments people have with Anita. I'd go so far as to say it's a straw man. The problems people have with Anita include, but are not limited to, the following;
One, as I joked about earlier, she took nearly two hundred grand to produce a series of videos that she is now roughly four years late on. Technically, she is delivering them, but not on the schedule she promised and certainly not the kind of content you'd expect someone with 200K to produce. I could put out videos that looked like that for free, and a lot of people do.
Two, she steals footage. A number of YouTubers have uncredited clips from their channels in FemFreq's videos. So again, what exactly was all that money for? She's used at least one piece of artwork, uncredited, from an Internet artist. There was a big to-do about it when they called her out over it.
Three, and this is the big one... she completely misrepresents the titles she's "critiquing". For example, the infamous Hitman video. Her big argument was that the game encourages, and rewards, you for killing the strippers in one of the levels. To support her point she... shows footage of someone doing just that, with their score clearly going
down in the upper left corner of the screen. That's the exact opposite of a reward. A few of the things she shows in her videos are oddities that do not happen during normal playthroughs; you basically have to force the game to do them (IE, "stage it" for the video).
Which leads me to Four; her arguments are flimsy as hell. A few academics (Cathy Young, for one) and endless others have completely torn her critiques apart and she never debates her points during personal appearances; she's usually spoon-fed softball questions that are pre-screened ahead of time to keep anything tricky from actually getting through. When this doesn't happen, she's blank as a fart. Witness the aforementioned Colbert Report interview, where Stephen asked her to name three games that (something I can't remember but was central to her thesis), and she couldn't do it. And yet she bills herself as an "expert".
So, why does any of this matter? Well, it's not simply a case of, in the words of XKCD, someone being wrong on the Internet. Anita positions herself as an expert who can't be criticized or even confronted (again, all comments on her videos are turned off and she doesn't debate her points in public), and popular opinion is that anyone who disagrees with her quite frankly, entirely wrong assertions about video games is just some beta cuck misogynist, so there's no way to actually have a constructive conversation about her points. And since she's "an expert", she gets to talk at the UN, and consult at video game companies, and basically spearhead the charge against certain kinds of content in video games. And developers listen to her and her crowd, and anyone who doesn't like what they see as the bullying or pandering to a vocal minority that affects the media that they consume is basically left twisting in the wind with no way to get anyone to seriously listen to them. (Apart from simply not buying the games, that is. That works, and is increasingly being used to pressure developers to stop.)
That's not even getting to the stuff she's said about mass shootings in the past (something something toxic masculinity), which is just completely out of line. Then again, some folks have said that was McIntosh, and she was just the mouthpiece.
Personally, I'd say she's a scam artist. She's found a way to make money peddling hot air to people... and normally I wouldn't really care, but... she's representative of the kind of crybullying that's happening in a
lot of the forms of media that I consume, and it's a trend that worries me. I don't think she's Satan incarnate, and I do think she's kinda cute, but... I live in California. We've had a few too many riots lately over this sort of thing, and I'm kind of afraid to see where it goes from here. I personally don't believe Anita actually believes the shit she's pushing; she just knows feminism is in right now and she's riding the wave. More power to her for that, I guess. But... yeah.
