Althouse: When it comes to Christina Hoff Sommers and sexism in video games, Jonathan Mann will not stand down.

September 20, 2014

When it comes to Christina Hoff Sommers and sexism in video games, Jonathan Mann will not stand down.

(Via Metafilter.)

58 comments:

Curious George said...: Oooookay....; 9/20/14, 6:57 AM
ron winkleheimer said...: Not quite sure what the point of that was. This Mann person might have had some good points, but that video is just annoying It's not an attempt to debate the issue. It's a tribal display.; 9/20/14, 7:18 AM
damikesc said...: Looking at the metafilter comments, all they want is tribal commentary.

Seeing people who clearly don't understand a thing commenting on it is endlessly amusing.

Gamersgate will either fix "game journalism" or kill it. The people sucking on that teat might want to realize that we don't care either way.; 9/20/14, 8:05 AM
Saint Croix said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/20/14, 8:19 AM
Wince said...: Does Mann really want, as he says, "more choice"?

Tribal commentary, in drawstring pants.; 9/20/14, 8:28 AM
Saint Croix said...: Christina Hoff Sommers is awesome. She's so awesome, when you try to kill her, she just becomes more awesome. She's Obi-Wan Kenobi awesome. You repeat what she says and add music? Awesome, awesome, awesome. With music!; 9/20/14, 8:30 AM
damikesc said...: Does Mann really want, as he says, "more choice"?

Tribal commentary, in drawstring pants.

He wants more choice ... as long as he agrees with the choice.; 9/20/14, 8:33 AM
Wince said...: I just watched Sommer's original video linked at Instapundit.

Very unfair editing job by Mann to create a demeaning, electronic female caricature to advance what are essentially straw man arguments to depict his viewpoint.

Isn't that exactly what Mann accuses the video game culture of doing to women?; 9/20/14, 8:58 AM
Bob Ellison said...: The "more gamers are women" notion screams out for unpacking.

What kinds of games? There's a big difference between Angry Birds and Dark Souls.

How much time do they spend gaming per week?

What's the male/female skew among games like FPS types filled with strippers and the like?

The Sims came out in 2000, and it forced the game-dev industry to re-think their marketing, because The Sims appealed overwhelmingly to females...and it made lots and lots of money. When you're trying to make and sell games, you don't care much whether it's boys or girls, and girls are a slightly bigger demographic.

If you have fancy, modern CGI images of females in lingerie, shooting aliens, does that only appeal to males? Some people are making faulty assumptions here.; 9/20/14, 9:15 AM
Guildofcannonballs said...: I said it was tribal weeks ago.

It's tribal.

Tribal.

T R I B A L

It's tribal all the way down.; 9/20/14, 9:17 AM
Ann Althouse said...: The original is linked at my Metafilter link.; 9/20/14, 9:19 AM
Anonymous said...: Toys for white boys.

Screw 'Grand Theft Auto' -- why not just give them the 'hood' game that they want and have the 'Ku Klux Klan' game: they can burn crosses for points and shoot and lynch blacks online with their white friends. Like old times...

It is turtles all the way down...; 9/20/14, 9:29 AM
chillblaine said...: Christina Hoff Sommers is proficient in exposing modern feminism as the dead fish, stinking from the head, that it is.

The modern feminist has no tolerance for 'boys will be boys.' If a video game has sexist and misognyst tropes, and that offends you, then don't play it.

Six offensive tweets from gamers who resent the feminist purge of male pastimes from popular culture, do not prove that we, as a culture, condone rape or violence.; 9/20/14, 9:54 AM
David said...: It's a marketplace of ideas. The idea of video games is to entertain very profitably. If women didn't buy the games in such numbers, the games would not be profitable and would change.

Want video games that are more feminist friendly? Build some and see if they sell.; 9/20/14, 9:55 AM
ron winkleheimer said...: I find it incredibly annoying that many of the people who are decrying misogyny and objectification of women in video games are the same people who applaud Beyonce's feminism.

Cause she stood next to a sign you know.; 9/20/14, 10:03 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: I watched Sommers first, then the rebuttal. But, maybe because of my age, but likely because of the content, I couldn't finish it, so wasn't quite sure of his point, except that he didn't like her, or what she was saying, or something. And, his selective editing tried to make her say what she wasn't saying, which is that heavy gamers are 7+ to 1 male, and as a result, their video games are violent and show females as sex objects. Duh. And, then showed the "View", which is just as sexist in the opposite direction. It is plain silly to complain that so many popular video games are violent and sexist, when their primary audience is adolescent and young adult males, at their peak in testosterone, but lagging in mating opportunities to somewhat older males.; 9/20/14, 10:07 AM
Roger Zimmerman said...: So, Mann wants more choice? Here are two:

1) Don't play (I don't).

2) Code your own damn video game.

P.S. I was about to make these very constructive suggestions on Metafilter, but they want $5 to join. NFW.; 9/20/14, 10:16 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: I do think it is somewhat tribal. How else does a guy make that video essentially attacking a business that caters to his gender and a woman who defends the guys who give that business their trade?

Striking in the video is how he never really addressed her arguments. He made fun of them, and took them out of context, but never engaged them. In her video, we learn that this sort of video game has a 7+ to 1 male audience, and then she points out that, of course these games are then violent and sexist. And, points out that females have their own entertainment that is just as offensive to a lot of males (e.g. (liberal) chat shows like The View, daytime soap operas, celebrity and glamor magazines, romantic novels, etc.) Instead of engaging the substance of her argument, he instead complains that she answers a question of sexism with an argument about violence, and the opposite. And, calls her arguments ad hominem, not apparently really understanding what that means. He, not she, is the one ignoring the substance of the argument, and instead spending his time ridiculing her.; 9/20/14, 10:22 AM
buwaya said...: I still have a teenager, my son, who unfortunately plays these games to excess, that's my opinion anyway. I suppose I am at this time an obsolete object but so be it.
I am informed, and given the source it seems on good authority, that the lads generally resent complaints about their games, despise "PC", are unsparing in their hostility vs such complainers, and that the games they prefer attract few girls and those that do play are inclined to agree with the boys.
There may be some value to these games after all.; 9/20/14, 10:25 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: The modern feminist has no tolerance for 'boys will be boys.' If a video game has sexist and misognyst tropes, and that offends you, then don't play it.

My working theory right now is that they see the perfect world as a feminist world, without all the things that make it more masculine than they would like. Less violent, etc., and where everyone can talk out their problems, like they do on The View (oh, wait, real conservative women, as well as men, aren't really represented there).

This is part of the reprogramming that we were discussing in the context of nature versus nurture the other day. Progressive/socialist solutions are essentially Utopian, and doomed to fail because they ignore the essential nature of humans. Their solution is to reprogram us to the point where these Utopian schemes will work. Here, maybe even more than trying to reprogram greed out of the human species, they are trying to reprogram male thoughts and behaviors out of the males of the species. Esp. the young late adolescent and early adult males who are at their peak in terms of testosterone production, but not in terms of mating opportunities, and with brains that have yet to fully mature.; 9/20/14, 10:31 AM
Scott M said...: The "more gamers are women" notion screams out for unpacking.

Of course it does. Look at the numbers in the original survey. This meme about the numbers of women gamers ONLY holds up if you include smartphone games like Angry Birds.

If you take out smartphone games, the numbers shift considerably.; 9/20/14, 10:42 AM
chillblaine said...: There is a context in which portrayals of violence against women would be acceptable to the modern feminist.

That would be scenarios where weaponized feminazis gunned down apostates like Shailene Woodley (I'm not a feminist because I love men).; 9/20/14, 10:45 AM
n.n said...: Games are also an outlet for fantasies and frustration. It's probably better that dreams of redistributive and retributive change be restricted to the virtual world. That men, and especially women, choose to relieve their stress and "burden", respectively, in a domain where no human beings will actually suffer a gruesome fate.

Generational feminism is nothing if not inconsistent. In the virtual world, women do not hit men and there are no blocked toilets. I prefer virtual women and chivalrous men.; 9/20/14, 11:19 AM
Alex said...: Considering the porn industry is $30 billion/year, you'd think that would be a more high priority target than video games.; 9/20/14, 11:48 AM
damikesc said...: Gaming influences the youth. And with stories in games improving (they EXIST now!), this is a part of pop culture that cannot be left to the Left.; 9/20/14, 11:53 AM
Heather said...: Isn't this just typical of the social warrior type. To mock rather than really debate the issue.

Boy are allowed to be boys when on one is hurt. Yes, they are allow to do other things than play tea parties with girls. What guys are not allowed to have their harmless fantasies, but we are stuck with Disney Princesses and Twilight?; 9/20/14, 11:54 AM
Alex said...: Remember how women are supposed to "Lean In" and assert themselves over the dominant male patriarchy? Well they're doing it!; 9/20/14, 11:56 AM
Alex said...: Whatever happened to #banbossy? Did it fizzle out in June?; 9/20/14, 11:59 AM
jr565 said...: When I first startched watching this I assumed the female was the one making the feminist case, but it's actually sweater boy.; 9/20/14, 12:09 PM
damikesc said...: The funniest part is that the women who was so "viciously" attacked was attacked far less than a dude who was the target of gamer hate for years...including by these same SJW.

See what they said about Jack Thompson when you hear them discuss how wrong it is to be mean to people.; 9/20/14, 12:19 PM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: Alex said...

Considering the porn industry is $30 billion/year, you'd think that would be a more high priority target than video games.

Never happen. It would put women out of work!; 9/20/14, 12:21 PM
Joe said...: I've played video games for years (on PC since I dislike consoles) as have my kids. Until their recent changed, I rated and kept track of all the games I'd played on GameSpot. So, I went through that list to see what games I played had sexist content. Out of 102 games on that list (plus some DLCs which weren't counted separately) none had clearly sexist content and maybe three had some content which an extremist might call sexist (though in one of those, there were two psychotic male antagonists in addition to a psychotic female antagonist.)

A whopping 24 had strong female characters, which you could play for a portion of the game. For six of those, the female character was who you played as (No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 and Tomb Raider in particular.) I didn't count World of Warcraft in all of these numbers nor a few games where the sex of the character you play is kept vague to the point where it's immaterial.

Then again, maybe RollerCoaster Tycoon is sexist.; 9/20/14, 12:53 PM
FullMoon said...: I don't know nothing about games or sexism but that lady appears to have a nice rack on her. Just sayin'; 9/20/14, 1:11 PM
Paco Wové said...: "Very unfair editing job by Mann to create a demeaning, electronic female caricature to advance what are essentially straw man arguments to depict his viewpoint."

Typical Metafilter cesspool of smug, then.; 9/20/14, 1:54 PM
n.n said...: Alex:

The matriarchy competes with the patriarchy for all the marbles. Neither holds the moral high ground. While the former is notably more degenerate, if only in its extraordinary hypocrisy.

The generational feminists do not care if women, or men, are objectified (i.e. commoditized) or exploited. Their concern is that it is done under their control, to their benefit, their/they're pro-choice. The feminists have emerged as a special interest, which exploits women, and men, for political, financial, and social leverage.

For some reason, there is a common perception that "women are from Venus", while "men are from Mars". The truth is that both have egos, with ambitions to match, while aggression varies between individuals.

On with the porn...

I wonder whose work reduced "secretaries" to mere "assistants".; 9/20/14, 2:00 PM
Anonymous said...: Alex wrote;

"Considering the porn industry is $30 billion/year, you'd think that would be a more high priority target than video games."

The problem is, games are made by men. These women you see in the games aren't really women. They are just cartoons of women.

On the other hand, their really are women in porn. Lot's of women. More women than men. This means money for women. Jobs for women.

If you're pro women and anti male, you'd be hurting your own cause by attacking porn. Then you'd be attacking women.; 9/20/14, 2:11 PM
Joe said...: The problem is, games are made by men.

And women--don't look at the technical staff, look at the production staff. You'd be surprised. But don't let fact get in the way of the meme.; 9/20/14, 2:14 PM
damikesc said...: The problem is, games are made by men. These women you see in the games aren't really women. They are just cartoons of women.

One of the lead devs on Portal was a woman. She later lead the team to make the underrated Quantum Conundrum.

One of the creators of the Assassins Creed series was a woman.

Are women a majority of developers? No, but they are becoming more prevalent.; 9/20/14, 2:25 PM
Jaske said...: Long ago I was teenage, the pizza store had Asteroids, or Space Invaders, or Joust.
We had children while playing NES and playing adult games on DOS like DOOM.
My children played complicated JRPG's like Final Fantasy
My Grandkids now rock Destiny.; 9/20/14, 2:39 PM
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...: Most critics of video games don't play video games. Those that do play criticize games they don't play. There are a lot of games made for teenagers and neckbeards. I don't play those games. And you don't have to, either. It's the same as movies. I don't watch horror movies, but I don't get upset that other people do. If you don't like a game, don't buy it.

There's a big disconnect between video game journalists and gamers. The people who write about games tend to be liberal arts grads that just happen to work in the game industry. They bring the same cultural biases to their jobs as anyone else with their background. The backlash from their audience is completely predictable.

Worse, very few game critics are any good at games. It's hard to take people seriously when they don't know what they are talking about.; 9/20/14, 3:10 PM
Joe said...: One of the lead devs on Portal was a woman.

Kim wasn't just a dev, but the producer and co-creator of the original concept, which was brilliant. It was later bought by Valve and made even more brilliant with the original team at the core.; 9/20/14, 3:35 PM
damikesc said...: Wasn't sure how deep Swift's involvement was as opposed to rest of team.; 9/20/14, 3:57 PM
damikesc said...: Yeah. The most fervent social critics of games play little. Some don't (Klepek of Giant Bomb plays a lot and is still major SJW). It's like the most intelligent articles involving sports, this year, were the ones Abdul-Jabbar penned.; 9/20/14, 4:00 PM
Joe said...: Here is a list of the top 40 best selling video games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

And what are considered the best games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best

Which are the sexist ones? The knee jerk response from social critics will likely be the Grand Theft Auto series. I won't entirely disagree, but they only make up a tiny fraction of the list. So, what are the rest?; 9/20/14, 4:52 PM
damikesc said...: The really misogynistic games are generally frowned upon by all gamers. Duke Nukem Forever (which was trying to parody misogyny but failed, spectacularly, in doing so and in all other regards) sold OK due to the novelty of a game with a 14 yr or so dev cycle.

The newer Leisure Suit Larry games were busts.

GTA is no more laden with misogyny than it is with misandry (the men aren't exactly reputable, either).

One could MAYBE argue Call of Duty, but those are Michael Bay films basically. They don't have enough of a story to even try to be misogynistic.

Even games like Bayonetta are basically games where the women are dominant and the men are useless.

I guess you could argue Lollipop Chainsaw as an example but it didn't sell.; 9/20/14, 5:11 PM
Anonymous said...: Pajama Boy's brother annoyingly breaks in and interrupts the view of Dr. Sommers apparently nice rack. That alone puts me off his message whatever it was.; 9/20/14, 6:24 PM
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...: damikesc said...
One of the lead devs on Portal was a woman.

And this was the only shoot-em-up game that my daughter has liked.

In general there is a dearth of games that girls like. I think this is a fair complaint. My daughter likes more peaceful games like Machinarium but I quickly ran out of games to buy that fit her demographic.

I was keen for her to learn to play computer games because they do teach a range of useful skills but there really wasn't a lot of great games available suitable for young girls.; 9/20/14, 7:08 PM
Jupiter said...: Who is that evil freak in the purple T-shirt, and why is he wearing headphones? I suppose I would know if I turned the sound on, but I'm not ready to go there.; 9/20/14, 7:16 PM
Saint Croix said...: My working theory right now is that they see the perfect world as a feminist world, without all the things that make it more masculine than they would like. Less violent, etc., and where everyone can talk out their problems

Feminists are incredibly violent if we are talking about the unborn. They are butchers. Our feminist world isn't non-violent. The violence is simply hidden away, in secret.

I believe the key to understanding feminism is how repressive it is, how hostile to free speech it is. This is why the feminists who are free speech champions (Althouse, Paglia, Sommers) keep getting in fights with feminists.; 9/20/14, 10:12 PM
Douglas B. Levene said...: Just to get my prejudices on the table, I like turn-based strategy games like "Civilization" but don't have the hand-to-eye coordination to play first person shooters (Halo, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto) or the mental quickness to play real-time strategy games (Rome). I've have, however, enjoyed watching my son and his friends play them.

It pleases me no end to see the SJWs get their commeuppance here. Games are a refuge from the world. From the PC bullies of the world among other things. There is only good news in this story: the SJWs who allegedly make a living as game reviewers picked a fight, and rather than roll over as so many targets have done, the hard core gamers (the first-person-shooter afficianados in particular) told them to piss off, and happily, there's not a damn thing the SJWs can do about it, because the hard core gamers buy the games, and without the hard core gamers, there's no game industry and no jobs for the SJWs writing game reviews. All's well that ends well.; 9/21/14, 12:09 AM
Anonymous said...: "The problem is, games are made by men.

And women--don't look at the technical staff, look at the production staff. You'd be surprised. But don't let fact get in the way of the meme."

Women make up about 10% of the game designers and about 3% of the game programmers.

The big money in the gaming industry is in Program and Design (That is, if you're a peon, obviously management and the owners make the most, but they are a small percent of the overall workforce).

This is why the progressives don't care. It's a man's world, gaming is.

Don't let the facts get in the way of your meme.; 9/21/14, 1:01 AM
Steve said...: When I grew up it was a man's world and there were no problems with boys playing war. We also played dodge ball during recess. Now, it is a Mann's world and dodge ball has been banned. Gaming is seen as an escape from a feminized world so it must be destroyed.; 9/21/14, 6:57 AM
Joe said...: Eric, do you even read your own writing?

"Women make up about 10% of the game designers..."

Aside from the fact that I see no credible source, it makes your previous statement bullshit. I suppose in your world if 49% of game designers were women, games would still be made by men.

Yeah, I'd like to see more game designers be women, though I doubt the results would be all that different. But, is that percentage due to sexism or because women, in general, don't like designing games?

Turns out most car designers are men as well. Is that due entirely to sexism or because women, in general, don't like designing cars?

(When looking at the top selling games, I was surprised at how many of the producers were female. It wasn't a huge percentage, but bigger than I expected and certainly much higher than the zero you originally claimed.); 9/21/14, 2:21 PM
Joe said...: After posting my previous comment, it struck me that even assuming that 10% of game producers/designers are women, it's a completely meaningless statistic.

Again, of the 220+ games I surveyed, including games I played, my kids have played and lists of the top selling and highest rated games, the only series which could be considered misogynistic was Grand Theft Auto, though as was pointed out, by that standard it's also misandristic--in other words, if anything GTA is misanthropic.

Even amongst the worse selling games and worse reviewed games, I could find less than five which might be considered misogynistic. This isn't counting a huge swatch of games in the middle, but with just this sample, that's much less than 1%.

So, who creates that much-less-than-1%? Except for Duke Nukem Forever, I have no idea; I couldn't track down who was on the production staff--probably because everyone knew the games were crap and didn't want credit.

(For what it's worth, I researched several of the six games from my played list in which you played a [positive, strong] female character. I was unable to find out details on most, but in the few I did, there were no female producers or directors, though the two lead writers for Tomb Raider (2013) appear to be female.

I should point out that several of the Rainbow Six series, which I haven't played, were produced by a woman.

Note: There is a problem with terminology. In the film industry, producers are generally responsible for the direction of a film and usually have final word on what is released, though for big budget items, sometimes the director gets "final cut". In video games, the responsibilities change from company to company and are evolving with the lines between designer and producer often blurred and credited oddly. One reason is that, unlike the film and TV industry, there is no union/guild specifying exactly who gets credit and how.

Note 2: I found one person's list of most misogynistic games. The author mostly equates hyper-sexualization with misogyny. If we accept that, is hyper-masculization of character misandry? What about characters that are super-smart? Oh, and some of the games, like Lollipop Chainsaw, sound hilarious--carrying her boyfriend's head around on a chain is what?); 9/21/14, 4:18 PM
SteveOrr said...: Balding McSweatpants doesn't understand that female gamers aren't creating content.

If this as a problem, it would be smart to encourage females to get involved. Which is what Sommers was doing. She argues that the gaming industry is open to all people.

McSweatpant's "rebuttal" was a montage of anonymous, discriminatory, troll tweets to represent the gaming industry. That was dishonest. But I suppose it nurses a sense of grievance. Yay?; 9/21/14, 4:57 PM
Christopher said...: I think that people are giving far too much credit to the press (and I use that term loosely) in regards to this issue.

What we are seeing is basically just writers trying to be taken seriously, and failing miserably at it. You see this all the time in sports and celebrity news.

There is something of a hierarchy in the news world and entertainment reporters are pretty much at the bottom of it; nobody takes them seriously and they know it.

This leads them to start trying to relate their field to serious subjects. So you end up seeing sports reporters writing on the societal impact of certain players or movie reviewers discussing economic systems criticized in films. The articles are almost always crap but they're not done with quality in mind, they're done in the hopes that somebody might mistakenly believe them to be an expert on a subject that matters.; 9/21/14, 10:50 PM
Fen said...: and rather than roll over as so many targets have done, the hard core gamers (the first-person-shooter afficianados in particular) told them to piss off, and happily

Yup. They picked the wrong crowd to fuck with. I've seen threads over topics like game balance that make political threads look like a picnic.

Also, unless it hasn't been mentioned yet - the pushback was about media corruption: feminist social justice warriors sleeping around with game reviewers to get special treatment for their radfem games, along with a bunch of coordinated media hit pieces about the "inherent mysogny" bullshit.; 9/22/14, 6:13 AM
Monkeyboy said...: I play PC games a lot, World of Tanks and western RPGs like Neverwinter and fallout.
What the SJWs don't realize yet is that unlike the Payola scandals of the record companies, we have options. If a company considers me evil and wold rather spend a review giving me their opinion of Ferguson rather than how a game plays, I can go somewhere else. I all ready dropped The Escapist and Cracked from my reading list.
The comapnies are going to continue to make COD, Madden and HALO because that is where the money is. At some point they are going to realize that payola spent on gaming writiers is uselss because we aren't reading them, and the money will dry up.
Plus as always, once the infidels are defeated the hunt for heretics begins, and watching SJWs being pilloried for microagressions is going to be fun.; 9/22/14, 7:49 AM