No Damsel In Distress Here: Anita Sarkeesian and Her Kickstarter Story

I’m a gamer and damn proud.

You won’t catch me toting a DS waiting to update my Animal Crossing town or feed my Nintendogs. I won’t spend hours in front of my tv wasting the brilliance that is the outdoors. And I will never pass up time with friends, to finish that last level of Bioshock Infinite or play one more round of Zombies. However, I will keep up with the industry’s latest and greatest. I do long for that occasional heartwarming nostalgia that comes with replaying an old N64 favorite. And I will always look forward to the occasional follow-up or reimagining of a series like Zelda or Tomb Raider. Gaming has been ingrained within me since as far as I can remember, but it wasn’t until recently that I stumbled upon a daring vlogger who prompted me to reanalyze these pieces of my past with a new feminist perspective.

A month from yesterday will mark the one year anniversary of a bold concept that would later rock the gaming community forever. After being invited to speak to video game development company BUNGiE, vlogger and creator of Feminist Frequency Anita Sarkeesian felt satisfied with her involvement, but realized there was a lot left to be said for the industry as a whole. She decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of videos that would analyze the history of video games from a feminist lens and illuminate the iconic portrayals of women in these games. Little did she know the tidal wave of backlash, harassment, and vandalism that would follow her from arguably the most proverbial of boy’s clubs.

Tis the Season to Be…Critical

I don’t know if its the warm weather or the abundance of pollen plaguing the air but I can’t help but think about the summer which in turn makes me think of swimsuit season. UGH the dreaded words, the thoughts of self-loathing, the images of women that are prettier than you, skinnier than you and wear that bikini better than you that flood our minds as the ocean tides flood the beaches.  As HannahGrace mentioned in her latest post, feminists sometimes have trouble admitting that we are not impervious to the images presented to us in the media that make us feel inadequate.  I’m not here to talk about shaming other women due to personal feelings of inadequacy or turning to eating disorders or disordered eating. What I really want to explore is point where our societal beauty ideal transformed from one of a healthy curvaceous body to a thin one represented by 5% of the actual female population.

I don’t know about you but a far as I can remember thin was the way to be even though my mother told me I was beautiful no matter what physical phase I was going through.  On our scales today the women on the bottom row of this picture would be considered “overweight” but have you ever considered over what weight? What is this tight imaginary box of poundage that we are supposed squeeze our way into?

Boys Will Be Boys

Last Wednesday afternoon, I sat down at my kitchen table to do some homework.  Like any normal, procrastinating college student, I headed straight for Facebook, momentarily disregarding the mountain of work silently pleading with me to get busy.  After logging on, my initial intention of posting stupid pictures with cryptic captions was immediately sidelined, as I came across a trending article in my newsfeed that nearly twenty friends had reposted.  My spidey senses started tingling when I realized it was from Jezebel.  I clicked away, and my heart sank as I read the opening statement of the article, as follows:

“A 16-year-old student says she was forced to withdraw from her prestigious Catholic prep school after texting a topless photo to two of the school’s star athletes, who shared it with the entire lacrosse team but received no punishment.  Instead of using the incident as a teachable moment for both male and female students about trust and social media, the administration sent a clear message: girls are ungodly creatures who tempt boys into sin.”

I was immediately appalled, and knew right away that I wanted to write a blog post about this.  As a graduate of a Catholic high school myself, I felt an instant connection to this story.  To boot, the subject of the article, Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax, VA, is my alma mater.

Oh, the plot thickens!  In all seriousness though, the school got a lot of heat, and frankly, it’s totally understandable.  However, I want to step away from the parallel of girls being biblically-proclaimed wily temptresses, and come at this controversy from a more religiously-neutral standpoint than Jezebel.

Anonymity at a Whole New Level

JMU Crushes. JMU Confessions. JMU advice.

Are these anonymous Facebook and Twitter accounts helping or hindering our already technologically dependent generation?  I vote hindering.

 I take up many issues with these new forums that basically encourage stalking and overall disrespect but is there really such a thing as anonymity  when it comes to the internet?  Your name may not be publicly affiliated with that degrading, creepy or ignorant post but there is a cyber footprint.  I’m not an IT professional but I’ve heard, once on the internet always on the internet.  This isn’t meant to be an internet safety lecture but if I were going to be a dumbass the internet wouldn’t be the first place I’d turn to as an outlet.

For those of you that don’t know, some anonymous person has started Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that enable JMU students to send in messages that will be relayed anonymously on the page.  Ultimately not a harmful idea but when you ask for the deep innermost thoughts of a bunch of college students, you’re obviously bound to reel in a web of gems.

Why I need feminism

I read an article about a month ago by Fox News contributor Suzanne Venker, entitled, “To be happy, we must admit women and men aren’t equal”.  Uh, what?  While many of my peers rolled their eyes and gave me that “what did you expect?” look when I told them about it, I still maintain that feminism is accessible to everyone, and transcends ideological and political boundaries.  However, the fact that a fellow woman could be so degrading to her own sex is frankly abhorrent, and for this reason, I will actually take up my allotted 500-800 words to discuss this piece.

As a quick synopsis, Ms. Venker bashes feminism for the manner in which it has allegedly catalyzed “mass confusion” rather than liberation.  She contends that gender is not a social construct, and that equality presupposes interchangeability of one thing for another, and on these grounds, men and women aren’t equal.  Pissed off yet?  Allow me to continue.

Constrained Choice: More power to us?

I recently wrote a post on whether Pinterest is killing feminism, and stipulated that Pinterest isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  After all, it can be used to promote pro-feminist (or, at least not anti-feminist) sentiments.  More fundamentally, Pinterest is a user-generated platform, meaning it is reflective of what the users themselves choose to pin.  And anyway, who are we to criticize what someone chooses to pin?

After much thought, countless discussions (but seriously, check out the comment thread on “What’s So Pinteresting?” for some pretty awesome discourse), and quite a bit of research, I’ve decided that this topic is worth revisiting, as it opens up a pretty consequential discussion on the matter of choice.  I find myself often inclined to say something along the lines of “feminism is a choice, and we should all respect one another for our choices, and at its core feminism is about equality, so the matter of what a woman ‘pins’ is rather trivial.”  Perhaps this is too simplistic in scope, though.  It’s not about taking what’s on your virtual pin board at face value:  there’s a lot more at stake for feminism than that.

The fact is that what a woman puts on her Pinterest board is a reflection of what she values.  Given that the feminist movement lends profound credence to the idea that the “personal is political”, there is absolutely a link between what a woman personally values, and how this relates to her lived politics.  I won’t rescind my prior stance that “feminine is not anti-feminist”, nor will I advise anyone to drop what she’s doing and remove those pins that relate to clothes, jewelry, or Martha Stewart.  I’ll admit, though, that we make a huge mistake in thinking that we have the freedom to pin (read: value) whatever we want.  While that’s partially true, as women, we are still socialized to value certain things over others.  Pinterest is problematic in that it is a virtual prototype that reveals the misconception in assuming that a woman’s choice is entirely her own.  Enter the notion of “constrained choice,” and how it relates to a problem that is, as I’ve said before, much bigger than Pinterest.

The Female Thing

Envy. Sex. Dirt. Vulnerability.

Four  words that Laura Kipnis uses to analyze the female condition. Overall she talks about the struggle women face with balancing feminism and femininity. Feminism being the mentality of standing up for yourself and claiming your right to equality; refusing to be called sweetheart or honey.  Femininity being the defining factor of womanhood whether it’s in the form of a push up bra or make up.  She hits the nail on the head, “”The main reason that feminism and femininity are incompatible is that femininity has a nasty little secret, which is this: femininity, at least in its current incarnation, hinges on sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy. Feminism, on the other hand, wants to eliminate female inadequacy, to trounce it as a patriarchal myth.”  It’s a constant balancing act for women but besides this aspect of the female condition Kipnis does an amazing job intertwining the four themes and tying them back to the ultimate “female thing”…the vagina.

Crab Mentality: How women hold each other back

That’s just crabby.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the concept of “crab mentality.”  This concept refers to a common occurrence in buckets of crabs: if one crab attempts to escape from a bucket of live crabs, the other crabs will pull it back down, rather than allowing it to get free. Often, the crabs will wait until the brave crab has almost escaped before pulling it back into the bucket. This seems strange—why would the crabs pull each other down, instead of working together to get out of the bucket?

The same question can be asked of women who compete with other women.  Real talk:  whether we’re willing to admit it or not, all women are competitive with other women, to some extent.  I repeat:  ALL women.  I recently read Catfight by Leora Tanenbaum, which discusses the ways in which women compete, in every aspect of our day-to-day lives.  At first, I didn’t quite buy into her hyperbolic examples of lady bitchiness, a la Mean Girls.  I’m not passive-aggressive and under-the-table, I thought.  Therefore, this logic doesn’t apply to me, right?  Wrong.

We’re socialized to compete in some form or another, because as women, we all fall short of an ideal type:  we fall outside of the category of man.  We are conditioned to equate manhood with credibility, and because we were born with two X chromosomes, we are inherently “lacking”.  As Tanenbaum points out, “if a woman belittles other women, she can prove her superiority among women—and is one step closer to the inner circle of men.”

Why Getting Raped Is Worse Than Missing Football Practice

I thought the answer to this statement was obvious, but the national media’s handling of the Steubenville rape case has proved me wrong. I don’t want to hear one more word about how the two rapists lives have been ruined or the football careers they missed out on. What about the victim? How has her life and the lives of her family and friends been changed by the event? What struggles is she facing now and what will her future be like?

I feel like no one is speaking up for her, and as a fellow sexual assault survivor, I want her to know she has the full support of myself and the community of survivors I know. I also want all my readers to know that contrary to what the media has been reporting, what she could potentially face as a result of the crime is a far worse fate than Ma’Lik Richmond and Trent Mays’s 1-2 years in jail.

The following list of symptoms and problems suffered by sexual assault survivors is certainly not an exact account of what she is going to go through or what I experienced. They are merely reminders of what CAN happen, meant to counter balance the mass amounts of sympathy that have been regulated to the rapists over the last week.

What’s So “Pinteresting”?

I recently read an article on how Pinterest is “killing feminism.”  When I first discovered the article, just a couple of weeks ago, I knew immediately that I wanted to do a blog entry on it, as I’ve felt pretty strongly about the issue since Pinterest’s inception in 2010.  I’m surprised at myself as I write this post though, because my opinion has radically changed over the span of the past two weeks.  Had I written on this subject in the midst of my initial passion, I’m sure I would have regretted it later.  You see, I initially had the idea that women were being superficial in using Pinterest, and that maybe the social media outlet was giving us a bad name.  But what exactly about women loving fashion is so wrong, and how is that a threat to feminism?  Isn’t a bigger threat when we start thinking it’s okay to regulate the interests of the feminist next door?

Fashion advice, a la Pinterest.

Allow me to explain.  First, for those of my readers who are unfamiliar with Pinterest, it’s essentially a social media platform that allows users to compartmentalize their interests via online “pin boards”, to which they attach links and pictures that strike their fancy (you’re welcome, Mom and Dad).  So, for example, if I’m trying to plan my dream apartment in Seattle, I can use Pinterest to sort through pictures of awesome room décor, affordable living room furniture, you get the point.  I’ll then post them all on a “pin-board” entitled, “dream apartment” or whatever.  Pretty cool, huh?

Well, some critics would say “nay.”  According to BuzzFeed writer Amy Odell, “Pinterest’s user-generated content, which overwhelmingly emphasizes recipes, home decor, and fitness and fashion tips, feels like a reminder that women still seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades — and that the internet was supposed to help overcome.”  She further stipulates that women’s media should be informative “without overwhelming them with superficial information about diet, exercise, or clothes, or wildly aspirational images of thin, photo-shopped models wearing designer dresses and lounging in mansions.”