Anita Sarkeesian Quotes

If you want to get to know a character, learn about their interests, goals or desires, their butt is probably not going to give you that information.

Since mobile, indie and retro inspired games are built on a legacy of inequality in the medium the new wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia has brought with it a resurrection of the worst of the old-school damsel in distress stereotypes. Indeed, many of these new titles essentially function as love letters to the trope as a way of paying homage to classic games of years gone by.

There's no such thing as sexism against men. That's because sexism is prejudice + power. Men are the dominant gender with power in society.

We can trace the "woman as reward" trope all the way back the beginning of the medium itself as […] upon successful completion of many arcade games, players were rewarded with a related "smooch of victory" trope, so named for the kiss the hero received as a reward for rescuing a kidnapped princess. Sometimes the prize is blatant, as with the "standard hero reward" in which the king will give his daughter to the hero. On other occasions it's taken a step further by employing the parallel of "sex for victory" or "rescue sex" trope.

The "mystical pregnancy" is one of the tropes that I loathe the most, because while other tropes represent women in stereotypical ways, this one hits us on a biological level.

For this video I tried to get a glimpse of Batman's rear end, but it's as if his cape is a piece of high-tech Wayne-Industries equipment designed to cover up his butt at all costs.

Well, maybe the princess shouldn't be a damsel and she could save herself.

Geraldine Doogue: I'm intrigued by Anita saying she had to learn about systems. You had to learn about the sociology of systems and structural change, and that was obviously quite a journey for you.<p>Anita Sarkeesian: Yeah, absolutely. I sort of joke about how it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me, and also the most frustrating for everyone around me. Cause, like, when you start learning about systems, everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time. So there's a good year of my life where I was the most obnoxious person to be around. And then you settle into it, you start to understand, like, oh, people have been living within these systems, and it was just sort of a liberating moment for me. You learn how to pick and choose your battles and that sort of thing.

Princess Peach is in many ways the quintessential stock-character version of the damsel in distress.

When the media we create excludes girls and women, fails to depict them as leaders and innovators or treats them as little more than side-kicks, love interests and sex objects, is it any wonder that women are systematically excluded and under-represented in so many careers and leadership positions?

It gets worse and worse, it reinforces this idea of women as sexual objects, right; there's this idea of women as playthings for their amusement … [that] we are not meant to be treated with respect.

Not a coincidence it's always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.

Anita Sarkeesian: For me, the big picture has always been culture change, and pop culture was just a vehicle and a medium through which cultural change can happen or it can be influenced by; so it's not actually about video games. But it's about video games, right?

Anita Sarkeesian: I think it's important to recognize that harassment is, as someone had mentioned, not just what is legal and illegal, right? Harassment is threats of violence, but it's also the day-to-day grind of "you're a liar", "you suck", making all these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis, and the mobs that come from those hate videos, et cetera.

I'm exhausted. I know that it's not unusual for nonprofits to have a life cycle shorter than a lot of people would like, but there are unique challenges when they're so entwined with an individual (me) who has become a symbol (oops), for better and for worse. I'm hoping that it will be valuable to share the reality of the bone-deep burnout that comes from consistently saying yes to the growth of Feminist Frequency, often at the expense of protecting my personal boundaries, and the workload of our team. While I've already said my piece about the harassment that myself and others have experienced over the years, reflecting on it now I can express both a sense of pride that conversations about online abuse have become part of our lexicon, and a reality that it has come at the cost of my health and wellbeing.