What are these trifling issues with women in islam? Could they be the result of following a cult founded by a habitual rapist and misogynist and his holy book that endorses rape and misogyny, and commands muslims to follow strictly the example of their prophet, the rapist and misogynist?

Choose a better cause to defend. How do you think these animals can go on television to talk such nonsense? Muslims are fundamentally broken; they can't reason. They're not alive in the same way humans are alive.

Naked pictures are not really the issue.

If her pictures had been stolen and looked at, but she didn't KNOW that they had been seen, her psychological damage from this theft would have been very different. Wondering who has seen them, being uncomfortable when meeting someone -- has this person seen them? That person? Not happy, not cool. And, in fact, she took back that particular psychological assault by posting this video and claiming her naked body for herself. Here. Look. I want you to look. It's my body and it is a fine body.

The real damage are the personal attacks, exposing personal information, attempted blackmail, active psychological assaults on her mind.

You guys can have your intellectual conversation about the cloud and how to protect yourself.

But that is not the problem.

I had to stop reading the comment stream when I realized it was starting to include crap about -- oh this isn't misogyny, this isn't hatred.

Yes. It is. It is violence against women, and this woman in particular.

And when you ignore that, and focus on the fact that she had made something that was vulnerable to theft... well, we get back to that feminist/humanist trope of -- you are part of the problem. #Not All Men? Well, men who focus on immaterialities while a violent psychological assault is taking place? I'd say #Those Men.

I know you don't mean any harm. I know you aren't #Those Men, not really. But I'm here to tell you that there is new harm being committed when you ignore the actual violent psychological crimes.

I am aware that some of what I have written might sound really stupid in light of the above comments, since I didn't read them. I'm okay with that. It is better than subjecting myself to what feels like an additional violation.

Not the wording: the definition. Exploit does not mean hate, and at no point was I defending misogyny or abuse or hatred of anyone. But this odd definition of exploitation of women being re-labeled as 'hatred' has always struck me as an awkward manipulation of reality. To me, it's akin to redefining being punched in the face as 'rape'. Both things are terrible, but repurposing a worse word to apply to a lesser one is over-exaggerating the situation only to draw attention to the crime.

As for exploiting people, that's just getting into a Freudian psycho-analysis, the nuances of which could honestly make everyone guilty of exploitation just by human nature. But we should bypass that because the subject isn't applicable and is wide and deep enough to spawn a hundred websites just dedicated to just that topic alone, and no one in this tier of human evolution will ever find a conclusion to that conversation.

But this is something different. This is an intentional action to belittle others for the sake of social or personal insecurity. I am entirely against that, but I have to draw the line at blowing things out of proportion for the sake of drawing attention to the issue, especially when it's done on a culturally-wide level, because that makes all of us collectively dumber in the end. I demand progress through honesty.

I'm not sure it matters if it is "true" hate or not. It is a malicious act, the intent is to do harm. Aside from that, misogyny is also defined as the mistreatment of women, so ya, I don't think it is a misnomer at all in this case.

Unfortunately, though I could be wrong, I'm pretty certain a significant number of Anonymous members are also involved in that (pathetic, spiteful, cry-for-attention) that was that feminist-gaming-fiasco idiocracy. Anonymous has done great things, and horrible things, and sadly, by their nature, they've nothing to direct them but the panic of the crowd. (I do think they're a great force for good most of the time, however).

I do disagree with this continuing theme of the "Hatred for women". Exploitation doesn't mean hatred. What's so often (mis)labeled as hatred or misogyny is simply the expression of power of one group over another. I don't think hate factors into it for the majority of participants. It's the same as school-yard bullies; they don't pick on kids because they literally hate them, they're just getting off on power and feeling good about making others feel less. No one really hated Ghyslain Raza (the "Starwars kid"), they just wanted to make someone else feel like shit so they could feel less pathetic about their own lives.

But I'm not trying to argue against her point. I think what she did is truly the best way to shove it in the face of those who've wronged her in the most intimate and public way. I'm sure she'll feel the pain of this violation for the majority of her life, as most people would in that situation, but the bravery of being proactively engaged against those who exploited her should give her, and any other woman who has experienced something similar, empowerment today.

There are serious problems with Sommers video. If anyone hasn't seen it yet, watch it here.

Basically, her argument is "I looked at some literature (I'm not going to tell you what though) and I concluded there is no misogyny in gaming. You can trust me because I call myself a Feminist."

That's called "appeal to authority" and it's a logical fallacy.

The hugely ironic thing is that anti-Sarkeesian people are constantly going on about Sarkeesian is not qualified to critique games because she only played some of the games she talks about in the videos and watched YouTube game footage of the rest. Yet Sommers admits in the start of this video that she hasn't played video games since Pac Man in the 80s! By anti-Sarkeesian standards, she's even less qualified to talk about games than Sarkeesian is.

But that doesn't stop people who don't like Sarkeesian from trotting out this video as some supposedly magical proof that Sarkeesian's arguments have been debunked.

There is misogyny in some mainstream games (from memory, I found GTAV to occasionally veer in that direction) but the examples she gives are so wrong they're either exaggerated, ignorant or purposefully misleading.

Dragon Age? Hitman? Really? Neither of these games can be in any way characterised as misogynistic. Dragon Age has strong main female characters, it displays the mistreatment of women but also racism and genocide. Hitman actively punishes you for killing civilians and gender really has little bearing on the game at all.

Slightly more women play mobile games than men today. Even before that we had the success of the Wii's general appeal and the huge sales of The Sims series before that. AAA titles still veer towards violent themes but that is not misogyny. If her views gain traction it's more on the basis of the preconceived and uninformed views of the general adult public rather than reality.

Her videos don't make the argument that games cause violence against women or anyone else. She analyzed the roles of women in games and found trends in how they were portrayed. These were not flattering portrayals (for example the "Damsel in Distress" portrayal) and male characters were not often treated in the same way in games. She's pointing out how off-putting that can be to potential and actual female gamers and recommending women be portrayed in a more realistic manner. She's also pointing out how games are reinforcing the sexist and misogynistic messages that already exist in society. I don't think she is claiming media is the root cause of either sexism or misogyny.

Games ARE changing and including less "Trope-y" content and more well-rounded characters. And that's partly BECAUSE of her critiques (the creative director on The Last of Us has publicly stated her work heavily influenced the character designs and story of the game).

But I don't see that as a reason to not call out certain games for falling back on tired and occasionally demeaning representations of women.

Speaking for myself I would say that I don't really agree with her assertion that mass media in general or video games in particular are the primary driving force behind sexism, misogyny or violence against women in the real world. I don't think there's ever been a conclusive study that makes that connection and much of this is basically the violence in video games causes real violence, only repackaged with a feminist twist. In her latest video she states that violence against women in games trivializes the violence that happens to women in real life, but then says nothing about it trivializing violence against anyone else (I guess men just don't matter as much as women). She accuses the industry of using women as little more than set pieces but then fails to acknowledge that many of her examples are NPCs, who are by definition set pieces and that goes for both men and women. She basically shows us a bunch of clips from various games and pulls them completely out of context and writes her own narrative for them. So, show everyone a bunch of shocking images and tell them what they mean, and hope everyone just takes your word for it and doesn't think too hard about it.

You're right. It is about context. But this video distorts the context.

Manhattan has a population of almost 1.8 million people. If you don't live in a major metropolitan area, please try to wrap your head around that number first. That's not all of NYC, that's just Manhattan.

When the director of this video said "The biggest ingredients for this to happen is tons of people, passing by and mixing with tons of other people. Its a numbers game. Eventually you run into an asshole..." he wasn't joking.

Higher density population increases the chance of seeing or experiencing things that are unpleasant. If you sat on your porch in bumfuck whogivesashitville long enough, you will eventually see some unpleasant things. It just happens faster where there are more people. And the culture IS different in cities then it is in rural areas. People are more used to being constantly near each other and interacting.

I'm not excusing the behavior of some of the assholes in this video. What I am really saying is that, at worst this video is a bullshit grab for money. At best it's a failed attempt to help women or educate/change the culture to be less misogynistic.

"Did you actually watch the video?" Yes. Did you notice this was two minutes out of 10 hours?

Misogyny exists. Harassment exists. Abuse exists. Domestic violence exists. Rape exists. We should all work to end it. This video just muddies the water on all those issues in what I think is a clear money grab.

/cynical

Seems like they all coulda done with some misogyny insurance at the end thar

So much for being on ignore.

You mean beside your long documented history of saying blatantly racist things?

you made a judgement about the cops based on nothing but their race. the literal definition of racism. The fact that you STILL don't get this after all this time further demonstrates your ignorance.

Funny that you don't deny the misogyny and trolling.

Crash and burn lantern...crash and burn....again.

@Payback, I'll put in my 2 cents on this discussion with @messenger, since it's stayed public.

I feel like you both seem to have a point about why certain users should be reminded of the sift 'rules' about attacking, intentionally offensive, and racist comments. It seems it's really about what gets your goat, for one of you it's racist hate speech, for the other it's self righteous misogyny. They do both add by giving an example of the 'wrong' side of many debates, and can both be trying to deal with.
From what I've seen, lantern has been more egregious about attacking others and actually threatening violence, while Shiny is just the same old annoying, hyper religious 'if you don't believe exactly what I do you're wrong, evil, and going to hell' crap. I'm not sure either really rises to the level of a ban, but both could certainly do with a refresher on what the 'rules' here are (as could most of us at times).

Take a look at the Wikipedia page on the topic. There are literally HUNDREDS of studies on this from countries all over the world. And they all show the same thing--women get shafted on salary pretty much whether they live in the developed or developing world.

It's interesting you bring up the video game industry example, because I'm sure you're aware of the huge controversy in the games industry right now about the general lack of female designers, programmers, etc. as well as the misogyny that often rears its ugly head in the industry (and among gamers). I worked in games 5 years and I saw this first-hand.

On one team I worked with we had a female programmer (the only female programmer I met while working in the industry) and she was pretty good. But you know what? These rumors started going around that she used to be a man and got a sex change. Because, you know, a woman couldn't possibly be that good of a programmer.

It has been argued before that women "choose" lower paying jobs (like being game artists, or teachers, etc.) but this begs two important questions. First, why are jobs that are traditionally associated with women paid less than those traditionally associated with men and second, can we really say women "chose" those jobs if they were actively discouraged from pursuing anything else due to societal pressure, discriminatory hiring practices, or hostility (both thinly veiled and open) in the male-dominated workplaces?

I don't get the weird wave of misogyny and mansplanin' sweeping the politisphere these days. Divide and conquer?

I apologize on behalf of my gender.

Time to grow up, gents.