Why are Certain Types of Social Justice Subject Matter so Painful to Deal With? (Feminism, Political Correctness etc)

Why are Certain Types of Social Justice Subject Matter so Painful to Deal With? (Feminism, Political Correctness etc)

Brief Introduction

My aim in this blog is to help explain the emotional inclination that people have to lash back against social justice politics, despite the fact that they claim to believe in equality.

This is something that I was thinking about for a long time. A couple of years ago, when I used to deal with social justice issues a lot, I noticed that I would consistently have negative emotional reactions to a lot of the issues, especially feminism. Sometimes those reactions would be extremely negative. I wrote this blog to help explain to myself why this was the case.

Once I have figured out (at least to my satisfaction) what issues and circumstances would cause such negative emotional reactions, I will consider those factors in relation to individuals with more reactionary political views than myself.

This blog will sometimes refer to online pro-social justice commentators as SJWs (an abbreviation of Social Justice Warrior) and I will refer to the channels dedicated to opposing social justice politics as ‘antis.’ It’s also very opinionated and I really hope that I haven’t messed this up.

Background Information

For about two years (late 2013 to mid-late 2015) I followed social justice related discussions online, particularly those relating to feminism. I subscribed to as many YouTube channels and Facebook pages relating to such content as I could find. I would also put out some of my own pro-feminist content on my YouTube channel.

These pro-feminist actions were heavily motivated by the fact that in late 2013 I had a been on YouTube for over three years, yet almost all that I knew about feminism was that thousands of angry neckbeards insisted that it was plot for female supremacy. That and the fact people loved to assert that ‘feminism is stupid because men have problems too.’ (a. k. A – Men have problems therefore women don’t have problems) At some point I got very sick of hearing that, especially since I found these talking points to be very dubious from the first time they were said. So when I first heard feminist commentary it was such a relief to FINALLY hear the other side of the story.

However, after a few months, reading feminist content started to become fatiguing work. It started to make me angry or even furious, and I had no idea why. Not every feminist argument made me feel this way, but a lot of them did.

I knew that in principle I shouldn’t get angry in reaction to feminist or pro-social justice arguments that chip away at social power structures. The only reason I could think of as to why feminism would make me angry, was that I had an intrinsically selfish desire to hold onto my privilege.

So, I’d shrug my anger off as not a big deal and get on with my life, and keep reading and producing feminist content. After all, if my own intrinsic selfishness is the only thing about feminist content that can hurt me, then the potential for feminism to hurt me must be extremely limited. If the potential for feminism to hurt me is extremely limited, then the feelings of aggravation that I get reading feminist articles must not be a big deal.

But they were a big deal. As I read more feminist and social justice content I got angrier and angrier. Sometimes after finishing an article I’d be too angry to read anymore. Other times I would react to the article by thinking – ‘You’re complaining about THIS micro aggression now? You’ve found ANOTHER gender, facing ANOTHER specific type of discrimination? Oh my God! Who the fuck cares? I’m so sick of all this repetitive, pedantic, endless shit!’

Then I would wonder why my brain was angrily asserting a principle that I definitely don’t believe in. I certainly don’t believe that a person should shut up about a problem just because that problem is small. For one thing it’s not even my place to judge what’s a small problem and what’s a big problem, especially as the issues being discussed generally don’t relate to me as a white cisgender male. And even if they did relate to me, there’d be some white cisgender males that would be genuinely bothered by some things, and other white cisgender males that wouldn’t care about those same things. Besides, why should the fact that a problem is small bother me anyway? Needing to do the laundry is a small problem (or at least it should be)and having to do that doesn’t create anywhere near the enraged aggression in me of feminist and social justice subject matter. So as far as I could tell I had absolutely no moral justification to be angry whatsoever...

And yet I kept getting angry. Feminism and social justice just made me angry again and again and again and again. And the pain and anger I kept feeling only got worse and worse and worse and worse. I seriously wondered if ‘Wanting to keep my privilege’ was an adequate explanation, or even remotely correct. But I still didn’t know any better explanations.

Adding to the anxiety of this situation was the fact that feminists and social justice commentators who I associated with (including myself) had extremely limited sympathy for anyone who was swayed by emotional inclinations to say that any social justice subject matter was unnecessary.

They would have sentiments such as ‘if you’re not a feminist you’re a bigot/misogynist,’ and ‘opposing feminism and social justice means you don’t really believe in equality. You just want to pretend that you do while not actually fixing anything,’

Those characterisations put me in a tight spot. I do believe in equality. I do want to fix things. But for some unknown reason, I have near-uncontrollable angry, wounded monsters inside me desperately screaming for feminists and SJWs to fuck off. And if I ever listen to those monsters, the SJWs will think that I’m fraudulent, selfish, privilege-hogging, bigoted arsehole. (And I’ll have no choice but to agree with them because what other plausible explanation is there?)

The website Everyday Feminism in particular would never let me forget what a tight spot I was in. It would often run stories about how people within their own ranks who had seemed serious about feminism and social justice (usually a man) had suddenly used a sexist microaggression and this was so frustrating, and disappointing to them. And they’d run other stories about how people in their own ranks had seemed serious about intersectional feminism, but then had fobbed off some sort of tiny, (and likely to have been previously completely unknown to me), disenfranchised segment of the population, in regards to some particular issue.

I was hoping like crazy that since Everyday Feminism was clearly well aware that everyone, even feminists were getting fed up with feminism all the time, that at some point I’d get an explanation as to why I was getting fed up with it too. It never happened. All they ever did was declare that if you care about their issues you’re good and if you don’t you’re bad.

So, not only did I get no explanation for the wounded, screaming monsters under my skin, but bringing up political correctness and previously unknown, tiny, disenfranchised groups of the population are things that tend to make the screaming monsters inside me scream in the first place. And on top of that I’ve been given assurances that I’m a bad person if I listen to them. And that’s the only answer I kept getting over and over and over and over and over until I was so fucking angry that I felt like I was going to burst.

It was apparent to me that I was having the same emotional reactions to social justice and feminist issues that the antis have, even though I was 100% certain that I did not agree with them. My emotions were totally independent of what I intellectually thought and I had no idea why.

Then, as part of Trimester 2, 2015 I took this university subject called Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media. This course discussed how society dictates beauty standards, and whether or not these standards are fair or not (which of course they never were.) (Appendix 1)

At the time I thought The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media might rejuvenate my interest in feminist commentary online, which was wearing thin for me due to my constant unexplained feelings of furious anger towards feminist content.

It didn’t. Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media was excruciating beyond any limit that I could possibly stand. I felt like someone had stuck a knife right into my brain and twisted it over and over and over and if they twisted it one more time I was going to mentally bleed out.  Any chance this subject might have had of making me feel richer for having broadened my horizons, was totally eclipsed by the feeling that I had been repeatedly smashed in the testicles with a hammer, except it had somehow happened inside my head. I began desperately hoping that there was some way to unlearn the information taught in this nightmare of a class, and had to fight the desire to scream insane, irrational comments at my tutor when I realized there wasn’t. I also wondered if I should imagine that my pillow was a feminist and stab the shit out of it to calm myself down.

I was now feeling seriously crazy (in case you can’t tell). It was significantly painful for me to even glance at most things even vaguely social justice related. The knife twisting in my brain couldn’t even take even the faintest touch. Even gay marriage was making me cringe and I’d always been completely confused as to why anyone would be bothered by that issue. I even avoided watching the children’s movie Zootopia until 2017. I was THAT apprehensive as to whether or not I could enjoy or even tolerate anything with a pro-social justice message.

To deal with these feelings of absolute hysterical agony in my brain, I started looking for as much low-brow stupid entertainment as I possibly could. I began typing phrases into the YouTube search engine such as ‘the poo song’ or ‘the sex song’ intending to watch whatever stupid videos popped up. I also watched several seasons of Geordie Shore, a whole bunch of Alt Right YouTube videos, and various stupid comedy movies.

Unfortunately by this time, I had been registered in Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing Children’s Bodies in the Media for several weeks, and the university doesn’t let you drop out of any subject past a certain date. So despite me being sick of social justice content to the point where I felt like I was cracking up, I still had another two months ahead of me of completing the unit. I tried talking to the psychologist at my university about how I felt. But without knowing where these feelings came from, I couldn’t really get across the problem.

I had no choice at this point. I had to start distancing myself from feminist and social justice content as much as possible. This wasn’t easy as I had become heavily entrenched in it. I had to un-sub from feminist channels on Facebook. I had to stop visiting my YouTube channel where I had uploaded various pro-feminist videos, and where I was subscribed to various social justice channels. At the same time I was friends with between 20-30 YouTube SJWs on Facebook, so I began to avoid my home page on Facebook, in order to avoid their regular posts and content. Then around mid-2017 I deleted all of my Facebook friends from YouTube.

I also started to feel bad about my pro-feminist videos on my YouTube channel which were most harsh and judgmental of anti-feminists. I figured that if feminist subject matter could make me feel like I was about to mentally snap, then there is limited moral justification to deride others who seemed to feel the same way. One of the videos that I took down I had worked on for three months, expended huge amounts of effort figuring out what I wanted to say, and had very limited logical problems with it, if any at all – but it had to go. It’s harsh, judgmental tone made its ‘cringe’ factor unbearable to me.

Then I started looking for answers as to why I felt so crazy, but I had no idea where to begin. I hadn’t even been able to describe the problem to my psychologist. So when I started mulling things over to myself, it was done in less clear terms than what I’ve written down below.

Why Do People Want to Hold Onto Their Privilege?

It has been stated that the right wing only ‘feels’ oppressed by social justice politics because they are people who have previously had it so much better than other demographics. (1)

But what exactly does this mean? In the past I have taken this to essentially mean that right wingers within the more privileged demographic were selfish, greedy, fat pigs rolling around in troughs full of privilege and snarling at the people too unfortunate to have their own trough.

You might think there is one obvious hole in this theory. In some issues (gay marriage for example) the underprivileged demographics gaining privilege doesn’t mean that the privileged demographics would lose anything, so how can this be motivated by selfishness? I reconciled this problem with the assumption that privileged right-wingers were unbelievably, mind-bogglingly selfish AND stupid.

According to a 2014 poll, 21% of Australians opposed same-sex marriage and a further 7% were undecided (2), even though the only right that straight people lose is the right to deny gay people the right to get married. It seems ridiculous. Even if they do feel as though gay people are oppressing them, they should be able to SEE that it’s not true, and change how they FEEL about it based on the facts. Regardless of their initial feelings they still have eyes and ears. They really SHOULD be able to change their views based on evidence. 

The fact that they can’t see this, coupled with the fact that anti gay marriage conservatives have incredibly weak and transparent arguments seemed to corroborate my theory that they are just unbelievably selfish and stupid.

But is this the case? There are other social justice issues of equality which are not only unpopular but aggravating to most of us, despite the fact that the more privileged demographic doesn’t lose anything.

One example of this is the issue of Political Correctness: ‘the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.’ (3) The only thing an individual loses by being politically correct is the insulting or marginalizing form of expression which they probably shouldn’t miss because it was a flawed form of expression. Yet it is common for political correctness to be spoken about with distain. If selfishness is the motivation of anti-PC rhetoric, then it should be clear as to why a person would be reluctant to lose an insulting or marginalizing form of expression. This is not always the case, as demonstrated by the following example.

Back in 2014, when I was part of the social justice community on YouTube, a particular issue of transgender rights came up for discussion. Some transgender people wanted more transgender inclusive greetings in schools and universities. They had taken issue with phrases such as ‘hello ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘good morning boys and girls’ because they identified as genders other than women/girls/ladies or men/boys/gentlemen (non-binary genders). Therefore they felt they weren’t included by these phrases, therefore they wanted them changed.

Given that this was being discussed by the progressives of the online social justice community, you’d think that they’d be supportive of this transgender issue, but they generally weren’t. One YouTuber in particular, (The Peach) although she didn’t deny that more than two genders do exist, got very upset and insisted that this issue was pedantic, whiney bullshit, and that it was the kind of thing which would turn progressive transgender allies off. Another progressive YouTuber (Amelia Nielson) gave only luke-warm support to the issue, and preferred to focus on whether the student who had brought the issue up had been polite enough. Even Steve Shives, (Steve Shives considers feminism and social justice extremely important) wanted to ignore the issue. He asked the Transgender rights activists ‘is this a hill worth dying on?’

It is odd that these individuals would oppose this issue, when the logical basis for advocating it seems so straightforward. If an audience was greeted with ‘Good evening everyone’ instead of ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen,’ nobody would even notice the difference apart from the transgender individuals, so why not change it? If they refused to grant the less privileged demographic rights despite the fact that they would lose nothing, then how are these progressives being any less selfish than the people opposed to gay marriage? So does this mean that The Peach and Steve Shives are unbelievably, mind-bogglingly selfish and stupid as well?

But what’s strange is that I didn’t want to support this issue either. Though I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t know what anyone was talking about (I thought only two genders existed when this issue came up), something desperate and wounded inside me was screaming not to support this issue. I had no idea where this screaming was coming from, but based on their behavior it seemed that The Peach, Amelia Nielson and Steve Shives could all feel the screaming from inside too.

Gay Marriage and Transgender Inclusionary Greetings still COULD bother someone in terms of selfishly wanting to hold onto privilege if that person was massively insecure, but I know firsthand that I am not insecure and selfish enough for the concept of transgender inclusionary greetings to make me that anxious. Clearly negative reactions to social justice issues where the more privileged demographic loses nothing, cannot be explained by massive stupidity, selfishness or insecurity.

If I could figure out why people DO react negatively to gay marriage and transgender-inclusive greetings it might help me understand my own anger at online feminism and Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media. However, the answer seemed to be just slightly out of reach.

Luckily, the answer fell right into my lap out of nowhere. Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of the fight scene from John Carpenter’s 1988 film ‘They Live’ is my entry point for explaining negative reactions to social justice issues.

Slavoj Zizek Explains The Fight Scene From ‘They Live’

The video showing Zizek’s analysis of the fight in They Live is here(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOINEXp0B8  

Zizek’s commentary is also written underneath in italics, in case YouTube takes the video down for some reason.

They Live from 1988 is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left. It tells the story of John Nada, Nada of course is Spanish, it means ‘nothing.’ A pure subject deprived of all substantial content, a homeless worker in LA who, drifting around, one day enters into an abandoned church, and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses.

And when he puts one of them on, walking along the LA streets he discovers something weird. That these glasses function like critique of ideology glasses. They allow you to see the real message beneath all the propaganda, publicity, glitz, posters and so on.

You see a large publicity board telling you ‘have your holiday of a lifetime, and when you put the glasses on you see just a white background, a grey inscription.

We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are (indecipherable), that is to say addressed by social authority, not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasures. Realize your true potential. Be yourself. Lead a satisfying life. When you put the glasses on you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.

The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the standard story of the invasion of the body snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens.

According to our common sense, we think that ideology is something blurring and confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses, which distort our view and the critique of ideology should be the opposite. Like, you take the glasses off so you can finally see the way things really are. This precisely – and here, the pessimism of the film of ‘They Live’ is well justified – this precisely is the ultimate illusion. Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideologies are spontaneous relationships to our social world, how we perceive its meaning, and so on, and so on. We in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts, it’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.

This is rendered in a wonderful way with a further scene in the film where John Nada tries to force his best friend John Armitage (name is actually Frank Armitage, Zizek misspoke) to also put the glasses on. And it’s the weirdest scene in the film. The fight takes 8-9 minutes(5 minutes, Zizek misspoke again). It may appear irrational because why does this guy reject so violently to put the glasses on? It is as if he is well aware that spontaneously he lives in a lie. That the glasses will make him see the truth. But that this truth can be painful. It can shatter many of your illusions. This is a paradox we have to accept. The extreme violence of liberation. You must be forced to be free. If you trust simply in your spontaneous sense of well-being, or whatever, you will never get free. Freedom hurts.

In relation to the critique of ideology glasses (being ripped out of your ideology) Zizek here was talking about general propaganda within capitalism rather than specifically anti-feminist and socially conservative propaganda in our culture in general. However what he has said here is a perfect metaphor for some of the arguments online between SJWs and antis. By this I mean that social justice concepts often function symbolically as ideology glasses.

Zizek’s assertion here is that it is painful to face that you have been joyfully following a problematic or dangerous ideology this whole time, by using it to relate to your social environment. You haven’t even known you’ve been following the ideology because it’s all around you to the point where you think of it as ‘just the normal way things are.’ (At least that is my interpretation of what Zizek is saying. When he says that the truth being revealed can be painful, I take it to mean that any realization that you are constantly surrounded by harmful propaganda is painful.)

In the movie They Live, the painful fact Frank Armitage has to face about himself and his society is that it is full of invading aliens and he has been almost certainly interacting with them and helping them without even knowing it. In real life these assertions that you’ve been following a problematic or dangerous ideology without even knowing it can come in the forms of political correctness, female traffic light symbols in Melbourne aimed to reduce unconscious sexism, sexism in video games, fat acceptance and other arguments aimed to deconstruct beauty standards, arguments that there are more than two genders, rape culture arguments or any arguments suggesting the existence of widespread unconscious bias, such as resume studies or concepts of privilege.(5) In my experience with online political commentary, people generally have contempt for all these subjects, but other social justice issues like abortion and gay marriage, which don’t reveal us to have been blindly following ideology are generally popular (unless the person comes from the religious right.)

If I were to provide detailed examinations of more social justice issues than the ones I will examine below, I am sure it would reveal much more disparity between support of issues which don’t rips us from society’s ideology and issues which do.

However, there is not enough time for that here, so I will only address a few social justice issues in the following sub-sections of this blog. Trans-inclusive greetings in schools and universities, gay marriage and sexist video game tropes. These issues will both allow me to explain how Zizek’s premise works in relation to social justice issues, and discuss some other factors which tie into Zizek’s premise when it is applied to social justice.

I will then briefly discuss the effects of being repeatedly ripped from ideology for an extended period of time, and finish with a brief summary of the main facts that have been established, and my conclusions based on those facts.

Transgender-Inclusive Greetings and Gay Marriage

Zizek’s theory helps explain why the issue of transgender-inclusive greetings was so painful for me to digest. My primary school teachers used to address their classes with ‘good morning boys and girls’ all the time in class, and I had absolutely no idea that I was following transgender-exclusionary ideology when that was happening. Therefore, learning this involved the painful process of ‘putting the ideology glasses on.’

Thankfully, an issue such as transgender-inclusive greetings hurts much less after it has been addressed the first time. Being reminded that you are surrounded by harmful ideology may still not be pleasant the second time, but the illusion has already been shattered so it doesn’t have the same painful, ripping shock. This is also how I managed to get through Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media without killing myself. I stuck to critiques of ideology that I was already familiar with, so that it hurt less.

Gay Marriage on the other hand has never been an issue for me because I was taught at home that it was okay from an early age. (I watched Sodom-mobile episode of Michael Moore’s The Awful Truth on the TV with my dad when I was eleven years old.) But there are other areas of Western civilization where acceptance of homosexuality involves leaving the ideology that you’ve been heavily indoctrinated into by your society. From my perspective it’s previously been too easy for me to look at people against gay marriage and see them as bizarre, alien and contemptible. Now I actually feel bad for them when I consider some of the more painful times that I’ve been ripped from ideology myself.

For example, as I’ve explained in Appendix 1, one of the assertions of Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media was that it is immoral and anti-egalitarian for society to consider the concept of clear, wrinkle-free skin more beautiful than old, wrinkly skin covered in gigantic pimples. And it doesn’t matter how gigantic the pimples are, or how wrinkly the face is, everyone should be considered equally attractive, or that’s not equality. This anti-egalitarian capitalist system of attraction exists so that companies can make money off pimple cream and wrinkle cream. When I first read such a thing my automatic reaction was to think ‘no, that can’t possibly be right,’ and then to frantically try to start coming up with reasons why that assertion wasn’t true. Living in a capitalist society that constantly  bombards you with the message that youth and clear skin is connected to beauty, makes It feels like youth and clear skin being connected to beauty just HAS to be the unchangeable way that things naturally are. Therefore, a suggestion that that’s not true is painful to absorb.

It looks to me like that is how the anti-gay crowd feel about gay marriage. Like they’re being told that massively wrinkly, pimply faces are beautiful. Like they’re being asked to accept something  which is so alien, so far removed from how their ideology normally dictates their social environment, that its unacceptable to them. Like they’re being told to accept something which they see as blatantly wrong on its face, so they don’t even need any good arguments in order to convince themselves that they’re right.

That would explain how embarrassingly weak anti-gay marriage arguments are. For example…

  Conservative commentators Pat Robertson and Bryan Fischer voice concerns that gay marriage would lead to bestiality and child molestation, (6) (7) even though it obviously wouldn’t because the latter are thoroughly unhealthy, mentally damaging relationships. If homosexual rights activists started demanding legalized child sex, everyone would definitely oppose that.

  American talk radio shock jock Michael Savage has argued that he can’t support gay marriage because a gay married couple would not be able to biologically create children. (8) This argument obviously fails because people marry for love, rather than to have childre

  Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has claimed that gays can’t get married because marriage is defined as something between a man and a woman, and marriage just has to be defined that way because it ‘just is’ defined that way. (9) Again, a very flimsy pretext to deny gays the right to marry as word definitions change all the time.

  Pastor Rick Warren appealed to the Bible to defend his anti-gay marriage stance (10), but the Bible has a lot of outdated views on morality that we no longer stick to like slaves having to be obedient to their masters. (11)(12) So why should we have to stick to that one?

  Even sillier than the previous point, Mark Levin in 2013 appealed to every major world religion at once as evidence gay people should not be allowed to marry (13). This is just bizarre, as he was appealing to religious authorities he didn’t even believe in. (Note: I couldn't figure out how to delete the bullet point below. Please keep reading the blog as though it weren't there.)

·        It’s obvious - These people have no idea why they’re against gay marriage. They’re unable to handle the concept of gay marriage emotionally, and their arguments only consist of them desperately trying to justify their inability handle the concept.

The reason that they can’t handle it emotionally is that for them the concept of gay marriage rips them from the ideology that they follow, telling them that their beliefs are part of what’s wrong with the world, and asks them to accept something which just plain ‘looks wrong’ to them.

This makes me question how capable they are of letting go of their anti-gay views. After all, I now know from personal experience that I have a limit in terms of how much ideology critiquing social justice ideas I am capable of taking on board. The fair presumption is that they have limits too.

It seems to me that ideally (it may not always be practical, I don't know) I should know how deeply entrenched in homophobic beliefs they are before I judge them too harshly. Getting ripped from ideology can be absolutely unbelievably painful.

Sexist Video Game Tropes

Feminist Frequency’s (Anita Sarkeesian’s) series about sexism in video games called ‘Tropes vs Women’ has received massive amounts of hatred for examining a culture of sexism in gaming content and online gaming communities. When her series came out she had to endure an online hate campaign, involving all her social media sites being flooded with threats of rape, violence, sexual assault and death. (14)  People’s hatred did not lessen over time either. (15)

Anita’s premise was that women’s roles in video games are mostly secondary and often limited to damsels in distress and sexy background decoration. Since there are a lot of games starring men and targeting a male demographic, why shouldn’t there be just as many starring women? Women play games just as much as men do so if games were marketed to them just as much they’d probably buy them just as much (16).

For a long time I was unable to emotionally understand why male gamers would react in such a mean-spirited and cruel way to such a harmless premise. Their behavior however, becomes much more understandable when the concept of the ideology glasses is applied to them.

Game developers have been pandering to a male demographic so hard, so regularly, for so long that men who play lots of video games think marketing video games to women would be breaking the laws of the universe. Gamer men who make videos against Anita Sarkeesian attack her from the perspective that all video games belong to men, and all video games should belong to men. As in the case of the anti-gay marriage arguments, all games belonging to men is not considered something which needs to be justified, because it is just seen as the natural order of things. For example…

In Tooltime’s video The Feminist Who Kicked a Hornet’s Nest (17) several different male gamers make comments suggesting that video games belong to men and Anita’s taking away what’s rightfully theirs.  MrRepzion displayed the same attitude when he asked the question ‘if women can have their TV shows like Oprah (and other midday TV shows like Dr Phil) why can’t men also have video games? (18)’

By the way, when I say that Anita’s critics think ALL video games belong to men, I do not mean that they believe literally every single video game on the entire planet is marketed exclusively towards men. I mean that they believe all games belong to men generally and all games belong to men by default. I’m generalizing to keep things simple. (Just thought I’d clear that up.)

I couldn’t connect emotionally to the backlash against Anita because I have never played video games often enough to start believing male gamer ideology. (I have a handful of PS1, PS2, PS3, and Nintendo Wii games, and I have never played video games socially online.) On top of this, most gamers probably did notice that women are always the ones being relegated to the role of damsel and that women rescuing men hardly ever happens. They may have thought that this was the natural and harmless way things are supposed to be until Anita came along. I on the other hand, had taken a Children’s Literature class in 2009, where it was mentioned that women being portrayed as weak and helpless was a consistent theme of popular culture. So I already had some idea that the damsel trope would be an issue for feminists.

In addition to ripping male gamers from their ideology, sexist video game tropes also have a couple of other potentially frustrating aspects. For one thing Anita’s arguments amount to game designers needing to include less of the Damsel in Distress trope, and less of the Women as Background Decoration Trope. (See Appendix 2) This could be irritating to men who enjoy those tropes and don’t want to see them dip in frequency (especially the latter trope.) Also SOME gamer men would lose the privilege of being able to sexually harass women in online gaming spaces. Gamer women would be less likely to put up with that if they were equals instead of guests in a male space (19). In short, there is practical, if not morally justifiable reason for men to oppose Anita.

Another reason that sexist video game tropes might theoretically be frustrating could be that the problems seem impossible to fix anyway. Objectifying images of women or men doesn’t seem like something which is possible to get rid of as a concept, so having been ripped from ideology for minor changes could feel futile and pointless. I don’t think that, but I have thought it about other subject matter, and I can imagine someone thinking it here. (Appendix 3)

In summary, although the harassment and threats from male gamers are very wrong, I still recognize that those angry male gamers are being ripped from ideology while I’m not. And when I AM being ripped from ideology it can make me so angry that I get the overwhelming urge to start screaming at someone.

The way to avoid giving in to that overwhelming urge is to remember that displaying such behavior would rightly be viewed as unjustified and cruel from a feminist perspective. As much as I couldn’t stand Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media, nobody is actually forcing me to deal with radical social justice concepts if I don’t want to. I asked for it when I selected the unit, just as male gamers ask for it when they click on Feminist Frequency’s videos. Feminist academics don’t WANT to hurt anyone. It’s just that ripping people out of ideology is the only way they can make a case for making the world more fair and equal.

If you think you’re angry at feminist academics because their arguments are illogical, I suggest that you second guess yourself as to whether or not that’s true. You might decide that your anger stems more from the fact that you’ve been shown how your deeply-held ideology can be harmful. And if you do decide that, hopefully you will decide not to lash out, unless you think it’s okay to lash out at someone for challenging you with truth.

Laci Green and the Effects of Getting Repeatedly Ripped From Ideology for an Extended Period

I’ve already pointed to Slavoj Zizek’s summary of how ‘They Live’ by John Carpenter quite creatively described how painful it is to be ripped from the ideologies which exist within society. This leads me to ask this question – if being ripped from ideology once prompts that much resistance, how painful must it be to be ripped from ideology over and over again? This question is something which ‘They Live’ also addresses.

About an hour into ‘They Live’ we are at the point in the movie where John Nada has successfully forced Frank Armitage to put the ideology glasses on. As a result, Armitage has started to wear the glasses all the time. So for the sake of Armitage’s mental health, Nada tells him ‘Don’t wear them glasses too long. It starts to feel like a knife turning in your skull.’ (20)

This, as I’ve already stated at the beginning of this blog, was exactly what happened to me. Reading feminist content became less and less manageable over time. I began avoiding the content entirely to avoid the headaches and bursts of anger. By the time I took Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media, I was thinking that I was going to have to quit dealing with feminism entirely if this class didn’t rejuvenate my interest again, because I seemed to be getting nothing but headaches from it. Metaphorically I had been wearing the ideology glasses too long.

People have limits in terms of how many deeply held belief systems they can tear down and rebuild (especially at one time), and I had hit my limit. Knowing this, if I were to see someone who appears to be in a similar situation to me, I should sympathize. Like for example in the case of, YouTube feminist Laci Green, who decided in mid-2017 to be friends with right wing antis such as Blaire White and Chris Ray Gun (who is now her boyfriend). And to debate trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) Meghan Murphy.

Here’s Laci’s situation, as I understand it from my perspective. She’d been on YouTube since 2008(21). Between then and 2017, she had talked about feminism for at least the majority of that time. I know this because I remember Laci being attacked by Tumblr feminist group-think, back in 2012 (22). I also know that she considered many online feminists friends, and had significant social presence generally on Twitter for a significant amount of time. (23)

So given that Laci had both online social presence with other feminists, and a serious attempt to learn and discuss feminist content online, I think it’s fair to compare her situation to mine. Except whereas Laci had been dealing with feminism for 5+ years, I dealt with it for about two years before I had to quit entirely because I couldn’t take it anymore. If I had to be in Laci’s situation for more than five years I’d shoot myself. Or stab myself. Or if there were no weapons available, I’d punch myself to death with my own fists. That is not crazy. Crazy would be continuing to live in such agony. Sanity would be to strive for the sweet release of death at any cost!

So under these circumstances, it seems to me, that taking issue with Laci for preferring to engage with worldviews that are simpler and easier to manage, is akin to disregarding her humanity. (Simpler worldviews meaning those of conservative commentators, or feminists who say that there are only two genders)

Online SJWs didn’t see it this way. They were apoplectic that Laci would give antis and TERFs the opportunities to spread their bigoted, wrong views around the internet. Her channel had previously been a safe space for marginalized groups to have their identities unconditionally reinforced, and they were livid that that was changing. So they attacked her with the most vicious, self-righteous, hateful bullying that they could possibly muster. (24)(25)(26)(27) Captain Andy in particular reacted in such a hateful way that I don’t think I can even sit through his video again. He accused her of being a sellout, said ‘Fuck you for excusing their bullshit,’ and characterized her decision as ‘I’m making connections with people who think you are subhuman.’ (‘You’ referring to marginalized demographics, particularly transgender individuals) Steve Shives said that ‘she should be fucking ashamed of herself.’ Dick Coughlan told Laci ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and ‘stop talking about YOU!’ (this was in reaction to Laci defending her decision). And Kevin Logan quote-mined one of her videos to make it sound trans-exclusionary, then responded to his own quote mine by asking Laci ‘Why are you still pretending to be a feminist? I mean, you’re fucking not, in any realistic sense whatsoever!’ (28)

There are a couple of factors which made this bullying extra horrible. One is that she was attacked by people who are meant to be friendly with her, and on the same side as her. The other is that the people harassing Laci are in the same position that she’s in. They should know how hard it is dealing with feminist subject matter for a long period of time, because they’ve dealt with feminist subject matter for a long period of time themselves. They should know that dealing with feminism is constantly a choice between having to painfully tear down and rebuild some belief system you’ve had your whole life for the millionth time over or having to rehash the same concepts that you already understand over and over. Yet despite this they STILL hated Laci’s guts for wanting to hear out and consider whether there’s value to more simplistic worldviews which don’t force as many of these responsibilities on people.

The people who had been experiencing the exact same negative experience as Laci for YEARS still had no empathy for her aversion to that very same negative experience. The assertion that Laci had ‘sold out’ and was agreeing to these debates for the views and money, was an especially clear display of this lack of empathy. If they thought she might have a knife turning in her skull like I did, they’d never accuse her of only trying to remove that knife ‘for the views and money.’ (Appendix 4) I find it ironic that these same people get upset about right wingers having no empathy. At least right wingers have an excuse to not know how to relate to the experiences of the people that they negatively portray.

If I never see another video by the YouTube social justice community in my life it will be too soon. On top of the fact that I’m sick of their type of content, they’re a bunch of callous, heartless, single-minded, hateful, cultish bullies who are under the false impression that they’re perfect angels.

Conclusions and Implications Summarized

So, here are the most basic points established so far –

1.       Facing up to the fact that we are constantly surrounded by potentially harmful, dangerous ideology, to the point where we constantly unwittingly use that harmful ideology to relate to our social environment, is a painful thing to do. Not everyone is going to be committed enough to force themselves to deal with that.

2.       More privileged individuals lose their privileged advantage over other demographics if they agree to fight against the ideology when it is pointed out. If there are practical (if not ethical) reasons to want to keep that privilege, that may add additional aggravation to the pain of getting ripped from ideology.

3.       The deeper entrenched in the ideology a person is, the more painful the issue is to deal with.

4.       Getting ripped from ideology hurts more when an individual had no idea they were following ideology. Arguments that rip someone from ideology hurt less after the first time.

5.       Getting ripped from society’s ideology is additionally frustrating if the individual doesn’t see any way of fixing the problem anyway.

6.       If an individual has to deal with ideology-critiquing arguments repeatedly for an extended period of time, the pain compiles into an especially painful feeling.

7.       These first six factors cause people’s opinions in general to be significantly biased.

8.       Marketing Children’s Bodies in the Media’s gave me an extremely heavy dose of the first five factors on this list and my two years dealing with feminist content gave me a dose of number six.

9.       People have limits in terms of how much harmful ideology they can acknowledge, especially at one time.

10.   The antis sometimes seem unaware that they are angry at feminists because of the first six factors on this list. Instead they assume that they are angry because the feminists are wrong and illogical. As such they often end up terrorizing feminists just for telling the truth.

11.   SJWs (including me in the past) often seem unaware that their subject matter can be painful and that there’s a limit to how much problematic ideology can be acknowledged. As such they can sometimes be much too morally rigid, and harsh because they think ‘this situation is ethically clear cut unless you choose to be a bigoted arsehole for no reason.’

12.   I recommend taking significant breaks from dealing with social justice material.

Epilogue

If I was going to start making videos again, I would address my audience from the perspective that ‘these are my views, but I don’t care if you disagree.’  However, because of that lessened enthusiasm I think I’d rather be doing other things. I imagine that videos will either be limited or non-existent. 

Appendix 1

I want to mention two things before I explain the content of Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media.

The first is that I don’t have links to back up much of what I’m about to say. I tried to go back for them before I finished at university, but they’d disappeared. I just remember that one of the authors was Judith Butler and another was Laura Mulvey.

However, since this is a video about how painful social justice subject matter can be, rather than about how unfair beauty standards are, it’s not going to matter. As long as the commentary below is painful to absorb it will have served its purpose to me.

My second point is that in the discussion below the phrases man and woman will refer to a person’s gender, which will refer to how a person is meant to look and act. The phrases male and female will refer to a person’s biological sex, which means factors such as whether they have a penis or a vagina, and whether they have XX or XY chromosomes. The following discussion will be confusing if you don’t know that. So without further ado…

What Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media was about, was asking the question - Why does society consider some people, with some physical characteristics more attractive than other people? The Laura Mulvey article that I read started by saying ‘they say that analyzing beauty destroys it. That is the intention of this article.’ That was also the intention of this unit in general. Destroying beauty in the name of equality. Since some people are considered more attractive now, that is not equal. So, what’s considered attractive now should be replaced with the system of attraction that is most egalitarian. I wasn’t 100% sure what this was supposed to be. As far as I could tell, the standard for physical attractiveness should either be one of two things. Either you are a human being with a pulse therefore your body is just as beautiful and sexy as anybody else’s OR the very concept of a human body being sexually attractive at all is perverse and wrong.

Whichever goal we’re supposed to be aiming for, it’s clear that the system of attraction that we have now is all wrong because beauty standards exist. If any beauty standard exists ever, then it marginalizes everyone who does not fit that standard, and is therefore immoral.

Every physical characteristic a person could have that our culture considers attractive is symptomatic of prejudice. If you find these things that I’m about to mention attractive, that means you’ve been brainwashed by your culture’s harmful institutional prejudices.

For example, the question was asked as to why in 2015 is femininity still connected so strongly to beauty? Marketing Children’s Bodies in the Media stated that femininity being connected to beauty was considered to be a problem because it perpetuates heteronormativity. This marginalizes homosexuals and anyone who isn’t straight. It does this due to the belief that the masculine form is supposed to interlock with the feminine form, which is why many people don’t understand how lesbians can feel good without a penis. If femininity wasn’t connected to beauty the whole concept of gay or straight would disappear. There have been other civilizations in the past with no concept of it. People shouldn’t care which sex you prefer to screw, anymore than they should care whether you like to screw on top or underneath the other person. Just as there is also no reason why heterosexuality has to be considered normal, there is also no reason why being cisgender has to be considered more normal than being transgender.

Ideas such as these were referred to as either ‘post-feminist’ or ‘4^th wave feminism’. Both of these terms mean that even if men and women did have perfectly equal opportunity within society, there would still be many more issues of social inequality to work on. (Though ‘post-feminist’ can also mean that you think equality has already been achieved between men and women.)

Furthermore Judith Butler characterized femininity as a propagandistic disguise. The frail, sweet-looking outside is meant to reflect what women are like inside. She claimed that this disguise had been demonstrated to by fraudulent by the existence of drag queens, where it is totally apparent that a feminine appearance clearly doesn’t necessarily reflect what a person is like inside. Presumably she considered the same thing true about masculinity. Guys aren’t necessarily as tough inside as they look outside.

The slender, frail, weaker-looking female figure being considered the ideal is meant to send an underlying message of misogyny, by making women look weaker than men. They are weaker to an extent biologically anyway, but beauty standards accentuate that difference further, to send a covert message of male superiority. This argument I find particularly convincing because I’ve heard anti-feminists conflate strength of character with physical strength before. I remember Thunderf00t’s response to the Ban Bossy campaign was to say that we separate the Olympics by sex, so we should also separate leadership positions based on sex too. And Rush Limbaugh said that feminists are wrong and men and women are not equal because Ray Rice was able to knock his fiancée Janay Palmer unconscious in an elevator. (29)

Clear, wrinkle-free, pimple-free skin shouldn’t be considered more attractive either. It marginalizes people who are wrinkly or pimply, and is only a thing because skin-cream companies want to be able to sell you their products. There was a beauty campaign by Dove back in 2013, where women described what they looked like and a sketch artist drew what was described. Then the sketch artist drew the woman as he saw her, instead of how she described herself. When what was described was compared to what was seen, what was seen was always more attractive. This was uplifting to those women because it said ‘you’re more beautiful than you think you are.’ (30) However, some people took issue with this campaign. One critique of that campaign stated that the Dove campaign was not ethical because the women in the campaign were too conventionally beautiful. It asserted (to paraphrase) – ‘Dove may be saying that the woman’s pimple doesn’t make a difference, but they’re also saying that the pimple would make her look worse if it was bigger. Therefore Dove’s campaign is ethically flawed.’ My immediate thought upon reading that was ‘it WOULD make a difference at SOME POINT surely! What if the pimple was three times bigger than HER HEAD? But there was no mention of any qualifiers like that. The contention was that a face half covered in a giant pimple on one side, and a mass of wrinkles on the other side, should be considered just as attractive as a spotless, wrinkle-free face. Otherwise society is not being egalitarian.

Also blonde hair and blue eyes being considered the most attractive generally sends a covert message of white supremacy, because only white people have blonde hair and blue eyes.

And that’s everything I remember about deconstructing beauty standards, now on to the rest of the subject matter.

In one of my previous videos I talked about Anita Sarkeesian’s master’s thesis. Anita talks about popular culture portraying certain characteristics to be desirable in men, and other certain characteristics to be desirable in women. And she says – morally popular culture shouldn’t do this. Whether or not a personality characteristic is good or bad, productive or counterproductive shouldn’t depend on whether you have a penis or a vagina. (31) Though Anita Sarkeesian was not actually mentioned in Material Girls, Material Boys: The Marketing Children’s Bodies in the Media, the unit takes that particular reasoning the rest of the way to its logical conclusion, implying that Men and Women being actual concepts at all is a bad idea. Not only is there no reason for different characteristics to be desirable in men and women, but there’s no reason for men and women to have to look different either. There’s no reason men can’t be feminine in appearance and women can’t be masculine in appearance, so between personality and appearance there’s nothing left of the concept of gender at all. The labels ‘man’ and ‘woman’ no longer describe anything. You may as well do away with these words and just call people male, female and intersex.

But everything I’m saying right now sounds totally counterintuitive because we have these concepts of men and women which we define in opposition to one another. It makes equality very hard to achieve. The Ban Bossy Campaign to make people more accepting of women in leadership positions got an absolutely terrible reception from what I saw, with everyone on the internet acting like this wasn’t an issue and they didn’t know what the feminists in this campaign were talking about. That is totally ridiculous. Obviously the right wing in America would go insane if there was a woman President. We had a woman Prime Minister in Australia a few years ago and the media was especially horrible to her, sometimes in a clearly sexist way, which is demonstrated by the YouTube video ‘The Bullying of Julia Gillard.’ (32). The real issue here is that all those angry YouTubers I saw just don’t want women in leadership positions because that’s just not how it’s supposed to be. That’s just not what a woman IS. Men are strong and commanding, women are weak and submissive, that’s how we designed them.

Furthermore, just saying the words man or woman reinforces patriarchy, because the words imply gender which implies certain characteristics and physical appearances. Patriarchy is made out of gender. So ironically you can’t even say the definition of feminism – ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of equality of the sexes (33)’, without reinforcing patriarchy. ‘Woman’ is a patriarchal word.

And not only is it hard to see what the difference between men and women should be, and if these concepts should exist, but its hard to know what the difference is now. The difference isn’t the genitals, as evidenced by the existence of trans people, so what exactly is it? Do women even technically exist if you can’t define them?

Plus the idea of opposing the male gaze was considered an important part of feminism, which as far as I could tell, meant that society sexualizes women more than men (and therefore women are to be gazed at).

That’s everything I wanted to mention from that class.

Appendix 2

Note: These are the summaries of Anita Sarkeesian’s most prominent points of the second and fifth videos of her Tropes vs Women series.

Damsel in Distress Trope

Possibly the most decent point that Anita makes in regards to the damsel in distress trope is that it feeds into the consistent narrative of our culture that women are waiting to be rescued and have their lives completed by men (34). If they succeed in catching their prince charming they live happily ever after, but if they don’t succeed they end up miserable, lonely old ladies with a huge number of cats for company. The damsel trope where the woman is trapped in the tower waiting to be rescued is, its own version of women’s lives being horrible because they have no man around. This type of romance narrative is part of why women stay in abusive relationships. Because if things will be THAT MUCH worse without your man, and catching him is your whole reason for existing then maybe you should cross your fingers and hope he doesn’t give you any more black eyes. In situations which are difficult to make sense of, such as an abusive relationship, people tend to look for order, and fairy tale-type romance narratives such as the damsel trope provide a sense of order. Only that order says ‘you definitely need your man don’t let him go.’(35) (36)

Women as Background Decoration Trope

In relation to Anita’s Tropes talking about the Women as Background Decoration trope, her argument is partly that this trope primes men to think of women as sexual objects, which increases the likelihood of sexual harassment occurring. (37) She also particularly cautions against scenes where extreme violence against sexualized women occurs because these scenes contain two types of objectification at once. The woman is depicted as both something which is okay to smash and destroy, and as desirable for her body or body parts (38) Given that harassment of women in online gaming is so prevalent, this is something to be considered when creating the game. Especially the latter point. Is it really so hard to design a game where sexualized people don’t get murdered?(39) (40)

Appendix 3

Practical reasons to not want change, and feeling like things can’t be fixed anyway are also elements which apply to my excruciating experience with my Material Girls, Material Girls: The Marketing of Children’s Bodies in the Media unit. The concept of every person in the world being considered equally attractive because there are no beauty standards (Appendix 1) sounds both impossible and undesirable to me. For example, if I’m walking through a department store and a dress for sale is being modeled on a 120-year-old, obese, mentally handicapped, genderless, Sudanese hermaphrodite with pimples the size of golf balls - and nobody else in society other than me batted an eye at that - I would feel incredibly out of place. Having realized this, do I really want to live in a world of perfect equality?

Appendix 4

It’s not surprising that the SJWs didn’t see things from my perspective, as they consistently show that they have no room in their worldview for the idea that people are limited in terms of how much social justice subject matter they can take on board. They think that since they’re able to deal with social justice concepts endlessly, therefore everyone is able to deal with them endlessly, and therefore people who don’t are arseholes. Therefore right wingers are arseholes and moderate liberals are arseholes pretending to be nice. The only people who are not considered arseholes are very, very left wing.

This attitude is displayed perfectly by Captain Andy in his response to a screen shot of someone claiming to be a liberal who voted for Donald Trump. (41)

‘Just how thin-skinned does a person have to be to take the statement that they have white privilege as some sort of insult? If this is seriously all it takes to convert someone who supposedly supports human rights and social progress into someone who will happily vote for a fascist, then it confirms what Shakur said (That liberals will turn on black people in tough economic times because they’re only pretending to care).’

Note that the framing here -  the individual is depicted as too much of a hopelessly, stupid, selfish irrational racist arsehole to reach, rather than that the realization that you’ve been soaking in bullshit is very painful to deal with, and as such the person can’t see straight. Andy never even tries to view his political opponents in a positive light and usually seems like he wants to view everyone as negatively as possible. In my experience, the same is true of most SJWs on the internet.

Reference List

(1)    Sam Seder interviews Professor Carol Anderson who comments that equality looks like oppression when you’ve had privilege. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga-m1csD0Lc

(2)    21% of Australians oppose same-sex marriage and 7% are undecided http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/poll-shows-growing-support-for-samesex-marriage-20140714-3bxaj.html

(3)    Google definition of ‘political correctness’ https://www.google.com.au/search?q=political+correctness&oq=political&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j69i59j0l4.5433j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

(4)    Zizek explain ideology in relation to the movie ‘They Live’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOINEXp0B8

(5)    An example of a resume study revealing unconscious bias http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-job-rather-jennifer

(6)    Bryan Fischer claims homosexuality will lead to bestiality and pedophilia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFoShuBDb2A

(7)    Pat Robertson says that you have to be okay with polygamy, bestiality and child molestation if you are okay with homosexuality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTx0lbwi8A

(8)    Michael Savage opposes gay marriage because women can’t impregnate other women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeD48tNoyuc

(9)    Former Australian Prime Minster Tony Abbott says that gay marriages are not marriages by definition and that can’t change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtxN9qWcw8k

(10) Pastor Rick Warren appeals to the Bible to defend his anti-gay marriage views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFM8MhHn23Q

(11) Kevin Rudd points out that the Bible says that slaves should be obedient to their masters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CmZIakQv6Y

(12)The Bible saying that slaves should be obedient to their masters http://biblehub.com/ephesians/6-5.htm

(13) Mark Levin says gay marriage is bad because every major world religion is against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X-svypKYLw

(14) Anita Sarkeesian explains the immediate backlash against her critique of sexism in video games in 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q

(15) One week of harassment against Anita Sarkeesian in 2015 https://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter

(16) An article from 2014 explaining that 52% of gamers are women but game designers don’t market to them https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-percent-people-playing-games-women-industry-doesnt-know

(17) Tooltime’s video: The Feminist who kicked the hornet’s nest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHOVIwGteEk

(18) MrRepzion’s video Re: 25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male. (4:02 – 6:26) is where he compares midday TV to all video games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD-zQKvnl04

(19)Video outlining how women can get harassed in online gaming spaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47-FMmMLy0  

(20)They Live, full movie online. One hour and four minutes into the film John Nada warns Frank Armitage that if he wears the glasses too long they will start to feel like a knife turning in his skull. https://123movies.co/movie/they-live/?watching=TiQrfuNTsl

(21)Evidence that Laci Green has been on YouTube since 2008. https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/lacigreen

(22)Laci Green gets run off Tumblr by angry feminist group think back in 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eCnmeaoGMA

(23)Laci Green on the Rubin Report talking about how she considered many online feminists who attacked her in 2017 to be friends https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z-OhlILrUw

(24)Feminist blog criticizes Laci Green for befriending anti-feminists. https://theestablishment.co/the-sad-case-of-laci-green-feminist-hero-turned-anti-feminist-defender-322515344297

(25)Captain Andy attacks Laci Green for befriending anti social justice commentators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd03sPu4MOk

(26)Various social justice commentators attack Laci Green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GICHv26wc3Y

(27)Dick Coughlan tells Laci Green ‘shut the fuck up’ and ‘stop talking about you’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8wjulrJNq8

(28)Kevin Logan quote mines Laci, then makes abusive comments based on his own quote mine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BiTty3QuK0

(29)Rush Limbaugh conflates physical strength and strength of character in relation to the Ray Rice incident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-l8IW1005k

(30) Dove beauty campaign of 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKLDEj73gGQ

(31) Anita Sarkeesian’s Master’s Thesis https://www.scribd.com/doc/130661629/Masters-Thesis

(32) YouTube video ‘The Bullying of Julia Gillard’ – Shows Julia Gillard getting bullied for being Australia’s first female Prime Minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsECK-gRCGc

(33)The Google definition of feminism https://www.google.com.au/search?q=feminism+definition&rlz=1C1OKWM_enAU772AU772&oq=feminism+de&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l4.6200j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

(34)Fonetella Bass singing rescue me exemplifies the theme of women waiting to have their lives completed by men. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9mp3s2gpy8

(35) The link for Anita Sarkeesian’s ‘Tropes vs Women Part 2’ explaining narrative theory. http://www.brown.uk.com/brownlibrary/WOOD.htm

(36) Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs

(37)Link backing up the theory that sexual objectification primes sexual harassment https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-009-9695-4

(38) Tropes vs Women 5 – In which Anita Sarkeesian argues that violence against a sexually objectified character is doubly objectifying, and therefore sends a worse message to the video game consumer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZPSrwedvsg

(39) According to Pew 44% of internet users think online gaming is more welcoming to men and only 3% think its more welcoming to women http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/

(40) Study indicating the extent of how much women are harassed in online gaming. http://blog.pricecharting.com/2012/09/emilyami-sexism-in-video-games-study.html

(41)Captain Andy’s response to Noel Plum about Gradualism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkNq_0U4RZc