Anita Sarkeesian is not Jack Thompson, she’s Mary Whitehouse.

I say this because a lot of battling the current social justice climate is about pattern recognition, and subtle differences in behaviour patterns can sometimes mean a lot of difference in knowing who or what you’re dealing with.

People have argued that Anita Sarkeesian is Jack Thompson because of the fact that Jack Thompson led the moral crusades against video games in the 1990s, and the Sarkeesian/McIntosh hive-mind is doing the same for this generation.

Except that’s not quite what’s happening, is it? We all know that Anita Sarkeesian will shamelessly complain about anything and everything for feminism points, but we were never able to marry that to the Jack Thompson comparisons because that’s not quite how she’s behaving.

It’s true that they both led their respective generations’ moral crusades against video games. But video games was where Thompson’s moral crusade ended; we know from about two years of Youtube work and a Masters Thesis that Anita Sarkeesian was actually complaining about TV shows well before she ever said anything (at least publicly) about video games.

The person whom Anita Sarkeesian best fits the profile of is Mary Whitehouse.

If you’re not familiar with Mary Whitehouse, she was basically THE moral crusader of the 1970s and 1980s. I’ll give you an example of her lamentably misguided activism:

In the 1980s, there was a play called The Romans in Britain. It was directed by Michael … Bogdanov, I think his name was. Anyway, it was attempting to show militaristic parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain in ancient times, and then-current English occupation of Ireland. Crucial to the play’s visual imagery and metaphor is a scene in which one of the Britons (male) is anally violated by one of the Roman soldiers (also male). You might agree that the inference gets no more stark than that.

When Mary Whitehouse caught wind of this, she took Michael Bogdanov to court, so outraged was she that the play would depict gay sex in such an obvious and public manner. She had never seen the play, however, so she had to send one of her lawyers along to watch it for her. She essentially lost the case because her lawyer sat in the back row, and therefore gathered “evidence” from too far a distance which was too easily demolished in court; he was unable to tell, for example, if the actor had been displaying his actual penis, or just his thumb held at crotch height.

Notice the parallels yet?

The other thing about Mary Whitehouse is that, like Anita, she didn’t discriminate the kinds of things she complained about other than by their presence in popular consciousness. You would never find Whitehouse complaining about something that wasn’t popular. Thompson was only ever about the evils of video games. Anita (like Whitehouse before her) goes whichever way the wind blows for her own notoriety.

So there you have it: two comparisons, two subtly but significantly different behaviours. It might seem pedantic, but I think it’s important. That’s why I wrote this post, after all.