Another thing I learned was that gamers appear to be open to a feminist perspective on games provided that said feminist considers herself a feminist gamer. I think that's totally fair. A feminist art historian must be trained as an art historian. A feminist legal expert should have a law degree. Despite the controversy surrounding my articles, there were no death threats, no rape threats, no doxxing, and no suggestions I should kill myself. Multiple people commented on how civil the overall discussion was. I think that's a big win.

And people didn't just respond to what I wrote. Some people were inspired to speak for themselves. That's powerful and humbling and I'm so very grateful to them. And I'm grateful to Anita Sarkeesian for being the catalyst for this whole experience. I'm sure there are people who won't like it very much that I'm showing appreciation for Anita in any way shape or form, but my message all along has been that this is an experiment in defying the feminine catfight stereotype and engaging another woman in the industry based on her ideas and body of work, not through personal attacks or a popularity contest.

On that point, we still need some work, and some of the worst offenders there were men. Which is why the catfight stereotype is so destructive: women who disagree publicly must do so extremely cautiously, in my experience, because once the white knights start charging, someone takes a lance in the gut. Or an arrow in the knee. Ha! I went there! I'm awesome!

Remember: these are just fictional characters.

So I decided to write another series analyzing the response to the first series. People seemed to like the first series, so why not? So to get started, a few ground rules: 1) I'm deliberately not calling out individuals by name, because that's not relevant to the discussion here. 2) I sometimes just makes jokes to lighten things up. If in doubt, I am joking!

The TL;DR (too long, didn't read) version is: much of the criticism I received only dealt with one or two out of context elements of the series, and didn't take a holistic approach to my ideas. This made it very difficult to see the comments as fair as opposed to politically or emotionally driven attempts to debunk my work. Very few criticisms tackled the assertion that Feminist Frequency's methods to date need improvement because they risk causing harm. Instead, they gnawed around the edges of my work, nitpicking. The bulk of the criticism was also only about part one, so my critics didn't even read the whole thing. That's not fair criticism.

Actual game developers, on the other hand, ate up the theory portions in parts two and three, which was extremely validating.

Many women, and men commenting on behalf of women in their lives, told me that they related strongly to part four, which was bittersweet. It sucks that so many people have suffered in silence. It's awesome that we're not silent anymore.

Those of you short on time or just plain lazy, that's the gist. Thanks for your click, you better not have read this off an archive. Everyone else, thanks for sticking with me.

The tendency to emphasize faction-based conflict and identity of the speaker over the merit of a given idea is, I believe, part of the reason that discussions of gaming (and other stuff) get so negative. Identity politics have become Kafkaesque in that Tumblr activists can just ignore any element of a person's identity that they deem inconvenient to their assertions of privilege.

"Privilege" is being used on the Internet to backstop what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Screaming "privilege" on the Internet is like screaming "fire" in a movie theatre: everyone runs for the nearest exit. That's a real shame, because the basic idea that we should appreciate that other people are worse off than we are should not be a controversial idea in a hobby that requires at least one expensive game system and a connection to the Internet.