It is no secret that I and many others are not fans of Feminist Frequency. I was initially interested in their series Tropes vs Women after seeing their Kickstarter efforts and was also appalled by the backlash from trolls which ended up backfiring, causing donations to sky rocket. The series was massively overfunded. It asked for $6000 to produce a series of Youtube videos and ended up with $158,000. Wow, what a great outcome I initially thought, trolls may have potentially helped a series that could be beneficial to our industry.
Whoops. Couldn't have been further from the truth.
Feminist Frequency have utterly failed to deliver what they promised to their backers. Their series is more than 2 years behind schedule and has produced less than half of the promised videos. Since its successful funding in 2012, we have received the following:
Women as Background Decoration
Damsel in Distress
MsMale
Positive Female Characters in Gaming (of which there are apparently 2)
By comparison, here is the promised list of videos:
Damsel in Distress - Video #1
The Fighting F#@k Toy - Video #2
The Sexy Sidekick - Video #3
The Sexy Villainess - Video #4
Background Decoration - Video #5
Voodoo Priestess/Tribal Sorceress - Video #6
Women as Reward - Video #7
Mrs. Male Character - Video #8
Unattractive Equals Evil - Video #9
Man with Boobs - Video #10
Positive Female Characters! - Video #11
Video #12 - Top 10 Most Common Defenses of Sexism in Games
Yup, there's definitely something of a difference there. Despite their lack of productivity when it comes to the videos they were funded to create, the dynamic duo that represents Femfreqs social media presence have been quite prolific indeed. In fact, to suggest that they spend a great deal of time yelling at people on social media would not be unfair. I'd love to say they engaged in debate but they literally never take the time to. They will retweet people that they agree with, block those they do not. It's very much an echo chamber, but hey, they have the right to do that. They even have the right to do what I'm going to criticise them for right now, which is riding the coat-tails of high profile titles with outrageous claims and even in some cases, hypocrisy. That's what free speech is after all, they can say whatever they want and I can use my platform to criticise that if I so choose, as can everybody else. Naturally the last time I did this I had my critique cherry-picked and used against me but hey would should not expect honest tactics from those who are intellectually dishonest.
You could spend many hours criticising things that Femfreq has to say. Their videos have plenty of inconsistencies and some outright misrepresentations (the now infamous example of Hitman comes to mind where whoever was filming the footage deliberately dragged around an unconscious female body into a splayed sexual position, while making claims about acting out sexual fantasies, here's the quote)
"The player cannot help but treat these female bodies as things to be acted upon,because they were designed, constructed and placed in the environment for that singular purpose. Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters.
It’s a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality."
That's not so much a leap of logic as it is taking to the skies with the greatest of ease, course? The land of make-believe.
Anyway, the point is not to dissect everything they've ever done, plenty of people have done that better and you should seek them out. The point is to look at what they're doing right now, which is jumping on the "imaginary violence is terrible" train again, specifically targeting the highest profile titles at E3 to cause maximum outrage. It's no surprise that prior to this Femfreq has focused its efforts on Witcher 3, the most popular title with core gamers to come out this year so far and certainly the most high profile. It gets them the most attention. Attention, whether positive or negative, can be used to validate their cause and can translate into donations. Are you suggesting that they may be doing this for financial gain TotalBiscuit? It had crossed my mind yes. After all, they're doing rather well, with revenue of over $400,000 last year.
An interesting thing to note is that 44% of the Kickstarter earnings (which if you recall were vastly overfunded) went to wages. As to what the people who received said wages did, well that is not publicly available information.
This is a small sample of the things they have said regarding violence. This suggests they are trying to make some sort of flimsy connection between that and their feminist cause, which seems like a bizarre strategy doomed to fail but hey, that's on them.
If those tweets make you cock your head slightly with a quizzical look in your eye then congratulations, you are probably moderate and noticing some rather radical points of view. There's plenty more where that came from, this particular rabbit hole is a deep one.
Regardless, this is less of a critique as it is a ramble. I'm on the road right now and don't have the time or inclination to go indepth on this topic, however there is one thing in particular I'd like to point out when it comes to the obvious hypocrisy of Femfreq.
Femfreq claims to abhor violence and yet when it comes to Towerfall, they love it so much they recommend it on their Steam curator page. Towerfall is a game that consists of 100% violence. The entire purpose of Towerfall is violence, there is nothing else you can do in that game other than shoot things with arrows. It has more violence than Doom, it has more violence than Fallout, two games they are going after right now. Why do they like Towerfall so much then?
Probably because of this.
My impression of this group is simply this. Double-standards and misrepresentation are commonplace for them and it seems that its less about principles and more about kissing the ring when it comes to appeasing them. Make some token ego-boosting gesture in their direction and they'll love your game, regardless of the fact that it flies in the face of the principles they proclaim to hold. Resist and they will wield Twitter as a cudgel and beat you into submission for ermmm.. equality... or something.
It's a shame this group is the one at the forefront of pushing for gender equality and diversity in games. I 100% support that cause but good lord is it made harder when these people are trying to be the loudest on the subject and poisoning the well.
