In Defense of Anita Sarkeesian: How I Almost Became an Antifeminist and Why I Changed my Mind

Prior to the year 2014, I was a typical Evangelical Christian who grew up in a conservative home. As a Christian, I was incredibly hostile towards the idea of feminism. The reason for that was largely because of radical feminists that conservatives, especially fundamentalist Christian conservatives, would use as political hand grenades for their own right-wing agenda. Those radical feminists in question were genuine misandrists. Little did I know that my perspective would change forever with Anita Sarkeesian coming into the picture, more on her later.

Valerie Solanas was known for writing an incredibly hateful document about men called The S.C.U.M. Manifesto that the Far-Right would love to use as a rhetorical punching bag for their own goals. They would often point to some of the worst feminists doing some of the worst things that a person can do for their own public image. They would often use quotes and interviews where they said things that the normal crowd might think are extreme and then use that to paint the entire feminist collective as insane. In the case of Valerie Solanas, it was her own radical literature and murder attempts committed against men that ended up easily being weaponized against the very idea of feminism itself. Unsurprisingly, these tactics worked, but she wasn’t the only example of a man-hating feminist that antifeminists liked to point out to.

Conservatives who accepted antifeminism as a part of their own right-wing worldview would also use other women like Andrea Dworkin for their purposes. Andrea Dworkin, in particular, was known to openly paint men who were interested in romantic relationships with women as sexual predators even going as far as to suggest that the very idea of marriage was to give a rapist the ability to own his victim. As you can imagine, none of her views helped me to view feminism positively. But I didn’t hold negative feelings for feminism forever. So what changed? Why did my own views on feminism become positive when this was previously unthinkable for me as a teenager?

Well, Anita Sarkeesian caught my attention. When Gamergate supporters all made hate videos and wrote hate articles about her, I had some expectations about her that were initially negative. At first I thought that she was going to do some stereotypical crazy stuff like say that the Ace Combat franchise is sexist for including overwhelmingly male military personnel. Or say that the Sims franchise normalizes misogyny against women for depicting women as mothers and wives in traditional family settings. But what I actually found when I watched her videos, specifically her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, was that she was advocating for things that sounded fairly reasonable to me. I found her narratives that the video game industry needs to have more strong and empowered female characters who aren’t damsels in distress and that women in video games should not be sexually objectified to be fairly reasonable ideas to accept as the truth. This laid the groundwork for me to begin embracing a more progressive outlook on life.

I also realized that all the conservatives who used Valerie Solanas and Andrea Dworkin to discredit feminism as a whole were using a disruptive strategy called nutpicking to misinform me about social justice movements in general. Nutpicking is when someone cherrypicks a poor representative of a collective in order to use as an argument against the collective’s existence. What happens is that an insane individual is singled out from a movement in order to make the entire movement look insane. The fallacy of this analysis is that it fails to understand that every idea has crazy supporters but not every supported idea is crazy. The real questions that someone should be asking are, “Does this movement promote crazy people?” and “Does this movement have proportionately more crazy people than its opposition?”

That was when I realized that antifeminism wasn’t actually a rational position to hold and that most of my outrage towards feminism was manufactured. It never actually had any merits of its own, so I revised my worldview to be more accepting of feminism. I don’t think that this was ever a bad idea for me. Even today, I stand by my decisions that I made as a 15-year-old boy. Special thanks to Anita Sarkeesian for informing my views on social justice.