Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

Back in the early days of YouTube, some people who are now called "YouTubers" or "influencers" were getting started. They were building channels, creating videos and throwing them out into the ether to see what would happen. Some of those early YouTubers were trailblazers in an area that has become mainstream: lestist harangues.

One such pioneer is Anita Sarkeesian. Her early YouTube channel evolved into a wider platform of its own called Feminist Frequency. It consists of a blog by the same name, a Twitter account, a podcast, etc. It became a brand, and a powerful brand at that. As its following slowly rose on the backs of such early content as "Caprica and the Queerness of Sam Adama" and "No Girls Allowed: File Sharing Culture and BitTorrent," it was in a unique position to explode due to a crisis it helped to stoke: GamerGate.

GamerGate was a controversy over alleged conflicts of interest in the games press. Gamers were enraged to learn that some journalists were allegedly dating the female developers of games they positively reviewed. The games press - and feminist activists like Sarkeesian - immediately transferred blame to gamers, calling them misogynists and toxic. It's now a common process and utterly predictable, but GamerGate was the proving ground.

Sarkeesian's video series "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" had started more than a year before GamerGate began and she became a notable figure during the kerfuffle. Her following exploded. She made the rounds on all the anti-gamer and radical feminist podcasts and publications and conferences. She talked about the backlash at the hands of nasty right-wing extremist misogynists. She talked about how hateful games are to women. All of the buzzwords, all of the Left Pole issues.

And now it's over. Yesterday, Sarkeesian announced the end of Feminist Frequency. In her announcement and interviews about it, she is sure to remind everyone of how great and groundbreaking her work was and how important she is:

"Me and my team were pioneering a space ... We were talking about representation very early on in a mainstream way. It wasn't a popular thing to do outside of academia."

Ever the martyr, she says she had wanted to shut down sooner, but just couldn't. She had to keep on. For the people. In the thick of "#MeToo," she waded back into the fray:

... "People were reaching out to me for help. I understand why people were coming to me. It was this interesting moment where I recognized that my career up until this point made me the perfect person to spearhead some of this work, which is kind of sad. But here we are."

But all things must pass, and being a shrieking harridan all the time and constantly seeing the Great Right-Wing Extremist Misogynist Boogeyman under every rock takes its toll.

"I was so over talking about abuse, the dog-and-pony show of trotting out my abuse ... I'm not retraumatizing myself for the sake of this audience anymore.' And that's when I started realizing that I'm just really fucking over this."

The best answer I can give is the honest truth: I'm exhausted. I know that it's not unusual for nonprofits to have a life cycle shorter than a lot of people would like, but there are unique challenges when they're so entwined with an individual (me) who has become a symbol (oops), for better and for worse. I'm hoping that it will be valuable to share the reality of the bone-deep burnout that comes from consistently saying yes to the growth of Feminist Frequency ...

Goodbye and good riddance to bad rubbish.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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