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From the perspective of feminist/critical theory, 'patriarchy' is not simply the rule of males over females, or giving preferential treatment to a sex.

Rather, feminists argue that the masculine gender role(ways of doing, seeing, thinking, being, etc.), as opposed to the male sex, are valued over feminine, queer, or another other type of role. The rule of males over females, their preferential treatment etc is derived from this.

In this sense, females are essentially allowed to be 'men', to 'wear the pants'. They have been allowed to occupy roles traditionally associated with the masculine gender role, such as being a CEO or politician. However, the organization of society, 'how things are done' if you will, is still very much a masculine-centric, and thus patriarchal one. It is still a question of 'who wears the pants', as opposed to the skirt, dress, toga etc.

If you're interested in other theories of power, I highly recommend checking out Hardt and Negri's Empire, which is mostly spot on from what I've read, though there are a couple ideas I disagree with that don't quite fit with other theories that I'm into. Here's a link to the pdf of Empire in case you want to check it out without buying it.

Probably more important is their 'sequel', Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, which describes the way 'Empire' maintains itself through a state of constant warfare, as well as describing the rise of its antithesis, which they dub the 'Multitude'.

Both of these books are super trendy right now, both amongst lefty activists and intellectuals, but also among military theorists and think tank-y people.

They also came out with a third book, which goes into more detail on what revolution might look like.

Sorry, I know that was way too long.

TL;DR: Feminist critique is not of who wears 'the pants', but that it is still always 'the pants' and not some other article of clothing.

Also, everyone should read Hardt and Negri.

Quick google search turns this up as a possible origin: http://www.amazon.com/Power-Prejudice-Politics-Diplomacy-Discrimination/dp/0813321433

(Part 1)
>Campbell's theory is one of many (and by the by, not terribly prevalent in academic studies of narrative. It's usually little more than a footnote to a lecture on the epic form).

Uhm... What's the others? The video that we're discussing puts the historian front and center and Anita knows about it from her thesis:

>Joseph Campbell (1949/2008) traces the patterns of the hero in “A Hero with a Thousand Faces.” In that work, he identifies what the archetypal heroes go through on their journeys including being called to adventure, refusing the call, having supernatural aids and receiving a boon that assists in finally completing the goal. In contemporary films
and television, writers still rely on the heroic journey Campbell documents.

So I find it highly misleading when she acts as if it doesn't exist when it's so prevalent to her studies. At the very least, it gives context to her videos and explains one aspect of them, namely, the Call to action. And in that part, we learn that the hero's world is disrupted. Given that we have 36 plotlines that we can use, what Anita's Damsel series boils down to is taking away a narrative that we've used since Ancient Greek times. Now if there's other ways to explain a story, by all means, explain. But acting as if games don't tell such stories at all is rather dubious, don't you think?

>And since the beginning, they've been notable exceptions to a genre where heroes are male by default.

Uhm... If you look at the history of games from 1973-1981, the games tell a far different story. And I highly doubt that over the history of video games, we've seen a total tally of male vs female protagonists nor shown a way to define if a game is a good portrayal or not.

>Sarkeesian is not presenting a one sided narrative about women not being in games, she's examining how women are used in a great many games.

Then why not show games such as Golden Axe and the Metroid series?

>In Mass Effect, your gender is little more than decoration, as far as I understand (I have only played the first one), where it changes how your character looks but little else.

Do you have other characters in the party that are female?

> But it should be noted that talking about positive portrayals doesn't make this less of an issue, it just changes the dimensions of the issue. And I think we should also note that we're getting way out of the purview of Sarkeesian's two videos, which are centered on damsel's in distress in particular, and women's use as plot objects in general.

FFX had Yuna as the protagonist, had her as a Damsel and had her ignored in both videos as she faced the big bad. And I won't even talk about Rikku or Lulu who know a lot more than Tidus and Wakka while Kimahri and Auron keep silent about everything... Why isn't she in the video?

>And it should be noted that we're talking about a three part series of videos of which the third part has yet to be released. As her videos go on, she may turn to discussions of other sorts of portrayals where there are more positive things to be found. I don't know, I'm not her.

Her first claim was that this was just one video discussing the trope. She later made it into two. Now it's three. And while I'm all for looking at different tropes, I'm not particularly interested in how she doesn't look at characters holistically. She's done this not through comparing women in media to each other, but just by simply taking characters out of context then saying how they are defined by the archetypes she gives them. I'm sure she'll talk about Samus, but it's going to prove the point that she doesn't try to understand her as a female bounty hunter who is strong enough to take on damn near anything, while avoiding Other M and its horrible inconsistencies, but wants to dress up her inadequacies and ignore her accomplishments as an archetype.

>You keep criticizing the way she has made her argument when I never found anything especially problematic with her technique. How exactly would you have preferred her to make her argument?

In a more scientific way where she didn't have the conclusion coming out with no facts to back it up.

> She found examples, an overwhelming amount of examples in my opinion, to illustrate what she is talking about.

As I said before and I'll say again, she took them out of context. Gears of War is a pretty egregious one. Dom and his wife have been separated for years and you have to ignore everything about what his character represented as well as how much he cherished his wife. You also have to ignore everything about the story to make Maria out to be a "Euthanized Damsel" whereby she qualifies as a stereotype but not a person. She'd been tortured for four years, the torture had already taken a toll on one of the largest and strongest fighters, Tai Kaliso, who committed suicide. Dom saw how Tai was killed, while noting that this was not the woman he knew. Her soul was gone from the torture and Dom became nihilistic afterwards. He still fought, but he was more accepting of death. This is a man that didn't give up looking for his wife and seeing what the opposition had done to them, he internalized the anguish he felt. In the final game, he killed himself to save others and be with his wife and kids.

In a book, we'd understand all of this. But in the video, we got the Gish Gallop approach, where you don't know anything about the women presented, just that they're Damsels. It's even more egregious when you think about how she spent the first video talking about Zelda and being captured and in this next one, she shows that Zelda is fighting Link with her own powers. That's some serious cognitive dissonance...

>Can you point me to where you links video games to real world violence, either in video or transcript?

DiD 2

[Every 9 seconds]

Wellspring

I don't see public research but mainly advocacy in the top two. I'm not entirely sure about Wellspring but since it's been around since 1931 I'm not questioning that too much. I just don't see the link of video games and domestic violence and she says that pretty explicitly in the last parts: