By Nelson Schneider - 08/06/23 at 02:55 PM CT
There’s a saying… something something Woke something something Broke. And it is being proven true with ever-increasing frequency as the general public – typically referred to as “Normies” – and dedicated fan communities for products, IPs, and/or hobbies have become fed up with the neverending torrent of bullshit raining down upon us from the Ivory Towers of Identity Politicians.
Thus is also the case for Anita Sarkeesian and her non-profit organization, “Feminist Frequency,” which was founded in response to the pushback she and likeminded 4th Wave Feminists received from the videogaming community immediately surrounding and in the aftermath of the GamerGate controversy, in which gaming nerds expressed anger at perceived corruption within Games Journalism, with some of the less well-adjusted nerds going so far as to issue a variety of toothless threats which were taken at face value. Of course, from its initial appearance, Gamers always knew that Feminist Frequency was nothing but a propaganda machine, and, unsurprisingly, paid it little heed, leading to a meager 1.4% engagement rate for the outlet’s videos.
However, with the overwhelming influence of Fringe Leftist ideals upon both traditional and online journalism in the past decade-plus, the viewpoint promoted by the GamerGate “conspirators” was ultimately vindicated, as corrupt, agenda-driven Games Journalism outlets have been dropping like flies in the wake of a rash of corporate restructuring – surprisingly kicked-off by Elon Musk cleaning house at X (nee Twitter) – that has seen a number of high-profile corporations cut loose their DEI managers as ‘useless and counterproductive.’ Feminist Frequency may have been one of the earlier and louder shrieking harpies attempting to paint Normies and Gamers as ‘fascists,’ but even getting in on the ground floor of a movement destined for failure didn’t allow it to keep churning out propaganda without financial backing.
Ultimately, Feminist Frequency’s influence upon videogaming has been fortunately limited. While Woke Ideology has failed to penetrate the Asian countries that still churn out a sizeable portion of videogames and the hardware used to play them, in the West, we’ve seen backlash against an trend of so-called ‘ugly’ female protagonists in games, with examples ranging from Potato Aloy in Sony’s first-party ‘Horizon’ series of Sandbox games to the transsexual developer self-insert that Microsoft ill-advisedly chose to be the face of the Xbox Divisions upcoming ‘Fable’ sequel.
It’s somewhat ironic that videogamers, who spend so much of their time engaged in escapist fantasies, tend to be what’s colloquially known as ‘Based,’ as in ‘based-in-reality’ – and the inverse of ‘Woke’ – when it comes to having finely-tuned bullshit detectors and a low tolerance for ham-handed proselytization. But at the end of the day, videogaming still exists, and for all her shrieking, needling, and browbeating, Anita Sarkeesian’s propaganda machine… doesn’t. Feminist Frequency is destined to be a mere footnote in gaming history – if it makes it into the history at all – having left next to no impact on the audience Anita so desperately wanted to change, while instead preaching to a choir of like-minded activists who, it must be emphatically noted, don’t play videogames anyway.
