If you’re an SJW, today might be a good day to crawl into your safe space, because Anita Sarkeesian has abandoned her Kickstarter project, Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games.

Of course, she’s selling it as “moving on to something else”, but the rest of us know what’s going on. Her project has been thoroughly exposed as a sham, and she’s decided to lick her wounds and try something else.

Anita has raised $158,922.00 on the project’s Kickstarter page. Whether she has any plans to refund any of the 6,968 backers of this project is unknown.

I’ve constructed the following graphic to help illustrate the progress that the project has made since it was first launched three-and-a-half years ago on May 17, 2012:

Anita attended California State University, Northridge (which has a surprisingly high 52.9% rate of acceptance) where she majored in communications, which involved analyzing media for narrative. So when Anita takes in over a hundred thousand dollars to play thousands of dollars in video games, she’s doing what she went to school for. She’s not the only YouTube personality who comments on the content of video games, but I think she managed to do pretty well for herself in making as much money as she has.

The purpose of Anita’s series was to demonstrate that there is sexism in video games. Many video games do portray women in some pretty unrealistic and even outlandish ways, and in some cases heavily sexualizes them. Nobody really needed a social critic to point any of this out. The thing is, practically no one cares. Everyone who plays video games knows that they’re an expression of somebody’s fantasies.

Anita complains anyway, because as she sees it, video games normalize certain stereotypes. As Anita sees it, someone is needed to speak out against stereotypes against women because gamers are impressionable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Of course, Anita is wrong.

One reason I prefer to stay away from radical feminists is because they tend to be extremely negative, sometimes assuming that complete strangers are criminals, particularly men. Most people don’t need to be told that almost no men actually have a desire to rape. Most of us recognize rape for the act of violence that it is. Of the men that actually have done it, most of them regret the act instantly. Even laws written primarily by men place rape on the same level as murder in terms of seriousness. Such laws have been around for a very long time, even in times believed by feminists to be the height of patriarchy. To the rest of us, this is obvious. To radical feminists, however, each man is potential rape waiting to happen. I have a hard time stomaching that kind of negativity.

I’m in favor of freedom of expression, even if what is being expressed is something I don’t personally agree with. I’m certain that Anita has heard of the game, Grand Theft Auto. It’s a bombastic game in which the protagonist is rewarded for committing outrageous crimes. However, the popularity of the game didn’t result in a surge in automobile thefts. This is because people know better, and aren’t so easily influenced by the expression of someone else’s fantasies, even if they enjoy the gameplay mechanics and play the game for hours a day. And even if someone steals a car because they learned to do it from a video game, it’s the car thief that’s held accountable, not the video game. The people who made the video game were exercising their protected freedom of expression.

So, what’s Anita working on next? She started a new crowdfunding project concerning the role of women in history. One can hope that the project won’t be nearly as divisive, unconstructive, and misleading as the one that she just gave up on (though this is Anita Sarkeesian we’re talking about, here). The initial fundraising goal of her new project is $200,000. That’s interesting considering that her previous project had a goal of only $6000. If she asked for thousands of dollars to play a bunch of video games, why is she asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to do research that one can do with the simple assistance of Google?

Believe it or not, women didn’t get their rights because a bunch a firebrands were shrill enough. Women got equal rights with men because men decided that society would benefit from it. What this means is that the feminist movement in it’s current form isn’t just divisive and as a result counterproductive. What it means is that feminism, in it’s current form, has been unnecessary all along.

Update (4-10-2016): Anita has made a video update, but she made it available for backers only. I found out about it because I was curious as to whether the project has raised more money or gained new backers since it was announced that Anita was moving on to something else. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it did, but as it turns out, that wasn’t the case. The video that was posted was not on one of the topics in Anita’s outline for her campaign, so in that regard, the video didn’t do anything to give her backers what they paid for.

It’s obvious that the reason she posts videos for backers only is because she’s far more sensitive to criticism than she lets on. Criticism (which Anita mistakes for “harassment”) is a normal and natural part of the experience of  publishing content on the internet, and is to be expected when what is produced is of inferior quality. Anita is taking measures to hide her content from her critics because she can’t take it anywhere close to how well she dishes it out (though she’s not very good at that, either).