Farewell, Anita Sarkessian

"I thought taking his life would bring catharsis ... Instead I just feel a deeper sadness. Another soul lost fighting for the wrong side." ~ Shinobu Sensui, Yu Yu Hakusho

It's been a while since I made a blog post. I'll not get into the reasons why - mostly being busy with other projects - but given my past history with Anita Sarkeesian, I figured this would be a fitting topic to take it up again. For those who haven't been following my work, I've invested a great deal of time, money, effort, and heartache over the past couple years trying to #HealTheDivide between both sides of the culture war, with the feud between Anita and Sargon of Akkad being at the heart of it.

Sadly, my mission has failed, though not from lack of trying.

I'd managed to change Sargon's mind, at least, and get him to back off personal attacks of her character, and many others as well; but alas, I was unable to reach her in the end, to be a true bridge between them, though I came closer than probably anyone has or was willing to attempt.

Mostly, I think it's my own fault. They say no one will ever listen to you or care about you the way a Pisces will; and even with all my empathy and willingness to humanize her and treat her as equal ... in the end, I think I still failed to really listen to her and get to the true root of what she actually wants and needs. Instead, I think I let my own wants and needs get in the way of true peace.

And I mean that. I was the one who failed to go the distance; and for that, Anita, I'm sorry.

You may be wondering why I'm choosing to write about this now. Well, simply put, I was watching Tim Pool's daily commentary when a video about Anita came up, showing that Feminist Frequency was apparently broke and Anita had laid-off her coworkers, Ebony Aster and Carolyn Petit.

Now, I know some of you who don't like her are probably cheering in your seats, singing, "Ding, dong, the witch is dead," and truly, I understand why you feel that way about her. But honestly, for as badly as she might have treated people like me and Boogie and Sargon in the past, this news brings me no joy.

I'm not a feminist and I don't agree with Anita on a lot of stuff, but I still chose to be a top-tier early donor to Feminist Frequency anyway because I feel her voice is important. I'm willing to give her a platform to speak, even if there are those on the radical identitarian left who wouldn't extend me the same courtesy.

I do it because I'm committed to free speech and believe that the only way forward is to put down the sword and start talking to one another.

To my dying day, I will maintain that my personal experience of Anita and her colleagues are that they are wonderful human beings with truly big hearts who consistently oppose violence and who honestly just wanna make the world a better place for marginalized groups. All three of them are more nuanced than people give them credit for; and sometimes, she's even surprised me at times, holding positions you might not think if all you relied upon were anti-feminist portrayals of her.

Things like agreeing with Sargon that The Legend of Korra is terrible because "the politics were all wrong." Three guesses as to which character she had in mind, which I think is unfortunate, cuz Korra is a strong, assertive woman of color who overcomes tremendous physical, mental, and spiritual hardships, including recovering from PTSD and fighting tyranny. Things you'd expect someone like Anita would be a champion of.

I've written before how she's specifically called out the rape of men as being awful. Something you wouldn't expect a radical feminist to do, right? Then there are more recent things, like being instant friends with YouTube gamer Destiny - a white male (for those who still think she's a man-hater) - or being borderline black-pilled with the entire political process when it comes to even someone like AOC getting corrupted by the system. Someone whom you'd think would be her girl:

Despite our falling out, I'm willing to keep Anita's portrait in my Inspiration gallery because I think she genuinely deserves that spot, and she deserves better than how the world has treated her. Many of you don't like that, but I did tell you early on not to underestimate her, and that she's not the evil grifting witch you think she is, and I was right.

Same for her colleagues, and all it took for me to reach that conclusion was to listen with an open mind.

They, like so many other leftists, aren't bad people deep down. The issue, in my opinion, is that they sometimes are simply misguided and wind up supporting policies that sound good on paper - ones that tug on the strings of compassion and decency - but actually cause greater problems in reality. If they are guilty of anything, it's being led by the heart more than the head and being too stubborn to realize their own bias in that regard.

I've often come to Anita's defense when I felt it was warranted, rebuking people "on my own team" who would berate and harass her, trying to help others see things from her perspective. Towards that end, I devoted several articles on this blog to talking about her.

Again, criticizing her ideas is fine, I just think Anita is much maligned and that has caused her to be somewhat paranoid and overreact. To her credit, even when she learned I was pro-Trump, she still tolerated my presence for a while on her threads and in private chats. I suppose in hindsight, I pushed my luck too far in offering to help and she rejected me publicly and got reamed for it. I think that embarrassed her and so eventually she blocked me after I'd suggested she could be more like Cassie Jaye - a radical feminist turned equalist.

Eventually, I gradually lost the will to keep fighting for her, though, since my efforts weren't appreciated.

My view of her and Feminist Frequency has now devolved to something akin to Chris Rock's perspective on rap music: love it, but tired of defending it.

I don't blame her, though, cuz again I don't think she's responding to me so much as this phantom of people like me she's built up in her mind as a result of endless echo-chamber propaganda by the mainstream media-political complex. The same one that has it out for people like her, ironically enough, since she's also an independent commentator in competition with them.

Again, deep down, I think she means well and hopefully my articles have proven that case. I just find this very tragic and wish that things had been different. My fondest hope for her was maybe she and I could someday sit down together and play video games on the surface of Mars and laugh and have fun together eating sushi and binging Star Trek as equals without malice or care about identity politics. I sincerely mean that. It would have been the best time ever to hang out with her, and I know because, as I wrote in my first article, hanging out with her in private video chat was like that.

I think that's a goal and a vision she also would have shared, but may never come to be, unfortunately.

Would that I could transpose that experience onto all of you and help you see her as I do. Maybe then, more people would support her, and listen to her, and respect her, and treat her with humanity and dignity; and if they did all that, then maybe her company wouldn't be going broke right now. Maybe people would have been nicer to her, and she in turn would have been nicer to them.

Honestly, I really don't know. This whole thing is just one fucked up shit show with people suffering on both sides, and it's frankly a god-damned shame it's come to this. Why can't we just be nicer to each other and recognize our common humanity?

I'll end this article with a prediction, since those are always fun.

Anita Sarkeesian is not going away. If anything, I think this will just be a break for her, the way Lauren Southern has chosen to retire or how Milo was basically forced into retirement, but came back stronger than before and feeling liberated by it.

For Anita, this'll be a chance for her to reflect and reassess her life and focus more on self-care and personal relationships with the people closest to her who matter. To be as introspective as I boldly claimed she was. But in time, she'll be back and be better than ever with less hysteria and more unity in her wake. Once the insanity of the current paradigm has blown over and she and everyone else gets a chance to realize that Trump wasn't the reincarnation of Hitler and there aren't white supremacists under every rock and corner.

That's my prediction.

She's an incredibly driven woman with tremendous skill and much to offer the world. She may not always get it right, but she is out there pushing new frontiers that history will look kindly on her for. In this, or any other endeavor, she will return and continue to inspire and infuriate people, because that's what a Master Persuader does.

I know she's spoken before of wanting to start a food criticism show, so maybe this will be a chance to do something like that. Personally, I think she'd be great at it. We'll see, I guess.

Farewell, Anita Sarkeesian.

Would that we could have been better friends; and if you feel you have a change of heart, my inbox is always open to you, though I'll no longer wait for you. Instead, I'll simply wish you the best in whatever it is you do.

May your life be filled with love, peace, purpose, happiness, and will.