I disagree with you.
The word «misogyny» doesn't fluctuate in meaning according to personal inclination and that's at the heart of the problem here, that some people have hijacked language to serve their own goals. For starters, we can contrast Anita's alleged examples with unequivocal appearances of misogyny in fiction, such as in Stieg Larson's first Millennium Series novel, whose original and much superior Swedish title was «Men who hate women». That hijack can be exposed. It
can be shown misogyny is not a subjective concept. I'm not convinced that's your case, but if anyone here really believes indeed it's a label one gets to stamp onto whatever one sees fit, then one would be forced to concede Anita carte blanche to apply it onto whichever she'd see fit, videogames at her discretion included.
Alluding to
@Guy N'wah 's Collective Guilt doctrine, which I do not endorse, what at least facilitates the misportrayal of this controversy in mainstream media as a dispute between one courageous outspoken female gamer standing up for the victimized versus a mob of vicious goons is the absence of an articulate fair-minded opponent in the public sphere operating at the same high level of prominence Anita does, a gap a debate would certainly help mitigate.
This is a discussion about tactics though, not the heart of the problem, so for now this is my last word on the subject of a public debate.
Dude, have you been watching anything that's been going on lately? Not even lately, really. They most certainly have been tagging things with the word misogynist as a weapon against things and groups they disapprove of. It's the exact same thing the media does with the word "racist", which in video game fanbases, you can see people doing against Stormcloak fans in Skyrim.
It's a common tactic, much like throwing out the word "communist" and "witch" in the red scare and salem witch trials, like I pointed out a good deal earlier. That's not even opinion, that's fact if you look at Zoe Quinn's activities.
For instance:
http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fine-young-capitalists
In this article, they say she used the word transphobic. And suddenly, everyone's on their case and they can't do anything.
The only reason I even heard of Gamergate was because she "Blew them wide open" and found "proof" that they were a misogynistic racist group trying to eliminate the feminist presence in the gaming industry. Ironically, that story is what got me and a lot of people into gamergate in the first place when they smelled the bs and realized the chatroom was an open chatroom with anonymous profiles...
edit: Of course, that isn't even what
@veleda was saying specifically. Though the weight of that word "misogyny" is there, same as racist, especially in America. She's saying basically that the arguments would go in circles, because it's opinion based, almost. Subjected to a point of view that can't really be proven. You CAN show that it is an opinion made poorly, but at the end of the day, it still isn't proof.
If I say, 'Oh it's sexist that the woman is wearing a sexy bikini', and you say no it's not because the guys are wearing only shorts, then I say 'Well why can't she show her nipples? Quit sexualizing women's bodies! Misogyny!"
.... see? It just keeps going and going. You can make almost anything look sexist depending on how you look at it, because as she said, it's subjective. And people will always see exactly what it is that they want to see.
edit 2: And, people really don't care about specific definitions of things. I learned that the hard way on tumblr when I tried explaining the difference between nationalists and racists. People associate words with each other, and so because nationalism attracts racist individuals as well as those who are not, they assume all nationalists are racists.
Same here. Anything they think is sexist, even if others don't think it is sexist, is branded as misogyny and evidence of the hatred of women in their eyes. Try stomaching one of Anita's videos and she says this plain as day and isn't shy about it.
