On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.
Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.
Late Tuesday night, this happened:
Some very scary threats have just been made against me and my family. Contacting authorities now.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014
I’m safe. Authorities have been notified. Staying with friends tonight. I’m not giving up. But this harassment of women in tech must stop!
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014
That’s right: Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home due to violent threats against her and her family … because she made a YouTube video analyzing violence against women in video games.
She then posted some of the threats she had gotten from a Twitter account set up specifically to harass and threaten her and her family. [TRIGGER WARNING for graphic rape and death threats.]
I usually don’t share the really scary stuff. But it’s important for folks to know how bad it gets [TRIGGER WARNING] pic.twitter.com/u6b3i0fysI
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014
For a larger version of the screenshot, see here.
Sarkeesian has also been tweeting some of the other threats she gets on a daily basis from anonymous gamers who are incensed that a woman has anything critical to say about their precious video games.
It’s especially amusing that this misogyny laced email is unironically signed “See you soon m'lady. *tips fedora*” pic.twitter.com/rLk3CvoxXV
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) July 15, 2014
https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/504437681527353344/photo/1
I get so many emails like this I could publish a coffee table book full of them. pic.twitter.com/qMoYOtV9tT
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) July 15, 2014
Unfortunately, this is an all too typical twitter response to my observations about video games. #E32014 pic.twitter.com/aWmwtQZLnm
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) June 9, 2014
You’ll notice that several of these threatening comments mention videos by Thunderf00t, a “skeptic” videoblogger best known, at least in the corner of the internet I write about, for a series of videos in which he viciously attacks some of the women who’ve drawn the most internet hate from angry misogynists – from skeptics like Rebecca Watson and Melody Hensley to video game maker Zoe Quinn and video game critic Sarkeesian.
Thunderf00t’s attacks have won him kudos from assorted Men’s Rights activists, from the regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit to A Voice for Men “operations manager” Dean Esmay, who has praised his videos and urged other MRAs to subscribe to them.
In other words, the harassment of feminist women on the internet is directly linked to antifeminist propagandists like Thunderf00t – and his MRA fans and enablers.
The constant, vicious, personal attacks on Sarkeesian you see not only in video game circles but from Men’s Rights Activists – on Reddit, on A Voice for Men, on YouTube, and so on – have helped to create a hostile environment in which critiques of sexism in games result in real-world death and rape threats against women. This has an undeniably chilling effect on the free speech of women. That in fact is the intent of the harassers.
Margaret Atwood once famously observed that
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
I think we need an internet corollary to Atwood’s observation:
Men posting on the internet are afraid that women will block them. Women are afraid that men will treat them like Anita Sarkeesian.
Thing is, Sarkeesian keeps moving forward, diligently researching and putting forth the videos she promised she would. All the huffing and puffing of her critics and attackers hasn’t shut her up. Each new video she puts out is a testament to her courage and her perseverance. Each new video is a blow against those who would shut women up. Each new video helps to inspire others who’ve gotten similar threats to continue speaking up and speaking out.
Supporting Sarkeesian helps to support every woman who wants to be able to speak out online without fear of violent threats. There’s no better proof of this than how angry the biggest misogynistic bullies get whenever feminists and other people of good conscience rally around her. The bullies are still angry about the money she raised via kickstarter, money that has enabled her to bring a new professionalism to her videos.
Hell, AVFM Bully-in-chief Paul Elam is still so angry about this that he’s already accusing her of “damseling for dollars,” collecting “gash-cash” because of these latest Twitter threats. Indeed, in a post that’s a lot more revealing than he intends it to be, he complains bitterly that she’s getting bigger donations than he is:
I am jealous. I have had half the major media in a couple of countries disingenuously and maliciously demonize me. Even after forcing some retractions I bet I got more threats than Sarkeesian.
My reward? Jack shit.
Maybe it was because I didn’t swoon hard enough or treat the threats like they were tickets to Disneyworld.
Oh, don’t be modest, Paul. You take in tens of thousands every year by pretending to be some sort of human rights generalissimo. You raked in $35,000 this summer by trumpeting “threats” that you were saying privately were phony.
While Elam “damsels” and fumes, Sarkeesian simply goes about doing the job she set out to do. Each video she puts out is yet another “fuck you” to her haters, and they know it.
U mad bros?
Here’s the video that caused all the stir. It’s well worth watching. CONTENT WARNING: Graphic violence against women.
If Edward comes back, I want to point out to him that this is not a thread about what Edward doesn’t like about Fem Frequency videos. It’s a thread about the DEATH AND RAPE THREATS MADE TO ANITA AND HER ENTIRE FAMILY. See, Ed, this is why you’re a misogynist asshole troll.
You ask who I am.
I’m Batman.
*asked*
Yeppers! On the post about this on Pharygula a male commenter took the critiques of the games by one female commenter as her saying he personally was a terrible person for enjoying the games. Sort of like Edward up there. He was *so mad* because he is totes a good guy and how dare you say I am terrible even though you never said that!
He then ended his pointless rant by saying he wanted to see her hurt and watch her burn.
Like defending yourself 101. Don’t pile insults onto yourself when they don’t even exist. Don’t prove said imagined insults to be true right after insisting you are such an awesome dude.
booburry: Yeah, I remember that. An absolutely jaw-dropping comment.
Edward Gemmer:
Then you can’t expect anyone to take you seriously in critical discussions of the work of Johnny Cash, because you’re over-invested and take things too personally.
I am now imagining how on earth I would have managed to navigate my university career if I’d taken personal offence every time I felt someone misrepresented my favourite works. It’s laughable that you think this is a real concern for anyone who is serious about reading and writing criticism. If you feel a work is being misrepresented in popular criticism, write new and better analysis that represents your point of view. If your analysis is solid, it will penetrate the mainstream and become an accepted and respectable school of thought on that work. This is how the entire cycle of art and media criticism works. Hurt feelings and offended fans don’t come into it.
Damn dude, if it’s not about you, it’s not about you.
Unless it’s about you,
in which case
it’s about you.
And I meant possess, not obsess, dammit. *grumbles*
You really do need to find a way to deal with problematic popular culture even, or perhaps especially, when you like it. I’ve been a Sean Bean fan for years, and there are some worrying things concerning his private life that has lead to a need for me to decide on where the boundries goes, as a fan. I get irritated with people sometimes when they try to claim I’m horrible by proxy if I still like Sharpe and Boromir, but that’s all. I get a bit annoyed. And that is when someone is saying flat out “If you like this you’re an awful person” and not when people just generally criticize him (which has nothing whatsoever to do with me personally) and I don’t somehow make it my head canon that they’re really, attacking ME in a deviously, sneaky way.
To Nathan hevenstone,
I found your post about how you were bullied so heart wrenching. Hugs if you want them. I was “mildly” bullied, if you will. No actual violence, but a lot of pointing, laughing, and name calling. In high school it died down, because I became more attractive (saw this happen with other brainy girl nerds who suddenly got popular at the onset of puberty. Yucky, I know). I would often witness other kids getting bullied, beat up, etc and I ALWAYS intervened. Mostly just screaming “stop it!!!” Usually they’d scatter like cockroaches when I did that, partly because sometimes I was older than the group or, as a friend pointed out to me once, they probably thought I was the teacher (not by looks, but by authoritative tone and sound) a couple times it has put me in a dangerous situation, where the bully(ies) in question turned on me. Then I would run away. A couple times I got pushed around, literally, and called a bunch of slurs.
My point is not to say what a great bystander I am, but to say how Ive always had a visceral response to bullying, and I just felt it when you told your story. I felt like it was happening to me. How that must’ve hurt.
My husband was brutally bullied as a kid and he has similar social anxieties, like getting anxious in crowds or thinking he’s the butt of a joke when he’s not. Walmart practically gives him a panic attack (but I think that’s true for most people, haha).
Anyway, I’m glad you survived and I hope you’re doing well in adulthood!
To be fair, when you hang around with people who are dumb enough to do something like this (Elam and the Doubletree, anyone?), it starts to look plausible.
Matthew Cline, didn’t you used to post here as “kymchanur” or something like it? I recognize your avatar.
Cheap socks makes me think of Pell – maybe if he invested in better quality, we wouldn’t be able to see through him so quickly!
I’m familiar with “women in refrigerators” trope. I was asking if she’d ever claimed a direct causal relationship between game violence and IRL violence.
Weird, I use it periodically with no trouble. Did you put “strike” in the brackets, or something else?
@Thread, while we’re confessing our problematic likes? In addition to being a huge Lovecraft fan, I can’t stop listening to “Forever” by Chris Brown. I heard it before I knew who he was, I didn’t pay for my copy, and I wouldn’t spit on Chris Brown if he was on fire, but I still like the song.
@Alex M: Oh man, am I glad human babies don’t eat like chicks. Also, I was seriously relieved when one of them finally managed to swallow that blueberry.
I’ve heard good things about Heroine’s Quest but I haven’t had time to play it.
I’ve played plenty of games where women are part of your team and aren’t sexualized. X-Com Enemy Unknown is one, but the women’s equipment is smaller than the men’s (weapons shorter, armor smaller, not that it covers less) because the women are smaller than the men and I think the developers just shrank their men models a bit as part of making the women.
Fire Emblem and Valkyria Chronicles both feature women in every role, and in fact some of my most valuable Fire Emblem soldiers have been women (e.g., Titania and Nefenee). Note no boob plate on either of them (although the point at the front of Nephenee’s breastplate looks uncomfortable).
I don’t recall any cheesecake armor in the Baldur’s Gate games, or in (what little I have played of) Dragon Age. There is some cheesecake armor in Skyrim, but I don’t seem to recall that it’s the norm.
I’ll recommend Shadowrun Returns, whose combat is very similar to X-Com but is more of a straightforward, fairly linear RPG instead of a squad-based strategy game. It’s been a while since I played the whole thing (recently started it again) but I don’t recall anything particularly problematic (although it is fairly dark. Still, one of the main characters is a WoC and the cast as a whole is remarkably diverse).
@teiresias:
Yep, that’s a Fridging, but for what it’s worth I don’t think Aleena is particularly sexualized. She gets a full suit of chain mail, as opposed to a chain bikini or whatever the heck they gave Alias. (That’s the cover to the video game and novel Curse of the Azure Bonds. I recall the novel specifically says that outfit is magical and the Absolute Cleavage is as protected as the rest of her torso. But still. Totally gratuitous.)
(Also gratuitous is that, when they published her stats for use in tabletop AD&D, every single one of her ability scores was 17.)
Standard warning: Fan art of Aleena (and for that matter the Fire Emblem characters I mentioned above) has been just as gratuitous as anything, ever.
@ blahlistic,
I’d have to go back and watch the video again, but my recollection is that she opined the reason we should really care about these fake images is because there are real world domestic and sexual violence against women at “epidemic levels.” Perhaps not an explicit claim that games affect reality, but certainly one implied.
So I guess that’s my latest opinion – I agree with her on the facts here, but the video just seems to go over the same ground over and over without making a convincing case of what the problem is. Yes, women are depicted as background decorations in videogames, but this fact doesn’t particularly make me think this is a huge problem for videogames as opposed to all other media. It’s not a fact that really requires a lot of explaining, and there wasn’t much of a payoff.
On the Pharyngula thread about the latest video somebody said something about how it wasn’t enough to just have naked women, it was an important detail that they were all suffering.
Next somebody got angry because they thought that comment implied all people who played games liked hurting women. (a reading fail right out of the gate)
How did they respond?
Well, I have to quote this part exactly, because it’s now burned into my head.
I can’t think a more succinct example of exactly what you said, Cassandra. Yep, way to show us all that you definitely don’t have a streak in you that wants women specifically to suffer! Saying that to a woman.
(which is to say, saying that to somebody with a not-particularly-gendered handle and a slightly-female-looking avatar)
Yes, women are depicted as background decorations in videogames, but this fact doesn’t particularly make me think this is a huge problem for videogames as opposed to all other media.
Ladies and gentlemen; Edward Gemmer, and his amazing motorized goalposts! Yaaaay!
http://giphy.com/gifs/DpB9NBjny7jF1pd0yt2
Aaand, eaten by the blockquote monster. Let me try that again.
Ladies and gentlemen; Edward Gemmer, and his amazing motorized goalposts! Yaaaay!
http://giphy.com/gifs/DpB9NBjny7jF1pd0yt2
@Edward Gemmer
… Isn’t the problem that women (particularly dead, brutalized, and sexualized women) are used as background decorations in games? Or do you mean she doesn’t make a convincing case about what causes the problem?
Anita has another series “Tropes vs. Women,” which focuses on sexist tropes in a wider media, so you can’t fault this series for being focused on video games. So how can you say she doesn’t make a convincing case of what the problem is?
Hey, maybe it seems obvious to you. That just means she did a really good job of explaining it. Plenty of people don’t get it, as evidenced by the legions of harassers and trolls vilifying her.
I don’t know man. To me, it just seems like you want her to be wrong somehow, even though you agree with everything she says.
I don’t know why people get so wound up about Anita Sarkeessian. She’s just rehashing the old “violence in video games causes violence in real life” argument. It’s boring and been debunked over and over.
That’s not even close to what she’s actually doing, but thanks for trying.
That does not make it not a problem in video games.
I used to really like Thunderf00t, when he still made fun of creationist. ,mostly. Even that series went downhill after he started talking less and less about scientific things.
It doesn’t help that after he started talking about Muslims and other cultural, societal and even economic things, only showed how little he understood these subjects. He has then turned increasingly bitter, angry and pointless. Not that there’s anything wrong with being angry, and sometimes even bitter, but the more he spouts out the bullshit he has now gotten into, the worse he makes himself look. He stopped being entertaining to me pretty much the moment he started moving into anti-muslim things.
He has enough yes-men to keep feeding his ego, no matter how wrong he is.
He has also become increasingly hypocritical – including not answering to many of his critics, making arguments that are either baseless or cherry picking his material and deriving the actual subject and in general using many of the tactics used by the very same people he built his original fame bashing. Worst of all, he clearly refuses to actually learn about the subject before he tries taking any argument he disagrees with down.
This is something that many, many science-minded folks have repeatedly stated – there’s no point in engaging someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Sad thing is, that he doesn’t realize he is wrong, and no matter what, probably will never admit it. It really seems like his initial popularity has filled his head. Or as we say here in Finland – the piss got into his hat.
On the other hand, I’m GLAD he outed himself as the douchecanoe he is. I’d rather not be a fan of someone with a mind as toxic as his. It didn’t take me long to unsubscribe from him when I still used youtube… and that was long before his feminist-tirade.
And I’m especially glad that several people, youtubers and otherwise, I have been a fan of from the same circles have proudly announced disagreeing with him and even debunking his arguments, many even showing support to a lot of the people TF has started waging his little war against.
All in all, a lot of the things TF has been up to lately would be fucking hilarious, if they weren’t so sad and/or enraging.
(Its kinda like the deal with Dawkins – good at some things, but should reaaally stay away from anything outside his field. Only I find TF way more obnoxious.)
@TinyOrc,
“This is how the entire cycle of art and media criticism works. Hurt feelings and offended fans don’t come into it.”
Hence, the numerous videos and pieces about Sarkeesian’s series.
@kirbywarp,
“I don’t know man. To me, it just seems like you want her to be wrong somehow, even though you agree with everything she says.”
I don’t think she is wrong, outside of the couple things I’ve mentioned. More, I’m explaining why I’m losing interest in her videos. Her earlier stuff had an almost playful side to it, which was entertaining. She seems to be slogging through this series, and every episode gets grimmer and grimmer in the not so interesting THIS IS SERIOUS tone. But I’m not convinced it’s serious. Yes, I agree with her premises, and I would like better treatment of women in videogames. But getting through her last couple videos has been a chore, and at the end I don’t really feel like I learned anything, which is not what I thought about her early work in this series and her stuff before then.
I’m not some big gamer, so part of it is that I just don’t care about some obscure scene in some obscure game I’ve never heard of. Further, I have played some videogames, so some of her statements ring a little hollow – i.e. look at this horrible scene of violence against a woman, it comes right after you kill 200 men. But like I said earlier, there just isn’t any joy in this series, and a series without joy and without making a great point isn’t something I get excited about.
Thus Spake ZaraFalconer:
Yeah, XCOM: Enemy Unknown (which I heartily recommend to anybody who likes turn-based tactical games) won a lot of points in my book for depicting women like soldiers and not like pinups. And for having female soldiers, which you wouldn’t think would be a Big Deal, almost forty years after the Women’s Army Corps was merged into the U.S. Army, but was enough to cause temper tantrums from some of the dudebros… because apparently cyborgs, flying saucers and mental powers are totes okay, but women in uniform is suspension-of-disbelief-shattering unrealistic.
On a related note, I loved the way Ace Patrol (a simple turn-based WWI dogfighting game, which I also recommend if that sounds like your thing) included women and people of color. Naturally, that also provoked howls of rage from smugly privileged manbabies… and unfortunately, the developer caved enough to add a “Male Pilots Only” to its sequel, for all those grotty neckbeards who can’t enjoy a game if it includes women with agency.