What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.
Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:
We need to seriously address connections between violence, sexism and toxic ideas of manhood before boys and men commit more mass shootings.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014
Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014
While it it not literally true that every single mass shooter in history has been male, we are talking about an almost exclusively male club: one recent attempt at crunching the numbers found that 97% of school shooters have been male, and 79% of them white. (The Maryville shooter was Native American.)
In any case, the notion that a crime so heavily associated with men might have something to do with our society’s notions of masculinity isn’t exactly a radical notion. Indeed, it seems rather obvious.
But to Sarkeesian’s many haters, on Twitter and elsewhere, it was as if Sarkeesian had just posted a video of herself drowning puppies. Cue the twitterstorm.
Here are just a selection of the literally hundreds of lovely comments that Sarkeesian had Tweeted at her on Friday and Saturday after making her original comments.
[Giant TRIGGER WARNING for violent, explicit threats, harassment]
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There were, of course, the explicit threats:
And the implicit threats:
And the sexual harassment:
And those who merely expressed their hope that Sarkeesian would kill herself:
Or die a horrible death:
Or simply die :
But not everyone wished violence on her. Some just told her that the threats and/or harassment she’s already getting is totally justified:
(Apparently by “fishing” Mr. de Alba means “expressing an opinion or making an observation.” Also note that the tweets that set off this latest wave of harassment didn’t contain the #GamerGate hashtag. )
Speaking of harassment, we’re just getting started in our chronicle of the latest wave.
Let’s continue with an assortment of Tweets using the c-word, a favorite slur amongst Sarkeesian’s detractors.
Why, yes, that is Suzanne McCarley, A Voice for Men’s “Assistant Managing Editor” happily adding her voice to the harassment.
Others pulled out the f-word:
She was called a “bitch.”
She was called a “whore.”
She was called a “terrorist.”
And a Nazi:
One fellow said that he thought Sarkeesian’s tweets were actually worse than the shooting itself:
And one even declared her “officially worse than Wil Wheaton,” the former Star Trek:TNG actor who has won mass opprobrium from internet dicks for publicly expressing his belief that people should not be dicks.
To add insult to injury, a few reported Sarkeesian herself to Twitter for various imaginary infractions:
Another asked why she wasn’t in jail for her, er, crimes:
Just to remind you: these tweets are all from TWO DAYS’ worth of harassment and threats on Twitter. And this isn’t all of them.
At this point anyone who claims that Sarkeesian is “making up” the harassment she gets, or writing it herself, or just the work of a “few trolls,” is either disingenuous or delusional.
I’ll leave the last word to Sarkeesian herself.
Our culture is deeply sick when simply asking questions about how toxic forms of masculinity may harm men leads to hours of hate on Twitter.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 25, 2014
EDITED TO ADD:
ATTENTION NEW COMMENTERS! I would like to draw your attention to this bit from my comments policy:
[I]f I’m writing about someone who’s gotten harassed by misogynists on the internet, and you want to talk about how much they deserved it, or what a lying liar they are? Well, fuck you! Your comments go right into the trash.
So take that into consideration. It might save you some time.
CORRECTION: I removed a screenshot of a Tweet that wasn’t threatening but was posted by a troll. See here.
@Bina, sadly, my own personal gunnutz aficionado responded to the news of the parliament shooting by going directly to the conspiracy theory forums and watching videos of interviews with people who were VERY CONCERNED that the implementation of the gun registry was step one in the plot to confiscate all the guns. Just you wait, they said back then, it’s going to happen SOON. He seemed to find that wrongness reassuring, somehow.
Also, the people responsible for the radicalization of young converts to Islam such as the shooter? The ZOG, obviously. I said, “Buh?” He said, “Who benefits, Unimaginative?” I said, “The gun and ammunition manufacturers? The military-industrial complex?” He said, “Noooo.” Apparently, I’m a sheeple.
It’s yet another issue we can’t talk about seriously, because the rational part of the brain cannot engage.
Those people are so disgusting… not only misogynistic, but also ableist. Insulting in all possible ways to any human being.
I may agree or disagree on certain points with her, but I absolutely admire her courage to go on. I don’t know if I would have been as strong as she shows to be.
She’s also quite professional about it. She hasn’t mentioned the harassment and threats she suffers herself on any of her videos so far. She keeps speaking of the content just as she did from the start, putting sexism in videogames as the main issue, and not placing herself as the “star”. I appreciate that, and I bet it must be difficult to do as well, besides her research itself.
There’s this “excuse” or attempt of “justification” I keep reading everywhere from GamerGate supporters: “She’s not even a gamer!”
She doesn’t have to. She’s a Sociologyst, and she’s doing her job focusing on videogames. And she’s good at what she does, given the reactions that prove her points.
John L. Blummer drew the image reproduced at the top of this post.
Yes, precisely.
I think that, at this point, Anita Sarkeesian can say anything – literally anything – and the haters will all go “RAGE RAGE RAAAAAGE! ARGLE BARGLE!”
As long as we live in a culture where violence is an expected and accepted make response to encountering rejection or disagreement, these tragedies will continue to happen. The fact that miss Sarkeesian is showered with threats (by primarily men) for taking about a situation where a man shot people because of what he heard from a woman only illustrates this point further.
Once again, I continue to be amazed at how Anita Sarkeesian can not only weather this constant floods of harassment, but can continue to act in a professional and academic manner in the face of it all. I applaud her conviction and bravery.
*male, not make. And flood, not floods. I really need to proofread my comments beforehand.
The stance that it’s a mental health issue is also a political one. Yet no one ever scolds the “he was just crazy” brigade about politicizing mental health and the shootings. Gee. I wonder why?
When three women a day are killed by their partners (IIRC that figure doesn’t even include women being killed by their exes and men they were never with but just rejected) there is literally never a day in which we can talk about misogyny and toxic masculinity by the “don’t politicize a tragedy” logic. Every day a tragedy occurs. Every day someone is freshly grieving the death of a woman or girl lost to misogyny. To me that means it’s not a topic to be avoided, but a topic to be discussed every day.
Those tweets are just, just awful.
On the other hand, although this meme on the Voice for Men FB page might be aiming for awful, it made me laugh: https://www.facebook.com/102001393188684/photos/a.392418540813633.89052.102001393188684/725604650828352/?type=1&theater
That is the most badly constructed sentence I’ve ever seen in my life.
I like how these people think that a person is a man-hater when they suggest that maybe out culture’s narrow views of masculinity might be harmful for everyone in the system.
On a similar note, when the news about Anita cancelling her speech finally arrived into my country via media, it was addressed by a sensationalistic click-bait site with absolutely no journalistic merit, with a title calling the people who threatened the event with violence “a bunch of sissy mom’s teat sucking crybabies”, a friend’s friend commented on the shared article how Sarkeesian is a whore. Another one went on about thunderfoot.Another kid explained how the sex of video game main characters doesn’t matter, and how we have enough female leads anyway. He apparently expected cookies for his progressive opinions.
A guy I knew personally started talking about how Sarkeesian and her ilk don’t care about gaming, and how she’s a scamming click-baiting hypocrite, and how Gamergate is not about harassment, it’s about ethics in journalism. (The last guy also endorsed Summer’s video, commenting how it had such good, well spoken points. He’s the only one out of these guys who is an adult.)
David’s couple of tweets to @b00nes about this, and the b00nes jackass first said that there was no “stated” connection to GamerGate in all these responses, then finished by characterizing Sarkeesian as making her first tweets “shamelessly” in order to “line her pockets,” thereby making her “fair game.”
Some can recognize active GG’s by their nyms, but anyone can take a look at time lines to see which ones are active. But where the fuck b00nes thinks there’s evidence of shamelessness or lining of pockets except pulled out of one’s ass, I couldn’t say.
And from now on, I’m going to view askance–with deep suspicion and stirrings of disgust–anyone who uses the phrase “fair game” about a person rather than a topic.
But she hasn’t brought out the truth about Benghazi yet. Don’t forget that.
It is possible to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, whether or not the “let’s not politicize this tragedy” police are going to emerge by looking at who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.
For example, I don’t recall “let’s not politicize this” being said after 9/11, certainly not by anyone in a position of power, and not by the people who are saying it now about this murder. 9/11 led to two fucking wars; there’s very little in this life that is more political than a war. People questioned the wisdom of the wars, but did not question, to any important degree, whether or not 9/11 was a political act that required a political response.
But when the victims are mainly or exclusively from groups that are systematically oppressed, suddenly the political nature of the violence becomes invisible and the “let’s not politicize this” police come out, to shake their fingers and deny that any politics are involved unless someone starts to talk about it.
@grumpycatisagirl: and I went into the comments. In about the bottom third of the page, two comments under the Joker pic, a female asks if the grammar can be cleaned up so she can link the OP image. And they take out their rageboners on her.
See, even asking men to fix the grammar on a misogynist pic so that a woman can share it is MISANDRY.
I hope that woman gets a clue soon. I have no idea why she wants to side with them. They don’t want her in the clubhouse unless they can use her as a shield.
Oh, but of course. Questioning Second Amendmentists’ crapaganda makes EVERYONE a human sheep. Never mind that the long-gun registry was NEVER, in all its years of implementation, used as grounds for wholesale confiscation. Hunters and collectors were never bothered. The only guns that WERE confiscated, were either stolen, or illegally imported, or used in the commission of crimes, or some combination thereof. And all of our chiefs of police thought it was a dandy detective tool, because it helped them dismantle entire networks of organized criminals dealing in those things. And now they’re hamstrung because some bunch of gun-sucking wankers were all “waaa, waaaa, we don’t want you to treat us like criminals“. Even though a better analogy was that they were being treated like car owners. When’s the last time you saw someone kvetch about the requirement to have a licence and registration for that?
Oh, but they do…if you happen to take the stance that public mental healthcare funding should be increased. They’re quite happy to label someone a nutcase, but NOT to actually do anything to help them.
I especially “like” the comment that says “correlation does not imply causation”, while clearly having no understanding of what that means. Correlation does not imply causation for two main reasons, and I’m wondering which one he is endorsing.
Is it 1: the directionality problem, where you don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect? Meaning, is he suggesting that going on killing sprees causes you to become male?
Or is it 2: the third cause problem, where some other unknown variable causes both factors, meaning that something is causing both malehood and killing sprees?
Or maybe this is just a phrase he heard somewhere and can’t be bothered to understand before he repeats it?
This article is honestly disgusting. That Psychicpebbles tweet was taken totally out context, just to support the uneducated points you’re trying to make.
@Mike Baker
You’re a fucking idiot and and an ableist to boot.
You know what was insensitive to the victims and their families? Getting out a gun and firing it at other human beings. That’s insensitive. Talking about it is not insensitive. See everything I wrote above about how this act was political the moment it was carried out.
You know what could have negative effects? Getting out a gun and firing it at other human beings.
Go step on every lego in the damned world. Defining someone as mentally ill, not before they commit an act of murder but afterward, so that all acts of murder are by definition committed only by people who are mentally ill, is the act of a fucking ableist murder apologist. You, sir, are a murder apologist. Think long and hard about the life choices that put you in that position.
Pallygirl, wow . . . I hadn’t looked at the comments. She got called a c— several times over for suggesting the “who’s” be corrected to “whose.” And also lazy and stupid and expecting men to do everything for you.
There is no misogyny to see there. None at all. Women who reject feminism will be totes respected.
OFFS.
Dude, don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter HOW she “framed” this. Merely being a woman, and speaking of it AS a woman, was all the bad “framing” it took. Don’t believe me? Just look at all the gendered slurs being lobbed at her head. Go on…LOOK. I’ll wait.
@ Mike Baker
Fuck you. I’m mentally ill and I’ve NEVER EVER considered killing or hurting othet people. Not when I was being bullied in middle school, not when I was ostracized in high school, and not when guys rejected me. Take your ableism elsewhere. The problem here is NOT mental illness. It’s lax gun laws and male entitlement.
@Mike Baker
W.T.F
You HOPED this would be framed as a mental health problem? Do you have any idea how utterly offensive that is? Go and do some actual fucking research before you decide to frame violent crime as the by-product of mental health difficulties – the majority of violent crime and homicides are committed by people who DO NOT have mental health problems, and people with severe mental health difficulties are more likely to be victims, NOT perpetrators, of violent crime.
I can’t even with you.
“Sarkeesian, to an outsider and someone who disagrees with her use of negative language connotations, made a mistake by reframing this as a cultural issue when it may be more likely a psychological issue.”
The thing is, even if the shooter had an undiagnosed mental illness (as the others said, just assuming so without even a shred of proof smacks of dickheaded bigotry and complete cluelessness, but for the sake of my point I’m going to be really fucking generous here)…
It’s still a cultural issue.
Between the American right successfully painting any sort of health care system as SOCIALISM!!! and the fact that men and boys are taught from an early age that seeking help is “Unmanly” and a reason for mockery, it’s still a cultural issue.
You know, it seems to me that what people are mad at is that Anita promoted her book and ideology so soon, and by using, a tragedy. Also you having taken most of these tweets out of context or stripped the context from them.
Mike Baker and GigaWalrus can fuck off. This mealymouthed “too soon/too political” is the reason we can’t seem to curb gun violence in this country. If we never talk about it, nothing happens, and it suits turds like this just fine.
OK, dudes, we’ll just sweep this one under the rug and not talk about entitlement or ease of getting guns until the next one, while your ilk makes some empty mewling noises about mental illness.