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.
Leave him a little love package of scented fucking candles to remember her by. 🙂
Not the good candles, though, the ones we got as gifts and thought they smelled funny.
Great. Just great. Now the only way I can retain my title as President and Dictator Misandrist for Life is to bathe in the blood of slaughtered men. And when you slaughter too many even a quite large tub will overflow and my cleaning staff are union. Thanks cassandra.
Well, I have many years of misandering practice. With time your skills will improve, young padwan.
@ Puddleglum –
I know this is late, so sorry everyone – I can’t see Aslan! I can see the owl, now that you’ve mentioned it, but mostly I see a chipmunk eating a potato chip. My brain is broken, isn’t it?
Hi, Kittehs, *waves*.
Been pretty good, thanks. Just found all the misogyny was getting me down for a while so took to lurking occasionally ’til my sense of humour reasserted itself.
And yourself and Mr K?
PS. Am I the only one who somehow reads “Mr K” as “Mr King” rather than “Mr Kittehs”? 😉
It gets like that sometimes, doesn’t it? I haven’t been that active on the blog either, mostly because I’ve no investment in gaming and that’s very much the main news at the moment. Glad to see you back here, though, and hope you’re feeling refreshed.
Mr K and I are good! Nothing much to report along those lines, but all’s well.
Mr King reminds me of how George III and Queen Charlotte called each other Mr King and Mrs King. I like it. 🙂
How many of those crappy “vilify masculinity” signs have I seen today?
http://media.tumblr.com/7f9e6607b705f4917303e2bc1d24955e/tumblr_inline_n7e8u519XD1rfrhvr.gif
@Falconer: MRA strawman illustrated by Horns of Nimon gif? I love you guys. Will catch up on 3 days of t1awful in due course.
I can’t wait to see the gamebros lose thier shit over this. 😀
https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/527601124992638976
No way.
Hee Hee Ha Ha and as we used to say back in the day Hardy Har Har!
@grumpyoldnurse, I tried really hard to see the squirrel, but the owl kept glaring at me, so I stopped.
@strivingally, ooooooh…..!!!!
@ Puddleglum – is OK. The owl probably ate it. Also, I suspect my brain might really be broken, as I really can’t see Aslan.
The shtik about masculinity reminded me – an old college friend visited me a while back. After meeting my husband and our two sons, she has since referred to my ‘overwhemingly masculine household’ with amusement. Apparently, heterosexuality is not a prerequisite to masculinity.
A while back, our older son (despite having not seen the movie) referenced the ‘This is Sparta!’ meme. I assured him that, by contemporary standards, he WAS in Sparta. He has since, after seeing the movie, commented on how it would have been nice if the Spartans could have been great warriors without being such buttheads.
@Newt: That serial never gets old. It’s just so awesomely cheesy, Nimon be praised!
So, still catching up on troll in thread, because work got busy and I just got back to it. Did he seriously issue a math challenge!
I LOVE MATH CHALLENGES!
After Calc 3, it suddenly gets really, really hard to decide which type of advanced mathematics is actually the most advanced mathematics, so his “Show me your problem and I’ll show you mine” is kind of silly at the outset. I know some people who are fabulous mathematicians and far smarter than I, but I can run circles around them in geometric applications.
Nevertheless, since he seemed to have the most problems with logic, we’ll start with a “simple” proofs exercise. Proofs are the foundation of pretty much all theoretical mathematics, and the proofs course is generally about midway through any undergraduate mathematics program.
Hey, let’s even be snarkier! Let’s specifically deal with equivalence relations. Bwahahaha.
Troll, if thou still be lurking… despite probably having been banhammered by now since I’m still 3 pages back in comments… your problem is thus:
Prove the following:
Suppose A is a set and F is a partition of A. Let R = UX ∈ F(X x X). Then R is an equivalence relation on A. (Specifically, R is the equivalence relation determined by F)
(crosses fingers and hopes that my meager html-ing skills don’t bork the “is an element” sign or the subscripts…)
Well, bork the subscript. And the italics.
X ∈ F should be subscripty.
I’m just going to write another poem and not think too hard about that one, because I understand the words, but not what it means.
@ Fibinachi
Silly little troll
Pooping on-line because troll
Can’t grok adjectives
Hahahaha! Apparently we’re at the “All you need to know evolution is Wikipedia!” and the “Wiki-GOTCHA” phase.
Why did I waste all those hours in my senior year taking that class! It’s as simple as a wikipedia quote! REPRODUCTION REIGNS AND MUTATIONS ARE IRRELEVANT! NATURAL SELECTION IS ALL OF EVOLUTION! THERE CAN BE NO EVOLUTION WITHOUT NATURAL SELECTION! GENETIC DRIFT IS TOTALLY NOT A THING! OR ANYTHING ELSE! IT’S ALL NATURAL SELECTION AND REPRODUCTION, BABY!
…eh-hem. Sorry, lost myself in troll dearests flails.
This thread is so amusing. I’m so many pages behind though.
I just watched Anita Sarkeesian on the Colbert Report. Oh how I delighted in the misandry! I look forward to the gamergater rage tears and wanks that will be forthcoming.
How was it, WWTH? I live in Oz and we’re not likely to get it here for a few days at least.
@strivingally
No need to wait, it’s been uploaded already.
The #Gits are flipping the hell out out; equal parts denial, cries of “Sellout! Boycott!” and crises of faith. It’s glorious.
*Sans one of the outs. Not sure how that happened. =P