A prominent feminist media critic, Anita Sarkeesian, recently had to cancel a speaking engagement at the University of Utah. Scheduled to talk about the portrayal of women in video games, Sarkeesian cancelled the event under threat of a “Montreal Massacre style attack.” What did she do to cause such vitriol? America has 190 million gamers, and 48 percent of them are women, Sarkeesian, a lifelong gamer herself, simply dared to analyze the way that women are portrayed in video games.
Sarkeesian first gained attention when she crowdfunded $160,000 on Kickstarter in 2012 for her video series, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The videos she has made about depictions of women in video games are smart, funny, and downright amazing. Who knew? Check them out on YouTube and you’ll see some of the misogynistic blow-back too, if you can stomach it.
She began receiving death threats after winning a Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award. Sarkeesian routinely receives backlash for her criticism of the industry, but this latest round of threats took the harassment to another level. To understand her drive to speak out on the industry, Sarkeesian was recently quoted on NPR as saying, “Often women are framed as helpless or they’re prizes to be won or they’re highly sexualized male fantasies.”
“The other piece of this too is that there’s this enormous amount of violence against women that’s used in these games often times as sort of set dressing. Just in the background these women are hurt or beaten up just to make the world seem more gritty,” Sarkeesian added. “These representations are really harmful to women, and so we’re asking for better representations and better stories having more female protagonists that are full and complete characters.”
Part of A Larger Debate About Sexism, Misogyny, and Harassment
The threats against Sarkeesian and other women in the gaming industry are part of a larger ongoing debate about sexism, misogyny, and harassment in the video game community. According to Upstart Business Journal, Sarkeesian is one of the higher profile targets of a recent phenomenon known as GamerGate, a nearly impossible-to-define movement that runs the gamut from conspiracy theories about game developers and journalists to a fairly broad group of gamers concerned with corruption in gaming journalism and a fringe group of gamers with misogynistic and even violent agendas. Sarkeesian argues that those who support GamerGate are implicitly supporting the harassment of women. As a result, the hashtag #StopGamerGate2014 trended nationally on Twitter.
Sarkeesian is not alone when it comes to GamerGate harassment; she is joined by a number of writers, creators, developers and critics who are currently subject to this bizarre form of what blogger Melissa McEwan has called “terrorist misogyny.” While the majority of people who work in games and play video games are horrified by what is going on, the attacks keep coming from a fringe movement that hides behind the GamerGate banner. The attacks on Sarkeesian go far beyond the important issues that she is drawing attention to and shine a light on the dark side of the Internet.
It’s been clear from the earliest chat rooms that the loudest and sometimes most hateful or threatening voices can drown everyone else out, if we let them. Today that is abundantly clear everywhere from online comment sections, to social media, to chat rooms. Now however, many of those voices have locked in on women as their target, and women across the board are finding themselves subject to what McEwan calls the “misogyny tax –the personal cost to being a woman in the public eye (or any sphere); the cost to one’s emotional resources to be expected to weather all manner of misogyny just in order to compete with men on a professional (or other) level.”
Women Are Staying Silent, Out of Fear or Fatigue
As a result of what Sarkeesian, and many women are enduring, women are leaving their voices off the Internet. They are staying quiet, whether out of fear or fatigue, and we are losing out on the contributions they could make.
Maureen Ryan sums it up well in Huffington Post, where she wrote:
So many brilliant, smart, provocative and innovative women are working in so many different creative realms right now. I probably won’t like every single thing they produce, and neither will you. But we might love some of it. On some level the quality of that work (and your opinion of it) are entirely beside the point. No matter what, I want them to be able to create. I want women to have the mental resources to do work that matters to them. I want them to be able to work without fear of harm to their bodies or minds. I want women to be able to write and to speak and to make things and to shout sometimes.
Women Need To Stand Together And Say “Enough!”
I couldn’t agree with her more. We need to unite, and celebrate social media for what it is, a great way to connect, to empower, and to lead our sisters to equality! At no time in our history have we had the ability to connect on such a global scale and share events in real time. Social media has the ability to bring positive transformation to every corner of the globe, if we can avoid getting caught up in the downside. And the only way we can avoid that is to stand together and say enough!