Blog Essay: Anita Sarkeesian's Fight Against #GamerGate

Trigger warning: rape threats, harassment, death threats

     For those who do not already know her, allow me to introduce you to one of the most successful people on YouTube, Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian is the host of the channel Feminist Frequency, which is a feminist critique of pop culture media with a focus on the video game industry. Earlier this year, she received the 2014 Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award, which “honors an individual [who has] helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games and help further [the] art” (Game Developers Choice Awards).

(Source: Feminist Frequency)

     However, her videos have also triggered harassment toward her and her work that goes far beyond hateful YouTube comments.

     Since beginning her video series in 2009, Sarkeesian has become the target of what she calls “a massive online hate campaign” (Sarkeesian, TEDxWomen 2012). This has included hundreds of death threats, rape threats, and the digital vandalism of her web presence. There was even an online flash game created in which the player could punch an image of Sarkeesian in the face, which became increasingly bruised and beat-up. Her personal information, including home address and cellphone number were also collected and distributed online, a practice called “doxing” (Sarkeesian, TEDxWomen 2012). In her 2012 TEDxWomen talk, Sarkeesian declares that terms such as “trolls” and “cyberbullies” are not sufficiently descriptive of what these perpetrators are doing; she instead proposes calling them a “cyber mob.” But Sarkeesian is determined to fight back and include her experience as a part of her mission to educate people about the mistreatment of women in the media. However, according to Laura Markey in her paper, Starving the trolls: How the news media and harassment victims can fight harmful speech online, “Sarkeesian’s is the rare success story; silenced by the cyber mob, others never merit any news coverage or public awareness” (2). This leads to her most recent media explosion as this cyber mob has only grown since 2012 and recently become legitimized by a group called GamerGate.

     GamerGate claims to have begun as a “movement” to call out ethical issues in video game journalism and as a criticism of some using the video game industry as a soap box for their social justice views. It has now become clear that GamerGate is itself a soap box and attack campaign for radical misogynists targeting people like Anita Sarkeesian. As discussed earlier, death threats are nothing new to Sarkeesian and before last Tuesday, it had never caused her to cancel an event (Wingfield).

     The day before she was to give a speech at Utah State University, an email was sent out to various members of the school administration threatening “the deadliest school shooting in American history,” if the event was allowed to continue (qtd. in Wingfield). On her Twitter, Sarkeesian says she made the choice to cancel the event not because of the threat, but because of the university’s refusal to increase security measures and check event goers for weapons, citing Utah’s law allowing the carrying of weapons.

To be clear: I didn't cancel my USU talk because of terrorist threats, I canceled because I didn’t feel the security measures were adequate.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014

     The university itself had no plans to cancel the event; USU spokesman Tim Vitale told the Standard Examiner, “The threat we received is not out of the norm for [Sarkeesian]” (qtd. Neugebauer).  Have these attacks really become so common that threats of large-scale massacre and terrorism (the person claimed to have pipe bombs) are considered 'the norm'?

Online threats against women are real, pervasive and must be taken seriously by law enforcement agencies and educational institutions alike.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 16, 2014

     We seem to be at the point where the conversation can be decidedly veered toward tackling the issue of radical misogyny and harassment online to create a safer community where people like Sarkeesian can be openly critical of gender portrayals in the media without risking their lives. If #GamerGate, as coined by GamerGate sympathizer and Firefly actor Adam Baldwin, is allowed to grow without repercussion or criticism from the media, it could have dire consequences for the cultural growth of the media and the safety of its critics. As Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell point out in their paper, Tipping Points: Marginality, Misogyny and Videogames,

[W]e need to understand and to demonstrate how these individual cases are epiphenomenal to a larger structural issue that enfranchises a ‘malestream’ of gamers (and others) to denigrate and abuse women who ‘dare’ to play and, worse yet, to make videogames (76).

     I would say this goes far beyond just an attack on feminists in the videogame community, but rather is one facet of a multiple-target attack on feminism as a whole, and the blatant abuse and harassment of women online and offline.

Works Cited

Game Developers Choice Awards Site. Ambassador Award Archive. UBM Tech. Web. 7 April 2015. <http://www.gamechoiceawards.com/archive/ambassador.html>

Jenson, Jennifer, and Suzanne De Castell. "Tipping Points: Marginality, Misogyny and Videogames." JCT (Online) 29.2 (2013): 72-                  85. ProQuest. Web. 7 April 2015.

Markey, Laura M. "Starving the Trolls: How the News Media and Harassment Victims can Fight Harmful Speech Online." Order                      No. 1539663 University of Kansas, 2013. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 7 April 2015.

Neugebauer, Cimaron. “Terror threat against feminist Anita Sarkeesian at USU.” Standard Examiner 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 7 April 2015. <http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html>

Sarkeesian, Anita. “Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen 2012” Video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q>

Sarkeesian, Anita. “Feminist Frequency” YouTube Channel. <https://www.youtube.com/user/feministfrequency>

Wingfield, Nick. “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” New York Times 15 Oct. 2014. Web.                      7 April 2015.