Jessica Valenti talks to Anita Sarkeesian.
Sarkeesian also points out that explicit abuse is just one way women are harassed online: some are targeted with conspiracy theories, or social media accounts that impersonate the victim. One person fabricated a tweet from Sarkeesian claiming she had spent her Kickstarter funds on designer shoes (with a picture of Gucci flats alongside a caption reading, “Buying 1,000-dollar shoes”).
Women are much more likely to be harassed in online spaces than men, and the harassment is much more likely to be sexually violent. A 2006 study by theUniversity of Maryland found that when the gender of a username appears to be female, the user is 25 times more likely to experience harassment. That same study found that those female-sounding usernames averaged 163 threatening or sexually explicit messages a day.
Because that’s what women are for – to be fucked or hated or both.
Sarkeesian is also fond of calling GamerGate a “sexist temper tantrum”, because “it does have that feeling of the kid screaming and you don’t know why”. When I point out that temper tantrums are generally thought of as harmless rages, and that the abuse she and other women have faced is much more serious, she agrees.
“That’s the reason I don’t like the words ‘troll’ and ‘bully’ – it feels too childish. This is harassment and abuse,” she says. But still, she says, GamerGate is a temper tantrum: “It’s just a scary, violent, abusive, temper tantrum. It’s an attack and an assault on women in the gaming industry. Its purpose is to silence women, and if they can’t, they attempt to discredit them.
“These dudes fling shit. They’re throwing things out there and trying to get something to stick.”
And of course something always does stick. Often everything sticks.
Valenti points out that a lot of the harassment comes from very young boys.
While Sarkeesian is careful to point out that the stereotype of teenagers in their parents’ basement is a dangerous one (much of the most dangerous harassment is perpetrated by grown men) she shares my concern that a younger generation is growing up with harassment of women not just as the norm, but as a way to impress your peers.
“There’s a boys’-locker-room feel to the internet, where men feel they can show off for one another,” she says. “A lot of the harassment is tied to this toxic masculine culture of ‘Look how cool I can be.’” Someone will send a woman a death threat and screencap it, posting it on a forum, which in turn inspires another man to do something even worse in a horrifying game of misogynist oneupmanship.
That’s the slime pit. That describes it exactly.
Sarkeesian’s strategy for dealing with her most persistent harassers is largely to block and ignore them. “There are men who make videos about me regularly. Some are just screaming; some hold guns while they talk about hating me. I don’t engage with them, as I don’t want to amplify their voices.”
Many of these men will insist it’s all for fun, or just a joke, but whether the intent is to harm, or simply to do some chest-puffing for friends, “it still perpetuates all of the harmful myths attached to that language and those words,” Sarkeesian says.
Perpetuates it, models it, rewards it…
Independent developers tell Sarkeesian her work makes them want to create better games. “People come up to me at events and tell me how much my work has meant to them and that it has helped them to speak up,” she says. At conferences, she can’t get from one end of the room to the other without people in the industry telling her how much they like what she’s doing.
That’s wonderful, Sarkeesian acknowledges, but she wants to know: “What are you doing? Because what is my work if you’re not going to do something about it, too?”
Sarkeesian is exhausted – she hasn’t taken a break since 2012 – but she’s not willing to give up. Even with the death threats, the obsessive abusers, the fear and the enormous personal cost, she asks a question asked by so many change-makers: “How can I give up now? I’m not going anywhere.”
Rock on.