“All of my social media sites were flooded with threats of rape, violence, sexual assault, death. And you’ll notice that these threats and comments were all specifically targeting my gender,” Anita Sarkeesian said of her battle with cyber harassers, one of whom developed a game for punching her face into a bloody pulp, in her 2012 Ted Talk.
Sarkeesian, a feminist pop culture critic perhaps best known for her “Tropes vs. Women” YouTube series, will speak Thursday in Baker Theatre at 5 p.m. Part of the Law, Justice, and Culture Center’s series on Critical Resistance in the Digital Age, Sarkeesian’s presentation focuses on the unprecedented scale of cybersexism she faced after launching a KickStarter campaign to raise money for a series of videos examining common representation of women in video games.
Sarkeesian’s experience is far from unusual for women with significant Internet presences. In “A Woman’s Opinion Is the Miniskirt of the Internet,” left-wing journalist Laurie Penny recounts her experiences with direct threats made to both her and her “school-age sisters” as a result of her job. She writes that as a woman, “having (an opinion) and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.”
Here at Ohio University, we’ve seen this phenomenon manifest itself as members of F--kRapeCulture were contacted on personal phones and social media accounts by men’s rights activists threatening to teach them “how it feels to be really raped,” as well as anonymous OU Confessions tweets saying FRC members “just need to be fked hard.” We’ve seen groups organized around harassing the supposedly “man-hating feminist” Dean of Students Jenny Hall-Jones and making an OU student falsely associated with the Court Street incident delete her social media presence to deter the threats.
Amanda Hess’ piece “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” suggests that the solution offered to the aforementioned student is almost universal: delete your accounts, modify your Internet use, and ignore the hate speech. “Don’t feed the trolls” is the cliché advice given to those who experience Internet bullying, as if this were an adequate response. Sounding suspiciously like the supposed rape prevention advice which recommends women don’t wear x things in y places, our conventional coping strategies for Internet harassment are neither progressive nor feasible in the digital age.
Anita Sarkeesian’s story has a happy ending. Raising more than $120,000 for her series, she continues to produce content for Feminist Frequency that both critiques existing video games and imagines media that could make the gaming community a powerful cultural safe-space open to all. Hopefully, that possibility exists for the rest of us as we graduate into an Internet culture still much more hostile to those who are aren’t straight white men than we are prepared to admit.
Bekki Wyss is a junior studying English literature. Have you experienced gender-targeted harassment online? Tell her about it at rw225570@ohiou.edu.
