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Anita Sarkeesian and Internet Criticism

Published by Uloop News

If you’re a member of the gaming community, you’ve probably heard of Anita Sarkeesian and her Kickstarter project Women vs Tropes in Video Games, a project which analyzes and informs people about the representations of women in video games via the video series on Anita’s Youtube channel, Feminist Frequency. The reason you heard about it is probably because of the massive amount of negative criticism and vulgar threats she received from beginning to fund raise for the project. Not only was she targeted by innumerable rape and death threats, some gamers were so angry that a flash game was created that allowed players to beat an image of Anita’s face black and blue. This abuse was pretty extreme, even for the internet, and has been cause for a lot of discussion of sexism in the gaming community.

 

Despite the extreme harassment and abuse, Anita has reached almost 26 times the amount of donation funds she had initially asked for for the project; she ended up raising over $150,000 in the June of 2012. This money has gone toward the purchase of hundreds of games for analysis as well as for production, equipment, and downloadable content.

 

Now in March 2013, the first episode of the project has finally been released. Anita’s first topic features the ever-present “damsel in distress” trope (Click here). Anita has disabled the comments for the video, which seems to be a reasonable decision on her part as the majority of the “criticism” she has received so far has been full of hate, sexist vitriol, and threats.

 

The launch of the project has caused another outrage from Anita’s critics, including the unleashing of comments through other social sites claiming “she is afraid of criticism.” The most prominent of which was a video made by YouTuber amazingatheist which argued against her “censorship” and reduced her TED Talk about her experiences with harassment to “whining”. He goes on to say,

 

“What are you afraid of, Anita? Why can’t people have a discourse about your material? Why can’t people make their opinions towards your content known? I understand that some comments will be abusive in nature — probably most will — but so what?”

 

Let’s stop here for a minute. This man is openly and freely criticizing Anita’s work through this YouTube video. Right there is where his argument that she is censoring any attempt of discourse about her videos is destroyed. The fact that there has been backlash at all about her decision to disable the comments on her video at all is evidence that there are numerous other vehicles of discourse that can be used – including but not limited to Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube videos, and Facebook.

 

The fact that amazingatheist even admits that “probably most” of the comments on her videos will be abusive shows that the comment section of YouTube is not, and will most likely never again be a forum for any kind of thoughtful discourse. Lastly, he is also implying that although abuse is entirely acceptable, shielding oneself from abuse is unheard of and personally insulting. Not to mention that like Twitter, YouTube comments have character limits and flood the video page along with spam comments. If anyone could make a thoughtful and profound argument or criticism of Anita’s work in that little space, I would applaud them.

 

In reality though, Anita’s disabling of the comments on her video has not at all stunted criticism, and actually could have pushed the discussion of her work into forums more suited for that kind of thoughtful discourse and less suited for abuse. Furthermore it has never been required that someone give you room to voice your opinion on their creative work. It can be helpful and constructive at times, but after seeing that even the idea of Anita’s project resulted in threats of death and rape, she has absolutely no obligation to viewers of her own creative content to give them the space to assault her further. If you as a viewer feel the absolute need to criticize someone’s work, you can feel entirely free to do so within your own space.

 

Amazingatheist feels the need to point out that while people say “crazy shit” to him all the time, he never chooses to silence them. Well, sir, the next time you get swamped with death and rape threats for being a man with an opinion, you can come tell me about it.

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