Culture

Anita Sarkeesian Has Collated All The Abusive Tweets She Gets In A Single Week

It'll put you off the internet for a while.

by Meg Watson  29 January 2015

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This post contains aggressive verbal harassment including gendered insults, sexual violence and death threats.

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It’s a mixed blessing that Anita Sarkeesian has become a household name these days. On the one hand it’s great to have a feminist games critic in the public eye. Her original web series Feminist Frequency is a worthwhile resource for both women and men interested in the problematic nature of much of pop culture (check out ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games‘ to see where this whole thing began).

On the other hand, a large portion of her fame has come as a result of her various confrontations with male gamers and her thoughts on the #gamergate movement. Every time she hosts a lecture, or goes on shows like Colbert she becomes more of a target.

Now, before she makes her way to Australia next year to speak about these issues at All About Women, Sarkeesian has outlined the harassment she puts up with on a daily basis on her blog.

It’s horrific.

“I’ve been harassed on a daily basis by irate gamers angry at my critiques of sexism in video games,” she wrote. “It can sometimes be difficult to effectively communicate just how bad this sustained intimidation campaign really is. So I’ve taken the liberty of collecting a week’s worth of hateful messages sent to me on Twitter.”

In just seven days, Sarkeesian received 157 tweets containing serious harassment. Though many of the users have since been suspended, you can see the full list via screen shots on the Feminist Frequency tumblr. But if that doesn’t sound so appealing, here’s a small selection to get the gist.

tweet tweet3 ttwee

This is something Sarkeeesian has addressed before.

A lot, actually.

With little to no success in stopping it.

Despite all this, Sarkeesian is gearing up for even more work with Feminist Frequency. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, she’s about to launch a new series that will instead focus on masculinity in gaming. And hey, maybe this continued dialogue will help provoke the paradigm shift Sarkeesian talks about. People may still disagree or have bigoted opinions, but we could at least put an end to threats of murder and rape, right? RIGHT?

Until then, we’ll be taking a little break from Twitter and pretending people aren’t just the worst.

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See the full post on Feminist Frequency.