Anita Sarkeesian (previously)
is a brilliant media theorist and critic whose Feminist
Frequency/Tropes vs. Women in Video Games projects revolutionized the
way we talk about gender and games – and also made her a target for a
virulent misogynist hate-machine of harassing manbabies who threatened
her life, doxed her, and did everything they could to intimidate her
into silence.
Polygon’s 9,000 word profile of Sarkeesian contains a lot of color about
her personality and approach (which is great stuff – Sarkeesian is a
fun and interesting person in real life as well as on-screen), but where
it gets really good is in describing how Sarkeesian led a massive
change in the way that games companies approach games, with “great women
characters” appearing in “The Last of Us, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,
Dragon Age: Inquisition,The Walking Dead, Battlefield 5, Dishonored 2,
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Overwatch”
Sarkeesian’s academic training is a combination of feminist theory and
media studies, which made her the perfect person to bridge between the
insidery, jargon-heavy world of gender studies and a popular, easily
digested way of thinking through these issues for games practicioners;
Polygon’s Colin Campbell calls it “a toolkit that developers could use,
to lever themselves out of the box they’d made for themselves.”
This was literally and figuratively “game changing” – Sarkeesian wields
“criticism so sharp that it cut the past from the future,” making a new
world of games, at real personal cost.
That cost is also an important part of the story: Sarkeesian’s harassers
were unspeakably vile and vicious, and throughout, Sarkeesian made a
point of never showing how it affected her, though it did (as it would
anyone who was subjected to it). But as Sarkeesian threw her energy into
guiding and comforting other women who’d been targeted for speaking
out, she learned that her stoicism had an unanticipated and unwelcome
side effect: “it hurt other women who were suffering because they might
be feeling like they needed to live up to the example I was putting out
there. So now when I talk about these issues, I think that there’s value
in being transparent and honest about the reality of who I am and where
I’m at.”
Sarkeesian has stopped doing YouTube videos – she still has an excellent podcast called Feminist Frequency Radio
– and she discusses how she feels YouTube’s moment has passed: “When I
go and speak at schools and colleges, students tell me they want to do
what I do. But you can’t do it on YouTube anymore…Digital video is a
really difficult place to navigate right now. I don’t think it has a
shelf life, as it stands.”
