A Weeks Worth of Death/Rape Threats over Twitter

Anyone with the baffling habit of actually keeping up with my writing will probably be aware that I spend a disproportionate amount of time keeping my eyes on Feminists Frequency and the work of the controversial Anita Sarkesian. At this point, it’s less that I agree with her opinions—I find she’s more 50/50 than anything else—but simply because she’s the figurehead for the feminism in gaming movement, and thus she’s a magnet for all the controversy surrounding it. She’s a good barometer, if you would, of the current state of feminism in gaming, and how the community is reacting to it.

With Gamergate having simmered down, I thought maybe we had made some decent progress. Articles were written, cases were made, people were criminalized… I had this hope that as the outpouring of support started to wane, maybe the criticisms would wane as well.

Unfortunately, that was blind optimism on my part.

To prove a point, and to give people a taste of what it’s like to be the most hated woman in gaming, Feminist Frequency secretly saved and compiled a weeks worth of threats and insults directed at Anita Sarkeesian via Twitter (the founder of the site) onto one web page, which I will direct you to here. You don’t have to click the link to guess how bad it’s going to get.

The number of death threats this woman gets in a day, in short, is staggering. There is a lot of hate directed at this woman, and while these tweets stop losing their creativity at a certain point (it seems rape/death threats and asking her to commit suicide are the only tools most of these people have) it does become exhausting and depressing.

This is a person who critiques female’s presence in roles. There’s less hatred for real monsters like Jim Kong Un then there is for this woman, and that’s sickening. I feel very bitter right now, to be perfectly honest.

I’m not going to list any of the tweets on this site, it’s not exactly appropriate, but I encourage people to check it out regardless to get an idea of what we’re dealing with here. It’s eye-opening either way.