When online feminists dare to open their mouths

It’s been going on for the past 10 years, and while I’ve only had to deal with a full-fledged attack once, it was really scary. (By the way, just about every female political blogger has had this happen at least once.) There are people on the internet who turn into jackals when someone points them in a certain direction, and you get the sense they’d do anything:

Californian blogger Anita Sarkeesian is one of the most famous cultural critics on the internet. Her Kickstarter to make a video series about “tropes vs. women in video games” was a huge success back in 2012 and raised much more than the $6,000 she had originally asked for. Her videos are some of the most thorough and well-researched examinations about gaming we’ve ever seen. It’s feminist criticism at its best: smart, witty, and intelligible to anyone who has spent time on YouTube.

Her work has also triggered one of the most violent abuse campaigns of recent internet history. Since her campaign took off, Sarkeesian has been blasted with misogynist bullshit: rape and death threats, Wikipedia vandalism, and even a game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian. (It’s all detailed here.) Last week, Sarkeesian had to leave her home and notify police after someone sent her and her family very credible threats.

Sarkeesian isn’t the only feminist critic on the internet experiencing this. Other commentators are reporting violent reactions, and even male allies on the sidelines are getting sprayed with the hate shower. But Sarkeesian is the most prominent case, and she’s not stopping anytime soon. She is still posting her thoughtful videos, just as she has planned all along.

To understand what’s been going on, I spoke to David Futrelle, who has tracked anti-feminism, the Men’s Rights Movement, and the campaigns against Sarkeesian and other women on his blog We Hunted the Mammoth.

VICE: Who are the people harassing and threatening Anita Sarkeesian? It seems like it’s an organized action. 
David Futrelle: It’s what I like to call the new misogyny—basically a large amorphous internet subculture that is consumed with hating and attacking women. Some of these people call themselves men’s rights activists and portray what they are doing as somehow beneficial for men. Others call themselves “men going their own way,” the basic premise being that they want to live independently of women but end up talking most of the time about how terrible women are. That whole subculture is very heavily represented among gamers and on websites like Reddit.

So is this mostly coming out of Men’s Rights Activism circles?

I don’t think the harassment against Sarkeesian is all done by men’s rights activists, but it comes out of this subculture. And the people in this subculture share some basic obsessions.

Like what?
One thing that happens again and again: They define certain cultural spaces as being properly male only and then go after women—women in general but often individual women—who they see as interlopers invading what they feel should be their safe space. You see this in general discussions about women and tech and women going into STEM fields. But also in other fields like atheist activism. For whatever reason that seems to draw a lot of very misogynistic guys too. Women like Rebecca Watson, who has talked about sexism in these spaces, face an enormous amount of harassment and abuse.

What did Rebecca Watson do?
That’s a good question. In most of these cases, if you look at it closely, what the woman being targeted has done turns out to be either nothing or something that has been exaggerated in all sorts of bizarre ways. Something that normal people wouldn’t see as provocation. In the case of Rebecca Watson, she was at the World Atheist Conference in 2011 and, after her return, posteda vlog in which she talked about her experience of sexism at the conference. Some guy followed her on the elevator and hit on her, asking her to come to his room. This was later known as the “elevator incident.” Because of this she faced years and years of violent harassment.

So basically the “crime” these women commit is to call out sexism in a field that some men feel is their turf.
Yes. Watson’s case is really very similar to Sarkeesian’s in that if you look at what the charges against her are, and you trace it back to the beginning, you see that there is really no argument. Basically people accuse her of scamming the public by raising a lot of money for her video series. These guys were harassing her before she even raised that money, and the fact that she was able to raise so much money was due to feminists particularly rallying around her because she was facing harassment for just proposing this.

Sarkeesian’s videos are very well researched. She’s not going for effect, but makes very sure to show lots of examples for any kind of sexist structure she is trying to point out in games. Why does this seemingly very levelheaded and not terribly offensive criticism still get people so angry?
Exactly. If you actually look at her videos, you see that she is not trying to censor games; she makes that very clear. She is critically analyzing them. But she is being made into some kind of demon when she is actually presenting a very straightforward and not very controversial set of arguments about the way sexist violence and sexism in general are prevalent in video games, which is pretty obvious to anyone who has spent any time playing video games.

So why all the anger?
What gets them really angry is when a feminist closes the comments on their YouTube videos or on their website. To them, that is an assault on free speech. So they harass her because she won’t let them harass her on YouTube, basically.

The extent of the vitriol is something that I don’t fully understand. My basic explanation, if I have one, is it’s a backlash against the successes of feminism since the 90s. Feminism has made progress redefining some things that men took for granted, such as sexual harassment and date rape. So I think it’s a backlash on what a lot of these guys see as restrictions on what they can say, how they can interact with women in a sexual way, and the idea that there may be consequences if they commit domestic violence. It’s mostly sexual resentment, the fact that they can’t get away with what guys used to be able to get away with with women, and that makes them very frustrated. Frankly I think a lot of them would prefer it if they could just go back to the way it was: Get women drunk and have sex with them. Without having the culture say, “Hey, this is date rape.” And:  “Your office jokes are actually sexual harassment.”

For a lot of these guys their experience of feminism is being denied to do what they want to do. Maybe they had to go to a seminar about sexual harassment or they had to sit through a presentation on date rape in college.

The other thing is women starting to move into these areas that these guys have just decided that they want to claim for men. They don’t want women to come into gaming and tell them not to call women whores when they are playing Call of Duty.

Thanks to Attorney Jason Kalafat.