Anita Sarkeesian, the head of web series Feminist Frequency, recently talked about the threats and abuse online.
She was forced to leave her home after she got death threats a few weeks ago.
“The perpetrators do not see themselves as perpetrators at all,” she said at the XOXO Festival in Portland, according to The Verge. “They see themselves as noble warriors. We are blamed for the abuse we receive and regularly told that we are either asking for it or inventing it entirely.
She added: “Falsehoods about me are initially pushed by detractors who use them to post to 4Chan and Reddit to rally more people to the cause. It’s bouncing from Twitter to Tumblr to Facebook to YouTube and back again. Once the cascade reaches a critical mass, it no longer matters what the facts are. It becomes a viral meme.”
Her series Tropes vs Women is critical of mainstream video games and how they show women as helpless victims or sex objects.
A few weeks ago, she wrote: “The Women as Background Decoration trope which is the subset of largely insignificant non-playable female characters whose sexuality or victimhood is exploited as a way to infuse edgy, gritty or racy flavoring into game worlds. These sexually objectified female bodies are designed to function as environmental texture while titillating presumed straight male players. Sometimes they’re created to be glorified furniture but they are frequently programmed as minimally interactive sex objects to be used and abused.”
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