Anita Sarkeesian

Well I think I have found a person who is causing the most controversy on the internet right now dealing with feminsim. Anita Sarkeesian of the YouTube channel Feminist Frequency.

For those of you who do not know much about her, as I did not, she creates videos about feminism on her YouTube channel but most recently has begun making videos which deal specifically with sexist stereotypes in video games. Her most recent video is a second part video on the 'damsel in distress' plot device which is used continuously in games.

In this video she talks specifically about how the modern 'damsel in distress' plot device has been changed into a darker form. Several variations she goes into are:

The death of the wife and victimization of the daughter.
The death of the wife and rescue of their soul
The 'woman in the refrigerator' in which a female character is killed off simply as a plot device to carry on the male characters story.

She explains how this shows women as objects or simply plot devices, making women not important, simply to be killed to further the male protagonist's story.

The only thing in her video which I disagreed with was when she used the video game of Dante's Inferno to show an example for the rescue of a woman's soul. Of course the video game was going to have this since it was based off of the book 'Dante's Inferno', which does indeed contain that plot device. I don't think that video games have increased the usage of this plot device, if anything the novel Dante's inferno created this plot device.

But onto the hatred of the internet against Anita sarkeesian:
The internet, a widely known nest of hatred, has harassed her continueously since she first announced these video series. From her Kickstarter campaign she garnered a massive hate attack, being called 'bitch', 'ugly', 'fat', 'stupid', and any other name you could think of, especially ones in reference to her being a woman. This was for simply wanting to make a video series exposing sexism in video games.

This was continued today, where her most recent Tropes Part 2 video was taken down shortly after it was uploaded due to a false flagging campaign. She has shut off comments and disabled ratings as well as statistics due to the trolling. I, however, take issue with shutting off the last two of those. I can understand not wanting hate filled comments on a video that she wants everyone to see, but shutting off ratings just because she (rightly) thinks that it will recieve mostly dislikes is going too far. Disabling ratings removes the ability to see how poeple actually are taking her videos.

Is she receiving mostly praise? Or mostly hatred? We have no idea.

She also disabled the statistics on her video, disabling us from seeing who is looking at the video and hwere most of her traffic is coming from. Again, who is talking about her video? Are people writing about it and agreeing with her or disagreeing? This, again, is lost to us due to her actions which I find somewhat cowardly. If she has something to say, she shouldn't hide it, she shouldn't care about the massive amount of dislikes she may get, she should just be proud of her work and say what she has to say.