before i start here, i’m responding to the comments more than the post.
the treatment of sarkeesian was despicable, but her videos were posted on youtube. find me a youtube video without some sort of “eat shit and die” comment. youtube has virtually no comment policy, so i’d say it’s not the best example of a “nothing like kotaku or whatever” situation. in fact, i’d say it’s potentially a whole lot worse, because of the instant cross-spectrum exposure. the youtube crowd is certainly not mostly gamers.
i assume that the biggest harassers of women in gaming, and people in general in gaming, are pre-mid pubescent boys, because i’ve spent time playing games. hop on a semi-public teamspeak channel for a popular game, or voice on a game like call of duty, world of tanks, war thunder, minecraft, hell, everquest ts was full of creepy little trollies with soprano voices. they do it because they can get away with it.
i have no doubt that in some instances these people are not super young but in my experience the older ones are much fewer and farther between, and i’ve dealt with a lot of people in games, be they rpgs, shooters, or the odd fsx flight controller that logs in to scream “NI&%R NI&$#R NI$($R” and log off. yep, on flight simulator 10.
regardless of age, they do it because they like to get under people’s skin, and they’ll pick whatever they feel is the most direct method. unfortunately, an attempt to call the harassers out on it is only begging for more harassment. i think it might be a lot more effective to go after the website that is failing so miserably to moderate the idiocy in their comments, because the internet is just not going to shut up, ever.
mind, i’m not talking about the people such as the interviewer mentioned above. that guy needs to be fired, or at the very least blackballed from any sort of gaming event, because he’s fueling more bs like this. there’s more than enough hate floating around already.
