Name: 【TEDx】Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen 2012
Uploaded: 2014-06-14T04:42:29.000Z
Duration: 10 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

I'd like to share with you a story  about how I accidently became the villain

For the past four years, I've been running

a video web series on Youtube  called Feminist Frequency,

where I deconstruct the representations  of women in the media.

I try to provide the tools  to give people the language to talk about

using accessible language  from popular culture

such as TV shows, movies,  comic books and video games.

Video games are really interesting  because it's actually the fastest growing form

playing Super Mario World  on a Super Nintendo.

So I've been playing games  for quite a while.

And, in addition  to being a lot of fun to play,

games have lots of positive  benefits as well.

So again, I've been playing games  for a while,

but there's someting that always  kind of bothered me.

It is no secret  that the video game industry

boasts some of the most sexually  objectified, stereotyped

and downright oppressive portrayals  of women in any medium.

So, with that in mind,  I decided to launch

a fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding  website Kickstarter,

to look specifically at the way women  are represented in video games.

The idea being that if you're interested in the project,  you could donate

and if you weren't interested,  you could choose not to donate.

that there were a bunch  of male gamers out there

who were, shall we say,  not too excited about this project.

Now, I'm a pop culture critic,  I'm a feminist and I'm a woman.

And I'm all of these things  openly on the Internet.

So I'm no stranger to some level  of sexist backlash.

I've sadly gotten used to sexist slurs  and sexist insults

usually involving kitchens  and sandwiches.

But what happened this time  was a little bit different.

I found myself the target  of a massive online hate campaign.

Now, the next couple of slides  represent just a tiny fraction

of the harassment I received  and they come with a very large trigger warning.

All of my social media sites were flooded

with threats of rape, violence,  sexual assault, death.

And you'll notice  that these threats and comments

were all specifically targeting  my gender.

The Wikipedia article about me  was vandalized

with sexism, racism  and pornographic images.

There was a campaign to report  all of my social media accounts

including my Kickstarter,  my Youtube, my Twitter

and they would report them as fraud,  as spam, even as terrorism,

They attempted to knock  my website offline,

they attempted to collect and distribute  my personal information,

including my home address  and phone number.

There were images made,  pornographic images made,

in my likeness being raped  by video games characters

There was even a game made,  where players were

invited to "beat the bitch out", in which,

upon clicking on the screen,  an image of me would become

What's even more disturbing,  if that's even possible,

in this overt display  of misogyny on a grand scale,

to this harassment campaign  and their abuse as a “Game”.

So, in their minds,  they concocted this grand fiction

in which they're the heroic players  of a massively multiplayer online game

and apparently they casted me  in the role of the villain.

And what was my big diabolical masterplan?

To make a series of videos on YouTube  about women's representations in games.

Yeah. So, if they think  of their abuse as a "fun game",

Well, often when we talk  about online harassment,

we think of teenage boys  in their parents' basements.

And while I was attacked  by some teenage boys,

I was also attacked  by thousands of grown men.

And this isn't entirely surprising  considering the average age

Well, the perpetrators turned  the entire Internet into a battlefield.

So in my case they came after  everything and anything

They also have a homebase,  where they coordinate their raids

And this usually takes place  on largely unmoderated,

largely anonymous message  boards and forums.

And these are places with no real mechanisms  for accountability.

Well, the immediate exclusive goal  is to stop the villain

And they try to do this by silencing  and discrediting me and my project.

But the larger implicit goal here  is that they're actually trying

to maintain the status quo  of video games as a male dominated space

and all of the privileges and entitlements  that come with an unquestioned boys club.

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【TEDx】Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen 2012

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