Anita Sarkeesian and the defiant women who shaped history
Despite experiencing years of online harassment, Anita Sarkeesian isn't about to quit now. She knows her calling.
Sarkeesian, a YouTube personality famous for her deconstruction of gender stereotypes in video games, just launched a new video series that challenges how women are portrayed in history.
"Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History" is a collection of five mini-biographies of women who Sarkeesian says rejected convention in their time. They are: Murasaki Shikibu, the first modern novelist; Ada Lovelace, creator of the first computer program; Emma Goldman, a political revolutionary; Ching Shih, a pirate captain; and Ida B. Wells, a journalist and civil rights activist. A new episode will air on Sarkeesian's YouTube channel each month through January 2016.
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Sarkeesian says the purpose of the series is two-fold. She wants to put the names of extraordinary women on the "tips of everyone’s tongues" and create a record of women who had cultural and political influence throughout history.
Since debuting the YouTube series "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" in 2013, Sarkeesian has been particularly frustrated by the routine suggestion that women can't be cast as more complex video game characters because it would be historically inaccurate.
"You’re saying women can’t be the stars of your game, but you have time travel and a backpack full of hundreds of weapons you can access at any moment?" Sarkeesian says with a laugh.
Her new series is a powerful counterpoint to historical accounts that omit women altogether or minimize their roles. In the debut episode, Sarkeesian portrays anarchist Emma Goldman as someone unafraid of infuriating the left or the right by denouncing fascism and communism during both World Wars. A pioneer on social issues, Goldman also spoke publicly in favor of birth control and gay and lesbian rights at the turn of the 20th century.
Future episodes explore the lives of Wells, an investigative reporter who documented lynching in the 1890s, and Shikibu, a Japanese novelist who is believed to have written the world's first novel in the 11th century.
Sarkeesian says viewers don't have to agree with the values or choices each woman in the series made. After all, she points out, the 19th century Chinese pirate Ching Shih likely engaged in mayhem and murder. Instead, Sarkeesian sees the series as an educational effort that champions defiant women, even if they're not always saints or heroes.
"There’s this through-line for all of these women who did extraordinary things who were deeply defiant in that process ... [and] changed the world in some way," she says.
As with her series on video game criticism, Sarkeesian turned to crowdfunding to produce her latest project. After raising $207,000 on Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding platform for filmmakers, Sarkeesian and her crew began filming and animating the series earlier this year.
"Just because the press stopped covering it, doesn’t mean the harassment stopped."
While she continues to find success — and a passionate audience — creating content online, the harassment Sarkessian experiences has not abated.
The slurs and threats that she began seeing in social media comments and receiving via email upon launching "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" reached a peak in 2014, when she canceled a public lecture in Utah after learning that someone threatened a mass shooting at the event.
Though it's less sensational these days, Sarkeesian says the abuse remains a near constant aspect of her life: "Just because the press stopped covering it, doesn’t mean the harassment stopped."
It also has real consequences for her ability to engage with fans. She long ago closed comments on her YouTube channel. She occasionally hosts a live chat on the gaming community platform Twitch, but says the conversation devolves quickly if her harassers flood the space with bullying or threatening comments.
Sarkessian also says that recent complaints against her YouTube channel led the company to age-restrict an old video and to temporarily delete her channel.
The video, which showed a female nipple in a video game as part of an episode on how women often become the victims of physical or sexual violence in the genre, is available again to all viewers. In a separate incident, Sarkeesian's channel was temporarily removed as a result of human error and reinstated soon after.
"I feel very strongly about the media playing a role in helping to create a more just world."
"With the massive volume of videos on our platform, sometimes we make the wrong call on content that is flagged by our community," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable. "When this is brought to our attention, we review the content and take appropriate action, including restoring videos or channels that were mistakenly age-restricted or removed.
For Sarkeesian, the recent setbacks are reminders that creating online content isn't always without personal or professional risk. The crowdfunding launch of "Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History" earlier this year came with yet more online harassment, and Sarkeesian expects more of that as the series debuts. She remains, however, undeterred.
"I feel very strongly about the media playing a role in helping to create a more just world," she says. "I’m not going to stop doing that."
Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree from U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
