Feminist Video Game Critic Driven Out Of Her Home By Death Threats From Gamers [View all]

After releasing her newest web series Feminist Frequency’s “Tropes vs. Women,” which focuses on how women are depicted in pop culture and video games, Sarkeesian has suffered an onslaught of online harassment. Immediately following the series’ latest installment, “Women as Background Decoration (Part 2),” that harassment escalated, causing her to call law enforcement and flee her home.

She later posted responses from one particular user who claims to know her parents’ names, where they live and where she lives. He threatened to “rape [Sarkeesian] to death.”

Twitter has been heavily criticized for not taking online threats seriously. In 2013, the microblogging site changed its policy so that blocked users could still follow and see posts from the users that blocked them. The policy was quickly reversed after a flood of complaints said the change made victims of harassment feel trapped and less safe. Moreover, critics said the move was a direct product from Twitter’s white male-dominated environment.

Despite those figures and growing criticism from the gaming community, female lead characters are rare. When women do appear in video games, they’re frequently over-sexualized, and being beaten, kicked, stomped on, or shot. Sarkeesian homed in on the issue in the video that sparked her harassment, criticizing game creators over reliance on domestic violence and the sexualization of female tropes — even in death — simply for shock value without actually critiquing the scenarios or circumstances surrounding the gender-targeted violence.



http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/08/28/3476787/feminist-video-game-critic-death-threats/



The events of the last paragraph are eerily and accurately portrayed in a thread by RedQueen which is still on page one of GD; as are the half-witted and trivializing rationalizations being made that "it's just a cartoon." Yet I wonder, if it was "just a cartoon" or if it is "just a video game", why the death threats against Sarkeesian, or the aggressive (yet empty) defenses targeting RQ's premise...?