Anita Sarkeesian (previously) is a brilliant media theorist and critic whose Feminist Frequency/Tropes vs. Women in Video Games projects revolutionized the way we talk about gender and games — and also made her a target for a virulent misogynist hate-machine of harassing manbabies who threatened her life, doxed her, and did everything they could to intimidate her into silence.

Kate from Feminist Frequency (previously) writes, "Feminist Frequency has just released a supplemental mini-episode in their Tropes vs Women in Video Games series."

The creator behind a series of feminist critiques of game design tropes—and target of a relentless campaign of online harassment—is profiled by Wil Wheaton.

Anita is just the latest woman writer to prove the law coined by journalist Helen Lewis: that the sexist comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.

The Feminist Frequency videos typically focus on where video games go wrong with gender, but the latest episode by Anita Sarkeesian takes a different angle: the times when they really succeed.

Sarkeesian was willing to go on with the show at Utah State University — as she's done after all the other death threats that she's received as a speaker — but wanted attendees checked for firearms. Ogden, UT cops refused, citing Utah's open-carry firearms law. — Read the rest

Whenever the feminist games-critic and survivor of countless outraged misogynist stalkers Anita Sarkeesian's name is invoked, there follows a flood of men who want to explain that she brought it on herself, that she isn't a gamer, that she isn't a good critic, and assorted related rubbish.

Anita Sarkeesian, whose excellent Tropes vs Women in Video Games series is an important contribution to the discussion of gender and games, has been driven from her home by enraged male gamers whose stalking, and explicit, credible threats of sexual violence against her and her family convinced her to go into hiding.

Mother Jones reporter Nina Liss-Schultz asked Anita Sarkeesian why she thinks she has been targeted by knuckle-dragging assholes on the internet–vicious threats, death, rape, and beatings by haters who happen to be men, and believe that women like Sarkeesian should shut up and stay out of their clubhouse. — Read the rest

A lead designer working on Warner Brothers' Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy video game operated a YouTube channel where he ranted about "identity politics" and supported Gamergate, the harassment campaign against women in the game industry.

Among Leavitt's other videos are lengthy defenses of both John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder who left his position at Disney in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct, and Nolan Bushnell, the Atari co-founder who Kotaku's reporting found to have fostered a toxic work environment for women.

In her new series The FREQ Show, Anita Sarkeesian digs into insidious, pervasive Hollywood stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs, and how those stereotypes fuel real-world Islamophobia. As Sarkeesian puts it:

To so many Americans, people in the Middle East have never been established as human beings with real lives, hopes, dreams, and struggles.

For years, Anita Sarkeesian and her crew at Feminist Frequency (previously) have been striking terror into the hearts of reactionary assholes by saying calm, smart, funny, sensible and insightful things about how video games reveal our social attitudes.

As part of her Ordinary Women series, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency examines the impressive achievement of Ada Lovelace, the "mother" of computer programming.

You can also watch the Ordinary Women profiles on Ching Shih and Ida B. Wells:

The latest Tropes vs Women in Video Games (previously) is as on-point, smart, and deep as ever.

Technologists have a dismal pattern: when it comes to engineering challenges ("build a global-scale comms platform") they rub their hands together with excitement; when it comes to the social challenges implied by the engineering ones ("do something about trolls") they throw their hands up and declare the problem to be too hard to solve.

Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed has written a long piece about Twitter's apparently inability to prevent neo-Nazis, rape apologists, death threats, and racism from flourishing on the platform.

In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez launched a campaign to put Jane Austen on UK currency and quickly became the target of more than 50 rape threats per hour — which forced Twitter to roll out a "report abuse" feature for individual tweets.

With a couple of days left, Feminist Frequency is about to hit their funding goal for Ordinary Women, a lavishly animated series about women who dared defy their times–and who history hasn't given their dues. Below is the complete set of preview videos for Ida Wells, Ching Shih, Emma Goldman, Murasaki Shikibu and Ada Lovelace; go help push them over the line at Seed & Spark. — Read the rest

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History is a video series about women overlooked by history raising production funds at crowdfunding site Seed & Spark. Creators Anita Sarkeesian, Laura Hudson (recently of Boing Boing and Offworld) and Elizabeth Aultman plan to feature Murasaki Shikibu, credited as the first modern novelist, 19th-century computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, womens' rights advocate Emma Goldman and others. — Read the rest

Feminist Frequency's excellent Tropes vs Women in Video Games has a new installment on the prevailing ways that characters' butts are presented in games: with female characters, they're emphasized, centered and revealed; with male characters, it's often literally impossible to see their butts. — Read the rest

The scale and virulence of internet harassment often lingers in the news, but three women who have faced down the bullies are sharing their guide to staying safe online.

The advice is eminently sensible, well thought-out and derives, sadly, from all-too-familiar experience. — Read the rest