"Women Are Being Driven Offline": Feminist Anita Sarkeesian Terrorized for Critique of Video Games | Democracy Now!

26.10.14

"Women Are Being Driven Offline": Feminist Anita Sarkeesian Terrorized for Critique of Video Games | Democracy Now!: Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent feminist critic of video games, was forced to cancel a speech at Utah State University last week after the school received an email threatening to carry out "the deadliest shooting in American history" at the event. The email sender wrote: "feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge." The sender used the moniker Marc Lepine, the name of a man who killed 14 women, most of them female engineering students, in a mass shooting in Montreal in 1989. Sarkeesian canceled the talk after being told that under Utah law, campus police could not prevent people from bringing guns. We speak to Sarkeesian about the incident, the "Gamergate" controversy, and her campaign to expose misogyny, sexism and violence against female characters in video games despite repeated physical threats. "Online harassment, especially gendered online harassment, is an epidemic," Sarkeesian says. "Women are being driven out, they’re being driven offline; this isn’t just in gaming, this is happening across the board online, especially with women who participate in or work in male-dominated industries."