Women Write About Comics • Round Four: Harassment and the Geek Blogosphere

Round Four: Harassment and the Geek Blogosphere

Yup, it’s time for another round of the carnival! This time we’ll be tackling… Harassment in the Geek Blogoshere. From July 7-8, we’ll be writing blog posts, recording vblogs, compiling resource lists and making comics, about online harassment.

Anita Sarkeesian’s (Feminist Frequency) Tropes Vs. Women In Video Games Kickstarter was met with some initial excitement and some predictable disdain. Then the harassment campaign hit. After thousands of comments threatening her with death and rape, the defacement of her Wikipedia page, and an attempt to have her pitch video flagged as ‘terrorism’ and removed from YouTube… Anita’s Kickstarter has raised $144,025, 24 times greater than her original goal of $6,000. As Carolyn Petit from Gamespot put it,

My feeling is that these kinds of reactions only underscore the need for serious considerations of feminism in games; if the idea of a project like this generates this kind of misogynistic outrage, clearly there are serious problems with women’s portrayals in games and their place in gaming culture that need to be addressed. And the harassment campaign smacks of desperation to me, which gives me an odd kind of hope. If this small, vocal contingent is working so hard to derail the project, maybe they’re scared, and if they’re scared by these ideas, then maybe we are getting closer to a gaming culture that is welcoming to everyone.

This week, comic artists reacted to Guillem March’s anti-cheesecake (so ‘sexy’ it’s no longer sexy? so backbreakingly bizarre it kills boners at fifty paces?) cover to Catwoman #0, with countless parodies and endless lolz. This too, inspired a backlash, but one so petulant as to be met with, well, more mockery. The response to the cover has been so negative that Bleeding Cool has speculated that it might be pulled.

So in light of these events, and in light of the harassment bloggers like Laura Hudson (Comics Alliance), Kelly Thompson (She Has No Head) and Sue (DC Women Kicking Ass) have faced, simply for daring to be women bloggers, I thought it was about time that we tackled the issue.

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