Hey, Let's Make a Video Game So We Can Beat Up a Female Critic of Video Games!

Anita Sarkeesian didn’t set out to piss off an army of male gamers when she launched a Kickstarter to raise money for a project that aimed to examine cliched, oversexualized tropes of women in video games. But apparently, daring to say anything bad about video gamers being sexist is enough to amass an entire army of jerks against you, jerks who are determined to video game beat you into submission. And now, one or more of those jerks has taken the time and effort to create a video game that allows players to beat up Anita Sarkeesian. That’ll show ladies who think some video game tropes are sexist!

Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress brought up this disturbing turn of events today, remarking that this isn’t the first time male geeks have completely flipped out over the mildest of honest criticism. She writes,

…anyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence.

According to Sarkeesian herself, this game is just another depressing evolution of what amounts to an all out campaign of harassment against her. She’s received crudely drawn images of herself getting raped (by, uh, Mario, of Super Mario fame) in her inbox, had her image been made into a meme where hilarious people who are hilarious design their own text to go over the image (sample text: “I like cock so much I raise my hands in the air!” and “I’m not a hypocrite, I’m a woman!”), and stills from her video with penises drawn ejaculating onto her face. She points out that “all of the images are attacking my gender or presumed sexuality and rely heavily on pre-existing sexist stereotypes” rather than any substantive point she’s made or tried to make.

Despite the best efforts of apoplectic man boys, Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project has raised $158,922, about 26.5 times her original goal of $6,000. Great job, assholes! You opposite win!

Anyway, nerd culture doesn’t have a problem with women at all. And the best thing to do when you don’t like how your face looks is get mad at the mirror.