Where's Rey? Dark Side of Marketing Forces Heroine Out

Left: Screenshot of Rey from Star Wars the Force Awakens. Right, a letter from 8 year old Annie Rose that reads "Dear Hasbro, How could you leave out Rey!? She belongs in Star Wars Monopoly and all the other Star Wars games! Without her, THERE IS NO FORCE AWAKENS! It awakens in her. And without her, the bad guys would have won! Besides, boys and gorls need to see women ca be as strong as men. Boys or girls, who cares? We are equal, all of us!" letter courtesy of Carrie M Goldman.

Star Wars: The Force Awakes looks to shatter box office records. It's brought in an estimated 1.5 billion dollars in box office sales so far. Rey is the heroine of the story, which is why it's been downright weird to see her missing from so much of the official merchandise Hasbro has been releasing. For example, on Hasbro's Star Wars Monopoly set, there were two characters from the main Star Wars series as game peices: Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. There were two characters from The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren and Finn. So, representing the classic and modern Star Wars? All men.

The “Battle Action Millennium Falcon” playset tie-in to The Force Awakens has Finn, Chewbacca, and BB-8-- but not Rey even though in the film she is the actual ship's pilot! And while Hasbro released a statement apologizing for leaving her out of the board game release and promising to include her in future releases, most official merchandise for Rey is still exceedingly difficult to find, and what does exist is rather thin on the ground. This has lead to the hashtag #wheresrey as fans and parents have taken to social media to talk about this representation.

According to an insider source with Lucasfilm marketing, Rey's lack of visibility in merchandise was not just some sort of accidental oversight. In an article on pop-culture blog Sweatpants and Coffee, this marketing insider said this was done deliberately:

In January 2015, a number of toy and merchandise vendors descended on Lucasfilm’s Letterman Center in San Francisco. In a series of confidential meetings, the vendors presented their product ideas to tie in with the highly-anticipated new Star Wars film. Representatives presented, pitched, discussed, and agreed upon prototype products. The seeds of the controversies Lucasfilm is facing regarding the marketing and merchandising of The Force Awakens were sown in those meetings, according to the industry insider.
The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more individuals raised concerns about the presence of female characters in the Star Wars products. Eventually, the product vendors were specifically directed to exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise, said the insider.
“We know what sells,” the industry insider was told. “No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it.”

It sounds like a bit of a self-fulfilling, doesn't it? Marketing decision-makers say female characters don't sell, so they exclude them from merchandise. They then use this as evidence that female characters don't sell, and use it to justify excluding them from merchandise in the future. Not only did marketing execs seem to be caught completely by surprise, but according to the article, they seem stymied by the fact that real life wasn't adhering to the narrative they'd created:

“I’ve spoken with Disney people, and they were completely blindsided by the reaction to the new Star Wars characters,” Marcotte went on to say. “They put a huge investment into marketing and merchandizing the Kylo Ren character. They presumed he would be the big breakout role from the film. They were completely surprised when it was Rey everyone identified with and wanted to see more of. Now they’re stuck with vast amounts of Kylo Ren product that is not moving, and a tidal wave of complaints about a lack of Rey items.”

How about your thoughts, readers? Is this sort of aggressively gendered marketing something that's going to fall by the wayside, or will marketers dig in their heels even more?

What You Know About The Death of Point & Click Games Is Wrong

The popular narrative about the history of point and click adventure games goes a little something like this: they were invented in the mid-80s with the rise of VGA graphics and mouse-based navigation and GUIs. Seirra On-Line pioneered the genre. LucasArts was responsible for the genre's golden age, starting with Maniac Mansion and ending with the released of Grim Fandango. then the genre lay dormant for a decade and a half until Telltale games single-handedly revived and rescued the genre,bringing it back from the dead and introducing a new generation to the joys of point and click, puzzle solving and managing inventory systems.

The problem with that notion? It's completely wrong. It ignores reality? Why? Penguin King Games' David J Prokopetz points out that some of it is tied to sexism in the video game press:

The fact of the matter is that point-and-click adventure games never died.
The chronology just doesn’t add up. To pose a few obvious examples:

• The Nancy Drew series, a point-and-click adventure franchise as old-school as they come, put out over a dozen titles during the early 00s. 

• Funcom’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was enormously successful, both critically and commercially, during a period when the gaming press would have us believe the genre was almost wholly moribund. 

• Likewise, the Dream Chronicles series managed three sequels during a period when point-and-click adventure games allegedly weren’t a thing... 

When FPSes began to dominate the young male gaming audience in the mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games saw the writing on the wall, and shifted their target audience en masse to young girls. And it worked fantastically - but as far as the gaming press was concerned, that was high treason.

Newly Discovered Pics: Victorian Women of Color

Description: Black and white photo of an unidenti-
fied black woman in Victorian era fancy dress sitting
for a photo portrait.

The website Dangerous Minds reports on some recently discovered and unearthed pictures of photographic portraits of some very elegant women of color from the Victorian era. Sadly, information on just who these women were are thin on the ground. Hopefully some historians or genealogists might be able to shed some light on the identity of these unknown and dashing people.

As Dangerous Minds reports:

Here are some photographs of Victorian women of color that date from 1860 to 1901. Unfortunately, a lot of these photographs have no names attached to the women posed in the photographs.
I’d love to know the stories behind each photo. What each woman’s life was like. Sadly, we’ll probably never know... Photos of Women of Color from this era are hard to come by, especially “family” photographs.A [few] of these photos were taken when there was still slavery in the United States.

These photos being shared online are very striking. These photographs could also give plenty of inspiration for steampunk and steamfunk fans, creators and writers. You can check out the full set of pictures here.

YA Books & The John Green Problem

Fiction for young adults is seemingly booming. YA lit sections in chain bookstores seem to keep increasing in size, the number of eager readers grow yearly, and YA writer John Green's novel The Fault In Our Stars was adapted into a box-office success in a movie adaption of the same name. As the Daily Dot pointed out earlier this year though, he's endemic of a larger genre-wide problem:

On Twitter, Green has 2 million followers. Compared to the rest of the leaders in Young Adult fiction, that number is staggering. To approach even half the Twitter influence of John Green all by himself, you need an entire army of YA women. Anderson, Blume,Dessen, Veronica Roth, Cassandra Clare, Richelle Mead, Margaret Stohl, Kami Garcia,Rainbow Rowell, Maureen Johnson, Malinda Lo, Holly Black, LJ Smith, Ellen Hopkins,Shannon Hale, Lauren Myracle, Libba Bray, Melissa Marr, and Leigh Bardugo: As a group these women only have about 1.2 million followers on Twitter. That’s the voice of one man outweighing several decades of women who have had major successes, critical acclaim, and cultural influence. 

The problem of the cultural influence his books have created is not Green’s fault, but it’s created a frustrating situation for female writers and readers. Book blogger Rhiannon K. Thomas issued a sweeping takedown of the way the NYT bestseller list is stacked against female authors, many of whom write series, which are automatically moved to the “Children’s Series” list, out of the YA category altogether. She also pointed out that when men like Green aren’t writing YA, the media perception of it suddenly changes. Instead of being high literature, it suddenly becomes a shallow, frivolous genre that only silly teenagers and unfulfilled housewives participate in—just like the romance genre sans Sparks.

While John green himself has also done loads of things that are actually harmful to the audience he's writing for-- like reducing the death of Anne Frank to a mere prop, or taking a teenage girl's post discussing how the author's online presence makes her feel uncomfortable to mean he was accused of being a pedophile-- I think it's part of a larger systematic inequality. 

Whether you look at books, comic books, film or television, women are under-represented and outmatched. This is especially troubling because it leads to the FALSE idea that not only are there no women writers, creators or taste-makers, but that half the planet can just be ignored or dismissed and wouldn't want to see themselves represented anyhow.

How Tor Books Threw Its Women Employees Under The Bus

Description: Drawing of a hand with index finger raised
and other fingers clenched in a fist. Text beneath it reads "That
finger's wagging at you.

Irene Gallo is the creative director of  science-fiction publisher Tor Books, as well the associate publisher of its sister website Tor.com. Tor.com has been praised for its diversity and its depth of authors featured and its breadth of stories,articles and other material, and a lot of that can be attributed to her at the helm. I have alluded to another science fiction group:the self-described "Sad Puppies" and the "Rabid Puppies".

Those were two groups (one of them led by a hack white surpremicist) that felt that "social justice warriors" were flooding Hugo Award nominations with nominations and crowding out deserving writers, so the groups' counter-action was... to abuse nomination rules to push a slate of nominations and crowd out deserving writers, up to and including recruiting GamerGaters.

Irene Gallo made a statement on her personal Facebook page when asked for her take on the Puppies: “There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.”

So the Rabid and Sad Puppies supporters flooded her boss, the publisher of Tor, Tom Doherty. So he felt the need to address the remarks made on her personal Facebook page by... throwing her under the bus and apologizing to the spurned Puppies. Don't read the comments unless you like wading through crap.

There are two paragraphs in his official statement as publisher of Tor that stand out:

“In short, we seek out and publish a diverse and wide ranging group of books. We are in the business of finding great stories and promoting literature and are not about promoting a political agenda... Tor employees, including Ms. Gallo, have been reminded that they are required to clarify when they are speaking for Tor and when they are speaking for themselves. We apologize for any confusion Ms. Gallo’s comments may have caused. 

Let me reiterate: the views expressed by Ms. Gallo are not those of Tor as an organization and are not my own views. Rest assured, Tor remains committed to bringing readers the finest in science fiction – on a broad range of topics, from a broad range of authors.”

What's odd is that Editor at Tor Books Patrick Neilsen Hayden called the Sad Puppies evil. Best aelling author John Scalzi-- yes the same John Scalzi that signed a 10 year deal with Tor Books for 3.4 million-- has publicly feuded with Vox Day (the white supremacist behind the Rabid Puppies slate) and called him a bigot. Neither of these high profile men had these actions or statements repudiated in public statements from Tom Doherty.

In fact,Tom Doherty's been quiet about a lot of things done by men at Tor. It’s also worth noting that Jim Frenkel, who sexually harassed and assaulted multiple women - including authors, fans, SF community members and editors got to keep his job, even though high-level people at Tor knew about his harassment. In fact, it took Elise Matthesen going public with her account of being harassed by Frenkel at WisCon, for Tor do anything...and that "anything" was allowing Frenkel to resign instead of being fired.Tom Doherty never released any statements on the matter.

Author K. Tempest Bradford weighs in on the matter, also pointing out that:

One thing I forgot and Mary Kowal reminded me of this morning: a Tor employee in the contracts department attacked and harassed her online over SFWA stuff a year or so ago. He backed off after what was assumed a talk from the Tor legal department, but that was only assumed. Did Tom Doherty issue a blog post about how Tor employees are supposed to act and how they need to make it clear that they are not speaking for Tor at that point? No, he did not. Even though the employee in question mentioned that he worked at Tor in contracts and had to grit his teeth or something every time he had to deal with hers. Because Mary is a goddamned Tor author... How is this supposed to make Tor authors feel? What kind of workplace/professional atmosphere is Doherty creating with this nonsense?

It seems to me that he wants women working for Tor to be seen and not heard.

Sherlock, Watson & Chainmail Bikinis

Description: A red-haired woman warrior locked in combat
with a lizard monster taller than she is. She holds a shield
to defend against attacks, sword ready to strike.  The armor
she is wearing is a chain mail bikini, leaving much of her body
exposed to attack.

There are two terms in literary criticism that have been used in the wider world of media fandom and fiction critiques: Watsonian and Doylian. Watsonian means looking at something from an in-universe perspective. For example: "Sherlock Holmes died in that story because he fell off a cliff," would be a Watsonian explanation. "Sherlock Holmes died because the author was sick of writing stories about the detective and wanted to start something new," would be a Doylian perspective, named after the author of the Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first used on a Bujold-Master fan discussion list and spread from there. It's basically making a difference between talking about something a character says or does and how it fits with the character's fictional world, and why or how the writer's choices fit into our real life life culture, society and circumstances.

There can be a bit of a problem in discussions of fiction when a Watsonian (in-universe) perspective is used to dismiss a Doylian (real world) criticism, and nowhere is that more apparent in both tabletop and gaming circles than the trope of the Warrior Woman Who Fights In A Chainmail Bikini.

The chainmail bikini has been a staple of pulp fantasy art since the 1930s, and has appeared in one form or another in the art and character designs of fantasy novels,tabletop games and video games ever since. Take the cover art for Runequest up there. An in-universe explanation for why the character chooses to wear a chainmail bikini because she feels powerful, almost invincible in battle, and doesn't think she really needs to wear practical armor, so what's the big deal? That would be a Watsonian view.

Description: Video game renders of characters in
armor.On the left,a woman wears armor that covers
armor covering her hands, feet, legs& shoulders while
barely covering her crotch and breasts & exposed
midriff. At right, a male character in armor leaving
nothing exposed but his head.

But the artist or character designer choosing to draw her or portray her that way isn't a value-neutral choice when you look at it in a Doylist (real world) sense. Sure, in the fictional world the story takes place she's Druscilla the Invincible and her bikini symbolizes her fearlessness. But the character also exists as part of a whole trope of chainmail bikini women in fantasy battlefields that have the men warriors decked out in armor from head to toe. And THAT exists among a tradition and media landscape showing women dressed like that merely acting as decoration for men who look like the traditional badass power fantasy. In-universe, the chainmail bikini could represent the character's choice to show fearlessness. In the real world, it is the artist who is choosing to create this look for a character, and those depictions mean something else entirely.

So yes, you can totally appreciate and acknowledge just how awesome Druscilla is in her story
setting. You can't, however, make the context for her portrayal and her appearance vanish or ignore it just because you happen to like her story or her character. So if someone points out how that portrayal in the wider world is sexist, and you counter with "This armor has a practical advantage and it's the character herself choosing to wear it!" you are trying to counter a Doylian crtique with a Watsonian explanation, and that doesn't quite work. Someone pointing out the inherent sexism in chainmail bikini art and representation is also about everything else in fiction in specific and society in general that that bikini can represent. If you're bombarded with those images and these portrayals amongst the constant sea of objectification of women, and you're a woman, you can't just not exists in the world you're living in and you can't just un-see it.


When someone points out issues with sexism in a game, it doesn't make the people who play it bad people. It doesn't make the artists or writers bad people either (though it might show them to be making lazy decisions). Critiquing elements of a game isn't an attack on the game or an attack on people playing it. Criticism of something you like isn't an attack on you. And this isn't just limited to video games.As recently as 2013, the The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's (SFWA) magazine The Bulletin generated controversy with its cheesecake cover of a woman in a chainmail bikini...on the heels of editorials and columns written talking about "lady editors" and rating women solely on attractiveness and how Barbie should be a role model to women in sci-fi and fantasy because she was "dignified".

Most people protesting what they see as gratuitous elements don't want to see things banned and certainly aren't trying to censor anybody (besides, censorship is something only a government body can do)-- they'd just like it to not be the default. It would be cool to have the default be something other that just skimpy or revealing attire. It'd be nice to get a break from the constant objectification. And these critiques can open up the door to considering other things we take for granted. Why not a lithe man calling himself Dru the Invincible wading into battle in naught but a thong? Does that seem silly to you, but not so much if it were Drucilla in her chainmail bikini? Why not?

Leigh Alexander: "All The Women In Games I Know Are Tired"

Photo courtesy of Shuterstock

Leigh Alexander is the former news editor of Gamasutra, as well as an author, creator of Lo-Fi Let's Play, and her writing on video games has appeared everywhere from Kotaku and Polygon to Variety and Time magazine. She hosted the "1 Reason To Be" panel focusing on how to encourage diversity in the tech industry in general and video games in particular. She has years of experience in writing about the nature of video games as a medium and as a creative force, and has worked with many other women in video games, from writing projects to memoirs to illustrated histories and more.

She's also noticed something she's had in common with her colleagues: they're all worn out and worn down, as she talks about in her personal essay "All The Women I Know In Video Games Are Tired":

"Every woman I know in games right now is really tired. Careful: That is 'every woman I know,' not 'every woman.' You must be very careful. It's the kind of fatigue that isn't so easily explained by our fist-shaking male colleagues who earnestly empathize across their social media platforms with how 'we get harassed a lot'. Some of us get harassed a lot and some of us don't... For the most part, I still have the same job that I have always had (not that I'm not proud of the growth I've had within it over the years). For my friends, the Twine revolutionaries and the vocal Tweeters and the other writers, a great act of deception has occurred: We've been in the New York Times and been invited to conferences and told that we are Important Voices, doing Important Work, we've been on the news at night and in magazines. We are awash in social capital. But none of it translates to real capital."

She talks also about her frustration with the impermanent nature of gaming's history, how so little is curated and so much writing about it disappears, and how so many interviews and panels want to focus on the issues she faces as being a Woman In Gaming to the detriment of her work in gaming:

[Another problem is] our ongoing memory crisis -- this field maintains little permanent record of either projects or conversations, reinvents the wheel every five years -- means we are all afraid to stop lest we be swept away and forgotten. If I were ever to stop, then five years from now, someone quite like me will not have known of me. Women, especially marginalized women, who had so much more to lose than I ever had and who risked it all to make their contributions, to do their important work, fear this too, probably far more. So we endure the interviews about The Harassment. But The Harassment is not our biggest problem at all...I have been here long enough to know that this article about Being A Woman will be more widely read than nearly any heartfelt work of pure games criticism I could do. That knowing is a low and constant ache.

The entire essay is a bracing and personal read. Please, read the whole thing.

Intel Apologizes for #Gamergate, Funding 300M Diversity Initiative

Photo courtesy theverge.com

Intel recently announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that it invest $300,000,000 in a "Diversity in Technology" initiative.  The initiative will see Intel investing in and partnering with the National Center for Women in Technology, Feminist Frequency, Rainbow PUSH, Girls Who Code, the Cybersmile Foundation, the IDGA and more.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in his keynote address that "It's not good enough to say we value diversity, and then have our industry not fully represent..." women and other minorities, and that the aim goes beyond the company's bottom line. "This isn't just good business," said Krzanich, "this is the right thing to do... We're calling on our industry to again make the seemingly impossible possible by making a commitment to real change and clarity in our goals. Without a workforce that more closely mirrors the population, we are missing opportunities, including not understanding and designing for our own customers." To show the effort is more than just talk, he said will make sure its hiring practices reflect this going forward and will tie its leaders' pay to the progress toward this goal, which will be closely tracked and monitored.

Last year, after the #gamergate-led groups directed an email astrotufing campaign to Intel attacking a blog post Leigh Alexander made about the hate group on Gamasutra, a video-game industry-focused site, and succeeded in convincing the company to temporarily withdraw its advertising contract. Intel later reinstated its advertising and released a statement saying "Intel does not support any organization or movement that discriminates against women. We apologize and we are deeply sorry if we offended anyone."

Where Are The Women Video Characters?

Over 90 percent of kids play video games regularly, according to the most recent study from the NPD group. And according to the ESRB, over 65 percent of US households own at least one video game console.

A study by Children Now and Dr. David Leonard of Washington State University this year that the images above reference showed that 17 percent of video games characters were female, 19 percent of characters were women and 64 percent of characters in video games were male. Even more distressing, the study found that found what little black women characters there were had a distressingly narrowed role: 90 percent of black female characters were either props, bystanders or victims. So with there being more non-human characters in video games than women characters in video games... how does that affect boys' views of women and what they can do? How does that affect girls' view of themselves? How many of the women characters are just motivation for the hero to start a quest, or a damsel in distress, or otherwise a periphery in a game?

As I've said often, representation matters. Two years ago, a study conducted by Commuunication Research showed that watching TV shows increased the self esteem of  white boys, but noticeably undercut the confidence and self esteem of girls no matter what the race.

One outlet that will be dedicated to tackling this issues is an upcoming podcast called The Smash Survey. The about page describes The Smash Survey as "... an upcoming podcast project that will critically explore the representation of race, gender, and queer identity in media and pop culture in a fun and engaging format. Through interviews, games, critiques, and panels TTS will try and answer the three primary questions of representation and media portrayals: Why are they the way they are, why are they wrong and what can we do to fix them?" You can follow the tumblr of the same name here.

What say you, readers?

Tech's Gender Gap Is Real, Pervasive, Worse Than Men Realize

For all the idealism behind the idea that technology knows no borders, that data and the market-place of ideas offer equal access to meritous ideas, free from gender bias or that women have achieved parity with men in the technology field, the actual lived experience of scores of women in the tech industry, from app development to tech investments is rife with stories that tell otherwise. Last week, Wired published an eye-opening and unflinching look at the gender gap between men and women in the tech industry entitled "This Is What Tech’s Ugly Gender Problem Really Looks Like". An excerpt:

Shortly after Kathryn Tucker started RedRover, an app that showcases local events for kids, she pitched the idea to an angel investor at a New York tech event. But it didn’t go over well. When she finished her pitch, the investor said he didn’t invest in women. When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said. Tucker didn’t need to hear any more. “I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ walked out, and never spoke to him again,” she recalled earlier this year, as part of a panel discussion on “fundraising while female” at the annual Internet Week conference in New York. 

It was one of many stories shared during a panel that painted the tech world as a place that—for all its efforts to push into the future with apps and gadgets and online services—is still very much stuck in the past when it comes to attitudes involving gender...  

But there’s another truth to remember: For every story you hear about investors behaving badly, there are far worse stories that many women wouldn’t dare to tell. “The most common thing I hear from other women is: ‘Oh the stories I’ll tell once I’m far enough along that I don’t have to worry about being shamed,’” says Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of the job search and career advice site The Muse. For women who have experienced this bias—and there are many—the simple act of talking about it is taboo... And yet, it’s only through these stories that we can begin to understand that the statistics aren’t the result of some fluke or mass oversight, but a very real problem that needs to be solved.

The entire article is worth a thorough read, and hopefully serves as a decent wake-up call. A word of advice, though: Don't read the comments on the article. They're particularly loathsome.

Mythbusting Ideas About Women In The Game Industry

Brianna Wu has an excellent article on polygon today on women in the gaming industry and harassment. She outlines the stories of a number of women in the gaming industry and the harassment they have received.

Not only that, but each particular case study takes a myth surrounding online harassment of women in the games industry and shows how it's false, using that woman's direct, lived experience.

An excerpt from the introduction:

My name is Brianna Wu. I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me. 

If you are a woman working in the games industry, especially in a public way, you’re going to experience harassment. I imagine telling my 12-year-old self that fulfilling my dream of making games would lead to constant threats. Would she still do it? Would any woman? The problem with sharing these stories in broad terms is that people think men and women receive the same harassment online. They do not. I’m not writing this piece to evoke your sympathy. I’m writing to share with you what prominent, successful women in the industry experience, in their own words.

The entire article is a must-read.

She also created a companion video:

The harassment of women in the games industry is an epidemic, and it's also a reflection of the crap that women have to go through in society in general. It's easy to lay the blame at the feet of anonymous internet cesspools like 4chan and misogynistic pockets of Reddit but those are really just enablers. The internet doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s part of the culture that we, as a society, have allowed to mushroom because we haven’t done much as a society to stop it.

I talked about a few things men can do to help stop this both online and in general in my blog post "The Status Is Not Quo: Being A Geeky Woman Online & What Men Need To Do".

The Status Is Not Quo: Being A Geeky Woman Online & What Men Need To Do

It's a bitter irony that for the many self-identified male geeks, nerds, gamers (both of the video and tabletop kind), comic books fans, sci-fi enthusiasts &etc that talk about growing up feeling unwelcome or ostracized in wider society, many women wanting to contribute to, or participate in, those same communities end up feeling that same isolation, hostility and othering just for being a woman online. Whether it's having their "credentials" challenged as being nothing more than a "fake geek girl" or being made to question their own legitimacy at an even just because they are attending an event with their significant other.

Online platforms like Twitter and Youtube have enabled women to work to curate and create spaces on their own terms. Women have flocked to these services to create their own networks of support, activism, and discussion as well as reclaim online space to talk about shared interests, media fandom, geek culture, video games and more from a feminist perspective. However, as Samantha Allen points out, for all the resources and community the Internet has offered, it has made it...

"...much easier for men to manipulate, harass, abuse, stalk, and, yes, physically harm women.This past weekend, I was on a panel with some members of Nostalgia Chick, a set of veteran media critics who often include feminist perspectives in their videos. They told me that the Internet, in many ways, has become a less hospitable place for them to do their work over the years. 

And I believe it. Between 4Chan, Men’s Rights Activist groups, theReddit Red Pill community, pick-up artist (PUA) groups, and anti-PUA groups like the one that Elliot Rodger clung to so dearly, the Internet has allowed men to band together more efficiently than ever before to threaten and antagonize women. Every woman with an online presence has a story to share about unwanted contact, sexual harassment, and predatory behavior."

Anita Sarkeesian, the writer and producer of the Feminist Frequency web video series, started the "Tropes vs. Women In Video Games" series that looks at video game tropes and culture through a feminist lens, has been the target of years of harassment, and recently shared a small sampling of the harassing emails she gets on a regular basis:

I get so many emails like this I could publish a coffee table book full of them.

It’s especially amusing that this misogyny laced email is unironically signed “See you soon m’lady. *tips fedora*”

Sadly, this is a widespread problem for women creators on YouTube, and was addressed at this year's VidCon, the world's largest conference for online video content creators. As Rae Votta outlines in "What It's Really Like For Women On Youtube":

In March, abuses of power by men in the YouTube space over their younger, female fans came to light after several women spoke out on Tumblr and other platforms about their experiences, causing community-wide outrage and task forces like YouCoalition, which was formed to “combat sexual abuse, emotional manipulation and other forms of violence in the YouTube community,” according to the website. Saturday’s Women on YouTube panel broached this still-raw topic, emphasizing the opinion that, while the start of the conversation about abuse had a lot of flaws, the important thing is that the community doesn't treat the situation like it’s finished, and still gives the issue the attention that it deserves.

Rojas, who was one of the women who spoke out against inappropriate behavior, chimed in, “We've shown a lot of people that they won’t get away with it.”
“We are not a community that welcomes abusers,” emphasized Lex Croucher. “The most important thing is to encourage people affected by this to come forward and [to be] supportive of those who do come forward.”

Lots of people try to frame harassment and abuse online as "just the Internet", but the emotional toll and physical danger is important, and a very real threat, and carry very real consequences. Recently, Samanta Allen was harassed off Twitter after she was buried under an avalanche of harassing tweets when she talked about how she liked the staff of Giant Bomb but was disappointed that for all the site's talk of valuing diversity, the site's first public hires in years were another two white men. Women's hurt and fear for safety and the emotional toll for being harassed online have real, chilling impact on discourse.

This is unacceptable. And the burden of speaking out shouldn't continually fall to the women being harassed. So what can we do? Guys, we have to loudly speak out against this behavior. We have to support women in our creative and media spaces. We need to let other men know that this behavior is not okay, and we need to make it socially unacceptable. We need to listen to women's experiences-- really listen, and not just wait for our chance to say "not all men". We need to realize that online harassment isn't something that just happens-- it's a choice that is made, it is a crime that is done.

As Andy Kouri says in "Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment":

It is wholly and rightfully and crucially up to men in this society and especially in this subculture to speak out and watch out. To end the cycle of bullying, harassment and violence. To recognize the grotesque irony of degrading women over matters of heroic fictions whose lessons about fairness and decency we’ve supposedly been studying since we were just little boys, and to start putting those ideas into practice as grown-ass men. 

Readers, what say you? Sound off in the comments below.