I grew up loving video games and was raised a huge fan of consoles like Nintendo 64 and Game Cube. Despite the fact that I hardly play them now, it's easy for me to understand the nostalgia and sentimentality that surround video games as a media form and create communities full of devoted followers. Even so, the community as a whole has its downfalls, the most obvious being its tendency to revert to online abuse in response to the presence and criticism of female voices. One fairly well known case of this phenomena is what resulted from Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency youtube channel in 2013. To put it lightly, in response to her video detailing the misrepresentation of women in video games, the community personally attacked her by publicly derogating and abusing her online. Shortly after, PBS Digital Studios posted a video on their youtube channel which interpreted this hostile backlash as a response to the threat that women pose to the gaming community's collective identity. Although a good amount of women play video games, the culture is seriously male dominated, so PBS understood her presence and criticism to have sparked a sort of identity crisis. On another note, understanding the community's hostility through a lens of group identity resonates with my own general experience playing video games. Although I started playing at a young age, the anti-female atmosphere was evident early on. It goes without saying, but the gaming community isn't the only industry that presumes male dominance and overreacts to a strong female presence. Not surprisingly, the sports industry has proven to be extremely hostile to women who find success as sports journalists. Similar to gaming, the climate and history of sports journalism is critically anti-female. According to a blog post from 2016 on Working in Sports, female sports journalists are the most likely to receive hateful, threatening, and misogynistic comments on social media. Along with being constantly delegitimized by objectification in the media, the blog specifies that women in the sports industry are also "faced with harassment from fans, the athletes themselves and even their own colleagues" (x). While this sort of behavior is lamentable regardless of the context, what is especially pejorative is that the women are being faced with such an extensive amount of intimidation for simply doing their job. I know that statistics and words alone don't do much to humanize the women who are experiencing so much unwarranted online aggression, so I thought a video might be the best way to communicate the gravity of this sort of antagonism and objectification. The video is titled "Women in Sports 'Face' Harassment" for a reason; it features two successful female sports journalists and a few men who read the graphic comments from the women's social media aloud. Although the men reading the comments are not the same people who wrote them, the mere act of saying them out loud is unconditionally outrageous. The video starts out with some awkward laughs but eventually both the men speaking and the women listening are disquieted. In fact, the men found themselves struggling to disclose certain comments because they were so hostile. It says a lot about how relevant anonymity and distance are to online harassment and misogyny. Reading a comment out loud and undisguised restores an element of humanity that sometimes gets lost in the words behind a screen. Clearly, there is still work to do in the prospect of respecting and recognizing each other as equals. The content is explicit and the language is violent, but this video solidifies and humanizes the experience of online harassment in today's world. For that reason, I think it's worth the watch.
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