Anita Sarkeesian Quotations

Developers need to start moving away from the entitled macho-male power fantasy in their games. They need to recognize that there are wider stories that they can tell.

Online harassment, especially gendered online harassment, is an epidemic. 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.

As others have recently suggested, the term 'gamer' is no longer useful as an identity because games are for everyone. These days, even my mom spends an inordinate amount of time gaming on her iPad. So I'll take a cue from my younger self and say I don't care about being a 'gamer,' but I sure do love video games.

There's a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynist hatred, this reactionary backlash against women who have anything to say, especially those who have critiques or who are feminists.

Games have a huge impact on our society because the media plays a role in helping to shape our attitudes. So it's not just fantasy.

My own contentious relationship with gaming continued through high school and college: I still enjoyed playing games from time to time, but I always found myself pushed away by the sexism that permeated gaming culture. There were constant reminders that I didn't really belong.

The power of pop culture stories should not be underestimated, and there is an enormous potential for inspirational stories that can have a positive, transformative effect on our lives.

We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies.

Game studios, developers, and major publishers need to vocally speak up against the harassment of women and say this behavior is unacceptable.

We can be critical of the things that we love. That is possible.

I love playing video games, but I'm regularly disappointed in the limited and limiting ways women are represented.

There are people I've blocked for a long time who will still respond to every single person that replies positively to me on Twitter. I have quite a few cyber-stalkers like that.

Game creators aren't necessarily all sitting around twirling their nefarious-looking mustaches while consciously trying to figure out how to best misrepresent women as part of some grand conspiracy. Most probably just haven't given much thought to the underlying messages their games are sending.

The notion that gaming was not for women rippled out into society, until we heard it not just from the games industry, but from our families, teachers and friends. As a consequence, I, like many women, had a complicated, love-hate relationship with gaming culture.

GamerGate is really a sexist temper tantrum. That's kind of a silly, funny way of putting it, but it's kind of what it feels like, right? They're going after and targeting women who are trying to make changes in the industry. They're attacking anyone who supports women.

Harassment is the background radiation of my life. It is a factor in every decision I make. Any time I tweet something or make a post, I'm always thinking about it.

I was frustrated with how academia tended to present feminist theory in disconnected or inaccessible ways. I wanted to try and bring a sociological feminist lens to the limited and limiting representations of women in the media and then share that with other young women of my generation. YouTube was the perfect medium.

The time for invisible boundaries that guard the 'purity' of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about.

I hadn't mentioned, but Ching Shih is a pretty villainous character. She is a real person, but she was a pirate commander, so she probably murdered a lot of people.

It's been really exciting to work on a collaborative, creative team where we got to bounce ideas back and forth and figure out the best one.

I really want to help write women back into history.

I want these to be names that young girls and boys and kids of all genders grow up knowing. It shouldn't just be when you take a feminist class in college, if you happen to do that. I hope this is fun and engaging for folks to watch.

I find crowdfunding to be one of the most ethical ways to continue doing the work that we do because the idea is that I want my videos to be free and available to everybody, and that's why I use YouTube and online platforms.

For me, if folks who are watching YouTube can pitch in a bit to help cover the cost for creating this work, that's great, but I don't want folks who can't helped to not have access to it. I really like the crowdfunding model in that regard.

I really wanted to explore a range of women who aren't necessarily perfect, heroic women. I wanted to series to influence creative people to include more women in their work, especially historic works.

My writer and I sat down and wrote a huge list of names of women to consider. It was really important to us to have a broad range of women from across generations and cultures. We didn't want to make it Western-focused, we wanted to make sure it was international and that it had an intersectional lens.

Maybe today we aren't being told that our brains are not capable of such things [like programming], but we [as a women] are being told that we are not good enough or smart enough or that our successes do not belong to us.

The struggles women face today are simultaneously very, very old and very new.

The struggles of dealing with online harassment is the same harassment that women have been dealing with, it's just a new medium in which it's happening.

I'm really thriving and enjoying being a part of a really vibrant creative team and doing creative work.

Here are examples of real women who have done real things: good, bad, and in between. We're expanding not just the definition of the female or feminine hero, but also villains and more complex, nuanced female characters. Too often I hear men say, "I don't know how to write women." Here you go, here are five incredible women you can use to inspire your own stories.

I got to focus on my performance - learning how to perform is something I've been working on both personally and professionally.

The other thing is that it's really hard to separate out the harassment from everything we do. When we started creating Tropes, we were hyper-aware of the intense scrutiny, the intense harassment, and the intense pressure to do something meaningful given the attention both positive and negative. That's carried over in terms of making sure that I produce the best work that I can, that's the most accurate, the most sensitive and engaged.

I wouldn't call it a silver lining, but with more women speaking up, online harassment is beginning to be taken more seriously.

I'm no stranger to a bit of sexist backlash, but I was surprised by the level of vicious and misogynist hate I received.

Well maybe the princess shouldnt be a damsel and she can save herself.

Ordinary Women was shot on a soundstage with a professional crew and a professional animation studio creating everything.

Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change.

The gaming industry has been male-dominated ever since its inception.

I wanted to make feminism more accessible. And I really wanted to engage with my own generation, one that is increasingly speaking in an audio/video multimedia language.

I came back to this idea of telling the stories of women who aren't in all of the history books. Their names are not up there next to male names that we've know since we were little kids. Ching Shih, for example, was a pirate commander from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. She was one of the most fearsome pirates, why is her name not included when we list the names of great pirates like Blackbeard?

One of the most radical things you can do, is to actually believe women when they tell you about their experiences.

There is a clear difference between sexist parody and parody of sexism. Sexist parody encourages the players to mock and trivialize gender issues while parody of sexism disrupts the status quo and undermines regressive gender conventions.

The US bombed them back to traditional values – feminism does not exist in Japan. While I don’t like judging an entire culture…that does not excuse them.

When we look at these historical women and what they've gone through, it's shocking to recognize some of our own experiences in theirs. When you look at someone like Ada Lovelace who is the first computer programmer, during her lifetime doctors said that was really sick because she was trying to use a masculine kind of brain that she didn't have. Today, her legacy of being the first programmer is stil disputed.

I am not a fan of video games, I had to learn a lot about them. I would love to play video games, but I don't want to go around shooting people, and ripping off their heads, and it's just gross.

There’s no such thing as sexism against men. That's because sexism is prejudice + power. Men are the dominant gender with power in society.

It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.