The second video in Anita Sarkeesian’s series of Tropes vs Women in Video Games has been released this week. Her first video looked at how the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope became so overused over the years and this video now talks about the darker and more violent side to it that is still in use today. The video has a lot of clips from games which have major spoilers in them; there is a list of the games used in the description of the video on her website Feminist Frequency.
As you may already know, this video series gathered a lot of attention and when it showed up on Kickstarter. The idea was a web series which looked at gender tropes in video games and the goal was $6000. This was quickly reached but what followed was a wave of abuse directed at Anita. Hateful comments were posted, her website was hacked and pornographic images were put on her Wikipedia page. A game was uploaded to Newgrounds which allowed players to repeatedly punch an image of her face until the screen went red. Anita describes some of the harassment she received herself on her site. Even the video released this week was briefly removed from YouTube after users abused the site’s flag function, it has since been restored.

Whether or not you agree with many of the points made in the series, this kind of attack on someone even trying to discuss the issue is inexcusable. In the end though the Kickstarter project far exceeded its goal of $6000 and $158,922 was pledged by supporters.