After launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a long-term project that would examine the roles women play—or are consigned to—in video games, Feminist Frequency video blogger Anita Sarkeesian was subject to a vicious, violence-saturated campaign of harassment. While it was awful to watch Sarkeesian be threatened and slandered for the sin of wanting to do her job well and comprehensively, the utter inability of her harassers to shut her work down has been wonderful to watch.

And I’m cheering Sarkeesian’s perseverance even harder now that the first installment of her project, titled Tropes Vs. Women, is out—and it’s terrific. Examining both the depiction and gameplay of characters like Pauline, Princess Peach and Zelda, Sarkeesian goes back to the origins of the Damsels In Distress trope art and literature, explores how the trope migrated into video games after the rights to Popeye characters couldn’t be secured for a video game, and examines how the trope became valuable to the video game industry:

At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters,” says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isn’t a sign that it’s perfect and everyone else is wrong: it’s a sign you can’t defend the things you love. That’s a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend.

This post discusses plot points from the February 27 episode of The Americans.

It’s not new for The Americans to discuss marriage, but this is the episode in which the show’s main theme ran most strongly through all three of the main storylines in play. When Elizabeth visits Udacha, she uses his widower status to make him emotionally vulnerable. “I’m very sorry about your wife. It was 35 years, right?” Elizabeth asks. “And eight months,” the man reminds her. She may be playing him, but when Elizabeth remarks “That’s really something,” you sense that she means it.

But what that “something” means, she isn’t exactly sure. After the defense contractor she’s seducing beats her badly with a belt under the cover of adding a little BDSM to their encounter—”It’s supposed to hurt,” he tells her—Phillip, newly enlightened to Elizabeth’s experiences with sexual trauma, refuses to accept that what’s happened to her is simply one of the consequences of her job she has to accept. But just because Phillip found out with Elizabeth in training doesn’t mean she’s ready to accept his protection. When he tells her “I’m going to deal with it,” Elizabeth is dismissive. “You’re going to deal with it? If I wanted to deal with him, you don’t think he’d be dealt with? I wanted the intel and I got it,” she tells him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. It’s over.” But he isn’t willing to accept her independence in this matter. “Somebody beat the shit out of my wife,” he insists. “I’m not your daddy. I’m your husband, Elizabeth. What do you think husbands do?” “I wouldn’t know,” she spits back at him. And she’s still skeptical when, after their caper with the car (the best action sequence the show’s filmed so far), Phillip comes after her instead of leaving her to extract herself. “You didn’t have to pick me up,” she tells him. “I didn’t have to bring you coffee, either,” he explains. “Or a vanilla cream donut.” Left unsaid is that husbands, at least in Phillip’s conception, do the little things as well as the big ones. And when Elizabeth asks Phillip to “Show me another way” to live her life, she’s telling him that she’s willing to listen to what he thinks marriage means, and to accept some of his desire to be good to her.

And down the block, Phillip’s raquetball partner is having trouble living up to his own standards for what it means to be a good husband. When Stan’s wife comes downstairs in a new nightie, she tries to tear him away from his study of Cyrillic—meaningfully, given his mix-up in tone with Nina from earlier in the episode, he appears to be taking them from a robot—with memories of what their relationship used to be. “You know, a few years ago, before your long stint undercover, we used to go line dancing, you and I,” she tells him. “And we used to drink Chianti at the bar at the old Spaghetti Factory, and host bridge nights once a month. And we used to have those family double bubble blowing contests. And you knew your son’s three best friends’ names. Life was pretty frickin’ great, wasn’t it? Remember?” Stan has ideas about what it means to be a good husband, telling Chris that he should try to be nicer to Martha if he wants to win her back, and later snapping at him “What you don’t know about marriage, and family, and responsibility, and obligation, and answering to people on a one-on-one personal level for 23 years? I could fill a goddamn warehouse, Chris.” What’s harder for him is that he knows who he wants to be, and he’s failing to be it. Part of him got lost out there with the white supremacists, and he still hasn’t managed to recover it.
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Over at Wired, entertainment editor Laura Hudson (formerly the editor in chief of Comics Alliance) explores the understandable confusion that women who find themselves the target of violent threats on Facebook feel about Facebook’s refusal to take down some of that content, despite the clear statements in its terms of use that forbid bullying or the use of threats or hate speech against other users. Facebook, which responded to Hudson’s request for comment, didn’t clarify things as much as they seem to hope that they might:

Wired reached out to Facebook for a comment, and a representative clarified the site’s position:

“We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. In general, attempts at humor, even disgusting and distasteful ones, do not violate our policies. When real threats or statements of hate are made, however, we will remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.”

What’s a threat and what’s a joke are both subjective things that depend on both the intent of the speaker and what’s heard by the person who is the target of their speech. What Facebook is effectively saying with this decision calculus that it’s willing to give more deference to speakers who say that they’re trying to be funny—a rationale that can be a very convenient shield for people who don’t want to be responsible for how their speech is received—than the fear of people who feel threatened. A joke doesn’t have to be “real” or effective in the same way a threat apparently does, a hugely subjective standard, to be actionable.

After I read Laura’s post, I read Melissa Gira Grant’s review of Katherine Losse’s memoir of working at Facebook, The Boy Kings. Grant urges us to recall Facebook’s origins as a site that scraped photos of women from existing databases and its transition to a site that got women to give up those images of themselves voluntarily. And she explains how Losse’s experience was part of a larger organizational disdain for customer service, even as a comfortable customer service experience was integral to the idea of getting people to be excited to and feel safe about sharing images and accounts of their personal lives online:

Facebook’s most valued employees—software engineers—relied on customer support staff largely in order to avoid direct contact with Facebook’s users. Rather than valuing their work as vital to operations, Facebook’s technical staff looked down on the support team, as if they were not much better than users themselves. “Personal contact with customers,” Losse writes, was viewed by the engineers as something “that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era…”…Women workers at Facebook, the customer service buffer between programmers and users, were charged with the social upkeep of this “safe space.” Hundreds of times a day, Facebook users would email Losse and the support team to ask, “What does poking mean?” “We always responded innocently,” Losse writes. “Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace.”

It’s not particularly surprising to me that an organization that started with a culture of putting women in subordinate service positions, that regarded customer service as an irritant, and that’s reliant on getting people to put up data on the site might end up with some of the problems that Facebook has now. All of those tendencies militate against taking down content, against taking customer complaints seriously, and against valuing women’s perspectives over the overall needs of the site. But if Facebook continues to want women to feel safe living their digital lives openly on its platform, it may have to start communicating more clearly, and being more responsive, to women who feel threatened on its digital streets.