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.

On Friday afternoon, Gawker published a long profile of a Reddit moderator who went by Violentacrez. A Texas programmer in real life, Violentacrez has helped shape Reddit’s norms, mentoring and writing documentation for moderators, scrubbing the site for patently illegal content, but also helping establish some of its most distasteful subsections, some openly racist, and others devoted to posting and discussion of sexualized images of very young women taken or republished without their consent. It’s very, very ugly behavior, and Violentacrez, who became a Reddit star, represents the outer limit of speech Reddit will defend. Reddit subsections have responded to the profile by collectively banning links from Gawker sites. But whatever your opinion of publishing Violentacrez’s real identity, the profile and the conversation around it have furthered discussions about a range of misogynistic behaviors, from the belief that men are entitled to images of women, even those obtained invasively, to the idea that men have a more valid right to protection of their identities or to sexual gratification than women have to be free of harassment or to name harassing behavior for what it is.

In the midst of the discussion of the Gawker piece, New Yorker television critic and friend of this blog Emily Nussbaum tweeted “The whole Gawker/Reddit expose is reminding me how thoughtful & prescient Buffy Season 6 was about exactly this type of geek misogyny.” It’s a brilliant observation, and I’d take it a step further. The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the titular demon hunter and her friends find themselves harassed by three young men, Jonathan Levinson, Andrew Wells, and Warren Mears, who call themselves The Trio. These characters are each an important example of three different and damaging kinds of views men can have of women, and what toxic and tragic things can come to pass when those different worldviews are conflated and intermingled.

When we meet Jonathan Levinson, the member of the Trio who has the longest history with Buffy and her friends, he seems awfully like some of the men on Reddit and elsewhere who express profound yearning for emotional and sexual connection with women (in particular), but are afraid such connections are permanently beyond their grasp. His failed high school relationships, which take place on the periphery of Buffy’s adventures, read like a litany of stereotypical complaints about the true motivations of women. There’s the reincarnated Inca princess who wants him for his life-force rather than his person. Cordelia Chase, a popular and beautiful girl, uses him to get over her own feelings of rejection with little regard for Jonathan’s emotions. Later, he has a date to prom who apparently doesn’t last. Jonathan struggles with suicidal impulses that Buffy initially mistakes for murderousness, an indicator of his profound self-hatred. And while Jonathan recovers enough to want to live, to honor Buffy for protecting him and other students at prom, he remains profoundly alienated and insecure.
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I know I’ve been writing a lot about Anita Sarkeesian, the Feminist Frequency video blogger whose attempts to raise money to fund a series examining the portrayal of women in video games resulted in vicious, sexist attacks on her—and much higher levels of contributions to her project than she initially anticipated. But I really am struck by these unfolding events as representatives of larger trends and ideas. Most recently, as the attacks have expanded from Sarkeesian herself to Stephanie Guthrie, an organizer who decided to shame the creator of a game that allowed players to beat up a picture of Sarkeesian, I’ve been left wondering what the people who are trolling Sarkeesian and Guthrie are hoping to accomplish here if it’s something other than shutting both women up.

First, I should acknowledge that Guthrie’s language in calling out Bendilin Spurr—the initial tweet was “So I found the Twitter account of that fuck listed as creator of the ‘punch a woman in the face’ game. Should I sic the internet on him?”—was harsher than I would have used, though I’m not really opposed to publicly shaming people who do gross things or threaten people online, particularly if they do so under their real names or Facebook accounts, or leave a clear trail back to such things. People aren’t entitled to greater deference than they give other people. But I think if you’re going to shame someone, it’s probably better to take the moral high ground. That is not always an easy thing to define. Personally, I’m comfortable calling people by name and explaining why what they did was dangerous, offensive, or uncool, though I would never tell folks to respond with retaliatory harassment, or affirmatively contact employers or universities to suggest that they not hire or admit someone (not, for the record, things Guthrie did). If we want to keep the institutions of the internet and the real world troll-free spaces, we have to avoid adopting certain tactics ourselves.

That said, the response to Guthrie was of an entirely different proportion. On Twitter, a user told her that he’d be “The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, bitch,” promising “I will wip you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before, mark my fucking works.” Guthrie, justifiably, called the cops.

The thing is, given that trolls have failed to scare Sarkeesian into silence, and they now appear to be failing to shut Guthrie up, what do they think they’re achieving? Screaming violent, sexist trash at women doesn’t dispel the idea that gamers are sexist, or insensitive to women’s concerns, or afraid of people who challenge their ideas. It’s not as if this is an example of classical trolling, which is meant to reveal something about the target’s naivete or hypocrisy. Calling a woman a cunt reveals vastly more about what the speaker thinks is acceptable than it does about the woman who’s on the receiving end of his name-calling. Everything about this kind of trolling is oriented towards short-term efforts to get individual women to stop saying things that make the trolls uncomfortable. And if those efforts fail, the trolls have left behind huge amounts of evidence that reinforce the perceptions of people who think they’re a bunch of troglodytes, making it more likely that feminists of all genders will say more things in the future that make the trolls uncomfortable. In addition to being ugly harassment, it’s bad, stupid strategy. At some point, you’d think that dudes who don’t want to be called out as sexists would try something else.