Her one tweet elicited a slew of negative and hateful replies from male users who inexplicably seemed to take offense to her statement.

Their vitriolic and sometimes violent words, as Sarkeesian says, reveal “the male privilege and male entitlement endemic in the gaming community.” In fact, during the very same Microsoft event, the tech company introduced a game by making an oppressive rape joke themselves – in front of a massive audience – for which they were later forced to apologize.

As video games have become one of the dominant forms of entertainment globally, with the top titles regularly out earning even the biggest summer blockbusters, it’s increasingly important that we challenge the messages these games and the larger community around them send to our girls and boys.

Let’s not forget that the aforementioned sexism is reflective of a larger American culture that continues to demean and degrade women. For instance, this same week, Republican congressman Trent Franks claimed that pregnancy rates are lower for women who have been raped, while others in Washington decided not to substantially overhaul a military system that allowed at least 26,000 sexual assaults to occur last year.

The issue of misogyny in gaming is particularly troubling because – contrary to stereotypes – at least 45% of all gamers are women and girls. How can our leaders, in corporate America, the media and beyond, continue to ignore and demean half of our population? And how can so many sit idly by when the women and girls they love continue to be disrespected and disparaged?

It’s time for all of this to stop.

On Monday, U.S. late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon will launch his annual “video game week,” where he will spotlight – to an audience of millions – many of the titles that debuted at E3. The producers of his show have explained that the intent of this week-long celebration is to broadly represent the rise of video gaming culture. Which means, they should be critical of the rampant sexism on display and certainly include the voices of women and girls.

Yet, based on early reports, the show doesn’t plan to promote any games with a sole female protagonist.

Tweet Mr. Fallon (@jimmyfallon) and his team (@LateNightJimmy) to ask them to stand up for women and use their influence next week to challenge misogyny in the gaming community. By encouraging a better representation of women in video game culture, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon can help reverse the troubling trends that were on display this week.

SUMMARY:

In Feminist Frequency‘s latest video, Anita Sarkeesian continues the exploration of common tropes of female characters in video games that she began earlier this year.

She believes that the females in many video games are not real characters with desires, motives, and actions, but are used as plot devises in which a woman is placed in a perilous situation which she cannot escape, and must be saved by the heroic male character. Many times this token “vulnerable” and “disempowered” female is the romantic interest of the hero, which portrays a dangerous power dynamic in relationships that is seen as acceptable, normal, or even desirable. Sarkeesian then continues to explain how the “damsel in distress” can be combined with other female tropes that involve victimizing women. She brings forward the “women in refrigerator” which is a trope that often involves a women being killed, causing the hero to seek revenge on the killer. This is another typical female character that is only used to propel the hero’s development and the game’s plot.

These plots have more depictions of violence against women, and she connects the violent images in video games with domestic violence in society. She states, “when video games exploit sensationalized images of mutilated, brutalized, and victimized women over and over again, it tends to reinforce the dominant gender paradigm which casts men as aggressive and commanding and frames women as subordinate and victimized.” Although the female characters are usually the driving force of the plot, none of the plots are about their stories. Their deaths are more important than their lives.

Not only do these depictions increase harmful stereotypes of women, but they also perpetuate stigmas of masculinity. While the female’s capture or death is seen as the driving force for the male hero’s, the hidden force is his shame for failing to perform his expected duties of protecting his women and children. The plot is really a journey trying to regain the masculinity that was lost, often using violence to achieve those means. She argues that this can be harmful to men because it enforces violence as the accepted response to death or tragedy. She finishes by encouraging the audience to consider how females deaths are framed, and how or why they are written.

It’s sad that we have to recognize an ad for being fairly normal, but when it’s coming from GoDaddy – numero uno on our all-time worst offenders list of sexist advertisers – it feels necessary.

Here’s their newest spot, titled, ahem, “Don’t be a Restraining Order Jim” (also know as “TMI”) which first appeared earlier this month:

It’s a play on the process of finding a domain name, and how important naming is for a new business, which, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize this before, is actually exactly what GoDaddy is supposed to help you do. This week new CEO Blake Irving, who joined GoDaddy in January, described the shift in strategy to the Wall Street Journal:

“Our advertising is now more focused on what we do as a company and who we do it for.”

What an idea.

In many ways this new commercial serves as an (unintentionally) stinging critique of GoDaddy’s prior advertising strategies. Based on the company’s history of objectifying and demeaning women, if GoDaddy were an actual human person, the name “restraining order Jim” would be pretty appropriate. For years, women (and their allies) have associated the GoDaddy logo with a feeling of ickiness – definitely something they’d rather not stand next to in an office break room. So one might draw a parallel between “Jim” here and the company itself – just a bumbling guy trying to be funny, but accidentally being creepy.

Except, let’s be real, GoDaddy’s advertising strategy for the past decade has been beyond creepy. It’s been harmful and oppressive – a consistently demeaning portrayal of women sent into millions of households every year. “Sexist and misogynist Jim” might have been more appropriate.

Nevertheless, in combination with the CEO’s comments, it does feel like an important shift for the brand. Here’s an ad that despite relying on a bit of base humor (“restraining orders” as the punchline), at least doesn’t use women as objects or overtly demean them. And though this isn’t the first time the company has promised to change its ways, this may be the first actual evidence of new thinking at GoDaddy. A video focusing on women as small business owners was also recently uploaded to the company’s YouTube account.

It seems the thousands of #NotBuyingIt tweets sent to the brand over the years have finally made an impact.

The real test though will be next year’s Super Bowl, when GoDaddy typically has its largest platform and where they have made a name for themselves as a consistently sexist brand. Considering that track record, even just airing something as simple as “Jim” would be a major statement, and proof that CEO Irving is actually committed to moving forward.

Not only did Facebook acknowledge their prior failures, but in this message posted to the site on Tuesday they committed to including a coalition of women’s groups in all future decisions around hate speech. They have effectively answered all the demands proposed in the open letter we co-signed last week alongside over 100 organizations worldwide.

MissRepresentation.org is proud to have supported this amazing campaign led by Women, Action & the Media, The Everyday Sexism Project and Soraya Chemaly. It’s a thrilling and inspiring example of what we are capable of when we come together to fight sexism and misogyny online.

Read more here.

-”Beauty isn’t between a size 0 and a size 8. It is not a number at all. It is not physical.” - The Ellen DeGeneres Show critiques comments made by Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries

-Slate’s Jessica Grose discusses our “Creepy Obsession with Celebrity Pregnancies.”

-Miss Representation is proud to join Soraya Chemaly, Women, Action & the Media and The Everyday Sexism Project in signing this open letter to Facebook:

“We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook…To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site.”

-”Yes, women make up half the population. And sometimes we like pink things. But more often than not, we don’t want what you think we want.” - BuzzFeed rounds up 16 products ridiculously marketed to women.

-Brave writer and co-director Brenda Chapman speaks out about why the fight to cancel Merida’s sexy makeover matters on A Mighty Girl.

Two hours ago I had no idea who or what Candypolis was (am still not entirely sure), but if I ever come across their logo in the world, I will remember this moment. They’ve created a positive brand association by taking a stand against Facebook’s passive attitude towards “rape jokes” and images of violence against women.

Their letter in response to the #FBRape campaign is by far the most “liked” Facebook post the company has EVER had and has been re-tweeted countless times.

They are among the surprisingly few Facebook advertisers who have realized that as thousands of consumers worldwide are expressing outrage over the social network’s policy around monitoring gender-based hate speech, this is actually a fantastic opportunity for brands to distinguish themselves as supportive of women and girls – as conscientious businesses. Which, in turn, paints all their competitors who stay silent in a very negative light.

(For proof of that negative light, look here. *trigger warning*)

Yet if your company isn’t persuaded by the fact that you are tacitly condoning and overtly profiting from misogyny by continuing to advertise on Facebook, then perhaps you might pay attention to this: 74.9% of American women identify themselves as the primary shoppers for their households. And as more and more of them become aware of this campaign (over 22,000 tweets have been sent in the last 3 days alone) that’s more and more women (and those who care about them) who won’t be buying your products in the future.

Imran is the Social Media and Communications Director at MissRepresentation.org. Follow him on Twitter @imransiddiquee

Excerpt:

We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook. Specifically, we call on you, Facebook, to take three actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.
2. Effectively train moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site.

The campaign is being led by Soraya Chemaly, Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) and The Everyday Sexism Project.

Read the full letter

Take action.

See examples of content allowed on Facebook (Trigger Warning).

The most memorable scene of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha features the title character, played by Gerwig, running through the streets of New York City to the tune of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.”

The camera swims beside her and, like the rest of this black and white film, it’s infused with a sense of romantic nostalgia. Yet, even as your cinephile mind thinks Manhattan or French new wave (or recalls this exact scene from another movie), the absence of color in the film does more than pay homage to the cinema of the past. In the context of Frances’ story it actually serves to highlight what those older classics – like most films – truly lacked. Whether we’re talking Godard and Truffaut, or all those coming-of-age post-collegiate American comedies about love (from The Graduate to recent offerings like Garden State and (500) Days of Summer), we realize – as Frances runs buoyantly through the city – that by marginalizing the voice of women in film we have been missing out on huge chunks of the human experience.

The look of the film, and the name behind it, also gives weight to the story – challenging our stereotypical notions of what “serious” cinema is. Baumbach, the Oscar-nominated writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, uses a light directorial touch here – it’s probably more comedic than anything he’s ever done – and yet it is an incredibly moving picture.

Frances Ha was co-written by Gerwig though, and that’s the real name to remember. At a recent screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the two writers explained that while the visual concept came from Noah, the idea for the story was all Greta. People have already made the inevitable comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls (which is just a testament to how few young women are getting their writing produced), and like that show, the women in this film talk and act like some actual 20-something women (also, like Hannah, Frances seems to only hang out with white people). But unlike that show – and unlike the stereotypes that Hollywood loves to perpetuate – here is a “romantic comedy” written by a woman that is not remotely about finding Mr. or Mrs. Right.

This film is more interested in how modern adults retain the hopefulness of youth through their friends – and how this process doesn’t necessarily include significant others. It’s not that Frances isn’t interested in that kind of love – she goes on a date from time to time – but it’s not the center of her life.

As a 27 year-old woman in New York trying to navigate increasingly complicated friendships and her stalled dancing career – without the distractions of romance – Frances is already, on paper, something of a revolutionary character. Through Gerwig’s unforgettable performance – which beautifully vacillates between clumsiness, confusion and unbridled joy – she becomes something more, the kind of transcendent figure that only the cinema can provide. Like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, she seems to capture the moment.

Bowie sings “God and Man don’t believe in modern love,” but Gerwig isn’t rejecting the past as much as she is exploring the changing conception of love today. Or rather, how it is expanding to finally truly value adult friendships. Watching this proven on screen will feel like a revelation to many young people who are spending their 20s in big cities, going from job to job, struggling to figure it all out while relying entirely on their friends to keep them sane. It’s not everyone’s story (obviously Frances has the privilege to wander that most do not), but certainly one that has almost never been told, from this perspective, on the big screen.

Frances Ha is an important feminist statement precisely because it isn’t overtly about feminism. The challenging ideas about gender are so embedded – so naturally a part of Frances’ relationship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner, who is Gerwig’s equal in every scene) – that you might not notice them at all.

Yet around the 10th time someone calls Frances “un-dateable,” while she’s teaching ballet to girls, counseling young women in dorm room hallways, wearing leather jackets with skirts and going through an epic break-up with her BFF, you start to feel just how different this movie really is.

While capturing the hilarity, awkwardness and anxiety all of us might face in our late 20s – gaining and losing best friends while pursuing what feels like an increasingly impossible dream – Frances Ha says something very specific about gender. It shows us that women can be messy, graceful, sad, funny, artistic, ambitious and caring all at once. You know, human.

Strange to think such an obvious truth could make a movie feel so sublime.

Imran is the Social Media and Communications Director at MissRepresentation.org. Follow him on Twitter @imransiddiquee

In a story posted this morning, NPR’s Morning Edition described New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in highly gendered and sexist terms. From calling her “petite, blond and perky” to saying she has a “girlie” voice, the original piece was filled with face-palm moments. It has since been edited (you can see the original, thanks to Sarah Jaffe, here), but what remains is still pretty offensive.

Here’s a quote:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once called her the “hottest member” of the U.S. Senate. But friends say the woman has scary grit — precisely the kind of person who can go head-to-head with the military about how it’s handling sexual assault.

There’s obviously a lot of problematic things about Harry Reid’s comment, but the writer here is also making an explicit distinction between someone being called “hot” and someone having “grit.” As if the two were mutually exclusive.

What’s most disturbing though is that this was supposed to be an article about Gillibrand’s vocal and proactive work to reform how the military handles sexual violence – and how this is part of a rising political career focused on women’s rights – but, by using such demeaning and trivializing language to depict her, it ends up perpetuating the very sexist culture that she is fighting.

I’m glad NPR has taken out the worst material, but this likely warrants a public apology to the Senator. Moreover, it warrants a longer conversation with their editorial staff and a deep study of Name It Change It.

Imran is the Social Media and Communications Director at MissRepresentation.org. Follow him on Twitter @imransiddiquee

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