The Arizona State Gamergate Disappointment: Why Women Have a Role in Pop Culture and Politics? A Conversation with Anita Sarkeesian

In September 2021, a group of female minority students at Arizona State University confronted two white male students who were studying in the library’s multicultural center.

The women were upset with what they saw as blatant antagonism: One of the men sported a “Didn’t Vote for Biden” shirt, the other had a “Police Lives Matter” laptop sticker. The women felt they had chosen the multicultural center in order to rile them. A heated row between both parties erupted, a video of which quickly went viral, threatening to upend the lives of all involved.

For The New York Times, Sarah Viren, a journalist and essayist, explored the incident in the context of “the widening gyre of the culture wars.” The row at Arizona State was, she explained, “a symbolic fight,” one that raised questions of “wokeism” and “free speech,” the perils of viral videos, and the purpose of “safe spaces.”

If you’d like to debate Anita Sarkeesian about whether or not male privilege exists, we’ll make this easy for you: She’s not interested. It’s been a decade since her groundbreaking web series, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, kicked off a firestorm of discussion and criticism around the treatment of female characters. It’s been almost as long since Sarkeesian found herself in the eye of the Gamergate storm, where she faced an onslaught of harassment for her efforts.

The historical context is important. She hears echoes of Gamergate in modern online harassment and disinformation campaigns, and to not point out those similarities would be remiss. Her new series, That Time When, is a map to the crossroads between pop culture and politics. Over its nine episodes she covers everything from Star Trek to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which she investigates in this week’s episode. Even if it is not a period that she would want to revisit, it was a period that ended with the controversy known as Gamergate. She says that she was a part of the history. I am tired of talking about it.

The industries that have evolved in the last decade are: Hollywood, video games, TV. The politics of the day have also changed. People now understand media representation better than they did before. There have been repercussions, like when a star of Obi-Wan Kenobi received racist messages on social media after the show was launched, or when users organized stalking campaigns. These things have precedents. “Moments when pop culture and politics collide are about regressive, puritanical control over women’s bodies, over culture, over challenges to the status quo or perceived progressive shifts,” Sarkeesian says. That Time When is like Tropes in that it wants to make those connections.

One episode of That Time When goes back to the early 1900s, and the films of Lois Weber, but most of the show focuses on the current time period. There’s an episode dedicated to the Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks) getting canceled, one on racial politics and the impact of Star Trek on Black public figures. There’s even one on another famous “-gate”—Nipplegate, when Janet Jackson’s breast was temporarily exposed during a Super Bowl halftime performance.

There is a series about the panic that occurred when Ellen DeGeneres came out on her show, and it features rhetoric that is similar to what is happening with the trans rights debate. When Murphy Brown became a single mother in the early ’90s, the talking point about family values and reproductive rights came to mind.

The tactic of cancel culture is a tactic long weaponized by the right. She points to the episode in her series focused on the Chicks. In 2003, at a show in London, lead singer Natalie Maines voiced her opposition to the Iraq War, a statement that got the band blacklisted for years. The term “cancel culture” is perpetuated by the right to undermine progress on the left, and that episode is important because of that recognition.