Via the Toronto Standard (thanks to Warren Ellis for the tweet):
UPDATE: Stephanie Guthrie received multiple death threats following the publication of this article. Police are now involved and the offending users have been reported to Twitter for account violations.
Women in TO Politics organizer Stephanie Guthrie isn’t known for keeping quiet. When gamer Bendilin Spurr launched the violent and sickening “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” game, Guthrie took to the Internet: “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?”
The Internet said ‘yes,’ but not without its own share of misogyny. One user called Guthrie “a cunt.” Trolls tried to scare her. She continues to receive death threats.
But Guthrie wouldn’t be deterred. She called out the Sault Star newspaper, which has since picked up the story (kind of), warned potential employers not to hire Spurr, and sparked enough conversation to further increase her ranking as a prominent local tweeter on politics and feminism.
“My primary motivation for confronting Bendilin Spurr on Twitter was to hold him accountable as a person for his actions behind an Internet avatar,” she says. “I felt frustrated knowing that he leads a whole ‘real life’ where it might be unknown that he spends his spare time on the Internet doing things like making a video game about punching a woman in the face for having an opinion. What happens on the Internet has consequences off the Internet.”
It all started when feminist pop culture critic Sarkeesian launched and won a Kickstarter campaign to generate funds for a video series that explores and deconstructs common tropes and stereotypes of female game characters…
[continues at the Toronto Standard]
