Ashley Judd, the actress best known for her work in Heat and Kiss the Girls, has presented a TED Talk to talk about the vitriol she received over the past six years online—ever since she first signed up for a Twitter account in 2011. She blames video games for part of the harassment she received, and paints the game industry as “profiteers” who promoted misogyny.
In Judd’s presentation, which was originally recorded at last year’s TED Conference, she says that the abuse of women has spiraled out of control, as hate speech, sexual harassment, and threats of violence has become the new norm for many women and marginalized individuals online. Judd recounts her own experience of being “terrorized on social media” for being outspoken in her feminist advocacy, and calls on the tech community, law enforcement, and legislators to act.
In addition to relating to her bad interactions with sports fans and some preaching about “internalizing the Patriarchy,” which she describes as “a system in which we all participate, including me,” Judd spares some of her 18 minutes to talk about the “profiteering off misogyny in video games.”
Unsurprisingly, she isn’t referring to Congressional candidate Brianna Wu, who profiteered off her status as “GamerGate victim” or the many others who’ve built their platforms on the subject. Instead, Judd refers to the game developers who in her view produce misogynistic entertainment for gamers.
“I’m so tired of hearing you talk to me at cocktail parties — like you did a couple weeks ago in Aspen — about how deplorable GamerGate was, when you’re still making billions of dollars off games that maim and dump women for sport,” said Judd. “Basta! — as the Italians would say. Enough.”
“Our friends in law enforcement have much to do, because we’ve seen that online violence is an extension of in-person violence,” she said.
Outside a few Flash games and extremely niche titles from overseas markets, there isn’t a single mainstream game on Steam that does what Judd describes. In ultraviolent games like Manhunt, all the victims were men, and Postal 2—a title infamous for its cartoonish violence—the goal is simply to wreak havoc and not much else. They’re also well over a decade old.
The way Judd says it gives listeners the impression that the game industry at large is making money off the brutalization of women, but the claim couldn’t be further detached from reality.
Presumably, Judd refers to Hitman: Absolution, a title condemned by feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian. In Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency video, she claimed that players were encouraged to treat women as “things” to be acted upon. “Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters,” she claimed, as a video clip shows the main character dragging an unconscious female body around the room like a ragdoll.
This is far off the mark, as female characters are equally as interactive as all the males within Hitman, and players are in fact discouraged from killing or even hurting anyone during their playthrough. That Sarkeesian herself chose to treat the bodies that way is emergent behavior, unintended by the game developer. It’s certainly not a game where the goal is to maim and kill women “for sport.”
Like many contentious presentations on TED Talks, the organizers disabled the comments and ratings, prohibiting users from discussing the topic on their platform, as well as on YouTube. They wrote: “Comments are disabled on this video, because it’s been our experience that comments on talks about online misogyny tend to tempt online misogynists to try even harder to create mindless shock.”
How convenient.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
