>> What I couldn't say is fuck you --
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
-- to the thousands of men who turned their misogeny
onto a game, a game in which gendered slurs, death,
and rape threats are weapons used to try and take
down the big bad villain, which, in this case, is me.
My life is not a game.
I've been harrassed and threatened every day for going
on three years with no end in sight.
And all because I dared
to question the self-evident obvious sexism running rampant
in the games industry.
Nothing about my experience is a game.
What I couldn't say is I'm angry.
When people who know what I go through on a daily basis meet me
in person, they often react with some surprise, saying things
like I don't understand how you aren't more angry
because I'm just being me.
I'm usually kind of charming and nice to people.
But I respond saying that I am angry.
In fact, I'm furious.
I'm angry that we live in a society
where online harrassment is tolerated,
accepted, and excused.
Where services, where web services
and law enforcement are not taking responsibility
for the abuse that women suffer every day online.
I'm angry that I'm expected to accept online harrassment
as the price of being a woman with an opinion.
What I couldn't say is anything funny.
Most of my friends would describe me
as a little bit snarky and pretty sarcastic,
and you can occasionally glimpse this part of my personality
in earlier criticism videos,
but I almost never make jokes any more on YouTube.
Even though humour can be humanising and I like using it,
I don't do it because viewers often interpret humour
and sarcasm as ignorance,
especially if those viewers are male
and the ones making the jokes happen to be female.
You would not believe how often jokes are taken as a proof
that I don't know what I'm talking about
or that I'm not a real gamer, even when those jokes rely
on a deep knowledge of the source material.
So as a result, I intentionally leave that more humorous side
of my personality out of my current video presentations.
I rarely feel comfortable speaking spontaneously
in public spaces.
I'm intentional and careful about the media interviews I do.
I decline most invitations to be on podcasts or web shows.
I carefully consider the wording of every tweet
to make sure it is clear and can't be misconstrued.
Over the last several years I've become hypervigilant.
My life, my words, and my actions are placed
under a magnifying glass.
Every day I see my words scrutinised, twisted,
and distorted by thousands of men hell-bent
on destroying and silencing me.
What I couldn't say is I'm a human being.
I don't get to publicly express sadness or rage or exhaustion
or anxiety or depression.
I can't say that sometimes the harrassment really gets to me,
or conversely that the harrassment has become so normal
that sometimes I don't feel anything at all.
The death threats come through on my social media,
and it's just become a routine.
Screen cap, forward to the FBI, block, and move on.
I don't get to express feelings of fear or how tiring it is
to be constantly vigilant of my physical
and digital surroundings, how I don't go to certain events
because I don't feel safe, or how I sit
in the more secluded areas of coffee shops and restaurants
where the least amount of people can recognise me, to see me.
I don't show how embarrassed I am when I have to ask the person
who recognised me in my local grocery store
to please not mention the location where they met me.
Somehow we fooled ourselves into thinking
that by expressing human emotions it somehow means
that the harrassers have won.
This false believe is largely
because in our society women are not allowed to express feelings
without being characterised as hysterical, erratic, bitchy,
highly emotional, or overly sensitive.
Our expressions of insecurity, doubt, anger,
or sadness are all policed and often used against us.
But by denying ourselves this space to feel
and to share those feelings,
we're just perpetuating this notion
that we should all suffer alone, that we should all just toughen
up and grow thicker skin, which we shouldn't have to do.
What I couldn't say is I don't even want to be saying any
of this, largely because I still feel fear
that expressing human emotions publicly will make me
seem insecure.
The truth is that women who persevere
and retain some measure of their humanity are not
expressing weakness.
They are demonstrating courage.
In all the different messy honest ways that we respond
to harrassment, we actually demonstrate how much humanity we
all still have in the face of such cruelty and injustice.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]