Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t like sitting near windows. We’re meeting at a sunny San Francisco coffee shop with a modern glass façade, and I’ve picked a table near the front. Every few minutes, she glances outside.

"I usually sit in the back of restaurants," Sarkeesian says. "I have to tell people not to tweet about where they saw me. When someone comes up to me to ask for directions, I still have that moment of, oh god, why are you coming up to me? I don’t open the curtains in my apartment."

She smiles and notes that these things "sound kind of insane."

For Sarkeesian though, they’re basic precautions. She receives a volume of rape and death threats inconceivable to most of the population, including tweets fantasizing about raping her, telling her to kill herself, or calling her a litany of sexist and racist slurs. She has to have professional security at public events, and she knows who to call at the FBI. Her parents have been threatened badly enough that they have also contacted the police.

Sarkeesian, who is 31 with purple streaks in her hair, is a target because she started a nonprofit to make movies and video games better for women and girls. Her organization, Feminist Frequency, creates videos in which Sarkeesian talks on camera about sexist stereotypes in popular culture, illustrating her points with clips from video games, movies, and television. Many of her videos have been viewed more than a million times.

Just a few years ago, Sarkeesian was working as a freelance web designer, and Feminist Frequency was a side project. She worked with Bitch magazine in 2011 to create the initial iteration of her video series Tropes vs. Women, which took a critical look at common narratives about women in film and video games — that they were damsels in distress or background objects or on the receiving end of brutality for sport. A year later, she created a Kickstarter to get $6,000 to fund some new videos, and a month later had raised more than $150,000.

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Then, about two weeks later, "the harassment hit." Sarkeesian had been harassed many times before over the Tropes vs. Women series, but the fact that she was raising money infuriated a group of video game aficionados. Her analyses of misogyny in video games was unfair and unwarranted, they said, and Sarkeesian was an interloper. There are surely a lot of reasons why people think it’s acceptable to harass a stranger online: a virtual mob mentality that encourages bystanders to participate, a specific kind of socially stunted young man who may frequent male-heavy online gaming communities, the safety in being cruel anonymously, and the rush as others applaud your viciousness. Sarkeesian was attacked because she was a woman in a space many men believed was created for and by them, and she was trying to change gaming. Her harassers seemed to fear that her efforts might just work.

"Everything changed when the Kickstarter happened, both professionally and personally," Sarkeesian says. "I always have a hard time talking about it, and there are things I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want them to be out there. I still need to retain some of that privacy."

Even today, Sarkeesian says her life online is "basically a steady current of harassment all the time, for three years nonstop. It will peak when I release a video, it will peak when I do an interview, it will peak when someone writes something about me. Anytime my name appears anywhere, it goes up. But it never, ever stops."

To keep herself and the people she cares about safe, Sarkeesian treats even small details about her friends, her family, and the places she likes to go as tightly held secrets. That little zone of privacy helps give her a place to be a real person instead of a caricature. But that inability to be a full person online comes with a price: It’s easier to harass and hate a caricature.

Sarkeesian is one of the most notable people on the Internet. She’s also one of the least known.

Sarkeesian is Armenian, and her family is from Iraq. Her parents immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, had Anita and her older sister, and raised the girls outside Toronto. Sarkeesian grew up playing video games, starting at age 5 with Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. When her family got Internet access, she was hooked.

"I was always online," she says. "I remember when you would dial up for the Internet and I would call every number that would go through and some would be long-distance. There was a massive phone bill and my parents freaked out."

She came to feminism as an undergrad, after attending multiple community colleges and winding up at California State University, Northridge. She was a natural rabble-rouser, protesting against global warming and the wars in the Middle East, and advocating for LGBT rights, but women’s rights initially weren’t her focus.

I was one of those feminists who was like, ’I believe in equal rights, but I’m not a feminist.’

"I was one of those feminists who was like, ’I believe in equal rights, but I’m not a feminist,’" she says.

She pauses, drolly raising an eyebrow. "And then I fell in with the wrong crowd."

She became increasingly involved in social justice work and read feminist book after book, finding herself drawn to the works of feminist theorist bell hooks, who writes about the intersections of feminism, race, social justice, and pop culture. During her time in grad school at York University in Toronto, she started Feminist Frequency, inspired in part by hooks’s work.

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"She would talk about how popular culture is where the pedagogy is happening, it’s where the learning is happening," Sarkeesian said. "She would try to give a lecture on feminist theory and [students] were not paying attention, but then she would apply it to TV shows and movies — and she probably didn’t do games, but I would add games into that — and be able to draw those connections."

Sarkeesian talks with such calm authority that it’s no surprise she’s on the public speaking circuit, giving lectures about misogyny and online harassment. The day we meet, she’s just returned from Australia, where she was giving a talk at the Sydney Opera House about the way women are treated in popular culture. She also speaks at tech conferences and to game developers, with the goal of changing both the culture and the products. The remedies, Sarkeesian says, are social, linguistic, and legal; she points to legal scholar Danielle Keats Citron’s book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, as laying out a good legal framework for moving forward.

"[Keats Citron] talks about how we didn’t even have a word for sexual harassment 40 years ago," Sarkeesian says. "Putting laws in place didn’t stop it from happening, but it made it so that it wasn’t acceptable and so there was some recourse for women. That fundamentally changed our relationships socially." When we create laws about online harassment, Sarkeesian says, "it changes our relationships and how we engage with this stuff."

Sarkeesian also pushes social media companies and websites to create systems that dissuade harassment by taking a gender-conscious approach. The current block and report functions, she says, are built for the kinds of attacks men experience and do little to serve female users.

Men and women are attacked online differently ... When women are attacked, it’s violent threats, it’s sexual harassment, and it’s sustained over time.

"Men and women are attacked online differently," she says. "Men are usually embarrassed, it’s an insult, and it’s usually one time. When women are attacked, it’s violent threats, it’s sexual harassment, and it’s sustained over time. So we can see that reporting on social media is created for the way men are harassed."

One problem, she says, is that users can send abusive comments and repeatedly make new accounts, and it’s up to the person receiving their vitriol to keep blocking them.

"There’s one guy who makes new accounts every day to harass me. What do you do to stop that? There’s that one guy, and there are thousands of other people like him," Sarkeesian says.

Sarkeesian notes that tech and legal changes can’t be the only answers — there also has to be greater cultural sensitivity to the issue, especially among authority figures.

"Women are still afraid to go to the police with stories of rape and abuse, and now we’re afraid to go to the police saying, ’I got this death threat from email or Twitter,’ because the police will look at you and say, ’What’s Twitter?’" she said. "I’ve had a cop say to me, ’Why don’t you just quit your job? Why don’t you just stop doing what you’re doing?’"

Reading through Anita Sarkeesian’s @ replies on Twitter is a crash course in the sort of unrelenting mass public cruelties usually associated with tarring and featherings in the town square. It’s jarring, just how many tweets there are, how you keep losing your place even though you’re scrolling through tweets from just a few hours ago because new ones keep popping up. Earlier this year, Sarkeesian published just a sample of the kinds of tweets directed at her in a single week. They included a hope that "every feminist has their head severed from their shoulders," variations on "I will rape you" and "kill yourself," and lots of "fuck you" and "dumb cunt" and "bitch" and "slut." Sarkeesian is alternately called a "Jew bitch," an "Arab bitch," and a "Paki."

Sarkeesian ignores the majority of tweets directed at her, partly for her own well-being and partly because keeping up would be a full-time job. The threats are disturbing, but so are the more casual taunts from people who are angry that she would complain about her treatment and who accuse her of attention-seeking.

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Writes one, "Endless abuse? Really? Some people were mean to you on the internet. That’s abuse now. #firstworldproblems"

Says another, "@femfreq is a liar, a thief, a professional scam artist, professional Victim, and a coward. I’d say grow a pair, but, ahahah, you can’t."

Others send her images of video game babes to make the case that she’s just jealous she isn’t as sexy as a cartoon woman. "You really are an ugly cunt," one says. "U are just jelly because guys give all the attention to the pretty girls and none to you. Stay classy." Another says, "she need to go make a damn sandwich and shut up."

That steady stream of harassment has an impact.

"How could it not?" Sarkeesian asks. "I realize it’s because my public presence is very, I don’t want to say academic, but it’s presented in a ’This is what happened’ way as opposed to ’This is how I felt.’ That was a conscious choice, because I didn’t think I would be taken seriously if I said, ’This sucks.’ Or the harassers would think they won if I showed any kind of weakness."

Women who experience online toxicity need to be allowed to have an emotional response, Sarkeesian says. She believes self-care is important, especially having a community of people who "understand the emotional cost" even if they don’t receive the same level of harassment themselves.

What does she do for self-care?

The level of harassment I get on a daily basis is probably almost impossible for most people to comprehend.

"I never know how to answer that question because this is so normal to me," Sarkeesian says. "The level of harassment I get on a daily basis is probably almost impossible for most people to comprehend."

She likes chocolate, she says. She knows time for herself can be helpful, so she’s been trying to take a day off, but it hasn’t happened yet. Mostly, she cares for herself by continuing the work that gives her a sense of purpose, even if it means she can’t fully participate online, as a real person who is more than just a set of ideologies.

She’s on Twitter, for instance, but she isn’t able to engage much with her followers, even the supportive ones, because checking her replies means subjecting herself to a torrent of abuse. She can’t use Facebook and Instagram to openly post photos of her life, her travels, or her friends.

Instead, she concentrates on how to fix the problem of hate online. That’s made her the focus of more hate online, and yet she’s made a career out of this. Is it all worth it?

"If you were like, ’Would you do it again?’ I would say yes," Sarkeesian says. "Is it worth it? Is this kind of abuse worth it for anything? I don’t know. I think that it just is. This just is my life. There is no time machine, there is no going back, I’m not giving up, I’m not going to stop what I’m doing."

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