Pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign a few days ago in hopes of raising $6,000 to make a series of feminist-critique videos about the roles women play in videogames. She ended up getting a bit more than she bargained for: She raised more than $120,000 while generating wrath among the online hordes, who have been harassing her in the crudest possible terms.

In response to the call for funding for her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games project, the 28-year-old California woman has received an overwhelming number of negative comments on her YouTube channel (sample entries: "tits or back to the kitchen, bitch" and "fuck off prude" – more rude remarks are screengrabbed here). The Wikipedia entry about her has been defaced as well.

"I have been running a web series on YouTube for a few years now that both deals with questions of sexism in the media and also has 'feminist' in the title, so I'm certainly no stranger to some level of harassment," Sarkeesian said in an e-mail to Wired. "I knew that delving into videogames might provoke a bit of a misogynist backlash ... [but] this level of organized and sustained harassment, vitriol, threats of violence and sexual assault in response to a project that hasn't even been made yet is very telling."

Sarkeesian, who posts her videos and writings on her website Feminist Frequency, vowed to keep going, promising that the extra money she raises will go to making more videos than the original five she had planned (there will now be 12). The tide seems to be in her favor: After posting about the harassment she was receiving, her Kickstarter has grown at an astronomical rate, clocking more than 5,200 backers.

"I wasn't sure if I could even raise the initial $6,000, so I've been completely overwhelmed, inspired and encouraged by the response, to put it mildly," she said.

Indeed. Sarkeesian's effort comes at a particularly fraught time for women in gaming and for feminist issues in the areas of tech and geek culture. Earlier this year, BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler was called a "cancer" endangering the gamemaker after comments she allegedly made were posted online (the legitimacy of the comments attributed to Hepler remains questionable). While her attacker's comments weren't necessarily about her gender, they had misogynist overtones. Meanwhile, in comics, a series of artists – including *Hark! A Vagrant'*s Kate Beaton – have done their own interpretations of the new Catwoman No. 0, slamming the racy nature of the heroine's image. Then, there's that "shut up bitch" guy who MC'd a Dell partner event in Copenhagen, and the general rise of "brogrammer" culture.

Sarkeesian posted this screengrab of the vandalism that happened to her Wikipedia page after she launched her Kickstarter campaign.

Photo: Feminist Frequency

Even as such incidents come at a steady clip, the tale unfolding over Sarkeesian's attempt to make a few videos shows a different side of the story. Because even as the flame-war rages in the YouTube comments on her video about the project, her backers are coming through in droves. And their names are mighty – entrepreneur Anil Dash and Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler are listed as backers of Sarkeesian's project. Even Roger Ebert tweeted about her campaign.

“I wasn’t sure if I could even raise the initial $6,000 so I’ve been completely overwhelmed, inspired and encouraged by the response, to put it mildly.”

She has lesser-known supporters too. Graphic designer Andrew G. Davis also took to Twitter to express support, writing, "I know a lot of my followers are male and/or gamers. Know that this is NOT acceptable." He included a link to Sarkeesian's post about the harassment she was receiving.

What's most fascinating is that this kind of backlash has come, as Sarkeesian points out, before anyone really knows what she's going to say in her video series. While it's hard to tell where the ire originated (she speculates the attack on her Wikipedia page originated on 4chan, which is possible), it's even harder to determine what inspired such vitriol.

In her work at Feminist Frequency, Sarkeesian – who has been making videos since 2009 and whose master's thesis was entitled "I'll Make a Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television" – has previously tackled everything from The Hunger Games to gender stereotypes in Lego. Her videos serve up the kind of smart, side-eye critique you'd expect from someone whose clips regularly show up on sites like Jezebel and Boing Boing. She's far from deserving of being labeled as being "on the same level of as [sic] a KKK advertiser" (actual comment).

To hear her tell it, her mission is pretty straightforward.

"I'm making these videos to help promote media literacy and provide some tools for folks to look more critically at gaming (and other forms of popular culture)," said Sarkeesian, who is a gamer herself. "I hope to present issues of sexism in gaming as a recurring systematic pattern across the entire industry because harmful gender representations are not just limited to a few games, genres or companies."

Now that Sarkeesian, who had until this project not solicited Kickstarter funding, has more money to use for research and filming, she's expanded the scope of the videos she plans to produce. Each of the 12 videos will run 10 to 20 minutes and explore issues related to the representations of females in videogames. Topics include "Damsel in Distress," "Women as Reward," "The Fighting F#@k Toy" and "Top 10 Most Common Defenses of Sexism in Games." She is also planning on developing a classroom curriculum for teachers.

Sarkeesian's Kickstarter ends early Saturday. Once the donations come through, she said she plans to begin research (yes, she'll be playing some games), writing and otherwise going into pre-production mode. She hopes to release the first video at the end of the summer, with others to follow in short order. It's an ironic twist that attracting a slew of haters might actually end up being the best thing that could've happened in her quest to raise a few grand for some YouTube videos.

"Given all the backlash," Sarkeesian said, "the project is now going to evolve to include a much larger component about online harassment and treatment of female gamers in videogame culture, because what's happening to me is not an isolated incident."