I follow a blog called Not In The Kitchen Anymore, this blog is dedicated to documenting the abuse one girl gamer, Jenny Hanniver, gets whilst playing video games on on-line video game services like Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Sony’s PlayStation Network.

Most of the abuse could be considered just “trash talk”, in the gaming community this is what follows after you get a point over the other player or team (akin to “ha I just beat you”). But this trash talk can get really out of hand and inappropriate sometimes. For example, a common thing to say whilst trash talking is using the word rape in ways other than it’s literal sense. For example, you could be killed by an enemy player and then you would say “Oh man, did you see that? He just come out of nowhere and raped me.”

And as you can probably see, this could cause offence to a wide number of people male and female. But one of the most common things that appear on Jenny’s blog and another blog dedicated to the harassment of girl gamers (the whole community not just the tales of one person) called Fat, Ugly Or Slutty, is when this “trash talk” goes from offensive but not literal, to the ‘you better lock your door’ literal. Examples of this are messages where the girl gamers have received either voice messages or text messages over the internet along the lines of, “You’re a fucking bitch, I’m going to rape you then murder your family”. Continue reading →