Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency nonprofit is broke

You may not recall Anita Sarkeesian but she’s a feminist critic who made a name for herself with a group of YouTube videos highlighting sexist tropes in video games. She also received a lot of threats and made news when she canceled a talk in Utah over the fear that concealed carry permit holders would be allowed to bring their weapons into the venue. That same year, 2014, Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency organization became a recognized non-profit and, as a result, she was required to file an annual report on the money she raised and spent.

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According to those reports (see video below) Sarkeesian’s group, which had two employees plus a producer, has raised and spent about $1.6 million over the past five years. But it seems that is coming to an end. A lengthy profile of Sarkeesian published by Polygon this week reports that earlier this year she laid off her two employees and stopped taking a salary:

Earlier this year, Sarkeesian decided that Feminist Frequency needed to change. She ceased taking a salary and laid off her co-creators and close friends Ebony Adams and Petit. She closed her offices and stopped making videos.

Feminist Frequency is still going, but it’s now mainly focused on a regular podcast hosted by Adams, Petit, and Sarkeesian. It’s a purely voluntary organization.

Sarkeesian has no pat answer to the question of why she’s decided to move on; no “it was just time.” The answers are more complicated.

Partly it’s about money. “Fundraising is always a struggle,” she says. “Paying my staff is always a struggle. I’m capable of fundraising. I learned how to do it through the process of running a nonprofit. But I didn’t get into this work to be a fundraiser.”

Feminist Frequency relied heavily on corporations willing to fund the sort of work that looks into intersectional feminist critiques of commercial art. When corporations make financial commitments to non-profits, they like to make song-and-dance about their noblesse-oblige, most especially when it portrays them in a positive light.

But they’re also prone to nickel-and-diming once favorable media coverage fades. Sarkeesian won’t talk specifics, but it’s clear that corporate generosity crept away once she outlived her usefulness.

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Earlier this month, Sarkeesian noted that fundraising problems on her Twitter feed while taking a shot at Electronic Arts: “@femfreq has been a non profit on the front lines of this issue for years constantly struggling with funding.”

Just last week, Sarkeesian was seen offering her services to the creators of a forthcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077, on the grounds that the game might get dragged by “the whole of the internet” for “some potentially sexist representations.” Cyberpunk 2077 is expected to be a big release. The game was introduced at E3 this year by Keanu Reeves who plays a character in the game.

Feminist Frequency’s annual reports demonstrate that the group was down to its last $30,000 in January. But as the video below points out the real problem isn’t just a lack of corporate donors, it’s a lack of public interest. The group has more than 200,000 subscribers on YouTube but the average podcast it released this year only had a few thousand listeners. That’s not much impact for a group that spent several hundred thousand dollars in 2018 on salaries and other expenses.

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