Trivia / Feminist Frequency

• Artist Disillusionment: She stopped creating the videos in 2017, having lost interest in the series. Likewise the corporate sponsorship that the site had relied on in its early days was eventually dropped, and it was announced as a non-profit in 2019.
• Creator Breakdown: Part of the reason the second series of videos concerning video games took longer than expected to surface was due to Anita suffering attacks from Trolls and misogynists - who sent her death and rape threats, as well as making inappropriate caricatures of her online. Uniquely for this trope, this led to Anita becoming a spokesperson for cyber bullying and harassment - meaning her schedule was taken up by public speaking appearances that delayed her having time to make the videos.
• Dear Negative Reader:
  • Anita was involved in an incident at Vid Con 2017 where she was speaking at a panel and noticed a YouTuber called Sargon of Akkad in the audience. As he had made several videos criticising Feminist Frequency, she called him out using language like "shitheads like this doofus" and "garbage human". Another audience member then asked her if she truly believed what she said in her videos, and she responded by ordering him removed from the question line. The incident was controversial, as Anita's actions were technically unprovoked and in violation of the Vid Con code of conduct - and she faced no disciplinary action from the organisers.
  • In an interview with Polygon in 2019, Anita claimed she had refused to make videos debating potential rebuttals to her arguments - "you can't beat a bad faith argument, even with the most detailed research". Never mind that many of the rebuttals were about her own research mistakes and misrepresentations. In another interview, she was asked about her critics and responded with "I don't have critics; I just have harassers."
• Hostility on the Set: There was running tension between Anita and her partner Jonathan McIntosh, who clashed frequently on the direction the videos should go in. Jonathan favored longer videos that debated possible rebuttals to the statements, while Anita preferred to keep the videos to a shorter length and putting things as succinctly as possible. The arguments between them could sometimes become quite nasty, according to an interview Anita did with Polygon. This was part of the reason that her second series of videos took a longer time to come out (as she suffered creative burnout and exhaustion).
• Troubled Production: The subject of a video detailing its fall from grace. Feminist Frequency began extremely humbly in 2009, when Anita was still a student at York University. The initial 'Tropes vs Women' videos were literally filmed in Anita's living room, with a bedsheet serving as her backdrop. Thus she was unprepared for the instant (and polarizing) success the project would end up getting online. For context, she launched a Kickstarter for the next series of videos, with a goal of only about $6000. It surpassed its target within a day, and amassed nearly $159,000. Suddenly, what was a simple two-person operation had more money than was needed, and that wasn't helped with scores of donations flooding in during the mid-2010s. It was reported that, at one point, Feminist Frequency was receiving $80,000 a year in corporate sponsorship. It expanded to four employees, who it later turned out were on zero-hour contracts. Things were further complicated by Anita parlaying her online controversy into another career as a public speaker - and much of that additional money went into financing her travel. This meant that promised deadlines weren't met, and viewership declined. Although they did see additional revue in 2016, possibly fuelled by the election of Donald Trump as president, Feminist Frequency's mismanagement of money was all over the place; $40,000 being spent on post production for simple three-minute videos filmed in the free YouTube studio. Viewership plummeted by 2017, not helped by Anita's increasingly controversial public persona as a Caustic Critic who was excessively nit-picky (an infamous interview clip made the rounds of her claiming "everything is racist, everything is sexist and everything is homophobic"). It didn't help that, despite going $200,000 over budget, Anita was found to have given herself a $10,000 raise. She grew tired of 'rage bait' videos and being known as an internet pariah, and wished to transition into other content. 'Tropes vs Women' was ended in 2017, and attempts to branch out into podcasts and newsletters didn't see much in the way of viewership. Ultimately, Feminist Frequency just wasn't creating enough content to justify the level of spending its employees were doing, and they filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Anita announced in 2023 that Feminist Frequency was shutting down entirely as an entity, citing exhaustion with continuous controversy.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The comments on the YouTube videos were turned off due to trolling and general rudeness. Others who had frequented the comments before they were disabled however disputed this - where comments were always given a 'pending' and ones that disagreed with Anita's viewpoints were rarely allowed to be posted.

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