Sexualisation in Gaming Content Creation

I came across a news article the other week, about a female streamer having to stand up for herself against a male content creator for creating ‘sexualised content,’ despite the short video she created actually parodying channels that show off sexualised clips of her. Pokimane, the most followed female content creator on the gaming streaming service Twitch, is no stranger to the misogyny in the world of gaming. The clip in question was one in which she was trying to eat a banana, but turning off her camera to avoid people taking the scenes of her eating a banana out of context and majorly sexualising them. This is something that has happened to Pokimane many times in the past, with some people even creating ‘Pokimane *HOT* and *THICC* Twitch Moments’, which is downright deplorable for a creator who has never focused on sexualising herself, instead just playing games and trying to entertain her viewers.

Live streaming on platforms like Twitch is a huge part of the gaming scene, so I decided to get into contact with some female content creators on a smaller scale to discuss these issues and how prominent they were. LadyCanidae was a Twitch streamer who amassed a total of 9.200 followers, mainly streaming variety content during the peak points of COVID in 2020 and 2021, and now features in a YouTube series ‘We Turned Avatar into a Nightmare’ by the channel Ruppy. We talked about the content creation sphere of the gaming world and how women are treated compared to men.

“Yeah, sexualisation was something I was always aware of and worried about when I was live,” she stated. “There would be times, much like Pokimane, where I’d be briefly turning off my camera to eat, get out of my chair, even to stretch. Some people would come into my chat and tell me things like ‘I was beautiful,’ and a lot of the time they were just being nice and trying to start a conversation, but then you’d have other times when it turned into ‘oh you’re so hot, can you bend over for me’ or ‘do you have an OnlyFans?’ and by that point I’d just have to ban them and continue the stream.”

During the majority of LadyCanidae’s time streaming, she was 19. She told me that she ‘felt too young’ to be told many of the things she had heard, only being a year out of high school. In a data collection done by the founder of OkCupid, a dating site, showcased the difference in age preference for dating between both genders. The age that women found most attractive in their partners was normally very consistent with their age, i.e. if a woman was 50, her most desirable age for a partner was 46. This was vastly different to men however, who found the most attractive age in women to be early 20s regardless of their own age, and the data did not allow participants to be interested in ages below 20. LadyCanidae stated “in the end, the reason I stopped streaming and started looking into other forms of content creation was because I always felt like I was being watched for the wrong reasons. I’d go onto people’s accounts who would make sexual comments, and they’d always be so much older than me. My stream was never sexual. I just wanted to play games with my friends.”

It feels disgusting, knowing many women out there in the world want to be content creators but will have to face the unfortunate reality of many men degrading us to nothing more than a sexual viewing experience. However, with creators like Pokimane standing up against this in the largest scale, there is hope for change in the future so all women can feel safe creating content in the gaming space.