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Encountering Sexism in Twitch Live Streaming

Introduction

In 2022 women made up nearly half of the video game players in the United States ¹, while in 2021 women made up only 30% of video game developers ² and comprise only 16% of the top 14 video game company executive boards ³. Despite the fact that women make up half of the population of video gamers, the industry itself remains a male-dominated space that is frequently hostile towards women—in the summer of 2021 Activision Blizzard, a major video game company, was met with a civil lawsuit due to claims of sexual misconduct after a two year long investigation by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing ⁴. Twitch.tv, originally known as Justin.tv, is, primarily, a video gaming live streaming company owned and operated by Amazon, purchased in 2014 in a $970 million deal. In its own right, Twitch is a social media platform as the chat feature can facilitate social interaction and helps to create a sense of community surrounding a streamer. In 2021 there was a monthly average of 8.5 million streamers on the platform, with 99% of the top streamers in quarter 2 of 2022 being men.⁵ As an observer and fan of the platform, I have witnessed a great deal of gender-based harassment levied against women and non-binary creators. As a result, I am studying instances of sexism and gender based discrimination within the Twitch environment and community because I want to know more about and better understand the experience of female streamers on Twitch and the gaming community in general in order that my reader can understand that sexism on this platform is a serious issue that ought to be addressed.

What is Twitch? A Brief Crash Course

Live streaming is simultaneously a new and old practice. Old in that there is very little conceptual difference between live streaming and live television such as live sporting events or television shows such as Saturday Night Live—live streaming is live footage or a live feed being sent around the world into individual homes and onto individual screens. However there are a few practical differences between the two. For example, live streaming, at least in the context I will refer to it in, is over the internet, not cable. Perhaps the most clear difference between the two, however, is that live streaming can be done by anyone with a computer, smartphone, or tablet in a location with internet access or cellular data service available. Any individual, group of individuals, or even companies—as in the case of the highest earning live streaming channel on Twitch, Critical Role, a Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying group who created a company based on the success of their Twitch stream—can begin a live stream, or “go live.”

Twitch.tv is one of the most popular websites to do just that, to share a live feed of something with an audience of someone. Anyone over the age of thirteen can create a Twitch account for free and begin streaming, making the platform extremely accessible. Twitch, along with a good deal of popular live streaming services, includes a live chat feature, in which viewers can send messages that appear in real time on the site for the streamer, and other “chatters,” can see and interact with. While individuals do not need a Twitch account to begin watching streams, they do need to create and login to an account to send messages in Twitch chats. For someone to go live on Twitch, a streamer—an individual who streams on the site—must include a title for their stream. Twitch also requires streamers to choose a category for their stream while they are live—this allows viewers to specifically look for streams of a certain category and categories also appear next to a stream’s title so their followers can know some idea of what the streamer is up to before watching the stream—that can change throughout the stream as needed. There are categories for virtually every video game that exists. Some popular video game categories include League of Legends, VALORANT, Minecraft, and many more. On Twitch, and many other live streaming sites, the most popular thing to stream is video game playing. A video game stream typically consists of live screen capturing of game play footage, and sometimes includes a “facecam,” or a live feed of the individual streamer’s face playing alongside the footage of the video game. Another popular form of video game live stream on Twitch is esports tournaments and commentary. These streams would be akin to the broadcast of live sporting events, there will likely be multiple camera angles and, perhaps surprising some, in many cases a large, in-person crowd of fans cheering for their favorite team. Additionally, Twitch hosts categories of non-video gaming, but still gaming content. For example, board games and, as previously mentioned with the company and Twitch channel Critical Role, Dungeons & Dragons are popular content on the site.

While Twitch offers a wide variety of gaming and gaming related content, their in real life (IRL) and “just chatting” stream categories offer a wide variety of content that may or may not have any relation to video gaming. Just chatting streams are most often just a “facecam”, although some streamers who are “faceless” and choose not to show their faces publicly typically increased privacy, may also engage in just chatting streams—frequently in cases such as this, the faceless streamer would have a piece of art, perhaps depicting them or whatever they have set as their profile picture on Twitch, on the screen in lieu of a facecam or game play footage—which is what it sounds like, a streamer chatting and, typically, engaging with their live chat. However there are other types of popular streams outside of gaming. One example of a popular subgenre of just chatting streams is political commentary, in which a streamer may discuss news and politics with their chatters. Another genre of popular non-gaming streams is the IRL, or in real life category, which typically involves streaming outside of a home or office. For example IRL streams may include streaming on the go, featuring a streamer walking around in a city or perhaps playing chess in a public location against strangers or even fans. There are many forms that these streams can take, and this genre alone showcases the vast possibilities and many audiences the site appeals to. The live chat feature of Twitch plays an important role in both the community building nature of the website as well as harassment on the site. The chat is live, so when a user types out a comment and clicks send, it appears on the screen of the user as well as on the screens of every viewer that has that stream’s live chat open, which is the default setting. On Twitch, there is no moderation of the chat by the company itself. A Twitch streamer must select users to be their moderators and delete offensive, inappropriate, or otherwise disruptive chat messages from the chat. This shifts the burden of keeping communities safe onto the streamer and the moderators that they select.​​ This makes it possible for many forms of harassment directed towards the streamer to go unchecked and to be easily viewed.

Background

In order to understand sexism and other forms of gender-based harassment on Twitch and within the Twitch community, it is imperative to have an awareness of the platform in order to grasp the context in which the harassment takes place. An important facet of live streaming on Twitch consists of labor done in addition to streaming itself. As noted in a 2021 study,⁶ some of these “off-camera” labors include “aesthetics, networking, community management and day-to-day maintenance or management activities”.⁷ Community building is an extremely important and labor intensive facet of successful streaming. It requires fluency across many kinds of social media sites. Additionally, streamers must be somewhat adept with technology to be successful in their streaming. According to the study, professionally streaming on Twitch involves a lot of labor, perhaps more than many outsiders believe—there is, at least to a certain extent, an assumption that live streaming is an easy or even lazy job, when in reality in order to do it successfully, streamers do a good deal of labor, both on and off camera. Furthermore, “off-camera labor is demanding, is extensive and diverse, and is a process of constant renewal and innovation”.⁸ This kind of labor is intrinsic to the culture of Twitch and is fundamental in understanding what streaming is in actual practice.
Additionally, as discussed in a 2021 piece,⁹ many Twitch streams that feature face cams have carefully selected backgrounds behind the streamer’s face. Although some streamers choose to put a greenscreen behind themselves so that they appear in the game itself, many streamers choose to make their sets in a bedroom or a room that looks otherwise cozy and intimate—this could include soft lighting, deliberate color palettes, and set pieces that are associated with bedrooms such as plushies. As established in the article, popular background setups, as depicted throughout the piece, vary a bit from category to category, for example games like League of Legends are less likely to feature a face cam than perhaps more casual games such as Stardew Valley. Furthermore, the authors note that non-video game streams, such as Just Chatting or Music streams, are more likely to have face cams that include domestic spaces as the background. Additionally, women are much more likely than men to stream from their bedrooms or other domestic spaces. This showcases some of the ways that the gender of a streamer can influence the content of a stream or the expectations of streaming content. “The basic fact of streaming implies an intimate invitation: entry, via webcam and direct address, into the private space and thoughts of the streamer,” and this intimacy is exacerbated by intimate spaces in live streaming. Another important aspect of Twitch to consider is the ability of engaged and varied communities to spring out and develop. One such community is the drag queen and king community on Twitch, which is explored throughout the 2022 article “Beauty from the Waist up.”¹⁰ The rise in popularity of drag as a sub community on Twitch illustrates that, even though Twitch is primarily considered a gaming website, it holds space for communities outside of and in addition to video gaming. Additionally, the popularity of drag culture on Twitch showcases Twitch’s potential to foster and host representation for queer identities on the internet. However, an important implication to consider here is that, when harassment runs rampant, it can become more difficult to create truly safe communities since the burden of moderation lays on the streamer, not the platform.

In addition to understanding Twitch as a platform, it is necessary to examine previously established instances and manifestations of sexism on the platform and in the community. Sexism on Twitch is no secret. In 2019, researchers collected and analyzed posts from the subreddit r/Twitch—a forum on the website Reddit exclusively dedicated to posts about Twitch—looking specifically for posts related to derogatory terms for female streamers such as “titty streamer,” “cam girl,” and other insults that are frequently written off as nothing more than juvenile jokes within the live streaming community.¹¹ However, as researchers note, they are more than “just jokes.” A major implication of calling someone a “titty streamer” discussed in the study is that the only reason that they have achieved success on Twitch is because they have breasts and that the only people who support the streamer do so only because they are sexually attracted to the streamer. This illustrates a major issue that women face on Twitch that goes beyond the harassment they receive. Professionally live streaming on Twitch is already a fight for legitimacy—creating content on the internet as a primary source of income is scoffed at and not considered a “real job” by many—but the name calling, derogatory words incessantly directed towards female streamers, and the implications of the terms themselves make this legitimation harder. Not only are women streamers dealing with the notion that their profession is not a “real job,” but within the Twitch community they are not viewed as “real streamers.” Furthermore, the notion that women are only successful due to their attractiveness is sometimes used in conjunction with victim blaming. This supports arguments made in Judith Howard’s 1984 study on victim blaming, which found that women who are perceived as sexually promiscuous are more likely to be perceived as at fault for their victimhood. ¹² This connects to Payne and colleagues’ “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of Its Structure and Its Measurement Using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale,” especially as it relates to victim blaming and disbelief of victims.¹³ Furthermore, the demonization of women who are perceived as sexual is reminiscent of the argument in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as it relates to the men demonizing women filling a role that they created—“you painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”¹⁴

Another term that is, perhaps, less overtly offensive as terms such as “titty streamer,” that has nonetheless been levied as an insult towards female streamers is “egirl,” a term that Christine Tran grapples with in a 2022 article.¹⁵ She notes that “egirl” was originally used as an insult for women on the internet, specifically women in gaming spaces, that were perceived to be faking their interest in gaming. This, as with the term “titty streamer,” further illustrates the fight for legitimacy that female streamers face in their work. Tran further discusses that even though it is less apparent than in terms such as “titty streamer,” the word “egirl” also typically implies a reliance on sexual appeal for any success earned. However, as noted by the author the word “egirl” has seen a unique shift in usage and now more commonly refers to a specific aesthetic commonly seen on sites such as Twitch and TikTok. The journey from insult to aesthetic involves the reclamation of the term by women who were the target of it as an insult as well as the capitalization of the label by some women. One such example is Belle Delphine, an online content creator who has made a career capitalizing on being labeled as an “egirl” or a “fake gamer girl.” The author notes that leaning into the term also showcases a tendency towards self sexualization, in this case meaning the sexualization of oneself and placing importance and worth on one’s own sexual appeal, that does occur on Twitch. The notion of women needing to legitimize themselves and reckoning with being considered somehow “fake” in male dominated geek subcultures is not a new phenomenon and is certainly not limited to Twitch. Suzanne Scott’s 2019 book Fake Geek Girls delves into the development of women being ostracized in geek culture. While the text does not directly address this topic in relation to Twitch live streaming, many of the concepts are applicable to the treatment of women on the platform, in particular the understanding of Twitch as a male dominated space and the marginalization of women in such a space. “Within this paradigm, women and other marginalized fans are framed as a contagion… [which] allows men to position themselves as avenging antibodies, tasked with identifying and neutralizing any entity that is perceived to be ‘foreign.’”¹⁶ This illustrates a potential influence for the sexism present on Twitch—women are moving into a male dominated space and are perceived as “foreign.”

Yet another way in which sexism and female streamers’ fight for legitimacy on Twitch manifests is through the discourse surrounding and the treatment of feminists and feminism involved with the platform. Another analysis of reddit posts or r/Twitch, this time focusing on posts related to feminism and conducted in 2022, showcases Twitch culture’s relationship with the idea of feminism as well as demonstrates that there are certain kinds of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” feminism on the site and in the space.¹⁷ As noted in the article, in 2016 Twitch promoted a fundraiser called Feminist Frequency, and received a good deal of backlash from the community, sparking comments expressing fear of Twitch becoming politicized and theories that the only reason Twitch promoted the fundraiser was to placate “feminazis” and ensure the site was not labeled a “women hating site”(546). This illustrates a key facet of the relationship between Twitch and feminism—feminism is seen, at least by some members of the community, as harmful in some way to the culture of the site. However, according to researchers, feminism becomes acceptable in certain situations on the platform. Specifically, when women present themselves in opposition to the previously mentioned “titty streamers” in the name of feminism, that is considered acceptable. This acceptable feminism stems from the idea that women who self sexualize on Twitch change the expectations for all women on Twitch to present themselves in a sexual way. On the flip side, women who support the idea that other women should be allowed to present themselves however they please is generally considered unacceptable feminism. This treatment of feminism is one of the ways that sexism manifests on Twitch. The notion of feminism as a threat to male spaces, specifically male gaming spaces is also not limited to Twitch. This phenomenon was also noted in a 2017 article arguing about what led to the rationalization of the harassment campaign, GamerGate, stating that parts of online and gaming culture incentivizes the kind of hate that came out of GamerGate.¹⁸ As noted by the author, in the case of GamerGate, feminism was seen as a threat, which seems to similarly be the case on Twitch. The conditional acceptance of feminism relates to Glick and Fiske’s 1996 study of benevolent, ambivalent, and hostile sexism,¹⁹ which found that men who subscribe to benevolent sexism hold women in higher esteem when they behave in more stereotypically feminine ways.

An additional way that sexism manifests on the site is through actual Twitch policies that disproportionately impact women, as discussed in a 2021 analysis.²⁰ The Twitch Community Guidelines, or the policies in place that determine what kind of content and conduct is and is not considered acceptable on the platform, has many rules and restrictions. A portion of the guidelines are dedicated to the restriction of sexual content on the website, however the definitions of sexual content seem a little fuzzy and, at times, contradictory. “These documents place responsibility on streamers’ shoulders, while also ignoring these streamers’ agency to determine the nature of their content and their own self-presentations,”²¹ and female streamers are more likely to face harassment and criticism based on their self-presentations than their male counterparts. Additionally, these wishy-washy definitions of sexual content, as discussed throughout the piece, ultimately lead to an assumption of male heterosexuality as the default gaze on Twitch. The Twitch Community Guidelines are “constructed around gendered cultural biases and anxieties”²². For example, the guidelines frequently conflate sex work with forms of sexual exploitation and sexual violence, which is not only constructed by cultural biases against sex work but also uphold the same biases. Another analysis of Twitch’s community guidelines conducted in 2020, showcases how the guidelines can encourage harassment by inviting policing by community members.²³ Making it “against the rules” to wear a low cut shirt or have a camera angle that is considered inappropriate encourages individual users to take it upon themselves to use the built in chat feature to call out individuals that they perceive as violating Twitch guidelines. “Within months after the 19 February [2018] update, groups of vigilante users began patrolling female streamer channels looking for violators of the new policy,” and showing up in droves to chats, spamming the same messages is a form of harassing a streamer. Additionally, “how sexual content is classified and discussed in the Twitch Community Guidelines is notable in that specificity is purposefully avoided to allow not only wide-ranging applications but also less accountability on the point of Twitch”.²⁴ The analysis of the Twitch Community Guidelines is significant in understanding sexism and gender-based harassment on the platform by determining what is and is not sanctioned by the site themselves as well as illustrating potential instances of structural sexism built into the rules of the website.

Methodologies

The culmination of my project is a website featuring a fifteen minute video along with accompanying written material to fully showcase all of the research I have done. My research takes a few different forms. First I have collected and will present and analyze tweets related to sexism on Twitch, from both streamers and viewers alike. Second, I have interviewed a woman who streams on Twitch, user IzaDoodle, about her experiences on Twitch including her experiences with sexism and harassment on the site. Third, I have selected a YouTube video posted by a Twitch streamer of a cut of one of their past live streams in which they share messages from individuals who were banned from her chat, meaning they are no longer able to participate in the chat due to a decision made by either the streamer or a stream moderator. This video showcases many examples of sexism on Twitch, as well as highlights some differences in the way men and women are treated on the site. Finally, I examined the Twitch Community Guidelines, or the actual rules of the website itself, in order to illuminate how Twitch’s current policies do not mitigate the harassment their female and non-binary streamers face, and, in some cases, directly and disproportionately affect women and non-binary streamers.

My website has six different pages. The homepage features the fifteen minute video and my completed project statement below it. The next three pages are dedicated to my text analyses—one page displaying tweets and my analysis of them, one page dedicated to my analysis of the YouTube video, and one page dedicated to my analysis of the Twitch community guidelines. My next page includes my conclusions and synthesizes my project. My last two pages are my acknowledgements and full annotated bibliography.

As part of my project, I reached out to five women and non-binary streamers in hopes of learning more about personal experiences of sexism and other forms of gender-based harassment. As a result, I had the opportunity to interview Twitch streamer Izadoodle. Below are the questions I prepared for the interview:

• How would you generally characterize your experience as a Twitch streamer? Has streaming on the platform been generally positive? Negative? A mixture of both? In what ways?
• In what ways, if any, do you feel your gender identity and/or gender expression impacts your experience on Twitch? Your response may also address elements of your identity that intersect with gender, e.g. race, sexuality, religion, etc.
• In your experience, does gender identity and/or expression influence streamers’ treatment or reputations? For example, do you feel that you have to work harder than your male peers to establish or legitimize yourself as a streamer, gamer, or nerd/geek? Why or why not? Do you feel that content that emphasizes the sexualization of female streamers, e.g. “hot tub streams,” have an impact on your experience as a streamer? If so, how would you characterize that impact?
• The following question(s) address harassment—unwanted behavior that makes the recipient feel uncomfortable or otherwise distressed—on Twitch. To the extent that you feel comfortable sharing: Can you describe an instance, personal or secondhand, in which harassment has occurred on Twitch? If so, was that instance related to gender identity and/or expression? In what ways, if any, have instances of harassment influenced your perception of safety on Twitch? What would you like to see from Twitch (the company, not the community) going forward in regards to the way they deal with harassment?
• Are you aware of Twitch’s policies pertaining to sexual content? If so, please consider the following questions: What do you think about Twitch’s policies on sexual content in terms of strictness, clarity, and enforcement? In what ways, if any, have these policies influenced your experience on the platform?
• Do you think the Twitch community and/or the gaming community has become a safer space for women and/or non-binary folks in recent years? Why or why not?
• Are there any other issues of concern about Twitch that you would like to share that have not already been addressed:

One way I showcase sexism and gender-based harassment in the Twitch community in my project is through the collection and analysis of tweets. There are a few reasons that I have decided on Twitter as opposed to other social media, including Twitch itself or the Twitch chat feature. For one, Twitch has a level of impermanence that is not present on Twitter. There are a few reasons for this. First, the way that the moderation of Twitch chat occurs is that moderators, who are selected by the Twitch streamer, are charged with monitoring the chat by deleting messages they deem inappropriate. This means that in order for me to collect my own data on Twitch I would need to screenshot messages faster than they are deleted by moderators, including “bot” moderators, or programs that streamers can use to instantly delete messages containing certain words or phrases as they are sent into the chat. Additionally, Twitch VODs (video on demand, the way that Twitch saves streams) expire, along with their associated chat replay, after three months. In contrast, tweets are not as strictly monitored and do not expire. I selected three specific instances or events related to Twitch or to a specific Twitch streamer and collected Twitter responses to these events. First, I examined responses to a tweet from Pokimane—a well known female Twitch streamer—about paying for her parents’ retirement. Next, I analyzed tweets surrounding Twitch streamer Amouranth coming forward about being in an abusive relationship. Last, I looked at sexist responses to Twitch’s decision to ban gambling streams. Additionally, I looked at two more contained instances—one involving the diminishing of a popular female Twitch streamer, and the second coming from a trans non-binary streamer expressing her frustration with frequent misgendering on Twitch. Together, these tweets illustrate forms of gender-based discrimination that occur in the Twitch community.

Another way I showcase sexism and gender-based harassment in my project is through the analysis of the YouTube video “He Tried Being Me For a Day,” posted by the Twitch streamer and YouTube content creator QTCinderella. This video is cut from one of QTCinderella and her partner and fellow streamer, Ludwig, streams in which they go through each other’s unban request forms. This is a relatively common and popular form of Twitch stream, in which a streamer goes through a set of ban appeals, otherwise known as unban requests. A Twitch user becomes banned from a person’s chat because the streamer or a stream moderator deemed one or many of their messages to be inappropriate, offensive, or otherwise disruptive and decided that that user should no longer be permitted to send messages in that particular streamer’s Twitch chat. A ban appeal is a form submitted by a user who has been banned from a Twitch chat requesting to be allowed back into that chat. Typically an unban request includes an apology or explanation related to the message or messages that led to the ban of the user. In this video QTCinderella and Ludwig go through each other’s channels’ unban requests. The reason I selected this video in particular is because it showcases that women receive significantly more sexual harassment in their chat than men. In the video, QTCinderella’s unban requests show a much higher number of users banned because of sexual comments and gender-based harassment directed at her in comparison to Ludwig’s channel. This video showcases some of the differences in treatment women and men experience on the platform.

Finally, I conducted an analysis of Twitch’s Community Guidelines in order to see if they, as I suspect based on my research, disproportionately target women. This analysis allows me to directly interface with Twitch itself in a way that my other analyses do not. Additionally, this analysis showcases what is actually considered against the rules which will illuminate what other guidelines may go unspoken. Twitch’s Community Guidelines are ever changing as the community and world continue to change, so I am interested in how much the guidelines may differ from past iterations of them. Even though the guidelines are constantly changed and updated, studying them will allow me to directly observe the platform itself in addition to my study of the Twitch community and Twitch users through my other analyses and my interviews. The current iteration of the guidelines includes the following sections: “Introduction to Safety on Twitch,” “Safety,” “Civility and Respect,” “Illegal Activity,” “Sensitive Content,” and “Authenticity.” While not all of these sections may contain relevant information, I examined each of them thoroughly in order to ensure that I do not let anything fly under the radar. In addition to the Community Guidelines, the page I linked includes other additional information related to Twitch that I may explore, time and space permitting. The additional sections that seem as though they may include pertinent information are the “Reporting & Enforcement,” “Moderation,” and “Resources,” categories. I feel as though these sections may include relevant additions because they inform how the Community Guidelines are enforced on paper as well as showcase where Twitch may point users experiencing harassment.

Footnotes

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1. J. Clement, “Distribution of Video Gamers in the United States from 2006 to 2022, by Gender,” Statistica, October 20, 2022.
2. J. Clement, “Distribution of Game Developers Worldwide from 2014 to 2021, by Gender,” Statistica, September 2, 2022.
3. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, “Gaming Industry: Please Wait… Gender Balance Loading,” Forbes, August 28, 2020.
4. Matthew Kassorla, “Sexism Within the Video Game Industry,” The Cornell Daily Sun, August 30, 2021.
5. Nikolina Cveticanin, “Twitch Stats and Demographics for 2022: The Most Influential Streaming Platform for Gamers,” DataProt, August 24, 2022.
6. Mark R. Johnson, “Behind the Stream: The Off-Camera Labor of Game Live Streaming,” Games and Culture, Vol. 16, no. 8 (2021).
7. Mark R. Johnson, “Behind the Stream: The Off-Camera Labor of Game Live Streaming,” Games and Culture, Vol. 16, no. 8 (2021) 1014.
8. Mark R. Johnson, “Behind the Stream: The Off-Camera Labor of Game Live Streaming,” Games and Culture, Vol. 16, no. 8 (2021) 1014.
9. Daniel Lark and Bonnie Ruberg, “Live Streaming from the Bedroom: Performing Intimacy Through Domestic Space on Twitch,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 27, no. 3 (2021).
10. Matthew E. Perks and Christopher J. Persaud, “Beauty from the Waist Up: Twitch Drag, Digital Labor, and Queer Mediated Liveiness,” Television & New Media, Vol. 23, no. 5 (2022).
11. Kathryn Brewster, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Bonnie Ruberg, “Nothing but a ‘Titty Streamer’: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate Over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 36, no. 5 (2019).
12. Judith A. Howard, “The ‘Normal’ Victim: The Effects of Gender Stereotypes on Reactions to Victims,” Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 47, no. 3 (1984).
13. Diana L. Payne, Kimberly A. Lonsway, and Louise F. Fitzgerald, “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of Its Structure and Its Measurement Using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale,” in Journal of Research in Personality no. 33 (1999).
14. John Berger, “3,” Ways of Seeing (1972), 51.
15. Christine H. Tran, “‘Never Battle Alone’: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as ‘Real’ Work,” Television & New Media, Vol. 23, no. 5 (2022).
16. Suzanne Scott, “Interrogating the Fake Geek Girl: The Spreadable Misogyny of Contemporary Fan Culture,” in Fake Geek Girls: 22, eds. Jonathan Gray, Aswin Punathambekar, and Adrienne Shaw, (2019) 85.
17. Amanda L. L. Cullen, “Just on the Right Side of Wrong: (De)Legitimizing Feminism in Video Game Live Streaming,” Television & New Media, Vol. 23, no. 5 (2022).
18. Michael Salter, “From Geek Masculinity to GamerGate: The Technological Rationality of Online Abuse,” Crime Media Culture, Vol. 14, no. 2, (2017).
19. Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske, “The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 70, no. 3 (1996).
20. Bonnie Ruberg, “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 6 (2021).
21. Bonnie Ruberg, “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 6 (2021) 1695.
22. Bonnie Ruberg, “‘Obscene, Pornographic, or Otherwise Objectionable’: Biased Definitions of Sexual Content in Video Game Live Streaming,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 6 (2021) 1695.
23. Andrew Zolides, “Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch’s Community Guidelines,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 10 (2020).
24. Andrew Zolides, “Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch’s Community Guidelines,” New Media & Society, Vol. 23, no. 10 (2020) 3013.