Gamergirls and Orientalism
Gamergirls and Orientalism
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By Akira Albar-Kluck
By Akira Albar-Kluck
As video games are an industry like any other, several smaller industries have arisen out of it. Due to it being an entertainment industry, sex work has become a very large genre of content in gaming entertainment. People like Belle Delphine have become some of the largest names in gaming, and while it is important that sex work become destigmatized some of the effects of this entertainment have been bad. These performers create an aesthetic to sell their work, which has become a sort of shorthand for these performers.
Known as the “UwU girl”, a reference to internet culture and a sound in anime to indicate innocence. The aesthetic is heavily inspired by anime and female anime characters, particularly schoolgirl animes. This aesthetic also borrows from Japanese pop culture, with things like Japanese snacks and Hello Kitty. The particular look borrows heavily from Japanese “lolita” and Harajuku style with colorful wigs and pastel colors. Pastel pink is practically the official color of this aesthetic, with pink gaming chairs, pink cat ear headphones, and pink gaming setups. The specific pastel pink is often associated with baby girls. The makeup uses the “fox-eye” eyeliner look to make the eyes look more Asian, and light makeup to appear more “natural” This aesthetic prioritizes youth and nostalgia, with the popularity of stuffed animals like squash allows. They will often wear school uniforms that have been designed to be more revealing.
This is an incredibly popular aesthetic and creators are making lots of money this way. It begs the question of whether this is harmful. These are white women using Asian culture and doing makeup to appear both younger and more Asian to sell sex. On Tiktok, the first several dozen videos under #gamergirl are all sex workers. Under #gamer there are still some videos of sex workers promoting their brand, there are far more videos of actual games. A lot of the women who are putting these videos out will post videos of inappropriate comments and their reactions, however, it is an advertisement for their channels. They are not criticizing it as sexual harassment, they are encouraging it. This creates a hostile environment and culture for women gamers. Some men expect any female gamer to fit into the “UwU girl” category. They will ridicule women as being bad at gaming, expect them to perform themselves in a similar way to those sex workers, or make inappropriate comments to them the same way they would those sex workers. This is often sexual harassment, which acts as a barrier of entry for many women.
The harm of this subculture is not just that it is monopolizing female gamers. They are literally using Asian girls as a costume to make money off of and sexualize young girls. This feeds into orientalism and the fetishization of Asian girls. There is a long long history of white men fetishizing and exoticizing Asian women, it started millennia ago. Europeans thought that “the Orient” was mysterious and intriguing. You can see this in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ painting “Grande Odalisque”, he is painting his idea of a concubine from a false idea of what the East looks like. This has only continued with the Madam Butterfly trope, of young Asian women marrying white men who are participating in colonial wars only for them to kill themselves, like in Miss Saigon.
The image white men have of Asian women has deadly consequences. Fetishization is violence, and it has real consequences. From sexual tourism to the mass shooting of an Atlanta spa. A huge industry in Asia is for white men to go to these Asian countries like Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand and hire sex workers. This leads to problems of human trafficking, and many women being coerced into sex work due to poverty in the country. There is a persisting stereotype of Asian women as prostitutes, due to this. This combination of racism and sexualization led a white man, named Robert Aaron Long, to kill eight people, six of whom were Asian American women. The police blamed it on Long’s “sex addiction”, a diagnosis not recognized by the APA nor the primary issue of this attack. The association of Asian women and sex is a result of racism, not sex. When he could not fulfill his colonial fantasies he killed them.
The fetishization of Asian women cannot continue, or else there will continue to be dire consequences for actual Asian people. White women like Belle Delphine feeding into these dangerous stereotypes for profit are complacent in white supremacy and colonial structures. As I said in the beginning video games are an industry like any other, and so is sex work. There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but it is important to keep in mind that all industries have the capacity to be colonial powers and white supremacists.
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