The most well-known egirls are a distributed imaginative and prescient, an web soften, collectively funded, partly, by followers’ thirst. They’re queens of the parasocial microcelebrity factor, charging $25 to $35 a month for OnlyFans “gamer girl” lewds or $25 for cosplay photosets. “It’s one of those fantasy things,” says Rusty Fawkes, an egirl with 1.5 million TikTok followers. On her OnlyFans, Fawkes posts cosplay-inspired lewds, titties out, in wigs and kitty ears. This isn’t really how women play video video games, she says. We don’t placed on a full face of make-up, a wig, and a Darling within the Franxx cosplay to zone out to some Valorant. (Sometimes viewers level out to her that her controller isn’t turned on.)
It’s hyperbole. It’s abstracted. And, Fawkes says, “it’s sexualized for them. I mean, hey, if it’s something you can market, and you want to market it, like, why not?” In 2019, egirl Belle Delphine posted a picture of herself in a tub along with her pink gaming controller: “i am now selling my BATH WATER for all you THIRSTY gamer boys ????.” $30. It immediately offered out. One notably enterprising PC builder peddled Belle Delphine bathwater–cooled PCs for $1,500.
This style {of professional} egirl additionally invokes a query central to its existence: Is this a liberation? Upstream of egirl are the Rococo-inspired Japanese lolitas—in fluffy clothes with cupcakes, Victorian doll Mary Janes, and lace socks. They may appear, at face, infantilizing, an attraction to male obsession with younger ladies. It is Lolita in any case. Lolita devotees would say it’s extra subversive than infantilizing. It’s anti-male gaze. It’s a deflective childishness, head-to-toe physique armor towards actuality. More like dolls than people.
If egirls are dolls, persons are having a variety of enjoyable dressing them up.
Maybe egirls are the pure conclusion to Donna Haraway’s 1985 cyberfeminist superb: “creatures simultaneously animal and machine who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” Online catgirls in curated bedrooms. In high-pitched child voice, there may be producer Senzawa’s 2018 egirl anthem, paying homage to an NSFW 2000s furry chat room role-play: Rawr!! x3 nuzzles pounces on u / uwu u so heat. Was Haraway mistaken?
Caldwell is agency that egirl is empowering. She’s not doing it for males, she says, or anybody else. And children don’t have a monopoly on cute shit. People take every part so severely. “Yes, I game,” Caldwell mouths in one other TikTok meme. She’s carrying a plushy pink bra with dangling bunny ears and matching fluffy short-shorts. “I know I don’t look like your ‘typical’ gamer, but look,” she says. The digital camera cuts to a video of her taking part in a online game on her tricked-out gaming PC. She’s transferring a sponge throughout a dish and bobbing her head rhythmically.
