Visage doll, pastel pink hair and headphones with cat ears, the “e-girl” speaks to her subscribers in front of the camera from her pink gamer chair, matching the neon lights that decorate her room. But let’s not be fooled by appearances, the e-girl – for electronic girl (in the “technological” sense) – is not just an archetype lurking behind our screens. In the profile factory what is TikTok, the hashtag #egirl already has 2.5 million publications.
Originally, in the early 2000s, this term defined young women who broadcast their video game games live on the Internet. Problem: the gaming community, which is rather masculine and sometimes sexist, gives a pejorative connotation to the term, describing e-girls as women who seek to attract the attention of men. Quickly, “cam girls”, who stream on Twitch in order to promote their private account on platforms like OnlyFans (where, by subscription, they publish pornographic content), appropriated this term.
The South African e-girl Belle Delphine, for example, sold, in 2019, bottles filled with her bath water to “thirsty gamers” for the modest sum of 30 dollars each, when others offer men to play with them for remuneration.
The crossfire of cyberstalkers
These actions of “cam girls” put obstacles in the way of real streamers, who are not taken seriously, always questioned about their real intention and their supposed passion for games – as if women could not nourish a sincere passion for video games. Some face the crossfire of cyberstalkers as soon as they show the slightest bit of skin.
We had to wait until 2019 and the explosion of TikTok for this posture to become a claimed aesthetic. The women concerned reappropriate a term perceived as offensive to turn it into a force. That year, “e-girl style” was one of the ten most searched fashion trends on Google, according to Business Insider.
The popularity of this expression is also linked to a sordid news story: the murder of American e-girl Bianca Devins, 17, who had her throat slit in 2019 by a young man she met online, with whom she had established a friendly relationship. He then posted photos of his victim’s lifeless body on the networks. This tragedy highlighted the fact that these young women are regularly threatened online, with sometimes disastrous consequences in real life.
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