The format of these videos is as follows: a girl opens a door with an 'e-girl factory' sign on it, then someone abducts her and starts putting the stereotypical make up on her: a lot of blush, eyeliner, and hearts under her eyes. Scrolling through Tik Tok, it is almost impossible not to come across these meme videos about the formation of Internet girls. I will try to explain this through the notorious 'e-girl factory' videos below. But what emblematic features are “enough” for a girl to be an authentic member of this identity category? As Maly and Varis (2016) suggest in their article, “Identity is a matter of ‘enoughness.' This means that there are certain, often minimal, features, that a girl must adopt in order to become a 'real' e-girl. This can be seen in Figure 6, which shows the so-called 'e-girl starter pack'. To understand it better, I will analyze the different types of e-girls.Įven though there are different types of e-girls, they share a common identity through commodities, music taste, love for anime, aesthetics, and social media discourse. This definition of an e-girl shows us the 'modern' understanding of the term that emerged on Tik Tok.

the tiktok/vsco e-girl (can also be know as the aesthetic e-girl).

There's many mainstream/commonly known types of e-girls, for example: However, Becker suggests that outsiders can reject the rules by which they are judged. An example is Rusty Fawkes (Figure 1), a 24-year-old cosplayer and Twitch streamer, who embraced this definition: 'I try to bring a bit of irony and humor into the situation because I mean, I love all my fellow e-girls.' Internet girls such as Rusty gave rise to a re-definition of the term:ĭefinition 2: An e-girl is a 'category' word: it's used to assemble many different specific types of girls that fit into a certain specific trend or 'type'. This is why they are regarded as outsiders. Following Becker's thought, according to male gamers, e-girls' 'cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group,' and their behavior was inappropriate. Male gamers portrayed e-girls as indiscriminately sexual women whose aim was to get attention from professional male gamers. As Becker states in his book 'Outsiders,' all social groups, and in this case, gamers, create certain rules, 'specifying some actions as 'right' and forbidding others as 'wrong.'' Men objectified girl gamers, who they saw as attention seekers that invaded male spaces by flirting online. They can also be found on twitch, the difference between a normal girl who plays video games and an e-girl is that an e-girl begs for money or sells herself for it.Īs I already mentioned, the term has been used derogatorily to belittle women. Urban Dictionary offers us two definitions of the term:ĭefinition 1: e-girls are usually girls who play games online and can be found on either Twitter or Discord, they send nudes/ thirst traps or even sell them. I will investigate the different kinds of e-girls, their aesthetic indexicals, and the negative attitude towards them, which construct their culture and identify them as deviant.įigure 1. In this article, I will present an online ethnographic analysis based on their Internet behavior in order to gain insight into their culture and role as a social group in the digital world. From here emerged two other names for them - 'Internet' or 'electronic' girls. To be an e-girl means to exist online, mediated.

Nowadays, while e-girls inspire young teenagers online, some make the new trend an object of ridicule. But e-girls are not only known for their 'kawaii' internet presence - the term was previously used to disparage women. Within the community there are several different types of e-girls: Tik Tok, gamer, emo, and artsy. Heavy make-up, dyed hair, chains, septum piercings, and layered clothing are part of the e-girls aesthetic. Although the term has been around for more than a decade now, it became notably popular at the beginning of 2019, shortly after Tik Tok came out. E-girls are a youth subculture popularized by Tik-Tok and Instagram.

Snapchat egirl