Sexualized culture on livestreaming platforms: a content analysis of Twitch.tv

You could argue that they are 'forced by the market' to be more sexualized. Or you could argue that they are taking advantage of the market and using sex to sell.

I mean the whole thing is asymetric, you can't expect men and women to behave in exactly the same way, they have different needs, desires, and affordances.

First minor point - 3 million daily viewers worldwide is WAY less than I thought twitch has. We keep talking about gaming becoming mainstream, but 50+million people watched friends finale in USA alone. Twitch is not as big as I thought.

Second:

"The sexualized representation of women in the media shapes gender attitudes, dehumanizes women, and legitimizes violence against them"

I haven't realized and I'd need some convincing that line between sexuality and legitimizing violence is so straight, firm, and one-to-one. My hope for future is that women and indeed any gender, can choose to display and engage, with any level of sexuality (including "none" and "lots") as much as they damned well please. It feels... "Wrong" to indicate that "sexual display legitimize violen". Am I too easily triggered that this feels slightly like victim shaming?

Third, As another commenter points out, genders are equal but not necessarily the same, biological and often culturally, and their target markets are different in their preferences as well. Is that morally good or bad? The paper appears to assume it is. I'd like more discussion on that.

The interesting thing to me in this article is the amount of women streaming that are sexualized:

>However, the majority of women (71.4%) wear attire ranging from moderate necklines to bikinis or minimal clothing and use the focus of the image to show their full body (76.2%). In addition, more than half of these streamers evoke a sexual act (51.6%), while two thirds of them insinuate such acts or seduce with their mouth (32.7% + 34.7%).

So 65%-75% of female streamers on Twitch are overtly sexualized. Overall, I think this is a complete race to the bottom. I understand the incentives that govern it (it's a male dominated audience, therefore sex gets attention, more sex gets more attention, and now we have an arms race) but this seems really unhealthy and disappointing for people on both sides of the thing.

Twitch is a disaster and needs to do something to reclaim its identity if it doesn't just want to turn into yet another porn site. I don't have a problem with porn but I do have a problem with the ubiquity of it. I don't think it's healthy to have it in every single social setting because it sucks all the air and value out of everything else around it. Keep porn on porn sites, and let people differentiate themselves in other, more creative ways, elsewhere. Porn is generally the least interesting thing a female creator can do in the attention economy and it just reinforces existing gender stratification.

Also, I have no idea why this submission was flagged, it's a reputable source and of real interest to this audience.

Twitch was suppose to be child friendly streaming service. Now it is soft-porn streaming site. So I assume kids (who like Minecraft, not porn) left and moved somewhere else. And other kids (who like porn) moved to some *hub that matches their preferences.

Other points are kind of irrelevant. Bobie streamers are not harmed, are self-employed, and are "sexualizing" themselves. Many of them are former sex workers, they can make more money on streaming. You could even say, Twitch reduces overall violence.