Streamer Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa (27) is by far the biggest streamer on Twitch. She often has to hear that she’s only successful because of her looks. But being a woman also brings drawbacks in business relationships, as she now explains.
This is Amouranth:
- The business-savvy streamer describes her online persona as a “shameless E-Girl”: Amouranth appears in Twitch streams dressed revealingly and follows every trend. She coined the “Hot Tub” meta, sat in a swimsuit in an indoor pool, licked microphones during ASMR streams, and once did very strange things while wearing a horse skull on her head, which should remain unspoken (via youtube).
- With her streams, she is enormously successful, she accepts donations, writes the names of donors on her body, and chats with her fans. She repeatedly promotes the platform Onlyfans, where she also offers adult content. Here, she apparently earns even more money than on Twitch.
- Besides her online persona, Amouranth is also a businesswoman, building a network, investing her money, and preparing for her retirement, where she wants to dedicate herself entirely to animal welfare.
Suddenly, the business partner invited her to dinner
What are the problems as a woman in business? Amouranth shares on Twitter about a business relationship with a representative of a major brand that she nurtured for months. They worked together on an advertising deal; Amouranth was apparently supposed to serve as a model influencer and use her reach to make a product more well-known. The collaboration had been constructive for months, and Amouranth had never heard anything negative about the partner, who had always been correct.
One day, Amouranth received a message that the partner was now in her city and would like to meet her for dinner in person. The question came during a completely normal business conversation.
Amouranth said: She hesitated to respond and brushed it off. Because during COVID times, she was cautious about meeting anyone, and she also felt uncomfortable as a woman meeting men whom she knew only in a business context. Therefore, she simply ignored the request and didn’t respond right away.
However, the business partner immediately became aggressive, threatening to end the business relationship if she didn’t accept his invitation. He demanded an immediate “yes” or “no” to his spontaneous dinner invitation, or else he would terminate the business relationship. Amouranth says the business partner accused her of behaving “unprofessionally.”
“Disgusting when I’m expected to put myself in potentially dangerous situations”
This is how Amouranth sees it: According to Amouranth, this is typical for life as a woman in business. This would never happen to a male influencer. In contrast, an invitation to dinner is completely harmless. But if someone invites her to a private dinner and then reacts so vehemently when she doesn’t immediately respond, she feels unsure about how to handle it.
Amouranth says: She doesn’t know if the person had any ulterior motives during the dinner. If she were a man, it could have also been a perfectly logical and reasonable meeting. But the business partner reacted so oddly to her non-response to the invitation, not letting up, pushing for an answer, which has been troubling her.
The streamer says she has been in such situations before and knows that colleagues have experienced it too: situations where deals suddenly involve ambiguous offers or where someone behaves in a way that crosses all boundaries of professional collaboration.
Streamer complains that even business partners perceive her as her “online persona”
According to Amouranth, it disgusts her that people expect her to put herself in potentially dangerous situations, just because of how people perceive her online.
Amouranth says:
“I have worked hard to get to where I am today: I don’t want special treatment, but I want to be treated the same as the people I work with. It is unacceptable for women to be taught to politely decline requests that make them uncomfortable or – even worse, that they feel pressured to accept just to maintain a business relationship.”
Amouranth
Amouranth says this is a problem that women everywhere in the workplace face, not just influencers. We need to hold ourselves and those around us to higher standards of professionalism when working with women and create a safe working environment for them to be able to succeed in their careers.
The streamer Amouranth has already dealt with the accusation that as a woman on stream, it’s enough to just look good:
Streamer responds to “As a girl on Twitch, it’s enough to be pretty”
