30-year-old streamer Sweet Anita feels like she is being exploited sexually by others. She cannot prevent it and says she does not even know why she is still on Twitch.
This bothers Sweet Anita now: The streamer is upset that viewers reduce her to her sexuality and spread clips on the internet about her that are used as templates for masturbation.
These are out-of-context excerpts from longer streams, where her butt is visible or her breasts are emphasized.
“They sell my body without my consent. Honestly, it annoys me, I just don’t want to be here anymore. I put my all into this, I invest heart, blood, time, and soul into what I do. […] And all they do is jerk off to it. I don’t know why I’m still here.”
Sweet Anita
“7 seconds of my butt get 500,000 views”
These are the clips she means: It’s about so-called “Creep Clips” or “Thicc Clips”. She shows, for example, how a streamer simply gets up or bends over, showing off her curves.
Sweet Anita says she gets up from her chair to go to the bathroom. And someone makes a clip “Sweet Anita completely naked” and uploads it to YouTube. This creates a completely false image of her.
She says:
- A 10-minute video, where she spends weeks or months sharing her thoughts, gets a few thousand views.
- A 7-second clip of her butt reaches half a million views in a day.
It is important to understand that Sweet Anita neither creates, nor uploads or distributes these “Creep Clips”, but other content creators do this and make money with her body.
Sweet Anita believes: “There are already so many butts on the internet”; hers is not needed. This leads to further problems, as viewers come into her channel with clear expectations that she does not want to fulfill.
Is it the same for others? Yes, this is actually a problem on Twitch. Unlike the streamers who choose to showcase their bodies, such as in “Hot Tub Streams”, there are also streamers like Sweet Anita or Pokimane who consciously refrain from it.
However, such “Thicc Videos” circulate from those, in which they are clearly sexualized.
Many female streamers are bothered that in their “most popular clips” the ones at the top are those in which they actually do nothing, but you can see their butt particularly well.
Sweet Anita says: She can do nothing about it. Even if she disables the clip function on Twitch, people would simply download the full videos and make YouTube videos from them, earning money on YouTube with them.
This is Sweet Anita: The 30-year-old Englishwoman became famous in 2018 as an Overwatch player. She has Tourette syndrome and some motor and verbal tics that are triggered more frequently by viewer actions.
In 2019, there was a controversy when users in her Twitch chat tried to repeatedly entice her to say racist slurs. Other Twitch streamers subsequently called for her Twitch ban. But black streamers supported her, stating she is in no way a racist. And Twitch ultimately decided: Streamers with Tourette are welcome on the streaming platform.
Sweet Anita is seen as a streamer who helps break down prejudices against those with Tourette syndrome. Someone who helps overcome barriers. But she seems to be struggling with the barrier of how Twitch treats women:
Some call for a ban on the streamer with Tourette – Twitch clearly takes a stand
