Youtuber misogyny: getting audience with sexist humor

Abstract

In the context of a broader investigation about audiovisual socialization among adolescents in the digital era (Autora, 2019), we saw how the youtuber phenomenon is the main innovation in the field of production and consumption of audiovisual content among current adolescents, a generation that has been described as "prosumer youth". That youth has led to the appearance of the youtuber phenomenon, which presents significant gender differences, either in relation to the popularity and follow-up achieved, or in terms of the differences in the topics treated according to the sex of the creator of the content. In this article we focus on the sexist or directly misogynist humor used by three very popular male youtubers from the Spanish-speaking world: el Rubius, Germán Garmendia and Wismichu. Thus, we analyze the feminine and masculine gender imaginary that they present in their contents from the beginning, the treatment they have given to their female followers of female characters from video games, and their reaction to the criticism for the sexism inherent in their videos. In this way, we can see that sexist humor is a very useful element to achieve success within the youtuber phenomenon, very influential among adolescents and young people today.