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On E-Girls
I may be young, and I may spend too much time staring at screens, but I’m decidedly out of step with the bleeding edge of Internet culture. Only when Facebook became passé did I give in and make an account (which I seldom use). I’ve yet to touch Tik-Tok, and I doubt I ever will. All for the best, I think. But some friends just alerted me to a new-ish trend in the digital world: the so-called “e-girl” (or “e-thot,” in slightly less polite parlance).*
An e-girl is a young woman who sells feigned affection online. A customer gives her money, and she pretends to care about him by sending him pornography, seductive videos, personalized letters, or even presents. Yes, you read that correctly: A not-insignificant number of men are willing to pay random women on the Internet to give them attention. (Some even justify their pathology as a form of “providing.” “I’m doing my duty as a man!” they say. “I’m providing for her!”) This isn’t entirely new. I once read that the most popular offering among upscale brothels, for example, is not sex as such, but the whole romantic package — a nice dinner and a night on the town, followed by a consummation of the short relationship. The e-girl model makes a digital simulacrum of this available to every sad schlub with a laptop and an Internet connection. Can’t find a girlfriend? Just buy a fake one. Or try a dating simulator.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Some guys seem to prefer e-girls to their flesh-and-blood equivalents. Floating around the web is an infamous Reddit post written by a 20-something woman whose live-in boyfriend threw hundreds of dollars at e-girls, even going so far as to buy his favorite one — but not her, his real girlfriend — a Christmas present. Despite being in a nominal relationship, he felt the need to purchase attention anyway. Blame feminism, I guess. (Sargon of Akkad certainly does.)
Just like that, the market has stolen yet more territory from the order of the sacred. The commodification of human relationships continues apace. First came pornography, which commodified sex. Next came online dating, which commodified the means by which humans form romantic relationships. Then came social media, which commodified the non-romantic parts of social life and turned us all into performing seals. Now, even ordinary affection is something to be bought and sold. What’s next? Sex dolls? AI “girlfriends”? My fashionable and tech-savvy brother tells me that “VTubing” is the hot new thing. The future is turning out to be Wall-E, minus the environmental degradation.
I’ve yet to see the conservative commentariat address this particular addition to the pile of modern social evils. They seem to think that pornography is the greatest single threat to marriage, family, and ordinary old-fashioned love; and it probably is, for now. But e-girls will have their moment in the sun. After all, this is the world the Soroses and Schwabs want: a global techno-utopian feudal order in which the docile peasantry consumes and then perishes, and does nothing else. A world without conflict, scarcity, or striving. A world where love and affection are exchanged, but never earned. Is this the kind of world you want to live in? If not, then you’d better invest in the tangible while you still can. . . .
. . . Oh, wait. My mistake. You can’t invest in the tangible because there’s a virus circulating, and it’s just too dangerous. Never mind. E-girls and sex dolls it is, then!
* Apparently, the term “e-girl” is also used to describe the style of dress such women tend to adopt. I’m sure an Internet-culture purist would object to my terminology in this piece, but I don’t care. What else am I supposed to call these people?
Published in Culture
I can see the attraction. Women as a rule are always after a man’s assets. This way a man can purchase what he wants while limiting the legal exposure of having ones assets removed by a increasingly womanized society.
How different is this phenomenon from the ‘cam-ho’?
No different, I assume. Variant names for the same people.
Just how do they dress? In very small fonts?
I looked at some pics after reading this post; makeup (including pink nose make up) ludicrously colored hair.
Sex clowns, basically.
You don’t want to know.
Some marriages are based on feigned affection in return for financial considerations. You get a real live person but it’s more expensive.
A good and interesting post. I worked a marked vice car once in awhile. Working that car I met some individuals, pimps, prostitutes, and their clients. It’s a sordid business. Working a district car you meet a mix of people. Some are just stupid. Working a vice car you meet some truly evil people. Most strip clubs are prostitution fronts. A pimp will target bachelor parties and then sell girls off premises, some are under 18.
E-girls may think they are safe, until they think they can make more money in a meet-up with a client. One night I conducted a traffic stop on a young man that attempted to entice women to get into his car. I talked him into opening the trunk of his car. He had restraint devices as well as an assortment of knives in his trunk.
What you describe in your post is nothing more than prostitution. It’s a dangerous business for both the girls, and their customers.
Consider the young guy who has geeky tastes. He has been told that any sex with a real woman requires the presence of a lawyer and notarized consent forms, with all the romance of following a Standard Operating Procedure or the erotic potential of an Ikea manual. Asking a girl out could get you fired, and a lot of the ones you hear talk hate men. Sure, there’s plenty of XXX videos out there, but for real companionship? Getting a virtual gal has a lot of advantages. You can pick what you want, the completely virtual gal can be your precise fantasy come to life. A girl who who has cat ears and a tail? Why not? Then you have the fact that virtual gal is guaranteed to be faithful and accepting. She’s not going to laugh at you or tell you she found someone better.
I love my girlfriend, but I would never have imagined she would actually exist and be interested in me prior to meeting her.
No kidding. And talk about having your identity hanging out there in the breeze; crooks don’t have to buy your data, you’re paying them to take it.
I wonder how many of the e-girls are offshore, like other forms of tech support and customer service. For now, the whole meatspace part of the business must be cheaper than bots and AI/VR “girls.”
For now.
There was a TV series about this a few years back, it’s called “The Girlfriend Experience.”
It seems high time for @henrycastaigne to chime in on this topic.
These aren’t the droids he is looking for.
Porn is devastating our society. I heard Klavan say conservatives overemphasize porn as a crisis, but he apparently hasn’t talked to young, chaste, faithful women trying to find a good man to marry. I’m talking about young Catholic women I know who seek out the young Catholic men who show up for daily Mass and Eucharistic adoration and a week or two into the relationship find out he’s hooked on porn. Jordan Peterson has had some things to say about it — how it makes men incapable of relating to real women. And that doesn’t even begin to address the devastating effects on the young women making the porn, many of whom are probably dead and only “preserved” in the “movies.” Tragic.
I think it’s past time we ask ourselves how we got to this point. And my view is it started with the common acceptance of contraception (separating the pro-creative act from procreation) and, before that, the overthrow of the moral authority of the Church. But, I would say that.
Did I mention how very wrong Klavan is about this?
If anything, your best argument would seem to be that porn didn’t CAUSE that, it was the RESULT of that. Which means that simply trying to ban porn is NOT the solution.
No argument there. It is a restoration of Christendom I advocate. The fall of which has lead to all the degrading sexual insanity we’re witnessing, from abortion to porn to transsexual mutilation of children. How do you know a society is doomed? This is how.
But I think you’d also find that such a return to earlier values would put girls/women into a position that would not be acceptable. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” I don’t really know, but I’m certain that it’s true.
You mean as cherished daughters of God and mothers of God-created children? Women have paid a pretty steep price for modern feminist sensibilities. As have men.
Meaning that women didn’t have any more sexual freedom than men did, or even less really. Women were for the most part socially unable to exist separately from men, which was how a lot of men were able to get women to be sex partners even if the women would have preferred not to. A Woman basically had to have A Husband to support her and their eventual family. To be a “spinster” was not a good thing. Single women – such as one of my grandmothers – could be elementary-school teachers and few other things, etc. And they weren’t expected to be that for very long, either.
You’re making my point about feminist sensibilities versus God-centered ones. Feminism has put women and men at odds — in competition with each other. I don’t believe that’s what God intended for us.
I’m not sure if it’s even at odds, really. But this also reminds me of a post from a while back, that I saved:
I can’t find a girlfriend either, and I’m pretty sure my wife would object if I did.
You won’t know for sure unless you ask.
We discussed it once. She wasn’t interested.
Some people are into that you know.
Though I do think that some men such as Dr. Bastiat should be bigamist, on average, bigamy makes people unhappy. It’s like wielding two swords at once. It’s very hard to do. It takes effort and skill to wield one sword competently.
Really interesting post. The entire phenomenon seems of a piece with Facebook’s discovery that flattery, a.k.a. “likes”, is sufficient to retain the attention of billions of people. The e-girl phenomenon seems to be taking Facebook one step further by having lonely young men actually pay to be flattered. In this particular case, I guess, insincere attention replaces “Likes” as the means of eliciting the requisite surge of dopamine. If the economics of this thing turn out to be profitable, I would expect that even the e-girls themselves will eventually be replaced by AI-driven bots and deep fake video. Then it could be done at scale and without the inconvenience of finding enough analog young women with purple hair. Would paying to be flattered by a bot be more pathetic than paying to be flattered by a human being?
There’s always something profoundly disturbing about the willful self-deception involved in this sort of thing. Lots to ponder about that.
The other aspect of this that interests me is the accelerating move away from living an actual embodied life that we’re seeing in the broader culture. What was begun by the introduction of ubiquitous internet connectivity has, I think, been accelerated by Covid. Public health policy has come down firmly on the side of fomenting actual fear of other embodied human beings. (It will surprise me greatly if there isn’t a monumental collapse of the commercial real estate industry in the near term, since I suspect many businesses will not go back to the old way of doing things.) But this has been happening for a while now in social networks as, especially, young people abandon actual real-life experiences in favor of virtual ones. It will be illuminating to see whether American churches are permanently altered by the confluence of pandemic and live streaming. The answer to that will hinge, probably, on whether church members view their churches primarily as an actual community, or as merely a source of anodyne indoctrination.
One of my sons worked for several years as a church youth pastor and he lived through the impact of the iPhone’s invention on youth culture, especially in regard to social life. Smartphones were the bellwether for an entire shift away from youth being oriented toward embodied social groups and their interests turning, instead, toward the inherent isolation of virtual activities.
Anyway, this has given me a lot of food for thought. Thanks for posting about it.
You are actually missing another side of all this. Children are expensive to raise both in time and treasure. Having kids is a massive endeavor for most people who come from homes where they were carefully raised. The people who have tons of kids either have a high value on family or raise children with the same neglect they endured growing up.
Let’s consider the following:
Helicopter parenting – kids must be constantly supervised, even older grade school kids.
Kids are much less useful in the workforce – Aside from child labor laws, there’s less tradework and apprenticeships.
Mothers have a less important role – Mothers are less involved in teaching children. The mother is basically an unpaid babysitter. It’s not seen as a role requiring intelligence, skill, or talent beyond the patience to deal with annoying brats. It’s a job for unskilled workers and minimum wage labor.
This goes even more for fathers and husbands – not prestigious, not particularly valued, and generally all hassle and limited perceived benefit.
You said alot. A few random points come to mind.
I don’t believe in G-d. You can’t make me believe in G-d. How are you going to make a world based on Christian morality with people like me. Your desire for a Christian revival doesn’t seem to add into that so many peoples genetic inability to believe in G-d.
You might get your wish for a religious society because of pornography V Tubers and sex robots. Technological satisfaction could very well replace breeding among the the non-religious people. Churches will still make women feminine and men masculine in a cooperative way and they will tend to breed. This will only be in Churches that focus on G-d but Churches that focus on G-d tend to be have high retention rates and get more converts. Among all religions that I know of, churches that are about social justice or serving the community rather than G-d have sparsely populated pews.
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The ur-reason behind this troubling new cultural trend is the reason behind every problem; humans are terribly creatures de novo. There is a good reason that the Bible begins with the story of Adam and Eve. Men and women were always designed to manipulate and compete with each other for status and wealth. David and Solomon come to mind as does Delilah. Men and women, with a few exceptions, never really got along. Shakespeares comedies, as well written as they were, were an overly optimistic of humanity. We weren’t designed to be nice to one another. I’m just glad that we didn’t evolve from ducks or Lions.
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Additionally, wouldn’t society be better if only mentally stable people with the ability to make lasting relationships passed on their DNA? I speak as someone who is genetically inferior and I myself should not breed.
Genetics aside, something seems messed up in our society with regard to sex. Theodore Dalrymple twenty years noticed this.
It has gotten worse since then. Homosexuals like Douglass Murray have noticed that the war between the sexes seems to be heating up in a way that disturbs them as bystanders. Recently, a friend of his had his kid go off to University and he mentioned that his kid wasn’t interested in girls. Murray said, “Oh, well so he’s. gay” The father responded that, “No. He thinks that there are more trouble than their worth.”
Murray mentions that lots of young men feel that way. (Video clip here.)
To summarize Murray’s point, young men have no idea how to interact with women anymore. Religious people are an exemption.
I think that you Western Chauvinist would protest and say that Catholic men are being destroyed by pornography but I need data that suggests that religious people are not marrying and breeding like they once did. I do value anecdotes but I need anecdotes from a variety of sources to seriously consider them. This is where Ricochet comes in handy. What do you observe of the modern hominids that you are surrounded by and how do they mate and date?