Pools, Hot Tubs, & Beaches

Fan is a new column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. This is the third column in the series. Get caught up on our first two dispatches:

Moomin boom

Herzogians 

Akhil Vaidya on parasocial fandom and poolside streams.

In 1996, a 19-year-old college student named Jennifer Ringley programmed a website that continuously shared still images of her dorm room as she engaged in her daily life. Called Jennicam, it was one of the first personal livestreams broadcasted on the internet. Years after she went offline, Jennicam is still credited with providing oracular insight into the performative contours of digital life. In a 1999 interview with CNN, at the height of Jennicam’s popularity, Ringley speculated on the nature of its popularity:

This parasocial  framework of interaction undergirds most of digital culture today.  The term “parasocial” itself has maintained the impulsive and obsessive connotations of traditional fandom. From Doja Cat’s summer crusade against her own kittens to Donald Glover and Janine Nabers’ dimensionless portrayal of stan culture in Swarm earlier this year, there is a cultural tendency to be repulsed by egregious stan behavior, without recognizing how media and content systems have systematically monetized our craving for parasocial connection.

While each style of content creation touts a unique conceit into parasociality, to me, livestreaming is one of the best and most overt conduits for projecting virtual, connective tissue. In 2017, writer Cecilia D’Anastasio described the Twitch streamer as a “digital-age geisha”: 

This framing of the streamer as a service, submissive to the needs of the parasocial viewer, is sometimes hard to reconcile with the hypermasculine culture that Twitch seems to foster.

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The Golden Bachelor: A hot tub time machine

The Bachelor started out as a great way to sand your brain in the face of all The Horrors.

But the format has gotten tired. The premium placed on ripped abs and perfect facial symmetry. The infiltration of aspiring influencers. The promises to include the show’s diversity and inclusion only to see a lineup that looks like Mitch McConnell’s internship class. Mostly, it’s just hard to believe these child brides young women are really struggling to date. 

That’s why The Golden Bachelor is such a refreshing deviation. Building a show around an older age bracket does what Hollywood hates to do: admit that women age, and then apologize for capitalizing on womens’ fear of growing old. As the last episode proved, steamy kissing in a hot tub isn’t just for the youth.

Most of all, The Golden Bachelor is a brilliant PR move from a flagging franchise. Best of luck to zaddy Gerry. 🌹

At Codeword, we’re always talking about what’s next for PR, marketing, brands, and beyond. Check out our newsletter or say hi.

Even as the girl has become the darling of the digital zeitgeist over the last year, Twitch remains a bastion of online manhood, where the overwhelming majority of streamers and their audiences are young men. Accordingly, some of the most popular Twitch streamers are caricatures of arrested boyhood. They play video games, of course, but also delight in blowing up their viewer-funded creator mansions, broadcasting porn and slurs, and platforming manosphere influencers.

For the women that do stream on Twitch, the platform offers little protection against the worst fruits of parasocial culture. Countless streamers can recount instances of being harassed, stalked, or bullied, but women on Twitch often bear the brunt of such abuse, as their content is automatically sexualized by viewers (most times, against their wishes). 

Enter “hot tub meta.”

Tucked away from the reaches of Twitch’s homepage, thousands of viewers tune into a separated category of streams called “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches.” Inscrutably named, this subsection of “IRL” streams features women, often in revealing bathing suits, as they lounge, sometimes perform suggestive actions, slather sunscreen, and interact with viewers for hours at a time. While these streams can be set in actual pools, hot tubs, or beaches, the “meta” originates with streamer XoAeriel, who claims to have pioneered the loophole of using an inflatable hot tub to get around Twitch’s strict regulations on women’s attire.

The controversy around hot tub meta in 2021 was a recirculation of the violent territorialism that has characterized women in streaming and gaming spaces for years. Tyler “Trainwreck” Niknam, a popular gambling and gaming streamer, stated the central issue quite plainly in 2017: “The same sluts that [rejected us] are coming into our community, taking the money, taking the subs, the same way they did back in the day.”

While the content of hot tub meta is certainly not groundbreaking, with visible roots in Jennicam and the countless camgirls and OnlyFans peddlers that followed in her footsteps, the livestreaming context in which hot tub meta exists alters its significance to me. Hot tub meta is an organic manipulation of key cultural fault lines in livestreaming and gaming communities, serving as a naked reminder that Twitch is not as invested in its culture of masculinity as it is in its business of parasociality. While some streamers, both men and women, might bristle at being compared to a shameless sexual appeal, hot tub meta symbolically equalizes the pursuit and submission of parasocial connection that exists at the heart of livestreaming.

What Twitch streamers (and content creators in general) might be afraid to admit is that there is a submission—and pleasure from such submission—that comes with the parasocial relationship. Does this mean that we are all “girls online?” Perhaps, but I suspect the online condition could be explained without ridding the digital subject of attachment and emotion. Instead, what if we are all fans online, following the platform-determined paths to cultivator or consumer of parasociality? Hot tub meta gestures at this, characterizing parasociality as a foundational social framework that encroaches on all online interactions, regardless of the cultural facades we put up to hide it.

The Dirt: Let streamers have hobbies.