Fostering New Female Spaces on the Net

Student Guest Opinion

By Tess Tarchak-Hiss | March 15, 2025

My mother’s worst nightmare had come true: I had lice.

I got lice at the ripe old age of 12, posing two questions: First, can middle schoolers even get lice? And second, how did this even happen?

At the time, we’d been stuck in COVID quarantine for a month. I was placed in double isolation, walking around my house with a hairnet—looking like Chris Farley in SNL’s “Lunch Lady” skit—to prevent any jumping joys from making an escape.

Despite the drawbacks, there was an upside: Nobody from school knew I was cursed, and no anonymous alarm was sent out to the parents of my peers that “so-and-so” had lice. I was saved from the embarrassment and the shunning.

However, I was not saved from countless hours under piercing white lights, sitting on the floor in the bathroom while my mom rooted out my infestation. To prevent my squiggling, an iPod Touch was thrown into my hands. An iPod Touch with three worthy apps: Subway Surfers, Bitlife, and YouTube.

I’ve always adored video games—Sims, Animal Crossing, Sonic, Pokémon, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, you name it. Cute animals and a fun house to decorate? Sign me up. Through these games, I developed a further sense of creativity. I made stories about my villagers in Minecraft and mapped out my Animal Crossing island on the big poster board intended for my pre-COVID science project. Despite being stuck indoors, my world was large as my imagination ran rampant.

My mother, who was a survivor of Sims addiction back in her day, was hands-off regarding what I played. Working from home, she had priorities, and her daughter’s screen time was not one of them. At the time, the fear of being judged by my real-life friends over the lice situation was immense. Despite that, I wanted a community—I wanted a frequent force in my life I could admire, whom I could share a common interest with. I turned to YouTube to find those figures.

Female gamers on online platforms get a horrible reputation. On account of a few bad apples, a stereotype is perpetuated that all women who play video games are money-hungry, overly sexual, clout chasers. I, and many others my age, found comfort in a specific group of women who knocked down these assertions and provided safe spaces.

These spaces were uplifting to awkward tweenage girls, embracing different backgrounds, interests, and various levels of weirdness. Watching YouTubers such as IHasCupquake, LaurenZside, LDShadowlady, and StacyPlays provided millions with warmth equivalent to a hug in a time where the closest physical interaction one could have was waving at the UPS driver
dropping off a package at the top of the driveway.

These women fostered motherlike admiration from their fans, proving that women could be their most authentic selves in male-dominated spaces. Mai Lantz, a sophomore at Traverse City West Senior High, grew up watching these women and continues to incorporate their messages of originality and resilience in how she sees the world.

“There was a lot of guardianship that they provided when I was looking for a figure like that,” Lantz says. “They were parental figures to me—I wanted to be as strong and creative and as funny as they were. They showed me possibilities through my screen. These women, I always thought they were just extremely strong, because it takes a lot to put yourself out there, especially on the internet, especially as a woman. But they put themselves out there and were relentlessly harassed because of it.”

According to womeningames.org, “Some 59% of gamers who are women and girls have experienced some form of toxicity from male gamers, with 28% saying that they experience this regularly online.”

That’s not the only dark side to gaming. Online video games, despite immersive storytelling and visual elements, despite the community they build, despite the creativity that lurches out of it, cannot replace real life.

“It’s a whole different thing when you’re depending on a video game solely for your happiness. It puts a dent in how you learn, how you see things, and how you interact with people. Some people start depending so much on these games. Especially when it’s the only thing you have, and it’s the only thing you have to live through. It can be a positive and a negative. It’s a way for people to distract themselves from what they’re going through,” Lantz says.

Even though video games provide dopamine to doomscrollers and dungeon dwellers alike, finding a balance between Call of Duty lobbies and the outside world is key. The communities these female gamers assembled, while helping mold middle school girls into independent and eccentric young women, helped bridge some of these “chronically online” behaviors.

After the lockdown, we took what we’d learned online into normal life, looking for friends who were similarly drawn to women gamers who exhibited strength and spunk and passed it down to their viewers. Now, we viewers have developed our own trademark moxie, become the next generation of gaming role models, and built and embraced communities of our own.

Tess Tarchak-Hiss is currently a junior at Traverse City West Senior High. She explores the world around her by writing at her dining room table while listening to Wiz Khalifa.