‘GFE’ means ‘GirlFriend Experience’. This service is provided, usually by prostitutes, to give you the experience of having a girlfriend in a day or on an evening. This usually entails a nice date, dinner and a happy ending, as one could expect from a day with a girlfriend. The concept itself is very interesting, as one can wonder what is what would entail the ‘experience’ of having a girlfriend and what people are looking for when they order this service. But this topic would be too explicit and not relevant enough to talk about in this blog. So we turn to an evolution of this idea, the digital GFE.
Digital GFE just means the ‘girlfriend experience’ turned digital. But then how does the GFE work digitally, when all parts of the physical GFE are just that; physical? Is it the same service but all communication is digitalised and the physical parts are cut? Is this exclusion of the service then compensated by the length of the service? Indeed, some GFE services start out online but move into the physical realm after a while. But do completely digital GFEs exist? They do, and the format that I presume to be the largest one to exist online excludes almost all explicit properties. The format I’m referring to is livestreaming.
Livestreaming is not a new concept and has expanded severely in the past two decades. A big part of livestreaming is the parasocial aspect. This means that the relationship between the viewer and the streamer is such that the viewer feels a personal connection to the streamer, while the streamer only has a connection to the stream, not to every individual. The viewers are provided with parasocial interaction, which is defined by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl as an interaction between an ‘actor’ and spectator, where the ‘actor’, while performing in any kind of medium, directly addresses the spectator, as if the spectator and actor were having a face-to-face conversation. The spectator, instead of merely observing the performance, feels as though he is participating in the conversation.1 Horton and Wohl found these parasocial interactions in certain radio or TV programs, which became popular due to their parasocial aspect.2 Livestreamers talk to or with their viewers quite directly and simultaneously, creating intenser parasocial interactions then TV or radio could provide. When the viewer of a livestream experiences more of this parasocial interaction from the streamer, they can form a parasocial relationship with the streamer.
Streamers have taken advantage of parasocial interaction and have been able to turn it into a profitable venture. On platforms as Twitch.tv, numerous streamers collect quite a large amount of income from donations and memberships by providing their viewers with parasocial interaction. This stands in contrast to other aspects of livestreaming, where the content is focused on gaming, vlogging or expressions of exceptional skills in gaming, sports or other activities. Examples of livestreaming that completely focuses on the parasocial aspect are the streamers that wear revealing clothing and perform slightly explicit activities (as much as the wholesome platform allows) for the viewers. The streams consist solely of baiting donations from viewers and giving viewers personal interaction based on the amount of money these viewers donate.
But why does this work so well? These streamers don’t give you personal attention until you donate money and you will almost never have the possibility to meet them physically, even less gain their undivided attention, physically or digitally. Even with the attention or parasocial interaction a viewer can receive, it would still be hard to call this experience a digital GFE, as sexual suggestiveness and short personal attention are not enough to warrant a true digital GFE. Traditional GFE includes more than the mainly explicit elements these streamers provide and puts more emphasis on the emotional and social aspects. Yet the reason then that I presume to be the cause of this success is the growing loneliness people, in particular men, are experiencing. People don’t merely desire the sexual gratification that is so easily accessible online, but want to social and emotional interaction they don’t receive in daily life. And the next category of livestreaming perfectly provides that niche.
Virtual Youtubers (or V-Tubers) are livestreamers that, instead of streaming themselves, use an avatar to interact with their viewers. The Youtuber Kizuna AI popularized this format, quickly gaining million of subscribers through the years. Although they are called ‘Youtubers’, not all of these streamers are on Youtube. They are often part of larger company that employs them as streamers, although independent v-tubers are becoming more popular as well. Their streams consist mostly of gaming, musical performances, collobarations with other v-tubers and talking to their viewers. Because these v-tubers are not bound to their real identity and keep their real identity almost always private, they can craft an identity and performance to best please their audience.
This is where the real digital GFE shines. Not all v-tubers perform GFEs, but some make it their emphasis. These ‘GFE v-tubers’, as they are called, match a certain performance with their avatar and stream content to maximize the parasocial interaction they can generate from viewers. They try to create a digital image of a ‘girlfriend’ that is the most popular with the largest group of viewers by acting in their streams with the traits the viewers would like to see in a romantic partner. Viewers donate large amounts of money to have their messages read aloud by the V-tuber and gain some personal attention. To uphold this image, the V-tubers need to maintain seperation between their personal life and their online identity. Often, they online include parts of their personal life that can in no way reveal their personal identity or jeopardise their online identity. When ‘harmful’ information accidentily gets revealed or leaked, it could prove disastreous for the V-tuber. An example of this is a recent event where it became apparent that a GFE V-tuber was in a romantic relationship with someone in real life because of a message notification during her stream. This reveal broke the image she had created, as one of the foundational factors was the fact that her online image was the girlfriend of the viewers. Surrounding this incident, she lost a substantial part of her supporters and viewerbase and was eventually fired from the V-tubing company she was part of.
- Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl (1956) Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, Psychiatry, 19:3, 215-229: 215
- Horton & Wohl (1956): 224
I have been thinking about how to “quantify “ human affection a lot. My personal feeling is always like they must be so good at “peopling” so they can make a living by it( when they do it out of their own will). But how do you quantify this skill? I have read some research analyses such topics from sociological perspective. And in one of the papers I read, the interviewee is working in the porn industry and escort services, and she talked about how systematically caring her clients and her strategies of management. It was very impressive for me when I first read about it. I know you drew majority of paragraphs talking about the baiting and relatively bad side of it. However, as someone who probably will never fall into their target audience area, an outsider in this sense, I am somehow very impressed by their professional skills even when it comes to baiting.