Our special article series continues with an interview with Chiffoi – content creator and owner of creator incubator Women We Watch.
Who is Chiffoi?
“I have done a little bit of everything – I’ve been making videos since I was eleven,” Chiffoi says. “I’ve made my own long-form, short-form and livestream content, and worked as a channel manager, researcher, video editor, thumbnail designer and graphic designer for a number of different YouTubers.” Her content and work has covered Minecraft, a variety of other games, and IRL content.
“My proudest achievement is just that I’ve kept at making content for so long that I’ve accumulated a few hundred million views across channels on content that I’ve either made or worked on,” Chiffoi tells us. “I think about fifty million of that is content that I’ve made myself entirely from start to finish. It’s definitely gotten my resume in front of a lot of employers, and sets me apart. I feel like when you put in the work from such a young age it pays dividends – I’m twenty right now and it’s already paid dividends.”
“Probably what I’m most known for within the Minecraft space is for Women We Watch, my incubator for women in the creator economy,” Chiffoi says. The incubator was previously known as MineHers, but was rebranded in April 2024. “We started taking MineHers in front of investors, but were kind of fighting an uphill battle. It very clearly signalled Minecraft, so in order to be taken seriously in competitions to secure funding, and to welcome people from outside the gaming space, we rebranded it to Women We Watch.”
“I feel like the reason we started Women We Watch was to provide a safe space for women to come together and collaborate in the community, but also to provide women with the resources that we weren’t getting, in order to learn how to have a successful channel,” Chiffoi says. “I feel like the issue that’s stopping women from succeeding in entertainment partially has to do with a lot of those factors. Obviously we’re blocked out of a lot of ‘co-ed spaces’, and not getting the materials or knowledge we need to have a good career – but systemically as women, we’re just discouraged from even trying.”
“What I started noticing over the last year or so in Women We Watch is that a lot of us, and I had this going on for a really long time as well, but when you’re constantly kept out of opportunities, it’s really easy to develop a victim complex. With Women We Watch, I can provide as many materials as I can get my hands on, but at the end of the day it’s not my responsibility or something that I can do to solve every single one of our victim complexes, so I think at this point what we all need is a mindset shift – and I just don’t think that Women We Watch is the place to provide that.”
Chiffoi’s focus has now shifted away from Women We Watch. “I’ve been kind of just locked in on the college grind – I’m finding that I’m getting a lot more opportunities and getting a lot further within the startup space and within academia than I ever was getting on YouTube, for a number of reasons,” Chiffoi says. “I think the reason I could never make it work despite constantly having these one-off hits like MCC or having a long-form or short blow up, is just if you don’t have the time to be consistent, you can get as many viral hits as you want and it’s not going to go anywhere because you just can’t follow up on it.”
With all that said, Chiffoi does still have plans for the future that involve Minecraft. “I’ve been ideating a project for a new channel that is within Minecraft. It targets a different audience from the SMP space. I’ve been really working hard on getting everything finalised that I can before I actually have time to start recording, but it’s kind of a hit-or-miss. There’s only really one channel that’s successful in that niche right now, but it’s run by a company, and because of that they have the resources to upload hour-long videos like twice a week. Because of that I don’t know yet if it’s viable.”
On sexualisation and women’s online spaces
‼️WARNING‼️ The start of this section contains brief discussion of graphic and disturbing comments that have been said to Chiffoi and other women. Whilst censored where possible, this content may by unsuitable for some readers.
“I was more involved in the PvP community, so I got a lot more of this I think than some other people get, but a big issue for a lot of women is the constant sexualisation – not being able to join a server without somebody asking you to perform sexual acts, or saying that they’ll commit sexual violence against you,” Chiffoi says. “I couldn’t have my own Discord server without people coming in and posting pictures of themselves [performing sexual act] on pictures they printed out of me. Someone did that with my Minecraft skin once, which is kind of insane.”
“Although men get sexualised in the community too, there’s this perception in society, because of just patriarchal standards that we’ve had for thousands of years, and because men are physically stronger and have more because of that autonomy over when people make advances on them, I think people don’t have the audacity to be quite as graphic when they’re sexualising the men in the industry. Although it is a problem for anybody of any gender, I feel it definitely hits a little harder a lot of the time as a woman.”
“I think the hardest part of that is that the men in servers that I’ve been in don’t understand what that feels like,” Chiffoi continues, “and really minimise what that can do to you.”
She also raises the point of female creators not wanting to go public about their romantic relationships with male creators, for fear of their career being diminished to just their partner’s girlfriend. “It happens all the time, but what’s really interesting is that since I’ve been dating SkyBoi for the last year and a half or so now, a really positive side effect of that is, because I’m ‘taken’, I haven’t gotten nearly the amount of sexual remarks or actions. Just being tied to a man in some way has meant I get less than a quarter of what I used to.”
“If you don’t live an experience you’re never going to understand how that experience is, and there needs to be a place that people who experience the same stuff in this community can go to talk to each other, to not have to worry about if you’re on call and then somebody’s going to threaten terrible things to you. I think in the capacity that I tried to make Women We Watch a place to push women to learn to make better content, I don’t think ultimately that we succeeded in that, and I did eventually make all of our resources public, because I didn’t feel like it was fair if we were generating new research and not also sharing it with non-women in the community. Maybe as a content incubator it didn’t work out, but I think that women in the community need to not close ourselves off, but we do need to stick together.”
If you’d like to stay up to date with Chiffoi’s content, she can be found on YouTube.
About The Author
