Meet Amouranth: the Woman Making 1 Million Dollars a Month Playing Video Games in a Bikini

Maybe you’ve heard of “hot tub streamers”. A streamer hops in an inflatable pool or hot tub and plays video games or just chats with their audience. It’s doing what Twitch does best; making viewers feel like they’re just hanging out with friends. But when that friend is also hot with a weird sense of humor, then the controversy starts. Kaitlyn Michelle Siragusa, better known to her 5.3 million Twitch followers as Amouranth, is the queen of hot tub streams. She’s also one of the hardest working content creators out there with hundreds of hours of content, sometimes streaming for 14 hours at a time. She’s been banned from Twitch five times but relocated to the lucrative waters of OnlyFans. Now she’s returning to Twitch. 

Amouranth is a content creator who games from her tub, does hangout streams, and is infamous for ASMR “earlicking” streams. Those are aural-centric streams where she makes a bunch of sloppy sounds into the mic. And all of this makes some people furious. The bannings from Twitch and other social media sites are usually due to the fine line she walks of creating sexually suggestive content, which go against community guidelines. Twitch's page says this:

“Sexually suggestive content or activities are also prohibited, although they may be allowed in educational contexts or for pre-approved licensed content, in each case subject to additional restrictions.” 

Let’s say this another way: “You can have sex with and kill a sex worker in GTA, but an IRL woman who is trying to make a living by performing for a crowd of consenting adults will get banned. Also don’t forget sometimes nipples are illegal.” We truly are not living in a golden age of enlightenment. 

In the early days of the “hot tub streamer meta”, when people were clutching their pearls because they think a woman’s body is evil and the idea of sex is THE DEVIL’S WORK, Twitch responded by making a whole new category on it’s platform. Alongside gaming and Just Chatting, you can now find “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches.” This created a bubble for hot tub streamers which has come and gone. Although a few soldier on, none have been as successful as Amouranth.

Amouranth moved to OnlyFans and has had fantastic monetary success. But now she’s pivoting to the more mainstream Twitch audience once again. Why leave a million dollar a month subscription platform behind? Longevity. She’s proved herself to be a savvy business person and even her bannings on Twitch have garnered her attention in the press and upped her subscriber base elsewhere. But in the long term, breaking away from the explicitly adult content of OnlyFans and opening up business possibilities in the open waters of mainstream media is a smart move. At least while we’re living in this repressive, puritanical bell jar we call a culture.