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“You’re so ugly, please go get plastic surgery.”
“I hate you…itty bitty titties.”
“Why don’t you go and die, BITCH.”
These are not typical song lyrics. But these ARE the lyrics of a song constructed entirely of hateful comments received by musical YouTuber Madilyn Bailey.
There is a trend on YouTube: female creators taking the horrific comments they receive online and putting them to music.
This has become something of a trend on YouTube: female musicians taking the online vitriol they receive and turning it into songs. The songs are catchy, but they speak to something much darker: the abuse that female YouTubers often face on the internet.
Online harassment of women is as old as the internet itself.
And YouTube is one of the places where this hatred is very present.
It’s nearly impossible to find a female creator who hasn’t been targeted by hateful trolling. In this article, I’m going to look at the phenomenon of trolling against women on YouTube and how it affects female creators on the platform.
As part of my podcast series, Who Killed the Female YouTube Star?, I’ve been investigating why female YouTubers are missing from the top-ranking channels on YouTube. In today's list of the world’s top 50 YouTubers, there are only 3 women. This series explores why that is.
In 2018, two Australian researchers, Inoka Amarasekara and Will Grant, conducted a study looking at science-related YouTube channels. They explored how the negative and positive comments on those channels differed between female and male hosts.
Their paper analyzed 450 videos from 90 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics channels. They studied over 23,000 comments in total. What they found was significant but not surprising.
Female YouTube hosts were twice as likely to receive negative comments as male hosts. They were also 12 times more likely to receive sexist comments compared to their male counterparts. The comments for female hosts were twice as likely to be critical and three times as likely to be centered on their appearance.
It’s a phenomenon that science YouTuber Emily Graslie knows all too well. In one of her Brain Scoop videos, she says:
“Is there any part of my job that I don't look forward to?
I would have to say it’s the frustratingly negative and sexist comments that I have to sift through in my various inboxes on a daily basis.
Now don't get me wrong. The overwhelming majority of comments I receive are positive and encouraging, but there’s still a lot of nastiness that I have to deal with on a daily basis in trying to make these positive, encouraging videos.”
Graslie went on to reflect on the impact of these comments:
“But I feel like women are going to give up more easily because of comments like this:
'I'd still totally do her.'”
From the science world to travel blogging, from comedy to cooking to crafting, the vast majority of women on YouTube have experienced some form of hateful comments on their videos.
A lot of those comments deal with looks.
Whitney Cernak, a DIY and craft YouTuber from the Midwest, shared her perspective:
“Thank goodness for the ‘hide user from channel’ feature on YouTube because that helps everyone's mental health so much. You know, just because we put videos out there doesn’t mean you have free rein to say whatever you want. Some people think that’s the case, but it’s not. It’s not some binding contract we signed when we posted our first video, like, ‘come at me.’ That’s not how it works.”
Other creators I spoke to referred to only reading comments for the first 30 minutes after posting a video, before the “haters arrived.” I’ve heard about female creators sharing tactics with others to hide the comments or handle the hatred somehow. For many, trolling has become an accepted part of being a woman on the internet.
Journalist Taylor Lorenz also shared her concerns about YouTube’s insufficient tools for combating harassment.
“Look at how difficult it is for women to maintain control over their own comment sections and how few controls YouTube gives creators over their own comment sections. It’s like you have to turn comments off if you want any kind of control. And if you turn comments off, that’s going to downrank and hurt your video. So it behooves you to allow basically hate on your own videos because it boosts you in the algorithm. And then you just get more hate.”
According to Dr. Tamar Sagi, a professor at Reichman University and an expert in gender relations, the objectification of women is deeply rooted in cultural norms and begins at an early age.
She explains that women, more than men, are consistently viewed as objects—an outlook reinforced through societal behavior, media, and even family interactions.
“We sit with our young children, we watch TV, and we do it naturally. We say, ‘Oh, look how pretty she is,’ or, ‘This one is ugly.’ But we don’t comment on men’s looks to the same extent,” she says.
This cultural tendency normalizes evaluating women based on their physical appearance rather than their character or capabilities.
This behavior doesn’t stop offline. It easily transfers to online spaces, where anonymity amplifies the issue. As Dr. Sagi notes:
“If we have an opportunity and it’s anonymous and it’s online, of course, it’s almost automatic.”
The result is a societal pattern where women’s bodies are routinely scrutinized and judged—a phenomenon that perpetuates online misogyny.
As I’ve spoken to creators and experts, one thing has become painfully clear: online harassment is a systemic issue that disproportionately affects women, and YouTube is no exception. Female YouTubers, despite their resilience and creativity, are navigating a platform that often feels more like a battleground than a stage. The hateful comments they face aren’t just personal attacks—they’re reflections of a broader culture that objectifies women and values appearance over substance.
While some tools, like hiding comments, offer a temporary shield, they don’t address the root of the problem. This harassment isn’t just a side effect of being online; it’s a barrier that stifles creativity and silences voices.
This is just the beginning of the conversation. In the next part of this series, I’ll explore why YouTube has failed to do more to protect female creators. I’ll take a closer look at the platform’s algorithm and how it actively incentivizes harmful content, examine the rise of incel communities, and discuss the systemic double standards women face online. Most importantly, I’ll explore what needs to change to ensure women can not only exist on YouTube but thrive.
To listen to our entire series about the gender gap on YouTube, you can check out the full podcast here.
