As we all know, especially through the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, when individuals dealt with the stay-at-home order and many were without work or school, TikTok’s popularity soared. One of the content creators on this app that later found success after this rise was Drew Afualo. To note, Drew is from California and is now 26 years-old. Regardless, Drew, who uses she/her/hers pronouns, started posting on TikTok on March 25th, 2020. However, she did not reach her current target audience until the end of March 2021 with her video captioned “UR WELCOME.” That video now has 3.2 million views and counting and almost 700,000 likes. Since then, she now has a total of 149.1 million likes and over 6.2 million followers on her verified account. Her other accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter garner her an extra half-a-million people. 

Making the majority of her content for mainstream heterosexual women, Drew confidently attacks stereotypical gender norms through nontraditional methods. If we were to analyze the social roles of gender, men would feel the need to be overly dominant and masculine to differentiate themselves from women. As seen in Alok Menon’s book report of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, they outline how societies preferred there to be a “visible difference between males and females.” While that book report was directly talking about body hair removal, it applies to all other aspects of life. This need for differentiation furthers the tradition, in some men, that they have the right to control women who are socially seen as inferior and submissive. Drew’s stitches work to interrupt these societal norms and clap back at misogynistic creators by specifically undermining these norms for her impressionable audience. As such, Drew’s main following and uploading focuses on her target audience of women, especially teens/young adults, and feminists. For Drew, it seems her intended purpose is to directly influence and inform her younger audience that they do not need to degrade their self-worth at the pleasure of men.

@drewafualo

#stitch with @maysunbaby UR WELCOME #greenscreen #fyp #xyzbca #girls #men #funny #college #embarrassing

♬ original sound – Drew Afualo

In order to contextualize Drew’s videos, she typically takes 3-5 second long clips from other accounts to use for her own educational/entertainment purposes; these are called “stitches.”  So, in this video, you’ll first see about 5 seconds of a clip by another TikToker, and then Drew jumps in afterwards with her own commentary. In the video mentioned above, it utilizes this Tiktok stitch filter with a different content creator, @Maysunbabe. As of 2022, Drew uses this stitch feature to directly react to misogynistic men or anyone opposing feminist ideology; but, in the video I linked, she is responding specifically to the prompt of “weirdly specific things I consider red flags in men.” For her answer, Drew lists out men that “love the movie Wolf of Wall Street [sic],” “call women ‘females’,” “starts any debate about women’s equality at all,” etc. In each of these examples, men who believe that women should be called females or that women’s equality is a subject to debate feed into the ideology that women are inferior to males. When it comes to Wolf of Wall Street, the movie portrays women as a commodity for rich men to objectify and do with as they please. This association to women as objects of pleasure in this movie demonstrates how the male audience should not revere this film. Additionally, referring to women as “females” also demotes women, a term inherently for humans, as something less-than-human because “females” refers to any egg-bearers for all animal species. And starting an argument with any intention to oppose women’s equality diminishes the hundreds of years of fighting women across history have done to better women’s socioeconomic position in relation to men. The real-life culmination of these beliefs in men or partners, as well as the other beliefs listed in Drew’s video, encompass her main reasonings for posting: to go against mysogynists and anti-feminists while creating a space where women feel comfortable enough to share their experiences with these types of men and avoid similar ones in the future.

Nowadays, Drew’s content contains more elements of comedy, but her message and support for women remains the same. She will start off her videos with a brief stitch, deliver her signature laugh, and dive into conversation about why men are not socially above women. In this newer video, Drew is much more comfortable with the audience and takes on a casual tone. She sits in what appears to be her bedroom, looking down as if she is on Facetime, and has a conversation with her viewers. For this tiktok, she laughs at and mocks the notion that men treat women nicely, and that women have full political and bodily autonomy, as a response to a male creator who was upset at the “men ain’t shit” narrative. The male creator in question, Actlikemetoo, is currently banned on TikTok, but previously asked “What if men treated women the exact same way women treated men?” His main argument was that the newfound hatred women are fostering towards men is unfair, and that men do not treat women badly enough to warrant this current aversion. Drew argues back by mentioning a list of achievements, like the right to vote or own property, that women have only recently acquired in the past 100 years, noting how the way men have treated women throughout much of human history was never fair to begin with, and that Actlikemetoo is severely in the wrong.

@drewafualo

I’m so tired y’all LMFAO #fyp #xyzbca #girls #men #funny #college #embarrassing #MaiselChallenge #ShowUsYourDrawers

♬ original sound – Drew Afualo

Considering Drew’s content and relatable video styling, she is greatly appreciated as an influencer: as Photoshop and what we see online becomes more edited, ensuring there are people to look up to that prioritize healthy mindsets is incredibly valuable. For her audience of young women, they can rely on her to not only produce videos that diminish sexist ideologies but also make a comfortable atmosphere for other women to laugh at these misogynistic stitches. In the end, women should live for themselves and not have to change when they enter heterosexual relationships.Still, while the majority of her content is meant for mainstream heterosexual women, she confidently attacks stereotypical gender norms. If we were to analyze the social roles of gender, men would feel the need to be overly dominant and masculine to differentiate themselves from women. This furthers the tradition, in some men, that they have the right to control women who are socially seen as inferior and submissive. These norms are interrupted by Drew’s stitches, which focus on specifically undermining these norms for her impressionable audience. As such, Drew’s main following and uploading focuses on her target audience of women, especially teens/young adults, and feminists. For Drew, it seems her intended purpose is to directly influence and inform her audience that they do not need to degrade their self-worth at the pleasure of men. Influencers such as Drew are greatly appreciated: as Photoshop and what we see online becomes more edited, ensuring there are people to look up to that prioritize healthy mindsets is incredibly valuable. In the end, women should live for themselves and not have to change when they enter heterosexual relationships.