Women Hating On Women

It has been quite a while since I wrote anything. I have been knitting away on my WIPs and it is not very exciting to write every week – “been working on my WIPs, not yet finished”.

There have been a few thoughts running around my head about the yarn industry in general but the one I want to write about today has been bubbling under the surface and has come to the forefront when people have been mean about YouTube vlogs.

Yarn crafts are predominately a female hobby. My mother and others of her generation would knit and sew our clothes as it was cheaper than buying them. At some point this changed and crafting is for fun not money saving. I feel like this cost change occurred when women of my generation continued to work after marriage and family.

Whenever it changed from money saving to purely fun it still remained a women’s thing. I am not dismissing men here. There are plenty that knit and sew but this post is about how women treat women. Which I’m sad to say is not very well. We’re not talking critique or criticism but just downright nastiness for the fun of it.

Not only are the participants predominately female but the small business side of the industry is also predominately female. Mainly because having participated in the craft, they now wish to have a go at designing or dying yarn. Also with YouTube you can show off your work, whether as a hobby or your business or if YouTube is now your business. These all have relatively easy entry points and can be started from home so make it very favourable for women.

So why are other women hating on them. Why do they feel this is an OK thing?

As the entry point is easy, it also means that standards can be low and we should be critiquing badly written patterns and badly dyed yarn. But what I also read is:- Designers should be paid, designers should produce a free pattern, they shouldn’t even have bothered to write a pattern for this. If something is just not to your taste then don’t bad mouth other women who are trying to get a toe on the threshold of the industry. (Another post for another day is the oversaturation of the industry.)

YouTube is an interesting phenomenon and many of the popular YouTubers (in any genre) never imagined that when they started out they would become so popular. This does encourage others to give it a try and I imagine some of them expect to be big from the beginning. Especially as you hear about so many making a living from their videos – I hear about this a lot in the gaming industry.

The beauty of YouTube is that you don’t have to watch it or there is something for everyone. And in this case there is something for every complainer. Picking on YouTubers is becoming a popular hobby especially right now with everyone producing Vlogmasses. You could just not watch them or say that person isn’t for me instead it is picking apart the content maker. And as with patterns it is mostly women picking on other women. And it is unnecessary. It is to the point where watchers are picking apart the person and their home life and they shouldn’t be doing what they are doing and I don’t like their voice and what they spend their money on and how does their husband put up with them.

So let’s stop this and support women. Give a big hoorah to those who are brave enough to put themselves out there for our consumption; whether it be YouTube or selling their yarn at their first show or nervously posting their first pattern on Instagram.