Ninja Responds to Controversy Over Refusal to Stream With Women

The streaming maestro that is “Ninja” has seen better days as of late. Even though he still has a massive streaming audience, he landed in hot water after he explained why he doesn’t play with female gamers on his stream. In a nutshell, he explained, “If I have one conversation with one female streamer where we’re playing with one another, and even if there’s a hint of flirting, that is going to be taken and going to be put on every single video and be clickbait forever.”

This hasn’t sat well with particular gamers and groups, so Blevins decided to post a further explanation in a note on Twitter.

“Please read,” Blevins explains. “I wanted to take a moment to address the discussion around the article that came out over the weekend. While I understand some people have implied my views mean I have something against playing with women, I want to make clear the issue I’m addressing is online harassment, and my attempt to minimize it from our life. It is something that affects all streamers, especially ones that make their relationships public. I wanted to bring attention to this issue and my comments should not be characterized as anything beyond that.”

He continued, “Having just celebrated my one year anniversary, my wife and my family will always be the most important thing to me and I am doing my best to protect them.”

“We are fans of all kinds of streamers and gamers — curvyllama, juliatv and halieatisuto are a few of our favorites and we encourage others to check out their channels. I look forward to the opportunity to meet and play with all kinds of Fortnite players in future tournaments and events,” he added, before signing off with “Tyler.”

A lot of streamers like to meddle in shock and controversy, such as making obscene commentary (or in some cases, going as far as to go all-out racist) and it sounds like he wants to steer clear of that. But it’s easy for folks to misinterpret his comments as something a little out of the ordinary. Still, it’s worth reading into, and shows there might more to his comments than you think.

It sounds like he might actually be open to the idea of streaming with female gamers in matches of Fortnite, though he didn’t say that specifically. We’ll see what happens with his streams moving forward.