TikTok users are questioning the authenticity of Gwen The Milkmaid after it was revealed that she was previously a popular bisexual ASMR creator.
Gwen Swinarton is a Canadian YouTuber who made the TikTok account, Gwen The Milkmaid, in February of this year where she posts about her conservative values, anti-vax beliefs, homesteading, and her aspirations of living a tradwife life. She was previously posting on TikTok from the account @gwengwiz, which is still live but inactive.
After reaching over 43K followers in just five months, Gwen’s new TikTok persona became subject to speculation last week when fans of her ASMR YouTube channel spoke out against the creator and her new style of content.
While some long-time viewers argue that Gwen is cosplaying as a tradwife influencer to grow a following and drive more traffic to her OnlyFans, there have been signs that Gwen was headed down the alt-right pipeline for years.
The GwenGwiz ASMR Era
Gwen joined YouTube in 2011 and later launched her channel, GwenGwiz, where she found success as a fashion influencer and ASMR creator— amassing over 500K subscribers and 90+ million views. She was vegan, openly identified as queer, and posted content that was pro-feminism and pro-body positivity.
TikTok user Rachel of @lighticegirly was among the first to speak about Gwen’s transition, claiming that she removed many of her early videos that included her former girlfriend.
“I know for a fact that she has a million videos that are just gone because I remember what her ex-girlfriend looked like,” Rachel said in a video. Rachel and her friend Izzy went on to explain that Gwen used to date a woman and labeled herself as bisexual. Former fan and TikTok creator @virgotherachel also claims that Gwen has deleted her early content with her former girlfriend.
Gwen started dating a man around 2017 and according to @virgotherachel, she spoke in some of those now-deleted videos about how she was questioning if her bisexuality was actually just “a phase.”
It was around this time that Gwen also launched her second channel, now called Growing With Gwen, where she posts vlogs and lifestyle-related content.
From the start of her ASMR channel, Gwen has been sexualised by a large portion of her audience.
Though ASMR content is not sexual in nature, it’s no surprise that many people find the genre’s soft-spoken roleplays, close-up whispers, and gentle movements to be arousing— almost like micro-dosing soft-core porn. And Gwen’s viewers have not been subtle about why they watch her videos. This subset of her fanbase frequently leave comments about how “hot” she is and comment timestamps when Gwen gives a sexy smirk or accidentally shows cleavage so other viewers can easily access these moments.
This behaviour from her audience came to a head in 2019 when Gwen’s privacy was violated by an unknown source who leaked her nude photos. This opened her up to an onslaught of requests from viewers saying they would pay for more sexually explicit content from her. According to an interview with Refinery29, these requests piqued Gwen’s interest.
She began responding to these comments and launched an OnlyFans account in July 2020. Within one year, Gwen was making over $80,000 CAD a month.
GwenGwiz to Growing With Gwen: From OnlyFans Creator to ‘Crunchy’ Influencer
Gwen lived in downtown Toronto, Ontario for the first several years of her YouTube career. The same month that she joined OnlyFans, Gwen moved to a house in the suburbs by herself and temporarily broke up with her boyfriend.
This is when fans claim they noticed a change in her.
“Over time, I think just around the time where she was starting to consider moving out of the city into the suburbs, she started to talk more about like, ‘crunchy’ topics,” @virgotherachel said in a video about Gwen. “She started talking about finding religion and coming off of birth control and espousing more views about wellness that were a little bit ‘crunchy’.”
She mostly posted this ‘crunchy’ content on her Growing With Gwen channel.
The term ‘crunchy’ refers to a subculture defined by the pursuit of slow living, wellness, independence, and traditional aesthetics. The cultural practices of ‘crunchy’ living can range from avoiding food dyes and additives to refusing to vaccinate children. The crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline has been documented in recent years as the rise of TikTok has brought about a new wave of ‘crunchy’ influencers infiltrating the online zeitgeist.
“The crunchy-to-alt-right-pipeline conversation gives us a chance to see something crucial that is often lost in depictions of right-wing formations,” writes Kathleen Belew for The Atlantic. “The white-power movement is not just men marching in the street. It’s also women sharing cultural materials through social networks. Women, and the cultural materials upon which they exert their most intense influence, are where we can see that this is a social movement.”
Belew argues that the ‘crunchy’ subculture is a form of “direct recruitment” for the white-power movement. Once someone goes ‘crunchy,’ they are more vulnerable to fear-mongering and conspiracies given their existing distrust in government, medicine, and other institutions.
Gwen appeared to enter this pipeline after getting back together with her boyfriend and adopting ‘crunchy’ interests like homesteading and spirituality upon her move to the suburbs.
More red flags emerged in the two years that followed her move, largely related to the content she was consuming.
The first major shift came when Gwen revealed that her stance on having children had changed. Though not uncommon for women in their late 20s to seriously contemplate this decision, Gwen said in a November 2020 vlog that she did not want children until she read Bill Plotkin’s Nature and The Human Soul because it gave her “so much hope” for the future of the environment and the education system.
“I really think that the way that the education system might end up changing is just those smaller, more grassroots places, you know, like, just one community changes and it influences that nearby community and you know, it eventually just expands,” she said of her hopes for a more “progressive” education system. “I feel like it can be a more just like, Everyday Joe type of person could actually be involved in changing the curriculum.”
Edit July 20, 2023: This vlog has been deleted since the publication of this article.
In November 2021, she sang the praises of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear — a novel that has been criticised for proselytizing right-wing “propaganda.” She said she was initially interested in the author because her boyfriend was on a “big Michael Crichton kick recently.”
In that same video, Gwen also mentioned reading George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. While these novels are not inherent markers of far-right beliefs, this particular book haul solidified her interest in anti-institutionalism, surveillance, censorship, and conspiracy.
Unsurprisingly, Gwen’s interest in these topics coincided with the pandemic and the on-again-off-again Ontario lockdowns. In a TikTok video from influencer Tyne Robinson, Gwen can be seen attending a “freedom” march in April of 2021, protesting masks, lockdown, and vaccine government mandates. Gwen later credited COVID-19 government restrictions for the reason she “woke up” to the liberal agenda.
Another major tip-off that Gwen was on the alt-right pipeline was the way in which she spoke about her sex work.
During an August 2021 Q&A video, Gwen said she thinks hook-up culture is “wrong,” “dirty,” and “dangerous” but that she doesn’t judge anyone who partakes in casual sex because she did too, at one point. Despite taking this stance, she went on to mention that she had an exciting OnlyFans collaboration coming with a girl who is “the hottest person you’ve ever seen.” She also admitted that her boyfriend hates that she does OnlyFans, but that he puts up with it for the money.
Shortly after, in a February 2022 update video, Gwen addressed the future of her online career, saying that OnlyFans was her “priority” for now but that she would “probably” stop in about two years.
It was in this video that she mentioned wanting to move to a farm, “detoxing” from birth control, and opened up about how she had started praying every morning.
“As I’ve gotten older I felt a definite call to connect to a higher power. But it’s just like, you know, the God that I imagine, it’s not one that’s in a book,” she said.
Gwen The Wannabe Milkmaid, Unlocked
After this February 2022 video, Gwen stopped posting on her Growing With Gwen channel for over a full year.
When she returned, it was clear that her beliefs had become more extreme.
“For the last two years, especially, I’ve felt this need to censor myself and not be my true authentic self and not share my real opinions [on YouTube], and I don’t want to do that anymore,” she said in her first video back. “The thing is, I’ve had this channel for like six years now and when I started it, I was a completely different person than who I am now.”
In this video, posted on December 1st, 2022, Gwen said she will be sharing her “controversial opinions” on her new Instagram account @growing.with.gwen and also revealed that she planned to stop making new content for OnlyFans by the end of the year. She clarified that her account would still be live.
Two weeks later, Gwen posted a Q&A video where she called herself “Christian-curious” and said her introduction to religion was through podcasts she listened to for political reasons. Most of the hosts of these “political” podcasts happened to be Christian.
She also spewed more anti-government rhetoric in relation to climate change. While it seems she accepts climate change as a reality, Gwen said the government should not get involved because “the government only ever makes things worse.”
“The government is good at stealing your money and then ‘losing it’ and wasting it,” she said. “Freedom is really important. I know some people make fun of people’s desire for freedom but I don’t think that they understand the history if they think like that.”
That brings us to 2023 and her new polarising TikTok account, Gwen The Milkmaid.
On February 8th, 2023, Gwen posted her last ASMR video to her main channel. She launched the Gwen The Milkmaid TikTok account on February 10th, and one week later, she posted a YouTube video announcing she would be taking an indefinite break from ASMR.
This signaled to fans that Gwen’s transition from progressive, queer ASMR creator to alt-right influencer was complete.
She now uses her Growing With Gwen channel as a platform to spout her anti-feminist and conservative views more openly than before, like her stance on abortion.
“I used to be very, very liberal. And of course, I was very pro-abortion,” she said in a March 2023 video. “I also thought like well, it’s her choice, it’s her body. She gets to make that decision. But now, as you can imagine, I don’t think that way anymore. […] I am definitely against it.”
Gwen’s long-form videos provide more insight into how and why she’s become indoctrinated by the far-right over the years, however, her new tradwife TikTok content sits in such stark contrast to her former self that many have a hard time believing it’s real. This contrast is amplified when considering that Gwen is still a sex worker.
Despite claiming that she would be done with sex work at the end of 2022, she posted on her OnlyFans account as recently as July 6th, 2023.
While some TikTok users, like @emhahee, think this blatant hypocrisy indicates that Gwen is cosplaying as a tradwife as a form of fetish content, @virgotherachel argues that Gwen can’t afford to stop OnlyFans as she has very limited work experience outside of content creation.
Given Gwen’s previous comments about her decision to stop creating new content for OnlyFans, it seems likely that Gwen has been posting old or pre-recorded content since the start of 2023.
As of July 2023, it seems Gwen does not yet reside on a farm.
Gwen did not respond to Centennial World‘s interview request.