The Pink Car Gang is the Grand Theft Auto Discord Group Recontextualising Girl Gaming

Words: Ivy Gray

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Apart from a brief stint playing Sims 3 in primary school, my knowledge of video games is minimal. As a woman, the complex, pixelated worlds of games like Grand Theft Auto have always felt a little daunting and male-dominated. So, when doing my ritualistic, pre-bedtime TikTok scroll, I was surprised to find myself in a deep online hole of GTA POV videos, where I discovered a sweet-but-psycho gamer collective fuelled by kitschy girl power: The Pink Car Gang. 

Serving as a new and unexpected frontier for feminist digital resistance, the Pink Car Gang is a group of GTA gamers defined by their flashy pink cars and fabulous pink outfits. Over 800 members strong, the group went TikTok viral after its founder, OXBhaddie, started posting videos of their missions online. 

“I see it as a form of empowerment but also about having fun,” Bhaddie tells me. One clip from her account shows the clan speeding down the roads of Los Santos in an all-pink convoy, led by a hot pink motorbike, with a baby pink helicopter hovering above the fleet for good measure. The pink cars come crashing into a rival (and male) player’s black sports car; the gang jumps out of their vehicles to chase him, pink handguns toted, the Pink Car Gang in all their glory, ready for virtual battle. ‘Being attacked by the Barbie Squad on a random Sunday must have been wild for bro’, one account commented under the TikTok, ‘How do I join? I need to let some rage out,’ read another. 
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“I made the gang because I felt like female gamers needed to group up and create their own space,” Bhaddie told me of her reasoning behind the gang’s creation. The beauty of the group lies in their safety-in-numbers technique, which allows female gamers the upper hand for once, as they can outnumber their male counterparts. “A lot of guys think, ‘They’ve got pink outfits and cars, they’re just girly girls who can't fight back.’” Bhaddie continued. “They get so cocky because I'm a female. If they try to fight me, I usually end up winning; I realised to beat a man, you have to play like a man.” 

Members join the group via the Discord server, which is customised to be on-theme, pink, and sparkly and is often promoted on Bhaddie’s social media. The group started in May 2024 as a small pack of the founder’s girl-gamer friends, and as its popularity grew online, male allies were eventually permitted to join. “It got so big that some guys wanted to join and support us. I see these men as part of our community; they are on our side.” Bhaddie told me. The ambush missions are still strictly for girls only, satisfying the need to give male gamers a long-overdue taste of their own medicine. “We get together in a lobby, find a guy on the map alone, and then surprise attack him. As a female gamer, I used to join lobbies by myself, and every time, I would have random guys targeting me for no reason, so we're now just doing what they do to us.” 

“Lots of female gamers don’t bother to use female characters, let alone use their mics, out of fear of inevitable sexual harassment or unfairly targeted violence from sexist male players.”

The gang’s TikTok comment section is awash with fed-up female gamers, expressing their joy at the catharsis of watching this girl gang dominate, and simultaneously voicing their frustrations at the continuous online abuse that woman players experience. Lots of female gamers don’t bother to use female characters, let alone use their mics, out of fear of inevitable sexual harassment or unfairly targeted violence from sexist male players. “I have had many notable bad experiences as a female on GTA,” Bhaddie told me. “Things have got personal, and looking back at it is upsetting.” 

“More and more girls are growing up playing games now than ever before,” Carolyn Petit, former editor at GameStop, tells me. “As they get a little older and start having their eyes opened to just how sexist the culture can be, they decide to fight back and assert their presence in this space.” Petit is the author of a particularly significant 2014 review of GTA 5, in which she criticised the game’s inherent misogyny. Despite awarding the game a generous 9/10 for its innovative gameplay, she was subjected to tens of thousands of abusive messages from GTA fans, along with a petition to get her fired. “I knew even before I published that review that people would be angry. These overwhelmingly male and mostly white gamers had come to feel a certain entitlement to games culture after years of being catered to by game developers and games media.” 

In her review, Petit criticised the game’s infamous abundance of sex workers, who are often killed almost as part of the game. It sends a pretty dreadful message to young male gamers… especially those whose frontal lobes haven’t yet fully developed. “Our larger culture is sexist, and because it was profitable to do so, for a long time, gaming developers and media presented video games as a space in which men could live out their patriarchal and misogynist fantasies,” Petit says.

When playing Grand Theft Auto V, players can choose to play as one of the three male main characters; in the current version, there is no option to play as a female character in the main storyline. However, you can create your own female character in GTA Online, the game’s multiplayer component (this is where the Pink Car Gang was born.)

The reaction from fellow female gamers to The Pink Car Gang epitomises the need for video game creators to facilitate the women in this community. GTA 6, which has been labelled the most anticipated video game in history, is expected to be released this autumn; through leaks, fans have determined that the storyline is based on ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and will star GTA’s first female protagonist, Lucia, marking a promising step in the right direction. And not to fret, the gang isn’t going anywhere: Bhaddie plans to further expand her all-pink empire on this new game version. “I get a lot of comments, ‘Please don't go away’ and ‘Please continue doing this when GTA 6 comes out’. Of course, I'll continue it. I’m just waiting for GTA 6 to come out so I can carry on.”