Editor's note: This story contains graphic content and mentions of gun violence.
ON A CHILLY March day in the desert outside L.A., a group of women in uniform run for cover. They duck into an abandoned house -- a one-story building with khaki-colored walls covered in graffiti -- and crouch in the corners next to tumbleweeds the size of beach balls. Bullets fly in through broken windows. Shards of glass fly. They are under attack, but they came prepared. Each of them carries a gun: handguns, shotguns and assault rifles. They are armed for battle.
It is the third and last morning of play at the 2022 Battle for Lost Angeles 4: Wasteland, one of the largest airsoft games since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Airsoft competitions, which originated in Japan in the early 1970s and are now played all over the world, feature guns that look nearly identical to firearms but shoot spherical plastic pellets. Competitions can be organized in small or large groups, inside or outside. Some games incorporate military influences and re-create real-life battles -- this type of airsoft is nicknamed MilSim, which stands for military simulation. Others encourage players to wear costumes that feel more like cosplay. The common thread between them is that players shoot their opponents to rack up as many "kills," or tags, as possible; in competition play, the team with the most tags takes home the win.
Of the nearly 700 players who descended on the empty housing complex on the now-shuttered George Air Force Base in the city of Victorville, less than a dozen are women. Many of them had corresponded online for months, even years, on social media, and now, on this last day, in this last battle, they chose to fight alongside one another as a group for the very first time.
Each of them feels a sense of conflict as they duck and cover, deciding what to do next. It is exhilarating to be here, to compete, which is why airsoft is one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. According to one report, the airsoft gun manufacturing industry in the U.S. has grown 5.2% per year on average between 2018 and 2023, during which it's projected to reach $355 million in sales. Another market research firm valued the global airsoft market at $1.89 billion for the year 2021 and projected that by 2031 that number will reach $4.13 billion -- a growth path that's parallel to what's happening in the firearm industry.
Much of that growth has been driven by men, with only a small minority of participants being women, and the few who do compete say they are often singled out for harassment. It's also impossible for the women to ignore the debate over gun culture happening all around them, in a year in which there have been more mass shootings in the U.S. than days so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The women hail from all over the country and are racially and politically diverse. They have different jobs, personal lives, belief systems, and opinions about their sport and what it means to play it. Yes, airsoft guns are replicas, and under federal law, they are not classified as firearms. However, some states and cities do impose age limits on who can buy them, while others -- including New York City; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and Chicago -- ban them entirely, in part because the guns look real. For some of the women, realism is part of the thrill, an essential part of their community. For others, realism is a dividing line.
"I have a lot of mixed feelings about it," says one of the competitors, Kaylee Diamond.
Right now, in California, there's no time for debate. Leah Mattix Del Castillo, one of the most prominent airsoft players and influencers in North America, pokes her head around a wall to scout the opposition. She is dressed as Fennec Shand, a woman bounty hunter from "The Mandalorian." Del Castillo's long black hair is pulled back into a French braid that snaps back and forth as she whips her head around. Two of her teammates, both in head-to-toe camo, crouch next to her. One leaps up to peek over the top of the wall. They spot a lull in the action, an opening, and yell to the others that it's safe to leave their sheltered perch.
Together, they charge out of the house, shards of glass and debris underfoot, and they disappear into the sunlight.
TWO DAYS EARLIER, on the first day of the tournament, Del Castillo, 38, stands at the check-in tent; she co-owns the events company that is hosting the tournament, along with her husband, Jet, who is also a full-time airsoft player and influencer. Behind her looms another abandoned building -- the former hospital on the base, now completely empty and dilapidated. Virtually every person in line is a man, many dressed in camouflage and holding airsoft guns that, from a distance, looked indistinguishable from assault rifles. (According to U.S. federal law, airsoft guns should have an orange tip that's at least 6 millimeters wide to help differentiate them from firearms. Whether a player may then remove the orange tip varies by state.)
That night, Del Castillo invites me to an Airbnb where two men who are prominent airsoft YouTubers are staying for pizza and beer. For most of the evening, she and I are the only women in the room. Sipping a Modelo and leaning over the island of the sterile kitchen, she explains to me the origin of her online alias, Unicorn Leah. People assume that it's because she has an affinity for the mythical animal, she says. Not true. Rather, it originates from one of her first airsoft games. That day, she wore eye protection but no helmet. During gameplay, she was shot several times in the center of her forehead, between her eyes. The pellets broke the skin. She bled. The area swelled into a bump that looked, her friends said, like the horn of a unicorn. (The feeling of being hit with an airsoft pellet varies based on factors like range, velocity, place on the body and the level of protection you're wearing, but the impact is often likened to a bee sting or a pinch. Airsoft fields almost always require eye protection, and some require full-face protection.)
There is another thing people in the airsoft community assume about Del Castillo: that her husband, Jet, was the one who introduced her to the game. Also not true. In 2013, after being laid off from her job at a college admissions office in the Bay Area, she came across a sales position at a now-shuttered airsoft company named Spartan Imports. She had never heard of airsoft but was familiar with guns: Growing up in the 2,000-person town of Cherryvale, Kansas, she shot BB guns with her friends out by the creek near her house. She applied and got the job.
Soon enough, she joined her first game, and she was immediately hooked. She loved dressing up in ornate costumes and the adrenaline rush. "I was like, 'This is so fun -- I'm just going to keep playing,'" she says. "So then I just started spending literally all my disposable income on airsoft."
When Del Castillo began playing, she created an Instagram account that revolved around her Airsoft experiences -- and the experiences of other women -- hoping to find and then grow the community. The account quickly took off: She estimates that she went from zero to about 10,000 followers within six months. Today, she has more than 109,000 followers on the platform, as well as more than 148,000 on YouTube.
Other players took notice, and their attention wasn't always welcome. She says men slid into her DMs, leaving sexually explicit comments and asking for nudes. "They thought that I was getting attention only because I was a girl -- that the only reason people follow you is because you showed cleavage," she says. "So, obviously, you're a slut that sleeps with everybody in the industry. Obviously, this is the only way that you're getting popular." At one point, when she had purple hair, she tells me, certain men would edit her face onto images of cam girls or pornographic actors with similar hair and circulate them online.
Del Castillo says in-person harassment is also an issue. In the early days of her career, she would give out Unicorn Leah patches during games for other players to wear on their kits. Once, a teenage boy approached her and asked for a patch to give to his friend because, the boy explained, his friend masturbated to her all the time. "I was just completely grossed out by the whole thing," she says. She then tells me about a more recent incident in which an adult man asked her, in the middle of the game, how much she cost, insinuating that she was a sex worker.
By 2015, Del Castillo felt airsoft to be so unsafe for women that she founded an online community to support them: Women of Airsoft, a private Facebook group for players around the globe that has more than 850 members. The discussion topics range from the technical, like equipment, to the logistical, like bathroom access. For example, at some events, bathrooms can be more than a mile from the action -- an issue for anyone, especially those who menstruate. One woman advised Del Castillo to carry a receptacle throughout the game to hold any used tampons -- hardly an ideal solution. "I definitely have had some bad experiences having a really bad period while also being at an airsoft game," Del Castillo says. "It's honestly just gross. Now, if I'm having a really bad one, I might even not go."
The Facebook group has also united to handle multiple situations when women were sexually harassed during games. "We have had a couple [of] instances where something like that has happened," she says, "and everyone in the group has ganged together to contact the event organizer or the field and make sure that whoever was the person that was doing the sexual harassment is never welcome again in airsoft. I would say those are the most meaningful conversations because it's good to know that you have a group of women who are supportive."
Still, enduring harassment takes its toll.
"Obviously, it makes you want to quit," she says. "But if you quit, then those people win."
AT THE START of the tournament, I approach Tanya Romero, known on Instagram as Tanye Asada, because she is the only woman manning the vendor booth for Evike.com, the largest airsoft retailer and distributor in the world. Today, she is wearing all black except a patch on her baseball cap that reads "TANYE" in white block letters atop a rainbow paint-splatter background. Her jet-black hair is bleached at the tips -- one side blonde, the other cotton-candy blue -- and pulled into two pigtails at the nape of her neck.
As she fields inquiries from a group of attendees, all men, she tells me she began working for the company in 2015 as a cashier. She'd simply needed a job and applied after becoming curious about what airsoft was all about, due in part to her boyfriend shopping there all the time. But once she got there, she never left. Currently, she works in marketing and manages the company's social media platforms. "What I really like about playing airsoft is definitely being able to get out of my comfort zone," she says. "...and how much friendships come out of the sport. After a long day, it's just the bonding of everybody playing together."
Although her experience has been mostly positive, she is quick to note the challenges of being a woman in the sport. Echoing Del Castillo, she says that she's often questioned about her credentials, especially by men. "We've all had those questions," she says. "Or [they ask], 'Do you have an OnlyFans? Because you're a gun girl, because the gun bunnies..."
I ask her to define the term "gun bunny." She says it was coined in the firearm industry. "They're models," she says, "or very beautiful ladies that are being very exposed with clothing and that appeal to the men's eye regarding, 'here's a gun, and here's the rest of my body.'" Some airsoft players do have a presence on OnlyFans. "I'm not against it," Romero says. "I don't personally have one. I think, especially from a woman's point of view, do what you want with your body."
Romero also says that the firearm industry has become increasingly intertwined with the airsoft community, noting the growing presence of "real steel guys" -- a term for firearm users -- who use competitions for training. She also says that it goes both ways: "A lot of airsofters are actually transitioning into real steel and using that as their beginning platform."
Before the first full game, I meet Tina Shreves, 35, a Washington State native. She is tall, has an open, sunny face, and wears a more traditional green military-style kit. Many airsoft players wear patches on their kits as a nod to their airsoft personalities. Shreves' patch is a gray soda can turned on its side that reads, in blue letters, Soda 241. She tells me it's a reference to S. E. Hinton's coming-of-age novel The Outsiders -- specifically Sodapop Curtis, the middle brother who unites his siblings at the end of the book. "I just fell in love with the characters of The Outsiders," she says. "I've always wanted to name [one of] my children Sodapop. I'm like, 'No.' So I named myself Sodapop."
Shreves served as a transportation specialist in the U.S. military for seven years. After she left, in 2019, she craved the sense of camaraderie that she'd found in the Armed Forces. A friend of hers played airsoft, so she tried it to see what it was all about. Immediately, she found that the sport -- particularly games that span hours or even several days -- filled that void: "I jumped in, and I loved that adrenaline," she says. "It was so much fun. It's like a mental chess game."
Shreves also met her husband, with whom she'd traveled to the tournament, through airsoft. They met playing at their local arena. He was an indoor player; she introduced him to more intense outdoor games, like MilSim. She estimates that between them, they own approximately 40 airsoft guns, which they store mounted on the wall of a spare bedroom. She shows me a picture of the wall; I remark how real they look.
"They look realistic," she says. "We're really hypervigilant when we take our guns out. We put them in gun cases. We make sure that we transport properly. Even though they're airsoft guns we treat them like real guns, because people don't know. I mean, you look and you're like, 'That's a real gun.'"
However, Shreves, who doesn't own real firearms herself, says she has never had an issue with airsoft borrowing military language and clothing. "It doesn't feel like the same culture as the military when I show up with friends to play airsoft," she says. "Everyone is there to have fun and do an active hobby with friends."
For other players, the connection between airsoft and gun violence is more difficult to ignore. After an evening game, I meet with Kaylee Diamond, 28, a medical malpractice lawyer from LA. She started playing airsoft in her backyard as a pre-teen, she tells me. However, when she began dating women, her first girlfriend -- whom she met in college -- found the sport upsetting because of its gun-centric undertones. At the time, she put her love of airsoft on a shelf and stopped playing for several years.
However, she told me, her current partner has a different outlook on the situation and convinced her to start playing again. In fact, she says that her partner actually encourages her to play competitively and embrace the sport.
About three months after we first met, we speak again over the phone. She says she still enjoys the social aspect of the sport and the technical challenge of building and customizing airsoft guns, but parsing her role in all of it -- and what it means to play, in general -- gives Diamond pause, increasingly.
"I've always thought that that was a little bit of a dangerous kind of road to walk down -- you're glorifying everything about death and violence and you're making it kind of fun and playful," she says. "We're either reenacting actual conflicts or creating made-up conflicts, but we're pitting people against each other, and we're killing each other, essentially."
"I don't really know what the long-term effects of thought processes like that can become."
LAST OCTOBER, I visit Del Castillo at her home in Victorville, California, about 10 minutes from the George Air Force Base, the site of the Battle for Lost Angeles tournament earlier in the year. She, Jet, and their three-year-old rescue pitbull, Chloe, live in a ranch-style house that looks, in certain ways, like a typical suburban home. There is a large flat-screen TV, gray leather couches, and a macramé wall hanging. On the walls are family photos: candids of Leah and Jet on their wedding day, as well as pictures of Jet's two children from a previous marriage, who also live with the couple part-time. On the ledge above the sink sits a plant in a pot painted with designs of flowers, butterflies, and the phrase "DONALD TRUMP IS A PIECE OF S---" in all-capital letters.
In the living room, on the mantle above the fireplace, are plaques from YouTube congratulating both Del Castillo and Jet on achieving certain subscriber milestones. Both have silver ones commemorating 100,000, while Jet also has a gold one for reaching one million. In the guest bathroom, paint-splatter artwork of a handgun hangs opposite the mirror. Their sprawling backyard includes a corner dedicated to airsoft target practice. And their garage houses the couple's collection of more than 200 airsoft guns. The garage is also home to Del Castillo's many game costumes, like her Fennec Shand uniform, a rainbow tutu (which she wore during Pride month), or what she calls her Pink Ladies outfit, which she wears the day I visit. Everything is black and pink: a satin jacket, a polka-dot necktie. a plaid skirt, a pair of knee-high socks, and sneakers. As if the real Pink Ladies, from "Grease," met the mid-aughts Avril Lavigne.
That afternoon, we have lunch at a Mexican restaurant where the two are regulars. Over tacos, we discuss another popular gun-influencer content creator who is a member of an ultra-conservative Evangelical church. The conversation quickly turns to Leah's own upbringing: In Kansas, she was also raised in an Evangelical household. Her parents have since converted to Catholicism, but Del Castillo identifies as an atheist. She left the church a decade earlier, after grappling with the beliefs she learned as a child. "Religion and Christianity are so intertwined with gun culture, too," Del Castillo says. "I do not like that at all."
Of the many conversations I've had with Del Castillo, most of them touch on gun culture. It makes her nervous to talk about it, she once told me, because it's such a hot-button issue: "It's so obvious that we have a problem," she says. "But we have to figure out how to address it without alienating everyone. And I think the problem right now is everything we do alienates people, and we just keep becoming more and more divisive...when people are really divisive in their rhetoric, I've only seen it create more problems rather than help to solve them."
On social media, Del Castillo is vocal about certain beliefs, like supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. But when it comes to guns and gun violence, she tends to use her platform to start conversations between her followers instead of taking a firm stance herself. However, she tells me she's pro-expanded gun control and background checks: "I will do my part as an influencer to say what I believe would work, but it's also up to everyone else to vote. That's the best way we can fix it."
She also aims to use her platform to promote the non-militaristic side of the game, as well as speak out on certain social issues, even if it means losing followers. "I don't want those people that are so ignorant that they're gonna block me over wearing a f---ing rainbow or something -- I don't want those people involved in this sport, anyway," she says. "They don't have a place here. I've been trying to be more vocal about like, just let people know like, this is behavior that's not tolerated in this industry, and I hope more people start following that. It needs to be way more welcoming. And it's come a long way. But it still has a way to go."
As we pay the check, Del Castillo shares some news about what's next: "[Jet and I] aren't going to do YouTube forever," she says. "It's not sustainable, really. We have a little piece of land out this way" -- she motions out toward the desert -- "that we're going to make into an airsoft field. It's going to be our retirement. We've been saving a bunch of money...for all the permits and everything else. We're trying to be as debt-free as possible -- we're going to be starting a new business."
"The field will be kind of a destination," she continues. "People know who Jet is. People know who I am. So that'll be where to go if you want to meet us."
The prospect feels significant in another way, too: Co-owning a venue would give Del Castillo a home base -- a place for her to fight her chosen battles, on her terms.
At that moment, I think of her and the other women right before that last game in Victorville, when they played together for the first and only time. As the game started, we hopped into the bed of a pickup truck to take us across the grounds and toward the center of the action. A male player called out from the road below, asking us why we -- the women -- were getting a ride.
"It's our vagina privilege," Del Castillo quipped, ever prepared to respond to little barbs, playful but knowing. The other women erupted in laughter. In the background, the shouts of the men, who were already playing, drew nearer.
Leaving lunch, though, the world feels quiet. Together, we emerge into the bright sun and stifling heat, pile into Del Castillo's pickup truck, and drive off together toward the vastness, and all the unknowns, of the California desert.
Avery Stone is a writer, editor and culture journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in The Cut (NY Mag), Bustle, Billboard, ELLE, GQ and more.