- Hi everyone!
Oh shit, hang on.
Hi everyone!
This is Ali from Ok2BeFat
and I haven't said this before on YouTube.
I've said it on Twitter but
I haven't said it on YouTube.
But I'm a nonbinary person
and my pronouns are she and her
and if you find that confusing...
Welcome to a critique of ContraPoints.
Now when I say critique,
let me explain what I mean.
I went to art school so
my experience of critique
or as people sometimes call it "crit"
is an experience of an extremely long
and extended and painful experience
of standing in front of a class of people
and having people tell you
what you did wrong in your artwork.
The entire first couple
of years of art school,
part of the process is getting you used to
accepting criticism and
not taking it personally
and it is brutally difficult.
But what they're trying to do is move you
from possibly the best teenage
art kid in your high school.
Talented art kids get a lot of
smacky kisses from artistic people
and people who wanna encourage them
and then maybe they go out into
an artistic field and
find out that working
in an artistic field is fairly brutal.
So having that experience of critique
built into the academic program,
I think is a good experience to have had.
And so it kind of gets
you out of the experience
of thinking that this
artwork that I made is me,
I put so much time into it,
I bled over it,
I did everything that I could do
and the professor's still
like "This is not good enough
and you could do better."
And that sucks, that's a sucky feeling,
but at a certain point you kind of
have to disassociate yourself,
like I am not the piece
of art that I'm making.
I am not the book that I wrote.
That's a book, people will read
it, and they'll react to it,
but they're not reacting to me
because those people don't know me.
They're reacting to a piece of art.
So for this critique I wanna be very clear
that I am reacting solely to the artwork
that ContraPoints has...words?
Produced?
That's a good word.
I'm reacting solely to the artwork
that ContraPoints has produced
and put out for people to view.
I am not interested in
imputing motives to her,
I am not interested in expressing
or guessing what I think
that she's thinking
or what necessarily even
what she's intending
because I don't know that.
I don't know her
and I have really no way of knowing that
so I can really only react
to what's publicly available.
You may be thinking:
"Oh Ali, you just said
you're a nonbinary person
and there's been several discourse rounds
on ContraPoints and nonbinary people."
But I have to apologize,
I've tricked you a little bit
because this is not about that.
I feel like that everything
that it is possible to say
about the relationship of ContraPoints
and the things that she
has said has been said
and if the only thing
that I had to discuss
with Natalie Wynn's videos was the things
that she said on Twitter
about nonbinary people.
I really feel like that's
been pretty well covered
and so I don't have a lot to add to that.
So if you're interested in what's going on
you scoot over to Twitter and look it up.
It's all right there,
it's available to see.
And I'm not even going to
talk about the Opulence video.
The video that I wanna
talk about specifically
is the video entitled Men.
That's the video that
I'm gonna talk about.
I'm going to factually critique it
and discuss some of the elements
that I've found to be a misrepresentation.
And I think that it's possible to discuss
how someone is factually wrong
or putting across misrepresentations
without necessarily it being
seen as attacking that person.
Everybody can be wrong, right?
I've been wrong a bunch of times,
you've been wrong, we've all been wrong.
My interest is in correcting
what I see as a wrong answer
or misinformation without necessarily
getting into saying anything
about anyone personally.
And I think that there's space to do that.
I'm so nervous,
I feel like people are
gonna be really mad at me.
But I think that when
someone who is as popular
and talented as Natalie
Wynn puts out information
that is mistaken, that it's
important to correct the record.
The form that this is gonna take,
I'm gonna talk about
the video entitled Men.
It's hard because I'm like
"I'm gonna talk about men,"
but I'm talking about a video called Men.
And then after that I'm going to kind of
group together some loose
thoughts that I've had.
So is everybody ready?
Adjust my glasses.
Alright, ready to go.
I had several issues with the Men video.
There's a point in the
video where it's expressed
that feminists don't care about men.
The video is about alienation of men,
what are we gonna do about
all these alienated men
and the things that they're doing
and how do we do something about that
and that's a topic that I am
very interested in as a feminist.
But I'm also very interested in it
from the experiences that I've
had in my life since 2016.
Years, 17 million years since 2016.
I have seen multiple male
friends and acquaintances,
cis men who have almost exploded with rage
in reaction to feminists
discussing gender violence.
This came to a head kind of during
the Brock Turner rape
trial, the Stanford rapist
and has not gotten any better since then.
Every woman and feminine person I know
was constantly posting about
this, posting about it,
posting about it on Facebook
and the men were not.
There's a lot of reasons
not to post about things
but it kind of in a lot of ways
seemed like they don't care.
I don't know if that's
a fair thing to think
because maybe they do care
and maybe they're not able to express it
or I don't know why.
But I think that it feels very isolating
to see those kinds of gendered breakdowns
of who is interested in
stopping sexual violence
and who is not saying
anything and not responding.
And so to see men react angrily
at the frustration of women
and people perceived as
women at the horrific levels
of violence that we have
to sort of put up with
in order to be alive and
walking around in the world
is deeply troubling to me.
That's the background.
The problem of what to do
about these radicalizations is an issue
that I have a lot of interest
in because it's dangerous
to have these guys out there
radicalizing each other
to more heights of gendered violence.
So I was interested in
the concept of the video,
I found the content off
putting and misleading
and the things that I found
off putting and misleading
were the idea that feminists
don't care about men
and that the feminist
answer to the problem
of patriarchy harming men is
to tell men that they're toxic
and that I guess they can
just go fuck themselves.
That is a misrepresentation,
that is not the feminist position.
You may be able to find individual people
calling themselves feminists
that that is their position,
but people have written over and over
and over and over about
patriarchy hurts men too,
patriarchy hurts men too.
Patriarchy hurts men too!
It's a thing that feminists say a lot
and have been saying for years.
The idea that feminists hate men
or want to punish men is not accurate.
It's not accurate to the point that
when I first because
a feminist in the 90s,
people really did feel like
they had to preface everything
that they said with the idea
that "I don't hate men."
And I think that people did
at a certain point get
tired of having to make
this preemptive disclaimer
to knock down a very old straw man.
The idea that feminists hate men
goes back to first wave suffrage ads.
It goes back to the
first time that feminism
was actually codified or proposed.
We've been dealing with the
idea that feminists are ugly
and mean and they hate
men and all these things
for hundreds of years
and they've been debunked
over and over and over.
And so I think it is a
damaging misrepresentation
of the feminist position
to state that feminists
tell men that they're toxic
and they can just fuck off.
That's not true, it's just factually not.
And I don't think that
that should be in a video
that has an extensible goal
of deradicalizing 4chan guys
because the places that
you hang out online
are kind of like your context.
I started out online
when I was a lot younger
and the internet was new.
I was hanging out in fanfic spaces
and online feminists spaces
because those were things
I was interested in.
I did not really like 4chan
and I didn't really ever go there.
And so my context is a feminist context
and it's a fanfic context.
Those spaces are gendered very feminine
and so I think that if you are in spaces
like 4chan and Reddit and et cetera,
that even if you don't intend to,
you tend to potentially absorb these ideas
about feminists and what feminists want
and what feminism is that
don't have anything to do
with what feminism actually is.
When people leave those spaces,
they very often do not take
the time to divest themselves
of the misogyny that they have imbibed
by just simply existing within them.
And when they haven't divested
themselves of that misogyny
then they show up in online leftist spaces
and they bring that with them
and they think that's
an okay way to behave.
And that makes those
spaces less safe for people
and that is bad.
So I think that deradicalizing
people off of 4chan
and Reddit is definitely a good idea
and it's great and important work
but it's not finished
if you tell these guys
that what they think
about feminists is true
because if what they think about feminists
is that feminists hate
men, well that's not true.
I mean the idea that you could
hate all men is such a straw man.
Men are everywhere, right?
They're our brothers,
they're our dads, they're our
husbands, they are our friends
We interact with them, and we love them,
and they're in our lives.
And so I think that it's
never gonna be possible
to not interact with men.
This is where I'm gonna
theorize just a little bit
that my theory is that
the current alienation
that a lot of men feel
has to do with the success
of second wave feminism
in that a lot of girls
and women and people who
are perceived as women
were raised by women who either
were second wave feminists
or had internalized some
of the basic tenants
of second wave feminism about how
women should be equal to men.
And so we were raised with the idea,
with a very go-go 80s, 90s kind of
"You go girl, girl power!"
and "You can do anything,
you can be anything that you want!"
And that's got it's own problems
because it's factually not true
and I think a lot of people end up
thinking that they don't need feminism
because everything has been solved
when we've done the very basics
of being like "Actually all kinds
of gendered people are just people."
Well that's very basic,
but supposedly we all do agree with that.
That was a win because when my mother
was growing up that wasn't true.
Men and women were not
considered to be equal.
There were not opportunities.
We have opportunities that my mother
and grandmother did not have.
But I don't think that the
boys who were growing up
at the same time got the same message.
They were kind of raised the same way
that boys have been being raised.
So the message that actually a woman
is not a different species of thing,
a woman is just a different kind of person
just like how you're a person
did not seem like it's gotten passed down
in the same way that the message
that I am equal got passed down to me
whether or not my parents want that or not
which they kind of didn't.
The culture changed.
The culture changed for
girls and feminine people
and more opportunities opened up,
but the culture of men did not change.
Now there's just a gross mismatch
where the expectations of
people are not matching up
and that a lot of men have
responded to this not well.
And that's not feminism's fault,
that's a failure culture wise,
that's a societal failure.
And I hope we can work on that
but I don't think that telling
men that feminists are mean
and hate men is a good solution.
Telling men that feminists
don't have anything for them isn't true.
There was a point at which the standards
for what was considered rape was gendered
where only women would
be considered victims
and that was changed to
become gender neutral
it was changed by activism from feminists.
That's something that's real.
Feminists do care about men
because we need men to be better
and so trying to say that we don't
is a mistake or it's factually incorrect.
And I think that in the same way
that people who are marxists
say that people don't
interact with communism
and marxism or anarchism
they don't interact with what
people are actually saying,
they're interacting with people's ideas
of what people are saying and
they want people to go back
and do some reading
and educate themselves.
The same is true for feminists.
Feminism is a system of
thought that is 300 years old.
It has a lot of text.
It has been disputed and fought over.
There is constant internal disagreement
as there is in any movement.
And trying to say "Well
feminists say this,"
is inevitably gonna be an
issue because who said it?
Which feminist?
Who are we talking about?
Did that person really say that?
I don't know.
And without an attribution
to a specific person
or a specific text, then we're
talking about straw manning
and I think that Natalie used
to know what feminism was
and has put out videos that expressed
a pretty decent understanding
of what feminists want
and how they express those wants
and I found it a little confusing.
Confusing and kind of upsetting
because I think that
she's better than that.
And I wanted to say additionally,
I don't know why there are
themes in the Men video
that stand out to me as
antifeminist talking points
and I am not sure why those are there
and I'm not going to speculate.
But the idea that feminists
hate men is not true.
The idea that street harassment
really isn't that bad
because some girls like it
is a very old, antifeminist talking point
that has been debunked many times.
And I'm not sure why that needs
to be in a video from someone on the left
who used to understand what feminism is.
I'm not sure why that's there.
I think that also there
was a section in the video
where Natalie compares the experience
of being afraid that you
are going to be the victim
of physical violence to
the experience of noticing
that someone is afraid of you.
I think that that is a false equivalency
and it's a potentially dangerous
false equivalency to make
because the experience
of gendered violence
against people who are
not cis men is so extreme.
Everyday in the United States,
two women die because they are murdered
by their male intimate partners.
If two people were killed
by sharks every single day,
I believe we would empty the oceans.
We don't accept that level of risk
in hardly any place in our lives
but we expect everyone who isn't a cis man
to accept that level of
risk and potential violence
just as a consequence of being alive
and that's not acceptable.
That level of violence is a
form of political control,
it is a form of terrorism.
It is gendered terrorism against people
who are not cis men for
the purposes of patriarchy.
And so I understand and am sympathetic
to the alienation and
invisibility that cis men feel.
I look at the way cis men treat each other
and it makes me really sad.
I don't understand why you
guys are so mean to each other.
I mean I guess that's what patriarchy does
but it just makes me really sad
because I think that you
guys deserve warm friendships
and intimate relationships with people
who are not your girlfriends.
I think everyone should
have a support structure
and people that they trust.
But the problem is is that
feeling alienated and isolated
and the experience of wondering
if someone is going to
attack you is not the same
and they're not even on the
same level of being the same
and I don't think that
they should be compared
in such a way that it could lead people
to come away with an understanding of
"Well I have it bad too,
so who cares about street harassment?
It's not that bad, some of them like it."
That's bad, that's not a good
message to send to people.
And I wanted to say that the experience
of street harassment is not
"Oh ladies, have a beautiful day."
That's not what most of
us are talking about.
And the experience of street
harassment is different
depending on other
marginalizations that you may have.
For me as a fat girl,
the experience of street harassment
is not compliments that turn into insults
that could turn into violence.
It is an experience that
skips past the compliments,
straight to the insults,
and sometimes straight to the violence.
I regularly have to deal with
men who push me and yell
at me and scream at me
and do things that are very upsetting
and make me feel in danger
and it happens sometimes
multiple times a week.
And so I am extremely,
extremely opposed to minimizing the harms
of I guess men saying
whatever they want to
to whoever they want
and putting their hands
on people and worse.
I don't think that's an experience
that should be minimized.
I think men know it's wrong
because they don't do it to each other.
If you know that you
wouldn't do it to a guy
why are you doing it to me?
Sometimes I wish I could borrow
a little bit of that invisibility
because my greatest wish
is to simply be left alone.
I would just like to be left alone
to listen to my headphones
and tweet my weird thoughts.
That's all I want.
I don't actually want to
interact with anybody on the bus.
When people are talking
about street harassment,
you have to understand
that it is different
for different people.
The only people who can make
street harassment better are men.
What feminists have asked for men to do
is to talk to other men
because the inherent problem
is that men don't listen to feminists.
So we've been saying these things
and the fact that you don't
know about it is indicative
of the fact that feminists
are not listened to,
not that feminists don't say things.
That feminists who say things,
who write books, who write articles,
who tweet all of these
things, make videos,
that these people are
not being listened to
and that these men are getting their ideas
of what feminism is like from
people who hate feminists.
That's not a good place
to get true things.
Someone who hates me is maybe
not gonna tell you the
full truth about who I am.
I feel like we all kind of know that.
And I think that having
lowkey, antifeminist messaging
in a video, it was really disappointing
because Natalie had made a video
about fat activism that I thought was good
especially for somebody who
doesn't have a background in it.
It was not 100% what I would do of course,
but I thought it was 95%
exactly where it should be
and that's really good and unexpected
and I was very encouraged
and it was what sparked my interest
in her work in the first place.
And so to go from that
to antifeminist messaging
is discouraging to me.
I think the problem is
is that people are not
interacting with feminism
on its own terms.
And if you're not willing to do that,
then you can't say that you
understand what feminists say
about anything because all you know is
third or fourth or fifth hand rumors
that you're getting from people
who already don't like the
things that we have to say.
And so you don't know what's going on,
you don't know what people are saying.
I think that it is a bad idea
to present like you do know when you don't
because either Natalie doesn't know
that feminists don't tell
men to go fuck themselves
as a response to toxic patriarchy.
Either she doesn't know that,
which is is a problem,
or she does know that
and she said it anyway
which is a different problem
and I don't know which one
is true and you don't either.
The only person who knows that is Natalie
so that's that, and that's
my response to that video.
In so far as the Opulence video
which is the most recent video,
I don't know what ContraPoints knows.
We don't know if she knew about
Buck Angel being a transmedicalist.
I don't wanna get into the details of it.
I tried to explain this entire thing
to friend who is not a real online person
and it took legitimately
an hour and a half
and then she was still confused at the end
so please look it up yourself.
But I don't know if she knew
that Buck Angel was a transmedicalist
or someone who is, you know,
people called truscum or not
and there's not really a way to know that.
That plus the inclusion
of talking positively
about Jeffree Star who a lot of people
also have problems with and
then including an entire section
in the video entitled Envy,
maybe she didn't know that
that was gonna upset people.
But that seems a little hard to believe
because it looks like deliberate trolling
and maybe it isn't
because saying that
it's deliberate trolling
is imputing a motive or
saying that I understand
what her knowledge base
was and I don't know.
But I think that there are certain things
that are guaranteed to upset
the trans community on Twitter
and being that ContraPoints
had just had an issue
with trans people on Twitter,
people are taking it as if
it is a deliberate attempt
to upset people and I can
see why they think that.
I don't know,
but this is the kinda thing
that people call a bad look
and I just think that sincerity is always
gonna get you further than shitposting.
Which is hard because shitposting
is fun, trolling is fun!
I have the heart of a troll,
but there's ways to troll sincerely.
There's ways to troll
people that aren't hurtful.
I'll show you one right now.
Do not, no matter what you do,
do not under any circumstances
look up the plot to the
Anne Rice book "Lasher."
Just don't look it up, save yourself.
Save yourself from the brain problems
that I have from reading
"Lasher" way too young.
That's an example of
pretty harmless trolling,
because how many of you are
looking it up right now?
And then a bunch of people in the comments
are gonna be sad about it.
That's amusing to me.
But I'm not hurting
anyone's feelings with that
except maybe Anne Rice but
she's historically touchy.
In so far as they issue
of nonbinary pronouns
I just don't feel
equipped even as a person
who is now very out I suppose.
As a nonbinary person
I do not feel equipped
to make statements about
trans or nonbinary issues
because I haven't really
done the rhetorical work
to be able to do that in a way
that isn't potentially an issue.
So I'm not going to do
that, but it's been covered.
You can find it and make up your own mind.
So that's my critique of the video.
There are two separate issues
that I also wanted to talk about.
I've watched all of ContraPoints' videos.
I've really liked them
and I've really enjoyed Natalie's work
and I think that potentially some people
are going to criticize
this video or me and say
"You made this because you
are jealous of Natalie"
or "You've made this because
you want more views on YouTube."
I mean yes I would like
more views on YouTube,
obviously I would.
I mean I'd like for my work to do better.
Guilty!
Making reaction videos is kind of
a time honored way to get more
views and everyone's done it!
ContraPoints has done it too.
And or maybe you might say
"Natalie's better at videos than you are."
That's true, okay!
I mean I don't know what
to say other than that
other than yes obviously that's also true.
I'm sitting in front of a wall,
Natalie makes gorgeous visuals.
I don't have the time or resources
or ability potentially to do that.
That's okay, it's a
different kind of video.
But you know, or maybe
"You're jealous because
Natalie's prettier than you."
I mean a lot of people are, that's okay!
But all of those things don't
make me wrong so there's that.
But I wanted to say that the two issues
that are kind of more encompassing
that I wanted to talk about.
One is the videos have taken a turn
in exploring trans issues
and transness potentially
if you wanna put it that way
that they seem like
they're coming from a place
of needing a justification.
This is the issue with transmedicalism,
is that justifying transness by saying
"Well it's in the DSM and so I'm real"
is like fat people who
say "Well I'm healthy."
It's like okay, sure!
But you're creating a
problem for the people
who don't meet those gatekeeping standards
and so you either care
about that or you don't
I'm additionally bisexual
and so I have been involved
in queer communities
off and on since the 90s.
I'm familiar with this
kind of gatekeeping.
A lot of bisexuals are,
'cause it's not just nonbinary people
that they wanna get out of the group,
it's also us bisexuals too.
That's been an issue for decades.
And so the gatekeeping
takes different forms
but it always kinda comes back to
if you have a group of
people who are marginalized
or traumatized by the way
that they've been treated,
some people use that experience
to become open and giving
and to try to make a difference
for the people coming after them
and some people take that
trauma and pass it on
and that is a problem.
It's been a problem in every
queer space I've ever been in
and I don't know what to do about that
except to just point it out.
But I think that framing the idea
that your gender has to be explainable
or that you owe someone an explanation
or that you have to be
able to rationalize it
or have these categories for
these things to fit into,
we don't ask cis people to do this.
We don't ask thin people
to justify their size.
I think there is something to be noticed
in who gets asked these questions
and who's allowed to slide
without having to constantly
think about their gender and sexuality.
Cis people don't generally think about
their gender very much.
A lot of straight people don't either.
I mean one of the things
that helped me come to terms
with my queerness was the idea that
the fact that it's torturing
me means that it is real!
Because my straight friends
are not very tortured
about being straight.
So who is being asked
to justify themselves
and who has the right to ask them that,
that's the point because not
having to justify yourself
it's a privilege, right?
I think that when you do that
you put yourself in a position
where if I try to justify my size,
if I try to justify being fat
or if I try to justify my
gender, which I'm not gonna do,
then I leave myself
open to the possibility
of any shitty little troll
coming along and being like
"Nuh uh, nuh uh, nuh uh, you're
not who you say you are!"
You don't have the right to say that to me
and I reject that.
That's it, I reject your
right to question me.
I think it's a mistake
to come at questions of marginalization
from a side of justification
because some people don't
have to justify themselves
and I'm not gonna justify myself either.
A lot of times if you're
in a marginalized group,
people feel really comfortable
asking extremely intrusive questions
that they would not ask somebody
who wasn't marginalized.
People who ask you how
you go to the bathroom
and what your genitals
look like would know
that they're not supposed to ask that
of someone who wasn't marginalized
in the way that you are.
They know that it's not right.
They either wanna satisfy
their idle curiosity
which is what Google exists for,
or they're doing it to hurt and upset you
and I'm not going to play into that.
I'm not gonna play your game.
You cannot fully justify
yourself to the point that people
who are bigoted will not
continue to question you.
You cannot do it.
It is a losing game, people
would just move the goal post,
they'll just straw man you,
they'll just refuse to listen.
And so I'm not gonna play,
and that's the only way to win
is to say "You know what?
You don't have the right
to say anything to me."
I know that can be difficult
but I think that it's always worth saying
that just because people
ask you a question,
or just because people demand
that you justify yourself,
you do not have to do that.
The second thing is is
that Natalie has said
in multiple videos that
she is going on Reddit
and 4chan I guess and other places
and she's watching
people pick herself apart
watching people say grotesque
and mean things about her
and I just wanted to say
that I have done that too.
I became a fat activist in 2011, 2012,
and they were on me immediately.
I didn't have a lot of followers,
I think I was sub 1000s on
Twitter when this started.
It was immediate and it was intense.
And for a long time I looked myself up,
I would look up my Twitter handle
and I would just read these things
that people were saying because
you know you shouldn't, you know?
You know that it's bad
and it's hurting you.
It's like pouring poison
into your own veins.
You know that it's bad.
I knew it was bad and I
knew I shouldn't be doing it
and I knew that it was a way
of emotionally self harming myself
and I knew that I should stop
because it's like pouring
poison down your own throat
to see these things said about yourself.
No one's meant to see that.
The brain cannot encompass it,
the breadth and depth of how bad it can be
and I'm so positive
that it's worse for her
than it's been for me
because she has more
exposure, she's so visible.
And I didn't wanna say that
to say "Oh you should stop."
Because I knew I should
stop but I couldn't.
I have now stopped but it was off and on
for like a couple of three
years that I was doing this
and I didn't tell anybody,
I just would do it.
And so I just wanted
to empathize with that
because people who are like
"Well you should stop doing that,"
it's like if people who
are talking shit about you
and you could find it really easily,
tell me you wouldn't go look.
Tell me you wouldn't
because I don't believe you.
I believe that you would.
So I just wanted to express empathy
for that because I've done it too.
It didn't help me at all.
It's so damaging, just
unbelievably damaging
and so I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that anyone
has to go through that
and Natalie if you see this
I hope you feel better,
and I hope that you don't
take this as an attack
because it's not.
Like a regular artistic critique,
here's the ways in which
I think it could be better
and maybe stop trolling people.
If that's what's going on,
which it seems like it might be.
I know it sucks when it feels like
people are criticizing you unfairly
but they're not criticizing
you, they don't know you.
They're criticizing your
work and that's fair.
That's it, I've been sitting
here talking for a long time.
Please like and subscribe to my channel.
Come and find me on Twitter,
it's ArtistAli if you wanna talk to me.
There's a link in the notes.
What is my name?
It's Ali, this is Ok2BeFat
because it is okay to be fat,
and I wanted to leave you with this:
BMI cutoffs hurt trans people
and prevent them from
accessing transition care.
So if there's one thing
that you remember from
this video, remember that.
Alright thanks so much, bye!
