so, natalie wynn of the youtube channel contrapoints
released a video called The Aesthetic, and
i have... feelings.
which shouldn't come as a surprise, seeing
as natalie has a long history at this point
of provoking, uh, "feelings" in her audience.
and i'll just lay my cards out right now:
i like The Aesthetic, and i'm a pretty big
fan of natalie's work in general.
i even have a shirt, so, yeah, i'm biased.
but it's also clear that plenty of people
who like the contrapoints
oeuvre
just as much as, if not more than, me didn't
just dislike this video, but felt actively
wounded and, in some cases, betrayed by it.
and that... sucks.
and i'm conflicted.
because i don't like to see people hurt by
media,
and i don't like to see people in a position
like natalie's, as someone who is a rare beacon
of representation and optimism for a marginalized
community,
apparently playing fast and loose with the
expectations they know their audience has.
but, again... i like The Aesthetic,
and my natural inclination is to defend the
things i like when i think they come up against
unfair criticism.
and, yeah... i do think some of this criticism
is unfair, which, under the circumstances,
will come across as glib, reductive, elitist,
and tone-policing no matter what i do.
but i just want to say it explicitly, for
posterity:
my intention is not to belittle or invalidate
anyone who has mixed or negative feelings
about this video.
i'm not interested in saying that anybody
who didn't like it, or who was harmed by it,
or who decried it based on its potential to
do harm, is wrong or bad or not entitled to
their take.
this is just me trying to work through my
own conflicts, and yeah, it's a reaction,
but i'm not judging the people i am reacting
to.
we can all agree that this video is problematic,
but i'm wondering... what do we gain, critically,
by ending the conversation there?
if something is "problematic," doesn't that
imply a problem in need of solving?
so, okay.
here's my question:
when does criticism become art?
i've been asking myself this a lot lately.
some prominent leftie youtubers have expressed
dissatisfaction with the "youtube formula"
as it were, and have started experimenting
with the form.
on one side you've got lindsay ellis, whose
trilogy of videos about the hobbit films takes
its textual criticism as an invitation to
explore the ramifications of nostalgia on
fandom, on economics, and even international
politics.
over time it morphs from a fairly standard
talking-head video essay into something of
a road film about a person flying halfway
across the world in search of some kind of
personal truth.
and then on the other side, you have hbomberguy
birthing himself out of a full-size canvas
print of loss.jpg.
yes.
YES.
wow.
both of these toe the line between criticism
and art.
lyndsay's endeavor is certainly the more...
socially acceptable of the two,
but neither video is an altogether objective
presentation of evidence in support of an
argument
-i mean, there's a lot of that, obviously,
these are still fundamentally argumentative
video essays.
but the argument is inextricable from the
expression -the facts here, such as they are,
are only important to us insofar as they relate
to the narrative they've been tied to, whether
that be personal, political, or esoteric.
so, that in mind... it must needs be remarked
that we do not judge criticism by the same
standards as we do art.
hbomb's third serious lore analysis, in my
opinion, is a scattered and difficult to follow
bit of criticism, something he'd be chided
for in a journalism class.
but, as a video about hypocrisy and fractured
identities, that same scatterbrained assembly
actually helps the point he's trying to make.
so, as pure criticism, it fails... but, as
art, it succeeds.
now, there's a whole epistemological debate
to be had here about the boundaries of the
categories i just carted out for the sake
of my argument, but we're not going to go
into that because i don't want to.
youtube, i think we can all agree, is a strange
intermediary medium that we don't tend to
approach the same way we do television or
film.
even as someone who respects the creative
capacity of someone like hbomberguy, generally
i go into his videos expecting criticism,
arguments, a point.
there are many expressive, artistic elements
in his videos, but i tend to see these as
the flavor that makes his brand of argument
special.
i wouldn't call most of his stuff art, and
i'd hesitate to call most things on youtube
art.
now, i don't think it's controversial to say
that there is art on youtube, but it isn't
"youtube art," so to speak.
a short film hosted on youtube is taking advantage
of the platform, but it isn't of or for the
platform.
it isn't what people think of when they think
of youtube, and the flipside of that is, in
my very limited realm of experience at least,
there's an opinion that what a person thinks
of when they think of youtube is anathema
to "art," that "art" and youtube are mutually
exclusive.
that's nonsense.
people have said that about every new medium
and they have always been wrong.
but this does beg a question- what does "youtube
art" look like?
and this gets us to contrapoints.
and yeah, i know, i'm sorry, i know how that
sounds.
just... go with it.
alright. if you haven't seen The Aesthetic,
here's the gist: it's a Socratic dialectic
(helpfully conveyed by the statue of Socrates
on the tv here) about the importance of aesthetic
womanhood in the public discourse by and about
transgender women.
Justine, who passes as cisgender, criticizes
Tabby, a black-block communist catgirl
"actually i'm an anarcho-syndicalist"
for her perceived lack of femininity and her
disinterest in attempting to pass.
so, for the uninitiated, a dialectic is a
philosophical argument in the form of two
fictional characters having a debate -and
yes, like all academic terms, dialectic conveniently
only has the one definition, which is why
absolutely no one will show up in the comments
to "well, actually" me.
dialectic is often deployed as a way of implying
objectivity -but, of course, it's just as
subjective as any argument, and the conclusion
of a dialectic often tells us a lot about
the author. and the contention around The
Aesthetic seems to be the result of a... shall
we say, ill-defined conclusion.
we don't like Justine, we don't like how she
treats Tabby, we don't like that Tabby barely
gets to defend herself, and we don't like
that the video seems to fail at adequately
criticizing Justine's transphobic, harmful
rhetoric.
we want Justine to admit she's wrong, or for
Tabby to finally be allowed to smash something...
we want some kind of catharsis and release,
but instead, it just ends with them saying
"i guess nobody wins," and we cut to a sex
joke.
it is, put charitably, ambiguous in its messaging,
which makes us wonder what the author's intended
message was.
a major hangup in this conversation is, are
the opinions expressed in this video the opinions
held by the characters, or are they the opinions
held by natalie wynn? more specifically, is
the oft-reiterated statement "gender isn't
who you are, it's what you do" natalie's personal
conclusion, the socratic truth she's trying
to convey?
and this is where that ambiguity really fucks
us, because a whole hell of a lot of people
give a shit what natalie has to say, and when
we're not really sure what she's saying, we
start jumping to conclusions. for non-passing
or nonbinary trans people, maybe this feels
like a revocation of identity from someone
they admire; for passing trans people, maybe
this is a confirmation that non-passing and
nonbinary trans people hurt the cause; and
for bigoted-ass cisgender people, maybe this
is an endorsement of their campaign to spread
their very bad opinions on every image board
from here to 4chan.
fittingly enough... nobody wins.
except, i guess, the cis people, because...
i mean, they always win, don't they?
now, natalie has spoken about a lot of this
stuff before.
these questions have been litigated constantly,
sometimes very explicitly, in previous videos,
and she's expressed on twitter some skepticism
about the idea that a twenty-something kid
assigned male at birth can just call themselves
a woman without "becoming" a woman.
but it seems like this is more a feeling than
a hard and fast opinion, and while i don't
share her skepticism, i also don't think she
should avoid trying to explore that feeling
in her work.
let's take it as read that The Aesthetic doesn't
really succeed as dialectic, and that natalie
herself doesn't provide much clarity on the
subject.
so, why don't we take an... admittedly difficult
step back from all that, and look at The Aesthetic
not as dialectic, but as art.
first of all, if it's art, we shouldn't even
be having this conversation about intentionality
-at least not yet.
the "word-of-god" debate exhausts me because
it's almost always the least interesting aspect
of any text.
"but what was the author's intention?" who
cares? the author is dead.
let's look at the thing and see what it has
to say for itself.
now, obviously the beliefs of the author are
relevant, and since we all agree that everything
is political, then art must necessarily reflect
the politics of the artist.
but the message intended isn't always the
message received -rarely so, in fact.
so let's just set all that aside and look
at the text.
so, we start with a new character, Tracy Mounts,
who is an homage to Divine, the drag queen
whose performances in several John Waters
films natalie has referenced previously.
"kill everyone now, condone first degree murder,
advocate cannibalism, eat shit!" "filth are
my politics?" and this isn't even subtle,
i mean, like... there's a poster for pink
flamingos right between tabby and justine.
now, i haven't seen pink flamingos, but i
know it by its reputation as a vulgar, bizarre,
offensive film that is ultimately a celebration
of the freakish (a moral that natalie echoes
in a previous video).
John Waters is known for being an articulate
and personable guy who is unapologetic about
the way his art offends the delicate sensibilities
of mainstream movie audiences.
in a recent interview, waters said of the
subject matter he's drawn to:
"I'm most fascinated by subjects I don't really
understand, that there's no easy answer to,
that I'll never understand.
and I'm always drawn to subject matter like
that and I like to bring my audience along
with me, to be a little surprised by it and
made nervous by it.
i never understood why people say "i like
feel good books."
I already feel good!
I don't need a book to make me feel good.
I like to be troubled.
I like to go into a world that troubles me
and amazes me, that I can't understand.
and then, after reading a book, think maybe
i understand that world a little better."
so, in just the first minute of The Aesthetic,
we're already signaled that this isn't going
to be a delicate experience, and that its
content is going to be evocative in ways we
probably won't be happy with.
there's a lot in this framework that suggests
some of the philosophical problems on the
author's mind.
tracy describes herself as "a lady who used
to be a man dressed as a man dressed as a
lady", which is already complicated enough
without taking into account that "tracy mounts"
is a character created and played by natalie
wynn, thus making her a lady who used to be
a man dressed as a lady who used to be a man
dressed as a man dressed as a lady.
identity! what the fuck is it?
tracy is here to talk about quote unquote
color praxis, "colors! what the fuck are they?"
which we're led into by youtuber Dan Olson
delivering a fifteen second monologue about
color schemes.
"analogous color schemes use the main color
plus one or more adjacent colors, while complementary
color schemes use any two colors directly
opposite on the color wheel."
it happens so fast you might not even realize
it happened, and it maybe seems like a nonsequitor.
but it's so specific- we're talking about
color schemes in a design, the main highlight
being the difference between an analogous
color scheme and a complementary color scheme.
later, we get this particularly telling digression
about the shadow illusion- "same wavelengths,
different colors."
to my mind, this is a clarification of how
we are to approach these bizarre fragmentary
identities -not as wholly distinct, but as
different wavelengths of the same color, as
it were. and this isn't, by itself, a terribly
revelatory inclusion -the very nature of natalie's
one-woman-many-characters dialectical style
basically makes it impossible for the audience
to forget that these are fragments of natalie
wynn.
what is revelatory, i think, is the focus
on analogous versus complementary. if we look
at the wide roster of contrapoints characters,
who talks to whom isn't just a strategic argumentative
decision, but a stylistic or, if you will,
an aesthetic one.
sometimes these dialectics are complementary,
and sometimes they are analogous. and it's
notable, i think, that when we are told about
the difference between analogous and complementary
color schemes, the image itself is black and
white.
just file that thought in the back of your
head for now.
tracy poses a question, "what matters more,
the way things are, or the way things look?"
before taking us to an "instructional video,"
IE an episode of The Freedom Report where
Tabby threatens Abigail Cockbane for misgendering
her.
this is another short segment that, nominally,
sets up the context for justine's criticisms
of tabby later on.
but when asked whether misgendering someone
ought to be illegal, abigail has this to say:
"liberation from the oppressive institution
of gender begins with freedom of speech."
i want to take a second to just analyze that
statement.
abigail's goal is liberation from the oppressive
institution of gender, which she insists begins
with freedom of speech.
a freedom she then exercises as a way of delineating
and categorizing tabby's gender, and to insist
that pronouns refer exclusively to chromosomal
sex -exercises which, undeniably, reinforce
the oppressive institution of gender.
i think abigail absolutely recognizes the
logical inconsistency here, and she cares
less about that than... well, this whole speech
feels canned, like a rehearsed talking point
she has on the ready for these situations.
the only moment she seems invested in what
she's saying is, at the end, when she hands
it off to tabby with a pronounced misgender,
and a vicious smile.
this isn't a good-faith argument, this is
a trap, and it's one that tabby falls for.
"that's a human rights violation! i'll smash
your fucking face."
abigail, instead of being surprised by the
outburst or worried for her safety, immediately
launches into another diatribe about transgender
ideology being a smoke screen for male violence.
she relishes delivering this speech, because
she knows that she's already won the war of
optics.
we then cut back to tracy mounts, who says,
"gender's just like a color.
some people see yellow, some people see blue.
it's all a matter of opinion.
or is it? it's not."
this is the first real indication of the confrontational
in-your-face-ness we ought to expect based
on the John Waters connection, with tracy
immediately undermining the suggestion that
gender might be subjective.
now, i could go through the rest of the video
at this level of detail, but we're only three
minutes in and i've got shit to do.
so, go watch the video for yourself if you
haven't already, and when you come back i'm
going to throw out a few observations that
i think are significant.
ya back?
okay. first, let's briefly touch on the mise-en-scene,
which is a pretentious college-degree-signalling
way of saying "all the stuff you see with
your eyes."
we got the aforementioned pink flamingos poster
-notice that divine's gun is aimed at tabby-
above which is a poster of the painted breakdown
frames from another contrapoints video, Tiffany
Tumbles.
hm, that probably won't come up again.
with tabby there's chairman mao partially
covered by what looks like a picture of the
golden one, and with justine there's oscar
wilde.
contradictions! satire! mise-en-scene!
okay, so the debate begins with justine laying
out the boundaries of the idea that "womanhood"
as a socially constructed role is an exclusively
aesthetic phenomena, and that one cannot be
a woman if they are not performing womanhood.
she calls it verisimilitude, a term i don't
hear much outside of film criticism, so its
use here is, i think, intentionally dehumanizing.
honestly there's a lot that justine says in
this video that is... woof. you watched it,
you know.
we get an interesting aside in the middle
where justine brings up the debate "between
blaire white and that youtuber with the pink
wig... what was her name?"
referring to a livestream natalie appeared
on early in her youtube career which marked
a pretty big turning point for her public
persona.
justine says that, while natalie may have
won logically, for all intents and purposes
she lost the debate because she looked, according
to justine, embarrassing and awkward.
as harsh as this is, it's hard not to see
her point.
in the 2016 presidential debates, a lot of
people -myself included- felt that hillary
clinton wiped the floor with trump, but a
whole heck of a lot of people thought otherwise,
and they thought that because trump always
looked in control, he just said things instead
of ever defending a position, which is rhetorically
suicidal but optically powerful.
after receiving a long series of insults and
judgments from justine, tabby starts to stick
up for herself, and we get this exchange:
"all your devices just try to turn me into
you.
well, that's not what aesthetics is.
aesthetics is the expression of an inner truth,
and i'll only ever be a second rate justine,
but i can be a first rate tabby."
"well kids, this week we learned a valuable
lesson about the importance of being yourself."
"shut up!"
this eventually devolves into a rapid fire
debate about the practical applications of
gender identity that ends with this: "who
do you think benefits, and who do you think
gets hurt, when you go out in the world and
represent trans women as masculine and violent?"
"who do you think benefits when they trot
you out to be meek and feminine and acquiescent?"
"I guess we can't win, can we?
Wanna just chill out and watch youtube videos?"
the supposed youtube video they watch is fascinating,
it's caitlyn jenner threatening ben shapiro,
or whoever this dweeb is, repeated at lower
and lower framerates, intercut with right-wing
trans woman blair white talking about damage
control.
then we get clips of the hindenburg crash,
some bigoted youtube comments, and flashes
of the word "plague."
so, "plague" still puzzles me, and it's kind
of the only thing i'm not really sure about
yet? it makes me think of the clip at the
end of lindsay ellis's RENT video, of a gay
activist admonishing others in the queer community
for their infighting and inability to garner
support in the wider public "Plague!
We're in the middle of a fucking plague!
And you behave like this!"
i don't know if this was intentional, but
it fits and it's the best i got.
this montage mirrors the freedom report clip
from earlier
"cut that out now"
"that's a human rights violation"
"or you'll go home in an ambulance"
"i'll smash your fucking face"
we then return to justine and tabby, then
we return to tracy, and then it's over.
after the patreon credits, though, we see
three things -a chess board, tabby hissing,
and then a kitchen with a bottle of svedka.
and now we're getting intertextual.
obviously, all of natalie's videos are in
conversation with one another.
in this case, we're led to one of tabby's
early appearances, called 'the left,' which
is another dialectic between tabby and justine.
it's very similar to the aesthetic, it even
ends on a similar note, with basically the
same joke.
"I think it's stalemate."
"No it's not- my queen is wide open."
"I love you."
"what?"
i'm also thinking of tiffany tumbles, another
video exploring the question of permissible
feminine expression, and this is where some
of that color theory seems to come in.
near as i can tell, 'the aesthetic' and 'the
left' are analogous -similar shades that meld
together consistently.
meanwhile, 'the aesthetic' and 'tiffany tumbles'
are complementary, opposing colors that stand
out from each other, but create a clear image
through contrast.
so, how do we bring all of this together?
'the aesthetic' obviously has some harsh subjects
on its mind.
as a trans person who's only been out a year,
a lot of what justine says i say to myself,
at least on my bad days.
i think that's true for most trans people.
watching this video was painful, frightening,
it kind of fed my demons a bit, y'know? but
that's precisely why i like it.
a lot of youtubers, myself included, pick
a topic that shows some kind of problem and
then solve it, or anyway pretend to solve
it.
'the aesthetic' doesn't do that.
see, when i go through this process of tearing
myself down in this way, i never "resolve"
it, there's no catharsis.
i just feel like shit for a while until i
forget to feel like shit.
no bones about it, this video is deeply problematic,
and it is for that reason we ought to examine
it critically- because it is deliberately
showing us a problem, showing us something
harmful, embarrassing, and true about ourselves
that we don't like to admit.
"we don't say it out loud, but we all know
it, and we all think it."
what does it mean that we feel so uncomfortable
witnessing this debate, especially as trans
people? doesn't it kind of shore up justine's
argument that other people hold the validity
of your gender in their hands, when we feel
our own validity threatened by a youtube video?
but 'the aesthetic' is also reminding us that
it does not exist out of context.
i think the "plague" montage is meant to show
where this whole charade of disagreement is
heading, a parade of fractured, segmented
identities unable to communicate or empathize
with each other "and i feel like, on my end,
i'm always damage controlling."
this compounds when we consider the intertextual
elements, that we can't take this one conversation
on its own.
neither a self nor a community is built by
one road, one dialogue -it's a complex weave
of analogous and complementary elements.
you can't take just one color and expect to
get the whole picture.
you need the analogues and the complements,
together, to approach a totality of self,
to stave off self-destruction by way of fragmentation.
you need this whole picture because the hungry
people on the outside? they don't see the
differences from one color and the next.
all they see is black and white.
the last point i want to make addresses a
separate criticism.
some insist that, by not taking a side, natalie
has taken the wrong side, and they point to
reddit threads that show cis bigots being
validated in all their bigoted nonsense, comments
on the video from disappointed and wounded
fans. and like... yeah, you know, that is
an issue.
like i said at the top of this video, that
sucks, and i hate it.
as much as i like this video, even with my
wildly debatable interpretation, i do think
it could have done just a bit more to reassure
natalie's audience.
and i say that specifically because natalie
has become a flashpoint of the transgender
community, and she knows it.
no one elected her, she didn't ask for the
position, but people hang on her every word
now -kind of myself included.
her dysphoria video is one of the things that
helped me come out and start transition.
whether she likes it or not, she has a responsibility
to her audience.
but, all that said... aren't we kind of missing
the forest for the trees here?
like, yeah, 'the aesthetic' has great potential
to do harm, arguably it already has.
some folks have said they wished cis people
weren't allowed to watch this video, and yeah,
i kind of agree with that, but we don't live
in that world.
and this ammunition we're worried that natalie
has given to the bigots... you really think
they wouldn't have found something else, somewhere
else, to justify doing or saying the awful
shit they already wanted to? we're focusing
so much on the negative impact of this thing,
and yeah, it's real, it's worth talking about,
but in stopping there, in stopping at saying
that it's problematic and therefore shouldn't
exist, aren't we doing exactly the thing that
justine does to tabby? we're essentially saying
that the only permissible expression in the
trans community is that which is optically
advantageous.
it has to make trans, nonbinary, questioning,
and allied people feel good about themselves,
while simultaneously not feeding the trolls.
it's got to be unambiguously self-affirming
of trans people, or unambiguously critical
of nontrans people, unless you're critical
of the bad ones that we all agree are bad,
like blaire white.
in short: it can't be problematic. and the
painful reality of art is, it's all problematic.
there's a bit in an episode of the podcast
behind the bastards where host robert evans
talks about the anti-nazi hollywood films
that were accidentally pro-nazi.
"when we think of nazi propaganda, we think
of triumph of the will.
when germans thought of effective nazi propaganda
they thought of gary fucking cooper.
the nazis also loved mr smith goes to washington.
they looked at it and saw, well, here's a
movie about how shitty democracy is, and one
guy with a vision has to come in and fix this
corrupt town.
a lot of it is not even that there's direct
collaboration going on, it's just that the
way movies work as entertainment really wound
up reinforcing nazi beliefs."
"is the matrix a fascist film?"
"kinda, right?
a little bit."
"if you want to view it that way..."
"if the matrix had come out in 1936, I think
the germans would have loved it."
i think about this a lot when critical debates
turn towards the question of what messages
the wrong audience will take from something.
lindsay ellis actually has an excellent video
about this, link in the description, and the
fact is, barring some truly inspired bit of
mel brooksian satire, it is impossible to
avoid giving ammunition to the people who
want to hurt you.
every time you open your mouth, put pen to
paper, every time you walk out your door,
you are making mistakes, you are contradicting
yourself, you are undermining the causes you
claim to care about in ways microscopic and
macroscopic in turns.
and yeah, you can mitigate the damage by being
aware of it, and i think natalie is still
figuring out how to do that.
just two years ago she was mumbling over grainy
camcorder footage; now, she's one of the very
few youtubers making something that approaches
"youtube art," art that could only exist on
youtube. and she's doing it as a trans woman
who is still very early in her transition!
it's fine to be critical, but we have to be
willing to give someone the benefit of the
doubt because when all we can focus on is
the harms produced by a work, we inherently
devalue the good.
we devalue the right and desire of a transgender
artist to depict her own pain in a way that
isn't safe or kind or helpful or easy to digest.
we might as well be insisting that what you
want to say is less important than what we
want the world to hear. and look, you don't
have to like The Aesthetic, or any of Natalie's
work, or any work at all.
you don't have to like how it affects your
friends, or how it gives ammunition to your
enemies.
but we ought to at least recognize that the
endeavor itself is justified and valid, and
that the text is still worth rigorous examination.
wow, thank you for watching this video that
is longer than the video it's talking about.
i wasn't gonna do all my normal shilling at
the end of this one, but at this rate there's
no way the video that was supposed to come
out in september is going to come out in time,
so i'm just going to take this opportunity
to shout out the september names.
special thanks to: austin mccauley, amy mims,
richard daly, and anarcho duck.
these are my ten dollar a month patrons over
at patreon.com/ltas. for as little as a dollar
a month you get access to, among many other
things, a thirty minute video essay! in case
you haven't read enough of my stupid words.
i also have a podcast, the trans questioning
podcast, where i talk about being transgender.
recently i had youtuber may leitz of nyx fears,
and that was a fun little conversation, you
should go check it out.
links to all the music and sources and everything
else in the description, and that's all the
things.
thank you for watching, good bye.
