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.
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