Woman-types: ever wondered what it would feel like to be catcalled by men who probably lack the upper body strength to work construction? Then you should start a YouTube series!
Despite the fact that the video hosting giant has featured three popular female vloggers in its recent ad campaign, being a woman who dares show her face on YouTube is a risky move indeed, unless you’ve got skin thicker than that fake dinosaur idiots thought Steven Spielberg murdered.
No matter what women do on YouTube, they can’t really win. Beauty vloggers have bigger audiences, more lucrative endorsement deals, and are somewhat insulated from the sort of ire flung at comedians and commentators and other How-To’ers. But because their main focus is on hair and makeup, they’re sometimes viewed as somehow intellectually inferior to their non-beauty vlog counterparts (according to The Daily Dot, beauty vloggers were excluded from a Women of YouTube panel at this weekend’s VidCon, an event where YouTube’s most watched and subscribed talk about the highs and lows of vlogging).
But no matter the focus of their content, female vloggers who spoke out at VidCon expressed frustration with the nature of abuse that focuses on their physical appearance rather than on the actual content of their videos. If they’re physically attractive, they’re bombarded with creepy requests to do things like slowly put on silk stockings and post the video (ostensibly so some weirdo can fap to it). If they’re not conventionally attractive, male commenters jump on every opportunity to let the woman in question know that she makes their particular boner unhappy and she should go away forever. If she’s of average attractiveness, commenters use the commenting space to have debates about her fuckability.
Science vlogger Emily Grasslie of The Brain Scoop weighed in after famously smacking down her looks-obsessed male critics in recent months, telling VidCon attendees that she mostly just ignores the trolly mctrolls to avoid risking undermining her credibility.
“I feel like I can’t take about my image on channel without compromising the value of my educational message,” she explained, going on to detail how people ask her every day about her hairstyle or clothing featured on YouTube instead of the content of her videos. “I have made a conscious decision to never answer those publicly. I’m so afraid that once I start letting in that side of my personality that people will no longer care about the educational message. I think that insecurity is totally a product of the society I grew up in.”
But the fact that women deal with this — still! In 2014! — is an incredible bummer. No matter where we go and what we do and what we say, there’s some guy standing by to shout about whether or not they want to see us naked.
One of the more irritating aspects of that sort of comment is that the people making them are 100% convinced that the worst thing a man can say to a woman is that he doesn’t want to have sex with her, that the most important thing to a woman is how their weens feel about her. Why else would they wear makeup? Heels? Why would they slather on sunscreen every morning?
Guys, guys, guys. It’s not for you. More often then not, women do it for each other. No one gives a shit about your boner.
I’d imagine that idea, expanded into 4 minute YouTube video form, would likely garner more than its share of rape threats.