Transcripts / Envy

This is a transcript for the video essay “Envy” which can be found here.

Part I

So, April 27, 2017 was the greatest day in the history of twitter.com.net.gov. I realize that to you children, Twitter is an app. But to us MILFs, it remains a website. We have to dial in. ☏

📞Hello operator, connect me to hell.

This was the day that Fyre Festival, a "luxury music event" hosted by Ja Rule and some charlatan was scheduled to begin on a private island in the Bahamas. There was a lot of hype, Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid endorsed the festival on Instagram, there was a promo video full of supermodels, tickets were selling for thousands of dollars. One Twitter thread summarized the marketing as:

"Exclusivity, conspicuous consumption, & many, MANY promises of excellent selfies for your already-insufferable Instagram."

So when the day arrived and the advertised "best in food, art, music, and adventure", turned out to be two slices of pallid American cheese languishing over sliced bread in an atmosphere that can only be described as muddy third-world shantytown; I mean if you weren't on Twitter that day, I don't think you can even imagine the revelry:

"Just learned about #fyrefestival aka Ja Rule's Concentration Camp for instagram models and rich white kids"

"yuppie hunger games hosted by ja-rule"

"Finish your food, there's starving millennial influencers in #fyrefestival"

"Instagram entitled rich kids meet Lord of the Flies."

"Let them eat salad"

It was a shuddering climax of pent-up class rage. You know, maybe millennials couldn't get Bernie Sanders elected, but at least those sandwiches were garbage!

Jameela Jamil is an English actress who's just extremely pretty. Imagine looking like this, imagine being perfect. Why are you doing this to me Jameela? Why are you doing this to women? One day on Instagram, an ordinary peasant told the Queen Jameela:

"Your skin is so perfect 🥺"

And Jameela replied:

"My skin is currently clear because:

A) Privileged people have more access to good quality nutrition and also our lives are significantly less stressful than those with less privilege. I also get to sleep more because of this. All of these things keep my hormones in balance and I'm able to address food intolerances easily.

B) I believe that trans rights are human rights. 🤓 

C) I exfoliate twice a week."

Oh boy. Jameela they're gonna cut your head off gorg. I'll protect you queen!

"could she be more annoying"

Someone wondered on Twitter, to 77,000 likes.

"this trend of fake self awareness legit makes me wanna rip my hair out"

Now look, to be fair, everything Jameela said is true. Being privileged does make it easier to spend time and money on cosmetics. But Jameela's acknowledging this, this recitation of all the complex socioeconomic factors that account for why she's prettier than you, doesn't take any of the sting out of inequality, does it? And that's kind of at odds with what activists used to say, which is that you should "check your privilege".

A suggestion which the privileged seem to have taken to heart, since the rich and famous now go around delivering these orations on how fortunate they are compared to rabble. And this of course turns out to be far more annoying than when they acted oblivious to it. I don't have any beauty secrets, I guess I just drink lots of water. 🌊 Take me, mommy!

A similar scandal occurred when Kim Kardashian tweeted about her birthday party at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

"40 and feeling so humbled and blessed. There is not a single day that I take for granted, especially during these times when we are all reminded of the things that truly matter.”

“After two weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal for just a brief moment in time." 

"... I realize that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these, I am humbly reminded of how privileged my life is. #thisis40"

So like Jameela, Kim is attempting some kind of privilege-checking maneuver and once again, it has not gone well.

"You are the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century, bragging about being ‘humble’ and letting us eat cake"

"Millions of Americans sick and suffering, standing for hours in food lines and being evicted as you flaunt your wealth and privilege. Your tweet made 10x worse by #ToneDeaf ‘humbled and blessed’ line. #gross."

"Happy birthday. I hope someone got you an alphabet book as a gift, so you can learn to read the room. ✨”

So the response on Twitter resembles moral outrage. But what people were upset about was not that she had the party. I mean, wouldn't you escape to a private island if you got that MILF money? The problem was more that she tweeted about it, and that the tweet was… Maybe, just maybe, a little bit yikesy? But if having the party wasn't wrong, then why was tweeting about it wrong? "This isn't a good look", we say. "Bad optics", "not relatable".

Relatable. Relatability is not a moral category. This is public relations, it's not ethics. And it definitely isn't socialism. Like I'm pretty sure Karl Marx never said– "The problem with the bourgeoisie is they're not relatable. They can't read the room, and it isn't a good look. This should have stayed in the drafts. #ToneDeaf"

Isn't the issue that when Kim tweeted this most people were trapped in quarantine. We didn't get to have birthday parties, some people couldn't even travel to visit their dying relatives. So watching Kim get to travel and celebrate her birthday like normal was… painful.

"Pain at the good fortune of others" is how Aristotle defined envy. And I think it's interesting that whenever social media erupts in outrage over luxury music festivals, or Kim K's birthday party, or Jameela Jamil's... privileged pores? No one ever uses the word "envy".

It's like we're averting our eyes, avoiding confrontation with this dark aspect of our own psychology. So in this video I wanna take a long hard look at envy. What is it, where does it come from, and seriously what is Jameela Jamil's skincare routine? Drop it in the comments bestie! 🥰

Okay, so what is envy? "Pain at the good fortune of others" is not a bad start, but there's more to it than that. Envy is a syndrome, a complex of poisonous thoughts and feelings about people who have what we want, but cannot get. It's not simply wanting what another person has, that's greed which is a much more wholesome sin. Because simply wanting what someone has can inspire us, it can fuel our own ambition, it can even motivate us to improve ourselves. And sometimes people call that envy, but it's not really envy. It's emulation or admiration. At worst it's what the Bible calls "coveting"– he covets!

Envy is something darker. It's not just wanting what someone has, it's begrudging them what they have. You might even hate the person you envy, and want them to lose what they have; to be humiliated and destroyed, even if their downfall doesn't benefit you in any way. Like Satan, who was willing to lose heaven just to spite God according to the poet John Milfton– it's gonna be 90 minutes of MILF jokes kids so strap in.

So envy is malicious, it's a force of destruction. For an example of the distinction between envy and emulation, think about "incels"– involuntary celibates– these men who can't get girlfriends and are bitter about it online. It was incels who contributed to our culture the concept of "Chads", that is beautiful, wealthy, masculine men. For incels, "taking the Red Pill" means buying into an ideology which says that women only want to date Chads, or else they want to marry beta cucks, just to take their beta buxx. 💸

Gaskeep, gateboss, girllight.

So if you're an incel you can either go to the gym and try to become a Chad– that's emulation, the aspiration to attain what another person has– or and this is the more popular option, you can "take the Black Pill''. Which means believing that Chadhood is genetically determined at birth, there is no hope, no woman will ever want you, and therefore happiness is impossible, you may as well lie down and rot. 

This mindset of resentment has inspired so many mass murders, there's an entire Wikipedia timeline dedicated to tracking them. And the essential motivation for this violence is envy. The incel's failed ambition, and sense of incurable predestined inferiority turns venomous. The logic behind the violence is: "if I can't get a girlfriend, if I can't get what I want, then no one can". In the words of a murderer:

"The Day of Retribution is my attempt to destroy everything I cannot have."

But most incels aren't murderers. Most of the time, envy is most harmful to the person who envies. The philosopher Max Scheler called it:

 "a self-poisoning of the mind." 

There's a Christian saying that: 

"Envy is the only sin that gives no pleasure." 

Because the other sins are fun right? Greed, gluttony, lust, that's what I call a good time. But envy is misery. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say it gives no pleasure.

"#FyreFestival is an art installation where mediocre people realize what their lives would be like without rich parents." 

"Rich refugee crisis. 😱😱😱😱🍿🍿"

We're living in a moment of growing inequality and resentment. Look around you, we've got the guillotine memes, we’ve got the edgy teens tweeting "eat the rich". And none of this is new, the slogan "Eat The Rich" actually originates with the philosopher of the French Revolution Zsa Zsa Gabor, who supposedly said:

"When the people have no more to eat, they will eat the rich." - Jean Jacques Rousseau

And fair enough, it's a good source of protein. But take it from me kids, cannibalism is one of those tricky things. It's hard to do just once. You develop a taste for it. It's like they say at NA meetings, once you vore you just want more. Also, who counts as the rich? Am I the rich? I certainly hope so. Cause I want you to eeaaatt meeeeee……⚡️ Shhh, stop it! ⚡️

See this is why I quit academia, if I was a professor I'd have to behave myself. And I don't wanna behave myself. I want to be bad. Do you wanna be bad with me? Let's be bad. 😳

🎵🍎🎵

🧿👄🧿

So, you might think that envy is simply the product of inequality, and that societies that have more inequality have more envy. I used to assume that too, but the more I think about it the more I realize that might not be true. Envy is a basic part of human nature, it exists in all societies and all economic systems, and it begins any time two or more people start comparing themselves.

Part II: The Desire for Mommy's Milk 🍼💨

According to Sigmund Freud or as I call him, Daddy–Zaddy– the first stage of human development is "the oral stage", in which the primary concern is oral gratification. Which is of course provided by mommy milkies. Am I doing too much? I'll tone it down, just a little bit.

So look, I get that a lot of people are skeptical about Freud, and it's true he was a bit of a crackpot coke fiend who had some zany ideas. Like "penis envy", maybe there's transgender men who experience that but I don't think it's a basic fact of the female condition. As for castration anxiety, is that a dare? Because I take that personally. I'm giving it very serious consideration, Doctor.

But I feel like even when Freud is wrong, he's often at least onto something. Like with the "Oedipus complex", it's not that you literally desire your mother right? That would be weird. It's more that you desire an archetype, Mother. Right? Mommy. You guys get it. Gen Z TikTok lesbians get it, they're the ones who got me started on this MILF shit. I'm a reverse Socrates, I've been corrupted by the young. My innocent and delicate nature has been defiled.

So Freud says that in the first two years of life, libido is primarily focused on mommy's milk. And it's also in this stage that envy first emerges. So I was the oldest child in my family, and I was less than two years old when my brother was born. So I don't remember this because I was one year old, but my family tells me that when my brother was born, I was just insanely jealous.

Oh, and I guess now's a good time to discuss the difference between jealousy and envy. Scholars agree that there is a difference, and usually they– and usually they describe the difference in one of two ways. The first is that jealousy is defensive, it's a kind of protectiveness over what is rightfully yours; whereas envy is offensive, it's resentment over what someone else has that you lack. 

And the second difference is that envy is between two people, the envier and the envied; whereas jealousy typically involves three people. As in romantic jealousy where you have the subject, the romantic object, and then the rival. And the subject is jealous of the rival because they're protective of their relationship with the romantic object. And that's also the dynamic of sibling rivalry, just substituting the romantic object for mommy. 

Of course in ordinary English people are always gonna say jealousy when they really mean envy, probably because jealousy has less negative connotations. And I think it's pointless to try to fight that, like I wouldn't go around "correcting" people, but just keep in mind that there is a difference.

So sibling rivalry, is that envy or jealousy? Well I think it's both, because initially you're defensive of your privileged only-child relationship with your parents. But a new baby often gets more attention, at least in your paranoid toddler brain, and you might be envious of that. And in romantic jealousy you may also envy the rival, if she has qualities that you wish you had.

You know, young kids are little egotists who are very sensitive to when another child might be getting preferential treatment. One of the favorite phrases of tiny babies is "it's not fair!" It's not fair, ehhhh. Tell me about it bambino. And I've got bad news, life is not getting any more fair than this.

According to the Bible, one of the first events in human history is the story of Caín y Abel. Los dos hermanos. I don't know why I said it in Spanish, I guess I just thought it would sound cool. Was I wrong? ¡Caín! It just sounds so much better than "Cain".

God tells Cain and Abel each to make a sacrifice, and then God prefers Abel's you know, cause God loves meat. Then, in an act of malicious envy toward Abel and spite towards God the father, Caín kills his younger brother. In my earliest memories of my brother, I already loved him and I don't remember the envy. So I guess I wasn't a Cain–¡Caín! so I must have somehow worked through this without resorting to murder, hmm.

Freud says the older sibling's envy of the younger leads to a recognition of impotence, because at first you selfishly want to be the special most-loved child. But you see that your parents love your sibling just as much as you, and you're powerless to do anything about it. So your ambition to superiority fails, and so you have no choice but to repress your ambition to superiority, as well as your envy. And the result of that repression is what we could call "herd instinct", solidarity. 🐎🐎🐎🐎

This feeling of identifying with a group, the equal siblings. And as you get older the herd instinct evolves into feelings about justice, duty, community, and equality. But Freud thought these feelings retain a vestige of repressed envy. If I can't be the favorite, if I can't have special privileges, then no one can! And from these observations Freud made the generalization:

"Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well."

Okay so we don't want other people to have anything we can't have, so we enviously insist on equality as a defense against the greater prosperity of others. Now I don't think I completely agree with that. Like I think Freud is definitely onto something here, but don't some of our community feelings also come from a place of genuine care for other people? 

*sigh* I cared for someone once. Rosebud. 🔮

Well, we'll come back to that later. Let's put a pin in me for now– a pin in it for now. In Freud I mean, let's put a pin in Freud.

Part III

In a 1966 book titled "Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior", the sociologist Helmut Schoeck argued that rather than being– That is a very German name. Helmut Schoeck. It's putting me in a German mood sweetie. Hallo meine Lieben. Heute gibts ein neues video! I just get worse at German every year.

Schoeck argued that rather than being the result of social or economic inequality, envy is universal across all human societies, including very egalitarian ones. For example, in tribal and village cultures around the world there's often a concept of black magic or witchcraft, which are thought used by envious people to bewitch the ones they envy. 

You're probably familiar with the concept of "the evil eye", which originates in Ancient Greece or maybe even earlier than that. Cultures all over the world today understand the evil eye as  a kind of curse cast by the malignant gaze of an envious person. Now you might be thinking that sounds superstitious, but I actually think the concept of the evil eye reveals a more sophisticated awareness of envy and of the social danger that it poses.

You've probably seen these amulets around. There's an emoji for them now 🧿, which are supposed to protect against the evil eye. It's called a "nazar", which comes from the Arabic word for "sight" or "surveillance", similar to the origin of the English word "envy", which is the Latin "invidia" which just means to look at.

So there's agreement across cultures that envy is related to sight, the malevolent gaze, the evil eye. And these amulets show that a lot of people are afraid of being envied, and want to protect themselves. I was just watching this Turkish YouTube channel with an episode on the evil eye, and the host explains that for Muslims:

"It's customary to say-"

"-Mashallah."

"Or god has willed it, when admiring a person or object. You know, to avoid unintentionally cursing them." ☪️

I love that. It's like "no envy!" Like "no homo", but "no envy"! Mashallah! The top comment on that video says: 

"You want to protect yourself from the evil green eye monster? Well, don't tell others about your ideas, goals, or wishes. Don't be flaunting your accomplishments on social media or posting pictures of your children, that's how you avoid being jinxed."

See this is where Kim Kardashian went wrong with her birthday post. Clearly, no one in the Kardashian Cinematic Universe has ever heard of the evil eye. Wait, I thought these people were Armenians. Why haven't they heard of the evil– oh. Okay, nevermind. 🧿

Every piece of media they've ever produced is about flaunting an enviable lifestyle. This is a particularly American thing, most Americans have no concept of the fear of envy. Like there's advertisements here that literally promise: if you buy this exclusive luxury vibrator you'll be the envy of all your friends! As if it's a good thing to be envied. Oh but it is not. If people envy you, they gossip about you right? They seethe over your successes, and celebrate your misfortunes. Being envied is basically the opposite of being loved, so why would anyone want to be envied? 

Well it's a contradiction of human nature. On the one hand, we need to be loved but then there's this other drive in us, this like Homeric striving for fame, and glory, and riches, which is kind of in conflict with our need to be loved. In a past gilded age there were stories like "Citizen Kane" and "Sunset Boulevard", which warned what a sad and lonely thing success can become.

In ancient democratic Athens there was a practice called "Ostrakismos", which is the origin of the English word "ostracism". Ostracism was a procedure where the Athenians would assemble, and each person would write the name of a person they wanted to ostracize on a pottery shard called an "ostrakon". And whoever got the most votes would simply be banished from the city for 10 years, no questions asked. I love the ancient world, things were so direct. Often this was used to remove someone who was becoming too prominent, or too arrogant, or just annoying. According to Plutarch– I'm just gonna read this from Wikipedia:

"In one anecdote about Aristides, known as Aristides 'The Just', who was ostracized in 482 BC, an illiterate citizen, not recognizing him, came up to ask him to write the name Aristides on his ostrakon. When Aristides asked why, the man replied it was because he was sick of hearing him being called 'The Just'."

It's good. It's so good! See this is why the idea of "cancel culture" is absurd. This has been going on since the dawn of civilization. People in most cultures– not all– but most cultures understand that being envied is a massive social liability. So it's best not to draw too much attention to yourself. According to a Tamil saying: 

"The tree that bears fruit will be stoned."

This is sometimes called "tall poppy syndrome", because the tallest poppies in the garden will be cut. Schoeck argues that the fear of envy is a major inhibiting force in many societies.

"In Haiti, GE Simpson found that a peasant will seek to disguise his true economic position by purchasing several smaller fields rather than one larger piece of land. For the same reason he will not wear good clothes. He does this intentionally to protect himself against the envious black magic of his neighbors."

Now this kind of thing is not unheard of in America. Like I've known people from seriously wealthy families who move to the city and they dress like gutter punks. Like they're trying to pass as poor. But in general, Americans don't openly acknowledge fear of envy in the way many other cultures do and I don't think that's an accident. We're a nation of show-offs, and so the taboo against discussing envy is related to our whole national ethos of shoving our wealth in everyone's face. But though the fear of envy isn't widely talked about or admitted here, it's definitely still there only repressed; confined to the realm of dreams and art. 🦢

In the movie "Black Swan", Nina is a perfection-obsessed ballerina who achieves her dream of getting the lead role in "Swan Lake", after which her life and mind are totally unraveled by fear of envy. Black magic, "Black Swan".

At first we see how Nina's success comes at the very real cost of being envied, by her ex-ballerina mother, by the other girls in the company, and by the former lead ballerina she's replaced.

Beth: "Did you suck his ****?"

Nina: "Not all of us have to."

I love Winona Ryder so much. I love Natalie Portman so much. I love Mila Kunis so much. I just like women. Where's my shock wand? Stop it! Stop stanning! 💘

But reasonable fear of envy becomes paranoia as Nina begins hallucinating Black Swan doppelgangers, and is seduced by bisexual demon Mila Kunis who's trying to steal her role. You gotta watch out for those bisexual demons, they'll getcha!–

You could argue that Nina is actually suffering a kind of "self-envy", where she envies the disinhibited, sexually liberated, corrupted part of herself that's capable of adult eroticism and also of dancing the Black Swan.

So she imagines that part of herself as an envious rival who's trying to replace her. It's like her mind is split between two impulses. There's her dominant White Swan impulse which we could call the "Squidward" personality, perfectionistic and orderly, but reserved, priggish, stiff. And then there's her repressed Black Swan impulse, which we could call the "Spongebob" personality, intuitive, chaotic, ecstatic.

In "Spongebob Squarepants" the character Squidward is fundamentally a figure of envy, stemming from failed ambition.

Squidward: "Hello, you've reached the house of unrecognized talent. 😔"

Squidward aspires to artistic achievement but remains in mediocrity, partly because of his overly dry, doctrinaire attitude towards art. Spongebob is Squidward's social equal, they're literally neighbors, and they both work the same fast-food service job for the same exploitative capitalist. But Spongebob is a Mozartean intuitive genius who's able to transform the most mundane activities: blowing bubbles, flipping burgers, into a kind of aesthetic rapture. Squidward intensely envies Spongebob's uninhibited joy and intuitive creativity, but he can't admit that envy to himself. So he convinces himself that what he's really feeling is contempt, snobbish disdain for Spongebob's childish behavior.

Squidward: "What the people want is culture, not dancing bubbles."

Though deep down, Squidward really wants what Spongebob has. 

Squidward: "IT’S BEAUTIFUL! 🥺 Uhhhhhh, I mean uh– 😠" 

Which we see when he can't help himself from blowing bubbles, or when he trades away all of his possessions for the chewing gum wrapper that in Spongebob's hands was a source of infinite entertainment. A lot of people my age who watched Spongebob as a kid, rewatch it now and are horrified to discover that they identify with Squidward. Whereas as children, they identified with Spongebob. Well, you either die a Spongebob or you live long enough to see yourself become the Squidward–

And there's a pain in becoming the Squidward, which is usually explained as "the disappointing drudgery of adult life", or simply loss of childhood. I would argue that "envy of childhood" is the distinctive Squidwardian emotion. Squidwardian? Are we saying that word? Are we really saying this word out loud… to an audience of millions? Okay. 🤪

It's basically the same dynamic as Salieri's envy of Mozart in "Amadeus". Oh my god, the evil eye killed Mozart! You gotta watch out for that one kids. If a mysterious stranger shows up on your doorstep at midnight asking you to compose a requiem mass for your own father, just say no.

So in Spongemadeus Mozartpants, we have a diligent though stuffy wannabe envying the effortless playfulness of the spontaneous genius.

(Spongebob and Mozart laughing)

(Squidward and Salieri grumbling) 😱

So Squidward's envy of Spongebob is, well, it's Apollo's envy of Dionysus. Look if we were to view "Spongebob Squarepants" through the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche– stay with me ladies, I have an angle here 🧠. We could say that Squidward represents what Nietzsche called the Apollonian impulse, while Spongebob represents the Dionysian.

Nietzsche thought there were two conflicting artistic drives in the human personality. The Apollonian, named after the Greek god Apollo, is the drive toward self-control, order, logic, morality. And the Dionysian, named after Dionysus, is the drive toward intoxication, frenzy, passion, intuition. Both Spongebob and Amadeus present these two drives in conflict, with the Apollonian envying the Dionysian.

Of course this is a misrepresentation of how art is actually created, because Nietzsche's whole point is that you need a balance of the two drives. In reality you cannot have a pure Dionysian artist like Spongebob, because creating good art requires at least some level of discipline and ordering– Otherwise you're just some drunk idiot with a guitar. Get off the stage!

So "Black Swan" is in a way actually more realistic. In order to give the perfect performance, Nina has to unify her fragmented personality and dance both swans, resolving the envious rivalry between her two artistic impulses– Another movie about fear of envious, ballerina doppelgangers… Can you guess it? ✂️

Is Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film "Us", which dramatizes the repressed economic guilt and fear of the American middle class. We meet the Wilsons, a moderately affluent family with a vacation house and a boat, along with the Tylers, a slightly better-off white family whom the Wilsons envy. 

Gabe: "You saw their new car, right? He had to do it. He just had to get that thing to fuck with me too." 

One night the Wilson's vacation home is invaded by a family of their own monstrous doppelgangers. Red, the only doppelganger who can speak, explains that her family is metaphysically tethered to the Wilsons, living wretched and destitute versions of their lives in a liminal backrooms underworld. 

It's super-fucking liminal. 🐇

Red: "Once upon a time, there was a girl and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody."

We later find out that all over the U.S.– Oh U.S. spells us... Hey, that's the title of the movie! Ohhhhh. The tethered have risen up to kill their privileged doppelgangers, and to link arms across the country in a dark parody of the real-world 1986 homelessness fundraiser "Hands Across America". 

So my reading of "Us" is that it's an expression of middle-class guilt about privilege, and fear of envy. It's not a movie about the working class. If it was a movie about the working class, then the working class would be able to speak human languages. And would not be scary monsters who make animal sounds, and stagger around like zombies. This is a movie about the anxious middle class's nightmare of the working class. "Us" represents in a self-aware way, what other home invasion movies represent unconsciously. The fear of the envious poor, of revolution, of slave revolt.

But "Us" diverges from other home invasion movies by not just being fearful about the underclass, but also guilty. The idea of the "tethered underclass" represents life as a zero-sum game where every moment of your happiness is bought with someone else's suffering. It's an incredibly guilty fantasy, an internalization of the black magic logic of people who blame their own misfortunes on the people they envy. As Schoeck puts it: 

"My neighbor's harvest can only have turned out better than mine because he has somehow succeeded in reducing mine by black magic."

So the fear of envy and the guilt of success are repressed in American culture. But they still find expression in movies. Jordan Peele is kind of like the Charles Dickens of the 21st century. "Us" actually reminds me of "A Christmas Carol", a story about the guilt of the rich if ever there was one. You know Scrooge is visited by ghosts, who show him how wretched and sad the lives of his employees are, and how he'll die alone and hated by everyone, and his funeral is only attended by businessmen on the condition that lunch is provided. Dickens was truly the master of scaring the rich straight.

So maybe fear of envy can serve a softly regulatory function by motivating charity and generosity in the rich. But in general I'm suspicious of envy as a motivation for politics.  Cause remember, the basic logic of envy is "if I can't have it, no one can" which is a purely negative, destructive style of thinking. It's taking privileges away not for the material benefit of the underprivileged, but merely for the psychological satisfaction of the envious person.

And that's even worse when you consider that envy is subjective. It doesn't necessarily target objective power and privilege. So envy in politics is not by any means relegated to the left. Conservative politics is brimming with envy. Like in this debate about forgiving student loan debt, you often hear people say: "I had to pay my student loans, so they should too. Debt forgiveness is not fair!" The logic here is "since I didn't get my student debt forgiven, no one should". 

It's "intergenerational envy", which is a pretty common thing. Usually older generations envying the young. "Kids these days have it so easy. When I was young we ate nails for breakfast, and sent 'text messages' on the Pony Express". The feeling is basically "it's not fair that kids these days don't have to suffer like I suffered". 

Or think about the concept of a "welfare queen", which openly reeks of envy and white resentment. Or the way conservatives talk about immigration, it's all this envious suspicion about illegal immigrants sneaking in and getting government handouts without having to pay taxes. "I had to work hard for my money, so why should these people get a free ride?" Not that's what being an illegal immigrant is actually like, except in the imagination of people who envy them.

Envy is felt more intensely by prideful people (because envy is a response to ego threat). So it's especially sharp when it targets people who are "supposed to be" beneath you. The Jewish radical feminist Andrea Dworkin made what I think is a pretty compelling argument that both anti-Semitism and misogyny are partly rooted in envy. She quotes a bigoted argument made by the wife-killing protagonist of Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata", who resents that women and Jews find a kind of paradoxical power in their own oppression:

"Just like the Jews: as they pay us back for their oppression by financial domination, so it is with women. ‘Ah, you want us to be traders only– all right, as traders we will dominate you!’ say the Jews. ‘Ah, you want us to be merely objects of sensuality– all right, as objects of sensuality we will enslave you.’

Dworkin explains: 

"This dominance of men by women is experienced by the men as real– emotionally real, sexually real, psychologically real; it emerges as the reason for the wrath of the misogynist… The woman appears to control sex. The man needs it. This causes his rage at her perceived power over him." - "Intercourse"

Women control access to what men want, which gives women a kind of indirect power that some men envy. They envy the sexual power of women. It doesn't matter to the misogynist that especially at the time Tolstoy was writing, women objectively have less power in society than men. He envies women because they "have" what he desires. 

Likewise, it didn't matter to Weimar anti-Semites that Jewish people were a marginalized minority. Anti-Semitism is often rooted in an envious obsession with the disproportionate influence and affluence of Jewish people.

"It is not the absolute differences between men which feed envy, but subjective perception, the optics of envy." - Helmut Schoeck

Part IV: The Optics of Envy

🪞👑

Natalie: Magic mirror on the wall, who's the cuntiest of them all?

Mirror: Thou art cunt my queen. But hold, a lovely maid I see.

Caitlyn Jenner: Oh yes, it's meeee.

Natalie: What?

Caitlyn: In a way I'm kind of just in the beginning of this whole transition, you know like a young little girl going through all these things– having a sleepover with the girls. What do we do on a sleepover? Do we have like, pillow fights and all that stuff?

Mirror: Alas, she is more cunt than thee.

Natalie: My pussy-stunting on the 'gram has come to nothing! Ugh 😖

The classic 1937 Disney movie "Snow White" and the Wicked MILF is the story of a quote "vain and wicked" queen, who obsessively envies the beauty of her own stepdaughter. Are you sure this was for children?

Every day the MILF Queen asks the mirror, who is the fairest one of all? And the mirror responds that the queen is the fairest, till one day it says the stepdaughter Snow White is the fairest. Which sends the queen into an envious fury, resulting in a series of bizarre murder attempts. So first of all, can we talk plot holes ding? 🔔

Are we really supposed to believe that this is more beautiful than this? Uh, ding! 🔔 Isn't Snow White like 12 years old? What's goin' on, Walt? Why don't you take a seat? Maybe she's not 12 I don't know, it's hard to tell cause she's constantly surrounded by manlets. But she's just so boring! And the queen is such a baddie. Step on my throat mother!

This is a horny video. Well yeah cause I quit riding that brown tiger. I can feel the pulse back in my veins. 🥵

So despite the injustice done to its lead MILF, "Snow White" does illustrate some interesting things about envy. Once again we have black magic and witchcraft as an expression of envy. We have the age difference, intergenerational envy, the envy of youth. It kind of reminds me of those millennial women who hit 30 and suddenly feel a need to rage against Gen Z. Pretty counterproductive since if you're worried about seeming old, complaining about the youths is probably not helping your case gorg.

You might wonder if there's also jealousy involved with the evil queen. Like is she worried the King is gonna fall in love with his own daughter? Well, I don't think so because we never even see the king. The queen doesn't mention him, it's not about the king. So there's no romantic jealousy involved, it's just one woman envying another over beauty for its own sake. We stan a Bechdel-test-passing movie about women hating each other.

Gatekeep, gasgirl…  Gategirl, gaskeep, lightboss.

In fact in the original Brother's Grimm version, the queen first tries killing Snow White with beauty accessories, poisoning a comb and lacing her to death with a corset. I wish I could die that way. Shhhh ⚡️

What's really striking is the pure kamikaze malignity of it all. This queen who we know is obsessed with her look is willing to transform herself with witchcraft into an ugly old hag, just to give Snow White the poisoned apple. And the queen disguising herself as an old hag parallels Satan disguising himself as a serpent. 

I mean you could actually argue that the queen is simply a persona of Satan. It's "Paradise Lost" all over again, which also happens to be the title of my memoir. The queen is incredibly petty because even according to the– again, wrong and tasteless mirror– she’s still the second most beautiful woman in the world.

How could someone so close to the top of the hierarchy still be consumed by envy? Well, basically because that's how envy works. It's petty, it's subjective, and it's indifferent to the magnitude of inequality, or to the absolute position on the overall hierarchy. So you can be the second best in the world and still be obsessively envious of the one person who may barely even be above you.

In fact there's studies showing that Olympic silver medalists are actually less satisfied with their prize than bronze medalists. Probably because the bronze medalist is just happy to be on the podium at all, while the silver medalist is so close to first that they can't help but wonder what if?

Humans form our sense of identity and self-worth not by comparing ourselves to any absolute standard, but by comparing ourselves to each other. And we're more likely to compare ourselves to the people who are around us than we are to people who are far away. We could call this "the proximity effect" of envy. We're more likely to envy people who are close to us, or similar to us, especially people we're in competition with.

That's why social media is such a nightmare. It's an incubator of envy, because it puts everyone next to everyone else, so we're all being compared, all in competition. And it can destroy your self-esteem, because you're comparing your actual life to these idealized images. And it also turns public figures into lighting rods for envy, because of the numeric visibility of popularity and success.

It's a perverse consequence of the proximity effect that envy within an oppressed class is often more venomous and obsessive than envy for the oppressor. So for example in "Snow White" and "Black Swan" you have women envying other women, because women are often in competition with each other.

And I know it's kind of a misogynistic trope. In media there's constant portrayals of vain and envious women, jealous bitches fighting over men, over youth, over beauty. It's like drag queen femininity. "Death Becomes Her" femininity– So yeah, it's kind of a misogynistic trope but…… How do I put this delicately, sometimes reality is misogynistic. 😲

Like when my eyelash won't stay glued on. The patriarchy's machinations are clearly to blame. 

In her 1976 essay "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood", feminist Jo Freeman wrote about her ostracism from within the women's movement.

"I have been watching for years with increasing dismay as the Movement consciously destroys anyone within it who stands out in any way."

And she quotes a speech by fellow feminist Anselma Dell'Olio.

"And who do they attack?... Achievement or accomplishment of any kind would seem to be the worst crime: ... do anything … that every other woman secretly or otherwise feels she could do just as well – and … you're in for it… You are immediately labeled a thrill-seeking opportunist, a ruthless mercenary, out to make her fame and fortune over the dead bodies of selfless sisters who have buried their abilities and sacrificed their ambitions for the greater glory of Feminism.

Freeman speculates:

"The primary reason there have been so few ‘great women _____’ is not merely that greatness has been undeveloped or unrecognized, but that women exhibiting potential for achievement are punished by both women and men. The ‘fear of success’ is quite rational when one knows that the consequence of achievement is hostility and not praise."

So at no point in this essay does Jo Freeman use the word envy, but as usual envy is right below the surface causing all the trouble.

So Freeman is describing how people from marginalized groups whose ambition raises them above the typical limits set by marginalization are often ostracized from their own communities. But she has no causal explanation for why this happens. I have an explanation, the explanation is envy. And women are more likely to envy other women. Trans women are more likely to envy other trans women. 

⚠️⛔️⚠️ Oh God, am I really gonna go there? If we did this topic justice, this video would be nine centuries long. ⚠️⛔️⚠️

A lot of people assume that trans women envy cis women, and there is some truth to that. There definitely was a time in my life when I used to envy cis women for being cis women. But now I kind of just don't even allow myself to have the thought, "what if I were a cis woman?"

So in a way, because becoming a cis woman is impossible, it's unattainable, I actually envy cis women less. So trans women are more likely to envy other trans women. Because of the proximity effect, and because another trans woman represents an actual possibility of what I, a trans woman could become. She is a standard to which I can plausibly compare myself. Here's a post someone made on my own fan subreddit.

"Am I the only one who finds it hard to watch trans creators? Before I realized I was a trans woman I fucking loved people like ContraPoints, NyxFears, and other trans creators. But ever since I realized I was trans, I just get this angry resentful feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I get recommended any of these videos. I seriously loved ContraPoints, but whenever I try to watch any of her videos, I just want to scream. I have this feeling towards passing trans people in general. I feel such a hatred for them, and I don't know why. Am I just a toxic person?"

Well sweetie, you're not a toxic person. At least not any worse than anyone else, it's just that human nature is a toxic person. And that "angry resentful feeling in the pit of your stomach" that "makes you want to scream" and "feel such a hatred" has a name. And the name is envy.

I actually admire the person who wrote this post because they're doing the best that any of us can do really, which is noticing the feeling without endorsing the feeling. I wish that more people could feel things without rushing to a "rational" defense of the feeling. And isn't rationality itself often simply the attempt to make our feelings contagious? Sometimes people have no self-awareness about it at all. 

For example there's a certain kind of, boomer transsexual who complains that "when I transitioned I had to go through rigorous medical gatekeeping, but kids these days just waltz on in and walk out with hormones." It's intergenerational envy, trans edition. "It was hard for me, so it should be hard for everyone." Like the student debt debate. "If I can't have it, no one can". And look, I do have sympathy and admiration for older trans people. Like, being trans in 2021 is already the maximum level of adversity that I can handle. I cannot imagine how hard it was to do this in the '80s. 🏳️‍⚧️

However, the pain of envy is not a valid argument. Envy is not sacred rage. And the malignant demands of envious people should be ignored. God this community. The constant competition, the envy, the cringing. It makes it really hard to get along with other trans people, oh speaking of which– 

🏳️‍🌈🔔🔔🔔🏳️‍🌈 Gay tangent everybody, gay tangent! 🏳️‍🌈🔔🔔🔔🏳️‍🌈

Envy presents kind of a unique problem to same-sex attracted people, because of the increased risk of envying the very people you're attracted to.

"i wanna f*** the ones i envy i envyyyyyyy."  - Lil Nas X

You know it's the classic "do I want you, or do I want to be you" problem. I've heard feminine queer women say they could never date another femme, because they're worried they would just end up envying her. So dating masculine women solves that problem, because having separate roles, separate aesthetics, separate categories, helps to avert proximity envy between partners.

Unfortunately, I am not that smart. Basically I am attracted to femininity, but I also want to embody a kind of feminine archetype myself. I'm not masculine and I don't want to be. You know I used to think I'd only want to date another trans woman because of the mutual understanding, but I've kind of realized that at this point it may actually be more psychologically healthy for me to open up to dating cis women. I used to not want to do that because I was afraid it would make me feel like a man, but at this point, honestly, just be a man. 

Whatever, it's fine. 🙃 🥃

As a drag queen once said "I'm more of a man than you'll ever be, and more of a woman than you'll ever have." Yes gawd.

I think at a distance, it's okay to indulge the attraction/emulation ambiguity. But if you want to actually have a relationship with someone, 👏 you 👏 have 👏 to 👏 make 👏 up 👏 your 👏 mind, that you desire this woman and you do not want to be her. Because think about it from the other perspective, what could be less attractive than someone who literally wants to be you? "Teacher, make her stop copying me". 😠

Like as much as I joke every episode about how Buffalo Bill is an iconique trans legend, you don't want to date that bitch. Imagine trying to date Eve from "All About Eve." Pass. Hard pass. 

So if you're a queer woman, or a queer anything honestly, and you find yourself envying your partner, my advice is stop overthinking a good situation. An enviable woman wanted to be with you. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the clout. I get it though, it's complicated. You know we're all supposed to proudly affirm what we truly desire, but how do you know what you truly desire? Do I want mommy, or do I wanna be the mommy? Yes. Just yes. 😳

Anyway, let's go back to talking about Sigmund Freud.

Part V

Do I look okay? Is my head on straight? 

So, we keep running into this avoidance of the word "envy". And people especially cannot seem to notice when they themselves are feeling envious. Like that person who puzzled over the "angry resentful feeling in the pit of their stomach" without being able to name what they were feeling. There's two reasons why people are usually in denial about their own envy: one is guilt and the other is shame. Shame! 🥺

Shame because admitting to yourself that you envy someone implies that you feel inferior to them, which is shameful. It wounds the ego. And guilt because envy is malicious. If you envy someone you may feel angry and miserable about their success and good fortune, and you may wish to see them ruined or brought down.

That's cruel and anti-social. It goes against most ideas of morality, and it's a thought that's usually not socially acceptable to admit. So envy is shameful, guilty, and socially unacceptable. And we deal with that by suppressing it from our awareness. But it is still there, and in order to maintain the denial, we have to convince ourselves that this angry resentful feeling in the pit of our stomach is actually something else.

Think about how in "Spongebob", Squidward shows contempt for Spongebob's childishness, for blowing bubbles, for having fun at work. When in fact, Squidward envies Spongebob's uninhibited joy and intuitive creativity. But he can't allow himself to have the thought that he envies Spongebob, because that would mean recognizing the intolerably shameful truth that he feels inferior to Spongebob. So what he does instead is convince himself that what he really is, is a refined sophisticate, scoffing at this childish fool.

"How did I ever get surrounded by such loser neighbors."

We could call this "envy-to-contempt sublimation". Sublimation is a psychoanalytic term which means that you transform an ego-wounding feeling, or socially unacceptable longing into something more ego-flattering or socially acceptable. 

So the classic example used by Freud is the transformation of sexual urges, of erotic energy into creative expression. It's like the founder of the no-fap movement, Lady Gaga once said: 

"I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from me through my ****" 

So according to Freud, the vast majority of erotic longings can never be fulfilled. Tell me about it Sigmund. Ugh, misery. 😞

But there's a positive side to this, supposedly, which is that you can sublimate your erotic longings into a more socially acceptable productivity. So, you know instead of flicking the bean, maybe you write novels about thirsty vampires, or for that matter philosophical treatises about the will to power. Oh we'll get to you. Freud thought that civilization itself is built at the cost of our instincts, most of which we have to sacrifice to live in a society. So like erotic impulses, I think envy can be sublimated, which is what's happening when it becomes contempt.

Another example is the blog McMansion Hell, which makes fun of the tasteless architecture of suburban ostentatious trash. I would argue that part of the fun of this blog is the pleasure and relief of looking down at the rich. Because looking enviously up at the rich is painful, it makes you feel inferior. And a way to alleviate that pain is to sublimate envy, and pretend that you're an aristocratic aesthete scoffing at the vulgar taste of the arriviste.

These flying buttresses are in extremely poor taste. 🧐

Another example is shit-talking plastic surgery. I once heard a trans woman say "at least I don't look like a botched sex doll!" The subtext is, there's a certain kind of trans woman influencer who lives in LA and has had a lot of cosmetic surgery to achieve a doll-like aesthetic. But it costs a lot of money to look like this, and a lot of trans women can't afford surgeries that they want. And one way to cope with frustrated desire is to convince yourself that the thing that's out of reach, is not worth having anyway. See also the discourse on Twitter about how "passing is transphobic".

There's an ancient Greek fable where a fox wants some grapes but he can't reach the vine, so he walks away bitterly and says, "well the grapes are transphobic anyway."

The cisgender version of this is maybe the "not like other girls" meme, which is classic envy-to-contempt sublimation. The trope is usually that "other girls are popular and slutty, they have fake tans and fake nails, they like partying and makeup and stupid music for idiots. But I'm quirky and real. I listen to Pink Floyd, and read books, and eat lots of pizza late at night alone and sad".

There's usually a subtext of anxiety about inferiority, the "other girls" being more socially accepted, feminine, and put together. A lot of times "the other girls" don't even exist right, they're a media construct of idealized womanhood. Like where are these "other girls" who've never eaten pizza and enjoy wearing makeup at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning?

Are they between the sofa cushions? Did you put them in with the other laundry? Are the other girls in the room with us right now?

So the feeling of inferiority toward "the other girls" is reframed as a kind of contemptuous hipster superiority, which is really just an ego-defensive persona of resentment. Like Janis in "Mean Girls". She's not even really a lesbian, she's Lebanese. Regina got confused. And then she dances with a boy at the end, and is readmitted into girlhood. Thank you for that Tina Fey, that's very helpful. 😔Great.

Another way we can reframe feelings of envious inferiority is by transforming them into moral superiority. Moral superiority often being the refuge of people with nothing better to feel superior about. We don't have to feel guilty or ashamed of envy if we convince ourselves that what we're actually experiencing is "justified", "legitimate" hatred. So for example think of the morality around sexuality.

Part 69: Sluts ♋️

Yeah what are you gonna do about it? Cancel me? Why does everyone hate sluts so much? Sluts never did nothing wrong to nobody.

Open sexual promiscuity is in a way analogous to opulence. You're conspicuously enjoying something that other people want, and might not be able to get. Many cultures have norms about modesty, for example expecting women to cover their hair in public. This is usually explained as prophylaxis against male lust, but I wonder if it also serves to prevent a more generalized envy, which female beauty has a way of attracting. 

Men often slut-shame because they want to control female sexuality. And by female sexuality, I do mean male sexuality. Because often what they're really struggling to control is their own desire. But slut-shaming is also done pretty viciously by women to each other. And that's a complicated thing, it's more than just envy. Sometimes it comes from a sense that a woman who's having casual sex with a lot of men, is compromising the collective sex-withholding power of the group. Almost like she's crossing a picket line. 🪧

But there's also sometimes resentment, that a woman who's showing skin is using her body to get "unearned" attention. And that smells like envy to me, "I don't use my body to get attention, so no one should!" 

The repressed feeling is: "maybe I'm a little jealous that she's getting all this attention by posting thirst traps". But you don't think that, you think: "I am above this. Because I am chaste. I have class. I am a feminist." I would also suggest accusing her of "pandering to the male gaze", that's of course the feminist way of calling someone a lowdown hoebag skank. 💅

So again we have envy-to-contempt sublimation, and often the contempt is "moral", "virtuous". The psychological need to convince ourselves that envy is morality, can become so strong that we actually start inventing things to be outraged about. Take for instance the tendency to imagine that the wealthy and powerful are enjoying wild Satanic orgies, and indulging all the forbidden salacious pleasures that we ourselves are denied. Like QAnon, these conspiracy theorists who want us to imagine Hillary Clinton reclining in a garden of earthly delights sampling the pleasures of ephebes.

Live laugh love that for her.

Envy is very imaginative when it comes to the hedonistic extravagance of the envied. Let's talk about Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who was guillotined by the Revolution. If you know one thing about Marie Antoinette, it's probably that when she heard about a famine where the people had no bread, she infamously responded: "Let them eat cake." 🎂

What an evil bitch. How could she say that? Well, she didn't. She never said it, it's a lie. The phrase "let them eat cake" originally "let them eat brioches", first appeared in Rousseau's Confessions. Written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years old. Rousseau attributed the line to "a great princess". 

Probably, no one ever said this. It's kind of like how the most famous photo of Paris Hilton is the one where she's wearing a "Stop Being Poor" t-shirt. What an evil bitch. How could she wear that? Well, she didn't. It's photoshopped, the actual shirt said "Stop Being Desperate". Envy likes to fabricate the diabolical crimes of its enemies, I assume to complement their hedonistic extravagance. I mean what is a Disney villain, if not an opulent homosexual seen through the eyes of the envious?

I'm gonna trying lowering the ISO cause it's so f*cking bright in here now. What if I get another light over here? That's what this channel is really about, one biological female's quest to create a harmonious color story.

In the years leading up to and during the French revolution, Marie Antoinette was constantly defamed in these sleazy tabloids called "Libelles". It's the same root as the English word "libel". The often pornographic Libelles depicted the queen as a bisexual demon, who was constantly having drunken orgies and sexually manipulating everyone around her. All of which is very interesting, but none of which is true. The historian Robert Darnton called it an  "avalanche of defamation" that "has no parallel in the history of vilification".

This woman took the blame, the moral blame, for the structural failings of a broken economic system. And by the time she was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1793, the actual person Marie Antoinette had long ago been overshadowed by the libelous caricature of her. Now there was maybe one good reason for executing the former queen. Which is that the legitimacy of your new republic is a little more secure when you don't have living monarchs hanging around. Someone better tell the English.

But the problem with that reasoning, is it has nothing to do with whether or not the Queen "deserved" to die. And beheading a recently widowed mother of two in front of a jeering crowd for political expediency, might weigh a little heavy on the conscience. So the Revolution had to convince themselves that the former queen "deserved it". Which was pretty easy after decades of again, false and defamatory gossip. 

In her biography of Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser describes how the prison guards separated Marie from her eight-year-old son who they plied with alcohol and groomed into accusing his own mother of incestuous abuse. To justify killing Marie Antoinette they had to destroy the idea of this woman as a mother. So she was convicted of what may as well have been crimes against ethics in games journalism and sent to the guillotine, where her last words were "sorry" to the executioner for stepping on his foot.

Uhh, women stop apologizing challenge! This is what a girlboss winning looks like.

So Marie Antoinette literally did nothing wrong, 🙆‍♀️ hey  🙅‍♀️ how 🤷‍♀️ are you. An innocent MILF was killed that day. And I for one, won't stand for it. 

So look, we have a psychological incentive to believe that people whom we envy are immoral monsters. Because then we get to label our hatred and violence towards them "justice". Cruelty generally cannot conceptualize itself as cruelty. And part of the reason for that is calling cruelty what it is, takes the fun out of it. 

It reminds me of the second best day in the history of Twitter, October 1st 2020. The day that Trump got COVID. And I'm gonna be honest, I have never felt more schadenfreude in my entire life. 🍾🎉

Well well well, if it isn't the leopards eating people's faces party having their faces eaten by leopards. 🥂

Let them eat cake.

Like Dan Savage said, it felt like Ronald Reagan got AIDS. The next day I tweeted:

"These last 24 hours have been the first time I've genuinely enjoyed Twitter in years. Because this website is good for one thing only. Reveling in the cruelest of human impulses."

And someone responded to that saying:

"Oh my god could you even be a bigger killjoy?"

But why was I being a killjoy? The tweet was about how much I was enjoying it! Well, for most people–I guess not me, but for normal people, for other girls– cruelty is only pleasurable as long as they're able to convince themselves it's something other than cruelty. "Justice served".

So again "reason", "rationality", are often the attempt to publicly communicate, to evangelize our private feelings. And morality, ethics, and justice are often put forward as the respectable public face of private envy, vindictiveness, and hatred. But is this a corruption of morality, or have we stumbled onto something darker? What if morality itself is simply the expression of some kind of sadomasochistic urge? 🧠

It's too early for this. It's literally 7 a.m. where I'm filming. I don't know how this keeps happening to me. My head gets cut off one afternoon, puts me in a philosophical mood. Next morning, I've stayed up all night and I'm still talking about the philosophes.

Part VI: Justice (Part 2)

Meow meow! 😻 

Hello again kittens. Let's talk about justice uwu. 😽

I look like a Supreme Court Justice. Sonyaa Sotomeowyor. It would actually be fierce if I wasn't, you know, if I wasn't being Nyatalie. 😼

Look, I've been seeing a lot of comments about me lately along the lines of "Natalie used to do serious academic arguments. Now she only cares about makeup". 

All right you little shits. You want book-learnin’? I'm gonna learn you so hard, I'm gonna learn you so hard you're gonna have a god damn headache in the morning. Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

Do you mind if I call you Fred? Frederick was a German philosopher who had a lot to say about envy and morality. But before we get into that, I want to say a little about his life, because it's just very funny. 

Nietzsche is famous for his concept of the Übermensch. But Frederick, sweet beautiful little Frederick, he was not what most people think of as an Übermensch. Frederick was a chronically ill, chronically in pain, nearly blind incel, who probably slept with a prostitute once and got syphilis and died. Life is funny. Sad, but funny. Ehhhhh

In the Introduction to "Beyond Good and Evil", the editor says: 

"Though he prided himself on being comfortable with women, he does not seem to have been very successful in establishing emotionally satisfying relationships with them, which is hardly surprising."

Aaaaaa! 🙀 

I love it when the introduction to a book is just a brutal roast of the author. Who wrote this? Rolf-Peter Horstmann. You're killing it Rolf. You're a savage. I adore. ❤️

Frederick's books sold a "dismal number of copies" in his lifetime:

"What emerges is a picture of a totally isolated, highly neurotic man who had to try hard to avoid thinking of himself as a complete failure."

Awww. He was also doing huge doses of opium– relatable, and writing himself prescriptions for sleeping pills using the name "Dr. Nietzsche". Dr. Nietzsche! Pretty sure I got an Xanax prescription from that guy once, behind a Dairy Queen. 💊

Nietzsche was also a failed musician and was in love with the composer Richard Wagner's wife. Awww. The virgin Nietzsche contra the chad Wagner, you beta cuck. 👅

Can we all agree that cat-girl Nietzsche is by far the most cursed thing I've ever done?

I just wanna mom this guy, honestly. I don't even care that he's a misogynist, his misogyny is simply too sad to be offended by. You know I think it's interesting that a person this pathetic, can also be a genius whose name will never die. He's someone who had a lot of reason to be envious and self-pitying, but his philosophy couldn't be more against that. And, as a person of pathetic experience myself, that is unironically kind of inspiring to me. 

So let's go in. In his book "On the Genealogy of Morality", Frederick wants to explain the origin of the concepts of good and evil.

"Under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing?"

Hang on, my food's here. That's right, you're getting a mukbang sweetie. Did you think I was gonna sit at this giant table and not be eating something? This video's been going on more than an hour, so I assume you guys are drunk by now, and we're just kind of hanging out at this point. You guys can't even see. Well, here, I've got a bunch of sushi and it's my mission to eat all of this while summarizing the entire life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trisha Paytas, Nikocado, consider this a challenge. 🍣

So Friedrich argues that "good" and "bad"– not yet good and evil that's different, we'll get to that– but "good" and "bad" were originally the self-affirming values of people with power. So to be good meant to be powerful, strong, beautiful, healthy. And to be bad meant to be weak, sick, common, ugly. 👄🍣

And Frederick supports this speculation with etymology. So in a lot of languages the word that means "morally good" or "spiritually noble", originally meant noble in the sense of aristocratic, the propertied class. Like in Buddhism the "arya satyani", that's Sanskrit for "noble truths". "Arya" means noble, and arya is used to mean spiritually noble but earlier it meant the aristocracy, the rich. And originally it was just the name that a culture in Northern India gave themselves, the Aryans. This was later misunderstood by Europeans, who wrongly thought that "Aryan" was a race.

Oops. Goddammit. Goddammit kids. Can we not?

Frederick traces the origin of the German word "gut" or English "good" to the name of the Goths. No not those Goths, the Scandinavian people who invaded Europe. Frederick calls them "the blond beasts of prey".

I like to stalk my prey in the small hours of the night, nyaa. 😸

The German word "schlecht" which means bad, is related to "schlicht" which means "plain, simple," originally "common, low" not aristocratic, not noble. So "good" and "bad" were originally the values of warrior aristocrats who were like Homeric heroes celebrating themselves.

And Frederick calls their value system "Master Morality": this glorification of combat, feasting, athleticism, sexual conquest, beauty. These things were called "good." And their opposites: weakness, impotence, ugliness, were called bad. The ancient nobles worshiped noble gods who acted like them and shared their values.

I mean if I created a personal goddess, I think you all know what animal that would be. Me and the ancient Egyptians, on the same page. 😻

So for example Roman warriors could worship Mars, the god of war. And it was like they were worshiping themselves. They were dumb jocks worshiping dumb jock gods. Well, good for them. But what about the people who got shoved into lockers?

Well… Friedrich's example, and this is gonna create some misunderstandings later, but his example is the Jews, who were colonized by the Romans in Judea. And it's certainly not that the Jews didn't try to revolt, oh they did. Multiple times. But for several centuries the Romans were just too powerful, no one could stop them.

So the question is, what happens psychologically to people who are oppressed and who lack the power to overthrow the oppressor? Well in that case frustrated vindictiveness builds over time to become this deep bitterness that Nietzsche gives the French name, "ressentiment". Resentment in English. 

Oui. Eh... eh… Oui. Absolument. Naturellement. I don't speak French, I just enjoy making vaguely French noises. Ment, bas, quatre, eh, eh oui. 🇫🇷

I don't like the English but I like the French even less. Because they're always dressed so well, and they speak a sexier language than me. Stop it!!! This is your final warning comprendez-vous? Good wine though, I'll give them that. 🍷

So there's a German word "neid", which means envy. So why is Frederick using this French term, ressentiment? 

What's going on Frederick? Why are you speaking French? Are you nervous? Are you trying to impress me?

Nietzsche must have said ressentiment because he thought it was something different than envy. I think the difference is resentment– and I'm just gonna use the English word so I don't sound like an asshole–  resentment is born not just of wanting what someone has, but of a permanent frustration of the desire for revenge. It's born of weakness, inability to get revenge.

Now revenge itself implies weakness, at least a temporary weakness. We say "revenge is best served cold", but actually, revenge is only served cold. If it's served hot, if someone slaps you and you slap them back immediately, that's retaliation not revenge. Revenge is only a possibility when you can't retaliate immediately, so you become vindictive, you start plotting and scheming. But if you're too weak, too impotent to have any hope of revenge, then you become resentful. So Nietzsche's argument is that a person who's too weak to get material revenge, can instead get psychological revenge by creating a new morality. In Frederick's words: 

"The beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values".

This is a little high concept for a mukbang, isn't it? What are you doing Frederick?

So while master morality says that "good" is: power, riches, health, strength, and "bad" is the opposite; slave morality, the morality of resentment says "blessed are the poor, the meek, the sick, the powerless". This is the "good" of slave morality, and its opposite is not the "bad" but a new concept, the "evil." And what is evil? Well, everything that master morality says is good. Power. Wealth. Conquest. Sexual satisfaction. 🐈

He's talking about Christianity here, he's not talking about Judaism. But Frederick thinks of Christianity as the spiritual revenge of the Jews against the Romans, an inversion of the Empire's values. But he also thinks that slave morality is fundamentally dishonest, it's like the fox and the grapes. 

"Not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness" - Nietzsche

Slave morality says that weakness is righteous. Submission to people you hate is called "obedience", having to wait is called "patience." Inability to satisfy sexual desire is called "chastity", "purity", and so on. And while master morality is born of saying yes to yourself, as a powerful "noble beast of prey"; slave morality is born of saying no to the master and everything he has that you can't.

I like to have my belly rubbed. Scratch my back above my tail, please. 😺

I'm gonna put the rest of the fish away because it's getting warm and I'm full. This has not been a successful mukbang. It turns out that it's actually very difficult to do a mukbang while talking, I should've thought this through a little harder.

So slave morality is born of a repressed desire for revenge, but that desire for revenge never completely disappears. It's there for example in the Christian idea of the Last Judgment. No need to take revenge against the wicked my sheep. God will do that for us. And in the meantime, being weak is good, actually. 😇

I find this book thrilling to read honestly, and I am not easily thrilled, especially not by philosophers. I think this book in particular gets me because especially if you were raised Christian, this is so the opposite of everything you were ever taught to believe that it almost feels like, dirty.

Should I be reading this? Is this allowed? 😳

Cause even if you're not religious, most of us still agree with a lot of Christian morality. Like yeah Jesus was a good guy, blessed are the meek, sure. But then Frederick comes along and he's like, hmmm morality is just a cope for frustrated vindictiveness. And you're like, I need to lie down, where's my smelling salts? 😹

But wait, there's more! This gets even darker. Nietzsche thinks that over the last two millennia of European history, slave morality has triumphed. St. Paul made Christianity marketable, the emperor Constantine converted. And by the Middle Ages, even kings and aristocrats were kneeling down not to powerful warrior gods made in their own image, but to a god that was weak, suffering, victimized, oppressed. Ehhhh.

So by the 19th century, slave morality had become the only morality. And it's not just Christians either, the secular version of these values became socialism, anarchism. About freethinkers and atheists, Nietzsche has this to say:

"We loathe the Church, not its poison … Apart from the Church, we too love the poison." 

Okay "the poison", what is "the poison"? Well, Frederick thinks that resentment poisons the mind and turns humans against our own natural instincts. Not just against aggression, but against sexuality, against ambition, against power, against life itself.

And there's two possible outcomes of this. One, is that resentment becomes a political movement. The "conspiracy of those who suffer", the tyranny of the herd, the revolution that eats itself. 

"'Only we are good and just' is what they say, as though health, success, strength, pride and the feeling of power were in themselves depravities for which penance, bitter penance will one day be exacted… Among them we find plenty of vengeance-seekers disguised as judges, with the word justice continually in their mouth like poisonous spittle" - Nietzsche

So you get the mentality of a hyper-moralistic resentment mob, which I'm sure we're all familiar with. The other outcome is that this moralism turns inward and attacks the individual conscience, producing asceticism, self-denial, guilt.

Because slave morality condemns not only the external beasts of prey who are oppressing us, but also the beast of prey within. Our own animal instincts, what Christianity calls "sin". So Frederick thinks modern humans have become "sick", we hate ourselves, we hate our own nature, we hate life itself.

I mean, is he wrong? You see a girlboss winning, I only see the will to power. Frederick thinks of modern men as once-proud wildcats who've become domesticated house pets, at the cost of everything great in the human spirit. 

That's very valid Frederick. That's super hecking valid.

So look I've been pretty positive about Nietzsche so far, but I do have a couple critiques I want to say. One is that Friedrich's associating "slave morality" with the Jews, is very irresponsible. Even though he didn't intend to be anti-Semitic and even though he was outspoken against anti-Semitism in his own time, when you keep referring to the Christian values that you're critiquing as "Jewish hatred" and "Jewish revenge", some people might get the wrong idea. And some people did, Frederick. Like your dumbass sister Elizabeth Nietzsche, who became a literal alternative-ethno-identitarian– goddamn it Liz!

Kind of goth goals though? Yes that kind of goth, you're right this time.

My other critique is that it doesn't seem to have occurred to Frederick, that genuinely caring about other people is an option. Like not because caring about other people is repressing your true selfish nature, but just because caring about other people is part of your nature. And isn't it? Isn't caring about other people also in our nature?

I do think that most of what Nietzsche says about resentment accurately describes a very real thing. But it's not the only thing. There is genuine care and love in this world, I've been told, I've heard rumors. And I'm even gonna go so far as to say #NotAllChristians. ✝️

Christ I'm defending the Christians, what is this channel coming to?

There are Christians, maybe not most, but still some, for whom love and forgiveness are genuine experiences and not just some kind of twisted, impotent, passive-aggressive vengeance. Where I agree with Nietzsche and with Freud, is I do think a lot of the emotional foundation of "justice" and "morality" is retribution, envy, or some combination of the two. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way. There's a famous Martin Luther King quote responding to Nietzsche:

"What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." 

So Reverend King concedes to Nietzsche that to simply call power "evil" is a sickness– "anemic". But there still needs to be some kind of emotional or spiritual force that keeps humanity from tearing itself apart. And maybe something like this Christian idea of love for humanity is the missing piece. Because without something like that, I just see retribution and envy snowballing into human self-destruction. And I hate that for us. It's not very sliving of us. Do you guys know about sliving? Do you even subscribe to Paris Hilton's YouTube channel? She doesn't have as many subscribers as I do, but you know, I try to support smaller creators. 😏

"Sliving is basically 'slaying' and 'living our best life' into one word. It's the new 'that's hot.'"

Maybe I'll do a video about love, when I'm in a better mood. So for now… well, let's put it this way: God is dead and we have killed him, nyaa. Sliving! 😸

Part VII

Okay I'm moisturized, I'm primed, I've proven my academic credentials, now it's time to do my makeup. That's right children, I'm going full Bailey Sarian. I'm going full suspish. 💄

So I guess I should say something about the political implications of all this, since uhh I guess this channel is about politics? Sometimes I have to read my own Wikipedia article to remember what I'm doing with my life.

So this morality of resentment, of impotence and permanently frustrated revenge, judges that power is evil.

I don't use foundation, I just use concealer. I know that's like not how you're supposed to do makeup, but I don't need to be good at makeup, okay, I have a million subscribers on YouTube. I don't need to be good.

There was a New York Times article about young women's attitudes toward political ambition, and one of the women who was interviewed said: 

"As a white woman, I know I have unearned privilege, so am I the best person to be in leadership?"

Uhhh… yes. Yes you are. Because we need leaders like you who are capable of questioning the legitimacy of their own authority. Otherwise we're gonna be stuck with another blond beast of prey. And of course it's good to be aware of your privilege, especially as a leader. But let's not be so self-effacing that we efface ourselves off the face of the earth. 

This is the self-sabotage of resentment values. If you think that power is evil, then you've given up on the ambition to acquire any power; which virtually guarantees your political irrelevance, since like MLK said, you have to at least have some power to implement the demands of justice. Remember what incels call "taking the Black Pill", this conviction that the reason you don't have a girlfriend is just that you're genetically undesirable. There's nothing you can do to change it, and I guess women are just too shallow to be attracted to all the amazing hatred and spite that festers in your heart. 

For a lot of blackpilled incels it seems like there is only one thing left in life that they enjoy, which is simply the pleasure of complaining, of moaning in pain. It reminds me of a comment from Dostoevsky's second-most horrible protagonist. 

"Even in toothache there is enjoyment, in that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point."

The moan is a protest against the meaninglessness of pain. And part of the satisfaction of moaning is inflicting your pain on other people. This kind of malignant moaning, it's kind of the opposite of music. Because a lot of music, like blues, is benevolent moaning that transforms pain into pleasure. I mean that's what blues is all about. "My woman don't love me no more, but I know her sister will". You know, optimism. 

I think a lot of incel discourse is really just malignant moaning. Right, it's not an attempt to diagnose or solve any problem, it's just a contagious expression of misery. A moan of pain that masquerades as a political agenda. "Sexual Marxism" they call it, the redistribution of sex, state-mandated GFs. That's very valid.

Of course they don't actually expect any of this to happen. That's not the point. So, incels are kind of a universal punching bag online, it's very easy to point and laugh at them. But what's harder is to look in the mirror and notice how these exact same tendencies are rampant in our own communities.

So the incel Black Pill is just one instance of what I call an "ideology of resentment", a discourse that outwardly appears like moral or political critique, but which on examination is mainly just a resentful moan. The goal of resentment politics is not to improve conditions. In fact, the resentful person is full of contempt for any "morally compromised sellouts" who are trying to enact plausible reforms. They don't want victory, they don't want power, they want to endlessly "critique" power. Because for them, "critique" is an important psychological defense against feeling impotent. Scheler described it this way:

"It is peculiar to ‘ressentiment criticism’ that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism."

What am I gonna do with my eyes? I think a pink kind of look. We've been doing a lot of pink looks, I just love that hay fever look. 👁👄👁

As a general rule, the more radical a political community claims to be, the more likely it is to be a community of resentment. Self-styled radicals will tell you, "superficial surface reforms do not interest us. The problem must be critiqued at its root". And then the root turns out to be this universal, all-encompassing evil right? Society itself, the system, the machine. A resentment ideologue always imagines himself engaged in a kind of Satanic revolt against an omnipotent, omnipresent enemy. 

Okay, I just need to do makeup for a second. It's harder than it looks to be a makeup vlogger, it's hard to talk while doing this. 

And nothing short of total revolution counts as any sort of victory whatsoever. "We have to dismantle the entire system! Burn it all down!" I guess it's pedestrian to point out that this is the revolutionary utopian equivalent of Christians awaiting the Last Judgment. Our Kingdom is coming comrades! 😇

Often the appeal of utopian ideology is similar to religion. It's not about healthcare, higher wages, relief from police violence. Those are actual goals that could be demanded, worked for, and achieved. Utopian ideology instead promises relief from some general malaise, "alienation". And so ironically it can have the same opiate effect that Marx ascribed to religion, but "release from the general anguish of human existence" is not a political goal. 

There's been many revolutions in the last few centuries, and so far zero utopias. Resentment, envy, and hunger for that matter are not satiated by the downfall of the old regime. When the people have no bread, they eat the rich. And when the rich are gone, they eat each other. And because of the proximity effect, envy may actually increase after the revolution. You may be more envious of a favored comrade, a successful citoyent– oui, a kulak, than you ever were of the aristocrats. So envy turns paranoid and imaginative in revolutionary moments, it gets sublimated into morality and the accusations start flying. “That citizen is conspiring against the revolution! That peasant is hoarding grain!”

So the guillotine starts slicing thousands of heads off, the gulags fill up. Or an authoritarian strongman takes over only to announce another revolution two decades later. The things people will do to stay relevant, honestly. And for what? What long-term egalitarian utopia results? Socialism with Chinese characteristics?

So look, I do understand that sometimes you just have to do a revolution. And if I'd been there in 1789, I'm sure I'd be storming the Bastille myself. But I just wish we could stop being so doe-eyed about it. Revolution is a bloody nightmare that happens because society is collapsing and people are desperate. At worst, revolution is nothing more than a violent "day of retribution", and at best it lays the groundwork for future incremental progress. But it will never usher in utopia, nor is it the antidote to a vague sense of unease, which, I'm sorry to report, is simply the resting state of an unsedated human mind. 😣

Now I'm not saying, as some conservatives do, that all leftist or all egalitarian politics is born of envy. No, this is a specific subtype. There are plenty of reasons other than envy or fear of envy, to oppose an economic distribution where some people have billions of dollars while other people are dying because they can't afford insulin. Objectively, that is not an efficient use of resources to promote human wellbeing. And personally, I just don't want to live in a country where people are dying because they can't afford medicine. And I'm willing to pay however many taxes it takes for that not to happen. 

So while I'm putting down straw-man versions of my argument, I'm also not saying "oh let's all just stop being envious", no, that's impossible. I think envy is like libido, it's a basic force of human nature that's more or less unstoppable. But with the right leadership I think that envy can potentially be sublimated, or redirected into something more constructive. Because raw envy is a very bad basis for egalitarian politics. It often targets the wrong people like millionaires instead of billionaires, and eventually it turns the revolution against itself and you get the circular firing squad, the self-cannibalism. 

The problem I see on the left today is that without any genuine political outlet, resentment mostly manifests as morality, morality itself being a way to vent envious aggression and vindictiveness. On the left we claim to be so impersonal right, we're all about structural analysis, the material conditions, systems of power, intersectional identity hierarchies. But if you look at what people actually spend their time doing here, it's all this obsessive moral policing. 

I wonder if because leftists can't seem to win on any major political stage we feel disempowered, and so this moral fanaticism is a psychological substitute. Like with Marie Antoinette, it's easier to blame people than systems. Also, structural analysis is very boring and destroying people with gossip is extremely entertaining. This obsessive moral policing also gets turned inward, and becomes leftist guilt. You know this useless, internalized scolding. 

I think I'm done with my makeup. What do we think? Leave a comment. I'm always hesitant to do anything about skin care, since last time I did skin care I was critiqued by Hyram. So I am gonna spray my face a couple times with this Tatcha Skin Mist, if that's okay with Hyram. It feels good to finally address this feud, clear the air. 💦

I look a lot better with makeup. I don't wanna say that I don't have natural beauty, it's just that it's very much enhanced by painting like a different face on top of my face. But hey, at least this way, I've kind of earned it, you know? Because it's my skill. 😊

There's a podcast called "Guilty Feminist" that's been running for years. I haven't listened in a while but in the early episodes they'd bring on these women who'd confess their feminist sins. You know: "Hi my name is Amber. I'm a feminist, but I enjoy being choked in bed". It's hard being a woman. Not only are you being choked, you also feel guilty about it. 

The same moral hand-wringing happens with body positivity. When you make loving your body into a moral imperative, not only are you still going to hate your body, but now you're also going to feel guilty about hating your body because it makes you a bad feminist. So there was one problem, and now there's two problems. Thanks morality! That's very helpful. 

Now I want to take a moment to acknowledge that a lot of conservatives have made some version of the argument I'm making in this video. For example Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia have argued that academic postmodernists are motivated by resentment. The argument is that deconstructionist literary theory is a kind of envious vengeance against the beauty and virtuosity of canonical Great Art. And yeah there's probably some truth to that, a lot of academics are failed artists– but I was even more manque than that. 

I've noticed that working-class non-academic socialists do tend to be more productive and more self-advancing, involved in unionizing or organizing. Whereas, it's usually people who went to college– presumably because they had middle-class ambitions at some point, but whose middle class ambitions have failed; who become the great "critiquers" of capital. I can tell you from experience that when I was eating Chef Boyardee over my master's degree, that's when I was most likely to say things like:

"According to Antonio Gramsci, in the logic of late-stage capitalism the culturally hegemonic neoliberal ideology manufactures the consent of the subaltern." 

Uhh so point taken. But some conservatives take this argument way too far, and try to argue that the entire left is nothing but a coalition of resentment. Like there's a video on YouTube of the philosophy professor Stephen Hicks doing a version of the postmodernism is resentment argument. And in the comments section there's a bunch of people saying "this describes Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the Democrats". Does it though? 

I mean any political movement is gonna have people in it who have resentment poisoning. But Black Lives Matter at its core is about the right not to be murdered by police. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" is an affirmation of the value of Black life. So that seems like something even Nietzsche would approve of. Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was inspired by Nietzsche to create the slogan "All Power to the People" 

"When we coined the expression ‘All power to the people’, we had in mind emphasizing the word "power" for we recognize that the will to power is the basic drive of man. But it is incorrect to seek power over people. We have been subjected to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism for hundreds of years; and the Black community has its will to power also. What we seek, however, is not power over people, but the power of control of our own destiny."

That to me is a role model for how to do "identity politics" without centering resentment. It's instead an affirmation of self-determination and self-respect. Like Nietzsche would say it's saying yes to yourself. Whereas if your whole political project is defined in the negative, then you’re allowing yourself to be defined by your enemies. 

I find feminism is prone to this, where even and in fact especially the most radical feminists cannot seem to escape this resentful consciousness of being the second sex, and defining themselves against men. Earlier I mentioned Andrea Dworkin in a positive way. She's the most radical of radical feminists, and my first impulse is actually to defend her because she's very widely hated. And most of the people who hate her, hate a caricature. Like in that Stephen Hicks video, Hicks summarizes Dworkin as:

"Calling all heterosexual males rapists."

Literally in the preface to her most famous book, Dworkin says:

"If one's sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape?"

Listen Hicks, I get that you're a full professor and I'm just a makeup vlogger. But my gut feeling on this one is before criticizing a book, maybe read the book. Just a thought. Get it together prof, you're being owned online by a makeup vlogger. I mean there's no shame in that, it happens to me all the time. 💅

That being said, I do think that Hicks is coincidentally "correct" that Dworkin is a theorist of resentment. What Dworkin does say in this book is arguably even more bleak than what is falsely attributed to her. The book is called "Intercourse." She wrote a book called "Intercourse." Imagine writing a book called "Intercourse." I can actually easily imagine that nevermind.

So this is an argument about the meaning of sex. Penetration, to be specific. Dworkin argues that penetration expresses domination, invasion, occupation, possession, contempt, degradation. So it's against the Freudian male castration anxiety interpretation, where it's a fear of being devoured by the woman. Imagine being afraid of that, imagine being afraid of that. 

I'm gonna get a facelift some day and I'm gonna look like this. 😗 I'm perfect. 

I certainly don't agree with everything she says, but isn't Dworkin closer to the truth here? Closer than Freud anyway. You know, think about what men typically say to women during the act. Do they say, "help, I'm being devoured!" Never heard that one, have you? No, usually it's more along the lines of "you like that don't you, you little…" et cetera. 

And of course you can eroticize being subjugated and degraded, and you can enjoy it. And I think Dworkin would argue that most women do eroticize subjugation because they're taught to. But enjoying it, she'd have to say, doesn't change the meaning of what's happening. So I think Dworkin says some things that are very true, and some things that are off the fucking rails. Where she loses me is where she starts getting blackpilled. And this book, this is the feminist blackpill. It is 250 pages of hopeless misery and rage. She says:

“Male-dominant gender hierarchy, seems immune to reform. This may be because intercourse itself is immune to reform.” 

Uhh okay, so women will never be free until men stop putting the P in the V. We can dream Andrea, we can dream. Like most ideology of resentment, this book is totally dismissive of any plausible reforms that might actually improve the situation of women. Instead preferring to wallow in the endless violence, filth, and abjection of it all. I also think it's symptomatic that Dworkin identifies as a lesbian, but in that second-wave "political" way. Quoting from the forward: 

"To Dworkin it was a badge of rebellion against the patriarchy. In 30-plus years of knowing her, I've never heard of a single romance with a woman, not one." 

This is not surprising to me, from the author of 250 page book about sex that not once pauses to even imagine the possibility of intimacy between women. Because it's not a lesbianism that’s about saying yes to women, it's a lesbianism that’s about saying no to men. You know people think that lesbians are the biggest man-haters. But I don't think that's true, I think lesbians just don't think about men that much. 

The only men I think about are Fred Nietzsche and uh… Oedipus the King.

It's straight women who are usually the real man-haters, cause they're stuck with this. And love is closer to hatred than neutrality. So what does Andrea Dworkin actually want? What would she say yes to, if she said yes to anything? Sometimes women have trouble saying what they want, because no one ever told them they could. Romance. That's what Joan Didion said was the real desire of the women's movement. Joan Didion of course, being not like other girls. Dworkin offers occasional glimpses of a positive desire:

“Despite all efforts to socialize women to want intercourse, women still want a more diffuse and tender sensuality that involves the whole body and a polymorphous tenderness.”

That does sound nice. I'm so lonely. I think it's a bit bold to speak for all women though. Like, there are definitely women who, uh, they don't make love, Anastasia. They f***. Hard. 

I'm really sleepy, and this bed right behind me just looks so nice. Get in here right now. What if I just go to sleep, and then wake up and then just record the rest of the video after I wake up? I don't wanna do it now. I'll get Pikachu, that'll make this easier. Isn't it better for me to have a friend? Pikachu is the most adorable Pokemon. Why? Because he's the yellowest. Name one thing more yellow than Pikachu. You can't name any, you can't think of anything. 

So if diffuse and tender sensuality is what you want, then just say that. Is that what you want, Pikachu? I bet it is. And Dworkin did get married, to a gay man. So I guess she found what she wanted. Lucky. Envying Andrea Dworkin, is that really what we've sunk to around here? 

You know, I've been noticing "the poison" creeping into my mind lately. I know this isn't very original, but I had a bad year. You know I fell in love with my best friend like a gay idiot, got my heart comprehensively broken, and then COVID hit and gave me a year of solitude to spiral deeper into a hell of my own making. 💔

You know I stopped saying yes to life, and started saying yes to chasing the dragon. By which I mean playing "Spyro the Dragon", one of the greatest appropriate for all ages video games of all time. Look at him goooooo.

I catch myself having bitter spinster thoughts. “It's because I'm trans. It's because I'm gay. That's why I'll die alone”. Yeah that's the reason I'm alone, definitely not because I don't leave the house. See, I am not immune to incel-tier brain poisoning. And you really can use political theorizing as an excuse not to fix your life. “Society did this to me. A transphobic society made me hate myself”. Well, yeah, that's true. But at a certain point, you have to take responsibility for your own mind, and decide to stop being an accomplice in your own annihilation. Since we keep referencing "Paradise Lost": 

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 

Yes gawd. So, I ask myself, what kind of mind do I want to be? Do I want to obsess over what I lack? Concede society's judgment of my inferiority? Become a self-pitying, self-hating, envious, resentful little nothing? Or, do I want to get off the goddamn floor, stop chasing the dragon, and say yes to life? 

The answer of course, is that I long to return to the sweet womb of my dark mother. But we're not gonna do that, because there's plenty of time to numb the pain after you die. 

The sweet embrace of death is the darkest mother of all. 💀

Also, nothing is less attractive than an envious, resentful, self-pitying person. It's beyond a personality flaw, it's a personality deformity that can ruin whatever chance at happiness you have. So in the short time you're alive, you have to discover that which is noble in yourself, and say yes to it. You know, don't say no to getting older. Say yes to being a MILF. 

Yes! Yes! What I'm really trying to say here is… Spongebob Squarepants is the Übermensch. Spongebob says yes to life, and so should we. Yes to ourselves, yes to art, yes to sensuality, yes to the world. Yes! Yes, eh oui! Is this really how we're ending the video? I guess. Okay bye! 🌊🏝 🎶🏝🌊