I miss philosophytube
I feel bad posting something critical on here, because it seems like Abigail checks it often. But I miss what Philosophytube used to be. I feel like online trans culture desperately needs our philosophers back, but over the last decade all of our best have slowly receded away from their audiences out of fear and/or disappointment, or just better-paying opportunities elsewhere. I cannot just quit my own work to start a YouTube channel, so it feels like there is nothing I can do about this short of posting.
When I started watching Abigail, she was just sitting with a camera in front of her bookshelf trying to "give her philosophy degree away for free." I found that so righteous and inspiring! I am still today always trying to give away my own art school education, writing about art history and art theory and feminism online. It was so exciting when she started to merge her acting work with her philosophy work. I think she and the other ""breadtubers"" were so politically invigorating to many of us American millennials a decade ago, who felt like western governments had already abandoned us by the late '90s, and again in 2016. I learned so much that I never would have learned otherwise, without money for a degree or friends willing to study along with me. I am so grateful for that knowledge, how easy she made it to learn things that really were important to know.
But there's been a slow change in her work over time; it doesn't feel like education is really the point anymore, and its making the politics feel... off. I tried to watch her last video, about conversion therapy, and it's the first video of hers that I genuinely just couldn't get very far into. She claimed that anti-sodomy law in the past was an attempt to "control women's sexuality," when that just isn't true. I had been doing my own research on the history of sodomy law, to try and understand what I have in common with cis gay men as a trans man, and it came off like she just hadn't done her research, and more, wasn't concerned with any cis-or-trans-men viewers feeling insulted or calling her out on it. Which was startling-- it's usually obvious how much work she puts into research and detailed context-giving and solidarity with people who are not just like herself.
I found in my research that sodomy laws have rarely ever been enforced on lesbians/cis women; they were largely an attempt to enforce control over cis men's role in reproduction, marriage, the family, and the economy. It made me think of one of her other recent videos, "Women, Money, and the Nation" which I thought was really excellent-- a man is just a scam invented by the nation to get free labor, too. The earliest sodomy laws in the UK were an attempt by the British upper-classes to criminalize their political opponents' sex lives; it was old white men trying to accuse other old white men of "degeneracy." We remember Oscar Wilde not just because he was a sexy poet, but because he risked his own class position and freedom to issue artistic call-outs towards his own class. It seriously disturbed wealthy power structures, and it made him a political icon. When these laws affect normal people, it is usually the poor; the goal isn't to maintain some fusty anti-sex culture for its own sake, but to maintain wealth inequality by locking off "the oldest profession" from people who are otherwise unemployable, i.e. disposable according to capitalists/"the nation."
But it feels like most trans people are just totally disinterested in understanding how that same sense of "reproduction + labor as civic duties" affect cis men, and not only women or trans people. We seem to not notice how the ideology of patriarchy is more specific than "women are simply inferior to men in every way," or how patriarchy is a cross-sex, cross-class, cross-racial justification for the poverty and imprisonment used to punish every type of "degenerate" person for the last several centuries. I wouldn't have had to do all the research myself if it was a topic that I had ever seen anyone in trans communities, online or off, talk about before. It seems like only weird old white men study this stuff, seemingly so they can run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with their regressive and authoritarian political goals.
I just rewatched her video about climate grief, which I won't link here out of respect for the rules, but you can find it easy enough. She asked some edgy-but-serious ethical-philosophy questions about what exactly we are to do about climate change, if governments refuse to respond to the obvious fact of it and mitigate the problem themselves. Now Europe is facing a historic heatwave that is definitely caused by anthropogenic climate change, thousands of people have already died, and it feels like nothing is left of the political spirit that made PhilosophyTube so great. All it's been for months are promos and references to her Hollywood work, and I'm sorry but I don't consider the commodification of trans YouTubers to be interesting or liberating or really political in any way. It makes me feel great despair that she has pulled so far away from continuing to pursue her most insightful & politically-effective work seemingly in favor of the safety and prestige of being a Hollywood cosmopolitan.
I am a trans millennial nobody from the midwest, and I am feeling very bleak about it all lately. I wish anyone still working in video essays would tackle the subject of policy around reproduction and sex work, and explain how these things relate to trans oppression and liberation, maybe through the example of Planned Parenthood providing hormones to the poor even while facing constant political attacks from the right. I wish someone would talk about "chosen families," and explain that polyamorous trans folks raising children together is an expression of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone's dream of "women's" liberation. I would die for a PhilosophyTube video connecting Simone Weil's idea of "needs of the soul" to trans identity. But I'm afraid that Abigail's bent towards ~metaphysics~ as an explanation for bigotry is just not going to do the political work that she wants it to do for us, and worse, I dread that she is soon going to abandon politics and YouTube altogether for fear of backlash, or out of doubt in her own ability to create real political change. Politics has never really been motivated by metaphysics; metaphysics is just the veneer worn by historic propaganda against the oppressed.
I'm afraid this is the sort of thing that will get deleted for "nastiness disguised as philosophy" (i.e. Bad Vibes) but I just wanted to put it somewhere. I feel very sad and afraid of what is going to happen to the US, and I am horrified by what is already happening to Europe and the UK. I feel such love and solidarity for all my trans sisters and cousins, I root for their success and eternal happiness, including the ones I disagree with. But I also fear that trans men & the poor have been socially and politically abandoned by trans communities and commentators, especially those of us who try to maintain solidarity with cis men (queer or otherwise), and no one with a large platform feels eager-or-equipped to speak on it or do anything about it.
Please, Abigail, if you see this: we need our philosophers back, badly. You are so good at what you do as a public intellectual, and the world needs smart, challenging, political women like you to help us understand how to get out of this mess we're all in. Please don't give up. Your old political audience is still rooting for you, and we want to help you win.