Female YouTuber attempts to "name the problem"

[Lessthanaballpark]

ViHart is one of my favourite YouTubers. Her content is mostly to do with maths but she made this video after the Christina Grimmie & Orlando murders.

It touches upon the issues that she, as a female gamer/online contentmaker, faces and although she doesn't specifically accuse men or go into any deep gender analysis she does make it clear that her personal experience has taught her to fear men more than women.

There's a powerful moment when she scrolls through all her "marriage proposals" and the sheer volume of them is staggering. It shows how something may seem low level and harmless but when on a massive scale becomes something else.

It also shows what happens when women speak out about the issue of male violence because she predictably lost a lot of subs after publishing the video because people obviously thought it too feminist and it's depressing to read the comments with their usual "whataboutery" and accusations of "feminist propaganda". However there are also some good rebuttal comments and arguments.

Anyway I just wanted to share and to see what you thought.

I have long been a big fan of ViHart's maths videos and I have often shared them with my students. (One of my IB Higher Level Maths students once did an exploration based almost entirely on a vid of her's)

Watching this one added an extra dimension to the image I have of her as a person. My respect for her has grown significantly.

Thank you for sharing

I know she's great isn't she? When she did her Maths stuff she had a large male following but obviously always got those messages.

It's sad that she felt that getting comments like that were just part and parcel of being a female presence online.

Her video on logarithms blew my mind!

That's amazing. Thanks for sharing less than

I watched it, thought it was awesome, and nodded along at her so clearly naming the fear women suppress, the strategies we employ to avoid harm from men, the male entitlement and rage at women who reject them and the genuine price paid by women at the hands of men.

And then the link to another one of her videos came up.

She is so very very close. And yet so far. If she can just jettison her false assumption "gender must exist because others claim it so strongly" in favour of what she already knows "I don't feel any kind of gender identity" then the whole thing would suddenly fall into place for her.

But as she says, she's had a lifetime's practice of downplaying her instincts, suppressing her fear, justifying and defending and being pragmatic about living as a female in a world of violent men that she's very adept now in reframing the world the way men say it is, and not the way she knows it already to be - and states it to be too.

So very very close.