In today’s ocean of mostly “angry social media content”, one person in particular stands out – Natalie Wynn, author of the popular channel ContraPoints. She is not afraid to speak out, she is not afraid to talk back, and she takes an unconventional and quite objective approach to all the political problems of the modern world.
In a way, calling Natalie Wynn just a youtuber does not seem right. On this platform full of make-up tutorials, gamer guys, terrible comedies and conspiracy theorists, Wynn, whose YouTube channel is called ContraPoints, is truly original. She is a provocative commentator and a fighter… Her videos are political, but feel like theatre, with lots of costume changes, drama and references to philosophers and academic texts. She can go from a discussion about Taylor Swift to Wittgenstein with the flick of a finger. Sharp-witted, observant, and funny, she is like a comedian who uses her wit to expose bigotry, the problems of the present and to force people to examine their prejudices.
She is also a transgender woman and often talks about transgender identity and rights. She is not afraid of not conforming to societal norms, to other people’s ideas of what she should think and look like, and she receives a lot of criticism and praise for this. ContraPoints has more than 1.77 million subscribers since its launch in 2016. Its videos have received tens of millions of views over the past year. She is a very interesting person, and we would like to introduce you to her more closely, so we will take a look at five of her YouTube videos.
The first video we want to discuss is Natalie Wynn’s YouTube video called “Opulence”. Here, the insightful Wynn talks about how the aesthetics of abundance and wealth have been nurtured and embraced throughout time and society. In particular, we learn that individuals learn a “taste for luxury” according to the social class of their upbringing. With that “taste” comes all the baggage of adulthood: snobbery, pretence and arrogance. Many people really only want to indulge in luxury and nothing else, but that does not make them rich.
The American dream… although it’s mostly platitudes and rose-tinted glasses… The vast majority don’t achieve that dream because it’s impossible… Natalie herself makes an insight that everyone will understand: “If we’re all going to be rich, who the hell is going to clean our golden toilets?” Yes, we all like things. Especially if they are luxurious… We like shiny things… but isn’t that just consumerism? Well, what we really need to understand is that all this so-called luxury gives us simple, childish satisfaction. But the reality for adults is that luxury is more than glitz and glamour, it has a social context, it usually means something… Or even simpler: it divides us into social classes.
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The video, which looks like a real work of art, raises thought-provoking questions and of course gives answers, such as: “Why does Donald Trump’s apartment look like Liberace married a Turkmenistan dictator and moved into a Cheesecake Factory? Well, because he’s trying to send a message, maybe to the world, maybe to himself. He wants to say: ‘There! I am a winner, a very stable genius with one of the highest intelligence quotients”. Powerful people often use luxury to symbolise their power, from the Egyptian pharaohs to the kings of France and even the humble servants of the world’s great religions. But in America, wealth more specifically means not just power, but success, a trophy to show the world that you have achieved the American dream.
“Listen up America, we live in a society - a society of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, not of climbers but of… graspers. To paraphrase Ian Danskin, maybe anyone can achieve the American dream, but everyone cannot. And the fact of the matter is, most people don’t.” says Wynn.
So why are people like that? They want to have everything… the whole world… but what will they do with it? Money, money, money, money… Everything revolves around money, wealth, famous designer labels, just listen to a couple of songs by Cardi B or Drake and you have the proof. The modern world is ruled by consumerism. No matter how much you stuff a person, they will always be short. And the worst thing is that “You know, you don’t need wealth to be rich. Because wealth is not abundance. Wealth is the aesthetic of abundance. It’s an aesthetic of having everything.” says Natalie. Those who don’t have, always want to have… To have more, they want to be of a higher social class, and that gives a person such glamour, glamour, feeling, but is it enough? And sometimes you can just pretend, fake that you are this and not that…
Glamour, that insecurity, that obsession with pride, is basically “down everyone’s throat”. America has created such an illusion of life that it is sickening. Everything has been so watered down that there is no more reality left. There is nothing but brainwashing all around. People celebrate wealth and luxury, no matter how insignificant, and that is the 21st century…
These and many other themes related to wealth, luxury, social class and the representation of people are explored in this video by Natalie Wynn:
Meet the guillotine of the 21st century, the so-called “Cancel Culture”. In 2020, ContraPoints itself was “cancelled/rejected” on Twitter, so it posted a video about “rejection”. It lasts an hour and forty minutes and is probably one of the most nuanced analyses of the developer.
Briefly on exclusion, here is the definition of ContraPoints itself:
“Cancelling is online shaming, vilifying and ostracizing of prominent members of a community by other members of that community. It started out as this vigilante strategy for bringing justice and accountability to powerful people who previously had been immune to any consequences for their actions. For example, the Me Too movement promised to use social media shaming as a way to topple sexually abusive men in power who couldn’t be held accountable in any other way. The promise of cancelling was that it was going to give power back to people who had none, and bring justice to prominent abusers.”
Further in the video, Natalie Wynn explores the 7 “tropes” she attributes to the cancel culture. The “tropes” in her video should be understood as recurring themes or motifs in “rejection” events. In the cancel culture, the allegation of an infringement is usually synonymous with an actual infringement. This is an attempt to remedy a world in which victims (especially victims of sexual abuse) are often not believed. In this culture, perhaps the biggest problem is the abstraction of events and facts. Because the removal of specific details leaves the listener to imagine only the information that is “necessary”, it is often blown up into a huge bubble that looks worse than the original accusation, so that people have the opportunity to “bark” even more violently and forcefully than they ought to have.
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“Essentialism is when we move from criticism of a person’s actions to criticism of the person. We don’t just say that he has done bad things, we say that he is a bad person.” says Wynn. Often, people who have done something, even the slightest misdeed, are condemned on the internet, and bombarded with angry messages and comments, and this is a really big flaw in modern society. Now that people have experienced freedom of speech on the Internet, they are pouring out and expressing themselves without a shred of forgiveness. Of course, there are cases where the person who has done wrong does not deserve forgiveness, but in most cases, people are “crucified”, whether the mistake they have made is significant or not.
“Certain ancient religions teach their followers to understand the cosmos as a struggle between light and dark, good, and evil. And cancel culture does more or less the same thing. It’s binary thinking. People are either good or they’re bad. And to add to that essentialism, if a person says or does a bad thing, we should interpret that as the mask slipping, as a momentary glimpse of their essential wickedness. And anyone who wants to remain good had better be willing to publicly condemn anyone the community has decided is bad. There really is something dystopian about this. You have to be willing to accuse other people to prove your own innocence.”
Thus, rejection of a person is not simply criticism, and often such “acts of rejection” ruin the lives of people who have made a simple mistake. Not everyone is equally strong, not everyone can withstand societal pressure. People must start thinking about the power of their actions and words. They must learn to use their heads to objectively unpick the events around them, and not to pass judgement.
“I find it hard to convince people of the intensity of the pain of rejection, because it’s just hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it.” says Natalie Wynn. People, think about it… what will you achieve by condemning? Do you want to teach the person you condemn a life lesson? Do you want him to learn from his mistakes and grow as a person? Now imagine that you actually want someone to learn… Imagine that you actually care… Is “crucifying” a person the right thing to do?
You can watch the full video with real people’s stories and examples of the cancel culture here:
The “justice system” is very similar to the cancel culture. But here, the brutal nature of humankind is not just a matter of words and online condemnations, but also of the intervention of state institutions. As in the case of “rejection”, so-called “justice” involves people cheering and crucifying the guilty. Naturally, the accused in this case receive a real punishment. But where do all these punishments come from?
As Natalie Wynn states, since ancient times people have been punished and have suffered, and suffered because brutality is a masculine (and here we are centred on men, because the vast majority of public officials are male) weakness. How can you take revenge on your enemy who has humiliated you? Of course, he must die a most cruel death! Well, that’s the way it’s worked out over the centuries… Now, people are killed more humanely, it’s not the victim who does it, it’s the state authorities who come to the rescue. It’s no secret that once you’ve taken revenge, you can’t stop killing, because it’s the only thing that gives meaning to this miserable life.
As mentioned before, the world is now all black and white… No matter how many “bad guys” you kill, there will be new ones. And so goes that closed circle of “justice”. “I am making this video at a time when hundreds of videos of police brutality are being shared on social media, fuelling the movement to abolish police and prisons. At the same time, there is a growing culture of online vigilantism, where justice is being taken into its own hands by the Twitter mobs demanding accountability and consequences for bad behaviour. All this raises many questions. For example, what should be the consequences of bad behaviour? Who should determine these consequences? And under what circumstances? And for what purpose? If we abolished the police and prisons, who would replace them?” such are the thoughts that run through ContraPoints’ head.
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Revenge and vengeance, that’s what makes societies such brutal creatures. Revenge is personal when the victim takes revenge. Well, now revenge is often emotional, an act of passion. Above all, revenge is sweet. Well, if we take revenge, we become murderers ourselves, so that is where the third party, the state, comes in. The state in this case is neither the victim nor motivated by emotion and it does not have the sweet sadism of revenge… So, such punishment of the accused becomes humane and justifiable.
Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that argues that the right thing to do is to do what produces the highest ratio of human happiness to human suffering. Hence, the utilitarian view of punishment is forward-looking to prevent future crimes, while retribution is directed at past crimes, i.e. vicarious payback. Some of the utilitarian aims of punishment may include deterrence by punishing criminals as an incentive for others not to offend, incarceration in prisons, or rehabilitation of criminals by attempting to educate or discipline them so that they can return to society. Many people believe that these utilitarian aims are more rational and scientific than punishment, which is very much based on emotions. Moreover, the utilitarian idea of justice makes sense even if you do not believe in free will.
Therefore, the “Victim Blaming” is an expression of the wrongness of the just world. You get what you deserve, so if something bad happens to you, you asked for it. The problem, obviously, is that nobody is an angel. There are no angels on this earth. We all have faults, we all have made mistakes, we all have done bad things. That doesn’t mean that we deserve to die a violent death. That is the “free” America. “Everything must change. The “justice” police need to go, and with them many other institutions of our justice system. We must imagine an entirely new approach to justice. And, frankly, it may take more than one YouTube video.” says Natalie.
Watch the full video on the justice system here:
It’s easy to form an opinion about someone. Probably Natalie Wynn’s most popular video is a nearly 2-hour video about JK Rowling’s story that criticises transgenderism. In this video, Natalie introduces us to the most famous bigot in American LGBT history, a woman called Anita Bryant.
“Has there ever really been a good and appropriate time to be gay?” Wynn reflects.
The Stonewall riots of 1969 forced gay rights into the national consciousness. The first pride parades were held in the summer of 1970, and in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association recognised homosexuality as a mental disorder. But only after gay activists disrupted their conference and shouted: “Gay conversion therapy is torture! We have abnormal urges, and we will not be silenced!”
In America, shouting is the only way to get anything done in that country. You have to be very assertive to be heard. 18 January 1977, Dade County, Florida, known for popular cities like Miami, passed a law introducing non-discrimination against homosexuals. Well, just when things seemed to be improving, Anita Bryant came along. This woman created the “Save Our Children” campaign to promote the stigmatisation of homosexuals. You can probably imagine what happened next… When the vast majority of brainwashed minds rise.
“The mainstream media would have us believe that Anita Bryant was a so-called “homophobe”, some kind of hateful bigot. But isn’t this just an authoritarian tactic used to silence valid concerns? Mothers in this country are worried about their children going to school to be taught by perverts. How can we be so sure that the militant homosexuals weren’t the real bigots?” argues Natalie Wynn.
If you play this gender game long enough, you can basically explain the whole concept of bigotry and come to the conclusion that there really are no bigots, just tragically misunderstood people with difficult childhoods and legitimate concerns, who are cruelly demonised by militant activists who slander and silence them with reputation-destroying insults such as “homophobe”.
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“Because you, the viewers, are intelligent, media-savvy people, you understand frames, so you already know that I am going to compare Anita Bryant to J.K. Rowling.” J.K. Rowling is a popular writer who used to write whimsical stories about a wizarding school and now writes books about serial killer transvestites who masturbate into stolen panties because they’ve gone mad… What a nightmare…
“Last year I agreed to be a guest on a podcast about J.K. Rowling hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, who had escaped from Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro Baptist Church is one of the most notorious homophobic hate groups in the world.” says Natalie. Sure enough, she was disappointed when she got there… She felt she had been taken advantage of the nature of the project was completely different from what she had expected. It was very much a mockery. “The main problem is that Megan only understands bigotry from a bigot’s point of view”, said Wynn, the interview became a rather pathetic three-hour interrogation of Wynn’s transformation and the usual concerns about transgender rights. It seemed to her that Phelps-Roper did not understand that transgender people are fighting for their lives, for the right to exist in society. This struggle is in no way equivalent to the rationalisations offered by people who oppose transgender rights, even when they are angry and unhappy.
Most fanatics cannot accept the moral cost of being hated. That’s why an obsessive bigot like Graham Linehan – whose all-consuming hatred of transgender people destroyed his life, cost him his marriage and ultimately left him all alone, to tweet about abolishing gender ideology minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve – feels psychologically compelled to assert with increasing conviction that transgender people are not just delusional or dangerous, but demonic perverts, such hyperbolically vicious enemies that they justify his crusade of self-immolation. This is the fate that probably awaits all those who hate so much and express themselves so much… Where has the most basic human respect for each other gone?
This is detailed in Wynn’s YouTube video The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling:
Finally, the last gem of an online essayist we want to discuss is called “Incels”. Involuntary celibate is a term closely related to an online subculture of people (mostly white men and heterosexuals) who describe themselves as unable to have a romantic or sexual partner, even though they want one.
This subculture is often characterised by deep resentment, hatred, hostility, sexual objectification, misogyny, misanthropy, self-loathing, racism and a sense of entitlement to sex, blaming women and sexually fulfilled people for their “achievement” (often considered predetermined by biological determinism, evolutionary genetics), a sense of meaninglessness and nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and sexually active people. Researchers, government officials and others are increasingly criticising Incel communities for their misogyny, support and promotion of violence and extremism. There is already evidence that this subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism, and a number of murders have already been committed as a result of the actions of this group.
As cruel as it is, Natalie Wynn stresses that it is not necessary to go deep into the concept and grasp certain words and attitudes in one’s mind, it is enough to know that these are simply men who are unhappy with their sex life. To understand a man who is compulsorily celibate, you have to speak his language… Once you speak his language, you realise that he sees a woman as an object, not as a human being, but as a hole for him to use.
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The men who “fall” into this subculture are those men (often nerds) who are resentful of life, when everyone around them is to blame but themselves… These men imagine they know a whole lot, when in reality they know nothing. They believe what they want to believe. It is as if they live on another planet. Consequently, one can become an incel because of one’s looks, height, mind or race, but what they all have in common is the conviction that love, and sex are forever out of reach. Unless you break free from your own prison. “It’s sad when a man makes himself miserable…” Wynn expresses.
For such people, progress is often impossible, as they will always find some inadequate reason why things are this way and not another. It appears that they like to humiliate themselves, whilst they get attention. So maybe they got what they wanted? Incels live in a world of caricatures, where it is easy to avoid thinking of women as real people. This is where my sympathy for them runs out…
Natalie wraps up her thoughts by saying, “Before I close, I invite you to consider that you don’t even need a warm body or a sex robot to satisfy your sexual desires, so stop slandering women and their bodies.”
See more about Incels here:
To emphasise, Natalie Wynn’s video essays are works of art that are worthy of a place in a museum. Often combining a musical score, high fashion and make-up with performance and narrative, and cultural critique and analysis, the complex themes are told in a way that makes the information “digestible”.
ContraPoints stands out because she is bold, critical and non-partisan. She is not nice. She does not agree with anyone, left or right. She is not afraid to say: “I am an evangelical transsexual. I don’t want tolerance, damn it. I want conversions”, and she doesn’t really care what others think. She is after what is real, what is purposeful and what is funny. Natalie is one of the few realistic people left. There are many problems in the world, and we need to talk about them, and if we don’t talk about them, they won’t go away, they will only grow. That is what Wynn does. When she sows objectivity in people’s minds, she also manages to make them interested… that is fantastic. The videos are a fun watch. If you don’t believe it, see for yourself!
