Video essays and self-censoring
A trend I have feelings on
Morning darklings,
I've been binging some Youtube deep dives and something has been bugging me. Then, as if a sign to write about it, Erin Hall shared a blog post about the pathetic excuse for our government toying with the idea of televising an execution, which makes me sick and has me desperately yearning to run from this country. In it, she shares an article "We Are Going To Kill 'Unalive'” from Anil Dash.
It's a great jump off point for the conversation I've been having with a lot of people lately. And it's all about words and power and censorship.
If you haven't been watching a thousand videos or aren't chronically online (or spend time with someone who is), you may not know that people are censoring themselves in order to be seen, but it's becoming ridiculous.
I've been watching a lot of a YouTube documentarian and commentary creator called Swoop who has two channels. She looks into pop culture—from exploring the bad behavior of the likes of Dr. Phil to examining apology videos to going through harmful TikTok trends. She's a spoonie and survivor who is honest, delightfully sarcastic and petty, and is filled with empathy, which of course, means she is deeply relatable.
I started with her most recent video, as one does, but found myself going back for years. What I saw was the grasp of our growing authoritarian government and the clutches of social media platforms controlling free speech. It's not new, mind you, but I fear it has been getting worse. Luckily, Swoop has never changed her topics to appease Lord Algo. In fact, she pointed out this same worry in a video 4 years ago. I saw it right after finishing this article, luckily, so I was able to add it before I sent it out to you. "Jeannette [McCurdy]'s ED [eating disorder] morphed into binge eating, which I will call BE, and later into bulimia, which I will refer to as BU. I hate having to censor so many words. Like, I feel like it somehow might reduce the severity and seriousness of these issues, but the platform just kind of leaves us little to no choice so here we are."
And so, she and others like her must abide.
The words rape and sexual assault are hard to hear, hard to write, harder to think about, and really fucking hard to go through. (My heart goes out to every single person who has ever survived, is barely hanging on, or didn't make it through to the other side, and the families and friends who were there for those people. I fear I may have been a case of didn't make it through if not for my own support system.)
The words r-word and SA (pronounced by the letters, like essay) are not hard to hear, hard to write, hard to think about, and one can not go through them. Yet they are replacing the real words at the moment. Rape is not a grape or an emoji of one ( 🍇<—I'm really struggling with that one). It's someone stealing another person's bodily autonomy by sexually penetrating them without permission or after explicitly being told no. To nestle the word of what most consider the most violating act in the name of a fruit so TikTok won't delete a video breaks my heart.
Suicide is not unaliving. It's killing oneself. It's a sad, horrible thing with fallout for dozens, hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of people, depending on who that person is. We can squabble over the phrasing committed suicide vs died by suicide and what those mean, but they both include the real word, the action, the fact. To make such a devastating act sound like a Monster High word for a science project to appease YouTube saddens me greatly.
I do echo what Anil said in his article, "I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault." But what about just at the beginning of the video or in the subject line? The viewer would know and be able to make informed choices about their content intake.
I get physically itchy when I say or type words related to arachnophobia. My family and friends say s-word instead. So calling rape the r-word tracks for me, and if someone needs that, I respect it, I understand it. Coding language can make your world a bit safer in the dark times. But someone cannot be prosecuted for r-wording someone, therefore erasing most of the word is for so few people, it may as well be for no one, as it only hurts us as a whole.
I don't want to talk about s-words. Talking around s-words but not using the word still makes me itchy, because the itchiness comes from the entire thing, not just the word itself. But you better know that if a fucking multi-legged monster was wreaking havoc on a city and ruining people's lives, while people in power pretended it wasn't even real because their buildings remained untouched, I'd say the word spider.
Words have power, I know that, which is why it's important to not erase the ones that discuss extremely real issues. Especially not on a global scale.
Let me be clear, I do not blame the creators.
Swoop made a video essay about Epstein that was thorough and sensitive and brilliant. It was suppressed—partially because of the topic, partially because of the algorithm. With good work like that in the world, having few people see it does a disservice to those who could use real information not tainted by Fox News. So she says the letter s instead of sex, corn instead of porn, she has to preface almost every new section with new warnings and new abbreviations. Some of it comes from empathy and sensitivity (which we love), but again, much of it is her censoring herself so she's not silenced again (which is shitty).
I've watched two video essayists who talked about being shadow banned, videos being suppressed, and people being spontaneously unsubscribed after a video with certain words or topics in them.
But, hear me out...
What if we said fuck you to YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitter (which I refused to call X) and other social media platforms' desire to control things? Things that we should note seemingly try to silence conversations around issues that affect some populations more than other, i.e. women, disabled people, people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, and other minorities.
What if people could openly talk about and examine rape culture? What if mental health awareness was mandatory school curriculum? The further we move from the real words, the harder it will be to make systemic changes.
But that's the point, isn't it? Maybe? Probably.
Silence us. Take away our rights. Erase us. Start a new world order—or rather an old world order. That's the ultimate goal, yeah?
I hate that this is just another thing we need to stand up and fight for, but free speech is literally in the constitution. Sure, the language of every man could be updated when discussing who is created equal (along with many other problematic things), but the tenants of being able to say what you want, feel your feeling, be free and equal are just truly solid no-brainers.
I've been considering getting on YouTube, making something akin to this newsletter with videos, maybe a pretty background, possibly making art while talking. This does gives me pause I'll get myself buried or banned within a few videos. I don't know if I can say unalive or grape when talking about these issue.
I don't know where to go from here, as I am just one human in a sea of humans. I have no real platform and wonder if I would be able to get one with my stance on things. But I hope we see a change. 99.999% of what this administration and administrations before it in the same party want is meant to silence women, eradicate the middle class, control and gatekeep knowledge, rewrite history, turn back the clock on slavery (but for more people this time), wipe out disabled people and immigrants entirely, and usher in toxic white christian nationalist beliefs as the country-wide religion—just to name a few things. If you haven't investigated Project 2025, I would. It's but the jump off point, really.
Think I'm being a bit dramatic? Turn on the news.
So, let's all try to stop this, maybe?
I realize this got unexpectedly heavy, but I've been writing about trauma and the body and culture lately, and sometimes this is where I land. I'm in a space of exhaustive frustration with our world. It doesn't have to be like this. I know. You know. People don't have to behave the way they are. Hurt people hurt people. / Knowledge is power. / History is repeating itself. You know all the adages that end in the same thought: we have to be better.
I hope we all move to change what we can—be that saying the real words of traumas or seeking out a community to spend time with or protesting or creating something that makes you thrive as a person or helps others feel seen. We need the goodness to improve as a society. But damnit, we also need truth and honesty.
Okay, now for the hardest of hard pivots...
Let me remind you that my miniatures are being shown at the PNW Miniature Show this weekend at the Sheridan Hotel at the airport in Portland.
It's a weird thing to do right after such a discussion, and reminds me a bit of the woman on TikTok that tried to use her house burning down to sell supplements. (Okay, not that bad.) But art is one of the ways I try to move the needle. Sure, these aren't the miniatures from my collection about disability, but they lead the viewer to me, the artist, writer, publisher, and activist.
I may not be able to be there, talking to people about my art and the meaning behind it, why I started making it again in the first place, but they can land in a space where they can find out.
It's the change I have for the week. It's a dice roll and crossed fingers, but it's all I have. So if do you make it there, take pictures and send them to me or tell me where to find them on your socials.
Until next time, harness the Little darknesses and embrace the Little things.
*Header image by Jay Openiano.
