SILKSONG IS OUT PARTY

from the beginning, the youtube asmr community has been dominated by women, but there have always been a small proportion of men around too. in the early days, the genre was constantly fielding accusations of it being a weird sex thing, which we can safely say wouldn't have happened if it was a male-dominated space. the vast majority of asmr content is not at all sexual, but it is performed by women, and those that are considered more attractive tend to be more popular, so it's easy to see why misogynists end up making this knee-jerk assumption.

that said, there's plenty of what i'll call lonely bastard content—labeling it softcore porn is an exaggeration, as most cases are very pg, and those with steamy undertones are still fairly tame. your girlfriend takes care of you and tells you she loves you. a pretty girl on your screen gives you instructions and praises you for following them. for some of these videos, it's clear that they're catering to the male gaze—look through some of softlygaloshes' thumbnails, for example, and you'll see what i mean—but it's not necessary to do so, as asmr has a large female fanbase and you can build a career just fine without going out of your way to cater to horny men. and male creators do this too! boyfriend asmr is a whole subgenre; there's a classic drew gooden video that samples some of what's out there. there are less embarrassing variations of this as well. the throughline is that it targets a female audience. basically, if the appeal is a cute boy spending time with you and treating you nicely, it belongs in this category.

a lot of male asmr creators who don't give off that heartthrob energy end up taking a different approach. these guys are often hyperaware that they're a minority here, and they'll milk it as much as they can get away with. i remember seeing asmr zeitgeist's "men of asmr" collabs back in the day, and other people have recreated this format. big collabs like this are organized by larger channels, with the intention of bringing visibility to smaller creators, so all-male collaborations provide this service exclusively for men. there are "asmr for the boys" videos that are sometimes tongue-in-cheek, but end up giving off this sort of desperate masculine energy. asmr content by men, for men. manly confident guys flexing their technical skill, or class clowns cracking jokes. telling the hypothetical male audience: it's not gay and weird to watch asmr. it's normal. it's cool. please watch my videos, if only girls watch asmr then where am i supposed to get my validation?

now i'm going to address a specific creator here, who i've been watching for years at this point: jojo. he's been around for a while, but in the last few years he's been seriously ramping up his efforts and making big waves in the asmr creator sphere. he built a fancy studio, started a company, hosted a 10-person irl collaboration event (almost all notable asmr collabs take place digitally, and the exceptions tend to consist of 2-3 people), built a second studio because the first wasn't big enough, and now his new 20-person event is just about to start. he's also been buying up the most expensive microphones he can get his hands on. jojo is throwing money around, networking, and turning a historically casual, decentralized, solo content genre into a very corporate-feeling spectacle.

and he's a man. inarguably the most prominent male asmr creator out there, clearly gunning to be the most prominent one overall. he's got the most subscribers of anyone i know of, having recently surpassed gibi who held the top spot for years. but nowadays gibi is busy doing unambitious things like having kids, stepping back somewhat from being the de facto face of asmr. she had many collaborations and appearances in other places over the years, but her core content has remained pretty grounded. with the trajectory jojo's been on lately, it's clear he's aiming outside the scope of what anyone's done before.

now this post is not a hit piece on jojo. i watch his content, it's very well done, and i don't see him as a misogynist overall (though i don't watch his old talk channel OR his new podcast, so i don't know much about what he says publicly outside of his asmr content). but like many male creators before him, he's aware of his status as a man in a predominantly woman's space, and he's far from immune to the sort of self-congratulatory preening that his male peers have been doing for the last decade. there's a lot of messaging about "making room for men in this community" that serves to implicitly obfuscate the reason why men aren't present to begin with: they think asmr is for girls, and thus untouchable. the strategy these men take in attracting a male audience is to masculinize the conventions of asmr in very stereotypical ways. jojo's recent content—the podcast, the high-end equipment, the company, the networking—is all in service of a distinctly masculine (and capitalist) ideal of success.

also, his collab event with 10 creators was 50% male. this is not a neutral action in a space where the overall gender ratio is drastically in favor of women. if he were selecting people in a totally neutral fashion to collaborate with, he would end up with one or two other guys, but of course he isn't. men flock to other men in female-dominated spaces, and they eagerly lift eachother up for being rarities, all while never facing the same roadblocks that women do in male-dominated spaces.

light cast by the screen looks like it's reflecting/illuminating dess's closet door: 1)in which kris beats themself up and the shelter codes are -> mantle reflects dessknight event 2)do not cross caution tape literally divides kris and noelle, forming an x where kris sits, stop sign in kris's shadow. *You can't even say stop like you used to. /*Kris used X-Slash! / knight slashing attacks dot gif / A ticket to nowhere. It shows a map pointing to the left of a red X. 3) baseball moon + leaks into dw noelle's section like the cyber world/wr have similarities to dessknight/dessknight event

light beam 1) looks like one of those school projectors and doesnt really make sense physically...i wanted it to be kinda surreal and intangible like it really could've just been a figment of noelle's imagination 2)is pointing to noelle and looks like ice and snow for obvious reasons 3)makes the midtones-highlights form a kind of fractured mirror piece shape a la noelle lake monologue screen in thirds visual

their positions of facing/not facing the viewer are reflective of how removed they are from they did in weird route

-> the corridor on (could be out of) the screen is the moment where hero_sword is about to cut down trees to recruit the ice mage + the red line running across the whole image put their states of dissociation into precarity. utdr has a whole thing about fourth wall break=integration/realisation/(lack of a better word) which is what i was trying to invoke here

the tree is specifically referencing the ch4 egg room, where kris tries to draw they saw and eventually paints a tree over everything. which, well, this is a painting where i draw kris and noelle unable to face what happened and hide it behind a tree. lol. lmao even

the roots i was thinking of like rorschach tests + if you have a bat everything looks like a ball + *(And just out of view, just perfectly out of view *Another hand pressed against yours *And pushed you back.) + dessknight as the unseen driving force behind the entire story. as like what happened to you is everywhere if you squint but you can never quite be certain if it's real. and i could make a diagram to completely explain what i intended the roots to look like but i feel like that defeats the intent

I think graecie (in her discussion on stream and on tumblr) unpacks the idea that managing bleed is on the audience really well! I also think it's a shame that, despite this, she's never used as a "good example" when talking about boundaries. So, I'm talking about her and why other people should too

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

I think graecie (in her discussion on stream and on tumblr) unpacks the idea that managing bleed is on the audience really well! I also think it's a shame that, despite this, she's never used as a "good example" when talking about boundaries. So, I'm talking about her and why other people should too

remember everyone...

thursday watch: the conditions for thursday are here, but a thursday incident has not yet been confirmed