With YouTube, everyone’s making media–including girls.
In 2006, Mary Celeste Kearney argued rather boldly that “through their insistence to be both seen and heard, girl media producers are a disruptive force, and we do well to consider the changes to popular culture and dominant society [that] their presence is provoking.” At this time, the one-year-old website, YouTube, still marketed itself as “Your Digital Video Repository,” as if the founders imagined their new creation as the world’s first virtual filing cabinet; a convenient space to categorize, preserve, and occasionally share personal items. As we all know, YouTube morphed into a business and communications giant bursting with commercial content; and yet, its current tagline–“Broadcast Yourself”–still emphasizes its roots in the personal and independently produced. YouTube keenly understands that it must preserve what makes it unique; that it must emphasize its departure from mass-produced, scripted media, even as the corporate giants voraciously–and lucratively–swoop in to claim their territory. At this point, YouTube is many things at once, a fluid interface, a tool that anyone with basic computer skills can manipulate, from the Marketing Director at Pepsi Co. to your neighbor’s twelve-year-old kid.
Although the democratic nature of YouTube is up for debate, the site undeniably launches new voices in entertainment–and in doing so, it assembles an unprecedented platform for these “girl media producers” that Kearney writes about: a platform for talented, intelligent, imperfect young women who insist on being both seen and heard. “Girl* vlogs,” in particular, are fascinating examples of what can happen when women control a piece of media from conception to production. What do these girls think about their role in society today? In this blog series, I’ll compare three twenty-something “vloggers:” Jenna Mourey of JennaMarbles, Lilly Singh of //Superwoman//, and Marina Watanabe of marinashutup, in an attempt to answer these questions: To what extent do they rely on conventional gender stereotypes? To what extent do they challenge them? Both? These are important questions to ask, because thousands of young teens watch these videos every day: what are they learning from their “cool older sisters”?
Before we dig into the specific, individual content, first I’d like to argue that the nature of the vlog–a girl sitting down in front of a computer, sharing her thoughts, and encouraging her viewers to respond–subverts feminine norms in and of itself. The inherent structure of the vlog challenges not only what we have come to expect from young girls, but also what we have come to expect from media, in at least three ways:
1. Vlogs are informal, independent productions. Okay, so this is not necessarily, technically true–Lilly and Jenna all receive money and sponsorship from various companies–but they all started out independently, they appear to have high control over their content even with sponsors, and–most importantly–they all must maintain the illusion of independent production. Viewers click on vlogs to hear someone’s personal voice, and when production quality improves, they grow suspicious. Jenna, in particular, has declined in popularity partly because of her enormous popularity (which is a frustrating catch-22 for her, I’m sure). A couple years ago, sponsors flocked to Jenna’s channel, which peaked at a whopping 20 million subscribers. As a result, her videos strayed away from the typical “vlog” structure into the realm of semi-polished sketch comedy shows, and, quite simply, it lost its charm. Jenna now has 5 million fewer subscribers than at her peak.
However, when all four of these vlogs are at their very best, there exists something intensely personal about them that seems to resist commercialization. To me, their confessional, diary-like structure feels reminiscent of other circles of
Marina Watanabe uses her vlog to address sexism in mainstream media
women’s production throughout recent history, from journaling to zine production. To explain: these women are making videos, and film media falls along a vague gender binary: we code the most respected, official media as masculine (think Academy Award winners), and the informal, marginal media as feminine (think soap operas). In Hollywood, men overwhelming comprise Hollywood’s list of directors and producers, especially the list of elite, successful ones. Of course, a vlog is not a feature length film, but it is filmic media; with this in mind, the girl vlog fits perfectly into the feminine tradition of producing informal, marginal media to resist the dominant, masculine, commercial space. These vloggers fill the gaps that mainstream media seems content to ignore. I doubt any major network would take a chance on Lily Singh, a Sikh woman, as a comedian, but Lilly doesn’t need contractual permission to express herself on YouTube. All of these girls speak directly to their own experience. As Marina says at one point, “Telling someone that their experience isn’t valid is only going to make it worse.” She happened to be talking about mental health, but she could have easily been speaking to under-representation of certain groups in entertainment media, which all these vlogs counter to some degree.
2. Vlogs encourage the audience to engage, which blurs the power dynamic of creator/consumer. All four of these women frequently and earnestly encourage audience commentary, especially comments that add something new. Even sarcastic, crass Jenna reminds her viewers: “If you have a different opinion, let me know, because I love intellectually stimulating conversation.” They all make videos based on audience suggestions and directly respond to requests. Which makes me wonder: To what extent are these videos the property of the vloggers, and to what extent are they the property of the viewers?
In this medium, the idea that a piece of art is a static, finished product that someone can “possess” doesn’t really hold water–through constant loops of comments and shares on social media, these videos mutate into their own little units of meaning, independent of the vlogger herself. (Of course, that’s the way it’s always been, but on the internet, this transformation is particularly quick and easy to map.) Over the years, subscribers watch these women change in direct response to their contact with their audience: Marina sometimes modifies old videos with asterisks over the top of her head in response to user feedback (for example, to better include transgender people) because, as she says, she was “uneducated” at the time. These women are not untouchable celebrities; they are imperfect, young people themselves, coming from a vulnerable place, usually in their bedroom, muddling the line between public and private spheres. Just as they shape us, we shape them. The audience craves that dynamic engagement.
And, finally,
3. “Girl Vlogs” simultaneously frame women as both subjects and objects of the gaze. The “gaze” is a visual theory concept that asks who is doing the looking, and, based on that answer, with whom we are supposed to identify. In the vast majority of film media, the camera frames the man as the subject, or the looker, and the woman as the object of the gaze, or (as Laura Mulvey coined) to-be-looked-at. This structure reinforces the idea that both men and women have been taught to see the world from a male perspective.
Look at a girl vlog, though, and gaze theory gets complicated. When a girl stares directly and unwavering at the camera and freely acknowledges the presence of the viewer, can she still be the object of the male gaze? The main pleasure in film typically comes from the voyeuristic sense that the character doesn’t know you are there, but the vlogger’s stare constantly breaks the fourth wall and interferes with that disassociated pleasure. And yet, all three of these woman are very attractive, and many viewers say they watch their shows because they take pleasure in looking at them (with varying levels of creepiness). Can a girl still be a passive, female spectacle if she is the one who actively engineers that image?
When we watch a vlog, we are basically looking at someone who is looking right back at us, almost as if we were having a conversation–but the vlogger entirely controls the flow of the discussion (at least initially; see #2). Mulvey theorizes that the gaze=power, and that the person looking is the one in control; therefore, the vlogger’s intense gaze her in a position of power rarely seen in mainstream film media. The vlogger, stationary from the neck-up, presents herself as a disembodied, made-up face–the spectacle–and then repeatedly undermines that spectacle by staring at us and refusing to let us either identify with her or be voyeurs. No one does that better than Jenna marbles, who will be the subject of my next (much shorter) post.
*Girl: In this sense, a reclaimed term that does not necessarily imply youth or inferiority.