Marina Watanabe, in contrast to Lilly and Jenna, is an explicitly feminist vlogger who uses her YouTube channel to promote awareness of sexual harassment and mental health issues. The 21-year old girl, who is a Women’s and Gender Studies at Sacramento State, comes across as unassuming and well-informed. Though moderately popular, with about 50,000 subscribers, Marina’s fanbase palls in comparison to the millions of subscribers surrounding Lilly and Jenna. It’s a shame that a calm, articulate voice doesn’t have quite the viral potential that a bikini does, not matter how ironically Jenna may wear it. Marina has a lot of great ideas that I have found myself using to analyze the other vloggers on YouTube.

Marina points out that feminine vocal patterns, like up-speak and vocal fry, typecast the speaker as dumb and irrational, which only serves to perpetuate sexist ideas that masculinity is the default structure, and femininity is the alternative, fringe structure. She doesn’t see feminine speech patterns as superficial, but as inventive and resistant: “Women tend to excel at fields of language, and sue language to speak out against a culture that oppresses them…Young women take linguistic features and sue them as power tools for building relationships.” Marina’s analysis makes a lot of sense in the context of YouTube vlogs like her own, but even Jenna and Lily’s. Both women imitate feminine speech patterns for comedic effect, but they use that speech to convey a wide ranged of nuanced emotions, and even to disguise their true intentions. For example, Lilly often plays a young girl talking on her phone with her boyfriend, and everything she says serves to manipulate and gain power over him. Although that is by no means a healthy relationship, Lilly also recognizes that when it comes to language, girls often have the upper hand. Whether the linguistic skill of young girls is either a biological reality or a culturally learned trait to cleverly manipulate a social system that has been set up to manipulate you, this is unclear. In any case, Marina’s fresh new ideas add to a growing body of online videos about feminist theory. Marina is one of many girls who are now using social media to rapidly evolve feminism into what some are calling a “fourth wave:” “I don’t think I would be pursuing a Women’s Studies major if it weren’t for my exposure to feminism through the internet,” as she said in her interview with Bust. These women are so young themselves, and yet they are still teaching even younger girls in imperfect but admirable ways.