Incel Horror and its "Crazy" Women

[00:00:02]In Don't Worry Darling, Alice lives out a 1950s tradife [music] paradise.

[00:00:09]According to her husband, this should make her happy. But as she gradually realizes that she's trapped in a full-time simulation against her will, she becomes anything but. Her husband Jack pleads with her to stay in the simulation, asking, "Don't you want to be perfect with me?"

[00:00:32]He believes that the only thing that truly matters to a person is happiness.

[00:00:37]But the problem is most people don't just want to be happy, they also want to be free.

[00:00:46]>> Some women may be happy as housewives, but making women happy is not the point of feminism.

[00:01:13]Boo. Recently, I've seen an explosion of the term incel horror used online, specifically rising in popularity with the release of the film Obsession.

[00:01:23][music] Originally, I didn't want to make a video essay about this because I've seen so many videos about obsession and the incel horror genre in general, and [music] I am terrified of accidentally James Summer topic. However, insult dum is kind of a special interest for me.

[00:01:41]Incelss are literally what got me into making video essays in the first place.

[00:01:45]Thank you, incelss. But those videos are long gone and incel horror is very much here and there [music] is so much I want to say on this topic. In case you are a pure grass touching innocent unperturbed [music] by black pill lore and traumatizing horror films, incel horror describes a genre where the principal antagonist element of the film and the source of the horror is a lonely man imposing his desires and fantasies upon a woman. I find [music] it interesting that Obsession has been the film to bring this genre into the limelight, [music] considering Curry Barker, its creator, didn't even know what an incel was before he made the film.

[00:02:28]>> I didn't think of it that way when I wrote it. Bear just makes some bad decisions, but I think it starts from a really innocent place. It's what he chooses to do after that that's bad.

[00:02:40]Embarrassingly, I wasn't even familiar with the term incel until someone brought it up to me. If you haven't seen Obsession, it's a film about this really nice guy, Bear, whose impossibly hot friend Nikki keeps giving him mixed signals. In the words of the original script, >> Nikki crawls into the booth, hugging Bear in a way that lingers beyond friendly. She kisses his cheek enough to confuse any man. Bear uses a toy called a onew wish willow, which he doesn't believe will actually work. But his wish that Nikki will love him more than anyone in the [ __ ] world comes true.

[00:03:22]At the start of the wish, themes follow like they do in Don't Worry Darling.

[00:03:26]Nikki, like Alice, suddenly becomes the perfect tad wife without her consent.

[00:03:31]She makes spare breakfast. She is always down for sex. She packs his lunches with the meat from his own dead cat and a horrifying message that she isn't in fact the real Nikki but women. Am I right? Bear chooses to believe that Nikki's sudden interest in him and her complete change in personality must be because [music] drugs or a kooky mental health episode. But the glaring reality is that [music] this isn't Nikki. Nikki, like Alice, is trapped. She is stuck in the fantasy [music] of Bear's wish. The real Nikki is trapped deep inside her own unconscious or possibly somewhere worse. Screaming over and over and over again. All the while having her body puppeted by the power of the wish, engaging in behaviors that she never consented to. In true be careful what you wish for fashion, the wish personified Nikki engages in increasingly horrific behaviors to prove her love to bear and to limit his life outside of their relationship. I think the comparison between Nikki and Alice is interesting because neither of them really have a life outside [music] of the fantasies of their male abuser.

[00:04:53]Nikki's body literally freezes when Bear [music] leaves the house. She contorts into a smile, a more violent and literal portrayal of Alice's happiness. Nikki does not use the bathroom. She does not eat. She does not get to exist as a person until [music] Bear comes home from work. Meanwhile, Alice cooks empty eggs which do not exist and cleans a house that is [music] perfect because it is not real until her husband enters [music] the simulation and joins her in sex, marrynt, and endless partying. The ultimate male fantasy for an incel seems to be a woman who does not exist outside of him. At the core of the incel horror genre is what should be a very obvious conversation about consent and male violence. But nevertheless, there are a lot of men who are against all odds not.

[00:05:54]>> So again, the men are at fault. Women would go any lengths to not hold any accountability for their miserable and cringe behavior.

[00:06:03]Gatine.

[00:06:04]>> OMG, y'all killing me with this pandering to one gender because if this was in reverse, everyone's going to say, "She's just so innocent." And why can't this guy see she's a good woman? Like, is accountability not in the female DNA?

[00:06:19]>> The point, the real horror is men not getting it.

[00:06:26]>> Sam, this is a scary [ __ ] There is no question whatsoever that Bear is assaulting Nikki throughout the entire film. Bear has multiple moments where it's made abundantly clear to him that the Nikki he is in relationship with is not the real Nikki and that the real Nikki is in horrible torment because of his wish and that she does not consent to anything going on. At one point in the film, she says verbatim, "I have never been with you, Bear." And his response to that is, "Is being with me really that bad?" He hears her literal screams, and instead of wanting to cancel his wish, he wishes to alter it.

[00:07:14]He knows exactly what he's done and what he is continuing to do, but he does it anyway. It is so inarticulatably uncomfortable to watch and more horrifying than any of the actual horror of the film. So horrifying that while the men of Reddit are complaining about crazy [ __ ] the women of Reddit are so horrified and disgusted and sad watching Obsession that some of them can't even finish the film.

[00:07:43]I was unsurprised after watching to see that the film was written by a man. This gratuitous portrayal of female assault has become a cornerstone of the horror genre. And even though obsession wants you to feel uncomfortable about it, it still feels like a story written by men.

[00:08:01]>> She kisses his cheek enough to confuse any man.

[00:08:05]>> Apparently, there is discourse [music] over whether Bear is evil or just a bit of a coward. But I think a lot of people don't realize that you can absolutely be both. Cowardice is too often framed as passive. But cowardice is an action, a choice, and it has the potential to be evil in the ways that it can produce, [music] propagate, and allow for evil.

[00:08:33]In my opinion, Bear is a violent, horrific, monstrous, and yes, evil [music] man. But is he an incel? If, like Mr. Barker, you don't know what an incel is. It's usually used to define a man who describes himself [music] as involuntarily celibate. These men have been, according to their own lingo, blackpilled into an ideology where women, [music] due to our shallow prejudices, choose only to date the upper 1% of men, the Chads. [music] Whether they get fit, adopt a good aesthetic, or develop a personality, unfuckability is a result of the cruelty of women. And there is no persuading women out of this cruelty. They must be resented at best [music] and punished at worst. These men believe that they are entitled to female companionship and sex and they usually hold very misogynistic views on women and very regressive views on gender in [music] general. For example, they think that Bear is more feminine than any of the actual women in Obsession >> by a large margin.

[00:09:49]>> So, this is what we're dealing with here. a very grounded and reasonable community.

[00:09:59]The irony of insula is that many incelss only actually want to date women who are extremely conventionally attractive by western standards of beauty. Bear exemplifies this when he pursues Nikki, someone he is shown to not [music] have any real chemistry with.

[00:10:17]>> Oh, um, don't let me forget. I I I got you something. Ew. No. That Why does that make me nervous?

[00:10:27]>> I don't know.

[00:10:29]That's an odd reaction. Night, Freaky Nikki.

[00:10:35]>> Ew, don't call me that.

[00:10:38]>> I know. I was kidding.

[00:10:42]>> You know I don't like that.

[00:10:43]>> Sorry. Instead of the alternative, although still very conventionally attractive, girl Sarah, who he does have a lot of chemistry with, like many real life incelss, Bear actually has women who want him. He is not involuntarily celibate. Sarah is super into him, and this [music] is made explicit to him in the film, but he says that he views Sarah just as a friend, [music] just as Nikki views him as a brother.

[00:11:15]I remember after watching Obsession telling my friend that I thought bear was [music] an incel and my friend was like that's not possible. Bear isn't ugly and incelss are ugly. But this is precisely the delusion that incelss themselves have propagated. [music] Incelss believe that they are ugly and unfuckable, but oftentimes they are just totally normallooking guys like Bear, who women would actually be into if they weren't so [music] unbelievably misogynistic towards us. Unfortunately, many of these men do actually believe that the only way they will ever experience [music] love, sex, and relationships with women is through coercion, like having lots of money or making a wish. I get accused on this channel a lot of hating men.

[00:12:04][music] If I so dare as to even delve in the faintest of feminist directions, this is seen as a provocation. People will comment that they stopped watching because I was blaming all the world's problems on men. Some of them will say, as indeed I've seen many guys say about obsession, that women like myself who talk about misogyny and the literal recorded statistical violence against women by men are hypocrites [music] because everything is actually worse for men in this world. Would that I had a One Wish Willow so I could make that actually come true. People will comment stuff like this on me just bringing [music] up facts, like discussing how more men are right-wing than women, which [music] is just true. Or the fact that Nazism was patriarchal. It's crazy how you can recount actual history to right-wing blackpilled men and they'll be like, "This evil feminist thinks Nazis favored men." And it's like, "Well, yeah, they did."

[00:13:06]I don't know, guys. [laughter] Maybe I'm just a crazy [ __ ] I am dreading the comment section on this video. All of this is funny to me because for one thing, the majority of my audience are men. Hi boys. I think because I'm a girl with colored hair and pronouns, people have fabricated this narrative that women like myself and the social trend in general is super anti-men. But this is largely a projection of resentment which doesn't actually exist. In reality, I like men a lot, arguably too much. I am a polyamorous bisexual lady who mostly dates men. It's not ideal, but in a world without one wish willows, what are you going to do? Please, for the love of God, just make me gay.

[00:13:59]My bisexual percentages are honestly so [ __ ] With the exception of my incredible current partner, I haven't had the best time dating men. I mean, I have stories which I cannot share in this video essay. But let me just say that the struggle is real. And that's not me hating men to say that. It's just mine and a lot of women's experience.

[00:14:29]Recounting phenomenological experiences is not hate. It's not an agenda. It's just themes that have happened. When we talk about violence towards women, we are not being man-hating. I don't want men to be lonely. I don't want men to suffer from mental illness, social isolation, or even unfuckability. The so-called men's loneliness epidemic, beyond all parody and joke potential, makes me sad. My feminism includes a desire for men to become more in touch with their emotions, to learn to communicate and date and [ __ ] better.

[00:15:10]But I don't want these things more than I want the women in the world to be safe. And I would really like for men to watch films like Obsession and Don't Worry Darling in [music] abject horror at these scenarios and to recognize the horrific potential [music] in the cinematic Nice Guy and his frequent real life counterpart. But let's assume men do get it. Let's assume the themes get through. What is incel horror doing? Is it solving misogyny? Is it making women safer? Are films like Obsession practice? German philosopher Theodore Adorno would have you believe that horror and really the entire culture industry exist only to distract you. Regardless of what message the media may be attempting to [music] convey, >> the tendency to subvert meaning has taken over completely in the text of novelty songs, suspense films, and [music] cartoons. The idea itself, like objects in comic and horror films, is massacred and mutilated. In crime and adventure films, the spectators are begrudged even the opportunity to witness the resolution. Even in nonironic examples of the genre, they must make do with the mere horror of situations connected in only the most peruncttory way.

[00:16:37]>> Men, not if you understand. Adorno is like your most annoying letter box friend, but times 5,000. Everything gets one star. This man cannot will not enjoy anything. According to his philosophy, horror films create monsters and boogeymen for you to be afraid of so that you can forget just how terrible your life is. And the fact that the real horrors of our world mostly stem from capitalism. I would argue that some horror films are quite anti- capitalist, but of course, anti- capitalist media can still serve as distraction. And with a lot of horror media, we may see horror as tied to the supernatural and serial killers and [music] random outliers of rare bad men and forget that those in power are capable of so much worse. No doubt the ruling group in the bourgeoa era did not engage in killing their own children and spouses or in prostitution and sodomy as frequently as their subjects who took over the morals of the rulers of earlier times. However, when power was at stake, the rulers have piled up mountains of [music] corpses even in recent centuries. Adorno also argues that horror films can do something even worse than distract us. They can prepare us for our own torment. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings [music] so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs. The enjoyment of the violence done to the film character turns into violence against the spectator. Distraction becomes exertion.

[00:18:32]>> I would love for Adorno to watch Obsession. I know he would hate it, but I just really want to hear him ramble about it. I think he would probably say something along the lines of >> Nikki is possessed by the wish the way that Donald Duck is possessed by the animator. She serves Bearcooked cat just as the media industry serves the spectator up to capital. Nikki's actions of violence create pathos for the male viewer to reinforce his already violent views on women. Unaware of the mutilated subject.

[00:19:09]>> While we're talking about the philosophy of horror, I want to make a mention of Mark Fischer's work in ghosts of my life. He talks about how the word haunt echoes the German unheim where him originally meant homely. So unheimly literally means unhomely and is used to mean uncanny. Just as haunt in English refers to both a haunt or a home and to haunt which is to scare to linger or to possess a place.

[00:19:44]>> What horrors does the big looming house present? The worst things the real horror is already inside.

[00:19:54]And what could be worse than that? You would never hurt mommy or me, would you?

[00:19:58]>> I find this particularly relevant for the films of the incel horror genre where the monster is the thing meant to love you, the person for whom you create a home with. I saw an interesting point being made about obsession that Beer's wish may have been specifically interpreting his idea of what love is.

[00:20:18][music] There's a scene between him and Nikki before the wish is made where Nikki tries to explain to Bear the difference [music] between love and romance. And Bear just [music] isn't getting it.

[00:20:32]>> Love.

[00:20:33]So, it's a romance.

[00:20:35]>> No, it's not a romance. It's a love story.

[00:20:38]>> Isn't that the same thing? So maybe Bear and many Incel's idea of love is a shallow selfish love that exists entirely to prop up male ego and fantasy. Every woman wants to trust her male partner and to believe that they share the same values on what love is supposed to mean. When a woman enters into a home with her partner, she expects [music] safety, warmth, and love. And sadly, often times in the real world, she receives horror. This is particularly apt with the recent investigation into the online academy where men are literally coached on how to assault their wives. And just to address this, because I do get comments on it sometimes, you will see me avoid particular language in this video, which is not my preference and not the tick-tockification of language.

[00:21:33]This is because I am a small content creator and I rely on monetization to pay albeit a very small portion of my bills. I highly encourage you to direct your resentments at the big corporations that are keen on censoring words which I personally think are important for you to use. And if you want to help me become less reliant on algorithms, you can support me on Patreon. I've also begun to post my content there adree. So if you want a less corporate experience that is where you can have that anyway [music] with don't worry darling and obsession selfish cowardly disgusting men are projecting their own happiness upon women turning [music] these women's lives into a horror through that projection of happiness and then asking why aren't you happy? A happy life in a world of horror is ignorinously refuted by the mere existence of that world. The latter therefore becomes the essence.

[00:22:35][music] The former negligible.

[00:22:39]>> A selfish happiness is easily a horror to those it is unwittingly forced upon.

[00:22:46]And incelss tend to care only about their own happiness, which they feel they have been wrongly robbed of by women and by the alpha men who take what they feel they deserve. So what better solution for an incel than to create an entirely new object person and program that happiness in from the very beginning. Make them obsessed with you.

[00:23:14]No magic involved. Make them horny for you and make them just about not human enough that you get to treat them as an object without moral remorse.

[00:23:32]The moment a woman is viewed as a person, she can only be conquered with her consent. She must be one. [music] Sleeping Beauty smile fulfills Prince Charming. The captive princess's tears [music] of happiness and gratitude give meaning to the night's prowess. Season one of the television show Westworld, which has only two seasons, introduces us to a physical fantasy amusement park made by the company Delos Incorporated.

[00:24:02]They have different parks with different themes, all with fully immersive environments and populated by characters known as hosts. essentially highly intelligent NPCs which bear no difference in resemblance to humans. In fact, there is no ability to even tell the difference between hosts and humans at all. The hosts feel human. When you kill them, it's like killing a human.

[00:24:29]When you sleep with one, it feels the same. These amusement parks have elaborately written quests and storylines, but many, if not most, of the guests choose to experience these worlds [music] as a sandbox.

[00:24:44]>> It's not about giving the guests what you think they want. And that simple titillation, horror, ulation. They're not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They're here because they want a glimpse [snorts] of who they could be.

[00:25:05]>> They can [ __ ] murder, and pillage whatever they like in this world with no consequences. The hosts can't kill them or seek justice for being assaulted, abused, or mistreated. It's the ultimate power fantasy, the ultimate male fantasy. In Westworld, the Western Amusement Park, which is also the title of the show, there unsurprisingly [music] exists a brothel, which is very popular amongst the park guests. The rich men can enjoy the hosts, who are of course programmed to fulfill every whim, every fantasy.

[00:25:47]The madam of the brothel is named Mave Millle, and she might just be my favorite fictional character ever. What can I say? I love a powerful sex worker mom. In one of Mave's original story lines, she was a homesteading mother to her beloved daughter when one day a park guest comes [music] and brutally murders both her and her daughter. This memory traumatizes her and it resurfaces throughout the show. She'll be trying to seduce a customer carrying out her sensual scripted lines when the memory triggers and this supposedly completely robotic, completely inhuman object becomes [music] triggered by it. This leads to a declining [ __ ] rate as it were. And those pulling the strings state [music] that if they can't get her popularity up, she will be decommissioned. What we see throughout Mave's time on screen is her awakening, both literal. She keeps waking up by accident in the technical studios of the Delos staff, where she sees the bodies of the hosts assaulted, bloody, and beaten [music] by the park guests and the Delos employees alike. She sees the way that those like her are treated as [music] cattle. And her awakening is also metaphorical. She is gaining or has always had sentience. Mave is shown to us the viewer as containing a complicated [music] intelligent internal reality that philosophically speaking should ascribe her personhood. Yet even those who discover that some of the hosts are becoming or have the potential to become sentient, they still choose to treat them like objects. Even personhood does not grant you relief from being treated as an object. When Mave realizes that her world is a simulation, albeit unlike Alice, hers is physical, she deems to take control of it. She learns to wake between the real life and the simulation. She learns to manipulate the employees of Delos into increasing her power over this fantasy world. and she becomes essentially magic. She increases her own attributes and gives herself the ability to control the non-scentient hosts.

[00:28:14]>> System. I need a system.

[00:28:15]>> Freeze all motor functions.

[00:28:28]You're still in there, aren't you?

[00:28:32]scared out of your wits. It's a difficult thing realizing your entire life is some hideous fiction.

[00:28:41]I could make you give [music] me that tablet.

[00:28:43]Turn your mind inside out.

[00:28:47]Make you forget all this.

[00:28:50]But I'm not going to do that to you because that's what they would do to us.

[00:28:55]>> Just nerding out here for a second. But this is kind of what I wanted from Alice. I wanted her to realize she was in a simulation and gain some sort of power over it and engage in epic mind battles with Frank. Maybe rallying the other housewives to her cause and developing their severely lacking story lines. And maybe this is what we see at the very end with the exploding light bulbs, but it was a little underwhelming and kind of too little too late. Of course, Don't Worry Darling is a mystery box movie, so what are you going to do?

[00:29:29]Mave is anything but a victim. And she goes on in the seasons which shall not be named to be the only part of them worth watching [music] consistently challenging power and being generally badass as hell. But while I would love to yap endlessly about this character, this is a video essay about Inceld them. Another film that I've been seeing brought up with this new Incel horror discourse is the film Companion.

[00:29:57]Like Westworld, Companion is a film about robots [music] which are functionally indifferent to humans. Like Westworld, one of the key functions of these robots is to provide [music] sexual services. They are, as Josh so delightfully entitles them, [ __ ] bots.

[00:30:14]The owner of the bot has [music] complete control over the intelligence of their particular robot. It scales from Ivy League grad intellect to [music] dialup internet. And of course, this slider is very attractive to men like Josh, the insult character of Companion, who sets his robot girlfriend's intelligence to [music] 40%. When Iris, eventually gets her hands on her own controls, she, like Mave, sets her [music] intelligence to maximum, and she becomes empowered to actually advocate for herself and defend [music] herself against careless, selfish, and greedy humans. [music] The [ __ ] bot unveils the hypocrisy of the object human defied and a fundamental [music] dishonesty which underlines a lot of incel ideology. Do men want an intelligent, self- advocating, fully realized human being in their lives with needs, [music] desires, wants, and struggles of their own? Or do they want an object that they [music] can have sex with? A governmentmandated fuckbot [music] or a wishmandated fuckbot.

[00:31:28]>> But you love you love each other.

[00:31:31]>> Love. No, no, no, no, no, no. You'd have to think of me as a human being first.

[00:31:37]I >> I don't understand.

[00:31:40]>> I'm an accessory. Like his [ __ ] car.

[00:31:44]I wear what he wants, eat what he wants, [ __ ] when he wants.

[00:31:56]Look who I'm talking to. In both obsession and companion, sex scenes take place in this top-down, sterile, unintimate way. The man is banging away, but when the camera pans to the face of the woman, she's just clearly not having a great time.

[00:32:13]Both women in these scenarios have been programmed to be willing to have sex.

[00:32:19]One is programmed by magic and the other an entire engineering team and a board of men who signed off on this. But the programming doesn't extend so far as to actual enjoyment or active participation in sex. And the men in these scenes [music] don't care about the blank expression of the person they're having sex with because they're not really having sex with a person [music] and they don't care. The object is actually preferable to the human because the object [music] cannot consent, cannot tell you that they're too tired from a long day of work and just not in the mood. In companion, when Iris gets sincere or showcases insecurity or really showcases any signs of being human, Josh dismisses or even straight up turns her off.

[00:33:17]>> Iris, go to sleep.

[00:33:18]>> When Alice shows signs of paranoia and anxiety, Jack tells her to get over it.

[00:33:24]None of it is real, and she should stop being so crazy. When Nikki makes Bear breakfast and is always down to [ __ ] Bear doesn't give a [ __ ] about the screams of real Nikki. But when Wish Nikki does things that are weird and starts [music] acting crazy, he tells her to >> just be normal.

[00:33:44]>> Just be normal. But I thought men liked a little bit of crazy.

[00:33:52]>> Do you really think anybody cares? I want you to tell me about you.

[00:33:58]>> If you've ever heard the expression grippy socks, grippy box, then I'm so sorry. Me, too. Grippy socks refers to the socks they give to you in a mental health hospital. Grippy box. Basically, men fetishize mentally unwell women. The idea is that if you are mentally ill or neurode divergent, you're really good at sex. And it's true, but it's also really [ __ ] gross. The most charitable interpretation of this god-awful phrase is that mentally ill women are stereotyped as hypersexual. And this stereotype goes all the way back to the Victorian era where women expressing sexuality at all was considered mental illness and could get you locked up in an institution. I will make so much progress with not hating men and then I will just read about history. Men will brag about pursuing colored hair girls because we're crazy and we'll give you the best sex of your life. But then all of a sudden when you tape the door shut because of your complex PTSD, you're a crazy [ __ ] and get away from me. You're scaring me. Like men don't actually want to deal with mentally ill and disabled women. They want what they perceive to be hypersexuality without having to have empathy and understanding for someone who may engage in erratic or antisocial behavior. or worse yet to actually have to physically support someone who needs extra support [music] because of their mental illness. But while erratic, terrifying women in horror, like Pearl, for example, do indeed exhibit the signs of legitimate mental illness, Nikki and Obsession, isn't mentally ill. And I've been a little bit concerned about how her character is being used to discuss mental illness. On the one hand, does Wish Nikki exhibit the signs of BPD, bipolar, CPTtsd, and neurode divergence?

[00:36:04]Arguably, yes, she does. She does also exemplify severe anxious attachment, but she also crucially is not Nikki. The behavior of this character is a result of the [ __ ] up wish of a [ __ ] up man. She as a character is not mentally ill or anxiously attached because she is not a fully autonomous human being. It could be argued that Nikki's nickname as Freaky Nikki might have originated from a history with mental illness. Like maybe the real Nikki actually did have a mental break or struggles with some sort of mental illness and was horribly bullied for it and that's why she hates the nickname. Maybe she got better and that nickname reflects a traumatic period in her life.

[00:36:49]Maybe the behaviors of Wish Nikki are inspired off of the real Nikki when she was unwell. I think that would be an interesting lens to examine the ways that selfish male wish fulfillment, abuse, and assault bring out the mental illness either already present or not before existent in women. But while I find this line of thinking interesting as a thought experiment, and while we could say that Wish Nikki's behavior is a metaphor for mental illness, at the end of the day, I don't think it's really worth discussing in too much detail because again, Nikki isn't Wish Nikki. This isn't BPD representation, even if you might relate to Nikki as an individual with BPD.

[00:37:32]>> This dynamic reminds me of another character I want to talk about eventually, Nikki from Obsession. Both characters slowly begin organizing their entire emotional world behind somebody else. They stop asking, "What do I want?" and start asking, [music] "What does this person mean to me?" Once this occurs, the relationship stops being just a relationship and becomes part of their identity. And when somebody's identity becomes that dependent on another [music] person, more times than not, there's always someone behind the curtain pulling the strings, somebody who recognizes that vulnerability, somebody who knows [music] exactly what that person needs to hear, which is one of the reasons why Nikki and Dex feel so similar to me. That doesn't mean that you can't relate to her. I just don't think that prescribing labels to the behaviors of the possessed demon girl is really useful. I also feel the need to say as a woman with OCD, despite its name, this film is not representative of OCD. I know some people think it is, but it isn't. Happy to clear that up.

[00:38:26]Technically, you could say that Wish Nikki exhibits some OCD behaviors. She does do constant reassurance seeking.

[00:38:33]There are obviously expressions of paranoia, but this is the behavior of a wish possessed body for one thing. And for another thing, I just don't think that there's enough evidence that OCD specifically would be the best label to put on this behavior, even if Nikki were considered to be mentally ill. A lot of people think that obsessiveness basically equates to OCD. But this is a huge misunderstanding of what OCD is.

[00:38:59]OCD is one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses there is. When people think that somebody who is very organized or who really likes to clean is OCD, usually they're confusing OCD for obsessivecompulsive personality disorder, which is a completely different thing from the mental illness.

[00:39:18]OCD as a disability has actually absolutely nothing to do with being clean or organized. Hi, messy ADHD girl here who also has OCD. everything you know is a lie. Now, while I do not think that Wish Nikki is necessarily mentally ill representation or neurode divergence representation, and while I don't necessarily think that you should be relating to her, at least not too strongly, I do think that a lot of women with experiences of mental illness and neurode divergence will definitely relate to the way that Bear responds to her craziness. I think it's very telling that Bear's moments of desire for Nikki are most strongly expressed when she's being, in his own words, normal.

[00:40:05]>> Just being normal.

[00:40:07]>> When she exhibits any signs of craziness, he expresses [music] social embarrassment and anger towards her. And I'm like, how dare you be embarrassed about this? She is only acting this way because of you. You should be embarrassed of yourself.

[00:40:22]Likewise, Jack in Don't Worry Darling often reacts with social embarrassment when Alice starts to question her reality and the patriarchal misogynistic power that created it. [music] Alice is gas lit over and over and over again. Every time she questions the legitimate insanity of the simulation she's been forced into or describes things that she has actually seen with her own two eyeballs, she is told by the man who's supposed to love her that actually gaslighting isn't real. You crazy [ __ ] I really appreciate how Alice only acts quote unquote crazy when she has been made to feel crazy. Her so-called erratic and antisocial behavior stems from her being abused and gaslit to the breaking point.

[00:41:11]>> Everyone is acting like I'm crazy and I'm not crazy. Likewise, Nikki only behaves in violent and insane ways because Bear is a massive coward and would rather get to keep his [ __ ] fantasy alive for just a little bit longer than do what needs to be done to dispel the wish. Men are quick to highlight the mental health crisis affecting men. And I want to be really clear, this is real and it's not something I want to belittle or make jokes about. But I also get frustrated when I see this brought up in debates about gender. Men are really keen to bring up statistics like the fact that men die from, sorry, I have to use Tik Tok language again, unalive three times more often than women. But women are also three times more likely to attempt unalivement than men. Young women are also three times more likely to have [music] PTSD than young men. Women are more likely to have anxiety. three times more likely to experience an eating disorder. And there are obviously lots of grim, frightening, and upsetting statistics about men. There's also the obvious fact that men don't get diagnosed as often as women because they don't talk about mental health and are more resistant to seeking help. This is all bad, gang. This is all pretty [ __ ] We should care about all of it. But bringing up selective misleading stats to fight in the trenches against crazy feminists is really annoying. But if we must gender mental illness, may I please [music] present into evidence one particular aspect of historical mental illness that was heavily gendered and which crops up in the incel horror genre, and [music] that is one of the lovely inventions of a man. Sorry, I know I keep bringing up gender. I promise guys, if you're still watching, I really don't hate you. I'm I'm just saying that technically, historically speaking, a man did invent this and it was widely used in the US and the UK and banned by the filthy Soviet commies who just didn't understand the value of true scientific achievement. And that is from the 1940s through the mid1 1950s, men slightly outnumbered women as patients in state hospitals. Yet female patients made up about 60% of those who underwent labbotoy. A prepoundonderance of women suffering from depression and other effective disorders may be partly responsible, but agitated and boisterous behavior in women was less acceptable to doctors of Freeman's time than the same behavior in men. Many psychiatrists believed it was easier to return women after operation to a life of domestic duties at home than it was to post-operatively rehabilitate men for a career as a wage earner. Rosemary Kennedy was the eldest daughter of the Kennedy family and sister to the eventual President John [music] F.

[00:44:05]Kennedy. As a young girl, she displayed developmental delays which historians debate between being a neurode divergence or being a neurocognitive disability. Her parents kept her hidden and socially isolated, pretending she was normal and then later deciding to instead declare that she was mentally because hers and John's father, Joseph Kennedy, believed that calling her mentally would be less harmful to Jon's presidential run [music] than saying that she was mentally ill. At the age of 22, she was expelled from a summer school and [music] sent away to study at a convent school in Washington DC. The nuns there believed that she engaged in sexually promiscuous [music] activities and she also expressed violent, angry, and erratic behaviors. Her parents became increasingly worried that her behavior would damage theirs and their children's political careers. And so when she was 23 years old, Joseph Kennedy decided to take his own daughter for a labbotomy without telling his wife. After [music] Rosemary was mildly sedated, we went through the top of the head. Dr. Watts recalled, "I think she was awake. She had a [music] mild tranquilizer.

[00:45:27]I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife.

[00:45:36]As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing God Bless America or count backward. [music] We made an estimate on how far to cut.

[00:45:53]based on how she responded when Rosemary began to become incoherent.

[00:46:01]They stopped.

[00:46:03]When I first learned about Rosemary Kennedy's story, I sobbed like a baby.

[00:46:08]Rosemary wrote, "I've always had serious tastes [music] and understand life is not given us just for enjoyment. For some time past, [music] I've been studying the well-known psychological method of Dr. Maria Monttoauri. and I got my degree in teaching last year.

[00:46:24]>> This does not in any way read as someone intellectually disabled. Even the doctor who lobbottomized her did not believe that she was mentally, but rather that she was merely depressed. After the procedure, Rosemary's mental capacity diminished to that [music] of a 2-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligently and was incontinent.

[00:46:48]But god forbid she damaged the presidential run of sweet little brother. Joseph Kennedy had loads of extrammarital affairs and was generally a massive piece of [ __ ] [music] But of course, his promiscuity and immorality didn't require him to be loized. But the moment a woman is different [music] in any way, men just destroy her entire life without a second thought. In Don't Worry, Darling, when Alice discovers that there is something wrong with her world and the horrible men piloting it, she begs her husband to escape this world with her. And his response is to lobomize her through shock therapy. It's not clear what exactly is happening in the real world.

[00:47:30]Like maybe he wakes up, does some sort of reinstallation on her to get her back into the simulation and wipe her memories again. We're not entirely sure how the simulation device works or what the extent of its power is, but it's entirely possible that this device does have some degree of labbotomizing function, especially considering it does have memory control. Alice is literally a doctor in her real life before her husband forces her into the simulation.

[00:47:59]She is super successful in her career.

[00:48:01]She takes 30our shifts to support Jack's life. and he's so insecure about it that he would rather destroy her life to bring it onto his level than try to improve his own life and be a better husband to her. In companion, as a show of power over Iris, Josh lowers her intelligence to 0% so he can control her, a digital labization.

[00:48:27]Nikki is also in her brief time shown to us as an autonomous human that she is intelligent, ambitious and a supertalented writer and she is in a manner of speaking magically labbotomized by the wish of an insecure unambitious and cowardly man. So whether through magic or technology or electricity or whatever other psychological, spiritual or physical devices exist, the labbotomy remains attractive to men who like their women like they like their politicians.

[00:49:02]Sexually promiscuous and dumb as rocks.

[00:49:05]There's a scene in Don't Worry Darling that I think is really telling where it's implied that Jack is wanting to have sex with Alice after her 30hour shift at work. He hasn't sorted food for them. He hasn't fixed their hot water issue. And he hasn't got a job. But he still expects sex to happen. Even though Alice is hungry, exhausted, and can't even clean herself to prepare for her next shift in just 6 hours. So, the simulation grants Jack not only a fantasy of male power, but it also grants him, as we are shown, frequent enthusiastic sexual access to his wife, which previously he wasn't getting. In all of these examples, the professional success and intellectual achievement of the women is less important than their sexual availability.

[00:49:56]And the men seem willing to put up with all degree of craziness and insanity in order to maintain that access. With obsession, it's really shown just how much it takes for a man to realize it's not worth it.

[00:50:12]>> I'm very upset. You can't cook the cat.

[00:50:15]Bear is basically constantly asked the question, "What would you put up with in order to continue to have uninterrupted sexual and romantic access to a woman?"

[00:50:26]And the answer is too much.

[00:50:31]Far too much.

[00:50:39][music] Despite what people always assume about me because of my aesthetic, I'm actually not the biggest horror fan. I don't like being scared and because of my OCD, I have a hard time with extreme gore and violence. That said, I do really love horror films that have a message beyond just a desire to scare or disgust or disturb you. Horror films that are technically labeled as horror because of a vibe or aesthetic, but which aren't actually very scary. Films like The Substance, I Saw the TV Glow, and basically anything under the genre of cosmic horror are some of my favorite pieces of media. I was told that Obsession also had a heavy dose of societal commentary before I watched it.

[00:51:28]So, imagine my horror when it was only after watching it that I found out it was being labeled one of the scariest films of the decade. And sure enough, I was scared. At one point, I had a genuine desire to leave the theater, but more than anything else, I just had the greatest, most overwhelming feeling of sadness. Don't Worry, Darling laces a lot of its sadness with stellar aesthetics, costumeuming, glitz, and glamour. But at its core, it's also a very, very sad story of domestic abuse ruining a woman's life. Even though both Alice and Nikki get their bodies back at the end of their films, you're left in the theater hearing the aching sobs of Nikki, you're left wondering, in what world is Alice ever going to get back to any kind of normal with her husband dead, her body tied to a bed, and her mind brutalized by an experience that cannot possibly be good for you.

[00:52:33]>> It was my life. Will Nikki now spend the rest of her life in jail, framed for murders she did not autonomously commit?

[00:52:44]Meanwhile, Iris is hitting the road as a millionaire.

[00:52:56]I'm glad one of you gets a happy ending.

[00:52:59][ __ ] All of these films are an excellent warning against the rise of the red pill. The popularity of misogynistic right-wing men who believe they have a [music] right to multiple women's bodies with their one-sided serial non- monogamy, conflating manliness with monstrosity. [music] There's this amazing moment in Don't Worry, Darling, where Frank's voice slowly becomes louder and louder as Jack listens to his Red Pill [ __ ] with [music] the camera slowly zooming out to show us the James Bond poster in the background.

[00:53:38]It's all too real. I know a lot of the stuff I talked about in today's video was grim and bleak and uncomfortable.

[00:53:48]And I'm not going to lie, this was a bit of a difficult script for me to write. I had to watch like five movies about women being abused by incelss. I'm going to become a Disney girl after this. If you didn't have a good time watching this video, all I can say is no. No, no, no. I thought we were having a good time. I keep doing this bit to my boyfriend who hasn't even seen Obsession. Maybe I shouldn't have joked so much about men not getting the point.

[00:54:19]Anyway, that's all.

[00:54:22]Goodbye. Good night. Sleep well.

[00:54:28]I thought we were having a good time.

[00:54:32]She's an actress. Thank you. [music] Oh, guys, check out my new tattoo. I got this yesterday. [music] I keep accidentally scratching it with these nails. I'm hoping it still heals well.

[00:54:48]What do we think? Do you guys like it?

[00:54:50]It's so cute. Do you like me? I needed something here for the credit scene, but I [music] I I was kind of rushed filming and I didn't really get any B-roll together for this video. So, [music] um yeah, I'm credits credits credits rolling. Thank you so much to this crew here. It has been a little bit of a tricky season for me. I haven't been paid by my day job in seven months and um I am uh potentially going to be kicked off benefits soon [music] because I am no longer classified as gainfully self-employed. So um yeah, if you would like to help me become gainfully self-employed and [music] maybe help this channel take up a bigger part of my professional life, I would be yeah just eternally eternally grateful. This is my dream. I I just really want to make videos full-time and I um Yeah. Where's my stick? Oh, [ __ ] I wished it away on not liking men anymore.

[00:55:50]That was a choice.