Incels
Natalie Wynn, better known by her YouTube channel name, ContraPoints, is a trans woman, ex-Philosophy grad, and member of the cohort of leftist YouTubers known as “BreadTube,” the aim of which is to build a counterbalance to the substantial far-right presence on the platform. Engaging the same topics and deploying the aesthetics and language (“triggered,” “cuck,” “snowflake,” etc.) as alt-right YouTubers, BreadTubers ensure that their content lands in the feeds of alt-right content watchers, grâce à YouTube’s watch time-optimizing recommendation algorithm, which, as internet culture reporter Kevin Roose points out, has been “a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides” and a recruiting tool for far-right extremist groups. In Incels, a response to the 2018 “Toronto van attack” by a self-proclaimed “incel” (or “member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active,” according to Oxford Languages), Wynn articulates incel ideology in order to understand “how someone might start out in a decent place and end up in such a f*cked-up place” (Marantz). In addition to seeking to understand, Wynn offers understanding, and from a place completely unexpected in a video explicitly addressed to incels: her transition to womanhood. Opening with on-brand self-deprecating humor—”I’m in the unusual situation of being a woman who dates men, who used to be a man who dates women. What kind of f*cked up sh*t is that? Is that even allowed?!”—she forays into the miserable core of the incel mindset by sharing details of her own involvement with an online community “founded on self-loathing and hopelessness” and hosted by none other than the lawless quagmire of 4Chan. Much like incels in their own virtual spaces, Wynn posted on threads with other pre-transition trans people fully expecting abuse in response, clinging to what she terms “masochistic epistemology: whatever hurts is true”:
And at first I justified the habit by telling myself I was just doing ‘research […], but soon I realized that it wasn’t just research, and it was infecting me away from the computer. This ridiculous vocabulary […] was popping up in my head at unexpected times. It was starting to color how I thought about myself, and worse, it was starting to affect how I thought about other trans women. And that’s the moment I realized, I need to stop looking at this stuff right now or I’m gonna become a monster, and once that happens it’s going to be very difficult to fix. (Incels)
Admonishing her incel audience that they are using their arguments (against women, sexually active men, and each other) not as arguments, but rather as “razor blades to abuse yourselves,” Wynn concludes with one of the most sensually affirmative messages of her work. Referencing this and other videos in an article for the New York Times, Roose profiles Caleb Cain, a former alt-right radical whose encounters with Contrapoints helped him to see the flimsiness of right-wing arguments: “’Natalie […] made a bridge over to my side,’ Mr. Cain said, ‘and it was interesting and compelling enough that I walked across it.’”