ContraPoints / William Nicholas Parrott / Natalie Wynn Parrott / Nykytyne2 - GamerGhazi Cannibalism Victim, Youtube "Intellectual"

[The_Bladder_Splatter]

I remember being a fan of Contra, now I see him after about 5 years of not watching and wondering why I ever liked them in the first place...

But then I feel that about most of the left wing muppets I used to watch.

You grew up and valued yourself as an individual, something many pop leftists can't really do

 

[Anteros]

February 29 is here, wonder if we're getting a new video or a 355th deadline from Controon

 

[Conspiracy Mawile]

Epic Vaush destruction with facts and logics incoming today?

 

[Tybalt The S@ucy B0y]

https://x.com/contrapoints/status/1763297495973552174?s=46

Maybe he forgot it was a leap year. February 29th doesn’t exist

 

[Cr1ms0n_&_C10v3r]

A day late and a decade of cultural relevancy short.

 

[Silence of the Troons]

>Three hours of wankery

Now watch as he disappears for another year or two

Edit: according this Hontra fan in the comments, reading Twilight as a man can be a sign of you being a heckin' stunning trans girl.

 

[Traummaschine]

So is this 3 hour video really about Twilight or is it all about angst and tranny issues? It's pretty funny if his fans has waited two years on the former, but from taking a glance on the comments I guess it's the latter.

 

[Cr1ms0n_&_C10v3r]

So is this 3 hour video really about Twilight or is it all about angst and tranny issues? It's pretty funny if his fans has waited two years on the former, but from taking a glance on the comments I guess it's the latter.

I've only been able to watch about half of it so far but he's essentially talking about sex and desire and power dynamics. Nothing particularly revolutionary and I don't even disagree with most of what he's saying, though he does of course need to dedicate some of the run time to bashing terfs, which is funny because I don't even think most women he would slander as "terfs" would object to most of what he's saying in this video which has been discussed more eloquently by other people before him and in a way less grating medium.
He's basically just using the Twilight series as a way to relate the nebulous, all over the place topic of conversation and the themes to a cultural touchstone most people have some familiarity with.

 

[DueTretective]

This video has been shelved since 2021 so Contra had 2 years to make it and it comes out so underwhelming. The contradiction between different sections is noticeably bad. In one section, he says "Sexual fantasy is a psychological wish fulfillment to satisfy repressed emotion so radfems are stupid to take it seriously". In the next section he says "Fantasy reflects the material conditions of the subject of fantasy and can possibly reinforce the unjust political reality". So which one is it? Are radfems stupid for taking rape kink as problematic desire or does sexual fantasy perpetuate harmful stereotypes? The only semi-interesting part in the video is when he compares Twilight allegories of giving birth and sex with Christian concepts of crucifixion and death. The rest is pretty subpar and just the usual philosophical and psychiatric empty gesturing about female identification in heterosexual fantasy, male/female classification in the sadomasochist dichotomy and how lust/sexual desire depends on a hierarchical order to maintain itself. It's annoying that he has to waste the first 1 hour to summarize the plot of Twilight.

 

[Tybalt The S@ucy B0y]

Parrott seems to have so much trouble not only producing one video a year, but also sticking to one topic. There are so many twenty minute tangents he falls into with minimal correlation that it would be best if he produced maybe a "series" of ten or twenty videos a year.

His current video is 2 hours and 52 minutes. He could basically make one 15 minute video a month and compile it into a playlist at the end of the year. The algorithm and his audience would like that a lot more, and it's much easier to manage videos in increments of 15 min than a 180 minute long monster.

I had a hard time following the entire thing. We started with a summary of Twilight, then a history of romances and the "Cinderella" fantasy and "Beauty and the Beast" fantasy, beginning with the 18th century novel "Pamela." Parrott also talked about the difference between "romance" and "erotica," and how romance and dark fantasy fulfills some women's emotional needs.

He also talks about how fantasy and erotica is wrapped around "shame," and that the reason women are into domination and rape fantasies is because they can keep their "purity" while being forced to experience pleasure.

Something mildly interesting was in the middle, Parrott talked a little bit about how "In fantasy romances, the lovers get a happy ending. In real life, they get something called a 'long term relationship.'" The goes on to say that long-term relationships don't thrive off "eros" and you need to either implement excitement and fall back in love with each other again and again, or settle into a more pragmatic and practical existence. Are he and Uwu still together? It's been 3-4 years now since we first heard about her, and this could be him telling on himself.

He criticizes radfems for being anti-sex and mocks "political lesbians" who want "egalitarian relationships." Claims all humans are attracted to power, and a lot of women view fusion with men as a manner of as close as they can get to ultimate power.

The only semi-interesting part in the video is when he compares Twilight allegories of giving birth and sex with Christian concepts of crucifixion and death.

This was so genuinely insane that I couldn't stop laughing.

Oh, he also maintains that female sexuality is still rooted in autoeroticism, which also made me burst out laughing.

Final thoughts from him are that gender is not a spectrum but a yin and yang, a duality (a binary), but not a binary! A blend, a fusion, a mixture!

Random tangents about 120 Days of Sodom, Jeffrey Dahmer, vore, and other topics that were very loosely connected to Twilight.

Conclusion: Should not have been 3 hours long, but maybe a six-part series. Parrott needs to cut back on the tangents. It feels like he took too many shrooms (as he jokes in the video), tripped out in the bathtub for a weekend, and envisioned this grandiose script that took up a three hour long video and made sense in his mind at the time, but is just a jumble of barely related media that he wraps under the bow of "sex and power."

 

[cia-log]

I got as far as him claiming George Eliot had internalized misogyny for writing "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" I don't know why I even felt this might not have the same sort of platitudes meant to sound challenging when really they're just pandering to the views of the audience that the rest of his videos are made up of, but I'm not gonna sit through this again, certainly not three hours worth.

Besides, didn't he cover this topic in a previous video? Or maybe it was Hunger Games or Fifty Shades idk. I'll quote the full paragraph he was criticizing:

We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and daughters devoting themselves to the production of “copy” out of pure heroism—perhaps to pay their husband’s debts or to purchase luxuries for a sick father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation. Women’s silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.

something something breadtubers

He criticizes radfems for being anti-sex and mocks "political lesbians" who want "egalitarian relationships." Claims all humans are attracted to power, and a lot of women view fusion with men as a manner of as close as they can get to ultimate power.

His takes lately have been, dare I say, PhilosophyTube tier. Just absolute blather posturing as profundity, only whereas Olly just slaps a bunch of philosophy words together and calls it a day, Contra's absolutely fucked his brain up with too much Lolita/Eyes Wide Shut/sissy hypno/etc. He keeps acting like deep down everyone's as much a Jeffrey Epstein as him and his friends, to the point where his videos even start to feel like sissy hypno themselves, the way they keep trying to convince the audience they have some deep dark desires or obsessions that nobody actually has.

 

[Drunk Chipmunk]

I don't have anything eloquent to add, but I did laugh a few times ("The French call orgasm 'le pain quotidien.'")

I agree that there's nothing revolutionary here, but credit where it's due: the aesthetic and production values are far better than anything I could put out, and there's interesting and humorous commentary in places if you ignore the boringly predictable requisite sperging about TERFs.

 

[Anteros]

When I saw the first few minutes of the video and got over the insane length, I was like "great! Finally a video without political anger and thinly veiled seething about [insert political enemy du jour here]." I closed it and planned to rewatch it later. Finding out from what other posters said here about him STILL managing to seethe about TERFs in a video about fucking Twilight is.... unsatisfying and I'm less excited about sitting through the video now lmao.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks that this video is some attempt at restoring Twilight to a semblance of cultural relevancy in the internet sphere as an alternative to Harry Potter ever since JK Rowling became public enemy number one? The ending of his last JKR video was "Harry Potter's dead to me, I'm switching to Twilight" and I don't think it's a coincidence that he now released a 3 hour lecture trying to pass off a horny vampire romance novel as highbrow literature unjustly dismissed by crass cultural commentators and the vulgar masses.

 

[Real Ariana Grande]

By the way, am I the only one who thinks that this video is some attempt at restoring Twilight to a semblance of cultural relevancy in the internet sphere as an alternative to Harry Potter ever since JK Rowling became public enemy number one? The ending of his last JKR video was "Harry Potter's dead to me, I'm switching to Twilight" and I don't think it's a coincidence that he now released a 3 hour lecture trying to pass off a horny vampire romance novel as highbrow literature unjustly dismissed by crass cultural commentators and the vulgar masses.

Contra is actually late to the party (likely because it takes him 2+ years to make a video). For the last few years something called the "Twilight Renaissance" has been going on because people are getting back into the series. There's a Twilight Shitposting group on Facebook with nearly 700,000 members, and Twilight jokes/memes have invaded dozens of other spaces online. It's a mix of mockery and genuine love for the series.

 

[AssignedEva]

So is this 3 hour video really about Twilight or is it all about angst and tranny issues? It's pretty funny if his fans has waited two years on the former, but from taking a glance on the comments I guess it's the latter.

Twilight is used as a framing device to talk about the nature of human sexuality and desire. I've made a bit of a summary of the talking points, but this is a summary and so is stripped of context and nuance (so it might read like there's some unhinged things being asserted with no backing, which isn't the case).

Spoiler

Part 0 - Twilight/Part 1 -Fiction

• The plot of Twilight and how it was received at the time
• People thinking Twilight was promoting dangerous relationships
• A history of romance novels in general, going back to the 1740 book Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson
• The purpose of art (to teach morals, to be accurate depictions of the world or to provide escapist fantasy)
• People being concerned about the literature women are reading

Part 2 - Desire

• Romance novels involve a barrier to the romance being overcome
• The concept of Eros is rooted in desire, and desire requires an absence (you desire something you don't currently have) and thus bittersweet
• When the love object is obtained, that's the end of a romance novel, as the romance is about the hunt (which is why it's often depicted as predator/prey)
• Likewise the yearning for a love object in real life is more about finding meaning through that yearning rather than trying to get that person themselves
• "You can't get what you want. And if you do, it won't make you happy. And if it does, not for long."
• The sweet of the bittersweet is the pursuit and hope, not the obtaining
• Obtaining the desired love object is only pleasurable thanks to the tension that has built. Without the tension, there is no pleasurable release
• Wisdom is to avoid the unfulfilling cycle of desire, but without desire life becomes mundane

Part 3 - Fantasy

• Victorians believed women didn't experience much sexual desire or passion; the Madonna/whore complex and only "fallen" women were into sex
• Pre-Victorian, Westerners used to think women were more sexual than men, but the Victorian attitude made women feel deviant for having sexual desires
• Twilight (and romance books) are erotically charged without being explicitly erotic or depicting explicit sex scenes
• "Ravishment" fantasies allow women to fantasise about sex without breaching the Madonna/whore complex - "the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex"
• Disavowal fantasies in general mean you can get what you want without the indignity of having to ask for it
• Extreme fantasies also allow you to override the typical barriers to pleasure - shame, insecurity etc
• Having a romantic hero with villainous traits overrides guilt - you don't need to feel guilty for selfishly indulging centring your own pleasure if you're forced to be a villain
• "Antis" think too literally and do not think of the psychological reasoning behind these very common fantasies, merely recognising they'd be bad if they happened in real life
• Misogynistic predators also take these fantasies at literal face value and think this means women want to be abused

Part 4 - Power

• These fantasies do reflect something real about the sexual dynamics between men and women
• Women are subjected to predatory men and this shapes fantasies
• The default assumption is that men are dominant, to the point that dominant women are treated like a kink (femdom etc)
• Erotic content for men tends to involve degrading women; erotic content for women tends to involve submitting to men
• This is rooted in historical gender roles that made women unable to exist without men - coverture etc.
• Women looked for wealthy powerful men as they were unable to create their own lives for themselves
• The fantasy of submitting to a powerful man also involves being uplifted as a consequence of it (the handsome rakish Duke eventually makes you a duchess; Bella becomes a vampire)
• Political lesbians and sex negative feminists felt "sexual freedom" was the freedom for men to act out violence on women, and not freedom for women at all
• Men had power over women as a class, and therefore heterosexual relationships are oppressive due to this power imbalance, and heterosexual relationships obstructed women's lib
• This was reframed to "eroticising power" (and thus targeted lesbian sadomasochists, too, or a gay couple that engage in penetrative sex, or interracial couples)
• Possibly what these sex negative feminists truly fear is the loss of self control resulting from Eros
• Thinking you can "rationally" opt out of sexual desire in the manner of a political lesbian is not realistic, you can't reason away what you find attractive

Part 5 - Death

• Human sexuality tends to display aspects of hierarchy, cruelty and consumption. Why?
• Love is two people becoming one, so a new kind of life but the death of the individuals who existed previously
• Erotic love can be a threat to our identity and understanding of ourselves as individuals.
• Desire can feel violating - you lose part of yourself, you are "penetrated" by thoughts of the other
• Death and love and death and rebirth are often highly symbolically linked
• Jesus as a lamb makes sense when you consider the role of lambs as sacrificial animals in Temple Judaism
• Blood (periods, childbirth) is "unclean", but shedding the blood of sacrificial animals is cleansing and sacred
• Likewise sex is unclean, but sex within the context of marriage for procreation is sacred
• These taboos are what drive desire, and it is the sacred being profaned that ties into many more extreme fantasies, rather than just base aggression
• But while sadism is driven by the surge to befoul, this is not congruent with the sexual fantasies of submission that result in the woman being uplifted
• Christian Gray is not a sadist but a masochist's fantasy of a sadist
• Lust is inherently transgressive, eroticism hinges on power imbalances, society attempts to channel these constructively; it is not society perverting eroticism through class relations

Part 6- Identity

• Identifying with the powerful makes us feel powerful. Serial killer groupies don't want to be a victim, they want to be the "final girl".
• Historically the only real way for women to gain power was by aligning themselves with powerful men.
• The real fantasy is being the woman who controls male power ("topping from the bottom" in 50 shades) and metaphorically becoming them
• In that regard, romance novels are more a psychodrama featuring different aspects of the reader's own personality; the heroine is mostly a placeholder
• The reader both wants to be loved by the hero and also be the hero (in an abstract way)
• Being desired by an attractive man, or possessing an attractive women, can also feed into narcissistic ego fantasies because of what it says about you for achieving this
• Narrow conceptions of gender roles mean women are assumed to be submissive, passive, beloved, feminine while men are dominant, active, lover, masculine and that these roles are fixed
• This is why some women are drawn to male/male erotica as it allows for more fluidity beyond that dynamic
• Gender is not a binary or a spectrum but a duality. There is no masculinity without femininity; there is no top without a bottom. Yin and yang.
• Everyone has elements of masculinity and femininity within them and rigid definitions of gender roles erase these
• Is Twilight really a romance or is it really a spiritual journey about unifying contradictory elements of ourselves? Being both predator and prey?

This really is a very abridged summary - there's a lot of specific stuff raised I didn't get into and a lot of genuinely interesting references.

There's an interesting broader point being argued. Effectively feminists like Dworkin and Sheila Jeffreys, and now in some ways more contemporary leftists, argued that the traditional dynamic within a heterosexual relationship was "problematic" as it eroticises power imbalance and thus replicates power imbalances. However couples who have then attempted to create an egalitarian power dynamic specifically in an erotic capacity have found it unarousing, because eroticism is linked to power dynamics. The suggested solution is to recognise male/female, masculine/feminine, dominant/submissive, penetrating/penetrated etc do not have to all align - the penetrating partner could be submissive - and that these roles do not have to remain fixed, and allowing partners to take turns as the dominant or submissive partner if that's what they so wish is key to having more egalitarian relations. Which is a bit duh, but exploring the arguments of sex-negative political lesbian separatists and considering them in a modern context - and then validating aspects of their perspective and proposing a more workable and realistic response wasn't something I was expecting to see from a Breadtube video.

Probably the most controversial claim is that there aren't two genders, but there also aren't three genders or a gender spectrum, instead people are misunderstanding the nature of duality and that we all have masculine and feminine elements to our personality and really there is only "one gender" with different elements of masculinity and femininity in it, which varies by person and can vary over time. It's certainly not something I agree with but it's an angle that does go a long way to undermining a lot of claims about non-binary people not "fitting" into male or female, for example. I don't think it's a unique suggestion by any means (the "abolish gender" crowd spout something a bit similar) but it's not really a mainstream viewpoint among younger Contra fans so there may be another twitter cancellation in the near future, if anyone actually makes it to the end of the video. I also wonder if this is another sign of a soft-detransition.

Mostly I found this video entertaining, but far too long. Contra once again has done successfully what PhilosophyTube fails to do - take a basic idea, then spin it off into an array of tangents to talk about broader concepts with consideration towards the writings of various philosophers, pop cultural representations and literary canon. I don't agree with everything but Contra does make a real effort to good faith represent varied viewpoints and it does feel more like someone sharing their personal perspective rather than "this is what is right, educate yourself". Also the jokes are actually fairly funny. It didn't need to be longer than The Sound of Music, though. I watched on 1.5x speed and watching it on 1x speed sounds a bit drugged up, and there's also a couple of jokes about basically getting really into heroin after being spurned by a lover (so I wonder if that relationship broke up).

When I saw the first few minutes of the video and got over the insane length, I was like "great! Finally a video without political anger and thinly veiled seething about [insert political enemy du jour here]." I closed it and planned to rewatch it later. Finding out from what other posters said here about him STILL managing to seethe about TERFs in a video about fucking Twilight is.... unsatisfying and I'm less excited about sitting through the video now lmao.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks that this video is some attempt at restoring Twilight to a semblance of cultural relevancy in the internet sphere as an alternative to Harry Potter ever since JK Rowling became public enemy number one? The ending of his last JKR video was "Harry Potter's dead to me, I'm switching to Twilight" and I don't think it's a coincidence that he now released a 3 hour lecture trying to pass off a horny vampire romance novel as highbrow literature unjustly dismissed by crass cultural commentators and the vulgar masses.

Some of this video is semi-ironic in tone. Stuff like "Snapewives" is touched on and the joke "why can't I go one video without talking about Harry Potter". Contra has more self awareness than most.

 

[Peenix]

 

[Shotgun Badger]

@AssignedEva I like your post, and I'll admit that I'm not going to sit through 3 hours of this nonsense so I'm basically just going off the summaries here, but I do think you are going a bit too easy on him, its kind of indicative of something I really dislike about Contra which is, at the end of the day, he's really quite anti-feminist and adheres to quite stringent and regressive ideas of gender, and mocks Feminists who hold opposite positions are mostly just shrill and unrealistic. Like it sounds like at the end of all of this he has a pretty unpleasant view of romance as being transactional and built on inequitable and somewhat exploitative interactions between people, which might explain his woes in his love life thinking about it.

 

[Dr. Butt]

it sounds like at the end of all of this he has a pretty unpleasant view of romance as being transactional and built on inequitable and somewhat exploitative interactions between people, which might explain his woes in his love life thinking about it.

Someone set him up with Aella!

 

[Tybalt The S@ucy B0y]

LLike it sounds like at the end of all of this he has a pretty unpleasant view of romance as being transactional and built on inequitable and somewhat exploitative interactions between people, which might explain his woes in his love life thinking about it.

What I interpreted was that he’s very libertarian about sex and that he prefers a versatile dynamic while he recognises other people prefer egalitarian dynamics. Pretty inconclusive at the end of the day, and all things considered, we did not need Parrott’s approval for any of it

 

[fax machine]

I got as far as him claiming George Eliot had internalized misogyny for writing "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"

It's a bit that speaks to Contra's alienation from class based analysis. The essay — and that paragraph in particular — reads easily to anyone receptive to the message as an indictment of class, of a leisure class so cocooned in its own fantasies that its members can spend their their whole lives writing and never touch anything real. Eliot was a lover of realism. Of course she had hard words for novels of romantic unreality. Is it bigotry for an individual to have individual tastes?

All I can say is that no one accuses a man of misandry for disliking the hero's journey because he finds it too contrived.

The psychological streak which has always been strong in ContraPoints videos comes out so strong in this one that it just about annihilates the materialist critique. Three hours of vibes, semiotics, mythology, mysticism, Dao. I don't necessarily dislike it — it's fun — but it reveals the inevitable futility of a Breadtube created by and for college educated neurotics. At the end of the day, when people are honest with themselves (and I think Contra has been more honest since the canceling episode), they're not going to make a life and mission of fighting to change the real world. The draw of Breadtube for its core demographic is the fun of thinking about ideals. Marx is a natural springboard in that he influenced an abundance of thinkers, but as this latest video shows, you can have just as much fun thinking in other directions — some of which indulge more fully that humanities major's yearning to live in the clouds.

This video has been shelved since 2021 so Contra had 2 years to make it and it comes out so underwhelming. The contradiction between different sections is noticeably bad. In one section, he says "Sexual fantasy is a psychological wish fulfillment to satisfy repressed emotion so radfems are stupid to take it seriously". In the next section he says "Fantasy reflects the material conditions of the subject of fantasy and can possibly reinforce the unjust political reality". So which one is it? Are radfems stupid for taking rape kink as problematic desire or does sexual fantasy perpetuate harmful stereotypes?

atp Contra clearly favors "psychologically eternal" over "historically produced" as an explanation for complex human phenomena. There are nods to material and political history here and there because the arguments are too obvious to ignore, but this video is a defense of fantasy and a call for more fantasies that treads very lightly around the (no, not one to one, but still somewhat real) relationship between fantasy and justifications of wrongdoing.