YABookgate

[Frogget-me-not]

Audra Winter is now Milo Winter.

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Lol what a mess. Milo of all names. God bless this autistic woman and her 4D chess move to twist the retarded leftie booktok drama channels into knots when they have to call her 'him.' Or will they go full transphobe? Let's find out.


Don't you remember the 2023 chyna controversies?

Milo? I hate every part of this.



The collective of people talking about yet Audra winters drama have now gone full retard with the new pronouns. Even if it’s obvious that some of them are sure this is just the next stage of the pity grift, they’re all being performative because they fear getting attacked by their own for not being validating uwu

Surprised that Mx winters hasn’t got a kiwi thread yet.

 

[Rezza]

Wait... what?

Yeah, so Taiwan also had indigenous people before the Chinese settled there. But they have brown/bronze skin like the South East Asian/other Austronesian (Austronesian actually came from Taiwan), so I don't know where this black skinned shit came from

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

so I don't know where this black skinned shit came from

Yakub

 

[Grayback]

I need to organize my thoughts

After further review, both videos are pretty bad. I've given up on trying to say which of them is worse.
It seems that Second Story has worse arguments but better motives, and that Nimbus / Cloud Parade has the reverse. But even that, I'm unsure of.

TL;DR -
1. Second Story's video makes a bunch of assertions about sex in literature, how it affects readers, and why it's there, but she doesn't really support anything that she says, and she makes few real arguments (instead of just "assertions"). It seems that she simply opposes the spread of sex in books, but is unsure of how to actually attack it—so she just throws theories at you about how pernicious it all is, about how these books manipulate and desensitize you, and you're powerless to resist these effects unless you reject smut outright. She spends a lot of time finding new ways to repeat herself, but she also contradicts herself a fair bit, makes liberal use of strawmen, and dishonestly misrepresents things. Throughout her complaints, she also just seems frustrated with normies for having lowbrow normie tastes—but that's just an unavoidable fact of reality.

2. Nimbus's response touches on a few of the problems with Second Story's video, and is mostly correct about those problems. But she spends a lot of time nitpicking at technicalities, making mistakes of her own in the process, and attacking things that aren't actually present in Second Story's original video—largely missing the substance of the video (which is where all of the stuff worth attacking is!). Nimbus also has a few cartoonish Leftoid moments throughout her presentation, which were what initially made me think that her response was worse than it actually is. It is trite and incomplete, self-indulgent at times, even petty and bitter—but it's not entirely wrong.

Spoiler: the first 8K of ~15K words, no really

I'm sorry about the length. But I wanted to be accurate.
And, if there's a way to properly indent lines on KF, I couldn't find it.

1.
__ The Second Story video throws out a lot of assertions, but doesn't do a good job of 1. supporting these assertions with evidence / sources, or 2. making an argument with these assertions.
__ Instead of going, "here's assertion A, and when you apply reasoning B, that brings us to judgment C," the assertions are given, the reasoning is usually just implied or assumed to be a given already, and the "conclusions" are just yet more assertions that don't really build on what came before. Sometimes, the assertion will just be given and then moved on from, without any apparent point. If someone is trying to convince you of something, and they start off with "X is a thing," their next point had better be, "because of X, therefore Y." Otherwise, no argument is being made.
__ The point of an argument is to transmit not just information, but a specific judgment about that information. If you're just listing off shit, and you aren't then presenting the conclusion that directly follows and the reasons why it follows, then people can jump off from the assertions that you've made in whatever direction they want, and draw their own conclusions from it. You're not making an argument by doing that. If anything, it's probably an indication that you're too wrapped up in your own point of view, because you see the conclusions and judgments that you expect people to just infer from what you've said as being natural and inevitable, as opposed to being something that you still need to argue for.

__ Almost everything that Second Story says in this video is an intuitive point about some big, general, overall trend. If you already see these trends and have already reached the same judgments about them that she has, then what she's saying will make intuitive sense to you, and you can just nod along as she talks for half an hour. But if you don't already agree with what she's saying, then there's almost nothing in this video to try to convince someone to agree with her view.

__ Second Story opens the video by essentially saying that smut in fiction is as big of an impediment (to "good writing," presumably) as poor technical skills are, which is why she wants to address this topic now.
__ She says that the books most often pointed to as proof of female authors' success in breaking through and reaching parity with male authors are lowbrow porn books like Fourth Wing or ACOTAR. "Most often" in what setting, though? Twitter? TikTok? Academia? Her friend group? Her local book club? Her YouTube comments section? Even if we grant that her observation is true, the complaint here just seems to be that normies have lowbrow tastes. Like, yeah, no shit.
__ She also points out (as a supposed contradiction) that there have been successful female authors in the past who haven't just written smut (Frankenstein, etc.), yet those authors aren't given the same recognition as all of these contemporary smutty romance authors. Why bring them up, then? If Second Story's point is that the modern zeitgeist has been taken over by smut, then why bring up other authors who apparently aren't salient in the zeitgeist at all? They can't be counterexamples of "how female authors can still be successful without porn" if, per Second Story's assertion, nobody ever thinks about or mentions these books, while they are instead thinking about stuff ACOTAR. Once again, this just seems like impotent frustration with the normies' lowbrow tastes.

__ Second Story then asserts that the publishing industry is dominated and shaped by Progressives, and that it seems like the women who have been successful in publishing (currently, and all the way back for the last hundred years or so) have been Progressive adherents. I'm inclined to agree (up to a point), but she just drops this on us without either support or a "therefore" and moves the fuck on. What?
__ If I had to, I could probably try to make my own argument about how Left-wing ideology broadly or Progressive ideology specifically necessarily has to push the boundaries of what's acceptable in a society, and how that leads to a loosening of standards, and thus an increase in literary smut—but for the entire rest of the fucking video, Second Story doesn't even come close to doing that.

__ Second Story starts her main argument by claiming that "most, if not all, of the 'women's literature' out there is... porn." She does not support this assertion. I'd be onboard with someone claiming that women's smut is "a highly-visible plurality" of modern fiction. But "most" is the kind of thing that you really have to support, and "all" is generally impossible in nature (unless you're making tautologies about a category or something).
__ She moves on to claim that defenders of romance / women's literature (which she has now defined as entirely smut) will usually conflate any criticism of that literature with criticism of what women like or criticism of women as a whole for liking it. She then sidesteps the accusation (which she brought up against herself) by saying that the issue of smut in books is not about being pro/anti women, instead claiming that the real motivation behind normalizing smut is so that people can make money. Because we can all agree that we all hate people trying to make money, don't we, fellow monetized large-channel YouTubers?
__ This strikes me as Second Story trying to take the safe (cowardly) position so that she can continue to hold the opinion that she wants to have with minimal pushback.
__ Publishers aren't making their money out of nowhere. Whenever someone is making money, there are two sides to the transaction. In this case, if publishers are making a killing selling smutty books, then the other side of the transaction is a correspondingly-giant audience of gooner women who want smutty books. If you want to criticize them, too, then do it. But don't pretend that you're only criticizing some Monopoly-man caricature at a publisher's office in a Manhattan skyscraper. You're criticizing the lowbrow normie audience, too. Do it. They deserve it. But don't pussyfoot around.
__ Second Story throws out a few more wild claims (like "women's literature doesn't exist") without defining what she means or backing them up in any way. I think here she's using "women's literature" to mean literature that only women (effectively, if not literally) would want to read (as opposed to something with gender-neutral appeal), because I'm not sure how else she could mean this that wouldn't contradict what she's said earlier. If it doesn't exist, then what has she been criticizing in this video? "Women haven't taken over the literary world, [porn] has." But I thought that she'd just defined the two as being basically the same thing! And if she meant "women's literature" here to mean "books intended for women, but without the porn," then she should have made a distinction between "good" and "bad" women's literature instead of saying that the two are the same. Really not good stuff here.

__ She then gets into talking about porn in general, and the difference between men's and women's approach to erotic material. It starts with intuitive stuff that seems correct (men prefer visual porn, women prefer thinking about / having emotions about their porn, etc.). She alludes to some studies about these differences, but, frustratingly, never cites or names them. In a conversation with friends about things that you already find intuitive, you can just mention that studies have been done on the topic, and you don't need to cite studies. In a video that's meant to convince a million people to agree with your position, you should probably cite studies.
__ As she goes on, she gives a lengthy description of the kind of porn that women apparently most respond to—which aligns almost perfectly with contemporary romance literature. On one hand, maybe the publishers have gamed women's neurological responses in order to keep them addicted, in the same way that we know that social media companies have. On the other hand, maybe this is just p-hacking (without even having the numbers to back it up).
__ The elements which Second Story says that women are wired to respond to are as broad and banal as a narrative structure, a character that women can self-insert with, a love interest who singles out the main character / reader as special, even fuckin' build-up over time. It's so broadly-applicable as to be meaningless. With how she's defined things, you could suggest that basically any element in a book that makes the book more interesting is being used to manipulate female readers' engagement.
__ And suppose that what she's described is true—what are we supposed to do with this information? Demand more-boring books? Ban girls under 18 from reading any fiction at all, as if it's equivalent to a porn website?
__ Her account of this insidious, super-effective pattern of women's porn is presented as it it's "just the way it is," so there's no argument to be had, and no explanation needed. She's defined herself as being dead-on right about this shit, and you just have to agree. Even if Second Story is mostly or even partly right about what she's described and how that pattern applies to romance books, and even though large parts of that argument might just seem intuitive, this is just not the way to go about convincing people.

__ Second Story then goes to an interview with Sarah J. Maas (which she actually cites this time), presenting Maas as an expert on the topic of romance writing. Second Story uses quotes from Maas about the supposed structure and timing behind her books' sex scenes to support Second Story's notion that all of the big female authors are deliberately using this same carefully-planned, sex-infused-narrative formula in order to better ensnare female readers.
__ The problem is, I don't believe Sarah J. Maas when she says that the timing and character of her sex scenes are so important and meaningful and meticulously-planned-out. I think it's a post hoc explanation that she thinks sounds better. I think she's lying to try to present the sex as an important element of the plot instead of admitting that it was just fun. Even if people enjoy sexual stuff in private, it's still weird and embarrassing to have to talk about it in public.
__ But Second Story runs with this as proof that current women's literature is being crafted to manipulate women's dopaminergic system in some incredible way. That sounds bad by itself, sure, but again, she leaves us without a "therefore...." How far is Second Story suggesting that we take this? Are we to infer that women are but helpless pawns, completely under an author's spell the moment that a book has starts to have its plot tension and sexual tension build up and release in parallel?
__ I even agree that there's too much smut in modern women's fiction, and that it's obviously being written in a way to try to appeal to women as well as it can, but this all just sounds so flimsy. It reminds me (oldest of the zoomers, certified unc) of listening to Jack Thompson in the mid-2000s talking about video game systems that he clearly didn't understand, and trying to argue that sound effects and achievement pop-ups and controller vibration were conditioning your average Star Wars: Battlefront player to become a ruthless murderer, actually, seriously, in real life.

__ Second Story's next piece of supporting evidence that women's fiction is all just sex-focused, porn-brained dreck? The categorization, spread, and specificity of sexual tropes on review websites and other similar outlets. Women apparently have really specific tastes about what they do or don't like in their stories, and they look for books that are categorized with those tags. She shows examples from the "book recommendations" subreddit that fit this mold.
__ In fairness to her argument, this is exactly like what goes on in visual, "male-focused" porn websites. Everything has tags. When you search, you add like 500 minus tags to exclude all of the gay / anthro / fetish shit that you don't want to see in the search results, and then add maybe 2 or 3 inclusive tags for what you actually are looking for. HOWEVER:
__ From how the people are writing in these posts, I suspect that the subreddit that she's showing us is a specifically smut-book-focused community. If so, it would be as absurd as taking the videos on Pornhub as exemplary of what all videos and films are like today. Even though the subreddit has a broad, banal title, that doesn't mean that it's a good, representative example of the whole reading audience as a whole. Just like how r/politics isn't by design supposed to be just far-left histrionics, or how /gif/ isn't by design supposed to be just AI tranny porn, that's still what they've turned into, as shaped by their community—and someone who's unfamiliar with the place wouldn't know that just by looking at the name of the website / board / subreddit.
__ I don't know if this is actually the case with the book recommendations subreddit (and I don't believe that I would be able to get a proper, long-term feel for the place to be able to say), but I suspect that it is. And from how Second Story spoke about the subreddit like a researcher trying to make sense of chimps, I suspect that she isn't familiar with the community in that place, either. But if Second Story has a bunch of examples of female readers talking about books in porn terms, then maybe it's just because of where she went looking.
__ I will, of course, grant that there's a lot of this sex-focused reader stuff out there. But do these readers' attitudes make up a majority of the modern women's fiction audience? A plurality? Just a loud, shameless minority? I don't feel that this example has brought us any closer to answering that. It's good for catching your attention as the posts fly by, but we have no idea how representative they really are.

__ Second Story's next evidence is that she apparently talked to (and read posts from) women who said that they were addicted to "hardcore content"—whatever that means. Watching porn? Watching rough porn? Getting their boyfriends to choke them during sex? Reading 50 Shades of Grey? I understand that Second Story is avoiding certain words in hopes of not getting demonetized, but trying a bit harder to find a way to still be specific would be helpful.
__ Second Story estimates that 90-95% of the women whom she read from / talked to started their descent down the "hardcore" rabbithole by reading erotic fiction. She lists off a bunch of scary (and vague) anecdotes from women about how extreme and depraved their erotic tastes got. They keep seeking out harder and harder stuff, it's "destroyed their lives," they have pOCD now, they're regretful, they wish they'd never started... and so on. And all of this is laid at the feet of erotic fiction.
__ Again, I can see the intuitive logic behind this. Smutty romance books could be a foot in the door. They could introduce readers to concepts which they might not otherwise have encountered, and the reader could pursue these concepts further and branch out from there, potentially branching further and further and getting more extreme, heading down a road that they might never have gone down had it not been for the book.
__ But there is zero causal link given here. Second Story is just leaving us to infer that there's a link, that there must be some inherent quality within smutty fiction (or within erotic content in general) that COMPELS readers to keep pushing the envelope and get more and more extreme. As she says, "these tastes... will intensify over time."
__ I guess she's alluding to dopamine receptor burnout, but I don't accept that that's inevitable or even common for people to experience. And if someone's tastes do grow to be more extreme, is it because of the book they read or the porn they watched? Or is it because their brain was just wired to overindulge and keep chasing that type of dopamine high in the first place? I think it's the latter. Second Story gives us nothing to think otherwise, but she's still trying to skip to this implied conclusion that there is a causal link.
__ As an example, I'm sure that 90-95% of methamphetamine users "started" by having high quantities of sugar when they were kids. Now, is that because their experience with sugar made them look for stronger and stronger stimulants, eventually driving them to use meth? Or is it because most kids these days get exposed to lots of sugar, and so whatever subset of people ends up using meth will have that same background as everyone else?
__ Of course, certain things will be more or less tempting to overindulge with because of the chemicals involved (either what you ingest, or what is elicited in your brain), but I think that it's people's inherent tastes / weaknesses / susceptibilities that cause them to misuse something and spiral out of control. Otherwise, what explains how so many people don't turn into brainrotted gooners even after reading romance books or using porn? If it were an inherent quality of erotic material, then nobody should be able to avoid that fate.

__ Second Story lists off extreme elements from a few contemporary books' descriptions, like necrophilia, torture, and rape, as evidence of authors pushing the envelope (presumably in response to readers' increasingly-extreme demands). But it's not clear that the examples that she's picked are representative of the modern book market. There's a lot more sex in books now. Sure. But necrophilia? Is the argument really that fucking necrophilia fiction is "on the rise?"
__ To emphasize the extremity of these tastes (and thereby support her idea that they must have arisen over time via desensitization), Second Story says, "women don't start out wanting rape-fantasy fiction."

ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?
__ Not all women, of course. Not even "most." But some of them definitely do. This is honestly "have you ever talked to other women before?" territory.
__ Still, Second Story believes that readers are being "desensitized" by reading erotic fiction. She brings up another anecdote of having seen lots of "very young teenage girls who say that the explicit sex in Sarah J. Maas's books is very 'mediocre' and 'vanilla.'" Second Story's conclusion is that these girls are "already desensitized and crave harder content." But... another conclusion might be that the scenes aren't landing because they're trite, or just poorly-written. Maybe they're good enough to be successful with the wider audience, but these reviewers want better-written scenes than just, "and then they banged."
__ "By now, I should have convinced you that these books are merely mass-produced hardcore adult entertainment... and that the result of [reading them] on a large-enough scale and on a long-enough timeline is pretty much the same as any other hardcore entertainment addiction."
__ Here, Second Story smuggles in "addiction" as if it's an intrinsic part of this. You can't just read these books and not get addicted, according to her. You can't avoid your reading becoming unhealthy and ever-more extreme. It's just an inherent quality of any fiction with sex in it.
__ Personally, I really dislike the ongoing surge of romantasy femgooner smut. I'm the kind of guy who's already inclined to be on Second Story's side. So if anyone were on board with what she's saying, it should be someone like me. But I'm just not convinced by anything that she's said so far because she's made some really extreme leaps and she hasn't even tried to back them up.
__ Is there a problem with women's fiction right now? Sure, I'm with you so far. Would I like to see a change? Yes. Should we condemn literally all fiction with any sexuality in it as inherently addictive and horribly destructive? No! What is this Jack Thompson shit?
__ But Second Story feels satisfied that she's made her case, and she's moving on.

__ Second Story starts responding to other defenses of smutty fiction that she anticipates receiving, but she only gives these each a little unearned scorn before sprinting past these defenses (that she brought up!) to start talking (again) about how women are helpless victims-in-waiting, merely drifting on the roiling seas of smut, defenseless prey for the next spicy book that comes along and ensnares them and warps their mind.
__ This time, her tactic is to invoke the world's vaguest study about "empathy." I'd intended to read the whole study for myself, but alas, it turns out that I need to contact the school to reset my old college e-mail password, so I wasn't able to access the full study. However, if I may be so bold, I don't think that Second Story actually read the fucking study, either. What she shows in her video is just the preview page on a journal aggregator's website, not actually the PDF of the article itself. She only shows the freely-available abstract of the study, and she cuts off her screenshot right before the big blue button that tells you that, if you want to get access to the whole article, you need to either give them your college / research organization credentials or pay up.

__ The abstract basically just says, "sometimes, empathy is good, but other times, empathy can be bad. Like if something bad happens, and you have empathy for it, then that can make you upset."
__ The study appears to be a meta-analysis of all of the different ways that this can happen. It really is that vague and broad, to the point of stupidity.
__ But even with this goober-ass writing, in the excerpts provided and even within the abstract, the authors make sure to differentiate between normal and excessive empathy. Occasionally, they call this "excessive affective empathy," as if it's a specific condition (further searches of that phrase didn't bring up anything, but that might just be a translation / wording issue, as the study's authors are all Chinese). A precise delineation for when empathy becomes "excessive" is not provided in the excerpts, but they still make it clear that the severe effects mentioned in the abstract come about as a result of excessive empathy.

__ AND YET, Second Story gives us some more intuitive broscience about how "women are more empathetic," and then spins a yarn about how female readers will begin to read a book, get to some objectionable part in the story (and not object to it?), and then, because of this dreadful empathy that they have, the reader will internalize that objectionable thing, and it will then seem normal to them. Thus, the femgooner desensitization ratchet turns.
__ To support this hypothesis of hers, Second Story just plucks the scary keywords (PTSD, burnout, etc.) out of the aforementioned abstract and presents all of these dire conditions as if they're related to reading a fucking book. As if these extreme conditions are all things that can happen to you, too, from simply 1. having empathy, and then 2. cracking open those smutty pages and allowing insidious women's fiction to prey upon your empathy.
__ This is so psychotically dishonest. It's a complete misapplication of the study, which she appears to have invoked solely to try to steal some of its authority to lend to her own arguments. My girl Aydin Paladin would never.
__ Second Story caps off her narrative of the archetypal ensnared woman by saying, "... strong emotions are exhausting, no matter who you are. And, women are more prone to feel emotions strongly." Therefore, WHAT, exactly? It really sounds like she's using this to try to support her assertion that women are just fucking helpless in the face of this process. They're like a leaf on the wind. Their emotions wear them out and leave them defenseless against the narrative's manipulation—right, Second Story? What else are we supposed to take this to mean?
__ Second Story earlier tries to distance herself from (having to be responsible for) this conclusion with, "... no, I'm not saying women are 'super weak,' or something like that," but with how she keeps trying to have her cake and eat it, too, I don't think she's being honest anymore. She wants to present the effect of romance books on female readers as insidious and inevitable, but also get away with not being accused of that. She says that strong emotions affect everyone, but she also singles out women as uniquely victimized by their own emotions. It's just basic-bitch motte-and-bailey stuff. I doubt that she's doing it intentionally, but it's still just so intellectually lazy.

__ Second Story then tells us that she spent a few weeks reading through a number of contemporary romance books, and that the experience left her SHOOK. Cool, another anecdote. Despite assuring us that she was super aloof and that she didn't really care about any of the characters or stories, they had a "huge emotional impact on [her.]" She claims that, while she was reading these books, she was "legitimately depressed." She had trouble focusing, eating, and sleeping. "I couldn't figure out what was wrong, until it dawned on me that my mind was basically being ripped around a female-specific rollercoaster that was designed to trigger the most extreme emotional and chemical reaction in my mind, short of actually doing drugs."
__ So she had a theory about what happens when you read romance books, she read romance books herself to try to prove it, and then she told herself that her theory was what she was experiencing. Okay.

__ Sounds like she found exactly what she went looking for. I don't think that we're doing science anymore, then.

__ Second Story's next point is that femgooner fiction is even worse than (she thinks) she's already established, because it isn't recognized as the harmful, addictive, pornographic content that it really is. Men's porn is condemned openly, but women's erotica flies under the radar or is even defended. Male porn addicts are regularly studied, but women aren't. On and on. She goes in circles just reiterating this difference for a few minutes. Once again, she fails to draw a conclusion from this, but the implication is that this lack of awareness or condemnation allows women's erotica to persist unchallenged, which allows it to keep harming women, and that the topic of women's erotica should be addressed and challenged instead—and Second Story is the one who will do it! I wish that someone would. I just don't think that she has.
__ Her next point is that "shame" is a good thing, because it's your brain trying to warn you off of bad behavior. For once, I agree with her. I'd quibble and say that there's another step—that it's your brain reminding you of the training that you've received from your family / culture about what's shameful, with negative-outcome behaviors being selected against and positive-outcome behaviors being selected for within past generations, and then with that knowledge of what's good / bad being preserved via traditions, but in general, I agree.
__ But Second Story goes on to claim that "... the effort to desensitize women to shame has been a lot more intensive than it has been to men...." She sees women as having been a particular bulwark against smut in the past, and seems to imagine that women were thus targeted by media publishers who just wanted to make money selling smut. Women were such stout champions in the fight against indecency that they just... rolled over to a little extra pressure? They're immediately won over by propaganda? Call me a dick, but I find it interesting that Second Story, a woman, wants to present women as simultaneously virtuous and important, but also helpless and not responsible for anything that happens to them. Call me an even bigger dick, but I think that both 1. the erosion of women's moral standards and 2. the way that Second Story is trying to present it are just bog-standard examples of women wanting to avoid any responsibility ever (because of evolutionary biology reasons; it's usually not personal).
__ Second Story proceeds by emphasizing how the women-targeted propaganda and the empathy-manipulating books go together to drive the smut problem, presuming that you've bought her arguments so far and can now just fit the pieces together.

__ Second Story next looks into the idea that women are dominating the publishing industry, and that they're the ones responsible for this trend of ever-increasing smut. Per her dubiously-reliable stats, about half of authors, two-thirds of editors, and three fifths of agents are women. Looking at which books are (supposedly) actually getting read, per the super-reliable and not-at-all-manipulated NYT bestseller list, slightly over half of "bestselling" books are written by women. Second Story tries to use these numbers to say that the publishing industry hasn't really been taken over by women—but then undercuts everything that she's been saying by interjecting that "... there are definitely other kinds of female writers working today," and that she "... [finds] it incredibly frustrating and just a little bit insulting..." that romance books are "... [examples] of typically-female writing..."
__ Once again, her position is just incoherent. There is no such thing as women's fiction, romance books and women's books are one in the same... but also they're different, and it's insulting that women's fiction is taken to mean "only romance books." It's like she wrote different parts of her script on different days with no memory of what she'd written before, not bothering to go back and check to try to make all of the arguments work together, just surfing on vibes of whatever she felt like she wanted in the moment.
__ She goes on. "But here's the thing: this fact—the fact that women dominate the literary agency—is not what created this problem." Dumbass, you just said that they didn't really dominate the industry. Once again, incoherent.

__ The problem that Second Story points to next is "... the widespread and constantly-increasing reliance on explicitly-sexual content to sell books." She gives examples: book endorsement blurbs describing a novel as "seductive and compelling." Pulp heroes rescuing the scantily-clad damsel on the cover of pulp novels. Sexy women on movie posters. Some of these examples are even from decades ago!
__ If one wanted to seriously study a sociological trend (like the use of sex in marketing), then they would have to look back a lot further than just a few decades. Beyond just what you can easily google, even. But doing so would require more than just 5 minutes of searching for a few keywords, which is all that it seems that she did.
__ But continuing with Second Story's surface-level recounting, these older works didn't actually have that much sex in them (compared to works now). And when there was sex, "... it kind of just came out of nowhere..." which is presented as better, and not just as an arbitrary difference (or even as being worse-written) because, per Second Story's model of the perfidious modern romance novel, if the sex comes out of nowhere, then the book can't slowly condition you to like erotic content. What a silly corner she's painted herself into.
__ Second Story presents the idea of basic escalation over time. Basically, an attention-getting arms race. If people in the past found out that a little sex sold well, and then more sex sold better as they were able to keep pushing that boundary, then we eventually reach the point (as we have now) where there's sex everywhere and you need more of it to get noticed.
__ I'm certainly onboard with the idea that the pattern of "eroding standards over time" is an inevitable function of time. I'm even sort of onboard with it as applied to sex in media. I'm just tired of her lazy arguments and her ass-pull conclusions. She has lost my goodwill. "You understand this arms race pattern, therefore you must agree with my perception of the modern book market" just doesn't work anymore.
__ She has a few more blithe assertions: book smut used to be more rare, it used to be better-written, it didn't use to be the focus of the book, and it didn't use to be so female-targeted. Just "shit is bad now, and it used to be better." This isn't much of anything beyond just saying, "I don't like it!" Yeah. We know. Even to those of us who agree, this offers nothing.

__ I'm also annoyed with the idea that "sex sells" as if it's an unchangeable fact of the universe. Sex sells if you're looking for sex. If I were looking for a military sci-fi novel, and I saw a scantily-clad woman posed on the cover, I would actually get the sense that this wasn't what I was looking for, and I wouldn't buy that book. It would tell me that the book was unserious and not focused on what I'm interested in. I want the cover with an intricately-detailed spaceship speeding diagonally across the image, and maybe a nebula or a binary star system or some explosions in the background. Same for an adventure novel, a children's book, or a crime thriller. If you want something specific, then that's what you want—and the cover on the next shelf over with big tits on the front and a titillating description on the back does not have to steal your attention and ensnare you instead.
__ I'm annoyed with how Second Story keeps using this idea to paint readers as innocent victims who are just having things happen to them, as if they have no culpability for the things that they choose to engage with. And I'm frustrated with how she uses the "sex sells, so more sex sells more, ad infinitum" idea to portray the decline of the book market as more or less an inevitability.

__ The video is really losing steam at this point. Second Story is running out of ways to complain about the admittedly-shit tastes of the plebs (and dress it up as something else).
__ She takes a random shot at Philip Pullman (author of His Dark Materials) for his quote about the necessity of including (or at least acknowledging) sex in stories.
__ Sex (and the relationships and families that are connected to it) is an important part of people's lives. It shapes their motivations and their decisions. It shapes cultures and interactions. Not in the sense that everything is sex-infused all the time (like everyone's walking around in fetish lingerie and fucking on the streetcorner 24/7 or something), but in the sense that someone's outfit can inform you about how they act in regards to sex and relationships, or in the way that someone might ordinarily rush into danger but would hesitate if that danger threatened their loved ones, and so on. It shapes what we do and how we perceive things. I'm reasonably sure that this is what Pullman meant when he was criticizing Tolkien's world as seeming "sexless" in the quote that Second Story brings up.
__ Instead of recognizing Pullman saying "It's as if they had their children by courier or something..." as an obvious and frankly tepid exaggeration meant to prove a point about how the world seemed to him to be (in one respect) lifeless, Second Story gives an insanely bad-faith interpretation of what Pullman said to try to paint him as if he's sex-obsessed. She suggests that Pullman is saying that he cannot comprehend where babies come from unless he personally watches the act of conception, and then pretends to be charitable toward him, saying that "... there's no way he's that stupid. I mean that sincerely." Having set up and knocked down this one retarded possibility, she then offers as "... the only other explanation..." "... that he's just trying to make an excuse for how badly he wants there to be lots of sex in books for him to both read and write."
__ "The only other explanation." Not that he feels that the characters are missing some of their motivation. Not that he feels as if the cultures are missing some of their richness. Not that he feels as if interactions are missing some dimension and come across as hollow. No. He's just a pervert. It's the ONLY possible explanation left to us. I'm sure that he has other shit going on, but if I were Philip Pullman, I would honestly see this as libelous.

__ Second Story uses this Pullman strawman for another woman-aggrandizing throwaway line that's just as incoherent as the last few, and it's not worth considering.
__ She goes on to say, "So many writers have repeated the same non-sensical argument that, because sex is a part of the natural human condition, failing to include it in your novel would make it unrealistic or disingenuous." This is like a caricature of Puritanism (which I take as cultural appropriation). Sex is very important to people. You don't have to put it explicitly on the page, but given the time scale, you probably need to consider acknowledging sex. If your book is about a weekend-long hockey tournament, then sex probably isn't going to come up, and you can have the characters just focus on the tournament. Battle of Normandy? Probably not going to come up—but it might, if a terrified soldier has a moment to think about what he wants to get home to. But if it's about any long-enough portion of someone's life? Yes, sex is going to come up. Having it. Missing it. Wishing for it. Wondering about it. Even if the character is a fucking monk, and sex only comes up in the context of him having to deny a thought that he's having and remind himself of his vows, it kind of has to come up eventually, or the experience of their life will feel incomplete or artificial.
__ It's fine to have high moral standards. It's fine to be a prude. It's not fine to confuse how you think things ought to be with the reality of human nature.
__ Again, Second Story uses a strawman to set herself up for what she thinks is a lay-up. She points out that shitting is natural, too, but we don't use shitting to sell books! Checkmate, atheists!
__ I'd counter that realism is a selling point—and that if, for an example off the top of my fucking head, you had a character who's spending days in a spacesuit, readers will absolutely need you to acknowledge either how they're shitting or why they aren't shitting. Readers will respect you if you explain this, and will condemn your writing if you fail to account for it.
__ And, no, the picture of an in-suit waste system or a bowel-suppressant drug on the book's cover isn't going to sell copies in the same way that a picture of an attractive woman will. Of course not. But I just don't see the point of trying to force equality between things which we know aren't the same. (It's a very feminine thing to try to do.) At this point, I'm not sure if Second Story's annoyance with sexy book covers comes from disdain for the plebs' lowbrow tastes, or frustration with human nature itself for existing in the way that it does.

__ Second Story shifts the argument again, claiming that she's "... not saying 'sex is bad' and you can't put it in your book. I don't really care." Liar. "What I am saying is that this ludicrous argument that books without sex are somehow bad is intolerably false."
__ Books without sex absolutely can be bad because of its absence. Sometimes, stories need sex to appear or to be acknowledged in order to remain coherent and make sense. It can be really weird if people just skip past acknowledging sex when it should normally come up. It can be really off-putting and undercut the believability of the setting if it seems as if the entire world exists in some sanitized realm without sex, and without any of the motivations that normally come from it. Second Story keeps trying to win points by making things so absolute and categorical, and when that's not actually the case, her arguments just come across as dumb.
__ She spends a while longer making up strawmen who are all mad that they didn't get to see sexy stuff in their media when they wanted to. It's all just so trite. I'm sure that the redpill community already has a hundred observations about women's every tactic eventually boiling down to "trying to deny you sex," and this just feels like that.
__ She circles back to the arms race theory and suggests that it's as simple as selling sex will make people want more sex, which will just continue until they only want sex, and then there'll be nothing but sex on top of shit-quality writing, and that people will "... stop noticing how low the quality of the overall books has become." Some people are dumb enough that they'll always eat the slop they're given. Others will absolutely notice the drop in quality and reject it. The problem is, these two groups will always exist. There is no "better system" that Second Story could come up with whereby we could change the plebs' tastes to become more enlightened. Maybe you could take away their smuttier options, so they'll also get used to and go along with the new slate of offerings, but you'll never actually change them. So all the time that she's complaining about this, it's like she's just screaming into the void (like me!).

__ She brings up a few more examples of sexual content in literature from centuries ago. She even says that "... sex that we see in [contemporary romance novels] has actually been normal for a long time," even in "... highbrow, award-winning literature." So is this a recent problem, or isn't it? Is modern romance pandering to our basest lowbrow desires, or does sex have a place in even "acceptable" books? Incoherent. Review and redraft your scripts.
__ But she doesn't seem to notice these issues because she's just using this to try to argue that all of these books' past defenders have just used "free speech" as a disingenuous shield while their real motive was to make money. Once again, make money from whom? Book publishers aren't these magical villains who descended from the stars. They're kept afloat by their willing audience. Go after the femgooners as well or shut up. But she can't do that—in her model, every woman who falls prey to romance books is an innocent victim of the empathy-manipulating narrative and the ever-increasing cycle.
__ Some people are just better than others. Some have restraint, while others are horny degenerates. If Second Story were actually on the Right (instead of just tepidly playing footsies with it), then she would probably know that. But it seems that her urge to always shield women from responsibility is getting in the way of understanding that some women can and do make their own mistakes and worsen their own lives.

__ Even though we're toward the end, Second Story tries to throw in another distinction, that "... highbrow literature has always had more sex in it, while commercial fiction has tended to have less." She suggests that people have just started to notice the issue of "smut in fiction" because "commercial" (non-highbrow) fiction now has a similar level of sex in it (per her assessment). But why is she invoking highbrow shit now? She mentioned earlier that she never reads romance, except to do some research for this video. She also casually mentions certified-highbrow books that she was reading earlier, when she noticed blah blah blah she's just telling you that she's a highbrow reader. That's all that's going on here.
__ She just wants to look down on people, and is searching for ways to do it. I'm not saying that plenty of people don't deserve to be looked down upon. I'm saying that Second Story is a slave to her own barely-understood urges. She's better than you, and she wants you to know it. She has the look, the set, the clothes, the editing, the upbringing (as we'll learn later), the cultured references, the authoritative studies and examples (just don't look to closely), and the sense of entitlement. She is evolutionarily driven to try to enhance her own apparent value while putting down every other woman that she can—and she has an obvious sense of superiority, which tells her that she's justified in doing this. It tells her that she's right. Everything else in this 40-minute-long video is just window dressing around her expressing this subconscious urge. Women are driven to increase their odds of reproduction as a proportion of the total population, not as a raw number of births, and not to benefit the rest of their group. If the rest of the group dies off and one woman is left to be the mother of the survivors, she is optimally reproductively successful. That's why they try to enhance their own image while tearing down every other woman, or why they sabotage other women by promoting shitty behaviors (making piercings / tattoos / hair dye more acceptable, promoting abortion, treating promiscuity as "empowering," etc.), behaviors which they usually don't take part in themselves, because they can actually afford (either financially or in terms of social capital) to avoid them. My source is (primarily) a female Australian researcher with glasses whose name I can't remember for the life of me. I'll add it if I can find her.

__ Second Story wraps up by just reiterating her thesis that Western writing quality is in decline because authors and publishers are using sex as a crutch to get sales instead of writing good stories. It's a theory, an idea of a pattern that could be true, but she hasn't proven it. She really hasn't gotten much further than just asserting it. She keeps going in circles on this, just restating it over and over in deferent ways, piling on words so that it'll seem like she has a lot to say, which must mean that her argument is really strong.
__ Her final thought is that le evil corporations are just preying upon readers for money. There are two wolves inside of you, and the one that grows is the one that you feed—so everyone, armed with the """"knowledge"""" that she's just given us, should all just choose to be enlightened, and reject smut, thus letting romance fiction wither on the vine. Sure. Because that's how people work. That'll definitely happen.

__ Fucking hell, I'm glad it's over.

Did you know that there's a 64,000-character limit for posts? I didn't!
Part 2 (about the second video) will be in the next one.

 

[Grayback]

Part 2, this time about the other girl (yes, she's a girl).

Spoiler: the rest of the ~15K words

2.
__ Nimbus / Cloud Parade's video starts by explaining how she found Second Story's video, so that we'll know that she isn't just randomly picking on Second Story. Maybe that kind of caution is expected in the tumblr-esque community where where Nimbus comes from, but I'm not worried about it. You can just criticize things.

__ Nimbus sets the stage with a quick look at Second Story, sharing her background and highlighting her real name (Hilary Layne), which isn't hidden... but she doesn't really use it, either, except in the URL of her website. It's not like she signs off with, "I'm Hilary, until next time," or something like that.
__ Initially, this looked to me like another example of someone (vaguely) on the Left doing what they always do to an anonymous / pseudonymous / not-that-public person (vaguely) on the Right, where they make the person's identity public and weirdly prominent (saying it more often than normal / when you otherwise wouldn't) just to try to fuck with them—either putting pressure on their real-life relationships, or inviting others to do so. Like how certain people will always use Tommy Robinson's real name, and make sure to repeat it in every sentence. Focusing on the last name, too, when people just don't do that in normal conversation. Nimbus kept calling Second Story "Layne" throughout this video, and it felt very odd.
__ But I leave open the possibility that I'm just a little too twitchy on this. I could be right, or I could be overreacting. The point is, I want to give Nimbus shit for this, but I don't feel that I can, because it's nowhere near clear enough, and that wouldn't be fair.

__ In setting up how she disagrees with Second Story's video, Nimbus first dumps a bunch of praise on Second Story (her organization, editing, clear writing talent, etc.) as if to soften the coming blow, but she will later contradict a lot of this praise. It's all so silly. Also, Nimbus praises Second Story's public speaking skill—but Second Story fidgets with her hands incredibly uncomfortably almost the entire time that she's speaking.
__ "But where it starts to go awry for me is the content of her video." This is supposed to serve as a thesis statement, but the video doesn't actually go in that direction. Instead, Nimbus will end up saying very little about the content, get caught up in going after the video's structure, get lost in nitpicking and miss a ton of better points that she could have made instead, and then use these issues instead as a jumping-off point for a bunch of random leftie and anti-religion things that she wanted to share instead.

__ Nimbus says that, given Second Story's title (The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing) and thumbnail (Women's Literature Does Not Exist), she expected the video to be about BookTok, publishing trends, trying to get away with selling lesser and lesser quality, etc. Something new that might explain the publishing industry's more recent trends. Honestly, I was hoping for the same, and I felt just as disappointed that Second Story's video didn't really mention much beyond her own little theory about "the brain-frying smut arms race," where the only "recent development" is just that we happen to sit at the ass-end of a long-running process of desensitization toward sex in books.
__ Also, Nimbus points out (or at least alludes to) the fact that there are other problems with modern writing beyond just the presence of smutty content. The writing quality is bad. The editing is bad. The stories are dumb. Good writers get turned away for not being part of the correct groups. But, sure enough, Second Story only talked about sex in books. She didn't even talk about how the focus on sex might be detracting from other parts of the writing. Sad!

__ In explaining what her video will be (in yet another false start; just get on with it!), Nimbus says, "This isn't meant to send hate her way—I'm trying to engage with a more academic and intellectual discussion. But, given our differences in, well, not just presentation style, but, basically, politics, I don't expect I'll get the same back from her." Holy shit, don't fucking do this. Don't condemn someone for having a particular reaction to you before they've even had a chance to react. They haven't done anything yet. But, what, because you're enough of a solipsist, you think you can read their mind and know what they're going to say, and impugn them for it? Just because they have the "wrong" politics? This is insane.
__ Nimbus also wants to assure us that she isn't copying some other, bigger YouTuber who also covered—I don't fucking care, get on with it. (It takes her 5 minutes to do so.)

__ Nimbus first summarizes Second Story's thesis as, "Modern writing for women is becoming degenerate, in her opinion, because of its association with explicit, smutty content, and it being normalized." Accurate. Nimbus acknowledges that novels with explicit scenes have become more common in recent years, as has discussion about and focus on "spice" in books. Yep, good so far. See, Second Story? This is how you make intuitive points.
__ Nimbus pokes the first hole in the thesis by pointing out that "... non-spicy books are also being published, still." But this point doesn't just hamper Second Story's argument. This impotent back-and-forth serves to illustrate the fact that nobody is actually describing the actual problem. We cannot address literary smut until we know how big of a problem it is. Is it just more common than it used to be? Is it approaching parity with normal books? Is it a massive majority that's drowning out everything else? Both Second Story and Nimbus are just going off of intuition, off of vibes, talking about how it feels to them. To Second Story, this shit is everywhere, literally synonymous with women's fiction (except when it's not). To Nimbus, yeah, it's out there, but it's no biggie. Until either of these two goddamned goofballs actually bring us some numbers, we have nothing to work with.
__ Find a way to assess smut in books. Assign values to certain things being present within a story. Categorize each book. Then bring us the percentages. Let us see how widespread the issue actually is, and how severe it is. Until then, this is just two girls going "nuh-uh" and "uh-huh." Each of them can hit the other with Hitchens's razor. To Nimbus's earlier prediction, maybe Second Story will just never respond because neither's position can actually trump the other.

__ Nimbus later seems to contradict herself on how widespread she thinks that smut fiction is. Nimbus and Second Story both agree that this stuff is lesser-quality fiction—but Nimbus is just glad that people are reading something, even if she doesn't like it; while Second Story, of course, sees even the softest of these books as a gateway to the rollercoaster from hell. Nimbus, at least, acknowledges that the rise in smut is being driven (at least in part) by reader demand. But again, she just doesn't see it as that big of a deal.
__ Next, Nimbus skips ahead to when Second Story brings up the Sarah J. Maas interview. Amazingly, Nimbus credits Second Story with the "analysis" of Maas's work and praises Second Story for it, saying that "It's cool to see it explained like that"—even though Second Story is actually just re-stating what Maas claimed herself in the interview (which I still don't believe from her).
__ If Nimbus likes and even agrees with the description of sexual content and narrative content being deliberately entwined, then you'd think that Nimbus would have to have an opinion about the way in which Second Story builds on this idea and claims that this pattern manipulates, desensitizes, and ultimately harms female readers. It was Second Story's main point. But it takes Nimbus a long time to finally get there, and even then, she only addresses it in part.
__ INSTEAD, Nimbus just uses the interview itself as a way to get some snarky digs in at Second Story. You see, Second Story didn't cite it properly, which makes Nimbus lose sight of the entire topic. But we'll get back to that...

__ ... because Nimbus first has an ADD digression in defense of fan fiction. It comes in response to Second Story's throwaway claim at one point in her video that "... fanfiction... has become just another form of debauched entertainment. Sure, yeah, okay, fan fiction that isn't smut does, theoretically, exist... but that's like saying, 'there are non-explicit OnlyFans creators.'" Nimbus goes to Archive of our Own, a large fanfiction-hosting website, picks a fanfiction genre (seemingly) at random, and uses the tags to quantify how much of it is actually smutty.
__ Out of 767,783 Marvel fanfiction stories, 132,159 of them have the "explicit" tag, signifying smut. That's 17.2%.
__ A further 76,139 stories still have the "not rated" tag. If we were to suppose that every single one of these unrated stories were smut (which I doubt), that would still only bring us to 27.1%.
__ Would other genres have different smut rates? Of course. Are some of the stories probably missing tags when they should have them? Sure. But I don't think that that would throw off the number that much. I'm willing to accept this as a representative sample. And it looks like a pretty strong rebuke of Second Story's impression of fanfiction (because it finally involves actual numbers).

__ Again, Nimbus just blows past all of Second Story's broscience about women's particular response to erotic material, and how it differs from men's. She'll come back to part of it later, but for an ostensible response video, this seems like dropping the ball.
__ She raced past it to get to a point about the accessibility of smut books, something that Second Story never really dwelled on (instead focusing on what happens with readers when they already have the book). Nimbus agrees that some of the smut out there is objectionable enough that it should probably be kept away from younger readers. Her brilliant idea? An "18+" warning sticker on the cover. Okay, sure. Hard-hitting stuff.
__ Nimbus then turns back toward her point about Second Story citing things. Nimbus latches onto the 90%-95% figure that Second Story gave as an estimate of her own experiences with the accounts that she read or heard from other women. Nimbus completely misses that this is where it came from. Yes, it's an estimate, yes, it's drawn from anecdotes, and no, we can't see her work to try to verify it... but while that's really not good science, it's also not "literally nothing." Anecdotes are still evidence. They're just not sufficient by themselves to build a case with. But Nimbus only brings it up to point out that Second Story has (seemingly) omitted another source.

__ Nimbus then moves back to talking about women's response to erotic material. Instead of talking about the substance of Second Story's theories, Nimbus lets the quote just run until she can give Second Story shit for saying something that was technically wrong. Second Story claims that the effect of erotica on women is under-studied, to which Nimbus points out that there are actually a fuckton of studies on this topic. Second Story could've just done a search on google scholar and she would've seen it all—which is yet more work that she clearly didn't do. But while she's exposing Second Story, Nimbus is also racing past Second Story's dumb theories on the topic, not addressing the substance, just to try to score cheap points and make her look bad. Good job, ladies. You both lose.
__ Finally, Nimbus wanders back to the topic of women's erotic response. She entertains Second Story's proposed model of a female reader reading objectionable material, blithely accepting it, and then becoming desensitized to it by entertaining it as if it's an individual anecdote. Not the lynchpin of Second Story's theories. Not a mechanism to assess. She just wonders, "whaaat? Has this happened?" and then concludes that she can't say for sure that it never has. That's not quite the point, you ditz.
__ Nimbus then pushes back against the model by decrying the whole argument as... "bio-essentialism." She even gives us the dictionary definition! Now that's authoritative! And just in case you missed it, because she can't help herself, she goes, "and this is how you cite a source properly, Layne." I don't recognize which manual of style Nimbus is using, though, because she only mentioned "from the Cambridge Dictionary," and then gave us a cut-off screenshot of the definition and a URL in the description. If we're going to be snarky pedants, then that's not a citation. I know that she wants to think otherwise, but she and Second Story are both doing the exact same fucking thing: cutting corners yet trying to seem authoritative about it.
__ The definition for bio-essentialism given is, "the belief that people's most important characteristics are controlled by biology and cannot change, particularly the belief that some groups of people are naturally less good than others because of this." This part, with a leftie reading off a slanted dictionary definition of a sociology topic as if it authoritatively settles an issue, feels like a caricature. It also lets her criticize Second Story with, "... it's just basic sexism."
__ But from this, Nimbus finally pushes back on the Second Story's model as being far too "absolutist" and deterministic, taking issue with the idea that all women will have the same "robotic" response. I agree with this critique. Nimbus also slips in another "where are your gosh dang sources" in her, which, yes, I agree with.
__ However, Nimbus never actually addresses the mechanism behind the model. Even if what Second Story is describing wouldn't happen 100% of the time, would it happen in that way at all? Nimbus has no opinion. When she lets a clip play to bring up the mechanism, she again rejects the deterministic idea behind it, and then... gets distracted by how Second Story is leaving out "... gender-diverse experiences..." from her model. Those simply aren't real, and I will not explain further. I'd say that it's not even worth consideration, but I think that Nimbus brings them (and Second Story's disregard for them) up purposefully, in order to contribute to her justification for her attacks against Christianity later in the video.
__ But from this mention of the poor, excluded whatever-the-fucks, Nimbus gets performatively flustered, and uses that to transition into her critique of Second Story's "structure"—which is really just a critique of her lack of citations.

__ Nimbus starts saying that Second Story's sloppiness is hidden beneath "... academic aesthetics." I would mostly agree, in general, but Nimbus just gets pedantic and petty with this shit.
__ She acknowledges that Second Story did tell us where she got the Sarah J. Maas interview from, but complains that "... leaving only the title is really unprofessional..." and comes back to it again later to call it "... unprofessional and improperly done, in my opinion." But she found the interview. So did I. That's the point of a citation. So stop it. We're all just trying to convey information such that people can follow along, not adhere to a rigorous manual of style. That's why I mentioned those earlier—Nimbus seems to be searching for ways to be petty even when they don't fit. A URL in the video description is helpful, but the quick blurb and the date were more than sufficient to get us there. Nimbus already criticizes Second Story's "academic aesthetics" as merely being a veneer, but if Second Story were including proper MLA or Chicago-style citations in her video description, wouldn't she just get accused of LARPing and trying to make the faux-authoritative smokescreen even stronger?
__ Again, Second Story has lots of things that she hasn't cited well enough, if at all, so for Nimbus to go after this particular one—when it was actually cited—really bothered me. Again, it's just petty.

__ Nimbus also tries to allege that Second Story maliciously (or, at least "unfairly") cherry-picked the section of the Maas interview that made her look the worst, as if Maas were a "... sex-addicted freak...." Nimbus seems to think that Second Story should've included other passages, but each of the quotes that she provides as examples have nothing to do with the topic that Second Story was talking about. They're just fluff. Second Story was under no arbitrary obligation to include them.
__ Nimbus then takes issue with Second Story constantly reiterating that everything that she's saying is just "facts." In general, I'm with Nimbus on this point—Second Story claimed way more than she could support in her video.
__ But Nimbus tries to make Second Story seem as if she's presenting herself as way more of an authority figure than she actually is, saying that "She's trying to portray herself as an academic and an intellectual..." which I just don't think is fair. This characterization is essentially making Second Story defend a claim that (to my knowledge) she's never made. Aydin Paladin and Ed Dutton are examples of an academic with a YouTube channel. Second Story is a YouTuber with a preppy / librarian / coffee shop aesthetic. Her channel bio (which Nimbus brought up earlier) doesn't mention academia at all, and I don't know of any of her videos that do, either.
__ Nimbus moves on to rightly critique Second Story's lack of sources throughout her video. But Nimbus continues to use the "I thought you were supposed to be an academic" cudgel, and she again gets hung up on where the "90-95%" figure comes from. I'm not going to explain that again. But from this, Nimbus uncharitably suggests that Second Story is "... obscuring the sources that she might have read, maybe in an effort to hide any sort of specific political bias they might have..."
__ Nimbus then lampshades this as if it was just a clever, tongue-in-cheek way to clarify the difference between speculation and fact for your audience. I just can't get over the pettiness. It was an excuse to take shots at someone who you've already sorted into the "wrong" political camp, but with the extra layer of protection from pretending that you were just doing a helpful little demonstration. Coward.
__ Incredibly, Nimbus then goes directly to the section where Second Story relates having spoken to and read accounts from other women to collect their anecdotes. This is the part in which she said where she got the "90-95%" figure from, and Nimbus still missed it. Great job.
__ Nimbus takes issue with Second Story having nothing to show that she actually did collect these stories (instead of just making them up), or that these stories were in any way meaningful or representative. And I completely agree. Nimbus also makes some very good suggestions about ways that Second Story could demonstrate that these accounts were real (redacted e-mails, etc.), and again, I agree. Nimbus can make some very good points about research methods when she's not being petty.

__ Nimbus also finds Second Story's harrowing account of having read a few romantasy books herself to be quite silly. No disagreement there. Nimbus also kind of doubts that Second Story even actually read them, given the lack of any examples of what had such an effect on her. I won't go that far, but I see Nimbus's point. Also, when Nimbus goes to check with one of her friends about how many sex scenes show up in Fourth Wing, on discord, that friend's name is "picklepussy." I am begging you to not be such a caricature of a leftie genderspecial.
__ Nimbus wraps up her complaints about Second Story's presentation by saying that "... the biggest issue with the structure of Layne's argument [is] her tone." This, Nimbus explains, is why she judges that Second Story is falsely presenting herself as "an academic." Because of her tone. No, dummy—she's just strident and overconfident. That's not the sole bailiwick of academics. Again, I wish that Nimbus would just stick to meaningful arguments like "where's the proof?"
__ She comes back to Second Story's lack of citations and evidence for a moment... before saying that presenting yourself as a faux-academic while having nothing to back up your claims, instead just stating appeals to morality and opinion as facts, is "... very... dare I say... 'Conservative strategy?'" No, retard—it's a tactic that humans use. Your political opponents do not have a monopoly on bad behavior.

__ Winding down, Nimbus amends her criticism of Second Story's lack of sources (slightly). She acknowledges all of the screenshots that Second Story provides, some of which allow you to find the original article by their title. Still, Nimbus takes issue with the fact that none of these are studies from academic journals—you know, the ones that can be wrong just as often as anything else, and which we're socially conditioned not to question? The ones with the replicability crisis. Those studies. Again, she's fitting the caricature. If it needs to be made explicit, don't just defer to studies. Defer to good studies, with good methodology and good data that you've reviewed.
__ Nimbus reviews a few more of Second Story's not-so-helpful screenshots. Weirdly, Nimbus is most okay with Second Story using Wikipedia, even praising what it's like now—but if you know who runs Wikipedia, then this is really not that weird. Just further caricature. This whole section is really sloppy and clearly edited-in afterward.
__ She gives a few more thoughts about how the NYT Best Seller List isn't a perfect metric, but does so for the wrong reasons. Nimbus thinks that the list isn't a representative-enough sample of all of the books that are being published. In a perfect world, the list would at least be a representative sample of the top echelon of books, which could then be used to show you what sorts of content ends up in the books which are most successful. And given the Pareto-esque distribution of how the top books account for so much of the overall market's sales, such an idealized list should actually give you a pretty good look at most of the total book market by sales volume. But the real problem with using the NYT Best Seller List as an indicator of anything is that the list is curated (manipulated) by the NYT editorial staff, and is NOT simply based on book sales. But the list still has some value, in that what the editors choose to reward with a place on the list shows you what sort of content has been deemed "ideologically acceptable" by the ruling class.

__ Nimbus then defends herself for having spent as much time on this response video as she has, presenting it as if she had to, since "... what [she] found with Layne's argument... is a classic, anti-intellectual Conservative grift, packed up in a pretty little bow...." She describes Second Story as "... a little clone of high-brow grifters like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro (when he tries)." I am exhausted at the endless use of the word "grifter," disappointed that that's all that she's gotten from Jordan Peterson, and downright bemused that she thinks that Ben Shapiro is a relevant example. Time to update the ol' caricature of your political opponents!
__ Someone is a grifter if they are knowingly lying in order to make money. That's what that word means.
__ I am begging the Left to develop theory of mind. Jordan Peterson is not lying. Second Story is not lying. They might present an argument poorly sometimes (or for an entire video), they might be mistaken about something that they think is true, they might even just be dumb sometimes, but they are not lying. These are their sincere beliefs. Just because you disagree with them, just because you cannot personally fathom how they came to the positions that they did, does not mean that they are publicly claiming to hold these beliefs when they actually do not. They're not "grifters."
__ Falling back on this same word for every single person with whom you disagree cheapens your critique by robbing it of the depth that it might have otherwise had if you had taken any other angle with it. Stop it.

__ Nimbus continues, saying that Second Story is "... a facsimile of their ilk that disguises her Puritanical, Catholic beliefs with rationality."
__ First, when the fuck has Second Story ever mentioned being Catholic? That's news to me. And even if she's brought it up in other videos, she certainly didn't bring it up in this one—so it has no bearing whatsoever on any of her arguments. This comes across as Nimbus already having a bone to pick with Catholics (or perhaps Christians generally), and it seems like she was just waiting for an excuse to force it into her response.
__ Second, Puritans and Catholics are absolutely not the same thing. This is like when I heard someone talking about those darn "fascist objectivists" once. If they're combining completely-contradictory ideologies, you know that they don't know anything about either of them. By trying to use both of these Christian traditions in her description of Second Story, Nimbus makes it clear that she's just heaping as many "scary" words together as possible for their intended effect on her audience. The Puritans, oooh, they were strict, weren't they? And the Catholics, too, oh man, tons of harsh rules and controlling bureaucracy. Get spooked.

__ But Nimbus just keeps going with her rant about how awful and Conservative Second Story is, with her words growing increasingly bitter. I think we've found Nimbus's real motive here. Everything else, once again, was just window dressing.
__ "Of course she likes the fiction of the old days—the fiction from before the 'smut invasion,' obviously." Here, Nimbus seems to be alluding to that hated trope whereby Conservatives point out that things were better in the past. "Her constant tracking-back to the 'before times' in literary fiction and publishing isn't PoSsIbLy a dogwhistle to her Conservative beliefs or anything." Nimbus later adds that Second Story's outlook (or, Nimbus's increasingly-angry description of it) "... [mirrors] the idea that 'the world we live in sucks now, and we need to go back to the '50s when everything made sense'—just ignore the issues of the '50s, and we'll be okay." Why the Leftoids hate this idea so much would take far too long to explain, but the idea that "the 1950s were heckin' miserable, actually" is another glaring Leftoid caricature (coming from ignorance and seething resentment), and I am once again disappointed with her.
__ Nimbus also mocks the idea that Second Story could actually have any concern for women's wellbeing. Fucking wild. I would agree that Second Story has a bit of self-importance around the subject of helping people, but Nimbus thinks that it's completely inauthentic? She supposes that Second Story wouldn't want to help people? Without theory of mind for your opponents, unable to extend them even a scintilla of grace more than what is required of you by social expectation, shit gets pretty dark pretty quickly. This may sound like I'm harping on nothing, but being unable to imagine that people whom you disagree with / dislike might still have good motives is rather bleak.
__ And Nimbus, too, then immediately frames what she is doing in making this response video as her trying to help all of the people who were fooled by Second Story's confidence and highbrow presentation, tricked into believing the wrong things. Nimbus shows a bunch of comments from the video of all of the people who were misled by Second Story. Nimbus explains that she's trying to enlighten those people.
__ So Nimbus does get the concept of seeing something which you think is harmful to others, and trying to warn them about it in order to help them. She understands that. She just can't apply that same motive to Second Story, apparently.

__ Nimbus then jumps to the part where Second Story argues in favor of "shame" because it exists to dissuade you from engaging in bad behavior. Instead of engaging with the idea—which would entail Nimbus considering whether or not one actually ought to feel guilty about reading smut, and either supporting or opposing Second Story's position—Nimbus gets distracted by the specter of Christianity again.
__ She criticizes Second Story for "... using shame, and guilt associated with shame, in a very 'Conservative Catholic' way," as if just labeling it as Christian or Conservative is sufficient as an argument against it. Nimbus says that "... she has associated these books with 'sinning'—even if she doesn't state it outright in her video—and she's twisting the definitions to meet her preconceived bias." But Nimbus doesn't offer any position of her own, or any argument for or against Second Story's (supposed) position, about whether smut books are or aren't sinful (or, harmful in a secular sense). Nimbus brings it up and then doesn't engage with it... because she got distracted by her own bias.
__ I don't even agree that Second Story (or anyone else) needs to come at the topic of smut in fiction with a Christian perspective in order to have a problem with it. If something is harmful, then it's something worth opposing, whether or not the Bible has an opinion on it.
__ The root of the issue is "whether or not smut in fiction is actually harmful." This supposed Christian influence is a layer over that, and that layer is all that Nimbus is able to engage with. Nimbus isn't disagreeing with the idea that calling smut "sinful" might be warranted; Nimbus is annoyed that "sinfulness" was even brought up. Hey, wait a minute... you mean I get to use this twice?

__ Nimbus complains that "[Second Story] didn't go into this video like most people do, where they discuss the issues that smut can have on people in an empathetic way." So, now Nimbus is tone-policing? Second Story was clear in her video that her intention was to warn people away from something that she thought was a problem—whether you agree with her judgment that it really is "harmful" or not. So trying to protect people from harm isn't "empathetic," now? What, does the inclusion of Christian rhetoric (which Nimbus has fucking hallucinated, remember) suddenly make it not empathetic anymore?
__ That's not it, though, is it? Nimbus complains that "Most of [Second Story's] argument has the moral undertone of shaming women who do enjoy it as 'filthy,' 'disgusting,' 'degenerates...'" Nimbus only sees the scolding. And she hates it even more for the Christian influence which she imagines is behind this scolding. She cannot take the discussion just one layer deeper to talk about what is causing this scolding. She cannot address Second Story's actual arguments.
__ Is it "sinful" to read smut? Is it harmful to read smut? Should we be ashamed of reading smut? Does reading smut really desensitize us and make our tastes more extreme? Nimbus never engages with these ideas. Where you come down on these judgments is the key to Second Story's arguments. They decide the validity of her entire video—which I thought Nimbus was here to refute. And she doesn't even touch this stuff. Sasuga, Nimbus.

__ Nimbus takes a digression to try to coattail-ride some apparently-internet-famous gabagool who I've never heard of, but I don't really give a shit what he has to say about some Saints whose names he can't pronounce correctly, addressing a different video of Second Story's, which is talking about a different topic. Second Story didn't base any of her arguments in this video on Catholicism, so whatever Nimbus is trying to tie in here is not relevant. She just suspects Catholicism as Second Story's motive, and would rather attack that than actually engage with and try to dismantle Second Story's arguments. Even though, as mentioned before (so long ago), there are plenty of cracks in those arguments which one could go after. But once again, Nimbus drops the ball.
__ She tries to do another lap harping on about how everything that Second Story argues for comes from "... Conservative, Right-wing, religious ideas...." The problem is not that these ideas are wrong. The problem is not that this is even true about Second Story. The problem that Nimbus is having is that she is simply reminded by Second Story of other things that she disagrees with, and she must rebuke those things at every turn. Great job meaningfully engaging with the material. Great job not getting one-shotted by your personal bugbears. What a wonderful and competent video essayist.

__ Nimbus mentions a few of Second Story's other videos, as if to try to lend credence to her case about Second Story's overall "Christian Nationalist" vibe (or whatever the fuck Nimbus is accusing her of), but Nimbus quickly gives up, having already convinced herself of her impression. Nimbus instead segues to talking about a segment from a video about schools, where Second Story discusses her own background. Second Story apparently spent little time in public schools, mostly being homeschooled or attending private schools instead. She didn't go to college, and instead traveled a lot to try to teach herself instead. Yes, this costs lots of money, and most people can't do this. So fucking what? We're not looking for street cred here. This isn't the end of 8 Mile. She can be as rich as she wants, and it has nothing to do with her arguments or her ability to make them.
__ When talking about Second Story's travels, Nimbus reads that she went around Europe "... and specifically Germanyyy???? We're gonna ignore that for now," while putting an ominous face up on the screen, implying that we'll come back to it.
__ We don't. She never mentions Germany or Germans or anything related to it ever again. So what the fuck was that? Just the world's gayest case of "I have been trained to hate Germany ever since 5th grade Social Studies class" reacting to the Pavlovian mention of the no-no country? Fuck you, Nimbus. Germany is great, and this shit is even gayer than you. Watch this turn out to be some inside joke that I'm overreacting to.

__ Nimbus finally reveals that she brought all of this up just so that she can try to argue that Second Story is lying about herself, "... obscuring her experiences to sound more relatable to other people." This strikes me as insane.
__ First, as Nimbus told us when she brought us this information, Second Story has already talked about her background in another video, so the information isn't a secret.
__ Second, because the alternative to what Second Story did this time (not mention it) is that she must, apparently, mention it. She has to give a disclaimer about her background with every video, lest you get tricked into thinking that she's relatable. That's a retarded imposition. But it's also an unnecessary one, because:
__ Third, Second Story's education, upbringing, and wealth have no bearing whatsoever on the merits of any arguments that she might make, in her videos or anywhere else. The only thing that affects the validity of what she (or anyone) says is the strength of her logic, and the relevance and reliability of her supporting evidence. If only there were a video essayist who would go after that part.

__ Along with this last point, Nimbus also accuses Second Story of trying to ignite a "moral panic." It has taken six minutes since this section began for Nimbus to get to the thing that it's named after.
__ I'll shit on the idea right away by pointing out that "moral panic" is just the name that you give to a situation when other people oppose something and you don't agree with them. Like how how democratic results just get called "populism" when people don't like the outcome.
__ Nimbus then gives us a summary of alleged "moral panics" and the resulting censorship, starting with controversies and fears about comics in the 1930s. I'll leave the critique of this to the experts. I just know enough to know that it's complicated, but that there was some weird / gay / occult shit in comics in the past. How bad was it? Was it bad enough to justify the implementation of the CCA? No idea. But I'm sure that the Wikipedia page that Nimbus is reading from doesn't truly know, either. Reading verbatim from an """official""" article in order to try to give yourself credibility? Mark off another leftie cliché for our girl.
__ Also, Nimbus seems to bring this up as an example of "moral panics going too far" or something... but the "CCA-approved" stamp on the front of a comic worked just like Nimbus's own recommendation of having an "18+" sticker on the cover of smutty novels would. So, if that sticker would be okay, then I guess that the "moral panic" around comics gave us a completely-acceptable solution, so there's nothing to fucking worry about!

__ Nimbus tries to bolster her vague and still-not-really-articulated point about the danger of "moral panics" by also bringing up the "Satanic panic" from the 1980s. As if to say, "see, this 'moral panic' thing is a risk that's always out there! We have to be vigilant against it!" But there are more problems. Some of the shit from that time period was actually real. Kids weren't actually "summoning demons" when they played DnD, of course. Satan wasn't communicating with you when you listened to heavy metal. But things like The Finders Cult were real—and people saying "this is just a moral panic, you're overreacting!" did immense damage by obfuscating the facts in real cases.
__ Now, is that always what happens when people claim that something is "just a moral panic?" No, of course not. But is "it's just a moral panic" the magic "I win, end of argument" button that Nimbus seems to think it is? Also no.
__ Nimbus then plays some insane "guilt by association" games. She starts by reminding us about the "moral panic" over Dungeons and Dragons. She then brings up an activist organization called BADD (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons), which was founded by Patricia A. Pulling, apparently with help from psychiatrist Thomas Radecki. Radecki was later accused of sex and drug crimes involving his patients.
__ Damn, that's crazy. Why is Nimbus going into these salacious personal details about these other people? What the fuck does it have to do with Second Story, and why is Nimbus trying to associate some random dude's alleged sex crimes with Second Story or her video? Oh, no reason? Cool, cool. I guess we're just supposed to assume that anyone accused of engaging in a "moral panic" is a horrible person now.
__ IMAGINE accusing Second Story of trying to fool her audience when this is the kind of shit that you do.

__ Now, Nimbus tells us, we're at the latest iteration of this Conservative urge toward "moral panics." Books and fanfiction now take the place of DnD and comics in years past. And instead of homosexuality or Satanism, the new fear is that things are "woke."
__ Huh? When the fuck did Second Story accuse things of being woke? That was never her argument! She says that books these days are horny trash, not that they're commie trash!
__ The closest that Second Story ever got to this was very, very faintly alluding to the idea that authors, publishers, and editors might share a Progressive ideological bent, but she moved past it as soon as she mentioned it. She said nothing mechanistic about how those views might be influencing the content of modern fantasy, nor did she claim that those views were showing up in modern fantasy. That wasn't Second Story's argument in her video. That's not what she went after. But once again, Nimbus goes after the positions that she wants to, not the positions that Second Story actually holds.
__ But Nimbus keeps trying to stretch to make this fit, saying that Second Story "... frames her arguments not around the anti-woke ideology, but the same Conservative view as those who do." This is so broad as to be meaningless. But Nimbus seems to think that she's adequately placed Second Story within the same group as the rest of the "anti-woke." To Nimbus's mind, when Second Story wants there to be less smut in fiction, that's equivalent to opposing race-swapped characters or ham-fisted writing with Progressive politics shoved into it. "I don't want Disney to make Luke Skywalker gay" is basically the same as "I don't think that young women should be reading literary porn." Seems like a hell of a lot of ground for the Left to cede, but I guess we'll take it.
__ And again, Nimbus never really disputed Second Story's assertions that modern romance books are porn. Nimbus basically assumes arguendo, as you would in court, that they are porn. And Nimbus's position here is just that Second Story shouldn't be trying to get in the way of anyone having access to that, because doing so makes Second Story "anti-woke," which is just the latest "moral crusade," which, to Nimbus, is bad.
__ I must ask, then—what was the point of Nimbus suggesting those "18+" stickers earlier? Those stickers would be an impediment to younger readers' access to these books. Maybe not a big one, but still an impediment. But if she's saying now that she's opposed to trying to stop people from having access to these books, then was she just lying earlier? Just throwing out the smallest bit of red meat that she could in order to try to quash an argument without ever actually meaning it? Who am I kidding—this cutesy uwu genderfluid cloud-kin doesn't actually have principles.

__ Nimbus does a poor job of arguing that sex is (or at least can be) important in books, implying (but not really bothering to argue) that we shouldn't get rid of it because of those reasons. "It's been around for thousands of years!" So has plenty of terrible shit. "It's linked to our relationships!" Not always, and not always in a way that would have to be shown or mentioned in a story. "Sex in a story doesn't just have to be prurient!" Actually a good point. If only she'd actually done something with this one. "Women write stuff other than just smut!" Weak, plaintive. The numbers that Nimbus brought us earlier were more convincing about this point.
__ Nimbus goes in circles again about how Second Story is an awful pseudo-intellectual, and about how our conception of the past as a better time is just a heckin' counter-revolutionary lie that you'd better not believe, and about how Christians are evil and they just want to keep the poor oppressed queers down... but, mercifully, she's just about done.
__ She gives us a pair of jumpscares, mentioning two other videos on the same subject that were made by two ghastly Leftoid caricature ogres, which were released before Nimbus finished hers. Unnecessary. Also, horrifying.
__ Her outro goes back and forth between patting herself on the back and softly seething about how bad Second Story is some more, just repeating herself.
__ Her one new point here is that she disagrees with the idea that modern writing is getting worse. Instead, Nimbus thinks that "... modern writing is democratizing!" Which, to her, benefits "Marginalized voices, queer people, people of color..." because they "... were never able to get a chance before...." This is just presented as an inherent, obvious, unvarnished good. Good enough to wash away any concerns about the rising tide of smut, apparently. Any further arguments to support that idea? Anything else to say about the massive topic of "access to the publishing world" that she's just kicked open?

__ Nope. Because she's done.

Good luck

I couldn't have done it without this. :^)

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

I'm impressed and dismayed you spent so much time writing these. It's like watching a girl get her tits out in a trashy b-movie.

Just for the effort alone I'm going to read it all, all the while wondering what you could do if you used your powers for good instead of evil.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

I couldn't have done it without this. :^)

You're welcome, despite the sarcasm. But I really meant it.

 

[Flexo]

My girl Aydin Paladin would never.

I watch her off and on and am a bit of a data nerd too so believe me I'm slapping myself probably even more than you with this but...

(I do need to look up, did she ever react to the replication crisis? You've really gone hardcore if you read Briggs.)

__ So she had a theory about what happens when you read romance books, she read romance books herself to try to prove it, and then she told herself that her theory was what she was experiencing. Okay.

I'm using this one sentence as just an example of the larger fallacy we data nerds tend to fall into. Yes there are places for scientific rigor and proper data collection - but not everyone can engage in that or even have time for it on everything involved in trying to grasp a larger picture. It would be like demanding Bob Ross explain the detailed history of his paint brush and every bit of paint before every brush stroke he put to canvas.

Like take this example here. Ok, we need to make some kind of proof about it. How would you even begin to accomplish that? Especially to proper scientific rigor. You'd need a massive sampling size of romance readers who are ALSO willing to participate in the study however it is to be done. Which may already tank the experiment from the start because it very well could be we'll never find enough participants to gather sufficient data.

Assuming we can even clear that hurdle, it then becomes worse every step from there. Are we hooking them up to brain monitoring tools (which have their own issue) or just having the participants self-report their emotions?

Which is... what Second Story did herself. So then is your complaint just that she is a sample size of 1?

In summary to quote CS Lewis:
"You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see."

If you work hard enough at skepticism, you can quite easily make all communication and understanding impossible. (i.e. "I touched the stove, it was hot." "Do you have proof or evidence of that?") Don't excessively reason yourself into unreasonableness.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Did you know that there's a 64,000-character limit for posts? I didn't!

I didn't know the exact character limit, just that it has one (all forums do, it just varies). Actually good info to have.

Anyhoo bravo, my man. I had to skim more often than not admittedly due to lack of time, still, I could sense your frustration and smell the lingering mothballs on your editor's cap. You must've been itching to get your fingers nimble again after so long.

 

[Dead Lion]

Did you know that there's a 64,000-character limit for posts? I didn't!
Part 2 (about the second video) will be in the next one.

They figured it out long ago by spamming nigger over and over.

 

[Fcret]

I have no deeper attachment to the femgooner lit discourse other than that it's funny what women are into and it's funny that a lot of them act like hypocrites about what men are into.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

I have no deeper attachment to the femgooner lit discourse other than that it's funny what women are into and it's funny that a lot of them act like hypocrites about what men are into.

Same.

So many of them act like Conan the Barbarian is some horrendous thing, and then they read shit that's a million times more vividly pornographic.

 

[Mola Ram]

Same.

So many of them act like Conan the Barbarian is some horrendous thing, and then they read shit that's a million times more vividly pornographic.

The difference is that men like Conan.

 

[Welf Welf]

Wear that autism badge with pride, I salute you.

 

[Grayback]

did she ever react to the replication crisis?

I know that Aydin has mentioned it fairly often in relation to other issues that she's covered, but I don't recall her making a video that's specifically dedicated to the replication crisis (and searching for one now isn't bringing up anything).

Yes there are places for scientific rigor and proper data collection - but not everyone can engage in that or even have time for it on everything involved in trying to grasp a larger picture.

we need to make some kind of proof about it. How would you even begin to accomplish that? Especially to proper scientific rigor. You'd need a massive sampling size of romance readers who are ALSO willing to participate in the study however it is to be done. Which may already tank the experiment from the start because it very well could be we'll never find enough participants to gather sufficient data.

Assuming we can even clear that hurdle, it then becomes worse every step from there. Are we hooking them up to brain monitoring tools (which have their own issue) or just having the participants self-report their emotions?

I agree that someone who's just making an argument in a YouTube video (or on a forum) doesn't need to be autistic or pedantic about the rigor of their testing. If a simple, decent test points in a particular direction, then that should be enough to support the argument and keep going with the discussion—especially since so much that people want to argue about is "vibes" and "intuition," which is difficult if not impossible to quantify and test.
I'd always prefer rigorous, academic-style tests (because they should give us better data), but I don't want to seem as if I'm demanding them, especially not in cases when they'd be unreasonable to carry out. Of course, the stronger the claims being made from the tests, the better and more-rigorous those tests need to be.
And, if someone brings better evidence to start poking holes in your less-rigorous tests, then, to respond to that, your tests will have to become more rigorous if you want to keep supporting your initial point.
A small sample size isn't ideal, but it's understandable if you're limited by circumstances or reasonableness. And we can still get some meaningful information from tests with small sample sizes, even if that information isn't strong or definitive. So I don't hate small sample sizes.

In this particular case, the thing that's being examined is Second Story's theory about the effect that reading romance books supposedly has on you.
She describes her weeks spent reading this handful of books as something like "doing research on her video's topic." So, when she set out to read these books, I don't think that she actually meant for this to be a proper "test"... but after doing it, she still presents the results of her experience as if they are data from a test. Because of that, I think it's fair to treat it as a test, and to point out that it wasn't done well at all.

To meet academic journal standards, you'd probably want hundreds of readers, or thousands if you could get them. But I'd be fine with a YouTuber just getting a few of their friends to read a few books and tell her what they felt while reading them. (As long as those friends aren't all identical in their tastes / temperament, i.e. don't just ask your fantasy book club who agrees on their reading list to do this.) And they could just share qualitative impressions of what they felt. We don't have to hook them up to heart rate monitors or fMRIs or anything.
A little panel like that wouldn't be "academic," but it should still be enough to make a point with in a YouTube video. And if the test readers all had similar reactions to something, then I'd take that as a meaningful indication that there's something going on there.
I also think that the test readers should be people who don't already read romance books—since, per Second Story's theory, regular romance readers might be desensitized to the content that she's trying to test the effects of.

Which is... what Second Story did herself. So then is your complaint just that she is a sample size of 1?

The tiny sample size doesn't help, but my real issue is with what I see as Second Story's confirmation bias.

In her video, Second Story presents her ideas in a way that makes it seem that she already had her theories about the effects of reading smut books before she began reading her selection of contemporary smut books.
For her self-reported, subjective findings about what she thought and felt to then fit exactly into the model that she already expected going into this struck me as confirmation bias. Our brains try to make sense of things that are as vague as just "how your body feels" based on explanatory definitions and narratives that we already understand. Think of the difference between how confusing and terrifying a medical condition was the first time that you had it, compared to the second time when you knew what it was, and thus had a mental model of how to think about it and handle it.
Even if this genuinely wasn't a case of confirmation bias, and Second Story really was interpreting and reporting everything completely objectively, then at the very least, this is a test that was set up in such a way that we could never rule out confirmation bias. So it's still not a good / useful test.

It's like if you were testing a new medicine.
If you're testing how well it treats physiological symptoms, then that's fine. You can measure things like temperature and illness duration and draw your conclusions from the data. Your interpretations and expectations aren't involved.
But if you're testing the medicine's flavor, and it's a flavor that you already know that you don't like, and then, when you try it, your result is that you don't like the flavor... well, no shit. Is the flavor actually bad? Is the new medicine really unmarketable to the wider public? Or is it just a flavor that you don't like? Based on this test, we can't know.

It's also possible that Second Story developed her theories about the effects of reading smut books after her reading experiment—in which case, I would be completely fucking wrong about the confirmation bias. But I don't believe that she ever explicitly says which part came first—and everything else that she does say makes it seem as if she had the theories first, and decided to try reading those contemporary books second. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong.

If you work hard enough at skepticism, you can quite easily make all communication and understanding impossible. (i.e. "I touched the stove, it was hot." "Do you have proof or evidence of that?") Don't excessively reason yourself into unreasonableness.

I agree.
I tried to focus my written analysis on the things that each woman actually said in their videos, without adding too much of my own ideas about what they could've done instead. I didn't want to be a backseat driver and take the discussion off in a different direction (although I'd certainly be interested in that sort of discussion about how femgooner books ought to be analyzed / dealt with, which I felt that neither video ever really talked about).
Because I mostly just went after stuff that didn't work instead of relating them to alternatives that would've worked better, I can see why it would seem that I was being too skeptical and trying to "um ackshually" everything.

 

[Blasterisk]

no no no you cant say porn is wrong you need SOURCES sweaty

 

[Grayback]

no no no you cant say porn is wrong you need SOURCES sweaty

If someone is saying that reading smut books has an unavoidable physiological effect on you which is basically equivalent to doing drugs, then, yeah, I'd like to hear some reasons to go along with that.

 

[Mola Ram]

If someone is saying that reading smut books has an unavoidable physiological effect on you which is basically equivalent to doing drugs, then, yeah, I'd like to hear some reasons to go along with that.

Indie writers on the right have a seemingly widespread distaste for sex scenes that borders on the Puritanical (if they happen to be religious, it is Puritanical). I say this as someone who's otherwise simpatico with most of these writers, and it's a frustrating trend.

 

[Drive-by Farts]

Yeah, so Taiwan also had indigenous people before the Chinese settled there. But they have brown/bronze skin like the South East Asian/other Austronesian (Austronesian actually came from Taiwan), so I don't know where this black skinned shit came from

Fun fact probably unrelated to Kuang’s lunacy, Taiwan apparently had little negritos there before the current indigenous Taiwanese (very similar to the negritos of the Philippines). They no longer exist at all in Taiwan though. They “disappeared with the arrival of Austronesian speaking people” aka the ‘Indigenous’ Taiwanese wiped them the fuck out. Many such cases! Various Asian groups have genocided negritos all throughout Asia in a way that makes Hitler look bumbling and incompetent. Asians have also wiped out other non-negrito groups like the Ainu and Tocharians. Historically and prehistorically, white people probably aren’t even close to being the top genociders. Even today, all the genociding is getting committed by Arab Muslims, Black Muslims, and the CCP.

In case anyone is curious about Taiwanese aborigines, they look like this.
Not exactly black-skinned. Very much a normal skin tone in Asia. It’s more the cut of their face that is different from a Han Chinese.

 

[Blasterisk]

If someone is saying that reading smut books has an unavoidable physiological effect on you which is basically equivalent to doing drugs, then, yeah, I'd like to hear some reasons to go along with that.

i was agreeing with you, the nerve of some people to imply that pornography affects the brain in any way is completely beyond the pale