Shane Dawson: the Age of Consent & the Age of Reason.

the idea of growing up and taking
responsibility is expressed in a very gender specific language we say in English be a man we don't say be a person we say man up we don't say adult it up we don't say human it up this is insane this woman is a thing I'm gonna wait till as many people get in here as I'm keep playing it crying oh my god oh my god today is the day that I've learned that Shane Dawson's book has been removed from bookstore shelves it has for example disappeared from the website of Target apparently the target um supermarket chain a department store chain whatever you want to call it it's gonna stop selling Shane Dawson's books entirely there are a lot of kind of shallow responses you could have this in the in the support of the moment like are we going to police the morality of each and every author at Target does target sell books written by communists does target sell books written by Nazis does target sell you know whatever ito Hitler's Mein Kampf for historical interest I mean you know there are important books historically that are written by industry terrible people including some former presidents the United States whose statues people have been trying to tear down lately I my dad right I used to have a slogan on this channel it ain't deep but it's real we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna keep it real in this video for this one this one goes pretty deep there's a very interesting parallel between the moral panic over Shane Dawson and his frankly pedophile comments about sex with underage people and the controversy that is in court in France right now a controversy that has roots going back to 1977 if you go to Wikipedia leave you the link below this video and let me just note it's very rare that I provide a Wikipedia article as a link in the description somebody put a lot of work into this Wikipedia article there's a very very strange history in France of left-wing intellectuals opposing age of consent laws and left-wing intellectuals endorsing and supporting a pedophilia no I that wasn't a typo no I didn't misspeak bizarrely all kinds of big names people who are still uncritically worshiped on the left wing like jean-paul Sartre Michel Foucault Roland Barse react Derrida etc this is sort of greatest hits of the left-wing fringe of the French intellectual establishment they all stood up and wrote open letters and protested that it was somehow a great injustice to deprive them of the right to have sex of people under 16 years of age and even under 14 years of age they were on paper at least pro pedophile and as I mentioned this debate in French politics continues to this day and is presumed that at least symbolically is going to conclude with the conviction of Gabrielle Metz Neph Gabrielle Metz Neve is a famous author in France not so famous here in the english-speaking part of the world Gabrielle Madson F it's not just that he faces accusations from one ex-girlfriend shall we say a young woman whom he had sexual relations with when she was 14 and he was approximately fifty years old uh-huh and by the way the number fourteen is significant because the age of consent in France is so low anyway if she had been 15 it would have been legal and there wouldn't be any possible repercussions so when the age of consent is so low when the age of consent is 15 they could only investigate and prosecute cases where it's a 14-year old but it up art from the testimony of that woman she's now a fully grown woman's many many years later um we have the testimony of the author himself who in numerous essays interviews in books advanced his shall we say paedophile philosophy of life and it's interesting every single newspaper article I've jinan this and including some broadcast media that covered this in news items every single one vaguely talks about the French establishment supporting it's not it's not the conservative establishment all right it's not the Catholic establishment it's not the Jewish just that one it's not the process that we are talking about the left-wing Communist and crypto communist is that we run it whatever we were talking about people like jean-paul sartre Michel Foucault Roland bar Jack Derrida etc click on the Wikipedia article for the fullest names that's part of what makes this so worth puzzling out so we're thinking about and asking yourself in what ways French society and civilization has changed since 1977 and in what ways it has stayed the same now I also think if you are a left-wing intellectual yourself in the audience right now I think it is really worth profoundly reflecting on just how wrong these people were and if their judgment was so bad about about this issue about pedophilia to be blunt how could you possibly trust or respect their judgment on any of the nuanced political and philosophical issues that people including university professors do indeed respect them on a quick parallel I saw a lecture recently from a Muslim author and this is actually a white Western guy who converted to Islam he wrote a whole book and he's going on a lecture tour about Islam and slavery because he he admits to himself that he has difficulty trusting you know that the word of the Prophet like how can you take seriously the political opinions of the Prophet Muhammad if you know that he was pro Syria and what ensues is like you know the most cringe inducing process of him bending over backwards to offer one insincere excuse after another for why well after all slavery was no problem and it was a long time ago when things were different than etc there is a great deal of that same rationalization that same style of excuse making mentality that goes on now where the year is 2020 and people want to pretend that 1977 and 1979 was somehow you know like 10,000 years ago as if the rules of morality did apply then as now let me tell you something when you're talking about slavery exactly the same issues were being debated in Aristotle in ancient Greece ain't a damn thing changed charlie with the age of consent I would say that to both in ancient religions and in every century every period the same fundamental questions the same fundamental problems with their human nature ain't changed the reality of love and relationships and raising children those fundamental aspects of life have not changed so you can't pretend that in 1977 there was somehow a totally different moral compass that apply to these people when they stood up and I mean to compare this to Shane Dawson there is no comparison these people were sending letters to the editor they were sending formal protests the government they were actually making a probe at a file protest movement they were arguing deadpan seriously that it was an unjust oppressive regime that would deprive them as pedophiles of the right of sleeping with people 14 years old and younger Wikipedia article covers in fine some of them specify 12 and 13 some of them specify 11 different authors within this group in France had different particular predilections in terms of how far they were went in so let me just you a question let me ask a question if you are gonna take shane dawson off the bookshelf if you are gonna take shane dawson out of the libraries if you're gonna burn Shane Dawson's book how about jean-paul Sartre how about Jacques Derrida all about anyone on this list of greatest hits of the fridge left Romania I can't I can't I don't want to save me and things about people this is insane this is insane this person literally oh my god no there is a wrong with Shane Dawson and I'd feel ashamed of myself if I just dropped the mic at that point and put up this video presenting him as if he were some kind of unjustly persecuted great author he's not a great author and frankly the persecution of Shane Dawson is richly deserved and very easily justified but I think his latest breakdown or sequence of breakdowns raises a number of deeper topics for us all to reflect on in the English language and frankly in every language I've ever studied maturity is gender coded right the idea of growing up and taking responsibility is expressed in a very gender specific language we say in English be a man we don't say be a person we say man up we don't say adult it up we don't say human it up right the very basic concept of being mature of being in control of being responsible morally or otherwise the consequence your actions it's always expressed in these loaded terms that are profoundly linked to culturally specific concepts of manhood and womanhood and these are heteronormative they're linked to ideas about heterosexuality let me be clear in a perfect world these things would not be any different for gay men and straight men but we're not living in a perfect world I would say to you right now that working as a bank teller or working as a car salesman I think that these jobs should not be any different for men and women I think they should not be different for gay men and straight men what have you but in reality I think if you talk to anyone doing either of those jobs they'll right away talk to you about the numerous ways in which it really is different for different genders and it is different for people of different sexualities I always resent it when I walk into a bank and they've got some woman in a tight revealing dress standing there and it's like I'm here to deal with money or here to deal with wire transfers I don't want to feel like I'm walking into a bar or a strip club I don't want sex appeal to be part of what goes on in a bank and of course it's striking even when you talk about straight men who sell used cars or something the importance of being handsome and being well-dressed and all that stuff stuff is gonna be different if it's a gay man or a straight man who's a used car salesman there are ways in which even if we can admit ideally there should be no gender but there should be normative sexuality and selling cars working Bank there is in this same way I really think we have to recognize that part of Shane Dawson's problem is that he has embraced this role of being a petulant infant late into his own adulthood that you know it has never occurred to him to think of himself in a parental role as being someone like a father figure neither towards his own relatives like you know who are in some of these scandalous videos where he's seeing shocking sexual vaguely pedophile things to cousins or what-have-you but 12 year olds and they see he is related to remember his family it doesn't occur to him to evaluate his own behavior as someone who is now or potentially could in future be in that father's figures role it doesn't occur to him to hold himself to that standard of being a man being an adult and so on with the triumph of gay rights with the success of gay rights in a country like Canada we may now be living through a transitional period in which gay culture disappears precisely because gay people are more and more accepted into the mainstream but let me tell you where I grew up when I grew up in Toronto Canada there was a separate gay subculture there was a gay neighborhood there was gay music there were gay restaurants they were there weren't just gays stand-up comics who were performing in straight comedy clubs there will be separate gay comedy clubs with gay comedy for gay audience by K Kampf these are two separate things alright so to a much greater extent than black people lived separately from white people in Toronto in my youth you could really say that gay people has her own subculture there really was a kind of gay presence a gay subculture and they had their own newspapers even there were multiple gay newspapers in downtown Toronto and now obviously directly and indirectly a lot of the impetus for that was the gay rights movement that had kind of its crowning achievement with equality of marriage gay marriage in Canada and now I mean probably it starts to seem silly well gee does there really need to be a separate gay newspaper is there really that much interest in having a separate dynamic gay culture in as much as you're accepted in and participate in the mainstream culture more and more so some of the questions I'm asking here it's quite possible that ten years from now or 20 years from now people looking back won't realize the extent to which different behaviors were gender coded encouraged and accepted for gay men in a way that they never would have been acceptable for straight men we had a lot of conflicts in Toronto in my youth because gay men would get away with things at the office that neither a heterosexual man nor a heterosexual woman could ever possibly get away with and this was at epidemic levels hear me out people would work in an office where there was a gay man who every single day made caddy comments about the clothes being worn by heterosexual women working on us and gay men who would touch the women or touch their clothes while commenting in this way and of course they might do this in an effeminate way they might do this in a way that they consider jokey or friendly and we really had to point out look what you're doing right now in a workplace context this would be harassment if a straight man we're doing it and if a straight woman we're doing it like it's possible there'd be a fight and everyone is standing back and not wanting to confront you because you're gay and because these behaviors are coded and accepted as if you have a separate subculture or as if your sexuality tells you to this you're behaving in this way that makes this woman's life miserable every single day she and a bunch when they show up to work every day knowing that you're gonna make these comments to them and at them and you're going to touch them you're going to comment on their weight you're going to comment on their hair that you're gonna say this up and you may think you're being friendly but you're making people's lifestyle this was this was a huge cultural conflict and when you think about it this relates back to these kind of very vague you know unexamined cultural assumptions about what it means to man up what it means to adult it up a new face you know it's not easy to communicate to someone look when you're in a professional environment this is what it means for you to be a professional among professionals this is what it means for you to be a man talking with a gay man you're still a man you're here as a man wearing a suit this is the way you have to address your colleagues this is the way we all have to get along these are the boundaries you have to respect and the fact that you're gay doesn't make you in any way an exception to these rules now admittedly gay culture in Toronto also had advantages I had one heterosexual friend he was a totally heterosexual guy but he spent all of his time at the gay neighborhood all of his friends were gay except me he would openly say that he preferred gay culture and he could list off the ways in which gay male culture was preferable the straight male culture can at that time his impression was that straight men spent all of their time drinking beer and watching hockey whereas he felt that when he was around these gay men in the gay neighborhood they were relatively sober relatively intellectual and relatively politically engaged and didn't waste all their time drinking alcohol and watching sports on TV what have you so I I did actually have one friend and he really even though he was straight he really preferred and sought out the company has lived in the context of gay culture it has its advantages it doesn't just have disadvantages but when we're talking about this example of Kaddi behavior at the office and of gay people getting away with and being tolerated when they're crossing boundaries invading people's personal space even humiliating people in a way where it wouldn't be tolerated for heterosexual people this is really a very shallow and easily observed example you know out in the open in our in our society what's harder to measure what's harder to address the ways in which people I think including Shane Dawson just hold themselves to a much lower standard because they don't think of themselves as living up to those same ultimately paternal ultimately parental roles that define maturity and gender in our culture and in our society I read the autobiography of a gay man I'm gonna leave out a lot of details here and he talked about his decision to adopt children he adopted two children and raised them and he adopted them alone so he wasn't a gay man married to another gay man and he wasn't married to a woman who was completely so he adopted and raised these two children and it was just a very interesting perspective on both his life being gay and how he perceived the gay community around him and he said that he wanted to rebel against the selfishness and short-term thinking that he felt his colleagues had he said he felt that his other gay friends they didn't really plan for the future they didn't take responsibility and he felt they never really grew up all the way that they wanted to live like teenagers their whole lives long in part because they never took an interest in this role of being a father of being a parent and he adopted and raised these two kids and the account included how that all turned out including the children's features as many years ago went by now you might think this is some kind of tremendously of steamiest self-disciplined or even monastic character given that I said that he wasn't married that he lived long no the man who wrote this autobiography slept with male prostitutes who were 18 years old at least once a week so again our sense of moral compass here our assumptions when you're really willing to deal with the gray areas of human nature I know he actually went to some lengths to iterate that he never would sleep with seventeen-year-old so that you would always make sure they were 18 and over but no in some ways this is a guy who falls into the despised category of the pederast although not quite the pedophile there actually are many details but that guy's autobiography that are morally jarring and hard to deal with but again what was so memorable to me about reading that account was that it raised these fundamental questions but the ways in which gender roles and just even thinking through the possibility of yourself being a parent in some ways helps us shape ourselves into mature and responsible human beings Shane Dawson's latest freakout do you notice that he's blaming everyone but himself it's everybody's fault but his Shane your grown man by your own description you spend all of your time watching gossip on makeup channels Shane recently was reunited with his estranged father what would you think Shane if you discovered that that's who your father was that's the kind of guy he was that was how he lived his life that your father who be reunited with that let's just say he was someone much more like you Shane and you found out that's way there's no and and chain naturally being someone who allows himself to wallow in this kind of garbage content to spend his time and energy and imagination on gossip on makeup channels he himself has participated in and he is himself to become a victim of this culture of gossip on makeup channels hate I think it is very striking and very instructive the extent to which Shane will blame absolutely everyone but himself that he'll find fault in absolutely everyone but himself he won't stop and reexamine the life that led up to this personal tragedy which it is for him I mean in middle its how would any of you feel if you had written this book you had a hit book it was the single greatest accomplishment of your life and then that book was taken up store shelves the his life's work was building up this YouTube channel YouTube channel was demonetized it's all being taken over it is a personal tragedy that very few of you can fully imagine or fully relate to just how terrible was and now yes he's also dealing with the personal betrayal of people in this stupid gossip beauty makeup community backstab me but you know what Shan nobody is responsible for you being an adult except you I mean you pass judgment on all these other youtubers as do we all and yet it seems to me that you held yourself to this strange Peter Pan standard that you thought you never had to grow up you'd meet with the rating their names the two brothers Logan Paul and okay if you met with Logan Paul and Jay Paul leave at hand I think you know you mean with these guys and you criticize them saying look is this children's entertainment or is this for adults why don't you grow up why don't you start acting age those are great questions but Shane you hold yourself to such an abysmal low standard that I note you never asked yourself those questions and now in this strange way you're dealing with the consequences I mean really people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know