The Closet: Shane Dawson vs. Bashur.

we're gonna talk about Shane Dawson and
we're gonna talk about another youtuber a parallel but contrasting case called basher or basher verse and we're going to talk about the gap between motivation and human behavior he ended up arresting me what you say online is a big deal and it was a big deal then - it doesn't matter if you don't act on it what you say online it's a big freaking deal they ended up arresting me and I would they put me in jail like I have never done anything wrong in my life I was put in a jail cell with a bunch of other people I spent like a whole week in jail and it was this I don't want to talk about that I went to court I know I was scared and they brought me up to the podium and they said you're being charged with the class a misdemeanor unlawful transaction with a minor and my lawyer was like you were so freakin lucky because you could have gotten to prison and stuff like that but they said they were going to be charging me with a Class A misdemeanor and I have to spend community time at some community hours I can't remember like a certain amount of hours doing this thing at a therapist for pedophiles basher he's notorious for several different reasons he's displayed several different kinds of aberrant behavior on camera but one of the most striking one of the most remarkable is that he makes these over-the-top declarations and demonstrations of his heterosexuality to paraphrase William Shakespeare methinks the lady doth protest too much I have seen this guy on camera with his girlfriend now his ex-girlfriend he had a conventionally attractive girlfriend an adult woman who has gone on to basically do pornography on the Internet and he would put on these gross displays where it's not just gross because of how he's exploiting her on camera for lack of a better term he is trying to make money out of he's trying to monetize her appearance and her sex appeal to the audience sure that's that's one aspect that makes it gross but just just watching this guy kiss his girlfriend on camera it's really gross and really disturbing and you can't shake this feeling that he is in fact a gay man trying to convince the audience and trying to convince himself that he's heterosexual through this over-the-top performance from my perspective there was a golden age of psychiatry psychology psychoanalysis there was a golden age of the sciences of the mind and I think to be honest that Golden Age came to an end precisely when people tried to insist that these were sciences they gave up thinking about human psychology as just an area of speculative philosophy people tried to insist that this was a horrid science in which you could ascertain a disease and talk about an etiology and a treatment and a cure there was a time when most of what went on in psychology was really a sort of speculative discussion of the relationship between motivation and action and when really psychological discussions were much more like the of literature they were much more like the analysis of a script in the theater or in making a movie so you guys don't have experience with acting very often you'll have a director and two actors you'll try doing the scene a couple times and think okay this isn't working and then the director will make a suggestion okay let's do the scene again but this time I want you to behave as if you're jealous of her and your motivation for doing this is not actually that you want to succeed if that you want this project to fail just to get back at you know you'll have the suggestion of definite director the actors will think about episode and say okay they'll try it again and then everything clicks everything's different everything sounds different everything feels different even though the lines they're performing word-by-word the script is precisely the same this is one of those interesting aspects of theater or dramaturgy analysis of script oh my how changing the motivation changes the certificates of the action and by the way the director may be saying that as a suggestion for how to play this scene when that isn't really what happens in the plot overall but somehow that makes a scene more evocative or seem more real or creates chemistry between the characters right but in this same way two different people can read the same novel the same work of literature and they can ascribe different motivations to the characters and you can never come to a scientific conclusion you can never come to some kind of certainty about what the motivations of the characters really were and guess what if you're looking at videotape footage of real people doing a real thing let's say it's a camera in a bank that recorded a bank robbery we recorded exactly what the people said and did during a bank robbery you could also have two people who were psychological experts or what have you you could have two two people who were philosophers sit down and discuss why do you think at this moment this guy says this thing or does this thing they could come up with different answers different explanations you can never pin down human motivation this sense but nevertheless I feel like there was this law cost avant-garde there was this golden age when people would really reflect on deeply motivation and then we're willing to speculate about what those different motivations might be instead of leaping ahead to a prefabricated diagnosis now the ones you guys may be most familiar with now or so-called bio psychiatry where you're leaping ahead to put someone in a box and say oh you have a condition called bipolar disorder and we have a drug that we assume treats that or you have a condition called depression and here's what that means here are the drugs so that there's really you know there isn't this openness there isn't this analytical and philosophical quality there's really the psychiatrist or psychologist or the therapist or analyst is sitting there with a kind of set of pre prefabricated boxes and question is which one are you gonna fit into you know is this depression or is this bipolar disorder what is it and and ultimately each one of those is linked to a chemical a mind-altering drug and supposed to suppose the treaty mmm but you're even taking a step back from that if you look at the early Freudian period once you had the assent of Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud just became a famous author people already really started thinking in these very narrow pseudo scientific terms as if were there were these pre established patterns of behavior that you're just going to fit people into and and what's most sad and sick about that of all is the assumption that human psychology is a horror to science dealing with facts and factors that we can know and quantify like geometry or chemistry right there was one statement from this girlfriend of his say they're now broken up one statement on the record in a kind of group interview format bunch of people talking over Skype or whatever it was over voice protocol and she said she felt she was speaking at her boyfriends defense she said people people have misconception when people think this guy is a really high sex drive or that he's pursuing all these other women around and she said you have no idea how hard it is to get this guy to have just once a week she said that she had to beg and plead and cajole him to try to force him to have sex with her just once a week and of course that's open to interpretation you're never gonna know scientifically what the guy's motivation is or what his problem is or what have you right you know it could just be that he has a low sex drive but certainly this is compatible with the analysis or the explanation that this guy really is homosexual and that his performance of over-the-top heterosexuality his you know he's really making uh making a display of his supposed heterosexuality is him overcompensating for his own sense of discomfort with his homosexuality with his own natural tendencies now when I look at a guy like Shane Dawson Shane Dawson now refers to himself as having been in the closet in the past and he speaks very explicitly about what his sex life now is which is a homosexual sex life to my knowledge he never stopped referring to himself as bisexual rather than homosexual but when you look at the aberrant behavior from Shane Dawson yes I have to make a concession that part of his aberrant behavior is explicable just in terms of him not being a very good comedian him trying to command the audience's attention trying to stay relevant trying to stay entertaining sure that those factors are there but part of it seems to me like a man who was as he says himself in the closet someone who was in denial about his own homosexuality and he seems to me like someone who was making this grotesque over-the-top demonstration of his supposed heterosexuality his supposed lust for women including women who are of a dangerously young age when I hear Shane Dawson saying these things even though I'm aware it's in part an attempt to grow so the audience it's in part him being edgy for the sake of being edgy it's in part a joke and yet we all know it is in part hinting at something tremendously serious um I can't help but notice the extent to which this sounds like a gay man who's struggling even to understand what it is that heterosexual men respond to when they experience attraction to women it seems to me that he can understand things like hair and makeup and clothing so that's the stuff he's talking about and no offense but he does not talk about those things he admires in women the way a heterosexual man does he talks about them in the way a gay man relates to women's hair makeup and clothing while putting on this grotesque performance in which he imagines himself as if he were an insatiable heterosexual male someone who's not merely satisfied with one two or three women but is lusting after all of these women that's again that's the sense in which this is an over-the-top jarring disturbing performance it's got to be over-the-top he's got to be more heterosexual with heterosexual he's got to overcompensate not fairly compensate right I feel like there's something going on here that hints at how profoundly corrosive it is for gay people to try to put on the mask of heterosexuality for them to try to compromise this aspect of their nature and their instinct for them to try to pretend publicly or privately to be straight when they are really and sincerely gay one aspect of what I'm saying here is not provocative at all not controversial at all certainly not shocking in the year 2020 one aspect of what I'm saying here is simply that living in the closet is a profoundly warped and warping experience that psychologically it really profoundly damages people to pretend to be straight when they're gay whether that is convincing their own parents that they're straight convincing their co-workers or their friends or convincing themselves and I think we can acknowledge this goes to an even deeper level when it's in a public context like that so if you become a public figure with some level of fame on social media you're in daily contact with an audience of at least thousands of people if not millions and you try to convince them that you're straight not gay and then maybe also deepest of all every day you've got to look in the mirror and try to convince yourself so that is something that can lead to demented and aberrant behavior I think the sense in which this suggestion is still shocking or is controversial is that if you speak in this way specularly about human behavior motivation and emotional response people will become very defensive because they'll assume you're thinking about this in scientific or scientistic terms as if these are billiard balls on a pool table you know one ball clacks into the other and then the next step in the process obeys the laws of physics consistently and predictably human emotions are not like that at all human motivation is not like that at all and I think when we talk philosophically in speculate about human psychology it absolutely never can be that way it is offensive to suggest to people that if they choose to live in the closet like if they choose to have a double life if they decide that what's best for their sexuality in their situation is to lie to their parents and pretend to be straight when they're gay in certain contexts that that will necessarily lead to the kind of aberrant behavior we've seen from shane dawson and pastor i would not make that claim at all i think that you can look at case studies of two different people or ten different people who've lived through exactly the same trauma and respond to it in totally different ways you can look at case studies of two different people or ten different people who cope with the same kind of stress same kind of terrible experience in their lives and came up with different creative responses to it and in some cases it's not even a difference in terms of creativity like consciously and intentionally coming up with a response to it sometimes it's just in the level of unexamined instinct how they respond to these things however i think when you examine these two case studies of aberrant behavior basher and shane dawson and you're not just looking at people who chose to do these extreme and even illegal things on camera for the public for the sake of fame we cannot explicate what she does and did as if it were a contrived act in order to achieve fame or stardom that doesn't make any sense at all gay or straight male or female a lot of people are powerfully motivated by the notion of what is normal wanting to be normal and they may never even stop to examine what this notion of normal really means or where it came from or how it is that they had this deep-seated assumption that being gay and being normal or to different things they can't accept themselves as normal if they're gay a lot of people are motivated by and even haunted by the notion of parental approval of doing things their parents would approve of doing things that would make their parents proud and and sometimes they don't even question whether cut the carrots their particular parents would approve of them being gay you'd pull off known cases of that people just assume their parents would be horrified disappointed the who they were gay and maybe maybe be surprised maybe her parents can be a bit more philosophical your parents in particular and maybe not these kinds of unexamined fixed ideas that people get attached to you they lead to aberrant behavior they motivate people to unspeakable acts of desperation most often in private but now more than ever before it gets documented and exposed here on social media I think it's very significant that both Shane Dawson and basher tried to reach back to their personal history of some kind of childhood trauma to contextualise there are at ulta burned behavior to elicit sympathy from the audience to rationalize to display themselves as the victim rather than the perpetrator these patterns are I think widely observed widely understood but maybe the deepest pattern of all was this yearning to be normal to be approved of by your parents and to wear that mask that lets you feel like you're part of the heterosexual majority as homosexuality becomes more and more accepted in Western cultures I think we now get into a deeper and deeper sort of questioning about the significance of those who choose to live in the closet something that wouldn't be surprising if you travel back in time 200 years or if now you get an airplane and go to an openly homophobic culture or like Saudi Arabia there's a questioning here of to what extent it becomes imperative for the sake of your mental health simply put to refuse to live a lie I mean people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know