Is Instagram Empowering Women? Angie Varona.

do you think angie verona
can ever ever be a real lawyer do you think she ever ever could take on a position of political responsibility and leadership or do you think the possibility for doing that has been destroyed forever in the same way that a teenager who chooses to deal crack cocaine on the street the possibility of him ever working as a lawyer is destroyed forever once he has that criminal record once he's made that moral compromise for short-term economic gain are you going to practice law hopefully down the line yes however right now i am trying to milk social media as much as possible because there's so many opportunities out there and right now it's i don't want to say it for lack of a better word it's paying off better than being a first year practicing attorney or even a second third or fourth year so i'm gonna ride this wave as long as i can and then i'm gonna practicing law somewhere down the line when i do um i'd like to practice family law really state law property wasn't trust escapes all that good stuff after law school i didn't want to go straight into study for the bar so i took this year off to dedicate it to fitness so i kind of want to reach that fitness goal which is basically i want to weigh around 120 but be solid muscle however i've been very sidetracked so i'm hoping that i can get back on track um but it doesn't seem that way i'm still 107 pounds so i get a lot of goals but i'm hoping i have faith in myself i do not criticize feminism often on this channel because i think that fears about it are massively overstated on the internet they are somewhat hysterical in character now that doesn't mean feminists aren't bad and evil and wrong frankly but tell me something honestly if you had a younger cousin say you had a cousin who was 16 years old and you learned that they were converting to third wave feminism and that they had decided that they want to go to university and study feminist theory feminist philosophy how concerned would you really be compared to that 16 year old cousin converting to islam and deciding to go to a muslim college madrasa whatever you want to say to go and study islamic jurisprudence or islamic philosophy or islam really really is feminism that bad really and you know part of this part of the concern does center around the university as a kind of locus for uh political discourse and debate but i've said this many times on the channel if you really think it's so terrible to be in university that is dominated by feminist opinion what is it like to be a university that is owned and operated by the catholic church that is owned and operated by one specific protestant christian church or another in the united states there are major universities owned and operated by the mormons scientology not yet so you know again yes i mean i've encountered it it is it is kind of weird it's kind of awkward dealing with feminist bias in an institutional setting but really it's not that big a deal really compared to any other ideology of our times and yeah we could mention other things that your 16 year old cousin might have discovered on the internet become infatuated with and decide to sign up for okay there are worse things they could sign up for that you could be more you could be more concerned about so feminism i almost always critique it because one of my viewers has written in asking a specific question and i sympathize with her i feel they're asking a meaningful question and today i got a question from viewer of the channel okay more than one person has said this to me in the last couple of weeks in response to my videos about only fans a few people were writing into me asking about the feminist justification of earning money from the sale of your own body if you like but really here we're just dealing with the sale of your nude image whether that's on only fans instagram or pornhub or some other website the feminist analysis of this as empowerment as empowering one of the people writing into me is herself making money through something like only fans but she's self-critical she's philosophizing about it she sees the disadvantages as well as the advantages why she's interested in talking about it and asking this question okay look sometimes sometimes it's important to ask ourselves these same questions and remove the element of sexuality entirely in the same way when i talk to white americans about racism i very often give them a kind of parallel study from a country like cambodia laos vietnam some country where they've never even thought about racism and try to get them to ask themselves the same questions like in this parallel universe that really exists like you know in laos lao people don't get along with the hmong people and the tai lu don't get along with a tiny like you know like can we talk about a history of racism that you personally don't have a stake in where your desires are not excited by the subject and then maybe we can come to some conclusions about racism in general and apply them to your emilia in this case almost all of us have have some kind of personal stake in in these issues of like sexuality beauty desire the human heart fame uh earning money i mean these are all things where to some extent nobody is completely detached to some extent our passions are inflamed by this is it fair to say that the feminist analysis of exploiting one's sexuality for money for advancement for personal gain would be parallel to encouraging a young black man who's born and raised in baltimore to buy and sell cocaine for his empowerment for his advancement right now i'm specifying a young black man in baltimore uh in part because the conversation i once had the guy was a phd student he said to me this is not a tremendously deep point but i think it is a it's an important and salient one he said you know that for him being born the family he was born into it would have been very easy to become a lawyer whereas for someone else maybe born into a bad neighborhood in certain american cities like baltimore it would have been almost impossible for them to become a lawyer and he said that for him it would have been incredibly difficult to become a cocaine dealer but for someone else born into other circumstances that would have been incredibly easy or would have been almost the only way to rapidly make a lot of money with relatively little effort remember watching a long interview with an african-american woman from new orleans and this was in the aftermath of hurricane katrina and exactly that but the whole world briefly paid attention to new orleans and she was actually a talented amateur rapper too interestingly and she talked about the role that dealing cocaine and crack had in her with her life and she was completely sober and she was just describing that once you get used to being able to make that much money in so little time with so little effort it's incredibly hard to it's important it's incredible to quit the habit not the habit of using drugs she didn't use drugs she was sober it's hard to quit the habit of dealing drugs right and she was talking about with very little effort making about 300 a day so just just to put it in perspective this isn't like high level many kilograms of drugs these are a few small transactions you can make 300 and get on with the rest of your day okay okay okay work at mcdonald's for minimum wage sell drugs on the street for hundred 300 a day with very very few hours of effort are we willing to call the criminal route empowering here and probably the people who do this they have friends who did this for years and never got caught never went to jail probably they can justify in their own minds that they're going to make this moral compromise they're going to do this deed maybe they think they're only going to do it for a few months maybe they think they're going to do it for a few years and maybe that'll give them the money so that they can go to law school and become a lawyer now doesn't maybe they want to go to dental school and become a dentist go to nursing college doesn't matter there is an argument for dealing crack cocaine being an empowering thing for the drug dealer right that seems to me in some important ways parallel to the feminist justification of selling nude images of your body on only fans of course in other ways it's not parallel it's not comparable but here's a further point of comparison you get caught you go to prison for dealing cocaine you put in all this effort to go to law school and now you can never practice law you can never be taken seriously as a lawyer nor as a politician because you have criminal record for drug dealing it's possible it's possible you could be a young woman who wants to go to law school who actually does go to law school and who pays her way by selling nude and sexy images of yourself on the internet now you've got a law degree and you can't use it or you're incredibly limited how you can use it because you're known as a porn star basically shall we say right so there are some interesting points of comparison here and i think that nobody can deny there is a sense in which it's empowering to make a lot of money with very little effort whether it's through pornography or drug dealing in contrast to working at mcdonald's working at starbucks and in our post-industrial north american economy united states and canada almost nobody has the option or opportunity to work on a farm right to actually haul in grain or bale hay i did that as a very young man i had memories of it and it it really shaped the way i viewed labor forever i've got to say it really had a very profound influence with me this idea of honest work and then i've been cut off from honest work of that guy for the rest of my life i've never had the opportunity so you know most of us again this has to do with your conditions of birth for some people it'd be easy to become a peanut farmer but for the rest of us it would be impossible depending on where we're born and really the only humble employment we could get is working at starbucks working at mcdonald's this kind of thing and then you have to flip it around and ask wait a minute if you want to be a lawyer if you want to be a political leader and these things are linked in american culture tragically i completely oppose that but the reality is getting a degree in law can be the doorway to a position of political leadership in american society canadian site probably in many other societies too okay if you want to be a political leader if you want to be a lawyer who's taken seriously and changes the world in whatever way what if that requires self-sacrifice what if even in regarding working at mcdonald's as terrible bad and evil and wrong what if what's required is that you no matter how beautiful you are refuse to sell your body refuse to be a porn star sell images on instagram you put up with working at mcdonald's because that end goal of being taken seriously as a lawyer or a politician requires that self-sacrifice you that that characteristic of self-discipline and self-sacrifice is a morally positive virtue you're expected to cultivate and maintain for that for that outcome okay another deeper question what if what if there really is a kind of dignity in working at mcdonald's what if there is a kind of dignity in working at starbucks that we're all just overlooking or ignoring simply because it's hard work what if doing more hard work for less money actually has an important kind of date what if that has some real moral and ethical importance in contrast to making a lot of money very easily fairly i discussed on this channel i think five years ago angie verona some of you you haven't heard of her since there was one video on this channel pointing out half jokingly but half dead serious that angie verona would be a better political leader than all the leaders we had at that time in the vegan movement in as much as veganism is a political movement all right still true today half joking but half serious angie verona at that time was a political science major she completed her political science degree went on to law school now she's finished law school she's a fully qualified lawyer joey carbstrom do you think joey carbstrom would last five minutes in a university department of political science do you think that guy could get a ba in political science i'm not even saying these things qualify you to be a leader of the figure movement tragically they don't what people actually learned in a political science degree another question but the irony was saying look even if you're going to choose people who are bikini models to be the leader of your political movement people like freely the banana girl even if this is how you can choose why can't you choose a bikini model who studied political science and kind of this is this is the point of the video right anyway our leaders in the vegan movement are so astoundingly terrible it's still true to this day compare angie verona to joey carbstrong uh wayne cyong the leader of dxe or the leader of anonymous for the voiceless there's a real argument that still today should be better than the leaders we've got veganism do you think angie verona can ever ever be a real lawyer do you think she ever ever could take on a position of political responsibility and leadership or do you think the possibility for doing that has been destroyed forever in the same way that a teenager who chooses to deal crack cocaine on the street the possibility of him ever working as a lawyer is destroyed forever once he has that criminal record once he's made that moral compromise for short-term economic gain i think this is the very simple puzzle lurking behind all of the complex feminist verbiage about empowerment