Video Essays & Why We Love Girls Teaching Us Things So Much
Words: Faustine Moulin
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‘Third places, Stanley Cup mania, and the epidemic of loneliness’, ‘Love Is Dead (and Other Parasocial Lies)’, ‘The attention economy is killing us’… For the past year, I deserted the Instagram Discover page to put all my trust in the YouTube algorithm. Now, my after-work hours are filled with 45 minutes of delightful debunking of all the new social trends flourishing on TikTok. After years of losing myself with pleasure in the abysses of doom scrolling, I feel like my brain has gained back all the neurons I left beneath 10-seconds videos about skincare and “self-development”. My evenings are now all about learning about why I feel so helpless and lost in our capitalist society, why micro-trends tend to fade as fast as they grow, and why our politicians do…. All that.
After work, I catch up with all my new bright and funny girl best-friends who take the time to teach me everything there is to know about the sick and sad world around us. One day, I will go to bed knowing about international food disparities, the next night, I will bore my friends about the importance of third spaces. Like a sleepover after school, they talk and I listen as they discuss everything and anything in minute detail. I love them; Mina Le, Shanspeare, Alice Cappelle and Katie Robinson got my heart for good. With them on my screen, I am not the girl who’s been told by a boy that she sounded dumb in class. With all the insights they share with me, I gain my power back.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
I love this meme we see every now and then: ‘When he’s telling you about a thought you had aged 8 at a sleepover.’ It is the perfect depiction of one of these candid testimonies of pure girlhood. Blissful and blessed evenings full of sugar, teenager movies and horrid secrets. The deep talks in front of the TV light at 2 a.m. were the premises of active mid-20s introspection. Most of the time, between two pictures of a questionable crush, you would end up realising how the world as you knew it two years ago is gone forever and why it is gone forever. If it sometimes would lead to long minutes of uncomfortable silence, it was delightful to go back to eating candies and accepting that you learned and knew things. And when I thought that I was done with deep learning about subjects I never heard about before when I left college and no longer took part in sleepovers, I got introduced to the wonderful world of video essays. Suddenly, I could go back to my younger years and listen to the girls I admire tell me about their obsessions with a vocabulary that is mine and examples I would use. A real intellectual yapping session.
“These video essayists create spaces and communities where we can discuss these matters between us, as girls.”
It’s through women that I became a woman. It’s the childhood friend’s mom who bought my first bra, the father’s friend who taught me how to cut my nails so they’d look the way I want, the 5th grade teacher who told me I was allowed to be sad and the high-school best-friend who confessed to me how it felt to be naked in front of a boy. I learned femininity with them, through all the small experiences they shared with me, even when they had no idea what they were actually doing either. So, when I sit on my couch, open YouTube and look for the perfect topic, I want girls. I want girls telling me what they think about the world we live in, I want women to enlighten me when I feel lost in front of pieces of information I’m not sure about. I want them to introduce me to things I don’t know about, just like all the women before and after them.
I love seeing these now familiar faces on my screen - maybe my most healthy parasocial relationships - fully aware that I’m about to think. Unlike some college classes, it’s going to be a good thinking session, one I’m excited about, one I’m seeking out because it’s entertainment as well. I admire their sense of details, their editing skills, their intelligence, their curiosity and their dedication. I love the fact that they get me obsessed about niche topics I never had any interest in before, because they present them to me with a beautiful set-up and examples from the world I, myself, exist in. If they sometimes tackle what we could patronisingly call girly topics, they do it knowing that ‘We’re just girls!’ These video essayists create spaces and communities where we can discuss these matters between us, as girls. They don’t even take the time to answer the misogynistic stereotypes; they destroy them with their brilliance. I’m taught about the fall of ;late stage capitalism as much as why pilates is so trendy.
In an adult life where our 9 to 5 keep us from spending all our evenings together, I send my best-friend my new favourite video-essay and wait patiently for the weekend where she will tell me with enthusiasm how dantesque these girls are and if blonde privilege really exists, and I’ll listen to her, reminiscing on the long lost art of sober heart to hearts and the earnest quest of knowledge lost to youth.
