I’m sure there have already been scores of hastily recorded videos trying to capitalize on the Jacob Geller revelations, but this was a really serious, thoughtful video from a survivor which delves into r@pe culture, notions of “forgiveness” and “futures” which are valued for men who perpetrate these assaults but not for their victims (or for that matter, even for other men in society who do things which are punished much more harshly than sexual assault—say, protesting the genocide in Gaza), how hollow and self-serving the calls for “restorative justice” are, and how making good video essays does literally nothing to facilitate that healing or mitigate the harm caused.
Separately, how do people feel about “CW: SA” vs. “CW: sexual assault”? I usually use the former, since it’s shorter and perhaps less direct, but that indirection could be a double-edged sword, especially for people who are not native English speakers (or simply aren’t familiar with that abbreviation). But I’d like to hear from the people who actually need the content warning rather than assuming anything.
…it occurs to me that I should probably post this question somewhere that doesn’t filter out the people who choose not to click through because of the CW.
I was going to post Big Dad’s video about the Jacob Geller sexual assault revelation yesterday but I was too tired to gather my thoughts by the time I saw it, so I posted the short film Nenaboozhoo instead and figured somebody else would post about Jacob Geller instead of me at some point in the coming days. Big Dad isn’t a channel I really follow or have any familiarity with outside of that video, so it was a cautious watch; but I got exactly two videos about the Jacob Geller sexual assault revelation in my YouTube recommended feed, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to watch or share the other video that kept showing up in my recs, which was by a channel called chud-something-or-other where the thumbnail depicted Jacob Geller as a Jewish ethnic caricature next to a menorah and a tied-up woman and the title or thumbnail text was something like “JACOB GELLER, KING OF R#PE (WORSE THAN EPSTEIN?!)” — just really awful, tasteless neo-Nazi slop, by the time I clicked “do not recommend this channel to me” mere exposure to the title and thumbnail alone had already taken a good year off my life expectancy.
More to the point, successful video essayists with silver play buttons, Patreons and Nebula channels are essentially small business owners in the “air of radicalism” industry; anybody who follows this career path must’ve already in some sense accepted this idea of profiting off of the surveillance capitalist machine. So it doesn’t really surprise me when YouTubers turn out to be things like sex pests, because “All Celebrities Are Bastards” has never done me wrong as a slogan. This is to say that Jessie Gender and Jacob Geller have the same class interests in the “creator economy”, but they still have their individual subjectivities and interests as a transfem SA survivor and a cismasc r#pist respectively that allow Jessie to be lucid, vulnerable, and insightful as hell in this essay when she can be less so in her other videos.
So yeah, this is probably the best video about the situation.
Edit: Also, I personally prefer to write “CW: sexual assault”.
I said I was going to in the general mega, then I went to sleep and forgot about it