My thoughts on another lazy feminist reaction video.
I watched a YouTuber called Annamarie Forcino react to trad wife Alyssa Drummond and her appearance on the show called Love Don’t Judge. I found Annamarie’s take to be lazy and dishonest. I couldn’t watch her video to the end without finding too many glaring issues.
Annamarie is part of the YouTube circle of feminist reactions. Although I’ve changed in my political views, I still like to watch a video that appears on my feed, regardless of whether I think I’ll agree with the take or not. However, what I’ve seen more and more is how superficial the feminist takes are.
So in Annamarie’s reaction to the disingenuously named Love Don’t Judge episode, she has some easy material to pounce on. I use those words deliberately as I personally think this reaction video is nothing more than an excuse to denigrate a trad wife and much less one married to an older man. Eww soo gross is the calibre of the comments this attracts.
I have actually watched some of Aly Drummond’s videos and found her take to be nuanced. I too am in what you would label an interracial and age gap marriage. It definitely gives you an opportunity to see things from a different perspective for a variety of reasons. In my case, it’s been quite something to walk through Rochdale town centre with an English man, looking like I could pass as a Pakistani woman (minus hijab). We get stares, to say the least.
What that does is make me see things from a more unique perspective and widens my understanding about different mentalities. So, I have found a familiarity in what Aly talks about and like her, my husband though older is in good shape. It’s not eww so gross because we have a proper relationship built on love and shared values. This isn’t some grooming scenario that feminists morbidly fixate on. I don’t call myself a trad wife but in some respects, I don’t think Aly is either.
She has a job (through her content creation) and although she’s framed her relationship with her husband as though it’s employer/employee, I see that as a schtick she is using for attention. After all she made her name through the outrage of feminist magazine articles pretty much doing her work for her.
From listening to Aly and getting a sense of the person she is, I don’t see her as this vulnerable and unintelligent woman that the superior sisters love to portray. All in their typical female/female aggressive manner. I also get the sense that her husband is attentive to his wife, which will grate on this other morbid, womanly fascination with husbands abandoning wives for younger models.
I see through the faux empathy of Annamarie’s video and others like her. It’s just bullying under the guise of concern. Annamarie’s video has no substance and is purely a bitch fest, albeit a better disguised one compared to her less calm counterparts.
What Annamarie could have done is use this an opportunity to discuss feminism. As Aly brings up the suffragettes and says men would have given women votes anyway, Annamarie says she’s lying. However, there is historical evidence to show that Aly is in fact right and I discovered this when listening to Janice Fiamengo’s excellent series casting a critical eye on feminism.
Annamarie says Aly is lying but provides no discussion nor facts for her statement. I doubt she does later in her video but roughly ten minutes in I had already found the video to be too immature, lazy and disingenuous to waste more time on. I did, however, want to point out the pattern I’ve observed in these kind of reaction videos. That is the utter lack of evidence to counteract criticisms of feminism. This was also the point I made in a previous post, that was about a criticism of Louise Perry.
Anyway, thank you for reading and if you like you can click on the tab below. My next post is about a better topic, which I am excited to be writing about, so I’ll see you then.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGFFi6pRCnCdQTe1iG3Tw4Td9jvhY2w74&si=HPFd-6wdIQZGAMjP
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGFFi6pRCnCcL5RUhTkIClr-g43wCDf1P&si=A1Ma7VRZqapnTo6y