I stumbled over a channel called Jolly the other day by watching Try Guy videos–after first watching their explanation video (as to why they fired Ned). It’s a channel with two Brit guys who are named Josh and Ollie (J-Ollie. Or Jo-llie. Get it?) and they do a variety of things. Lots of them are food-related, but not all of them. They also have a channel called Korean Englishmen because they both love all things Korean and want to make their friends eat Korean foods and videotape it.
They have 2.7 million subs on their Jolly channel and 5.4 million on their Korean Englishmen channel. They are cheerful blokes, and they are decent-looking guys. I would say they are conventionally cute, albeit in a nerdish way. They are in their mid-thirties, married, and one has a child. At least. That’s what I’ve gleaned from their videos.
They are upbeat and carefully calibrated to not offend. They are so gosh-dang wholesome, but with just a touch of sauciness on occasion. They are definitely the kind of boy you can take home to you mother.
I have watched several of their videos and they are very morish. They eat a lot of food. Their videos in LA were funny, familiar, and easily digestible. When I say that they make their videos deliberately non-offensive, that’s exactly what I mean. They are crafted in such a way that you can watch it, chuckle lightly, then move on to the next one. I’m not being dismissive, by the way. It’s an art, and they have it down to a T. They are affable, goofy, and kooky, but in a very acceptable way. There is nothing jarring or off-putting about them.
Josh is the nerdy guy who wears button-downs and glasses. Ollie is the class clown who is adorably clueless. They are both just so eager to make sure everyone is having a good time, and they are very diffident. I know the latter is part of being British, but I can’t help but be charmed by them.
Right now, I’m watching different videos about people eating Howlin’ Rays–Nashville chicken–mostly the hot version in LA. The vast majority of the channels are dudes. Sigh. I really don’t like the ones that are WHAT’S UP FAM IT’S ABOUT TO GET LIT–especially by non-black people. And airhorns. And fast cuts. I just hate all that shit. Just be chill and show me the food, damn it.
Anyway, most of these channels are men. The ‘try all these things’ channels. I have a theory and it’s completely out of my ass (ass theory). Men are more acceptable acting up than women and other genders are. That’s it. That’s my theory. I can go more into it, but it basically comes down to that.
When I used to watch the Try Guys at BuzzFeed–and by the way, their apology video was well done. I really appreciate that Eugene brought up that women are treated more harshly on the internet than men are–and I saw that happening with their situation. It’s even more egregious because Ned was the boss and Alex the employee, but I digress–I couldn’t help but think how differently it would have gone over if it was a group of women or even two dudes and two non-dudes. People of other genders could not have gotten away with half of what they did. In addition, ‘women trying on men’s underwear’ would not pack the same punch to it that dudes trying on women’s underwear did.
It’s frustrating to me that the view on sexism (and other isms) has moved towards ‘if an individual minority is fine with something, then it can’t be the ism’. I’m old. I’m tired. But goddamn it there still is systematic isms, no matter if people want to admit it or not. “This individual person feels fine about it” is not an excuse.
In the case of content creation, it’s not hard to see that non-dudes have a much harder time on the internet than dudes do. Nor that it’s easier for affable dudes to make a channel work than affable women. It’s pretty well-known that with popular media, women will consume media that is geared towards men whereas men will not do the same with media geared towards women. (Let’s not even talk about genderqueer, genderfluid, or nonbinary media.)
So it’s an issue if you’re a non-male person trying to get out there in the content creation world. Do you want to be put in a niche or not? Women who do cooking shows (and that’s the one niche in which the content creators are overwhelmingly female) can succeed. Women who do makeup, well, I never watch them, but they seem to be doing fine as well. The more stereotypically feminine endeavors? It’s ok if women do those. But that’s about it.
Most eating shows are done by men. It’s very rare to see a show about a woman eating food. I’ve watched YB (Try Guys) on her own channel eating food, and, man, she can pack it away. I admire her because she doesn’t care. But, she’s also tiny and cute. And doesn’t like to exercise. She just has good genetics. But I love that she’ll eat with unabashed enjoyment and make no apologies about it.
In general, though, I can’t think of a popular channel featuring food eating that has a female host. Which is depressing as fuck. And it’s relevant to my current thinking because the things that I want to talk about/do aren’t necessarily things that I would be ‘allowed’ to do. I put allowed in quotes because of course it’s not as if there are legally-binding laws that cannot be broken when it comes to content creation.
But, in general, the internet is much kinder on dudes than it is on non-male people except in those narrow confines I mentioned earlier. Some of the things I want to do would be fine (reviewing pop culture), but others would probably cause people to rage (talking about Taiji weapons, Dark Souls, eating food). In the latter category, it would be GF/DF because I don’t eat either gluten or dairy.
I like to watch “I ate all of this one thing” and I have the idea to do that for GF/DF food. There aren’t as many options, obviously, but I could make it work.
Another thing about these dude variety shows–they are allowed to look stupid. They can make all these comic faces, say, as they eat really spicy food, and it’s funny. A woman does the same, and it’s ugly. Men are allowed to be ugly, grimacing, Oh, also, when they invite their friends/other content creators to visit them, it’s almost always men as well. So it’s men helping out other men–much like it is in regular networking.
But, if women or other minorities state that they explicitly are helping fellow minorities, they’re shouted down for discriminating. When I was in college, I mentioned that I was making a concerted effort to read only Asian women. Some white dude said it was as discriminatory/prejudiced as if he stated he only read white men. I looked him in the eye and said, “I bet you that I’ve read way more white dudes than you have women of color.” He had nothing to say to that. I have no tolerance for ‘but reverse racism’ without any acknowledgement of context.
I want to do a variety show. I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. I don’t know how viable this is, but it’s what I want to try.