YouTube Babes

I am not cut out to make it as a star of YouTube. I haven't got the drive to produce three videos per week or to spend six hours rehearsing a spontaneous presentation. I also don't have the face and figure for the job. These days to make a splash on YouTube you need to look the part. What you have to say is only of minor importance, if you are between 15 and 25 and female you've got an excellent chance of becoming a star by producing even the most pedestrian material.

I have reached the conclusion that I should stick to the right media for my talents, and that is text. In text form I can make full use of my ability to craft an elegant phrase. In real life people often mistake me for stupid because I am trying to edit what I am saying while I am saying it. For many people their writing is as impressive as their speech, stream of consciousness is as fluent as their thoughts ever get, taking more time to polish their words does nothing to improve them. For me that is not the case. I am relatively slow at typing, but I see no reason to learn to type faster as my lack of typing speed allows my thoughts to catch up and settle on an impressive phrase. When I speak I utter second rate phrases and stumble as I try to improve them as I go. Sometimes I end up saying a bad amalgam of two distinct sentences. The impatient and those lacking perception often mark me down as stupid as a consequence, which is a big mistake. When writing my phrases come out better. When typing on a device which allows rapid text input and invisible editing I reach the zenith of my expressive ability. To make a video as fluent as my writing is a big ask. Whilst it would be possible it would cease to be fun and it would become real work. It does not make sense for me to spend hours to make a video which is watched by a couple of hundred people. So there is my Catch 22. I will not become a YouTube star unless I put in a lot more work into my videos, which I am not prepared to do unless my videos are significantly more popular.

In text form I can create sentences that I can't speak out loud. They work just fine in my head, my inner voice doesn't have the problem of drawing breath and he can put in a huge amount of emotional dynamic range without ever running short of breath or waking the neighbours. I can't deliver my own lines quite as well as I can write them. Please, as you read my words imagine them being delivered by a great actor or performer, as I do when I am writing them. Maybe one day I will be able to square the circle somehow and be able to give you my own words in my own voice with all the sublime beauty and cadence they have in my own inner theatre.

They always say the pictures are better on radio and with my words the sound is better in text too. If it helps you just read out my words in the voices of Stephen Fry, Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Tom Baker.

James May can handle the quiet, dead-pan and self-effacing stuff leaving Stephen and Jeremy with the mid range notes and Tom can handle the highest levels of theatricality. When you see me on YouTube performing directly to camera that is unscripted and it is as close to the real me as you are likely to get. When you hear me in voice-over that is from a script, usually with the excessive pauses shortened and the ermms, duhs and tuts removed by Audacity. I can now recognize a spurious tut visually, and I am nearly confident enough to delete what looks like an errm on sight too, but not quite. That is something you just can't do with video without leaving tell-tale evidence of the editing. This is where text scores over video. The edits in text are perfectly invisible. You have no idea how fluently the words came together. Or not.

This is where text scores   over video          the edits in text are perfectly in

invisible.         You have no idea how fluent the words          came

fluently came together.               Or not. whether

Once you have started to say a phrase in a particular way you are stuck with it unless you decide to retake the whole scene, which is often unsatisfactory as it is difficult to match up the voice levels, tone and pacing. Just a couple of inches closer to the microphone ensures that the sound is noticeably different. With text on a web page a sentence can be edited six times before it appears and another six times over the following decade and it never betrays any evidence of that editing. Except of course sometimes to me, as I can remember editing it and why I did so.

I get very annoyed by seeing second rate material on YouTube getting thousands of hits simply because the video is made by a teenage girl in a bedroom looking very shaggable.

There is one user in particular who has twice as many subscribers as I have who has produced nothing but mirrors of other videos and a four minute introduction promising something interesting in the future. When she's not too busy. And that has got her twice as many subscribers in a week as I managed to get in over a year. Why? Because she is young, blonde, female and sexually attractive. And of course the subscribers are largely not attractive, many are significantly older and they are almost 100% male. Eye candy matters more than content. It is obscene.

The classic ruse is the cleavage shot. Many young women on YouTube aim their cameras so low that they regularly allow their eyes to go out of shot and the top of their head might as well not exist. When a man does a straight-to-camera piece the eyes or nose tend to be in the centre of the screen. If his chest is visible at all then you will certainly see the crown of his head as well. You will hardly ever see a man aiming his camera in such a way as his chest is visible and the top of his head is not, unless he wants to show off a T-shirt slogan. But for many young women on YouTube this view is the default. The neck and throat are always in shot, even in the centre of the shot, to allow plenty of cleavage to “accidentally” come into focus. Some culprits even manage to “accidentally” keep the cleavage in view while the eyes disappear off the top of the screen. Surely any man who found that he had made a video like that would retake it, or at the very least add an apology to show that he had at least noticed the problem. But of course to the attention whore it is no problem at all.

Then you come to the background. When a young man makes a video in his bedroom he will typically video himself stood against a relatively plain wall opposite the window or just sat in his chair facing his computer. Very often he will make the video downstairs, sat at a dining room table perhaps. Not so for these attention whores. No, they always make sure that it is blindingly obvious that the video has been made in a teenage girl's bedroom. They will aim the camera from a dressing table at the bed and pose on the bed. Or they will sit the camera high above them and look up at it as they kneel on the floor. Can you envision any circumstances in which you might find yourself in a teenage girl's bedroom with her looking up at you as she kneels on the floor talking quietly? Please tell me it's not just me.

Of course you can easily fall victim of the blonde syndrome here. Just because some dumb women can get far more attention than their true talents deserve because they are buxom and blonde it does not follow that all buxom blondes are dumb, dull or have nothing to say. Likewise not all attractive young women on YouTube are airheads whose content is not up to the mark. Being attractive is not evidence of having something worth paying attention to but neither is it proof that whatever following you get is undeserved.

It is not surprising that those with something to say are often quite good looking. Neither is it somehow wrong to use what gifts you have, Brian Blessed doesn't talk in a whisper, he has a commanding voice and he uses it to his advantage. I can't see any harm coming from a young woman allowing her breasts to enter the field of view of the camera occasionally in the same way I sometimes use obscure words, denying my vocabulary would be absurd and there would be no point to me pretending to be as ignorant as the average redneck. However having cleavage on show in every single video even to the point of allowing the eyes to go off the top of the screen is something else, it is cynical and manipulative. It is sexual exploitation of men. It is selling sex, it is whoring.

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YouTube Babes

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© 1999 - 2011 by Martin Willett.

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