The wacky musings of 26-year-old Jenna Mourey, vlogger moniker Jenna Marbles, usually accompanied by little more than her dogs, a few props and her living room wall in Santa Monica, have made her the fifth-most popular YouTube presence to date. I've watched her videos before—How To Trick People Into Thinking You're Good Looking is probably the biggest deal, as well as How To Avoid Talking To People You Don't Want To Talk To—and they're pretty fucking funny. She often riffs on Men-Mars/Women-Venus topics as well, e.g. What Women/Men Do On The Internet: it's pretty stereotypical stuff, but it's meant to be lighthearted and maligning.
Last year, the UCLA publication Fem Newsmagazine deemed her a "revolutionized feminist" and praised her for being "fearless, outspoken and not afraid to talk about topics that others might find sensitive. At times her videos are crude and her choice in vocabulary is poor [but] nevertheless, she is proud of who she is." However, her most recent video, posted Wednesday, "Things I Don't Understand About Girls Part 2: Slut Edition," has been garnering many cries of slut-shaming and "concern trolling" (I never heard that one before!)
She maligns one-night stands with her first point: girls "have fucking body issues" and it doesn't sound fun to "get ass-naked with a stranger and do sex things to him. We don't know each other... and on top of that... maybe he's got big plans of chopping me up and keeping me in the freezer for awhile. Or he's got ten roommates who are gonna come in and gang-bang you for awhile. I watch Law & Order: SVU."
(This, incidentally? Nowhere near as cringe-worthy as Mindy Kaling's invocation of Law & Order: SVU in her own jeremiad against one-night stands in Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me: "Ultimately, it comes down to this: How embarrassing would it be for me to be talking to a detective at a precinct after you tried to rape and murder me in my home, and not be able to tell him your name or any information about you because we were having a one-night stand? I've seen Law & Order: SVU. I know how it works." GAH. I have a sense of humor, though! So like... that's satire, right? But it's hard to tell in the context of the rest of the über-judgy chapter, so GAH.)
Mourey goes on to offer her friendship to these sluts: "You should come be my friend, because I would never let you go home with a dude... to go get murdered, and herpes. I watch SVU. It happens. I care about you. I'll take care about you." Breath. "The next thing I wanna talk about is stupid sluts." (Stupid sluts, as we learn, indulge in "slut logic," as in "anal sex is not actually sex.")
Some other gems:
Help them. Help the sluts of the world make good, non-slutty decisions... because I think they're just a little lonely and sad."
Hooking up with a lot of dudes doesn't make you cool. Hooking up with one dude that you care about, and know, and have strong feelings for, makes you cool.
Read: If you want to have sex, ever, you should probably get a boyfriend.
Although expecting every woman to advertise a certain brand of feminism is akin to censorship (duh) and that kind of uniformity of gender values would never be expected of a dude, the sad thing is that her fanbase is largely comprised of 13-17 year old women who are gonna run around talking about "stupid sluts." And I have a 17-year-old sister. :/
'Things I Don't Understand About Girls Part 2: Slut Edition' [YouTube]