Her tone remains calm and quiet as she strokes the microphone with a makeup brush, wave-like sounds rolling through the speakers. It’s impossible to ignore the empty house beyond her smiling face, especially as the comments become more and more hostile. Despite her tranquil movements, dread sets in.

This is the opening vignette from Tingle Monsters, a short horror film written by, directed by and starring Alexandra Serio. In it, Serio plays an ASMR practitioner named Dee, and the entire 11-minute film feels like a genuine at-home live stream -- blown-out lighting, misspelled comments and all.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and it’s a relatively new field of self-care spawned by the YouTube generation. In the bulk of these videos and live streams, women with fantastic manicures tap, scratch and trace everyday objects right next to powerful microphones, amplifying their comforting sounds. Or, an ASMR practitioner will whisper kind phrases and affirmations with their mouths extremely close to the mic, catching every pleasant pop and tsk.

People who experience ASMR find these videos calming, describing the feeling as “tingles” that flow from the crown of the head, down the neck, shoulders and spine.

Alexandra Serio

It’s not sexual. However, ASMR videos are intimate and largely feature women, and for many viewers, the closest parallel for this combination is pornography. Serio calls it “pore-level intimacy,” a kind of closeness that isn’t often shown in videos outside of porn.

“An overwhelming majority of ASMRtists are female, so that type of altruistic nurturing felt like fertile ground to build a narrative on top of, examining how violence against women begins with words and how this affects women's real-life treatment,” Serio said.

"Violence against women begins with words."

Serio is Chief Content Officer at Nameless Network, the company behind the Webby-nominated Everything Explained video series and the Museum of Pizza, an infinitely Instagrammable pop-up that appeared in New York City in 2018. She’s monitored the responses to Nameless Network’s YouTube videos and social media posts over the past six years, and during that time, she noticed a trend.

“As a content producer, I have always been struck by the difference in the comment section on videos hosted by women, which usually focus on the female host's appearance, the way her voice sounds or what she chose to wear,” Serio said. “On male-hosted videos the comments section typically focuses on what is being presented in the video.”

Misogyny is nothing new, but YouTube comments sections offer a fresh outlet for these deeply ingrained, harmful perceptions to shine. Written out in all-caps or all-lowercase lettering, spelled correctly or grammatically unhinged, finished with an “lol” or a “bitch,” people who present as women on the internet encounter hate and disrespect regardless of the content they’re producing, based solely on their perceived gender. It’s inescapable and well-documented. Combine this truth with the intimacy of ASMR videos, and it’s a recipe for hypersexualization.