Ira Glass Act 1, Video Killed the Video Star. Laci Green is a YouTube star in her 20s. Because of that, people take shots at her. No surprise. Perhaps you've heard how the internet works. What is surprising is how over time, the kinds of people taking shots at her changed until she was under fire from the last people she expected, because they objected to certain words that she was saying. Before we start this story, I want to pile up the warnings here, OK? This is a story about offensive language, so it is just chock-full of potentially offensive words. If you're not into that, don't listen to the story. This story not only acknowledges the existence of sex, it specifies some of the body parts involved-- probably not right for little kids. We have un-beeped the story here on the podcast. If you prefer the beeped version, there's one at our website. Our reporter is Kelefa Sanneh.

Kelefa Sanneh So, if you want to be a YouTube celebrity, it helps to have a niche. Here's Laci Green's niche.

Laci Green Well hi, babes. Let's talk about losing your virginity. The first thing you need to know about losing your virginity-- the foreskin is a highly elastic piece of skin that covers the head of the penis, and it's amazing. Aha! You've come to the right place. I'm kind of a vibrator connoisseur. When do I not want to talk about boobs? Boobs are great. Everyone loves them. I think if there's one thing that could bring world peace, it's probably boobs.

Kelefa Sanneh You can tell she loves this stuff. She gets animated when she talks about sex and relationships and genitalia. It feels like her face was designed for YouTube-- very expressive features, and she includes footnotes on screen, like each video is a cheerful, little seminar. My producer, Zoe Chace, and I called her to talk about her first big hit.

Laci Green Yeah, the first sex ed video that I made that went viral was called You Can't Pop Your Cherry, and it was about the hymen. The hymen doesn't completely cover the vagina at all. It doesn't need to be popped. It doesn't need to be broken. The hymen is a very thin-- And it was about basic anatomy-- what the hymen is, and also a little bit of cultural analysis about the hymen myth and some of the sexism that drives it.

Zoe Chace The hymen myth?

Laci Green Yeah, that you have to break your hymen when you first have penetrative sex. So, let's talk for a second about this misconception that the hymen covers the whole vagina and needs to be broken. Not only is it outright false-- wrong! It's also kind of violent. Ah! Big, bad penis needs to come in and pop your hymen and make you bleed and--

Kelefa Sanneh Laci talks about sex like an enthusiastic nerd-- excited, totally unembarrassed. She started getting hundreds of thousands of views-- millions of views. The videos brought in steady money and opportunities. She went on Dr. Phil. She was the host of MTV's first YouTube series-- it was called Braless. All of this-- this whole sex ed career-- was basically an outgrowth of her childhood, or really a reaction to it. She grew up in a small town near Sacramento, raised within the Mormon church, which she found stifling.

Laci Green This is relevant because the Mormon church is strictly anti-masturbation, which absolutely did not stop me from doing it. It just made me feel really bad when I did. In my early teens, I was overcome with shame and guilt and anger-- anger at myself.

Kelefa Sanneh Which brings us to the first word that got Laci in trouble. It isn't the kind of word you bleep in a radio story.

Laci Green Yeah, I made this video called, 50 Reasons Why I'm a Feminist. That's kind of when the storm began, I would say.

Kelefa Sanneh Feminist. She said it on purpose, and she knew it would provoke a reaction online, not just from people who watch her videos, but from people who can't stand feminism-- people who go searching for feminist videos to criticize. She knew she was about to get sucked into an endless cycle of reactions and counter-reactions.

Laci Green And I waited a long time-- actually, sat on that video. I recorded the video and didn't upload it for nearly six months. I just sat on it and waited, until I felt ready to post it. And I never do that. That's not a common thing for me. I just was a little bit scared of what was about to happen. The rumors are true-- what they've been saying about me. I have to come clean. I, Laci Green, am a feminist. What? You're a lesbian now? Man hater? Hairy armpits? Say it ain't so!

Kelefa Sanneh It covered the basics. Women are always judged on their appearance. Girls are called sluts, while boys are called players. But still, the people who loved this video-- they really loved it. The women's website, Bustle, said that it was, quote, "awesomely on point," and HuffPost wrote, "Laci Green reminds us why we all need to be feminists." But there was also a torrent of abusive messages-- messages that still show up at Laci's inbox every day, telling her that someone's going to kill her or that she should do it herself.

Laci Green It was immediate-- just this immediate reaction. It started getting tons of response videos from all over the internet, blog posts, tweets. My Twitter timeline became a nightmare of people calling me names and calling me a feminazi and all this stuff. And all these people who were making these reply videos-- collectively, they had a pretty big audience. They would send their audience to my channel.

Kelefa Sanneh Laci's video was supposed to empower young women, but it also did a pretty good job empowering guys who like to criticize young women-- guys who proudly call themselves anti-feminists. The whole point of being an anti-feminist is to mock and criticize feminism, which means that the anti-feminists on YouTube need to find feminists to mock and criticize.

Sargon Of Akkad I haven't actually watched this video yet, but I know by the title, it's going to be fucking great. Here's Why I'm a Feminist, by Laci Green.

Laci Green The rumors are true.

Kelefa Sanneh Anti-feminists can mean lots of different things. It might refer to someone who obsessively harasses and insults women on the internet, or it might refer to someone who likes to crack jokes about the perceived excesses of feminist discourse. And on the internet, of course, it's not always easy to draw a bright line between harmless jokes and pernicious harassment. This guy, for instance, Sargon of Akkad.

Sargon Of Akkad Back to the yucks.

Kelefa Sanneh He's mainly known for acerbic videos about how liberals are irrational, but he did once tweet, "I wouldn't even rape you," at a female politician he disagreed with. He made a video where he mocked Laci's video, and it got nearly a million views.

Laci Green I think that feminism is both kick ass and super important, and here are a few of my reasons why.

Sargon Of Akkad Because feminist supremacy would make you a primary beneficiary of all the benefits it would bring to a privileged class? Oh, I'm sure that's not it, Laci. I'm sure it's not.

Kelefa Sanneh Here's another video by a guy named Chris Ray Gun. He used Laci's picture to illustrate a satirical song.

Chris Ray Gun (SINGING) Women infantilized every day. But not by the men who the feminists blame, but instead by the motto that constantly claims. The patriarchy is raging.

Kelefa Sanneh Around the same time, Laci started taking a lot of heat from a different group-- the people who were supposed to be on her side. The people at the heart of her fan base-- college kids. She still remembers the moment when she first came face to face with it. She'd been touring colleges as a speaker. Lots of students knew her from YouTube, so they'd show up to hear her talk about healthy relationships, and they would submit anonymous questions that they were too embarrassed to ask anyone else. So, this was four years ago-- 2014. Laci doesn't even want to mention the college's name.

Laci Green And I walk in, and there's a bunch of students there. And some of the students are clapping and saying, yay, but there's a ton of boos in the audience. And I've never had that happen before.

Kelefa Sanneh She was confused. She didn't know why they were mad at her.

Laci Green I don't know what to do. These are my peers. I'm not that much older than them. I mostly ignored it. I actually couldn't even-- when I was up there, I couldn't even really hear what they were saying. I just knew that they were shouting things while I was talking. It's like, what are you doing? It's never happened to me before. I've never had students just yell. How rude.

Kelefa Sanneh She gave her talk, despite the push back. But some of the things she said made it worse. Afterwards, the school newspaper described the scene.

Kelefa Sanneh I'm looking at a picture of you in a plaid, flannel shirt, it looks like. They quote one of the students that was upset, and she says-- this is one of the students speaking, saying, "some of the things that she said," meaning you, "were very alienating to me, at least, and I think that one of them was that she used the homophobic slur, dyke, a couple of times, and not as a self-referential thing. Not as a self-identity, but as a way to describe a party she didn't like. I think I know where she's"--

Laci Green That is not true at all. What the fuck?

Kelefa Sanneh And the student said, "I think that she doesn't mean to be homophobic, but that's still a slur, and I still associate it, at least, with homophobia and with violence." So it sounds like you had mentioned in your talk, dyke parties.

Laci Green But the parties are called dyke parties.

Kelefa Sanneh Right.

Laci Green That was definitely a thing that would happen in San Francisco and at Berkeley, where people would have dyke parties, where only women were invited, and it was just like a thing that happened. What do you want me to say? D-word party? My problem is the way that she framed it as if I was calling people dykes or something. And it's just the deliberate sort of twisting of what you say and what you do all the time, to make it seem like you're just this evil, deep down homophobe who's just-- you're revealing your evil nature when you use various words or whatever and taking things out of context all the time.

Kelefa Sanneh Dyke was the second word that got her in trouble. But that isn't even the reason they were upset with her from the moment she got there. That was probably because of the fallout from a third word she'd said, way back in 2009.

Laci Green I had this video way back in the day where I said the T-word.

Kelefa Sanneh The T-word. I'm not going to say it, either. But it's spelled T-R-A-N-N-Y. A word for transgender people, widely seen these days as derogatory.

Laci Green So the short story is, I had made this fan video for Chris Crocker, who is a self-proclaimed T-word. I made a fan video saying I love him, blah, blah, blah. I used the T-word in the video, then later on, a bunch of social justice types dragged it up to prove that I am a evil transphobe.

Kelefa Sanneh Chris Crocker. He's a YouTube personality who went viral back in 2007, when he made a video saying, "leave Britney alone!" Back in 2009, Laci made a video saying that she loved him, and she used the T-word. She thought it was OK because that's a word Chris had used about himself. When someone asked Laci about it in 2012, she apologized. She unpublished the video. She said she had learned how harmful the word was, but some people objected that she used the word again in her written apology. And Laci says she was targeted and harassed by people who saw her as a symbol of transphobia.

Laci Green It was really, really, really horrible. People came to my house. They took pictures of my door. They took pictures of me while I was in public and sent it to me through my email. It was nuts. That was absolutely insane.

Kelefa Sanneh That's what kick-started the perception that Laci was transphobic and problematic, and that perception followed her to the stage of that college. Laci was stumbling across all these words you can't say, and of course, the modern archetype for what's supposed to happen with these words is the N-word. Lots of people feel like the N-word is so ugly, so damaging, so scary, that non-black people aren't allowed to say it, ever. It doesn't matter if they're quoting a song. It doesn't matter if they're reading from an antebellum novel. It doesn't matter the context. They can't say it. Then the question is, how many other words are like the N-word? How many other words can't be said?

Laci Green That was kind of when I started to notice the more social justice warrior side of things.

Kelefa Sanneh OK, so just in case you haven't heard this one, social justice warrior-- an insult that can be thrown at anyone who speaks up against racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, all the other -isms and phobias.

Laci Green Students felt like it was OK to be rude, to call names, to degrade and disrespect people because they weren't woke enough or something. This idea that the words themselves have more meaning than the context that they're in.

Kelefa Sanneh There were other words she couldn't say-- words that were more fundamental to the kinds of videos she made.

Laci Green People got mad when I would say male or female in a video to refer to anatomical stuff, like female orgasm or male sexuality or whatever. Yeah, people said, can you not say male or female?

Kelefa Sanneh That's the thing. She makes sex ed videos, so she talks all the time about genitals, about reproductive health, about sex. There's basically no way for her to avoid these words without making some pretty fundamental changes to the way she talks, like how do you talk about someone who's intersex? Born with sex organs or traits that don't fit traditional definitions of female or male?

Laci Green Yeah, I made a video about intersex conditions. And in the video, I talked about sex development in the womb and sex differentiation and how we become male and female, and they're somewhere in between. And people didn't like that I used the terms male and female, but literally, how do you explain intersex without male or female? I've thought about it so many times. I don't even know. You have to use anatomical terms.

Kelefa Sanneh And how do you talk about sex and anatomy without saying male and female?

Laci Green Well, I start using the terms vagina-owner and penis-owner. I was trying to be creative. I want to address the genitals. If you have a penis, is it applicable? And that's kind of the route that I've taken since.

Kelefa Sanneh Did you get positive feedback when you started talking about penis-havers and vagina-havers, as opposed to males and females?

Laci Green No. I mean, yes. But also no. Some people liked it. I'd say more people didn't like it. They're like, why are you calling me a vagina-owner? And I'm like, ugh.

Kelefa Sanneh So, if this is new to you, and you're wondering why some people want to avoid the words male and female, the idea is this. When you call a penis a male sex organ, you're kind of implying that having a penis makes you a man, and that's not true for everyone. You're leaving out some transgender people, for instance. None of this satisfied the growing number of people who thought Laci was totally problematic. On Tumblr, someone put together a list. It was called "Masterpost-- Why Laci Green Sucks." It had 93 entries, accusing her of hypocrisy, ignorance, insensitivity. It explained why her commentary had been hurtful, not just to trans people, but to women, people suffering from mental illness, Muslims, millennials, vegans of color. When she first started making videos, it felt like freedom, and now it felt like the opposite.

Laci Green It started to feel like being back in Mormonism. You've got this sort of doctrine-- the social justice doctrine that you hold on to. The intention is good-- to make us better people, to do better by each other, to become more moral. They're both moral systems, and they operate in similar ways. Using shaming when you get out of line. There's just sort of this feeling of repression on your chest, where you just can't speak freely or be freely in the world. And it felt exactly the same to me, like I was policing my own thoughts and words. I felt like a bad person all the time.

Kelefa Sanneh After being mocked by the anti-feminists and then being assailed by the social justice crowd, she scaled up. She started attracting the hostility of a much bigger, louder group-- Trump supporters.

Laci Green Well, I tweeted that night of the election. I said, "fuck white America," when Trump won.

Kelefa Sanneh The tweet went viral. Conservatives passed it around to make fun of liberals who were losing their mind over Trump. Here's what her original tweet actually said. "We are now under total Republican rule. Textbook fascism. Fuck you, white America. Fuck you, you racist, misogynist pieces of shit. Good night."

Laci Green Oopsie.

Kelefa Sanneh And some people noticed that the day before, or on election day or the day before, you had tweeted, "regardless of the outcome, we are clearly a deeply divided and broken country. So much work ahead to mend, heal, and restore the U in USA." And some people noticed that there had been a change in tone and thought that that was funny or revealing. And one person actually wrote to you on Twitter, "Hey Laci, do you, like, not see how you're acting like the very thing you claim to be opposed to?" Do you remember who wrote that tweet?

Laci Green No.

Kelefa Sanneh It was a guy who is known as Chris Ray Gun online.

Laci Green I knew you were going to zing with that. I knew it was coming.

Kelefa Sanneh Chris Ray Gun-- an anti-feminist with a YouTube channel. A guy who liked to make fun of people like Laci. A guy who liked to make fun of Laci herself. Chris is the one who made up that song.

Chris Ray Gun (SINGING) The patriarchy is raging.

Kelefa Sanneh Laci is giggling because Chris Ray Gun, the YouTubing anti-feminist, is now her boyfriend, which is a pretty wild twist in Laci Green's story, considering the trolling that she went through from him and from his friends. And to explain it, we have to back up. Laci had booked a series of talks on college campuses in the weeks after the election.

Laci Green As soon as I came out on stage, people started screaming, fuck you, cunt. Fuck you, bitch. You lost. Trump, Trump Trump. Started throwing pencils and paper and whatever crap had in their backpack at me. I was really scared. I was scared that one of these students was going to rush the stage and hurt me. That's all I could think about. I can't do this. My mind's not in this place. It's not worth it.

Kelefa Sanneh Online, the vitriol against her and her feminist allies got 10 times worse after the election. And after a few months of that, Laci decided she'd had enough of everyone ranting at each other, especially ranting at her. She'd try something different. She'd reach out directly to one of the antagonists, Blaire White. Now, Blaire is a conservative who's also a trans woman, and she'd become an unlikely hero to anti-feminists. Blaire had been making nasty videos about one of Laci's friends, so Laci began a careful approach to Blaire. First, she followed her on Twitter. Blaire noticed, and she tweeted, "Laci Green just followed me. Was that an accident, girl? lol." "Ha ha, nope. Been watching your vids and appreciate your perspective. Sometimes, I agree. Sometimes, I'm confused. Want to chat?" Nerd face emoji. "Yes, honey. Let's talk." The people on Twitter couldn't decide whether this was a good idea. More than one of Blaire's followers responded with an image of Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi saying, "It's a trap!" In fact, when Laci and Blaire finally streamed their 2 and 1/2 hour long video chat, it was pretty civilized.

Laci Green Do these opinions and feelings need to be expressed in such a mean, cruel way?

Blaire White Yeah, I mean--

Laci Green I don't think it does.

Blaire White Yeah, like I said, there are certain content creators where their MO is just to destroy a person and others who--

Laci Green I knew when I was talking to Blaire that I was basically speaking to that entire community, because they were all watching.

Kelefa Sanneh Laci started hearing from other people in the anti-feminist world. They wanted to talk, too.

Laci Green Very, very eager to have these conversations, and not even publicly-- wanted to just sit down and have lunch at Chipotle, have a Skype on a Friday night when we're all just bumming around.

Kelefa Sanneh Talking to a celebrity YouTube feminist like Laci was a good way to get viewers. The idea was that Laci was making friends with her enemies-- people from the other tribe. In this world of YouTubers, it was a major plot development. Everyone wanted to see what would happen next. Was Laci undergoing some kind of conversion? Was she switching teams?

Laci Green Talked to Andy Warski.

Kelefa Sanneh He's a hyper-aggressive YouTuber. He once said that social justice warriors should be shot-- metaphorically, he added, for legal reasons.

Laci Green Yeah, I talked to Sargon.

Kelefa Sanneh That's the guy who got almost a million hits on his video making fun of Laci's feminism video.

Laci Green I talked to Bunty King, who is now one of my best friends.

Kelefa Sanneh He's a Canadian guy of Indian descent who loves to mock social justice warriors.

Laci Green All of them. I've had conversations in some capacity with all of them.

Chris Ray Gun Take 45. Take 41. Take 97. Take fuck my ass. You've got a friend in me! Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Ray Gun Recap. Chris Ray Gun here, coming at you live from an unyielding whirlwind of physically and emotionally crippling stress.

Kelefa Sanneh OK, so this is Chris Ray Gun, the patriarchy is raging guy. After Laci made a video about all these conversations, he made a video about her video, using her video in his video. That's how this world works.

Laci Green People have been pretty kind to me, and I'll be honest. I didn't really expect that. No judgment, no vitriol. I even feel like I have a really good connection with a couple of new friends-- couple of new friends-- couple of new friends.

Kelefa Sanneh At this point, the screen goes black and white, and we see a close-up of Chris popping his collar in slow motion.

Chris Ray Gun Yeah, that's right, guys. That's the main part of the video that a lot of social justice types seem to have a problem with. And there is certainly more to that video than just that, but this appears to be the main point of contention. It's essentially just a video where Laci Green says, hey, you know, not all anti-SJW YouTubers are sub-human, Nazi pieces of filth, and I'm actually open to having a dialogue with them.

Kelefa Sanneh Then he makes fun of some of the feminist men who criticized Laci, but there's also a moment of journalistic disclosure.

Chris Ray Gun Now, with all that said, what do I think about this whole Laci Green thing? First, I should let all you guys know that I've actually become pretty good friends with Laci Green. We've been hanging out quite a bit, recently. So, that is a thing that people should be aware of-- ethical standards and all that. I'm letting you guys know that there is a bit of a conflict of interest here. But here's what I really think.

Laci Green He just cracks me up. He's so funny, and he's such a sweetie. He really is. He's got the biggest heart. You might not know it from his YouTube channel.

Kelefa Sanneh Chris and Laci had lunch at Chipotle for four hours, then they kept hanging out, and Laci made a decision. She wouldn't Google him. She knew he was part of the anti-feminist tribe, more or less. But that was about it. After all those years of straining to take everyone seriously, she liked the fact that he didn't even try. To him and to many anti-feminists, it was all a big game-- people trolling each other, making dumb jokes, sometimes arguing. He didn't take it so personally. And that's why she liked him. Also, they like each other's company.

Laci Green Some debates over dinner or breakfast.

Kelefa Sanneh And sometimes they talk about the same things they talk about in their videos.

Laci Green We have talked a lot about what rape culture is, the extent to which the United States is a rape culture. He actually does see it pretty much the same way as I do, and once we change the language, we talk about it as not rape culture, but as coercion culture. The ways that our--

Kelefa Sanneh And of course, once people found out she was dating Chris Ray Gun, it was kind of a big deal. The website, Vox, published a story that accused Laci of dating an alt-right troll. The story quoted an activist on Twitter who had written, "don't date alt right. Don't date white supremacists." And it quoted a popular Facebook post that accused Laci of turning her back on people of color. It should be said that it's kind of strange to describe Chris Ray Gun as a white supremacist or a member of the alt-right. He's more like a sarcastic Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx who loves video games and thinks the social justice movement is ridiculous. More and more, Laci found herself hanging out with Chris and his friends, the anti-feminists. This made some feminist YouTubers really upset.

Riley J. Dennis If you're happy to associate with people who've sent their mob of shit heads toward me, then I just don't care about you.

Kelefa Sanneh Like Riley J. Dennis, the old friend of Laci's, who had been targeted by Blaire White on YouTube.

Riley J. Dennis Maybe it's a this is our group and this is your group thing. But that group has done so many terrible things to me that even if you haven't directly done it, if you're still buddy-buddy with all these people, that hurts. That's like you're basically cosigning it.

Kelefa Sanneh Some people were saying that maybe Laci had never been a real feminist.

Kelefa Sanneh This seems to have had much more fallout for you than it has for him.

Laci Green Yeah, it definitely had more fallout for me.

Kelefa Sanneh It kind of feels like you're the one who paid the price for this.

Laci Green Yes. That is definitely true, because none of his followers care. They didn't turn around and be like, Chris Ray Gun is dating a feminazi, and she's just like this evil, horrible, man hater, baby killer. That just didn't happen. They just did not respond in that way, at all. I feel like the feminist side of things is just much more negative and eager to bring people down. And that was my perceived tribe, so of course it makes sense that I paid the bigger price for it. And that's one of the things that's bothered me all along, is this sort of gleeful willingness to just try to destroy people.

Kelefa Sanneh But you do still identify as a feminist.

Laci Green Yeah. I do feel sort of squished in between these two rocks that are just getting closer and closer. I don't always know how to handle it-- what to do.

Kelefa Sanneh In the last year, Laci hasn't posted many videos, and the ones she makes now don't have that same bubbly confidence and clarity. Lately, she presents an issue, like whether toxic masculinity exists or whether it's OK for little boys to be drag queens, and tries to look at it from different angles. She doesn't sound as if she's teaching-- more like she's trying to translate between two groups that don't talk to each other.

Laci Green This term, toxic masculinity, sounds like you're saying masculinity is toxic. And I think that this is a bigger problem in social justice land. A lot of the language that is used to communicate sounds kind of shamey. Personally, I don't care if we call it--

Kelefa Sanneh Here's the thing about words you can't say. You can say them, if you want. It's just that there are consequences-- consequences you might not be able to predict. Like, Laci said feminist, and that set off a chain of events that ended with her dating an anti-feminist and leaving some of her feminist allies behind.