This list is curated from 380 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
This list is curated from 380 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
Harry Potter series
by J.K. Rowling
[JK Rowling's] position in the culture is kind of weirdly split right because on the one hand there's her continuing legacy as the author of The Wizard books and on the other hand there's like almost her entire public persona that which we mostly experienced through Twitter which is basically obsessive bigotry towards trans people that's become sort of her definitive thing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Bible
by
This is actually closest to the origin of the concept of scapegoating in Leviticus, where on the Day of Atonement, the high priest lays his hands on the head of a goat and confesses the sins of the Israelites. He then sends the goat out into the desert, symbolically transferring the sins away from the community. Conspiracists are usually not as self-aware about this as the Israelites. (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Twilight
by Stephanie Meyer
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
On the Genealogy of Morality
by Friedrich Nietzsche
I find this book thrilling to read, honestly, and I am not easily thrilled, especially not by philosophers. I think this book in particular gets me because especially if you were raised Christian, this is so the opposite of everything we were ever taught to believe that it almost feels like, dirty. Like should I be reading this? Is this allowed?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Fifty Shades of Grey
by E. L. James
Christian Grey is not a groper. Have you even read it?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Troubled Blood
by Robert Galbraith
J.K. Rowling is a popular author who used to write whimsical stories about a wizard school, but who now writes books about transvestite serial killers masturbating into stolen panties because she's lost her goddamn mind.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Right-Wing Women
by Andrea Dworkin
In my opinion, Dworkin's best book is "Right-Wing Women", published in 1983, the era of Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant. "Right-Wing Women" is an analysis of why so many women are drawn to conservative politics, seemingly against their own interests. Anyone who is interested in understanding the Gender Critical movement, a crypto-reactionary backlash disguising itself as feminism, should read this book.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sexual Personae
by Camille Paglia
Why read Jordan Peterson when Camille Paglia is right there? Tired of male misogynists being promoted over more qualified female misogynists
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Unfollow
by Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan left the Westboro Baptist Church in 2012 after a crisis of faith precipitated by a power struggle within the church. She wrote about all this in her book "Unfollow", which is honestly a pretty interesting account of deconversion and the circumstances that lead to someone leaving a hate group.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Conflict is Not Abuse
by Sarah Schulman
I recently read a book by Sarah Schulman called "Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair". Basically Schulman's argument is that, in various contexts from romantic relationships to community infighting to international politics, the overstatement of harm is used as a justification for cruelty and for escalating conflict.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger
Last time I was reading the only book I’ve ever read, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, I noticed this description of glamour in the context of advertising: “Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.” And I felt kind of attacked, because glamour is very important to us. And by us, I mean the gays.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Intercourse
by Andrea Dworkin
Like if you're straight, do you want to publicly debate whether your marriage is valid? Andrea Dworkin claimed that penetrative heterosexual intercourse is inherently an act of violence. I've noticed most straight men don't want to have calm, civil discussions about that.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Transsexual Empire
by Janice Raymond
Now it's true that trans exclusionary radical feminism began as an offshoot of far-left lesbian separatism, with academic feminist Janice Raymond writing in 1979 that transsexualism should be morally mandated out of existence. But the Gender Critical movement was always destined to become a right-wing movement, because it has the structure of a right-wing movement; taking women's fear and rage toward familiar men and displacing it onto an unfamiliar outsider.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Envy A Theory of Social Behavior
by Helmut Schoeck
In a 1966 book titled "Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior", the sociologist Helmut Schoeck argued that rather than being- That's very German name. Helmut Schoeck. It's putting me in a German mood, sweetie. Hallo meine Lieben. Heute gibts ein neues Video! I just get worse at German every year. Schoeck argued that rather than being the result of social or economic inequality, envy is a universal experience across all human societies, including very egalitarian ones.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Michelle Remembers
by Lawrence Pazder
The Satanic Panic began in Canada with the publication of Michelle Remembers, a supposedly non-fiction memoir recounting Catholic psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder's hypnotherapy sessions with his patient-turned-wife Michelle Smith.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer
The specifically feminist criticism of the romance novel goes back at least to Germaine Greer, who included a long rant about them in her 1970 manifesto "The Female Eunuch", in which she condemns romance readers as "women cherishing the chains of their own bondage."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Masochism
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Gilles Deleuze
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Civilization and Its Discontent
by Sigmund Freud
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Richard von Krafft-Ebing
You were a lady, you were dressed in China, you were something perfect, slightly sacred. - This is the view taken by 19th century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of "Psychopathia Sexualis", one of the first attempts to scientifically study human sexuality, so scandalous at the time of publication it had to be printed in Latin to keep the hoi polloi from getting notions.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson
Why read Jordan Peterson when Camille Paglia is right there? Tired of male misogynists being promoted over more qualified female misogynists
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Joy of Pain
by Richard H. Smith
Seen on Contrapoints nightstand in the video Envy
The Myth of Male Power
by Warren Farrell
For this video I decided to actually do some research for once, and the first thing I did was read the foundational text of the modern men's rights movement, which is "The Myth of Male Power" by Warren Farrell. Actually I listened to the audiobook 'cause let's be honest, reading is hard.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Open Society and Its Enemies
by Karl Popper
Karl Popper said, "the conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?'" (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Behold A Pale Horse
by Milton William Cooper
In his bestselling crackpot ravings, Behold A Pale Horse, conspiracist William Cooper describes his intentional view of history: quote, "A grand game of chess is being played on a level that we can barely imagine, and we are the pawns." (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
When Adam Smith wanted to describe how the preference for doing business at home leads merchants pursuing their self-interest to also unintentionally promote the good of their country, he said they're "led by an invisible hand." (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Essential Guide to Practical Astrology
by April Elliot Kent
I think astrology has its place, so long as astrology knows its place. In the essential guide to practical astrology, April Elliot Kent writes, "Astrology is a language; it's the sky's way of speaking to us." Taken literally this is intentionalism. The sky does not speak any more than volcanoes get angry.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anti-Semite and Jew
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The philosopher Sartre noticed something similar in his essay on antisemitism. He says, "I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation." (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Phenomenology of Spirit
by Friedrich Hegel
Most people find conspiracism more intuitive than dialectical materialism, Lord have mercy. Just explain to Joe Rogan that it's simply a non-idealist inversion of Hegelianism, how difficult is that? (book shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Jewish Space Lasers
by Mike Rothschild
In a Jewish Space Lasers, Mike Rothschild-no relation to the wealthy banking family, but you know-good luck explaining that to the "there are no coincidences" brigade. Mike Rothschild says, quote, "Almost all conspiracy theories are rooted in antisemitism, and almost all antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
For conspiracists, the persona of investigator gives them a noble purpose. It makes them important. But instead of giants, they think windmills are directed energy weapons. And instead of chivalric fantasy, their literary model is like, the dystopian fiction we had to read in high school: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, you are here.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Them
by Jon Ronson
David Icke was a BBC sports presenter until his 1991 appearance on the TV talk show Wogan, where he announced to the British public that he was the son of God and prophesied a plague of tidal waves and earthquakes. - The press claim that you claim to be the son of God. Is that true? - Yes. You see, the thing is that-you see it's quite, it's quite funny, really- - The studio audience ridiculed him live on air. And afterward he says, he quote, "couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule." (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Conspirituality
by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sandy Hook
by Elizabeth Williamson
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
None Dare Call It Conspiracy
by Gary Allen
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
A Culture of Conspiracy
by Michael Barkun
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Violence and the Sacred
by René Girard
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
by Richard Hofstadter
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
There's an interesting book called In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado about her experience being in an abusive lesbian relationship and like one of the difficulties of how do you talk about that
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu
New Tangent “Spirituality” on skepticism, the X-Files, divine intervention, quantum mysticism, Bach, Xavier Renegade Angel, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, mindfulness, soteriology, the three marks of existence, meditating on LSD, self-care, dissociation, and more!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Ecrits
by Jacques Lacan
I'm not really personally convinced that it's super worth it to read Lacan's Ecrits unless you fucking are really devoted to it. Because I already read... I do think Bruce Fink is pretty good on this topic. Not really sure that you need to read actual Lacan because he's impossible to comprehend.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Lacanian Subject
by Bruce Fink
I'm not really personally convinced that it's super worth it to read Lacan's Ecrits unless you fucking are really devoted to it. Because I already read... I do think Bruce Fink is pretty good on this topic. Not really sure that you need to read actual Lacan because he's impossible to comprehend.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Eros the Bittersweet
by Anne Carson
I love Eros the Bittersweet! I've read that book at least twice all the way through, probably three times. Honestly it's really good, especially if you are, you know, in a stage of life where you're struggling with limerence. It's a great book about limerence.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
I think that you could certainly make an egalitarian relationship exciting in fiction but the way that you do that would be to put other kinds of barriers in the way. I mean I guess you look at something like Romeo and Juliet was as an obvious example where Romeo and Juliet are, I guess, more or less socially equal although you know, as medieval man and woman not really... but still there's not quite the class element that there is in say Pride and Prejudice or in Twilight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Midnight Sun
by Stephanie Meyer
A lot of romance novels are written with a very strong male perspective in them. One thing that I kind of speculate about is I do think that a lot of women read romance novels and identify with the man right, so I mean for example you know Twilight Stephanie Meyer has rewritten in this 2020 book Midnight Sun which is just the Twilight story but told from Edward's perspective.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
by Sigmund Freud
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Complete Poems of Sappho
by Willis Barnstone
And then there's Eros, the problem child. Eros is the aching, passionate longing of romance novels, of Sappho's poetry, of "Romeo and Juliet".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Why We Love Serial Killers
by Scott Bonn
There's a German word for this, because of course, vorfreude, which means pre-pleasure; the pleasure of anticipation. It's the reason that we gift-wrap presents. As Ted Bundy said, "The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself." So true. Anticipation is the basic pleasure of eroticism. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde
"In The Importance of Being Ernest", Algy says- - The very essence of romance is uncertainty. - Uncertainty is also the very essence of gambling. It's why I wasted $2000 playing Egypt Quest.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Stone Butch Blues
by Leslie Feinberg
I actually just read Stone Butch Blues for the first time and it's, I mean it's kind of, it's pretty dark so warning but it's kind of a revelation about the history of queer experience in America.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anti-Oedipus
by Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze
I actually haven't read Anti-Oedipus. I've read Deleuze's book on masochism and I liked that so...
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Gay Revolution
by Lillian Faderman
According to historian Lillian Faderman, "Anita Bryant created fervent activists out of those who'd previously been content simply to enjoy their newfound freedoms."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Anita Bryant story
by Anita Bryant
For the short remainder of her career, gay activists protested her events, they shut down the tour for her book about how persecuted she was by the militant homosexual. And they succeeded in turning public opinion against Anita Bryant to the point that she became virtually unemployable in mainstream entertainment. It helped that she came across as kind of a judgmental prude, that even hip straight people didn't want to be associated with.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
by Anita Bryant
Anita described her most intense adolescent memory as a feeling of intense ambition: "...a relentless drive to succeed at doing well the thing I loved."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Irreversible Damage
by Abigail Shrier
Rowling says her primary "concern" about young trans men is the loss of fertility. [The book Irreversible Damage displayed]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
I've been reading Oscar Wilde like I'm reading Ernest, I'm reading Dorian Gray.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Ressentiment
by Max Scheler
Most of the time, envy is most harmful to the person who envies. The philosopher Max Scheler called it "a self-poisoning of the mind." There's a Christian saying that "envy is the only sin that gives no pleasure." Because the other sins are fun, right? Greed, gluttony, lust, that's what I call a good time.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
You could actually argue that the queen is simply a persona of Satan, it's "Paradise Lost" all over again, which also happens to be the title of my memoir.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Nietzsche
So, instead of flicking the bean, maybe you write novels about thirsty vampires, or for that matter philosophical treatises about the will to power. Oh we'll to get to you.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Explaining Postmodernism
by Stephen Hicks
Like there's a video on YouTube of the philosophy professor Stephen Hicks doing a version of the postmodernism is resentment argument, and in the comments section there's a bunch of people saying, "This describes Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the democrats." Does it though?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Odyssey
by Homer
Revenge is such a popular plot line because it's easy for people to identify with a revenge-seeking protagonist. And it's just the easiest way to hype people up about spectacles of violence. This technique was used in one of the first books ever, "The Odyssey" by Homer. I stole this copy from my high school and I stole this copy from my college. I still just read the SparkNotes. Well, let's read it now. See, I knew this would be useful someday.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Histories
by Herodotus
they didn't meaningfully choose seems, well... The Greek historian Herodotus tells a story about the Persian King Xerxes ordering the sea to be whipped with 300 lashes after a storm destroyed his bridge. Which seems irrational, right? To punish a force of nature. Leave my beautiful wet wife alone!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Punisher
by Chuck Dixon
The skull is the symbol of "The Punisher", the Marvel comics' vigilante anti hero. The Punisher's real name is Frank Castiglione but he changed it to Frank Castle, I guess 'cause he's ashamed of his Sicilian heritage. Disappointing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Cringeworthy
by Melissa Dahl
All of these responses illustrate exactly what writer Melissa Dahl says in her book "Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness". According to Dahl, "The moments that make us cringe are when we're yanked out "of our own perspective, and we can suddenly "see ourselves from somebody else's point of view."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Shock Value
by John Waters
Then when I was working on Opulence, I needed a voice actor to do a line from John Waters's book. And it was my co-director, Theryn, who suggested, "Don't you think Buck Angel sounds kind "of like John Waters?" And I said, "Well, he just messaged me on Insta, "let's see if he wants to do it." And I just loved the idea of having Buck Angel as John Waters in the video credits. Like a trans icon playing a gay icon.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Man Who Would Be Queen
by J. Michael Bailey
There is a controversy that goes back to 2003 with the publication of a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey which proposed a bad theory of what it is to be a trans woman and a theory that sort of misrepresents us in ways that are kind of stigmatizing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Okay, but that's not what the theory of evolution says. Science cuck Chuck's book is not titled "On the Origin of Species by rAndOM aCcIdEnt," Oopsie doopsie, new species originated! No. It's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Natural selection is not random accident.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
by Augustin Barruel
Listen to how 18th century conspiracist Augustin Barruel described the secret causes of the revolution: Quote, "Even the most horrid deeds perpetrated during the French Revolution, Everything was foreseen and resolved, on was combined and premeditated: they were the offspring of deep-thought villainy, since they had been prepared and were produced by men, who alone held the clue of those plots and conspiracies, lurking in the secret meetings where they had been conceived." (Quote shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
by Maria Monk
In the US, one of the bestselling books of the 1830s was an anti-Catholic hoax called Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, which claimed that so-called "black nuns" were forcing initiates to have debauched sex with local priests, and that the resulting babies were baptized, strangled, and buried in secret tombs beneath the convent.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Malleus Maleficarum
by Heinrich Kramer
In the 1486 witch hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum, there's a kind of horny obsession with women fucking demons.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Don Quijote de la Mancha
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Conspiracists take this narcissism even further. It's not enough for them to be Socrates and Sherlock Holmes. They also have to be Jesus Christ, some kind of persecuted martyr, heroically fighting the forces of evil in the information war. It's like Don Quixote, that book we all pretend to have read about an aging noble who reads chivalric fantasy novels all day and deludes himself into thinking he's a knight.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
For conspiracists, the persona of investigator gives them a noble purpose. It makes them important. But instead of giants, they think windmills are directed energy weapons. And instead of chivalric fantasy, their literary model is like, the dystopian fiction we had to read in high school: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, you are here.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
For conspiracists, the persona of investigator gives them a noble purpose. It makes them important. But instead of giants, they think windmills are directed energy weapons. And instead of chivalric fantasy, their literary model is like, the dystopian fiction we had to read in high school: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, you are here.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Outrages
by Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf went from respected liberal feminist to conspiracist co-host of Steve Bannon's podcast and one of the most deranged posters in the history of X dot com. - No! No!! Naomi was never the best fact checker, but her dissent fully began during a 2019 BBC radio interview about her new book on 19th Century persecution of homosexuality, when the host noticed that a fundamental premise of her book was based on a misunderstanding of legal terms.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Under the Eye of Power
by Colin Dickey
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Murder of William of Norwich
by E.M. Rose
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Biggest Secret
by David Icke
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
On Immunity
by Eula Biss
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Storm is Upon Us
by Mike Rothschild
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Children of Lucifer
by Rubin van Luijk
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
They Are Already Here
by Sarah Scoles
Listed as bibliography in the description for the video "Conspiracy"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
A Modest Proposal
by Jonathan Swift
I can't even tell reality from parody anymore. It's like that essay, A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swyft. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sirius, the hero dog of 9/11
by Hank Fellows
"Isn't it weird that Sirius, the hero dog of 9/11 was photographed with Bill Clinton exactly one year before the attack? [book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler
An Austrian painter and conspiracy theorist once said in his book, My Struggle- Aww poor Baby. "My Struggle." He should have just called it My Journey. My Whole Entire Journey. He wrote that the media's insistence on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being an antisemitic hoax is quote, "the best proof that they are authentic." This is one reason why conspiracy theories are impossible to debunk.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis
by Timothy Dwight
In 1798, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, said quote, "shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?" The concubines of the Illuminati...
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Proofs of a Conspiracy
by John Robeson
This conspiracy theory was popularized by John Robeson's 1797 book, "Proofs of a Conspiracy: Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried On in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected from Good Authorities." Well, if it's from good authorities...
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Ickabog
by J.K. Rowling
It reminds me of that tweet where she tweeted about her children's book The Ickabog and then like accidentally control-pasted the text of some insane screed about trans people and terfs that she had been writing elsewhere. It's kind of the fascinating paradox of JK Rowling in general it's that there's this kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing where it's like "oh children's author who writes whimsical stories about wizard school" on one hand and on the other hand it's like these insane venomous diatribes about the transsexuals.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Upanishads
by Swami Paramananda
New Tangent “Spirituality” on skepticism, the X-Files, divine intervention, quantum mysticism, Bach, Xavier Renegade Angel, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, mindfulness, soteriology, the three marks of existence, meditating on LSD, self-care, dissociation, and more!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Natural Causes
by Barbara Ehrenreich
You know sometimes reading one book will cite another and then that takes you on a journey [...] I recently did a Patreon video about what I'm calling Granola Fascism or what people often call Conspirituality now, the kind of combination of right-wing conspiracy theory culture with new age spirituality. And I guess I was reading this book by Naomi Klein "Doppelgangers" which in large part deals with this topic. Naomi Klein cites Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Natural Causes" which is about the wellness movement and I was like oh I've never heard of that book but it sounds relevant so then I'll go read that too.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Life and Death
by Stephanie Meyer
In 2015 Stephenie published "Life and Death", a gender-swapped reimagining of the first novel. Yes, she transgendered "Twilight". "Twilight" has gone woke.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
by George Eliot
In 1856, Mary Ann Evans, known by her masculine pen name George Eliot and often considered one of the greatest novelists of all time, wrote an essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" in which she complained that "lady novelists" write unrealistic, wish-fulfillment fantasy schlock, with absurd Mary Sue self-insert protagonists who every man falls in love with. You know all the same complaints that people make today about romance fiction.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
It Ends With Us
by Colleen Hoover
In the 2000s it was "Twilight", and then in the 2010s, it was the "Twilight" fanfiction "Fifty Shades of Grey". At the time I'm making this video, it's a novelist called Colleen Hoover, who's sold six trillion books about dangerous alpha males named Ryle. I promise that in whatever year you're watching this video, there's currently some lady novelist who's caused an outrage writing stories about a dangerous, wealthy, controlling alpha male.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex
by Thomas Gisborne
When I was young, in the 18th century, ladies were advised to read what we called "conduct books," such as Thomas Gisbourne's "An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex", which instructed the reader in proper feminine virtues. Doesn't that sound exciting?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
by Samuel Richardson
The first best-selling English novel ever was a romance published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson called "Pamela or Virtue Rewarded". "Pamela" tells the story of a virtuous 15-year-old girl named Pamela Andrews, who's employed as a maidservant by the wealthy pervert Mr. B, who repeatedly attempts to seduce her, kidnap her, sneak into her room at night. And the whole time Pamela is like, "Nay, I shan't acquiesce to this licentious rake. For my innocence and virtue are more dear to me than my life. And if the cost be my felicity, so be it. For I shan't subject my poor mother and father to the ignominy of-" In the end Mr. B is so impressed with Pamela's virtue that he reforms his rakish ways and marries her, which is supposed to be the reward, I guess, for Pamela's chaste behavior. It's a Cinderella rags-to-riches fantasy, with a Prince Charming who's not so charming.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected
by Eliza Haywood
Anti-Pamelists wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected". Wow, what a savage burn. And Henry Fielding's "Shamela". Both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Shamela
by Henry Fielding
Anti-Pamelists wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected". Wow, what a savage burn. And Henry Fielding's "Shamela". Both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Whatever we think of its "morality," "Pamela" became the template for romance novels where a young, inexperienced, impoverished girl becomes an object of fascination for an older, richer man with a dangerous edge. In the 19th Century "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" both fit this description, though "Pride and Prejudice" is obviously much more agreeable to 21st century morality than "Pamela".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Gentle Rogue
by Johanna Lindsay
In the 20th century the term "romance novel" became associated with mass-market paperback romances, derogatorily known as "bodice rippers," like Johanna Lindsey's "Gentle Rogue", with the classic Fabio clinch on the cover.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The point I'm trying to make is that there's a historical continuity from "Pamela" to "Twilight". Stephenie Meyer's contribution is that she took the classic romance formula, combined it with the lurid sexiness of "Dracula", and then Mormonized it to the point it became appealing to 21st century teenagers and moms.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein
by Sabina Spielrein
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
by Sigmund Freud
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
by Erich Fromm
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
by Sigmund Freud
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Melanie Klein
by R. D. Hinshelwood, Tomasz Fortuna
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sexuality and The Psychology of Love
by Sigmund Freud
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious
by Carl Jung
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Sexual Politics of Meat
by Carol J. Adams
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Straight Mind and Other Essays
by Monique Wittig
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Twilight Director's Notebook
by Catherine Hardwicke
[The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Natural History of the Romance Novel
by Pamela Regis
In her "Natural History of the Romance Novel", romance scholar Pamela Regis says quote, "The 'barrier' is the conflict in a romance novel; it is anything that keeps the union of heroine and hero from taking place."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Love and Limerence
by Dorothy Tennov
It's similar to what the psychologist Dorothy Tennov called "limerence." Limerence is like an adult crush, sexual by nature, intense to the point of obsession and anguish. Eros, or limerence, or romantic love, whatever we want to call it, is the emotional impetus of the "Twilight" saga.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Lysis ; Symposium ; Gorgias
by Plato
In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells a myth about the origin of love, which says that we all used to be double what we are now, round beings with four arms, and two heads, and two sets of reproductive organs, until Zeus split us all in half. Why is God always an abusive father?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats
It's the moment of obstructed desire John Keats described in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Rules
by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider
Like in the '90s, there was this infamous dating manual for women called "The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right". It included such advice as, "always end phone calls first, don't accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday." In other words, play hard to get.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sonnet 147
by William Shakespeare
Desire is desire for desire. Shakespeare says something similar in Sonnet 147. "My love is as a fever longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease" Shakespeare compares desire, that is love, eros, to a sickness that wants to perpetuate itself.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Sonnets
by William Shakespeare
Craving is like Shakespeare's description of lust in Sonnet 129. "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." Aww poor baby. Bill was really having a hard time of it in those sonnets.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sex and the Failed Absolute
by Slavoj Zizek
Lacan says something similar, I'll quote Zizek's summary because Lacan is illegible. If you don't care about philosophy, just ignore these names. Close your eyes and pretend this isn't happening. Quote, "The drive's goal-to reach its object is 'false,' it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by repeatedly missing its object." This is the trap of yearning, of unrequited love and of nostalgia. You yearn for good old days because you lack them.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Library
by Pseudo-Apollodorus
In an ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera are feuding about whether men or women enjoy sex more, so they summon the transsexual prophet Tiresias to resolve the issue and Tiresias says, "Of 10 parts a man enjoys one only, but a woman enjoys the full 10 parts." Which sex is more sexual? Controversial. [The book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
2 Billionaires in Vegas
by Nicole Casey
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
3 Bosses' assistant
by Nicole Casey
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
That's why a common feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
by Sigmund Freud
Two gorgeous monster boys fight over Bella and they carry her around and they tell her how much they love her and want to protect her. All the other girls are jealous of my cool boyfriend. So by association, I must be cool too. If you're a "Twilight" reader and you identify with Bella, these are exciting fantasies to have because they gratify, what Doctor Father calls, "His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every day-dream and every story." All of this I think is pretty obvious. But where things get controversial, and to many people disturbing, is when you start introducing darker themes into your romantic wish fulfillment fantasies. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Flame and the Flower
by Kathleen Woodiwiss
It's the reason bodice-rippers are called bodice-rippers. They were notorious for these "ravishment" scenes where bodices are, you know, ripped. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Men in Love
by Nancy Friday
This resulted in a book which is very explicit and which challenges assumptions about feminine sexuality being sort of soft and gentle and mushy. [Book shown on screen]
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Notebook
by Nicholas Sparks
I hope I don't need to argue that men can write mushy romance? (book shown on screen)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Bless This House
by Anita Bryant
Green was allegedly a controlling and abusive husband: "Only as a practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband. Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord." - Anita Bryant, Bless This House (1976)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
At Any Cost
by Bob Green
Anita's husband pleaded to supporters. - "How would you men feel if you opened a letter, and there was a photo of your wife's head superimposed on some other female nude body in the most lewd and shocking sexual act you can imagine?" - Bob Green, At Any Cost (1978)
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee
by Nat Hentoff
Civil libertarian, Nat Hentoff wrote in his 1992 book "Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee", that the orange juice boycott reminded him of a little thing called McCarthyism.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Bless this food
by Anita Bryant
As an alphabet mafiosa, sometimes I just can't fit The Most Dangerous game into my busy lifestyle of destroying the family and recruiting children. Whenever a new box arrives, I get out my copy of "Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook".
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
Disrupting feminist meetings is a feminist tradition. Haven't you heard of the Lavender Menace? In 1969, Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" and founder the National Organization for Women and Second Wave feminism in general, coined the phrase "Lavender Menace" to describe the threat she believed that lesbians posed to the Women's Movement. Friedan was worried that being associated with lesbians would make it easy to dismiss the movement as a bunch of mannish man-haters.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
SCUM Manifesto
by Valerie Solanas
Is it fair, say, to pretend that Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol, who advocated male extermination in her Society For Cutting Up Men manifesto, is representative of feminism as a whole? Many anti-feminists over the years have done exactly that. But it's not fair, is it?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Let's not pretend that past movements have never made demands before everyone was ready. Because there there never has been and never will come a time when everyone is ready. I mean, Mary Wollstonecraft published the "Vindication of the Rights of Women" in 1792, and misogyny, in case you hadn't noticed, remains rampant.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sexual Homicide
by Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas
Beach reads
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Salvation
by bell hooks
I have not heard of the Love Trilogy by bell hooks. I mean, I know that bell hooks has written books about love. I should really read those!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Communion
by bell hooks
I have not heard of the Love Trilogy by bell hooks. I mean, I know that bell hooks has written books about love. I should really read those!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man - The Christ
by Helgard Müller
I saw pictures of people at a Trump rally holding this book. So obviously I had to get a copy.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Poems of Catullus
by Catullus
I want a cat named Catullus because I've been reading Greek and Roman poets and there's a Roman poet named Catullus who's kind of a weird horny wacko.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
by Richard Rorty
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In Search Of Lost Time Vol 4
by Marcel Proust
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
by Anna Freud
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Brazen Femme
by Chloë Brushwood Rose, Anna Camilleri
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Speculum of the Other Woman
by Luce Irigaray
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Melanie Klein
by Robert D. Hinshelwood, Tomasz Fortuna
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Selected Melanie Klein
by Juliet Mitchell
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Psychedelic Experience
by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sex, Art and American Culture
by Camille Paglia
Got some new books to read
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Rhetoric
by Aristotle
"Pain at the good fortune of others" (- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 10) is how Aristotle defined envy. And I think it's interesting that whenever social media erupts in outrage over luxury music festivals, or Kim K's birthday party, or Jameela Jamil's... privileged pores? -no one ever uses the word "envy." It's like we're averting our eyes, avoiding confrontation with this dark aspect of our own psychology.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Histoire de la Révolution Française
by Adolphe Thiers
The slogan "Eat the rich" actually originates with the philosopher of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who supposedly said, - "When the people shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich!" (- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, anecdotal, in Histoire de la Révolution Française, Adolphe Thiers) And fair enough. That's a good source of protein. But take it from me kids, cannibalism is one of those tricky things. It's hard to do just once.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The World as Will and Representation
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Seen on Contrapoints nightstand in the video Envy
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
by Marquis de Sade
Seen on Contrapoints nightstand in the video Envy
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
"Us" actually reminds me of "A Christmas Carol", a story about the guilt of the rich if ever there was one.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
She quotes a bigoted argument made by the wife-killing protagonist of Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata", who resents that women and Jews find a kind of paradoxical power in their own oppression.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Grimm's Fairy Tales
by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm
In fact in the original Brother's Grimm version, the queen first tries killing Snow White with beauty accessories, poisoning a comb and lacing her to death with a corset. I wish I could die that way. What's really striking is the pure kamikaze malignity of it all.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Let's talk about Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who was guillotined by the Revolution. If you know one thing about Marie Antoinette, it's probably that when she heard about a famine where the people had no bread, she infamously responded "Let them eat cake." What an evil bitch. How could she say that? Well, she didn't. She never said it. It's a lie. The phrase "let them eat cake", originally "let them eat brioches" first appeared in Rousseau's Confessions, written in 1765 when Marie Antoinette was nine years old. Rousseau attributed the line to "a great princess." Probably, no one ever said this.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon
by Robert Darnton
The historian Robert Darnton called it an "avalanche of defamation" that "has no parallel in the history of vilification." This woman took the blame, the moral blame, for the structural failings of a broken economic system. And by the time she was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1793, the actual person Marie Antoinette had long ago been overshadowed by the libelous caricature of her.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Marie Antoinette
by Antonia Fraser
In her biography of Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser describes how the prison guards separated Marie from her eight-year-old son, who they plied with alcohol and groomed into accusing his own mother of incestuous abuse. To justify killing Marie Antoinette they had to destroy the idea of this woman as a mother.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
For a lot of blackpilled incels it seems like there is only one thing left in life that they enjoy, which is simply the pleasure of complaining, of moaning in pain. It reminds me of a comment from Dostoevsky's second-most horrible protagonist. - "Even in toothache there is enjoyment, in that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point." - The moan is a protest against the meaninglessness of pain.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Huey Newton on Black Capitalism
by Huey Newton
Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party was inspired by Nietzsche to create the slogan "All Power to the People." - [Huey] When we coined the expression "All power to the people", we had in mind emphasizing the word "power" for we recognize that the will to power is the basic drive of man. But it is incorrect to seek power over people. We have been subjected to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism for hundreds of years; and the Black community has its will to power also. What we seek, however, is not power over people, but the power of control of our own destiny.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Oedipus Rex
by Sophocles
The only men I think about are Fred Nietzsche and uh... Oedipus the King.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Anatomy of Prejudices
by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
A book called "The Anatomy of Prejudices" by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl really helped with this video. One of the points she makes is that a lot of the time, bigotry is backlash.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Female masculinity
by Judith Halberstam
I've been reading this book called "Female Masculinity," which is about the experiences of butch women. And there's a section in here called called "The Bathroom Problem" which describes how women's bathrooms, "Tend to operate as an area for the enforcement of gender conformity". The author, Jack Halberstam, who's assigned female at birth and presents masculine, describes routinely having security called on him for using the women's bathroom.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
God, this thing is huge, it's like the "Infinite Jest" of TERFery. So "Troubled Blood" is a detective novel about the simmering heterosexual tension between two investigators. That's really what Rowling is best at isn't it, simmering?
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Of Revenge
by Francis Bacon
So revenge is arguably the most basic form of retributive justice. The philosopher Francis Bacon defined revenge as a "wild justice," "Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out" - Francis Bacon, On Revenge
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Kanuni I Leke Dukagjinit
by At Shtjefen Gjecovi
In Albania, there's an ancient code called The Kanun which requires a family to commit murder in order to preserve their honor when another family offends against them. Life for life, blood for blood. This historically led to blood feuds between families that could last for generations. And in fact, it still sometimes happens in parts of Northern Albania.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Politics as a Vocation
by Max Weber
The extremely heckin cute and valid German sociologist Max Weber defined the state as the organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Axiom's End
by Lindsay Ellis
Look what came in the mail, the new book by that transformers lady pic.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness
by Edmund Carpenter
She quotes the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who in the '60s did a study of the Biami tribe in New Guinea where he showed them mirror, video, and photographic images of themselves for the first time, and described the results: "They were paralyzed: after their first startled "response, covering their mouths and ducking "their heads, they stood transfixed, "staring at their images, "only their stomach muscles betraying great tension." So basically, they cringed at themselves.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures
by Stephen Pile
The purest example of a lolcow I can think of is actually someone from way before the Internet, namely Florence Foster Jenkins. Jenkins, or Lady Florence as she liked to be called, was an American soprano who attracted a cult following in New York City during the 1920s, '30s and '40s due to her being such a terrible singer that people went to her concerts essentially for the lols. She was described as "The world's worst opera singer. "No one, before or since, "has succeeded in liberating themselves quite "so completely from the shackles of musical notation." Behold this f*cking camp queen.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Sonichu
by Christine Weston Chandler
The relevant thing about Chris-Chan is not Chris-Chan. It's the fact that for the last 13 years, nearly every aspect of her life has been obsessively archived online by thousands of voyeurs known as Christorians. Chandler first acquired this anti-fandom several Internet centuries ago, back in 2007, when 4chan took notice of her comic-book series Sonichu, a childishly drawn hybrid of Sonic and Pikachu.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Bitch Manifesto
by Jo Freeman
In this video I used the word "canceling" more or less synonymously with what feminist, Jo Freeman, author of the "Bitch Manifesto". calls trashing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
As Jon Ronson, author of a great book on public shaming put it, "I suppose that when shamings are delivered "like remotely administers drone strikes nobody needs "to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. "The snowflake never needs "to feel responsible for the avalanche." And that's how you get these situations where you have hundreds of people endlessly bashing someone who's already been knocked to the ground, and feeling all the while like they're punching up.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Class
by Paul Fussell
My favorite book about class in America is Paul Fussell's "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System," which describes nine distinct classes. Fussell is not as concerned with economic relations between classes as he is with status, what Marxists sometimes call social and cultural capital, things like education, style, taste, and attitude towards money.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Remember in high school, when you had to read "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott SparkNotes? The character Jay Gatsby doesn't even like opulent mansion parties, but he throws them anyway just to show his crush, Daisy, that he's made it, that he's a success, that he's worth something. And as we all remember, in the end, they get married and defeat the monster Grendel to save the hall of Hrothgar. At least, that's what I wrote in my 10th grade English essay about how the theme of "The Great Gatsby" is money always leads to happiness. I got a D minus!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Notes on Camp
by Susan Sontag
You think you're safe from criticism because your look is bad on purpose. f*ck that! Take a stand, you pussy bitch! I take great offense to this as a person whose look is bad on accident, and Susan Sontag agrees with me. In "Notes on Camp," she distinguishes between: - [Susan] "Naive and deliberate camp. "Pure camp is always naive. "Camp which knows itself to be camp, or camping, "is usually less satisfying." - Sontag defines naive camp as failed seriousness, a grand artistic vision that gets a little outta control and enters into absurd territory.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Fierce
by Jo Weldon
Jo Weldon, author of "Fierce: The History of Leopard Print," observes that: - [Jo] Tacky, as a concept, refers to the lack of cultivation or the resistance to taste, and more often than not, refers to tastes that are not suitably conservative. Furthermore, tacky is likely to be feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant, not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Metaphysics of Morals
by Immanuel Kant
The great philosopher and venerable German closet queen, Fraulein Immanuel Hildegard Marlene Kennedy Davenport-Kant, said that purse aesthetic taste is disinterested. That is, completely free of any material desire. Of course, Miss Thing also founded the #NoFap movement, so I don't know how seriously we want to take of that.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Future Has a Silver Lining
by Tom Holert, Heike Munder
The connection between glamor and opulence is explored in the 2004 essay, "Viva McGlam? "Is Transgenderism a Critique of or Capitulation to "Opulence-Driven Glamour Models?" by transgender writer and underground house music producer Terre Thaemlitz, aka DJ Sprinkles. Sprinkles writes: - [Terre] "Europe's ruling elite used opulence "as an ideological weapon to befuddle the lower classes "with glimpses of heaven on earth, "a lifestyle so foreign and unattainable "that it could only be the result of divination. "It is this spell of opulence "that led to our current definition of glamor, "which is more associated with wealth than magic."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
by Isaac Newton
When I decided I wanted to make a video for men, ContraPoints For Him I started brushing up on my reasoning skills because I wanna be so f*cking rational for you. So to prepare for this video I read Newton's "Principia Mathematica", Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", and of course the philosophical classic, "The Rational Male" by Rollo Caliente. So my mind is well-lubricated and I'm ready for what I have no doubt will be a penetrating intellectual interchange.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Tractatus logico-philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I decided I wanted to make a video for men, ContraPoints For Him I started brushing up on my reasoning skills because I wanna be so f*cking rational for you. So to prepare for this video I read Newton's "Principia Mathematica", Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", and of course the philosophical classic, "The Rational Male" by Rollo Caliente. So my mind is well-lubricated and I'm ready for what I have no doubt will be a penetrating intellectual interchange.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Rational Male
by Rollo Tomassi
When I decided I wanted to make a video for men, ContraPoints For Him I started brushing up on my reasoning skills because I wanna be so f*cking rational for you. So to prepare for this video I read Newton's "Principia Mathematica", Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", and of course the philosophical classic, "The Rational Male" by Rollo Caliente. So my mind is well-lubricated and I'm ready for what I have no doubt will be a penetrating intellectual interchange.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Wordsworth's Literary Criticism
by W.J.B. Owen
As the poet Wordsworth said about artistic appreciation, "Every author, as far as he is great "and at the same time original, "has had the task of creating the taste "by which he is to be enjoyed." So even if you don't conform to conventional beauty standards, through the power of original style, you can create the taste by which your unique beauty is to be appreciated.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
by Sylvia Plath
There's that wonderful quotation from Sylvia Plath where she describes the way living as a woman stifles an adventurous spirit and her longing for a male experience. - [Narrator] "Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle "with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars "to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording "all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, "a female always supposedly in danger "of assault and battery. "My consuming interest in men and their lives is often "misconstrued as a desire to seduce them "or as an invitation to intimacy. "Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. "I want to be able to sleep in an open field, "to travel west, to walk freely at night."
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
On Why Sex Change is a Lie
by Germaine Greer
- "On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. Thank you, it breathed hoarsely, thank you so much for all you've done for us girls! I smirked and nodded and stepped backward, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckley, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly coated with a pancake make-up through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women's liberation emblem. I should have said, you're a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off." - Germaine Greer, "On Why Sex Change is a Lie"
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Last Unicorn
by Peter S. Beagle
I’ve never seen or read this but it looks really interesting!
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Illuminations
by Walter Benjamin
Reality plays no role in politics. Politics is aesthetics. - “Politics is aesthetics”? That’s literally what fascism is. Have you even read Benjamin? - Ugh. - “Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Game
by Neil Strauss
The difference is that pick-up artists are not celibate, in fact they try to have sex with as many women as possible by following a series of strategies and scripts known as “game” as described by the book of that title, as well as by the red-pilled pick-up artist Roosh V, author of a book called— Bang, a new mascara from Benefit. So the tube is bomb, I am living.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Bang
by Roosh V
The difference is that pick-up artists are not celibate, in fact they try to have sex with as many women as possible by following a series of strategies and scripts known as “game” as described by the book of that title, as well as by the red-pilled pick-up artist Roosh V, author of a book called— Bang, a new mascara from Benefit. So the tube is bomb, I am living.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Decline of the West
by Oswald Spengler
But in its contemporary sense, the idea of "Western culture" didn't really exist until the imperialist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when it was popularized in part by Oswald Spengler's 1918 book, 'The Decline of the West', an important influence on Nazi ideology.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In Search of Lost Time Vol 1
by Marcel Proust
the idea of Western culture is still a foundational concept in our schools and universities where you have to take courses like History of Western Civilization or Western Literature that you didn't actually do any of the readings for because you were too busy crouching in the bushes outside the Dean's office vomiting up a couple pints of Malibu.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
by Stephen R. Covey
So I spent the last couple weeks listening to hours of Peterson’s lectures and podcasts and reading his books, and honestly I think I get why people like him. Clearly he has real talent as a public speaker and as a kind of life coach. His book 12 Rules for Life echoes past bestsellers like Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Purpose Driven Life
by Rick Warren
So I spent the last couple weeks listening to hours of Peterson’s lectures and podcasts and reading his books, and honestly I think I get why people like him. Clearly he has real talent as a public speaker and as a kind of life coach. His book 12 Rules for Life echoes past bestsellers like Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Maps of Meaning
by Jordan B. Peterson
Jordan Peterson is right at home with the late modernists. His first book Maps of Meaning is an attempt to describe how humans make sense of the world and create order out of chaos through universal myths and archetypes, which he claims are a product of our species’ evolutionary past.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Madness & Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Michel “Faux-coo” wrote intellectual histories of subjects like psychiatry, medicine, and criminal justice in which he argued that we should not understand these histories as straightforward progressions toward liberty and scientific truth but rather as mere shifts in the way that power orders our institutions and populations.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Birth of the Clinic
by Michel Foucault
Michel “Faux-coo” wrote intellectual histories of subjects like psychiatry, medicine, and criminal justice in which he argued that we should not understand these histories as straightforward progressions toward liberty and scientific truth but rather as mere shifts in the way that power orders our institutions and populations.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Discipline and Punish
by Michel Foucault
Michel “Faux-coo” wrote intellectual histories of subjects like psychiatry, medicine, and criminal justice in which he argued that we should not understand these histories as straightforward progressions toward liberty and scientific truth but rather as mere shifts in the way that power orders our institutions and populations.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
by Richard Rorty
The other postmodernist I’ve actually read a lot of is Richard Rorty (yeah fuck you Derrida, if you wanted me to read you, you should have been easier to read). Rorty advocates an attitude toward knowledge he calls “ironism,” irony being the skeptical caution with which we should regard our own beliefs in our awareness that our vocabulary for describing and understanding the world is not the final or best vocabulary.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Republic
by Plato
Much of Plato’s political dialogues are concerned with arguing against cultural relativism, suggesting that, far from being an invention of postmodernity, it was actually a pretty popular worldview among ancient Athenian pederasts.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
A Treatise of Human Nature
by David Hume
Our favorite Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously said that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Literally feels over reals.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorders in Children and Adults Ray Blanchard
by Ray Blanchard
In 1989 a sex researcher named Ray Blanchard published a controversial, provocative, politically incorrect theory claiming that transgender women are not, as custom has it, essentially female souls accidentally born in male bodies. Instead, he claimed, they are men of two types: gay men who love straight men, and straight men who love themselves. For the latter condition, Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia,” new Greek for love of oneself as a woman.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Galileo’s Middle Finger
by Alice Dreger
In her 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger, bioethicist Alice Dreger championed Bailey as the undeserving victim of a hysterical SJW lynch mob. But she gets so caught up in exonerating Bailey of the personal accusations against him and in telling a bigger story about academic freedom and how scientists are being silenced by PC cucks, that she doesn’t bother to check how good Bailey’s science really is, and ends up affirming the autogynephilia theory herself.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Men Trapped in Men's Bodies
by Anne Lawrence
From 1998 to 2011, Lawrence collected 249 anonymous accounts of autogynephilia over the Internet and published them in her 2012 book Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies. Great title Anne, very provocative, very controversial, very politically incorrect, I have been triggered, well done. What is this cover though? Come on, Anne. Get a statue of Hermaphroditus or something on there.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
by Karl Marx
Much of Karl Marx’s early writings are primarily concerned with the state of the human soul under capitalism: with the alienation of working not for yourself, but for an employer who appropriates the value of your work; with the fetishism of commodities:
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
by Arthur de Gobineau
And one of the chief dingbats was the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau, one of the intellectual grandfathers of Nazism. Gobineau wrote a book called Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he developed the idea of the Aryan master race, warned that miscegenation would lead to social chaos, and gave the word “degenerate” its modern fashy definition.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Das Judenthum in der Musik
by Richard Wagner
During this period, German nationalist composer Richard Wagner wrote his essay condemning Jewishness in music—which he first published under the pseudonym “Freigedank,” which literally means free thought. That’s right, he pulled the goddamn free speech card.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Degeneration
by Max Nordau
Then the Jewish doctor Max Nordau published a pseudo-medical book called Degeneration accusing Wagner and other contemporary artists of degeneracy.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
The idea that European civilization is in some way suicidal or self-destructive goes back at least as far as the 18th century, when scholarship about the fall of the Roman Empire led to speculation about what causes civilizations to decline.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka
At least read the Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony. Each readable in a sitting.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
In the Penal Colony
by Franz Kafka
At least read the Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony. Each readable in a sitting.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
So YouTube’s all in an uproar because there are apparently too many genders [too many notes]. You see, when we were kids, boys played with tiny skateboards and girls played with urine. The cosmic order was in balance. But now there’s demiqueers and trigenders and everyone wants to kill themselves. But you know what, maybe hold off on the bleach for a minute there, Hamlet, I say we should give this thing a shot. But if we’re gonna do it properly, we’re gonna need to get into the spirit of the thing.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
by Robert Nozick
I was once in an advanced political philosophy seminar with a bunch of other grad students, and the reading we were to discuss that week was the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. None of us in this seminar were able to mount any plausible arguments against Nozick, not because he’s correct, but because we had so little experience arguing against anything that far right. Everyone in this room was a reasonably intelligent and articulate philosophy PhD student, but we’d all cut our teeth dissecting the little squabbles between Rawls and Habermas, and we had no experience arguing against anything as far right as the political views that most Americans actually hold.
— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
