Tangent: Sexual Personae
Added 2025-07-31 18:11:48 +0000 UTCHey all,
Tangent finished. Haven't slept. Update soon!
-Natalie
P.S. I have fully committed to the 4:3 aspect ratio.
Comments
I study biological engineering and always have environmental influence on the mind - The idea that Ancient Egypt is kind of the embodiment of an Apollonian desire to control makes me wonder how the surrounding landscape influenced them. A need to bring order to an otherwise pretty unforgiving environment, exerting control over the Nile in order to provide for themselves, since the Earth would not. Then even as "apollonians", the Earth still controlled them... mother always finds a way🙂↕️
Ella Martini
2026-01-14 04:29:06 +0000 UTCI would love to know if you've read Angela Carter's The Sadean Woman?
Lauren
2026-01-13 12:51:18 +0000 UTCOMG I want this so bad
Rose Dombegh
2025-12-30 01:11:17 +0000 UTCRewatching this one for the second time. For some reason, it was wiped from my memory right after the first watch. The continental tradition does this to a bitch - it almost sounds like a profound revelation and like something that has the potential to reframe my entire worldview while sounding like someone’s acid trip. I’m too Apollonian for this. Anyways, back to my sex dungeon, my hair ain’t gonna pull itself.
Flatlander Woman
2025-12-29 14:19:15 +0000 UTCI think it would be very funny for someone to do a close reading of the nick fuentes/tucker carlson 'feminism' convo through the lens of sexual personae https://youtu.be/efBB0D4tf1Y?si=xWn-01DTrl6vmNZM&t=6999
Anna Walsh
2025-12-22 19:51:33 +0000 UTCNot sure if I’m too late to the party for engagement, but have you read Paglia’s essay “Sontag, Bloody Sontag?” It’s probably the most hilarious piece of writing I’ve ever read in my life and sheds a lot of light on Paglia’s bizarre feud with Sontag.
Tuimutu Wihongi
2025-12-11 19:15:51 +0000 UTCWho else is exploring the sadistic aspect of nature in their work? I wish their was another word for "sensual sadism" of "consensual sadism" inspired by a woman, not related to a serial sexual criminal. :( Please, someone make it fashionable, otherwise I am gonna do it.
Madame Grenat
2025-11-16 19:51:09 +0000 UTCAnyone else think the witch clans in "Throne of Glass" are devouring Chthonian mothers?
Rose Dombegh
2025-11-12 00:26:15 +0000 UTCNatalie's birthday is coming up! if you'd like you can tell her you appreciate her work & wish her a happy birthday in her BIRTHDAY e-CARD, here's the link! 🎂 https://www.groupgreeting.com/sign/adf75fa34247f3e People have formed online mobs to harass her recently so let's do something the opposite to show how appreciated she is! If you're wondering how Natalie has responded to receiving a birthday card in the past, I've posted a screenshot of her thank you note on r/ContraPoints, the post is titled "A Thank You from Natalie for her Birthday Card 💜" I'm moderating & safety checking the e-card, & if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me in the replies! If you've seen an announcement about this before, sorry for posting these invites multiple times. I'm trying to give everyone who might want to the opportunity to see & know about this, like you did! A collective effort like this unfortunately, requires the indignity of having tell everyone all about it! Natalie's audience is all around the world, so I'm still trying to get the word out! 🌍🌏🌎
highclass_lady
2025-10-08 03:20:10 +0000 UTCIdk if you read these comments but i really feel the need to let you know that i absolutely love your work and have endless respect for how you handle the exhausting attitude that the internet-people have towards you.
Rob Barnatt
2025-10-05 13:06:40 +0000 UTCI resubscribed after deleting my account a few months ago, and just within a day of resubscribing, my laptop died while I was watching this video. Love.
M
2025-10-04 02:14:05 +0000 UTCThe first great rock guitarist was in fact female: Meet Rosetta Tharpe!
Tanja
2025-09-22 11:15:49 +0000 UTCNatalie has a birthday coming up! To wish her a happy birthday, you can leave a nice message in her BIRTHDAY e-CARD, here's the link! 🎂 https://www.groupgreeting.com/sign/adf75fa34247f3e People have formed online mobs to cancel her before so I figured let's do something the opposite to show how appreciated she still is! I'm glad a portion of ContraPoints viewers are open to doing something collective & hope everybody who wants to shows up for Natalie! 🥂 I'm moderating & safety checking the e-card, & if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me in the replies! If you're wondering how Natalie has responded to recieving a birthday card in the past, I've posted a screenshot of her thank you note on r/ContraPoints, the post is titled "A Thank You from Natalie for her Birthday Card 💜" If you've seen a comment or announcement about this before, sorry for posting these invites multiple times, I'm just trying to give everyone who might want to the opportunity to see & know about this, like you did! Any collective effort like this unfortunately requires the indignity of having tell everyone all about it! So far just over 1/3rd of the number of people who signed Natalie's birthday card last year have this year, Natalie's audience is all around the world, so I'm still trying to get the word out! 🌍🌏🌎🎉
highclass_lady
2025-09-20 17:12:17 +0000 UTCI would love to see you do a video on Batailles/ Frazer and the idea of sacred kingship!!
Griffin Deubler
2025-09-09 13:40:09 +0000 UTCI love irrational time signatures and aspect ratios!
Sean Covington
2025-09-02 14:54:49 +0000 UTCHope you are doing okay, Natalie. I know things gotta be wild lately and just want to know, appreciate all you do and your work
T M
2025-08-27 20:59:48 +0000 UTCCame here to say I’ve watched this 2.5 times and have thought about it a lot. It’s fantastic, thank you!
caitlin ruth
2025-08-27 14:41:05 +0000 UTCMa'am, this is a Wendy's
zach steidl
2025-08-25 23:28:27 +0000 UTCafter binge watching all your tangents and i remembered you saying in an old video that you occasionally have to look yourself up on wikipedia to remember what you even do with your life but I feel like you are like the modern version of a philosopher. like philosophy tube your videos reference lots of old thinkers and principles but the difference in my eyes is Abilgail focuses on explaining the philosophy of others (which makes sense since she said she was inspired to start the channel as a way of giving her philosophy degree away to people for free) and uses them to construct and argument or perspective on some topic where you go further and use the old ideas as jumping off points to form your own ideas. Even the perspective you bring on these pieces you bring in makes them more than they were on their own. In the sexual personae tangent you identify yourself as one of "the thinkers" and I think that's true. I think you enjoy thinking and have simply made video essays instead of written essays. I think it would be really interesting if you were to look back through your body of work (an exercise i realize is your nightmare ~"sweaty, if you turn on one of my videos i will leave the room!"~) and look for continuity of underlying ideas. Most old philosophers have had their work posthumously woven together from essays and speeches but also letters, diary entries and even scribbled thoughts. We know them and their philosophy through the ideas of their fan boys. I doubt that it would be a first but at the very least it would be interesting if you were to take your own body of work and ideas and made a video presenting your own view. I also think that the fact that you are basically a breathing Socrates intending to entertain (and i realize that's more the way you view your work: entertainment. And yourself an entertainer. And it's true I am extremely entertained by your content. It's one of my favorite sources of entertainment . A particular favorite of mine is when you talk about or to these old philosophers like they are current peers. The familiarity and your tendency to roast them is hilarious. When you suddenly say things like: fuck you! If you wanted me to read you, you should have made yourself easier to read; or roast one of them and end with: this is a callout is honestly one of the funniest things I have ever heard, So you aren't wrong about being an entertainer but I think being a thinker is too large of a component to overlook.) I think this, to some degree, inoculated you to the habit of the left to eat its own. I mean, it is still constantly being done and I don't mean to minimize that. I can see your anxiety over the reception by the various "factions" that theoretically should be your allies but will roast you alive for any perceived "transgression" as if their rhetoric is unquestionable scripture. You outright admit that reality many, many times in your videos. You, however, have found a devoted audience of fellow thinkers. People who--recognizing you as a fellow thinker--look at your controversial opinions or views with curiosity rather than vitriol. And I love that for you. Move aside Derrida. Who will be left willing to read through his written work when there is a new Contrapoints video.
zach steidl
2025-08-25 23:22:06 +0000 UTCUnfortunately this is still a Wendy's
Matej Pop-Duchev
2025-08-24 17:00:20 +0000 UTCThis was a great tangent as usual, really informative and thought-provoking. I'm not gonna search all the comments if someone else brought this up, but I knew of Camille Paglia because she said that Mustafar from Revenge of the Sith (and apparently, indeed, all of Revenge of the Sith) to be among the greatest art she'd ever seen. After watching this vid...yep, I can see why this person thinks that (no slander to ROTS, of course): https://www.vice.com/en/article/camille-paglia-believes-that-revenge-of-the-sith-is-our-generations-greatest-work-of-art/
Taylor
2025-08-23 23:50:53 +0000 UTCBack in one of our Comparative Literature classes, our professor did something I’ll never forget. She took three Madonna videos: Frozen, Open Your Heart, and Vogue. And she read them through Camille Paglia’s lens of the chthonic and the Apollonian. It felt like watching pop culture suddenly turn into mythology right in front of us. In Frozen, Madonna appears almost like a dark goddess. The desert, the black gown, the animals morphing...Everything breathes this chthonic, primal energy. It’s mystical, eerie, raw. But at the same time, the video is full of symmetry, icy elegance, and almost sculptural poses. That’s the Apollonian side: order, beauty, form. The whole video becomes this tension between dark magic and pure shape. Then there’s Open Your Heart. At first it looks like a straightforward erotic cabaret act; Madonna dancing, teasing, owning the male gaze. That’s the Dionysian excess, the raw force of desire. But the staging itself; spotlights, theatrical structure, and especially the ending, where she takes the boy’s hand and walks away, turns the whole thing into an Apollonian frame. It’s not just lust; it’s also a performance that closes with an almost innocent gesture. And finally, Vogue. This one is my favorite to think about. On the one hand, you’ve got pure chthonic energy: the body, the dance, the invitation to “strike a pose” and join the collective ritual of movement. But then, it’s all wrapped in black-and-white cinematography, classical Hollywood references, and frozen, statue-like poses. The chaos of desire is literally sculpted into form. Fashion becomes Apollonian discipline for Dionysian energy. What our professor showed us that day is that Madonna is basically a mythmaker. She takes the wild, chaotic energy of the body and reshapes it into timeless images, balancing shadow and light, desire and order. And honestly, it made me see her videos in a whole new way, not just as pop, but as modern mythology. That being said, I’m not exactly chairing the Paglia Groupie Club annual picnic. Sure, her whole Apollonian-versus-chthonic shtick is fun, I’ll give her that. But then she goes off on these endless rants about trans people and pronouns, like the self-appointed TERF grandmother of them all, and honestly, it’s just cringefully exhausting at a brain-cell-frying level. Half the time she’s brilliant, the other half she’s insufferable, like that elder relative at dinner who starts making sense and then suddenly puts on her tin foil hat&veers into conspiracy-theory territory. So yeah, I can borrow her mythic vocabulary when it works, but I’m not about to put her on a pedestal by any means. Thanks for your insightful tangent though, much Dionysian wine-dness& Apollonian fine-ness🥰😘🥂🤗
n€hØcKy🪁🐲🛸🧙🏼♀️🎬📚
2025-08-23 22:59:44 +0000 UTC“I don’t identify as a good person” - really wish you can expand on that in a future video! This line of thinking has legitimately not occurred to me and I would love to hear your thinking on it
Elad Gilo
2025-08-18 21:17:47 +0000 UTCI am so grateful for the intellectual pleasure, reflection, beauty and respite you provide in these dark times. 🙏
Uri Baruchin
2025-08-16 14:46:31 +0000 UTCSomething about Paglia gives Courtney Love vibes. Obviously very smart, combative, polarizing. Peterson? Pfffft. I wanna be a fly on the wall while these two female rock guitarists have a chat!
Calliedude
2025-08-16 03:50:45 +0000 UTCNatalie just posted a new video of her playing piano on her ContraPointsLive channel! Bach: Partita No. 1, Allemande | ContraPlays https://youtu.be/K5gAs0UDmiI
highclass_lady
2025-08-15 23:08:23 +0000 UTCMen want to fuck the Venus of Villendorf, but they want to marry Nefertiti. Is this where the Madonna-Whore complex started?
Gzuz Tiddy Fugging Chwist
2025-08-15 20:22:58 +0000 UTCThis was my favorite tangent ever and one of my favorite videos you've ever made overall. I learned a lot. Thank you.
Marisa
2025-08-07 16:48:57 +0000 UTCJust coming here to say I'm glad you're taking time before responding/updating and that you're continuing to do what you love. And to say, when you think you've taken enough time and thought it all through, take some more time. No one here wants or needs you to update. And anyone who loves your content but was critical of what you said regarding Israel and Palestine shouldn't want that either.
Bryony Eilish Porteous-Sebouhian
2025-08-07 10:11:35 +0000 UTCYour tangents are consistently better than what most people put out in their main feed. Thank you!
Laura Tenschert
2025-08-07 08:59:00 +0000 UTCThe body itself has not been thought about in the same way across history and culture. In many (maybe even most) cultures throughout history, there has been an acknowledgement of more than two variations of adult genders. Often, specialized labor was divided among these variations. My take is that gender was once more closely related to the division of labor, rather than roles in procreation. At one point in time, identity was largely linked to labor, parentage, and location. It's how we got so many jobs for surnames. As identity has shifted from our positions in society or within our families to our internal experience of ourselves, gender has taken on a new meaning. The meaning of ancestry and location has also greatly shifted in the modern age. For me, this indicates some trouble with current identity models.
Caedmon Jamonsta
2025-08-06 04:59:39 +0000 UTCI remember the time she said women should be as mean as possible lol. Something I still agree with her on.
Cherry Darling
2025-08-06 03:08:29 +0000 UTCdo you know the book "the castration of oedipus (feminism, psychoanalysis, and the will to power) from J.C. Smith and Carla J. Ferstman - intro by Ann Scales... 1996 New York University Press..... the book goes a few steps further that Paglia in its psychoanalysis... ofcourse the entertainment and wonderful details from Paglias book are irreplaceable...
anton26
2025-08-05 10:48:49 +0000 UTCShe writes about the gender politics of medieval armour? Damnit do I need to read this shit?
William Knight
2025-08-04 22:01:14 +0000 UTC
