“Jennifer Aniston Goes Viral,” also called “Jennifer Aniston’s Sex Tape,” is an ad for smartwater. It contains a series of typically viral tropes (various animals behaving in entertaining fashion, animated babies etc). At one point she kicks a man in the groin, and says “sorry, but that’s worth like 100,000 hits.”

Doing a lazy, disorganized survey of youtube channels and posts, my sense is that that number changes depending on the popularity of the channel and the other material in the video. I wouldn’t be surprised if the net for the Smartwater video was higher than 100,000, while with smaller channels where the posts have low views (like the youtube questionnaire respondants), it looks to me like that number might be closer to 40/50,000 or less.

In both cases, it’s huge, and, integrated with other factors, mga potentially has a much greater selling power than 100,000 hits.

I think there are three takeaways here. One of the takeaways is simple; mga sells. Part of the motivation for including mga in media is the 100.000 hits (plus or minus, where I suspect the plus is sometimes plus a lot). The second takeaway is an obvious question about the first one…why does it sell, and who does it sell to? The third takeaway is subtle…apparently someone somewhere knows that mga is worth 100,000 hits, yet no one talks about it. That’s weird.

FIRST TAKEAWAY–mga sells

This one is pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t say 100,000 hits is necessarily a jackpot amount…I think the video might have gotten like 1.5 million hits. I do suspect that the mga accounts for more than 100,000 in the case of this video, and I’m sure the 100,000 is ultimately a made up number (or a statistic based on very loose evidence); even so, I don’t think that that 100,000 number explains the prevalence of mga. Rather, consider a different question…how many things CAN they include that would get those kinds of numbers or higher?

The following is going to contain some seriously broad-stroked characterizations of the history of media in the last hundred years. My apologies. I might consider revising and expanding this section in a future article. For now, if you think I’m dead wrong about any of it, let me know that.

I heard David Milch, creator of Deadwood, talking about the history of Westerns and the kind of language used in Westerns. Deadwood was famous and controversial for it’s language, especially it’s heavy use of profanities. He had a theory that the trope of the strong, silent type in hollywood movies came from the Hays Code. This was basically a morality code; before 1930, there was much more of an anything goes attitude in moviemaking; after 1930 sex and vulgar language in particular are severely curtailed. Milch’s theory was that those characters were shaped much more by that code than by some kind of historical sense, or even an idea of a type of masculinity. The writers invented the strong silent type in order to navigate their new writing restrictions.

I wonder if this logic applies to mga. In the 70s (and, I would say, early 80s) things had loosened up tremendously in media, especially in movies; there was lots of nudity, sex, violence, vulgarity etc. It loosened up at all levels…so G and PG movies had nudity, R movies regularly had material no one had seen in a movie before. Before the 70s, for example, there was very little mga…starts to become a more common thing in the 70s. This was in a generally offensive context; so a sex comedy will have a woman visiting the doctor, who isn’t really a doctor, just a random guy who happened to appear there in the doctor’s office; but now he’s there, and examines her, feels her up, gets her to undress and so on (with clearly and overtly sexual motivation). Somewhere else in this sex comedy someone will get kicked in the groin.

I think I’m on safe ground saying that the first kind of scene is forbidden today, no studio (outside of porn) would put out a movie or tv show with that scene. Generally speaking, many of the “100,000 hits” options of the 70s are closed off today for mainstream media, as many of them involve including material that gives straight males cheap sexual thrills, and indulge (or create) fantasies of easy access to sex. It’s not hard to imagine that writers could feel a pressure to lean on the ones that are currently allowed, like mga. Further, it’s not a stretch to imagine that the ratings/morality/whatever police feel pressured to allow MORE mga as other kinds of restrictions increase, and writers complain that they can’t do anything to get cheap laughs or thrills.

Out on a limb here, but a further conclusion is that many of the typical kinds of scenes with mga could be self-reinforcing, like the strong silent cowboy. We wrote a strong, silent cowboy, in hopes that would stick; the movie did well, or fine, so…no reason not to go with that again. Decades of that later, anachronistically, people think that “strong, silent type” is actually how manly men behave, or toxic men, whatever. We assume it’s in movies because it’s in reality, and the movies were just imitating life, not the other way around.

…so…it’s not necessarily the mga that gets, say, 1,000,000 hits…however, if the media has no edginess in it at all, perhaps that LOSES 1,000,000 hits (or more than 100,000 anyway). And if mga is the only kind of edginess allowed, or one of the few kinds, that puts a fair amount of pressure (or temptation, however you want to look at it) on creators to include mga.

SECOND TAKEAWAY–why does mga sell, and who does it sell to?

(most of this should go in a later article I think)

This is a simple and obvious question to ask, but very difficult to answer with any kind of evidence, and the answers simply generate more questions. I’ll go ahead and make some very brief speculations here, which I hope to follow up on in more detail in a later article.

–the elements of mga…pain, humiliation, sex, perceived role reversal (like, strong man is brought down in a humiliating way), are all present in other kinds of comedy. It has things in common with materials of comedy.

–everyone has a reason to hate a man. Some male, at some point in your life, gave you reason to hate him; probably more than one. So it seems possible that when a boy or man is a victim of mga, we project into him the boys or men we have disliked in our lives.

Is this also true of women? Has some WOMAN given you cause to hate her? I’d say 1) that’s independent, and not how we process those moments of stories and 2) we’ve trained ourselves to be critical of any kind of misogyny to such an extent that we’d immediately notice an attempt a story makes to cash in on our misogyny, at least misogyny brazen enough to be equivalent to mga.

–mga is often praised by content creators who identify as being feminist, affirming, positive etc. If I were to generalize on these characterizations, they assert that images and instances of mga are affirming for girls and women, and that those instances also serve to bring down the patriarchy.

–Way, way out on a limb here, in terms of the psychology I’m referencing. I suspect that victims of mga, which could well be most males, can be drawn to images of mga. I’ve heard this called retraumatization, and my understanding of that concept is that trauma can leave us with an urge to reimmerse ourselves in the traumatic experience. While innoculation to traumatic situations can (I’ve heard) be a healthy kind of therapy, the compulsive, unhealthy version of this innoculation is retraumatization. I know little about this, and I will research for a future article. That being said, this model matches some things I’ve observed. The short version of that is that some victims of mga might feel a compulsion to watch these things, and “victims of mga” might be many or most males, as far as we know.

THIRD TAKEAWAY–how can something get 100,000 hits and be so under-discussed?

Not sure I have a lot of insight here. It could be very simple; deep down, we all know we are doing something bad when we make light of mga, but it appears that, if we simply don’t discuss it, we can continue to do it. There is too much embarrassment, too much humiliation, too much pain among victims to speak up for themselves, and assholes are readily at hand to mock whoever does.

I’m guessing my blog has already convinced my readers that this absence or darkness exists, and that you see it at every level, all the way from how these actual scenes play out in media (like the victim disappearing from the scene immediately after the mga, and the mga itself disappearing from the narrative after it happens) to the bizarre holes in social discussion. There’s no observation or speculation about mga anywhere among sociologists, psychologists, caretakers, teachers, parents, child advocates, people who work against sex crimes. You see a microcosm version of that absence in Lizzo’s thorough apology for saying “spaz,” where she talks about wanting to be the change she sees in the world, and how she understands the power of words, in the context of a song where she fantasizes about attacking a random man and cutting off his penis.

That darkness breeds the disease, I imagine; the less we discuss it, the less ok it is to express negativity about mga, the more extreme the instances will be.

I started this article as speculation about why Courtney Henggeler would specifically request an mga scene. Maybe she is a misandrist, or mga otherwise fits her agenda, politics, or worldview; or, maybe she’s simply aware of the 100,000 hits, and thinks a scene with mga would be a good career move. Something I’ve always wondered about there…how does mga affect the career of male actors? I think there is at least a fair amount of speculation about what different kinds of scenes and movies are like for female actors, especially things like sex scenes, etc. Certainly it’s easy to find female actors complaining about nude scenes, saying the have felt pressured to appear nude, regretting having done nude scenes and so forth…here is one of many examples I found just now in a lazy google search

GOT Star Nathalie Emmanuel Explains How Doing Nudity Has Affected Her Career | Evie Magazine

But I wonder if anyone notices what happens to male actors who agree to be the victim of mga scenes. Not knowing how that business works, I would assume it’s a bad deal. You (the male actor) go into the scene with some very wooden dialogue or behavior, as a set up for the mga; then, we’ll look at you just long enough to see you humiliated and dehumanized as you writhe in agony on the floor and scream; then you disappear from the script. Then, when the next job you want asks for your most recent work, that’s what you’re showing. And regardless of those career specific concerns, the scene you just filmed is arguably the most eggregious kind of sexual exploitation; you were violently sexually assaulted for laughs, to ratify contempt for your character and men generally, and to glorify your abuser.

Do male actors have a bad feeling about these scenes, from a career perspective? If we take all (or a statistically significant chunk) of actors who’ve played mga victims and look at the numbers, do they subsequently fare better or more poorly than actors who don’t? Knowing how the invisibility and silence around mga works, it’s easy to imagine that they may well have reservations, but feel unable to speak up about them. There is zero discussion about it; while there are pages of hits if you search the matter of sex scenes or nudity and female actors, there is nothing of the sort about how mga affects male actor’s careers.

So, you’re an actor who shot an mga scene. You’re not Brad Pitt or Matt Damon; you don’t have an indestructible career. You’re an mga victim yourself. The scene you were in is the weakest writing in the script. The setup is demeaning to you and men in general, then you get sexually assaulted, then you disappear. Now that’s your most recent work, that’s what you’re posting on your instagram or your website, that’s how you are trying to get employed again. How do you feel when you see those 100,000 hits?

It can actually get worse than that, which I’ll discuss soon.