Laci Green is an American YouTuber whose content mainly deals with sex education, feminism, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Her online pseudonym is GoGreen18. Celebrating her tenth anniversary on YouTube in 2017, Green has amassed 143 million views and 1.5 million followers on her channel. Several years ago, she had started making videos as a hobby, and originally they were about theology and religion. That changed when she ventured into sex education, and her channel began to gain popularity. Since then she has won several awards including a ‘Webby’ and a ‘Steamy’. She has collaborated with ‘Planned Parenthood’ and ‘Discovery News’, and hosted ‘Braless’, the first MTV YouTube Channel. In 2016, she was named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by ‘Time’ magazine. Controversial and direct, Green uses humour and her natural charm to address serious issues, which has made her bi-weekly show ‘Sex Plus’ an attractive source of information for the young adults of digital age. Her audience is 5 million strong spread across 196 countries.
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https://www.youtube.com/user/lacigreen/about
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https://speakerpedia.com/speakers/laci-green
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https://rewire.news/videos/2016/03/22/laci-green-on-abortion-restrictions/
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Career
Laci Green was a self-described ‘nerd’ in her childhood. She loved libraries; she thought they were magical castles which gave her a cosy and comfortable shelter against the constant rains of Portland where she grew up. At ten, she discovered the sex aisle. It spurred her curiosity to explore more. During her teens she started to participate in various social movements in college. She became a certified rape and dating violence counsellor. She then took to using YouTube as a medium to reach out to young adults and help them gain scientific knowledge about sex, teen pregnancy, and gender identity, posting actively for ‘Sex Plus’.
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She worked with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England on a project named ‘A Naked Notion’, with an aim to have a “frank, open conversation about sexuality”. She was hired as one of the three presenters to discuss general science by Discovery Networks' DNews science vlog. In 2014, she collaborated with MTV to produce ‘Braless’, a unique take on pop culture, politics, and history “through the lens of gender, equality, and a little thing called feminism”. She has given lectures at multiple universities in the capacity of a sex educator and also as a representative of Planned Parenthood.
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Activism
The philosophy behind her body of works is deeply rooted in her understanding of feminism, which in itself is the direct product of her secularist, humanist mindset. She is an ardent supporter of the sex-positive movement in all her content. Talking about the difference between the sexual object and sexual subject, she had this to say to bustle.com, “When it comes to being a sexual subject versus a sexual object, we're really talking about who you're being sexual for... a sexual object is performing for other people exclusively... But the sexual subject is what I argue that Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj are even though their videos were really sexually charged, because they're calling the shots and they're the ones that are deciding how they want to be portrayed.” In 2014, fellow YouTuber Sam Pepper posted a video where he pranked women by grabbing their bottoms. Green penned an open letter imploring Pepper to “stop violating women”. It was co-signed by several other prominent YouTubers.
Controversies & Scandals
Since her early days on YouTube, Laci Green has been receiving relentless criticism and threats from extremist groups from all sides. She was dubbed anti-Mormon and anti-Islam for her outspoken views on how few rights are granted to women in either religion. She has gotten deaths threats from both far-right and far-left groups. From the former because of her firm stand on reproductive rights and abortion, and from the latter for getting certain terminologies wrong from time to time.
In late October 2016, Green filed a copyright claim against ‘Roaming Millennial’ for using Green’s image on a thumbnail of her video. It drew wide and almost universal criticism towards Green for the abuse of copyright laws as ‘Roaming Millennial’ had not flouted any law in doing so. Even Laci Green’s love life is not free from controversy!
She began dating YouTuber and political satirist Chris Ray Gun in April 2017. It caused quite a stir, as Gun, at best, can be defined as an anti-feminist. In a video titled ‘Taking the Red Pill’ (an allusion to the movie ‘Matrix’), uploaded on May 11, Green stated that although she is still a feminist, she is open to conversation with people from the opposite point of view.
Personal Life
Born on October 18, 1989, in Utah, USA, Laci Green is from a multi-cultural family. Her father is an Iranian Muslim, while her mother is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She has two sisters. She grew up as a Mormon, first relocating to Portland, Oregon when she was two years old, and then at 12 to California with her family. Stepping into her teenage years, she began to question her faith for its views of rigid gender roles and about homosexuality, ultimately leaving it. It led to a severe bout of depression and suicidal thoughts. Her concerned parents took her to a therapist, who helped her navigate through her issues. Now, she recognizes herself as an atheist, and her sexual orientation as pansexual. After completing high school, she enrolled in the University of California in Berkeley. She graduated in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in legal studies and education. She currently resides in Los Angeles.
