Whatever being a red-blooded American man means these days (not much, it seems), I like to think I am one. I chop wood. I’ve never had a manicure and refuse to wear skinny jeans. I relieve myself outdoors with great regularity, even when indoor options are available. And though I don’t hunt my own meat, I sure as hell eat plenty of it.
But with my manhood established, I have an embarrassing confession to make: I like watching YouTube videos of women brushing their hair and whispering. This might not be as bad as coming out as a Brony, or as someone who collects bootlegs of Coldplay concerts. Close, though. As I’ve promised my wife, it’s not sexual. It’s hard to be lustful while being lulled into a coma. Which is precisely why I watch my whispering vixens, in an uneasy bit of rationalization that marks the cyber-age’s final triumph over us as sovereign beings: The Internet—the very thing that overstimulates our brains—is now the only thing that can unplug them.
I’ve never gone in for prescription sleep aids. And somewhere along the way, my favorite over-the-counter remedy, antihistamines ‘n’ Maker’s Mark, lost its ability to render me unconscious. That’s when I fell under the sway of the weird little subculture known as ASMR videos. Coined just seven years ago in a Facebook group, the term stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Which is intended to sound official, medical even. But it’s really just a hollow pseudo-scientific term, like “electrogravitics” or “Al Gore.”
The idea of ASMR videos is that they “trigger” you. Not in the negative way we’ve come to associate with triggering (an Oberlin undergrad being subjected to the humiliation of her media studies professor using a non-gender-neutral pronoun). Rather, your ASMRtist performs deliberative acts such as whispering softly or gracefully tracing a magazine ad with her finger (ASMRtists are about 95 percent female) that are intended to hit that magic lever in your brain, releasing serotonin and oxytocin, heightening sensation while simultaneously yielding complete relaxation.
ASMR has been known to give everyone from tightly wound corporate cubicle monkeys to war vets with PTSD something they’d never know otherwise—temporary release from their own thought prisons. Not for nothing do they call these sensations “braingasms”—though ASMR videos often last for 30 minutes to an hour. If you can have the other kind of gasm for that long, you have better things to do than fall asleep.
While non-erotic, ASMR is a bit like sleep porn. And as with the regular kind, it caters to every predilection. At this very moment, you can punch up videos of ASMRtists doing everything that could possibly float your boat as a sort of self-hypnosis. They might repeatedly tap their fingers on an Altoids tin, or run a makeup brush over their face, or pretend to do a lice check of your scalp (I’m not kidding), or crinkle gum wrappers—the last of which is a bit like nails down a blackboard to me. Come to think of it, there are nails-down-a-blackboard ASMR videos, too. The variations are endless. Which yet again evidences the deranged beauty of the Internet: However weird you think you are, someone weirder is always just a quick Google search away. To some, this makes the world feel a little less lonely.
Over the years, I’ve become attached to my own favorite ASMRtists, too myriad to list. But without ever communicating with them, it’s like they’ve become members of my family. I noticed when “amalzd” showed up all of a sudden one day with a nose ring. (No! Don’t do that.) When VeniVidiVulpes, the ginger queen of hair-brushing ASMR, stopped making videos two years ago, I felt like notifying the authorities to put out a missing-persons bulletin, enduring sleepless nights over all the nights I would no longer have her videos to put me to sleep. When Skyler Rain’s brother died in an accident, as she announced one day in a video, she gradually went from a sunny, fetching blonde, to a more sober, sad brunette, before she dropped out of ASMR altogether. I miss her. She gave one of the best cranial nerve exams in the business.
To each of these, and many more, I owe a debt. As they’ve given me something that doesn’t come easy—the gift of sleep. The triggered will tell you that sleep is the safest space. As Hemingway once put it, “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
