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First there was Call Me Maybe (3-min video). This guy Stephen Kardynal went on Chatroulette (the site where you can video-chat with random strangers) wearing various scanty outfits (mostly bikinis) and his beard and mustache, and lipsynched and danced to Carly Rae Jepsen's song “Call Me Maybe.” And he recorded people's reactions, and (with their permission!) uploaded the resulting video to YouTube, where it got about 46 million views.

It's infectiously cheerful, with a delightful sense of fun. It's sad how many of the guys who saw him reacted with horror or disgust, presumably over the idea of a man wearing women's clothing (or in some cases maybe over having been momentarily fooled into thinking they were watching a woman, before they saw his face), but that's only about half of them, and some of those are quickly won over. And the rest of the men, and I think all of the (relatively few) women, react with a smile, or a laugh. My favorite bits are the various guys (especially the ones who look like frat boys) who sing along, grinning. I love having my stereotypes smashed like this.

Anyway, all that is old news; that video was posted in late 2012. But more recently, Kardynal gave the same treatment to Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball (3 min), in (and sometimes out of) his underwear, with an awesome homemade wrecking ball. This one was posted in November of 2013, and has gotten 107 million views to date. And this time there are only a few horrified or disgusted guys, and once again I love it when the viewers get into it and laugh-with rather than laugh-at, and start singing along—and most especially when they look like Guys Who Would Never Do Something Like This. There's a lovely sense of delight, of falling into the happy friendly inviting spirit of the thing.

(I feel like this is the kind of thing that could easily go badly wrong—a guy acting like a particular woman singing a particular song could, if done in a different way, easily be seen as mocking the woman or the song. But to me, these videos don't feel even slightly mean-spirited; they feel like he's doing something fun, and inviting others to join in the fun.)

And I wrote most of this entry in November, but before I got around to posting it, Kardynal did another one: Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You (3 min), this time in a Sexy Santa outfit. And though this one got only 13 million views, it's just as charming and lovely as the others. These videos make me so happy!

(Via Jhayne.)