Hi there, I’m Amanda, also know as Oldphan. I always feel a bit guilty when tasked to explain my life, as there’s already an embarrassing number of hours of me yammering on and on about my every intricacy on my Youtube channel, ForeverWolfFilms. I’m currently 37 years old, I’m an artist of many mediums, I live in Chicago IL USA, and I’ve been producing Antinatalist & EFIList Multimedia for around 10 years.
I was born in Manhasset Long Island, New York, in 1983, the deeply twisted child of a psychoanalyst and an oil painter/advertiser. In some respects, I’ve been a very actualized person from a very early age, and I mostly had a great childhood, filled with art and action figures and comic books and weird movies… But there’s no question that I was also a very troubled kid. Being a Fat, transgender, learning disabled, obsessive-compulsive nerd, who was obsessed with darkness and horror and monsters – others often found such a child abhorrent. Though I would later come to love welding the provocative and controversial and shocking for the sake of art & performance, I often felt like I got that reaction as a kid for reasons that were entirely out of my control, and that often made me feel very misunderstood and under attack. I felt like people were always trying to fix me, to rehabilitate me to some idea of normalcy, and it made me afraid to use my voice, fight back, and to assert my real opinions…
I knew I didn’t want to have a baby, I knew I didn’t believe in God, I knew it was wrong to eat animals, I knew there was something very wrong with life itself, and I wanted to articulate these things very badly. But I was already in so much external and internal duress all the time due to everything else about me that people couldn’t understand, that there were many battles I was just not prepared or equipped to fight as a younger person.
So I suppose I didn’t have the most normal maturation towards my own Antinatalist understanding, in that I don’t come from a background in ethics. In fact, I’ve sort of led a rather debaucherous life and truly believed for most of it, that I was incapable of living differently than that – that I could do no better. Life clearly was at least sometimes tolerable when you were getting what you wanted, and getting desires filled – or so it seemed? I was certainly capable of losing myself, and losing my connection to the rest of the world through staying buried in my realm of monsters and art and toys and nostalgia – Perhaps it was acceptable to fail in such a way?
But I was also, not blind to the suffering. Being of both Jewish & Armenian descent, I grew up with stories of genocide on both sides of my family. One of the enduring stories of my early childhood was about my great-grandmother being thrown into a pit of corpses where she was forced to pretend to be dead for several days in order to evade Turkish soldiers. I was plagued by a reoccurring nightmare about a Museum of War, in which the displays and knowledge of suffering found within the museum were so awful, so shocking, that an unseen force would literally push the perspective guest out of the front door – none could even enter, the truth was so incomprehensibly horrible.
But then why was suffering so often also a spectacle? Why did people accept it? Why did people seem to compete about it? Why did some people seem to love it? Should I accept it? Should I love it? Was it delicious? Is it true it’s going to make me stronger? I didn’t understand. The answers are obvious to me now, but It didn’t seem that way then, and from my perspective, most of the world seemed to be as equally confused about this as I was. When I was 10 years old, my asshole father decided it would be a great idea to show his already severely warped child Tod Brownings 1930’s classic, Freaks, & Jacopetti & Prosperi Mondo Kane, (Within the same week I might add.) which only further exasperated this problem within my mind.
The endless chasing was becoming too obvious for me not to see. The hollow, filling of a need that didn’t need to exist in the first place to impossible to ignore. I was wasting time, I was being wasteful, but I Could. Not. Stop. I couldn’t be better, and I suppose, I refused to be for some time. I had grown too used to being an asshole.
I needed to find something that framed suffering coherently because I was growing increasingly uneasy that nothing was.
I finally found that something when I first came across the videos of Inmendham in 2010. The result was like being hit by a bolt of lightning, and suddenly, so many Lego blocks, so long out of place, scattered & unassembled, finally clicked together and became whole. Atheism, The Right To Die, Determinism, Animal Rights, Antinatalism, Sentience, EFILism… Responsibility. Finally, my vision was clear, my inspiration was on fire, but my voice was still weak…
How was I, a manic, toy collecting performance artist, whose first movie was about fucking a Teddy Bear, (Confessions of an Underage Masturbator) going to add anything to this, to help in any way? Could I really say these things? Did I dare? How was this going to be my life moving forward? I didn’t know, and so I hid for the very first year of my Antinatalism. I hid, I watched the Antinatalist community take it’s first tender steps from a distance, and I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, which was to create a massive diorama in minute detail, of the entire private world of the person who had inspired me to think – when it was finished, I had had my chance to think about everything deeply, and I was ready to be an Antinatalist, an EFIList, and someone who could no longer be silent about the suffering.
And the rest is a well-documented history of my gleeful involvement from one Antinatalism related project after another! Anti-Natal Funnies, Vloggerdome, EFIL-TV: Antinatalist Television, The Exploring Antinatalism Podcast, and finally Antinatalism International, have been most of my biggest projects so far.
I attended Graduate school at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago from 2013-2015, where Antinatalist/EFILism became my thesis, and I made the worlds first explicitly Antinatalist film, The EFIList – an in-part-humorous synthesis of performed monologues by Inmendham, mixed with my own special blend of cringe and melodrama. Miraculously, part of The EFIList went viral, and I was asked to be a guest on the popular Comedy Central TV show Tosh.0, which was, as far as I know, the first time Antinatalism was ever discussed on North American television. (Watch it HERE)
We are told our entire lives that there is nothing we can do about how bad life is, and that there is nothing we can do about suffering… That there are no tools available to us to change anything or make a difference… But that of course, is a lie. DNA has been forcing us to buy a faulty, harmful, dangerous product, over and over again, for far too long. The task of the Antinatalist is to give Life the scathing product review that it deserves so that maybe, people will stop buying it.
Antinatalism is leaving its infancy now, it’s starting to grow up, and it’s up to us to raise it well. I think the future looks very bright for the argument in favor of the end, and personally, I feel like I’ve only just gotten started.
One aspect which is common between you and me is that since very early I also knew I didn’t want to have a baby, I knew it was wrong to eat animals too, I knew there was something very wrong with life itself.