Hello friends, it’s the end of 2023! Another year that flew by. A bit of housekeeping upfront. First, I have read all of the 2023 Book Review Contest entrants, and I am prettttttty sure that I know the top three. I just need to pick a winner and the two runners up. Announcement soon. Second… will you buy my book? Please? JUST DO IT! Buy a copy! Make me happy! Make Baby Jesus happy! Buy a copy for a friend!
And now here’s my annual roundup of favorites and a “winner.” If you aren’t a subscriber and you want to see the rest, you know what to do.
Winner, 2023: Sad Dudes of a Certain Type
It’s tempting to just put “incels” here and be done with it, but that would feel very 2018 and anyway what I’m describing is broader and thus a little more problematic. I’m thinking of a kind of guy who has been found at times under the broad umbrella of the alt-right, named Pepes, or maybe incels, who have occasionally been denoted with the term redditors, who now might be referred to as gooners or coomers…. All of the various flavors of this kind of dude share a certain status: an aggrieved sexlessness - which I believe often deserves great sympathy, given that it’s so often a reflection of a much broader loneliness and structural societal issues - matched to a resentment that becomes destructive and prompts a progressive backlash that eliminates the opportunity for that sympathy. As I said, this condition itself is not new. What I think changed in 2023 is that (in a completely unquantifiable and impressionistic sense) those guys started winning. I think to a remarkable degree incel values have become written into the basic idiom of our culture.
There’s been a growing fascination with podcasts like the one in this image above, which have the basic format that chinless men go out of their way to humiliate hot women, who are willing to appear on the shows because it affords them the opportunity to plug their social media accounts and, very often, their OnlyFans. (J.J. McCullough recently mentioned them, for example.) For me, it’s real fall-of-Rome shit, what a dying culture looks like; everything about these shows is gross and awful. The parts where the hosts aren’t openly shaming the women are typically just incredibly boring sex stories told by those women, which I suppose simply titillates guys who can’t believe that hot women ever choose to engage in sex with anyone. But the appeal here is very plain: the hosts mock the women, which satisfies the misogynistic resentment that sexlessness sometimes engenders, while the women understand that the publicity is worth it and that this will result in more subscriptions for their racy content. And what’s impressive(ly bleak) is that the men who watch for the chance to see hot girls get humiliated and the men who pay to masturbate to the content those hot women produce are the same men.
More and more, that whole weird subculture seems like mass culture.
I was on some subreddit earlier this year, and the topic of common advice for lovelorn men came up. I was giving my usual spiel saying that a big problem is that men are told that women want confidence when what most women usually want is ease, a comfortable and casual attitude, the sense from a man who’s hitting on them that he’s done this before and that whether he gets her number/takes her home or not, it’s not a big deal. All of those men who walk around bars with their chests artificially puffed out to project confidence are submarining themselves, as their effort to appear confident reads as just that - effort, performance, artifice. “Just be yourself” is vague and frequently-useless advice, but it does contain an understanding that the problem with trying to appear to be confident is that the sweatiness that comes with such an attempt is off-putting and unattractive. Women are sexual beings too, sometimes they want to have sex, sometimes they might even want to have sex with you, and once you understand that fact, every potential opportunity won’t seem like this huge deal to you and you’ll appear like a more normal and laidback person. I don’t pretend that any of this is revolutionary. But it’s an important point in a world where lonely men are constantly taught that a woman wanting to have sex with them is some exalted and rare status.
I’m confident in that advice, but it might be wrong, I don’t know. What was sad and amusing was that sharing it on Reddit prompted an explosion of unhappy responses, which had much less to do with the specific perspective and more to do with the fact that making the point relied on the notion that I have, as a 42-year-old man, occasionally had sex in my life. To be clear, I never represented myself as some sort of player, and in fact the whole point of that advice is that the concept that you have to be some sort of pickup artist to get laid is wrong - having sex is normal, it’s a thing ordinary people do all the time. Didn’t matter. They were so angry that I just openly acknowledged that (it’s true!) in my single days there have been some women who have wanted to have sex with me, in my three decades of adulthood, and further that this did not make me exceptional. This violated some kind of unwritten compact that we must all act as though having sex is a mark of immense privilege. And to me, this sort of thing is more and more common online, the imposition of this very particular niche internet ideology onto more and more of the online space. With the progressive voice having lost its dominance thanks to the demise of Twitter, which functioned as the organizing committee for elite liberal sentiment, the most hyperactive and shameless elements of internet discourse have filled the vacuum.
If you’d like an example of the incels winning in message if not in substance, look at the dire state of franchise filmmaking and the Marvel movies, frequently derided as the “MSheU” by a certain type of dude. Nerd anger has grown for years as Marvel and other major franchises have grown more and more focused on diversity. Well, 2023 was a year of total collapse at the box office, particularly in genre films, with the (women-led and racially diverse) Marvels in particular cratering worse than any previous MCU film. This has led to a great deal of rejoicing, and an insistence by many excitable YouTube video essayists that “real fans” rejected all of that diversity stuff and sank Disney et al. I don’t think that’s actually true; I think decades of Hollywood history demonstrates that “real fans” are insufficient to make real blockbuster economics work. But I’m less interested in the truth of these claims than I am in their increasing purchase in the culture, where mainstream sources seem more and more likely to take this narrative seriously. CEO Bob Iger is out there saying that Disney got too invested in messages over entertainment. It happens that I agree with that, in a certain sense, but of course mine isn’t the sense that will predominate. I think the incels, long derided as a sad rump, have clawed their way to a position of real influence in popular consciousness. And I have to tell you, I’m very concerned!