You're right. I generally resist the implication that hyper-masculine and/or homophobic men are themselves just closeted queers. I find it to be a form of victim-blaming - that the reason queer people might face discrimination or hatred is because of other, secretly-queer people. I think the reflex to accuse bigots of being closet-cases is a tired trope that needs to be retired.
It's clear that Clavicular is genuinely suffering in some way, but what dug the bottomless pit of his need for attention is a mystery to us for now.
But it's also women and our elite culture, not just incel asshats, who are redefining sex as something more than the natural, powerful thing that it is. When we began, around ten years ago, to obsessively correlate sex with power--a core belief in consent culture--we moved away from seeing desire as an often blazing impulse one might be lucky to feel, to defining some desires as more about power than about lust or even love. Sex that used to be within the norm--falling for your co-worker, dating someone with one of the many gaps--age, power, status, money, education, the list is now endless--suddenly became dubious.
I believe with every fiber of my being that sex between two people should be something that both want and won't later regret. My beef is not with consenting, it's with the consent culture that sees sex and relationships through the lens of power first and lust and love often not at all.
I would agree it's not all on the incels shoulders. A good amount of this too is how society has come to regard basic sex not as a fun, spontaneous, and normal activity between two people who have the hots for each other. But rather as a proxy for perceived value, especially in an economic or status sense.
Internet culture has also made the game much harder for men in particular. It used to be a dude could rely on his charm and wit to make up for any other shortcomings he may have (height, looks, wealth, etc.) _before_ they knew much about each other. Now most men are either pre-screened before ever meeting the woman, or not given much of a chance after the first date if he isn't up to some kind of pop culture standard or something.
I think the whole equating-sex-with-power thing has been going on for a lot longer than ten years. I think what happened is that people started analyzing and deconstructing this paradigm... which, in the process, managed to reify it, now making it the sole lens through which many people view sex, as opposed to just a heuristic for understanding particular relationships.
It was important for us to talk about how a certain Hollywood producer used his power to do terrible things to young women, or how a certain former president leveraged his charm and the immense power of his office to use a staffer as, essentially, a plaything. But then at some point we quickly began to see the 30-year-old bookkeeper having a fling with a 22-year-old barista as the same sort of dynamic, which is insane.
I am currently watching The Morning Show--had never seen it--and the first season is about just this. I've lived in a college town my whole adult life and have seen all sorts of permutations of romance between what many consider non-equals. Doctors marry their nurses, office managers, and PAs. Grad students get involved with their advisors. Campus administrators date professors.
If all those relationships turned out in ways that both parties say were right for them, were they wrong in the first place? I tend to think no.
I'm of the opinion that dating across gaps in age, experience, and hierarchy can even be beneficial for everyone involved, if only for the simple reason that it's good and important for human beings to connect with others who are not like them.
When I was 18, freshman at college, I had a months-long relationship with a woman in her mid-twenties who was a teaching assistant (and actually taught my roommate's English class). She was careful about the difference in power and experience between us, but as a result, I learned tons about adult sex, dating, and romance (as well as a crash-course in contemporary lit) that otherwise would have taken years of trial-and-error to figure out. Even though she broke my heart by (wisely) breaking it off at semester's end, it was a vital formative experience. The breakup may have shaken me and sent me into depression, but that wasn't an unrecoverable trauma; it was just the pain of young love.
I so agree. When I was 16 (this was in 1977, a very different era), I had a relationship with a 21 year old, the loveliest year old guy I'd ever met. (I broke his heart.) I feel so lucky that he was, in many ways, my first. He was smart, careful, and made sure I was endlessly safe in a way I doubt anyone my age would have.
For the rest of my life, I only became involved with men five to eight years older than I. (I've been with my husband since I was 25 and he was almost 32.)
My kids say MOM, THAT WAS STATUTORY RAPE. I just roll my eyes. I understand the concern, but in this case and in every other relationship I've ever had, it was unwarranted.
That's so nice! And I suspect we are not alone in this. Those sorts of formative relationships with older, more experienced people can really be quite lovely, and don't have to end in exploitation and betrayal.
But I feel like the current discourse makes that sort of thing impossible. No wonder young people are so lonely - if you date someone more than a few years younger or older than you, apparently one of you is a creep. The dating pool is somehow simultaneously infinite and very small.
Honestly not just a few years. I've seen secondary and college kids (as a teacher) gets righteous and impassionately judgemental about //one year// age gap differences amongst their peer relationships. I wish they'd get angrier about the non-consensual sharing of images. For some of them, any digital harassment or illegality is not a big issue, but any in-person romance or intimacy is fraught with potential evil and terror.
Amen. I find the puritan sexual culture mixed with porn kink to be weird. I agree with Freddie, sex is just a normal thing that normal people do. It ain't that big a deal. But I'm old, what do I know.
It's also not, usually, imbued with the sort of power it routinely gets tinged with. It's almost as if we'd rather talk about it, criticize it, judge it, than do it.
When it comes to the 16/17 year old and the partner in their early twenties, for me I feel like maturity and life stage varies so much in the early 20s I don't feel like a blanket judgement can be made. At 22 some of my peers were already married with two kids and working steady 9-5s, some were completing internships and getting ready to graduate college, and some were still living with their parents in their hometown and working the same part time jobs they had in high school. The first example dating a 17 year old would have seemed much different from the last example dating one.
I was sexually active at 14 and my boyfriend was 17. I later got married at 18 to a 24 year old. It lasted 18 years. I've been married for 31 years to second husband. Altogether I have 6 kids. Not at any time did I feel like I was taken advantage of because of age differences or differences in situation. I am assertive and independent.
That said, I told my kids they weren't dating till they were 16. In retrospect, 14 was too young. However, It was my choice and I was responsible for my actions. I grew up early. It wasn't my parents fault.
I think this fear of the opposite sex and constant judging on the basis of appearance is a consequence of social media. Turn that shit off.
Now, I'm going out to wield my chainsaw and burn slash piles because summer is coming and I live in a tinderbox.
You're right it goes further back than that. I'm spitballing on this, but I suspect that it began in the early days of the New Left/second wave feminism and really took root after the defeat of the ERA. The former, a lot of early second-wavers were really soured on their experiences in New Left groups that did have that informal sex-equals-power dynamic in play. That informed a lot of their thinking not merely towards men but the nature of power in general.
On its own, not necessarily the problem. But when the ERA was defeated, there was also a massive retreat from politics - in the sense of agitating for changing the laws in major, impactful ways - in mainstream feminism. Where the political shifted was toward putting women in positions of power so that it would be easier to make changes without having to face (much) conflict. During that time, a lot of feminists who were burned from their New Left experiences leveraged this development to narrow the discourse around relations with men, and you really start to see sex-equals-power take shape there.
I also suspect that there is just the mythos of the woman who sleeps her way to the top - and the resentment that generates from men but ESPECIALLY women - as a factor.
That's not what I am saying at all. In fact, the prospect of using sex to gain some sort of advantage is exactly the fuel that many truly exploitative relationships thrive on.
My point really was that the sex-as-power paradigm became an important heuristic that the public used to look at the truly abusive behavior of some powerful elites, but then ended up becoming the only way that many people understood sex, leading to them finding abuse and exploitation in places where it doesn't exist.
That said, abuse and exploitation definitely can and does happen, and we should be vigilant about that, especially when it involves powerful political and business leaders.
I'd say outcomes matter and the outcomes tend to be outsized with those with great power.
It's a hard problem to parse, for sure. But in our rush to protect those we deem as vulnerable, we ended up saying all needed to be treated as vulnerable if there was a perceived power/money/status gap. That didn't go over well with most Americans who are adamant they should get to make their own choices.
I had to spend several years working on an essay about a past relationship (and I use that term in the broad sense—there was no fucking) to understand that your penultimate paragraph describes exactly how I sabotaged it—by seeing everything through the lens of power first, overstating what I saw, and refusing to acknowledge anything else as relevant.
'Love is powerful' is something I've heard my entire life. It says more about power being the ultimate measure of all things in society, rather than the value of love, which has nothing to do with power at all.
Right, I think the real answer that there's more going on here - it's sort of an unacknowledged consensus, reached from opposite directions, between groups that would vociferously deny any affiliation with the others. A little like the conditional alliance between feminist antiporn activists and the right back in the 70s, except (like everything these days) much more ridiculous.
Men are not the only half of this equation who are having their ability to have normal human interaction with other people broken upon the wheel of market logic and social media discourse incentives by the phone in their pocket.
From what I have seen from my own teenage kids, their friends, and young people I work with, you don't need a full Butlerian jihad to deal with this issue. Doing any moderately intensive, time consuming co-ed activity still works for forming heterosexual relationships. But you still have to get off the phone, out of the house, and into the activity!
I think this is all basically right. A lot of people on the internet have galaxy brained themselves into... well inceldom apparently.
To the extent I think there's anything to it, it's the technology. It's easier and more tempting than ever to isolate yourself inside, among various entertainment devices, and avoid the one thing that might crush the narrative(s), i.e. interacting with real people in real life. I am also an old dad with wife and kids now but one thing I luckily learned early on was that getting some had a significant element of serendipity. Obviously it helps to take some basic care of one's appearance and maintain a minimal sense of social cues, but otherwise, put yourself out there enough, and something will happen. We've all seen guys with no business getting anything hit a homer once in a while and I struggle to believe things have changed that much.
Also I recall an old Seinfeld joke where Elaine or George is asking how all these people are somehow managing to get together and Jerry goes 'Alcohol!' Nothing against our increasingly green culture but maybe people should drop the vape and go have a couple beers. Real beers. Crappy, mass produced, watery beers. Then all will be right with the world.
I was a very awkward, self-doubting young man all through college, but at some point I just...grew out of it. Got a girlfriend. Got laid. Happily married now. We're rooting for ya Carlos.
I can't believe the utterly predictable consquences of a society that treats normal masculinity and male sexuality as problems to be solved actually happened.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. Most of what ails this generation could be solved by more IRL activities and a return to flesh-and-blood relationships. At the same time . . . it IS possible that what looks easy and natural and normal for you is systemically difficult for others, maybe a LOT of others. If you've never had the experience of someone spontaneously being sufficiently attracted to you to have sex with you (as you described in your essay), and you say, "C'mon, this is easy!", you're going to get a lot of resentment. It's like the man in the three-piece suit telling the beggar on the corner to "get a job." Maybe it was easy for you. Maybe others are having a very different experience.
Seems like he goes out of his way to address this concern several times in the piece. Plenty of awkward, sweaty, deeply un-cool people have managed to get laid and get married, as recently as yesterday. He isn't saying anyone can become a Lothario by smiling and joining a co-ed pottery class. He is saying most men, if they are willing to endure some rejection and learn from it, and don't confuse Instagram with reality, can get laid eventually and even find girlfriends and wives eventually. True, in my experience.
Not laughing at the guy in question, but invoking the divine for one getting laid is funny. That sense of humor should definitely help rack up numbers.
I paraphrased, that's not what he actually said. I don't feel like he's charismatic or funny at all, his personality is average (to me). That was the most mysterious pairing I've ever seen, I truly don't understand how it happened, that woman was very beautiful and he is fat and uncharismatic. They did break up after 8 years.
Yes. It's possible my standard for nerdy/awkward is higher than yours and I wouldn't count you as nerdy/awkward if I met you. I've found that feeling like one is awkward/nerdy/autistic is relatively common now, including in friends that seem perfectly normie to me.
Um, you may wish to think more carefully about whether Clavicular is some genuinely anguished guy or a dude doing a cynical hustle for clicks on Twitter (HINT HINT HINT HINT HINT).
...emerging like a virus unto a layer of civilization in which private equity recently acquired the last of the memory cells and mulched them for their lipids
"Looksmaxxing" might be one of the lamest terms I've ever heard. Good lord, do we really need an obtuse phrase for the simple act of being presentable?
Granted I'm a dude, and we normally don't have near the prep a woman has for social forays. But the term was being applied to men in general.
I'm also admittedly out of the dating scene at this point, but I don't ever recall prepping for a date or social outing being very complex at all. What am I missing here?
Looksmaxxing is not simply grooming oneself; its purpose is to optimise appearance through close analysis and correction. While this may bear some semblance to fixing oneself up, the obsession with jawline/canthal tilt/symmetry reveals something pathological that has more to do with power/narcissism/status than with seeking to impress one’s crush or love interest. It has as much to do with actual dating as social media posts have to do with actual experience; it valorises a confection above candour.
Looksmaxxers treat dating like a game and treat themselves like characters whose appearance is something to be enhanced so as the better to play it.
You might say that this is generally true of everything, but a looksmaxxer overdoses in their own pursuit of physical perfection so as to always feel, i guess, ‘powerful’ on the sexual marketplace. This goes back to FdB’s main point, and his reference to looksmaxxer, Clavicular. This is not normal.
When you put on a suit, you are putting in some kind of cosmetic investment so as to belong in a setting where others are doing likewise, but once you get in the door, so to speak, you may seek connection. Looksmaxxing turns one’s sight inward and makes real connection impossible: you might gain access to pretty things, people and places, but your self-concern will render you blind to what is really beautiful.
If you would like 15 minutes of cringe, read the NYT link Freddie shares about how this "Clavicular" guy looks. He hits himself in the face with a hammer to adjust his jawline. He snorts meth to lose weight. He's functionally impotent due to steroid abuse. It's all very... sexy.
Great piece, but I’d argue that incels are a symptom, not a cause.
And also, of course, incels ARE obsessed with sex the same way dieters are obsessed with food.
But yeah, sex seems to be losing its power as a cultural motivator, Personally, I think this has a lot to do with its overuse in flogging supplier-induced demand in these the declining years of late-stage capitalism: it’s analagous to the reduced excitability you see in nerves and muscle cells after prolonged stimulation; they become unable to generate action potentials.
Though, of course, there are other explanations as well besides “But I’m NOT getting a boner every time I sit in my new Ford truck! Those ads LIED!” 😃
Spot on as usual. Thank you for providing an interesting, sensible, and hilarious critique of this uninteresting, privileged movement.. You are definitely not bragging and anyone who interprets this that way will hopefully close this app and go back to Dreditt.
They certainly have “zero chill”, and are strangely proud of it (!) because of the attention (online) that they receive. At least it’s hilarious.
"a bleak, hyper-strategized, market-based understanding of intimacy that treats human connection as a ruthless auction and desire as a rigged algorithm."
I see this more and more in online discourse and it's finally got me feeling like an old man because I simply cannot relate to this way of thinking at all. Nor would I want to. Talking about sex and relationships and intimacy like a sales strategy meeting or a quarterly report. Yuck.
I think it's worth mentioning that the dating market, by which i mean the actual market of apps, reinforces the sense of rejection and self-loathing among young men in order to enrich themselves. Women don't swipe right the way men do; relationships are built from actual human connection and knowing people, and when it's just a picture of a guy women are far choosier than men. This is data the websites themselves have, and they make no effort to modify themselves to get the information that actually attracts the majority of women, build those relationships, etc. because if you're sexually desperate you will pay them for higher priority and the ability to approach women more effectively through their premium mechanics. So the rejected man is a market for these companies that they enrich themselves through making more of.
This obviously doesn't excuse the misogyny but I'd say the rage and pain is real and even legitimate, just totally misplaced. It's not women they should hate, it's the people who run Tinder.
The apps were supposed to be liberating! No more bothering women at the bar who were there to have fun with their friends only. No more mistaking interest on the dancefloor and making someone uncomfortable. Instead, all the women one could make contact with explicitly wanted to interact with men for romance/sex - seems like a win/win.
Maybe it was never going to work like that IRL, but the way the companies have enshittified the apps really upsets me. I am not the kind of person who inspires attraction during traditional ways of meeting women so they felt, for a brief time, like I had a chance.
But he might be Patrick Bateman, who also might be a deeply repressed homosexual, who fucks his image in a mirror while savaging ostensible females.
Freddie didn't say that he is!
You're right. I generally resist the implication that hyper-masculine and/or homophobic men are themselves just closeted queers. I find it to be a form of victim-blaming - that the reason queer people might face discrimination or hatred is because of other, secretly-queer people. I think the reflex to accuse bigots of being closet-cases is a tired trope that needs to be retired.
It's clear that Clavicular is genuinely suffering in some way, but what dug the bottomless pit of his need for attention is a mystery to us for now.
Brilliant piece - i guess only thing id disagree with is that youre a normal man
Yes to all this.
But it's also women and our elite culture, not just incel asshats, who are redefining sex as something more than the natural, powerful thing that it is. When we began, around ten years ago, to obsessively correlate sex with power--a core belief in consent culture--we moved away from seeing desire as an often blazing impulse one might be lucky to feel, to defining some desires as more about power than about lust or even love. Sex that used to be within the norm--falling for your co-worker, dating someone with one of the many gaps--age, power, status, money, education, the list is now endless--suddenly became dubious.
I believe with every fiber of my being that sex between two people should be something that both want and won't later regret. My beef is not with consenting, it's with the consent culture that sees sex and relationships through the lens of power first and lust and love often not at all.
We all need to be standing up for fucking.
yes, and to always be mindful of the angle
I would agree it's not all on the incels shoulders. A good amount of this too is how society has come to regard basic sex not as a fun, spontaneous, and normal activity between two people who have the hots for each other. But rather as a proxy for perceived value, especially in an economic or status sense.
Internet culture has also made the game much harder for men in particular. It used to be a dude could rely on his charm and wit to make up for any other shortcomings he may have (height, looks, wealth, etc.) _before_ they knew much about each other. Now most men are either pre-screened before ever meeting the woman, or not given much of a chance after the first date if he isn't up to some kind of pop culture standard or something.
Not for the gays, bro. It's still just types and looks. My old thing was "You're cute, let's have sex. If you are cool, maybe we can date."
I think the whole equating-sex-with-power thing has been going on for a lot longer than ten years. I think what happened is that people started analyzing and deconstructing this paradigm... which, in the process, managed to reify it, now making it the sole lens through which many people view sex, as opposed to just a heuristic for understanding particular relationships.
It was important for us to talk about how a certain Hollywood producer used his power to do terrible things to young women, or how a certain former president leveraged his charm and the immense power of his office to use a staffer as, essentially, a plaything. But then at some point we quickly began to see the 30-year-old bookkeeper having a fling with a 22-year-old barista as the same sort of dynamic, which is insane.
I am currently watching The Morning Show--had never seen it--and the first season is about just this. I've lived in a college town my whole adult life and have seen all sorts of permutations of romance between what many consider non-equals. Doctors marry their nurses, office managers, and PAs. Grad students get involved with their advisors. Campus administrators date professors.
If all those relationships turned out in ways that both parties say were right for them, were they wrong in the first place? I tend to think no.
I'm of the opinion that dating across gaps in age, experience, and hierarchy can even be beneficial for everyone involved, if only for the simple reason that it's good and important for human beings to connect with others who are not like them.
When I was 18, freshman at college, I had a months-long relationship with a woman in her mid-twenties who was a teaching assistant (and actually taught my roommate's English class). She was careful about the difference in power and experience between us, but as a result, I learned tons about adult sex, dating, and romance (as well as a crash-course in contemporary lit) that otherwise would have taken years of trial-and-error to figure out. Even though she broke my heart by (wisely) breaking it off at semester's end, it was a vital formative experience. The breakup may have shaken me and sent me into depression, but that wasn't an unrecoverable trauma; it was just the pain of young love.
I so agree. When I was 16 (this was in 1977, a very different era), I had a relationship with a 21 year old, the loveliest year old guy I'd ever met. (I broke his heart.) I feel so lucky that he was, in many ways, my first. He was smart, careful, and made sure I was endlessly safe in a way I doubt anyone my age would have.
For the rest of my life, I only became involved with men five to eight years older than I. (I've been with my husband since I was 25 and he was almost 32.)
My kids say MOM, THAT WAS STATUTORY RAPE. I just roll my eyes. I understand the concern, but in this case and in every other relationship I've ever had, it was unwarranted.
That's so nice! And I suspect we are not alone in this. Those sorts of formative relationships with older, more experienced people can really be quite lovely, and don't have to end in exploitation and betrayal.
But I feel like the current discourse makes that sort of thing impossible. No wonder young people are so lonely - if you date someone more than a few years younger or older than you, apparently one of you is a creep. The dating pool is somehow simultaneously infinite and very small.
Honestly not just a few years. I've seen secondary and college kids (as a teacher) gets righteous and impassionately judgemental about //one year// age gap differences amongst their peer relationships. I wish they'd get angrier about the non-consensual sharing of images. For some of them, any digital harassment or illegality is not a big issue, but any in-person romance or intimacy is fraught with potential evil and terror.
Amen. I find the puritan sexual culture mixed with porn kink to be weird. I agree with Freddie, sex is just a normal thing that normal people do. It ain't that big a deal. But I'm old, what do I know.
It's also not, usually, imbued with the sort of power it routinely gets tinged with. It's almost as if we'd rather talk about it, criticize it, judge it, than do it.
When it comes to the 16/17 year old and the partner in their early twenties, for me I feel like maturity and life stage varies so much in the early 20s I don't feel like a blanket judgement can be made. At 22 some of my peers were already married with two kids and working steady 9-5s, some were completing internships and getting ready to graduate college, and some were still living with their parents in their hometown and working the same part time jobs they had in high school. The first example dating a 17 year old would have seemed much different from the last example dating one.
I was sexually active at 14 and my boyfriend was 17. I later got married at 18 to a 24 year old. It lasted 18 years. I've been married for 31 years to second husband. Altogether I have 6 kids. Not at any time did I feel like I was taken advantage of because of age differences or differences in situation. I am assertive and independent.
That said, I told my kids they weren't dating till they were 16. In retrospect, 14 was too young. However, It was my choice and I was responsible for my actions. I grew up early. It wasn't my parents fault.
I think this fear of the opposite sex and constant judging on the basis of appearance is a consequence of social media. Turn that shit off.
Now, I'm going out to wield my chainsaw and burn slash piles because summer is coming and I live in a tinderbox.
You're right it goes further back than that. I'm spitballing on this, but I suspect that it began in the early days of the New Left/second wave feminism and really took root after the defeat of the ERA. The former, a lot of early second-wavers were really soured on their experiences in New Left groups that did have that informal sex-equals-power dynamic in play. That informed a lot of their thinking not merely towards men but the nature of power in general.
On its own, not necessarily the problem. But when the ERA was defeated, there was also a massive retreat from politics - in the sense of agitating for changing the laws in major, impactful ways - in mainstream feminism. Where the political shifted was toward putting women in positions of power so that it would be easier to make changes without having to face (much) conflict. During that time, a lot of feminists who were burned from their New Left experiences leveraged this development to narrow the discourse around relations with men, and you really start to see sex-equals-power take shape there.
I also suspect that there is just the mythos of the woman who sleeps her way to the top - and the resentment that generates from men but ESPECIALLY women - as a factor.
Yep...cuz those 'playthings' had zero agency, right? And gained nothing from the 'transactions'. Gimme a break
That's not what I am saying at all. In fact, the prospect of using sex to gain some sort of advantage is exactly the fuel that many truly exploitative relationships thrive on.
My point really was that the sex-as-power paradigm became an important heuristic that the public used to look at the truly abusive behavior of some powerful elites, but then ended up becoming the only way that many people understood sex, leading to them finding abuse and exploitation in places where it doesn't exist.
That said, abuse and exploitation definitely can and does happen, and we should be vigilant about that, especially when it involves powerful political and business leaders.
I'd say outcomes matter and the outcomes tend to be outsized with those with great power.
It's a hard problem to parse, for sure. But in our rush to protect those we deem as vulnerable, we ended up saying all needed to be treated as vulnerable if there was a perceived power/money/status gap. That didn't go over well with most Americans who are adamant they should get to make their own choices.
I had to spend several years working on an essay about a past relationship (and I use that term in the broad sense—there was no fucking) to understand that your penultimate paragraph describes exactly how I sabotaged it—by seeing everything through the lens of power first, overstating what I saw, and refusing to acknowledge anything else as relevant.
'Love is powerful' is something I've heard my entire life. It says more about power being the ultimate measure of all things in society, rather than the value of love, which has nothing to do with power at all.
Interesting. I'll have to think about that.
Right, I think the real answer that there's more going on here - it's sort of an unacknowledged consensus, reached from opposite directions, between groups that would vociferously deny any affiliation with the others. A little like the conditional alliance between feminist antiporn activists and the right back in the 70s, except (like everything these days) much more ridiculous.
But that might lead to dancing!
Men are not the only half of this equation who are having their ability to have normal human interaction with other people broken upon the wheel of market logic and social media discourse incentives by the phone in their pocket.
Thank you for all the thoughtful replies. I've now written my own piece about sex and the many gaps--you guys and, of course Freddie, are inspiring.
From what I have seen from my own teenage kids, their friends, and young people I work with, you don't need a full Butlerian jihad to deal with this issue. Doing any moderately intensive, time consuming co-ed activity still works for forming heterosexual relationships. But you still have to get off the phone, out of the house, and into the activity!
Yes but we should have a full blown Butlerian jihad anyway
Nice Fight Club reference.
I think this is all basically right. A lot of people on the internet have galaxy brained themselves into... well inceldom apparently.
To the extent I think there's anything to it, it's the technology. It's easier and more tempting than ever to isolate yourself inside, among various entertainment devices, and avoid the one thing that might crush the narrative(s), i.e. interacting with real people in real life. I am also an old dad with wife and kids now but one thing I luckily learned early on was that getting some had a significant element of serendipity. Obviously it helps to take some basic care of one's appearance and maintain a minimal sense of social cues, but otherwise, put yourself out there enough, and something will happen. We've all seen guys with no business getting anything hit a homer once in a while and I struggle to believe things have changed that much.
Also I recall an old Seinfeld joke where Elaine or George is asking how all these people are somehow managing to get together and Jerry goes 'Alcohol!' Nothing against our increasingly green culture but maybe people should drop the vape and go have a couple beers. Real beers. Crappy, mass produced, watery beers. Then all will be right with the world.
Remember when?
Going to bars.
The guy at the end sends a drink over.
The live music is great, or not.
You've gotta work tomorrow.
But what the hell.
And you survived. And perhaps even thrived.
"I was there, 3000 years ago...'
I mean, a lot of incels have never in their life felt like they're normal. I'm kinda incel adjacent and I've never felt normal.
I was a very awkward, self-doubting young man all through college, but at some point I just...grew out of it. Got a girlfriend. Got laid. Happily married now. We're rooting for ya Carlos.
I can't believe the utterly predictable consquences of a society that treats normal masculinity and male sexuality as problems to be solved actually happened.
Just kidding. Of course they did.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. Most of what ails this generation could be solved by more IRL activities and a return to flesh-and-blood relationships. At the same time . . . it IS possible that what looks easy and natural and normal for you is systemically difficult for others, maybe a LOT of others. If you've never had the experience of someone spontaneously being sufficiently attracted to you to have sex with you (as you described in your essay), and you say, "C'mon, this is easy!", you're going to get a lot of resentment. It's like the man in the three-piece suit telling the beggar on the corner to "get a job." Maybe it was easy for you. Maybe others are having a very different experience.
Seems like he goes out of his way to address this concern several times in the piece. Plenty of awkward, sweaty, deeply un-cool people have managed to get laid and get married, as recently as yesterday. He isn't saying anyone can become a Lothario by smiling and joining a co-ed pottery class. He is saying most men, if they are willing to endure some rejection and learn from it, and don't confuse Instagram with reality, can get laid eventually and even find girlfriends and wives eventually. True, in my experience.
Hasn't been true in mine, if I'm being honest. Only seen it happen twice, one of the guys in question did say it was pretty much a miracle.
Not laughing at the guy in question, but invoking the divine for one getting laid is funny. That sense of humor should definitely help rack up numbers.
I paraphrased, that's not what he actually said. I don't feel like he's charismatic or funny at all, his personality is average (to me). That was the most mysterious pairing I've ever seen, I truly don't understand how it happened, that woman was very beautiful and he is fat and uncharismatic. They did break up after 8 years.
You've only seen two nerdy, awkward guys get laid? In your entire life? (And, since you've met me now, at least by proxy, your count is up to three).
Yes. It's possible my standard for nerdy/awkward is higher than yours and I wouldn't count you as nerdy/awkward if I met you. I've found that feeling like one is awkward/nerdy/autistic is relatively common now, including in friends that seem perfectly normie to me.
Um, you may wish to think more carefully about whether Clavicular is some genuinely anguished guy or a dude doing a cynical hustle for clicks on Twitter (HINT HINT HINT HINT HINT).
...or a metaphorical nadir of some sort. A person entirely of story, the local-worst story
In which even the meta-narratives are merely a layer of a larger cynical hustle.
...emerging like a virus unto a layer of civilization in which private equity recently acquired the last of the memory cells and mulched them for their lipids
"Looksmaxxing" might be one of the lamest terms I've ever heard. Good lord, do we really need an obtuse phrase for the simple act of being presentable?
It’s anything but a simple act
Granted I'm a dude, and we normally don't have near the prep a woman has for social forays. But the term was being applied to men in general.
I'm also admittedly out of the dating scene at this point, but I don't ever recall prepping for a date or social outing being very complex at all. What am I missing here?
Looksmaxxing is not simply grooming oneself; its purpose is to optimise appearance through close analysis and correction. While this may bear some semblance to fixing oneself up, the obsession with jawline/canthal tilt/symmetry reveals something pathological that has more to do with power/narcissism/status than with seeking to impress one’s crush or love interest. It has as much to do with actual dating as social media posts have to do with actual experience; it valorises a confection above candour.
Looksmaxxers treat dating like a game and treat themselves like characters whose appearance is something to be enhanced so as the better to play it.
You might say that this is generally true of everything, but a looksmaxxer overdoses in their own pursuit of physical perfection so as to always feel, i guess, ‘powerful’ on the sexual marketplace. This goes back to FdB’s main point, and his reference to looksmaxxer, Clavicular. This is not normal.
When you put on a suit, you are putting in some kind of cosmetic investment so as to belong in a setting where others are doing likewise, but once you get in the door, so to speak, you may seek connection. Looksmaxxing turns one’s sight inward and makes real connection impossible: you might gain access to pretty things, people and places, but your self-concern will render you blind to what is really beautiful.
Thanks for all that. I had no idea it was an actual name for a trendy aesthetic, I thought it was just a throwaway slang word like poser or something.
I had to look up what canthal tilt was, wtf...
If you would like 15 minutes of cringe, read the NYT link Freddie shares about how this "Clavicular" guy looks. He hits himself in the face with a hammer to adjust his jawline. He snorts meth to lose weight. He's functionally impotent due to steroid abuse. It's all very... sexy.
Well said, er, written!
Great piece, but I’d argue that incels are a symptom, not a cause.
And also, of course, incels ARE obsessed with sex the same way dieters are obsessed with food.
But yeah, sex seems to be losing its power as a cultural motivator, Personally, I think this has a lot to do with its overuse in flogging supplier-induced demand in these the declining years of late-stage capitalism: it’s analagous to the reduced excitability you see in nerves and muscle cells after prolonged stimulation; they become unable to generate action potentials.
Though, of course, there are other explanations as well besides “But I’m NOT getting a boner every time I sit in my new Ford truck! Those ads LIED!” 😃
Spot on as usual. Thank you for providing an interesting, sensible, and hilarious critique of this uninteresting, privileged movement.. You are definitely not bragging and anyone who interprets this that way will hopefully close this app and go back to Dreditt.
They certainly have “zero chill”, and are strangely proud of it (!) because of the attention (online) that they receive. At least it’s hilarious.
"a bleak, hyper-strategized, market-based understanding of intimacy that treats human connection as a ruthless auction and desire as a rigged algorithm."
I see this more and more in online discourse and it's finally got me feeling like an old man because I simply cannot relate to this way of thinking at all. Nor would I want to. Talking about sex and relationships and intimacy like a sales strategy meeting or a quarterly report. Yuck.
I think it's worth mentioning that the dating market, by which i mean the actual market of apps, reinforces the sense of rejection and self-loathing among young men in order to enrich themselves. Women don't swipe right the way men do; relationships are built from actual human connection and knowing people, and when it's just a picture of a guy women are far choosier than men. This is data the websites themselves have, and they make no effort to modify themselves to get the information that actually attracts the majority of women, build those relationships, etc. because if you're sexually desperate you will pay them for higher priority and the ability to approach women more effectively through their premium mechanics. So the rejected man is a market for these companies that they enrich themselves through making more of.
This obviously doesn't excuse the misogyny but I'd say the rage and pain is real and even legitimate, just totally misplaced. It's not women they should hate, it's the people who run Tinder.
I also understand that, not only are men less choosy, there are a lot more men on the apps.
The apps were supposed to be liberating! No more bothering women at the bar who were there to have fun with their friends only. No more mistaking interest on the dancefloor and making someone uncomfortable. Instead, all the women one could make contact with explicitly wanted to interact with men for romance/sex - seems like a win/win.
Maybe it was never going to work like that IRL, but the way the companies have enshittified the apps really upsets me. I am not the kind of person who inspires attraction during traditional ways of meeting women so they felt, for a brief time, like I had a chance.