00:01:41.900She ate contaminated food at the mother buffet and had explosive slayeria.
00:01:47.040I would contend that's the same picture, right?
00:01:49.400Yeah, these are the same sentences in that they are nonsense that are more about gesturing at membership in a like online subculture, even then like communicating any meaning.
00:02:03.020And they're like self-referential and over the top on purpose.
00:02:06.900The hermetic nature of the discourse is kind of making fun of itself.
00:02:10.440I do think the clavicular tweet is a joke.
00:02:12.640I don't know for sure, but I'm hoping.
00:02:14.660And I mean, the tweet about the explosive slayeria is obviously a joke.0.96
00:02:18.680And it's about the fact that certain elements of the gay community will find a way of saying very simple things like, she looked good, in impossibly complicated and convoluted ways, where it's both celebrating kind of an inness, but also kind of, it's just celebrating like doing weird shit with language.0.86
00:02:38.660And I do think that a lot of this talk of gesture gooning is that.0.77
00:02:43.160It's like their attempt to like do the gay community, but, you know, not quite succeeding.1.00
00:02:49.000Yeah, the look smacksers are trying to be gay men.1.00
00:02:52.540The gay men are trying to be black women.1.00
00:02:54.880And all of us are just sort of like getting like the backwash, contaminating our brains and our vocabularies.1.00
00:03:01.620I did say that I was opera pilled the other day because a friend of mine was trying to get me to go to the opera.
00:03:05.640And I was like, yeah, let's go to the opera.
00:03:07.320And I realized this is from the incel language that is now like, and, you know, there's all kinds of ways I'm much stupider than I used to be because of the internet.
00:03:18.120But like there's a pervasiveness with which these like incredible catchy, like quasi nonsense words have now become like really ubiquitous slang.
00:03:30.740But yeah, we're going to talk about gesture gooding at the club.
00:03:34.220We're going to talk about this weird subculture that has suddenly exploded.
00:03:39.200We're going to talk today about looks maxing.
00:03:42.620And, Adrienne, before we get too far into it, I wanted to take a second to defend ourselves and to justify this episode.
00:03:51.920Because I've come across a bunch of people saying, like, this isn't news.
00:03:56.560You know, like, this should not be a story.
00:03:58.040This is ultimately a small subculture.
00:04:00.260It is a group of people who are sort of self-marginalizing, right?
00:04:09.200They are like clearly seeking attention.
00:04:11.620I think when we get to somebody like Clavicula, we're going to talk about his actual talents, which are mostly for generating virality, for seeking out sort of like mass attention.
00:04:22.520And that, you know, covering them as this curiosity sort of gives them what they want.
00:04:27.280And I think those are all like decent points.
00:04:29.140Those points are well taken. I also think this is a, like, innovative and strange manifestation of, like, right-wing gender expression, right? This is a ideological product of the right's conception of masculinity in, like, the post-2016 era, and I think that is just kind of really squarely our beat, and it would be a little weird if everybody was doing looks-maxing and then better if the right wasn't, or at least I would feel weird about it.
00:04:57.120And I also think that what these guys are doing can sort of unlock some bigger questions about like manhood now, like what it means to be a straight man under the Trump regime in this very specific economic circumstance in what the existentialist called the situation of straight white men right now.
00:05:16.960And this is a pretty white subculture, which we're also going to get into.
00:05:19.880And hopefully we can, like, tease a little bit out of that and get something out of our conversation about Luxmaxing, which is a little more than just, like, rubbernecking at the car wreck that is these people.
00:05:32.040But that said, we are going to be rubbernecking at the car wreck that is this people.
00:05:39.160There was some false advertising in you pitching me this episode.
00:05:43.760Okay, so, Adrienne, what do you know about just, like, what Luxmaxing is?
00:05:49.540So looks maxing comes out of a subset of the incel community.
00:05:56.440It's kind of contradictory in some ways, right?
00:05:58.960The incel community, unlike the pickup artists, assumes that no amount of effort will make them attractive to women.
00:06:06.560Looks maxing is doing the opposite.0.96
00:06:08.540It's saying like, oh, there's no hope, but also let's kind of get our bodies swole and like our eyes like the right distance or whatever.
00:06:17.560And it's largely, I think, TikTok-driven.
00:06:20.080I guess it's not just about attractiveness.
00:06:21.740It's really about, like, conforming to a kind of eugenic ideal, sometimes through working out, but more often, I think, through drug use and surgery.
00:06:32.040Yeah, you know, so, like, looks-backsing is a lot of things.0.52
00:06:34.860It does emerge from the incel subculture, and I would argue it kind of becomes something else.
00:06:44.060I'm going to make an argument later in the episode that we can't properly talk about these people as, like, incels by and large, even if that's, you know, somewhat how they're advertising themselves.
00:06:54.580But, like, look, this is the latest in what has been for the past, I'd say, 10 years or so, a series of, like, morbid curiosities that are emerging from the male internet.
00:07:07.100There's a bunch of these subcultures that people understand to have collectively created the MAGA movement or be a product of the same cultural forces and crises within masculinity and resentments of men that have created the MAGA movement.
00:07:23.780that these are the sort of comorbidities, right, that are interacting with something that's actually
00:07:31.280very meaningful in our politics and is being reflected again in these sort of like weird
00:07:36.160subcultural products. But looks maxing, even though it's kind of having a media moment and
00:07:42.040coming to a lot of people's attention right now, it's not actually that new. It's been around for
00:07:48.560a number of years as its own distinct subculture in the manosphere internet. It's broadly defined,
00:07:57.140looks maxing, as the effort by these men, mostly white and mostly very young men, we're talking
00:08:04.640puberty up to, I'd say, like mid-30s at the absolute oldest. So really men and boys,
00:08:11.880it's coming out of these far-right communities, and it's arising from that kind of putrid mix
00:08:17.480of the incel, the manosphere, the groyper, the white supremacist, and the gamer worlds.
00:08:24.440And it's these efforts by these guys from these right-wing internet milieus
00:08:29.160to improve their physical attractiveness and to do so to the greatest extent possible
00:08:36.740So this subgroup has this theory that they semi-sincerely and semi-ironically put forward
00:08:43.980that looks are the sole determining factor in personal worth and success,
00:08:48.960and that they measure male beauty as kind of a predictor of male happiness,
00:08:56.000of male financial fortune, of male social success, and crucially of male status.
00:09:02.540And so they also measure male beauty differently than you and I would.
00:09:08.200When they talk about beauty, they're talking, as you said, Adrienne,
00:09:10.960about conformance to a standard that is like highly quantified yeah they have a scale that
00:09:16.300we're going to get into later a numerical scale that takes into account an average of various
00:09:21.660different ratios things like how far your nose is from your upper lip things like the angle of your
00:09:29.260inner eye corners things like your body fat percentage and it takes all of this and sort of
00:09:34.760spits out a number and the higher your number is the more you are personally worth right but they
00:09:39.240Make a distinction between that beauty, which they think of as more real, more genuine, and, like, people finding you attractive.
00:09:47.260That's the other thing to keep in mind.
00:09:48.940Sexual desire gets substituted out in this, like, numerical quantification gets substituted in, but they also do that kind of selectively.
00:09:56.160Yeah, it's like math instead of, oh, this person seems winning in some way.
00:10:01.520Yeah, it's yet another instance of the downfall of humanities, Adrian.
00:10:05.200They quantify things that can't actually be quantified.
00:10:09.240And they sort of, you know, look at each other and they look at themselves and they spend a lot of time raiding each other and themselves and raiding strangers and raiding women.
00:10:18.820And Adrian, I want to, like, dwell for a little bit on what the looks-maxing subculture considers their North Star, their pinnacle of male beauty, this ideal that they're striving towards.
00:18:27.620No, I would say that Mewang is on the second tier as you progress a little further into the looks-maxing spectrum.
00:18:35.560And that's where you find stuff that seems a little more quackish and like maha-y, like supplements.
00:18:42.820These guys are really big on peptides, which are like this whole genre of like kind of scammy supplement that they'll tell you does absolutely everything in the world, right?
00:18:51.860Sometimes they'll purchase this stuff online illegally from, like, these foreign internet pharmacies because it's not FDA approved in the U.S.
00:21:44.400If you get a chance to Google Dr. Mew, he looks ridiculous.0.84
00:21:47.480But he tells people to do everything from, like, suctioning the tongue to the roof of the mouth to try and make their jaw look a little more prominent to, like, actually chewing on rubber balls to try and, like, develop, I guess, muscles around the jaw.
00:22:03.640It's a weird series of little pastimes, but, like, you can indeed do that if you want to.
00:24:10.260Kind of. It is. Yeah. So face hammering is the detail that gets mentioned in every single piece about looks maxing. And people who cover this movement from the outside are pretty divided on it.
00:24:24.200So some people claim that this is really just a joke, that nobody's actually doing it.
00:24:28.720I think, honestly, in this kind of nihilistic male online subculture, I often find that a kind of, like, cynical humor serves as, like, a shield and this, like, plausible deniability for things these guys wind up actually being kind of sincerely invested in.
00:25:10.900It's all of this or like be nice to women, right?
00:25:13.260When you're, like, taking at face value that the professed desire of these guys is to, like, get girlfriends and get laid and, like, have romantic success, there's no shortage of advice from women or, like, advice coming, frankly, from men.
00:25:32.840It's like, well, you know, you should, like, ask her questions about herself.
00:25:35.500You should, like, remember something she says and, like, bring it up later in conversation.
00:25:40.080You know, you should follow up question maxing.
00:25:43.540You should, like, you should consideration mog.
00:25:46.220But, like, they don't want to, like, treat you as an equal to them in, like, intellect and dignity.
00:25:54.940If that's the option, they would literally rather, like, hammer their faces.
00:26:00.040You're hacking the interaction rather than genuinely engaging it.
00:26:03.500You kind of think it has to be fixed in advance for it to succeed.
00:26:06.820But, of course, this is awfully self-reinforcing.0.90
00:26:08.880Because, like, first of all that time that you're spending hammering your fucking jaw, you're not developing, you know, the kinds of hobbies that you could bring up at a successful date and be like, oh, that's an interesting thing for someone to do.0.97
00:26:20.200And if you do bring up your actual hobby of hammering your face, I'm guessing it ends the date rather quickly.0.98
00:26:25.020Yeah, I'm going to go to the bathroom and I'm going to see if it has a small window I can jump out of because I'm done.
00:26:32.340Like, when you're doing looks maxing the way these guys are, you really kind of can't be doing anything else, right?
00:26:37.820It's incredibly time consuming. It is incredibly like expensive. It's a lot about consumption. It's a lot of time investments in like repeated, expensive, routinized bodily adornment and modification.
00:26:55.380And I'm guessing this is something that our friends over at Maintenance Phase always point out that like if this technique doesn't work for you, you're going to be told that you hard maxed incorrectly somehow and that you have to just hard max harder.
00:27:07.160That seems to be the idea. You know, the looks maxing constituent, right? The looks maxer has an idea of his future self that is higher status, romantically successful. And it's on the other side of all of this like pain and work and self-denial and like humiliation. And that's sort of like the pretext beyond a lot of their behaviors. But that's also an ever receding horizon.
00:27:36.060There's no other better self that you arrive at one day.
00:27:39.880You're just kind of stuck with this version of yourself that you're building over time and can't, like, unmake or change in two big fundamental ways.
00:27:48.820Well, except you can get yourself addicted to crystal meth, I guess.
00:28:31.640I think these, like, Discord, Kik, Twitch, they, like the incel movement, have, like, evolved and sort of expanded in their purview.
00:28:41.740These used to just basically be forums where, like, people would watch, like, let's be real, men, not people, men would watch each other play video games and, like, chat while they were doing that.
00:28:52.240And now it's that, but it also sort of is like broader, almost like a YouTube thing where there's a lot of like live content being created and recorded.
00:28:59.980And there's like simultaneous chats with live performers, but he's not like playing video games, really.
00:29:06.640That's right. Because, of course, the tweet we started with is him live streaming from inside a frat party, I believe, at some kind of university where then the aforementioned frame mogging occurred.
00:30:38.960And on that platform, he does a bunch of stuff, right?
00:30:43.040It's basically his whole life is live streamed.
00:30:45.020So everything he does is a kick video.
00:30:47.920And part of his sort of business model, which is quite successful, he makes more than $100,000 every month as a kick streamer in addition to like other sort of sponsorships and like deals he gets for this.
00:31:01.140But part of what he's doing is he is streaming so much content and producing so much content because he's being filmed basically all the time that he does what he calls clip farming or what is called clip farming, which is the idea that you just kind of flood the zone with shit and you try to do as much outrageous stuff in a day as you can in the hope that some of it will be clipped and will go viral as like a five second or 30 second little video on these other platforms.
00:31:26.180Right. So that's his approach to his life as an influencer.
00:31:30.740It's like everything is going online and almost by the law of averages, some of it will go viral.
00:31:37.280And they say that podcasting isn't a real job.0.99
00:32:00.940He'll like recruit a woman, like usually a woman who like has her own streaming aspirations or like a woman who's valuable on the like incel metric, like a hot girl from a sorority.
00:32:14.760And they'll go on a date together and he'll like insult her a lot.
00:32:19.240He does like a lot of little skits also, these like kind of like stiff, inorganic, pretty fictional clips that are sort of the standard form of vertical video.
00:32:29.140And in those who like try to quote unquote frame mog other men, which is where he just kind of like dominates them by looking good or by looking better than they do.
00:32:38.240So there's also like this weird passivity where he's not like very charming on camera, actually.
00:32:43.040He's sort of socially awkward, if anything, but this doesn't seem to be a huge problem for him, in part because so much of what he's doing just involves sort of being silent or just, like, staring.
00:33:30.060where they premiere the dentist system?
00:33:32.860This sounds like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia skit0.98
00:33:35.220this guy sounds like a complete sociopath0.95
00:33:36.860Yeah, it's like performative cruelty. There's not a ton going on. The videos, I watched a bunch of them and they're like kind of shockingly contentless. They've got this like jabbery, like nonsense language. There's like a lot of him at nightclubs. There's a lot of him like talking to the camera.0.98
00:33:57.280So, like, a big genre, actually, of his content are these videos where his followers, like, sometimes women, but overwhelmingly young men in their teens and early 20s will send him pictures of themselves.
00:34:10.160And then he tells them what is wrong with their faces and bodies and what surgeries they should get.
00:34:15.540But that's an extension of these kinds of forums, which was exactly that.
00:34:19.140It was, like, rank and rate each other.
00:34:20.740It was just men kind of assessing each other's beauty, right?
00:34:24.540It's interesting to me because like I understand that like rating people's beauty on a numerical system to be like something men do to women to bond together as men.
00:34:34.980Right. Like early Facebook, like hot or not, or like those odious little 4chan threads where guys would like upload pictures of girls from their like undergrad class or their workplace or their high school and be like, look at this fat broad.0.86
00:34:49.180and then all the guys would have a comradely maleness together
00:34:53.120about degrading women on these gendered terms
00:35:54.120But he almost didn't make it because he got arrested in Arizona at a nightclub because he had a fake ID and he had some drugs.
00:36:01.700And the rumor is that his sale was paid by Peter Thiel, who has taken an interesting clavicular as sort of an avatar of the transhumanist aspirations that Thiel has long sort of harbored.
00:36:13.520But then he also got arrested in Florida because for a video, he had compelled two young women to physically fight and they had gotten pretty hurt.
00:36:29.940He's actually had a bunch of run-ins with the law.
00:36:32.340And he's the media darling of the moment.0.84
00:36:34.980And part of that comes from editorial choices at these specific outlets that are choosing to sort of like rubberneck at this new grotesque weird thing that has come out of the post-maga, like online far right.0.78
00:36:47.160Partly he's a media darling because he's a curiosity, right?0.86
00:36:50.760But it's also because of his own quite savvy attention-seeking behavior.
00:36:55.840So even though he's new to this scale of his fame that he's had over the past couple months,
00:37:01.960Clavicular has been streaming online since 2021 when he was about 15.
00:37:06.820And he makes more than a million dollars a year from his streaming channels,
00:37:09.840which is a great time to ask our beloved listeners to please subscribe to our Patreon.
00:37:16.480We will not be bone smashing, but we'll do anything else.
00:38:50.580So a couple weeks after the Cybertruck incident, he posted a video of himself at, like, some kind of rancid nightclub in Miami.1.00
00:38:58.700And he was with Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
00:39:01.660I think, like, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, you can see as, like, kind of the two poles on, like, the manosphere sexual politics spectrum.
00:39:10.300But, like, it's not a broad spectrum, mind you.
00:39:12.780But, like, one of them has taken on the role of this, like, hypersexual dominant man.
00:39:19.180Like, Andrew Tate is running a media empire that basically amounts to, like, a pimp MLM.0.87
00:39:25.060And Fuentes is, like, sort of the opposite direction of the incel young man where he has, like, embraced his own disgustingness and self-hatred and has pivoted away from, like, trying to obtain sex with women.0.94
00:39:37.860and is now sort of, like, in this, like, pridefully abject, like, little, like, hate monger space.0.97
00:39:45.660But these are both, like, two really influential, really hateful guys.
00:39:48.460They were on a live stream at Da Club with Clavicular.
00:39:52.100And Clavicular posts this video of the three of them together, and they're all singing a Kanye West song.
00:39:57.980This is, like, recent Kanye, not, like, vintage original Kanye.
00:40:02.360And so I admit I had never heard of this song, but it's called Hail Hitler.
00:40:06.320And I gather that that's pretty much what the words are.
00:40:09.720So like one thing you'll read in these more credulous profiles is like clavicular is apolitical.
00:40:14.600He doesn't really have a career in politics.
00:40:16.120And then he's on live stream with Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate saying,
00:42:27.240Yeah, he drove into a bunch of women in a crowd.
00:42:30.240Yeah, and so the incels became a thing that people talked about because of these attacks.
00:42:36.240Before that, it had really sort of gone under the radar and just as a kind of a curiosity that people would talk about.
00:42:41.360And the other thing is that like the black-pilled incels sort of then used Elliot Rodger as kind of an identificatory figure, right?
00:42:48.760I think going ER was the phrase that they would use on these forums, and it was the threat that, you know, if their dating life didn't improve, they would do mass violence, right?
00:42:58.360And so that garnered a lot of attention, even though the group, of course, was extremely small, and the vast majority of people who participated in these online conversations seemed to have aged out of it, but it's still deeply frightening.
00:43:09.820Yeah. And there's, you know, sort of something about this pickup artist, incel to terrorist spectrum that is all grounded in a foundation of sexual entitlement. Right. Like a vision of women as owing sex to men and men as being sort of like deprived and justified and being angry and resentful at women who decline them sexual attention.
00:43:35.420so i think something that's really interesting about the looks maxing movement is that paying
00:43:43.280this much like assessing attention to your own body is a kind of like self-alienation and self
00:43:51.140objectification right like the looks maxer's body becomes an object that he assesses as if from the
00:43:58.220outside right he's uh taking on the gaze of a pretty cruel other like sometimes like given a
00:44:03.840literal avatar in these influencers like clavicular and he's applying that standard to his body that a
00:44:09.700body can like necessarily never meet yeah it's i mean this is true just to go historian here for
00:44:14.600a second this is true of all physiognomic analysis right you have to abstract away from the qualities
00:44:20.840that in here in a body and just turn it into this abstract icon of itself to analyze and it's in
00:44:26.180it's a form of extreme uh dehumanization right always and it also of course like you're doing
00:44:31.700this to yourself I think like very like crucially but you're also doing it to other people right so
00:44:35.640you're constantly assessing often in weird eugenic like pseudoscientific and like highly
00:44:41.720quantified terms like it's always a number the bodies of other people and it's describing what
00:44:47.340they're lacking how they're insufficient uh how they're better or worse than you it's like measuring
00:44:52.640status constantly in one of these videos I saw of clavicular he was like oh yeah I hate getting
00:44:59.900piss-mogged. What? Mogging is like a suffix that they use. Yeah. And apparently it's an acronym
00:45:05.620that began as AMOG, A-M-O-G, alpha male of the group. Yeah. And it means kind of dominating.
00:45:12.300And he's like, I hate getting piss-mogged. And this woman's like, what does that mean?0.95
00:45:15.380And he's like, you know, when you're at a urinal and the guy next to you has a bigger stream.
00:45:20.020Oh my God. And I'm like, oh, there's just like no moment of your day where you're not assessing
00:45:25.420your status, right? And like feeling more or less status all the time, which I think is like a soul
00:45:33.220disease to think of the world that way. I think that is like a trap from which some people never
00:45:38.740escape, but it's like here driven down to like even the most minor interactions, you know, like
00:45:45.540everything is a status measure, which sounds really, you know, exhausting, honestly. It's also
00:45:51.760a way of looking at the world that like really does draw like pretty apparently from racism and
00:45:56.800eugenics right so like they use these terms of subhuman and mongrel they're often linked to0.51
00:46:03.360right-wing eugenicist ideals about like the chosen elite being able to reproduce i think it's worth
00:46:08.820saying that there have been like young black men who've tried to like sort of break in and have
00:46:13.560found themselves just sort of be pelted with racial slurs i don't think that this is a place
00:46:19.260where, like, young Black men should spend a lot of their time prioritizing, like, equal access.
00:46:23.660I don't think that's, like, a righteous new struggle for the, like, the Black freedom movement.
00:46:27.640But it does show the extent of the investment in bigotry and hatred and, like, supremacist
00:46:33.860understandings of the world that they, you know, take their would-be fellow travelers and attack
00:46:39.420them on these racist terms. The attempt to, like, forge a multiracial male supremacist0.60
00:46:45.280coalition in the manosphere is something I think is really interesting because there are tons of0.67
00:46:50.440men of color who want to be a part of these spaces and who are like motivated by misogynist
00:46:55.080resentment and sexual entitlement. But the white men in these spaces are very interested in0.85
00:47:00.220preserving a racial hierarchy among men and are really sometimes resistant to integrating these
00:47:05.600guys as equals and are basically always using rhetorics of white supremacy in how they define
00:47:10.900men's value. So that's like another little thread I think we should pull on maybe on a future
00:47:15.440episode. Although, I mean, like with Elliot Rodger, the interesting thing is he was half Asian,0.75
00:47:20.080which he he believes in all the white supremacist stuff. And he thought that his lack of success
00:47:25.380had nothing to do with the fact that he was apparently incredibly off-putting and would
00:47:29.060just like fly into rages when he saw like happy couples, but that it had to do with his partly0.84
00:47:34.540Asian heritage. Yeah, there's a really interesting strain we wanted to do when we started the
00:47:38.580podcast, an episode on M.R. Asians, like the sort of resentment of Asian men who feel that the kind0.70
00:47:46.200of racism they're subjected to like emasculates them and like decide to blame this on like
00:47:52.400usually like Asian women who date white guys. That's like a recurring theme. We never like
00:47:57.200found the right time to do it, but maybe we should come back to it. Yeah, maybe. But this
00:48:30.340What they want to do is not express and be recognized for their inherent genetic inferiority, but to ascend out of their degraded default state into an achieved state of worthiness and perfection, like the giraffe who in Lamarck's delusional imagination of how it works just like stretched her neck long enough that when she finally had children, they were suddenly born with longer necks.
00:48:52.380It's like the desirable trait can be acquired, right?
00:48:55.980It's not an accident of nature or like a roll of the dice of DNA.
00:49:01.040It's something you can do if you put in the work, if you have the volition.
00:49:04.760And that means that like the artificiality and the difficulty and the unnaturalness of the looks-maxing ideal, all of this is actually like part of the point.
00:49:15.480Yeah, which is kind of connected to Mar-a-Lago face where we said the same thing.
00:49:18.860Yeah. And I'm glad you bring up Mar-a-Lago face, Adrienne, because one question I had about this stuff is like, isn't this just what women and girls do already?
00:49:30.120I think like part of the media appeal of looks maxing and it's like narcissistic nihilism is just plain like rubbernecking at the grotesque. But part of it is also the strangeness of seeing men do something degrading to their own health and dignity that is usually the sole purview of women.0.66
00:49:48.580Like, nobody gets, as Clavicular got, a series of magazine profiles for telling women that the route to heterosexual success is to sacrifice their comfort, health, and self-respect for the sake of being beautiful.
00:50:02.540Nobody gets a magazine profile for telling women that because for women, getting that advice is completely banal.0.68
00:50:10.000The monstrousness of self-harm and the service of good looks becomes obvious when men do it.0.95
00:50:17.380When women do it, the monstrousness is made invisible by how ubiquitous and banal it is.0.99
00:50:23.240It's a condition that is acceptable for those at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, but seems really unacceptable and disturbing for those at the top of it.0.99
00:50:31.360And I think one way to understand what's going on with looksmaxers is to look to, like, radical feminist critiques of beauty and fashion.
00:50:39.040Because I think that some of the same principles of the operation of this sort of, like, complex of standards and demands and fantasies that is now being enacted on men in these subcultures is very similar to what is enacted on women and girls in the dominant culture.
00:50:57.160So, Adrian, have you ever heard of somebody named Sandra Lee Bartke?
00:51:03.040So, Sandra Lee Bartke was a feminist philosopher.1.00
00:51:05.380her. She was working in the dominance feminism tradition. She died in 2016. But I have gone to0.99
00:51:12.740her work a few times during the Trump era to try and use her work to, like, articulate what I think
00:51:17.820is going on in sort of, like, the gender politics of our time. She wrote this book, Femininity and
00:51:22.900Domination Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. But for this episode, I reread
00:51:28.580an essay of hers that I hadn't read in, like, 15 years called Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation.
00:51:35.380Where she is just, like, talking about the operation of the fantasy of being beautiful and the various sort of self-harm, but also, like, pleasure and aspiration and, like, libidinal investment that women wind up pursuing in the effort to become beautiful and to sort of find their place in a vision of, like, heterosexuality that demands they have very, like, rigorous kinds of bodies.
00:52:05.020And she is talking about how when you're subjected to these kinds of beauty standards, you wind up developing an assessing gaze on your own body that both alienates you from it and also renders it into an object with like a low market value, right?
00:52:20.400Like a commodity really with a low market value.
00:52:24.800She talks about, like, one way of looking at this phenomenon as being the Marxist concept of alienated labor as being, like, something that happens when women are alienated from their own bodies.
00:52:35.720But she also says that taking on this own gaze towards your own body restores some of your own sense of power by allowing you to master and identify with the perspective of the forces that oppress you.
00:52:51.060So when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, assessing whether you're like frame mogging or whether your thighs are too fat or whatever it might be, you're both subject and object at the same time.
00:53:02.360But the subject that is looking at your body in a mirror and assessing it, it's not exactly you because your perspective on your own body has been replaced or supplanted or like not allowed to really form in the first place.
00:53:17.260and instead the perspective from which you are assessing your body is an amalgamation of a vast
00:53:22.920complex of fashion and beauty standards and demands so i wanted to quote from her this is
00:53:29.560not a very strongly analytical paragraph but there is this one quote that's kind of famous
00:53:35.720she goes this is sandra barkey i must cream my body with a thousand creams each designed to act
00:53:41.680against a different deficiency, oil it, pumice it, powder it, shave it, pluck it, depleate it,
00:53:48.440deodorize it, ooze it into just the right foundation, reduce it overall through spartan
00:53:53.980dieting, or else pump it up with silicone. I must try to re-sculpture it in the ideal
00:53:58.640through dozens of punishing exercises. If home measures fail, I must take it to the figure
00:54:03.920salon or inevitably, for those who can afford it, the plastic surgeon. There is no dead time
00:54:09.660in my day, during which I do not stand under the imperative to improve myself. While waiting for
00:54:15.700the bus, I am to suck the muscles of my abdomen in and to lend them tone. While taking on the0.96
00:54:22.260telephone, I am bitten to describe circles in the air with my feet to slim down my ankles.
00:54:27.680All of these things must be done prior to the application of makeup, an art which aims, once
00:54:32.880again, to hide a myriad of deficiencies. The fashion-beauty complex produces in woman an1.00
00:54:38.580estrangement from her bodily being. On the one hand, she is it and scarcely allowed to be anything1.00
00:54:44.000else. On the other hand, she must exist perpetually at a distance from her physical self, fixated at
00:54:50.300this distance in a permanent posture of disapproval. Wow. This, like, litany of things that women are
00:54:58.400supposed to do as their cosmetic or physical interventions that are time-consuming, expensive,0.88
00:55:04.220invasive, painful, like dubiously effective, and even potentially dangerous. Like this would be
00:55:10.300cringe for any feminist to write right now, right? It would be considered banal or like1.00
00:55:14.360well-covered territory, but something like that litany of procedures and demands is in every
00:55:21.460single looks-maxing article. Yeah. So I think part of what is fascinating about looks-maxing
00:55:26.900is it's men acting like women. Yeah. And one question we ask is like, what is it about0.99
00:55:32.100about this historical moment and this situation that is making men act like women,
00:55:37.600that's turning men into women a little bit.
00:55:57.180It's like these are things that you do instead of having a job,
00:56:00.180instead of going out into the world and doing other things.
00:56:02.840Like, it's part of what is meant to keep you in place.
00:56:06.320And that's, of course, not as obvious as it would have been when this advice was first given.
00:56:10.280I mean, I think, like, a lot of women are doing, you know, 60-hour weeks and still going to Pilates
00:56:14.940and still not eating more than, like, 1,500 calories a day or whatever it is. Yeah.0.72
00:56:18.960Yeah, but it comes out of a moment where we don't acknowledge incompatibility of those two things, right?
00:56:24.740And I think that that's because the beauty industry, as it exists right now, was sort of created as a rearguard action, I feel like, in the immediate post-war in order precisely to, like, limit women's forays into independence.0.66
00:56:40.260And, you know, it seems like today we just force people to do both.
00:56:44.960But it seems to me that there's a complementarianism at work in what Bartke is describing, and that's gone away, it seems to me.
00:56:51.580Yeah, and I think there's something that is, you know, historically particular about this generation of men is not just that, like, women are independent or they've made more advances towards independence.
00:57:06.560It's that this is, like, kind of the first generation in which women did not really need men for survival with anything like the ubiquity that they once did.
00:57:15.340and so men have lost the status affirmation and the ego boost of being able to have a wife who
00:57:23.580depends on him and must be therefore his domestic subordinate right like look it's a popular like
00:57:29.740feminist catchphrase to say that feminism helps men too and patriarchy hurts men too but i'm not0.86
00:57:36.480totally sure that's true at least not in like strict material terms because back when women0.99
00:57:41.860were kept dependent and unable to support themselves,
00:57:45.120their oppression meant that being a man
00:57:47.220used to just kind of come with a free maid, you know?0.98
00:59:12.000And men have lost that as the hierarchy that places them over women has lost a lot of its, like, material enforcement, right?
00:59:21.220Now, companionship as well as, like, domestic labor and sexual access, that's something men have to actually compete for, kind of for the first time.
00:59:30.680And one way to see looks maxing is as men responding to this new demand
00:59:35.800and the withdrawal of their male status in like a maximally petulant way.
00:59:58.060But also, I think it's useful to like put these guys in the broader context of our historical moment when like all kinds of sources of esteem and respect are being foreclosed, not just from men, but also from women.0.59
01:00:13.400Like upward mobility is a joke. Your vote usually doesn't mean anything. Politics is impossible and completely foreclosed as a like point of struggle or like moral meaning making. And trying to keep to a set of values largely looks like this like feudal enterprise that will only court failure and punishment and humiliation, right?
01:00:37.380It doesn't make sense for kids this age to look forward to a bright future, and it doesn't really make sense to believe in anything.
01:00:45.260It doesn't make sense to feel that you're special or possessed of any kind of, like, unique destiny from anybody else.
01:00:52.080And the licks-maxing and the broader manosphere really emphasize domination.
01:01:00.500To other people's standards, to other people's judgment, to specific men that they admire and try to emulate and, like, will accept insults from.
01:01:10.200So I think that the looks-maxing rank and file, the guys who, like, watch the videos and they leave the comments and they buy the supplements,
01:01:19.180I think they're not really looking to become domineering or to, like, gain control over their lives in a world that has denied them opportunities for upward mobility and control.
01:01:29.180That's kind of like the standard line about the manosphere is like, oh, they can't control anything.
01:01:36.400I'm not exactly sure that that's what's happening here.
01:01:39.180I think what these guys are doing is complying with their own degradation.0.99
01:01:43.800I think they're buying in to this idea that they're pieces of shit who don't have any kind of claim on a more like robust or meaningful source of dignity.0.99
01:01:55.420I think they're looking for ways to submit.1.00
01:03:48.200Like, we've been talking about looks maxing as an outgrowth of this incel culture and of these men and boys turning to these extreme measures and nihilistic worldview as a result of their inability to find romantic love, right?
01:04:01.400And there is a kind of shared, wounded masculinity that they indulge in.0.83
01:04:07.780And the one group of people that doesn't seem to be showing up a lot in these videos is women.
01:04:13.700It's really much more about like being impressed by other men, impressing other men, et cetera, et cetera.
01:04:19.200The more or less standard account of looks maxers and the incel world more broadly is that like these men's misogyny is a result of their resentment at the fact that they feel they have to do this, right?0.53
01:04:32.660They have no other choice but to hurt ourselves for female approval.
01:04:37.180And that reflects badly on women, even though like we're the ones hitting ourselves in the face with hammers, right?
01:04:43.160It's not the misogyny that motivates these guys looks-maxing in the first place.
01:04:47.640It's the resentment that they resort to when looks-maxing doesn't work.
01:04:51.960But I don't think that's exactly what's going on here.
01:05:09.880But, like, also I think incel, by this point, that's a term that's two decades old.
01:05:15.520And that online subculture has spawned a much bigger manosphere movement in which that, like, signature incel misogynist contempt has sort of broadened and morphed into a much bigger array of male supremacist postures, prominently like a status-obsessed dominance-based masculinity.
01:05:34.380But though all of this came from incels, and though many of those participating will probably identify themselves that way, there are no longer bright lines, I don't think, between incel culture and other misogynist cultures or incel cultures and other parts of the right.
01:05:49.640It's no longer really current or coherent to talk about incels as a discrete part of the right-wing internet or the male internet.
01:05:57.300Yeah, and partly that's just because, as you've been laying out, what they think they're owed by women far exceeds sex, right? Like, there's something there that, like, it's this kind of measurelessness of the demands. As you say, like, it's almost like a turning back time, but not even that. It's like this completely fantastical world that they would like around them. And it's like, well, yeah, the ability to have sex with someone is just the tip of a gigantic pyramid of expectations and demands that you want to have met.
01:06:25.680And so, like, the celibate part is a very small part of it.
01:06:29.460Yeah, Judith Butler calls this the phantasm of anti-gender politics.
01:06:33.480Like, the professed or articulated grievance is I want to have sex with women and I am not doing so.0.61
01:06:39.160But that's actually, like, kind of a stand-in for a bigger grievance, which is, like, I wish I was born in a different world or I wish I was a different kind of person or I wish I didn't feel this, like, crippling doubt or, like, anger at my own inadequacy and smallness, right?
01:06:52.460But also I think incels can't be identified as a discrete subculture anymore in part because of the extraordinary success of their message and the depth of their influence.
01:07:02.980Like incels' values and their principles and their priorities and their vocabulary and their habits, these now dominate many, many online spaces.
01:07:11.260And not all of these guys are like quote-unquote incels as we would traditionally understand them.
01:07:15.640If you're coming from an understanding of incels as they functioned in like 2011, they're having sex or they could be having sex but are choosing not to or they're having lots of sex and documenting that everywhere for other men's like witness and validation.
01:07:29.700Those are not like involuntarily celibate men.
01:07:32.200They are men who are carrying on the incel ideological project.
01:07:36.700So like we're all incels now in that sense.
01:08:40.880But even more importantly than dominating women and asserting status over women, sex is a way to assert and gain status over other men.0.96
01:08:50.420Other men knowing that he can or is having sex with women is the draw of having sex with women for it looks maxer.0.69
01:10:09.620To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex, fucking exclusively with the other sex, that is to say, women.1.00
01:10:17.460All or almost all of that which pertains to love most straight men reserve exclusively for other men.0.98
01:10:23.040The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence, and love they desire, those are, overwhelmingly, other men.
01:10:39.140In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity, or paternalism.0.59
01:10:43.560What passes for honor is removal to the pedestal.1.00
01:10:46.860From women, they want devotion, service, and sex.0.99
01:10:49.680Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic.0.99
01:10:53.040She wrote that in the 1970s. And like, look, it's a common bit among straight people to accuse outwardly misogynist men like these guys in the looks maxing movement of being secretly gay. Right. They're like, if you hate women so much, maybe you're really into dudes, you know, etc. I think that accusation is basically homophobic.
01:11:12.500But I think it's homophobia as a distraction from what's really wrong with heterosexuality, right?
01:11:19.520It's them trying to distract from something dark and true about heterosexuality.1.00
01:11:23.200And that is that, in fact, it's perfectly possible to fuck women when you hate women.1.00
01:11:28.200Like, millions of men do that every day.1.00
01:11:31.300But I do think it's worth pressing a little more on the idea of homoeroticism in these looks-maxing communities.
01:11:39.140because theirs is a culture where men perform their own beauty for an audience of other men
01:11:45.020in which men assess the beauty of other men in which men feel and express admiration for the
01:11:51.660beauty of other men and spend like truly extensive amounts of time seeking the approval of other men
01:11:57.140and like look not to be vulgar but something you do see a lot in the more like trolly comments on0.99
01:12:01.740these looks maxing videos is guys saying like this shit is gay and i think there's kind of something0.97
01:12:07.180to that and adrian i want to ask you maybe to like close this out by bringing in eve sedgwick0.99
01:12:13.180ah i was wondering where they were going there yes yes this is the homosocial triangle the idea
01:12:19.880that sedgwick developed this in respect to fiction but i think this holds true pretty generally
01:12:25.360about you know homosocial bonds that are formed through a woman often through the competition for
01:12:34.140woman, but it can be anything. And this idea that you create intense homosocial bonds by having a0.97
01:12:41.320woman in the mix, but as this kind of non-object, right? She's a sort of vanishing mediator that
01:12:46.560really sort of pales before the real point of the interaction, which is the homosocial one.0.99
01:12:52.680And the way I would explain it here, frankly, is just think about the amount of time a person who0.99
01:12:59.280really believes in this looks maxing stuff spends actually interacting with the people who are
01:13:05.100supposed to be the target audience of that looks maxing versus how much time they spend either on
01:13:10.680the looks maxing itself or in having it reviewed and reacted to by other dudes online if you were
01:13:18.360to sort of graph on a pie chart how they spend their time you can see exactly the kind of dynamic0.93
01:13:24.000that Sedgwick is describing, which is, yeah, the women seem to be there.0.98