This whole thing is pretty weird to me. Many of the men in the documentary are avowed misogynists, but guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.
What confuses me - on both the ‘incel’ and ‘mainstream liberal’ (not that those are the only two views, but they’re the two most commonly represented in this debate) is that both sides are taking something out of these stories and interactions that isn’t true.
Let me illustrate:
The handsome, outgoing and tall 19 year old ‘Clavicular’ flirts with and hits on the young women outside Miami bars and clubs on camera. He says some outrageous things and also happens to have been an incel / looksmaxxing forum dweller. According to the incels this somehow vindicates a particular strand of contempt for women. But this young man’s misogyny and performative meanness to women isn’t why he gets laid! He gets laid because, presumably, he is tall, handsome and outgoing. A very handsome and charming 6’4 man could just as well be a consummate feminist and do just as well. If the accusation is that women looking to hook up with guys outside clubs in Miami prioritize looks over the politics and social views of the men they hook up with, OK? As the joke about white nationalist men with non-white wives goes, this is not a gender-specific concept.
And does this really mean women in general are particularly shallow? Leaving aside the fact that may of these streamers primarily hookup with OnlyFans content creators (ie sex workers), even the “girl in a tight dress outside a nightclub in Miami at 1am willing to talk on camera to a guy with an entourage of posturing young men” isn’t the ‘average’ woman or even young woman, it’s a very much filtered group. It’s like dating only people you meet at Burning Man and complaining they all smell bad, are polyamorous, and have STDs.
The second issue, the banality of the progressive or mainstream critique of these guys, is just as obvious - the primary victims of these men aren’t young women, who mostly don’t care or have nothing to do with them (unless they have an OnlyFans to advertise) - they’re the young men who donate their hard earned money to them on stream, or who spend thousands of dollars on scam courses or fake ‘trading’ apps where nobody but the house (and the influencer taking a cut of every rube he directs its way) ever makes any money. It’s that short Mexican guy from the documentary who thinks that if he’s only a bit more masculine, more misogynist, more alpha, he can have the life of the tall rich white guy.
Many of these streamers stream 7 days a week all day, that $10 a stream adds up fast, there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.
Most important thing for what? I think a reasonable framing is that looks are very important, especially when seeking a partner (but also generally, the halo effect, etc). That’s just biology. But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.
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