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Regarding looksmaxxing and body modifications, I would like to present a case of someone who does not indentify as a looksmaxxer, but nevertheless has made a career out of making sweeping, permanent modifications to his looks. Specifically, I would like to talk about f1nn5ter, a Youtuber and Twitch streamer who started out making Minecraft videos, but quickly transitioned (figuratively at first) into just-chatting light fetish content, eventually culminating in a femboy focused only fans account.
You see, f1nn5ter, was incredibly good at passing as a woman. He could do his makeup, put on fake breasts, and do his hair. Once he was done, especially in the right lighting, you would be hard pressed to tell the he was actually a man until you heard his voice. He quickly gained a following that absolutely loved this. A solid mixture of LGBT, trans-folk, people not quite sure if they were trans or not, and several who gained some amount of sexual pleasure from seeing him dress up as a woman and act all bratty and submissive on stream. It turned out that some of his fans were willing to pay a lot of money to keep him that way, and so the crossdressing became an increasingly permanent feature of the stream. Over time, the streamer became increasingly involved with trans advocacy, gained a trans girl(?)friend, started microdosing estrogen, and eventually fully transitioned (literally this time) to genderfluid(?), meaning that his/her/their pronouns are subject to change constantly.
Recently, F1nn took a step up by undergoing face feminization surgery. Essentially shaving off some of his bones in the face in order to appear more feminine. As a reminder, he already passed quite well. Here is a tweet he made 3 years ago (without the fake breasts), before officially starting hormones and transitioning.
The culture war angle is two-fold: First, it seems weird that people go so hard on clavicular when stuff like this is accepted (at least by the online left). Prior to transitioning, the guy experimented with estrogen with no guidance from a doctor just to try and look more androgynous. Now, he underwent surgery, risking complications and a long recovery period just to appear slightly more female. But this is apparently okay because trans. I am split on this. On the one hand, I think this promotes a dangerous lifestyle. A slippery slope of increasingly significant medical procedures just to make yourself look slightly closer to your ideal. Never accepting yourself as you are, always chasing perfection. He apparently considered straight up getting bones removed, although the surgeon talked him out of it for the time being. On the other hand, I think the transhumanist angle here is quite cool and that surgeries like this are a good thing if they dramatically improve your life.
My second issue is with the pronouns. Reading the subreddit, people don't just use his pronouns interchangeably. They use them interchangeably within the same sentences. "She uses he/him pronouns!" is an actual serious quote from there. While I find it impressive from a writing perspective (and interesting as a kind of performance art) that you can still sort of follow along if you know what they are doing, I think this is kind of insane. Like, a frequent talking point from trans activists is that the pronoun thing is easy. But once you start throwing nonbinaries, questioners, and genderfluids into the mix this stops being the case. Having three or more sets of pronouns that you swap between at your leisure and just expect others to adhere to strikes me as sadistic. A kind of dominance play in which you take pleasure in observing others put all their effort into following your rules.
Of course, F1nn is not a good trans representative, being a pornstar and all, but I do think he represents a good part of why the online trans communities seem so weird. This kind of rhetoric and advocacy is not exactly uncommon on the internet, and it is hard to look at it and not see some kind of social contagion or slippery slope when all people do is encourage it.
There are lots of (right wing) people who would agree this youtuber is unhealthy. The reason mainstream left-wingers don't is just because of politics. The only asymmetry is that more people attack Clav. Part of this is that he is far more popular (than this youtuber I hadn't heard of before). The other part is that there is no high-status anti-feminist messaging in culture.
A lot of feminism's revealed core (that men are fundamentally bad/dangerous, sex is harmful and degrading to women, anti-man family courts, etc.) is not disputed by the conservative Right. It would take hard reactionary anti-feminism politization -- trans insanity but reversed -- to get sizable support for Clav's looksmaxxing (and the worldview that he signal-boosts).
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I don't follow f1nn very closely so this is all stuff I've picked up secondhand in the instances when trans Twitter gets really mad at her for reasons I don't understand. It's funny that you see the pronouns thing as "a dominance play" on f1nn's part because the view in some corners of trans femme Twitter is that it's a kind of degrading concession to a cis audience to accept any and all pronouns and she should get some self respect and insist on she/her.
This is not something I know much about but sometimes other trans women who have done sex work will write about how what is desired from men who are into hiring trans women is a mix of sex characteristics and that they enjoy seeing the "transformation". I've heard it said that once they get surgeries and have been on hormones for years the demand goes way down because they're less of a novelty.
F1nn5ter is probably the highest paid trans sex worker of all time and while she has a more mixed audience for the streams where she does makeup and stuff my guess is the money comes from men who buy her porn. For that reason I think we might learn a lot more about what men desire in trans women, then about the typical trans woman, by analyzing f1nn.
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There is a strange tension in contemporary western culture. On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization. On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves. Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).
I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires. This is interestingly a complete inversion of the more negative view of the "passions" which most premodern Western thinkers had (both pagan and Christian). Traditionally passions are considered to be fleeting, unstable and for a good life one needs to learn how to control the passions lest the passions control you. I don't know much about eastern thought, but my superficial stereotype of Buddhism also includes a negative view of the passions. Much philosophical work has been done and is being done with regards to the question of what a self is or whether a self even exists and I will not make a judgment on that question in this comment, but at least I agree with the ancients that the passions are a particularly implausible and silly candidate for locating one's self.
This unspoken interpretation of self-actualization as maximally indulging ones passions is in my opinion the cause of much of the cultural woes of contemporary Western society. Passions being fleeting, unstable and insatiable, it is no coincidence that our culture is reaching ever sillier ways of actualizing ones true self. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". Once we get people telling us that amputating perfectly healthy parts of their body is the only way they will ever be able to really be themselves or pursuing literal vampirism to extend oneself throughout time, we should maybe pause and think what on earth went wrong in our culture. I believe to recover from this madness we need to regain a sense of some sort of human nature and when our passions point at things that are at odds with human nature, one's true self is to be found in human nature and not in said passions. Things only get their beauty and meaning and identity from their place as a part of a meaningful whole. In other words, we need to recover the value of limits, moderation and propriety, but limits are anathema to a Left that seeks to emancipate us from all hierarchy and a Techno-Right that wants to move fast and break things.
From the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne:
"His Power bounded, greater is in might,
Than if let loose, ‘twere wholly infinite.
He could have made an endless sea by this,
But then it had not been a sea of bliss.
Did waters from the centre to the skies
Ascend, ’twould drown whatever else we prize.
The ocean bounded in a finite shore,
Is better far because it is no more.
No use nor glory would in that be seen,
His power made it endless in esteem.
Had not the Sun been bounded in its sphere,
Did all the world in one fair flame appear,
And were that flame a real Infinite
’Twould yield no profit, splendor, nor delight.
Its corps confined, and beams extended be
Effects of Wisdom in the Deity.
One star made infinite would all exclude,
An earth made infinite could ne’er be viewed:
But one being fashioned for the other’s sake,
He, bounding all, did all most useful make
And which is best, in profit and delight
Tho’ not in bulk, they all are infinite."
This was never the case. If you decided to be gun loving religious republican, you were never celebrated for your unique identity. As usual, it was word game since the beginning, where the only legitimate identity is the progressive one. Every other identity is unauthentic, performative and driven by false consciousness and internalized isms and phobias such racism, misogyny and whatnot. As James Lindsay said, activists share your vocabulary but not your dictionary. It goes with all other words including the words I used, but also words like ally, representation, violence, inclusion or even democracy and myriads of other words.
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As someone who has massively struggled with how I look in a non-trans way;
This could not be less true for me and my experiences. If you have problems with yourself aesthetically, you are roundly shamed for trying to get help in fixing them. Vanity is bad! And vanity operations and cosmetic surgery are superfluous! And shameful! You need to go to therapy to have some boring middle aged woman who could not be more removed from current culture talk at you until you agree there's nothing wrong with you just to make her shut up!
Becoming okay with being your ugly self is the ONLY option presented to you if you have non-trans related dysmorphia. Anything else and you're being shallow, you're being vain. And nobody cares what you look like! (This is the biggest lie of all time, I get treated MUCH MUCH better by randos ever since I fixed myself up and became beautiful.)
I dislike trans healthcare because if I had claimed to be trans, I would have been immediately shuttled off down a route of all the surgery and other interventions I wanted. But because I don't want to grow fried-egg man-tits and cut my dick off, I got nothing but being told to make peace with an ugly body I despised.
Yeah I was thinking mostly of trans stuff when I said that. I agree with you that our culture is very hypocritical and incoherent when it comes to this, which is the very tension I was trying to point out. Which is why the very sentence after the one you quote says:
I'm happy to add ugly men to that list (or ugly women when they can't frame their vanity as transgressive feminism trying to dismantle the patriarchy trying to control their sexuality or something like that). I have no clue what your personal struggles were of course, but I will say fixing some sort of obvious deformity or a scar or something to me is qualitatively very different than trying to look like another gender, trying to look half your age or trying to have cartoon action figure musculature or unnatural gigantic boobs or something. Depending on the specifics I might well still come down on the "make peace with the body you were given" side, but I have much more sympathy for somebody who feels insecure about some unattractive feature of their body and just wants to look normal, compared to people who want to look like a transhuman abomination.
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This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.
The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.
It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.
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I think this is less about "looksmaxxing" and more f1nn5ter just gradually realizing that 1) she is trans (and apparently autistic based on some youtube vid titles), 2) wants to be the Gen Z soft porn equivalent of someone like Natalie Mars and 3) has the means and genetics to actually achieve that. Ie. she wants to be a trans
pornstaronlyfans ”influencer” who actually passes and looks pretty at the first glance instead of immediately triggering "this is weird, ugly and creeps me the fuck out"-reflex in people.This does have an interesting intersection with the pronoun discussion: What would the anti-trans people call someone who looks like a woman, in the future presumably sounds like a woman, acts like an autistic woman but has a penis? I’m on neither side but my immediate instinct is to go with ”she”, at least if I don’t hear her voice, because my brain first sees a cute girl-next-door before conscious thought comes into the picture.
That's a whole other question, because autism in women allegedly presents differently than autism in men. If you mean the kind of trans autistic person who has male-coded interests, then that is not behaving like an autistic woman, that is behaving like an autistic man who happens to also identify as a trans woman.
Ah, no. Typical autistic MTFs are a whole different thing. I do mean actual autistic women (who I happen to know a couple of IRL).
I’m not saying they’d pass like one after extended discussion but in casual contact that might well happen (provided they actually tried).
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"Acts like an autistic woman" is the, er, rub. I don't know that I've ever actually encountered this. IME, they code as autistic men. In theory, the internet is the perfect venue to be your true self without anyone getting hung up on your physical attributes but I frequently find I clock a transwoman online the instant I see a female pronoun.
"Wait, this nerd is a she? Oh, ok."
Of course, it's hard to estimate how many have slipped under the radar. But I've yet to have the experience of concluding someone was a woman, and then being surprised to learn they were born a man.
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Related is the "What is a woman?" question. Normally used to dunk on leftists, it can be used in a ship-of-Theseus sense. When have you undergone enough hormonal replacement, voice training, and surgeries to be more female than male?
I know the most hardcore anti-transers will say the only thing that matters is your birth sex. But as you said, the heuristic for most people is just "Does she appear female?" Which lends some credence to the Judith Butler theory that gender is primarily a performance and thus "Am I a man or a woman" is determined by the actor and the audience.
The median position if I had to vaguely estimate society's views. Certainly not the median position on reddit or other online spaces which are far outside the cultural mainstream.
This might be a matter of social circle. Most people I have met care way more about your presentation than your birth sex. If they get to know you as a woman and believe you are a woman, then the revelation that you are actually trans won't make them suddenly think of you as male. The only exception are anti-trans activists.
What kind of social circle is this? It sounds like one profoundly unrepresentative of Western society as a whole.
Mostly young people who are too concerned about their own circumstances to really care about other people's pronouns. They just want to live and let live, and only struggles with trans stuff insofar as the presentation of the trans person is clearly different from their claimed gender (admittedly happens more than you would think), or if the trans person somehow makes their life worse. Also older leftists, but their stance is obvious.
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Are you sure that is the position of the most hardcore? Might be the plurality position.
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Well, that's the thing. "Looking like a woman" is a heuristic, not a definition. It's reasonable to assume that something that walks like a duck and talks like a duck is a duck. But the existence of entities that resemble ducks but are not in fact ducks doesn't mean that our definition of the word "duck" is lacking: it just means that the heuristic we were using sometimes produces false positives, and that's okay. Heuristics by their very nature are imperfect. Definitions, by contrast, are supposed to be definitive. "Anyone who looks like a woman is a woman" is a bad definition by virtue of being circular, and it wouldn't even satisfy most trans activists as it makes trans identification contingent on passing. It also leads to absurd conclusions, like the idea that a man wearing makeup and a wig becomes a woman by so doing, but then reverts back to being a man once he takes them off.
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I mean as a transhumanist but also as a liberalist, tbh I'm all for this. People can do anything they want with their pronouns inside the bubble that they created, maintain and advertise. There is a case to be made for the corrosive influence of media fame, but I don't see the pronoun thing here. If you follow f1, I can only assume you know what they're about. At any rate, nobody forces you to be there, it's not a public space, and no benefit is even accrued from your presence so that you may be pushed into obligation.
I'd slightly rephrase the saying: As it harm none against their intent, without their knowledge, or out of coercion, do what you will. Intentionally and knowingly allowing yourself to be harmed should not bar others from action, and I assume this clarification was only left out of the law because the thought of people harming themselves intentionally as a moral argument was considered too absurd.
I agree, and Clavicular. The problems are 1) being promoted to people, especially kids, over more "normal" celebrities; and 2) being motivated to push beyond where they'd naturally stop, in ways they end up regretting. Both mainly caused by social media.
What is normal? What is the ideal path for each individual? I don't think either of these influencers are normal, but neither do I think the ideas of anyone I've seen promote censorship. Even good-intentioned censors: determining what is best for others is hard, hence why I think softer methods are better (for starters, not promoting these influencers to children against the wishes of their own parents; censoring them from children is OK, but shouldn't be necessary).
I would caveat, only when it is beyond reasonable doubt against your sane interests, because what defines harm? For example, suicide treatment that someone may enter initially voluntarily is OK, because the people who it saved believe so, but people who diligently consistently want to die should be entitled to MAID. Or in this case, both trans and looksmaxxing adults should be allowed gender-affirming care, with a bit of friction to ensure it's what they really want (unless obvious); because it's their choice, and there's a not-insignificant chance they won't regret it.
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I think the main risk is in advertising the lifestyle to others through success and streams. There seems to be a subculture where the ideal body is one you can only achieve through chemical modification, often without the aid of a doctor. Specifically people who don't qualify for gender dysphoria taking estrogen in order to appear more androgynous and attain the ideal femboy physique for longer. It bothers me that this kind of thing seems widely accepted within these spaces, and is not challenged by leftists outside them.
It's not specific to the femboys; how many of those bodybuilder influencers are on steroids? You think those instagram girlies haven't had any work done?
There tends to at least be some degree of pushback within those circles. Even amongst bodybuilders, being on steroids is not uncontroversial.
Well yes, I agree that they lie about being on steroids. But plenty of those physiques are not available naturally.
Anyone making money off being visibly jacked and isn't subject to a drug testing regime is roided, especially if they say they are not.
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To be honest, if I had a body a bit (a lot) more suited to this, I might be into it myself, lol. It's incredibly unclear to me to what extent this is an existing impulse being revealed by new affordances or something being carved by a hyperstimulating media landscape. It's also possible to me that the vast majority of human culture is already something that was carved by the vast forces of yesteryear. So I don't know. But at the end of the day, I'm libertarian enough that I'll come down on the side of "state funded trans healthcare should be rare and gated and proven by unbiased studies or not available at all; and estrogen, puberty blockers and appearance surgeries should be regulated, reviewed, generic, and over the counter." Every generation has something they are silly about to the point of harm. It's still not gonna be as bad as cigarettes or opiates.
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The online left's problem with Clavicular is that he's part of the manosphere. That is the bottom line and his surgeries are ancillary to it, at most. It's just terrible optics for progressive gender values when a neurotic out-and-out misogynist influencer faces little trouble picking up young attractive women in Miami. Acknowledging this would vindicate incels, in their mind.
It is disturbing and it comes with the territory. Social reinforcement, financial incentive and ideological capture create a feedback loop where "just a little more feminisation" becomes the rational next step. Add in a heavy dose of victim complex, and toxic acceptance of the most extreme variety of "self-expression" becomes necessary to prove the concept. ""Look man, no offense, but that sounds unhinged" sounds awfully close to what the transphobes tell me all the time. How can I repeat that line while being trans myself?"
Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid? Birth rates in socially conservative countries and communities clearly prove that to be incorrect regardless of what ‘Clavicular’ is doing.
To me it seems like the idea that, say, the existence of a happy nuclear family with two dads raising well adjusted and successful children ‘disproves’ social conservatism with regards to family formation.
We can go even broader. There are people who get away with socially deleterious behavior all the time. Think of the famous shopping cart greentext. At some point the argument is implicitly ‘do [x prosocial behavior] even if some other people get away with not doing it’, whatever the behavior is and whether or not you agree with the specifics of the argument.
I think that the issue is of a different kind, something James Lindsay refers to as "woke right". It means that ideologically it actually agrees with left narratives, it only turns them on their head. Patriarchy oppresses women? Yes and it is a good thing, be a chad like Tate and deal with the hoes and their white knights like rabble they are. Radical feminists rave about beauty hierarchies and pretty privilege? Fat activists talk about how fat people are oppressed? That is true, be beautiful and openly sneer and mog all the ugly degenerates, objectify everybody.
This woke right shit is literal heresy to leftwing activism, it can accept all the premises and just declares "and it is good". Hierarchies are not unjust, they are natural. Systems of oppression should not be dismantled, you should strive to play the game and be on top. It is woke version of satanism, that is why it actually cuts more deeply - mostly because the leftwing ideology actually gives them ammo, they agree that all these things bring privilege. Leftists just assume that people will intuitively say that having privilege is bad, and that people will automatically cheer for the underdog - without actually explaining why. It is actually a big weakness, Lindsay likened it to vampire ideology: you have to invite it to have power of guilt and shame over you. If you make yourself immune to it and openly laugh at it and if you are able to live through cancellations and struggle sessions, you are beyond their reach. It has no longer any power over you.
Leftwing activists are much more likely subject to be subverted into these movements as they are primed to the language, these movements are more dangerous to them than let's say libertarians or neoliberals etc.
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Feminists have no trouble squaring this particular circle- they just claim that those women don't have any choice. Yes, this can extend to pretending to believe that groups of normal people in the continental united states are actually living in caves in Afghanistan.
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I'd say it was the converse - that most men who can't get laid can't get laid because they are misogynist. Not even feminists are sufficiently disconnected from reality not to notice that some misogynists are getting laid.
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Denying that "chicks dig jerks" has been a feminist staple for decades, yes.
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IMO the polarised nature of the discourse guarantees an endless enfilade of bad takes deployed as gotchas. Gen Z seems to have way more social outcasts than their parents' generation, and almost no one knows how to discuss the phenomenon without ruffling feathers.
"This is why no one likes you!"
"Well what about Brad? Everyone likes him!"
A lot of TRP is just crude locker room talk. Some interesting pattern recognition mixed with some bullshit. You still have to observe the world for yourself and decide which parts actually align with reality. Realistically, an average man can meet the standards of his looksmatch, but he usually has to put in the legwork in the initial stages. Failing repeatedly at that breeds bitterness, which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy and repels potential partners. A character flaw? Maybe. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of progressive platitudes that insists that in a western style dating environment, women would claw off their fingers before dating a Trump voting man. Both things can be true. Unlikeable vibes make dating much harder, and plenty of women still date objectively shitty men.
The discourse rarely manages to hold both observations in its head at once.
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I'm old enough to remember when the stock piece of advice feminists offered to sexually frustrated straight men was "be more feminist" and "of course women like nice guys – that's why you can't get laid, because you're not one" and so on. "The reason Nice Guys™ can't get laid is because they don't Respecc Wahmen enough" was a core tenet of what Scott calls geek feminism, and still lives on in how progressives use the term "incel" as a term of abuse towards any man whose opinions are deemed insufficiently socially progressive. See this comment by a poster who expressly believes that any woman who dates a conservative man must be mentally ill and filled with unconscious self-loathing:
I devoted several comments to attempting to rebut this reasoning as facile.
In fairness, feminists might legitimately rebut that misogynists can only get laid in socially conservative countries where women are afforded very little freedom in their choice of sexual partners, and that in a free society no woman of sound mind would voluntarily choose to go to bed with a misogynist. They tend to get very defensive when you provide them with some examples of men with backwards attitudes to women who nevertheless have no trouble attracting them.
As I’ve said before, both the ‘geek feminists’ and a lot of the counter arguments are wrong here. The nerdy sexless man who starts reposting Andrew Tate (or indeed Clavicular) reels on main is not becoming more attractive to women by doing so. M
But a lot of the criticism of the ‘feminist’ viewpoint is straw or at least weak manning. The argument was not “an extremely hot, rich and charming man who is a misogynist can’t be sexually successful”. If you asked one of these feminists whether a billionaire who hated women could still get laid, they would obviously, presumably, have said ‘yes’.
The strongman of their argument (which I’m not committed to defending as their argument) was more like “sitting around hating women isn’t going to get you laid. Make more friends, build a larger social circle, speak to more women and it’s more likely to happen for you”, and for the average sexless man that is in fact excellent advice and probably far more helpful than hitting the gym and watching Clav streams.
Thing is, the absolute core of 'geek feminism' was directing young men not to do this. The single biggest complaint of geek women was getting swarmed by men b/c the gender ratios of geek subcultures were so skewed and therefore the 'advice' they repeated more than anything was:
'If I want to talk to you, if I want to do something with you, I will let you know. If you are coming up to me, or talking to me, and I haven't proactively expressed interest then you are probably harassing me'.
Which hit like a freight train to guys like me who already had trouble approaching women. That the girl talking to you doesn't like you and is smiling until you get the message and go away is essentially every man's worst nightmare, and geek feminism was broadcasting it (for somewhat understandable reasons) 24/7. It also meant that the only guys talking to these girls were the ones who didn't take no for an answer, which intensified everything.
Their entire narrative on this is constructed to act as a Kafka trap. If you as a man try following their advice, you already lost.
This is the second time in five days that I've seen someone on the Motte use the term "Kafkatrap" with a meaning very different to my understanding of the term. If you don't mind my asking, what does the term "Kafkatrap" mean to you?
The feminist Kafka trap in this context means to me that an entire cluster of feminist narratives is preconstructed in a way to ensure that if a non-feminist man decides to engage in discussion with them there can be no possible outcome other than him being at fault or him being wrong or him being part of the problem.
Another concept similar in effect and purpose is the narrative of white fragility, for example.
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One of the few moment's I've ever had of existential horror was when I saw someone arguing that this habit from women in such spaces wasn't to police men's behavior but to brag to other women they were receiving attention from men.
If that’s already existentially horrifying, just wait until your pattern recognition kicks in and the wrongthinker within you starts Noticing a similar phenomenon when women complain about the streets not being safe to walk around in at night or bemoan their constant fear of getting raped (all the while voicing ardent support for moar third world migration and compassionate treatment of criminals).
Sorry to disappoint(?), but I'm already well down that hole with a shovel and yelling back up at you.
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My memory is this pre-dated the mass internet access of geek feminism and the blogosphere and goes back at least to the '90s and the idea of the New Man. I was too young to have any real awareness of gender discourse prior to that but I see traces of the same message in repeats of popular 1970s sitcoms too (Bob in The Likely Lads, or the daughter's boyfriend in Til Death Do Us Part).
Unfortunately, unlike The Last Psychiatrist's dictum that "if you're watching it it's meant for you", barring convoluted epicycles I think these messages were received and absorbed by exactly the sort they weren't meant for. The Scotts A of the world were never going to cat call women and become wife beaters, it just gave them another reason to feel anxious around women.
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I actually do not remember such a time. In fact, what I remember was closer to "oh, you are a nice guy? What, do you want a cookie? That's called being a decent human being, women don't owe you anything for that." Do you have an example of what you're saying?
In "Radicalising the Romanceless", Scott provided a prime example:
Sometimes I wonder if the person who wrote this actually believed that consuming art by female artists would make a man more desirable to women, or if she was just trying to line the pockets of her fellow female creatives.
I have seen several thoroughly red-pilled guys offer the same advice. Chicklit, romance, and by-women-for-women erotica (which is a majority of textual erotica because men don't read while wanking) all provide a view of what women actually want which is a lot less filtered than you are going to find in explicit dating advice.
Admittedly a substantial fraction of it is "a man who is unreasonably rich, powerful or physically attractive expresses genuine interest in the girl next door" which is non-actionable to men reading it for research.
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I think you're conflating two things here.
Your version of the author's claim: "you should read women to get laid"
The author's claim: "being a decent human being is helpful, but not sufficient, to finding love. Since you have difficulty treating women as people, you should read women to become a decent human being"
There's no implication that reading Gloria Steinem is going to get you laid. The claim is that it will make you better off and maybe move the needle on falling in love:
What is the purpose of reading women specifically?
Does this guarantee results?
To put it simply - the (geek?) feminist perspective on this is something like "you should be a decent human being, but nobody owes you anything for that, but it might lead to something." If you do follow this playbook and expect it to lead to sex and get frustrated if it doesn't, you aren't actually a decent human being, you are a nice guy (this is a term of art).
But this is the exact point of disagreement – I don't think there's any correlation between being a "decent guy" (read: feminist) and getting laid. It's trivial to find examples of men who aren't decent guys and yet have no trouble attracting women. So the advice is worse than useless.
You are still thinking that the respondent is giving advice on how to get laid. She is doing no such thing. The advice is, basically, on how to become a decent human being, which does not constitute any obligation on the part of any woman. You are so moidbrained that you can't imagine that someone would respond to this letter with anything other than advice on getting laid, and the respondent is so foidbrained that she doesn't see why someone might expect that there ought to be an effective strategy for getting laid and/or getting married.
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I can't name a specific example, but there was a whole thing with "Nice Guys(tm) are not actually nice" which, like many feminist trends, started with a legitimate complaint but then overextended massively into just punishing guys they didn't like.
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I've seen several compilation videos of him trying to pick up girls in assorted locales and striking out. Maybe it's a numbers game, but "little trouble" seems to be exactly what he's facing i.e. he's not effortlessly hoovering up pussy without a care.
I mean he doesn't succeed "all" the time and disgruntled people want to signal boost when he fails, but you can find lots of footage of him succeeding with no effort or when he shouldn't.
Notably, people online tend to claim that he has paid the people who it does work on.
Which is unsurprising if he is showing off his success on Youtube. The first approximation is that everyone you see on TV is being paid to be there, and the vast majority of them are in some sense professionals. (Back in the elder days of broadcast TV, the most notorious example was that the vast majority of contestants on game shows that were not as intellectually hardcore as Mastermind, Jeopardy or Millionaire were out-of-work actors). Big-budget pro Youtubers count as TV here.
If I wanted to create pro-quality footage of me successfully picking up girls, I would hire actresses to pretend to be picked up. The alternative involves spitting game while being followed around by a cameraman, which would make even normie chicks who were willing to be picked up for NSA sex run away.
So it helps that he's on twitch more than YouTube from my understanding, which means that more volume and less filtered content.
I'm no expert on the guy since most of my knowledge about him is served involuntarily, but I have seen stuff that credibly is authentic (for example: when they committed a crime and had to go court, the girl who was caught cheating on her bf with him on twitch, the time his fans were pissed because he made out with someone who was trans). Also sometimes it def looks like he's paying people to be there. Also he gets blown off. Def a mix, but anything who believes that girls in their late teens or early 20s don't eat that shit up missed a lot of formative experiences.
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I'm actually not sure this is about trans or gender at all.
Finnster reminds me of nobody so much as Nikocado Avocado - somebody who put a huge amount of himself online, obtained a large and enthusiastic following, and became addicted to the likes. This then leads to the person sharing himself more and more, modifying and selling his body in order to gain more and more attention, no matter how permanent, unhealthy, or damaging.
It's tragic, and I feel awful for the people doing this to themselves, but ultimately I have more condemnation for the social media system they exist within, and even for the slavering audience.
This is the correct answer. f1nn5ter, Avocado and Clavicular himself are all particularly morbid examples of the perils of audience capture.
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Nikocado Avocado was my first thought as well. It needs to be studied how someone who began with a seemingly normal personality and approachable demeanor could descend into such a grotesque, self destructive public spectacle for... clicks? The psychological arc is fascinating and deeply disturbing.
The closest example from the pre-social media times I can think of were probably carnival sideshow performers or certain extreme vaudeville acts, people who willingly turned their bodies and personal degradation into public entertainment for money and attention. But these people were usually born with a condition that led to their unfortunate appearance, and they had no better means of putting food on the table. I can't imagine someone having access to better choices and still choosing to go down this road.
Fortunately, Nikocado secretly lost weight years ago and got back his former weight.
We probably shouldn't be that surprised - the approval of the tribe is something humans are pretty-close-to-hardwired to crave, and the interaction of that instinct with social media can go very dark places. Would you rather be a famous freak, or a healthy, happy nobody? It's not surprising that young people in particular sometimes choose 'famous freak'.
(Apparently it is disputed just how much Gen Z kids want to be influencers or content creators, but even in the lower end, 5% of people is still enough to give you a big supply of freaks.)
I think age does come into it. Most of people doing this are kids, and people in their teens or early twenties often don't really understand lifelong consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are things like taking hormone treatments, getting surgery, or over-eating. Often it's only when you get a bit older and start to feel the creaks and pains that you realise you really do need to take care of your body. Still, if we combine big ambitions, insensitivity to or ignorance of consequences, a greater tendency to reckless behaviour, and brains being hacked by the virtual crowd, this is what you get.
When I was at school, there was usually a clown or a reckless attention-seeker in the class. Sometimes he (it was almost always a he) would pursue attention in obviously stupid, self-destructive ways. I remember a boy whose 'thing' was going up to to the fence during recess and throwing his packed lunch into the road, and watching it being run over by cars. Other students found it funny and cheered, so he kept doing it, day after day. I sometimes wonder how that guy felt a few hours later, as his stomach rumbled...
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There's a social media element to it for sure, but there definitely is a trans element to it as well. I distinctly remember Philosophy Tube getting a visible bump in patreon subscriptions, and I think I recall someone going through other examples of suddenly trans influencers.
PhilosophyTube is the best example of a modern Patrick Bateman and it's not even close. It would be the perfect act in a modern rendition of American Psycho to weave in the alleged reason for his transition.
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Do we really need like 3 top-level trans posts a week? And keep in mind this is coming from a horrible anti-trans bigot like me; I can only imagine how tiring this is for the other side. A biography of one random streamer doesn't seem postworthy. (When Asmongold or Hasan Piker goes trans, then you can @ me.)
So I'll admit I may have been too hasty in posting this, but I disagree that this guy is just a random streamer. For several years, he pulled in enough viewers to do collabs with various large streamers such as Mizkif and Belle delphine, his fan subreddit has almost 100k subscribers, and his posts are still on top of /r/egg_irl and /r/crossdressing, two very prominent trans related subs. He is one of the the biggest trans-focused content creators out there, and might be the most prominent trans-centric streamer that currently exists. Thus I find it reasonable to conclude that his is behavior somewhat representative of and condoned by online trans spaces which makes him relevant to the culture war.
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IIRC, F1nn5ter used to be sufficiently prominent to make the front page of Reddit on a semi-regular basis, just like Asmongold and Hasan. That's where I learned about this rigmarole.
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Part of the explanation is this: Clavicular explicitly says that he does looksmaxxing to gain social and sexual status. Trans advocates, on the other hand, usually say that trans people transition to feel more comfortable with themselves, because they have intense dysphoria, etc.
Putting aside the question of whether the trans advocates' claim is accurate or not, cause that's a different topic... still, part of what is happening here is just that people tend to respond more positively to the "I am doing this because I am suffering psychologically" presentation than to the "I am doing this to for sex and money" presentation.
Of course, the reality is that Clavicular's story is that he too, as he freely admits, was suffering psychologically when he was younger. Suffering psychologically from being a nobody, from not getting girls. Not only that, but he is still suffering psychologically, as he freely admits, because his underlying personality is still that of a socially anxious introvert. He uses psychotropic drugs and the motivation of getting money to get himself to constantly go out and make influencer content.
But male desires for sex, money, and social status are widely seen as being somehow inherently wrong and disgusting. Not just on the left, but even by many people on the right. People tend to associate these pretty natural and understandable desires with the worst examples of what happens when psychologically disturbed people pursue them: rapists, social climbing sociopaths, sleazy business sharks, and so on.
A man wanting to become a woman, on the other hand, does not activate these associations. Becoming a woman might conceivably get a particularly sexually unsuccessful man more sex than he would have had otherwise, but becoming a woman is popularly conceived (whether accurately or not) as something that would make the sex that the person gives to others less dominant and aggressive. Becoming a woman is also not popularly thought of as something that would give the man more social status. Yes, there are cases of trans activists using trans issues as a way to status climb, but it is popularly understood that men on average have more social status than women and that most of the world's most powerful people are men. In reality, the average young woman probably has more social status than the average young man, but that might be a point that is too subtle for the average observer to grasp.
Another point is that: Yes, Clavicular in a sense is doing gender-affirming medical treatments just like some trans people do gender-affirming medical treatments. But he is going beyond gender-affirming treatments and doing gender-maxxing. So the trans equivalent to Clav isn't just a man who does some relatively light gender-affirming treatments to reduce the presentation of masculinity. It's a man who tries to turn himself into a female bimbo stereotype, with fake lashes, large fake breasts, and so on.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with that, whether it's the trans person doing it or Clavicular doing it. But I think that many people are weirded out by the monomaniacal maximalism and "trying to turn yourself into a superficial stereotype" aspects of it, similar as to how many people are weirded out by extreme bodybuilders.
Interesting. I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them. But you are stating that the reason why most people think he is bad is because he is being public about his desires for women, money, and status.
That's another big reason why people think he is bad. I just didn't mention it.
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This is because the normies know about clavicular. Up until your post, I had been blissfully ignorant of this guy. I think they're both stupid, for the record.
Fair enough. He became quite big during covid, consistently pulling video views in the hundreds of thousands for years with what was really just clips from his stream. While his popularity has seemingly faded over the last three years or so, I would think this would be enough to justify some degree of mainstream appeal to him. At least amongst those on the internet.
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Easy to understand - F1nn let his face be remodeled by professionals, the best and the brightest experts, while Clavicular performs the looksmaxing care on himself with hammer in his own hands.
The same reason why suicide is discouraged, why stopping suicide and saving human life is one of main pretexts of rising internet censorship and gun control, while simultaneously Canadian care is spreading around the world.
Your face, your skull and your life do not belong to you, they belong to the experts. Trust the science, trust the experts, only they can decide, not dumb muggle like you.
Equivalent to Clavicular style looksmaxing in woke world is DIY gender affirming care, ranging from injecting yourself with various bathtub made substances to fully self performed gender affirming surgery.
But this is problematic.
Trans people have been going underground to access care for generations. But that doesn’t mean DIY networks are a large-scale strategic answer to transphobia.
This is not something praised and encouraged by mainstream left online and offline, this is domain of real hardcore underground very very far from public acceptance.
edit: links linked
Yeah, many people might not realize that Clav did the DIY stuff because of limited medical options and the fact that he used to have no money, not because he has anything against the idea of going to professionals.
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If you go on trans related subreddits, endorsements of DIY transitioning in the form of purchasing and administering hormones on your own are not that hard to find. The justification being that anything is better than nothing, and access to care where the poster lives is too limited. DIY surgery is definitely a level beyond that though.
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