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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.
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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