site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2232 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The latest craze on Youtube? A guy called Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek is a 21 year old bodybuilder and mech eng. student from Ohio who has, over the past six months, gone from about 50,000 to over 1.7 million subscribers. I've heard dudes at work that don't lift mention him, either. He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs). Regardless of how he gets his gains, his appeal, however, seems pretty genuine. Unlike the deluge of overedited, attention-grabbing garbage on Youtube, Sulek's videos are lightly edited and mostly show him driving to, working out in, and then driving back to the gym with occasional meals, while he provides a kind of stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts on training and diet. There's very little groundbreaking stuff here, his videos are nearly entirely unscripted (like his workouts themselves) and Sulek saves all his intensity for his lifting. In fact he comes off as a fairly charismatic, positive, intelligent student. More than that, though, his videos scratch a desire for society and friendship. Commenters describe them as relaxing, and Sulek as authentic, but really what they are is parasocial. Sulek isn't acting as a coach or source of information or salesman (though he does have a deal with Hosstile), but more as the lifting buddy that millions of people wish they had. And though it can hardly be any good for my very poor self-esteem and body image issues, it's difficult to stop watching.

It’s interesting to me that zoomer men primarily follow “influencers” who have extremely unrealistic bodies, in that they can’t be gained naturally. Even in the previous generation, the Zyzz physique obviously requires excellent genetics, perfect training etc. The 99.9th percentile, in other words.

Women don’t tend to do this as much. Female beauty, skincare, fitness, makeup etc influencers are usually attractive, that’s a given, but the most successful are rarely 99.9th percentile for looks - those people either tend to be followed mainly by men, or are actual high fashion / runway models with comparatively small followings. Women often follow people who are somewhat hotter versions of themselves in terms of face/body/hair/skin etc.

Men seem to prefer to follow the absolute physical ideal. They are less interested in the merely 80th or 90th percentile gym bro who lifts 3-4 days a week, cares about nutrition and has a naturally attainable body.

I guess in general lifting culture is interesting to me. It’s not broadly anti-doping, but at the same time so much of the culture is ostensibly based around techniques for training naturally, efficiently gaining, diet and other stuff that pales in terms of their effect on bulking when compared to many forms of doping. Are they tricking themselves, or are they being radically honest? Clearly coping is acceptable in the bodybuilding community and doesn’t count as cheating the same way, say, cheating in chess is cheating. But the advantage gained is so much that training as someone who dopes versus someone who doesn’t is like playing two completely separate games, or having two separate hobbies. They’re incomparable, and yet treated as the same by casual followers.

But the advantage gained is so much that training as someone who dopes versus someone who doesn’t is like playing two completely separate games, or having two separate hobbies. They’re incomparable, and yet treated as the same by casual followers.

I don't think casual followers understand this

There was a period, perhaps from the 90s to the 00s, where the trend went towards toned and slender. Steroids were made illegal in 1990, and though bodybuilders continued to get bigger, Hollywood turned away from beefy bodybuilders towards more uh, human-sized action leads. The apogee of this was Brad Pitt in Fight Club in 1999. Since then, bodybuilding and lifting have become more popular. Zyzz comes at kind of the tail-end of that, as bigger physiques became more popular again. At the same time, superhero movies were starting to dominate the box office, and with them, superheroic physiques became desirable again. Thor was 2011, for example (and it even has a joke about steroids). The internet has made it easier to get access and information on steroids, and in the competition to stand out on social media, it has to be the biggest and the best.

And uh, I might have been a cause of it too. The past twenty years have seen gay men go from the butts of jokes and distrusted perverts to accepted and even celebrated. And our tastes put a small but forceful finger on the scale, almost always pushing towards bigger and more extreme. It's hard to exaggerate to what degree male beauty standards are shaped by this tiny minority who most men have no interest in - and yet it does, mysteriously, like dark energy invisibly curving spacetime around it.

the most successful are rarely 99.9th percentile for looks

I mean, I don't know if 99.9th percentile for looks really makes sense. In the realm of lifting, bigger and stronger is better and there's always someone bigger and stronger, but in the realm of physical appearance, once you're 'very attractive', the difference between you and the next very attractive lady is mostly just personal taste or vibes. But then, that's the appeal of lifting - there is a hierarchy, there is a 'better' and a 'worse', and therefore you can be driven by the desire to become better. A woman who sought to make 'constant progress' in her own makeup abilities wouldn't even make any sense.

I guess in general lifting culture is interesting to me. It’s not broadly anti-doping, but at the same time so much of the culture is ostensibly based around techniques for training naturally, efficiently gaining, diet and other stuff that pales in terms of their effect on bulking when compared to many forms of doping.

I agree there's an interesting contradiction here. Doping is an open secret, and one that people don't really know how to deal with. The refrain is the same - bigger and stronger is better, you should be willing to do anything to succeed... but not the thing that might actually work better than anything else. That's embarrassing and shameful, except that most of the people idealized are on gear anyway. People like Sam Sulek dance around it, they talk about their training technique or how they time their carb intake or 'mindset' or a million trivial details that matter far less than raw biochemistry. And though the 'fake natties' are bad, so are the 'natty police' who lob accusations of steroid use around, and who encourage others to treat it as a shameful secret.

At the end of the day, you still need to have your training and nutrition dialed in to have a top tier physique, drugs or no. To casual followers, the dedication is what they relate to and use for motivation.

What actually draws people in is results, not dedication.

Reading the comments, nobody expects to get similar results any time soon.

It could be overcompensation, in that most men have few to no archetypically masculine men in their own lives, let alone any balanced masculine role models in media or even literature that most consume.

Unfortunately I see a lot of the hyper masculine alt right type stuff as a consequence of the masculine archetypes being forcefully eradicated from our culture via an unholy mix of feminism and jealous lower status men sniping at positive masculine role models. The surge in hyper masculine media figures is a natural response as far as I can tell.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats