liver king is old news and clowning on him is hack shit but this picture is so funny that I couldn't resistIt's been a beautiful Christmas in NYC: it wasn't too cold outside, my mom got me a sweater vest, and walking my dog was very peaceful due to everybody being inside save for an incredibly loud hanukkah celebration / zionist cope session going on at the park. In honor of the christmas cheer that's currently happening I'd like to talk about the things that people get mad about online that make me and people I know mad - those in specific being online bait movements.
By that term i mainly mean, like, tradwives and gymcels, specific sections of online culture that just barely imply a call to action (wear skirts and read the bible, do overhead presses, etc.), enough that they perhaps can be called political in their aspirations, but don't really exist specifically as a political movement. They're not like the NRA or anything, but they're still trying to get some of messaging across. And the reason they're 'bait' movements is because I don't really see them as trying to do anything in particular so much as trying to get whoever sees them either interested or pissed off.
Presumably people already know that there's a large section of online politics that's basically an infinitely dividing fractal of increasingly gauche and incomprehensible political ideologies that seemingly only exist online. It's also well known that a lot of content online exists specifically to make you angry because angry people engage with the most measurable significance. This is like half and half those two things. They kind of care about how the world is such that something needs to change and the internet is the main place you hear about them, but really they're more like a type of media franchise oriented around a specific message rather than a particular group of associated individuals.
I don't really want to do any theory of internet subcultures here, a fool's errand as every piece as every internet thing expires after two months in favor of some newer, dumber thing. I just want to point out a couple subcultures and a couple of characteristics that I find interesting.
If you think I'm wrong about any of this it's probably because I am, all this bullshit is scarcely researched and off the dome. None of this is serious <3
Anyone who's been in the male fitness sphere for a decent amount of time, especially anywhere near bodybuilding circles in particular, probably understands on some level that underneath what is ultimately a deeply ordinary and uninteresting hobby is a delicate concoction of bodily neuroses, pathological desperation, and a steadfast trust in the apophenia of random dudes online. As a result of this disposition, incels, grindset guys, internet stoics, and miscellaneous self-improvement types are a great match for this specific variety of fitness culture. These guys are great candidates as the progenitors of the internet's cultural milieu. For who else do we have to thank for the soy protein estrogen stuff? Without them we wouldn't be able to call guys soy for playing nintendo switch. In between the creatine supplements and debating over whether one should purposefully contract rabies to boost their T levels, there's a deep sadness nestled in heart of it, curled up inside a hollow capillary swimming alongside the lactic acid. I don't want to imply that I actually have much insight into the phenomenology of their thought, but I think there's a part of me that understands and occasionally experiences the state of alarm that they're constantly in. I assume it's the same feeling of horror when I look in the mirror and start to suspect that the flab of fat on my stomach has grown in an amount almost certainly imperceptible to anyone other than me - it feels like I lost a child, I clutch my stomach in grief for my baby. Ironically it's when my stomach starts expanding that I feel like I had a miscarriage (I know what that feels like trust me).
liver king is old news and clowning on him is hack shit but this picture is so funny that I couldn't resist
There's sort of a politics implied in it sometimes, very much in the vein of reject modernity embrace masculinity type stuff. It's all very vapid and also kind of gay, in like a first speech of Plato's symposium kind of gay. I wonder if cartoons never progressed past the rubberhose era these guys would be making edits of popeye set to xxxtentacion instead of guts from berserk.
Given the loose incel relation, a lot of them are also psycho-sexually paranoid about a scenario where a woman accuses them of sexual impropriety because they looked at her ass by accident or something. I don't actually care about the content of that fear or whether the gym girls on tiktok actually want to do that to them; I just think it's fun that these guys are freaked out by the prospect of accidentally walking into a pepe le pew bit where they are forcibly and unknowingly cast in the role of pervert skunk. Equally fun is the fear of getting mogged by a guy who starts curling your deadlift or something and then calls you a pussy online lol. It's all very shitty underdog high school comedy from the early 2000s, which I almost find kind of endearing in a way.
Of course most of the time it's not fun, it's just annoying and sad. There are times that I mourn the way in which the basic technical knowledge on how to do an overhead press is a high speed tunnel to exposing you to an endless stream of slop, where every how to tutorial also needs to follow up with a recommendation that you watch david goggins telling you to practice semen retention. It's not that big of an imposition, you can always just put the phone away, but to be a modern man is to be a whiner incapable of moving on from even a mild inconvenience. I think that's the part at the core of the oroborus of gymbro self-help, both in its physical and therapeutic aspirations. In order to engage in any of it you need to always be bothered by yourself in such a way that you need the content to pull you out of the hole, and oftentimes the content just seeks to remind you of all the things that bother such that you can surmount them once again. It's a timeloop of reminding you that everything's shit and you need to stop being a piece of shit, where the reminder sows in you the seed that everything's shit and you're actually still a piece of shit and need to stop being a piece of shit. At some point you just gotta log off and ascertain the scatology of your spirit via self-reflection on your own time.
From what I've heard, tradwives are woman that posit themselves as the negation of that one eat hot chip and lie meme from like five years ago. They know how to cook and are not be bisexual. I don't think they're the same thing as tradcaths but they're definitely the same type of thing as tradcaths. I'm sure there's some sort of patient zero for all of it that accounts both for the religious inclinations and the attraction to homesteading as a personal calling, like some gay little Italian alter boy got really into baking and made a Focaccia so killer it survived through the Protestant reformation and somehow delivered the morals of catholic domesticity to thousands of online women.
Some of that might be true, some of it might be entirely false. I have no way of knowing and it's neither my nor your business to know how wrong I am. It might seem weird that one of the subcultures I'm pointing out is one I have basically no firsthand familiarity with, but that's the kind of what interests me about them. I know essentially nothing about them beyond second-hand osmosis, but I think that's by design, like it's part of how these subcultures work. The big secret (and underlying elegance of the algorithm) is that every bait subculture is personalized for the viewer, like a specially tailored nightmare for each person's particular neuroses. Everything I know about tradwives I know through the women in my life that are in their twenties, are highly educated and/or are working professionals, and were either reared in or have completely acclimated to western cultural norms. Basically, they're the target demographic for tradwife content, not necessarily because they're the most likely to buy into it wholesale but because they're likely to respond to it in some way or another.
In a seminar I had last year, two women got into a brief argument over whether tradwives are an actual political threat to the feminist struggle for freedom. The student who brought was kind of pissed that there was any credence given a group interested in submitting to male domination as a political imperative, while the other was unconvinced that the choices made by these women were actually of concern. Like many arguments, the entire thing happened because of miscommunication and was a complete waste of time. The student speaking in their defense is an international student who literally didn't know what a tradwife was, and thought the argument was over whether woman should be allowed to just, like, be housewives. There's probably an actual debate over the problem of choice-feminism on that but that's more or less unrelated to the political characteristics of tradwives as a specific online subculture.
The point here is that the conversation was completely illegible to someone who was just slightly out of the target demo in terms of who tradwives are supposed to be shown to. Homegirl literally had no idea what we were talking about and I can't even blame her! How was she supposed to know that women from utah are churning butter on tiktok or whatever as conservative praxis? When I think about it, I don't think I've ever actually seen a tradwife, either in real life or online, I just take the word of other people who tell me they're real. They could literally just be an elaborate psyop pulled by the CIA to fool me specifically that this is a thing that's happening.
This is comforting for me, actually, because it makes me feel much better about the things I see online that worry me in particular, that other people are getting shown completely different things to freak them out. Sometimes I think that stuff on the internet has this way of inflating the importance of the affairs that only cause anxiety for us in particular. It makes me feel a little better about the fitness stuff that see, that the upper east side retirees at my gym probably don't concern themselves with the psycho-sexual indulgences of fitness internet. Hell, the pajama zoomers probably don't even care that much. Maybe this is obvious to anyone who actually has a brain, that ragebait seeks to worry you more than it actually has any empirical right to, but I'm an idiot, so it's a nice bit of perspective.