How to Get Rich and Famous by Being an Abusive Creep on the Internet, and Why That Needs to Change
Dec 30, 2022
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In case you haven’t heard the story that took the internet by storm, it goes — deep breath — like this. An online influencer andnoted violent misogynistdecided to make fun — for no reason, just out of the blue, because, well, misogynists will be misogynists — ofGreta Thunberg. To which sherepliedwith the tweet above, which the internet celebrated as a hilariously accurate takedown. It went viral, and said guy — let’s call him a manfluencer — responded with abizarre videoin a bathrobe and a cigar. Next to him was a pizza box. And what happened next? The Romanian authoritiesswiftly detained himon charges of organised crime and rape.
To which Gretaresponded: “this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes.” Funny? Savage? Ludicrous? All of the above. But also deadly serious. Said guy runs acamgirl “business,” and he’s more or less out of the closet as a trafficker. Don’t take it from me, take it from him, normal guys don’t exactly makeremarkslike (and trigger warning here for violent misogyny): “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up b*tch.” Or, for example:
In one video explaining his reasons for the move he suggested it was because it would be easier to evade rape charges. This is “probably 40% of the reason” he moved there, he says in one video, adding: “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.
This sordid, gross manfluencer is just one tip of a far larger iceberg. The toxic-masculinity-industrial-complex.What do I mean by that? There are a lot of guys like him, and for some reason, being that kind of guy? Misogynistic, violent, bigoted (because of coursehating women is a form of bigotry), loud and proud of it? It’s become a veritable career path. Say this kind of stuff out loud, and you can getrich and famous.
That’s because, in turn, manfluencers arecreated.
Let me give you a simple example, and you’ll know what I’m talking about because odds are it’s happened to you, too. All I watch —allI watch — on YouTube are a) videos about making disco or b) disco videos from before 1982. So why is it that regardless of that, I get recommended videos from this grotesque cast of characters…over and over again? Why would I possibly be interested in hating women and minorities and violently attacking them and building my muscles up to absurd proportions and becoming a caricature of a man…when all I clearly want to do ismake music?
Because, of course, the answer goes, “the algorithm” recommends them.But the algorithm isn’t some kind of abstract, pre-ordained divine creation. It’s basically the preferences of the guys who wrote it, made into a machine, churning away. Those guys, like these guys — the tech-bros who coded the algorithm have a certain fondness for manfluencers — and so the algorithm, which is really the tech-bros choices, will just recommend the sordid manfluencers to you, over and over again, forever,no matter what.
That’s the “famous” part. Join this vulgar way of thinking — say it out loud — and before you know it, you’re getting recommended.Not just on YouTube, but TikTok, Facebook, everywhere. The one notable exceptionwasTwitter, until The Dweeb whose anagram is Noel Skum bought it, and reinstated accounts like the violent misogynist above, who promptly — instead of, say, holding back, began to harass Greta Thunberg. Sure, it ended with him being arrested. But along the way, well, he got rich and famous. And those riches and that fame were a choice. Made by platforms and tech and capital and bros,forthe rest of us.
So what do these guys have to say? Well, you probably know by now. Their game isbasically psychological abuse, as a way to “get girls.”The basic idea is that you have to be an “alpha” or a “Chad,” aka a musclebound moron, who flaunt his indifference and cruelty and above all, toxicity. What women really like is being insulted, harassed, mocked, “negged” — put down — and even physically abused. That’s because women are inferior, like, say minorities, but the only difference — and this goes unstated — is that straight men still have a desperate desire tobewith women, so how do you end up attracting someone youhate,so much that you think they’re subhuman? Well, you, put them down, according to this theory, violently, because that’s what you do with and to subhumans, and if you do that, they’llthank you for it.
Now. Anyone who actually has the remotest shred of success with women knows…this is hot garbage. Me? I’m a real life vampire. Thesunlight can kill me. And that’s always given me a certain kind of romantic edge. Girls like it.Peoplelike it. Because it gives me a certain kind ofdepth, I suppose. It makes me interesting. I’m the furthest thing from the cliche of the dumb assh*le you can get…and you know what? I can tell you for a fact that women are people, and if you like one, well, try talking to them like a human being, andsee what happens.
In case that’s not epically clear, let me give you a counter example.Let’s imagine that I made my own video. In it, I tell the story of how I met my wife, who just so happens to be — and this is true — not only a doctor, but a runway model who’s done fashion weeks in London and New York and so forth. What happened? Did I impress her with my bulging muscles? Was I on roids? Was it my huge…bank account…and my collection of sports cars? LOL,no. I was almostdead. We went on a date, randomly, just because I needed someone to talk to. I didn’t even look at her pictures. I liked her choice of poetry, on her profile, and I said, hey, do you want to have a coffee and talk about it? At this point, I’d lost 50 pounds in a few months — I was so close to dying that I was literally the cliche of a scrawny weakling. And nevertheless, this amazing, beautiful, intelligent woman didn’t just…go on a date with me…she saved my life, figured out the light can kill me, andmarriedme.
Crazy, right? I’d end that video with a pretty simple moral of the story, for sad, lonely guys. Just…be yourself. Really.There’s nothing more to it than that, and the rest of it is all nonsense — from the muscles to the money to the cars and especially to the idea of harassing and abusing women as some kind of Secret Love Potion.
Do you think that video would ever get recommended? Of course not. Why not? Because the algorithmwouldn’t value it. And that, in turn, is because it doesn’t reflect the values of the tech bros whowroteit.It says something totally the opposite — even if it’s true: just chill, be yourself, don’t fake it, be real, be a person, and treat your desired partner like one, too. No shortcuts. Hard work. Takes courage and bravery and faith. No misogyny, hate, violence — no man-childishness. Just people, relating. LOL — are you kidding me? The algorithm would put that rank that one down tooblivion.
The fame of manfluencers iscreated. It’s not some kind of natural phenomenon reflecting some kind of innate desire in the male psyche. It’s just…acon game.Of course if you recommend Jordan Peterson toevensomeone like me, who thinks he’s a pathetic sad creepy loser, then, LOL, of course he’s going to get famous, fast. And if you do that enough, well, riches await too, because then millions of peoplewatchthis stuff. And then they buy the stuff that said manfluencers sell, which is the real game here. The violent misogynist had an online “university” — LOL — and others sell books and “seduction courses” and so forth. It’s a con game, to the max.
There’s a simpler word for all this, which ispromotion. Manfluencers are promoted by Big Tech, and sadly, Big Tech’s where we all spend too much time these days. On mega-platforms — you know the ones — doomscrolling, trying to keep abreast of the news, maybe just bored and looking for some idle entertainment. And suddenly, instead of pet videos, there’s some dude saying women are subhumans, who are meant to be abused and violently objectified and harassed and repressed. Do that enough, and sure, there are a lot of lonely, defeated young men out there, who’ll eventuallybelieveit.
But the root cause of the problem ispromotion. This violent misogyny is promoted, and soyoung men and boys are getting the ideathat this is the way tobe.It’s how to “attract” women, how to survive, how to live, how to find a date and a mate, just how to exist in the world — as an extension of an algorithm that basically promotes toxic masculinity in a way that history’s never seen before, a million times a second, blindly, to everyone and anyone, with absolute impunity, no consequences, and no freedomfromit, either.
Now. There is a real problem here that has to do with the socioeconomic position of young men.Young men find themselves in thepincers of a set of particularly grim and ominous trends: downward mobility, which makes having a career seem impossible, which makes having a family and finding a mate that much more difficult, a catastrophic breakdown in social bonds, which makes something as simple as dating that much more problematic and strange, and stagnant economies, which means their lives feel like they’re going nowhere. That’s acute for young men because they’re still raised in a culture where they’re told that figures like Donald Trump or the Dweeb Who Bought Twitter are the onlyrealmen, that men prove their worth with the size of their bank accounts, that masculinity is about how much power over others you have, not whom you can liberate from what form of repression and injustice and lies and hate.
Add that to a situation in which these men are watching their female peersslowly gain the economic liberationthey’ve fought for, for generations, and you have a recipe for misogyny.
Manfluencing preys on these socioeconomic trends which have young men in jaws.It takes young men who’ve lost faith and confidence in everything, fast — institutions, systems, relationships, even themselves — and offers them a certain seduction. It’s ironic, because here are young men, looking for women, but they’re getting seduced by…other men…who are con artists, basically. Thosecon artists put forthan caricature of masculinity. It takes yesterday’s macho masculinity, and blows it up to cartoonish proportions.
What am I talking about? Here, take alook at a pictureof the “Liver King.”This dude claimed only eating raw meat made his muscles bulge like that, and because other manfluencers said you had to have bulging muscles to get a girl, any girl, that women are basically objectified sex drives drawn hopelessly to biceps the size of small planets…tons of young men believed this guy. It turns out — LOL, wasn’t it obvious? —the dude was on steroids.Duh.That’s a cartoonish caricature of masculinity. The idea that you have to bethatripped to ever… “get a girl.” That you can’t just be a normal dude…you know, with a little extra here and there, or just a completely average physique. Oh no. That means you’re a Beta, and only Alphas get girls. They getallthe girls, and none are left over for anyone else.
Does that even make sense? Have you ever, I don’t know, walked down a city street, or a mall? Do you really just see fifty women on the arm of amale model? LOL. No, you see couples of all kinds, and maybe these days, extended forms of relationships. What you don’t see is the paranoid fantasy that, basically, you have to be Genghis Khan wielding a battle-axe on a warhorse, to have a harem of ladies swooning at your Khal Drogo style bloodlust, andthat’sthe only form of sexual and relational health thereis. The whole idea is absurd on its face — and that’s a testament to why it needs to be promoted so hard by algorithms, because, well, otherwise,who’d ever take it seriously?
Now. What manfluencers are selling — what the toxic-masculinity-industrial-complexenablesthem to sell, promotes themfor— is what we might call “hyper-masculinity.”This extreme caricature of it that’s emerged on the net. It begins with bulging muscles, and the theory of Genghis Khan and the harem as the only model of sexual matching — one super-winner of a man, “getting” all the “girls,” because, hey they don’t care about women as people. And from that inference — they don’t care about men as people — comes the even more vicious misogyny. If they don’t care about women as people, thenyou shouldn’t care about them. The way to “win” the mating game is to amass money and power, flaunt it, “neg” women, taunt them with it, then discard them. Sure, that’s kind of always been around — think of the ideal of the “playboy” in the 70s and 80s — but this is a super-extreme version of it. Even the playboy looks tame compared to these guys, who think womenget offon rape and death threats, that violence is justified, that women are a subspecies of humans, and so are men who are “Betas.” All of that’s, in fact, pretty ontologicallyfascist.
All this is just a childish restatement of everyone’s least favorite philosopher, Fred Nietzsche. The toxic-masculinity-industrial-complex is selling theideal of the Nietzschean Zarathustra, basically, in modern form — you have to be indifferent, cruel, abusive, in order to dominate women, who hold a “slave morality,” because they’re inferior. They like to be abused, you see, and that’s why you don’t have much success in relationships. You’re just not enough of anuberman.
Now, the fact that the tech-bros believe all this too is very muchthe problem. If they didn’t believe it, the algorithm wouldn’t value it, and promote it to such absurd heights. But they do, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of them, being nerdy, shy, types, not really used to talking to women, instead of just sucking it up and having the courage to try, fell for the schtick of the manfluencers.And having bought into it, now the entire internet has begun to reflect the attitude that being a “real” man is about violent misogyny. That’s how the toxic-masculinity-industrial-complex came to be.
What’s all that really saying to young men, in its simplest form? Let’s take an unlikely example, women. They’re subject, too, to what might be called a toxic-femininity-industrial-complex. What do I mean by that? Well, they’re bombarded by exactly the same thing online, just from their own gendered perspective: acartoonish, extreme caricature of femininity. Go online as a woman, what do you see? Influencers of your own. With seriously warped bodies and faces, altered by plastic surgery. Living pretend, fictional lives. Smiling like they don’t have a care in the world, even though they’remostly miserable. Wielding designer handbags and shoes with pretty, vacant grins, chiseled into their weirdly plastic faces.
It’s not exactly going online and seeing, I don’t know, a female astrophysicist, novelist, scientist, thinker, poet, is it? It’s a horrific caricature of femininity, really: girls are there to be pretty!Objects for men to desire. And if they can be that — even if takes surgery, mutilation, alteration, money, implantation — well, then maybe they’ll have the status markers of women successful at the mating game, designer trinkets. The point of life for a young woman is to want that, be that — pretty, vacant, objectified, smiling, so they can win the designer stuff — not, say, accomplished, literate, serious, thoughtful,a whole person of their own.
What’s themessage women receive from their influencers? That they’re notenough. Not good enough. Not pretty enough. Not thin enough, not shapely enough.Their features have the wrong angles, their proportions the wrong dimensions. They need surgery. That’s why the lack the status symbols of success in the relational world — a $5000 handbag. Just being yourself — and enacting that self, as in, I don’t know, being a novelist, artist, writer, scientist, thinker — that’s notenough. You have to be this caricature of a woman, or else. You’ll never behappy.
This is exactly what manfluencers tell young men, too. They do it in an especially seductive way, which is as old as time. When I was a kid, I’d read Archie comics — remember those, the old ones — and in the back, there was always an ad, that showed some scrawny kid having sand kicked in his face in the beach…and then he transformed into a…not even the Liver King, just a guy with muscles. It was an ad for weights, I think. Pretty innocuous by today’s standards, because it wasn’t really saying hate women and abuse them. Today’s manfluencers use an extreme version of that ad to seduce young men — they empathize with them. Hey, I’ve been there, little guy. I used to be sad and lonely too! And then you know what? I became akiller.I formed these huge muscles and learned how to harass and abuse people, especially women. Riches came my way, and women swooned at my feet.I can teach you. Buy my book. Take my course. I’ll show you how to seduce them.
Like I said, the painfully funny irony here is that the only person getting seduced here is the sad, lonely guy…by another guy who’s a con artist.Nobody here is actually seducing a woman, because, well, why else is the violent misogynist we discussed earlier in prison ontraffickingcharges? Not exactly a sign that the schtick works, is it?
This is thepatriarchy of the internet.Young people are being told that they’re not enough. Just as they are. And that’s a tragedy. They already feel like that, because our societies have failed them, socioeconomically, offering them only downward mobility and decline and precarity, instead of opportunity and optimism and rising living standards.Psychologically beaten, they’re that much easier prey for the seductions of the Bad Feelings Industrial Complex. You’re not enough, it whispers. And then it offers each gender a cartoonish, lampoonist, ultra-extreme caricature of itself. You’re a young woman? You have to look like a cartoon woman and have cartoon proportions to win a mate worth desiring. You’re a young man? To win a mate like that — whose the only one you should desire — you have to be abusive, violent, creepy, and hateful, not to mention look like a cartoon superhero, and have the bank account of a cartoon billionaire. Otherwise? You’re nobody. Nothing. Just a loser.
Beingyourself? Your real self? You know, the young person in you that just wants to be…an artist…musician…scientist…poet…brewer…baker? That person isn’tenough. Not to really be happy. What is happiness? Happiness is domination. It’s having power over others. It’s making them feel less than. Small. Little.Like you feel right now. Only when you have that ability will you really be powerful, and only someone with that kind of power can ever be happy. Hence, people fall for this ridiculous schtick — both man and woman — this cartoon version of masculinity and femininity both that the internet is currently ablaze with. It’s a problem.
We should all — sane and thoughtful people — make a clear and present point these days of rejecting the toxic-masculinity-industrial complex.We should question it and call it out when platforms recommend these creeps to us, when we’re clearly not interested. We should say openly that promoting hateful violent bigots is wrong, and making them rich is disgusting. We should create the norm that all this iswrong, that deliberately manufacturing hate and bigotry is repellent.
Or else the complex is just going to keep on steamrolling us, our sociality, our relationality, and warping it with the disturbed inadequacies of the tech-bros.It’s true that they can’t get dates. But that’s because they’re boring, dull, don’t read books, don’t offer much as partners and dates, and then they made the mistake of blaming that on everyone else: they let themselves be twisted into rage and hate by manfluencers. Their foolish mistake — look, they still can’t get dates, no matter how much of the dumb manfluencer lore they can recite like a liturgy — shouldn’t be amplified algorithmically to the point it poisons therestof us.
UmairDecember 2022
