How being straight became gay

Let's start with a softball question. You know, how do you think men are doing right now? I think men are doing bad, badly, poorly. Yes. But I would also like to add to that. I think men are doing poorly because everyone's doing poorly. How would you sort of genuinely describe the state of men at the moment? You know, with the understanding that everyone's kind of doing badly. But how specifically do you think men are at the moment? Disappointed, I think, would be the main thing that comes up in mind for me. Yeah, that sounds right to me. That sounds, I think, based on the right wing, especially chatter that I see, I think that's kind of the way that they're thinking about things. And today we're going to be talking about really kind of like the logical end point of the manosphere and a lot of these disappointed men, which is that they are now so hateful towards women especially that they think it's kind of gay to get married or talk to them or have sex with them. And I am Ryan Broderick. I am not one of those men. I want to be really clear up top. Grant Irving, my producer, I'm pretty sure isn't one of those men. You might be hearing from him from time to time. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And with us today is podcaster, activist, porn star Siri Dahl. Welcome to the show. How are you? Hello. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. Just my voice is a little different than it normally is because I just got back from AVN and I have a cold. Not a problem. It's like a good podcast baritone. That's good. Like that works for us. Yeah. I'm just a little more vocal fry than usual. As I teased at the top, I will be saying some pretty insane things based on your pick for what today's topic is. So I'm just going to read it straight right now. I think you should explain to the audience your theory on how, and I quote, being straight became gay. well i mean the manosphere is pretty pretty gay in it this is like all right yeah we got it okay cool uh yeah i mean if you if you just look at like some of the top manosphere podcasters from you know just guys like andrew tate who are mostly talking i mean i mean he talks he obviously does or at least more recently he started talking about political things but But mainly he just talks about like, oh, yeah, like here's how to sex traffic your own women that you find in Romania. And then on the other end of that is like Nick Fuentes, I guess, who's just building his own weird cult. And Nick Fuentes is definitely gay. For the sanity of our legal team, we're going to say allegedly or that there are rumors that he might be. But yes, I can journalistically say that I have seen many, many rumors that Nick Fuentes is gay or at least dates men from time to time. I have seen the same rumors. And even there was that clip recently when he was asked if he's gay. And the way he responds is just like, okay, that's very convincing. Very sure. Yes. I think you're dead on that the sort of like super toxic manosphere has these like weird monastic elements to it that have also sort of combined with, I don't know, like hyper masculine ideas about how people are supposed to look and behave. And it's all become very homoerotic in the last year or two. I think to a degree it always has been. I just think it's like because Internet, because computer now the like sort of what's always been this like looming kind of element of misogyny is now being concentrated and concentrated so much via Internet activity that and algorithmic bias and things like that, that that now it really has done this like full Ouroboros of. Yeah. The straightest man you can be is one who never has sex with a woman. Yeah. I mean, it's it's like very much like I mean, I've seen jokes that like the manosphere is like white Taliban. And I think that that's sort of part of it, too, in a way where it's like you don't want to be around women at all anymore. Yeah. Yeah. To start here, I want my producer Grant to pull up a picture. This was taken in January 2026 at a club in Miami. I'd like to try to name all of the awful men in this photo. I definitely know two of them. I think I might know three total. And it's so funny because I have seen so many clips from this, and I still cannot remember the names of a chunk of these guys because I don't – because I'm not in their – Yeah, that's fine, actually. That's good. So on the far left, we have Nick Fuentes. That's right. The guy in the puff vest and the next guy in the pink suit cannot remember their names. I think that the guy kind of hiding behind this other guy is – is that Sneeko? That's Sneeko, yeah. Yeah. I don't know who this dude with the shitty goatee is. And then the guy on the far right is Clavicular. That's right. Clavicular, who on this trip to Miami learned that jester maxing in the club is the new meta, if you didn't know that. I want to make sure we got that. That's right. So we've got Nick Fuentes, the guy in the puffer jacket. I never remember the name of either, but he kind of doesn't matter. He's kind of like C tier or D tier. He seems to be the token brown man, so they can all pretend that they're not Nazis. I mean, Nick Fuentes is also Hispanic. And I think Sneeko is. Hispanic origin. So, yeah, it's. Yeah. I did see a couple of right wingers bring that point up, and they said that Hitler would kill himself again if he saw this photo of his biggest supporters in 2026. Yeah. So the guy in the pink, that's Andrew Tate's brother, Tristan. oh yeah yeah i should i should have been able to tell by the doofy face yeah goatee guy his name i actually don't know either but i know that he like is kind of like a pickup artist kind of guy and then yes clavicular is the newest sort of gen z looks maxer i've been following these guys you know and their misadventures on uh kick i believe is the streaming service they're using and i and i do think it's like a very strange evolution of this world where they're basically running like a 24-7 Big Brother house with each other. And they're all, like, I watched a video the other day of Vitaly, the Russian YouTuber who just got freed from Filipino jail, injecting clavicular with some kind of, like, boner medicine to give him a boner at a party. I wonder if it's the boner medicine that is commonly used in the adult industry. Is it injected into the base of your penis? Actually, that's a good question. I mean, there's a couple different ones. The one that is most popular current day, though, I'm not sure. Okay. Well, that's the one that Vitaly – There was an older one that was actually you would inject like almost like in the tip more. Yeah. Here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Let me set the scene here. So they're in some sort of – Yeah, I figured. Yeah. So Clavicular and Vitaly and a bunch of these guys are all in some sort of empty McMansion on the outskirts of Miami, I have to assume. I think they were all going to Aiden Ross's boxing match or something. Oh, man. All of this is awful. And like I said, Vitaly has been in a Filipino jail for like the last six to nine months. And he's been – What did he – He was harassing people for videos. And so the Filipino government wanted to deport him, but they kind of held him for months and months, deported him to Russia. He was in jail for being annoying. Yes, yes. He was in jail for being annoying. All right. Got it. So now he's out. He has made his way to the U.S. And he's at a party with Clavicular. Clavicular has basically just been like snorting ketamine on live streams for the last two weeks with these guys. And he seems really out of it. And he's like talking to some quote unquote baddies at this party. And Vitaly is like, let me help you with the baddies. And then Clavicular is like, okay. And so they go into a room. And then you only hear sounds. And then Clavicular comes out and he's like, he just injected something into the base of my penis that's going to give me a boner. Well, I mean, if you're on enough ketamine, what else are you going to do? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you make of that? What do you make of all of that? Okay. So I do have a unique perspective since I'm familiar with such drugs. Sure. Not every male performer uses them, but I mean, it's on a porn set when you – it's kind of a hard thing to keep a reliable boner when you have – sometimes you have a long break. like you have to cut and there's a long break because you have to reset and you have to go back into the sex scene and there's like 10 people watching uh all the crew members and stuff so you're not even really supposed to talk about it if you use those drugs because it's like it's like it's kind of taboo but it's kind of taboo for i would say maybe a good reason just because it's like very discouraged to be on any substance right right you definitely can't like have alcohol or anything like that. But I mean, yes, there are male performers who use drugs to help with a boner. So I mean, the injection thing, I know that to most men who aren't familiar with that kind of kind of medicine, it's like, oh, God, that's terrifying. For me, I mean, I work in an industry where it is a little more normalized. And I'm aware that like, there are people who just, well, you know, want to use it for one reason or another, and they're using it like responsibly. So I try not to really judge there. It's like your body, your choice. But OK, in the context of clavicular being like having another man inject this into the base of his dick for him, were the the baddies in question, did we see them at any point? Yeah, you see them before and you see them after. And they and when he comes out, he explains to the baddies like what has happened and they just laugh at him. And it's like, and yeah, horrified. Of course they do. It's like, yeah, He went to a back room and got a penis injection. Literally, it feels like a comedy sketch that's like almost like tongue in cheek. Like, yeah, like I'm totally straight because I'm getting my dick injected by another man so I can talk to these hot girls. He's just going to talk to them. It's like, why are you at the point? He says like you want to immediately you want to do the dick injection immediately before sex. Truly, you do. You want to do it immediately before sex. Otherwise, you could end up with a blood clot in your dick and have to go to the hospital and they cut it open and drain it. I think he has a line where he's like, I have 30 minutes if anyone wants to go upstairs with me and all the girls like laugh at him. Yeah. But I do think like there's an interesting connection between the adult film world and this one, at least aesthetically, because these guys are taking stuff that, as you said, has been on the Internet forever. And they're now like actively performing it. Like it's not like keyboard warriors on 4chan being like girls are gross and I'm an incel. Yeah. It's like I look like a G.I. Joe figure and I'm going to like perform this in public and on the Internet. And it looks really silly and ridiculous. Yeah. Well, I mean, the key is like I don't know where they're finding the baddies that are women who are willing to go to a house full of these men, which seems like deeply unsafe, deeply unsafe. Yes. My guess is that they're being compensated. 100% or whether whether by the party hosts or compensated more indirectly because of the clout they might get you know like if they're only fans baddies if they're appearing in these viral videos with these dudes they're very likely to like experience a big surge in new subscribers means new money right yeah there's no question in my mind why these women are there they're there because they're going to get paid somehow, some way. They're going to get compensated for putting their Lord knows what at risk for being in the presence of these shitty guys. It 100% is a performance, and that's the funniest part, is it's a performance for other men. Right. If these dudes had spent any amount of time around women or bothered to try to understand women as human beings, fellow human beings, then they would be aware that like the vast majority of women are not into the shit that they're doing. No, not even in the same like universe as what most women would find attractive in a man. Clavicular needs to get like those big glasses and start dressing like Grant and they got to listen to Claro. That's like a good first step for him. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's this performative masculinity that is entirely completely based in a homoerotic gaze. This is a post from a guy who was following one of the streams at home and he was watching it and he screenshotted a moment where a woman sits on Clavicular's lap at this Miami streamer house and the guy writes, bro is in a room with Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Tristan Tate, Myron, etc. I think Myron was probably one of the guys that we couldn't name. and he is distracted by a random hoe this is why controlling less is important and i think this gives the whole game away because it's like i've been covering some version of this scene for 15 years now and the very beginnings it was guys being like come to my seminar i'll teach you how to like cold approach women at bars or bookstores and you'll meet girls and then you'll be happy did he help you figure out what to do if it's like the middle of the day and there's a set Yeah, you got to do a two set, a three set. You got to demonstrate value. I know I've interviewed the guy who wrote the game, right? I'm so sorry. Was there any sleight of hand? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. If you become a good pickup artist, you just become a magician. But here's the thing. I understand that world, actually. I understand, like, OK, I'm lonely and I want to meet people. I don't know how. I'm willing to pay money for it. Somewhere along the line, probably, you know, like most things in like the middle 2010s, Everything became like way more politically charged, polarizing, violent, xenophobic. And the idea of becoming this kind of person to meet women has actually totally disappeared. And now it's like we want to become this type of man to only hang out with other men like this and eventually overthrow the government and force women to be with us. Well, when all else fails, right, what do you want these guys to do? Go to therapy? No. Here's the other thing. If they got the fantasy world that they apparently want where women are have no rights right are completely dependent on men like they don what these dudes don realize is that the um the rate of of a lot of husbands like oopsie daisy drinking rat poison in their coffee would skyrocket like crazy like there is no world where andrew tate gets a wife that doesn't poison him correct that is a hundred percent i'm so serious. Like that's exactly what the case would be. You're exactly right. And as these guys have become sort of more focused on, we're going to become uber menches and we're going to use the government to give us like state sponsored girlfriends or whatever, they've attracted men who are less and less interested in women or even thinking about women. And there was a very funny incident during this Miami streamer tour. Nick Fuentes got a New York Post write up about it, In fact, so they they write a humiliating clip showed Fuentes being approached by Brayden Peters, also known as the controversial looks maxing influencer Clavicular. Clavicular asks Fuentes excitedly, yo, Nick, I'm going to bring some girls over for you. And then Fuentes, looking flustered, put his hand up and immediately begged him not to responding awkwardly. No, I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, OK, you know, you can you can obviously make a million jokes about like Nick Fuentes, his sexuality and what it may be. But it also, I think, is a fascinating example of how it's kind of clear that Fuentes like didn't think that this would even be something he'd have to deal with. Yeah, because he's he only interacts with men. Right. We have we have a tweet here in our in our research where he posted at one point being a wife guy is still gay, actually. And then Andrew Tate responded to that writing, this is an objective fact. Anyone who's experienced with women isn't enamored by them. OMG, my OMG wife said so anyway. I was having a beer and then my wife said gay. I mean having a wife, gay. Totally. Having a wife and then acknowledging her. Yeah. Like speaking of her in a conversation with your boys, gay. Yeah, totally, totally. There's no straight way to be married to a woman. But I do want to go back to sort of the very beginnings of this because I think it is sort of astounding how far we've come from this. Are you familiar with AngryHarry.com? Have you ever heard of that? No. No, I'm not actually. I mean I don't think I am. So AngryHarry.com was the first ever recorded men's rights website on the internet. It appeared in the mid-2000s. It was, of course, written by a British guy, and it is very small, but it kicks around a little bit. There is also a very early YouTube video that Grant can pull up for you here, which is pretty interesting. This is porn music. Definitely. so for listeners at home who are listening to this not watching this the video is very much about like custody law like that was a big thing for the early men's rights guys beef with the family court it's a lot of family court stuff there's also just like a subsection of like british male blogger that is completely obsessed like losing his children to like some sort of custody battle it i think it's like the heart of like british turfdom like male turfs as well like they're all sort of obsessed with it, but it's very different. You know, it's a very different aesthetic than, you know, what we see now. It's very different tone. And I would say it is separate from the pickup artists that are sort of operating at the same time. And then around this same era in 2006, we get MGTOW.com, which stands for men going their own way. Are you familiar with this? Yes, I am. Can you, can you sort of briefly describe the, the, the noxious vibes of men going their own way the whole theme is like extricating yourself from interacting with women not necessarily like in a totalitarian like right don't have any interaction with women but it's it's just like whatever women like or care about or want to do that's we want the opposite yeah it's kind of like a reactionary bullshit thing i think the easiest way to think about it is like society has been, is controlled by women. And so I'm going to move out to the woods and die alone out there to get away from it basically. But here's here. All right. Okay. Which is like, but that's also just like the male response to anything, which is like, Oh, I'm going to go out into the woods. I'm going to die alone. Cause like, that's just like men fantasize about it. But here's, here's an archive. Here's a piece of, uh, from the archive. So I see this question posted with some regularity in the personal section. So I thought I'd take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there. that haven't figured it out. What happened to all the nice guys? The answer is simple. You did. See, if you think back really hard, you might vaguely remember a platonic guy pal who always, oh my God, I know where this is going, who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He'd tag along with you when you went shopping, stopped by your place for a movie when you were lonely, but didn't feel like going out or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the other guy that you were fucking treated you. And it goes on and on and on for pages. And then it ends with, he came to realize that if you wanted a woman like you, he'd have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be. Fact is, now he's probably getting laid. And in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. So if you're looking for a nice guy, here's what you do. One, build a time machine. Two, go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass. Three, take a look at what's right in front of you and grab a hold of it. And I imagine this guy wrote it while wearing Joker face paint. This feels like very Joker to me. Essentially, this comes down to like I don't like women who have – who value them, their own autonomy and have self-esteem because they will expect more of me. Therefore – Yes, yes. You should lower your standards as much as possible and allow men to mistreat you. It's like it's a self-justifying thing. I will say, like, I've been with my partner for seven years. And not only does he have a I'm sorry to say I have his permission to advertise this fact. We've shot content together. Not only does he have one of the things that all these sad dudes probably desperately wish they had, which is a massive penis. He's very attractive sexually and aesthetically. and my best friend, one of the nicest human beings I've ever met in my life. But sometimes I'm like, he's also bi. And I wonder how much that has to do with it is like being capable of actually admitting like, but like, cause a lot of these guys, I really think that there's a lot of repressed homoeroticism going on. It's the only, like, I don't see how else you could possibly be straight and, and truly genuinely hate women so much. But what if your partner hated you? uh and acted like it all the time wouldn't you like him more i feel like that's what these guys are telling each other i've i've been in i was in a enough unfortunately i was like married to a guy who was like very emotionally abusive like over a decade ago and it was the kind of like gaslighting relationship that i it did take me like i was with him for two and a half years so it took me some time to realize what was going on and work my way out of it yes i think that there is, as you said, like repressed homoeroticism at the heart of a lot of this stuff, but there's also like profound insecurity and just like, like, you know, this, the, the anger that sort of builds up with men who are socialized like this. And, you know, when we were talking about like, at what point did these guys start thinking like, we're never going to be around women. There were obviously like the men going their own way who are going to go die out in the woods alone. But the, even this angry, hairy guy all the way back in the, you know, the, um, 2000s, He's writing stuff like this. In my view, traditional marriage is not the long term solution, though I suspect the modified form of it will certainly be very helpful. Marriage. Don't do it. Come the divorce as come. It probably will. The courts will systematically shear you of your children, your house and huge amounts of your income for 20 years. That's a little specific, angry here. I feel like you're pulling from somewhere very personal there. And we're going to talk about how this resentment, this almost like pre-resentment of women, like before they've even done anything. The fact that you're walking through life with the idea that women are preying on you in some capacity, how this gets darker and darker in the next decade. And that they're all the same. And that they're all the same. And we're going to talk about all that right after a word from our sponsors, Blue Chew. I think that's the boner one, right? Yeah. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie. Maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend. And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or template. Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. Obviously, the 2000s, everything kind of changes in terms of how we're using technology. It's not just like weirdos blogging anymore. We're all online. We're all using dating apps, which I think is sort of like an under-discussed dimension here, the sort of like ability to see the sexual dynamics of a large population. I also think that dating apps have a pretty large hand in some men falling into radicalization. Say more about that because I agree and I feel like it's so under discussed. This is based on my observation and anecdotally conversations that I've had with friends of mine who are straight men who use dating apps. Dating apps are I think the earliest versions of them. Like, you know, I really liked OKCupid when I was in college. it was i liked it because there was all these personality tests and it was fun you could like make your results public and then go see other people who had like similar results to you so it was like kind of fun trying to like find people that i might vibe with that way um but they're so gamified now it is literally just a way of like getting getting money from people and most of the people who are paying for like the subscription stuff and like the what's the like 500 one that Tinder also launched. Yeah, there's a mega premium tier now, right? Yeah, it's like this is predatory toward men because they know that dating app companies have all the information that they can see. Like, first of all, most of the user base is overwhelmingly men. There's always far less women on the apps than there are men. The women that are on the apps are regularly experiencing abuse from, like, dudes who just have no tact. and it's like you have these two like opposing groups where the women are like i'm like i don't want to reach out to you like i i'm trying to minimize the amount of abuse i experience on this app while like genuinely maybe looking for the things i'm looking for whether that's just hookups or hookups from a safe cool guy that you can talk to or actually relationship material i just feel like for a lot of men it ends up regardless of what they're looking for ends up being this like incredibly frustrating experience of reaching out to 300 people a week and most of the time never getting a single message back. And if that's what you're experiencing and you're also like, I'm paying $500 a month to Tinder for this. Yeah, it's totally it's definitely like radicalizing some guys. And you can see like a direct rise in gender based violence with the sort of advent of both dating apps and I think visual social media. I think that there is like a component of like seeing the people who don't want you in theory, like that is that, and, and sort of algorithmically being bombarded with this stuff. And it's not to take agency away from these guys, but just for an example. So the kind of like dorky, like go die in the woods group, men going their own way. It gets really dark around 2011 when Thomas ball kills himself. He lights himself on fire in front of a New Hampshire courthouse to protest the family court system. When that happens, another one of these guys, Paul Elam, calls for like a revolution, basically saying that like they should burn legislature buildings and lampposts and hang corpses from them. And he creates a doxing website called RegisterHer.com, which is, you know, just fills up with just like random women that these guys are mad at. Katherine Heigl gets swept into the incel frenzy at one point when she makes a joke on Funny or Die that men should be neutered. And this is all kind of building towards Elliot Rodger, the incel mass shooter. And as this is happening, we're getting more and more spaces for these guys to hang out. So you're getting a voice for men. And then you also have Roosh V, which I think was Return of Kings was his. Yes. Very well remember that. Yeah, I'm so mad. I remember the name of his stupid blog. Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, they're all filling up. You're getting the red pill theory stuff. And then GQ goes to the first Voice for Men conference in 2015, and they write at the time, the issues were as varied as the manosphere, father's rights, suicide, and circumcision. And also false accusations of rape, male victims of rape, and unfaithful wives, cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs, quote, as one speaker would put it. What? I think that's like that whole idea that like your wife will leave you for a black guy, which is like very common. I was going to say that that's a racism thing. OK, got it. Yeah, that's a racism thing. Got it. And then there's another interesting – I would love to see that man's top porn search terms. We know what it is. We know what it is. Like it's all psychosexual. All this stuff is an admission. So from the GQ piece it reads, first – so it's talking about like one of the men there and his origin story. First he says his wife cheated on him. Then she wanted him to know it. She'd laugh at me. His low point lying on the floor in a fetal curl while she stood over him, mocking him. He says she had a butcher knife in her hand. She denies this. All of it. That is just a guy with a cock fetish. Yeah, it sounds like a fantasy, actually. I've thought a lot about this over the years because, you know, you read enough of this stuff. And at least for me like I always trying to be like OK like how is this still happening And I do think that there is like this interesting pipeline where like a lot of men are raised to only date women based on looks and they don really care about women as human beings And they're told like over and over again they shouldn't care about women as human beings. I would imagine probably a same or slightly smaller percentage of men who are with abusive partners that women are with. Right. It's probably I mean, I don't know the details here, but I do think that like when you're going after a potential romantic partner and you don't care. out anything about them other than how they look and how other men would perceive you for having them as your partner. You end up in really toxic relationships that you then find even deeper toxic communities to talk about these with. So you end up in these conferences where these men are like, oh yeah, like my BPD wife, like tried to kill me with a butcher knife. And it's like, you don't like your wife. You never liked your wife. You just started dating her to impress guys, you know, and now, yeah, she's probably going to try to kill you. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, I would say probably probably incompetence in multiple areas like like like I feel like a lot of the guys who fall into this mindset this horrible philosophy are also like somewhat emotionally stunted yeah and of course this sort of rhetoric allows for even more unsavory ideologies to sort of take root and in fact at this conference that this GQ reporter went to One person said, I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex than on the side of ruining men's lives when asked about, of course, age of consent laws. What? It becomes this whole idea of repercussions for the basest impulses I have as a man. That's what these guys really do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But one thing I wanted to ask you specifically about, because I think it's another piece of this that is not talked about very often, is have you noticed a sort of rise in what I would call like sexual mercantilism? Like the idea that like women are a resource that have to be hoarded, the sort of like post GameStop pump idea of like there's like a sexual economics at play that like you have to deal with. Because I see these guys talk about something like that all the time, and I've never seen anything really good about it, written about it or discussed about it. Well, OK, so I do think that this the framework of patriarchy just sort of inherently does that anyway. Like it just is that. So, I mean, I suppose there's there's one way to talk about it where I'm like, I guess these guys are they're perceiving that they're perceiving that that is already existent within this. structure they're just like really being really on the nose about it yeah i think a lot of like you know social progress that has been made in the last like couple hundred years has um made it pretty uncouth to actually express misogynist opinions in that point of a way but just like you know overt racism has made such a comeback overt misogyny is very popular now as well it's like i also think about the the podcast bros you know like fresh and fit podcast and the whatever podcast and and and those things where it's like their whole shtick is to invite on a woman who does only fans as her job and then just like poke every imaginable button and like disrespect her in every imaginable way and yes and dehumanize her uh just to be clear you're talking about the whatever podcast uh right yeah yeah they just like they just like shout it only fans models for two hours and yeah yeah that's i yeah i try to imagine the kind of person that watches that and like i don't i think you just have to sort of like dig a hole and like put them in it like i don't think they can be in society anymore i know well and it's funny that the whole thing with like attacking the the sex workers on like with that those podcast guys a big part of the criticism is like oh well you you're just materialistic like you're a gold digger blah blah blah and and i'm like what they're they're parasites they're making a living making content creation off of people that are making content that people actually enjoy she's making all of her money like this is she's she's making money fair and square like also like you're selling you're making content it's like not an easy job to do only fans full-time working really hard making a lot of content and building a fan base to market it to and then those people simply buying the content that you're selling to them like that is not what a gold digger is also these guys these guys are part of the ecosystem like none of these women would come on to get shouted at if they couldn't get some kind of following from it and these guys have to know that that's what they're promising them so it's like they do yeah so the whole thing is broken but it's kind of just rage bait yes i've actually heard multiple women who have gone on the whatever podcast say that like that the main guy i don't know his name that he's like not even really doesn't really believe in any of this just stuff it's like is an empty person morally and he knows that the rage bait will like help the women who go on the podcast get more subscribers because that is the viewer base for that podcast is men who also pay for a lot of only fan subscriptions yes it's weirdly enough and then i it's crazy to me like we've talked about this in previous episodes but like i think the rise of the term simp is so telling where it's like it is a term specifically for the men who like hate themselves for having parasocial relationships with women online and it came about right as women both who are streaming and also on tube sites as verified influencers and also on OnlyFans sites and competitors. It's a derogatory term for a man who likes a woman who is benefiting from the online attention of men. And it is a self-hatred thing. And right before we go to our next break, I wanted to read this last chunk from Voice for Men because I think it is a useful sort of illustration of how we're slowly over time watching these guys drop any pretext that they're going to meet women through this ideology. So A Voicier Man writes this in the mid-2000s. They write, romantic love is a narrative of male sacrifice in exchange for sex and to some degree approval. Romantic love takes that temporary insanity and turns it into a mandate. On its face, it's a perfect storm of sexual selection, male sacrifice, and male disposability, which is really just three different ways of saying gynocentrism, which is like gynocentrism. It's like, yeah. And we're going to talk about how Andrew Tate takes a hold of that whole ideology right after a word from our sponsors, HIMSS. I think they also sell a boner pill, right? I think they do. Yeah, they sell minoxidil too for when your hair starts thinning. Nothing wrong with that. That's just gender affirming care as far as I'm concerned. It is gender affirming care. I take minoxidil. It's great. I take it too. I have a guy in Chinatown that gives me a really strong dose of it, and it keeps me looking 25 years old. It's great. No, I'll sell Medoxidil. I think it's great. Oh, yeah. And Boner Pills, because Boner Pills are also great. I'll take them all on stream. Let's see what happens. I mean, what do we need to do to get a creatine sponsor? Or, yeah, Grant wants a creatine promotion. He wants those watery creatine muscles. Do it. You want to be as bloated as possible. 10 milligrams of creatine a day. Sorry. He wants to be super bloated. When did you first learn about Andrew Tate? I guess in like probably like 2018 or 2019 when just because I used to be really active on Twitter. So it's one of those things where I kick myself because I had all these screenshots and I never did anything with them. But I remember I would it would have been 2019. I was doing an investigation into the Hungarian far right movement. Oh, because at the time I was covering sort of like far right radicalization around the world. And so I was like looking into Viktor Orban's kind of deal. And I discovered like a bunch of these old pickup artists that I had been following in years past were suddenly popping up in Hungary. And they were popping up at like basically like cigar clubs and like poker clubs and stuff. And I came across this account on Instagram called Cobra Tate. And I was like, what the fuck is Cobra Tate? And then I spent like probably an entire afternoon just like screenshotting how him and his brother were popping up at all of these like far right epicenters around Europe. And I couldn't figure out like who they were, why they were there, why they were networking with like established pickup artists and men's rights activists. I never did anything with the story and I always kind of kick myself. But we now know that he was building what he would eventually call Hustler University, which was an alleged human trafficking operation and also pyramid scheme, which also operated kind of as a fan club. And so the idea was actually very evil and very clever, which was you would pay him money to share his videos on TikTok. He would basically earn points in his pyramid scheme by paying for the privilege to share his content online. And it kind of unlocked like an algorithmic tidal wave of Andrew Tate content around 2019, 2020. And then I think that got supercharged. It is unfortunately pretty genius. It is. It's like a growth strategy. I think we should start Panic University Grant. I think that'd be really cool. You can share our clips and only for $20 a month, we'll give you our clips to share. What would we teach? How to be better men. Of course. To take creatine, work out, watch anime. How to make eye contact. Well, that I cannot do. I can't even make eye contact through a Zoom screen. I can't even do that. How to ask yourself questions like, if I was this woman, what would I be feeling in this moment? Basic empathy. Yeah. So, I mean, were you surprised when you learned of Andrew Tate's existence? No. Like, oh, of course this guy exists. No, I was like, yeah, of course this guy exists, 100%. I started working in the adult industry in 2012, and in the porn industry, someone like Andrew Tate, we would call a – well, he got a little too advanced with his whole scam after building it up. But maybe when he was just starting out with Hustler University, he was at a status where we would have described him as a suitcase pimp. Suitcase pimp? What is a suitcase pimp? Okay, well, it's been around for a while. I don't know who actually originated it. But when you're a female talent in the porn industry, you pretty much provide all your own wardrobe. So like a studio hires you for a scene. and you go to set with a suitcase. And so a suitcase pimp would be like this dude, this like shitty, like manipulative dude who would usually be dating a model. He would also like identify himself as her manager, sometimes her agent, whatever. And he's pretty much just like a leech sucking off her resources. I see. But acting like he's actually providing her some kind of service in exchange when he's really not. He's just a fucking leech. But yeah, suitcase pimp, because he'd always be dropping this girl off on set. OK, that makes sense. Have you seen more suitcase pimps since Andrew Tate? Well, so because the porn world has actually gotten so like way better, like it's it's actually easier than ever to identify the suitcase pimp type now because we have because individual performers have more power than ever to control their own careers, their own income. And that power we have now specifically because of platforms like OnlyFans that let us just sell our content directly to fans. Like most people in the porn industry don't make the majority of their business revenue on shooting for studios. And it was the studio and like the talent agency system that actually was more enabling men to be leeches in that way. Wait, wait. Based on what you just said, which I think is a really important dimension to this, what do you make of this sort of fact that right as women were basically being able to create their own businesses and their own mini media empires through these tools, something shifted in the manosphere almost as sort of like an economic revolt against it. this idea that like, wait a minute, like you guys shouldn't be enjoying this. Like you guys shouldn't be like happy and healthy and doing things on your own terms. That's not allowed. Like it feels very much in the same way that like it's very much based on the rise of dating apps and visual social media. It also feels very connected to that as well. It definitely is. And I mean, it's also totally not a coincidence that the new like wave of anti-porn legislation and anti-porn sentiment has risen at literally bar for bar like at the same pace as very visibly successful women doing sex work being only fans models etc even though if you like all of us keep saying no the potential for exploitation was far greater 10 years ago it's very ironic that a lot A lot of the anti-porn stuff now is like resting in this argument that like we're being like sex workers are being exploited. So we have to, you know, remove the industry like it's negative for all these reasons. And it's like no one was trying to argue that when it was very definitively more exploitative back before we had the ability to make our own money and be much more in control of that. So, no, there's no question in my mind that the backlash really when it comes to specifically sex workers and and women online making their own money like that, that backlash really does rest on like it's like jealousy. It's jealousy over 100 percent over like, oh, I think that this girl's hot and she's an OF creator. And now I'm mad because she's hot. she'll like i she's unattainable to me and i'm mad about that and i'm doubly mad because she's making money from a bunch of men who she's also unattainable to i'm not saying that that's the case because plenty of only like successful women and only fans like have stable loving relationships with men who don't look like a clavicular like are just like normal fucking dudes but i'm saying that that the thought process of men like this when they you know get angry about women Yeah I mean that is basically what he is doing though he is like he is running he is allegedly running a very far international uh human trafficking and campsite operation and he is spinning that to be an entrepreneurial pursuit and teaching other men how to how to do this at the same time Nick Fuentes is getting his start as a streamer. Our researcher Adam described the Nick Fuentes idea as in the wake of Trump's first election, edgy online people are forced to find something more offensive than Pepe the Frog. And they move on to a new obese cartoon frog named the Gruper. And I think the rise of these two pillars of the online male community are very telling. So you have this one who is like total nihilist, neat, you know, never goes outside. And then you have this, you know, uber mensch kind of guy. And they're both effectively just like live streamers who are exploiting people. So Mother Jones writes about him right before, right around the pandemic saying, eventually he'll keep up this facade even when he moves to a larger house. And production studio is showing how crucial it is to his image, which is true. He is still looking like he's in his basement, but he is obviously making millions. And we tried to – okay, so to go back to your thesis that all these guys have made being straight gay, we tried to find the earliest instance of Nick Fuentes coming out against heterosexual sex, which appeared in 2022, according to the Star Observer, who writes, earlier this month America First treasurer Jaden McNeil found a girlfriend moved out of Fuentes's basement lair and denounced the group as a cult this seemed to infuriate Fuentes and sent him off the rails Fuentes some people call me gay because I've never had a girlfriend I think if anything it makes me less gay if anything it makes me not gay if we're really being honest never having a girlfriend never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because honestly dating women is gay men having sex with women is gay and having sex with men is gay and it's really all gay the only really straight heterosexual position is actually incel what's gayer than being like i like cuddles i need kisses yeah well you know that really does speak for itself doesn't it and that same year andrew tate gets written about and and and in this piece it reads he says he likes young women that he can control and make an imprint on. Several of the women in his videos are branded with the tattoos Tate's Girl or Tate's Property. And then he's quoted as saying, I fuck women so I can get what I actually want, which is not them. They are means to an end. He explains in one of his videos. So it's like both of these guys have taken this to its logical end point, which is that there's no straight way to be around women. And the only way you can be straight is by in non-sexual partnerships with men. And these guys are now responsible for like shaping the young minds of boys across the country. So. Yeah. What do we do? What do we do with that? Well, God, we need to fix the education system. I agree. That's a big one. That's a real big piece of it. I genuinely feel kind of like sad at the videos of Clavicular. I think he's 20, if not maybe 21. He's doing meth. He's doing meth and ketamine. He proudly admits to doing meth to hollow out his cheekbones. I mean, if that's the looks maxing meta right now, like I'll start doing meth too. But like the thing is, like I feel so bad for him because like he's clearly like if this was happening in a foreign country, we would be like, oh, that kid was groomed by ISIS. Like that kid was groomed by insert terrorist organization. and and i feel really sad watching his videos like there's a video that came out i think a couple days ago where his dad texts him while on the stream and he's like you're a drug addict and you embarrass me and he looks like he's about to cry and then he sort of goes into some kind of trance and talks about why mogging is is important and it's like yeah that's so sad and the andrew tates the nick fuentes of the world have shaped this guy's life to the point where he is now just like an insane meth addict like shooting drugs into his penis like the whole thing is crazy Yeah, it's it's no, it's really tragic. Genuinely, I don't know how many people's like parent like someone like clavicular who's like currently 20. So I mean, how old do we think his like parents are part of me? I when I see like the really hardcore, like misogynist incel like Gen Z guys, I part of me wonders, like, how old are your parents? Like what? what kind of monitoring of your like internet usage activity were you exposed to growing up if at all i'm a little bit hypocritical and even saying that because like i was a very my parents are boomers i was raised as a very very free range kid and also i had internet access like i had my first computer with internet access in my bedroom when i was nine years old which was like far earlier than most anyone else I knew. This was the case for me because my dad was is a computer nerd. He was a programmer and he wanted us to like learn those skills really early. I was like doing nefarious shit with my Internet access as a prepubescent child on the Internet. And like, was I exposed to things that were potentially dangerous? Blah, blah, blah. Absolutely. For sure. But it was different back then. I don't know that I would have been capable of even finding a community as toxic as like these ones that exist now. And I just don't know that a lot of like people who are raising children currently are even aware of the things that they're, that their kids can get up to. I try to tell my own mom because she's super offline. And I have conversations with her where I'm like, yeah, are you aware that like, for like an 18, 19 year old guy right now, it is like a pretty kind of almost typical opinion for them to be like essentially politically a Nazi, to think that women should lose the right to vote. And all these other things that are like, you know, we think of as incredibly backwards, and it's somehow been normalized. And it's literally just because of like algorithm based stuff, the alt right incel like radicalization pipeline that's just been perfectly set up for kids to fall into from a young age. And it's like, there's so much shared responsibility across different like aspects of our culture yeah i mean like on one hand yeah clavicular did discover that jester maxing is the new meta at the club but he has also ruined his life and fried his brain yeah and i also wonder like you know back to this question of like what can you do which is a question that like grant and i will never really get in the form of emails for this episode because we always do when we talk about this stuff you can raise kids to be media literate and you yourself can become media literate and understand this stuff and sort of recognize, you know, these archetypes that as we've proven on today's episode have been around for 20 years. Uh, it is not hard to sort of point out an incel or point out a men's rights guy. You, they, they all, they've, they've been talking the same way for two decades, but it is also like, how do you, especially right now, shelter a young person, protect a young person from probably the darkest like era of like american society post-civil rights movement at this point like it is it is they are surround it is the water that these kids are swimming in as you said like the median gen z boy is a neo-nazi and i don't really know how you fix that part of it that's when the personal and the societal start to sort of bump into each other. Yeah. And I mean, also just panic in general about teenagers having access to social media and like smartphones. No, that is a moral panic. It is a moral panic. I agree. Yeah. And I would not ever suggest that like age verification, mandatory age verification for everyone, you know, like banning cell phones, blah, blah. I don't think any of that stuff is a solution. No, I mean, all of this stuff happened on TikTok, one of the most censorious social platforms that's ever existed. It's hard for me to imagine that someone could grow up to be a clavicular had they been taught, like knowingly, meaningfully taught empathy from a young age. But yeah, I kind of blame a lot of parents. I really do. Partly I say that because I grew up going to my family, like if I can have a small tangent here. Part of why I'm So critical of culture and and left leaning politically, I really think rests in the fact that I experienced a very like eye opening kind of culture shock when I was 12 years old, because I grew up in Minneapolis, going to public schools, living in the city and having a pretty diverse experience as a kid. And that's what was normal to me. And my family moved to a very conservative white suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, right before I started middle school. and that's where I lived and went to school until I finished high school and for me this drastic change in like not just culturally like from the north to the south but in terms of like religious values being imposed on children and stuff I immediately met a bunch of children fellow 12 year olds that and I had I generally like I'm not trying to like look at it with rose-colored glasses But like, you know, growing up in Minneapolis when I was living there, it was not a thing that I heard kids telling other kids like prepubescent times. So there wasn't a whole lot of like discussion of anything related to sex necessarily going on at that time. But I didn't hear like a whole lot of like gendered insults. I didn't observe overt racism all the time at school, but it was just like such a stark contrast. And that area has only continued to get more. Now there's like a literal like a neo-Nazi group that like infiltrated all the PTA at the public schools in that part of Texas, the Patriot Front. And this was like the subject of an NBC News podcast years ago called Southlake, which is one of the neighboring suburbs where I grew up. Like literally they've been like the PTA that the school boards and shit have been like overtaken by like neo-Nazis. It's crazy. And and those people are raising kids who are a school age right now. So I'm like, I really think a lot of the responsibility rests on parents. And you can't say that since like so many young Gen Z men are like in these radicalization holes. I'm not saying that the parents are all training young men to be this way. But I think it's ignorance combined with boys having access to this information online, the algorithmic bias pushing them very intentionally into the manosphere. And then I guess like parents not having a close enough tab on what their kids are doing. because if you were if you were having conversations where you're like valuing empathy and understanding other people's experiences like it'd be it'd be really hard to not notice that your kids falling into that and to like want to like help them out of it at some point so it's like to get to the point of a clavicular i think that it requires like a combination of a lot of different kinds of like enabling and ignorance yeah i think the first step is to sit your child down and if they're talking like someone like Calicular, you just have to look them in the eye and start making fun of them. You talk like you're weird. Stop being weird. That's the first step, you know? And then if your child tries to mog you, you have to sit them down and you have to make fun of them. Like who told you that that was cool? That's actually, no. You don't have to hurt them. You don't have to be mean to them. You just have to look them right in the eye and very simply say, you're talking like a weird freak. And that's how you make sure you don't raise a bully. Yeah. Every once in a while growing up, my dad would say, I don't understand what you're talking about, and it seems really weird. And then I would think, am I being weird? And sometimes I was. So not a big fix, but it's a step. Yeah. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was great. This was a wonderful conversation. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? Okay, so that's usually what I ask our guests. If people want to follow you in a safe for work capacity on the internet, where can they do that? And if people want to follow you in a not safe for work capacity, where can they do that? I feel like that would be easier to split them in half. To be honest, all of my links are at siridahl.com, S-I-R-I-D-A-H-L.com. Perfect. That goes to both safe for work and not safe for work. my primary platforms that are safe for work are blue sky uh which is the one i recommend the most for people who are interested in what i have to say in that regard and then secondarily like instagram because i still post on there but it's of course a little more like censorious with as far as free speech goes i think i've turned a corner on blue sky i still think everyone on there is annoying but i am kind of liking my time more than i used to on there it's definitely better than x these people are a little annoying there i've been on there for a while now and cultivated my feed and all that to where it's like the annoying folks are more minimized. But it's fairly close at this point to what the golden days of Twitter used to feel like. Yeah, I do appreciate it. It's almost there. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fjellstedt is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at CourierNewsroom.com. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at YouTube.com slash at Panic World Pod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.