Part One: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular: The Story of Incel Evolution

Cool Zone Media. Netflix policy in Vietnam, but at least we're on everywhere now. We're on everywhere now. Except Korea and Vietnam. Except for Korea and Vietnam. Unfortunately, my camera's not working right, so we had to use the webcam on my laptop, which does not look as good, which will also not change how 90% of people experience this podcast because it is an audio medium. Why even attach visuals to it? No one knows. To be fair, buddy, I think you look fine. Thanks, Sophie. I think you look great. you know who looks great is our guest kat abu kat how are you doing welcome back i'm good and now i go by my full government name kat abu you're right because you're running for congress because i'm running for congress i have to call you something different now you want to give a little psa plug for the campaign up top i would love to uh hi everyone i'm kat i'm running for congress in the ninth district of illinois that goes from uptown chicago up to Evanston, over to Skokie, all the way to Algonquin and Crystal Lake. It is gerrymandered to hell. And I'm trying to represent you. I am one of the top three viable candidates in this race. Election day is March 17th. I'm the only one of those three people that has not met with or submitted a position paper to APAC. We are the only campaign in this race funded by small dollar donations. I have a cat named Heater. She's orange. And yeah, that's kind of my thing. Oh, and I covered the far right as a researcher and journalist. You might have heard me here before when my microphone was dog shit. Yes. Now your microphone's better and you're running for Congress. And listeners, Kat's my friend. And Sophie's my friend. And our friend. Okay. You're also included. I get to jink on there. Yeah, Robert and I took so many shots of Malort together at the Onion launch party. Oh, God. Oh, Malort. I was like, I bet I can do more than you. And I did. And it's the only time I've ever even somewhat blacked out besides literally being drugged by someone unconsensually. That was like drinking liquid bandage. It was crazy. It was awful. When Ben describes it as spicy WD-40. Yeah. That does prove your rightfulness for the spot that you're seeking is your ability to win the Malort contest. That party was wild. And then you were like, Sophie, come with me to the other bar. And we drank something good. I don't remember what it was. It was like something. I don't remember. I just had like five shots of Malort. And then Ben took me And just like his Standard intro I remember because it was so fucking funny His standard intro to me To people whose names I don't remember This is Sophie, she's the future The funniest Funniest way to introduce So funny It's how I also talk about you And then we went up to Chexnotes Don Lemon And he's like hi Don Lemon, this is Sophie She's the future that was so weird I remember being like let's get a picture together I was like this is all on you man wow I just really enjoyed Robert taking a picture of our young garrison with Don Lemon with full flat I never got to turn it off Welcome to Behind the Bastards the podcast where we talk about a time where we were at a party with Don Lemon and drank too much velour and just fucking blinded his ass with my, I have one of these huge Chinese phones that look at the fucking light on the back of this. This thing's flash goes off like a federal flashbang. Like Bortat guys don't have flashbangs this intense. I'm crying a little bit. Normally if I'm crying on this podcast, it's because of something heinous Robert has told me, but it's really just. Oh, I'll make you cry. Don't worry. We'll all be crying before this is over. Yes, the cats got the right idea. Anyways, back to the job. Really enjoyed memory lane, though. I'm glad cats. I'm really glad cats here. So good to be back. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the biggest night in podcasting. 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This is going to be a memory lane trip for Kat and me, because Kat, you also spent a sizable chunk of the aughts spending way too much time reading about incredibly online right-wing maniacs, right? Yes. Yes, I did. Yeah. So who are we talking about? Great question. Have you heard of clavicular? Oh, my fucking God. Are we talking about clavicular today? A bit. Yes. Today and tomorrow, we'll talk about him a bit. We're explaining how you get from, you know, May 23rd, 2014, when Elliot Rodger goes on his shooting spree and killing spree in Isla Vista, California, which killed six and injured 14 and was like the first big incel mass murder event, right? And it's kind of the thing that put incels on the map. I'm going to guess most of the audience, the first time you heard incel was in the wake of that spree killing, right? Unless you were a very online weirdo prior to May 23rd, 2014, you probably hadn't heard of these people. but through a series of very unlikely and in some ways confusing events this this subculture that kind of comes onto everybody's radar in the wake of this mass murder has kind of led most recently and really just the last couple of weeks to a massive degree of fame and and general internet bemusement over this guy clavicular and there's a direct line between like the first incels and the birth of the incel subculture to the look-smaxing subculture, which is where this guy- So smashing your jaws with hammers. Yes. Hitting your jaws with hammers. Okay. Taking methamphetamine to be hot, right? Like all of that stuff. My first introduction to Clavicular was a random TikTok where Logan Paul was talking about how unbelievably handsome this person is. Yeah. I did not bother to look it up because I don't care who Logan Paul thinks is handsome. but now we're on behind the bastards talking about it so it all makes sense you'll get to see him in a second i want to describe just like in terms of thank you so much for this topic i'm thrilled and this is the exact fucked up shit that i'm glad we get to dive into you know me so well um but the most fascinating thing about incel culture is how so much of it is like this weird both hyper masculine and also like homoerotic subtones of what they think like women want and it's like this like Chad with which is incel uh vernacular by the way that's like all buff and all this stuff when it's like I don't know I like my guy that runs the onion and makes me laugh yeah well that's called jester maxing oh that's jester maxing I'm so sorry thank you thank you we've got a new term for that thank god but he's also just like he's a nice man yeah women like want if in terms of being attractive to men the vast majority just want you to like be a good person that's like not sexist or racist or homophobic or bad or transphobic uh make them laugh and like i don't know close the dishwasher which i don't do so i need a guy to do that for me it's always funny to me because i i too can't love reading incels like talk about like what you like all of the mountains you have to cross to get like a single date where you have to make sure that like your face is no wider than this but at least this wide and like your nose is like is positioned at this part of your face and your eyes are this far apart and like otherwise no one will ever love you. Whereas like living in the real world, you realize that it's mostly like, there's no rules. It's just people like each other or don't. Usually because you like someone who's like not a dick and who has does stuff that you find like cool and interesting and is fun to be around and relaxing to be around and doesn't scare you all the time by talking about like their bone structure and hitting themselves in the face with a hammer. Like these are the things real people want in relationships. And when you see like the stuff incels have talked themselves up into believing they need to do, it's just like, you really, it really makes sense, like why there's been so many killings out of this community, because it's like, oh, yeah, they're just totally detached from reality, right? And that's what we're going to be talking about today, how this group, because what's interesting is not incels are crazy. And it's not like, oh, wow, clavicular, you know, the looks maxing subculture has its roots in the incel subculture. It's how is the head in cell subculture been so influential? Because almost everyone I know every day uses words that like originally came out of the incel community and have now just become like common Gen Z, Gen Alpha internet slang, right? Like that's kind of the strangest thing to me about this is despite how fringe and extreme and like toxic and scary the actual incel subculture is, they've also had this like incredible history of like shotgunning terms and concepts into mass consciousness that's both like really surprising and kind of worrying and so that's that's kind of like what we'll be talking about this week awesome and yeah also in a way that the right really struggles to penetrate pop culture but in cell culture hasn't had that issue as much yeah yeah it's it's moved like a fucking knife through butter yeah it's it's really been weird um so So about a couple of weeks before I sat down to write these episodes, on February 6th, 2026, this Twitter post that those of you with the video podcast will see, I'll read it to everybody else, went viral, reaching about 24.5 million people through Twitter's own unreliable counter, but also spreading in screen cap form across every other type of social media. I found it like with something like 20,000 upvotes and Reddit, you know, just in one post. Like this is all over the place. And there's a good chance you've seen it. It's a post from some guy called Chromeheart600. And he writes, Once this hits, you get a bunch of people online talking and dissecting all of these terms and then remixing them and taking terms like jester gooning and throwing them out in other circumstances, not necessarily even knowing the original use of any of these words. And part of why this post went viral, Clavicular was already a very influential streamer and influencer when this post went viral. Otherwise, it wouldn't have. But it went viral not just because of his actual content, but because the post itself was so seemingly absurd with so many newlegisms that people didn't know that folks just found themselves compelled to spread it and make fun of it. And by doing that, they kind of helped spread some of these terms around. And when you watch the attached video, because this includes a video of whatever is being described in that post of clavicular, it doesn't make any sense, right? Like the video does not help you understand what those words say. Sophie's going to play it for you right now. You'll hear the audio, but I don't know how much help that's going to be. It's just like a guy who looks like a kind of normal young frat dude guy with what looks like a frat party. There's some young women and young men behind him. He's streaming on kick. And then, yeah, so if he's going to hit play and you'll hear what he says. The caption is SMV Chad fishing in the club question. SMV is sexual market value. And yeah, Chad fishing is people are fishing. Someone's fishing for a Chad. They're talking about. It's like when you do like Latin classes and you're dissecting the words. And if you spent way too much time online or in right wing spaces, you're able to like do like all of the etymology. Yeah. Yeah. You find your nominative, your genitive, your dative, accusative, adletive. Right. But all in just weird terms, freaks made up to talk about why they're not, you know, having sex on the Internet. Yeah. I mean, not including Robert because he's my Christina Yang. But I have never disliked men more than I have since the start of this year. This is going to deeply be disturbing and play. Just you wait. My friend likes your cameraman. He likes you. What's your name? I want to eat. Tell us your name. Yo, his name is Kirk. Kirk. So I would describe that as a pretty normal guy trying to film in the middle of a frat party and some girls are making fun of him. I would describe that as jester gooning. Yeah, it's jester gooning, right? They're jester gooning on him. So they're saying Clavicular was trying to attract these sorority girls by doing that when the girls came up and they spiked his cortisol levels. They got him flustered. And they believe that when your cortisol levels get spiked, your testosterone production drops, right? So that's the gist of this, right? And then this later leads to him getting like mogged on or kind of made to look sort of shitty by a much more buff frat-like leader, right? And that's kind of the genesis of this whole nonsense. Like that's what all of this terminology actually stands for. And what's weird to me about this is just how much of the pieces of this, because even if you didn't understand a lot of this, you probably heard, you may have heard the term foids, because that's a common incel term. for women. It means like femoids. It's way of dehumanizing women, right? You've heard the term gooning, probably. You may have heard some of these like references to cortisol levels or mogging, like pieces of this have been spreading all over the internet for years. And what's weird to me is how widely in cell terminology has broken containment, because you don't see this for most other weird internet subcultures, even most extreme violent internet subcultures. like when I think back to the time I spent reporting on like 8chan and these online neo-nazi movements there's a couple of pieces the use of the term based that's kind of spread out of those communities but there's not most of the words they use are still kind of nonsense to the average person whereas incel terms seem to like every couple of years you get like a new font of them washing into the culture so why is that or a meme yeah or a meme like the wojacks exactly And we'll talk about that in a bit. So I want to talk about why that shit is happening. And it may seem weird to some people that, because like Clavicular is a traditionally handsome guy, we could say, right? Like if you just see that dude on the street, you wouldn't be like, oh, that's an incel looking dude, right? You'd be like, well, that's just a guy, right? I wouldn't leave my drink uncovered around him. Of course not. That has nothing to do with it. That's the jester gooning. but half of this guy's videos like content is like videos of him hanging out with Andrew Tate in Florida clubs and they're always surrounded by women that doesn't seem like someone who should have any relation to the incel community based on like what incels are famous for which is not hanging out in clubs surrounded by sorority girls right? so how did this happen? like how do we go from a bunch of online weirdos who are like so upset at the fact that like women don't behave the way they want them to that they're doing mass killings to this guy who's like famous for being handsome and hitting himself in the face with a hammer, like going to frat parties and having impenetrable internet dialogue spread about whatever happened there. Hit himself in the face with a hammer? Sophie, you don't know about bone smashing? It's key, Sophie. I do. I just like did everything I could not to look into this person because I just simply don't care about men. But here we are. Here we are, Sophie. So how and why that all happened And it's the story we're going to tell this week. And to tell that story, we got to go back to 1997 and the place where all great evil begins, Canada. No. That's actually very unfair. That's so unfair to Canada. And then it's unfair to the very first incels because the phrase involuntary celibate originates from a Canadian student named Alana. And she seems to prefer, based on the stuff I've read, not giving a last name. My understanding is that very young person, obviously. I think she was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. And because she's a young person kind of living out in a not huge, heavily inhabited part of Canada, she's having a lot of trouble finding people, right? Like a fairly, especially in 1997, a fairly normal experience for a ton of people And so as a result she finds herself like involuntarily celibate And in other words she can like find any people that she has this like she she feels like in common with that she feels she can be open with about who she is. She doesn't know how to start those conversations. She's a self described late bloomer. And she starts thinking like, well, maybe other people are going through this. And maybe the internet can be a way for us to kind of bridge some of the gaps between us. I found an article on her with the BBC, and quote, I thought, maybe there are other late bloomers out there. I noticed people would talk about the lonely virgin and make silly jokes about people who didn't start dating in their teens. She rightly felt like this was messed up and wanted to create a place where she and other people struggling with sex and relationships could commiserate. Since it was 1997, she created a website and named it Alana's Involuntary Celibate Project. so that's that's sort of the origin point of all of this stuff and it's perfectly banal like it's perfectly harmless Alana's not doing anything wrong she's trying to connect with other young awkward people who are trying to figure out life she described her form as a friendly place and it was a place that both men and women frequented and they would go there and they could talk about being lonely and they could wonder aloud what's like what am I doing wrong why am I not meeting anybody what do I need to do differently Alana said quote Men have to take credit for women's work. Right. That is a big part of this story is how the women get completely edged out of this community and of this like concept. And it turns much more toxic as a result. Because when it is mixed gender, when it's Alana, you know, and a bunch of like when it's a bunch of men and women on this forum, the purpose is not to hate on people for not dating. The purpose is to figure out what do we need to do different in order to change this thing about our lives? right? Which is a reasonable thing to ask. She recalled, there was probably a bit of anger, and some women were a bit clueless about how men are unique human individuals. But in general, it was a supportive place. So even then, there were some signs that like, some of these guys seem to be surprised that like women have feelings. And she's noticing this, right? And that's kind of weird. But a couple, one couple who meets on the site gets married, and people get better there, including Alana. And in fact, she over time stops being involuntarily celibate. She finds people, she starts dating, she moves on with her life. And to be entirely fair to her, she is not the origin of the term incel. She comes up with the term involuntary celibate, but her preferred abbreviation was invcel, I-N-V-cel, which was never going to go viral the way incel has. No, it's harder to say. It's harder to say. And an unnamed member of the community suggested incel might flow better off the tongue. The term originally referred to people of any gender, right? Like, it was not specifically just for angry young men. So again, after a couple years of this, Alana's life changes. She starts meeting people and dating, and she leaves the community she'd started around the turn of the millennium. The website she'd built and the community on it wound down, but the term incel stayed in use, and it kept on being adopted by people who, well, they wanted to have sex, but they weren't having sex, right? Like, that's kind of the whole deal. Over time, being online stopped being a thing only nerds did and started becoming the norm. As more and more people started communicating via the internet, some of them, like Alana, became aware of the fact that there were a lot of young people who wanted to have sex but weren't, right? That there's still a lot of these lonely virgins out there, and that this is actually a sizable community of people online. And some of the folks who have this realization hear cash register sounds in their ears. And this is where enter the pickup artist community, right? Ah, yeah. There's that good, that good far right men's rights movement prehistory. Please, I love a good pickup artist. Oh, yeah. Give me condescension. Women love it. We're going to give you something slightly different. I thought I was going to start by reading you some old pickup artistry stuff. And we both be like, wow, it's fucked up how crazy and bigoted this old pickup artistry book is. I had the opposite experience. So pickup artists started out well before the internet, right? This is not a thing. I asked a couple of different friends going into this. When do you think pickup artistry got started as like a social movement or grift or whatever you want to call it? And everyone guessed like the 90s, basically. Can I guess? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. Chicago World Fair. Yogi, you went back too far. It just feels like it'd be a thing there, you know, where it's like, everyone come here, I'll show you how to get a woman. Yeah, yeah. Introducing the concept of women. Exactly. The Chicago World Fair next to the light booth. Pickup artistry does predate the internet, though. You're not that far off, is the crazy thing. The official birth of pickup artistry as a concept was the book How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber, published in 1968. So this actually does go back. That's not that long after the World's Fair. I was pretty off. You don't have to make me feel better, Robert. You did the best. You did the best. I'll say that. You're the best at this. That's true. So today that book is so obscure that Wikipedia, if you look that title up, they just have a full page for the movie inspired by the book that came out in 1978 and starred Desi Arnaz. I'm going to have to read that or watch that fucker at some point. But Weber's book was a bestseller, and you can still find copies, full copies of it for free online, which is how I came across the cover. And look at this thing. Look at this. It's a the top is how to pick up girls by Eric Weber. And then there's a picture of like 10 young women all kind of posing together. And then underneath the picture is featuring interviews with 25 beautiful girls. Incredible. I love it. Incredible. All of their arms are crossed. None of them are smiling and they're all traditionally thin. Got it. They all look like they're going to be the shit out of you. Yeah, they have angry smiles, I'd say. it's a it's a new internet enemy tyra banks would say they're smizing yeah they're smizing now when i saw this cover i was like oh yeah we're i'm gonna i'm gonna find a couple of quotes about this that is the worst thing any of us has ever read and that's not what happened i wasn't really planning to do like much more than reference this book because i wanted to focus most on the online community but right in the intro something did kind of strike me right and this part is pretty gross. Weber opens the book by describing a little tragedy that has happened to most men. You're walking down the street and you see a beautiful I'm going to say you see a beautiful woman. Weber uses the term girl exclusively because it is 1968. Awesome. You see this person but you don't actually say anything to them and then she walks by and you never see them again and you have this horrified, this is how he describes it Should I throw myself at her feet and promise her my savings account, my car, even my brand new golf clubs? Or should I just grab her long golden locks and drag her off into the sunset? So this is written in 1968, right? No. No. No. Please do not grab her by the long golden locks. Also, don't offer me your fucking golf clubs. I don't want your golf clubs. I don't want your golf clubs. It was 68. I'll take your savings account. Yeah. Even then. Even then. I got my own. Don't need it. That's super gross. But if you recall from the title, the premise of this book is that he's interviewed 25 beautiful girls, right? And he makes it clear he's interviewed 25 young women who are single. And most of the book is him giving quotes that they give about what they want in like a man or what they want when someone's like picking them up or like what they find attractive when someone's flirting with them. and so surprisingly as gross and as very 60s as this is it's a thousand times more woke than any modern insole or pickup artist shit because the basic premise of Weber's book is that if you want to be attractive to women you should learn what women want what women want matters women like dating too and it's fine to ask them out but you need to understand what they want from you otherwise they won't be into you that is so far advanced from modern pickup artistry and in soul culture it feels like a different world and i shouldn't be looking at this 1968 book where he talks about knocking a woman out and be like wow this is so much better than like modern pua stuff but it does treat women like human beings with actual individual wants which isn't true by the way yeah we're all robots yeah Yeah, voids, to use the current parlance. And then there's moids for men, too. Don't worry, folks. They've got more than one term. It was DEI in the incel vernacular. They were like, well, we have to include moids here, too. Yeah. So this is kind of how the pickup artist subculture really gets started. And I do find it interesting that that's sort of the first work on it. But obviously, over time, things get more and more deranged. and in the early 2000s, Neil Strauss goes undercover in the pickup artist community that has popped up in the early 2000s and kind of come out of the late 90s. And he writes a 2005 bestselling book called The Game. And The Game is pickup artistry, right? And he's talking about all these crazy tactics, right? That guys have invented, stuff like negging, basically where you're kind of insulting or mocking a woman to try to make her want to get your affection. Stuff like peacocking, where you're dressing like crazily, you know, and wearing like ridiculous fedoras with literal peacock feathers. Because like, look, all that matters is you, you know, if you get noticed, right? And that's so different because Weber is literally quoting women saying stuff like, I like it when a man just like talks to me and tells me what he wants. Whereas by the 21st century, these guys like, no, no, no, you have to like, you have to activate the back portion of her brain that responds to color in the way of like an animal on the Serengeti by wearing feathers in the back of your hat. Otherwise, you'll never find love. You won't stand a chance out there. In other words, Webber's 21st century descendants describe women as like enemies in a video game. They're basically mindless automatons that you can hack via the right series of inputs. And that is the first major shift that we get that makes the incel community possible, is this shift from, well, I'm a gross man and I'll joke about knocking a lady out, But fundamentally, I want to know what women want. And by the time you hit 2005 or so, women don't want things. Women respond to inputs like a video game, right? That's the big first shift that we have to make before we can get to incel. And I think that's an important point. Ew. Yeah, it's gross. But this is also, you know, a big part of where terms like alpha come from, right? Like early pickup artistry starts reintroducing that concept, which is based on a misunderstanding of how wolves work, right? And that's all of like pickup artistry. It's a bunch of hacks and cognitive tricks and like psychological phenomena that is supposed to work for these kind of elaborate, contrived reasons they come up with. So we'll talk about what happens to this first and second generation of pickup artists and kind of like how that feeds into the incel community later. But first, let's feed you to our advertisers. Hooray. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's Place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me and it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey and your journey's different to theirs. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Usually on this podcast, we'll kill you. We talk about the diseases, infections, and biological threats that can make us really sick. But right now we're doing something a little different. We're stepping back and looking at what the human body needs to keep going. When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out. We are predictably unpredictable sleepers. We're talking about why sleep works the way it does, why our bodies don't follow neat rules, and why modern life makes rest so hard to come by. The second half of our series takes us to the digestive system with a multi-part series on what happens after we eat. Okay, I just have to say that all of my favorite words apparently are digestive words. Sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum. It's fascinating, it's funny, and it matters so much more than you think. Episodes of our new series run from January 20th through February 17th, with new episodes every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to This Podcast Will Kill You as part of the Exactly Right Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's fair. I'm sure those are different budgets. That's a different P&L. That's a different P&L. Have y'all ever had ICE advertise on here? I know that ICE was doing Spotify advertisements. Washington State Highway Patrol, but not ICE. No, we never got... Fortunately, we... We've had an FBI ad, right? We've never had ICE ads, because if we did, somebody would... People would have told me. But we... Yeah, and then I would have freaked out and got that removed immediately, but no. I miss the Chamba Casino ads. Those used to be the most common ones I get when I listen to Behind the Busters. Or like gold ads for literal gold and things like that. But yeah, they're just like Alex Jones. Yeah. That's right. Just like Alex Jones. Well, I don't have my own brand of supplements yet. Yet. But you know what? If you want to send me $50 and just take a fatal dose of vitamin B12 and caffeine, you know, with a little bit of lead mixed in for good measure, we'll call it even. We can call that my brain force. I would totally sell like mineral sunscreen. You're just selling five shots of Malort. Yeah, five shots of Malort. It'll power you through anything. Including talking to Don Lemon. Don Lemon's taking so many strays in this podcast. Yeah. Sorry, Don. Yeah, like, look, after what he's had to deal with this year, Don Lemon, we're good, you and me. He's fine. We're fine, Don. Sorry, that should have happened to you. I get it. Yeah, it sucks. Wild. Yeah. The first and second generation of pickup artists make a lot of money. These guys are, for a couple of years, very successful and early internet famous. So they've got this kind of brief period of prominence, and it fades rapidly for a couple reasons. The biggest one is that once pickup artistry becomes famous and regular people start to read what these guys are saying, what they're talking about in these lectures and clinics that they're giving and what they believe about dating, they make fun of it because it's silly, right? Like most people who hear about all this shit are like, well, that's ridiculous. And when you add that to the fact that none of this stuff works, right? Like if you're otherwise handsome and you dress up ridiculously and go to the club, sure. Like maybe you'll have good luck. Or like if you're really charismatic and also dressing like a crazy person, again, maybe stuff will work out for you. but if you're the kind of person who's paying that guy to tell you how to wear a fedora it's probably not going to work for you right and that's 99 percent of the guys this has given gotten so much hate for actual fedoras which still look cool as hell that's an indiana jones hat it's not the same shit that neckbeards wear i just want to be clear my grandfather used to wear a fedora every single day he looked cool as hell he was buried with it and i don't want them to catch finally listen to that folks online cat is standing up for the fedora you know i'm setting history reaching an arm across the aisle fedoras have always been left discoded you can't tell me anything different yeah that's that's fair that's fair um it's the trilby it's the damn trilby we gotta take down the boomerang or like the horseshoe we got here fucking yeah um so again most of this stuff doesn work for most of the men who get interested and who are spending money on this And when you selling a solution to a problem that doesn work people will eventually realize they been ripped off You can only convince someone to go to pay or for so many coaching sessions on how to pick up women and have them not get any dates because you've basically taught them to run around dressed like a maniac cursing at women. That does not work. They'll realize that you're screwing them, right? That you've lied to them and that none of this stuff is real. And this brings us to the website, puahate.com. PUA Hate stands for Pickup Artist Hate. It was launched in 2009 by several disaffected members of the pickup artist community. These were not people who had offered coaching classes, but these were people who were paying for them, right? And they'd gotten fed up and realized they'd been taken advantage of. So they start this website and they announced their new forum. I found like in the Wayback Machine, the very first like page on that website was like a this new forum will be up Sunday or sooner thing with a spatter of blood underneath it. Right before the forums active, like that's the that's the little header that they that they put on the Internet to like tell people that it's coming, which like at the time, maybe you would have noticed there were a lot of websites that young men and gamers use that would just have random blood spatters on them, you know, in the early 2000s. A lot of forums did shit like this. But given what comes out of POAHate.com, it's hard not to see it as like this kind of foreboding message about what was coming later. Now, per the Wayback Machine, the actual forum launches a couple of days later in late 2009. And the landing page features a common JPEG of a man in a suit flipping the bird, and then a content warning that says adult content and not safe for work. You know, don't view this if you're under 21. And you have the option to enter the forum or leave the website. Those who chose the inter saw an advertisement for the Barry Kirky radio show, which was a, I think, now defunct podcast that mocked the seduction community, which is what pickup artist fans had branded themselves. The first actual saved copy of the forum itself I found is from 2011. And at that point, it's toxic, but it's not a guy's going to go on a killing spree toxic, right? It's like young men on the internet normal toxic. Most of the posts are like people shit talking different pickup artists or linking other articles where people reveal, you know, uncomfortable or embarrassing details from like famous guys like Mystery and the pickup artist community. But even at this early stage, you could see some signs that community members were branching out from insulting seduction influencers to trying to puzzle out the mysteries of women. There are threads on hypnotic dating, which I'll have to look into at some point. There's a thread on how and why women test men. Crazy. Yeah, great stuff. And there's also a thread counting down the days until Mystery's daughter turns 18, which was, again, it's gross. But, like, that was a huge thing on the internet for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. So it's not new either, right? No, and it's still happening. I'm thinking of, like, when the Cash Me Outside girl, Bad Baby, I think is her stage name, turned 18. there was like a countdown to her posting on OnlyFans and she like made millions in dollars in one day which was just disturbing on so many levels. I never heard of that. Yeah, sorry. Great. It was a bummer. Yeah. Speaking of things that will disappoint you these ads. Segregation in the day integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. they had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me. And it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey and your journey is different to theirs. This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx. I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much use my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better. I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us. If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Usually on this podcast, we'll kill you. We talk about the diseases, infections, and biological threats that can make us really sick. But right now we're doing something a little different. We're stepping back and looking at what the human body needs to keep going. When you consider what we know about sleep in humans, there's one rule that comes out. We are predictably unpredictable sleepers. We're talking about why sleep works the way it does, why our bodies don't follow neat rules, and why modern life makes rest so hard to come by. The second half of our series takes us to the digestive system with a multi-part series on what happens after we eat. Okay, I just have to say that all of my favorite words apparently are digestive words. Sphincter, peristalsis, duodenum. It's fascinating, it's funny, and it matters so much more than you think. Episodes of our new series run from January 20th through February 17th, with new episodes every Tuesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to This Podcast Will Kill You as part of the Exactly Right Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, in short, in 2011, the Pickup Artist Hate Forum is gross and a lot of stuff that's really toxic, but nothing that's like crazy for the internet and nothing that would have like really stood out. There weren't really extremism researchers trawling the internet in the same way that there have been, you know, for the last 10 years or so back then. But there wasn't much that would have set this community out ahead of the others by that point in time, that I'm seeing at least. But over the coming months and years, pickup artist hate evolved into one of the most extreme storehouses for misogynistic content on the internet. And this happens for a couple of reasons. For one, the early 2000s also see the rise of the men's rights movement. This happens alongside pickup artistry, and a lot of early men's rights activists are either former pickup artists or other people who are kind of dissatisfied with what they actually get out of pickup artistry. the MRA toxic subculture starts with these it starts with a lot of complaints about on the surface what seem like reasonable issues like guys if they're giving you the elevator pitch for men's rights we'll be like well you know single fathers have all of these different legal problems if they're trying to pursue custody right and some people will be like oh well maybe they're talking about a real issue all this stuff is just a comment for hating women and wanting to take away women's rights like if you actually get into what these people are saying it's not I want to be treated more fairly by the courts. It's I don't think women should have checkbooks. And I don't think my wife should have been able to leave me, right? Yes. Fantasies of violence and murder are common with MRA content and around the same time. So this is bubbling up through the early 2000s into the aughts. And at the same time, the incel community has kept evolving, right? After 1997, it's continued to change. You know, Alana leaves around 2000. And so per an article published in the Journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. By the 2000s, incels began to inhabit spinoff forums such as Love Shy and Incel Support. Love Shy, with a more relaxed content moderation policy, began to house the more extreme elements of the growing movement. And Alana had noticed from the start there were some men who didn't seem to realize that women were people. That becomes more common. But now that there's not any moderation on these forums that have descended from hers, no one's pushing back. and over time the women who might have found themselves drawn in the same way that Alana was to communities like this were just looking for a place where they could commiserate on well it's kind of hard to find a date I don't know how to do this I would like some advice they stopped showing up because all these places have been colonized by these incredibly toxic angry young men right and a bunch of those angry young men including and a bunch of MRAs all start finding puahate.com right and they start posting on there and they start becoming increasingly radicalized. I don't think we have a great understanding of why, but even though there's a couple of different groups that kind of come into POAHate.com, they all start adopting the term incel for themselves. That becomes extremely popular on the forum. Per The Guardian, it became a place where sexually frustrated men could go to vent and share pseudoscientific theories about women. And that's the other really important thing, right? is that these guys aren't just complaining no one will date me. They're developing an ideology, and they're developing a glossary of terms, all of which will work together to explain their theories for why women don't like them, right? That's what they start really focusing on. It stops being, how can I do better? How can I change? How can I, like, have more success in love? It starts being more about what is it that's fundamentally wrong about how women are hardwired and about how human civilization is constructed that has made this situation so unfair for me because it's obviously not my fault, right? That becomes the overwhelming drive here. So they start cutting up all of human society into three groups. There's alphas, right? And the male alphas are chads and the female equivalent are Stacey's. And these are the beautiful people, right? These are your celebrities. These are your hotties. These are the folks that in incel terminology, everybody wants to get with. I don't think I've ever heard you use the word hotties before. It was really weird. It's the hotties. What do you want me to say? That's in still ideology in a nutshell. I just really want you to say certified baddies, please. No, no. None of these people are certified something. I'm running for Congress. Could you please say certified baddies? Certified baddie. Yeah. Did that work? It was good enough. Yeah, thank you. Close. It was great. You got your alphas up at the top, but that's a tiny percentage of the population. Most people are betas. That's normal people, right? Now, in the, in incel ideology is very rock, paper, scissors. It's very hard line and very rock, paper, scissors. So in the, in the, their evolving understanding of the world, alphas get to fuck other alphas, obviously, but also any alpha has the ability to sleep with any beta that they want. And obviously no beta would ever say no to an alpha. Meanwhile, the third and lowest, and also betas get to partner up with each other at least, right? So at least they're not lonely. The third and lowest category and the most oppressed people in society, the most oppressed people in all of human history are the incels, aka the members of the POA hate community, right? They basically, in the space of a year or two, fashioned a cosmology in which they are the victims of history, right? It's so convenient how that works out. It's great. It's way better than taking ownership of your own fuck-ups. I need to get some of that right now. You know, the fact that like earlier today when I was trying to clean the house, I realized that I hadn't cleaned all week and I've got like three hours of work ahead of me. That's got to be someone else's fault, right? That's got to have been like written into the stars that my house would be messy. It's not my fault that my house is messy. I didn't make the mess. The mess exists. As Jordan Peterson would say, make your bed. Uh-huh. When was the last time you made your bed, Robert Evans? I built a bed once. Okay. That wasn't the question. It kind of counts. It wasn't a good bed. So once you have these categories, once you've come up with, you've decided these are the categories all people fit into, you have to have an explanation for why these categories exist in the first place, right? It kind of begs the question. So the incels start posting pictures of themselves and of each other, right? And they start posting pictures of people that they think are chads and alphas to try and suss out the rules behind who is attractive enough to find love. And they come across a real term in mathematics and in art called the golden ratio. I'm sure most people know what the golden ratio is, right? It's a term that explains this particular set of proportions we see over and over again in like natural objects like snail shells. But also people seem to find this basic visual harmony that is created by the golden ratio pleasant. And so you see evidence of the golden ratio all across human art in great architecture and fine art like the Mona Lisa. The golden ratio is all over the fucking place. It's a real observed phenomenon, right? And all it means is that, like, for whatever reason, we find certain kind of proportions more attractive and pleasing to our eyes, right? What incels take from this is that attractiveness, and attractiveness is directly and 100% correlated with the ability to be loved, right? Being loved has nothing to do with anything but how hot you are, right? And attractiveness is something you're born with or not. It's not something you can develop over time by, like, being cool. If somebody's not conventionally attractive, they will never find love, you know? and if that's the case, then it's not my fault that I'm alone. If I could change how I present myself to the world, if I could change how I introduce myself to people, if I could alter and learn things and grow as a person, and maybe I will, through that process, meet people and have friends and companions and find love one day, if that's possible, then the fact that I'm not currently doing it is my fault. And I don't want to accept that. That can't be the case. So it's just the fact my nose is not the right size. So I'll never be loved. Right? You see how it works. It's so poisonous and fucked up. And yeah, that's what they take from the fucking golden ratio, right? If your bone structure doesn't fit the golden ratio, you're screwed forever. And that means nothing is my fault. So over the course of the next couple of years, let's say crudely from like 2009 to 2013, they work out this categorization system, which is called the PSL scale. And they use it to kind of objectively evaluate attractiveness on a scale of one to 10. Now, fucking people have forever been using a one to 10 scale to evaluate like how attractive people are, right? In high school, we were using terms like that. So this isn't new. What's new is that the incels have come up with like a scale that they're pretending has scientific rigor to it. It's objective. It is... the only thing that matters. Exactly. As opposed to like this guy you bought weed from in college being like, oh man, that guy's a nine or whatever, right? Like that doesn't work. It's gotta be scientific. So the name for the PSL scale comes from the three forms where incel ideology is developing and spreading during this time. There's PUA hate, of course, which helps to spawn slut hate. And I probably don't have to explain what's going on there. And then the last of the sites- It's interesting that PUA hate is about not being like, it's not like, oh, we hate pickup artists, but slut hate is we hate sluts. Right. Well, they do hate pickup artists. Yeah, but like not in the same way. Not in the same way. It's very different. And if you hate sluts, we're not friends. Yes. Well, there's slut hate. And then the last one is lookism, right? So it's PSL is PUA hate, slut hate, and lookism. That's where the name of the scale comes from, right? Oh, interesting. And we'll talk about the concept of lookism because that's what leads us to looks maxing in a little bit. But the PSL scale comes along with this kind of, alongside this, they develop this intricate vocabulary for facial features primarily. And I found a quote from an article in The Viewer by Maya Gilhog and Isabel Lee that gives an overview of this. Quote, different physical traits impact the PSL rating someone receives. A weak jaw, for example, makes a man a two out of ten, while a negative canthal tilt or downward slanted eyes repels universally. Both characteristics, along with many more, are considered unmasculine by the incel community. They signify weakness and low SMV or sexual market value, the primary measure of an individual's worth according to an incel. And I don't think this gets enough attention. There's some like toxic capitalism baked into incel ideology, which is the idea that like. Well, everyone has an objective sexual market value. Market value. Market value. Market value. Can I just say I hate the fact that all of these terms are not new to me. No. I hate the fact that I've been so steeped in the far right and covering the far right that I'm like, oh, yeah, this is not a new language. This is an inherent one. I know. I'm like, I unfortunately know so much about the manosphere from the work that I've done that I'm just like, oh, God. No one wants to know this stuff. This stuff is so. And this is why you should elect me to Congress because actually no joke part of it is like so much of this influences the Republican Party now which is what we going to get into But like yep this is the basis that when you taking bad faith arguments and good faith of like the male loneliness epidemic And it's like, OK, so what are we doing about that? Is it creating third spaces? Is it ensuring that people have their material needs met? Is it making sure that we aren't punishing vulnerability and encouraging like a feminist outlook that treats men and women as equals, including men? Like men deserve that, too. No. OK. It's a Republican. Are we just going to keep taking rights from women? It's a Republican. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, this is like Nick Fuentes thought now where it's like the government needs to ensure that every man gets a woman. Right. Like that is where this leads. And it's not it's not quite the Republican Party platform now, but it will be getting there. They're getting there. so the term for this whole idea of like ranking people and using all these all these kind of incredibly obscure and nuanced terms for different weird little facial features that's lookism right and it's the name both of an online community and a broader name for this general concept of ranking people's smv now evolving in self theory does allow for the possibility of people dating or marrying outside of their sexual market value or their level of attractiveness right but in their view, the only men who get to do this are like crazy rich guys, right? Like if you become a billionaire, then it doesn't matter if you're a slubby dude, you can date the Stasys because they want your money as a rich guy. And that's part of what pisses off the incels is that women have the unfair advantage of being able to date out of their league way more often than men do. Ugly poor men never date out of their league, right? But women get to do it all of the time for reasons that are based, and the reason they believe this, I will say, is based 100% on the fact that they've never talked to women, right? Yes. They don't know women who are frustrated because they can't find a date. They don't know women who find it gross when a guy just tries to buy their way into their affection because they don't know any women. They just assume all of the hot girls are engaged in hypergamy, right? They're being with a bunch of partners. They see a woman that they're not attracted to, which is very rarely like any woman. I mean, there's the idea that a lot of, you know, like, just that white dudes see worth in just the women that they would ever eventually have sex with. And when they incels, they see women in general. And for most of them can see an opportunity there because women are so objectified because, like, we go out and put our makeup on. And, like, the average woman looks a lot more dolled up than the average man. And so but if you showed them a woman that they're not sexually attracted to, all they do is say the most vile shit to them. somehow even more vile than the rape and death threats so many other women have gotten from incels. It's so fucking disgusting. It's disgusting. And it's also super self-defeating because a lot of these guys are just gross monsters that I don't have any sympathy for. But a lot of them are like teenage boys who aren't destined to fall into something like that forever. And you'll see on these forums, what was really heartbreaking kind of lurking in them to me would be to see a guy be like, hey, I actually had a really good experience with a girl in my school today and i think we might go out on date and then like a million guys post that's cope cope she hates you she hates you she doesn't like you you fucked it up give up now man you should just kill yourself right like that's literally how the community works i used to be doing some work um looking into brain cells which was once the incel subreddit got banned brain cells yeah the other one um but one of the mods there uh when i was sorting by new which i would do every day and want to uh put an ice pick through my brain because of it uh one of the mods wrote a suicide note and i reached out to him and i dm'd him and i was like hey like like say on like what what are you into like let's talk there's way better stuff in life i promise and then he looked at my account and realized i was a woman and then like said something very like sad and then just never stopped replying and so i dm'd the mods of the brain cell community and they were like you fucking bitch you can't blah blah blah like just completely ignored everything i said and then two weeks later they finally realized that he was dead and they hadn't noticed for two weeks oh my god yeah it's heartbreaking what this does to to people in it it's horrific yeah yeah you're sorry i'm making a hat i'm hoping i'll finish the hat by the end of the podcast that's good but no like that's that's such a fucking story i want a cat hat gotcha the and that's what gets me every time about the people both about these communities about the people who like professionally have to analyze them as there's always so much concern from the researchers i've known about when they see like oh i think this person might actually harm themselves yeah and none of that within the community none of it it's kind of a win because that person didn't escape if they kill themselves they haven't gotten out they're still an incel right i mean i hope that they they fucking just logged off and was like like i hope that's what happened and but like they never heard back from him and it was like there was also all of this infighting in there being like he was weak for killing himself then or it was good that he killed himself because there's no reason to live while you're an incel it's so fucking disgusting and based on that guy's post he could have been older than like 19 yep it's really dark it's fucking yeah it's sad and it's like this is happening. And this is, I want to note, because we will talk about the dangers algorithms play in all of this. This is all pre-algorithmic harm. Not that there aren't algorithms in social media in 2013-14, but that's not really affecting the growth of the incel subculture at this stage. These people are meeting on forums that don't really, people are finding this organically, right? They're not being slalomed this kind of content for the most part from like an algorithm at this stage, right? That's not yet a factor. So the fact that the incel hate and this belief that women are hypergamous, right? And sometimes this is like incels really hate polyamorous people for the same reason that like, oh, it's a couple of chads hogging all the Stacys, right? Or just like- We could just hate polyamorous people just for fun, you know? You could just do that anyway. People have been doing it for forever. But this is all coached. Again, it has to be – this can't just be I just don't like this stuff and I'm a dick. There has to be like evolutionary justification for it, right? And so the justification they come up with is, well, women are programmed by evolution to seek the strongest provider for their future children, which all women want to have, obviously. I know women. I've talked to them. In the meantime, before they have those kids, women don't have souls and thus feel nothing about sleeping around and breaking men's hearts, right? They'll just go for whoever has the most money. They'll try to fuck all the chads while they can. And then they'll settle for a beta with cash. Isn't it in Scientology where your baby, like the baby's soul is. Yes, it is. Like the Ngram. Yeah. Yes, it is. Yes. And you bet your ass. I've listened to the L Ron Hubbard episodes five times. Yeah. I won't say much more than this, but there are some people who believe that when, uh, if like a relative of yours dies, you can adopt a baby and someone, that person's soul into the new baby and raise them as that person. Scientology, it's cool. I must talk about Scientology. I would so much rather do that than show you the JPEG I'm about to show you. This is commonly passed around in lookism spaces, and it illustrates the phenomenon I'm talking about, right? On one side, you have two sides of this image. One is like 1955, one is 2015. And they show on one side of the image a bunch of men and on the other a bunch of women, right? And they're ranked from like boring and ugly at the bottom to interesting and good looking at the top. And in 1955, all the boring. Interesting and ugly or boring and good looking. Right, right. It never has happened. Never once in life. Danny DeVito simply did not exist. Such a boring and hot guy. I'm not calling him ugly. The incels would, right? But they're saying in 1955, all of the ugly women and all of the ugly men got together. And all of the medium attractiveness men and women got together. and all the hot men and hot women got together, but everyone had somebody, right? But in 2015, thanks to feminism and the internet, all of like the chicks above the bottom 20% of hotness are going to the top like two or 3% of men, right? And there's no men for the, yes. This goes back to exactly what I was saying. At the bottom, there are like two different women that aren't going for anyone. They're just at the bottom. And then there are also men at the same exact rank They're not willing to do it. On the bottom. And for some reason, they're like, no. No, no. And like, it's just not true because nobody has ruined a girly pop's life more than a medium ugly man. I'm sorry. So true. Just like, man, I haven't been around the block a few times. I have seen, and these guys will know I'm talking about them because they listen to the show. And they'll take this with pride. I have seen some busted ass dudes with some lovely partners, right? And it's because, yeah, they're not great at like doing their hair or dressing up or even showering every day. But they're really nice and skilled. They're really nice, intellectually, like interesting, funny gentlemen. Hello. They can build a house on their own and they don't, they're not assholes. They have skills. They have skills. They're funny. I actually dated a guy that did so many steroids. He, I've had a lot of thought about it after like two months of dating. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And then we broke up. Yeah. But it didn't do anything for me. I was honestly like, it's a little bit, like you seem a little too into how big your arms are. Like this seems like it's for you. And like in that case, like that's fine. It's like, you know, putting makeup on for yourself. But like this idea of what a masculine man is, is so fucking crazy. No, we're, yeah. When in reality, we just want you to have skill. You have to have skills and be secure. There is like, honestly, it is so hot to be able to like text my boyfriend Ben and be like, hey, do you want to go get a pedicure? And he'd be like, yeah, sure. Because like it feels good. And like you're taking care of yourself. Hygiene's hot. Hygiene's hot. I would say the number one thing I have seen is like if you want to use the, I hate to use, but to use the term game. The number one like example of game that I know is a guy who knows how to cook really well. that's like very close to the top of the list for me it's like just being able to do really good bits like bits that aren't punching down like constant bits respect but also like you you're able to make shishitos with soy sauce yeah it's over i just really want a t-shirt that says hygiene is hot i just really need that or at least a pin somebody yeah yeah you could cook a souffle and you can like fix the insulation in like a bad attic. And I'm 100% sure you wash your hands every time after you use the bathroom. Right. And clip your nails. Honey. And honestly, guys, I hate to say it. That's not even a hard requirement. The bar for men is low. The bar for men is so low. It's so low. Meanwhile, incels are like, you need to have this, this, this, and this for women too. And it's like, I'm like, oh God, it's so hot when like a guy takes out the trash and like you don't have to ask him to do it. He just does it. Oh my gosh. I have literally had the experience of going out on a double date with a friend and being with like two friends, right? One male, one female and pointing to like my friend who's the dude and being like, hey man, your shirt's on Inside Out and him going, hey man, yours is too. Like the bar is on the floor. I mean like women I've dated, there are like so many things where it's almost like just being with a really good roommate, you know? Like where it's like, oh, yeah, like you just did the thing. And so when you meet a guy that also just does those things because they're considerate, it's like, wow, that's so hot. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Anyway, we could continue off of mogging the incels. This has turned into a dating podcast. It has. And we have thoughts. So I should say before we go out here that from the jump, lookism and incel thought is also heavily rooted in eugenics and race science. This is immediately part of what's going on. And it's there from the beginning up to the present day. A major, and it's not always in the way that you'd think, right? This is not just like weird white guy race science. One major and angry subset of incels are young men of Asian descent. And these guys come to, they convince themselves that Asian men are inherently unattractive based on this PSL system. If you were an Asian man, it's impossible for you to be hot, basically. Which, okay, man. But this has led to a situation, a problem in the US, where high sexual market value Asian women only date white men who are by naturally the highest SMV group. Because, again, this is all basically repurposed Nazi race science. All of these male beauty standards are envisioned with like Casper Van Dien from Starship Troopers as like a 10, right? A blonde, square jawed Aryan man is like the peak of attractiveness. um and there's also the racist aspect of being like well she's just gonna have black babies with some black man like that's something that i get my fucking replies all the time they're so fucking racist oh yeah tons of it and it's yeah it's like that that's an important aspect of it too this is not just guys like coming up with their own silly scale they're also repurposing a lot of like old race science bullshit you know um so what you have kind of by 2013 2014 right before elliot roger does what he's going to do, you've gotten to the point where you've got the incel communities come up with this scale and like this set of hard requirements for what it takes to be handsome or lovable, I guess I should say. And because like half of the incels accept all this and they decide, okay, well, if there's physical features that make me attractive, I'll just work out or I'll diet or I'll have dangerous and painful surgery. But there are ways I can change my physical features and I might then be able to find love or at least have sex, right? And that's bad. That's pretty toxic. That is the strain of inceldom that does bring us looks maxing and clavicular. But as toxic and stupid as that side is, they're the objectively healthier part of the incel community because they believe they can improve their situation. The other half of incels become, in their words, blackpilled. They basically believe in the principles of lookism, but they deny that at least they specifically have any hope of improving their PSL score. They're inherently ugly men. Even surgery can't help them. And if you're someone who can't even fix your looks through surgery, you only have two options. You can commit suicide or you can commit suicidal mass murder, which they call going ER as a reference to Elliot Rodger, right? Wow. Those are your only options. That's the black pill chunk of the community. So that's where we are by like 2014. Great. Cool. It just took five years. Awesome. Wow. It took five years to go from I don't like mystery to I think I might need to kill a bunch of people because I can't get a date. It takes a lot less time than that now. Yeah. Takes like a week. I hate it here. Yeah. Kat, you want to give a plug for the campaign at the end here? Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Running for Congress. Yeah, so I'm ready for Congress because we don't have Democrats who know how to handle the far right. And that's what I've devoted my life to. You can find more about my campaign at catforillinois.com. If you are in the Chicago area, check what district you're in. I'm Illinois 9. Our election is March 17th. Please consider donating or volunteering. Our Discord server is discord.gg slash catforillinois. We need all hands on deck. Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, that's part one. Check Cat's Campaign out if you're in Illinois. You know, vote for the love of goodness. And we'll be back on Thursday to talk about things that will depress you even more. And eventually talk about bone smashing. Thank God. Good Lord. Bye-bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast award is... See all the nominees now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at audible.com. This Women's History Month, the podcast Keep It Positive, sweetie, celebrates the power of women choosing healing, purpose, and faith, even when life gets messy. Love is not a destination. You have to work on it every day. Keep It Positive, sweetie, creates space for honest conversations on self-worth, love, growth, and navigating life with grace and grit led by women who uplift, inspire, and tell the truth out loud. I have several conversations with God and I know why it took 20 years. To hear this and more, listen to Keep It Positive, sweetie, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. it's the new me and it's the old them this woman's history month the podcast if you knew better with amber grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power my like tunnel vision of like I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of like I wanna make a better life for us if you knew better brings real talk from women who've lived it unpacking career pivots relationship lessons and the mindset shifts that changed everything listen to if you knew better with amber grimes on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.