Looksmaxxing Ourselves to Death
Incels and Instagram Face.
Outside the window over my writing desk, as I write these words, a squirrel is shaking his ass in a Crepe Myrtle.
Maybe that’s projection: he is clinging to a branch and twitching his tail with a ba tum-tum that leads me to believe that it may be some kind of primordial pole dance. The apparent lack of utility to the movement and his totalizing focus suggests girl squirrel heat floating on the wet morning air or some other motivational qualia beyond my senses.
Watching him feels inappropriate, to tell you the truth. I’ve never seen such dull-eye’d sexual vigor. I can’t help but think (there’s no way this is true) that he wouldn’t be shooting his shot if he knew I was watching. At least, they don’t seem to do this when I’m standing in the yard.
I don’t even get what girl squirrels find so sexy about this. I mean, I don’t intuit the language: maybe tail size or speed of the little flicks or the grace of the movement or a subtle admixture which amounts to squirrel machismo? I can’t judge his performance either way so I suppose there is no need to feel embarrassed for him.
I bet you could study to find the triggers for male squirrel hotness, though. I know, for example, that they once studied a goose and they found that she would run faster to chase down a bigger egg if it rolled away from her nest. The bigger the egg, the harder she ran. They found they could even put a fake egg in her nest, larger than any natural egg could ever possibly be, and mother goose would exert a preternatural amount of effort to retrieve it. They called that super-stimuli.
You could find the same levers for male squirrel attractiveness, if you were so inclined. Maybe I could tie a feather duster to the end of my new friend’s tail and transform him into a total Don Quixote and every female squirrel in the parish would make pilgrimages to join his harem.
Of course, as far as “real” fitness indicators goes, it would be a trick. The squirrel remains probably an average specimen (no offense to present company). We would have merely discovered, through our high-level human inductive powers, the cues that female squirrels use as shorthand for genuine male-squirrel fitness. We will have hijacked those cues to higher salience than is possible in nature, just like they did to mother goose’s eggs.
The mere fact of super-stimuli seems like a good-enough argument against genetic determinism (which geneticists only could reasonably believe last century, anyway). If we were merely machines running on genetic scripts, then why would the dials go up to eleven, so to speak? The more likely explanation is that living things have a “telos” they aim to fulfill, in all their particular manifestations, expressions, and biological substrates, including but not limited to DNA. Sometimes, symbols of what get you closer to your telos may be exaggerated to salience beyond the very point of reaching them.
Now, lower animals don’t have the sufficient self-awareness to manipulate each other with hyper-salient facades. True, occasionally a species will get caught in a feedback loop of its own sexual selection’s criteria: the antlers of a deer or the feathers of a peacock or the nest of a magpie. But these are all selected below the level of will and so the resulting feedback loop is constrained by the speed of reproduction.
The moment that this changed for humans, actually, works well as one biological and genetic perspective of the “fall” of humanity: by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad (“bad” is a better translation than “evil” here in Genesis. Evil is a meta-capability that knowledge of good and bad makes possible), we suddenly become aware of the parameters by which we are selected as mates. Some we recognized as good, some we recognized as, uh, less than super-stimuli. Naturally, the first thing we do is cover our junk. The second thing males do, presumably, is the ancient version of deleting facebook and hitting the gym.
We are unable to walk freely in the garden with all the swagger of ignorance, and that’s awkward enough, but there is a deeper issue that we are terminally resentful about the inadequacy our self-consciousness reveals. If at all an option, we seek to make ourselves into a great and terrible god in the eyes of others. More specifically, we seek to grok their telos and then devise ways make ourselves into super-stimuli for them. It could be a skill, a golden temple, or a perfect jaw. The Trojan war was fought over the desire to impress Helen of Troy with ever more elaborately impressive bronze members.
It’s fashionable in certain online circles to presume that this primordial pagan war to become sexual super-stimuli is “base reality.” This is the “red pill.” Hard to swallow, but gets you out of the lies and cope of the Matrix. The “real truth” is exactly what we’re most afraid to say: male status is the measure of his right to reproduce.
The squirrel “incel,” at least, has a shot at reproduction by the mere fact that there is a lot of noise and lack of optimization in his mating landscape. The modern human incel, by comparison, is himself systematically compared to practically all male specimens on earth, many with a lifelong dedication of making themselves into Herculean super-stimuli. Used to, you just had to compete with the quarterback of your home town. Now you also have to compete with Tom Brady.
The “red pill” suggests you should become one of these top 1% men or die trying (various other colored pills suggest different responses. The “black pill,” for example, suggest you should curse God and die). Most mainstream punditry about incels refuses to understand unspoken sex dynamics and therefore don’t say anything insightful about incels beyond “ick.”
Mind, a similar arm’s race is also happening for women. However, the biological substrate that scaffolds their potential to become super-stimuli is different. The situation for women is fundamentally set by their exponentially higher cost of reproduction and therefore the choosiness of the most fertile women about which males they will allow to reproduce. At the most practical and biological level, women need a partner high-status enough to protect, but committed enough to help raise her children.
If this were the only balance to strike, the equation would quickly reach equilibrium: men and women would permanently pair with someone of roughly similar levels of attractiveness. They could then turn their focus toward willing the good of the other, raising kids, and making beautiful things. But, a third black object upsets the predictable orbit of pairs: deception. Both parties have various opportunities to defect for shorter-term gain.
For women, for example, a theoretically more optimal situation would be to have the genetic material of an exceptional man and then pair with an average stable man to raise the resulting child. In crass terms, marry the best guy who will have her, have the child of the best guy who will sleep with her (those are different men, always). The only problem is that the cuckolded male would never agree to it, so she must defect to achieve it.
In a traditional society, if it got out that she was “that kind of woman,” then no one would marry her, making the risk of female deception high enough to deter it somewhat. This describes the unfortunately named concept “enforced monogamy.” This leaves pre-modern women two viable ecological niches: become a woman of marriage, or join the world’s oldest profession, which allows men to spray and pray and pay for the chance, almost like a reproductive lottery system.
However, in one of the more recent developments in the sexual arms race—probably a result of some mixture of material prosperity, literary feminism, widespread pornography, sexual liberation, and the pill—the sexually parasitic have managed to bend social norms enough to partly nullify the stigma against their preferred form of selfish optimization. Thus, hookup culture and musical-chairs mating mostly benefits the sexual psychopaths to the detriment of those hoping to find a stable relationship.
Don’t think I’m saying it’s the women’s fault, by the way. It seems to be a chicken (or goose) and egg situation: male sexual deception both causes and is caused by female deception in the vicious cycle. Desirable males are incentivized to lie about plans of long term commitment in exchange for a low-cost sexual interaction, which frees them up to repeat the process with other women instead of investing energy in raising one child, permanently muddling the dating pool for other men.
The “spray and pray” sexual strategy is, in every way, less than optimal, even for those highly desirable men. That’s not an intuitive claim, but it’s clear if you unfold a couple of subtle concepts: Insects optimize for volume by having as many offspring as possible; prohibitively huge-brained mammals do not do this if they at all have an option. It’s only settled for by some males if they believe there is a high enough chance of female deception about the legitimacy of their fatherhood or if they’re psychopathic enough to feel they can’t operate in one community for long.
In a sufficiently low-trust society, the math shakes out that the top 1% or so of human men tend to have the most access to the reproductive years of the attractive women. This is especially true now that we exist in an online global village. Since untrusting young women feel they can’t secure a committed and providing relationship anyway, they are willing to suffer sharing the best of the best with other women for the relative security it provides. Again, not optimal for either party but more like a local maxima in a low-trust environment.
As this behavior ramps up, the other 99% of males are increasingly left out of the guaranteed-legitimate-father marriage pool. They eventually stop doing important things like working. These are the incels everyone is worried about.
Even to the extent that we live in a trusting society with marriage norms and strong social sigmas against cheating, there is still an sublimated sexual “black market.” Even if we don’t actually partake in hypergamy or womanizing, we are obviously play-acting it in the virtual world for kicks. Most of us are chronically looking at or producing porn or near-porn in complete digital privacy. We know it’s about as destructive to the commons as throwing trash out of the car, even if we can’t explain why, which is why we hide it from each other.
Naturally, this occasions shame, which feels terrible. Instead of interrogating the meaning of our shame, we have miraculously decided that shame is an aberrant and universally unwarranted emotion, even though that makes no sense. Shame has become the modern folk devil, and so we encourage shamelessness and also name that sexual liberation.
The actual truth is that total freedom in human sexual relations means total freedom to mercilessly deceive each other and thereby destroy the trust that builds wealth and safety and children, which is to commit ourselves to slavery and death in the long run. This, as a matter of fact, is what Don Giovanni is about. The reason that opera is a tragedy is because, to put it mundanely, his game doesn’t iterate well over time.
Even if Don impregnated six hundred young maidens across the Mediterranean, he would have done it with deception, necessarily, because the women would never agree to his unconcealed terms. Despite Don’s many offspring, he left them all in a world with less trust, and trust is what makes a society happy and wealthy. By the second or third or even fourth generation of his progeny, all that was gained will have been lost and more. His line is forever tainted by the origins of deception, and his offspring will eventually destroy themselves or else succeed enough to destroy their society. Don goes to Hell because Hell takes place over generations (at least).
That’s why science can’t answer questions like: “Are men naturally monogamous or not?” We are both. Both adaptive strategies compete within us and leave their traces in our biology and physiognomy. But one path alone allows our progeny to flourish. The other is a fundamentally parasitic short-term adaptation, built as it is and rationally must be, on cashing out assumed trust, betraying it and therefore undermining it.
Making up new concepts to hide this fact from ourselves won’t work to displace the anti-social and degenerate results. There is no such thing as a functional human “open relationship” or “polycule” any of the other similar terms. The squirrel can maybe be in an “open relationship” because he can’t self-consciously optimize for extreme sexual success because there is far more noise and near-zero deception on the squirrel sexual marketplace.
Because of self-consciousness about our own nakedness and thus our ability to exploit this fact in each other, we are creatures morally obliged to monogamy, despite part of our nature being promiscuous and therefore ever-tempting us toward a quick payout through social defection. If you want your children to flourish to the highest possible degree and over the longest possible time horizons, you are obliged to reject that part of your biological desires, forever. No way around it.
Even the most “liberated” people tend to find themselves in normal monogamous relationship once the turbulence of low-trust relationships burns and humiliates them sufficiently or their powers of youth fade away. A tiny minority do manage to play the low-trust game all the way to their grave, but almost no one envies the final fate of someone like Hugh Hefner.
Mercifully, if you aren’t born average looking enough to reject the underground game, age will eventually make you so. By the end, you will more than likely find yourself in bed next to someone for twenty or more years. My good friend is pushing eighty and his biggest regrets are not about missed sexual adventure, but a lack of even earlier and total commitment. This is usually the gist of old men’s advice.
Generally, as the chances of us becoming super-stimuli were always pretty low and are getting lower by the day, we eventually settle down. But we still don’t want to fully let go of the dark gravitational object. These days, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking we don’t have to. That Phone, the Thirst Trap, the third partner that lies in bed with most couples every night, is a way to feel the thrill of being a sexual deviant with no obvious longterm costs.
“Obvious” is doing a lot of work there, because the non-obvious cost is enormous. For one, our behavior suggests to our partner and ourselves that we are committed to monogamy only insofar as we have failed to do better. Virtual sexuality is an expression of the desire to be Don Giovanni with none of the wanton courage that would even make that sort of behavior appealing in a swashbuckling sort of way. Naturally, we are ashamed and disgusted by what that indicates about ourselves but can’t admit it.
Intuiting this, a subgroup of incel types are always trying to prove the “science” of “no fap” (really disgusting and revealing phrase). They are rebuffed by real scientists who confirm that masturbation does not damage the body like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, so it must be fine. Both of them just reveal their implicit materialism. Porn is bad for the same reason tearing up photos of your best friend’s mom is bad: something has clearly gone wrong. Neither needs to produce medically dangerous outcomes for this to be the case.
Beneath the phony science, what incels are really doing, which is so baffling to materialist normies, is trying to dominate the sexual black market by making themselves into a top 1% male. They stare and yearn for it on their phones all day and have concluded it would be something worse than death for them to be settled for by a woman who was used up and aged out of the interest of top men.
They have watched other men, like perhaps their father, settled for in this way and then still divorced, financially and reputationally massacred. More subtly, they rightly perceive that most of what we would think of as “normal” modern relationships are fundamentally built on this mutually undisclosed “unless I can find someone better” low-trust behavior, barely concealed with monogamy-for-lack-of-better-offers, which is only tolerated to stave off the worst of the crushing loneliness of the compounding fruits of anti-social promiscuity.
It’s sad: they have never encountered couples who have believably rejected the sexual black market, even the subtle temptations on the phone. They don’t think this is even possible for themselves or a potential spouse. They believe that the only reasonable, honest, and noble course of action is to either master the “real” sexual marketplace or literally die trying.
They think the black mirror, stroked so much more often than spouses as it is, is the portrait of true sexual fulfillment. They seek to become a king there. This explains Andrew Tate and the millions of “incels” he’s talking to. This also explains the political landscape increasingly dominated by incel talking points.
Freddie DeBoer wrote a piece about the overstated influence incels have on our culture lately, and used that as an opportunity to double down on not feeling sorry for them (no one ever will). He claims that incels are full of it: it’s actually pretty easy to get laid. Fat, old, and short guys do it all the time. Even Freddie himself—can you believe it?—gets laid.
It’s hard to know where to start with this. First, the piece is well-written and funny, which suggests Freddie is likely smart and perceptive, which is one of the most attractive qualities in men. It doesn’t matter how much “an shucks” humbleness he lays on it, unfortunately Freddie likely finds himself a “high-value male.”
And yes, that is repulsive terminology. Not because it’s not indicative of something real, but because everyone senses that it speaks to the rules of a social game we shouldn’t be playing. Freddie chides the guys who are the bastard children of a deceptive hookup culture that he himself is contributing to, while also managing to slip in a humblebrag that, yes, he is marginally chad. The incels don’t want what he’s got anyway because they think sleeping with conquered, discarded, and probably now infertile women is cope for losers (not my perspective, to be clear).
He’s right about one thing, though: cries to feel sorry for incels will never work. The sort of people most likely to respond to appeals to pity (women) have already been traumatized by an “alpha” or two. They don’t understand that “alphas” are statistically exceptional compared to your average incel. They don’t care if that’s true anyway, because the number one dream of the incel is to become the exceptional betrayer of women. Not a likely alliance there, then.
Despite their mutual hatred, low-trust men and women still do depend on each other in a mutually parasitic way that increasingly exclusively takes place online. The temptation to participate in this parasexual online sphere starts early and often. Of course, boys are now encountering porn online at a very young age. For women, it’s more insidious: when my wife was a teenager, she posted a photo of herself in a bikini. Older men quickly saved the photo to their phone. Was she supposed to pretend like she didn’t know what for? Girls are of course extremely disgusted by this when they first encounter it. It involuntarily implicates them in the sexual black market, which makes them “that kind of girl,” which we still retain vestiges of traditional social defenses against, and so we must at least pose with our pearls clutched.
The fact remains, though, that huge and increasing numbers of girls devote their entire young lives to seeing how high they can get that number. To that end, they get plastic surgery and makeup that optimizes their appearance for an iPhone camera, effectively making themselves virtual sexual super-stimuli for incels they hate and will never meet. It becomes even more important than reality for them. If you’ve ever seen it, “Instagram face,” is hyper-attractive on camera and yet looks strangely “2D” in real life.
Incels gaze at these hyper-sirens all day, like a goose hunched over her supernatural egg, slowly beating lust and envy into every cell of their meat. They grind harder, isolate more, and now an elite few have even become “looksmaxxers” and dedicate their entire lives to the pursuit of the illusion of some composite virtual super-siren. Their sexual energy is wholly misplaced in a sterile landscape that produces nothing, not even the cursed progeny of Don Giovanni. If you were an alien, you would look at that and decide it was some kind of gnostic death cult.
Those of us not directly involved in all that, for the most part, still stupidly stare at the super-sirens on our phones and compare them to our own dowdy selves and spouses. We’re deeply unhappy and increasingly not getting married or having children because the super-sirens online are making us lonely and unbearably self-conscious and yet historically picky and vaguely obsessed with making ourselves hot.
That’s pathetic, for one because none of us has a shot in hell of looksmaxxing in real life better than self-proclaimed autists like “Clavicular” who’ve sacrificed their lives and endocrine systems to making themselves super-stimuli on our screens. When asked why, the only specific outcome he points to is more swipes on dating apps and better “halo effect.” If society’s Jenga tower was already balanced on one brick, this generation is adding a live horse to the top.
If you’re single and lonely and you don’t know how to change that, I’m telling you: brick your phone, go to a real place, and do something hard with other people. You will notice after about a month that normal people are more beautiful than you thought. Real beauty emerges with time and trust like layers of subtle light. This light is only party and temporarily revealed through instantly legible fertility signals like what you would optimize for swiping. Tie yourself to the mast of your ship to resist those super-sirens, if you have to. There are apps.
I met my wife in a church, among friends. We became exceptionally attracted to each other, not because we treated each other as good-enough replacements of the super-sirens, but because over time that subtle light become too bright to ignore. Still, neither of us is deluded enough to think we are above the temptations of parasitic sexual strategies, so we both have our phones bricked. We have chosen the sacrifices of monogamy with clear eyes. We made this choice to give room and soil for love to grow, to raise kids, and to make beautiful things. That is all much realer than the “red pill.” I legitimately feel sorry for incels because they don’t know that.
The people who make that choice, as hard as it is, outbreed those who don’t. That’s the “flood” of Noah, genetically. It has always won the slow war of attrition, even in the face of overwhelming unpopularity and difficulty. This is not new.
It’s straightforwardly a better strategy, at every level of analysis, than looksmaxxing ourselves to death.