Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Birth of the Manosphere

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss the sigma male.FOOTNOTES:1.    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/30/elliot-rodger-puahate-forever-alone-reddit-forums 2.    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/mass-shooting-1989-montreal-14-women-killed 3.    https://newrepublic.com/article/145097/hugh-hefners-incomplete-sexual-revolution4.    https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/lepine_note_1.1.pdf 5.    https://medium.com/@yaraticineo/what-is-sigma-male-b22bc154b3b96.    https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/what-is-a-sigma-male-the-so-called-rarest-man7.    https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/786016778048643073/photo/1 8.    http://davemech.org/wolf-research/ 9.    https://www.themarysue.com/alpha-sigma-abo/ 10. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/sigma-males-explained/11. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sigma-males12. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/05/explaining-sigma-again.html 13. https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-packs-is-wrong-502754629 14. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale 15. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/05/pickup-artists-teaching-men-approach-women-industry-street-harassment16. https://deepai.org/publication/from-pick-up-artists-to-incels-a-data-driven-sketch-of-the-manosphere 17. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1321618. https://www.amazon.com/Came-Something-Awful-Accidentally-Donald/dp/1250189748 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess, let me be perfectly clear, my dog fights, but it's because he's aggressive and he's got some strong opinions. I don't personally benefit from it, and in fact, it is tanking my career actively, my dog's fighting career. Well, controversial stances from Jamie Loftus are dog fighting. I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history. Jamie, how are you doing in this lovely Fabia Jan, Wary, March Day? You know, not great, but I've started reading Kathy cartoons. Oh, that is a horrible sign for your mental health.

I really think that that is a symbol that I've hit some sort of all, but I don't know what it is. And here's the thing, I'm laughing. You're laughing. I see Ak, I laugh. That's where I'm at. I think you and I might be on a similar mental track right now, because I have recently gotten back into reading the comics that I read as a kid. I've been going through the old Calvin and Hobbeses, some of the old Foxtrot, yeah. The classics. The classics. The classics where no one ever actually had a problem.

They just thought they did. And I think I might get back into Bloom County. I've been missing my weird 80s comedy, a lot of making fun of Donald Trump in the old Bloom Counties. It's true. There's a, I've been, oh God, my week really did devolve into Lolita ended, and I'm like, I can do whatever I want. And it turns out, whatever I want is reading Kathy comics for three straight days. You know, she, there's a whole week in Kathy comics where she just went to see the big chill every day in the comic. She just kept going. She loved the big chill.

And she campaigned for Dukakis. That's what I learned about Kathy this week. That is all heartbreaking. Well, Jamie, your tragic journey with Kathy is actually a perfect lead-in for our subject today. As I, as I stated, you know, we're going to be doing some book episodes and you and I are going to get into a real terrible book, but not today. Today we're going to talk about the manosphere. Oh, no, that's exactly what Kathy was afraid of Robert. That's exactly what Kathy was warning us about.

Listen, I was the light one out of Jamie's eyes when Robert said that. This is going to shatter. I pumped myself up with Kathy for three days and you just take what I've got. I've earned. Okay. What is, what is the manosphere? It sounds like a fucking spike TV show. We'll get to that. I'm going to explain why we're talking about this today before we get into the book that you and I are going to talk about later this week. So on January 21st, 2021, a non-binary, transfem Twitter personality named Lily Simpson posted a tweet that went so viral it inspired a whole bunch of articles and think pieces.

It's got something like a quarter of a million shares. The tweet consisted of four images, the cover of a book titled The Sigma Male, What Women Really Want. Now, the cover of this book features a man in a suit with a medieval sword as the cover art. Now, next to that image were several screen grabs listing the five male archetypes, which according to those screen grab or according to those image macros or whatever, range from alpha males to omega males. Now, I think pretty much everyone, I know, I know, oh, Jamie, you're going to hate this episode so much. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. This episode is revenge for the things that I imagine you would have said if I'd told you that Nestor Mock knows nickname really meant daddy. Which I guess I should, yeah, I do not forgive you.

And if I feel that there's information, I'm just going to insert daddies where they don't exist as a cautionary measure. I did what I had to do to save Christmas. I understand that it's going to ruin the rest of my life. Very Cindy Lou who of you. Most people are familiar with the concept of alpha males, right? The idea that some men are inherent. There's a small cadre of men that are inherently dominant and that they're the most attractive to women and all that stuff. Now, so that was, you know, there were, in this tweet that Lily Simpson put out, there was like an image of that Sigma Male book, there was an image of like the list of all the different kinds of males. And then there was an image of a pyramid chart labeling what it called the socio-sexual hierarchy. Now the pyramid has alpha at the top and omega at the bottom and it goes through all the different kinds of males.

And then outside the pyramid, next to alpha is the Sigma Male with the explaining text, the Sigma and Alpha are equal. The Sigma sits outside the hierarchy by his own choice. Whoa, the Sigma is the mummy. And of course, on the other side of this pyramid is a crude clip art of a wolf because... Is it really a pyramid if there's not an American wolf sitting right next to it? Gotta be a wolf. It's a shame what's been done to the wolf. We'll be talking about that today too. So the last, yeah, the last image in Lily's tweet is the best, a screen grab of a YouTube video titled How to Become Sigma Male, the rarest male type. This sounds like a great act of public service by Lily.

Yeah, Lily's wonderful and this was a wonderful tweet that they put together. Now, the video that that screen grab is from was hosted on the Alpha Show channel and it has 137,000 views to date. In the portion of the paused video we see, there's an image of Keanu Reeves as John Wick next to the text, rarest male type, which is not strictly untrue. That's an unfair appropriation of Keanu Reeves' wholesome image. It is and I think part of why Keanu Reeves is so magnetic is that he has never spent a single section of his life wondering what hierarchy of male he counts as. He simply exists. I used to sell Keanu Reeves his Sudoku puzzles when I first moved here. It's my favorite fact. I had another friend who worked at the Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica who also sold books to Keanu Reeves.

He's a reader. He's a gentle soul. He's a lovely man. I also interviewed once the guy who does gun training for Hollywood films, like action movie stars and how to use guns on screen and stuff. He's worked with Keanu a lot and everybody loves Keanu Reeves. Everybody who works with Keanu Reeves loves him. I've never heard a bad thing about Keanu. Man, I hate that Keanu Reeves is being used for evil. He is the rarest male type. But I have a feeling that that has nothing to do with... I haven't seen the John Wick movies. Are they talking about John Wick as the rarest male type? They're talking about John Wick, of course. They're talking about John Wick as the Sigma male who stands outside the male hierarchy.

So what the fuck is going on with the Sigma male nonsense? We're going to talk about that. The unreadable book that we're going to read on Thursday is about the Sigma male. It's the book that Lily featured in their tweet. Oh, yes. But today, I think we should lay some groundwork in the tweet that Lily posted. They asked, what the fuck is going on with men? Now, Lily's done a YouTube video. Yeah, great question. And Lily's done a YouTube video on this, which I'll link in the show notes titled Sigma males into the manosphere. It's quite good.

Today, though, I want to go back further and I want to talk about the groundwork that created what serious researchers really do call the manosphere. This is a term that people have published peer-reviewed studies about this thing. And the manosphere is, in short, the chunk of the internet dominated by an increasingly toxic galaxy of male supremacists. So we're going to talk about where all of this comes from and how this testosterone ladle jumble of idiocy has turned into something that inspired terrorist attacks that have killed dozens. We're going to start. Yeah, it always ends there. I was like, how long is it going to take to terrorist attacks that kill dozens? Not much.

You should just have your knife out. I always have a knife. I know. I know. But I wanted the listeners to know that I didn't bring it up the first time. Look at this knife. He's really proud of it. It's new. I've heard about it several times today. Isn't this beautiful? Look at this. Look at this knife. Yeah, River, if you want to show us your new toys, you can just show it to each.

I'm just enjoy holding it. It's made by Curtis Halland of Free Hill Blades. You should check him out on the gram. He's incredible. I just want you to know you fell into that trap loft. He was waiting for you to bring it up. I know. I know. Jamie, a little spoiler for where we're going. I was peacocking. Are you? Is this the whole episode?

Yeah, I was peacocking and I started the episode by nagging you about dogfighting. That's true. First of all, and I'm just trapped. I'm so beaten down that I didn't even fucking notice. He's pulled a knife on me yet again. Okay. Well, there's like little inscriptions on it. It's cool. Robert, I'm going to start texting you Kathy cartoons.

I feel like they would improve your day to day. Jamie Loftus, are you ready to take a journey into the manosphere? Yes, Sigma. Take me. Well, we're going to start as we nearly always start when we're talking about horrible things that lead to mass death with capitalism. Because before the manosphere, before the internet, we had the men's liberation movement. Now, based on... Where are they being liberated from?

Well, this was actually a pretty reasonable social movement. It started in the 1960s with the Vietnam War and the growing counterculture. And it existed within that space as a critique of traditional male gender roles in the capitalist United States. The first generation raised by World War II veterans had grown up in a world where men were expected to be breadwinners and women were expected to be domestic servants. And the men of the men's liberation movement saw this as toxic, right? The idea that obviously men had a lot more and still do have a lot more privilege,

but it's still bad for men to just be expected. Your only value is to produce money, right? Absolutely. That's a toxic thing, and that's kind of what the men's liberation movement was reacting to. And in fact, it was tied with second-wave feminism, and both of them were pretty tightly interwoven and not in opposition to feminism. This is where Kathy comes in, Robert. This is literally where Kathy comes in.

This is where Kathy starts. Kathy starts in 1976. She's firmly in this place. She's winning her own bread, and it's a problem. Yeah, and so in the 60s, you get kind of the birth of the men's liberation movement. And researchers Becky Costin and Michael Kimmel explained, quote, and this is talking about kind of how these guys thought, if men were imprisoned in the home, then men were exiled from the home,

turned into soulless robotic workers and harnessed to a masculine mystique so that their only capacity for nurturing was through their wallets. So yeah, this is pretty reasonable, you know? Yeah, and that's like a lose-lose too. It's a classic lose-lose where a woman is not allowed to validate themselves through work if they choose, and then the man has the additional pressure. It is, everyone loses. And it's also like, you know, women aren't validated as being capable of having a professional life,

but also men aren't validated as being capable of nurturing, you know? That's a toxic thing as well. And perhaps actively encouraged to not do it. Yeah, perhaps actively encouraged to drink high balls and talk about the war in dark voices until they pass out drunk on the couch. Yeah, that's base-level daddy culture. Daddy cult, baby. So, yeah, again, men's liberation movement started out in a pretty reasonable place,

a justified reaction to the inhuman realities of what a lot of people would call capitalism's golden age. In the mid-1970s, starting around 1973, that golden age came to an end. Inflation soared, employment plummeted, gas prices skyrocketed upwards, and political corruption grew more in your face than it had ever been before. President Jimmy Carter, coming to power hot off the heels of the guy who pardoned Nixon, described the national mood as a sort of general malaise. Now, during this period, a new movement, the men's rights movement, branched off from men's liberation. And this was not as positive a thing.

I'm going to quote from a study titled, From Pick-Up Artists to In-Cells, A Data-Driven Sketch of the Manisphere. God bless whoever had to write this. It's a good, it's a really good study. Quote, this new branch saw the problem men experienced as stemming more from feminism and women empowerment than oppressive gender roles. So-called men's rights activists would focus on men's issues such as health problems, military conscription, divorce, and custody laws.

In this new ideology, women's liberation would be inflicting on men the worst of both worlds, and the movement's empathetic tone turned to anger. So, starts out as like, hey, this whole system's fucked up, it's unfair to men and women, and we support women in their quest for liberation, and we also have to liberate ourselves. And then capitalism stops working in the same way, and there's less money, and there's less opportunity. And suddenly a lot of these guys are like, oh fuck, the problem is that women are getting rights. Right, okay, so this is like the mid-70s energy? Yeah, 73 is kind of when this process starts, but obviously it's a process.

We're just gonna pivot to blaming women for the failures of capitalism. Hell yeah. I like when we do that. Oh, Jamie, let me tell you, when I realized I could just blame women for the failures of capitalism, suddenly I didn't have to blame capitalism. And that's way easier. Suddenly you don't need to blame, you know, it's something that you feel like, it's just a direct person to yell at.

Capitalism isn't a person, and people hate that. And it's, you know, it's incredibly powerful and incredibly difficult to fight, whereas a bunch of women who don't have the same employment opportunities as men, way easier to fight than capitalism. Let me tell you. Literally, men are choosing to fight Cathy. I'm sorry. People are like, instead of fighting capitalism, let's oppress Cathy specifically.

Let's oppress Cathy, that's right. So many of the figures at the forefront of the men's rights movements people who had been associated with second-wave feminism Warren Farrell, for example, let a men's group within the National Organization for Women. He then, in 1993, wrote The Myth of Male Power. Now, this book was a foundational text for men's rights activists, and it claimed that men, not women, were systematically disadvantaged in modern society. Farrell's work is generally seen as like simplistic and insensitive and inaccurate and bullshit,

and also the foundational text of what we now know as the men's rights movement. Right. It's just like that need to be more oppressed. Yeah. Yeah. And it definitely, like, Farrell starts on the side of women's liberation and then makes a real, real jagged shift, which is cool. It's cool how that works.

Love that for him. So it's not coincidental, obviously, that economic collapse and contraction led to an awful lot of men going from a fairly healthy attitude. Men should be liberated, and so should women, and instead, like, now there's less money. Fuck women. They're way I don't have money. And this basic true trend would hold true for, you know, forever, really. And obviously, I do want to, we're not talking about a majority of men when we talk about

the men's rights movement, when we talk about any of this stuff. We're talking about a very vocal subculture, and I don't want to, like, erase the men who continue to be like, hey, there's problems that men face in society, and they're tied to the problems that women face, and we have to, like, I'm not trying to, it's not like the whole movement. Which is all exists under capitalism and that whole bit. I will say that Kathy's boyfriend Irving does sound like he would believe in this sort of bullshit, though.

Oh, fucking Irving. Let me tell you, I've never read Kathy. I don't know. Listen, wait till I start texting you, Kathy, comics nonstop. You'll hate Irving in two minutes. Oh, Jamie, I am so excited to be texted, Kathy, comics nonstop. That will be much better than your panic text about where your dog is in the night, because he's gone off to fight again.

He would just be nice to get a text of where he's fighting. That's all I'm saying. Well, I haven't seen him in any of the dogfights. I don't attend. No, he's JV. He's JV. So. So.

Historia Barbara Ehrenreich actually puts the first break with traditional 50s ideas of manhood much earlier than this period. In the mid 1950s, rather than being tied to any social movement or counterculture. And she like, so there's obviously, there's this men's liberation, which turns into the men's rights movement. But the first big kind of social break from the traditional expectations of manhood that has kind of evolved during the early 1900s started in the early 1950s. And it's credited with to Hugh Hefner.

Oh, yeah. That takes. Okay. We're talking Hugh. This is, this is what Barbara Ehrenreich argues. So Hugh had gotten married at age 22, which was honestly kind of old to get married in his day. But I think too young to get married would be my opinion.

And, you know, but he was in the same situation of millions of other men in his generation and he regretted getting married. He felt like he'd gotten, he'd gotten hitched too early and he hadn't had enough sexual experience. And that's perfectly valid, right? To feel like you got pressured into marrying too early. Where he goes with this is less valid. In 1953, he creates Playboy magazine, which was aimed at men like him who sought a life

more liberating than the expected job to wife to kids to grave pipeline. Now, again, obviously, Hugh had a few points here. 1950s culture was toxic in every single way. But he didn't just like say like, Hey, men should have, you know, consider other options for their lifestyles. He took the tack that is becoming increasingly familiar of blaming women for the unreasonable constraint society placed on men. The issue of Playboy included an article warning men of gold digging women.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes, it was a no holds barred attack on the whole concept of alimony and secondarily on money hungry women in general, entitled Miss Gold Digger of 1953, the beginning Playboy loved women, large breasted, long legged young women anyway, and hated wives. So. Yeah, I've, I've read that article before. Yeah. Hugh Hefner is such a frustrating figure where it's like, like many of the men you're describing, they start from a valid point of frustration, which is the expectation society is putting

on them is unfair. But then they're like, but here, here's my solution. Naked underage girls that you have to pay for. And a bunch of stories about how men are underserved by society between them. And so it just becomes such a dissonant message immediately. And spoiler alert, it stays that way. And it's not a wildly different process that you could, you can honestly see with a lot of anti-Semitism where people start from like, oh, hey, finance is fucked up.

Oh, hey, capitalism is actually like really bad and unfair and unequal. And it's like, okay, okay, okay. And it's because of the Jews. And it's like, okay, no, you see, you, you, you just. Just targeted. You just have complete misfire right away. Yeah. The first issue of Playboy is a fucking weird ass document that just shows you so much because

it's like even in the mission statement, there's parts of the Playboy mission statement that you're like, I see where they're going with this. And then by the end, they've already deviated into hell. And then I have to call people, you know, 70 years later to ask what everyone's titty is. It's not fair. It's not fair. But I got answers.

And that's what, that's what's important. I earned my $8 an hour. Jamie Loftus, famed Playboys man. So Hefner provided young men of the post-war era with kind of the first popular alternative view of masculinity, one that was independent of a wife or a family and focused unfortunately around the acquisition of objects. So it's not just like you're independent of, you know, you're a complete person without having a family and being a breadwinner, which is a good way to view things.

It's like you're an independent, if you, if you don't have a family and a wife, you can have like nice furniture and nice liquor and stereo systems and stuff. One of Hefner's kind of big major innovation, I don't know, innovation is a weird way to say it, but one of the major things he introduced to society was the concept of the bachelor pad, which is, you know, like a nice house that's just your place as a dude to bring women to and filled with things that you have acquired for money. In his book, it came from something awful, which is wonderful. David Baron notes, quote, this Hefnerian vision of manhood was still tied to economic achievement.

Like the breadwinner vision of manhood, it encouraged conformity and merely changed the system of rewards. So you have the men's liberation movement, which is very anti or at least critical of capitalism. You have Hefner's vision of kind of new masculinity, which is fundamentally dovetailing into capitalism and kind of casually anti women. Yeah. It's whatever you're expressing, you're expressing your masculinity through active participation

in capitalism. So it's like, well, yeah, we're lost. And I feel like there's similar, you know, it's frustrating because again, it's like you could easily draw a similar line to women as well of like how there's such a pressure to participate in capitalism, look a certain way, have a certain thing, do all this stuff that is part of my, I don't know, like that, of my myriad issues with second way feminism. A lot of it is just like, let us participate in capitalism, undisturbed. And it's like, well, what are we really fighting here?

What's going on? And I think you could also, you can see some kind of broadly similar in their structure, things happening within kind of trans exclusionary radical feminism too, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Which I have not done enough research on to want to get into more here, but I definitely see some similarities on what I do know.

So by the late 1970s, you have this distinct men's rights ideology that's starting to form and has settled into a well-developed pattern of blaming women for the constraints that men face under American capitalism. A large chunk of the growing movement had been inspired by the objectification of not just women, but life itself, seeing the only reasonable path for them as a series of conquests, both financial and sexual. This would all feed into the culture of Reagan-era greed and corruption in the 1980s. Now alongside this period, a lot of other things were happening, of course, but one

of them was an explosion in cartoons, movies, and popular fiction aimed at children and set in fantastic worlds. The media of the 1980s and 90s in particular is still dominant today. And some of the most influential pieces of media that were created in the decade or so before 2001 were aimed at children and also aimed at like selling kids things. And it's... Yeah. You're transformers.

You're blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. You're Michael Bay properties. And I think a big part of... You're future Michael Bay properties. Why the kind of nostalgia culture that we're mired in today is so big is that the 15 years or so of media that we're talking about right now is what came right before September 11th,

and everything has just gotten worse since September 11th pretty consistently. So it's not only people's childhood, but a lot of this stuff harkens back two-way time when, for example, the average person had some level of hope that things could get better for them economically. You know? Yeah. Yeah. So the people who had their childhoods in the 1980s and 90s in particular would grow

up to face a tougher and less hopeful world than their parents, the boomers would. Gone were the dreams of even modest financial security. Careers became gigs. The future seemed to erode from underneath many people. Some of them chose to handle this by retreating back into the warm worlds of fantasy that had undergirded their youth. Now this phenomenon was first recognized and named in Japan in two distinct but related social phenomenons.

The Hikikomori, or turning inward, is a term used to describe young adults who reacted to the difficulty of adult life and financial stagnation by pulling away from society and isolating themselves in their homes or in their parents' homes. Now the other phenomenon that Japan, like Japanese sociologists or whatever kind of started to name around this period, 70s, 80s, really like the 80s, 80s, 90s were called otaku. Now Dale Barron writes, quote, two factors had created the otaku. The first was the same expansion of leisure marketing to children that had occurred in

the United States. In the early 80s, Japanese homes filled with VCRs and TVs. Previous generations had faced the austerity and deprivation of war, but postwar consumers found themselves with disposable income for an ever-expanding market of recreation and entertainment products. As in the United States, fantasy worlds designed to enthrall children and convince them to acquire a set of plastic toys and tapes flooded the market. In Japan, it began with a giant robot craze.

Many children learned to gratify their existence through self-centered consumption of commercialized media. As they grew older, their worldview and habits grew with them. The second factor was unique to Japan, though eventually similar dynamics would spread to the United States. Japanese children of the 80s were called the bean sprout generation because they grew quickly and tall in postwar prosperity, like bean sprouts, but were strangely substance-less. As the American model of the postwar corporate state was imported to Japan, Japanese kids

fell into the machine that the counterculture had protested in 1964. They were flattened out into machine parts, reduced to facts and figures, ranked by computerized tests, and then assigned a place in the hierarchy according to their usefulness, represented by the degrees they received. This way of operating was not all that different from the preceding fascist system in which individuals subsumed themselves into the greater collective hierarchy of the state. It also dovetailed with the Japanese belief that hard work, difficult experiences, and sometimes even suffering, often administered by an authority figure, were good for the

soul. And so parents and schools pushed students to succeed in ways that were considered extreme to Americans in the 80s, though eventually, as competition increased, such practices would be imported to the United States. Hey, Robert, do you know what else is good for the soul? You know what else is getting imported into the United States, Sophie? Products and services that support this podcast. I see.

Is it also good? Are they also good for the soul? No. We do not sell anything that's good for the soul. I believe the soul is a cancer upon the human race and must be eliminated. Death to the soul is the behind the bastards motto and the motto of all of our sponsors. I thought it was fuck around and find trout, but OK. Sophie, I think we both agreed that our corporate motto was death to the human soul.

I like it. It's catchy. Fair enough. It's a universal message. I think a lot of people are going to get on board. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ugh, we're back. We're back. We're back. The phrase otaku has only become familiar to me in the last several months because it comes up a lot with Lolita stuff.

Yeah. And I think it's an important subject to study and I'll have people say you can't generalize it too much to the US, but I think that a lot of what's happening here is especially what's happened within the alt-right, the 4chan folks is very similar. And I think Japan was just kind of a few years ahead of the trend. And it's all, you know, everything we're talking about today, all this toxicity is a reaction to capitalism, and it's a reaction to capitalism that gives people something to either do to numb the pain of capitalism or something to blame rather than acknowledge

the flaws of capitalism, which is one of the most brilliant aspects of capitalism as a sentence. I read a fucking essay a couple of years ago where I think it was a data researcher or a mathematician, somebody you knew more math than me, was making the argument that global capital is functionally an artificial intelligence because it acts and defends itself in ways that imply some sort of gestalt intelligence, acting within the system of capital. And watching the way in which criticisms of capitalism and its flaws are deflected because of how people are able to find other groups to blame, other things to rage at, there's

a lot of, I think, back to that essay a lot when I watch, I don't know, all of this shit. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. We'll talk about it. That's galaxy brains. I want to know more. Yeah, I'll try to find the essay again. We'll talk about it one of these days, Jamie. So a lot of what happened to the otaku obviously sounds familiar to what we've seen 4chan and

Reddit do to large chunks of a whole generation. One major difference would be that to the best of my knowledge, most analyses of otaku culture tend to focus on isolation and not, for example, the violent rage that these people exercise upon the world as a result of their isolation. I'm certainly not saying that being an otaku is the same as being into 4chan or an internet Nazi or whatever, but similar social pressures led to the creation of all of these classifications of people or whatever you want to call it. Okay, interesting.

This is all relatively new info to me. Yeah. I've been thinking about in a disorganized fashion for years, and in the book it came from something awful, kind of helped me put some of this into a little bit more order, but my research on 8chan and stuff, which is what got me famous in the first place, was kind of proceeding from this. It's definitely, I grew up on the internet. I'll talk about that more later.

It's been weird to watch this happen. So obviously, the US was a few years behind Japan in this phenomenon, but again, the same factors would work in this part of the world. The first warning signs that something was terribly wrong, actually started terribly wrong and was going to lead to like really violent anti-women terrorist movement, right? The first kind of warning signs that the in cell movement was coming actually started in Canada. So we're going to talk about Mark Leppin.

Do you know Mark Leppin? You heard this guy? I don't know Mark Leppin. Have you heard of the... Should I hit him up? You should not. And no. Have you heard of the Ecole Polytechnique attack?

Yes, I have heard of that. Yeah. He's the guy who did it. So Mark Leppin was born in 1964 to an Algerian father and a Canadian mother. His dad was abusive to his mother and towards women in general, and he bounced out of the picture when Mark was young. Mark actually changed his name to Mark Leppin out of hatred for his father. As a child, Mark was intelligent but withdrawn.

He had difficulties making friends or even connecting with family members. His mom was a single parent and did not have a lot of time for the family. She was working all of the time. And this is also something that Mark grew up very angry about. He had a younger sister who mocked him relentlessly for his acne, and he repeatedly fantasized about her violent death. Mark's hobbies is a boy included shooting pigeons with an air rifle and reading about Adolf Hitler, who he grew to admire.

It's very, we need to talk about Kevin. It always comes back to Hitler. It's the same thing. This is never emphasized. It's not emphasized when people talk about a cold polytechnic. It's not emphasized with the Columbine kids that they were like, super fucking into Hitler. It's a pretty big mistake or big detail to repeatedly gloss over, I agree. Yeah.

All of the shit I had to hear in elementary school after Columbine about how it was the result of bullying. He was like, no, they were fucking Nazis, but okay, they continued like pretty consistently well into the 2010s. Yeah. Yeah. That whole, that whole be empathized with this, with the school shooter. Be best.

Methodology. Yeah. Yeah. No, actually what needs to be done is young men need to be called on violent and anti-social and particularly anti-women behavior because there's a lot of conversations that could be had about gun control. But you know what? If you stopped, if you took guns away from men with a history of domestic violence or

anti-women violence, you would take guns away from about half of mass shooters because like half of them have histories of violence towards women, including the guy who shot up the health clinic recently. Yes. Had had an arrest for domestic violence. Keeps happening. Seems like it's the number one predictor of whether or not somebody will do violence in public is if they hit women.

Maybe people should do something about that. Some of them just start podcasts. Some of them just start podcasts. And it's great. Ted Cruz is proposing that we take guns away from people who have been investigated for domestic terrorism, which is like number one, how do you define an investigation that's not like, you're talking about taking away someone's constitutional right because they've been investigated and not convicted of something.

It's a great way for Ted Cruz to suggest something that doesn't involve taking guns away from domestic abusers. It also just sounds like an interesting way to deflect from the people who vote for him. Yeah. So sorry, we're getting off topic. So we're talking about Mark Leppin. In 1981, when Mark was 17, he attempted to join the Canadian armed forces. Mark would later write that they determined he was anti-social and refused to accept

him. The Canadian military would later say that he was interviewed, assessed and found to be unsuitable. In 1982, his family moved and Leppin started a two-year pre-university course in engineering. He got a job as a custodian at the hospital where his mom worked. He was quiet and withdrawn, at one point falling madly in love with a coworker, but never working up the courage to talk to her. He got his own apartment and applied for admission at the Ecole Polytechnique, which had a prestigious

engineering program. It's like an engineering school. He was accepted, provided he complete two courses and he didn't take those courses. He was rejected twice in all from the school. Mark's acquaintances noted that through the 1980s, he began to express a repeated and heated dislike for feminists. He was enraged that women were allowed to be cops in particular and felt that they should be forced to stay at home caring for their families.

His friends stated that he desperately wanted a girlfriend, but seemed to be unable to actually talk to women. When he did interact with women, he tended to boss them around in an attempt to show them how smart he was. See? Well, that's a great way for them to not point out his acne. Yep. Got some notes, Mark?

Yeah. Mark. Mark was fired from the hospital. Yeah. He was fired from the hospital where he worked for being angry and unreliable. He initially planned to shoot up his former workplace in Revenge, but after he was turned down by Ecole Polytechnique a second time in 1989, he decided to focus his rage on the college and particularly its feminists because even though they had given him clear instructions

about what he needed to do to get accepted and he'd failed to do those things, he blamed the fact that he hadn't gotten into school on feminists because women were taking up all the engineering slots that would rightfully have gone to him if it weren't those damn women. Yeah. Yeah. I know this argument. Not a thing that's ever happened again.

Yeah. On December 6th, 1989, he walked into the Montreal Engineering Schools campus with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife from the Guardian, quote, Nathalie Provost was 23 when Lepin shot her. Four bullets from his legally obtained rifle entered her body and changed her life forever. Lepin had entered her classroom and sent the 50 men and nine women to opposite sides of the room. Then he ordered the men to leave.

He told us that we were there because he was against feminists. She told the Guardian, I answered back, we are not feminists. We are just engineering students. And if you want to study at Polytechnic, you just have to apply and you'll be welcomed. And then he shot six of the nine women in that room were killed. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. It's pretty bad.

Jamie. Yeah. It's pretty bad. By the time Lepin's rampage was over, he had killed 14 women and injured 14 other people, including four men. He then killed himself. For many years, this shooting has been kind of just written off as a mass shooting, right? In Canada, instituted some gun control legislation as a result of this.

But it did not stop the anti-women terrorists. And I think the most recent one was Alex Minassi and like two or three years ago, killed 10 people in a van ramming where he was aiming at women. But we'll keep talking about this subject. Oh, good. Yeah, it was kind of taken as like this was an inexplicably deranged man with a gun who was choosing to like kill strangers and kill women. But it was seen as just kind of like a mass shooting.

The reality, as is made clear by Lepin's suicide note, is that the Ecole Polytechnic attack was the very first incel terrorist attack. And I'm going to quote from his manifesto now, the feminists have always enraged me. They wanted to keep the advantages of women, e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave, preceded by a preventative leave, et cetera, while seizing for themselves those of men. Thus, it is an obvious truth that if the olympic games were removed, the men, women distinction, there would be women only in the graceful events.

So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic that they do not neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus the other day, I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the front line during the world wars. How can you explain that since women were not authorized to go to the front line? Well, we hear of Caesar's female legions and female galley slaves who, of course, took

up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed, a real Casus belly. So you see what he's saying there? He starts with me. No, I don't. I mean, I do, but it's all very frustrating. First of all, that's male figure skater erasure in the olympic section. It is. God, just how quickly it escalates to women just strictly participating in an activity

they were once more limited and barred from with this grand scheme to displace men is just so, I mean, whatever you hear, you hear it all the time, but it never sounds less A to G in logic. And I think there's a few things that are worth noting there. One of them is that the initial lines by him we wrote where he was like, women are trying to, they only want to, they only want to change the things that don't benefit them about society. They don't want to give up all their advantages. And that's what like the men's rights activists of the 70s were arguing, right?

That's what Warren Ferrell, who wrote the myth of male power was arguing. So he's, he's not coming at this from out of nowhere, right? These same social movements exist in Canada and Mark is influenced by them. And he's influenced by debates about feminism in Canada and obviously in the United States because Canada's, you know, basically are our little brother. Women in their damn maternity leave and their damn maternity leave. Why do they get maternity leave and not me? Which actually is a great question.

Men should get maternity leave. Right. It's a valid thing, but like it's the answer isn't kill women over it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's again, this thing of like, yes, there's a very valid critique of American style capitalism in particular, because other capitalist countries are not as irrational about this as we are, where it's like, yeah, husbands or fathers should also get maternity leave. Parental leave in general.

It should be. Yes. Like, yes. Why, why can't you just, me, ugh, it's so fucking infuriating. Yeah. Maybe, maybe whenever a couple has a kid, regardless of what their sex or gender is, they should get six months off of work because as a society, we should note that it's important to spend that time with your child and more valuable to do that than continue to create value under

capitalism. And it would lead to healthier children and a healthier society and thus is worth it for us to all pay a little bit in order to make that possible. Maybe. Too far. I think you're taking things too far. That's enough of that. Maybe a healthy culture would make that call.

I'm leaving the Zoom. But not America. Not America. We will never do the healthy thing. So Mark's note makes it clear that he started entertaining thoughts of serious violence against women about seven years before the shooting. So if you're looking at this guy's path to radicalization, it's about a seven-year journey, which is slow.

I mean, it can happen in fucking weeks, thanks to the internet. There's a lot to say about how much the internet has sped this up. You look at some of the QAnon people who have been engaged in violence, and it's like they got into Q six weeks before they kidnapped their kids and drove across the country or raided the capital. But in the pre-internet days, obviously, there were not massive online communities of male rights advocates or anti-feminist advocates. And Mark was mostly left alone to stew in his hatred.

He was also relatively unable to spread his hateful philosophy to an accepting community. But still, the public reaction to a coal polytechnic made it clear that there existed significant support for his actions even then. A psychiatrist at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Quebec was quoted in La Presse as saying that Le Pen was as innocent as his victims and himself a victim of an increasingly merciless society. Perhaps this man who shot 28 people is as much a victim as the 28 people he shot. But that is such a...

I mean, I'm not surprised at all that that was the attitude then, because that was the attitude for a long time after that. It's the attitude a lot of people have now, when it's a right-wing terrorist. All the articles coming out about how a bunch of the capital rioters had, or insurrectionists wherever you want to call them, had had like recent financial difficulties, right? Even though, if you actually look at it, most of their financial problems came from not paying taxes on the businesses that they ran because they're right-wing shitheads, but whatever.

Yeah. Very frustrating. No, let's blame... I blame... I blame anything else. Anything but, number one, the individuals and also the ideologies that are heavily supported by large segments of our society who make huge amounts of money supporting that... You're cheering on that shit, anyway.

So that all takes us in to the 1990s, right? This happens 1989, very early days of what would become the internet. We get into the 1990s and increasing numbers of young men are increasingly online. And I was one of these young men. I spent most of the late... I mean, I was a child in the 90s, but I spent most of the late 90s in the early aughts. Because I think I can honestly say one of the very first terminally online young men. Basically, all of my socializing, all of my free time that was not spent playing Warhammer

or whatever, D&D, was spent in various online communities, like early forums and message boards. You were on the boards? I was on tons of boards, all about the boards. Name the boards. A lot of online communities. Docs the boards. I absolutely will not talk about most of them.

But one of them was something awful, which started in 1999. There were some that I was in before that. And I can tell you that in my experience, I didn't... I don't recall encountering a lot of open, violent hatred of women and fantasies of violence against them. Obviously, there was a ton of misogyny, and most of which I did not recognize as misogyny at the time because that was the culture that I was raised in. Yeah, I didn't run into people fantasizing about murdering women because they couldn't

get a date, right? Like that thing had not... It was not... At least not common yet. What was common were stories of sexual frustration and feelings of hopelessness about the idea of finding a girlfriend. A common meme back then was, there are no girls on the internet, which was largely inspired by a couple of facts.

Number one, a lot of men pretended to be women online. Obviously, at the time, we said that a lot of creepy guys pretend to be women. I have... As just kind of based on some of the people that I've met, particularly some of the trans people that I've met, I've become aware more recently that a lot of that was like people who would later realize they were trans kind of starting to experiment with that identity. Obviously, at the time, it was just like a lot of guys are pretending to be ladies is kind of how 14-year-old me and a bunch of other people on the internet interpreted it.

And the other aspect of the whole, there are no girls on the internet thing was that there weren't a lot of girls on the internet. It was a lot of... It was like most of the communities I was in were made up of a lot of isolated young male nerds who played way too many video games and kind of had trouble imagining that many women would enjoy the same internet they did. And obviously... They may have been right.

They may have been right. It was pretty objectifying and misogynistic in a lot of ways. Also, great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are no girls on the internet. Great podcast by Bridget Todd. There are no girls on the internet. It is weird because it's like I remember... I didn't spend a lot of time on forums as a kid, but I do remember like what?

Fora. Well, I was just too busy having friends and doing activities. I was just too busy getting laid, pounded, bruised. I was just like kind of... No, but I didn't spend it, but I do remember when the option online was to try to find a forum for something you were interested in, I remember going to some and then being immediately like scared off by how people were talking there. And then you either have to like assume whatever, do the child online thing and assume a false

identity and do the same thing and like match the energy. Or you just, you're like, well, I guess I can't, you know, I guess this series of unfortunate events forum is scary and I have to leave. Yeah. I guess I will give a little detail about one of it. So I, the two big, one of them was something awful, which was in a lot of ways toxic and also objectively healthier and more responsibly run than any major social media service today. Which is saying nothing to be fair.

Like, no, it's they banned Nazis. That was the limit of it. I hate that that's saying, yeah, as I hate that that's like in their defense, they banned Nazis. And it cost money to join, right? There was a consequence. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, not that they were comprehensive or perfect at doing that, but it was a thing they did better than Twitter did. Um, yes, that is true. So the other, and I think this is why, because I think a lot about why I didn't kind of wind up in getting like pulled into more like hard right stuff, because I was definitely had, there was a point at which I could have been, you know, I grew up very conservative. I still love guns and knives. Um, and you won't stop pulling them on me.

I will not stop pulling the knife. I'm surrounded by firearms as often as I can be. Um, I enjoy a lot of like kind of stereotypically male things and aesthetics. And I also was a huge isolated nerd growing up. So like, yeah, it could have, I think there are a number of reasons it didn't, you know, some of them come down to my family. There's a lot of strong women in my family. And that was always like a thing.

Um, I, I grew up around, but obviously that could have gone the other way too, because I had a lot of anger at my mom over shit. Um, now the other thing, I, you know, I had some, you know, I had some, you know, I had some, I had good friends who were not, uh, toxic creeps, but I think a big part of it is that the other set of online communities that I, I, I spent time in, one of them was like a master of Orion three, which wound up being a terrible video game, but a forum dedicated to that game. And when the game turned out to suck, a bunch of the friends I'd met there brought me over

to their other weird little online community, which was like, I think that you would call them like, like furry dragon fetishes type people now. Um, but it was just sort of like a, a discussion and role playing forum and there were a lot of women on it. Um, and women who would very gently call me on shit. Um, and I, I, I, I, I, as I've gotten older or something, like, yeah, maybe if I'd never run into that, I would have wound up in a lot more toxic communities as opposed to these, um, pretty mature people in their thirties who just had a weird thing for dragons, but

we're, you know, fairly mature, lucky, like that's, that's really, I wish that you know, like more 14 year old boys, uh, in, instead of, uh, you know, just feeding each other garbage all day, uh, just had a nice conversation with a, with a thoughtful furry. Um, I've been, I've also been, you know, steered towards a more nuanced and thoughtful opinion online by, by a furry in their thirties. We all owe a lot to the furries. I, I, um, I like genuinely strongly agree.

Yeah. It was not a joke. Yeah. I, I, I owe, I owe, I, I need to cut a check to the furry community cause I've learned. Mm hmm. So as the years went on, uh, a sizable chunk of my generation was raised in forums like something awful and later 4chan, uh, which, which spring out of something awful, fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head.

Uh, and you know, these communities, the men in these communities often rarely talk to women, uh, or anyone at all. Athena? Yeah. 4chan is, is the Athena, the Athena of racism, but yeah. We need a new, we don't, I'll think of a different one for that continue. So, uh, there was a lot of, yeah. These communities all had a lot of very online young men who were very easy prey for a new

grift that burst onto the scene in 2005 pickup artistry, I love that. We're heading into the years of Tucker max and the game and the mid aughts bullshit. Yeah. Bring it on. Yeah. And I, I, I don't know. I think also maybe part of the reason I didn't get as much into it is that by kind of 2004 or 2005, the split between 4chan and something awful made for something awful, a little healthier,

you know, um, because a lot of people went to the chans, you know, there was a lot of ugliness on something awful. I'm not trying to whitewash that either, but it was definitely a healthier place to be a young man than fucking 4chan. Um, yeah. Yeah. Again, low bar. Yeah.

So the inciting incident for the kind of infection of pickup artistry on these communities of lonely and increasingly bitter young men was Neil Strauss's 2005 bestseller, the game, which is basically the story of a journalist who got drawn into the world of pickup artists who were men who treat dating kind of like an engineering problem, right? If you, if you read a lot of pickup artistry stuff, they treat it like picking up women is like, it's an issue of numbers and repetition and learning repeatable tactics. Like, you know, we can't do math, so she won't even notice. She won't even notice.

Um, yeah. Like tactics like negging, which is insulting a woman in a way that isn't obviously an insult, but undermines her confidence and makes her want to impress you. And the game also introduced the world to peacocking, which would thereafter ruin the fedora for everyone. That's why Robert pulls a knife on us 400 times an episode to this day. Neil's legacy felt strongly in the zoom. Yeah.

I am fedora. I was a fan. What? I like the fedora. Hold on. I'm a cowboy hat. Can we rebrand the fedora? Oh, that's fine.

Wow. You really are in Texas. I love, I love cowboy hats. They're great hats. Look, nobody's there. That's a good hat. I found an exceptional 2019 article in The Guardian on pickup artists by Cyrin Gale. In it, she writes, I went to university two years after the game was published and watched

its influence spread like a virus through the men in my year. I don't think I went on a night out in 2007 without some drunk rugby player trying to neg me. Oh, God. Yeah. Now, in that article, which I really recommend, Cyrin Gale quotes Dr. Rachel O'Neill from Warwick University, who writes about masculinity and seduction from an academic standpoint. She says of pickup artistry, the basic premise of all seduction teaching and practice is that

interactions between men and women are subject to certain underlying principles that once understood can be readily manipulated. This is an impoverished view of sex and relationships in which intimacy is less something to be experienced for its own sake and more something to be achieved for other ends. Impoverished view of sex and relationships. Oh, that's, that's, that, that hits, yeah. Very much so. Yeah.

Now, I think this quote explains pretty well why pick up artists tactics took off like a rocket among extremely, extremely online communities made up mostly of gamers, right? All of the guys in these, in these very insular online communities played way too many video games. I think we, we're in 2005 or so it would have been World of Warcraft was the big one. Well, yeah, I was going to say it's like the, the, like gamifying, gamifying loneliness is a fucking galaxy brain level grift, like, and just implying that it's whatever that I mean, that's any grift is implying that the tools are, it's within your reach.

You just need to do A, B and C and you can replicate a raw human joy. Yeah. And it's, it's this, you know, if you're, maybe it's different for kids now, just the way I grew up socializing mostly in video games and forums, not spending a tremendous amount of time having friendships with women. The act of like being appealing to women of, of, you know, going out and trying to find someone can seem like an incomprehensible task, you know, if you're out hanging out on like the chans or something awful and you're spending all of your free time griefing people

on wow, you're, you're also not going to be spending time in the kind of spaces where you can gradually gain more and more experience, right? Kind of being appealing to and flirting with other human beings is like a learning process, right? It's something that you've learned how to do and if you're spending all of your time on forums and participating in like raids and stuff, maybe you don't get as much experience doing that. I have a question because, okay, so I feel like I had experiences online in more probably

female heavier forums where there would sometimes be like, I would want to have a certain kind of social interaction, but, but the forum is so already bogged down and it sounds kind of like the same thing of like the, the forum or the media you're consuming is already so bogged down in telling you that that is going to be really hard for you to do, that you're like creating an additional obstacle to having a basic social interaction because you're surrounded by people who have tried it and say that it's impossible. And so I don't know, I created additional obstacles where social obstacles already existed because I'm like, well, everyone in this forum seems to reinforce that this is something

that is not easy to do. So I may as well not even, you know, attempt to do it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard thing to do anyway, kind of learning how to have romantic relationships, you know, like that's a, that's a difficult process.

And it's made harder by a lot of the self-reinforcing habits that are pushed in these communities and a lot of the attitudes and ideas, right? Like these just being told like, well, it's never going to happen anyway. Like, yeah. I don't know. I'm kind of aware this is all leading and, you know, I, to be honest, yeah. So the reason that pickup artist really appeals to these people is that for this community of like very online frustrated gamers, these pickup artists are basically saying, hey,

there's a set of cheat codes for fucking, right? Like that's, that's, that's the gist of this. Like there are these replicable things you can do, like pushing, pushing AABA and it will make women sleep with you. So obviously a lot of young nerdy men got all on board this shit, you know, now pickup artistry has existed in some form as an industry for more than a half a century. But the advent of the internet and the introduction of pickup artistry to online communities changed things in dark and terrible ways from Siren Gale's article, quote, with the advent of

the internet, elements of the pickup artists community's ideology hardened into something darker. They paved the way for other masculinized self-help formations to emerge, such as Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life, says O'Neill Peterson, a Canadian academic published his best selling self-help tome in 2018 and as a critic of feminism. It also counteracts with masculinist factions such as the incel movement and men's rights activists. This globalized network of pickup artists, men's rights activists and incels all emerged

out of the same primordial sludge. And that's kind of like, that's what we're talking about today, right? This sort of like this, this again, gestalt mass of impulses and frustration and media and anger turned inward that spews a few different communities. But right now you've kind of got pickup artists who had existed for quite a while coming into this community of increasingly frustrated and basically all male nerds. And this winds up kind of laying a lot of the groundwork for Gamergate in addition to a number of other horrors that would come.

I was just going to say Gamergate was when I was in college and, oh, what a bad time to be talking to young man at parties. Real bad. Can second that one. I think again about like why I didn't turn out this way. I like, I just was talking about like playing too much wow as a thing. I honestly think the people that I met on wow were another reason why I didn't get pulled into this because I was like, I was a huge fucking nerd.

I was on a role playing server. So we were like always in character. So pure. And so we'd attracted a lot more incredibly nerdy, like really like not just like want to play video games nerdy, but want to escape into a fantasy world. And so there were actually a lot of women on the servers, the server that I was on and in the communities that I was with, including like women in like their thirties and forties who I formed friendships with and who, again, helped me not turn out that toxic, you know?

Totally. Yeah. The more I think about it, the more I am really in debt to a lot of very nice older women on the internet who very patiently explained things about adulthood to me. That's beautiful. I feel like, yeah, it's a very, I don't know, whatever. It's such a crapshoot being online. It's a total crapshoot, right?

Yeah, you can turn out some good shit. I don't know. Yeah, it makes me want to like revisit sites where it's like you find even just like one or two people who you're like, oh, that's a normal person living healthily. And what a nice thing that is to see online, I don't know, I used to be obsessed with this woman from Portland who took shitty pictures on her digital camera and I was like, this is going to be me someday. I'm going to have a Sony power shot and take pictures of balloons and like.

Jamie, I believe you could get a Sony power shot one day. I really think I could take a picture of a balloon with a Sony power shot. I'm not quite there, but I'll get there. Someone listening has a Sony power shot and by God, I think we'll get it to you, Jamie. And on that precious note, it's time for an outbreak, Robert. Speaking of Sony power shot, take a power shot of capitalism into your wallet. Call it with these ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

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He's a shark and not in the good, bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back and reminiscing about the days when cameras were things that existed independent of phones. The dark ages. So all of this stuff we've been talking about today, like all of these different kind of social movements, which are sort of tap dancing around each other in the primordial sludge of the internet, these had all started to metastasize into something truly dark by around 2010. The process was early yet and the men's rights movement was still fairly small, incels weren't

really a thing, but an early network of misogynist thought leaders were already laying the ground for what would become Gamergate and many of the horrors that would come later. One of these thought leaders was a fellow named Theodore Beale, alias Vox Day. Born in 1968, Beale was the son of former WorldNet Daily writer and convicted tax evader Robert Beale. The son wound up even further right than the father and he was quickly deemed too extreme for WorldNet Daily, which is like basically a half step shy of outright fascism at this point.

Vox reached prominence as a science fiction author and also as a Nazi. Over the years, he has praised Utoya's shooter Anders Brevik, denied the moon landing and the holocaust and written for the anti-women website Return of Kings, which was a major vehicle for the prominent pickup artist and now Christian fascist, Ruch Vee. What a hat trick. What an exciting. Right. And we're seeing now, we're seeing like the pickup artist kind of like Vox Day is a big

alt-right figure. Right. We're seeing the pickup artists and the alt-right. Like they all kind of come together and like, because Ruch started out as a very traditional pickup artist, writing books about fucking women in foreign countries and also admitting in those books to raping women on a number of occasions. He sounds like Tucker Max. He sounds exactly like him.

Except for, I don't know what Tucker, Tucker Max, I think just has a family now. Ruch has now like a hardcore Christian fascist who believes that people should be executed for extramarital sex. So it's, he's had quite a journey. Holy shit. Also literally lives in his mom's basement. Well, that's, that's reinforcing a negative stereotype about men who live in their mother's basement.

Nothing wrong with living in your mom's basement, but it's funny that he does. Two things can be true. Tucker Max is a ghost writer now. He no longer writes under his own name. He just, he ghost wrote, he ghost wrote Tiffany Haddish's memoir, which is a detail I find very strange, but it is true. What a journey. Really?

I know. Yeah. What the hell? The weirdest fucking thing? That is the weirdest fucking thing. Anyways, I'm going to go back to forgetting that he exists. That he ever existed. Yes.

Yeah. So first names are scary. Yeah. Men also, Tucker's, I'm not convinced we need Max's either. But you know, yeah, I guess I would need to be sold on a Max. You know what? I know a couple Max's. I know a couple Max's.

Come on, but they're all technically Maxine's. There you go. So Vox Day, Theodore Beale, got his start in punditry by attacking prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins. And he seems to be one of many fascists who were really radicalized by 9-11. He spent much of the early aughts. He was against like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan because he was like against, you know, for the same reason a lot of folks on the right were the same reason Trump was.

But as kind of those things turned more into wars against Islam, he started really supporting the idea of a war of extermination against Islam. So his issues with like Iraq and Afghanistan is that we weren't going over there to kill Muslims, you know? No war for oil, war to kill Muslims. That's Theodore Beale. Cool. You'll like this, Jamie.

Theodore is also a member of Mensa and brags regularly that his IQ was over the genius threshold. Oh, wow. Wow. I'm honestly surprised it took Mensa this long to come into the mix. Yeah. Well, I'm sure it came in earlier. This is just the first time my research led me to bring it up.

One of our, I'm sure someone shouted that in my face at one point and I just didn't remember. It's my tiny woman's brain. It's your, yeah. I'm not going to quote that line from Anchorman again. Anyway, Vox Day, as he is known professionally, intersects with the manosphere in a number of ways, but probably most significantly as a major architect of the alpha, beta, and of course, Sigma hierarchy. He is in fact the inventor of the concept of the Sigma male as best as I can determine.

But before we get into that, I think we should talk a little bit about where the idea of alpha males come from in the first place. Oh, we're talking about, are we going to talk about wolves? We are super going to talk about wolves. We've reached the wolf portion. Nice pallet cleanser. Wolves never did anything wrong. They're incapable of doing anything wrong.

They're just wolves, love them, way better than men, people, because they're, I want one of those. I miss those shirts with the three wolves howling at the moon. Yeah. I never had the confidence to wear one at school. See, and we made fun of like we mocked the furries in the early aughts. We mocked the people who were brave enough to wear a three wolf moon shirt, tragic. When they were like the furries, the bravest and best among us.

It's like, it's like, you know, it's like the Romans killing Jesus. We always kill those who want to teach us a better way. It's true. It's true. Tragic. Tragic. In 1947, Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behavioralist, published a paper titled, Expressions Studies on Wolves, where he coined the term alpha to describe social relationships he observed

between captive wolves in Switzerland, Sue Basil. Schenkel was working to establish what he termed the sociology of the wolf, and he identified two primary wolves leading the captive pack that he studied. One was a male lead wolf, and the other was a head female bitch. He wrote, A bitch and a dog as top animals carry through their rank order and as single individuals of the society, they form a pair. Between them, there is no question of status and argument concerning rank, even though

small fictions of another type of jealousy are not common. By incessant control and repression of all types of competition within the same sex, both of these alpha animals defend their social position. It's interesting that we have this form so much of the basis of men's rights ideology when Schenkel is saying, first off, that, well, men and women are equal in wolf society. There's a top man and a top woman, and there's no issues of status between them. They're dominant. There's two alphas.

It's always that shit, though. It's the same thing with IQ stuff, where it's the foundational document that people are declaring their supremacy on states in the document that IQ is not fixed, and you're wrong if you try to fix it, but they're, God, that's so depressing. It's a bummer. That it's literally in the document. Got it. Okay.

Yeah. Now, the concept of the alpha wolf was born as the result of this paper, and now Schenkel was, I think, a good scientist. Obviously, he winds up being wrong in a lot of ways, but it's 1947. He's doing the best he can. He did not make any comparisons to human social relationships in his paper. He did, however, repeatedly draw conclusions about domestic dogs based on captive wolves. For decades, Schenkel's work was basically the only word most people could find on wolf

behavior. His findings were backed up in 1970, when wildlife biologist David Meck published The Wolf, the Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Now, we now know that all of this research was fundamentally flawed. Schenkel and Meck were studying and drawing conclusions about wolves held in captivity. As you might guess from prisons, incarcerating a bunch of animals in a situation wildly different from their natural environment. Do they perhaps act differently?

Yeah. Yeah. They do not behave the same. Interesting. Meck himself is one of the primary voices challenging his old research, because he and his other colleagues started carrying out more research on the dynamics of wild wolf packs and obviously learned that they had been wrong. I'm going to quote from a write up on I09.

The concept of the alpha wolf as a top dog, ruling a group of similar aged compatriots, Meck writes in the 1999 paper, is particularly misleading. Meck notes that earlier papers, such as M.W. Fox's Socioecological Implications of Individual Differences in Wolf Litters, published in Behavior in 1971, examined the potential of individual cubs to become alphas, implying that the wolves would someday live in packs in which they would become alphas and others would be subordinate pack members. However, Meck explains, his studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families, two parents along with their younger cubs.

Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank. They are not born leaders or born followers. The alphas are simply what we would call in any other social group, parents. The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has won a role as leader of the pack. The parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. This is so, oh, jeez, it's always like, okay, first, the misunderstanding that the hate group is built off of is strictly accomplished by not reading the original document.

And then the original document is proved to have been false anyways, but it's like, it just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter because they're not actually- That's an interesting wolf fact, though. I didn't know that. That is a neat wolf fact, and Mech, to his credit, has spent decades railing against his outdated work.

He keeps trying to get his publisher to pull his 1970 book from publication, but it's very popular because of weirdos who are obsessed with the idea of the alpha male, and his publisher refuses to stop selling it. What a fucking exhausting problem to have. He's just trying to be the best scientist he can, you know, changing- Man, just wanted to strap a GoPro to a wolf, and you made it fucking weird. You made it about people fucking. Why did you do that?

He was just trying to understand wolves. He just wanted a GoPro on a wolf's head, and all of a sudden it has to do with why a teenage boy isn't getting fucked, like, Jesus. I think we can all agree that science was a mistake, and so were books. I blame, I blame, I don't blame capitalism, I don't blame men's rights activists. I blame science. And the printing press. Yeah, I blame Gutenberg.

If Gutenberg hadn't started fucking around, maybe we wouldn't have this problem. Yeah, I'm going to go back in time and beat him to death with a giant letter A. Exactly, exactly. You see the end credits of the movie, the like, A is lying in his blood, and the old timey detective pulls it away and sees that it's made a printing on the surface of the cobblestones. He's like, my God, and the printing press happens anyway, and anyway. Really making progress on my screenplay here.

I was like, yeah, this is, thank you for involving me in the workshop process. Oh yeah, always, Jamie. So Mech has tried to get his book pulled, but it keeps being sold to people like Vox Day, who again, in the mid-auts, started using it to draw conclusions about human social dynamics. That's the idea of the alpha male. Obviously, the manosphere did not invent the concept of the alpha male. That term has been in use for decades, usually as a generic term for a loud and socially

dominant man. What the manosphere did was take that basic concept and codify it into something that started to resemble a religion. It started with misanthropes on 4chan and similar spots, all lamenting the sex that alphas were supposedly having. And part of the appeal of pickup artistry is that it was going to give these betas the tool to attract women and become alphas themselves. And again, the manosphere 2010 doesn't really exist, but it's starting to be born in this

period. You're starting to get these kind of amorphous groups of frustrated young men forming ideologies. And Vox Day is a big part of that. In 2010, he writes a post on his popular blog that went beyond the simple alpha-beta dichotomy. His work here was partly a reaction to the fact that five years into the mainstreaming of pickup artistry, a lot of men were finding that it didn't work, and rather than wonder if maybe it's because it was toxic bullshit. No, the virus must mutate.

Yeah. They decided that this was because the alpha-beta thing is an immutable hierarchy literally carved into the bones of human males. And so pickup artistry isn't a con because it teaches men how to, you know, it fundamentally shallow and toxic view of male-female interactions that most women simply have no desire to be a part of. It's wrong because you can't, if you're a beta, you're doomed. Yeah, it couldn't be that the approach is insulting and people don't, okay, all right.

It's rad, Jamie. We're really starting to reach. And it's weird because this is like, I don't know, it's like any, this is like when I was in high school and it's like you can sort of start to notice when this shit starts picking up in like high school and the college. Yeah. 2010-ish, you know? Yeah.

So I'm going to quote from Vox Day's article. This is where the sigma male comes from as best as I can tell, quote. And this is him laying out the different types of man. Alpha, the tall, good-looking guy who is the center of male and female attention, the classic star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader, the successful business executive with the beautiful, stylish wife. All the women are attracted to him, all the men want to be him or at least his friend at a social gathering like a party.

He's usually the loud guy telling self-flattering stories to whom several attractive women are listening with big, interested eyes. Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the alpha's gratification, physical and psychological. Beta, the good-looking guys who aren't as uniformly attractive or dominant as the alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy's friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the Tier 1 women and pairing up with the Tier 2 women.

Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don't have total illusions about them either. Delta, the normal guys, they can't attract the most attractive women, usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are reasonably in their league. This is ironic because deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will

lose interest in him, and so he will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his nonstop dancing attention upon her. This is the vast majority of men. In a social setting, these are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making the occasional foray towards various gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Delta's tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them.

If a man talks about his better half, or is an inveterate white knight, he's probably a delta. They like women, but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them. Gamma. This whole thing is organizing women like they're the deltaco cravings menu is scary as fuck. Yeah, I mean, this is, of course. We talked about in the WeWork article how I think it should be legal to hit people in

the face with a brick if they express a desire to be the world's first trillionaire or president of the world. You say either of those things. That's a brick in. Right? That's just anyone should be able to hit you right in the face with a brick. If you start talking about the tears of women that exist, that's a brick in and you won't do it again.

There. It's God. Yeah. Whenever women are organized like a drive through menu, that's a red flag. And also you have to wonder like where on this hierarchy does the person who's sitting in the corner of a party making this shit up? Is that Sigma? What is that?

Yeah. What do you call that behavior other than begging for a brick in? Yeah. I mean, so Jamie, I think a lot about how we could improve society and I would like it if we would take the resources and a lot of the very skilled sort of individual investigators who exist within the FBI and turn them into a new organization whose whole goal is to find people saying shit like this, both online and in real life. And you have this like network of agents who are just always looking for this.

And when something like this comes up, they just walk up and punch you right in the fucking face. Wow. And that's what, imagine if that's what the FBI did. They just sought out men saying this shit and just one punch right in the jaw. And everyone would know if a guy in a suit comes up and socks you in the jaw, oh, that dude was saying some bullshit. Right.

We would just have to be able to trust. We would just need to, yeah, make a whole group of trustworthy FBI agents. We just need to find a bunch of chats, Jamie, a bunch of real chats. Here's the thing, whenever I see the cartoon of Becky, no, wait, Becky, it looks exactly like me and I get mad. I'm sorry, Jamie. I'm literally the doppelganger of that cartoon. I know your pain.

Yeah. I know. It's, it doesn't feel good to look like the cartoon. I'll say that. It doesn't. Yeah. All right. I have to finish Vox Day.

Okay. The gammas, the outsiders, the unusual ones, the unattractive and all too often the bitter, often intelligent, reliably unsuccessful with women and not uncommonly all but invisible to them. The gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex, mostly depending on whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Gammas are the guys who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time.

Gammas supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho jealous ex-boyfriends and the authors of excruciatingly narcissistic doggerel and the unlikely event they are at the party, they are either in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there, sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have a worship hate relationship with women, which is directly tied to their current situation. Yeah. And then there's omega males. Their current situation is a fun way to put that.

Okay. And then, of course, he names the sigma males, which are men who are not part of the hierarchy because they consciously stand outside it, but they're equal to alphas. They're the lone wolf, right? That's John Wick. That's the John Wick. Yeah. John Wick didn't exist yet.

But yes, that's clearly how Vox Day, and I think you get the feeling Vox Day views himself as a sigma male. Of course, yeah. And of course, sigma males are inherently attracted to women, but they don't seek women's approval because they're just too cool. Oh my God. That's so embarrassing. I know.

It's so... It's incredibly embarrassing, right? You know, you can't see the pyramid unless you stand outside it, and of course, women are not going to see you if you're standing away from the pyramid, so I think that makes sense. Wow. How embarrassing for him. He wrote that down.

He wrote that down on the whole ass internet. It's there forever now. He wrote that down. Wow. Okay. And then, tragically, online young men, years of failure at pickup artist techniques led to rage. First, in a system they believed had conned them into believing the alpha-beta hierarchy

was not a strict caste system. Some of these red-billed men formed an online community named puahate.com, pickupartisthate.com. Okay. It was founded to mock and attack pickup artists, which isn't necessarily an ignoble goal. But the men who made it were coming from the perspective of believing that only alphas with a very specific bone structure could possibly attract women. Ah, we've got to the bones. And this happens other places online where ensales gather.

They'll take pictures, they'll photoshop pictures of themselves into what it would take to make them into an alpha. One of the phrases you hear a lot is that the only difference between an alpha and a delta is a couple of millimeters of bone, and that it's so unfair that natures played this cruel joke on them that they will never, ever, ever be able to be with a woman, because their bone structure isn't quite right. And obsessing over bone structure is a gateway to so, to infinity prejudice. To great to phrenology, to Naziism, yes.

And it's also like, one of the things that's most frustrating about it is that like, all of these, it's not actually that they don't think they could ever find women, I mean, for some of them it is. But for most of them, like, when you hear what they're saying is that I don't have a chance to get with a woman who looks like the heavily airbrushed and photoshopped models. And I have a right to that, right? Right, which is like acting entitled to something that doesn't even exist in the first place. Yeah.

And it's like the Theodore Beale stuff is like, well, I don't want to tier three women, I don't want to tier one woman, and like, even the tier three women don't like me, and like, they can all get to fuck whoever they want. If I do get a tier one woman, she's just going to be waiting until she can fuck someone else because they can't ever be like, we need a, and it's Jordan Peterson intersects this shit, right? When he started talking about like, we need to find a way to have the government enforce monogamy, because otherwise you're going to just be creating all these violent men because

they won't be able to get, find women to have sex with. Because the women, it's like this, it's one of the ways in which Peterson is saying the same shit as the incels, because he's, he's like, the incels are like, well, women will always just try to fuck all of the chads that they can and have no desire. The only reason they would fuck anyone who isn't an alpha is if that person has money, and then they're just going to cheat on him every chance that they get because they're they're animals. And Peterson is a little bit more like restrained than that, but he's basically like these incel

terrorist attacks are coming out of the fact that these men, because women are so hyper gammas, right? Having sex, like, because a small number of very attractive men are having sex with all of the women. There's no women for these, these unattractive men to have sex with. And that's where all these shooters are coming from. And so the government needs to enforce monogamy. Like that's Jordan Peterson shit.

Yeah. I mean, isn't Jordan Peterson currently dying of eating too much meat? Like isn't that where he's like. That's going great. It's like, it's funny because I look at a lot of these pictures of these incels take of themselves and for every one of them, it's like, I know a ton of guys who look like you or who you would even consider less good looking than you who have a lot of sexual relationships that are very fulfilling.

You know why? Because they're interesting, talented people who are nice and who care about other people and listen to them and don't try to gamify every relationship. And it turns out that matters more than your bone structure. Like. Yeah. It. God.

I mean, it's like whatever. It's so demonstrably true that it feels like silly to even say out loud, but like traditionally attractive men who do this shit, no one wants to fuck them or like no one wants to get to know that that person, it's a behavioral thing. I don't know. The reach people will do to not make small behavioral adjustments that are critical of their own behavior. They will literally kill people.

It's wild. Amazing. Because like. Yeah. You know, just kind of from coming up for a long time and sort of like the poly community. I know a lot of guys who are like very charming and very good at being romantic. And you know, what the number one thing they all have in common is, is that they're really good cooks and that they're very good at providing something that is both attractive and pleasurable.

Like it makes them more pleasant to be around. They make wonderful food, which is also them exhibiting a fact that they care about the other people that they're nurturing behavior goes all the way back to the original thing we were talking about from the sixties of like, oh, God, damn it. Stop worrying about bone structure, shower and learn how to cook. It'll take you further. Literally log out, take a shower, like log out, take a shower. You know, it may not, it won't get perfect, but it will get.

It'll help. It will help. Jesus, at least she'll be healthier because she'll learn how to cook. In my experience, it has never hurt to log out and take a shower no matter who you are. It's amazing. Cause like one of the communities that kind of forms in the, which is in 13, 14, 15 is the Migtows, men going their own way, which is like, I forgot about them. Yeah.

We're not going to talk about them a lot, but like they're men, mostly divorced men who are really angry at women and have decided that sex, because women are inherently toxic and trying to steal from men, men should separate themselves entirely from women. And that's the way to be happy. My recollection of them is kind of like the uncle branch. Like if they're the uncle branch. Okay. That's what I thought.

And they have, I've spent a lot of time in their communities too, and they will share recipes. And my God, Jamie, it is always the saddest thing on the fucking planet, like often just popping a frozen chicken breast into the oven and salting it, heart breaking. I cannot cook for shit, and that is, that's, wow, wow, wow. It's amazing. So, yeah, as we were talking about, like all of these red-pilled men, a former community called PUA, pick up artist hate, because they get angry that pick up artistry techniques

don't work for them. And in the spring of 2013, an angry young man named Elliot Roger found puahate.com. Yep. Yep. In a manifesto, he later wrote, Roger noted that in PUA hate, he had found a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me. What he read there confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.

I can't not go into the Ben Shapiro voice, but I start reading the stuff. But that's, that's like, I feel like that's kind of what I was trying to get at earlier of like being surrounded by confirmation bias, like before you will even try something, you're being told by a million other people that it's not going to be possible and don't try, and here's something else you should do that's scary instead. Yep. Now, yeah, through PUA hate, Elliot Roger discovered the red-pill constitution, which was written by a group of men who came to be known as incels.

He deliberately copied from them in his manifesto when he wrote, quote, there was something mentally wrong with the way women's brains are wired, they are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. And they're incapable of that because they don't recognize that Elliot Roger is the greatest guy ever. Damn, classic us. Supreme gentleman, Elliot Roger. Yeah.

Women do be not liking Elliot Roger, and that's on us. The reason he thought he was the supreme gentleman and women had to be mentally ill for not falling in love with him is because he had fallen first into all this pickup artistry bullshit, right? He'd done all of the pickup artist techniques, you know? He'd done all of these things that were supposed to guarantee him access to women. He pressed all the buttons in the correct order. Exactly.

But the NPCs weren't acting as they were supposed to. That must mean women are irrational. Yeah, he is seeing them as NPCs, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's, yeah, that I mean that'll, whatever. Yes. That's a fucking screaming match with my college boyfriend over NPC behavior that, God, well,

I always continue. In the case of Elliot, if I'm remembering correctly, he basically went through the entire checklist. He did the fancy clothes situation. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Yeah. So he had tried to attract women by acting, in his words, cocky and arrogant. Mm-hmm.

Might have a note for you there, Elliot. Okay. He would put down other men as betas. When this did not work, he complained, men shouldn't have to look and act like big animalistic beasts to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their minds haven't fully evolved. Oh, so projecting what women want on to them based on no evidence.

Okay. Sick. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me. All right, we're just going to let that one go because I can't make heads or tails of

it. I know. I know, Elliot. Jesus Christ. Elliot spent, his dad was like a Hollywood producer. Yeah. And Elliot spent a huge amount of his father's money. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. On fancy clothing in order to peacock. This quote from one of his posts skips you an indicator of how he probably came across when he was flirting with women. And Jamie, I might vomit reading this. So I do apologize if that happens and we have to pause this for a moment. Okay. I'm down to watch a vomit.

Thank you. Never insult the style of Elliot Roger. I'm the most stylish person in the world. Look at my profile pic. That's just one of my fabulous outfits. The sweater I'm wearing in the picture is $500 from Neiman Marcus. You know what he guesses as to why this guy didn't... It sounds like a Joe Bluth line.

Neiman Marcus. Like R.A. He wrote and in his YouTube videos talked like if you were trying to script like the worst man in the world for a TV show or something to have as the villain. And you wrote them the way Elliot Roger spoke and wrote about like his own thoughts. No one would believe you. It's straight up. Yeah.

It's like a... It's fucking cartoonish. I honestly, I don't know that much about Elliot Roger because I just... I don't know. I don't know that shit was going on, I just remember actively trying to not learn anything about him if I could possibly help it because there was so much information. I feel like that was also a time where it was the first wave of like, let's stop giving all these fucking people so much airtime and I was...

But I don't know. Elliot Roger, I mean, yeah, he's such a fucking cartoon that even men who hated women could hate Elliot Roger and not see any of his stuff in themselves. Yeah. I know. But even... I'm thinking of like, I don't know, even guys I knew at that time who had very misogynist outlooks and attitudes who had no problem being like, oh, look at Elliot Roger, he's

such a fucking loser, which he is. Huge loser. But not also not recognizing that a lot of what Elliot Roger's core belief system was was reflected in their behavior. So, yeah, he believed a lot of the same things you did. He just was way too weird. And he was just a fucking... Yeah.

He was just a fucking... A loser. He was a loser about it. Yeah. He was just too much of a loser for it to... Yeah. Oh, God. He was...

I don't know. This is probably a mistake to word it this way, Jamie, but I'm going to do it for comedy. Elliot Roger never popped his cherry, but his manifesto popped my manifesto cherry because I think his was the first manifesto I read word for word. Take it back. Take it back. No, no, that's in there forever. Take it back.

That's the whole internet now. I really am having flashbacks to talking to young men around the time of Elliot Roger, and it was just not a good time at all to be talking to men my own age. And this is the same year that GamerGate happens, right? Yeah. 2014. Yeah, 2013, yeah. It was a little bit before, or it was right in that time.

So from poahate.com, Roger found the forever alone subreddit, an early online home for incels. He found love shy.com, whose users congregated around threads with titles like, It Obsets Me, Seeing All the Hot Babes I Can't Have Sex With. In these communities, many increasingly radicalized incels celebrated the actions of George Soudini. In 2009, after writing about being constantly rejected by women, Soudini went on a shooting spree. He killed three women and injured nine more.

Going Soudini became a shorthand term for what many of the incels around Roger wanted to do. And you all know the next part of the story. On the evening of May 23, 2014, Elliot Roger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, murdering six and injuring 14. His manifesto became a foundational document for the incel movement and inspired multiple deadly rampages over the next seven years. I feel like this also was one of those things that really put a highlight on the meat, because

the media only talks about him. They didn't talk about, yeah, I mean, I had a lot of friends who were at UC Santa Barbara at the time of this, and that was one of the things that was, it was highlighted so much. And as a result of how it was highlighted and how prominent this guy became, incel stopped saying going Soudini and started saying going ER or just like ER as a, as a code for going on a shooting spree to kill a bunch of women. And there have been, I don't know, like four or five incel mass killings. And you know, a number of them, at least one of them is involved, a guy just renting a

van and plowing it into crowds of men and women. And obviously men always wound up also getting attacked by these, which you could kind of link back to the early men's liberation movement. And the fact that all of this misogyny is also a deadly threat to men. Like, you know, like it's, it's, it's comprehensively a poison. It's good stuff. Super rad. Oh boy.

God. What is what? I mean, it's, it's always a dark time, but that was a, that was a dark time to be talking to 20 year old men. Yeah. Just not good. Yup. And that Jamie is more or less where we are now.

There's more to the manosphere, of course, there's the MiG Tows gamer gate winds up kind of intersecting with this in a number of ways. You can learn more about the manosphere and about like all of this, this poison and how it continues to this day on the wonderful blog, we hunted the mammoth where Dave Futrell has done a great job for years of documenting this stuff. The title of his blog is based off of a thing these guys would keep saying about like women, basically women owe us because our ancestors hunted mammoths for them. Like that's what he's prove it, prove it.

So Jamie, though, I think this provides us with enough context to begin our exploration of the Sigma male. And we're going to talk about that book on Thursday. I love it. So do I. Jamie. Yeah. Any pluggables to plug?

Well, this has brought up a bunch of bad memories. I guess you can. It's always my goal. You can always follow me on Twitter dot com, where I'm trying to be as little as possible at Jamie Loptis Help. You can listen to Lolita podcast and I would recommend highly recommend and where Robert is giving the performance of a lifetime as Vladimir Nabokov weekend and week out. And I would recommend the Kathy cartoons.

I recommend Jamie just as like a person. I also recommend Sophie. I'd recommend I'd recommend Robert and I would. I don't know about the knife. I haven't met. I don't know. Very look at this night. Look at this night.

I was like, there is a fourth presence in a beautiful night. It would feel wrong not to address. I have others. He's made Curtis Holland, a free freehill blades, just just incredible stuff. He has not paid me. I have just paid him a lot of money, but I'm just in love with these knives. So fight toxic masculinity by buying a knife and statin out. Okay.

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