Son, What’s a ‘BP Edit’?

The idea of the “male loneliness epidemic” has come into vogue in recent years, but not without its share of scorn or scoffs. Those more thoroughly inundated with loneliness may posit that it is more of a generational issue imposed by the captains of our capitalist technocracy. Every man born after the year 2000 knows the Sisyphean struggle of using dating apps, fighting algorithms and Elo ratings just to have a chance at a woman’s touch. The vast majority of us dare not approach women in public for fear of seeming predatory or being subject to soul-crushing words of rejection for all in the room to hear —“the worst thing she can say is no” has long been written off as dated advice. In turn, there are many young men currently losing the war against the Triple Entente of Bumble, Tinder, and Hinge.

I myself have had more success than the average man on said apps, getting decent amounts of matches even in spite of my ‘ethnic-ness’ and its algorithmic unfavourability. Still, it is sparse enough that I remember every compliment, heart emoji, and semblance of interest that any woman has presented me with. Furthermore, getting to the point of an actual relationship is yet another harsh battle. Getting ‘ghosted’, i.e. having a potential lover abruptly stop communication with you after extended text-message bonding or even a date or two, inclines many to treat dating in postmodernity as not being worth the emotional exhaustion. The drive to ‘ghost’ in and of itself can be traced back to the apps, a runoff of the love-as-transaction mentality and detachment that dating apps foster. 

In the face of this digital hellscape, battalions of men have turned to the philosopher-kings of TikTok, Twitter, and deeper ‘incel’ forums to answer the question of their lack of success in love. Youths between their teenage years and early-20s defer to figures like “Syrian Psycho,” “Clavicular,” and ‘looksmaxxing’ AIs for advice on ‘ascension.’ Others congregate in the comments of accounts like “Shortcel,” having the most unhealthy and counterintuitive group therapy sessions in the history of psychology as a science. The theory these hopeless young men espouse is the infamous ‘Blackpill’, or ‘BP’. The ‘Blackpill’ is a development from earlier incel theories about men’s desirability, in particular the Red/Blue pills based on those of the same name as seen in The Matrix. In short, men have (or had) two options: take the blue pill like a ‘beta’ and settle for a “used-up” woman or take the ‘alpha’ red pill, improve your desirability in any way you can, and pick up tons of hot chicks. 

The Blackpill is a far more aggressively pessimistic outlook on love than preceding incel epistemologies. Forged in the fires of troubled men’s heads, BP (as it is colloquially known) separates men and women into caste systems based on looks, height, and voice. The untouchables are known as ‘sub5’, those considered exceptionally ugly or undesirable in some way. The average person you will come across is referred to as ‘normie’ (for men) or ‘Becky’ (for women). These designations are most often used with the prefixes LT-, MT-, or HT-, denoting low, mid, and high tier respectively. At the top, the landowning military estate of inceldom is made up of ‘Chadlite’, ‘Chad’, or ‘True Adam’ men (swap ‘Chad’ for ‘Stacy’ and ‘Adam’ for ‘Eve’ when referring to women). In contemporary incel spaces, there are ways to ascend this ladder of desirability. ‘Looksmaxxing’ is a nascent subculture originating in incel/Blackpiller spheres that has itself ascended into the mainstream by means of the TikTok algorithm. Young men often see edited short-form videos of conventionally unattractive people talking, crying, or even just existing for a few seconds before a black bar containing the word ‘Mogged’ (i.e., overshadowed) in white lettering covers their eyes. Afterwards, it cuts to footage of models and looksmaxxing influencers, emphasising their superior beauty. More often than not, these edits serve as advertisements for supplements, tools such as gua shas, and AI-fueled rating apps. 

Behind the edits, looksmaxxing as a concept is somewhat self-explanatory. Young men congregate on the Internet and are prescribed tactics to improve their physical attractiveness by the aesthetes of TikTok and beyond. Said tactics can range from the most benign and even possibly normal actions of debloating and ‘mewing’ (sucking in one’s cheeks to make one’s face look more angular) to the violent ‘bonesmashing’ (hitting one’s face with a blunt object in ways to angularise it) and limb-lengthening surgery for height extension (an action that leaves patients unable to run, sprint, or jump). In a way, the weight of arbitrary and unattainable beauty standards has shifted from women to men between the 2000s and 2020s. The millions of boys hopelessly doomscrolling Blackpill edits and using every looksmaxxing method under the sun would find kindred spirits in the millions of girls who starved themselves to look thinner and thinner. Despite this, incels are infamous for their large-scale hatred of women (even though some are far less misogynistic than the term would connote). 

In an effort to immerse myself in the Blackpilled incel mindset, I curated a fresh TikTok For You page by following several incel accounts. The one that stood out most to me was a young man calling himself Sheglo. I think a central draw might have been the fact that I wasn’t fully able to get a read on him. He was evidently Blackpilled (presumably due to short stature), regularly posting reminders of how superficial and unhealthy our current dating scene is to anyone who would hear. Yet despite the right-wing proclivities of some of his peers, he often reposted videos calling out anti-feminist/homophobic women for upholding the patriarchy in ways that benefit them. On December 11, Sheglo posted a guide on how to get a girlfriend as a “sensitive young man,” accompanied by Chet Baker’s crooning on “I Fall In Love Too Easily”. This post showed a degree of normalcy from one in a markedly abnormal subculture, suggesting that neurodivergent men should attempt to tackle social interaction by making up interesting anecdotes and “nichemaxxing,” or joining other subcultures in order to seek out women in them. Interestingly, he begins by saying that “sensitive young men” are marginalised by “soyciety” (a portmanteau of ‘soy’ and ‘society’, denoting unruly femininity), which he describes as the “current state of human civilisation characterised by horrible cultural decline, praise of disgusting, wicked, soulless, depraved degenerates and punishment of those who are sensitive, gentle, pure, and righteous.” Despite his endorsement of certain progressive ideals and slight awareness of the society around him, he often calls women ‘foids’ (short for ‘femoid’).

To understand him and inceldom’s current zeitgeist better, I interviewed Sheglo through TikTok direct messaging. He had first been exposed to Blackpill content at age 14, during Covid lockdowns. As for his view on women, he seems much less misogynistic than the archetypal incel. He considers the vast majority of women “uninteresting and hard to be around,” characteristics that he ascribes to most people in general, just at higher rates in women. He even correctly identifies gender differentiation as largely a product of social conditioning, saying “…obviously your looks, height, status, money, etc. as a male will matter significantly more while interacting with women… women that didn’t experience socialisation the same way as the majority are far more interesting and relatable. They’re also less judgmental and more empathetic.” As I read over his statements again, I wonder why he isn’t a gender abolitionist. The answer, of course, is the algorithm. Inflammatory rhetoric and ideals breed interaction both negative and positive, making the algorithm into a (largely right-wing) propaganda machine. Some grad student posting about the nuances of patriarchal oppression and gender as an integral construct of society won’t get a quarter of the clicks that “Get her back in the kitchen!” and “If he rejects your advances, he’s broke and gay [derogatory]!” will.

Herein lies the insidious nature of looksmaxxing’s algorithmic fecundity. Many of its current figureheads espouse far-right ideals, the aforementioned “Syrian Psycho” claiming that discrimination based on height is worse than racism and “Clavicular” repeatedly saying slurs to his young audience. Clavicular, or “Clav” for short, is an especially abhorrent and unhealthy role model for his viewers. One of the actions that recently garnered him clicks was his open admission of his methamphetamine usage, taking it as an appetite suppressant in order to further angularise his face. As for other harmful looksmaxxing techniques, he is an avid “bonesmasher” and advocate for it, promoting what is tantamount to image-based self-harm to his (again) young audience. Clavicular’s own looksmaxxing journey seems to have made him think he is a sort of demigod. On a Kick livestream broadcasted on Christmas Eve, Clavicular ran over a man with a Tesla Cybertruck. This came after repeated instances of him stating his intent and desire to kill someone that night. After the woman in his passenger seat asked if he was dead, he simply said “Hopefully.” In response to this incident, his fanbase conjured up AI images of him running over that very same victim captioned “Chad does what Chad wants” (with Clav’s face edited to make him look more Chadlike). These antics combined with his purported political positioning drew interest from professional anti-Christ Peter Thiel, Clav indicating during a livestream that he was invited to one of the tech baron’s parties.

Further in my conversation with Sheglo, I asked him to define “soyciety” and the “degeneracy” he attributed to it. In all honesty, I was expecting him to disparage queer people or minorities, as I had seen him repost what seemed to be anti-immigrant rhetoric on occasion. But his image of degeneracy was possibly the least controversial or fascistic definition of the word I had ever read in my life. For him, the harbingers of barbarism are “Infidelity, hookup [culture], unhealthy habits [i.e., drugs and hazardous fitness], bullying, rudeness, [and] disrespect towards others.” He went on to lament recent surges in individualism, saying that “‘nobody is entitled to anything’ is a popular idea which is technically right, but people misinterpret it to avoid responsibility.” In all honesty, he struck me as one far more conscious of the world’s ills than most people, in particular the isolation of every person on the planet as encouraged by the tech barons behind our social media and dating apps. 

BP ideology and looksmaxxing highlight many antisocial behaviours with a degree of prevalence among people; as Sheglo said, things like bullying, individualism, and superficiality in interpersonal interactions directly lead to the Blackpilled mindset. These youths (along with us “non-incels”) live in a dog-eat-dog world. So why do so many of them embrace fascism and the far right? When you are surrounded with hate, it is the easy way out to embrace a reactionary hatred. I acknowledge that the idea has been proposed over and over and rejected repeatedly, but it has to be said. Especially if we are grown, mature adults who believe in rehabilitation, we need to be reaching out to incels. We need to validate their feelings of insecurity and show them that said feelings are attributable to laissez-faire capitalism, consumerism, and ad agencies rather than women as a whole. If we want decent boys in a decent society, we have to show them decency. We have to mould them. Throughout my immersion in the Blackpill, in many “counterarguments” to incels’ posts I saw bodyshaming, class-shaming, childish hostility, and even homophobia. Is this the Left? Is this progressive? This is no mould for upstanding young men, only a buffer to send them further into misanthropy and right-wing rabbit holes. Reinforcing these young men’s insecurities for a fleeting dig, no matter how much you (or I) may feel their actions warrant it, is abhorrently counterproductive. By calling a short boy who complains about bodyshaming an incel, you legitimise the beauty standards set by the market. This only reinforces the status quo, pushing the boy into the far right and upholding the very foundation that fascism is set upon. So many of these boys feel that they are at subhuman levels of desirability. This leads them to foster hate and adopt hateful ideologies that artificially put them over women and/or sexual minorities. We must bring them back into the Agora, teach them how to love others by showing them love. It is only when we bring these boys into our arms, correct them, and support them, extricating the idea of looks-based subhumanity from their minds, that our society may start to heal.