Journey into the Italian Manosphere, Part II. Here is Part I, Youmaxxing – Masculinity and the Online Self-Improvement Culture.
To the Thirty-Year-Olds (username: ‘subumano’, 9/09/2024), a thread:
Year 1994. You’re born into a lower-class family. You grow up between playgrounds and the oratory, the friends you go to call in person by intercom. Just as it had always been before. But pay attention, even in elementary school, two subjects suddenly seem essential: English and IT. The second one, of course, taught terribly. Now you’re 11 years old. You watch from the balcony with your family as Italy wins the World Cup that summer.
It’s 2006. - a year passes - You’re 12 years old, and within two years, you and your peers have discovered the importance of the cell phone. Thrills, SMS. The first Nokias, Siemens, Motorola. You share the first videos via Bluetooth, porn, and Dragon Ball. Every day on TV, even if you don’t understand it, you hear about crises and unemployment.
- another year passes - You’re 13. You start using the internet with your huge computer. You’re afraid that if you look up porn, your PC will fill with viruses and your dad will find out. MSN comes up, a program to chat with others. Every day, right after school, you keep it open all afternoon. Occasionally, you get a ‘nudge,’ a sound notification meaning someone is waiting to talk to you. You have lots of friends. The same old stories keep coming on the news.
- two years pass - Phones are getting more advanced. Ofers no longer focus on minutes or SMS; now, gigabytes for browsing are becoming essential. The luckiest people have 1 GB per month. Now, all the kids your age have Facebook, which becomes crucial for socializing. You post nothing. Every day, it’s all about nonsense: music, thoughts, chatting with friends and NPs (if you’re lucky).
- three years pass - You’re 18 years old. You realize you’re already behind because it seems like everyone except you is using Instagram and WhatsApp. During your adolescence, you had to learn to keep up with social changes year after year. Literally, just seven years earlier, you were used to finding your friends by buzzing their doorbells. And it had been like that for at least 50 years.
Not for your generation. In just 7 years, through SMS, MSN, Facebook, and now Instagram, like a chameleon, you had to adapt. For jobs that used to require a diploma, now you need a degree and specialization.
All permanent state jobs are taken by 40-50-60-year-olds who have half your knowledge and don’t know how to turn on a computer. Despite all these changes, the news still talks about youth crises and unemployment.
It’s 2013. You finish classical high school, step outside, and realize your education has prepared you for work exactly zero.
Another ten years will pass. You’ll realize that if you want to buy a house, you should do so by the time you’re 26-27, a house you’ll finish paying off by the age of 60. So, by 26, you should already have a good job. In the meantime, you’ve lived through a pandemic. In the meantime, social relationships have reduced to being judged by appearance and the number of followers. The figures of YouTubers and influencers have emerged. Many girls earn as much as bank directors by selling photos to desperate men because having sex has become impossible unless you meet strict aesthetic-economic-social standards.
Generation Z advances, made up of lobotomized automatons, all identical to each other. At 20, they act like gurus, talking about assets and productivity. Young, muscular, doped-up kids. Already redpilled. Young girls, already superficial, and seasoned.
You have chosen to study medicine, you fell behind, you lay down, and now you’re reading that in a few years, even for doctors, it will be tough to find work because young people will outnumber retirees by 2030.
It’s 2024, you’re nearing 30, and you don’t really feel like you belong to anything, to any generation, you’re alienated. On the news (which you now follow online), they still talk about crisis.”
‘Subumano’ adds a simple comment to his thread: ”It’s over.” User ‘FreeSoul’ replies: “I was born in ’97, and I confirm everything. The best years for me were those of my childhood, not just because I was a kid and the redpill social dynamics hadn’t yet crashed down on me, but because they were the last years without invasive technology. Since the advent of Facebook (around 2010 in Italy), the decline began. Technology will continue to damage us more and more, first with various social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) and now with artificial intelligence…”
Another user confirms: “Everything ended after 2011”. Others blame the pandemics. ‘Subumano’: “At 29, I feel like an adolescent. Not because of the life I lead, but because of my level of maturity. When I think that society will soon see me as a 30-year-old man, I shudder — it will only be on paper”.
A few replies later, there’s another notable comment. User ‘SixSamurai’: “I had to log in just to respond and compliment you on how accurately you described the life of early zoomers/late millennials. Even though I haven’t lived that kind of life because I’ve always been reclusive and antisocial, I can attest that the phases you described match reality perfectly. The generation before now (alpha) experienced the change, and sure, there were shifts in other eras, but this one is perhaps only comparable to the second industrial revolution, and maybe even greater in its global and widespread scale. Always late, never on time to catch up with new developments. But maybe it’s our fault for not being easily adaptable to unrequested changes: we’re attached to things. I would have liked to live through some youth anyway, even amidst those thousands of difficulties”.
User 'subumano' speaks of an experience, parsable at different layers of depth. The experience of a generation wracked by the subprime bubble’s burst. The experience of a teenager facing the digital revolution; of growing up, today, as an online boy. The experience, as parodistic as tragic, of coming to observe the world locked in a room: from the peephole of the Internet is a view of ein weltloser Welt, a worldless world.(1) Utmost absurdity of the experience, and yet, purity of vision. What looms on the horizon?
This is a world with no prospect of redemption for the multitude. In which the 30-year-olds are condemned to precariousness, and the younger ones are portrayed as futureless and brainrotted because of an online environment operating precisely as a cognition vacuum; in which you are pelted with thirst traps, as if all the girls were making big money from OnlyFans, and the overabundance of sexual satisfaction must then be the exclusive preserve of those few successful men, blessed by genetics – the chads, ça va sans dire. A twisted world, to be sure. But there must be some world that has dictated these conditions of observation to user ‘subumano’, and thousands of other guys like him. It is then also somewhat the world that observes itself through the phenomenological channel of “subumano” (which literally means “subhuman”). It's the Internet, which is mirrored in some of its parts from a remote region.
An ugly world, seen by the uglies. The (un)locked world of the BlackPill: nothing shines deep down the rabbit hole besides phone screens under the blankets.
.In a single thread user ‘Subumano’ characterized himself quite a lot. For a season, he has been one of the most problematic active users on the forum; now his silence is creeping in. His BlackPill leans toward a high school fascination with nietzschean supermanhood and survivalism of the fittest; the idea of transcending life to “draw strength from the brutality of existence”. Even the most innocent and gratifying hobby is dismissed as copium and thus disqualified. ‘Subumano’ has admitted to being addicted to benzos, almost to alcohol; he doesn’t believe in therapy and says he just cannot be helped.
He’s rotting, supported by his parents, stuck in a learning process he seems incapable of wrapping up, which snowballs into an unbearable sense of debt. From his troubling condition comes an equally significant analysis (with a non-trivial focus on the history of media). I can recount many elements of his retrospective story as familiar: we are almost the same age, socialized as males, perhaps growing up in the suburbs, maybe raised by the cruel optimism – about technology, about schooling, about social mobility – of a proletarian family that had accessed the middle class, unaware of its inevitable re-proletarianization. Today’s Y2K retromania and Nintendo rom hacks are two sides of the same coin, feeding our times’ primary need: lightheartedness. Nostalgia is the impossible journey à rebour to the place in time where we used to feel “hope”, our youth. The impossibility of accessing a meaning dimension through the narrative frames that have upheld modernity: work, love, family. That’s the story of many guys hanging around here (and many more).
Il Forum dei Brutti
Il Forum dei Brutti is the major RedPill community in the Italian language. It has recently risen in the news because RAI (Italy's main public broadcaster) produced a podcast about incels, which was awarded a prize for investigative journalism; the journalist, a woman, reported her experience in the forum – predictably, a bad experience. As much as a well-done outreach approach to a heavily overlooked issue in this country is appreciable, I found the community's reaction to this product more compelling: the paranoia towards feminists and soyboy infiltrators, anger, and a sense of violation. There is honestly little to “investigate”: you don't need a VPN, you don't even need to create an account to access the threads of the forum, I myself don’t have one. Everything is naively, harmlessly public.
It is the dark forest of the internet: dissociated from the clearnet, this colony thrives under the shade of a fig leaf, now aware of the inquisitive eyes it has attracted – allegedly “expert” observer, myself included, with this underhanded approach midway to ethology and colonial anthropology that makes me ashamed, I must admit. Ethnographic distance entails a loss of humanity. As I became more familiar with the users day by day, the explorer's hat I was pretending to wear began to weigh me down. In this perverse communicative ecosystem of messages in bottles on open water, of signals covered by the deafening babel of the network, there is also this very story I am telling you about these usernames hiding people in the flesh, and I now find myself wondering if it will ever reach them.
It's been more than a year since I have been lurking. Basically, ever since shortly after its relaunch with the new domain, when the previous one (which was online since 2009, being one of the largest online incel gatherings, with 22k) was shut down by the admins. As far as I understood, this schism was likely due to the uproar following the loss of user ‘End’, in the summer of 2023. You can still read his post in another forum about ordering sodium nitrate from the UK, on a website now sanctioned for incitement to suicide. Back then, many users adhered to a whip-around and bought flowers for his grave. They still often talk about him.
Today, Il Forum Dei Brutti (FDB) has just over a thousand registered members but remains quite active. The site features a “Rating” section, in line with other international forums, as well as a section dedicated to “Looksmaxxing” and “mental health”, though these are much less frequented than the main sections: “Ratings”, and mostly “Una vita da brutto” (“Life as an ugly person”), which is “the beating heart of the forum”. There have been about 7,5k discussions as of this writing, and they often surpass 2k readers. This means that lurkers far outnumber active users, who are almost always the same small group of people, a few dozen at most upon closer inspection. Nonetheless, FDB is still considered the benchmark for the RedPill and incel community in Italy. This statistic is diagnostic both in terms of realizing how fringe this actual phenomenon really is, with its own intrinsic closed-community logic that would lead me to consider it a case standing in itself (which it is, as I aim to argue) and in representing it as the dark depths of a broader incel identity iceberg capable of peeping over the threshold of visibility in other spheres.
During the winter of 2024 the forum was again in peril of being shut down: personal issues between admins apparently, and above all, the excessive behavior of some users: incitement to violence, suicide, and trolling. We are talking about an environment with a problematically high default threshold of tolerance, which has been lowered lately precisely by the increasing awareness of being watched; from the concern of maintaining an “acceptable” reputation and not being criminalized. The main figure in the new turn of events was founder 'Anakin', who appointed a revised moderator team – among which, notably, there is user 'albaserenadv' who describes herself as a woman in her forties, married and a teacher. Eventually, the restrained line prevailed and was made explicit in this vademecum aimed at pinpointing the nature and the purposes of this forum, in the “Announcements” section.
Some Clarifications about the Forum (user: ‘#anakin’, 15/02/2025):
“What is the redpill? The redpill is the concept taken from the movie Matrix (1999). It symbolizes an acknowledgment, an awakening even in a spiritual sense. It has NOTHING to do with the “LMS theory,” or that in the world being attractive means getting laid. This is known from the 2-year-old child to the 90-year-old woman. Good looks or social position can foster acquaintances with the opposite sex, the discovery of hot water. And also disproved by the way several times on the forum and outside.
The term ‘np’ [non-person] This term I think originated in blackpilled psychiatric circles. For convenience I also used it as an abbreviation, but from now on I will no longer use it. As a forum we do not support misogyny. In these same circles I have also met many men who might have been called np, fortunately fewer and fewer. Mine is not a way to cover my ass or get ahead of myself, I know very well that many women are unfaithful unfair and shitty. But I think they are regardless members of the human race. Men are not all goody-goodies just as such. And I remain convinced that some good women somewhere remote still exist. Certainly they are an extreme minority on that there is no doubt
The harsh truth The harsh truth is that almost everyone has psychological problems. We specify that by now even perfectly normal people have great difficulties. For other people unwilling to make any kind of compromise or active program to change their situation: traveling, dieting, and questioning their thoughts and the way they see the world. It becomes really difficult. It already is objectively so for almost everyone, let alone for people who grew up with mad people or with various family dramas behind them....
The psychological problem always precedes the aesthetic problem on the FDB. this is the ugly and tough truth. This is a redpill for example, and not LMS or the world is based on aesthetics (bluepill). There is so much underlying psychological suffering, and people who have made up a world to justify it: it is women's fault! (though it is plenty of so-called shitty women who lord it over as if they were goddesses, that is also objectively true).”
There have been bans, however, and many other users have reacted positively to the change of direction, moderating language and content and above all seeking a constructive approach to a mutual understanding of each other's difficulties. The supportive role this space represents for many people is quite palpable: there you can read the report of a psychiatric hospitalization or the sharing of a roguish fantasy story; it can be a way to have someone to joke with, to feel less lonely on a Saturday night. The forum has repeatedly questioned itself and its function as a mousetrap, or echo chamber if you prefer: the more you get inside, the farther the grass gets from your touch. However, it was saved by users because several users say they were saved by the forum.
Many other things, however, have not changed at all and cannot be expected to change, that much is equally clear. Distrust and violent resentment toward the woman in abstracto, counter-idealized and deformed by undue assumptions and numb, sexist misconceptions, is still the background of the discussion (as can already be guessed from the alleged “non-misogynistic” disclaimer from user 'Anakin' ). Someone unfamiliar with the incel discourse bumping into this forum would feel at least disoriented, probably sick. In this case, I just wouldn’t recommend this reading – take it as a late trigger warning. But since you got here I assume you are an insider, and I won’t dwell on the somewhat banality-of-evil beyond this premise – besides withstanding it and without being apologetic about it.
As much as the forum tries to peddle itself as a RedPill space, and more generally as an open place to discuss masculine troubles, the majority of the most active users are self-described incels and seem to me to shape a generally BlackPill-accented discussion environment. A shared existential state – as I said, an experience – that can be interpreted as a social thermometer, as I rather aim to focus on. Misogyny must not be dismissed or normalized. In this setting (which stands out as an intensity of the spectrum over a sexist continuum anyway) I just read it inside the most predictable foucauldian tragic screenplay: sexuality is once again a pretext to express, signify, and embody some complex social distress that we now need to understand, historicize, and socialize.
Reflecting
Reflecting on My Life (user: ‘abitante’, 5/02/2025):
I was out for a walk earlier, listening to some music, in the dark and cold I could see the fog mingling in the light of the street lamps, I looked around, in the empty streets, every now and then some human shadow sneaks from afar, I think to myself back a little to the last few months, and I feel a little guilty, at work I almost felt like crying, because of the music, I use it to get angry, to remember, to suffer, and meanwhile what I really have in front of me, I can't even see.
I get to a bench, in a driveway with a few flower beds, in the middle of an area full of condos, I sit down and take off my headphones, the silence is so loud, I can hear that kind of continuous whistling, given by the absence of noise.
I start noticing what's around me, and I see some windows from which light is coming, and I remember that there are lives going on in each of those houses.
I can also hear some voices, but I don't understand the dialogues; they could never imagine that right at that moment someone is listening to them.
I think of hypothetical scenarios in which I see her again, and I dump all my frustration on her in a passive way, in which I humiliate her intellectually, to overcome that frustration that I cannot shake off, despite all the work I have done.
However I understand that nothing strange has happened, people are things, and when you get something sooner or later you will lose it.
Then I looked up and saw a half moon, stars, satellites, the Big Dipper I think, and I thought that sooner or later those too will disappear, even if we live according to the sun and the moon and consider them almost eternal, human beings try to create things and live for them as if they were the sun and the moon, decide that one is a celebrity and remember it for generations, take it as a model, live according to the laws, surely these things too will die, long before the sun and the moon.
I had forgotten myself for a few moments during the course of the arguments, then there came a peculiar noise, which distracted me again, perhaps it was a referee's whistle, coming from a nearby soccer field.
So I got up and went home.
The mind after these reflections thinks differently, certainly the emotions are weaker but unfortunately they are still there.
Now I am in bed, and among other things I wonder what my grandmother would think of me if she could observe how the last 10 years have gone, thanks for all the help she has given me will never be enough.
I also thought back to the child me, the winter evenings spent on the couch with PSP, the speedy chicken, the aseptic environment of home, that feeling of tense respite from my parents between quarrels.
It had a special flavor, feverish I would say, revisited now, there are various memories.
Who knows in a while what feeling I will experience when I revisit the memories of the phase in life I am going through now.
I drag on day by day.
User ‘bruttoesolo’ replies: “I have memories of when I was 16 (now 27) and my parents came to pick me up from the gym and I kind of laid down in the car thinking about the future – when I finish high school, someday I will have a girlfriend, children. I was sure of that, I knew the suffering was in the school.... I even wanted five children, a large family. Today the very idea of living together, besides being impossible because of my ugliness, disgusts me. Again I am disgusted by human relationships. I like to discover the world, history, the cosmos, and culture. In other respects, I don't even feel more backward than others. When I was a boy I felt more backward because I thought I was a human being like everyone else. Today I realized that I am different, I am not like other people; I am ugly and therefore not worthy of anything and I do not feel equal to anyone, I am part of something else.” Then, 'ilgrande maiale': “We all are dragging on in one way or another, crossing that line between the wonder of childhood and the unknown of adult life. My life now is the day, I wake up and am born with darkness and go to sleep and die with darkness.”
Reflecting on the memories and expectations of youth is a recurring theme in the forum. This thread is just the most recent of those that have struck me the most. Much of it has to do with the social regimes of compulsory schooling: true loneliness and social detachment come after high school, where the supposed entry into the adult world and its responsibilities await us. But “Lone Wolves” are fighting shy. That is precisely the rupture, the missing element in the narratives of these experiences: no threshold crossing, no transition from potentiality to actuality. Adulthood is a door without a handle. Youth remains the golden prison of the unexpressed, the vague world of play. The joyful tension of anticipation slowly capsizes into the realization of being jilted by life itself. And we plunge into the RedPill paradox whereby society itself becomes “one big high school” (an iteration of the sole social pattern they have been exposed to), reduced to the scale of the classroom, staged by cheerleaders, alpha males, betabuxes – and, finally, spectators.
Feeling of Non-Existing. User ‘👁️ 👁️’, 29/11/2024]:
I have this almost perpetual feeling of non-existing, of being just an observer, a feeling of unreality, I think that is dissociation, depersonalization, does it happen to you too?
Sexual apprehension and the wound of universal female rejection are often cumbersome to the point of eclipsing the blank field left by some broader query of meaning. Other times, these questions come up in their bare ineluctability. For example, what is the point of working? What is the point of working if I am alone? What is the point of working if I cannot have a family? Without a relationship to support, and children to raise – what is the point of doing what my father did?
User ‘Abitante’ posts again on the same thread: “Talking with a friend a couple of days ago, I realized that my father had to face some big misfortunes, he lost his father when he was 25 and his mother around 35, he is a loner, I visit him, but I never saw things from his point of view all the times I got angry with him. Despite his negative sides, however, it is no small matter to get up at night and work shifts to raise a child. At least this, last year, I was able to tell him, unfortunately there is no way to get him away from alcohol. In spite of everything I always put myself first, even though I know that one day, thinking back, when he is dead, I will suffer. I always wonder, what would the predecessors think of their descendants? Are we experiencing a drying up of life? The Italian part of my family is originally from Basilicata [Southern Italy], and my grandmother comes from a family of 14 brothers and sisters. Both my father and I are only children... I just don't understand such a ... sharp change in the way the family is conceived.”
Other users of the forum, further down the line, have often addressed the topic of their survival strategies. It's the unworking. “Working sucks. Imagine then as a single person coming home and silence or parents waiting for you. Are you kidding me? Unworking your whole life, creating income, parasitising, etc. etc. Life is not just active slavery. But then, an ugly man who works? Screwed by the system twice”, writes user ‘Scatologaranzia’.
Yep, the system. “Many here in fact do not work,” writes user ‘Avanguardia’ in another thread. “How can you be a slave in a society by which you are rejected, laughed at, and in which you do not find yourself regardless of even how things go with women. If after many years of banging away at work, nothing has changed with women, you might as well live as a parasite, even as a bum or hermit, we have to die anyway.” ‘Avanguardia’ is now a mod, for years among the most active and respected users. I understand he is between forty and fifty years old and lives with his parents in a rural village in Sardinia. He does farm work, runs errands, walks among archaeological sites, and inquires about the global infosphere. His is an unproductive life claimed against the capitalist mode of production. He preaches hermitage and is inspired by Ted Kaczynski. On the other hand we can find ‘AgatoWallato’, who is more secularized but the same age. After working abroad for years saved up a nest egg with which he bought a house to rent, and settled on a ruin in the country in which to live frugally and self-supporting, cultivating what he eats. It is his “system.”
Young men's refusal to work is little debated in Italy, with respect to the US. The widespread threads about this on the English speaking forum incels.is – which fall under the LDAR label, “Lay Down And Rot” –- reflect this sentiment: “abstinence.” Yet, FDB's anti-system spirit is not limited to this aspect. “No Pussy No Work,” replies user ‘Dark Magician’ - some international Men's Right's boutades, such as bounding men's working productivity with the right to have sex, seem to have come so far as well. But BlackPill's misalignment has actually little to spare with this masculist vibe, and probably not much more with the Great Resignation. It is something subtler, perhaps something greater than bedrotting. It's invisibility.
Ugly People Are Invisible
Us Uglies are Invisible (username: ‘bless123’, 9/12/2023)
I don't know if it happens to you too but I often really feel that I am invisible to women. For example if you go out with friends and if there is some girl, she immediately socializes with your friends and less so with you. Some people say this happens because you are shy but I think that is not what determines invisibility, because if you are shy but cute it will be women who will try to get you to open up with all the seductions they are capable of. I think that the woman considers me invisible by making me disappear from her field of vision, that is, it is the enactment of a defense mechanism by the woman in this case against the unpleasant feelings that the sight of an ugly guy like me causes, what do you think? has something like this ever happened to you?
The feeling of invisibility accompanies incels daily and is central to their self-narrative. Two well-known members from the forum have chosen such usernames like ‘invisible_man’ and ‘StranoInvisibilePercepito’ (literally “InvisibleWeirdoPerceived”). However, we face a paradox: their invisibility, supposedly due to an appearance outside the norm, flips into a spotlight effect. These are different paranoid manifestations stemming from the same sense of exceptionalism.
The feeling of invisibility accompanies incels daily and is central to their self-narrative. Two well-known members from the forum have chosen such usernames like ‘invisible_man’ and ‘StranoInvisibilePercepito’ (literally “InvisibleWeirdoPerceived”). However, we face a paradox: their invisibility, supposedly due to an appearance outside the norm, flips into a spotlight effect. These are different paranoid manifestations stemming from the same sense of exceptionalism.
User ‘vin_iaghi’ tells the forum about his experience at a shopping mall. He is convinced that people are mocking him for his ugliness. He claims that a couple stared at him, and the girl started laughing. The shopping mall is, in fact, a recurring setting for crudities (“crudezze”), a frequent place mentioned on the forum: full of beautiful girls who will never return your gaze, but also full of happy couples enjoying a carefree afternoon together. Other users warn him: our ‘invisible_man’ advises “never to go to the shopping mall on Saturday and Sunday afternoons”; he goes “during the week in the late afternoon/evening when there is almost no one”. “Exactly, the timetables for incels are different”, adds ‘Yorick’.
Incel Marco Traula, well-known in the Italian community for his YouTube account (which has now been shut down, so I cannot link his videos anymore), always appears in his videos with his face covered. He was pleased with the pandemics because it gave him an excuse to go out with the mask, which he still uses when he hits the shops. He recommends wearing a cap or a hood, and always sunglasses — even at night, perhaps with clear lenses. If anyone asks why, he says he has an eye problem: “By now going around with your face uncovered is like going to war without weapons”. It is important to dress well to gain a few points and avoid crowded places “full of boys and girls who will judge you”. He believes that in this society, you can’t even be a “trash man” unless you’re attractive.
He is often ridiculed on FDB, but we are not too far from these levels of fixation and dysmorphophobia here. User ‘macready’ comments on the thread from ‘bless123’ about invisibility: “I’ve been used to it for years, and I try to do the same; imagine that at a wedding, my cousin wanted to give me a welcoming kiss, and I dodged her because at that moment I was thinking that I’m an incel”. Radical ugliness is sun-shading, retiring you from the world of perception. And at the same time you fall under the magnifying glass of the objectifying gaze, the same involved in redpilled “Looks” ratings. An optical desire innervates incel’s cosmos. The fear to be watched is a craving to be seen, to be perceived, to be observed.
Everyone is a girl online, says Alex Quicho – “You could say that platform-determined behavioral design, with its vectors of attentional capture leading to the illusion of monetary reward, is simply forced feminization. To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us ‘girls online’ regardless of gender”. She also really gets to the point I think, when without explicitly referencing the incel says that “hatred of the girl mistakes girlification for consumer culture itself: the admittedly well-founded paranoia that any remaining selfhood has been scraped out to make room for more ads and that any desire we experience has been routed along deep grooves of persuasive marketing.”
If FDB users participate in the experience of the Sad Girl, verbalizing through an avatar the most intimate wounds of their tender hearts – if girlhood is a spectrum, is there anything more girlish than this? – there is a crucial difference in my opinion: this is something close to the Tumblr experience, yes, but without aesthetics. The bleak interface of the forum is a web 1.0 mancave. If anything, manliness persists in this misfitness to digital visuality; in its incapacity to glamourize, commodify, and showcase its own misery – which is an Online Girl’s secret. When artist Audrey Wollen came out with the Sad Girl Theory she said she felt “kind of alienated by contemporary feminism, because it demanded so much of me (self-love, great sex, economic success) that I just couldn’t give” – some kind of social pressure that you can extend to the whole post-feminist, late-capitalist Western society, broadly speaking. Bedroom sorrow and self-destruction thus became means to “disrupt systems of domination”, through self-representation on Instagram. But what if having any “Self” to “represent” by these means was a problem already? (2)
Almost every time I read about RedPill, I felt there was an elephant in the room, not adequately addressed; not enough from the guys on the forums, nor even from the zealous debunkers of their abstruse theory. If there are so many heterosexual boys today struggling to connect with the world – and therefore with girls, with friends, with work – it is because they lack a requirement that has materially become primary to their subjectification: cultivating an aesthetic personality; developing some taste for a marketable styling to apply to, and for a visual sensitivity, which is even more proficient to their digital personas, to their profiles. The skill of being able to showcase yourself as a digital product becomes even more essential, the more you are disconnected with real people out there. This is a wound that platform-owned web 2.0 has inflicted to us all.
Something in this negative experience of the online boy perhaps relies on the difficulties of adapting to these techniques of the self. It is a matter of being normal today – of silent norms, such as knowing how to aestheticize and express yourself – and therefore of discipline. It involves a whole disposition, traditionally unfamiliar to men: seeing yourself through the mirror, in the third person. Self-objectification is a passport in visual society. From this perspective, the online boy stands outside the norm: he suffers from the dramatic misidentification with the condition of the commodity. Tiqqun’s nightmare has fleshlessly incarnated in the last decade: redpilled incels are a byproduct of the Young Girl,(3) they testify as the ruins of its unattainability – sometimes this failure can result in a stoic will to retreat, and you can call it broicism;(4) much more often it seems just the result of inadequacy, of being noncompliant, undisciplined.
BlackPilled incels hate the normies as much as they hate any ownership. They despise glamorous boys and girls, despise all kinds of commodification. They hate the merchandised world, and that's a girl’s world, shaped by scopic capitalism. If it’s true that “living as ‘male’ is to live in horror of ever being a girl” – as Quicho insists – then the abstinence, the Great Indisposition (if “Resignation” presupposes anything to resign from) of the BlackPill is first and foremost the unburdening from the pressure of standing out. It is a retirement, an exhaustion from the performativity of the self-representing self — and the refusal to take care of it.(5)
Post-patriarchal sense of dismissal, aberration of the alien desire to be watched, extreme humiliation of feeling invisible: that's what it means, today, to be an ugly boy – and this is also why any attempt of rebranding in the “ugly chic” style does not seem a viable option. “Cut it all out and shine like soft candle lights, with the way the world is set up today and its laws it befits to live hidden,” writes user 'Ilgrande maiale’. Lathe biosas, living in hiding, was Epicurus' solution. Thrive as fireflies in the dark forest of the internet. Go your own way, ascend to the WhitePill.
“Biologically determinist influenced nihilism” is an effective formula to summarize the BlackPill ideology. The very core idea is that male attractiveness to women only depends on the genes – so, if you’re not, it is because of your build and there is honestly nothing to do about it, sorry not sorry. Trying to correct your phenotypic expression with grooming, fitness, and moneymaxxing won’t be enough. Maybe you can blame it on your ancestors’ nutrition, perhaps on the whole civilization: we were supposed to be hunter-gatherers and groceries are the reason why our jawline retreated and we got so unmasculine. That’s what a pretty long and detailed recent YouTube BlackPill-bible video says, with a glimpse of hope: if you eat tons of raw meat – possibly livers, hearts, and drinking eggs instead of water – and monger the same diet to your progeny perhaps you can get an alpha great-grandson. But to try motivating blackpilled talking about offspring could be jumping the gun a little.
Jokes aside, in most cases the BlackPill leads to a completely powerless frustration: rotting. On FDB, they chose a flag-term that could better be translated as “slumping down” (“accasciarsi”). Given this particular fixation with ugliness – detailed to the point of losing any frame – it is blatant to me that we are facing a depressive conspiracy theory, given substance by some totalizing social darwinism, where the scapegoats are women. It stems from social detachment, as the guys in the forum rightly recognize, which is a dramatically increasing condition. Like any other conspiracy fantasy, it nourishes from a multi-faceted real datum (which I have been trying to contour). And like in any other conspiracy fantasy, there is a way out from the rabbit hole, albeit hard to find.
Following the pill jargon, the WhitePill consists of a condition of “optimistic nihilism,” contentedness of living according to what you got, and focusing on what makes you rejoice. Often overlapped with – or rather, muddled – asceticism and the stoic life, rather than the embracing of a voluntary celibacy (volcel) or with the MGTOW movement (we are pretty much moving in a grey area here, where these internet tribes do not fit), this pacific ugliness (have we come to uglitude then?) is unresented acceptance of sentimental dissatisfaction. On FDB, user ‘ilgrande maiale’ lights up this path, and he is not the only one.
What strikes me most – and this is already true for the blackpilled condition – is the realization that we are at odds with the “RedPill philosophy” here; even though we are still swimming in the same pond: same vocabulary, same narrative, same digital environments. I would rather argue that blackpilled infirmity and its healing with the whitepilled ascension can be read as the discharge of the RedPill, the offload of its pathogenic tension. It is the dismissal of neoliberal subjectivity and its excruciating conatus; its infinite predicament of making something of yourself, its restless incitement to improvement and productivity; its agonizing request for recognition and validation; its responsiveness to the allure of success. The RedPill asks you to work and consume, one voice with the master; the BlackPill just answers “slump down” – and it feels like an honest answer.
With the WhitePill, it can be about looking up, getting out and just being, organically acquiring your own sense of self. It is moving on, and finding new reasons; but mostly, you’ll do this on your own. It is dramatically remarkable that such predisposition is supposed to be achieved outside society, perhaps at the expense of giving up trying to be a part of it – a healthy sociability, that would be the only possible “ascension”. Post-redpill serendipity is monochrome anyway.
(a special thanks goes to Kate Babin who helped reviewing both essays)
1. Just playing with Heidegger here. Something “weltlos” (literally world-less) is just senseless, not belonging to world’s history, not accessing meaning.
2. Indeed, Audrey Wollen has later deleted her account.
3. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl (1999) is Tiqqun collective’s disturbing pamphlet. The Young Girl (the Jeune Fille) is a neutral subject, it is “the anthropomorphosis of the capital”, “whose entire activity will be aimed at self-valorization.”
4. I have already mentioned the link between popular stoicism and the manosphere in the Part I. As I suggested then, see also https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051241274677.
5. Heavily drawing on a Foucauldian conceptual framework here. All volumes of his History of Sexuality have been a primary source for this reflection.