The Gigafad
How childish notions of masculinity turn many right wing men into massive liabilities
Look at him.
Isn’t he handsome?
At the time of my writing of this piece the Internet has long fallen in love with the (most likely photoshopped) pictures of Ernest Khalimov, or as he is better known: THE GIGACHAD!!!
He is the mountain man, the perfect man, the Ubermensch himself, the Summum Bonum of masculinity, and how couldn’t he be? Have you even seen those abs? Do you even lift Bro???
Now women would accuse us of being secretly gay for Gigachad. Otherwise, why would we be spending half of our time online sending pictures of a half-naked man back and forth? Women do this of course because they don’t understand. In fact, women will never understand.
But why will women never understand?
What if we looked at Gigachad from a woman’s eyes?
Gigachad is a meme that is of much less interest to women than it is to men. In parts, this is because looks (in men) aren’t as important to women as many men believe. It is after all a (not so) closely guarded secret in the lifter community that the only ones who will really be “mirin” your toned physique will be other gym bros. In fact, my personal conjecture is that posture and composition factor into male appeal about twice as heavy as physique.
But the other aspect of Gigachad, his representative status of the perfect male archetype, is even less important to women. To cut a long story short this is because the female brain doesn’t segment like the male brain and is, therefore, less prone to be interested in blanket categories than the male brain. One way this may be illustrated is that a man can respect another man even if he despises him, this is much harder for a woman to do because the personal relation to the subject is more instructive than other attributes relating to it.
Gigachad, at his best, is to women less of a statement that stands for itself (as he is explicitly in one of his most common forms: the “YES” meme), but a signifier of something desirable to identify or even ally with.
This is something unique to women…
… and children
The process into manhood
Humans start out as female and have to become male. This is true for us biologically, where the human fetus first develops as a female and only turns male if testosterone is present but also mentally. Female and child psychology are much closer to each other than male and child psychology. Men for whom this is not the case have traditionally been called “effeminate” men and (amongst other things) are biblically promised to not make it into heaven (in most bible translations these are referred to as homosexuals which used to be a synonym until fairly recently).
The behavior of an effeminate man has been traditionally described in mostly its ethical implications: Inability to resist temptations, inability to keep his word (which nowadays would also encompass commitment issues), and shrinking away from challenges are some of the most common behaviors cited about this type of personality.
Further distinguishing factors can be found in the statistical effects that testosterone has on the body which I already spoke about in my video here:
Additionally, I want to mention an aptitude to whining or complaining as typical effeminate behavior and something I will describe as “hyper-ventriloquism”.
Hyper-ventriloquism
Hyper-ventriloquism in itself is a behavior that I see play out mostly in females, but to a skewed extent also in effeminate men and children. It is the tendency to live through another person. In the female case, this can turn into a toxic form of possessiveness that was best described by a woman detailing how members of the “glee” fandom took personal offense if something hostile to their deposition happened to their favorite character. Another case not uncommonly found is mothers using their daughters as tools to fulfill their own childhood ambitions.
In the male case, this “other” is usually a construct of archetypes that is then projected out by the male in question as what is commonly referred to as a “LARP”.
Now one would be justified in asking “what differentiates a LARP from imitation” and so one shall: But ST, what differentiates a LARP from imitation?
Well other ST whom I constructed from various archetypes driven by my own effeminacy, let me explain:
Imitation tries to copy a pre-existing form as close as possible. LARP on the other hand sets its own rules. For example, we can accuse a paintballer of LARPing who claims that his paintball hobby gives him an advantage in real combat situations over a man who has a racing hobby. The reason is that playing under his own rules, the paintballer has a LARP understanding of combat which leads him to overvalue aim and positioning whilst disregarding one of the most important factors of real combat: Stress, which his race-driving counterpart is much more equipped to handle.
Another example would be civil war re-enactors. These men obviously play out the glorious grind of armies grappling at gettysburg in accordance with their own rule-set. What typically differentiated the civil war re-enactor from the previously mentioned paintballer is that the re-enactor is very keenly aware that he partakes in a play that mimicks the aesthetic of the battle, whilst not having much else to do with it.
Lost boys
The subculture-currently-known-as-dissident-right is a collection of lost boys. This is not surprising, nor is it something to be ashamed of. The fact is that the value structure of the 21st century has no place for young men, they are neither powerless enough to be favoured nor powerful enough to be able to keep their status and so they slip through the cracks never to be seen again. And these boys, through little fault of their own, become perpetually infantilized. This is the Soyboy, this is the dude bro, this is the perpetual liberal student, and this is also the dissident right winger.
What exactly seperates the dissident from other subgroups may be omitted here but something that is obvious about him is that he belongs to a wider stream that tries to shed of his effeminacy and tries to become authentically masculine. It is also quite natural for him to seek out “parental figures” and role models to learn from and imitate. But this is where the problem arises for the dissident right.
What men need to be
I take this truth to be self evident: Real men get the job done! The highest measure of masculinity is after all potency, if you can actualize potentials you are a man, if you are impotent you are a eunuch. So how do you become more potent?
The reality is that the world is a rough place. It doesn’t care for effort, it only cares for results. This means that whoever is able to move the world to his liking is potent to the degree to which he does this. In term of potency this means that it is agnostic towards effort, ethic or engagement. And this leads us to the crux of the problem.
The Cowboy delusion
For quite a while now there has existed in the United States a certain romanticism that has started to infect the entire western world. This romanticism, mainly an outbirth of Hollywood is the Cowboy delusion. The Cowboy delusion is best explained as follows:
The wild west is a dangerous place, it is filled with outlaws, indians, treachery and a hostile environment. To survive it you need to be a special kind of man: A cowboy, a lone wolf who knows to call a spade a spade, is able to tell when you are lying to him and, when worst comes to worst, able to survive in the compassionless wilderniss with nothing but his gut, his head and his trusty revolver.
The cowboy is a good man who needs no praise. When his deed is done he rides off into the sunset, often never to return. He prefers it this way. It keeps him humble and close to the only things a man can truly rely upon in this world: His steed, his knife, his flask and his gun.
Hollywood and other entertainment hubs enjoy feeding this mythos in characters like: Han Solo, Geralt of Rivia, Conan the Barbarian and a billion different Clint Eastwood roles (if we round it down).
The problem is that this archetype doesn’t exist in the form in which it is being presented at all.
The real wild west, and the related westward expansion, wasn’t a hotbed for lone-wolf individualism. On the contrary the harsh and hostile environment of the western United States saw a blanket win of collectivist over individualist attitudes. The tribe and the clan suceeded, the lone wolf starved until he froze to death in a prarie night.
Another example for how rough environments foster collectivism due to the sheer need to survive can be found in one of the most natural disaster prone areas in the world: Japan
Yukio Mishima and the “death” of Japanese Culture
Yukio Mishima is an interesting Figure. A talented author, he wrote about his fight against his own effeminacy. Whether or not it is a battle he won I will lay aside for now but his road ultimately led him to try a coup attempt to re-establish the imperial Japanese Government, which he promptly finished up with his own ritual suicide.
Mishimas motives can be inferred easily, he had in himself waged a war against what he perceived to be his lower nature, and saw with displeasure that Japan seemingly wasn’t willing to do the same. In his book “Sun and Steel” he pays homage to a lifestyle of Bodybuilding and outdoor activity, to a certain Samurai ethos of Japans past warriors and to a life well lived. An amazon reviewer describes it thus:
Sun and Steel is most accessable if you are already familiar with the life of Mishima. It is his most honest, unadorned writing. It is filled with his death romanticism and also with his frantic quest for beauty, strength, action and his obsession with aging and longevity. It is a passionate piece of writing, consisting of one paragraph around 100 pages in length. His fetish for militarism is evident towards the end of the book, and he begins with an almost embarrassed admission of his age and stature as a "mature' writer, reflecting his obsession with eternal youth and glorious death.
It is ironic then that Mishima, in his high regards for the Military and masculine vigor, seemingly had no idea what he was fighting against when trying to rebuke westernized, and modernized, Japan.
The Military and the Corporation
In sociological terms one generally distinguishes between two different types of social structures which James Coleman, the father of modern sociology, calls in his 1990 magnum Opus “foundations of social theory”: Conjoint and disjoint authority structures.
A conjoint authority structure is one in which a subordinate expects to benefit directly from subordination. A good example might be a boy who goes into apprenticeship under a master artisan, expecting to benefit from the authority and guidance the master provides to him.
A disjoint authority structure in one in which there exists no such expectation. Typical examples include the business corporation and the military. You enter both not desiring to fall under their authority structure but rather expecting a tertiary benefit such as good pay or the ability to protect your loved ones in case the russians invade from the east (cheers to my Ukranian readers btw)
Because disjoint authority structures grow out of necessity rather than organically they need to incentivise subordination and punish dissent. And characters that are immune to both must be removed from the body.
The rise of the Gentleman
One of the sociological effects the medieval era had on europe was what medieval historian Tillmann Bendikowski called the “Taming of the men”. The medieval period started in the so called “dark ages”, a time when europe was still impacted by the political fracturing of the roman state. At this time europe was subject to something comparable to a state of anarchy, although rule of law existed in theory it was seldom enforced. Roaming bandits were common and poltical organization was hard, infrastructure projects basically didn’t exist and local lords raiding their neighbours was not an unusal sight either.
The untamed men were nothing but effeminate brutes. They wouldn’t keep their word, never took responsibility and had to result to violence because they had no concept of social dominance. They were mainly driven by appetite and temptation and posed a net negative on early european civilization.
Coming out of the medieval period the (western) european lands had been fully subjugated. Kilometers upon kilometers of argrarian lands had been captured from the forest in hard manual labour over the centuries. Rule of law was commonplace, infrastructure widely available and where the early medieval europeans were barely able to organize a raiding party, late medieval europe was a dense fabric of interwoven social structures. Let us take for example the 15th century emergence of the Landsknecht.
Besides being the embodiment of Drip, the Landsknechts are also a remakable homage to late medieval organizational ability. If a roman army was a walking city in how it appeared aesthetically, a landsknecht camp was a walking city in how it worked socially, a caravan that also happened to be an army. Landsknechte went to war with their wifes and children tow, the camps had their own internal trade and markets, currency, law, police, firebrigade, manufacturing, system of senior judges, etc, etc, etc… If you got recruited into the company, you lived in the company for the duration of your membership, sometimes your whole life.
The results speak for themselves, for more than a hundred years the Landsknechte dominated the battlefield of europe. They became emblematic of a new system of dominance that started to emerge, one in which groups became more than just the sum of their parts, one in which a real army culture made sense again, one not dominated by brute, but by gentle men.
This has happened in history many times before, whether it was the bronze age, antiquity or Japan, when overcoming the chaos of their time men had to learn to form disjoint authority structures, and in order to do that they had to learn to be gentle.
And it is these gentle men that go on to dominate the world. Because they self sacrifice, because they care and because they dont waver in front of adversity, being too driven by their knowledge of what is good. It is after all not an accident that christianity, being subject to the most gentle of men, was the inventor of heroic virtue.
Now some of my readers might actually be in the army and tell me that the army is not a gentle place, so let me go a bit further.
The fall of the gentleman
Simulacra and Simulation is a 1981 essay by Jean Baudrillard. In it he describes how symbols can increasingly lose touch with reality. This process goes through four stages:
The sign reflects a profound reality
We come to believe the sign to be a maleficent distortion that masks reality
The sign becomes a copy with no original, it pretends to be a faithful copy but is completely fake
The sign becomes pure simulacrum, it no-longer corresponds to any reality but rather becomes part of so called hyperreality (which Adam Curtis made a great documentary film on called: Hyperreality) which breaks down at the slightest touch with reality.
Contemporary notions of masculinity are in the third stage of Baudrillards process. Hence our society still holds men to the standard set by the gentle men: endure your hardships, take responsibility, make sacrifices, stand up for what is just and never start whining. Yet it neither understands what makes a gentle man nor what sustains him. Men are told to follow their passions and endulge their appetites, promiscuity is celebrated in the simulacra-cloaka that is modern television and vice is seen as the spoils of the powerful. All of this destroys a man, hollows him out and makes him into a robot, paying homage to a symbol of masculinity he long left behind.
Based is better than cool
Within the dissident right culture of modern zoomerism came the insitinctive reaction of young men to this artificial notion of masculinity, nowhere better exemplified than by the term: Based.
Based replaced another term of teen-lingo, namely “Cool”. Cool in turn was a recognition of gentleman behaviour, where the brute loses his composure at the slightest affront and is unable to resolve the situation by anthing other than violence, the cool man keeps his name-giving cool and is thereby able to navigate the situation and find alternative solutions to get his way.
The problem with Coolness is that it became increasingly simulated, as we see for example in the case of former US President Barrack Obama, whose politics and behaviour, despite oozing an aura of “cool”, showed a deep and lasting insecurity.
He was succeeded by Donald Trump who, instead of being cool, was Based. Based, deriving it’s meaning from “basing something on something else”, can easily be identified as a recognition of authenticity. Losing your cool is based if you are unable to actually keep your cool and just put up a dishonest front in hopes of unjustly claiming higher status than you actually have.
As such I see the right wing youths desire for being based Chads as a corrective that tries to rediscover the authentic masculinity of their christian ancestors. But this process is being preyed on by snake-oil salesmen.
Emblematic for such issues: The bronze age mindset, a book written by an author who styles himself the “Bronze age pervert” (BAP for short) is the exact opposite of what the right wing needs. Being hailed as a RETVRN TO MASCVLINITY it actually presents the fourth step a la Baudrillard, masculinity as pure simulacra. But to understand this we first need to look back to our boy mishimia.
The same-sex-attracted-self-seeking-satyr-of-the-rising-sun
Growing up Yukio Mishimas father Hiraoka Azusa wanted his son to become a real mans man. He beat his child and teared up Mishimas self written literature which he viewed as effeminate and unbecoming. One could therefore try to describe “Sun and Steel” as Mishimas pathology of trying to live up to his fathers standards. But doing so would be effeminate and wrong. Instead this upbringing hints at a different pathology. Homosexual pathology, marked by radical estrangement with the father in early adolescence and heavy binding to the mother, both of which are exhibited by Mishima. In later life he wrote “confessions of a mask” which many see as his admission of homosexuality, even though the family denies it.
I already mentioned that effeminate men behave more like women, and that women would accuse men who enjoy gigachad of being gay, this is simply because when women imagine themselves as men they imagine themselves as effeminate men.
I hope you get what I’m describing here.
Mishima might essentially have been gay for the emanation of his own Hyper-ventriloquism. Not necessarily in an erotic sense (that would probably be too weird) but more in an pathological sense.
Regardless of whether this speculation is true or not his persona in later life was a japanese version of a 3rd level Baudrillard conception of masculinity. He exhibited a person rooted in samurai culture that was a copy with no original. To illustrate let me go on a final Tangent.
Bushido
The ironic flaw in Mishimas conception of samurai was that samurai were very openly gay and regularly abused little boys whilst Mishima remained closeted for his whole life.
Ok no but seriously. The ironic flaw of Mishimas conception of masculinity was that it led him to rebel against the very thing it was created to uphold in the first place. Bushido culture was the romanticism of Edo period Japanese aristocracy that used the collectivist nature of Samurai culture, that completely overwrote the concerns of the retainer, to inspire social stability and conformity. Because Japan conformed onto the post-war status quo bushido would support it. And it does, the legacy of Bushido is alive and well in modern day Japan, and one of the, if not the, main reason for its sky high suicide rate.
That there is something wrong with it may be true but in just how spectacularly Mishimas Coup failed we can see that Bushido cannot be used to contradict its own purpose. Now mishima too has washed ashore on the beaches of history, leaving no effect on it because his masculinity in the end was little more than a carried over romantic notion of what a samurai is supposed to be.
BACK2BAP
Sun and Steel is one of the, if not the, main influences of the Bronze Age Mindset. Building upon the third Baudrillard level of Mishima, BAP created masculinity as pure simulacra. His entire ethos of “being like a God” is hard to not be understood as a joke, seeing how far it is removed from the lived reality of modern men. But if it were just that, a simulacra, it would be of little issue, because simulacra are generally shattered as soon as boots hit the ground. The problem is that the internet has a certain ability to capture and feed simulacra and that is where the snake-oil-salesman problem comes into final form.
It can be clearly seen in his rejection of christianity as weak and of the liberal arts (which have been regarded as the enablers of disjoint authority since ancient rome) as nerdish. In fact BAP seems to despise everything that would give a group an ability to actually organize itself into any form of organization that isn’t conjoined authority.
Conclusion
BAP essentially sells a LARP of a noble savage. Or in other words the Cowboy delusion. Internet simulacra keep this delusion alive, drawing upon an endless repository of Hollywood myths and RETVRN memes. BAP affirms disjoint authority structures, not unlike the military, but having never served himself (nor seemingly having any good friends that did) he does not understand that his philosophy impedes their generation. Instead he infects the minds of young men with this same philosophy of “space” and “heroism” which in turn makes them less- or unable to create and partake in disjoint authority structures.
It is for this reason that BAP and all similar figures must be regarded as liabilities if the dissident right ever wants to grow into being more than a self therapy round for young men forsaken by the system.
Thanks, I appreciate your work here. Your novel "cowboy" distinction is very useful, and explains the cope for the atomised anon in the DR. "I don't need to cooperate with others, I'm a heroic cowboy, doing my bit".
Some new references for me, disjointed and conjoined. Will research.
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