Latest / Cobra Lily / One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill
Transcript
- Ella Simone: I think there's a lot of men who consider themselves incels who could actually get a woman if they broke up with inceldom and the red pill ideology. And then there's what incels refer to as true cells. And this is a truly sad case to me. men who really were born unattractive, they don't have charisma, they may or may not have really severe social anxiety and getting female affection truly is difficult for them. I do have genuine sympathy for people who feel like that. I used to have a lot more pity for incels before I knew more about the really heinous trappings of their worldview. I kind of a couple of years ago when I became aware of this, like I said, didn't know up close like the depravity of what they believe. I assumed that this was like a COVID thing and a way to online Reddit thing and a lot of these guys would get over it. but seeing how many of these men have kind of chosen to plant their feet in this ideology of of hatred I can only have so much empathy for people who have literally none for me, you know? Hi guys, welcome back to Cobra Lily. It's Ella. I have a very topical episode in store for you today, which originally was recorded with my friend Aiden, but I unfortunately had to scrap the recording because I messed up the audio. So we're gonna be running it back as a solo episode. Today we're gonna be talking about incels, gooning, and red pill culture. So I recorded this episode in mid-August 2026, and I kept it in the vault for a while because I wasn't sure about the ethics of helping bring awareness to the red pill ideology in a time of such widespread hostility toward women from men. We're seeing direct attacks on women's employment and bodily autonomy from the Trump administration. We're seeing tech bros talk about dosing women with oxytocin to prevent them from divorcing their husbands. And we're seeing a disturbing uptick in violent rhetoric online from very young boys directed toward women. I recorded this episode before Clavicular was accused of drugging and raping a minor, which I believe before the Cornell 7 case breached containment, the victim of whom I also believe. And before an investigation was launched at a high school in Idaho over group chat where several football players talked about wanting to rape, murder, and hang up the body of a female classmate. All within the span of a month. So it's getting really scary out here for women, and that's why I feel like it is appropriate to release this episode. The men who adopt these red pill beliefs do pose a real threat to us, and we need to know our enemies. I think this entire red pill movement is a psy-op meant to divide men and women and prevent them from seeing their common interests and developing class consciousness. I think much of it is driven by These villainous tech moguls like Peter Seal, who's been accused of funding clavicular's rise, as well as the assortment of weak chin tech bros teaming up with the Trump administration to push natalism and undo the decades of progress women have made outside of the home and in the public sphere. A lot of these men seem to harbor these twisted fantasies of having a subservient robot sex slave, like in the movie Ex Machina, and keeping a harem of concubines to. multiply their progeny and bolster the dwindling population of white people. It's all racist, it's all misogynistic, it's all insane revenge of the nerds shit. I have absolutely no sympathy for these figures, and men certainly shouldn't either. However, some guys genuinely are incels in a way that does make me feel sad, and I I do want to extend my sympathy toward them. There are guys who are born unattractive They often have severe social anxiety or other mental issues, preventing them from developing the charisma that they need to compensate for what they lack in the looks department. While these men may fit the definition of an incel, meaning an involuntary celibate, not all these men become the incels I'm talking about. The incels who originally festered in the dark corners of the internet and now have felt emboldened enough to take their racist and misogynistic ideology mainstream. So in this episode, I'm talking about men who fall into this category, whether or not they are conventionally unattractive. They make up this epidemic of men in 2026 who are extremely jealous of and resentful toward women, but simultaneously want the social capital of being a hot woman. They want you to buy the drinks. They want you to pursue them, and they want to be the bad bitches for real, while also hating on bad bitches. And what I find most embarrassing about this demographic is that a lot of these guys Aren't even chopped. They could find girlfriends if they wanted to, but they become undateable by adopting these extremely misogynistic beliefs that women are rightfully repelled by. But instead of looking inward and asking how they could become better, more desirable partners, they have decided to steal valor from true ugos and betray themselves for nothing. They're stealing uggo valor and luxuriating in their own self-pity, and that's why they're not getting laid. I think some of them will move past this juvenile ideology, but most of them seem to have chosen the darkness and will continue to make up a new, more bold class of misogynists. I think the entire Red Pull movement is a response to the fact that women en masse are waking up from the programming of centering men and only entertaining men who add to their lives and treat them as equals while also starting to lap men in higher education and in the workforce. I think maladjusted men at all levels of society will continue to try to punish us for threatening patriarchy and we have to continue to fight back. So I say fuck turning the other cheek because they would never do that for us. And ladies, we gotta mobilize So the Incel worldview rejects the idea that personality and character are really important in dating and in romance, and insists that romantic and sexual success is is largely determined by these immutable traits that you are either born with or born without. And women select men according to these specific biological markers, and men at the bottom of that hierarchy are effectively excluded from relationships through no fault of their own. in the incel worldview, there's kind of different archetypes, with the one at the top being the Chad, which is the kind of stereotypically attractive, high status man. And then there's the Stacy, a hot girl, basically. There's the normie, an average person who just kind of participates normally in dating is probably unaware of this weird online shit. And the true cell or in cell, which is men who sincerely believe that they're sufficiently disadvantaged by the way that they look and that ordinary dating is essentially unavailable to them. Looks are just believed to matter enormously. there's this kind of idea that your genetic and physical characteristics largely determine your romantic destiny and you can't meaningfully overcome them. So that's height, hairline, facial structure, race, body type. All these sort of become the subjects of intense analysis among the incel community, hence their kind of obsession with like facial symmetry and facial harmony and things like this. to the incel, this kind of inequality is considered a major social injustice. there's a really big distinction between just I'm lonely and women don't like me, and inceldom. Like someone can be involuntarily celibate without being an incel. The ideology develops when the personal experience becomes an explanation for larger society or for women in particular. So it's not my lack of romantic success is a personal problem. It it's it demonstrates that society's sexual hierarchy is fundamentally unjust. And this hierarchy according to incels is based on biological, like evolutionary. traits of men and women. There's a book called Sexual Utopia and Power that is kind of considered a foundational incel text. And it basically makes the case that the two sexes have these broadly opposing ideological or biological interests. So healthy males seek to produce with as many women as possible, as is their biological imperative, which is an imperative because it's so strong and unyielding, supposedly, with little regard to their attractiveness. They're not picky. And on the other hand, healthy females also seek to reproduce, but their biological imperative is to reproduce with only a select group of males, with great regard to their attractiveness as well as other characteristics. But they really focus on the attractiveness, which I think is a huge flaw in the ideology because women don't really care that much. In my in my experience. nothing to do with because of their personality. and I certainly don't have friends who speak or seem to think in this kind of logic anyway. all of the girls I r know really just want to be treated nicely by a guy who they have a lot in common with, you know? But to the incel the incel kind of disregards women's interest in character and personality and other traits. the blue pill, red pill thing, I'm sure people have heard the term red pill at some point, be it, you know, in conversations about Andrew Tate or what have you. That's actually a reference to the movie The Matrix, where one of the characters is offered a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill will kind of keep him asleep, and the red pill will like wake him up to the harsh truth. So the blue pill in incel ideology is the, you know, the conventional belief that dating is like open-ended and that personality confidence, compatibility, social circumstances, all that stuff really matters substantially. The red pill is like a much more misogynistic worldview, arguing that men are disadvantaged by feminism, not just women, but by feminism in particular, and that men need to understand women's supposedly self-interested and hypergamous sexual behavior and get ahead of that by like tricking them, basically. The black pill is the really fatalistic extension of the red pill, which basically says that your position in the sexual hierarchy is is determined by these immutable characteristics, so there's little nothing you can do about it, and it's over for you, basically. and the INSA worldview is very characterized by this sense of kind of entitlement. It's more than just I'm unattractive, it becomes I have been denied something that other people receive naturally and nobody acknowledges how unfair that is. And it really does lead to this idea that women owe men sex and relationships, which I have encountered in the real world pretty recently, just going out on dates and stuff. I've heard troubling, familiar talking points that I have also stumbled across in my deep research on incels and looks maxing and the red pill because You know, I think you should know your enemy, and I think it's an interesting social phenomenon. I went on two dates recently and I in both situations I got this kind of disgruntled vibe from the men when the night did not end in me sleeping with them. And based on text that I got from them afterwards, that was more than just a vibe. it's just this kind of pouting, like I've been I've been cheated or something attitude that they have if you don't put out. this idea that You know, if you take a girl out or if you treat a girl nice, if you go on a couple of dates with her and you pay for some things that she owes you sex, it's not only misogynistic and entitled, but it's it's inherently incongruent with the requirement that red pill incel type guys have of women, which is that they be as chaste as possible. They're always talking about how women are ran through and how they can tell these women have had a high body count and they want like a pure virgin, supposedly. But they don't want you to be so chaste that you won't put out for them. So it's like they want you to be chaste with everyone. They just wanna be the exception to that rule because they want they want your decision to sleep with them to affirm their uniqueness, I guess. So it doesn't really make sense. It's like you want women to be you don't want to be the type of girl who would sleep with a guy after two dates, but you also want a girl who will sleep with you after two dates. It just doesn't make any sense. So of course women become the enemy in this toxic worldview. And it's led to the proliferation of like hundreds of these red pill podcasts, red pill YouTubers. And figures like Clavicular, Andrew Tate have really led the expansion of the Manosphere, which platforms the red pill movement. and basically is like the sprawling network of websites and forums and public facing influencers promoting masculinity in opposition to feminism. people like Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, sell courses and basically radicalize men and into this like misogynistic black pilled worldview. So taking the red pill basically means waking up to the the belief that Western society is fundamentally biased against men and in favor of women because of feminism. And we're seeing how things like Lux Maxing, which was once confined to the fringe online incel communities of the early 2010s, has exploded in all across social media, to the extent that Conan O'Brien made a joke about hostmaxing the 2026 Oscars, and need I even mention, you know, Clavicular's huge popularity. So I read a book this spring by Irish author Andrea Nagel called Kill All Normies, online culture wars from Fort Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. And my preparation for writing an essay about looks maxing. I downloaded the PDF of this and read the whole thing in one day. It's really disturbing, at times, just because it depicts like the the brutality of these online misogynistic communities, but I think it's really well written and researched and like really important that we as women wake ourselves up to this phenomenon because it's only growing and we need to know it when we see it, you know. I've I've spent the last couple months looking deeply into this stuff and at this point even I'm tired of it. I I it was fascinating at one point, just as like a social movement. but now like it's just so negative and I would like to move on soon. but I think it has helped me recognize red flags. And I think it's really good that I have that spidey sense now that I feel like I know it when I see it. And I think women need to like prepare themselves to deal with this kind of thing. So in this book, Nagel basically starts talking about George W. Bush, who kind of embarrassed so-called educated people with his gaffes and his grammatical mistakes or bushisms, and led to this kind of feeling of shame among American liberals. which was captured at the time by books like Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. This obviously was in lockstep with the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obviously George W. B. Bush was not really a a Texas townie, but that kind of like awe shucks, not very educated, like American chud. I think there was a big distaste for that archetype of person after his presidency. And then came Obama, who was articulate and sophisticated, very cosmopolitan. looking back at his first election, It was pretty magical. It was historical and his star power was just so clear and it really felt like the winds of optimism had finally, you know, swept the American public after the disaster of the two thousand eight financial crash. She said even some of the icy hearts of those significantly to the left of the Democratic Party were temporarily melted in what felt like a mass outpouring of positivity and hope, an egalitarian dream realized. Obama served his two terms, and I think that an undercurrent of racism and jealousy bubbled throughout the entire time he was in office and was kind of bound to breach containment. Nagel in her description of Hillary Clinton's campaign in twenty sixteen, where she tried to kind of repeat the Obama formula by being very like social media savvy, by dancing on the Ellen show, by calling in Beyoncé to perform for her, by assuring listeners of her love of hot sauce and feminism and trying to like do the Obama thing and like really speak to young people and be very like culturally tapped in, as opposed to like stuffy and removed in like an old guard politician way. I remember this once an event moment because I was in high school when she was running where she condemned the new internet age, like right-wing movement that Trump was really tapping into as part of Trump's quote unquote basket of deplorables, which you know resulted in just like an explosion of memes and mockery online. Hillary obviously had a lot more baggage than Obama and a lot less charm. And there are a million reasons why she lost that election that I'm not gonna get into, but I'm just gonna read a pretty decent passage from this book because I feel like Nagel can just break it down better than I can. But she's talking about how changes in the media landscape like coincided with her election. And she said, as old media gatekeepers of cultural sensibilities and etiquette have been overthrown, notions of popular taste maintained by a small creative class are now perpetually outpaced by viral online content from obscure sources, and cultural industry consumers have been replaced by constantly online internet content producers. The year 2016 may be remembered as the year the media mainstream's hold over formal politics died. A thousand Trump Peipe memes bloomed, and a strong man Twitter troll who showed open hostility to the mainstream media and to both party establishments took the White House without them. By 2016, a spirit of deep nihilistic cynicism and reactive irony bubbled up to the surface of mainstream internet culture, and an absurd, in-jokey form of humor became dominant. The Harambe memes meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized them. So she's basically saying that legacy media such as the New York Times or Cable News at this point in the mid-2010s was already losing its dominance and the online factions and the online opinion and the online consensus was becoming more important and more absurd because it just wasn't bound by the same like limitations of decorum and, there's no there's no leader on in the online world. There are like legacy media tycoons. we don't have that on the internet. I wanna give credit to my friend Aiden for helping me with this episode and the research, but this whole idea that I'm about to get into was entirely from him. So he brought up in our discussion of incels this idea by Friedrich Nietzsche Ressentiment, which he described as a deep-seated psychological state of chronic hostility. envy and frustration that happens when a person feels weak, inferior, or powerless to change their situation. Because they cannot express their anger directly or fight back, they turn those negative feelings inward and create a new moral system that labels the strong or fortunate as evil and themselves as good. And Aiden wrote Black Pill ideology performs this exact transaction, but with the twist of replacing moral superiority with epistemic superiority, claiming to see the truth i.e. the black pill that everyone else is too deluded to accept. And that truth being that looks are everything, women are hypergamous, the future is dead, humans are animalistic, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he added that by giving everyone a microphone, social media has kind of given everyone the license to become their own little genius. and their ideas will only be affirmed and intensified by the way that algorithms work and just the way that information is condensed and simplified on social media overall. social media has created an echo chamber where everyone can be an expert in their own niche. So this weakens like people's own self-doubt. And he wrote stupid people don't feel stupid anymore because a million other stupid people are calling them smart. So I just say that to illustrate the cyclical and kind of self-fulfilling nature of these online communities where your strange misogynistic beliefs can be validated by a chorus of other little online avatars who never question what you say. And everything I'm saying is foregrounded by the quote unquote Gen Z sex recession that's been a hot topic in the media for, I don't know, the past two years. basically Gen Z ain't really fucking like they used to, and everyone is trying to figure out why, and that's having a lot of sweeping implications for culture as well as individual behavior. The statistics on Gen Z in particular not being as sexually active, I don't think are as black and white as some news outlets or op eds make it seem because if you look at the graphs, really like everyone is having less sex. So it's really not just Gen Z, but for Gen Z, it's kind of the most concerning because, you know, we're young and we're at the point where it's expected that we're going out there and dating and meeting people, falling in love, having sex, and for a lot of people it's just not happening. so one statistic I found is that twelve percent of adults age 18 to 29 reported having no sex in the past year in 2010, and that number doubled to 24% in 2024. I want to mention that we're seeing similar trends in Japan and South Korea and across the Western world, as well as a growing political divide between young men and women in the US and across the West, that I think is driving a lot of this too. I want to briefly talk about a couple reasons for that, although that's not really the point of this episode. So I want to bring up this concept in sociology called the pro-poniquity effect, which is the tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those they encounter on a regular basis, workplace interactions, people in your community, people who you commute with. that's like a major reason why close friendships and relationships form. now more people than ever are working from home and spending their free time by themselves. I found a really surprising statistic about the same age group eighteen to twenty-nine, which is that in twenty ten that age group reported twelve point eight hours of weekly social time on average. And that fell to six and a half hours in 2019 and then to just over five hours of 2024. So there's been a drastic decline in the amount that people are socializing. I think that has a lot to do with people's lack of work-life balance, lack of third spaces. People's inability to afford their own lives, making the idea of financing a courtship or starting a life with another person seem pretty impossible. And although we're seeing these trends across age demographics, it is especially true for Americans under thirty. Now it's difficult to nail down a time when all this red pill stuff really started. But when I wrote an essay last year called Leaving Love to the Market, which was kind of about the manosphere, the quote unquote femisphere, and the like Gen Z sex recession, I learned about this show called The Pickup Artist, which is a reality show that aired from 2006 to 2008, hosted by this Canadian magician. Named Eric von Markovic, who went by the name Mystery. in both seasons, he rounded up eight male contestants who were really frustrated by dating and tutored them in the art of the pickup, where their skills were put to the test in these weekly competitions in which their encounters with women were filmed, and they used his little methods I guess the idea is to like. use psychological methods to trick women into getting in bed with them or going on a date with them. There's I don't I don't care to even look in the details, but there's things like negging, which is when you like lightly insult a girl to kind of pique her interest in you. Because another red pill talking point is that like women don't actually want men who cater to them or who want to please them, that's actually emasculating and w women like it when you're mean to them. And I remember seeing a criminal minds episode in high school where they depicted like a homicidal pickup artist guy who looked a lot like mystery. So there was obviously a reference there. and his teachings evolved into what kind of became the Manosphere slash red pill movement of the twenty tens and twenty twenties that we're seeing now. There's also a guy called Kevin Samuels who died a couple of years ago. He was an image consultant in Atlanta and he was one of the first dating influencers to explain gender relations and the it's explicitly like economic language. So he was the one who popularized the term high value man and high value woman in these YouTube streams he would post that often went viral. Explained in a video in 2020, the basic economic principle states that the value of something is what the market is willing to pay for it. The value is determined by what? The market. In order to be a high value man, it starts with money. I didn't put the six figure thing out there. It's been with us since the eighties, and that's where this whole thing starts. You have to make a certain amount of money, and this line is roughly 10K a month adjusted for Atlanta dollars, which translates to 120 a year. And in the red pill space, They have this concept of the 666 rule, which says that women only want men who are six feet tall, have six-pack abs, and make six figures. we can see how this idea plays into the worldview of incels that women are like have these very high, strict standards and are hypergamous, meaning that they use men to elevate their own social status by going for men who make more than them. And I just wanna emphasize on an anecdotal level how much these red pill podcasts and red pill influencers distort female expectations and female patterns of mating, at least in my experience. the Fresh and Fit podcast is this podcast I mentioned on a previous episode of Cobra Lily, run by this guy Myron Gaines and I don't know what his partner's name. It's Tweedledee and Tweedledum, it doesn't matter. they promote these red pill ideas. They'll say things like, you shouldn't like please a woman sexually because that's that's submissive and you shouldn't ever chase women and you should not be deferential or kind to women because it'll make them respect you less. the the longer you listen, the more brain cells you lose. So I don't look into the actual details of their talking points that much, but they will affirm this worldview to their impressionable listeners, many of whom are under the ages of twenty-five, by inviting OnlyFans models or sex workers or strippers onto their show and asking them these really pointed, leading questions about what they look for in men and I don't know if some of them are in on it. I don't know if they give them prompts of what they're gonna say before. I've never actually watched more than five minutes of these interactions between the podcast hosts and these women because it's just so stupid. and I don't really care to see it. It it makes me sad. I'm not trying to make any kind of statement of judgment or value on sex workers or OnlyFans models or any of these people in these industries. I'm actually aggressively pro the decriminalization of sex work. but I'm just saying that they are only getting intel from a s pool of women who were in these kind of fringe industries And I don't think there's something about a sex worker or a stripper who makes her abnormal in her character and her soul than other women, but I'm just saying they're purposefully seeking out one demographic instead of like hearing from all women. And a lot of times these these women don't agree with what they're saying and they do push back and they c they just dismiss them and try to make them look as stupid as possible. I want to transition into talking about gooning. So Aiden told me he'd been well aware of the phenomenon of gooning since early 2026, and I didn't learn about it until reading this article, The Goon Squad and Harpers, which I highly recommend to everyone. I'm gonna try to remember to link it in the description. And it starts with a description of an incident in January 2026 where a couple dozen young men pulled up to this coffee shop called Bikini Beans in Arizona to mourn the death the death of a 27-year-old man named Nautica Malone. So they showed up with flowers and votive candles and shirts printed with his face. And they were honoring basically this man who had gone viral on the internet. he'd gone viral on the internet for pulling up to a drive-thru window at this coffee shop called Bikini Beans. The gimmick of this coffee shop, by the way, is that all the baristas wear bikinis. so he pulled up to the coffee shop He's naked from the waist down. He has a hand on his genitalia. And the barista had already been filming him by the time the car reached her window, which leads me to believe that he had done this before and they recognized him. and sh it got out and went viral. The view count went crazy, and a couple days later he drove a few turns over and shot himself in the head in the front of his Dodge Challenger. Leaving a note to his wife and young children basically asking for their forgiveness. So his death was covered pretty widely in tabloids and on social media, but it was not really covered by the mainstream news outlets, as far as I'm concerned. and the young men who were tapped into this began referring to it as the Goonicide and his vigil was this kind of like ironic live stream stunt that became known as the Gooneral. this kind of language, Goonicide Guneral, was already legible to hundreds of thousands of people online who are in on it. It's kind of like an a if you know, you know thing, which signals That the verb to goon had broken containment. So what is gooning? Gooning is a form of masturbation that involves edging for a really long period of time, resulting in this kind of like hypnotic trance-like state. So edging, for those who don't know, is maintaining arousal without quite reaching orgasm. so the gooner goons to reach the supposed goon state, which is a zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to like a advanced form of meditation. and the pursuit of the goon state compels them to goon for hours or in extreme cases, even like days at a time. There's debate among gooners about whether the goon state is even real. And in the article, one person interviewed described the goon state in near religious terms, saying it's one of those things where it only works if you believe that it could work, he said. So those who participate in these online gooning communities, they'll turn their rooms into goon caves. and the typical setup is having a bunch of different monitors at once and a bunch of different pornographic material, like magazines, pictures. I saw one where this guy had like a bunch of women's panties stapled to the wall. Basically make their rooms into this like masturbation dungeon. it's really quite frightening. and gooning is kind of this like communal activity where gooners will gather on Discord for I can't believe I'm saying this, but shared jerk-off sessions while they each project porn onto these like shared screens. Of course this shit is downstream from 4chan because all this stuff really is. most schooners, by the way, don't regularly masturbate for like eight to twelve hours at a stretch. Apparently they only tend to do that once or twice a month. but the average time is about two or three hours a day, which is already a lot, no? Some gooners even identify as pornossexual, which means that they have voluntarily opted out of the dating game and the in incel language sexual marketplace because their sexual needs are entirely met by porn. Now, why the multiple screens? Why the maximization of like pornographic material, you ask? So many Gooners, because they've been watching porn for so long, have grown accustomed to a degree of stimulation that most porn isn't really equipped to satisfy. I couldn't really find exact numbers, but It's estimated that about two-thirds of Gen Z men have been watching porn since they are between the ages of ten and thirteen. So you can imagine how exponentially that compounds into having a much higher threshold for arousal as opposed to someone who just started watching porn at twenty. You know, something pretty tame might be really impactful for them because they don't really have a frame of reference and they're not used to seeing this kind of thing. So The Gooner aligns his room with all these different screens and'll have different pornographic videos playing at one time there's kind of a new form of pornography that's developed from the these lagooning Discord communities called the porn music video or PMV. It's described in the article as schizophrenic porn mosaics of often staggering density. Hundreds of clips sourced from existing online porn and spliced into productions of just a few minutes' length, soundtracked by the kind of ludicrous pounding techno more often associated with unlicensed weed stores. Some contained seizure warnings, others contain prompts to inhale poppers, and for how long. Aiden and I actually watch them. These videos are crazy. they're really lynchian in nature. They're so surreal, it's just dozens of clips of of porn with intense music i and sensory overload and it prompts you to like smoke weed or take stimulants or like it like the article said, like take poppers and make it this kind of like one person sex rave basically. there's one quote from the article that's really sums up the Gunnar worldview in its entirety. If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk art practices of Goon World, it is this kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites a straight male viewer to imagine himself as the man on screen, Goon or porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are macerating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them. Ruin your mind, go deeper, give up on life. These are Goon porn's basic slogans and the movement's rallying cries. And these videos will take on an almost cinematic quality, We watch a snippet of one video where a woman in this really sexy voiceover says, Follow me, keep scrolling, further, deeper, forever and ever. Submit to porn. You can't turn back. there's also a studio called Humiliation POV, which produces a lot of these P Vs, one of which was called Little Dick Losers Deserve Loneliness, Isolation and Endless Gooning. So I bring that up to illustrate the fact that humiliation is really central to the gooning apparatus. It's not like the quote said about picturing yourself as like the hot porn star, who's like fucking a hot woman. It's about kind of browbeating yourself for being so far from that, I suppose. the producer who runs Humiliation POV was quoted saying, People really get into the darkness of the fetish. It's not just the addiction. The guys enjoy the humiliation of being humiliated for their addiction while they're participating in it. the author said many of the men he talked to claim to not be actually addicted to porn, but rather aroused by the concept of being ruinously in its thrall in this kind of almost religious devotion. He said, certainly many of them are using porn to cope with some serious life problems, but what your average Gunnar is up to is basically kind of a sad, confusing roleplay. I wanna make a an aside about porn. Like I said, it's it's difficult for me to find exact statistics, but we can roughly estimate that two-thirds of of Gen Z Med have been watching porn since they were prepubescent, and it's probably worse now with Gen Alpha. And just to give you a perspective on the ubiquity of porn, as someone who doesn't even watch it, there were fifty-four thousand copies of Playboy sold in nineteen fifty-three. And there are approximately 80,000 porn hump visitors per minute in 2025. So porn has obviously become a lot less stigmatized and easier to access. I think we've all seen those pop-up ads that take you to porn sites if you click them mistakenly, which I imagine is how a lot of kids stumble on it. And I'm not here to make a statement about the morality of porn or engage in some kind of one person debate, but I do wanna bring up this study of male college students that found that regular engagement with porn was associated with lower satisfaction with their own genitalia and higher rates of loneliness and performance anxiety around sex. A study of men ages 18 to 27 found that regular porn watchers scored lower on an assessment investigating their sense of identity, especially concerning their body image and what they want from dating. And I think that's significant because I think porn has given men body dysmorphia and especially dysmorphia about their own genitals. evidenced by an article I read in the New Yorker recently called The Big Little Penis Panic about how there's a really marked uptick in in men seeking out advice or medical solutions to their anxiety around the size of their dicks, basically, which I think is downstream from porn. So the scooting stuff is obviously really strange and concerning, and I want to talk about my theory as to why it exists. I do want to mention the femisphere, which I don't think is nearly as harmful as the manosphere, but does exist in a symbiotic relationship with it. And that is the kind of like network of female dating coaches, female dating influencers who sell one-on-one coaching sessions, dating courses, who become maternal or big sister figures to young women. So I'm thinking of people like Shear a Seven, The Wizard Liz, and there's varying degrees to which they're kind of expecting their viewers to take them seriously. I think there's a bit of a wink with figures like Shea Seven that Manosphere influencers don't really have. I think they're being more sincere with their viewers. the Femisphere ideas of you should expect princess treatment, You should only entertain men who can pay for your entire life and who are willing to make your life super easy. they don't really bring up like how a man's character is or the strength of your partnership with them. Basically like the money he puts down is the good treatment. Not so much like, does he listen to you? Does he value your input? Does he, you know, introduce you to his friends and does he speak to you kindly? They don't really talk about that so much. while I don't think that is positive. I don't think it's nearly as negative as the Manosphere's ideas where basically you're encouraged to mistreat women. some people like Andrew Tate going as far as to encourage hitting women if they talk back with you and this really heinous stuff. seeing all human relationships in such a like capitalist transactional nature. Is is harmful in and of itself, even if, you know, there's arguments out there that marriage has always been a transaction. I I don't think we should start seeing everyone as a potential ATM or as a potential pocket pussy. And that's what both both these sides are promoting. so the femisphere, like the ideas are harmful, but I think what's really harmful about it is the way it informs red pill manosphere talking points. So the Andrew Tates of the world can look at the wizard Lizes of the world or the Shira Sevens of the world and say, see, this is what women are saying. Women are hypergamous. Women do just want to use you for your money. And I think both both spheres of the internet exist to hawk dating courses and to, you know, enrich the the few influencers who really profit off them. So my theory is that the red pill influencers who have illustrated to their viewers that women have these incredibly high standards for men, i.e. the six six, six rule, have led their viewers to basically choose two paths. The caveat being that obviously plenty of men don't think about this stuff or completely ignore it, but I'm talking about the men who do view their content or who at least come across it on their algorithm. And the first camp is those who lock in and pursue self-optimization. So the idea that you should become unrecognizable, go monk mode, build your business, go to the gym every day. of which looks maxing is basically an extreme expression. And the other camp, the gooters, drop out of pursuing sex and dating entirely. They essentially go, I'll never be good enough. I should just give in to all my most debased instincts through pornography and do everything I can to enhance the pleasure of watching it. And then the third camp, I guess, which I didn't really mention is the incels, who may not be gooning, but they're participating in a lot of these like red pill ideas. So my guess is that the penchant for degradation within the gooning community is connected to this feeling of inadequacy in the face of impossible dating standards, set by the red pill guys and set to some degree by Themisphere influencers. And the shame of repeatedly getting turned down on dating apps and comparing yourself to porn stars with huge dicks only compounds the problem. I don't know if anyone here has heard of Calvinism, but Calvinism is a Protestant religion, and I don't know how many modern Calvinists today still believe in predestination, but when Calvinism first became a thing as part of the Protestant Reformation and split from the Catholic Church, one thing that differentiated it from Catholicism was this idea of predestination, which states that God has basically chosen who is gonna go to heaven and who's gonna go to hell already, and you just won't know who it is, and there's nothing you can really do about it. I don't know why anyone would want to believe this. it's such a horrible doctrine, but basically it's just the idea that God chose a a specific group of people for salvation. Which are referred to as the elect, leaving the rest to just face condemnation for their sins, no matter what they do. human will plays no real part in earning or changing this destiny, because God's divine decree is absolute. And I noticed a parallel in the way that like incels think about the world and their place in the quote unquote sexual marketplace. incels who consider themselves true cells, meaning like they're truly unattractive, they're truly undesirable, from birth were just like marked with this stain of almost like an original sin. So within the incel community, there's there's plenty of guys who I think could get laid and could fall in love and could get a girlfriend because they're not objectively unattractive, and they have some good qualities, but they cut themselves off from women by carrying these really misogynistic, dark worldviews and women can kind of pick up on it. the incel ideology kind of makes it impossible to form an intimate bond with a woman because as we talked about in previous episodes, you can't really be intimate with anyone you're trying to dominate and who you think you're better than. So I think there's a lot of men who consider themselves incels who could actually get a woman if they broke up with inceldom and the red pill ideology. And then there's what incels refer to as true cells. And this is a truly sad case to me. Like men who really were born unattractive, they don't have charisma, they may or may not have mental issues or like really severe social anxiety and getting female affection truly is difficult for them. And it's not just a self-fulfilling prophecy. I feel like there's a parallel between the idea of being a true cell and the idea of being determined by God as damned before you were even born, because there's such an emphasis in the in cell community on objective attractiveness being everything in dating they do devalue character and personality so much to the extent that I can see why a man who thinks of himself as really unattractive would think, Yeah, like I really am doomed I do have genuine sympathy for people who feel like that. I do pity anyone who thinks of themselves like that. I used to have a lot more pity for incels before I knew more about the really heinous trappings of their worldview. I used to feel a real sense of sadness for their ordeal. and I kind of a couple of years ago when I became aware of this, like I said, didn't know up close like the depravity of what they believe. I also assumed a lot of them would grow out of it. I assumed that this was like a COVID thing and a way to online Reddit thing and a lot of these guys would get over it. I think plenty of them have. but seeing how many of these men have kind of chosen to plant their feet in this ideology of of hatred I can only have so much empathy for people who have literally none for me, you know? I don't know if that makes sense, but I I see a parallel between the idea that a person is born damned, and it's kind of out of their control. with looks maxing, it's interesting because the big idea that looks maxers sell is that you can ascend your physical circumstances. You can ascend your status of being a pathetic incel loser by optimizing your looks. And that's the kind of dream that people like Clavicular are selling. that almost sounds like salvation in religious terms, I can supersede the limitations of my pathetic situation through acts of self optimization, now I wanna wrap this episode up by talking about a shooting that happened in Montreal, Canada. on June 22nd, 2026. It didn't really make a big splash in the media because it didn't result in a lot of fatalities, but I'm not really here to talk about the shooting itself. I'm here to talk about the manifesto written by the shooter His name was Seth Hatfield before he was killed by a police officer. Basically, what happened was he got a hotel room on the sixth floor of a hotel across from the headquarters of this global multimedia conglomerate called ILO. And they own Pornhub as well as other huge porn websites. his goal was to kill executives at ILO by shooting from this hotel room. So he started shooting. It didn't hit anyone. So he went downstairs and outside and tried to walk directly into the headquarters, but was met by police and was killed on the scene. So the actual shooting isn't really the point. but this manifesto written by a 25 year old former philosophy student is really something. I'm like vaguely aware of some incel texts like the manifesto written by Elliot Roger. he's had a lot of copycats. But usually the manifesto's from what I've gathered by just doing research and skimming, are very angry, they're very convoluted, they're very ideological. And they basically just like shit on women and bitch and moan about not getting sex. and this is something different. it's called the Manifesto of June 22nd. I'm not putting this out there to like promote any of these ideologies. or say that I agree with them, I'm just critically engaging with them. I don't fuck with incels. I don't fuck with this worldview whatsoever. I'm really not trying to spread this harmful ideology, but I'm just trying to bring attention to it and talk about something that interests me. This essay does seem largely derivative of that foundational incel text I mentioned, Sexual Utopia and Power. this manifesto by the way was 104 pages long. I could only find the first thirty seven pages online because it was heavily censored. it did get increasingly more histrionic as it went on, but I will say the first let's say twenty five pages of it are pretty Well written, they're very academic, they're very, very heavily sourced. It w the essay was just full of footnotes, and they're inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's The Communist Manifesto. And I'll get to that in a second. So Hatfield creates this dichotomy between his understanding of the word hypergamy and monogamy, He says by hypergamy, I don't mean the traditional definition of that word which pertains to women marrying into wealthy families, but rather I mean something like the opposite of monogamy, or namely a phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with the plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy in which the same females would be bound legalistically and culturally to just one male. I don't know if I would have used the word hypergamy if I were him, because he just kinda changes the definition, but we're just operating in his framework. Hypergamy is like women seek to find the best men possible instead of like finding one man to pair with and stick with for life. He doesn't really mention much about the decline in marriage in this essay, which I think is a huge blind spot. but he basically says that the transition from hunter-gatherer societies where humans were nomadic, we moved around, to agricultural societies led to the introduction of monogamy, I would actually say marriage, but I guess tomato tomato in this framework, which ameliorated this antagonistic dynamic between the sexes. he says the introduction of monogamy in the earliest agricultural societies was very powerful because it improved the lives of the broad category of adult males who were average in physical ability and attractiveness. They're not Chads, they're just normies, basically. In other words, he said the people who composed the vast majority of those laborers, urban and agricultural, who physically constructed the infrastructure of the first civilizations. he's basically saying before monogamy, this large class of like average males was subjected to an existence of harshness and brutality, he says. Their short lives were comprised largely of serving small communities which did not benefit them very much, or more specifically, they were serving the females who themselves were all only breeding with a few of the males. evidently those males that were most strong and attractive and held leading roles in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. So the chiefs, the alphas, the Chads, basically he said, were lording over the vast majority of the male population by like taking all the women. He said, once monogamy had been instituted, the broad class of common males found themselves far better off than they had been, for under monogamy they no longer had to spend their lives in miserable loneliness and savage brutality. He's really dramatic. Only to die at the hands of some stronger human male or some carnivorous wild animal. this sentence I don't really like, under monogamy in early civilization, most women ultimately could no longer indulge in the excessive fulfillment of their biological imperative as they once did back in the pre civilization times. Now they found themselves legalistically bound to just one common man. he said this order of things basically stayed intact as ancient agricultural societies transitioned into what he calls low capitalist societies, meaning pre industrialized capitalism. and it remain intact because of institutions like the church. he said this was good for most common men because they were able to live relatively fulfilling existences, being able to have families with wives and contribute to their societies. then this all gets disrupted, he says, by high capitalism, which does away with institutionalized monogamy. He says capitalism is a system based on the continual profit of a select few people who are the bourgeois class. And this is something that Marx lays out. so if you haven't read the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels basically set up the different classes in society according to the logic of capitalism. So there's the bourgeoisie the members of society who own the means of production. They're the men who own the factories, like the Jeff Bezoses of the world. and then there's the proletariat or the working class, which is the vast majority of humans who have to sell their ability to work in exchange for a wage so that they can live. Marx, who lived during the time of the Industrial Revolution, was seeing how pre-industrial capitalism had transitioned into what Hatfield calls high capitalism, a system based on the continual profit of a select few people who are the bourgeois class. now let's talk about Low capitalism and high capitalism as Hatfield understands it. Like I said, he describes low capitalism as pre-industrialized capitalism. What does that mean? So when Marx was living in England during the height of the Industrial Revolution, he witnessed the evolution of Europe's localized pre-industrial mode of production into a global marketplace of mass production. So prior to this change, the production of goods and services took place in homes or small workshops for the purpose of sale in local markets or for direct consumption. production typically occurred as a cooperative process between families and villagers, masters and apprentice. The master blacksmith, for example, owned his shop. And personally transferred his knowledge of how to make a product from start to finish to his apprentice. He owned all the tools and materials he needed, aka then means of production, and he could decide how and when to work based on his own need. And the industrial revolution replaced this small-scale economic structure with the factory system, in which machines made manufacturing on a massive scale possible. and labor was divided into these small, repetitive tasks. Production became about generating profit rather than meeting need, and artisans could no longer compete with the speed and cheapness of factory production. So most independent craftsmen were forced to relocate to these crowded urban centers to become wage laborers and factories where the capitalist or the bourgeois owned the means of production, they owned the factory, they owned the product, they own the materials used to make the product, and exploit their workers' need for financial sustenance to meet the demands of mass global consumption. And this results in another thing we talked about in a previous episode, the sense of alienation from the product, from the work that modern workers and workers in the Industrial Revolution experience today. in episode three of Cobra Lily, Guy, Maria's boyfriend talked about how he worked in a salad factory for a month where he's making those pre-made salads you get in the grocery store. So he has no connection to the product. He's not growing the lettuce or the tomatoes going in the salad. He's not gonna eat the salad. The salad isn't to meet the needs of anyone he knows, it's just to generate a profit for the company that. He's working for. It has nothing to do with him. It doesn't really mean anything to him. So there's this sense of alienation or detachment from one's own work. Hatfield goes on to say that since capitalism is a system based on the continual profit of a select few people, the bourgeoisie, it was ultimately the case that widespread monogamy simply proved to be less monetarily profitable for the bourgeois than hypergamy did. So he was saying that prior to our embrace of high capitalism, much of the female population was kind of cut off from What he describes as bourgeois exploitation, as they remained in their homes, performing household tasks, raising children, taking care of the family with their husbands, not doing paid wage labor. But this arrangement was ultimately unprofitable for the bourgeois class because half of the population was not generating income, was not contributing as directly to the economy, was not paying taxes. Now, obviously raising the workforce and buying products in service of child rearing, it does contribute to the economy, but it didn't contribute to the economy as much as working for a wage that could be taxed does. Since such an arrangement was obviously highly unprofitable for the bourgeois class, he says, feminism was allowed to flourish and was directly promoted, while bourgeois businessmen gladly allowed women to enter the workforce and contribute in massive numbers to the expansion of the power of bourgeois industries. He then explains how women's economic autonomy as a result of entering the workforce, along with the replacement of traditional, more religious culture with what he calls high capitalist monoculture, made women less likely to want or need to engage in monogamy. He has one really spicy statement that I disagree with but I find evocative. The simple reason that that they largely preferred to be hypergamous while working for corporations as opposed to being monogamous while working for their husband is because the path of corporate concubinage was more in accordance with their biological imperative. I don't like that, but let's move on. And a note on his idea of high capitalist monoculture. I'm just gonna read this quote. The nineteen fifties, though so commonly idealized by conservatives today, was actually a time of rampant substance abuse, infidelity, and general degeneracy in the West as compared with previous times. It was in that decade that the rapid growth and proliferation of a new degenerative capitalist monoculture occurred. he said it was and is characterized by the spread of unhealthy and commodified food, the propagation of increasingly vulgar and degenerate commercialized music, and the replacement of more gentle traditional and localized cultural practices with new commodified practices, based heavily on the inordinate idealization of so-called celebrities, be they actresses, musicians, sports stars, or what have you. And I didn't get to the portion of the manifesto where he criticizes porn and dating influencers, the part that I had access to, he kind of like makes statements grouping them in with this high capitalist, like immoral monoculture. Porn he characterizes as as downstream from this monoculture. he goes on to say that this transformation accelerated through the sixties and seventies, resulting in a society that had become practically unrecognizable from how it had been during the times before the Second World War. he describes our current society as a hypergamy state, a society where hypergamy rather than monogamy is the dominant mode of intimacy. And he defines hypergamy as the opposite of monogamy. So I guess basically casual sex as opposed to procreative, like marital relations. What's interesting though is he's not a Christian and he doesn't really make like religious or Christian or pro-marriage arguments in this either. He's really talking from like a materialist, like Marxist lens. although he does make statements that I would describe as slut shaming. And you could say that that's a component of Christian purity culture. this is probably the most interesting part of the manifesto. He goes out to delineate three classes. Chads or the sexually favored males are at the top. They basically are the bourgeois. Their lives are just demonstrably better from the time of their birth because, as he says, quote, beauty is objective and the perception of it is measurable in the brain. He compares them to the bourgeoisie, which controls the means of production. I think using his lens you could say that they control the means of reproduction. And he says that because the excessive amount of joyous triumph that favored males are granted, many of them become arrogant assholes who behave poorly toward women and the males beneath them. And that's not untrue, but he clearly is very stuck on the morality and the attitude of these so-called Chads to the point where it kind of sounds like ressentiment, the concept that Nietzsche was talking about earlier. Basically having intense Envy and hatred toward those who you perceive as being unfairly above you. He places women in the middle of this hierarchy because they have access to what he describes as an abundance of intimacy and no systemic reason not to engage in hypergamy, allowing them to, of course, select for the best mate possible. And I would add that in the age of dating apps and financial independence, women more than ever can enjoy this like unprecedented level of sexual freedom, not to mention birth control. I'm actually surprised he didn't mention birth control. he points out all these studies about how female children are cherished and heard more than their male counterparts, citing studies about how this occurs in the classroom and within the family unit. I have no comment on that. I didn't read the studies. But he's saying that that also places them above the lowest tier, which we're gonna get to in a minute. But he does make an interesting caveat that I've never ever heard any other incel or incel adjacent. figure talk about, which is that despite women's sexual freedom, women experience, quote, terrible ordeals and undergo severe mental health problems, which mostly stem from the general social chaos that exists within the hypergamy state. He talks about how women experience, quote, odious harassment from unwanted and degenerated common males, as well as brutal, perverted, and excessively lustful treatment at the hands of the more barbarous and debauched examples. Other favored male partners. He uses these high-profile examples of male athletes and musicians being found guilty of sex crimes, domestic violence, etc. he also brings up the quote, sinister and brutish culture. Unquote in the average Western high school where many girls are kind of thrust into the sexual marketplace without much protection. And he points out how many of them are pressured or forced into sex at the hands of older males. And then of course at the bottom of the hierarchy we have the common males, the incels, the proletariat, who he calls the dispossessed, who are at the bottom because they're cut off from this like warmth, affection, intimacy, partnership that men supposedly are entitled to. And I don't really need to get into much more than that in the manifesto. I think the way that he describes this breakdown of society is overly simplistic. It is inflected with this seething incel ideology and I think ultimately wrong because it is so influenced by incel ideology. had this kid not gotten pipelined into all this weird online stuff, he could very well be alive and happy and maybe even in a relationship today. I don't have sympathy for the incels who really hate women and who wish harm on us, but I do have sympathy for those who find themselves pipelined into this really like harmful, suicidal, nihilistic, online world because it is a a huge tragedy for someone to lose their youth and their happiness to such a thing. Not to say that they don't have free will, but it's complicated. And I I can understand in some ways the frustration of of men who feel so inadequate. and there's a period in my early twenties where I couldn't really have sex because of a medical issue I was having and intense, intense anxiety I had around any kind of sexual encounter. And I too felt unwanted and weird and like there was something deeply, deeply wrong with me and I felt very unlovable I first kind of took interest in this incel stuff because I was interested in the psychology of it. I had a viral TikTok that resulted in me getting a lot of like hate comments from incels and I became interested in why they spoke in such a way. But a part of me could relate to their sense of alienation and and frustration with their own perceived sexual inadequacy. thankfully my issues have been since resolved from that and I didn't go down this horrible pipeline in into misogyny and hatred. I don't really have anything to say to the men who actively promote this stuff and who have really internalized these ideas. but I do have sympathy for and I choose to have some sort of hope for the men who find themselves kind of in the middle. I feel sad for them. in the way that I feel sad for anyone who who has strayed so far from like happiness and and God's light, you know, and who are cut off from the amazingness of women. I hope that those who have not fully planted their feet in this ideology, can find their way out of it. we did those two episodes about men's issues based on, you know, the Bell Hooks book. And those are kind of the people I'm trying to speak to. I'm not really invested in trying to change the hearts and minds of like incels who've been thinking in this way for years and who have decided that this is their lot in life. I think that's their choice and I don't think there's anything I can do about it. but for the men many of whom are not even men yet, a lot of young guys falling into these spaces, I do want to express my my sympathy for them and I do hope that they get out of this line of thinking. I also wanna move on from this whole topic pretty soon 'cause it's so It's so dark and I wanna move on to something more positive, but before I did that I did wanna get this episode out. because I think it's really important. I think it's a nuanced and layered topic and I think we need to critically engage with it if we're gonna deal with any of this stuff. This red pill stuff is becoming more widespread every day and we need to contend with it. We can't just continue to dismiss these ideas as something fringe when it's it's becoming so mainstream. So this has been my attempt to critically engage with that. I hope you guys found it interesting. I hope it made you think. I don't endorse any of these ideas. I'm just talking about them as they exist. And I hope it was worth a listen. So if you got this far, thank you for listening and we'll be back next week. Thank you.