Part One: From Elliott Rodger to Clavicular: The Story of Incel Evolution

Robert explains how we went from incels complaining about women online to the influencer Clavicular with special guest Kat Abughazaleh. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that has just suffered yet again the indignity of a major technical malfunction.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  And right at the point, the day after, we got approval from Netflix to stream full video episodes worldwide. Minus Korea and Vietnam, I'm so sorry, I have no idea why.

• 0:26Robert Evans?

  Sorry, guys, I can't, I can't influence Netflix policy and Vietnam, but at least we're on everywhere now.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  We're on everywhere now. Except Korea and Vietnam. Except.

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, except for Korea and Vietnam. Unfortunately, my camera's not working right, so we had to use the webcam on my laptop, which does not look as good, which will also not change how 90% of people experience this podcast, because it is an audio medium. Why even attach visuals to it? No one knows.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  To be fair, buddy, I think you look fine.

• 0:56Robert Evans?

  Thanks, Sophie.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I think you look great. Kat thinks you look great.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

  You know who looks great is our guest, Kat Abu. Kat, how are you doing? Welcome back.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I'm good, and now I go by my full government name, Kat Abu Ghazali.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  You're right, because you're running for Congress.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Because I'm running for Congress.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  I have to call you something different now.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Kat, you want to give a little PSA plug for the campaign up top?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  I would love to. Hi, everyone, I'm Kat, I'm running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois. That goes from Uptown Chicago, up to Evanston, over to Skokie, all the way to Algonquin and Crystal Lake. It is gerrymandered to hell, and I'm trying to represent you. I am one of the top three viable candidates in this race. Election Day is March 17th. I'm the only one of those three people that has not met with or submitted a position paper to AIPAC. We are the only campaign in this race funded by small dollar donations. I have a cat named Heater, she's orange, and yeah, that's kind of my thing. Oh, and I covered the far right as a researcher and journalist, you might have heard me here before, when my microphone was dogshit.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  Yes. Now your microphone's better and you're running for Congress.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  And listeners, Kat's my friend.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  And Sophie's my friend.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  And our friend.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Okay, you can, you're also included.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  I get to, I get to jink on there.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, Robert and I took so many shots of Malort together at the Onion.

• 2:11Robert Evans?

  We did.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Launch party.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  Oh, Malort.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  I was like, I bet I can do more than you. And I did. And it's the only time I've ever even somewhat blacked out besides literally being drugged by someone unconsentually.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  That was like drinking liquid Band-Aids. It was crazy.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  We're then described as a spicy WD-40.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that, that does prove your, your rightfulness for the spot that you're seeking is your ability to win the Malort contest.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  That party, that party was wild. And then you, and then you were like, Sophie, come with me to the other bar. And we drank something good. I don't remember what it was. It was like something.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Mixed thing.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  I just had like five shots of Malort.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And then, and then Ben took me and was, and just like his standard intro, it was, I remember because it was so fucking funny. His standard intro to me to people whose names I don't remember. This is Sophie. She's the future.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  The funniest, funniest way to introduce so funny. It's how I also talk about you.

• 3:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's how I do too, honestly.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  And then we went up to text notes, Don Lemon. And he's like, hi, Don Lemon. This is Sophie. She's the future.

• 3:18Robert Evans?

  That was so weird.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I feel like, let's get a picture together. I was like, this is all, this is all on you, man.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Wow. I, I, I just really enjoyed, I really enjoyed Robert taking a picture of, of your, of our young Garrison with Don Lemon with full flash.

• 3:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we got to turn it off.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about a time where we were at a party with Don Lemon and drank too much Malort.

• 3:46Robert Evans?

  And just fucking blinded his ass with my, I have one of these huge Chinese phones that, look at the fucking light on the back of this. This thing, this thing's flash goes off like a federal flashbang. Like Bor-Tac guys don't have flashbangs this intense.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I'm crying a little bit. And normally if I'm crying on this podcast, it's because of something heinous Robert has told me, but it's really just.

• 4:11Robert Evans?

  Oh, I'll, I'll, I'll make you cry. Don't worry. We'll all be crying before this is over. Yes. Cat's got the right idea.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Anyways, back to the job. Really enjoyed Memory Lane though. I'm glad Cat's, I'm really glad Cat's here.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  So good to be back.

• 4:27Speaker 03

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• 4:32Speaker 04

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• 5:01Robert Evans?

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• 5:37Robert Evans?

  This is, this is gonna be a memory lane trip for Kat and me, because Kat, you also spent a sizable chunk of the aughts spending way too much time reading about incredibly online right-wing maniacs, right?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I did.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so-

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Who are we talking about?

• 5:55Robert Evans?

  Great question. Have you, have you heard of Clavicular?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Oh, my fucking god. Are we talking about Clavicular today?

• 6:03Robert Evans?

  A bit, yes. Today and tomorrow, we'll talk about him a bit. We're explaining how you get from, you know, May 23rd, 2014, when Elliot Roger goes on his shooting spree and killing spree in Isla Vista, California, which killed six and injured 14, and was like the first big incel mass murder event, right? And it's kind of the thing that put incels on the map. I'm gonna guess most of the audience, the first time you heard incel was in the wake of that spree killing, right? Unless you were a very online weirdo prior to May 23rd, 2014, you probably hadn't heard of these people. But through a series of very unlikely and in some ways confusing events,

• 6:44Robert Evans?

  this this subculture that kind of comes onto everybody's radar in the wake of this mass murder has kind of led most recently and really just the last couple of weeks to a massive degree of fame and and general internet bemusement over this guy Clavicular. And there's a direct line between like the first incels and the birth of the incel subculture to the looks maxing subculture, which is where this guy-

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So smashing your jaws with hammers.

• 7:10Robert Evans?

  Yes, hitting your jaws with hammers, taking methamphetamine to be hot, right? Like all of that stuff.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  My my first introduction to Clavicular was a random TikTok where Logan Paul was talking about how unbelievably handsome this person is. I did not bother to look it up because I don't care who Logan Paul thinks is handsome. But now we're on Behind the Bastards talking about it, so it all makes sense.

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  You'll get to see him in a second.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  I want to describe just like in terms of, thank you so much for this topic, Robert. I'm thrilled and this is the exact fucked up shit that I'm glad we get to dive into. You know me so well. But the most fascinating thing about incel culture is how so much of it is like this weird, both hyper masculine and also like homoerotic subtones of what they think like women want. And it's like this like Chad, which is incel vernacular, by the way. It's like all buff and all this stuff when it's like, I don't know. I like my guy that runs the onion and makes me laugh.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:11Robert Evans?

  Well, that's called gesture maxing.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Oh, that's gesture maxing. I'm so sorry. Thank you. Thank you.

• 8:16Robert Evans?

  We've got a new term for that. Thank God.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  But he's also just like, he's a nice man.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, women like want, in terms of being attracted to men, the vast majority just want you to like, be a good person that's like not sexist or racist or homophobic or fat or transphobic. Make them laugh and like, I don't know, close the dishwasher, which I don't do. So I need a guy to do that for me.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  It's always funny to me because I too can't love reading incels, like talk about like what you like, all of the mountains you have to cross to get like a single day. Well, you have to make sure that like your face is no wider than this, but at least this wide. And like your nose like is positioned at this part of your face and your eyes are this far apart. And like, otherwise, no one will ever love you. Whereas like living in the real world, you realize that it's mostly like, there's, there's no rules. It's just people like each other or don't usually because you like someone who's like not a dick and who has, does stuff that you find like cool and interesting and is, is fun to be around and relaxing to be around and doesn't scare you all the time by talking about like their bone

• 9:23Robert Evans?

  structure and hitting themselves in the face with a hammer. Like, these are the things real people want in relationships. And when you see like the stuff incels have talked themselves up into believing they need to do, it's just like, you really, it really makes sense like why there's been so many killings out of this community because it's like, oh yeah, they're just totally detached from reality, right? And that's what we're going to be talking about today, how this group, because what's interesting is not incels are crazy and it's not like, oh wow, clavicular, you know, the looks maxing subculture has its roots in the incel subculture. It's how has the incel subculture been so influential? Because almost everyone I know, every day uses words that like originally came out of the incel community and have now

• 10:07Robert Evans?

  just become like common Gen Z, Gen Alpha internet slang, right? Like, that's kind of the strangest thing to me about this is despite how fringe and extreme and like toxic and scary the actual incel subculture is, they've also had this like incredible history of like shotgunning terms and concepts into mass consciousness. That's both like really surprising and kind of worrying. And so that's, that's kind of like what we'll be talking about this week.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Awesome. And yeah, also in a way that the right really struggles to penetrate pop culture, but incel culture hasn't had that issue as much.

• 10:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's moved like a fucking knife through butter. Yeah. It's, it's really been weird. So about a couple of weeks before I sat down to write these episodes, on February 6th, 2026, this Twitter post that those of you with the Video podcast, we'll see, I'll read it to everybody else, went viral, reaching about 24.5 million people through Twitter's own unreliable counter, but also spreading in screen cap form across every other type of social media. I found it like with something like 20,000 upvotes and read it, you know, just in one post, like this is all over the place. And you, there's a good chance you've seen it. It's a post from some guy called Chromeheart 600. And he writes, "Clavicular was mid Jester gooning when a group of phoids came and spiked his cortisol levels.

• 11:25Robert Evans?

  Is ignoring the phoids while munting and mugging moids more useful than SMB Chad fishing in the club?" And that's just such like, that's an insane series of words. Like it's completely impenetrable to people who have not spent way too much time online. But at the same time, it's like, it's kind of enticing. Like you see this and you're like, what the fuck does that mean? Right? Like, and so I've seen again, once this hits, you get a bunch of people online talking and dissecting all of these terms and then remixing them and taking terms like Jester gooning and throwing them out in other circumstances. Not necessarily even knowing the original use of any of these words, right?

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  And part of why this thing went, this post went viral, you know, Clavicular was already a very influential streamer and influencer when this post went viral, otherwise it wouldn't have. But it went viral, not just because of his actual content, but because the post itself was so seemingly absurd with so many new logisms, right? That people didn't know, that folks just found themselves compelled to spread it and make fun of it. And by doing that, they kind of helped spread some of these terms around. And when you watch the attached video, because this includes a video of whatever is being described in that post of Clavicular, it doesn't make any sense, right? Like the video does not help you understand what those words say. Sophie's gonna play it for you right now. You'll hear the audio.

• 12:50Robert Evans?

  But I don't know how much help that's gonna be. It's just like a guy who looks like a kind of normal, young frat dude guy with at what looks like a frat party. There's some young women and young men behind him. He's streaming on Kick. And then, yeah, so if he's gonna hit play and you'll hear what he says.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  The caption is, "SMV Chad fishing in the club?"

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  SMV is sexual market value. And yeah, Chad fishing is people are fishing, someone's fishing for a Chad. They're talking about-

• 13:16Speaker 02

  It's like when you do like Latin classes and you're dissecting the words. And if you spent way too much time online or in right wing spaces, you're able to like do like all of the etymology.

• 13:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. You find your nominative, your genitive, your data, accusative, ad infiniti. Right. But all the just weird terms freaks made up to talk about why they're not, you know, having sex on the internet. Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, not including Robert because he's my Christina Yang, but I have never disliked men more than I have since the start of this year. This is going to deeply be disturbing and play.

• 13:48Robert Evans?

  Just you wait.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  My friend likes your cameraman. Really likes you. What's your name?

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Tell us your name. Yo, W. His name is Kirk. Kirk.

• 14:01Robert Evans?

  So, I would describe that as a pretty normal guy trying to film in the middle of a frat party and some girls are making fun of him.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  I would describe that as jester gooning.

• 14:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's jester gooning, right? They're jester gooning on him. So, they're saying clavicular was trying to attract these sorority girls by doing that. When the girls came up and they spiked his cortisol levels, they got him flustered. And they believe that when your cortisol levels get spiked, your testosterone production drops, right? And so that's the gist of this, right? And then this later leads to him getting like mogged on or kind of made to look sort of shitty by a much more buff frat leader, right? And that's kind of the genesis of this whole nonsense. Like, that's what all of this terminology actually stands for. And-

• 14:49Robert Evans?

  What's weird to me about this is just how much of the pieces of this, because even if you didn't understand a lot of this, you've probably heard, you may have heard the term "foids" because that's a common incel term for women. It means like "femoids," it's a way of dehumanizing women, right? You've heard the term "gooning," probably. You may have heard some of these like references to cortisol levels or mugging, like pieces of this have been spreading all over the internet for years. And what's weird to me is how widely incel terminology has broken containment, because you don't see this for most other weird internet subcultures, even most extreme violent internet subcultures. Like, when I think back to the time I spent reporting on like 8chan and these online neo-Nazi

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  movements, there's a couple of pieces, they used the term "based" that's kind of spread out of those communities. But there's not, most of the words they use are still kind of nonsense to the average person. Whereas incel terms seem to like, every couple of years, you get like a new font of them washing into the culture. So why is that happening?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Or a meme.

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or a meme.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Like the Wojaks.

• 15:52Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And we'll talk about that in a bit. So I want to talk about like, why that shit is happening. And it may seem weird to some people that, because like, Clavicular is a traditionally handsome guy, we could say, right? Like, if you just see that dude on the street, you wouldn't be like, oh, that's an incel-looking dude, right? You'd be like, well, that's just a guy, right?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  I wouldn't leave my drink uncovered around him.

• 16:14Robert Evans?

  Of course not. That has nothing to do with it. That's the jester gooning. But half of this guy's videos, like, content is like videos of him hanging out with Andrew Tate in Florida clubs, and they're always surrounded by women. That doesn't seem like someone who should have any relation to the incel community, based on like what incels are famous for, which is not hanging out in clubs surrounded by sorority girls, right? So how did this happen? Like, how do we go from a bunch of online weirdos who are like so upset at the fact that like, women don't behave the way they want them to, that they're doing mass killings, to this guy who's like, famous for being handsome and hitting himself in the face with a hammer, like going to frat parties and having impenetrable internet dialogue spread about whatever happened there?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  He hit himself in the face with a hammer?

• 16:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Sophie, you don't know about bone smashing?

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  It's key, Sophie.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  I do. I just like, did everything I could not to look into this person.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Because I just simply don't care about men, but here we are.

• 17:12Robert Evans?

  Here we are, Sophie. So how and why that all happened is the story we're going to tell this week. And to tell that story, we got to go back to 1997 and the place where all great evil begins, Canada.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:25Robert Evans?

  That's actually very unfair.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  So unfair, Canada.

• 17:29Robert Evans?

  It's and then it's unfair to the very first incels because the phrase involuntary celibate originates from a Canadian student named Alana and she seems to prefer, based on the stuff I've read, not giving a last name. My understanding is that very young person, obviously. I think she was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and because she's a young person kind of living out in a not huge, heavily inhabited part of Canada, she's having a lot of trouble like finding people, right? Like a fairly nor especially in 1997, a fairly normal experience for a ton of people. And so as a result, she finds herself like involuntarily celibate. And in other words, she can't like find any people that she has this like she she feels like in common with

• 18:13Robert Evans?

  that she feels she can be open with about who she is. She doesn't know how to start those conversations. She's a self-described late bloomer. And she just starts thinking like, well, maybe other people are going through this and maybe the internet can be a way for us to kind of bridge some of the gaps between us. I found an article on her with the BBC and quote, "I thought maybe there are other late bloomers out there. I noticed people would talk about the lonely virgin and make silly jokes about people who didn't start dating in their teens. She rightly felt like this was messed up and wanted to create a place where she and other people struggling with sex and relationships could commiserate. Since it was 1997, she created a website and named it Alana's Involuntary Celibate Project."

• 18:52Robert Evans?

  So that's, that's sort of the origin point of all of this stuff. And it's perfectly banal. Like it's perfectly harmless. A lot is not doing anything wrong. She's trying to connect with other young awkward people who are trying to figure out life. She described her form as a friendly place and it was a place that both men and women frequented and they would go there and they could talk about being lonely and they could wonder aloud, what's like, what am I doing wrong? Why am I not meeting anybody? Do I need to do differently?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, once again, men have to take credit for women's work.

• 19:23Robert Evans?

  Right. That is a big part of this story is how the women get completely edged out of this community and of this like concept. And it turns much more toxic as a result. Because when it is mixed gender, when it's Alana, you know, and, and a bunch of like, when it's a bunch of men and women on this forum, the purpose is not to hate on people for not dating them. The purpose is to figure out, what do we need to do different in order to change this thing about our lives? Right. Which is a reasonable thing to ask. She recalled, there was probably a bit of anger, and some women were clue, a bit clueless about how men are unique human individuals. But in general, it was a supportive place. So even then, there were some signs that like, some of these

• 20:05Robert Evans?

  guys seem to be surprised that like, women have feelings. That, and she's noticing this, right? And that's kind of weird. But a couple, one couple who meets on the site gets married, and people get better there, including Alana. And in fact, she, over time, stops being involuntarily celibate. She finds people, she starts dating, she moves on with her life. And to be entirely fair to her, she is not the origin of the term incel. She comes up with the term involuntary celibate, but her preferred abbreviation was invcel, I N V cell, which was never gonna go viral, the way incel has.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  No, it's harder to say.

• 20:44Robert Evans?

  It's harder to say. And an unnamed member of the community suggested incel might flow better off the tongue. The term originally referred to people of any gender, right? Like, it was not specifically just for angry young men. So again, a couple, after a couple of years of this, Alana's life changes. She starts meeting people and dating, and she leaves the community she'd started around the turn of the millennium. The website she'd built and the community on it wound down, but the term incel stayed in use. And it kept on being adopted by people who, well, well, they wanted to have sex, but they weren't having sex, right? Like, that's kind of the whole deal. Over time, being online stopped being a thing only nerds did, and started becoming the norm, as more and more people started.

• 21:27Robert Evans?

  Communicating via the internet, some of them, like Alana, became aware of the fact that there were a lot of young people who wanted to have sex but weren't, right? That there's still a lot of these lonely virgins out there and that this is actually a sizable community of people online. And some of the folks who have this realization hear cash register sounds in their ears. And this is where enter the pickup artist community, right? Ah, yeah. There's that good, that good far right, men's rights movement prehistory.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Please, I love a good pickup artist.

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Gimme condescension, women love it.

• 22:04Robert Evans?

  We're gonna give you something slightly different. I thought I was gonna start by reading you some old pickup artistry stuff. And you, we both be like, wow, it's fucked up how crazy and bigoted this old pickup artistry book is. I had the opposite experience. So pickup artists started out well before the internet, right? This is not a thing. I've, I asked a couple of different friends going into this. When do you think pickup artistry got started as like a, a social, you know, movement or grift or whatever you want to call it? And everyone guessed like the 90s, basically.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Can I guess?

• 22:37Robert Evans?

  But the, yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Chicago World Fair.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  Okay, you went back too far.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  It just feels like it'd be a thing there, you know, where it's like, everyone come here, I'll show you how to get a woman.

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Introducing the concept of women.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  The Chicago World's Fair next to the light booth.

• 22:56Robert Evans?

  Pickup artistry does predate the internet, though. You're not that far off, is the crazy thing. The official birth of pickup artistry as a concept was the book How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber, published in 1968. So this actually does go back, like, that's not that long after the World's Fair.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  I was pretty off. You don't have to make me feel better, Robert.

• 23:19Robert Evans?

  I think you did the best. You did the best. I'll say that. You're, you're, you're the best at this.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 23:24Robert Evans?

  So today, that book is so obscure that Wikipedia, if you like, look that title up, they just have a full page for the movie inspired by the book that came out in 1978 and starred Desi Arnaz. I'm gonna have to read that or watch that fucker at some point. But Weber's book was a bestseller and you can still find copies, full copies of it for free online, which is how I came across the cover. And, and look at this thing. Look at this. It's a, the top is How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber. And then there's a picture of like 10 young women all kind of posing together. And then underneath the picture is featuring interviews with 25 beautiful girls.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Incredible. I love it.

• 24:04Robert Evans?

  Incredible.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  All of their arms are crossed. None of them are smiling and they're all traditionally thin. Got it. They all look like they're gonna beat the shit out of you.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they, they have angry smiles, I'd say.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a, uh, new internet enemy, Terrence would say, they're smizing.

• 24:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're smizing. Now, when I saw this cover, I was like, oh yeah, we're, I'm gonna, I'm gonna find a couple of quotes about this that is the worst thing any of us has ever read. And that's not what happened. I wasn't really planning to do like much more than reference this book because I wanted to focus most on the online community. But right in the intro, something did kind of strike me, right? And this part is kind of pretty gross. Weber opens the book by describing a little tragedy that has happened to most men. You're walking down the street and you see a, you see a beautiful, uh, I, I'm gonna say you see a beautiful woman. Weber uses the term girl exclusively because it is 1968.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 25:00Robert Evans?

  You see this person, but you don't actually say anything to them. And then she like walks by and you never see them again. And you have this like horrified, this is how he describes it. Should I throw myself at her feet and promise my saving, her, my savings account, my car, even my brand new golf clubs? Or should I just grab her long golden locks and drag her off into the sunset? So this is written in 1968, right?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Sophie.

• 25:23Robert Evans?

  No.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  No, please do not grab her by the long golden locks. Also.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Also, don't offer me your fucking golf clubs. I don't want your golf.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  I don't want your golf clubs.

• 25:33Robert Evans?

  No, it was 68.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  I'll take your savings account.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Even then, even then, I got my own. Don't need it.

• 25:40Robert Evans?

  That, that's super gross, but if you recall from the title, the premise of this book is that he's interviewed 25 beautiful girls, right? And he makes it clear, these are, he's interviewed 25 young women who are single. And most of the book is him giving quotes that they give about what they want in like a, a man, or what they want when someone's like picking them up, or like what they find attractive when someone's flirting with them. And so surprisingly, as gross and as very 60s as this is, it's a thousand times more woke than any modern insul or pick-up artist shit. Because the basic premise of Weber's book is that if you want to be attractive to women, you should learn what women want.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  What women want matters. Women like dating too, and it's fine to ask them out, but you need to understand what they want from you. Otherwise, they won't be into you. That is so far advanced from modern pick-up artistry and insul culture. It feels like a different world. And I shouldn't be looking at this 1960 book where he talks about knocking a woman out and be like, wow, this is so much better than like modern PUA stuff. But it does treat women like human beings with actual individual wants.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Which isn't true, by the way. We're all relapse.

• 26:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Foids, uh, to use the current parlance. And then there's moids for men too. Don't worry, folks. They've got, they've got more than one term.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  It was DEI in the insul vernacular.

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  They were like, well, we have to include moids here too.

• 27:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this is kinda how the, the pick-up artist subculture really gets started. And I do find it interesting that that's sort of the first work on it. But obviously, over time, things get more and more deranged. And in the early 2000s, Neil Strauss goes undercover in the pick-up artist community that has popped up in the early 2000s and kinda come out of the late 90s. And he writes a 2005 bestselling book called The Game. And the game is pick-up artistry, right? And he's talking about all these crazy tactics, right? That that guys have invented, stuff like nagging, you know, basically where you're you're kind of insulting or mocking a woman to try to make her like want to to get your affection. Stuff like peacocking, where you're dressing like crazily,

• 27:53Robert Evans?

  you know, and wearing like ridiculous fedoras with literal feet, peacock feathers, because like, look, all that matters is you, you know, if you if you get noticed, right? And that's so different because Weber is literally quoting women saying stuff like, I like it when a man just like talks to me and tells me what he wants. Whereas by the 21st century, these guys like, no, no, no, you have to like, you have to, you have to activate the back portion of her brain that responds to color in the way of like an animal on the Serengeti, by wearing feathers in the back of your hat. Otherwise, she'll never find love.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  You won't stand a chance out there.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In other words, Weber's 21st century descendants describe women as like enemies in a video game. They're basically mindless automatons that you can hack via the right series of inputs. And that is the first major shift that we get that makes the incel community possible, is this shift from, well, I'm a gross man and I'll joke about knocking a lady out, but fundamentally, I want to know what women want. Where and by the time you hit 2005 or so, women don't want things. Women respond to inputs like a video game, right? That's the big first shift that we have to make before we can get to incel. And I think that's an important point.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Ew.

• 29:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's gross. But this is also, you know, a big part of where terms like alpha come from, right? Like, early pick-up artistry starts reintroducing that concept, which is based on a misunderstanding of how wolves work, right? And that's all of like pick-up artistry. It's a bunch of hacks and cognitive tricks and like psychological phenomena that is supposed to work for these kind of elaborate, contrived reasons they come up with. So we'll talk about what happens to this first gen and second generation of pick-up artists and kind of like how that feeds into the incel community later. But first, let's feed you to our advertisers.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Hooray.

• 29:44Speaker 06

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• 30:14Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 31:13Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  We're back. I hope it was the Portland Police Bureau again. I was so tickled to see them advertising on our show, Sophie.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  I was nodding, got it removed immediately.

• 31:36Robert Evans?

  Anyway, I just wanted their money. Look, they're gonna spend it on more tear gas if we don't take it.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 31:45Robert Evans?

  I'm sure those are different budgets. So...

• 31:48Speaker 01

  P and L.

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  That's a different P and L.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Wait, have y'all ever had ICE advertised on here?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I know that ICE was doing like Spotify advertisements.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:56Robert Evans?

  Washington State Highway Patrol, but not ICE.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  No, we never got, we never, fortunately, we, you know.

• 32:02Robert Evans?

  FBI ad, right?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  We've never had ICE, ICE ads, because if we did, somebody would, people would have told me.

• 32:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  But we, yeah, and then I would have freaked out and got that removed immediately, but no. Fortunately.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  And this is the Chumba Casino ads, those used to be the most common ones I get when I listen to Behind the Bastards.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Or like ads for literal gold and things like that, but.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Y'all are just like Alex Jones.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Just like Alex Jones.

• 32:29Robert Evans?

  Well, I don't have my own brand of supplements yet.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yet.

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  But you know what? If you want to send me $50 and just take a fatal dose of vitamin B12 and caffeine, you know, with a little bit of lead mixed in for good measure, we'll call it even. We can call that my brain force.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I would totally sell like mineral sunscreen.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  You're just selling, selling five shots of Malort.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, five shots of Malort. It'll power you through anything. Including talking to Don Lemon. Don Lemon's taking so many strays in this, in this podcast. Yeah. Sorry, Don.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, look, after what he's had to deal with this year, Don Lemon, we're good, you and me.

• 33:07Robert Evans?

  He's, he's fine.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  We're fine, Don.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Sorry, that shit happened to you, I get it.

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it sucks.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Wild.

• 33:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the first and second generation of pickup artists make a lot of money. You know, these guys are, for a couple of years, very successful and like early internet famous. So they got this kind of brief period of prominence and it fades rapidly for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that once pickup artistry becomes like famous and like regular people start to read what these guys are saying, like what they're talking about in these lectures and clinics that they're giving and like what they believe about dating, they make fun of it because it's silly, right? Like, like most people who hear about all this shit are like, well, that's ridiculous.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  And when you add that to the fact that none of this stuff works, right? Like, if you're otherwise handsome. And you dress up ridiculously and go to the club. Sure, like, maybe you'll have good luck. Or like, if you're really charismatic and also dressing like a crazy person. Again, maybe stuff will work out for you. But if you're the kind of person who's paying that guy to tell you how to wear a fedora, it's probably not going to work for you, right? And that's 99% of the guys.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  This has given, gotten so much hate for actual fedoras, which still look cool as hell. It's an Indiana Jones hat. It's not the same shit that neckbeards wear. I just want to be clear. My grandfather used to wear a fedora every single day. He looked cool as hell. He was buried with it and I don't want them to catch these traits.

• 34:37Robert Evans?

  Finally, you listen to that, folks, online. Kat is standing up for the fedora, you know?

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I'm setting history right.

• 34:43Robert Evans?

  Reaching an arm across the aisle.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Fedoras have always been leftist coded. You can't tell me anything different.

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's fair. That's fair. It's the trilby. It's the damn trilby we gotta take down.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  The damn trilby. The boomerang or like the horseshoe we got here.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Fuck it. Yeah. So, again, most of this stuff doesn't work for most of the men who get interested and who are spending money on this. And when you're selling a solution to a problem that doesn't work, people will eventually realize they've been ripped off. You can only convince someone to go pay $1,000 or $5,000 for so many coaching sessions on how to pick up women and have them like not get any dates because you've basically taught them to run around dressed like a maniac cursing at women. And that does not work. They'll realize that you're screwing them, right? That you've lied to them and that none of this stuff is real. And this brings us to the website PUahate.com. PUahate stands for Pickup Artist Hate.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  It was launched in 2009 by several disaffected members of the Pickup Artist Community. These were not people who had offered coaching classes, but these were people who were paying for them, right? And they'd gotten fed up and realized they'd been taken advantage of. So they start this website. When they announced their new forum, I found like in the Wayback Machine, the very first like page on that website was like a "this new forum will be up Sunday or sooner" thing with a spatter of blood underneath it, right? Before the forum's active, like that's the, that's the little header that they, that they put on the internet to like tell people that it's coming, which like, at the time, maybe you would have noticed, there were a lot of websites that young men and gamers use

• 36:26Robert Evans?

  that would just have random blood spatters on them. You know, in the early 2000s, a lot of forums did shit like this. But given what comes out of PUahate.com, it's hard not to see it as like this kind of foreboding message about what was coming later. Now, per the Wayback Machine, the actual forum launches a couple of days later in late 2009, and the landing page features a common JPEG of a man in a suit flipping the bird, and then a content warning that says, "Adult content and not safe for work," you know, "Don't view this if you're under 21," and you have the option to enter the forum or leave the website. Those who chose to enter saw an advertisement for the Barry Kirky Radio Show, which was a, I think now defunct podcast, that mocked

• 37:07Robert Evans?

  the seduction community, which is what Pickup Artist Fans had branded themselves. The first actual saved copy of the forum itself I found is from 2011. And at that point, it's toxic, but it's not a guy's gonna go on a killing spree toxic, right? It's like, young men on the internet, normal toxic. Most of the posts are like, people shit-talking different Pickup Artists, or linking other articles where people reveal, you know, uncomfortable or embarrassing details from like famous guys like Mystery and the Pickup Artist community. But even at this early stage, you could see some signs that community members were branching out from insulting seduction influencers, to trying to puzzle out the mysteries of women. There are threads on hypnotic dating,

• 37:52Robert Evans?

  which I'll have to look into at some point. There's a thread on how and why women test men.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Don't love the phrasing.

• 37:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, great stuff. And there's also a thread counting down the days until Mystery's daughter turns 18, which was, again, it's gross.

• 38:09Robert Evans?

  But like that was a huge thing on the internet for Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. So it's not new either, right?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  No, and it's still and it's still happening. I'm thinking of like when the Cash Me Outside girl, Bad Baby, I think is her stage name, turned 18, there was like a countdown to her posting on OnlyFans and she like made millions in dollars on in one day, which was just disturbing on so many levels.

• 38:33Robert Evans?

  I never heard of that.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  It was a bummer.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Speaking of things that will disappoint you. These ads.

• 38:45Speaker 06

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• 39:15Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 40:25Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So in short, this, the early, in 2011, the Pickup Artist Hate Forum is gross and a lot of stuff that's really toxic, but nothing that's like crazy for the internet and nothing that would have like really stood out. There weren't really extremism researchers trawling the internet in the same way that there have been, you know, for the last 10 years or so back then. But there wasn't much that would have set this community out ahead of the others by that point in time, that I'm seeing at least. But over the coming months and years, Pickup Artist Hate evolved into one of the most extreme storehouses for misogynistic content on the internet. And this happens for a couple of reasons. For one, the early 2000s also see the rise of the men's rights movement. This happens alongside

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  pickup artistry and a lot of men, early men's rights activists are either former pickup artists or like other people who are kind of dissatisfied with what they actually get out of pickup artistry. The MRA toxic subculture starts with these, it starts with a lot of complaints about, on the surface, what seem like reasonable issues, like guys, if they're giving you the elevator pitch for men's rights, will be like, well, you know, single fathers have all of these different legal problems if they're trying to pursue custody, right? Right. And some people will be like, oh, well, maybe they're talking about a real issue. All this stuff is just a comment for hating women and wanting to take away women's rights. Like, if you actually get into what these people are saying, it's not, I want to be treated more fairly by the courts. It's, I don't think women should have checkbooks

• 41:54Robert Evans?

  and I don't think my wife should have been able to leave me, right? Yes. Fantasies of violence and murder are common with MRA content. And around the same time, so this is bubbling up through the early 2000s into the aughts, and at the same time, the incel community has kept evolving, right? After 1997, it's continued to change. You know, Alana leaves around 2000. And so, per an article published in the Journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "By the 2000s, incels began to inhabit spinoff forums such as LoveShy and incel support. LoveShy, with a more relaxed content moderation policy, began to house the more extreme elements of the growing movement." And Alana had noticed from the start, there were some men who didn't seem to realize that women

• 42:36Robert Evans?

  were people. That becomes more common, but now that there's not any moderation on these forums that have descended from hers, no one's pushing back. And over time, the, the women who might have found themselves drawn in the same way that Alana was to, to communities like this? We're just looking for a place where they could commiserate on, well, it's kind of hard to find a date. I don't know how to do this. I would like some advice. They stop showing up because all these places have been colonized by these incredibly toxic, angry young men, right? And a bunch of those angry young men, including and a bunch of MRAs, all start finding PUahate.com, right? And they start posting on there and they

• 43:17Robert Evans?

  start becoming increasingly radicalized. I don't think we have a great understanding of why, but even though there's a couple of different groups that kind of come into PUahate.com, they all start adopting the term incel for themselves. That becomes extremely popular on the forum. Per The Guardian, "It became a place where sexually frustrated men could go to vent and share pseudo-scientific theories about women." And that's the other really important thing, right? Is that these guys aren't just complaining, "No one will date me." They're developing an ideology and they're developing a glossary of terms, all of which will work together to explain their theories for why women don't like them, right? That's what they start really focusing on. It stops being, "How can I do better?

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  How can I change? How can I like have more success in love?" It starts being more about, "What is it that's fundamentally wrong about how women are hardwired and about how human civilization is constructed that has made this situation so unfair for me? Because it's obviously not my fault, right?" That becomes the overwhelming drive here. So they start cutting up all of human society into three groups. There's alphas, right? And the male alphas are Chads and the female equivalent are Stacey's. And these are the beautiful people, right? These are your celebrities. These are your hotties. These are the folks that, in incel terminology, everybody wants to get with.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I don't think I've ever used the word hotties before. It was really weird.

• 44:44Robert Evans?

  It's the hotties. What do you want me to say? That's incel ideology in a nutshell.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  I just really want you to say certified baddies, please.

• 44:53Robert Evans?

  No, no, none of these people are certified something.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  I'm running for Congress. Could you please say certified baddies?

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  Certified baddie.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:02Robert Evans?

  Did that work?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  It was good enough.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Close. It was great.

• 45:06Robert Evans?

  You got your alphas up at the top, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 45:10Robert Evans?

  Most people are betas. That's normal people, right? Now, in the, in incel ideology is very rock, paper, scissors. It's very hard line and very rock, paper, scissors. So in the, in the, their evolving understanding of the world, alphas get to fuck other alphas, obviously, but also any alpha has the ability to sleep with any beta that they want. And obviously, no beta would ever say no to an alpha. Meanwhile, the third and lowest, and also betas get to partner up with each other at least, right? So at least they're not lonely. The third and lowest category, and the most oppressed people in society, the most oppressed people in all of human history are the incels, AKA the members of the PUA hate community, right?

• 45:52Robert Evans?

  They basically, in the space of a year or two, fashioned a cosmology in which they are the victims of history, right?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  It's so convenient how that works out.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  It's great. It's way better than taking ownership of your own fuckups. I need to get some of that right now. Like, you know, the, the fact that like earlier today, when I was trying to clean the house, I realized that I hadn't cleaned all week and I've got like three hours of work ahead of me? That's gotta be someone else's fault, right? That's gotta have been like written into the stars that my house would be messy. It's not my fault that my house is messy. I didn't make the mess. The mess exists.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  As Jordan Peterson would say, make, make your bed.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  When was the last time you made your bed, Robert Evans?

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  I built a bed once.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Okay. That wasn't the question.

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  Kind of counts.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  It wasn't a good bed.

• 46:45Robert Evans?

  So, once you have these categories, what you've come up with, you've decided these are the categories all people fit into, you have to have an explanation for why these categories exist in the first place, right? It kind of begs the question. So the incels start posting pictures of themselves and of each other, right? And they start posting pictures of people that they think are chads and alphas to try and suss out the rules behind who is attractive enough to find love. And They come across a real term in mathematics and in art called the golden ratio. I'm sure most people know what the golden ratio is, right? It's a term that explains this particular set of proportions we see over and over again in like natural objects like snail shells.

• 47:25Robert Evans?

  But also people seem to find this basic visual harmony that is created by the golden ratio pleasant. And so you see evidence of the golden ratio all across human art, in great architecture, in fine art like the Mona Lisa. The golden ratio is all over the fucking place. It's a real observed phenomenon, right? And all it means is that, like, for whatever reason, we find certain kind of proportions more attractive and pleasing to our eyes, right? What incels take from this is that attractiveness, and attractiveness is directly and 100% correlated with the ability to be loved, right? Being loved has nothing to do with anything but how hot you are, right? And attractiveness is something you're born with or not.

• 48:10Robert Evans?

  It's not something you can develop over time by like being cool. If somebody's not conventionally attractive, they will never find love, you know? And if that's the case, like, then it's not my fault that I'm alone, right? If I could change how I present myself to the world, if I could change how I introduce myself to people, if I could alter and learn things and like grow as a person, and maybe I will through that process, meet people and have friends and companions and find love one day, if that's possible, then the fact that I'm not currently doing it is my fault. And I don't want to accept that.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  That can't be the case.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  So it's just the fact my nose is not the right size, so I'll never be loved, right? You see, it's so poisonous and fucked up.

• 48:58Robert Evans?

  And yeah, that's what they take from the fucking golden ratio, right? If your bone structure doesn't fit the golden ratio, you're screwed forever, and that means nothing is my fault. So over the course of the next couple of years, let's say crudely from like 2009 to 2013, they work out this categorization system, which is called the PSL scale. And it's, they use it to kind of objectively Evaluate attractiveness on a scale of one to 10. Now, fucking people have forever been using a one to 10 scale to to evaluate like how attractive people are, right? I've been in high school, we were using terms like that. So this isn't new. What's new is that the incels have come up with like a scale that they're pretending has scientific rigor to it.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  It's subjective. It is the only thing that matters.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  Exactly. As opposed to like this guy you bought weed from in college being like, oh, man, that guy's a nine or whatever, right?

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  That doesn't work. It's gotta be scientific. So the name for the PSL scale comes from the three forms where incel ideology is developing and spreading during this time. There's PUA hate, of course, which helps to spawn slut hate. And I probably don't have to explain what's going on there. And then the last of the sites.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  It's so interesting that PUA hate is about not being like, it's not like, oh, we hate pick up artists, but slut hate is we hate sluts.

• 50:21Robert Evans?

  Right. Well, they do hate pick up artists, but.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  And if you, yeah, but like, not in the same way.

• 50:26Robert Evans?

  Not in the same way.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  It's very different. And if you hate sluts, we're not friends.

• 50:31Robert Evans?

  Yes. Well, there's slut hate. And then the last one is lookism, right? So it's PSL is PUA hate, slut hate and lookism. That's where the name of the scale comes from.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 50:41Robert Evans?

  And we'll talk about the concept of lookism because that's what leads us to looks maxing in a little bit. But the PSL scale comes along with this kind of alongside this, they developed this intricate vocabulary for facial features primarily. And I found a quote from an article in The Viewer by Maya Gilhogg and Isabel Lee that gives an overview of this, quote, "Different physical traits impact the PSL rating someone receives. A weak jaw, for example, makes a man a two out of 10, while a negative cantle tilt or downward slanted eyes repels universally. Both characteristics, along with many more, are considered unmasculine by the incel community. They signify weakness and low SMV, or sexual market value, the primary measure of an individual's worth according to an incel." And I don't think this gets enough attention.

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  There's some like toxic capitalism baked into incel ideology, which is the idea that like, well, everyone has an objective sexual market value.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Market value.

• 51:36Robert Evans?

  Market value.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Can I just say, I hate the fact that all of these terms are not new to me.

• 51:43Robert Evans?

  No, no, no.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  I hate the fact that I've been so steeped in the far right and covering the far right that I'm like, oh yeah, this all made like, this is not a new language. This is an inherent one.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  I know. I'm, I'm like, I unfortunately know so much about the manosphere from the work, the worker that I've done that I'm just like, oh God.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  No one wants to know this stuff.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  This stuff is so.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  And this is why you should elect me to Congress because actually no joke, part of it is like so much of this influences the Republican Party now, which is what we're going to get into. But like, this is the basis of when you're taking bad faith arguments and good faith of like the male loneliness epidemic. And it's like, okay, so what are we doing about that? Is it creating third spaces? Is it ensuring that people have their material needs met? Is it making sure that we aren't punishing vulnerability and encouraging like a feminist outlook that treats us men, men and women as equals, including men? Like men deserve that too. No? Okay.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  It's repugnant.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Are we just gonna keep taking rights from women?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  It's repugnant.

• 52:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, again, this is like Nick Fuentes thought now where it's like, the government needs to ensure that every man gets a woman. Right? Like that is where this leads and it's not, it's not quite the Republican Party platform now, but it will be, you know?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  It's getting there.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  They're getting there. So the term for this whole idea of like ranking people and using all these, all these kinds of incredibly obscure and nuanced terms for different weird little facial features. That's lookism, right? It is the name both of an online community and a broader name for this general concept of ranking people's SMV. Now, evolving incel theory does allow for the possibility of people dating or marrying outside of their sexual market value or their level of attractiveness. Right? But in their view, the only men who get to do this are like crazy. Rich guys, right? Like if you make, if you become a billionaire, then it doesn't matter if you're a slubby dude. You can date, you know, who you can date your, the, the Stazies because they want, you know, your money as a rich guy.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  And that's part of what pisses off the incels is that women have the unfair advantage of being able to date out of their league way more often than men do. Ugly poor men never date out of their league, right? But, but, you know, women get to do it all of the time for reasons that are based, and, and the reason they believe this, I will say, is based a hundred percent on the fact that they've never talked to women, right? Like they, they don't know women who are frustrated because they can't find a date. They don't know women who find it gross when a guy just tries to like buy their way into their affection because they don't know any women. They just assume all of the hot girls are engaged in hypergamy, right? They're

• 54:22Speaker 02

  And like the, when they see a woman that they're not attracted to, which is very rarely like any woman. I mean, there's the idea that a lot of, uh, you know, like, so set white dudes see worth in just the women that they would ever eventually have sex with. And when they incels, they see women in general and for most of them can see an opportunity there because women are so objectified. Because like we go out and put our makeup on and like the average woman looks a lot more dolled up than the average man. And so, but if you showed them a woman that they're not sexually attracted to, all they do is say the most vile shit to them. Somehow even more vile than the rape and death threats so many other women have gotten from incels. Like it's so fucking disgusting.

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  It's disgusting and it's also super self-defeating because a lot of these guys are just gross monsters that I don't have any sympathy for. But a lot of them are like teenage boys who aren't destined to follow to something like that forever. And you'll see on these forums, what was really heartbreaking kind of lurking in them to me would be to see a guy be like, hey, I actually had a really good experience with a girl in my school today and I think we might go out a date. And then like a million guys post, that's cope, cope. She hates you. She hates you. She doesn't like you. You fucked it up. Give up now, man. You should just kill yourself, right? Like that's literally how the community works.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I used to be doing some work, um, looking into brain cells, which was once the incel subreddit got banned, brain cells.

• 55:42Robert Evans?

  Yep, we'll talk about

• 55:43Speaker 02

  The other one, um, but one of the mods there, uh, when I was sorting by new, which I would do every day and wanted, put an ice pick through my brain because of it, uh, one of the mods wrote suicide note. And I reached out to him and I DM'd him and I was like, hey, like, Like say on like, what are you into? Like, let's talk. There's way better stuff in life. I promise. And then he looked at my account and realized I was a woman and then like said something very like sad and then just never stopped replying. And so I DM'd the mods of the brain cell community and they were like, you fucking bitch, you cunt, blah, blah, blah. Like just completely ignored everything I said. And then two weeks later, they finally

• 56:27Speaker 02

  realized that he was dead and they hadn't noticed for two weeks.

• 56:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's heartbreaking what this does to to people in it.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  It's horrific.

• 56:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're Also, sorry, I'm making a hat. I'm hoping I'll finish the hat by the end of the podcast.

• 56:43Robert Evans?

  That's good. But no, like, that's

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Wait, I want a cat. I want a cat hat.

• 56:49Robert Evans?

  The and that's what gets me every time about the people, both about these communities, about the people who like professionally have to analyze them is there's always so much concern from the researchers I've known about when they see like, oh, I think this person might actually harm themselves.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  And none of that within the community.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  None of it.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  Kind of. There's kind of a win because that person didn't escape. If they kill themselves, they haven't gotten out. There's still an incel, right?

• 57:14Speaker 02

  I mean, I hope that they they fucking just logged off and was like, like, I hope that's what happened. And but like, they never heard back from him. And it was like, there was also all of this infighting in there being like, he was weak for killing himself then, or it was good that he killed himself because there's no reason to live while you're an incel. It's so fucking disgusting. And based on that guy's post, he could have been older than like 19.

• 57:37Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  It's really dark.

• 57:38Robert Evans?

  It's fucking. Yeah, it's sad. And it's like, this is happening. And this is, I want to note, because we will talk about the dangers algorithms play in all of this. This is all pre algorithmic harm. Not that there are algorithms in social media in 2013, 14, but that's not really affecting the growth of the incel subculture at this stage. These people are meeting on forums that don't really, people are finding this organically, right? They're not being slalomed this kind of content for the most part from like an algorithm at this stage, right? That's not yet a factor.

• 58:09Robert Evans?

  So the fact that like the incel hate and this belief that like women are hyper gamus, right? And sometimes this is like incels really hate polyamorous people for the same reason that like, oh, it's a couple of Chads hogging all the Stacys, right? Or just like-

• 58:24Speaker 02

  We could just hate polyamorous people just for fun, you know?

• 58:27Robert Evans?

  You could just do that anyway. People have been doing it for forever.

• 58:33Robert Evans?

  But this is all coached. Again, it has to be, this can't just be, I just don't like this stuff and I'm a dick. There has to be like evolutionary justification for it, right? And so the justification they come up with is, well, women are programmed by evolution to seek the strongest provider for their future children, which all women want to have, obviously. I know women, I've talked to them. In the meantime, before they have those kids, women don't have souls and thus feel nothing about sleeping around and breaking men's hearts, right? They'll just go for whoever has the most money. They'll try to fuck all the Chads while they can and then they'll settle for a beta with cash.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Isn't it in Scientology where your baby, like the baby's soul is-

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  Yes, it is.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:15Robert Evans?

  And-

• 59:15Speaker 02

  You bet your ass I've listened to the L. Ron Hubbard episodes five times.

• 59:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I won't say much more than this, but there are some people who believe that when, if like a relative of yours dies, you can adopt a baby and summon that person's soul into the new baby and raise them as that person. Scientology, it's cool.

• 59:36Robert Evans?

  I miss talking about Scientology. I would so much rather do that than show you the JPEG I'm about to show you. This is commonly passed around in lookism spaces and it illustrates the phenomenon I'm talking about, right? On one side, you have two sides of this image. One is like 1955, one is 2015. And they show on one side of the image, a bunch of men and on the other, a bunch of women, right? And they're ranked from like boring and ugly at the bottom to interesting and good looking at the top. And in 1955-

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  You can't be interesting and ugly or boring and good looking.

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  Right, right. It never has happened. Never once in life. Danny DeVito simply did not exist.

• 1:00:13Robert Evans?

  I'm not calling him ugly. The incels would, right? But they're saying in 1955- All of the, all of the ugly women and all the ugly men got together and all of the medium attractiveness men and women got together and all the hot men and hot women got together. But everyone had somebody, right? But in 2015, thanks to feminism and the internet, all of like the chicks above the, the bottom 20% of hotness are going to the top, like two or three percent of men.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  This is not, this is.

• 1:00:42Robert Evans?

  And there's no men for the, yes.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  This is not.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Which goes back to exactly what I was saying. At the bottom, there are like two different women that aren't going for anyone. They're just at the bottom. And then there are also men at the same exact rank as them on the bottom. And for some reason, they're like, no.

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  Nope, no.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  And like, it's just not true because nobody, nobody has ruined a girly pop's life more than a medium ugly man. I'm sorry. So true.

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  Just like, man, I have, I haven't been around the, the block a few times. I have seen, and these guys will know I'm talking about them because they listen to the show and they'll take this with pride. I have seen some busted ass dudes with some lovely partners, right? And it's because, yeah, they're, they're not great at like doing their hair or dressing up or even showering every day.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Are they great guys?

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  But they're really nice and skilled.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  They're really nice intellectually, like interesting, funny gentlemen. Hello?

• 1:01:42Robert Evans?

  They can build a house on their own and they don't, they're not assholes.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  They have skill.

• 1:01:47Robert Evans?

  They have skills. They're funny.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  I like very briefly dated a guy that did so many steroids. He, I've had about it after like two months of dating and I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And then we broke up. Yeah.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  It didn't do anything for me. I was honestly like, it's a little bit like, you seem a little too into how big your arms are. Like this seems like it's for you. And like in that case, like that's fine. It's like, you know, putting makeup on for yourself, but like it, this, this idea of what a masculine man is, is so fucking crazy.

• 1:02:15Robert Evans?

  No, we're, yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  When in reality, we just want you to have skill. You have to have skills and be secure. There is like, honestly, it is so hot to be able to like text my boyfriend back and be like, hey, do you want to go get a pedicure? And he'd be like, yeah, sure. Cause like it feels good and like you're taking care of yourself.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Hygiene's hot.

• 1:02:32Robert Evans?

  Hygiene's hot. The number one thing I have seen is like a, uh, if you want to use the, I hate to use, but to use the term game, the number one like example of game that I know is a guy who knows how to cook really well.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  True.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  That's like very close to the top of the list.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  For me, it's like just being able to do really good bits, like bits that aren't punching down, like constant bits, respect, but also like you're able to make shishitos with soy sauce.

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  It's over.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I just really want a T-shirt that says hygiene is hot. I just really need that. Or at least a pin somebody.

• 1:03:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. You could cook a souffle and you can like fix the insulation in like a bad attic.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  And I'm a hundred.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Or like say guitar.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  And I'm a hundred percent sure you wash your hands every time after you use the bathroom.

• 1:03:25Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  And clip your nails.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Honey.

• 1:03:27Robert Evans?

  And honestly, guys, I hate to say it, that's not even a hard requirement. The bar for men is low.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  The bar for men is so low. Meanwhile, incels are like, you need to have this, this, this, and this for women too. And it's like, I'm like, oh God, it's so hot when like a guy takes out the trash and like you don't have to ask him to do it. He just does it. Oh my gosh.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  I have literally had the experience of going out on a double date with a friend and being with like two friends, right? One, one male, one female and pointing to like my friend who's the dude and being like, hey man, your shirt's on inside out and him going, hey man, yours is too.

• 1:04:03Robert Evans?

  Like the bar is on the floor.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  I mean, like women I've dated, there are like so many things where it's almost like just like being with a really good roommate, you know, like where it's like, oh yeah, like you just did the thing. And so when you meet a guy that also just does those things because they're considerate, it's like, wow, that's so hot.

• 1:04:21Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, we could continue off of, off of mugging the incels.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  This has turned into a dating podcast.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  It has and we have thoughts.

• 1:04:34Robert Evans?

  So I should say before we go out here that from the jump, lookism and incel thought is also heavily rooted in eugenics and race science. This is immediately part of what's going on and it's there from the beginning up to the present day. A major, and it's not always in the way that you'd think, right? This is not just like weird white guy race science. One major and angry subset of incels are young men of Asian descent. And these guys come to, they convince themselves that Asian men are inherently unattractive based on this PSL system. If you were an Asian man, it's impossible for you to be hot, basically, which. Okay, man. But this has led to a situation, a problem in the US where high sexual market value Asian women only date white men who are by naturally the highest SMV group.

• 1:05:18Robert Evans?

  Because again, this is all basically repurposed Nazi race science. All of these male beauty standards are envisioned with like Casper Van Dean from Starship Troopers as like a tin, right? A blonde, square-jawed Aryan man is like the peak of attractiveness.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  And there's also the racist aspect of being like, well, she's just gonna have black babies with some black man.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Like, that's something that I get my fucking replies all the time. They're so fucking racist.

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, tons of it. And it's, yeah, it's like, that's an important aspect of it, too. This is not just guys like coming up with their own silly scale. They're also repurposing a lot of like old race science bullshit, you know? So what you have kind of by 2013, 2014, right before Elliot Roger does what he's going to do.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:05Robert Evans?

  You've gotten to the point where you've got the incel communities come up with the scale and like this set of hard requirements for what it takes to be handsome, or lovable, I guess I should say. And because like half of the incels accept all this, and they decide, okay, well, if there's physical features that make me attractive, I'll just work out, or I'll diet, or I'll have dangerous and painful surgery, but there are ways I can change my physical features, and I might then be able to find love or at least have sex, right? And that's bad? That's pretty toxic. That is the strain of inceldom that does bring us looks-maxing and clavicular. But as toxic and stupid as that side is, they're the objectively healthier part of

• 1:06:45Robert Evans?

  the incel community because they believe they can improve their situation. The other half of incels become, in their words, "blackpilled." They basically believe in the principles of look-ism, but they deny that at least they specifically have any hope of improving their PSL score. They're inherently ugly men. Even surgery can't help them. And if you're what, someone who can't even fix your looks through surgery, you only have two options. You can commit suicide, or you can commit suicidal mass murder, which they call "going ER" as a reference to Elliot Roger, right?

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:07:20Robert Evans?

  Those are your only options. That's the black pill chunk of the community. So, that's where we are by like 2014. Great.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:07:28Robert Evans?

  It just took five years.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Awesome. Wow.

• 1:07:31Robert Evans?

  It took five years to go from, I don't like mystery to I think I might need to kill a bunch of people because I can't get a date. It takes a lot less time than that now.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, takes like a week. I hate it here.

• 1:07:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Kat, you wanna, you wanna give a plug for the campaign at the end here? Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Running for Congress. Yeah. So, uh, I'm ready for Congress because we don't have Democrats who know how to handle the far right. And that's what I've devoted my life to. You can find more about my campaign at catforillinois.com. If you are in the Chicago area, check what district you're in. I'm Illinois nine. Our election is March 17th. Please consider donating or volunteering. Our Discord server is discord.gg/catforillinois. We need all hands on deck.

• 1:08:17Robert Evans?

  Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, that's part one. Check Kat's campaign out if you're in Illinois, you know, vote for, for, for the love of goodness. And we'll be back on Thursday to talk about things that will depress you even more and eventually talk about bone smashing. Thank God.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Good Lord. Bye bye.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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