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major update and history lesson on the death of the aesthetic self in the west vs the wodaabe
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For decades the Manosphere has been afraid that women's selection for hyper-masculine men would lead to extinction through nuclear war or some other form of violent collapse of civilization. | For decades the Manosphere has been afraid that women's selection for hyper-masculine men would lead to extinction through nuclear war or some other form of violent collapse of civilization. | ||
The reality appears to be men are becoming more behaviorally androgynous (highly masculine in some ways and highly feminine in others), and society is not collapsing but slowly grinding to a halt. It will come to a standstill as more men stop working jobs that benefit, innovate, or bring value to society in some way and instead focus on [[LDAR|LDARing]], [[NEET|NEETing]], or spending all their time [[looksmaxxing]]. The inevitable and eventual result is nearly every male in western society spending every ounce of their free time looksmaxxing in an effort to pass on their genes. Western society is becoming an | The reality appears to be men are becoming more behaviorally androgynous (highly masculine in some ways and highly feminine in others), and society is not collapsing but slowly grinding to a halt. It will come to a standstill as more men stop working jobs that benefit, innovate, or bring value to society in some way and instead focus on [[LDAR|LDARing]], [[NEET|NEETing]], or spending all their time [[looksmaxxing]]. The inevitable and eventual result is nearly every male in western society spending every ounce of their free time looksmaxxing in an effort to pass on their genes. Western society is becoming an distorted, funhouse mirror image of society within the Wodaabe African tribe, the most matriarchal society on the planet, with the vainest men. | ||
Where the Wodaabe have a unified, symbolic, holistic culture around copying the mating patterns and aesthetics of the egret bird, the West and similar societies have only science and pseudo-science but no shared cultural identity. For example, if we were like the Wodaabe, then Fabio Lanzoni, the original male supermodel, at the height of his popularity would have become a cross-cultural symbol of unification among men towards attracting women. The hair, the muscles, the romantic affect. There would be festivals where men roleplay as romance novel heroes, engage in athletic and artistic competitions, and women judge. A male beauty pageant, yes, but one that actually gets you wives and girlfriends, embedded in the communal calendar, anticipated year-round, and sanctioned by tradition. | |||
Instead, We have thousands of isolated men staring at themselves in bathroom mirrors, calipers in hand, measuring their own cheekbones against internet-derived standards that will be obsolete within months. We have forum threads where a 19-year-old asks whether his canthal tilt is “positive enough” and receives conflicting opinions, each citing a different study, each convinced of its own objectivity. We have men spending four hours a day in the gym and three hours on skincare, yet unable to articulate why they are doing so beyond a diffuse anxiety that they are, at this very moment, falling behind in a race nobody defined. This is not the Wodaabe path. It is the pathology of disenchantment. | |||
The Wodaabe man copies the egret bird because the egret bird is meaning. It is fertility, it is the coming of rain, it is the boundary between earth and sky, it is the elegance his grandfather copied and his grandson will copy. He does not need to know the bird's mating call frequency in hertz. He does not need to analyze the geometric ratio of its wing span to its body length. He becomes the bird through ritual, and the ritual is shared, and the sharing is the point. | |||
The Western man copies nothing. He compiles. He scrapes data points from a dozen conflicting sources—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, the remnants of old forums, the ghost of GQ, obscure scientific studies—and assembles them into a personal optimization protocol. There is no community validation because there is no real community, only men with a crab bucket mentality that kick out members for achieving the goals, they themselves want. There is no ritualism because there is no calendar "looksmax event". There is only the permanent, low-grade panic of the algorithmically-mediated self, forever in beta testing etc. | |||
Fabio Lanzoni could have been the West's egret bird as he was, for a brief window in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the closest thing the West ever produced to a unified male aesthetic symbol. The hair—, flowing, unmistakably deliberate. The physique—muscular but not grotesque, built for romance novels not powerlifting competitions. The face in that precice mascthetic Goldilocks zone: strong jaw, heavy brow but soft eyes. The affect— on women unabashedly romantic, performatively sincere, utterly without irony. He was on 400 romance novel covers. He was on I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! commercials. He was recognizable to grandmothers and teenage girls alike. He was also, crucially, a role. Not a checklist of traits to be approximated through surgery and starvation, but a character you could play: the conquering lover, the rescuing prince, the man who arrives on horseback and speaks in declarations. Men did not look at Fabio and think, I need to measure my zygomatic arch. They looked at Fabio and thought, I wonder if I could pull off that cape. | |||
But the West has no mechanism for transforming a commercial image into a sacred symbol. Fabio was a product, not a totem. His face sold butter, then it sold cologne, then it sold nostalgia. When his moment passed, there was no ritual to preserve him. No generation of fathers taught their sons the Dance of Fabio. No women gathered annually to judge which local man best embodied the Spirit of the Romance Cover. The market simply moved on, and Fabio became a punchline, and the aesthetic void he left was filled not by a new symbol but by a thousand competing micro-templates: the metrosexual, the hipster, the lumbersexual, the e-boy, the K-pop idol, the TikTok pretty boy, the gymcel, the androgynous alt model, the dark triad "[Chad]", the Zaddy for girls with daddy issues, the Silver Fox. Each comes with its own set of measurable metrics, its own forums, its own contradictions. Each is consumed and discarded by the attention economy within months. The result is the "looksmaxxing" mindset: a desperate attempt to construct, from first principles and fragmented data, a personal optimization algorithm that substitutes for the missing collective ritual. This is why Western men are not truly becoming like the Wodaabe, despite the superficial resemblance. The Wodaabe man is vain, yes. He spends hours applying makeup, arranging his hair, practicing his expressions. But his vanity is ceremonial. It is performed for a specific audience, on a specific date, within a specific tradition that gives his efforts meaning regardless of outcome. Even the losers of the Gerewol return to their community with their dignity intact; they have participated in the renewal of the tribe. | |||
The Western looksmaxxer, by contrast, experiences his vanity as existential maintenance. He does not prepare for a ritual; he prepares for all of life, which is to say, for no moment in particular. He must always be camera-ready, because the camera is everywhere and the judgment never stops. He cannot rest, because resting is falling behind. He cannot claim victory, because victory is defined as a moving average. | |||
And what do women actually want, when the algorithmic noise is filtered out? | |||
The Incel Wiki Team's analysis of anonymous female voting on Photoeval.com—specifically the preferences for the monarchy hyper-royalty aesthetic, the silk/satin/velvet textile attire, the Versace hair and beard ornamentation, and the Sistine Chapel full-back tattoo—reveals something the looksmaxxing forums cannot compute. The interconnected role of [[Fashion]]. | |||
The man in the hyper-royalty attire is not a man with superior shoulder waist-to-hip ratio. He is a sovereign, a figure from a story about limitless wealth and arcane power. The man in silk and velvet is not a man with low body fat percentage. He is a ceremony, a being who exists beyond the realm of labor and utility. The man with the Sistine Chapel tattooed on his back is not a man with symmetrical hairline. He is a cathedral, a living vessel for the central drama of Western civilization—the touch of God and Man, creation itself rendered on his skin. | |||
These are not just only metrics. They are narratives. They are symbols as dense and meaningful as the Wodaabe's egret bird. And they are being selected by women—across cultures, across skin tones, across ages—when the anonymity of the rating site frees them from the performative preferences of the social world. | |||
This is the evidence that the symbolic path is not dead; it is merely inaccessible to men who have been trained to see themselves as biological products rather than living stories. | |||
The Western man who attempts to embody the hyper-royalty aesthetic is not engaging in the same act as the Wodaabe man copying the egret. He is engaging in consumption. He buys the thawb, the keffiyeh, the signet ring, the velvet, silk or satin. He posts the photo. He waits for validation in the form of likes and comments, and sure they may arrive but there is no community in the West that shares the meaning of these objects; there is only an audience that registers them as exotic or aesthetically pleasing. He has acquired the signifiers without being the signified. | |||
The distortion in the mirror is this: | |||
The Wodaabe man copies a bird and becomes a vessel for fertility, beauty, and divine order. | |||
The Western man copies a emperor and becomes a customer, a consumer. | |||
This is the "grinding to a halt" that the Manosphere dimly perceives but cannot name. It is not just that men are ceasing to work or innovate. It is that the work of self-presentation—which, in a healthy culture, is a ceremonial labor with communal payoff—has become an infinite labor with no payoff except the temporary postponement of obsolescence. | |||
Men are spending their lives optimizing a product (the self) that never ships, for a market (female approval) that never closes, using tools (science, data) that are exquisitely designed to measure everything and meaning nothing to symbolic meaning. | |||
The Wodaabe system works because it is finite. The ritual ends. The winner is chosen. The loser goes home. Everyone returns to ordinary life until next year. There is closure, and closure enables psychological peace. The Western system is infinite because it is market-based rather than ritual-based. Markets never close. Algorithms never stop updating. There is always a slightly better jawline, a slightly lower body fat percentage, a slightly more fashionable haircut, a slightly more expensive skincare serum. As looksmaxing hero "Patrick Bateman" would say. However the man who "wins" today will be obsolete tomorrow, because obsolescence is how the market drives consumption. | |||
The ultimate irony is that the "primitive" Wodaabe system is more sophisticated than the "advanced" Western one. | |||
The Wodaabe understand something the West has forgotten: that human attraction is not just a biological computation but also a symbolic conversation. We fall in love with phenotypes sure, but we also fall in love with stories. The handsome man is not just the man with the optimal ratio of androgen receptor, he is also the man who successfully embodies a narrative that his culture has deemed beautiful. | |||
The West, having destroyed its shared narratives through 500 years of disenchantment, now attempts to rebuild them from the rubble using the only tools it trusts—science and data. But science cannot tell you why the egret is beautiful. Data cannot tell you why the Sistine Chapel moves you. These things are not legible to the metric mind. The "looksmaxxing" project, in its current form, is doomed. It will produce men with perfect cheekbones and empty eyes. It will produce men who can recite their own hormonal history but cannot hold a room with their presence. It will produce men who are, in the clinical language of the blackpill, "[[chad]]s" and yet profoundly unattractive in the way that matters most: they have no story to tell. | |||
The question is whether Western men will learn to read their votes—and whether they can overcome 500 years of disenchantment to become, once again, the egret. | |||
==500 years of symbolic aesthetic self removal in the west== | |||
Before 1500 in the symbolic universe, man does not possess meaning—he participates in it. | |||
The pre-modern Western male understood himself through a web of fixed, sacred, communal narratives. He was not an individual optimizing his personal brand; he was a knight, a craftsman, a king, a peasant, a priest. These were not job descriptions or lifestyle choices. They were ontological categories. His value was not earned through achievement metrics but conferred by his faithful embodiment of a role within the Great Chain of Being. | |||
His body was not a project. It was a vessel. His clothing was not a signaling mechanism. It was a uniform. His courtship was not a negotiation between autonomous agents in a frictionless marketplace. It was a ritual—sanctioned by family, church, and community; governed by custom; dense with symbolic meaning. | |||
The pre-modern man would have understood the Wodaabe instantly. He would have recognized the Gerewol as kin to his own May Day festivals, his chivalric tournaments, his saints' feast days. He would have seen the egret bird and thought, without irony: Yes. This bird is beauty. I will become it. | |||
Then the West began its long divorce from the symbolic order. In 1543 Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus. The Earth is no longer the center of the cosmos. Man's home is removed from the center of the universe. The cosmos is no longer a stage for divine drama but a mechanism to be charted. | |||
1637 Descartes declares "Cogito, ergo sum." Truth is located in the individual mind's capacity for reason, not in inherited tradition or revelation. The self becomes a thinking thing rather than a node in a sacred network. The body becomes a machine attached to the mind, not a vessel for spirit. | |||
1687 Newton publishes Principia Mathematica. The universe operates according to discoverable physical laws, not angelic intervention or divine will. Nature is drained of spirit. It becomes a resource, a puzzle, a system to be mastered—not a teacher bearing symbols. | |||
And thus we have The Cumulative Effect: | |||
By 1700, the Western mind has acquired the conceptual tools to see the world as disenchanted matter in lawful motion. The symbol of the aesthetic self has not yet been killed, but its authority has been fatally undermined. The knight still exists, but he is beginning to look like a man in costume rather than a man in truth. | |||
What the Wodaabe would not understand: The idea that the egret is "just" a bird—a biological organism with no message for humanity. Then in | |||
1760–1840, The Industrial Revolution. Production moves from the home and workshop to the factory. The craftsman, whose value was in his unique, inherited skill, is replaced by the worker, whose value is his interchangeable labor. Man becomes a unit of production. 1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations. Value is redefined as market price, determined by supply and demand. All things—including human labor, human time, and eventually human bodies—become commodities to be priced and exchanged. 1789 The French Revolution. Hereditary aristocracy is abolished in the name of merit and individual rights. The ancient symbolic hierarchy (king, noble, peasant) is replaced by the abstract category of "citizen." Man is now legally defined by his universal rights, not his particular role. Then finally in the 1830s we have the rise of the popular press and mass advertising. The first glimmerings of the modern attention economy. Human desire becomes a resource to be harvested and sold. | |||
The Cumulative Effect: | |||
The Industrial Revolution completes what the Enlightenment began. The pre-modern man was defined by his station—a complex, inherited, meaningful identity embedded in family, craft, and community. The modern man is defined by his function—what he produces, what he earns, what he consumes. The body begins its long transformation from vessel to tool. Strong bodies are valued because they work longer. Healthy bodies are valued because they cost less to maintain. Beautiful bodies? Not yet a category of value— as that requires another century. | |||
What the Wodaabe would not understand: That a man's worth could be separated from his community's judgment of his beauty, courage, and ceremonial skill. That a man could be "successful" while being considered ugly. | |||
Next is The Biologization. 1859 Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. Man is no longer a fallen angel or a divine creation. He is an animal, descended from other animals, governed by the same blind mechanisms of variation and selection. 1871 Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, explicitly applying sexual selection theory to human beauty. Attraction is no longer a mystery, a gift of the gods, or a matter of ineffable chemistry. It is a biological computation. 1880s The rise of scientific racism and eugenics. Human value is quantified, ranked, and measured. Skull shapes, facial angles, and cranial capacities become data points. 1899 Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. The inner self is no longer a soul to be saved but a psyche to be analyzed. Human motivation is reduced to drives, complexes, and repressed instincts. Love is sublimated lust. Ritual is neurotic compulsion. Art is wish-fulfillment. 1904 G. Stanley Hall publishes Adolescence, formalizing the study of developmental psychology. Even the life stages of man become objects of scientific management. There is a correct way to mature, and deviation is pathology. | |||
The Cumulative Effect: | |||
This is the crucial pivot. Darwin and Freud, working from different directions, complete the de-sacralization of the human. | |||
Darwin removes the soul from biology. Freud removes the soul from psychology. What remains is a biochemical robot, programmed by evolution, driven by unconscious impulses, and utterly alone in a universe without inherent meaning. Attraction is now fully legible to the scientific gaze. It is not a symbolic conversation between two souls participating in a cosmic drama. It is a mate selection algorithm running on organic hardware. | |||
The Wodaabe man who becomes the egret bird is not, from this perspective, performing a sacred ritual. He is displaying fitness indicators—symmetry, health, coordination—through the medium of culturally-specific courtship behaviors. His symbolic consciousness is an illusion; the real work is happening at the genetic level. | |||
What the Wodaabe would not understand: That their most sacred ceremony could be translated without remainder into the language of evolutionary psychology. That the egret could be reduced to a "sexual signal." | |||
Next is The Commodification of Aesthetics. 1920s, the rise of Hollywood and the celebrity system. For the first time in history, millions of people can gaze upon the same faces daily. A new aristocracy emerges: the aristocracy of the screen. 1930s The Great Depression and the New Deal. Economic anxiety becomes permanent background radiation. The fear of falling—in class, in income, in status—becomes a defining feature of the middle-class psyche. 1940s–50s The Golden Age of Advertising. Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew) applies psychoanalysis to consumer behavior. Human desire is now explicitly understood as a resource to be extracted. Products are sold not on utility but on psychological association: cars = freedom, cigarettes = sophistication, deodorant = sexual success. 1960s The Sexual Revolution. Courtship rituals, already weakened, are discarded entirely. Sex is separated from marriage, marriage from reproduction, reproduction from community sanction. Mating becomes a private transaction between consenting individuals. 1970s The rise of the fitness industry. | |||
The body is now explicitly a project. Men who had never considered their appearance are told that they can—and should—reshape their bodies through effort and consumption. 1980s The supermodel era. Male beauty acquires a commercial ceiling. Fabio, the first male supermodel, sells 400 romance novel covers and a butter substitute. His image is ubiquitous, but it is product, not symbol. 1990s the internet arrives. Information about attractiveness—previously confined to magazines, films, and local observation—becomes globally accessible and infinitely searchable. Men can now compare themselves to every attractive man on Earth, 24/7. 2,000s the first mainstream studies with publicity about attraction are published. The scientific study of male beauty, once the province of eugenicists, is rehabilitated as legitimate evolutionary psychology. The metricization of the male face begins in earnest. | |||
And finally in the 2,000s we have the rise of the metrosexual. Male vanity is mainstreamed and commercialized. Men are now explicitly encouraged to consume skincare, fashion, and grooming products. The male body is fully incorporated into the beauty-industrial complex. 2004 Facebook launches. Identity becomes a profile. The self is externalized, curated, and performed for an audience. 2007 The iPhone. The algorithm follows you everywhere. Every swipe, every like, every linger on an image is recorded and fed back into the system that determines what you see next. 2009 The launch of [[Photofeeler]]. For the first time, men can receive anonymous, quantified feedback on their appearance from strangers. The rating is no longer a social judgment; it is a data point. 2012 Tinder. Courtship is fully gamified. Mating decisions are reduced to binary yes/no judgments on photos, processed at swipe speed. The algorithm determines who sees whom, and the user adapts his behavior to please the algorithm. | |||
2010s The rise of the incel community and blackpill ideology. The logical endpoint of the disenchantment project. A subculture that has fully internalized the Darwinian-Freudian-consumerist model of the human and found it unbearable. Man is a biological robot competing for mating opportunities in a zero-sum market. His value is his position on the bell curve. If his metrics are insufficient, he has no recourse but despair. | |||
2018–Present TikTok and the e-boy aesthetic. Male beauty is now a genre of content. The e-boy is the first male archetype to be born entirely within the algorithm—optimized for short-form video, designed to trigger specific engagement metrics, and obsolete within months. | |||
The Cumulative Effect: | |||
We have arrived at the present moment. The Western male is the most visible, measured, and self-conscious man in human history. He has access to more information about his own appearance—and more tools to modify it—than any man who has ever lived. And he is, by many metrics, more anxious, isolated, and uncertain than his pre-modern ancestors. Why? Because he has no ritual. No calendar. No community. No shared symbol that transforms his individual vanity into collective meaning. He has only the algorithm, which tells him that he is never enough, and the market, which sells him the tools to try again tomorrow. | |||
T | |||
By the end of the 20th century, the transformation is complete. The pre-modern man was a soul in a vessel, embedded in community, governed by ritual, seeking meaning. The modern man is a self with a body, competing in markets, governed by data, seeking optimization. Every component of the old symbolic order has been replaced by a secular, scientific, commercial equivalent: | |||
What the Wodaabe would not understand: That a man could spend forty years "optimizing" his body for female approval and yet never once participate in a communal ritual where that body is publicly evaluated by women who know his family, his history, and his role in the tribe. That he could die without ever knowing whether he "won." | |||
== See also == | == See also == | ||
* [[Cutecel]] | * [[Cutecel]] | ||