‘Looksmaxxing,Bone Smashing,Emotion Avoiding,and Toughness’: An Analysis of Modern Masculinity Through Brent Robbins’ Anesthetic Culture

Clavicular

Over this past winter break, I was alerted to a figure in the Manosphere – a community of online celebrities, streamers, and content creators who are known for their hypermasculinity, overt misogyny, and somewhat unusual physical health practices (UN Women, n.d.). This figure’s name is Braden Peters, but he is better known online as Clavicular (Bernstein, 2026).

Clavicular is 6-foot-2, weighs 180 pounds and has a 31-inch waist. His biacromial width – basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name – is 19.5 inches. He has a midface ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils, of 1.07. His chin to philtrum ratio is 2.6. According to Clavicular, these calculations make him handsome. Just not as handsome as the actor Matt Bomer. (Bernstein, 2026, p. 1)

The measurements, ratios, and ideals Clavicular uses to measure his supposedly objective calculation of attractiveness have been curated, defined, and refined within a subculture known as Looksmaxxers (Berstein, 2026). In addition to critiques of the traditional cis-male body, this community is often connected to the larger Incel (involuntarily celibate) community, mostly made of up hetero cis-men who are having trouble finding sexual partners Interestingly, Incel’s are not as interested in examining and updating their hygienic, communicative, or lifestyle practices according to the preferences of women as much as they are in airing grievances they have toward women (Sparks et al., 2022).

They feel not merely angry but aggrieved; they are not merely disappointed but resentful. They feel not merely let down but positively betrayed, by women in particular and by the world in general. They feel that the world owes them certain favors. (Manne, 2021, n.p.)

In addition to the breadth of grievance is the insistence on hierarchy. Instead of developing partnerships or mentorships to solve their problem (inability to attract sexual partners), Incels are often more concerned with mogging other men. Mogging is a term used within the community to designate the domination of one man over another; a sort of social Darwinism based on a conflagration of physical attributes, financial status, domineering beavhiors, and social clout (Bernstein, 2026).

Clavicular, a 20-year-old who has had multiple recent run-ins with the law, is a paragon of this culture. A reflection of the reductio ad absurdum of the community, wherein the obsession with meeting ideals of physical masculinity has led to a neurotic narcissism and obsession with maintaining this lifestyle even at the expense of his own health. You see, to maintain his looks, his physique, and his ‘grindset’ lifestyle (overworking as a virtue), Clavicular has had to partake in self-inflicted physical mutilation, in conjunction with pharmaceutical manipulation of his mind. He has admitted to using a plethora of drugs, including Testosterone Replacement Therapy, steroids, methamphetamine, blood pressure medications, and melatonin at levels 30 to 50 times the highest OTC dose (Bernstein, 2026), while performing an at-home reconstructive surgery known as bonesmashing (Alonso, 2026). Specifically, Clavicular took a hammer to his own jaw to create microfractures in the hopes that once healed, he would have the jaw that most likely resembles actor Matt Bomer (Bernstein, 2026). Matt Bomer has, according to Clavicular, the quantifiably objective ideal male face.

It did not work, and in response, he underwent a 35,000 dollar bone reconstruction surgery to finally get the look he was attempting to hammer into his own face. And how do we know that he was taking a hammer to his own face? He recorded it on multiple occasions and posted the videos online, well before the recent New York Times biography came out. In each video, Clavicular, or possibly at that time, Braden Peters, stoically and repetitively, as if laying down a 4/4 beat on a snare drum, tapped at his own jaw over and over again. Never once showing pain, never once showing discomfort, and never once, seemingly, rethinking his choices.

Anesthetic Culture

Robbins (2019), in his work The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture, lays out the premise that science and medicine have become detached from the living, meaningful body. They replaced this with a mechanistic, objectified, reductive body that ignores the personhood, the consciousness, of the human body. The belief is that this detached stance helps compartmentalize emotions when practicing medicine and science, and especially in medicine, to protect the practicioner from these emotions. Additionally, as we move further from the lived body and the finitude therein, society must maintain an ever increasing denial over the certainty of death:

The attitude of medical dispassion and objectification toward cadavers and living patients is a style of living, a way of seeing and acting in the world. In that respect, the medical culture of modernity has introduced a pattern into the culture, and this template of dispassionate concern has had a cascading and lasting effect. (Robbins, 2019, pp. 247–248)

Anesthetic culture has blossomed out of the mediation of medical interactions with the lived body and the memorial cadaver in a way that has trickled outward into the greater society. As we separate ourselves from the lived body, shifting toward an idealized and objectified body, pain becomes something to diagnose and eliminate rather than something meaningful. ‘[A] theme of distance and detachment – as well as diminished empathy and mechanistic objectification – appears in the culture in a way that demonstrably follows medicine’s lead’ (Robbins, 2019, p. 248). This is especially prevalent in the realm of mental health and mental illness, where subjective experiences are reduced to their biomechanical correlates.

Robbins (2019) goes on to examine how this shift in medicine grows outward, even beyond the clinical sciences. ‘This cultural ethos as a worldview has clear advantages, in that it prepares a basis for modern science and technology’ (p. 249). The benefits can be seen in medicine, communications, transportation, and even the arts, where media is ever-present and accessible. The mechanistic roots of anesthetic culture ‘enables human beings to predict and control our natural and social environments’ (p. 248).

While these inventions and creations have generated massive benefits, ‘the modern worldview, as a particular perspective on the world . . . is often blind to its own limitations’ (p. 249). The anesthetized modern perspective ‘tends [to] understand itself simply as reality in and of itself, unmediated by a cultural ethos’ (p. 249). As Foucault (2000) states in What is Enlightenment, ‘Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to “heroize” the present’ (p. 310).

Using the ideas of Ernest Becker and Erich Fromm, Robbins (2019) begins to analyze this ‘heroization’ of the present. For Becker, culture serves as the conduit for meaning making around death and finitude. When the culture does not ‘adequately supply the individual with a sense of meaning and purpose,’ neurosis occurs, both at the individual and the societal levels. Robbins (2019) connects Becker’s ideas regarding cultural meaning making with Erich Fromm. Fromm ‘expressed concern that modern, industrial culture unnecessarily frustrates basic, existential human needs for relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, and a sense of identity’ (p. 250). This frustration generates ‘culturally patterned defects’ (p. 250), or ways of being in the world that are inherently pathological or destructive but become necessary and normalized due to the nature of the social and economic engines of Modernity.

When the culture rewards and normalizes character traits that are intrinsically harmful to self, others, and/or the environment, Fromm refers to these traits as a ‘pathology of normalcy’ . . . When the norm of a culture becomes, in itself, pathological or harmful, this is particularly dangerous, because the strain of pathology is not recognized as such. (Robbins, 2019, p. 250)

Constructs, such as mass media, generate ‘cultural identities’ which filter out the perceptions of the wider social system’s dysfunctions and destructive patterns. Fromm’s social filter works in similar ways to Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony:

Gramsci argued that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of ideologies – beliefs, assumptions, and values – through social institutions such as schools, churches, courts, and the media, among others. (Cole, 2025, n.p.)

These institutions are what Fromm calls ‘social filters’ wherein the elite’s ideology becomes normalized and repurposed as what Gramsci calls common sense. ‘For example, the idea of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps’ . . . is a form of “common sense” that has flourished under capitalism, and that serves to justify the system’ (Cole, 2025, n.p.).

From Becker, we learn that human culture is most successful when it gives purpose and meaning to its participants. From Fromm, we learn that culture doesn’t always succeed in this endeavor, and when it does not, ‘culturally pattern defects’ arise within the social body. When these patterns face resistance, that resistance is pathologized in order for the existing paradigm to continue. To ensure resistance is minimized, defective patterns are hegemonically constituted as ‘common sense’. And who would want to question common sense when doing so would lead to pathologization, punishment, and marginalization? In fact, one major key to ensuring cultural hegemony over what is considered ‘common sense’ is maintained, is the internalization of pathologized normalcy that occurs within the scapegoat(ed) (Robbins, et al., 2015)

The Scapegoat and the Pharmakon

Girard addresses the Greek word ‘pharmakon’ (root of English pharmaceutical) which carries the ambiguous and paradoxical double meaning of remedy and poison. The pharmakos designates a human scapegoat onto whom the guilt of the community will be transferred and who will be ritually expelled or sacrificed (Robbins et al., 2015, p. 88)

The social scapegoat can be found by certain predictable traits – they are always a member on the margins of society, and the powerful always identify them as the problem and solution to society’s ills (Robbins et al., 2015). The powerful describe them as having supreme power over major events, while also having little power to stop the eventual violence that is perpetrated upon them – they are somehow both insidious and inferior. The scapegoat ‘is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality’ (Girard in Robbins et al., 2015, p. 88). While modern societies are (usually) less likely to overtly oppress and persecute the scapegoat, in any society, the scapegoat is differentiated from the remainder of society and made ‘responsible for the cure because he is already responsible for the sickness’ (Girard in Robbins et al., 2015, p. 88).

Stigmatization of phenomena such as mental illness and addiction follows the modern scapegoating process by ‘initially reducing blame and guilt when attributing the individual’s mental condition to biological causes rather than, for example, personal choices’ (p. 89). Modern campaigns to reduce the stigma of mental illness focus on this ‘differentiation’ to lessen that stigma experienced by those with psychiatric diagnoses. Yet there is an expanding body of evidence that teaching the medical model of mental illness, itself a pharmakon of differentiation, actually leads to an increase in stigmatization (Bakker, 2025). This means that teaching the medical model may increase empathy for those with psychiatric diagnoses, but that empathy does not mean that people gain trust in those with a diagnosis. In other words, people feel less secure with someone who has a diagnosis performing certain roles in society (such as childcare) and are less likely to interact with someone with a psychiatric diagnosis.

There is one very modern addition to the scapegoating mechanism – acceptance of the role of the scapegoat by the scapegoated (Robbins et al., 2015). Of all the diagnoses, substance use disorder (i.e., addiction) is probably the most reflective of this. ‘Addicts’ are taught that they must accept their new identity as a certain type of person who carries the disease of addiction, and accepting that identity is the only way to remit the disease. Yet, while the ‘addict’ may not be responsible for their disease (and the havoc that disease rests upon society), they are responsible for the cure. They must practice a program of recovery. Ironically, this pattern is present in the policies of addiction treatment centers. While inpatient centers will assist with detoxification from drugs/ETOH, outpatient programs expect their clients to instantly refrain from using their drug of choice . . . in order to receive help in learning how to refrain from using their drug of choice. And in both forms of treatment (in or outpatient) patients are expected to continue refraining from their drug of choice, in order to learn how to refrain from their drug of choice, which they are told they do not have control over. And when they do not . . . they are expelled from the treatment.

Common sense states that if there is an addict, there must also be a ‘non-addict’, even in regards to the consumption of drugs. Yet, through the refined lens Robbins (2019) creates using Girard, Fromm, and Becker, ‘the idea of the diseased and abnormal addict shields us from having to explore our relationships with the addictiveness of materialistic hedonism’ (Robbins et al., 2015, p. 92). The addict reflects a culturally patterned defect where the materialistic and hedonistic values present within society are taken to their logical conclusion, and by upending the ‘common sense’ of society’s norms, a certain death salience remerges.

We are reminded that we live in a finite world where it is impossible for every embarrassed millionaire to gain their fortune – to garner wealth and success. We also become aware that obsessing over materialistic success and consumption is itself fatal.

An Auto-Ethnographic Examination of the Scapegoat

Autoethnography is the self-study of an individual’s experience within a community, annotating these experiences from their personal memory (Hughes & Pennington, 2016). The guiding question of an auto-ethnographic study is ‘what [can] I learn by examining my identities, power, privileges, within one or more cultural contexts?’ (Hughes & Pennington, 2016, p. 7). I, personally, have experienced anesthetic culture and the pharmakon scapegoat of being ‘the addict’. I have also experienced the work of Brent Dean Robbins in person. And those two experiences, interestingly, are intertwined in a way that begins to speak to the solution to what Fromm would call ‘a sick society’.

In July of 2012, after arriving at the emergency room of Pittsburgh’s main psychiatric hospital, I was told that I could not receive the services I was requesting. Specifically, I could not receive ambulatory detoxification: a process where, early every morning, a patient receives detox medications and attends a psychotherapeutic/psychoeducation group with other patients before proceeding with their day (Moore, 2020). Why? Because I had already experienced two withdrawal seizures while attempting to detox from benzodiazepines and alcohol. Which is what I was attempting to detox from… again. Instead, I would have to be transferred to an ASAM (American Society of Addiction Medicine, n.d.) Level 4 detox unit, the highest level of care in the ASAM System. There were only two in the area – one close to downtown Pittsburgh, only a couple of miles away, and one in the county just north in the town of Butler, PA. As there were no beds in Pittsburgh, I was taken via ambulance to Butler.

Looking out the back windows of the ambulance, I watched the city get further and further away, and with each passing mile, a realization crept over me – maybe I am responsible for the cure. In prior attempts to refrain from using, I had rejected the disease model of addiction but also faced difficulty in grasping a strategy for dealing with, or even accepting, the problem as it existed. In this case, I realized that action was necessary and I (finally) became active in those things that I was responsible for. After my stay in Butler, I tried Narcotics Anonymous meetings, even gained a home group and sponsor, as is the guidance one receives in most addiction treatment programs. When that began to fail (mainly due to my ideological issues with the organization), I tried SMART Recovery, a CBT- and REBT-Based program that eliminated the spiritual aspects of 12 Step but still maintained abstinence as the end goal (SMART Recovery, n.d.). Soon, that too began to fail. While I had faced this failure before, and in the face of it, failed myself, this time it would be different. I would try one more thing.

After Google searching ‘harm reduction alcohol’, I came across a group called H.A.M.S. (Harm Reduction, Abstinence, and Moderation Support for Alcohol), which posited a harm reduction approach to alcohol use in addition to the choices to moderate or abstain (Anderson, 2010). Harm reduction, at it’s core, believes there are many paths to recovery from drug and alchopl addiction, including changing relationships with drugs that does not always start and end with abstinence (Marlatt, 1996) I had already begun drinking again and was frightened to death that the benzos would soon follow. Using the community at H.A.M.S, I spent 8 months positively relearning my relationship with alcohol. However, as Becker might remind us, the existing cultural milieu did not inherently provide a meaningful outlet for my needs. I needed purpose.

I already held a bachelor’s degree in sociology, but to gain work in social work, community health, or clinical fields, I would need a graduate degree. My goal had become to obtain that degree and work toward the expansion of harm reduction ideas by becoming a practitioner in the field. At that time, harm reduction was still seen as controversial, so my search was guided by my wish to ensure that the program I entered would not hamstring these ideas that were giving me back my life. Eventually, I came across the Point Park University website and learned that there was going to be a new master’s program in clinical-community psychology. This new program would be headed up by Drs. Robert McInerney and Brent Robbins.

In order to attract students and ensure they knew what they were getting themselves into (both the students and the professors), the duo held sample classes over the summer of 2013. The first class, taught by Robert McInerney, was the very first time I had ever received any functional description of the concept of phenomenology (while watching this man hop, spin, roll, and crawl around the room while describing fascinating stories and examples of theory in action). The second was headed up by Brent Robbins, and there I listened to the roots of existentialism, phenomenology, humanistic psychology, and realized . . . this was it. This was my purpose.

After the second class, I speed walked to Brent and asked him all the technical questions – how do I apply? What are they looking for on applications? What can you do with the degree? etc. Every transcript, letter of recommendation, personal statement, and resume was sent to the admissions department within a week of that discussion. On August 25, 2013, I walked into my Community Psychology class with ‘Dr. Bob’ and . . . I never left.

I received an MA in Clinical-Community Psychology, a master’s in health systems administration, and a PhD in Critical Psychology all through Point Park, while helping to generate programs between Point Park’s psychology department and homeless organizations. I have also been introduced to organizations outside of Point Park. While serving as the president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, Brent brought myself (and now Dr. Justin Karter) into the fold of APA and specifically Division 32. I have presented at numerous conferences and been published in different publications, including serving as a Science Writer for Mad in America. In January of 2016, Brent offered me the opportunity to instruct courses in sociology and psychology, which began my now decade-long career as a professor.

And most importantly, I have never gone back to detox.

When Brent announced his diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, I sat in disbelief, drips of tears rolling down my cheek as I held back a deluge of emotions. However, I held them back not because I was afraid of these emotions or felt the need to anesthetize them – I simply wanted to hold it together long enough to make sure I took that opportunity to tell him that he had saved my life. Not through some miracle, but simply by acting on his principles to question the status quo and to bring others into the fold who knew deep down something in the world needs to change. By putting in the work to create that master’s program, giving a space to those of us who were searching, he created the possibility of a culture that could work as a therapeutic to my own culturally patterned defects. And while having helped to save my life is more than enough, I feel driven to continue this work of giving therapy to the culture.

These experiences gave me meaning and helped me fight back against the internalized pathologization of what are understandable reactions to an abnormal society. That meaning and purpose helped me push through all the painful aspects one faces when working on recovery from drug/alcohol addiction(s). In fact, the addiction in and of itself was a process of anesthesia to ‘cure’ the symptoms of larger issues I had not faced up to. My addiction was cued by social practices of drugs and alcohol – my heavy drinking began while being a member of a college fraternity, and my pill usage started through the wide prescribing and disbursement of anti-anxiety medications. Those social practices reflect back the anesthetic culture Robbins (2019) has described. While my eyes have been opened, I still see the suffering taking form not just in the addict in Kensington Philadelphia . . . but also in the wider culture, and even those we consider famous and powerful.

Which brings me back to Clavicular, looksmaxxing, Incel culture, and our modern world.

Weapons of Mass (Cultural) Destruction

Recently, President Trump stated that fentanyl was a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ going so far as to generate an executive order proclaiming as such (The United States Government, 2025). Fentanyl, in reality, is a useful tool for both pain management and general anesthesia (Ramos-Matos, 2023). Of course, fentanyl is also the most widely available street opioid on the black market and has been at the center of the ongoing overdose epidemic (Kolodny, 2021). Yet, we are still talking about a non-corporeal, non-agentic, non-conscious substance. But these ideas, that drugs are inherently dangerous and addictive, are one of ‘common sense’. It is an idea taught through media, school-based programs (D.A.R.E.), and even in institutions of higher learning. This belief in the inherent danger of non-living substances, in turn, helps to uphold the current cultural hegemony. However, through the lens of Brent Robbins’ Anesthetic Culture, we can see the scapegoating process at work. This process hides and obfuscates the very real social ills of our time. By blaming fentanyl, we can mystify the very palpable and understandable reasons why people would use this drug to anesthetize themselves against our current culture.

Two of the medications that Clavicular uses are Adderall and methamphetamine (Bernstein, 2026). Both of which are nearly chemically identical to each other. Adderall’s main use is in the treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which according to the DSM-5TR is akin to other neurocognitive disorders such as autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). As Chapman (2023) describes, the neurodiversity movement has been pushing back, or resisting, the idea that neurocognitive disorders are inherently akin to other diseases such as diabetes. Instead, they are experienced as disabilities due to the nature of the social order:

[S]ociety . . . disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way [people diagnosed as neurocognitively disordered] are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. (UPIAS in Chapman, 2023, p. 128)

As Chapman points out, ‘early neurodiversity proponents began to ask whether neurological divergence could similarly be celebrated’ as other diverse identities within civil rights movements and environmentalist biodiversity celebrations (p. 130). It is increasingly possible that neurodivergence is as important as biodiversity is for the human population, and ‘it takes more than just neurotypical minds for groups or even society as a whole to function’ (p. 136). Society identifies those who are not productive to the cultural hegemony, and manipulates and anesthetizes them, in order to fit into ill-fitting expectations. This does not stop at a supposed mental disease.

It is not known if Clavicular was prescribed these medications for ADHD, but he himself has claimed that the usage of Adderall is separate from his usage of other amphetamines (Bernstein, 2026). Specifically, Adderall is used to generate the focus and energy needed for him to keep pace with the level of production he believes to be satisfactory (the earlier described grindset mentality). In response to a possible increased appetite from exceptional hours working (and working out) he takes methamphetamine to suppress his appetite, which helps him maintain his particularly designed and measured physique. Increasingly, it becomes obvious that Clavicular is engaging in culturally patterned defects that have been generated over centuries prior to his birth. His Becker-ian ‘Hero Project’ (Robbins et al., 2015, p. 91) is to mechanically manipulate his body into a culturally generated ideal, partially through anesthetizing the very drives human beings have, including simple hunger.

Yet he did not wellspring these ideas into existence. These phenotypes that he aspires to have been around for years, if not decades. The concept of mechanical manipulation of the body has become so mainstream that there are Groupon coupons for liposuction, Botox, and facelifts (Groupon, n.d.). Medications are used to reshape the brain to match a modern normative ideal state of neurology (Chapman, 2023). And all these possibilities are generated through a cultural milieu and latticework of men searching for a normative masculine identity that could give them some feeling of stability (Sparks et al., 2022; Williams, 2024). But what happens when that masculinity is generated by an already sick society?

Boys are socialized, in school if not also in the home, to disconnect from their ability to be connected with themselves or others . . . This often results in a form of emotional illiteracy that recognizes only one emotion – anger. Our civic and religious institutions spread false information about what it means to be a man, and each generation of boys has grown up with fewer examples of men who embody a character forged through becoming responsible for their own emotional regulation. (Boscaljon in Williams, 2024, n.p.)

When you combine an anesthetic culture with a media riddled with culturally patterned defects (specifically social media) and a (needed) shifting attitude around masculinity, you will arrive at a Clavicular. In this case, it was Braden Peters. Yet Braden Peters is not alone in these activities. He currently has around 750,000 followers (according to a quick Google search).

We identified a singular anesthetic as a weapon of mass destruction while ignoring the mass destruction that anesthetic culture bombards onto Western society. And in this case, Western Men.

Toughness as Numbness

On November 20, 2024, the duo of Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson released an episode of their Citations needed (n.d) podcast entitled ‘Gaza and the Political Utility of Selective Empathy’. It reviewed the work of Dr. Ayyash (2019), the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence: A Four-Dimensional Conception. In the episode, they reviewed how certain groups are interpreted as having an inherent drive and propensity for violence. These groups were often marginalized either within a society (such as Muslim-Americans) or by the Western Elite Nation-States (such as the populations of majority Muslim nations). However, prior to their interview with Dr. Ayyash, they reported on research done in 2012 regarding the interpretation of pain tolerance in relation to racial stereotypes.

The research published by Trawalter, Hoffman, and Waytz (2012), showed that certain expectations around race lead to predetermined beliefs about a person’s ability to withstand pain. Namely, black people were expected to feel less pain (especially black women). The given rationale for these biases had less to do with essentialized characteristics, such as genetics, and more to do with the belief that people with less privilege would be better equipped to handle pain. ‘The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness’ (Trawalter et al., 2012, p. 5). What this shows is the effects of an anesthetic culture on the interpretation of what we could call ‘toughness’. Toughness, in this case, is believed to be based on the ability to withstand hardship, withstand pain, and withstand injury (another part of the study showed that injured Black NFL players were more likely to play in a subsequent game than injured White players). Toughness then equals not feeling.

We believe that cultural issues, such as racist beliefs about pain tolerance, are always rooted in White Supremacy. And to be fair, they usually are. But with this particular case, there is a gap in the analysis – a gap that can best be understood by the work of Brent Robbins and his concept of the anesthetic culture.

‘Feelmaxxing’ and ‘Emoti-Mogging’

Alexithymia, a condition where a subject has difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions, difficulty in creative thinking (usually being trapped in rationalizations and logical thinking), and even an inability to dream, is the natural end to an anesthetic culture (Robbins, 2019). As Williams’ (2024) work points to, problems in masculinity, especially toxic masculinity, are often wrapped up in the social conditioning that generates the belief that ‘real men’ are tough, and so if they are tough, they do not feel. If they are tough, they do not need others. If they are tough, they can withstand pain – even and especially self-inflicted pain in the pursuit of perfection.

But what if we didn’t change the idea that men need to be tough, and instead, redefined what toughness means? What if we lean into feeling as strength? What if we lean into the idea that the acceptance of the full range of human emotionality is stoic stability and hardiness? What if we begin to describe pain as an indicator of needed change rather than simply something that must be endured or eliminated? And to help translate this to the Incel culture, let me switch to their vernacular for the finale (Incel Wiki, 2026).

What if we were to model ‘emotionmog’ (better control our emotions and show it) for the ‘redpillers’ (incels, etc.) by ‘feelmaxxing’ (learning to understand our emotions) to S-tier (super) stoicism? What if we got them to understand that ‘simping’ (becoming obsessed and obedient in order to gain favor) for ‘PSL points’ (a combination of measurements designed by the Incel orgnaizations PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism) is High Cortisol (unnecessary stress) and ‘jester’ (in this case, a waste of time)? How can we help this subculture, and the wider culture, understand that ‘Lookism’ (obsession with physical appearance) just creates ‘Omegas’ (losers) because the ‘femoids’ (women) eventually ‘pill’ (figure out) the ‘halo effect’ (the discrepancy with image and reality)?

And hey, ‘slaymaxxing’ (casual sex, or sex in general) is at an all-time low across all the genders (Wahl, 2022)! In fact, Clavicular himself believes he may be sterile due to the numerous pharmaceuticals it takes to ‘mog’ (dominate others) as a ‘gigachad’ (Übermensch of the looksmaxxing subculture; Bernstein, 2026). What if we started to argue that even he is a ‘wagecuck’ (a working-class person) and if we don’t all change soon, ‘it’s over’ (self-explanatory) for the Alphas, the Betas, the Sigmas AND the Omegas (leaders, followers, cool weirdos, and losers)! We can’t all ‘blackpill’ (fall into nihilism) and ‘LDAR’ (lay down and rot). ‘Roping’ (committing suicide) is already at an all-time high, especially among young men (Hansen & Marcotte, 2023), so this current culture is, as Fromm would say, ‘soy’ (weak and broken).

While that might have sounded like A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat, learning and speaking the culture of the Manosphere and the Incel community is going to be necessary to some degree. These phenomena are inherently connected and driven by an anesthetic culture – one where feeling is associated with pathology, especially for cis-men. Robbins describes in his 2019 book how a mindfulness more authentic to Buddhist practice (than what is often derided as McMindfulness) may become an ‘experiential revolution’ (p. 309).

[B]y adopting an attitude of mindfulness as an epistemological habit, a phenomenological sensibility can open new avenues for re-awakening a relational ontology which understands the lived body as the center of a matrix of meaningful relationships. The lived body is a social body – a body that is always already situated in the social and natural worlds that we inhabit. To be attuned to the lived body of present-focused awareness is to step back from the detached attitude that constitutes body, world, and other as objects, and re-discovers the flesh of the world as a plenum of existence saturated with meaning and value, which gives us direction and orients us to the realization of a life worth living, in commune with others as social beings. (Robbins, 2019, p. 309)

I personally have been transformed through relational awareness, practices of mindfulness in the therapeutic and academic realms, and an acceptance of experience and even death. As Robbins (2025) alluded to in his recent talk ‘The End is the Beginning: An Existential Perspective on Suffering and Death,’ death is not the end of living, but the beginning. Without death, without emotion, without pain, without suffering, life becomes meaningless, vacuous, and inevitably filled with inhumane subcultures, destructive patterns, and unhelpful ‘cope’ (distractions and anesthetic tools).

While he might get called ‘soy’ by the incels and other manospheres, the reality is, we need to get the message out there. Brent Robbins is actually ‘based’.