The Textured Brave New World
The home page on YouTube grants a fascinating insight into the questionable sturdiness of my psyche. I’ve learnt to no longer question the beautiful cacophony of my suggested, which ranges from “Atilla the Hun – the Entire History” and “Willy Wonka being Willy Wonka for 6 minutes straight”. However, while falling down some strange YouTube rabbit holes in the past, I was not prepared for where a click of the mouse would transport me on a perfectly average morning a couple of weeks ago. I landed on a strip of cyberspace some have labelled the maniverse. More specifically, it was a snippet from an episode of the Fresh&Fit podcast titled “How She Should Be Treated.” And oh, boy. You might want to see this one for yourself.
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The podcast as a content medium is at its zenith. I suspect this, at least in part, is due to the two-fold effect of the pandemic; it forced creators to search for alternative avenues to meaningfully interact with their viewers, while simultaneously generating an audience starved for human connection, hungry for interpersonal conversations. Often less scripted and directed than videos, podcasts establish an enticing sense of intimacy and vulnerability. Which is just ridiculously ironic in the context of Fresh&Fit, due to the hosts’ unhinged aversion to both of those.
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Fresh&Fit was started by two friends, Walter Weekes and Myron Gaines, in early 2020; their channel quickly went viral, and currently sits at an impressive 650k subscribers. Their self-confessed mission is to educate and equip young men with tools necessary to become the best version of themselves. To achieve this, the content is thematically broken down into a frat bro’s holy trinity and assigned an alliterative day of the week for going live, treating their fans to Money Mondays, Womanizer Wednesdays, and Fitness Fridays. It’s the hump day episodes, focused on dating, love, and relationships that I found most mind-boggling, both due to the content and the format.
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Walter’s and Myron’s assessment of the dating scene is grim; men and women are apparently locked in a Hobbesian-esque “gender war” and our hosts are there to “arm men with bazookas” to fight the “women coming at them with butter knives.” Modern women have over inflated egos and demand too much; they forgot they are replaceable because they are nothing more than sex objects. Do not fret, Walter and Myron have emerged on the scene to put them back in their place and remind them that they are not special, not just via their words, but via the very format of the podcast. In a shamelessly ingenuine olive branch gesture, they invite female guests, who usually are involved in industries Walter and Myron harbour resentment towards. The playing field is uneven from the get-go. The guests are not there as respected opposition to be heard out; they are there to be humiliated for the hosts’ enjoyment.
In the world of Fresh&Fit, everything boils down to power and leverage. They way to win is to never relinquish power or show vulnerability. Myron suggests that even in a committed relationship, it is bad taste to ever let your partner get comfortable; the aim of the game is to keep them on their toes, to keep them guessing about your intentions, to let them know you have other options. He argues this creates a high value man. I argue this puts you somewhere between emotionally immature and emotionally abusive.
In the world of Fresh&Fit, everything boils down to power and leverage, with no space for pure intentions, respect, chemistry, reciprocity, interest, tenderness, insecurities, or absolutely anything else that underpins human connections. It’s that black and white. It’s grounded in cold tactics, behavioural determinism, and rationality. It’s all been explained away.
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People’s choice of language gives away a lot more than they anticipate, and the linguistic propensities of the Walter and Myron result in pathological de-humanisation of individuals and intricate social concepts. They persistently call women “girls” at best and “creatures” at worst. Their emotional sterility is reflected their references to the dating environment as “the current marketplace”, as if people are mere commodities to be traded. And this language is not at all uncommon in popular culture. Love is Blind’s Shake gives a nod to this tendency for materialistic conception of relationships, describing marriage as “not that different than making a huge purchase” in the reunion episode. Sure, Shake, just insert your card into the reader and we will get the keys to your newly purchased wife. Would you like her gift-wrapped?
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A scroll through the Fresh&Fit Twitter reveals that their obsession with axioms and rationality in sphere of love and dating borders a fetish. Their tweets read like a contemporary and gender-focused take on Moses’s 12 commandments:
“Men want quantity
Women want quality”
“Guy game is attaining the girl FOR sex
Girl game is retaining the man AFTER sex”
“Men are interested in things
Women are interested in people”
In true spirit of Exodus, I closed the tab after reading about 20 of these. It is beyond me how they see no issue with condensing the myriad of desires, interests, decisions, and behaviours of the entire planet into two-liners.
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I listened to so many Womanizer Wednesday episodes when researching for this piece, yet somehow heard absolutely nothing valuable. The conversations are unremarkable, repetitive, and often uncomfortable due to a reprimanding tone the hosts adopt to talk to the female guests; nothing new is brought to the table and whatever is brought is so incredibly hackneyed, I’d rather it be put away. For example, an episode staple is asking their guests to estimate a body count of an average 25-year-old woman; it goes without saying that the question is both boring and loaded (the corresponding Twitter commandment is “Women want a man with a future. Men want a woman without a past”), and the pseudo-polemics that follow are so devoid of nuance they make high-schoolers sound intellectual. The only way to reinvigorate an irreparably banal topic is to ask better questions, and there are so many that come to mind. Why not discuss what is at the root of people’s discomfort regarding their partner’s body count, be it low or high. Or consider what made certain sexual experiences pleasant, or embarrassing, or empowering? There are as many interesting and enriching ways to engage with topics of sex and gender as there are ways to love and desire, so why not nurture variety of experiences, thoughts, and opinions?
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But let’s be honest, Walter and Myron have no interest in expanding their horizons. They are comfortable in their literal and metaphorical echo chamber with an agenda they are ready to hammer into the four walls until the plaster cracks. Their rules - do not let your guard down, be on the offensive, follow the commandments, women are always like this, men are always like that- have denuded relationships of uncertainty that at times makes existence so painful, fragile, and delicate. My anger at their rhetoric quickly abated, and turned to pity, when I saw them exactly for who they are – hurt people, desperate for rigid rules to follow to avoid emotional torment, a compass to steer them clear of the beached shipwrecks of the heart. A burn will force you to study the properties of fire so astutely you make a science of it, and you’re only as protected from its heat as the conjectures underpinning it are sound, so deflect all that contradicts and regurgitate all that supports, do whatever it takes to keep yourself safe.
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Hear me out. Absolutely nothing in this world is guaranteed. Labels sometimes fail to provide security, marriages sometimes end, and our loved once sometimes let us down. The minute you accept that no digestible postulates, commandments, or rules are going to protect you from the realm of uncertainty of interpersonal relations is the minute you set yourself free. Individuals are elusive, cryptic, nuanced. Their behaviour cannot and should not be distilled to formulas, although it’s tempting to. Simultaneously, they crave security and danger, proximity and distance, appreciation and challenge. These contradictions exist, side by side, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in disarray, but either way, it gets goddamn hard to keep figuring people out. You keep trying to put it together, a puzzle made of shattered glass, just to find the edges chipped, not fitting. To persist in this maddening task, to truly see others, to make sense of the contradictions, requires tremendous courage. But lest we forget the courageous are rewarded. Sift through the glass pieces and suddenly, you are Miranda, staring into humanity’s kaleidoscope eyes, proclaiming, “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it.”
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I don’t doubt that the world Walter and Myron live in is much simpler world. But I doubt it’s curious. I doubt it’s full of goodly creatures. I doubt it’s brave.
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To study the tapestry of human essence is to run your hands through it, blindly absorbing the richness of the textures. Caress the shredded sinews of bleached denim to reach the seductive delicacy of silk in crevices that are hidden from the sternness of the external. Glide through the velvet patches of childlike softness. Let your palms bleed as your drag them across the cracked glass and allow the red to stain the smooth clean cotton Where the cold of the leather repels, the felts of wool comforts. Feel it all, persist in the flight of your hands, and you will untangle knots of ancient mysteries, rip apart fused seams to reveal the sequestered truths. Do it because the terror is intoxicating, do it because the only alternative is to relinquish curiosity and spend the days studying sandpaper that will disintegrate mercilessly into sharp grains inside your clenched fist.
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Don’t let hurt people on the internet persuade you to simplify the acts of loving, desiring, and being into rule-based postulates. Don’t let your own hurt deprive you of textures. And most importantly, don’t let anyone question your sanity based on the randomness of your YouTube homepage.