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Part-Time Jackass, Full-Time Chad—This Week On VICE: Members Only
One writer’s odyssey into the strange new connections between attraction, entertainment, and the algorithm.
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There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. Jordan B. Peterson once said this about a photo of the sun hitting a bottle of Evian on an in-flight meal tray, and—despite being a misquoting of Matisse—it’s probably one of his more positive contributions to the popular consciousness. As a basic philosophy it encourages finding the beauty in things designed to blend into the sludge of everyday life. Granted, this is also what people on DMT will tell you while staring intently at the crevasse between two sofa cushions. Still, it’s good to find new and unorthodox ways of looking at things—and there has been a lot of that this week at VICE: Members Only, the paywalled section of VICE.com, where dispatches from inside North Korea sit alongside photos of Ukrainian goths and a tell-all from a cocaine addict who used to work for the United Nations.
For example, have you considered that a delightful couple’s vacation might actually be the perfect time to terminate a relationship? VICE writer Amber Rawlings put together a very compelling case for why the ‘destination breakup’ ranks high on the list of ways to boot someone in the chest, metaphorically speaking. If that sounds evil, perhaps Amber’s logic will sway you:
“I’m not saying it’s nice. It definitely wasn’t nice to nickname him James ‘Composite’ Bond because of his missing tooth. I mean, it was really funny when you came up with it as he emerged from the pool that one time. (See? I’ll remember bits of our holiday quite fondly). But it’s not about being nice, is it? If you’ve decided on the destination breakup, you’ve already done away with social convention. Obviously you could wait until the holiday is over. You could let him buy you an overpriced Burger King at arrivals and then let him down gently when you’re back on home soil. That’s probably the ‘right’ thing to do. But life is fucking short. What do you gain from being a martyr?”In fairness, if someone’s going to ruin your life for the foreseeable you might as well get something out of it—a few lagers in the sun and a deck of cigarettes with the branding in tact, an afternoon dive bombing through a rubber ring in the resort pool, like a dog doing all its favorite things before being put to sleep. “Minus the earth-shattering events that took place,” Amber argues, “he should be grateful.”
For the single people who don’t have someone special in their life to consider putting on the chopping block in Santorini, you’re maybe—in fact, let’s be honest, almost certainly—more invested in looksmaxxing, which Amber has also written about this week.
There have been several developments in the looksmaxxing community recently besides Clavicular getting brutally blah blah yeah you know the rest. For instance, men are coming up with increasingly imaginative ways to achieve their beauty goals. Some lads are smashing up their legs to gain an extra few inches in height. Others with jawlines like Lord Farquaad shilling “training gum,” while one is busy forcing bees to sting his face in service of a more powerful hairline. How serious they all are is hard to say. In a piece speaking to current and former looksmaxxers about their motivations, Amber argues the more stunt-based side of things is basically another hustle economy of content creators going to ridiculous physical extremes for engagement—Jackass for the algorithm, as she puts it. Speaking to Alex Aaron, a self-proclaimed “biohacker” and full-time “#chad,” she writes:
“Escalation is baked into the model. ‘The people that are successful are successful because what they say is crazy,’ says Aaron. ‘They keep finding crazier things to say.’ And increasingly crazier things to sell. The looksmaxxing ecosystem has merged with the broader hustle economy, where going viral and flogging something are essentially the same move. It’s a long way from the late-2010s ‘incel plastic surgery panic,’ when the story was more straightforward: pathetic losers mutilating themselves to get girls. The guys dominating the space now aren’t desperate for sex—they’re entrepreneurs.”
Click the link below to read her theory and see what you reckon.
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year gets you the full digital package plus 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door.
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IMAGE: VICE's Amber Rawlings. Part-Time Jackass, Full-Time Chad—This Week On VICE: Members Only 4 minutes ago By Emma Garland
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