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In 2015, a subreddit called /r/The_Donald was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and widely been regarded as a bad move.
Roughly 5 years after its inception, the Reddit staff banned /r/The_Donald because it was a cesspool of hateful content and harmful conspiracy theories. You can learn more about it here.
Why are we talking about this in 2021?
Well, a lot has happened in the first week of the new year. A lot of words have been written about the fascist insurrection that attempted a coup on the U.S. legislature, so I won’t belabor the point more than I have to.
But as it turns out: The shitty people who ran /r/The_Donald didn’t leave well enough alone when they got shit-canned.
(Art by Khia.)
Instead, they spun up a Reddit clone under the domain thedonald.win and hid it behind CloudFlare.
Even worse: Without Reddit rules to keep them in check, they’ve gone all in on political violence and terrorism.
(Content Warning: Fascism, political violence, and a myriad of other nastiness in the Twitter thread below.)
https://twitter.com/Viking_Sec/status/1347758893976457217
If you remember last year, I published a blog post about identifying the real server IP address from email headers. This is far from a sophisticated technique, but if simple solutions work, why not use them?
(Related, I wrote a post in 2020 about more effectively deplatforming hate and harassment. This knowledge will come in handy if you find yourself needing to stop the spread of political violence, but is strictly speaking not relevant to the techniques discussed on this page.)
Unmasking TheDonald.win
The technique I outlined in my previous post doesn’t work on their Reddit clone software: Although it asks you for an (optional) email address at the time of account registration, it never actually emails you, and there is no account recovery feature (a.k.a. “I forgot my password”).
(Art by Khia.)
However, their software is still a Reddit clone!
Reddit has this feature where you can submit links and it will helpfully fetch the page title for you. It looks like this:
How this feature works is simple: They initiate an HTTP request server-side to fetch the web page, parse out the title tag, and return it.
So what happens if you control the server that their request is being routed to, and provide a unique URL?
Well, that was easy! To eliminate false positives, I performed all of this sampling with Tor Browser and manually rebuilt the Tor Circuit multiple times, and always got the same IP address: 167.114.145.140.
An Even Lazier Technique
Just use Shodan, lol
https://twitter.com/_rarecoil/status/1347768188017143808
Apparently chuds are really bad at OpSec, and their IP was exposed on Shodan this whole time.
(Art by Khia.)
The Road to Accountability
Okay, so we have their real IP address. What can we do with it?
The easiest thing to do is find out who’s hosting their servers, with a simple WHOIS lookup on their IP address.
Hosted by OVH Canada, eh? After all, nothing screams “Proud American” like hosting your website with a French company in a Canadian datacenter.
I immediately wondered if their ISP was aware they were hosting right-wing terrorists, so I filed an innocent abuse report with details about how I obtained their IP address and the kind of behavior they’re engaging in. Canada’s laws about hate speech and inciting violence are comparably strict, after all.
I’ll update this post later if OVH decides to take action.
Lessons to Learn
First, don’t tolerate violent political extremists, or you’ll end up with political violence on your hands. Deplatforming works.
https://twitter.com/witchiebunny/status/1347624481318166528
Second, and most important: Online privacy is hard. Hard enough that bigots, terrorists, and seditious insurrectionists can’t do it right.
This bears emphasizing: None of the techniques I’ve shared on the history of my blog are particularly clever or novel. But they work extremely well, and they’re useful for exposing shitty people.
Remember: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Conversely: Basic OSINT isn’t hard; merely tedious.
Other Techniques (from Twitter)
Subdomain leaks (via @z3dster):
https://twitter.com/z3dster/status/1347807318478639106
Exploiting CloudFlare workers (via @4dwins):
https://twitter.com/4dwins/status/1347809701291937792
DNS enumeration (via @JoshFarwell):
https://twitter.com/JoshFarwell/status/1347840751720304641
If the site in question is running WordPress, you can use Pingbacks to get WordPress to cough up the server IP address. If you aren’t sure if something runs WordPress, here’s the lazy way to detect that: view any page’s source code and see if the string /wp-content shows up in any URLs (especially for CSS). If it’s found, you’re probably dealing with WordPress.
Gab’s (another platform favored by right-wing extremists) IP address discovered through their Image Proxy feature to be 216.66.0.222 (via @kubeworm):
https://twitter.com/kubeworm/status/1348162193523675136
The Alt-Right Notices this Blog Post
Shortly after I posted this online, some users from thedonald.win noticed this blog post and hilarity ensued.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1348204577154326528
I want to make something clear in case anyone (especially members of toxic Trump-supporting communities) is confused:
What’s published on this page isn’t doxing, nor do I have any interest in doxing people. That’s the job of law enforcement, not furry bloggers who sometimes write about computer topics. And law enforcement definitely doesn’t need my help: When you create an account, you must solve a ReCAPTCHA challenge, which sends an HTTP request directly to Google servers–which means law enforcement could just subpoena Google for the IP address of the server, even if the above leaks were all patched.
This also isn’t the sort of thing I’d ever brag about, since the entire point I’ve been making is what I’ve done here isn’t technically challenging. If I wanted to /flex, I’d just talk more about my work on constant-time algorithm implementations.
If, in response to my abuse report, OVH Canada determines that their website isn’t violating OVH’s terms of service, then y’all have nothing to worry about.
But given the amount of rampant hate speech being hosted in Canadian jurisdiction, I wouldn’t make that bet.
Addendum (2021-01-19)
Additionally, this wasn’t as simple as running a WHOIS search on thedonald.win either, since that only coughs up the CloudFlare IP addresses. I went a step further and got the real IP address of the server behind CloudFlare, not just CloudFlare’s IP.
According to CBC Canada, they moved off OVH Canada the same day this blog post went live. I’m willing to bet a simple WHOIS query won’t yield their current, non-CloudFlare IP address. (To wit: If you think the steps taken in this blog post are so unimpressive to warrant mockery, why not discover the non-CloudFlare IP for yourselves? I’ll bet you can’t.)
There are a lot of ways to deflect criticism for your system administrators’ mistakes, but being overly reductionist and claiming I “just” ran a WHOIS query (which, as stated above, wouldn’t work because of CloudFlare) is only hurting your users by instilling in them a false sense of security.
Just admit it: You fucked up, and got outfoxed by a random furry blogger, and then moved hosting providers after patching the IP leak. How hard is that?
Also, if anyone from CloudFlare is reading this: You should really dump your violent extremist customers before they hurt more people. I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech–especially for sex workers, the most censored group online–but they’re actively spreading hate and planning violent attacks like the Capitol Hill Riot of January 6, 2021. Pull the damn plug, man.
Finally, I highly recommend Innuendo Studios’ series, The Alt-Right Playbook, for anyone who’s trying to make sense of the surge in right-wing violence we’ve been seeing in America for the past few years.
How Do You Know This IP Wasn’t Bait?
After I published this article, the developers of their software hobbled the Get Suggested Title feature of their software, and the system administrators cancelled their OVH hosting account and moved to another ISP. (Source.)
You can independently verify that their software is hobbled: Try to fetch the page title for a random news website, or Wikipedia article, with the developer console open. It will stall for a while then return an empty string instead of the page title.
If the IP address I’d found was bait, why would they break a core piece of their software’s functionality and then hurriedly migrate their server elsewhere?
The very notion doesn’t stand up to common sense, let alone greater scrutiny. The whole point of bait is to catch people making a mistake–presumably so you can mock them while remaining totally unaffected–not so you can do these things in a hurry.
A much more likely story: Anyone who makes this claim is trying to downplay a mistake and save face.
Header art by Kyume
https://soatok.blog/2021/01/09/masks-off-for-thedonald-win/
#cloudflare #deanonymize #hateSpeech #OnlinePrivacy #Technology
Update (2021-01-09): There’s a newer blog post that covers different CloudFlare deanonymization techniques (with a real world case study).Furry Twitter is currently abuzz about a new site selling knock-off fursuits and illegally using photos from the owners of the actual fursuits without permission.
The website in question.
Understandably, the photographers and fursuiters whose work was ripped off by this website are upset and would like to exercise their legal recourse (i.e. DMCA takedown emails) of the scam site, but there’s a wrinkle:
Their contact info isn’t in DNS and their website is hosted behind CloudFlare.
CloudFlare.
Private DNS registration.
You might think this is a show-stopper, but I’m going to show you how to get their server’s real IP address in one easy step.
Ordering the Server’s IP Address by Mail
Most knock-off site operators will choose open source eCommerce platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, and OpenCart, which usually have a mechanism for customers to register for an account and login.Usually this mechanism sends you an email when you authenticate.
(If it doesn’t, logout and use the “reset password” feature, which will almost certainly send you an email.)
Once you have an email from the scam site, you’re going to need to view the email headers.
With Gmail, can click the three dots on the right of an email then click “Show original”.
Account registration email.
Full email headers after clicking “Show original”.
And there you have it. The IP address of the server behind CloudFlare delivered piping hot to your inbox in 30 minutes or less, or your money back.
That’s a fairer deal than any of these knock-off fursuit sites will give you.
Black magic and piss-poor opsec.
What Can We Do With The Server IP?
You can identify who hosts their website. (In this case, it’s a company called Net Minders.)With this knowledge in mind, you can send an email to their web hosting provider, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
One or two emails might get ignored, but discarding hundreds of distinct complaint emails from different people is bad for business. This (along with similar abuse complaints to the domain registrar, which isn’t obscured by DNS Privacy) should be enough to shut down these illicit websites.
The more you know!
Epilogue
https://twitter.com/Mochiroo/status/1259289385876373504The technique is simple, effective, and portable. Use it whenever someone tries to prop up another website to peddle knock-off goods and tries to hide behind CloudFlare.
https://soatok.blog/2020/05/09/how-to-de-anonymize-scam-knock-off-sites-hiding-behind-cloudflare/
#cloudflare #deanonymize #DNS #fursuitScamSites #informationSecurity #OnlinePrivacy #opsec
Earlier this year, I detailed a simple technique for deanonymizing scam sites on CloudFlare, by getting the back-end webserver to email you and reveal the server’s IP address (so you can forward your complaints to their ISP).
In a similar vein, I’d like to explain a simple technique for increasing the likelihood that your abuse reports on social media websites like Twitter get taken seriously.
Don’t Use the Easy Button
Every tweet (except your own) has a Report Tweet link attached to it. The user interface is different on web and mobile, but most people know how to find it.
The problem with this “easy button” is twofold:
- It’s low-effort and high-bandwidth, so a lot of people use it and therefore the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t very high.
- The “report tweet” workflow lets you select from one of a few narrowly defined categories of abuse without giving you any space to explain why it’s abusive.
For example: A lot of anti-furry hate is a dogwhistle for ableist or queerphobic rhetoric. Without knowing that context, how do you expect the folks handling abuse reports for social media companies to make the correct choice?
Instead, File an Abuse Report
This is actually a separate thing, and the link to the harassment report form is here. (This is one of many forms you can file with Twitter’s support team.)
Not only do you get to click the radio buttons that the Quick and Easy path allows, you also get to fill in a description of the problem.
The difference here isn’t theoretical; a concise explanation of the problem is the difference between your report being ignored and this:
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1319983706858246146
If you have any friends that are frequent targets of social media harassment, and their reports aren’t taken seriously, share this article with them.
(That being said, I’m really sorry this is even necessary.)
What About Automation?
One motivation to still use the “easy button” when reporting abuse is if you’re hoping to trigger some automated mechanism (i.e. “If 3 different accounts report this as abuse, suspend their account until someone can investigate”).
In that case, press that easy button to your heart’s content.
https://twitter.com/packonines/status/1068746663764860929
https://soatok.blog/2020/11/12/deplatforming-hate-and-harassment/
#abuseReporting #cyberbullying #harassment #hateSpeech #onlineAbuse #SocialMedia #Twitter
Update (2021-01-09): There’s a newer blog post that covers different CloudFlare deanonymization techniques (with a real world case study).Furry Twitter is currently abuzz about a new site selling knock-off fursuits and illegally using photos from the owners of the actual fursuits without permission.
Understandably, the photographers and fursuiters whose work was ripped off by this website are upset and would like to exercise their legal recourse (i.e. DMCA takedown emails) of the scam site, but there’s a wrinkle:
Their contact info isn’t in DNS and their website is hosted behind CloudFlare.
You might think this is a show-stopper, but I’m going to show you how to get their server’s real IP address in one easy step.
Ordering the Server’s IP Address by Mail
Most knock-off site operators will choose open source eCommerce platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, and OpenCart, which usually have a mechanism for customers to register for an account and login.Usually this mechanism sends you an email when you authenticate.
(If it doesn’t, logout and use the “reset password” feature, which will almost certainly send you an email.)
Once you have an email from the scam site, you’re going to need to view the email headers.
With Gmail, can click the three dots on the right of an email then click “Show original”.
And there you have it. The IP address of the server behind CloudFlare delivered piping hot to your inbox in 30 minutes or less, or your money back.
That’s a fairer deal than any of these knock-off fursuit sites will give you.
What Can We Do With The Server IP?
You can identify who hosts their website. (In this case, it’s a company called Net Minders.)With this knowledge in mind, you can send an email to their web hosting provider, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
One or two emails might get ignored, but discarding hundreds of distinct complaint emails from different people is bad for business. This (along with similar abuse complaints to the domain registrar, which isn’t obscured by DNS Privacy) should be enough to shut down these illicit websites.
Epilogue
https://twitter.com/Mochiroo/status/1259289385876373504The technique is simple, effective, and portable. Use it whenever someone tries to prop up another website to peddle knock-off goods and tries to hide behind CloudFlare.
https://soatok.blog/2020/05/09/how-to-de-anonymize-scam-knock-off-sites-hiding-behind-cloudflare/
#cloudflare #deanonymize #DNS #fursuitScamSites #informationSecurity #OnlinePrivacy #opsec
The year 2021 has taught us, if nothing else, that we can be sure that lies, misinformation, and bullshit are post-scarce resources in modern society.
In such an information economy, it should come as no surprise–yet an abundance of disappointment–that ideas like the “Sigma Male” even exist.
What is a Sigma Male?
I’m not going to mince words.
https://twitter.com/LilySimpson1312/status/1353674278722392066
“Sigma Male” is a ploy to recruit insecure young men into the same involuntary celibate (incel) / anti-feminist / pick-up artist trifecta that’s been making the Internet a worse place for everyone since at least 2005, and an evolution of the widely debunked “alpha male” myth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTyQgwVvYyc
Trust me on this one, guys: I’m a gay furry. The whole alpha/beta dynamic gets referenced a lot by neophytes to furry/kink culture. Sometimes we entertain it as harmless fun, but practically no one (especially with a canid fursona) takes it remotely seriously.
Why is This Even a Thing?
Let me tell you what’s really going on here:
When the career date-rapists and grifters behind the pick-up artist and “alpha male” circle-jerk realized that their audience was becoming disillusioned by the fact that their attempts to act “more alpha” was not resulting in healthy sexual or romantic relationships with women, they decided to invent a totally new concept–divorced of any psychological basis, of course–in order to keep their audience faithful to their bullshit and ensnare additional desperate, insecure young men.
Since trying to act “more alpha” just makes most people total jerks, which results in women running away as fast as they can, they decided to invent a more-hipster alternative for the failures in their revenue base to aspire to: One of silent edginess and marked by deliberate rejection of social structures. Since nothing comes before alpha in Greek, but video game culture places S-Rank above A-Rank, they decided to opt for the label “Sigma”.
Naturally, this results in a litany of book deals, YouTube videos, and public relations to sell their audience the idea that achieving this fictional aspiration is “what women really want”. The proposition here is, “If you know what women really want, you can get what you really want from them.” (i.e. sexual gratification).
It’s not just gross. It’s also a kind of exploitative that begets more exploitative behavior.
The same crowd that invented “Sigma Male” also conceived “negging”.
Here’s an actual list of “qualities” ascribed to a so-called Sigma Male, according to one of the peddlers of this moronic belief, only rearranged to emphasize the contradictions and meaninglessness of this description:
| “SIgma Males” are… | …but also apparently…? |
|---|---|
| 10. He’s Incredibly Self-Aware | 14. He Can’t Be Told What To Do When It Comes To Anything |
| 13. He Could Be an Alpha If He Wanted | 4. He Treats Everyone Around Him The Same Way |
| 2. He Is a Silent Leader | 9. His Social Skills Could Use Some Work |
| 6. He Understands the Importance of Silence | 12. It’s Hard To Understand Him |
| 1. He Loves Being Alone, But He Values Other People | 3. He Knows How To Adapt To Different Situations |
| 11. He’s the Master of His Own Fate | 8. He Hates Living Life Safely |
| 5. He Doesn’t Need a Social Circle To Be Himself | 7. He’s Morally Grey, Or Worse |
A lot of words could be written about these contradictory or vacuous statements.
How can you be a leader with inadequate social skills? If he really understands the importance of silence, why is it hard to understand him? Sure sounds like he’s misusing silence to me. Who isn’t a master of their own destiny? Who does need a social circle to be themselves?
The “Sigma Male” con is what happens if you take the tactics of cold reading and apply them in reverse:
Instead of starting general and drilling down to more specific based on your audience’s response, you start specific (“rarest type of male”) and then generalize the definition to become completely meaningless while also maximizing the relatability of the label to catch unaware rubes off-guard.
(Art by Khia.)
While we’re on the subject of some of the sleaziest pieces of shit to ever walk the earth, let’s examine some more crimes against culture by these self-aggrandizing embarrassments to the male gender.
The “Friend Zone”
If you want to doom someone to a lifetime of unhealthy relationships, convince them that there’s this tragic place called the “Friend Zone” wherein, if someone you’re attracted to views you as a “friend”, you’re doomed to never have sexual relations with them.
If you’ll notice, I omitted gender in the previous paragraph. This one is so pernicious that I occasionally encounter it in the LGBT community.
For adherents to this particular cognitive distortion, relationships exist in a linear hierarchy:
- Spouse–You want to be here
- Significant Other
- Friends with Benefits / Sexual Partner
- Friend (Platonic)–You don’t want to be here
- Acquaintance
- Stranger
Friendship isn’t valued on its own merits. Instead, it’s a stepping stone; a mere transitional fossil between where you are and where you want things to be. I’ve talked about this before.
When someone adheres to this belief, it shapes the way they interact with people they’re attracted to, and often creates a negative feedback loop. This in turn gives rise to the incel (involuntary celibate) mentality–except now, it’s almost always by men against women.
Failure to become an “alpha” leaves you delegated as a “beta”–or worse, a “cuck”.
Let’s put a pin on that point for a moment.
Interlude: On the Modern Usage of the Word “Cuck”
Right-wingers love to use the word “cuck” to describe someone they dislike.
It became a meme during the 2016 Election in the United States, with some labels (“cuckservative”) being used to demonize Republicans who weren’t reactionary enough.
The origins of the insult began with a term for a sexual fetish called cuckoldry: The enjoyment of watching other people have sex with your significant other.
Most bloggers treat this as a clinical subject and stop there. I am not most bloggers.
An under-reported and unfortunate truth of cuckold fetishists is that there’s often a significant racial component to their fantasy: White couples almost always seek out a black man to be the “bull” (the person whom displaces the cuckold) of the scene. (This is as much a problem within the LGBT community as it is outside of it.)
If you thought the depraved minds of 4chan users wouldn’t pick up on this cue, you haven’t been paying attention to the Internet since 2007.
The insult “cuck” has less to do with the fetish, tangibly, than it does to do with a white supremacist worldview.
To white supremacists, white women are the “property” of white men, and any man who “allows” white women to have sex with a person of color is a cuck.
Thus, there are two kinds of people who use the word “cuck”: Those who know its intent and mean it, and the oblivious masses who mask the dog-whistle. Propagandists call the latter useful idiots.
https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/814635817650028545
In Want of Money and Power
If you want to find the truth behind a person’s actions, you need to first discover their incentives. This is the “follow the money” approach, but generalized: Some people don’t need money, they want power. Political power, specifically.
It should come as no surprise that pick-up artists, anti-feminists, and incels all subscribe vehemently to the “friend zone” mythos. Additionally, incels, in particular, are prone to self-loathing and projection around the “cuck” insult.
This ultimately leads to a very dark place.
The Fascist Event Horizon
Most of us, in our youth, are varying degrees of socially awkward. This leads to anxiety, insecurity, and a sense of listlessness in most young adults.
Typically, we grow out of this by building relationships, learning through a litany of easily avoidable mistakes, and acquire the understanding we lack.
Pick-up artists prey on the rest of us, convincing them that the reason they don’t have a fulfilling sex life is because they’re not adhering to some aggressive social stereotype that gives them superpowers over women.
The ones that “succeed” go on to perpetuate that cycle. The ones that fail become self-loathing incels that stew in their own awkwardness and contempt.
It’s no secret that white nationalism courts Internet nerd culture.
Once you start to head down this path, you’re almost guaranteed to internalize a lot of the beliefs that are espoused:
- “Women want strong alpha males.”
- “Alpha males are dominant, assertive, adhere strongly to evangelical Christian values, and embody tradition.”
- “Women would rather sleep with a jerk than a nice guy.”
- “If you’re friend-zoned, that makes you a cuck to the girl you deserve.”
It’s here that two competing interests will clash.
Incentives Rule Everything Around Me
People who want money and influence are incentivized to find some mental framework that allows a diverse set of personality types to somehow succeed at their relationship goals. This is why they went on to invent the Sigma Male, and insist “they’re equal to alphas, but separate from the hierarchy”.
People who want political power and true believers to perform political violence and stochastic terrorism on their behalf are incentivized to set the bar high and make everyone feel inadequate.
That’s why, immediately after the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and a general shunning of his rabid supporters, the Sigma Male meme is suddenly on a rise in popularity.
Preventing the Poisonous Patriarchy
If you want to prevent a friend or family member from falling into the trappings of abusive con men, white nationalist recruiters, and toxic masculinity, there are a few things you can do to stop them from going down this road.
- Consent is sexy.
Establish good habits. “Yes means Yes” is a better framework than “No means No”, because it implies a negative default in the absence of a specific answer. There’s a lot of literature on BDSM culture and sex work that you can pull inspiration from. - Emphasize healthy friendships.
Fuck the hierarchy worldview; friends are amazing. Whatever it takes, make sure you can appreciate your friends for who they are, not what they might later become.
If you’re struggling to make friends, I recommend reading this article. - The only thing we have to cringe is cringe itself.
Fuck what other people think: If you’re having fun with an activity, who cares if it’s “cringe”? Authentic enjoyment becomes fleeting for many adults once you progress through puberty; and while I’m not sure if that’s nature or nurture, I do know that being shamelessly yourself at all times maximizes your enjoyment. - Abandon tradition, embrace modernity.
Tradition is stupid. It’s literally doing what people have always done because a better idea hasn’t yet come along–even when a better idea does come along!
Instead of relying on traditions, practice creative and imaginative thinking every chance you get. Step out of your comfort zone from time to time. Introspect and plan differently for the next time you’re in a similar situation. That’s how you grow as a person.
If you practiced all of the above and are still bewildered by “what women want” and worried you’ll be alone forever, here’s my final bit of advice: Ask them! Especially if you’re close enough friends that they’ll answer in earnest, because they know that you’re trustworthy and not trying to objectify them.
Literally nobody knows what a given woman is looking for in a partner more than she does. Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit or dangerously manipulative.
If you ask 100 women what they want in a partner, you’ll get 100 different answers. Gender roles aren’t a symptom of a homogeneous population. People are people.
If anyone is truly your friend, they’re already emotionally invested in seeing you find someone that will make you happy. Trust them more than you’d trust me, or anyone who confidently claims to know “what women want” and then proceeds to totally misunderstand everything women say.
Additionally, everything I said above is also true of men and enbies. People are people, dammit!
What Do I Do if Someone Calls Themselves a “Sigma Male”?
Reply “Sigma balls“.
Ridicule might not adequately discourage participation (after all, the unscientific Myers-Brigg Type Indicator is still prevalent everywhere), but it’s cathartic.
https://twitter.com/M3rcaptan/status/1355665303540215817
Questions and Answers
Since I first published this article, I’ve received a lot of feedback. I’m going to attempt to respond to some of the questions I’ve received over the past few month in order to save everyone time asking the same questions.
Is the Notion of a Sigma Male as Scam or Grift?
Yes! See above for details.
The goal of the “sigma male” idea is to capture more of the “desperate and lonely single man” market segment–in particular, the ones that don’t buy the whole “alpha male” shtick. It’s pure bullshit and it’s bad for you.
Is Sigma Male “Cringe”?
Cringe culture is stupid, but I’m willing to make an exception for the whole “sigma male” meme (but only insofar as we also treat “alpha male” with the same level of earned contempt).
Science has shown that biological sex is not binary. Furthermore, sex isn’t the same thing as gender identity, which can be different from your biological sex and has to do with your role within society. This is what science has to say about the subject; it’s not up for debate.
So, with all that in mind, why do the same crowds of people who insist that sex is binary and assigned at birth (in spite of what science actually suggests) turn around and invent multiple kinds of male that someone can be, only to then arrange them in an imaginary hierarchy?
That’s pretty cringe, bro.
Why Are You Falsely Equivocating PUAs and Incels?
I’m not, and you have to be acting in bad faith to think listing two groups together is the same as equivocating the two.
Both groups are the consequence of the same harmful and false beliefs about gender, sex, and masculinity. Their beliefs about women are disgusting and they prey on the insecurity of other men to secure book deals and speaking gigs.
Pick-up artists are predators that spread predatory ideas. Incels are the desperate dregs that don’t buy the PUA books but still internalize the same values, usually expressed through self-deprecation. These are clearly not the same thing, but both groups are the consequence of the same delusional bullshit rooted in anti-feminism.
Eww, a furry!
Wow, you sure got me there.
How will I ever recover from this startling revelation?
Sigmas are REAL! They’re the introverted version of the Alpha. Period.
Nope. Alpha Males aren’t a real thing either.
The person who coined the term “alpha male” in wolf populations spent the rest of their career trying to correct the misconception they accidentally created. I covered all of this in the blog post already.
The people who purport that “being alpha” is a meaningful descriptor of humans rather than incomplete software are either delusional or trying to pull one over on you.
The unproven hypothesis of “sigma male” is predicated on debunked pseudoscience. Why bother believing something whose entire foundation is false?
The science of personality (a discipline of psychology) is extremely complicated. The people peddling the [Greek Letter Here] Male are trying to sell you on the belief that masculinity is a hierarchy of tribes. It’s just as stupid as the Myers-Brigg Type Indicators.
If you want an actual model for personality based on real cognitive science, look at HEXACO. Notably, your personality scores do not yield a reliable partitioning (“Are you an T or a P?”) nor is a hierarchy proposed.
Anything that says your entire personality or existence can be summarized as belonging to one of N groups (with N less than 100), or by a ranking in an imaginary social ladder, is bullshit–pure and simple.
Note: The header for this section is from one of the many unapproved comments submitted to this blog post with a fake email address. Comments like this aren’t an expression of introverted personalities. The word you’re looking for is “cowardice”.
Why aren’t you approving my comments on this blog post?
Mandatory reading: My blog isn’t a platform for internet randos.
https://soatok.blog/2021/01/25/no-youre-not-a-sigma-male/
#alphaMale #cuck #Fascism #hateSpeech #Incels #PickupArtists #SigmaMale #Society #toxicity
I rarely think about the labels that describe me.That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)
The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.
At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.
Identity
Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”
Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.
Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?
Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.
Pride
Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.
I wish I knew the original source for this meme.
And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)
There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.
I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.
This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.
That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.
Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.
Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.
Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.
It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?
A Dream To Seek
Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.
As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.
So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).
Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.
No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.
The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.
The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.
And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.
What Do Your Labels Mean?
This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.
Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.
Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.
Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.
If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/
Content warning: Increase in hate speech on bird site
“The toxicity of Twitter has severely increased post-Musk’s walking into that building," one of the researchers behind the work says.
The full story on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/heres-proof-hate-speech-is-more-viral-on-elon-musks-twitter/
#twitter #hatespeech #news #research #WIRED
Here’s Proof Hate Speech Is More Viral on Elon Musk’s Twitter
Researchers monitoring a “firehose” of public tweets found signs of increasing toxicity—before Elon Musk reversed bans on Trump and other divisive figures.Will Knight (WIRED)