Dear fellow idiot males —

I remember, in the old days, they had a little thing that they used to call Vaudeville. And when I birthday would happen, a man would get a cake. A man would get … there’d be a candles-on-the-cake type thing. Today, the kids get an Egg McMuffin, and a little piece of cherry pie type thing, and they think that’s the way to live your life! That’s not a good thing.

I remember, in the old days, marketing assumed common cultural givens about personhood and only tried to spruce it up. You’d buy a Chrysler to feel elegant-cool-smooth and a touch of Smug arrogance. Marketing would address abstract attributes—coolness, sexiness, apparent wealth, confidence. People would purchase a new status or state of being, but not a high-level abstract kind. Black consumers might purchase blackness, but whites did not purchase whiteness, or maleness. They would only purchase a species of maleness, such as jock, rich, or stud.

There used to be shared assumptions about the fundamental categories of the thing being spruced up. Men would want strong jaws with facial hair cut off below the surface. Hot women would join them by the bathroom mirror, rub their face, and bend up one leg like a flamingo in arousal response. “Man” was assumed, and “sexy face” was the need being met, and sex (or sexier sex) was the promised consequence. The mark was attacked by being shown a better way. “Hey. Are you as happy as you could be? No—you know the answer is No. Women love smooth faces. Look, it makes their legs bend.”

We listen to commercial theater not only to solve a problem, but to learn what the problems are that we have. The problems that advertisers invent are delimited because the products they sell are particular. Lack of sex? Girls are primarily interested in faces, and they are most attracted to smooth football faces. Using <stupid product name> gives you the most desirable face. Here is the full formula —

1. You don’t know what women want, loser.
2. Women want a square jaw and dimpled chin and steroid-plumped Glen Danzig masseters
3. Buy the bullshit we show you at the end of the add—either shaving cream, after shave, electric razor, disposable razor, or pack of blades for your safety razor.

In short: You don’t know why you’re not happy. We do. It’s your lack of smooth football-player-jaw. Buy this bullshit and you’ll get it. The selling is also an education.

You will pay to know what you really think

Today, the mark is attacked for not having a proper grasp on its own category of being. This make sense with species of being. You can learn to be a better maid or a better cop. These are well-defined techne where educating and training makes a difference.

But marketing knows no limits, and even metaphysical strata of abstracta can be mined!

You’re now buying yourself as a gender. Only one step away from paying to know what you really are qua species being! You want to know what it is to be a Man? An “adult male?” There are websites to teach you what postures and attitudes to fake, what hobbies to like, and what affiliate linked buttons to press to buy the products that fabricate you into a worshipped alpha. Look at these names: askmen.com, theadultman.com, and the non-parody artofmanliness.com. These really exist. And male humans in America are swallowing what anyone from prehistory to 1997 would have laughed at. Just for being gay! It’s like toddlers who worship professional wrestling—they adore then absorb and then emulate their heroes. But now the heroes are smug models lounging with half-mast eyes, a cocked eyebrow, and a derisive half-smile. Sexy and powerful, this Gap shirt model is dismissive … mmm! But its authentic, because it uses Beagle Bros.-type clipart and 70s mustaches.

Manliness marketing vomit-chunk example: Bespoke Post

Here’s a real screenshot for Googling that gayest of shit-items, the Bespoke Post Box:

Anyway, here’s how it works:

1. Asshole company Bespoke Post buys department store shit your mom would force on you when you were 10 from companies for cheap. This is the shit they couldn’t sell at the mall.
2. Asshole company then “curates” it—that is, they pick the crap that is least offensive.
3. Then they mix it with other crap, creating a deliciously curated bespoke post of just the choicest most delicious morsels of manly mustache beard lumberjack pharma-bro bullshit to help you get laid.

I detest Bespoke Post. You're paying money to gulp down some really bad vomit. The scam, the manly marketing, the selection of the most cliche specimens of stupid crap, bought for next to nothing, then packed together in a sexy-dark-brown box, marked up, and sent to you … every month. It’s a subscription service to receive ugly, but manly, crap. Only the soulless and desperate would want to eat shit beautified by marketers’ magic of inventing “value” from nothing but description.

The fact that the word bespoke is used is offensive. The only reason people know what it means today is the fact that the stupid company with that stupid entitlement-worshipping word as its vomitous name comes along with its olive-oil voice and Guinea charm. And wanna-be men run to it.

Bespoke Post is a company that buys poorly-selling trash from other companies, in large quantities, for big discount. Ugly, stupid shit that no one wants. They then mark it up, collect random shit together, and then put it in a dark earth-tone colored box designed to be manly. Dad stuff for people who want to be dad-like. It’s a funny trash idea that you’d find in a PKD novel, something that one of the trash characters would do.

Evidence of your petri position

It just don’t get no clearer than this: