At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend: \u201cfriction-maxxing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea, in a nutshell, is that people have overconvenienced themselves with apps, AI, and other means of near-instant gratification\u2014and would be better off with increased friction in their daily lives, which is to say those mundane challenges that ask some minor effort of them.<\/p>\n
Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of \u201cmaxxing\u201d as a suffix assumed to be familiar or at least intelligible to most readers of a mainstream news outlet is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader internet. The online ecosystem of incels, or \u201cinvoluntarily celibate\u201d men, is saturated with this sort of clinical jargon; its aggrieved participants insulate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak that is meant to baffle and repel outsiders. So how did non-incels (\u201cnormies,\u201d as incels would label them) end up adopting and recontextualizing these loaded words?<\/p>\n
Slang, no matter its origins, has a viral nature. It tends to break containment and mutate. The buzzword \u201cwoke,\u201d as it pertains to our current politics, comes from African American Vernacular English and once referred to an awareness of racial and social injustice\u2014this usage dates to the middle of the 20th century, preceding even the civil rights movement. But the culture wars of this century have turned \u201cwoke\u201d into a favorite pejorative of right-wingers, who wield it as a catchall term for anything that threatens their ideology, such as Black pilots or gender-neutral pronouns.<\/p>\n
Back in 2014, the eruption of the Gamergate harassment campaign set the stage for a different linguistic realignment. An organized backlash to women working in the video game industry, and eventually any sort of diversity or progressivism within the medium, it exposed a vein of reactionary anger that would gain a fuller voice during Donald Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign. This was a period when many in the digital mainstream got their first taste of the trollish nihilism and invective that fuels toxic message boards such as 4chan and gave rise to a network of anti-feminist manosphere sites collectively known as the \u201cPSL\u201d community: PUAHate (a board for venting about pickup artists, it was shut down soon after the 2014 Isla Vista killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger, who frequented the forum), SlutHate (a straightforward misogyny hub), and Lookism (where incels viciously critique each other\u2019s appearance).<\/p>\n
Lookism, named for the idea that prejudice against the less attractive is as common and pernicious as sexism or racism, is the only forum of the PSL trifecta that survives today, and while we don\u2019t know who coined the \u201cmaxxing\u201d idiom, it\u2019s the likeliest source for the first verb with this construction. \u201cLooksmaxxing,\u201d which borrows from the role-playing game concept of \u201cmin-maxing,\u201d or elevating a character\u2019s strengths while limiting weaknesses, became the preferred expression for attempts to improve one\u2019s appearance in pursuit of sex. This could mean something as simple as a style makeover or as extreme as \u201cbonesmashing,\u201d a supposed technique of achieving a more defined jaw by tapping it with a hammer.<\/p>\n
If the 2000s introduced people to pickup lingo like \u201cgame\u201d and \u201cnegging,\u201d the 2010s ushered in language that extended the Darwinian vision of the dating pool as a cutthroat and strictly hierarchical marketplace. \u201cAMOG,\u201d an initialism for \u201calpha male of the group,\u201d gave us \u201cmogging,\u201d a display where one man flexes his physical superiority over a rival. An ideally masculine specimen might also be recognized as a \u201cChad,\u201d who allegedly enjoys his pick of attractive partners, while a Chad among Chads is, of course, a \u201cGigachad.\u201d Women were disparaged as \u201cfemale humanoids,\u201d then \u201cfemoids,\u201d and finally just \u201cfoids.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}