"This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?" 

—Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

There's a quick gag in Baby Steps when backpacker Jim offers protagonist Nate a map. A minimap blips onscreen with an eagle's caw. With characteristic awkwardness, Nate declines the map. The minimap disappears. The player will not be benefitting from the necessary affordances of a Rockstar epic. Rockstar games, in this case, Red Dead Redemption, signify a rugged, traditional masculinity; men's stories in men's worlds. A map suggests goals, collectibles, and points of interest: a slow conquest of everything. Baby Steps doesn't have any of that. "The dominant mode is dramatic bathos," says friend of the site Nick Capozolli. The level of challenge the game imposes—or in some areas, almost dares you to engage with—doesn't mean there are commensurate rewards in store.

Bennett Foddy's games have inspired a genre of amusingly busted endurance tests like Push It! With Sisyphus, Chained Together, A Difficult Game About Climbing, and Only Up!, to name a few. The Sisyphus angle is baked-in, I think, to any game that puts you through minor gauntlets of granular physical maneuvering. In its constant anticlimax, Baby Steps engages more directly with this allusion than any other Foddylikes. Nate's constant deferring of any assistance in his climb is a parody of masculine self-reliance, as if he's taken his sudden materialization in this mountaineering otherworld as a sign to buck up. Nate doesn't have a family to cast off or responsibilities to shirk in his pursuit—he was plucked from his dank basement couch mid-One Piece binge. 

Why Nate? Who knows. Sisyphus was punished for getting one over on the gods, but Nate is an unassuming schlub. He's not hardly worth divine censure. I'd be surprised if he'd ever pursued anything in his life. The same can't be said for au courant looksmaxxer, streamer, and alpha-of-the-month Clavicular. I'm sure you've had a lot of thirtysomething bloggers try to explain this guy to you in the past couple weeks; indulge one more. 

Clav is a narcissist on par with that of Greek myth: he's monomaniacally focused on achieving objective physical beauty at all costs. He's brooding and unpleasant, a joyless hedonist unmoved by the attention of women. Sex is not his preferred matter of the flesh, and despite the monstrous superficiality, hitting someone with his car, and the admitted meth use, there is nothing detectably homosexual about Clavicular at all.

  Camp, however, abounds. In one clip of the "ASU frat leader framemogging incident" the tousled blonde assassin looms rectangularly behind Clav, like a Thwomp sneaking up on Mario. “Mogging,” for the uninitiated, is to look better than another guy. “Framemogging” is to mog with one’s build, or frame (this is not the same “frame,” or mindset, from MRA lingo). To mog is to belittle by sheer physical beauty; in ballroom the category would be “face.” 

So mogged, Clav sulks, looking honestly close to tears at his helplessness in the face of this man's absurd frame. More often than not, Clavicular looks heavy with Byronic moodiness; surely he knows he can never get what he wants, but he's doomed to pursue it. 

Camille Paglia wrote that "A woman simply is, but a man must become." Using his eponymous system, and for an undisclosed amount of money, Clavicular will help you become; or, in his words, ascend. He's the yang to Silicon Valley anti-aging obsessive Brian Johnson's yin. Both of them couch their programs in pseudoscientific, Rogan-verse jargon; everything is "stacks" and "protocols." Boys come to Clav, ascend his protocol, and leave looking like men+. Following Brian Johnson's "Don't Die" method will allow you to defeat death, like a mortal granted eternal life by the gods.

Despite streaming on Kick (a sort of Sadean mirror-world Twitch, less far-right than third option "Rumble") Clavicular's politics are incoherent aside from misogyny and self-interest. His viral fame is comprised of a typically murky mix of genuine reach and ironic spectating. His platform is the mog. The mog is God and the mog is precarious, ephemeral, as fickle as the wind. Paglia, again: masculinity is "risky and elusive." It's mog or be mogged out there. The wrong person walks into the restaurant, the bar, the club, and suddenly your cortisol skyrockets. You are no longer the number one guy in the group. The amount of work you have put into reshaping yourself can be trumped by an encounter with any random freak-of-nature hot guy who didn't have to hardmaxx. He just got out of bed that day.  

The so-called crisis of masculinity has hit every sector of maledom, leaving avatars like the "dichotomy is crazy" guy to the ailing Jordan Peterson, from Hasan Piker to the tetchy Nick Fuentes. I remember Tucker Max and The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild, so I'm not convinced this is anything new. It's just a hypercurrent self-help grift, with plenty of lore for Substackers to "unpack." 

But OK: how should men be? What behavior is or is not pauseworthy for a grown man to engage in? Seed oils or no seed oils? SPF or beef tallow? Learn how to live off the land or drink matcha? Hit yourself in the face with a hammer until your cheekbones pop or paint your nails? Clavicular promises ascension: get hot, get money. Brian Johnson promises you potential immortality. It all sounds terribly confusing, and unfortunately, I don't have any advice. The culture has been peddling bullshit to women since god knows when, and we still fall for it. 

Nate might reject help to the point of absurdity+, but the thing is, he can go it alone. As Ed wrote, Nate may be bullheaded, but he's uncommonly skilled at moving his body from one place to another. In the end, now that we understand the territory, we’re finally given that map, tracing the messy circuit of Nate's journey. In this surreal hinterland, he has found something he's good at, or at least something he can apply himself to in full, an opportunity it's safe to say never crossed his path while he smoked out his parents' basement. Never anyone's idea of an alpha, he has still managed to ascend.

///

+ Pause.    

++ "I love my body," exults one of the game's many bipedal donkey-men, wearing only a hoodie, his loose penis swinging low. "I love it too," Nate parrots. Whatever will get him through the current conversation.  

***

Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.