Maybe I’m just old fashioned, maybe I have a bit of traditionalist in me. There’s something to be said about observing the delta and trying to decide if one’s major goals are really accomplished over time, or not. It could be one’s quality of life, it could be one’s virtue, or even, in this case, the quality of discourse.
Quality of discourse is a metric that I think is almost criminally underdiscussed. That may be my current bias - it seems that these days, there’s an almost constant hum of social media backlash plying on exactly the subject of the poor discourse that tends to happen over it - but it feels, to me, as though there’s rarely much of an attempt to dig into the specifics. I suppose I ought to try to walk my own talk here and take a stab at it. Thus, I’d like to write about Chad.
1.
It’s been my experience that the use of a name referring to a specific kind of person ought to be a particularly relatable character, somebody that we all “know”. The most oft-mentioned one these days is definitely Karen - everybody knows a Karen, or at least has encountered them. When I first came across the term Chad, I definitely felt like I knew some Chads in my time.
They were jock-y (even if not actual jocks) men who seemed to effortlessly wield their masculinity with a sort of fluency that practically guaranteed success. Chad was that guy that would tell a sexist joke and even the women would laugh. Chad was never a perfect person, as a student he could be lackadaisical, as an example, but Chad was so tuned in to the positive feedback loops in life that he was already miles ahead of you and made it look easy.
2.
I was never particularly bullied, growing up. There were some students who I didn’t get along with particularly well, but most people seemed content to maintain a polite distance and keep to each their own. That worked for me. There were one duo of students who emerged in high school, however, who cultivated a particularly adversarial relationship with me. Curtis, and Josh. Now Josh was not particularly interesting, definitely a hanger-on of the much more popular Curtis. This was the man who I immediately thought of when I first stumbled across the term “Chad”. This was my experience, my relation to the term.
Curtis wasn’t a strikingly attractive man. He was a great big bear back in high school, stunningly tall, proportionally larger in every dimension. He enjoyed playing football, but wasn’t on the school team. He had a great big nose, too, too big even for him, and his acne was almost as bad as mine. He drove an extremely ancient pickup truck that his father had somehow kept running. “Here’s the keys, if you can turn it on I’ll let you keep the truck”, he told me once. I tried. The ignition didn’t turn when I tried. The whole circumstance absolutely bled traditional masculinity.
Curtis occupied a strange space, and it took me a long time to understand it. He was known for being a bit of a jerk, but in a way that somehow increased his popularity. He was never short of a girlfriend, or the company of women just in general. I don’t know if he was good at that, but I had heard stories that he wasn’t a kind boyfriend. Hard to trust the word of exes when one is overhearing a conversation and missing the rich context. At any rate, the strange space was that I felt that he wasn’t a particularly good, or really even minimally decent person, and yet - how in the world was he so popular?
Growing older and learning more about the world, I came to understand: Curtis, while maybe not being a great person by the standards that I hold myself to, was an absolutely fantastic example of a man by the standards that society holds us to. He spoke the language of masculinity fluently, perhaps even poetically. He was absolutely bursting with self-esteem, confidence, and gumption in general. His grades were poor, the teachers would help pass him. I vividly remember taking biology in the same class as him, come exam time he leaned backwards and turned half around in his chair to cheat off of my test. I told him, loudly, to stop cheating off of me. The teacher told me to stop talking during the test. That was the kind of experience that I associated with Curtis - at the time I thought he was dumb, but now I realize his genius. He knew how to work the positive feedback loop, and he fed on it like a pig on its slop.
3.
The problem with the discourse surrounding Chad, in particular, is that his relatability has been lost, which can obscure so many of the deeper problems relating to the incel community. What made Curtis so popular wasn’t his looks, it was his male power, the product of a social construct rewarding seemingly arbitrary traits with access to privilege. Incels are correct in identifying that a model-tier man can certainly skip over some of these barriers and tests in order to achieve this sort of masculine power, but at the root of it, male power is what makes Chad a Chad. It’s why he will be successful in any enterprise - schooling, business, romance, all will fall to his sheer privilege.
The natural result of the discourse around male power leads to a not entirely disagreeable bifurcation - do we think that everyone in society should feel so privileged? Would it be better that nobody should succeed except by relative merit, rather than their ability to fulfill a list of only tangentially meaningful traits? Either choice suggests some sort of remedy, some sort of policy beliefs or potential actions that could be taken to work on the problem. The current discourse of identifying Chad as model-tier hardly suggests any action aside from plastic surgery and complaining. After all, nobody could blame any particular individual for favoring a more attractive person, that is a deeply ingrained impulse, nothing that can really be corrected on a society scale without unacceptably draconian action.
Maybe that’s part of why I think about this issue the way I do - maybe I choose a discourse that suggests action. Or maybe I’m right, and the current discourse is mistaken in its hopelessness, constructed to grant feelings of powerlessness. Ruminate on it, and let me know what you think. Cheers for now.