A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: “The Age of Soft Boys”
This week I’m digging through the cesspool of online influencer “alpha males” to find out what the “era of soft boys” means. I’m also exploring the helpful “Utah Fitness Test” trend, learning what happens when AI starts making memes, and exploring the Humane AI badge, a new tech gadget I definitely don’t need .
What is the “soft guy era”?
Men’s influencers on TikTok and other sites have been hyping the phrase “the era of soft boys” for the past week or so, working hard to get the hashtag trending and plant the idea in people’s minds. And it seems to work—at least on younger men. So I looked into it and I wish I hadn’t.
According to Scarfacemark , the man at the center of the soft guy trend, a man from the “soft guy era” wants to find a woman who will “take care of him ridiculously.” Seems simple enough, but Scarface expresses no desire to be what used to be called a “kept man.” Like most everything since the red pills and the people associated with the red pills, the “soft boy era” is a reactionary and dishonest concept, a troll driven by misogyny and money.
The “Soft Boy Era” is a reaction to the “Soft Girl Era” trend that became popular, especially among young African American women, in 2023. “Soft girl” seems to be mostly about taking care of oneself and living a life that doesn’t. For some women, this means expensive vacations and extravagance, or seeking more gender-traditional relationships where the man earns the money and the woman runs the house. And this is a turning point for powerful men.
In the world of online misogyny for money, being a “soft girl” is an insult to men and an injustice, even though a man supporting a woman is rooted in the patriarchal ideas that online guys tend to espouse. This is another double bind of the gender war: women who want a career are hated, and women who don’t want a career are hated too. Hate is the real essence. Influential people come up with slightly unique twists on time-tested misogynistic ideas and use them to annoy weirdos, increase viewership, sell ugly T-shirts and cryptocurrency, or do anything else to get the rent on their apartments.
I dug into the hashtags #softgirlera and #softguyera. The most popular of the first videos are juicy odes to successful relationships , the desire for romance and calls for peace and gentleness. The best soft guy posts aren’t like this. They’re almost always unfunny “comedy videos” made by a bunch of weird, fat weirdos who act like they’re joking when in fact they’re jerks. All these guys pretend to be rich “alpha males” who reject supermodels, and it’s transparent to everyone except the children and teenagers they prey on. Maybe the soft girls are running their own online business, but at least they don’t make me feel like I need to shower and take a nap.
What is the Utah State Aptitude Test?
Remember when it was fun to piss off your friends by making up sexual practices like “Mississippi Landslide” or “Evil Algonquin?” The “Utah State Fitness Test” has nothing to do with this. It’s an innocent TikTok challenge where you put on baggy jeans, give the camera a thumbs-up, then jump into the air and try to turn around twice before landing. Or just spin it once – no one’s keeping score.
The trend was started by Utah TikToker Michaelmal568 . He published the first video with the hashtag . It seems like he just wanted to show off his outfit but he took it too far and people thought it was funny/cute and a trend was born. Now it’s spreading across TikTok, Instagram and everywhere else. Everyone tries to do it and some fail . Some push the envelope . (Obviously it’s not easy to land even one spin cleanly, so kudos to Michaelmal for the semi-clean 720.)
There’s an interesting generational twist to this story: the song you play for the actual Utah Fit Check video is “Harness your Hopes,” an obscure b-side by 1990s alternative band Pavement. I’m always happy when something I loved a million years ago finds a new audience, although the more annoying TikTokers have started using Billy Joel’s sentimental ” Vienna Awaits You ” instead of Pavement. They should be ashamed of themselves.
AI takes over the creation of memes
Internet users have started turning over the creation of memes to artificial intelligence, and things are going as expected. In this subreddit dedicated to the topic , the memes are either incomprehensible or simply not funny. They’re not even “so bad they’re good”, they’re just boring. One redditor asked AI to create memes that only AI would understand . The AI didn’t do anything particularly interesting with this hint either .
As artificial intelligence gets “better”, it loses the one interesting thing it has – that surreal edge that makes everyone sick – and replaces it with absolute mediocrity, complete mediocrity. The future will be computer-generated boredom on a level we are just beginning to see. But at least we will all remain unemployed.
Viral Video of the Week: “Humane AI Sticker: Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… So Far”
When a trusted, respected, and unbiased tech reviewer like Marques Brownlee posts a video in which he calls a heavily hyped tech device that will change everything “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed,” many people take notice, especially when the Humane AI Pin product is backed by hundreds of millions of investor dollars and was invented by two former Apple executives who worked on the iPhone and iOS.
The Humane AI Pin is a wearable AI assistant that promises to take users beyond their cell phone by packing a camera, light, laser projector, phone and more into a tiny, sleekly designed device that can hang on your lapel. You can ask it questions in plain English, dictate to it, take photos, make calls, send text messages, and perform other basic assistant functions. It even projects information onto your hand using a laser if you can’t talk to it.
So what’s the problem? According to Brownlee, that’s it. The artificial intelligence of Humane AI is slow to react and often makes factual mistakes (as is always the case with AI). Battery life is terrible. It overheats easily. It’s hard. The projector’s function is difficult to read and it often doesn’t understand what you’re saying. But the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t connect to your phone or anything else. The Humane AI badge is like paying $700 and a mandatory $24 monthly subscription fee for a second phone that’s noticeably worse in every way than the one you already have. It turns out that the touchscreen interface is much better than the voice interface. Who could have guessed?