The scene of Seinfeld It’s from 1997, but it’s back on social media now, especially on TikTok. In it, one of the series’ protagonists, Elaine, is on board a plane with her boyfriend at the time, David. They return from a vacation in Europe and things have gone more or less well. With a 22-hour flight ahead of her and several layovers, Elaine decides to do what almost anyone would do: entertain herself a little. She starts reading a book. David remains motionless, staring at the back of the seat in front of him with a completely absent, lost expression.
That’s how this late ’90s series eerily accurately advanced a trend, or perhaps we should say a joke—depending on how you look at it. David’s behavior totally drives Elaine out of her mind, and she ends up breaking up with him, but that’s not what interests us most here (or maybe a little bit). And it already has a name: the trend we are talking about is rawdogginga term that is difficult to translate linguistically but that in real life implies living things in the rawest and purest way possible. No filters.
The attitude of David, a character who in the series embodies the archetype of a hypermasculine boyfriend with the sensitivity of a jellyfish—in this century we could have called him fife or, due to his age, brother-in-law—, fits exactly with the way in which some TikTok users, especially heterosexual men, have represented him on the Chinese social network: spending hours immobile on board a plane during very long flights.
The gaze glued to the seat in front, the safety instructions or, with a little luck, to the screen where the flight route appears. No reading or watching a movie. No sleeping or eating, much less talking to the passenger next to us. rawdog A flight is experiencing the absolute emptiness that is actually moving from one place to another while sitting in an armchair. Face that reality without any type of protection. Just like David does in that chapter of Seinfeld.
Although, in reality, rawdogging can be made from almost anything from drink coffee without milk or sugarfor feel the authentic experience of drinking coffee, attend the Ascot races doing absolutely nothing but watching the races. Go to a club and not talkdrink, or dance anything at all, work eight hours without coffee, music or conversations with our colleagues… The list could go on.
A joke with a somewhat dark background
Behind him shock and, surely, the initial laughter, because it is obvious that in all these videos there is a clear humorous intention, a brief reflection leads us to think that behind this kind of meme-trend, there is something more.
Authenticity, the desire for purity to be better, living things as before, when the world was a more real place. Also the pain, the suffering to achieve things. We are one step away from the speech of the coaches who proclaim on the networks that the way to have a Lamborghini in the garage is to get up at four in the morning and kill yourself in the gym.
Seen from this perspective, the rawdogging is closely related to revival of stoicism in which we have been immersed for several years now, with the desire to follow restrictive diets to reach our “maximum potential.” Also with the #nonutnovemberconsisting of not masturbating during the month of November. A movement that, by the way, also started as an Internet joke and ended up becoming the messianic movement NoFapwhich promises a radical life change – for the better, supposedly – for men who abandon masturbation forever. Obviously through paid courses.
A new form of meditation for men
Surely something more aspirational than real, especially thinking about the attention span that the average citizen has today, the importance of rawdogging It is the philosophy and way of life that it promotes and that, according to the psychologist Victor Amat It has a multitude of contradictions. “Set to do rawdogging Seriously, I wonder what those who do it on a plane do. They should fly with their own wings or not at all,” he explains. “And while we’re at it, eat raw food, shit in the forest and drink water collected from the stream. It’s the same as always. These fads are nothing more than unfortunate attempts to attract attention and fool some naive people.”
And he remarks: “The problem with the embrace of these new-old philosophies is the incongruity. That is, comply with the precepts that interest us and not their complete execution. In the world of Stoicism, one of the virtues was humility and transcendence of the ego. When today’s presumed stoic shows us his success and his convertible, he is failing to comply with one of the capital norms of the philosophy he intends to defend.”
When today’s presumed stoic shows us his success and his convertible, he is failing to comply with one of the capital norms of the philosophy he intends to defend.
Victor Amat
— psychologist
Amat, who is the author of Punk psychology: Against positive and naive thinkingof Punk self-esteem: How to end self-esteem happy flower and just published Anti-meditations: What Marcus Aurelius never told you about the art of living (all published in Vergara), has been dedicated for years to uncovering the absurd and brazen side of those who propagate the latest fads in the world of self-help. “I try to stimulate the critical thinking of the people who read me so that they try to evaluate all these trends with a minimum of rigor,” he says.
The countertrend of the trend
For Janira Plansanalyst of Internet culture, this movement of exaltation of purity, of suffering to get what one wants, suggests an adaptation of lifelong Catholic values but expressed in a language “tiktokero”. Also a shameless way of trying to draw attention to oneself. “It’s like saying, ‘Look how good I am that, even though it’s bad, even though I could do a lot of things to entertain myself during a 10-hour flight, I prefer not to do it because I can, because I’m better than that,’” he says.
In that sense, Planes also sees it as a response to the culture that has dominated the Internet in recent years during which speaking from complaints has predominated. “Depressive memes are a way of complaining,” he says. “Complaint has been a trend for a long time, but every trend, to be one, needs its countertrend and that is where stoicism fits in, memes of ‘you have to imagine Sisyphus happy‘, the purity or suffering of the speaker, for example, Llados. So, for me, this type of behavior has a lot to do with a, quote, countercultural position.”
Planes, in fact, is also against pointing out this movement as something exclusively masculine, since it is already beginning to be observed among women as well. She gives the example of the attitude of some girls when they get their period. “I have been one of them myself,” she admits. “You have your period, it hurts a lot, but you prefer not to take anything. You could do it and the pain would go away, but you don’t do it and endure. And there are girls who tell it on networks and their speech is not very different from the defenders of stoicism. In short, it is clearly a movement, to which I give a countercultural character, that is gaining more and more strength on the Internet,” he concludes.
#Rawdogging #male #cult #authenticity #suffering
