Have You Heard

Thoughts On The Bikini Bridge Gap And What It Says About Young Men

It’s my intention for the blog to be generally work-safe, which means that I can’t actually show you a picture of the “bikini bridge gap”. Instead, I’ve chosen to excerpt an article from another site that neatly explains the idea. You can Google “bikini bridge gap” if you like, and you’ll find all sorts of images, including many of the motivational/hoax “macros” created in service of the concept.

When you’re done, come back and we’ll talk about it.

Hello again! Fascinating, isn’t it? But why does it exist? Why did someone come up with the idea of the “bikini bridge gap” and why did thousands of (mostly) young men immediately run out to try to make it a thing?

Full disclosure: your humble author has been a lurker on 4chan for a very long time now. Not as long as the site’s been around, but about as long as it’s been possible for well-informed outsiders to realize that many of the “memes” seen in popular culture are originally baked there. Ironically, 4chan isn’t what it used to be in that regard; the watered-down clone sites like 9GAG are probably contributing a lot more to the ebb and flow of memetic sewage nowadays. There’s a kind of weird feedback between 9GAG and Reddit as well that’s bubbling up a self-sustaining culture. Signs — danger signs! — that someone you love could be involved in that culture include: the use of “le” before everything, the replacement of the banal “lol” with the contemptible “lel” and “kek”, use of “trollface” graphics, that sort of thing.

The bikini bridge thing, however, could only have come from 4chan. It’s brilliant in its own way and it has a purpose that would only really make sense to a long-term member of that site and/or someone who completely shares the mentality of long-term 4channers. I’ll explain the purpose and the mentality in a moment. But first, a brief note on the idea of so-called “beta males” and “omega males” in the context of modern male-female relationships.

I’m deeply ambivalent about the so-called “manosphere” and/or the “PUA” (pickup artist) community. Mostly because I sincerely, deeply do not want a single thing that any of these men say or write to be true. I want to believe in love and romance and the triumph of the spirit and all of the things you read on the more expensive Hallmark cards. I regard the idea of “asshole game” and “jerkboy charisma” and “pump-and-dump” the same way I regard the idea that there are tiny centipede monsters living on my eyelashes. It might be true, it might work in practice, but I don’t want to think about it at all.

The manosphere writers refer to the “Red Pill”, which is itself a reference to the scene in The Matrix where Neo is offered a choice between two pills. Taking the Red Pill will reveal reality to him. Taking the Blue Pill will return him to the embrace of the Matrix and allow him to forget everything he’s been shown. It’s common for PUAs to talk about their “red pill moment” — the exact instance when they realized that everything popular culture had told them about women was wrong and that everything the manosphere said was right.

I’ll share my “Red Pill Moment” with all of you. Because I’m unusually stubborn and slow to accept reality, it was really a pair of moments. First: A woman I’d known a long time, about the same age as me, asked me to dinner. She told me how she was sick of her “boring” husband who wouldn’t take her to the local strip-mall bar every night. This woman lived in a $750,000 house, drove a new Lexus truck, and worked part-time for her own amusement. Her husband was a hard-working, successful man who had beaten alcoholism a few years ago and as a consequence needed to avoid strip-mall bars. He didn’t prevent her from going; he just wouldn’t go himself.

I strongly advised her to make things work with her husband, and then I went home and thought for a long time about what a broken person she was. That was the first moment. The second moment happened a couple of years later when the same woman called me up and suggested that we go out for drinks. At this point she was divorced. Her ex-husband had done everything possible to make her comfortable: expensive new condo, new Lexus truck, maintenance payments. I rode my motorcycle over to her place, at which point it became apparent that “drinks” were going to happen at her place, and that “drinks” really meant “sex.”

I’m always the kind of person who is willing to look a gift horse directly in the teeth so I had to ask her: why would she possibly be interested in sleeping with me instead of sleeping with someone who loved her so much he was willing to maintain her in luxury even after an acrimonious divorce? I should point out at this point that the ex-husband was better-looking than I was by any reasonable standard, in better shape, and far wealthier. The motorcycle I was riding at the time had cost me, as I recall, eighteen hundred dollars.

“You’re just not boring like he is,” she said, and removed her top to display a rack that wouldn’t have shamed a woman fifteen years younger. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that I had the moral courage to immediately depart the premises.

The whole ride home, I was profoundly disturbed. This was exactly the kind of crap that the Red Pill guys were writing about. Women chasing excitement and novelty at all costs, abandoning or spurning good solid men in favor of cheap-motorcycle-riding philandering part-time autowriters. In the years that followed, I saw the same things time and time again: women chasing novelty and “alpha/jerkboy” behavior the same way men chase beauty and sex appeal.

I have a never-ending supply of so-called Blue Pills and I take them all the time. Whenever I meet someone I find attractive. Whenever I think about my son and his future that I hope will include a perfect girl for him. Whenever I hear about a friend or acquaintance of mine being thrown over in favor of the proverbial “outlaw biker”, or whenever I see my “outlaw biker” friends make a new pump-and-dump conquest. Please let the old ideas of romance and love be true, I whisper, and I swallow the pill, and I wake up the next day willing to be convinced of anything. Alas, it usually doesn’t stick.

But let’s get back to the bikini bridge thing. One of the core beliefs of the manosphere is the idea that the sexual revolution and women’s liberation fundamentally changed the way women select men. The story goes like this: In the good old days, when sexual behavior was well-regulated by society and “morals” were front and center, most women eventually settled down with a man who was “good enough” for them to have as a long-term partner. They might have continued to dream about Clark Gable or John Wayne at night, the same way their less-than-perfect husbands continued to read Playboy, but in general about eighty percent of humanity found satisfying arrangements and the species continued.

When women found themselves with no limits on their sexuality or behavior, they set their sights higher. Not “higher” in the sense of “more decent and respectable”, but “higher” in the sense of “more exciting and sexy and outlaw and alpha and whatnot”. All of a sudden, as the infamous DeliciousTacos says, five guys in the whole world are fucking everyone. More realistically, the “hottest” guys are having low-commitment sex with more women while the “regular” guys are becoming what 4chan calls “incels”.

That’s INvoluntarily CELibate.

Imagine a college class of a thousand people: five hundred men and five hundred women. One hundred of those guys are sleeping with three hundred of those women. The other two hundred are “distributed” among four hundred men. These are completely non-scientific numbers, of course. But it matches what I’ve seen in the dating marketplace and heard from younger male friends. Any way you slice it, you wind up with a significant number of incels.

To be an incel, a member of the unlaid, is a very frustrating thing. Believe me, I know; I was two or three years younger than everyone else in my high school class. I didn’t have a hope in hell of dating seriously until I got into a situation where I was surrounded by people my own age. My high school girlfriend, God bless her heart, went to another school and was a few grades below me. We rarely saw each other. I was, basically, an incel.

However, I knew the situation was temporary. I knew I was tall and although I was ugly I’d seen ugly guys hook up. The important thing was to be tall and to brood mysteriously. These things I could do. Plus, I had a guitar. Things worked out okay for me.

The incels of today have no such confidence. In their teens, they look ahead to college and see a hookup culture that favors the handsome and daring. In college, they look ahead to twentysomething life and they imagine an endless procession of lonely nights in bars watching a guy with a faux-hawk and a tribal tattoo arranging a threesome near the jukebox. As twentysomethings, they console themselves that they might eventually pick up a veteran of the hookup culture who will accept them for their job and their house and dutifully lie on the bed and take it while dreaming of the hockey player from Beta Theta Pi who date-raped them one drunken night fifteen years ago.

They have phrases: “cock carousel”, “hitting the Wall”, “alpha fucks/beta bucks”. They eventually come to see women as fundamentally different, fundamentally contemptible beings. Eventually, they come to hate women. Not in the turning-gay sense, but in the incel sense. Women are the enemy. Women are unreliable, evil, always willing to hurt and humiliate you even as they debase themselves in front of the Affliction-wearing bartender.

A disproportionate number of incels are extremely intelligent, because a majority of women tend to be suspicious of intelligence in men and associate it with creepiness/nerdiness/unfuckability. So what do you get when you have a vast community of permanent incels with high IQs and plenty of time on their hands?

You get the Bikini Bridge Gap. The purpose of the BBG is to make women unhappy. Not a particular woman. It’s targeted at anyone who sees it. It’s designed to make women feel sad and sick and ashamed about their bodies, to make them starve and humiliate themselves, to make them compete harder with other women and feel more depressed as a result. Its a memetic weapon leveled directly against the entire 12-to-40 female demographic.

The BBG cannot get incels laid. To the contrary; after starving themselves and hating themselves, the young women in question will be even more firmly targeted on the top quartile of available men. But it has the potential to make some woman out there just as unhappy as the incel who made the “image macro” in the first place.

If the idea of an attack or disease targeted specifically at women sounds vaguely familiar, then it’s probably because you’ve read The White Plague by Frank Herbert of Dune fame. Of course, the White Plague was meant to punish mankind, not womankind. But the core idea — a disease sent out to infect all women regardless of personality, race, whatever — remains.

The Bikini Bridge Gap was “unmasked” pretty early on, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t take hold in the minds of many young women who will, in the long run, be unhappier for it. Hell, one CrossFit mouthpiece immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started offering BBG-specific Crossfit classes. There’s always a useful idiot like that sitting around.

A society with a high number of incels cannot be healthy. It’s already led to the so-called MGTOW, a movement of men simply forsaking the company of women in favor of video-gaming or watching sports or other hobbies. To some degree, that’s the same as dropping out of society, which is bad. And it’s sad, because there’s nothing more satisfying or wonderful than a decent relationship with a woman whom you love. That’s a feeling that these poor kids on 4chan and elsewhere may never know. At most, they’ll have the satisfaction of conquest, followed by unease and self-doubt. They deserve better. We all do. I don’t know what the solution could possibly be — a public service campaign designed to get women to date non-outlaw-bikers? — but something needs to be done. This “hoax” campaign is only the beginning of the backlash, but it would be nice were it to be the end, as well.

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Categorised as: What I think