The story of how an alternative theory of dentistry made its way from medicine's fringes to an audience of young men online. This week we try to make sense of jawmaxxing with help from Panic World’s Ryan Broderick. Panic World Garbage Day INVCEL - Reply All Support the show at searchengine.show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What is jaw-maxxing and why is it relevant?
I mean, I sort of take everything that happens in 4chan as kind of like arch performance art. At least it starts that way very often. So in the earlier memes, it was like popular women were Stacey's and popular men were Chad's and Chad's go as Stacey's. And it was sort of part of this idea of like...
early pickup artist communities trying to like codify sexual dynamics that and so the chad was like the archetypal man and because these men who were talking about this are like insane nerds they were using anime power scaling and what is anime power scaling so like uh For instance, in Digimon, if you become a very high-level Digibod, you might have Giga attached to the front of your name.
Okay, so it's like these nerds are trying to define... And when I say nerd, I don't mean that pejoratively. I just mean it descriptively. But these nerds are trying to define... kind of alpha jock masculinity. But as they're trying to do it, their anime-inflected nerdiness creeps through. And so first they're like, well, this is called a chad.
And they're like, just like in like Digimon, there's this thing called a gigachad. Yes. And then they're taking all the attributes they've used to label a chad and they're like exponentially increasing them to a place where they are ridiculous.
Yeah. And I, you know, when you ask about like, is this a bit or not? I think it's a not very useful way of thinking about this because context collapse is so just a part of the way the internet works that like, even if you come up with something kind of funny and even in the original thread, everyone in there kind of knows it's a joke.
So this idea of a Chad, this jokey meme about a hyper-masculine jock who women love, it kicks around on the internet for about a decade. Sometimes Chad's drawn as a guy with a mohawk. Sometimes Chad is represented by this one picture of this one high school football player. In 2017, a new meme circulates of a bearded, high-cheekboned, absurdly roided-out muscle man.
These are black-and-white photos that border on the uncanny, almost AI-generated. And people start referring to this image as the Giga Chad. Like, the Chad to rule all Chads. This is the GigaChad music. Of course, there's theme music. And there are tutorials. These videos of scrawny young teenage boys teaching each other to imitate the GigaChad's bizarre facial expression.
Eyebrows raised, cheeks sucked in, and a distinctive smirk. It's like a goofier version of how you might flex your biceps and pretend to be Superman. If you've been around teenage boys in the past couple years, the Giga Chad face, like the Sigma face, is just something you see them pulling at each other and then cracking up. We had Jim Carrey, they have this.
But again, as Ryan says, the Giga Chad is both a joke and a not joke at the same time.
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