Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Why Everyone Hates This Video

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April 9, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

19:42

Why Everyone Hates This Video

Gen Z boss and a mini!! Dave's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheDistributist/

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	In July 2024, a silly TikTok trend occurred of women making little hype videos about themselves.
	This trend began with a video of some women doing a little song and dance about what they were wearing on a night out.
	Boots and a slick back bun.
	Boots and a slick back bun.
	Cowboy boots and a blowy.
	Cowboy boots and a blowy.
	Sam was in a little red bag.
	Sam was in a little red bag.
	All pretty frivolous and harmless stuff, and many other groups of young women jumped in on the trend.
	And nobody cared about this until the young women at a small Australian start-up called TBH Skincare decided to jump on the trend as well, to promote their product.
	And somehow, they managed to create a video that drove everyone mad with rage.
	It seems that this video went insanely viral, primarily because of the emotional damage it seems to have done to everyone everywhere.
	The sheer volume and intensity of the response to this video was remarkable, and every time it pops up on my timeline, I find myself watching it repeatedly to try and figure out just what about it makes it so detestable.
	For I too am only human, and I also found this to be completely insufferable.
	But it seems to be quite difficult to pin down exactly why everyone hates it so much.
	On the surface, it seems quite unreasonable to have such a strong reaction to a TikTok trend video made by a small women's skincare company, which was just doing its own thing, marketing products for women to women using a trend made by and for women.
	Clearly though, this struck a note which resonated more deeply than this superficial analysis would indicate.
	On the surface, it's easy to say that the trend itself was insufferable because it was so self-absorbed.
	Women getting around and hyping themselves is actually not an admirable thing to do, and it reveals a kind of perennial insecurity in the modern woman which itself is not respectable.
	It makes them look like overgrown teenagers who don't know how to comport themselves in an adult environment.
	But this is a new startup run by young women and they have created an office environment with which they are comfortable and can have fun in a particularly feminine way, which clearly shows in the video.
	So it really ought not to have been such a big deal.
	It's one thing having a bunch of silly girls being self-obsessed in isolation, but there's a wider social context in which this was produced and one that has been generating a great deal of resentment.
	I don't think it's unfair to say that modern feminism has deeply impacted corporate culture, not only in deliberate affirmative action programs for women, but also in an unconscious bias in favour of women, which makes it evident that men are being actively discriminated against in the workplace.
	This is not a new phenomenon.
	Take for example one data analysis done in 2016 by recruitment firm movemeon.com.
	After analysing 20,000 applications, they found that women were 35% more likely to be hired for a job than a man.
	As one might expect, this is having a severe detrimental effect on the motivation of young men.
	Bloomberg News analysed US government data which revealed that a fifth of young educated men were not employed and not looking for work.
	As one young man put it, it feels kind of delusional now, but I was thinking I could get a $100,000 a year job.
	But after applying to about 500 jobs, he became discouraged.
	When I was at the point where I didn't even have one interview for anything, I was like, oh my god, I feel like a failure right now.
	It definitely messed with my mental health.
	There is a particular difference in the way that modern society is calibrated to help one of the sexes and marginalize the other.
	If there is a plague of young men staring at the 500th rejected job application and feeling at their wit's end and not knowing what to do, and then there's a video of five frivolous women apparently wasting time in an office instead of actually working, well that might well feel like a slap in the face.
	What I'm saying is that a fair left-wing analysis of this situation might conclude that young women have a privilege that the men don't have.
	And the fact that they can be so cavalier with their time and output seems to show it.
	Indeed, the women in the TBH skincare video put out a sequel video mocking the comments that they received online and it seemed to underscore this point in particular.
	The insults or despair shown regarding their video had made no impact on them.
	And they just laughed at it because, from their perspective, their careers and social status are unassailable.
	Jennifer Paygap, bring it back!
	Jennifer Paygap, bring it back!
	It's giving millennial core!
	It's giving millennial core!
	Women should go back to the kitchen!
	Women should go back to the kitchen!
	Try not to cringe impossible!
	Try not to bring it impossible!
	Naked shot hate this!
	Naked shot hate this!
	They know they aren't going anywhere.
	So why not just laugh at the losers on the internet who are still firing off CVs as if they've got a hope in hell of ever being recruited by someone?
	The few people who attempted to defend the TBH skincare video would say things like, oh, it's just girls having fun, lighten up, as if this were to just evaporate the concerns that people have about this, but instead it opens up a new can of worms.
	As I said previously, it's not evident that these women were selling trivial skincare products, and this attitude probably isn't the best one to foster for women in a professional environment, especially when it comes to women doing jobs which are actually important.
	You may remember in February this year that a Delta/slash Endeavour Airplane crashed on landing in Toronto.
	It seems that the plane did not suffer a mechanical fault, but instead it was a pilot error from the first officer that caused it to flip over before coming to rest, and it was a miracle that nobody was killed.
	Though Endeavour Air have not yet made any official announcements about who the first officer was, rumours quickly began to circulate and internet sleuths began to dig.
	And they came to the conclusion that the first officer was 26-year-old Kendall Swanson, who apparently scrubbed her social media shortly after the accident.
	And it seems that Endeavour Air operate a feminist affirmative action program for their pilots, which means that now more than half of their pilots are women.
	Is this all correct?
	I have no idea.
	But after taking a brief look at Endeavor Air's TikTok account, I could bloody well believe it.
	Girls, come on.
	Leave the saving of the world to the men?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so.
	Even if this information does turn out to be incorrect, the reason that people are convinced that this is an example of a prime woman moment is because there is a feeling that women have a way of avoiding accountability that men don't.
	And this is also encapsulated in the defences of the TBH skincare video.
	Has anyone been fired from Endeavour Air after the crash?
	How is it that someone can flip a plane and not lose their pilot's license?
	Is nobody going to be held accountable for the 80 odd hospitalisations and millions of dollars lost?
	Saying, oops, I'm just a silly girl, shouldn't be enough to cut it when people's lives are on the line, but it isn't just in such severe circumstances where it becomes unacceptable.
	There is a certain way of doing things that men have to rightly endure, which women, frankly, don't.
	And this is a part of the privilege of being a woman in an office environment which is rankling people so much.
	There's probably a technical term for this, of which I'm unaware, but it's evident that nobody pulls their punches with men like they do with women.
	For a man to succeed is hard, because other men do not give them the benefit of the doubt.
	There is no solidarity for men.
	As a man, you get no special consideration, no soft touch, and no compassion if the answer is no.
	If you as a man are found to be insufficient, then you just have to get back to work on yourself and do whatever you're trying to do better than you had been doing it before.
	There is no male equivalent of the feminist movement to whine to a sympathetic society on your behalf and stack the deck in your favour.
	You have to improve, and if you don't improve, you don't get what you want.
	For many women, they don't go through this trial by fire, at least to the extent that men do, and this makes them less experienced and less accomplished than the men who would ostensibly be their professional peers.
	If you aren't fighting tooth and nail to get promoted, and are instead shunted up the career ladder because of a privilege you received by just being a woman, then you don't know what you don't know.
	And when the position you've arrived in calls for expert experience par excellence, you will find yourself realising that you're actually a fraud and you don't really know what you're doing.
	The male privilege that feminists lamented for so long was actually the product of survival of the fittest in the male-dominated urban jungle, which made men hyper-competitive, and many women, especially younger women, have just skipped this part of the journey to arrive at the destination, and they wonder why flaunting this privilege has wound so many people up.
	I'm not saying that no women have worked hard or anything to that effect, but there is a general trend of this, and I'm convinced that this is at least partially behind the reaction to the TBH skincare video.
	There is another aspect to the irritation towards women's frivolity in the workplace, and that's that it appears to be self-centered and ignorant.
	As with the many TikTok videos of nurses pratting around in hospital wards during the COVID pandemic, it seems that women engaged in these videos just aren't aware that other people are relying upon them, and they have a duty to others they ought to be fulfilling instead of making videos?
	The entire reason for making a dancing TikTok video is to bask in the glow of approval from strangers to inflate your ego.
	When you make a silly TikTok video in your work environment, you reveal to everyone that your desire for attention supersedes your diligence.
	You seem again like a selfish teenager who is more interested in making themselves feel good than doing the job for people you're meant to serve.
	Moreover, the childishness of the videos themselves has a delegitimizing effect on the offices of the people who make them.
	It reveals that there is no nobility of character on the part of the women doing the dances.
	If you don't take yourself seriously in a position of authority, why should anyone else who do take their work seriously and sincerely and who are concerned with the dignity of their careers not look upon you with contempt?
	I think this is the social and professional context in which the TBH skincare video hit the internet and a major reason why people reacted very poorly to it.
	This kind of silly, girlish behavior rankles that part of the male mind which considers it important to do things for other people and not just yourself.
	And really, this is the entire problem with the girl boss trend.
	When men do things, they do them for the thing itself and not for the social status that the thing brings with it.
	In fact, in many cases, it's not evident that there is any social status to be gained from such a thing.
	But the girl boss is attempting to attain something someone else established, not for the sake of the thing or for doing it well, but for the status it provides.
	The fundamental motivation of the girl boss is selfishness and solipsism.
	It doesn't matter if the person doing the job isn't good.
	It doesn't matter if someone else doing it would be better or has a more valid claim to it.
	It's just about satisfying the vanity of the girl boss, no matter what damage she does to the people around her.
	Finally, there is a phenomenon which my friend Dave Green calls the female group chat brain.
	This is where groups made up exclusively of women have a tendency to attempt not to resolve problems by facing the issues frankly, but instead attempt to ameliorate or dismiss them entirely by telling each other pleasant fictions to protect the feelings of the women with the problem and to elevate the woman's status by allowing her to claim to be a victim.
	This is not a problem with women.
	It's a problem with the social network comprised entirely of women.
	Because the social network incentivizes certain sentiments.
	And it doesn't have to necessarily be online.
	For instance, I have the picture here behind me.
	There was this, you know, there was a celebration.
	There was sort of a celebration parabox moment that struck the right wing in 2024.
	And it was concerning these girls in an office building.
	And they were like doing this kind of like playground chant where they sort of validate themselves with like self-affirming epitaphs and put it in like a sing-song voice.
	Like you might see some 12-year-old girls do at a sleepover party or like even younger girls do on the playground.
	Girls always do this, but the thing is like they're in an office building and they're obviously employed at that office building.
	And they released this video on TikTok where they're like buttering each other up about how they're all girl bosses in this kind of like playground chant, dancing around in trench coats and making up rhymes about themselves being, you know, girl bosses with bobs and all this stuff.
	And every right-winger, every man online like lost their shit.
	Like they got so angry about it.
	And immediately, um, you know, immediately the question was why.
	And again, superficially speaking, superficially, it's hard to explain because the uh you know, I had a hard time explaining, like, okay, these women are being goofy.
	It's kind of at work, but why is that?
	Oh, why are all men getting angry about this?
	Why am even I getting angry at this?
	Like, I can feel myself not liking what I am seeing.
	And I can't even really explain why, other than it's a stupid TikTok video.
	And of course, like, all the typical female bloggers are like, men are overreacting.
	This is an example of misogyny.
	Um, what is an example of men reacting to is female groupthink.
	Uh, the female groupthink is by its very nature self-validating.
	And the fact that these women were in apparent positions of power gave people the impression that these women would like they'd go into a group, they'd validate each other's decisions, and then like the workday would start again, and these women would have all of these crazy ideas that they all validated themselves from believing.
	And they'll go take these ideas and like use them to justify firing you.
	Or maybe if you're in a publishing environment, not entertaining your manuscript you submitted to the New York Times Review of Books or any number of things like that.
	I mean, any amount of power can be justified.
	Any amount of abuse, any abuse of power can be justified if you've got a circle of people who are there just to validate you.
	This is, of course, the inverse of what the feminists were always claiming about the old boys' networks.
	Men have their own natural masculine biases and don't even recognize that they have been creating work environments which naturally excluded women and prevented them from getting ahead by not pandering to their feelings of victimhood in the way that men do not pander to feelings of victimhood for other men.
	This does create a hostile environment for many women, and that's why feminism had teeth.
	Men understood that their environments were tailored for men.
	Well, if you are a man now in a corporate environment and all of your superiors are girl bosses who have been fast-tracked up the DEI ladder, do you think you're going to get a fair hearing if they take issue with you?
	I think many men believe that they will not.
	And the TBH skincare video seemed to represent the flippant nature of these all-female groups, which exclude male concerns about professional gravity, excellence, consideration for others, and fair play.
	Would you like to be put in front of a tribunal of women who would validate themselves with TikTok dances?
	What this will amount to for many men is a kind of soft tyranny in which any appeals to masculine virtues would be laughed out of the room as you lose your livelihood to a bunch of solipsistic women with the emotional maturity of schoolgirls.
	Just the thought of it makes me shudder.
	And this is, as many other men, I think, understood on a deep and unconscious level, a part of the reason that adolescence has caused such a stir amongst a political consensus, which is designed to uphold the affirmative model of female groupthink.
	I think many men feel that they will receive no quarter because the female-led authorities, who don't feel that they have a responsibility to anything outside of themselves, not only won't care that there is a different worldview from which to consider things, but they won't even understand or have any frame of reference for what these men are talking about.
	And it seems that it will preclude men's concerns by definition.

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