A closer look at the content and constellations of Josh Rainer Goldstein, who livestreams himself eating raw meat.Presented in three parts:
An analysis of how the content is self-centered, ableist, misogynistic, and contribute to structural racism and epistemological confusion.
An exploration of the deeply Freudian aspects of Goldstein’s account: its frenzied death wish expressed in an oral/anal fetish of raw meat and body perfectionism. The larger psychoanalytic question is: why are these displays gratifying to his followers? What does Goldstein allow them to feel, without shame? Part of it giving absolution for reactionary behaviours that feel good: consuming huge quantities of meat, and fantasizing about being surrounded by dozen babies on a homestead. In this part we also meet Goldstein’s mom.
A letter that confesses how warmly I feel towards Goldstein: towards the understandable needs that get hijacked by the politics he’s gotten messed up in. How can we control what we’re exposed to, after all?
Show NotesEating Raw Meat, Dreaming of Fatherhood — Matthew Remski on MediumGoldstein’s raw lamb mukbang.“You own your land. You defend your land.”
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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Dear Raw Meat Guy, Perhaps you saw the article I posted to the Conspirituality Report this week about the social media content of Josh Rainer Goldstein, who livestreams himself eating raw meat and philosophizing in the mode of what I've dubbed muscular conspirituality.
Now if you haven't read that article, it's in the show notes for this bonus episode, and you might want to actually pause this and read it first to get a starter pack delivery on this content.
I'm going to use this bonus episode to go a little deeper into the Goldstein material, a little more speculative, a little more intimate, a little more empathetic.
I'm going to try to do three things, two of which didn't quite fit into the media review format.
First, I'm going to review the research of the article and just name straight up how Goldstein's views are self-centered, ableist, misogynistic, and contribute to structural racism and epistemological confusion.
Because facts are facts, and everyone's going to be responsible for what they say to 24,000 followers on Instagram.
But secondly, I'm going to explore in a little more detail the deeply Freudian aspects of Goldstein's account.
This kind of frenzied death wish expressed in an oral-anal fetish of raw meat and bodily perfection.
And the fact that, developmentally, the concerns alternate between the adolescent and the king-baby stage of total id indulgence.
There's also some public family stuff to gently explore, because once you see him interacting with his multi-millionaire mom in her high-art, Martha Stewart-themed vanity homestyling videos, you can't unsee that.
But with that bit, I'll be careful to describe rather than diagnose because who knows what's going on inside anyone.
The larger psychoanalytic question is why are these displays gratifying to his followers?
What does Josh Goldstein allow his followers to feel without shame?
Spoiler, I think it has something to do with giving absolution for reactionary behaviors that feel good.
Consuming huge quantities of meat, And fantasizing about being surrounded by a dozen babies on a homestead.
The last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say a little bit about how warmly I feel towards Josh in the form of a letter.
I find that his needs are understandable, but they also get just fucked up beyond all recognition by his psychology and the politics he's gotten messed up in.
And who really knows whose fault that is?
How can we control what we're exposed to?
And in that warmth, I feel, there's also sadness because it's so obvious that body fattishism won't work.
It just can't solve the problem that a person is anxious about.
But before I get to those three items, I really have to address something first, which is, why am I obsessed with this guy?
I'm not entirely sure, but I do have some possible answers that will become clearer as I progress.
I can say that I was unsettled throughout researching and writing the Conspirituality Report article.
I felt conflicted, and it wasn't clear why.
So I reviewed the material from Thien Nguyen on Moral Outrage Porn, and I asked myself, is that what I was doing?
And I didn't think so, because I was legitimately defining a new, or at least an unexamined aspect of conspirituality.
Was I punching down?
I mean, he's got 24,000 Instagram followers, so not technically.
I think I am punching down if we're going to talk about intellectual resources.
I'm not saying he's dumb, but he just isn't very well read, and he's in this terrible position of getting rewarded for doling out hot takes and wisdom by people who came to ogle his abs.
And through that process, he's putting some really harmful ideas out there and making them look spiritually evolved.
So that's all fair.
But there is something alienating and one-sided about the kind of analysis that we do.
I was reading Dr. Annie Kelly's thesis on digital anti-feminism to prep for next week's episode and I came across this concept in her methodology section and the phrase itself has kind of haunted me ever since.
Kelly cites a digital sociology researcher named Robert Kozinets.
Who argued in his book, Netnography, that if you aren't in direct communication with your online research subjects, by both interviewing them and participating as members in their spaces, that you wind up with something that he calls unengaged content analysis.
And that's about as flat as it sounds.
So I want to learn more about this over time.
I'm not a sociologist, so those aren't necessarily my exact concerns and standards, but at the same time I can see that the whole issue of whether you're really invested in a discourse and a culture is obviously a determining factor in how close you'll get to real substance, if not the truth of things.
In the midst of all of this waffling on the article, I reached out to Julian for a gut check.
I sent him the draft and I asked if it was fair.
And he was reassuring and pointed out that what was really fair was that the piece was in our subject area wheelhouse.
And so that was good validation.
I mean, it's simply established that a guy like Josh will pump out conspirituality, and here we are, ready to translate it into cultural discourse.
And at this point, anyone like Josh who isn't aware that they will encounter fact-checking or cultural critique on social media is just playing too cool for school.
But then Julian asked, are you concerned about him being devastated?
And that was it.
I was.
A little.
And this was a sign that I'd transferred something onto him.
That I'd identified with him for some reason.
That I was thinking about him as much as his content.
So anyway, having that cleared up was really helpful in two ways because I could see that I was playing fair on one hand and that on the other I had more questions to answer for myself.
But then I saw him getting treated like a seven-year-old by his mom as she talked him through setting her gaudy, rich-ass dinner table.
But then only let him put a flower on one of the awful plates.
And I could suddenly feel some of what this guy has had to work out.
