Your bag is empty.
This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
What’s a man to do after publicly losing the biggest beef in rap history? One does not envy Drake’s situation. He released three albums in one night, flooding the zone with new music, which seems like a decent strategy. Playing a lewd, low-budget, and highly-staged online speed-dating game strikes me as less gracious in defeat.
Last week, Drake played Wife Pipe Bestie, in which he met 20 women and chose one to pipe, one to wife, and one to become besties with (you can use context clues for “pipe”). The stream was arranged by Kyle Foregard of The NELK Boys, a longtime YouTube prank show which took a manospheric turn around the 2020 election, as a thank-you to Drake for gifting him a roughly $500,000 Richard Mille watch. Drake met the viral pornstars Lena The Plug and Lily Phillips. He revealed to a woman named Chloe Yummy that he had previously scouted her for a music video, but assumed she was AI. And he particularly connected with a goth woman named Pinkchyu. He barked like a dog for, helped her open Magic! The Gathering trading cards, chose her as his “wife,” then bought her mother a house, sparking one of his first major viral moments since the beef. Conveniently enough, the game was a segment in a multi-hour stream Drake hosted for the Internet casino Stake celebrating the company’s 9th anniversary on their affiliated streaming platform, Kick.
This was modern media distilled, forming a superconcentrated combination of livestreaming, gambling, livestreamed gambling, influencing, mass-marketed pornography, engineered virality through clipping, trading cards as investment assets, undisclosed advertisements for hard seltzer and nicotine pouches, and a prank YouTuber who’s friends with the President. If Wall-E took place on a spaceship full of only pubescent boys, this is what they would be staring at in their chairs.
This speed dating format, a YouTube-native bastardization of The Bachelor for split-second attention spans, has become exceedingly common. A cottage industry of shows like Pop the Balloon, Druski’s Coulda Been Love, and Sidemen Tinder IRL dramatize the experience of swiping on people for an audience. Its popularity, in my view, owes to the now-widespread idea that dating is structured around hypergamy—marrying up for money or social status, as defined in sociology. The term spread via the mainstreaming of incel culture, in which hypergamy is a shorthand for the perceived unfairness of modern romance to men. The theory posits that an elite class of males, your 6’5” blue-eyed men in finance, hoard the vast majority of female attention, leaving a huge swath of average guys out in the cold. Questionable data about women’s choosiness on dating apps has been used to support this theory around the Internet. Many looksmaxxers try to increase their Sexual Market Value (a combination of their empirical PSL aesthetic score and factors like rizz, wealth, popularity, and dick size) to game this supposed system.
Drake’s 20 v. 1 was an extreme example of televised hypergamy—albeit a sexless, influencer-casted version. But to some extent, this must be what Drake’s life is actually like. As an extraordinarily wealthy and famous musician, he probably does enjoy exponentially more female attention than the average man, or even the average rapper. Drake has cornered the sexual marketplace for so long that he seems tired of it, skipping past the sex and right ahead to doling out cash and Birkins, as he does at the end of the challenge. He has adopted an unlucky-in-love, hopeless romantic persona that reads something like “The Sad Hypergamist.” He even bought a chain containing 42 diamonds, symbolizing all the engagement rings he thought about but never bought.
In fact, Drake seems so exhausted by the dating world that he has become open about his use of pornography. In 2022, as part of an album rollout, he posted a fake Howard Stern clip about watching “superstar” “top givers.” A few days after the stream, Drake reunited and took photos with Lena The Plug and Lily Philipps. The photo prompted many baffled, desperate reactions from men along the lines of: “Drake can get any girl in the world! Why them?” To those at the bottom of the hypergamic totem pole, the behavior of those at the top can be confusing.
But all of this does beg the question: Why is Drake doing a 20 v.1 Wife/Pipe/Bestie with one of the NELK Boys? Because Drake is a streamer, and this is what streamers do. Drake has long been sponsored by Stake, whose co-founders started Kick in part because the OG streaming platform, Twitch, had stricter rules about gambling content. It’s odd for a global music superstar to bark on command for a goth girl, but perfectly normal for a streamer.
Drake would not be the first famous person to leave a dream job in favor of this kind of work. President Obama left office and started making Netflix movies. Prince Harry left royal life to podcast. David Solomon got so into DJing professionally while in charge of Goldman Sachs that it became a “distraction.”
People often remark that Clavicular should have a reality show. But why would he want one when he has his own stream? The Internet is no longer a stepping stone to a “real” career. To the new generation, content creation is the goal. I don’t know Drake’s finances, but it’s entirely possible that livestreaming for an online casino is more profitable than making music. In one survey of Gen Alpha, 32% wanted to be Youtubers, 21% wanted to be TikTokkers, and 15% wanted to be streamers. Just 14% wanted to be musicians. If we believe them, videos with the Nelk Boys and pornstars aren’t a diversion or a marketing stunt or a misstep; they’re the job.
This is a new, truly Internet-native medium. And the medium is the message. Streaming is created by and for young men, cloistered from meddling network standards, FCC rules, or persnickety advertisers. It is designed for people who are so attached to their screens that they’ll watch a livestream longer than the Super Bowl. As livestreaming becomes an even more dominant form of entertainment for young men, it will carry its own stock formats, celebrities, sponsors, and values. If early television was talk shows, Milton Berle, Texaco, and consumerism, early livestreaming is 20 v. 1s, Kyle from NELK, Stake, and sexual market dynamics. Enjoy the show.
