Laugh Reaction Media

There is a movie out there called Lady Ballers, released on December 1st, 2023. The plot is about men pretending to be women to dominate at women’s basketball.

The movie was originally slated to be a documentary, but Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire commented it was turned into a movie once producers found out actual medical transition would be required and nobody wanted to do that.

What resulted was a nearly 2 hour long movie playing to this fantasy that men can both effortlessly compete and dominate in women’s sports. A stunning cross between White Chicks and a South Park episode that went on for 90 minutes longer than it needed.

It isn’t an offensive movie, so much as it’s an extremely niche movie playing to the culture and expectations of a specific population. I imagine people who play golf for a living love golf movies?

And so too this movie serves as entertainment and pageantry to the audience of it’s guest cameos (pulled from Wikipedia):

Senator Ted Cruz and former competitive swimmer Riley Gaines both made cameo appearances as themselves. Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, Brett Cooper, and Jordan Peterson all make appearances.

For a certain segment of population these names are big deals. They’re the Goku and Friends of their world. Real Main Character Energy™ in their lives and entertainment.

The Culture of Laugh Reaction Media

What is missing from this discussion is a misunderstanding of the culture inherent to folks who engage in this media. Specifically, there is no deep political or scientific position. It all exists in the vector of entertainment to be consumed and ritual performance to feel like part of the ingroup.

This movie, for example, is just a gag movie built on a fake premise that can’t happen in reality (confirmed by Shapiro) and exists for the intent of entertainment and engagement.

And a BIG part of this isn’t simply consuming the media, but the perception the media will trigger those snowflakes into a fetal position from which they may never recover.

A Pavlovian salivation at the thought of laugh reacting every 500 word too long moral posturing, as the left struggles to meme, but just can’t put the venom into their curses to do real damage. Heck, they just spend their time trying to stay alive, which is a terrible combat choice.

Anyways, we get a kind of transformative art that builds into it an addicting parasocial element. You get to ridicule people with it and then talk to everyone within your ingroup about your conquest.

A lot of which exists within fantasy and mythology of the culture, which occasionally spurs things like bomb threatening hospitals when people need more of their fix to feel something. I didn’t use the word addictive in the previous paragraph lightly.

History of Laugh Reaction Media Culture

I think there is something overlooked in any of these often highly partisan spaces and that’s how culture socializes people into performing these roles.

What you find for folks who often engage in Laugh Reaction Media (LRM) is largely cisgender boys and men and it reflects a displacement of the cultural expectations they grew up with and ones they’re expected to follow now.

Men were socialized under values of protection, strength, honor — white knight shit we call it, at the same time feminism was empowering women to not need any of that.

So you have boys who grew up into men, with a skillset nobody wanted. Can imagine how upset and betrayed that might make someone feel.

Dad humor of the 1980s was saying spicy shit they didn’t really mean. The underlying belly was they’d rile you up for a laugh, but if a flood happened and your car broke down, they’re the first to show up to help you. That was the implicit understanding that words didn’t matter, actions did.

Now every little thing they say is criticized and they’re bad people for their thoughts. They shouldn’t try to help women as that’s sexist and whatever the future is, it isn’t them. In this context it’s easy to see how life became a joke to them. It’s also why it’s become easy for radical groups to start recruiting.

We could say LRM is also more likely to be demographically white and flirting with libertarian or social conservative circles. And the interesting unexplored reality is that libertarians are the biggest optimists in humanity of any group in the world hands down.

Does anyone get that? Do we realize that?

They have this absolute belief in humans and that short of these systems of regulation, we’ll all excel at our best. And the point I want to hammer home is that these groups highly romanticize a lot of virtues we probably all agree are good and feel displaced by our modern society as unable to achieve them. Thus lashing out and being destructive to modern culture.

This isn’t a justification for actions or an excuse, but if you don’t seek to understand someone how they see themselves — you just further mythologize a group in unproductive ways.

Trans People in LRM

The other interesting disconnection is that LRM doesn’t actually care about transgender people.

While Lady Baller might focus on ridiculing trans folks. While Chapelle and Rowling both made their brand antagonism to trans people and political actors use anti-trans legislation to fundraise and get elected — trans people serve as a proxy for larger things they dislike about the world.

The correct default opinion to have about transgender people is none. There is literally no reason to have any opinion about it unless you are trans or personally know a trans person or work with the population specifically in your field.

In general, trans people are a proxy argument that the left has gone too far or that black/cis women’s issues aren’t being treated seriously enough. They’re sometimes an argument for some global conspiracy of aligned political actors trying to take away your freedoms, which is how they’re used as a vector of radicalization.

Trans individuals are also often used to create an emotional bias when considering law, such as case law favoring more religious freedom (undermining discrimination protections) or less regulation (undermining child protection).

But most of the entertainment and LRM industry doesn’t fundamentally care about trans people. Anti-trans antagonism is a product to sell. Often one that can give people who have been displaced by modern culture direction and feeling of belonging.

This also echoes into trans positive spaces as content to talk about and rally against, so the profit does trickle down, but lateral harm and violence is still largely one way.

Chapelle and Rowling both drifted conservative as they couldn’t compromise their fixation on trans individuals, because that antagonism started to close doors in more neutral or liberal spaces.

The Future of LRM

I think the novelty of anti-trans media is getting really stale. On the continuity of the brand, Lady Ballers is like Godfather 10. And the thing with anger is it’s very difficult to maintain, because it’s an emotion that requires constant fuel.

Part of me wants to believe that a post on Facebook with tens of thousands of Laugh Reacts is mostly algorithmic bots, because I think about the emotional state of someone compelled to do it.

Hating others almost always comes from first hating yourself and then doing what you can to throw that pain somewhere else.

When I write, I try very hard to bring a unique perspective to topics. I don’t need to be the 100th writer on why bullying people online is bad? So, please don’t take this lens as being insensitive to the harm of these actions.

While I often write to maybe 20 people, a post like this also has the chance to tick off the right people to make it go to a much larger LRM audience as fuel to feed the flames or put another way — nonconsensual participation in someone’s hate kink.

If it does get further than a handful of people reading and does reach into groups that find ridicule online a hobby, I want to say that was me as a kid. I grew up on the internet, I harassed people as a teenager because I thought it was edgy or funny, and I hated myself.

It’s such a fucking vicious cycle, but you can break it. I can’t recommend volunteering in your community enough. Food shelters, emergency relief, participating in donation drives, or being a poll worker.

I’m betting a lot of folks who engage in LRM care deeply and don’t have ways to express that or be rewarded for it. And while anger keeps you warm as long as you have something to burn; kindness and memories of helping others can keep you warm for life.