Sexual Main Character Syndrome

The full text of Amelia Buzzard's piece, for paying subscribers

Sexual Main Character Syndrome: The Manosphere, 4B, and the Quest for Power

Amelia Buzzard

Who’s the main character in your sex life?

“Main character energy” began trending in 2020 after a TikTok-er posted a viral video with the message: “You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character. Because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by.” The trend quickly became an excuse for flaunting inconsiderate or narcissistic behavior. Now, the 1.3 million-member online community r/ImTheMainCharacter is devoted to mocking “videos/photos of people acting like they are the center of the world.”

One of the most popular posts in the forum, for example, shows a social media influencer at a commercial gym ranting about some other customers who had accidentally walked in front of her camera. In the comments section, a viewer sums up the influencer’s attitude: “I was only there for 15 minutes in a shared space….how dare someone go about their business.” That’s the essence of the main character: to interpret the world as if her own goals and desires are the only ones that count.

The extremes of the men’s and women’s rights movements display a similar mindset. Both have given up seeing members of the opposite sex as moral agents with their own griefs, triumphs, and fears. Each extreme prefers to see itself as the only one who, when pricked, bleeds.

Since the November 2024 election, 4B, a South Korean feminist movement, has gained traction in the United States, at least on social media, if not in actual practice. Evoking the 1970’s lesbian separatist movement, 4B calls for women to renounce men, refusing romance, sex, and childbirth. At the same time, the “manosphere” subculture, which began proliferating in American internet forums in the 2010’s, has come into prominence in the 2020’s with the rise of internet personalities like Nick Fuentes and Pearl Davis. This movement generally presses men to “take the red pill,” teaching them how to psychologically manipulate women in order to get both sex and power.

Both movements leverage victim narratives to justify treating the opposite sex as less than human.