Fixing Your Life with Beef Liver Crisps
What do the Twitter accounts warning of the perils of sunscreen and prolactin want from you?
Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.
There are so many people looking for guidance. They’re just desperate for it, for someone to please let them stop simply feeling like they’re not in control and to instead let someone else’s ideas be in control for them. Online, people who have essentially emerged from nowhere are fashioning themselves into vanguards of “truth” and “wellness” and “freedom” using vague assertions of masculinity and men’s health, and a growing audience is taking it as gospel.
The problem isn’t that they’re wrong, or that they’re tying these messages to a more insidious ideological creep, both of which may be true, too. The problem is that they’re doing it to sell you beef liver jerky.
Such is the case with the Twitter account Carnivore Aurelius, an anonymous account with 250k followers and a photo of a statue of Marcus Aurelius for a profile photo. For weeks I’ve been following this page and others like it, enthralled by the way these pages are able to fashion unchecked claims about culture, society and biology into axioms and cures for the contemporary ailment of being. They pair pictures of cliffside European dinners and farmland settings with statements about how you should eat fewer leafy greens or that real men want women who aspire to make ice cream from their breast milk to tell you that there’s something wrong with how you’re living. And look, maybe they’re right about that. I agree that something is off about a lot of our lifestyles, that we probably should be getting more sunlight, that many of us lack a broader sense of meaning or purpose and that we likely won’t find it by upping our screen time. I’m even trying to eat less seed oils!
Yet whatever good advice or fact can be gleaned from pages like this, there’s a profusion of content that seems willfully distorted, and in the end it’s all done to drum up engagement that leads readers to Carnivore Aurelius’ online beef liver jerky shop. It’s also recently been resurfaced that the LLC linked to the account is tied exclusively to one woman named Caeleah Taylor who maybe works for a marketing firm. Is the information shared by the page any more or less factual because it’s being said by a woman? Of course not. The possibility that Carnivore Aurelius is purely a marketing tactic for selling jerky has been obvious from the start — it’s linked right there in their bio.
One part of their engagement-farming that I frequently get hung up on, however, is their discussion of sexuality. This page and others like it talk frequently about the ills of porn and masturbation. Almost always are the two treated as one — the idea that a man could masturbate without watching porn is unheard of.
As I discussed in my No Nut November and goon cave pieces, it’s obvious that there are plenty of men for whom porn has become a destructive habit that eats up too much of their time and energy. It’s all fine and good that some people want to change their relationship with porn and masturbation. I personally think more men should give masturbating without porn a try sometimes, and I also think people can be normal with porn in the way people can be normal with alcohol. But again, whatever truth might be found in these tweets about porn and masturbation must be parsed from claims for which there is little evidence. In particular, they keep talking about prolactin. Prolactin is a hormone that is mainly responsible for breast milk production in women, but men produce prolactin, as well — namely, after orgasm. It’s long been thought that prolactin is what causes the refractory period in men after sex, but more recent studies have found that there’s not much evidence for this. There is, however, plenty of research that says that high prolactin levels in men can indeed lower testosterone and reduce libido. It’s this that Carnivore Aurelius and others are leaning on. The thing is, problematically high prolactin levels are probably not the result of orgasm but of an endocrine disorder. If masturbation caused chronically high prolactin levels, so would sex — men produce 400% more prolactin following orgasm during intercourse compared to masturbation. And yet, nobody is decrying sex as ruining testosterone. So my question here is, what are these people after in making claims like this? They’re trying to hook you on some semblance of truth and an insecurity, and they’re doing it to sell you beef liver jerky.
Or perhaps what they’re trying to sell you is an online course, or a bottled supplement, or maybe even a Substack subscription. And can I blame them? I’m trying to sell you a Substack subscription, yes because I want to share a message that I think is important and writing is what I do and I love it and blah blah blah but also because I do indeed like to make money. But I suppose what I’m really trying to get at here is that these are confusing times. We’re looking for answers and receiving too many. Have the lot of us forgotten the way to live, or are we just being told so? Become a paid subscriber to find out. ;)