🤼‍♂️✨The Nexialist #0190

trends are bullsht. long live the trends | ai and the future of sex | make it awkward | gay body culture goes mainstream | vanity is a virtue | prosthetic pnis | man-loving | bionic men

Sep 12, 2024

welcome to another week of “let’s get cyber-physical”, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you (s)well. i’m back in amsterdam and still recovering from the jetlag, along with the reality-check of cloudy end of summer in amsterdam vs. blue skyed winter in buenos aires. this week i bring you trends in general, but also some trends in sex, masculinity, along with some quite awkward truths. i hope you enjoy (and share this with whoever needs to listen) 👂✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🧠trends are bullsh*t. long live the trends

Elodie Marteau

recently released a trends report which covers “14 industries and 42 trends shaping in-the-making futures.” marteau brings a refreshing pov of culture in her content at

In Case of Doubt

and the report synthesizes that. i’m happy to see some movements i’ve brought here before with examples and some twists (and many of which i haven’t picked up.) i always like seeing what i call indie reports, which usually break from the big corporate reports, with a bit more dirt and rawness.

Foresight science and the business of trends can seem (and sometimes are) nebulous and void when focusing on short-term hype culture and relying on flattening algorithmic determinism. Critical thinking is necessary to turn foresight into a tool that truly provides inspiration, fuels creativity, ignites minds, sparks change, and even provokes.
This free-to-download Future Forecast offers a preview of our dedication to interrogating future-shaping socio-cultural movements, to make sense of the trendy trend business, and to empower brands’ aspirations.

brainsparks: meta trending trends '24 (tn#158), 2024 trend reports (tn#151)

🍑ai and the future of sex

Leo Herrera

’s substack is a treasure, as he talks about pop culture and sex, through his queer critical gaze. for this post, he partnered with mit technology review to talk about ai and the future of sex, and his thoughts are simultaneously illuminating and dooming. i have to say i’ve come across cgi and ai porn and it’s quite disturbing because it has become so realistic and otherworldly.

Porn and real-life sex affect each other in a loop. If people become accustomed to getting exactly what they want from erotic media, this could further affect their expectations of relationships. A first date may have another layer of awkwardness if each party has already seen an idealized, naked digital doppelgänger of the other.
Despite (or because of) this blurring of lines, we may actually start to see a genre of “ethical porn.” Without the need for sets, shoots, or even performers, future porn studios might not deal with humans at all. This may be appealing for some viewers, who can be sure that new actors are not underage, trafficked, or under the influence.

once i read in a group about male mental health an older member sharing how he worries for the younger generation (i could not find the post but i’ll try to share his idea), which lit up in my memories while reading this. in his youth, men were only able to compare themselves with people in their life, like in the lockeroom or movies. with social media and porn available in our phones, that field for comparison and inequacy grew exponentially, which was already quite damaging. now, how will the youth’s imagination and expectations about bodies (their own and others) cope in the era of ai and synthetic porn?

brainsparks: the porn conversation (tn#95), how tech is reshaping male masturbation (tn#95), synthetic media (tn#155)

😬make it awkward

who would have known there is so much to learn about awkwardness. this post by alexandra plakias, the author of awdwardness, is like discovering a whole new world. “Make it awkward! : Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script.” it’s worth reading the full post.

People often feel like awkwardness is about them – that they are awkward, or not. But awkwardness is a collective production. More accurately, it’s a collective failure. Awkwardness is a kind of normative negative space, offering what Adam Kotsko calls ‘insight through breakdown’. It arises when people find themselves suddenly without a social script to guide them through an interaction or an event. The term ‘script’ carries associations of playacting, and that’s not a bad way to understand awkwardness. But the lesson of awkwardness is that, in the dramedy of life, we’re not just the actors, we’re the writers.

brainsparks: to be cringe is to be free (tn#73), weird stuff (tn#58)

🩲gay body culture goes mainstream

juan sent me this a few weeks back and this piece by mark harris fits perfectly here: Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed With Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is: In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not.”

the author walks us through how the current male body culture (and its growing pressure) has been led by gay culture over the last decades. if once gay men had to mimic straight men to fit in, even as a survival strategy, there was a moment the tables turned, and gay men got on the lead, as a tastemakers. “This wasn’t exactly the gay rights win it might have looked like on paper, since all it proved was that we could embrace body fascism with the best of them.”

The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism. What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment. This is where I am legally obliged to say, “Not all gay men.”

i also couldn’t stop thinking how this shift happens in service of capitalism, as there are industries making profits off of men’s insecurities (as it has been historically for women). the author even calls it the gay-industrial complex. because of my project, flaccid zine, i keep confirming (and repeating) how feminist and queer movements are lightyears ahead in the conversation about body positivity and neutrality, and how men should follow suit.

“in a society that profits from your self-doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act”
— caroline caldwell (tn#13)

brainsparks: bigorexia (tn#79), fruity men (tn#182), queer monument, male objetification through the ages (tn#127), queer the future (tn#5), the yuppie handbook (tn#66)

🔪vanity is a virtue

washingtonpost

A post shared by @washingtonpost

it’s timely this article and the one before are published in the same month. i would like to say and believe we’re on the brink of this talk about body positivity for men reaching the mainstream, but maybe i’m naïve. terrence mccoy writes for the washington post: ‘Vanity is a virtue’ — Chasing the perfect abs, men flock to plastic surgery.

Now, it’s not just women who are being wheeled into the operating room by the thousands. Six years ago, men accounted for just 5 percent of plastic surgery patients, according to the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery. By last year, their share had risen to nearly one-third. Over a similar time frame, surveys show, the number of liposuctions performed on Brazilian men soared by 46 percent.

i feel like it’s mirrorring y2k’s plastic surgery boom, but then women were the overmwhelming majority target. while i can recognize it’s positive to see that brazilian men are caring more about their health and self-care, something once seen as “too gay,” it worries me that the pressure has become so great that these numbers have grown so much. it’s also impossible not to see the inequality on who can and can’t affort this.

brainsparks: the brazilianization of the world (tn#35), the dystopia of são paulo (tn#83), body shaming stories (tn#79)

🍆prosthetic p*nis

recently we’ve been seeing more and more male full-frontal scenes on tv and cinema, and we (and least i) love it. i remember being a teenager and questioning why they would only show nude women on films, and rarely nude men. in the past years, however, things seem to have been changing. shows like house of the dragon, white lotus, euphoria and minx, plus the iconic naked dance on saltburn are just some examples of this shift. this pop culture moment (which is hopefully more than just a moment) is being called a dicksplosion or penis ploriferation.

what has been bothering me is that many of these representations are not actual organs, but prosthetic penises. this has become such a regular practice that whenever it happens, the internet is quick to ask: is it real or not? so i couldn’t agree more with peter lehman, who wrote: “How prosthetic penises in shows like HBO’s ‘Minx’ reinforce existing stereotypes and taboos.” the problem is even worse when some of these shows use their male full-frontals as PR for being progressive and inclusive. if we have the illusion that the representation in these cultural products are real, it keeps everyone’s expectations where they are, or even more oppressive.

brainsparks: naked education (tn#115), the origin of wat (tn#95), the dangers of big d*** energy (tn#104), measuring manhood (tn#125)

🤼‍♂️man-loving

this image came with the tweet by illuminatti hotties and has been living in my head rentfree: “not my partner finding feminist theory that blows my mind in The Bachelor reddit.” it comes from marilyn frye’s the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. “heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”

brainsparks: bff nude portraits (tn#79), the alpha male myth (tn#127), the disappearance of men (tn#175)

🦿bionic men

the naked truth series from bbc is not very new but i still love what they’ve done. they have episodes about male body image, tattoos, loose skin and this one about men with prosthetics and their stories. i think it’s quite a powerful and beautiful way to normalize nudity and diverse bodies, and go beyond the image, but sharing their intimate stories.

brainsparks: body neutrality (tn#125)

see you next week, awkward people 🫀✨

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz

The Nexialist