Who is this mythical man of meme-dom? Chad is a name that appears in pop culture as a joke long before its origins as a true internet meme.
In each edition of web_crawlr we have exclusive original content every day. On Saturday our Video Producer Kyle Calise explores the origins and history of the most iconic memes online in his “Meme History” column.
Do you think you’re better than everyone else, but are too good to explain why? Do you have gigantic muscles that you use for nothing practical other than defining your entire persona?
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, it originates as far back as World War II, used by British soldiers to refer to members of the Royal Air Force. For our purposes, we first see Chad in the Urban Dictionary at least as early as 2005, describing something that’s “rubbish or unworthy.” On August 10th, 2013, the first instance of “Chad Thundercock” appears there.
It describes a stereotypical high school/college alpha male, successful with women, and often oblivious.
Read also: The Life of Chad Everett Harris
The Evolution of Chad in Memes
The history of Chad in memes dates back to the 2000s and even further in pop culture to the 1990s when "Chad" was a derogatory slang term for young, successful white men in their 20s and early 30s in Chicago, Illinois. "Chad" was first added to Urban Dictionary on June 1st, 2006, by user Mav Himself, defining him as a guy who "goes to the bar to pick up chicks."
On August 9th, 2013, Urban Dictionary user Dr. Going into the remainder of the 2010s, the aesthetic signifiers of the typical "Chad" solidified themselves in multiple "Chad" memes and trends. For instance, the physical practice of Mewing surfaced on YouTube in 2011.
Mewing involves resting one's tongue on the roof of their mouth at all times, which allegedly leads to a stronger jaw and aesthetically pleasing jawline/face. For instance, on June 7th, 2017, the first iteration of the blonde Chad cartoon present in the Virgin vs.
Going into the 2020s, Google Trends interest in the term "Chad Face" started to accelerate, notably occurring in 2021. Over the course of two years, the video received roughly 370,500 plays and 77,600 likes.
"GigaChad Face" tutorials started emerging soon after as some creators were able to make the face without the filter.
Read also: "Married to Evil": Chad Graves
Also known as “Nordic Gamer,” this face and side profile often appear alongside Wojack variants and other comics. He originates in a super racist 4Chan forum juxtaposed against someone of Mediterranean descent. But yes, Chad really took off as a meme following a 2019 tweet where he was pitted against an unrelated comic. This is the format that seemed to work for him, because in the current day, he’s almost never seen alone.
Appropriately, Yes, Chad often only says, “yes” to whatever thing he’s prompted with, which gives him a standoffish and superior tone. Note, again, the blonde hair, full beard, full jawline, and almost idiotic levels of self-assuredness.
The Chad Face, also known as the GigaChad Face, refers to the facial recreation of what a typical Chad and GigaChad is perceived to look like online. Making the face involves slanting one's eyebrows, flaring one's nostrils, sucking in one's cheeks and puckering one's lips, all while emphasizing the jawline.
The practice of Mewing and its parodies are said to be an origin, leading to the face's usage in image macro memes.
Incel Logic
The Left-Cheek Bias and Facial Perception
Indulge us for a minute: if you’ve got your phone to hand, pick it up and take a selfie. Which way did you turn your head? Results of psychology research indicate that it’s likely you chose to show off your left cheek, but you probably don’t realize you’re doing it.
Read also: Vallow-Daybell Trial: Key Evidence
This is an example of something called the left-cheek bias, and it goes way back to when oil paintings - not Instagram posts - were the way to show off.
What is the left-cheek bias?
The left-cheek bias was first noted in the 1970s. For their 1973 paper published in Nature, Christopher McManus and Nicholas Humphrey, then at the University of Cambridge, studied 1,474 portraits from Western Europe dating between the 16th and 20th centuries. They found that 891 of them showed more of the subject’s left cheek than the right.
“This 60 percent bias to the left is highly significant,” they wrote, after performing some statistical analysis.
Inspired by this study, in the same year, Martin LaBar took a look at a contemporary source - two 1972 college yearbooks - to see if the same bias was apparent.
“I found a similar tendency to expose the left side of the face more than the right,” LaBar wrote in a letter to Nature.
Further research into this phenomenon found that when posing for a portrait, regardless of medium, people really do seem more likely to offer their left cheek to the artist. However, the opposite was found to be true for self-portraits, where the right cheek was found to be more predominant.
This was put down to the fact that self-portraits would likely have been painted by using a mirror, so if the subject was observing their left side in the mirror it would be painted as a right-sided view.
As more and more people began to carry cameras with them - in the form of smartphones - wherever they went, the opportunity arose to explore this in more depth. A 2015 study found that when a standard selfie was taken, people were more likely to photograph their left side, as we’ve come to expect. When the selfie was taken in mirror mode, a right-cheek bias emerged, again suggesting that in general people prefer to appear in photos facing towards the left.
“The two biases are remarkably stable across different cities and between males and females,” wrote the authors, whose data covered selfie-takers in New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, and Bangkok.
Other studies have since backed up these findings, with one paper reporting that left-oriented selfies got more likes and comments on Instagram, and another finding that humans’ preference for left-sided photos even extends to depictions of chimpanzees.
Basically, we’re big fans of the left sides of faces. But why?
What’s behind the left-cheek bias?
The fact that the left-cheek bias exists has been established again and again over 50 years’ worth of literature, but the reasons behind it have proven more difficult to determine.
McManus and Humphrey suggested a few potential explanations in their first paper all those years ago. One of the most simple is also the most easily discounted: that artists are more likely to be right-handed and thus might find it easier to draw a left-facing profile. That may have been true, but then we wouldn’t expect the effect to persist into the age of photography and selfie-taking.
They also speculated that the left side of the face may be generally perceived as more attractive, or that the left side of the field of vision - under the control of the right hemisphere of the brain - is better at facial recognition. Another hypothesis was that there could be a reason why people are more likely to turn their heads to the right first.
“But the data do not give much support to any of these explanations,” they wrote at the time. Since then, however, more research has been carried out.
A 2017 paper in aptly named journal Laterality said, “Though we are rarely conscious of it, […] facial expressions of emotion are asymmetric: we tend to express greater emotion on the left-hand side of the face.” This is probably the most widely accepted explanation for the left-cheek bias.
“Previous studies in adults have confirmed that the left cheek bias is not simply the result of an aesthetic (i.e. preference for left cheek portrait poses) or perceptual bias by comparing responses to images in original and mirror-reversed orientations,” the authors elaborated.
“These studies found that the left cheek's greater anatomical expressivity is evident even when the images were digitally manipulated to make a left cheek pose look like a right cheek pose.”
Another factor that McManus and Humphrey noted back in 1973 was a difference between male and female portrait subjects: “Although the left-cheek bias is significant in portraits of both men and women, the bias in women's portraits […] is much greater than in men's.”
This is something that has been revisited as the body of research has grown. Some findings presented in a recent poster from researchers at the University of Oslo - which has been posted to preprint server PsyArXiv and not in a peer-reviewed publication - found that of 32 studies, 21 of them (66 percent) “did not find an effect of gender on posing bias”. It’s therefore unclear at this stage whether gender may play a role.
Chad, Incels, and the Manosphere
Also, context matters. The slang term Chad has historically been applied in different contexts. The term has come into use in incel forums and as internet slang to refer to sexually active, supposedly genetically superior men, or "alpha males." Within the manosphere and internet culture, Chads are generally viewed as constituting the top decile in terms of genetic fitness.
In online animation drawings in the manosphere, a Chad is often depicted as a muscular blond man with very pronounced masculine features. One such depiction, in the "Virgin vs. Chads are sometimes portrayed as the opposite to "omega" or "beta" males, and as physically attractive. "Gigachad" is a related internet meme that uses black-and-white photographs of a muscular male model.
The GigaChad Phenomenon
GigaChad is the ultimate Chad-the hypermasculine ideal, the alpha, the most confident meme of a man you’ll find on the internet.
What is a GigaChad?
The GigaChad meme takes the Chad moniker-that of a big dumb confident man-and ramps it up by a billion (giga). Everybody knows that if you post a GigaChad picture, your opinion is correct.
GigaChad meme history:
The image that became known as GigaChad is the fruit of an art project called sleekntears, created by the artist Krista Sudmalis. At the time, the person wasn’t known as GigaChad.
“Years of Bogdanoff research into genetic augmentation has finally yielded fruit,” reads the post, referencing the Bogdanoff twins, a pair of French celebrity brothers who became memes themselves for their extreme, plastic surgery-altered features. “Behold, the Gigachad. The perfect human specimen destined to lead us against the reptilians.
But while Khalimov has become the public, chiseled face of GigaChad, the real story is more complicated than that. Evidence for that idea (aside from his cartoonish, bicycle-pumped muscles) includes the fact that there are no behind-the-scenes photos of GigaChad’s model like there are for the other models in Sudmalis’ series, as pointed out in an article by Dude Products.
Artur Farad, a fitness model, is a likely candidate for being the real inspiration. A look on his Instagram account shows he does bear a real resemblance to the impossibly square-jawed model.
Ernest Khalimov’s opinion on the memes
Despite the unlikelihood of Khalimov being a real person, the ruse has been maintained over the years. After the GigaChad picture initially went viral, berlin.1969 responded to the attention with a friendly post thanking his fans for the attention.
“Must admit I’m shocked that there are so many of you and that you are not negative … I have nothing to say to you, probably because I look much more interesting from your words,” he wrote.
“It’s very flattering and overshadows my commonness. Thanks for the kind words. Thank you for the positive energy. don’t doubt guys I mentally return it to you. Take your time and keep calm. Take care of yourself and your loved ones … Yours faithfully.
“gigachad is real, and humble and he seems like a pretty nice guy. he’s an actual Chad,” wrote one redditor in response.
Riffing on the idea that posting an image of GigaChad automatically makes everything you say correct, a smiling devil-may-care version of the meme was integrated into the popular Average Fan vs.
Another variation of the meme has GigaChad reacting to country names like Georgia, Turkey, or Hungary by acting like they aren’t the names of countries but are other places, nouns, or adjectives. Think it’s stupid?
Do people find GigaChad attractive?
Despite GigaChad being held up as a masculine ideal, this photoshopped take on an allegedly highly attractive specimen actually doesn’t seem to be all that appealing to women at all.
According to a survey of both men and women done by DatePsychology.com, women ultimately rated the GigaChad images as “below average” looking. In fact, men rated him notably higher-a 4.88 average on a 7.0 scale, compared to women’s 3.58.
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tags: #Chad
