﻿You go on Youtube, and the most trending videos all start to look eerily similar.
Smiling profiles, mouths agape, scraggly beards and hairline recession. You see this is the
meme of the Soy Face, but we’re gonna take it seriously and find out if there’s any truth to
why these grown men pose like hyperactive toddlers. Wait, I think I just answered
my own question, it’s to appeal to children, the most lucrative Youtube audience. Who else
has 6 hours a day to binge watch all of your videos and get you that sweet ad revenue?
So first let’s classify the diagnosis of the soy face. In case you can’t tell, this entire video
is a joke, but not really a joke either. The Soy Face is an internet meme that has existed since I
was a young lad.. It just went by different names, but the main link is that somewhere,
someone made an incorrect link between Soy product consumption and declining Testosterone levels.
While Soy does have isoflavones that have an estrogenic effect the effects in question
are like shouting into the wind, weak. Most Meta Studies show that Soy has no significant effect
on bioavailable Testosterone, which is what really matters, and meta studies are studies of studies
so they’re about the highest quality of research you can get on a topic,
so we’ll leave it there. Nonetheless, the theory goes that drinkers of Soy Products such as Soylent
have lower Testosterone levels and thus participate in more effeminate, childlike or
generally non-masculine behaviour. The Soy meme also has strong links to consumerism,
but what I’m really trying to figure out with this video is why do they all look the same.
I don’t mean to get political, but why do they all LOOK the same. I’ve yet to see a person of colour
pulling the Soy face, and honestly, this is one place I do not want representation in.
To answer this, let’s look at the silly mouth open expression these men pull for Youtube view. The
closest comparison I can think of is male model Mario Adrion’s channel, where he has in the past
pulled some exaggerated expressions to express his point. The difference between him doing it and him
doing it is night and day in how we perceive the two faces. This is the most fascinating
piece of research for me; Testosterone, Smiling and Facial Appearance. Two studies
report less smiling in high than in low testosterone individuals. We associate
this goofy smile with low testosterone and low testosterone with soy because psychologically we
do not see masculine looking men smile as much. Mario isn’t the most masculine looking guy,
he’s more of the pretty-boy androgenous type and he’s certainly comfortable with his sexuality,
but he is far more masculine than this face just by virtue of being lean,
young and having a full head of hair. Three of the biggest physiological indicators of testosterone.
Obviously you all know that when you’re young you have higher testosterone than an older gentleman,
you also all likely know that being high bodyfat has an estrogenic effect on your hormones,
reducing your testosterone levels. As for hairloss, it’s a bit trickier, Testosterone turns
into DihydroTestosterone which is what causes hair follicles to miniaturise. Saying a bald man has
less testosterone is not physiologically true, but the reason for why we find balding unattractive
is due to the ‘young father hypothesis,’ you can read the full writeup for it over at the
QOVES website by Simon our biologist. Okay, so let’s recap, if this man pulls a
silly face for views and this man does it, we take this as cute and playful and this as
infuriating and annoying. A) Because of their differences in attractive male characteristics
B) Because their expressions while similar are at different levels of over the top. The
facial appearances of the two men give subtle indicators of testosterone and thus masculinity,
strength and power. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant, it could be that he actually has
a higher blood testosterone reading than this guy, but how we see them in that split
second first impression, whether by social or biological condition is everything.
The same paper on Testosterone and smiling also found that higher testosterone men smile less
widely or with as much activation of the Orbicularis muscles or levitators so there
could be a very real link to hormones and facial emotions. It doesn’t mean that higher
Testosterone men smile less, they just smile as less openly or fully for whatever reason.
Socially, we can interpret smiling as a vulnerable act, when you smile you are indicating that your
guard is down. The russians have a proverb; Smiling with no reason is a sign of stupidity and
I think this aptly sums up our feelings towards these thumbnails. The video is going to be silly,
stupid, vapid, shallow. The thumbnail is meant to attract people who enjoy silly, stupid, vapid
and shallow mainly kids, and it’s okay if you as an adult click on them too, everyone
likes some fun content now and again, but the soy face is a deliberate marketing tool to indicate
exactly what the video is going to be about. The hyperexpression is something that young
children who are just learning to control their emotions can relate to. With respect, Michael from
V sauce fits the look of many of these Soy Face enthusiasts, balding, bearded, white middle aged
man, but since he’s an educational creator and a man with self-respect, it would be impossible for
us to imagine him pulling a face like this to get views for a high production science video, it just
doesn’t match the content. If I search Soy Face thumbnail the remaining results are all tutorials
on how to make an effective thumbnail. I vaguely remember when I was starting off on Youtube,
I think it was Graham Stephen who said in his course on video making to show your face in the
thumbnail with a goofy expression for clicks. The last question I want to figure out is why the
men pulling these faces are mainly white. I’ve rarely seen people of colour do this. It could
be cognitive bias that we’ve come to associate the Wojak soy meme with white, pasty looking men or it
could be more cultural. Afterall, much like the Russian proverb many non Western cultures have
strict emphasis on self-conduct and how society perceives you. It’s really only in the West and
mainly America that the focus on self-freedom is so high, that you can say, act and do anything you
want to and not care about how society sees you. The soy face is degrading quite simply put,to me,
it’s the lowest of the low in terms of clickbait choices, when you know your content is not good
enough to sell on its own but you also degrade the intelligence of the audience
needing goofy faces for them to watch. You become the court jester doing a little dance for the
king to get your ad revenue. Perhaps because people of colour are minorities in the West,
they do not want to have to perform these degrading acts with the fear that it makes their
people look worse from an already disadvantaged position. It could be why the Soy-Face has a
certain demographic of White men participating in it exclusively for jokes, views or for pragmatic
reasons. It is in all sense, a marketing tool to evoke emotion, comments and engagement