Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

In the shady hellscape of far-right forums, one constant is the strive for manliness. You can see this in the in-fighting between the “alt-right” and the supposedly impure “alt-light,” in the use of “cuck” as an epithet, and, perhaps most prominently, in the unchecked misogyny and homophobia that runs wild through all strains of their political and cultural thought. These are threads borne out of bodybuilding and pick-up forums as much as they are gamer and political ones, leading to a near-constant demand for macho posturing, occasionally (but not always) with an ironic veneer.


Anyway, this is why dumbasses on 4chan are eating raw onions now. As spotted by Will Sommer, creator of the Right Richter newsletter, which tracks the movements and ideologies of the far-right onlin, someone on 4chan’s /pol/ board proclaimed the manliness of raw onion consumption:


The original post reads:

Time and again, science has confirmed that onion and its juice boost testosterone levels—sometimes threefold. So, I just attempted to drink a cup—a single cup—of onion juice. Needless to say, consuming onion juice was a trying, though masculine experience, and my entire house smells as if an uncleaned NFL locker room and Mexican kitchen converged upon a single point. I can feel the onion juice flowing through my body, coming into contact with every organ, every cell, and every bodily fluid.


But OP saw this thing through and came out hungry for more manly onion experiences:

Though this has been an overwhelming experience, I feel far more energetic, youthful, and virile. I might try this once or twice more to get the full experience. I am in need of a testosterone boost, and thus am willing to smell like an onion for a few weeks or months.


It spawned a whole bunch of onion-eating followers, most of whom similarly struggled to eat the raw vegetable, because it’s raw fucking onion. There is, as New York points out, absolutely no proof that such a thing would raise testosterone—you can find early claims on Reddit from years ago, as well as one small test in an inconsequential science journal. This is not enough reason to eat a raw onion, but, look, these guys are desperate to get a little more testosterone in that body. They’ll eat a goddamn raw onion if they have to.

Once news broke of the onion-eating alpha males to rich, beta laughter worldwide, the manly men of 4chan began debating whether or not it was all a hoax designed to humiliate them.


Today, if you hop into 4chan’s fitness board—because, again, this is a group that doesn’t differentiate between masculinity and politics—you can see that onions have become a meme to be embraced sarcastically.



You’ll recall that last year chugging milk became an ironic symbol of purity among the same group, a meme that has evolved such that now they are calling inadequately manly men “soyboys” instead of cucks. Now they have first sincerely and then ironically embraced eating raw onions, because they are both the strongest men in the real world and the smartest men on the internet. We look forward to their next gustatory humiliation.