"Smoothgroin" Is Just Fancy Incel-Speak

The latest line of attack against Graham Platner's critics could have emerged from the swamps of Reddit.

The revelations from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times stories into Graham Platner’s misconduct with women – sexting and alleged domestic violence – as well as a Washington Post op-ed from his former political director Genevieve McDonald in which she describes him “gaslighting” her over his controversial Totenkopf tattoo, were not enough to prevent him from winning the Democratic nomination for the Senate against five-term Republican Susan Collins. Granted, his nomination was something of an anticlimax, as the field had pretty much been cleared for him: outgoing Governor Janet Mills had suspended campaigning a month prior, and deputy EPA director David Costello and write-in candidate Andrea LeFlamme had no shot. But even if he’d won by only one point, his supporters would still be rubbing people’s noses in it.

Platner’s first ad of the general election, released this week, is a 15-second humblebrag amounting to “if both sides hate me, I must be doing something right!” and that’s an honest reflection of both his campaign’s and his supporters’ attitude. I’m reminded of the August 2015 Time Magazine cover story about Trump’s first campaign, which sported the headline “Deal with It” – a nicer way of saying “fuck you.” As with Trump, the more Platner steps in it, the more his supporters double down and insist you’re the problem, because if they admitted otherwise it would force them to reflect on how they might be wrong, and they can never admit they were wrong. It’s why they blame John Fetterman’s behavior on his stroke rather than face the reality that he fooled them into thinking he was a progressive during the primary.

This gloating has included a great deal of bullying and outright dismissal towards women who’ve either criticized Platner or alleged he was a shitty and at-times-abusive boyfriend. After the Wall Street Journal story came out, Platner fans smeared McDonald, a source for the piece, with one Democratic operative calling her an attention-seeker who sought vengeance by speaking to a “Murdoch Rag” (never mind the Journal’s hard firewall between the newsroom and its editorial board). Similarly, Lyndsey Fifield, the ex who alleged he had been physically hostile towards her, has been dismissed as a Republican operative, despite the fact that according to her LinkedIn, almost all her work experience has been for conservative organizations and her only work on an actual campaign (which is what operatives do) is two months on Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign in 2023.

Nothing about this sexism is shocking. I lived through Skyler White hate, GamerGate, the female Ghostbusters and BernieBros (and I’m here.) What’s surprising this time is that in defending Platner’s philandering, they’re not just going after women. They’re casting all his critics, male and female, as asexual prudes. Journalist Ken Klippenstein calls them “smoothgroins”:

“The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner? The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want. People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life Barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be…. These are people who think we’re still living in the I Love Lucy world where married couples retire to separate beds so as not to offend viewers’ delicate sensibilities.”

Klippenstein’s linguistic trick isn’t just about creating a catchy phrase. It’s designed to be a more respectable version of incel-speak. The key incel meme is the sketch of the “virgin” and the “Chad,” the “virgin,” depicted as a nerdy loser who looks at his feet when he walks and the “Chad,” an impossibly buff macho man whose hands are “always prepared to grab nearby fertile pussy.” If the smoothgroins are “virgins,” then Platner is the “Chad.”

Look at the contrast Klippenstein sets up with Platner and Buttigieg, setting aside both his homosexuality and the Buttigieg Derangement Syndrome that has consumed the left since he won the 2020 Iowa caucuses. Why would you want to be like Buttigieg, he implies, a Harvard graduate who started small by working in local politics, spent his political capital on a longshot presidential campaign, and demonstrated enough communications and policy skills to become a powerful player in Democratic politics? You should be like Platner, a swole college dropout whose working-class resume of bartender and oyster farmer and populist rhetoric make him a man of the people who deserves to sit in one of the most powerful governing entities in the country even though he’s never run for office before. Never mind the fiction behind this persona – Platner’s family wealth and his VA disabilities allow him to run the oyster farm as a rich kid’s hobby more than a vocation (and his one client listed on his financial disclosure form is his mother.) Like the incel vs. Chad, it’s a convenient myth giving his supporters permission to justify their fandom with some kind of underlying philosophy instead of a mere matter of preference. Anyone who questions his treatment of women is instantly robbed of their sexuality. You can throw a football at their groin and they won’t have the capability to react, so they can do it as much as they want.

Mind you, you can absolutely make a good-faith case for Platner as Senator. Maybe you want more people from outside the system to go to Washington, or you just want to beat Collins. That’s the basis for a productive discussion. Once you add toxic stereotypes into the picture, you make it more and more difficult for skeptics to come on board. And you’ll need their support, especially if more scandals drop—and they’re already dropping.

Last night, Dipshit Usagi (@420mercymain69, real name unknown), posted a long statement on Twitter about her relationship with Platner. Unagi dated him briefly in 2021, only to learn that he was engaged to another woman, “Jen,” the whole time. “Jen” and Platner eventually broke up, Usagi says, when “she walked in on him having sex with another person at a wedding they were at in DC.” She also said Platner knew the tattoo was a Totenkopf and justified it to her with a completely different story than we’ve heard him give in other interviews. In the last 24 hours, she’s been attacked as a Republican operative, a liar, an attention seeker, and “a tool of the evil powers,” and no doubt his fans will keep lobbing these attacks her way. The ball. The smoothgroin. It works on so many levels.