The evolution of online culture has achieved a rapidity we never could have imagined in the 2000s. Back then, we had to subsist on what we called “internet fads” for months or even years. We supped upon a thin gruel of Hampsterdances, All Your Bases, and Hello My Future Girlfriends. Mr. T Ate Our Balls! He ate our balls, damn it.
Even on the recently-compromised then more-recently restored 4chan, memes had a relatively long shelf life. In those days, “meme” was a little-known word that actually referred to a repeated and gradually transmuted image or phrase. Later, it became shorthand for “image macro.” Today, it basically just means any kind of joke you see online.
The average internet user in 2025 sees more “memes” in a single hour of browsing their timeline than a child in 2005 would have seen in an entire year. Inevitably, these trends tend to peak then recede from the public consciousness. Like, remember the Twitter craze of posting a grid of characters or real people with dollar amounts attached and asking your followers to build a team from them with a certain budget?
Well, some people never forgot it. And, it should go without saying, they incorporated it into an incredibly baroque system of masturbation.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across r/celebeconomy. I told Sean and Robert that I wanted to write about it on March 2nd, and they approved the pitch, though Robert noted that while it would make a good article, it would also make him sad. When the time came to actually write this piece and I braced myself to delve into the subreddit to gather material, I was confronted with an unexpected setback.
r/CelebEconomy, like r/RedScareForCisHetMen before it, had been struck down by Reddit, leaving its 81,000 members without a place to call home. I was crestfallen and confused. Do we truly live in a world in which men cannot publicly gamify the fictional purchase of famous women for the purpose of sex? It’s political correctness gone mad! And more importantly, it’s getting in the way of me generating content. But fear not — though the subreddit is gone, its legacy lives on. Specifically, it lives on on weird off-brand porn sites focused on still images that presumably exist to serve lonely Arctic researchers who have to make do with fifteen minutes of internet access a day on a Starlink connection.
I had to see an animated pop-up of Dale and Peggy from King of the Hill fucking for this. The things I do for you. It doesn’t even make sense! Dale is a happily married cuckold! Bill’s the one who’s obsessed with Peggy! Sorry, I’m stalling. But I think it’ll become clear pretty quickly why that is. Let’s try and start with something relatively tame.
Simple. It’s a grid of well-known, attractive, mainly-white women, each assigned a dollar value, with serviceable graphic design. By the time you’ve finished reading this article, this will seem quaint to you. Why would anyone participate in this kind of thing on a public forum? I suppose it’s a slightly more evolved form of the old “who would you rather bang” question with some light gamification. A kind of rules-light RPG that provides a scaffolding for storytelling versus a free-for-all jackoff improv.
I’m a little confused by the “negative $1 discount” for wifing, though. Does the double negative signify an increase in price, which would be expected given the value proposition of sharing your life with one of these women rather than a single night of passion? Or are we meant to take it as a true discount, given that whomever made this almost certainly hates women and for whom the prospect of being married to one, even an accomplished and/or famously beautiful one, rather than pumping and dumping her is a kind of hardship for which he theoretically deserves recompense? I’m stalling again, because things are about to get worse.
Ok, kind of a jump in mechanical complexity here. This time we’re running through a list of famous attractive women and assigning them various “materials.” Would it be churlish of me to point out that “bikini” and “shiny dress” aren’t materials, exactly? I suppose “nude” is, technically, if you consider it to mean “flesh.” But hey, we’re not talking about cutting a woman’s face off to create a terrifying death mask.
Oh. Oh no. This isn’t great, and it’s actually worse than it seems at first glance because we’re not just picking one, as the instructions suggest. We have a budget. We’re shopping for lady faces and we’re going to stitch them together into something new and terrible. We are the villain in a Thomas Harris novel. Can we get a silly one?
Baldur’s Gape. No notes. Of course Shadowheart, the stern goth mommy with a secret heart of gold is valued most highly here, since she was built in a lab to appeal to shut-in gamers. Speaking of gamers, maybe you want something a little more intellectual?
Jesus Christ. This looks like the puzzle on the back of a box of Weinstein-O’s. But we can get more complex.
Here we fucking go. We’re practically into complex European board game territory now. Anyone who seriously engaged with this graphic has gone beyond horny and has discovered something else. And you know what? I think we might have fucked up by making hardcore pornography so freely available. A culture without 24/7 access to the most extreme kinds of filth imaginable doesn’t produce images like this. We’re looking at the work of a mind so inured to an endless stream of genitals in various configurations that it had to invent a means of making it more difficult to jack off. But hey, I just noticed there’s a transgender woman and a model with vitiligo on there. Welcome to the #resistance, horny guy who made this image.
Next up is Tour de Fuck. Tour de Fuck, everybody! It’s a cutely-themed French choose-your-own-fuckventure! I regret to inform you that they’ve actually all been relatively cute up until now compared to what’s coming. Aside from the face one, I mean. Let’s get nasty.
Now we’re talking. The player of this game is invited to imagine himself engaging in specific sex acts with each of his choices. This is a game of strategy and also imagined insemination, much like Warhammer if you’re playing the forces of the Chaos God Slaanesh. Sidebar: the phrase “slow and passionate deepthroat” is an instant tipoff that you’re in the presence of a serial killer. Distract him with sexual grid puzzles and effect a hasty retreat from the situation.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Chaos earlier. Now we must walk its Path, which happens to be lined with an unexpected number of Korean pop stars. Do you think this guy maybe has a certain type? And additionally has psychosexually imprinted on Amy Adams? I had to cut this one off since it went on for like a dozen rows, but spoiler: yes, and yes. Speaking of overlong images…
This one is called “The Last Men Alive,” and it bills itself as not just a game, but a story. Let’s dive in.
Incredible. We’ve got amnesia, we’re making choices, and there are stats involved. This is practically a Bioware game already. I’m going to roll with Miranda Cosgrove, since I think the Sociability skill is low-key underrated in a post-apocalyptic scenario, which this is, I think?
Right, right, the Devastation. Promising breeders. Underground bunkers. “DSL.” Cute. It’s a Sex University where the administration disappears you if your evaluations fall off. So basically regular university, if you’re an adjunct.
Things kind of go on like this for a while. I picked Camila Mendes as my Assistant for another +1 to Sociability and someone named Victoria Justice as my Planner for +1 Duty. My enforcer is Chloe Moretz, just because that’s a really funny image to me. She gives me another +1 Sociability. But things get interesting when we get to “Housekeeper” (sexual).
We’ve got unlocks now? Of course I’m going with Fouz Al Fahad. Let’s scroll down to the list of perks and see what that gets us.
Haha wait, what’s that last one? Haha. Wow, ok, I think I’m good on pursuing this any further! Let’s just move on to the scoring.
My Sociability is 5. My Duty is 1. My Libido is 0. That means we have failed! I guess the UN is going to kill us. The guy screaming incoherently on the corner downtown tried to warn me!
Wait, what? Yes, for the crime of not taking this very seriously, we are now forced to imagine ourselves being sexually dominated by Alison Brie, Jessica Chastain, or another woman who appears on all of these that I haven’t heard of before.
What a journey that was! And it’s not the only one like this, either. Before r/celebeconomy went down, you could have spent all of your time just running through these things. It’s like browsing un-playtested solo tabletop RPGs on itch.io, only with more tits. About the same amount of depression, though. Here’s a bit from another one where you’re a king assembling a royal court.
Hey, Susan Sarandon! That’s nice. Having a woman over fifty in one of these fantasy fuck leagues is the social justice equivalent of America electing a gay President. I think it’s kind of fucked up that if you pick Christina Hendricks you steal her nipples from your children, though.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an article about a weird subset of the porno enthusiast community without an incredibly specific premise. Go on, guess what it could be. Staffing a sexual daycare for adult babies? Castle of female Draculas? TikTok house passing around a pizza boy? It’s none of those, and I’m furious that someone who isn’t me is going to make millions off of Reverse Gangbang TikTok House.
Years ago, I did some phone sex work. It wasn’t for long, but it was enough that very little surprises me anymore, carnally speaking. Most people’s fantasies, even the ones they think of as uniquely despicable or strange, are actually very common. I only ever came across one desire that was actually novel: a guy that wanted someone to pretend to be his mother, who was also his martial arts sensei, and karate chop him to completion. The image I’m about to show you is, I think, actually more out there than that.
I have to say, as large as the AT&T girl’s breasts are, I do not think that paying her $4 million dollars to play professional basketball would be a wise investment. And did you catch the stuff about mouths and ball-handling? It’s pretty subtle, so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Just in case it went over your head, the creator provided a helpful little key at the bottom of the graphic.
Now, there’s an obvious question here that I’ve been eliding up until this point. If you take celebeconomy posts seriously as a sort of game design — and the over 80,000 members of the subreddit certainly did — then how do you determine a celeb’s relative value in a given game?
Does it just come down to personal preference on the part of the creator? A gut feeling? My, my, how naïve. No, like the mainstream video game industry, it’s all about data. Activision and EA are constantly gathering metrics to determine how often to dole out loot boxes for maximum engagement in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: 2, and likewise the denizens of r/celebeconomy compiled vast quantities of survey information to help would-be designers craft well-tuned fuckmatrices.
And boy, do they get granular.
I had some trouble accessing these sheets — I had to pull the links from an archived version of the subreddit, and I think the Google account they were associated with might have gone down with the ship. Eventually, Google Sheets just started yelling at me in Swedish while refusing to do what I asked, which I think costs $5 from Alicia Vikander and grants a +1 to your Meatballs stat. Get it? Meatballs? It’s like testicles. Because of sex.
When I dove into the archives to find these charts, I also took a look at the subreddit rules and guidelines. They are extensive, containing documentation helpful to anyone trying to start a career in whatever this is.
There’s bidding on some of these? I joked about European board games earlier but we’re essentially dealing with a Reiner Knizia once we’ve added auctions into the mix.
Twine! Old friend, is that you? I published a book on Twine a decade ago. To see it recommended as a tool for crafting Sophie’s Choice-style dilemmas over which Instagram model you’d rather have join your starship crew as Chief Cockwarming Officer raises some complicated feelings. It’s got me in a contemplative mood, thinking about what all of this has meant.
What have we learned today? We’ve learned that fantasy fuckball no longer has a place on woke Reddit. We’ve learned that men will go to extraordinary lengths to create barriers between themselves and jacking off with the goal of getting more out of the experience rather than just cooling it for a while and going to the gym or something. But most of all, we’ve learned that selecting Fan Bingbing — star of the live-action Mulan remake — as the sexual negotiator for your harem not only grants you a +1 to Sociability, but also unlocks the Tax Evasion ability.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, red pill stockbrokers of the fleshnet who see past charisma stats into pure harem optimization theory.