The Ice Man Swimmeth

(in ableist dogma) PLUS: how health is a religion now, and the legacy of the Freemasons

The dopamine mythos is shaping up to be another series! This shit goes deep, and it touches so many deviant things we love here at Slug HQ. I’m doing a voracious level of reading to expand on it, and I’ll be sharing my research here for supporters as I go.

If you can’t afford to support right now, don’t worry, I will be publishing finished pieces on this for everyone, just at a slower pace. Writing takes a long time! It’s called Sluggish!!

Today’s infodump for paid slugscribers includes:

• A charismatic leader who says he can change his immune system at will but insists there’s nothing cult-y about it!!!

• A paper that theorizes all the ways that healthism is a religion now (and proves him wrong)

• What the hell the Freemasons have to do with all of this?? (historically, not conspiratorially)

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  (just a content warning: this post includes discussion of drowning, suicide, and heart attacks)

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If cold baths are a dopamine mythos purification ritual, then I have found Ice Jesus.

His name is Wim Hof, and it only took a few minutes of poking around the health and wellness manosphere to hear his name. This guy is straight-up worshipped by self-optimization lovers everywhere, who love to call him superhuman, a word that immediately activates my critical disability brain regions (along with “optimize” and “your full potential”).

He’s an eccentric Dutch man who lived as a squatter for almost a decade until he had four kids and was forced to re-enter the world of “square thinking,” as he calls it in his book, The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential. Hof started ice swimming when he was seventeen, eventually combining it with breathing techniques and semi-public nude meditating.

His personal practices became a worldwide movement after his wife died by suicide in 1995 and he was compelled by his grief to break a bunch of world records for ice swimming and climb Mount Everest in shorts. Hof calls the cold a “righteous and merciless” teacher, and he is constantly cursing the limits of the human body and screaming about how he’s found The Way to surpass them.

Curious scientists have done studies on The Wim Hof Method and found that he’s not totally full of shit — his breathing practice does have an effect on adrenaline levels (probably because it’s basically just hyperventilating), and in one study that he brings up constantly, people who were practicing WHM showed less of an immune reaction to injected endotoxins than people who were not.¹

However, several people have died by drowning while doing WHM — most recently a man in a pool in Singapore, who had been using Hof’s app on his phone. Hyperventilation is something trained free divers are told never to do in water because it can lead to what’s called shallow water blackout, and while Hof’s app does include a warning against doing his breathing exercises in water, he was filmed teaching it during a training earlier this year.

And it’s not like he hasn’t come close to drowning, too. While attempting to break his first record for swimming under ice, Hof’s corneas froze over and he blacked out underwater, needing to be rescued. His son, who runs much of his business, also allegedly attempted to cover-up a dangerous incident during a training hike on the side of an icy mountain in 2018 that sent three people into hypothermia and easily could have killed them.

Despite all this evidence that the human body does, indeed, have limits, Hof claims the endotoxin study is proof that we can control our own immune systems. This has led to all kinds of ideas about his practices being able to cure cancer and autoimmune diseases, and his YouTube channel is full of testimonials from practitioners saying that WHM healed everything from childhood trauma to Crohn’s disease.