The Woman Question 6: Being Alone
or, Bad luck comes in threes: Happiness, sexual metaphysics and masculine virtue
You latch on to the pain, because in it there is still the feeling of connection, the memory of what was lost. That's why we latch on to it. You choose the pain, because it's easier than being alone. Being mad, deluded, insane, or even miserable, even horrible pain. Everything is easier than being alone.
1. Fellow travelers
For a long time in my early internet career, a certain type of individual who would reach out to me. A strange string of characters, who claim me as one of their own - without thought, self evidently. They look at me and see one of them. This is not a “distancing myself from the people who made me” post. This is more of a “coming clean” post. I have never read the red pill blogs. I never read the PUA canon. When I reference the terminology and stuff I do it in a superficial, joking or posing way, like name-dropping a literary author or philosopher, who I also haven’t read. The point here isn’t to distance myself, but to establish where the conversation is going.
A joke: A girl once asked in casual small talk conversation “oh did you guy (Danes) have sex ed in school” and I said “no, I am just a natural.”
It was always curious to me that the trained professional seducers of women would look at my work - my “me” - and just go “oh he’s one of us”. Flattering! Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the envy of other men as much as anyone. It’s not unique to the internet either. The same phenomenon happened when I was a real artist. Audience members would tell me after a show, “I used so and so line from your work and it got me laid!”. I felt the same way about that stuff: Something is wrong here, and we should all put our cards on the table.
I think at the height of the Red Pill cultural moment, I was just not very “online”, and our similarities, such as they are, are more an expression of a genuine zeitgeist, independently developed, rather than any direct literary connection. Like how when I started writing in English, a lot of people thought I was inspired by The Last Psychiatrist, who I only learned about by people making the comparison. I am not of their schools, so to speak. And I have purposefully often pretended otherwise - played along, because I thought that it in some way benefited me. Either in some small, social way, or in a general grand Machiavellian “moving pawns around on the chess board” to establish myself as a public figure on twitter dot com. I often let people believe things about me, even if I can see they are mistaken, if it’s beneficial to me. Or if it’s sufficiently embarrassing to correct them.
We all fill in the gaps and project things onto “people” we “see” online. I lean into it when it’s to my benefit. I think that’s bad, and should probably be kept to a healthy minimum. You always benefit more from direct confrontation and openness. Not even in the long run. Instantaneously. This is what I believe. Open conflict is more loving than polite deceit. The only limiting factor is you must be strong enough to love, and your opponent must be strong enough to be loved. Sometimes this isn’t the case and in such cases “open conflict” is counterproductive and blows up in your face.
I didn’t learn the theory, I never heard about “cold approaching”. I just did it and experimented and tried things randomly myself. Because I was drunk, mostly. In a sense with the same aim, I suppose. It still feels like there is a fundamental difference, between adopting a system and creating one. But perhaps its the kind of difference as how no one is “taught” to masturbate, and everyone “invents” it. Except the sexually abused of course, but you get my point.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, my fundamental project when I first started out doing anything creative writing related, before even the internet was a philosophical project of “saving” romantic love. In a kind of simple intuitive way, I was always a romantic.
Any worldview without it is intolerable to me, and at the time I grew up there were no tolerable worldviews. I do not fundamentally find the “red pill” articulation of men and women, or any of it’s interpreters or inheritors, tolerable. There is a lot there, but it’s mostly right by accident. We have to go further back. The problem was never “men and women”, it was never a “social issue”. Its a moral issue, and an issue about first assumptions, basic philosophical worldviews.
But I do accept the characters as fellow travelers. I see the collective project as being, as mentioned elsewhere, restoration of Virtue: finding out how to be men and even human, and how to live in a society, because the knowledge was lost and we have to built the whole thing all over again from scratch. Morality not as a set of rules, but as a skill.
And even in those who act in villainous ways, they are in a sense working on this project. We just have to take care of them when we’re done. Unless they get their act together before then. We are all going to make it, and I am going to drag as many as I can with me, kicking and screaming.
I think a lot of people, seducers or otherwise, online and offline, are attracted to me because they sense that I know how to be alone. A double entente, yes. Abstinence, but also, being alone with my thoughts, being comfortable in my own skin. That I don’t have this same inflamed rushed anxiety that drives everyone to constantly self-stimulate, and live in one’s own little paranoid mental universe, but I actually pay attention to my surroundings, and you can connect with me, and I’m not off somewhere in fantasy land when you look into my eyes.
And they infer from this intuition, rightly or wrongly, that I can take their pain away by teaching them whatever mystery I wield. Insofar as that is accurate, I'd like to, and I think that is what we are trying to do here, among other things. But there is a certain kind of man, who wants the pain to be taken away, so he can keep doing bad, destructive things. They will generally have read my more vulgar and perverse stories, and think "ah he is like me!", or thinks it attractive as an aesthetic life, and think “ah this is what I would like to be!”. Who doesn't like sex and drugs? Well, me.
They are attracted to this picture of life, of aesthetic self destruction, running towards it, blind to the fact that I wrote those things because I was running away from it. Because I was unhappy. And to this day men of all ages write me, trying to compare kills. Look brother, we are alike. We could be friends. We could redeem each other, couldn’t we?
Perhaps that is the paradox, the pain that such gentlemen hope that I can help them escape: “this sexual drive is painful to me”. “The idea of not being Sexually Validated is existential to me”. They look at me painless and think: Ah! A Don Juan who has somehow figured out to do it all painlessly. When what they really envy me is abstinence. They run towards me, as I run away.
When you signal socially how weak and vulnerable you are, you attract two kinds of people. Other vulnerable people who relate to you and make for close friends because you have things in common - and, the kinds of people who are attracted to vulnerable people. Sadists. Carrion-eaters. Cowards. Things that are attracted to weakness, because they are to weak to act on their desires against strong, normal, healthy people.
Similarly if you signal moral conviction, you attract both fellow seekers, and: People who feel guilty and want someone to punish them. And to the latter category, I am sorry. I simply do not have the time to babysit you. There are only so many hours in the day. If I had all the time in the world, I would gladly participate in your moral education.
2. Sexual metaphysics and killing two birds with one stone
My first Internet Essay was an accusation of my then poetress friend, who came to function in a literary sense as a stand-in for the mainstream doctrines about life and sex and romance. She was accusing her mom’s spirit of being a loser, because she had never had sex with a fireman. She was having a fight with her mom and praising her own “rebellious” vulgar, selfish, self destructive lifestyle, living in spite and pain. And I told her, are you happy? Is this making you happy? Why are you doing this. What's the point. Based and redpilled owned with facts and logic. Blown the fuck out. Right?
I don't dislike her. That’s the thing. That’s the moment that I tried to recreate in writing, and I think, failed to. I felt bad for her. I wanted to help her. I didnt feel like she attacked me or was a threat or anything like that.
We could easily have ended up together if things had been just a tiny bit different. Last I heard she was engaged to a mutual friend. I ran into them a couple of years ago. I hope they work out.
Now that the dust has settled, who was in the wrong here? Her. Obviously. But basically my point with all this is there are a lot of guys, today, who are Her, and who continue to this day being Her, and specifically that unlike Her, they haven’t grown out of it yet, and tried to brush it all under the rug and pretend like she was never a huge spiteful self destructive idiot.
There is in male sexuality a moment of confrontation with what I call 'infinite vulnerability'. I have written about it before about the TV show Hannibal, and the concept of holding babies.
A man in the sexual act, or even only the sexual fantasy, is at a certain level confronted by the wounded bird. It is a metaphor for the physical experience of power - specifically having power over something. A naked woman in your arms, is an undeniable existential experience of power. “I have power over her, I can do anything I want to her”. Simply from the fact of being male, and female. I call this universal, because it’s not a fantasy image, or some personalized trauma-fetish. It’s the mere physical facts, that you are a man, and you are big and strong, and you have a penis, and she does not.
What do you do? The feeling imposes a choice, but it is not a condition-less choice. Both options are deeply tainted. Both options have implications.
The feeling of “I want to help it” is irrational. In the bird metaphor, you cannot help it, and if you choose it you are choose it in spite of this. You don’t have magic bird healing powers. You can’t fix it. The feeling implies impotence, want, lack - your own vulnerability. To choose this feeling, you must confront your own vulnerability. That is, in a deep sense: You are Not God. You are limited. Even in this moment of ultimate Strength and Power over Her, you are lesser, somehow. To chose this is to be able to stare at death and not wince, if you wanna be Heideggerian about it.
The Bird imposes a feeling a duty, for lack of a better term. "I see the problem and I know how to fix it (emotionally, not literally) - so why don't I?". Pattern recognition. Sorting. Autism. The pattern pulls at you, draws you in, magnetically or gravitationally. It Pulls at you.
Sexual Morality maybe sound scary but it's objective and you ignore it at your peril - think about it not as a set of prescriptive impositions on your “free sexual expression”, but a description of how you are already feeling. It’s your “free sexual expression” that is an imposition, it’s your “free sexual expression” that doesn’t exist in the first place, and is just a weird figment of your imagination. We start in the real, in what is the case: You are already ashamed. Society and group pressure haven’t even had the chance to impose on you yet, and its hard to say if they could even get through to you if they wanted to.
The reported feelings of regret and disgust after masturbation, or 'bad sex' - these are the product of the undeniable existential experience of - failing in your duties. It's not some random meaningless thing. You just choose to ignore the meaning.
My enemy is quite simply the man who, in the confrontation with infinite vulnerability, and the feelings that awakes in him, feels guilt, and shame, and then says:
It's the birds fault for making me feel this way.
And crushes the bird, in an impotent lashing out.
The bird is sometimes the girl. Most of the time it's also yourself. It's not a literal one-to-one metaphor, but a philosophical essence. Infinite vulnerability. Babies.
Lucky for you people I as recent internet meme christian am commanded to love my enemies. But I am keeping my eye on you. There are, at the end of the day two teams in this world. Love, and everyone else. And sooner or later it's going to be the end of the road for everyone else.
I think this is the core social problem, the gender war, feminism etc; Bad Sexual Metaphysics. Today, most people think that what sex IS, is killing the bird: Ego death. Obliteration. "Sex" is just base animal Freudian self gratification, the other person is fundamentally a masturbatory tool, an illusion, to induce a pleasant psychotic delusion for a second. Mutual Enabling, mutual exploitation. Killing the Bird.
In the modern zeitgeist, you are compelled to "enjoy" - enjoying is the prime virtue. Feelings of guilt, shame, duty, or even love and meaning, are "irrational" and synthetic spooks to be discarded. Hedonism is compelled - then when it fails to make you happy, you feel guilty for not being a good hedonist - and guilt makes you guilty twice over, guilt is forbidden. So you just keep yanking and yanking, to try to achieve your hedonistic virtue. And make the pain go away. And finally be happy.
There is no coherent hedonistic worldview, because in a final sense the hedonist does not want to live in this world, nor can he give you a vision of the world he would like to live in. Because he does not want to live in any world: He wants to die.
What is the coomer? He comes in many shapes, but fundamentally at the bottom of all of them all, is moral cowardice. Snakes and weasels. People we are eventually going to do something about.
3. Bad things come in Threes
I was always trying to prove something. It changed what exactly, and to whom. My peers, myself, my dad, God, and so on. As a teenager with brain damage I was very insecure, very socially insecure. Very BAD at being alone. Giving a woman sexual pleasure was the first thing that made me feel like I had any value. I suppose that is a more archetypal female experience. I must be a nymphomaniac in a man's body I suppose.
It was physical, practical. Undeniable, impressionist, unable to be argued or reasoned with: I am doing this to her she is happy, I am making her happy. I am real. I am good. I am wanted. I am loved. I am desired. I am appreciated. Undeniably. I exist. I have value. I am real.
Or in a word, validation.
I talked those girls OUT of a "threesome" not into one, you stupid morons.
"But why didn't you just exploit them for your own gratification?". Why indeed. "she is already broken - what does it matter what I do to her? She is already dirty, how is anything I do impurity?"
When I was 18 years old, I had sex with 3 different women in as many days one weekend. I was very proud of this fact for a while. A couple of years later, I kissed three different women on the lips in one night - and I instantly realized, that that felt better. That made me feel more like a Big Man, than the first. Well, how could that be?
Would you rather be desired or loved? Well if you assume that you are fundamentally unlovable, the answer is easy.
Recently I told dad that I love and forgive him, and that I hope he loves and forgives me. And he just doesn’t care. It’s too late. Barring a miracle and direct divine intervention, we are not going to reconcile in this life, not truly. Not fully. Not like I want. So as a good christian, I of course expect it any day. But it is still good to categorize it correctly, and understand that it would be a literal miracle, and that, most importantly, I wasted my whole life.
All my life I was trying to prove something to him, that I was worth loving, that I deserved being loved. And it was all totally pointless, because the problem was that he wasn’t invested in the first place, not that I had failed his test. There was no test. I was creating tests in my head, and attributing them to him. That is a way I have sinned against him.
I was carrying all this, latching on to the pain, because in the pain I could still feel closeness to my Father. Our relationship as I remembered it as a child. Love. Because that pain is easier than being Alone. Easier doesn’t mean better. It just means easier. More often than not, easier means worse. Lift weights.
My BEAUTIFUL GIRLFRIEND said the other day, “it is an strange shameful pain that we must love God before we can love one another, that we cannot love each other directly”. I said to her, I think God politely steps out of the room once he is assured that we are doing all right on our own. I think that’s what marriage is. Or what it’s supposed to be, at least.
The way all of this started was, I asked my feminist poetress friend if she was happy, and she winced. Am I happy? What do you mean, I am a hedonist living hedonistically, praising hedonism, to an audience of impressionable teenagers, spreading hedonism. How could I not be happy? I am a hedonistic greengrocer and I know my hedonistic place. I pay my hedonistic taxes. How dare you.
Is all this stuff you are doing making you happy? I think you should try to be happy.
I think that when women say they want "equality," that they "want to be equal," what they actually want deep down is to be known and to be loved. (I'll allow that some of them, particularly the more autistic ones, actually do want equality.) A lot of what's going on now between the sexes is just an attempt at large to farm love at industrial scale. They want credentials they can put on display to prove, categorically, that they are worthy of love, that they deserve love -- because this psychologically allows them to give up on love ("I give to the other") and focus on the credentials ("I deserve this from the other"). Of course, there is a parallel for men, and it is here, in what you wrote.
The crystallization of love into credential is the problem; it is the very essence of the Faustian West. This is the last step of progress that cannot be taken.
"“it is an strange shameful pain that we must love God before we can love one another, that we cannot love each other directly”. I said to her, I think God politely steps out of the room once he is assured that we are doing all right on our own."
I don't think there is an opposition between loving God and loving your wife - not a good way to think. You love your wife so you can love and draw near to God, "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for her." Marriage is an icon of such love through which God concretely works in the world. In perfect marriage there is perfect synergy between serving each other and serving God. Nevertheless we are fallen and imperfect - yet we should strive for perfection. St Paul discusses in Ephesians