Sadly Porn

Hier meine Unterstreichungen aus dem schönen Buch.

Undoubtedly someone is going to toss the words heteronormative and individualizing the structural at me, and that person should stop reading immediately, not just this book but all books, your mind is broken and it is better suited for TV.  I don’t mean you are stupid, only that you are even more a product of the system you hate than the porn you think you reject.  You think your sexual proclivities define you, they are unique to you, distinguish you; that the man who likes forced interracial porn is fundamentally different than the woman who likes soft core lesbian porn, this is wrong: the fact that you both like a porn makes you far more similar than different, please observe that your oh-so-personal and disparate kinks are all served by the same handful of websites, we are all brothers and sisters after all.

answers to your questions are irrelevant, those aren’t your questions, those are your defenses that safely protect you from asking other questions.  “What am I getting out of porn?”  Try: What is porn getting you out of?  The media scienticians tell us that it destroys self-esteem, relationships and careers, but the media can’t show porn so talking about it is their way of capitalizing on it while taking credit for being above it.  Don’t listen to them, they are using you.  If they made up the woman to deliver the news, you can be sure they made up the news for it to be delivered.

if there’s no porn of it, you can’t imagine it.

Which is more embarrassing to him: that she discovers that he likes her, or that she discovers that he lusts after her?  Which discovery about him requires a response from her?  You’ll say love, of course, because you know that his lust has nothing to do with “her”,  just her body/walk/scent/moves/gaze/status– she gets to choose when to disavow her always-on sexuality, “that isn’t me.”  Yet his love, which is based on nothing about her anyone can point to– is something she’d feel obligated to deal with either approvingly or through a protection order.  But she’d be literally right: his lust has nothing to do with her, which is why he turned off the window.  But if the lust carries the lesser risk, why are you so nervous to approach some defenseless girl in a bar, yet you have no shame sending a woman walled up in her fortress a ten page autobiopic?

so your anxiety is telling you something important: your desire to tap her drunk ass is your confused attempt at love, not lust, and your mind protected you from the mix up by failing to try, on purpose; while the spectacular love you feel writing your fictional backstory is way more about you and your character doing a dp on your DP, which is why you spent so much time writing it.

So much of the satisfaction– not interest, not pleasure, but satisfaction– of watching porn is not just from seeing the sex act, nor a laziness to pursue sex, but from not having to generate the fantasy.

If fantasizing is daydreaming– a semi-conscious elaboration of the unconscious– then avoiding fantasy is a way to avoid the terrible truth that we will never get our wish fulfillment– it is a way of not ever wondering what our wish fulfillment might look like, and the sad reason for this is that our wish fulfillment doesn’t actually contain us– it’s impossible.

So rather than fantasies that risk failure but at least clarify our real desires, we find it easier to want things that we are told to want– that we don’t want, but that there can be no guilt in wanting because they were commanded to be wanted.  Since it’s too painful to fantasize what will never come to pass– or shouldn’t come to pass– we drown ourselves in other people’s visions and are lead mechanically to the end, see also politics, economics, love.

You think you want the content but your history shows it’s only the form, you keep coming back for the system, and it obliges, it lets you be autonomous and individuated and pursue your unique interests, it let’s you think you came up with them on your own– it only asks that you use your unique individual autonomy here, not there.  “Yes, yes, what’s it called when a benevolent consumerist superego absolves you from guilt by offering only what is possible to want?”  I think it’s called a tyranny, but I’m no historian.

the purpose of art isn’t to reveal the truth, but to repress the truth so that it can return as art.

How may times before you realize that when a charlatan tells you the future, he chose you to tell because you are a fool?

Oedipus was repressed, by mom and dad, and sure enough he returned, which means that this isn’t a story about Oedipus’s desire to get his mother, it’s a story about Laius’s desire for someone to take his wife.

The point is you can’t read Oedipus without involving Freud.  And since you don’t agree with Freud– you are now done with the play.  And if you do agree with Freud… you are now done with the play.

Psychoanalysis got us out from under the 2500 year oppressive weight of Greek tragedy6, the next step was to get out from under psychoanalysis, in the same way– not by running from it but by embracing its harsher truths.  That move took only a hundred years, we are well practiced.

Admittedly, personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six.

But when you want to masturbate over the face of the passed out girl at a party and then take a picture, that’s what you decide to label id?  Because it’s a weirdly complicated behavior to attribute to the instincts.  Sounds like you’ve been taught how to want.

“The fact that [the superego] is less firmly connected with consciousness is what calls for explanation.”  Here’s the explanation: it’s connected to someone else’s consciousness.  Freud thought it was the Father because Freud didn’t own a TV.  If he had, Sie would have been TV.

And you say, why on earth would his people go along with this, why would they want a tyrant?  Because they weren’t going to do anything anyway, now everything that happens could only be his fault.

The wish fulfillment of an ox is to be tied to a plough, because it’s better than being slaughtered for someone else’s enjoyment.

Modern readers want the play to ask whether the gods are just, whether Oedipus deserved it, but unless you believe in gods, who cares?  That was Sophocles’s problem.  That the plague was caused by the gods doesn’t require a suspension of disbelief, it’s the whole purpose of the play– to prove they exist, to make you believe in them; to make you believe that they have power.

In order to cause the gods to exist, Oedipus had to be guilty of causing the plague on Thebes that therefore they sent for what the Oracle predicted he had done.  If he said, and Thebans heard, “the plague has nothing to do with me, it’s all bacteria and chaos theory,” Thebes would have still had a plague AND the Athenians would have surrendered to whoever asked first.

Oedipus was not supposed to be a possession for all time, it was written to win the applause of the moment, that moment, those people; it wasn’t philosophy but tragedy, which means it was written for goats to train their feelings, it wasn’t about what they believed but how to believe.  Sophocles could only have written about the power of the gods if it wasn’t true anymore.

Don’t laugh; we proudly modern materialists think we’re smart because we deduced that everything bad is a conspiracy of Capitalism.  Like it’s a person.  “It functions like a person.”  Then why can’t you?  Zing.

So when the Delphic Oracle declared Socrates the “wisest of all men”, that was code for “this guy’s a wiseguy, he asks too many questions.”  NOTHING IN EXCESS.

plague and the war in Athens are felt to be on autopilot, there is nothing they can do, so they do what all impotent people do: they devote all their energy to discussing it.  “Is this a coincidence, bad luck– or inevitable?”

“But that’s the power of patriarchy.”  Sure, whatever, call it what you want, as long as the power is safely elsewhere so it’s not yours.

“I need to know more about my past!”  Why, stupid?  Because self-psychology is easier than microbiology and choosing to act?

the answer is she killed the sister in order to get the man, to hide the truth that she fell for the man in order to kill her sister.

idealize him as a god, realize he’s a just guy wearing khakis, and then deprive him of his satisfaction.  Oh no, she’s not going to leave him (not unless she finds someone else) because there’s every chance he wouldn’t feel that as deprivation, he might enjoy being without her.  No: she’ll stay with him to make sure he’s never satisfied.

The importance of supervision is that sometimes the supervisor is thus able to hear much more of the discourse, owing not necessarily to his years of experience or “extraordinary powers of insight” but to his distance; the reason for this is that the [treating analyst] serves as a filter, or refractor, of the patient’s discourse, and in this way a ready made stereograph is presented, bringing out from the start–

point here is who has the power to tell you something is true; in the humanities it is the teacher, in math it is the math.

being the fulfillment of a prophecy is a lot better than being the one who stupidly starts a war for the stupidest of reasons, and then loses it because even his horses are stupid.

Instead of thinking as a rivalry as a competition over a valuable trophy, look at it from the perspective of the trophy: it has value only because of the rivalry.

There is no such thing as a love triangle, the two suitors each love a different person.

No matter how hot the trophy, the rivalry fantasy isn’t about the trophy, but what it looks like when one person deprives another. The trophy isn’t merely an excuse to deprive the other, the trophy is a tool used for that purpose.

only the person who doesn’t see it as a rivalry– i.e. the rival– actually values the thing/person that is the trophy because he isn’t motivated by the rivalry, he actually wants the thing.  The former wants to destroy the rival and can only act on that desire if it is for something else, like a trophy.  Hence the trophy won’t satisfy him, should he get the trophy, he will soon not want it.

Why can’t the system be changed?  The wrong answer is that rivalries between semi-equals are easier fights than structural “Oedipal” conflicts because attacking the system is too dangerous for a lowly individual.  No.  This fear is not the explanation for inaction, it is the defense against action.  The real reason you don’t attack Dad isn’t that he could kill you, but that you might kill him.  He is the only Dad you have, he is the only one keeping order– he is the order– you need him for status quo, however bad status quo is.

And your envy, the satisfaction you derive from depriving others, is hidden from you, you go from being an oppressor to being oppressed,

Because today, if you woke from an alcohol blackout to discover the horny chick you ejaculated on was your mother, you’d feel a lot of shame, but you would feel no guilt.  “How could I?  I didn’t know!”  But the alcohol wasn’t the excuse to do what you want– it was the defense, the defense against realizing that even if you weren’t drunk, you still wouldn’t feel any guilt.

When the white collar criminal robs millions from the masses and you say, “oh my God, did he feel no shame?” you reveal yourself to be sheep: of course he felt no shame, why would he?  He doesn’t want to be part of the world of sheep.  Even by your own logic the correct standard should have been, “oh my genetics, did he feel no guilt?”  But you would never have said this because the question makes no sense, it shows the two logics are incompatible.  So

All you can empathize with is…….. the feeling of shame.  And this is why he robbed you and why you were robbable and you will be robbed again.  “We need stricter laws!”  What do you need them for?  “Deterrence!”  I didn’t ask what we need them for, your devotion to the society’s welfare is the most hypocritical of your self-delusions, I asked what do you need them for?  Maybe he gets 30 years in prison and you feel ten seconds of arrogant self-righteous indignant superiority; what have you gained– other than that?  The feeling that your rage helped deprive him.  That was all it took to satisfy you– and you will set up the world to be robbed just to get that feeling.

“There’s no guilt in X,” say the media scienticians, and you proudly accept their progressive judgment, when what you should do is turn and say: get thee behind me, Satan, who are you to tell me there’s no guilt? Wait– were you told that guilt is pathological, that it is an artificial holdout from a bygone unscientific morality that pretends to be ethical but is really used as social control?  And you believed– them?  The sheep? Guilt is freedom: you bond yourself to yourself and free yourself from everyone else.  “What if I think everything I do is right?”  Then I’d say you’re a person without guilt.  Let’s see how good you are at math… what follows?  Oh, you’re not good at math.   “But guilt is restrictive–”  You have it backwards, self-control precedes autonomy, there’s  a Venn diagram about it.  The movement away from guilt towards shame is a longing to get away from freedom, it wants tyranny, even if it manifests as social control by the mass of idiots, distributive justice channeled by a media just savvy enough to own the distribution channels.

You’re confused about what a superego does and what your superego does.  Your conscience isn’t cruel, you are cruel, you enjoy the deprivation of others, and if you can’t stab them you’ll cut your own wrists just deep enough to satisfy a feeling– the feeling of what it’s like to hurt someone.  “I don’t enjoy it, I do it to punish myself, to feel pain.”  Why not try some math homework?  “That’s not funny.”  I’m not joking.  Punish yourself?  Look around: how many other people have you caused to suffer because of your self-punishment?  “Well, I can’t be responsible for their feelings.”  You have said it.

But instead of convincing those who learned math they should share with those who didn’t, you use your rhetoric to convince those who didn’t that they are being deprived by those who did.  You should look closely at the direction of the force vector, it starts not from ethics or equality but envy.  You

It’s only satisfying if you feel like you got something from them: the more they feel good about giving it the less it will count.  And heaven forbid they do it selflessly, plainly, for you, as if it was out of love– you would never believe it, you’d know immediately they must have some ulterior motive.  Still doubt I am talking about you, gift from god?  Then replace “them” with “women”.

I know, the Oedipus Complex is bunk because you can’t imagine you wanted to kill your father to get  your mother.  But the part that seems unlikely isn’t wanting to kill your father, on a fantasy level that part is 100% believable and hardly requires repression; the unbelievable part is loving your mother.  It is so unbelievable that it took the Oracle 16 years to reveal it.  Love your mother?  In fact, she was often quite… enraging.  Get her?  You couldn’t wait to get away from her.

And you will run this game for the rest of your life, ad infinitum=ad nauseam: X is desirable because someone else desires it– you are told to desire it; but if you got it you’d suddenly have to deal with the realization that you don’t want it; and how could you not want what the audience told you to want?  So you look in desperation for a new Father to compel you not to do what you never even got a chance to decide you didn’t really want.  “Those blonde sluts don’t want me, women are biologically hardwired to pursue high status men.”  The system is sound.

we’re honest, all the family responsibilities aren’t stressful because they take time away from work, and neither is work stressful because it takes time away from family, but because the combination of both but especially the family takes time away from “for myself.”  When you can’t get any time for yourself, no one blames the career; why would you?  It gives you self-worth, doesn’t ask increasingly of you, doesn’t infinitely depend on you.  The family does.  “That’s the trick of capitalism.”  Capitalism?  You think capitalism wants you to spend your free time looking at pictures?

Your system wants hegemony and homogeneity, which means it wants individuality to cede to collective individualism– ego death for a stronger superego– because democratic individuals who think they are unique will always follow the herd, each one applauding himself for discovering on his own the narrow ramp that leads to utopia.24  “Moo!”  Yes.  Moo.

The fault is as much men’s as women’s, as much a problem of society as individual psychology, as much about expectations as aspirations.  Different things are at stake, but there is a common pathology, here it is in bullet form, along with its defense: inability to love, manifesting precisely not as not loving but as loving someone without satisfying them

Ostensibly like the ancient Greeks they claimed to admire, education was conceived as political, the education not of the individual but of the citizen; State training for the benefit of the soul for the sole benefit of the State.  It is correct to say that the “decline of public education” began precisely with its invention.  It was never for education or progress; it was for maintaining the status quo.

They said they were fighting for equality?  Men must have rolled their eyes when the very first thing women did with the vote they so desperately wanted was to ban saloons because drink made men more aggressive.  What women appeared to want was not more power for themselves but ways to make men less powerful.  In that distinction was the rage of women perceived by the rage of men.  To these young men, barely aware of the power women screamed that they lorded over them, women seemed to want to be able to exercise all of the same political powers as men, yet still demand deference, restraint, and politeness– a feminization of the society enforced by sword.  The young men saw in women– a truly privileged class on the cusp of more privileges–  their own castration.

The suffrage movement, like all the other contemporaneous movements (temperance, spiritualism, abolition) may have a meaning, but was used in everyday practice as a way of getting women together to offer each other affection, conversation, companionship, love.  The men had stopped being dependable. They had given up on love, causing a vacuum.  Women were sucked in to fill it.

Giving the women the right to vote in order to protect the higher values and decency was an admission by women and men that men had failed at this.  And so it fell to women.  Not simply that women did believe in these things; it was only possible to imagine women could believe these things.  The loco-motor Mass and Saloon Catholicism of that time especially gave its men a way to believe in God without having to overthink it; indeed, they were encouraged not to overthink it, hence the Sunday saloon. Their rituals were externalized, then self-medicated.  But the rigidly obsessive Protestantism of the time would not allow its men such an escape, and they couldn’t handle the responsibility.  Men had to pray to the God they had growing doubts existed that the women still believed.  Women had to be empowered to be in control of themselves, and men.

but observe that women did not organize to attack domestic violence and rape itself.  NB: exactly opposite to today.  This is partly because there was no serious male support for such an attack on rape, but not because the men wanted to reserve the right to rape and most certainly not because they didn’t think alcohol caused men to rape.  The overwhelming focus on alcohol’s effect on men– by women and men– needs therefore to be understood as its gender and power opposite.  The true problem with alcohol was its effect on women: it made them succumb to sex.

The problem isn’t why women have sex, the problem specifically is that we want there to be an explanation.  Male sexuality, by contrast, has always had sufficient made-up explanations– biology, aggression, power, etc– these words are the equivalent of Greek gods, they’re not real, they are merely placeholders: they assure us that even if that’s not the reason, there is a reason.

The point is equate woman as victim, so that she needs protection; in order that some other omnipotent entity must be created to protect her, after all men are not dependable.

Here’s the trick: the media puts the answer to, “love or career?” in the mouth of: a CEO, a judge, a woman with power; but it reports the answer to a demo that will never be these things.  For years, the center two-page advertisement in a very popular news magazine was for chewing tobacco, the advertisers must have calculated that if these idiots were swallowing the news they’d more than likely chew on this.  At least their husbands would.  The result is that a college girl destined for part time work feels a pressure not to put love over a career; it is strongly recommended to her that she “not give up who she is” (=where she works) for a man.  She’d never let a man tell her this– she’s been taught NOT to listen to men– which is why the system doesn’t have men telling her this, it finds women to tell her this, and every one of these women is impeccably dressed.  It’s easy to see this as capitalism tricking a woman into trading her life for a wage, but she hardly needs to be tricked into working, she doesn’t have a choice.  The threat is to the media, and the threat is her relationship, media can’t get your attention at work but the other 16 hours are up for grabs, the only way to get her all in on media and away from the interfering effects of another person’s desires is to weaken the relationship.  She wants to be told not to give up her “career” so it can feel like she chose not to give it up, and the consequence of this “choice” is that she has no choice but to give up on love, for which she will substitute media.  These stories are so prevalent in media and necessary to the audience not because they justify the desire for career but for the lack of desire for love, the obliteration of dependency; at work there are clear identities and safeguards but in love no one is the safe, let alone the same.  That these articles are endlessly discussed in and by the media solidifies the supremacy of the media as the moderator for such issues, it patronizes you by inviting you to “be part of the debate”.

“I get rejected by women all the time.”  Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results?  What kind of a woman would want that kind of a man?  “Sometimes it works.”  You mean sometimes you make an initial tenuous connection that you can overestimate that she will later have to break once she realizes what kind of a man you are, leaving her with all the blame?  “How is this my fault?”  If a gambler loses 99% of the time at blackjack, we’d agree he wants to win, but at some point he needs to admit he’s trying to lose, no one could pull those kind of numbers without a reliable system.

The checking of the phone isn’t the cause of the distanced relationship, it is the solution to a relationship forced into what is felt as unnatural proximity– because what feels unnatural is being depended on; not the being with someone else, but having to be for someone else.

There’s no need to control people when they can’t act on their desires, just give them access to knowledge and let their OCD paralyze them.  They’ll celebrate their own impotence as long as they feel like they know what everyone else is doing.

The Giving Tree dynamic played out with the genders 100% reversed, with a wife who splits and desexualizes her husband to minimize dependence on all men in her timeline: she reduces him to a series of utility parts, safely emasculated and fully contained somewhere else in the house; while the husband, in the home office watching other men perform acts, makes great visible sacrifices but secretly withholds from his wife the most valuable parts of himself that would be constituents of love (e.g. his inner life and thoughts; desire for his wife’s inner thoughts; sex, etc.)

the Democrats know their progressive politics are unpalatable to the idiots in Central/Mountain Time, so they need a woman candidate in order to equate these attacks with misogyny; to Republicans, her gender is precisely the kind of inconsequential issue that is too palatable to the idiots in Eastern/Pacific Time, so they have to focus on her being a bad woman.

One would be tempted– well, your Dad would be tempted– to call you lazy.  But he’s wrong, you’re not lazy, you’d work harder than anyone, you just need to get chosen first.  And who can blame you?  Everything you’ve ever seen with your eyes says greatness is thrust upon the unsuspecting hero; while everyone who works hard becomes…. a worker. And so this “laziness” is the logical first step of exactly what you desire.  You want to be selected for doing nothing.  You don’t want to do better in calculus because then you will become a calculator and you will be responsible for calculating.  You must not commit to any definite path in case the Sphinx is down another.  It’s also why you’re still single, even if only mentally.

And it enrages you!  Your rage, however small, that she is too unimportant to receive media coverage supports the premise that the media should be important.

When someone falls in love with you, it’s not specifically for what you did or what you look like but because of some intangible quality– and only your lover can see it, no one else could, including you.  The question you must ask is if that counts.   How does love die?  You actively obliterate the intangible in her.  Then you suspect the intangible never existed.  Then you assure yourself intangibles aren’t real.  Except for the one in you, which of course obviously exists but people can’t see.

Since you’re not going to listen it’s of no use pointing out that wanting her to suffer is the reason you suffer, especially if “her” is a surprised woman in a one or two thousand year old document that you use as a screen for your projection, but even if it is your own wife who cheated the math is the same. It is therefore correct to say that what Jesus offered them in compensation was only freedom from the need for compensation.  He brought freedom from ledgers.  He brought guilt.  It is a gift so painful you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy– so you forgive them, to spare them that pain, and in return you are free, because if you live your life with a ledger your the bottom line will always sum to rage.

What prevents women from acting, what robbed them of will, what– castrated them?  The story’s answer is “modern marriage”– it limits their options, it constrains them, it forces them to give up so much of their potential enjoyment.  This is a very telling criticism, because it is exactly what men have long said about marriage.  When two opposing groups both use the exact same argument you can be sure there is a third party benefiting from the conflict.  That would be an interesting discussion to have.  Don’t worry, no one will have it, too much is at stake.  They want the problem to be marriage.

I don’t have to do anything because I could.

“Well, we can’t all have perfect marriages like you!”  Good come back.  Same as: “well, we can’t all have perfect children like you!”  Thinking comparatively is the default.  Meanwhile your infantile criticism is structured tellingly: “we can’t have perfect X.”  Why do you think about it in that direction?  Shouldn’t you worry about whether you are a perfect parent for the kids?  Instead of worrying if you have a perfect marriage, shouldn’t you try to be good for the other person?  You say you can’t depend on them, but you resent that they might depend on you.

women not to pursue their desires, but to want to be desired.  This may seem wrong in a world where we have seminars on how to pick up chicks or make money fast; and even advertising links our desire for the impossibly beautiful model with product placement. But the images are aspirational, not inspirational, you may desire the person in the ad, but you’ve really been taught to want to be desirable like them, or desirable to them.

This is not a debate about action, it is a debate about meaning.  It is, formally, rhetoric.  The primary target of rhetoric is belief, not action: rhetoric tells you what to believe regardless of what happens.  The opposite of rhetoric is propaganda.  Propaganda doesn’t care what people believe or don’t believe; pride, shame, benevolence or vengeance: believe what you want, as long as you act in the required direction.

this is a direct democracy.  People are more suspicious when the ulterior motive isn’t obvious, or, said the correct way, an obvious ulterior motive reassures the people that they know what’s really going on.

Plain talk is the mark of your enemy, which is why devils and demons did it, what they said makes too much sense so you can’t make sense of why they said it.

The logic of envy is the logic of a democracy that does not feel connected to power, which is troubling because these democrats theoretically and in reality had all of it.  They didn’t lose their power; they didn’t want it anymore.  This is why rhetoric was developed not merely as an art but as a science, to methodically and reliably target the psychological needs of a people whose belief in their own power was being replaced by knowledge.  “I can’t do anything, but I know that guy is up to something.”

men.  You should not miss the rage underpinning the fantasy: if she finds satisfaction with other better men and she is not cheating, then consequently, in real life she remains unsatisfied.  The ledger is balanced.  The debt has been paid.

“I’m kind of a news junkie, there’s so much happening right now it’s hard to keep up with it.”  Yet no one depends on you keeping up with it, they’d benefit much more if you didn’t.  Devotion to something with the appearance of importance, of velocity, of kinetic energy; that you don’t really need, that you can always claim in an emergency doesn’t “actually” define you.

Do you really want him to stop looking at porn?  What do you expect he will do instead?  Spend three hours a night staring at Thucydides? Now he’s a sociopath, and that’s not a relationship you can post pictures of.  You think the fantasies that he needed porn to replace are just going to stay repressed?  Porn isn’t the pathology, it is the defense.  If you take the defense away, what remains?

By taking away her power to consent there, she’s not necessarily any safer from rape, but she is immune to being complicit in adultery.  The risk to society these laws address, therefore, is her promiscuity, not her rape; the point isn’t to let men get away with a hypothetical city rape by labeling it adultery– he dies anyway– but to make a woman’s very problematic unchaperoned field promiscuity into a rape– no one’s fault but the rapist’s; to be extremely precise: not not her fault, but specifically not society’s fault.

It seems like every girl with a complicated backstory likes to be choked during sex, so if choking means male power and dominance, then women wanting it must mean they miss male power and dominance, and you can see where all this is going.  She doesn’t just miss this male power in her own sexual life; as a reliably voracious omnivore  of on camera reality, this is what she finds lacking everywhere.  In other words, if she wants you to choke her, it means you look like you would but she knows you can’t. Never mind why some women might “secretly” crave male power, take them at their word.  If it’s male power they want, why are they content with only the appearance of it?  Doesn’t the reality of “he’s not actually going to choke me out since I can stop him any time I want to” detract from the eroticism of the “male power?”  “It’s just fantasy.”  Yes.  “The fantasy is the loss of control.”  Why are you only interpreting half of it?  How is a loss of control a fantasy?  “What I want is a guy who wants me so much he’ll do anything to seize me.”  Except actually seize you.  “It makes me feel desirable to be taken, wanted so much.”  But who are you fooling?  You know he’s faking it, and he hopes to God you know he’s faking it.  The fantasy isn’t the loss of control– the fantasy is having a loss of control AND full control, simultaneously– that’s a fantasy because it is impossible to have these things at the same time, they are logically exclusive.  The only way for it to be possible is if you are acting for someone– or something– who is watching, if it is pornographized: you know you have full control, but to a hypothetical observer, it looks like a loss of control.  It looks hot– so it is hot.  The problem with being the main character in your own movie is that in order for it to be satisfying, you need an audience.  “Because ultimately we really just want to be looked at?”  Ha.  No.  Because someone has to be seen being deprived.

“Maybe activists just care about helping other people.”  HA!  No.  No one who brands themselves by their rage cares about other people, it’s not a logical possibility.  You should write that down, it is always true and there isn’t much in life that is always true.

But the moment they entered media, they became a brand, another choice among rival choices.  Brands can be attacked, destroyed, without ever touching the substance of the product.  For example, it’s easy to cast activists as ugly, not because they are ugly, but because it is easy to cast them as ugly.  Find a few ugly activists and give them an interview on TV; they know TV is superficial, yet they never ask if their face is super enough to best represent their brand.  “But it’s not about me, it’s about the issues.”  It was, until you went on TV.  “No one even watches TV anymore, stupid.”  I don’t know if you know what TV means, let alone what it’s for.

You’ll counter that “the system” does not exist, it’s just an analogy, a symbol, but then who are you fighting against?  It either exists, in which case it is way more clever than you, or it doesn’t, in which case you should probably see a psychiatrist.

The only thing your unemployable major allows you to do is work for the university that made you unemployable, and now you are neutralized.

You don’t need to go to college to learn STEM, you can do it from the woods, all of the relevant lessons can be pulled out of thin air for free.  But no capital F Feminist will ever say this to a girl, you will not train them to self-study, you will believe the solution is to major in STEM, and when I tell you why you will catch your breath and demand that I hate women: because then you don’t actually have to learn it.  The university declares that you did.  Try to learn math on your own and it is hard, very hard, because you are accountable only to the math; the math is easier in a university because less is expected of you, when the math seems really odd you can just skip the evens, you can figure out what might be on the test, there’s a curve, you will be given the appearance of the blessing of knowledge and if all else fails you can always convert to a BA.

what you should be asking is why the Marxists needed the proles at all, why didn’t the Marxists just do it all themselves, or at least lead the charge?  And that’s easy, they know everything, and therefore can’t act;  proles are ignorant but have the strength of ten Marxists.  Once in a while you see a Marxist who does rise up, but usually he and the other avatars will only storm a dean’s office or circle a square, which is pointless.

One of the unintended lessons of the book is that while you shouldn’t judge people by their appearance, you probably should judge them by their appearance if they have the ability to choose their appearance and the appearance they choose is bananas.

You are not living in an age of science, you are living in an age of science journalism.

Faust was an alchemist so we should take his chemistry to the end: if he could take a pure woman, transform her into a slut, and then into a mother, and then into a murderer, it would mean he had been purified.  This is the strategy we use today, the modern innovation is to transform the mother back into a slut that you won’t touch.  “Alchemy’s not real.”  Fair enough, but you don’t know any chemistry, either, so what’s the difference?

“Philosophy is like a lisp: cute in a child, hatable in an adult.”