On the Monkey's Two Backs

"A body lies open in the fish[wo]man's yard

Like the side of a ship where the iceberg rips

One less soul in the soul cages

One last curse on the fish[wo]man's lips"

 

Sting - The Soul Cages

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"We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them

We don't need them"

 

Billy Talent - Red Flag

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"   As the boy gets to boy-girl age, if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual, he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks, or the student body presidents, or the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school, and the system and in life in general, and so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls, especially the ones he's most biologically addicted to, the beautiful ones, the cheerleaders, he starts withdrawing into porn. And, a little bit of porn is not a huge issue. But the porn basically is... based on, the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus you have. And so as he gets addicted to that dopamine he begins to get addicted only being able to be stimulated when the risk-taking is higher and higher.

     So finally he succeeds and one girl, woman, being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her, but he's so unable to be turned on just be the mere maybe light touch of a hand, um, or turned on by just being fascinated by what she's saying and the interaction or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with a little bit of touch; he's so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs and when he gets to be entrusting of her a little bit, he says, you know, can you be this way, can you do this, can you act this way, and she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the porn, eventually gets disgusted with him and withdraws, and he begins to say, alright, this convinces me, I am as worthless as I thought I was, and the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn, and what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction, even as he's also becoming simultaneously frequently addicted to the video games at the same time"

Warren Farrell in a discussion with Jordan Peterson on the upbringing of boys

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"No one's asking to go dancing

Its not like that anymore
Its romantic if they mean it

When they shut your fingers in the door"

 

Dresden Dolls - Glass Slipper

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Wait... what the hell makes you assume your fingers should be blocking that door in the first place? 

To be reiterated at a far future date, but having stumbled on that Boy Crisis dialogue I couldn't pass up the chance to repurpose a third red flag in a row. Though fully aware this was not a scripted discussion and I'm therefore not being fair in tone-policing or nitpicking Farrell, I do find his wording revealing of our general assumptions.

Start with the word "succeeds" as a reminder of just how one-sided are the courtship rituals we've inherited as our inescapable, practically universal cerebral undertow. The male courts his heart out, attaining as much social status as he can to lavish upon a potential mate, while she sits in judgment of his worth. If he "succeeds" well, good for him (and bad for the nine other men who got edged out of the race) but there is never even a question of success or failure on her end of the bargain. If he's rejected, then he has failed and not her. Hey, I can see the appeal. Passing judgment is fun! It's basically what I do every few days here at the den.

 

Similarly, if she gets disgusted with his sexual preferences in this scenario, we assume it is entirely the fault of his preferences. Her judgment is not up for debate. Moreover, even accepting this currently trendy accusation of porn escalation, paraphilias do not spring up overnight. The female in question could have pre-empted the entire scenario by walking up to the male of her choice a year earlier (before he got into lemur masks, croquet mallets and penny whistles or whatever the current fad is) and propositioning him herself, a scenario in which she can expect nearly guaranteed "success" - except it's obviously too much to ask of her to lean even slightly off her pedestal. Or, as a better analogy, a rock in the middle of the ocean, where yon melodious maid need but signal her existence, awaiting sailors to build a ship and make their way to her only to drown for her amusement.

After all, why should any woman settle for less than absolute control?

"Withdraws" is a funny term too, because it shows up twice: negative when the male withdraws from having his hopes dashed, his worth declared insufficient (and likely being out a few dinner dates' worth of cash too) but when the woman "withdraws" from her own rejection of another, we pay no attention to her destination, to what the woman does behind her curtain.

Because it's not behind a curtain.

Romance novels can be found on any bookstore shelf (if you can find a boostore) and Hitachi "back" massagers on the shelf at the supermarket. No respectable movie theater would dare show porn, but think nothing of plastering Matthew McConaughey's sheepishly grinning mug alongside children's movies, which are themselves laden with RomCom tropes to the point of parody. Oh, by all means, let us weep for the woman who feels like an "object that is being traded in for the porn" of the man's shameful, secret desires, despite every single step leading up to the sexual act being defined by the man's ability to mold himself to whatever Prince Charming ideal is plastered on every single movie screen, checkout magazine and billboard, in public, in every facet of society!

 

Why do we accept the presumption that any man who doesn't get aroused by "the light touch of a hand" must be a perverted monster who's desensitized himself to normal sexual relations? If we're to summarize mammalian sexual relations, regardless of the particular courship displays of each species it would still factor down to "face down, ass up" and in fact we have no trouble ridiculing the men of previous eras for being so sexually repressed as to get aroused by a flashed ankle... or elbowwww! Yet the same sublimation, when expressed by females or on their behalf, is presumed the moral centerpoint of the entire enterprise! We are to accept, unquestionably, that half the species cannot be interested in sex unless it includes tiny sparkling rocks, ritual feeding among the extended tribe, rhythmic public limb-flapping, conspicuous conveyance, aural accompaniment by a more famous male and no less than seven different scented candles. The term for shifting of sexual priorities toward nonsexual elements is "paraphilia" as I seem to recall, and if you're really, honestly searching for causes of sexual dysfunction among the East-African Plains Ape, look first to the nuptial gifts and endlessly reiterative courtship displays, the entire spectrum of ludicrous kinks we glorify as "romance" and toward which our species' sexuality has careened over the millennia.

 

We presume, unjustifiably, that the moral high ground must lie in females' home turf, to the point we can accept a scenario like the above without questioning the endless feminine kinks, the sadistic Ithacan trials which the man in question was obligated to practice and master in order to "succeed" in attracting a mate, before the story even starts, before his preferences are even brought into question to be condemned. If a man being rejected thinks himself worthless, by what assumption does the woman doing the rejecting balance that equation?

While you could find endless such examples in any media, this particular interview galls precisely because it's framed in Peterson's usual self-help manner in terms of the man's best course of action, and was voiced by arguably the most famous and influential men's advocate. Farrell even slips up at a later point in the video and uses the term addiction to refer to men's attraction to women, but sadly chose to ignore the implication that pornography, that overwrought pale imitation, is not the main culprit here. Far from curing those addicted to the heroine of this story, he is merely denying them their methadone. This is, in fact, the main problem with most of those who claim to be trying to repair the currently growing rift between the sexes in Europe and North America. They focus not on teaching men how to compensate for their instinctive subservience before female demands but how to learn to stop worrying and love their matrimonial bondage.

The two yammer back and forth about the slippery slope of rejection, substitution, addiction, self-hatred leading to such extremes as school shootings... yet their solution is to teach boys "delayed gratification" the better to absorb female scorn and abuse and continue drowning themselves chasing that siren approval.

 

Instead of condemning that teenage boy for "withdrawing" into porn, why not admit that repeatedly throwing oneself upon rejection is itself insane, that no sane person would accept this one-sided supplication and it is only our innate insanity, our hormonal addiction, which forces such behavior upon us? The more pornography allows boys and men to "withdraw" from defining themselves by their worth to women, the better. It is not a solution, not truly. No matter how much we'd like to pretend otherwise, we need women, desperately, psychologically, somatically, intrinsically. Don't fool yourselves. Don't deny reality. Defy it, if you can, however much you can.

 

Much like heroin, we should acknowledge that heroine addiction is very real and also a need not to be indulged, a self-destructive thrill, a surrender to those who view our self-hatred and enslavement as their absolute right, who presume to sit in judgment, who presume that sex, the meeting of the sexes, should occur on the home turf of their own romantic paraphilia. Any palliation from such life-sapping subjugation should be sought and refined, not demonized. Though every new generation will be fathered by men willing to have themselves enslaved, we could at least stop catastrophizing the extreme negatives of the scant and fleeting escape options available, and instead refine them so as to minimize the self-hatred which comes of forfeiting a hopelessly rigged game.