Book Review: Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist

The book is Sadly, Porn.

Like you I have a fondness—a nostalgia—for the writings of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter TLP). In fact, those who have been with me for a while know that my 2019 novella, God-Shaped Hole was intended as an homage to this then-hypothetical work. Also like you, I never expected TLP to deliver. But he has, and I have torn myself away from judging over 400 of your original works of fiction for passage prize to write this book review. I cannot promise it is the only diversion I will take. Please forgive me for borrowing from his writing style, which is infectious (and there’s no vax) but after grinding through a thousand pages I’m feeling like a generative pretrained transformer (GPT). Maybe you don’t know who the last psychiatrist is. He was a blogger from 2007 to 2014, and like all good bloggers, he eventually ran out of steam. It’s fun to go back and read his blog, because if you were online back then, it’s like going back in time. You can remember all those little news cycles, the obnoxious feminists of the sextanic panic; Jessica valenti, A-man-jaw Marcotte, the old villains/demons of the—may Allah forgive me for using this word—Manosphere. Now we have different villains, but the narratives are basically the same. 

Just in case, here are a few of his greatest hits: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam, Hipsters on Food Stamps, or my personal favorite, Amy Schumer Offers You a Look into Your Soul. What you may notice if you spend time with either his blog or his book is the way he condescends. Everything has this scolding tone, it’s all written in second person, and he jumps to conclusions on your behalf and then tells you why you’re wrong for saying the words he put in your mouth. And he’s pretty good at it, or at least he used to be. I have to wonder if it’s more that I’ve changed, grown, moved on, or that he has failed to do these things, not through any personal shortcoming of his, but because of the fact that he’s obviously older than me, more brittle, or just not as open to certain exigencies that I perceive. Maybe I don’t like being scolded by anonymous strangers anymore (and yet I am on twitter, curious…) but let’s leave that for a moment, I think a lot of people do like being scolded, as long as it’s not by someone with any actual power over them. We’ll get into that. 

Anyway it felt like a timewarp, there I was eight years ago, Obama was still president, Oberfell had yet to meet Hodges, and Bitcoin was trading in the low hundreds. I heard he stopped abruptly because was because he felt his blog was having the perverse effect of exacerbating the tendencies he was trying to curb in his readers, but later I learned it was because he was doxed and his employers gave him an ultimatum. A smart told me that when someone writes an essay about ‘you’ or ‘we’, he’s really talking about himself, and I think that pretty much has to be true about TLP. Nowhere is this more obvious than the way he constantly berates you (i.e., himself) for not studying enough math, but the only people I’ve ever heard talk about math this way are people who fetishize it because they actually have almost no lived experience of it. People who find math useful don’t need to talk about it. And yes, it’s a dangerous game to psychoanalyze the psychoanalyst, but seeing as I’m anon, we (i.e., me) are going to play it. 

TLP’s new book, which is ostensibly about porn, starts with a bombastic introduction that was everything you (i.e., I) would want it to be: brash, brazen, and manic. It reminded me of something I would write. There’s a footnote which is longer than the introduction itself. He says you won’t get a table of contents, which is the same thing I told Canonic regarding They Had No Deepness of Earth. The labyrinthe doesn’t come with a map. 

After the introduction in which he disavows the entire book and all of its contents, TLP opens with a ~30 page pornographic story, written from the perspective of a cheating woman, about how her husband wagers her to his rival in a game of drunk strip poker. The husband passes out and she has sex with the rival. The story is replete with explicit descriptions of body parts and sex acts, rubbing and touching and breasts and nipples and so on. It is clearly intended to be titillating, but in parallel with all this is a window into what is going on in the mind of the wife as she cheats, to wit: her sense of guilt and also how she rationalizes all of her actions, how she convinces herself that she doesn’t have a choice, even tells herself that her unconscious husband would in fact want her to have sex with his rival, and not just sex, but the best sex of his life, as if she is somehow going to do him proud by all this.

The porn story, much like TLP’s life as a blogger, ends in the middle. There is a sexual climax but there is no aftermath, no resolution to the psychological threads that hold the story together. I am told that some men quite enjoy cuckold fantasies, but for those of us who don’t, an inside view of a cheating wife’s thought process is not a pleasant thing to read. I believe TLP led off with this story specifically to hurt his readers, and once it concludes he doesn’t even mention it again for over 300 pages, at which point, in a footnote, he acknowledges that his book has a strange physical layout and says the porn story was intended to scare you away, “a giant ‘beware of dog’ sign written in cat.” Lovely. The layout, by the way, is that half the book is footnotes, and the footnotes are only tangentially related to the words they attach to, and most of them are essays unto themselves. The effect is exactly like reading a blog from the golden age of blogging, the era when he was writing. He never explains this, but if you are accustomed to the format, it’s instantly familiar.

So what’s in this book? It’s about pornography, but it covers a wide range of subjects. I didn’t add it up and calculate its percentage-apposite-to-porn-by-weight, but I would guess it’s closer to thirty percent. Early on, he asserts that all media is porn, or that all media can play the role of porn, and that the actual object-level content of the porn is irrelevant compared to the way you use and abuse the media-cum-porn in question. (Pun not intended, it’s a latin word, look it up you philistine)  One of the either frustrating or engaging attributes of TLP’s style is that tends to dance around his theses. (He talks an awful lot about rhetoric, but never once drops the word enthymeme, I wonder why) Here’s a quote:

Porn addicted men—let’s stop pretending this has anything to do with gender, or porn: media addicted hominids—men who have adopted someone else's superego proudly settle for a real life girlfriend/wife who may not look like their porn “ideal”—protecting them from the self-accusation of shallowness—but can be described as such. “She’s big titted blonde.” “Long dark hair and a big ass.” As long as the phrase is literally correct, it can be used metaphorically.

All of TLPs work is saturated with rhetorical flourishes, tricks, enthymemes, and neologisms; these things give it texture and make it fun to read, but let’s just pretend for the duration of the review that we are interested in his ideas—we like him for his brains, not his body (of writing)—which means the goal of reading this book is to stop being surprised by the ideas he presents. In order to do that, we need to extract a model of his philosophy from the particulars of its expression. It would be nice if he would just spell his ideas out, but that’s a much harder book to write. Paradoxically, writing a thousand pages is something you do because you couldn’t bear to spend any more time on the thing, not something you do because you had too much time in the first place.

TLP elucidates his ideas by walking us through his readings of various stories and histories, including (but not limited to) Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Henry James’ The Bostonians, The Devil Wears Prada, Disney’s Maleficent, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, The Giving Tree, du Maurier’s The Apple Tree, The Contender, Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War, Gone Girl, Death Note, The Welder, Goethe’s Faust, 50 Shades of Gray, DH Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner,  and the Gospels of Luke and Mark. He studiously avoid current events for the most part, but he does touch on all of the topics you actually care about: atheism, womens’ suffrage, racism, nazis, communism vs. capitalism, democracy, and cuckold porn, which definitely, absolutely, incontestably belongs on that list; they are all of a kind. 

The mental model he uses to analyze these things is much smaller than the analysis, necessarily. Because of this, the text gets mind-numbingly repetitive somewhere in the mid 500s, pagewise, but at that point you’ve already committed yourself mentally to writing the review and letting it be known to all your extremely online friends that you’ve read the book. TLP talks about this early on, and it’s something we all know, that doing a thing now only feels real to us when we post about it on social media, that it’s the audience we care about, that everything we do now is done vicariously through an imagined audience, and that is part of what is trapping us in an emotional panopticon. The phrase “emotional panopticon” didn’t appear in his book, I wrote it down in my notes because I saw it in a tweet as I was scrooling intermittently between reading footnotes. Side note: the best coinage in the book is when he refers to your smart phone as a teleprompter. He’s sort of making fun of politicians when he says this, and also comparing you to one. The conceit of this, obviously, is that a teleprompter tells you what to say.

I know, you want to get smarter, but after a long day scrolling through your teleprompter, by nighttime you’re just too exhausted to do anything other than crash on the couch and scroll through your teleprompter.

But TLP doesn’t blame social media for this effect; he identifies it equally in the era of television and suggests that it’s probably universal, ancient, inexorable. The upshot of this is that it’s not enough for me to read this book, I have to feel like I’m being seen reading it, and to do that I have to tell all of you about it. OK. But before I try to tell you about the worldview and psychoanalytic model of the last psychiatrist, before we get to the parts I liked, we’re going to talk about the parts that are bad. I’m not a classicist or a philologist but what is abundantly clear from reading Sadly, Porn is that neither is TLP, not even close. I don’t know how many thousands of words he wastes serving up his fatuous readings of the gospels but the parts where he tries to uncover hidden interpretations of Jesus’ parables are so bad they throw the entire book into question. The dodge, the pre-emptive defense against this is the old psychoanalytic chestnut that you’re running from a painful truth you don’t want to acknowledge, but no, he’s just wrong, not even in an interesting way. If you have a novel reading of one of the stories in the gospels, you are pretty much wrong by default. Although there is something otherworldly about them, their meaning is exactly what it appears to be on the surface. A quotation from Francis Bacon, which I always keep close to my heart: “it pleaseth god to apply himself to the capacity of the simplest.”

Nowhere does his Bible-reading go more catastrophically awry than when he tries to exegete the utterance in Luke 5 where Jesus tells his disciples he will make them fishers of men. Jamie, can we pull that up?

The problem with this wordplay analogy is that it’s not an analogy. It is only wordplay. As an analogy it would necessarily fail. The purpose of an analogy is to deliver more clearly, not less clearly, a complicated meaning. But this analogy doesn’t simplify or clarify, in fact it requires you to make necessary adjustments all along. Ok, fishermen, now they’re fishers of men, except they’re not actually going to capture any men, or gut them, or sell them, or lie about how big they were; these fishers of men are going to save their catches, protect them-- from other fish? Other fishers of men? “Fishing for men” doesn’t get you there, unless you think the analogy is that the fish/men are supposed to be killed, and if you think no one would ever think this note that Julian The Convert thought exactly this when he observed that “the apostles were just like the fishermen who draw the fish out from the water where they were free and happy, into a place where they can’t breathe and will soon die.” Guess what happens next.

And the thing that really compounds the stupidity of all this is that he is plainly tells you how stupid he knows he sounds and still tries to justify it after talking in this vein for thirteen more pages. He tries to go to the original greek but it’s squid ink, much like the kind that a certain lebanese man secretes into his spaghetti to pretend to be Italian. Sad! Ultimately he admits that he asked some real classicists who are skilled at reading ancient Greek and they told him he was full of shit. Somehow this didn’t prompt him to cut the previous thirteen pages of rank sophistry. What’s even worse is there are many of these episodes in the book—he gives the same careful treatment to the funeral oration of Pericles, to the Mytilenean debate, to the political career of Alcibiades—and the whole time he rattles on about the difference between primary and secondary sources, in fact it’s one of the core theses of the book.

He says no one reads primary sources, only secondary sources, because primary sources are merely text, whereas secondary sources are “knowledge” —and the word knowledge here has a special meaning in his epistemology, it means something you believe that gives you permission to not take action—and he goes on an on about the importance of reading primary sources, but then when he actually engages with those sources, he bungs it up so badly that you almost suspect he’s doing it on purpose so as to make the case that primary sources should be left to the experts. He can’t even fucking interpret the gospel of Mark, and you’re going to trust him to tell you about the Peloponnesian War? 

But enough shitting on the man (for the moment,) I also want to talk about the good things, because there is plenty here to like. His analytic lens is well-suited to modern pop culture, where there is no ground truth underneath, but it only distorts and lies when he turns it on anything with substance. Maybe this is crazy but what if the theoretical framework you use to interpret Fifty Shades of Gray and Devil Wears Prada isn’t equally applicable to Thucydides and Jesus? Really I’ll stop, until we get to his political views. Enjoying this book (which is different from feeling satisfied by it) requires the reader to engage in Gell-Mann amnesia, but fortunately, you have a lot of practice.

“You don’t believe in psychoanalysis,” he says, and that’s correct, I don’t, but I am still willing to grind through a thousand pages of it in order to harvest some zingers to own the libs. The only reason I read anything is throbbing, monomaniacal hate. You will tell yourself that was a joke. He also disavows everything in the book right at the beginning, remember? Ah but I’m sorry I couldn’t hear you over the rest of the book that you wrote. 

Famous quote from Walter Benjamin: “ It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” In the age of photoshop, deepfakes, beauty filters, and neural style transfer, this quote has aged extraordinarily well. Psychoanalysis shows you whatever imaginary things you want to see, and so do cameras. The optical unconscious, like the instinctual unconscious, is a void we fill worth word games. One of my favorite twitters put it this way: ‘at a certain point “self reflection” becomes like putting two mirrors up to each other. kind of cool and interesting but not really what mirrors are for.’ 

Psychoanalysis is a journey into a hall of mirrors illusion, but this isn’t to say that it’s worthless, or that the book is either. You know the saying, “all models are false, some models are useful.” So I am neither endorsing nor rejecting this model, only trying to explain it, with the caveat that any model you have to start by apologizing for (i.e., this one) clearly possesses some glaring deficiencies. And no matter how wrong or kooky or overly complicated this text is, the upshot of reading a thousand pages of begging or pleading that you are constantly hiding things from yourself is that you end up turning these same devices he uses in the book back against yourself and looking in your own life for those things you are hiding. I think that’s a valuable exercise.

Here are some axioms that he doesn’t present as such but that appear to me to be the premises underlying his thought:

1. Omniscience and Omnipotence are mutually exclusive, not in a theological way, but in a psychological way, in the way you conceive of and relate to authority. If something or someone has knowledge, they don’t have power, and vice versa. 

   1. Therefore you use knowing difficult things as a substitute for doing difficult things

   2. “The purpose of the conspiracy is to defend impotence by knowing something”

   3. And when something is difficult or unpleasant you gladly retreat into knowledge of that thing

      1. And this neutralizes your need to do it

   4. Primary sources are facts, secondary sources are knowledge

      1. “The” media — i.e. the news is always a secondary source.

2. Everything we do is done for the benefit of an imaginary audience, even if it’s done in private, even if it’s done in a circumstance where no audience could possibly exist. We experience all of our actions vicariously through a television / social media audience.

   1. Here’s a quote: “The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done outside of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be? But one doesn’t need to be seen by individual people, it's enough to imagine being seen by a hypothetical audience.”

   2. People will tell you that overexposure on the internet is a way of broadcasting an identity you hope everyone will believe, but we're also told by those same people that nobody believes anything on the internet, everyone knows it's a cesspool of liars pretending to be someone else.

3. The outward manifestation of your desire is never your true desire.

   1. Often you choose to want something in order to protect yourself from having to enjoy something else.

   2. [... N]ot only can she not want what brings her enjoyment, what she wants is the defense against it. She wants to be a devoted wife and mother-- she knows she's not, ok, but she believes she's supposed to want this. She wants it because others want it for her, and so it becomes her conscience, her identity. Wanting this-- just wanting, not even being it-- saves her from anxiety. If she wanted what she enjoyed, she would know she was a monster. The wanting is the defense against the enjoyment. “I want to be there for him.” You have said it.

4. No matter what you tell yourself, you mentally think of all your relationships transactionally and keep a “ledger” of who is getting the better or worse deal out of whom.

   1. You mistakenly think most of your desires are formulated positively: “I want this” “I want that” but they are secretly formulated negatively: “I want him not to have this” “I want her not to have that”

   2. Your desires center around depriving other people of satisfaction in your personal, internal, abstract ledger, but you aren’t capable of knowing or admitting this explicitly because it’s not socially acceptable to you or to others

   3. So instead you repress your desires and they return in a different form

   4. The people you are closest to and think of as your friends and loved ones are also your fiercest rivals in the battle of the ledger

5. Fantasies are precursors to action when they organically and authentically come from within your own mind

   1. But none of your fantasies are actually your own, because you now get all of them from media, and all media is porn

   2. All media is porn BECAUSE it causes you to have other people’s fantasies instead of your own, so you never end up taking action because step one is fantasizing, and you never even fantasize, because porn does that for you

From these axioms we (i.e., TLP) derives the idea that what you really want (not what you consciously want but—no—but the thing that makes you feel satisfied), in your heart of hearts, is not even to deprive others, but for the imaginary audience of your life to see others being deprived.

These ideas recur throughout the book, and he applies them to each of the stories I mentioned above. I haven’t read much psychoanalytic theory and this book was more than enough for me, but I have no doubt that someone more versed in the literature might trace this or that piece of the model to, e.g., Lacan or Freud or etc. That’s fine, it’s not really my purpose here. I think when you write out the tenets of the model, they sound a bit less impressive than when they are illustrated to you through scolding, condescending snark.

So but anyway, where were we? Bombastic intro, sadistic porn story, then what? Some long, meandering discussion of Oedipus—what does it really mean, what is the Oedipus complex, what did Freud get wrong? He relates this to atheism; there’s a refrain throughout the book that the gods aren’t real, and he says Oedipus’s real sin wasn’t killing his father or sleeping with his mother, no, it was abdicating all responsibility as a king, choosing the trappings of kinghood, the fact of being the king because this freed him from having to actually take any action as the king. The nature of kings is to perform kingly actions, but he never does, only embraces the form of kinghood and this is said to be a way to avoid kinghood. Perhaps this is intended to draw a parallel to King Trump, probably not, maybe. Really it’s intended as a parable for all of us, because this is the motif of the entire book: the ways we use fantasy, knowledge, and appearance in order to evading actually taking action.

Freud was wrong, Oedipus's latent wish wasn't to kill his father and sleep with his mother, that is the manifest content of the dream. The latent guilt—the reason Sophocles picked the Oedipus story to train the audience—is that he had failed in his duty to be the state by wanting his duty to be to the State, failed to serve the people by wanting to serve the State

I don’t remember all the little twists and turns that come next—the labyrinthe is long and winding—but one of the next things he talks about, in between footnotes, is some kind of late-night premium cable softcore porn movie called conFIRMative ASSent, capitalization entirely intentional. I tried to google for it, didn’t try very hard, couldn’t find it. I’m pretty sure he made it, Borges style, and then spent two hundred pages talking about it. Near as I can tell, its plot (as such) is about promiscuous sorority girls who freely have sex with every member (no pun intended) of their complementary fraternity, and yet despite this there is some particular guy and girl who are in a relationship, and it’s an open relationship? But they still have some half-baked sense of fidelity or duty to each other. There’s a scene in a hot tub, and another one where the girlfriend is in the shower and her rival comes and blows her boyfriend in order to ruin the sex they are about to have. None of these details are important. TLP uses it as a blank canvas to explore various lemmas and corollaries of the model I outlined above, particularly (5).

Later, closer to the end of the novel, he drops even the pretense of analyzing third party stories, and says “let’s imagine a halloween porno movie where a man and his wife go to a costume party, and he makes her wear a slutty nurse outfit, and he wears a mask, and she ends up sleeping with another man who is wearing the same costume as her husband, but she’s off the hook because she thinks it is her husband until it’s too late, i.e., until his dick is inside her.” I’m summarizing. He calls it TrickX or Treats. The last thirty pages of the book are a screenplay, complete with a music score, for the trailer, which I mostly skimmed because lmao, and because he actually printed it twice, once with just dialog, and once with stage and camera cues and music. Truth be told the entire last 25% of the book descends into dadaism. There’s an especially surreal moment where he tells you the recipe for his lunch, then tells you a disconnected-from-everything story anthropomorphic colors but really it’s an allegory for deep nutrition or maybe pharmaceuticals. Then he spends a few more pages explaining the rationale behind his lunch (which is not very appetizing) and assuring you that he can deadlift three plates. “While I’ve got you here, and since you read this far, you rube….”

The book is ostensibly about porn but it’s really about feminism, politics, and one specific pornographic fantasy, namely: the fantasy of the cheating wife. He says in the beginning that it could have been about any fantasy, it could have been gay porn even, it wouldn’t matter, the object-level content of the porn is immaterial, he says, all that matters is that it is porn, and that you are watching it, and that it’s acting as a substitute for having your own desires. But after reading the whole thing and reflecting on it, I don’t find this convincing. I think the only reason you’d spill this much ink dissecting and explaining away the cuck fetish is if you (i.e., TLP) personally had that fetish. And I’m not even trying to throw shade here, maybe that unfortunate wrinkle in his soul has pushed him to explore new frontiers of psychoanalytic knowledge. While we must admit you don’t get to choose your fetish, that doesn’t let you off the hook, especially if you choose to wallow in it. But supposing you found the idea of a cheating wife arousing, wouldn’t you try to understand why?

Let’s give him the benefit of a doubt, and say he chose it because, of all the fetishes he might decide to write about, there is something uniquely appropriate about cuckoldry to the politics of the current year, and to TLP’s thesis that you are incapable of action in part because you don’t know how to want things appropriately, so instead your fantasy revolves around other people taking action. You’re cucked by the media, he says, which has replaced your fantasies with its own, and cut you off from even knowing how to desire things, since you have scarcely ever tried. He says part of the fantasy is that your wife is desirable, because in the fantasy she is desired by someone you both see as desirable. Another part is that in your mental ledger, you are already providing for her and caring for her, so if you also sexually satisfy her then she’s getting more out of you than you’re getting out of her, so part of the fantasy is depriving her of the sexual satisfaction that you would allegedly give her. 

I invite you to pause here, for a moment, and reflect on how batshit that is. Maybe you don’t believe me, that anyone would write such a thing in earnest. Here’s a quote:

Having a smaller dick doesn't sound like much of a fantasy, but it's a magnificent one if she must depend on it. Why should she get the house and your income and also satisfaction from you? Is she satisfying you? Doesn't seem fair, the ledger is unbalanced. If some random woman wants to have sex with you, of course you'll try and satisfy her-- that's a fair trade, tit for fat. But the women in your life-- “you know what I mean”-- scheme to get the ledger unbalanced in their favor. So the rage gets masked as a sexual fantasy and you imagine that she can only get full satisfaction with other people-- which means, in real life she isn't satisfied. Ledger balanced. Her fantasy orgasms show you just how very much she is deprived of by staying with you in real life, and it makes you cum so hard.

Njgga what? I feel like I can’t possibly write a belletristic sentence explaining this logic because the mental anfractuations are too topologically complex. Is this why he finds it necessary to constantly scold and remind you he’s much smarter than you, so you’ll just nod along and accept this kind of bullshit? This is the type of hallucination you start to have if you spend too long starting into the hall of mirrors. But look, not everything he says on this topic is, to use his word, bananas. E.g. he describes a scenario where a rival has been flirting with a hypothetical cuckold’s wife and he tells her that “those men were only interested in her for her body”—

The interesting part of this deliberate self-deception is that he thinks that telling her they only wanted her body is going to turn her off. He hopes the lies he has heard from four generations of women and the current generation of men are true: that women don't like being objectified, that women really only want to be liked for their mind or personality. The result is he spends a giant amount of energy hiding the fact that all he sees of any woman is her sex; he is overly respectful, overly polite, hyper-cautious. So it is enragingly confusing to him when other men are able to objectify them right to their big ass boobies, and the women don't seem to mind. They giggle.

I have definitely encountered men who think like this, and eventually they may end up calling themselves incels (I have sympathy for the involuntarily celibate, but I do NOT have sympathy for those who adopt the label and make it their identity). Here’s a pretty good neg against incels by way of Faust:

[The incel thinks] “This world is not built for people like me.” Well, that's true, anyway. The impossible desire to be a Don Juan becomes the unfulfilled wish to be a Faust, but no one’s going to believe it unless you are chosen by a Mephistopheles, and since the devil doesn’t exist and anyway couldn’t be less interested in you you’re going to need a Gretchen, simply find a woman who’s been underestimated all her life and temporarily overestimate her. The envy of the effortlessly mutual carnality that seems the privilege of others but barred to him is transformed into an overvaluation of his own self-worth—“I know too much”—such that he is worthy of being redeemed.

Does that sound like anyone you know on twitter dot com? But as much as this book is too clever by half, and as much as it really does tend to suffer from the exact problem that it repeatedly highlights; that knowledge obviates the need to act, there are many good and interesting sentences, and I am going to reproduce some of them now.

This is the line between arousing pornography and enraging pathological jealousy, choose which side you want to be on because there’s no actual line, they're the same. Take the simple example of “drunk.” “Drunk” is a common label in porn, but there's no porn labeled as sober. Drunk is a fetish, it stands for something missing. Drunk has the real life connotation of erasing the self (“I didn't know what I was doing, that's not me”); but in porn, “drunk” means willingly erasing the fake everyday self so that the real desires come out, so that you turn into someone else’s fantasy. Thus telling your husband—a man raised on porn—“I'm so sorry, I was drunk”, as if it were an excuse, doesn't make things better, it makes them way worse.

This paragraph (obviously?) is in regard to the inevitable discussion that follows the wife cheating, where she claims she was drunk. “So what you’re saying is that cheating was your secret desire and the alcohol let you overcome whatever was separating you from your true desire?” And speaking of being drunk, I found this anti-feminist zinger especially diverting:

it puts an awful lot of faith in a man’s ability to act when evidently he needed to be drunk just to ask her out in the first place. a woman might be too drunk to give consent but a man can never be too drunk to require it. The subjective term drunk becomes one of the only available objective boundaries in female sexuality.

For whatever reason, TLP likes to read books and watch movies that are popular with women. What does this mean in light of his old catchphrase “If you’re reading it, it’s for you,” which he deploys exactly one time in the whole book, on page 843? More on that shortly. For all his pontificating about the ancient Greeks, it’s by far his commentary on chick-lit that shines. When he talks about The Devil Wears Prada, he’s really talking about all women, and he nails it:

…the primary problem is the inability to act on a desire. It doesn't matter what her desire is. For her, acts have to be impulsive, compelled, or for some other reason, other than desire. If the pre-modern problem was guilt, and the modern problem was the inability to feel guilt, then she exhibits the post-modern problem: the inability to act. “Because I would feel guilty.” Keep telling yourself that.

You might criticize not her but the movie’s script, the writing, it doesn’t allow its lead character to make her own choices but instead has her pulled along by the plot. That is a common critique of female lead movies, but it is absolutely also a defense. The aspirational quality of the story and her character is precisely that she does not act towards goals. She reacts to situations.

It’s not, he says, that porn makes us unable to act, but rather that we retreat into porn because we are unable to act. I think he also wrote this next bit about Devil/Prada but it doesn’t even matter, it’s also about cheating wife fantasies, it’s also just what the whole book is about, which is how people—by which I guess he mostly means women but in a broad way that includes most men, too—are “on autopilot, looking for permission, not decision.” They can’t take action until they first contort themselves into a mental frame where they believe they have no choice. The cheating wife in the opening porn story tells herself "I never had a choice, I may as well enjoy it." In this sense, he casts Devil Wears Prada as being every bit as pornographic as what comes up on google if you search for lewd words. Here are some more sentences (by TLP) on that subject:

The pornography is not the cause, it is the response to a problem that was there long before I Do Not Have a Choice, It’s On Autopilot. “Well, she didn't know!” Didn't know what? That he could only see the world through the lens of a camera? How could she not have known this, was it an arranged marriage? Or did she think how he saw the world applied to everything except their love-- the one thing that requires fantasy?

The patriarchy is said to be powerful but it seems very inconsistent, on the one hand some women are hyper-objectified, on the other hand other women aren't objectified enough. So now she's worried that men will become disinterested in their partners because porn women are more appealing? Get rid of porn and a size 12 could be sexually attractive again? I assume she means to rich guys. Did you think I was going to say whites? Back in the Bush Administration I would have.

[...]

The form of every decision she makes is, “I want—or don’t want—something, I cannot pursue it directly, so I need something to compel me to do what I want to do.”

Another theme that TLP handles particularly well, outstandingly, is the way that the modern conception of love has become deformed w/r/t the way it approaches obligation. You may notice the weasel words in the previous sentence “the modern conception.” I don’t want to say “our conception” because this isn’t how I think of love, and I hope it’s not how you think of it, but I feel like I’ve met a lot of people who do have this understanding, though it’s never something that crystallized into my mind to a degree that I could articulate it. The concept is that love which is obligate, for example, the love of parents towards their children, “doesn’t count” because it’s not “freely given,” but rather, it’s part of the role and the expectations of parenthood. Maybe that sounds perverse and alien, but when he describes it, it’s all too familiar. The following is excerpted from his comments on the Disney movie, Maleficent:

[Fatherly] love can't be true love because it is definitional, obligatory, and therefore it doesn't count. What the demo believes in, what it aspires to, is unconditional love chosen by free will. But as this is too massive a choice let alone responsibility for those who can't even imagine adult love, there's another trick: it has to photograph like love but entail no responsibility. [...]

While Maleficent does visit with Aurora, nothing would happen if she didn't. She's under no obligation to show up, and when she does, all she has to do is “spend time together.” That's love; ask any deadbeat dad stopping by on Xmas. Lacking any symbolic obligation she is free to not be anxious about Aurora's grades, boyfriends, or trajectory. Maleficent doesn't need to depend on Aurora, and Aurora doesn't have to depend on Maleficent.

To the demo, far from the symbolic obligation being both the requirement for love and its justification, the symbolic obligation negates it.

[...] a father’s love is heavy, his love asks things of her, obliges her, he is the impediment to the kind of love that skips barefoot and giggles. TV characters are everywhere adopting black children: rather than mirroring an actuarial trend in adoption, or even cynically reading it as “performative liberal Hollywood”, it represents the fantasy of aspirational love: since there is no biological or cultural expectation to love this child, since it's obvious you didn't “have” to, then this love is (depicted as) real love.

[...] they were taught to value things in this way-- devaluing anything that comes from obligation, convention or expectation because it didn't come from “you”, because you get less credit

I never saw Maleficent and I don’t intend to, but I have to preach a little here. I think it’s obvious to everyone but it still can’t be said enough: the stories we learn, especially as children, define our social reality as adults in ways we often don’t even realize. It’s not just that our desires are shaped by what others desire, though that’s true, also, it’s that the stories we learn become normative, they become our models for how we interact with other people. Ask any parent and they’ll tell you, after your kids watch cartoons, they imitate what they’ve seen. That doesn’t stop happening when you grow up, just all the seams and the hard edges get smoothed over, and the stories you learn as a kid count for triple at least.

A further comment on this, which comes much later, when he’s talking about The Giving Tree. 

Parental love can't be true love because it is definitional, obligatory, and therefore it doesn't count. What the demo believes in, what it aspires to, is unconditional love chosen by free will—that can be witnessed and confirmed by other people as an act of free will. To the demo, rather than the symbolic obligation being both the requirement for love and its justification, the symbolic obligation negates it. This is the form of love you and the other adult readers are capable of-—of imagining. That’s why it’s a tree. Since there’s no cultural or even biological responsibility to love this boy, then this love is (depicted as) real love.

[...]

like children, the audience has learned to accept as authentic only fake attempts at authenticity, because real authenticity is customary, obligatory, carries responsibility-- it is based on pre-existing rules and not on the individual-- and therefore doesn't count.

It matters tremendously what kinds of stories are shown to children, and I’m not saying this in a “think of the children!” kind of way; I hate that kind of moral grandstanding. I’m worried about myself living in the future world that those children inherit. This kind of story doesn’t even permit the possibility of familial love, only love between deracinated genderless blob people. Obligate love is always gendered. Fatherly love. Brotherly love. A mother’s love. A sister’s love. These are all categorically different. They have specific delineations. When we inhabit them, that’s what instructs us in how to love. But the love that Maleficent holds up as ideal is a love which “knows no boundaries.” And what I’m trying to convey to you is that love without boundaries isn’t infinite, it’s infinitesimal, because it doesn’t know how to be anything. This is a movie that is intended for children, and also for grown-up children. 

But TLP seems to disagree with me here, because he says the degeneration of love precedes the moral degeneracy of our media.

On your behalf the media separated love and lust. Now it must separate lust and porn, now lust is the threat: whatever the man is looking at will always be less dangerous than whatever the man is thinking about. Porn doesn't suppress love, love was repressed, by us, and it returned as porn.

Any attempt at repressing a thought is never fully successful, there's always a leftover. This leftover is misleadingly called “the return” of the repressed, but it doesn't return so much as transmute into a different form. You can reliably identify something as “the return of the repressed” because repression is an identifiable process, it causes the leftover to appear in typical ways—for example, as a negation or an excess.

Do you believe this? That lost love is responsible for the porn epidemic, and not the other way around? But so when did we start repressing our love? (And who’s we, hombre?) In situations like this it’s always the case that both conditions obtain in a feedback loop, mutually reinforcing each other. Rewrite every “X is downstream of Y” this way and the world will become much clearer, though it still doesn’t answer the question. TLP never even tries to answer it, though he blames “the media.” Well, we all do that, seems like a safe target. It might be true.

There’s another claim that unless we have seen something depicted in media it feels unreal to us, and TLP is careful to note that the act of depicting something in media—anything, whether it’s sexual or not—is equivalent to “pornographizing” it. A depiction of violence is a pornographization of violence, a depiction of parenthood is a pornographization of parenthood, and so on. He’s not saying we can’t think about or understand things we haven’t seen in media, just that we have trouble perceiving them as real. This next quote was also about The Giving Tree, but pay special attention to the last line.

And the man wants her, even needs her... as he gets older but not because he gets older, two problems arise. The first is he idealizes her less and less, and then is able to see certain things about her—not stuff that he doesn’t like, just things which are superfluous—but which might be desirable to others. They all have to go. I can eat an apple, but what's with all the leaves? Get rid of them, you look like a whore.

The second problem are her desires. Obviously she wants to be what he wants—which he recognizes means she generally wants to be what others want, to be desired by others. So now he’s in a competition, ostensibly with others but mostly with her. Initially he limits her exposure to other people, not just physically, but also by framing the interactions to be about something else other than their desire. “You're going to meet X, he's a big jerk who hits on everyone” = “even if he wants you, he doesn't want you.” It looks like he's a meany guarding her jealously from becoming attracted to another man. This is false and anyway wouldn't count. The fear is that she might believe the guy is attracted to her. If being desired is what she wants, someone desiring her means she got what she wants: she is ahead.

The thing is, both of these problems are lies. Faded childish idealization and jealousy about what she wants/who wants her aren't the problem, they are the defense against the problem. The fundamental problem, the one that causes the other two, is that he has become emotionally dependent on her. This is the only reason

he obliterates her… What he really wants to obliterate is his dependence on her, a dependence that feels unnatural because it doesn’t feel like anything “real”= discussed in a video. Despite that everyone with at least a tenth of a soul has felt this dependence, no one has ever described it, explained it, pornographized it-- so it remains unreal

Elsewhere he says: “the only way to elicit feeling in a person whose only authentically felt emotion is rage is to pornographize it.” I’m trying to work this into a coherent whole but I think the book itself defies that; I don’t think there’s any coherent whole to be found, but if there is, it’s something like: you should take control of your life, of your country, of the world, but really you’re a naughty boy/girl who doesn’t have it in them, you don’t know how to take action because you don’t know how to want things because you’re hypnotized by the media you consume, which is all porn, all of it. You are morally deficient, also, though not because of the above; what’s contemptible in you isn’t that you don’t know how to have desires or act on them, but that you like this state of affairs, that you revel in it. You want to be led, you want someone else to take away your responsibility.

The consequence of a video life is that any inner life that cannot be videoed cannot be lived. It cannot even be imagined. What are you going to do show quiet desperation, or even math homework? Cut yourself? Actually do math? 

[...]

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.

It’s just all too tempting to “fire back” at this kind of indictment that the reason you wrote this sprawling, sadistic book is that you, The Last Psychiatrist, don’t know how to do these things and don’t want to do them either, so instead you wrote this book explaining the problem as you see it in the hopes that someone else will figure them out and then fix it, with “it” being the things he thinks are wrong with the world. There’s another running theme, both in the blog and in the book, that all the self torture in the form of wanting things (so you don’t have to enjoy them) and enjoying things (so you don’t have to be satisfied by them) is all ultimately in service of maintaining the status quo. That the thing that’s really scary and unpleasant about taking action is that it brings about change, and that the one thing you (your subconscious, I guess) really wants is for things to not change. 

[...] by adopting the thoughts of another, you also accept their unconscious motivations for having thought it.

Here is the consequence of not being able to fantasize: you can only know what you are told, you can only want what someone else wants; and so your happiness becomes logically relative to someone else's.

And at the end of the book, when he’s summing it all up, telling you how bad you are, the thing he finally settles on is that because you have all these deficiencies around desiring and acting and changing, you (collectively; all of us) are choosing tyranny over freedom. The implication is that every aspect of the current political and technological world is a march ever deeper into the throes of tyranny, and that you (all of us) are not only doing this, but you like it, because it’s preferable to the alternative of taking action and being agentic.

When you hear that a “bad” melodrama is “so clearly manipulative” you should understand that what the audience objects to is the clearly, not the manipulative. They want to feel knowledgeable, but they want to be lead.

The irony of all this is that TLP’s book does exactly this, it is clearly manipulative, it makes you feel knowledgeable, and ultimately the knowledge it offers you is a defense of the status quo. And he clearly knows that, although he deliberately makes no effort to lead you. You can sense his reticence even when he’s wrapping it all up, he doesn’t want to give you a moral prescription, he doesn’t want to make any statement about what is good or correct. The closest he’ll come is to say that you’re retreating into porn while you gladly hand society over to vague, unnamed, tyrannical forces. 

the world you don't understand requires an imagination you don't possess, which is why you want someone else to take the power you don't want. [...]

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 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.

[...] you don’t want to be the main character in your story. You want to be the main character in a story written by someone else.

This fantasy manifests both politically and romantically. We’ll start with romantically; TLP is at his best when he is talking specifically about how the female mind works. To the degree he is good at analyzing men, it is only when they exhibit feminine behavior and thought patterns, which admittedly is often. Twice as many women as men go to therapy, and honestly it makes sense that their core offering is tailored to their core demographic. It makes perfect sense when you realize that psychoanalysis, like everything else, is constrained by market pressures. Like fortune-telling, like astrology, like critical race theory, it has evolved to exploit women’s emotions for money. It should not be surprising that it has the same customer acquisition strategy and conversion funnel as all of those things, namely: cold reading. 

This goes back to the Gell-Mann amnesia thing; you read something insane and bananas and wrong, you turn the page, and the next thing he says is credible again. You forget what you just saw. Cold reading works exactly the same way: TLP tells you twenty pathological things about you and you relate to four of them, and then you think, wow, so insightful. There’s really something to this. And if you protest, he reminds you that your subconscious is a wiley old trickster with a mind of its own, and that its job is to hide these unpleasant truths from you by offering up distractions and rationalizations that give you an “easy” way out. As an aside it occurred to me that your brain has two hemispheres and what if one of them is “you” and the other one is your “subconscious” and it really is invisible to you and it spends all its time scheming and resenting you. This is silly but it’s a pretty decent premise for a horror story. Anyway.

To reiterate: TLP is at his best when he is talking about how the female mind works. My favorite part of the whole book was when he wrote about Fifty Shades of Gray (bee-tee-dub 2011 called, it wants its pop-cultural milieu back. Oh yeah? Well the jerk store called…) 

There's no ambiguity in Fifty Shades BDSM, it is more real, more concrete—not compared to real BDSM, that’s the wrong comparison—but compared to a marriage. This isn't a BDSM fantasy, it is an MFF threesome in which contract law is the M [...] she doesn't submit, he doesn't dominate—both are protected=castrated by something higher than both of them. The fantasy here is not of patriarchal authority, but a regression to parental authority, both obeying simultaneously a powerful father and a nurturing mother. They aren't romantic partners, they're siblings. Which means—surprise but boy oh boy you should have seen it coming—this BDSM is really an incest fantasy.

The media blessing not only makes it ok to have such fantasies, it gets you out of having to have them. Your creepy grandfather hid his disgusting porno mag in a brown wrapper, this is the opposite: dirty on the outside, totally safe and sterile on the inside, branding to yourself and everyone else that you are alive, powerful, you have secret fantasies-- but still societally approved, Best Seller list and corporate media authorized, after all, the whole fantasy is about submitting to corporate authority.

And that brings us to one of my favorite recent twitter lolcows, @ZoomerTheosis (PBUH). If we take the TLP definition of pornography seriously, then we realize that zoomer has been pornographized to a greater degree than any previous generation, that he has grown up with porn, cradle to grave, and as @ZoomerTheosis has pornographized his Christianity to a degree that only a Zoomer could. 

The parallel here is almost too obvious to state. ZoomerTheosis is only demanding explicitly what Fifty Shades subtly hides. In the logic of psychoanalysis, this means it’s not what he really wants, because if he can say that he wants it, then it’s actually a defense against what he really wants. If we lean into that, into what I’ll call the Paranoid Style in American Psychology, then what he really wants is actually to deprive others of enjoying sex, and what he really really wants is for his audience to perceive you being deprived of enjoying sex, and the fact that he spent most of his brief time on twitter retweeting people sperging out over his incest fantasy I think 100% backs this up. 

But the beauty of psychoanalysis and cold-reading both is that the rules are really just guidelines, and thing that counts is how clever you are. Or as TLP says: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes it’s more than a cigar; but it’s never not also a cigar.  The obvious, obvious criticism of ZT is that he’s just a kid who has exactly zero experience of sexual love and who is demonizing as a reaction to the fact that his generation is inundated with it—in other words, he’s affecting rebelliousness to signal to all the orthodox showties what a bad boy he is. But he anticipates this criticism, and because of this, he gets off on it. In fact his sexual strategy (which he would disavow) is actually even more clever than that: he is offering women the exact same incest fantasy as Fifty Shades: not of patriarchal authority, but a regression to parental authority. But of course, any woman who responds to this strategy will feel cheated, because just like every other male feminist, he will try to fuck her while treating her like his sister. “But I thought you were going to slap me around?” “No babe, I’m a sadist; you genuinely won’t like what I’m going to do you.”

Now, you might say the above paragraph is batshit, too clever by half, and you might be correct. These are the kinds of exciting adventures you can have when you operate from within TLP’s psychoanalytic model. But also and in true TLP fashion, we will use the counterintuitive and overintellectualized critique as an elaborate detour to arrive right back at the obvious, common, banal belief that everyone else arrives at anyway. We will do this because what this model gives you is knowledge for the express purpose of obviating the compulsion to act. Male feminists like @ZoomerTheosis want to flatten the husband-wife relationship into the brother-sister relationship because regardless of their age, they never stopped thinking like an adolescent.

The adolescent can’t imagine that sex between married people is enjoyable, mostly because of the unenjoyable things that go with it—love, commitment

in true modern day Puritan fashion, i.e. the logic of adolescence, [having a] child prevents the new mom from ever enjoying sex again.

A teenager, screaming at his parents to give him his freedom—and the keys to the car; what he says he is screaming about are the (basically trivial) limits on his freedom, but what he's enraged about is his utter dependency on the parents. This is why “love” is magnified 10000x when the teen falls in love with a peer: that love feels infinite because it is absolutely devoid of dependency, nothing is placed in the liability column

Psychoanalysis refers to the capacity to act as “having the phallus.” This is based. On Freud. In spiritually legitimate marriage, only one person of two has the phallus, both literally and figuratively, and it’s the same person. @ZoomerTheosis doesn’t want the phallus, he wants God to have it, so that he and his “wife” can both be the girl. It is out-of-scope for me to argue about theology, but I think it’s mostly uncontroversial to say that outside of a few pockets of weirdos, Christianity in America is highly feminized. I don’t know about the churches in other places, but I’m drawing on personal experience here, but I’m far from the only one to have noticed. TLP argues that pornography (i.e., all media) does this to you, it castrates you (metaphorically) which means the only way you know how to want things is as a woman, i.e., as an object (as opposed to a subject.) You desire to be acted upon, not to act.

Complete this syllogism: To love is a type of action. Porn renders you unable to act. Uh oh.

At some point TLP compares incapacity-to-love to atheism, though he leaves it underexplored. He says the nature of our relationship to God is the same as our relationship to love. (Fill in the blank in that syllogism, also.)

Everything said about love applies to religion, take Catholicism vs Calvinism. The scary mysticism of the Latin rite, chanted in baritone and apocalypse, gave way to a 45 minute efficient and inviting ceremony filled with sappy songs not about Jesus but about how Jesus makes me feel, and it's hard not to wonder if this wasn't a conscious branding to target the moms […]  If you stumble over a Dad praying, he must be an Evangelical and you must be in Central Time, what they did to attract the men was to pseudo-intellectualize the faith, everyone gets to be an amateur lawyer; memorizing the Bible allows them to quote statutes and precedents and argue like strict constructionists—rather than facing their own potential unbelief, they bury themselves in intricate knowledge, and any unbelief is safely explained by appeal to authority—“my pastor would know.” What if he doesn’t? “I know what I believe.

After watching e-Christians argue online ever since Adrian Vermeule came up with his cunning plan to split the dissident right on a platform of Ban Porn and Don’t Let People Buy Groceries On Sunday, this rings true, so true. He also repeats a claim I’ve made myself on several occasions, which is that attempts to ground faith in logical proof or scholarly evidence actually end up negating the act of having faith.

Making their beliefs the subject of university scholarship and “objectivity” relieves the burden of total belief—the belief is registered within the world of knowledge, albeit incomplete—it is no longer entirely their responsibility. The unpayable debt gets crossed out. The ledger becomes balanced. 

[...] the rock hard foundation of your knowledge is appeal to authority—to the one who does not act. If you accept the very basic premise that the one who acts—for good or evil—does so out of belief in his own power, then to balance this in your ledger, whoever has power cannot also possess knowledge. They have to be totally separate. If you're wondering why your stellar post-secondary sources education has failed to result in commensurate power, it's because you're asking the question backwards. You have no power, therefore you assume you are educated. “I know how the world really works.” Let me guess: incompetently, frivolously, or exploitatively, and there are no other choices. 

The last line veers into politics, so. I mentioned already that psychoanalysis is geared towards women, but the book is written as if it’s addressing men, and that the venn diagram overlap of that is men who think like women. The way that cashes out is that the book assumes you have progressive (normie) politics, even though I suspect anyone online enough to read this book probably does not have normie politics, though it’s hard to be sure. One theory is that it’s written to normie because the dissident can handle normie content, but not the other way around, another theory is that if the writer and the reader both pretend we’re talking about a normie then it gives us a certain kind of breathing room to maintain a critical distance while assessing the ideas. You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, you aren’t a normie, it’s OK, we’re both just talking about an object that’s far away. But if you’re reading it, it’s for you. TLP pretends to assume the reader will have normal, progressive-ish opinions like "I believe people are inherently good." The third theory is that he himself holds these opinions (and I think he does), and that anyone who writes about “you” or “we” is writing about himself. And that’s how he comes to write the following.

Your thesis is that the system is e.g. male and oppressive right to the girders—that patriarchy is part of the structure of the system, and that's what you're fighting against. Then why was your interest in destroying it legitimized—encouraged? Why was there a major in college that allowed you to deconstroy patriarchy, organize movements against it? Or did you think the university was a “safe space” outside of the “patriarchal system” from which to “critique” it-- for $50k/year?

“We're pushing for revolutionary social change, against the 1%.” I know math isn’t your thing but your 1% is more like 40%, and did no one notice that your key ideological supporters are the actual 1%?

Human beings have abdicated moral, social, and political power to the technologies, much as you’ve done with your sexuality, which means any moral/social/sexual progress it seems to have made is entirely illusory.

Protest all you want, there will be no further social progress until someone invents the next big tech, or, said a different way, you can send an entire society’s value system back in time just by throwing the appropriate kill switch.

Throughout the book, TLP expresses support for democracy, he negs racists and antiracists, he condemns and mocks nazis, he mocks feminists but also expresses support for them. He points out the ridiculousness of edgy anticapitalist stances but he offers no alternatives. He stands for nothing in particular, engages in some gentle both-sides-ism, and then recites a stylized version of “democracy is the worst system except for all the others.” Or in his own words:

imposing no judgments is impossible, so by refraining from imposing personal judgments, you end up imposing society's judgments, which is why everyone is told not to impose their personal judgments.

He mocks revolutionary types, talks about “the system” and how it controls you, but he also tries very hard to be edgy, and it’s impossible to be authentically edgy while also supporting the status quo. I also want to be fair to him about this, I think he is in the fairly common position of having been a left-centrist fifteen years ago, not having let the herd drag him left, and now feeling politically homeless, correctly perceiving how impotent and naive the republican party is, but despising the tyrannical and totalizing media-industrial complex. The most common thing people in this position say is that they have moved beyond right and left, that the racial and sexual politics of the dominant party don’t constitute the true left, but TLP is too smart for that. Instead he pleads with a hypothetical normie who is running all the latest leftoid ideology patches, asking they/them to please figure out how to stop masturbating to porn, take charge of their life, and not hand the entire world over to “tyranny”—he doesn’t name any names but if you read between the lines, it’s there.

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.t

Class struggle is detected to be the problem, so it can be used as the defense.

Victimhood is aspirational. It solicits passionate sympathy, when you don't have the capacity for unselfish love you look for an energetic substitute.

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

TLP knows, as I know, as you know, that the attempt to reduce everything in the world down to economic explanations is fatuous, a way of feeling like you understand the real causes behind human events. He says people do this, not because it gives them a feeling of control, but because it relieves them of the need for it. He castigates people who think everything can be reduced to greed. He is correct.

Troublingly, the actual Holocaust, and modern genocides that regularly recur despite the promise of increased connectedness in our global village, can't really be explained by economics, so these exceptions are carved off and explained as having religious or racial “root” causes. I put “root” in quotes because while it gets us out of having to explain why a particular genocide isn't economics like everything else is supposed to be, we all “know” that religious/racial conflicts in general are—surprise—“really” about economics. And so on down the line, you get to class struggle without ever having to identify or justify whether it is class struggle. The idea of class struggle replacing fear/honor/interest as history’s universal motivator didn't take off until the 19th century, and so either you believe someone figured out something truly novel about human nature, or someone discovered a much needed defense against human nature. “Yes, yes, it's really about exploitation of labor!” You can imagine how bad the alternatives were.

[...]

it wasn't greed, stop saying it was greed—greed doesn't drive a man to take another man by the throat, the force vector is in a different direction; greed wants to have more but is indifferent to whether others have any; “greed” is the modern defensive rationalization for the true origin of his=your relentless rage.

He contrasts American society to the ancient Greeks:

The difference between the Greek culture and the American culture is that Greek culture was vectored towards the goal of attaining the desired object, while American culture is vectored towards the goal of being the desired object.

America is in this the opposite of Athens: despite the rhetoric, the propaganda of America teaches both men and 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. Not desirable during a sexual relationship-- it doesn’t count when your partner actually finds you attractive—but that you feel desirable in theory, to the camera, to the audience.

The unique problem the Athenians had was that they were absolutely, 100%, materially equivalent to the state, which meant they didn’t have recourse to the defense that “the State acted” or even “the head of the State acted.” But instead of this making them behave more morally, or at least ethically=consistently, or even more profitably, they had epileptic fits of depersonalization, they spent their energy trying to make it true that the State was some other omnipotent entity.

This is his defense of democracy. There is some sleight of hand since obviously the Athenian democracy worked quite a bit differently from what America calls our democracy. But for TLP it’s close enough that he spends at least a tenth of the book talking about the Athenians and how they slowly yielded to tyranny. He psychoanalyzes them and encourages us to draw parallels to present-day America. Again, he won’t name names, but it’s obvious who he means. 

I want to explain some things to you now that you probably feel deep in your bones but probably haven’t found the time to articulate. Whenever someone talks about “capitalism” like it’s a hostile alien living among us, they are either wittingly or unwittingly agitating for communism. They may not even realize it. Everyone feels some measure of discontent in their life and the lazy, fashionable scapegoat for this in current year america is “capitalism.” If you blame capitalism for your problems, no one will take it personally, and many of the other monkeys around you will make agreeable noises. But there is exactly one group of people who blames all their problems on capitalism, and that is communists. If you blame your problems on capitalism, you are a communist. If you talk about “late capitalism” or “late stage capitalism” you are (possibly unwittingly) claiming that the return of Christ glorious worker’s uprising is nigh, repent repent, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Georgius Christ is Floyd. There are two ways you can try to get out of this: the first is “yes, and” and the other is “no, but”. If you’re part of the first group, you’re irredeemable. Communism, much like being a woman, is a congenital condition, and it can’t be cured, though sometimes you can treat the symptoms.

If you aren’t a communist, but you scapegoat or criticize capitalism, then you are at the least participating in communism, but it may not be your essential nature. The slur for these people is “neoliberal” — a word that means someone who likes communism in theory but is just slightly too pragmatic to ever get past second base with her. You’re the ones I’m trying to help. We can tell TLP is in this second group because although he talks about capitalism, he saves his worst vitriol for “the media,” which is a right wing dog whistle, just like talking about capitalism is left-wing dog whistle. When a man is sending you mixed signals, it means he himself is confused.

Of course you’ll say the job’s punitive outreach is only capitalism “protecting its money.” But you should be precise about the direction: capitalism responds to what the consumers want, and what they want is not a higher standard of appropriateness. They do not want people to be better. If they wanted this, the market would create a service that would give them that. They want these things only secondarily. What they want is that the job has more authority over our lives—that it becomes a benevolent tyrant, that it publicly display its authority over us; and we cause this to be true by demanding or complaining that it is true. Of course, while we want corporate power to increase you yourself don’t want to work for a corporation. You are, after all, a prothinker not a sucker; you want others to work for it, so that its power can be wielded by you passively over others. That the only such absolute authority we can imagine is a corporiathan is historically hilarious, but no other power was believable. What we want is to not to be good, but to be ruled.

We want the corporate power to be even stronger, because it alone ensures a kind of world with rules, dress codes, appropriate behavior-- not just safety, but a place, a purpose, a title. Good enough, so long as we retain the public(izable) freedom to express ourselves sexually, which, not ironically, now requires restraints.

Now, finally we are ready for his views on racism. 

Today, the racist doesn't come from a place of racial/cultural pride—in fact, he thinks racial pride itself is the telltale sign of racism and ignorance, including and especially those who have white pride. Those guys are a losers. He can't be a racist because he defines himself as not having racial pride, he may be white but he’s quick to tell you he hates white people. Individual white people are ok, some of his best friends are white, but as a whole—well, ok, it’s not being white that’s bad, it’s white culture. He’s racist against racists, who are universally white. That’s the key: supporting other races is the cover for a homicidal rage towards some other group, say, rich sorority girls, that if pointed at rich sorority girls would be detected as “pathological”; but as long as the TriDelts are accidentally in the blast radius it’s celebrated as “pro-social.” FYI that’s why activists prefer bombs over guns, the target is the collateral damage. He doesn’t know much about Asian racism, because they were all in the other math class.

On the other side, the racist these anti-racists hate also doesn’t think of himself as a racist, also because he defines himself as not having racial pride. He doesn't need it, he's proud of who he is, which is “my own man.” He is an individual. He is informed. When he says, “I'm not a racist, I just see reality”, he isn't lying—he truly believes this, because it doesn't come from a pre-existing racial pride. He's just a guy, no better than anybody else, trying to make his way in a world where exist well defined, fully formed and characterized groups—with their own culture, language, ideology—while he has publicly disavowed any. He knows we are all just human beings, but individuals are not all the same, equality of outcome is always going to be impossible, we each just have to work hard, do our best. Not everybody can be an NBA player or an opera singer, or even a lawyer or a teacher. 

And boy oh boy is he is wise to the media gimmick. From time to time our media show, for the edification of the American philistine, the news comes from some part of the “underprivileged neighborhood” that a black man has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even an opera singer. He stares at the bourgeois blockheads on TV that say how marvelous are the achievements of our modern educational system, and because he is informed he recognizes this as a socialist manipulation to support the theory with which “they” infect the public: that all men are created equal. He knows that what they report is a crime against reason itself, that it is an act of criminal insanity to preferentially train someone who is barely an anthropoid by birth until the pretense can be made that he has been turned into a lawyer; while, on the other hand, millions of intelligent people are stuck in positions which are unworthy of their intellect. He realizes that it is a sin against reason to allow hundreds of thousands of highly intelligent individuals to remain floundering in the swamp of misery while former criminals are recruited to fill positions in the intellectual professions. If the same amount of care and effort were devoted to intelligent individuals you’d get people a thousand times more capable. But who supports him? No one. And so “us vs. them” becomes “me vs. Them,” and me feels outnumbered. Thank God for the internet.

There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here. If the above makes you feel angry, it means you caught a reflection of yourself in it and you don’t like it. It’s intended to own everyone equally, and if I’m being charitable to him I will say that the third paragraph here is intended to reveal, with plausible deniability, what he actually believes. But then, despite demonstrating the ability to mostly understand what it is that a racist thinks, he throws it all away:

Both of you think the other has artificially manipulated what should be a natural process based on merit. Both of you see the other as the problem not because they are inferior, but because they found a way to game the system, to cheat normal Darwinian capitalist functioning, and you think this even if you don't like capitalism or Darwin. Turns out you think like the racist you hate, which makes sense because you had the same teacher.

OK, so three things here. First off, no, there are two “others” on the left side of this equation, the first is not inferior but evil, and it’s a banal kind of evil, an evil which believes it is moral and righteous to dissolve borders, deracinate peoples, and destroy heritage, and which gets warm fuzzy feelings when it does that. I think that first, evil other deliberately installs the most inferior people it can find in positions of power and leadership, that it specifically selects for inferiority, because it is precisely this arrangement, the worship, the exaltation of the inferior, that gives them the warm fuzzy righteous feeling they are chasing. They don’t pick smart black people to promote into these positions, they pick brainboxes like Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, because anyone can believe that a smart black person is smart, it takes faith to believe that a retarded one is.

Second thing: when two people make the same claim against each other that doesn’t mean both are wrong. Liars tend to accuse everyone else of lying, thieves accuse everyone else of stealing, and so on, and so on. Now, I’m no psychoanalyst but I think that’s called projection. (inb4 you try to tell me that psychoanalytic terms have escaped into common parlance in a way that almost precisely inverts their meaning.) In order to understand TLP’s perspective on the racists and the anti-anti-racists, we have to jump ahead a hundred pages to his exegesis of King Solomon, which is probably how he sees himself in this debate:

The unexamined piece of the analysis is the very premise that the two harlots come to Solomon because he is wise. But not only is this premise iffy, the story requires this premise to be false. The lying woman's fundamental assumption is that Solomon is the respected authority to everyone else, but he will not know the truth, he can be fooled

When Solomon decrees the deprivation of the real mother in the initial decision to kill it, the liar no longer needs to want the baby, so she stops wanting it. She is satisfied, and she no longer needs a defense against what satisfies her, because she has the ultimate defense: it's not my fault the baby died, it was caused by-- some other omnipotent entity.

TLP likes to talk about math, and in shape-rotator speak, what he does in his reading of 1 Kings 3 is refactor the terms of the equation. They still sum up to the same thing, except now Solomon is wise, not because Solomon and the mother are good, but because he uncovered the secret heart of the treacherous prostitute using psychoanalytic insight. And what TLP tries to do with his both-sides-ism is the same trick: refactor the terms, change nothing about the relation, and at the end the racists are still dumb and both sides are still whores. The material claims of each side are irrelevant because he balanced the ledger.

[...] the rageful fantasies of children which look for big structural explanations to “figure out what's really going on”-- that therefore explains=permits their impotence.

This is true if you’re trying to be a famous artist or writer, living paycheck to paycheck as a bartender, borrowing money from your parents, eventually you marry some kind of NWO NGO CIA tentacle monster, steal some hapless bastard’s birthday cake, and claim your lack of success is caused by “structural racism.” Blaming the system for your personal failures is a bitch move, always has been, always will be. There are a hundred ways to lose your leg that don’t involve Moby Dick, but we cannot conclude that Leviathan doesn’t exist just because you, personally, are not Captain Ahab. “Structural” is in most ways a nonsense word, used by nonsense people to signify nothing. We should mock those people. 

But if “structural” did mean something—if it means anything—it means there are laws and institutions which privilege some groups over others. And those laws do exist, and the argument really is about who specifically is putting their thumb on the scale for who. TLP knows the answer to that question, too, or else he wouldn’t be able to describe what he tries to handwave away as “the media gimmick.” The media is warping all of our minds and making it impossible to have our own organic desires—you see?—but when those inorganic desires have a racialist component, well, that’s just a gimmick. Tell us more, professor.

This is already running way too long and it’s out of scope (as we say in the biz) for me to sit here explaining to you who the real victim is. There’s a trap where if you play the victim, you’re a loser, and if you make an honest accounting of your grievances with “the system”, you’re “playing the victim,” so you’re never allowed to complain. That’s why it takes someone like Donald Trump, someone who everyone knows isn’t a loser, who has wealth, women, fame, and property, to stand up and talk about these things. Even then they try to paint him as a loser, but it doesn’t stick much. TLP anticipates this line of thinking, too; he knows which well to poison, so we won’t linger to have a drink.

In Athens, the rhetoric spoke to those with power, while the American rhetoric speaks to victims. I don't mean it speaks only to the victims: I mean that when it speaks, it speaks to the audience as if they are victims. This is true for both parties equally. The message of American rhetoric is that “they” have deprived you, I will set things right.

Third thing: racial pride. He’s talking about people who say “I’m not a racist,” so probably not you, if you’re reading this, if you’re reading me. You’d never say anything as gauche as that. So calm your tits. He’s talking about normiecons, people who vote Republican, people who watch Fox News. Well look, even Chris Rufo watches Gutfeld, a man whose wife is too hot to be beard but whose whole shtick is laundering gay sass into a late-night format for people who don’t approve of gays. I kind of want to take a detour here to talk about how Fox News has this tic of referring to “the media” in much the same way TLP does (as an enemy, except what they mean is “all the other media”) but it’s cringe when they do it because in the same breath they tout the fact that they are the most-watched cable network. Gutfeld surrounds himself with milfy women who overlaugh at his jokes and overperform ditzy femininity almost like it’s a drag act but it’s being put on by actual women, much to the delight of both his audience and me when I visit my boomer parents. The whole thing is some kind of catty oblique comment on what liberal women are like and who doesn’t like a good cat fight? TLP is spot on when he describes the anti-anti-racist mentality of the Fox News audience. They have no (white) racial pride and they’d balk if you tried to sell them some.

if your brain obeys the media then black men have the ability to act on their desires and white men don't, they have to act on other people's desires. that's why the modal date rapist is a white man (he is acting on desire he believes his 'victim' has) whereas the modal violent rapist is a black man. (he can act on his own desire) the black man hasn't been castrated (psychoanalytically speaking) "yet"

The fantasy of most internet racists is that one day the normiecons will wake up and develop some racial pride when they finally realize what’s going on in the world. But this fantasy is eschatological, not practical, and if it ever did come true, all they would do is purity spiral and tell all the normiecons to fuck off, we got here first. Genuine racial pride is exceptionally hard for Americans, because even confining ourselves to the Western European races, we are extremely miscegenated. I know you knew that one quarter-Irish guy in high school/college who was really into being Irish, a check which cashed out as him always drinking Irish beer, making an ass of himself on St. Patrick’s Day, and getting a tattoo of a celtic knot. By the same token I have little doubt that Elizabeth Warren has a dream catcher in her bedroom and cheap hotel tier paintings of dusky New Mexican landscapes on her walls.

The internet racist’s racial pride is in the same family as both of those things, and I know this because I am one. We are living in the age of the simulacrum, where we learn about everything from watching TV. I’ll assume you’re familiar with Baudrillard, but just in case, there are four stages of relationship between image and reality. Stage one, the image as faithful copy of the true original. Stage two, the image as unfaithful copy, in which we no longer perceive the signifier as being authentic to the signified. Stage three, the treacherous image which pretends to be a faithful copy but there is no true original. Stage four, the image as unfaithful copy of the treacherous image, a copy of a copy with no original.

The best way to explain how this plays out is through sex and porn. You can actually watch some of the first video pornography ever made, it’s only about three clicks and one google search away. It doesn’t feel even slightly obscene compared to the porn today, in fact it feels like a Charlie Chaplin film but for some reason the actors have their entirely ungroomed and unhollywoodified genitals exposed. Stage 1. Stage 2 is VHS porn with lighting and bolted on tits and penises 2 std. devs. above normal, the occasional paraphilia. Stage 3 is what happened kids who came of age having watched that porn and who effectively learned how to fuck from it then grew up and made stage 4: current year streaming internet porn which covers such a bizarre range of paraphilias that we now identify reproduction as a “kink.”

White racial pride in America is also in stage four; the only place you can even see it depicted is in the hyperreal persecution fantasies of Holocaustianity. I’m unfortunately obligated to throw in a disclaimer here, because people will misinterpret this: I am not saying is that racial pride is bad or that you shouldn’t have it. What I am saying is that your racial pride is most likely distorted and acromegalic and cerebrospinally incontinent not out of any kind of malice or moral deficiency on your part but because you have been forced for your entire life to always begin by phrasing it as a negation, as “hatred” in the form of “racism,” as what you aren’t or as who you don’t like, and that in general you can only come around to the positive and abundant and gregarious aspects of racial pride once you have passed through these things, and that real racial pride actually isn’t spiteful towards people of other races at all, it’s condescending, without even a trace of ressentiment, because it has nothing to resent. I’m sorry, I forgot for a moment which author’s style I was imitating. Anyway I am sure that you, gentle reader, are not suffering from this problem, that your racial pride is authentic and confident and still in stage one, which explains why you, like me, are still dunking on everyone’s favorite fat/skinny comedy act of the alt-right three years after their top ten anime betrayal by posting increasingly deep-fried gigachads. Next Topic. I’m Bored. Who Cares. Define Gigachad.

TLP has another adventure into Solomonic centrism when he talks about women’s suffrage. I am lazy so I will give you an abridged version.

Women first got the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869. No doubt you were unaware that Wyoming was even a state in 1869, and lucky for you it wasn't, so note Wyoming males decided to give the women the vote even before they decided to join the U.S.—this, four years after the Civil War.

What was it about Wyoming women that made the need for their enfranchisement so obvious to the men? The imaginatory of the wild west Winchester and wagon train woman more self-reliant than any sissy Sassachusetts socialite is the dominant mythology of today, but it is in contrast to the reality of the frontier’s females being just as frittering and feminine as those in 1950s TV suburbia, with [fewer] orgasms.

The myth tries to show what should be a humanist axiom because in reality it was not and still is not. No one, especially the women, thought women were equal to men. They were better.

But if Wyoming women were proper not powerful, why them? Why would Wyoming men want those women to be their political equals? Think about this, think about this today. What alternative was so threatening that they preferred female empowerment? “There must be an economic reason.” Only 1/3 of the time, and here no, unless you mean economic in its literal Greek, in which case yes.

The threat to men, to the “establishment”, was—other men. How you tell the story of those other men depends on the story you want to tell, so I'll tell all three because they’re connected by a railroad. Communities of 1) hard working 2) white 3) Protestant men, with families and values and status, were overnight invaded by 10000 railroad workers= immigrants: Irish, Germans, and elsewhere Italians and even Mexicans, derisively stereotyped as “Catholics”. They were solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, fueled by high levels of endogenous testosterone and higher levels of exogenous alcohol, 2x the procreation rate of the native/temperate/moral Protestants= “Americans”. Who would civilize them—or at the very least uphold proper decency? Today's notion that suffrage was seen as a small step towards greater sexual freedom for women would be merely laughable if it wasn't specifically intended as a giant step in the opposite direction for everyone. The women weren't looking to burn their corsets; they were looking to put men in them. The first step towards social regulation and good society in towns, cities, and villages is the ballot in the hands of the mothers of those places.

So in a territory with 6 times more men than women, woman suffrage in Wyoming is useful in two ways: it would prove a great advertisement, drawing women's hopefully Protestant vaginas there, who will no doubt vote in accordance with principled morality, and thus increase the power of the establishment. Helpfully, it also locates the political power so you know what buildings to board up: Protestant political power organized itself in(side) the churches, while the degenerates did it after Sunday Mass in saloons, drunkenly, but unanimously. Thus, the first target of the suffrage=temperance movement wasn't the drink but the drinkery, through the enforcement of Sabbath laws. Within 6 months of woman suffrage, Wyoming went from being a Viking sack back to a Puritan state. A civics lesson which is 100% true: one cannot vote for change.

Consider the counterexample, Colorado, where it took more than seven years after Wyoming just to muster up a referendum. It was handily rejected. Certainly, 6000 native-born men, temperance men, cultivated, broad, generous, just men, men who think, voted for women's suffrage; but they were beat out by 16000 Mexican greasers. I'm sure Susan B. Anthony would have had a more subtle analysis, but facts are facts.

This is the most TLP thing ever in the entire book; he finds a historical account which paints something progressives love and reactionaries hate, women’s rights, as something that progressives hate and reactionaries love, racism. Does that make it cringe or based? Virgin or Chad? Soyjak or Gigachad? Show us on the lifeline. I’ll spare you the suspense, because the punchline of this essay is that TLP, despite having tremendous insight into the inner worQUEENS of the female mind, cucks harder than any of the men in his hypothetical cheating wife pornos that he analyzes:

Because most of you are idiots it needs to be stated explicitly that suffrage was good and necessary for women, and the country; and that the women who fought for it truly believed in it. I would never doubt the sincerity of the rube, this is America: the customer is always right as long as and etc. What the history of suffrage suggests, however, is that such political movements are not higher social consciousness, but neither base economics in disguise. They condense into these; they manifest as idealism with easily detected economic causes to hide that their motive force lies elsewhere.

This from the same man who printed this incredible anecdote:

There's a story about Caesar observing that some tourists visiting in Rome were cradling little designer dogs and pet monkeys in their arms, fawning and cooing over them, and he says, “so the women of their land can't bear children?

But after that little detour, TLP drops his wife’s son off at daycare and goes back to ripping into democracy, which he does ultimately endorse as well, see above:

Second, women voting had the immediate and paradoxical effect of reducing the total number of votes cast. In Wyoming's 1869 election (prior to the passage of woman suffrage), 5000 out of 8000 people voted. In the next year's election, despite the total population increasing by 1000 and the inclusion of women, the vote fell by half. No doubt voter fraud explains the previously high numbers, but if so, why would women voting decrease the fraud? The public explanation of the time was that the presence of women voters (not even their votes) “civilized” election day shenanigans. But the more likely explanation is that it was simply not worth it.

This explains what would otherwise be a paradox: did it not occur to the anti-immigrant suffrage fighters that they would also be empowering immigrant women? If you take their true goal to be not the right to vote per se, not to increase one’s own power specifically, but to deprive others of their power, then in that they succeeded: the fight for suffrage negated overall the power of the vote-- even at their own expense. It shifted power away from individuals and to some other omnipotent entity. That they thought this entity (the “government”) would then do what they wanted is both irrelevant and 100% the point: it is the shift from wanting to act on what one wants to wanting someone to act on what you cannot. This trend continues into today. It is telling that the modern public debate about the utility of online voting is about the elections, when the technology actually makes possible an Athenian style direct democracy, where every citizen votes on everything the State does. Nobody wants that.

My summary covers only maybe the first third of this essay, which can be found in footnote #17. The rest of it is more 7D chess galaxy-brainery about how America had a psychic need to empower women in order to put them in charge of men because women still believed in God and the moral order, and men didn’t. This is where my Gell-Mann amnesia switches off and and I’m inclined to doubt all the good parts of his book again, which is also why I spend almost zero of the words in this 30 page review of a 1000 page book talking about his reading of Thucydides, despite that being a third of the book by weight. Not because I’m some expert, but because it’s clear to me that he isn’t either.

Here are some more notes on the WQ which I enjoyed, and which I offer with no comment:

It takes two to tango, they say, yet the first rule of tango is that the man leads, even if the woman has way more experience than him, which in America is pretty much always. The second rule of tango is that though the dance can be improvised, there are very specific forms and moves that are allowed and... required. Meanwhile, the third rule of tango, never to be said out loud by anyone who wants to tango, is that only women really enjoy the tango, the main reason the men even put up with it is because that's where the women are. So there's your metaphor: women want controlled sexuality with the appearance of male power, and men will dress like a matador to go one on one with an ox.

The manifest fantasy of “giving up control” is for the purpose of causing it to be true that they have some control to give up.

Wherever it went, a loss of male power has not resulted in an equivalent gain in female power. Certainly HR has made men more docile around the cubicles, but it's hard to say this made a 21st century woman feel more powerful than a 19th woman. Having not taken physics, they are surprised to find that power is not conserved. The result of this math is that as much as they say they want more power and etc, as much as they know that it's possible, they actually don't believe that it's possible-- it is not even fantasizable. The only fantasy they can imagine—i.e. the pornographic one they are shown by approved media sources, which therefore must have some other purpose—is not that women should get more power; it is that men might be deprived of theirs, taken not by women but by some other omnipotent entity. That men might subordinate themselves into a new role as an equal sibling under the supervision of the parents

when a woman is depicted in media to women as more powerful than men she will work for/through/with the government, or at least some hierarchical power structure.

OK, that’s it, we’re finally at the end. Ultimate question: Is this book worth it? Hell if I know, man. I give it 7/10. Not as much as I was hoping it would be, much better than it could have been, entirely unexpected, a pleasant surprise, far too long and crammed full of useless bullshit. Just like the internet. I’ll hit you with that link one more time. Buy it, maybe: Sadly, Porn.

TLP, there is a non-zero chance you will read this review, and I want to say: (which is different from feeling satisfied by saying) I hope there are no hard feelings. It was thought-provoking and introspective and the reason I wrote this essay is because I wanted to share all the bits that made me feel something. I’ll finish off with some of my favorite lines from the book, which I couldn’t be arsed to work into the main throughline of the review: 

You're for sure in the land of child psychology whenever you see a black supporting character used to portray masculinity, maternity or maturity, these are equivalent to the trope of Orientalism=wisdom and resonate deeply with 8th graders who know of neither. Which partly explains the defensive utility of interracial porn, and there's a cis-white heteronormative term if there ever was one, does anyone know if it's more racist or more sexist to like it or hate it depending on the race or sex of the man or woman—and/or audience? It’s has the odd distinction of being one of the few kinds of porn still categorized by the thing you don't like.

A relationship is a new whole, not two parts. But if you keep talking about two people, then you aren't responsible.

in the third act he learns the woman he hurt is about to be hurt by someone else, threatening to demote his hurting of her as her most significant life experience

you have been told to stop seeing women as some kind of prize that rivals compete over, which is exactly the kind of thing a woman who has never been fought over would tell you

She pursues enjoyment in order to be satisfied; she pursues what she wants in order to avoid anxiety. Those are two very different force vectors with different magnitudes and directions, you should draw them out every time you make a decision of your own and see which of them is driving your purchases.

Unlike assault, bullying succeeds because the bully doesn't care about society's rules while the victim is castrated by them

If the State blesses marriage as meaningful, then you can pretend to choose not to participate in a thing that exists, brand yourself as having opted out, as opposed to there being nothing to opt in to.

the point of this pornographic fantasy is to not inspire action. It slyly assures you of what you could be capable of—if you were forced to act.

every porn assures us that love exists somewhere, especially by explicitly excluding it from the shot.