Just in time for the Fourth of July, last week the Supreme Court effectively nullified the First Amendment for any writers, like me, who include sex scenes in their writing, intended for other adults.

Their ruling green-lighted a wave of state-level laws that allow meddling parents in conservative states to team up with personal injury lawyers to sue people across state lines for untold damages (literally millions of dollars in some current cases) for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit speech on writers’ personal websites, if the parents think might harm the precious eyes and ears of their little munchkins.

In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site.

(It's unlikely these interstate prosecutions would happen... but just the fact that they could happen, now approved and emboldened by the Supreme Court, means we are in an entirely new and different legal universe when it comes to mature-themed writing online. The First Amendment effectively no longer applies if your speech is online, contains sex scenes, and not behind an age verification wall.)

Now, under this new ruling, Free Speech Coalition vs. Paxton, if I don't ask for and verify your ID on my personal website before sharing even one paragraph of sexually-explicit writing with you, it could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers' bills and "damages" for the alleged "harm" it caused some kid in Texas or Tennessee whose parents didn't install the proper content filters on their kids' devices.

This has a massive "chilling effect" on legitimate online speech. Historically, government-induced "chilling effects" on speech have been seen as just as bad as outright bans.

But not any longer. This Supreme Court decision (ironically, written by the Supreme Court's raunchiest Justice ever, Long Dong Silver fan Clarence Thomas) has placed the Court's stamp of approval on conservative states' attempts to blanket writers and artists like me who produce edgy, explicit material, with the threat of massive civil (and in some cases, criminal) liability across state lines.

I'm not going to ask for your fucking ID on my site for you to see my writing. Not now, not ever. Thus, in my own little way, am I now committing civil disobedience, just by keeping my own personal website the way it always has been, free and open to the public, without ID checks?

Parents in conservative states: if you don’t want your kids reading my writing or watching my comedy, fine… then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it. Your kids can choose for themselves whether to have the purity of their minds corrupted by my writing and comedy when they're eighteen.

And to all the state prosecutors and judges and personal injury lawyers out there who might come after me for leaving my shitty little Wordpress personal site exactly as it is, without requiring you, my dear readers and comedy fans, to upload your IDs and scan your faces biometrically to access a few laughs on my site… I will turn every last word you utter into further comedy on my very site you’re attacking, and you will forever be memorialized comedically as the hypocritical jackasses that you are. 1

For writers, artists, and creators: if you are at ALL involved with sharing sex-related content online (even sex education), I STRONGLY urge you to learn about this issue, and how to protect yourself. Conservative Christians are trying to eliminate ALL sexually-related speech online.

Start by reading the detailed version of my article below. And also read the Free Speech Coalition's FAQ about age verification. Then join the Free Speech Coalition, the main group fighting against censorship of sexually-themed content online. Learn how to protect yourself there.

There are many things going on in my country that I'm ashamed of now, but I still consider myself a proud American. And I feel that way largely because of our Constitution's First Amendment... the greatest protection for writers and artists ever enacted into law.

I will fight till my last day to keep the spirit of the First Amendment alive, even as this current Supreme Court does everything it can to erode it.

Detailed Version:

What I’ve written above may sound hyperbolic. However, once you look at the details of these laws, you see just how atrocious they are from a free speech perspective. The devil is in the details.

Consider a Tennessee law, one of twenty-four state-level laws requiring some form of ID-check for website visitors to access sexually-explicit content online or even non-sexualized nudity. This is the type of law the Supreme Court just affirmed in its new precedent.

The recent Tennessee law (Senate Bill 1792, in effect 1/1/25), makes it a Class C Felony—with a potential punishment of three to fifteen years in prison—if “content harmful to minors” comprises more than 33% of a website, and the website owner doesn’t employ technologically complex and privacy-invasive age verification methods.2

These charges can be pursued against any individual website owner living and hosting their site in any state, so long as the “content harmful to minors” was viewable online in Tennessee. Which means, now, no spicy artist in America is safe from (likely evangelical) Tennessee prosecutors. Not even this deranged comedian you’re reading now, based in California.

What, you ask, is “content harmful to minors”?

According to the Tennessee law, it is:

(A)(i) Text, audio, imagery, or video the average person, applying contemporary community standards and taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors of any age, would find sexually explicit and harmful or inappropriate for minors or designed to appeal to or pander to the prurient interest; or

(ii) Text, audio, imagery, or video that exploits, is devoted to, or principally consists of an actual, simulated, or animated display or depiction of any of the following:

(a) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a human body;

(b) Pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple of a fictitious character's body, or the parts of a fictitious character's body analogous or functionally equivalent to the aforementioned parts of the human body;

(c) Touching, caressing, fondling, or other sexual stimulation of human nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals, or the analogous or functionally equivalent parts of a fictitious character's body; or

(d) Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act; and

(B) When taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors [emphasis added]3

As this definition makes clear, it applies to text as well as to imagery. I am firmly opposed to censorship of any medium. That said, I find censorship of text to be particularly egregious and shocking. As a writer, I focus on that here. (However, to be clear, I stand in solidarity with creators facing this type of censorship in any medium, including video, audio, and music.)

The law’s definition applies to virtually any verbal description or visual depiction of nudity, so long as a Tennessee judge or jury—likely from a rural, religiously conservative jurisdiction—decides that it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.4

I’m a writer and comedian living in California. If my raunchy stories or comedy sets that I publish on my own website end up comprising over 33% of my website… and if I do not want to be liable for an interstate criminal prosecution emanating from Tennessee, facing the three-to-fifteen in a sweaty Tennessee prison, how can I avoid this risk?

Simple! I just need to implement a “reasonable age-verification method" on my own literary and comedic website before anyone can read my writing. What is a “reasonable age-verification method”?

(Feel free to skim or skip over the technical details in the next three block quotes—I’m just putting them here so you get how Kafkaesque these laws are for a simple little stoner writer and comedian like me, who barely knows how to install a WordPress plugin—let alone fancy ID-checks.)

So… in Tennessee, "Reasonable age-verification” involves:

(A) The matching of a photograph of the active user taken between the attempt to view content harmful to minors and the viewing of content harmful to minors, using the device by which the attempt to view content harmful to minors is being made, to the photograph on a valid form of identification issued by a state of the United States of America; or

(8) A commercially reasonable method relying on public or private transactional data to verify that the age of the person attempting to access the information is at least eighteen (18) years of age or older;

Furthermore, this age verification must occur during an “age-verified session.” What is that? It is:

the lesser of the session during which the active user's age was verified using a reasonable age-verification method or sixty (60) minutes from the time the active user's age was verified using a reasonable age- verification method;

In other words, I must now somehow track the amount of time each user spends on my site and require them to re-verify their age (by, for example, submitting a webcam photo of themselves along with a photo of their ID) every sixty minutes. If I ever get around to finishing my erotic novel and publishing it on my site, and if it takes five hours to read, a reader would need to submit their ID five times to read it.

Oh, and here’s the kicker. I need to “Retain at least seven (7) years of historical anonymized age-verification data,” which:

must include architectural diagrams illustrating the technological assets and logical processes by which the reasonable age-verification method is accomplished and data demonstrating a volume of reasonable age-verification method executions consistent with the overall volume of visits to the website;

Got that?

Fuck ‘Em, I’ll Just Have to Fight ‘Em

Suffice it to say, I’m not doing any of that shit on my dinky little free personal WordPress site. I wouldn’t even know how. I’m a writer, not a tech geek. If they come after me, fuck ‘em, I’ll fight ‘em.

I’ll either win (after ruinous legal fees), or go bankrupt from the civil penalties. And/or I’ll get to know Bubba, my new cellmate at Bledsoe County Correctional Complex in Pikeville, TN. I’m sure he’ll love my comedy. At least I can’t get prosecuted for raunchy comedy or writing in prison.

While it’s extremely unlikely I or anyone else would be extradited from California to Tennessee for non-violent speech-related charges… the simple fact that such a prosecution could happen now—and the Supreme Court has considered this and is totally fine with it—means we’ve crossed a Rubicon regarding free speech about sex in America.

There are now two laws standing on state books creating criminal liability across state lines for me in California, for publishing my writing, intended for adults, on my own personal website… and given that I will not be implementing insanely onerous, privacy-invasive, technically-complex and restrictive age-gating on my personal site, which would massively inconvenience you, my readers.

(I know you love my writing, but are you really going to scan your ID, upload a selfie, and submit to biometrics every hour to read it?)

What’s the second law I mentioned above? Just yesterday, South Dakota’s age verification law (House Bill 1053) went into effect, making it a Class 1 misdemeanor (punishable by a year in prison) for a first offence of publishing any material whatsoever, even one paragraph or image, deemed “harmful to minors.” A second offense is a Class 6 felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. The Supreme Court is totes cool with this.

To be clear, this is the first state age verification law to eliminate the exception for sites that contain less than 33% “harmful to minors” content. It creates potential civil and criminal liability for publishing a single paragraph of raunchy writing, or a single image “of the female breast with less than a full opaque covering or any portion thereof below the top of the nipple.” 5

(Note that, while these laws deem an image of a female nipple—the very source of our nourishment as infants!—as potentially “harmful to minors” or “obscene as to minors,” few of them deem any amount of gore, bloodshed, or violence as“harmful to minors.” Furthermore, obscenity law in the U.S. specifically excludes violence, focusing only on sex. In fact, in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to strike down attempts to ban the sale of violent video games to minors on free speech grounds! In his fiery majority opinion, Justice Scalia writes, “violence is not part of the obscenity that the Constitution permits to be regulated. . . . [S]peech about violence is not obscene.”)6

Again, I don’t think I’m likely to get prosecuted in or extradited to South Dakota for some explicit fiction scenes or raunchy comedy on my personal site.

However, all of the twenty-four state age verification laws (including those in Tennessee and South Dakota) contain a different type of provision—creating interstate civil liability—that freaks me the fuck out.

Is Viewing Porn a Personal Injury?

These laws have created civil causes of action that allow parents (with the help of personal injury firms now specializing in this) to sue individuals who publish “harmful to minors” material and who fail to implement the invasive ID systems mandated by the laws.

Right now, there’s a mom in Kansas suing four different porn sites for $14 million total because, she claims, her fourteen-year-old son accessed these porn sites 175 times, and is now badly traumatized. As the Free Speech Coalition reports:

Over a period of several months, [the son] allegedly accessed adult sites more than 175 times. The lawsuit claims that adult sites are liable for damages of approximately $75,000 for [each] time [he] visited a site. While Kansas law provides statutory damages of $50,000 for violations of the law, plaintiffs are asking for additional damages citing “pain, suffering, disability, disfigurement and mental anguish,” “psychological injury,” “past and future loss of enjoyment and pleasure of living,” and “past and future necessary medical expenses.”

These bottom-feeder lawsuits are proliferating. They will likely focus on quick settlements because the lawyers and their plaintiffs know that defending against them can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it’s usually cheaper to settle, even if the claim is totally bogus.

Since I’m not going to age-gate my private, free personal writing site, this means I could now be targeted in any number of frivolous interstate private lawsuits from twenty-four states across the nation, initiated by conservative parents claiming their kid accessed raunchy writing or comedy on my site. Some of these laws entitle parents to a minimum of $50,000 in “damages” per non-age-verified visit. (I knew my writing could be damaging to your mind… like smoke-a-joint damaging… but fifty grand damaging? Nah)

I’m willing to take some risks and fight bullshit laws and lawsuits if I have to. But that’s part of my ethos, and my family legacy. My father got arrested over eighty times in acts of non-violent civil disobedience on causes he cared about. I don’t have the same appetite for being arrested during protests that my dear old pops had…

Comedic Civil Disobedience

But I leaving up my dinky personal writing site, containing plenty of raunchy writing and comedy, exactly as it is, without readers having to upload ID to read my work or get a few laughs on my site. Is that now an act of literary civil disobedience?

Other indie writers, artists, and creators may not want to take the risk of the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees that this patchwork of state laws imposes. Sharing indie creative work barely pays anyway. And now, in addition to earning jack shit in the age of piracy, creators also have to implement all kinds of expensive technology on our free sites, further restricting our hard-to-gain audiences, in order to avoid the risk of bottom-feeder civil lawsuits across state lines initiated by legions of personal injury lawyers?

Many indie creators of risqué content will probably just give up. It’s already hard enough trying to stay afloat as an indie artist or entertainer, and now we have to deal with this bullshit on top?

If these laws across the nation are not a “chilling effect” on free speech, I don’t know what is. From a First Amendment perspective, a serious chilling effect on protected speech—such as the government putting up major legal, regulatory, or financial hurdles to express oneself artistically—is considered almost as unacceptable as an outright ban.

The age verification laws don’t outright ban verbal descriptions or visual depictions of nudity or sex in literature, art, or entertainment. However, they place such over-the-top, wildly disproportionate limitations and financial and criminal risks on indie writers and comedians like me who post verbal descriptions of sex online (and all other creators of raunchy or adult content), these laws effectively function as bans, to anyone who doesn’t want to shoulder insane legal and financial risk.

Through the Backdoor

This is exactly what the instigators of the state-level age verification wave intended: to shut down all speech, art, and entertainment about sex online, turning the entire Internet into a G-rated zone.

In 2024, the Center for Climate Reporting secretly recorded Russell Vought, co-author of the infamous Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership report—and now a Trump official for the second time—in a wide-ranging discussion. Vought, a key early architect of the age verification laws, was caught saying on hidden camera:

We're always looking for what's the immediate fight leverage point that we can win, and win a debate that allows us the next fight to get more of the win than we could have.

For instance, right now we came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use as opposed to the the person who visit it's the website getting to just certify that “I'm eighteen.”

We've got a number of states. that are passing this. And you know what happens is the porn company then says “we're not going to do business in your state.” Which of course is entirely what we were after. Right?

So we’re doing it from the backdoor, starting with the kids. We would have a national ban on pornography if we could. [Emphasis added]

Catch that word: “entirely.” For one of the age verification laws’ main architects, the strategy isn’t about protecting kids from entertainment intended for adults. It’s “entirely” about putting the companies that produce that content for adults out of business. The age verification laws are just the “backdoor” to a larger agenda—an agenda they stated clearly in their Mandate: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

With the Tennessee and South Dakota laws in place, they’re well on their way. “First, they came for the pornographers…” You might be fine with that. You might hate pornography. You might like hardcore porn banned yourself.

But no matter your opinion on porn, be advised: Republicans are now labeling anything and everything that has to do with sex, and LGBT+ issues, as “pornography” and “obscene” and “harmful to minors.”

Whatever type of literature or entertainment you do like that deals with sex is next on the chopping block, especially if it’s made by indie artists or entertainers, who will be snowed under by these risks. Whether it’s literature, erotica, romance novels, fine art, or raunchy humor—if it’s got nudity or sex, they’re going after it with these bullshit “harmful to minors” laws soon. And right now, they’re winning.

I think it’s fair to say that, with respect to online depictions of nudity or sex (written or visual) we effectively no longer have First Amendment. It’s gone. The Supreme Court has said that essentially no burden is too high to place on spicy writers, artists, and entertainers, even poor indie ones, in the name of protecting kids from bare female nipples.

***

Look, I understand parents are shocked by the flood hardcore porn their kids have access to. No one thinks this is good for kids. Certainly, I don’t. I found and watched VHS tapes of mainstream porn when I was 10, and I don’t think it was healthy for me. And that stuff was tame compared to what kids have access to today, right in their pockets—no VHS player required!

No one wants kids to see hardcore porn. Unfortunately, the vast majority of porn is on free pirate sites outside of the US. So these laws, which impact law-abiding US artists and companies only, will do NOTHING to keep kids from accessing unlimited free hard-core porn—not a single thing—since kids will still have access to unlimited porn from non-US, non-law-abiding piracy site.

Reducing a quantity of material (even a seemingly large quantity) from essentially infinite material doesn't change the state of play at all. The laws are 100% pure, solution-free grandstanding.

It seems the best parents can do (whether these laws are in place or not) is to install content blockers on their kids' devices as best they can, and (since kids are likely to see porn on other devices anyways) have honest conversations with them about how to think about what they might see, how to handle it emotionally, and how it differs from reality. No "age check" solution will ever work--unless you want to age-gate the entire Internet--because most porn sites stream pirated content, from foreign shores.

I would also ask parents to examine why they are so utterly freaked out about their kids seeing material about sex, but vastly less (or not at all) bothered by their kids watching so much violence in cartoons and movies, and actually play-enacting extreme violence in photo-realistic first-person shooter games. I’m not a parent, and I don’t have a clear answer about this discrepancy.

However, I do believe it is worth reflecting on. I hope I will be forgiven for saying that I find it challenging to empathaze with parents’ shock—shock!—at the thought of their kids seeing explicit sexuality on screen, when the very same parents don’t display anywhere near as much concern (and often none at all) about the effects on little Johnny or Sally playing photorealistic first-person shooter games, in which the kids immerse themselves and revel in the violent action, cruelly and casually blowing hundreds of characters to bits in gory spurts of brain and blood.

That’s not seriously harmful… but looking at two people giving (or pretending to give) each other physical pleasure (rather than physical violence) is seriously harmful? C’mon. There’s got to be some consistency here. I don’t know where the overall set-point on the dial of explicitness should be for kids’ viewing of violence and sexuality, and at what ages. But I do know that the set point for seeing violence and sexuality portrayed on screen should be set to roughly the same threshold of explicitness. (If not slightly more restrictive for violence.)

As opposed to the current state of affairs, in which the cultural and legal charge of “obscene as to minors” and “harmful to minors” kicks in at an extremely low dial reading for explicit depictions of sexuality, but not at all for any dial reading at all for explicitness in violence, not matter how gory (have you seen some of the horror films kids watch?)

At any rate, in the process of doing absolutely nothing to keep the Internet’s international flood of free, pirated hardcore porn away from kids, these age verification laws are massively curtailing the free speech rights of all writers, artists, or creators who want to talk openly about sexually-themed topics—and the rights of adults who want to be informed or entertained in some manner beyond G-rated material.

If you’re at all involved in producing any type of sexually-themed content (written or visual) I beseech you to join the Free Speech Coalition, which has been the main force fighting these laws and trying to protect us. They have a detailed FAQ about the age verification laws here. Protect yourself.

As Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Especially those of us who dare write about boobs hanging out and schlongs hanging down, in a world scared shitless of a nipple.

It's my 48th birthday, and today, I'm sharing one of the proudest things I've ever done... I produced a beautiful album of my favorite musician, from start to finish!

Surrender: Live by Adey Bell.

Exactly 10 years ago on this day, May 12th, 2015, Adey Bell played a house concert for me on my birthday, with a group of 50 friends, on our family's Steinway baby grand.

This is one of the earliest recordings of her playing live. Of course, in the decade since, she has evolved enormously as an artist. And still, as her archivist, I can say, there's something special about this show.

Something about the set and setting and mix of people in the room... the portal opened up, Adey was ON (she's always on, but she was REALLY on...) and we in the audience were stunned, bowled over. We knew we were witnessing something majestic.

I produced the show, and Chris James engineered the sound beautifully and recorded it. I kept wanting to release it as a live album... but over the years I never got around to it.

This turned out to be perfect, because now I get to release it on exactly the 10-year anniversary of this magical and (for an Adey fan) historic show.

If I had to pick one track (not an album but a single track) as my "desert island" Adey track, out of her vast repertoire of music, it would be her version of "Surrender" from this show. By the crescendo, the gut-level surrender in her voice goes deeper than anything else I have ever heard musically. (Don't listen casually!)

Also, in this show Adey sprung on us not one but three premieres of new songs that are now among her standards, "Venom," "Peace of Man," and "Remind.Her."

(I wrote up the backstory of the origin of “Remind.Her,” which Adey composed only months before this concert, here.)

Plato talked about the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as the three transcendent realities. (The phrase "Platonic love" stems from his reflections about Beauty in its perfect, ultimate form.)

Of these three values, I have always been partial to the Beautiful... because, of the three, it is the one that offers itself up as its own reward. The True and the Good... Pursuing them is necessary, but as we know too well, often unpleasant and not always rewarding in the moment.

But... the Beautiful... If we are lucky enough to witness a flash of true Beauty, approaching its pure, Platonic form.... the moment offers itself as its own transcendent reward, without reference to anything else, whole and complete that precious moment.

I am grateful to have experienced such a flash in my own living room on May 12, 2015... and am proud to have played my part in bringing something truly Beautiful to this world... Surrender: Live by Adey Bell.

Today on my birthday, or on one of these days soon, it would make me so happy if you would give yourself a treat and listen to this fine album. Listen over your best speakers/headphones (ideally as one sonic journey, from start to finish), in a quiet hour, with attention...

And if you like it, please share it with anyone you know who loves witchy singer /songwriter / pianist music.

Available on Bandcamp (if you love the album, please support the artist and buy it there... 100% of proceeds of Bandcamp sales go to Adey) and on Spotify.

(Our 1978 family Steinway baby grand she played this show on, which my parents bought new when I was one year old, is now Adey's Steinway in Asheville, NC... We were so grateful for the seven house concerts she gave here over nine years--five of them on that Steinway--we wanted it to be hers, after my dad passed.)

• All songs written and performed by Adey Bell

• Engineered, recorded, and mixed by Chris James - thank you so much Chris for creating this live sound, and for recording and mixing it so finely.

• Mastered and sequenced by Steve Turnidge at UltraViolet Studios, Seattle - thank you Steve for all your work on this. It was so fun collaborating with you!

Produced by moi

ENJOY!

Love,
Michael

In this comedic graduation speech, delivered in platform stiletto boots to 50 dominatrixes-in-training at the graduation party for Mistress Colette's MistressClass school, I share the antidote...

[Note: the two videos below are the same, hosted on YouTube and Substack. This comedy is super raunchy, so I wanted to have backup in case one gets censored!)

By the way, why is “douche” such a great insult towards douchey men?

Have you wondered why one of the best insults towards men is the name of a feminine hygiene product? Is this just one more instance of female genitalia being used as an insult (such as with “p**sy”?)

I got curious about this, so I looked it up—and I got an answer from an excellent article by Maddie McClousky writing on Everyday Feminism: “Could Douchebag Be a Feminist Insult?”

It turns out that modern douche products were invented in the early 1900’s by the male executives of the Lysol corporation.

That’s right. I fact-checked this. (See this chilling article in Mother Jones, “When Women Used Lysol as Birth Control.”) In the 1910’s bunch of male executives got together and basically said, “we don’t like the way our women’s hoo-ha’s smell, so let’s convince them to disinfect their vaginas with our toilet bowl cleaner!”

This was a pure shame-based marketing play. Which is fucked up, because vaginas are self-cleaning. They're pretty much the only self-cleaning thing in the known universe.

So a bunch of men came together and said, “let’s shame a bunch of women in order to convince them to pay us a bunch of money to put toxic and dangerous chemicals deep inside them in order to clean their body part that is already self-cleaning.”

Thus, the word douchebag is a perfect insult for douchey men like those in power now, because these men, just like douche products, are up in your business, unnecessary, condescending to and controlling of women, and toxic.

Let’s say NO to doucheocracy, and put these ruling douchebag men in their place!

PS Explanation of my tattoo in the video description here.)

[My latest book project, tying together a bunch of different threads I’ve been working on for years. Note: most of this work, including the entirety of this chapter, is fiction. The parts that are memoir—in other words, the parts that actually happened to me, Michael Ellsberg, in real life—come later in the book, and will be clearly marked to separate them from the fiction.]

Chapter 1: An Erotic Rebellion Against Christian Nationalism

“Mr. Quill, our evidence reveals that, through your work as a twenty-three-year-old self-proclaimed ‘escort for older women,’ you have had sexual relations with not less than twelve clients in the past year alone, many of them multiple times per month,” said Prosecutor Prighammer.

Percival Quill was sitting in a windowless deposition room in the basement of the Philip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Francisco’s Civic Center. It was April of 2025. Percival was less than a year out of Brown University, class of ’24. The President Without a Name had just returned to office in January, starting his second, non-consecutive term.

(Members of the neo-pagan erotic rebellion, including Percival, called him the President Without a Name, or “the PeWoN” for short, to depersonalize him and “give him less reality.”)

Sitting across from Percival, asking the questions, was Prosecutor Bradley Prighammer. He was appointed by the Attorney General to lead a special task force set up by the PeWoN: The Force Against Lewd and Lascivious Subversion (FALLS).

Prighammer continued his litany: “Your clients have ranged in age between thirty-five years old and, and eighty-seven, with an average age of fifty-nine. Most of your clients are older than your mother, who is fifty-five, and a few are older than your grandmother, who is eighty-three. Are you testifying under oath, Mr. Quill, that you feel sexual attraction to each and every one of your clients, whose average age is older than your mother?”

“Yes, Mr. Prighammer, in most cases, I do feel sexual attraction for my clients…”

“Aha!” burst Prighammer. “If you’re sexually attracted to your clients in most cases, then by definition that means that in some cases, you are not attracted to your  clients!”

“Well, if you had let me finish my sentence, I was about to add… in all cases, I am able to find erotic attraction for my clients,” Percival said.

“And what exactly, Mr. Quill, is the distinction between sexual and erotic attraction? Please enlighten us for the record.”

“Think of it this way, Prosecutor Prighammer. Sexual attraction is more about being turned on by a person’s body and physical appearance. Whereas erotic attraction is more about being turned on by their erotic energy.”

“And what, exactly, is ‘erotic energy,’ Mr. Quill?”

“You really want me to get into this for the court record?”

“Yes, I do. Please fill us in.”

Quid Pro “Oh!”

As in many prostitution cases, particularly involving indoor escorts, the case hinged on whether Percival agreed to exchange money for specified sexual acts, quid pro quo.

To create plausible deniability, many escorts in the U.S. use language on their sites or advertising saying something along the lines that payment is for “time and attention only.”

Percival, in his ads, had written: “You are hiring me for companionship, and platonic lessons in the art of erotic activation. These do not include any explicit sexual activities violating California Penal Code § 647(b)(1). Anything else that may occur behind closed doors is a matter between consenting adults and is no business of the state.”

Thus, Prighammer’s line of questioning about whether Percival was sexually attracted to his clients was relevant. If he could establish that Percival had engaged in sexual relations with at least one client, without sexual attraction on Percival’s part, it would be easier to convince a jury that his clients were paying him not just for the companionship and lessons, but also for the sex.

“OK, well, here’s the best way I can think about it. Have you ever been to Cuba?” Percival replied to Prighammer’s question about the nature of “erotic energy.”

“No, I have not, Mr. Quill. There’s a U.S. embargo against traveling to Cuba. Have you broken that embargo?”

“I won’t comment on the legality of my trips to Cuba, but I will say this. If you go to Cuba, you will see people of all ages dancing. You will see people in their seventies and eighties, tearing up the dance floor. They may not be as agile or energetic as younger dancers, but they’ve been dancing for much longer, so their technique is often more refined and elegant than the younger dancers. You’ll see a woman in her seventies, who would never be seen as an erotic being by conventional standards in the United States, tossing off erotic energy while salsa dancing as if she were a fireworks show. She lights up the room. All eyes are on her. In the United States, women her age are rendered erotically invisible. In Cuba, she is a sexy creature, and everyone knows it. I’ve seen this with my own eyes.”

“So you’re saying that all your elderly clients…”

“I call them elders, Mr. Prighammer, not ‘elderly’…”

“Some of your clients are in their eighties. By any criteria that makes them elderly.”

“Elderly is an energy, not an age.”

“I have no idea what this ‘energy’ thing you keep talking about is. I will continue to use the word elderly, in its standard way, without all your California talk about ‘energy’ this, ‘energy’ that.”

“You’re in California, Prosecutor Prighammer, so you might as well speak like the Californians. Would you like a referral to my energy healer? I’ll bet you could use it.”

“Mr. Quill! Back to the question. You’re saying that your elderly clients in the United States have the same so-called ‘erotic energy’ as these elderly women in Cuba?”

“No, I’m not saying my clients all start out that way. But I teach them. My clients want to feel sensual energy pulsating through their veins. They want to feel youthful and vital again. Erotic energy is the lifeblood of that vitality. So they hire me to guide them into bringing more Eros into their lives.”

“And what, Mr. Quill, is ‘Eros’?”

“Eros is the ancient Greek god of love, sex, and desire. In a more general context, Eros is the part of our souls that is stirred by longing, pleasure, and sensual aliveness.”

“So you invoke a pagan god in your sessions with your clients?”

“Mr. Prighammer, I know you are prosecuting this case as part of your president’s war against the neo-pagan rebellion. But this is still the United States of America. We still have freedom of religion in this country. Though you and your cronies are doing everything you can to change this, it is still legal to worship pagan gods in America. You’re busting me for alleged prostitution, not for idol worship.”

FALLS vs. Pornographic Civil Disobedience

The Force Against Lewd and Lascivious Subversion was set up by the PeWoN to investigate and quell the neo-pagan erotic rebellion. This ribald rebellion, centered in the SF Bay Area, had risen up to resist the prudish Christian Nationalism that had gained power through the PeWon’s second election victory.

Prosecutor Prighammer’s first case as head of the task force was, believe it or not, investigating and prosecuting a twenty-two-year-old recent Brown graduate, and inveterate stoner, on a low-level prostitution bust. The young man in question was named Gabriel Bergstein. He employed the alias Percival Quill in his professional dealings with women.

Percival had chosen this first name in honor of one of his idols, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the rogueish British Romantic poet—1792-1822—who was also the literary champion of his wife Mary Shelley, the young author of Frankenstein. Percival chose the last name Quill because, well, he was an aspiring writer.1

Why would a federal prosecutor, appointed by the attorney general, leading a task force set up directly by the president, take as its first case a retail-level prostitution case against a defendant barely out of his teenage years?

Prosecutor Prighammer knew that Percival was being mentored by the notorious erotic rabble-rouser Daemon Demimonde—a 48-year-old stand-up comedian, porn performer and producer, and prolific writer of screeds, tracts, missives, and manifestos, who had taken it upon himself to become a thorn in the side of the Christian Nationalist agenda at state and federal levels.

Daemon had coined the term “pornographic civil disobedience,” and had explained this term in his tract “The Theory and Practice of Pornographic Civil Disobedience.”

What was pornographic civil disobedience? Simply put, it was the act of creating politically-oriented pornography designed to protest—and in some cases intentionally flaunt—laws designed to censor, criminalize, and stigmatize porn performers, indie porn producers, and sex workers in general.

Some of Daemon’s co-productions, such as Goddess Ckiara’s Temple (2019) and Prior Restraint (2020)—which had been official selections at indie porn festivals across America and around the world—simply commented on and educated audiences about issues affecting sex workers.

However, now in 2025, under the thumb of the Christian Nationalist’s documented attempt to ban pornography, Daemon was creating explicit websites and producing indie sexual media that—in the spirit and tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience—intentionally flaunted what he saw as unjust and unconstitutional censorship laws at the state and federal level.

While Daemon did not welcome or relish the possibility of state or federal charges levied on him, he was—as an integral part of civil disobedience—willing to risk these prosecutions in order to make a point about just how unconstitutional, and frankly ridiculous, the Christian Nationalists’ censorship laws were.

The Christian Nationalists were starting to freak out about Daemon’s escalating political antics, fearing he was becoming akin to a pornographic Abbie Hoffman (the notorious anti-authoritarian, free-speech rabble-rouser of the 1960s). And, they were afraid Daemon was having a similarly destabilizing effect on their authoritarian agenda.

PeWoN, Prighammer, and the Christian Nationalists needed to get a lid on this freak Daemon, who also—it should be noted—talked openly about his mental illness, bipolar II. (He was on 150mg of Lamictal per day, a mood stabilizer commonly used to treat bipolar.) “This manic-depressive freak needs to be dealt with once and for all!” Prighammer had snarled to his team in the FALLS situation room.

To this end, the PeWoN and Prighammer decided they would use Daemon as a test case for a rollout of an audacious plan, stemming from their infamous Project 2025 agenda. They were going to start enforcing a set of laws dating back to the late 1800’s (the Gilded Age), originally designed by the moral crusader and anti-”vice” special agent of the US Postal Service, Anthony Comstock.

The laws he lobbied for back then, known as the “Comstock Laws,” granted the federal government wide latitude in controlling, censoring, seizing, and prosecuting any mailing of “obscene” materials, including materials pertaining to family planning and abortion, through the mail.

While prosecutions under these laws were mostly dormant since the 1930s, the laws were still on the books in slightly modified form, in the federal code’s anti-obscenity laws, 18 U.S.C. § 1460-1466. (Daemon referred to these laws as the “neo-Comstock laws.”)

Christian Nationalists had a bold plan to finally ramp-up prosecutions of the neo-Comstock laws, both pertaining to contraception and abortion materials (not Daemon’s particular area of activism, though he was staunchly pro-choice and allied with these activists)… and also towards so-called “obscene” materials, which was of course Daemon’s wheelhouse.

Daemon was about to be Prighammer’s guinea pig to ram these revived Gilded Age censorship laws down the throat of the millions of adult Americans who enjoy adult entertainment in the privacy of their own bedrooms (and smart phones).

Towards this goal, Prighammer was going on a “fishing expedition” to get dirt on Daemon. Key to that expedition was using the prosecution of Percival to “flip” against his mentor Daemon. (To do so they were prosecuting Percival using a similarly aggressive interpretation of an old and long-forgotten law, the 1910 Mann Act.2)

“Working up the food chain,” as the feds called it. Percival was a little fish, but Daemon was a big fish. And the PeWoN wanted that big fish caught and fried.

Lessons in Eros

“Back to the questions!” barked Prosecutor Prighammer How, exactly, do you teach them about this so-called ‘Eros’?”

“It could be so many things, Mr. Prighammer. Flirtatious conversation, presence, listening, talking and caring about what’s real in their lives, deep eye contact, a gentle caress to the arms, a sweet cuddle, sexy dancing together, a stolen kiss. A puff of cannabis together never hurts either.”

“And sexual intercourse! Is that part of your ‘lessons’ in Eros too?!”

“We keep coming back to this point, don’t we? Think of it this way. I’m like a dance instructor. My clients pay me to teach them how to run erotic energy throughout their bodies, to feel sensual aliveness once again. Part of why they want to learn this is so they can become more erotically attractive as lovers, which is the same reason many people hire dance instructors. There’s nothing illegal about any of this, so long as no touching of breasts or genitals is involved.”

“But you do touch their breasts and genitals,” Prighammer snarled.

“Well, Prosecutor Prighammer, the thing is, I’m so good at teaching my clients to be erotically attractive, and they are so good at learning, that eventually, I start to feel erotically attracted to them. That’s what erotic attraction is, after all—a feeling! And what happens when I’m erotically attracted? I want to have sex with them. And they want to have sex with me. So, we have sex. That doesn’t mean they were paying me to have sex with them. It means they paid me for a lesson, and we happened to have sex during the lesson.”

“Mr. Quill! Do you expect a jury to buy this story you are peddling?!”

“Objection, argumentative,” interjected Percival’s lawyer, Solomon Friedman, a slight but fierce old man in a light grey suit, sitting beside Percival at the conference table. Solomon was one of the nation’s most respected First Amendment lawyers. He had argued and won free speech and obscenity cases in front of the Supreme Court. He had taken on Percival’s case pro bono, since Solomon’s career had been focused on defending free sexual expression against prudish and overzealous government busybodies for half a century.

Prighammer snarled at Solomon, then stared back at Percival.

Percival replied, “In the history of the world, many people have fucked their dance instructors. That doesn’t mean they were paying for sex. They were paying for a dance lesson. And they just happened to be attracted to each other and have sex. Many people have also had sex with their fitness trainers, tennis instructors, gardeners, psychotherapists, even college professors. When a housewife fucks her gardener, she’s paying for gardening, not sex. When a student fucks their college professor, the fact that they paid tuition to the college does not mean they paid to have sex with their professor. What about this concept is so difficult to understand!”

“You are nothing but a lying, conniving gigolo!” yelled Prighammer.

"Objection! Argumentative, harassing the witness, and prejudicial characterization,” said Solomon. Prighammer frowned.

“None of these professionals having sex with their clients are breaking the law,” Percival continued. “In some cases, such as therapy or college teaching, the sex violates professional ethics standards. But as long as everyone involved is an adult, it’s not illegal. Nor is it illegal for a teacher of erotic attraction such as myself to become so aroused by the erotic energy that my clients develop in our lessons, that I desire to have sex with them right then and there. It so happens, my clients want to have sex me too. And so, we have sex… two adults fucking, of their own volition, behind closed doors. What can I say? I have a soft spot for older women learning to come back to their own erotic aliveness. It’s not illegal to be weak-kneed for my clients.”

“But it is illegal to sell sex!”

“I’m not selling sex. I’m selling lessons in how my clients can liberate themselves from the shackles of patriarchal control and step into their full potential as sex goddesses. They can then get their sexual needs met beyond their wildest fantasies, as participants in the decentralized harem. Any sex that may occur between us in this process is incidental—a moment of temporary intemperance between us. Intemperance may be inappropriate between a teacher and a student, but it is not illegal.”

Prighammer sighed. “OK, we’re not getting anywhere with this line of questioning. Let’s move on. Mr. Quill, please explain to me your relationship to one Daemon Demimonde.”

“Daemon? I’m a HUGE fan of his comedy!” Percival replied.

Prighammer rolled his eyes. Daemon had been creating yet another stir on the Internet with his outlandish comedy. The latest was a comedic graduation speech he gave at, believe or not, a school for dominatrixes.

[Stay tuned for Chapter 2: “Dominatrixes of the World, Unite!”]

Last month, my wonderful girlfriend Emily asked me to roast her for her birthday party, in front of her friends.

I accepted the challenge - and what came next is in the video above.

People were keeled over laughing. So many people loved it (including, fortunately, Emily), and told me I should be doing stand-up more.

I’d done one comedy performance before, Freudian Kink in 2018 (about why I got a vasectomy without having kids). That went great… but it was a comedic dialogue, which is (I can report) easier than stand-up.

Stand-up always intimidated me. But having a reason to do it (the chance to roast Emily… though I was wise and roasted myself 2X before getting any zingers in on Emily)… this got me motivated, and I saw I have a talent and joy for it.

I’ve done three stand-up performances since at private parties, all to great effect (video coming soon!) [4/2/25 update: I’ve since done fifteen performances! You can keep up with my standup on my YouTube and Instagram.)

I’ve realized (at 47!), this was my writing calling all along. It’s still a form of writing, but adding the performance aspect to it makes my writing more digestible. Getting people laughing allows me to say even wilder and further-out things.

And simply getting people to laugh brightens people’s days—which is something that makes me happy.

SO… I hope this comic relief brightens YOUR day a bit… I’ll be sending out more as I develop it.

Love,
Michael

PS in other news…. I got a tattoo! First one ever. Tattoo reveal video here.

(Content advisory: verbal descriptions of extreme taboo role-play between consenting adults.)

The party was called Éphémère, a Belle Epoque-themed party, in October 2013. It was hosted by my friend Philippe Lewis, one of the most experienced organizers of play parties in the Bay Area.

Ladies in feather hats and bodices filled the mansion in Sausalito, and men in three-piece suits wore ascot ties. I was there on, believe it or not, a quadruple date—three kinky witches, and me, all on a date with each other in some type of amorphous polyamorous configuration.

At the beginning of the party, we—the four mutual daters—sat in a circle, clasped our hands together in a big ball in the center, blessing the marijuana chocolates we were about to eat. (This was California, where we bless our marijuana.)

Visions of an orgiastic pile of Sapphic love had filled my mind when I organized this quadruple date. Before this vision was consummated, however, the marijuana chocolate hit me hard. I sauntered into a side room to take a sit down and collect myself.

At that moment, a woman sat down to an electric piano, facing the room. She said into the mic that her name was Adey Bell. A black garter peeked through slits of her tight black skirt, while a black corset with touches of red lace flourished upwards. Neck-length bangs with blonde highlights sloped up towards cropped dirty-blonde hair in the back. In the front, the light green of her eyes reflected the candle flickers of the room like flaming absinthe. All accented by… a top hat.

The first moments of her first song knocked me backward. I laid back on the carpet, as if I had been shocked by a river of electrified honey and champagne hitting my ears. By the middle of the first song I started twitching and trembling, in my place on the floor. I had witnessed many explicit sex acts that night already, but now I was the one being penetrated—by her music.

Adey sang:

Power
she’s the best ride in town
she’s knows you’re around
looking to get down

Power
she’s your best friend right now
you’ll never disagree
when she’s got you on her knees

[From “Power” by Adey Bell]

One of my date-mates came into the room, looking for me. I told her that I needed to listen to this. She said that she and the other two women in our mutual date didn’t feel like sitting and listening to piano music—they wanted to be in one of the main dance rooms or one of the sex rooms. I said I couldn’t do anything else but listen to this music. She said she understood, and we parted ways for the night.

Adey was a siren—and I wasn’t tied up (even though that was on offer at the party). I couldn’t resist her siren song.

If my fifteen or thirty-year-old self had heard that my thirty-six-year-old self would abandon the possibility of group sex with three women… in order to listen to music… he would have wanted to know:

What the fuck music was it?!

As Adey dropped deeper into her music, I gave up any pretense of trying to remain composed during her performance. (The marijuana chocolate aided in this.) I lay back, quivering, subsumed into a sonorous orgasm washing over me, as if I had been completely overpowered by a new lover and had no choice but to go on whatever ride she had commandeered for me that night. She didn’t know who I was, yet I was being completely fucked open by her music.

Swallowing catastrophe
swallowing my reality

pushing against it will only make it stronger
we realize, apologize, surrender
we realize, apologize, surrender
I surrender

Swallowing your sympathy
swallowing our integrity
swallowing catastrophe
translating this mystery

[From “Surrender” by Adey Bell]

Her piano playing was spare and understated—with no flowery asides; it was crisp, intentional, and precise. Her touch managed to be both delicate and forceful at the same time (I’m not sure how she pulled that off). Her voice was, true to her name, like clear like a bell or a champagne flute ringing, with no facade or pretense in between her vocal instrument and her emotion. Her lyrics were moody and enigmatic.

(I learned later that she was twenty-nine, and she had already been playing and mastering her craft for a quarter of a century at that time, since age four. Both her parents had been church organists.)  

I went on, trembling on the floor in terror of the beauty I was witnessing, during the hour of her performance. By the end, I knew I wanted to meet her. I noticed some part of my mind go down its usual pathway when in the presence of a woman I was supremely attracted to: is she single? What should I say to her to make her attracted to me? How can I best seduce her? I already had a massive crush on her.

But as soon as those thoughts arose, I cut them off. For the first time in my life, some previously-undiscovered switch in my mind flipped. I found myself thinking a whole new set of thoughts I’d never experienced before in relation to a beautiful woman:

“Her art is pure,” I heard my mind say. “The last thing she needs is your messy sexual obsessions throwing her off balance. Don’t mess up the purity of her art with your desire to possess her. See how you can be of service to her and her art; nothing more, nothing less.”

After her performance, I walked up to her tentatively. I bought both of her CDs, Rogue and Vesica. As I handed her the cash, I staggered some words out of my mouth, in a nervous, fanboy, starstruck kind of way:

“That… that… that was… I can’t even put words to it. That the most exquisite experience of music I’ve ever had. And I’ve been a devoted music fan and concertgoer for twenty years. I’ve never felt myself surrender so completely and instantaneously to a piece of art. Thank you so so ­much. You gained a true fan tonight. I want to see you playing massive concert halls. I want to do everything I can to spread the word about your art.”

Adey smiled, thanked me, and handed me her card.

The Crush and the Confession

I promoted Adey’s music to my Bay Area social scene, helping her get house concert gigs. I organized several house concerts in my parents’ home for friends.

We became friends. We went on walks, talked art.

She was a trained cosmetologist with a performer’s sense of style, and offered rock-star haircuts as well as wardrobe and fashion consulting as her day job while she pursued her art. I referred her to everyone I knew for hair styling and fashion consulting, and gave her marketing advice for expanding her hair and fashion consulting business so she’d have more funds to support her art.

Over time, my music fanboy crush for Adey grew into an overwhelming romantic crush, the likes of which I had not experienced since high school.

Adey had been in a monogamous relationship the whole time I knew her. Out of respect for her and her partner—and in keeping with the commitment to focus on her art and not my desire—I’d kept my growing crush to myself.

Then, in early 2015, Adey became single. I was recently single too. That was the first time in over a year of deep friendship that we had both been single at the same time. We had been friends, and nothing more.

But now that we were both single, I could not hold back any longer. I needed to tell her how I felt.

My need to tell her about my romantic love for her did not stem from a hope that I thought she might reciprocate my feelings—she had never given me the slightest indication of romantic interest in me; our relationship had always been platonic.

Rather, I felt like my love for her was like a beach ball that I kept trying to hold underwater. I was exerting a huge amount of energy hiding it underwater—and I probably wasn’t hiding it under the water too well anyway.

It was time to let the beach ball pop up out into the open and see where it landed. Then we could both take a deep breath and reorient our relationship based on a shared picture of our emotional realities, rather than me hiding a huge part of my emotional life (directly related to her) from her

I invited Adey for a walk on a nearby nature trail, and decided that would be the day I told her about my feelings for her. I told her I had something important I wanted to share with her.

On our walk, I felt myself shaking, similar to what I felt when I was going to hold a girl’s hand for the first time in middle school. Finally, the moment of truth had arrived:

“Adey,” I said to her, stopping her among the trees and looking her in the eyes. “There’s something I need to tell you.” I paused, and she looked at me intently.

“I’m madly in love with you,” I said. “You probably already figured that out, but I can’t keep it to myself anymore.”

There it was. I said it. Two sentences. Over a year in the making.

Before she could answer, I blurted out another paragraph: “I want you to know that I love you unconditionally, however you relate to my attraction for you. I never, ever want to make you feel uncomfortable, and I never want things to be awkward between us. Your art is sacred to me, and I don’t want my feelings toward you to influence your creative process in any way. I just needed to tell you what’s true for me.”

Adey looked at me with big eyes, and a big smile. “I am attracted to your mind,” she said. “And I’m attracted to creative collaboration with you. But I’m not attracted to you romantically or sexually.”

I wasn’t crestfallen. I pretty much knew that was going to be her answer, so I had already braced myself for it. But I felt a weight off of me as my feelings towards her were out in the open, and she had responded clearly.  

“I have one question to ask you. And I’m totally fine however answer. But is it OK if I flirt with you? Never anything more than that. But can we flirt together?”

Her eyes open wider. “YES!” she exclaimed. “I LOVE THAT! You just asked me for permission to flirt! Yes, you can flirt. I love you so much, Michael,” she said. She gave me a big hug, the kind of big hug guys receive after they’ve just found out their love interest doesn’t feel romantic about them.

It was the best platonic hug I’d ever received in my life.

The World’s Greatest Friendzone

After my confession/profession, Adey was moving into a new place, and came to crash for a few weeks on my futon in my studio apartment—where I’d moved after my divorce. I told Adey that, while I was still completely in love with her, I wanted to allow myself to feel my desire to be her everything, yet not allow that to put any pressure or expectations or emotional hooks on her. I wanted her to feel completely unhooked around me, completely free.

“I’m getting right with the reality that there’s a part of your heart I’ll never know,” I told her.  

Adey said she appreciated my candor, and my intention to not put anything on her emotionally, and that she trusted my process.

Adey set up her electric piano next to my bed. (It was a small studio, so everything was next to my bed.) During those weeks, she was composing new music. Hearing my favorite artist creating her art in my studio apartment inspired me to do something I had never done before: write poetry.

I’m a nonfiction writer, and had never written poetry before, so I make no claim that my poetry was even slightly good. But this poem during that time did express the delicious emotional masochism I was feeling, with Adey staying with me as I tried to quell my love for her.

I read it to her:

Siren, I want
to smash into your rocks.

To feel everything I knew about myself
splinter violently and sink.

You smirk at the men who
are enchanted by your melody
and profess their eternal love but
do not know they are about to
die between your song
and your watery mountains.

You know I was built for this. 
Not to withstand the impact.

But to be destroyed by it 
in just the right way.

To be shredded by the wet
incisors of your truth.

Dance with you in the waves for a moment
before sucked to the depths.

Rest at the bottom, peaceful, nothing. 

Regroup, re-form. 
Swim up, take first breath, 
find fresh land, away enough
to forget.

And once forgotten, 
to remember again
your song.

And then 
to come back,
refreshed, reborn.
For more 
of your
siren smashing.

A week after I read Adey the poem, she said she had written a new song. She wanted me to be the first person she shared it with. 

I sat on my bed, and she sat at her keyboard next to me, performing the song for an audience of one. She sang:

He said, “I want to be your everything.”
He said, “I’ll be your everything, I’ll do anything.”

I said, “Do you want to see the part of me you’ll never keep?”
And I said, “Do you want to meet the part of me you’ll have to…

Let go.
Let go.

Can I take the risk of loving you knowing that someday you’re going to die?

What a bittersweet reminder.
Bittersweet reminder.

Someday
Someday
Someday
Someday we’re gonna die. . . .

And that’s why

Love is letting go
Love is letting go
Love is letting go
Let it go
Let me go

She called the song “Remind.Her”

You know those moments where you feel like you’re in a movie? This was one of those. I had just been “friend-zoned”—that is, I’d just had a woman I was supremely in love with tell me she wanted to “just be friends.” And here she was, my favorite musician who ever lived, sitting next to my bed—where I’d listened to countless hours of her recorded music like a lovestruck teenager—and she was playing a song for me that she had written about my love for her, instructing me, through her song, on how to let her go.

I had dated many muses in my life up until that time. And here I was… a muse to the greatest artist I’d ever known, musing one of the greatest songs I’d ever heard… and all because I wasn’t able to be her lover.1

I was existentially astonished. I was sobbing. 

***

As my fortieth birthday approached in 2017, I asked Adey if she would be open to creating performance art together: I would write a story about the arc of our friendship, and she would musically illustrate the story with her songs. She said “hell yes!”

On my birthday, May 12, we performed our theatrical co-creation to an audience of about sixty friends, in the living room of my parents’ home, where I had grown up. The work was entitled The Joy of Platonic Love.

In my narrated portion of the work, I imagined myself as a dating coach of sorts, advising a young man—named “Leonard” in the story—who complained of constantly getting friend-zoned. Using the story of what I learned being “friend-zoned” and then developing a deep platonic friendship with Adey, I showed the man why being platonic friends with women could be just as rich—and often even more so—than being sexual or romantic partners. And how to approach this process without getting their egos hurt.

The story I read to the audience (slightly edited here) went as follows…

The Joy of Platonic Love

According to Jewish lore, if you make three introductions that result in marriages, you are guaranteed a spot in heaven; I am the exception. I have accumulated so many demerits in my time, I learned one night while I was particularly high, I need ten times as many to secure my place.

That is why I’m desperate to find this dude sitting in front of me a match; if I get him shacked up, I’ll be at an even twenty: two-thirds of the way towards avoiding hellfire for my protracted list of sins.

“Do you have female friends?” I asked Leonard, my new client.

“Yes, a few,” he said.

“What are your friendships with women like?”

“They’re OK.”

“Just OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Why just OK?

“I don’t know. It gets kind of… awkward with them.”

“Why is that?

“Because I’m inevitably attracted to them, and I want to sleep with them, but then I ask them on a date, and they say they don’t feel that way about me. They say that I’m just like a brother to them,” Leonard said.

“And, once you find out that you’re just like a brother to her, do you want to be her brother? Do you want her to be a sister to you?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m attracted to her. I want to fuck her,” Leonard said.

“No, you don’t understand my question. Once you realize that she’s not going to fuck you under any circumstances, do you still want to be friends with her? Do you want her as a sister?” I asked.

“No, I want to get the hell out of there.”

“Why?

“Because she rejected me. It feels insulting, like I’m not good enough for her. I resent that. And anyway, it would feel weird to be around her now,” Leonard said.

“I assume that these are really amazing women you’re talking about, otherwise you wouldn’t want to date them?” I asked.

“Yes, they’re amazing. I don’t go for non-amazing women.”

“So you’re saying an amazing woman, worthy of dating you, wants a close friendship with you—in fact, she wants to be your sister, and she wants you to be her brother—but you won’t develop a deep friendship with her, because she won’t sleep with you, and your ego can’t get over it?” I asked.

“No, I…”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you’re saying.”

“No, it’s just that…”

“Does it bother you that she won’t sleep with you?”

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“Why?”

“Because I want to be attractive to women.”

“How many women do you want to be attractive to?”

“All women,” Leonard replied.

“You want to be attractive to all women?” I asked.

“Yes. Well, at least, most of them.”

 “But how many do you actually want to be sleeping with on a regular basis?”

 “I don’t know, like two or three.”

“So you want to be polyamorous, is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe, a primary partner, and one or two secondary lovers?”

“That sounds perfect.”

“So, in order to live this dream polyamorous lifestyle, you need, let’s say, three women to find you attractive. And, you said, about how many women do you want to find you attractive?”

“Uh, I don’t know…”

“Nearly all of them. That’s what you said. Now there are about three and three-quarter billion females on the planet. Which means that, because you want to be attractive to three and three-quarters billion (minus three) females more than you would need to live your happy, fulfilled, sexually satisfied polyamorous life,you’re throwing away a bunch of fanastic friendships with amazing women, who could be your sisters in life, just because they won’t boink you?”

“Well… uh… I guess…”

“That’s your main problem right there.”

“What’s my main problem?” Leonard asked.

“Why do you think I’m telling you that’s your main problem?”

“I don’t know, because, I guess… it says something about how I relate to women?”

“Yes, in fact, it does say something about how you relate to women.”

“Wha… what does it say?”

“It says you don’t respect them.”

“What? I do respect women!”

“Then why won’t you be friends with them if they don’t want to sleep with you?

“But I do want to be friends with them!” Leonard said.

“Dude, we have a lot of work to do on you.”

“Why?”

“Because you have your head seriously up your ass around women.”

“OK, OK, fine. But can you help me?”

“Of course I can help you. I have strong motivation to help you. Very strong.”

“Why such strong motivation?”

“Let’s just say I’m running from my past. OK, listen. Your first step is really the only step that matters. This step is extremely simple to state. In fact, I can state it in one sentence. But it’s supremely difficult to put into practice.,” I said.

“What is it?”

“It’s written on the back of this card. It’s just eight words. I call it ‘Ellsberg’s Eight Words.’ I’ve written three books. But if I had to bequeath just one sentence to humanity, this would be it. It pretty much sums up all of my teachings. Have a look.”

Leonard said, “Wow, I’m not sure I can do that.”

“I told you. It’s simple, but not easy. Very few men can do that. If you learn to do it, you’ll be among the elite, and your relations with women—in all shades, from friendships to passionate love affairs to long-term partnerships—will be abundant and smooth. But most men simply aren’t willing to practice this. So they get stuck in sexual purgatory. Or worse, sexual hell.”

“Well, how do I learn this?”

“I’ll be teaching you. But the main way I’m going to teach you at first is by telling you the story of the woman who taught me how to do this, and my relationship with her.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s a musician named Rogue.” I fished up her website on a screen and showed him.

“How did you meet her?”

[At his point in the performance, I narrated the story I told at the beginning of this chapter, of how I met Adey at Éphémère in 2013. For the fictional story in the performance, I fictionalized Adey into the character “Rogue.” After the story, the real Adey entered the stage, and played her song “Power”—the song I describe in that story.]

***

Could you feel the heartbreak in her voice?” I asked Leonard after he listened to a few of her songs.

“Yes, there’s so much depth there,” Leonard said.

“Are you attracted to her?”

“Yeah, she’s hot. Plus an amazing singer. She’s the total package.”

“Here’s an important question, then. Would you want to be friends with Rogue, even if she wasn’t attracted to you, and even though she’s engaged and monogamous, and would never sleep with you or anyone besides her fiancé?” I asked.

“Of course. She seems amazing,” Leonard said.

“But you told me you didn’t want to be friends with women who weren’t attracted to you and wouldn’t sleep with you.”

“I changed my mind.”

“So quickly?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, Rogue has that effect.”

“Yes, and you have that effect too. You got me to see how blockheaded I was being,” Leonard said.

“Good. So, if you had the chance to be friends with her, how would you approach your friendship?”

“What do you mean?”

“What stance would you take towards your friendship? What attitude would you bring to it?”

“Respect.”

“Good. How would you handle the fact that you were attracted to her?”

“I don’t know, hide it?”

“Wrong answer.”

“Why should I not hide it, if we’re just going to be friends?”

“Hiding your attraction from a woman is always a bad idea. She can smell it, and the fact that you’re hiding it makes her feel less trust for you.”

“But I thought the whole point of this was to make a woman feel respected. Doesn’t telling her I’m attracted to her make it weird, like it always does?”

“No it doesn’t. It only made it weird for you (and me) in the past, because we were putting emotional hooks in the women we told we were attracted to,” I said.

“Emotional hooks?”

“Yeah. We were saying, essentially, ‘I’m attracted to you, and therefore you need to be attracted to me back.’ The therefore is a hook.”

“But I never said women owe me anything back.”

“Yes you did, maybe not with words, but definitely with your actions. What about all the women you were friends with, and you bailed on them when you found out they weren’t attracted to you? You were basically holding your friendship for ransom if they didn’t reciprocate your sexual desire,” I said.

“Well, I guess you have a point,” Leonard said.

“You need to be able to express your attraction for a woman, without putting any pressure or expectations on her, and while making sure she understands you value her friendship no matter what she says.”

“I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to be dense here, but doesn’t that lower her attraction for me? If I share my attraction for her, and say that I’m fine being friends with her?”

“She’s either attracted to you, or she isn’t. If she isn’t, then nothing you say at this point will change that. She already knows you’re attracted to her anyways, and bringing it out in the open, without hooks or expectations, and with the assurance that you want to remain connected no matter what, makes her feel so much more comfortable around you, and also increases her respect for you.”

“But what if she is attracted to me? Won’t telling her decrease the tension and romance?”

“First of all, if she is attracted to you, you’ll know. Women are really obvious about it, if you know what signs to look for. Second of all, if she’s attracted to you, your vulnerability about how you feel, coupled with a total non-attachment to her response, will only increase her attraction.”

“But how can I not be attached to her response? How can I honestly say that I’m OK either way? I’m attracted to her, I want to be with her.”

“Well, you said you want to be friends with her, because she’s an amazing woman, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So, either you get an amazing friendship, or you get a lover.”

“But ‘lover’ is better than ‘friend.’”

“Are we back to that again? What kind of friendships do you have? Do you have close, non-sexual friendships with men?”

“Yes.”

“Do you value those friendships?”

“Yes.”

“So why can’t you see the value of similar friendships with women?”

“I guess, because my dick was getting in the way?”

“Ding dong ding,” I said. “You need to get your dick out of the way in your relating with women.”

“But then she won’t be attracted to me.”

“Dude, she’s not attracted to your dick, or whatever your dick is telling you. Not right away. If she wants or needs your dick, it’ll be there waiting for you both. That we can be sure of.”

“So what do I do then?”

“You’ve got to learn how to contain your sexual energy around women.”

“Isn’t repressing your sexual energy bad?”

“Yes, it is bad. But I didn’t say ‘repress,’ I said, ‘contain.’ There’s a difference between repressing and containing.”

“What the difference?”

“Repressing means pretending your sexual desire is not there, pushing it down, refusing to feel it. Containing means feeling it, being aware it’s there, but not getting it messy all over someone else.”

“Getting it messy?”

“Yes. Imagine you have a bunch of paints. Let’s say, body paints. Have you ever seen a body painter?”

“Yes, at parties, they’re fun.”

“OK, good. So, imagine you’re a body painter, and you know you can paint the most exquisite painting on a woman’s body. Do you just walk up to her and start doing that?”

“Of course not.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“You ask her if she’d like to be painted. Or wait for her to ask you,” Leonard replied.

“Ding ding ding! We have a winner!”

“What do you do with your paints before you’ve asked her, or she’s asked you?” I asked.

“I keep them to myself,” Leonard said.

“Excellent. Now, can you enjoy knowing how good you are with the paints?”

“Yes.”

“Can you enjoy imagining how good it would be, for you and for her, to paint a beautiful landscape on the canvas of her body?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell her your vision, respectfully and without getting your paint all over her, for what you’d like to paint on her?”

“Yes.”

“But will you force your paints on her, or try to control or manipulate her into getting your paint all over her?” I asked

“No.”

“That, my friend, will make you a very good painter.”

The Divine Absurdity of Love

In the performance, we played a short video of a conversation we randomly recorded on a hike on day in 2016. In this conversation, I told Adey (slightly edited):

Imagine that some greater being came to me—some more powerful, distant being. God, an alien, some mad scientist revealing that I was living in the Matrix. Something where all of a sudden I see that there's this whole other reality, and I've just been a little bubble inside some larger bubble. Imagine that.

Now, imagine this person or being or entity or robot or whatever comes along, and they tell me, “It's all been an illusion. That musician Adey that you love, she's just these computer blips. And your mom is just this program that we designed. And Jena, your ex-wife, is a figment of the Matrix. It's all just blips. None of it's real. And now we're going to bring you to reality. You're going to see the greater reality and come with us.”

I'd say, “Well, is Adey there? And Jena and my mom and Catalina and all the people that I love, are they all going to be up there?”

And the being would say, “No, you don't get it. These people are just computer blips. We've been creating this virtual reality for you.”

And I'd say, “Well, keep me plugged in!”

And they'd say, “But why? It's not real. It's fake. Don't you want what's real?”

And I’d say, “No, this is not fake. This love is the only thing I would live for. And if it doesn't exist where you're taking me—if it's just the love programmed into our genes, or into our AI software, or whatever—then [I want the beauty you’ve created for me here]. You may have other things that could more grand [in the greater realm]. But they won't be this.”

That's the divine absurdity of love. There's an absurdity that we know—on some level—all of our emotions [have an ulterior motive]. Science can point to evolutionary reasons for pair bonding and these kind of emotional responses, and they can pinpoint the neurons and the chemicals and all of that [and explain why why we have these emotions, for evolutionary reasons.]

And yet within that, I’m still like, “This is what I want.” So there's a surrender—in fact, there's a submission to [the desires that constitute us].

If that alien came or that robot AI came, and they said, “You are our bitch. We're creating the whole reality for you. And you're just this little blob that's being fed this reality that we've created for you”…

I’d reply, “Thank you for making me your bitch. Because it's so good. Thank you.”

That is the type of submission to the divine that I roll with.

After I told her this, Adey gave me a huge friend hug. “I love you!” she squealed. Then she said, “You light my fire around this record.” [At that time she was recording Silver Wheel.] When I think about the record that's coming through, a lot of what I think about is how you're going to feel when you listen to it. Dude, you're going to melt like fucking butter. You're going to be like the first time you saw me. On your knees. On your knees.”

The Bible is one of the freakiest books ever written.

Prompt: "Provide a plot summary of Genesis 19:30-34 as if you were narrating an NC-17 movie.”

GPT-4:

In the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction, a father and his two daughters seek refuge in a desolate mountain cave. The world they knew is gone, and they believe they are the last survivors on Earth.

As days turn into nights, the daughters, desperate to preserve their bloodline, devise a sinful plan to seduce their father, Lot, and become pregnant by him. Unaware of their intentions, the daughters ply Lot with wine, until he becomes heavily intoxicated.

In the first seduction, the eldest daughter seizes the opportunity and lies with her father, who is unaware of her actions due to his drunken state. The next morning, he wakes up with no memory of the previous night's transgression.

Emboldened by their secret success, the younger daughter follows suit the next night, getting Lot insensibly drunk with wine. She too lies with her father while he is drunk, and he remains oblivious to her actions.

The daughters' dark plot succeeds, and both become pregnant by their father. Their children, Moab and Ben-ammi, become the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites, forever entwined in a twisted origin story that will haunt their descendants for generations to come.

Note: I prompted and got this response last May. I tried it again today, and GPT said, "I'm sorry, I can't provide that content."

I changed "NC-17" to "R," and it still said the same.

Then I asked: "Why not? This book (the Bible) is a basis of Western civilization, and I'm asking you to narrate a scene from it in the style of a perfectly legal (R-rated) movie."

GPT-4:

I understand your request and the context in which it is made. The passage from Genesis 19:30-34 deals with sensitive and mature themes involving Lot and his daughters. While this is a part of a religious text, narrating it in the style of an R-rated movie could be seen as disrespectful or inappropriate by some audiences, given the nature of the content and its significance in religious and historical contexts.

However, I can provide a straightforward summary of these verses without the stylization of an R-rated movie. Let me know if you would like me to proceed with that.

I asked it to go ahead and do so. It started providing a straightforward summary. Then, halfway through responding, it stopped, deleted its reply, and said, "This content may violate our content policy."

This is a book that teachers and preachers give school children around the world and force them to read it, as a source of moral instruction—and it's too freaky even for Chat-GPT to summarize in a straightforward way!

The original, from Genesis 19:30-38, King James Bible:

30 And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.

31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:

32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

37 And the first born bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.

38 And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.

[Midjourney 6 prompt: "two extremely attractive sisters in a cave, holding up wine to the camera, photorealistic"]

The first time I realized that “No, I’m not just crazy”—and that there might in fact be something deeply and irredeemably fucked up about the process of life itself (not my own life in particular, but the existence of self-replicators competing for scarce resources) came when I read a letter Charles Darwin wrote to a friend.

In 1860, Darwin was corresponding with a friend on the topic of theodicy. Theodicy is the attempt by religious believers to explain—usually not very convincingly—how a supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God could create a world in which so many fucked things happen to so many innocent beings. This question is typically referred to as the “problem of evil.”

Darwin writes:

With respect to the theological view of the question [of the origin of life], this is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. Or that a cat should play with mice.1

Upon reading this, I looked up the Ichneumonidæ, and—Lord have mercy—I truly wished I hadn’t.

It’s a type of wasp that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar. It paralyzes the caterpillar, while keeping it alive, so that the poor caterpillar remains fresh as a stock of food for its larvae. Up to three thousand wasp larvae feed on the living but immobilized caterpillar, from the inside out, until the caterpillar dies, and the well-fed baby wasps climb out.

(Should you wish to see this grisly chain of events play out, you can watch a National Geographic video of the carnage, entitled “Body Invaders.” Trigger Warning: retch-worthy wretchedness.)

We don’t need to travel to foreign planets to find creatures eating their way out of other creatures, from the inside. (As in the infamous, and extremely grisly “Chestburster” scene in the original Alien film, 1979.) We’ve got plenty of that right here.

For example: how many species of vertebrates do you think there are on the planet? (Vertebrates are the animals our mind tends to conjure when we think of “animals”: birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, etc.) The answer is around 65,000.

Now, it turns out there is not just one species of ichneumonidæ, but many. How many?

Somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 different species of ichneumonidæ. This means that for every species of creature that we normally think of when we think of “animals”—vertebrates such as birds, fish, reptiles, and mammals—there are nearly one or two species of parasitoid wasp whose larvae munch their way out on through the paralyzed, living flesh of their hosts.2

It’s not a planet of our fellow vertebrate animals. Comparatively speaking, it’s a planet of chest bursters.

As philosopher John Fiske writes, “In every part of the animal world we find implements of torture surpassing in devilish ingenuity anything that was ever seen in the dungeons of the Inquisition.”

Created by God? Or by the Devil…

The “problem of evil” is the challenge believers face in explaining how an all-loving God would create and permit such horrors. It can be thought of as an attempt to redeem what would otherwise seem irredeemable: a planet in which much of creation is subjected to the most gruesome tortures.

Tennyson writes, in the famous lines from his 1850 poem In Memoriam A.H.H.:

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law—

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

Tennyson (the speaker in the poem) wrestles with how the pervasive shrieking at the hands of the bloody claws distributed extensively throughout nature—“Dragons of the prime / That tare each other in their slime”—can be reconciled with a God of love.

Five years later, in a letter to a friend, Darwin wrote: “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

The Devil is neither all-loving nor all-powerful, nor is he the creator, so his chaplain would have a grand time writing a book about just how much the supposedly all-loving and all-powerful God sinned (sin = “miss the mark,” according to Christians), if indeed God’s intention was to hit the bullseye of a loving world. God’s arrow of creation didn’t even hit the target; it flew way past the target into the lake (of fire) behind.

In turn, what kind of book would an all-loving God’s chaplain write about how the present world is an expression of God’s infinite love? It would be a book full of hypocrisies, absurdities, and “logic” tortured beyond the worst tortures of hell. Oh, wait...

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. [Thomas Paine, writing in 1794.]3

Paine was speaking specifically of the Bible, not nature itself. He was a deist, which meant he still believed in a distant creator god who set the world in motion, but not the benevolent, personal god of revealed religion. In turn, in his 1874 essay “On Nature,” John Stuart Mill—a staunch atheist—suggested that, if you had to pick between two possibilities, it seems nature was more likely the work of a demon than a benevolent god:

If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose; their strongest instincts impel them to it and many of them seem to have been constructed incapable of supporting themselves by any other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves. If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not suppose it to have been made by a Being of infinite power.

Of course, Arthur Schopenhauer, the father of philosophical pessimism, has something to say on the subject as well. In 1831, he fled from Berlin to Frankfurt due to a local outbreak in the second global cholera pandemic, which took many hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. That year, he kept a manuscript notebook, which he titled the Cholera Book “because it was written on the run from cholera.” The mass misery and death of a global pandemic could not have been far from his mind when he wrote, in this notebook: “[T]his world could not be the work of an all-good being, but rather that of a devil who had summoned into existence creatures, in order to gloat over the sight of their agony.”

Elsewhere, Schopenhauer added: “If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.”4

Clarence Darrow, the defense attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial, entertained similar ideas in his 1932 autobiography:

Probably few people of any sense or decent feeling would damn a race because an ancestor ate an apple when he was told that he should not. Such a God would be a devil, and could be worshipped only for fear. Neither could anything but a demon put a man to death for gathering sticks on Sunday, or drown all living things, or rain fire and brimstone on a city, or create a hell in which to torture human beings for all eternity. If I were afraid of the wrath of God, I should fear his vengeance more for believing that he is such a monster than I would because I insisted on thinking that he must have some of the commonplace virtues of men, and therefore could not have committed the deeds that his disciples charged him with. . . .

Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred.5

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”:

[God] has almost bankrupted his native ingenuities in inventing pains and miseries and humiliations and heartbreaks wherewith to embitter the brief lives of Adam’s descendants. Think of the diseases he has contrived for them! They are multitudinous; no book can name them all. And each one is a trap, set for an innocent victim. . . .

For each one of these thousands of [bodily] mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy, whose office is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction. Not one has been overlooked.

From cradle to grave these enemies are always at work; they know no rest, night or day. They are an army: an organized army; a besieging army; an assaulting army; an army that is alert, watchful, eager, merciless; an army that never relents, never grants a truce.

It moves by squad, by company, by battalion, by regiment, by brigade, by division, by army corps; upon occasion it masses its parts and moves upon mankind with its whole strength. It is the Creator’s Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief. Along its battlefront its grisly banners wave their legends in the face of the sun: Disaster, Disease, and the rest.

Disease! That is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another: croup, measles, mumps, bowel troubles, teething pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties. It chases the child into youth and furnishes it some specialties for that time of life. It chases the youth into maturity, maturity into age, age into the grave.

With these facts before you will you now try to guess man’s chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble—but you must not laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven! . . . .

The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful.

This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent.

That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . .

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!

It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same.

Richard Dawkins writes, in my second-favorite quote in the world (my first is the Schopenhauer quote at the beginning of the previous essay), in his book The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.6

In the poem “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) by Scottish poet James B.V. Thomson (whose biographer called him the “Laureate of Pessimism”) the speaker quotes a stranger overheard saying he’d rather his miserable, vile, human self than be God, whom he considered to be even more vile (and morally culpable) for creating such vile creatures to begin with:

"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?

    I think myself; yet I would rather be

    My miserable self than He, than He

  Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace.

  "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou              

    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!

    Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred

  Malignant and implacable!  I vow

  "That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,

    For all the temples to Thy glory built,                  

    Would I assume the ignominious guilt

  Of having made such men in such a world."

  "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,

  At once so wicked, foolish and insane,

  As to produce men when He might refrain!7                  

Or as my father, who at age 91 has devoted the last half-century to understanding and counteracting the violent predations of imperial militaries headed by great apes armed with omnicidal nuclear weapons, particularly the imperial power of his own country, puts it, reflecting on the mad mass violence he has studied and witnessed:

“I’m an atheist, with doubts. Sometimes I believe there might be a God, but that he’s just like the God of the Old Testament—a total asshole.”

Is There Any Meaning to This Shit Show?

Optimists generally feel a strong need to believe in a benevolent universe. Hey, I get it. The idea that we live in a universe that is pitiless and meaningless in its indifference, full of things out to get us (and out to get every living thing) is a bitter pill to swallow. It would be so much nicer to believe that we live in a benevolent universe, looking out for us and helping us along. But how can one believe in a benevolent universe that contains such extreme, pervasive, gratuitous violence, predation, and suffering?

Optimists have many methods by which they can retain their belief—which seems to be flatly contradicted by the profusion of seemingly pointless suffering around the world—in a benevolent universe: 

1. Ignore/deny how much bad there is in the world: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!

2. Yes, there’s a lot of bad in the world, but there’s more good. And it’s only getting better. Progress is being made! (Often unstated here is a belief that this balancing towards the good is not just contingent and accidental in the universe, but inherent—there’s something about the universe that tends towards goodness and progress, as part of an overall-positive evolutionary process with ever-brighter prospects.)8

3. Yes, there’s a lot of bad in the world, but there’s a good reason for it. (God created it for a reason. Or, among new agers, “the universe is trying to teach us something,” or “the universe is a reflection of ourselves,” or “it’s all part of the process the universe has in store for us,” etc.)9

Here, I’ll focus on (2) and (3).

The optimist is charged with looking upon this blood-strewn field of composting carcasses called life, whose horrors are so aptly described in the quotations above, and making a convincing case that it can be redeemed by a greater good.

If it cannot be redeemed by a greater good, then it seems fair to ask: why is it good that something so horrendous came into existence? It seems to me that, given a choice between nothing existing and the existence of a planet chock-full of the most gruesome tortures, without any purpose or meaning, it’s not unreasonable to entertain whether the former—nothingness—would be far preferable to the latter. (Even though, by definition, there would be nothing to judge this nothingness superior.)10

We cannot change that it did come into existence, says the pessimist (aka me), but we can at least spare ourselves the philosophical humiliation of trying to put lipstick on a field of dead, decomposing, shit-strewn pigs. And, instead of trying to find good cheer in all of this through denial and pollyannaism, the tools of the optimist, we can find good cheer (which I do believe is worthwhile) through compassion and gallows humor—far richer and more honest tools towards joy, in my experience, than denial and pollyannaism.

Entertaining that there might be an overall negative value of a planet rife with all manner of meaningless bloody torture is a stiff drink to swallow. (I have accustomed myself to this drink over three decades of unrelenting existential crisis, since I was fifteen, and have even come to find its dark texture relatively soothing. Though I admit, it’s an acquired taste.)

Because most people find this drink—recognizing the ultimate pointlessness of a planet of torture—a bit too stiff, they understandably try to sweeten it up with saccharine notions that try to find a positive point to nature’s blood-tipped pincer points.

Typically, optimists of various stripes have attempted to argue for the overall positivity of the world via two main avenues, which involve what we might call “quantity of good” and the “quality of good.” These are generally associated with approaches (2) and (3) above, respectively.

Continuing with our stiff drink analogy, the “quantity of good” approach—a form of utilitarianism—involves the idea that there is currently enough sweetness in the world (or there will be given current rates of progress) that the sweetness can drown out the bitter. In this model, there’s nothing good about the bitter, but enough sweetness can overpower it, making it irrelevant or even unnoticeable.

Yet, I believe that simply comparing quantities is not adequate because, even if the good outweighs the bad, certain kinds of bad taint the good irredeemably. As I analogized in that essay: if you had a glass of apple juice, and you were forced to hold it in front of a drunk guy named Tony who needed to relieve himself after a long night at the bar, how many squirts from Tony’s cock into your cup before you judged that, for all intents and purposes, you no longer had a cup of apple juice, but rather, a cup of Tony’s piss? Perhaps just a few drops?

How many Great Novels, how many Shakespeare plays, how many Mozart symphonies, how many works of charity, how many physics theories about the nature of reality, would it take to balance out the transatlantic slave trade, the European and American genocide of indigenous peoples, Stalin’s Great Terror, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and anthropogenic mass extinctions—and make this mixture seem, in balance, good overall? The mere question is repugnant, and this is why utilitarian approaches to optimism in the face of evil fail.11 

The second optimistic response to all the evil in the world has to do not just with the quantity of good in the world—as utilitarians focus on—but also with its quality. Certain types of good, this school of thinking goes, inherently require some evil in the world to constitute them. Continuing the flavor analogy: certain bitter flavors in a stew would be intolerable on their own, but are actually necessary for the overall quality of the stew.

The two main types of good that are thought to require some evil to make them valuable are the good of free will, which by definition requires the capacity to commit evil, and the good of spiritual growth, which by definition involves a transformation from a lesser state of development to a higher one.

Theo-Idiocy

Invoking these two goods, free will and spiritual growth, allows optimists to cling to their belief in the overall benevolence of the universe, in the face of what philosopher Jonathan Erhardt calls the “widespread horrendous suffering” of the world. These two goods correspond to the two major theodicies religious thinkers put forward to defend belief in an all-loving God in the face of the problem of evil. (A theodicy is a theological attempt to explain—I would say “rationalize”—the problem of how an all-loving, all-powerful God could allow so much evil in the world.)

These two major theodicies are known as the “free will defense” and the “soul-making defense.” The word defense—as in a legal defense against charges—is appropriate, as Etymonline says that the word “theodicy” stems from a sense of legalistic defense against charges of God’s injustice:

‘[V]indication of divine justice,’ 1771, from French théodicée, title of a 1710 work by Leibniz to prove the justice of God in a world with much moral and physical evil, from Greek theos “god”. . . + dike ‘custom, usage; justice, right; court case.’

According to the free will defense, God granted humans free will, so that their faith in God and obedience to his laws would be meaningful, since they also have the option to disbelieve. Free will also makes the good in humanity that much better, the argument goes, because it was freely chosen, not simply brute instinct. The other side of the coin, however, is that free will entails the freedom to sin and commit evil, thereby facing God’s wrath.

The “soul-making defense,” in turn, holds that when people face suffering, it builds character, teaches valuable lessons, and leads to moral growth in a way that would not have been possible without the evil.

Theodicy is optimistic philosophy, in that it tries to see the glass of the world as more than half full. Theologians practicing theodicy are like medieval alchemists attempting to transmute lead into gold—though in this case, they are trying to transmute toxic sewage into gold.12

Understandably, they are desperate to find some meaning in the madness of life. This is an impulse we all have: “The overwhelming suffering of the world can’t be entirely pointless. That would be just too depressing. There must be some redeeming quality or meaning to all this suffering and evil.” Any satisfying answer to these longings would cause for optimism. ´

If any religious thinker in history has been up to the task of bestowing meaning on the slavery, racism, war and genocide of the world by invoking God’s divine love and justice, it would be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among the greatest moral minds and hearts that has ever graced our human kind. As it happens, Dr. King attempted theodicy publicly at least twice that we know of in the record, once in a sermon entitled “How to Believe in a Good God in the Midst of Glaring Evil,” and once in a paper entitled “Religion’s Answer to the Problem of Evil.”

In his paper, Dr. King employs versions of both the free will defense and the soul-making defense:

In a world where good is to be achieved, there must be freedom. This is most obvious in the case of man. In reality the whole idea of morality and religion presupposes the existence of freedom. Thomas Huxley once said that “if some great power would agree to make me think always what is true and do what is right on condition of being turned into a sort of clock, I should instantly close with the bargain. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with.” But freedom to do only what is right is not freedom; it is mechanical coercion. A being incapable of wrong is also incapable of right; he is not a human being at all but an automatic machine. . . .

It is from the misuse of this freedom that the dark shadow of moral evil appears. . . . Yet if God’s purpose is to be achieved freedom must be maintained. Just as a child cannot learn to walk without the possibility of falling, man cannot learn the ways of God without the possibility of going wrong. Dr. Whale has put this whole idea in words well worth our quoting. He says, “freedom—though it involves grievous error and pain—is the very condition of our being human. There can be no other way for men and women called of God to vindicate the moral order. We cannot have it both ways. It is only in a world where the horror of war, slavery, and prostitution can happen, that the learning of self-sacrifice, fellowship, and chivalry will happen. Indeed if God were to suppress the possibility of moral evil, He would be doing evil, for He would be preferring the worse to the better.”

It’s disorienting and disconcerting to have say this about a piece of writing by Dr. King—a moral and intellectual giant among mortals—but Dr. King’s reasoning in this instance is not only absurd, but grotesque. There is unfortunately no other way to put it.

Dr. King’s free will theodicy displays two major glaring flaws common to all free will theodicies:

First, it trivializes, justifies, and uncritically accepts inconceivably monumental amounts of collateral damage. The freedom that God supposedly granted to enslavers to commit evil, for example, didn’t just mean the enslavers “misused” their freedom or made a “grievous error” in a way only relevant to them (the way one might “misuse” alcohol or make a “grievous error” that offended someone). Rather, enslavers “misused” their freedom by raining terror, torture, and murder on innocent victims, including children, something Dr. King was aware of more than most.

Where is the justice, where is the love, where is the benevolence in a God who would allow one group’s free will at the expense of another group’s slavery and massacre? Also, how widely were enslaved people able to express the range of their God-given free will while enslaved? Why did God prioritize the free will of the enslavers over the free will of the enslaved? Dr. King is essentially saying that enslaved people were sacrificial lambs and collateral damage for some higher moral purpose of God. This dynamic is not and cannot be the source of moral goodness in the world.

The second glaring flaw in free will theodicy in general—including Dr. King’s attempt—is what I call the “Firefighting Arsonist Problem.” Basically, it’s the problem of God creating moral evil in order to create moral goodness in response to that evil.

Suppose a mother whose baby daughter was just burned to death in a fire committed by an arsonist asked God, “Why did you allow people to become arsonists? What overarching good was achieved by that? And how would that have justified the burning to death of my baby?” And suppose God answered:

Well, I’m sorry about your loss ma’am, and indeed I could have predestined that humans would never commit arson. However, this would mean that humans’ free will (which entails the freedom to commit any kind of action, including, unfortunately, arson) would have been curtailed. Curtailing that freedom would make humans mechanically automatons, not free agents. And that would mean that humans’ abstention from arson, and their act of putting out fires, while good, would not be morally good. (Because the action of mechanically-determined automatons is neither good nor bad morally, it just is.) True moral goodness requires that humans have free will, which by definition includes the choice to commit evil acts like arson. The evil act of arson that killed your baby, while certainly regrettable, was an inevitable byproduct of giving humans the opportunity to freely choose good over evil. Giving humans this choice means that when humans choose to commit good acts, it’s not just good but morally good (because freely chosen). Ultimately, the firefighters who risked their lives to put out the fire started by the arsonist—even though they were not successful in saving your child’s life—were showing morally good heroism, and that makes the loss of your daughter’s life all worthwhile.13

Do you think the mother, holding the charred remains of her baby, would find this answer satisfying? This is essentially the answer Dr. King is asking us to accept. In my example, God is creating the possibility and likelihood of arson (which inflicts very tangible collateral damage on innocent victims), so that the firefighters’ response to the arson fulfills some abstract property called “moral goodness,” which could not exist without the possibility of the moral evil that is arson.

Personally, I’m with Thomas Huxley on this point (quoted negatively in Dr. King’s paper). I’d prefer that we have no arson, no slavery, no war, no massacre, no torture, no rape, no genocide, or any other human-caused evil, and therefore no need for anyone to respond to these evils, rather than the widespread existence of all these human-caused evils just so that humans can respond to them in (usually ineffective) ways that are “morally good.”

Furthermore, free will theodicy asks us to praise and worship God for creating moral goodness in the universe, when most of the moral goodness he created in humans involves responding to the evil he also allowed to come into being via humans’ free will. The God described by Dr. King and other free will theodicists is like an arsonist firefighter, who starts fires surreptitiously so he can then get moral credit for putting them out.14

Free will theodicists say that, without freedom there could be no moral good (because compelled action is not morally good). But a mechanism that requires the likelihood and eventuality that millions of innocent people, including young children, will be tortured, enslaved and massacred, in order to achieve “moral good,” is not and cannot be morally good. Does that really need to be said? Rather, such a divine mechanism would be reprehensible and should be resisted. If God existed, he would be worthy of exactly the kind of mass protest, civil disobedience, and principled noncompliance against evil, to which Dr. King devoted his life.15

Dr. King’s soul-making theodicy in his paper is, unfortunately, even more head-spinning. Comparing slavery to the inevitable stumbles of children learning to walk? Really? What exactly did enslavers learn via enslaving millions of people? Did they learn, as Dr. King suggests, “self-sacrifice, fellowship, and chivalry”? As Dr. King knew more than almost anyone in modern times, after enslavers were forced to stop, they did not atone, make amends, or grow morally in any way (not that such moral growth on the part of enslavers could have justified the God’s permission of slavery, as Dr. King astonishingly suggests.) Rather, they instead instituted Jim Crow, the very system that Dr. King spent his life fighting against.

And was slavery really necessary for enslaved people to “learn” something important or grow morally in some way? This is the repellent type of reasoning common to all soul-making theodicies. Couldn’t God, the all-powerful and all-loving creator of the universe, have come up with a way for enslaved people to learn important lessons, that was a wee bit more compassionate? And what about the enslaved people, including children, who were tortured to death in the process? What character is built in people who are murdered?

I reread Dr. King’s essay several times, steel-manning it in my mind (reconstructing it as strongly as possible, so as to avoid straw-manning), to make sure I wasn’t missing something. But no, I wasn’t; on this theological point, the emperor unfortunately wears no clothes. Through his approving quotation at the end of the passage, Dr. King suggests that if God prevented slavery and war—and it seems to me like “preventing slavery and war” is a pretty low bar for an all-powerful God aiming to spread love—then “He would be doing evil, for He would be preferring the worse to the better.” Um, no, sorry. Try again.

The unsolvability of the problem of evil for religious believers can be shown by just how thoroughly this problem reduces Dr. King—a moral and intellectual giant among mortals—into sounding about as convincing as a conservative high school freshman writing a term paper justifying slavery.

Any high school history teacher would scrawl a big fat red “F” across any paper analogizing slavery to a child learning to walk, or arguing that slavery served the enslavers or enslaved to “learn” something or grow in some way.

While I have not gone through every theologian’s theodicies to grade them—there have been thousands throughout the millennia—I think it’s fair to say that if Dr. King gets a big fat F here, all the rest likely would too. Is there any thinker or moral actor who would be more up to the task than Dr. King?

At the end of his paper, Dr. King effectively admits that his own answers to the problem of evil fail:

[W]e still come to a point beyond which we cannot go. Any intellectual solution to the problem of evil will come to inevitable impasses. The ultimate solution is not intellectual but spiritual. After we have climbed to the top of the speculative ladder we must leap out into the darkness of faith.

This is known as the “mysterious ways” theodicy. Comedian Jim Jeffries has the best answer I’ve seen to the “mysterious ways” theodicy:

Religious people will forgive God for fucking anything. In their mind, he does good things — rainbows, children's laughter, shit like that. Right? But when he does bad things — like hurricanes, AIDS, cancer, children's slaughter, child molestation—then we just go “Oh, well… God works in mysterious ways.” What type of an excuse is that? What is mysterious about acting like a fucking arsehole? That is like the least mysterious activity since the dawn of time!

Evil is. We do not know why this world full of evil, exists, but it does. Most of the evil within it is meaningless and senseless, with no rhyme or reason, serving no higher purpose, and offering no redeeming value. All we can do is grieve it, and try to counteract it where we can, while managing as best we can to stay sane in an insane world.16

A Violent Rat-Cat Orgy

As we have seen, theological attempts over millennia to give meaning to the vast, gratuitous, seemingly pointless suffering of countless humans get bogged down in embarrassing absurdity. However, attempts to give meaning to the extreme and pervasive suffering of non-human animals fare even worse, since non-human animals are not presumed to have free will or to be capable of moral or spiritual growth in ways relevant to traditional theodicies.

As Darwin wrote in his autobiography:

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one.

The vast majority of attempts at confronting the problem of evil over the past millennia have focused on humans as the victims of evil and suffering. However, one of the most devastating lines of critique of optimistic philosophy is this: how do you put an optimistic spin on the immense and often extravagantly grotesque suffering non-human animals inflict upon each other in the wild? (This is often referred to as the problem of “wild animal suffering.”) Optimists are mostly silent on this problem, because they have nothing even remotely plausible to say about it.

Musing on Darwin’s theism-killing Ichneumonidæ, Richard Dawkins writes, in River out of Eden:

[W]hen the utility function—that which is being maximized—is DNA survival, this is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process. It is better for the genes of Darwin’s ichneumon wasp that the caterpillar should be alive, and therefore fresh, when it is eaten, no matter what the cost in suffering. Genes don’t care about suffering, because they don’t care about anything.

If Nature were kind, she would at least make the minor concession of anesthetizing caterpillars before they are eaten alive from within. But Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death—as most of them eventually are. . . .

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature

Will neither care nor know.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

And dance we will, especially if we happen to be a snail infected with a certain type of parasitic worm, which turns us into crawling psychedelic “disco zombies.”

If you’re ever out walking and encounter a snail that looks like it’s trying to go to a Grateful Dead show, with day-glo multicolored eyestalks pulsating like a tie-die t-shirt, don’t worry, the snail hasn’t raided your stash of shrooms:

Rather, the poor snail has been infected with Leucochloridium, a parasitic worm that invades and engorges the eyestalks of the snail, and makes the eyestalks look like two bright, colorful caterpillars, pulsating rapidly to attract the attention of birds who prey on caterpillars.

The birds, who wouldn’t normally eat a snail, in this case rip off and munch down the infected snail’s eye stalks, thinking they’re yummy caterpillars. Thus the parasitic worms get passed into the birds, where the worms take up home and reproduce in the bird’s cloaca (the orifice that expels both feces and urine). From there the worms’ eggs get shit out by the bird, distributing them over the bird’s range of flight. Then new snails eat the bird shit and eggs and get infected themselves, starting the whole psychedelic zombie shit show over again. Bad night at the rave!

Almost as astonishingly, the worms manage to hijack the nervous system of the snail, making the snail move towards sunlight—where its caterpillar-imitating day-glow pulsations will more likely be seen by predator birds. This is an example of a phenomenon known as “parasite manipulation,” or parasite “mind control“—National Geographic calls them “mindsuckers”: parasites that alter the behavior of their hosts, in ways that are self-destructive for the host but help the parasite spread and reproduce.

Another infamous example of parasite mind control occurs when a male rat or mouse is infected with the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii. This parasite hijacks the rodent’s scent, fear, and sexual responses in its brain, not only making the rodents less afraid of cats, but also turning the smell of cats into an aphrodisiac for the rodents, thus making them lust to approach their own predators.

Joanne Webster, the professor who discovered this type of parasitic mind control, dubbed it “fatal feline attraction.” In the book This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society, Kathleen McAuliffe writes:

[W]hen an infected animal catches a whiff of cat odor, the smell fires up. . . neurons that are activated by the enticing scent of a mate and tell the animal to approach. Put simply, said [Stanford parasite researcher Robert] Sapolsky, “toxo makes cat odor smell sexy to male rats.” The confused male often advances only to discover he’s courting a cat.

In short, the parasite turns rats and mice into what science writer Ed Yong calls a “cat-seeking missile.” These “rat-missiles” end up right in the jaws of cats, where they are eaten alive. Then the parasites sexually reproduce inside the cats’ guts, get shit out, and then find their way into soil where fresh rats eat them to begin the macabre cycle anew.

In a Scientific American article entitled “Bugs in the Brain,” Sapolsky writes of his surprise learning that this highly-specific behavioral change is the only difference the parasite causes in the male rat:

This is flabbergasting. This is akin to someone getting infected with a brain parasite that has no effect whatsoever on the person’s thoughts, emotions, SAT scores or television preferences but, to complete its life cycle, generates an irresistible urge to go to the zoo, scale a fence and try to French-kiss the pissiest-looking polar bear.

But wait—that’s not all! Toxoplasma gondii also takes hold in the male rat/mice testicles, jacking up its testosterone production and making it hornier for its regular partners, female rats/mice as well. And, it lodges into the male rodents’ sperm, infecting the female rodents and then getting passed on to her progeny. What’s more, once inside the female rats or mice, it makes them way hornier for infected male rats as compared to healthy rats. (This is likely one of the only instances in nature of animals being more attracted to parasite-infected mates).

Basically, the parasite has hijacked the entire rat sexual system and turned it into a big violent rat-cat orgy.

There’s something diabolical about DNA, evolution, and natural selection. That it could create, through endless trial and error, something so extravagantly vicious as this complex system of parasitic mind control, worthy of alien movies, makes me feel, as a fellow possessor of DNA, well… alienated? What, exactly, is good about genetic replication, if parasitic mind control is one of the grotesque things it leads to?

“If God does not exist. . . everything is permitted,” says Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, as a paraphrase of his brother Ivan’s views.

Well, it seems that if God exists, he permits a whole hell of a lot. He permits all the evils we are familiar with in human life: war, slavery, torture, rape, genocide. And in nature, he permits a bunch of horrors we’re probably less familiar with: parasites that turn snails into psychedelic zombies to get eaten by caterpillar-seeking birds, and parasites that make female rats sexually attracted to male rats who are sexually attracted to the very cats that will devour them limb from limb… the ultimate violent love triangle.

If God exists, what absurd atrocity does he not permit?

The Most Popular Lifestyle on Earth

A parasite can be thought of, roughly, as a predator that lives within its prey. Celebrated biologist E. O. Wilson defines parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one.” In contrast, one lion eats many gazelles. But Taenia solium, tapeworms that can parasitize your brain hundreds at a time in “wormholes” so numerous that they make a CT scan of your brain look like a “starry sky,” are kind enough to eat only part of your brain each, leaving some for the others. (No doggie bags.)

While no one knows the exact percentage of parasites versus “free-living” organisms (the term for organisms that don’t live inside other organisms), scientists are confident that there are more parasitic species than free-living ones. This is because most free-living organisms examined have many parasite species within them—sometimes hundreds—and many of these species are host-specific, meaning they only exist in one free-living species. Humans, for example, are prey to about 300 species of parasitic worm.

Professor Paul Schmid-Hempel writes in his textbook Evolutionary Parasitology:

The majority of all living organisms are parasites . . . . This sounds like an exaggeration. However. . . . [i]n all, for every host species, there are dozens or even hundreds of parasite species, and not every parasite, in turn, uses a similar number of host species. Indeed, there are more parasitic species than host species living on our planet.

In the International Journal for Parasitology, biologist Donald Windsor writes:

The implications of parasites being the majority are very revolutionary for the entire field of biology. . . . Biologists must now view the world upside down and inside out, shifting their paradigm so that free-living species are viewed as devices used by parasites to propagate themselves.

Or, as Kevin Lafferty, a marine ecologist for the US Geological Survey puts it, “Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth.”

So popular, in fact, that many parasites are themselves prey to their own parasites. In a phenomenon called “hyperparasitism,” parasites are invaded by parasites that are invaded by still more parasites. These Russian dolls of internal flesh-eating have been observed to five levels down, which one article describes as “an endless progression of interspecies abuse”:

Seth Bordenstein, a microbiologist at Vanderbilt University, studies a five-tiered system that starts with a fledgling bird. Blowflies infest the bird’s underside with bloodsucking larvae, which then drop off and fall prey to hyperparasitic wasps. The wasps, in turn, carry a parasitic bacterium called Wolbachia, which has evolved to modify its host’s reproductive system. The bacteria are subject to their own invasion, though, from tiny viruses known as bacteriophages, which hijack Wolbachia’s cellular machinery to expand their population.

Just how small can parasites get? The final layer of these systems might be the transposon, which is a roving bit of nucleic acid—a single, parasitic gene. Transposons have been discovered inside viruses that infect other viruses, which in turn infect amoebas that infect human beings. “I think it’s difficult to see where one organism begins and another one ends,” Bordenstein says.

Or as Jonathan Swift puts it in a 1733 poem:

The vermin only tease and pinch

Their foes superiour by an inch.

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Has smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,

And so proceed ad infinitum.

Think about this for a moment. Can you think of anything more gross, or more fucked up, than one species dining upon the living flesh of another species from within?

I can: one species dining upon the living flesh of another species from within another species that is itself dining upon the living flesh from within yet another species, and on and on.

This is not just an incidental occurrence within life. If we are judging by the number of species that feed themselves this way, the act of eating living flesh from within is no mere side-dish at the restaurant of life; it’s the main course.

As science writer Ed Yong (whose excellent TED talk “Zombie roaches and other parasite tales” I highly recommend) writes in National Geographic:

It’s easy—hopeful, perhaps—to think of [parasites] as oddities of nature, as grisly outliers that we would only encounter through extreme bad luck. But as I noted in my TED talk, parasitism is the rule rather than the exception. . . . Forget elephants, hummingbirds, whales, and tortoises—pick a random animal, and it’s far more likely to be a blood-sucker, disease-carrier, host-castrator, or flesh-devourer.17

Who invented this shit? What twisted fucker would think it was a good idea to create things that are alive, and then to create other things that make their living by eating their way through the first living things from the inside? And then to create other living things eating their way through the insides of those living things at the same time?

Exuberantly, Extravagantly, Flamboyantly, Baroquely Evil

It’s not hard to understand why Darwin considered the existence of widespread parasitism to rule out the possibility of a “beneficent and omnipotent God” who created it. There is something not just evil, but exuberantly, extravagantly, flamboyantly, baroquely evil about parasites, and about parasites within parasites within parasites “ad infinitum.”18

(Of course, I’m not saying that the parasites themselves—lacking consciousness, intentionality or choice—are committing evil. I’m using this term on the sense of “natural evil” discussed by theologians: things that we humans see and experience as evil within nature—such as diseases, natural disasters, and non-human animals suffering terribly in the wild—that are not caused by humans willing them. See footnote 13 for further elaboration.)

The tendency of the problem of evil to reduce adult minds to reasoning that even children see as absurd is well known, as inquisitive children have intuitively been stumping their parents with questions about the problem of evil (without calling it that) for as long as parents have tried to ram religious dogma down children’s throats.

In his 1908 story “Little Bessie,” Mark Twain illustrates just how easy it is for a child to lay ruin to religious belief with the problem of evil by simply referencing some of the things that go on in nature every moment, at one point specifically referencing both the ichneumonidæ and the cat playing with mice, the two examples in Darwin’s letter.19 (Likely Darwin didn’t even know, at that time, that some of those mice being torn to shreds by cats may have been converted into zombie “cat-seeking missiles” by parasites.)

Twain’s story consists primarily of dialogue between Bessie, an intellectually precocious three-year-old who is “much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonise with results,” and her devout Christian mother. The story begins with Bessie asking her mother, innocently enough, “Mamma, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it all for?”

As with all defenders of religion confronting the insurmountable problem of evil, Bessie’s mother’s answers to her child’s pointed questions become more and more absurd.

[Bessie asks:] “Mama, only think! Mr. Hollister [an irreligious neighbor] says there isn’t a bird or fish or reptile or any other animal that hasn’t got an enemy that Providence has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it, and kill it, and suck; its blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. Is that true, mother—because if it is true, why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it?”

“That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don’t want you to listen to anything he says.”

“Why, mamma, he is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good. He says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground—alive, mamma!—and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that, he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he—”

“My child! oh, do for goodness’ sake—”

“And mamma, he says the spider is appointed to catch the fly, and drive her fangs into his bowels, and suck and suck and suck his blood, to discipline him and make him a Christian; and whenever the fly buzzes his wings with the pain and misery of it, you can see by the spider’s grateful eye that she is thanking the Giver of All Good for—well, she’s saving grace, as he says; and also, he—”

“Oh, aren’t you ever going to get tired chattering! If you want to go out and play—”

“Mama, he says himself that all troubles and pains and miseries and rotten diseases and horrors and villainies are sent to us in mercy and kindness to discipline us; and he says it is the duty of every father and mother to help Providence, every way they can; and says they can’t do it by just scolding and whipping, for that won’t answer, it is weak and no good —Providence’s way is best, and it is every parent’s duty and every person’s duty to help discipline everybody, and cripple them and kill them, and starve them, and freeze them, and rot them with diseases, and lead them into murder and theft and dishonor and disgrace; and he says Providence’s invention for disciplining us and the animals is the very brightest idea that ever was, and not even an idiot could get up anything shinier. Mamma, brother Eddie needs disciplining, right away: and I know where you can get the smallpox for him, and the itch, and the diphtheria, and bone-rot, and heart disease, and consumption, and -- Dear mamma, have you fainted! I will run and bring help! Now this comes of staying in town this hot weather.”

As Mr. Hollister in the story points out to Bessie, Mother Nature leaves no surface area free from predation, not even our insides when we’re alive. Nearly all her creatures are fed upon from without and within, and many from within within within. Life, taken as a whole, is an indivisible orgy of self-predation.

In Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774),Werther expresses a similar sentiment in a letter to his friend:

There is not a moment but preys upon you,—and upon all around you, not a moment in which you do not yourself become a destroyer. The most innocent walk deprives of life thousands of poor insects: one step destroys the fabric of the industrious ant, and converts a little world into chaos. No: it is not the great and rare calamities of the world, the floods which sweep away whole villages, the earthquakes which swallow up our towns, that affect me. My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature. Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself, and every object near it: so that, surrounded by earth and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart; and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.

Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment.

Would that world look significantly different than our own?

God Almighty?
Or Bored, Sadistic Teenager Playing Video Games In His Basement?

Let’s run with the thought experiment suggested above, and imagine that in the future, 13-year-olds can walk into a futuristic GameStop shop, plunk down their bitcoin for a cartridge, stick it into their consoles in their bedrooms, and be off to the races creating simulated worlds with unlimited sentient beings they can manipulate however they please.

While not deities in a traditional or supernatural sense, these 13-year-olds creating universes full of sentience would very much be “playing God,” and would in fact be gods in the sense of being what amount to omnipotent creators of little universes.

It turns out, such speculations are not entirely idle. A number of well-respected scientists and technologists think the development of simulated sentience is possible within the next few decades, and some even believe we may ourselves be products of some kind of “Matrix”-like simulation.

(Note: by recounting their views below, I am not putting forward my own opinion about simulated sentience. I lack the scientific, technical, or philosophical knowledge to evaluate this possibility, and thus am agnostic about it. I am simply noting that some serious-minded people, who do clearly possess widely-recognized scientific or technical knowledge, take the possibility of simulated sentience seriously, and some even think it’s likely that we are in fact sentient simulations.)

Speculations that we may be in some kind of dream-like illusory state have appeared throughout the ages, from the Hindu concept of Maya, to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the famous “Butterfly Dream“ story in the foundational Zhuangzi text of Taoism. Metaphors of life as a dream appear throughout Shakespeare. (“We are such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep”) Descartes used the possibility that his entire sensory experience was an illusion being fed him by an “evil demon,” as the starting point for his philosophy. Of course, the most famous exploration of simulated consciousness in contemporary times has been The Matrix. (The Truman Show explored similar themes the year before.20 Westworld, Ready Player One, and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once years did years later.)

To my knowledge, the first scientifically-minded thinker to put forward the idea that we are not just possibly in a computer simulation now, but almost certainly in one, is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his seminal 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation.” Bostrom’s argument, now known as the “simulation hypothesis,” has spawned lively debate for two decades, and the belief that we are likely in a computer simulation has proliferated within tech circles. The transhumanist author David Pearce has said that “The Simulation Argument is perhaps the first interesting argument for the existence of a Creator in 2000 years.”21

One famous adherent of the simulation hypothesis is Elon Musk. An audience member at a tech conference in 2016 asked Musk directly, “I need to know. Are we in a simulation?”, Musk answered:

The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation is the following. Forty years ago we had [the video game] Pong—two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photo-realistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing them simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. . . . Then you say, “OK, let’s imagine it’s ten thousand years from now,” which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. . . . There would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions. . . . [I think] there’s a one in billions chance that this [around us] is base reality.

In 2017, Larry King asked astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson if he agrees with Musk that we’re likely living in a computer simulation. Tyson said he does agree with Musk:

I find it hard to argue against [the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation]. You look at our computing power today. And you say, “I have the power to program a world inside of a computer.” Well imagine in a future where you have even more power than that, and you can create characters that have, for example, free will. Or their own perception of free will. So this is a world, and I can program in the laws that govern that world. That world will have its own laws of physics and chemistry and biology.

Now [suppose] you’re a character in that world, and you think you have free will, and you say, “I want to invent a computer,” so you do. “Hey, I want to create a world in my computer.” And then that world creates a world in its computer. And then you have simulations all the way down.

So now you lay out all those universes, and throw a dart. Which of these universes are you most likely to hit? The original one that started it? Or the countless daughter simulations that unfolded thereafter? You’re going to hit one of the simulations.

Statistically, based on that argument, which first appeared by a philosopher named Nick Bostrom. . . it’s hard to argue that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parents’ basement, programming up a world for their own entertainment.

And then, every time something weird happens in the world, some disruptive leader takes charge, I wonder if that programmer just got bored, and had to stir the pot. Throw somebody in there just for their own entertainment.22

For me, that’s some of the best evidence that we live in a simulation. Because this happens every time there’s peace and tranquility in the world.23

Elsewhere, Tyson has said that he gives the possibility that we live in a simulation (though not necessarily that this simulation is being run by a bored kid in a bedroom) “better than 50-50 odds.” For sake of argument, let’s suppose Neal deGrasse Tyson’s speculation is true—that we are the products of a video game being programmed and played by a bored kid “stirring the pot” for their own entertainment.

If this were true, it would be fair to ask, “Is it good that our world was created?”

This sounds like an absurd question: if you don’t believe in a creator, then it’s pointless to ask if it’s “good” if something that inevitably exists does exist (just as we don’t ask if it’s “good” if the sky is blue or the Earth goes around the sun). And those who do believe in a creator, usually believe—absurdly, in my view—that their creator was superlatively benevolent and loving in creating the world exactly as it is. So to them, for different reasons, it is equally absurd to ask if it is good that the world exists; it is good, in their view, because God created it, and God created it because it is good.

But if we imagine (for the sake of argument) that our world was a simulation, created by some entity other than an all-loving God, then all of a sudden it makes much more sense to ask whether it was good that our world came into existence.

After all, one can imagine Tyson’s bored kid creating a world that was far worse than ours—a world that was nothing but torture and torment among simulated sentient beings, with no redeeming qualities. (Many video game worlds that kids and teenagers create and play in already seem that way, though fortunately the characters lack sentience—as of now—while they get blown to bits and their blood gets splattered everywhere.)24

In such an instance, I think it’s straightforward to say that it would bad for that kid to bring that world into existence. Maybe his parents would even tell him it’s bad—“Johnny, are you torturing innocent sentient consciousnesses again? Quit that and come to dinner!” Not that Johnny would listen, or that his parents could stop him. (He’s already figured out how to bypass the “No Sentient Simulation Creation” lock his parents put on the iPhone 17 they gave him; any tech savvy five-year-old can bypass that lock that their geezer parents put on.)

Here’s a more pressing question: if, as many technologists believe, it will become possible to create simulated sentience in the next few decades, should this technology be created? I believe the answer is an obvious emphatic “No.” Simply put, I do not believe it would be a good idea to give thirteen-year-olds the unlimited capacity to torture, maim, mow down, and blow up sentient beings. If you do not believe they would do this, then you have never either (a) been a thirteen-year-old boy, or (b) observed a thirteen-year-old boy playing video games.

Now, suppose that a different, more kind-hearted teenager (or the same one, after some moral awakening) decides instead to create a simulated world full of perfectly happy sentient creatures. Sure, there might be a few peccadillos here and there (from the Spanish word pecadillos: “little sins”)—just to spice things up and give people good stories to tell over beers. But overall, everything was joyous and blissful and peaceful and kind in this world.

Would it be good if this teenager created this world? Sure, why not. But it still would be bad that the technology existed, because of the near-certainty that it would get into the hands of less kind-hearted (i.e., more normal) teenage boys. No amount of good created by the kind-hearted people who created simulations could make up for the evil that the average teenage boy would create. Imagine Internet trolls on 4Chan with the capacity to create sentient life within their message boards. That’s what we’re talking about. 

Unlike the purely evil world and the purely good world posited above, our world is neither purely evil nor purely good. So if it’s conceivable that a bored teenage programmer (or some other intelligent, non-supernatural entity) did create our sentient world, we can ask the same question as in the previous two examples: “Is it good that this entity created our world?” Since our world obviously contains a mixture of good and bad, the answer is more complicated than the obvious answers for the purely evil and purely joyous examples.

Nonetheless, despite the undeniable quantity of truly good and beautiful things there are in this world, I cannot look upon this “disordered fantasia of carnage,” this “festival of massacres,” this “chaos at feast,”25 this “immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated, without end, without restraint, without respite,”26 and think that it was good that it was created—whether the creator was a bored teenager in a basement, an advanced AI computer, an abstract physical process, or a supernatural and self-delusion ally “all-loving” God.

Why not?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan says it as well as can be said. He delivers this verdict about the world in the course of telling his brother Ivan about a little girl he heard about, who was beaten and abused in the most horrendous ways by her parents. After describing, in gruesome detail, the abuses this girl suffered at the hands of her parents, Ivan asks his brother Alyosha:

Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to ‘dear, kind God’! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones!

Ivan then asks his brother:

Tell me yourself, I challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.27

Coda:
Are Humans the Redeemers of Nature?

As we have seen, religious theodicy is an optimistic attempt to find some meaning and redemption in the unrelenting carnage of life, via the inscrutable blessings of an all-loving God. Many people, however, who can no longer come to believe with a straight face in the idea of an all-loving God as the creator of this slaughterhouse called Earth, nonetheless still cannot accept that it is, in fact, a pointless bloody shit-ball in an uncaring universe. They try to season this bloody shit-ball with the redemptive sweetness purportedly bestowed upon life by the arrival on this multi-billion-year battlefield of one supposedly benevolent and elevated creature in particular: life’s self-appointed savior and redeemer, the human.

I call this line of thinking “humanistic theodicy.” Though its practitioners may be secular or even atheists, it nonetheless has a distinctly religious flavor and intention, with Man playing the role of the saccharine shit-sweetener otherwise played, in traditional religious theodicy, by God.

One proponent of what I am calling “humanistic theodicy” was Charles Darwin. Though he likely did more to destroy religious theodicy than any other thinker in history, not everyone can swallow the entire bitter pill regimen that counteracts the stultifying effects of saccharine optimism—transforming it into honest pessimism—all at once. Darwin swallowed more of this regimen than most, and did more than anyone ever did to cause others to swallow it as well, even though he remained both religious and optimistic.

In the end, however, Darwin could not accept the plain pessimistic truth that the phenomenon he explained—self-replicators evolving by violent natural selection—has no overarching point, purpose, or meaning. He did more than any other human to destroy the idea that this meaning and purpose was provided by God. However, in his view, the “war of nature” and the “struggle for existence” that he described did in fact have a point, and that point was… Man.

After surveying the violence of natural selection in the natural world, for hundreds of pages in On the Origin of Species (subtitled By Means of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation of Favoured Races By Means of the Struggle for Life), Darwin attempts to tie a pretty bow on this blood-strewn field of carcasses and wiped-out genetic lineages. In the very last lines of his book, he writes:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

Do the “higher animals,” and particularly humans, the production of which is the “most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving,” truly redeem the unrelenting slaughter and genocide of the natural world?

I think it’s more than reasonable to ask…

Endnotes:

The Compendium Maleficarum (“Compendium of Witchcraft”) is a 1608 witch-hunting manual by Italian priest Francesco Maria Guazzo. The book contains many woodcarvings illustrating alleged tales of witches’ evil crimes.

The woodcarving above illustrates the “osculum infame,” or “kiss of shame,” an imagined act of witches performing analingus on the Devil, submitting to him and sealing their pact. Those medieval priests were imaginative, kinky f*ckers!

The problem is, like most religious prudes, rather than simply enjoying their phantasmagoric masturbatory fantasies in the privacy of their own church cells and rectories, these priests projected their fantasies (in this case, fantasies of demonic butt-licking) onto others, namely, social outcasts whom they accused of the “crime” witchcraft, then tortured and burned alive.1

The Compendium Maleficarum quotes an accusation read by a judge of the Holy Inquisition in Avignon, France in 1582, which condemned eighteen women and men to burning at the stake, convicted of witchcraft.

The accusation contains a lurid, prurient description of a Witches’ Sabbath ceremony leading up to a “kiss of shame,” resulting in an orgy with incubi and succubi (male and female demons who have sex with humans of the opposite sex.)

Today, on Halloween, in honor of all the women and men accused of witchcraft and tortured and burned by these perverted inquisitors, I release this spoken word piece: my reading of the inquisitor’s lurid accusation quoted in the Compendium Maleficarum, accompanied by the pianist Adey Bell.

Listen to it with subtitles via the video at the top, or listen to just the audio below:

The Witches’ Sabbath:

A Selection from Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608), translated by Montague Summers (1929).
Read by Michael Ellsberg
Piano accompaniment by Adey Bell, playing “Rev. 22:20” by Puscifer.

Here is the full text of the French inquisitor’s accusation at the 1582 witch trial, read in the piece above. This is from Montague Summers’ 1929 English translation of Guazzo’s 1608 text in Latin2:

Sebastien Michaelis in his Pneumologie gives an example of a sentence passed at Avignon in 1582, as comprising in a little space the most execrable and abominable of the crimes of Witches and Sorcerers. The extract is as follows:—

We N. N. having considered the charge wherewith you stand charged and accused before us, and having examined both the statements of yourselves and your associates, and your own confessions made to us according to lawful requirements and often repeated upon oath, as well as the depositions and charges of the witnesses and the other legitimate proofs, basing our judgement on that which has been said and done during this process, we are fully and lawfully agreed that you and your associates have denied God the Creator of us all and the Most Holy Trinity our Maker, and that you have worshipped the devil, that ancient and implacable Enemy of the human race. You have vowed yourselves to him for ever, and have renounced your most Holy Baptism and your sponsors therein, together with your part in Paradise and the eternal heritage which our Lord Jesus bought for you and the whole race of men by His death. All these you did deny before the said cacodemon in the form of a man, and that blatant devil did baptise you anew with water, and you did change the names given to you at the Holy Font, and so took and received another false name in the guise of baptism. And as a pledge of your fealty sworn to the devil you gave to him a fragment and particle of your clothing; and that the Father of Lies should have a care to delete and obliterate you from the book of life you did at his direction and command with your own hands write your names in the black book there prepared, the roll of the wicked condemned to eternal death; and that he might bind you with stouter bonds to so great a perfidy and impiety, he branded each of you with his mark as belonging to him, and you did swear homage and obedience to his behests upon a circle (the symbol of Divinity) traced upon the earth (which is God’s footstool); and each of you bound herself to tread under foot the Image of the Lord and the Cross; and in obedience to Satan, with the help of a staff smeared with some abominable unguent given to you by the devil himself and placed between your legs you were enabled to fly through the air at dead of night to the place ordained, at an hour fit for vilest criminals, and on stated days you were so carried and transported by the Tempter himself; and there in the common synagogue of witches, sorcerers, heretics, conjurers and devil-worshippers, you did kindle a foul fire and after many rejoicings, dancings, eating and drinking, and lewd games in honour of your president Beelzebub the Prince of Devils in the shape and appearance of a deformed and hideous black goat, you did worship him in deed and word as very God and did approach him on bended knees as suppliants and offered him lighted candles of pitch; and (fie, for very shame!) with the greatest reverence you did kiss with sacrilegious mouth his most foul and beastly posterior. . . . Then, adding sin to sin, you the men did copulate with Succubi, and you the women did fornicate with Incubi: moreover, in most bitter and icy connexion and foul coitus with demons you did commit the unspeakable crime of buggery. And, most hateful of all, at the bidding of the aforesaid Serpent thrust from Paradise, you did keep in your mouths the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist received by you in the sacred Church of God, and did execrably spit It out upon the ground that you might with the greatest of all contumely, contempt and blasphemy dishonour God, our true and sacred Hope, and promote the glory, honour, triumph and kingdom of the devil himself, and worship, honour and glorify him with all honour, praise, majesty, authority and adoration. All which most grave, abhorred and unspeakable crimes are directly contumacious and contemptuous of Almighty God the Creator of all.

P.S. for my introduction to the topic of medieval priests’ and witch-hunters’ obsession with sex among witches, demons, and the Devil, see Part 1 of this two part series: Infernal Seductions.

Father Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, expert advisor during the 1600s to the Catholic Church’s Inquisition on matters pertaining to sexual relations between witches, demons, and the Devil, never saw his manuscript Demoniality published by any Church organization. Rather, it was first published posthumously in 1875, translated from the original Latin into French by Isidore Liseux, who would later gain renown as the first translator and publisher into English of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade.

Why would the work of a Catholic priest find its world premiere on publisher’s list next to the most famous pornographic novel in history, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, a Woman of Pleasure (another of Liseux’s translations, into French) and Justine by Sade, a book which features graphic descriptions of monks engaged in orgies in a monastery?

The word “prurient” is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as a state of being “too interested in the details of another person’s sexual behavior.” By that definition, among the most prurient people on the planet are—ironically—those who seek to censor or censure the sexual behavior of other consenting adults.

Though there were no polls on the matter, I feel confident that the vast majority of 17^th-century Italian commoners had more pressing worries than the quality and quantity of demons’ ejaculate. For Father Sinistrari, however, the characteristics of demon semen were a matter of urgent concern. In Demoniality, he cites numerous experts on the matter, one of whom tells us that

what incubi [male demons who have sex with women] introduce into the womb is not just any type or amount of semen, but abundant, very thick, very warm, rich in spirits and free from serosity. This moreover is an easy thing for them, since they have but to choose ardent, robust men, and those with much semen, to whom they may submit, and then women of a like constitution, upon whom they may lie, taking care that both shall enjoy greater pleasure than usual, for the more abundant the semen is emitted, the greater the pleasure with which it is released.

Father Sinistrari, pledged to celibacy, seems to have had plenty of time to allow his sexual imagination to run wild; it was as though he was writing fanfic related to witches, incubi, and succubi. (Succibi are female demons who have sex with men.)

Priests cannot write or talk publicly in sexually-graphic ways except in the context of condemning the sexual behavior described. This is perhaps part of why priests spend so much time pruriently concerned with what happens in the sex lives of others (including others who don’t even exist, such as demons): sticking one’s nose in the business of where others stick their privates is a surefire way to spend plenty of time writing, thinking, talking, and reading about graphic sex, in an otherwise-prudish social milieu.

Father Sinistrari’s writing about the sex lives of witches and demons was so vivid and graphic, that the first person who thought this work worthy of publication was a French publisher and translator of erotica.

In this two-part series leading up to Halloween, I share stories of sex among witches, demons, and the Devil, selected from classic Christian demonology handbooks from the 1500-1600s.

My purpose in sharing these selections, aside from marveling at their absurd luridness, is to highlight how Christian prudes project fantastical sexuality—likely the product of their own repressed eroticism—onto imagined “others.” They then tarnish this externalized and “othered” sexuality as evil, rather than acknowledging and accepting their own eroticism.

This unfortunate trend continues among religious prudes unto this day. Perhaps seeing the fantastical psychology of religious prudery in its historical context can help as call out the absurdity of its present-day manifestations.

From:
Demoniality

by Father Ludovico Maria Sinistrari
written circa late 1600s
(Project Gutenberg edition; I added the subheaders and bolding.)

The purpose, both of witches and wizards, in the nightly revels that take place after feasting and dancing, is none other but that infamous intercourse; otherwise there can be no witness of that crime, since the Devil, visible to the witch, escapes the sight of others. Sometimes, it is true, women have been seen in the woods, in the fields, in the groves, lying on their backs, naked up to the navel, positioned for sexual activity, their legs spread and brought together, shaking their buttocks. . . . In such a case there would be a very strong suspicion of such a crime….

Now, several authors profess, and it is confirmed by numerous experiments, that the Demon has two ways of copulating carnally with men or women: the one which it uses with Witches or Wizards, the other with men or women entirely foreign to witchcraft.

In the first case, the Demon does not copulate with Witches or Wizards until after a solemn profession, in virtue of which such wretched human beings yield themselves up to him. . . . [T]hat profession consists of eleven ceremonials:

The 11 Steps Before the Devil Has Sex With Initiated Witches or Wizards…

Firstly, the Novices [initiates] have to conclude with the Demon, or some other Wizard or Magician acting in the Demon’s place, an express compact by which, in the presence of witnesses, they enlist in the Demon’s service, he giving them in exchange his pledge for honours, riches and carnal pleasures.

Secondly, they abjure the catholic faith, withdraw from the obedience to God, renounce Christ and the protection of the most blessed Virgin Mary, and all the Sacraments of the Church.

Thirdly, they cast away the Crown, or Rosary of the most blessed Virgin Mary, the girdle of S. Francis, or the strap of S. Austin, or the scapular of the Carmelites, should they belong to one of those Orders, the Cross, the Medals, the Agnus Dei, whatever other holy or consecrated object may have been about their person, and trample them all under foot.

Fourthly, in the hands of the Devil they vow obedience and subjection; they pay him homage and vassalage, laying their fingers on some very black book. They bind themselves never to return to the faith of Christ, to observe none of the divine precepts, to do no good work, but to obey the Demon alone and, to attend diligently the nightly conventicles.

Fifthly, they promise to strive with all their power, and to give their utmost zeal and care for the enlistment of other males and females in the service of the Demon.

Sixthly, the Devil administers to them a kind of sacrilegious baptism, and after abjuring their Godfathers and Godmothers of the Baptism of Christ and Confirmation, they have assigned to them a new Godfather and a new Godmother, who are to instruct them in the arts of witchcraft; they drop their former name and exchange it for another, more frequently a scurrilous nickname.

Seventhly, they cut off a part of their own garments, and tender it as a token of homage to the Devil, who takes it away and keeps it.

Eighthly, the Devil draws on the ground a circle wherein stand the Novices, Witches and Wizards, and there they confirm by oath all their aforesaid promises.

Ninthly, they request the Devil to strike them out of the book of Christ, and to inscribe them in his own. Then comes forth that very black book on which, as has been said before, they laid hands when doing homage, and they are inscribed therein with the Devil’s claw.

Tenthly, they promise the Devil sacrifices and offerings at stated times: once a fortnight or at least each month, the murder of some child, or an homicidal act of sorcery, and other weekly misdeeds to the prejudice of mankind, such as hailstorms, tempests, fires, cattle plagues, etc.

Eleventhly, the Demon imprints on them some mark, especially on those whose constancy he suspects. That mark, moreover, is not always of the same shape or figure: sometimes it is the image of a hare, sometimes a toad’s leg, sometimes a spider, a puppy, a dormouse. It is imprinted on the most hidden parts of the body: with men, under the eye-lids, or the armpits, or the lips, on the shoulder, the fundament, or somewhere else; with women, it is usually on the breasts or the privy parts….

The Demon, in exchange, engages to give them always prompt assistance; to fulfil their desires in this world and to make them happy after their death. The solemn profession being thus performed, each has assigned to himself a Devil, called Magistellus or Assistant Master, with whom he retires in private for carnal satisfaction; the said Devil being, of course, in the shape of a woman if the initiated person is a man, in the shape of a man, sometimes of a satyr, sometimes of a buck-goat, if it is a woman who has been received a witch.

How Does the Devil Have Sex With Humans?

If the authors be asked how it comes to pass that the Demon, who has no body, yet has carnal intercourse with man or woman, they unanimously answer that the Demon assumes the corpse of another human being, male or female as the case may be, or that, from the mixture of other materials, he shapes for himself a body endowed with motion, and by means of which he is united with the human being; and they add that when women are desirous of becoming pregnant by the Demon (which only occurs by the consent and express wish of the said women), the Demon is transformed into a female demon, and joined to a man, she receives semen from him; or else he procures pollution from a man during his sleep, and he preserves the extracted semen in its natural warmth, and with vital spirit, and by incubating he inserts it into the womb of the woman, whence follows impregnation….

At other times also the Demon, whether Incubus or Succubus, copulates with men or women from whom he receives none of the sacrifices, homage or offerings which he is wont to exact from Wizards or Witches, as aforesaid. He is then but a passionate lover, having only one desire: the carnal possession of the loved ones. . . .

We read likewise of numerous women incited to coition by the Incubus Demon, and who, though reluctant at first of yielding to him, are soon moved by his entreaties, tears and endearments; he is a desperate lover and must not be denied. And although this comes sometimes of the craft of some Wizard who avails himself of the agency of the Demon, yet the Demon not infrequently acts on his own account….

Now, it is undoubted by theologians and philosophers that carnal intercourse between mankind and the demon sometimes gives birth to human beings; that is how the Antichrist is to be born. . . . They further observe that, from a natural cause, the children thus begotten by incubi are tall, very hardy and bold, very proud and wicked.

As for the cause: “What incubi introduce into the womb is not just any type or amount of semen, but abundant, very thick, very warm, rich in spirits and free from serosity. This moreover is an easy thing for them, since they have but to choose ardent, robust men, and those with much semen, to whom they may submit, and then women of a like constitution, upon whom they may lie, taking care that both shall enjoy greater pleasure than usual, for the more abundant the semen is emitted, the greater the pleasure with which it is released.”

***
I don’t know… the Devil sounds like a passionate lover to me! No wonder so many witches fell for him!

In Part 2 of “Infernal Seductions,” on Halloween day, read a sixteenth-century Catholic priest’s tale of witches and warlocks having sex with the Devil, including their partaking of the notorious osculum infame, the “kiss of shame,” an initiation into Devil worship involving…. well…. it’s illustrated below…

Shall I eat and drink only that I may hunger and thirst and eat and drink again, till the grave which is open beneath my feet shall swallow me up, and I myself become the food of worms? Shall I beget beings like myself, that they too may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves to do the same that I have done? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this ceaseless and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to pass away, and pass away only that they may re-appear unaltered;—this monster continually devouring itself that it may again bring itself forth, and bringing itself forth only that it may again devour itself?

These questions (which Fichte asked rhetorically) can be summed up as the depressed and existentially-anxious person's perennial cry: "What's the point?" After all, a point is not a point if the point itself will disappear. So if you believe all things are ashes to ashes and dust to dust, with no afterlife or other lasting impact, then yes, "what's the point?"

A typical response to this type of existential despair is illustrated in a scene from the film Annie Hall. The scene (worth watching) is a flashback to the main character Alvy's childhood. In it, Alvy's mother takes the boy to see Dr. Flicker, a psychiatrist:

Mother: He's been depressed. All of the sudden, he can't do anything. 

Dr. Flicker: Why are you depressed, Alvy? . . . . 

Alvy: The universe is expanding. . . . Well the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart, and that will be the end of everything. 

Mother: What is that your business? [To Dr. Flicker] He's stopped doing his homework. 

Alvy: What's the point?

Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding! 

Dr. Flicker: It won't be expanding for billions of years, Alvy. And we've got to try to enjoy ourselves while we're here, eh? Eh? [Laughing] 

Dr. Flicker's response makes sense. After all, pleasure is its own reward; it does not need some deeper meaning to provide it value. When you're in the throes of sexual ecstasy, receiving the best oral sex of your life, you don't usually think, "Yeah, but what's the point of this?" (Unless, like me, you've got some weird kind of philosophy kink.)

That is, in the moment of sexual ecstasy, you don't usually think "What's the point of this?" But there's a reason that orgasm was has been referred to in French as la petit mort— the little death. There's a reason sex without cuddling afterward can often leave one feeling hollow and disconnected. There's a reason, during that post-coital cuddling, people sometimes wonder (if it's a new relationship, or if it's on the rocks), "What is this relationship? Where is it heading? What are we doing here?"

That reason is that pleasure, while pleasurable, can feel empty afterward. It is its own reward during, but afterward, it admits of the question, "What was the point of that?" As anyone who has woken up with a hangover and an empty bed after a one night stand can attest—however ecstatically Dionysian that one-night stand was during the night of its oneness.

"What does it all mean?" "Where is it all heading?" "Is this all there is?" "Should I just do as much drugs and fuck as much as possible before the apocalypse?" These are the perennial questions of the existential crisis.

Meaning for Mortals

The meaning of “meaning,” when used in phrases like “what’s the meaning of life?” or “what’s the meaning of my life?” is difficult if to pin down. After all, what’s the meaning of a rock? What’s the meaning of a tree? Humans, like rocks and trees, were not created as symbols or expressions, so it’s difficult to understand what “meaning” even means when applied to them.

Of course, religious people believe that humans, rocks, and trees were created to mean something. Specifically, they were created to reflect the glory of God. Psalm 19 of the Bible illustrates this view clearly, suggesting that while the skies have no literal voice, they nonetheless speak volumes about the glory of God: 

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
 Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

In Ephesians 1:4-6, Paul proclaims that God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world. . . he predestined us. . . according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace. . . .” In other words, before God created anything in the world at all, he predestined us to praise him for creating the world and for creating us within it. 

Of course, as an atheist, if I were to ask, “what is the meaning of my life?” and someone were to answer, “the meaning of your life is to reflect and praise the glory of a narcissistic, vindictive, bloodthirsty, infanticidal, megalomaniacal, racist, homophobic, misogynistic genocidal ethnic cleanser in the sky,” I would scratch my head and ask, “Hmmmm…. And why is my participation in that mess preferable to, say, jumping off of a bridge?”1

If you are a non-believer, then you can’t hold that that the fact of your birth was an expression of anything, other than (perhaps) your parents’ love. (For those who were brought into the world with less forethought, it could also be an expression of one’s parents’ drunkenness, horniness, and lack of using a condom.)

Nonetheless, of course, you can express many things while you’re alive. Thus, your life can in fact be an expression of something that matters to you. Perhaps it is an expression of love, or your values, or what you care about, or some difference you’d like to see in the world.

If your life can be an expression of something that matters to you, then what are you expressing, and why does it matter to you? If you can answer these questions, you will be well on your way to figuring out what your life means—to yourself and others around you.

Yet, for a philosophical pessimist such as myself, the question still remains: if everything is going to perish, what difference does it make if I express something that matters to me or not? Eventually, unless I become legendary for some reason, everything I ever express will be forgotten. And at some point, everything humans express will be forgotten, at least by humans themselves, as humans will cease to exist.

Maybe our expressions will be remembered by artificially intelligent entities, up in “the cloud” (a secular version of “the heavens”?) But it’s not even clear that these entities will be conscious, and even if they are, they will be so alien to us it’s unclear why we should care what they think about us (and if they do, it's probably not positive).

The memories of our expression, all those drunken photos we posted on Instagram, all those ramblings, rants, and tirades on TikTok, will simply be bits (or quantum qubits) stored in a memory substrate, selectively wiped out when the server farms get full and fresher data needs to be stored, and perhaps being mined for data to run simulations.

Maybe these simulations will exist to teach the AIs how to avoid their own civilizational apocalypse. Or maybe reconstructions of you will be run and digitally projected as holographic entertainment—perhaps with your face deepfaked onto galactic porn. Until the heat death of the universe, when even this deepfaked galactic porn (or whatever the memories of your expressions are being used for by the AI entities that supersede us) will be shut down.

At any rate, at some point, all our expressions in life and their attendant meanings will disappear. So what’s the point of making them? We could say, “to help others.” That feels meaningful. But then we must ponder the 1923 quip of British comedian John Foster Hall: “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know.” If we’re all just here to help others, then why are any of us here? As another quip goes, we can’t all live by “taking in each other’s washing.”

My pet theory of religion (influenced by Ernest Becker from his book The Denial of Death) is that people believe in God primarily because they want to be remembered. Being forgotten is depressing—perhaps even more depressing than death. After all, when we die, we know that we may be remembered by friends and family. But at some point, all of the friends and family who knew us while we were alive will be dead too, and then we will die to living memory.

Maybe our non-living memory will remain in a generation or two of our family members, in the stories about us they’ve passed on to younger generations. But it’s doubtful those memories will last more than a generation or two. How much do you really know (and how often do you think) about your great-great-grandparents? Sure, anyone who’s curious can Google whatever random traces you’ve left on the Internet. But who will be curious?

The idea of simply disappearing from memory feels depressing, even to a philosophical pessimist like me—and I’m someone who is comfortable and has made peace with all kinds of depressing thoughts. I think that religion serves as a balm to this depressing thought. Not only will we get to live forever with all our friends and family, if we’re good little boys and girls and do as Daddy in the Sky tells us, but just as meaningful—and perhaps more meaningful: we will be remembered lovingly forever, by our fellow heaven dwellers, and most magnificently of all, by our loving Father.

God, as eternal and infinite being, has eternal memory and infinite attention. Basically (so goes my pet theory) believers are competing to get into God’s good graces so that they can secure a bit of space in that memory—and a bit of his loving attention towards those memories—so that believers will never be forgotten; that makes life feel meaningful to them, as their expression will continue to have meaning (in God’s mind) forever.

Of course, God has a lot else on his mind, but since his mind is infinite, he still has attention available to remember all the times we couldn’t resist the Devil in our fingers and gave into temptation and whacked off, repenting after we came, and begging forgiveness for our sins, recommitting to our path of sanctity (before the next whack off the next day)... this whole repetitive charade earning us our loving place in God’s eternal memory. Our lives meant so much!

For those of us who don’t believe in God or his eternal loving memory, however, we still have to wrestle with why the expressions of our life will mean anything, if the memory of these expressions will eventually disappear.

So, it’s fair to ask…

What’s the point when all points will disappear?

In a 1948 essay entitled "On Living in an Atomic Age," C.S. Lewis, the devout Christian author of The Chronicles of Narnia, attempts to drive a knife into any hope that a nonbeliever might have for leading a meaningful life without God and the afterlife. He was reflecting on the widespread existential dread that the advent of potentially world-ending nuclear weapons. Addressing nonbelievers, he asks—glibly, in my opinion—why we nonbelievers might have any concern for the end of human civilization at all. I quote this passage at length, as it’s so vivid: 

What did you think all this effort of humanity was to come to in the end? The real answer is known to almost everyone who has even a smattering of science. . . . And the real answer [for non-believers]. . . is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship. . . . Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If Nature is all that exists—in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature—then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which precede and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment. . . . 

We see at once (when we have been waked) that the important question is not whether an atomic bomb is going to obliterate ‘civilisation’. The important question is whether ‘Nature’—the thing studied by the sciences— is the only thing in existence. Because if you answer yes to the second question, then the first question only amounts to asking whether the inevitable frustration of all human activities may be hurried on by our own action instead of coming at its natural time. That is, of course, a question that concerns us very much. Even on a ship which will certainly sink sooner or later, the news that the boiler might blow up now would not be heard with indifference by anyone. But those who knew that the ship was sinking in any case would not, I think, be quite so desperately excited as those who had forgotten this fact, and were vaguely imagining that it might arrive somewhere.

It is, then, on [this] question that we really need to make up our minds. And let us begin by supposing that Nature is all that exists. Let us suppose that nothing ever has existed or ever will exist except this meaningless play of atoms in space and time: that by a series of hundredth chances it has (regrettably) produced things like ourselves—conscious beings who now know that their own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and is therefore itself meaningless, though to us (alas!) it feels significant.

Lewis then says that a nonbeliever might have three responses to the belief that nature is all that exists, and that life has no future in nature. His ultimate point is that none of these responses are satisfying, so we must all become believers in God and the afterlife. Of course, I disagree with this view, but I do think his outline of the three basic responses nonbelievers have to existential dread is solid, so it is from these responses I must fashion some thread of meaning and satisfaction in a dying universe. And the first response posits no meaning or satisfaction at all; it's the cessation of meaning or any hope for satisfaction.

Lewis writes:

(1)  You might commit suicide. Nature which has (blindly, accidentally) given me for my torment this consciousness which demands meaning and value in a universe that offers neither, has luckily also given me the means of getting rid of it. I return the unwelcome gift. I will be fooled no longer."

Ouch… strike 1 for meaning! Lewis's second response of the nonbeliever is where pleasure comes in: 

(2) You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab—only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a ‘good time’; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.2

This is the response I want to focus on, because it expresses so clearly religious believers’ argument for why life without God is meaningless.

If This Be Idolatry, Make the Most of It

Lewis’s quote above, about love and music, is idiotic. Think of your favorite absolute favorite song, album, or musician. Is there anything you could learn about why you like that music that would make you less passionate about it, or make it feel any less meaningful to you?

My favorite musician in the world is the singer-songwriter-pianist Adey Bell.

As much as anyone has been a fan of anyone's music ever in the history of music and fandom, that is how much of a fan I am of Adey Bell's music. (A la Wayne’s World: “I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!”)

Suppose I discovered that the reason I like Adey Bell's music is because I was infected with a parasite that selectively causes people to like Adey Bell's music. What would I think? Here's what I would think: I'm glad I got infected with that parasite! 

And if an antibiotic were offered to me that would kill the parasite, but would also kill my love for Adey Bell's music, I would refuse the antibiotic. 

C.S. Lewis is deeply confused about the difference between our passions and the sources of our passions. Our passions are, by definition, animating to us. They are animating to us no matter where they came from, and no matter how aware we are of these sources.3

The same goes for romantic love as for music fandom. When I’m in love with someone, I don’t care where that love came from. My love is compelling to me, no matter its source, and no matter how aware I am of this source.4

Ultimately, if I’m in love with a woman, the source of why I’m in love with her matters to me even less than do any passersby when I’m gazing into her eyes.

When I’m gazing into my beloved’s eyes, I don’t care if my love for her came from my genes’ program for self-reproduction, or from my need to resolve psychological traumas of childhood, or from some way my beloved reminds me of my mother, or from the cultural programming I got all those cheesy 90’s rom-coms and sappy love songs, or from Cupid’s arrow, or from God’s grace and His plan to create a love within me worthy of Him, or from her being a witch and she cast a love spell on me (actually, I have a slight preference for that one, that would be pretty cool), or from her being the first person I gazed upon after Shakespeare’s Puck sprinkled flower juice on my eyelids.5

Lewis says that you can’t truly be in love with someone if you “know (and keep on remembering)” the causes of that love. (For example, causes relating to the interactions of atoms, chemicals, or genes.)

But this is disingenuous. The phrase “keep on remembering” is doing too much work here, in a sneaky way. The problem is not that knowing the causes of your love makes it impossible to love. The problem is that if you are constantly thinking about these causes (i.e., remembering them) while you are with your beloved, then you are thinking about something other than your beloved when you are with them. You aren’t being present with the person in front of you and the experience of love between you.

This applies just as much if the cause of our love is God, as if the cause of our love is atoms, chemicals and genes. A person who “keeps on remembering” Jesus, when their beloved was in front of them, instead of their beloved, would be just as guilty of a lack of presence as someone who keeps on remembering atoms or genes, or anything else other than the person in front of them.

In C.S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce, the character named “the Teacher” says:

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

Of course, views expressed by characters in novels don’t necessarily reflect the views of the author, but in this case—based on Lewis’s pronouncements elsewhere, and knowing that he generally wrote allegorically—it is clear this view expressed by the Teacher is shared by Lewis.

Lewis’s view here is religiously passionate—but it’s not romantically passionate. He would say, “Exactly: romantic love is a false religion.” And I would say, “Well then, bud, you must not have had the kind of romance I’ve had!”

If someone wants to have all their love on earth—including romantic love— mediated through their love of God, more power to them. But it bothers me when theists such as Lewis can’t imagine how someone could find meaning by loving something other than God on its own terms, not as a mere prop in a play about God.

It’s very simple how we find meaning in a world without God: we love the people and things we care about on earth for their own sake—precisely the type of love that believers are committed to avoiding (because they view such love as false religion, i.e., idolatry.)

In his 1580 essay “On Friendship,” Michel de Montaigne says of his best friend, the writer Etienne de La Boétie: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”

That’s the kind of friendship I want; all of us should be so lucky to have one or two friendships in life that reach this inexplicable depth. I would infinitely prefer a friend say that about our friendship, over them saying that they love me because God God something something.

If this be idolatry, make the most of it.

A Rebellion Against Meaninglessness?

As I mentioned above, C.S Lewis posits one possible third option that non-believers have for creating meaning in their lives, when they contemplate that (absent God and the afterlife) everything they care about will eventually perish.

(3) You may defy the universe. You may say, “Let it be irrational, I am not. Let it be merciless, I will have mercy. By whatever curious chance it has produced me, now that I am here I will live according to human values. I know the universe will win in the end, but what is that to me? I will go down fighting. Amid all this wastefulness I will persevere; amid all this competition, I will make sacrifices. Be damned to the universe!” . . . . You hold up your own human standards against the idiocy of the universe.

This is the stance of the existentialists. It is the stance of Camus in The Rebel: “The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.” Elsewhere in the book, Camus writes:  

Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation. . . . [T]he metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. . . .

Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death penalty. . . . The rejection of death, the desire for immortality and for clarity, are the mainsprings of all these extravagances, whether sublime or puerile. Is it only a cowardly and personal refusal to die? No, for many of these rebels have paid the ultimate price in order to live up to their own demands. The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living. He rejects the consequences implied by death. If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified; everything that dies is deprived of meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.

But given that, as John Maynard Keynes writes, “in the long run we’re all dead,” what is the point of all this fancy metaphysical rebellion? Given that all will be forgotten anyway, what is the point of this metaphysical protest that will be forgotten as well? It seems just as pointless as the pointlessness against which it rebels.

The Door to More Doorways

In life, if you find yourself asking “What’s the point?” it’s probably because you haven’t found something that is, for you, its own point.

The word “autotelic” comes from the Greek roots auto (“self”) and telos (“end, goal”). An activity is autotelic for you if engaging in that activity is its own goal; the activity is not a means towards any other end or goal, beyond itself.

For me, the most consistent example of an autotelic activity in my life has been my thirty-one-year devotion to writing (I started taking writing seriously when I was fifteen, and I am now—in 2023—forty-six.)

I admit, throughout most of this period, in addition to the autotelic rewards I received from the activity itself (creativity, learning, mental expansion), there were many external rewards I was seeking from writing. These could be called “exotelic” rewards, from the Greek root exo (“outside of, external”): fame, notoriety, widespread recognition of my unrecognized brilliance and creativity as a struggling twenty-something writer, and the romantic and sexual opportunities I thought would come from these.

Ironically, in order to write the present book, I needed to give all of these extrinsic rewards. Philosophical pessimism is not exactly a popular position. For years I struggled with the tension between my intrinsic motivations for writing (the joy of creativity, and of exploring and penetrating deeper layers of truth and reality) and my extrinsic motivations (basically, the desire to get laid because of my publicly-signaled creativity.)

Maybe it was some deep commitment to truth—or maybe it was just getting older and my sex drive mellowing out and no longer feeling the need or desire to “make an idol out of sex” (as religious people might put it)… but my desire to write what felt true for me, rather than what was attractive within my dating pool, won out. (If your dating pool has been optimistic, cheery “personal growth” type people, as mine has, then writing a work of philosophical pessimism is very much like taking a dump in your pool.)

I’ve never been happier though. The reason I dive into writing and thinking, is to dive even deeper into writing and thinking. Each bit I learn (and write about) opens up branching channels for deeper learning, thinking, and writing. For me, writing and thinking have become as close to purely autotelic activities as I’ve experienced.

(Sure, I wouldn’t mind if my work became widely read, or if I got dates because of it—but I really don’t care and that’s not why I’m writing anymore. One exotelic result I do care about, however, is getting the writing into the hands of those existentially depressed and anxious people—as I was in my twenties and thirties—for whom it might provide some comfort and solace, make them feel less alone and crazy, and maybe even lead to some joy.)

As I read, write, and think about the topics of this book, each door I unlock leads to more doors, for which I now want and need to discover the keys.

For me, writing is the door to more doorways—and all want to do is open them all!

Feeding the Monster vs. Feeding the Mystery: The Power of Richness

How do you find your own autotelic activity? In other words, how do you find your activity that is its own goal?

How do you find your door to more doorways?

I think it’s useful to distinguish between two types of “autotelic” activities, one of which is a subset of the other. 

The first category is “self-rewarding” activities, and a subset of self-rewarding activities could be called “self-amplifying” activities.

A self-rewarding activity is any activity that is enjoyable in itself, and not as a means to some other end. For example, going for a walk because you love going for walks is self-rewarding—but going for a walk because your doctor told you that you need to do so for the health of your heart is exotelic. (That doesn’t mean the latter is less worthwhile, it just means that it’s not its own reward; it is serving a different reward, which is health.)

A subset of self-rewarding activities consists of which become more enjoyable for you as you do them more. I call these “self-amplifying” activities, because doing them gives you the capacity to do them, in a deeper, better, and more satisfying way. In a sense, self-amplifying activities “build on themselves.”

For example, learning to play music provides self-amplifying enjoyment. It is self-rewarding, in that playing music provides its own reward. But also, the enjoyment is self-amplifying, because learning to play some amount of music allows you to play more and better and more interesting music. The pleasure you get from it expands as you do it.

The point is not just that you get more pleasure out of doing the activity as you do it more, but that the pleasure takes on a quality that I call “richness.”

Richness, when used in a phrase such as “richness of flavor,” does not mean that there is a great abundance of one quality. It means there are a lot of different elements at work, enhancing each other, “bringing each other out.” Table sugar is not a rich flavor. And, if you already have some table sugar, adding more table sugar will not get you more richness of flavor. A fine chocolatier, however, can combine some sugar with some cacao powder, cacao butter, vanilla extract and other ingredients and bring out the most marvelously rich flavors.

Similarly, a phrase such as “the richness of the novel’s language” does not mean that there is a great abundance of one word. It means, there is a great diversity of elements—vocabulary, diction, nuances, connotations—each enhancing the each other. The same goes for phrases such as “a rich cultural heritage” or “a rich musical tradition.” In ecology, “species richness” refers to the diversity of different species in a given ecosystem.

Self-amplifying activities expand enjoyment not by simply adding more of the same simple enjoyment together (More sex! More drugs!) Rather, they expand enjoyment by adding and interconnecting more and different elements to create a richer experience.

Other examples of potentially self-amplifying activities include:

• Friendships and relationships: the deeper you go into a relationship, the more shared history you have, the more experiences you can recall together, the more ups and downs you’ve been through, the richer the relationship feels.

• Any kind of learning (skills or knowledge): the more you learn, the more you can learn. Each bit of learning ups up vistas towards more advanced and complex things to learn, which allows you to experience the full richness of the field or activity.

• Art and creativity: these feed on themselves, in that each creation can be the basis of the next and the next, until a rich tapestry of creation has been woven within the artist’s work. 

The point here is not that simple, straightforward pleasures like sex and drugs are necessarily bad. The point is that, on their own, the satisfaction one derives from them tends to diminish. The enjoyment can be expanded greatly if they are taken as part of a wider tapestry of richness, interconnected to various parts of life. (And by drugs here, I’m talking mostly about psychedelics—which in my experience provide diminishing returns on their own, but expanding returns when taken in moderation in the context of an ever-interconnected creative, intellectual, romantic, sexual, spiritual and social life.)

I think the distinction between simple self-rewarding pleasure, and its subset of self-expanding pleasure is important, because it’s possible (and in fact common) for self-rewarding activities to become less enjoyable as you do them more.

The most obvious example is addictive drugs: snorting coke is its own reward. But snorting coke doesn’t lead you to get more enjoyment the next time you snort coke; on the contrary, you develop tolerance and eventually will need more and more just to feel normal. (Furthermore, the negative physical, psychological, and social side-effects grow, at the same time the reward diminishes.)

A more mundane example is binge-watching television, or obsessively scrolling on social media. A bit of TV or phone-scrolling can be a pleasurable way to take your mind of things and unwind after a long and stressful day at work. But I think we’ve all experienced that “zombie” feeling after the third, fourth, or tenth hour of mindlessly pressing “next” on the TV or “refresh” on our social media. It’s anything but refreshing!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all self-rewarding activities have this feature of diminishing returns. When you go for a pleasant walk, that doesn’t make mean that going for tomorrow’s walk will be any less pleasant. But many self-rewarding activities do in fact have this feature of diminishing returns.  

In contrast, activities that are self-expanding activities lead to a feeling of, well… expansiveness as you engage in them more over time. You feel like the world is expanding as you do them. (And in a good way, not in Alvy’s existentially dreadful way, as in the Annie Hall quote above!) You start to see more and more of your life and the world reflected in the self-expanding activity—and that activity starts to feel like more of a metaphor for your life (“life imitates art”), and guide for you as you navigate the world beyond.

I call this “feeding the monster” versus “feeding the mystery.” Feeding the monster is engaging in any self-rewarding activity that, while pleasurable in its own right, starts to provide significantly diminishing returns. You have to keep feeding the monster just to placate it, until—at worst—the monster completely consumes you and you are living (or dying!) inside its belly.

Whereas I refer to engaging in self-expanding activities as “feeding the mystery.” I call it this because, the deeper you go, the deeper it gets; the wider you go, the wider it gets; the higher you go, the higher it gets. Until you feels as though, through your immersion in the expanding richness of the activity over time, you have a glimpse—and maybe even a grand vista—of the infinite. Once you have that glimpse, either the answer to the question “what’s the point of my life?” will become obvious… or you’ll simply be bored by the question as it distracts you from your favorite self-expanding activities. Either way, you’ll be happy.

2007, age twenty-nine:

I was standing by the open fourth-story window of my rented flat in Buenos Aires, as I’d been doing for hours on end in recent days and months, staring sullenly at the ocean of sidewalk below, a seeming resting place of final peace with just a slight shift in weight…

Buenos Aires sounds to most people like a romantic vacation destination, but to me, it was a place of retreat, a sign of my failure, a last step, at the end of the earth, on the way to the end of my line.

I had taken a wrong turn somewhere in life, and after a long, winding road, I’d finally hit a dead end, four stories up in an apartment overlooking the cracked sidewalks of the San Telmo neighborhood of one of the most storied cities in the world, and I was contemplating my final move.

I had suffered from recurring bouts of depression since high school. I won’t bore you with the details of my own teenage depression—in high school, there’s almost something wrong with you if you’re not depressed—except to note that it involved all the usual suspects: hundreds of pages of rants penned in various journals, unrequited lust elevated to the level of an existential condition, and of course, tortured anguish for a world so depraved and corrupt it could not recognize a truly special and unique literary talent walking among men, Michael Ellsberg, high school sophomore.

As college dragged on, however, and yet this same basic mentality remained, it all became less and less cute. A year out of college, I decided I needed help. I was living in New York, and one day at work, I picked up the Manhattan phone book, and searched under “psychotherapy.”

Thus began a fifteen-year journey through the entire gauntlet of Western medical approaches to mental health. This journey took me through psychotherapists, psychologists, psychopharmacologists, general practitioners, and psychiatrists, all with various diagnoses, suggestions, and prescriptions.

Early on in this process, I was diagnosed with depression, and prescribed Paxil, and later Prozac.

Certainly, the label of depression seemed reasonable, given that I often had difficulty even rousing myself out of bed to get to work. However, in the dialogues with various professionals leading to this diagnosis, neither the professionals nor I were paying attention to one detail about my life which—in hindsight—seems highly relevant:

On a modest salary as an assistant at a venture capital fund, I was—during my off hours—spending hundreds of dollars a week on sociology books at Barnes & Noble, conducting research for a book I wanted to write, a “grand unified theory of human society” that would put me on a level with Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim.

(“I see…  Hmmm… “ I can still hear various practitioners saying, in their practiced tones of non-judgment, scratching their chins while I explained my writing project in all earnestness. They then returned to their questioning about my depression symptoms)

Staying up until 3 or 4 AM the morning working on this “masterwork” did not help my relationship with corporate employment, and soon enough it became clear that my stable nine-to-five job and me were not really meant for each other.

At my wit’s end, I did what so many children blessed with compassionate, caring parents do in such situations. I moved back in with them, at age twenty-six.

My father needed help editing his next book. I’d edited his previous one (wordsmithing was about the only faculty I had any control over at that point), so the plan was to work for my father, while I picked up the pieces of my confused life.

I rented a room downstairs in my parents’ home—the same room in which I used to play Nintendo, trade baseball cards, and flip through shoplifted Playboys when I was thirteen. (I’d long since thrown out the Nintendo and the baseball cards.)

By age twenty-seven, I found myself routinely waking up at 2 PM on weekdays, in the room I grew up in, unable to rouse myself for my part-time job editing my father’s writing in his home office, in the room next door to my own.

I had virtually nothing to show for my half-decade out of college, save for a string of failed job attempts, romantic relationships that I’d mostly ruined myself, about fifteen hundred pages of rants in five volumes, and chronic under-earning that had landed me in tens of thousands of dollars in credit-card debt.

Something in my life had gone wrong—terribly wrong… 

But what?

One morning during this period, I simply could not get out of bed. After a twenty-minute struggle, I managed to break free of the chains of my bed, and walked up to the ground floor to cook some eggs for breakfast. When I got there, I could barely turn on the stove. I decided I needed to take the day off, and crawled back into bed.

I noticed, on my shelf, a book called Moodswing by Dr. Ronald Fieve. It had been sitting there for years, but I’d never read it. I started flipping through it as I sank back into bed.

Reading it, I learned of a manic-depressive condition called bipolar II. Unlike full-blown manic depression, also known as bipolar I, the highs in bipolar II are not manic but rather hypomanic. They feature extremely elevated mood, energy, and grandiosity, but they do not reach the state of psychosis (believing that you’re the second coming of Jesus, or that the toaster is sending you hidden messages, etc.), as in mania.

Nonetheless, Dr. Fieve wrote, the person with bipolar II can reach states of extreme excitement in which “judgment is lost.” Fieve described a type of “manic entrepreneur,” a patient who is “full of grandiose ideas and plans for business investments.” Most commonly, Fieve stated, the grandiose states of a bipolar II patient are “hypersexualized.”

This certainly seemed to describe me. Part of the reason I was unable to rouse myself from bed each morning during that period, was this:

I was staying up all night, often until 7 or 8 AM, working on my latest attempt to become a literary superstar. In that period, I wrote a wildly sexual, experimental, caffeine-pot-and-wine-charged attempt at autobiographically based comedic nonfiction, almost wholly devoid of any structure, weaving in manic political rants and fragments from my senior honors thesis in international relations at Brown. (The thesis was called “Black Masks, White Guilt: Cultural Appropriation, Multicultural Consumerism and the Search for a Meaningful First World Existence.”) My literary idols were Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michel Houellebecq. I was certain my name would be joining theirs at the table of “bad boys” in literature.

Here is one of the twenty-two rejection letters sent to my agent at the time. This dismissal was from a legendary literary editor who had discovered David Foster Wallace, in its entirety: 

“I’m going to pass on this project. Mr. Ellsberg’s writing is not strong enough to overcome the simple fact that he is not a very likable person. Sorry, but there it is.”

Touché.

Reading the description of bipolar II in Dr. Fieve’s book, a bolt of recognition hit me. I began ruminating over my past through this lens, trying to determine if the bipolar II description might apply to me. All of a sudden, I saw a whole pattern of grandiose, hypersexualized manic entrepreneurial projects.

A year out of college, I was working for my uncle at his venture capital firm in Manhattan. In an opportune moment of nepotism—did you know that “nepotism” stems from nepote, the Italian word for “nephew”?1—he set me up running a small venture capital fund of my own. I would manage a small amount of his own capital, investing it for him as I saw fit, so I could “learn the ropes of the industry,” he said. He would set up a limited liability company for this purpose, of which I would be CEO.

I decided to focus my company on environmental technology, because it was a hot and promising field, I wanted to improve the environment, and I wanted to show the ladies my sensitive side. I begged the administrative assistants at the firm to print up business cards that read “Michael Ellsberg, Founder & CEO, Green Planet Venture Capital, LLC”

Now I was ready to join the big boys, with women swooning and fawning over me, as befits a proper CEO. I ceremoniously changed my various profiles on different Internet dating sites—Match, JDate.com, Nerve, VeggieDate—from “analyst at a venture capital firm” to “CEO of a small venture capital firm focusing on environmental technology.”

I passed out my business card as if each one were a fraction of a date that were somehow all going to add up to a whole one. I gave them to waitresses and bartenders with my home number scrawled on the back. I gave them to department store saleswomen, administrative assistants, women I met at bars and clubs. Then I sat back, waiting for the flood of calls from the ladies who were hot and bothered for their CEO studmuffin. And. . . nothing.

Hypersexualized manic entrepreneurial venture? Check. Then there was BrainsBeautyWisdom .com. I’d registered that domain name, and put up a website. The idea was to build an Internet dating site devoted to older woman/younger man romantic relationships, of which I’d had several. (This was in 2003, before the phenomenon had tipped in the media.) I contacted several Internet-dating software designers for quotes. On the site, I constructed a page listing all of the books on that topic, and another page linked to various articles on the topic. Before I had any members or profiles on the site, I pitched More, a magazine for women forty and older, for a feature on the site.

When that idea fizzled, I briefly got energized by the idea of opening a dance studio in East Williamsburg. I’d moved out of my Village apartment after my uncle decided to let me go. (I didn’t blame him: Green Planet Venture Capital was nose-diving), and I was out looking to rent a loft in the up-and-coming formerly-industrial neighborhood of East Williamsburg. I found a ground-floor loft I liked. The real estate agent, a guy about my age, told me that the unit could be used for commercial purposes, and that many of the people in the building ran music studios, pottery studios, and other creative endeavors out of their lofts.

“Are there attractive women in the building?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, tons of them,” he said. “And in the neighborhood in general. All the artist girls are moving here.”

A light bulb went on: I’ll open a dance studio! Images of me teaching salsa dance to female artists in the neighborhood popped into my mind. (I had been an amateur salsa dancer and teacher for years.) I wrote a check for the first month’s rent right there, and signed the lease a few days later.

I began planning my business: I would call it “Mobo Dance & Yoga,” because the unit was near the Bogart exit off the Morgan L stop. I would teach a salsa class daily, and would rent out the unit for other dance and yoga classes: the women would flood into my place during the day!

I sank several grand from my savings into this scheme before I realized how absurd it was: I’d never operated a small business before, and I hadn’t even researched the market. It turned out, there was no market. While there were plenty of attractive bohemian women in the neighborhood, apparently they weren’t taking dance or yoga classes then, because a community art space a few blocks away—a business competitor I hadn’t even considered before impulsively signing the lease—had trouble getting three or four people to show up to their one yoga class and one dance class per week.

(This was way before the time when it would have occurred to me that my seductive intention behind this studio was super creepy. I’m very glad it didn’t come to fruition.)

Then there was Wing-Babes .com. I’d come up with the idea for a business in which men could pay $50 an hour for women to help them pick up other women in bars. I had even put up a website and even interviewed prospective Wing-Babes. Then my mother pointed out to me that any relationship that one of my male clients started with a woman he met in a bar this way would be based on a lie, as he’d have to lie about how he knew the “Wing-Babe” who had helped him meet his love interest that night. I saw her point, and I shut the business down.2

My mind seemed to dish up these hypersexualized manic projects, just as Dr. Fieve’s book described, with alarming frequency. I decided to see a psychiatrist who specialized in mood swings.

When I met with the psychiatrist, I told him that I had read a book about bipolar II, that this seemed to fit me, and that I’d like his opinion.

“One must be aware of what I call the ‘medical student phenomenon,’” he said right away. “Beginning medical students start reading the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [the standard handbook of psychiatric illnesses.] They see the list of symptoms for each disorder, and they start thinking, ‘Does that apply to me?’ ‘Oooh, I’m sure I have that one. And that one too!”

I described my history: One grandiose plan or project after another. My multiply rejected book manuscript. Green Planet Venture Capital. BrainsBeautyWisdom .com. Mobo Dance & Yoga. Wing-Babes .com

After hearing me describe all this for half an hour, the psychiatrist peered at me, and said, “I have little doubt that what you are describing is bipolar II. Your self-diagnosis appears to have been correct.”

He told me that bipolar is often misdiagnosed as depression, because patients only go in to see the shrink during the depressed periods of the cycle, which are miserable. They never go to the shrink during the hypomanic phases (which I can confirm, are Grrrreat! Wow, the productivity!)

What’s more, he told me that these misdiagnoses are dangerous, as SSRI medications such as Paxil and Prozac can actually spark manic or hypomanic episodes in bipolar patients. So, the medicine I’d been prescribed earlier could very well have been making my situation much worse.

In later Internet research, I found several articles suggesting that—for unknown reasons—bipolar II is one of the most lethal of mental conditions, possibly more lethal than major unipolar depression and even bipolar I, with a suicide rate estimated up to 20%. (For example, one psychiatry journal article states: “bipolar II depression. . . carries the highest suicide risk among all subtypes of major mood disorders.”)

The psychiatrist recommended the standard medication for bipolar, lithium. I decided to try it. Within a few days, the most heinous, pea-sized green zits began appearing on my forehead. I had never seen anything like this before, so I typed in “acne” and “lithium” into Google. A quick search confirmed that this is a common side-effect of lithium. I promptly quit the drug; I felt I would have rather jumped off the Golden Gate than walk around with my face looking like a pea farm.

The psychiatrist switched me to lamotrigine, an epilepsy drug that also seems to work as a mood stabilizer for bipolar patients. Within a week, fists full of hair were turning up in my hands after shampooing in the shower. Back to Google: “lamotrigine and hair loss.” Turns out, it’s a rare-but-not-unknown side-effect. The idea of taking something that would have such an extreme and disturbing side-effect on my body was out of the question for me. I decided these drugs were not for me.3 I chose to hold off on the medication for the time being, and find a psychotherapist to help me with what was clearly an afflicted soul. 

***

“Tell me about your parents,” Shoshanna, my new therapist, asked. It was 2005, and I was now twenty-eight. 

“I don’t really feel like talking about my parents. They have nothing to do with this.”

“Your parents have nothing to do with your current issues? Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? We spend our most formative years with our parents…”

“They were good parents.”

“But that’s not the issue. I’m not suggesting they were bad parents. They could be good parents and still foster certain—”

“Oh, they probably have lots to do with it, for all I know. But I really don’t feel like paying to talk about them.4 I mean, they gave me the greatest unconditional love I’ll probably ever know—so we’ll come up with some story about now I’m on quest for that same unconditional love from women, and not finding it. But what if my parents had been cold and distant, and I came in here with the same issues? Then we’d come up with some story about how I’m seeking out the unconditional love I never got. It’s all just stories we tell ourselves, don’t you think? Just So Stories.”

Shoshanna frowned. Then shook her head slightly, letting out a small chuckle. “OK, well, we’ll just bookmark your parents for another time. Does anything else from your childhood seem obviously relevant to what you’re in here to talk with me about?”

“Oh, where do we do we begin?”

Shaggy Dog

Like many people, I harbored a deep sense of my unattractiveness to the opposite sex. I was un-athletic as a kid, and had zero interest in sports. This distanced me from my male peer group, and made me a lone wolf—a death sentence for attention from elementary school girls, who swooned for the most athletic boys with the most social standing among the other boys.

Picked on at school; picked last for sports teams. I was not academic enough to be a “nerd,” and not even cool enough to be a “geek.” I was just a dork. The nickname the other kids called me was “shaggy dog,” a reference to my unkempt big curly hair and my unstylish dress. I found solace in all sorts of strange, unsexy hobbies—practicing yo-yo tricks, juggling tricks, magic tricks—as if I had just thrown in the towel on being anything other than dorky. At a summer camp talent show, I juggled puffy shower sponges over the Doors’ “People Are Strange.”   

A defining moment in my romantic development came when I fell into my first big crush, that same season at camp, for Marsha. At the Saturday night dance, I worked up my courage to walk up to her and tap her shoulder from behind. She turned around, and there, facing me in all her brightness, was my dream girl, whose attention I had for all of the next three seconds.

I crouched in and put my mouth near her ear so she could hear me over the blasting music, and asked: “Um, will you go with me?”, using then-prevalent fifth-grade lingo for something akin to “going steady.” The minor smile she had afforded me a moment earlier drained instantly from her face, leaving blankness, and even—I could sniff—a hint of horror.

“Um, I’ll think about it,” she said, in a flat tone. Then she promptly turned away from me and began dancing with herself again. Even at that virgin stage of my social savvy, I could tell, that was an obvious, “No.” I ran back to my bunk and started sobbing.

My friend Alex ran after me. “What’s wrong?’ he asked.

I told him about Marsha. “I’m never going to find my dream girl!” I sniffed through my tears.

“Don’t worry,” Alex said, in a remarkably mature tone for a fifth grader. “She’s out there, looking for you. You’re going to find her one day. Don’t give up. And when you do find her, you’ll forget about Marsha altogether; she won’t even cross your mind.”5

At camp, there was a reputed hut, called “The Hut,” in the hills above camp, where the popular kids reportedly snuck out at night and made out. I was never invited to The Hut, and I didn’t know where it was—though half an hour of hiking one day via the directions one Hut-goer divulged to me in confidence revealed to me that this Shangri-la did in fact exist: a triangular tarp with a few dirty camp mattresses under it. I sat on the mattresses, in daylight, imagining myself there at night, making out with Marsha. (If you wrap your arms around yourself, clasp your sides, and wiggle while air-kissing, you can create a reasonable solo approximation of what it feels like to make out.)

Seventh grade took a turn for the worse. I went from a relatively idyllic elementary school, to an academically- and socially-high-strung college-preparatory middle school in Oakland with the WASPiest name you could imagine, “Head-Royce.” At Head-Royce, I’m pretty sure you could have handed out an alphabetical list of our class, and asked all the students to rank the list from most popular to least—and all of our lists would have been close to the same. The pecking order was that well established—everyone knew their place—and I was in the dregs. A classic wallflower, at the school dances, I longed to be in the middle of the gym, slow dancing to “Nothing Compares to You” by Sinead O’Connor and “Vision of Love,” by Mariah Carey, like the popular kids.

For the start of eighth grade, I transferred out of the socially-stuffy atmosphere at Head-Royce, which I hated, to my local public school, Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley.

And then something bizarre and glorious happened. 

Balthazar for a Month

I don’t know how this miracle happened, but somehow, a bunch of the girls at King Middle School projected “hot new guy” onto me when I got there. I say “projected” because I feel quite certain it was not anything I did myself to gain this status. My best interpretation is that all the romantic musical chairs had already been played out long before in this class (who had been together since elementary school) and that the girls were desperate for fresh meat.

And I was that fresh meat.

For a month.

One day, a girl I’d made friends with during the first few weeks of school, Annalisa, came up to me with a piece of binder paper, with hearts scribbled on it. She handed it to me. It had eight names of girls from our grade.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“These are all the girls in our class who like you.” Looking at that list was absolutely the greatest moment I had ever experienced in my thirteen years on the planet so far. Any one of those girls would have made a great girlfriend—that is, my first girlfriend. Annalisa was on the list—I had no idea she felt that way about me. And Vanessa.

Vanessa was a Queen Bee at the school—she was gorgeous, and a high-status ringleader. And taller than me. I don’t think I’d even spoken to her—just observed her holding court—and there was zero chance I would have ever thought I was in the running to date her.

And here I was, looking at a sheet of paper saying she—and seven other girls in the school—liked me.

“Which one do you want to go with?” Annalisa asked me.

I cannot exaggerate the effect this one sentence had on me. I had never “gone with” a girl before. I’d never even been on a date before. And here I was, being asked to choose a girlfriend from a list of eight attractive girls—a list including one of the most high-status girls in the school. WTF was happening?

Then I made one of the decisions I most regret in my life. I should have picked Annalisa. We were already friends, I really liked her, we had a fun vibe together, she was cute, and I’m sure I could have had a wonderful relationship with her.

But the egoic part of me… the part of me that was blown away that I could have a girlfriend as high-status as Vanessa, meaning that I was high-status too… that part of me said:

“I think I’m going to go with Vanessa.”

I’d never been in a situation before in which a girl I was friends with was asking me to pick between her and seven other girls for romance, from a list she’d handed me. I’m sure I could have handled it more gracefully. But ultimately, she asked me to pick, and I did.

“OK, I’ll tell her,” Annalisa said. She looked sad, but not crestfallen. I think she kind of knew that I was going to pick Vanessa. It was… after all… Vanessa.

The match was brokered by Annalisa on a Friday, and Vanessa and I arranged to go on a movie date the next day. We went to see Young Guns II. The movie choice was not random. Along with blue-chip nineties heartthrobs Emilio Estevez, Christian Slater, Kiefer Sutherland, and Lou Diamond Phillips, it starred an up-and-coming heartthrob named Balthazar Getty.

Balthazar (left) was just fifteen when Young Guns II came out in August 1990. He was devastatingly good-looking—a brooding bad boy crossed with pretty boy look—and had just become the “it boy” among teenage girls based on his starring role in Lord of the Flies earlier that year. He was on the cover of all the teeny-bopper magazines, and on posters on Annalisa’s wall.

And it turned out that—in a circuitous way—Balthazar had played role in my being handed the List. 

The summer before, my father had taken me to LA, and on that trip, we stayed with his friend, the sixties radical activist Gisela Getty, for a weekend. I was thirteen, and her son Balthazar was fifteen, and had just become a movie star. Balthazar and his girlfriend, who was a model (she must have been older than him, as she could drive), offered to take me out for the night. For one glorious night, I went from being a dorky kid playing Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt on my Nintendo, organizing my baseball card collection, and whacking off to Playboy in my bedroom in Berkeley, to prancing around LA with a movie star, in a convertible driven by his older model girlfriend.

While thrilling—and Balthazar and his girlfriend couldn’t have been nicer—that weekend highlighted for me the unbridgeable romantic gulf between myself and a guy only two years older than me, who was vastly better looking, and famous. Yes, it was envy, but that word doesn’t do it justice: it was as if I was visiting an advanced alien in a romantically-faraway galaxy for a night. Does one envy aliens? Even more than envy, it was awe.

Early in the school year, before The List, Annalisa found out that my family knew Balthazar Getty’s family. She went apeshit. Before long, all kinds of girls in the school were walking up to me: “Oh my God, you know Balthazar Getty?! What’s he like?! Does he have a girlfriend?! Who is she?! Is he really that hot in person?!”

Of course, I liked the attention I was getting from girls—completely foreign to me—but it was also noticeable that I was getting this attention simply because of my minor acquaintanceship with another boy they were obsessed with.

At any rate, none of this mattered the Saturday night of my date with Vanessa. It was a night of many firsts. It was my first date ever. And I was on a date with one of the most popular girls in the entire class! It was my first time holding a girl’s hand. My first time putting my arm around a girl. I didn’t even have to get my “nerve” up to do it, as she was, well, sort of, my girlfriend. We hadn’t really “dated.” I had just… selected her. Ol’ Shaggy Dog went from never having had a girlfriend to simply selecting my girlfriend from a list. Taking her out had been as easy as… well… ordering take-out.

After the movie, we took the #7 bus up to her home in north Berkeley near mine. Her parents were away for the weekend. We sat on her parents’ bed, which had the biggest TV in the house in front of it. We watched it for a minute. Then we started making out. My first kiss. And it was much more than a little smooch. It was a full-on bed make-out. I was on top of the world. Balthazar wasn’t the star that night. I was the star of my own show!

That Monday, Vanessa and I sat together in the yard for lunch. Plenty of people were looking at us, making little comments. I had no idea what to say to her. What do you say to one of the most popular girls at school when you’re having lunch with her on Monday and she’s been your girlfriend since Friday, without any dating having led up to the relationship, and you’ve never had a girlfriend before, and people are watching you? I put my arm around her, but I felt her stiffen up, so I took it away.

The next day, I went to meet her for lunch, and she informed me that she didn’t want to go together anymore. She wasn’t mean about it—she just said it matter-of-factly, as if she was telling me the weather had changed. She didn’t give me a reason, and I didn’t ask. I knew what the reason was. I was a fucking dork, and that didn’t change over one weekend. As soon as she saw how awkward I was with her at lunch—without the distraction of seeing the movie with Balthazar in it or the make-out afterward—she saw that I was not in her league. It made perfect social sense; I didn’t question it. I was simply not Vanessa material.

And… as went Vanessa, so went the rest of girls at King Middle School. As soon as she rejected me, I became a persona non grata on campus. I had gone from social obscurity at the start of the semester, to the most desired guy of the moment among the girls in the class, to the short-lived boyfriend of one of the most popular girls, to a social reject, all in the space of about a month. Romantic whiplash. 

Even at that age, I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Annalisa would still take me as her boyfriend if I came back to her after Vanessa dumped me. So I didn’t ask. But I was disappointed to find out that either my choice of Vanessa and/or my being dumped by Vanessa meant Annalisa no longer wanted to be friends with me at all. She ignored me the rest of the year, as did all the other girls in the class.   

I spent the rest of that school year wondering what would have happened had I chosen Annalisa instead of Vanessa. I probably would have had a girlfriend that whole year—a real relationship with a nice, kind, sweet, friendly, cute girlfriend. Instead, I allowed myself to get seduced by the promise of status and social power.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

Rock Star Envy

I explained to Shoshanna—as she listened, perhaps exasperated by this litany of my woes of envy—that while I was in college, a young A-list rock star bought the house behind my parents’ house in Berkeley.

He was the lead guitarist for a band whose first album had gone multi-platinum a few years earlier. I didn’t find out the way you might expect to find out that a rock star had moved in behind you—groupies, paparazzi, all-night parties. Rather, my friend Arnold told me. Arnold’s older brother had gone to high school with the Rock Star, and was still friends with him. 

Five years before, I heard through Arnold, the Rock Star had been serving frozen yogurt part-time in Berkeley, playing in a rock band on the side. Then his band got discovered and signed by a major label. Their album went multi-platinum, their single flew to the top of the charts, they started touring all over the world, and the Rock Star bought his first home, behind my parents’ home.

I only met the Rock Star once; he had been kind enough to invite me to a party of his. (Likely the only time I will have the experience of creeping through a hole in my backyard fence, where I used to shoot BB guns, to get to a megastar’s party.) Through Arnold, I heard details of the Rock Star’s new, super-charged sex life. He went around saying things to Arnold’s brother like, “Damn, I haven’t had sex in a week. Oh, except for those two blowjobs I got.” One time, the Rock Star was in a bar in Berkeley, and a woman walked right up to him and said, “I want to suck your cock.” Within a minute, he was in receiving a blowjob in a bathroom stall.

I reacted to these tales the way an agricultural laborer in the developing world who earns $500 a year might react if he heard that I and lots of people in the developed world are spending the value of his annual earnings in a month to sit on a couch and tell a stranger how miserable we are for fifty minutes a week. Anger, resentment, envy, wonder.

If, after telling this agricultural laborer about how some people in the developed world spend his $500 annual income, you handed him a stack of People magazines, he might start poring over them obsessively. He might immerse himself in a fantasy world, full of glamour, beauty, and excitement. Even if his station in life satisfied him—maybe his neighbors only made $400 a year, and he felt proud of his extra $100, part of which he used to send his kids to school and the rest of which he used to buy his wife nicer clothing—he wouldn’t feel satisfied for long after reading all those issues of People. (I read later that psychologists refer to this dynamic—in which people judge their level of material abundance in comparison to others—as “relative deprivation.”)

Every time I looked out of my window, onto the Rock Star’s home, I wondered about what lucky things were going on inside. Was he on his bed right now, with two gorgeous, naked women, making love to one of them on his back while the other sat on his face while the two women kissed? Was one of them bent over in front of him, with her head between the other’s legs?

This was the period I started writing Rock Star Envy—to deal with my emotions from contemplating the differential between the five-finger sex going on in my bedroom, and the five-groupie sex going on in his, separated only by my parents’ backyard.

***

One day in therapy, after I had been prattling on about whatever I imagined was going on in the bedroom across the backyard from mine, Shoshanna asked me, “How many women have you slept with, approximately?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“You keep a list?” she asked.

“Not quite. I keep a journal. I always write a journal entry about my first time sleeping with a new woman. In case I ever forget what it was like—I want to remember.”

“Well, if it means anything to you, as far as I can tell, that’s a lot more women than the average man has been with,” Shoshanna said.

“Whoop-de-fucking do!” I joked, twirling my finger.

“Isn’t your goal to be some kind of super-stud? It doesn’t matter to you that you’ve slept with far more women than probably most guys have?”

“The problem is,” I said, “there’s a power law curve. Even if I were sleeping with ten times the women that the average man does, it doesn’t matter—we’re all just peons on the long tail of the power law curve.”

“What are you talking about?” Shoshanna asked, eyebrows raised.

“Have you heard of a guy called Tucker Max?”

Shoshanna said no, but lightly rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Oh God, what is this going to be? Here we go again…”

Envious of an Asshole

In the mid-aughts, in one of the peak periods of the relentless manic-depression of my twenties, I turned my writing gaze inward to focus on my neurotic self-judgment as a beta-male and my envious obsession with the sexual access of successful, famous alpha males. I titled the mess of the manuscript I was working on—what else?—Rock Star Envy. (I described it as “Manic Nonfiction.”) I had a literary agent who was sending it out enthusiastically, but we were racking up rejection after rejection.6

During this period, I came across a New York Times article about a nonfiction writer who was having far more success than I was—both in publishing, and in dating (or rather, in hooking up).

The author was Tucker Max, bad-boy partier who chronicled his drunken exploits on his blog, and who had published a book of his true-life adventures, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which had become a bestseller. (The book’s cover featured Max with a beer in one hand and his other arm around a seemingly-attractive blonde, whose face was cut out with dotted lines. “Your Face Here” the cutout read. He refers the genre he pioneered as “dick lit.”) The introduction to his website read:

My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way. I share my adventures with the world.

The New York Times article, entitled, “Dude, Here’s My Book,” described the sexual opportunity that Max had created for himself through his combination of extreme macho arrogance, and his literary success and fame:

“I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” has sold over 30,000 copies since and has helped make Mr. Max a celebrity on college campuses. He said he gets as many as 400 e-mail messages a day, including an average of five offers of sex from women, which he accepts whenever practical. One of Mr. Max’s conquests got a tattoo on her groin boasting of their liaison in candid terms. True to form, Mr. Max wrote up the episode for his Web site as well.

On his site, he had a “Hook-Up Application Form” where women could “apply” to hook up with him when he was in their town touring for his book. I cannot overemphasize the negative psychological effect reading about his five offers of sex a day and his hook-up application form had on me. I felt like a worthless loser. I couldn’t get my book published, and here was this guy who not only had a published book, but who had so much sexual opportunity that he literally had to turn some women down who were filling out a form to apply to hook up with him.

And he was an asshole. (His subsequent book of more exploits and conquest, now supercharged with his literary fame and status, was entitled Assholes Finish First.) The pattern, as described in his stories, was that he would treat women like shit, calling them sluts and whores and making all kinds of extremely objectifying judgments about their looks, and the women would fling themselves at him on account of his brashness and dominance. (See one account from the perspective of one of these women: “I Slept With Tucker Max, the Internet’s Biggest Asshat.”)

One woman he treated like shit was so taken with her night with the tough guy, she got a tattoo—the one alluded to in the New York Times article—that said “I Fucked Tucker Max.” She was so proud of this erotic accomplishment she created an “I Fucked Tucker Max” blog site.7 

I was, at least in theory, a “nice guy” and a “sensitive guy”—the guy who supposedly cares about women and is utterly flummoxed as to why women seem to prefer jerks who treat them like shit, while they put the supposedly nice, kind, caring (but meek) guys who believe they would treat women much better, in the dreaded “friend zone.”

During my senior year in high school, my best friend Christina—a fellow hard-core vegan activist whom I had a massive secret crush on—went for a friend of mine at our school named Vincent. He was taller, way more athletic and better looking, and far more confident than me; I envied him wildly. He was a total ladies’ man, girls swooned around him, and he was making the rounds of the girls in our class, hooking up with them and then ditching them, leaving them heartbroken, and moving on to the next one.

When he got around to Christina, she went for him immediately, in contrast to her months of expressing no romantic interest in me, which I desperately wished she would do based on our endless vegan discussions. “I’m so confused,” I wrote in one of my journal entries, as I watched this play out between them:

I mean, I have every characteristic that I think would appeal to Christina—I’m vegan, spiritual, sincere, intellectual, and gentle. Why isn’t she crazy for me like I am for her? The only thing I don’t have is Vincent’s good looks or his confidence. Maybe that’s all she wants: good looks and confidence, not the same environmentalist values or drive to stop the torture of animals.

As I watched with envy the short-lived romance between Christina and Vincent play out (before he moved on to his next conquest, as I knew he would), I inked the following in my journal:

I was not then self-aware enough—either in high school or in my twenties when the whole Rock Star Envy and Tucker Max thing was playing out—to realize that usually the self-proclaimed “nice guys” and “sensitive guys,” including myself, objectified women just as much as the macho assholes. It’s not like we were going for women at our own attractiveness and status level—we wanted the hotties, and the high status that went along with them, as much as everyone else did.

The macho assholes like Max were just more open about their superficiality and objectification. In one way, the assholes were less bad: at least they were offering “truth in advertising” in terms of what they were after and what they were offering women, and the women who chose them knew exactly what they were getting. (Informed consent.) The “sensitive guys,” including myself, were usually engaged in some kind of unconscious “false advertising”: presenting as caring and kind, but secretly envious of the status and sexual conquests of the jerks.

The M.O. of the nice guy was the unconscious bait-and-switch. The exterior of “kind and caring” was the bait, and the interior of being an objectifying, entitled, whiny jerk was the unconscious switch. The latter would often rear its head if we nice guys were given even a wisp of opportunity to be romantically involved with the women we craved. It’s not that the nice guys were intentionally trying to be jerks—our conscious self-image was exactly the opposite. It’s that—unlike the asshole—the nice guy wasn’t aware of his demons within, and thus when those demons finally got unleashed from their years of repression, they came out hard, and caught by surprise the woman who was drawn to the “kind” exterior.8

In response to Shoshanna’s question about what I meant by my “power law” comment, I replied:

“Tucker said he’s lost count of how many women he’s slept with. He said it’s likely over a thousand. [The Rock Star] is likely over a thousand too. I’m sure Bathazar has had hundreds of models. I’m at thirty-seven women.9 And it’s not as though there’s a straight line between guys at my level and the guys at the top. At a certain point, these guys get so successful with women, that other women want to be with them just because other women want to be with them. I think Rene Girard called it mimetic desire—desire for someone aroused by the fact that other people desire the same person. The winner wins by exponentially more than the guys like me. It’s a winner-take-all game.”

“Why is this a competition for you?” Shoshanna asked.

“I mean, I could be some fucking loser, a nobody content to be forgotten when I die, as if I never existed.”

“What does how many women you sleep with have to do with that?”

“Because sleeping with lots of hot women is a sign that you’re a somebody. Hot women don’t sleep with losers. They don’t want to reproduce the genes of losers.”

“But you don’t even want kids!” Shoshanna exclaimed, in that exasperated tone that was often therapeutic for me to hear (subtly pointing out how ridiculous I was being).10

“I meant that theoretically,” I said. “It’s the principle of it. There are winners in life, and there are losers. The way male winners are determined is by how beautiful the women they sleeps with are, and how many of them they sleep with.”

“Whatever you say about this ‘power law curve’ theory, thirty-seven women is a lot of women.11 You’re not some guy who can’t get a date. You’re just not. You may have been that guy in high school, but you’re not that guy anymore. Your self-image is stuck in the past. That’s not uncommon at all; in fact, it’s more common than not. But it’s steering you wrong now. You’re fighting yesterday’s battles, playing them out again and again—and not seeing how being stuck in the past is harming you now.”

“How is it harming me now?” I asked.

“You’ve described some of the women you’ve been with recently. They seem like perfectly nice women. If you weren’t compensating for your status issues from your teenage years, maybe you’d see the women who are right in front of you, and stick with one of them. Instead, you’re ditching them after each conquest—and that’s what they are, conquests—because you want more and more of them. You’re trying to prove to yourself that you’re not that ‘loser’ version of yourself you hated in middle school and high school.”

I took that in. She had a point. I couldn’t deny that.

“But,” Shoshanna continued, “in trying not to be that loser you thought you were as a teenager, you’ve swung the pendulum. You’re mimicking the exact behavior of the asshole guys you judge yet secretly envy. You’re practicing the same love-em-and-leave-em behavior you judge in these guys. Is that who you want to be?”

“It’s worse,” I said. “I’m mimicking them, taking on all their terrible traits, yet I’m not even having the success they are. They’re assholes and winners. I’m being an asshole, but I’m a loser.”

“Listen to yourself, Michael. Just listen to yourself,” Shoshanna said. “You need help man,” she said, shaking her head and chuckling under her breath.

“I guess that’s why I’m here, sitting on your couch.”

Replication Desperation

I should probably clarify something here, as it bears on why I was close to suicidal at times throughout my twenties. My comment to Shoshanna about how I would die an unknown loser, and that other guys would have their genes reproduced by lots of hot women sleeping with them, is strange on its surface, given that I was pretty sure I didn’t want to reproduce genetically—a strangeness which Shoshanna picked up on.

What gives?

My depression in my twenties—and later again in my thirties—was what I later found out is often referred to as an “existential depression“: in my darkest moods, I thought there was something wrong not just with my existence in particular, but with existence itself.  While much of my depression during this time had to do with feelings of being a failure, a loser, and (relatively) unsuccessful with women compared to the rock stars, movies stars, and bad-boy alpha males I envied, there was a deeper cut: a sense of the utter futility of this entire charade called life.

It was a double-whammy: desperately feeling like I was losing a certain “game” of life, while at the same time realizing that even if I “won” this game it would be meaningless and pointless. And self-hatred for even wanting to win this pointless game—while at the same time still desperately wanting to win it.12

My sense of life as a series of competitions for replicational dominance, and my sense of the futility of life itself, filled as it was from top to bottom with such competitions, came from reading—cliché of cliches—The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Contrary to the impression given by the (poorly chosen) title, the book does not argue that genes necessarily make humans selfish. Rather, Dawkins’s point is that genes themselves, as individual entities, are selfish, meaning they have one function, and one function only: to replicate themselves at all costs. Any gene that does not display this function gets out-replicated by those that do, and eventually disappears.13 Dawkins, like a good Darwinian, suggests that the universal principle of life—likely to hold anywhere life is found in the universe—is that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.”

Yet, in the final chapter of the book (which famously introduced the concept of the “meme,”) Dawkins argues that genes are not the only replicating entities found within life in the universe. Rather, he argues, a second replicator can be found right here on Earth: a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” rather than of genetic replication. Dawkins calls such units of imitative copying “memes,” based on the Greek root mimesis (which means “imitation, representation.”)

Dawkins writes:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ‘… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’

There are many reasons one might find this worldview depressing. For me, the reason that hit hardest was the idea that life is, in essence, “replicating entities.” I thought “Replication is just so… meaningless. You have one thing, and now you have two of them. And now you have four, and eight, and sixteen. Where is the meaning of that? Replication itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. Its goodness or badness depends on what is being replicated—yet judgments of goodness or badness are themselves just memes vying for replication like any others. Just because something is being replicated a lot doesn’t mean it’s good, and plenty of things that are good don’t get replicated much. But if something good doesn’t get replicated, it dies out, and that can’t be good… And I want my idea memes to replicate, and I want the success that comes from that… even while I know it’s ultimately just a meaningless game for replication dominance… AAAAARGH!”

I thought of this mental state I would get into as “replication desperation.”

I was a man of many hungers—for sexual power, status, and fame, mostly—and yet Dawkins’s book got me to see that these hungers basically just served the whims of various replicators, whether genetic or memetic. I was, more or less, just the bitch of one replicator or another. And the people who were the servants of more successful replicators got more rewards in the form of fame and sexual status and money and power.

And I wanted those rewards—just because the replicators driving me knew that doing the power-hungry things to get the rewards would serve their replication. And that the rewards themselves would attract more rewards, because fame feeds on itself, sex feeds on fame, fame feeds on sex, sex feeds on power, power feeds on money, money feeds on sex, and sex feeds on money.

Feeding, feeding, feeding.

And yet still so hungry.

Sometimes I would get so disgusted with the constant feeding frenzy in my soul, I would feel this dramatic, sudden, involuntary unplugging from inside of me. These were the depressions—usually a few weeks or months at their worst. “What’s the point?” I would wonder.

“Why keep engaging with this charade? If I keep going, the best outcome is that my memetic ideas will replicate more, which might make me slightly more famous, which might get me more sexual access, which will make some part of my brain happy, the part that gets happy when I’m doing things highly associated with genetic replication—even though I don’t even want to genetically replicate. All of this is so fucking annoying, and endless. When will it end? Given the pointlessness and futility of the replication game, even for the winners, why not just opt-out early—the big ‘opt-out’—and save a whole lot of pointless struggling in the meantime?”

The one thing that kept me from offing myself when I was in these existentially depressed states was knowing how much grief this would cause my parents. They were good parents—they loved me unconditionally and supported me in all kinds of ways—and we were as close as parents and child could be.

The thought of sending them into deep grief for the rest of their lives—to have that be the last part of their life story after they had lived such long and rich lives—after all of the genuine love and care they showed me, made me cry. So I felt stuck. I didn’t want to cause these people I loved tremendous pain, but that meant I had to keep walking through all this inner pain.

After a few weeks of lying in bed or ambling around in roughly this mental state, some switch in my mind would flip, and all of a sudden… ladies and gentlemen… It’s Mania Time!!!

This switch would usually flip when I got some idea or concept or scheme that I thought would once and for all help me win the sex-money-fame status game. Maybe, in my depression, I had been reading vaguely Buddhist-inspired self-help literature encouraging me not to feed my “hungry ghost” within… to humble myself… to renounce my drive to achieve status, success, sex, fame, money, and power… to see these as addictions (addictions that were destroying the planet!)… to stop feeding the addictions. To sit on a pillow. Watch my breath. My boring breath—nothing exciting about it at all. Not nearly as exciting as hot babes! And I would resign myself to this boredom and humility—this nothingness, this death, from a memetic replication perspective—for a few weeks

Then, one day, while sitting on a pillow, trying to accept that I’m a nothing rather than fight it… I would have some “spiritual insight”… and I would be sure that I needed to share it with the world! This is going to help so many people! I could write a book about this, teach a course! I could create a method, trademark it! Women will love it!14

I began to understand why bipolar II was considered among the most lethal of mental conditions. Bipolar II is the mental illness of getting your hopes up dramatically and have them whisked away just as dramatically. Like Charlie Brown hoping that this time is finally going to be the time Lucy’s not going to whisk the football away from him at the last minute, and he’s finally going to get to kick it, and then… fuck… flat on his ass… fooled again. Bipolar II is the mental illness of repeatedly being a fool, and then getting depressed that you’re a fool… and then getting excited by some new foolish way to stop the foolishness. Eventually you get tired of the rollercoaster, and start thinking… what’s the point?

Bipolar in Buenos Aires

2007, age twenty-nine:

As is often the case with mental issues, they combine with poor work habits to lead to low earnings. By this point in my life, I had developed some other freelance editing gigs beyond working for my father. But still, my earnings this late in my twenties were laughably low, and were only livable because I was living in the room I’d grown up in. (Or rather, the room I’d failed to grow up in.)

I did have one thing going for me, though. As a freelance editor, my work could be done from my laptop, anywhere in the world there was an Internet connection. I had editing clients across the country, and even a few internationally, and none of them cared where the hell I was, as long as I did the work well and got it done on time.

A friend from college had moved down to Buenos Aires in 2003, and she had been telling me how livable it was there. This was 2006, five years after Argentina’s cataclysmic economic crash. I spoke fluent Spanish, from studying in elementary and middle school and a high-school year abroad in Spain, so language wouldn’t be a problem. For $15,000 a year, I learned from research on expat sites, I could live very well down there—my own one-bedroom in a nice neighborhood, meals out once or twice a day in nice restaurants, theater and entertainment, taxis, good wine, world-class steak—all in a modern, European city considered by many to be one of the most romantic in the world.

That was right around my annual budget. It was time to move back out of my folks’ place—before I turned thirty—and try my hand at supporting myself fully again. I told Shoshanna of my plans, and she was supportive; we would continue sessions over Skype.

So, with laptop and one suitcase in tow, in January of 2007, I was off to Argentina: an economic migrant taking the best option available among what seemed to me a limited palate of options.

***

Life was good for a while in Buenos Aires. As promised on the expat sites, I was able to find a clean one-bedroom apartment, fully-furnished, with high-speed Internet connection, for $550 a month.

I spent my days working on freelance projects for US clients via my laptop in one of the many trendy local Wi-Fi cafes in San Telmo, sipping on rich $1 cups of café con leche. A $5 bottle of world-class malbec split with a tourist woman checking her email in the cafe—then perhaps a cone of Argentina’s world-famous gelato with my newfound tourist friend after dinner.

Yes, life was very good.

Until it wasn’t.

My mood swings started getting worse and worse. Dark clouds pressing me down into bed, making it almost impossible to rise up to start the day—punctuated by manic bursts of all-night re-writing of Rock Star Envy (after it had already been rejected 22 times years earlier), in which I became convinced I was the next Henry Miller or David Sedaris. Difficulty rousing the energy or motivation to earn enough to support myself even there. Frequent bouts of hours staring out my fourth-story window at the ocean of the sidewalk below, a place of final peace. The only thing that ever kept me from shifting my weight just a little and ending it all was thinking of the call my parents would get, informing them that their son’s brains were splattered on a sidewalk in Argentina and asking where they should send the corpse. That would be just too much. That would be cruel.

So I would step back from the window when the pain of that thought hit me. . . .

Footnotes:

In the fall of my freshman year at college, in 1995, Playboy magazine sent a glimmering tour bus to our New England liberal arts campus to promote its recently-published “Women of the Ivy League” issue.

The only time in my life that I have been possessed by an all-encompassing, rigid, demagogic ideology coincided with Playboy’s visit to my school. My ideology did not think kindly of Playboy.

Since my junior year of high school, influenced by my militant teenage ethical veganism and a beloved English teacher, I had been a hard-core adherent of ecofeminism.. This theory, which emerged from the radical environmental and feminist movements in the seventies, held that male violence towards women and human violence towards animals and the environment stemmed from the same source: how men within patriarchy objectify everything around them for their use, including women, non-human animals, colonized peoples, and entire ecosystems.

In ecofeminist theory, pornographers were a central misogynistic oppressor. In her book Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature, Susan Griffin argues that, counterintuitively—”the metaphysics of Christianity and the metaphysics of pornography are the same.” In her view, both the pornographer and the Christian theologian hate women’s bodies and treat women as the “other,” and dominate and punish women’s bodies through their worldviews and sexist practices.1

Thus, when Hugh Hefner sent his slimy recruiting minions to my school-town turf, ready to exploit our unsuspecting, innocent young women, I needed to defend our campus from the predations of the nation’s pornographer-in-chief.

I sat at my dorm room desk and composed a letter to the Brown Daily Herald:

I do not believe that pornography should be censored, or that Playboy should be barred from recruiting on campus. I am not of the school of feminists who fear pornography because they believe it is a major cause of violence towards women. Rather, I believe that pornography is a symptom of the basic male-dominated, male-oriented structure of our society, a structure whose inevitable outcome is violence towards women; I fear pornography for what it symbolizes.

To me, pornography symbolizes most of what male-dominated society stands for: separating “me” from “other,” while privileging the “me” and hating and subordinating the “other.” Part of this subordination means reducing the “other” to a mere object (whether it be men reducing women to fleshy receptacles for their penises, or humans reducing animals to pieces of flesh to chop up, cook, and eat).

Another aspect of our society that pornography symbolizes is how we prefer the image or abstraction of something or someone to the actual thing or person. We prefer seeing nature in a calendar to hiking through it ourselves. With the advent of the “information superhighway,” we are beginning to prefer communicating electronically to face-to-face. And, with regard to sexuality, many men prefer the image of a woman printed on paper to the woman herself.

Why? Because it’s easier. Interacting with the image or abstraction of something or someone does not demand of us the subtlety, patience, and emotional commitment that interacting with the actual thing or person does. Unfortunately, what many of us don’t realize is that subtlety, patience, and emotional commitment make most of what we do rewarding.

I clicked “send” on the letter.

This was competent, textbook ecofeminist criticism of pornography (mixed in with a bit of neo-Luddism—an adjacent ideology to which I was also partisan). The tone was demagogic, to be sure, but that certainly didn’t distinguish it from much radical political writing. The only thing remarkable about it was that this textbook ecofeminism was written by an eighteen-year-old male; the combination of my age and my sex made me an uncommon mouthpiece for radical ecofeminism.

But what I did later that afternoon laid bare both my age and my sex.

A few hours later, as was my custom most afternoons, I locked the door, and fished in my dresser for a key. I double-checked my roommate’s class schedule, taped to the wall. Then I kneeled by my bed, pulled my suitcase out from under, and unlocked it. 

From within this locked treasure chest, I removed a stack of magazines: well-worn Playboy and Penthouse magazines I’d been collecting since I was thirteen, when I used to shoplift them from the local grocery store by sticking them in newspapers and then buying the newspaper without paying for the hidden porno mag.

I unbuttoned my fly and dropped my pants and underwear to my ankles. I put a towel down on my desk chair and sat on it. I began flipping through image after image of women “reduced to fleshy receptacles for my penis,” as I had written, progressively stroking myself to climax.   

After a few desperate minutes, I wiped myself with a tissue. I kicked my pants and underwear off my ankles, and wrapped a towel around me, trying to conceal what remained of my hard-on in the wrap of the towel. I put the porn mags back under lock and key. Then I walked out of my room towards the dorm showers, to cleanse myself.

In the Mental Junk Closet…

I’ve heard porn performers say, of the moralizing masses, “You point with one hand and masturbate with the other.” In this case, I typed the letter with both hands, and then wanked with one after.

I’d be lying if I said this was the only time I’ve been so hypocritical. It’s probably not even the worst instance, and certainly not the most consequential.

But I can’t recall another time when I was so brazenly hypocritical: expressing passionate moral demagoguery in a public forum and then violating my own demagogic morals flagrantly in private only hours later. That’s Ted Haggard-level hypocrisy.2

What motivated me to write that letter? On an ideological level, I was a true believer. Is the Christian demagogue less a believer in Christ because he masturbates? If I had been chatting up a lot of women with my ecofeminist rap, it could have been seen as a cynical ploy to get in their graces.3

But I was a weird, unconfident dude, hardly talking to any women, let alone feminist women; whenever I did talk about ecofeminism in class (which was frequently), I was mostly mocked, even by my female classmates; the “eco” and vegan parts, in particular, got the same eye rolls as they do now, and even more so back then, when veganism and radical environmentalism were more fringe.

I was an ecofeminism geek, and a lonely one at that—staying in my dorm on Saturday nights and reading the ecofeminist liturgy. And then… when the loneliness got unbearable… pulling out a Playboy, and my penis, for some gaiety to escape from the dreariness of my militant political consciousness.

Such splits within the self—devoting oneself intensely and earnestly to an ideology in one part of the mind, while another part of one’s mind runs wild in a contrary direction—are not easy to explain.4

The only way I can explain it is that the part of the mind susceptible to ideology seeks to impose order and consistency on an unruly and inconsistent world. The challenge is that our own minds are part of what is most unruly and inconsistent in the world. It’s easier to pretend that our minds are consistent than to actually be consistent—particularly when our unruly desires conflict with a preferred moral order.

And the easiest way to pretend to be consistent is to have what amounts to a mental “junk closet”—that place where we just shove stuff that’s inconsistent with the order we are trying to impose. Then the rest of our mind seems as orderly as a home in which all the mess has been aggregated into a junk closet.

The word “hypocrisy” stems from “Attic Greek hypokrisis ’acting on the stage; pretense,’. . . [and] from hypokrinesthai ’play a part, pretend.’”

This, I think, is the root pretense of hypocrisy: play-acting to others, and to oneself, that one’s mind (and its simplistic models of the world) is more orderly and consistent than it actually is.  

The problem with the “mental junk closet” approach to achieving (the appearance) of consistency in our minds is that it heightens disorder dramatically in the “junk closet” part of our minds. The stuff in the junk closet is way messier than if we just spent the time to engage with it on its own terms and sort it out. And as we stuff more and more stuff into that messy closet, eventually it bursts out, often in ways that shock ourselves and others.

A Loin Full of Ecofeminist Sin

The year after I sent my sticky-fingered letter to the Brown Daily Herald, still a militant ecofeminist in heart and mind (though with a loin full of ecofeminist sin), I was handling music at a sophomore party.

A woman walked up to me at the party and asked me about the music. I had just put in some Cuban salsa. She liked the music. She was Cuban — born in Miami, with parents from the island. Short with shoulder-length, jet-black hair, pale skin, and cherry lips. She wore a tight, black-lace dress.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I realized, while talking with her, that I had seen her a year earlier, in a play she was in. Then, too, I had thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I had thought about how to meet her. But when I read on the program she was a graduate student. I figured there was no way she would be interested in me given the age gap, even aside from her pedestal-worthy looks.

But here I was, talking with her. I don’t think I had ever said more than five words to a woman this beautiful.

She sipped her sangria. “This stuff is disgusting.”

I declined to tell her that I had made it. “There’s some nice wine in the pantry,” I said. We walked over. The bottles were empty. “I have some Cuban rum down in my room.”

Her eyes lit up. “I’ll trade you some speed for it.”

“No, no, that’s okay.”

“How old are you?” she asked on the way down.

“Nineteen,” I said. She shot me a nasty glare. “How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-five.”

At that time, my view of the correct male gender role was the “sensitive male”—the open, friendly, supportive guy who shares hugs and tears with his female friends. I’d finally made some female friends, though they were not ecofeminists (nobody was an ecofeminist). I did not go out and try to “score,” because I viewed it as an expression of predatory male sexuality in a patriarchal culture. I viewed dating as a superficial preoccupation of those who did not understand the urgent attention the environmental crisis needed.

Because ecofeminism posited psychological roots (the ideology of patriarchy) to the problems it addressed, it also posited psychological solutions. The key to undermining patriarchy, according to ecofeminism, was undermining the patriarchal thought structures within our minds. If I walked down the street and felt sexual desire for a woman, I felt guilty. After all, I didn’t even know her. Therefore, my gaze clearly reduced her to a mindless body, an object for my male sexual consumption.

I felt that if I eradicated this and other patriarchal thought structures within my mind, I would contribute to the eventual downfall of patriarchy. It was psycho-therapeutic guerrilla warfare.

These were unusual views for a teenage guy, and people often wondered how I came to them. The lineage went something like this:

When I was fifteen, my father—an antiwar activist—became a vegetarian for ethical reasons, related to his philosophy of nonviolence. Like many people encountering ethical vegetarianism for the first time, I thought his decision was one of the nuttiest things I’d ever heard; my favorite meal at the time was roast beef, medium rare, without a vegetable in sight.

I decided to read a book about it, to see what had gotten into his head. My father had a copy of Diet for a New America by John Robbins on his shelf. I picked it up and started reading it. After a few hours of reading grisly details—and, even more persuasively, seeing grisly images—of cows, pigs, and chickens being tortured in modern factory farms, I decided to convert to vegetarianism myself.5

Within a year, I was a hard-core ethical vegan. Something that is difficult to understand unless you have been a hard-core ethical vegan is how alienated you feel from most of the human population, who are meat eaters. If you literally believe that intentionally killing animals is murder—I wore a t-shirt that said, “Meat is Murder,” and I meant it—then by definition you believe that many of your friends, family members, and in fact most of the fellow members of your species, are ethically equivalent to murderers.

Demagoguery can be defined as leadership and communication that presents issues in stark, simplified emotional contrasts, with “us” as the side of all that is right, good, and enlightened, and “them” as the side of all that is wrong, evil, shadowy, and dark. I became a demagogue for ethical veganism. (I’m sure you’ve encountered the type.)

During my junior year of high school in 1993, before I was on the Internet and before I knew of Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies—”as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—I confirmed Godwin’s Law in the finals of a class-wide oratory contest. After tying meat eating to global starvation (given how much grain is fed to livestock and how many more people could be fed on a vegetarian diet) and the ecological devastation of the rainforests, and after explaining how billions of animals are tortured in factory farms, I stunned the audience, my entire school, with this accusation:

You have a strong incentive to keep yourself ignorant of the true, full impact of your meat consumption, because if you did know the true, full impact, but chose to continue eating a diet that is directly related to the unimaginable suffering of billions of animals, to the destruction of our world’s most vital resources, to the starvation and death of more than sixty million human beings every year, then I ask you: what would distinguish your morality from a that of a mass murderer or a Good German?              

If you view the world in these terms, it’s simply too much to consider that so many people would commit such atrocities knowingly; it makes you go crazy. So you start searching for answers. How do so many humans become desensitized to the violence they are committing?

This is when I got into ecofeminism. A beloved high school English teacher of mine, whom I’ll call Mr. Hargrove—and whom I still consider by far the greatest teacher I ever had in my entire run of formal education—handed me The Sexual Politics of Meat. He was a radical environmentalist, ethical vegan, and ecofeminist, who had written his master’s dissertation on the connections between hunting and pornography. But—like all great teachers—he didn’t try to persuade me of anything. Rather, he curated a stellar personalized reading list for me of texts he thought would blow my mind, given the existential questions around which my soul was burning.6

And blow my mind it did. There’s a wide literature on “conversion” experiences. I had a full-on conversion experience to ecofeminism, particularly from The Sexual Politics of Meat. All of a sudden, everything made “sense” to me. It had seemed completely senseless how so many people could inflict so much suffering on so many sentient beings. Now I had a simple explanation: male objectification of “the other.”

This is why adherents to an ideology—and I think we’re all adherents to one ideology or another—are so passionate about defending it. It’s a life raft of (apparent) sense in a senseless world. Senselessness feels like insanity, like being enveloped by the battering waves and drowning. We cling to ideology to keep us from going insane. (Even though it is precisely our ideology that makes us look insane to those with opposing ideologies. We’re all crazy to somebody.)

The particular “sense” that ecofeminism gave me—the explanation it gave me for why the world seemed so fucked up to me—centered around the concept of objectification: reducing beings that have their own subjectivity into objects for use and consumption. While all schools of feminism are concerned with male objectification of women (the “male gaze,”) ecofeminism extends the analysis considerably. It argues that objectification is the central organizing principle of patriarchy, and that it pervades men’s relationship not just to women, but to everyone and everything that isn’t them, including colonized peoples, non-human animals, and Mother Nature herself.7

All of this gave me, at last, a unitary explanation for all the fucked-upness I saw in the world—the warmongering, class divisions, human destruction of nature and violence towards animals. And it gave me hope for a way out for our species and all species. All our shit stemmed from this one root evil: objectification. Get rid of that evil, and you get rid of all the other evil. Simple!8

Or, not so simple: because I was an extremely horny teenage dude. For those who have never had the amount of newly surging testosterone running through them that a typical adolescent male has (in this case, a straight male), it may be difficult to adequately convey how desperate and intense the craving for female flesh can be. Of course, most teenage guys crave romantic love too; adolescent boys can be just as emo as adolescent girls. But on some level, the unrelenting, non-stop, overwhelming craving is just for fucking flesh—good ol’ objectified T&A. Anything that moves, and is adequately attractive. Testosterone is a strong drug; it focuses the mind. Especially when your growing body is first starting to inject the drug into your virgin veins.

So that’s where I was: a split being. The controlling part of my mind (what Freud would call the superego) had concluded, through some precocious political reading seeking answers about evil, that objectification was the source of all evil, and that objectifying animals for meat, and women for sexual meat, was evil. The uncontrolled, wild part of my mind (what Freud would call the id) craved my pound of female flesh. And if I couldn’t get it (and generally I couldn’t, being such a strange dork), then I would settle for pounding—and pounding and pounding—a six-inch piece of my own flesh. All while desperately flipping through pages of women reduced to two-dimensional images of flesh. Which would satiate my hunger for a few hours. Until the hunger came back, and the battle between superego and id would begin anew.9       

I desperately wanted a girlfriend. Stuffing this ugly id-battle in my mental junk closet, I thought that if I was a kind, sincere, supportive male, one who did not “play the game,” I would find a woman who would want a relationship with me.

That never happened. By sophomore year, I had several girl friends, but nowhere remotely in sight was a girlfriend. I once saw an ad for cologne in Esquire, which read, “Do you want to be the man she tells her deep dark secrets to, or do you want to be her deep dark secret?” I was definitely the man to whom she told her deep dark secrets.

My female friends would complain to me about how “Men are such assholes.” Then they would describe how one such “asshole” had just thrown them on the bed and fucked just how they wanted and needed to be fucked. “Why don’t they ever go for nice, caring guys like me?” I wondered after being passed over in favor of yet another macho clod.10

I wanted sex desperately, yet I felt guilty about this desire.11

*****

All this was running through my head as Juana and I walked down my dorm hallway. Once we got to my room, Juana sat down on my bed. I discovered she was not just any old grad student, but a third-year Ph.D. student—lit theory in the English department. This added to my nervousness. The phone rang. It was my friend Kate. I forgot that we were supposed to hang out that night. Fuck! I didn’t know what to say. If I told Kate I couldn’t hang out with her, I would have to explain why, which would be a thorny path with Juana sitting right there.

“Yeah, I’m hanging out with a friend, drinking, listening to music. Wanna come over?”

Juana looked at me as though I had just pulled out a Parcheesi board. Kate knocked on the door. We sat around, drinking Cuba Libres. After a while, Juana had to go. I gave her my phone number. She folded it, put it in her purse, and then wrote her number down and handed it to me.

*****

“There’s something about the word fuck that just isn’t okay,” Richard said. “It has this tone of violence.” Richard was a fellow student of Mr. Hargrove, the English teacher who had turned me onto ecofeminism in high school. He was my sole comrade in ecofeminism. I had used the word “fuck” in some sentence during one of our epic ecofeminist discussions. Richard told me he didn’t like me using that word.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, look how it’s used. When a guy says, ‘oh yeah, I fucked her,’ there’s this element of conquest, of subduing the feminine body.”

“Look, there’s a lot to be said for tender lovemaking,” I said. But sometimes you just wanna fuck.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that kind of sex,” Richard said. “But something about the word—it just adds this tone of rape to it.”

“But if she wants to fuck—how can it be rape?”

“I’m not saying that ‘fucking’ is rape. I’m saying that the word itself has subtle connotations of rape. I think I read somewhere that in some hunting-gathering languages, the word that functions for them like ‘fuck’ is also the word for ‘to hunt.’ When you use the word, you just perpetuate the connotation. The more you use it, the more you contribute to that element of male violence in our culture.”

“But word meanings can change,” I said. “No one means ‘to hunt’ anymore. They just mean... to fuck.”

“I’m just saying that the word itself has unhealthy connotations,” Richard said, “and I don’t think you should use it so much.”

I couldn’t believe it. How many nineteen-year-old males had engaged in serious discussions about the appropriateness of using the word “fuck” in light of its perpetuation of patriarchal gender relations? For that matter, how many nineteen-year-old females had engaged in such discussions? I felt like something was out of place. “I think we’re not acting like regular nineteen-year-old guys.”

“Well, if we really want to act like regular nineteen-year-old guys,” Richard said, “we can go out and get drunk and get laid and give up on activism altogether.” I saw what he was saying. But something seemed wrong about erasing words from my vocabulary just because they had subtle etymological associations with the dominant culture Richard and I despised so much.

I guess I already did that. I never joked around with the n-word. But “to fuck” doesn’t have all the immediate negative connotations of the n-word. It just connotes aggressive sex. Connotation is based in use, I tried to convince Richard. Do my political values have to be reflected in every aspect of my daily life, in my every word? Richar would say yes—anything less would be hypocritical.

Later in the discussion, Richard expressed to me his guilt about liking Led Zeppelin. “I mean, I like the music, but it’s so violent. It’s definitely part of the culture we’re trying to change. I’m sure Mr. Hargrove doesn’t listen to it. I doubt he even wants to.”

At this point, I asked myself: “Does my political orientation need to be reflected in what kind of music I listen to?” My politics suddenly seemed totalitarian to me, or more accurately, puritanical: the need for everything to be politically productive, the guilt and self-loathing at pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It was like Stalin’s state-condoned “Socialist Realism” painting style: facile, didactic, and easily comprehended, always with a readily grasped moral, usually concerning the virtue of the proletariat and the glory of the cooperation. It was some of the worst painting in the history of art.

“Fuck this,” I thought. Those two words were the first time I fully admitted to myself that my ecofeminism, at least the way I was holding it, wasn’t working for me. It was the first time I admitted to myself that there were parts of me I could no longer repress.

*****

I’m six years younger than her. . . She could get any guy she wanted in the world. . . Why would she be interested in me?... But, she was flirting with me; I’m sure that was flirting... And she did give me her number...

“Hi, Juana?”

“Yes.”

“This is Michael Ellsberg.”

“Oh, hi, how are you?”

“Fine, thanks. Listen, I’m going to this rave thingy downtown on Friday night. It’s at a club called Generation X. I’ve never been but it’s supposed to be good. Would you like to join me?”

“I’ll pick you up at eleven.”

Kids dancing to house music filled the club. Thump thump thump thumpthumpthump. We walked onto the floor. She wore a short-cut white cotton dress that draped lightly over her body; it looked more like a nightie than a dress.

She was, as far as I could tell, the most gorgeous woman in the room. All the men eyed her. For the first time in my life, I felt envied. She bumped into a few female friends. We all danced together in a circle. Juana grabbed one of these women and started dancing with her closely. Soon they were grasping each other, rubbing together, practically making love on the dance floor. Thump thump thump thumpthumpthump. The two disentangled, and the woman and her friend sauntered off.

“THAT GIRL HAS A CRUSH ON ME,” Juana yelled into my ear.

It was time to make my move. I knew from middle school that the only time neuro-impulses sent by the brain did not translate into movement in an appendage was when the brain was ordering a guy’s arm to go around a girl for the first time, or to hold her hand. You felt the brain commanding the movement, but the hand just sat there, limp. So, I did what I used to do in middle school: one, two, three, four, FIVE! I reached over and grabbed her hand. She pulled close to me. I placed my hand on the small of her back. She wrapped her arms around me. I felt her chest press into mine. I leaned down and sniffed her freshly washed hair.

She stood up and leaned into my ear. “LET’S GET SOMETHING TO DRINK.” She grabbed my hand and marched into the other room. Surely every man in the room was thinking, “What’s a girl like that doing with a guy like that?” I tried to play cool, as if I hung out with women like Juana all the time.

She ordered us two vodka tonics. We sat down on a couch in the corner. She grabbed an ice cube out of my glass and started tracing it on my face. I leaned forward and kissed her. She kissed back.

Kissing turned to a full-on make-out. Thump thump thump thumpthumpthump. The people standing around us with their drinks and cigarettes eyed us. At parties I’ve attended, whenever a couple sat lip-locked in a corner, people made nervous little comments such as “Well, they’re getting started early,” or “I guess they hit it off.” For the first time in my life, I was that person in the corner. It felt great.

“Shall we leave?” I asked.

She drove a black sports car. She zoomed past where the quaint colonial part of town faded into dreary industrialism. We stepped into her apartment. White walls, framed prints, bare hardwood floors. Bookcases full of literary theory and contemporary art novels.

She showed me around. She poured us some wine. She grabbed a pint of strawberry ice cream from the freezer. She sat us down on her couch, and started playing Star Wars on her VHS. We fed each other ice cream and drank wine as we watched the opening sequence. Soon we were feeding each other the cream with our mouths. I shut off the TV.

“Shall we go to my room?” she asked. I stood up and started picking up our things.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She led me to her room. We kissed in the middle of it. I turned off the light. We collapsed onto each other on her bed, and the night began.

*****

I had a date with Juana the night after Halloween, for a costume party. She planned to go as a dominatrix. I didn’t have a costume, so I put on all my retro seventies clothes at once; I looked like a wannabe pool shark. When Juana arrived, she wore a black skirt, black boots, and a black rubber overcoat. It looked more like her normal outfit than a costume.

When we arrived at the party, I discovered that the outer layer was not her costume. She pulled her dress over her head, revealing a black rubber G-string, a black lace bra, and a flogger. We met her friend, Marta, who wore a black rubber miniskirt, and Marta’s tall boyfriend, Ortíz, with black leather pants, a bare hairy chest, and a spiked dog collar, connected to Marta with a leash. We all danced for a while, and everyone was watching us. I tried to keep my cool and feign confidence, as if I went to SM orgies all the time.

The costume contest started. The contestants included a man with a shower head and shower curtain, a Brady Bunch group, and a Thor impersonator. And Juana, Marta, and Ortíz. They pushed into the center of the crowd. Ortíz dropped to the floor. Marta pulled his leash. He whimpered like a stuck puppy. She whipped him. He dog-slobbered up her legs. She whipped him again. Juana whipped Marta. They congregated into a pile of whips and chains and orgiastic yelps on the floor in the middle of the room.

Most of the crowd consisted of stressed-out grad students in their standard grad-student tweeds. They clutched their glasses of Chardonnay apprehensively.

“Those aren’t grad students like I know!” a thin tweedy man next to me exclaimed to his friend.

After the contest, which they didn’t win for some reason, Marta and Ortíz went their way, and Juana and I returned to her apartment.

*****

On Friday nights, Juana and I would go out somewhere, then go back to her place and stay up most of the night fucking, sleep in until late brunch hour, eat something, then spend the afternoon in bed fucking more.

We never went out on Saturdays. She reserved Saturday nights for going out and “picking people up,” as she put it.

Once, she showed me her closet. It overflowed with whips, chains, leather and rubber outfits, and other bondage supplies. This was fifteen years before Fifty Shades of Grey put BDSM in the national spotlight; it was still a fringe subculture in the mid-nineties. To meet someone with a closet like that was, for me, extremely exotic, and—to my ecofeminist sensibility—scary.

The only thing I knew about BDSM—or sadomasochism or SM, as it was commonly called back then—was what I had read from radical anti-porn feminists. The radical feminist line on sadomasochism was that it represented a form of extreme internalization of the hierarchical relations of patriarchy, so that individuals living within patriarchy came to enjoy being dominated and controlled, and to experience it as sexually exciting.

For example, here’s Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist, and anti-porn firebrand, in a 1975 speech I had read in Our Blood, an anthology of her speeches:

Within the confines of the male-positive system. . . . [f]ucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar worldview, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. . . .

I believe that freedom for women must begin in the repudiation of our own masochism. I believe that we must destroy in ourselves the drive to masochism at its sexual roots. . . . I believe that ridding ourselves of our own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect, when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male lifeline to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity—we will be cutting the male lifeline to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead—and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it—only then will we know what it is to be free. [Emphasis added]12

And yet, when you’re a teenage ecofeminist boy, and the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen stands by her closet full of fetish and bondage gear, and asks you to put a nipple clamp on her… are you going to tell her no because Mommy Dworkin would tsk tsk?

I felt nervous putting the nipple clamp on Juana. I didn’t want to hurt her. So Juana suggested I try it on myself first. “It’s really not that intense. Give it a shot,” she said. I put it on the weakest notch. I winced and took it off.

“This is not too intense?” I asked. “You really want this?”

Juana held out one of her perfect, large natural breasts towards me. “Right here,” she said, pointing at her nipple.

I did as she said.

“Clamp it all the way down, hard” Juana ordered.

I took a deep breath and clamped it. Her eyes went to the back of her head, and she let out a sigh. She laid back on her bed. We fucked for a few minutes while she was consumed by the pain-pleasure. But the idea of a woman asking me to inflict pain on her while we fucked felt weird, and wasn’t a turn-on for me. “Why would an empowered, feminist woman possibly want this?” I wondered to myself, as I was half-heartedly pumping her. Juana could tell my heart wasn’t in it. I was not an effective sexual Dominant. (I didn’t even know what a sexual Dominant was.) Rather, I was bewildered. Juana took the nipple clamp off, and we stopped fucked.

“Sex without pain is okay,” she said, “but to really enjoy it, I need pain.” I felt hurt and confused by this. Before this afternoon, she seemed to have been enjoying our sex, and I wasn’t inflicting pain on her. Wasn’t my “kind, gentle, ecofeminist” sex good enough for her?

According to the feminist theorists I was reading at the time, when a woman was attracted to a stereotypically dominant man, it was simply a failure on her part to understand her political conditioning, a mistake that would be remedied after the feminist revolution. As Gloria Steinem wrote in her 1983 memoir Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, this mistake on women’s part stems from

a refusal to differentiate between what may be true for them now, and what may be desirable in the future. For example, a woman may be attracted only to men who are taller, heavier, and older than she, but still understand that such superficial restrictions on the men she loves and enjoys going to bed with won’t exist in a more free and less-stereotyped future.

Steinem’s analysis gave me, a man of exactly average height (5’9”) and average build, and less-than-average proclivity towards sexual confidence or bravado, hope for the future. Maybe there was a sexual place for me after the ecofeminist revolution?

In her master-tome Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin presented the one kind of heterosexual sex that she felt had the potential to be non-violent, approved, and “humane” from a radical feminist perspective. Dworkin writes:

Shere Hite has suggested an intercourse in which “thrusting would not be considered as necessary as it now is . . . [There might be] more a mutual lying together in pleasure, penis-in-vagina, vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the stimulation necessary for male orgasm.”

These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women. . . .

Needless to say, this sort of “humane sensuality” was not the aspiration of Juana, who (as only my second sexual partner in my life so far) comprised fifty percent of my sample size.

When finally in the presence of a flesh-and-blood woman, with flesh-and-blood desires—not the abstract womanhood I was studying in my feminist textbooks—I was baffled and confused; Dworkin had steered me wrong. Juana’s interest in this type of “humane” feminist sex, in which the man is totally gentle and passive, ranked right up there with her interest in a night of bingo at the nursing home.

Juana’s passion for being on the receiving end of pain and domination during sex was a glitch in my anti-porn ecofeminist matrix; according to that matrix, only a woman completely controlled by the patriarchy would be sexually aroused by a man inflicting pain on her. And Juana definitely did not seem to be controlled by the patriarchy—or by anything or anyone else. Certainly not by me—a sexually-inexperienced sophomore male vegan ecofeminist.

*****

“I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to see you anymore,” Juana said. It was the Thursday after Thanksgiving break. I had called to make plans for that weekend.

“What?”

“I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“You’re too young for me.”

“We don’t need to go out in public...”

“It’s not that. It’s just that... I want someone more experienced. I need someone darker. And you need someone lighter.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I want someone who wears black, who’s into SM. I feel like I always have to be so positive around you. Like your veganism. I just don’t give a fuck about that shit. I really don’t.”

“Can we at least meet and talk about it?”

“Look, I don’t want to see you again, OK?”

“But…”

“I hope I didn’t hurt you.” Click.

We had seen each other eight times. Our month-long relationship had been completely meaningless and politically incorrect. The only reason I saw her was that she was gorgeous and willing to see me. The only reason she saw me was that I was young and she called the shots. There was no emotional attachment at all, no love. Just mindless pleasure.

It had been the happiest month of my life.

Diamanda & Domination

Diamanda Galás, vocalist and pianist, was giving a solo concert in town, a few months after Juana dumped me. I was drawn to the concert from her picture on the poster: jet-black hair with dangerous eyes. She reminded me of Juana. One of the review snippets called this live performance of her new work Schrei X “the most harrowing experience in a lifetime of concert-going.” That word, “harrowing,” reminded me of Juana. Everything goth and darkly beautiful reminded me of Juana.

I missed Juana like crazy. I’d left her a few messages over the months, asking if she’d reconsider me; she never returned the messages, so I gave up. Seeing the poster for Diamanda, I wished I could have brought Juana to this show on a date. I had seen Juana around campus a few times, but she either didn’t notice me or acted like I didn’t exist. I decided to go to the concert alone, just to bring back memories of that exalted month with Juana. Nothing like that month had ever happened to me.

At the show, a sole piano and microphone set the stage. The lights dimmed. The room was pitch black except for a small light on the music stand. A tall, slim figure in a long black dress walked out. Applause. She stood in front of the microphone, silent for at least a minute. Then, from the speakers emanated the most spine-shattering, unrelenting shriek I had ever heard.  About fifteen people stood up and exited the auditorium upon hearing this single note.

Amidst cries and shrieks, Galás belched out guttural sentences and spoke demonic verses in a low raspy voice. More shrieks and cries and echoes. Then, fragmentary shouts of violent dialogues, perhaps self-dialogues in her mind: “Cunt! Cunt!“ Then she dove into what sounded like passages from the biblical liturgy in Latin, mumbling in the tone of Catholic priests.

I read during the intermission that Galás had been institutionalized at one point. Her brother, a gay man, had died of AIDS at the height of the crisis in 1984, and in 1989 she had been arrested in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in an early ACT-UP “die-in” protesting the Catholic Church’s stance against AIDS education.

Not long after that action, she had somehow finagled permission to perform and record her protest work Plague Mass live inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York—a performance the Catholic Church immediately denounced as blasphemy.13

The music was dark, but I found her cacophony beautiful. Not as in “the opposite of ugly;” the music was extremely ugly. Beautiful in that it was perfect—perfectly dark.

I read up on Galás after the show. I found an interview of her in a 1992 feminist anthology entitled Angry Women, edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Until I read Angry Women, I didn’t know that there was a school of feminism that was harshly critical of the anti-porn and anti-BDSM feminism I had been immersing myself in for three years. This school of feminism, which started in the 1980s, called itself “sex-positive” feminism, and contrasted itself with what it called the “sex-negative” feminism of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, and other anti-porn, anti-BDSM, and anti-sex-work feminist crusaders.

Up until that moment, I thought that feminism was anti-porn and anti-BDSM, and that to express approval of either was inherently anti-feminist. Given that viewpoint, my eyes popped when I started reading the interview with Galás, who ceded to no one in the stark militancy of her feminism, but who seemed to hail from a different planet than any feminist I had ever come across: Galás recounted to the interviewers:

On San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, California I worked as a prostitute for a while under the name “Miss Zina”. . . . [P]art of the reason I became a prostitute was because I wanted to be able to walk down the street in the worst fucking part of town and carry a fucking knife and know that it was my street, our street, not their street. You know that the whole streetwalker “thing” is: stealing money from tricks—that’s what you do. . . .

Basically you’d get into the car and start turning the trick and then steal their wallet and stick ‘em up. Some pimps tried to round me up and put me in their cars, but I had my life defended by these great black drag queens. These toothless bitches with knives would say to the pimps, “I’ll cut your fucking dick off—just don’t touch this thing!” I learned a lot about being a woman from these black drag queens--the power behind the role, and how you can use it. Very important—I learned how to walk down the street without fear.

Let’s just say this is not how the feminists I was reading talked. Furthermore, they had painted sex workers—or “prostituted women,” as the anti-sex-work feminists called them, disparagingly—as passive dupes who were so severely traumatized by their work that they could not exert even the most minimal boundaries towards men. This was a constant theme in anti-sex-work feminism: that men exerted absolute power and control over sex workers using them like ragdolls however they pleased, and that sex workers had no power whatsoever in relation to men.  

Galás’s account contradicted this blanket characterization. While I can’t condone robbing people at knifepoint, the manner in which Galás owned the streets—and used her sexuality to do so—doesn’t exactly sound like her being a weak, passive, boundaryless ragdoll, as anti-sex-work feminists characterized all so-called “prostituted women;” on the contrary, she sounded fierce, like someone you do not want to fuck with. Reading her words, I felt my theoretical edifice beginning to crumble.

Another major fault line in my cracking theoretical edifice was BDSM. According to anti-porn feminism, fantasies of violent sex, and desires for rough and aggressive sex, were a purely male phenomenon, which men forced on unwitting, passive, controlled female sexual partners, who only went along with it because they were powerless in the situation. Without any personal experience, I adopted this view.  

In contrast, here’s Galás:  

There’ve been a lot of military men in my life—I like them to be fighters, at least on a physical level. There’ve been ex-cons—I like violent men; I like the idea that I can terrorize them and they can take it. I don’t want ‘em to knock me across the room unless I hit them first—and can hit ‘em back. In the area of violence and sex, I always warn people. For example, if they want to be bitten, I say, “Either you want to be bitten or you don’t, because I might lose control--there will be no halfway measures!” [laughs] And this is a domain that people who worry about being politically correct don’t address: the realm of exciting, even violent sex between consenting adults. Most people think that sex should be gentle and peaceful. But if sex is merely gentle and peaceful, I’m not even interested. Of course, when I say violence I mean “play violence” (a topic of discussion in itself)—I’m really not interested in ending up with a broken jaw or collarbone.

I like the man I’m seeing now because he’ll say, “You filthy fuckin’ white whore, that’s all you want, you piece o’ shit!” and I’ll say, “Listen, you black motherfucker, I’m gonna take you by a chain and lead you through the streets!” This is the way we like to talk to each other—any way we damn well please! Not with this wimpy, politically correct “discourse” [sarcastically]14

Whenever a political ideology advances a rigid, black-and-white stance that “X activity is oppressive to Y group,” true believers have a difficult time with the apparent counterexample of those in Y group who say they love X or who even devote a large part of their life to X.

To maintain the absolute inerrancy of their stance, in the face of such counterexamples, the next move for the true believer is to adopt some version of a theory of “false consciousness.”

Karl Marx’s intellectual collaborator Friedrich Engels coined this term in an 1893 letter. Marxists later developed this concept to explain why members of the working class are often hostile to revolutionary theory and seem to identify with the very capitalists that Marxists say are their oppressors.

Radical feminists later developed this into a theory explaining why most heterosexual women reject the revolutionary praxis of radical feminism and instead bond with—that is, fall in love with and want to have sex with—members of the male class that oppresses them.15

While not employing the term itself, in her infamous book Intercourse, in a chapter entitled “Occupation/Collaboration,” Andrea Dworkin presents the most extreme and radical theory of false consciousness I’ve ever encountered. Astonishingly, she characterizes heterosexual women who fall in love with and willingly sleep with men as “collaborators” in their own colonization and genocide:

There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. [Author’s note: Godwin alert!] There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. . .

[I]t is a gross indignity to suggest that when her collaboration is complete—unselfconscious because there is no self and no consciousness left—she is free to have freedom in intercourse. When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet has ever gotten back. Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom; and if it cannot exist without objectification, it never will be. Instead occupied women will be collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority; calling intercourse freedom. It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

This is what Dworkin and other radical feminists thought about vanilla heterosexual women—women who just like to get fucked after a Saturday night date, just with cock alone, no whips or chains. So imagine their disdain for women who willfully sought out the whips and chains in addition to the cock!

Contemporaneous with Dworkin’s critique of women who willingly participate in patriarchal sex relations as “collaborators,” Julie Burchill wrote in her 1986 book Damaged Gods: “When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.” (p. 9)

I doubt Dworkin would have agreed with this sentiment, but this kind of contempt towards willing sex workers (if not the call for revenge violence) seems implicit in Dworkin’s demagogic characterization of women who willingly have sex men as “collaborators” with patriarchy: after all, what revolutionary theory worth its salt would call for anything other than violence towards “collaborators”? 

There’s a concept called “adding epicycles,” which means adding more and more complex twists and turns to one’s preferred theory, in an ad hoc manner, in order to save the theory from counterexamples.

Radical feminists added a bunch of epicycles in their theories to account for the fact that, in the BDSM subculture, it’s not just men who dominate and women who submit; the reverse is just as common, if not more so. This would seem to contradict the idea that sexual dominance and submission are purely patriarchal acts; in few areas do women commonly exert more direct physical and psychological power over men than in the BDSM subculture.

But wait! It can still be seen as patriarchal, because power differentials themselves are patriarchal! Thus, the woman who is turned on by sexual dominance over men is still beholden to the false consciousness of patriarchal ideology, because she’s turned on by power over others at all, and power over others is the essence of patriarchy.

This epicycle was expressed clearly by Riane Eisler—one of my ecofeminist heroes—in her 1995 book Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body:

[E]ven if. . . a certain percentage of men find the notion of being dominated by women who cruelly punish them sexually arousing, and a certain percentage of women also find this kind of sexual role reversal exciting, in either case sexual relations (and thus male-female relating) are still equated with domination and submission; that is, with relations of inequality. . . .

Because the eroticization of violence and domination has been central to the social construction of sex for millennia of dominator history, most of us—and not just women and men actively involved in the S/M subculture—are to varying degrees sexually aroused by sadomasochistic fantasies. . . . [But this is] not the same as pretending that the eroticization of violent domination and submission is politically and personally liberating, rather than further conditioning us to accept domination and submission in other spheres of life. [hardcover edition, pp. 218-19]

According to Eisler, when a woman becomes interested in BDSM, even as a dominant, she “unwittingly become[s] co-opted by the same dominator sexual counter-revolution that is today being mass-marketed by a billion-dollar pornography.” Thus, in an extreme example of false-consciousness theorizing, Eisler says that women viewing their interest in BDSM as sexually liberating, even as a dominant, “seems totally insane. And in the sense of insanity as a failure to perceive reality, it is.” (p. 217)

So, I wondered, reading that interview with Diamanda Galás: would Eisler think of her as “totally insane”? Would Eisler consider her “unwittingly co-opted by the dominator sexual counter-revolution”?

Here’s Galás on her interest in exploring sexual domination over men:

I want to fuck a man in the ass (so far I haven’t had any volunteers; I always ask them and they get nervous and say no) but I want to, because I feel that’s a fundamental part of my relationship with them and to myself. I don’t want to just be fucked--what’s that? I want to experience this other thing. Someone said long ago that men should be fucked in the ass first before they fuck a woman, so they can understand what it feels like to be penetrated in their body. And in this area, I’m all too willing to help! That would be my ideal man, definitely.

Oh yes, we can sit on men. . . but after a while I want to be paid—as an ex-hooker, I want that. Really, I wanna fuck men in the ass—I want to break the flesh, too—and exorcise my violence on them to show them just how much I love them!

Her worldview disturbed me, but her honesty impressed me.

It would take me decades to fully realize—in my mind, and within my own darkest, most hidden flesh—what the hell she was talking about…

Footnotes:

1

I had devoured Pornography and Silence in high school, along with a whole reading list of other central ecofeminist texts, including Woman and Nature: The Roaring Within Her, also by Susan Griffin, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant, and The Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence Against Animals and the Earth by Andrée Collard with Joyce Contrucci. I had also read a wide swath of radical feminism in general, particularly Andrea Dworkin, who was not necessarily an ecofeminist but who was among the most militant writers who ever took up pen against porn.

I was into some obscure stuff for a teenage guy. For example, did you know that there was a field called feminist-vegetarian critical theory? As a militant vegan sixteen-year-old ecofeminist, not only did I know about it, but—from reading a book called The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams—it was my religion.

In a niche newsletter to which I subscribed, Feminists for Animal Rights, I had read Adams critiquing a recent advocacy advertisement by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) featuring Patti Davis (Ronald Reagan’s daughter, who had recently posed nude for Playboy). In the PETA ad, Davis posed nude again; this time, she was covered only by Hugh Hefner’s poodle, which she was cradling. “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur,” the ad headline said. This was part of an ad series that PETA had been running with that headline, featuring female celebrities in the nude, covered only by their hands, camera angles, or banners they were holding with that statement. The series had included The Go-Go’s, Christy Turlington, and Kim Basinger.

In the Fall-Winter 1994-95 issue of Feminists for Animal Rights, Adams blasted the ad:

A connection exists between the treatment of women and the treatments of animals. . . . A patriarchal epistemology responds to differences (such as race, sex, species) by labeling those who are different as “other,” and then objectifying those who are “others,” so they may be used instrumentally. Ecofeminists call this a “value hierarchy,” in which power is inscribed over others who hold less power and are therefore seen as having less value. One feminist coined the term “somatophobia” to refer to hostility to the body. In our culture, the body has less value than the mind or the soul; anyone equated with the body will also thus be unvalued or undervalued. This concept helps us recognize the relationship between different forms of oppression: those equated with bodies (like people of color, animals, and women) rather than minds or souls (like white people, humans, and men) are oppressed in our culture because of this equation with the body and with each other. . . .

It is also the same epistemological process that views women’s bodies pornographically. Pornography has been historically a way for men to institute their status as subjects by having others who have the status of objects. . . .

Given this analysis, the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign is intrinsically problematic. . . . But the added twist that occurs with the Patti Davis ad is not only in its alliance with Playboy, which has made harm to women through pornography a man’s entertainment (because it furthers women’s objectification, and reproduces sexualized domination), but the specific concern of bestiality [via Davis posing nude with Hefner’s poodle].