[Icarus]

Gents,

I have posted before several articles by Mark Ames of the eXile, such as his Whore-R stories and his adventures in Minsk. One of my favorite articles of his is Meditations on Misogyny (2003), which is remarkably personal and did resonate with me:

Quote:



At my book presentation party two weeks ago, a Russian journalist in her mid-twenties told me, "When I first read your columns in the eXile, I hated you because I thought you were anti-Russian women. I wanted something really bad to happen to you. I wanted you to just suffer something awful. Then I became a lesbian and I realized, you were exactly right. I hate Russian women too. I really, really hate them."

"But I don't really hate Russian girls," I said. "I don't know why people think I do."

"No, you don't understand, Mark. I agree with you. I hate them. You know? Their stupid fucking games. It's not just that they play games, they believe in them and their whole lives become those stupid drama games."

"But that's why I like them," I said. "American women can't even come up with an interesting game. They're too ironic, too 'down-to-earth.'"

"I don't know, I've never slept with an American woman."

"They go, 'Really? Great!' while shaking their heads up and down and smiling. It's a real turn-off."

"I like young, really young Russian girls," she said. "They have energy. They don't have problems like older women. I hate older Russian women. Once they get into their twenties I can't stand them. Teenage girls haven't been disappointed. They still believe things will be good."

"Their meat is tighter," I said.

"They're fun to be with. You get their energy."

"We're like vampires," I said. "So what's it like being a lesbian? Is it satisfying? I mean if you hate women, why take them?"

"Well I'm not really a lesbian. I still prefer men."

"I slept with a pair of dykes, and I didn't like it," I said. "You feel useless, like a pair of tonsils, sitting there while the girls get off. It made me angry in a bad way."

"You get something you can't get from a man. It's a different experience. There is a lot of touching and it's more intimate."

"Ee-gads!"

A week later an extremely, er, shall we say, pre-nubile "journalist" came over to my house to interview me about my book.

"Do you hate Russian women?" she asked.

"No, not at all! Why do people think that? I love them!"

"I hate them."

"Well, I've been accused of being a misogynist," I corrected myself.

"I hate women," she said, in her tiny voice in that tiny mouth. "I thought your book was boring at first, until the second half when you wrote about how much you hate women."

"But I...don't..."

"I like that part, Mark. Why don't you talk more about how you hate women, about sex? This interview is boring."

She was right. I gave the worst interview of my life because my spine turned to Jell-O at the sight of her on my divan. I was tongue-tied, like the fat guy in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: "Ch-ch-ch!...Ch-ch-ch!...Chick!... Look, Chick! On the couch! I'm tellin' ya, she's right there!... WoooOOO!"

"You're not like how you write," she said. "This is a disappointment. I was expecting more."

She was expecting ice-cold misogyny. She told me that she was a zhenonenavistnik, but she no longer believed that I was. The truth is that I wasn't. I couldn't have even faked ice-cold misogyny that night, not to a beautiful young Russian punkette.

I still remember the first time I was called a misogynist. I was 20, a student. She was a clinical psych major whose specialty was castrating mice and observing the results. We'd slept together once or twice, but she always made me nervous by how advanced she was.

"I've got you figured out, Mark," she told me while we were drinking on my roof. "You're a misogynist disguised as a misanthrope." I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. So I pretended to agree with her. Later, when I looked up the word "misogynist," I panicked. How'd she know? Who invented that word? Would I be arrested?

I only spoke to her once more after that. It was to tell her that I may have given her crabs. If you want to end a relationship painlessly, call your date and tell her you got crabs and you wanted to be responsible and warn her. (Pretend you're embarrassed by offering obviously lame excuses: "I may have caught it in an airplane" or "I think I got it in a sleeping bag at my friend's house" -- if you admit boldly you got it from boning a skank, she might admire your bravery).

I note this to illustrate my point: that my "misogyny," if that's the right word for it, comes not from ice-cold, cinematic antisocial tendencies, but rather, from fear. Fear and pain. Way too much fear and pain. I ain't like those other assholes, the axle-grease-on-the-arms misogynists. That kind of misogyny, the cool kind, the misogyny of a crocodile, is completely alien to me.

Misogyny born of sociopathic coolness may be attractive, but it isn't interesting. It's just a reaction, like gas or sweat. Misogyny born of fear and pain is what makes Eraserhead, Louder Than Hell, Death On The Installment Plan, "Pretty Girls Make Graves"... It's rich because it's true, born of experience, a truth too dangerous to be admitted into middle-class discourse.

Women are scary on all sorts of levels. They're not dumb and weak, they're scary. It's that simple. If you don't understand that but you still hate women, you have no right to be a member of my misogyny club. You're just a common jerk. I've known all kinds of jerks in my life. Real jerks aren't interesting; however, a stylized, literary sort of jerk is. Most women I've met through my writing expect that from me: stylized antisocial misogyny, cigarettes and rape with Link Ray soundtrack. Many of the male friends and writers I've known since starting the eXile have tried to ingratiate themselves by affecting their own sham misogyny. But real misogynists can sniff out the phonies: our pain-radar is flawless. The fake misogynists saw that my columns got me an audience, that it seemed cool, so they affected it, wore it like a beat-up leather jacket. They didn't pay for it, though. (Misogyny has even become a chic stance for a certain faction of urban hipsters in America, although it's mediated through some kind of anti-PC backlash that is itself rooted in a bourgeois major premise.) So the fly-by-night misogynists call women "stupid bitches," brag about fucking and dumping them, about how much they "hate women," about how they made them cry and didn't care...It's a lie. They didn't pay for that, you can tell by the ease in which they move in and out of the stance.

The other kind of misogynist, the sociopath type, they don't show off their misogyny. It means nothing to them. They just step on women once in awhile. And that's what makes sociopathic misogynists so attractive... to women. Which is as good a reason as any to hate women.

If you paid hard for your misogyny, then you want to make the others pay too. You HAVE to make them pay, to transfer at least some of your pain back to the source. I've been doing that for years now, getting payback. It's calmed my demons down to the point that I can live with it. I'm not even into the "S" of the "&M," at least not like before.

Man used to equalize his fear of women by using a knout, a mule switch, or just bare fists. But you can't really do that anymore. Even when you do get violent, it has to be stylized. No matter how edgy and debauched you are, there's no way that even the wildest S&M experience you ever had wasn't, on some level, consensual. These are bad times for misogynists.

Which kind of brings me back to the issue at hand: this week's whore. I didn't want to take one. I wanted to be alone. I've been alone, I mean all alone, without even a dugout bitch for garbage sex, for a few months now. And these have been the most peaceful few months I can ever remember. Most people cannot handle being alone. But for me, loneliness is nirvana. I suppose it all goes back to one's childhood: my happiest childhood moments were when I was alone in my bedroom, after school, my mother at work, my brother out with friends. You could hear things rustling, smell things, imagine things when you were alone that you couldn't when people were around. They interfered with the reception.

One of the most memorable things ever said to me, by an American writer I knew years ago, was his reason for marrying so young: "I figured that either way I was in a jail. If you're always chasing girls, you waste all that time and you're trapped. If you're married, you're also in a jail, but at least you're not wasting so much time and grief. I just wanted to get writing."

His assumption was that one way or another, every man needs a woman (or a twinkie if homosexuality is your thing) in his life. In that way, I'm damaged. For me, grief comes from the physical presence of a woman in my time-space. It spoils the view. If love is involved, then you're really fucked. You may as well get a job at a bank because your inner world has just been bombed, razed and occupied by love. Every emotion, every thought, is mediated, damaged. Just knowing she might call is enough to sprain the imagination. Nothing is pure, everything is framed. Purity is very underrated these days.

My whore experience came during this striving-to-purity. I ordered her from the Moscow Times classifieds. She was tall and thin. Her face was long, narrow and knobby, not very Slavic. I didn't speak to her. The second I let her inside my apartment, I ordered her straight into the shower. She must have been there for 15 minutes. When she appeared in my TV room wearing a towel, I pointed to my bedroom. I was very gentle with her. All this talk of misogyny, the cold, kewl, antisocial kind, had me annoyed. So I spent the first 20 minutes caressing her, petting, not saying a single word. And no kissing: no snowballs for me. At one point I guess I got too rough, twisting and pulling her nipple. She yelped and said "Ow!" and backed away. I apologized. I was trying not to do that. As Samuel Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, "I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' reeeeal hard to be good."

I don't know her story because I didn't ask her. I don't even know where she was from. I wasn't interested. This story is about me, not her.

[Mr. Plow]

It's like a work of mangled art. True experience shared. You could call it a train wreck, but that would be wrong. It's an insight into truth.

[The Lizard of Oz]

I'm reposting this comment from another thread (that thread is of interest in its own right) to give Icarus a chance to respond here. It refers to an excerpt of the passage in the OP starting with "I note this to illustrate my point" and ending with "these are bad times for misogynists".

************

That Ames passage is funny. He's basically saying that beta rage and resentment at having been fucked over by women (which he glorifies as "fear and pain") is really where it's at and is what allows one to see the "truth" which is lost on "sociopathic" (lol) alphas whose misogyny is only a kind of cool indifference (and therefore worthless compared to the beta's grave and saintly torment).

Now I'll grant you that the beta's mix of wounded pride, rage, resentment and bitterness is a potent and foul-tasting brew and drinking from it does afford the beta some hard-won insights here and there. But is it really so infinitely "rich" and "interesting"? I don't think so. After a while, one gets bored of more or less pertinent beta whining almost as much as one gets bored of the female antics that incite it. Neither one of these modes is as deep or inexhaustible as it's sometimes imagined to be.

Despite what Ames says, the biggest problem with females is not, in fact, that they are "scary" or cruel or treacherous -- they are all those things, more or less, but there are ways to deal with that if one has to. The biggest problem is that they are so f'ing dumb and boring -- and to this problem there is no solution that I know of. And being constantly obsessed with the quite limited psychology of such dull-witted creatures is not a recipe for the most interesting and enjoyable life for a man with a brain in his head.

[Icarus]

(04-26-2014 06:12 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

That Ames passage is funny. He's basically saying that beta rage and resentment at having been fucked over by women (which he glorifies as "fear and pain") is really where it's at and is what allows one to see the "truth" which is lost on "sociopathic" (lol) alphas whose misogyny is only a kind of cool indifference (and therefore worthless compared to the beta's grave and saintly torment).

I disagree. I would never call Ames a beta, and someone who wrote the infamous Whore-R Stories and fucked several prostitutes in one night merely to have material for a new article is anything but saintly. His life experience is quite extreme, and orders of magnitude darker and cruder than the average suburban beta provider's "life" experience.

My interpretation of Ames's article is that there are three kinds of misogyny:

• The misogyny of the man who does not have much actual experience with women other than being ignored, rejected, LJBF'ed, and bossed around by them. This is the resentment of the omega, but also of the beta. However, it's resentment that comes from being denied access to the "Garden of Eden", so to speak.
  

• The misogyny of the man who, despite having been denied access to the "Garden of Eden" at some point in his life, has improved himself and striven to understand how women really are and how the world really works. This man was then granted access to the "Garden of Eden" and after much experience, he found that paradise slowly becomes Hell. This is the pain that comes with "paradise lost" rather than "paradise denied". Whereas the man who was denied access to paradise still believes in paradise, the man who lost paradise is in a much more interesting position. Where can one find the next paradise? To some extent, love has replaced God in the past decades. When life experience kills any belief in the possibility of love, then one becomes godless.
  

• The misogyny of the sociopath, which is uninteresting, since it stems from biology rather than life experience, assuming that sociopaths are born, not made. The misogyny of the sociopath is nothing more than a manifestation of his innate anti-social nature.
  

(04-26-2014 06:12 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

Now I'll grant you that the beta's mix of wounded pride, rage, resentment and bitterness is a potent and foul-tasting brew and drinking from it does afford the beta some hard-won insights here and there.

Why is that you assume that only betas can feel resentment?

I remember this one time when I was fucking a Czech chick and her phone rang. She's on top of me, I am balls deep, and she answers the call, it's her fiancé, and her voice and body language revealed no signs of guilt or shame whatsoever.

My resentment comes not from being cheated or fucked over, but from seeing many men being fucked over, and from losing any illusion that woman's moral quality is the same as man's. There are things I cannot unsee, and how can I ever trust a woman again after seeing what I have seen? Perhaps I would like to have a family one day, but how can I trust a woman to be a decent wife and mother of my children?

Women are dumb in many ways, but they are experts at lying and manipulating men. Their intelligence appears to be confined mostly to enslaving men and making men work for them and provide for them. This makes them scary. Quoting Kipling: "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

(04-26-2014 06:12 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

And being constantly obsessed with the quite limited psychology of such dull-witted creatures is not a recipe for the most interesting and enjoyable life for a man with a brain in his head.

True, but one should learn enough to be able to protect oneself. There are certainly many topic infinitely more interesting than the primitive psychology of the female of the human species.

Yet, I know a couple of very intelligent men who did their PhD's in the best mathematics departments in the world, and then went to work on Wall Street, and even though they were quite successful in their professional lives, they married the wrong women. Their egos were too big, and so was their naivety, and they married gold diggers who were once eye candy but who make their lives utterly miserable. They make over half a megabuck per year, and can't get out of their golden cage because they procreated with female predators. So, what good is knowing Algebraic Geometry and Algebraic Topology if one can't even make a good decision on whom to marry?

[The Lizard of Oz]

Icarus, I never said Ames was a beta (or not), only that he glorifies the knowledge born of the beta's experience a little too much for my taste.

My impression of Ames himself is that he is an extremely literary guy in a way that is unpleasant to me; I find his writing in this passage annoying and bordering on cringe-worthy. So many writer types are overrated -- they preen and psychologize and leave you with very little. Really, almost all literary writing is poison: a thin and mannered reduction of the world rather than a lively addition to it. This is doubly true at the present time for reasons that I outlined in our previous exchange.

Further, one of the real problems with literary and intelligent men is that they overvalue the sphere of eros quite generally, making it the locus of absolute concentration of their psychology; this applies both to men who are relatively successful with females and to those who aren't. Almost all these men are obsessed with eros and its highs and lows, its supposed Garden of Eden and its hells and purgatories, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

This is a terrible mistake; the erotic band, while it is a very hot one, is much too narrow to sustain such concentration. As a result of this, men often lose the world, because they never really become interested in life quite generally. That is why their writing, if they do write, often feels so dead on the page -- all the details that are mentioned seem rote and rehearsed since they are not the organic distillation of a sustained loving attention to every part of life; such a loving attention is impossible to a man continually consumed by the psychology of eros in all its manifestations.

Indeed, this applies even to these men's apprehension of the ostensible point of eros: the act of fucking and the purely physical aspects of sexuality. For it is quite true that in the right circumstances, using a woman's body with the appropriate concentration and avidity is one of the very greatest physical pleasures that a man can experience -- and that is a big deal. But intelligent and literary men are so absorbed in the useless morass of erotic psychology that they often lose even the pure appreciation of the thing itself, and their relation to what I called elsewhere the moving meat becomes as abstracted as their relation to all other parts of objective reality. And that is a terrible waste.

So while is is of course necessary and important for a man to acquire a good understanding of female nature and female psychology, it is perhaps even more valuable for literary and intelligent men to deflate and de-emphasize the psychology of eros very generally. It is no Garden of Eden; it never was. It is a sphere where great and superb pleasures can be had, and they should be sought when possible; but while these pleasures should be properly attended to and appreciated, it is a bad mistake to let the psychological ambiance surrounding either their presence or absence become one's main focus in life. There is maybe nothing that an intelligent and literary man can do to give himself a chance at an unusually interesting and enjoyable life that is of more value than seeing through the lamentable literary cliche of valuing psychological eros and its ecstasies and depredations above all other parts of life.

Finally, what I mean by "other parts of life" is not "algebraic geometry", as it were (though of course that is of very great value). But all too often for a certain kind of intelligent man the world divides a little too neatly into two spheres, one of them encompassed by an abstract and purely technical field of work, and the other consisting entirely of some variety of eros and erotic psychology.

So by suggesting that such men should de-emphasize erotic psychology, I do not mean that they should therefore concentrate entirely on their often quite abstract and technical field of expertise (although that may be fine in some cases). Rather, I really mean a much more subtle and not so harshly delimited interest in the world at large; in what one sees on the street and in the coffee shop, so to speak. I really feel that there is no better and more rewarding way to live one's life than one that allows a man to enter into a state of relaxed and thoughtful openness to experience and to the world around him. Life has the characteristics of depth and subtlety, and it rewards nothing so much as unforced, relaxed, organic attention over quite long periods of time; a man only comes to love and embrace the world if he allows himself to marinade in it for years and years.

Nothing distracts a man from the world and its subtle depths as much as the continual absorption in this or that psychological morass; and for the intelligent and literary man, that morass consists of the world of eros in 9 cases out of 10.

[Icarus]

(04-27-2014 12:04 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

My impression of Ames himself is that he is an extremely literary guy in a way that is unpleasant to me; I find his writing in this passage annoying and bordering on cringe-worthy.

Your reply was quite interesting and it took me a few days to digest it.

Yet, I don't find Ames a particularly literary guy. The literary guy of the eXile crowd is doubtlessly John Dolan, also known as Gary Brecher, also known as The War Nerd. Dolan was Ames's teacher at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. Dolan appears to be a man who read and wrote more than he lived, whereas Ames appears to be a man who lived more than he read and wrote. Both are well-read, of course, but Ames is (or was) a thrill-seeking adventurer with self-destructive tendencies, whereas Dolan is an intellectual and an academic at heart.

I don't think that the idea of the "Garden of Eden" is literary at all. A person can feel it without knowing what to call it. My own life experience suggests that humans are prone to believing that if only they had XYZ they would be happy and fulfilled. XYZ could be "hot girlfriend", or "millions of dollars in the bank", or "Ivy League pedigree", etc. It seems that life is always a bit grim, and people naturally seek solace by trying to "acquire" people (e.g., friends, admirers, romantic partners, sexual partners) or objects (e.g., cars, boats, houses). I don't think this is something that only literary people do. What literary people do is to ruin the experience by believing that they themselves are characters in some grand novel.

[TomArrow]

(04-27-2014 12:04 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  

My impression of Ames himself is that he is an extremely literary guy in a way that is unpleasant to me; I find his writing in this passage annoying and bordering on cringe-worthy. So many writer types are overrated -- they preen and psychologize and leave you with very little.

This is one of the most useful and greatly written pieces I've ever read in the manosphere. I share your opinion to the point and I wish I had expressed the sentiment as well as you did before. Thank you.

[TomArrow]

(05-02-2014 05:52 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

I don't think that the idea of the "Garden of Eden" is literary at all. A person can feel it without knowing what to call it. My own life experience suggests that humans are prone to believing that if only they had XYZ they would be happy and fulfilled. XYZ could be "hot girlfriend", or "millions of dollars in the bank", or "Ivy League pedigree", etc. It seems that life is always a bit grim, and people naturally seek solace by trying to "acquire" people (e.g., friends, admirers, romantic partners, sexual partners) or objects (e.g., cars, boats, houses). I don't think this is something that only literary people do. What literary people do is to ruin the experience by believing that they themselves are characters in some grand novel.

How about calling it something?

Spot on with the grand novel thing. I do that way too often. Though, for me it's usually a great movie. Think about how impatient that makes me - I have to win over the world in 90 minutes. There's a reason I've decided against the video business.