To the woman I met with my grandmother’s name

I had never met somebody like you before. You radiate sex appeal. You are older, but this does not matter to me. I like you a lot. I want you to find me, to hold me in your sophisticated, energetic embrace. But you will not, because you do not need to be that close to me to feel me.

I will find you, I’ll seek you out. I’ll let you know I care for something more than what is traditional for a meetup at a park. I won’t pretend with you.

Would you like this?

The man on the subway

There was a man on the subway today. He didn’t look mad, because he was articulate in his gestures. He was trying to do something.

It was a dark man, coming south from Harlem. He did not frighten me. His eyes looked like they were somewhere else, but wherever he was, this did not seem like a frightening place to be.

He was in love with something. He was in a fever dream, not a nightmare.

He was there by himself, and none of us knew where he was. His arms and head and back were dancing, in his own seat and the empty seats next to him. His legs did not move.

What I look for when I check my phone

I look for the shadows of the people I want to be there. The people I miss, who I’ve seen before. Who normally, without anything, I wouldn’t see or hear from again except in the flesh, beside me.

If I catch sight of them, I get all of them, as they are.

But now, I can look for disembodied shadows of them in the wires, in the air.

But I can’t ever tell if they are safe.

To the man who took me shooting

You accidentally did a good thing for me there. We all thought I would be terrible, and we were all surprised. You, me, the instructor.

It was important for me to impress myself, and it was important for me to impress you while I impressed myself.

I forgot that I was sharp. And this made me remember. To learn something that quickly, and to see you see me do it…

thanks

Dear Thiago, on becoming broken

Sometimes I come home from a long day, and you’re the person I want to talk to. I want to tell you my theories, even though you might not understand them. I don’t know why I do this.

When I’m with you, I don’t want to collapse and leave the world. It’s not an escape into each other for a little bit. It’s us looking at the world, together. You make it more glittery and exciting and interesting.

I was thinking about how this thing works—I was quite pleased with myself. People put too much pressure on you to do what they want. They want you to become something for them. And you try, but they get mad at you for not being what they wanted. And then you eventually break. And they don’t notice for a while, and still keep the pressure on you. But eventually with your complete failure to meet any expectations at all, they get the hint that something is wrong—you don’t respond when they push your buttons anymore—and they are confused why nothing happens when they push the buttons.

And so then they determine you are broken and start to treat you like a broken person. Now everybody around you who you tried to hard to please and impress thinks you’re broken.

I don’t know what this means. It means the incentives aren’t aligned somewhere.

Dear Thiago, why we aren’t friends

You called me once to be your comfort woman when you were ill. You do not call me for vacations, or to have fun with you, or to relax. I’m your comfort woman.

We aren’t friends because you treat me worse than you treat your friends. I have always treated you as much—even better.

That’s it.

Dear Leon, on my cure for metaphysical trauma transference

I figured out something big for myself. I was talking to you before about metaphysical transference of things like emotional states and trauma.

I was having a particularly bad evening, and I managed to do something pretty cool. Not only can you tap into a person’s trauma, you can also tap into their coping mechanism.

I don’t think I can overstate the important of this to me in my development. Ever since that night, I feel like an entire world of creative options for my imagination has emerged. There are many things I can tap into now. I can not just tap into emotions, but I can tap into entire systems of emotions. That is pretty cool.

My self-consoling strategies have now, due to this one exercise, multiplied tremendously. I have a suspicion that my work progress will increase a lot as well.

Why women can’t approach first

I was asked a question by a man recently—about why women can’t approach first.

The answer is nonobvious and nontrivial.

Women who want sex, which is most women, don’t want to continue chasing sex forever. They don’t want to spend all their mental energy finding somebody to have sex with.

Imagine a woman who takes a man’s hand, and leads him to the club bathroom to fuck.

What is the chance that he will call her the next day? The chance isn’t low or high—we just have no idea. It’s completely random. We know absolutely nothing about this person. No checks have been performed.

Likely, the man thought that he was getting no-strings-attached sex, and will get weird when the woman wants to meet up again. He might act extra aloof to “not lead her on.” No flowers, nothing too intense or too romantic. Later, the guy may act straight-up entitled, weird, or mean. It ends up being an incoherent, cruel waste of time.

What can a woman do, if not ask for sex? She can doll herself up, walk into a room, and ask a man to help her reach the glass on the top shelf. A woman can come over, gently stroke a man’s shoulders, and walk away.

Now, the man has to prove at least basic interest and basic competence at picking up her signals in order to have sex with her. He has to “get” that the handkerchief was meant for him, and have sufficient interest to play along with the game.

This is where RedPill is wrong. Not all of women’s tests are pointless shit tests for the most alpha male. The tests like the handkerchief test are to see not if a man is alpha, but if a man can dance. They are tests for not if the man is dominant, but if he can smooth down his overt dominant frame to actually play with her.

Because this is important: men are dangerous. Men who cannot put down their aggression to notice her charms and play around with her for a bit will almost certainly not put down their frame for something as sophisticated as caring for her when she is upset or hurt. Forget about tenderness, soft kisses in the rain, birthday presents, cuddles with her and the kiddies, or any other softness from him.

Men are dangerous, and women are typically soft, cute, happy fluffy things. The general feminine position is generally to be open and full of love, and let good things come. But there is no shortage of aggressive corpse-men looking to suck the life out of a happy creature. There is no shortage of vampires on the earth. A woman who walks around giving away everything she has to everyone who asks will soon burn out completely—because everybody wants what she has. Nobody is not going to want a happy cute fun soft time, but not everybody is willing to get off their ass to actually help her be comfortable.

So when a woman puts herself out there and approaches first, she is not just putting herself in a vulnerable social position on the “social stigma, slut shaming,” front—but on a much deeper level too.

And this relates to what women want in a partner. Can you be my champion in the world and defend me from all these pigs and vultures who want to pick at my goodness and innocence?

And that's where women become a contradiction, and don't go for the Good man. They want a good man, who is competent and skilled and not a pig or a vulture, but ultimately, they want a champion to do battle, and if that means picking a vulture on her side, versus a Good man....well....she'll pick the vulture.

A woman would pick the most competent person who can navigate and get along with other men the best, but also who likes her the most and likes her for the right reasons. Because that will mean he will want to protect her and can protect her. And, ostensibly, her children.

Most men and most women know that completely no-strings-attached sex is a lie. At the very least, a string is not making each other feel horrible, and not being dangerous to each other. This is why there are these tests.

I made a miscalculation

I thought you were trying to help me all the time because you were trying to make up for something. You wanted to be useful. You got off on being useful, or you just liked to talk. Or you cared about me and just wanted to help me.

It didn’t occur to me that maybe you didn’t realize something—that you helped me just by being there. I just liked you around. You made me feel infinitely less lonely. You made me think that everything was possible. I just liked sitting next to you, in silence.

You just helped me by existing. I am ashamed that this knowledge was taken from you.

Why you don’t feel love

There was a man once. I write letters to him sometimes. He won’t tells me he doesn’t love me, but he does tell me he is fond of me, often.

Love is weird. I don’t love him either.

But a lot of these emotions are close together. Affection, fondness, love.

I don’t tell him I love him, but I do tell him I adore him.

The feeling of throwing your arms around someone, like a child.

A childish love.

That’s how I feel. It’s not quite love.

I’ve been completely smitten. That’s close too. But it’s also not love.

For love to happen you need to let it happen. You need to have a kind of trust. It doesn’t work if the other person isn’t open to your love.

I am convinced, and maybe I am wrong, but for now I am not convinced that love can be not reciprocal. It can be obsession, fandom, or lust. But not love. Because if they won’t let you see them, then you don’t see them. You can’t love them if they don’t let you.

Men who say they don’t fall in love—do you even want to? Do you want to love, in this moment, if you were truly honest with yourself? Or is there something that is stopping you?

Little clues for what women want

Little clues

little clues for you

about my little secrets

that’s my response to your

Little clues

Little clues for me

about your little secrets

you won’t tell me

You say you’ll tell me if

—do you know what an known unknown is? If you don’t I’ll tell you

And I’ll say no, I don’t know what a known unknown is,

and you’ll say ha! You know. You gave the answer.

I don’t know if it’s your joke, but it’s funny.

Women are confusing to you

I am confusing to you. So let me explain

to your heart full of torments

you say you’ve never loved, and I’d believe you,

if you said this after you cleared off all your torments.

But let me tell you about the things I think about at night, to clear away my own little torments

Little clues for you

about my little secrets

about what goes on in my little heart

I think of candles, and how the little flame moves about, and how almost nobody really knows what combustion is

and i think about how at restaurants you would play with the candles

and i started playing with the candles, and other people give me funny looks, but I stole this from you

i think about how you like LED lights, and these are underrated

but sometimes i try not to think of you, and what you like

not when i am trying to clear myself of torments from you

i think about the fig candles i have, that you’ve never seen

i think about the coldness of the air

and the lamps i have my friends have bought me when they realized i collect lamps

i think about how feather dusters look like tails, and they should make a play with some foxy ladies dusting around

i think about soft kisses in the rain

and squeezing me closer

and moving in closer to you

and then i get sad again because now this has something to do with you,

and so i start over

To the men who say we are not dating

The funny thing about this is that you are always the ones who bring it up. I never would, because it is so clearly true. We are not dating. This was not on my radar at all.

But when you say something that is so self-evident, then you must mean something by this. It means you were thinking about dating, and then convinced yourself that for one reason or another, this is not going to work out.

It means that there are some responsibilities or obligations you feel towards me, and feel you have failed, and so want to dismiss any expectation I may have that this was something you actually have a responsibility to do.

That’s it. That’s all there is to that.

To the men who see me using lots of drugs

Thiago, Leon, and this is important.
If you see me using lots of drugs, it means there is a problem I am trying to solve.

The longer I am using the drugs, the greater number of men have failed to help me solve the problem.

By now this problem that no one else can solve is interesting. By now you may want to get involved out of pure curiosity.

Do not pity me.

To the man who is finally happy being alone

Congratulations. You don’t need other people anymore. You are no longer wasting your time trying to be accepted by others. You can finally be the full manifestation of you. You can be yourself without feeling like you are suffocating. You are working harder than ever. You are running every day. You are working out—hard—and you just beat your squat record. You can finally think straight because everybody else’s noise isn’t clogging up your mental bandwidth. You can finally focus on yourself. Good job. You don’t like blindly trusting your feelings, but you are not. You’ve thought about the objective metrics. You can tell that this is the best you’ve felt in years. This is clearly helping and this is on the right track.

There’s more too. Even more than this. That little voice of self-loathing is quieting. You can actually hear yourself again. You can feel it, and it is starting to feel, if not good, per se, but at least not so damn tormented. You don’t want to kill yourself every night. You don’t continuously think that you are somebody who does not deserve to live in society—because you don’t care about what those people think anymore. And you feel a whole lot better.

You don’t even miss her, because she’s a drain on the things you care about—the things you need to protect—at all costs, or the world that you are barely holding together for yourself will collapse.

Here’s the secret: You’re not a secret genius here. You didn’t find some brand new path forward and upwards. You’ve found the actual exact formula for feeling better in almost any situation. Did you not think that literally removing yourself from complicated entanglements and large amounts of primal release would make you feel a lot better? It’s designed to. This doesn’t mean that you are doing the right thing, and this doesn’t mean you are doing anything to actually better your own life or anybody else’s life.

It means that you are uncomplicating your own life, short term, by putting aside the messy whiteboard and pulling out a clean one. It means that you are injecting heroin-lite through your workout endorphins and confusing this with emotional achievement.

You think you don’t deserve love, but you know that she does, and you don’t think you can ever give it to her because you are a pathetic piece of shit, actually, she is just confused, but maybe if you work hard enough you’ll finally pay off your karma and then you will get the love you deserve.

You’re not sure if you’ve ever felt love. Maybe you haven’t met the right person yet. Maybe when you feel the right person, you’ll feel it.

Except you know that isn’t it. You know that whoever comes by who is good enough, will never be good enough. You know that it really is you, because you can’t be happy with yourself for long enough to sit still.

You know she’s quite the person because you wish you could be better so that you could actually be with her—and you don’t want to tell her this—and you try to find literally anybody else to be with so that you could avoid being with her.

You would never say, “I miss you too,” when she calls. You’ll say, “I’m glad you came,” when she comes.

You would never say, “I love you.” You’ll say, “I would go significantly out of my way for you.”

You would never let her feel like she’s a part of you, because you don’t want her to be a part of you. You don’t want anything to be a part of you. You don’t want anything to have anything to do with you.

I know this is how you feel, because I have felt this way too. I wanted to break anything, and laugh about it. I did it in my mind. I did it over and over, in cleverer ways. Just destroyed everyone I cared about because I can’t seem to figure something out.

Dear Thiago, I think you know

You’re the only one, of all the people, who suspected you will be written about enough to tell me you don’t want it done.

There were people who assumed they would be, and in laughing texts told me to show them. They were excited for it.

You were always wary. I don’t think you could have ever imagined what I would say. It would shock and delight you, in ways you do not understand.

I think you knew.

I think you always knew.

You know that it all was more than the world, and you know that I had it in me, this more than the world, and if it had to come out in this way because I couldn’t keep it inside me, what would it be about? Why wouldn’t it be about you? What else is this big, that it is bigger than the world?

What else is there like that, that you have felt or that you think I have felt?

You knew what I meant when I looked at you, and that what we had was not articulable. You could not ever say it. Why not it be me who tries?

Do you hate yourself so much, that when you look at my wonder, you have to stab this part that knows it has something to do with you?

Dear Thiago, why I only let you play with me when tomorrow is not a work day

Being completely overpowered by a man, knowing that he can overpower me because he is a man

Being fucked and taking on his anger and violence as my own, and hating him for it

but loving him desperately for it, for making me meek, for

forcing demureness

on me.

For making me see

you can’t have one without the other.

Hating myself, because I release blood like a demon, and I touch myself, and now I am covered in blood and I am demonic

both for the release of blood

and for enjoying it, and enjoying myself.

The thrill of the flurry of emotions and I hurricane around the city, and I’m drunk on my own existence,

and I’m a demon then too, and I say it’s love but really I want to possess you through your possession of me

who owns who at that point?

Being afraid of myself, and being afraid of him more, because ultimately I am fragile and I want to love, and he is fragile but he does not want to love—he wants to want me, but when he stops, I am a twig and he can do what he wants.

And we both know it.

And this turns me on, and this turns him on that this turns me on.

He tells me—I knew when it started to hurt.

He tells me—I could have stopped.

He tells me—I didn’t want to.

I tell him stop and he goes harder, and I squeal, and who is destroying who at that point?

I help him with his own destruction.

Tell me, do you understand now?

These emotions that come, this balance of life and destruction. Blood and tears and innocence,

and you destroy my innocence

You think I would not notice, but, it’s me.

It’s my body. You’re inside me. That’s where your cock and your anger and your loathing went, and now I have it.

You gave it to me. That was the point.

You flipped me over and said, “I’m gonna give you my cock.”

I make you mad in ways I do not understand—in ways I may never understand. The fury you keep for yourself all this time—inside for everybody—you keep it special for me. I am the one who gets to see it, when I am the most weak and when you force me to be weak for you

that’s when I see

you at your fullest brute force

and I have to take all of it

Dear Julius, the analysis on women’s fashion

I promised you this, so here we are.

Cargo-culting

I watched a French movie the other day, Masculin Féminin (1966), and the next day when finding an outfit to wear to meet a few people, I put on the outfit Madeline was wearing. Flat shoes, black skirt, black tights, a sweater. Her sweater was white and mine was black, but I was cargo-culting the entire outfit. In the film she explained a little bit about the outfit, in an interview (Madeline was a singer in the film). It’s about youth.

I don’t really know much about how this outfit represents youth, and I don’t really know why I would want to represent youth in the first place, but I liked the outfit, it looked classy, I had everything I needed for it, and so I just went for it. I followed the formula without myself making the derivation.

That’s cargo-culting. And cargo-culting works really well if the culture you are copying is doing a decent job. You can just get away with copy-pasting and have good results.

It leads to disastrous results if what you’re copying is actually awful. That is, I suspect, one reason why American fashion is so disastrous. People don’t want to make choices and derivations all the time, they cargo-cult, and what they are cargo-culting—what they see on TV, is just terribly mediocre.

Some people say that Americans need a return to modesty. I don’t think modesty has anything to do with it. Not really. Something like wanting to project modesty is now a derivation. That’s already too much work for a lot of people.

Cult of Authenticity

When Americans are deriving something, what are they deriving? And from what and for what?

In America, the core value around fashion is individual expression, which leads to some fun and interesting fashion choices, some of which are quite novel and exciting. But most of the time it is a chaos of whatever the person feels like at a current moment. You get blue hair and a green hoodie and purple trousers and clown shoes.

Compare this with the core value in Canada, which is not individual expression, but rather communal comfort. You wear clothes that would make the people around you feel good. You want the people around you to be comfortable, and for your clothing choices to reflect respect towards the people around you. This eliminates clothing choices that are too unusual or shocking. This leads to a conformity of neutral sweaters, but in limiting the options, the general fashion sense of the public.

Dear Roman, my night with the manta ray stone ritual

I spent an evening tonight, on April 13, 2021, in Hawaii, Hawaii, near Kona, with the Manta Rays.

One of them, Amanda, was recently gangbanged by other rays a few days ago and is likely pregnant. To the instructor this is great news.

We go underwater and we go onto rocks in a circle of rocks. We sit down in the sand on our knees, holding onto a rock not to float back up if we haven’t been weighed down properly up on the boat (When you dive, you carry some rocks to control buoyancy). We hold flashlights and there is little buzzy plankton everywhere.

The idea is the manta rays come around and eat the plankton. It’s a huge family reunion. A huge celebration. Thanksgiving for the manta rays!

I think this was the most other-worldly thing I have ever seen in my life. It looks like a pagan ritual. It looks like an alien gathering. It’s completely not of this earth—and yet it is the most earthly, grounded thing too.

Everything is glowing. There is a ring of flashlights from all of us sitting in the circle, and in the middle lights are set up so we can properly see our guests.

They’re friendly. They swim up, and they can sense your electricity and avoid you. They can swim around you.

Most of the time they choose to. But sometimes they bump into you. They have a coating on them that protects them from infection, and you shouldn’t touch them or it may rub off.

They basically register as people, similar to how dolphins register as people. They know what they’re doing. They’re full adults. They have social dynamics, and they certainly seem to have thoughts. It’s their world, and we are the intrusion.

If these 14 rays didn’t show up, there would be no event. We’d just be dicking around underwater like losers, lose some money, go back up.

But they showed up. Sure, we lured them with some well-lit plankton, but they didn’t have to come. Sometimes they don’t.

There’s a deeper lesson here about sometimes you just have to show up.

Dear Thiago, no, I am not lost

Every once in a while, somebody comes around and thinks that I am lost. He may imply it through a thinly veiled insult, or he may insinuate it through the way he engages with my work. It is a common enough motif that young people are lost, and even that old people are lost, that when somebody is not sure what he is seeing, this is an easy enough framework to reach for.

I am not lost. I will tell you what is going on with me, or has been going on with me when you say this.

There is a difference between being lost, and not seeing hierarchies that you can reasonably climb. There is also a difference between being lost, and not seeing hierarchies you believe in.

In order to make a move “forward,” what you are really talking about is a move “up.” When you are talking a move “up” you are talking about a move up some “ladder.”

There is not one fixed ladder. There are many ladders, and people are climbing different ones for different reasons. One person may be climbing the ladder of making as much money as possible. One person may be trying to get laid as much as possible. One person may be trying to climb up the ranks of academia. One person may be trying to have as many kids as possible. One person may be trying to climb up their literal corporate ladder.

People climb a ladder because they think there is something at the top worth having. They do not exert effort to climb arbitrarily. They climb because they see something they want up there.

When people don’t believe in the reward anymore, or don’t think the reward is worth the cost, or don’t think that the next step up the ladder is possible for them personally, they may appear “lost.” In fact, “stuck” is a better description, because they are not lost, and “finding themselves” will not help them. In fact, they probably know exactly where they are, and the futility of their options.

But even “stuck” is not a good word for what many people are going through in this current moment. They genuinely do not believe in the existing hierarchies, and they genuinely do not believe in the rewards either. What is the point of taking the next step if it leads nowhere?

And they are not wrong about thinking this. Our institutions are discrediting themselves with overly obtuse ideologies, that are aimed to give them legitimacy in a diverse world, but only discredit themselves further and further.

Our corporations are becoming more and more inhumane, with each person dispensable. You can work somewhere for 10 years in a head position, and still be dispensable when one manager does not like you and it’s layoff season.

If everyone was just lost, we could poke them about, or send them off on a road trip, and they would come back stronger and ready to take on the world.

The problem is when they do come back from the road trip, what they see is disaster and a society that not just punishes them for doing wrong, but most of the time, punishes them from doing right, too.

They do the right things to climb, and are knocked down anyway. Why not sit at home collecting Covid checks? That’s the smart thing to do. Who knows how long it will last.

Dear Rina, how to be a girl pirate and the failure modes of failure modes

I have a new favorite line—tell me what your copes are, and I will tell you what you are.

I’ll come back to this later. But right now I will start with why women are so neurotic. In America at least, there are a few acceptable female archetypes to strive towards: The homecoming queen, the perfect mom, and the perfect sex kitten. Serena van der Woodsen, Martha Stewart, or Ariana Grande.

What do all of these archetypes have in common? They have different values on the surface, as if they are about completely different things, but each of them aims at some kind of perfection, and a perfection at some sort of performance. Performance at public hair, make up, walking and smiling for the homecoming queen. Performance at having nice children and a nice household for the mom. Performance at all kinds of niche sexual acts for the sex kitten. Not only are all these performances, they are all public performances. And they are all performances tailored to impress some group—the student body, other moms and other women, and single, horny men.

Not only are these all public performances, they aren’t even public performances to please the general public. They’re hyper-tailored for some specific sub-demographic and so are taken to an even greater unreasonable extreme than they would be if aspects were subdued to please everyone. And these public performances aren’t to be a “good student,” a “good mom,” or a “good sex kitten.” The key word there is perfect.

I am not sure where each of these came from—though I have my theories.

But this brings me to the title of this letter—failure modes. If you are merely a “good” mom, under this schema, you are not actually good enough. If you are a pretty girl in high school, but otherwise a “loser,” then you are not good enough. If you can do a split but refuse anal…well…what is the point of you even?

This is real. I’ve met people who are distraught about the above and who have felt these standards define entire periods of their lives. And they aren’t particularly rule-abiding or particularly self-conscious. This stuff runs deep in our social machinery, and there are actual concerns here. If you sleep with one guy and tell the wrong person about it, now you’re a huge whore.

If you forgot to pick up your kid from soccer that one time, nothing happened but Sharon will still tell everyone you’re a shit mom. If you have no kids and work an office job, you’re an uptight she-man. If you do have kids, then you’re a lame housewife who hasn’t made anything of herself. If you have no kids but your boyfriend pays your rent, now you’re a prostitute. If you’re actually a prostitute, well, then if you get murdered it’s not just fair game, it’s funny.

If you’re hot, it feels like you can’t win. If you’re not hot, then you really can’t win, so what’s the point of playing?

I have a suspicion that this is why we have been seeing so many failure modes of female archetypes. Fuck Martha Stewart, let’s wear spikes and be Billie Eilish! Except Billie is a teenager trying to survive. People cannot meet these impossible standards, meeting them partially does not seem to count, and so people enter a failure mode.

Here we see the “fat is beautiful” crowd. The fetishization of clumsiness in Twilight. The cutification and cultification of mental illness on YouTube. We see women saying they hate literally all men, or shaving their heads, or cutting themselves up with extreme body modification, or giving up on any kind of personal development except devising more clever ways of socially justifying their narcissism.

Those are the failures modes, and none of them are good. This is the failure of the current failure modes. When you fuck out of the system, your presented alternatives are extremely stupid and so your short-circuiting out of society leads you to unchecked and limitless despair.

That is not the point of a failure mode. The point of a failure mode is not to just fail, and keep failing forever until you waste yourself in the dirt. Or—worse for its dishonesty, to tell yourself and everybody around you that being a 400 pound alcoholic is a perfectly fine way to live. The point of a failure mode is to catch when something is going quite off, and then to get back to processing as usual. A properly set up failure mode is not limitless failure. In fact, by allowing some failure, it prevents total disaster. It sets a floor on failure, and ideally, a mechanism for bouncing back.

We need better failure modes. As a model, I suggest looking at the failure modes for men. Men also have unattainable standards (James Bond), but they also have failure mode archetypes that do not suck. If you can’t be James Bond, you can be Sterling Archer. If you can’t be Batman, you can be Deadpool. If you’re not an amazing dad, you’re still the decent dad in a flannel shirt throwing a tennis ball to his kid off the front porch.

If society is feeding you bullshit, we have an archetype for fucking out that does not suck: The Pirate.

What does the female conception of the pirate look like? The point of the pirate is that the pirate is not perfect, and the pirate does not meet all societal expectations. But the pirate is also not hopped up on LSD in a dark alley cutting up his own testicles and streaming it on YouTube. The pirate is not nihilistic. The pirate values his life. The pirate has friends and is a perfectly acceptable mating companion. The despair of the pirate has a floor. The pirate meets baseline competence and mental and physical fitness standards—perhaps more so than the average in proper society. The pirate also has a moral code that is at least 70% based on reality and real dealings with people. The pirate is not perfect, but the pirate is good. In fact the pirate, in his endeavor to really think about what is really truly good, may end up being more competent and virtuous than even the best of society.

But the pirate famously has vices. Back to that line—tell me what your copes are, and I will tell you what you are. The pirate drinks his rum. Maybe he has sex, or watches porn, or likes poking pufferfish for fun. Maybe he spends too much time on cards or Twitter. His vices may be intentional choices, or they may be the only way he can get any work done, or they may be entirely pleasure.

He sometimes takes these vices pretty far, and they might not be completely harmless—they may on occasion harm people, but he does not let it actually destroy people or himself. I would not say his life is balanced in the conventional sense, but no single vice tips the scale such that the vice stops being a vice and becomes his life. That is why having vices is actually fine: you cannot get rid of all vices. The only way to fully expel them from your stomach is by redefining them as no longer vices—but as just normal things you are allowed to do all the time and frame your life around. Or even worse—you get used to vice so much that you redefine vice as virtue.

What would be the equivalent of acceptable female vices? Is she currently allowed any? Right now, women are allowed to do whatever they want—all standards have been dropped completely. But the traditional woman does not drink. She does not smoke. She does not have sex outside marriage. She does not watch porn. She is a healthy weight, maybe pleasantly plump without being obese. She smiles a lot, controls her emotions, is not too loud. She creates warmth and hominess wherever she goes. She follows the law. She has sex with her husband without wanting to have sex with anybody else, and she certainly is not a nymphomaniac.

What can the pirate woman do, that isn’t drinking herself into oblivion alone in her house, or burning her boyfriend’s house down, or becoming heroin-chic, to let off some steam and keep herself sane?

The mainstream modes of behavior are either 1. Be a perfect version of either sex object, teenager, or mother, 2. Be whatever the perverted puppeteer men in the media decide is the latest fad for their flesh-puppets (Like heroin-chic), 3. Less common, but be trad.

No wonder we see women just bailing out from trying to fulfill any kinds of standards whatsoever and descend into full self-destructive idiocy, backed by “authentic” and “self-caring” and “all-inclusive” ideology.

We need to give them another credible option to blow off steam, have some fun, and have an aspirational archetype that is attainable without being a total fuck up. And it can’t just be “woman who smokes and jerks off in a public hot tub” or “woman pirate.” The reason the pirate works is because it actually appeals to men’s idealistic aspirations. It actually does serve as a reasonable guide for behavior, like a compass of 80% accuracy.

The traditional companion to the male pirate was the female wench who waits for him to come home. Well—what the hell is she doing in the meantime? Cleaning tables—forever, faithfully? Where is her compass leading her?

I’ll tell you this much. Virtue be damned—I’m not waiting around.