I did not read Sadly, Porn
If I ever see a review that seems a bit more skeptical of its thesis I might consider it
There are plenty of true things that tend to make you a lazy and/or indulgent thinker when used as first principles. Chief among them is a belief that people are generally not aware of their true motivations for any given action.
This is true some of the time (not that often, but enough to count). What people tend to assume - which is also sometimes true - is that outsiders can see why individuals take the action they do much more clearly than the individual themselves.
This tends to sort of inexorably slide towards an assumption that outsiders always understand individual motivation better than the individual actor does, and this often erroneous assumption is a weakness of an intelligent mind that prides itself on rationality.
Such an assumption can make you lazy in assessing people’s motives and indulgent in picking motives that map to whatever shit you’re on about at any given time, all in the name of your superior powers of perception.
Too often I see people who can’t conceive of having done a specific thing for a specific reason who consequently assume that the active party is self-delusive. Sometimes this is the case. Often the first party is bad at modeling unusual people and wants an excuse to throw out an outlier while feeling smug about their superior knowledge base. Worse, the first party may themselves be unusual and incapable of modeling relatively normal people.
This brings me to that Book people have been Talking about. I haven’t read it, as it says on the tin. I am mostly intrigued at what appears to be taking a sexual proclivity found much more commonly in one sex than another (and as far as I know, found only in a minority of that sex’s members) and using it as a blueprint to explain the sum total of human desire, inside and outside the bedroom.
It skirts almost all complaints by claiming repeatedly that people are in constant denial of their true intentions, which are (perhaps always) to seek to deprive their fellow men of good things.
Forgive me for amateur the emperor is naked reviewing but is this not,,,,,a boring and implausible thesis? How are so many people I respect so intrigued by this?
One explanation here is that I myself am simply unaware of how many of my intentions are centered around depriving someone else of something, perhaps even in writing this essay.
Another is that most people actually are like this but I am somehow not.
A third is that the man who wrote this spilled more than a thousand pages worth of ink on a very hard-to-defend philosophy and the people who are drawn to it came for the intellectual novelty - even at the cost of accuracy - on an oft-examined subject.
There is no rigorous means of proving that people act out of envy the overwhelming majority of the time and lie to themselves about it, yet my friends who care a great deal about quantification and evidence seem unperturbed by this. It all feels like a sort of cynical fan service. Yes, this cankerous mouth breathes, humankind is nasty and small, just like that boss you hated and that bitch you married.
People devour this just as eagerly as they do anodyne platitudes about human goodness, but they feel twice as smug about their bravery in the face of darkness.
Indulgence is indulgence whether pleasure or pain, and I get tired of watching intellectual sadomasochism being branded as being thoughtful or brave.
One version of this thesis that I’m open to is that men are more prone to this kind of motivation than women are (this is definitely not what’s claimed in the book).
[On the subject of men and women being equally given to nasty impulses, I find it illuminating when people who believe in the deep crevasse of mental, emotional, and physical disparities between the sexes start advocating that the sexes mirror each other on something or other - this tends to be where you find their deepest convictions about where gendered unfairness ends.]
Men seem to live under a relentless tyranny of hierarchy, one that is not found at any similar scale in womanhood. Everywhere men seem to be both reminded of and anxious about their position relative to other people, specifically other men. The idea that any two men could be equally good as each other isn’t a commonly accepted reality, and group cohesion therefore has extreme limitations. Many who feel and preach this most strongly would argue that female sexual selection drives it.
It would make sense to me that in such a system it would be hard to avoid resentment and jealousy of what other people gain through their status relative to yours. There is no concept of succeeding with your fellow men that tastes as good or sounds as sweet as triumphing over every single one of them, but the latter requires you to actually *be* better than every single one of them. And so, for most, the alternative must be trying to thwart the progress of the person or people at the top, regardless of its cost to you.
People talk about female jealousy, and it’s true that women are not immune to envy or to the desire to undercut more successful women (and men). To speak of that reality without acknowledging how much more common female group supportiveness is than male feels dishonest and angry, a resentful attempt to balance scales that are absolutely tilted in favor of the female social experience.
Women are measured against other women but with much lower variance, much more room for shared tiers of excellence even if you buy into this logic (and many women refuse to). Furthermore, women are measured against other women in much more immutable categories, like how good looking they are, which tends to reduce jealous jockeying. Some women are prettier than you and that’s the way it is, goes female jealousy. Some men are more talented than you are but you might be able to change that if you try harder so why the fuck aren’t you trying harder, goes male jealousy.
A friend - whose writing is much better than my own - once wrote with caveats that rape fantasies could fit into this category, as fundamentally being about a fantasy of depriving someone else of what they want, as being driven by resentment. She noted that she was evaluating the applicability of the book’s starting framework rather than cosigning her reading. Frankly, I think female sexual resentment does not work enough like male sexual resentment to justify a chiral evaluation, whether or not we accept that this thesis holds for men.
Male sexual resentment seems to tie strongly back to this sense of performing, of being forced into exhausting status games and dancing like a monkey to be seen as high status enough to be desirable. Cuckolding seems to offer a reprieve from this resentment by turning into the skid - imagining a world in which they fall short, their worst fear is realized, and it’s actually better than the status games. Fundamentally, it seems much more a means of feeling in charge of a dynamic that is thrust upon its subject.
[Frankly I’m very open to the possibility that this book is none other than 1000 plus pages of its author desperately trying to convince himself that his fantasy is not about a desire to escape being weighed and measured, because he believes that would be evidence of an inadequate man and he is fully certain that he is not an inadequate man.]
Rape fantasies, by contrast, are mostly about female self-referential sexuality running headlong into the reality of being attracted to people who can physically overpower you (and a nonzero number of them wish they could with no repercussions). It’s a fantasy that delights in being so attractive as to make someone else break rules, and it’s also a fantasy where you can find solace in knowing that that rule could be broken and you’d be better for it.
I’m not convinced that at the root of cuckoldry or rape fantasies (or just about any fantasy) is depriving a partner, because I think both forms of sexuality that lead to them are way too self-interested to be thinking so much about their partner’s experience.
Furthermore, I have known enough men who have married happily and outgrown a rat race for female attention and approval to be skeptical; even if this thesis applies to men, I see no compelling evidence that it applies as broadly as its author appears to believe.
As for true counterarguments, my central complaint is entirely boring: I’ve never seen a thesis so balletically fail Occam’s Razor. Why do people do things, this book asks? Well, neither their first nor even their second assumptions are right. Nor is there much variety in human motivation, despite even our most basic needs including things like connection, food, and shelter, never mind that they obviously cannot be accomplished with a single emotional hammer. This book asks me to believe that man is not seeking goodness for his fellow man, not seeking sex for himself, no, he is above all trying to ignore his ever-present desire to ruin any goodness he can in the lives of people he envies.
I don’t know why I have never seen a *single* review on this book that calls that thesis what it is: flatly asinine.