DoktorGlas
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User ID: 1338
The essay reminds me quite strongly of an old quote from the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderbergs best and most well-known work Doktor Glas:
"Ett nyfött barn är vedervärdigt. En dödsbädd gör sällan ett så ohyggligt intryck som en barnsbörd, denna förfärliga symfoni av skrik och smuts och blod."
"A newborn child is hideous. A deathbed seldom makes so terrible an impression as a childbirth, this horrific symphony of screams and filth and blood."
Pregnancy and childbirth truly are among the most hideous physical processes in existence. Everytime I watch a hospital series and a birth scene comes on, I feel the same revulsion as if they'd switched to a snuff film. It's telling that the Old Testament felt the need to explain pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment from God for an espeically egregious sin, and in a broader metaphysical sense the old story of the Apple of Knowledge and the plight of the female pelvis carries deep metaphorical truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma
This is an existential problem which haunts me, and more so than usual lately. I see no solution – that is to say, a solution which cuts to the heart of the matter – to this, short of maybe artifical wombs followed by abolishing women as a sex. That idea has a lot of merits, and it would make the natalist position a lot more appealing if we could at least make it less of a travesty to create new people; but it is also a pipe dream which will obviously never become reality. I am at least grateful for the fact that I was born a man, and that I was thus spared the fate of being a sacrificial lamb of human reproduction.
Despite all this, it's unfortunately difficult to feel particularily sorry for women. The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male, as the good Kipling wrote, and through their harsh sexual selection women have created what they are now complaining about (this is, again in a metaphorical sense, the aforementioned sin for which they are now all collectively being punished). Men obviously fare only a little better in the equation. The truth is, my friends, we are dumb and evil animals and for that reason we all deserve to be miserable – and so we are.
I end with another classic Doktor Glas passage:
"Jag hade alltid känt ett stort förakt för de dåliga gossar, som brukade rita fula ord på väggarna och planken. Men i den stunden var det mig som om Gud själv hade ritat något fult på den blå vårhimmeln, och jag tror egentligen att det var då jag först började undra, om det verkligen fanns någon gud."
"I had always felt great contempt for the scoundrel boys who used to draw ugly words on walls and planks. But in that moment it seemed to me as if God himself had drawn something ugly on the blue spring sky, and I think it was a that moment I began to wonder, if there really was a God."
I do not wonder. There is no God. We are alone.
Earlier this spring I met a girl on one of the many dating apps I reluctantly use. It turned out to be one of those life-changing romances you mostly only read about in novels. Most of the time I have trouble feeling comfortable around people, and yet the vibes here were totally instant. We hit it off right away and just sat by the town river cuddling and talking for several hours on our first date, and the second one went even better. I've only felt so instantly connected to and comfortable with someone once before in my dating life and that was a long time ago. After that we slept together, which I would honestly rate as one of the highlights of my life. My judgement is naturally clouded my hormones, but she really was perfect: more than I would dare hope exist.
You've already guessed what comes next. Soon after our fourth date she rejected me over the phone one evening when I was coming home from a trip (ostensibly because of my political beliefs, but you never know).
This has already been a less than stellar year for me due to job-related reasons, but losing her was devastating. I fell into a lighter depression, and I have been low, low, low since the day she left. Only the last month or so have things gotten somewhat better. I still think about her often and I still feel like something that could have been really special vanished for no good reason; but I can distract myself with other activities and sometimes feel like things are maybe okay. A lot of my moments are nevertheless even now spent listening to Townes van Zandt and thinking about death.
The ordeal has also got me thinking and reflecting a lot about my lovelife, especially since the intimacy with her was so exceptionally wonderful. I'm now in the later part of my twenties, and I have had sex a total of four times in my entire life (and that is including this encounter). This is about a couple of hundred times less than I had hoped to have by this point. If someone had told the teenage me that I was in for more or less a decade long dry spell I think I would've been horrified. But it has become this way gradually, day by day without a girlfriend and with no other willing partner, and only now when auditing the records of my life has it really hit me how badly things have gone. The aforementioned girl was younger than me, yet from the conversations we had it's clear she already had way significantly more experience than me in this field. Same thing when I compare myself with my male friends. I am obviously and painfully doing unusually poorly.
By many other metrics things are going decently well for me. At the same time I value women and sex highly, I can't help myself from doing it, and I remember looking forward to having sex when I was teenager. I have since tried my luck on dating apps and in my social circles, and despite all my attempts it now more and more looks like my younger years will soon have passed with very limited success with the opposite sex. Looking forward I am also not feeling optimistic. In particular the prospect of becoming 30+ and attracting women the same age who've already had their fun and now want someone "serious" to settle down with doesn't appeal to me. I don't want to be practical choice rather than a romantic one. I'm sure in this modern world it's terribly entitled and sexist of me to think like this, but I value youth and beauty in women, and it's something that I want to experience more in my life.
In the year that's coming I'll likely try to make some changes to my life and put myself out there, try and salvage the situation somewhat as best I can. I think history is a good predictor of the future when it comes to things like this though, and another miracle-woman like the one I opened this post with seems unlikely.
I don't know what I hope to achieve by posting this here, or what advice or encouragement I hope to hear. Still, a lot of your are cleverer than me: maybe someone here will figure out something smart to say.
"
Casualsex is a luxury. And that's been true for the entirety of human history. "Indeed. The issue, however, is that progressive maxims generally proclaim inequality is bad and that luxury should be distributed more equally. Yet women are the supreme luxury for men, and their distribution remains highly unequal despite being obviously more important than wealth for male well-being.
I don't care very much if I have twenty thousand dollars more or less, but I'd exchange a significant chunk of my fortune for success with women, and an even bigger chunk to keep the love of my life that came and went last year. What man wouldn't make that trade? The simple truth is that failing to attract women (or a least a woman) makes the average dude's life much, much worse in a way that doesn't seem to be true for women in the corresponding situation. Between the choice of accepting this gigantic inequality as inevitable and denying it exists, it's no surprise many pick the latter option.
Speaking more broadly, I honestly think a big part of the current malaise of the West is caused by the relationship and sex recession. It's difficult to find cultural meaning when you can't get find a girl or at least get laid every now and again, and civilization decline seems to be what no pussy does to a mf.
The recession in turn is caused by many trends, but chief among them in my book are 1) women gaining ever more status and wealth and being generally hypergamous, 2) women using their voting power to tax men so that the state indirectly provides much of that which individual men used to give them, and 3) dating apps rigging the game to the disadvantage of most men.
This trend, coupled with increased tokophobia due to the internet making it easy to research pregnancy and childbirth, leads straight to a sudden and sharp demographic decline. This then runs the real risk of creating an unbreakable demographic death spiral in the entire West (since less children means downsizing of schools, a bigger burden for the coming generation, et cetera, which in turn makes children both more difficult and less enticing). Climate change might be annoying, but demography is the real threat looming over us. The Shadow of sexlessness has fallen over Middle-Earth, and it is hard to see how it might be vanquished. But it's still too early to give up hope, and maybe there'll come a change for the better soon.
Once again, I add here at the end, the foresight of Kipling makes fools of us all:
"On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
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