Virtue

I’ve never had meaningless sex,… I meant to bang every girl I ever did.

Whenever I author a particularly inflammatory post or forum thread that grates on people’s ego-invested beliefs, one of the first accusations I expect to have leveled at me are those that echo a shaming appeal to moralism. I can generally identify a pretty important issue if the response to exposing some uncomfortable truth requires questioning my common sense or ethics. On a larger scale, many a White Knight, and many an ethics-invested woman will simply default to ‘higher self‘ arguments when confronted with simple observations that challenge what they believe – and what they assume everyone else believes along with them.

People with questions don’t frighten me, it’s the people without any that scare the hell out of me.

My problem isn’t necessarily with principles or morals or ethics in and of themselves, but rather men chumpishly clinging to them when in actuality they really had no other options to give themselves a wider perspective on what they believe.

They make necessity a virtue.

For instance, telling yourself you’re remaining (conditionally) celibate in order to hold to some higher ideal is really just trying to prove a negative if you don’t really have any valid options to influence your decision in the first place. If you weren’t get laid to begin with it seems like prudence to convince yourself and others that it’s really by your design. You ‘win‘ by not doing anything.

And it’s unassailable. I can’t doubt the merit of a guy’s convictions when nothing is what’s required to prove them. I read a lot of guys who question the merits of Game. Some reject it entirely or profess some desire to “get out of all the game playing” in order to rationalize their inability to adopt a new, more productive, mindset for themselves. Usually this is accompanied by some qualification as to how they’ve seen it all, banged their fill of “low quality women“, and now have developed some higher sense of self – all while implying those still “in the game” have not – and are now giving themselves ‘permission‘ to exit the game by settling down with some girl in blissful monogamy. They’ve finally grown up and are doing “the right thing.” It’s like all endings to romantic comedies – he’s really a bastard with a heart of gold who met the ‘right’ woman to bring it out in him. For women, this is usually part and parcel of the Epiphany Phase, but for men it’s the virtue signaling that accompanies his following The Script.

Anyone would sound like an idiot for trying to convince you not to be moral – to drop your integrity or demean yourself – but that’s the reason appeals to moralism sound good. Being resolute is admirable, but until your virtue is significantly tested they’re just excuses that look nice on your sleeve. Guy’s who have legitimate harems don’t make announcements about how they’re renouncing them in favor of ONE quality woman. There’s no self-convincing, they just do it, without any fanfare or seeking affirmation from others for having done so.

It’s been my experience that the guys who are the most vocal about the merits of self-esteem and personal integrity trumping sexual experience are generally the same guys who aren’t hooking up with any real frequency anyway. Remember, a sacrifice is only significant when you actually have something relevant to lose.

The points these guys like to make are generally based on common truisms that very few people will argue with – and they know this. We’d all like to think that possessing some basic form of self-control is admirable, particularly in respect to our base impulses, but for as much as we’d like to self-righteously pat ourselves on the back for “resisting temptation“, the fact remains that yes, we are still motivated by those impulses. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to identify with the “sex driven man” label – the guys who lets his dick do his thinking – and certainly not as his recognized source of esteem, however, the physical/biological forces that motivates his libido is still very real.

Flowery prose doesn’t make a personal anecdote a universal truth. It’s interesting that a virtuous Purple Pill guy will make a point of personal esteem being a paramount virtue in one paragraph, yet still equate bedding a “woman of value” with a sense of victory. He did it the right way, right?

It’s interesting to me when I hear appeals to righteousness in the form of deriding the experiences of men (sexual or otherwise) by characterizing them as worth less because they supposedly compensate for some inner failing or need for ‘personal validation‘. One canard is the presumption that a guy with many lovers in his past must somehow be banging his harem to impress himself or others. I’ve honestly never known a guy who didn’t enjoy sex for the sake of sex. Considering the difficulty most men encounter in just banging the handful women they do in the average lifespan, I doubt the few men who actually can enjoy a variety of women do so simply to acquire more accolades from other men for having done so. And that’s the utilitarian aspect of moralistic men shaming other men – it’s not that men with more access to sex need to validate themselves, it’s that moralistic men with less access to sex believe that those men would even care about their opinions enough to be validated.

What’s ironic to me is that the same self-righteous appeal to adhere to convenient convictions is actually done for much of the same reasons they accuse other men of – to garner respect and affirmation for doing so.

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should‘ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to have sex just for the sake of having sex – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning.

It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.