Rollo, I just saw the movie ‘Shame’ starring Michael Fassbender and felt the need to recommend it on here.
The main character is addicted to sex, it’s basically the main focus in his life. He is constantly pursuing it one way or another, picking up women he meets in his daily life, getting behind his laptop to engage in internet porn, ordering an escort girl, or just jerking off on the toilet.
He’s good with women, runs pretty solid game. But it’s all superficial, he just knows how to push the right buttons and make their ginas tingle, then fvcks them. He’s unable to establish something like a “connection” with them, fvcking is a purely individual experience for him, just as masturbation. Only, instead of using his right hand, he uses a woman’s body.
It seems as if the guy is empty inside and is trying to fill his inner emptiness by engaging in sexual activities all the time. Of course, it doesn’t get him anywhere, but he can’t help himself. He just keeps repeating his cycle of sexual activities, he’s a slave to it. The moment he would stop doing it, he’d become very uneasy, like a drug addict going through withdrawal.
Fassbender’s portayal of the main character is quite brilliant. Nothing of what I wrote above is being told explicitly, you just deduct it from his actions and body language while the movie lets you be a spectator to the main character’s daily life (so, in fact, you might disagree with certain parts of my analysis of the main character and give a slightly different meaning to his behavior, although I’m sure you’ll agree with it for the most part).
Anyway, it’s a pretty raw and engaging movie, and upon viewing it, I realized I have more in common with the main character than I’d like to admit… I suspect many of you would feel the same upon watching it. It also reminded me of Squirrels and the problems he spoke of in many of his posts. Squirrels could be this guy, lol. So if you could relate to the things Squirrels was struggling with, you’ll probably find this movie interesting.
Love to hear your thoughts if you watched it!
One of the most common themes in human storytelling is the quest for meaning in what’s essentially meaninglessness. This story has been retold for centuries in different contexts, but it’s essentially the same plot; the person with the unfillable void inside that prompts them to great acts of creative passion or horrible deeds of self-destruction. It can be a tragedy or a comedy.
Sex addiction is just the meme du jour of this century. Feminization has taken this cliché for its own purposes. Every romantic comedy, every ‘love story’ in the past 50 years, all revolve around men’s inability to fill the hole in their heart that only a special woman can. Literally, everything else in the world is just a cheap, superficial substitute for the inexplicable magical element a woman completes a man with. He literally cannot live without her piece of his puzzle.
Sex addiction is simply the new pathology of the male condition so we make the leap from Pretty Woman and the Hooker with the Heart of Gold in the 80’s to the more sinister sex addict of the new millennium who’s so hopelessly flawed he’ll burn away to hell before he sees the healing light of submitting to the feminine imperative’s medicine.
Women like it because they feel superior in their capacity to control themselves sexually (dubious, yes) in comparison to men, but also because it provides them with a self-righteous sense of pity; “If only men would just see us for our beautiful insides and be less obsessed with our bodies they’d find peace.”
Men like this narrative because it gives them a feeling that as bad as they are, they’re not THAT bad. There’s a self-righteous sense of qualifying to women based on how much better they are in controlling themselves, and again this contributes to their “not-like-other-guys” sense of uniqueness they hope women will recognize, appreciate and want to ƒuck them for. That sex addict in the story can’t make a human ‘connection’ with women, but I can, so fuck me instead.
The fact that a thought about a movie about a ‘sex addicted’ man occurred to someone and was created is proof enough of its cultural relevance for our time. The zeitgeist of this period is evidenced in what we think others will find relevancy in, regardless of any intended purpose. The story wouldn’t exist if the cultural interpretations weren’t already pre-established to make it relevant.
The Cure
One of the more insidious social narratives that the feminine imperative has convinced us of is that the inherent flaw(s) of maleness can only be ‘cured’ by uniquely female means. This is an easy narrative to follow since most modern storytelling (TV, movies, books) revolves around women’s influence being the only solution to men’s moronic, uniquely male, self-inflicted problems.
As with most other social narratives embedded into our collective consciousness, even Beta men pick up this ideology and attempt to use it to their Beta-Game-feminine-identification advantage. Convince men of an innate incompleteness, and sell women’s mystical element, women’s home-spun wisdom, women’s presumptive intuition as the completing factor he’s unable to comprehend he needs due to being a male and therefore ignorant of his deficit. Every romantic story, comedy or tragedy, has revolved around this narrative for centuries. Only recently has it been used as a social tool of feminization, as well as a commercialization of men’s presumptive inherent lack.
Women, on the other hand, are portrayed as self-contained, self-sufficient entities, and even when the story develops upon a woman’s flaws it’s never due to her ‘femaleness’, and the solution to her conflict is usually resolved through the influence of other women. There is rarely, if ever, any contrition that a man might solve a woman’s problems – and when he does, it’s usually through employing feminine means to do so (i.e. he “gets in touch with his feminine side” to resolve the conflict). Feminine primacy needs this narrative to ensure its lasting predominance as a social influence.
The first thing Tiger Woods did after his sexual appetites came to public attention was to commit himself to therapy for his ‘problem’. To the feminine imperative, the male sexual response is a ‘problem’ requiring therapy, medicalization, a cure. There has been no better means to maintaining feminine primacy than to collectively convince society that the effects of testosterone and male sexual response is aberrant social behavior. Men being men is vulgar, lewd and often violent – this is the meme. When men such as Tiger’s first response is to agree with that meme and institutionalize himself, he adds one more affirmation to the feminine social narrative of men’s ‘problem’.
Top post, I am preaching to female friends using your site.
One of the few south park episodes I ever saw dealt with how the “sex addict” meme was complete nonesense and actually had the boys sent to be “fixed” where Tiger, David and Blill Clinton were being treated you can watch the full episode here:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s14e01-sexual-healing
I always figured tiger woods pulled that move to keep endorsement money flowing
The guys at the old Season of Tumult and Discord noted that despite this supposed meme that men need a women, most if not all the great discoveries/inventions/art that men do happens before marriage and it ends when they get marriage.
Alkibades is still around at his new blog:
http://thelefthalf.wordpress.com/
Powerful first line. I really enjoy your writing.
Being cheated on is hard on a person’s psyche, no doubt. You’re left with 2 options: either you’re somehow insufficient or the other person has a problem. Sex addiction is a convenient label in this case. The harder truth is in owning the idea that both sides have an issue. Years ago I did a few months of SA meetings after a false epiphany. So I sat through day after day of meetings and realized finally that something was wrong with these guys, but not what they thought. They thought that they had a problem with sex, but what they… Read more »
Dalrok just ran a similar article, worth a read.
This was hard for me to see for how many years? now it’s clear as fuck. I wonder when the red pill is going to hit mainstream. It’s inevitable.
A splendid essay.
Outstanding post Rollo. It is an particularly insidious meme that has become attached to masculine pursuits, gleefully expedited by the nearly ubiquitous psycho-babble and amateur diagnostic jargon that passes for modern conversation. Certain places certain times, you simply cannot be yourself, you cannot refer to things that give you joy and your life meaning. To do so invites a torrent of patronizing explanations of your ‘real’ motivation. It seems that most any activity other than quilting with a hearty herbal tea is sure sign you re deeply insecure, and of course what else could a man possibly be insecure about… Read more »
[…] been looking for an old Talleyrand article in light of Rollo’s post today. Still haven’t found it yet, but I did come across this one I wrote back on 11/30/09 […]
Women love to talk about how simple men are and how we “need” sex. And yet, they seem so much happier after a good fuck.
If we do not pathologize men’s sexuality, women will lose control. If we lose control we will have to return to being feminine in order to have any power. That is simply inconceivable!!!!! Sarcasm aside, I don’t think women would have any clue how to deal with this at all. Almost an entire generation of women would go without marriage until they figured out how to bring men back around to them.
I think many men and women are spritually empty and they seek to fill that void with people, who can never fill that particular need. I had a very wise professorin who said something I never forgot: “Don’t turn men into gods.” I suppose its similar to the idea of not putting women on a pedestal. People have a multiplicity of needs and no one person can fulfill them all, nor should one expect someone to be able to do that.
[…] today’s Dalrock & Rollo Tomassi posts for proper context for this […]
you say vulgar, lewd, and violent like its *bad* thing….
haha
Re: the movie. So guys who screw lots of chicks feel empty and unhappy? I dunno, Roosh looked pretty happy in his last video.
Yohami, this was brutal:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVqeo4jMlXE
The first rule every Beta-Herb chump needs to beat into his head:
Hypergamy doesn’t care about relational equity.
https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/relational-equity/
ROTFL! She rang his Mum….
On the plus side, (I hope) he did quite well with her for at least a short time. Hopefully not too much communal property in the pot!
So, the solution to a sex addict is another woman… But why? Coke addicts dont get more coke to cure themselves… This is unfair for them. I demand equality.
Slightly off topic, but today I did a search for “hypergamy”, and what did Google Autosuggest come up with before I hit the return button?
“hypergamy…doesn’t care”
Not off topic: A friend of mine who is a cop once told me a story about how his special response team breached a house to apprehend a mentally deranged man who’d taken three people hostage; two women and one teenage male. When his team entered, found and put the guy down (safely – the mental dude was episodic, glassy-eyed and didn’t put up a fight), the two females literally leaped forward and clung to his legs… so much so that he had to get two other team mates to pry them off. I guess the point of this anecdote… Read more »
the two females literally leaped forward and clung to his legs
whose? the cop’s, or the kidnapper’s?
both are equally likely for females under duress.
The females grabbed at the cop’s legs (for safety and security), but granted you are correct that any masculine force would probably do.
Your questions are valid because I think it’s similar to how sometimes police show up to a domestic violence situation where the man is literally beating the woman, but when the cops show up, the female suddenly turns and defends her aggressor mate from the cops. I’ve actually seen that scenario for myself in action and it positively boggles the mind. Beaten females will actually turn on their saviors in defense of their aggressors.
“Your questions are valid because I think it’s similar to how sometimes police show up to a domestic violence situation where the man is literally beating the woman, but when the cops show up, the female suddenly turns and defends her aggressor mate from the cops. I’ve actually seen that scenario for myself in action and it positively boggles the mind. Beaten females will actually turn on their saviors in defense of their aggressors.” This has everything to do with how women apply apathy with their innate insecurities. 1) They either feel the man that is beating them is in… Read more »
“I am confident that once the wheels totally come off the Leviathan state you won’t have to worry about the culturally-feminized matrix for long… it’ll dissolve all upon it’s own. The trick will be to manage the female panic as it occurs. NOT white-knighting and ‘protecting’ them, mind you, but MANAGING them to your benefit.” Yeah, good luck with that – I imagine that men who have spent any period of their lives exposed to both feminism and the modern woman will quite likely have no interest in managing female panic and I imagine they will allow them to run… Read more »
Great post, Fred Savage did a similar movie called the Last Run, fits perfectly into your analysis.
Concerning the clip, wow! “I’m divorcing your idiot son.”
That clip condensed about ten thousand words in two minutes, every game tenant possible was evidenced.
feral: My reading is that women feel an attraction to power and can’t stand others having power. The beaten woman does not want the police to take away her access to power and drama, and resents the police having power over her and her partner.
“Pathologizing the Male Sexual Response” should actually be “Normalizing the Sex Addict Response.” Rampant male sexuality, of which Shame is one fictionalized example, leads to bathhouses, rest stops, city parks, and Fire Island chain parties. It is the equivalent of obesity under the extremes of gluttony. Chastity means achieving control over a base urge, just as a diet regimen controls the primitive desire to load up on fat and salt. Your philosophy assumes that not giving full voice to those urges is some kind of unnatural self-oppression. Sexual incontinence is regarded as heroic while dietary incontinence is thought of as… Read more »
One of the most common themes in human storytelling is the quest for meaning in what’s essentially meaninglessness. You presume that the “hole in their heart” is a wicked harpy invention that sends us on a “quest for meaning” in a world of “meaninglessness.” But what if young men and women actually do have an erotic longing for completeness that is not “essentially meaningless[]”? And what if that completeness can never be satisfied no matter how many acts of pleasure one engages in? No, the hole in the soul is very real. Every young lover experiences it, the jaded experiential… Read more »
Back when men ran things women were treated for “hysteria” and “nymphomania”. Of course at that time the state of medical and psychological research was very primitive. That women are getting away flipping the concept in modern times just demonstrates how dedicated they are to producing the negative image of “patriarchy”, the Satan to the God of Man.
[…] The Rational Male – Case Study – Wanted: New Daddy, The Five Stages Of Unplugging, Pathologizing Male Sexual Response […]
whats with “i am different from other men” thinking?
Article was fantastic (as always) but that video clip, holy shit. I could tell it was gonna go bad from the minute she got mad and he started supplicating. Serious lack of masculinity notwithstanding, there’s an even bigger principle at play here. The person cheated ON is the one who should be angry, and the person who did the cheating should be contrite (regardless of gender). Guy lost frame 1/2 a second into the conversation when he let her get upset when she should have been begging for forgiveness. Poor bastard never stood a chance after that. The worst part… Read more »
Russian Hairdresser Kidnaps Robber, Rapes him for Three Days
@ King A (Matthew King): Here we go again. Once again, our resident Jesus – Freak deliberately distorts Rollo’s post to suit his own ends of trying to save the PUA/Red Pill community, one misguided sinner/Alpha/MGTOW at a time. Here’s a clue, dimwit. No one suggested that “not giving full voice to those urges is some kind of unnatural self-oppression.” That’s an interpretation that YOU put on the article, and it’s clear that you did so to give yourself the excuse to indulge in yet another flatulent jeremiad extolling the virtues of white-knighting. Can’t you just go on a mission… Read more »
[…] Rollo and Dalrock have had posts recently regarding the feminine imperative and some of the repercussions of this. In a nutshell, the feminine imperative is the idea that most everything female is good and held up in society while those things male are not (to take it further, all things male are often derided and frowned upon). Woman have come by this imperative by seeking masculine power for themselves and then adding into the narrative how people used to feel about women. People seem to be slowly realizing that woman cannot have both. They cannot work to achieve all things… Read more »
There’s a Cheerios commercial currently in rotation in which an herb is sitting at the breakfast table gushing over the cereal’s cholesterol-lowering properties. His owner, er, wife condescendingly chimes in “you still have to go to the gym.” Imagine the shitstorm that would ensue were the genders reversed.
For what its worth, I just discovered something the other day. On one male site, the guy was talking about changing your life one month a time, about 60 or 90 days of an action can form a habit when you start deliberately incorporating positive behavior into your daily regime. Then he asked for ideas. One guy said “Not watching porn” and linked to some site. I clicked it. The site talked about the connection between ED, porn, and masturbation. They called it PMO, porn, masturbation, orgasm and made reference to noFABing, which I guess is Fantasy Activated Brain. They… Read more »
[…] The Rational Male kirjoitti aiheeseen liittyvän artikkelin, jossa analysoitiin tuoretta elokuvaa nimeltä Shame. Elokuvan päähenkilö on seksiaddikti, joka ei vilkkaasta seksielämästään riippumatta luo henkistä yhteyttä naisiin ja kokee sen takia elämänsä tyhjäksi. Tuo aukko miehen sielussa, jonka vain nainen voi täyttää on romanttisen kirjallisuuden keskeinen trooppi ja se on myös keskeisin fiktiivinen trooppi, jolla parisuhdetta myydään miehille elämän tärkeimpänä saavutuksena. Nainen, joka kykenee täyttämään miehen henkisen aukon on näissä tarinoissa miehen elämän tarkoitus. Hän on se oikea, jonka ansiosta miehen elämä saa tarkoituksen ja jonka ansiosta hän on valmis uhraamaan kaiken. Naiset, jotka pystyvät tarjoamaan tyhjän seksin sijasta henkisen… Read more »
In light of recent comments here I feel like I should add some clarity to this post. My intent with bringing to light the new pathology of male sexuality isn’t to debate the effects of porn or an un-self-restricted sexual response in males. If anything I’ve argued for more self-restraint with regards to masturbation in prior posts: https://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/the-pheromonal-beta/ My issue is with the wholesale pathologizing of the male sexual response as a means to effect social control over men. Imagine for a moment applying the same degree of social shaming about sex we accept as normal for men to women.… Read more »
Yes, people (girls and plugged betas) tend to shun any explicit sexual attitude. It happened to me, soon after unplugging I was eager to show my new sexual, ferocious alpha wolf of the pack attitude. One of the girls of my social circle called me out on this, saying: “Gosh, you sound like an animal!”. Only to, at a party, make out passionately with me saying how wet I made her… Moral of the story, don’t let social conventions (since most of them are feminized) take you out of the masculine way. Be a man, be proud to be a… Read more »
Men wanting sex is not a problem; men not wanting sex is.
🙂
Rollo, did you watch the movie ‘Shame’? It’s not a movie about sex addiction, it’s a character study about a man with poor sexual boundaries, from an obviously troubled family, who deals with his problems of self-worth by debasing himself.
I like your writing and your blog, but this movie has a powerful message, and one that shouldn’t be perverted by mapping it onto a power struggle between the sexes– his sister in the movie has similar problems to him.
You can’t talk seriously about what over-indulging in sex means if you don’t distinguish between compulsive and impulsive behaviors. Compulsions are repetitive, rigidly performed behaviors whose purpose is likely relief from psychological pain, not gratification. Compulsions typically cause distress and interfere with functioning. Think of an OCD who isn’t certain he turned the stove off — not a happy person. By contrast, impulsive behavior is when you can’t resist desires that involve pleasure and gratification. Being driven by pleasure is not the same as being driven to reduce inner pain and depression. Impulsive behavior is what little kids do —… Read more »
[…] Masculinity sex addition BS, normal male sexuality http://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/pathologizing-the-male-sexual-response/ […]
[…] One of the more insidious social narratives that the feminine imperative has convinced us of is that the inherent flaw(s) of maleness can only be ‘cured’ by uniquely female means. This is an easy narrative to follow since most modern storytelling (TV, movies, books) revolves around women’s influence being the only solution to men’s moronic, uniquely male, self-inflicted problems. http://rationalmale.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/pathologizing-the-male-sexual-response/ […]
Rollo, I don’t think you got the idea of the movie ‘Shame’ quite right. The movie displays a sex addict that only lives his life thinking about sex and don’t care for his job/career life (he is not a “positive” male). Also, it does not imply that only men have this problem (the sister of the main character also have issues), neither that monogamy is the cure (it only shows how the guy have problems to stay/create relationships). The movie don’t even show if he is “cured” after all, it has a duplicitous finale. That said, I totally agree with… Read more »
[…] ubiquitous pornography and then the social pathologizing of the male sexual response (while empowering and encouraging the female sexual response) are two very easy observations of […]
and it still continues, today (3 years later) in TV, movies and books.
Men are considered shallow and empty (if they have sex a lot with various hookups) but women are expressing themselves or exploring their inner self when they do it.
Always shame the man but never even think about questioning the woman (thought process with many in our society). I have no problem with questioning women on anything: weight, ONS, etc….because equality (right, ladies?).
Was told I was vile.
I know I’m not but having these needs is part of being male.
[…] and social associations of male masturbation in the past in The Pheromonal Beta, as well as Pathologizing the Male Sexual Response. The “lively” discussion about male masturbation in this week’s comments […]
Rollo
http://www.guystuffcounseling.com/porn-addiction-statistics
[…] in a religious context, or an old books ‘man up’ context, the element of shaming and pathologizing men’s sexual impulse to promote an ideologic bent is always […]
[…] Çeviri : Pathologizing the male sexual response […]