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’.