PicoBlog

There is a good rhetorical question wedged somewhere in the middle of the insane, intertextual self-published book Sadly, Porn, by the blogger of The Last Psychiatrist fame.

Which is worse: if your serious partner of a long time cheated on you full of lust, or with no lust?

Most people would choose “no lust” but, he argues, this is worse. Because you have made a life with someone who is OK with cheating on you with someone they’re not even attracted to.

“It is probably possible to have sex with someone you are attracted to and not have it be a reflection on your own partner, but it is impossible to have sex with someone you are NOT attracted to and not have it be a reflection on your partner.”

This is the kind of book that this is.

For pages and pages and pages.

It is a bleak worldview.

The author attempts to dom the reader with endless little interspersions:

“Are you listening? Does it make you uncomfortable? No, because you’re an idiot, and all you can do is go to therapy and complain and never take responsibility for yourself.”

It kind of works.

In the end, we all need daddy.

The book is so chock full of things to think about that it does result in epiphany. But is a kind of nasty, dark epiphany. A lot of anger and self-contempt and of pushing the will to be stronger.

For all the biblical references, there is not one ounce of compassion or human generosity.

It’s chemo, a hard medicine.

Dozens of literary references and movie references. The Devil Wears Prada put through a Slavoj Zizek psycho-analytical Lacanian meat-grinder.

Let me try to sum up what the Last Psychiatrist thinks: all “love” or “lust” falls back to purposeful forms of deprivation. The difference between jealousy and envy is that jealousy is just jealous of what others have, envy is worse because it secretly wants to deprive others of what they have, wants them to fail.

And, I think, he is saying that envy is at the root of relations between the sexes because—and well, people aren’t going to like this, but I think it is kind of true—men are envious of women being women and secretly kind of want to be women.

Men secretly or not-so-secretly want to be desired and objectified, men want to be desired for only their looks and sex appeal; not for their decency or affability or intelligence or money-making ability and status.

And his other big point is that, at the same time, there are men are out there, making a world of sex and desire, pusha-men of a certain type of desire into the world, which they claim to be “their desire” but they actually just learned from 20 years of watching the teevee.

But The Last Psychiatrist is not some kind of romantic. He doesn’t really believe there is a way to have sex anymore lovingly looking into one another’s eyes, that simply will not work, if it ever worked at all.

He’s critical of the men and their bizarre, self-destructive desires. And there are a lot of examples throughout that the thing most scrambling to men is that they are pathologically horrified of “their” woman going with another man, but they are pushing women toward other men by unconsciously depriving them of love or sex—his claim is that men look at porn to deprive others. They deprive themselves in the process, but it’s an act of spite, he says.

(I don’t know if I buy any of this. I think most people might look at pornography out of laziness and sadness and boredom. Like eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.)

Like the suicider, it all boils down to pain and addiction and spite.

He claims that romantically-committed men are in a very serious trap desire-wise—because by living committedly with a woman they see her in her wholeness, they see her as a full person.

And this, by definition, destroys the possibility of her being a pornographic fantasy.

And so the possibility of her being a porn object to OTHERS is always and forever there for others, but not for the man who is attached and loyal and committed.

For him, she will always be a full and complete person.

He will occasionally catch glimpses of her sexuality here and there, that she could be pornographically objectified (any woman can be.)

But not for him.

For others.

And so The Men look at porn searching for an erotic individual (another, not the one that is “his” but probably “belongs” to another).

And when their partner finally cheats on him or cuckolds him or does whatever, there is a secret relief in it all coming to a head. He knows he’s been depriving her, which results in this new situation where she does something that fascinates and horrifies him, showing that she is desirous of and desired by others—think of the heart of conflict in Season 2 of The White Lotus.

Whew. I dunno. It’s a lot. This book is a lot.

I cannot say I recommend reading it.

I guess I liked reading The Last Psychiatrist blog.

But this is something else entirely.

He comes back over and over to the problem of the “ledger” that couples have a ledger and it can never be equalled, there are debts, emotional, physical, everyone is keeping score, and the only way for love to be real is for the ledger to be taken away, but no one can take it away in any relationship.

Received a blowjob? That’s not free, that goes in the ledger. Did chores? That goes in the ledger. Acts one doesn’t necessarily want to do but does anyway, those all go in the mutual ledger.

I wonder if the writer has considered that people don’t turn to porn or masturbation to get back at the world or their partner, or to say, “You can’t have me” but rather to just momentary escape the cycle of interdependence and interrelation with others. Which seems to be never ending.

People want to just be self-sufficient—just for one goddamn minute—they don’t want to owe anybody anything or get involved in anything. We have become Japanese.

That’s probably why young people are increasingly keeping to themselves and their pornography.

I’m not sure of the exact page and I’m not going to go back through it, but the author looks down on this—he doesn’t see it as independence, he sees it as deprivation, a lack of love for others, for the world, and he does not believe it can last, that a person can just opt out, or if they do opt out, he thinks that is wrong.

It’s true.

We live in a state of never-ending interdependence with others.

But still.

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