Mario Mangione
Let us workshop this narrative about a man who, having faced harsh penalties from crossing unevenly enforced cultural lines, is on the verge of buying tickets to an Ice-Spice show.
scent of the day: Triad, by Bortnikoff.—Clean and leafy enough to be categorized alongside green beasts like Amouage’s Beach Hut Man (despite, yes, their major differences and especially considering the opening burst of fermented-cheese Chinese oud and the creamy hyraceum of the deep dry down), Triad—a celebration of rose in all its sour-green glory, before much later transitioning into a celebration of rose in all its soapy-green glory—seems easy to “misinterpret” as more so having the structural style of Tabac Doré (where the oud is recessive, there merely to support) as opposed to the structural styles of either Oud Maximus (where the oud and the rose are co-equal stars in what I consider the ultimate benchmark of masterful blending) or Lao Oud (where the oud is the superstar supported by the coffee and other elements)—the truth of the matter being that, despite what many think of as an overload of rose and a frustrating minimalism of oud (some finding the oud as recessive that the musky nuttiness that serves as the third element in the “triad”), the dominant ouds here (mainly Sri Lankan and Thai) are heavily angled in the grassy and lemony direction (green and vegetal and floral and citrusy just like rose) as opposed to the barnyard or fermented or rubbery or smokey directions we commonly associate with oud (and for that reason the oud in Triad might actually be, as the pyramid would suggest, as oud-heavy as Lao Oud).
Mario Mangione
It is the first thing we notice: outward appearance. How could it not be? We are flesh-bound (wired for desire), not disembodied souls wafting above the tides of instinct. Over countless millennia of evolutionary chiseling (a process so granular and relentless no finite mind can fully appreciate), men have been groomed to be horny—even, in an arms race with the hypertrophy of the brain and all the nooks and crannies of its intricate foldings, to stoke their horniness with all sorts of psychological techniques. Survival flourishes because of it. Beyond just noticing curves of breast and thighs, we play all sorts of head games: from the relatively innocuous fantasies of wet dreams to erecting taboos—and correlate policing infrastructures—that sharpen the don’t-press-the-red-button ache, increasing the hunger to Diddy those taboos to hymenal shreds. It would not be a surprise, in fact, if we learned that—just as they say that the main driver of technological advancements was to better aid and abet our horniness (the more obvious ones being high-speed haptic cyberspace that followed the printing press, photography, VHS, discrete cryptocurrency, and so on)—our imagination grew to the flesh-into symphony vividness we take for granted today, vivid enough to reach Asimov extremes, mainly to aid and abet horniness.
What help is there for it, really? Congregations may clasp hands and whisper prayers to “correct” human nature (just like they do to “pray away the gay”). But however well-intentioned, even here the stratagem is self-defeating in the end: the carnal musk in the well-wisher huddle—vulvic musk as clear as an agarwood-cumin combo—betrays the futility of the endeavor. Shock therapy, lobotomy, de-Sade guillotine threats (or even the actual follow-through of those threats)—short of such extremes, there is no realistic help for it. And now, in the modern West, where media saturates the air like a miasma, the threadbare promise of hope—already gossamer thin (since we cannot reproduce through budding like the hydra or through fragmentation like certain flatworms)—has all but vanished.
Turn on, tune in, and behold incessant visuals of baby-oil twerking, backdrop to the nastiest verbal barrage of hypersexuality (hyper-squared-sexuality)—its hypnotic efficacy, as fuck-tomorrow as coal-burning, driven to psyche-hammering extremes by the oontz-oontz pulse mainlined through earbuds, worming right to the tingling perinea of school-aged children. Wet ass pussy (extreme mop-bucket wetness, as extreme as the alien mouths and breasts and asses of even just “regular” female podcasters), hungry anuses fizzing with half-dissolved Percocet tabs—the global parade of such imagery, outcompeting other counterbalancing values, staggers the mind: infecting even loincloth jungle enclaves and far-flung rice paddies (almost as if some Bilderberg cabal had something to gain with everyone having their faces buried in pussy like truffle-hunting warthogs). Too often as taunting as they are nymphomaniacally depraved (“Beat it up, nigga, catch a charge / Extra large, and extra hard”), and clearly reflecting the mentalscape of at least two generations of young people with unadulterated access to rapey porn even in the internet’s non-corners—we all know the lyrics. And we all know that, like it or not, these lyrics do not merely present a whore ideal. Dripping with the nihilism of an age as bored as it is overstimulated by images many of us might not be tough enough to handle (such as NASA’s twenty-four seven space-station footage of our own planet twirling against the void), these lyrics celebrate a whore ideal (giving up sex for goods, whether in the old-fashioned form or in the OnlyFans form)—a whore ideal often served on a pussy-beat-like-Pacquiao platter full of uncontroversially immoral fixings—that would shock even the most head-horny ancestor five thousand years ago.
A few snippets from just the female side of the lyrical aisle should showcase how our culture has barreled into self-radicalized extremes where sex is a currency traded for clout, goods, or pure nihilistic spectacle: no mere vulgarity, but rather manifestos of depravity perhaps indicative of the existential terror to which the boredom of living fat has opened us.
“If your ass a broke nigga, hell nah, I can't meet ya / If your ass a rich nigga, I'ma fuck ya 'til you ain't one.”
“My pussy is the most expensive meal.”
“Oh, you like big butts, well I like big bucks.”
“Put your hands all in yo pockets / Then you pull out that wallet / Tell that nigga stop flossin, you know this pussy costly / Want it dripping like a faucet? You got to make deposits.”
“You can block my number, but he still gon eat my ass / He just paid for my titties, that's why you bitches mad / I suck dick like a champion when he put the Perc in my ass. . . ./ Rachet ho, but I feel like Kim Kardashian / My pussy good, that's why a bitch stay pregnant / I swallow nut, I really feel like a elephant.”
“Spank me, slap me, choke me, bite me. . . . / Give a fuck bout what your wifey's sayin. . . . / I just want to fuck all night.”
“If you got the sense that God gave you / don't leave me round your man. . . . / I drop the Perc in his drink / and I don't give a damn.”
“Lick between my booty crack / I'm a hoochie mama, slash hoodrat / Hoes hate on me cuz my coochie fat / Put a Perc-30 in my asshole / Yo' bitch boring, she a lame ho. . . . / Nigga, put that dick / balls deep in my liver (sex, sex) / If you got the sense that God gave you / don't leave me round your nigga (sex, sex) / He finna eat this ass / I made him spend them bands (sex, sex) / Went through the pussy-nigga pocket / cuz he was too high off the Xans.”
“My son need a new pappy / Too many bitches, where the niggas at? / I'm tryna get my coochie scratched / I'm tryna get my coochie stretched. . . . / I can't say his name cuz he be cheatin (I love you, baby) / Yeah, and I'm the reason.”
“I'm faithful to a nigga that's married / Steal niggas, I'm the Grinch, Jim Carrey / I wanna choke right now / Put the dick in my throat right now. . . . I'ma fuck your baby daddy and I'ma fuck him again / I'ma suck his dick, without no hands / Spend his bread then fuck yo' man / You heard what I said, what the fuck I said / I'll beat yo' ass then fuck yo' man. . . . / I take yo' nigga, put this pussy on his tongue / Deep-throatin dick, I got cum all in my lungs.”
“Yo' main dude wanna feel on my body / And if I take him, bitch, I won't say I'm sorry. . . . / A bad bitch with no morals, I'm sinning).”
“I’m sexin raw dog without protection, disease infested."
“Double-hand hand twist the pipe but I ain't even plumbing / He like em nasty-nasty, bitch, I'm Mrs. Put That Thumb In.”
“Lay on my stomach, toot it up, do the crybaby (Crybaby)/ Look back, hold it open, now he annihilated (Yeah)/ Moaning like a bitch when he hit this pussy/ Damn, he probably wanna wear my hoodie (Ah)/ Choke me, spank me, look at me, thank me (Thank me)/ If I give it to another n—, he’ll hate me (He’ll hate me)/ Spit, slurp, give him that work/ Fell too fast for me, now the n— hurt/ Deeper, deeper, I need a reaper/ Thought I was in trouble how he tearin’ them cheeks up.”
or Megan-nymphomaniacal (“Thinkin he's a player, he's a member on the team / He put in all that work, he wanna be the MVP / I told him ain't no taming me, I love my niggas equally.”
“How about I cum all on your dick and then I lick it off?”
“And when you get it, don't be telling where you get it from / I know you young but you know I like that young money. . . . / See, little boy, I can be your little teacher / And if you ball, then meet me behind the bleacher.”
“Licky licky licky licky licky for an hour / I’ma make it rain for you, golden shower”);
“Double-hand twist have him sittin on a cloud / Hit it from the back, makin macaroni sounds.”
“You better get on your knees and eat this pussy right / before I have another nigga do it for me.”
“You know my nigga be buggin me / I just be wonderin if you can fuck on me better.”
“YG and The Game with the hammer yelling, “Gang, gang" / This isn't what I meant when I said a gang bang.”
“What your girl don't know won't hurt her / Anything to make this love go further. . . . So what's my chance / I'm willing to do anything to get in your pants / You don't have to worry, I won't say a thing / And if she finds out, I don't know nothing.”
“I like being in the same room as you and your girlfriend / The fact that she don't know / that really turns me on.”
“GPS your nigga if you looking for me.”
“If he knew the things I did, he couldn't handle it / And I choose to keep him protected / So I creep, yeah, just keep it on the down low.”
“Fuckin your nigga, I got him on lock.”
“My neck game match my wrist game.”
“Your baby daddy fuckin me and suckin me / He don't answer you, bitch, that's because of me.”
“My rent due, nigga, let me suck on it / Put that dick in my throat, I wanna lick on it . . . . / Big dick in my stomach, I wanna feel it / Bitch, I eat the cock like a Hot Pocket / Dance on that dick, pop, lock, and drop it / Before a nigga fuck, I need a big deposit. . . . / We ain't got no morals, we some fuckin hoes.”
We all know the lyrics (overt, unashamed, taunting)—pumped into the recirculated air so steadily that many of us might just be, on the contrary, like the young guppy who replies to the elder’s question of “How’s the water?” with “What the fuck is water?” Against the cultural backdrop of which these lyrics are part and parcel, let us imagine a sensitive man—an artist type who feels breezes to which others are callous. This man finds himself disgusted by the nymphomaniac monocrop. The megalomaniacal focus on sex (as if it were the ultimate axis) has made it hard to breathe. It is not sex that bothers him. He is no prude. He wishes neither to conceal nor to snuff out the sex-mania that animates humanity. His anger is at the relentless amplification, the stripping away of alternatives, the suffocating omnipresence—sex is no longer one among many facets of human experience but the only one worth tuning into.
He is a writer. So how can his own horniness in the head, a birthright of Darwinian selection, not show through his prose in such times of sex saturnalia? How can we expect his poems not to skew toward sexual themes, surrounded as he is by the equivalent of cupcake-gorging mukbang for the akratic dieter: this sex-mania music—music so ubiquitous, playing in the background of every car ride (even if not to the club) and often involving everyone singing along, that whereas once it was a requisite for a political candidate to proclaim their belief in God to have any chance at election, now they must have the same whore-artists quoted above publicly endorse them? “They say she’s young, I should waited. But she’s a big girl dawg when she’s stimulated.” So often he feels like the young girl in question. And no matter how hard he tried to resist the culture flicks as his bean, it always seems to reach its target (greased with the gooiest of hawk tuas).
His writing, it should be said, is sometimes a form of exorcism (purging his emptions around the topic) and sometimes a sad giving into the logic of “If you can’t beat em, join em” (a giving in to which he has long been habituated) like when, after realizing that nagging his dad to stop drinking made no difference, he made the sad pivot made by too many elementary students in his neighborhood: glugging down his dad’s vodka at night, leaving enough for his passed-out dad the next day (at first for the sake of realism but soon after for even more what’s-in-it-for-me? reason of ensuring that his dad would have his morning fuel to get up to secure a fresh bottle for another night session).
The sex-sex-sex stuff has really become triggering for him, driving him crazy in a low-grade but chronic way (chipping at his spirit). But his hatred is not just about its growing ubiquity. Despite the other-oriented (concern-for-the-children) spin he often puts on it, the radix of the hatred is his unfair exclusion from participation in the orgy. He feels, and his feeling is true, that he is beign singled out. Being beaten by a cop’s Billy club for jaywalking on a street corner where everyone continues to jaywalk even as the bloody scene unfolds, he gets extreme heat simply for doing like everyone else. The unjust exclusion from the very orgy the culture demands, the hypocritical targeting—that is really what has made it triggering.
The micro-aggressions are endless: side-eyes when he looks at Megan the Stallion spread out on every screen (even though he has the common courtesy not to lick his lips or moan, let alone race to finish off a spit shine before the Amazon commercial ends). A whisper of “Damn” might creep out and he will be met with “Why do you sexualize things?” and “Why do you focus on looks?”—judgments in the form of a question uttered, yes, in fullest sincerity despite both he and the judger being equally products of the stream polluted by Barbie plastic and BBLs and mega alien lips (the same lips that show up on the tv static creatures of sleep-paralysis nightmares). And the fact that he is chastised as a make-America-great-again bigot if he find those lips jarring (and god-forbid voice any lament about the extinction of non-filter and non-surgery beauty)—that gets us to the deeper issue. For the exclusion is not all micro.
The macro hits are much worse. What has made the sex-sex-sex world most triggering to him is that he was terminated from his professorship, at the height of the safe-space hysteria, for sexual content in his poetry—yes, from the same left-leaning quarters who sing along to the songs cited earlier. The biggest problem, as he sees it, lies here—and he sees it writ large: a society that glorifies sexual excess in its music, media, and politics while punishing certain individuals like him who reflect it back. Funny enough, most of that poetry labeled “inappropriate sexual” was Onion-style parody!
Why him? His every move magnified while others revel freely, why is he the target of this collective contradiction? Life is as capriciously unfair as it is impermanent, of course. So in one sense it would be ridiculous and pathetic and deeply ignorant for him to ask “Why me?” here (just as it is in the case of the teen who asks “why me?” when it comes to her cancer diagnosis). He knows this. But he does not mean “Why me?” in the woe-is-me sense. He literally wants to know why. And there is something to know even in the cancer case: was it all the years swimming in the superfund creek downstream from IBM? What is going on in his case is hard to say. Factors like height and tone of voice heavily influence how you are seen and handled. Society ideally is in place to help temper all that, and make sure we distinguish between moral equals on the basis of relevant factors: tone of voice is relevant for selecting the best ASMR speaker but not when selecting the best astrophysicist. But society is not perfect.
However difficult the why is in his case, surely his “problematic” (that is, white) optics do not help—an understatement of the century in an identity-based world of the most insane double speak: “progressive” translates to “Nancy-Reagan-style censorship”; “diversity” translates to “ideological conformity”; “empowerment” translates to “perpetual victimhood”; “equity” translates to “punishing achievement.” Perhaps also what is going on is that the maintainers of the sex order (most of them unconscious stewards) sense—especially when he is doing Onion-level parody—that he is holding up a sex-party-spoiling mirror to all of them, a mirror as spoiling to the sex party as would be Jay-Z receiving a phone call from his sick mom in the middle of his beating up some thirteen-year-old pussy with a high-fiving Diddy while J-Lo—oh please do not let it be the beloved Beyonce!—sucks his balls. So, perhaps we stewards of the sex order are more like Trump than they would like to admit: all-too-ready to kill Alec Baldwin for doing an impression of us, if only we could get away with it. Or—or in the inclusive sense, of course—perhaps like a rapist sniffing out a once-raped, they smell on him that he was beaten down as child. Could it be that—smelling the victim on him, some pheromonic release triggered by his the epigenome on which his abuse has been recorded—they (mere monkeys in clothing at the end of the day) cannot help themselves from making an exception in his case: othering him so they do not have to face that he is just an outcrop of them? There might even be more flattering reasons, so he tries to open himself to despite his anger. For a long time many around him placed their hope in him: one of the first in the family to read, let alone leave the hometown to secure a PhD. Might some of the extra heat, then, be society’s way (if only unconsciously) of pulling a tough-love Ben Affleck on Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting: saying to him, in effect, “You are better than all this sex-sex-sex stuff the rest of us revel in—so yeah, we’re gonna go hard when we see you behaving like us!”
Whatever the reason, they zoom for him (like zombies who catch a whiff of blood) when he throws back to the world the very sex-sex-sex that the world has swamped him with to claustrophobic extremes. They go low with all their sex. And they go lower by making him the sacrificial lamb for their own sins. So he goes low too. Sometimes it is real low, his defiance taking on a Pazuzu tongue of grotesquery—especially, yes, if someone brought the heat to him. (On that last point, that is sort of his modus operandi. As a professor, for example, he afforded blanket leeway (sit anywhere, show up if you want to), such that he would have curb-stomp righteousness behind him if you ever tried to attack him for being too strict. “Do not fucking come for me!” That was his motto. And he really did set the bar so low and consistently in every sphere that it would not bee so unreasonable to wonder whether these were are baited traps set by the demon within him, itching for an excuse to lash out!) Most of the time, however, the going low in response to the sex order and its maddingly relentless oontz oontz was rather innocuous: merely licking his lips at the TV screen or simply poeticizing an image they have all seen—all of them, however much they claim to be “triggered!”—a million times in their unfiltered internet access: vaginal discharge worked up to a creamy horse foam (spumante) by a cock pummeling. But even here the response was consistent. The bullies around him would say—through their “What is wrong with you?” “Why do you objectify?” “There’s more to women than pussy”—“you aren’t allowed to go low!” Do you see the insidious logic of the dance?
His unjust exclusion is just one local expression of a larger trend in a DEI world where people who look a certain way risk career loss for refusing to stay away from campus on a designated day so that BIPOC populations can get “a breath of unoppressive air” or for even saying a word that merely sounds close to what others with different optics say freely on ever bus and Dunkin line. The role of his unjust exclusion should not be underestimated here. At risk of overcomplicating matters, it is hard to say how much the monocrop aspect would bother him were the hypocrisy not present. He is the sort of person, after all, who enjoys being on the margins of superiority. And humans carve out their identities in opposition: Pepsi guy not a Coca-Cola guy; Jets fan, not a Giants fan; Muslim, not a Buddhist. So if the mainstream was all sex all the time, he might get satisfaction—yes, despite full cognizance of the damage it does to young people—at least in the self-knowledge that he is different with all his academic focuses.
The double dealing is the biggest aspect. Given how deeply affected—at a nails-on-chalkboard level—by injustice, he might just be an undiagnosed autistic. At risk of hyperbole, hatred for hypocrisy—the people who eat cow burgers and yet condemn (without any bit of self-reflection) those who eat a dog burger—has grown so strong that he might rather be friends with consistent advocates of a racist agenda than with inconsistent advocates of antiracism. But just like we can get by—completely unwracked—when the starvation is happening way over their in Africa, he can at least white-knuckle through hypocrisy when it does not cross paths with him anymore than him knowing about it (which is path-crossing enough, as far as he is concerned). His Achilles heal is when people come at him for doing something they freely do. It is one thing when people are too dumb to see how their stance or judgment on one particular matter butts heads with their stance or judgment on other matters. The old adrenaline violence from is past (perhaps adaptive then but not now) and which he never went to Alanon to address—that creeps up, egotistic as it sounds, when someone comes at him on grounds that would equally undermine their own beliefs or modes of operation. He literally cannot stand it—to the point of needing perhaps institutional help.
His upbringing has left him ill-equipped to fight this system directly. He does not have a community like a religious congregation that he can lean on and an kick off from to opposing the monocrop. But that is the least of it, however big that is since we are social creatures in a time where we—as if in prison—are forced to gang up. He learned early on, from an disadvantaged and underclass upbringing full of sex and drugs and violence, that it is all a powerplay: just as the believing in Santa (even if inappropriate for an adult) is just a nascent form of believing in Jesus, the bullying of fifth grade (even if mocked by adults) is just a nascent form of what they continue to do even through the Toby-Flenderson affect of HR equanimity. Dysfunction made him a go-low-if-they-go-low person—an amplify-the-chaos person, taking control in an out-of-control nightmare by instigating it further. What that means here is that his default way to combat the monocrop—and especially his unjust penalties for his own sex focus—is not to take the direct and sober and square approach of saying, like some square stick-in-the-mud father-figure type, “This’s getting way out of hand, all this sex sex sex. I refuse to have this playing around me. It’s a bad influence on me and on the world.” Instead of taking the direct and sincere route (and it is understandable that he would not since he equally opposes the anti-sexual purist types and is all about sex-drugs-speech freedom to libertarian extremes), his style—reflecting the general Western (especially American) approach that David Foster Wallace decades back so precisely diagnoses, is to take the indirect route of irony and parody to combat. That is to say, his approach is to give the world back what it gives him. (By the way, it is not lost on him—however much she is the target of his attacks—that this might be—fat chance as it is—precisely what Sukihanna is doing, or at least was doing before being absorbed into the machine.)
He has been this way since a child. And since a child he knew it only alienated him further, which he knew—at least in a kid way—was kind of the point. His father would instigate backyard fights between neighborhood kids, money and candies and beers the incentive. His was always sensitive and different, oriented toward things at odds with the circumstances in which he was born. He did not want any part of these battle royales. But instead of taking the David-Foster-Wallace approved angle, the Boy-Scouts-honorable angle, of “No Father, I will not participate in this drunken dysfunction,” his form of rebellion was to throw it back: make a dysfunctional statement of his own. And like always with him, the statement had to be the drama of someone enraptured in the fantasy of having power enough to make a statement that would end all statements—a result, while never playing out in the robust sense (since the dysfunction would inevitably continue, if not in amplified fashion, exactly as Sophocles showed us so well), only playing out in the thin sense (that of ending the cycle as far as the aggrieved is concerned) if it involved the death of the aggrieved. His form of rebellion—all too human, and precisely what nudges the child of the drone-stricken village to grow up into a terrorist—was to amplify the dysfunction under the erotic overestimation of his power to collapsed the dysfunction (which again it only does, since no rebellion—despite what Satan might hope—can ever extinguish being itself, in the sense that involves the extinguishing of the aggrieved agent himself)—and so we have before us, beyond all the talk of afterlife virgins, a deeper insight into the mind of at least some suicide bombers and rampagers. His form of rebellion was to go hard—harder: pummeling his downed opponent, even grabbing a rock to bash its head, so as to say to his Dad “Is this what you fucking want?” Understand that the same guilt-tripping instinct toward psychological and emotional manipulation (the skill that bloomed well in his hometown conditions) drives his reaction to the sex monocrop. He does not stand apart in quiet condemnation, a caricature of puritan restraint. Instead, he mirrors the world back to itself, grotesque and magnified, as if to ask: “Is this what you fucking want?”
So now that we understand the sort of person we are dealing with (ready to respond to the world’s depravity through moral low roads of pissed-off parody and fed-up participation), imagine people close to him (friends, loved ones) who play the messed up music discussed above. They play it even though, by the way, he has repeatedly said that it grates on his nerves, that the monocrop it is becoming is as suffocating as it is bad for humanity, that it triggers him, that (like a nymphette bouncing talking about how she likes to sip her mom’s vodka as she bounces on lap of man trying not to act upon his prophet Muhammad attractions) the music threatens to knock him off the wagon of his own attempt to keep his mind on other things (poetry, metaphysics) than sex-sex-sex—a struggle, again, not only because he is a great ape, but a great ape in this sex-crazed culture who has been repeatedly singled-out like a child by the stepfather whose torture is not only in the punches and face pushes into dog shit and mocking laughter but also in the theatrical cherishing of all the other children while he groans on the floor. So let us assume that, during a movie night, he finds himself—there is so little help for it (sometimes despite his best efforts to keep civil)—making as lascivious comment about one of the sweet things on the screen. He agrees that if he cares for the other people in the room and those other people do not want him to make such comments it is a decent ting to hold his tongue. He does not deny that. He is not a monster. But imagine that the response to his comment is “Why’s that the first thing you notice?”—where, of course, this is not asked as a matter of disinterested curiosity (to which the answer would involve many of the things said above) but asked in judgment, sharp and unyielding, like he is a special problem. The irony burns so much it screeches in the salty sea of complicity. Terminated from his job for having sexual content in his poetry, he is the a dime-bag seller cops beatdown and throw the book at while letting the megadealers continue on (as if something was in it for them). And the reach of the law extends into the nooks of the private sphere.
“What audacity?! How dare they wield the culture’s tools against me, playing hypersexual music one moment and condemning his “male gaze” the next?” That is what he feels. This double standard, this audacious judgment for doing what the world trains everyone to do—to him this feels like psychic assault (carving at his sanity). His response is “I will never give into the bullies. If you live a righteous life (one not complicit in the hypersexual craze), maybe then I will respect such judgement—and even that is a big “if” (since it is still unfair to judge a pit-bull trained to be ruthless for its ruthlessness). In his quieter moments, he wonders if he is broken in a way that no amount of self-reflection can fix. But then the judgment returns, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases he breaks, and the rage swells again. Funny enough, those who condemn him for his “sex focus” almost always themselves talk a good game about grooming—about how he was groomed or she was groomed (yadda yadda). But when it comes to him he is not given the same leeway. Has he not been groomed by our cultures sex-sex-sex maraschinos on top of the Darwin sundae?
At least when one puts oneself in his shoes instead of someone else who, say, might have been raised better and might have enough self-respect to cut people off from him who play this sort of music and enable this sex monocrop (although really that is easier said than done when the sex-sex-sex has swept through the souls of everyone, reaching perhaps even into Amish communities)—at least when one puts oneself in his shoes, who would not be livid? After years of the same same same (the same sex-all-the-time, on the on hand, and the same targeting of him for sexual content on the other hand), how can someone raised like him and with his ingrained approach to attack through parody (parody as ineffective as LaRusso’s crane kick in Karate kid II) resist for much longer not go on a suicidal rampage at one of the sellout shows of these Ice Spice acts? How could the daydreams not sift from escape to annihilation? How could fantasies about fair play, or at least breathing room, not radicalize into fantasizes about eradicating the culture? How could it not radicalize into fantasies about at least taking it all out on some of the conspicuous metonyms for that culture, like all the drag queens who talk on podcasts about anal mucosa double penetrations and who freely groping bob-cut Becky at mimosa brunch shows and say phrases like “work bitch” and “bitch please”—phrases that would entail all sorts of bans (from friend groups, from jobs, from Thanksgiving tables) even if he said it in the same spirit.
Really—no, really: think about it. Here we have a man grappling with a culture obsessed with sex. Sexual imagery and language are inescapable and dominate public and private spaces, even infiltrating his creative and professional life. His frustration stems from both external pressures—society's relentless promotion of sexual content—and internal struggles, as his biological instincts and cultural conditioning amplify the dissonance between his desire to resist this fixation and his inability to fully escape its influence. He feels marginalized and judged by a world that, paradoxically, celebrates sexual excess while condemning his if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em reactions to it. His tendency (again, rooted in his personality and coping mechanism, a personality and coping mechanism largely shaped by dysfunctional upbringing surrounded by sex-drugs-violence and lack of positive role models)—his tendency to meet dysfunction with parody instead of straightforward condemnation only serves to alienate him more, rejected by moral purists and libertines alike. With no prison gang to affiliate with to ease the claustrophobia of his entrapment (where he finds himself not only bombarded by the very content that destabilizes him but also chastised by those closest to him, whom he perceives as complicit in perpetuating the cultures centering of sex and also—as if condemning someone raised in a polluted stream for being polluted themselves—the targeting of him for his quasi-parodic and quasi-genuine participation in the sex party of the West), it seems understandable that this man—this man of the West—would continue to fragment under the pressure of escalating rage.
Healers most deserving of the title practice proactive preventative medicine (in this case, in the least reaching out) instead of cashing in, making bank, on the treatment (in this case, prison or the insane asylum or the money-sucking morgue). He is in desperate need, not of exile, but of one of these healers. Without this, the cycle of anger and alienation will only deepen. His story is a warning: a man trapped in the monoculture’s suffocating embrace, torn between its irresistible pull and his desperate need to escape. He knows all of this at a conscious level. It is not something simmering merely in the unconscious. He has full grasp on the unfolding, but that is not stopping the momentum.
Still he polishes his gun, placing its cold barrel in his mouth: grim rehearsal for what must be done in quiet desperation after he finishes the rampage against the machine unwilling to address its own contradiction. One must not underestimate the efficacy of this machine, however—how it smothers with one hand and strangles with the other. For even these acts (practical in their mechanics) takes on an unwanted sexual veneer in the shadow of everything he has endured. The law of the sex land—slithering, like Christ, not just into the home but into the spirit, the nooks of introspection—mocks him for the sexual connotation of his shining stokes and his deep throat of the barrel, its hypocritical voice (internalized enough to haunt him on a deserted island) ready to colonize even his death: “Why must you be such a pig, even at this lowest point?”
