Mario Mangione (ROUND 5)
Let us workshop this narrative about a man who, bullied and victimized by double standards in the crosshairs of contemporary sexual politics, is gearing up to flip out like Milton in Office Space
scent of the day: Sayat Nova, by Bortnikoff.—A boozy skin-scent with the same Laotian agarwood we find in my top Bortnikoff Lao Oud (only too dialed back to stand out in its barnyard glory beyond the first minute), Saya Nova opens with an apricot compote (one dosed with vanilla extract and rum) that becomes more like a vanilla-marzipan cigarillo (dried out after having been dipped in that rum, and now half-smoked and crushed in mossy soil)—the tobacco feel here, which comes with an oud-oakmoss edge of dirtiness and peekaboo chalk-dust smoke, the result not of tobacco absolute (like in Tabac Dore) but of narcissus absolute, which yields a wheat-bran or hay-like tobacco (a Chergui-like tobacco moistened a bit by the solid dose of sweetness-dampening oakmoss).
Mario Mangione
How could it be avoided? Outward appearance is the first thing we notice. If that makes us objectifiers, so be it. Billboard of evolution’s unrepentant advertising, our flesh is wired for desire and our souls, perhaps nothing more than epiphenomenal vapors (if not mere phlogiston) in the end, find themselves bound up in flesh—taproots corkscrewed down into the loins. Millennia of Darwinian chiseling (a process so granular and pitiless no finite mind can fully appreciate) have etched libido into the deepest strata of our style. And as our brains have swelled to the folded fractalities we know from biology diagrams, our techniques for stoking that libido have reached headcase proportions: from the hot-for-teacher tit daydreams that have us covering our hardon at the chalkboard with the textbook, to the taboos—and the infrastructures to police those taboos—that sharpen our don’t-press-the-red-button ache (increasing our drive, and the carnal calculations to fulfill that drive, to Diddy the forbidden to hymenal shreds). It would be no surprise, sculpted by such selective finesse, if we learned that imagination (our crown-jewel power to form internal pictures) came on the scene, let alone grew to the Asimov-tale vividness we take for granted today, mainly to aid and abet the horniness at our core—the horniness that drove most, if not all, of our technological advancements in some fashion: the be-kind-rewind VHS cassette to jack off to, the cryptocurrency to launder our whoremastery, the cyberspace of high-speed haptics to bypass all the calorific cost and herpetic risk of securing (let alone banging) real bodies. Pick the example. Before even enabling bathhouse sleaze, the aqueduct dramatically improved the health stamina to fuck. We are not just horny. We are engineers of horniness.
What help is there for it, really? Let the congregation clasp sweaty hands and whisper benedictions, praying away the human nature as it would the gay. Even such a holy stratagem, based in sweet and supportive intention, winds up a Derridean deconstruction: the carnal musk in the well-wisher huddle, vulvic tang as clear as an agarwood-cumin combo, betrays the futility of the endeavor—an endeavor so obviously futile, so obviously self-defeating, that even mockers of tinfoil conspiracy might wonder if the real purpose were precisely to stoke the fire (sort of like all those breastfeeding videos on Instagram, tea-saucer areolas pimpled with Montgomery tubercles as latch-worthy as the nipples themselves, that have us imagining, less and less merely in the vinegar strokes, nutting thick seminal ropes over the throbbing fontanelles of innocence). Shock therapy, lobotomy, de-Sade guillotine threats (or even the actual follow-through of those threats)—short of such extremes, man’s nature refuses to yield. And now, in the hyper-mediated West, where Cardi sex moans taunt from every digital pore (“Beat it up nigga!”) like a cultural death knell, the threadbare promise of hope—already gossamer thin (since, after all, we cannot reproduce through budding like the hydra or through fragmentation like certain flatworms)—has all but vanished.
Turn on, tune in, and behold the Hotlanta spin—a no-hands twirl around the strip pole—we have put on that tired tale of civilization’s sunset. The flapping and clapping of gelatinous meats, slow-motion reverberations, clear enough to catch sight of rogue hairs and even to smell (if only the FOMO scroll did not banish us from that inner core of monastic peace)—such gyrating visuals (so much twerking, baby-oiled to the gleam of supermarket chicken, that the question should actually be “Why didn’t Diddy, rich as he is, have more bottles?”) provide a backdrop, superfluous given the powers of our mind’s eye, to the nastiest verbal barrage of hypersexuality: psyche-burrowing lyrics (as fuck-tomorrow as coal-burning), mainlined right into the earbuds, oontz-oontzing down to the perineal nerve endings of children already creamy from the diesel rumble of the school bus. Wet ass pussy (extreme mop-bucket wetness, as extreme as the alien mouths and breasts and asses of even just “regular” female podcasters), tossed-salad anuses fizzing with half-dissolved Percocet tabs—the global parade of such verbalized imagery, outcompeting 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 snouts 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 mental-scape of at least two generations of young people with unadulterated access to rapey porn even in the internet’s non-sewers—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 a TikTok age desperate to avoid facing the traumatic impacts of Camusian scenes proliferated with an abandon reflective of parenting inattentive to the need for atmospheric buffers of delusion against the void that swallows prayer and orgasm alike (scenes such as NASA’s twenty-four-seven feed of a you-are-here marble pirouetting in the indifferent vacuum of black), these lyrics—now the world’s lingua franca—celebrate the whore ideal in its fully glory of Trump-squared gaudiness.
A few snippets from just the female side of the cervix-bruised aisle, where the demand for pussies to be “beaten up like Pacquiao” passes the smell test of sincerity with too many flying colors to be written off as Stockholm, should suffice to showcase our barreling into self-radicalized extremes. But who really needs these examples? For 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—often taking on a blaccent—seek the public endorsement of the same whore-artists quoted below. Who could be so deep under a rock that these baselines, as root-chakra vibrating as a Hitachi wand at full gallop, fail at least to tickle?
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Enter a man named Mario, traumatized veteran in the crosshairs of the contemporary sex craze. He breathes the recirculated air of unguent nymphomania like the rest of us, only it has him nauseous. Whenever enough is enough (and enough-is-enough comes much sooner than it used to, now that the bukkake wads are just too much for the cerebrospinal fluid of deep sleep to hose away in preparation for another day)—whenever enough is enough and he finally reacts outwardly to their bass-thumping singalongs (“All she wanna do is pop a Perc and get her pussy beat (ba-ba-ba) / Take this dick, bitch, stop pushin me / Face in the pillow, bitch, don't look at me”), the response he often receives from his wife and friends and siblings is the standard “I don’t pay attention to the words. I just like the beat.” Whatever the truth might be in their case (although it should be said that the ambient-noise interpretation is somewhat odd given the way they stress the “dick” and the “bitch” and the like, stresses (and not to mention the well-timed bites of the bottom lip) that cannot help but suggest their at-least momentary empathy with the rapper), he does pay attention to the words. He deconstructs every vulgar syllable, every prolapsing metaphor—a perpetual brain motion barring him now from any layers deeper than twilight sleep.
Above the dashboard on his bloodshot way to work (in what should be his fifteen-minute break from the unmooring barrage) he watches a cluster of school girls give middle fingers to the doddering crossing guard as they chant “Rich nigga eight figure that’s my type / Eight inch big ooh that’s my pipe / Bad bitch I’ma ride that dick all night.” He wishes he could not hear the words. An artist type, hypersensitive antenna picking up even faint frequencies, they enter his overeducated brain in 4k resolution no matter how loud he might shout his transcendental-meditation mantra or otherwise try to redirect his mind with thoughts or memories—thoughts or memories never vivacious enough to keep the dark at bay. He is no puritanical prude. He wishes neither to conceal nor to extinguish the sexual-fire that animates humanity. The problem, for him, is the relentless amplification, the stripping away of alternatives, the suffocating omnipresence—sex no longer one among many facets of human experience but the only one worth tuning into.
We are social creatures. No one can fully resist the pull of the norm. Mario 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? We are communal creatures, less atomistic than we might imagine. More nights we have spent huddled for warmth and protection than we have spent as humans. 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, playing in the background of every car ride (even if not to the club) and often involving everyone singing along—the singalong is always the knife twist? “They say she’s young, I should waited. But she’s a big girl dawg when she’s stimulated.” Too often he feels like the young girl here. It seems like no matter how hard he tries to resist the cultural flicks as his bean (still baby pink), it always seems to pin its target (greased with the gooiest of hawk tuas).
He uses writing, although less now than in the early stages, as a form exorcism. It helps him purge the intense emotions around the sex-sex-sex, the brown bootyhole slurping at his spirit like a relentless car alarm outside his window as he is trying to think and write and achieve something more fitting to the human as envisioned by Aristotle rather than to the human as envisioned by Sexxy Redd. Other times, now more than ever, his writing is a sad giving into the logic of “If you can’t beat em, join em.” Joining in on what pisses him off, like pointing the alarm of his bullhorn—one he bought from Amazon, yes, for precisely this reason—back toward the offending car, is a style of response ingrained from before double digits. He knows he has this self-defeating tendency. He reflects on it often. In fact, he believes he knows the exact night when that tendency—moving from infestation to possession—took root, when he welcomed it in. After years of realizing that nagging did nothing to stop his dad’s drinking (if anything, it only increased the thirst), one night—when the mumbling bitterness shifted to apneic rattles—he made that sad pivot of too many kids in his neighborhood. He glugged down what remained of the bottle on the table, making sure to leave just enough for his dad’s breakfast—only, after enough nights of this, compassion turned self-interested. For without at least a morning glug, there was risk that his dad might sleep away the day instead of securing a fresh bottle for a repeat session.
Despite the other-oriented spin he often puts on it (“what damage is done to our children, when their visions are narrowed to no more than the grimiest forms of fucking?), the radix of the hatred is his unfair exclusion from participation in the orgy. He feels, and his feeling is true, that he is being singled out. Being beaten for jaywalking by a cop on a corner where everyone continues to jaywalk even as the bloody scene unfolds—no, beaten for jaywalking by fellow jaywalkers in the full righteousness of citizen’s arrest on a child-trafficking pedo, he receives 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 and, yes, right in the home: 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 objectify women?” and “Why do you focus on looks?” The judgments, questions only in look, rain down. They are voiced in fullest sincerity, as much sincerity as every “Yass queen” every time Megan’s does that camel-toe-revealing lift of her right ass cheek. They are voiced in fullest sincerity, even as both he and the judger swim in same plastic stream of BBLs and mega alien lips. Those lips are the same lips that show up on the TV-static creatures of sleep-paralysis nightmares. Of course, if he points out this connection or God-forbid complains about the extinction of non-filter and non-surgery beauty (because, yes, his hatred and disgust for the plastic-surgery-look norm has only increased as more and more of those that judge him for focusing only on looks celebrate such looks), he is chastised as a make-America-great-again bigot.
That gets us to the deeper issue. For the exclusion is not all micro. What has made the sex-sex-sex world most infuriating, what has turned his knife into something serrated for bleed-out pullback, is that he was terminated from his professorship for sexual content in his poetry—the clinical sentence, as final as a guillotine blade, delivered by the same left-leaning mouths that sing along to “Pound Town” (delivered, in fact, by a department chair, and former prostitute, whose latest academic articles had been titled “Whoring as an Antidote to Whiteness” and “My Pussy Pink, My Bootyhole Brown: The Emancipatory Potential of (Raw) Fuck Work in the Postcolonial Black Experience.” The biggest problem 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 “inappropriately sexual” fell toward the Onion extreme on the spectrum between parody and complicity!
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?” (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 world-revolves-around-me sense of woe is me. 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 optics” (white and not just male but cis male) 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 to ensure non-white non-cis”; “diversity” translates to “conformity to the sanctioned (safe-space) ideology”; “empowerment” translates to “perpetual victimhood”; “equity” translates to “punishing excellence.” Perhaps also what is going on is that the maintainers of the sex order (most of them unconscious stewards) sense—especially when his poems carry out Onion-level parody—that he is holding up a sex-party-spoiling mirror to all of their grotesqueries, 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 some woman in the shadows—oh please do not let it be the beloved Beyonce!—sucks his balls for added tumescence that surely the little girl does not need. 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!” Or maybe it combines many off the elements in one and what is going on is similar to when the Dad sings along to the child’s rap lyrics the kids gets mad, barring him from what they freely sing—perhaps because (a) he has the wrong optics (older white male) and (b) he is expected, if only implicitly, to be above this (he is a responsible father, not a G) and (c) he has the greater mental firepower and lived experience (enough even to gather the meaning of the niche slang in context) to understand at a deeper level what the lyrics are saying and that in some way is offensive (plunging into the child’s territory deeper than the child) and (d) his singing the lyrics back sort of shows them a mirror of themselves, spotlighting how stupid it all it (spoiling the game).
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 every city 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.)
Mario 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 orchestrate backyard fights between neighborhood kids, money and candies and beers the incentive. Mario was always sensitive and misaligned, oriented toward things at odds with the circumstances in which he was born. He never wanted 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—just as it was when he would throw rocks at crack whores from the rooftops (the same ones whose dick sucks he refused despite his father’s guilt-tripping prepayment), 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), 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?”
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 his lips curl into grotesque parodies. He is a child once again. He mirrors the world’s filth back onto itself, grotesque and magnified to the shaved-pussy clarity of goosepimple HD, as if to ask: “Is this what you fucking want?”
Ready to respond to the world’s depravity through moral low roads of pissed-off parody and even fed-up participation, matching the cultural madness note for note—that is the sort of man we have before us. Mario has tried to be polite. He has repeatedly told the people around him that the music grates on his nerves, that the monocrop it is becoming is as suffocating to him as it is bad for humanity. He has reminded them how he has been punished for the very same sexual content that keeps raining down on him (and in that sense feels like society has treated him like a wicked stepfather: mushing his face in dog shit for eating the Halloween candy before dinner like all the other kids and then, still before dinner mind you, giving all the other kids more candy (peppering the scene with a good dose of psychological torment). He has even tried to use their language: saying that the music “triggers” him—that it makes him feel “unsafe,” that he has “PTSD.” How could this ever work, however? He does not have the right look to pull such cards.
So the music continues to play, interrupting his attempts to focus on more metaphysical matters than sex-sex-sex and mocking him (especially in light of his history of being severely policed)—mocking him and yet, like the confusion of a rape orgasm (he is, after all, still a great ape), titillating his root chakra as if it were a nymphette bouncing on his lap and he were a man with the no-grass-on-the-playing-field taste of prophet Muhammad. But look what happens the minute he makes a lascivious comment. Does it matter that his comment, for whatever reason (perhaps more fight-fire-with-fire juvenile rebellion), is extra-specific, focusing specifically on the “anal pipe” of the “redbone” gyrating on 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. Fine. He does not deny that. He is not a monster. But the response is as expected: “Why’s everything sex with you?”—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 white gaze of patriarchy. The irony burns so much it screeches in the salty sea of complicity, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases he breaks.
His words in response to the psychic assault, the hypocrisy sharp as glass underfoot from the plates and vases, more often than ever work him up to the point of breaking household items and punching holes in walls (only to end up in the dark, nursing his gun in a rocking motion). “I’ll never give into the fucking bullying. It ends now! Not taking the bullying. No more. No twerking fuck, no person who goes gagga over these sex-sex-sex drag shows, has a fucking right! How the fuck someone who sings along to that ugly-ass Stallion bitch ever gonna question me about being too focused on sex? Look at me in disgust!? Huh? Look at these fucking mutant red-haired cunts? Fucking whores who need Jesus gonna judge me!? Judge me chanting ‘cream these holes nigga’!? Yeah right. It ends today! I’ll never give into the bullies. No one singing along with these sicko lyrics ever gonna judge me! You fucking crazy?”
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 KII) resist for much longer going on a suicidal rampage at an Ice Spice concert (or one of the many other festivals enshrining the monoculture he cannot seem to escape)?
He knows that even the most satisfying massacre, an anti-nightmare where none of his shots can miss (the golden showers of the attendees, with all their ridiculously plastered down edges, a function of fear as opposed to “making it rain for a nigga”), will stop neither monocrop nor his unfair exclusion. Thinking that it will be an effective wakeup call is as naïve, he knows, as thinking that killing the CEO of health-insurance company will put an end to the American system of profiting on the sickness of its citizens. The problem is systemic. Ice Spice is as fungible as the CEO. The way his daydreams have shifted from escape to annihilation, however, you would think that he does not know this. For his fantasies about fair play and breathing room have radicalized into fantasizes about eradicating the culture or at least one of the more conspicuous metonyms for that culture, like all the drag queens who talk on podcasts about anal mucosa double penetrations and who freely grope 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 late at night, its cold weight too familiar in his hand. Unable to sleep, he places the 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) take 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 solitary 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?”