Mario Mangione (ROUND 8)
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: Sadonaso, by Nasomatto.—Sadonaso—although quite basic and unoffensive when we get past the opening of piss-warm diaper and the BDSM marketing (simply a vanilla-honey musk that, like Silver Musk, is more like a pheromonic booster of one’s own natural scent than a scent in and of itself)—does gives off a dildo-condom plastic vibe that, together with the torched caramel and milky almond and pissy honey and subdued animalics, brings to mind something like Barbie dolls (Barbie dolls that, after having been golden showered upon and used as a non-anal dildo but then hastily cleaned, were chewed on by a kid that had been eating Werther Originals)—the overall result being the smell of an over-douched vagina (Pepto Bismol innards against creamy white labia, the colors this scent brings to mind), a vagina that belongs to a breast-implanted-BBL lady straight out of the Capital in The Hunger Games: shallow, superficial, and suffering from bromhidrosis phobia (which explains the futile attempts to sterilize, and mask with vanilla lotions, the animalics of her vagina).
Mario Mangione
How could it be avoided? Outward appearance is the first thing we notice. If that makes us objectifiers, so be it. Our flesh, billboard of evolution’s unrepentant advertising, hums with inborn desire. Our souls, perhaps no more than epiphenomenal vapors (if not mere phlogiston), find themselves bound up in this flesh—their taproots corkscrewed deep into the loins. Millennia of Darwinian chiseling (granular, pitiless) have etched libido into the deepest strata of our style. And as our brains—folding in on themselves—swelled to convoluted fractalities, our techniques for stoking that libido have reached headcase heights: from the hot-for-teacher daydreams that have textbooks covering our hard-ons up at the chalkboard, to the taboos—and the infrastructures to enforce 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 to learn that imagination (our crown-jewel power to form internal pictures) came on the scene, let alone grew to the Asimovian vividness we take for granted, mainly to aid and abet the horniness at our core—the horniness that drove perhaps every technological leap: the be-kind-rewind VHS cassette to jack off to, the cryptocurrency to launder our whoremastery, the cyberspace of high-speed haptics to bypass the calorific cost and herpetic risk of flesh-on-flesh transactions. Pick the example. Even the aqueduct, long before enabling bathhouses drenched in HIV-slicked sleaze, strengthened our stamina—our stamina, ultimately, to fuck. We are not just horny. We are engineers of horniness.
What help is there for it, really? Let congregations clasp clammy hands and whisper benedictions, praying away the human nature as they might the gay. Even such a saccharine stratagem, however, winds up a Derridean deconstruction: the mingled musk in the well-wisher huddle, a vulvic tang just asking for it, 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 studded 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, the guillotine—short of such extremes, man’s nature refuses to yield.
And now in the hyper-mediated West where Cardi moans taunt from every digital pore (“Beat it up nigga!”) like a cultural death knell, hope’s thread—already delicate (since, after all, we cannot reproduce through budding like the hydra or through fragmentation like certain flatworms)—seems to have snapped. 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, yes, to smell (if only the FOMO scroll did not banish us from the inner core of monastic peace that would allow us to reconstruct all the cuminy funk and shitty indolics with the mind’s eye)—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 potency of our imagination, to the nastiest verbal apocalypse of hypersexuality: psyche-burrowing lyrics (as fuck-tomorrow as coal-burning), mainlined right into the earbuds, oontz-oontzing down to the perineal nerves 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 (if only sublimations of libido themselves), 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, pop lyrics one could only wish were merely soda pop for the soul. 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 even as mere 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 whore rappers. 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, so at least goes the elevator speech, 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 he is being singled out. Beaten for jaywalking by a cop while everyone continues to jaywalk, he receives extreme heat simply for doing like everyone else. The better way to put it, in that case, is that the fellow jaywalkers themselves are beating him for jaywalking—as if they regarded jaywalking as the worst of sins and for that reason (in the style of the closet homo who leads “God Hates Fags” campaigns) needed some other, some scapegoat, to punish as a way to relieve their own guilt and preserve their self-image. 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 grunt of “Hmm” or even a “Yum” 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 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?
Is it his height, his tone of voice? 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: where “progressive” translates to “Nancy-Reagan-style censorship to ensure non-white non-cis” and “diversity” translates to “conformity to the sanctioned (safe-space) ideology” and “empowerment” translates to “perpetual victimhood” and “equity” translates to “punishing excellence.” Just look around. We are in a 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.” We are in a world where people who look a certain way lose their jobs just for saying a word that merely sounds close to what others with different optics say freely on every city bus and Dunkin line.
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 the stewards of the sex order are more like Trump than they would like to admit: all-too-ready to kill Alec Baldwin, if only we could get away with it, for nailing the impression. 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’re 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 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. 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!”
The role of his unjust exclusion should not be underestimated here. The inconsistency is like nails on the chalkboard, molar chomps of aluminum foil. Had he been the type to have a pediatrician (let alone get all his vaccines), the diagnosis surely what have been autism. Inconsistency, like starving African children, can be put out of mind. What he has no escape from—his Achilles heal—is when people come at him for doing something they freely do. He literally cannot stand it—to the point of needing perhaps institutional help. Put it this way. It is so bad that, although he might talk a save-the-children game, he would most likely let the monocrop swallow everything—no matter the risk it poses to the youth, no matter how much it increases the gravitational pull of the hypersexual black trope (a trope already perhaps spaghettifying his son)—if only it meant the torture of his unjust exclusion would come to an end.
His hometown produced in 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 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 is to take the indirect route of irony and parody. That is to say, his form of combat—and imagine this was equally true even of someone like Sukihanna?—is to give the world back what it gives him.
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 finality, while never playing out in the robust sense (since the dysfunction would inevitably continue, if not in amplified fashion), that could only play out in the thin sense of ending the cycle as far as the statement-maker is concerned (as in when, for example, the statement-maker dies in the process). His form of rebellion was to amplify the dysfunction under the erotic overestimation of his power to collapse the dysfunction by means of dysfunction: 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.
In his frustration, he ramps up the sexual content of his art even more. Because he knows the effect will be more ire, and because he knows social connection is crucial to human flourishing (let alone survival), it could very well be that this is all an enactment of the death drive. Writing this way has become the slow-burn suicidal thrill behavior serving as the mossy bed for the more attention-grabbing punctuations of floral and citrus top notes. An example from a few months ago should suffice. Beneath the whore chants rattling his uninsulated walls (“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”), by some miracle he heard harsh scraping on the back patio. His response, even before learning that it was one of the many neighborhood junkies struggling to drag away his grill, was to lunge out with a knife—a response whose unblinking automaticity proved that, however well things might be going in his life on any given day, some core part of him waits on standby for the excuse to end this thing. Since this is New York (a duty-to-retreat state) and since the culprit was black (a color that you cross at great risk of the “R” label, today’s scarlet letter) the result was not unexpected: the grill-thief called the cops on him, which resulted in guess who face down on his own driveway in cuffs (tempted to put up a struggle to have done with it all: suicide by cop).
Mario’s motivation, however, is more complicated than self-destruction. Some part of him—might we call it his “better angel”?—ramps up the graphic nature of his poems to infant-testicle-slurping degree so that he might draw out of the woodwork folks he once mocked and now fears have gone the way of the dodo: those who are not themselves participants in, or at least enablers of, the hyper-glorification of sex. If only some good Christian woman in a floral muumuu, a lady who—although smelling of aldehydic rose (key constituent in a “grandma perfume”)—never twerks or “be eating niggas ass” or chants pop depravities (“There’s some whores in the house”) or kicks heinous bars (“I'm 5 foot but my throat 6'6" / I'm a ratchet bitch, suck a mean dick / You mad 'cuz your pussy ain't fat like this / And your man eat the pussy like chicken nuggets / I'ma suck his dick for some red bottoms / I'm a real hoe, bitch, I don't spit I swallow. . . . / Pussy so fat you could see it from the back / I'm a west side hoe, everybody know that / I fuck with the boosters and bitches that sell they stamps / And bitches that sell they pussy with they legs on a ramp)—if only one of these ladies, condemning unequivocally (and worse than the anti-dance preacher in Footloose) all the lyrics and the scantily clad choreographies on TV, would slap him across the face and say “Clean you act up young man!” He would fall at her feet, crying in thanks, just for her consistency. He would change his life.
Alas, it is never this way. His judgers are always cogs in the machine of glorification. The editor at one of the last magazines he submitted writing to, one whose “What We Want” section calls for “poems and short stories unafraid to throw low blows,” not only rejected his manuscript and blocked his email address and reported his Submittable account, but proceeded to dox him over the course of several blog posts (releasing his number and address, information included in the header of his submission) for the “toxic convergence” of two factors: on top of failing to issue a trigger-warning identity statement (one “alerting vulnerable readers to the fact that he is white and male”), “this man’s poems showcased scenes of prostitution and sustained micro descriptions (smells included) of the female body. How can he know anything about the female body? This fuck’s identity precludes him from knowing anything about me!” The kicker, of course, was that these raging posts were sandwiched between laudatory reviews of Sexxy Red’s “liberatory line” of lip gloss: Gonorrhea (sheer green apple with multi-chrome shimmer) being a standout among the others (Coochie Juice, Bootyhole Brown, Nut, Pussyhole Pink, Yellow Discharge, Gonorrhea, Blue Ballz) because, in the editor’s words, “it’s the boldest middle-finger to the Protect Our Daughters movement and all the other patriarchal forces (and all their father-daughter promise rings) that shame women, especially Black women, who ‘stay getting they bag, hoeing and shit.’”
It never ends. Accusers simultaneously the enablers, the suffocating double standard never ends. A few years back he read a poem that mimicked the sexual hollowness of current pop lyrics at a writing workshop whose moderator, a published writer of erotic verse and editor of the anthology “Drip,” allowed the offended “non-binary” participant to lay into him for his “predatory exercise in objectification,” for the “white entitlement” that allows him to “rape the black body” with his words—minutes upon minutes of harangue (all eyes on him, all heads shaking in either disappointment or disgust), before ultimately the moderator asked him to leave “so everyone can feel safe.” Once a group of twenty somethings, loudly talking in Starbucks about whether foot content was still lucrative on OnlyFans and about investing in sex machines for their live streams, reported to the barista (their spokesperson, you cannot make this up, a girl in a “Thick Thighs Save Lives” shirt) that they felt “unsafe” and “reduced to bodies” after catching a glimpse of his screen (which showed, only for a second as he was uploading it for his Substack post, a non-nudity cover of a 90s throwback issue of Black Tail Magazine). Once his cousin’s wife, the very same one who does twerk routines with her daughter on TikTok (and who clearly is a secret reader of, and perhaps squirter to, his poems), overheard him sigh “Damn” to an unguent Nicki Minaj video she put on the TV (was it precisely to bait him?) and then (after accused him of trying to draw her husband into his “disgusting way of thinking”) stormed out—yelling from the kitchen, loud enough so that his cousin would get the hint and have him leave, “that creep look at my daughter that way and watch!”
The double standard never ends. But let us try to be fair. When push comes to shove, perhaps these people (had they the linguistic firepower) would use against him the same logic as the firing department chair (quoted here through the proxy of the university’s lawyer).
“Mario is not a victim of a double standard. We must distinguish between fair and unfair discrimination. Just as it is appropriate to reject non-Black actors to play the role of Malcom X in a historical film, it is appropriate to reject Mario’s participation in sex culture. Mario holds and continues to hold (yes, in spite of his termination) all the power in a white supremacist nation. We do not chastise Black students and Black faculty members for using the n-word. But we do chastise white students and white faculty members. Same goes here when it comes to graphic content. Graphic content, coming from someone with Mario’s identity, only serves to demoralize. It does not matter if it was done, as he says, “off the clock.” It is a form of punching down. Mario complains, to quote his “Letter of Grievance,” about a “dystopian world where we censor and punish even comedians for their jokes.” Clearly Mario has not reflected on the difference between punching up and punching down. His own whiteness bars him from such awareness. Whiteness does not allow him to see that there is no inconsistency, no unfairness, when the same university—and here we cite his own example from that same letter—that reprimands him for the sexual themes in his artwork at the same time sends out mass-emails promoting drag performances and other diversity events. He has been victimized, like the rest of the world has, by his own identity. That is why the department showed leniency, allowing him to finish out the semester. We wish Mario luck in the future. We wish him increased awareness. We wish him to do better.”
But the music continues to play. He tries to focus, with all his extra free time, on more metaphysical. But the sex-sex-sex continues to mock him—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 thing 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 raging out would only prove the world’s worries about whiteness. He knows as well 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. Even if she and a glut of her fans were somehow Thanosed out of existence, the world would still go on as before: celebrating sexual excess while condemning both his repudiations (“another white man trying to control bodies no longer his chattel”) and also his if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em reactions. He would still be rejected, especially given his tendency to meet dysfunction with parody instead of straightforward condemnation, by moral purists and libertines alike—left with no gang to affiliate with in the prison yard of society. The YouTube drag queens his wife always playing, the same ones who literally groped all these mimosa-tipsy bob-cut Beckys with no repercussion at a brunch event he—ever the white-knuckling sport—brought her to, would still go into detail about anal-mucosa seepage due to double-penetration one night stands and yet he is a demon if he throws on some old she-got-a-bone-of-her-own footage of Andrew Dice Clay. All these homo content creators, live streaming Dress to Impress on Roblox, would still cheer on “liberated” women, women who have taken their financial future in their own hands by means of goliath dildoes on OnlyFans, with phrases like “work bitch”—gatekept phrases that, even if he used them in the same “fun-loving” spirit, would entail all sorts of bans (from living rooms, from Thanksgiving tables, friend groups, from jobs).
The way his daydreams have shifted from escape to annihilation, from fair play and breathing room to eradicating the whole culture, you would think that he does not know these things—the futility, the falling right into the trap of the bullies just itching to say “Told you what his whiteness is capable of!” Fragmenting under the pressure of escalating rage, he swings have grown wilder and in every direction. He spent decades as an unabashed promoter of libertine philosophy, Bataille and de Sade looming on his bookshelf. And now, because of the hypocritical bullying, he is sickened enough even just by the voice of Megan the Stallion that he is losing sight of himself—ripening for capture by ideologies that Bataille and de Sade would have nothing to do.
He is in need of a healer, some Furious Styles, to tell him in tough love: “You're not alone, so stop going around pretending you are." He already knows what he needs to be told to him. The voice is in his head. And yet the momentum builds. He knows he is not alone. And he knows it he has more than just the “white knights of the Klan” on his side. His childhood friend, a Puerto Rican, constantly gets his social-media content flagged for “violating sexual content guidelines,” while videos of rappers simulating oral sex with microphones remain untouched. His brother in law, an Asian, found himself having to issue a Zoom apology for creating a hostile work environment after his colleague, who just a week prior used in her slide presentation a snippet from Salt-N-Peppa’s “Push It” (“You're packed and you're stacked 'specially in the back / Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that”), reported him to HR merely for using the instrumental to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” in his own presentation. He knows he is not alone. And yet the momentum builds.
He polishes his gun late in the midnight hours, the cold weight of quiet desperation too familiar in his insomniac hand. That same pleading compromise of too many nights now, it tumbles from his mouth in the insanity mumbles of the shopping-cart homeless: either return to the old war against sex and (if it must come to that) crucify him even for shaking himself too much after urinating or else do not war against sex (keep ramping it up if need be) but just never come at him for a lip-licking observation and especially not for his graphic artwork (unless you would come at anyone, of any race or color or creed, for the same); never weaponize against him (unless you would weaponize against all humans) the word “objectification”—a word that is as ridiculous of a cudgel (since none of us are non-objects) as the word “appropriation” (since none of us are the buckstopping sources of any sliver of what we think or do). Knowing that both autistic options are nonstarters for humankind, he places the barrel in his mouth. It is a grim rehearsal for what must be done 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 even the non-gnostic 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?”