The Simp-Rapist Complex

Pathological conflict between contradictory polarities of desire

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Thee hath in thrall!’

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy), John Keats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1901

A great deal of Discourse revolves around the desultory state of the broken modern young man. We wring our hands about porn brained incels, and about the incel’s mirror image in the sociopathic gym bro fuckboy. We talk about how men need to man up, put down the console controller, get out of the basement, talk to real girls, and wife them up. At the same time, we do everything we can to make this as difficult and unappealing as possible. Male sexuality is relentlessly demonized, and this is at the root of great deal of social dysfunction.

Our society has established new social norms that make talking to girls in the wild, or even looking at them, tantamount to a sex crime. Buying a girl a drink at the bar is an imposition, an implicit expectation that she will at the very least say thank you, and this is essentially sexual harassment. As a result of this men do not buy girls drinks anymore. Glance at a girl’s cameltoe as she places her yoga pants between you and the mirror to do hip thrusts while you’re trying to focus on your deadlift, and get put on blast on TikTok as a perv. As a result men carefully avoid looking at girls, and girls wonder why they don’t get attention. Office romances are right out: ask Betty from accounting if she’d like to get a coffee, and you’re rolling the dice between getting lucky and getting a talking to from HR (if you’re lucky). Friend-group romances are discouraged: they bring too much drama.

The only romantic avenue still permitted is the dating apps. The de facto proscription of every other venue was so abrupt and thorough that I can’t help but wonder if MeToo was engineered by Match Group, in order to do to dating what Uber did to taxis. Just like Uber took an occupation that was able to provide a reasonable living standard for working class guys and turned it into piece-work for an imported third-world precariat, so Tinder wiped away thousands of years of accumulated social technologies optimized for the purpose of bringing young men and women together into stable, loving, and fecund matrimony, and replaced it with a winner-take-all meat market in which a small minority of the best-looking men swipe their way through a digital harem of emotionally crippled cum-dumpsters, while women retaliate by using their matches to get free meals and ghosting as soon as the cheque comes without so much as a thanks for the company. Commoditizing romance left everyone more lonesome and miserable than ever, but would you look at that market cap.

The decay set in long before Tinder, however.

Frank C. Pape

Feminists have gotten a great deal of mileage out of Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. This is the idea of a Manichean division of femininity: the chaste purity of the innocent nurturing mother, contrasted with the wanton looseness of the degraded prostitute. The Madonna is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose only begotten child was conceived immaculately, which is to say without actually having sex. Both archetypes are caricatures that fail to capture the full range of feminine sexuality, but a traditional, god-fearing society effectively forced women to choose between one or the other. Either she represses her instincts and lives a passionless life of quiet misery, or she becomes a fallen woman.

Unlike much of Freud’s oeuvre, which largely consisted of the author’s barely concealed fetishes, the Madonna-whore complex has held up fairly well in the era of evolutionary psychology. Freud’s explanation for the phenomenon – that it is rooted in the Oedipal desire to rut with your own mother – is of course nonsense (except possibly insofar as it may have applied to him). Its origin is more plausibly in the predicament of paternal uncertainty which has bedevilled men since before the dawn of mankind, and which leads to a trade-off between short- and long-term mating strategies with easy women on the one hand (with whom paternity is always in question, and in whom investment should therefore be kept to a minimum, but since they’re easy you can sow your seed in lots of them), and chaste women on the other (with whom paternity can be more reliably determined, and in whom greater investment is therefore warranted). It doesn’t matter that we have paternity tests now: evolved instincts don’t care about your technology.

In the aftermath of the sexual revolution female sexuality was freed from these ancient constraints. Women are permitted to dress as they please, date who they want, have sex with as many partners as they desire. Any attempt to dissuade women from such behaviour is attacked as slut shaming, a ploy by the patriarchy to control their bodies.

Pandora, John William Waterhouse, 1896

Promiscuous premarital sex was once a one-way street to single motherhood. The pill and legal abortion reduced that risk considerably, which provided the justification for eliminating sexual restraint in the first place. Male sexual psychology presents its own problems, however. Revealing attire invites male attention, and often not from the males whose attention a woman wants to attract. Women enjoy male attention, and so dress to attract it. Sexually excited men are liable to behave badly. Badly behaving men result in women getting hurt. Obviously, if a man behaves badly, society will punish him ... but the wise course is to avoid putting temptation in his way in the first place. Those ancient restrictions on female sexuality weren’t there to oppress women: they were there to protect women from themselves.

Women may have chafed under the chastity belt of the Madonna-whore complex, but it caused problems for men too. Men don’t generally want either a frigid Victorian schoolmarm or a drunken slattern for a wife: he wants the happy medium between the two, purity in the streets but a prostie in the sheets, a girl who enjoys sex and is good at it, but only has it with him. The Madonna-whore complex is a schizoid separation of these two conflicting desires, which then leads to the romantic frustration of both sexes: men have to choose between two equally unappealing options, and women are required to deny one or the other aspect of their own sexuality.

Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, John William Waterhouse, 1891

Just like men, women tend to want two, somewhat contradictory things from the opposite sex. First, they want men to protect and provide for them: to build what needs building, fix what needs fixing, pay for dinner, buy them pretty jewellery. In other words, they want men to sacrifice their time and energy of their behalf. At the same time they want men who are dominant, strong, confident, and at least potentially dangerous, for the obvious reason that men must compete with other men, and men who do not possess these traits make terrible protectors and providers in comparison with men who do. The necessary tension is that dominant, aggressive men are generally much less interested in protecting and providing: a man who won’t submit easily to other men, won’t submit to women either; a man who can force other men to submit to his will, can also force a woman to do the same. This mirrors the tension in male desires: a girl who’s a good lay might not be the most impeccably virginal of innocent maidens.

We can’t call women whores anymore in order to enforce virginal purity, but bad romantic decisions still carry bad consequences, and women also need to be protected from those consequences (and can’t ever be held responsible for them). The emphasis has therefore shifted from policing female sexuality to policing male sexuality. The result of this is the emergence of the simp-rapist complex.

The only way to create a safe environment for women whose behaviour is entirely unrestricted is to ruthlessly suppress precisely those masculine traits of dominance and aggression that women find attractive in the first place. All of these traits get included into the broad category of ‘rape culture’. Even looking at a woman without her expressly stated positive consent becomes a problematic act. Men who violate these norms become, according to this standard, “rapists”.

Rape of Proserpina, Ulpiano Checa (1888)

The simp is the chevalier blanc whose generosity is unaccompanied by any expectation of sexual reciprocity. The simp helps his fair maiden with her homework, picks up her slack on the quarterly report, pays for her dinner, buys her drinks, sends her money over OnlyFans, jumps to her defence when the incel orcs beset her on social media, and in exchange for this he receives nothing beyond a thank you and a smile, if even that much. Everyone knows that the simp hopes to get something more than that, but everyone – onlookers, the object of his affections, and the simp himself – understands that this hope is pathetically forlorn. The woman regards the simp with contempt, amused contempt at best, but more often as cold as a witch’s tit. She will milk him for his time, attention, and financial resources, but the more he provides, the more her pussy dries.

An Offering, Frank Bernard Dicksee, 19^th century

Women are acculturated to punish every manifestation of ‘rape culture’ in their social environment, thereby cleansing the environment of precisely the predatory, aggressive male sexuality their instincts demand. These repressed and therefore unsatisfiable desires then boil up from their collective id, expressing themselves in the paramours of the chick-lit girl-porn that has taken over the publishing industry. Women flick their beans by their millions to stories in which the female protagonists are helplessly ravished by monsters, whether figurative, as in the sociopathic billionaire who hires an executive assistant for his BDSM dungeon in Fifty Shades of Grey (which sold over 150 million copies), or literal, as in the minotaur who frequents a fantasy-world gloryhole in the popular Morning Glory Milking Farm and sweeps the millennial girlboss who works there off her feet.

Morning Glory Milking Farm (3.9 stars, over 21,000 reviews)

The psychological mechanism is straightforward: women exile that half of male sexuality that most excites them to the realm of the monstrous, and inevitably find themselves fantasizing about monsters. In exactly the same way, when public morality enforced demure chastity upon women, male fantasies were full of the sort of sultry femme fatales that graced the covers of pulp magazines (it isn’t accidental that the contemporary male fantasy is now the beautiful mid, the friendly girl next door whose primary point of attraction is that she isn’t a bitch: we always fantasize about what we can’t find in real life). In both cases primal sexual desires are repressed via public vilification, preventing one sex from admitting that it wants the thing that it wants and prohibiting the other sex from expressing the thing that its complement wants. These genetically coded desires cannot be eliminated, and therefore surface from the unconscious shadow as depraved fantasies.

Fan art for The Shape of Water, Paolo Barbieri

Some women are self-aware about this drive to be dominated. Witness this young woman describing her romantic fantasy of a man holding a sword to her throat and thereby rendering her helpless, admitting that this power move would make her wetter than October.

@momo_obrienMaybe i'm just speaking for myself, but I do not think I am. I feel like #booktok might appreciate this one. 
 #fantasy #dnd #larp

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Rape fantasies are not at all uncommon in women: studies consistently find that between one and two thirds of women indulge in them. Obviously this doesn’t mean that the majority of women want to be violently sexually assaulted. There’s ‘rape’, and then there’s rape: it’s one thing to be abducted by corsairs from your sleepy coastal village and sold into the sultan’s harem, where by charm and wit you rise to become his most favoured concubine; it’s quite another to be violated with a liquor bottle by a gang of pungent Pakistani taxi drivers who have got you strung out on cheap black tar heroin. The conflation of the two experiences in a single word is the same kind of deliberate linguistic confusion you see in that other modern bugaboo, ‘racist’, which includes ‘noticing biological difference’ and ‘wanting to genocide everyone who doesn’t look like Dolph Lundgren’: failing to distinguish between the two indicates that the innocuous noticing necessarily implies genocidal intent, and is therefore every bit as bad. The widespread prevalence of rape fantasies suggests that many women would prefer men to take a more aggressive role in romantic approaches than is currently permissible: not that they want to be literally attacked, but simply that they want men to play a more dominant role, to assert themselves, bend women to their will, sweep them off their feet.

But, perversely, men are punished for doing that … and punished in other ways if they don’t.

The simp-rapist complex places men into a psychologically impossible position, forcing them to choose between a set of terrible options.

Frank Frazetta

The first option is to conform to one of the two archetypes admitted by the dichotomy, either moulding themselves into deferential, soft-spoken castrati, or aping the brutish persona modelled by, for example, Andrew Tate. They can either have social respectability, or self-respect and a sex life, but they can’t have both. The simp must humiliate himself by submitting to the total domination of a tyrannical woman, one who will never respect him – and so never really love him – because he so clearly does not respect himself. The rapist must treat women like single-use fleshlights: he hardens his heart to make himself a pitiless Lothario, incapable of having his heart destroyed by a woman because he allows no woman to touch his heart. In neither case is anything recognizable as romance possible. Love as such becomes impossible: there is only sex or its absence, but sex of a cold and mechanical kind, a biological function drained of genuine eros.

The second option is the path of the passport bro, who tries to stay one step ahead of the social toxicity produced by female sexual emancipation and look for love in Latin America, Eastern Europe, or Asia, where they imagine that the girls are more ‘trad’ or at least less insane than women back home. In most cases this is really just an international sub-type of the fuckboy, a Tinder-enabled sex tourist. There are cases of passport bros genuinely looking for love, and while this works for some men it often ends tragically. Relationships with women from the third world are frequently more transactional than the hapless passport bro is willing to believe: he thinks he’s found love, she understands that she’s found a meal ticket, and the moment she has everything she needs she discards him like a used tampon and takes everything else. I knew a guy who ended up in a homeless shelter because of this. Even when it does work out, the resulting children are racially and culturally confused: you might have successfully passed on your chromosomes, but you have not really reproduced yourself.

The third option is to become gay. If you’re in a societal prison, you might as well have prison sex. This has the advantage of complete liberation from the simp-rapist polarity, and the further advantage of gaining access to DEI set-asides. It has the great disadvantage that it is gay.

The fourth option is to castrate oneself, first chemically via a regimen of cross-sex hormones, and ultimately surgically, carving out a bussy where your member used to be. The troon escapes the simp-rapist complex not only by nuking his sex drive, but by abandoning masculine identity entirely, fashioning himself into a travesty of a woman.

Temptation of Sir Percival, Arthur Hacker, 1894

The fifth option is simply to withdraw from sex entirely, to become what the Japanese refer to as a herbivore: an asexual creature who fulfills or sublimates sexual needs without contact with the opposite sex. There are many varieties of this. Incels make their involuntary celibacy a cornerstone of their identity, channelling sexual frustration into rage against the Chads who monopolize female attention, and resentment of the cruel Staceys who flock to the alphas and leave the incels on the shelf. Volcels (or voluntary celibates) and MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way) adopt the monk-like existence of incorrigible bachelors, doing their best to simply ignore women and instead diverting their sexual energy into hobbies, careers, fitness, or political activism. The pornosexual gooner immerses himself in visual stimuli with something approaching religious abandon, elevating the consumption of pornography to a devotional activity as he chases the Nirvana-like bliss of the goonstate.

Different as these terrible options are, sterility is a unifying theme. Children cannot be produced by anal sex, masturbation, or celibacy; the troon removes even the biological possibility of insemination; the fuckboy does everything in his power to avoid complicating entanglements with his toys.

Only the simp has even the possibility of reproducing, and this typically late in his 30s, with a blown-out roastie emotionally fried from her whirls round the cock carousel, who deigns to provide her beta provider with 1.3 children in exchange for veto power over the fine details of his life. In a legal environment in which no-fault divorce has made a mockery of the very concept of marriage as a binding contract, and in which the sexual access implied by marriage is rendered null and void by the self-contradictory concept of ‘marital rape’, to get married at all is to voluntarily place oneself in the position of a simp. The husband is no longer the head of the household; since equality is always a fantasy, the husband necessarily becomes the subordinate partner, a house slave who must defer to his wife in all matters lest she blow up the marriage, take the kids and the house, and ruin his life ... something she might do anyhow, on a whim, despite his every effort to appease her ... indeed, she might do it precisely because he appeases her. Perhaps if he is a good boy he will be very fortunate and she will let him have a man-cave, where he can drink IPAs and admire his funko-pop collection.

There are exceptions to this, of course, for instance insular religious communities in which some form of patriarchy remains in effect, despite being legally unenforceable in the wider society. Religion is not at all a panacea for this problem, however: witness the phenomenon of ‘servant husbands’ in evangelical churches, who ‘lead’ by deferring to termagant wives in all respects. There are also individual relationships here and there in which both husband and wife deliberately and consciously reject the inversions brought about by feminist sexual liberation. We are not concerned here with the lucky few, however, but with the broad generalities of societal conditions, and by and large this kind of gimp-suit househusbandry is the default condition of the modern married man, and it has been for some time: witness boomers saying they have to check with ‘the boss’ before going golfing, because ‘happy wife, happy life’. I’ve personally known quite a few men who became shadows of themselves after getting, as we used to call it, ‘pussy-whipped’, and some of these were hard men – combat veterans and the like. Conversely, I’ve known very few cases where this did not happen: where a man got married, and did not end up deferring to his wife on all matters of substance. Again, I’m not saying that this is true in every case, obviously there are exceptions, but with the absence of any genuine legal force to back up the patriarchal norm that the husband is the true head of the household (and in fact with a legal environment that implies precisely the contrary), couples in these kinds of traditional marriages are effectively engaged in a form a play-acting, a mutual agreement to pretend that the societal context is not what it very clearly is.

It turns out that you cannot actually force men to get married and sire children. If you make marriage unattractive enough, if you turn it into something degrading, if you make servitude the price of reproduction, very large numbers of men will choose wanking over sex and hookups over marriage. They will prefer the extinction of their familial lineage and even of their very race to being unmanned. You can rage against this, you can tell them they need to man up and do what’s necessary no matter how humiliating it feels, but male psychology is what it is and protests to the contrary are shouting into the raging hurricane of human nature. Chimp in state of nature never jerks off; a panda in captivity won’t fuck even to save its species. Wat does this mean?

Pornography is often blamed for the derangement of modern man, and there is some truth to this. Internet porn is an audiovisual drug that men can mainline straight to their brainstems from the obsidian sand demon portal that’s always just a stroke of their soft fingers away, and there is practically not a single man alive who has not been touched in this way. Porn has hit Western man with all the terrible fury that firewater hit the red man: we have no natural defences against it; being ubiquitous and freely available, it is impossible to escape; it is hideously addictive; prolonged abuse carries horrible psychological consequences, leaving addicts depressed and enervated.

Despite this, porn is not actually to blame for the malaise. Porn is not a cause, but a symptom. The red man was driven wild by firewater for centuries, but alcoholism did not really destroy him until he was sequestered on the reserve, isolated, bored, dependent, and politically impotent. At the same time Wall Street is full of high-functioning alcoholics and cokeheads. Environment makes all the difference with addictive substances. Addiction studies demonstrating the overwhelming power of cocaine or heroin to enslave the mammalian brain were largely performed on rats kept isolated in bare cages in brightly lit rooms. Such an environment is the nearest thing to hell for a rat: it is exposed, lonely, and dull. With their only source of stimulation being a spigot dispensing morphine-laced water, which they could access at will, they naturally developed a habit. Later studies found that rats kept in more congenial environments – large enclosures with other rats to socialize with, places to explore and hide, stimulating toys to play with – were not nearly so helpless when exposed to chemically addictive drugs. If the environment is terrible, any substance will do: when Indian reserves tried banning alcohol, their bands simply turned to huffing glue, paint, and gasoline.

Porn addiction is an epidemic, yes, but vast numbers of men use porn in vast quantities not because porn has some sort of sorcerous potency to entrance them, and not because they are weak or flawed or bad, but simply because they have been forced to inhabit the most sexually sterile environment that the human species has ever created. In fact, sexually sterile is not really the right characterization, because after all some some men are still getting laid quite a bit. The hell we live in is romantically sterile, an environment in which love itself is made all but impossible to achieve. Men aren’t only using porn to cope with an absence of a sex life because they’re rejects who can’t talk to girls, although there are certainly many of these. There are also many sensitive souls who turn to pornography out of an overpowering nausea: they could have sex if they wanted, but sex without love strikes them as pointless, a sickening pantomime, a howling existential void in precisely that place where the richest of life’s meaning should be. It’s sex reduced to biological function, to Agamben’s bare life, la petit mort to help the Last Man get a good night’s sleep. Thank you for getting me off, my head is clear now, so you can fuck off whenever you like. As they say, you don’t pay the prostitute for sex, you pay her to leave.

Frank Frazetta

Men who internalize the simp-rapist complex – and that is really almost all of us, to some degree – experience their own healthy sexual instincts as something perverse, something to be ashamed of. Just looking at a girl appreciatively is felt to be a violation, let alone approaching one and asking her out. This is especially poisonous to European men because we are naturally wired to be a bit shy, to overanalyze our interactions with women, a consequence I think of a relatively thick prefrontal cortex, one purpose of which is to second-guess evolved instinct. Take this quote from a horrifying Atlantic article about the gooner subculture, The Goon Squad, subtitled ‘Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation’, which I found via Niccolo Soldo’s excellent weekly Saturday Commentary and Review:

Spishak gave me a few stated reasons for his pornosexuality. One is a fear of STDs; another is standard-issue performance anxiety. These both make a degree of sense: gooning compilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you—and it is this element of Spishak’s pornosexual philosophy that seems to me most striking, and most emblematic of the Gen Z gooner mindset writ large. It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

The pornosexual isn’t worried that women will lie to him about sleeping with other men, but about whether she’s lying to him about liking him in the first place. Perhaps his mere presence in the room is in some subtle way coercive, placing her in a condition in which she must pretend to give her consent out of a concern for her own safety. If so, that would make him a rapist. The youth may be a sexual degenerate so porn-brained that he identifies as being exclusively attracted to jpegs, but he is a good feminist, he believes in positive consent, and this standard – when you loop it back into itself in a positive feedback Moebius loop of self-amplifying social anxiety – is an impossible one to satisfy. The result is total paralysis of the sexual instinct.

The tendency of well-meaning young men towards analysis paralysis is why European society developed such an elaborate set of carefully calibrated courtship rituals in the first place. Formal dances required the man to ask the woman to dance, and then to lead the dance, thereby putting the man into the dominant position women find attractive; this is terrifying for the man (what if she says no?), so the convention was that a woman would generally say yes; at the same time, for the woman’s comfort, a dance was just a dance and implied nothing more (no one can call her a slut for saying yes). Similarly with buying a girl a drink at the bar: the man buys it because this puts him in the position of provider, which women find attractive; obviously the man hopes that it leads to more than a drink, but the convention was that nothing more was implied than a moment’s conversation, thus giving both parties plausible deniability. The woman is given insulation from the implication that she’s a slut, while the man is given some assurance that he will not be publicly humiliated without very good reason. With these conventions removed, neither sex has any assurance; attempting to replace this with continuously voiced affirmative positive consent, in addition to having all the ronantic charge of a spreadsheet, doesn’t work because there’s no telling if she really means yes.

The young pornosexual’s anxiety over consent is not groundless. The MeToo era saw the cancellation of many high-profile men over cases in which they had every reason to believe they had the woman’s consent, only for her to withdraw it retroactively, publicly claiming that she never consented, or that her consent was coerced. Harvey Weinstein was the first and most high-profile victim: he was jailed for ‘rapes’ which were actually just transactional casting couch sex with starlets who understood full well that they were exchanging sexual access for career advancement. This is perhaps disreputable, but characterizing it as rape is doing violence to the meaning of the word, and the signal that was sent to men everywhere was that even prostitutes – which was essentially what these actresses were – could get you convicted of rape in a court of law even if you paid up in full ... as Weinstein always did. You’ll note that none of his supposed victims ever complained that he did not advance their career.

Norman pirates in the 9th century, Évariste-Vital Luminais, 19^th century

When men try to break out of the role of the simp that a lifetime of feminist programming has inculcated in them, there is an almost unavoidable tendency to overcompensate. Being nice to women at all, in even the smallest fashion, is simping. Giving them anything is simping. They move to the opposite pole, becoming hard core misogynists, which they come to believe is the only way to get laid because, after all, it works. The rapist and the whore both enjoy sex, at a purely physical level, but they both tend to hate the opposite sex. Women now commonly taunt their online critics as incels (despite many of those critics being married family men, but this doesn’t matter: it really just means ‘I would never have sex with you’, which is the greatest insult a woman can think of), but the truth is that the most misogynistic men are often precisely the ones with the most sexual experience. In order to succeed sexually, they had to cast aside their simp programming, and embrace their inner rapist, something they had been told their entire lives was evil. Then, to their horror, they found that women actually love it ... that not only do women enjoy, on some level, being treated as an object, but that they also lie about what they like. It’s hard to come back from that, and many of these men end up becoming exhausted and sickened with the whole thing and adopting monk-like volcel lifestyles. Witness Roosh pulling his popular pickup guides off of the Internet, converting to Orthodox Christianity, and sequestering himself away in a monastery or whatever it is he’s doing now.

The healthy response to this dynamic is to transcend it – to integrate the two polarities of protector/provider and predator. In the absence of a social environment that deliberately cultivates this balance, this is much more easily said than it is done, and therefore in practice very few men succeed. The sexual behaviour of modern women puts an exponent on the difficulty of this task, because it acts to push men away from a healthy balance. Not only does a man have to overcome his programming without overcompensating, but he must also find a woman who has not been driven insane herself, who is not also at war with her own romantic impulses, who won’t wildly oscillate between treating him like a vile incel simp and a brutish animal rapist every time he does something nice for her or asserts himself.

There is, admittedly, a certain romance to this situation: it has never been harder to succeed in the romantic quest, and the very difficulty of finding love in the wasteland makes the spring water of success all the sweeter, for those few who taste it.

Nevertheless, macrosocial problems are not solved at the individual level, and however impressive the stories of those few who do succeed in this environment, their individual solutions will do nothing to pull society out of its ongoing catabolic collapse. Fertility rates are well below replacement, a problem which is at least partly a function of the reluctance of men to marry. Men and women are both lonely and miserable: suicide is at historical highs for men, while women prop up their psyches with SSRIs.

Exactly what the solution looks like, I don’t know. A patriarchal revival might eliminate no-fault divorce and marital rape, re-impose the double standard of the Madonna-whore complex (which, say what you will, at least correlated to a high rate of marriage and fertility), and put an end to sexual equality laws giving women preferment in scholarship, admissions, hiring, and promotions (in order to facilitate a more natural socioeconomic order in which men rise to higher status than women, thereby making them more attractive). Since patriarchy is illegal, it’s just as plausible that the gynocracy will try to leverage the bureaucratic state to impose one-sided all-stick/no-carrot marriage on men, forcing them to act as providers to state-assigned wives in a sort of inverted Handmaid’s Tale. That would really just be an intensification of the existing system, in which the state acts as Big Husband to redistribute resources from tax simps to unmarried women.

Perhaps articulating the pathology of the simp-rapist complex might help point the way to a more mutually agreeable resolution to the sex war. If nothing else, the concept provides a short-hand terminology with which to confront women with the predicament posed by their own self-contradictory sexual impulses, and the consequences – for men, for society, and for their own happiness – of leaving these drives unacknowledged, unaddressed, and unfulfillable.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you found it a valuable investment of your attention. As always, I would like to express my gratitude towards my supporters, whose generosity enables me to spend time writing these postcards. Supporters get invited behind the paywall, which is where I keep my short fiction. Aside from this they get only my appreciation ... that, and the cool badge next to their names, which lets the plebs know that they are an aristocratic patron of the arts.