Women Don't Have Agency
...and that's why they have power.
A few years ago I briefly dated this girl we’ll call Rebecca.
Depending how you count it Rebecca was either the sixth or seventh girl I’d been with, and in either case was definitely the first to actually like me.
She was also the first truly beautiful woman I dated, my first Jewess, and the first gal who was noticeably better than me at manipulation and situational framing—so much so that I dedicated much of my recent essay on the matter to her.
A few hours ago Rebecca escaped from her court-mandated alcoholism treatment plan and texted me hoping I’d take her in as a fugitive and presumably enable her addiction.
Currently I’m chewing on the matter and still haven’t decided how to respond.
Earlier this year I participated in a rather lively discourse here on Substack about that perennial topic of female agency and consent.
My main contention during this period was that the legal system ought to accommodate the reality that lots of women can’t control their actions in certain situations with the Unfair Sex. I noted this is particularly common in Zoomer women (who often suffer from prohibitive levels of anxiety and atrocious executive functioning) and whenever there exists a large status differential in the man’s favor.
In such situations, I argued, women will very genuinely perceive an ostensibly consensual situation as having “just happened” without much active participation on their part. They will maintain this account not only for the benefit of their jealous husband or boyfriend, but also for their own psychological comfort, because in retrospect it doesn’t make sense to them why they acted a certain way.
It’s as though in these situations the woman’s sense of agency simply evaporates.
And in some such scenarios you really do have to sympathize with her, because as Trump famously pointed out, power absolutely has a hypnotic effect on the female mind. Could Paula Jones *really* turn down Slick Willy in that hotel? Could a Polish broad in 1941 *really* turn down those strapping Wehrmacht guys marching around?
Obviously different people will have different intuitions about such matters. But at the very least one must understand these situations as creating extenuating circumstances under which to assess a woman’s actions.
Rebecca’s story is a tragic one.
Like every other girl who likes me she was molested in early adolescence. The dude was one of those early internet pedophiles who specialized in grooming 12 year-olds at scale. One of them also got to my first girlfriend—another surgeon’s daughter and aspiring actress—around the same time, and turned Natalie first into a prolific preteen camgirl and then into the sort of brutal and extractive virago who creates guys like me.
From what I understand both of their pedophiles are still free.
And so is Rebecca—at least for tonight. But I don’t expect her freedom to last very long, as her parents have her under a Marchman Act, which somehow still exists in the Free State of Florida, and once they’ve identified her location they’re sure to send the piggies after her.
Of course Rebecca intends to preempt this by simply lying about her location. But this galaxy-brained ploy probably won’t work, as years of substance abuse have degraded her Ashkenazi manipulation skills to quasi-Aboriginal levels, and as a consequence she has acquired a reputation among her friends and family for lying about fucking everything—so much so that when she fell in the shower and hit her head on the day of her Marchman hearing everyone immediately knew it was a Slippin’ Jimmy situation and the act went through anyway.
To me this rhetorical impotence is easily the most tragic aspect of her alcoholism. One of the things I always found so compelling about her (and honestly fetishized on an ethnic level) during the many lockdown dates we spent binge-watching Sopranos was just how good she was at playing The Game. She turned it into a genuine art, maneuvering in a way that dignified her counterparties while consistently securing tremendous returns for herself.
This talent created lots of wonderful memories and taught me tomes about the bittersweet nuances of life and love.
It’s also what makes it so repulsive to watch her decline into a capricious and grasping lush.
My thoughts on the Female Agency Question have ripened quite a lot since my initial foray into the subject this past spring.
At the time I was motivated by a sort of elitist impulse to divide women into three basic categories: low status bimbos like Paula Jones who are basically children and can’t be trusted to display any real agency; more sophisticated and higher status women who are talented at frame management and strategically weaponizing their pussy/tears, and are probably the real power brokers of sexual politics; and an idealized cadre of virtuous good girls who are theoretically smart enough to cynically weaponize their vulnerability but actively choose not to.
This breakdown is honestly quite retarded and misses a lot of important nuance. But at the time it made a lot of sense to me—probably because my romantic experience with elite women was mostly confined to Natalie and Rebecca. Most of my subsequent girls were either very young or working class, while the elite-adjacent ones tended to be rather normie / non-sentient even if they theoretically had a high IQ.
Since then I’ve had a few experiences that greatly refined my understanding.
For one thing I’ve come to appreciate that it’s often the simplest women who are most likely to take responsibility for their actions. These gals have a very straightforward understanding of free will and were usually raised by a somewhat brutish father who would have called them out for trying to frivolously paint themselves as a victim.
The impetus to rewrite history, abrogate one’s agency, and weaponize vulnerability is typically far stronger in elite women who possess a lot of control over their actions (and if anything obsess over “mindfulness”), a robust network of allies and confidantes, and a sophisticated understanding of complex power dynamics.
These women inhabit an overly therapeutic world wherein Women Are Wonderful and literally everything you have in life comes down to your ability to navigate complex status hierarchies without scaring the hoes by coming off as overly aggressive / strategic / mediated. In this world gossip and crybully tactics are far more effective than masculine negotiation, while the more complex / ambiguous situations that emerge ensure that literally everything comes down to framing and messaging.
In other words, the broads who have the most agency (and certainly the most power) are also the ones most likely to act as though they don’t have any at all.
But that’s kind of a pat Owning The Libs conclusion, and I’d feel like a chud terminating my analysis there. There has to be something more at play.
I first met Rebecca in September 2020, roughly a month before my twenty-seventh birthday and at the peak of my “anger phase,” to use the manosphere parlance.
At this point I’d been on steroids for a few months and had just begun experimenting with meeting girls from SeekingArrangement. I’d hooked up with a few of them in the prior months, but still felt like an incel sort of assailed by the world, and in that scarcity mindset I wasn’t especially motivated to treat my conquests well.
Obviously I never coerced anyone or outright lied to a woman about my intentions—if anything I was brutally honest with them about my transactional mindset and always insisted on creating a hard paper trail to prove consent. But I did this because I saw the sexual power game as zero sum and something to be “won” against my heartless and implicitly predatory female adversaries. Thanks to that attitude I occasionally acted rather callously / carelessly toward girls I later realized had come to me entirely in good faith.
Rebecca changed me for the better—after her I was never really angry at women as a category in quite the same way, and generally made a greater effort to accommodate their feelings. I was still quite selfish and lazy, but my misbehavior became a lot more unthinking and banal.
From our first phone call it was immediately apparent the two of us would love bomb each other into oblivion. She was as desperate to be adored as she was desperate to be tortured, while I craved a girl equally smitten with Jekyll and Hyde.
We met at the Thai joint I always used for first dates back then, which is an entirely different place from the Thai joint I currently use. Back then I actually cared about things like "game,” so I liked to use a place several minutes from my house so I could grab the girl’s waist etc. on the walk over to build attraction and whatnot. But none of that was necessary with Rebecca; I’d already won her over pretty much entirely with words.
We engaged in passionate sexual intercourse six or seven times that night, and spanking her with a dogeared paperback of Mein Kampf mostly extinguished my lingering antisemitism.
In between we learned basically everything there was to know about each other and bonded intensely over our shared body dysmorphia—me as a spiteful former fat kid with Jonah Hill Syndrome and her as a lifelong bulimic with a supermodel body and six fake teeth.
She told me all about her old life job stacking as a stripper and Disney princess. She also spoke about being molested as a little girl and the many many many times she’d been raped—by her best friend’s brother in high school, by her old drug dealer, and even by a Chad she was planning to fuck anyway but who decided he’d rather just demand her pussy at gunpoint.
Several years before this Natalie had told me similar stories. But for her there was always sort of a subtext that they justified her terrible behavior toward men, and I often walked away from them with the impression that intersexual dynamics were intractably a cycle of cruelty and abuse. But with Rebecca it was almost the opposite—it seemed every assault had only left her more submissive, more pliable, and more desperate for love. She didn’t really hate men at all.
Make no mistake, her years as a stripper and sugar baby (she insisted on referring to herself as a “sex worker,” which I found repulsive) had left her without any illusions about male nature. But she fully understood that women had the potential to be just as predatory and malicious as men. She also refused to embrace a cynical worldview or close herself off—her solution to the extractive and predatory nature of modern social dynamics was to deluge almost everyone in her life with a virtually limitless supply of love and validation, and coming from a beautiful and charismatic young woman that frequently worked.
Our relationship had a few natural tensions—obviously we disagreed over politics, and this was in the immediate aftermath of the Summer of Floyd—but none of them really mattered. The sex was great and she prepared all my meals and cleaned my apartment and I paid her bills and our conversational rapport was basically perfect. Amidst all that any fights we had felt unimportant and meaningless. If anything our political arguments were just a vector for flirtation, and any serious tension came from the prospect of interacting with her gendergoblin friends and boomer libtard parents.
The only thing I found frustrating about her was that she wouldn’t drink—she told me she’d been an alcoholic in the past and was almost a year sober. At the time I hadn’t been close to any addicts and didn’t take addiction especially seriously, so it always annoyed me we couldn’t get tipsy together. At least it did until the anniversary of her sobriety, when she decided she wanted to get blackout drunk and have me enjoy her body while she was fully unconscious.
This scenario has always been appealing to me in theory, and I’ve likewise found it appealing in reality when actualized with the right sort of girl. But I’ve also discovered that a lot of women are really quite repulsive when they get too drunk, and Rebecca was one of them. She grew hypersexual and incapable of mediating her lust through a facade of modest femininity, she became overtly extractive and scheming in a way she never was while sober, and after a certain point her DDLG tendencies displaced all agentic adult cognition and she insisted on acting like a literal child.
It wasn’t sexy. After one night of that I made her promise never to drink again.
Sadly I didn’t have much time to hold her to that, because we ended things shortly thereafter, roughly three months into the relationship. This was entirely my doing and in retrospect the reason sounds quite pathetic: I was still incredibly hung up on Natalie and wanted to get her back, so when Natalie suggested she visit me and we assess our remaining chemistry I jumped at the opportunity.
Without giving it much thought I sacrificed something stable and certain with a girl who made me feel like a god for the sliver of a chance with a girl who made me feel like a dog.
So naturally I ended up losing both of them, and spent most of the next two years as a dissociated fuckboy while watching Rebecca enter into a much longer and more serious relationship with a domineering lesbian attorney who sort of looked like me as a teenager.
I’ve never trusted people who talk a lot about “morality.”
To me moralizing language has always seemed like a despicable impulse to obfuscate messy power dynamics and deter people from Taking Their Own Side, which to my mind is the most basic and universal human impulse.
I’m personally a lot more interested in the idea of honor, which allows for a workable system of norm enforcement and group coordination without relying on any sort of retarded schoolmarmish universalism. It also allows you to game around the easy assumption that others will act in accordance with their own rational self-interest.
Under this framework as I conceive it social order requires us to adhere to duty-bonds extended through concentric circles of relational proximity. You owe the most to your children, and then to your spouse, your extended family members, your friends and close collaborators, your “tribe” (coworkers or members of voluntary associations), your coethnics and coreligionists, and finally to your countrymen and species.
Then when operating outside your ingroup honor becomes mostly a matter of transactional negotiation and reputation management, with the principle of reciprocity as the underlying ideal. It’s a “repeated prisoner’s dilemma” dynamic where the end goal is to nurture confidence you’ll follow through on your promises while brutally punishing your enemies and dispensing largesse to your friends and followers.
The most egregious way to defect against this system is to treat your ingroup badly—an abusive father or husband probably can’t be trusted in any domain of life—but it’s very nearly as bad to break a transactional understanding with someone on the outside. One reason for this is it makes you unreliable to future counterparties and ghettoizes you within your ingroup. Another reason is that it prevents your initially transactional arrangement from evolving organically into an ingroup duty-bond (such as between longtime business partners) that expands your personal network and facilitates a less cold and strictly mercantile approach to value exchange.
But there are two notable exceptions to this rule.
The first is when dealing with a hostile outgroup. When someone has established themselves as unwilling or unable to behave reliably and honorably toward you it is obviously appropriate to respond in kind. But even then it’s important to be attentive to proper escalation / jus belli, because exceedingly few people desire to live in a zero sum world of Nietzschean maximalism without any kind of safety net for losers.
The second is in the domain of love and romance. You generally can’t expect people to be honorable / reciprocal when something this personal, vulnerable, and existentially significant is involved. In the past you could *somewhat* corral human behavior by enforcing strict courtship norms in the Jane Austen sense, but this is basically impossible in a diverse pluralist society where everyone comes from a different cultural background and is free to affiliate with whichever subculture best matches their natural temperament. In a world like that everyone will have totally different sensibilities on acceptable romantic / sexual behavior, and whenever you engage with someone from a different “world” there are bound to be crossed wires.
There’s also the simple fact that the heart wants what it wants, you can’t negotiate desire, etc. It’s basically impossible to subordinate emotion to rational morality. When a moral code tells someone not to do something they want to do and can, they will typically just find an alternative moral code. And so the less constrained we are by practical necessity (and higher order mores / institutions initially created to address such necessities) the more you have to expect people to simply follow their desires.
Both of these exceptions are obviously exacerbated by modern labor-saving and communication technology that greatly expands personal freedom and choice, but even a cursory read of literature demonstrates they’ve always existed in some sense.
Hence that infamous old adage:
All’s fair in love and war.
Rebecca and I reconnected two times this past year.
The first time was in February, when she texted me indicating that she was nearly out of her sobriety program (she’d been in and out of them following a horrible suicide attempt caused by a messy end to her lesbo thing, plus being stalked by her lawyer boss who was also fucking her) and could finally meet up with me to pick up where we’d left off.
This was several months in the making, and she’d already ghosted me a few times before, so I didn’t let myself get too excited at first. A large part of me suspected her enthusiasm was somewhat performative and she mostly just needed her rent paid. But I also knew it meant something real that she was coming to me instead of the lesbo or some new boomer on SeekingArrangement. So I booked a hotel and spent a day fucking her and falling back in love.
This was basically cheating, because at the time I was in the longest relationship of my life with a girl who had a remarkable amount in common with Rebecca, like having bangs and enjoying Lana Del Rey. But she was also a working class single mom six years younger than me, so culturally speaking there was more of a gap between us than I had with her Semitic counterpart. Also by that point our relationship was on flimsy ground because I was spending most of my time on Substack and not giving her enough attention, and I was beginning to resent feeling like a shitty boyfriend because of this given that I was still paying all her bills.
Long story short the same thing happened with her and Rebecca that had occurred years before with Rebecca and Natalie: I tried to exchange my current ride-or-die for an old flame and ended up losing both of them, in this instance because Rebecca’s psycho parents wouldn’t stop interfering in her life (keep in mind she was almost 30), which drove her to break her sobriety in March and got her ordered by the court into *yet another* treatment program.
I didn’t hear from Rebecca again until October, when she and I reconnected for a second time.
One evening she called me shitfaced drunk completely out of the blue and demanded that I call her a kike whore to help her masturbate. This of course made me quite angry, because I felt like she was simply using my high verbal IQ to get off when I was still deeply smitten with her and was more interested in discussing our relationship like a faggot. She then tried to provoke me by mentioning she now had an elderly sugar daddy who was taking much better care of her than I ever did, and this naturally caused me to hang up the phone in disgust.
The following evening she called me again, this time much less drunk and far more depressed. I learned she’d been diagnosed with MS and her boob doctor had found a lump in her tiddy that had to be biopsied. She was terrified of losing her fantastic tits / becoming a spastic, and that had caused her to start drinking again after a few months of stable sobriety.
Rebecca was vulnerable and longing for connection, but I remained incensed about how she’d spoken to me the night before and wanted to hurt her for that transgression. And so I bullied her into taking a two hour Uber ride to my condo, where I promised to fuck her very brutally.
But upon seeing her I found myself entirely incapable of that. Instead we mostly spent the night talking and cuddling, and in the following morning we made love in a manner I almost certainly would have found quite gay back when I was 26.
Then I told her to marry me.
She said I didn’t know what that meant. That I’d have to get along with her narcissistic parents and trans cousin. That I’d have to push her around in a wheelchair if the MS got bad. I told her it would be hot for her to be that helpless and dependent. That made her giggle.
I told her to marry me again. She said she would if I could romance her and write her a love letter with ten supporting reasons. I did. She took too long to respond and I got pissed off.
She tried to get me to outbid her sugar daddy before resuming a relationship. I told her that was retarded and undignified and I won’t pay her bills unless we’re engaged. She seemed to respect that and told me to wait until she got back from some vacation with her Jew family.
A week later she called me at 4am crying. She told me to Uber her over and marry her if I was so serious about it. I was still angry at how she’d acted the week before and quite distracted by business concerns, so I told her to call me later in the day and we could talk. She never did.
I didn’t hear from her again until the following week. It was the night before the election, and she called me slightly drunk but ostensibly sound of mind. She said she wanted to stay over for a few days—that we could discuss a long term relationship and that she would cook and clean for me just like she used to. I liked the sound of that.
That night went well, but the following morning the cooking and cleaning failed to happen as promised because she kept sneaking shots of liquor when I wasn’t looking. Around midday I got annoyed and told her to sleep it off and sober up. She wanted me to fuck her, but at this point I was even more disgusted by her sloppiness than I was in 2020 and refused.
Suddenly her roommate Stephanie calls. She insists Rebecca is out of control and needs to be in treatment. I swear to keep an eye on her and keep Steph posted, and I think I do a good job honoring this promise… until Rebecca randomly gets out of bed and insists she needs to leave.
It seems her old lesbian has come to claim her.
The next day Rebecca calls me from a hospital and apologizes for not being transparent with me. I learn her blood alcohol was at near-overdose levels when the lesbo picked her up, and simultaneously feel guilty for not realizing how intoxicated she was and ferociously angry that she would ever put me in that kind of situation without even telling me what was going on.
I insist to Rebecca that she needs to get sober before we talk about any kind of relationship. This insistence lasts the better part of a week before she randomly calls me shitfaced at 2am saying she wants to move in with me and I immediately Uber her back to my place.
It would seem my boundaries are about as strong as hers.
An important realization I’ve had over the past six months is that men really ought to look at the question of female agency more from the woman’s perspective.
Particularly for elite women in liberal cultural ecologies, the incentive to abrogate one’s agency is so incredibly strong that it doesn’t really make sense to expect them not to do so. Such a thing would be tantamount to giving up their most powerful weapon! At the end of the day everyone has the basic right to take their own side, and to that end it would be horribly dumb for women just to throw away this powerful tool.
Another key insight is that there will always be a limitless supply of thirsty men and overprotective fat chicks who’ll enable these girls by making excuses for them at every turn and immediately believing any narrative that frames another man as the predator. Meanwhile Paula Jones’s husband will always be eager to believe Bill Clinton sexually harassed her, because the alternative is far too unpalatable to entertain. In aggregate these sort of people create an incentive structure wherein unagentic and dishonorable behavior in women is virtually inevitable.
In light of this basic reality, my ultimate conclusion is that it’s virtually impossible for women to have agency insofar as we acknowledge that people respond to incentives.
Alternatively, we could say it doesn’t matter whether or not women have agency, because men ultimately have no choice except to act as though they don’t.
You *always* have to game around the possibility of a woman rewriting history and reframing / recontextualizing things to give herself an easy way out or acquire power and status, because there will always be a constituency very eager to indulge her in this behavior. That isn’t her fault and will probably never change; the only thing you can control is your own behavior.
A lot of the time operating in this way will feel horribly unjust and dishonorable, but these are ultimately just the rules of The Game, and complaining about them is about as useful as a black guy saying math is racist. Things like morality and honor don’t really apply here, and fundamentally can’t apply in any post-scarcity pluralist ecology where desire is the only real god any of us continue to worship.
Because remember: All’s Fair in Love and War.
The next time I hooked up with Rebecca was the beginning of the end for our relationship.
Initially I was excited to have her move in with me. I planned to watch her like a hawk and ensure not a drop of liquor touched her lips—an impulse greatly bolstered by her lesbo ex calling that night and promising to hold me accountable should Rebecca perish at my place.
On one hand this pissed me off greatly because the last time she’d come I had zero indication just how drunk she was and felt completely bushwacked by the ultimate revelation. Meanwhile Rebecca had told me things about said lesbo’s behavior in their own relationship that indicated she was far safer with me. I suspected her hostility was motivated by simple sexual jealousy plus a sense of betrayal that her old girl was fucking a Republican.
At the same time, it’s not as though I couldn’t understand the lesbo’s concern. I still felt guilty over not noticing on my own accord how drunk Rebecca had been. On some level it seemed that if she was my girl I had to take ultimate responsibility for her behavior. And so I ripped through the luggage she’d brought with her and made her pour all her alcohol down the sink.
I also demanded she be honest with me about the situation with her parents and the law. In doing so I discovered she’d left her treatment facility before completing her detox and had been served papers to appear in court under the Marchman Act. Her parents were looking to lock her up in a more secure facility, and she was terrified of that because it included an ED treatment plan that would force her to gain weight.
The next day I managed to keep her sober and we called her parents. In my arrogance I imagined an impassioned plea from an upstanding young gent eager to marry their little girl might win them over and secure Rebecca’s freedom to pursue sobriety with greater agency in a relatively accommodating facility. Unfortunately her father proved a psychotic self-important tyrant whose first instinct was to ask for my credentials, and it immediately became apparent that our options were very limited. And so with great sadness I sent her back to her friend’s place so she could prepare for her initial Marchman hearing the following day.
It went poorly.
I told her we’d get a lawyer and fight it, but she was already wasted just a few hours after getting home. I was at my wits’ end, but she begged me to stay on the phone with her and watch a movie. We were halfway through the Nathan For You finale when she passed out and I had to call her lesbo ex (who lived much closer to her friend) to bring her to the hospital.
The next day the exact same thing happened while we were watching Mean Girls. Thankfully by this point I was a lot savvier and didn’t have to lean on the lesbo as much. Ultimately I got her through it by forcing her to pour out her alcohol over a video call before she’d consumed a truly dangerous amount. For a moment I thought we were making progress.
But then it happened again the next morning. Quickly it was becoming apparent that Rebecca couldn’t be left alone even one moment because she could get booze brought to her virtually anywhere using delivery apps. The worst part is she would constantly lie about drinking and I often wouldn’t discover she was sloshed until she’d already grown completely incoherent.
So I had her dump the liquor again and got her yet another Uber to my place. The idea was to sober her up that night and send her off to a facility she trusted the following morning while working with a lawyer to fight off her parents for her final Marchman hearing.
It wasn’t a particularly ambitious plan, but it probably would have worked had Rebecca not stopped the Uber at a 7/11 to buy more tequila just as she was starting to sober up.
When she arrived at my place she was already blackout drunk and I had no choice but to bring her to the hospital. While doing so I went through her phone and immediately noticed she’d spent the better part of that morning texting five other guys looking for someone thirsty and naive enough to enable her retardation in exchange for some alky cunt.
More exhausted than enraged at this point, I had her best friend meet me at the hospital and left her there with the intent of washing my hands of her for good.
Recently I discovered a fascinating essay by
entitled Dangerous Women, which discusses how the classic archetype of the scheming high status older woman who targets a passive and unagentic young woman has recently fallen out of favor:The only politically correct type of an evil woman is the femme fatale - a strong, independent, agentic and attractive woman who triumphs over a stupid, careless, sex-driven male.
I responded to this excerpt with the following:
I think the femme fatale remains so popular bc she is ultimately a male fantasy.
Men wish that women were that talented at using us, because it’s a lot more painful and emotionally unsatisfying to be victimized by an unagentic little girl whose evil comes more from fickleness and laziness and cowardice than any overt malice.
When the FF manipulates you and screws you over she does so in an artful and intentional way and in doing so extends you some basic dignity, because you can't properly instrumentalize someone without respecting them on some level. In fact there is something almost sexually/romantically cathartic about the femme fatale plot--it has a kind of primordial femdom valence. It's sort of nice to fantasize about women actually being reliable and competent, even if it's what enables them to take you down.
But in real life that pretty much never happens, and female evil is 99% of the time a matter of reframing things to minimize their own agency in a complex situation while lazily weaponizing vulnerability. Which means if you want to enjoy women it’s prob best not to take them all that seriously.
Piotr responded very adroitly with the following:
I think that part of the Femme Fatale fantasy is that they're hyper feminine, both in the hot & sexy kind of way, and in how they can have their way with men (and women, for that matter) using covert, indirect and manipulative strategies.
This was known and documented even in the ancient times. Eve, Lilith and many other Jewesses in the Old Testament were Femme Fatales, much like many Greek/Roman goddesses and female mythical creatures like sirens and succubi.
I would say the fantasy has less to do with respect and more with status. A Femme Fatale exploits men for personal gain, so it only makes sense for her to target the highest status man around and exploit his material and social resources before moving on, kind of like your Evita example in your Slutty Women essay.
But I also think there's something very deeply primal, a black widow/praying mantis sort of masochistic sexual fantasy: I get to sexually climax and reproduce, even it it's the last thing I'll ever gonna do.
I think this is spot-on.
Men adore the succubus because she promises a sort of cathartic release from the demands of masculine performance and status insecurity.
Yes she destroys you, but in doing so she performs femininity for you in a manner precisely tailored to your individual preferences. She embodies your anima and creates a perfect fantasy worth obliterating everything you have.
But for the femme fatale narrative to work she needs to own up to her scheme in the end. She needs to demonstrate agency and accountability. The praying mantis actually has to eat you. That’s what makes you cum—that’s what offers real catharsis.
And that is the crux of the male fantasy at play, because this is what real women never do—not even the talented and scheming and relatively agentic ones. They’re never willing to acknowledge that they’re the bad guy in a direct confrontation or admit in a straightforward and unironic way that they manipulated or took advantage of you.
This isn’t because women are scheming harlots who consciously play innocent when the lights come on. I mean, maybe some of the dumber / trashier ones are like that, but those ones aren’t especially interesting or worth writing about.
The vast majority of women simply do this without realizing it—they’re constantly reframing, recontextualizing, and subconsciously convincing themselves they didn’t actually mean to do that.
Because real-life women are never femme fatales; they’re scared little girls responding to constantly shifting incentive structures and managing their own fickle natures.
And you can’t really blame them for this, because inside every girl who burns you is a cavewoman trying to convince herself to love the guy who murdered her family.
Last night Rebecca left her treatment center again.
After her Marchman was approved and she received word that her parents were sending her to a stricter facility she called an Uber during phone time and walked right out.
Then shortly after arriving at her friend’s house she called my number and begged me to take her in as a fugitive. She insisted that she wanted nothing more than to give her life to me, and even suggested we could elope sometime today.
This has a lot of appeal as a romantic fantasy, and if I had another property in the state I’d probably go for it. I could throw her phone out the window somewhere on the interstate so they can’t geolocate her and then buy her a new one on my plan. Then I’d get her sober in a few months and eventually her parents could be cajoled into calling off the Marchman.
Unfortunately we live in the real world. Her parents know who I am and the city where I live. They’re also loaded and could easily afford a decent PI. Meanwhile I’m currently living in relatively tiny high rise condo, so it wouldn’t be long before bae started to grow stir crazy.
She’s also so fucking unreliable… eventually she’d get cranky from withdrawals and wouldn’t be able to stick to our plan. If I deny her liquor she’ll inevitably figure out a way to get ahold of her phone unsupervised and reach out to her lesbo or some fresh cock trolling for a new angle. Then just watch how fast I go from knight in shining armor to controlling abuser.
Fucking cunt.
A hundred years ago I’d never have this problem. I would have sauntered in on a white stallion to claim Rebecca as my woman and she’d be overjoyed to submit to my authority. I would have given her my last name and her parents would have no choice but to fuck off. Her jealous dyke ex never would have dreamed of approaching me with an attitude of moral authority, she wouldn’t be able to rely on safe and destigmatized sex work for quick cash, and there’d be no therapeutic managerial state to butt into our business. In that world I could have saved her.
Then again, in that world would we have even met? Or would she have just married a Chad at 22? Or, perhaps more realistically, gotten lobotomized at 19? In all likelihood a guy like me benefits more from the chaos and asymmetry of modernity than he’s hurt by progressivism.
Honestly she just needs to go back to the facility and accept the transfer. It doesn’t matter if they fatten her up a bit—she can lose it upon her release. Then once she’s sober and acting like her old self I’ll check in to see if she still wants to give herself to me.
She despises that plan and spits out a bunch of passive-aggressive invective my way. Going to the other facility simply isn’t an option, she insists. She won’t let them make her fat. Instead she’s going to hide out at her friend’s place until her gnarly septuagenarian sugar daddy (who she says has a micropenis and refers to eating her pussy as “praying”) is back in town.
I tell her if she somehow escapes her parents she’s just going to end up alienating more and more of her network until she ends up trafficked or dead of alcohol poisoning or locked away in a significantly worse institution than her parents have in mind.
I threaten to call the cops on her or tell her parents her location. She hangs up so she can Uber to another friend’s house. A few minutes later I call her again.
She answers right away, but neither of us speaks for several minutes. We’re at an impasse. Through tears she says she doesn’t know what I even want from her at this point.
I admit to her I no longer want anything, but promise I’ll love her until the day I die.
Then I hang up the phone.
Earlier in this piece I mentioned that after we reconciled for a second time Rebecca had asked me to write her a letter listing ten reasons I wanted to marry her.
At the time she insisted she loved this letter, and I’m reasonably certain she meant it. But looking back I suspect it didn’t land as powerfully as I’d hoped, mostly because it reflected a glamorous memory of our past she knew she couldn’t live up to.
Rebecca gave me permission to share this letter with you, and I’m going to do that because it’s pertinent to the topic at hand and will be a fascinating read for Wally B superfans. It might also give you some perspective into why I held out for her so long.
But it’s also going behind the paywall—both for privacy reasons and because this is a fantastic opportunity to shore up my (((paid subscriber count))).
Happy reading.