You might think that Pickup Artists, dudes obsessed with sexing up the young fertile lasses, would be huge fans of contraceptives – which, after all, are what makes their particular lifestyle possible. But some prominent PUAs are about as enthusiastic about contraception as a Pope.
In the case of the charming fellow who calls himself Heartiste, I mean this literally. In a recent posting, he quotes approvingly from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae dissing contraceptives for allegedly demeaning the women that use them. Paul suggested that contraception may cause men to
lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.
I’m no Pope, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
Heartiste, for his part, embraces and extends this line of reasoning, adding in some of that Alpha-Beta-Schmeta nonsense that manosphereians seem to regard as cutting edge science.
[A]s cheap contraceptives silently and subtly move men toward devaluing women, so too does the technology move women toward devaluing beta males, those bitter losers in the sexual market (note: I did not say marriage market or child market) for whom contraceptives, coupled with female economic self-sufficiency, have rendered them practically superfluous as primetime sexual partners.
The mass-produced condom and the Pill have freed men from feeling obligation for women as much as they have freed women to regularly and blithely pursue what was historically risky sex with caddish alpha males on the make.
The contraceptive is, in practice, a female hypergamy facilitator.
Yep, that’s right: contraceptives are the tickets to the mythical Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel.
But poor Heartiste has impaled himself on the horns of a dilemma. He’s got a good anti-woman rant going, but there’s just one problem with it: he’s devoted his life to becoming one of those Alpha Assholes that contraceptive-using women purportedly cannot resist riding.
It’s funny for me to write this, because contraceptives have, in fact, been very very good to me. I did a back of the envelope calculation and figured that my aggregate sex life would have been truncated by 90% if contraceptives were prohibitively expensive, unreliable and hard to get. A world in which women had to grapple with real, palpable fears of STDs, pregnancy and subsequent abandonment is, not to put too fine a point on it, a really shitty world for womanizers and serial monogamists and uncomplicated lovers of the art of seduction itself. I imagine I’d have to *gasp* start promising marriage or some such claptrap to any woman I wanted to bang, just to loosen her up enough to unhook her bra.
Spoken like a true asshole.
Oh, but don’t worry, Heartiste isn’t going to stop attacking sex-having women as one of the harbingers of “the cultural and technological juggernaut that hastens, if it is not the sole cause of, the death of Western civilization.”
Indeed, Heartiste almost seems to relish the ironies of his position, as it allows him to spew forth some of the silliest purple prose you’re ever going to find outside the pages of bad romance novels (or comments from our friend Steele):
Here I am, standing at the edge of the abyss, pointing into its bowels like a histrionic jester, leading the ignorant and the deluded to peer into the void and imploring them — no, more precisely taunting them — to heed my warning of their desolate future… and still I cavort insouciantly along its lip, secretly relieved that no one will seriously weigh my prophecies.
Well, at least he’s right about that “histrionic jester” bit.
Last I checked, Heartiste’s post had spawned 450 comments. I can’t bring myself to look through them to see what further horrors can be found there.
EDITED TO ADD: You should all be aware that our lovely Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel illustration is available in t-shirt form! As is the Mammoth! And a delightful Cupcake as well! And you’re in luck! Zazzle is having another one-day 40% off sale on T-shirts! Click here to go to the Man Boobz Zazzle store. Use the code 12DAILYDEAL8. Oh, and in a lovely irony, the profits go to Planned Parenthood!
Pecunium — just one more reason I barely ever went to see the Pittsburgh orchestra. And they seemed pretty good about it, think the violin second chair is/was a woman.