This passage is taken from Andy Nowicki's newly-published Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 3: On Being Unwanted, now available on Kindle and in paperback.
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There is a certain boy I remember from my youth.
As an
adolescent, he was a slight, gawky lad with a wide mouth and incongruously
beady eyes. Unfortunate-looking though
he was, he wasn’t of a resentful frame of mind; nothing in him seemed inclined
towards viewing life in such a light; instead, quite oblivious to his miserable
social state, or in any case utterly unmindful thereof, he relentlessly
projected an attitude of thoroughgoing optimism; what was more, he was an
inveterate and rather pesky romantic, much
after the fashion of Looney Toons mainstay “Pepe Le Pew.”
A would-be Romeo, absent the charisma or the charm, he was
never without a Juliet, even if she only belonged to him in his fantasy world.
But none of this would have been terribly striking, had he not also shown a
marked preference for pretty, popular girls, the sort for whom he was nothing
but a nuisance, at best. He wrote them love poetry and fawned over them
constantly, and always seemed to take their inevitable rejections in stride.
 |
| A Romeo for all peoplekind |
I suppose there was something admirable about his absence of
inhibition, even if it was more an indication of reckless heedlessness than of
manful fortitude in the face of never-ending humiliation. Still, the result was
the same: this wide-mouthed, beady-eyed pseudo-Romeo always avoided getting
slapped by reality. Indeed, even if one of his bevy of chosen populette Juliets had actually slapped him, he would have found
it no more disheartening than when that feline object of Pepe Le Pew’s ardor
slapped that stinky would-be wooer in the maw, and he responded, “Ahhhhh, mon cherie, oui oui, love can hurt, yes?
But yet we still love, no?” before smothering her anew with a series of unwanted
skunky kisses.
Of course the boy in question wasn’t nearly as rape-ishly aggressive
or space-invasive as M. Le Pew, but he proved to be equally unflappable. Yet in
spite of his talent to ignore the ignominy of embarrassment, this unflappable
lad was nevertheless castigated-- and to my mind, even in retrospect, quite rightly
so-- for his proclivity to fling himself at popular girls and rhapsodize their
beauty in verse. His fellow low-status males found him clownish and contemptible,
however, for reasons that none of us could exactly articulate at the time, but
now it’s plainly apparent that the boy simply lacked pride; indeed, he struck
us (though, again, we didn’t know how to put it back then) as shameless.
For we self-respecting low-status men knew then what we
still know now, that beauty is the bait intended to lure us into self-betrayal
and self-debasement. The low-status self-respecter is cunning and astute; quite
aware of the desire within him to be
wanted (discussed at the beginning of this volume), he has nevertheless
opted to go without. He knows that going without will, of course,
necessarily result in a feeling of a paucity, or lack. Still, he accepts this lack
in his life, since the alternative, as far as he can tell, can only be something
still worse.
It would be interesting to know what has become of my
classmate, the “Pseudo-Romeo” discussed above. Did he maintain his unflappability
into adulthood? Was he ever persuaded to lower his standards, and compose verse
for a slightly homelier species of woman; if so, did he maybe finally succeed
in his relentless wooing efforts, and actually land himself a girlfriend?
If
so, did he afterwards find that the thrill of the quest perhaps failed to be
commensurate with the glory of the supposed achievement? Did he ever wake up in
the night next to his slightly homelier girlfriend-cum-wife-- now grown
conspicuously homelier, fatter, and more sullen-- and suddenly realize, with a horrified
shudder, that all of his years of ardent white-knighting had only won him a remaining
lifetime of humdrum misery and quiet desperation? That the female species that
he revered as angelic turned out in the end to be quite human after all, and
(in his case, anyhow) considerably less interested in his own well-being and
happiness than the inverse?
Or, as somehow seems more likely, did our Pseduo-Romeo sadly
never fully discover the folly of his ways? Did enlightenment concerning the
egregious error of his simpish, female beauty-praising proclivities only linger
fitfully in his subconscious on a few occasions before always ultimately
dissipating into the ether?
In short, once a man first strides heedlessly down the path
of contemptible and pathetic white-knightery, does the surety of a state of
servile emasculation forever dominate his future?
Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. Visit his Soundcloud page and his YouTube channel. His author page is Alt Right Novelist.
