MERRY LOW-STATUS X-MAS!

Andy Nowicki—author of Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 1: Status-Lust and Self-Loathing and Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 2: Celibacy and Hypergamy, as well as the as-yet unfinished Ruminations of Low-Status Male, Volume 3—shares some candid thoughts about how nature and culture combine to humiliate the low-status male (LSM)...and what the LSM can do on his own behalf to counteract this double-fisted effect.

THE DEATH OF SEX

by Duns Scotus

If there is a problem, it is only logical to yearn for its solution. If your house is on fire, who would not wish for the flames to be doused? If you have a disease, who would not crave an appropriate antidote, even if there were none available. A problem always implies a solution, even a hypothetical one, and even when the solution is worse than the problem, or the cure worse than the disease – that too is simply a problem calling for its own solution.

One of the most intractable problems of humanity is sexuality and its various aspects.

Firstly, it has been essential to human propagation, and for this reason it has been exempt from any truly radical critique – except on the lunatic fringe. Secondly, it has been associated with some of the highest and noblest aspects of human nature, and inextricably intertwined with them. When purified, rarefied, and sublimated, the crude sexual instinct becomes the foundation of such laudable elements of human nature as chivalry, family feeling, masculine honour, and even feminine chastity. Indeed, many of our traditional virtues have developed in symbiosis with – or more accurately in direct opposition to – our sexual natures. To strike at sex, therefore, is to a certain extent to strike at humanity.

"IT FOLLOWS": MONSTERS FROM THE ID

by Andy Nowicki

It Follows, a brilliant new horror film by director David Robert Mitchell, has a curious distinction: it may be the most “sex-negative” movie ever made.

Self-aware yet irony-free, bathed in atmospheric dread, It Follows treads a careful course between the “slasher” films of the 70s and 80s, its most superficially obvious forebears, and the distancing, overtly “post-modern” spoofy self-referentialism embraced by Wes Craven’s Scream series. In the final analysis, however, It Follows belongs with a more elegant breed of cinematic pedigree, deserving to be considered among classics like Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, eerie films in which the source of the terror is never finally understood in an intellectual sense, but is rendered so primordially palpable on an emotional level that it haunts the viewer for days afterwards.

ANTISEXUALISM

by Andy Nowicki

In my recent review of Ann Sterzinger's novel Nowhere, I observed that we now now live in an age when most social and intellectual movements with any sort of momentum and enduring traction are essentially negative in orientation, "anti-" in temperament. Sterzinger's book highlights one of the less visible, if most radical of these anti-ideologies – that of "antinatalism," the belief that life itself is a misery best avoided.