Sex…? No, that’s not even close to the point.

I don’t like (having…) sex; that much is true. The problem I have which spurred me to write this post is with how people treat sex. That’s another story entirely.

Sex is theoretically wonderful – it helps to promote pair bonding due to the release of hormones (oxytocin, for instance), it’s relaxing for similar reasons, is great exercise, and I hear it’s also good for fostering healthy skin. I just don’t like doing it that much, in much the same way you might not like anchovies. It’s gross, slimy, and full of weird looking bits that should not ever be present in a food product. Yech.. Yet, if you were starving, I’m sure you’d eat some anchovies if you had any laying around.

To the point, though… I had a bit of a personal revelation on this topic earlier. You’ve heard the saying, “nice guys finish last,” right? The idea that only the assholes seem to catch the attention of girls? Well, for myself, that rarely bothers me because, let’s face it, when you don’t like sex, there’s not much you might want to get from members of the opposite sex aside from friendship and a chance to relate to someone else.

But let’s consider the asshole, for a moment. The asshole has spent much of the time he’s had around the opposite sex in attempting to convince them to have sex with him. He’s found strategies and methods to convince the girl that it’s a great idea, even if his objectives are different from her objectives. Women seem to like excitement, romance, maybe a bit of danger; the asshole hones in on what the woman wants and presents that to her in a neat little package, complete with a bow of chivalry! It’s great – until the woman has slept with him and the deed is done; then the asshole behind the mask comes into focus and things go sour very quickly. Depending on how long this bipolar charade continues, it can create very nasty messes.

So we have a problem here. In order for the asshole to complete his overarching mission of getting laid, he has to convince the woman he’s targeting that he is perfect – he’s just what the woman is looking for. He has to pretend, like George Clooney in Ocean’s 11, to be something he, in reality, is not. And the discrepancy between reality and the fiction that the asshole has to fabricate, will ultimately cause a breakdown in the bonding portion of the relationship. So women fall madly in love with assholes and later put up with the assholish behavior – even to the point of struggling to get rid of them for good – because they’re still clinging onto the fantasy of the ideal man that the asshole had to present to them initially.

Obviously, I’m generalizing quite a lot and it’s definitely not always like this, but in my experience, it seems to be relatively normal. It goes so far into cultural experience that it reflects itself in the hiring ritual one has to undergo to find employment. Only in the case of applying for a job, the interviewer and the interviewee are both aware of the farcical nature of the ritual. Despite knowing, though, and much like a strange and long-forgotten Greek mystery ritual where the initiate must dress up like a deer and prance around a room because, gosh darn it, it’s important, everyone just assumes it makes sense to do things how we do them. Mass psychosis? Mass delusion? Civilization is the aggregate of many counts of individual insanity, as far as I can tell.

So why does this bother me? I don’t even really understand it since my objectives do not fall into conflict with the asshole or the nice guy, for the most part, although finding a sexless relationship would be amazing. I don’t suspect it’s likely I’ll find that (granted how sex-obsessed the culture surrounding me is), and oddly enough, I’m not all that broken up about it. For me, were I to go after a girl in the hopes of establishing a relationship, the girl would have to either be asexual herself, or open to… how shall I put this…. alternative arrangements, as far as sex is concerned. But since I lack the experience to effectively convince a girl that I’m perfect in every way and would be a great partner (despite being human and full of flaws), and also lacking the desire to gain such experience due to my general bafflement at how stupid it all is , the best I could probably do is to write satirical stories about the topic and have an inward chuckle at the state of humankind. Maybe even sell some of those stories and make a quick buck from the effort. Who knows.

I saw an internet meme once that said, “I do not wish to live on this planet any longer.” I concur. Fuck it – everything is so stupid and pointless. People tell you when you’re growing up, “Just be yourself – don’t try to pretend you’re someone you’re not,” and yet every single human being who participates in our elaborate mating rituals, or our strange job-hunting rituals, has to do exactly that – pretend they are someone whom they know they are not. Western culture is built on a  foundation of cognitive dissonance.