Category Archives: Books/Media

One of the funniest aspects of English Teacher X’s blog and books—beyond his sick, graphic prose—are the crudely drawn comics that often accompany his musings. Resembling an acid-fueled rendition of 4chan rage comics, ETX scrawls cartoons revolving around the disgusting conversations he’s had with his fellow vagrants, the women he’s bedded, the students he’s been stuck teaching and more. This recent title, as the name suggests, brings together every cartoon he’s ever published, from the beginning of his blogging career up to the present day.

If you enjoy English Teacher X’s writing, Complete Collected Comics is a fast and hilarious book, also interesting because he delves somewhat into the history of the comics:

I doodled the first snowman picture on a bar napkin and scribbled “English Teacher X” under it, and liked it so much I went home and drew a bunch of cartoons on that.

Why English Teacher X? Well, X = the unknown, and there was an element of X rated, Generation X, and of course, Racer X from the old Speed Racer cartoon.

I submitted them to The Exile magazine, and was told they were too “soft and Generation X.” and suggested I make them a little more mean-spirited.

I made the rude reply that I was trying to avoid the burned-out bitter Expat thing. (Don’t think I succeeded, did I?)

And then I started my own website.

Complete Collected Comics runs the gamut from the early, hand-drawn comics that ETX started out with to his lengthier MS Paint epics such as “Disgusting Bar Conversations” and “Doofus & Valiant: The Graphic Novel” (which I was surprised to find out was intended to be a parody of those “Goofus & Gallant” comics from the old Highlights magazine for kids). My favorites were “Gonorrhea of the Eyes,” the chapter on the various types of English teachers, “A Conversation About Needs Analysis,” and “A Conversation About Privates.”

One issue for Kindle owners is that since most of the comics are in color, unless you own a Kindle Fire, you’re better off reading the book on your computer so you can get the full experience. But if you’re looking for a bleakly funny, dark, quick read, Complete Collected Comics is well worth the money.

Click here to buy Complete Collected Comics.

Read Next: Guide to Teaching English Abroad by English Teacher X

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on December 22, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

The two most important things you need to know about the Velvet Underground are:

1. Almost all the music you listen to was either inspired by the Velvets or inspired by someone who was inspired by the Velvets.
2. Like most geniuses, they didn’t get their due until they were dead (in this case, after the band had broken up).

Now the hipsters and other idiots have glommed onto the legacy of the Velvets, obscuring their message with reams of bullshit. Just read the comments on any VU song on YouTube. Of course, this isn’t helped by Lou Reed, the heart and soul of the Velvets, doing his best to claim the title of the World’s Saddest Aging Rock Star. Had he done the right thing and OD’ed on heroin in 1979, he’d be remembered as America’s greatest poet. Now he’s going to be remembered as the doddering old imbecile who can’t even keep in time to his own song.

Still, the legacy of the Velvet Underground lives on in just about every decent piece of music recorded from the seventies to the present day. Despite being around for only nine years and living in obscurity the whole time, the Velvets spawned whole new genres of music with the four studio albums they released. Punk rock, indie rock, even heavy metal either wouldn’t exist or would be radically different were it not for the Velvet Underground.

All prophets begin as pariahs, and the Velvets never caught on during their brief existence because they weren’t just counterculture, they were counter-counterculture, against the hippies and the other faux-rebels of the era. I’ve come to the realization that hippiedom was never a rebellion at all, but simply stealth Christianity, its codes and rules stripped away, retaining its noxious core. The conflict between hippies and the “silent majority” was the conflict of two siblings living in the same house arguing over who got to ride shotgun in mommy’s car, not the total cultural alignment that the Boomers claimed it was. Ever wonder why so many of those “free love” hippies found it so easy to become Jesus freaks? Or why those same Boomers who did it in the road became Reagan Republicans in the eighties with nary a peep of protest? The sum total of hippiedom is revealed in an elderly Ringo Starr performing on David Letterman’s show, weakly urging his geriatric fans to “choose love.” Love, the debased commandment of a debased religion.

Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker would have none of it. Their discography was a vicious jab in the eyes of both the bourgeoisie and their pretend opponents. Where the hippies were pious and preachy, the Velvets were forlorn and frank. Where the hippies proclaimed drug use as a gateway to enlightenment, the Velvets spoke of it as a world of pleasure-fueled despair. Where the hippies were saccharine and sweet-sounding, the Velvets used guitar feedback, viola droning and distortion to drown their listeners in noise. Where the Beatles played at being wise Indian gurus, the Velvets drew from fascist and underground aesthetics, narrating a nihilistic world of bleakness, existential nausea and black humor. Despite this, they also pre-mocked the self-pitying bathos of their prep school imitators (I’m looking at you, Strokes) with songs like “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “What Goes On” and “Ride Into the Sun.” Even the more tender VU songs (“Here She Comes Now,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “After Hours“) have a mischievous or morbid twist to them. Hell, their name itself was taken from a bit of lurid morality porn of the time, a book on the supposed sexual degeneracy of the mid-sixties.

Before he got married and went senile, Lou Reed was not a man given to cheap sentimentality or pretty lies. An immensely talented autodidact who taught himself to play the guitar, his parents had his brain melted with electroshock therapy when he was a teenager to “cure” his homosexuality. He went to college at Syracuse University, where he was nearly expelled for his crummy grades, spending all his time spinning rock ‘n roll records on the campus radio station and rocking out on the weekends with his buddy Sterling Morrison. Following college, Reed stumbled into a job writing knockoff pop songs for a record label in New York; it was there that he met John Cale, a classically-trained musician who studied and performed with avant-garde composers like La Monte Young and Aaron Copland. Moe Tucker joined after the Velvets’ original drummer, Angus MacLise, quit because he couldn’t stand the thought of actually getting paid to perform. But it wasn’t until after Andy Warhol and his crew saw them performing in a crummy dive bar in Greenwich Village that the Velvets got their big break.

Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story is considered the definitive VU biography not only because it was co-written by Gerard Malanga, a close associate of the Velvets who performed with them during Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows, but because it largely consists of interviews with the band members and their friends and colleagues, like this:

REED: “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things,’cos things have gone so far that somebody really should say something. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically, I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke! It’s a joke! The kids are being hyped.”

Given Malanga’s co-authorship, the book’s focus is on the Velvets’ time with Warhol’s crowd, their EPI performances, and their short-lived partnership with Nico. The title is both figurative and literal, alluding to the original name of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight, and the supposedly “uptight” nature of the Factory scene:

The Velvet Underground were intrinsically related to Andy Warhol. Between them they reflected both the concept of rock’n’roll and the time in which it was happening more accurately than any other performers that we know of. Picking up on the current temperament, expressing uptightness and making the audience uptight is remarkably accurate. We may think of the Sixties as a “groovy” time of peace and love, but the international rock scene out of which the EPI grew was an extremely uptight scene. Just consider how uptight the stars in this constellation were: Bob Dylan and Brian Jones, who should be credited for their preparation and introduction of Nico and their catalytic presences on the scene, were both extremely uptight about their positions in the rock hierarchy. Nico was uptight because she wanted to sing all the songs and sound like Bob Dylan and because Bob had given ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ to Judy Collins to record. The Velvets were uptight because they saw that Nico could easily upstage them and they didn’t want to sound like Bob Dylan at all.

Up-Tight is an amusing and interesting bit of rock history, full of primary sources and snide, catty asides (like the authors’ description of Warhol having been “murdered in a NY hospital”). I read this one years ago and I highly recommend it as an introduction to rock ‘n roll’s most influential and least understood band. Over a decade since I first picked up a VU album, their songs retain a freshness that other music from the same time period doesn’t have.

Click here to buy Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story. (Note: There is a Kindle version of Up-Tight available, but Amazon won’t sell it to customers in the U.S. for some reason.)

Read Next: Music Reviews: The Ten Albums You WOULDN’T Want to Be Legally Prohibited from Owning

If John Dolan and I were to ever meet, I’m pretty sure that we would not get along. He would see me as an obnoxious reactionary jerk; I would see him as a sniveling, defeatist dweeb.

Nonetheless, Dolan is probably the closest thing I have to a personal hero.

John Dolan is best known for the War Nerd columns he writes under his Gary Brecher pseudonym, the fat, disgruntled data entry clerk from Fresno. And while I love the War Nerd as much as every other marginalized ex-dork, I was also a fan of Dolan’s Exile book reviews. It was through Dolan that I not only discovered many of the authors who influenced my writing—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles Portis, Philip K. Dick and more—but I also learned how to write. Reading his blistering takedowns of talentless hacks like Jonathan Franzen, James Frey and Thomas Friedman, I got a crash course in literary frankness; avoiding bathos, overwriting, and every other bad habit my English professors tried to instill in me.

So what if Dolan is a dick? Does the fact that he’s not the kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with (whatever that means) somehow invalidate his writing talent? That loathsome mentality is why modern literature is complete garbage. Americans, even supposedly progressive ones, read books the way that fundamentalist Christians do: they evaluate them based solely on whether they’re “moral,” damn everything else. This infantile impulse is why a con man like Frey can make millions off of blatantly fake memoirs while Dolan himself is reduced to homelessness. You can even see this moronic debate being played out in the manosphere when some uptight prig starts nattering about Roissy or Roosh or someone else being “moral degenerates,” “evil” or some other self-congratulatory insult.

We of all people should know better.

I’m not brownnosing when I say that Pleasant Hell, Dolan’s debut novel, is the best one of the 21st century so far, or at least in the top three. It’s a defiant middle finger at the pious sewer of American literature, a glorious triumph of comedy and darkness; true darkness, not the mawkish Precious/Oprah idea of darkness. As far as I’m concerned, it’s required reading for everyone in the manosphere, and in a just world would be required reading in universities.

Pleasant Hell is, quite simply, the story of a loser. Not the glamorous Hollywood-type loser, but a real loser, the kind who is too depressing and pathetic to film. The blurb on the book’s cover calls Pleasant Hell “Revenge of the Nerds, only without the revenge,” but that comparison trivializes Dolan’s achievement. His book follows in the tradition of Céline, that of the alienated, cynical loner struggling against a world that holds him in contempt:

I say tie him to one of the light-rigs of one of the squid boats. Facing down. With his squinty old “canny” eyes tweezed open like the guy in Clockwork Orange. Keep him out there all night, while the sullen Koreans try to process the billions of mindless, eager squid squirting around under the lights, trying to crowd into the nets: “Duh… me first! Me first!” Let him spend the night looking down into that squirming mass of eager, gelid protoplasm sliding and flopping around, gleaming in the million-watt lights… animate jelly so thick you could stroll around the boat on it, bouncing along like kids on those McDonald’s PlayZones filled waist-high with colored ping-pong balls… walking on water, buoyed by several million squid-per-square-foot… bouncing over slurpy tubes all eager to get closer to the nets, avidly fouling the water with milt and eggs, all trying for a ticket into the net.

Like Céline’s novels, Pleasant Hell is essentially a fictionalized autobiography; Dolan didn’t even bother giving his literary surrogate an original name. The book begins in present-day New Zealand, where Dolan has been resigned to teaching illiterate undergrads who despise him so much they’ve formed an anti-Dolan protest movement, complete with T-shirts mocking his balding, pudgy appearance. The book then flashes back to the seventies, Dolan’s origins in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasant Hill, beginning with his omega high school sexual frustrations:

Tip #2: This one goes out to any pubescent goddesses who may be reading: never be nice to nerds if you’re a beautiful girl. A lot of girls die that way, and their parents and siblings and anyone else who happens to be in the house… and the nerd too, last of all, barrel in the mouth, toe on the trigger, the Beloved half out of bed in her room, beautiful golden hair now streaked with viscous dark, blouse clumsily rebuttoned from one shy necrophiliac fondle; her mom sprawled in the kitchen, stopped in her tracks mid-casserole; and her Dad, head dripping onto the back of the sofa where he first raised his head from the paper, annoyed by the noise of the sliding door being jerked open.

If Céline’s influence wasn’t obvious from Pleasant Hell’s premise, the book’s graphic prose drives it home. Dolan describes his travails and failures in sick, lurching detail, leavened with ample humor; many of the book’s segments had me doubled over in laughter. Despite the novel’s grotesque subject matter, Dolan never fishes for sympathy from the reader, nor does he resort to bathos to force a reaction. Hey Frost! Hey Painter! Are you paying attention?

Following his teenage torment, Dolan enrolls in U.C. Berkeley, commuting to class on the newly opened BART rather than moving to the dorms, further steeping him in isolation and frustration. Dutiful dweeb that he is, Dolan takes the proclamations of the newly ascendant feminists to heart, becoming a passive doormat, and is rewarded with continued celibacy while the girls run into the arms of the chauvinistic jerks they purported to oppose. He comforts himself by obsessively reading Jane’s reference manuals and war histories in the Berkeley library basement (which he recently admitted formed the basis for his War Nerd columns) and taking karate classes like every other dork, where he manages to turn his gi into a foul-smelling mold factory:

But I went back to the next class. In the same green gi. I couldn’t quit. Sometime, I presumed, they’d have to get past the mystical dancing-stuff and tell you how to really maim people. So I kept going. And nobody mentioned the green gi or the cloud of decay which followed me about. They just gave me a corner of the room all to myself. In this way the spores turned out to be very handy: they actually lessened the social awkwardness I felt. Kept the others at bay. I practiced by myself, even on the two-person drills. “By mutual consent.” So I had learned a sort of martial art in spite of myself: a clumsy, peasant form of chemical warfare, which worked on all the wrong people.

Dolan wallowing in his own filth is one of Pleasant Hell’s most prominent themes. Following this chapter, he takes a job as an overnight security guard at a junkyard in the slummiest part of Oakland, assisted by the guard dog Max, an abused German shepherd with “filthy shit-smeared fur” and a gigantic wart over his eye. All the while, he wears cheap biker boots with the nails punching up into his soles, his feet constantly oozing in a blood-and-pus soup. Near the end of the book, he even develops a bizarre aversion to bathing itself, covering up his stank of sweat and B.O. by smearing his armpits with eucalyptus-scented Vap-O-Rub.

Boy, I can’t see why Oprah won’t be adding Pleasant Hell to her book club any time soon.

The book isn’t all gloom and suffering, though; even Ferdinand Bardamu eventually got laid and fell in love. Instead of an ex-prostitute or a tart who cheats on him with Argentine beef dealers, though, Dolan ends up in a relationship with Joanne Whitfield, one of the “Super People” from his high school, a popular, bicurious girl who takes pity on the little weirdo. The segments where Joanne half-contemptuously shows him how to French kiss or tries to take his virginity are un-erotic to the point of hilarity, reminding me of the sex scenes in Election.

And even in these little bits of triumph, Dolan still ends up losing in the end.

That’s the ultimate reason why Pleasant Hell triumphs: it’s honest. It’s a novel about suffering, not the phony, glamorous suffering of rich trust-fund brats partying and doing drugs, but the real suffering of sexual invisibility and social rejection. They’re two of the only true forms of suffering left for American men, the iniquity of not having a woman willing to validate you as a man, not having another person on the planet who cares about your existence. It’s a hell that more men are trapped in than we know, not that any of them would ever admit it in public.

And the more frightening reality is that few of the men consigned to that hell ever break out of it.

Dolan certainly didn’t, by his own admission. The evidence of it is plastered all over Pleasant Hell. The picture of Dolan on the back cover depicts him staring off into the distance, his lips half-open, still visibly flinchy after all these years. The acknowledgements, which are strangely cramped onto the copyright page, sheepishly thank Katherine Dolan and Mark Ames “for all the personal debt.” Dolan even refers to the former as his “spouse,” as if calling her his “wife”—and thereby alluding to her sex—would be a violation of some arcane feminist law. (He’s also squeamish about alluding to his parents’ sexes in the book itself with lines like “So I’d pound on it until one or the other parent opened it,” though I assumed that was because he made a promise to leave them out of the story as much as possible.)

This is why Pleasant Hell is required reading for men, for anyone with a flicker of intelligence, for anyone with their head screwed on straight. It’s one of the most hilarious and accurate portraits of American culture and modern masculinity that has ever been written. It’s a textbook example of how to tell a story the right way, the honest way, the brutal way. And if you absolutely need some kind of “lesson” or “moral” from the book, that’s it right there: how to tell a story.

Because God knows few writers can do that.

Click here to buy Pleasant Hell.

Read Next: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm

If this post makes me seem behind the times, I don’t really care. I don’t watch TV, don’t even have cable, and I’ve seen exactly two movies in the past year: Django Unchained and Gangster Squad. I vaguely followed the media fracas around Girls when it debuted last year, and by “vaguely followed” I mean I just slapped my forehead at the idiotic accusations of racism against the show’s writers. I’m half-convinced that Lena Dunham hired Ryan Holiday or some other media manipulator to gin up a completely bogus controversy that would stir interest in this otherwise unwatchable show.

No really, Girls is garbage.

It’s not funny. It’s not truthful. It’s not even entertaining in a “so-bad-it’s-good” kind of way. All of you people in the manosphere who think that Girls somehow espouses red pill truths are completely wrong, and even if you were right, so what? Am I required to rubberstamp every piece of shit that crosses my desk just because it reaffirms my worldview? If Lena Dunham is the voice of my generation, I don’t want to be part of this generation any more. Will you GenXers take me?

Here are the big reasons why Girls sucks.

1. Lena Dunham is intolerably ugly.

Dunham isn’t the ugliest actress working today, but she’s certainly trying to snag the top (bottom?) spot. She was already dealt a bad genetic hand in her gargantuan cow thighs, tiny breasts and flat ass, but she’s inexplicably decided to worsen the problem by refusing to exercise in any way, giving her a stomach that protrudes out further than her chest, flabby arms and a hideous double chin. Combine that with her freakishly translucent skin, tasteless tattoos and premature aging caused by a poor diet (she’s only a little older than I am and she’s already developing forehead wrinkles) and I almost feel like I should offer her condolences for whatever life-threatening disease she’s fighting.

And yet, in some lunatic inversion of common sense, Dunham is the only actress on the show who ever gets naked.

Okay, that’s not quite true; in one episode, we get a nude scene from Dunham’s character’s mother, the only woman on the show I want to see naked even less. Who’s the idiot at HBO who green-lit this? Girls has a veritable plethora of attractive women, from Allison Williams (who resembles an old high school crush of mine) to Jemima Kirke (who resembles one of those shapely Russian women who pose nude for Met-Art or Femjoy). Even Zosia Mamet, with her creepy beady eyes, is decent-looking. And yet they never show us more than their thighs, leaving us to watch Dunham’s numerous vomit-inducing sex scenes, where she looks like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man getting stabbed with an icicle.

The worst part is that the idiots in the mainstream media are heralding Dunham’s disturbing lack of shame as a great leap forward for American culture. “Omigod it’s so wonderful that a REAL woman is being depicted on TV!” What the fuck is wrong with you people? Since when was there a law that requires entertainment—something we engage in to escape the dreariness of our existence—to be a perfect mirror of our everyday lives? I have to look at fat, pasty white girls every day, at the bank, the gas station, the supermarket and more, and they usually have bad attitudes and bastard spawn along with their jiggling rolls.

Why would I want to watch fat, pasty white girls for fun?

2. Girls is not funny.

This is easily one of the most badly written shows I’ve ever watched. The worst part is that Girls is crummy on purpose: it’s firmly rooted in the mumblecore aesthetic, one of the most loathsome cultural movements spawned in the history of film. For those of you not in the know, mumblecore is a genre conceived by upper middle-class Brooklyn hipsters featuring non-professional actors, ugly cinematography, “realistic” improvised dialogue, and thin plots revolving around the tedium of post-college life.

In other words, it’s the kind of movement that could only be spawned by arrogant trust-fund nihilists.

Prior to Girls, Lena Dunham’s only artistic achievement was the mumblecore film Tiny Furniture, and it’s clear she learned nothing from the experience. The bland, wordy dialogue in Girls makes watching it, particularly the early episodes, an exercise in frustration. The pilot episode is so bad that were it not for Dunham and her co-stars having rich and famous daddies, it wouldn’t even be fit for public access TV. There’s no wit, no bite, no filter, just a nauseating smugness that permeates the entire episode. The only time I even chuckled was during the scene where Hannah passes out while talking to her parents because she can’t handle her opium.

In the show’s defense, the second half of the first season is a little funnier, but even then, the writers seem hell bent on sucking out what little comedy Girls has, like a clown mainlining helium from a balloon. Every time the show actually starts to get good, Dunham and her girlfriends find some way to wreck it. For example, the scene at the end of episode five, where Hannah walks in on Adam jerking off, starts off funny but deflates quickly due to the poor writing:

Adam: Does it turn you on, to watch me touch my own cock?

Hannah: Kind of, yeah.

Adam: Or does it disgust you? Do you think I’m really bad?

Hannah: No, I don’t think you’re bad. I mean, everyone does it—

Adam: You think I’m pathetic and disgusting?

Hannah: Yes, actually.

Adam: You do? Why?

Hannah: Because there’s a woman standing less than ten feet from you and all you can do is play with your own cock.

Adam: Is it bad?

Hannah: It’s really bad. It’s pathetic and bad and disgusting and weird and lazy.

Adam: Plus, if you have a big cock, you should use it on a woman.

Hannah: It’s not that big.

Adam: It’s not?

Hannah: No. Maybe that’s why you don’t want me to touch it; maybe you’re embarrassed because it’s not that big.

Adam: Maybe…

This is the kind of writing that you’re supposed to have beaten out of you before you finish your freshman year of college. And this isn’t even the full scene; it goes on for another two minutes, the dialogue constantly circling around the point. The other great scenes in the first season come from episode eight, where Adam pisses on Hannah while she’s showering and when Jessa and Marnie get picked up by a high-strung businessman who tries to guilt them into a threesome. The former is about the only scene in the show that is actually done well, because it’s short and gets to the point, while the latter is—once again—ruined by the fact that it drags on too long.

3. Girls is blue pill to the core.

This is the biggest sin of all. Lena Dunham has duped about half of the manosphere into thinking that her show is somehow espousing anti-feminist truths about sex and women. The reality is that Girls is a box of blue pills in red pill packaging. It’s a celebration of the flakiness and uselessness of modern young women disguised as a satire, in the same way that Stuff White People Like and Portlandia are self-gratification disguised as self-abasement.

It’s true that Girls’ protagonists, with the possible exception of Mamet’s character Shoshanna, are self-absorbed, ignorant, lazy shits. Marnie is a flaky snot who detonates her relationship because she can’t handle dating a man who actually respects her the way society tells him too. Jessa is a carefree slut who causes pain and grief to those around her, whether she misses her abortion appointment to have sex with a stranger she met in a bar or incites a gang of punks to beat up her boss. Hannah is the worst of all, a mooch who callously uses her friends, who leads Adam into thinking that she’s interested in a relationship only to dump him at the last minute, who thinks her parents are obligated to endlessly fund her frivolity.

The problem is we’re supposed to root for these characters.

Girls is framed in such a fashion that we’re required to sympathize with the main characters and view their flaws as pluses. For example, the pilot episode ends with Hannah waking up in her parents’ hotel room, trying to order room service on their dime, then stealing the tip they left for the maid. We’re clearly intended to feel sorry for her because her miserly parents and selfish roommate have reduced her to stealing from the poor just to survive.

The supposed “red pill” elements in the script—Hannah’s and Marnie’s relationships with their boyfriends—are clearly framed in a pro-feminist manner. Yes, Adam is an aloof asshole who makes Hannah live out his sick sexual fantasies, like pretending that she’s an eleven year-old girl that he’s raping. But their relationship isn’t framed as a result of Hannah’s hypergamous impulses and poor decision-making, but as a result of how she’s misunderstood and mistreated by the world at large. And when Hannah misleads Adam into falling in love with her, only to break his heart at the last minute, he’s treated as mere collateral damage in her quest for self-actualization.

She’s an empowered independent woman! She doesn’t have to honor her commitments if she doesn’t want to, you sexist misogynist pigs!

I could go into greater detail with Marnie’s and Jessa’s relationships with men and how they fit the same script, but you can figure it out on your own. Girls is yet another example of the mainstream media co-opting underground culture for its own purposes. Much in the same way that the Clash was designed to de-fang punk rock, or how Tom Wolfe’s books were designed to neuter gonzo journalism, Girls’ primary purpose is to inoculate an entire generation of women against the red pill.

“So what if you’re fat and slovenly? You’re fine just as you are, girl!”

“Stuck in relationships with losers? It’s not your fault, you’re a strong, smart woman and guys simply can’t appreciate your awesomeness!”

“Parents cutting you off, making you get a real job? They’re just big meanies who don’t understand your genius!”

It depresses me to see guys in the manosphere praising this cultural gentrification as a good thing.

I should mention that this post was based solely off of the first season; the second season isn’t yet out on DVD and I have no intention of watching it. I don’t need to lick every turd in the litter box to know I’m dealing with a pile of shit.

Click here to buy Girls: The Complete First Season.

Read Next: Day Bang: How to Casually Pick Up Girls During the Day by Roosh V

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on January 5, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

I referred to this travel memoir in my original review of Roosh’s A Dead Bat in Paraguay as another example of a young man suffering a quarter-life crisis and going on a journey abroad to cure himself. Now, I’ve decided to give Thomas Kohnstamm’s story of sleaze and scandal the full treatment. While weak in some areas, Travel Writers is an outstanding entry in the travelogue genre and a must read for young men today.

As I mentioned in my Paraguay review, Kohnstamm achieved some minor notoriety when Travel Writers was released four years ago due to its muckraking angle. The book concerns part of Kohnstamm’s tenure as a writer for Lonely Planet, where he claimed to have fabricated parts of the guidebooks he wrote or contributed to. He even claimed to have contributed to Lonely Planet’s guide to Colombia without having set foot in the country, getting all the information from his then-girlfriend, who worked at the Colombian consulate in San Francisco. Despite all the furor, only about a quarter of Travel Writers at best can be considered an expose on the travel writing industry; the rest is riveting travel memoir.

In the opening chapters, Kohnstamm writes about the alienation he felt that drove him to abandon his life to roam Brazil. His story is familiar: after struggling in minimum-wage hell with his useless Latin American Studies degree (at one point, he was working the women’s dressing room at a Club Monaco), he stumbles into a high-paid Wall Street cubicle job. Even with money coming in and an attractive girlfriend, Kohnstamm still feels lost and aimless:

I stare blankly at my computer screen. I want to gouge out my eyes with paper clips and gash my wrists with manila folders. Why am I sitting here, aiding and abetting white-collar criminals and merging with my ergonomically correct office chair, when I should be on the beach in Brazil?

After getting an email offer from Lonely Planet to write the next edition of their Brazilian guidebook, the seed of doubt is planted in Kohnstamm’s mind. Finally, after a conversation with his bitchy social striver girlfriend, Kohnstamm throws up his arms, tells his bosses to go fuck themselves, and walks out on his old life. After a rum and cocaine-fueled night of “fuck[ing] up New York City” with his crackpot pal the Doctor, Kohnstamm hops on the earliest flight to Rio. It doesn’t take him long to realize that not only is Lonely Planet’s deadline of less than two months too short for him to effectively do his job (covering the entirety of northeastern Brazil), he’s on the verge of bankruptcy, his advance being absolutely pitiful.

Travel Writers’ style veers wildly between the nihilistic, don’t-give-a-fuck attitude of gonzo journalism and the prissy, uptight diction of SWPLtopia. Kohnstamm is surprisingly good about keeping sentimentality to a minimum, as shown in an episode near the middle of the book where he hooks up with a Brazilian model in Olinda who turns out to be a… well, I won’t spoil it, but you can see the twist coming from a mile away. At the same time, he has an annoying habit of slipping into liberal arts psychobabble, such as when he starts blathering on about “cultural relativism” while watching a Brazilian guy beat the stuffing out of his woman in a dive bar. At times, the contrast makes the book feel schizophrenic, as if two entirely different people were narrating the same sequence of events.

Even still, the book is engaging, with Kohnstamm narrating his escapades with the right mix of frankness and exaggeration, whether he’s talking about his attempts to sell drugs, his narrow escape from the Brazilian police, or his brief affair with an Austrian stewardess who goes psycho stalker on him. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? is a funny, entertaining travel memoir and and a great read.

Click here to buy Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Read Next: To Travel Hopelessly: A TEFL Memoir by English Teacher X

Have you ever wondered why all economic systems end up in the same place? Communism, capitalism, libertarianism, social democracy, Falangism, feminism; at the end of the day, barely anything distinguishes them, at least if you’re one of the proles, the poor, unlucky bastards stuck shoveling the coal or picking the cotton. Whether it was the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., Sweden or Singapore, every nation organizes itself around work and production, carrying with a whole host of mechanisms designed to strip everyone involved of their humanity. The cult of mercantilism is so ingrained in our society that it even cripples our ability to enjoy ourselves or love others.

The Who may have sung about how they wouldn’t get fooled again, but the human race has been getting fooled all the way back to Moses’ day.

Raoul Vaneigem is one of the thinkers who witnessed the Cold War and saw the inherent absurdity of the conflict between Russia and America; both sides purported to stand for freedom and prosperity, but used the exact same methods of social dehumanization and statist repression to maintain control. While he began his career as a member of the Situationist International, Vaneigem progressively rejected Marxism as yet another false opposition and began formulating his own alternative to the status quo.

Now, the best of his works have been compiled in this Kindle title.

Trevor Blake sent me a copy of Selected Works after my review of Ernest Mann’s I Was Robot resulted in a dramatic uptick in sales. Like Mann, Vaneigem’s work focuses on the deleterious nature of our consumption-based economy and social structure. Unlike Mann, who was focused on the negative externalities of work, Vaneigem takes aims at the way that work retards our minds and cripples our ability to relate to our loved ones:

Roles have become impoverished within the context of a fragmentary power eaten away by that which had been made not sacred, just as the spectacle represents an impoverishment in comparison with myth. They betray its mechanisms and artifices so clumsily that power, to defend itself against popular denunciation of the spectacle, has no other alternative than to initiate such denunciation itself by even more clumsily replacing actors or ministers, or by organizing pogroms of prefabricated scapegoats (agents of Moscow , Wall Street, the Judeocracy or the Two Hundred Families). Which also means that the whole cast has been forced to become hams, that style has been replaced by mannerisms.

Selected Works covers a wide scope of Vaneigem’s writing, most notably his legendary 1967 manifesto The Revolution of Everyday Life, which had a significant influence on the May 1968 uprising in Paris. In Everyday Life, Vaneigem deconstructs the fundamental nature of mercantile society and how it perverts human desires and motives to perpetuate itself:

Consumer goods are tending to lose all use-value. Their nature is to be consumable at all costs. (Recall the recent vogue of the nothing-box in the USA: an object which cannot be used for anything at all.) And as General Eisenhower so candidly explained, the present economic system can only be rescued by turning man into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest possible number of consumable values, which is to say, non-values, or empty, fictitious, abstract values. After being “the most precious kind of capital,” in Stalin’s happy phrase, man must now become the most valued of consumer goods. The stereotyped images of the star, the poor man, the communist, the murderer-for-love, the law-abiding-citizen, the rebel, the bourgeois, will replace man, putting in his place a system of multi copy categories arranged according to the irrefutable logic of automation. Already the idea of ‘teenager’ tends to define the buyer in conformity with the product he buys, to reduce his variety to a varied but limited range of objects in the shops, (Records, guitars, Levis…). You are no longer as old as you feel or as old as you look, but as old as what you buy. The time of production-society where ‘time is money’ will give way to the Time of consumption, measured in terms of products bought, worn out and thrown away: a Time of premature old age, which is the eternal youth of trees and stones.

While Vaneigem wrote Everyday Life during his tenure in the Situationist International, he had already begun to turn against much of the mindless Marxist cant that characterized his contemporaries. The volumes that immediately follow it, “Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle, Intended to Be Discussed, Corrected, and Principally, Put Into Practice Without Delay” and “The Book of Pleasures,” show this, as he puts forth a concrete plan of action for changing the world:

The men who carried out the massacres against the Paris Commune and the Commune of Budapest have taught us that the repression is always ruthless and that the peace of graveyard is the only promise that is ever honored by the forces of the Statist order of things. When the confrontation reaches the stage where the repression will spare no one, let us not spare any of these cowards who merely await our defeat as their opportunity to play the executioner. We must put their residential areas to the torch, eliminate hostages and ruin the economy so that not a trace remains of that which has prevented us from becoming all is left remaining.

“The Book of Pleasures” is the other cornerstone piece of Selected Works, and the last in the volume. In it, Vaneigem argues that mercantile society survives in part by muzzling the human capacity for pleasure in a million subtle ways, from referring to the orgasm as la petite mort to symbolically “castrating” men, women and children. He also lays into feminism for seeking to replace patriarchal oppression with a new form of oppression. At points the book reads a little like something a delusional hippie would spout off after one too many acid trips, particularly with asides like this:

Few people breathe with the love of self. We should take our cue from lovers who drink each other’s saliva, lick each other’s sweat, and drop for drop sip cyprine and sperm. They utterly give up worrying whether other people think they smell saintly or sulfurous.

Reading that made me flash back to the section in Hooking Up where Tom Wolfe talks about how the hippies’ horrifying lack of hygiene led them to develop diseases that had been eliminated millennia ago.

That’s one of the bigger problems with Selected Works. The others pertain to Vaneigem’s prose style. I’m not sure how much of it is due to translation issues (Vaneigem is Belgian and wrote all of his books and essays in French), but much of Selected Works reads awkwardly and starchily. Vaneigem’s habit of slipping in curse words every so often doesn’t help, and makes him come off as pathetically as the high school teacher who says “damn” or “hell” every so often to fake-shock his students:

We have only the eyes in our heads left. With our intellect we scan the labyrinths of inauthentic life. In the old story a child who gazes on his mother’s sex is struck blind. The stories told in modern education go one better: by all means stare at your mother’s cunt but don’t enjoy it. Thought stares and no longer lives in experience.

My other issue with Selected Works is the absence of any kind of introduction from Trevor, which would have helped ease me into the currents of Vaneigem’s thought. Additionally, the earlier short works in the book (“Basic Banalities” and “Some Theoretical Topics That Need to Be Dealt with Without Academic Debate or Idle Speculation”) are a slog to get through; combined with the absence of an introduction, this could dissuade less tolerant readers from reading long enough to get to the good stuff.

In spite of all the book’s flaws, as well as the weirdness in “The Book of Pleasures,” I highly recommend Selected Works. Even if you disagree with Vaneigem’s ideas and conclusions, his writings are thought-provoking and force you to re-evaluate your prejudices and beliefs. Not many books can do that. If you have any interest in philosophy or anti-consumerist thought, you need to read this book.

Click here to buy Raoul Vaneigem Selected Works 1962-1979.

Read Next: Three Must-Read Works of Fiction

On the recommendation of Blowhard, Esq., I checked out this novella from Lloyd Fonvielle, best known for being the guy who wrote the screenplay for The Mummy (the original, not the godawful sequels), and I have to say that I liked it. It’s brief, it’s concise, it’s thrilling and believable and doesn’t talk down to the reader.

In other words, it’s everything that fiction should be.

Missouri Green is a Western, revolving around the eponymous protagonist, a New Orleans prostitute who tires of her job and decides to make the perilous journey west to California. To help her survive the journey and mine for gold, she buys herself a slave named Jim, a highly-skilled outdoorsman. I can’t help but see this as a blatant reference to Huckleberry Finn, not only because Missouri constantly calls him “Nigger Jim” (“nigger”-phobic liberals beware), but because a big part of the plot concerns her learning to respect Jim and view him as a smart, loyal human being:

She smiled at him fondly. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, Jim. You know that.” She reached out for his hand and pulled him down and he sat beside her on the bed. “You love me, don’t you, Jim?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“And you know I love you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I know.”

“Then we had the best of it, Jim— the best there is in this sorry world.” She ran her finger across his face, leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. Then she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. “I guess I’ll go to Hell for that. Find out soon enough, won’t I, Jim?”

Fonvielle deftly avoids falling into the “magical negro” trap by depicting Jim with complexity and depth. He begins the novel openly resentful of Missouri and even comes close to murdering her a couple of times. None of this feels forced, though, thanks to Fonvielle’s crisp, unpretentious style and economical use of words (the book can be read in less than an hour):

Missouri took the bill of sale out of a pocket in her dress and said, “What the hell do you think that is? Says I bought him.”

Harpending stood up with righteous indignation shaking his whole frame. He said, “That paper is an affront to God and Christian civilization!”

“England don’t tell us what to do no more. We throwed you off so we could be free.”

“Do you realize the idiocy of the words you’ve just spoken?”

“Do you realize you’re a jackass?”

Harpending picked up a tin plate and a fork and banged them together loudly.

The book starts to come apart in the final chapter, but otherwise, Missouri Green is a damn good read, and worth a look even if you aren’t normally into this kind of genre fiction.

Click here to buy Missouri Green.

Read Next: Disgruntled Fat Sluts of the World, Unite!

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on February 15, 2010. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

For all my busting of libertarians’ balls, I was more sympathetic towards libertarianism when I was younger. While in high school and searching for an ideological pier to tether my boat to, I happened upon my mom’s collection of dog-eared paperbacks by the world’s most famous female autist, Ayn Rand. Her philosophy and its ethos of capitalism, logic and reason was a refreshing change from the soft, squishy socialism that permeated the teachings of the Catholic school I attended. I glommed onto her worldview like a barnacle on an oil tanker, quickly devouring her four novels and her countless essay collections. I even cited Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness in an essay in my religion class on how to create a world free of war and violence. I was just a kid then; I didn’t notice Rand’s repetitious, Aspergery writing style, her turgid prose, the massive logical holes in her arguments, her complete lack of humor (actual Rand quote from The Philosophy of Objectivism: “The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.”), and the fact that her writing actually got WORSE as time went on. Once I started tearing into the likes of Hayek, Mises, and Kirk, I was done with Rand for good. Objectivism is only a credible philosophy to the young and pliable of mind.

The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, by L.A. Rollins, is the kind of book I wish I had had during my teenage years, as it would have saved me a whole lot of winding through bad writing. Rollins’ tract takes the foundation of modern libertarianism–the concept of natural rights–and not only smashes it into teeny-tiny pieces, he makes libertarian icons like Rand, Murray Rothbard, and others look like complete and utter morons in the process. As such, it’s a must-own book for anyone interested in political theory.

As Chip Smith, whose Nine-Banded Books has republished The Myth along with a collection of Rollins’ other work, writes:

Originally published by Loompanics Unlimited in 1983, the central monograph is a two-fisted display of lib-targeted philosophical shit-stirring that holds up well after 25 years. In its previous incarnation, The Myth provoked a fair amount of measured praise along with entertaining fits of blustery outrage among libertarian stalwarts and natural law votaries, with much of the tooth-gnashing playing out in the pages of the Sam Konkin’s old New Libertarian magazine. Rollins’ thesis also famously prompted movement luminary Murray Rothbard to pen a delightfully truculent head-in-the-sand essay enjoining “The Duty of Natural Outlaws to Shut Up,” and it inspired Robert Anton Wilson to publish a lively book-length companion essay entitled Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy.

The central argument of The Myth of Natural Rights is that the concept of natural rights, as formulated by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and serving as the foundation of libertarian theory, is a fiction, a religious idea that has zero relevance in the real, secular world. As blogger TGGP of Entitled to an Opinion writes in his introduction:

Without giving the game away, it is perhaps better to start out by saying what natural rights are not than what they are. If one were to begin a sentence with the phrase “natural rights are,” that sentence would already be false. Natural rights are not. That they do not exist is the blunt thesis of The Myth. Natural rights are the tooth-fairies of political philosophy, claiming no more substance than the epiphenomenal gremlins inhabiting Daniel Dennett’s car engine. Despite the carefully parsed semantic rigging, a “natural right” is to be found nowhere in nature, and unlike an actual legal or customary right, it confers no protection upon its claimant.

Rollins’ monograph is less polemic than carefully researched academic argument, albeit written with a snarky undertone, free of filler (the primary text of The Myth clocks in at less than seventy pages), and absent the panicked defensiveness that characterizes academic writing. In the opening chapters, Rollins draws a distinction between natural rights, which are “fake or metaphorical rights,” and “real rights” or “positive rights,” describing the latter as “those rights that are actually conferred and enforced by the laws of a State or the customs of a social group.” Contrasting the two groups, Rollins reduces natural rights to little more than wishful thinking on the part of libertarians, mocking them as “bleeding heart libertarians” who conjure up bogus rights out of thin air.

My biggest complaint with The Myth is that the bulk of it is focused not on proving the phoniness of natural rights but on making mincemeat of noted libertarians who base their arguments on the theory. To be sure, Rollins accomplishes his goal with aplomb, tearing Rand, Rothbard, Tibor Machan, and others to shreds, exposing the gaping holes, paradoxes, and pretzel-like mutilations of logic in their writings. In particular, his chapter on Rand rips apart her rationalist, atheist facade to reveal a deeply religious, irrational woman, amusingly dubbing her “Mrs. Illogic.” By spending most of his time picking fights with other intellectuals instead of making an independent argument, Rollins limits The Myth’s effectiveness as a standalone work. Nonetheless, for those who are looking for an airtight reason to disavow mainstream libertarianism once and for all, or those who’re looking for a book on ideology that is unlike anything else out there, The Myth of Natural Rights is a text you should read ASAP.

Reviewing this book without mentioning the “other essays” in the title would be dumb, considering that those “other essays” make up two-thirds of The Myth’s pages. The middle third of the book is a trio of essays on Holocaust revisionism which displays Rollins’ penchant for misanthropic iconoclasm. (DISCLAIMER FOR THE SLOW: While I support the rights of Holocaust revisionists and deniers to speak their minds, I am not a revisionist or denier myself.) In “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow,” he lays into “Holocaustorians” who perpetuate falsehoods about the Holocaust and who refuse to debate the subject, comparing them to religious fanatics. On the subject of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, he writes:

For many people, the six million figure is not a fact, although they call it that; rather it is an article of faith, believed in not because of compelling evidence in its support, but because of compelling psychological reasons. For such people, the Six Million figure is a Sacred Truth, not to be doubted and, if necessary, to be defended with dogmatism, mysticism, illogic, fantasy or even downright lies.

The second essay, “Revising Holocaust Revisionism,” is by far the most interesting of the bunch, because in it Rollins turns his guns on revisionists for pushing falsehoods and lies, accusing them of having hidden agendas beyond “set[ting] the record straight”. At the end of the paper, he declares himself to be “skeptical of both sides”, stating that “[n]either side in the Holocaust controversy claims a monopoly on falsehood.” The final essay, “Deifying Dogma,” is the most boring, as it’s nothing more than a point-by-point refutation of the anti-revisionist tract Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, who made the fatal error of smearing Rollins in its pages. Remind me to never get on this guy’s bad side, as it makes for poor writing on his part.

The remainder of The Myth is devoted to L.A. Rollins’ satirical writings, serving as the cherry on this ice cream sundae of idol destruction. “Lucifer’s Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment” is a Samuel Johnson-esque collection of witty, laugh-out-loud definitions (ex: “Blowjob, n. A nice job, if you can get it.”) that deserve to be re-published on their own. On the other hand, “An Open Letter to Allah” is simply awful, tenth-rate anti-religious invective delivered in the voice of a Rand-drunk teenager who keeps a copy of The God Delusion under his pillow. “An Ode to Emperor Bush” is a moderately entertaining bit of doggerel, but it lacks the spark that makes “Lucifer’s Lexicon” such a wicked read. The book would have been improved if both of these diversions had been taken out.

Aside from its few flaws, The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays is a great read, a well-crafted collection of works by a sadly-forgotten writer. Whether you’re interested in shibboleth-skewering essays or satirical shots at sacred cows, you ought to pick this one up.

Click here to buy The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays.

Read Next: Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays by Irmin Vinson

A few weeks back, I nearly sliced my finger off.

I was cutting open a package of kielbasas and pushed the knife in too hard, plunging it straight through the plastic and into the tip of my left hand’s middle finger. I immediately dropped what I was doing and ran over to the sink to wash up, but the blood was flowing too fast and the bandages I put on kept slipping off. I eventually gave up and went upstairs to the bathroom, sucking on my finger to keep from leaking arterial blood all over my house. I poured some hydrogen peroxide on my finger, then wound a gigantic gauze pad around the tip, holding it in place with some surgical tape for good measure. It took at least an hour for the wound to close up, and I was in enough pain that I couldn’t use my left hand to type or lift anything for the next couple of days.

That experience was far less painful than reading The Red Pill.

This isn’t just the worst book in the manosphere, it’s easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And as much as it pains me to write this review, seeing as R.J. Patton is one of us—he posts as “painter” over at Roosh’s forum—I can’t sugarcoat the truth. The Red Pill is so bad that reading it felt like having one of those ancient Egyptian brain removal hooks shoved up my nose. Everything about it is flat, cliched and excruciating.

The Red Pill is a novella about taking the red pill, as it were, focusing on a guy named Andrew who decides to take charge of his health, career and love life. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same plot as A Generation of Men, with one main character as opposed to three. But compared to The Red Pill, Frost is practically the next Houellebecq, because this book reads like an Horatio Alger movie adaptation by the autistic progeny of Ayn Rand and Judd Apatow. Just sample the first paragraph of the first fucking chapter:

He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t go more than thirty seconds without thinking about Natalie and how much he loved her. She meant everything. She was the sun, the moon, the stars, and the air he breathed. But Natalie didn’t love him anymore and Andrew just wanted to roll over and die. He didn’t realize until she dumped him how much his world revolved around her and now that she was gone his suffering seemed immeasurable.

Now imagine a hundred pages of this. The neverending run-on sentences. The repetitive, brain-dead cliches. The bland fourth-grade vocabulary.

And worst of all, the awful characterization.

The characters in The Red Pill aren’t one-dimensional, they’re no-dimensional. There’s not a single bit of nuance or meaningful development among them. The good guys, like Andrew and his magical alpha mentor Adam, are saintly and heroic; the villains, such as Andrew’s roommate Joe and his sister Tracy, are stupid, snotty, lazy and entitled. They don’t even rise to the level of archetypes; they’re fucking manosphere mad libs:

Tracy looked up calmly, relishing how easily it was to push his buttons and moved in for the kill. “Aw, poor baby. Can’t keep his girlfriend and now it’s my fault? I don’t think so. Fine, you want the truth, Mom and Dad? Natalie told us she broke up with him because he got violent with her. She was terrified Andrew was going to hurt her! I don’t blame her for one second. You need to learn to control your anger or no woman will ever come near you!”

Andrew stood there shocked, unable to even move. Natalie was telling everyone he hit her? He started shaking, tears springing to his eyes. He had to get out of there before he exploded and stalked out of the dining room.

“See what I mean?” he heard Tracy saying behind him, “I told you he’s a psycho.”

Our story begins with our intrepid hero reeling from a bad breakup. Having discovered his girlfriend Natalie moonlighting as the town bicycle, Andrew decides to kill himself out of grief. And despite having only known him for a few pages, I was praying for him to go through with it. “She was sucking every dick within a five-mile radius, you dipshit! Why do you want her back?” Like I said, the characterization is so flat and Manichean it’s unbelievable; even after Natalie and her father steal half his things when they get her stuff from their apartment (which comes after he threatens to kill Andrew if he goes near her again), he still begs her to come back to him.

PROTIP to aspiring novelists: if I’m rooting for your protagonist to huff some carbon monoxide before the first chapter is over, you have failed as a storyteller.

But alas, God and gravity intervene to keep Andrew from hanging himself, and he moves into a new apartment with his best buddy Joe. By sheer random chance, his new next-door neighbor is Emily, an old crush of his from high school, and he predictably tries to Compliment & Cuddle his way into her vagina. It works as well as you’d expect, but Andrew manages to parlay his friendzone status into a date at a bar on State Street (presumably, The Red Pill takes place in Madison, Wisconsin), where they meet Adam, the guy who changes Andrew’s life forever.

Adam is the lead singer in a Doors tribute band, which drives Emily wild. A few days later, after they start hooking up, Andrew runs into Adam outside and inexplicably starts monologuing to him about his 99 problems. Adam decides that this is a perfect opportunity to monologue back at him:

“I was the biggest loser. I couldn’t get a date, I couldn’t play sports besides tennis, which everybody laughed at. My parents were crazy, my Dad was a drunk and my Mom ran off with some drug addict biker when I was nine years old. I didn’t fit in anywhere no matter how hard I tried. Hell, even my teachers hated me. I tried everything to fit in and nothing worked until I was so far down I finally realized I already had something to hold on to. The one thing that wouldn’t make fun of me, that didn’t give a shit about what I looked like or where I came from or where I was going. You know what that was?”

After this stilted heart-to-heart, Adam decides to take Andrew under his wing and teach him the ways of the red pill. Thanks to the book’s godawful dialogue and characterization, Adam comes off more like a male Manic Pixie Dream Girl than the zero-turned-hero cool guy that he’s supposed to be, and violently homoerotic passages like this don’t help:

Finally, they were done and Andrew’s entire body was sore, limbs burning, but he also felt pumped up at the same time. They went to the mens’ locker room and Adam tossed him a white towel from a neat pile by the door. “You can leave your stuff right here,” he pointed to the bench running along the row of lockers, “Don’t worry, this place is safe and secure, you won’t get ripped off like a regular gym.” With that he opened his locker and stripped all his clothes off. Andrew hesitated for a moment, self conscious. Compared to Adam he was thin and small and scrawny, but he took off his sweaty clothes, wrapped the towel around himself and followed a naked Adam to the adjacent white tiled room with a row of four open showers. He was impressed at how clean everything was and his self consciousness went away as he washed up under the hot water.

I half-expected a surprise twist where Andrew and Adam confessed their love for each other, then run off to get gay married.

From here, The Red Pill devolves into montage territory, with Andrew slowly getting cut, starting his own small business, and learning how to behave with a sack around girls, puffed up with horrifying segments where he and Adam monologue at each other. Even John Galt would tell these guys to give it a fucking rest. And naturally, Andrew’s fat feminist sister, once the pride of the family, is forced to move out and get a real job. Every time you think things can’t get worse, the book somehow manages to yank another clump of brain out through your nostrils.

But the real scorn is reserved for Joe. Jealous of Andrew’s success, angry at his fat Asian girlfriend (there’s a segment where he flips out and punches her), and unwilling to make the effort to improve his life, Joe succumbs to omega rage and decides to murder him, Adam and Emily in the final chapter. Again, if this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same plot twist that A Generation of Men had, and it’s just as fake, manipulative and cheap here as it was there:

The look in Joe’s bloodshot eyes was pure hate and evil and Andrew would never forget it. His friend dropped down onto him, knees crushing him like boulders, knocking the wind out of him. Andrew gasped for air, saw one large fist come angling down from high above, smashing hard into his face, and then another and another. “You think you’re so much better than me, huh?” Joe roared. “Not so fucking tough now, are you? You or you’re fucking new best friend!”

Another tip for aspiring novelists: pouring blood and dismembered body parts all over your draft does not make it good. Stop ripping off Bret Easton Ellis. He wasn’t that good to begin with, and your tenth-generation Xeroxes of his phony secular Augustinian shtick don’t even have the few things that make it bearable: his believable characters and sense of humor.

I expect this sentimental garbage from the likes of Oprah, not from the manosphere.

The closest thing I can muster in defense of The Red Pill is that it’s not intended for the manosphere; Patton wrote it for the purpose of bringing unconverted guys around to our way of doing things. But the book is so shoddy that it almost made me want to send a big check to David Futrelle. At best, The Red Pill comes off as a pitiful nerd’s revenge fantasy, with all the storytelling quality of a high schooler’s fan fiction. Again, it doesn’t make me feel good panning a fellow manospherian’s book—and I don’t know Patton that well, I assume he’s a nice guy—but I can’t simply ignore a book that put me in physical pain while I was reading it.

If this is The Red Pill, I wish I had taken the blue pill.

Click here to buy The Red Pill.

Read Next: Journey of a Red Pill Princess

Attention, horny hacks! Want to film two people having sex without being dismissed as a B-movie schlockmeister? Simple: call your little porn flick “art” and watch the critics fall all over themselves to praise your genius. Requiem for a Dream, “Piss Christ,” Passage; there is no limit to what garbage you can pass off so long as the general public thinks you’re making some deep statement about human nature.

If you doubt me, check out Vivid (aka Luscious), the “highly regarded but sexually charged Canadian art film,” so highly regarded that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. The movie is at best on the level of a film school project, or at least it would be were it not for all the shots of Kari Wührer and Stephen Shellen rolling around naked. In terms of artistic merit, it’s sandwiched between The Devil in Miss Jones and the Hysterical Fiction video series.

In other words, if you’re looking to jack off without feeling too guilty, you should check it out.

The setup is simple enough: Shellen plays Cole, a manic-depressive painter suffering a drought of inspiration, and Wührer is his girlfriend Billie suffering his various psychotic outbursts. He also won’t have sex with her, which is immediately where the movie loses me, because any man who would refuse to fuck Kari Wührer circa 1997 is a repressed homosexual.

Cole cajoles Billie into posing nude for him, which causes him to Hulk out, smashing his canvas to bits and tearing his shirt off. She defiantly pledges to “never [pose] for [him] again,” leaves to go to work and comes home later to find him curled up in the fetal position on the floor. Their relationship is about as believable as that of a porn chick who offers to pay the pizza boy in blowjobs, and the clunky dialogue doesn’t help. Every line in Vivid seems like it was written by a teenage fat girl who gets all her information about sex from Charlotte Brontë novels, though I did chuckle when Billie huffily announces that she’s going to jill off in the shower: “Like I’m gonna let you watch.”

And this is only the first fifteen minutes! We’ve got another hour of this swill left!

The next day is when the stupid shit hits the fan. Cole discovers that Billie has thrown away a cupcake that his mother gave him—a cupcake that was weeks old and covered in mold—and nearly starts crying. At this point, I was hoping Billie would crack him over the head with a chair and run off to get fucked by the mailman, but instead she apologizes and offers to make it up to him by posing nude again. After Cole—shock, horror, surprise—nearly has another psychotic breakdown, Billie cleverly impugns his masculinity by telling him he “can’t even get [his] brush up” (I see what you did there, movie), which provokes him to angrily throw paint on her and fuck her atop one of his canvasses.

A new form of art is born!

This is where Vivid loses what little narrative coherency it had and devolves into a series of repetitive sex scenes, interspaced with some of the most tedious improvised dialogue outside of a mumblecore flick. For the first act of the film, we were at least left wondering whether Cole would come out of the closet, or whether Billie would get fed up and stab him in the chest with a kitchen knife. Gone, completely gone. With both his artistic muse and libido back, Cole becomes the toast of the art world, free to gaze into the camera with his tortured artist eyes or engage in horrific pillow talk. We learn that Billie’s pussy tastes like raspberries, watch them playfully tease each other about how they sound when they cum, and get drawn-out descriptions of Cole’s horrible, horrible nightmares.

And it’s all set to an overly-loud soundtrack of whatever generic nineties alt-rock that the filmmakers could afford to license.

The plot finally returns about an hour in, when Billie leaves for New York on a modeling assignment. While she’s gone, Susan, one of Cole’s clients and friends, visits and convinces him to let her join in on the paint fornication fun. As you would expect, Billie comes home a little too early and is shocked to find a naked blonde diddling herself with a foot-long zucchini on her living room floor. Cole, being his usual whiny sociopath self, doesn’t understand why she’s upset. At this point, Billie finally decides to leave the little creep, but he manages to cajole her into not only staying, but letting him fuck her in the butt.

Though given that her sole objection is that “[her] ass just isn’t designed for that,” it really isn’t that big of an accomplishment.

Cole and Billie’s anal adventures end about ten seconds later when she starts shrieking on the first thrust, and they inexplicably decide to abandon their fucking on canvass experiment and go back to regular painting and modeling. Cole’s painter block returns, they have another yelling match, and I started rooting for them to kill each other and get it over with. “Do it Billie! Shoot him in the heart! Bake him some poison cupcakes! Lorena Bobbitt his psycho ass!”

But nope, the closest she gets to murdering this asshole is slapping him across the face, then grabbing the paintbrush and stabbing his canvass in rage.

This magically resolves everything. Cole decides to start painting Billie in various poses: while she’s sleeping, lying on the couch or painting her own masterpiece. Awwwwww.

Vivid is extraordinarily stupid and lazy, softcore for the pretentious. It isn’t even entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-good way, because that would require effort from the filmmakers. Hell, I almost want to give the movie points for its near-parodic depiction of modern art fans being gullible idiots, snapping up the Pollack-esque paint smears that Cole and Billie call “paintings.” But it’s not even smart enough to do that.

If you’re the kind of conceited jerk who listens to This American Life and thinks that mainstream porn is too “misogynistic,” you’ll like Vivid because it will let you get your rocks off while still thinking you’re better than the plebs. If you’re a devout Mormon stuck in a cycle of buying Penthouse mags, whacking off and burning them to keep your wife from finding out, you’ll like Vivid because it’s arty enough to keep those feelings of shame away.

Everyone else?

Skip it, unless you think full-frontal nudity from Kari Wührer is worth an hour-and-a-half of terrible dialogue.

Click here to buy Vivid.

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