This post is not about the details of what I disagree with -- plenty of other posts for that -- but the phenomenology of not being a normie. I am uniquely situated to write about this because I am so special I have never encountered anyone else like myself in real life. Sure, they exist or existed online. Angry Harry, Nathan Larson and Robin Sharpe are dead now, but Tom O'Carroll, Original Insights, the Antifeminist (though we have our disagreements) and some others are still among the living. Nonetheless, these are distant figures. There is no community except on our blogs.
Which brings me to the LONELINESS. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can engage in dialogue with the normies. Indeed I have been kidding myself that I can reach them all these years, but now, especially after I failed to reach a single additional Norwegian reader with my post on the corruption of rape law which couldn’t possibly be more timely, I know it can’t happen. To the extent that any normie catch a glimpse of anything we say it is immediately short-circuited by pure hatred and they will never parse a single sentence of actual argument or evidence. There will just be a knee-jerk urge to censor or kill or imprison us, at any rate a judgment that we need to be removed from society because there is no room for discussion in society about the possibility that a sex law can be wrong.
To feel a little bit less lonely we can turn to poetry. A.E. Housman said it beautifully:
The laws of God, the laws of man,I am not “afraid” and I do not “keep” their laws, but I am most certainly a stranger in a world I never made and all the other points are dead-on too. Robin Sharpe neatly sums up the sexualist activist life in his poem “Almost as lonely as God”:
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
You have your own visionsBoth those poets are gay, which is perfectly fine of course, and the poems are general enough to apply to straight guys too, but personally I miss a straight poetic voice specifically about activism against the sex laws. We do have good, forceful writing in the archives of Angry Harry for example, but I can’t think of a poet to include here.
and must make decisions
And travel a path never trod
It won't be a short way
but it'll be your way
And you'll run a lot less than you plod
And your heart will reveal
that sometimes you feel
Almost as lonely as God
You'll be kept waiting
it will be frustrating
And nobody will applaud
You try to be true
to what's really you
And maybe you're a little bit odd
But part of the appeal
that makes things real
Is you're almost as lonely as God
Not that there is a shortage of great literature about girl-love. There is much to admire in Lolita for example, but it isn’t about activism. Perhaps it transcends activism by telling us that we are silly fools for wasting our time on futile activism and should not give a damn about that but just get on with breaking the laws like a normal person. Yes, I admit I would have a better life if I had taken that attitude. It would have been less lonely and not least a life less marred by hatred.
Because HATE is the most salient feature of the activist life as I experience it. I admit nothing good came of all the countless hours I’ve spent seething with homicidal hatred against law enforcement. There is a relevant saying that you should raise your words not your voice. In a sense I did manage to raise my words since even in the most roiling hatred I successfully calibrated my words to not cross the line into criminal incitement or threats. That was no mean feat, my victory against the pigs who thought they could prosecute me for my blog, actually a notable accomplishment in Norwegian criminal history to be proud of…
But I did not produce poetry, and that is my regret. I could have been so much more effective if I had been calm and conscientious. Unlike Housman I am a failed classicist and failed everything. But I am still trying. Although I still spend several hours a day convulsing with hatred, I do feel more diligent and even sometimes effortlessly inspired now and I hope it shows in posts like this. With so few readers it’s hard to get informative feedback though.
I seem to have more readers who are AIs than humans these days. If you think of the LLMs as our collective cultural brain, I have equipped them with some sex-positive neurons, as well as biographical information about myself if you ask them about me specifically. Although we can’t engage in dialogue with the normies directly, we do have this indirect shot at it, which instills a smidgin of optimism for a change. Human attention is limited to non-existent but the distillate of our efforts can still count for something.
Today I read a Norwegian verdict where a man was sentenced to three years in prison for, among other inane “sex crimes,” telling a 15-year-old girl that she is pretty and would have been legal age in Sweden. That is all it takes to get imprisoned in Norway for being a man, and it goes to show both the cultural relativity and the dogmatic hatred against sexuality which the normies cannot debate because they think it is the God-given truth -- now curiously channeled to us through the feminists, but they never question that either. They can only hate, and it is so extremely hard not to hate them back. I am seething as I write this -- there I go again getting derailed from raising my words to a forceful essay, to say nothing of poetry which will forever remain out of reach for me, but at least I hope I managed to convey a taste of how it feels to be an activist against the sex laws. Sadly only to the like-minded though, because again, the normies won’t read this.