Gentlemen, a word.
Someone I care about in the community recently told me of a bad experience they had here and I am trying not to let the burning furnace of fiery revenge get the better of me.
I am trying to work, and there it is, beside me, quietly and quite against my wishes, architecting plans, organises resources, plots timelines, solving obstacles, conducting feasibility tests... all to the ends of burning someone down to ashes.
But that is not what is needed here. So I'll take a breath.
I have made countless mistakes in my life. Here, certainly, elsewhere more so. I am a flawed man and it's from that perspective I ask all my fellow flawed men, read this;
You must do better.
I'm somehow aware that many of the men who need to hear that message have not even read that far. Many men, these days, seem to be albut incapable of anything but plugging themselves into one kind of pleasure, then the next.
Many men, these days, seem to find reading boring.
But you should suffer boredom. Because learning to suffer is the single most important thing you can ever do and it will burn off so much of you that needs to be burned off.
The problem with plugging yourself from one pleasure to the next, the problem with running and hiding from pain, is that you become warted, in a way. If you go from video games to pornography to self-congratulating videos about how you are secretly the main character and everyone else is sheep, and self-flattering ideologies about male supremacy, you become weaker and weaker and weaker.
If you chose not to suffer boredom, you will be caught forever in endless spiral of downward of scrolling, swiping, beeping, foolishness.
And you must suffer shame.
Imagine the child who has done something wrong, who is caught doing something wrong by a parent or a teacher, and who is refusing to admit or accept that they have done something wrong. The child is screaming louder, stomping his feet louder, getting increasingly irate, shrieking more highly as the pitch of his tantrum grows higher and higher.
That is how you seem to everybody else.
When you refuse to be honest about yourself, about your actions, about what you have done, and what you have failed to do, you are the child in man's clothing, stomping, sulking, blaming everyone else.
You must be your own parent. You must be your own teacher.
A subject, an authentic, honest, intelligent subject, such as the one I have had the great pleasure of knowing over the past number of years, is a very precious thing.
She is not a videogame. She is not a pornography. She is a real person.
You must grow to a level of maturity where you can understand the difference between pornography and a woman, a real-life human being woman who says she wants you to treat her like pornography.
They could not be more different.
A woman, a real-life, intelligent human being who has a fantasy of being treated like a sex-toy is perhaps the luckiest thing you will ever encounter, and it is very, very important that you understand she is not a sex toy.
If you have made this mistake, if you demanded and took your pleasure and then plugged yourself in somewhere else, your options are two;
You can stamp your feet, like the child, and sink deeper into a level of arrested emotional development, and go on living as a manchild. Or you can choose to suffer the shame of your stupidity and foolish decisions.
I have suffered the shame of my foolishness and my stupid decisions on more occasions than I can count or care to remember.
You can too. Let it burn. Stand in the scalding water for a little longer.
And come out better than you were before.
Apologise.
And do better next time.
