This is the first of what I hope will become an ongoing series: letter exchanges with brilliant Substack authors.

If you are a writer and you’d like to riff with me, fight me, debate me, quibble with me, discuss a topic, promote a book or project, or make your wild take that the world needs to hear, please reach out, and I’d be happy to discuss having a correspondence with you. For the details on doing a letter exchange with me, please see this footnote.1

Today, I am delighted to bring you my correspondence with . She is, in my opinion, a national treasure of both the Indian and French people. She writes beautifully about men, culture, sex, religion, and much more at her Substack. Growing up in India and now living in Europe gives TCR a unique perspective on how men used to be and how they are, which means she has an incredibly optimistic worldview and is, in her words, “A man enjoyer”.

In this exchange, we discuss the challenges facing men, feminine and masculine modes of loving men, what masculinity even is, and much more.

Stephen:

Welcome, Cultural Romantic (Miss Culture? Madame Romantic?) to the Sacred Tension letter exchange. Thank you for taking part in this experiment with me.

We’ve bonded on Substack notes over our mutual, unbridled love of men. I’ve recently bemoaned the apparent lack of love for masculinity and manhood in liberal culture (see my article Do You Love Men?). Because of this, I find your work incredibly invigorating and refreshing.

I, of course, approach men, male beauty, and male sexuality as a gay man. You wrote a gorgeous article titled Love As Redemption and Absolution exploring love of men from a feminine perspective.

In that piece, you describe a medieval work of art titled, “St. Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata.” What was it about this artwork that so captured your imagination, and how does it relate to what it means to love a man?

Madame Romantic:

Hi Stephen,

Madame Romantic does sound lovely! Thank you for inviting me to this experiment. I do so love writing letters.

And I love how you love men and have read so many of your pieces on the topic. I admire your writing muchly.

Regarding my piece on St. Catherine of Siena, I was just mesmerised by the artist’s vision of her. It is very unusual in art to see a woman in a sort of “protective from below” stance towards a man, though that is a quite normative position many women hold in real life. A man so obviously in pain, but above her because he is stronger and more powerful. Yet, she “dares” to protect him. And her protection is so powerful she redeems him. I was fascinated by the story of St. Catherine, the way she described Christ as her husband, the licking of his wounds — it’s almost dog-like in devotion, no? —I daresay I have never heard a man talk of god that way. Just the audacity of it all thrilled me.

There is something in the depiction of the feminine mode of loving that is immensely satisfying to me as a woman. Despite the physical weakness I possess in comparison to a man, I know that I can soothe him, envelop him when he needs it spiritually, physically, and the combination of both of these makes it erotic. A man may protect because he is stronger, but a woman protects precisely because she is softer, which is often seen as a weakness, but it’s not, it’s the greatest of strengths. To be soft, to be yielding, to be receiving — these are things that are both physically and spiritually strong and transcending, and I think that is a wonderful thing that a woman can give a man.

Similarly, I see that a man’s physical prowess is often perceived as his “original sin” and I don’t like that very much. It sees men as no different to a puma. But Man is a thinking animal, as they once used to say. So when a man is kind, when a man is a gentleman, it is a testament to his restraint both physically and spiritually and often I melt completely at the sight of a silent gentleman in public — someone who opens doors, carries bags and babies with equanimity, just stands and protects by his very presence which takes care of all the “what ifs” that go on in my mind — I think that is beautiful. But I guess that is a topic to go into detail on another day.

Going back to St. Catherine, I think that painting has some erotic undertones. There is a clear “Giving” and “Receiving” depicted, but there is also a protective softness of a woman, a worshipful “on my knees” protectiveness, and that paradox is sexy :)

In your article, you ask this question, and it has been shared and reshared so many times, and it haunts me every time I think of it:

And yet, still I ask you — both male and female alike —do you love men? Not just individual men, but manhood itself? Is manhood merely a bundle of abuses and appetites for power? Is that all that constitutes manhood and masculinity?

My question to you is — what do you think masculinity is? What is manhood qua men?

Stephen:

First, let me say that your description of Catherine of Siena is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a very different relationship from what I have with men, given that, in a homosexual relationship, strength generally matches strength. There is something wildly beautiful to me about the collision of two men: their affection, their strength, their sexuality. That does not mean that protection from below, as you describe it, does not exist between men; it certainly does. But my experiences are different in shade from what you are describing.

In the 2010’s, Macklemore declared homosexuality a “same love”. Same as heterosexual love, I assume. But this is, in my experience, categorically false. It is a different love altogether, because men and women are slightly different on average.

You write about how sexy and beautiful the restraint of strength is in a man, and I agree. Let me throw another word in the mix: tenderness.

I am blessed to have an extraordinary partnership with a man, as well as many close friendships with men whom I consider brothers. I admire their strength, integrity, and discipline. But what truly melts my heart — what truly demolishes me — is their tenderness. It takes a long time to reach that apotheosis. Men often struggle to get there, especially with other men. But when that armor comes off and a man allows himself to express truly tender affection, care, and vulnerability with me, that is a beauty I truly cannot describe.

Your final question gets to a vexing challenge of this whole affair.

The more I look at masculinity, the more elusive it becomes. I read a lot of books on this subject, and a huge number of them attribute to men what are, in fact, universal features. The chief offender here, at the top of mind, is Scott Galloway. In his Notes On Being a Man, he argues that masculinity consists of the Three Ps: protect, provide, procreate. I have a number of challenges with this framing, which I will explore in future articles.

The problem, of course, is that women, by definition, do those things too. They provide for their children, they procreate and give birth, and they protect those they love. It might be that men and women do these activities in different ways on average. But my point is that when I really investigate what “masculinity” means, it gets fuzzy. It’s easy to start deconstructing it completely, seeing it as all culture and illusion that we just need to get rid of.

The problem with that is that I am an androphile. My entire body and soul know that masculinity is real because I am irresistibly attracted to it. I can only rely on first-person experience to explain what I mean:

Masculinity is when I press my cheek against his and feel his stubble. Masculinity is when I carried my partner down a mountain on my back because he was suffering from frostbite on his feet, and I had the strength to do so. Once in the car, I warmed his body with mine, bringing blood and warmth back into his limbs.

Masculinity is when I hold his hand and feel the coarseness of his skin. Masculinity is when I hug a man, feel his body pressed against mine, and feel the corded muscle of his arms around me. Masculinity, too, is the feral force of his sexuality: the abject, unapologetic objectification of me as an object with a soul. To find myself in the laser-focused beam of his lust: that is masculine as fuck.

In the context of sex, I get charged when I behold a masculine, rather than feminine, form. This is ingrained in me — something I did not choose and cannot be rid of. The build of his shoulders, the coarseness of his skin, the way his hips are categorically different from those of a woman. The way muscle and fat form on his frame. That is masculinity.

Masculinity, too, is how readily men sacrifice their lives for others. The Carnegie Hero Award doles out posthumous awards to everyday people who sacrifice themselves for the protection of non-kin. The vast majority of these awards are given to men.

That’s just a start. I could go on and on. How does that land for you, and what is your own answer to that question?

Madame Romantic:

Dearest Stephen,

Apologies for the delay in replying. I was travelling. I love your description of masculinity and especially your gaze as a man who loves men. Wow, it sounds so intense and powerful, strength colliding against strength. Very Greco-Roman. Troy-Achilles. Sexy :) You know what you love, because it is in you.

In contrast, I am fascinated by what I love, because it can never be me. I am ridiculously weak as a person and can at the maximum carry one suitcase up a staircase without exhaustion, and so men are almost divine to me. What is Superman if not someone who is extra strong? Imagine a whole array of supermen and all of them, just like Clark Kent, hiding in plain sight, yet always willing to give a helping hand. It’s just such a great deal for me as a weaker person to know that the stronger sex doesn’t even MIND helping, like helping takes no effort for them and they do it so unthinkingly, whether it is my brother or my cofounder or a random stranger in the Paris train picking up two giant suitcases and a duffel bag together like it’s nothing. It thrills me to no end. To me, every man is a superman (if we take man to mean human, which it should); the normative man in my subjective experience/vision is a woman, so these beings who are way more powerful than me living around me in secret (their strength is not particularly visible until they express it) is awesome.

I agree with you that these definitions like “protect, provide, procreate” are silly. Because I have protected and provided for pretty much every guy I dated, I started out-earning my men when I was around 28. And if I ever procreate, 9 months of that will be in my body with the initial bang for buck happening with his and my body together (and I love that uh, banging, so I mean no hate).

Masculinity is, to me, best described by Roosevelt (I think) when he said a gentleman is one who has a steel hand in a velvet glove. I see that as soft boundaries, enforced kindness, restrained capacity. And of course the steel hand can smash when necessary (which is why I find the Ukrainian President incredibly hot, sorry I just had to say that).

I don’t see masculinity and femininity as some ancient cavemen aesthetic. Grug the caveman and his girlfriend weren’t consciously thinking of procreating or protecting or providing. He put her over his shoulder and had his way with her, and she bore with as much as she could, not different to any animal in the jungle. Modern stylized femininity and masculinity is a flourish of civility and only can happen within civilization. I have written about modern femininity before — it’s a very long piece so don’t feel obliged to read it all, but I am working on a companion piece on masculinity, and I hope that this discussion will help me get there. I admit just as everyone else that to get the perfect definition of modern masculinity is a tough ask. Especially something that works for everyone, all men and all women.

But I think what I really like about modern men is their ability to make others laugh. Isn’t it interesting that in an older age, only a jester could make people laugh but was sort of seen as a “lower class” of person, and a king or a knight (a higher class person) was forever stoic, and the jester had to “make the king laugh”. Nowadays, one of the deepest desires of a man is to make people — especially his woman, laugh. That is a civilizational flourish, I think. And the sort of stoic model of masculinity pervading the internet is a bad faith experiment that is going to lead to heartbreak and pain, because why don’t you want to laugh and make people laugh?

I also enjoy the nerd archetype immensely (mainly in American media but also a bit in Europe). The bookish person with lots of ideas was not always so valorized in older societies, and I see some of that disgust toward bookish people still, especially on the internet, but in media it has always been romanticized and I enjoy that so much. Harry in Harry Met Sally talks about reading all the time. Isn’t that so charming? Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (which I recently watched) is a bumbling anthropologist whose greatest desire is to find a dinosaur bone to complete his skeleton model and get funding for his work at the museum. I find that so incredibly charming, this normalization of the thinking, socially awkward man as arch masculine and romantic. In the era of Marvel superheroes and ironic stoicism, that archetype might have taken a bit of a back burner, but I hope its cultural influence serves to continue to protect the civilizational man.

The kind of men I am attracted to is very much the nerdy, silly, funny, quiet, shy man. So this is the type that I think deserves to exist more (for my selfish pleasure, ofc), and it is only modern civilization which has made this combination of archetypes possible. I enjoy flirting with shy and quiet men because you can instantly see the surprise in their eyes that this is happening. They look often shocked and it’s fun to escalate and play in such a context (at least for me).

One of my favorite discussions of such man as a deadly force — is the talk (often on reddit where I found it) about Sgt Mike Vining. Isn’t it fascinating that a man like this could be a protector if he wanted to? Because civilization allows for him to be so.

Given that I consider the chief (only?) difference between men and women to be physical strength, I find it interesting how civilization has shaped that difference to be expressed, felt, magnified (when needed) and within its protection allow man to live for his passions and fun and enjoyment alone — even though he latently has the capacity to be Grug, he mostly uses it to lug things around for pretty women and old people and children. And the extent to which men use that space to be playful with it makes it sexual to me. I find their way of being simply divine. Watching them exist is almost ritualistic to me. The more men hold their strength with style, the more I am attracted to them (not an individual person but in general).

And of course I agree with you that the hard hair on a man’s face, even the idea of a stubble, the corded muscularity when they hug you, the way they reverse a car, the way they fold their sleeves, the way they beckon to you with just a hand (to hold it!!!!!) – all of it IS INCREDIBLY HOT. But that kind of masculinity can only be expressed on a personal, romantic level. I mean I would love to rub my face on every hot man’s stubble, but that would maybe be inappropriate? :)

In the context of sex, I get charged when I behold a masculine, rather than feminine, form. This is ingrained in me — something I did not choose and cannot be rid of. The build of his shoulders, the way his skin feels coarse, the way his hips are categorically different from those of a woman. The way muscle and fat form on his frame. That is masculinity.

Masculinity, too, is how readily men sacrifice their lives for others. The Carnegie Hero Award doles out posthumous awards to everyday people who sacrifice themselves for the protection of non-kin. The vast majority of these awards are given to men.”

I am in intense agreement with both of these statements. A man’s hips are intensely beautiful, the way they are so much narrower than my own, just as his shoulders are so much more giant than mine. The contrast is immensely sexually erotic for me. I rarely get excited seeing a woman’s body myself, and as you say — it’s ingrained in me. But the hairiness of a man, the strength of him, his giant chest, the sheer quantities of his sweat, his giant clothes, I love it all.

I also think the physical sacrifice of that stronger body, almost like a sacrificial offering to the civilizational fire (was it Jefferson who spoke about the roots of democracy needing to be watered with the blood of patriots?) is an immensely beautiful way for men to express their strength. Isn’t it such an inversion of the natural order of things where the weak are eliminated for the strong? The runts are cast off by animals, but in civilized societies the strong “brutally mog” (lol) the rest of us in the sacrifice department. I stand, as always in awe of this beauty in their soul. The Carnegie Hero Award winner is not the “runt of the litter”, he is quite possibly, the greatest among us all, and his existence as such is proof of our great reversal of natural law.

Masculinity, too, is the feral force of his sexuality: the abject, unapologetic objectification of me as an object with a soul. To find myself in the laser-focused beam of his lust: that is masculine as fuck.

This part of your letter is the part I must push back against a bit. There is a feral force in female sexuality too, an unapologetic objectification, a laser focused beam, an obsessive devotion (hello Catherine of Siena did it to GOD himself!!) so I wouldn’t particularly categorize that as masculine. But I understand that maybe it’s a difference in opinion? Vision? I have (and I am sure many women will agree) mentally undressed many a man in my head, imagining his body. If you read any “women’s novel” or “smut” as it’s called today, you will know the depth of a woman’s objectification. We talk so much about men that the Bechdel test had to be invented to shame us into stopping – we haven’t, though. Every women’s novel written by and for women is failing the Bechdel test, every day! We are literally fucked in the head for men to such an extent that the literal entire publishing industry rests on the shoulders of our collective lust for your sex :P

I shall leave you with that Atlasian image and end with a question – much more serious, I am afraid – you often write about mental health, especially regarding men. It is difficult for me to read, especially since I recently lost a friend to drug overdose.

What breaks me is the fact that we had known each other since we were 13 years old; I knew about his first crush, I knew about his job search, his problems with his parents and family; he told me everything, I told him everything, I really did, but turns out he hadn’t. Every time we discussed our individual love-bomb-filled love lives, we even had a joke-pact to get married at 40 if we were still single, but how did I not know about the drugs that consumed him in the last few years? Why did I not notice? It breaks me wondering if I shouldn’t have taken him at his word because we met once a year? Because he still looked fit and youthful? Because he always picked up my calls, always replied to every message, because how could a man who had a successful, international travel-filled life be so unhappy? Because the last time we met was on the eve of my move to Europe and he spent 4 hours chatting, joking, laughing with me as I packed my clothes into suitcases, feeling like I was recreating that precious childhood that is now all gone. What I am saying is that I didn’t even know how to recognize that my happy-looking friend was internally suffering from a secret illness I couldn’t protect him from eventually. I hate the idea of him being harmed in some way and me not even knowing that he had to be protected. Having to wait to be told someone is sick sounds incredibly dangerous. And it makes me feel incredibly helpless. Catherine could protect Christ because his wounds were visible, but what of men who don’t show us their wounds? What then? How do we protect? As a man, can you tell me? I want to know what you think are the ways in which men are being harmed and why, and what do you think we can do to help protect this most beautiful of the sexes?

Stephen:

There is so much in your letter that I want to dwell on and respond to, but your final question is so important that I will limit my response to some preliminary reflections and then get to your question.

First, I’m noticing us (me?) struggling with my criticism of Scott Galloway, perhaps without even realizing it. To recap, I criticised Galloway for ascribing to men what are, in fact, universal human traits. I describe the laser beam of male lust as “masculine”, and you point out that women, too, have that lustful laser beam. I argued previously that Galloway is wrong in asserting that “protector” is a masculine trait. Yet, later in that letter, I point out how men impulsively sacrifice their lives for non-kin in greater numbers than women.

This is interesting to me because it demonstrates how thorny this topic is. We are, I think, two reasonably intelligent and thoughtful people, and yet we are still flitting around this streetlight of gender like moths, trying to make sense of it.

Our discussion leads me to wonder whether these universal human drives—drives that make men and women more similar than different—are expressed slightly differently on average between men and women. Both men and women (obviously) have the drive to procreate and experience lust, but it’s notable that while men and women enjoy pornography in equal proportion, women prefer written erotica on average, and men prefer visual/live action porn on average. Both men and women have a drive to protect, but that drive might manifest itself in slightly different ways.

Second, your adoration of the nerd archetype resonates with me and reminds me of my partner. When we first met, I was in the best shape of my life, and he was a hot, nerdy long-distance runner who had just left monastic religious life. (I’m very, very glad he gave up his vows of celibacy.) He is shy, brilliant, and beautiful, with thick glasses and messy, wiry hair, and an adorable nerdy professor vibe. I was — and still am — absolutely smitten. I come home from work every day and find him engaged in some niche endeavor: tinkering with his collection of typewriters, fixating on some esoteric subject (gnosticism, UFO religions, the history of North Korea), learning a new language (he’s a polyglot), or, as has recently been the case, teaching himself how to knit.

I always assumed that I’d go for the jock. Turns out that I’m the gym bro and I’m here for the nerdy professor.

Now, regarding your final question. I am so, so sorry to hear about your friend. Losing someone in such a way is unspeakably painful. Thank you for sharing your memories of him, and for writing so starkly about your questions, your love for him, and the feelings of helplessness that are plaguing you. You clearly love him.

If you want to talk more about him in a more private setting, I’m happy to do that. None of what follows will ameliorate the grief you are feeling. More importantly, none of what I write here is necessarily speaking to his specific situation. I don’t know your friend’s circumstances, and I would not dare to say I know why he passed. Every human is unique, and death very rarely has a single cause. The only thing I can offer you, friend, is fellow feeling and empathy. The following addresses male suicide and overdose writ-large and in general.

We already know the stats about male deaths from suicide and drug overdose, and I won’t regale you with them here. It’s important for me to state that this is not a zero-sum game between male and female suffering (e.g. 80% of deaths by suicide are men, and women attempt suicide 4 times more than men). But men do, on average, face challenges that are slightly different from what women experience. I believe that a number of factors lead to these astronomical numbers of male deaths of despair, and I will list them here briefly. This is not a comprehensive list, but rather my own areas of interest:

• Men have, on average, higher levels of impulsivity and risk-taking, which, in a dark moment, can sweep them into the abyss. This is particularly dangerous when a man has access to lethal means (firearms) and substances (primarily alcohol). There have been times in my own life when that impulse towards death overwhelmed me. The emotional pain was just too great, and a voice in my head started yelling at me to do it, do it, do it; don’t think about it, just do it. If I had access to lethal means in that moment, I would likely be gone now or severely injured.

• Men have smaller social support systems and experience less intimacy with their friends on average compared to women. This means that the vulnerability and human connection that softens the sting of painful emotions and experiences are less accessible. Men then turn to destructive coping skills (gaming, gambling, drug use, out-of-control sexual behavior) that compound the suffering.

• I believe that our culture(s) under-emphasize the significance of friendship in comparison to sexual romance. As a result, men confine their vulnerability, tenderness, and emotional needs to romantic partners, or hope to do so when they eventually get a girlfriend/boyfriend. We should obviously be vulnerable and tender with our partners. The problem, though, is that partnership is not always available, nor are our spouses always capable of carrying the totality of our needs. With nowhere else to turn, the need for co-regulation goes septic.

• Men are not being touched enough. Numerous men have expressed to me that they are only touched by others when they are having sex, and that’s assuming they have someone with whom to have sex. Experiencing platonic touch with friends, partners, and other men is important, and something vital is lost without it.

• The decline of male spaces. My bias is that, in a limited but meaningful way, men need other men, and that something is lost when male-only places vanish, as they have over the past decades. A good example of this in America is the Boy Scouts. In recent years, the Boy Scouts changed into Scouting America, allowing girls into the program. The Girl Scouts of America, on the other hand, continue to be exclusively female. I am saddened by this, and I think it demonstrates a larger trend. At their best, male-only spaces teach cooperation, civilizing instincts, and emotional intelligence.

There are a myriad of other reasons, of course. Let’s throw in the loss of meaning and direction for good measure, along with extremely confusing narratives about what it means to be a man.

But my particular interest, as demonstrated above, is the relational. I believe that meaning, direction, and resilience are forged by human connection. Men are not exempt from being mammals who need affection, tenderness, and co-regulation. Humans are social apes, after all. I believe that when we are not touched, loved, and seen, something goes deeply awry in our systems.

So, how do we fix it?

I don’t know! All kinds of people are proposing systemic solutions to help men (see: Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway). But I’m not a policy wonk. I’m a grocery store manager who writes on Substack. So, I try to solve these problems through my embodied actions in the world.

I try to be the guy that other men can feel safe (platonically) sharing their lives with. This takes some skill, since men (work with me on this) are cats. I have seven indoor cats, and there’s a learning curve to being attuned to them. Cats are incredibly affectionate, but not in the way of dogs. Cats express love, but in ways we often miss. Cats, being prey animals, hide their ailments, and you have to be exquisitely attuned to subliminal cues of pain. Men are cats.

I create the context where men feel safe to share their hurts with me. I listen intently to the mundane things (music, sports, tabletop gaming), and that signals that I am willing to listen to other, deeper things. If I pay attention to what a man is saying, I notice that the pain is often there but often expressed without affect, or even as a joke. If a guy drops that he is going through a brutal breakup, or has been exceptionally tired, or has been “not feeling great”, I know that there is a well of pain lurking beneath the jokes and stoic demeanor. I exemplify vulnerability by sharing my own pains, and that signals safety and reciprocity.

As an aside, it’s important to acknowledge upfront that this is complicated by my homosexuality. I’ve written about the challenge of close platonic male friendship and homosexuality here. It’s a complicated dance, not only on my own part to maintain healthy boundaries between Lover mode and Brother mode (which I have become proficient at), but also on the part of other men who choose to trust me. I, as a gay man, am relying on them to not misinterpret my actions as flirting, and to manage their internalized homophobia maturely.

I also need to be a man that other men respect — I must demonstrate the virtues of strength, loyalty, competence, resilience, and mastery. If a guy looks up to me, he is far more likely to confide in me. I do my best to teach skills to young men, sometimes skills as simple as showing up to work on time or how to lift weights. Other times, if the man is the writerly sort, I encourage his writing, read his stuff, and offer refinements. The passing on of skill from another man, for whatever reason, is uniquely powerful for younger guys.

If I notice a man is looking for connection, I don’t invite him out to coffee, as face-to-face interactions often feel threatening. Instead, I invite him to go for a hike or some other shoulder-to-shoulder activity. In that context, he inevitably opens up. He starts talking, and once that torrent starts, it’s like he can’t stop. All the emotion comes out. I’ve seen guys express tenderness, doubt, fear, and loneliness. He talks about struggles with sex, or substance abuse, or deep, aching, meaningless.

They may start crying, and I tell them it’s ok to cry. They sometimes ask for a hug — an excruciatingly vulnerable ask for a man here in Appalachia — and of course I give them a hug. Men have called me sobbing, desperate for some human connection, and in the most extreme cases, men has called me with a gun to his head or the pills in his hand, ready to end it all. I’m honored to be the man others feel safe enough to call when they have hit their breaking point.

In other words, I try to be the man with whom I myself would be comfortable sharing my innermost thoughts. The goal, here, is that, like kittens, men learn from other men how to play, practice healthy boundaries, and love deeply.

That is all I know to do in the face of male pain.

Madame Romantic:

Hi Stephen,

Apologies for the delay, but it was my 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I have just been all over traveling and meeting very beloved friends.

But this long break and some wonderful conversation with a man IRL has led to a huge breakthrough in my understanding of this now. I totally agree with you that men and women have similar qualities but some in larger and smaller quantities. Because men are the physically stronger sex, they tend to use that quality to display their loyalty and devotion more. And maybe that is where the “men save more lives” thing comes from too. It’s simply because they can. They are stronger than all other groups on earth (as I wrote in a recent essay).

I cannot tell you how much I adore that story of you and your husband. I love me a cute nerdy men, and if he’s shy it’s just a cherry on top!

Thank you for sharing your ideas on how to help men who are in such deep trouble that they attempt to end it all. I am still struggling to come to terms with what I have experienced and my solution is to only hold on harder to the men I love. I hold them to high standards but I hold them close and hard nevertheless.

I love the idea of men as cats and kittens. I scrunch up all the cats I know with hugs and love and they just roll their eyes at me and bring me gifts of dead animals. Which now that you mention it, is very similar to the vibe I have with the men I love. My brother will roll his eyes at how dramatic I am, but will text me songs that remind him of me, because I am the one person with whom he can do that.

It’s so incredible that you do the work you do helping men and I do think that is very needed and maybe male-centric spaces are the solution. I wouldn’t know?

I mentor a few younger men, especially related to work, and what I have learnt is that they will tolerate my emotionality because they can trust my competence and my 20 years of experience. They can come to me with questions about how to write a resume, how to apply for a particular job, if I could connect them to someone who would be good for them in terms of networking — all of these are questions they know I am incredibly capable of answering. The emotionality, the spontaneous hugs, my teary eyed goodbyes — all of these are just the bonus. Interestingly though they start off being awkward about it but later they seem to find my affection endearing. A young friend of mine told me that I was the first person, man or woman, who had hugged him since he was a teenager. It really broke my heart to hear that. If you have through some accident of life stayed single through your teenage, and your parents stop hugging you because you need to prove you are not “cringe”, do you really go through close to a decade with no physical touch or emotional affection expressed physically? That sounds traumatic and almost a dystopian condition. I am glad to have helped many young zoomers on the way to a better career. Maybe seeing that to get a great career you don’t have to be a closed off rationalist suspicious of your every emotion would help them embrace the cringe.

My question to you is, regarding what you think the future looks like — how do you think the current and future generations, especially since they spend so much time online — will do in life, men especially?

Stephen:

Madame Romantic,

I wish I knew what the future holds for men. My immediate gut reaction is, “more of the same,” but I might be wrong. I’m not a data analyst or a policy wonk. I’ve been so focused on the present challenges that I honestly haven’t given much thought to what the future might hold. My goal is that things change. Whether they do or not any time soon — I don’t know.

I hesitate to make any big proclamations about where these trends will go, because I simply don’t know. Just because a line on a graph goes up or down does not mean that it will continue to do so in perpetuity. I try not to make statements about the fate of civilization, or nations, or the existential state of men and women, because all of that is far above my pay grade.

In the short term, though, I think we will continue to see endless debates over what masculinity is and isn’t, because that has always been the case. I think we will continue to see the left fumble their response to men, and the right continue to cater to male insecurities. The political divide between men and women will continue to exist, and perhaps even widen. Hucksters and con men targeting male anxiety will continue to fill their purses, and those who oppose them will continue to misunderstand their appeal.

More importantly, I think we will continue to see men and women suffer in unique ways on average. For the foreseeable future, men will continue to fall prey in greater numbers to particular online casinos — gambling, out-of-control sexuality, and isolation. I don’t see the male suicide rate going down until society as a whole makes a concerted effort to reverse that trend. Men will continue to dominate the stats of homelessness and drug overdoses.

I am becoming increasingly worried about what, in my own limited and anecdotal observations, looks like a male retreat from the world: a flight to gaming, gambling, pornography, and other forms of solitary vice and entertainment. This retreat takes other forms, too: men are choosing to step away from work, family, and social life in greater numbers. I can’t help but feel that this culture of masculine retreat could have a devastating impact on the world. But that’s all vibes for me – that trend could change in five years, or tomorrow, or something unpredictable could happen to change the course again. And unpredictable things are always happening to disrupt how gender gets acted out in the world.

Another topic that is of enormous interest to me is how the internet is shaping sexuality — particularly men’s sexuality. I will have more to say on this in the coming weeks, but I’ve already written one incredibly weird article about how masturbation to digital stimuli can cause a drift in human arousal. I think that this arousal drift is resulting in extraordinarily interesting, unusual, and sometimes horrific sexual behaviors. What does that spell for the future? Again, I don’t know. But the vast world of online sexual roleplay, gaming, camming, gooning, hypnosis, and kink is, without question, changing how a generation of men relate to their sexualities.

By the same token, awareness around men’s issues is changing. The national conversation here in the States is shifting towards taking the challenges men face more seriously. This is spearheaded by the likes of Richard Reeves at the National Institute for Boys and Men. Mainline outlets are now covering the topic, and those who may not make men their top priority are acknowledging the challenges men are facing.

So, I’m simultaneously hopeful and pessimistic.

The more pressing question for me is: what do I do? Here things become far more simple. I continue to listen closely. I make eye contact. I model what it means to be a mature, ethical human. I choose to care about the inner worlds of strangers. That, I am convinced, is the work cut out for me and anyone else who wants to make an impact on the world.

We’re reaching a good word count, so let’s try to bring this in for a landing. Thank you so much for taking part in this experiment with me. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m open to many more, with both you and other writers.

I want to give you the final word (no pressure.) What do you see as the future for men?

Madame Romantic:

Thank you Stephen,

What a wonderfully thoughtful response. I worry about pretty much the same things that you do — online sexuality and gambling being the biggest issues I see facing men. But I see a future of happiness because we are finally talking about these things. They are not just being shut up into a crawl space where no one looks. We are talking about how men could choose other things that could make them just as or even more happy. I agree with you that a graph doesn’t predict the future, and that a line that looks like it’s going downward will go upward someday. I wish there was some way to mass-culture talk to men about how bad gambling, online sexuality and drugs etc could be for them. I wish there was a book or a movie that opened their eyes to this. But I think that’s just me looking for a one-stop solution that would help everyone instantly, and that’s not fair. The slow churning change is the best I can hope for. I am glad that we have moved on from the last decade of uncaringness. The absolute disinterest in mainstream conversation of the precarity of millions of male lives shocked me out of my own happy world. I realized that there is so much out there that must be combated with more than just Twitter flame wars. I am glad I got into long-form writing through Substack, and I will keep hoping that these conversations, the support systems in real life, create the world where I can see the men I can help, really thrive.

I made this metaphorical comparison in an article recently — that for a while we had a recreation of the Regency era for men and women, especially in the 90s and 2000s, or at least that is how it feels like in hindsight. But now we are in some sort of war again, a war inside our culture that is an assault on our senses mediated through the internet. In this 24/7 attention economy, to give sustained 1-on-1 attention to someone is itself the biggest win. We can’t stop ourselves from retreating into our individual foxholes but maybe we can find a way to have friendships and fall in love beyond this cultural war. Maybe we can send each other off to the culture wars with affection and love that ties us to one another even as we battle it out.

As a woman, there’s nothing that I want more than to end the status jockey-ing between men and women, to truly see both of us come to understand each other with kindness and some consternation, softness yet annoyance, love yet irritability :)

Thank you again for this lovely Letter Exchange, it has been a pleasure talking to you <3

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The highs and lows of bipolar are normal, just as earthquakes are normal in Japan and hurricanes are normal in Florida. These “normal” travails are severe, frightening, and debilitating, and should not be taken lightly. But, every so often, a great-granddaddy of a storm hits — a Tohoku Tsunami — a crisis of such magnitude it changes everything.

I call these my Decade Episodes, and they strike like clockwork. The first hit when I was aged 16-17, and it was my maiden voyage into the mad seas of bipolar. I almost hung myself in the shed. I had delusions that someone was poisoning the drinking water. I entered a blackness so deep that, to this day, it’s terrifying to think about. That episode remains the most dangerous, because I had no tools to survive it when it struck. I had to build those tools myself, in the dark.

The second hit when I was 26, fresh out of the closet, and I had just started dating my now partner Jonathan. We had about one month of romantic bliss before the apocalypse came, and I would wake up screaming in the morning because my brain was on fire. At its peak, I believed that the ceiling fan was a monster, like the Babadook hanging from the ceiling. My partner — a hero by anyone’s standards — tells me now that he stuck with me because he loves me and saw how hard I was fighting to be well.

Then, in 2024, at the age of 36, I hit my third Decade Episode. It lasted close to 2 months, and its impact on my mind and body is still being felt.

A major episode is like passing through an invisible door into a Lovecraftian Narnia. Once trapped, my one mission in life is to find my way out, with no idea where the exit is.

My memory of that summer is shaky. My brain, like a protective parent, simply blacks out the worst experiences while leaving their outlines.

Every night, I had nightmares, and every morning, I woke up screaming or sobbing. The tears would start immediately – heaving, uncontrollable sobs. I was deep in psychosis, believing with as much conviction that the sun would rise in the east that a shadowy government agency was on my trail. My body felt like electric fire through every moment of the day – a pain so severe that I can hardly believe I experienced it minute by minute for two months. 876000 minutes of agony.

My only consolation was traversing mountain trails with heavy weights on my back. I pushed myself forward at a feverish, manic pace, sobs racking my body. Fellow hikers knew I was suffering but left me to my tears. Pushing myself forward up mountains knocked the pain down from a 10 to a 9; sometimes an 8.

I don’t remember being suicidal through much of the episode because, paradoxically, I was in too much pain and too far beyond the voice of reason to want to kill myself. Bizarrely, the worst suicidal ideation comes with episodes that are middling on the pain scale. Such middle-ground episodes are bad enough to induce despair, but not powerful enough to impair function to the point of disability.

I won’t go any further into the specific, gory details of that summer in 2024. Much of it I can’t remember, and that which I can remember is simply too big, too much, too terrible, with implications too frightening.

Among my friends with bipolar disorder, there is an unspoken, mutual respect for the privacy of a major episode. We all know how terrible it is, but also how intimate. We respect the Dark, and understand that the box must be opened with care.

People like to believe that the mind floats free of the brain and its physical processes, and that what makes us uniquely us is soul rather than neurons. But a major episode belies this delusion. A bipolar crisis is, in fact, a physical injury inflicted upon the brain that alters one’s reality. That injury is so severe that it is a mortal weapon against one’s personality, thoughts, and life itself.

If left untreated, bipolar escalates. Manic and depressive episodes become more severe over a lifetime, which causes a butterfly effect through the rest of an individual’s existence by impairing work, cognitive function, impulse control, and relationships. The terrible result is that the average lifespan of a bipolar person is 13 years shorter than the national average.

Every major episode may cause brain damage which, over time, accumulates into measurable wear and tear. These findings are preliminary and should not be taken as unvarnished truth. But my subjective experience suggests that something beneath the surface truly has been damaged.

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Gay Christian activist and author Matthew Vines recently wrote a bombshell article in The New York Times titled, I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters. In it, he argues that the capaciousness and rebellious nature of the word “queer” has contributed to the declining support for LGBT equality. This article sparked tremendous backlash and debate across the LGBT multiverse.

Matthew’s article provoked me to reflect on my own relationship with the word and why I don’t embrace it.

It’s not at all surprising to me that Matthew would reject the word “queer.” I know Matthew personally, and he is, to my eye, a traditional Christian. To him, there is nothing particularly radical about being gay or married to a man, and this is the crux of his argument for the inclusion of gay marriage in the Christian world. He writes,

The faithful relationships highlighted by the campaign for marriage equality helped me see that same-sex love could be just as profound and enduring as heterosexual love. They were in keeping with a core biblical idea about marriage: that it is a covenant designed to reflect God’s self-giving love for humanity through the sacrificial love of spouses for each other.

This is, I admit, a far from radical vision of gay relationships.

These words are reminiscent of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s statement: “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative, I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.”

Vines also argued that the immutability of homosexuality was a core feature of the success of gay rights, and that subsuming Gay under the far more ambiguous and capacious moniker of Queer undermines that core engine of equality.

Matthew and I are not the same. I am, of all people, the type to embrace the queer label. I am a kinkster; I have explored gender-queer identities; I have always struggled with gender norms; I’ve always felt like an outsider; I’ve been part of fringe, rebellious, outsider communities like The Satanic Temple. And yet, despite all this, I still reject Queer. I thought I would take some time to explain why.

Caveats

Let me first make an earnest attempt to soften everything that follows.

There are tangible benefits to the word Queer. Those benefits will, for many, be worth the downsides. I respect that choice and will not demand that anyone give up the word.

Matthew himself acknowledges this when he writes,

To be fair, “queer” has certain advantages. It is more economical than “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+,” and its openness can feel freeing to those ill at ease with the binary nature of “gay” and “lesbian.” I have friends who are transgender, or are married to someone who is, who find “queer” a more comfortable fit for that reason.

I agree.

I also don’t lose my mind when someone calls me queer. A Christian pastor recently told me that my work on masculinity is interesting because I come from a “queer perspective.” An old friend from my Christian school days recently said that I was the only queer person she knew growing up.

I’m not bothered by these interactions, because Queer has so thoroughly seeped into modern vernacular that it is the word most readily at hand for many people. I respect people’s right to call me what they want, and I have bigger fights in life than getting my panties in a wad over being called Queer in my day-to-day interactions.

Finally, some of the wisest, kindest, and smartest people I know are part of the self-identified queer contingent — people who have mentored me, who have at times even saved my life, and whose character I admire immensely.

I beseech you to keep all of this in mind as you continue reading. Multiple things can be true at once, no matter how harsh the words that follow.

A quagmire for discourse and a political disaster

As best I can tell, Queer has at least 6 shifting definitions, many of which overlap with each other:

• Queer #1: a slur against gay and gender-nonconforming people.

• Queer #2: a reclamation of the insult and a synonym for gay.

• Queer #3: the broad philosophy of queer theory, represented by the likes of Judith Butler.

• Queer #4: an umbrella term for all the other letters – gay, lesbian, bi, trans, intersex, asexual, and so on.

• Queer #5: a more generalized and deeply-felt internal sense of otherness, particularly related to sexuality and gender.

• Queer #6: an anti-establishment temperament and philosophy.

I don’t object to every usage on this list, nor will I unpack every version of queer in this article. Instead, I will touch on a few that I find troublesome in no particular order.

From the very get-go, though, we see the first signs of trouble. I love words and their occult-like power to shape reality. Because of this, I buck against the capaciousness of Queer. This proliferation of usages makes Queer a quagmire for discourse and a political disaster.

Clarity matters, and it matters more than ever when rights and policies are on the line. Queer is simply too broad and chaotic a term to form a cohesive political message to effect change and win the sympathies and votes of Americans.

Queer is sneaky and slippery because anyone who claims it can retreat — sincerely or cynically — to any of the other definitions when their usage comes under scrutiny.

When someone (correctly) argues that “queer” includes connotations of rebellion (Queer #3 and #6), defenders come back with, “no no no, it’s just an umbrella term for all the letters. Do you not support trans kids? How dare you not support vulnerable gender-diverse people.”

Christian singer/songwriter and drag queen Flamy Grant exemplified this approach when she responded to Matthew’s article with,

We’re not playing respectability politics, and we’re sure as hell not leaving any of our rainbow fam behind to score a few points with the bigots in power. As a queer AF queen who lives (and tours) in both red states and religious communities, I denounce Vines’ short-sighted op-ed with my whole Styrofoam chest.

In other words, a rejection of the word “queer” is a rejection of Queer #5 (otherness) and Queer #4 (the umbrella term), and therefore leaves behind trans, nonbinary, and so on. (To make matters more confusing, Trans itself is also considered an umbrella term, so we are entering Umbrella Fractal territory.)

A critic might, as Matthew did, pull out concrete examples of how radical groups and critical theorists have defined the word. The defenders are unperturbed. They can flee to more solid terrain whenever it suits them: it’s just an inclusive term for people who don’t relate to gender norms or the hard categories of “man” and “woman”, “straight,” and “gay.”

This makes it an impossible word to discuss, and it leaves everyone else in the room feeling bewildered and gaslit. Making the American population feel gaslit and confused is not a winning political strategy for equality.

The simplicity of Gay; the complexity of Queer

In contrast, the words “gay,” “bi”, and “lesbian” have no such luxury. Everyone knows what “gay” means. It means someone who is innately and exclusively attracted to the same sex.

The simplicity of Gay sets it apart from Queer #3-6, and this is the immense vulnerability of Gay — we can be judged and discriminated against for a concrete, immutable characteristic that the word points to. But that simplicity is also its superpower.

Unlike Queer, Gay does not gesture towards a particular philosophy or temperament. Jeffrey Dahmer was gay. Harvey Milk was gay. Peter Thiel is gay. Pete Buttigieg is gay. The celibate Christian writer Wesley Hill is gay. James Baldwin was gay. And, to put a finer point on it, Matthew Vines (an otherwise traditional Christian), and I (someone who is very much not) are both gay.

The power of Gay is that it describes a single, bordered fact about an individual and says nothing in particular about their outlook, temperament, or worldview.

This clarity helps us win because it identifies something measurably different about us but remains neutral towards the rest of our existence. Gay is not a community, or a philosophy, or a distinct lifestyle. In other words, it humanizes us; it allows for the natural diversity of our thought and individuality to emerge.

Gay, therefore, is indifferent to ideology, but Queer is not. Queer includes rebellion and avant-garde ideas in its definition, but is also broad enough that anyone can claim plausible deniability when those fringe elements come under scrutiny.

Queer as rebellion, otherness, and radical ideology

The ideologically laden, rather than indifferent, nature of Queer makes me uncomfortable for two reasons.

First, because a mark of real equality is when minorities are empowered to express a diversity of beliefs — something that Queer #3 (Queer Theory) and #6 (A temperament of political and cultural rebellion) innately guard against. This is the paradox of Queer — it has no bounds as long as that frontier is politically leftward. I have never, in my entire life, met a self-identified queer person who is right of center, or even politically moderate.

True progress is when a minority is so accepted that they can hold a diversity of opinions, no matter how wrong, stupid, or evil, and be accepted by their respective tribes. I want homosexuality and gender variance to be such a nonissue that people are judged based on their character and actions, not immutable characteristics.

I don’t further that vision of equality by adopting an identity that demands a charmed circle of temperaments, politics, and rebellions in the way that Queer often does. I want equality under the law for the Log Cabin Republicans and the nonbinary queers in polycules.

Second, the absence of any (leftward) limiting principle on Queerness leads to absurdities that I’d rather have nothing to do with.

Taken to the extreme, consider the Radqueer movement: an online school of thought that wholeheartedly embraces criminal paraphilias (zoophilia, pedophilia, necrophilia) and truly wild trans identities (trans-rapist, trans-species.) I see no limiting principle to prohibit these individuals from claiming Queer as a reasonable label for their transgressive worldview.

Just as alarming, consider that self-identified MAPs (an acronym for “Minor Attracted Person”) happily embrace the word Queer to include their outsider status. Again, I see no cap on the rebelliousness of Queer that would prohibit such usage for this criminal paraphilia. Linguistically opening the door to such innately abusive and disordered appetites undermines the liberation of people who only want intimacy with consenting adults.

This doesn’t mean that all self-identified gays are middle-class, milquetoast normies and all self-identified queers are wild degenerates.

The difference is in the neutrality of the language. Peter Thiel — a man I despise — is gay, but Thiel’s homosexuality is not ideologically bound up in his horrific techno-authoritarian worldview. “Queerness”, though, is innately bound up to dispositions and ideologies on the left and the fringes of society. While many consider this a positive feature of the word, I consider it a hindrance to true liberation.

So, instead of Queer, I prefer to say what I mean. I’m not queer, I’m a kinkster. I’m not queer, I’m gay. I’m not queer; I support individuals who fall outside the “norm” of sex and gender, assuming they do so in accordance with my ethics. See how clear and easy that is?

LGBT Amnesia

Queer #1 — the slur — deserves some reflection.

Words change. That is one of the few things we can be certain of: in addition to death and taxes, words will change their meanings over time.

So I don’t get frothing mad when younger generations use “queer” as an empowering term. I might as well get mad about the sun rising in the east.

I do fear, though, that the younger generations are losing touch with the history of the horrors perpetrated against LGBT+ people. For all the fears of how bad things are right now, our current circumstances don’t hold a candle to how bad they were mere decades ago.

This forgetfulness is demonstrated by the outrage to Matthew’s Op-ed itself. His article is, in fact, a testament to the progress we have made. The fact that a gay, married man can write a searing Op-ed in the paper of record in which the acceptance of gay relationships is a foregone conclusion is a sign of cultural progress so huge that we are practically blind to it. No such thing could have been dreamed of mere decades ago — within living memory.

“Queer” can pass so blithely from our lips that we forget its horrific history: that it was the last word a gay man would hear before being smashed to death, or arrested in a police raid, or publicly shamed by the American government’s near-century-long campaign of psychological terror against LGBT Americans.

Given how recent this history is – it was practically yesterday – I find the outrage towards people like me and Vines who have moral, personal, and philosophical objections to the word bizarre in the extreme. I can’t imagine anything more understandable and human than having sincere and sweeping objections to the word, considering that, what feels like a mere minute ago, it was a cruel and dehumanizing obscenity.

Amnesia is the most charitable explanation I can think of for this phenomenon. This response article to Vines’ piece titled If You Are Gay, You Are Queer, And Yes, It Matters might be the purest distillation, which argues that any gay man who doesn’t embrace the word is catering to straight delusions. Surely, these people are merely forgetful and know not what they do. The alternative is far uglier, and I prefer not to think ill of my fellow humans.

So, sure, use the word. I was a Satanist. I appreciate the power of reclaiming the most taboo words and identities in our vocabulary. But I resist using the word so readily that I forget the horrors that accompanied it. The LGBT world is, in my experience, forgetful. I refuse to forget.

Queer as Otherness

I have a particular bone to pick with Queer #5: a deeply felt sense of otherness as it relates to gender and sexuality.

As I’ve already stated, I, of all people — an outsider, a gay man, a former Satanist, a kinkster, etc. etc. — would be the most likely to embrace the term.

But I don’t call myself queer for these attributes because they don’t actually set me apart from the rest of humanity. If “queer” means “not normal”, then there is nothing queer about falling outside the bounds of “conventional” gender and sexuality.

If loving kink is queer, then are the hordes of women who devoured Fifty Shades of Grey – the highest-selling book of the 2010’s – queer?

Three of the most consumed forms of pornography on the internet in 2025 were "trans” (18th highest search term), “femboy” (10th highest), and “threesome” (14th highest). Are the untold millions of men watching trans porn, femboys, and group sex queer?

My issue with the broadness of “queer” isn’t that people are weird; it’s that it sets up a false dichotomy between “normal” and “not normal.” Gender variance and ambivalence is normal. Feeling like an outsider is normal. Having an interest in non-normative and non-monogamous sex is normal. So you don’t relate to male or female gender stereotypes? Who does?

I’ve been an outsider long enough to know that everyone — absolutely everyone — harbors an otherness within themselves: secrets, guilty pleasures, and confounding contradictions that would brand them as queer in some way. There is, as Matthew points out, no limiting factor that would bar anyone from claiming the term if they wanted to.

Worse, the false dichotomy of “queer” and “not queer” narrows the range of “normal” by its mere existence. If queer means being non-monogamous, or having an interest in unconventional sex, or having interests outside “the norm”, then “normal” shrinks. That isn’t the world I want. I want a world where weird is normal — because it already is.

So, I reject “queer” for myself not because the strangeness it signifies is innately wrong, but because it is redundant, and I prefer to keep my identity small. Seeing myself and others as individuals first is the most expedient way forward, and every individual contains a multitude of delightful and degenerate surprises.

Meanwhile, I have a perfectly acceptable and understandable word that describes something important about me that does set me apart from most men: I’m gay. I’m exclusively attracted to the same sex.

Don’t misunderstand me: I love and support human diversity. I support trans people, and kinksters, and those who (ethically) don’t fit the norms of society. I just don’t like the word, and I think that’s ok.

My critique of Queer is not to take away the balm that heals the sting of estrangement for so many. It is, instead, to open up the world beyond disgust and polarization, so that we can finally embrace innate human diversity.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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This is a lightly edited repost of an article I wrote in 2020. For six years, I was a prominent member and eventual minister and leader in The Satanic Temple. I spent a great deal of that time articulating my Satanic philosophy.

While I have moved on from Satanism as my core religious identity, I still retain some of the principles that guided me during that time. I think some of these principles I articulate here can be helpful for anyone, regardless of their religious path.

As I’ve developed my personal Satanic Philosophy over the past few years, I’ve received a number of questions from the non-infernal. Questions like: how can you be religious if you don’t believe in God? How do you reconcile Satanic individualism with our human need for community? What’s the point of ritual if you don’t believe in the supernatural? I’ve used these perceived contradictions and questions as a way of establishing a sort of meta-structure for my Satanic practice.

A central symbol of modern Satanism is Baphomet, who contains within their being a multitude of paradoxes. They contain angelic and demonic, male and female, up and down. At their navel rises the Caduceus, an ancient symbol for the reconciliation of opposites. I’ve taken Baphomet as a representation of my Satanic practice itself, holding within itself a multitude of perceived contradictions. What many people interpret as irreconcilable contradictions, I see as dynamic tensions central to my Satanic practice.

I’ve come up with six primary dichotomies for my own Satanic practice. These dichotomies at first seem like mutually exclusive categories, but upon further examination, they are not. I personally see these dichotomies as complementary to The Seven Tenets of the Satanic Temple. If they resonate with you, you are welcome to adopt or modify them for yourself.

Religion Vs. Nontheism

The first and most obvious dichotomy is the nontheistic nature of my Satanic practice. I don’t believe in God, gods, or the supernatural. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist — rather, I don’t think I’ve seen sufficient evidence for their existence. The common assumption is that religion entails some sort of deity or supernatural belief, but I see this as woefully Protestant and American-centric. There are plenty of non-religious people who hold some sort of supernatural belief (we’ve all met spiritual-but-not-religious types who believe in ghosts, God, New Age energies, and astrology), and there are also plenty of self-identified religious people who don’t believe in a literal God. Some Jews, Buddhists, Quakers, Episcopalians, Confucians, and Hindus all claim some variety of nontheism.

As the FAQ of the Satanic Temple succinctly puts it:

The idea that religion belongs to supernaturalists is ignorant, backward, and offensive. The metaphorical Satanic construct is no more arbitrary to us than are the deeply held beliefs that we actively advocate. Are we supposed to believe that those who pledge submission to an ethereal supernatural deity hold to their values more deeply than we? Are we supposed to concede that only the superstitious are rightful recipients of religious exemption and privilege? Satanism provides all that a religion should be without a compulsory attachment to untenable items of faith-based belief. It provides a narrative structure by which we contextualize our lives and works. It also provides a body of symbolism and religious practice — a sense of identity, culture, community, and shared values.

Mysticism Vs. Non-supernaturalism

I consider myself a deeply mystical person, and this chafes both at atheists, who have no time for mysticism, and at supernaturalists, who don’t understand how a nontheist can experience mystical ecstasy.

Myriam-Webster defines “mysticism” as “the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality reported by mystics.” Mysticism and altered states of consciousness are a natural part of human experience. Transcendence has been experienced in every culture, in every time, and in every religion. I believe that the ecstasy of altered states of consciousness and religious experience are some of the highest forms of pleasure a human can experience, and it is a shame to forego those experiences simply because I don’t believe in God.

We can experience mystical union with the cosmos, even as skeptics and nontheists, in a myriad of ways. Meditation, yoga, ritual, music, sex, reading, dreams, and psychedelics all lend themselves to the joy of healthy altered states of consciousness. The important word here is “experience.” I’ve experienced cosmic union, I’ve had tactile hallucinations as a yogi, and I’ve had thunderous, life-changing narrative visions. I don’t have any reason to believe that these experiences represent some external, objective reality. But they still alter me in profound ways, have changed my perception of myself and others, and have given me great joy. I don’t need to believe in literal spirits to enjoy the benefits of mystical experience. Mysticism is like orgasm: a wonderful human experience, and there is no good reason to forego it. In this way, I am a Satanic, hedonistic, recreational mystic.

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Reason vs. Enchantment

Moving from specific mystical experiences into life as a whole, many people are baffled by how Satanists can pride themselves on being rooted in nontheism and rationality while also being in love with a mythical figure that doesn’t exist. How can we celebrate both rationality and fantasy? How can we exist in the world of rigorous reason and science, while also being equally informed by the enchanted myth of Satan?

To be human is to think in story and symbol, and the enchantment of these shared imaginary worlds (what Joseph Laycock calls paracosms) can give our lives a profound joy and richness. To be human is to inhabit a multitude of imagined worlds, be it games, films, novels, fandoms, or religions. My Satanism is a self-conscious imagined world, a paracosm, which gives my world a sheen of enchantment. It makes me happy and informs my everyday choices.

In no way does my imagined narrative conflict with my commitment to skepticism, science, and reason. They are complementary aspects of my human nature, and I feel no need to sacrifice one for the sake of the other.

Humor vs. Sincerity

“Humor and satire have no place in religion,” an Eastern Orthodox woman once said to me, “it is either religion, or it is humor. It is never both.”

Except that, for some of us Satanists, Satan is something of a trickster god — a Pan or Loki-like figure that has a devilish sense of humor. Following in his footsteps does not make our religion satire, but a sincere expression of our religious life. It’s easy for some people who are only used to the dour solemnity of certain religious traditions to look at TST’s public campaigns and see the humor inherent within them as negating our religious identity.

I think the BDSM baby demonstration, the Abortion Raffle, and the Pink Mass are wonderful because I see them as honest, humorous, authentic expressions of our religion. Christians follow in the footsteps of Christ. I follow in the footsteps of Satan, the ultimate trickster god. Having a sense of humor is part and parcel with my religious expression.

Individualism Vs. Community

A source of angst for some observers of Satanism is the extreme individualism, usually evident in the works of Anton LaVey. I frequently get asked, “How do you reconcile the radical selfish individualism of Satanism with our human need for community?”

I see this as another false binary. Yes, Satanism encourages individualism and critical thought, but in no way is that opposed to our communal human nature. We are social and individual. In his book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier discusses the lone wolf and the pack as two different states that we flow between. I personally think these two states are helpful in some situations, not so helpful in others. Sometimes we need to be the lone wolf, sometimes the pack. Individualism and collectivism are not a static binary.

I reject LaVey’s radical Randian selfishness. I instead see my own Satanism as an admonition to mindfulness. I must always be mindful of the cognitive glitches that bias me towards groupthink and mob mentality. Satanic individualism, for me, means retaining a critical part of my consciousness that can have the courage to stand against the crowd, tyrant, or orthodoxy when it is morally imperative to do so. In no way does that contradict collective work towards social change, or healthy community.

Blasphemy vs. Ecumenism

Satanism frequently engages in blasphemy as an act of empowerment. As Lucien Greaves (co-founder of TST) writes in the introduction to the Devil’s Tome by Shiva Honey,

The Black Mass, as it is enacted today has no need for supernaturalism, and it is not performed with the infantile expectation that it should conjure Satan or demonic spirits. In fact, it is our assertion that the Black Mass can be enacted with no ill-will toward the world at large, but as an expression of personal independence against the stifling strictures of supernatural religion that were instilled in some of us as frightened and unwitting children. The Black Mass, at its best, should have a cathartic and liberating effect for its participants and observers. In this spirit, Satanism in general embraces the blasphemous, as we reject divine fiats and the notion of symbolic crimes.

Later in the book, Shiva provides scripts for some Black Masses performed at TST headquarters, some of which involve nudity, urine, and heaps of blasphemy. And yet, Lucien Greaves also had this to say in a recent interview on my podcast Sacred Tension:

I think what people find when they come to nontheistic religion from militant atheism is that this — at least for me — actually helps to reconcile myself more to that idea of religion and helps to kind of mitigate that feeling of animosity, because I know what they are getting. I know to a certain degree what their religion is — or at least I feel like I know what religion can be for people when they don’t have designs for authoritarian power, which was all I could see of it before when my viewpoint was more militantly atheistic. Now I’m not willing to just entirely disregard the progressive factions of these belief systems, but I am willing to work as an ally with them when they understand what I believe, who I am, and they don’t ask me do otherwise […] And I feel like when we really make some inroads in the fight against theocracy, we are going to make those inroads by alliances with progressive Christian groups, progressive Jewish groups, progressive Muslim groups, and other established religious organizations.

This seems like a contradiction to some people, but for us, blasphemy is not an act of symbolic terrorism against other religious communities. Blasphemy is for us, because many of us were abused by these symbols. They are our symbols, given to us through trauma, and we can do what we want with them. When I blaspheme the symbol of Christ, I’m blaspheming the Christ of ex-gay therapy, the Christ of colonial mission work, the Christ of clerical rapists and molesters.

I also keep an icon of Christ on my Satanic altar, to honor the Christ who stood against injustice, cruelty, and tyranny. That isn’t a contradiction to me, because symbols are subjective. I despise the Christ of child sex abuse and colonialism and Qanon. I love the Christ of Martin Luther King Jr., Doris Day, and Thomas Merton. I love and hate the symbol of Christ, depending on context.

Blasphemy and ecumenism — the deliberate effort to work with other religious groups for understanding the greater good — is therefore not a contradiction for me. I still interview a huge number of progressive Christians for my podcast, I collaborate with Christians, and I even worked at a church as a yoga teacher up until the pandemic.

These dichotomies make my religious life exciting, more compassionate, and challenging. I hope you find as much delight in these paradoxes as I have.

To read why I eventually left the Satanic world, check out this article:

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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Do you know what Chaos Magick is? No? Let me enlighten you. In the process, I hope to convince you that the mind-altering power of the occult is a helpful lens for understanding how online pornography is changing human sexuality and cognition.

This article is neither anti-porn nor anti-occult. I am neither a saint nor a vestal virgin, and I consider my life enriched by this fact. Both porn and the occult exist on a spectrum of ethics, and I am not writing this piece to instill fear of either. Instead, I hope to shine a light on how their power can be used for good or destruction.

I have never made a dedicated study of the occult and have mostly absorbed my knowledge from the esoteric communities I moved through as a Satanist. This has given me a working but limited knowledge, and I welcome the scrutiny of readers who know more about the occult than I do.

A brief description of Chaos Magick

Aleister Crowley famously defined “magick” as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” Crowley believed that, when the force of will and desire is crystallized through ritual, it can shape external reality. Crowley delineated between “magick” with a “ck” (abracadabra shit) from the stagecraft of mere magic (parlor tricks, staged magic shows).

Prior to the occult Renaissance of the 20^th century, Magick was shrouded in inscrutable folds of ceremony, vestment, and liturgy. The High Ceremonial Magick of Crowley, The Golden Dawn, and Eliphas Levi were like the liturgies of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.

The Occult Renaissance of the 20^th century, then, acted as a sort of magickal reformation, stripping away the shrouds of ceremony, and Chaos Magick was born.

Chaos Magick, pioneered by extravagant weirdos like Austin Spare and Peter J. Carroll, is a sort of do-it-yourself magick that focuses on self-expression, creativity, and the emotional core that drives all occult practice.

The most enduring innovation from Chaos is Sigil Magick, which was pioneered by artist and occultist Austin Spare.

On Creating and Firing a Sigil, or: How to Make a Psychic Bomb

Sigil Magick starts with a deeply felt, passionate wish: one that is not impossible to attain but unlikely to be achieved witout outside aid. The wish could be for romance, greater income, a break in one’s career, or a healthier and more attractive body.

The practitioner writes down their wish in a single sentence, like so:

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Then, the practitioner marks out repeating letters, leaving a set of non-repeating letters, like so:

VYPNDMU

Finally, the magician arranges the remaining letters into a “sigil”: a symbolic representation of the wish and the passion that accompanies it, like so:

The creation of the sigil can, on its own, be a powerful, cathartic experience. I can’t explain how or why, only that it feels strangely fulfilling to see your passionate desire in symbolic form.

It’s time to “fire” the sigil. If things weren’t weird enough, this is where they get weirder, and also where we get to the first link between pornography and sigil magick.

To fire a sigil, the practitioner must reach “gnosis” — an ecstatic, transcendent state — while gazing at the sigil and feeling the full force of the wish it represents. Gnosis can be reached via meditation or drugs, but the most common method is self-pleasure and orgasm.

Having fired the sigil, the practitioner does not rest on his magickal laurels. He still works towards the goal in boring, mundane ways, but with a sense that it is more possible.

A unique feature of Chaos is that, unlike (some) other forms of Magick, it does not require belief in unseen forces to be practiced. The Chaos Magician is not concerned with why it works, but simply that it does. Placebo, gods, demons, and the subconscious are all the same to the Chaos magician. A purely psychological view of Magick is perfectly acceptable within the practice.

My personal hypothesis is not that the force of will reaches outward into the world, shaping it to meet the desire, but rather that the fired sigil reaches inward, deep into the mind. I believe that, like psychedelics, hypnosis, and ecstatic states, sigil magick is a tiny liturgy that puts the mind into a relaxed, open, and suggestible state where it can get out of ruts and explore different ways of being in the world. Having experienced the imagined possibility, it now feels more likely. In a million tiny ways, a desire is more within reach if it feels more present and intimate.

Pornography, by its nature, is a visual manifestation of a deeply felt wish. When someone goes deep into that relaxed, pleasurable state and climaxes to the wish, it makes that fantasy feel more present, more real, and more attainable.

I am not suggesting that online pornography will manifest a hot, hung plumber in the kitchen while the husband is away, nor a shapely milf to fulfill all your fantasies. Instead, I am arguing that orgasm to a passionate fantasy arcs and bends one’s desire, shapes one’s internal erotic landscape, and thereby shapes one’s life.

It usually starts with feeling a glittering awakening in response to something strange but compelling when surfing porn sites. You discover something weird, kind of enthralling, something bizarre, maybe a little revolting. Despite how off-putting it might be to your conscience, you can’t help but notice a spark of pleasure.

You orgasm to that thing, and that orgasm is the first rain falling on that seed. From there, it grows. You find yourself doing this again and again. You start seeking out online communities dedicated to this fetish. You read posts, you make friends, you find entire websites dedicated to this one tantalizing thing. Before you know it, your life has changed.

Sigil Magick influences the risks one is willing to take in pursuit of one’s goal. Having become psychically unstuck by the ritual, the magician and the porn enthusiast both become more willing to take risks — large and small, but mostly small — to achieve their desire.

This is not necessarily bad, and I don’t think that there’s anything innately wrong with discovering new things that you like online. I think it’s cool that people can explore their internal erotic landscapes. But care must be practiced: great care, great caution. There are dragons on this journey.

Everyone watching porn at three AM, then, is a chaos magician without knowing it, and I believe that this fact might account for the more startling manifestations of online sexuality.

I will now take a moment to explore two examples of this conditioning process found in the wilds of the internet: loser gooners (mostly men) and monster romantasy fandom (mostly women). From there, I will offer some solutions.

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We discuss my experience growing up gay and Christian, the traditional religious view of marriage, biblical arguments for and against homosexuality, persistent homophobia in our species, dehumanization, the failures of progressive identitarianism, and much more. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too.

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I’ve recently had to walk away from a community that was fraught and dear to me in equal measure. I won’t go into the gory details and instead simply say there is a special kind of grief in walking away from a beloved group.

Departures such as these are a sort of breakup, and the post-breakup world is always hard to navigate. I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the challenges of community and what I have learned by leaving it.

In his book Practical Magick, renowned occult scholar recounts his own travails with various groups and lands on a magnificent turn of phrase.

“You possess power to limit your relationships,” he writes. “Nothing matters more in relationship than feeling seen and appreciated; nothing is more corroding than feeling debased, including subtly. There exists no law that you must abide relationships other than those that honor you. It is far better to be nobly alone than to compromise with bad company.”

I believe that there are some limitations to the occultist’s words here if they are not balanced with countervailing principles. All meaningful relationships, for example, will involve some strife and disagreement, and it can be easy to interpret such strife as denigration. This does not, though, negate Horowitz’s core insight.

I love his statement because it flips the condition of loneliness from powerlessness to agency, from being lonely to nobly alone.

Loneliness is a scourge, a sign that we are in deep trouble, and it ought to be avoided. But we will all, someday, find ourselves without a tribe. The question, then, is how to be nobly alone and confront that exile with dignity.

As with all things, resilience during hardship starts long before the trial comes. Loneliness, like sickness, is inevitable. Both are equally deadly. It’s sensible to prevent both. I’ve poured enormous amounts of energy into doing everything I possibly can to never be lonely again.

I realize, though, that I missed something crucial in this crush of preventative medicine: no matter how much I may rightly work to prevent calamity, it will still happen. I’m reminded of the longevity gurus online who, in their noble effort to live as long as possible, seem to forget that they are still going to die. It’s worth putting some effort towards not just allaying loneliness, but preparing for it.

“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster...” writes Seneca in his letters to Lucilius. “This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise ...Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.”

This core insight has, like a great deal of ancient wisdom, worked its way into modern therapy. One of the most harrowing features of OCD treatment, for example, is accepting that the thing we fear the most might indeed happen. Yes, you might contract a deadly disease and die a miserable death. Yes, you might irreparably hurt someone you love. Yes, your house might burn down. “Maybe, maybe not,” goes one of the mantras in OCD treatment.

Holding the horrible possibility in our minds without responding to it, just as Seneca instructs, habituates us to the calamity. We become more comfortable with the fragility of life, and that allows us to be more resilient and resourceful when disaster comes.

Those with OCD have an acute version of the terror at human fragility, but we all share this fear in one way or another, and there might be no greater fear than of being alone. Contemplating loneliness, then, is a prerequisite for being nobly alone.

I do not believe such stoic acceptance is innately passive. Rather, acceptance is the beginning of resilient action. We cannot act on the truth until we accept it as true.

I woke up this morning, the third of June, with a truth in my mind that is so primordial that I have always known it, but also so big that I need to learn it again and again: I am on earth for this.

Did I ever truly believe that I am exempt from grief? Did I ever truly think that I wouldn’t confront loss, heartache, and confusion? Did I truly believe that I was just here for the nice emotions instead of the full range of the human condition?

Yes, I realize: somewhere inside myself, I did think that I’m exempt from the human condition. Don’t we all believe that in one way or another? That we are exempt from the normal hardships of living? That we, kings and queens that we are, shouldn’t have to know the degradations of grief, loss, and loneliness? It might be our most persistent delusion.

The truth, though, is empowering when I finally accept it: I am on this earth to be human. I am here for this, for this, for this: the union and the severing, the joy and the sorrow, the connection and the loneliness. I am here for all of this.

Embracing this truth softens the sting of loneliness. It flips the necker cube from loss to attainment.

The last time I experienced the loss of community, it was, as usual, poetry that came to my aid. A Zen Buddhist Monk’s haiku landed in my psyche as a compass.

Ryokan, an 18^th-century monk, came home one day to find that a thief had pilfered his tiny shack and taken what few, essential possessions he had.

Reflecting on this disaster, which would leave most of us panicked and angry, he wrote,

The thief left it behind:

The moon

At my window

It is crucial, after loss and the inevitable loneliness that follows, to recognize what is left behind. There is always something of great value, something that will be the key or consolation to carry you through.

In Zen Buddhism, the moon represents enlightenment, but to my eye it also represents a myriad of mundane things that are crucial for survival:

The capacity to see beauty in the moon, in nature, in music, in people.

The relationships that are still in your life, and the simple animal warmth of a friend.

The security of a roof over your head, and the nourishment of good food.

Your resilience, your capacity to heal, and the principles that guide you.

How do we be nobly alone? We look to the moon and discover what remains.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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In the film Doctor Sleep, based on Stephen King’s novel by the same name and the sequel to The Shining, we follow Danny Torrance as he contends with his past at the haunted Overlook Hotel.

The ghosts that stalked the Overlook and drove his father to alcohol-fueled homicide keep following him, specifically the decomposing old bathtub lady who seduced his father and menaced Danny. The ghosts of his traumatic past are haunting him long after the trauma is done.

Early in the film, the spirit of his old mentor Dick Holloran appears to him and gives him a weapon against the ghosts.

“World’s a hungry place,” Holloran tells the little boy, “and the darkest things are the hungriest, and they eat what shines, swarm it like mosquitoes or leeches, can’t do nothing about that. What you can do is turn what they come for against them.”

Holloran tells Danny that there is a method to combat the Dark Things and gives him a gift.

“My Grandfather,” Holloran says, “he was a mean son of a bitch. Dark inside, same type of dark as your dad. Beat me senseless, and my grandma too, and when he died, I danced. But he kept on coming back, standing in my room, suit all gray and stinkin’ from whatever mold was growing on him in that box.

“So, Grandma, she taught me a trick. Gave me a present.”

Holloran unveils a small wooden box and hands it to Danny.

“I want you to know this box inside and out. Don’t just look at it, touch it. Stick your nose inside and see if there’s a smell.”

“Why?” Danny asks.

“Because you’re gonna build one just like it in your mind – one even more special. So next time that bitch comes around again, you’ll be ready.”

Stephen King, in his genius, is simultaneously describing the human condition of being haunted by our pasts and giving us a tool to combat it.

I won’t give spoilers for the rest of the story, except to say that Danny’s box becomes a sort of superpower. His ghosts haven’t gone away; they are contained. Finally contained, he has agency over them.

What I am calling Dark, or Shadow, or Ghosts, are the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Sometimes, these stories are well and truly Trauma with a capital T: an unusual and life-threatening situation that the brain struggles to consolidate. Far more often, though, The Dark is a self-destructive story rooted in our pasts that has metastasized across our minds.

Every single one of us has ghosts. Each of us has suffered in some tangible, brutal way. If you haven’t yet, you will. Someone close to you has died. You have witnessed or experienced violence, neglect, and evil, or you have endured horrific mental suffering. Perhaps you have been the villain: you have done the neglecting, the abusing, the betraying, and you now carry the weight of that moral injury. To be human is to be haunted.

Mental suffering is often a malady of attention and a loss of agency over how we direct it. The ghosts from our pasts appear in our doorways at three AM and impose themselves on us. We no longer have control over our minds; the ghosts are in control. As Dick Holloran said, the darkest things are the hungriest, and they feed on us.

The Dark will not go away. How, then, do we practice agency over it? How do we direct our attention towards or away from it as we will and, like Danny Torrence, use the dark for good?

We become Shadow Benders.

“Shadow bending” is a nod to the popular anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which characters control certain elements, hence “water bending” and “air bending.” We can do something similar with our own Shadows.

As my friend and mentor once told me, “Let your horror become part of your hero.”

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I recently re-watched the Robert Eggers interpretation of Nosferatu with my father. Through the entire film, I felt uncannily seen. “This is addiction,“ I thought. “This is all about addiction.”

The best horror is about the human condition and the parts of ourselves that we are too scared to look at in the naked light of day. This is, in part, why the horror genre persists — it is a sort of pop culture shadow work. We can, for the duration of a film or novel, confront the hidden things that scare us the most about ourselves, humanity, and the universe.

Nosferatu scares me because in the portrayal of the blood-sucking vampire driven by hunger, I saw myself; I saw a story about addiction. Nosferatu is the embodiment of a craving that can never be sated, and he is eventually destroyed by his own lust.

I won’t reveal the specific details of my life of addiction. This is to protect my privacy and dignity, but also to keep this article simple. There have been so many addictions in my life. One of the most frustrating features of addiction is how merrily it skips along from one vice to another like a child playing hopscotch, and I’m scrambling after it, trying to chase it down. Giving a full accounting of that game is a fool’s errand.

Sometimes the bare facts of a thing don’t tell the truth about it. We need stories to make sense of it, and metaphors to communicate it.

What follows is a patchwork of reflections on addiction: disjointed, out of focus, and poorly structured.

The impulse to numb out everything and sink into a sea of white static started in high school, when I discovered that alcohol, self-injury, and prescription pills effectively turned down the noise in my head. I was a troubled kid, dangerously depressed and self-destructive, an academic failure and closeted homosexual, bewildered by the burgeoning mental suffering inflicted by bipolar disorder.

Even before the abuse started, the appetite was there. Long before I ever got drunk or high, I would think, “I need to get high right the fuck now.” As an adult looking back on that lost boy, I recognize those first addictive actions as a teenage resourcefulness in the face of pain and chaos.

But I had no inkling of what that resourceful coping would become, and the depths to which I would plunge.

Two decades later, one particular scene in Robert Eggers’ film spoke to me. The heroine confronts Orlock the vampire face-to-face and tells him, “You cannot love.”

“I am an appetite, nothing more.” Orlock responds, “But I can only be sated in you.”

There is a hatred in Orlock: a grasping, destructive hunger that is malignant in its devouring appetite. How often have I thought the same in the throes of craving for my favorite drugs of choice? I positively hate them, but nothing else could sate me. My sober mind wanted nothing more than to be free from the craving, and then the hunger would rise up, unbidden. I’d be nearly doubled over with cravings. Hunger, hunger, hunger, hatred, and hunger.

The depths of that loveless hunger horrify me. Those all-night benders, those 5-AMs, those desperate actions, those near medical emergencies: damaging my eyesight, cutting too deep, and taking dangerous, near-suicidal risks with my body.

I remember with pain the moment I understood, with the full force of a terrible diagnosis, that I’m an addict. It was two AM after a bender, and the thought settled on me with so much shame that I felt like it might poison me. My life is out of control; my competence is a mask; I’m compromising my future. I’m an addict, I’m an addict, I’m an addict. The words bellowed in my brain, over and over again, feeling like a death sentence.

I felt filthy. I was one of those people — one of the degenerates who possesses no self-control. I’d built a meticulous framework of mastery and discipline for myself, and I had no space in my self-conception for this terrifying creature that had been living under the rock this entire time. Confronting that creature felt like a physical wound.

This moment, as anguished as it was, was the beginning of a slow turning point.

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The cravings know me better than I know myself, and this becomes an alarming, if helpful, tool. Craving is like a completely dysfunctional and over-enthusiastic fire department. The firefighters detect the fire long before I do and dispatch their crew at the first sign of smoke.

Debilitating cravings, impulsive benders, thoughtless actions: these are often responses to something out of alignment beneath my conscious awareness. Learning to notice when addiction gets dispatched, then, is a useful tool for self-study if one has the courage to look beneath the surface.

I don’t even notice that I am feeling a particular way; all I feel is the devouring craving, as if I am being taken over by an alien force. When I do look beneath the surface, usually what I find is hurt, loneliness, and directionlessness. Perhaps more than anything, I find that I am very, very scared.

After a relapse, I examine my life, wondering why the overwhelming cravings pounced on me. I missed my time at the gym or on the trails; the most effective method I found to sate to the appetite so far. My sleep was shit. I had an argument with someone I love. Work was stressful.

Or, more humbling, I realize that I haven’t been touched recently — I’ve been too enclosed in my own world that I haven’t felt tenderness and affection from another human.

Substance abuse feels like the most sensible thing in the world when one is in catastrophic amounts of pain. You take Tylenol for your ailments; I take other things. The danger, of course, is believing that there is something uniquely special about one’s pain that justifies a special cure. I’m a special boy with special needs. Normal people with regular lives and brains that don’t torture them don’t need what I need.

The Special Boy (or Special Girl) pervades addiction. All the self-talk that enables destructive actions and all the self-pity afterwards comes down to a central theme: I’m unique.

I’ve uniquely suffered, and that justifies an extreme medicine.

Or, I’m uniquely heroic: a Byronic figure who doesn’t need support or recovery groups or connection to manage the demons within me.

Or, I’m uniquely shameful and grotesque. “But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo,” wails Thom Yorke of Radiohead. That could be the ballad of the user.

The Special Boy is a liar, and overcoming addiction is about uncovering his lies. Everybody hurts. Not in the same way, of course, but nobody is justified in hurting themselves or others, including me. Yes, I’ve seen horrific things in life (surviving a shooting as a teenager, for example), but that makes me normal in the grand scheme of humanity. It is we — the modern, climate-controlled, democratic, and sheltered — who are strange. The violence and despair I have experienced in life do not make me an outlier but instead put me in closer proximity to the universal condition of humanity throughout our history.

No matter whether the voice is self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement, it always comes back to the same thing: I’m special. Normality, mediocrity, and universal humanity are the bane of addiction’s existence.

One of the Special Boy’s favorite hobbies is looking for tragic causal narratives for addiction.

Maybe I was traumatized. Maybe if I find the source of that trauma, this compulsion will go away. I endured trauma and horrific violence at a crucial age of development. I’m gay, and gay people have higher rates of addiction than the general population. I have bipolar and was diagnosed with severe ADHD as a kid, and both predispose people to compulsion and substance use. It’s a disease; it’s a trauma response; it’s a manifestation of childhood wounds; it’s a comorbidity with neurodiversity.

On and on and on. It’s so easy to circle the drain of causal explanations for why I am this way. Addiction becomes a Rorschach test onto which we impose whatever self-actualizing story we want. Maybe some of the stories are true, or all of them, or none of them at all.

I am at the point where I’m not sure I care. I’m no longer convinced that spelunking into my past for roots and explanations is a good use of my time. What matters is that this compulsion is constantly lurking behind a corner, ready to ambush me and ruin my life. This is my responsibility, mine and mine alone, and I have to manage it right here, right now. Does the past matter when the present is so dire? Writing David Copperfield stories about my life (“Chapter One: I am born”) is a waste of time, especially when I’m getting assailed by the Hunger.

As much as I sneer at self-actualizing addiction stories, there is one that makes sense to me.

Addiction, substance use, and compulsive behavior are, for me, all about power. As Lance Dodes writes in The Heart of Addiction, “Addictions are an attempt to preserve control over your feelings and your life and respond assertively to helplessness.”

There is nothing I hate more than feeling weak. I prefer feeling like a badass; I crave feeling in control of my mind, body, emotions, and actions. So, when I feel powerless, along come substances and other compulsive behaviors that allow me to push a button to feel really, really good. In doing so, I feel in control again. I get to finally exert some power over the unmanageable powerlessness I’m feeling. It’s a bullwork against chaos.

The problem, of course, is that the bulwark becomes its own chaos.

Addiction is a pagan deity that demands blood sacrifice to keep giving you that power. At first, it’s a fair trade, and the sacrifices feel marginal and worth it. But over time, the scale tips. The god demands more and more blood to sustain my control. Eventually, the cost becomes too high. I crash at rock bottom like a grand piano dropped from a skyscraper. It’s time to pull out the feeding tube that keeps me plugged in to the monster of addiction.

Pulling the plug means, invariably, a full-frontal assault of that thing I fear most: powerlessness. It means confronting myself without tranquilizers and getting rawdogged by unfiltered reality. I feel the full force of all the intolerable emptiness, hopelessness, hurt, loneliness, touch starvation, and most of all, rawness. It’s a feeling of rawness so acute that it’s as if all my emotional skin has been sanded off and there’s just the raw, exposed nerve underneath.

“I never struggled with alcoholism,” the actor Steve-O said in a podcast, “until I got sober.”

I’m alone in a parking lot, the cravings devouring me like a facehugger from Alien. I clutch the steering wheel, listening to my heart race, feeling the throb at the vein in my neck that borders on pain and pleasure, and I have an all-out brawl with myself. I want it, I want it, I want it, screams my whole body. Do I turn right and get what I want? Or do I turn left and go home to a boring, painful life?

I know, in that moment, that this is like quicksand – the more I fight, the more powerless I become. Ghost might as well have been speaking from the perspective of addiction when they sing, “every day that you feed me with hate, I grow stronger.”

Willpower, determination, promises to never use again: these all act as fuel for the addiction.

So, I call a friend instead. “I’m about to do something really stupid,” I tell them. They talk me through it. I go for a walk and talk on the phone, or hang out with a friend. These are moments when, if it weren’t for other people, I would be right back in the pit.

The realization here is a painful, beautiful one that runs against every inch of my individualist, self-sufficient, John-Wayne masculinism: I need people. Desperately and down to my marrow, I am weak without others. “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety,” goes the old refrain in some recovery circles, “but connection.”

If addiction is about power, then, inevitably, I must find a way to return power to myself. This is where I find myself in fundamental conflict with the 12 Steps, the pre-eminent recovery tool so ubiquitously accepted and endorsed that secular courts order addicts to attend 12-step meetings.

The 12 Steps have staying power because they work for so many. I understand their utility, and I benefited from them in my 20s. No recovery is the same, and I’m grateful that the 12 Steps have helped so many. For me, though, they are a disaster.

Showing up to a circle of people hyper-fixated on addiction and saying, “My name is Stephen, and I’m an addict,” immediately gets transmuted to, “My name is Stephen, and now I’m thinking about doing something really stupid tonight.”

12 Step meetings just make me want to indulge more. Calling myself an addict, while true, just reinforces the identity and therefore behavior that I’m trying to escape, because behavior follows identity.

The Zen Koan of addiction is that quitting something doesn’t work. Striving to quit as an end in itself, or even taking on the identity of being “In Recovery”, doesn’t work for me. “Recovery,” no matter how sincere, acts as a strange nightmare world where, no matter how much I try to escape the monster, I turn a corner and find myself walking right back into addiction’s clutches. This is because Recovery is the addiction’s world.

In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, a little girl finds herself trapped in a world created by the terrifying Other Mother — a monstrous, supernatural creature who spins a web built for the sole purpose of capturing little girls. That is Addiction as Identity: a spiderweb-world spun by an Evil Mother. No matter how valiantly a fly may fight, the struggle just signals to the spider that there is food.

What does help, I’ve found, is cultivating an alternative, positive identity that has nothing to do with addiction but still requires its reduction. I then throw myself into a community of like-minded people to pursue that goal. I’m not an addict, I’m an athlete. I’m not an addict, I’m a lay monastic. I’m not an addict, I’m a modern Stoic dedicated to the fulfillment of the virtues.

Choosing my identity returns the power back to me and flies in the face of the starting point of the 12 Steps: “We admitted that we were powerless over addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.”

If I could rewrite the 12 Steps, they would start like this: “I admit that my life had become unmanageable, and in the midst of that chaos, I discovered agency.”

And yet, and yet, and yet. There is a name for the thing that I am. There is a word for someone who perpetually engages in a particular behavior or substance despite adverse consequences and multiple attempts to quit. That word is addict. Whatever wisdom might be in my previous soliloquy, it can easily fall into the ingenious deception of addiction.

Addiction, you see, is brilliant, and its chief strategy is to convince you that it does not exist. Here, a positive identity becomes a shield against facing the truth. I’m a badass who’s on top of my shit; I’m a competent man who provides for my family. Sure, I’m getting trashed every single night, but I can pull myself together and get to work the next morning. That’s because I’m a badass.

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one,” writes C.S. Lewis via the urbane devil Screwtape. Addiction connives against us in the protective shadow of positive self-conception, building a fortress of terrifying consequences that won’t truly be felt until a decade has passed when our drinking, drugging, scrolling, and smoking finally come home to roost. It lands on our lives in the form of sabotaged time, lost relationships when we need them most, destroyed finances, and a broken body. “Go on believing you’re a master of your fate,” addiction says, “and I will go on ensuring that your life becomes a living hell.”

There is no tidy conclusion to this article because there is no tidy conclusion to addiction. I wish I could wrap this narrative up in a hopeful, simple, clear direction and point you, my reader, to a satisfying end.

But I can’t. I don’t know if this story will ever end. The vampire legends always conclude with the Undead defeated with a stake through their heart or incinerated by the sun. Life, though, does not offer us such simple conclusions.

Perhaps we will never be rid of our demons. Maybe that was never the story we were living in the first place. Believing that I can put a stake through Nosferatu’s heart and kill him once and for all is, perhaps, just a misapprehension about human nature that results in more needless suffering, because untrue stories always hurt us.

The answer, then, is to know the monster, and to accept that my dalliance with Nosferatu does not end until I end. In the best-case scenario, that relationship, if done well, will help me be a more compassionate, wise, and humane friend to the world.

So, when all is said and done, I am Nosferatu, and I will never stop being hungry.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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The most startling thing about human beings is not that we suffer tremendous wounds, but that we heal.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods the past couple of weeks. The mountains are my usual refuge when things get rough. This was modeled for me by my father when I was a little boy. A passionate man with big emotions, he would retreat into the forests, often late at night, to confront and manage his demons.

Perhaps I inherited his constitution. The demons have been frolicking. Every so often, my bipolar brain decides it’s time for another tectonic shift. I find myself lying on the floor in catatonia, barely able to breathe, immobilized by a pain so deep that it is the chimeric inversion of mystical transcendence.

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The episode reached its peak on April 3rd, which was Good Friday in the Christian calendar.

There’s no use dwelling on the details of the agony. Contemplating the most tender parts of a bipolar episode, poking that wound in public like a medical display, simply reinforces its ferocity. “Dead is better,” writes Stephen King in Pet Sematary.

So, I will avoid the gory details. Instead, I will reflect on the aftermath and what it means to embrace resilience after what feels like an almost incomprehensible amount of pain.

When I am in recovery, I follow in my father’s footsteps. I find my way into the Appalachian wilderness, and trust that here, in the green light filtered through leaves, I will find nourishment.

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I am currently in the depths of a major writing project, and it is taking up all the oxygen in my writing life. That project will (possibly) be appearing on here on Substack in the coming weeks, but it is leaving me little space for other articles.

So, this week, I am republishing a short reflection from December of 2017, originally titled “How Depression Has Made Me a Happier Person,” in which I grapple with a major bipolar episode from three years prior. I suffer a cataclysmic episode every few years, and I was still, three years after the fact, trying to integrate that suffering and live a good life in its aftermath.

My official Bipolar With Psychotic Features diagnosis came much later in the spring of 2024, and I now understand that I was trying to articulate and appreciate the experience of my undiagnosed condition.

When people ask me how I am, I usually say, “I’m alright,” or simply, “ok,” and some people respond with concern: “Just alright?” As if being manically exultant is not living a full life. I hate that response: “just ok?” To me, “just ok” is heaven. For me, “just ok” is hard-earned fulfillment.

Before the monster came, I was almost psychotically ambitious. I wanted to be the best musician, the best athlete, the best student. Simply … the best. This drive for the best became a sort of torture, but I couldn’t put it down. How could a drive for excellence be bad? I wanted to be Mozart, but I was haunted by the possibility that my fate would be that of Salieri’s in the film Amadeus: “the patron saint of mediocrities.” When I worshiped the best, all of life was simply not enough.

And then, in 2014, the monster of depression and anxiety came upon me again. Beneath these demons, I was broken.

I mean that as literally as I possibly can: I became a mere shadow, a sliver of myself. I became terrified of ceiling fans; walking, moving, lying down, and sitting all became an unbearable torture; I would wake up in the morning in so much anguish that I would scream, and scream, and scream into my pillow. Every thought blazed; my mind felt like it was on fire. Every stranger I encountered looked physically grotesque and carried an ambiance of unbearable darkness. The whole world became unimaginably frightful.

The pain was so great that my life was reduced to a tiny pinprick, and my sole purpose was to make the pain stop. I could barely remember or imagine a world without such pain.

Recovery was slow, and it took a village of therapists, doctors, 12-step sponsors, friends, and my valiant partner to get me back to normalcy. Little things that would go unnoticed in the land of Normal People were suddenly gigantic milestones of celebration. I could go out to a movie with my partner and feel ok! I managed to go for a walk, and I didn’t die! I got through work without customers transforming into monstrous ogres before my eyes!

The most miraculous moment, though, was when I was sitting on the couch, playing a video game. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, to be exact. It was evening, and incense was burning on my desk. It was in that moment when the experience struck me with all the beatific force of a mystical encounter: I feel ok. I’m just sitting here, playing a video game, feeling ok. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I could simply be. I didn’t have to do anything, fight anything, defend anything, or force my mind into an impossible shape. It was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.

Depression has forced me to give up my idolatry of The Best. I’m now happy with good enough. After the depths of hell, The Best feels like a mirror image of those horrible depths.

Now, I’ve committed myself to living and working with integrity, fullness, and commitment, even if in the end I’m the patron saint of mediocrities. If I am, I celebrate that. Being ok is a luxury I will never take for granted ever again.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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My recent work has focused on men and the forces that impact them in unique ways: emotional intelligence, initiation, pornography, suicide, self-injury, testosterone, sexual violence, and more. The elephant in the room in all my articles, of course, is that I am gay.

Periodically, as I’ve explored this subject, I get asked how I navigate male spaces, friendship, and men’s work as a gay man. I consider my sexual orientation the least interesting thing about me, and I have largely moved on from LGBT topics as a theme for my work. But I get asked about this subject often enough that I feel there’s value in writing about it.

Yes, I am gay, and I love men passionately and think their bodies are proof that God exists and wants me to be happy. I’m also grateful for the identity of gay as a recognized class and how such recognition has allowed for the liberation of people like me. But, in another way, I cannot help but despise how these categories — and the persistent homophobia they reify — have stifled so many men.

I feel a primordial, driving need for the company of other men. I crave male friends, male mentors, and male community. When I first started sitting in a men’s group, I felt as though a long-starved part of myself was finally receiving nourishment. I will never argue that this is a universal male need; there are as many types of men as there are men in the world. But, after writing about men and moving through so many male-only spaces, I see the same primordial need in others.

The great challenge of being a gay man, of course, is that my need for the company of men does not erase my sexual attraction to them. Conversely, my homosexuality does not erase my need for platonic male intimacy.

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For most straight men, the erotic and brotherly are naturally split into two different channels. The erotic is directed at women, the brotherly is directed at other men. (Although things do sometimes turn out to be more complicated than that, which we will explore later in this article.) For me, though, those two channels of erotic and platonic are collapsed into the same frame.

Growing up on sports teams, dorms, and changing rooms while also being sexually attracted to my male peers was extremely painful and confusing. The world of male-only spaces — the casual nudity, the aggressive affection, the competition, the rough and tumble physicality of it all — is indeed bewildering for a young gay man struggling to understand himself.

For years, my life was fraught because I had not developed sufficient clarity and boundaries with other men, and I had no mentors or cultural context to navigate my feelings. In high school and college, I’d make a friend and find myself crushing on him or falling in love, completely unable to understand these painful, terrifying, massive feelings I was having. Inevitably, each friendship would end. But now, those boundaries between sexual and brotherly are firmly in place.

When I find myself forming a deep friendship with a man, I inevitably have “the talk” with him in some way, usually strategically and casually placed in the middle of a conversation. “The talk” usually goes something like this: “I have two modes with other men I love: Brother mode and Lover mode. Both are capable of equal levels of affection and intimacy, but in profoundly different ways, and I have strong boundaries between the two. With you, I am in Brother mode, and you do not need to be afraid of me crossing that boundary with you. There are many ways to love another man, and I love you deeply.” This is a terrifying thing to tell another man; without fail, it has been received well.

So how does someone like me, a man aroused by and in love with male bodies, healthily cultivate these two houses of masculine love? That has been a long, difficult journey, often full of pain and confusion, but also one that has yielded the most tender, beautiful, and loving male relationships I have ever known.

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Ever since I was 16, when Bipolar Disorder came to full bloom in my brain, I have lived with some measure of suicidal ideation.

Suicide follows me like a little black cat, even on the good days when the sun is out and my life is going well. I’ll be on my porch in the summer light reading a book, and I look up and see that little black cat sunning herself on the roof. On these days, she is less of an impulse and more a reminder that I have lived this way for so long that I have wanted to die so often in my life, and likely will again soon.

The little black cat pauses in her grooming to make eye contact with me, as if to say, “I’m at a distance now, human, but here is a reminder that I am always following you. Carry on with your life, but never forget that I am near, purring, with my tail in the air.”

Other times, she closes the distance between us, and she is no longer small at all. She sits on my chest as I stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night, her weight that of a tiger on top of me. Her voice becomes loud, insistent, a roar: “do it do it do it do it.”

She’s there at the worst moments, when the portal to the abyss opens like a yawning maw, and she weaves her body between my legs, demanding I throw myself down that well.

She terrifies me, my little Familiar. I’m terrified that, some day, she will win. I live with the knowledge that the next major episode could very well be my last. I take meds that stabilize me and put her at a distance. I regiment my life, building a bulwark against despair with social connection, discipline, sleep, diet, and exercise. I deny myself access to lethal means, knowing that there have been times when, if I had a gun, I’d be gone and my notebook would be blank instead of full of these words.

Over the years, I have found ways to cope with my Familiar — ways to give her what she wants without also giving her my life. I call this method “little suicides,” a potentially ill-advised way to sate the appetite of the monster.

The suicidal voice, I have found, always wants something. The trick — a dangerous trick, no doubt — is to entertain the voice, listen to her needs, and give it something other than my life.

I can’t recommend this method to others. Bartering with the Familiar in this way is a high-stakes game. I am not a therapist or mental healthcare professional, and I am not encouraging anyone to follow what I describe here. This is art, not medical advice. It is an exploration of the darkest voice in my head and an attempt to find purpose and beauty in that voice.

If you are in the middle of a crisis, please stop reading and reach out to support or call the crisis line at 988. I have called the hotline myself and benefitted from it.

So what, for me, does The Familiar want? She wants one of three things: to be forgotten, to be unconscious, and to make the pain stop. The trick is to help the familiar learn that what she wants, she already has, and what she thinks she wants, she doesn’t.

To Be Forgotten

When things get dark, I become possessed by an overwhelming desire to be invisible and forgotten by the world. I want to be unseen and unremembered, and death feels like the best way to attain that.

There’s no logic here. Suicide doesn’t erase the memory of me or the devastation of my death on those who love me. But that’s depression brain for you: as compelling as it is incoherent.

After confronting this state over and over again through my life, I’ve found a way to fool the Familiar. I tell her that, at unknown intervals, there are moments when everyone who has ever known or loved me have no thoughts of me. I lie awake at three AM and think, “it is possible that right here, right now, nobody in the world is thinking of me. I am all alone in this enormous night. Isn’t that beautiful?” All the clamoring of other conscious minds beholding me are elsewhere, lost in dreams or other thoughts, and in a way, that is like being dead. “Isn’t that lovely?” I tell the Familiar. She retreats, satiated by this temporary nourishment.

I remind her, too, that if it is forgetting she wants, all she needs is time. Soon enough, I will die, and in no time at all I will pass into that vast forgetfulness that we all, inevitably, must enter. I know almost nothing about my great grandparents, or their parents, or anyone they knew. Someday, I will join them in just 2 or 3 generations.

“Soon, you will have forgotten the world,” writes Marcus Aurelius, “and the world will have forgotten you.” I commit these words to memory to remind my Familiar.

“See?” I tell her, “Soon enough, I will be yours. But not yet. Till then, there is too much to love, to much to do. Give me my time, and then I will gladly give you yours.”

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To Be Unconscious

Other times, I simply want to stop being conscious. It’s hard not to, when the whole of one’s consciousness feels like a sentient open wound. Killing myself is the ultimate black-out, and the Familiar is particularly skillful at suggesting that method when I need to get outside of myself.

Over the years, I’ve tried to give The Familiar her oblivion in all manner of sordid ways. I’ve pushed myself to all sorts of highs trying to attain the black out I want. These methods are dangerous, because they very well could kill me — if not in the moment, then cumalatively. They’ve also resulted in addiction and compounding chaos over the years.

I eventually learned that some numb-outs are better than others. The black-out pleasure of sex works. Tattooing by a skilled artist is another method to attain the void. Brutal exercise becomes a sort of spiritual self-annihilation, and non-dual meditation — deliberately looking for the self and realizing its non-existence — provides immense relief.

Readers will be quick to point out that this is the manifestation of an unhealthy mind. Of course it is. I’ll never claim to be a saint, a bodhisatvha, or an ascended master. Give me Saint Paul for my money: “I’m the chief among sinners.”

But I’ve also come to realize that ego-death, no matter how dark, is a universal human need. We are all yearning to worship, to undergo Theosis and be absorbed into a God. My impulse might be extreme, but it is part of a nature we all share. It is our choice to channel that impulse towards constructive or destructive ends.

I eventually learned that the most reliable ego death is the one that happens every night. “You want me to die so that I can finally not be conscious?” I tell the Familiar, “So be it. Tonight, I will lie down and enter the black night of dreams and nothingness. There, you have your little suicide.” Going to bed is a little re-enactment of death that surprisingly sates the demon, at least for a day.

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,” writes Shakespeare in MacBeth,

“The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

This “death of each day’s life” is one with a resurrection and the potential for greater healing, clarity, and life. And this gets to the most fundamental need of The Familiar.

To make the pain stop

More than anything, the Familiar wants to put out the fire in my mind, and here she might have a perverse wisdom — she’s right that something needs to die.

It is usually ego, or terror, or shame, or embarrassment, or a searing conviction that I am all alone, that needs to die. These impulses are all-consuming in the midst of a suicidal episode, and they feel as inseparable from me as my own skin. Ripping that skin off and casting it aside feels just as terrifying, if not more so, than ending my life.

I trick the Familiar and turn her own logic against her. I can channel the suicidal impulse into killing the things keeping me from being well. This is, indeed, a death, and you will never know how terrifying a death it is until you have faced it in a mental health crisis.

The death might be giving myself up to the medical system: a terrifying free fall into uncertainty. Or it might be killing my pride and collapsing into the arms of a friend, the care of my family, or the comfort of my partner. It means, too, allowing parts of my personality, or story, or values, to be seared away by the pain I’m experiencing. All of these are an apocalypse, an ending and a beginning.

So, you want suicide, Little Black Cat? I will commit suicide by killing my ego, my pride, my fear of being a burden, and throwing myself into the support of others. I will die by asking for help, I will make an even greater risk than death and trust someone else with my health. There, you have your suicide.

This is what she always wanted, beneath her terrifying words and fantasies: she wanted death and rebirth. She was just confused about how to get it.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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I have taken a Pro-Human Pledge. This article was drafted by hand, edited in Microsoft Word, and is untouched by AI. To support human-grown creativity, please subscribe to my work.

Half of my work is behind a paywall, and this Substack is a crucial part of my income. Please consider becoming a paid or free subscriber with the button below.

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I was a 19-year-old missionary living at a Christian missions base in Colorado when, after a Christmas party, a gunman came to our base and opened fire in a hallway. Of the five people in that hallway, I was the only one who wasn’t shot, and two of my friends were killed. He had intended far more damage — he had 200 rounds on him and explosives in his backpack. He wanted to murder us all.

There is no manual for how to navigate life after surviving a shooting as a teenager, and there is no sage who can prepare you for the strange, dark wonderland that awaits you after passing through the looking glass of violence. I was on my own in that post-apocalyptic space.

What no one could have prepared me for, in the months and years after the shooting, was how I felt a distressing kinship with the gunman. He, like me, had been raised in the belly of the evangelical beast and suffered from all manner of religious agonies. He, like me, had struggled enormously with being a missionary. He, like me, was drawn to the dark and suffered severe mental health challenges. No one warned me — no one had needed to warn me— that when someone would try to hurt me and those I love most, they wouldn’t be an inhuman monster, but just like me. The wound of violence is not that it is perpetrated by monsters, but by people like us. What, I wondered, did that say about me?

I tell this story because I believe it subtly mirrors the state many young men find themselves in today. I know so many men who recognize the horrors and violence perpetrated by other men, and they fear what that says about themselves as men.

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11 years ago, I went on my first date with Jon. He was slim, shorter than me, with a runner’s build. My first thought upon seeing him was, “those are some amazing legs and ass.” He had the shy, nervous intelligence of a nerdy college cross country runner. He was soft spoken, gentle, and clearly nervous. When we held hands, his palms were sweating. I thought he was adorable.

And then he smiled.

“Holy shit,” I thought. His cheeks dimpled, His teeth were brilliant, and his eyes glittered, framed by the smiling lines and creases of his face. He was already handsome, but with that smile he became magnificently handsome.

That smile was the hook upon which I was caught. He, in his simultaneous nervousness and unselfconsciousness, didn’t even know that he was reeling me in, helpless as a fish on a lure. I’ve always found the most beautiful features of a man to be those things he is unconscious of — unstudied and unseen by the men themselves.

Over a decade later, I still love Jon. I love him so much, In fact, that it is impossible to tell you how I feel about him. He is so much a part of my world, knitted into every feature of my life, that trying to pinpoint what I feel is like asking the bird how it feels about the sky.

I love him most of all for those salient things that lead us to love any individual human: his personality, his dark humor, his playfulness, his sharp intelligence, his integrity and reserves of moral strength.

But much further down on this list, I love him because he is a man. I am, after all, gay. I find masculinity as mysterious and awe-inspiring as a nebula. I love masculinity, I love men, and I love being a man.

In her chilling and fascinating memoir, Evil at Our Table: Inside the Monsters Who Live Among Us, forensic psychologist Samantha Stein explores the personal and philosophical challenges of her work evaluating violent sex offenders.

In one particular scene, a young woman training in the same field asks Stein, “Does this work ever affect your opinion of men?”

The young woman describes how her work with sexually violent men was starting to impact her views of all men as “kind of out of control sexually,” including her own boyfriend.

Stein responds honestly to this question: “Unfortunately, this is not an idle worry,” she replies, “Is it possible to see hundreds of men who’ve harmed people through their sexual choices and not be changed?”

She goes on:

“Maybe the task isn’t to not be changed; That’s just not possible. Maybe, instead, It’s not to become jaded, to work to love individual men. And to be able to hold on to compassion for the mistakes of being human.”

She then reflects, in the solitude of her own prose, about the inherent contradictions and challenges of her work. She reminds her young colleague —and herself—that “Most sex offenders are men, But most men aren’t sex offenders.” She mulls over the men in her life and reflects that after all she’s done in her career, “Sexual abuse by men feels inevitable and unstoppable.” She acknowledges her feelings “that men, as a whole, pose a terrible threat.”

She also frets over how this fear impacts her children—how her attempts to keep them safe might shape their view of men and that it sends them the message, “Men are more likely to be scary and dangerous.”

Finally, she concludes her reflections with, “Ultimately, I worry what that message means to me, too. I never want to lose sight of their individuality. Of their humanity.”

I find Stein wise and humane in her treatment of this subject. I simply cannot imagine the psychological toll of her work, and in no way am I casting aspersions on her, nor am I casting judgment on the fears of her young colleague and the myriad of other women who come face to face with male violence and sexual licentiousness. Women fear men for a reason, and I cannot imagine a more human experience than to be afraid of men after being hurt by them.

So, I offer the following not as an accusation, but a gentle observation: as humane as she is, what is noticeably lacking in Stein’s discourse about men is a love of the masculine itself.

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She fears — correctly, I think — losing sight of men’s humanity and individuality. As I have written elsewhere, humanity and individuality are the two identities that trump all others, and respecting these two pillars is the foundation of a humane and civil society.

But what of masculinity itself? What of manhood itself? Is there beauty there, too? Is there something worth loving there? Or is it just dead weight — A condition that puts all men in terrifying proximity to the worst sex offenders; a base nature that needs to be trained out of men?

Yes, there is a darkness in many men. I know this; I was almost murdered by a young man and watched him snuff out the lives of people I loved. I’ve seen enough evil in life to know that men and women are often dangerous in different ways.1

When was the last time you heard of a woman persistently roofying men to rape them? When was the last time you heard of marauding gangs of women cutting throats, engaging in street warfare, or burning villages? When was the last time, as pointed out, you heard of a female version of Dominique Pelicot — a predator who drugged his own wife Gisele to be raped on film by dozens of men for over a decade? “An alternate universe where 50+ women sought out an unconscious male to abuse (as per the face-meltingly repugnant Gisèle Pelicot case) would be Opposite World indeed,” she writes.

These headlines reflect a reality on the ground that I’ve seen first-hand: the majority of women I’m close to confide in me that they’ve experienced some kind of sexual abuse, at times horrifically violent.

An obligatory caveat: most men do not perpetrate violence in the way Dominique Pelicot did. Most men are not rapists, serial killers, or street thugs. But most men are, I believe, capable of hurting others, knowingly or unknowingly, with their sexuality, their anger, and their strength. They are human, after all. Their maleness might just color that harm in a particular way.

None of this is to acquit women from human evil — they are not more virtuous for not being men. Male evil is extravagant, easier to spot and prove, while female evil is often more subtle. The worst men resort to acts of violence, while the worst women manipulate, poison their kin, instigate from the shadows, and sell children to sex traffickers. And, yes, there are female abusers, rapists, and child molesters. Men account for about a quarter of all domestic abuse cases. I assume that number to be far higher, since men often don’t admit to the abuse they suffer.

Despite this list of caveats, I still firmly believe that it is not an equal playing field between the sexes when it comes to violence. Men far outpace women in the most horrific acts of bodily destruction.

I know this too well: the vast majority of victims of male violence are other men, and being one of those victims myself, I still fear certain men. A man with a threateningly italicised aura will approach me and the fear lances through me all over again.

And yet, still I ask you — both male and female alike —do you love men? Not just individual men, but manhood itself? Is manhood merely a bundle of abuses and appetites for power? Is that all that constitutes manhood and masculinity?

I ask, because, regardless of your sex, you cannot make a home or a good life if you hate the innate, unchosen condition of your spouse, or the state that half the world’s population find themselves inhabiting: your brothers, fathers, sons, perhaps even yourself. And what does it mean for young boys and men when they hear, implicitly or explicitly, that their sex and gender identity are all hazard? Surely that is not a recipe for creating more compassionate, just, and virtuous men in a world that sorely needs them.

I am an androphile in every way. I love the company of men, I love the platonic brotherhoods forged with men. And, of course, I love male sexuality in all its wildness and feral self-abandon. Few things are more rapturous — or masculine — than coming into full intimate contact with a man’s arousal and tenderness.

Not only do I love other men as lovers, brothers, and mentors, but I also love my own maleness. I love being a man, I love having a male body, and I love moving through the world as a man. I love the strength it gives me, and I also love the vulnerabilities, too — how manhood has presented me with certain challenges that have required me to rely on others, admit my weaknesses, and acknowledge my privileges.

I will never pretend that there is only one type — or a handful of types — that men ought to be; I wouldn’t be a good androphile if I did. As someone who majors in men, the infinite variety of masculinity is part of its beauty. But no matter how much we may deconstruct manhood and masculinity into nothing — cultural scripts, a collective illusion, an oppressive hierarchy — my homosexual, androphilic body and soul know them to be real and beautiful.

I get it — not everyone is like me, nor should they be. Not everyone needs to experience, or value, or believe in masculinity and manhood the same way I do. But still: imagine my dismay when I log on to the internet, or talk to fellow enlightened liberal friends — men and women alike — and see no delight in the masculine. I see criticism, distrust, anger, resentment, and bitterness. Most of it is understandable and perhaps even necessary. It comes from horror, trauma, and a deep-seated moral compass. But too often it is paired with a total absence of love.

If your answer to my question is, “no,” that’s ok. I appreciate the honesty, and it might be you need a long time away from men, in the same way I needed a long time away from all the straight people and the Christian world.

People cannot simply talk themselves out of their fears. I certainly know that I can’t. Things are not so simple — if they were, then we would not be in this predicament. I know I can’t talk someone out of despising masculinity when their lived experience gives them all the evidence they need to do just that.

So, I will only say this: the tragedy of trauma is, in part, that it tells us a story that is true enough to be convincing, but false enough to destroy our lives. Trauma excels in particular at weaving tales of collective guilt that result in misogyny, homophobia, misandry, and racism.

It was a man, Brock Turner, who raped Chanel Miller behind a dumpster; but it was also two young men on bicycles, complete strangers to Chanel, who rescued her from her assailant. It was a man who tried to murder me and killed my friends, and it was also a man — a fireman — who hoisted me onto his back to carry me through the snow to the bus that transported me to the safety of the police station.

Is it possible, I wonder, as I write this, if that which makes masculinity so horrific at its darkest is also intimately connected to what makes it good? That which makes a man sexually dangerous is also somehow linked to what makes his sexuality so beautiful, playful, and wild. A man’s capacity for harm is also inextricably linked to his ability to protect. His potential for masculine darkness is inseparable from his capacity for great good. In this way, Mr. Beaver might as well have been describing men at their best in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when he said, “safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe, but he’s good.”

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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I typically avoid writing about current events these days — I’m not good at it, and I’m comfortable with my online presence not encompassing the entirely of my life or beliefs. The recent revelations from the Epstein files, however, transcend politics and are a matter of our humanity, as a nation and as individuals. How do we absorb these revelations? Do we just carry on? Do we stop everything and wear sack cloth and ashes? Do we burn down the whole hideous temple? And, crucially, how do we think about ourselves, power, and our relationship to it?

I don’t have answers to these questions. Instead, I will offer just a few preliminary thoughts as I’ve struggled to absorb the full breadth of what has been revealed.

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“What do you do with the mad that you feel?” asks Mr. Rogers in a song, “when you feel so mad that you could bite? When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong… And nothing you do seems very right?”

As with all great children’s creators, Mr. Rogers is speaking to adults just as much as he is to children. He is articulating the human condition in words that a child can understand, making them all the more resonant for grownups.

In the next verse, he offers a few options for what to do when you feel so mad you could bite — you could “pound some clay or some dough”, play tag with your friends, or “run to see how fast you can go.” He concludes with this:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish.
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.
Know that there’s something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.

This simple children’s poem strikes me as a profound tool to navigate all manner of challenges. When I get blinded with rage at work, when I want to shut down and numb out, when the challenges of addiction and recovery feel pointless and overwhelming, I find myself thinking his words, “I can stop when I want to, I can stop when I wish ... And what a good feeling to feel like this and know that the feeling is really mine.”

There are many markers for being a man — sexual prowess, physical strength, financial or career accomplishment — but rarely, as a boy and young adult, did I learn that managing my feelings was a crucial ingredient of being a mature man.

Contrast this ethos with the lyrics to Prof’s song Tough Boy. Prof’s upbringing was extreme, but I believe that many men have some version of the Tough Boy living within them:

How to make a tough boy 
I can’t take no shit (fuck that) 
Papa ain’t raise no bitch (fuck that) 
Nothing but goons in the clique (fuck that) 
Gotta stay strapped with the stick 
How to make a tough boy 
Give a fuck what you think (fuck that) 
Getting in fights off drink (fuck that) 
Spitting up blood in the sink (fuck that) 
Can’t speak to no shrink 
How to make a tough boy

Tough boy don’t whine 
Tough boy don’t snitch 
Tough boy get a tough whooping from his tough daddy 
Gotta make sure tough boy don’t flinch 
My first memory was family violence, why I’m a bit nihilistic, your highness 
I just sit back in the climate, shaded in silence 
Shouldn’t complain so I kept it in private

I have my own Tough Boy, and he served me well. I’m not saying I was or am a badass, the emotional equivalent of a Marine, a mental Jocko Willink. I’m not. I’m painfully emotional, sensitive, and often fragile. But I did have to callous my heart, and I had to figure out how to keep moving forward despite all the pain.

The Tough Boy got me through high school, a shooting, gay reparative therapy, bipolar episodes, the arrest of my father overseas, the death of loved ones, and more. He did what he needed to do in order to survive. Some toughness — perhaps even some toxic stoicism — is necessary at times. Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t seen their friends shot to pieces and had to go on living anyway. So, I’m partial to retaining some respect for toughness. The ability to put one’s own pain aside and do a job, or provide for others, or merely survive, is a superpower.

The problem, of course, is that the uniform of the Tough Boy becomes a cage. His armor fused to my skin. I eventually found it nearly impossible to voice my feelings in any meaningful and vulnerable way at all.

Inevitably, throughout my life, the Tough Boy would implode. I’d bottle up all the pain or fear until it came pouring out in an uncontrolled torrent, and those closest to me would be privy to the meltdown in the same way passers-by on the street are audience to some unfortunate’s psychotic break. I would only ever express my feelings — especially the scary ones — when they pushed me to the breaking point.

The Tough Boy at his apotheosis — all self-protection, all armor, all posturing of heroism — is the opposite of Mr. Rogers’ vision of manhood. The Tough Boy is unable to know that a feeling is his because he no longer knows what he is feeling at all.

I’m not putting down physical and mental strength — quite the opposite. These things are good. It’s awesome to be a badass and to embody Scott Galloway’s 3 Ps of masculinity: Protector, Provider, and Procreator, in whatever way they best suit the individual man. But each of these Ps is impossible without the ability to name and navigate one’s own emotions.

If men are to stop over-relying on pornography to cope with stress, emotional intelligence is required. If men are to return to the world from video games and online gambling, then emotional intelligence is required. If men are to be fully present as fathers, spouses, and citizens, then emotional intelligence is required.

As recently pointed out to me in the comments of his article For The Love of Men, so many of the societal fixes for men proposed by figures like Richard Reeves — getting men into HEAL jobs (Health, Education, and Literacy), for example — first require emotional intelligence in men.

It took other men to help me remove the Tough Boy armor and mature into a more fully-formed manhood. It took men modelling vulnerability and embracing the unadulterated messiness when the armor finally peeled off.

I was excruciatingly uncomfortable in my first online men’s circle. The group was presided over by a sweet old British man who explained, at the beginning of the meeting, that we were going to use “I statements” and the primary emotions when talking about our experiences: sad, angry, scared, happy etc.

Immediately after this preamble, the band-aid was ripped off with brutal force. These guys started sharing their deepest, darkest feelings that they’d been carrying with them all week with the enthusiasm of a pack of hounds released from their kennels. This emotional full-frontal nudity felt somehow perverse. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I thought, “at least buy me a drink first.”

But, as I kept attending men’s circles online and in person, something started to change. These men accepted me as I shared my darkest truths and were present as I finally allowed myself to verbalize pain that I had always covered in jokes, denial, or placid indifference. When the tears finally came, they held me. When it came time for me to tell my secrets, they listened.

Here was a space where I could finally get away from the cruel double-standards imposed on men. Too often through life, when I’d tried to follow the societal demand to “open up more” as a man, I was punished for it. “Be more vulnerable” I was told, again and again, “stop being so stoic, be more emotional.” When I did open up — particularly with women — I was ridiculed, or punished, or shut down. These men proved to me that I could finally come down from my horse instead of die on it.

In finally verbalizing my emotions, taking responsibility for them, and being accepted by other men as I did so, I experienced the passage from boyhood to the mature manhood Mr. Rogers describes in his song. The Tough Boy fell away and was replaced with a different kind of strength.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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In many cases, the use of AI is a confession. I do not mean using AI to draft some quick copy for a work email or cutting out the menial tasks from knowledge work. Instead, I mean using AI to replace the most precious work of the intellectual and creative life.

We all want to have read War and Peace, and we all want to have written something meaningful that moves people. We want the resulting prestige, knowledge, and likes and subscribes. But we don’t want the present-tense experience of doing the writing, reading, and thinking. We want the final product — a certain mind or a certain piece of creative work — without all that tedious stuff in the middle. In rushes ChatGPT to give us exactly that: the participation trophy without us having ever actually participated to begin with.

The tragic irony is that it is impossible to receive the true benefits of reading and writing without being transformed through the present-tense experience of doing them. Real wisdom from reading and craftsmanship is not possible without active participation in these arts.

Using AI in thinking, writing, and understanding forfeits this active participation, and this is why I call it a confession. It is an individual admitting that they do not value the deepest fruits of the intellectual and artistic life. Or, even worse, it is an admission that they don’t even know that such fruits exist.

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I am, as a writer on the internet, making a pro-human pledge. No matter your particular craft, I think you should, too.

AI generated content is proliferating across the internet. I have discovered successful Substack publications — bestsellers with thousands of readers — entirely generated by AI. The onslaught of AI-generated videos has finally put a dent in my YouTube reels addiction, and a large portion of Substack notes has become uninteresting to me due to the torrent of AI deepities.

More unnerving, however, is the uncanny experience of being an online reader. I will be enjoying an article on Substack and then trip over a section that has the metallic stench of AI. “Did this person use ChatGPT?” I wonder, “or do they just write like this?” I don’t want to assume someone used AI when they didn’t. Even thinking that feels like an insult to fellow writers. Or, I wonder, maybe this person writes like ChatGPT because they use it every day and they have absorbed its voice. I find it dreary to harbor such suspicions of my fellow writers. Such ambiguity disrupts the flow of an otherwise immersive and enjoyable read. We writers ought to care about the experience of our craft, both for ourselves and our readers.

Because of all of this — the onslaught of AI content and the eeriness of the uncanny valley of the reading experience — I have decided to make a pro-human pledge.

Being pro-human is not to be confused with being anti-AI. Like most new technologies, AI will have a panoply of benefits and trade-offs, and I’ve already written about the promises and perils of AI companionship. Instead, to be pro-human is exactly what it sounds like: to center, valorize, and love the human voice and human connection through creative expression. It isn’t necessarily a dismissal of AI, only a love for one another and our craft.

This pledge consists of three parts:

1. I will not use AI to craft or edit my essays.

2. I will show the human process of my work to my readers, primarily by posting a photo of my handwritten draft at the end of each article. You likely don’t draft by hand and will have to come up with other creative ways to show your work.

3. If and when I do use AI, I will be transparent about that use — either in footnotes, or in disclaimers at the end of the article.

We, as a writers, have a responsibility to deliver a uniquely human voice. “We read to know we aren’t alone,” says C.S. Lewis in the film Shadowlands. The job of the writer is, in no small part, to bridge the chasm of loneliness between each of us with words and imagination. In doing so, we bring both medicine and illumination to the human condition. As AI invades our lives, it is clear to me that readers will crave unambiguously human voices. Let’s give it to them.

This pledge is also a selfish one; it is for me as much as it is for my readers.

Call me old-fashioned, but I value doing hard things, and writing is hard. Just like lifting weights or running, doing hard things keeps me well and ensures that I have a greater likelihood of being a healthy 80-year-old. We are anti-fragile, meaning we fall apart without challenge and pressure. Offloading the hard parts of my writing process to AI is the cognitive equivalent of taking the elevator instead of the stairs every day. In doing so, I am hastening the decline of my mind.

Furthermore, the use of AI in creative work undercuts one of the greatest benefits of writing and belies an enormous misunderstanding about its value.

Writing is not merely about having a final product that will drive clicks or subscriptions, no more than reading Charles Dickens is merely about learning facts about Victorian London. It’s also about what’s gained through the act of writing: the formation of the self, the capacity to reason and problem solve, the ability to withstand discomfort, and the skill of ordering one’s mind. These challenges, like alchemy, transform my soul.

When the writer grapples and struggles and steeps and transforms in the womb of creativity, so too, hopefully, does the reader. You may not know it, but we are in relationship, You and I. The best writing transfigures us both: me through the act of writing, and you through the act of reading. Replacing this process with AI robs us of something intangible but no less vital to human flourishing.

Finally, I have found that using AI to be more productive with creativity doesn’t actually work. I simply find myself double checking ChatGPT’s responses, editing the alleged editor, or scrutinising the sources it provided. It feels easier, but that feeling is an illusion. It trades effort for time, when I could just internalize all of these processes and be more efficient as a result. A little effort, after all, never hurt anyone.

You might, as a writer, decide that AI still has a valuable place in your work. It still has some value in mine — I occasionally use Microsoft Copilot to draft the SEO description of my articles, and my conscience is (usually) clean in this use, as SEO is usually only read by other machines.

If you use AI an an integral part of your creative process, though, you, too, can make the pro-human pledge by disclosing when and how you use AI. It is OK to have differences of opinion when it comes to the use of this technology. In fact, such public disagreement is a crucial part of how we learn to adapt as a society. But such discourse is hampered if we are not transparent about our use.

If you are resistant to disclosing your AI use in your work, I think it’s worth asking why. Are you ashamed? Are you worried how readers would respond? Or do you have good reasons for your use and why you keep it hidden? Regardless, you serve the public good by being open about all of this. Such transparency will help us all navigate the AI age.

I think this is important, so I urge you to join me in taking the pro-human pledge.

This article was drafted by hand, edited in Microsoft Word, and is untouched by AI, including the SEO description. To support human-grown creativity, please subscribe to my work.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

Leave a comment

Half my work is behind a paywall, and this Substack is a crucial part of my income. Please consider becoming a paid or free subscriber with the button below.

If you want a paid subscription but can’t afford it, DM me or reply to this email, and I will grant you six months free, no questions asked.

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