Post-Nut Sincerity

Jacking off, David Foster Wallace, the new insincerity

N.B. this is satire. | “My Artwork,” David Shrigley (2018)

I AM THE ADULT IN THE ROOM.

In my last post, I wrote, with my tongue not entirely in my cheek, that the only non-cynical way to approach a piece of art like Saltburn is to experience it only to see Jacob Elordi’s dick. “This is the apogee of the new sincerity—a single-entendre principle in action”—wonderful. Lying awake one night, I was reminded of a scene from Greg Jackson’s short story “Wagner in the Desert” (2014) in which the narrator says that he’s reached the “end point to the confessional mode” while masturbating in a bathroom, stoned out of his mind. Here’s a long-ass quote, but you’ll enjoy it:

In the bathroom, I locked the doors and stripped to nothing, put the cold-water tap on low, and lay down on the bathmat. Something like fevered joy clenched in my abdomen. If there is an end point to the confessional mode it is surely the things we think about while masturbating, but here goes: I thought of the breasts of a woman who had been at dinner the night before, big, heavy breasts. I thought of her telling me to fuck them, or maybe having multiple dicks, or a kind of “Matrix”-like displacement of dicks, and fucking her and her tits at the same time. [...] I thought, This feels so good, and when it is over I will die, but there won’t be any reason to live anyway, so that’s fine. And I thought, What am I doing with my life? And I thought, Am I a good person or a bad person or just a person? And I thought, Am I powerful or weak? And I thought, Now’s maybe not the time. . . . And I thought, Let’s pretend powerful, just for now, let’s pretend I’m powerful and Lily’s powerful and I’m fucking her in the ass, and she’s asking for it, pleading probably….

There’s a lot I like about this scene, beginning with the strange body horror that arises from trying to depict the grotesque processes of sexual imagination. But it’s only here, in this moment of self-abuse, that the narrator raises fundamental questions about his life: what he’s doing with it, whether he’s a good person, whether he’s powerful. The joke, obviously, is that these questions are as masturbatory as his anal sex fantasies. (You could say he’s up his own ass.) Jackson, who consciously tries to wear the mantle of David Foster Wallace, takes these questions about self, purpose, and ethics animating the new sincerity to their logical end: not by answering them convincingly, but by showing their flimsiness, the self-regard embedded in them, and their fantasy of the solicitous, non-exploited other (or reader) who deeply cares about How Sincere You’re Being.

In 1993, Wallace described the new sincerity through the analogy of a house party. “For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party.” As the night wears on, the fun turns into nausea and chaos, and one begins to hope that the parents will return and restore order. He goes on: “Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back—which means we're going to have to be the parents.” Of course, there’s nothing more desperate than declaring yourself The Adult In The Room, like a child declaring himself the king of the hill. It’s the hectoring position of Democrats at home and liberal interventionists abroad: equal parts self-righteous and oblivious. It isn’t coincidental that the new sincerity in literature reached its peak under Obama. There’s something not merely uncool about this position—the worst charge that Wallace would admit to—but condescending, potentially cruel.

(Incidentally, the dirtbag leftist critics of the Obamacrats were the partygoers still doing whippets well past dawn. In all, it stands as a pretty good analogy—congrats, Dave.)

One has to respect Jackson for looking squarely at his literary hero and doing the jerk-off motion. And isn’t he right—haven’t we reached the end point to sincerity? The climax? The stage where you have jizz all over your stomach and have to struggle to find something to clean yourself off with or risk making a bigger mess? What comes after that—cringe, indifference, a social media brand, a pledge to oneself to never do it again?

The new insincerity

Not that Jackson has a good answer to these questions in “Wagner.” The characters snort cocaine off of keys to eco-friendly cars; their solution, if they had one, would be to switch to organic cotton cum rags. (Neither here nor there, but I’m reminded of this funny passage in my journal ca. 2020 where I wrote that, given my current trajectory, the only self-growth I seemed to have in my future was expanding my definition of a cum rag.) As the narrator puts it succinctly, “We were not heroes. We were trying to find ways not to be villains.” Here you can see the rise of what Lauren Oyler called the “self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction.” Self-awareness becomes its own end.

I’m reminded of one of my many scuffles with a dissertation committee member, the prototype of the Gen X nihilist who nonetheless goes through every woke genuflection and takes Lexapro to smother her constant anxiety. Exasperated, she let me in on a class secret, the knowledge concealed from militant grad students but known among tenured radicals: We don’t really have to care. It was bracingly honest. Haunting.

I’d be lying to you if I said that there wasn’t something so temptingly freeing about it. To give up the very possibility of bad faith and insincerity. What you have to understand about me is that I’m blasé about selling out; what I’m wary of is buying in.

Substack chad v. David Foster Wallace

If you want my own response to Wallace, it’s that sincerity less often takes the form of an affirmation of single-entendre values (“I believe in democracy”) than the cagey expression of double-negative values (“I don’t not believe in democracy”). The latter isn’t a disavowal of belief, but its preservation.

Jungian shadowboxing

Anyway, I thought I would like to write a piece about masturbation that tries to map out and engage the strange male sex panic surrounding jacking off and porn. But even in writing this post, a modest foray, I began to believe that it requires more engagement than I’m willing to give it because I don’t think it deserves it. (Pace Camus, everyone likes to think they’re a potential suicide, taking themselves hostage to prove some point. Why be Sisyphus when you could be homo sacer?) Besides, I suspect that Edward Teach, who formerly wrote The Last Psychiatrist blog, said much of what there is to say about it in this passage from Sadly, Porn:

The answers to your questions are irrelevant, those aren’t your questions, those are your defenses that safely protect you from asking other questions. “What am I getting out of porn?” Try: What is porn getting you out of? The media scienticians tell us that it destroys self-esteem, relationships and careers, but the media can’t show porn so talking about it is their way of capitalizing on it while taking credit for being above it. Don’t listen to them, they are using you.

Your “heterodox” Substack writers would be far less sex-negative if they were hot enough to pull off OnlyFans, is what I’m getting at. “Most women who do OnlyFans aren’t successful and ruin their career prospects.” Yeah, that probably doesn’t apply at all to subscription-based, race realist, TERF blogs with permanent email receipts.

So much of what we call the culture war is just people boxing with their Jungian shadows in public. In private, though, it’s worth identifying your shadow. You already know mine: heterodox Substack writers, the post-left, the dissident right, the dirtbag left, midwits, the manosphere lite, etc. Some weren’t always my shadows; I had other ones. Some I once admired. But now I fear being hateful, edgy, contrarian, very online, immature, cultish, and dumb—which isn’t to say that I’m not these things, just that I fear them in myself. I fear bad faith. I fear losing the plot.

The shadow also conceals my desire to be cruel, provocative, and irresponsible. To win attention and be admired. To not have to care.

After all, being The Adult In The Room is an awful way to exist in the world.

We hear stories of people who become so obsessed with their altered images—the selves that they display in Instagram photos—that they take their Facetuned selfies to plastic surgeons to have them realized on their bodies. I feel like there’s an equivalent effect for people who render themselves as (or generate their self-understandings from) text and takes online. The only term we have for this form of self-corruption is irony-poisoned (or maybe more generally radicalized or X-pilled?), but I don’t think it captures the scope, diversity, or root of the phenomenon.

A brief thesis on endlessness

But if you insist on listening to yet another hateful, edgy, contrarian, very online, immature, cultish, and dumb take of mine, my hunch about the hysteria toward porn is that it centers on a fear of endless consumption. So much of online life tries to emulate the compulsive consumption of porn: social media, dating apps, gambling/stocks, video games, online shopping, etc. Everything operates on the logic of endless scrolling, micro-novelty, and pleasure-seeking. As Achille Mbembe writes in his recent book Brutalism, the economy has taken a “neurobiological form,” and I think people experience this form most generically in the consumption of porn (hence all the discussion of dopamine). Though it’s not exclusive to them, men seem to face asymmetrical exposure to these technological forms of endlessness, which impinge on the deeply gendered virtue of self-discipline and ostensibly thwart one’s agency to engage in life-building activities.

What’s interesting about porn is that, unlike other technological manifestations of endlessness, it releases you. Post-climax, porn loses all its appeal. You seldom get this same feeling of reaching an end point with other technologies. Not even with online shopping, which should have limits but reports show increasing amounts of personal debt, especially through buy now/pay later purchases. It’s only because porn has an end point that it can instill a sense of existential threat. Teach asks the right question, “What is porn getting you out of?”

On (with?) the other hand,

Post-masturbatory shame is probably just the inescapable product of some physiological response (inflamed cheeks, something about core temperature), and if one can’t blame religious morality for this feeling anymore, then porn/technology/society will suffice as a scapegoat. People are so fragile to their sense of shame that they’d rather make extended arguments about neoliberalism and quote Achille Mbembe rather than endure it for, like, five minutes. Porn aside, horror over masturbation is a perma-adolescent refusal of adult sexual life equivalent to Swifties who think that they’re being groomed at twenty-five. Contra everything you read on the internet, it’s possible to be chill about some things.

If this hypothesis is true, then the solution is relatively simple: you just have to bust really huge loads—just buckets—so your feelings of surprise and accomplishment overcome your shame reflex. Good luck.

Since I’m in the self-sabotage stage of this newsletter, 

I’ll take a page from Greg Jackson and tell you about this time, a bit over a year ago, when I jacked off and, in the resulting post-nut clarity, the entire meta of my life snapped into focus. For context, I was fresh out of grad school after seven years and just started a job at a place that, two months later, seemed poised to shutter within the year (it didn’t). It was hard to fashion any sort of existential grounding under such circumstances, because I just started a new life and would have to start it over again soon.

One very cold afternoon, my body seemed to spontaneously give itself a case of blue balls. I either had to jack off or suffer extreme gut pain—a situation that is hardly an either/or. In the aftermath, this is what I realized: that these days were limited but should be enjoyed for what they were, not what they would yield. Indeed, I would have to give up the expectation that these days would yield anything—whether meaning or money or relationships or a sense of home. And yet, given my level of material and spiritual comfort, I had no need to make myself miserable; doing so would be both ethically and personally irresponsible.

Which is hardly inspiring, intelligent, or interesting, and yet this revelation settled in me for the next few months. Then, as revelations always do, it began to fade, becoming less believable and less livable. I revisit it occasionally, searching again for solace in the refusal of expectations it outlines. The irony on which Infinite Jest turns is that it can take an entire thousand-page novel to believe in a five-word mantra, like the ones that addicts in Alcoholics Anonymous use in their recovery (“One day at a time”). There’s a type of banality that you have to fight to create and place your faith in. It takes building a cathedral to believe in God.

For the record,

I avoided mentioning narcissism, though it’s the obvious subtext for much of what I wrote above. My suspicion is that narcissism is just the N-word that’s replaced n*oliberalism: technically accurate but analytically next-to-useless. It seems like a dead end, which maybe proves Lasch right but doesn’t take us anywhere. What’s the solution to narcissism? Taking shrooms?? Being moralistic on Twitter??? Bro, that’s just slacktivism of the self.