Bestselling Novel discusses MGTOW

[bomwaParticipant 488]

So I had been checking out this site for a while without joining. Then I stumbled across the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq and just had to sign in to share the section in which he lays out the MGTOW case.

Enjoy:

Mostly I had mistresses – or rather, as people said then (and maybe still do), I had girlfriends, roughly one a year. These relationships followed a fairly regular pattern. They would start at the beginning of the academic year, with a seminar, an exchange of class notes, or what have you, one of the many social occasions, so common in student life, that disappear when we enter the workforce, plunging most of us into a stupefying and radical solitude. The relationship would take its course as the year went by. Nights were spent at one person’s place or the other’s (in fact, I’d usually stay at theirs, since the grim, not to say insalubrious, atmosphere at mine hardly lent itself to romantic interludes); sexual acts took place (to what I like to think was our mutual satisfaction).

When we came back from the summer holiday and the academic year began again, the relationship would end, almost always at the girl’s initiative. Things had changed over the summer. This was the reason they’d give, usually without further elaboration. A few, clearly less eager to spare me, would explain that they had met someone. Yeah, and so? Wasn’t I someone, too? In hindsight, these factual accounts strike me as insufficient. They had indeed met someone, I fully concede that; but what made them lend so much weight to this encounter – enough to end our relationship and involve them in a new one – was merely the application of a powerful but unspoken model of amorous behaviour, a model all the more powerful because it remained unspoken.

The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, holidays) that were not only sexual, but social. At the same time, there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships – in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step towards one’s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and final, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.

The complete idiocy of this model became plain to me only much later – rather recently, in fact – when I happened to see Aurélie and then, a few weeks later, Sandra. (But if it had been Chloé or Violaine, I’m convinced I would have reached the same conclusion.) The moment I walked into the Basque restaurant where Aurélie was meeting me for dinner, I knew I was in for a grim evening. Despite the two bottles of white Irouléguy that I drank almost entirely by myself, I found it harder and harder, and after a while, almost impossible, to keep up a reasonable level of friendly conversation. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, it suddenly seemed tactless, almost unthinkable, to talk about the old days. As for the present, it was clear that Aurélie had never managed to form a long-term relationship, that casual sex filled her with growing disgust, that her personal life was headed for complete and utter disaster. There were various signs that she’d tried to settle down, at least once, and had never recovered from her failure. From the sour and bitter way she talked about her male colleagues (in the end we’d been reduced to discussing her professional life: she was head of communications for an association of Bordeaux winemakers, so she travelled a lot to promote French wines, mostly in Asia) it was painfully clear that she had been through the wringer. Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up ‘for a nightcap’. She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the lift doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen. I didn’t even want to see her naked, I’d rather have avoided it, and yet it came to pass, and only confirmed what I’d already imagined. Her emotions may have been through the wringer, but her body had been damaged beyond repair. Her buttocks and breasts were no more than sacks of emaciated flesh, shrunken, flabby and pendulous. She could no longer – she could never again – be considered an object of desire.

My meal with Sandra followed a similar pattern, albeit with small variations (seafood restaurant, job with the CEO of a multinational pharmaceutical company), and it ended much the same way, except it seemed to me that Sandra, who was plumper and jollier than Aurélie, hadn’t let herself go to the same degree. She was sad, very sad, and I knew her sorrow would overwhelm her in the end; like Aurélie, she was nothing but a bird in an oil slick; but she had retained, if I can put it this way, a superior ability to flap her wings. In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions, her imperfectly extinguished sensuality would lead her to seek out the company of young men, she would become what we used to call a cougar, and no doubt she’d go on this way for several years, ten at the most, before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive, and condemned her to a lasting solitude.

In my twenties, when I got hard-ons all the time, sometimes for no good reason, as though in a vacuum, I might have gone for someone like her. It would have been more satisfying, and paid better, than my tutorials. Back then I think I could have performed, but now of course it was totally out of the question, since my erections were rarer and less dependable and required bodies that were firm, supple and flawless.

My own sex life, during my early years as a lecturer at Paris III, hadn’t evolved in any notable way. Year after year, I kept sleeping with students, and the fact that we were now teacher and student didn’t change things much at all. At the beginning, there was scarcely any age difference between us. Only gradually did an element of transgression enter in, and this had more to do with my rising academic status than with my age, real or apparent. In short, I benefitted from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from year to year, or even from month to month.

The one real change, since my student years, was that now I was usually the one who broke it off when the academic year began. It wasn’t that I was a Don Juan, or yearned for some kind of untrammelled sexual freedom. Unlike my colleague Steve, who also taught nineteenth-century literature to the first- and second-year students, I didn’t spend the first days of university eagerly checking out the ‘new talent’. (With his sweatshirts, his Converse and his vaguely Californian looks, he always reminded me of Thierry Lhermitte in Les Bronzés, emerging from his cabana every week to assess the new crop at the resort.) If I broke up with these girls, it was more out of a sense of discouragement, of lassitude: I just didn’t feel up to maintaining a relationship, and I didn’t want to disappoint them or lead them on. Then over the course of the academic year I’d change my mind, owing to factors that were external and incidental – generally, a short skirt.

Then that stopped, too. I’d left Myriam at the end of September, now it was already mid-April, the academic year was coming to an end, and still I hadn’t replaced her. Although I had been made a full professor, and so had reached a sort of end point in my academic career, I didn’t think the two facts were connected. By contrast, it was just after things ended with Myriam that I saw Aurélie, and Sandra, and there I did feel a connection – a disturbing, unpleasant, uncomfortable connection. Because as I looked back over the years, I had to admit that my exes and I were much closer than we realised. Our episodic sexual relations, pursued with no hope of any lasting attachment, had left us disillusioned in similar ways. Unlike them, I had no one to talk to about these things, since intimacy isn’t something men talk about. They may talk about politics, literature, stocks or sports, depending on the man, but about their love lives they keep silent, even to their dying breath.

Had I fallen prey, in middle age, to a kind of andropause? It wouldn’t have surprised me. To find out for sure I decided to spend my evenings on YouPorn, which over the years had grown into a sort of porn encyclopedia. The results were immediate and extremely reassuring. YouPorn catered to the fantasies of normal men all over the world, and within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man. This was not something I took for granted. After all, I’d devoted years of my life to the study of a man who was often considered a kind of Decadent, whose sexuality was therefore not entirely clear.

At any rate, the experiment put my mind at rest. Some of the videos were superb (shot by a crew from Los Angeles, complete with a lighting designer, cameramen and cinematographer), some were wretched but ‘vintage’ (German amateurs), and all were based on the same few crowd-pleasing scenarios. In one of the most common, some man (young? old? both versions existed) had been foolish enough to let his penis curl up for a nap in his pants or boxers. Two young women, of varying race, would alert him to the oversight and, this accomplished, would stop at nothing until they liberated his organ from its temporary abode. They’d coax it out with the sluttiest kind of badinage, all in a spirit of friendship and feminine complicity. The penis would pass from one mouth to the other, tongues crossing paths like restless flocks of swallows in the sombre skies above the Seine-et-Marne when they prepare to leave Europe for their winter migration.

The man, destroyed at the moment of his assumption, would utter a few weak words: appallingly weak in the French films (‘Oh putain!’ ‘Oh putain je jouis!’: more or less what you’d expect from a nation of regicides), more beautiful and intense from those true believers the Americans (‘Oh my God!’ ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’), like an injunction not to neglect God’s gifts (blow jobs, roast chicken). At any rate I got a hard-on, too, sitting in front of my twenty-seven-inch iMac, and all was well.

[RockmaninoffParticipant 1641]

This is one of the most disgustingly elegant passages I’ve ever read. Do you know where I can find an excerpt of this in the original French?

". . . elle, suivant l’usage des femmes et des chats qui ne viennent pas quand on les appelle et qui viennent quand on ne les appelle pas, s’arrêta devant moi et m’adressa la parole"—Prosper Mérimée

[Anonymous 3]

Feminists are the biggest misogynists around. The irony. They knew this would happen. They just wanted all women to become lesbians, which didn’t happen.

[bomwaParticipant 488]

I purchased the English version on Google Play. I suppose you could find the original version on there too.

Yes, I agree it is an elegant account. The English translation is superb. The entire book was a pleasure to read.

[Author]

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