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Mordred

Frankly, as a YouPorn masturbator, I was pretty offended by this. (By the way, you can also hit me up on Chatroulette.) What's more, the last part kind of makes him sound like serial killer: "My local life is clean. I am more focused than they are. Stronger and better suited to what is near me -- my family, my wife, my job." It almost feels like his next sentence could easily be, "No one would ever dream of looking in my shed."

But the other weird part about this is that he says, "you don't fight men over stuff like this" -- yet he goes and does just that. He fights with men (with me) about it, he just does so in flaccid anonymity.

[. . .]

First of all, I would never, never describe making love to my wife as "sweet." There is actually a lot of grunting, if you must know.

[. . .]

This is not a cheating piece, this is a revenge piece; society isn't nice with all its fancy expectations for little Prince Anonymous, so I will treat my wife passive aggressively -- no, make that cruelly -- and I'll do so in complete anonymity (just like this article). I will use my wife and these women to get back at the big bad modern world that doesn't appreciate me. Performance reviews, training, 401K, too much work, deadening career, flawed and antiquated apparatus of marriage.

This is not a cheating piece. It's more of this Nouvelle American Man Poor Me bullshit. This is just a retread article by a guy with no sense of humor about himself, who is too soft to take any real responsibility in his life. Don't like your boring job? Quit, and learn how to live with less, or find something that interests you more. Living too long? Get a heroin problem. Don't like being married? Don't get married. Or man up and get a divorce. Fix just one aspect of your miserable life and stop giving me shit about masturbating to YouPorn. Don't act like some jaded character resigned to his fate, don't be an anonymous guru who purports to have some deep insight into what men really think, because ultimately, while there are a bunch of guys over the age of 30 who think and act like this, most of us got over this angsty stuff a long time ago. The only thing this particular anonymous has any insight into is the way spoiled little boys think. (Aaron Traister, “Explaining Tiger Woods and Jesse James, badly,” Salon, 19 March 2010)

Mordreds

When we sense that Morgana, not Arthur, rules the realm, the most obnoxious -- for sensing themselves so obnoxiously-backed/empowered -- are the Mordreds of the world, those who have offered up their scrotums and their souls to their mother-wives.

Why does Aaron so often repeat that he's a YouPorn watcher -- put this fact before us, not so much as if he was owning-up to his clownishness, but as if he was muscling his balls before our face? Because it posits him the teen boy whose bathroom grunts are to be understood by mom as but natural -- that "that's what little boys do" -- not someone who is contesting her centrality of interest to, her ownership over, him. His juvenile grunts show he has retreated away from any claim to adult self-possession; he becomes the adolescent who proves daily in his ostensible adulthood that he will never in fact defy or move on.

This is a rewarding but also humiliating place to be. You do feel some wife-revenge in his making clear "we're up to grunting, not just petting" -- a way of covering with the mutual his intention we know how daily HE makes HER grunt -- but it is well diverted toward some other intention, toward the primary "out" for his revenge. For in the age of Morgana, the wife-fidelitous YouPorner feels -- and actually can -- make mince-meat of any ranging 'squire, and so frustration finds release primarily in OUR carnage. He needn't even argue or write well: it's enough for him to show off his branding for us to know that our God, our Lady, has ordained the day for him.

Link: Explaining Tiger Woods and Jesse James, badly (Salon)

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