Ladies and People Who Came Out of Ladies, this article features a trigger warning: Contains discussion of sexual assault, violence, murder, and gratuitous sexual imagery.
When Puff Daddy’s house was raided in 2024, they found thousands of bottles of Baby Oil, enough to fill a pallet. It wasn’t until a year or so later, during the trial, that it was made clear what the oil was for. They were supplies for P-Diddy’s so-called Freak Off parties. They’d drug girls and bring in male and female sex workers and oil everyone up and command them around.
But what does it mean for a man’s sexual appetite to be so rampant he requires people to do things against their will in order to achieve the ecstacy available to us all via sex?
Rape culture can be seen a spectrum. On the lower end of the spectrum there is unwanted advances at a coffee shop and on the far end there is aggressive, violent rape and murder. The incels on r/nicegirls like to claim that women are so on edge about rape these days that it’s impossible to even express interest in a woman without getting accused of accosting her. But in reality, if you are approaching a stranger and she is acting offended, it’s probably because you’re being offensive.
The truth is: this is not a society where it’s likely that a little boy will grow into a man. The white misogynistic capitalist patriarchy made sure that the whole world is a little boy’s oyster. “The sky is the limit,” “conquer the day,” “nothing can stop you.” (Even though she is unsurprisingly a Zio,) Amy Schumer has a good skit on rape and football that feels relevant to this point:
Little boys are impulsive, they need constant stimulation, and they act without considering consequence. To be on their best behavior, they need a coach. . . they need a mommy or daddy to put them back in line.
Like children, men too kick and scream when their behavior is “corrected.” And often, if they are held lovingly throughout the process (again, like a child must be) their nervous systems show their appreciation for the boundary, and they know their lives are better because of it.
Just last night, I was watching my son playing in the backyard while the sun set and as the air started to grow colder, I watched his little hands and feet turning red and his skin tightening. I told him it’s time for bathtime. He said no, “I want to be out here in the cold.” I expected this: “It wasn’t a question. It’s time to get in the bath.” He started crying as if I killed his dog. Or as if I was a woman, and he was a man, and I had expressed my feelings about how his behavior affected me. But as he is crying and staring and me in horror, I watched his body autonomously begin to take of his clothes. As he dragged his feet into the house through the kitchen and into the bathroom, he undressed all the while and got in the bath before taking a big sigh and relaxing into the wam water. He was still mad though. “Bad dadda, I’m never going to play with you again.” Still, I watch his skin settles down, his blood returns to his hands and feet. He is calm and soon distracted by a toy boat floating past. My presence and direction kept him regulated.
At other times, my dysregulation may make my kids get out of whack when otherwise they’d be self-regulated.
There’s a misconception I held for most of my life that the goal of anger was violence and submission, and it’s certainly used this way most commonly. If someone is angry at me, especially someone I don’t know, it’s not hard to imagine them hurting me physically. But if the people are in relationship, that same anger enjoys a container of love, and it can help the system regulate just like any other emotion does. But then how do people get stuck in abusive relationships, say, with P-Diddy?
Whenever some new sexual assault celebrity scandal happens, I immediately think of Big with Tom Hanks, and how horribly wrong that all could have gone.
Harvey Weinstein, P-Diddy, and the like were plucked like Tom Hanks from their young bodies and breathed into some adult man’s body. But instead of it being a kind-hearted 2-hour Tom Hanks movie, they were left there in those bodies for the remainder of their lives. Don’t you see the loneliness in their eyes? The decrepitude is real.
Coming Correct
One of the first books Marley gave me when we started dating was The Sexual Teachings of the Jade Dragon: Taoist Methods for Male Sexual Revitalization. In the book, a Green Dragon is defined as someone driven by raw desire, often impulsive and undisciplined. This state is characterized by uncontrolled sexual chi, leading to behaviors that are more about personal gratification than mutual connection. Think of a little boy revved up in the backyard knocking over trampolines and kicking balls and throwing brooms. This is explosive, uncontrolled sexual chi (Westerners likely would call this “testosterone,” though I think thats just a part of a bigger story that “sexual chi” better encapsulates).
While Western Puritanism is suspiciously afraid to discuss childhood sexuality, Taoism is mature enough to explore how sexual energy grows and morphs in the human body. This energy doesn’t just come on line on your 18th birthday—it’s a slow fade. Humanity’s whole raison d'être is to have sex, so it makes sense that the second we can walk and talk, we’re touching ourselves and wondering what the deal is with these skin flaps we hide away all day. We don’t know what they are for, but they have a gravity to them we are interested in. We are born sexual beings. Being born is sexual.
All people start as Green Dragons and can, through physical practice, become Jade Dragons who serve their partners with strength and clarity, control their sexuality, and are a stabilizing force. In Taoist tradition, the word “jade” refers to semen, and the jade stone itself symbolizes dragon cum.
The patriarchy has us existing in a world where men can show up to a woman all Green Dragoned out, energy leaking like a sieve, and that she should be so grateful that he has chosen her. And then the man leaks all over her life and has the gall to say “nothing will ever make you happy.”
If sexual energy just grows throughout life without thoughtful education and experience, you get men willing to murder and maim in order to achieve peace, men willing to rape in order to achieve intimacy, men willing to make people around them unsafe so they can feel safe. Men who are incapable of actually relating to another person in a cosmic dance, but must order people hierarchichally and mistreat those below them.
In The Teachings of the Jade Dragon, a Jade Dragon could visit a white tigress to train him to use his sexual energy in a controlled way. One of the lessons involves the White Tigress having sex with a Jade Dragon while the Green Dragon (in training) sits in the next room listening. The intention here is to teach the Green Dragon to listen to a woman in a real away, understanding the pacing she needs to feel safe, understand what it feels like to be in the room when she is being drained of energy versus when she is being filled up. Even though Western (white American Christian) culture isn’t unique in its misogyny, it is unique in its near complete lack of matriarchal lineage and respect. Even if you update the history books with the great women of history, it’s hard to avoid tokenizing because the current of the status quo is so strong toward writing women out of the story. That’s why wokeness, especially in bureaucratic and corporate environments, comes off so cheesy and forced.
Because a violent patriarchal society has de-personified woman in men’s eyes, women now have the added labor of having to really slap men around a bit in order for them to be seen as a whole human and the real relationship can begin. Most of us were raised by mothers who were willing conspirators in unjust and patriarchal norms. We don’t even know what it feels like to interact with a decolonized woman. What it feels like to come correct to her when she comes correct.
I believe if you don’t come correct to a woman they have three options: (1) leave you in the dust, (2) whip you into shape, or (3) take on the patriarchal worldview where they need a man and their man, no matter how obviously grotesque a person, is at the top of the family hierarchy. And option 3 is a relationship where one or more people are ultimately unfulfilled and both people usually feel non-consensually submissive to their partners. That is, it is a hierarchical relationship—there is someone on top reaping the benefits.
Motherfucking S.I.M.P.
If you’re steeped in patriarchal mind games like this lady ⬆️, you probably think being a simp is a bad thing.
You probably read The Superior Man and went to your mens groups or talked to your girlfriends and settled on the idea that real men are stable, secure, and strong. You’ve probably understood simps as needy, eager, and submissive. These definitions are on their way out.
To all my d00dz (is that gender neutral for dude?), next time you try and approach a woman, remember that option number two is your goal. Hold space for the possibility that this woman might know how to whip you into shape and that it won’t always be an enjoyable process. Remember that your job, as a man, biologically speaking is to help her feel safe enough to procreate.
That is why the most sexually tense exchanges often involve a bit of bickering, and it’s usually the woman doing the bickering. It’s a test, to see if he can handle it. Are you going to hang your head and skulk away or dance with her? Someone once told me, “Do you know how to know if a woman is testing you? She’s talking. Do you know how to know if you’re failing? You’re talking.”
The lesson here isn’t to shut up, but to listen, to take in your chosen person’s critiques and painful feelings and emotions and quirks and transmute them into something that strengthens your bond. Allow your ego to be big and strong, not big and brittle.
While men can take the lead here and there in the material realm, in the emotional realm, let the woman take the lead. That doesn’t mean collude with every one of her anxieties and fears, but it means treat their feelings as if they arrived like gems from heaven and it was your job to keep them safe, not to smash them into sand and say “problem solved.”
One of the saddest aspects of the crimes commited by Diddy, Weinstein, and the like, is that they all had inumerable avenues to get sexual gratification consensually, and in a healthy way. Healthy here means: with people and in situations where everyone leaves feeling good. The world would be better if your sex was better.
My Thing
In November 2017, five women accused Louis C.K. of sexual misconduct, alleging that he masturbated in front of them or asked to do so without consent. He admitted, “These stories are true,” acknowledging that he abused his position of power. He disappeared from the public eye for several years and then returned with a comedy special where he talks about how every guy has “a thing”—a sexual predilection that is the holy grail of their sexual experience. But he laments that in getting outed, now President Obama knows what his thing us. He likes to jerk off in front of people; like a neglected Green Dragon might with their sexual energy run amok. As Louis points to himself he says, “Some people just like fucked up sex.”
I used to have “a thing.” I had some shame around it; it wasn’t even that rare or weird. But I felt like there was no way I could experience it without feeling bad for my partner, like I was forcing them to do an extreme sport. And then I was lucky enough to marry to a former sex worker, who has let me hold “my thing” in reverence, and turned it into a way—in her mind and in mine—for us to be connected and intimate in a serious way. Tending to the rougher edges of our selves as a way of building a container of safety.
If P-Diddy was coming correct, he would have made a situation for himself where rubbing baby oil all over some guy and asking him to have sex with his girlfriend wasn’t so. . . fucked up. But, as Louis hinted, and as I used to think about my thing, some people want the fucked up part. The darkness is a turn on for them. I can’t think of a better example of how colonizing and misogynistic thought patterns destroy the external world as well as our internal world.
Why? Why does the hurt need to be real?
I think most men want someone to show them how their darkness is nothing to be ashamed of. But that is an active process. They can’t just wait for someone with the right temperment to help them transmute this darkness. They must be on their own journey with it, and using the relationship as a proving ground. The goal is to have healthy relationships and to me this means decolonized, non-hierarchichical, sex positive, and shadow affirming. This is a pie in the sky, I recieved too much nervous system level programming to just CRISPR it out of me. Miosgyny lives in me. Racism lives in me. We’re all on this fucked up sitcom together, we might as well have great, consensual, life affirming sex.
From the quagmire of american misogyny, we did recieve one gem of cliche wisdom: “Happy wife, happy life.”
It’s simply true. And if we extrapolate it to the whole globe: happy wives, happy lives, If you make it your goal to serve women’s nervous systems, many of the world’s ills would be healed. Most of us men are lost, our nervous systems are all out of whack. We need you.
In The Superior Man, David Deida says that when a woman is unhappy she is not like a car engine that needs a new carburetor, she is like a flower that just needs some water. In other words, don’t over complicate it, don’t worry about her personality and what you think of her—that will make you reactive and un-present. Just focus on her nervous system: what can you say or do that will make her feel truly safe and held?
Anyway, this is all such bullshit. I know this is what I need to do, but every day, I’m still a grumpy guy who makes ill-timed jokes and slips into autopilot 80% of the time. Sorry, I just got the feeling I was writing a bit too flowery trying to close this article up. I don’t want to social-media shame you into thinking I’m great and my relationship is perfect and radical. It ain’t.
This stuff is sometimes touchy and I appreciate you reading. I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Love,
Josh
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