I’ve never had meaningless sex,…I meant to bang every girl I ever did.

Whenever I author a particularly inflammatory post or forum thread that grates people’s ego-invested beliefs, one of the first responses I expect to have leveled at me are those that echo a shaming appeal to moralism. I can generally identify a pretty important issue if a response to my exposing some particularly uncomfortable truth requires questioning my common sense of ethics. Taken to a larger scale, many a White Knight, and many an invested woman will simply default to ‘higher self’ arguments when confronted with even the most simple observations that challenge what they believe, and what they assume everyone else believes along with them. People with questions don’t frighten me, it’s the people without them that scare the hell out of me.

My problem isn’t necessarily with principles of morals or ethics in and of themselves, but rather men chumpishly clinging to them when in actuality they really had no other options to give themselves a wider perspective on what they believe. They make necessity a virtue. For instance, telling yourself you’re remaining (conditionally) celibate in order to hold to some higher ideal is just trying to prove a negative if you don’t really have any valid options to influence your decision in the first place. It’s unassailable; I can’t doubt the merit of a guy’s convictions when nothing is what’s required prove them. I read a lot of guys who question the merits of Game, reject it entirely or profess some desire to “get out of all the game playing” in order to rationalize their inability to adopt a new mindset for themselves. Usually this is accompanied by some qualification as to how they’ve seen it all, fucked their fill of “low quality women”, and now have developed some higher sense of self – implying those still “in the game” have not – and are now giving themselves ‘permission’ to exit the game by settling down with some girl in blissful monogamy. They’ve finally grown up and are doing “the right thing.” It’s like all endings to romantic comedies – he’s really a bastard with a heart of gold who met the ‘right’ woman to bring it out in him.

Anyone would sound like an idiot for trying to convince you not to be moral, drop your integrity or demean yourself – but that’s the reason appeals to moralism sound good. Being resolute is admirable, but until your virtue is significantly tested they’re just excuses that look nice on your sleeve. Guy’s who have legitimate harems don’t make announcements about how they’re renouncing them in favor of ONE quality woman. There’s no self-convincing, they just do it, without any fanfare or seeking affirmation from others for having done so.

It’s been my experience that the guys who are the most vocal about the merits of self-esteem and personal integrity trumping sexual experience are generally the same guys who aren’t hooking up with any real frequency anyway. Remember, a sacrifice is only significant when you actually have something relevant to lose. The point these guys like to make are generally based on common truisms that very few people will argue with – and they know this. We’d all like to think that possessing some basic form of self-control is admirable, particularly in respect to our base impulses, but for as much as we’d like to self-righteously pat ourselves on the back for “resisting temptation”, the fact remains that yes, we are still motivated by those impulses. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to identify with the “lust crazed man” label, and certainly not as his recognized source of esteem, however, the physical/biological forces that motivates his lust is still very real. Flowery prose doesn’t make a personal anecdote a universal truth. It’s interesting that they’ll make the point of personal esteem being a paramount virtue in one paragraph yet still equate bedding a “woman of value” with a sense of “victory”.

It’s interesting to me when I hear appeals to righteousness in the form of deriding the experiences of men (sexual or otherwise) by characterizing them as worth less because they supposedly compensate for some inner failing. One canard is the presumption that a guy with many lovers in his past must somehow be fucking his harem to impress himself or others. Honestly, I’ve never known a guy who didn’t enjoy fucking for the sake of fucking. Considering the difficulty most men encounter in just banging the precious few women they do in the average lifespan, I doubt the few men who actually can enjoy a variety of women do so simply to acquire more accolades from other men for having done so. What’s ironic to me is that the same self-righteous appeal to adherence to a convenient conviction is actually done for much the same reason they accuse other men of – to garner respect and affirmation for doing so.

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should’ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.