Commentary on Footnote 1 of Sadly, Porn, Part 1
A secondary source for a book explicitly against secondary sources
Fair warning: I’ll be going through footnote 1 almost paragraph by paragraph, cutting only what can safely be skipped, which is practically nothing. The quotations will be lengthy, and you will have to read all of them. I warned you.
“What does the mainstream popularity of this book mean? In order to answer this question, you have to read the book. Not read about the book, read the actual book, the one thing that best characterizes the problems in American style education isn't the grade inflation or guaranteed loans with unguaranteed repayment but the dominance of secondary sources. You might not get much out of a week reading Thucydides, but you will only get lies from a semester reading about him. “I really liked that class.” Then it worked and you didn't have to. Right here someone usually says that reading Thucydides is hard, you need some context, but calculus is hard yet no one has ever offered me a biographical sketch of whoever invented the Hamiltonian. "You know Thucydides was bald and hated women?" I'm pretty sure you just made that up, but anyway, if it was relevant to the writing, don't you think I would have picked this up by actually reading the writing? But thank you for New Yorkering a physical description into your criticism, it helps put the writing no one will read in context. You're not going to want to hear this, but there was once unanimous intellectual agreement that it was impossible to understand Plato from a translation, and 1500 miles and years from the crucifixion Martin Luther derailed top-down Christianity almost entirely in reaction to the insidious influence of expert commentary. Meanwhile back at college you could have learned about the differences between love and madness straight from the 26 pages of the relevant dialogue-- and why is it lumped with rhetoric?-- or the logical incompatibilities between love, lust, and alcohol; but instead you attended a class given by an old man bored with his wife or a young bore with neither man nor wife, with predictable results. “I learned a lot in college.” Then you must have been really stupid to begin with.” – Sadly, Porn, section 31
One of the failures of the modern reader is his inability to engage with the work. I’m not talking about lack of attention span or TikTok 30 second videos melting your brain, that’s too easy, I’m talking about active engagement: reading, rereading, writing, clarifying your thoughts, discussing, thinking. The modern reader expects the meaning of a work to passively “arrive”, to appear, he wants “easy to understand”. I’m sure this has always been the case to some extent, people have always been lazy, but by the same token a man born 100 years ago learned to speak 5 languages, 2 dead, by the time he graduated college. Plainly something has changed and it’s not just rose-tinted glasses.
The main complaint against Sadly, Porn, and TLP’s blog in general is that it is hard to understand. Sadly, Porn, like any good work, requires effort of the reader, it demands work, which is to say change: this is why people hate it, this is why its “rambling” and “nonsensical”. Anything that you read that is clear, simple, anything that leaves you with a feeling of “oh, wow, so true” by the close of the last sentence is full of shit, its lying to you, it is masturbation. Any such work is a defense against change that is working, actively, to maintain the status quo. We pat ourselves on the back for having read something “difficult”, as if reading alone is all that a work of philosophy or psychology or any piece of art requires of you, but this is ridiculous. Philosophy, psychology, art, all of them must be read, reread, discussed, written about, and most of all lived, it must be uncomfortable and difficult because if it isn’t it hasn’t caused you to change.
But even reading a primary source is a stretch. If not a second or third hand source, we read translations, because we can’t speak 5 languages, because our education system has failed. Secondary sources, lack of engagement, expert commentary, fact checking: one follows the other like vultures circling a corpse, the stench is everywhere.
The goal of this essay is twofold: one, to show that the thesis of the book is established in footnote 1, clearly, it is completely explained; two, to demonstrate that engaging with the work, writing about it, reading and rereading it, and explicitly checking what sources and media Teach is referencing rather than taking his word for it leads to actual understanding. Understanding the book beyond footnote 1 is left as an exercise to the reader.
I. None More Profitable
The first footnote to Sadly, Porn comes literally one paragraph in, in the disclaimer, which is odd until you’ve read the rest of the book. The footnotes of Sadly, Porn are a form of violence on the reader: the book is laid out in such a way that the most important parts often come in footnotes that make up entire essays. Meaning is interwoven between these footnotes and the rest of the chapter implicitly, so to understand the chapter you have to read the long rambling footnotes, and then go back, and then reread sections, and jump around. This is intentional: Teach intends to be irritating with the layout in the sense that an irritant will cause change: you have to jump back and forth, you have to read long rambling sections that don’t seem related, the whole thing is designed to not allow you to read comfortably, to not allow the meaning to simply arrive, passively. You will have to pull it out, bit by bit, not because it is hidden or obscure but because it is not given to you neatly, tied up in a ribbon. You are forced to actively understand it. You are forced to think.
Teach is asking in this first paragraph: what is porn? He’s talking about what a young man would be thinking about, and how an older man “forgets how sex and love frame all their decisions, forgets that the kid looking idly around a train car isn't thinking about bladder capacities or his boss’s incompetence, he's daydreaming about gazing at his beloved or ejaculating on a chick as he explains to her that she knows she likes it.” And here begins our first footnote.
Besides the instant irritation of a footnote being literally one paragraph into the book – instantly breaking the readers “flow”, forcing them to switch gears – the opening footnote begins with a number in brackets: [7.14]. What? I skipped this at first because I am incompetent, but clintonthegeek, resident McLuhan expert on the ole subreddit (I’m not a redditor don’t call me a redditor) has helpfully pointed out that these numbers refer to Thucydides and his work The History of the Peloponnesian War. Nota bene, this is a central text to Sadly, Porn. I have not yet read it and discussing Thucydides and its importance in SP is enough for the topic of an even larger essay, probably several, that I am not yet capable of writing.
[7.14]: what does it mean? Thankfully an online tool exists and we can plug the exact number into it and see.
“14. 'You to whom I am writing know that the crew of a vessel does not long remain at its prime, and that the sailors who really start the ship and keep the rowing together are but a fraction of the whole number The most hopeless thing of all is that, although I am general, I am not able to put a stop to these disorders, for tempers like yours are not easily controlled, and that we cannot even fill up the crews, whereas the enemy can obtain recruits from many sources. Our daily waste in men and stores can only be replaced out of the supplies which we brought with us; and these we have no means of increasing, for the cities which are now our confederates, Naxos and Catana, are unable to maintain us. There is only one advantage more which the Syracusans can gain over us: if the towns of Italy from which our provisions are derived, seeing in what a plight we are and that you do not come to our help, go over to the enemy, we shall be starved out, and they will have made an end of the war without striking a blow. I could have written you tidings more cheering than these, but none more profitable; for you should be well-informed of our circumstances if you are to take the right steps. Moreover I know your dispositions; you like to hear pleasant things, but afterwards lay the fault on those who tell you them if they are falsified by the event; therefore I think it safer to speak the truth.”
This is from a letter written by Nicias and sent to Athens. Nicias is out on the Sicilian Expedition, an ill-fated and insane empire expansion attempt that is discussed at length in another footnote. The Athenians have sent Nicias to protect Sicily from her enemy Syracuse, ally of the Spartans, but really to expand their empire by conquering all of Sicily. Nicias is a general, a seasoned veteran, and he realizes that trying to conquer Sicily is nuts. Alcibiades, the guy responsible for this idiotic idea, has defected, so in his stead Nicias has been put in charge of the expedition. The Syracusans request aid from the Spartans, who are at war with Athens. The Spartans pull up and with the help of the Syracusans beat the Athenians (as Nicias thought they would) and encircle them; Nicias, without men or supplies, is trying to convince the Athenians at home that this is insane and that they need help.
I will caution, my summary here comes from Wikipedia, which is to say it’s a fourth-hand summary from a third hand source that was written from second hand sources, who most likely did not read the first hand source in Greek but a translation. Which is to say, my summary is shit. But I did read all of Nicias’ speech (in translation) and can at least give you something there.
Nicias relates that the besiegers are now besieged: the Athenians cannot bring out their army but are stuck in their battlements, harassed by Spartans. They can’t get supplies or men, the whole thing is a disaster. Gyllipus, a Spartan general, is bringing reinforcements from Peloponnesus and from other Sicilian cities, to attack from both land and sea, and the Athenians ships have rotted in the water making a counterattack by boat impossible. Men are abandoning the fight or defecting to the Syracusan side or getting killed when they go out to forage food, since supplies are being cut off by the enemy.
The crew of a vessel does not long remain at its prime, and the sailors who start the ship and keep the rowing together are but a fraction of the number. Men are deserting, the strong cannot hold them together, and Nicias can’t stop them from running. If the cities that remain on the Athenian side decide to switch over to the winning team there will be no more provisions at all, and the war will be lost. But the important part is here:
“I could have written you tidings more cheering than these, but none more profitable; for you should be well-informed of our circumstances if you are to take the right steps. Moreover I know your dispositions; you like to hear pleasant things, but afterwards lay the fault on those who tell you them if they are falsified by the event; therefore I think it safer to speak the truth.”
We are the Athenians, and Nicias, weary and beat down, is talking to us.
This theme is, again, central to the book: modern America (which is to say, the world) is ancient Athens, we are encircled, supplies are running out, the situation is grim. If we are to take the correct steps, we must be correctly informed. People keep saying the book could have been written better, that it be less confusing, easier to follow. Their Athenian dispositions long for more cheerful tidings: they will find none here. They long to hear pleasant things, but Nicias knows our trick, he knows he’ll take the blame at the end of the day when lies don’t work out. Cheerful tidings don’t make you change, and so, like Teach, Nicias would rather speak the truth.
II. Know Thyself
We were talking about a young man daydreaming about ejaculating on a chick. Except, he isn’t: “Of course, in real life he wouldn't be daydreaming about sex, he'd be looking at it on his Pornotron. That's not a joke, it is the central problem of our time.” This is the gist of the book, and it has nothing to do with porn breaking our brains or whatever the currently popular argument is. Those discussions are defenses against change, they help maintain the status quo of porn. The central problem of our time is commitment.
“Men regularly whisper what women wonder out loud: why do the most desirable women have the least devoted boyfriends? ... it’s evident that these men aren’t invested, everyone easily leaving his woman to the mercy of greater numbers. Intercourse happens only with fear, so every man husbands his girlfriend just enough to make due, making no plans and planting no seeds, because you don’t know when some other bull will inevitably invade and carry her away. God knows you can’t keep her walled in, and if you landed her, she’s got to be easy to plough. ‘Why commit? She’ll just end up cheating anyway.’ … But because of this they never show any ability, either for wealth or achievement or anything else. The most desirable of the women are always the most susceptible to these turnovers of boyfriends.”
“Porn becomes the solution to a problem you didn’t know you had, which isn’t genetic, but arithmetic. Rather than evolution magically matching fecund brunettes to instinct driven reproduction machines that want to impregnate as many uteros as possible (using the Darwinian strategy of facials) the men do a quick calculation: how much energy should I give to what will surely be taken from me, especially if beforehand I make it radiate even more brightly?”
The problem is arithmetic: what is the minimum amount of commitment that I must give without ever truly committing? Without ever tying myself to her? How do I own without ownership, how do I love without loving, so that when I lose her, I lose as little as possible? We are only on this journey for a little while, our paths will someday diverge, lets enjoy it while we can without taking it too seriously…
From this, of course, no potential, no future, the men who have optimized this strategy know to never fully involve themselves. “…because of this they never show any ability, either for wealth or achievement or anything else.”
“‘Why am I attracted to those I can’t have?’ “Why do I date people I shouldn’t?” “Why don’t I understand myself better?” Like the Delphic Oracle commands, KNOW THYSELF? You know the Oracle isn't really all knowing, right? Did you stop and wonder why professional manipulators carved this into their temple? “Didn't Socrates also believe it?” The liars certainly told you so.”
“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 Oracle at Delphi gave prophecies under the divine possession of Apollo. The Athenians believed these prophecies. Carved into the Temple of Apollo were three things:
1. Know Thyself
2. Nothing to excess
3. Surety brings ruin
Socrates may or may not have said “Know thyself”, all we have is what was attributed to him by Plato and Xenophon in their writings on him. Secondary sources. The context of “Know thyself” is never given, we are told this is what Socrates said not even by our own reading of the dialogues but by further third sources in isolation from the dialogues in which they appear. Socrates is known for his irony, for tricking others; the only references I can find to “know thyself” in Xenophons Memorabilia is Socrates using the phrase when convincing Euthydemus of the good of wisdom. A few paragraphs later, after Euthydemus has agreed excitedly about how good wisdom is, Socrates goes on to describe various people who have suffered immensely because of their wisdom. Not a wholesale endorsement, if you ask me. What Socrates meant doesn’t matter: some other expert tells us he’s an expert, Socrates the Greek philosophy man, everyone knows him, and he’s telling me to know myself? Geez, I better do some introspection.
These questions, self searching, looking into the mirror, all of it is masturbation. “Why do I watch porn instead of loving my wife? Is it some past trauma/lust/something else?” Well, now you can spend time thinking about the answer to this question instead of loving your wife. Know thyself and see what it leads to: the man who masturbates to porn can say he’s “no longer horny for” “no longer attracted to” his wife which is to say he no longer has to be attracted to her, he doesn’t have to try. The porn frees him from commitment, the porn gives him relief from needing to act, he no longer has to love. “Porn destroys relationships,” but look what the porn is getting you out of, affect is always 100% correct.
“One interesting discovery I made-- and you're going think this was obvious-- is that most people masturbate while they are watching porn... to completion. Easy, baby steps: they don't watch it, then retreat to a safe room and masturbate the rest of the way to a porn-inspired fantasy, re-shot, re-casted and re-directed in their head. There is no fantasy. They are lead mechanically to the orgasm. But what makes it diabolical is that it feels like you are fantasizing, it feels like they got it, like it's your fantasy presciently or coincidentally acted on screen. “I know porn isn't real, but how did they know this is what I liked?” Change “liked” from past tense back to future conditional…”
You read that last line and skimmed right over it, didn’t you? Me too. In order for this book to make sense, you have to do the work. Future conditional is the tense relating what you will do, in the form of “if x I will do y”. “If Johnny has time after school, he will help me with my homework”. It rests on a condition: Johnny having time. Let’s rearrange our sentence: if “like” is in present tense, then what we like is conditional… on us knowing porn isn’t real. “If I know porn isn't real, they know its what I will like.” Us knowing porn isn’t real has nothing to do with its actual reality as we’ll come to see later, but the fact that we know it isn’t real means it can be disavowed, that it doesn’t count. “I jerked off to that and came in a minute event though I can’t get hard for you, but I still love you.”
What we like is decided by the porn, because the content of it doesn’t matter, this is why you, unique, containing multitudes, can find the exact thing that gets you off in the top recent videos on Pornhub. We like porn because it gets us out of… everything else. The medium is the massage.
Now we can continue on:
“Change ‘liked’ from past tense back to future conditional and then contrast the Pornotron to how Judge Reinhold masturbated to a red bikinied Phoebe Cates coming out of the pool in Fast Times At Ridgemont High: he's not actually seeing it, he is imagining it. … Reinhold took what he saw and then masturbated to a fantasy. We want the reality [of porn] to obliterate the fantasy.”
We’ll get to Reinhold later, don’t you worry.
“Generating your own sexual fantasy has no payoff and thus no reinforcement because after the orgasm there's nothing left, all that work you put in refining what you want becomes afterwards merely a memory of what you'll never have, you’re way better off spending hours a day watching videos of your deceased child. “Whoah, why'd you bring that up?” Because the mechanism is the same, the lack of payoff is the same. “Drowning out reality with unreal images?” No, drowning in video reality to drown out unreality, anything so your mind is not ruminating, fantasizing, the painful video memories seem masochistic but they are 100% defensive because to a person stuck in mourning-- sorry, complicated bereavement-- sorry, Major Depressive Disorder------ do you see how they want to castrate you and leave you only porn? the only way to know yourself is with their jargon------ the videos are absolutely more tolerable than closing your eyes and seeing him in your obsessive imagination, over, and over, and over, and over.... the pathology isn't in the fact of the images, it is in the replacement of the images: it is a disorder of thinking, it is a disorder of math. You can say the digital images are painful, but they are far less threatening than imagination. You are sad, you are so so sad, but you are not changed, you are still you.”
This part confused me when I came across it the first time, and I’ve seen other people discussing it too. But its not confusing at all: the pathology of porn is exactly the same to what is described here. Fantasizing is a mechanism for change. As he states later in the book, Alexander the Great kept a copy of the Iliad on his nightstand and a dagger under his pillow. His fantasy, to become Achilles, just out of reach: the means to do it, a dagger, directly within grasp. Fantasizing is painful, it forces you to confront a reality you want but is not. With porn images replace those fantasies, the reality of porn obliterates fantasy. You don’t have to imagine yourself as a stud fucking some girl, the porn does it for you, and thus you don’t have to face the post nut realization that you are a loser. And because of this you do not have to change. That is the pathology of porn, that is the goal of porn, that is what it does, that is what it gets you out of: changing.
Watching videos of a deceased child works the same. You are sad but you’re still you: you don’t have to find a way to move on. Let’s put it another way: looking at pictures of your ex. You can stare at them all day, rewatch videos, scroll her Instagram, and you’re sad, so sad, but you’re still you. To change would require you to figure out a new life without her, to imagine an entirely new way of living, to fantasize about who you are and what you can be without her, and then to act on those fantasies. Both the fantasizing and the acting are painful, horribly painful for a long time. Looking at the images lets you escape this, the images obliterate the imagination.
I’m going to skip the Pericles and the Salem Witch Trial sections simply because this is too long already, but for the record, “My guess is you don’t know his name or that he was a powerlifter” is referring to Giles Corey, the guy who was pressed to death and kept asking for more weight. Researching Pericles is left as an exercise to the reader, but hint, he’s part of the History of the Peloponnesian War and he’ll come back later in the book.
“With porn there's no work in fantasizing and no guilt in the fantasy, after all, it's not yours. So too with actual sex, as long as the cheating was pornographic, there can be no guilt-- this has always been true.”
“‘America has always seen sex as something shameful.’ Yes, shame, I figured you'd bring that up. Which is more shameful: getting caught masturbating to porn or getting caught masturbating with your eyes closed? Because one of those makes you a sociopath. Your inner thoughts are always more depraved to everyone else. Porn is less shameful because, well, it's not yours. Before you finish nodding please observe that it’s kind of the opposite for women.”
“You are living through the product recall of Freud's steam driven invention: the obliteration of all unconscious fantasy, thus locking us down into the existing reality: someone else's unconscious.”
Porn is someone else’s fantasy. It’s less shameful to masturbate to porn because it can be disavowed: its not you, you aren’t responsible for it, you didn’t come up with it after all. We are actively obliterating our own fantasies with those of someone else, we welcome them so that we are relieved of the effort of fantasizing and changing. We don’t want to commit, making the leap is the most terrifying thing in existence because it requires change. Rather than loving another person, truly loving them, which is to say sacrificing and changing for them, we commit as little as possible, making no plans and planting no seeds. This was already occurring before porn, porn just became the solution to a problem we didn’t know we had: porn relieves us of having to fantasize, because if you were able to fantasize you would be forced to confront your failure to love. We don’t commit, we ruin the lives of those around us because we cannot love, we become people trapped in glass boxes, unable to connect to one another. Porn is the defense against the repression of the imagination. You never have to imagine, never have to desire. The death of love and porn as defense, porn obliterating fantasy: I could have written you tidings more cheering than these, but none more profitable.
Commentary on Footnote 1 of Sadly, Porn, Part 1
Got a lot out of this post. Seen TLP mentioned in various places but never felt compelled to read his work until now.
Hey, just so you know, many of your "its"s are missing apostrophes. Interesting take on the "future conditional" thing, although I believe what he meant is literally what he said: "change the *tense* to future conditional" so the statement would go from "how did they know this is what I liked?" to "how would they know what I like" or "how did they know what I would like" / "how did they know the type of thing I would like?" The future conditional tense is the grammatical future hypothetical (hence "conditional").