The best analogy for the thing comes from porn.

It is well-understood by now that penis size matters an awful lot more in porn than it does in real life.  The trope where women are devoted to Big Cock, where penis size is the measure by which a man’s worth and virility is measured, is a porn trope.  (And to the extent that it can be found in real life, well, a lot of that is cultural backwash.  We all know from porn that cool experienced sexually-voracious women evaluate men by penis size, and if little Jane wants to be a cool experienced sexually-voracious woman, well…)

Porn is made for men.  It is not, particularly, aimed at men with much-larger-than-average penises; I have encountered no evidence that such men use porn to a greater-than-chance degree.  And yet the trope came into existence, and spread, and persists.  Men are eagerly signing up to fantasize about being judged by a standard that most of them, by definition, will not meet.  This is weird.  It demands explanation.

There are many interlinked causes behind the phenomenon, no doubt, but one of them is this: the elimination of ambiguity is, itself, a comforting fantasy.  The collapse of sexual appeal into a single well-defined variable makes the world of sex less existentially dreadful. 

In actual existence, finding and keeping sexual partners is a bogglingly complicated and never-ending process that dominates people’s lives and fills them with anxiety.  It is inextricably intertwined with love, emotional validation, and all sorts of other very-important things.  It requires navigating the unique preferences and sentiments of each other human with whom you interact.  The prospect of being able to dispense with all that, and to have women fall all over you simply by revealing your Big Cock, turns a labyrinth of fearful neurosis into something gloriously simple.  Even if you don’t actually have a Big Cock, you can imagine that you do, and…that goes pretty far, when we’re talking about porn. 

I’m not here to tell you what kind of porn you should or shouldn’t enjoy, but there are obvious ways in which this fantasy, in particular, can be very bad for you.  Not only is it completely unachievable even in theory, it runs completely counter to most people’s endorsed non-masturbatory values; the world in which Big Cock works as advertised would be a worse world than the real one, a world in which love and attraction and even just straight-up sex would be less precious and less interesting than they actually are.  And if you’re jerking off to the idea that women could only feel desire for a Big Cock that you don’t have, you’re not only a loser even by your own standards, you are actively enjoying the fact of your own loser-ness, you are – what’s that word? – cucked. 

Recently I’ve been reading a bunch of culturally-far-right writing, of the kind that is at least trying to be intellectually serious, and the Big Cock concept-plex has been coming to mind more and more. 

The unifying factor amongst these essayists, insofar as there is one, seems to be an insistent belief in some kind of absolute universal telos.  Every human being is actually playing the same game, or so the argument always seems to go; everyone knows what success and failure really are, deep down at least, and the value of a human’s existence can be measured according to that one transcendent metric.  This is most intuitively obvious with the religious conservatives, for whom the universal telos is synonymous with the will of God.  But sometimes the telos is alleged to be a sort of collective cultural greatness, in a system where things like scientific discoveries and artistic achievements and big wholesome families provide Valuable Points that must be maximized.  And – often – macro-level evolutionary theory is overlaid onto micro-level human psychology to produce a claim that the telos is about reproducing and passing on your genes.  (This post came together after I saw someone claim that the best way to attack liberals, to really get their goat, is to play on their “deep insecurities” about their reproductive fitness.)

These various alleged Objective Meanings of Life do not have a lot in common.  But there is a lot of commonality in the way that their proponents will fold, spindle, and mutilate their perceptions of human behavior in order to make it center on the preferred telos.  You see unsupported claims that vast swathes of people are deeply, deeply unhappy and sick at heart.  You see unsupported claims about a golden age when Things Were Better because we were More in Tune With Our Purpose.  You see a persistent refusal to acknowledge explanations for social phenomena that are more Occam’s-Razor-y (material explanations, explanations centering on the random variables of individual psychology).  Most of all you see a radical simplification of the human mindscape, a collapse of people into a smallish number of categories, so that everyone can be accounted for by the theory.

(…I have a lot of sympathy for people who do that last thing.  I, too, am an abstract systematizer with a love of pigeonholes.  But it’s important to realize when your mapping system is blocking out information rather than using it.)

For the most part these are not especially comforting fantasies, at least on the surface.  The people who peddle them tend to be very pessimistic, as conservative intellectuals so often are.  Maybe God is good, but the idea that everyone is just profoundly obsessed with mating opportunities and gene-spreading is…not a happy idea, and not presented as such.  And, to credit them with integrity where due, many of these guys are very open about the fact that they themselves are not winners by the standards of winning that they propound.

But the Power of Big Cock is not a comforting fantasy either, on the surface, for most guys.  And yet. 

A universal telos simplifies moral and cultural life in the same way that the Big Cock myth simplifies sexual life.  It says “you can imagine being a winner, even if you aren’t in fact a winner, because winning is at least a thing that exists.”  It says “you don’t have to model the universe as a vortex of chaos where nothing means anything and nothing makes sense, you can model it as a game with rules, and whether or not you’re winning you can get some pleasure out of constructing and mastering your model.”  It says “you could, at least in theory, prove to those jerks who are laughing at you that you’re better than they are.” 

The alternative is, well, actual existence: a world in which everyone is different and nothing is commensurable and all you can do is roll with it, or impose your conceptual will on a tiny corner of reality through sheer power.  I can see why a certain breed of person would be very driven to escape that.

I wonder how much overlap there is between the people clinging to a telos and the people who fantasize about the dominance of Big Cock. 

This is armchair psychologizing, and therefore necessarily kind of dickish.  I feel bad about that.  Not bad enough not to do it, I wanted to share these thoughts, but…bad.  Speculating about what people really think (independent of what they say) is rude, even if they make a practice of doing it themselves.

I do want to say, though:

Facing down reality, in all its horror, is a virtue.  But I really, really, really do not blame anyone for finding the nature of reality horrific.  “You should just learn to be cool and go with the flow and not care about ultimate meaning” is not the lesson here, not even a little bit. 

If there is a world you want to inhabit, you should get to build it, and you should get to live there.  I would like to help you do that, if I can.  It doesn’t matter whether the Great and Good, or anyone else for that matter, would find that world appalling.  Just…don’t insist that other people would necessarily want to live there with you, and don’t try to gobble them up in your attempts to justify your desires.  Your desires do not need to be justified on universal grounds.  There is world enough, and time.