King of the Orcs

an excerpt from my upcoming novel

This here’s a sample chapter from my upcoming novel The Con.

Hope you ladies and germs enjoy.

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Chapter 5 - King of the Orcs
September 2021
Orlando, FL

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Mid-forties. Tall. Blonde. Still has her figure; at her age that suggests money.

She was garbed in Laptop Athleisure—dark dreary auntie tones against faded pastels and white-grey runners. Just one cute accessory—in her hair, around her wrist, on her belt… the sort of detail only other women and gay guys and men named Jeremy notice.

People almost certainly thought KAREN at her from time to time, in much the same way women thought INCEL at Jeremy whenever he hyperverbally systematized social dynamics, or Jeremy thought NIGGER at African-Americans whenever they made him wait at a crosswalk. But for his part Jeremy abhorred the word “Karen.”

It struck him as semiotically imprecise:

It’s like you’re trying to denigrate high status white women by channeling this vague slurry of grievances from incels and rednecks and Muslims and autistic STEM guys who hate HR and mulatto teenagers who want to get away with doing a bad job working at McDonald’s and resentful obese minority women and so on… and clearly that stratagem SORT OF worked, because the word “Karen” has real teeth now. But it also seems to have displaced far more useful and precise terms like “AWFL” and “pantsuit,” which means that in some sense the slur “Karen” being thrown around so casually in the common parlance is hugely beneficial to the very worst kind of Karens, as entirely legitimate complaints about women weaponizing vulnerability in dishonorable ways are starting to get lumped in with the grievances of McDonald’s niggers and Andrew Tate shit and guys who are butthurt they’re 5’5.

The operatic ingenuity of feminine power...

The blonde woman had a discomfiting gravitas. Carried herself like someone a little too accustomed to getting her way. Strangely though that hadn’t yet impelled Jeremy to fantasize about raping her.

Her face had that preternatural luminescence often seen in apex status sirens sired in the 70s, though it felt rather ungentlemanly to speculate as to whether her Glow had come from collagen or botox or Tasteful Work or some baroque new dermatological procedure. What mattered is it stopped him from objectifying her—perhaps because he associated it with BangBros-coded Stacies who like sex too much or pretend to—and this in turn is why he never once over-indexed on this woman having almost precisely the same body type and height and even shoe size as his long-lost Natalie.

The woman’s vibe was also so peculiar—if she were still 13 it might be called “coltish”: cognitively masculine, but not really a tomboy; neither girl’s girl nor pick-me; sort of a sperg, yet paradoxically a bit of a cool girl; a kind of Khachiyan-by-way-of-Coulter.

And for his part Jeremy had always enjoyed coltish girls. He adored their adversarial flirtation in gifted classes; the excitement inherent in engaging a new narrative foil who knows how to play with gendered performativity in provocative and layered ways; the sophistication that undergirds even their worst grotesqueries of vanity and bitchiness; and above all, that manic heroine drive to deploy their feminine wiles in curated defense of masculine-coded honor norms and epistemics. I’m in awe of them.

Yet the coltish girl’s voracious when she’s younger, running sexually precocious, and so oafishly we’ll watch her dating older men, then wedding normie sober men like Dobermen, because in just a sexual sense a cultivated colt cannot retain an earnest interest in any nerd too incel-adjacent (except, ironically, Queen Colt Ann Coulter herself). They genuinely win you over—freak transformed to friend—but generally just marry John Mulaney.

Yet incel warts and feminine sorts aren’t actually intractably opposed; the Nekrasova types get fucked by fucked-up losers on occasion; luck’s a bagatelle of bulls and cucks and hucksters Jew and Asian. Although art hoes also shred a loser’s life a lot more shrewdly—it behooves you to act Jewishly at times, and even crudely—because each year she’ll clock your motives less and less and you should stress you faggot fuck you stained the dress and popped the cyst and now she’s pissed cause now you’re fat a worthless rat soft as a cat and now your art hoe won’t even believe that Lilith exists so now you’re mist.

Whereas the cunty coltish colder kind a la Khachiyan will just decide to disappear her damsel-domina by dint of distaff dickishness. She’ll force her luckless Lilith on a rooftop and then she’ll prod her to perform her own evil… and then repeat this act poetically, then naked and balletically—her animus in effigy, it’s ominous how unapologetically—and then you’ll feel the rot again, that salty Wife-of-Lot again, performatively hot again—and Christ it’s fucking tedious and faggoty and boring and what’s worst is unmysterious.

Suddenly a bony finger stabs into my shoulder like a rapier.

“Dude, can I get to my seat?”

“Hmm…?” I stop narrating and snap to attention. Oh shit, it’s her.

“Can you let me into my seat, please?” She’s smiling, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m in the middle. The plane’s about to take off and that flight attendant’s glaring at me.”

“Ah. Yeah, certainly… one second.” At least she’s thin… I was afraid my middle seat person would end up being that Peter Griffin Boomer snoring behind me; these days sitting next to a fat dude on an airplane is practically foreplay. I begin to unbuckle.

Then almost immediately I can’t seem to help myself, and turn back to face Cersei. “Hold on… what are YOU doing in a middle seat at the back of the plane?”

For a moment she stares back at me in shock, perhaps wondering if I’m a bit retarded. Then she purses her lips in annoyance, and now her eyes actually are smiling.

“It’s just the seat I was assigned, dude…” She cocks her head passive-aggressively.
“But if you’d like I’d be glad to show you my boarding pass?”

I stare her down. She’s calm. No one behind her. She was late for the plane. Got over it fast… Nodding a bit I smile metallically at her. “Yeah—let’s have a look.”

I take great pain to say this in an inside voice, but in the ears of Back Row Boomer it might as well have been an alarm clock—or perhaps, as it were, a Pokéflute—because my words almost immediately pull the ogre from his slumber to play White Knight.

“What the hell are ya doin, ya little jerk? Give the girl her seat! God, I’m sorry, hon!”

Megyn Kelly waves a palm at him. Bitch didn’t even make eye contact... Immediately I feel a bit chastened—not for my sake, clearly, but his. The fellow reminds me a bit of my own father, or even John Candy in that movie with the airplane. He’ll definitely keep embarrassing himself... Thankfully my conscience is allayed when Jadis produces her pass and daintily taps it on the tray table carrying my incel droid and White Monster.

I examine it closely.

Katherine Aldridge-Sauveuse
Seat 32B

My eyes dart up to her. “So I’m talking to a hyphen woman...”

She smiles sweetly and plants her hands on her hips “Well, my mother was a hyphen woman. These days it’s a bit passe…” She smiles even more sweetly. “But why am I telling you that? I mean, you’d obviously know, being so much younger than me...”

I hand her back the pass and shrug. “I dunno, what are you, like 37?”

Her immediate response resides somewhere between scoff and giggle. “Don’t pull that crap with me, dude—you’re talking to an attorney.” She rolls her eyes again… yet do I detect a smile beneath that sneer? “Now can I get to my seat? Please?”

“I guess it depends. How do I know you’re *actually* Katherine Aldridge-Sauveuse? What if you’re an impos…”

Suddenly Back Row Boomer makes a Chris Chan noise. “What’s WRONG with you?! The lady SHOWED you her pass! Do I need to teach you some manners? Hon, I…”

Katherine calmly places her driver’s license on my tray table.

Katherine Karen Aldridge-Sauveuse
July 17, 1974
5’10, 132 lbs.

My eyes drift up to meet hers. “Wait, so…”

“Yes—Karen is quite literally my middle name. Hysterical... Can I get in now?”

I hand her back her license and get out of my seat. “I was going to say it’s about to expire… which is weird, because you seem like someone who’d be on top of that.”

She sighs and slides into the middle seat smiling. “I’ve been busy! And it’s in transit.”

“Right.” I nod and sit back down. “Anyway, you’re not a Karen, that’s pretty evident.”

Katherine raises an eyebrow and regards me carefully, clearly considering her next words. “Nice of you to say, dude…” She looks away and there’s a pause.

I nod to myself and reach for my dopamine droid.

Then suddenly Katherine turns her head back to me and the two of us lock eyes.

“Can I ask why?”

I shrug. “Karens don’t really litigate; they complain. Want you to feel bad for them...”

That elicits a real laugh from her. “Oh, I’ve known quite a few Karens who litigate, my dude! And at least half of them were men.”

I nod thoughtfully. “And if it works it’s only because they know the rules better than everyone else? But it’s like… shylocky. Or like an autistic kid playing monopoly?”

Katherine hisses out a sneaky little chortle through her teeth as some of the folks around us shuffle anxiously in their seats. Then she shakes her head. “Jesus, dude…”

My scalp itches and I get kind of angry so I do my damndest to reduce my volume to half-whisper. “I mean, look—I actually have autism myself. And because of that I’ve dealt with lots of people getting mad at me for thinking of irreducibly complex social shit in this hard reductive way…”

“You’ve been diagnosed?” She’s clearly suppressing a smirk.

“I mean… well, no, I’ve not.” I sigh. “But my mom took me to some people as a kid and it was like… an edge case I think? Said my brain was ahead of my body or something.” And now my back hurts. “But all these little categories and names are kind of just bullshit. The DSM is a political document. Like, it used to say being gay was disordered, and then they took that off for purely ideological reasons. So with, like, Autism, ADHD, NPD, BPD… all that crap is based on diagnostic criteria that are mostly super arbitrary and subjective, and meanwhile we haven’t even solved the hard problem of consciousness yet so…”

Katherine smacks my arm. “Dude, first off—slow down. You’re going a mile a minute. Also, I’ve heard almost all of this before and you’re honestly kind of preaching to the choir on this one.” She smiles… and then the lawyer face. “And that’s why I’m curious: why call yourself autistic if it’s all fake?”

I shrug. “Just colloquial shorthand. I mean, I probably do have whatever they were trying to classify with, like, ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’. But then they collapsed everything into this one useless category, and so now eccentric geniuses are lumped in with, like, Chris Chan, or those nonverbal tards who hit themselves in the head with a hammer like Looney Tunes...”

Some more people around us shuffle, but she’s too deep in cross-examination to notice. “So to clarify—you’re saying you LIKED identifying with Asperger’s but not ASD… but will publicly call yourself autistic hoping it connotes the former due to, like, semantic inertia?”

“Yeah, sort of.” I sigh. “I mean I’ve always despised the name Aspergers because it has a really atrocious mouthfeel, and not just with the whole ‘ass’ ‘burgers’ element, but like overall aesthetically it just really SOUNDS like something an obese reddit mod would call himself, right? Whereas autistic is kind of just funny sounding—almost cute really—though not in a way that especially precludes masculine dignity, and it’s also sort of phonologically adjacent to ‘artistic’ which helps…”

She crosses her arms. “So you’re just shopping around for a disorder that lets you get away with being weird… just not in a way that makes it harder for you to, like, get laid… or be taken seriously by normal people because of your disorder being cringe?”

“Yeah. Cause if I didn’t say I’m autistic I’d just get shredded by people who call themselves ADHD… or all these girls who blame their mood swings on BPD, PTSD…”

Now she’s mad. “See, this is the problem with your generation! And I can’t even blame you for your part in it because I’ve seen the shit you’re talking about myself.”

She drums her nails against her elbow. “Though maybe I CAN blame you, cause the autism shit is easily the most annoying. I mean, you quite clearly have theory of mind.” Her eyes narrow. “Maybe a bit too much. Either way, social skills aren’t something you’re born with. You grow them, like a muscle.”

“Right, and exactly as with physical musculature, there’s tremendous genetic variance in individual trainability in social acumen.” I scratch my nose. “Only a lot more so with your floor and ceiling… which means it’s often quite easy to max out your beginner gains, whereas your cap-out point is just hugely genetic. As is where you start.”

“But that’s exactly the problem! You guys aren’t getting socialized properly at a young enough age to iron out those differences. And so people who might just be, I dunno… a bit more predisposed to quirkiness or something are calling themselves autistic or borderline.” Her eyes narrow on me. “Then even worse are the folks who shop around for someone to diagnose them with ADHD just to get their hands on a little speed…”

I smile sweetly and play along. “Or even worse than that—the doctors who are helping depressed fifteen year-old girls chop their titties off by convincing their gullible-ass parents that they’re actually boys...” Tons of people are looking at me now. Good—let the faggots seethe. I live for this… fucking needed it. I smile warmly at her. “Like, the gender ratio for reassignment surgery flipped basically overnight, and we’re still supposed to act like these goddamned shrinks are anything but a bunch of predatory quacks...”

Now Katherine’s eyes are glowing and she’s smiling half a smile… yet she's also gone silent. All she does is cock her head slightly and sigh like I’m some peevish little nephew who just spilled Capri-Sun all over her fancy new couch. Immediately I clock the matron’s meaning: We had a fun little game going, but now you’re ruining it by being self-indulgent and cartoonish.

I sigh to myself. Why do I want this bitch’s approval so bad? It feels vaguely embarrassing. Also why couldn’t she have been my boss instead of Pantsuit Ruby? I’m about to reach for my incel phone and permanently give up on extended interaction with cognitively mature human females when Katherine suddenly throws me a lifeline.

“Well… it was certainly a little disarming just how fast everyone jumped on board with that. I mean, it took generations to get gay marriage through, and I can recall even my crunchy liberal friends saying all sorts of terrible shit about gay people as recently as, like, 2004. Because they *were* really quite strategic with how they went about it—you have to admire it, whatever your politics.

“Whereas with this new thing…” Katherine shrugs, obviously considering her next words with the utmost caution. “It’s like… I love trans people—I was friends with trans girls in the nineties when it actually meant something. But can anyone really say they’ve been strategic? It’s like, if you force through a bunch of stuff society isn’t ready for, you’re just setting yourself up for a reactionary backlash...”

I try to phrase my response so it won’t get us stared at. “Cuts the other way, too… it’s like you have John Roberts being smart and slowly boiling the frog on Roe, and then all these other lunatics trying to fry it overnight, because apparently you can make up for losing college-educated white women with the Andrew Tate demo. Awful politics.”

Her eyes light up. “Exactly—you get it! Because on both sides these days it’s nothing but a bunch of self-indulgent solipsistic whining and grievance-mongering. ”

I press the advantage. “But if you just look at history I also feel like there ARE lots of times where something radical starts gaining real traction, and then suddenly later on there’s this huge reversal and everyone looks back on it as having been literally the worst thing ever. Think anti-clericalism, or prohibition, or slavery as a positive good… hell, there was even this kind of soft pedo apologism thing in the early seventies nobody talks about but it was connected to the…”

She flashes her palms. “Yeah, dude…I get your point.”

I shake my head. “Didn’t finish—my point is even on a purely amoral strategic level it often helps you long term to take a presently unpopular stance you know is Lindy.”

She furrows her fine golden eyebrows. “Lindy?”

“Robust. Long-lasting. Time-tested. Anything with kids I’d say risks nuclear backlash.”

She nods slowly. “I mean, I dunno, it sounds like you’re implying it’s mostly self-harm? And morals aside, if you’re right about that I’d certainly prefer the self-harm method de jure be something that isn’t quite so irreversible…”

“You know, a lot of the girls I date used to cut themselves as kids. And I used to freak out at the nicks on their thigh, and the girl would always laugh at me because they don’t assign much import to those nicks. It’s like an embarrassing old MySpace photo.”

She rolls her eyes and giggles. “Dude, are you seriously defending cutting?”

“I actually am. Because provided those cuts are superficial it’s all just catharsis, right? And her body, her choice.” I rip off the covid mask dangling on my ear and shove it in my jeans, before crushing my White Monster and pushing up my tray table.

“I know if I had a daughter, I’d much rather her channel teenage angst into a few scars than have her looking like Peter Pan and sounding like Johnny Cash.”

She rubs her eyes. “How’d we even get on this topic? We were talking about autism…”

“We were…” I put a bit of hurt in my voice. Older women love it when you’re gay... “Because you seem to think I’m being a snowflake or something in saying I’m autistic.”

She studies me for a moment. Then her face softens. “You want to know something, dude? I might have called myself autistic too if I was born fifteen years later. Things didn’t always make a ton of sense to me socially—hell, they still don’t—and I was different from a lot of the other girls. And yeah, I know it’s like… ‘cringe’ or whatever to say that now, because you guys all turned it into a stupid meme, but I actually was: too tall, too flat, too aggressive...”

“You don’t seem flat to me…” I bite the inside of my cheek.

Katherine gasps. “Why thank you, young man!”

Then she rolls her eyes. “They came later.

“Point is I keep seeing all these Millennial and Gen Z girls on Facebook who are seriously convinced they’re autistic now… but they never actually seem genuinely AUTISTIC to me, just kind of awkward and coltish. And I’m thinking they were obviously just late bloomers.” Katherine looks away for a second. “And it’s true their brain is a bit ahead of their body, but that’s SO NORMAL, it’s fine—the sort of thing that levels off with age as you mature socially.” She sighs. “Or at least it’s SUPPOSED to level off... I think it really did in my day. Honestly, your parents probably just spoiled you too much. Yeah, you are a fuckin’ snowflake.”

“I am; we are.” I lazily extend my leg into the aisle.

“But at least we have personalities…”

Her brow furrows. “Well, that’s a new one. You’re saying *I* don’t have a personality?”

“I mean, you clearly do. But it’s, like… mediated through MTV.”

She giggles incredulously and throws a braid behind her shoulder. “Honestly, dude? Sounds like you’re making shit up at this point. But keep going, I need to hear this.”

“Well, you’re clearly intelligent, articulate, accomplished professionally…”

“Gonna start the fan club?”

“…so why do you still have the affect of a Valley Girl? Or, like, one of those bitchy mean girl antagonists in, like, a nineties movie about going to high school?”

Her eyes narrow on me as her mouth wrestles between frown and smile. “I dunno, dude… how come YOU have the affect of Patrick Bateman? Also how old were you even when that movie came out—like, seven? At least I talk like an archetype people my age thought was cool...”

“Actually, let’s interrogate that point!” I energetically fondle my beard. “Because I’m assuming you’ve read about the decline of the Western monoculture and such…?”

“Heard of it. I’d invite you to one of my dinner parties, but after this conversation I’m definitely not letting you analyze my taste in décor.”

“Fair. My point though is when you were a kid there were still accessible cultural scripts for behavioral archetypes—affects that connoted high status and such in a broadly known monoculture.”

I Kobe my White Monster into a trash bin passing through the aisle and continue: “Whereas by the time I came of age—to say nothing of Zoomers—that had all broken down, and everyone was simply imitating whichever hyper-specialized subcultural archetype they personally preferred—or just increasingly higher order simulacra of those archetypes. But then it turns out some archetypes are kind of just objectively more appealing than others.”

“Which is why the monoculture existed in the first place.” Katherine nods. “It’s guardrails.”

“Yeah, but honestly? I kind of prefer society without them. If I were your age I would have turned out like Ron DeSantis or something. Whereas Patrick Bateman might not get invited to dinner parties, but he often gets laid and always gets paid.”

The Back Row Boomer behind me sighs—oddly enough in a manner that reads more as wistful than especially contemptuous.

Meanwhile Katherine sucks on her cheek. “Yeah, I get it. But you’re also weird—in a good way—and I think most people your age aren’t served by any of this shit at all.”

“They most certainly aren’t.” I shrug my shoulders. “That kind of helps me, though.”

She scoffs. “Kind of a fucked up zero sum way to look at things…”

“Nah, it’s more like… when you’re trying to outrun a bear you don’t need to be faster than the bear. Just a teensy bit faster than the fat kid running next to you.”

“How do you come up with these analogies?!”

“And it’s not like you’re sociopathically HAPPY if he trips on a root or something… but it sure as hell makes your own escape a lot more likely.”

Katherine’s eyes narrow on me. “So you’re saying it’s actually negative sum?”

“That’s not really the framing I’d use.” I sigh. “It’s more that we—by which I mean us men—can’t afford to circle back and rescue every desperate dude stranded in Somalia because his copter crashed.” Now I’ll bet that’s a reference Miss Katherine will appreciate…

“But they DID go back for the guys in Somalia. That was something that, you know, actually happened, hence why you’re citing the movie they made about it in service of the exact opposite point. Actually, my fiancé served in that...”

“What’s his name?”

“My fiancé? Why does it—” She sighs. “Carter.”

“Like the Peanut President?”

She exhales. “No, NOT like the… ‘Peanut President’. Like his grandpa. Anyway…”

“He was named after Jimmy Carter’s grandpa?”

“We’re not doing this.”

“Fine, fine… what about his last name, though?”

“This is so creepy…”

She sighs. “Kavanaugh.”

“Like the Rape Judge…”

“Ugh—Brett Kavanaugh didn’t RAPE anyone, what a fucking load of baloney!”

Well, that was loud…

Several people look back at Katherine. She ignores them, then sighs and talks softly.

“Look—that Blasey woman was older than I am; she really should have known better. But instead she ended up a useful idiot for partisan opportunists and completely undermined all the good MeToo could have done. So irresponsible…”

“You really think she weakened it? Because it still seems awfully powerful to me…”

She stares at me a moment. “Well yeah, you’re a dude. And I’m guessing not a lawyer?”

“Actuary.”

“Huh. I would have guessed software engineer…”

I sigh. “Probably should have been…” Better to drain septic tanks than be a fucking actuary. “Though I actually was planning on law school for a few semesters… that’s a big reason I majored in Philosophy back in the day. But then I saw how bifurcated attorney salaries are and was really worried I’d end up, like, defending poor bla…”

“Wha… why? You would have done great.” Her brow furrows. “I LOVED law school—I’d, like, skim the readings and always got the top grade because my professors were bored as shit and mostly just rewarded you for writing them an interesting argument they hadn’t heard before. After a few years of that everyone’s throwing money at you.”

“Yeah… since then I’ve regretted not doing it for sure. At the time I was too young to make an informed decision, I think. Also my mom had me talk to this gay attorney friend of hers who tried to convince me to choose something else because he hated it… but I think he was just depressed more generally, because he sort of killed himself shortly thereafter.”

Her eyes bulge out. “Jesus Christ...”

I shrug my shoulders. “It’s fine, I didn’t know him well... point is he also would have killed himself if he were a gay software engineer or gay actuary, because guys like that oftentimes just kill themselves, and in doing so shape the lives of future generations as sort of… reverse role models? Just not in any way that isn’t just some existentially absurd cosmic dice roll.”

We’re both silent for a moment.

Then I remember our original thread. “So Kavanaugh…”

“Hah! I mean, not yet…”

“Wha…? Oh—no, not your fiancé, the Rape Judge. Falsely accused Rape Judge. Brett.”

Katherine sucks on her teeth. “Burr-ett... I mean, he’s no rapist. He’s just… Brett.”

She smirks to herself. “And women know Brett.”

Without warning her eyes flash across my face. “See, Brett doesn’t rape. He just… makes you say no more aggressively or insistently than other dudes. Or he’ll engineer situations where saying no is annoying or logistically inconvenient or feels a bit rude.”

I guffaw merrily. “Or where she wouldn’t want to… because of the implication?”

Katherine sighs. “Yes, that... and then if you DO say no he’ll make a bunch of shit up about you to his friends. And so a lot of times Brett will get a chick who’s awkward or weak-willed or insecure in a scenario where she’s too bashful to say what she wants and that gets him laid.”

She scratches her face. “Now, obviously that makes Brett a huge asshole, but you don’t call it rape. You go behind his back, call him an asshole, pushy, sleazy, whatever… but the moment you say rape people will see you’re reaching and men will close ranks.”

She shakes her head. “It was after Blasey fucked up you started seeing guys who used to be sympathetic to MeToo closing off. Either that or, like, only performing sympathy. Same with older married women… you didn’t notice this I’ll bet because the HR goody goodies are sort of in control of society at the moment, but that’s SO temporary. Yeah, Covid empowered them, but trends come and go. Like, even whether it’s cool to be a slut shifts every nine years.”

She pauses a moment, then sighs. “Anyway, if fucking Brett is a major social problem now we’re already way too far gone. But girls these days are being fed all kinds of dumb shit about being ‘groomed’ or what have you because their boyfriend at the time was like… five years older. What a joke! You know, when I was seventeen I was sneaking into the city and hooking up with dudes in their thirties. And believe you me, these guys were NOT predators. If anything *I* was the predator! Most of the time I felt bad for these losers cause they’d fall hopelessly in love with me, and then I’d have to figure out some way not to hurt their feelings or take advantage.”

We’re both silent for another moment.

“Hey Katherine? Er… Kat?”

“It’s Kit, actually, but—yeah?”

“When you marry this Kavanaugh man… are your initials gonna be KKK?”

She exhales slowly. “God, I’m glad I missed the boat on needing to consider that.”

“I thought being a hyphen woman is passe…?”

“It is.” Her eyes light up. “Which is why I’m keeping my hyphen intact.” Kit smiles at her cleverness, her expression rather reminding me of little Marie from The Aristocats.

“So you’re… like… not taking anything at all?”

She turns to me with heightened brow. “I am not. Does that bother you, sir?

“I mean, I don’t care personally—obviously. But like, what about your kids?”

She crosses her arms. “Don’t want em.”

Again we both sit there.

Eventually I turn to her. “I mean… kids suck ass, clearly. But I thought women…”

“Most do. I don’t.” She shrugs.

“Sure, I get it. Like if I had to pass some giant kidney stone out of my wiener that also, like, made me fatter just to procreate I probably wouldn’t want to either...”

“It’s not really that for me. It’s the helplessness, the mommy brain…”

“Some girls like being helpless.”

“It’s nice in the right context. This is waaaay too fucking existential.”

I scoff. “So what’s the point of even getting married, then?”

She’s silent a moment. “Excuse me…?”

“It’s just… if you don’t want his name, don’t want kids, he doesn’t provide for you…”

“Honey, I make more than him. By a lot.” She mad…

“I’m sure! But then why even bother getting married? Why not just have a boyfriend?”

Her face curdles up. “Uh… I don’t know… because I LOVE him? Because I want a big fancy wedding that makes my friends jealous? So I have an excuse to take nice pictures of myself for Facebook without pretending I’m Hillary fucking Clinton? Because I’m stressed as shit and just want to take a long-ass vacation without the other partners sayi…”

I nod indulgently. “All exquisite reasons, Kit—really just fantastic—except the first.”

“Wha—that I love him?! How? What do you mean?” She stares me down.

I stroke my beard. “Well… I didn’t prepare for the LSAT long enough to get past 175 on any of my practice runs… but I DID get a perfect GPA with that Philosophy degree, so how about I let you play professor here and you can tell me how interesting and novel this argument is?”

She’s quiet a moment, then smiles softly. “175 isn’t bad.”

“I could have hit 180 if I…”

“Shoulda woulda coulda, hit me with your best shot.”

I nod. “So we’ll start Socratic—tell me Kit: what is love to you?”

“Really? That’s where you start? If so I’m failing you, this is retarded.” Fucking women… Across the aisle I notice a meddling biddy who looks like Kit but fatter glaring at her.

“Alright, fine…” Less abstract. “I submit to you, Kit: why does marriage exist?”

She sighs. “You want the real answer? So society has a formal basis for adjudicating messy breakups without everything turning into an undignified he said she said...”

“Not sure that’s what King Solomon would have said, but okay, we’ll go with that for now. Doesn’t it still turn into that either way?”

Kit rolls her eyes. “Sometimes? Mostly cause guys are dumb and don’t get pre-nups... But that certainly doesn’t NEED to be the case.”

“Pre-nups?” I snort imperiously. “Don’t they get thrown out, like, all the time?”

“No, that’s a myth.” She rolls her eyes through a sultry little scoff. “And when it DOES happen it’s basically always in some super religious right wing state where they don’t think women can make decisions… or didn’t until, like, super recently. And even then there’s a lot you can do to make it almost impossible to throw out. Like… just have her review with her own lawyer, make sure there’s enough time... honestly, everyone should get a pre-nup. I mean, I have a pre-nup.”

“Well, of course YOU do…” I exhale through my nose. “Girls always clear an exit route. It’s just they usually do so covertly, because in most situations they’re the poor one.”

“Ooh, there we go! I was wondering how long it would take for you to bust out some Red Pills.” Kit smiles faintly. “You know, I used to read those forums back in the day. I’m guessing you didn’t—presumably because you were too busy jerking off to Pokémon or something?”

“I mean, it was more Cartoon Network, but…”

“Gross. Look—my point is none of this is new to me. And it isn’t scandalous, either.”

She rubs her temple. “But I will say this: the Red Pill hasn’t been amazing for dudes overall. And no, that isn’t just me being a woman, I’m speaking as someone who’s seen this shit start to impact normal guys your age and turn them into something that didn’t even EXIST twenty years ago. I mean, the original Red Pill guys were just, like… dweebs. But they were smart dweebs who actually had agency and could, like, observe the external world to figure out what was wrong with them and what they needed to do to fix their shit. And they actually fucking tried—that’s the important thing. They’d iterate and A-B test and share notes…”

“Well, they were latchkey kids, right? And by that point your generation was pretty used to experimenting and suffering and figuring out what works for yourselves…”

Kit-Kat smiles proudly and nods back. “Fuckin’ A.”

“…but have you considered whether your own formative experiences may have created concomitantly problematic attachment issues? Not that I’d ever knock loitering at the mall or looking for forest porn or getting molested at daycare with the bros, but...”

“Oh, Jesus Christ—almost NO ONE got molested at daycare, that was a Boomer myth to keep women at home! And OF COURSE women were the ones to fall for it…” Kit’s voice grows quiet for a moment. “I actually have pretty fond memories of daycare.”

She blinks twice and shakes her head. “Anyway, all I’ll say is that when I was reading the Red Pill forums back in the day—and I got pretty popular in those circles, let me tell you, and not as some sycophantic pick me chick either—I saw that those nerds actually wanted to get better, and that they were interested in female perspectives… they fer sure didn’t have that thing I see in modern incels, that… I don’t want to call it ‘evil’, but that’s sort of how it feels.”

I shrug. “They ARE evil, Kit. They accessed a bunch of dark esoteric wisdom that had remained dark and esoteric for a very good reason. And it sort of just ruined them.”

“I mean, no.” She shakes her head. “No. Because it didn’t do that to the guys my age…”

“Okay, so first off… are ya sure? Because it’s always seemed to me Gen X dudes hate women more than literally anyone. Maybe they were different in your threads?”

She rolls her eyes. “No, because I obviously read the ones I wasn’t posting in as well, and they acted the same. Also, men being more aggressive with you doesn’t mean they hate you more—if anything it’s the exact opposite. I think you’re kind of just a snowflake, dude…”

“Yeah, fair enough. But I’d say the difference you’re noticing is mostly a function of scale and selection effects. Like, back in the day it was only the relatively salvageable incels who even noticed these things or would ever get involved in these types of communities, since you pretty much had to be kind of a weirdo sperg to get super online before the Obama Era, which meant most of these dudes had the raw IQ and executive functioning to not fall into some kind of horrifying fatalistic blackpill spiral. Whereas nowadays you get this… I dunno, lower order kind of autist? Not as many Teslas, but a lot more Chris Chans. Or even just low quality untermenschen types who are pissed about being short or balding or something…”

Kit rests her hand on my arm. “Yeah, I’m not really talking about freak show guys... Honestly, I don’t really care that much about them. Maybe that makes me a bitch, but like, I actually DO care about these super young kids, these normal guys who are, like, sixteen, and don’t seem to realize it’s totally fine and normal they’re not some bodacious Chad… or that historically a ton of dudes were virgins until their twenties.”

She plays with a braid. “Also, one of the reasons I actually enjoyed Red Pill stuff back in the day is a lot of guys there were just, like, normies from really Christian families who still believed their grandma that women aren’t lustful or whatever. And honestly, these guys actually DID need that… ‘dark and esoteric wisdom,’ or whatever the hell you just called it… that sometimes women want sex too. But these days it’s gone WAY too far in the opposite direction, and so now you’ll have all these super young guys—like hapless teenage boys—thinking they’ll never know love now because they’re, like, short for their age.”

I lock eyes with her. “I mean, is it gonna HELP them find love?”

“They shouldn’t even be worrying about that! Just let them have a childhood…”

“You’re infantilizing them. They want better life outcomes. It’s the same as grades.”

“Dude…”

“Why do you call me dude all the time? It feels really fucking patronizing.”

She sighs. “Believe me, it’s not. Just blame the MTV—dude. I call my big sister dude.”

“Fair enough, my dude—but would you care to know what I would have thought of you when I was sixteen?” My jaw starts to tense up. “Or, shit—even thirteen?”

“Not really. I was just starting to like you!” She grazes my arm with long red elf talons.

Why does that work? I sigh and grin back at her diplomatically. “Well, the sort of dudes you’re talking about, who ‘figured it out for themselves?’ I’m pretty sure they genuinely dislike women a hell of a lot more than any Millennial or even Zoomer. They don’t even seem to have the cognitive space for actual romance... whenever they’ve offered me girl advice through the years it’s pretty much always been some asinine and crusty variant of, like… Just Care Less.”

She cocks her head and smirks. “Have you tried it? Might solve a lot of your problems.”

“I mean, clearly I have. But I’m a bit surprised to hear you cosigning.”

“Uh… why? I feel like playing hard to get is actually quite obvious.”

“Yeah—I’m not talking about silly performative disinterest games in early courtship…”

“Do you have to call it courtship?”

“DATING, whatever—I’m talking whether your relationship is worth taking seriously. Whether there’s a point at which it becomes transcendent—something higher order that matters over and above one’s animal libido and childlike emotional vacillations…”

Kit crosses her arms. “So if your girlfriend or wife gained fifty pounds, or had her face melted off in a car crash, you’d still put the relationship over your… animal libido?”

My first impulse is to bite the bullet and churlishly defend the implied double standard in some cartoonish way that defuses our rift with dignity. Instead I opt to be honest: “Absolutely I would. No hesitation.” I scratch my chin. “Only for Natalie, though.”

She smiles softly. “Natalie… I’m guessing that’s your girlfriend? I didn’t see a ring.”

“Ring?” I scratch my neck. How aged can a bachelor be before higher status women automatically presume him a fuckboy / homosexual? “I mean, I’m only 27…”

She bites back a grin. “You’re fine, hon. Just figured you were, like, a Republican, so…”

I scratch my nose. “Not that kind of Republican.”

“And this Natalie, is she your actual girlfriend, or just some poor girl you’re stalking?”

I pull at my beard. “A little of both?”

Kit groans. “Oh God—you fucking Millennials and your dysfunctional weird-ass situationships. Alright then, what’s so special about this woman?”

“Well, she was the first girl I hooked up with, I think.”

“You think? What do you mean, you think? Actually, never mind, I don’t wanna know. But I’m guessing there’s a lot more to it than just that?”

“Well… I was internet famous when we met back in like 2015, right? And Nat was kind of my groupie for a while, and then became a close collaborator in my work. So being around her reminds me of when I was a lot happier and doing something creative, with her by my side.”

“That’s a good reason! Or at least more interesting. But I doubt you need me to tell you at this point that trying to relive the past almost never scratches the same itch. Most of the time it just delays the future that fits… or blinds you to fresh opportunities. Anyway, take it or leave it, just my tired old auntie wisdom.” Katherine shrugs.

“I mean, you’re not wrong. I obviously know this trip isn’t going to end well and realize it’s perfectly idiotic to keep chasing a girl who’ll never be as into me as I’m into her. It just feels like Providence or something… or perhaps a Sisyphus situation, just actually a roguelike, where if I finally get good enough at bouldering something interesting and new might finally happen...”

Kit smiles politely. I’m definitely boring her. I just don’t know what else to say.

So maybe we can just sit.

Suddenly she turns to me and looks annoyed. “You think she’s different, don’t you? Like she’s this… qualitatively distinct sort of woman. You talk about this girl in poetry when the rest of the world doesn’t even get prose—just some cynical Reddit post.”

“Of course I think she’s different. Or rather, I assert she is and choose to believe it so hard and well it ideally becomes myth. What other type of love is even worth having?”

“Um… I dunno—something realistic? Something where you’re completely honest with each other, and acknowledge each other’s limitations as humans, and don’t feel any need to strive for transcendence because just the two of you together as people is entirely fine? Like, that’s exactly why I got a pre-nup; the way I see it all relationships are transactional, and it’s only once you start being honest about what’s really going on that real intimacy can emerge.”

I can’t help but smile.

“Frankly, Kit? Completely agree with you there. That’s why outside of Natalie I do most of my dating in a sugar baby context. Does a lot to keep terms legible.”

Her eyes bulge as she takes a fuller measure of me and leans back to chew on her lip. Then she nods and speaks: “Well, in that case you should see the logic of a pre-nup; you’re just defining your own marriage contract. And this sort of dynamic is exactly why I tell my guy friends they need one before some little gold-digger takes him for a ride. You want to make it hard and fast what she gets and you get so you don’t even think about it anymore—let alone fight over it—because most dudes can’t handle ambiguity to save their fucking life.

Kit crosses her arms and leans back. “Guys like you get manipulated so easily by chicks who love playing the victim. And it’s always the same… whenever it’s time to sign she’s a weepy mess saying she doesn’t want to… ugh… ‘make things transactional.’ But then we get to her piece of the pie and suddenly she’s talking like Tony Soprano.”

I scratch my chin. “I mean... I’m not trying to marry someone of a lower social class—mostly because if I did gals like you would speculate as to whether she’s a hooker at the office Christmas Party—but it’s easy enough keeping sugar babies in line. As for Natalie... well, she’s old money and her dad’s a surgeon, so if I do wife her up it’s not like I’ll be afraid for my 401(k).” I fondle my beard. “Honestly? I wish she were poor.”

Kit yawns into her hand. “To make her more, like, dependent and captive?”

“Yeah, I mean obviously that’s super hot. But more than that I’d really just like to be…”

“Her hero? Mr. Moneybags?”

“Yeah, both. Not even because I love flashing cash for its own sake—it’s just that making money is something I’m good at and proud of, I guess. And it’s frankly kind of insulting she’s never compared my salary to guys our own age. Just to like… her dad.”

“I mean, you could ask out a different chick. One who works at Applebee’s, maybe? You’ll probably make more than her dad...” Kit grins and eats a chortle under her hand.

“Look—it wasn’t JUST the money. Her dad was also… I want to say, like, 6’6 or 6’7?”

She rubs her forehead. “Please don’t let this be you getting mad at her dad’s height…”

“I’ve nothing against him! It’s just, she kind of called me short a few times.”

The sides of Kit’s mouth twitch impishly. “What are you, like 5’10?”

“Last I measured 5’12.” My jaw clenches up. “Which is approximately eightieth percentile for my demographic cohort—and something I never got credit for with her, not once.”

“Man, this one’s making ME uncomfortable!” Kit rubs her eyes. “Poor Natalie… it’s annoying enough when a dude’s weird about your ex… but when it’s your fucking DAD? Jesus Christ… I mean, what did you even expect her to do? Like, overtly gush about you being ‘eightieth percentile for your cohort’ and making a lot for your age?”

“Literally just not imply that I was short and poor! Especially when I was significantly richer than each of her ex-boyfriends even then, as well as multiple inches taller. Clearly I wasn’t asking for celebration or glory or even recognition; merely succor from unwarranted denigration.”

“Denigration?!”

“Yeah, Kit—denigration! Because height is statistically the single strongest social stratifier in men, correlating not only with sexual access, but also with income, educational attai…”

“OH! MY! GOD! She was probably just TEASING YOU because it got such a ridiculous insane rise out of you! Not everything in life is a super deep power play…”

“What are you talking about? Teasing clearly IS a power play, as are literally all speech acts. Would have thought a fucking Democrat would have read her Foucault…”

Kit sighs; shakes her head; turns back to me. “So how tall was she?”

“5’10, same as you.”

“How’d you…? My license, right.” Kit leans back and grins. “Well, I suppose if this kind of stuff matters THAT much to you, it’s always an option to go for someone shorter, right? Like… marry a girl who’s 5’3 and then she’ll always see you as a giant!”

My face curdles up. “Gross… my mom is 5’3.”

“Don’t call your mom gross!” Kit smacks my arm. “She gave fucking birth to you.”

“I mean… I hook up with short girls all the time. But it’s hard not to see them as, like, pets… or perhaps as sort of half-daughters? Whereas with Natalie being only two inches under me she seems more like a… companion, I guess? It’s just a lot easier to take her seriously.”

Kit gets quiet for a moment. “Do you think the short girls like feeling like pets?”

“I mean, of course. You kiddin’? They live for it.”

She drums her nails on the armrest. “But it’s crazy if a tall girl wants the same thing?”

…

“It clearly is not.” As I suck on my teeth Kit eyes me curiously. And then I turn to her. “But is it crazy for a man to want to exterminate guys taller than him?”

“YES!” Kit smacks my arm again.

“Yes, that’s EXTREMELY crazy. Leave the cute tall guys alone!”

My scalp catches fire. That eternal itch...

“Kit, we JUST went through this… I myself am tall!”

She groans and buries her face in her hands. “Look, dude, you’re definitely not short, okay? Six feet is a perfectly fine height. But in terms of percentiles a 5’10 woman actually tracks with a guy who’s, like… 6’3.” She scratches her knee. “Also, those stats that had 6’0 as eightieth percentile—were they controlling for ethnicity and social class? Because I’m pretty sure that these days six feet is average if we’re restricting the domain to upper income white people.”

My jaw seizes up like a rusty door hinge.

“Uh, dude…?”

…

“Hey… look… I hope you know I was only just playing around with you...”

…

“I didn’t mean…”

I turn to Kit and grind my teeth. “You’re right. Completely! You were right. Congratulations. Once we land I’ll board the next flight back to Orlando and leave Natalie alone for good.” I can’t read the expression in her eyes, but it doesn’t strike me as especially important. Immediately I pull up Twitter.

She’s silent for a while. Then she takes a deep breath and starts talking:

“So first off, that’s not what I said. It’s your life, and you can live it however you’d like.”

I roll my eyes. “Clearly I cannot. Like everyone else I’m rather brutally constrained by the vicissitudes of fate; ubiquity of power dynamics; arbitrary despotism of desire...”

She ignores me. “Second, you’re radically over-indexing on the importance of height right now… and also lots of other shit literally no one cares about in the real world.”

“They obviously do care, otherwise height wouldn’t correlate half as strongly with such a diverse and neatly quantifiable array of unambiguously positive life outcomes. It’s just that the power of traits like height and beauty usually emerges downstream of second-order halo effects, which means the causal chain is apprehended less than fully consciously by way of proximate causes, sanitizing leveling rituals, copium...”

“LOOK, I’m not saying there’s ZERO benefit to being tall as a man. Like, clearly there’s a lot! But you’re also acting right now like it’s the ONLY thing that matters, which is just insane.”

I scoff. “I never once said it’s the only thing. Kind of interesting you went there, actually. What I said is it’s the most causally impactful individual variable, and among the least plastic. Do you disagree with that assessment?”

“I reject the framing! Because attraction and respect and social capital are too messy to be systematized or quantified away like that into these mechanistic relationships!”

“Right, because women operate under this perfumed shroud of plausible deniability that keeps the whole song and dance incomprehensible outside the confines of your pinteresty interiority. And so we’re at this intractable epistemic impasse, which is why I’d suggest we end this conversation here so I can enjoy my Twitter feed and you your genetic superiority.”

“What?!” Katherine rubs her eyes. “I never said I was ‘genetically superior’.”

“You noted that your height—also Natalie’s height—tracks with 6’3, which is superior to my own 6’0.”

“Taller doesn’t mean superior!”

“Don’t be tedious.”

…

“Dude… why the hell are you obsessed with tall girls, anyway?! You know, you could date a girl who’s 5’7—which is your percentile equivalent—and she’d STILL be considered tall!”

I suck in air. “Let me get this straight: You’d consider a 5’7 girl tall, whereas a 6’0 man—who you yourself JUST identified as her precise percentile pair—counts merely as average?! Well, there’s a fuckin’ lawyerly bit of reasoning if I ever heard one…” I sneer in disgust.

Kit throws up her hands. “Man, will you give me a break?! I’m just trying to say this doesn’t have to be a question of better and worse! It’s so undignified to talk that way!”

“Is the world we live in such a palace of dignity? Seems to me the real gears of human progress are asymmetry and power and pain. And perhaps that means men of my stature should humbly accept our lot in life as this degraded subaltern caste content with fucking stubby 5’7 goblinettes. But don’t act like my friend and then ask me to drink out of black people water fountains.”

“Shhh! People are staring at us! Can you PLEASE chill?” She’s anxious. I get a bit hard.

“Your voice is much louder than mine. I’m entirely fine.” I smile at Kit-Kat sweetly.

She massages her temple. “Okay, look… I wasn’t saying anything about Natalie when I mentioned the percentile thing. I mean, you even said her exes were shorter than you! So it doesn’t even seem to matter to her that much. Except maybe to, like… neg you.”

“Alright.” I smile and nod.

Galadriel jostles her head around incredulously. “Just that?”

I pause. Then I turn to her a bit theatrically and gaze deep in her eyes.

“You really want to hear?”

She purses her lips: “No.”

I nod and go back to Twitter. She stares out the window.

Then she inhales deeply. Exhales. “Yes.”

I shrug. “Sometimes I just don’t see the point in existing if you’re not seven feet tall.”

She sits with that thought a few moments. Ponders. “Do you mean that literally?”

“Sort of. As I said, height is just the most causally impactful and genetically intractable stratifier for men. There are other big ticket items that lend a certain modicum of dignity—aesthetic sense, athleticism, verbal IQ—but we all know there’s nothing quite like height. It’s concrete; readily apparent; easily measurable; eternal; undeniable. And there’s really just some brute animal sense in which the 6’6 fag will always reign superior to a 6’0 manlet ceteris paribus—even if ceteris is never quite paribus and short kings very often do get the girl in practice. Because over the law of large numbers it still breaks a certain way, and no one would deny that.”

I turn to Kit. “And in any case, it’s specifically on swipe apps a la Tinder or Hinge where height becomes hyper-salient, as it’s the single most important individual characteristic for women in assessing male attractiveness. And so women will often use height as their primary or even solitary filter, flattening masculinity into this single cartoonish dimension wherein Wadlow is Gigachad and anyone below a certain threshold isn’t even in the race.”

I sigh. “And the thing is that doesn’t even benefit women, because a lot of the gals who filter primarily by height would never place such a premium on it in person. Meanwhile the things that help normal men stand out in real life, that girls feel fine gushing over—think a fellow’s voice, manner, affect, bearing—they’re utterly erased. Even literary talent is flattened into the dirt because it’s now seen as disqualifyingly effortful for a man to write a good profile description. And so in essence there’s a distortion effect caused by poor design choices.”

Katherine takes a deep breath. “Well, last I checked no one’s forcing you onto Tinder. You can find your own platform, ways to show off traits you want to broadcast…”

“I mean, fucking duh. That’s why God created SeekingArrangement.” I shake my head. “But seriously? Fuck Tinder. It stole its entire model from Grindr and consequently suffers from this ontologically homosexual UX architecture that doesn’t scale to normal straights.”

“Ontologically homosexual?”

“You heard me. It’s made normal women choose guys in the exact same manner a twink would, and this isn’t making them happy. But it’s also cornered too much of the market through network effects, and is seen as the default option for many millions of women who aren’t picking it with any thoughtfulness or intentionality but will still think of you as a disgusting worthless incel who deserves to be tortured to death if you don’t do exactly what everyone else does in every solitary situation because they’re stupid retarded girls. And under this regime why shouldn’t I long to throw guys taller than me in a gas chamber? It’s punching up.

“JESUS! Dude, should I be worried about your local DMV workers?”

“I mean, why would you be? Low value targets number one, and secondarily violence is pretty demonstrably counter-productive unlessin’ you’re directly seizin’ hard power...”

“Whatever—this is such a fucked up and mean and evil way of looking at the world! And again we’re back to that negative sum thinking, where it’s not even about your own ability to get laid so much as about stopping others, or punishing them for it!”

Katherine plays with one of her long Wagnerian eugenics braids. “Sometimes it feels like you guys are this angry army of orcs marching on in literally JUST to cause pain. I’ll see a sweet old normie woman posting an article about how we should treat each other better and the entire comments section will be flooded with these angry-ass orcs wanting meats.”

I grunt flatly. “Poor hates rich, black hates white, incel hates Stacy—news at eleven, ‘dude.’ Look—why are you moralizing this? You don’t seem the type. And literally NONE of this is about morality. The notion doesn’t even cohere in situations adjacent to desire and power; that’s literally why we have that ancient adage about love and war. It’s also why you have a literal pre-nup instead of relying on mutual goodwill with the Carter you love so very much... because ultimately it’s all just kind of a brutalist shell game wherein some are born with a winning hand and others without any cards at all and for most of us it’s always boiled down to a vague slurry of tactics, skill, and luck. And so it seems to me you’re just being a Pussy Snob and punching down at levelers here—which is actually sort of Fascist and based, and I respect it—but c’mon, don’t be so fucking gay about it and just say you’re better than me.”

Kit throws up her hands again. “But I don’t think I’m better! This isn’t a damn competition! And if it is it doesn’t HAVE to be….” Kit sighs to herself in exhaustion.
“I mean, yeah, I get it… clearly it will always be a little. But it’s supposed to be playful and fun, not World War 2 all the time. The attitude you younger guys have is just…”

“Hurt? Because incentive structures are frayed and the dating market shot, and no one cares? What you’re saying now is part of that—they’re not allowed to feel pain!”

“They can feel whatever they’d like! But I don’t have to hear about it, let alone ‘fix’ it.”

“Actually…? You sort of DO have to hear about it—though only if they can figure out some way to artfully shove their agony down your citrusy Aryan gullet. Because all’s fair in love and war, Kit-Kat, and romance is anomie. And here’s the deeper question you seem to be avoiding: Have we created a society wherein the expected hedonic return from terrorizing Sex-Havers is consistently higher than the expected return on investing in genuine self-improvement?”

Kit looks at me thoughtfully. “Well… you certainly seem to have given the matter a hell of a lot of thought. Like… an absolutely insane, genuinely really concerning degree of thought. So how about you tell me which provides more of a return to you?

“One data point doesn’t matter…”

“Can you stop?” Her face softens. “You KNOW what you’re doing here is mean and childish. Like, I’m trying to connect with you and you’re throwing your poo in my face. But I really want to know what got you thinking about this kind of stuff so intensely.”

After a moment I nod and smile faintly. “I get where you’re coming from, Kit. It’s just…

“Well, I’m not sure I even think of “connection” in the same way. To me none of this is something that could be “debated” even in principle, as it’s not about “ideas” so much as power relations and relational friction downstream of subtextual status jockeying. It’s like—I have my material interests and aesthetic proclivities entirely preordained by an antecedent causal chain, and so do you, and the conflict points can be derived entirely aprioristically, which means any attempts to sway the other are just callow gay manipulation. At the end of the day it’s all just force pushing up against force.”

“What force? Are we at war now? I genuinely don’t understand what you’re on about.”

I sigh. “Look—I’ve been the incel. But I’ve also been the… I dunno if I’d say Chad, but these days I get laid pretty frequently, and that’s in part due to having internalized loads of Red Pill heuristics back in the day. And yeah, I sort of despise incels for not being able to ascend like I did—and also for acting like such ankle-biting faggoty bitches all the time—and because of this I do feel a powerful ladder-pulling impulse toward them on occasion.“

I sigh again. “But honestly? I very genuinely despise the normie a hell of a lot more—mostly for how cartoonishly exaggerated his contempt for the incel is… and also for how it’s not even about inceldom itself anymore so much as “incel coding”, where even second or third order suggestions of incel-adjacency will tank your social standing.

And what’s worse is that there’s also a certain expectation that if you DO ascend you never ever talk about it, or if you do so it can only be in the context of aggressively shit-talking incels all the time, even more sadistically than normies will, almost like sort of a Black Republican dynamic. It’s like you can’t have ANY loyalty to your past self—to your most fundamental human dignity—and nary a crumb of grace is extended to the thematic contiguity of your interiority.”

Kit tosses back a braid. “Well, no, not if you’re gonna side with evil revolutionary orcs! Because, ya know, maybe I AM a Pussy Snob, and maybe I AM just Pussy Moralizing behind my Pussy Curtains… but isn’t that better than being a Pussy Communist? Maybe I’m just the Pussy Joe McCarthy and want to make sure you don’t have any pinko tendencies that could make you amenable to orcish overtures if they want to redistribute me or something.”

“Well, obviously I’d never resent you for self-advocacy. What I don’t like is obfuscation under this disingenuous fake and gay moral universalism rather conspicuously out of step with the rest of your worldview. But I completely respect open and transparent displays of power—force pushing up against force.”

I smile at Kit. “All that ever was, and all that ever will be.”

“C’mon, that’s bullshit.” Kit dramatically throws back yet another long Viking braid. “So, what—are you just giving up on the idea of civilization? Of ideology, of culture… of normativity itself? What does that even look like? If nothing is beautiful or good or true anymore and you just want to say we’re all brawling about in the mud like pigs then what’s the point of literally anything?”

“For someone with a French name you aren’t especially conversant in existentialism...”

“Is that what you’re calling this? Also, has it ever occurred to you that simply not pushing the boulder is an option? Have you ever tried it, even once? Maybe you’ll be the Chad! I mean—you’re handsome and smart and pretty freakin’ charming when you actually TRY.”

“Gonna start the fan club?”

She scoffs. “You don’t even believe me...”

“Well, you just said I’m charming when I TRY.” My brow furrows up in confusion. “But that doesn’t comport with my own lived experience, and certainly not with any of those Red Pill precepts you apparently still subscribe to.”

She considers my words. “Well, I don’t mean acting try-hard, or desperate or something… I mean things like being present, activated, conversationally competent… most guys are really bad at that!”

“Wouldn’t that imply conversational incompetence offered men some adaptive advantage?” She’s such a sweet lady. So why do you keep sneering at her, you chode?

I adjust my glasses. “Maybe guys suck at listening because registering female utterances as meaningless non-cognitive girlsqueaks produces more attractive outcome-independent behavior in men, whereas taking women at face value or loving and respecting them makes you sort of groty and incel-coded… or just hampered by inadequate nonverbal communicative throughput, which in turn gets your entire tribe raped and cannibalized by Neanderthals…”

Kit buries her face in her palms and groans. “Duuuuuude, why are you, like, vivisecting your own fucking compliment out of existence? I literally just told you I found you charming—and I’m actually being honest and earnest here.” She sighs. “Does that not mean anything to you?”

“It does on an intellectual level, but viscerally? Not especially, because contextually my charm is sort of just tautological due to this being a zero stakes scenario.”

I crack my neck and sigh. “Like… between the age gap and you being affianced the upside potential from you finding me charming has a remarkably low ceiling… which paradoxically makes it rather easy to charm you, since charm is mostly just a function of authentic outcome independence paired with genuine enthusiasm, and you’re clearly still lovely enough for me to register a pretty powerful dopaminergic response from extended conversation, which means I don’t have to force it or exaggerate my interest like I would if you were, say, overweight, or black or something. And so in short this is sort of a perfect storm for charm… just not a hugely meaningful one.”

Kit looks at me a long while, and then she sighs. “This conversation is going in circles… maybe I should just leave you alone and catch up on my reading?”

I nod to her slowly and want to kill myself. “But before you do—I’m kind of curious about my grade?”

“I mean… you got an F, dude.” She shakes her head. “I’m not even convinced you understood the assignment. You didn’t stay on topic at all… you were supposed to convince me my ideas about marriage were wrong, but then we looped through so much unrelated shit I couldn’t even tell you half of what we said. It was disorienting.”

“Ah. So you were wrong about me doing well in law school?”

“Did I say that? I said you failed the Kit Test.” Then she smirks rather enigmatically. “But so did Johnnie Cochran.”

We sit in silence a moment. I scroll through Twitter, but can’t seem to parse anything on my feed. Kit pulls out some gay airport book by Fatty Yglesias but can’t even crack the thing, instead gazing wistfully out the window past the pockmarked mug of a slumbering abuelita. Yet it’s only when the captain conveys we’ll be landing imminently that I opt to engage her again.

“Hey Kit?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Where’d you meet your fiancé?”

There’s a beat.

“Hinge.”

“Do you remember what filters you used to find him?”

Two beats.

“No.”

Four beats.

She sighs. “I mean, I haven’t opened it since we met, but… it’s probably still there.”

“Did you know Hinge was actually designed to be deleted?”

“Ha ha.”

Three beats.

I bite my cheek. “I think you should extra credit me up to a C if you have the 6’0 filter.”

“No.”

Beat.

She turns to me and frowns.

“Stop trying to haggle with me like I’m one of your hookers. You’re not getting out of that failing grade. How long has it been since you faced literally ANY consequences for your actions you didn’t immediately gish-gallop your way out of?”

Five beats.

She frowns more deeply. “Though I’m honestly kind of curious about the filter myself.”

She pulls out her phone—passcode 1974—and opens Hinge, extending out her arm so the Apple product is positioned equidistantly between us.

Then Kit sighs to herself. She turns to me.

“Look… I probably do have the filter. Are you gonna be fucking weird about it?”

“I mean, obviously. But stop being gay and open your fucking search.”

She does.

FAMILY PLANS:
[ ] Want children
[x] Don't want children
[ ] Open to children

DATING INTENTIONS:
[x] Life partner
[x] Long-term
[x] Long-term, open to short-term
[x] Short-term, open to long-term
[ ] Short-term
[ ] Figuring out my dating goals

HEIGHT:
6’3 – 7’0

“Huh… weird.” Katherine sighs through her teeth. “Genuinely thought I had it at 6’2…”

Suddenly the wheels of our 737 find purchase with the sturdy Atlanta tarmac, and in half a heartbeat our party is taxying gaily toward the gate. It isn’t long before scores of fat sweaty Sun Belters start waddling out those cabin doors, row by cheesy row.

Perhaps realizing it’s her last chance, Kit takes a deep breath and turns to face me.

“Hey, dude? Before we part ways….”

“Yessum?”

“I just need to know… do you actually enjoy being so angry all the time?”

The passengers in front of us start to file out, and Kit-Kat sighs as we both unbuckle our belts. “I mean, you’ve got all this ability—ideas, insight, actual presence—and still you waste it clinging to that world. Defending it, even. But what does that get you, exactly? I mean, did you ever even care about fixing your shit for real—'ascending’, as you called it—or was the whole point to become the World’s Most Powerful Incel?”

She sizes me up. “Is that what you wanted this whole time? To be King of the Orcs?”

I consider Galadriel’s words carefully. Then I turn to her and respond.

“Honestly? Maybe. But at this point I’ve clearly gone too soft to be a real orc—even if I also have too much orc-blood in me to ever be entirely proper company for the gentler races. And while I haven’t much desire to cling to that world, I’ll also never slam the door on it… mostly because I’ve learned through the years that there’s surprising power in liminality—a lot of narrative heft in presenting oneself as a stepping stone or gatekeeper… or even a doorman.

Which you know every bit as well as I do, coltish girl.

I clear my throat. “Anywho, before we skedaddle: a question for you, miss?”

She raises an eyebrow. “No weird shit. And make it quick?” She gestures subtly to her right; seems la abuelita de la ventana has returned to waking life. Is she going somewhere?

I nod to Kit, smiling graciously as Back Row Boomer’s spare tire grazes my left elbow.

“Nothing weird, Counselor… merely a reprise of that first question I asked you an hour ago: what are you doing back here with the livestock? Assistant shit the bed?”

“My assistant is wonderful—better than me. She was actually the one who suggested I trade spots with a partner’s kid so they can chill together up in First. It was just good social politics…” Kit grins at me darkly as she chaps up her lips.

“Though in retrospect we most definitely did the world a favor in not letting you recite your manifesto to a sixteen year-old boy.”

I smile back at Katherine Karen Aldridge-Sauveuse.

Then she follows me out of the cabin and onto the terminal.

“Have a very cool life, dude. Also—for what it’s worth? It’s actually sort of a pity you don’t see a crown in your future... cause if I’m being honest, you would have made a pretty fuckin’ wicked King of the Orcs.”

I offer Kit my hand for a final shake goodbye.

“Not a lot of glory being King of the Orcs... but should we ever cross paths again I hope to be something quite a lot cooler.”

The coltish girl raises an eyebrow. Her handshake is rather firm for a woman...

“Oh yeah? And what might tha—oooh!”

meticulous wrist clasped fast in virile grasp
wizened willowy frame falls into fat boy
back of her neck so soft; secure; safe
red chapstick chastened chastely
with White Monstrous mwah
then in her ear a whisper:

First of the Uruk-Hai.