When Cruelty is Kind

In defense of being mean

In this essay I’m going to argue in favor of being mean to people.

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So if you aren’t simple you’ve almost certainly heard of the Ben Franklin Effect:

The Ben Franklin effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people like someone more after doing a favor for them.

An explanation for this is cognitive dissonance. People reason that they help others because they like them, even if they do not, because their minds struggle to maintain logical consistency between their actions and perceptions.

Now, this phenomenon is very palpably real, but to my mind the cognitive dissonance explanation is actually sort of pedestrian, and a far better account is readily available—namely, one rooted in the idea of social debt.

Have you ever had a friend who did you a ton of favors you never really asked for and who you gradually came to find kind of annoying? Or have you ever lent money to someone only for them to start avoiding you—or even acting all pissy around you?

Well, that’s social debt.

Long story short is that it’s horribly frustrating to owe people things—especially without one’s active and agentic consent. Yet the expectation of reciprocity (and with it the desire to meet said expectation) is essentially a human constant, and taken together these phenomena mean it will frequently register as kind of annoying or uncomfortable when people do too many nice things for you, unless it’s something you genuinely need or specifically asked for.

The exceptions to this rule reside primarily among the severely disordered, who’ll often weaponize their own psychic immunity to the cognitive load produced by social debt to extract all sorts of favors and come out on top as a consequence. And for some of them that instinct’s entirely natural, but for others it’s quite clearly trained, as in a rootless social ecology we’re all basically all incentivized to act like shameless narcs

Anyway, compare that to when YOU end up doing the nice thing—especially at their behest. That gives you narrative currency: greater legibility and agency even in THEIR version of the story (again, unless they’re some sort of extreme outlier psycho).

Hence we have two ways to be an asshole with social debt on the Kind Side:

martyrdom — doing unsolicited favors to establish a reciprocity expectation and seize narrative leverage (think the overbearing mother or the ever-persistent beta orbiter)

parasitism — constantly accepting favors from people without registering any normal reciprocity impulse (think the solipsistic cool girl or hot shot narc)

And it goes without saying that parasites and martyrs fit each other like yin and yang.

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So now let’s take a look at the Cruel Side of things.

When you’re just unapologetically evil and mean to someone you’re in a sense doing them a profound narrative service, because you’re performing as an antagonist into whom they can pour their hate as catharsis and blame for their misfortune— something that’s often a phenomenal source of energy, agency, and inspiration.

There’s actually something rather Christlike about just overtly accepting the role of Bad Guy in someone else’s story—especially if there are witnesses who feel bad for them and might hold it against you in the future. It essentially gives your victim a social and emotional Rubber Band Effect, like a racer lagging behind in Mario Cart.

Yet exceedingly few people are ever quite so narratively chivalrous in their predation—it’s virtually never that clean. Pretty much every seriously talented predator will keep the entire thing plausibly deniable, such that even their own victim will defend them
(or at least be inclined to inject nuance into the discussion). And so instead of a cleansing Rubber Band Effect you just become ensconced in this stultifying pool of narrative quicksand—no clean break, and certainly no righteous fury… just an infinitely recursive autofacefucking Ouroboros of ambiguity…

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No doubt you see where I’m going with this; the subject clearly has a sexed valence.

You may recall I broached the topic last November in Women Don’t Have Agency :

…for the femme fatale narrative to work she needs to own up to her scheme in the end. She needs to demonstrate agency and accountability. The praying mantis actually has to eat you…. that’s what offers real catharsis...

…this is what real women never do—not even the talented and scheming and relatively agentic ones. They’re never willing to acknowledge that they’re the bad guy in a direct confrontation or admit in a straightforward and unironic way that they manipulated or took advantage of you.

This isn’t because women are scheming harlots who consciously play innocent when the lights come on…. The vast majority of women simply do this without realizing it—they’re constantly reframing, recontextualizing, and subconsciously convincing themselves they didn’t actually mean to do that. Because real-life women are never femme fatales; they’re scared little girls responding to constantly shifting incentive structures and managing their own fickle natures…

Do I still think this?

Kind of.

But having reflected on the matter with a few Zoomette frens (thanks in particular to Sai Ψ and Sabina) I’ve largely given up on the idea that feminine re-narrativization is entirely or even primarily unconscious—frankly that’s a bit of misty-eyed male cope.

These days my notion is more that once a woman registers a man as either Disgusting or threatening to a competing romantic narrative she’s more bought into she’ll sort of just dehumanize him by necessity. But the process is usually quite conscious and often done in a spirit of rather overt sadism, which she herself experiences as a kind of heroic feminine will to power (think Amazing Amy’s iconic Cool Girl monologue).

And let me be clear: just in and of itself I don’t see this phenomenon as a Bad Thing—nor even as anti-male on the whole of it. It’s simply pro-winning male, and I’d obviously be a pretty shitty vitalist if I weren’t in favor of that. Obviously it’s sort of annoying that the most recent time it happened to me was in front of an audience, but over the broader course of my life it’s clearly benefited me on aggregate, and for sure benefits our sex as a whole, specifically by allowing women to cognitively sever any ancillary branches cleanly and mercilessly without them ensconcing her arm in thorns. Indeed, this is what makes monogamy possible—you can’t achieve the Edenic Dyad without dehumanizing the snake. Without it all women would just end up in someone’s harem.

Yet there’s still a problem—an unhappily tremendous one—namely, that women don’t really ever give you the Rubber Band Effect. They just give you quicksand.

The way it usually goes down is she frames you as either deluded or overtly predatory— makes sure it never registers as cruelty / manipulation / triangulation on her end, because she herself is either scared or vaguely weary or annoyed. And it carries far too much of a low status incel stink to push back against her re-narrativization, so most guys will simply cede absolute narrative sovereignty to her and walk away defeated.

But here’s the crucial point—I actually DON’T think this tendency is endemic to female nature; to my mind it’s very specifically a product of Christian theology.

I briefly allude to this idea in The Girl Who Cried Incel:

You also need to realize that whenever you interface with a girl both Lilith and Eve exist in there, but they’re not two sides of the same coin—they’re just the same woman, with an entirely contiguous interiority and sense of self. The girl who made you feel all those lovely things was precisely the same person who operatically betrayed you. Every bit of it went hand in hand, and that’s the ultimate redpill.

For centuries the Abrahamic faiths buried this understanding out of a Manichean urge to obliterate the Dark Feminine. Judaism cognitively transformed women into men while Christianity made them children and Islam reduced them to livestock.

And for a while this actually sort of worked. But in the end Mephistopheles always comes back to claim his pound of flesh.

This to my mind is the central crux of what I’ve been interrogating for over a year now while grappling with the Female Agency Question.

In premodern times Christianity (and Abrahamic monotheism more broadly) actively repressed and obviated the Dark Feminine so as to sort of sexually infantilize women, and as a consequence Western Femininity has a thoroughly unintegrated shadow—really an entire cognitive architecture that structurally precludes shadow integration altogether—such that post-Christian civilization has no vocabulary to recognize the capacity for evil within female desire, let alone meaningfully restrain it.

Just think about it for a minute; the very notion feels almost non-cognitive.

Meanwhile women can critique masculine sexuality practically out of existence—say X is pedo-coded, Y is grooming, Z is coerced consent—whereas literally ANY critique of female sexuality reads as inexorably and eternally incel-coded and stinky and wrong; the foremost sin in our broader civilization. Men are socialized to experience intense shame for EVER pushing back on female preferences, and when they do so it’s very nearly always under some cartoonishly ghoulish Villain Hat framing.

Why is this?

It’s because for westerners female sexuality is holy.

It’s Mary.

But now Mary gets to suck and fuck and you’d better fucking validate her, incel!

Whereas in India et al they’ve pretty much always had goddesses cutting off your dick and using it as a dildo or whatever, and you saw the same thing with our Norse and Hellenic forebears. In pagan cultures you just have a better integrated understanding that Eve and Lilith reside in the same building, which is why female desire isn’t seen as sacrosanct but precisely as venal and bestial (yet equally, just as holy) as male desire.

In my first podcast episode with Sai Ψ she was expressing frustration that guys in America over-index on sexual validation from women far and above literally everything else, such that a man who’s great in every other dimension but a technical incel is afforded almost zero dignity in our society. And at the time I couldn’t give an especially sophisticated take on the issue, because even to me that seemed right.

But more than a year later I can proclaim this with a confidence felt in my bones:

The Western sexual script is deeply corrupted.

And yet the issue isn’t merely ethical or aesthetic; it’s epistemic. It’s fucking ontological.

Repressing the Dark Feminine for millennia only to all at once unleash her on the world via the Sexual Revolution was a cataclysmic error, because now we can’t even talk about the world as it actually is.

See, once you elevate womanly desire to the absolute most sacrosanct social value then everyone just starts lying all the time. Literally nothing’s about the truth anymore; merely what codes as high status, or what makes people ‘comfortable’.

I write about this extensively in The Con; it’s as though we’re under the Orwellian—
if not Lovecraftian—reign of a tyrannically solipsistic Clitoris-Empress bent on obviating the interiority of anyone who DARES contravene her exalted tastes…
and who also has the power to dismantle your entire being with a scoff. The only way to escape her is to overtly embrace the possibility of being disgusting and low status, bellowing forth into eternity that sometimes what girls find hot is gross, too.

Statistically it’s well established that most men are technically crypto-hebephiles, and either repressing that consciously or deeply unaware of it—specifically because we do a tremendous amount to train ourselves out of that attraction since it very clearly runs counter to all the goals of a higher order civilization and is pretty contextually evil.

So would it kill women to do the same thing? Like, at all?

Look—ultimately I don’t care either way; I’m obviously no moralist.

But bitch, admit you’re gross and evil, the exact same as me.

And if you’re gonna stab me in the back then at least grow some fucking ovaries and BITE MY FUCKING HEAD OFF.