I.

Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader.

The author - the pseudonymous “Edward Teach, MD” - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between ability and other virtues - but where he’s good, he’s amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride.

He’s also impressively erudite, drawing on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, psychoanalytic literature, and all of modern movies and pop culture. Sometimes you read the scholars of two hundred years ago and think “they just don’t make those kinds of guys anymore”. They do and Teach is one of them.

If you read his old blog, The Last Psychiatrist, you have even more reasons to appreciate him. His expertise in decoding scientific studies and in psychopharmacology helped me a lot as a med student and resident. His political and social commentary was delightfully vicious, but also seemed genuinely aimed at helping his readers become better people.

My point is: the author is a multitalented person who I both respect and want to respect. This sets up the conflict.

Because this book is . . . what even is this book? The first page has an eight-page long footnote at the bottom, which covers the Delphic Oracle, the Salem Witch Trials, and the movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, and ends up concluding that you (yes, you) are incapable of having desires. Immediately afterwards, the narrative breaks off for a thirty page cuckold porn story, which sounds like the sort of thing you do in order to discuss later, except that it never does. Then it’s back to more seemingly-crazy assertions and multi-dozen page footnotes. Footnote 35 is half a page of the author screaming at a hypothetical reader who wants fewer footnotes:

“Why so many footnotes???” Which is the same question as, “why are your sentences so long, why so many commas, what the hell is with you and semicolons?” It’s all on purpose, to get rid of readers. You’re stumped by the physical layout? This book is not for you, your brain is already set in concrete, it can never change, only crumble as it ages. Which is fine if your plan was to be a foundation for the next generation, but it isn’t; you’re the rotting walls that they have to knock down while you play the flute and pretend to give freedom to everyone else. If you look forward to TV, if you think “the problem with the youth today is that they’re entitled,” if you think, “damn all the partisanship, I wish someone in government would take charge and do the right thing — you are a true Athenian democrat. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Yeah. I’m not saying you are necessarily a bad person, I’m just saying your kids would benefit from a more hands off approach to parenting. And a math tutor. Most of you should not read this book, the Disclaimer represents all the justification you deserve, I did everything I could to exclude everyone, including adding the porn story at the beginning, a Beware Of Dog sign written in cat. You are the kind of person who will be bothered by the presence of the porn story here, in a book safely away from any observation, even as you don’t observe that your kid observed…what you have been observing. You are the kind of open-minded replicant who will say, “I don’t have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written!” That’s how you were told the kind of person you want others to think you are would select even his porn. Exacting measures of quality for your self-indulgence, while your standards for employment and diet are bafflingly arbitrary. “Are these cubicle donuts gluten-free?” They’re regular free, is that not free enough? You demand excellence in everything for yourself except yourself, you figure that will come after you’re discovered for being excellent. “But I can’t follow your book, why can’t you write more clearly?” I typed it, what the hell more do you want? Audiobook? But you didn’t mean it literally. You never mean anything literally. Try it. You can’t. Never mind all that: how do you experience your frustration with the book? Answer: As if I owed you a debt. When Tarkovsky sent Stalker to the Soviet censors for approval, and they came back with the complaint that it was too slow paced and dull, he told them “it needs to be slower and duller, so people have the time to leave.” I would have published this in 4 pt font if I could, the irony is sometimes I had to write in 4 pt font to avoid the surveilling eyes of Athenians who sat next to me on transports. “Couldn’t help noticing you weren’t talking to me, what’s that you’re working on?” It’s a manifesto, you should buckle up.

There’s a trope where a brilliant writer at the peak of his career writes something that defies all the normal rules. Finnegan’s Wake. The Northern Caves. Is it a troll? Is its impenetrability the very sign of its genius? Is it some sort of complicated tease, where the very exhortations not to read it make you want to read it even more, to prove you’re one of the true fans, one of the elect who’s better than those Athenian democrats and gluten-free donut eaters?

Teach’s earlier work centers around Christopher Lasch’s idea of narcissism. Sadly, Porn adds a layer of Lacanian psychoanalysis (I wasn’t smart enough to recognize this myself; other people pointed it out). I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while. Partly because I never understood him in school. Partly because Slavoj Zizek is into him and everyone seems to think Zizek is smart. And partly because I recently realized that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which I also never understood, actually has useful insights (hint: compare Part III of this post with the theory of part objects) and for all I know Lacanian psychoanalysis might be the same way.

But also: I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan. They’re all exactly the same: highly-driven highly-charismatic people, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout. Teach fits this same mold. Does the personality type attract you to the theory? Does the theory produce the personality type? It’s a weird enough coincidence that it makes me want to learn more.

And: I have a running argument with one of these people. The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”

I can’t remember if this was part of the conversation or came up afterwards, but there sure are a lot of holes in that area of my map. Why do some people have the “charisma” to become successful cult leaders? Why do other people follow them? Why do some people keep falling for abusers, again and again? Why are so many people attracted to partners with Dark Triad traits? Why do people have fetishes which seem contrary to common sense (submission, humiliation, cuckoldry, etc)? I have boring semantic stopsign answers to all these questions, but none that seem satisfying.

This kind of hole-filled map suggests I must be missing something here, and a whole lot of people who might know suggest trying to find it in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I already tried the kind of normal book that a normal person might use to try to understand Lacan, and I bounced off of it like putty. So fine. Let’s try to read this abomination and see if we can squeeze something out of it.

II.

Sadly, Porn consists of a few dozen short-ish (5-10 pages) interpretations of various texts, vaguely connected by rants and insults. The texts range from classical (especially Thucydides and Oedipus Rex), to Biblical, to modern novels, to movies, to pornos, to dreams. Some of them, on closer inspection, are fictional - not in the sense of being works of fiction, but in the sense where Teach made them up.

Some are outright psychoanalytic dream interpretations, and the rest draw from this tradition. The underlying theory is that every work of art (including porno) is an expression of some repressed desire, which has to be different from the open desires (so eg Oedipus can’t really be about marrying your mother, because Oedipus openly marries his mother). So for example, here’s Teach on The Giving Tree - yes, this is a long quote, but a review this book won’t make sense until you see the kind of thing he’s doing:

Take a look back at Shel Silverstein’s 60s storyboard, The Giving Tree. Here’s an invalid but reliable statistical observation: if you sell 7 million copies of a book with a positive message and it doesn’t make people live the message, then they didn’t get that message. What they did get was a very strong defense against the actual message, see also The Gospel Of Mark.

It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother. This is a very odd association to make, because it’s clearly not a mother, it’s a tree, if it was a mother than [sic] the boy would be a sapling. “It’s literally a tree, but the tree is a metaphor.” Obviously it’s a metaphor, what I want to know is why you chose the wrong one. The boy is a biped and has a human girlfriend; the fact that the story requires organisms from two different kingdoms not only complicates the possibility it represents a mother, it requires the reader to force the interpretation on the book, to “do violence to the text”. You know, like rape.

Why do you think it’s a mother? It gives and gives and gives and asks nothing in return, but that’s not what defines “a mother”, that’s how your mother defines herself. In fact, the fundamental characteristic that would make it a “mother” is explicitly absent from the story, and that’s responsibility to the boy. The Tree has none. It may be nice to him, it may sometimes let him win at hide and seek, it may give him a boat, but it doesn’t have to punish him, it doesn’t have to protect him, it doesn’t have to worry about teaching him to swim or warning against gold digging hippies, it doesn’t have to make him sad/angry/scared for his own good. “I just want him to be happy”. That’s it? The tree isn’t his mother. At best, it’s his godmother. Uh oh.

So the question you have to ask your pop rocks and triple cola conscience is not why you thought it was a mother, but why you wanted it to be a mother. “Because it acts selflessly out of love?” Boy oh boy are you way off.

The trick to what the demographic wants, and this may sound familiar, is that while it doesn’t believe in “true love” between two people, it doesn’t believe in true love of a parent for a child either. Parental love can’t be true love because it is definitional, obligatory, and therefore it doesn’t count. What the demo believes in, what it aspires to, is unconditional love chosen by free will - that can be witnessed and confirmed by other people as an act of free will. To the demo, rather than the symbolic obligation being both the requirement for love and its justification, the symbolic obligation negates it. This is the form of love you and the other adult readers are capable of - of imagining. That’s why it’s a tree. Since there’s no cultural or even biological responsibility to love this boy, then this love is (depicted as) real love.

The desire to display gigawatt devotion with zero responsibility is the standard maneuver of our times, note the trend of celebrity soundbite social justice, or children’s fascination with doing the extra credit more than the regular credit, and as a personal observation this is exactly what’s wrong with medical students and nurses. They’ll spend hours talking with a patient about their lives and feelings while fluffing their pillow to cause it to be true that they are devoted - they chose to act, chose to love - while acts solely out of ordinary duty are devalued if not completely avoided. “Well, I believe the patient’s spirituality is very important.” It will be if you don’t get this NG tube in. You may think you have very valid personal reasons for not wanting to assume responsibility, like apathy or minimum wages, but the overwhelming motivator for devotion by choice is the rewarding reward of giving gifts of oneself, seemingly selflessly, because these publicly “count” more than discharging duty. The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done out of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be? But one doesn’t need to be seen by individual people, it’s enough to imagine being seen by a hypothetical audience. […]

The entire childish fantasy of “motherly love” collapses the moment obligation enters into it, which is why, in The Giving Tree, it never does, and this is why so many remain deeply attached to it as a mother figure. It doesn’t represent a mother - the wish is that it could. Tree-mothers will do anything to convey devotion and “love” - because there is no obligation to do it. They are willing to sacrifice, to give of themselves, to convey the appearance of suffering and sacrifice even by actually suffering and sacrificing - they’ll cut off their own arms to prove it, in order to assure themselves and a love object too guilty to be suspicious that they do it all out of willful, chosen love. “I love!” But can you help me with my math homework? No? Fine, I’ll just go back to wetting the bed and playing with matches. The desire for it to be a mother also satisfies within the adult reader the childish desire to be special: if only my mother did these things for me because she loved me and not because she had to - not because she would have been similarly obligated to any of her meiotic anomalies. Because then it would count.

Why would Tree-mothers so reliably avoid acting out of responsibility, but might perform the very same acts out of “love”? Why is this kind of mothering so aspirational, celebrated? What’s so bad about obligation that it needs to shrouded [sic] in “love”, or outright resisted? Because obligatory mothering means you matter less than your replacement, no thanks, my place in the world is unique. And the uniqueness is signaled by regular, public gifts of themselves, not public in the studio audience sense, but public in the storyboard sense, the potentiality of an audience that doesn’t need to exist. “I’ve sacrificed so much to give you a boat.” But shouldn’t you teach me to boat so I can boat for a lifetime? No? That’s Dad’s job? Got it.

Your desire to be a selfless godmother may imply you’re a bad person, but it doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad for the kid, he still gets a boat, right? Can’t self-interest result in positive outcomes for others? Yes, but this isn’t self-interest, it’s self-definition, it is relative to the outcomes of others. In other words, there’s a ledger that needs to be balanced, and the kid is going to pay eventually. The apparent selfless devotion perversely/purposefully obligates the child to them - it causes there to be a debt owed back to the parent which should not exist: the child perceives the existence of such an unpaid debt and thus believes his guilt is warranted. This is the guilt that the adult reader misinterprets as “nostalgia” or “poignancy”. This is entirely separate from the complex duty an adult child owes their parents, which many avoid anyway; this is an repayable debt that keeps the child indebted to the parent - in this way precluding the possibility that the child can mature into their replacement, or at all.

The Giving Tree is an anagram for I Get Even, Right? That’s a solid example of the return of the repressed assuming it wasn’t on purpose. So the boy rebels, becomes selfish, he grows up and appears not notice [sic] or not to care that he’s hurting the Tree; but this is inaccurate, his destructive actions should be seen as a response to this debt, to the unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt against which his neurosis is a protest.

Not everyone likes the story. There have been a lot of ferocious criticisms of its “theme”. The question is, what is the outcome of these criticisms? Do the criticisms offer an alternative understanding, or do they pretend to criticize in order to maintain the status quo? A popular criticism, heavy with contempt and thus conveniently dismissed as misogyny, is that the Tree “mothered” him too much and failed to foster independence in the child. While this may be factually accurate, it’s even more wrong, it’s the kind of insight that gets you out of having to go any further, it ends your connection to the story - you are done with the book. The criticism that the Tree fails to foster independence presumes it is supposed to do this. But that’s not it’s job. It’s his actual mother’s job, it’s his father’s job. Based on how this little rat turns out it’s clear they failed, but that’s a totally different book, and it’s called Oedipus Tyrannos. The critics say the Tree failed as a mother because they want teaching independence to be the metric of motherhood; but as they are misogynists their true target for redefinition is fatherhood. No one criticized the Tree for failing to teach the boy math, or for self-cutting to guilt him into a debt, its one celebrated failure was not teaching him independence, which, you will observe, is way easier than teaching him math. Consequently it is correct to say that the criticisms of the book pose no threat to the underlying psychology which both haters and admirers share, their ends are the same, both pro and con have succeeded in reprioritizing the myriad defining responsibilities of a parent for the modern age, here they are in full, in order of importance: 1. Foster independence. 2. Other stuff.

Asserting parenting’s main job as fostering independence is not merely self-serving, it’s bad for the kid, and it’s probably correct to say that in modern times we have completely accidentally but nevertheless excessively fostered independence, to the point that dependence of any kind is seen as a moral catastrophe, or at least an easy target for self-righteous indignation. Of course the independence that’s fostered isn’t real independence, it’s green screen individualism, all the dependencies are disavowed or at least fetishized with money; even the money gets fetishized into creidt so he doesn’t even have to see he needs money, the credit card lets him believe he is his own man; and it only makes jarring the instances where independence is utterly impossible, eg medical illness or falling in love. We’ll tolerate a certain amount of material dependence because it doesn’t count, but no way is anyone going to allow an emotional = “pathological” dependence on the other.

“But isn’t pathological dependence just borderline personality disorder?” Border between - what and what? The question you asked about their pathology is a symptom of your pathology. You want the borderline’s pathology to be their pathological overdependence on the other because you don’t want it to be the characteristic that you both share, which is the absence of interest in whether the other can depend on you. The crucial distinction is that while neither of you are dependable, the borderline wants to be seen as dependent and not dependable, whereas you want to be seen as not dependent but as dependable. The borderline may be more thirsty, but it’s still a babbling brook for both of you: can’t live without it, derive no real enjoyment out of it, can’t tell it apart from any other water and often pee in it. The water gets nothing in return from either of you.

If you accept that the boy has an actual biological mother, never seen in the story because the need for her is repressed and thus of no interest to the childish reader, then something else becomes true and changes the genre from kiddie porn to Lovecraftian horror: the man doesn’t keep coming back to the Tree, the man keeps coming home to his actual mother. The Tree is outside waiting for him.

But the claim that the tree fails to foster independence turns out to be literally incorrect, a defense in the form of a criticism. The last sentence of the story is, “And the tree was happy.” Why is she happy? Because the old man has wasted his life and came back to her?

The tree doesn’t fail to foster independence; it actively thwarts the child’s independence at every turn. This may seem hard to believe, she did give him her trunk so he can heed the call of Manifest Destiny, but unless you’re going to chop it up and Huck Finn the pieces into a raft that trunk isn’t going to carry away anything but your optimism. And who taught you to use an axe, your mom? Don’t dismiss the giving of the boat as a contrivance solely for the purpose of furthering the plot, because the contrivance is what the passive agent uses to cause the active agent to act on her desires. She fofered first her apples which were useful and then the wood which she knows is not useful. But instead of first offering the apples and then referring him to the 2 ton cedar trees in the next forest or at the very least a boat maker, she offers him what couldn’t possibly satisfy him. “I hope the scent reminds you of me”. You know he’ll be back in a week, when was he going to forget?

The tree isn’t giving “of itself” because it has nothing else to offer, it is giving of itself because it doesn’t want the boy to want anything else. But this selfishness is totally opposed to how the Tree views itself - a kind, loving, giving Tree - so it is necessary to disavow this. To hide that thought from herself - not the boy, but herself - she is willing to chop parts of her body off for him, as long as those parts don’t do him any good. The magnitude of sacrifice is illusory even if it fools other people as well, it looks huge to the outside, which is why that part was chosen for sacrifice - but it is of only passing value to the boy. The sacrifice hides to herself her attempts to keep the boy unsatisfied, wanting more. The last page of the book shows the man come full circle, sitting on the stump. “And the tree was happy”. Which was the whole point.

In other words, the GIving Tree is a giant cunt. Take it easy, that’s not me saying it, that’s Silverstein: in a later comic, he drew a picture of a man approaching a cave that looks like the top part of the Giving Tree and all of a 60s mom’s vagina, I’ll wait, and the guy goes in but doesn’t come out. The title of the comic is “And He Was Never Heard From Again.” Well I have a question: is the cave happy? Anybody want to tell me why?

It’s important to ask: if the Tree’s target is the boy, even into adulthood, why does it continue to position itself as a mother - instead of as one of the historically reliable poses for manipulating adult men such as a wife, lover, or damsel in distress?

Because she doesn’t know what he wants. The only thing she knows about him is that he keeps coming home to his real mother. But hold on - I don’t mean she tries to be a mother because that’s what she thinks the boy wants. She doesn’t know what he wants. Stop here, read that all again. But his mom must know - it’s why he keeps coming back to her. So the Tree identifies with the mother in order to figure out what the boy wants; not like Special Agent Empath who “gets inside the head” of the criminal, but like a high end escort or high priced psychoanalyst. She has no idea what the guy lying beneath her wants; the only thing she knows about him is that he thinks escorts and psychoanalysts would know. So she doesn’t guess what he wants: she simply stays in character as the one who is supposed to know, and waits for the man to act.

Of course escorts and psychoanalysts get paid, ie the ledger is immediately balanced. In the Tree’s case, however, no payment is forthcoming; and since it is an arithmetical necessity that the ledger must balance, it becomes even more important to figure out what he wants, in order to deprive him of it.

And so on for another four pages. Imagine fifty-ish of these analyses strung together by the loosest of connective tissue, and that’s Sadly, Porn.

III.

An ancient Zen koan:

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened.

This actually helped me understand Zen. So: what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?

Does he claim that the books/movies/pornos he analyzes really mean what they say he means? That the author intended those meanings? That the authors’ unconscious minds did? That those meanings were a fortuitous and coincidental reaction between the authors’ unconscious minds and ours? Or is he using them the same way postrationalists use tarot cards - as a semirandom canvas that gives an excuse to speculate about ideas that realistically come entirely from your own mind? It has to be the latter, right? He doesn’t really think The Giving Tree means all that stuff? And yet when bringing up the anagram with I Get Even, Right?, he calls it “a solid example of the return of the repressed assuming it wasn’t on purpose”.

Although I’m impressed by Teach’s erudition, I’m - let’s call it “not as impressed as he is with himself”. It’s impressive how many facts he knows, but he warps them into Jenga towers of speculation that can’t possibly be true, almost compulsively, without bothering to justify himself. There’s an analysis of fishing-related words in the Gospels where he mentions he ran it by a bunch of Greek scholars and they all said it was nonsense. He seems to accept they’re right and his analysis is wrong, but - doesn’t care? Makes us read it anyway? Maybe it’s the semirandom canvas thing after all?

Something I learned when writing this review: Lacan admitted to being deliberately obscurantist. He said Freud was easy to understand, so everyone read the text without deep thought, then misinterpreted it. Lacan figured if he was hard to understand, people would think about it, let the ideas float around a while before forming an opinion on them, and maybe get them right.

Part of me feels like saying I’ve read this study and it doesn’t replicate. But it’s a fascinating idea. If you have some concept it’s easy for people to get wrong, might you transmit with higher fidelity if you’re hard to understand? For example, suppose that the idea has many interlocking pieces, and each piece gives a clue about the nature of every other piece. If your writing is easy to understand, the reader immediately gets (some possibly slightly-flawed version of) the first piece, then uses that to produce a (even more flawed) version of the second piece, and so on. But if your writing is hard to understand, maybe you present the first piece, the reader doesn’t get it, you present the second piece, they still don’t get it, and then once you’re done your reader is able to compare all the pieces to each other, and the only shape in which they really all interlock is the true theory.

Memetics is the study of ideas optimized to spread. It’s a useful lens on religions, image macros, and catchy songs. Antimemetics is its less well-known (ha!) cousin, the study of ideas optimized not to spread. “But I can’t think of any ideas like that!” Exactly. A low-grade antimeme is merely boring. A medium-grade antimeme is invisible in plain sight. A high-grade antimeme is worst of all; you can attend an entire college course about one, come out the end thinking “man, that was a good course”, get an A+, and still not get it at all.

(The Bible describes very clearly what angels look like. Everyone agrees the Bible is the authority on angels, maybe the only primary source for them at all. All Western culture for 1500 years has been based around the Bible. There are hundreds of millions of people who take the Bible completely literally and read it every day. The Bible says - Revelations 22:18 - that if anyone changes the Bible in any way even by a single word they will be punished with eternal torture. And yet nobody’s mental image of an angel, nor any popular artistic depiction of an angel, has anything in common with the Biblical description. This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.)

A lot of Sadly, Porn feels like a guy trying to cram an antimeme into your head. Psychoanalysis is about defense mechanisms; you actually like Shel Silverstein books because they speak to your secret desire to kill your father and marry your mother (or whatever), but you’re horrified by that desire and want to repress it. The Shel Silverstein book gives you some sort of protective cover, hides it under ten layers of symbolism and misdirection. You can say something like “the job of a literary critic is to reveal the secret desire the work is speaking to”, but if your brain wants it hidden so bad that it’s willing to use ten layers of misdirection, probably saying “hey, the hidden desire is that you want to kill your father and marry your mother, okay?” isn’t going to work.

(just to be clear, Teach isn’t arguing that kill-your-father-marry-your-mother is a real secret desire; I think he even claims that this is one a misinterpretation/misdirection that society invented in order to defend against the real meaning of Freud)

The naive defense mechanism is to deny it and get angry, but most people are too smart for that now. The sophisticated defense mechanism is to intellectualize it so hard that you can write a bunch of books on the semantics and semiotics of it without ever engaging with it on an emotional level. Most people do something in between: they get the idea partly right but deliberately misunderstand some crucial piece of it such that it loses 100% of relevance and in fact it becomes a defense against the real idea.

Michael Story ⚓ @MWStory

Absolutely infuriating to learn an important lesson, try to explain it and it just comes out sounding like a platitude that your past self would have dismissed as obvious or inapplicable

March 3rd 2021

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Teach seems to think something like this can also happen en masse, eg how wokeness originated as a call to destroy the system and ended up as a Coke marketing gimmick.

In one kind of surreal passage, Teach discusses the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. Dreams contain content that the mind wants to repress, but then - why dream it? Why go to a psychoanalyst specializing in dream interpretation? When the CIA wants to keep something classified, they don’t cloak it in a riddle and email it to the KGB’s Riddle Decoding Division.

Teach thinks people do this in the hopes of tricking the psychoanalyst into giving the wrong interpretation, thus providing them with an extra misdirection layer. Something like “I can be sure I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother, because if I had those kinds of desires they’d probably come out in dreams, but the psychoanalyst says my dream is just about how I secretly fear failure, so I’m fine.” Dreamers do include the real hidden desire in the dream, but only to keep it fair, so that the analyst’s failure counts. At some point I believe Teach suggests that normal people don’t have meaningful symbolic dreams, only people who go to psychoanalysts do, and for that reason! And he reinterprets one of Freud’s dream analyses in a way that suggests Freud got it wrong - not, one assumes, because Teach is better or smarter than Freud, but because the patient was optimizing his story for deceiving Freud in particular, and succeeded.

This is the grade of antimeme we’re going up against, and Teach comes from a tradition that believes that the stronger the antimeme, the more annoying your published work has to be. So, this book.

IV.

I don’t claim to have cracked this puzzle or done anything more than scratch the surface here, but if you put a gun to my head and demand I do the Zen master thing and explain as much as I can openly, here’s what I’ve got. Keep in mind there is basically a 100% chance this is the thing where you encounter an antimeme and immediately misunderstand it and turn it into something less interesting:

Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.

Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it.

So instead, you spend all your time playing incredibly annoying mind-games with yourself whose goal is to briefly trick yourself into believing you are high status. Everyone else, so far as you even recognize their existence at all, is useful only as a pawn in this game. For example, you can trick a psychoanalyst into giving you a dream interpretation denying your repressed baggage, and then feel good about yourself because you don’t have any repressed baggage (or at least you’ve convinced a representative of Abstract Society of that, which is the same thing). Or, you can trick a hot girl/guy into sleeping with you, thus proving you’re the kind of high-status person who gets (deserves?) hot girls/guys.

The most popular move in this game is envy. Envy is different from jealousy: jealousy is when you wish you too had something nice, envy is when you wish the other person would lose their nice thing. If your friend marries a beautiful woman, you don’t think “I wish I too were married to a beautiful woman”, because that would be a normal healthy desire, and you don’t have those. You think “I wish my friend’s wife left him, then we would be even again and my status relative to his would go up.” If you think you feel jealousy (you want a beautiful wife too) probably this is just a defense against the real feeling (envy).

Another move in this game is “ledger”. You balance every good thing you’ve done for someone else, and if it’s more than they’ve done for you, you hate and resent them as a good-thing-moocher. If it’s less than they’ve done for you, you hate and resent them anyway for their dastardly plot of putting you in a situation where you owe them one. This is not paranoid at all, because you yourself are constantly plotting ways to do good things for people in order to put them in a situation where they owe you one. It’s not like you’re ever going to call in the favor - that would be an action, and require a desire - you’re just going to secretly know that you won this mind game against them and there’s nothing they can do about it.

You hate and fear action, because it seems like the kind of thing that could go wrong and lower your status. But you would prefer (“desire” seems like a strong word for something this unnatural) to have certain things happen, for example for your friend’s wife to leave him, or for your ledger to be fairer. You solve this contradiction by fantasizing about some “omnipotent entity” somehow forcing you to sow dissent in your friend’s marriage. Only then can you act without the stigma of actually acting.

Since everybody wants everybody else to be worse off, refuses to act openly on this, but dreams of having someone make them act, there’s widespread support for any limitation on human freedom, simply because it’s a limitation on human freedom. We are ruled by a bunch of psychopathic vampire elites, but it’s hard to be really angry at them. Society found some psychopathic elites sitting in vampire castles and basically begged them, “PLEASE take our freedom and make us worse off!” The psychopaths answered “I dunno, seems like a lot of work and we’re already pretty rich”, and Society was like “No PLEASE we are begging you!” and the psychopaths shrugged and said okay, you can have a little oppression, as a treat.

Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them.

(Technology is also an acceptable master in some cases. Teach claims that the reason dating sites are catching on isn’t because “it’s so hard to find matches in meatspace.” It’s because if you met a match in the real world, you would have to approach them and ask them out - an action, therefore scary and impossible - whereas on dating sites it’s the algorithm that matches you, and you just play your assigned role of sending the message.)

The book uses porn as a metaphor for this process. It attacks the popular claim that porn decreases interest in real sex; Teach thinks porn is the defense against noticing you don’t have an interest in real sex. You don’t actually want things, you can’t actually fantasize (because fantasy is a step between desire and action, neither of which you’re capable of), so you download mass-produced fantasies from our corporate overlords in order to, essentially, fantasize about fantasizing. “Human beings,” he says “have abdicated moral, social, and political power to the technologies, much as you’ve done with your sexuality.”

V.

Let’s pretend that what I wrote above has at least some passing resemblance to the real antimeme that Teach wanted to convey. Do we have any reason to believe it?

I read Sadly, Porn around the same time I was writing Motivated Reasoning As Mis-Applied Reinforcement Learning, and the particular way I probably mangled the antimeme owes a lot to that thought process. It kind of fits, doesn’t it? Instead of acting, people play head games with themselves trying to figure out the best way to convince themselves they’re high status - ie replacing behavioral reward with purely epistemic/perceptual/mental reward.

And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test. One group got an easy question, the other an impossible question (they had to guess anyway). Then the psychologists told both groups that they’d gotten the question right (the easy group was presumably unsurprised, the impossible group presumably thought they’d gotten really lucky). Then they asked both groups to try again, but offered them the chance to try a performance inhibiting drug they were testing. The easy group accepted at some rate; the impossible group at a much higher rate. The psychologists theorized that the impossible group wanted to preserve their “good opinion” of themselves as people who correctly solved problems (even though on some level they realized they didn’t know how to do the problem and had just guessed) - they figured that if they took the drug, they could attribute their inevitably-worse performance the second time to the drug, rather than their own inadequacy. There are lots of experiments like this.

Also, here’s a kind of patient every doctor has seen: the hypochondriac who goes to the doctor to be reassured she isn’t ill. That’s it. She’ll describe her mouth feeling weird or something, you’ll say something like “By the way, just so we’re on the same page here, you’ve come in here with mouth-weirdness twenty-six times already this year, it’s always been nothing, it’s never gone anywhere, and now you have another case of mouth-weirdness exactly like the others, and you want me to tell you if it’s serious?” And she’ll say “Just say the words, Doctor”. And you’ll say “Don’t worry about it, it’s probably nothing.” And then she’ll be happy and go home and live a normal life for two weeks or so until she gets anxious about the same thing and comes in again. Again, this seems to suggest a really weird relationship with knowledge and reassurance.

Also, compliments. We all know the “fishing for compliments” phenomenon. And we all know the “I fished for compliments and someone complimented me but it doesn’t count because I know I was just fishing for it” phenomenon. And its close cousin, “someone complimented me, but it was for the thing I already know I’m good at, so it doesn’t count”. And their weird uncle, “someone complimented me out of the blue, and it was a really good compliment, and it was terrible, because maybe I secretly fished for it in some way I can’t entirely figure out, and also now I feel like I owe them one, and I never asked for this, and I’m so angry!” This seems a lot like “using other people as pawns in a mind game to feel high status”, and at least a little like the ledger where you resent someone forever if they do something nice for you.

(half of you are saying “Nobody really thinks like that, right?” and the other half are freaking out: “How did he know what I think?”)

Also: one strategy I notice the sort of high-charisma manipulator people who read Lacan doing: they’re misanthropic, yes, but mostly in some vague sense, to people offscreen, such that they have a reputation for misanthropy and harsh judgment. Then when they talk to you they’re very nice and complimentary, and you think “Oh man, this person who hates and judges everybody likes me, maybe I’m special.” And this is strong positive reinforcement, and talking to the person and getting those hits of praise becomes mildly addictive, and you want to talk to them more often and continue earning that praise, and then later you describe them to a friend as “charismatic”.

Since this is theoretically a porn book, we should get back to things at least vaguely related to sex and romance: why is it so hard to ask someone else out? I spent about ten years miserable and romantically frustrated and wishing that I had a partner every single day. The total number of people I asked out during that time was one or two, I can’t remember. Even then, it was some kind of incredibly ambiguous form of asking out with five layers of plausible deniability. This was stupid and I know it was stupid. Still, when Teach comes with some psychological theory that purports to explain why I am “incapable of action”, I can’t plead completely innocent.

As far as I can tell, I enjoy relationships for their own sake - contra Teach, who says you only really enjoy sex because it gives you status, or because you’re depriving someone else of the use of your sexual partner, or because it’s otherwise a winning move in your mind game (cf. Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”) But - don’t laugh - a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about being the person who wrote the music, or playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me, or something like that. It seems that my enjoyment of music - maybe not quite as primal as sex, but still pretty primal - actually is at least assisted by status fantasies. Maybe for some reason I can admit this about music but I’m still defending against realizing it about sex. Or maybe I’m 100% completely honest when I say I don’t have a status motive for enjoying sex - which explains why I’m kind of on the ace spectrum and don’t really enjoy the sex act itself.

I once asked a friend who identifies as sexually submissive how she came by her fetish. She said that she was raised to believe that sex was kind of shameful and that women who sought it out were sluts (I should mention here that Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese! - but my friend was raised by first-generation immigrants from a more conservative area and maybe she’s a legitimate exception). Anyway, she says she used to fantasize that people would enslave her and force her to have sex with them, because then she got to have sex without the stigma of being the kind of slut who asked for it. Even in her fantasy she had to maintain high status - not the social high status of being a non-slave, but the moral high status of not admitting she had the taboo desire. This is basically Teach’s “people beg to be enslaved so they don’t have to admit their desires” thing to a T.

Why do some people have sexy nurse fetishes? “Because nurses are people who comfort you when -” No, I mean why that particular nurse costume, which no nurse has worn since World War II? And I assume Japanese men have Japanese schoolgirl fetishes because they remember the puppy love of their own high school days, but why do so many American men have Japanese schoolgirl fetishes? I distinctly remember teenage me thinking breasts were weird-looking and not sexually attractive at all - I don’t want to touch people’s weird milk-producing glands - and then getting gradually “socialized” into finding breasts attractive just like most other straight men. Teach says that nobody actually finds nurses or Japanese schoolgirls or breasts or even women attractive in the deepest and most fundamental sense, they learn what other people find attractive, then want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them.

(although this seems unnecessarily complex compared to an answer of the form: “evolution didn’t bother including a full specification for attractiveness, it just included a program for social learning to figure it out from other people”)

And - why do people like porn? I’m not asking for answers of the form “it has hot sex”, I mean why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head? “My imagination isn’t as high-definition as a real computer screen.” But lots of people like story porn, like on Literotica. “But that’s more creative than they can come up with themselves”. My impression is that people can use the same story over and over - the words on the page seem to have power even when realistically they’ve memorized all the sexual beats by now. Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.

While we’re asking crazy questions eight thousand words into an almost-unreadable essay, why do people like art? I don’t mean actually nice art with pretty pictures of trees and lakes, I mean Classic Literature, by which I mean 800-page novels about English professors who have affairs and then feel guilty about it. Surely something must be happening inside people’s heads to make them read novels about cheating English professors so avidly. Maybe it speaks to some kind of secret unconscious desire (not to have an affair with an English professor, that’s the manifest content so it can’t be the latent content). Maybe I personally just don’t want to do whatever having an affair with an English professor is a defense against, which is why those novels never appealed to me.

I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but I’m trying to take seriously the advice of my suspected-cult-leader friend: if your map has a hole in it, don’t say that the people who like those novels are dumb, or they’re only pretending to like them, or they’re only signaling that they like them, or the whole topic is stupid - take the hole seriously and get intrigued when you hear a theory that fills it!

On the other hand, this sounds like a good way to end up believing lots of wrong things just because they’re the first theory you heard. Also, suspected cult leaders are probably bad people to get advice on epistemics from.

There are aspects of my experience that sort of fit with what Teach is selling. How do I judge this? Maybe if I really understood the antimeme instead of muddled-understanding it, my experience would match it perfectly. Or maybe we should expect all fake psychoanalytic theories to vaguely remind you of true things, for the same reason that all Nostradamus prophecies vaguely sound like true things and all cold readings vaguely sound like true things. Or maybe Teach planted one or two real insights as honeytraps in the middle of his web of pseudo-profundities.

My current plan is to try to be more sensitive to the way my brain plays status-related mind games with itself, and to the tension between that and actual real action in the world, which I expect to be fruitful. Everything else I think I’m just going to wait and see.

VI.

That’s the book’s psychology. What about its sociology and politics?

The main message I get here is “Teach really likes talking about classical Athens”:

Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines. Your personal conscience, however improvised, followed a different line than your political ideology, however plagiarized. You may think that they are 100% congruent or at least parallel but ask anyone else, they are not. The best you can do is change the angle between them and affect the rate of their con/divergence, under your guiding principle of maximally depriving the other.

This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves. Personal morality vs. social standards:L public behavior vs. private thoughts - for at least 50 years it would have been inconceivable to an Athenian that those were different things. I don’t mean they thought whatever the state wanted them to think, that’s as meaningless as saying people think what their brains want them to think. And I do not mean there weren’t bad people; I mean there was no recourse to the psychological position of “I’m not a bad person, I just did a bad thing”. When we say the Athenian democracy required full participation, it should be taken literally. The citizens didn’t just make up their own laws or fight their own wars, they thought the same thought: the state was the highest - not power, not might - but good. The highest good. Think about this. Think about whether you can think about this. Think about whether you have no other way to think about this except to think “O’Brien” - assuming you could even think “O’Brien” and not default to “Hitler”. Yet early Athens was not a surveillance state, it did not need to know - thought admittedly every government will patronizingly embrace its sycophants - it left the accumulation of knowledge and power to the citizens so they could act, as it. This is why that period of history is so unique and so unrepeatable. For the first time and the only time and never since time, knowledge was used for action; the purpose of knowledge was to act; the purpose of earthly knowledge was to be able to act like gods without restraint. Not only for a handful of “great men”, they all thought this, it was the cultural standard. And then the war came, and the plague came, and the plague came again, and the sophists came, and the idea of man’s greatness through obligation became more fantastical than 12 hairless gods on a cold mountaintop wrapped in bedsheets, or on them. What good are gods in heaven if they won’t send my neighbor to hell? For all but a few, math became arithmetic and philosophy became accounting, and getting some power was far less satisfying than depriving the other of theirs. And here we are.

His relationship with Athens is kind of love-hate. On the one hand, their direct democracy was a rare case in which people managed to resist the urge to enslave themselves. On the other, they misused the direct democracy pretty badly, and their resistance waned further and further until finally:

They worshiped [conquering Spartan general Lysander] as a god…not because he spared them but because he was powerful, took away their power and also flattered them, let them believe they had fooled him into thinking they were worth sparing - all of those words are correct, that’s what they wanted from their omnipotent god. He let the people who wanted no part of responsibility for their state take credit for its past while having little they could do but obey. He took their hubris and massaged it into pride, he let them take pride in their hubris and - and they started masturbating ferociously. “Take from us, O Lysander, our beautiful Athens and rape her, rape her before us, slay her with your phallus, remind us of our desire, and failure to satisfy her.”

(did I mention the recurring cuckold porn theme yet?)

As for you, you’re probably even more contemptible than these Athenians. Teach thinks the modern psyche is downstream of decisions by advertising agencies. At some point their usual trick of selling products through implied peer pressure and hot women stopped paying as many dividends. The companies did some kind of judo move where they told us “well, darn, you’re just too individual and unique a person to fall for a mass advertising campaign - and incidentally the surest way to make everyone understand that is to drink Coca-Cola, The Drink For Individual Unique People”. And everyone lapped it up. This isn’t even subtle, the highest market value company in the world uses the motto “Think Different”. Or Burger King: “Have It Your Way”. Literal actual Coke printed the 150 most popular names onto their bottles in the hopes you would see your name and think you had a special relationship with them.

But it’s more than this. It’s an obsession with what kind of person you are. Brand loyalty becomes a way to signal that you’re the kind of kid who buys their clothes at Hot Topic/Abercrombie & Fitch, not at Abercrombie & Fitch / Hot Topic. It’s not that one of these stores is more prestigious (= signals class) better than the other. It’s that they signal what makes you, you. If you shopped just the right combination of brands, you would really capture your uniqueness, and everyone would like you for being you, ie not for boring regressive contigent things like your job or your family (ie your accomplishments and social roles). Result: nobody respects anyone for their accomplishments, nobody wants to fulfill their social roles or do their duties, and everyone wants to be unique and individual = not buy store-brand.

(I can’t remember if it was Teach or an imitator who applied this analysis to Harry Potter. Harry isn’t the smartest or hardest-working person in the school - that’s Hermione. He’s not the most ambitious/decisive/strategic/active person - that’s Lord Voldemort, which automatically codes him as a villain. So why is Harry the main character and the hero? Because a prophecy placed the burden of specialness on him, without him asking; it was forced upon him by an omnipotent entity, no action required. Harry Potter is wish-fulfillment; the modern person wants to be special not because they accomplished great stuff but because special-ness is just who they are. Brands tell them that this is true, and in exchange they buy the brands. [Brand]: Because You Deserve It.)

Despite blaming ads and companies, Sadly, Porn doesn’t hit any of the beats you’d expect in an anti-corporate book. I think Teach worries his readers would use an anti-corporate message as a defense: “Yeah, I never accomplish anything, but that’s the fault of those evil corporations who caused me to have the wrong psychic structure. This famous psychiatrist says so! Wanna go to a protest with me instead of trying personal growth? All the experts agree that we’re excused from changing our defective characters in any way until capitalism is overthrown!”

This is where the anti-woke message comes in; he thinks they’re doing approximately this. For such an esoteric book, some of these sections feel pretty basic - “SJWs are just virtue-signaling” would be a fair description of about five pages (incidentally the only five pages I feel like I really understood). I think “virtue signaling” may be a weird case where rationalist/economic thinking briefly touched up against psychoanalytic thinking, such that Teach thinks he’s doing something esoteric here but I'd already gotten the same insight from another direction. The only necessary clarification is that signalers aren’t necessarily signaling to other people; self-signaling (or signaling to the imaginary “audience”) is enough.

(people criticized the rationalists for a long time for using “status” as a generic term without specifying “status among who” or “status about what”, but I get the impression that this is the exact right way to use status if you want to understand Edward Teach’s school of psychoanalysis)

Socialists come in for the same kind of criticism as wokes (Teach hints that Marx actually had some good ideas, but they were mostly antimemes, so modern socialists have no idea what they were - he has nothing but contempt for the latter). His system - psychoanalytic factors → envy → everyone hates everyone else → everyone demands to be ruled - has a natural foil in the sort of socialists who talk about “income inequality” a lot.

In a very charitable reading, perhaps socialists are sad that Elon Musk has $300 billion because they’re imagining how many bowls of soup that could provide for the hungry, or because he’s guilty of some specific labor law violation and it’s too bad that this pays off. Needless to say, this is not how Teach thinks of it; he suspects socialists (and lots of other people besides) would gladly see Elon Musk reduced to penury if it never helped a single soul, or even if it actively made the poor poorer. If Musk is allowed to be happy and high-status because of his accomplishments, it suggests accomplishments are good, which undermines the system where I’m the best and highest-status person because I’m special, buy all the right brands, mouth all the right slogans, and win various mind games against myself. Therefore, Musk must suffer. If we can guillotine him, we should do that - otherwise, we’ll settle for hating him really hard - making sure everyone in our coalition agrees he’s low status and deserves guillotining.

Claim: one reason the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War because is that they voted to ostracize any general who won too often. But the Athenians were still better than you. Athens hated successful people, and they took it out on them in particular instances, but at least they managed to do this against a general backdrop of democracy. Our society hates everyone so much that it creates various oppressive institutions and norms just to piss them off.

VII.

Why did Teach write this book?

He shows contempt for people who go to psychoanalysis, saying that they’re using it as a defense against change (instead of doing the hard thing directly, you tell yourself there’s some “unconscious block” that prevents you from doing the hard thing, and you need ten years of therapy and deep self-knowledge before you can even get started).

Actually, he shows contempt for people who seek self-knowledge, full stop. Self-knowledge is of the same genus as the Harry Potter uniqueness fetish: if only I had the right brands / the right dream interpretations / the right personality test results, I could understand my deepest self and then succeed effortlessly.

(there’s also some deeper point here about power being the opposite of knowledge which I don’t understand here; you can be “omniscient” or “omnipotent” but not both. I think this might have something to do with how all actions are part of your mind game to trick yourself into thinking you’re high status, the more easily-tricked you are the more actions you can take, and so knowing more limits your space of possible actions. But I’m even more confused by this than the rest of the book, so low confidence here.)

But his greatest contempt is reserved for you, the reader of his book. Remember that quote at the beginning?

“Why so many footnotes???” Which is the same question as, “why are your sentences so long, why so many commas, what the hell is with you and semicolons?” It’s all on purpose, to get rid of readers. You’re stumped by the physical layout? This book is not for you, your brain is already set in concrete, it can never change, only crumble as it ages. Which is fine if your plan was to be a foundation for the next generation, but it isn’t; you’re the rotting walls that they have to knock down while you play the flute and pretend to give freedom to everyone else.

Eventually I had to just mentally substitute “you” with “a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person.” Which I’m sure he’d call a defense mechanism.

So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves?

I don’t really have an answer for this. But it’s not a contradiction to think “Most psychoanalysis makes most people worse off” and “Some psychoanalysis can occasionally make some people better off”. Maybe if you’ve got a sufficiently important antimeme, you’ve got to say it, even when you’re 99% sure your listener will judo it into yet another defense mechanism. Maybe the 1% of people who had a guard carelessly leave a gate open in their defense mechanisms that day will listen and be genuinely better off.

The author uses the pseudonym “Edward Teach”, which was the real name of the pirate Blackbeard. But also, “ed” means education (eg “sex ed”), so “Edward” means “in the direction of education”, so “Edward Teach” is maybe the most didactic name possible. Would the sort of person who expected Shel Silverstein to have thought through possible anagrams of the title of The Giving Tree really not have considered this? Teach talks a big game about being against knowledge, but I think on some level he believes that moral instruction can produce positive change.

Or maybe it’s something weirder than that:

A dreamer in analysis assumes the analyst knows what the dream will mean. Of course, the analyst might not know. But by allowing - encouraging - the belief that he, the analyst, is the person who absolutely would know but doesn’t tell it, the dreamer can act on it. The dreamer might never know what it meant, but something changes. You may find yourself tonight having a dream and thinking, I wonder what the author of this odd book on pornography would think of my dream? He would know what it means. And by knowing that I know what it means, you could begin to suspect some of what it means because its meaning is knowable - and you will act. And the reason you think I would know what it meant is that you dreamt it with me in mind. But if I told you what it meant, even on the outside chance I was dead on, you would hear it whatever perverted way you needed to but attribute that meaning to me, you would use my authority to defend against the true interpretation. You would be much more satisfied, consider me a genius, and everyone else would be miserable. The analysis failed, but the therapy was a big success. That’ll be $500, please.

Anyway, that’s what Sadly, Porn is about. That’ll be $500, please.

[other reviews, which I mostly avoided reading until done with mine, to prevent information cascades: Resident Contrarian, Zero HP Lovecraft]