They Made You Addicted and Then Used Your Addictions To Control You.
The Cult of Media Part 1 – The unquenchable longing of perpetual adolescence
Let's unpack the comment –"Male sexuality is the attraction to teenagers." It was a reply to a post by Benebell Wen on the Tao Te Ching and feminism.
CW: I will be examining the origins of men’s attraction to underage girls in order to untangle them/us from the ways in which their sexuality has been manipulated by private corporations to serve profit interests. This will be one of my more intense posts, so please check with your deeper intuition to see if you have space to process this.
Just, wow. If I'm getting it right, this man is saying that he believes that his authentic, adult male sexuality is and will always be aimed at teenagers. This means he is inescapably condemned to a life of longing for someone he cannot have.
This is the pain of a poisoned existence.
I didn’t realize people swallowed the lie *quite* this deeply, but of course, many do. No wonder the commenter is pissed. I am grieving to realize that the lies of the anemic fairy tales told by Disney and Hollywood have been repeated so many times that some have swallowed them whole. It's not ok. No wonder we have violent Incels.
Let’s take this one more notch to excavate the absurd extreme – some men do act on these urges. Perhaps the distance between the stereotypical Incel and an Alpha Chad who purchases the services of a child prostitution ring is merely that the latter is rich. Perhaps by accident of birth, the Alpha Chad became a CEO, trader, investment banker, military contractor, commercial real estate broker, the president of the United States, or any of the other horrifically competitive and unpleasant male-dominated jobs that propel you into the 1%.
Is it surprising so many men choose to be wage slaves in the hope that they too will be rich one day? It’s the only way to indulge their addictions.
It sets me back on my heels to consider that a technically legal sexual relationship with an 18-year-old wouldn’t be enough to satisfy narcissistic men’s addiction to the bodies of girls, but these addictions are not meant to make sense to a stable, mature, sovereign person. These addictions are only meant to stifle for a few hours at maximum the pain of a poisoned existence.
As many times as you may satisfy your addictions, your addictions never satisfy you. If you are in this spot, you can stop. You have the power to choose differently.
What the Incels don’t know is that the Alpha Chads who purchase non-consensual sex are suffering mightily, regardless of their outward appearance. Truly, there’s no reason to be jealous of them. The more they indulge this unholy desire to consume young bodies, the more it swallows them whole. There’s not enough Oxycontin in the world to numb the pain of what they’ve done.
Yes, narcissism can be healed. Obsession over sex can be healed. I know many doubt this, but I’ve seen it happen.
Where did the lies start? In the stories we tell ourselves
The Monomyth aka Hero's Journey is the story framework that everything from Star Wars to Lion King to Men in Black used. Sadly, it leaves out the critical first step of preparation for the epic journey – the male hero must integrate the feminine qualities that his culture has stripped him of, or if it’s a female heroine she must integrate her masculine qualities which were denied of her. Jung called this stage of development the “anima integration” back in 1916, so it’s by no means a new concept.
Have no idea what I’m talking about? I’m not shocked. Anima and animus have been omitted from our mainstream narratives by those who are not interested in telling stories that would undermine their business model. I’ll be unpacking this more over the next few months, so subscribe if you’ve not already.
Until we tell real hero, heroine, and non-binary stories that give you critical teachings as did the epic tales of old, we will continue to have a society of emotional, sexual, and economic adolescents. Middle-aged men may have bank accounts, cars, and houses, but they will be in perpetual longing for that which capitalism promises but never delivers.
Men are just as much affected by the American obsession with youth as women, it just looks different. Who is to say which is more painful?
Addiction is a profitable business model
I can’t fail to mention that it's a far better business model for Disney and Hollywood to sell addictions to fantasy romances than to tell the truth. This is, however, about to kill us all. According to Scientific American, we have exceeded six of the nine planetary boundaries that indicate massive weather changes that, if the models are correct, will lead to incalculable damages and loss of life.
Is it finally time for us to take our heads out of the sand and look at the root causes?
When did the lies start? In infancy
Disney and Hollywood completely forgot that the role of storyteller carries a responsibility to your culture, and doesn’t exist just to make a fat paycheck from your partnership with Coke. *The construction of Disneyland was financed by Coca-Cola in 1955. Sugar-laced fairy tales and blockbuster movies sold expensive and profitable sugar water. Are we still not making the connection? Are we still buying both poisons for our kids and ourselves as some kind of treat?
I wish I could tell the commenter that once he has stopped idolizing girls he will be attracted to powerful women. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the teenage girls he’s fantasizing about don't want the kind of sex that he wants anyway. Women don’t peak in their sexual maturity until they are my age – peri-menopausal forties.
Sidenote: The so-called “temple prostitutes” were more accurately honored by their real title “temple priestesses” in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and many more cultures. They initiated young men into sex and taught them the necessary skills, but that’s another post for another day. Those women were – you guessed it – in their late thirties to forties when they began service. Nothing major in government happened without consulting these women.
The commenter says “Being a man is illegal.”
No, being a man is not illegal, nor is he cursed as he believes himself to be. He’s giving his power away and does not know it. He’s rather on the extreme end of it, but nearly all of us are giving our power away to our addictions. This is the state I find most people to be in, BTW, it just expresses differently depending on the gender you were born.
He is stuck in some twisted fantasy that he (hopefully) is never going to be rich and/or stupid enough to play out in real life. I want to reassure him of this:
Powerful men are attracted to powerful women, full stop.
One way you can tell a man is truly powerful is that he’s attracted to powerful women *providing of course that he’s heterosexual. When I see men fantasizing about girls and 20-somethings when they are grown-ass adults, I can guarantee they still have a lot of work to do.
The commenter does not know that the urges he has to consume the bodies of girls are not even his, they are counterfeit. They were installed by marketing, movies, and porn. He’s likely never met his real sexuality, or he would never have said this. He’s not disordered or in any way beyond repair, but he is utterly colonized by an addiction to young bodies.
Men are not inherently attracted to children. They’re fantasizing about girls because they don’t feel threatened by girls. Grown heterosexual men are attracted to grown women, but they may still be too terrified of women to have come to this realization. They won’t know their “type” in women until they do some serious inner work.
These boys and men crave validation and reassurance. The girls they fantasize about are in no position to give them either. They need mentors, teachers, and examples to look to for hope.
Somehow they think if they rub their body against a young one as you would do with a genie lamp it will grant some kind of relief from the fear of death and assure them they “still got it.” It will not.
The commenter’s last sentence brings this all the way home. “You can get put in prison for 250 years for dating a 17-year-old girl and see what real oppression is like.”
It’s no fun feeling powerless, longing for what you can never have, and being abused by the very culture that disabled you in this way.
They made you addicted and then used your addictions to control you.
I also want to tell the commenter that he is already powerful, he’s just forgotten. He has to learn some new skills to put that power on the ground. He has to learn what his power is for and how to use it wisely. It will be scary, but he’s up for the journey. We all are.
I would bet you all the money in my pocket that he’s never been mentored by a man who sources his power from being balanced in his masculine and feminine qualities. I would bet you he thinks that being a man is about only masculine qualities since that’s all Disney and Hollywood ever show us.
For the love of all that is holy, let’s get the teenage boys who are still teenagers and the teenagers with gray hair and mortgages the tools they need to step into their power in a lovely, balanced way. You’re gonna enjoy it more than you can imagine.
And yes, that’s exactly what I’m up to. Please share this newsletter with anyone ready to take up this challenge. We will be offering a deep dive course over on Maven in 2024. Exact start date is still TBD.
For the younguns who can’t afford it, I’m happy to pass along gift subscriptions to any who are struggling to unpack their gender conditioning during this confusing moment in history.
For more in the cult series: