It used to be a cliché that bad boys were faustian bargains and ultimately girls would be hurt by them. In the last few decades, they did a Taylor Swift and rewrote the ending so that Edward Cullen and Christian Grey, bad boys with so many red flags they may as well have been Soviet, were ultimately good bad boys. What became “toxic” was then anyone they wanted to be toxic. It became a matter of “choice” and “rights” and therefore feminist. Edward Cullen is feminist, according to this, because he is what women want. With the anti-rape rhtetoric turned up to eleven and the emphasis on consent being the basis for ethics (which, of course, is true but is not the sum of ethics that its emphasis implies) this bled into ontology and got postmodernist. I’ll touch on this in an upcoming blog which I have scheduled for later this month, but the narrative changes from a shotgun daddy fending off bad boys because they’re bad to a shotgun daddy fending off good boys because their daughter thinks they’re lame.
Even platonically and that because their daughter’s happiness is the most important thing. At which point, the shotgun daddy is not defending virtue but vice, namely malignant narcissism. A shotgun daddy fending off a platonic suitor who is a nerdy good boy because his lameness is social suicide to his daughter in her clique is enabling her worst personality traits. Like a postmodernist defending a shaman curing cancer with herbs as legitimate; reality is abandoned for an ontological relativism where happiness, and here that means short-term pleasure, determines reality. What is good for you is what gets you high. This is increasingly true among Gen Z. Infamous for parents getting angry at the teachers rather than their own kids for their kids’ failures. They want a world where the world serves their children and by that they mean their children’s shallow and short-term wants and material status.
(In fact, as alluded to in “Capitalism and Suicide”, happiness is almost entirely defined in terms of wealth, status, and dopamine)
That’s, kind of, happened to me. A few times. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t do drugs, my masculinity is soft and not hard, and by every metric of lifestyle choice and personality trait I am statistically safer than almost any other demographic but girls have been protected from me, more or less, because I am lame. I make them unhappy and for people who cherish more than anything their happiness, I am evil. It doesn’t matter if I have honor, decency, moral character, or anything else. I cause unhappiness because I am a loser. Christian Grey may raise all the red flags but if the girl likes him, he is good for her. To buttress that, they rewrote the cautionary folklore of our culture to comport with what they wanted to be true. Demons are good because they give you what you want while angels are bad because they expect sacrifice and repentance.
In the upcoming article, I dive into the idea that with the abolition of virtue ethics and utilitarianism for purely liberal consent that the popular are more ethical than the unpopular because people are comfortable around the popular. At the point at which being uncomfortable interferes with absolute Lockean rights to not be harmed with discomfort. Attractiveness, charisma, charm, and the like determine whether someone is a good person or not. Ultimately, giving happy endings to toxic relationships in the folklore of our culture creates a feeble and self-serving false epistime where the wise choices are always the one that one desires, where the piper shall lead one to paradise and the proverbial toad is rightfully eschewed because they are ugly. Where what is right is always easy because that is what daddy’s little princess wants and daddy only wants her to be happy.
The Autistic Resistance 