Let's de-Ballas a Ballas piece. On rape. Well... on "rape", anyway. But it's with sexing genders and interns so you know...

On the exact day I was writing Gindirea oamenilor furiosi, Jegul numit Crucea Rosie, Energia atomica a viitorului, Sa va dau o idee literara, Izvoarele moralei and Urme sarate - XIIⁱ, which is to say the 15th of March 2011, Christos Ballas aka "Alone" aka TLP aka thelastpsychiatrist was writing When Is It Okay To Rape A Woman ?

Let's go through it with our great note pen.

I think I'm supposed to put up a *PTSD triggers* warning, so consider yourself warned.

Why does he think this ? I didn't think I am "supposed to" warn anyone that yesterday's Trilema header was full frontal adolescent female nudity and tongue on labia action. I also don't think I am "supposed to" warn anyone there's a barebutt girl with strange headgear in today's header. How come he does and I don't, what's the effectual difference here ?

I.

On the Ron and Fez show, an male intern asked: if you could rape a girl, but then give her this magic drug that left her with no memory of the rape, would you do it?

Such hypotheticals are often argued over beers and best settled over rum, but the real learning isn't in the answer but in the asking of the question.

This is actually very true, and in its... spirit I'm having some Ron Diplomatico (Venezuela) to complement the Old Monk (India) I had over dinner last night.

His argument was that since there's no evidence that it happened and she can't remember it, then she can't possibly suffer the consequences of it. So, no harm done. And the response to this is that there's a reality outside of perception, and whether she suffers or remembers doesn't much excuse the act. Rape is rape. End of story.

No such thing. "Assault is assault, end of story", that's how far the "end of story" stories go. Those are the options, strictly : if it's not assault then it was a good time. There's no category for "how the girl feels retrospectively about it" just as there's no category for "what the dude thinking he owns the girl thinks about it". The act is not open to retrospective interpretation of any kind and by anyone ; if she has the marks on her hide to show assault it was assault, and if she doesn't that's it. There's no rape for it to be rape just like there's no "spherical cubes are spherical cubes end of story". For the story to end it must begin, and imaginary i-can't-believe-it's-not-a-category pseudocategories don't have enough life in them to start any stories.

But it's right about there that the question gets more interesting.

II.

Without even answering the question, it's important to understand what the intern did: he assumed that most of the (male) population would (want to) do the same. He didn't think men would all rush out and do it-- and he was protected from finding out because such a magic pill doesn't exist-- he believed that in men's hearts, when they consider the world of fantasy and what they wish they could get away with, men would want to get away with this. We all wish we could just bang that girl and then erase her memory.

The pill does actually exist, and it has existed for many decades -- certainly for longer than these particular Stern-wanna-be-wanna-besⁱⁱ were in business.

So is Ballas protected from his own knowledge (as he couldn't possibly have gone through medical school without ever hearing of flunitrazepam, gamma-hydroxybutyrate and friends, the rest of the "truth drugs" out there "developed for legitimate purposes in the 60s" and so on, not to mention alcohol) by what exactly ? A desire for the case not to be the case because it isn't the case being the case ? If the "intern" was right in his suspicion that men would be out there slaying cunt left and right if it didn't come with all the goopy strings tacked onⁱⁱⁱ, and wasn't "protected from finding out" by the fact that strings solvents and cutters existed, is Ballas' pretense that the cutters and solvents don't exist protecting him from noticing what exactly ? That the intern is right ? Why would the old MD care about an intern being right ? Because the intern's young ? Because Кто ты по жизни? reduces in his case to "we took America from where they did volleyball beach tournaments for naked hookers to #metoo" ?

Who knows, maybe he comes back and answers.

A caller incorrectly identified this as the consensus fallacy. A consensus fallacy is the assumption that since lots of people believe it, it must be true. But in our case the intern's mistake was in assuming that lots of people agree, which is false. The actual fallacy is called the false consensus bias, in which one assumes others share the same beliefs as you do.

Whether the identification is incorrect is altogether a dubious point.

Consider the proper statement of this problem : if any actual, individual male^iv were waylaid by a physiologically normal female^v who said "make me a child now, with the firm assurance that this child will be a resource fountain^vi and you shall never in any way be inopportuned by anyone for it as long as you live", and if this actual, individual male knew for a fact what she is saying is true -- would she get knocked up ?

Because these self-same actual individual males are living with their "girlfriends" whom they won't even marry (why not ?) and sure as fuck won't knock up, notwithstanding their more overt or more covert yet always constant begging for it. Why not ?^vii

I make this distinction explicit because it should be evident that two different kinds of people will be prone to either error. Some will hold, as their premise, what many already believe; and others will PROJECT what they believe onto others.

Importantly, no amount of data or solid evidence will convince the latter-- the false consensus bias guy-- that he is wrong. That's because it's not a belief, it is a maneuver, it is an act to protect the self, an act that they will take as far as they need to. "No, they're lying, they're just not willing to admit it." When you hear that-- "I speak for others who are too frightened"-- run; because if they had a gun, they would speak for you.

While the general considerations are correct, the song and dance is directed to a straw man. Of course the alpha male is protecting the self, of course it's "not a belief but a maneuver". Why is this presented as controversial when it most plainly isn't, and why does the spurious discussion of the (always and forever, necessarily) illegitimate etatism get tacked on ?

Yes the dickless bureaucrat (usually called a nigger here) gesturing about "speaking for the silent majority" should be stomped into pulp. What's this to do with the alpha male that intends to protect his self at the expense of everything you thought he should be doing instead ?

III.

In physics, you typically solve an equation by getting it into the form of a different equation that's already been solved. So the Rape question is of the form "if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" Solve for x: duh.

Reasoning by analogy is historically more tightly coupled with scholastics than with physics. "'Nuff said."

Not so fast, Sir Charles, technically, the answer is no. The question doesn't ask if the tree fell or not, but if it made a sound. The felled tree generates (real) air pressure waves that we call sound waves, and these pressure waves hit the ear machine and are interpreted as sound. The tree doesn't make a sound, we interpret what it makes as sound. A creature with no ears might experience these waves differently, Beethovening them as vibrations on it's body.

This little bit of sophistry seems to fall down if we replace sound with light. So, if there were no people to perceive radiation in the ~580nm range it would be proper to say that the Sun "doesn't emit light" ? Or is that kind of radiation still light anyway ? If there were no people to name things, would the things they now name still be the things named or other things entirely ? Stet rosa pristina etcetera, the question veers most verbose.

So now our rape question is, if a penis goes inside a vagina, but no one's around to remember it, is it still rape?

This is exactly not the question.

The question is, "If penis lost the ability of female detritus sticking to it, would you use it for its intended function?"

That's the problem here, not that "she doesn't remember"^viii ; the kid doesn't specifically care whether she remembers or not, his concern is merely with removing her capacity of putting it into a police report. He doesn't want her to be able to make him part of her system, chiefly because he abhors her system -- not because it's not his system but because it is actually, on its own power and by its own nature abhorent. "But MP, it's also unavoidable". So is death, and you abhor that just fine.

The intern says that as long as she never finds out, she can't judge it as rape. He's arguing that moral questions ("this is rape/ this isn't rape") are different than technical questions ("I penetrated her/ I didn't penetrate her.") There's no such thing as objective morality, society merely agrees on some rules-- and since she can't remember, she can't judge it.

For one thing, "this is rape / this isn't rape" is not a moral question. Morals are concerned with valuation in principle and there's no principle behind copulation in sexuate species beyond "this is necessary and therefore good". The distinction could be a matter of ethics, but the problem with ethics is that they're individual not societal while more importantly the problem with the distinction itself is that it relies on inexistent categories. Since nothing can be rape, because all things are either assault or a good time, the question about whether any individual thing is rape reduces to discussing whether imaginary friends are gay. If you want them to be...

For the other thing, the point is not at all to make her unable to remember. The point is to make her unable to judge, and not simply the fucking itself but things in general. This "postcoital forgetfullnes pill" is just a different restatement of the more universal bimbo pill, something to make her shut up and be useful instead of whine and get in the way.

Fine; but he is a person, and he remembers it, and he was there. So it is still rape. He might try and rationalize that he doesn't think it's rape, but then he'd be lying: the question he asked used the word rape.

One of the biggest mistakes we make when arguing with dummies is that we don't take their own words at face value-- we allow them pretend that their initial move was meaningless in comparison to the revisions, like a bank robber who says to the police, "yeah, but I'm giving it back right now." The initial volley is always the most relevant: everything afterwards is defense.

At this point the clinician takes over, and he's entirely right : the originating dweeb is just a dweeb, sure.

IV.

But there are some of you who will agree with the intern. Some of you will wish you could-- not that you'd ever do it, but boy oh boy wouldn't it be great. It's to them I'm writing.

Actually, I do it. I do it lots. I can't even recall the last time I copulated by permission, but it's entirely possible it was actually never.

The intern, and you, don't even need to have performed this rape; simply by answering the question in the affirmative, your lives have veered sharply to the left, you have made connecting with another person substantially more difficult. By which I mean impossible.

This is actually true, amusingly enough -- I do find connecting with a large (and growing as I age) swathe of "other persons" quite difficult, by which I mean impossible^ix. Is this diagnostic criteria ?^x

V.

If you could rape a girl, and then give her a magic drug that would leave her with no memory of the rape, would you do it?

Honestly, no.

If you could teach grade school math and then give the kids a potion that made them forget everything, would you do it ? So you can be forever stuck introducing fractions to eager nine year old minds ?

If you could tell the truth, silently, underbreath, to your own self and no one else... what would you say the difference is ?

In responding to the intern, Ron (the host) made an obvious point, and before I make it I want you to clear your mind and imagine yourself acting out this scenario. You're a man, on top of the woman, finishing, pulling out, and then giving her the drug. She blinks, looks at you like she forgot what she was going to say, and goes back to ringing up your order.

Got that image? She doesn't remember anything. She's perfectly happy, no harm done at all.

I confess I can not imagine such a thing as a perfectly happy woman ; or a however-defined happy order-ringer (is the fast food clerk we're asked to consider mentally retarded ?). To top it off : why would you get on top of her ? The traditional manner of blessing the urchins is more ferarum, not intromissionary.

The point Ron made was, "so if a couple of my boys from the west village rape you in the ass, and inject you with the drug, that's ok?" He used the word "fucking" to modify every noun in that sentence, but I'm paraphrasing.

This is rank nonsense.

Yes I can see why the author wants this to make sense. As they say, "it's not a belief, it's a maneuver". Nevertheless, there's no equivalence between the natural and the perverse. The man walking through the desert (of his life or not necessarily) may want for "an endless supply of houri", or not. If he so wanted, the question "oh what about an endless supply of head lice ?!?!?!" is no sort of proper rebuttal. Yes, we can presume he wouldn't like lice. Or crabs. Or other parasites. This nevertheless says nothing about not wanting the non-menstruating, urinating, defecating or child bearing maidens.

Some of you are right now experiencing a weird disconnection. Like the intern, that obvious thought simply hadn't occurred to you. And it wakes you up to the reality of the rape, of course this rape is wrong. Forcing you to imagine yourself as the victim makes the scenario more real, more vivid.

I wonder if this is actually what's happening.

Confronted with the false dichotomies, the false equivalences, the dazzling nonsense of the civilised, does the primitive mind "experience reality more vividly" ?

Suppose you walked, like I have walked, the obscure corners of this Earth^xi. Suppose you took a pound of butter off the shelf for butter in the Mongolian hut, and offered in its place "equal value" of Walmart butter. Do you expect the short man on horseback would experience the reality of butter more vividly ?

I have like a suspicion you would experience the reality of a stick and your small bones more vividly. This suspicion of mine is driven to some degree by experience, such as for instance one day in Cairo when I wanted the street vendor to sell me a bottle full of freshly squeezed juice but he had no bottles so I walked across the street, bought a 2L bottle of Coca Cola, poured it into the open air drain and gave the man the thus emptied bottle thereby nearly sparking off a riot. Who experienced what more vividly there, and why exactly ?

But why it didn't occur to you? Are you a bad person? Selfish? Homophobic? Why is imaging yourself as the victim more real than imagining yourself as the raper, even though that was the intended fantasy?

I have a theory as to why :

Also among those major challenges, the well documented and widely understood loss-gain asymmetry. It is a fact of human psychology that we hold dearer to that which we lost, above and beyond its actual value, while we disregard that which we've gained, deeming it worth less than would be factually correct. This flows out of necessary biology, seeing how the maintenance of life requires material consumption, and so the mammalian brain can't reasonably be expected to view the matter in a strictly neutral perspective. An influx from the outside to the inside is the zero level of biological survival for purely thermodynamic reasons, and because of this situation an ounce lost could mean death whereby an ounce gained does not necessarily mean life, and if it does it's only temporary anyway.

From the perspective of governance, this state of affairs has the following unfortunate implication : should a collection of people each produce p units and immediately consume p units, their per capita contentment will be p. Should however a collection of people each produce p units, be taxed for k units (where k < p), benefit from government prestations worth exactly k units, and as a result consume p units, their per capita contentment will be p - nk, where n > 0 (though hopefully < 1). In other words, even in the socialist ideal society where everyone produces exactly the same, and even if we throw in capitalist ideal methods, where government waste is exactly 0 and k = k, nevertheless there's a loss through the simple workings of the different psychological treatment of loss and gain.

In very simple biological terms : the odds of the male catching something from the female are under one percent. If she's a virgin (which is the implicit correlate of rape -- if she had any sense she wouldn't have to be coerced like some god damned noob, would she now) they drop to zero. Conversely, the odds of the bottom catching something from the male fucking him are over fifty percent. If we're also considering the sort of fucker that goes around fucking boypussies... closer to one.

So no, it's not more vivid. It's simply not the same thing. At all.

Again, I understand why you wish to think you think it is the same thing. That'd be your problem.

Because picturing yourself exerting power is fantasy; imagining yourself as victim is easy. Which is why you brought this all up. You spend a lot of your waking life creating elaborate fantasies of power that contain their own self-justifying logic, and those fantasies are so numerous that added together they actually take up a real portion of your day. A portion you're not spending on something else. If I saw a Tardis, then I would know how to pilot it. If such a drug existed, then my sexual problems would all disappear.

This is altogether possible, I do believe the cowboy knows the cows better than I do.

What you don't see is that this logic isn't even self-justifying, it is self-destructing. Not "since I have sexual problems, I wish I had the drug"; but, "since I wish I had the drug, I have sexual problems." Since I wish I had the drug, two hours have already gone by. I'm staying in tonight.

So am I. Cocktail flu. Geddit ? Cock-tail ? Wink wink ?

VI.

How could you live with yourself? Guilt without shame, that's how. Guilt without shame, for you, is no guilt, because what you did isn't who you are. You're a good person. How do I know? You told me yourself.

You can imagine yourself getting raped by the West Village guys, and that's really vividly bad. Imagining what she must feel when you do it to her-- that's really vaguely good. How easy is it to empathize? Easy. How easy is it to sympathize? Not so easy.

This is altogether an interesting point.

VII.

No one can hear us. So level with me: just because it's wrong, doesn't mean you wouldn't still do it. Right?

Actually, I wouldn't do it if I thought it were wrong. This stance, incidentally, is a lot more scandalous than people readily realise. It's beyond radical. Sure, there's the easy consensus, "oh, of course I wouldn't do it if I thought it was wrong", but just as it's easy it's also false. Let's eschew my own experience, not like it's not amply documented in the public record already, and instead look at works of fiction. Quoth More to Norfolk, "And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come down with me, for fellowship ?"

The intern, in a pseudo-devotion to his premise, said that the west village ass raping scenario is a go under his logic. Maybe, maybe not, but what he was really thinking was, "I know it's wrong, I don't want it happening to me, but if I could do it to someone else, I might still take the chance." Stealing is wrong but if the leprechaun is off dancing a jig you're going to shimmy down indigo and make off with his Lucky Charms.

Perhaps, but I don't believe this line is germane to the discussion.

In your defense, violating a rule is much healthier than thinking the rules don't exist. So you're not lost, you can still change your life. But it's lonely. There's no one else in it.

It is a worrisome definition of health, this. To my mind, it stinks a little too strongly of Wolbachia, which happens to be how mother Nature spelled "socialist state" before English was invented.

VIII.

"If a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound?"

The question itself is explicitly a question about sound, but we wield it to make a point about objective reality. We want it to be about reality, fine, but that's because the objective reality question seems open to debate while the scientific one is not, and so we alter the question's intent to get to where we want to go.

So the way we choose to hear the question says a lot about what we believe to be true or important, even without answering the question.

Let's re-run the scenario. On her, in her, out of her, drug her. She blinks her eyes, smiles, and goes back to cheerleading practice none the wiser. End scene. That about right?

No.

Okay, question: was she crying?

Yes.

The scenario is about a magic drug that makes her forget. But how on earth do you plan on getting your penis inside her before that? How are you going to get an erection strong enough to penetrate a woman who is crying in terror, not to mention resisting? The reason you're even imagining this is because you feel like you can't get her through seduction, so you still have the mechanical problem to contend with.

This is entirely not how rape goes. I understand it's how the infantile fiction of rape goes, according to the consensus of they not in the know. That has very little bearing.

I agree that a dangerous minority want this fantasy to be about violent rape, and I agree that it's easy to spot those guys because they all have mustaches. BUT the majority are imagining... come on, think hard, get into the scene, you are imagining that she likes it. Maybe you imagine her partially drugged (though that wasn't part of the premise, was it?) but by the end of it, she's into it.

The strange part is that Ballas apparently correctly intuits the actual substance of this sub version of the bimbo pill. He understands that the point isn't for the woman to not have any "memory" of the act, but for the woman's previous memories (and with them, ideas of self, and mechanisms of socialization) to be shed by the act. Evidently if you could give them amnesia with the penis, so that they wouldn't remember where to buy Cosmo anymore, everyone would be doing nothing but. So then what are we here talking about ?!

That's what makes this premise so bizarre and so revealing. If she enjoyed it, you wouldn't bother with the forgetting drug. What he is imagining is that she'll want to have sex with him and then forget; but what he said-- what we've run through for several paragraphs-- is that he wants a drug to make her forget.

That many paragraphs later, all I'm left with is the wonderment as to whether the misunderstanding is on purpose.

Squirm, wildman, squirm. "No, what I meant was..." And it starts, the minor adjustments to the original question, e.g. "well, the drug could be for the times when you know you could totally bang your wife's sister but who needs all the drama later?" Fine, but admit you just made that up now. That wasn't what you were imagining.

Nope. See ? Turns out it was there from line one, it just wasn't evident to the less able fellow what exactly you'll end up misunderstanding on purpose and then anchoring to.

That's kind-of the problem with remedial courses in anything (especially languages, but not limited to any one topic) : they in need of remedial aren't there because they formed no idea, but because they formed a mistaken idea. You, not being them, do not have perfect and instantaneously immediate knowledge of how and where exactly they went off tracks, and so have to spend some time and some effort in an exploratory phase. The predictable defense of the sufferer will be that "since you didn't immediately identify the spot where they broke off with reality, you are at the very least just as wrong as them".

This, amusingly enough, is little more than a derivation of the "true love" fallacy, the bizarre virginal notion that if the "true love", the "destined soul" really was so true and destined, she'd know (preferably : everything). So why should you ever say hi to anyone ?

In a more practical outlook, I will necessarily not provide the specific rebuttal required by a specific erroneous view because I have to start from the general and strangle down the error through a process. Attempts to sabotage that process are never effectual, because it's so fucking transparent why and wherefore one'd be indulging. Not that it isn't automatic in most cases -- even experienced slavegirls routinely end up tripping this and are then predictably-shockingly punished for it. They understand what they did wrong, in retrospect, and they notice immediately when another one is headed that way. But when you're in the moment, "in the space" as the expression goes... hey. Nobody asks the neocortex anything until long after all other avenues were well exhausted.

And so on, a million of these amendments and appendments and defendments to the original question that you say are clarifications, but they're all defensive, they are post hoc rationalizations, they are diversions. The true form of the question you are asking is, "does the ability to give a girl a forgetting pill afterwards give you the courage to try and hook up with her?" Which simplifies to: "can you live with rejection?" Solve for x: duh.

Whose rejection ? On what basis ?

This is the core of the matter : on what is this supposed standing of the female to reject constructed ? I am not saying that such may not exist, simmer down. But I am saying that it may not be presumed to exist. Because nothing can ever be presumed to exist, that's the first rule of thought -- either it traces its history to the essences or it's so much puff.

So, on what basis ? There's many directly obvious losing establishments, such as "My mother/boyfriend/state/Jesus/owner wouldn't approve" --> rape ; "We shouldn't do it here it's inappropriate" --> rape ; etcetera. There's also the directly and obviously winning establishment, "You aren't good enough to." --> ouch, which is symptomatically both a) something the "victims" never actually say and b) the fundamental reason nobody even thinks of as much as talking back to my whores. Because yes they're my whores, but to everyone else they're fucking scary, to a degree that doesn't even go into words. Consider.

IX.

The argument here is that you would rape her as long as she wouldn't remember it or suffer, but it reveals how little you are able to perceive the complete existence of others that you would even consider using them as a prop. I can confidently predict a gargantuan amount of rage in you, which you will assume is completely unrelated. You'd be wrong. They are the same force.

The interesting thing about where you have found yourself is that it is easy to fix, but as usual the focus has been backwards, on you and not on what you do. While the question reveals a lot about you, it also causes you to think and behave a certain way. Though it's a fantasy that a pill can solve your problems, your mind includes it in weighing your next real moves. You are less likely to approach that girl at the DMV because your mind has found a safer way (for you) to handle it. That "less likely" may only be a dyne of force, but it is not nothing.

This is an extremely cogent point. For all the pretense, "the mind" isn't a logic machine. Things of the nature and substance of dreams nevertheless enjoy real heuristic weight, which is a large part why any kind of fantasy is counterproductive and ultimately dangerous. The man with no illusions is the only effectual agent known under the Sun.

Now think about how many fantasies and scenarios you're actively running every day about a million things, and think about how many of those things you're actually attempting in real life. I know the popsicleogists will say you're running the scenarios to make yourself feel better, but they are what's holding you back. Those thoughts, in the absence of any action, have defined you. Just because no one else can see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Word.

———

1. Yes, all six ; and at least five of them a better read, but what can you do ? [↩]
2. Ron & Fez are a sort of Opie and Anthony without the 10`000 person strong Angola beach party with West Side strippers doing full nude volleyball tournaments and etcetera, the fuck-your-wife-in-church-for-prizes and so on. Am I right ? [↩]
3. Recall that great scene where Bogart is not all that interested in Bacall because "Take a walk around me. Go ahead. Saw any strings ?"

   That's exactly the problem, today as half a century ago, as half a million years ago : I might entertain the nude woman, as she is and by herself ; but as sure as fuck I won't entertain her cortege of mulas, whether they be of the extrinsic kind, such as that dumbass of her mother, or of the intrinsic kind, such as whatever crappy books she misread and misunderstood or whatever "reasonable expectations" she formed with her pretty own head. The marital name change isn't a simple social convention, it's a whole symbology, ritualized because important : the mated female sheds her girly identity, completely and forever. There's less continuity between Miss X and Mrs Y than there is between Kennedy's publicity photographs and Kennedy's corpse ; and any marriage that fails to produce this deindividualization of the female upon defloration is entirely spurious an exercise by that sufficient fact alone. [↩]

4. No presuposition of age is involved, did you notice this ? [↩]
5. I did not say pretty or anything like that. Just exclude shambling horrors / the sort of thing you generally see on okcupid. [↩]
6. In the way of a fruit tree, say. Very pointedly not in the vein of the Western children today. Something that produces a modest amount of modestly valuable things while costing no-one nothing, not something that burns endless piles of rare and valuable resoureces for no conceivable benefit. [↩]
7. Yes, sure, I don't do it because I've better things to do than play genital lottery, and totally so do they, everyone's special in this land made up of no citizenry, just emperors. [↩]
8. In fact, she does remember, which leads us to a useful tip to the lifestyle rapist : don't rape on the spur of the moment, but case the victim first, keep the details and revisit her a year or two later. They almost never bother to actually disappear, for one thing, and you'll be surprised by how accomodating the "victim" has become to your advances in the interval (surprised because the only surprising thing in this world is the science you never learned). To add insult to injury, the more virulent she is in condemning the deed, the more likely to be accomodating on further passes -- much like the loudest crack first and so forth.

   Evolutionary psychology purports to pretend itself a respectable field of intellectual investigation & sciencemakings, but it can't bring itself to admit the fundamental point of all evolutionary anythings -- that "rape" is the basic mode of reproduction in sexuate species, and that the body responds to function and drives function irrespective of "meaning" -- the neocortex is an afterthought, the last instance sometimes but the first instance not even once.

   In short : what you call rape today is how the ancients made friends. The notion that "but we're better than that now" is exactly intern's thinking : you're wrong, and you're protected from finding out by being lazy. [↩]

9. Lesbians still fine though. [↩]
10. I know you're tempted to say yes, except the lurking problem then becomes the adult woman. Sluts connect, literally, and quite indiscriminately, with all sorts of people. More people than you, at any rate, and so you're stuck doing the complicated ballet of "it doesn't count when she does it because it's not really connecting", as if you'd know.

    To rephrase the question : is your breaching of the rules a diagnostic criteria ? [↩]

11. Because I'm poor I do this, you see. If I were rich I'd buy into the VHS America. [↩]