About A Girl
Tradness is a state of non-reality. The past never was—not the way we imagine it. We fear its image and yet we are drawn towards it anyway, just to hate it when it inevitably fails us. We have lived past the end of our myth and we are trying to repeat it, to take refuge in it. What, then, is our punishment?
-Matilda Lin Berke
I prepped at a Very Good School. The refectory was paneled in dark wood, with the names of important Boys who had long since graduated inscribed in small gold Gothic letters on the walls. I sang in the choir there, and played the games one plays at prep school; football, and wrestling, and lacrosse, but also Maul Ball and Smear the Queer. I preferred the second to the first in the same way I preferred wrestling to football.
One was not required to be homosexual to be the Queer, only to run from a pack of other boys and to fight credibly when inevitably caught by them. I enjoyed chasing down the Queer with the pack, but I liked being the Queer more. It was a dramatic role, and I did not have to worry that I would damage a friend in the fracas when I was finally run down. No one is on your side when you are the Queer; every face or belly in which you can bury your fists belongs to someone who will cheerfully do you harm. I have always been dramatic, and I have always enjoyed a good scrap.
I did not graduate from prep school. I went instead to the finest troubled teen facility money could buy, like Paris Hilton. The facility, a “therapeutic boarding school,” was both a step up and a step down. They were serious about fighting there in a way to which I was unaccustomed, and I learned a great deal, but it was not academically sound, and I was regrettably unprepared for college. It took me a long time to graduate, and by the time I received my degree, I had met The Wolf, who had taught me to fight on an entirely different level.
On the one hand, I at last felt safe. I had been bullied, and I was now, in a certain, very important way, bully-proof. But on the other, I had loved testing myself against my peers. Five years in the House of The Wolf removed me from their world; there was no one who posed the kind of threat to which I was accustomed anymore. The Wolf had spent hours patiently, lovingly training my eye to spot fracture points in an opponent's defense. His Art was based on attacking those fracture points in a maximally efficient way, and by the time I had left his House, I had become a weapon.
At prep school and at the troubled teen facility, I had been made the butt of jokes, so I was careful not to become a bully. After all, The Wolf had not been one; though fond of coarse, crude humor, he was at heart both gentle and courteous, and he disapproved of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. He had taught me to act like a man rather than a boy, and as such, I expected to be taken seriously.
But the culture at large was pivoting. Richard Hanania has discussed the power of women’s tears, and it is relevant in this case. The woke attack vector on fighters is to behave, exaggeratedly and preemptively, as if a man who moves like one is dangerous, however gentle and courteous he may be. I hold men who behave fearfully around other men in polite contempt, especially if it’s clear that they’re doing it for effect. Join a gym, soy boy. But when women do it, the pain in your heart is like hitting your thumb with a hammer. There is a shock, then for a moment, nothing. Then a sharp pain that blossoms into an ache consumes your sensorum entirely, especially if you know from experience what it is like to have suffered sexual violence, as many fighters do.
I learned to deal with it over the years. Date women who like fighters. Don’t give drama queens of either sex your valuable time. Be philosophical about weakness in others, and try to help those who will allow you to help them get stronger. Be a man. Handle your business. Don’t get drawn in.
I met The Girl on an anti-woke political forum. There had been an exchange on the subject of manhood, and she approached me after I complimented her to the room at large on her attitude toward masculinity. We exchanged emails, then photos, then video chat. She was intelligent and personable, and I’ve always been a sucker for shy, soft-spoken dancers with long, pin-straight hair. She said she was moving to America to go to school in the fall—coincidentally, to a city near me.
I fell for her quickly, and hard. That she was a moderator of a Female Dating Strategy-adjacent forum barely registered, a catastrophic misjudgement I attribute to benzo withdrawal.
There was more than a ten-hour time difference between us, so when she texted me one morning to ask me if I wanted to video chat, I assumed she was burning the midnight oil. She explained that in fact, she was on her way home from a bar. I sighed heavily. Having been around the block once or twice, I assumed she had had some sort of tryst with a stranger while drunk, and while I wasn’t thrilled, it didn’t seem realistic for me to assume total sexual fidelity from a woman I’d never met and who, given the oceans between us, I couldn’t realistically satisfy myself at the moment in any case. I figured she’d confess to something, we’d work out what Dan Savage refers to as a “hall pass” after the fact, and either things would work out when she arrived in America or they wouldn’t.
She opened up the chat before she had even taken off her coat, a miserable, guilty look on her face, and told me the kind of transparent tall tale to explain away her inability to look at me that I associate with alcoholics (which I now understand she most likely was) and drug addicts. I did my best to ascertain that she was physically okay, that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted or physically injured, and told her we should probably talk about it after she slept it off. After all, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen this movie before.
Instead, beginning the very next day, The Girl, who was already a social worker in her home country and would be attending therapy school in this country, took it upon herself to “hit me back first.” She used therapy framing techniques to exploit the woke attack vector on fighters I mentioned above. She took all of the things I’d told her about myself, about The Wolf, about my own abuse, and weaponized them in a kind of anti-therapy, blending therapy techniques with DARVO and tactics taught on FDS. And she gaslit me, creating alternate identities online with which to keep tabs on me and manipulate me every time I tried to get away from her. It was the most coldly efficient breakdown of my spirit I’d ever experienced.
When I couldn’t take it any longer, I ran. I moved down the coast, hundreds of miles from my home. I went back to therapy, after having believed myself recovered from trauma for good. During my very first meeting with my new therapist, she told me, unprompted, that she wanted to work with me to ensure The Girl's school was notified so that she could never work as a therapist in this country. She was horrified at what had been done to me, and she believed that “this woman” was a clear and present danger to any future patients under her care and to the profession at large. How dare she, she asked me. How dare she do that to you.
It’s been a few weeks, and every now and again I pick up that gun and weigh it in my hand, but I can’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Doing as my therapist suggested would be trivially easy. I have pages and pages of emails and text messages that prove what I’m saying is true, from her declaration of her own amorality to her manipulation of me to her construction of her primary alternate persona. But she likely wouldn’t be able to stay in America if she were expelled from her program, and I don’t know how she could possibly get the help she desperately needs if she were sent home. Would she be punished by her family? Would she be married off against her will? Given where she is from, I just don’t know. It's certainly possible; she was closemouthed about her past, and I empathize. I have been brutalized myself, and there are people and places I want only to forget. I don't think I can bring myself to send her back to anything resembling the hell from which I barely escaped myself.
It was my birthday yesterday. I got calls and well-wishes from friends and family, which buoyed my spirits; I am, after all, alone in a strange city. When I went to sleep I dreamed of old friends I miss with all my heart, who I know I will never see again. They told me they loved me.
Then the dream changed, and I held a spear a new friend is forging for me. He has promised to bless it with the blacksmith's Word; in the dream he had done so. It was straight and sharp and very beautiful, with a wondrous balance.
I woke up teary-eyed but comforted. Not every memory is bad, and I have a future to which I look forward.
But it is hard for me to be happy at present.
Happy birthday. Keep handling your business and don't get drawn DOWN.
Great writing, like always, and man, that sucks to go through. Stay strong and encouraged, brother.