by Jason Stotts
My younger brother once told me, echoing the sentiments of my disowned father, that all women are sluts. This is, surprisingly enough, a true statement – to the extent of his knowledge.
My brother Wes, like his blackguard father, is an amoral hedonist. Their goal in life is to indulge their whims, to live life in the moment, and ultimately to pursue pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Now my brother is of the kind that includes drugs and alcohol on his path; some do, some don’t. There is no fundamental difference between those that do and those that do not, it is merely a subjective preference of pleasure. Why do I say this? Because the end goal, the goal they don’t want to admit to themselves or others, is that their goal is death. Since both kinds share this goal, they are fundamentally similar.
Why do I think that they seek death? Because a human life can only be achieved by a process of rational thought and it is precisely rational thought that these people are trying to destroy. With drugs and alcohol it’s clear how they destroy rational thought – being under the influence is valued by these people precisely because of its destructive property. They revel in their imaginary universe of non-thought, they revel in the destruction of their brains and bodies, they revel at the thought of their own death.
Sex, however, seems to be different. Is one’s brain damaged by sex? No. Is one’s body damaged by sex? No. What then leads me to classify sex, the way it’s practiced by the amoral hedonists, as self-destructive? The answer lies in the nature of sex.
Let us return to Wes for example. His greatest goal in life, in his own words, is “to get laid”. If you were to ask him about his background, you would find a string of failures leading up to a zero – which is precisely what he has accomplished so far in his life: nothing. Yet he is a proud young man; proud because he has slept with more women than he can remember their names (not all of which he knew at the time). Wes is also proud about how much he can drink, and how much marijuana he can smoke in a day, and how many other drugs he’s tried.
Wes has never had a real relationship in his life; this should come as no surprise because the kind of women with whom he associates is not the kind who has the mental fortitude or maturity to be in a relationship. Wes has been in a string of bitter relationships that flare quickly and burn away just as rapidly. He bemoans this sometimes insisting that he “just can’t meet the right girl”, while at other times lauds this situation because it leaves him free to “get more ass”.
Wes has only known sex with random women and in failing relationships. Never has he experienced sex properly – nor could he, having no idea what love is or how to achieve it. This justifies Wes’ claim that all women are sluts, because all of the women that he has slept with are sluts. So to the best of his knowledge the statement is true. However, the statement is clearly false. The statement is really nothing more than an admission that the only kind of women that the speaker has ever been with has been a slut and an unspoken desire to relegate all women to the role of slut that way while he has never experienced a true woman, he is no worse than anyone else.
Incidentally, this idea of wanting, not to be good, but to be no worse than anyone else is one of the driving forces of the amoral hedonist. Implicitly knowing that life can only be achieved by thought, but also knowing that thought is the opposite of what they want, they try to stay just a little ahead of the worse among them in order to postpone their inevitable demise and to hide from themselves the fact that this, death, is their real wish.