Would Tony Soprano take a dick pic?

Leaked nudes, Robin DiAngelo, workplace flatulence, and contemporary penistography

This week I’m working out one of my clients who mentions he received a text, from an unsaved number, threatening to release his nudes to all of his followers on a large-platform social media app your bubbie could be on and, while you can use it to hook up, it more closely resembles an extremely popular ecommerce site where people also yell about politics.

The person on the other side of this number sends him several nudes to prove they have the goods, along with a screenshot of his followers, asking for a ransom. He says, no, and tells them:

• Get bent.

• Get wrecked.

• Get fucked.

To just release what I’ll call a cache so that I may imbue the situation with a little dignity.

Too little, too late, he changes his settings so that, from now on, only he can see his network. Then he sets about messaging his contacts, asking them to be understanding and disregard the impending onslaught of poorly lit pictures taken in the reflection of dirty mirrors displaying sand-colored carpet littered with discount clothes and actual cat litter in a sad white apartment, and the look of a cry for help on the face of a man looking for love in all the wrong places.

He tells me, as if it’s really no big deal, that many of his friends are replying, saying they also have nudes floating around and that it’s nothing to be embarrassed about, a rounding error not to be taken seriously in the point-system of life.

What I should do is bite my tongue, but what is the point of having your own business if you’re always going to be beholden to some set of rules you don’t even believe in? While I’m 40, I’ve never been much of a prude, so I feel confident enough saying it must be a gay thing, having all these nudes of yourself circulating around the internet as a dude.

For background, I have a face that is generally stoic and sometimes registers as serious or angry but would mostly fall under what’s called shallow affect. It’s the same thing that turns women on in times of danger and makes them think you’re dangerous in times of peace. It tracks concurrently through both autism and psychopathy and can be induced in children through neglect. All this is to say, I don’t think I’m having a lapse in my expression so much as this client, who like ~50% of my business, happens to be out and proud, hears his own words hanging inauthentically in the air and feels the need to justify his behavior by saying all men just want to be worshipped for their bodies, including and especially by other men, which is when the record skips.

While my face may not have betrayed my thoughts, I was no longer interested in pretending at equanimity when I said, “What?” Without going into too much detail during our inappropriate but basically standard kind of conversation people have with their trainers, massage therapists, stylists, assorted wagies and other merchants of snapback economics—without getting too into it, I told him that wanting to be looked at, to get compliments for your looks, that it’s for the birds.

Female instincts

I know. I work people out for a living and don’t want to put myself out of work, but this schtick about seeking likes through pics registered false to me for many reasons but my main point is pragmatic and doesn’t even pretend at depth: Straight men have sex with women and no woman I know is really turned on from pictures alone. This isn’t to say they don’t have libidos. They do, but they display themselves differently in different contexts, and they display them more, the more they are turned on, which as far as pictures go, is not that much.

In the world of ideas, many women indulge in romance novels, bodice-rippers, and franchises such as My bb daddy is a vampire and 50 Flavors of Fornication, sometimes getting into the fandom of the guys on the covers or hitting message boards to argue about the descriptions therein. Even then, the world of ideas is usually a cheap proxy, a linguistic platform for the atoms of the material world which incept you with lust and ideas anyway, which is why only a few women read these novels in proportion to the amount who have seen Titanic. Seeing your punim animate across MeatSpace where you must carry yourself, use your voice, display how you operate and greet animals, obstacles, traffic, waitstaff and minorities, this is the stuff attraction is made of.

But, what they are not that into are pictures. Porn, sure. But, still-photography seems dated and whatever lip-service and keyboard-clacking may concern this or that photo of this or that celebrity, the thing on display is the intrasexual socialization, the words themselves and the agreement or disagreement from the peanut gallery. The pictures are just an excuse for the socialization and displays of desire in the same way that construction workers catcall women mostly to signal competitiveness and virility among the male hierarchy; yes, they are construction workers but they have a data set and know this isn’t a winning tactic.

As Heather Havrilesky writes of women’s attraction, “I value humor over hotness now. If I met a gargoyle who made me laugh I’d take my clothes off immediately.” NB you can read hotness as “inanimate looks.” Obviously, she’s saying humor, delivered off the cuff, in real time and MeatSpace, is hot. Definitely better than a picture.

To be clear: It’s not that women don’t like pictures of nice bodies. It’s that the body is the plus; the picture of it, the promotion of it, and desire to be looked at can be kind of a minus, a turnoff to women who secretly wonder if you will take longer than them in the bathroom, leave your stubble in the sink, make them late for dinner, cheat on them with your pretty self, or worry about your nail breaking in a fistfight.

The fast-paced world of penistography

While it’s possible 40 makes me too old to maintain contact with ground-surface reality, it still seems more likely a girl will call you daddy without prompt than ask you for penistography. I fully admit that some women do ask but, when they ask:

1. It’s probably because it feels like a necessary piece of choreography they learned, potentially in trying to get you to ask them for pictures of themselves or more pictures of themselves.

2. It’s usually just the penis itself, not a whole selfie.

3. They have already seen your penis IRL (congrats).

4. They are not men (you can just be gay if you want and circumvent this whole thing where we pretend we’re identical except for one thing).

5. They are not seeking it for your validation. Again, it may be to get you to ask them for pictures of themselves, which boomerangs into their validation.

As Dmitry writes (emphasis my own):

Male sexual market value is determined via female hypergamous pressure cooker. Male economic performance is often rewarded with the right to put on a sexual performance. Women do not find male essence intrinsically valuable, but they greatly respect male accomplishments and abilities. Nature deems that men must perform to be worth anything, and women follow these orders. This is why men are not born, they are made.

You may note that, as we require fewer things of men, especially things that women are not already doing, that women are decreasingly attracted to men or, as

Magdalene J. Taylor

notes, able to tolerate them at all.

Not how the body look but what the body do

While it’s true that, all things being equal, bigger muscles are stronger muscles, which can move heavier weight, and there are all sorts of reasons why big muscles look good on a guy, the size and leanness are basic proxies for health and utility:

• the ability to live long without burdening others,

• to do violence,

• stave it off, and

• carry resources from one place to another.

You read that correctly, people will like you more if you seem like a useful person who contributes more than they take. Shallow, I know.

There are all sorts of places where you see this current deemphasized. For instance, in safer, wealthier, more urban places that require less physical ability or mechanical/spatial competence, both sexes are often more androgynous, with a more pronounced effect occurring in men who, on average, appear less masculine in all but the poorest, least safe urban environments.

It is in the realm of atoms, specifically as the mass of objects increases, that our differences become more indisputably perceptible because they are both measurable and visible even without measuring. I can imagine thousands or millions of women beating me at chess which I haven’t played in decades and never spent much time on but I cannot imagine many scenarios in which a woman can beat me at arm-wrestling which I have also not done in decades or spent much time on.

In safe geographies, neither men nor women need to know how to fight. In fact, Daniel Penny’s case proves that it can actually be criminal to know how to fight in areas that are not actually safe but are instead deemed too embarrassing to authorities to be classified as unsafe. In wealthier longitudes and latitudes they do not need to know how to steal resources nor combat their theft due to resource abundance. Because these places are safe, wealthy, and already hospitable, they attract independent women who do not want to have to rely on men to protect them, which decreases how much men are pressured to get muscles, fight, carry things, reducing muscles to ornaments. They may get used for moving day (usually once a year at most) and times when safety decreases. They may even be adored by women (and gay men) who seem to enjoy this hard-to-fake accomplishment, but it will not be because straight men want other men to worship them. Respect and fear can sometimes be confused for such.

To send the point home, no wealthy place can stay unsafe for long as it must either become safe or will become poor as wealthy people GTFO or get their fortunes seized. If you bury your face in a spreadsheet, don’t be surprised when your hard drive gets stolen by people with muscles.

It only gets worse from here

Women basically start out life with inherent value which can increase through certain events like Pilates and eyebrow lamination, but women’s SMV (sexual market value) is largely predicated on not diminishing the value they start with, a reality realized in the proliferation of anti-aging products, services, and technologies ranging from wrinkle-removers to labiaplasty.

While I have never been too much of a prude or interested in purity/virginity, most straight guys do care about this within a certain threshold. I don’t think you have to be a prude to pass over a woman who has had sex with thousands of men and I’m sure there are those who would argue otherwise, but it probably puts a guy in an awkward position if his friends can readily deploy Google to figure out how saturated and what shade his gf’s labia may be. Plus, it signals increased risk of poor outcomes from mental health to physical health and beyond.

On the flipside, I’ll venture to say that a certain threshold of prudishness likely coincides with somewhat predictable, stable health, wellness, and wealth outcomes and makes it less awkward for your man if his friends don’t know how your pussy lips look.

Femininity is partially defined in negative terms, by absence of certain things rather than presence. Everyone knows women fart, but farting in front of someone is not only impolite, it will make you unfeminine and lower your SMV whether you are male or female; however, men it seems are given more leeway here (which I am fully opposed to) likely because they have opportunities to make up those points through utility functions like violence/deterrence, protection, and resource management at levels women cannot compete with.

Not for nothing, farting in an office, where most people’s bodies are basically meat-liabilities that get in the way of email and computing functions, is a much bigger deal than farting on an oil rig where your body is often occupied under extreme conditions. It may be dangerous to hold a fart in, 300 feet in the air but it is similarly dangerous not to hold it while presenting KPI’s.

Similarly, everyone knows women can grow facial hair but, if you want to be taken seriously as a woman and regarded as feminine, you better get rid of it. Everyone from Tony Soprano to Robin DiAngelo knows this which is why there’s a taboo on guys who cannot grow sufficiently thick facial hair. Having scraggly facial hair is worse than too much or none at all. It’s what happens when you let uncompetitive people try to compete: You get ugliness.

The Robin DiAngelo school of thirst

This brings me to a good heuristic. While you shouldn’t go around cheating on your wife and running a criminal enterprise, you also shouldn’t go around being criminally annoying while pretending to be a do-gooder. Having said that, there is a list of things neither of them would do in trying to attract a mate and this is a great place for most men to start.

While I think women should be able to take as many pictures of their pussies as possible, Robin DiAngelo would never. Similarly, Tony Soprano would never be stressing about how well he backlit his penis or which filter he used. While DiAngelo does not serve as a paragon of femininity or masculinity, we can set her level of primping as the upper limit of femininity most men, at least straight men, should indulge in the pursuit of sexual attention. And while you should probably aim for a body that’s closer to Neil Patrick Harris’ than Tony Soprano’s, setting your boundaries against intersexual competition, closer to Tony’s will allow you to more gracefully navigate the burden of heterosexuality.

Is Tony Soprano really that alluring, or are we trying to say something else entirely?

The noncompete clause of coed interactions

A potential reason why a gay guy, like my client, wouldn’t want a straight guy, such as myself, describing his behavior as female could be his sense of perceived homophobia, which is not true in my case, but for the sake of being charitable, I want to argue why he might feel that way.

It goes without saying most cultures in most times have had taboos on homosexuality, especially in public. Additionally, most in most times have had taboos on intersexual competition in any number of arenas. While you may not see much merit to segregating girls from boy’s classrooms or barring them from classrooms Taliban-style, most people have an intuitive knowledge regarding why we don’t let girls play football or hockey with boys past a certain age, if at all. At the intersection of this Venn diagram of homophobia and chivalry is a taboo on intersexual competition. Whether it is logical, whether it is fair, there is a masculine virtue and instinct against competing with women. This can be seen in taboos against men wearing makeup and lingerie in the same way that there are taboos against dunking on women and putting them in the hospital.

In fact, this is the main lens through which men who do commit violence against women can feel justified in doing so; they are using one form of intersexual competition to combat the audacity of a woman or women competing with them through another. This can correspond with these men feeling threatened by female competence but it can also be unpaired from their competence, as I have personally witnessed, seeing a girl at my high school who was allowed to play varsity lacrosse with the boys and who regularly learned, through the firsthand study of the impulse-momentum theorem, that every time she got rocked, they were actually showing her mercy, warning her what might happen if someone actually tried.

Many can argue that enfranchising women is a good thing that men should not be threatened by, but few talk about how many men feel that enfranchising women diminishes not only what it means to be a man, but what it means to vote, and that this is one of the many reasons so many men see no value in it, extending rights to those who are not even capable of fighting for them.

As Curtis Yarvin has noted, voting is simulated warfare, a count of heads, which is meant to stave off the violence that would otherwise be inflicted by the majority against the minority. My own observation would be that bad things happen when there is too much misalignment between those with a say and those who can fight.

Whether you take umbrage with the explanation for its occurrence or not, it is obvious to men that they are not being disallowed from universities through any kind of explicit rule; rather, as

Celeste Davis

points out here, they receive an embodied understanding that institutions so saturated with women and female social norms are, at worst hostile and inhospitable to them, and at best, uninteresting. One of many places we pit their skills against those of the fairer sex who will feel uncomfortable with too much overt competition.

Men who conform to female social standards too much, will be doomed to receive ransom texts. They will lift, and post, and cope, and tell you there’s nothing more normal than the desire to have your body worshipped by other men, when they’re actually just men who want the respect of having worked hard, not so they can be useful as men, but so you can use them like women.