In Defense of Worst Boyfriend Ever

only criticize those you love.

picture unrelated

Vultures are circling.

I will begin my defense of WBE with pure ad hominem. No pretense of objectivity here.

closeted gays moan smugly about WBE

“First Things” is a theocratic rag for men who ask God for forgiveness after rubbing one out. These are the lamest people on the planet. And they are attacking WBE.

“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” attacks WBE

Worst Boyfriend Ever is a kind of weak, bloodless, and definitively modern interpretation of the picaresque novel.

“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” has no clue what a picaresque novel is. The first picaresque novel was Lazarillo de Tormes. It was anti-Catholic and satirical. The hero of the novel is not strong or bloody. He’s literally a cuckold.

The author seems to envision himself as some sort of roguish, red-blooded hero who lives by his wits and defies the pale, rigid, clockwork world of restraint and repression. But Mr. Boyfriend is no picaro; he is no Julien Sorel.

A picaro isn’t a “red-blooded hero.” A picaro lacks honor, and is malicious and cunning. Mauberley uses a lot of fancy words without knowing what any of them mean.

He spends his days not dueling with rapiers and wooing wealthy dowagers but masturbating in a dingy office park and gulleting 5mg of Adderall to churn out prolefeed smut for never-nude zoomer girls who want a titilating¹ sexual experience without all the fluids. Mr. Boyfriend is not the rakish hero of days gone by—he is the last descendant of an old and decayed house. The strong, manly features of the race—the stallion vigor of Stendhal, the grim brutality of Celine—have all withered away, and what remains is something weak and frail—hollow cheeks and skin like alabaster.

Everything said here is projection, minus the risky masturbation and drug use.

No one writing this right-wing slop is a rakish hero with “strong, manly features of the race.”

What is endearing about WBE is that he lacks this obnoxious pretense. WBE is cutting and humorous, rather than obfuscating and stodgy. As a writer, he is best compared to the comedy of Machiavelli:

“I was now completely terrified, however since I was alone with her in the dark, I gave her a good hump. Even though I found her thighs flabby, her genitals greasy and her breath stinking a bit, my lust was so desperate that I went ahead and gave it to her anyway.”

Mauberley would have critiqued Machiavelli and Shakespeare as degenerates, “the last of his race,” and so on.

In this age, I fear we have mistaken art for the mirror of life. Men and women² these days read not for “power” as Ezra Pound suggested, but to be reminded of themselves. Every floor-mopper at Safeway, every old arthritic coot, every pimple-faced bag boy expects to open a novel and see himself—his smallness, his meaness,³ his petty virtues and petty vices, his wretched figure, hideous and crooked. If he opens a novel and finds not his own monstrous visage but something fine and fair, a Grecian form full of grace and pride, then his heart fills with immortal hate.

Mauberley’s style of writing is so opposed to the Greeks, their Laconic and ascetic attitude. Mauberley lacks self-awareness.

I am tired of being lectured by right-wingers about why every attempt to do something raw and real is in fact illusory and not good enough. What exactly are these people doing? Where is their rawness? Where is their vitalism, their manly vigor?

Who is going to read Mauberley and come away empowered? No — this is drivel and smugness. It is an empty purity, moralism disguising itself with pomp.

No one is reading WBE and thinking, “ah yes, I too quit my job and drive across the country on a regular basis, he is so much like me, I enjoy seeing my petty habits reflected back at me, how familiar and comfortable!”

There’s no floor-mopping, arthritic cooting, bag-boying, or petty virtue.

Mauberley is fine and fair, like a little doll. Nothing messy, nothing dirty. Not a monstrous visage, but a pathetic one. I prefer the monster.

Why do we need more insipid diarists and autofictional documentarians in an age as solemn and impoverished as our own? Does anyone need literature that reminds them that the world is dull and sterile and mundane and tedious? Just look around you—fluorescent lights, gray polyester office carpet, $80 for plastic pants. Every day, most Americans wake up, go to work, come home, eat their microwavable Trader Joe’s burrito, and then settle down for an evening of guilty masturbation and Seinfeld re-runs—there’s nothing profound in this, and there’s little virtue in telling about it “honestly.”

I’m starting to doubt whether Mauberley has ever read WBE.

If he had, he would understand that the entire ethos of WBE is opposed to the fluorescent lights, the office carpet, the plastic pants, the microwaved burrito, and the Seinfeld re-runs.

There’s nothing “solemn” about WBE. More projection from moldy old Mauberley.

Worst Boyfriend Ever is almost Schopenhauerian in its theme. Mr. Boyfriend craves but is never satisfied; he lives, as Nietzsche put it, “impudently in brief pleasures” and barely casts his goals “beyond the day.” All his attempts to achieve some catharsis end only in disappointment and regret—the pendulum swings back and forth between boredom and pain. This, of course, should be anathema to all who abide by the Nietzschean creed—“do not throw away the hero in your soul. Hold holy your highest hope!”

This isn’t critique, but praise. WBE is a pessimist in the tradition of Schopenhauer, Spengler, Cioran. If Nietzscheanism is the idea that the ugliness of the world should be hidden for an artificial optimism, that is cowardice.

I despise the Nietzschean who makes that man into a Buddha to be quoted and worshipped. Mauberley and his cohort have become a cult of Nietzsche with their own dead and empty dogma. Everything is a quotation battle to prove who is the true Nietzschean. If that is Nietzschean, then let Nietzscheanism be burned.

There is nothing heroic in Worst Boyfriend Ever—there are no trumpet sounds that rouse men from days of aimless wandering, there are no siren songs that lead off to a secret world of pale shores and moonlit eyes. What is the purpose of art if not to show man that there is another path?

Again, this description shows a profound ignorance of the picaro. The picaro is he who wanders aimlessly.

What is the Odyssey but a man forced by circumstance into endless wanderings?

There is something beyond this ashen world of illusion and veils, a secret grove where the trees rustle and the water runs clear and the great god Pan leaps in the meadows. I have always believed this, so did the Greeks, and so do all men who have that fire in their blood.

WBE is not a completed work. It is a fragment, a slice of life.

What a saccharine view, that everything one should ever read must always have a happy ending, a picture of heaven and the Elysian fields, a sunset and a rainbow and a unicorn! Mauberley would have censored The Bacchae, or the Iliad for its depiction of death, calling it unheroic. Mauberley cannot spend one afternoon without bathing himself knee deep in the fine, fair, and graceful light of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Where are our novels now that show the untimely man, the fighter against his age, the man out of season? Where is the classical man? Where is the romantic hero?

Mauberley is a conservative. He is frozen in time, not outside of it. He can only endlessly critique, never create. Hence the title of his blog: “The Dim Kingdom.” Nothing hopeful or inspiring about his book reports on Schopenhauer and H.L. Mencken.

Liberal Attacks on WBE

“somebody has to articulate the standards”

“blue collar worker”

The liberal attack on WBE is too facile to argue against.

WBE is a bad person. Wow, just wow.

Old people hate him, which is enough for me to love him.

the old who hate the young

“Young men are always fucked, and genetically vulnerable to the impulse to commit evil.”

This is the liberal disgust against WBE, encapsulated.

Katherine Dee’s Attack on WBE

Katherine Dee hates WBE because he belittles Asian women.

I like Katherine Dee. Katherine Dee is part of the reason I’m on Substack today. She thinks through her opinions thoroughly and expresses herself passionately.

It would be unnatural and perverse for a married woman with children to like WBE. Katherine’s response is healthy and natural, and doesn’t require refutation, but I will attempt to explain the difference of opinion.

Katherine isn’t attacking WBE with the voice of a radical, but of a conservative. She wants a society where we treat each other kindly, fairly, and people are safe. This is an understandable instinct of self-preservation and social cohesion. It is the basis of community and brotherhood.

WBE is a writer of alienation. Nobody enjoys WBE out of a desire for cozy communal heartwarming maudlin sentimentality. WBE is enjoyable because he is worse than a serial killer.

Katherine writes about society’s fascination with serial killers. She warns against their lionization. She likes to go into dark corners where others dare not venture. This is admirable. But there are always limits.

WBE hasn’t killed anyone. Should an “asshole” like WBE be reviled worse than a killer of small children, like Adam Lanza?

Perhaps. Human empathy is limited. It’s easier to sympathize with the pain of being hurt by an “asshole” than it is to sympathize with the parents of dead children.

I don’t say this to be mean, but as a point of fact. Most women can relate to the experience of having their heart dissected by a cruel, manipulative man. Most women cannot relate to the experience of being killed or having their children killed. Emotional responses aren’t calibrated according to utilitarian calculation, but according to personal resonance.

There’s also something admirable about death in itself, as opposed to a low-risk hookup. The ultimate critique of WBE is that he refuses to murder and dissect the women he fucks — his critics wish he were more brutal, more unforgiving, more punishing, more hateful. They want him to become more monstrous. And yet, all he wants at the end of the day is to be loved. It’s his refusal to kill that inspires the resentment against him:

I cut into your heart with my scalpel, pull out your organs and display them to my audience like a medical professor in the morgue showing students how to remove the liver and kidney. This is what Doctor Mengele would do to the Jews, if Doctor Mengele were a sex addict. Your most private, personal thoughts are being put on display — to the horror of anyone who stumbles upon this plastic bag of guts.

There is something rape-like about violating someone’s privacy. But it is even lower than rape. Rape contains some kind of force, courage, risk, violence, or vital energy. What I am doing is low-risk and merely scummy.

It would be more respectful for me to hit her across the face, spit on her, and sodomize her — because that’s what she wants — than to coldly upload the contents of her life to the internet. She wants personal connection, not public shaming.

Instead of helping her, I plastered her pain on the bathroom stall.

Stories of werewolf sex resonate with women because they touch an unspeakable fantasy, the fantasy of being desired by a creature of paradoxical nature. On the one hand, the werewolf is pure desire without rational faculties; on the other hand, he is a sophisticated man with a high-rise apartment on 5th Avenue. The paradox of opposites is intensely erotic.

WBE bridges the gap between female sexual fantasies, bawdy comedy, and philosophical pessimism. The union and contrast of opposites mixes comedy and tragedy.

WBE flirts with genius, while continuously scurrying away into the gutter like a rat. You scream, “HEY, GET BACK HERE YOU RAT! I WANT MY HAPPY ENDING!” and he makes some kind of sad rat face at you and disappears. The frustration is in feeling that he was so close, that he almost escaped, that, for a moment, he revealed a spark of light beyond the sewer, then stole it away… The frustration is funny to those with a sense of humor, and maddening to the humorless.

It’s the ethos that inspired the deathly-grim aesthetic of emo, goth, punk, and pop-punk, with self-aware irony. It’s the teasing of the seductress. Men say of women, “I can save her.” It’s the tragic brokenness and vulnerability that entices.

sex, death, and humor in the circus of life

The problem of tragedy is that the field is saturated and overdone. Every pop song is about heartbreak and betrayal. Oversaturation leads to cynicism, an emotional defense mechanism. Calling art “cringe” is like calling a woman “slutty.” Good tragedy must balance seduction with concealment.

Hardcore porn is too open; sundresses in wheat fields are too trite. The sexual ideal lies between, in the uncanny valley of uncertainty.

Conclusion.

Is WBE genius? Is he trash? Is he a rapist? Is he a loser? Is he a racist? Is he a degenerate? Ambiguity creates the tension, the reaction, love and hate wrapped into one.

The problem of the left today is that it seeks to eliminate all ambiguity in favor of strict delineation. Consent is a contract. Sexuality is litigated. The result is unambiguous HR compliance. Nothing messy, nothing painful, nothing tragic: just two consenting adults masturbating each other to death.

This lack of ambiguity also speaks to the dearth of leftist comedians. The right dominates comedy because only the right is willing to offend.⁴

Against this imprisonment of passion, you get Glenn Greenwald licking spit off the floor. Sexual frustration leads to intensification of the desire for rape, abstracted and psychologized.

The most radical sexual fantasies aren’t about being “trampled by horses, donkeys.” That is conservative wishful thinking:

Conservatives prefer control by violence over control by social conditioning. They pine for Bukele; they resent the nagging school teacher. In the conservative mind, public spankings allow for emotional catharsis. Conservatives are like a bratty sub who resents their partner as weak for not hitting them.

Conservatives prefer to believe that the elite wish to exterminate them. They fantasize about Mexicans chopping up children with machetes as an expression of an unmet need for corporal punishment. Monarchy represents the return of the strong father who will spank his children, proving that he truly cares for them.

Memes of white genocide are deeply sexual because they represent the most extreme possible fantasy of hyper-violence. South African and Haitian cannibals eating people alive, raping corpses, and so on. This is a fear, an erotic fear.

Against this tendency, WBE stands as a wounded and cynical figure. He deflates hysteria. This is his unforgivable sin.

Whether or not WBE is a “good writer” is beside the point. If WBE were a bad writer, he could be dismissed without complaint. There are trillions of shitty bloggers — none of them inspire the level of contempt leveled at WBE. The fact that he inspires such hatred is itself the mark of a good satirist.

As Nietzsche said (or didn’t say, it doesn’t matter), one should only criticize those worthy of criticism. If he is truly unremarkable, why give him attention? Katherine Dee’s pithy scoff at WBE is the most effective and honest approach. I disagree, but I respect it.

If WBE is so derivative, unoriginal, and uninspiring, there should be nothing to say. His overwrought Nietzschean critics reveal themselves as untouchables as the bottom of a sloppy human centipede. For my part, I would prefer a world of millions of road-tripping, pill-popping, sex addicted “losers” to the mawkish protests of fake Nietzscheans.

In my essay against hobbies, the most common criticism was that I had not “systematically defined hobbies.” Is singing a hobby? Is writing a hobby? Is having sex with Asian girls a hobby?

The idiocy and small mindedness of this critique is that it seeks to reduce all human action to consequentialist, materialist utilitarianism. These people are blind to intention, the power of will. What differentiates the hobbyist from the hero is that the hobbyist seeks peace, while the hero seeks greatness or death.

The funniest response was people telling me to “touch fur.”⁵

I am in favor of nature — the kind of nature that swallows you up and kills you. Not floofy pugs.

So long as WBE annoys the floofy normal-one-havers, I stand with him.

1. “titilating” — Mauberley didn’t bother to use spell check — although maybe that’s a badge of honor in the age of AI?

2. What sort of feminist Nietzscheanism is this, where women are imagined to have “read for power” in days of yore?

3. Substack editor has a spell-check function. These spelling mistakes are more obscene than anything WBE has ever written.

4. I will change this. I will become leftist Joe Rogan.

5. I am, in fact, an alien intelligence. You’ve never met someone like DeepLeftAnalysis before.