Dominant Guy Quotes

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.

Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.

I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.

Establishing dominance early in the relationship is key. Vampire children are like human children in that they can sense weakness. They will wait for you to be busy or too distracted to realize that you’ve given them permission to feed on the pizza guy. —Siring for the Stupid: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Newborn Vampires

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.

I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.

Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy.

She's never asked for a drawing before. I'm horrible at giving them away. 'For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I'll consider it,' I say, knowing she'll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and trees. We've been dividing up the world since we were five. I'm kicking butt at the moment - universe domination is within my grasp for the first time. 'Are you kidding?' she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she's getting. It's like she's being stretched at night. 'That leaves me just the flowers, Noah.' Fine, I think. She'll never do it. It's settled, but it isn't. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she's expecting the English guy to speak to her. 'Okay,' she says. 'Trees, stars, oceans. Fine.' 'And the sun, Jude.' 'Oh, all right," she says, totally surprising me. 'I'll give you the sun.

Overtly relating this to a guy entirely defeats his credibility as a genuinely dominant male. The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because that’s ‘the way he is’ instead of who she had to tell him to be. Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he’s not the man for her.

Je n'ai plus aucune force, aucun courage, aucune domination sur moi aucun pouvoir même de mettre en mouvement ma volonté. Je ne peux plus vouloir ; mais quelqu'un veut pour moi ; et j'obéis.

There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker—if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize—the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical.

Knox Masters is exactly the type of guy I want to date. He dominates a sport I love. He’s confident but not arrogant. He’s funny, able to laugh at himself, and… shit, hot as the fires of Mordor. I mean, the One Ring could be forged in his hotness. I want him.

American evangelical leaders have succumbed to a watered-down salvation of entitlement, prosperity, conservative judges, and anti-abortion laws. They reap the seeds they’ve sown in an inept, blasphemous leader who divides and weakens his nation. Stripped of world dominance, power, and respect, Catholic leaders waddle in the shame of their pedophile-plagued clergy, inviting pagan religions into the house of God. Each has cut a Faustian deal with the devil, which presents Andre with an opportunity: a path to redemption

I tried in my way to be a good guy for her but I set us both up to fall. She fell in love with a man who doesn’t exist and in turn, I punished her for loving him.

If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy). One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns. Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect.

Well, confidence is not necessarily knowing that everything will go awesome and that you will succeed, confidence is being comfortable and okay with whatever does happen.   Someone

The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.

In a direct response to African Americans patrolling Oakland, California, and “copwatching,” Republicans in California passed the Mulford Act, which banned open carry of loaded firearms in California. Who signed that law? Republican patron saint and then governor of California Ronald Reagan. The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.

So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I was applying for campus housing and overheard Andy telling my mother that the only way I was going to be safe from all the sexual assaults he'd heard about on National Public Radio was if I lived in an all-girl dorm. Never mind that I have been kicking the butts of the undead since I was in elementary school, and that almost the entire time I resided under Andy's roof, I had a hot undead guy living in my bedroom. These are two of those secrets I was telling you about. Andy doesn't know about them, and neither does my mother. They think Jesse is what Father Dominic told them he is: a "young Jesuit student who transferred to the Carmel Mission from Mexico, then lost his yearning to go into the priesthood" after meeting me. That one slays me every time.

Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own.

I once read if you stare down a dog long enough, you prove your dominance if the dog is the first to look away. I lift a brow in challenge, refusing to blink. Troy’s thick lips turn up before he drops his gaze to the floor. That’s right, Fido. Now, go lick your ass.

If you’re someone who is intimately involved with a true masochist, and yet can’t bring yourself to actually hurt that person, you’re like the guy wearing a red uniform on a Star Trek away-mission: expendable.

Cocks had always been an incidental bonus to me, something I only cared about in proportion to how much I liked the guy it was attached to. Silly when flaccid, exciting or scary or off-putting when hard. It was a man’s words or expression or caresses that dominated my masturbatory fantasies—a specific man at that, be he a crush or a celebrity or a character from a movie. I never simply fixated on a dick. They were strictly secondary to the man himself.

Imagine you have a frog and you plop it into a pot of boiling water. What’s it going to do? It’s going to jump straight back out. However, if you put the frog in a pot of cool water, and slowly warm it up, the frog won’t notice until it is too late.   Similarly,

At any rate, she knew why she was attracted to Flynn now—attracted to being with a guy who could completely dominate her in bed. It was what she’d been doing in every aspect of her life lately, wanting to hole up in the backseat and not be asked to drive. Just hand over the keys to someone else.

The high-value woman doesn’t ever let men have their way with her emotions, time, body, money, or career. And this is a boundary she strongly protects. Every boundary she bends or changes is only changed when he deserved it. It’s never given.   When a high-value woman is in a relationship with a high-value guy, they behave like a team. They both make concessions, but there’s always an equilibrium. Not a quid pro quo where every concession from her needs to be met by a concession from him. The relationship is always a win-win. Never a lose-win or even a win-lose. (She doesn’t want to dominate her guy either.)   The

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side.

The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.

Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015): Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met. Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs. Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect. Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.

Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.

Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage. Why would I give a fuck about the original public meaning of the words written by these men? Conservatives will tell you that the text of laws explicitly passed in response to growing political, social, or economic power of nonwhite minorities should be followed to their highest grammatical accuracy, and I’m supposed to agree the text of this bullshit is the valid starting point of the debate? Nah. As Rory Breaker says in the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: “If the milk turns out to be sour, I ain’t the kind of pussy to drink it.” The Constitution was so flawed upon its release in 1787 that it came with immediate updates. The first ten amendments, the “Bill of Rights,” were demanded by some to ensure ratification of the rest of the document. All of them were written by James Madison, who didn’t think they were actually necessary but did it to placate political interests.

can i have it?" This shocks me. She's never asked for a drawing before. I'm horrible at giving them away. "For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I'll consider it," | say knowing she'll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and the trees. we've been dividing up the world since we were five. |'m kicking butt at the moment - universe domination is within my grasp for the first time. "Are you kidding?" she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she's getting. It's like she's being stretched at night. "That leaves me just the flowers, Noah." Fine, i think. She'll never do it. It's settled, but it isn't. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she's expecting the english guy to speak to her. "Okay," she says. "Trees, stars, oceans. Fine." "And the sun, Jude." "Oh, all right," she says, totally surprising me. "I'll give you the sun.

Oh. Dane. That's his name, right?" she asked. "He took our phones and put the shackles on us, but said we could use the phone on the table. I'm not sure if it's some kind of dominance posturing," she trailed off for a moment. "Actually yeah, having been around him for more than thirty seconds, I'm relatively certain that this is one hundred percent, testosterone-laden alpha male posturing. Is Jake like this?" "I might be an idiot," I said, "but even I wouldn't fall for this sort of thing. A guy who goes to this length to seem awesome must have a dick the size of a gherkin.

Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organized crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. This may reflect homo sapiens position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men's ability to physically coerce women.

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of 'lonely crowds.' . . . 'With the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control,' says Lewis Mumford in The City in History, describing 'henceforth a one-way world.' But the general movement of isolation, which is the reality of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of workers depending on the needs of production and consumption that can be planned. Integration into the system requires that isolated individuals be recaptured and isolated together: factories and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing developments are expressly organized to serve this pseudo-community that follows the isolated individual right into the family cell. The widespread use of receivers of the spectacular message enables the individual to fill his isolation with the dominant images―images which derive their power precisely from this isolation.

In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")

Kane smiled and said, “You want to know something funny?” “Always.” “There are over seven billion people on this planet, and I can only tolerate eleven.” I raised an eyebrow. “Who are the eleven people?” He held up both of his hands and dropped a finger for each person he named. “You, Branna, Bronagh, Keela, Alannah, Alec, Dominic, Ryder, Damien, Tony the pizza delivery guy, and Susan who works in Subway in the village.” I resisted the urge to laugh. “Why the last two? You don’t know them.” Kane pointed his index finger at me. “Tony brings me food, and Susan makes me food. Leave them alone, they’re good people.” I snorted. “You really need to expand your circle of people.

As Vishous seemed to find a partner in surly crime with Rhamp, Qhuinn found himself staring at the brother. For a lot of reasons. One, the fact that V seemed to be falling all kinds of enchanted over Rhamp was…well, a person was more likely to see God up close and in person before a male like V was ever going to ohhh and ahhh over a kid. Second, Rhamp was starting to warm up in return, the little guy’s initially hostile response easing, his body relaxing its tension, his expression and those myopic baby-eyes assuming a kind of fondness. Sort of like if one tiger met another in the wilderness and the pair decided to hang out instead of try to eat each other in a bid for dominance.

In Scotland, the poverty industry is dominated by a left-leaning, liberal, middle class. Because this specialist class is so genuinely well-intentioned when it comes to the interests of people in deprived communities, they get a bit confused, upset and offended when those very people begin expressing anger towards them. It never occurs to them, because they see themselves as the good guys, that the people they purport to serve may, in fact, perceive them as chancers, careerists or charlatans. They regard themselves as champions of the under class and therefore, should any poor folk begin to get their own ideas or, god forbid, rebel against the poverty experts, the blame is laid at the door of the complainants for misunderstanding what is going on.

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.

The missile crisis "was the most dangerous moment in human history," Arthur Schlesinger commented in October 2002 at a conference in Havana on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by a number of those who witnessed it from within as it unfolded. Desision-makers at the time undoubtedly understood that the fate of the world was in their hands. Nevertheless, attendees at the conference may have been shocked by some of the revelations. They were informed that in October 1962 the world was "one word away" from nuclear war. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," said Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive in Washington, which helped organize the event. He was referring to Vasil Arkhipov, a Soviet submarine officer blocked an order to fire nuclear-armed toredoes in October 27, at the tensest moment of the crisis, when te submarines were under attack bu US destroyers, A devastating response would have been a near certainty, leading a major war.

Korie: Phil and Willie are so much alike. We went to a marriage seminar at our church one time, and Phil and Kay and Jase and Missy were there as well. Each of the couples took a personality test to see if their personalities were compatible. We all laughed because Phil and Willie scored high in the characteristics for having a dominant personality. They were almost identical in a lot of areas, but somewhat different in that Willie was high in the social category as well. I think Willie got that part of his personality from his mother. It’s funny because people look at the Robertsons and think Jase and Phil are just alike, and they are certainly similar in their love for ducks. But when we took the personality test, we saw that Jase’s personality is much more like his mother’s. So I guess it makes sense that Phil and Jase get along so well in the duck blind. They made a good team, just like Phil and Kay do at home. Kay has always said that Willie is a lot like Phil and even calls him “Phil Jr.” at times. While I wouldn’t go that far, I definitely saw the similarities. They both have strong, charismatic personalities. They are both big-picture guys with big ideas and deep beliefs. Whatever either of them is going in life, he does it all the way, and they are both very opinionated, which can sometimes be a challenge. Phil and Willie haven’t always been as close as they are now. As they grew, they recognized the attributes they have in common and learned to value one another’s differences and strengths. Willie says it couldn’t have happened until after he was thirty, though. He needed to grow up and mature, and Phil has gotten more relaxed as he’s gotten older. Willie loves to hunt with his dad and brothers, but there have been times when he’s had a hard time sitting in Phil’s blind. You can only have one leader in the duck blind, only one man who lines up the men and yells, “Cut ‘em!” when it’s time to shoot. Willie and Phil have both always been leaders, whether it’s in the blind or in business.

Before dinner on the last night, while the guys were on the deck drinking whiskey and talking about Elon Musk, Liz and I went on a walk and she told me about a dream she’d been fixating on, a dream about what happens after mothers die. “We are all in this place. All the mothers who had to leave early.” (I would repeat her unforgettable phrasing—had to leave early—to Edward as we went to sleep that night.) “It’s huge, big as an airplane hangar, and there are all these seats, rows and rows, set up on a glass floor, so all the moms can look down and watch their kids live out their futures.” How dominant the ache to know what becomes of our children. “There’s one rule: you can watch as much and as long as you want, but you can only intervene once.” I nodded, tears forming. “So I sat down. And I watched. I watched them out back by the pool, swimming with Andy, napping on a towel. I watched them on the jungle gym, walking Lambchop, reading their Lemony Snicket books. I watched Margo taking a wrong turn or forgetting her homework. I watched Dru ignoring his coach. I watched Gwennie logging her feelings in a journal. And every time I went to intervene, to warn one of the kids about something or just pick them up to hold them, a more experienced mother leaned across and stopped me. Not now. He’ll figure it out. She’ll come around. And it went on and on like that and in the end,” she said, smiling with wet eyes, “I never needed to use my interventions.” Her dream was that she had, in her too-short lifetime, endowed her children with everything they’d require to negotiate the successive obstacle courses of adolescence, young adulthood, and grown-up life. “I mean, they had heartaches and regret and fights and broken bones,” she said, stopping to rest. “They made tons of mistakes, but they didn’t need me. I never had to say anything or stop anything. I never said one word.” She put her arm through mine and we started moving again, back toward the house, touching from our shoulders to our elbows, crunching the gravel with our steps, the mingled voices of our children coming from the door we left open.

I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can’t be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth, Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that’s the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don’t mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can’t lie down so innocent on objects made by man,” I said to him. “In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God’s wrath on page one and Wieboldt’s sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?” Kayo said, not much surprised by this, “What you are talking about is moha—a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another.

A bad guy? He smothered a smile at the naiveté of the question. “Do you wish I was your heroic rescuer? That’s cute.” “You didn’t do any rescuing. That part was all me.” “I’m no one’s hero anyway. Most label me an abomination. It’s my lot in life. I do scary things beyond what you could even imagine. It’s why you’re best off if you get out of the car. Go your own way.” “You do scary things? Like pick up a girl and murder her on the side of the road?” “Are you frightened?” “I’m terrified,” she said sarcastically without a hint of fear. “You lumped us together earlier when you said ‘our kind,’ so I assume I also do bad things.” “You killed that guy in the club.” “You mean the one who planned to shoot you in the heart?” “I’m not saying I feel bad for him. Just pointing out murder’s not exactly a heroine move.” “So I’m a bad girl? You like that, don’t you?” She stared out the window, her lips compressed against a smile. “I like it.” Holy shit, she was incredible. He dealt with the deadliest of preternatural creatures on a daily basis. His servitude to the Crown required he hunt down and destroy paranormal threats bent on power, greed, or world domination. But he’d never encountered someone like her.

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on. It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t

Since we were on Everest, many other climbers have succeeded on the “big one” as well. She has now been scaled by a blind man, a guy with prosthetic legs, and even by a young Nepalese teenager. Don’t be fooled, though. I never belittle the mountain. She is still just as high and just as dangerous. Instead, I admire those mountaineers--however they have climbed her. I know what it is really like up there. Humans learn how to dominate and conquer. It is what we do. But the mountain remains the same--and sometimes she turns and bites so damn hard that we all recoil in terror. For a while. Then we return. Like vultures. But we are never in charge. It is why, within Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky--lest we forget. This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain, and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it. If the peak hints at you to wait, then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might. The weather can change in minutes, as storm clouds envelop the peak--and the summit itself stubbornly pokes into the fierce band of jet-stream winds that circle the earth above twenty-five thousand feet. These 150+ mph winds cause the majestic plume of snow that pours off Everest’s peak. A constant reminder that you have got to respect the mountain. Or you die.

Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

with his daughter.” “Incest?” Rainie looked at Quincy incredulously. “Jesus, SupSpAg, how do you sleep with that mind?” “I can’t be sure,” Quincy said modestly, “but it has all the classic signs. Domineering father alone with his young daughter for the first thirteen years of her life. Seems very doting on the outside. I’m sure if you conducted further interviews you’d find plenty of neighbors and teachers telling you how ‘close’ Mr. Avalon and his daughter were. How ‘involved’ he was in her life. But then she hits puberty and the jig is up. To continue risks pregnancy, plus she’s starting to get a woman’s body, and many of these men aren’t interested in that. So Mr. Avalon goes ahead and takes a wife, some poor, passive woman to serve as window dressing and help him appear suitable to the outside world. Now he clings to the fantasy of what he once had. And protects it jealously.” “Does Mr. Avalon have access to a computer?” Rainie asked Luke. “In his office.” She turned to Quincy. “If Mr. Avalon was involved with his daughter, would he have problems with her relationship with VanderZanden?” “He’ll have problems with any of her relationships. In his mind, she’s his.” “That’s it then. He found out, got angry—” “And got an alibi,” Luke interrupted flatly. They looked at him sharply. He was nearly apologetic. “I tried, Rainie. I stayed in town till eleven last night trying to break this guy’s story. I’ve probably pissed off every blue blood in the city and it still holds. Mr. Avalon was in a business meeting all day Tuesday. His secretary swears

People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, how much simpler our lives would be if we could date each other. That delousing kit cost eleven dollars! “Do you ever think it would be easier if we could go out with girls?” I said aloud. Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I find most of the lesbians I know a bit intimidating,” she said, finally. “And I don’t really share their aesthetic sense—or they seem not to value aesthetics that much. I just don’t think I’d fit in. Especially since I’m always lusting after boys.” That was something I thought about, too: the physical response I felt to Ivan, the dull electric jolt, some heavy, slow machinery starting to turn in my chest and between my legs. I had never felt those things with relation to a girl. On the other hand, I usually hadn’t felt them in Ivan’s presence, either; it was more when he wasn’t there. And how much was that physical feeling worth? Was it really enough to counterbalance all the disadvantages? You couldn’t just talk to Ivan like he was a normal person; he didn’t hear, or he didn’t understand, or he went off somewhere and you couldn’t find him. Also, all his friends thought I was crazy. Instead of dealing with those people, how much more fun and relaxing it would be to pet Svetlana’s shining golden hair, to tell her how pretty she was and to watch her get more pretty, as she always did when someone complimented her. Her body wanted to be complimented, and I knew just what to tell her, so why couldn’t I? “But girls are more beautiful, and so much easier to sort of negotiate with. And the lust for boys never seems to work out well for me. So it just feels like girls are at least something to think about.” Again, Svetlana didn’t answer right away. “I would feel squeamish with anything beyond kissing and playing with each other’s breasts,” she said after a moment. I realized that I, too, had only been thinking about kissing and playing with each other’s breasts. What else did lesbians even do? Other than oral sex, which was apparently horrible. The way people talked about it on sit-coms: “Does he like . . . deep-sea diving?” You had to be altruistic to do it—a generous lover. That said, oral sex with a boy also seemed likely to be disgusting. Guys themselves seemed to think so. Wasn’t that why they went around yelling “cocksucker” at people who cut them off in traffic? “Do you not feel squeamish when you think about sex with a guy?” I asked. “I do, but it feels exciting. The idea of being penetrated and dominated.

There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery. The Second Amendment is in the Constitution because Patrick Henry (Virginia’s governor at the time that the Constitution was being debated) and George Mason (the intellectual leader of the movement against the Constitution, the “anti-federalists”) won a debate against James Madison (the guy who wrote most of the Constitution and its original ten amendments). Henry and Mason wanted the Second Amendment in there to guard against slave revolts. Although, overall, white Southerners outnumbered their enslaved populations, that numerical advantage did not hold in every region. In parts of Virginia, for instance, enslaved Black people outnumbered whites. Predictably, whites were worried about slave revolts because, you know, holding people in bondage against their will is not all that easy to do without numerical and military superiority. The principal way of quelling slave revolts was (wait for it): armed militias of white people. Gangs of white people roving around, imposing white supremacy, is nothing new. But the slavers worried that the new Constitution put the power of raising militias with the federal government and not with the individual states. That would mean that the federal government, dominated by Northerners, could choose to not help the South should their population of oppressed humans demand freedom. In a May 2018 New York Times article, Professor Carl Bogus of Roger Williams University School of Law explained the argument like this: During the debate in Richmond, Mason and Henry suggested that the new Constitution gave Congress the power to subvert the slave system by disarming the militias. “Slavery is detested,” Henry reminded the audience. “The majority of Congress is to the North, and the slaves are to the South.” Henry and Mason argued that because the Constitution gave the federal government the power to arm the militias, only the federal government could do so: “If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither—this power being exclusively given to Congress.” Why would the federal government “neglect” a Southern militia? Henry and Mason feared the Northerners who “detested” slavery would refuse to help the South in the event of a slave uprising. Madison eventually gave in to the forces of slavery and included the Second Amendment, along with his larger Bill of Rights.

Would the pair of you like to turn your backs so you exclude us more effectively?” Jode asks. “We’re just adding to the list.” I hold up my journal. “Daryn.” Gideon shakes his head, pretending to be disappointed. “It’s our list.” “A list?” Jode leans back, resting his head against his bag. “What’s this list about?” Rather than explain it, I just lean over and give it to him. Gideon puts his hand over his heart and winces. “I hate sharing, Martin.” I lean up, whispering in his ear. “Some things are only for you.” He gives me a long unblinking look that makes my face burn and my body feel light and hot. “This is an outrage,” Jode says dryly. “I’m in here once and Gideon is here … two, three, four times?” “Three,” I say. “The last one doesn’t really count.” “Oh, it counts,” Gideon says. “How many times am I in it?” Marcus asks. “Are you guys making this a competition?” “Of course.” “Yeah.” “Definitely. And I’m dominating.” “For real,” Marcus says. “How many times am I on there?” “Once, like me. For your winning smile.” Jode closes the notebook and tosses it to Marcus. “But don’t let it go to your head. Gideon’s arse has a spot on the list as well.” Gideon looks at me and winks. “Like I said, dominating.” “Dare, you got a pen?” Marcus asks. This catches me by surprise for a moment. “Yes.” I toss it to him, smiling. This is perfect. Whatever he adds, it’s already perfect. As Marcus writes, Jode leans back and gazes up at the trees. “You’re thinking it’ll be five for you after this. Aren’t you, Gideon?” “You know me well, Ellis.” Marcus finishes writing. He sets the pen in the fold and hands the journal to Gideon. I lean in and read. Marcus’s handwriting is elegant cursive—almost astonishingly elegant. And what he wrote is, as expected, perfection. Even better is that Gideon reads it aloud. “‘Twenty-eight. The family you make.’” He looks at Marcus. “Damn right, bro. This is the best one here.” He looks at me. “Tied with fourteen.” “Ah, yes,” Jode says. “Gideon’s Super Lips.” Marcus shakes his head at me. “Why?” “It was a mistake. I wrote it before the list went public. What’s your addition, Jode? It can be anything. Anything that has significance to you.” “Full English breakfast,” he says, without missing a beat. “Bacon, eggs, sausages, baked beans, grilled tomato, mushrooms, toast, marmalade. With tea, of course. One of life’s undeniable pleasures.” My mouth instantly waters. “Well, it’s no trail mix, but all right.” I add “English Breakfast” to the list.

They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided. He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try. The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big. Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes. She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?" Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered. "He is famous here?" "Not very." "I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?" "Personality?" I offered. "Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.

they dictate how each person is to behave and what he can and cannot feel. The most common role distortions of the preschool years are: Superresponsible One, Overachiever, Rebel, Underachiever, People Pleaser (nice guy/sweetheart), Caretaker, and Offender. This lack of individual identity is why dysfunctional families are dominated by toxic guilt. Healthy guilt is the guardian of conscience. It develops out of a healthy sense of shame; it is the moral dimension of healthy shame. The toddler’s shame is premoral and mostly preverbal.

As Guy Bois has written, the Roman town was a parasitic community, not a center of production: “In the Roman period, the dominant function of a city was of a political order. It lived primarily from the revenues draining into it from its surroundings by the agency of the land tax.… The town, in effect, produced little or nothing for the benefit of the surrounding countryside.

Unassertive men too scared to express their true feelings display incredible mental weakness to women. Men who are too scared to stand up for themselves or do what they want to do because it might potentially upset someone else display similarly undesirable characteristics to women.

Patti Smith wrote to me in Amsterdam in 1971, and she said, 'I always loved you because you could find the laughter loophole in any tragedy.' If you're going to be up close with life, the one perk you get from experiencing pain is that you also get to experience what is hysterically funny about it. There's something just so absurd about life that is quirky and weird. For instance, there is something completely funny - a laughter loophole - in most of the rapes that happened to me. In Bad Reputation! I tell the story of this guy who tied my legs together, and I thought, 'Well, how's he going to rape me if he ties my legs together?' I guess everybody has those experiences. It's a way to maintain sanity. The reason why I chose realism was because I was just so stunned by how crazy real life is. I suppose because my early experiences were with camp - with Vaccaro, for example- everything has been a sideshow carnival. I wanted to show the ridiculousness of reality. (from an Interview with Dominic Johnson)

It’s not a tattoo people have on their foreheads labeling them as monsters. There’s this sliding scale to toxic masculinity. Over time you learn where these bros are on the scale. Do they make a couple of out of line comments and then backpedal when I call them out? Or are they the guys that make the waitress’s skin crawl by the way they talk to her? Do they think consent is optional and just a bunch of people being too sensitive? Then there are guys that just hide it well and you only see it slip every now and then. It’s confusing because, like Jake, getting women is not a problem for them. It’s not some resentment about rejection. It’s about conquering something, a need to dominate someone.

One of the core themes to emerge is that even while women are aware of their sexual rights their sexuality is still dominantly about  making themselves desirable to men. Women assess their body and their sexuality through a man’s eye. They want to please. Navtara, 19, says, ‘I sought appreciation in physical appearances . . . so if a guy was not making a move on me, I felt there is something wrong with me.’ Just

I… I don’t know. I was just suddenly worried. I mean, some men… some men have fantasies. They want it like that.” “And some men don’t.” He cups my cheek and meets my eyes soberly. “Sweetheart, men are as different from each other as women are. We don’t all want the same things. I’m not like the men who’ve used you in the past. I don’t want to use your body to feed my ego, and I don’t need to dominate you to feel like a man. I guess I’ve always been rather an old-fashioned guy. I married young and never felt the compulsion to sow a lot of wild, dirty oats. Until you, I didn’t have sex with anyone after Sarah and the boys died. I barely even felt the urges. I want…” He turns his head to the side for a moment like he’s almost embarrassed at himself. But he continues, “I want to love you, not possess you. This is me, love. Getting everything I want with you. Letting go completely. This is what it looks like for me.

Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.

He went to a doctor about his insomnia. The doctor gave Dahmer a prescription for Halcion, a sleeping pill. The drug, he said, worked dramatically. “It didn’t slowly put you to sleep; it knocked you out quickly.” He wondered what effect the drug might have on sexual partners, and brought crushed-up portions to the bathhouses. It worked like a charm. The drug rendered his partners unconscious, and Dahmer had his way with them. This satisfied his urge to dominate, as Dahmer now had complete control and did not have to reciprocate sexually in any way that he didn’t want. However, this solution was short lived because several of his pickups woke up with terrible headaches from the drug and complained. There was an episode where Dahmer gave a guy too much Halcion and he stopped breathing. Someone called an ambulance and the victim was revived, but after, management barred Dahmer from entering the bathhouse.

And while we’re on the subject, calling them mommy porn is a guy’s way of belittling a billion dollar, female dominated genre which outsells any other genre in the world.

Screen for troublemakers, and all will be well! Not only is the theory flawed on the practical level, but this doctrine of innocence is one of the engines of violence in America: an inducement to kill based on an illusion of purity. The good guy, it seems, is not the solution: he’s the problem. The first truth of the gun culture is a raging myth.

You guys don’t even have a red room,” Jess said, sighing dramatically. “What kind of Dominants are you?” “I would like a rainbow room, personally,” I said. “Red doesn’t work with my skin tone.

Building an emergency fund is perhaps the single best investment available. The first $1000 to $2000 in the bank results in a state of mind unavailable to the guy who has bad debt and lacks emergency funds. The person with a small cash cushion gets to sleep at night, knowing they can afford next month’s rent and their next meal.

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing — all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.

Andrew Willard Jones writes, Within the metanarrative of progress that underwrites liberalism, Christians are cast as the losing side and, I am afraid, there is no amount of maneuvering that can change that. In fact, our role in the drama is precisely this maneuvering. We are cast to fight a rearguard action: we steadily lose ground, but nonetheless put up a stubborn resistance. In the liberal march to freedom, we are the ever-retreating but completely necessary tyrants, the enemies of human rights against whom the freedom fighters heroically contend, the defenders of dogma against whom the courageous scientists struggle, the stuffy prudes against whom the free-spirited youth must battle. We have all seen multiple versions of this movie—in fact, this is the plot of nearly all our cultural productions. If this is indeed our role in the cultural narrative, new tactics will not save us. Devising new ways to “turn back the clock” or new arguments within the dominant discourse of freedom and rights, of religion and the State, is simply to continue to play the part of the loser in a liberal script acted out on a set constructed of modern concepts. To view ourselves as the retreating good guys is simply our role.

This man. What is it about him? God, he’s so… Impressive. Dominating. Forceful. I don’t know—there’s simply this presence about him I can’t ignore. Gravitas. That’s what it is, I suppose. He’s so substantial. So masculine. I think about the inane crap guys my age spout. They’re so full of swagger and hot air. Not Rafe. He doesn’t have any of that. I could sense the first time I set eyes on him that he has no need to prove himself. His self-confidence is of the quiet variety. But I’d guess it’s unwavering. And I’d bet the reason it’s unwavering is that he’s never had any reason to doubt it. I bet he gets what he wants. Especially when it comes to women.

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (the latter is still the primary mechanism for transferring class power from one generation to the next), along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by those two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains repressive and offers nothing but pseudo-gratifications. Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness—dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having – human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.

Where would the American feel dominant? This is a negotiation, we assume. He’d want a psychological advantage. He would want to be comfortable, and he would want the other guy to be uncomfortable.

You and I love in a culture where we gather in stadiums and around television for hours at a time to watch guys run around a field with a pigskin ball in their hands as they try to cross a white line. We express enthusiasm, emotions, and affection for football and other sports, and it begs the question, what would happen in our culture if the church prayed with such passion? What would happen if Jesus dominated our affections more than the superficial trivialities that garner our attention? What would happen if we spent hours before God praying on behalf of the church, the lost, and the poor around the world?

is too short for trying to be someone else or trying to please everyone

Your hard-to-resist charm makes you incredibly sexy and keeps guys coming back again and again. You are dominant in AND out of the bedroom, making you a hot commodity to a lot of guys. Your quote should match the confidence you have in yourself because THAT is what makes you sexiest. You don't need to beat around the bush when you want someone to know how you feel about them, so saying something direct is exactly what you would do. Guys flock to you because you make honestly look so sexy.

With that in mind, Luke closed his eyes and thought determinedly of Dominic’s smile. The next morning, his father’s helicopter crashed in Colombia.

Life has hurt me. When life hurts you, which way do you go, up or down? When life hurts you what happens to a healthy body, a healthy mind? They gradually, gradually diminish. Evaporate. There was a false self. A Peter who believed in his power, that he could dominate any situation that he found himself in, that he could smoke and drink and be one of the guys but also a Lothario.

it seems that the original film is the best clue to what happened, as Steve Sailer notes that President Trump is like the emergence of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as The Destroyer at the end of Ghostbusters, except [instead of] one guy conjuring up the thought in his head, most of our cultural elite has been dreaming/dreading/exploiting the fear of the Coming of the Blond Beast for decades to justify their domination of power and thought. The counter-revolution … has triumphed.   Be careful what you dream of. To

Delicious Dialogue “We’ve all known the proverbial conversation hog who dominates a discussion and pays little notice to another person’s input. They’re so busy talking about themselves, we can barely slide a word in edgewise. Don’t be that guy!” “An engaging conversation is a two-way street. Learn to delight in dialogue to ensure mutual respect and consideration.

We’ve all known the proverbial conversation hog who dominates a discussion and pays little notice to another person’s input. They’re so busy talking about themselves, we can barely slide a word in edgewise. Don’t be that guy!

I knew the way these guys operated; I'd seen it over and over again. They had a need to manipulate and dominate their prey. They wanted to be able to decide whether or not their victim should live or die, or how the victim should die. They'd keep me alive as long as my body would hold out, reviving me when I passed out or was close to death, always inflicting as much pain and suffering as possible. Some of them could go on for days like that. They wanted to show me they were in total control, that I was completely at their mercy. The more I cried out, the more I begged for relief, the more I would fuel and energize their dark fantasies. If I would plead for my life or regress or call out for my mommy or daddy, that would really get them off.

Dear John’ Monologue   On the day I terminated our relationship, Anak and Taer were their usual spirited selves, doing their best to tempt me into a three-way liaison. They thought I was playing a dominance-and-submission game until I put a stop to their seduction with an authoritative stance. At that point, they turned sheepish, and I made them hear me out.               It was difficult delivering my ‘Dear John’ spiel, but I knew I had to do it. It was for the greater good after all. It was gruelling not to feel guilty when they looked so mousey and lost.               I said, “The two of you are sweet and accommodating, but you must realize our liaison must come to an end. I’ll be returning to Quebec, and you guys will have to make a life for yourselves here.”               “We go you to Quebec for you,” Taer replied in broken English.               “Yes, we go you Quebec,” Anak professed.               “I’m afraid that is not possible. I can’t look after you,” I expressed.               “Why no? We help in house,” chirped the older boy.               “Yes, we help in house,” seconded the younger one.               Those two made every conceivable excuse to hang onto me, envisioning me as their ticket out of the Philippines. I did everything in my power to end the affair sensibly, but my reasoning seemed to fly over their heads. I was left with no choice but to toss them out of my lodging. It was not a pretty sight when we finally parted ways. Before they left, they swore revenge and that I would not see the end of them.               The situation turned ugly.

So.....you’re the guy Maggie’s got the hots for.” Maggie rolled her eyes and dropped her head into her hands. Leave it to Shad to just come right out with it. From her dejected position, she couldn’t see Johnny’s response, but she felt his interest pique like a blow torch aimed right at her face. Her neck and cheeks flamed hot. “Johnny Kinross - in the flesh,” Shad was warming up to the subject now, his lines right out of a poorly-written made-for-TV movie. “You are Johnny Kinross, right? I mean...I never saw you. But I think we had a pretty good relationship.” Maggie sputtered, a laugh erupting from her chest. Shad swiveled his head and gave her his “Shut-up-woman!” lips and his “domineering male” chin thrust. He was talking again before Maggie could give him her “you’ve-got-ten-seconds-to-vacate-the-premises-before-I-cut-you” glare in response.

Remember, you met someone," Kane said. "I had second thoughts. Don't do this, Kane, I'm sorry. There I said it," Brian said. "Too late," Avery called out from behind Kane. Avery felt territorial and primal. He clenched his fists and dropped them into his pockets to keep from going after the guy. "That's not for you to decide," Brian shouted back at Avery. That got his attention. Avery's eyes narrowed, and he ripped his hands free of his slacks, moving around Kane, toward Brian. Brian backed the rest of the way out of the apartment, holding up his hands. Kane's hands were on Avery's chest, pushing him back, so he slammed the door shut with his foot. Avery locked the dead bolt in a show of dominance.

The ‘republican’ variant is that freedom must mean non-domination. Stemming from Aristotle, republican freedom requires freedom from potential domination as well as from actual domination by figures, institutions or processes of unaccountable domination.12 In other words, to the extent that authority figures or institutions could, if they wished, ‘arbitrarily interfere’ with a person’s ability to act or think (or develop), republican freedom is compromised.13 This view is linked to the argument, derived in part from the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the very existence of property can destroy or compromise such freedom. After all, if a few families own all the land, to talk of everyone having freedom would be absurd. Robust republican freedom could be said to exist if everyone in society could avoid or escape from unwanted interference, and also from the rational fear of it. To be free, a person must be free of the will of others. If I fear rationally and reasonably that, were I to offend someone, my freedom would be lost, I am not free. By contrast with libertarianism, which sees all government as compromising freedom, republican freedom requires and depends on government. But it must be government that is democratically accountable and geared to the promotion of full freedom, defined primarily as the ability of the most vulnerable in society to avoid domination. Republican freedom also requires government to ensure that the choices of the powerful cannot block others from making choices themselves. If

There it is, forming behind us: The Fat Blue Phalanx. All the smug self-satisfied maleness you can drink, and free refills at the station house. It's all I can see in cops, that patriarchal bullshit that will never yield to a contract of mutual respect. That grunting fuck-obsessed inability to deobjectify you and treat you as a person, it’s a subclass of male that will never, ever change, no matter what. There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they’d whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides you’re not supposed to let it get to you. You’re supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren’t allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don’t like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don’t) who if you’re lucky will offer to go beat them up knowing you won’t take him up on it because you know perfectly well he’d probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they’ve been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and the grime of uneducated testosterone. its thanx to our weak boyfriends that we have cops at all, surrogate cock and balls to maintain ‘order’, whatever that is. Or was. And where does it really leave you as a prisoner of the suburbs? Fuming over some tiny incident that the aggressors have already forgotten about, but you have the sinking feeling you've just sniffed the true underbelly and the aroma was not what you get in Calvin Klein ads. Scratch 'n' sniff, scratch 'n' sniff, peel the onion... will you ever get down to the reality of what this place is about? And I know I shouldn't brand individual cops with the big blue brush but in my mind these guys are a symbol of the whole iron-cage Boy system that makes me always a victim, no matter what I do, it's a cage I can't escape. I'm the little princess. They dominate, they aggress, they protect.

We don’t say “Hey, guys, you don’t show your masculinity by publicly dominating and embarrassing a woman.” We tell women “Dress in a manner wholly unacceptable to you to avoid being raped.” Because, of course, they have responsibility in this, too.

Liberty as we understand it in the United States has been the exception not the rule — and its survival over the past three centuries the consequence not of happy foreordination but of the good guys in the world having enjoyed unmatched military and financial supremacy. Having known little else, the historically myopic will find it tempting to presume that our present global order represents the immutable state of nature. It does not. Just as the primary reason that the forces of liberty have prevailed since 1815 is that they have acquired and maintained unrivaled power, the relative peace and buzzing international trade that we currently enjoy is the product not of the West’s moral dominance, but of the prepotency first of the British Empire and then — after a seamless and invisible handover — of an ascendant United States.

I've been on the warpath for forty years. I've probably put a thousand men in the ground. Women too. Hell, probably some kids mixed in along the way, although I can't say for sure. And I know some good guys got caught in the crossfire, too; cops, security guards, watchmen, even your run of the mill innocent bystanders. Wrong place at the wrong time and all that.” I stared off into space. “Why are you telling me this?” “Because you need to remember I'm not a nice guy. I'm not far removed from that thing in your dream. Call me a war criminal and you'd probably be more right than wrong. I always thought at the time I was working for the good guys, fighting for the right reasons. But the Cold War was still a bloody business and I was always there at its bloodiest. Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Iran, India, Brazil, Russia...I've been all over, always where the fighting was the dirtiest. Tore up some places here in the States as well. Things the press was threatened to keep quiet about, or bribed into silence, or worse.” “Just keeps getting better and better,” I said. “And just remember, I'm one of the good guys. Some of the animals I worked with, they make your run of the mill concentration camp guard look like he's gentle enough to run a daycare center. Some of those older guys, they probably were concentration camp guards back in the day. Plenty of the grey-hairs I went into the field with, those were the war addicts, the guys who couldn't go back home. Saw it after 'Nam, too; men who lived for death, lived for the blood and the thrill of the kill. They weren't much better than the dummies we were gunning after. Matter of fact, most of them were probably worse. At least the guys at the end of my gun usually died for a cause: communism, Islam, even plain old fashioned world domination. Some of the savages I fought with, they killed simply for the fun of it. The money? That was just gravy.” I turned to look at Richard, slouched in his rocker, hat pulled down low over his blue eyes. “So what about you? Killing for a cause, or was it the fun?” Richard finally turned and looked me square in the eye. “You ain't figured that out yet? I killed for profit, kid. And back in the day, business was good. Business was really good.

It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.

Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D. The