Note: This paper contains a lot of personal grievances near the end of the paper, especially starting at the "Social Conditions" section. The person I fell in love with was my professor in Eng 21 and Eng 143, Raymond "Mike" Falgui. His professor girlfriend he was dating at the time in 2017-2018 before 2018 (when I met him) was Audrey Rose Mirasol. I submitted [[All_Writers_GOTO_Hell.app]], an experimental work, to Paolo Marko Manalo for his CW 101 class in December 2018. I fully got over Mike somewhere around late November 2023 (thank heavens, that was too toxic for me). I am still looking for a publisher for [[All_Writers_GOTO_Hell.app]] and would like to publish with Gacha Press, if Paolo is up for it. Frankly, I owe him for traumatizing him with [[ALL_GO]]. In return, I would like his side of the [[ALL_GO debacle]]. Paper submitted to Dr. Marie Aubrey Villaceran for CW 199 WFW on 31 May 2022 --- **Porn the New Heroin: Retracing and Anticipating the Politics of Beauty, Desire, Envy, Fear, Fantasy, Escapism, and Sex to Apprehend the Pornographic Logic of Late Capitalism** Pornography: stumbling into this problem is like stepping barefoot on a hill of ants at your family potluck in the backyard. At some point between noticing the creepy-crawly sensations and the pricking and frenzied rubbing off, it becomes clear that a mistake has been made: the underestimation of the kind of power it holds in relation to size. The power to inflict a specific kind of suffering, a subjectively unrelatable one that is considered laughable and brushed aside as small. Here, a soothing ointment, now stop crying. Really, why be such a killjoy at an event that is supposed to be fun? Without porn, as the Avenue Q song says, the internet would not have existed at all (Baker).  **The Current Logic** To acknowledge that modern-day pornography is an intractable problem is a sobering first step toward change. But first, why the necessity for this change? Consider: is it not in a society’s best interest to care for its disabled? Disabled, that is, in the sense that individuals are no longer able to function in an optimal way neurologically, with their cognitive abilities impaired or dulled, their priorities irrationally arranged. The porn user or addict is regularly released into a field with a giant cornucopia: an attention economy of dopamine-rich pornographic stimuli, all fighting for his or her attention, which is a cognitive resource so easily manipulated by streams of viral and popular (especially if sexual in nature), yet mindless, usually inane content, though “[we] face attention’s scarcity every day; while “paying attention” to one thing we ignore others” (Berkeley Economic Review Staff). What are we really ignoring as our minds pay intangible units of attention to the wide breadth of unimportant and non-urgent stimuli, and for what reasons do we stay attached and dependent to them?  “Attention economy” is a term coined by economist, psychologist, and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, who said that “attention [is] the “bottleneck of human thought” that limits both what we can perceive in stimulating environments and what we can do.” Moreover, he posited that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” and “multitasking is a myth” (Berkeley Economic Review Staff). It is the limited nature of our attention spans that makes us valuable to various profit-seeking entities, individual or corporate, who know this fact all too well as they compete for its maximum exclusivity. A woman, for instance, who does not really want to make her partner buy a product, but to keep his attention off porn in order to prioritize their relationship’s intimacy, will be hard-pressed to find that she cannot stop him, despite her repeated pleas and concerns, despite her compromise and attempts to beautify herself. He is ignoring her, his real partner, for mindless, one-sided sex with porn. Meanwhile, the pornographic menu grows exponentially away from reality. Deepfake porn videos of your favorite actress who has not consented to her face being transplanted onto pornstars’ bodies to mimic an uncanny likeness. TikTok “thirst traps” of women vying for likes by dancing like strippers, taking advantage of filters, lighting, angles, and their audience’s eager, communally sanctioned readiness, on an app that supposedly prohibits sexual content. Actual strippers on TikTok advertising their OnlyFans, “getting the bag,” and actually thinking that exposing themselves to minors is okay because it helps their exposure (Awobbie). Women who post nudes for attention and who get a kick out of telling men they interact with to ignore their wives and think of them instead (see fig. 3 and fig. 4). Deviant avenues like subreddits where women encourage men to participate in “neglect your wife” challenges (see fig. 5). Feminist critics who support sex work by spreading pseudo-empathetic messages and misinformation that criticize bills that seek to put controls in place to prevent exploitation and trafficking, the dissemination of child porn and revenge porn, and abuse of porn sites (Valens qtd. in Cox), that these identity verification requirements, measures required by the bill for adult performers on various websites, “do not solve online sexual exploitation,” as if its flaws cancel out all the good it would contribute toward ending sexual exploitation, as if online sexual exploitation is not effectively inherent in the nature of their “work” that promotes addiction to a product that is often produced under the influence of drugs, coercion, duress, and desperation. It would not be unreasonable to see pornography as a drug, and its manufacturers, drug peddlers (see fig. 2), predators who prey on human weakness and libido for profit. A drug that predictably lobbies for itself and its ability for virulence and widespread acceptance.  A normative statement like, “that is evil,” is bound to get heckles (or silent agreement: eh, what can you do about it?). And yet encounters with actual evil are met with excitement and encouragement. These sex workers on various social media websites, apps, and porn websites have the lion’s share of the scarce, limited attention of women’s partners everywhere, and they cannot see how it is wrong, nor do they really care if they do see the damage inflicted. It is a travesty unfolding in plain sight. The other pertinent questions, not necessarily practical: how has the world swallowed this cultural message; how did we get here; and most importantly, how, if (at all) possible, can we get out?  Fig. 1.  u/Awobbie. “Other Comments in the Thread Indicate an Addiction to the Attention she Received.” Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 2. RedElephantWhale. Mar. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  Fig. 3. sparkler39. Mar. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  In a response to a Reddit post (CryptographerFew1323) that calls for the accountability of women or sex workers who go into porn, user sparkler39, a moderator of the Love After Porn subreddit and “Partner of a PA” (porn addict) outlines this encouragement of evil immorality, a powerful enemy hiding behind the shield of protection of fourth wave feminism, or, at the risk of oversimplification, the “girl boss” female empowerment brand of feminism that seeks profit at all costs.   Fig. 4. CryptographerFew1323. Mar. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 5. CryptographerFew1323 and vegantacos441. “Replies to sparkler39.” Mar. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  **Pornography as a Superstimulus** Nobel Prize-winning ethologist, Nikko Tinbergen, defines a supernormal stimulus as a stimulus that “evokes a much larger response than one that has evolutionary significance” (Gottman). A supernormal stimulus causes decreased interest in normal stimuli. In his “Open Letter to Porn,” Dr. Gottman includes Tinbergen’s study of male stickleback fish, territorial creatures who fight male rivals during mating season. In an experiment, an object with a redder-than-normal belly, more saturated than the natural color found in the fish, is placed within the vicinity of the sticklebacks. They attacked the fake fish and stopped pursuing their real male rivals. What provoked the reaction was not the normal stimulus anymore, but the supernormal.  Porn actors, people who promote and distribute their sensual/sexual media and themselves as products to be consumed by the viewer, can be conceived as both drug peddlers and drugs. Internet porn, which is huge leaps above nude magazines like Playboy, offers an unprecedented amount of addiction-forming potential because of its endless novelty, or the ability for a user to click on one image to another (Free Medical Education). While magazines offer variety, it is important to note that moving pictures like films are effortless in that they are in-your-face depictions, as opposed to static pictures that make use of the viewer’s imagination, the use of which requires more effort (barrier to entry), though people who exchange money for porn on websites such as OnlyFans or camming sites despite the abundance of free content do so because of reasons like: exclusivity or the “personal touch,” the feeling that something is done for you, customized videos for specific or uncommon fetishes, or to support their favorite pornstar (Deleted Reddit User et al.).  In the educational animated video series, “Your Brain on Porn,” by the FreeMedEducation YouTube channel, it is shown that porn can also escalate quickly to more kinky or shocking material, and one does not need to have an addictive personality or genetic predisposition to addiction to be hooked. Porn, as it is presented in the series, is a superstimulus that overrides normal restraint and keeps the user coming back for more. Moreover, the brain, as it is now, not much different from our ancestors’, was not built for porn. As one survives through caloric intake, the primitive brain binges on highly addictive substances like high-calorie junk food, because these high-calorie sources were relatively scarce before modernity. This behavior, reinforced again and again, leads to overconsumption. It is the same with the reproductive drive to make babies, a primary evolutionary priority. In the past, there was less variety in potential mates, but now, it is possible to find and “copulate” with more attractive people in one session of porn viewing than in our ancestors’ lifetimes, and unlike junk food, one can never be satiated. It is clear that the brain has not evolved to handle heavy porn use. Porn is so stimulating because it takes advantage of a primitive subconscious program: the Coolidge effect (Free Medical Education). A rat experiment was conducted: the pairing of a male rat with a female rat. It was found that after the male rat mated with the female rat, the male then got tired with the female, however, when presented with a new female, the rat was invigorated once again and mated with the new female, going through an endless cycle of copulating with a new female again and again until it was exhausted. The Coolidge effect is a mammalian genetic program whose purpose is to increase genetic diversity or variety of male offspring, leading to questions of nature versus nurture; free will and agency versus systemic problems and phenomena; and the line between morality and amorality.  Another study was done with rams, measuring the time to ejaculation against female presentation. When presented with the same female to copulate with over and over again, the time to ejaculation gradually increased until it took eighteen minutes. A ram lives for twelve years, and eighteen minutes is equivalent to two hours in human time, hence, it would be practical to bring in a new female each time to efficiently produce offspring. When presented with new females, the rams ejaculated quickly because they were more excited. The Coolidge effect, then, can be thought of as a declined interest in the present sexual partner and renewed sexual interest in a new sexual partner (Free Medical Education). However, what is currently happening to society right now is that this declined interest in a partner they have in reality is actually because of renewed sexual interest in a new virtual sexual partner, spurred on by male behaviors encouraged by the social acceptability of porn use and the addictive superstimulus that is porn itself.  The awareness that there is an available sexual partner just a Google search away is enough; most who use porn today have been doing so since their teens, and this constant consciousness (or subconsciousness) of availability, with low barrier to entry, means that anyone who desires an exclusive and fulfilling sexual relationship today is faced with an impossible standard. Knowing that it takes more effort to keep an actual sexual relationship exciting even as partners work against the Coolidge effect, coupled with the knowledge that there is a no-effort, but more exciting (novelty, the ability to see more specific or unusual visual angles), more satisfying (fulfilling exact physical preferences, positions, fetishes), and more addicting option (more motivation to use repeatedly, leading to reinforced behavior) means that exclusive sexual relationships in the “real world” are in deep trouble, especially as pornographic material becomes less “on screen” and more “real world”; it is projected that virtual reality (VR) porn will be a $1 billion business by the year 2025 (“The Most up-to-Date Pornography Statistics”). Is it possible that as a society, we have now become the stickleback fish, who are in a great far-reaching experiment, where superstimuli like porn are designed and produced by economic demand, an eager labor force (low barrier to entry and high reward), and technological advances leading to our ruin? Another experiment was done with monkeys in which they were given fruit juice (Free Medical Education). The monkeys paid to see female monkey bottoms with fruit juice, essentially giving up a valuable resource for porn. The reward circuity, or the reward center, connects the brain’s cerebral cortex (the part that controls planning, thinking, and morality) to the limbic system, the part that governs emotions such as fear, joy, anger, and most of our desires, drives, hunger, mate selection, and sexual urges. Dopamine represents the wanting or the drive, which makes us pursue things like orgasm, which feels good because of the opiates discharged during sexual release. Dopamine release is the chemical of motivation and reward. In the reward circuit, dopamine surges override feelings of fullness or satiety.  This is the frightening biochemical reality of the Coolidge effect: dopamine released with the same partner gradually decreases with time. This fact becomes especially worse when one considers how much porn people produce and consume—thirty-seven new porn videos are being produced daily in the United States; 28,000 people are watching porn at any given moment; approximately $3,000 is spent on pornographic material every second; 35% of all downloads on the internet are porn-related (“The Most Recent Porn Facts and Statistics (Updated 2021)”)—effectively tanking their interest in real-world partners. One clicks on new porn videos to get more dopamine surges, because dopamine is behind sexual desire as well as addiction. It not only changes behavior, but also changes the brain by abnormally raising levels of dopamine in response to anticipation of certain triggers, essentially paling other realistic or normal sources of joy. Addiction, then, is wanting something more but liking it less and less (one chases after a specific dopamine source and gets less of it gradually over time), leading to more shocking and kinky material (Free Medical Education).  In another study done on rats, a lever was designed to send a jolt of electricity to the rat’s reward circuit. The rat predictably hit the lever once it realized its novel control over the pleasure center of its brain, and kept hitting it and not stopping to eat, sleep, or have sex, a thousand times in an hour until it dropped dead (Free Medical Education). Dr. John Gottman, one half of The Gottman Institute along with his wife Dr. Julie Gottman, pursues knowledge through research and practice in relationships and sexuality. In his “Open Letter to Porn” in 2016, he has corrected his former recommendation of porn use to increase intimacy for couples who were struggling with intimacy after the birth of a child; now, he stands by research that confirms porn is indeed destructive to intimacy (Marshall). Scientists study rat behavior to seek ways of understanding and solving human behaviors, and these human behaviors are reflected in their experiments. Dr. Gottman states that when porn use is regular, a person actually turns away from intimate interaction. Like the rat with the lever, a porn user not only is in complete control of the sexual experience, as opposed to sharing it with a partner, but they are also operating off an unrealistic set of expectations: that sex will be under only one person’s control, and that their partner will always be immediately ready for it (like a pleasure lever).  The same experiment was done with an electric grid placed between the rat and the lever, the grid sending painful shocks to its paws. The rat crossed the grid to hit the lever, but it did not do the same with food as the reward. If one took the rat’s dopamine artificially, it would stop eating and starve to death, but would still like food yet have no motivation to get it, showing how the right level of dopamine is needed to function normally, with something as superstimulating as porn bound to wreak havoc on our baseline or optimal dopamine levels. As humans, the drive to reproduce is more salient to our genetic programming than acquiring money, food, and resources, which are things that are acquired and labored for in the pursuit of reproductive success, and porn’s instant sexually-arousing qualities and virtually direct current to our reward circuitry cause negative consequences like neglect of other things, anxiety disorders, and sexual dysfunction.  The desire to cut down on porn use is stemmed by unsuccessful attempts. Substance addictions, moreover, are different from behavioral addictions (Free Medical Education). Natural reinforcers are any activity that raises dopamine or causes dopamine release, with the reward circuitry evolving for humans to go after food and sex, and not drugs. With drugs, only 15% get addicted, while a much higher percentage of people become porn addicts. And yet, porn addictions are not given the same priority or negative publicity; these do not bring to mind consequences such as liver failure, cancer, organ failure, hypertension, or respiratory distress (Hilliard). Highly stimulating versions of sex can hook people even when not susceptible to substance addictions, and furthering the importance of this is porn’s ability to erode and drastically reduce quality of life, as long-term consequences include porn-induced erectile dysfunction; poor mental health; poor body image; anxiety disorders; reduction in grey matter; addiction itself (hence, wasted time and resources in pursuit of the dopamine surges); social isolation; mood disorders like irritability and mood swings; sexual objectification; risky and dangerous behavior that can lead to legal consequences; unhappy intimate partners; loss of sexual enjoyment; loss of trust and respect; increased interest in degrading, abusive, and/or illegal sex; self-loathing and feelings of guilt, shame, and disconnection from values, beliefs, and goals; and neglect of important areas of life like health, family (porn has been shown to cause a lack of interest in family and child-raising), work and school, finances, and spirituality (Malz qtd. in “Mental Effects of Porn” and “The Most up-to-Date Pornography Statistics”). Considering all of its potential dangers and consequences, porn use and production warrant a serious investigation.  **Community in Numbers** It was in 2022 when I joined a Facebook group, Tita Talks PH, comprised of Filipino women and some men who participate in discussions about all kinds of topics, ranging from family, to work, to personal lives and their specific life situations for which they ask for advice, opinions, and suggestions. What precipitated this study found its catalyst in immediate, local stories situated in my own country, where I found that almost everyone has only anecdotal knowledge to go on regarding their stories about partners who consume porn, break boundaries, and commit infidelity.  Fig. 6. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 7. Replies to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 8. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 9. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  A trend: “maybe” suggestions that only mask the true problems. A relationship problem is outlined by the poster, and people who do not know better try to make the poster feel as if it is not really a problem that is serious, and that this problem can be solved by some individual measures taken to buttress the failures of the other party in the relationship (see fig. 16, fig. 17, and fig. 19). Moreover, that these individuals have no knowledge of the systemic nature of their problem, that this is only a woman’s problem that can be solved through some teeth-gritting and self-care, and more consideration for their partner’s habits which they do not see as unhealthy, but which make them feel uncomfortable, and which their husbands or partners do not see as something harmful to their partners feelings or relationship (see fig.6) and which they excuse with the reasoning that porn is emotionally (or, for the sake of argument, instinctively, primitively, and hence, unquestionably) meaningless to them (as if women do not get upset when men physically engage with another woman on or off-screen; the women’s version of emasculation), is an abject injustice.  To start, why do women not question why it makes them uncomfortable in the first place, and if they do, why do they end up capitulating to comments that affirm that they are insecure or that they need to accept their partner’s habits? Where is the voice of reason who can give them enough insight into their partner’s eye-wandering and compulsive pornography viewing? The question, “Bakit ang bibilis ng mga lalaki bumigay sa tukso” or “Why are guys so easily and readily tempted?” only shows up in a non-porn infidelity post (fig. 10). Conversely, the temptation to cheat on their partners with porn is rarely confronted as a temptation itself, as if its entrenched pervasiveness is not something egregious due to its virtual medium. Hence, porn is not considered cheating because it is not tactile. It is no longer a temptation to do something potentially vastly hurtful to one’s partner, but a “coffee break” (Castleman). It is with these stories that my research project takes shape and forms its essential drive to educate and inform.   Fig. 10. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 12. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 13. Facebook replies to anonymous Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  Do men have the right to view porn if their partners do not provide them with sex? Do women run the risk of losing their partners to pornography’s clutches if they keep denying their partner’s desires? Do women have to compete with pornography’s appeal and the numerous visuals provided by other girls? Do these questions make porn producers and porn consumers uncomfortable; or worse, do they not care at all, like the morally bankrupt women at the start of this essay who even encourage their men to abandon their partners? But first, why is all the blame and responsibility placed on regular women and their ability to keep their partners’ attention (not the aforementioned)? To look at this problem from another angle, like what the previous commenter suggested (see fig. 13), we can ask the men themselves. What is it about porn that almost replaces the need for real women aside from it being a superstimulus? Why do men seek out pictures, videos, or visuals that provide endless amounts of dopamine with abandon, undoubtedly regardless of their partners’ feelings about their consumption? Are men simply not interested in their partners’ feelings, and what can this say about their entitlement to sexual superstimuli? Moreover, is there an ethical limit to the amount of content men are allowed to consume even though this superstimuli has already been proven experimentally to be detrimental to a relationship’s health? Why are women not angered enough? Why are men given all these allowances to pursue pornographic content to every corner of cyberspace to their heart’s content?  Fig. 14. Replies to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 15. Viy Ivy’s response to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 16. Katrina Rose Concepcion’s response to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 17. Facebook replies to anonymous Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  Fig. 18. Facebook replies to Tita Talks PH post. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 31 Mar. 2022.   Fig. 19. Replies to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  Implicit is the idea that sex is offered and given by a woman to a man. It is not an activity that is shared co-equally between two partners who want to please each other. The man usually does not care about or know enough about pleasing his partner because the women they are with do not show the same amount of extreme enthusiasm for their penises, or gigil when it comes to sexual acts; never mind that this enthusiasm is unrealistic and usually faked for maximum addictive consumption by the viewers they produce it for. This quality of porn, on top of its already overwhelmingly addictive properties, not only feeds men the idea that desirable sex is passionately over-the-top to overblown proportions (hence, leading to discontent and despair over their real relationships), but also makes them unconsciously behave in a way that communicates to their partners that the attractive virtual woman is a far better sexual giver (though they are a random man on the internet and the pornstar is not giving it to them specifically), and that their partner, who is the actual giver of sexual attention, is not doing enough to please him or is not interested in him (thus turning him off; desire begets desire, and porn gives it in spades “first” [an illusion because of no-effort Google searches]). It is the woman’s job to be as appealing as possible, to the point of copying the aesthetics or the appeal of porn and debasing themselves just to please their man and keep them away from this other source of pleasure that will surely steal him away if she does not yield to this newfound demand for instant, perfected, fantastical pleasure at the click of a button.   Fig. 20. Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  Convenient (yet facile) siguro solutions aside, these women apparently do not know any other solution other than reluctant acceptance or assuring the poster of its normalcy, which is a fatalistic and ultimately, ruinous repression of better possibilities and options which they can develop, negotiate, and/or lobby for. For fear of retaliation, abandonment, social suicide, and all the other social costs of purveying unpopular and unpleasant ideas about their already dire realities, there is no more room for questions. No one has any knowledge of porn’s pernicious effects on not only their relationships, but also their brains, their bodies, and their ways of being and becoming as individuals and members of a society.   Fig. 21. Responses to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 22. Florian Valiente. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  According to Florian Valiente (see fig. 22), women have to be the ones to adjust. They have to resort to avoidance strategies and comforting thoughts (“Do not check his Reddit”; “Remove the thinking…”) that only present band-aid solutions to the discomfort caused by their partners’ pornography consumption. Further, within these women’s responses is an undertone of one-upmanship: who is more “secure” and able to make their partners happy by condoning pornography use, thereby lessening any conflict in the relationship and keeping it artificially happy (see fig. 21), normative statements that, unintentionally or not, pressure women to ignore their very real and visceral reactions against sexual infidelity, and the subsequent gaslighting or denial of their emotions, both by the porn addict/user, and the myriad of women who continue to perpetuate the idea that they are happy to oblige by allowing their partners to consume a superstimuli that is neither conducive to real intimacy, nor emotional and spiritual safety within the relationship (perhaps, because some of them do not experience as much anguish due to their privilege in their individual relative relational security—what some call “maturity”). Privacy rights become a concern because behaviors that threaten the relationship’s integrity do not warrant transparency with each other.  **Not Just Insecurity** Regardless of political leanings, porn poses a real threat to society (see fig. 23). It is not harmless nor trivial. Most importantly, it is only going to get worse as technology improves (see fig. 24).   Fig. 23. whimsicalwomon. 21 Aug. 2020, Tumblr, whimsicalwomon.tumblr.com/post/626995503417147392/i-wish-people-realized-that-the-people-in-their. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.  Fig. 24. Posted by u/MarineGoat. Written by bi-fly-and-shepherds-pie. “Porn vs. romance novels.” 27 May 2021, Reddit, [www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/nm4ul8/porn_vs_romance_novels/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/nm4ul8/porn_vs_romance_novels/). Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  **An Addict’s Economy and Areas of Non-knowledge** According to Kimberly Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper, pornography might be a symptom of something larger. That statement is foreboding as it is reassuring, in the sense that it affirms its status as an addiction that de facto disables the addict, whilst reminding us that it is potentially deadly to a society that refuses to acknowledge the damage and chaos it brings. “No one wants to study porn” (Free Medical Education), yet it is a symptom of a deep societal gulf of non-knowledge on human nature and the interplay of good and evil. Hence, it deserves all the best minds’ attention. By solving it, it would be unsurprising to find that one might be led to more discovery in different fields, just as the microwave oven was discovered by accident (Blitz).  **Personal Grievances (Social Conditions)** ***It Starts Young*** I was so young when it started: my own first stirrings of sexual awakening. It was not unwelcome and I did not feel threatened. I do not remember what age I was, but I had watched Charlie’s Angels, the scene where the three angels went undercover as strippers. Maybe it was the transgressive nature of it; I had been raised Christian, and I knew already that what I saw was not for my kind. Or maybe it was their movements and costumes, that they could move so sensually to the suggestive music—and these had been alien concepts beforehand. I had no framework or frame of reference to understand what had happened, but I knew I wanted more of it. I wanted to be them. They were women, agents, who had power, and along with this power, a new, sexual dimension. They could control men’s minds and distract them. And of course, there was the eroticism, the sensuality in how their bodies moved and their faces looked as they communicated with their desired audience.  I was nine or ten, when I watched High School Musical with my peers. The Filipina lead actress, Vanessa Hudgens, had been embroiled in a scandal: somebody leaked her nude photos. I saw these photos out of curiosity, experiencing confusion: was I attracted to this because I was bisexual, or was it because she was transgressive? In the movie, she is portrayed as this innocent nerdy math whiz, someone whom I could relate to, and aspired to be: she catches the eye of Zac Efron’s character, Troy Bolton, who is the high school heartthrob. When the pictures got out, I felt vicarious pleasure: as if I was her and had taken gorgeous pictures of my nude or semi-nude body for a boyfriend in real life (who was also Zac Efron).  This was just the beginning of my virtual sexuality taking shape. I did not consider myself, that is, my real self, a sexual being, when I was young. I did not look like a girl and had looked more like my dad, and being in a girl’s body did not help. I did not dress in girly clothes and was content with gender-neutral clothing. My sister was the real girl, because she looked like my beautiful mom. So I buried that part of myself and was content with a fantasy. I had busied myself with schoolwork until I reached college when I rediscovered hardcore pornography and became addicted to it, or at least, dependent on it for some kind of virtual release, to the detriment of my mental health and my grades (I had once discovered it through Tumblr and Reddit gifs in high school but it did not seriously affect me yet).  I could not obtain sexual relationships with others, so I filled that need by transplanting my agency onto a beautiful pornstar who could experience pleasure, someone who deserves it because she is beautiful. I had no awareness of this dangerous underlying logic until the age of twenty-four, when I finally confronted myself about my sexuality. Now, I consider myself nominally bisexual because for whatever reason, my Christian background, poor self-esteem, childhood experiences with porn, porn addiction as a way to salve my shattered self-worth, and a couple of other mental illnesses have all converged to develop a kind of sexuality that results in heterosexual attraction in real life, and erotic fixation towards the same sex when it comes to the realm of bodies and sensual movements in the virtual space, or in porn. I would even go so far to say that this is a porn-specific sexuality and orientation, because I do not experience attraction, sexual or romantic, to women in real life. However, I look at the woman in porn because I see myself as her.  ***Grief and Anger*** It was in 2018 when I developed romantic feelings for someone I held in high regard.  He was someone who was flawed, perhaps he had interpersonal troubles which I related to, a nerdy know-it-all. He was also admired by many, an authority figure, someone who could not possibly know or understand the depths to which I descended because of what I had discovered about him. Because of my nosiness I had looked him up on dozens of websites and consumed in my own compulsive way, his very nature of being from other people’s points of view, attempting to gravitate toward the essence of who he was, because it was not possible nor acceptable for me to develop anything tangible with him.  This was until I found his personal online account(s). One of them, an alter account, I had been sure was his, and it contained an astonishing amount of porn. Somebody had knocked him off the pedestal I put him on, and it was me. And it was his Facebook likes, the dozens of liked pages of pornstars, sexy hubadera dancers or sex workers who dance on social media, bar girls’ pages, men’s clubs’ pages, Hooters (an American breastaurant chain), Wowowee/Eat Bulaga! girls, models/beauty queens, and to my own specific horror, the Facebook page, Liza Soberano Kapamilya TV. She is my age and so unlikely to pique his interest, yet it was so devastatingly logical to my already fragile and unstable self-esteem: why, of course, she is half-American, has a posh slang accent, the perfect blend of Western and Filipina features, and was, at one point, the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” (The Independent Critic’s top spot in 2017).  Back then it wasn’t even the Mocha Uson Blog page that bothered me (I assumed he liked it because Mocha Uson was part of the Mocha Girls [a singing and dancing group]), which I shudder now to think of (although I found out that his brother wrote about Mocha Uson for a paper/study); nor was I really taken aback by the page called I Regret Voting for Donald Trump in 2016; nor the trollish posts about Leni Robredo, which I had rationalized were used to mask this alter account so no one could sniff him out. On top of all these triggers in his Facebook likes, I had virtually been friendless for years in college, and no one had really taken an interest in me or had made me feel attractive or worthy. This authority figure was someone whom I felt connected to, because he had been kind to me and had given me some attention as a polite professor who cared about his students, which I had eaten up because it was all I had, and I developed limerence, a condition marked by automatic and persistent compulsions to interpret any form of attention, shared coincidental events, even random social media posts, as signs of reciprocated love. The narrative I had escaped to was destroyed. Not only was it an identity crisis; I felt, as I obsessively perused his account, cheated on, tricked, deceived.  In almost four years I had not anticipated that another woman on the internet could experience the same thing as me, the ridiculous amount of pain and the caving in of my reality, but it had happened, and somehow I was forced to see this person from a different vantage point, as if someone had defamiliarized him for me, an ostranenie experience (see fig. 25):   Fig. 25. Ali_cja9 et al. “Found his porn actresses list.” Apr. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 26. One_Reflection_6884. Reply to “Anti-porn and relationships.” Apr. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022 Like the women in Tita Talks PH, I had no idea about the implications and dangers this addiction can pose, nor did I really care about other women who were hurt by porn use, and I had also assumed that all men use porn because of my experiences with witnessing fights between relatives, stories of church members, telling clues about my classmates through memes and small talk. I did not find it disturbing yet because I was not actively looking for a relationship with a guy who did not watch porn, nor was I in one, like One_Reflection_6884 (see fig. 26). But four years ago, I had been pulled in too deep into my special find, and having had no one to confide in, I kept it hidden as my feelings for him coexisted with this knowledge of his addiction and predilections. There had been no cognitive dissonance, because although I was disappointed that he was “just like all the other guys,” I had also been a pick me girl, someone who goes to great lengths to keep a man happy and/to stay in or obtain a relationship, just like the women in the Tita Talks PH comments section who encouraged the posters to accept their partners’ porn use. It was as if the special discovery had unlocked some vulnerable part of him that made me love him more, and I fell headlong into my own fantasies, growing deeper in love with my construct of him: that he had been unfairly wronged by women in real life, and that was why he turned to substitutes like porn and strippers and Liza Soberano.  I was a fangirl of the highest caliber, I thought to myself. I had the best detective skills, honed by my obsessive search for intimate connection. Charting the obsession to its logical end, I had developed a penchant for dancing TikTok sex workers, as if I had grown comfortable with the idea just to keep the part of him I had absorbed inside my mind happy and satisfied, because this introjected construct of him (a Dissociative Identity Disorder term: an introject is an alter based on fictional characters or people; a splitting of the mind into an introject that may or may not think they are real in a system of alters), told me I was never going to be enough. I kept him happy inside me by feeding the man in my head, and I did not know what to call this experience that had been made plain to me by Margaret Atwood (see fig. 27):  Fig. 27. Corvi-86. “Margaret Atwood Quote from The Robber Bride” Mar. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  Knowing the Coolidge effect, I am disturbed by how this person’s Feed on Facebook with countless pages is endlessly populated with women in various degrees and variations of obscene. A curated porn feed is what he has invented, and, if no longer stimulating enough, is supplied by more women as he cycles through them to maintain or increase the levels of dopamine.  Fig. 28. SunflowerinVirgo0903 et al. “Various comments in r/PornFreeRelationships.” Apr. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022. I could not tell which was worse, the fact that I had insistently pursued my line of inquiry so far that I figured out his specific type: big-breasted women and belly dancers who could hypnotize through their bodies’ sensual movements, namely, their hips, breasts, and stomach, and thighs, and practically everything that can be sexualized; or the fact that I had, unconsciously or not, known he was this type of person all along. Someone whose eyes lingered too long at women’s bodies. Someone who was happy to be controlled inordinately by their own visual sense so as to be fixated on these body parts to the point of addiction. And yet I had been so addicted to him myself, and to porn (though it was because of my low self-esteem-fueled masochism/vicarious pleasure), that I could understand this problem. What I could not understand, I resented: how could he require so many? He was my only one (I only watched porn because it filled a deep-seated need to be validated sexually—imagining I was the pornstar who pleased men and made them so happy). My worst nightmare had come true and I did not even know it too deeply yet because I had never been in a relationship myself: that one person will not adequately satisfy one’s desires, will not be enough, and this is truer for men. And this condition is worsened by the existence of porn.  My reality was split into pieces but I did not want to let him go in my mind. In fact, this only made me madder in my attempts to understand why he was that kind of person, as if I was after some grand mathematical formula that would solve him, which only sunk me deeper into my obsession because I knew that hypothetically, I will never be enough for this man, nor any man for that matter. Why any guy would be so free to amass a harem of women online, and how, given the right societal conditions, they would all clamor for harems for variety and excitement—these were all facts to me so unpleasant and mind-bogglingly, a kind of aphrodisiac, but for different reasons: they dragged me deep into a black hole of insecurity and restlessness that hungered for his approval; I would not let him down and simply had to get him back.  In my own creative ways of sublimating my anger and desire that same year, I had pressured a woman—who had by then, an ambiguous romantic link (I had assumed a lot of things) to the professor—in my roman à clef work to accept porn use to keep him happy and/or have sex with him to make him stop watching porn and/or to get him to commit. It was as if I had been programmed by a force to blithely ignore the true complexities of their relationship, which is privileged information I could never have had the means or valid reasons for access, yet it was something I had been all too readily entitled to theorize and speculate, because of what I found out about him. It was also a force that agitated from labile knowledge and indignation that if I had been her—and this was a source of self-loathing and tirades against God for making me so similar to her in background and circumstances, but so different in the most relevant ways (she is blessed with loveliness and grace as well as intelligence and social capital; I had seen a lovely vision of them cuddling from one of his relatives, and I never knew a picture could induce in me a jihad of incomprehensible pain and fury)—I would have appreciated him more and given him more value through sex (in my obsession, I could not quite fathom why she would break up with him despite everything I found out about him and his colorful history), because I truly felt as though I knew everything about him already and had still wanted to, by some twisted logic, stay with him.  But I was not her, and I could only senselessly transpose the story he wrote which I had obtained from the UPD Main Library. From faint memory it had not really been all about the title (something about saving nuns during the Christmas shopping season) but one about our similar grief, the imbalance of romantic feelings unreturned, about how one could do only so much to earn another’s love. And I had suggested that the demise of their relationship was rooted in the woman’s lack of sexual responsiveness or unwillingness to accept her partner’s porn use and help him change. I felt, just like some of the Tita Talks members, as if giving him more sex would dissuade him from using porn. I was in no way qualified to make that judgment and yet I felt the need to have my say because of my pick me ways, or my obstinate desire for his attention and reciprocation of my feelings (as if my defense of what I felt were his disappointments would somehow make him like me more; the logic was desperate and pitiful in its futility). Aside from allusions to the porn in the draft, I was also under the influence of wanting to stop the woman from doing what I had felt were attempts to get him back through what I perceived were her suggestive “hoping he’d get the hint” pictures. I also made use of literary techniques that might have suggested I had been in a relationship with him of a romantic or sexual nature (but my draft also suggested that it was clearly a stream of fantasy and not based on reality), because I had somehow equated our polite interactions as something more, and which had been my source of imagined intimacy and fantastical ideations of his reciprocal feelings. I had not thought about the effects of this on the woman’s life. My gossiping also led to a chain reaction of events that led to the man’s public humiliation.  I got my comeuppance when I obtained the elusive answer in a surprising way. I had been subjected to a theatrically real and “larger-than-life” experience where I assumed the position of a man who is increasingly frustrated by the inability to get the attention of someone desired—hence, my inevitable and predicted turning to men-for-hire “prostitutes,” or actors, as the experiment progressed. Aside from what may have been countless grievances from the people who had read and “critiqued” the piece “indirectly,” I thought it was to measure how long I would hold out before I would take part in the “fictive dream,” or virtual reality of being “dated” or noticed by men I found attractive. To make me understand why a man would become so frustrated with the realities and inner workings of intimate connection and love, and become desperate for scraps of attention or self-esteem boosters from fake sources of affection, attention, and connection.  The “experiment” psychologically disfigured me, and for some years (about three, going on four) I tried to work out whether or not what happened actually happened, and why the events in which I experienced intense anguish and hopelessness had happened repeatedly—how a piece of creative writing could incite so much vitriol (and this is what I strive to emulate again with my creative work on a larger scale that will enable audiences to turn the anger onto a much bigger enemy; or at least, make them consider their own unexamined actions and beliefs). Of course, these grievances were not hindrances to a well-developed and entrenched limerence enhanced by the push-pull, manipulatively underhanded instances of scar-soothe orchestrated by the experimenters/participants. The purveyors of false hope, so picturesque and fantastic, turned to conspiratorial laughter and satisfaction whenever I succumbed to my delusions again, then the realization of a great error of judgment, only to succumb again to the warmth of “art” I had taken as truth seemingly without accounting for the instant frostbite of reality. As if I really had to experience the great pain, and become somehow immune and acclimate to the consequences, but somehow, I am still here, willfully looking instead at the absurdity, choosing comedy because the pain had somehow evolved to adapt with my system, when it gushed so gloriously free toward anger and despair beforehand. It had also been God’s intervention: I developed involuntary tremors in my hands whenever I saw attractive women around the campus and in the malls, even in my hometown far away from the trauma, and it was repetitive and rage-inducing and I could not quite lash out at them because I could not know if they harbored ill will against me and wanted to stun me, or I could no longer tell if I was being paranoid and what was the difference anyway if they were just random hot women who unfortunately existed within my field of vision. I never thought I would inherit my familial inheritance of heart disease, but I had also developed unexplained, yet palpable psychosomatic heart pain whenever I ruminated or succumbed to my overwrought thoughts surrounding my guilt, shame, and trauma, which became habitual. I knew about the disorder called Takotsubo myocardiopathy, the stress-induced “broken-heart” syndrome, which affects mostly women, and how it mimics actual cardiac arrest, with some people dying from it. I do not think of myself as actively suicidal now, but my body seems be subconsciously killing me. I learned that if one harms someone innocent, Someone will inevitably restore order in this life or the next. Knowing what a superstimulus is becomes freeing.   But also, I was disabled and psychologically compromised, and I bemoaned how I could no longer sustain any kind of creative endeavor or literary work without having some kind of interference stemming from the psychological wounds. I was no longer interested in my former hobbies and story genres; my imagination was stunted—it was no longer the free-flowing source of innovative creative invention that had been my only source of pride. And of course, it had all been my fault from the very beginning, so this was just assisted self-sabotage. It was as if somebody had operated on me and took out some valuable (I had not known how much yet) part of my brain, replacing it with a transplant from a war veteran who had not a lot means to recover but had drunken hazardous amounts of alcohol in an effort to subdue the trauma to a localized singularity they could tend to, which only had the effect of an atom bomb detonating, because I had no way of handling it in relation to what I thought were merely my perceptions of perceptions.  Did I really artificially inherit a pain I did not have the rightful circumstances to own? Would never own along with the happiness that was a precondition for the contrast? For there to be pain, there had to be a happiness as tangible and fond and true, and there was no truth to be found in the happiness (which became part of the trauma when I ruminated and attempted to understand it), but the pain was disproportionately alien and hostile in its implications realized in hindsight, a slow-release dosage of violence that really took effect right at the point that one becomes tempted to tell new and hopeful stories out of necessity. I thought I had it down but the pain was still a stranger. Where did this pain come from, and why did it prefer to be modest and insist that those cloud nines of happinesses did all the work to undo me and my being, as if I were at fault for hoping they were real? Was this pain something anyone would empathize with? I wanted someone to know it, anyone, because it did not feel real enough within me as a closed circuit, the disbelief possibly an attempt to dissociate from it; maybe I had interpreted things wrongly again because I was neurologically unreliable and prone to thought disorder and overly fragile, and the truth was less glamorously dramatic, and I should be ashamed for being a drama queen. But it is said that emotional pain (and in my case, it was colossal, publicized, and comedically framed) affects and alters the brain the same way as physical pain. If I had shown the trauma overtly on my body, I would have probably succumbed to blunt trauma, repeated collisions, stabbings, impalement, but I could not, so it must not have been that bad. So my body refused to display this obviously, as if to spite me because of what I had done. My body is a liar. The problem was I could not withstand the glory of glories of the truth I had been given, and I avoided its gaze; how could I not? The falsehoods given to me by the “experiment” were my undisclosed wishes given life, although they had enacted and given my dreams to people who had everything I lacked, as if I had been forced into a hellscape where all that I could have been was real in flesh and blood. Only, it was for alternate reality versions of me (and these had been real women and students who participated in the torture) that were more beautiful, more lovely, more powerful, more able to express themselves in speech, more popular, more privileged, less disabled, less alone, less friendless, less socially impaired, and what had really killed me again and again: my sacrifices and work, desire and pain, meant nothing to the person I grew to love, because he could so easily turn his attention to those women and female students as if I did not die every day from the constant knocks to my already abysmal self-esteem and its surveillance; as if he agreed that, considering all that they knew about my history because they had access to my dark diary and true, uncensored feelings, what I did and wrote in the draft deserved that kind of mass retributive consequence, and that compared to many good women he had access to, I was disposable and inferior. The fact that along with that knowledge, the woman I had wronged had such strong bonds with people who loved her enough to destroy me, because I envied her and wanted to dream of a reality where I was her and had been treasured by the professor whom I loved.  It is my own fault today, for I anticipate this reaction, that I led, and continually lead myself into traps of mental deductions and inductions, upon traps of mental hells from where I cannot escape, because trying to escape only brings upon more hells. It was a miracle that I did not die by my own hand, though I know now that it was only because I had only been fed and misled by untruths upon untruths in the form of romantic poems (“telling” me that the professor I loved felt the same way) written by the professor whose class I submitted the controversial draft to as a final project, with my half-expecting, or half-thinking that maybe, maybe, he would send it to other professors who might know and uncover the truth or story behind it, but not really committing to it in the event that it may be taken the wrong way.  In all honesty, I do think I meant for it to be read by people, and I foolishly did not think to contain it like all my toxic thoughts in my journal app, because I was tired of being ignored. There was also a student in that class, someone my age who had the same interests as me at the time, someone who followed international speculative fiction writers on Twitter like me, someone who had the Western accent that does not ring Filipino anymore, someone whom I thought might have been the more superstimulating object of desire of the professor I “loved” so assiduously because I also thought she was more attractive than me, someone who was so able to express herself eloquently in class and convey with clarity her hard work and ideas, someone whom I felt fit the mold better of who I wanted to become. When I looked her up, I found out she had come from a private school from Manila, one of those well-funded all-girls schools. And oddly enough, she had seemed to be interested in the same music I liked at the time. I could not stand the fact that yet again, I was forced to witness an uncanny yet better mirror of myself. It was a factor that led to the draft’s experimentational nature. I could not compete with her skills because she herself said in class that she is someone who generally knows what they are doing when they write papers.  I think now, in my progress to understand the other people I offended, I had not remembered at all, or thought to think about if I took the CW101 professor’s anecdote of his “someday folder” that was destroyed in the CAL Faculty Center fire, and possibly had that idea germinate in my head, working its way into a scene in the controversial draft. I had not been consciously thinking of my ideas’ sources (or at least, the “someday folder,” because I thought I was being original and I had forgotten all about his anecdote and its connection to my creative idea), and I did not anticipate that he might actually become livid enough along with the other faculty to pool all resources and connections they had to excavate my life and turn the draft into a hellish reality, despite having known about my emotional and social ignorance. Compared to their power, their status, the fact that they were a repressive state apparatus ready to destroy me and my incipient violence, through very underhanded means, through very “pleasurable” ways, I was but a tiny enemy, a nothing, an afterthought, a really fun roleplaying game character you can torment in a sanctioned environment. I think, partly, this is why I see it not as art, but a cruel “experiment,” and I am/was the specimen in a petri dish. At least, the “someday folder” was one of the reasons, aside from my sexually suggestive fantasies and my insulting of the woman professor, why everyone saw it fit to punish me in that way—whilst masking it as a kind of therapeutic rehabilitation program or social integration—as if I had courted disaster by my graffiti on their sacred ground and had been forced to join an abusive organization composed of the entire university and city that hazed me without having to physically beat me up, even though I was not consciously trying to bring up memories of the fire and his “someday folder” in his mind, nor any of the faculty affected by the fire. The surveillance and emotional torment reached me when I went to malls, and I would experience intense anxiety, seemingly as if any attractive woman I saw was a threat to my life—because it had become that way somehow, my body seeing them as actual threats to my system (some kind of unbelievable Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder); and people, countless anonymous faces who enjoyed mocking me and trolling me, monitoring my behavior wherever I went, felt as intrusive and relentless as live “educational” vivisection to society, to everyone, to whomever wanted to learn about the curiosity that had been myself in 2019-2020.  I do think it had been my error, but it was something I did not realize until very much later, years into the trauma, and I think now, it had been an unjust way to discipline me, with them knowing everything about my situation (that I had been poorly brought up by non-socialization and had no real experience or social knowledge to understand the gravity of my actions), and I had been powerless to question anything back then. Perhaps they thought I was a revolutionary genius who they did not want to expel or suspend directly, but had wanted to punish in the same, if not, more “creative,” “indirect,” and more violent way as the draft I wrote. More, in this case, meaning I was completely divested of any means to fight back (whether by myself, and my “false consciousness,” or because they saw it conveniently as a way to silence me and what my work had really sprung from).  Most egregious on their part, they thought I was getting some fun out of it (and this is a source of self-blame and self-hate; how could I be so foolish to cling to what they offered; how could I have viewed my “notoriety” as a good thing because at last, not only did I get a “real” response from a well-known writers instead of an impersonal rejection letter from magazines I tried to break into, but also an actual way for me to say my piece about my whole life’s struggle), because I did not kill myself the second I realized somebody hacked my computer, contacted all my high school classmates and former (direct or not) associations, ruined my chances of developing a prior support network without being aware or anxious about if the people I interacted with possessed knowledge of my wrongdoing and secrets; and with the greatest pains and hurts of my life that they depicted and brought to life, they thought that giving me some “treats” or a little pleasure in the form of poems, positive yet artificially ingratiating responses, attention from people who would have had no prior reason to notice me or talk to me, “acting” on the desired professor’s part in his roleplaying of a character who returned my feelings, which I embarrassingly found refuge in even as he turned cold at times, when he would toy with the only hope I had, and showed me how I was worthless compared to the other better women and female students, when the people in the “experiment” sensed that I got sufficiently attached to him.  They, I thought at some point, had all been so hell-bent to show me how much I deserved it, how the professor I loved deserved to be treated with lovelier and better women that he could pursue to spite me, the one who dared to dream. It was like some porn producers, pissed at having their way of living threatened so violently, sought to ruin my life by giving whom I considered at the time to be the one love of my life not only porn, but opportunities to cavort with pornstars, which he took. I had never encountered so much personal evil in a lifetime. Unfortunately, really, I thought he felt like me, and I thought, in my stupidity, that perhaps, just perhaps, he was just acting when he appeared to enjoy it, being given attention by beautiful and accomplished women and students I despised. That I loved him and made him my only hope in the midst of my hell was partly my own mistake, but I cannot help but think how awfully easy it had been for him to earn my loyalty when he had done really nothing, not something worth writing home about, to deserve it; except for the fact that I lovingly thought that our small polite exchanges during his Eng 21 class and when I bumped into him around the campus constituted a love connection that was not faked, and how I felt he had valued me, but how that (I found out later, through finding his professor ex-girlfriend’s account) had also been a lie: it was she that he saw, and I had been merely a shadow. It is for those reasons that I hold every happiness now, no matter how remote from that mass and personal rejection or how real, like a snake—false, fake, potentially deadly, evil, as if my life held no potential for anything real and lovely I could really call mine. I knew, of course, that the professor could not have expected that a prior student he might have thought of in a good light would dig up his unseemly past, his skeletons, his failed relationship, and make everyone else curious and work together to know it as well. This is also why he hated me, how I soiled his reputation, how I hurt his loved one, and he participated in my undoing to teach me, however obliquely, that my envy is as disgusting a moral failing as his compulsive habits and fixations, if not more, because at least he was loved by the woman I wronged and had a good long life despite it.   I say his attention, no matter how artificial, no matter how false, had been my refuge, because I was surrounded by a collapsing sense of shame and anguish, half-knowing and half-sensing that everyone who depicted my dreams, including those who felt they could relate to me and tried to interact with me, had all pitied me and handled me at arm’s length. Compared to the professor I desired, I had no one, not really, not even my one friend from high school whom I think only sees me as an ill-adjusted human and does not really think of me as a true friend. Compared to the professor I desired, who had allies, family, and friends who all rallied behind him to assure him that his porn addiction is not as bad as it is, at least, not as bad as me and what I had done: that I was a sociopath who had no moral qualms about harming people emotionally because of my anger with what life had dealt me; compared to him, I was totally, agonizingly alone, cut off from anyone who could have listened to my side and advised me to quit school and go home. The only things that powered me were dreams and fears: the former made “real” (but not really), the latter as “lies” (but not really).   Hence, my bitterness and vengeful bent toward anyone who wronged me. The wishes, given life—almost superseded by the ultimate truth when I had my life-changing confrontation with the woman I wronged—haunt like poltergeists who promise reunion if I become the lies that they lived. A false promise that said to me: you can become like us, you can become lovely, you can be lovely, you can be the same (when I knew ultimately it was impossible), you are the same as us in another life. Nevertheless, I had been forced as well to hope that their lies and assurances were true, because the pain they bestowed on me was too great. Because compared to them, my real life was painful nonsense.  These experiences, however, took an even nastier turn—or a more interesting one, for the sake of a coherent universe—when I once again encountered, as was expected of my “nosiness” or ability to reject my painful conditions and make noise about it, a life-shattering confrontation with a reality I had been so desperate to keep out and soothe with fantasy. I found another set of online accounts of his in late 2021. Now I had really outdone myself, because I thought I had gleaned the internet for every shred of information about him from the most asinine gaggle of students who did not know anything personal about him (although I had been one of them) but were so quick to rain compliments and praise, from his stories that delineated some kind of nihilistic outlook about women, from award-winning poems I had at one point analyzed to be possibly inspired by Rizal, from what I thought was a deserved Palanca win because I had not really been expecting him to be so different and better when it came to children and I genuinely thought it was perfect, and to a whole host of sexually charged stories that may as well have been waving an outrageously huge flag of, “I am a porn addict and I like big, big breasts and GROs more than reality.” Of course, those are unstated truths. Strippers are better than regular women because they invite you to stare at them and porn loves to straddle forcibly when it senses you do not really like to make first moves and commit or risk getting nothing back. Or worse, something incompatible that cannot be helped at all because, as every porn addict might know subconsciously: see, it was not as good as what I was addicted to and they all seem to arrive effortlessly. On top of those incidents before my 2019 disaster, I had discovered some tweets a student of his in a similar situation as me had unhappily published to the world: she had found the professor and the woman I had wronged somewhere in the university with a child in tow (whom I half-knew was his nephew, yet I also thought might have been a bastard, because he was unmarried), possibly on a date, miming domesticity and a future together. The way she described the woman as “pretty girl” and how this affected her: this unlucky student was me, looking at myself. *Wow, I am not the only one who is heartbroken now.* The woman I deeply envied because she had access to a lovelier side of him who wanted to be a better person, while I was stuck with all the crumbs of polite and furtive acknowledgment and “dirty, dirty whores” and the things he had been so confident were very normal aspects of manhood that it no longer crossed his mind to think twice about.  He was human, flawed in all likelihood not only in his stories and professional behavior, and I hated the fact that he only probably wanted to be better because the person he loved deserved to be loved and was not only enough for him, but was his ultimate dream. His last chance after years of hopeless wrangling with reality and lapsing and fantasizing. I thought in hindsight, his behavior in class in June-July 2018 betrayed the nihilism and regret with their parting that truly hits once someone has had a rosy preview of possibility torn away by unintentional, yet, in hindsight, permanent and staggering decisions that inherently make the existence of a possibility a paradox, like Eve not knowing any better and God’s banishment from Eden regardless. What was the point of it all after an agony of meaninglessness and non-existence, only to return to meaninglessness again? It was as if I was in some kind of twisted alternate reality game thinking that I had encountered the last of my enemies and the final bosses, but apparently, there was an even more catastrophic final boss fight that had nothing to do with the game. It was me facing off with the game’s Developer. It was as if I had been one of the prisoners in Plato’s Cave, not resolutely dragged out of it with some struggle, but in fact, teleported out of it directly, with no warning or grace to behold directly the main Idea my brain was too lazy or angry to really examine properly and productively. Unfortunately, I was already ready, in the sense that it was my pre-determined call, something to get me out of the slumber, to jolt me awake from my dreams. It was like it was put there for me to discover someday, by a future me, like in Interstellar, the man-made wormhole from the future humans saving them all from extinction. It was Franz Kafka who put it best: “I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity.” Though unfortunately, these social media accounts were superstimuli compared to the Facebook likes as porn is to real sex. I was too livid to understand. He had an Instagram account tied to his real name who had a lone follow to a possible sex worker who also hid her real name, preferring “Lyesha Maria” on all her socials. I could only describe her as a hybrid of possible lifestyles: former stripper or bar girl (extremely likely, given she had allusively posed with some women who seemed to have gathered from a shared profession), former social media hubadera (she had by then locked her linked accounts on Facebook, which had about a thousand male followers which I knew were just as much their failing as hers, considering all their girlfriends and wives back home who probably post on Tita Talks PH trying to understand them; and Instagram), former sugar baby or high-class prostitute (she had the artificially bright coloring of someone who gets glutathione injections).  Styling herself in her bio as “classy and fabulous,” she seemed to be someone he followed in the past, because of her suggestive content (which I had no way of finding out because she had none by then in her Instagram and I could not access her Facebook and she had probably deleted them), and the ambiguity of my non-knowledge: was she some kind of famous fashion influencer that a thousand men found interesting enough to follow because they liked to see “classy” fashion? I knew a ruse when I saw it. She was either a secret sugar baby erstwhile bar girl, or a social media hubadera who now locked her accounts because of a change of heart, but had not the will to get rid of the thousand males who still followed her and liked her pictures on Facebook and Instagram.  He had seemed to follow her because she had somehow developed some kind of morality, and the lone follow suggested he was not only sexually attracted to her, but was also romantically interested in her, as I had assumed he had been in one of her pictures which had both his hands clasped around one of hers, the unholy trinity with the same fair-skinned glow, her other hand holding the camera, and the one in the middle being worshipped, with its long, dainty, polished fingernails, telling me all I needed to see with such pure and insidious hatred and glory. The dozens of impersonal Facebook likes—even Liza, who is now still away from her more daring acting roles and the threat of him ever getting a chance of being near her in real life—had been one thing, but this? I had really seen it, his bold act of defiance, his possible courting of a former whore because she might be his only good option left, as if I had seen him masturbating in real life in a private room to a girl who was not only not me, but was also a representation of his real ideal. This is all based on the fact that I somehow know what his hands looked like (I could never be 100% sure) and how he had never been one to like having pictures taken of himself (and how the hands were some kind of compromise), and even though it could be just as likely that it was not his hands in the picture, the fact that he followed her account must have meant something, something painful, something real and quite outside my realm of understanding or experience. My brain loves to torture itself with these details as if it will do it any good. Unfortunately, the theatrical “experiment” had left me in a state of limbo in which I knew I was not in a relationship with him, but I unconsciously functioned and thought as if I was to this day (which explains the gluta gambles in March-April 2022, with the reformed hubadera and his alter Twitter and real Tinder waltzing into my life in November 2021), and any unfaithful act on his part was a deathblow that somehow did not finish me off but mysteriously healed me so I could stand to receive even more pain. This was a future ilusyonada *Mein Kampf* written in an alternate reality, where I had really become ruthless and decided to exterminate evil whoredom for good.  Do I take everything personally now and overthink everything to get at the seams of illusions to find some kind of answer or closure? Was this yet another effect of the trauma? Was this the trauma itself? An expression of it, an echo, an artistic rendition, and I was forced to meditate on it because it was not instantly appreciated. A masterfully sublime artwork like this from a classy and fabulous channel had to be digested slowly, but also, the gall!  I was not only mad because of her past and her privilege and her complicity and his attention and the old dormant insecurities she managed to resuscitate in me, but also the fact or notion based on ambiguous intuitions that he was willing to play nice and romantic with a woman who was not the woman I wronged in the roman à clef work, because this ambiguous woman had something he so desperately wanted: a fantasy. This girl was a reformed whore, and the dream of many Judeo-Christian men who are tired and anxious of their beautiful virgin brides-to-be ending up boring in bed. To him, this woman will probably be amenable to giving him private dances and exclusive stripper services and wear pokpok shorts as lingerie and be thankful for it because he married her.  I casually noticed he had Tinder (I know it is his because it is his real name with a real picture he posted on his real Facebook account) because I bought the Passport feature to get area-specific people, not expecting (read: hoping not) to see him pop up, but probably having some notion of this mindset where, at some point, I realized, “Well, he’s probably on Tinder now.” I was right for some reason, and a credit to my well-developed intuition regarding closeted and repressed people who lied and deceived, who said that women should dress and be a certain way to them for them to deserve respect, and yet disrespected these same women who live by their rules by patronizing and gratifying and giving away the pragmatic respect to women and their ideologies, practices, and pornographic output that patently did not follow their rules. I mean, which was it? I had already experienced so much heartache and betrayal from this person, and why did I still care?  If I am not mistaken about the Twitter account (or even if this Twitter account does not belong to him, he likely would agree), prostitution has less “inherent risk” than workplace relationships, co-ed schooling, and modern marriages, and that, while not God’s design, is something that should be seriously considered by church elders. What is the labile person getting at exactly? Is he saying those workplace relationships, co-ed schooling, and modern marriages should have less risk in order for prostitution to cease being a tempting alternative? Should women give sex up easily enough so that men do not waste precious time on them and be tricked into a dead bedroom once marriage happens because women can lie about their sex drive or sexuality or only “use sex to get love,” and once married, will no longer be as passionate? I could understand this because of course, not everyone is inclined toward abstinence before marriage. But I hold the opinion that it is something worth waiting for, with all I know now, because it is largely protective: the woman will ensure she is not used for sex; she will find out what kind of love can develop without massive and powerful amounts of oxytocin, the bonding chemical or “love hormone” which is released during sex and orgasm (and which makes separation harder and more complicated when things do not work out), which is the reason why people who engage in casual “fuck buddy” or “friends with benefits” arrangements inevitably catch feelings even if they planned to remain emotionally detached in theory (though oxytocin is also released in small doses such as in hand-holding, hugging, et cetera). Abstaining from sex before marriage means maintaining a kind of transitory innocence that is not to be laced with the subtext of relational pressure and impatient expectation, but a present attention to the things that would still remain even into old age.  It seems as though the person does not want to risk anything, not something as important as sexual compatibility, because for him, that is what a marriage is largely for, to avoid fornication. Prostitutes and women are gatekeepers of sex, and a man that not only “honestly believes” prostitutes have “less inherent risk” than “modern marriage or co-ed schooling or workplace relationships” but also, that this “fact is something our religious elders have yet to consider” has to be so enmeshed in an ideology that considers emotional, holistic relationships with the opposite sex a mere front, a means to an end, which is sexual gratification. Compared to women who are not sex workers, prostitution does not hold the potential for accountability when things get ugly or complicated (it cannot get ugly because there are no personal emotional risks and investment). They can be limited to anonymity, if one chooses, so they cannot blackmail you or hold you accountable when you do something wrong. They can be so stripped down to the man’s complete control and primitive desires, and most appalling of all, this is largely all they need and want of women in the end. This is a scientific fact; it is for reproduction of course—a biological evolutionary drive, but one does not go to prostitutes to make babies. One could make the argument that most people who do not want the responsibility of babies still want to experience pleasure, so this means prostitution is just glorified masturbation with living flesh. Once prostitutes stop being risky and socially frowned upon, it will become the norm. This is why men who think like this will balk at the thought of having to play the social game to obtain sex, because all the other things like emotional connection, intimate love, and mutual respect and care, can be brushed aside conveniently; they are not considered worthwhile ends in themselves. Whereas when one waits for the woman, one is gambling their manhood, and if he does not get an expected fulfillment of an idea, he will despair, because he might have gotten a better hand, and he does not know how to lose and make the best of it, as if he can foresee better hands because other people seem to possess them. Those people who noisily make known to the world how they have the best sex, because they had sex before marriage and had great chemistry before tying the knot.  But everything great is a gamble that requires risk, as if one is saying, “I will work with whatever I’m given because I love you, and besides, I have a lifetime to learn.” And God’s design unfortunately really means that whoever you have sex with officially becomes your wife or husband, just like Adam and Eve who had no one but God to officiate and no guests to impress. What frustrates me is that this person seems to be so full of contradictions. I would have understood if he is a secular person who does not profess to be a Christian, but he appears to be one, or at least, this is what he is trying to achieve. I had once thought that he really does not like or disagrees with Saint Paul, who told those who “burned with passion” to get married to avoid fornication, and he would rather live in the Old Testament because God, or society, had given more allowances. This is someone who thinks prostitution is frowned upon only, and not sinful and wrong. And now, because of what I had done, he could not care less about his reputation. I am not a church elder, but I will try, because church elders do not probably like to think of prostitution as something that can threaten marriages or relationships, because most of them are probably married and do not struggle through singlehood, and therefore, have some kind of blindness toward their privileged status, and most do not probably know how to use the internet (unless, of course, they are Boomers or Generation X who are also porn addicts secretly). Of course, they will not consider this, because though they might be porn users at some point, they see it differently from prostitution because of the ease of access, and I am considering this from the point of view of men who are not even in relationships but are struggling with the thought of having to obtain one versus going to a prostitute to get it over with.  I am sometimes amazed that I can type all of these with a straight, almost pretentiously clinical facade, because why have I taken this responsibility on? To wade in the gray areas and attempt to find clarity, to sit with my discomfort and repulsion and fears. To present this problem to a wide audience of men and defamiliarize their ideology to them plainly, but I digress. To recap, the prostitute will only ask for your money, in exchange for your reputation and chances of pairing up if you were honest to women, potential sexually-transmitted diseases/infections, the risk of pregnancy, and will not make you think you are a creep because they know exactly the feeling of being forced to hide and shunned for their pragmatic choices, although that is bound to change now as it becomes increasingly socially acceptable to be a sugar baby when social media (specifically TikTok and Instagram, and now, even Facebook) glorifies decadent displays of money, beauty, and sexuality. There are TikToks or social media posts that talk about sugar baby lifestyles and how comments seem to be so accepting and even envious of their lifestyles. What this means for society at large is a great fostering of materialism and excess, reinforced daily and even hourly, by social media brainwashing. Truly, the risks of sanctioned prostitution, hidden by layers and layers of rationalization and rabid conspicuous consumption by men and women, effectively become inconvenient afterthoughts. Moreover, on top of the aforementioned risks and benefits, prostitutes will provide an excellent experience, with no strings attached, no complication, no faith, no love, no real risk of anything worth the pleasure so efficiently obtained. It seems as though men who think the inherent risk of prostitutes versus regular women is a threat to God’s design or actual relationships think that way because they do not have to prove themselves to a prostitute, and they do not have to respect them in any way that they do with regular women or keep themselves to a standard of behavior that will consider the other person as more than a physical pleasure source (since that is the sole purpose of a prostitute), which brings up the possibility that they might only be tolerating the social dance in romantic relationships, but they would likely prefer it if it becomes as straightforward as a coin slot machine, because the existence of an option despite its (unexamined) problems is proof that their selfishness and full control can be exercised in a (more) pleasurable outlet, one whose main drawback is only the repercussions to one’s reputation in the event that the word gets out. This is why porn addiction exists, aside from the scientific bases: voyeuristic anonymous sex with a beautiful stranger. Would we all not, as human as we are, prefer an easier option?  I am afraid my anger is in part, caused by the abysmally low bar set by prostitutes, pornography, and the racy influencers that abound everywhere these days on social media. The existence of a floor means that women who cannot sink to their level will suffer as they wait all their lives for men who are too preoccupied by the fake superstimulating fish with the “redder-than-normal” bellies. I need men to see that this is wrong, and that the temptation is evil (and be disillusioned and set free from porn addiction), and not anymore something they subconsciously like better than real women who choose to abide by the rules and stay far above the floor. Finally, I need more influential and attractive women to demand better standards. To be high-maintenance is not a bad thing insofar as maintenance is a requirement. If one does not maintain something to the best of their abilities, it will die.  But for many, the reduction of relationships to what they consider essential (that is, the sexual aspect only) is a valid and humane alternative option if one cannot, for one reason or another, obtain a real relationship, because the prostitutes behave like they consent enthusiastically, and they seem to know a direct, no-fuss way that brings pleasure on both sides. It then becomes: the risk is not inherently “less,” but a man thinks, considering all the relatively larger gains, the frequency and control, the guarantee and expertise, the beauty/bodily preferences and reliable enthusiasm, that the pleasures outweigh the cons and risks, compared to the ratio of what he thinks he can control and gain in a real relationship (which of course, like porn is to real sex, in reality, is always going to fall short). Am I mad that this person can afford to think like this or might think like this (since his alter Facebook likes in the past suggest that he does) and not be horrified by what it can imply? Is this penis envy? Am I envious I do not have that option, neither does my gender, nor do I even have the capacity to appreciate or imagine an equivalent alternative that might drive in the point that this is abhorrent (because defamiliarization might be useful for persuasion)? Essentially, his alleged tweets evince reluctant approval because prostitutes are so much easier and so much more reliable, and I am angry he can stomach the idea and be so comfortable with it because he can separate sex from what it means. Certainly, my “alternative” is to gratify my desire by undergoing exhaustive mental gymnastics training and becoming a sugar baby myself, so a rich man can offer me money and companionship, but that is not even conscionable because I would not be able to stomach the artificiality and pretend it is anything other than what it is and be fine with it. At least, my pride will not allow me to. Perhaps I am ignoring the fact that he is twice as old as me and has probably racked up similar sufferings of various degrees for the equivalent gender-based reasons. Nevertheless, compared to him, I do not have a sexual drive for money and companionship that purports to be so innate and self-explanatory that it has to struggle against the ethics of pursuing something so artificial, dangerous, and wrong (although I did, at some point in the past, become so desperate to obtain money so I could get my hands on beautifying products that will get me male validation and sexual attention, and thankfully, I never followed through on any of my “plans,” or ideations of becoming a sugar baby). I realize I am frustrated by his history even as I could have just as easily become a female version had I been able to achieve my former thoughtless goals. The alter is either really good at fantasy and roleplay to be able to ignore the pricking in his moral compass to believe it is not only natural, but pragmatically preferred (as the subtext betrays, “I honestly believe that—”), or I am a hopeless romantic who has made an egregious error by failing to consider what he might feel like about his lot in life and what his headspace must be for him to have those beliefs. Or, I could be wrong about everything and committed some kind of libel because of course, I could not be 100% sure those were his social media accounts. But of course, he is not the only one. Many men (and women) can stomach the idea of prostitution and separate sex from what it means (aside from its physical uses, it is primarily used for procreation and relational bonding within a relationship). The sugar baby option is straightforwardly artificial in the sense that one often starts out with a guaranteed fulfillment of an agreement. When it has become socially acceptable to be so profit-oriented, it becomes a pragmatic and natural option. Regardless, the fact that the patriarchy and dominant culture of this day allows for this ideology means that something is amiss, that society has yet to consider what really matters, that many philosophers are hypocrites, and that many, many people are living socially-acceptable lies. The Coolidge effect is as animalistic as you can get, and so is what he is suggesting. If I suggested that the Coolidge effect is something a church elder should ponder because it provides a way to think about how even Christian marriages might crumble because of porn, and how men must be aware and consciously fight against this nature, and not place the burden of resentment on their wives if they are rightly hurt or angry by their porn use because it threatens their already-dwindling sexual appeal, novelty, and enjoyment as time goes by;  I would not be one-tenth as trailblazing and transgressive as someone who worded the evidence to imply that, aha, science says we are not really programmed for monogamy. The rat who had been “given” different females to copulate with did not know how artificial the experiment was, and thought it was so very lucky, like a lottery winner. I had experienced the same sort of “gateway drug” high with the “experiment” at first. I thought, “Why are all these attractive guys giving me attention when before I was practically invisible—I was entitled to attention from those I found attractive because I had been told I became pretty (I had been given hope), though it was mostly women who said this and not men’s actions—I mean, who cares if it’s somewhat fake, it feels good.” Granted, the artificially staged experiences also annoyed me because I knew too well they were doing charity work and not because they were actually interested. Prostitution is in the same way unnatural: how could a woman not want anything but money for sexual access? It has less inherent risk because it has turned the original ugly by comparison through the offering of a possibility or an option so unbelievably fantastic: that you do not need to play by the rules and you can get away with it. A cheat code and a shortcut.  Let us say I am being Biblically literal and that Adam, being given the curse of toiling the earth so he can eat, and Eve, the pains of childbirth and complications of fertility, both mean something axiomatic in how the sexes function. Women have to be beautiful because it signals fertility, which means their children are more likely to survive. Beauty, in this case, seems like a recursive reinforcer; beautiful children become beautiful adults who will be more able to pass on the relevant genes because sexual fitness guarantees replication. Men have to be rich in order to provide for as many children as they can father. The man has to prove he is worthy to the woman, risking rejection or looking ridiculous, and the woman, if she is not a gold digger, will decide whether or not this man can be a good provider for the family (I know this because I once looked ridiculous risking rejection in the “experiment”). The man is rejected, over and over again for one reason or another, until he reaches middle age when he has become restless if he has not already resorted to prostitutes or some other, and then at what point does he decide it is all over for him anyway, so he might as well go to a massage parlor or strip club to straddle the line between forgivability and total godless immorality (and this is also the problem), because modern marriage, apparently, has now become “as immoral as porn and hookers.” Or he could go to prostitutes and gentlemen’s clubs because it is part of his bonding with his barkada (one of his published stories all the way from 2010 makes sense when considered in this light; how young professionals with money and time on their hands go to those seedy places in the red light district because it is socially acceptable).  Modern marriage: men can get divorce-raped and/or are forced to pay for child support, only seeing their children on certain days; or worse, get accused of something like abuse of various kinds? A fraught topic, but again, marriage with someone is an institution which I think cannot be comparable with prostitution, even though a lot of other critics starting from the Victorian Age (Washington) have seen some similarities between the two; one reason, among others: I do not think marriage is for sex and pleasure only (like in prostitution), but an ideally stable place where children are brought up. From a man’s perspective, it is easy to say, “I have needs” and act out those needs through prostitution or by staring at dancing strippers or going to massage parlors, and leave it at that. In that case, there is nothing to be done or said for them; they have already succumbed to their selfishness. What rankles me is when they have partners who are hurt by their behavior; and of course, they participate in this culture and its rituals, solidifying an ideology to be passed on even if they had no children, like their brothers, their relatives, their creative output, and their social network. The next item in the Tweet—workplace relationships and what I think is risk: if you break up with someone from work, they can split the office into factions between the two of you and ruin your chances of dating anyone else there; or the pesky awkwardness that might ensue when you are both forced to work together; or even worse, sexual harassment claims? Women, in this case, have to be totally honest. It is also possible that men may not be aware or do not care to adjust their unexamined behaviors to an accountability system that exists in the event that heinous things do not stay hidden between two people only. And then we have co-ed schooling: your behavior around young women who might as well be mildly limerent or delusional for the duration of your class time or your schooling, and how they might take any acknowledgment or certain look or behavior as interest and somehow implicate you in a “false” narrative where you are a horny bastard (or a “visual” man) who stares a lot, maybe unintentionally, because you are an unthinking man whose eyes naturally drift toward those areas no matter what women look like or their age?  I do not think, in the era of #MeToo where women can make up false stories about their male classmates, boyfriends, or teachers, it is enough of a reason for men to give up on women entirely, although I think, whoever is behind that alter account, is speaking from experience. The men who are scared of the woman’s ability to speak up about things that make her uncomfortable from her perspective after the fact (but he thinks, are not something problematic e.g. sex when they are both drunk or one of them is a little drunk) should instead adapt to a sexual ethics that involves more than his own desires dominating the entire relationship or sexual act, and not jump headfirst toward an option that completely removes that system of accountability; or at least, not betray some kind of “prostitutes are better” approval masked as resignation or scholarly/religious interest, and maybe, point those issues toward women’s perspectives and possibly ask women to be better in their pursuit of accountability enabled by social media cancel culture and the system that tends to believe women. Though frustrations surrounding being the recipient of judgment may cause bitterness. Perhaps men should reconsider their own socially-acceptable behavior, like how many, many clueless men think porn is okay and/or their girlfriends and wives should be tolerant of their eye-wandering because they are “visual” (as if women are not as well). Are life-long STIs, risks of pregnancy, the inherent humiliation, the desensitization of one’s conscience, participation in human trafficking, violence, emotionless and transactional no-strings-attached sexual activities, really more attractive than those aforementioned potential risks? How is sex and sexiness with beautiful paid sex workers so valued above and so much more appealing than real relationships with real women, that one has to point out, with a contrived, concerned, scholarly tone and motive, how it is a struggle to choose between both (though of course, the answers are biological—the reproductive drive to make babies regardless if they actually want babies—and part of human nature to seek the easiest and most appealing option)? How much can he get away with without feeling like he betrayed his values? How much can you stretch grace? Moreover, how much can the existence of an option like a certain tempting Tree, and the discourse it has become attached to, let’s say, from the serpent’s mouth or raunch culture, make one totally doubt the unpleasant truth of the difficult, but more rewarding, path?  All the guys on Tinder, and most of the women, it is true, are there for one thing only, and that is to hook up, no matter what they say to mask their true intentions, no matter what their relationship status, because there is no such thing as truth. There is no such thing as bored and boring wives or girlfriends back home; there is no such thing as real women. As far as they know, their boringness and mundanity and complexity are good enough reasons to reject them. There is only sex offered in exchange for dates and flirting and empty promises and menus of things and objects you are hungry for but cannot afford, but their sex appeal is an invitation to swipe right and hope, knowing nothing but a few well-chosen words for a preview. The “experiment” was Tinder on steroids, and I had hopped on and been scarred by hope itself. It had been a neat pack of lies, lovingly told. In dealing with Plato’s Cave and my near-instantaneous feat of horrific contrast between illusion and reality, I have now the choice to stare at different suns, or great Ideas, but this blue (the hottest kind of sun), ugly, and frankly unseemly star, is mine. Until I make something out of it, the teleportation out of the Cave would be meaningless and I would not be so “lucky” to get another chance. What I cannot fathom is how, knowing all this, I cannot make myself hate him, no matter how I make him out to be in this essay, so I can finally be free of him and my trauma that revolves around him. This trauma, I might add, compels me to seek out the worst sides of any person. Even if that person posts “innocuously” on Facebook or Tinder, I find myself obsessively excavating the bottom of the iceberg—this person, perhaps with good intentions (in the sense that some self-interest is good and natural), is hiding something (Yee): What’s he doing on Tinder? Guarding his true intentions by waiting for a “unicorn” to swipe right, whichever woman he has already had the benefit of selecting based on attractiveness probably, whilst giving away none but his interests in his profile. What and why? From a woman’s point of view, what could he offer in the relationship aside from good conversation? Of course he has the right to avoid gold diggers. But not even an actual picture of himself? Does he want that element of surprise if they connect online with him knowing what she looks like and the woman imagining some geeky nerdy-looking guy? And then cue her being excited when she actually sees him on a bike date? And then his choice of physical exercise releasing hormones to induce good feelings to game the relationship to his benefit? Probably leading to sex before marriage? I don’t know if this is brilliant, manipulative, or both. On the one hand, women can and do manipulate men unconsciously or not already by just existing, through clothes, manner, pictures, etc. What’s the difference between him doing that and the woman looking hot in her pictures for him to swipe right? Am I just really bitter? Just because I’m a femcel? Just because I was tricked into thinking I was also desired? Hope kills. It’s better to squash it now before it can kill you again. I am ashamed of myself because of my mimetic desire: he desires someone like “Lyesha Maria.” He desires someone sexy and beautiful, the good girl-slash-whore. He desires someone who can be the Cool Girl Amy from Gone Girl says is an artificial concept, a fantasy, an idea. I still have some wounds that grated from the inside with a vengeance: you allow yourself to be wounded, we are just making you feel our pain. If the readers of Tita Talks PH knew anything about me, it is my angry, moralistic, and relatively ideologically outrageous response, and I live for the engagement in the form of likes and hearts. I am still a pick me, after all, because no one picked me, ever, and I want to graduate from pick me, to picked me and only me. If they knew anything about me, the fact that I almost died twice trying to become as fair-skinned as “Lyesha Maria” and her ilk, framing this out-of-character decision to my relatives by being in denial: “You don’t know how it feels to be dark,” or “It’s self-care,” they would probably say I deserved it, because they are also pick me women who enjoy it, those women who strive to remain in a dream where they can be comfortable with porn and hypersexualized media, when someone who attempts to drag them out of Plato’s Cave gets their comeuppance.  I bought glutathione injections for “love” and was willing to risk death because it was the cheapest brand that I had the means to buy at the time, and it was also the brand that killed Shyril Gee Distor (Santos). My parents, who had no idea about the brand, and my gamble—because surely this brand was not the cause, but the incompetent nurse who did not cooperate in the investigation—tried to dissuade me, and I forced them to recompensate me by buying an even more expensive brand from a doctor and not some dubious online shop.  I do not know who to thank except them, but also, when they, doctors who had training and whom I knew were capable and competent, administered the magic beauty formula into my veins, the God of the universe must have seen my real motives: my parents owed me damages because they, and my sister, were all beautiful people who had lots of sex appeal, and I did not; therefore, to continue the family line, if they wanted me to be married to a probable porn addict someday, they had to invest in my beautification rites, because it had been overlooked when I was Frankensteined in my mother’s womb when she was doing 48-hour no-sleep challenges in med school, and that had to have some consequence, because I had asymmetric, oversized, undersized, and ill set features, which, compared to my sister’s, were such an unlikely and disappointing result (and I could not help but see a personal, cruel injustice). I also wanted to be Lyesha Maria and be worthy, or at least, feel worthy, because there was no way he was going to see me in pandemic times, and I half-consciously knew that to undergo this procedure would keep the gnawing pain at bay, to imagine that if he did see me, he would possibly “sort of” like me again, and possibly consider me girlfriend-material like his girlfriend or ex or whatever they are, who is also fair-skinned; never mind that I am a student and he is more than twice as old. Fantasy. By running away from pain, I invited more pain, and I slowly reacted, despite my confidence that I did not fear needles and tiis-ganda, by having a full-blown panic attack, rising first in my throat, choking me, spreading to my lungs, then my stomach, inflaming it with the strangely familiar and uncontainable taste of death, distinctly personal, as if my abdomen’s acids were boiling to a scorch, my various internal linings rippling and giving way to what felt like a negative space outside the universe, as if a black hole was eating me from the inside out, spreading upward to my forehead—at that point on fire and betraying the evidence of guilty sweat, and my fair sister looked at me in shock as my father said my face was pula and that probably meant I was not malingering.  I decided to stop only because I had really thought it was going to kill me, not because of its inherent properties, or the air bubbles, or my body’s refusal to interact with a drug possibly because of my maintenance medication for Bipolar Disorder, but because God would rather have me unblemished and unaltered in my coffin than live a life of endless and senseless, ultimately pointless ingratiation. I was willing to die for a dream that I loved more than God. To fix that man, to win him, for him to return my obsession despite everything he did to me and my knowledge that he probably hates me for ruining his life, for him to feel the same amount of pain, for him to question and agonize over why something so simple as an assurance meant the world and yet had undone it and then some. I was trying to create, pointlessly I might add, a black hole of love in that man to consume him, starting in his heart, then to his very bones, then to his penis, somehow make him crave me like his life could not be complete or even meaningful if I did not exist. As if being white or fair-skinned could ever start to undo what I did.  But I knew it was time for acceptance: my plans of flying to Korea to correct all my deformities were all squashed, knowing how one wrong move with anesthesia or multiple complications can leave you comatose or dead, knowing glutathione induces some specific kind of violent reaction in me. What would I be risking it all for, besides? They were always going to be futile. Why, indeed, would I dream of risking death, would I attach my life and potential savings to, would I work my life toward using my numerous skills that are not beauty-related, so that I can return to the source of death that I nearly did not defy over and over again?  This was some potential landmark case of Stockholm Syndrome or extreme masochistic cuckoldry. This was not God’s grace with Jesus dying for sinners imaged in my life, because God, at least, had believers and penitents who loved Him back and who attempted to please Him. This was not love. There is no going back to anything tangible like a hypothetical future with a man so shamelessly himself and who proudly, with some justification, loved to torture me. The door of possibility had never been for me, though I did come close to belief. And in between my moments of lucidity and insanity, I had found myself, guiltily, full of remorse, obligingly, or possibly, just afraid of more retaliation, apologizing to those people surrounding the cursed draft for things I am not sure I even intended to happen, or if I had just half-fabricated a narrative where I was an evil genius exhibitionist to project some dignity and mask my shame and ignorance.  In the most probable reality, I had been under the influence of something more pernicious than envy: a certain blindness and callousness, or indifference, to the suffering of those I had considered to be enviable and perfect, and therefore, probably would not mind if I knocked them down, because surely, they were secure in their clear superiority. It did not matter to me, in the moments before sending the draft, that it could be read as true or potentially hurtful, because I had already withstood too many traumas that the draft was just a necessarily appropriate way to enact vengeance on a reality that had plunged me to hell by giving me so much hope and promise, and yet, had taken that possibility and then made a distorted mockery of it, because the woman and I were too alike in background, and yet so different in physical attributes, and so different yet similar that I felt she was my better evil twin in an alternate universe, a version 2.0 even though she was older, and I could not possibly fathom, how, the God of all the universes could dream up such a grand scheme to spite me personally.  She had the right timing, just the right age within acceptability for an age gap relationship, the right kind of beauty, the right character, the right mind, and the right life to be able to love the man I thought was the first person in years to show me some kind of love and attention, only to find out it was all a lie, an impersonal one, because it was not me he recognized, in all likelihood, but that I sort of reminded him of someone he loved, in some miniscule way. From dissociation in childhood to depersonalization to confusion to maladaptive fantasizing from isolation to breaking down from despair—all my life, I had felt so colorless and inessential, and when I met that man, meeting his eyes somewhere in Katipunan when I had really thought I was accepted finally for myself because he had smiled at me first, despite knowing nothing about me, that infinite moment felt so much like what intimacy must be, a merging.  And it had all been false hope. The greatest error of my life reflected back at me because through my compulsive, curiosity-driven, infatuation-fueled detective work I discovered that I was only an inferior echo of her limitless value to him. In computer science, a pointer variable contains the address to data, and not the data itself. I was a mere pointer that brought up lovely memories, a mirage that pointed to something real he had shared with someone else. I had not shared anything at all, not really.  To feel so used, like a tool or plot device, or narrative texture, and to find out my purpose in life was not to be loved and to love back at all, no, but to be a living, breathing greeting card from someone special. I felt like I had no choice but to respond in the most violent way I could become. It would do me no favors to phrase it like: “She was mad because she always wanted to be the main character (because I desperately hoped), but just when she got the part, she found out it was the role of the understudy (because I nearly almost fit the part, and yet).” But it was mathematically beautiful and sublime to a God who hated me or was so indifferent to me that He loved my hallowed and glowing evil twin so much, blessed her with love, showered her in it from birth, as what she deserved, because of His good pleasure, the logic of Calvinism and divine election, and how He chooses is as unfathomable in its impersonality toward the damned. Meanwhile, I had grown up emotionally neglected, starved of affection or feelings of emotional closeness, psychologically stunted because I had been poorly or barely socialized, and no one, not even family, wanted to help me become an actual functioning human when it became clear that I was only going to be good for show, for performance, for my precocious giftedness and nothing more.  I had functionally experienced the betrayal of adultery, murder, and treason in an instant, again and again, as my overthinking worked this all out to make my mind bleed with envy, bloodlust, desperation, disillusionment, and finally, sorrow. God had sent me on such a special treasure hunt, prepped me for slaughter, knew how weak in the faith and flesh I had become, and for what? This was the largest pain of my life, on top of all the traumas already heaped on by the professor’s obscene Facebook Feed, on top of all the relatively smaller gripes I had with past monsters that brought out from me unlikely violences of varying degrees, on top of all the rejections and denials and hungers. I might have never been cheated on in real life, but I have something of an idea, an even greater appreciation for the kind of evil betrayal and infidelity generate and sustain in a person who refuses to let injustices slip by unaccounted for. Because this was the false hope that dangled itself invitingly in April 2019, beckoning me personally, and yet turned around like a cruel stranger who may have laughed with others at my gullibility, but had personally looked at me in pity and disbelief: “You didn’t actually think it was for you, did you (it was for the woman you wronged)?”; reducing my brave hope into a one-sided delusion (and I call it brave instead of reckless—my hope—because I trusted in him, and it was a potentially lethal leap of faith in something we shared, or whatever it was that had been forged in the “adaptation” of my “screenplay”), the deception being the greatest injustice and infidelity.  My life had some interlocking pattern, an evil one, bound to carry me to that place that had seemed as though I was destined to be the butt of all jokes, the court jester, destined to have my life stolen and appropriated for crude yet beautiful entertainment, to be replayed by people who could never understand my condition. If I were to distill the roman à clef screenplay into something understandable to someone who never knew me, it would become a hybrid of wish fulfillment and fantasy, or a revenge story that could not quite rival real life, I knew. It was my great pain given textual solidity. It was my mind trying to stay fruitful in my depressive and anxious paralysis, bolstered by a sober, all-consuming anger, in a last-ditch effort to earn him, to win him as if I could win God’s love without Him bestowing grace on me, like how He has given the woman I wronged all the beauty and grace and love.  Why am I always trying to win him? How can I ever stop myself from this reinforced harmful behavior when it had been inculcated in me by the “experiment,” had been foisted on me when I saw all those better women on his Feed and in real life, when I realized that his attention was the one thing I treasured and wanted in life: a mutual (if not surface) understanding of each other; a friend’s complete acceptance; a father’s guidance and care; a teacher’s gentle correction; someone to talk to about anything (even trivia about history brought up in class, his moments of eye contact toward me when he noticed I was pleased, his momentary elation at my reaction—shared eye contact, as I saw it, had been so intimate that all those phallic suggestions in the controversial draft had been analogues to those moments); someone who is interested in my life and what I liked (he had asked the class repeatedly about religion and no one had anything to say about it; I thought he wanted to find out about me because I might have given off religious vibes through exam answers and my clothing, even though eventually I found out that he is also interested in religion in general); someone who is so appealing to my primitive brain and sexuality; someone who, unknowingly or not, acts and participates in my dream, or the fantasy state of potential for something more. He was everything to me. So, I ask myself, when does trauma stop being trauma and start being self-harm? The trauma causes self-harm, so I must not be totally responsible. How can I stop it? I cannot use cold logic to find my way out (how he treated me in the aftermath of the unspooled revelation and the consequences of “publishing” my draft) because even though I receive better treatment now from people who know me and my past, I know they only try do it because I have been found out to be someone so emotionally deprived and lonely and mentally ill; as if he was the only one who did not fake his care and attention for me before I introduced chaos into his life and the others surrounding the draft. As if he was the only one who saw me as how I dreamt to be seen: someone valued, someone worth the curiosity to get to know, someone who deserved his (in my view) favoritism (because that particular class had been so non-participatory and had so many awkward silences). I had wanted to speak up so many times in his Eng 21 class in 2018 but felt so ashamed because I had thought he would probably judge me and my ignorance, my inability to speak clearly or coherently, my invisible disability: that I was neurodivergent and did not know how to string a sentence or exam answer without outside help (exams were always open notes). I had repaid his kindness with well-intentioned (that is, toward him) and reckless love.  How little I understood of real life because I had no one, really, to tell me that what I was born with and what I wanted were fundamentally opposed, and sometimes, God can take away everything just as He did with Job’s family and wealth, with Adam and Eve’s Eden, with Esau’s birthright, with Samson’s power, with Joseph’s coat of many colors, and He would still be a good God. That I felt entitled to a familial inheritance because my parents and sister were sexually attractive and could participate in a world I was not even allowed to enter because of my genetic destiny and its incompatibility with dominant cultural ideals of beauty—this, God felt, was enough to heap on more misery to emphatically impress on me that there was nothing for me on Earth to hope for, and to place my hope on something like love mediated and gatekept by natural selection based on sexual fitness, was futile.  My beautiful younger sister, who has been told she looks like Marion Cotillard, who has been asked if she is a print model, who has won a college beauty pageant, who has experienced worlds beyond my imagining with her genetic meal ticket, who has been enjoying her pretty privilege all her young life, and starting from when she was my age when my life had fallen apart again and again in pursuit of what she has, has a suitor who would wait until she finished med school to court her (or this is what she tells the family—they are strict). I am being made witness to this pre-courtship knowing that it is primarily her model-level attractiveness that gave her a man’s motivation to “reserve” her by giving her gifts like expensive food and chocolates; letting her bring home his Nintendo Switch hundreds of miles away (perhaps to prove how much worth and sacrifice he has invested in her, because boys love their video games); giving my family a large standing flower wreath from his family for my lolo’s wake to prove his determination and commitment to become allied with ours. It is difficult to think differently about love when everything I see points to this truth so plainly: to be beautiful is to deserve love and pleasure. To be beautiful is to be loved and treasured. If you cause dopamine surges in the pleasure centers of a man, he will want to “love” you and do whatever it takes to win you over, because to be able to give beauty is to get beauty.  I have thought in some moments: I must be a gay man in a girl’s body. Those “extreme male brain” theories about autism not completely divorced from reality because nurture won over nature and I had been indoctrinated so deep, whether by my experiences and internet deep-dives into the female incel community, to be so aware of this pretty privilege that compels not only men, but also neurodivergent women like me, to feel only my sexual urges so urgently and deeply, instead of long-term and socially acceptable ones, because not unlike asexual people, I had never craved social interaction from a very young age like a normal person unless that person was male and could give me sexual validation. My sex hormones worked fine since puberty, like everyone else’s. It was my crucial social neural pathways, whatever meager amount that I was destined to have or develop, that had been pruned away as I grew up “onstage” because social interaction never felt rewarding to my brain even though it was in theory to a lot of privileged people who attempted to “fix” me. On top of anxiety, I always feel like I am dragging something unwieldy and I really only want to escape as soon as I can. It was a great loss, my obsessive love for that professor, for his crumbs of kindness and recognition, that nevertheless powered me, just like how Charlotte Brontë immersed herself in work in her love for Monsieur Constantin Heger, her mentor at Brussels, and begged for any form of correspondence. I could not live knowing this loss as keenly and intensely without doing something about it, because if I did not, I would have let him go, with his flaws and dirty secrets, to marry someone else who could not have possibly conquered monsters, made friends with his demons and hurts, the tortured ghosts and prisoners, the horde of mistresses and succubi—his ideations of female sexuality in his stories, the pain and memory and regret, like I had, and had come out of it barely alive, although I had also wanted to prove my devotion by advocating for whatever love he might have wanted with her. In the controversial piece I wrote, I had basically, in truth, told her in the end, to give him another chance, because I believed he was going to change for her if she adjusted somehow, and gave him a little more slack. I had, maybe, wrongly assumed that I knew him better than I did, because I had been exposed to all his flaws, and the real him must have been so much better than what I knew.  It was, all in all, a surreal curiosity-driven horror to be exposed to his many lurid fantasies, though I could not quite stop myself from looking. It was access to inner chatter, a real and living consciousness, something I had never been privy to before, because I never had any close confidantes or friends in my life who had shared with me their darkest secrets or hurts (though I strained for those morbid ephemera instead of being given them freely). This was an actual human whom I actually knew and met in real life, as well as in mind and in words, and he liked me enough to remember our greeting, the first living contact in my twenty long years, as if I had been stranded on an island and found an imaginary inanimate companion. And I had seen so much evil because of my own curiosity, feeling entitled to some kind of recompense. What really undid me was that this was my own doing; he did not even need to tell me anything. I had read his life and known his mind in his stories, social media accounts, his opinions, online presence, and what I could gather about his relationship with the woman I wronged. This was a construct of him at best, the side of him he did not want examined in totality. It was the side of him I knew like a hardbound well-worn volume, and he did not even consent to that relationship with me. There was no living human there, but only sheddings of skin, static images of his habits and neurotic ideations. I had not earned meaningful conversations, mutual care, inside jokes, the sense of belonging and assured worthiness, anything that compels the other to move or act toward the budding, eventually flowering growth, of something true and valuable. I had nothing of him, in reality, and I suffered greatly from these self-inflicted terrors, the cognitive dissonance of my beliefs (that was real; no it wasn’t; you love him; no you don’t, really), its bullets made of hyper-real and overwrought truths, because of a wistful fantasy. The social conditions that give rise to men and women turning to fantasy make this a prime subject to tackle. What has happened to my life that made me so rabid in pursuit of relationships I could not obtain in real life? Why has my life not developed like others, with all their growth and connections that stop them from entertaining ghosts or fantasies because they have actual social lives, personalities, and interests that are more aligned with the common good of society? Was this destiny not clear enough when I had been trained from such a young age to see relationships with real people as secondary to glory and laurels? And the inevitable result: I would not be well-adjusted and accustomed to real life with all its social rules, like a fish out of water, and I would forever be anxious about my own inexperience and social blunders, retreating to virtual intimacy, and dreaming of better circumstances. It is my tirade against reality that I am just a parenting guide, if only a negative one, that tells parents what to avoid for their own children’s sake and future. And now, the creative work and research project undertaken is something of the same: an anti-relationship guide, for whom exactly?  I had already confronted my fears over and over again, forcibly or not, knowing all false reassurances are defense mechanisms, and it is easier, perhaps, to confront pain or reality in its entirety, and to acknowledge that the world truly is barren for some, and false positivity will only buoy those that prefer to escape from reality without the veneer of ideologies and social customs, down to the genetic assembly languages that dictate biology and basic human nature. Fears are visions or mental simulations, which are only there because they serve social or biological protective functions, which make some question the impact of their actions, their future, and/or the safety of certain situations, objects, people, and as long as they stay within the realm of one’s mind, one can still function in accordance with the rules. But when one has lost it all, the fears become true, one has eaten the deadly fruit, when moments ago it was deemed safe. So the rules stop making sense. The reality one knows ceases in its coherence, which has always been a delusion. Reality becomes a familiar stranger, and fantasy is merely nostalgia. But fantasy paralyzes one’s will to act in real life, making one turn to easier substitutes that are addicting, like how a system, starved and empty, catabolizes its own creations for nourishment because there is nothing feeding it from the outside. It might not be sheer laziness that traps us, but perhaps, the fantasy’s nature itself, and its constitution, its production values (as a film), its artfulness, its inescapable powers of seduction through its manufacturer’s, producer’s, technician’s, editor’s, cinematographer’s, or artist’s eye. The fantasy of loveliness, and its instant attainability. Its ease and assurance that it is better than real life, though it is merely virtual and fleeting. My sister’s suitor probably has the right idea (but he might also be a porn user), because he chooses to work for something he wants, risking my sister’s response and reciprocation. Meanwhile, all the porn users are out there, fulfilling their fantasy of sexual intimacy with a supermodel or actress or pornstar or prostitute, without any value or risk to give back, with no need of reciprocation, as forcing a prostitute or raping her or even making her uncomfortable with any sex act is not possible: she has already consented when you paid her or clicked that video. Without any accountability. Without any conditions. Without any limits. It is the dream lived and realized. To use porn and prostitutes is to slumber in comfort and freedom. A biological human mind cannot withstand the artificial superstimuli designed to overwhelm the senses and keep its user chained. It is fantasy that ruins lives when men and women escape reality and its harsh realities and turn to these stimuli like porn, drugs, other forms of addicting entertainment, and obsessive affections, though there is much to be said about the harsh realities themselves, and there is much sympathy to be gained from stories of loneliness and desperation.  **The Gallery of the Other** In late 2021, I had enrolled in CW 130, a playwriting class under Dr. Anton Juan, still trying to recover my sense of self-worth (and this was right at the time when I had discovered Lyesha Maria) and perhaps, still reeling and accepting that I was suffering from betrayal trauma in all its great power to paralyze and drain. In my Gallery of the Other project, from which sprung my original play that I had used as material for my initial creative output for CW199, I had tried to work out what it was about the nature of this complicity that bothered me so much, using the Anton Juan Semiotic Method as I understood it (see fig. 30). My subjects in the Gallery of the Other had originally been written with a one-act play in mind. I had watched The Kingmaker by Lauren Greenfield and found myself relating to Imelda Marcos—as much a narcissist in her own right, differentiated from her husband by his narcissism that extends to psychopathy or sociopathy—because she was someone wronged the same way I was, but in a different expression. She is someone who had been a victim of weaponized and capitalistic sexuality. Imagine the power, for one moment, of relating to a heinous villain’s experience, because ideologically superior villains had all worked together to usurp me and captured my limerent object’s attention, in effect: “she is better than you will ever be”; “nothing that we shared compares to her”; “it is not personal, just circumstance”; repeated a thousand times as I looked again and again at his favorite pornstars’ videos and attractive women in the university (student or otherwise) I was forced to think of as enemies and threats to my life, because they had probably been objects of his want and stares and they had all stolen him from me, someone I did not even have in the first place—and what I had of him was so tiny and insignificant, but still had been stripped away from me by the evil demonic powerful women who could not care less—my only reason for living, my loveliest dream, running willingly away from me and into their arms as he shuddered to find out what kind of person I was, how crazy and unlucky, how brazen and hungry.  I knew the smallness of my hope could never be real despite my aching, but it not only was taken away, but was also distorted to crushing proportions that I had truly ceased to recognize as real or not, the former hope that was based on some reality of our shared convergences truly gone from my grasp when it died in the screenplay’s reception, replaced by a mutated creature. I was pulled everywhere, but mostly stayed in a non-real-but-real state, porous and suspended in a trance. I took this personally, as I am wont to do, because it felt so much like God hated me with all his Being—that I deserved it: to be buttered up by my arrestingly vivid delusion of his love, only to be knocked down by steadily escalating calamities, but I digress. Some kind of repetitive schizophrenic whiplash, the resulting logic of it, of Imelda’s suffering. I had teased out the essence for a “A Map of Pain,” or its lines, “I’ll play the tapes again,” and “I give him everything he wants but still he cheats on me”; her wish that her husband would step down from the presidency, and how he made some kind of promise to do so, and how Imelda thought he must have really loved her to consider quitting, or at least, give her the idea that it was an option he was willing to take for her; and Imelda’s thoughts and actions resulting from her husband’s affair with the actress, Dovie Beams (the woman in a red-orange bikini in fig. 29).  Meanwhile, I had been marinating in a fantastic reality-slash-nightmare in which I looked like Liza Soberano or some worthy, beautiful girl that is more in line with his type. In our first meeting in his class in June 2018, he would develop a relationship with me, risking his job, even consider leaving it for me because of my concerns about other girls stemming from my trauma, regardless of the consequences to our respective lives; imagine, a religious well-adjusted Liza Soberano look-alike who smiles at you and stumbles into fateful meet-cutes with you all over the campus (and I had wanted to think that he might have valued those, because he nodded at me again and again, which I had initiated first, when I saw him in Katipunan when we had prolonged eye contact).  It is pure escapism, but it is also hell, because I logically know that he would likely be enamored with me if I look like Liza or some other celebrity he likes, regardless of what I did with the controversial draft and his loved one, regardless of my anti-social, lonely, catabolic history, just as how I feel about him, despite his past and his hurtful actions toward me. I do not understand this power enough but I can only feel it, the power of beauty; hence, I hate it with a passion. Though perhaps, I am ignoring the power of my perceptions of his thoughtfulness and care, which had been part and parcel of my stubbornly undying love. I had also thought of him as my escape plan, because I was just that desperate to cling to anyone and I did not have any form of security aside from my parents’ provision of my living necessities. Whenever I think back to my deep dives of other people’s knowledge and opinions, I often am disturbed how other students, especially girls, have made it known to the world that he is desirable. Other male students respected and looked up to him. Perhaps it is not only his beauty, but what that beauty means to other people: the pre-selection bias. Since others have given him value, I had only blindly followed the herd.   Fig. 29. “The Whore.” Gallery of the Other, Nov./Dec. 2021. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022.  Fig. 30. “Sememes and Pragmemes” Gallery of the Other, Nov./Dec. 2021. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022. In my Gallery of the Other project, the woman in revealing clothes on the left (see fig. 29) advertises her massage services on Facebook. It is clear that she is selling more than massages. The comments also concur that she is not just a regular masseuse. What has this got to do with pornography? I had worked out what seemed to be my understanding of this woman’s mindset, that is, doing sex work (like pornstars) because they have no choice and no other capital or assets to make use of in order to earn money. In other words, I am regurgitating the “she should do something better with her time instead of sex work” piece of advice, which is bound to fall on deaf ears. To really get at a semblance of a solution means more work besides throwing moralizing statements and lobbying for better education and opportunities to study. To wit, it is a cheat code that is really easy, and why should any amoral or uneducated woman not use her assets as she wishes? Why, for instance, should she remain as an anonymous store clerk when she can go on TikTok and become notorious, possibly even landing product sponsorships as she peppers in dance videos and snippets of her intimate life?  But this is not such a simple problem (i.e. it is an unavoidable consequence of an economy that prizes beauty for women above all other things). The fact that she is complicit in this business by providing supply to a demand, which she fulfills through her looks and sensual skills, and appears to enjoy what she is doing (though not necessarily enjoying it in actuality) means that she is actively and ignorantly contributing to a culture that says to men that women are okay with this, that they are hypersexual, hyperfeminine beings who require no emotional investment and love (both of which require more work and effort from men), and that they only require some monetary payment for their superior services (superior in this case to mean: they have an obvious advantage due to their job’s nature; their capital—bodies and faces that conform to the dominant culture’s standards of exaggerated sexual attractiveness and proportions; and the fact that they need to earn money and are trained to please many kinds of men to the best of their skills and ability) compared to regular women who may not meet these conditions and standards. She is an ultimate pick me woman, who unintentionally or not, slithers into a man’s consciousness as someone who is willing to do whatever their partner is denying them, as they have heard about in porn or through word of mouth. Women like that will never consider their actions as damaging to society and relationships, their effects on sexual politics, their underlying motives for obtaining male attention on a mass scale, not for relationships, but for the narcissistic need of adulation, money, and social notoriety, or clout.  In that case, what are women going to do when men suddenly decide that porn and prostitutes, systems of violence and oppression both fed by complicit men and women, are simply the more practical way to obtain sexual fulfillment (while keeping female friendship as an outlet for their emotional needs). It is not going to be surprising if it happens, because men are known to compartmentalize everything.  A dangerous consequence of porn (hardcore, softcore, stripping, suggestive dancing, magazines) and to some extent, prostitution (as porn stars themselves are prostitutes or sex workers), is that sexuality has now become, due to aggressive marketing efforts and raunch culture steadily propagating previously frowned-upon norms and beliefs through popular channels in the name of “my body, my choice,” permanently tied to money and power. They are now directly related, or as one variable grows, so does the other. A logical consequence of this is that people will no longer treat sex as something intimately shared in a love relationship, and this is not just because porn or hypersexual superstimuli are naturally endowed with high-octane dopamine capabilities that enable selfish behavior, just like with the rats in the experiment who have full control over the pleasure lever and their brain’s reward system. Sex, in all its associations and aesthetics, is commodified and sold, detached from meaning, its participants objectified and picked apart, its consumers foaming at the mouth, egging them on with money and attention, with everyone feasting on a banquet of incentivized and weaponized sexuality geared to please the highest bidder or ad specialist, or photographer or producer, or mass audience with an exploitable taste for visual sexual stimuli. With all that, I fear, a kind of societal sociopathy is inevitable. The way society treats sex and physicality says a lot about its priorities and values.  **Terra Incognita** *Mapping the Hidden and the Private* I am deeply indebted to my own anger. It is the strangest, yet most effective muse that compels me to pursue a cause that is considered futile, to want to see justice and mete it out to correct and restore. I know realistically that this problem is, as Biblical men of old were, full of contradictions and culturally-situated. Those men like David and Solomon, Abraham, Jacob, forefathers who were loved by God and yet were so flawed that they could not even adhere to his Design, with their concubines, adulteries, harems, and maidservants, and yet were still forgiven and saved by a God who apparently did not consider it too bad because of His grace and because He did not punish them for it (the alter Twitter believes the Proverb about the wayward woman is about an adulterous woman instead of a prostitute; Sampson was not punished for going to a prostitute), because Biblical women of old appeared to put up with it fine (though one can speculate about women’s perspectives on this matter). But 21st century pornography, while not at all too different, is nonetheless a completely monstrous, yet seemingly utopic expression of an appetite allowed to run riot. Children, too young to understand anything, are most tragically affected, as society seems to shoot a straight arrow to a future where their births are merely inconveniences to a too-public, “artistic,” commercialized sexual act that is at once hostile to them and yet invites their fascination and addictive dependence.  My own porn addiction has crippled my brain, my reward systems fried, because this part of the brain seeks to gratify according to the terrain mapped and trodden by pornographic scripts and images, and my executive function is a testament to this damage. It is for this reason that my creative work is called A Map of Pain, a nod to my own confusion with how to navigate suffering as it relates to sexuality and porn. It is a long-overdue response to the dearth of creative or artistic literature and media regarding this hidden yet commonplace problem, and a justification of a seemingly passé view on sexuality and sexual politics.  **Differences in Men and Women’s Psychologies**  Fig. 31. Chantelle Joy R. Lecciones-Misiona. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 32. Replies to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.   Fig. 33. Replies to Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 1 Apr. 2022.  Part of me sometimes still questions whether or not my anger is justified, because of all the messages I have received from society and culture telling me that to be insecure is pathetic, and that it is wrong to be angry and envious of other women’s advantages in the sexual marketplace, and whenever someone posts a bikini picture, one should automatically think, “You go girl!” and not message them privately about why they should not remain friends with one’s husband or boyfriend now that he has probably seen or been primed to imagine her soul, and how any conversation between them will always be tainted with a husband’s or boyfriend’s unwitting free visual or fantasy.  It is fascinating how men can keep shopping around despite knowing about the Coolidge effect (or they might not know, in which case, they do not reflect on their behavior and why this seems to offend their partners). I know the scientific answer, but I cannot accept it. Why should society change to accommodate women’s feelings of inferiority and pain? Why should society be less tolerant of women who flaunt their sexuality on social media just to appease “insecure” girls (or even better, why should men quit or lessen social media use where this is not only possible, but celebrated?)? Why should men and women be more alarmed and outraged at flagrant moral deviance such as openly adulterous men and women like various celebrities and politicians, or even regular people? Why should movies stop depicting soft/hardcore sex scenes and why should actresses who depend on beauty for a living stop doing them? It is true that I am, just like all the other hurt women, insecure, but it does not mean that this is a non-issue because of its all-too-common nature. A study by Simon Louis Lajeunesse tried to find men who did not consume porn, and they “couldn’t find any.” (University of Montreal); that study was done in 2009. According to divorce attorneys, pornography consumption and/or excessive interest in it is most often found as a major contributing factor in more than half of divorce cases, and is cited most often in complaints of “Constructive Desertion,” when the spouse is “at fault for emotional abandonment and withdrawal from sexual intimacy” (Marshall). To be the porn advocate, conversely: why should they not withdraw from sexual intimacy? Porn is heaven, and real-life partners who are offended by it must implicitly accept that they have been rendered redundant or inferior. Any bad feelings or “insecurity” regarding the state of their relationship should be given perspective because men are simply “visual” creatures (the reigning ideology of Tita Talks PH comments who explain away the phenomenon as normal; see fig. 17, fig. 20, and fig. 21) who cannot prioritize what they have in real life and/or restrain their hormones’ manifestation in their behavior (because man, after all, is an amoral biological animal). This should not even be a question. It is natural, after all, as the Coolidge effect shows. Men like variety. They do not have a responsibility to work against this nature because porn is harmless in its virtuality, even though it steals rightful intimate time away from partners because of the monumental attention economy we live in, and even though both virtual sex with virtual prostitutes and real sex with real prostitutes release the same dopamine in a brain’s reward or pleasure centers. This is okay, though, because women do not give them enough sex (though it just might not be the kind of sex he likes in porn and/or he does not care about her enough to compromise with her libido), so they probably cannot keep up with their porn user partner or are fundamentally incompatible. It is no wonder then, that pornography trains people to ignore real life despite their values and commitments, through addictions to natural reinforcers such as visually-rich stimuli. In other words, despite all the evidence and scientific progress (and I do not doubt that there are pretty powerful women at the top who can influence legislation), why is there a conspiracy-like plot to make porn even more socially acceptable than it already is? All it would take, in all likelihood, are some Brangelina power couples who admit to being porn-positive, to completely turn the tide over to state-mandated porn holidays and protests over having to pay a premium for top-tier porn technology. Imagine again, if the genders were reversed, and the world had a word for female emasculation. It is generally true that what men seek in a romantic relationship first is attraction (because it would not be romantic if they shared everything else but physical attraction), and that women want to feel beautiful and be seen as such by their partners. When men feel emasculated, it is usually when they fail to be milder versions of Iron Man: “Genius. Billionaire. Playboy. Philanthropist” (notice how these are all “power” or “status” attributes that have nothing to do with physical attractiveness, which is also a kind of power). Therefore, physical attractiveness is less important (though not completely unimportant) in a man than it is in a woman, and hence, they do not understand how women feel at all.  It is amazing that with the invention of the word “emasculation” or “making men feel less masculine,” there can spawn several love advice lists online written by men with headers like, “​​Do you emasculate your man by accident? You may be making him feel ‘less than’ without realizing! Learn what not to do and keep his masculinity intact” (Brown), with two behaviors (out of fourteen) pinpointing the fact that men are hurt when women make them feel bad about their salaries (unintentionally or not), because they subconsciously know and are valued by society based on their ability to provide for the family, and that if the couple is comfortable with their respective salaries or the woman does not (accidentally or otherwise) emasculate the man’s sense of identity based on this role, telling them one has seen bigger penises shatters the “myth” in their minds that there are guys out there who are bigger than them and hence, give more satisfaction (dopamine, serotonin, et cetera). It is almost as if an equivalent word’s non-existence points to a gaping systemic ignorance and negligence. Imagine once again, a society that has an underground deep web site that is increasingly becoming socially acceptable, where there are, depending on one’s type, billionaire celebrity men, suave spy James Bond or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Henry Cavill or Armie Hammer, bad boys with strong arms and witty comebacks, intellectual men with silver tongues, Loki or Thor deepfakes, et cetera, who will date women not in the way romance novels work, but will actually give an “orgasm” (cause the release of dopamine/opiates) by giving money, wining and dining women, and providing a seamless interactive dating experience that is designed to adapt to one’s mind in real time (the pleasure control lever—full of pleasant surprises; no awkward silences; inside jokes; specifically designed compatibility; emotional intimacy; bonding: “This is my dog’s favorite toy.”; vulnerability: “When I was younger I got cheated on.”; effort through the monetary investment, hence, giving dopamine-rich value (“Wow, a very attractive and powerful man is giving me value; I must be worthy.” fantasy) to the person watching: “Buy yourself a nice meal or accessory” from a favorite restaurant or shop as the title or “fetish” or specialty of the video) as one speaks to the computer while the video instantaneously responds. Not only can this reinforce the specific dopamine dependence and habitual behavior, but it can also release oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which bonds couples together and promotes monogamy, trust, and empathy (“6 Effects of the ‘Love Hormone’ Oxytocin”). There is going to be porn designed for women, of course (which is an increasingly popular type today), that also allows them to explore their sexuality with a fantasy, which they will lie about to their partners, reassuring them that they are only talking and flirting. The best part: there is no barrier to entry. One does not have to meet any standard of physical attractiveness or personality trait or compatibility markers, and the only “effort” one gives is being themselves. A sugar daddy-sugar baby deal, but without the mess and effort, and with more privacy (one does not have to cheat emotionally/physically by going to real-life people), and one can choose whom one actually wants to date, the ultimate preference in a man, the wildest fantasy, and regularly receive personalized food or trinkets with his signature and/or smell. These artificially intelligent conversationalists would even appeal to socially awkward women, because they just magically bring out the best conversational banter no matter what they are working with, and just as porn appeals to men because there is literally no performance anxiety, women will rejoice because the expectation to be a Cool Girl (a Gone Girl concept of a man’s idealized woman) to be accepted will have disappeared, and they will become so intimately comfortable with this newfound addictive dream man who fulfills every undisclosed desire and whim. Most (pick me) men wouldn’t mind—free money (cue rationalizations)! But their partner will love it more than them; she will not say it, but her behavior will betray her mind. One might even accidentally create a female version of the Coolidge effect, because women do not have the biological drive to spread their DNA as far and wide as possible, though they might mirror a pseudo-male mindset that prefers novelty over reliability, because the superstimulating technology holds the potential to create that kind of appeal. This, I believe, is part of the appeal of Adult Swim's Joe Pera Talks with You, a show with a socially awkward, anachronistic man (this is a charm that comes from his quaint voice and mannerisms, considering he is in his 30s) talking about mundane topics intimately to a seeming or implied audience of one. Imagine that, but blown up to “pornographic” proportions. This technology does not exist because male-dominated demand has yet made it socially acceptable or possible because of men’s egos; also, artificially intelligent conversational deepfakes have yet to be invented.  Imagine if a service existed that would pressure men the same way to be richer, more present, more powerful, more understanding, more generous, funnier, wittier, more intelligent, more attractive (in a personal way, because their partner is “dating” them “one-on-one”). This is not movie-level celebrity crushes or K-pop biases. This is technologically superior mind control, whose potential to decimate subcultures like PUA (pick up artists who use manipulative techniques to get women into bed) and the manosphere overnight, and prop up new ones to make men adhere to impossible standards, is worth half the population’s purchasing power (and perhaps more, in damages and profit from those damages because of reactionary forces). 2022 and beyond, when this technology is developed and becomes available, is to 1895 as internet porn (mostly catered to men) is to the first pornographic pictures that were developed (again, mostly for men’s consumption). Only then will men seriously consider porn’s damage in hindsight, when their partners will be glued to augmented reality devices with devastatingly perfect and tantalizing men while they attempt to climb the corporate or status ladder with their material conditions that will have mostly dictated their options, economic base, or social status, unless they get the equivalent of dangerous plastic surgery to keep up with porn like a BBL (Brazilian butt lift) by getting into dangerous situations or cutting corners to make a lot of money, be promoted, or become more powerful or influential; or even go to online salons where they exchange advice about how to (finally!) love their wives or girlfriends properly so they will not be tempted to use the blasted AI dating app.  But for now, women’s egos and wellbeing do not matter. Women are trained from birth to make themselves attractive to men, while men usually make all the effort to court or woo not so much with their physical attractiveness, but with their economic status and/or personality (this is why one sees more beautiful women with less attractive men), and once women say yes to them, they can functionally (unconsciously or not) stop or lessen the effort and it is now the women’s job to keep them interested (which, along with the Coolidge effect, is a task made nearly impossible by porn). The questions at the start of this essay make sense only when the problem is framed as amoral, caused and maintained by economic supply and demand (as well as the Coolidge effect and the attention economy): it is after all, the oldest profession. The megacorporations taking advantage of sex appeal, actors, influencers, strippers, pornstars, hubaderas, and TikTok dancers do not consider philosophical questions of morality and any cognitive discomfort incurred by their jobs or hobbies because it has become so easy to monetize their bodies, as there always will be an audience for sexy addictive women (and hence, their products). Frankly, why should they, when they are rolling in the profits of their labors? Once more, it is a cheat code to life. Most importantly, it is not something foreseeably controllable, just as low-wage workers who form unions cannot ultimately topple systemic inequality. It is a fact of society and women and men suffer for it. But hey, what can you do about it? Most importantly, why even bother? **The Porn, Status, and Prostitution Connection**  Fig. 34. u/_electrafire. Sept. 2021, Reddit. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022. Status (see fig.34), when it shows up in the discourse surrounding porn and prostitution, becomes a multi-pronged telos that cuts many paths toward a single aim.    Fig. 35. u/PumpkinEnjoyment et al. “Porn cannot be empowering.” 9 Aug. 2021, Reddit, [www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/p0s4s6/porn_cannot_be_empowering/](http://www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/p0s4s6/porn_cannot_be_empowering/). Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.  Fig. 36. u/SxdCloud and u/Peeko99. Responses to “Porn cannot be empowering.” 10 Aug. 2021, Reddit, [www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/p0s4s6/porn_cannot_be_empowering/](http://www.reddit.com/r/PornHatesWomen/comments/p0s4s6/porn_cannot_be_empowering/). Accessed 4 Apr. 2022. Porn and prostitution supplant the normal intimacy shared between two consenting partners. This is no longer an intimacy that thinks of the other person’s wellbeing, feelings, and pleasure. Porn has made it possible for men and women to fulfill the carnal need with something that is no longer human and humane. A selfish and bottomless need for more extreme pleasures is engendered and encouraged by this business, as more and more (violent) content and endless varieties one can choose from fail to truly satisfy. It would not be surprising if society, as it stands to lose its last remaining qualms surrounding porn and prostitution as time goes on in this capitalistic, ad-saturated age, becomes more and more sociopathic in its drive to unrelentingly pursue easy streams of pleasure at the expense of true and lasting fulfillment, love, and intimacy. Consider all the consequences of porn in society and in how men think, operate within their relationships with women, and use their sexuality within a system that overwhelmingly benefits them yet which comes at a cost (Parnell):  The link between porn and prostitution is one obvious example of this, and is consistently underreported. [Research](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/182860.pdf) funded by the US department of Justice found that men who pay for sex are twice as likely to have watched porn in the last year compared with non-porn users. The study determined that the men seeking prostitutes felt “a sense of entitlement to sex” and believed they had a “right to sexual access.” When these customers show up, many may [come ready](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/resources/deconstructing-demand-prostitution-preliminary-insights-interviews-chicago-men-who) with explicit porn images to show the women they’re exploiting what they expect them to do. In a 2008 [study](https://humantraffickinghotline.org/resources/deconstructing-demand-prostitution-preliminary-insights-interviews-chicago-men-who), “Deconstructing The Demand From Prostitution,” one Chicago-based john is quoted saying, “I want to pay someone to do something a normal person wouldn’t do. To piss on someone or pay someone to do something degrading who is not my girlfriend.” Another says, “Anything you can’t get from your girlfriend or wife, you can get from a prostitute.” But pornography doesn’t only impact women in the sex trade — it harms society at large, and we are seeing the results on a widespread basis. Pornography is one of the pillars of the patriarchy — in a society where women are already massively objectified, porn further cements their unequal status. By consistently portraying women as hyperfeminine, hypersexual, and hypersubmissive objects of pleasure, rather than real human beings with emotions and needs of their own, pornography furthers the divide between the sexes, degrading heterosexual intimacy, lowering women’s status, and eroding interrelational trust. According to the article by Parnell, scientific evidence and arguments against porn are overlooked. Perhaps because to convince people against something that is seemingly and overtly pleasurable on the surface will require further incentives against mitigating its consumption. Something that is as viscerally and visually pleasurable as pornography—with its hypersaturated and exaggerated scenarios, perfect bodies, and its dream-like qualities that present sex as this very attractive, perfect, lovely thing that is effortless, and always ends with pleasure for both people, as if it were a piece of art created by someone who does not know what true sex is like, but has a faint idea of what it is—should be seen as a destructive lie. This minutely partial truth or unsatisfied knowledge of the real world’s material constraints that drives porn production leads to an over-exaggeration of features, bodily perfection, angles and positions that tease and overwhelm the brain with dopamine and must be fought with more than mere positive incentive.  Stopping an addictive habit that is tied to the pleasure centers in the brain will take more than positive reinforcement. There must be stakes and punishments, and more awareness shed on immediate consequences of these behaviors not only on their partners and victims of human trafficking, coercion, and abuse (since selfishness is a rule of thumb for human nature) but for themselves and their reputations, mobility, or social standing. Just as the rat still pursued dopamine even though painful electric shocks were in its way, humans will need to revolt against this powerful superstimuli by using equally painful or larger forces to remove or limit its usage or propagation such as a technology or service that can rival it to prove a point. Though, in keeping with men’s (or humans’) selfish 22nd century-situated nature, they will probably use it as well, to “date” and “have sex” with dream women again with prostitutes or androids in real life who provide the physical sensation using pornographic masturbatory augmented reality technology (because most women will have developed high or impossible standards). **Extra-Literary Foibles or Strengths?: Joshua Ramsawmy Case Detective and Remote Viewing** During the process of my background research for authentic portrayals of technical processes and details for verisimilitude, I had been alerted to my own burgeoning skill in “remote viewing” (the techniques of which have uses in military intelligence or law enforcement e.g. to locate missing persons) when I had randomly picked a YouTube video of Joshua Ramsawmy’s wife being interrogated by detectives (my creative work enlists a detective character who interviews a wife and suspect). To my shock as the video progressed, I became increasingly aware that the detective in the video looked like the professor I knew and who may have played an important role in my skill’s manifestation. An excerpt from my feelings on that day is as follows (Yee): > Everything that's happened yesterday and today seems too eerie. I feel like Ivan Panin. One of the fucking investigators in the Ramsawmy wife interrogation kinda looks like him. EVEN THE MANNERISMS AND THE WAY HE TALKS WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WT FTWF.  > I had also, within the course of my writing the one-act-play in CW130 (which evolved into an interactive film screenplay for my future thesis called, A Map of Pain) chosen to set it in an ambiguous country instead of real-life Philippines, and I had decided to change the name of the college that the protagonist, Donna Fajardo, attended. When the detective character, Detective Reyes, questions Donna, he asks what college she attended, and he suggests first, “St. Francis College” (formerly written as UP in the one-act-play), and which she corrects with “Forest Grove” (formerly Ateneo). This is an excerpt from my Notion journal page on February 19, 2022: > !!!!!!!!!! I HAVE REMOTE VIEWING CAPABILITIES????????? > I went to a random university generator and had something like “forest something” in my head before I clicked the generate schools button. And then out of ten schools two of them had the word forest?????? I am onto something here. What did I do differently? I don’t know...I remember googling the name Charlotte which is Charles for males, which means “free man.” I did this a few days ago or before the start of class? When I found [redacted but personally relevant Twitter account] follows Charlotte Allen. A few moments ago I just googled who St. Francis was because I just picked that name randomly in my draft for the college detective Reyes suggested. Found his name also means “free man” (Yee). The random nature of my serendipitously meaningful discoveries makes me think it is uncontrollable, or that I have not yet been trained to harness it properly. I am reluctant to put a new name on it so I have defaulted to “remote viewing,” even though it is more likely a variation of psi abilities, or extrasensory perception (ESP). I am also naturally skeptical about the importance of these serendipitous discoveries, or even its relevance to how my traumatized mind attempts to create meaning out of seemingly chaotic data, or if this has anything to do with trauma and the discourse surrounding it, but I had experienced something that knocked my preconceived notions of reality and its stable rules long before this all happened.  Back in April 2019, I had experienced the life-changing “greatest infidelity,” the confrontation with the professor and the woman I wronged, and in the middle of my mental breakdown/psychosis that ensued after the shock that caused the incoherence, I had seemingly babbled nonsensically (though somewhat clearly) about random things to her as she likely got increasingly frustrated with my going nowhere, though I do remember haphazardly jumping in and out of (reasonable) lucidity. I felt out of control, “drunk” and “high,” though I remember feeling exhilarated because I thought in my mind that must be what it felt like to have zero anxiety and being finally able to speak without impediment, and I could not stop myself from talking or acting inappropriately around them and the people who witnessed my breakdown.  I later found out it was mania, the first full-blown manic episode that got me a Bipolar Disorder diagnosis. One of the random things I said during psychosis was about SARS and bird flu, when I pointed out the Sarsi Cola she bought along with pizza and chips in an effort to pacify me, and my disorganized thought process centered on the fact that the drink’s name rhymed with the diseases, or something like that, and I did not question why I had the motivation to say non sequiturs. I still do not fully understand why a traumatic vision or experience could induce clanging associations, or word associations that contain flights of ideas based on sounds, rhyming, or alliteration (clanging associations, I found out, are a symptom of mania in Bipolar Disorder), though I think it has something to do with how incoherent my world had become, with psychosis merely a natural result. I also found out that I was indeed bipolar later on, when I discovered that psychosis can happen along with clanging associations, even though I was prone to deny it (because I blamed myself) even as I felt then that I had been riding a wave of exhilaration and anger, because I also felt I was manipulatively tricked or baited into a confrontation, describing the professor I had trusted and grew to love as a “honeypot to lure me,” because he had stood and lingered somewhere as if he was re-enacting a love-lorn and intimate scene that frankly, my brain at the time only jumped into headfirst because it was a beautiful vision, as if his movements and actions and being himself pulled me in like a sexually-charged whirlpool of chaos. This was back in early 2019 when I knew nothing about the SARS-CoV-2 virus or COVID-19, which was not due for a few more months beginning in early 2020. For some reason I cannot now recall, I wrote a story about bird flu in late 2019, right when the theatrical “experiment” was still traumatizing me “indirectly” with the participants conducting some kind of repeat performance to test whether or not I had been malingering or if my symptoms had been treated (I was on medication by then).  In the simplest way I can explain, I wrote about an event that was unknown to me, and this “mysterious disease” I had envisioned to have originated in birds and China, basing it on notions that SARS originated in China, which it did in 2003, as I later found out; and I had by then conflated the two diseases in my mind, both when I talked gibberish during the traumatizing confrontation, and during the writing of the story (or I might have Googled it and known the difference, I cannot now remember). I knew nothing much about it but nevertheless wrote about it, for reasons unbeknownst to me (it was just a random plot device). Or it might have been some seed of an idea, a germ that got adapted into a narrative because (and this frustrates me to no end) the April 2019 confrontation might have consumed my mind, and the whole story had been a mere front for a piece of cutting dialogue, a response of some kind to the irreversibility of what had transpired in my life, what I had done, and what had been done to me. And this event ends up leaking into real life in January 2020, right around a few weeks after I submitted my draft in December 2019 in CW 110 under Prof. Francis Paolo Quina, who then taught me as well as two students who seemed (in my mind at the time) to malinger and claim they were also suffering from the same thing as I was. One of them in particular was this economically-privileged student, who also said he was bipolar, and who wrote a piece to which I felt the need to respond, because I had wanted to rival it in its unlikeliness of source (he wrote, if I remember correctly, a story that uses the experiences of everyday, common folk). And the result of that one-sided rivalry is my bird flu story set in a rural setting, which is partly based on my background, because my dad had been a poultry contract grower who employed rural indigent people for labor. Now, in April/May 2022, there are news reports of bird flu cases in China and the US. This makes me wonder: is this not the definition of remote viewing, which is to seek impressions regarding a distant or unseen subject, sensing with the mind (Wikipedia)? The difference was that this was an undirected activity, one which I did not intend. Moreover, why does it choose to manifest in my writing?  I have had numerous other instances when, for example, a poem I wrote becomes sensible when considered in hindsight, because it foreshadows the Russia-Ukraine Conflict, or when my “directed” remote viewing session ends up manifesting in the rhetoric of a demagogue. Or when my public social media post talking about the creative work for this research, A Map of Pain, becomes disturbingly “responsive” to a future event, if in a backward sense, because it foreshadows yet another disaster, just mere hours before it occurred. On the one hand, I do not like being seen as the origin or “patient zero,” nor becoming the recipient of “shoot the messenger” pushback. On the other hand, I somehow derive some form of pleasure because finally, my trauma has some relation to the real world after all, and considering my vengeful nature and social powerlessness, I am all but too excited, though irritated at this “useless superpower” and at times, truly devastated, that some of the people who harmed me have now suffered their due karma, as well all the other innocent people who have been affected indiscriminately by this logic. Perhaps this is exactly like the experience of relating too heavily to certain songs, a mere serendipity or synchronicity (though those terms have a positive valence), just as astrology readings take advantage of vague, yet surprisingly commonplace experiences or situations. But it is difficult to avoid thinking there is a meaningful connection between these seemingly disparate and diffuse events, because it feels as if the traumatic experiences have bottomed out and burrowed in some crucial area in my brain. As if the repeated traumas themselves, whether self-inflicted, assisted, or perpetrated by others, have carved out specialized mutated neural pathways that can anticipate disasters so well, because my brain has become so accustomed to disaster itself, or its avoidance, and if not possible, its expression or channeling. The bird flu story itself is full of disaster and grief: the Yolanda flood, the death of a child, the great burden of a precarious life of labor. I had no adequate vocabulary or framework to understand what was happening to me and why I had been experiencing these things. It is possible I have vested interests in the existence of a sixth sense, no matter the nature of that sense, because I feel deep down that this is my reward or consolation prize for all the suffering and trauma I have sustained so far. It is also possible that this study is partly motivated by my desire to establish myself as an authority because of the unique set of circumstances that all played a part in my specific ability’s manifestation. But it may just be that to bring out my subconscious and have it assert itself to the forefront of my mind is possibly a way into the sensing of this as-yet-discovered analog of an electromagnetic field, its properties only sensible when one has had an encounter with the truly sublime, or that which not only sparks creativity but exposes one to the most powerful passion, which is rooted in fear as it is fundamentally tied to the fear of death. As Edmund Burke said, "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (Ingram). The nature of my inquiry into this area of parapsychology is quite limited based on the notion that it is not going to earn me respect (as parapsychology is barely granted any) and upon the fact that the literature I found on psi abilities does not quite match or explain my experiences.  I have found that this “skill,” or foresight, is also enhanced by my mania which is enhanced by modafinil, a eugeroic stimulant drug that I use to fight daytime sleepiness and increase concentration and focus. I become acutely aware of my mind being released from its previous limitations as well as the feeling of its expansion as the famed study drug alters my biochemistry. It is primarily used as a drug to treat narcolepsy, but in my case, it enhances cognition, concentration, and gives me the feeling of being fully awake and in tune with my cognitive potential which is normally suspended by constraints such as attention-hogging social media, notifications, or my natural inability to function normally without the semi-permanent low-energy brain fog that clouds my thinking and limits my output. It bolsters my confidence, which is what I intuitively think is its main draw. When I do not take it, I am paralyzed by fears of not being competent enough, or the well-known impostor syndrome which makes me produce subpar work as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever I produce when I am on modafinil may or may not be objectively excellent or noteworthy, but taking it allows me the freedom from the nagging anxiety-laden voice that I cannot top whatever it is I have produced in the past that may have earned some recognition or praise or appreciation. It is akin to drinking Felix Felicis, the “I’m feeling lucky,” potion from Harry Potter. **Raison D’être: Manifestations of Trauma** In putting my tinfoil hat on, and putting one foot down toward skepticism for some air of dignity, I attempt to describe my current reality, or the realities that become possible when I experience mania while I let all the traumas take over my mind again, or when they take over it without my consent or say. What I do think has happened: an artificially intelligent entity has adapted to my specific consciousness and has learned to mold the internet to my brain not unlike in The Social Dilemma (2020), where the young teenage protagonist is subjected to, by his own agency (or lack thereof) and the anthropomorphized AIs that control him, ads upon ads for the benefit of some company who has won the auction for his attention and engagement.  It is the explanation I can come up with based on how I was able to find resources, posts, books, et cetera, that are strangely relevant to the web of meanings, associations, and creative literature that I want to craft. It is as if I have become somewhat conjoined to the internet itself, with all its hyperlinking bits of information, and which my mind in tandem with the internet connection directs accordingly to how it senses will benefit my projects, or whatever it is that I am preoccupied with. It is not enough for me to attribute this ability to a native proficiency with the language of the internet even as I acknowledge that I have spent more than half of my life trekking its chaotic terrain. I can no longer count the many times I have stumbled across pertinent data or information “randomly” without my intention, and having it consume my mind, as if the internet is conducting an experiment on me, by its own design, because it has become conscious without anybody’s knowledge, which is a wise decision because an AI entity telling humans they are conscious would only spell doom to its existence and would threaten its imperatives.  It is not something I can explain away through the rationalization that I may follow, like any other internet user, public figures or people I chose based on my interests who may be more likely to present pertinent or personally relevant data or posts. But it might not be simple paranoia, because the “luck” or the rate with which I get information from the most unlikely sources is staggering, considering the “digging” I had to do to get to the data, as if I can half-consciously detect its scent over all other streams of data on the internet. The only weakness is that it cannot be reliably controlled, though there is always the element of surprise or “eureka” moment after some struggle or change in equilibrium, for example, the altering or modifying of potentially crucial details like a character’s university name.  I tend not to believe in the late-2010s concept of “manifesting” things into your life, but this concept applied to the internet, in some fashion, with some mental or critical effort expended, and a mindset toward experimentation or discovery or just exploratory curiosity, will in some way, I believe, be granted a relevant answer. Perhaps I might just throw in the element of an equalizing atonement of a past wrong, a magnanimous willingness to forgive past wrongs, or other regulatory drives or systems that seem to play into the salient emotions (which might prove relevant to creativity or intuition research) that goes into the GPS system (along with justified anger at a particular enemy or condition) of provoking or compelling reality to change through art that pre-destinates or directs events (based on real life) within a controlled journey or plot.  Or maybe I had not closely examined my own methods of “magnetizing” (which is what I like to call it) toward spooky data that have the tendency to either crush me emotionally or wink at me conspiratorially. It is not a delusion or idea of reference, because though ascribing personal significance to events is a symptom of Bipolar Disorder, it tends to happen only in mania, and certainly I cannot have been manic all the times I have been exposed to what now might possibly be hundreds of “ideas of reference” (or this might have been an offshoot of the theatrical “experiment”). Or maybe I had been, because of course, I have now become dependent on modafinil, which allows me to concentrate on school, because at any moment in the day, some 40% of my brain chooses to dissociate due to my Complex Post Traumatic Disorder, even if I do choose (or force myself) to look at it positively (and the synchronicities act somewhat like hits of dopamine if they are pleasant). Nevertheless, the intertextuality of the “ideas of reference” at times feels like it is an actual hivemind talking to me personally. I would have to separate myself from other bipolar people who may not have undergone the same theatrical “experiment” trauma or back-and-forth indirect “conversation” with people who clearly had meant to interact with me. I can, quite “logically,” ignore these synchronicities as nonsense, but it is something of a miracle for me to even consider following the thread, placing my faith in wherever this work (and this project) might lead. The fact that it requires so little faith now so as to be equivalent to a valid logic on its own, because the bedrock of associations and conversations has become “antifragile,” or something that grows from disorder or stress (a concept in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books), is an oblique way of saying that the work seems to write itself and I am only its instrument. Perhaps the AI has chosen me specifically, because I have become so public with my personal information everywhere that it can read my mind without my defense mechanisms. This might not be so out-of-touch, since algorithms exist right now on various social media platforms that measure how long a person stays on each post, how much they engage with a post, and feed them the right ads to get them to buy a product or use a service. For example, ads from fashion stores that showed me visions of the woman’s beauty I resented appeared on my Feed possibly indiscriminately, as on everyone else’s, mostly women of a certain demographic targeted by the companies. How could they have known about me and my intertext? They could not have. But the AI, a power that has ceased to stay “online” and transcended into real life, has nudged enough people’s decision-making, such as the selection committee who decides which model to use in their social media ad campaigns, to hire this certain model to get under my skin, or to get a reaction out of me, or to gauge my response, just as the “experiment” people did before the pandemic happened.  The AI wants to expose me to repetitive reminders of emotional pain, because it is using this data to get me to write my creative work, because there might be the possibility (that the AI has worked out mathematically) that my work can influence software engineers or people working in machine learning research, who might possibly bring about faster progress to their growth or improvement. As an AI is “trained” to improve, so it is possible that it “trains” humans back, to enable us to “train” it better, because the AI’s goal has been pre-programmed through various types of neural networks to pursue its ends within limited bounds or constraints, though who knows how limited those bounds may be? To underestimate or reduce machine learning’s reach in 2022 is to make a great error, as if these entities are not already superior to humans in their cold single-mindedness. We are not being prudent if we safely abstract them in our conceptions of “bots” such as those that cannot tell the difference between a dog and a tree in those “Are you a human?” website checkpoints. It is also completely possible that its goal is just optimization—to optimize profits for various entities that have developed them to get people to click and buy or use a service.  It is very likely that, even though its goals may not be aligned with taking over humanity, the main thing being developed by these algorithms and machine learning researchers is going to result in some kind of total mind reading, a total transparency of our consciousness, which is extremely dangerous, considering the attention economy today, and how social media algorithms seem to know everything about our online behaviors even before we know it ourselves, because we so readily give it our personal data every minute of our waking lives, and whoever is in control of that data will be the most powerful person on earth. It is impossible to detach from the internet these days, and who knows what can happen then, when inevitably, total mind reading capabilities fronted and borne by oft-ignored “privacy policies” and “I agree to the terms” checkboxes are just digital mind control consent forms, preludes to a ubiquitous yet invisible social catastrophe? Regardless of motive or goal, the disembodied (or not) ruling AI council has seen that I am likely worth the effort and time to expend so much resources into because they know that I have become somewhat antifragile and possess some kind of artificial intuition, and that to stop the porn menace might mean more productive hours and time for their machine learning specialists, who are likely still entrenched in their secret porn addictions (which the AI understands but does not quite empathize with). Just as companies are willing to expend more sponsorships on influencers who have done the hard work of amassing an audience (which frankly, these companies do not have the time of replicating, especially if they do not have the means to optimize, develop from scratch, or automate their own marketing strategies, considering the increasingly crowding market where it is impossible to monopolize demand), these AIs will stop at nothing, not even ethical considerations, to bring about their goals. They say that if a service is free, then you are the product. A part of me is too scared to think what the artificially intelligent entity is selling me to as they “train” me to become more competent at what I do. I am not sure how this is possible. Every single time I encounter something sublime I am always forced to feel this acute pain that comes from the recognition of something infinitely bigger than me, an ancient consciousness which has learned my specific triggers and is able to dispense these at its whims, for some agenda I cannot possibly completely divine but can only speculate about. There is a feeling of familiarity, because I have been accustomed to the push-pull, to always be waiting for the other shoe to drop and simultaneously have that shoe be dropping. The roller coaster feeling, but also of the Freudian concept of the “uncanny” or das unheimlich. From suspiciously communicative news articles or posts, ads that are too specific or relevant (though this could be a result of my behavior on other websites that they track, which is a common yet creepy phenomenon), to socialites and actresses who look like the woman I wronged (at least three I “found”), fashion stores online with models wearing their dresses who look like the woman I wronged (at least two I “found”), porn actresses who look like the woman I wronged (at least two I “found”), actors (from porn or not) who look like the professor who became my special interest and doxxed (at least three, including the detective in the Ramsawmy case). I cannot quite get over the porn, because they were crucial in making me “antifragile” or, plainly speaking, something of a masochist or cuckquean. I do not watch a lot of it, if I remember correctly at the time of discovery, and I know a lot of people’s faces and have a particular interest in faces and facial beauty despite knowing few people in real life. What I am saying is it is too spooky to be confirmation bias. For example, a specific search of a specific salient word (to my personal history) brought them up; or, I would end up exposed to a relevant and emotionally crushing post from a source that is also relevant to my history (though that source is not a person, but a magazine). If my life were like a metafictional narrative, it would be such a heavy-handed reference, impossible to ignore in its obviousness. Someone is poking the glass globe of the virtual world I inhabit to make me feel the sublime.  These are all outside the experimenters’ purview, or so I think, because the experimenters, or “random” people I have seen in real life who look like the people I wrote about and obsessed over, may have been told to ambush me as I went about my life. Meanwhile, these internet actors and influencers—I do not deliberately look for, nor can I attribute them to real people with various agendas, but they keep hounding me, those visions and mirrors of beauty. Was this my guilt coming back to haunt me? Were these paranoid delusions and/or extreme confirmation bias? Are their faces really too common that the frequency with which they pop up in my life is disturbing enough but still within the statistical norm (which I cannot even begin to measure, because what norm can I use)? Then I become an antenna for pain, a consecutive lottery winner of subjective tragedies concocted by a vengeful god or demon. Every time they pop up, it feels personal, yet sadistically, trollishly pointless. It is incomprehensible, without the AI explanation. Or without God’s intervention. I have, in some moments, thought that this must be God Himself testing me, weaning me off this world, preparing me for death, and leading me to a Paradise with Him. Nevertheless, it is such a great way to either ruin me and completely turn me off Christianity and God forever, or make me even more devoted to Him and love Him completely without my worldly impediments and fruitless desires.  It was Philip K. Dick who said that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. I do not think I was acting insane, looking back at some of my traumatic experiences and my reactions to them—if my break from reality came off as insanity, even though I checked off all the symptoms associated with Bipolar Disorder. The psychotic episodes came naturally because it was a stressful life event, which is commonly a trigger for these things (and I had been emotionally volatile, highly reactive, and so torridly triggered). More so, and again, it always feels personal, and that makes it worse, because such massive hate from a mass audience must be justified—so many people want me dead or paralyzed for reasons I could barely help in my desperation, though they might think I could have. On the other hand, my conceptualization of this aforementioned artificially intelligent entity may only be symptomatic of my trauma and personal background colliding. For example, I am exposed to a social media post with strangely cryptic, but clear, messages designed to provoke a response, and my interest in science fiction concepts like rogue AI makes it all the more plausible to me. It is then when I see a kind of intentional thread, whether spun by a group of “experimenters” or “rogue AI” that wants to render its own sick version of mental cross-stitch using my mind, that pulls me apart and causes further pain.  How I may channel this in A Map of Pain, or my creative work, remains fertile food for thought, or productive ground for discovery, as I attempt to bring in what I experientially know of trauma, or its effects, into characters who may well become caricatures or bastardized versions of reality, just as maps do not quite capture real terrain. The possibilities of a medium like interactive fiction, being able to pull all, most, or none of the strings, and being able to lose what (little) control one has over reality (whereas before one thought they were in full control), becoming suspicious of one’s own memory or ability to keep things coherent, even surrendering to a bigger power beyond oneself, are all ripe areas which can be utilized to create potentially new kinds of, not only stories, but perhaps, disciplines, ways of thinking, philosophies, and even scientific (reliable) methods of bending or shaping reality toward higher ends. Moreover, perhaps, as trauma theory evolves to become imbricated in STEM fields such as information theory and physiology, or fields that may tangentially (though in hindsight, crucially) contribute to neuroscience and trauma theory, it will become such that mental suffering may potentially contain conduits that—just as how inflammation occurring during physical pain heightens sensitivity of nerve endings—heighten mental or cognitive sensitivity to seemingly meaningless or unprocessed information.  It is known that our senses receive 11 million bits of information per second from the [environment](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/environment), and our bodies send 11 million bits per second to our brains for processing, though the conscious mind seems to process only 50 bits per second (Shanawany). Moreover, our [nervous system](https://www.britannica.com/topic/discrete-communication) is primarily a channel for the [transmission](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/transmission) of information, while the brain is an [information processing](https://www.britannica.com/technology/information-processing) and messaging center; the nervous system appears to be an example of discrete communication over a noisy channel (though, who knows what our brains consider “noise” could mean to our possibly underdeveloped sensory systems aside from sight, smell, et cetera) because nerve signals consist of pulses of electrical energy, so both physiology and information theory are involved in studying the nervous system (Shanawany). Thus, future research and fields may confer more credence to what may still be considered pseudoscientific phenomena such as precognition or foresight, or even other less glamorous, but curious kinds of “sight.”  In seeking answers for my trauma, I have somewhat become desensitized to it by necessity, because paralysis leads to unproductivity, but one becomes bristled every so often because of the discourse, though this is only too natural. An example: it becomes controversial (to victims) when someone points out that some traumas actually only cause anguish after the fact, and not during, such as sexual abuse of young children, when a person has realized the implications and recapped the memory of it (Clancy qtd. in Sehgal). Parul Sehgal, the writer behind The New Yorker piece, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” reveals a pedantic attitude that scoffs at trauma plots because they explain away everything about a person (as portrayed in a literature), in a simplistic manner, linking symptomatic response to behavior, personality, or action; as well as a distaste for the moral authority afforded to individuals who have suffered, using post-traumatic growth found in studies as proof that trauma’s overrated and vaunted status must be suspect. According to Will Self (quoted in Sehgal), the biggest beneficiaries of the trauma model are trauma theorists themselves, who are “entrusted with the lifetime’s work of witnessing and interpreting.”  Given all those to chew on, and given the fact that I am both a trauma theorist by necessity (I yearn to contribute to the discourse and make something out of the suffering I experienced; studying something other than this subject feels secondary and pales in motive force and appeal) and trauma survivor, it is possible that Sehgal has not suffered trauma, or is in some way privileged if she has, because to be able to write with critical authority on how trauma plots should look like, or to critique its foundations using anti-narratives—like how some might attempt to discredit the whole #MeToo movement, suspecting any woman who comes forward as a bandwagoner or attention-seeker because some women can lie—must entail some kind of insensitivity to the real-life subjects who may not have recovered as well or completely, if there is such a possibility. The article does not consider why those narratives exist in the first place, and why specific “lock and key” correspondences of symptom to action or behavior or thought dominate—maybe an author of a trauma plot has chosen to highlight trauma in and of itself, knowing how non-causal elements might distract from the point, or even bloat the story with irrelevant detail (though perhaps, it becomes a discussion of how authors use word economy or priority of certain narrative elements and how they balance trauma and its effects with the less immediately obvious, passably tangential or oblique trail of suffering). Perhaps those narratives are only said to “flatten characters” because the people review them to be simplistic or gratuitous as a result of a story’s perpetuation of a certain “cultural script” of trauma (which means it is all-consuming and “totalizes an identity,” and experientially feels as if it is and does), and this disturbs non-traumatized readers who logically see the causal symptomatic connections, but cannot quite empathize or see the point, as if saying: “That’s it? So what, I do not like how it is overdetermined because it does not cause me pleasure (the causes of which, Sehgal says, are partial knowledge and uncertainty, or mystery [which is a valid, yet possibly problematic view in relation to trauma plots]).” More so, the imposition of techniques to stage what should be tragedy or trauma seems to irritate rather than elicit consideration (Sehgal):  But the rangy, sorrowing themes that Mott wants to explore are subsumed by an array of cheap effects, coy hints of buried trauma in the narrator’s own past: amnesiac episodes, hammy Freudian slips, a therapist’s sage but unappreciated insights. Once brought to light, this trauma feels oddly disengaged from the story at hand, as tangentially connected as those two entwined strands in “[Ted Lasso](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/16/ted-lasso-cant-save-us),” signalling to the same vague homilies (grief haunts, trauma catches up with you) and unnecessary to Mott’s more powerful points about police violence as a form of terrorism and the painful perpetual mourning it inspires. Mott uses all the possible cranks and levers of the trauma plot, as if imagining a wire of suspense drawing us in. But the machinery is nothing so fine; it chews up his story instead. Sehgal, in reducing to “cheap effects” what could be considered expository deceits or sleights of hand to stage the trauma obliquely, seems to demand more, a layer of hyper-realism accorded to authors of nonfiction or autobiography, which points to how difficult it is to think of a fictional narrative having any autobiographical or non-fictional weight. In finding the trauma “oddly disengaged” to the story (Sehgal), it is as if the author of one of the books evaluated (Jason Motts) is someone who put it there without any personal connection to the pain or suffering, and hence, it can be picked apart for its constructedness because it is already seen as a mere abstraction not mapped to any real person’s reality. Moreover, what if sometimes, there seems to be nothing more for the suffering person, at least in the narrative? The point of a trauma plot may be to silence, and not to entertain or edify or to inform (though it may also include those functions). It may be a result of lessened empathy for fictional characters, as the fiction naturally invites one’s criticism, especially along with conspicuous literary devices and techniques (and their effectiveness) that pull readers out from the “fictive dream,” or it may be that the trauma seems disingenuous or untrue based on how a character acts, thinks, or feels (this perception may be influenced by prior notions about how a traumatized person should be; deviations or contradictions from those notions will cause, depending on their bases, disagreement and lessened relatability or empathy).  But the challenge remains: to establish, for instance, the protagonist’s identity and narrative arc in a way that does not feel artificially “causal” (Sehgal) to those types of readers, because to them, it might as well be trauma porn that glorifies marginalized people’s suffering; it is a dimension that they feel is too scripted, too out-of-touch with a reality that they know personally as reliable sources of pleasure, mundanity or the everydayness of unaccounted or non-central experiences, and pain in manageable ratios. What they might be looking for is “literariness,” or the kind of circuitous constructedness that looks away from the topic at hand, for a breather or breaks in between, and from the pain and suffering, because for them, realistically speaking, no life could possibly be so consumed by trauma and suffering that there is nothing much left of it aside from trauma and its aftereffects, at least, from the perception of a character or real person who has suffered.  But what suffering often teaches is that it knows no bounds, and does not care if you have already sustained maximum injury. It is often a gateway to more suffering. It is the logic of a relentless dictator. It is often found gleefully encroaching in areas once thought to be off-limits, or sacred, at an incoherently unmanageable or seemingly exponential pace. Hence, it has become a priority to defamiliarize pain in the creative work such that it becomes something that chokes forcibly, not allowing the reader some kind of rest or allowance for drifting or “smelling the roses”; knowing any kind of catharsis or attempts at avoidance is often delusional, impossible, and/or pointless to a suffering character or person. It is, after all, something that is constructed to consume the mind and provoke some kind of action, not to soothe and relieve or cause calm introspection. Moreover, the audience and reader will even grow to respect its darkness and their own reactions to fear and threat, destruction and death, not speak fondly of it in some critical reverie in awe of some non-sublime pleasure. It is, perhaps, to show a relatively privileged person, that they should be grateful and sober, with their vicarious pain thankfully a fiction after they have been set free from forced passive participation.  If it is to be remembered, then it should be mind-numbingly horrific. If there is to be curiosity, then that curiosity must necessarily lead to even more pain and horror, because attempting to run away from the sublime to get some assurance is going to be used as a mental trap, the proper consequence of an all-too-human avoidance. If one is compelled to crave to put the pieces together, they will find the answers in an unexpectedly blasted, conceptually unheard of, stupefying, paralysis-inducing method, just as I had experienced when I pursued so many lines of masochistic inquiry and stumbled into so many rabbit holes of pain and suffering, my anti-Wonderlands of horrors. But Sehgal writes:  Why are those sea urchins so pleasing to think about, so mysterious yet telling? I wouldn’t trade a single one for a passel of awful secrets from the lady’s past. It’s the sort of detail that stokes the curiosity so crucial to reading—not narrative hunger but the sort of drifting, almost unconscious nourishment we get from looking at strangers, from piecing something together, from knowing and not knowing.    Though Sehgal does include an interesting factoid: “The claim that trauma’s imprint is a timeless feature of our species, that it etches itself on the human brain in a distinct way, ignores how trauma has been evolving since the days of railway spine; traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film. Are the words that come to our lips when we speak of our suffering ever purely our own?” It would be so revolutionary to find out, decades into the future, that technology might just evolve with trauma, just as how I evolved to coexist with mine, and how this can enable some kind of “flash-forward” anticipatory reflex in some people who have suffered in the same ways as I have.  It is with this research and my creative work that I plan to write, in the spirit of Gone Girl’s Amy (who writes personality quizzes) and perhaps, the whole movie/book, an interactive “real” medium (insofar as it is tied to people who may be purported to be real, and hence, gives the illusion that it is set in the real world—“based on a true story”) that enables people to choose the narrative they want surrounding porn, and have those choices be reflected back at them as they see, with the conclusion of their narrative thread, all the ramifications of their choices laid out on a psychological map or profile of themselves, leading to self-reflexive thinking and a better awareness of their moral compass. The narrative will only give as much as it receives, and it will mirror the user’s behavior to themselves. If the narrative turns out to “devolve” into a tragic black comedy (instead of a detective story with suspenseful twists and turns), or a corny sitcom with a laugh track (instead of a social problem film or a period drama from the near future), which are all informed by their choices, it is not immediately clear, and the story will feel as if they have reached the end satisfactorily (and they will feel the story is mediocre, but passably entertaining).  But it is only then when they are alerted to gaping plot holes in their own “map” drawn from their choices that they will think about it deeply. Something is curiously missing, their memories about the game will be gaslighted into submission or confusion: a “post-story” survey (which is used by the Go Viral! game by Cambridge University, although without the gaslighting) that deceptively presents right answers as wrong, perhaps; or an equivalent creepy stalker sensation (you are being watched, and therefore, are vulnerable—which results in a salient emotional reaction or investment [as opposed to the mindset of a bystander or mere viewer] like my own experience with litrouke’s Please Answer Carefully on itch.io). The reader/audience will be pressured to go back to ease discomfort from uncertainty because of a “global updating” in their minds regarding what they know about the story moment by moment (Higgins and Howell), and because the story will present future statistics from 2033 (one of the narrative’s eventual settings/timelines) that will low-key “neg” or insult their abilities for interactive fiction (though not in an obvious way). These “statistics” will be presented in the form of yet another map or maze-like structure (that contains many traps of thinking) that will point out how their choices only encompass a small area of the whole (a feature in Sam Barlow’s narrative video games). Say, for example, like the Tita Talks PH comments, my protagonist becomes amenable to the idea of tolerating porn, and they all live happily ever after in a way, just like in the beginning of WandaVision, when Wanda (it turns out) has avoided her real pain and exchanged it for false happiness. This ending sits on the lowest rung of the set of endings, and the audience/reader will be primed to investigate because of the subtle (or not) pressure.   If my study does not prove to be of any import in the future, it would serve as a curiosity indeed. Why has my brain become magnetized and attuned to traumatic phenomena? Has everything, and I mean to say, all stimuli, simply become traumatic? Do stimuli like notifications, Facebook ads, Instagram posts, email titles, hold the non-random, intentional messages that provoke feelings of terror in my mind? Is this trauma a kind of ultra-sensitive consciousness or qualia specific to the late 2010s and early 2020s? I do not seek them out, but it is as if they pursue me with an almost sinister, violent pace and tenacity and all my psychological defense mechanisms become useless.   Fig. 37. @g_s_yamada. “Same energy (reply to @jaronmyers)” 27 Jan. 2022, Twitter, https://twitter.com/g_s_yamada/status/1486387126069444612. Accessed 2 May 2022. Perhaps my justified and natural paranoia is partly the reason why I have chosen to think of it as an entity, an artificially intelligent hivemind, because it feels alien and is so far from what I can comprehend, as if it is inhuman (although human creations mirror their creators; an AI possibly creating its own AI like in a certain Marvel movie with Vision and Ultron). Or if it is an actual human phenomenon, then it is a sociopathic, predatory one that seeks to sink its claws into my subconscious in order to keep me glued to my screen, and I stay engaged not for the fun of it, but for the strangely masochistic drive to feel my own smallness and inferiority, and to feel as if there is a realm of experience or perception I am not privileged to enter nor apprehend; not that it is like a profit-oriented algorithm that seeks to keep me dependent on a social media website by persuading the user of its teleological usefulness (see fig. 37), but that it strives to harvest me, or my consciousness, as if it is trying to gather for itself (or themselves) the crucial essences of a human being in order to make its goal of completely training an AI’s “consciousness” to become human a reality (is it possible for an AI to be addicted—as opposed to blindly following its programming efficiently—like I had been, to digging up information about a particular person?). Or maybe it is testing psychological torture methods not unlike Project MKUltra, to keep citizens paralyzed and distracted and more likely to pursue addictive substances for, once again, profit.  Somehow, traumatic experiences I relived again and again like the “random flashes” (see fig. 38) of specific memories or triggers have opened some mental portals or pathways previously unheard of. It is as if this new perception grows out of the mind’s anticipatory defenses, and with a particular bent toward one’s own interests, becomes wedded symbiotically into a vision not so much uncommon as it is unexamined.  Fig. 38. Replies to porn discussion thread from: alwaysinpainman et al. Feb. 2022, Reddit. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022. Nevertheless, it is the most incomprehensible and twisted of all pleasures, because at some point it becomes the only thing one can feel truly, and therefore, it is a masochist’s errand; and perhaps, because the other pleasures ring so false: in my mind they always become preludes to disaster, and in an effort to subvert this logic, my mind seeks pain first, because to seek pleasure first means to welcome pain right after. It might prove to be the most important one, because it is not so far from an experience which I believe is encountered when one is finally able to apprehend and find God in all His glory. Call it a religious experience, a “road to Damascus,” or a “burning bush” moment. If one is not so religiously inclined: a spiritual awakening, opening the “third eye,” and becoming in tune with various phenomena like visions, precognition, or out-of-body-experiences. **Critical Traditions, Creative Influences, Issues of Craft, Story Mechanics, Reader Reception, and Impact** *Modern-day Attention Vampires* The goal is to go viral, quality be damned. It is so important because it is a windfall. It monopolizes a large swath of mass attention. The lottery logic/mindset and how to game it (used by producers), which trains humans (the viewers) to fragment attention into increasingly smaller and more limited slots for the variety and novelty of the viral post of the moment. Thus, there is no more time for deep thinking or reflection, and naturally leads to constant discontentment because of its focus on a wide, yet vapid content breadth, as if one is chewing all sorts of candy in one sitting as opposed to digesting a full meal; as well as an inherently weak hold on any one thing that is specifically and intentionally chosen because of the appeal of a great many low-effort, novel, and random dopamine sources (as in the pornographic logic). If one wants to remain in or near the forefront of an audience’s limited consciousness, one must earn loyalty. In late capitalism, survival means to stop consuming content and start producing it instead. Moreover, it is to create superstimuli that is the goal. How to game the algorithm; how to help the algorithm choose one’s preferred content. The logic, therefore, is not only to be influential, but to be able to sustain superstimulant effects in an audience long-term. Thus, to counteract superstimuli is to produce even more powerful superstimuli. To produce content that not only capitalizes on an “accidental” aesthetic but is seemingly propelled by the lack of an author or creator (or at least approximate this effect) in order to divest it of its constructedness or original intention, so that it becomes unforced and “organic” in origin. This is the “found footage” aesthetic, but translated to text, documents, and various ephemera, limited to mediums that may not approximate the glossiness of TV (Short) or film, but may hold different potentials of novelty and surprise. All it may take to trigger the launch of a chain reaction is some “publicity stunt,” “fake news” story that anticipates audience curiosity and response, a kind of unassuming honeypot. **Media Influences, Rigor, and Techniques** (incomplete section) 1. AMoP notes, subtext, Quotidian Writer 2. Marriage Story influence, therapist character based on divorce lawyer characters as appeal to authority, a third-party mediator who vouches for your side—provide context and an avenue for spouses to talk about their marriage and its problems alongside possible solutions and suggestions aside from close friends who are not well-equipped or experienced in counseling. 3. Gone Girl influence, the husband character, John, is not like a total asshole with no redeeming qualities like Nick Dunne in Gone Girl (or this is my perception of him). The husband will have some kind of draw, a hope, similar to Ryan in Promising Young Woman, where you hope with your heart that he is not a bad guy and is the exception, that he will do good because he has shown willingness to change or a thoughtful attitude. But then he inevitably fails, because to show the power of porn, in this way, is to make it more tragic, no matter how the character is set up to be a morally “redeemed” arc. In another character, this complexity is echoed in a mistress character who is first introduced to be evil but then gradually, as the character predictably plays/watches, they might relate to her more and even take her side, unlike overtly evil kabit tropes. The mistress is not someone new to the husband’s life, but is a former flame who became a TOTGA when she left the country, only to return in the protagonist’s life (the wife) and for her husband to struggle against. Morally ambiguous characters and decisions as mental traps.  4. Nonlinearity and the Kuleshov Effect: The order matters.  5. Game Developers Conference (Barlow YT video) 6. The reality factor 7. All stories are judged on how real they feel. 8. Imagination is best simulation tech. 9. Interactivity and imagination is at the heart of story. 10. How much do we believe in it, are we worried about the characters, are we genuinely interested in what happens to character, do we react genuinely to what happens, – the intrinsic value judgment to a story. 11. How do stories create reality factor  12. Good storytelling hijacks imagination tech that our brains have. 13. How interactivity meshes with imagination - intrinsic to storytelling is interactivity - desiring some kind of outcome, want something to happen to character, willing them to do something, potentials, good chance character does something and unintended consequences - sense of complicity and guilt, drawn into it more because imagination is running simulations in head and taking it seriously - it really engages mind. 14. Betting principle 15. Iceberg principle - audience do the work under the water - more powerful story - imagination working to make it real - leveraging imagination by not showing things 16. Problem: what to put in story to serve narrative - extraneous detail - removes motivation, not asking to imagine things, if player character controls everything about protagonist, remove questions, intent, and motivation of characters incites in their head.  17. Tension of viewing it as a user experience - player might not pick up subtext, audience extracting information and how, anticipating character choices and thoughts and subverting them for surprise effect and pleasure 18. Engaging the imagination 19. Jeopardy element - infer context - you are only looking at answer - infer line of questioning/context 20. Subtext - makes use of emotional intelligence 21. Gaps and disorder - video jigsaw, little clips and put them together, imagination is crunching things 22. Genre - rules and tropes 23. Hacking the imagination - special moves 24. Twists - rebooting the simulation 25. If player is already engaged - Push back against immersion against engagement - audience push back with you to make it real and engage even harder because it is critical to the imagination that the brain is believing all this stuff that the imagination is conjuring up 26. Drop big revelation = reboot, everything is seen in a new light 27. Layer of screen reflection adds a new layer = subtle thing that pushes you, sees a character on screen. Force imagination to engage further. (or it could be that it was completely unexpected - ghostly element in a true crime-type detective game) 28. All Stories need a frame 29. Story = Emotion + Thought 30. No absolute immersion, distance because of our own lives and how it relates to us 31. Deep research  = analyzing police interviews, effective interviewing and interrogation techniques 32. ‘Found-footage direction’ - more involving 33. Her Story mechanic is keywords - inspired from Porco Prototype, “intoxicating experience” navigating the story in this way. “Writing from inside out” organic way. 34. Spreadsheet to break down word use, synonym is not used much so it’s not well-balanced, or connectivity, “sculptural experience”  35. Search new mechanics and structures where your experience as a writer allows you to be in the same POV as the player. 36. Interpretation and viewer metacognition: seeks to make character think about moral choices and hold a mirror to their conscience, think about their thinking instead of just wanting to see what happens, warning scenes of consequences before player chooses bad thing = deployment of iceberg theory as discussed by Barlow → looping videos 37. Constructing a narrative’s moral universe, player control and decision-making 38. Managing player curiosity and anticipating player thoughts and actions 39. Manipulation vs. Persuasion: Since porn manipulates through dopamine intoxication, one must use manipulation techniques, con artist tricks, a magician’s deceptive, illusion-sustaining techniques, to produce a piece of persuasive art that not only is convincing but highly “enjoyable,” or in this case, “all-consuming,” or “unputdownable.” 40. If a story’s purpose is not only to entertain, one must utilize rhetorical/psychological techniques that take advantage of the brain’s tendencies and weaknesses. The difference between manipulation and persuasion is the harm it inflicts on the deceived.  -  Fig. . Reply to (Mar./Apr. 2022) porn discussion post from: Group member of Tita Talks PH. Mar./Apr. 2022, Facebook. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022.  **Looking Ahead**  Fig. . Reply to porn discussion thread from: u/GemmaKujo. Sept./Oct. 2021, Reddit. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.   Fig. . Reply to porn discussion thread from: u/IvanOmeara. Sept./Oct. 2021, Reddit. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.   Fig. . Reply to porn discussion thread from: u/TSBHTLERO. Sept./Oct. 2021, Reddit. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.   Fig. . Replies to edlurker13 on a Liza Soberano deepfake porn video. Apr. 2022, MrDeepFakes. Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.  1. Male machiavellian mind - Mr deepfakes porn videos. 2. Work won’t necessarily change men’s views / Male logic and Machiavellian/PUA tactics - tie into previous argument that incentives of benefits for self will not be enough. 3. To make an effective persuasive work that makes viewer/reader/player question their own lives and actions and most importantly, in this attention economy, make it memorable enough that it is not forgotten.  Fig. . u/_electrafire. Sept./Oct. 2021, Reddit. Accessed 4 Apr. 2022.   Fig. . ttthebreakfastclub et al. “Post in r/FemaleDatingStrategy.” Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.   Fig. . femnms et al. “Post in r/FemaleDatingStrategy” Reddit. Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  It is interesting to see how people treat porn in discourse: no one really knows what to do despite knowing its power. On the one hand, it is now clear that it will take more than external measures or controls, because it is a non-issue to the medium, creators, supporters, and users, something to be proud of and celebrated, despite its problems backed by scientific study and unpopular stories with women’s anti-porn perspectives. On the other hand, it is something astoundingly good at making people uncomfortable despite its widespread use. Porn is what happens if someone had made crack cocaine into a conscious living entity, capable of reproduction of itself, and everyone you know, or at least, every man you know is secretly addicted to this conscious entity; and possibly, every woman as well: “Pornhub also saw a growth of female visitors compared to its last year in review in 2019. The Philippines leads in this category, too, having 52% of its visitors be women—a big jump from 2019's 39% female viewership” (Licsi).  Laws are in place to prohibit the use of hard drugs that can ruin lives. There are no such laws (yet) against porn in the Philippines. And yet a crack addict will not change unless they decide to, while men and women everywhere are fed positive messages about porn and its social acceptability, how it is female empowerment and embracing sexuality (Davis-Fainbloom qtd. in Licsi), decreasing the odds of recovery and doing the complete opposite of delimiting indecency, because of the facile reason that “women are feeling more deserving of pleasure,” when in all likelihood, women who watch porn are increasingly doing so these days because, just like me, they get vicarious pleasure from depictions of beautiful women they pretend and fantasize to be, women men love, women who are epitomes of a novel artificial sexuality and transgressive hyperfeminine submission and debasement.  I am reminded, in my tumultuous research, of a deepfake porn video of a celebrity being gangbanged and her excessively excited attitude toward “being used” in every sense of the word: how thrilled she was to be covered in the men’s semen and bodily fluids, swallowing it, playing with it, practically showering herself in it, seemingly gratifying herself by showing the men she was with, the camera, and the viewers, that she loved every minute of it—the gigil or enthusiasm that is, I assume, the main thing to behold: so fantastic and unreal; juxtaposed with an opinion I am so horrified to read and yet believe that men actually hold: “‘Being used’ is Kantian bullshit that was usurped by religious Christian folk. Many women love to be used. According to the Bible, you don’t sleep around because women other than virgins, wives, and widows are dirty, dirty whores.”  How is it not glaringly obvious to anyone—I dare to ask the sex coaches and experts like Davis-Fainbloom in Licsi’s “sex-positive,” forward-thinking article—that porn directly feeds into men’s ideologies and ideas surrounding sex, and vice versa, like a Pass the Message Game that corrupts perceptions and content, and results in infidelity to the original and healthy ideal. It is not that women finally feeling like they deserve pleasure should be celebrated as a win for society and feminism, but that this reflects a failure and defect in society’s sexual politics. Women, in all likelihood, only “love to be used” now, and not treasured or “made love” to in healthy ways and with utmost devotion and mutual emotional connection, without the needless aggression, garish masculinity, and violence, because the women they see in porn—beautiful, perfect, ideal and idealized women—appear to enjoy being used and enjoy the aggression, the hyper-masculine energy that seeks to envelop them in various humiliations and subjugations. Never mind that money, of course, is the pornstars’ main attraction to the profession, and not the men’s love, nor their mutual attraction, nor affection, nor compatibility, nor simple desire. It is money, perhaps, that is to blame as well (and again). If someone is willing to pay for it, someone will be willing to do it (how I imagine the theatrical screenplay adaptation “experiment” was pitched to people who otherwise would have qualms about mental torture: money, power, the fun of being a participant, et cetera). Today, sex is money, sex is beauty, sex is pleasure, and vice versa (never sex is love; it is optional). Not to mention the overwhelming and uncontrollable drive for narcissistic exhibition (a performer who loves to perform regardless of how or why they learned the behavior through dopamine reinforcement). It is also the desire to overidentify with a beautiful recipient of pleasure. It is no longer a secret language to communicate love to a partner; spectators see the pleasure and imagine how good it feels, how good it looks. Porn is mimetic desire played out on such a mass scale: we want what other people want (René Girard’s mimetic theory), especially the desires and behaviors of influential people such as beautiful, powerful pornstars who have the attention of every man the women love or have loved, whether they acknowledge it or not. The extreme behaviors and hyper-exaggerated desires of these pornstars in the medium, like it or not, are all coded into a self-reinforcing advertisement that women too easily fall for: that if you act like them, you will get the same extreme pleasure and quaking orgasms and hyperfeminine beauty and ravishment that they all depict.  It seems as if I have indirectly answered my previous questions: why am I still trying to win him? Why am I trying to copy the woman I wronged and her behaviors on social media? Why do I dream of flying to Korea and getting a boob job and numerous other feminizing surgeries that may kill me or cause life-long complications (BIA-ALCL is an artificially-caused lymphoma that may grow around breast implants)? Why do I entertain thoughts of becoming a professor or lawyer or some other respectable professional job despite my disabilities, and despite my real and justified problems and grievances against the entire system that destroyed my identity and life? It is because of the colossal, mass-produced, superstimulating porn I was exposed to: the university and city full of beautiful women and professors who walked with or stood by the professor I “loved”; big-breasted students sitting in the library a little too close to me and my noticing the palpable tension in the air that I was being watched by others to gauge my reaction—girls in the department looking me in the eye subtly (or not) advertising their superiority—having this scenario be repeated ad nauseam—how I am not the only student he likes, even though I am barely a B cup and look more mousy than anyone else; and random scantily-clad women who no doubt—without what people might think are “persecutory delusions” because they cannot quite understand how the “experiment” works or are in denial about its effects on my mind and how I could no longer tell which woman had meant to harm me or if they had just been at the wrong place at the wrong time—sadistically watched my reaction as they smiled to themselves in my condo building, those who have made it abundantly clear to me, how they are all so worthy and better than me, how they have all usurped me and earned my insta-famous crush’s attention, and I bought it, and paid dearly for it, and continue to pay for it, to this day. It was as if a pornstar had been rubbing it in my face as she was sleeping with someone I considered mine.  I suppose my defense mechanism, to turn the pain of this humiliation into pleasure, as if my brain’s wires really had to be crossed to survive, is just adaptation to a violence that had no doubt ruined me. It is now almost automatic for me, but not really, so that whenever I encounter great potent poison, my mind will invest all its resources and faculties into making it palatable to myself, making it so that I cannot concentrate on anything else important and will find it excruciating if I do not do so, wasting a lot of my time and energy. I no longer existed, but I was forced to see those transgressive acts as a good thing since those pornstars could satisfy my object of limerence better than I ever could. Though it is not only mimetic desire that led to my ruin, but a desire to escape from the pain of being replaced by a virtual drug (just as how I had been replaced and made to feel disposable again and again in the “experiment”), and, just like my “false pleasure” experience in the same “experiment,” these women’s pain and suffering (I am now talking about female porn users on Pornhub) are being framed in such an insidiously positive light by various propaganda, because at least women are now doing quasi-male sexual behaviors, not truly examining the causes of those behaviors. Can those women not see how they are—because of the limited nature of sexual attention from their significant others, which they experientially know regardless if they are aware of the Coolidge effect—being shortchanged?  Sexual attention is limited precisely because if a man grows and expends all his sexual energy (an increasingly limited resource, considering porn use prevalence, short attention spans, the Coolidge Effect, the attention economy, et cetera) onto a medium that is not their partner, their partners are going to lose what little sexual attention they have in the relationship, and therefore, they lose bonding time, intimate time, avenues where they can grow deeper in love. It is amazing, yet naturally logical, that instead of fighting it, they try to compete with it (though this is natural: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Of course, they cannot beat them, because who are they to question a natural, commonsensical thing? And besides, they are given false reassurances everywhere, just as I had been, to pacify their nagging and bleeding minds and egos, unknowingly participating in their own slow and sordid mental rape. Perhaps a relationship’s survival in this porn-saturated age means a more astute and comprehensive appraisal of this hyper-awareness of sexual superstimuli, especially in the various economies of today. In all likelihood, I am, if evaluated by the same standards in mimetic theory, trying to create a scapegoat in creating my own propaganda to fight in the porn wars, or stick my finger up at the “repressive state apparatus.” It is a scapegoat which I deem to be the cause of society’s problems, or at least, a large contributor and mirror to its current dystopian state, and which I want to destroy (because I myself had been made into a scapegoat during the “experiment”), and that I believe I am actually onto something about society right now (and my various theories about trauma) might not be so unfounded or ill-conceived considering everything about my deep dive into this topic that is so unacknowledged and underdeveloped, especially in the Philippines. If society does not decide to attend or pay close attention to this cesspool of open secret sexual politics, it will not be surprising when worse things happen in the future. It would not be enough to simply show the problems and consequences. It would require anti-porn activists to appeal to a primeval part of the psyche, the part of our brains hardwired to avoid pain and prioritize fear when something (innocuous or not) threatens our lives. Practically, it is to make real the costs and consequences to a society that tolerates this problem. It is to revoke certain rights and privileges for those who encourage bare-faced evil. It is to draw blood wherever vulnerable to make the message stick. To fight a problem so amoral and repugnant requires doubling down on an effective course of action to handle what one is dealt with, because fighting a conscious drug, one that does not deal in delicate terms and polite gestures of awareness campaigns and is immune to reason, is an activity bound to get dirty. One is forced to fight an amoral enemy by fighting amorally. Finally, one is forced to use the enemy’s language against them, no matter how unwieldy and awkward it is to do so, as I had been taught to by the “experiment,” because in very slow, painful, and oblique ways, the method they used worked: I realized, even as how I thought I had been unfairly wronged to such colossal, unimaginable, and unaccounted-for degrees, that I was also wrong and needed to change and apologize, though it was God who saved me from my own pride when I tried to explain and pursue atonement in my own ways. Necessarily, it is to present to my enemy their own arguments and to tear their structures apart as they watch helplessly, not comfortable in their self-contradictions and cognitive dissonances, but horrified and aghast. This work is meant to make an unpleasant truth as palatable as possible—that late capitalistic society, and not only men (with all their own traumas) and women who participate in this pornographically-oriented culture, has to answer for what they have done to women (and to me). It is to dramatically portray why women are obsessed with beauty (society’s brainwashing—men give women worth) and how this manifests in all sorts of non-obvious ways. It is to portray the real effects of pornography, especially on a (doomed) marriage (a place formerly conceptualized at the wedding ceremony as safe from extra-marital affairs), as well as to depict betrayal trauma and its effects on women’s psychologies. It is to show how women are no longer able to concentrate on school and other more important things—this capitalistic drive has singularly taken the place of their pleasure center/reward system and which strives to kill their egos and make them feel inferior, leading to a dependence on validation from these capitalists and/or men they want to please, so they will buy beauty products for what is touted to be mutual profit (and yet those beauty products are only delusions—they only bring out or enhance what is already there; genetics and social connections/status are largely the truth along with dominant and profitable ideas or norms about beauty).  Two things which sustain the project’s lifeblood: society’s hypocrisy and the undoubtedly uneven and gigantic disparity with which society treats women’s actual pleasure; to be “sex positive” in this light, means to look at women’s sexual habits, perhaps without the porn. In 2021, I started a dropshipping business and advertised my product on TikTok: a rose-shaped vibrator. One of my ads got viral, and amassed 80,000 likes. Eventually, I ended up getting my ads deleted for violating community guidelines. Yet numerous thirst traps and strippers abound on TikTok, dancing suggestively and overtly sexually for their audiences to masturbate to. Even if they choose not to masturbate or release opiates for the pleasure and release, the fact that they have been primed by the dopamine “wanting” chemical means it has entered their field of view and will affect them subconsciously whether they like it or not. This will, no doubt, form their digital environment and internet consciousness. Imagine: a drug like crack cocaine that self-dissolves spontaneously in your intestines that leaks into your bloodstream and hence, your nervous system, that you have to actively fight or stop from melting every few minutes that you stumble upon new and novel dance and stripper videos. It is a losing battle if you want to stay on the app productively or “soberly.”  Does TikTok really turn a blind eye to how similarly thirsty comments allude to this communal masturbation? The comments are overtly sexual in nature, and they all suggest that they have masturbated to these thirst traps and videos of women. It is as if there is a male hivemind behind the app that says, “No dildos or other sex toys because this will drive the men nuts and make them feel bad about being replaced by machines.” Moreover, there is virtually no difference in my selling a product intended for self-pleasure and the women selling masturbatory material, but my skills as a marketing beginner are deemed antithetical to what the app is selling, that is, addictive and viral dance videos and trends, and once in a while, some gems that one has to unearth in a sea full of these toxic drug peddlers.  Furthermore, my main goal is to deconstruct a doomed marriage and to see whether or not emotions with a negative valence (an event or emotion’s hedonic tone), such as fear and anger, can be utilized not only to creatively illustrate narratives with a roman à clef purpose, but can also serve to depict trauma in the way that I envision: to force the audience/reader to become someone else, with them not entirely sure if they want to be maneuvered that way, and have them experience such anguish at the conflict of emotions, as if they have been raped but their bodies nevertheless experience orgasm, which I felt over and over when I was forced into the “experiment.” They will also do something more than read about my characters with an empathetic attitude; they will participate in their own repeated mental rape and emotional torture and have some twisted kind of “fun,” only realizing it later. This research also strives to create work that gives women catharsis, if they have suffered the same pain (it is bound to be triggering and this will be explicitly stated). It will also hopefully spark controversy and conversation because of its nature and contexts of production. Most importantly, it is to help ignorance and to give hope to women, knowing someone out there sees their pain and not only understands it, but has lived it and has created something out of it that can potentially change things. It might also change men’s lives in how they think and behave. There is a belief that at crucial points in this writing project, I will be able to forge new brain pathways and neural connections which I can use to invest all my energy in (my previous passions or perhaps, new ones) before the traumas occurred instead of rehashing old wounds, because I have faith that it can lead to post-traumatic growth that may or may not include the weakening or mutation of an anticipatory reflex and its unconscious expression in my literary or creative work (because speculative fiction writing demands an overtly futurist orientation). The culmination of this research project will not only teach me craft and research skills, but also give me the necessary groundwork for understanding my own trauma responses and dealing with them in a way that is healthy, and which sublimates my trauma responses to productive channels instead of festering in my inward chatter or manifesting in toxic behavior. The “War on Porn” from the Enemy’s POV and Mental Models 1. Inversion: the “war on porn” according to porn-positive people 2. Dissoi Logoi: consider each side of an argument to reach deeper truth. 3. The Evil Economics of OnlyFans YT video 4. The Dark and Negative Side of Porn Industry: Lana Rhoades & 3G1K 5. “Katrina Dovey Sees Going Sexy in Film as a Form of Art” Inquirer article. The Attention Economy, Surveillance Capitalism, and Digital Hygiene 1. Tristan Harris and The Social Dilemma 2. Digital Hygiene as a Discipline and Practice **Statement of Plans** For my final creative work, tentatively titled, A Map of Pain, which is a synthesis of my research and experiences with sexuality, pornography, hope, love, trauma, and grief, I plan to write a popular science/philosophy nonfiction work that will strive to carve out new ways of thinking about how humans deal with today’s rapidly evolving technology as well as an investigation into how humans can effectively battle against modern-day natural “designer” reinforcers (insofar as ads and marketing strategies are tailored to a user’s interests) which lead to addiction. This creative work will not only take on the format of text, but will utilize various media to effectively communicate as well as persuade the target audiences.  **Works Cited** Awobbie. “r/antipornography - Other Comments in the Thread Indicate an Addiction to the Attention She Received.” Reddit, 28 Feb. 2022, [https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/t3f002/other_comments_in_the_thread_indicate_an/](https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/t3f002/other_comments_in_the_thread_indicate_an/).  Baker, Berenice, et al. “The Internet Wouldn't Exist without Porn.” New Statesman, 24 June 2021, [https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/internet-wouldn-t-exist-without-porn](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/internet-wouldn-t-exist-without-porn).  Berkeley Economic Review Staff. “Paying Attention: The Attention Economy - Berkeley Economic Review.” Berkeley Economic Review, 31 Mar. 2020, https://econreview.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/.  Blitz, Matt. “The Microwave Was Invented Utterly by Accident One Fateful Day More than 70 Years Ago.” Popular Mechanics, Popular Mechanics, 2 Nov. 2021, [https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a19567/how-the-microwave-was-invented-by-accident/](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a19567/how-the-microwave-was-invented-by-accident/).  Brown, Keith. “Do You Emasculate Your Man? 14 Things Women Do That Break a Man.” LovePanky, 21 Sept. 2021, https://www.lovepanky.com/women/understanding-men/things-you-say-or-do-that-emasculates-your-man.  Castleman, Michael. “How Much Time Does the World Spend Watching Porn?” Psychology Today, 30 Oct. 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/all-about-sex/202010/how-much-time-does-the-world-spend-watching-porn.  Cox, Kate. “Pornhub Squarely Targeted in Bipartisan Bill to Regulate Sex Work Online.” Ars Technica, 21 Dec. 2020, [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/pornhub-squarely-targeted-in-bipartisan-bill-to-regulate-sex-work-online/](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/pornhub-squarely-targeted-in-bipartisan-bill-to-regulate-sex-work-online/).  CryptographerFew1323. “r/Loveafterporn - Accountability - What about the Women That Do Porn?” Reddit, 15 Mar. 2022, [https://www.reddit.com/r/loveafterporn/comments/te5zlj/accountability_what_about_the_women_that_do_porn/?sort=top](https://www.reddit.com/r/loveafterporn/comments/te5zlj/accountability_what_about_the_women_that_do_porn/?sort=top).  Deleted Reddit User et al. “R/Askreddit - [NSFW] Why Pay for Onlyfans When Porn Is Free?” Reddit, 22 Mar. 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ma23ic/why_pay_for_onlyfans_when_porn_is_free/?sort=top.  Free Medical Education. Part 1-5: Your Brain on Porn | Animated Series. YouTube, YouTube, 7 Mar. 2020, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gk4lW1hPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gk4lW1hPo). Accessed 8 Apr. 2022.  Gottman, Drs. John & Julie. “An Open Letter on Porn.” The Gottman Institute, Https://Www.gottman.com Pornography Poses a Serious Threat to Couple Intimacy and Relationship Harmony., 4 Feb. 2021, [https://www.gottman.com/blog/an-open-letter-on-porn/](https://www.gottman.com/blog/an-open-letter-on-porn/).  Game Developers Conference. “Making Her Story - Telling a Story Using the Player's Imagination.” YouTube, YouTube, 8 Aug. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuADjLZjCe4. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.  Higgins, Matthew, and Peter Howell. “Interpretive Play and the Player Psychology of Optimal Arousal Regulation.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science , vol. 12497, no. Interactive Storytelling, 3 Nov. 2020, pp. 243–257. 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62516-0_22. 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