How To Remain Unflustered By Female Beauty

X. Ignore her beauty

The man who trains his mind to subdue the reward centers of his brain when reflecting upon a beautiful female face will magically transform his interactions with women. His apprehension and self-consciousness will melt away, paving the path for more honest and self-possessed interactions with the objects of his desire. This is one reason why the greatest lotharios drown in more love than they can handle — through positive experiences with so many beautiful women they lose their awe of beauty and, in turn, their powerlessness under its spell. It will help you acquire the right frame of mind to stop using the words hot, cute, gorgeous, or beautiful to describe girls who turn you on. Instead, say to yourself “she’s interesting” or “she might be worth getting to know”. Never compliment a girl on her looks, especially not a girl you aren’t fucking. Turn off that part of your brain that wants to put them on pedestals. Further advanced training to reach this state of unawed Zen transcendence is to sleep with many MANY attractive women (try to avoid sleeping with a lot of ugly women if you don’t want to regress). Soon, a Jedi lover you will be.

The above is from the Sixteen Commandments of Poon. Readers have asked, not unreasonably, “Hey, I get it, being unperturbed by a woman’s beauty is rock solid inner game, but how am I supposed to do that?”

Good question! Unfortunately, the best answer is one that won’t help you when you need the help most. Only the accumulation of repeated beddings of beautiful women is guaranteed to instill in a man unflappable poise when in their company. Sexual experience with beautiful women strips them of their mystery and tempers their power to transfix.

This is not to say you will lose the ability to appreciate female beauty; only that a pretty face won’t be able to stupefy you into bumbling betaness anymore.

Fine, now how do you assume the right emotional state when you don’t yet have a wealth of experience handling beauties? As mentioned in the quoted passage above, refraining from the knee-jerk beta male reflex to loudly, or silently, declare this or that women to be hot, smokin’ hot, or fuckin’ insanely hot, start thinking and speaking of women in more subdued, less penilely loaded, terms; e.g., interesting, unique, endearingly comical.

This simple change of perception will help you immensely. You should even go out of your way to chide your beta buddies whenever they start yawping about some or another chick’s hotness. “Dude, chill on the compliments. She’s ok, nothing more.”

There is another technique that I have put to good use in helping me overlook a woman’s beauty. Whenever I’m approaching or talking to a hot babe, I reproduce this image in my head:

I remind myself that every woman has a penis head, aka cervix, pointing outwardly in her vagina to greet my own penis upon arrival. This visualization of hot women as storehouses for bulbous penis heads, by reducing them to their component biological parts, renders their beauty less fantastical, even a little silly. Imagine that cervical penis waiting to meet, glans-a-glans, your penis head in a romantic French kiss. A sword fight in the arena of her vagina.

I assure you, that if you plant this image in your head, you’ll never again be stunned into catatonia by a hot chick.

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Sexy Quotes & Lurid Links

Scandalized reader “halisi” unintentionally offers a great example of a feminist ashamed of what feminism is really about.

1) Feminsim is NOT anti-beauty/pro-frump! There are plenty of feminists who like to wear designer clothes, wear makeup, and/or take the time each day to make themselves look beautiful. Jessica Valenti said it best (and I’m paraphrasing here): “I like to wear makeup. I just realize that I’m only wearing it because society tells me I’ll look ugly without it.” Feminism is about finding the beauty within yourself, makeup or no.

2) Feminists aren’t anti-men/family, either. There are tons of feminists who are married with children. Tons. And not all feminists are pro-abortion, either; that’s actually one of the most contested issues in the feminist community.

3) And feminists are most definitely not against women/girls playing sports! If anything, that’s anti-feminism.

1) If feminism is not anti-beauty, why do so many self-declared feminists look like coal miners?

1a) Valenti’s “I just realize that I’m only wearing [makeup] because society tells me I’ll look ugly without it” is the dog-eared “deus ex societas” card that feminists always pull when they have run out of credible explanations for female behavior and are forced to confront the reality of innate sex differences. To demonstrate the bankruptcy of that card, try to imagine a man saying “I just realize that I’m only trying to get girls into bed because society tells me I’ll be depressed if I stay celibate.” Ridiculous on its face, yet that is exactly the level of intellectual feminist thought.

2) Marriage and kids are no amnesty from man-hating. Some of the worst ideological feminists are lantern-jawed fuzzfaced quasi-dykes married to mincing beta schlubs who confirm feminist prejudices by their mere existence, not to mention by their sycophantic suckuppery.

2a) I’m sure there is a lone feminist or two somewhere out there in the hinterland who is pro-man and anti-abortion, but she has little say in the national conversation. Feminism’s leaders and spokeshos are, almost to a bitch, man-hating termagants who loathe male desire and cheer on third trimester vacuumings. So, please, spare me your empty-headed NAFALT argument.

3) Who said feminists are anti-sport? I’m pretty sure the field hockey team in my high school was 90% incipient dyke. Of course femcunts love the idea of sports; it’s another way for them to undermine traditionally male domains. Title IX is exhibit A in how a feminist policy to force equality of the sexes inevitably tilts the playing field against boys. Schools only have so much money to spend, so boys, who by nature prefer participation in the sports battlefield in greater numbers, on average, than girls, have seen their sports programs cut to accommodate the inclusion of women’s sports programs.

No, feminism is, right down to its withered, cunty heart, a grotesque ideology mounted on a dais of lies. My goal is to mock it so ruthlessly that its practitioners and sympathizers, all of them, find it ever more difficult to pronounce in public life that they are feminists, to drive the true believers so far underground that only their raspy-throated, dusty-muffed sisters-in-arms are willing to entertain their insipid nostrums. This is total war, and in total war where the weapons are words, the goal is utter destruction through social ostracism. The icy wasteland of discredited ideologues and crackpots mumbling self-medicating catchphrases and hitting themselves in the forehead is feminism’s inevitable destination.

***

Gramps has some insight into the nature of decision-making.

As an old guy, I can say that almost every decision I made, regarding important life choices, which were comfortable and low risk, I came to regret. Those decisions I made which were stressful, and which I made under duress (choosing between several stressful alternatives) I found yielded the greatest rewards.

I can see two forces at work here. Perhaps, because we imbue stressful decisions with greater importance, we come to value the consequences from such decisions, regardless of benefit, as more rewarding. Or, this is an example of hormesis: a version of “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”. Decisions made under stress strengthen our resolve to see them through, and the more we have invested in a decision, the greater the likelihood we will value the fruits of our labor, even if those fruits aren’t very good for us.

***

Sea7 writes in response to women wearing pajamas to the classroom:

That is nasty. Contaminating the classroom with all their previous night’s clitty litter as it sloughs off the twat and sprinkles out the PJ leg hole.

Alpha pillow talk.

***

Related: How to pick up chicks who are wearing pajamas.

There are so many possible situations here, and I am so drunk, that covering them all is beyond the scope of this post.

However, in a “common dressing” scenario (of, say, lots of PJs), the neg, social, and value scoring possibilities become PUA friendly for ambitious Betas looking to move up a notch.

To wit:

PJs have flaps. Or not. The point being, ASK about them, in a teasing neg, if possible. This can lead as deep into the coal mine as you are willing to go.

PJs look good. Or not. The point being, CONTRAST them unfavorably from your target against another chick. The more public and subtle you pull this off, the better.

PJs make a statement. Or not. The point being, acknowledge (and, of course, neg) the “innocence” and “exploratory” subtext of the PJ beaver whilst working a touchy-feely move towards relief and satisfaction.

PJs rarely have shoes, and beavers CRAVE shoes. The possibilities here are potent – use them.

How I’d open a PJ-wearing girl: “Too good for Snuggies, eh?”

***

A shadowsage calling himself Porter leaves an especially illuminating comment over at Mangan’s. People in the rotting majority who think diversity is really about equality, and thus that their looming minority status will open access to all sorts of multicult racket goodies and exonerations currently only available to designated pawns victim groups, are in for a rude awakening. It is not human nature to grant one’s historical scapegoats mercy when they have been enfeebled and dragged down to one’s level, particularly when one has been invigorated by nursed grievances and desouled of the nobler virtues; just the opposite: it is human nature to pile on, to execute the finishing move until the last sworn enemy is dangling from the gallows in the public square. There is no mélangutopia awaiting us over the horizon; only hands at throats across America.

***

So single motherhood and the decline in male industriousness our author describes cannot be spirited away simply by getting men and women to the altar. ‘Outrageous’ though it may seem to a generation steeped in feminist propaganda, the natural economic basis of marriage must also be restored. White men are programmed by evolution to be providers. If you deliberately rearrange society to render this function superfluous, do you have any right to complain when men stop knocking themselves out to perform it?

F. Roger Devlin, a man who abides Chateau principles, wrote the above criticism in his review of Charles Murray’s forthcoming book “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010”. He rightly raps Murray’s mangina tendency to excuse female mating predilection while happily clobbering men over the head with the “man up” billy club, in what is otherwise sure to be a good book. Murray tackles social issues, race and class very well, but he seems to shy from taking on feminism and its bastard children.

My opinion of cultural trends now underway?: Thanks to technology, diversity and cognitive stratification, America is entering the period of The Great Culling, a process which will create not only new classes, but even new races, broadly a snarky Eloi and a medicated Morlock, and slowly, as the government cheese runs out, the losers in this culling will begin to procreate less and less, until they are discarded by the invisible crotch of evolution as failed human experiments unable to adapt to the new reality. (Note that some of the losers include childless spinsters of the high IQ elite.) The wildcard is genetic engineering, something nerds love to trumpet to assuage their feelings of hopelessness, but I doubt it will emerge in time to make a difference.

Anyhow, may 2012 be filled with postponements of the coming dystopia!

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Pajamas Feminism

There’s a reason I argue that feminism is anti-standards, and thus, anti-beauty. If girls start taking up the feminist banner in earnest, expect to see ugliness shroud the nation like an advancing orc army spilling out of Mordor. And one sign of that ugliness is women thumbing their noses at feminine fashion. Roosh writes about feminism’s anti-beauty message: “Next thing you know, American women will appear in public wearing pajamas.”

Already too late. Recently walking through what we’ll call ‘Whole SWPLs’ on a weekend afternoon, I noticed a hipster-ish couple groping a selection of gala apples. Both the man and the woman were wearing what looked exactly like pajamas. Loose-fitting, billowy, plaid cotton pajama pants, pilling from too many washings and dryings. They had jackets on, but underneath the girl’s jacket I spied what appeared to be the matching top to her pajamas.

Maybe these were clothes designed to mimic the look of pajamas, but does it matter whether they actually tumbled out of bed and seized the day in their sleepwear, or if they put on clothes that looked like they tumbled out of bed to seize the day in their sleepwear?

That’s it. We’ve arrived. The total neglect of one’s appearance is now a fashion statement. A nation of Dudes and Dudettes. Careful man, I’m holding an iPhone here.

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Proof Found For Rationalization Hamster?

A new study shows that people will rationalize their shitty situations if they think that they’re stuck with them. (See also: sour grapes.)

People who feel like they’re stuck with a rule or restriction are more likely to be content with it than people who think that the rule isn’t definite. The authors of a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, say this conclusion may help explain everything from unrequited love to the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Psychological studies have found two contradictory results about how people respond to rules. Some research has found that, when there are new restrictions, you rationalize them; your brain comes up with a way to believe the restriction is a good idea. But other research has found that people react negatively against new restrictions, wanting the restricted thing more than ever.

Kristin Laurin of the University of Waterloo thought the difference might be absoluteness — how much the restriction is set in stone. “If it’s a restriction that I can’t really do anything about, then there’s really no point in hitting my head against the wall and trying to fight against it,” she says. “I’m better off if I just give up. But if there’s a chance I can beat it, then it makes sense for my brain to make me want the restricted thing even more, to motivate me to fight” Laurin wrote the new paper with Aaron Kay and Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke University.

So does this prove the existence of the infamous female rationalization hamster? Well, almost. The study was gender-inspecific, so what it tells us is that people in general will rationalize their powerlessness so as to assuage their tender egos in the face of unchangeable circumstances. We will have to continue to rely on experimental reports from the field and incisive observations into the womanly condition from Chateau proprietors for evidence of a particularly mighty breed of female-specific hamster. There is strong anecdotal data that such a female-particular breed exists; it is now up to scientists with the balls to snicker at feminist shrieking to bravely test the hypothesis.

When a rule, a restriction, or a circumstance is fixed and inalterable, our tendency is to act like we are perfectly OK with our lack of choice or station in life. In contrast, when we feel like we have a real shot to change our circumstances, we are less likely to resign ourselves to fate, and less likely to pretend as if we wanted our crappy lot in life all along. So if you want to see the hamster spin wildly, make sure the little bugger has no hope of escape from his wheeled hellmatrix. He’ll spin, spin until he loses all touch with reality.

I think we’ve seen plenty of examples of self-gratifying spinning in the comments on this blog, not to mention just about anywhere in the informational universe where feminists congregate to kvetch. And the spinning is not just limited to feminists. Most losers in the mating game have experienced the crush of 5 Gs in their hamster wheels. I find these kinds of people fall into two camps: the pity whores (woe is me, i’m a loser, there’s nothing i can do about it, so stop trying to help people like me, you’re only leading us astray with your advice), and the delusion zombies (i’m not a loser, i have everything i need in life, single cougarhood, five cats and a niceguy beta orbiter are exactly what i’ve always wanted).

To bring this study closer to the mission statement of this blog, what does it imply about love?

And how does this relate to unrequited love? It confirms people’s intuitive sense that leading someone can just make them fall for you more deeply, Laurin says. “If this person is telling me no, but I perceive that as not totally absolute, if I still think I have a shot, that’s just going to strengthen my desire and my feeling, that’s going to make me think I need to fight to win the person over,” she says. “If instead I believe no, I definitely don’t have a shot with this person, then I might rationalize it and decide that I don’t like them that much anyway.”

Bulls-eye. An elegant confirmation of push-pull game theory. Drawing a woman in, then pushing her away by, for example, disqualifying yourself or her, will switch the courtship dynamic around so that she is in the role of the chaser, instead of the typical female role of the chased. A woman who isn’t sure you really like her because your actions are calculated to deliver an ambiguous message, is more likely to press the seduction forward than she would with either a fulsomely unambiguous man or a completely uninterested man.

If you flirt with a woman, raise her buying temperature, but then show no interest at all in her for the remainder of the night, she will rationalize her rejection by telling herself she never really wanted you.

There are many real-world examples of women rationalizing their rejection or low sexual market value. Below, I list some of the more common ones.

“I’m not interested in guys who like anorexic women.” 
“Men my age won’t date me? I prefer younger men anyway.” 
“Men are intimidated by my intelligence/career/education.” 
“Men don’t like opinionated women.” 
“Women reach their sexual peak at 35!” 
“I get all the love I need from my child.” 
“I was looking for a one night stand, too.” 
“No man is good enough for me and my child.” 
“Men are afraid of commitment.” 
“Now that I’m older I choose my men more carefully.” 
“Men refuse to grow up and settle down.” 
“Men who date younger girls can’t handle women their age.” 
“I’ve grown into my beauty.” 
“Real men appreciate my curves.” 
“A confident man loves a woman with experience.” 
“I’m not dating because I need me-time.” 
“He stopped calling because he got scared.” 

And, of course, the all-time favorite rationalization of the castaway driftwood of womankind:

“There are no good men left.” 

Some may ask why I so confidently assert that the female rationalization hamster is stronger and speedier than the male rationalization hamster. The answer is simple. Since women are the more biologically valuable sex, they have a lot more ego to lose — and hence to spin into hamsterrific delusion — by being rejected or downgraded to the invisible fringes of the mating market.

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Overselectivity And Anti-Game: Like Oil And Water

Recently, a nerdgirl who works for the nerd site Gizmodo and has a lazy nerd eye and crooked nerd face wrote about her disgust at having dated a nerdguy who, she found out during the course of the date, was a grand champion at some nerd card game called Magic the Nerdering. Dalrock has a good round-up of the nerdy non-affair.

In delicious comeuppance, it turns out our intrepid nerdgirl with her 463 bullet point checklist rejected not just a nerd with nerdy hobbies, but a wealthy hedge fund manager. And if you want to call this revenge (of the spastic sort), brigades of sympathetic nerdboys stormed the Blogstille to throw their venom-tipped Chinese nerd stars at nerdgirl’s soul. (I can’t be bothered to spell out nerdgirl’s real name, such a vapid nonentity she is.) In good nerdy form, she skulked away to lick her wounds.

You might think this is going to be a post piling on nerdgirl’s ridiculously trumped-up standards. After all, nerdgirl is a 4 in beneficially dim lighting, so the only standards she can plausibly hope to meet in men are mental stability and merely intermittent halitosis.

Nerdgirl is the classic entitled American feminist shill and princess wannabe (try squaring that circle — you’ll need a hamster) who suffers from a psychological disorder known as overselectivity (you heard it here first!). She demands for herself from men what she has no ability to give in female value. Result? Dateless, alone, prone to neurotic outbursts on blogs and/or self-mutilation, and a creepy maternal love for all things feline.

Truth, but that is not where your focus should be. Nerdgirl’s public rejection — a type of rejection women only do when they are so thoroughly turned off with a date that they feel a need to lash out in penance for their own lack of judgment — of a man who, on paper at least, is way out of her league, proves a core tenet of game:

Maxim #49: If you have no game, or worse, anti-game, little else will compensate for your unattractiveness.

Nerdiness in style, mannerism and behavior is anti-game. It is even worse than having no game. You can actively repulse a woman who would normally think you a possible match if you run anti-game on her. Men with no game at least get lucky sometimes by steering clear of major fuckups.

Despite his riches, sterling character and good manners, hedge fund nerdguy was a nerd to the bone, and his every verbal and nonverbal tic likely telegraphed that unpalatable fact to his date. The way to bet is that a grand champion of a nerdy hobby is a nerd in most facets of life, and it was his nerdy charmless demeanor — not his involvement with a nerdy pastime — that disgusted nerdgirl and motivated her to libel him, (and inadvertently out herself as an ugly bitch to be avoided).

Need clarity on this point? Sure. Take a guy with game and tell him he has to mention at some point during a date with a hottie that he won a championship playing a nerdy hobby. Do you really think this stipulation will deep six his chances? No, it won’t. If anything, a pickup artist will reframe this tidbit of normally unsexy information in his favor, getting to the girl qualify herself to him that she’s smart enough and adventurous enough to understand the thrill of winning competitions. And she’ll lap it up. Know why? Because everything else about him will be subcommunicating CHARMING BASTARD.

And that’s the moral of this nerd tale of woe. Nn matter how kind you are, how much character you possess, how easy on the eyes you are, or how much money you make, a nerdy personality and anti-game will render you unfit for mating by a pig-faced 4 with delusions of high sexual market value.

PS: Here is a picture of Good Dog Greg, for your amusement:

UPDATE

An astute commenter noted that sometimes these plainer and uglier girls have something to prove that hotter girls, with their more secure belief in their hotness, don’t. So, paradoxically, a high value man might find it tougher to game a 4 into bed than an 8. In this case, that could have happened. Nerdgirl wants the world to know — really, she just wants to convince herself — that she is hot shit, so rejecting nerdguy helped assuage her tattered and frayed ego, giving her an imaginary SMV boost that won’t last past the next pump and dump she endures at the hands of an even nerdier guy.

You can conclude from this theory that men who are beginning to shed their worst beta habits by adopting game would have more success trying to pick up hotter girls than they’re used to, instead of sticking with the nasty little frumps they have become accustomed to thinking that’s all they deserve.

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Beta Of The Month

This guy:

The only thing gayer than inking John Elway’s face inches from his nads would be tattooing a giant, erect prick up his leg. Preferably black.

The display of male superstars’ names in the form of tattoos or jerseys is something that has always perplexed me. As a man, it makes no sense to advertise a much higher status man on your body like a billboard. It screams beta, if not omega. And yet, go to any sports event and you’ll see lots of jock-y meatheads, tough guys and douchebags doing just that. Don’t they realize how lame it looks to women, to boost the competition? The only explanation is that the dudes who do this have no clue how women think.

I suppose there is some evolutionary-based reason for it. Perhaps in the EEA, associating yourself with an alpha male would increase the chance that he would drop some of his sloppy seconds in your lap. But that is not the case today. Sucking the titular cocks of sports stars or rock stars is nothing short of slavish worship, and worshipping another man is the hallmark of the beta mentality.

Wearing the jersey — let alone tattooing his mug on your leg — of some millionaire athlete with a harem of hotties you could only dream of banging is analogous to the cuckold fetishist who sits in a corner feebly stroking it with a pair of tweezers while some grossly overhung studhorse jackhammers his wife into multiple Os. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to feel pride wearing Jeter’s shirt over your manboobs. You may as well be tucking your junk and licking his balls to a polished shine.

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Cutter Lover

We were laying down side by side on her bed mid-afternoon. It was muggy in her small and untidy bedroom because her window unit A/C wasn’t working properly. She was naked and I was resting my left hand on her mons pubis, as if it were the lacquered mahogany end of an arm rest. This was the first time she exhibited her naked body to me under the shadowless light of daytime. Every dimple and flaw she no doubt imbued with outsized importance was freely visible to my appreciative eyes. Before this moment, sex was a nighttime activity only.

As we lied on the bed staring at the ceiling and her collection of carved giraffes on her bookshelf, my hand wandered down her thigh. A geometric pattern of tiny raised obstacles tickled my palm. I looked over at her leg where my hand was perched and saw three thin reddish-purple lines, barely a millimeter in width but each more than three inches long, carved into the flank of her thigh and hip like claw marks from the angry swipe of a cat.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, these?”

“Yep. It looks like a cat got you.”

She steadied her gaze and paused, an odd hesitation that told me she was quickly weighing the options of lying or telling the truth. “I… they’re cut marks.”

“Cut marks?”

“Not from anything. I did them to myself.”

“You cut yourself? With a razor blade?”

“Yeah, I use a blade from my leg razor.”

“Oookay.” I moved my hand away and focused on her slim vulva and then her face. “That’s strange. Why?”

“It helps when I’m feeling crappy. I get into these moods, and the only way I can feel better is by cutting myself.”

“So hurting yourself makes you feel better.”

“Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. Don’t be a judgy jerk about this.”

“It is crazy. Why not try running to lift your mood? Or alcohol? It won’t leave scars.”

“There are no scars. I make sure not to do it too deep to leave a scar.”

“Does anyone else know about this?”

“No, just you. Although my mom once saw the marks and I lied to her about them.”

I fingered the congealed blood of the narrow cuts. “You do them on parts of your body that won’t normally be seen in public.”

“Yep.”

“And you’ve been doing this a long time?”

“Since ninth grade.”

“Are you depressed?”

“You know I get depressed sometimes.” She waved a hand at her superficial wounds. “This helps me cope.”

“We need to find you a new coping mechanism. I like your skin to stay silky smooth.”

I never talked about the cutting with her again. Fact is, it didn’t much bother me. We were together for another nine months or so, and the sex was always hot. She was up for it anywhere, anytime. Like me, she especially liked doing it in front of mirrors. She had an incredibly high libido even for a crazy chick. I briefly wondered if it was the inherent drama in our relationship and my flirtatious ways with other women which caused her to cut, but she never did it again while we were together, as far as I could tell. (The possibility exists she found a harder-to-locate patch of land somewhere in the nooks of her body to hide her cutting from me. But I’m pretty thorough when it comes to exploring the savannah of a lover’s body.) I believed her when she said she cut to feel better. As a man, I can understand the impulse. We men often relish the pain of crunching blows from fights or sports or body blows from self-discovery adventures gone awry. Testosterone makes us men want to feel life for all it’s worth, and there’s no better mental stimulant than the physical stimulants of pain and sex.

But not too much pain. We’ve got our pretty boy faces to keep in mind.

Pain takes us men out of our minds, away from debilitating introspection and toward living in the moment. Maybe for some women, pain from cutting performs a similar psychological analgesic for them, taking them away from worries and stress and into their exquisite bodies where their truest womanhood resides.

***

Do women, then, cut because of negative emotions filling their hearts? A study states it is so, drawing relevance with ancient religious practices of self-flagellation to cleanse the soul of impurities.

Psychological scientist Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland, Australia and his colleagues recruited a group of young men and women under the guise they were part of a study of mental and physical acuity. Under this pretense, they asked them to write short essays about a time in their lives when they had ostracized someone; this memory of being unkind was intended to prime their personal sense of immorality—and make them feel guilty. A control group merely wrote about a routine event in their lives.

Afterward, the scientists told some of the volunteers—both “immoral” volunteers and controls—to stick their hand into a bucket of ice water and keep it there as long as they could. Others did the same, only with a soothing bucket of warm water. Finally, all the volunteers rated the pain they had just experienced—if any—and they completed an emotional inventory that included feelings of guilt.

The idea was to see if immoral thinking caused the volunteers to subject themselves to more pain, and if this pain did indeed alleviate their resulting feelings of guilt. And that’s exactly what the researchers found. Those who were primed to think of their own unethical nature not only kept their hands in the ice bath longer, they also rated the experience as more painful than did controls. What’s more, experiencing pain did reduce these volunteers’ feelings of guilt—more than the comparable but painless experience with warm water.

According to the scientists, although we think of pain as purely physical in nature, in fact we imbue the unpleasant sensation with meaning. Humans have been socialized over ages to think of pain in terms of justice. We equate it with punishment, and as the experimental results suggest, the experience has the psychological effect of rebalancing the scales of justice—and therefore resolving guilt.

Guilt is one emotion that can be absolved by the self-administration of pain. I wouldn’t be surprised if pain lessened the burden of other negative emotions as well. My cutter lover may have felt guilt about spending the best years of her life with a man who gave no hint of driving the relationship toward a marital resolution, and being unable to extricate herself because of her attachment to me. Or she may have just been a naturally depressive person, inherited from some long ago depressed ancestor, and cutting was her cheap Prozac.

The most important lesson I took away from that relationship was that cutters are a great lay. I now look for the telltale signs on all first dates. If the cuts are on her face, I know she’ll be wearing no panties underneath her skirt and will be ready to fuck in an alleyway before we’re even halfway home.

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