“You give me a good whore house every time. A guy can go in an’ get drunk and get ever’thing outa his system all at once, an’ no messes”- George Milton, Of Mice and Men
Compared to male sexuality, female sexuality is surprisingly linear. While it’s true that men enjoy the typical signs of youthful fertility- large breasts, curvaceous hips, clear skin- a man’s attraction to a woman must be tempered by a sense of realistic accessibility. “The girl next door” archetype is sexy because she isn’t intimidating; she’s unaware of how sexy she truly is and this makes her accessible.
Female sexuality is more linear because women don’t feel indebted to accessibility as a component of attraction; for a woman, this would be like going to a movie and wondering, “do I deserve to be here watching this movie?” Since women don’t have this concern, a woman can feel entirely unencumbered with whom she’s most attracted to- which inevitably is the highest-quality male in any scenario.
However, defining highest quality male isn’t always what it seems.
People are primarily motivated by sex. Mostly in their fertile years, but try telling the old man renting the 25 porn VHS tapes that. Biologically, you have a single purpose- do what it takes to get laid. Men want to fuck the highest quantity of women, because his silly genetics haven’t caught on to the idea that he won’t be popping out two dozen kids, and women want the highest quality male to screw them for the same reason.
The solution, as it would seem for the male-end of the equation, is to become the highest quality male.
If you get anything at all out of this blog post, I’d like your takeaway to be not going to graduate school for anything outside of Science and Math. If the undergraduate experience can be crystallized as an introduction to leftist ideology, you can look to graduate school as the difference between Kindergarten and High School- in grad school, you’re not a kid anymore and you’re supposed to know better.
So, if you sign up for a graduate program ignorant to this idea, as I did, while thinking that an advanced level course load will provide more opportunity for nuanced discussion and outside ideas- after all, you’re a big kid now- you’re going to have a miserable time. You should know better, and have had any dissenting ideas bleached away by the angry cat ladies of your initial university experience.
Like everything, I learned this the hard way and unintentionally made every one of my useless geek grad school professors hate me for mistaking one-way ideology for discussion… and this was ten-years before I was more fully reality conscious.
But, when I realized this- that the ideology of graduate school was essentially the memes of a Disney movie deconstructed and taught to classrooms of idiots for the price of a luxury car- I couldn’t help but wonder: why I was doing it at all?
A friend was in a similar situation at the time, locked down deep in a terrible graduate program being force-fed the same mickey mouse bullshit, and we’d joke about how great it would have been to work in one of those old mom-and-pop video stores of the 1980s instead.
Sitting behind the counter in the corner of a strip mall, handing out copies of “Ghostbusters 2” and NES games with Wrestlemania V on the in-house big screen; your biggest decision of the day would have been whether you wanted pizza, chinese, or deli for lunch. And you’d go home that night with a fresh copy of “License to Drive” and Bad Dudes, and there’s your life- no fuss, no muss. Maybe you even sold a beeper that day and your boss will give you a validating high-five.
A totally bullshit free existence.
Only these kinds of video stores were extinct during the culturally deadened 2000s, and what girl was gonna date a video store clerk anyway? We were young virile men; we wanted to get laid.
And the myth we were fed was that a respectable, civilized man with admirable ambition and a professional career was attractive to young women- and so, we pushed forward.
To the uninitiated, those who buy-into this myth hard and are inevitably burned by it, the growing phenomena of a young female teacher screwing one of her twelve-year-old students is a real pickle of a problem, and is ultimately swept under the carpet with the label of pedophilia. If she’s crazy- if she’s mentally ill– this stupid motherfucker can get to sleep at night with his myth still in-tact.
But, what if it’s not pedophilia at all- what if this speaks to the much larger reality of female attraction that contradicts everything we’re taught to believe?
There is nothing inherently attractive about the civilized good-boy who sips his tea, speaks politely, and has an adorable little career with amassed resources. Any drug-addled bartender will tell you that, straight up- no graduate degree required.
When a woman scans her surroundings for the highest-quality male, the civilized man with the admirable career isn’t on her list of priorities. Whether she’s aware of it or not, her criteria is set to finding the highest-quality human animal.Â
The human animal embodies power; power is needless.
Take a young, fertile woman in her mid-20s. The men available to her are predictably boring good-boys with their silly beards and leftist talking points. She understands that she’s supposed to like them, but something she can’t quite verbalize is missing. And she has that one little asshole in her third-period English class who never wants to listen, has a bad attitude, and openly mocks her to her face; he doesn’t take her seriously like her bearded good-boys and she can’t help but feel attracted to his entirely authentic showing of natural, budding Alpha male masculinity. Even at a young age this boy embodies the power of the human animal.
The same confusion is sure to arise within the wimpy heart of the bearded boy-man when he realizes that Curley’s Wife- described as a 1930’s budget Hollywood starlet- becomes attracted to the lovably retarded Lennie Small in Steinbeck’s dustbowl classic “Of Mice and Men” (1937).
Although the novella primarily reads as George and Lennie’s journey toward tragedy, the character of Curley’s Wife is the key in understanding why these pieces are in-place to begin with.
If you haven’t read “Of Mice and Men” (you should), don’t worry- I’ve got you covered:
George Milton and Lennie Small are traveling from one town in California to another where they plan to work on a ranch as low-paid farmhands. Lennie is retarded, and George is not. The idea is to save enough money in-order to buy their own ranch and not work as wage-cucks for rich landowners.
When they get to the new ranch they meet the rich landowner’s son Curley, who immediately picks Lennie for an easy target to bully. We later find out that Curley is a beta-cuck to his new wife, and is convinced the other men on the farm are all screwing her. Curley’s Wife is described as being heavily flirtatious, showing off her body to the other men, and it’s implied that she’s having an affair with the Alpha male of the ranch, Slim. Since Curley is intimidated by Alpha-male Slim, he decides to beat up retarded Lennie… who uses his size and power to crush Curley’s  hand.
When Curley’s Wife learns that Lennie stood up to Curley, she becomes flirtatious with Lennie… who ends up accidentally killing her.
A far too basic reading of “Of Mice and Men” would be to consider Lennie nothing more than a large, clumsy, asexual child; this is typically how women teach the novella. While Lennie is certainly childlike- he’s mostly incapable of following a conversation, looks to George as a father-figure, and has a passion for touching soft things- it’s too simplistic to think that he doesn’t have a fully realized sex drive; after all, the reality of Lennie is that he’s an adult male. And so, when Lennie first encounters Curley’s Wife he takes immediate notice of her beauty, commenting: “Gosh, she was purty” (32).
And when Lennie crushes her husband’s hand with raw power, Curley’s Wife is intrigued. Even if Lennie doesn’t have the social acuity of the highest quality male at the ranch, Slim, Lennie has certainly proven himself to be the most powerful- and this, alone, is enough to attract Curley’s Wife.
It’s something the beta-cuck is incapable of understanding. Lennie is low-IQ, uncivilized, probably beardless, and devoid of leftist talking points… and yet, Curley’s Wife is attracted to his unwitting display of human animal dominance.
And this is where Curley’s Wife makes the fatal mistake of misunderstanding nature.
“Just because you forget about nature does not mean that nature forgets about you”- Stefan Molyneux
Women are sheltered from nature, and thus will inherently misunderstand it. Historically, this was a privilege. Nature is cruel and dangerous; uncompromising, nature is the ultimate fascist. The responsibility of dealing with nature falls to the hands of men, who exist on the front lines of risk when shit goes down and man must protect his tribe. Man, as hunter, understands the unpredictable nature of the wild animal; woman as caretaker will only understand the cute and cuddly, cartoonish domesticated animal.
In modern terms, even if hunting isn’t our primary method of sustainment, men are still tasked with the responsibility of understanding reality while women favor a socially acceptable, cute and cuddly, cartoonish worldview; of course, this is problematic in an egalitarian democracy.
But when women decide to venture out into nature and poke a few bears, blind to the reality that nature is not something within their sphere of control, things can get ugly.
Steinbeck deliberately compares Lennie to an animal, describing him as walking “heavily, dragging his feel a little, the way a bear drags his paws” (2). With a severely limited cognitive ability and low impulse control, Lennie is quite literally a human animal. Throughout the novella it’s noted that Lennie accidentally kills any pets his takes on, although it doesn’t really matter so much to him as he only wants a pet for the tactile stimulation of its soft fur. This is important to note; the relationship between Lennie and the animal is entirely one-sided, as Lennie is using the animal- much like a wild animal uses its prey for nourishment.
Curley’s Wife is shielded from the reality of Lennie as something dangerous; she is only able to comprehend Lennie as cute and cuddly, assessing him as “jus’ like a big baby” (90). And while Lennie is certainly adorable and childlike, misunderstanding the fact that he’s still an adult male, only plagued with tragic limitations, is just like thinking the adorable brown bear at Yellowstone is just dying to be canoodled.
Curley’s Wife had been used to situations entirely within her control; where she can taste a bit of danger by flirting and teasing the men on the ranch- albeit rugged but ultimately domesticated men- while relying on the dependable safety of the situation. Even if there were less than honorable men working there, they would understand that Curley’s Wife was married to Curley, the bosses son, and would have them fired if they crossed any lines with the wife.
Only Lennie doesn’t have the impulse control, nor the full comprehension of the situation, to understand where to draw any lines. And when Curley’s Wife pokes the bear, having Lennie touch and stroke her hair, she isn’t able to control the situation as she can with the other men at the ranch. Lennie won’t let go when she asks, and when she demands he let go, Lennie becomes frightened and thrashes her about until he kills her- just like the asshole feeding bears at Yellowstone; nature gives no fucks.
Thinking about my video store fantasy now, I feel a lot like George Milton dreaming of a little ranch to call his own. Although we don’t know much about George’s history before the start of the story, we can surmise that he hasn’t had a lot of luck with women… and we can also surmise that he has a deeper understanding of female nature than he lets on. When he first meets Curley’s Wife he immediately get the deal with her, saying “I seen ’em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jail bait worse than her” (32).
George’s dream is a little ranch to call his own, but not for the benefit of a woman nor to start a family, but to live out the rest of his years comfortably with Lennie.
George understands the reality of female nature and chose to go his own way.
And in semi-modern terms, this would have been like saying fuck-it-all and taking up a stake at the local video store, getting chinese for lunch, and taking home a bag full of NES games and VHS smut at the end of the day. It should be noted that graduate school wouldn’t have been something available to George, and that due to the poverty of the Great Depression, women were looking for wealth as a primary qualification to marriage- so, George as a homeless, migrant farm worker was left out of the conversation entirely.
But even if resources were the primary for a woman’s long-term interest in men, resources still weren’t something attractive to the female animal. Remember, nature isn’t something that changes; nature is the ultimate fascist.
Steinbeck understood this too, evident when Curley’s Wife reveals why she’s married to Curley in the moments before her death. Throughout the story it’s obvious that the relationship between the two is one-sided; Curley desperately wants her acceptance, even to the extent of wearing a glove full of vaseline on his left hand to keep it “soft for his wife” (27), while Curley’s Wife does everything she can to avoid Curley.
And in her final moments, Curley’s Wife explains that she met a man from Hollywood who gamed her into believing that he could get her into the movie business and that she should wait for a letter from him inviting her to the studio. When the letter never arrives, Curley’s Wife blames her mother for stealing it and keeping it from her. Was there ever a letter? Was he really someone from Hollywood? Or was he a sharp, 1930s style pick-up-artist looking for a cheap lay? I’ll let you decide.
That same night she met beta-man Curley, and they eventually married as Curley was heir to a wealthy ranch and her ticket out of poverty. It should stand as no surprise that Curley’s Wife finally reveals that she doesn’t like Curley at all… because resources aren’t inherently attractive to women, as every beta-cuck marrying a washed-up thirty-two year old will eventually find out; female attraction is reserved for the highest quality human animal, and everyone else serves as pawns in the game- a fact that George Milton implicitly understood, and maybe even what the guy renting you “Weird Science” knew a little something about.
