Curiosities: February, 2025
Christianity, Sex, OnlyFans, and Masculinity
Happy February, kittens! In this edition of Curiosities, we will pretend the world isn’t burning down and hyper-fixate on our special interests. This method of managing a crisis hasn’t failed me yet.
But first, an announcement:
and I have started a regular live stream on Substack where we solve the NYT crossword and discourse about the current discourse. Right now we are streaming Sunday nights. It’s been great fun, and I hope you will join us. If you are subscribed to either of us, you should get a notification when we start live streaming.This is a quick reminder that inclusion in the Curiosities series does not necessarily equate to agreement or approval. An article is included here because it made me think and moved me in some way, either intellectually or emotionally. If you want to know what I think about a particular topic, ask me directly or see my own writing on the subject.
If you are interested in being featured in an upcoming edition of Curiosities, please see this footnote1
My articles in January
: That time my dick didn’t work
There was a period of time when my dick didn’t work. During these miserable years, in my mid-twenties, I didn’t talk about it with anyone. But I wished that I could read some compassionate writing about the subject, some consolation penned by someone halfway intelligent who wasn’t selling me dubious herbal medicines.
Well—here it is, the written consolation.
The primary word I’d use to describe erectile dysfunction isn’t embarrassing, or horrifying, or depressing, although it is those things. The first word I’d use to describe is stupid. It feels so, so stupid. It is a remarkable example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
: How Not To Be a False Prophet
Hal Lindsey has died, at 95 years old, a long life by any standards, and massively consequential, even though you may have never heard of him. Author of The Late Great Planet Earth, the largest-selling “non fiction1” book of the 1970s, Lindsey made his name and a fifty year career out of apocalyptic speculation. Late Great was famous enough that Orson Welles narrated the film version; Hal Lindsey has influenced your life, whether you know it or not. Though it never occupied a central place for me, when I was a child Late Great was a staple in the lives of people I knew. I was aware that some folks believed we were living in the end times, and that geo-political events could be - should be - interpreted through the lens of the Book of Revelation. Lindsey’s book sorta kinda maybe predicted the Second Coming of Christ would occur around 1988, asserted that the fortunes of the modern State of Israel mattered to the whole world2, and helped give new life to a psycho-social tribe that sees that pretty much everything - from the number of letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan’s full name3 to the proliferation of bar codes, and to natural disasters occurring in particular places - as a sign that the clock of the world is currently five minutes to midnight.
Barri Weiss and Tom Holland: Tom Holland on How Christianity Remade the World
The paradox is the great motor of the Christian story and of Christian history. The idea that a man can be a god, the idea that someone who is dead can come to life, the idea that someone who suffers the death of a slave can be greater than Caesar: These are all paradoxes. And over the course of the 2,000 years of Christianity’s history, it’s unsurprising that these ideas have, in turn, generated further paradoxes, of which I would say—and this is pointed out by people hostile to Christianity—that for a people who claim to have a universal identity, Christians are very fond of fighting one another and denying the name of Christian to one another.
Christianity is a faith that is founded on the conviction that a crucified criminal suffering the death of a slave triumphs over the greatest empire on the face of the planet. That conviction has led to it becoming the most hegemonic explanation for who humans are—what their purpose on the face of the earth is, and where they will go after death—that has ever existed. And that gives it an unbelievable degree of power, and has given kings and emperors and popes power.
: How Onlyfans Took Over The World
Onlyfans maintains the dynamic that made camming so successful - direct, live connection with a girl - but manages to make it feel individualized. Instead of having to pay a lot of money to rank against other men, you can pay a little money and enter a pussy paradise with not a single other man in sight.
Onlyfans lends its design towards isolating the men from each other. If you’re a horny dude, the existence of other horny dudes is a fleeting shadow, a ghost only hinted at implicitly through seeing ‘like’ counts on photos or occasionally subscriber count numbers, for the rare girls who make it public.
From the girls’ perspective, OF is designed to make this easy. There’s a bunch of settings for mass messages and filtering of who gets those messages, so that a thousand brand new men may at once receive the blessed ‘hey babe, u up?’, a virtual realgirl gazing directly into their own eyes, just him and her, horny, together, forever.
: I’m a feminist and I think it’s harder to be a man than a woman.
Society trains men to put manhood at the very center of their identity. When we talk about patriarchy, we talk about those things which men have built their identities and lives around. Of course they are defensive. It feels like an attack.
But we have to stop conflating patriarchy and men.
Our ability to have really important conversations relies on our ability to make this distinction.
So often those of us who bring up patriarchy and those who shut it down are on the same side. We want the same things. We want life to be better for men.
We must make room for the reality that we talk about patriarchy not because we hate men. We talk about patriarchy because we love men.
: The 6 Most Common Issues That Lead Men to Commit Suicide, According to Suicidal Men
One of the most significant differences between the sexes was men's difficulty opening up and asking for help. They felt judged by societal expectations of toughness and felt the best way to be a "real man" was to keep their problems to themselves and soldier on.
This one resonated with me more than any other on the list. When I was trying to prove myself, my job involved dealing with horrendous incidents of death and destruction. The incident which led to my lifelong battle with PTSD could have been somewhat alleviated.
I could have spoken up, said I needed a break, and removed myself from the scene. Others did, and today they have no lasting adverse effects.
But I wanted to be a "real man". I knew what society expected from me, and I stuck it out to the bitter end (I’d rather not go into detail).
I did this time and time again until one day I broke. Eighteen years later I have reconstructed much of my life, and I stand as a living testament to the danger of silence — of not asking for help.
: The Trouble with Elon
I didn’t set out to become an enemy of the world’s richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. Until this moment, I’ve resisted describing my falling out with Elon Musk in much detail, but as the man’s cultural influence has metastasized—and he continues to spread lies about me on the social media platform that he owns (Twitter/X)—it seems only appropriate to set the record straight. I know that it annoys many in my audience to see me defend myself against attacks that they recognize to be spurious, but they might, nevertheless, find the details of what happened with Elon interesting.
Of all the remarkable people I’ve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figure—despite his best efforts to become a clown. He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe. None of this was obvious to me when we first met, and I have been quite amazed at Elon’s evolution, both as a man and as an avatar of chaos. The friend I remember did not seem to hunger for public attention. But his engagement with Twitter/X transformed him—to a degree seldom seen outside of Marvel movies or Greek mythology. If Elon is still the man I knew, I can only conclude that I never really knew him.
: Believe for Your Own Sake, Not for “the West”
Memetic Christianity chills me both within and beyond the cultural war in which its proponents see it as a necessary weapon. It is the same chill I get when I think about their ostensible rivals: the Remixers of the post-relativism age. It is not merely the notion that a useful, if false (or at least inconclusive) idea, if spread among an intellectually acquiescent populace (by, necessarily, a knowing elite), might be an efficient mechanism of social order. It is, even more worryingly, a religiously-tinged affirmation of the bleakest tenets of our post-truth age: that the memetic and the metaphorical are realer than, and prior to, the particular or the literally true. Jesus Christ becomes, in this rendering, merely a paradigmatic rendering of the God-man: the human being who, through knowledge, through will, through innovation, through the creative power of the (so-called) Western intellectual tradition, succeeds in transhumanist self-divinization. If Christianity is not literally true, in other words, it becomes instead a kind of Hermetic magical transhumanism, in which Jesus is a mere metaphor for the divine in all of us. Storytelling, command of language through logos, becomes in this vision the ultimate human prerogative: the creation of reality through the judicious dissemination of memes. Man is a divine reality-creator because he is a self-determining storyteller. (It’s telling that both Thiel and Peterson’s accounts of the Judeo-Christian tradition center a figure that seems a lot more like a contemporary technological innovator than a Nazarene carpenter).
That’s all for now. Stay curious.
Posts must be well-written with a minimum of grammatical and spelling errors. Most of us don’t have professional editors so a few mistakes are inevitable, but the piece needs to be readable.
I must find the article moving or interesting, which is completely subjective. Just because a piece doesn’t ring my bell doesn’t mean it’s bad.
No authors will be featured two months in a row. So, if you were featured in last month’s post, you will by default not be included in this month’s post.
Sometimes I run out of space, time, or energy, and your piece just gets left on the cutting room floor as a result. Don’t despair! You might be Shapespare, I just work too many jobs and I’m too overwhelmed and your piece fell through the cracks. Feel free to remind me of your article again, and I will make time to read it!