Astral Codex Ten

Sadly, Porn

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Sadly, Porn

Article

Sadly, Porn is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 16, 2022 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn ?”; “What’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn?”; “quasi-Lacanianism of Sadly, Porn”. It most often appears alongside Freud, Lacan, Lacanian.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: February 16, 2022
  • Last seen: November 17, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader.
Inline links: Sadly, Porn
Teach’s earlier work centers around Christopher Lasch’s idea of narcissism. Sadly, Porn adds a layer of Lacanian psychoanalysis (I wasn’t smart enough to recognize this myself; other people pointed it out). I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while. Partly because I never understood him in school. Partly because Slavoj Zizek is into him and everyone seems to think Zizek is smart. And partly because I recently realized that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which I also never understood, actually has useful insights (hint: compare Part III of this post with the theory of part objects) and for all I know Lacanian psychoanalysis might be the same way.
Inline links: this post
Sadly, Porn consists of a mid-double-digits-number of short-ish (5-10 pages) interpretations of various texts, vaguely connected by rants and insults. The texts range from classical (especially Thucydides and Oedipus Rex), to Biblical, to modern novels, to movies, to pornos, to dreams. Some of them, on closer inspection, are fictional - not in the sense of being works of fiction, but in the sense where Teach made them up.
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness.
“What’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?”
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
But Lacan doubles down on this idea of ego defense, and ties it into the Law. One of the rare places this book intersected with the quasi-Lacanianism of Sadly, Porn, was its insistence that not only are humans bound by Law, but they insist on being bound by Law, and someone who isn’t bound by Law will flail around desperately looking for some Law to be bound by, until they end up with horses or buttons or whatever else was at hand. I will not deny that this is an interesting prediction of how many people end up with spanking fetishes, or “discipline” fetishes, or master/slave fetishes, or teacher/student fetishes, or some other fetish that ritually re-enacts the establishment of Law. I wonder if anyone has ever had a fetish for judges. What about that very particular white wig they sometimes wear?
On the comments of my Sadly, Porn review, FeepingCreature wrote:
Inline links: wrote
Probably this comes from a combination of genetic instincts and cultural mores just like everything else. But the exact genesis is sort of obscure, and the instincts and mores sure do get channeled along some unusual paths.I wrote about some of this in my Sadly, Porn review, but upon contact with any real people, our society’s stylized description of sex (people get pleasure from genital contact with others, especially hot others) fractures into a dizzying array of inexplicable weirdness.
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Blue: financially savvy, bad at romance, natural leader, enjoys biking …then most people will find that they have some traits of each, but that’s just a natural result of the system being made up and useless. Maybe the problem is I’m using this as a psychological type system, but it’s actually supposed to be a business book after all? The namesake principle claims that overperforming Clueless get promoted to middle management, and underperforming Sociopaths get promoted to the top. This ought to be testable. Suppose we looked at a sales firm, or an investment bank, and correlated first-year sales/profits with promotions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that overperformers get promoted to the next level up - after all, the naive ordinary model says you get promoted for good work. Surely most people who underperform their first year won’t get promoted, but the Gervais partisan could say that yes, only a few very special underperformers are real Sociopaths. So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. I would naively predict the top echelons would be made of former normal-to-over-performers, so if someone found they were in fact underperformers that would be a big update for me in favor of all of this Gervais stuff. I can’t find a dataset that would tell me this, but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say. Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here. Finally, it just seems totally wrong to me that the highest-status and lowest-status members of groups/clubs/societies are legible, and everyone in the middle isn’t. I am thinking of some non-formal groups I belong to, and the highest- and lowest- status people are often as confusing as everyone else. The exceptions are formal organizations with presidents or whatever, but even there I couldn’t tell you who the lowest-status person is. VII. That last section might feel harsh, so I want to stress that I liked a lot of things about Gervais Principle. Gervais Principle feels like what psychoanalysis would be like if it weren’t so devoted to making itself incomprehensible. It explained its theories clearly and gave good examples of each. Even though it stuck to really traditional psychoanalytic ideas (the theory of people getting stuck at developmental stages is classic Freud - see eg anal-retentivity, oral fixation, etc) it vastly exceeded the source material in clarity, plausibility, and ability to avoid naming all of its concepts after barely-related bodily orifices. In particular, I feel like I better understand some of the ideas from Sadly, Porn. People’s desire to subject themselves to an order created by sociopaths. Everyone keeping a ledger of status transactions. Terror of acting openly, and how it breeds bureaucracy and excessive layers of management. It’s all in here. Lacan claimed there were three different personality structures: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert. Suggestive, but I can’t squeeze these into matching Rao’s triad. For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least. Likewise, Lacan says psychotics are incapable of using language normally, instead retreating to stock phrases - a suspiciously good match for Rao’s Clueless description. But Lacanian psychotics are most able to act and least dependent on other people’s approval, which is totally the opposite of Rao’s system. Clinical Introduction hints at a rare personality type who has passed beyond neurosis, and is able to have normal healthy self-motivated desires that are not just the desires of others. It doesn’t dwell on this type, because they rarely see psychoanalysts, but it sounds like a good match for Rao’s Sociopaths. That would mean we have to map all three main Lacanian types into Rao’s Clueless and Losers - but I have no idea how to do this faithfully. So I am less impressed by the typology itself than in the book’s ability to ask questions - or, more precisely, to make the reader ask questions. This is its “organizational literacy” - when confronting people or groups, you can ask things like: What narrative script is a person relying on in order to maintain their sense of specialness?
Inline links: anal-retentivity, oral fixation, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?s=w, Clinical Introduction
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
6: More commentary on Edward Teach and Sadly, Porn.
Inline links: commentary on Edward Teach and
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
I originally picked up this book because I wanted to learn more about mimetic desire. I think there might be something to this part. The “two kids fighting over a toy” example is mine (my neighbors have several small children, who have leaned into this stereotype recently). But also, Girard explains this (I think correctly) as an example of how desire forms at all, beyond a couple of hard-coded things like liking calorie-dense foods. There were hints of this in Sadly, Porn (why do cultural beauty standards exist at all? why are there fads in fetishes?) and I thought it was important and wanted to understand it better.
Inline links: Sadly, Porn