“One day, men will no longer have nipples.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Evolution. Male nipples serve no purpose.”

The hypothesis was put forth by Michael for the benefit of Jake, his friend. They were sitting in a car, dressed in sharp suits and drinking coffees. The car, Jake’s silver BMW, was parked in front of a midtown coffee shop. They had been talking about sex and women while watching young ones walk in and out of the shop. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the ladies dressed lightly.

Michael then expounded on his views on sexuality:

“I don’t understand the appeal of sex. It’s a sweaty, smelly act. The sexual organs are repulsive. Nothing shows that humans are animals better than sex.”

Jake slurped hard on his iced frappé, either in reaction to Michael’s words or in reaction to a hot girl who at that moment swung out of the coffee shop and into the sunshine. Michael for his part took a long sip of his hot americano, and continued:

“And the way two people become infatuated with each other when they fall in love! I can’t stand that; the day before they were just some average Joe and some bimbo, and the day after their magical conversion to love they are suddenly the king and queen of the universe. Talk about delusion.”

“That’s your view,” said Jake, “You can feel whatever way you want about it, but the fact is, sexuality is what potentiates the species. Without it, we go extinct in fifty years. So, the value of sex and love is objective.”

They were on a break from the office. They both worked in the downtown high rise of Stanford, the accounting giant. I too worked there, and still do in fact, as a human resources manager. The story I tell here, I learned through interviews with both men, conducted in the wake of an office scandal in which the story ends and that was, in fact, of a sexual nature.

I decided to tell the story not because of the extremes to which it lurches – I have handled cases of much worse depravity – but because I think it representative of certain flaws afflicting many of today’s young men. Many of the details are of course invented to flesh out the narrative, but they are not gratuitous - I imagined them from what I learned about the personalities involved throughout the inquiry. Names have been changed to protect identities.

Michael and Jake were both in their late twenties and single at the time. Jake was known around the office as a player. He changed girlfriends often. He dressed meticulously. He went on expensive vacations. He was active on social media and Tinder. In short, he spent the bulk of his energy and earnings in attracting women.

Michael was nothing of the sort. Women didn’t exert on him that charm that comes from mystery because he had grown up with two older sisters. How exactly was his relationship with his sisters, no one knew, but he certainly gave out a mild misogynistic vibe. At any rate, Michael did not try to impress women, though he could have. He had the same high-earning job as Jake, and he was about as good-looking.

The two men had started hanging out together when they were first assigned to a common project. It didn’t take long for Jake to turn their casual conversations to his favourite topic: women, and how to seduce them. Michael at first ridiculed Jake for what he saw as a pointless and pathetic obsession, but this only sparked the type of mild confrontation that had them both returning to the topic again and again. They found enough common ground to become friends.

Jake opened to Michael about his romantic conquests, and Michael didn’t get envious listening to his stories. Jake, to demonstrate his emotional sovereignty, told his stories with ironic detachment – he would describe victories dispassionately, and breakups as inevitable. His stories were spiked with quite a dose of pessimism, and not much passion. And really, Jake made up a lot of details, both to embellish his accomplishments and to add notes of bitterness, which Michael relished. The two friends were corporate workers, after all, used to embellished resumes and the accompanying suspension of disbelief.

All things considered, it was hard to figure out whether Michael or Jake disliked women more. Michael however went more radical. He had been a regular on an incel forum on the deep web. That weekend, he was to stumble upon a post by a user named The_Archangel that would set off a permanent change in his outlook on life. At first, the post read like a typical rant about the degeneracy of the West. It lamented the devastating effects of the sexual revolution and pined for the days when a man had to marry to get access to a woman’s body.

The post differed from the usual fare of the forum in that it ended in an exceptionally informed take on what religious tradition had to say on the question of sexual morality. It talked about how every human body is a temple of God, and not to be defiled by carnal passion. It talked about Saint Augustine’s struggle with lust. It mentioned the saint’s famous Libertine’s Prayer: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

Michael had never read a single piece of theology and was surprised that a major saint, a Doctor of the Church, would be an admitted former sex addict. Moreover, he found that he had not a few points of agreement with religious revulsions towards sex, at least as they were described in the post.

He downloaded Saint Augustine’s Confessions and several other books on theology Archangel recommended. He searched the poster’s references to see if they are true. The quoted text was indeed found, but then he had to read around it to understand the context. On that first night he spent some twenty minutes reading on the subject. He swiped back and forth on his tablet computer and frowned with amusement.

“What a strange world these old school dudes lived in!” thought Michael, “They held some ridiculous beliefs, but in their twisted way they were spot on with so many social issues. The way they talk about sexuality, it’s as though they had a Tinder account!”

That was not the end of Michael’s exploration of theology. Over the next week, he would read a little every night, and that little would expand gradually until he started reading about it for hours every day. He became curious to understand the worldview, though he often got bored when the text dug into the more abstract God-talk. He would read late into the night at home, until his eyes burned as he glared and squinted at the white-on-black text on his tablet. He would then continue reading in the office the next day. At work, he would anxiously guard the reading screen lest his workers figure out his queer new interest. He would twist the screen and his shoulder away from foot traffic; this caused him to become cramped and jumpy.

After a couple of weeks his curiosity was exhausted, and he became ambivalent about religious ideas on sex. He appreciated the need for a strict moral code. He recalled watching his mother and his sisters go through romantic catastrophes, and he thought that in a more conservative world these things would never happen. The women in his family would have been spared the emotional devastation they suffered.

On the other hand, he was bothered by what he saw as a tyrannical encroachment on individual freedoms, by the idea that the church should get involved in someone’s personal life. He was also bothered by how big of a deal they made of sex and everything else, and all those threats and fears of divine judgment and perdition. Such thoughts would often turn his ambivalence into indignation.

“These religious people are a joke!” Michael said to Jake at another coffee run, “The pursuit of sex comes from an uncontrollable biological urge. Marriage is suppressing that urge in exchange for social kudos. That’s it, for the most part. Yet you talk to a religious fanatic and all you hear about is sin and punishment.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jake, “I don’t see how my relationship with Deborah has anything to do with holiness. Or heaven, or hell.”

“Their world view is completely disconnected from reality. But they must know how it really works, right? The hypocrisy is staggering!”

“Religion is just another form of social control,” Jake shrugged.

“Look, I get the fact that back in the Iron Age you had to put the fear of God into the populace to override their animal instincts and maintain social order. But the Iron Age is over now, we have policed societies and human rights, so why can’t we stop with the whole guilt and damnation thing?”

“Well,” Jake enunciated, his eyebrows and shoulders raised, in that expression of both patience and impatience, “There are a lot of envious uglies out there whole are trying to guilt-trip the good-looking people having fun.”

Michael missed his friend’s body language and went on another exposition:

“Okay, so here’s how I see it. The alpha males of the society get the best chicks. There is no need to get so inflamed with resentment that you curse them to Hell for it. At the end of the day, the whole alpha male dynamic is a leftover from our ape ancestors, and this makes it funny - and a little pathetic if you ask me. Look at dating apps - they essentially replicate the mating dynamics of baboons. When the Singularity comes around and we all get brain implants to reach unimaginable cognitive levels, the age we live in now will look embarrassing in retrospect.”

Jake did not have much to say in response. Michael eventually decided that Jake was not a great debating partner. So, he went back to the incel forum and started getting into arguments with Archangel. Michael contended that religion was not the answer to modern licentiousness because it could only cure it with deranged magical beliefs. Archangel insisted that Michael was misinterpreting because he was not properly trained in theology.

“What a moron,” thought Michael, “I don’t even know who this Archangel dude is. For all I know, he could be a fifteen-year-old beating it off five times a day in his mom’s basement, and here I am arguing with him and getting upset. He clearly doesn’t know the first thing about how The Game works.”

His last polemic with Archangel was on a Friday, throughout the workday, and it left him worked up. He needed to blow off some steam. Jake suggested they hit up a nightclub.

“You need to get off Reddit, bro, or whatever it is you are on,” said Jake, “and join the real world. You come with me, and we’ll do some hands-on research on the game. How’s that?”

Michael hated nightclubs, but he went that night because he wanted to get back at Archangel, to prove him wrong. He wanted to go out and observe what he knew happens in nightclubs: a general, drunken, and open struggle for mating partners. A battle of all against all.

Sometime past midnight Jake and Michael were quite drunk and standing at a bar facing a packed dance floor. Jake worked relentlessly to attract women to come and talk to him and his friend. His efforts eventually produced two pretty girls, both slim and tall, one wearing shorts and another one a short white dress. The first talked to Jake, the second to Michael.

“You look a little grumpy,” the girl said to Michael. Her name was Monica.

Michael saw that the girl was beautiful. She had long legs and a curvy body, and her long hair spilled in rich curls down her smooth, shiny dress. Her smile made her face gleam, especially her eyes and her mouth. She smelled so nice, too. In response to her comment, Michael forced a smile of his own, which wasn’t so hard. They introduced each other and did a few rounds of small talk. When Monica asked about what he thought about the club, Michael said that it was okay, but he didn’t really like clubs. He said that clubs are for people without social skills; they keep them too dark and too loud to communicate, so the only thing left to do is to get wasted and whore out. That setup strongly favours superficial douchebags. Monica said that he was being too harsh maybe, but Michael pushed on. He picked out people in the crowd and mocked their drunken, horny antics. Monica was amused. She said she didn’t go out often but liked coming out to clubs to dance with her girlfriends.

“And I like the attention from the boys, but only if I like them,” she said, “But I think you’re interesting. I can see where you’re coming from. You’re right, there’s so many guys in here who are ridiculous! I can tell you some crazy stories about how they hit on me.”

“There is no harm in that, I guess. I mean, you liking to have fun,” said Michael. “If I could meet a girl like you every time I go to a club, I’d definitely come out more often, too.”

Monica smiled sideways at those words, looking at Michael over her shoulder while she leaned with both elbows on the bar. The movement exposed the full profile of her figure to Michael’s eyes, which glistened as he stole a glance. He too leaned harder onto the bar with one elbow, looked straight at Monica and smiled.

He bought another round of drinks, then another. They danced together. They forgot where Jake went with the other girl. By two o’clock, they were making out in the washroom. By three o’clock they were in Michael’s downtown condo. The sex was amazing, at least according to Michael. All that anger built up on the online forum, all the resentment and rebellion he felt towards religious authorities and all prigs in general, all of that became pent-up energy that he channelled into the act of love with Monica. He was a rebel giving a big-middle finger to all of them. And he felt like Monica was the only one who understood his feelings, the only one on his side against an unfeeling, idiotic world.

He had never felt like that before. He had had girlfriends before, but the way he explained it to me at least, he always felt pressured into relationships. One time in high school, his two best friends got girlfriends, so he got one too to fit in and continue hanging out with them. Others found the match for him and convinced him that he liked her. She was nice and pretty enough, and he got respect for dating her, but none of it came from the heart. It was something that he absorbed from the environment but that never soaked through to the core of his being.

With Monica, it was completely different. “Could this be what they call love?” Michael mused the next day.

He did not get hung up on that question, though. He had had strong opinions about women when talking with Jake, and strong opinions about religion and morality when arguing with Archangel, but as for what it was that was happening with Monica, he was not desperate for an explanation. It was self-evidently a good thing. It was a glorious thing. With Monica, he was very much happy-go-lucky.

That summer became poetry. It was the good times. Michael and Monica went out all the time, floating and fluttering from one downtown patio to another, soaked in music and joy, surrounded by happy crowds. They danced and ate and drank together, and they made friends with other happy couples. Jake came along too with various dates, but slowly he fell off, unable to keep up with the energy of his friend and his new girlfriend.

Monica looked beautiful in Michael’s eyes. She was elegant and sexy. Her manner of dressing created that perfect contradiction of enticement and prohibition, that powerful double bind that can drive men nuts. Michael did not understand the trick, but he nevertheless felt empowered by the fact that he could override the prohibition. It filled him with pride that Monica belonged to him. When they were out, he sought the most prominent spots; he wanted the whole world to behold him and his trophy. When people would approach them, he would hand them a cigarette and initiate a conversation. Turns out that Monica was beautiful in the eyes of the others, too, and he made quite a few new friends this way.

The dour block of ice that lodged in Michael’s breast for so long began to thaw, and as the melting sludge washed away it left behind it a supple, breathing chunk of passion, a life-force that became as expansive as it had been constrained, as deliberate as it had been judgmental. Monica was a gentle creature who listened to Michael’s issues and, unlike anyone before, seemed to understand him perfectly. In response, Michael opened up. His former bitterness turned into a sense of humour, and his former cynicism turned into a feeling of serendipity.

And what about Monica’s background, you may ask? How did she fall for Michael so fast? From what I could gather from my inquiries, at the time she met him she was recovering from a bad relationship and an even worse breakup. Her ex was the type who knew how to say all the sweetest things to a girl, to buy presents and to mark special occasions, but who couldn’t resist messing with other women behind her back. Their relationship became increasingly mistrustful until the guy started dating another woman in another city, where he often went on business. Monica found out when the new girlfriend connected with her on social media and told her that her man loves the new girlfriend and not Monica.

Still hurting from that experience, the last type of man Monica wanted to meet was another smooth talker. As she listened to Michael’s dark take on romance when they first met, she found herself reluctantly agreeing with the things he said. She assumed that he too has been hurt before, just like her, and saw him as a kindred spirit. His words came out with strong, genuine emotion, and Monica was convinced that Michael could be trusted, and honesty was paramount for her. As for his bitterness, she had compassion for it, and wanted to cure it with her love.

She too enjoyed the summer of love. Michael became less cynical, less bitter, and happier. She too began to heal. They were a beautiful couple living it up in a beautiful city. They were living the dream. Many of Monica’s girlfriends would say they envied her, but not her bestie Serena, the girl who had gone out with her on that first night – and whose connection with Jake had ended then and there.

“I am so happy for you!” Serena said to Monica over lattes. “It sounds like you are having the best summer ever. So, what’s your long-term plan? Marriage? Babies? He-he!”

“I haven’t really thought about it. We are having such a great time, and I don’t want to spoil it with any pressure. Things are evolving so organically between us.”

“Oh, for sure. He seems to be quite nerdy, from what you told me, and that type of man can’t handle too much emotion. My only concern though, with all that skepticism he has about love and romance, is how can you be so sure he is in love with you? That your romance means a lot to him?”

“I can just feel it. He glows when we are together, and he calls me all the time.”

“Yeah, but have you actually asked him about his intentions? Have you had that discussion?”

Monica had to admit that they did not. Michael had never told her that he loved her. He generally didn’t express any tender feelings, at least not with words. She chalked it up to his peculiar personality, but Serena’s advice now made her think. What if Michael wasn’t even aware of the love she was giving him? What if he didn’t appreciate her? He is not a cheater, but what if he simply gets bored with her and she gets dumped, again, and this soon? She could not let things continue without clarification.

Their conversation went silent for a moment. Monica looked over the flower beds that fenced the patio and onto the beautiful street flooded with perfect sunlight. She was as happy as that summer’s day. Staring towards the sun a few moments too long, she became blinded, and when she looked down on her table, shades of blue darkness danced momentarily in front of her eyes.

The next Saturday was another sunny afternoon at Cartel Rooftop Patio. Michael showed me some pictures and videos he took on that occasion. The joint was packed with a raucous crowd sitting at long tables eating and drinking, or standing around the bar and clogging every open space. Ambient techno played in surround sound.

Monica had brought Serena over as a third wheel. Michael was smoking a cigar and having white wine. He looked and felt like a king in an unbuttoned silk shirt, expensive sunglasses, and slicked-back hair. He sat up straight and square and savoured the sights and sounds around him. Monica was wearing a stunning tube romper, while Serena came in a black tank top and a tight pair of stonewashed jeans. The ladies were sharing an iced pitcher of sangria.

“Who do you think looks better, Michael, me or Serena?” Monica asked teasingly after a few comments had been made about the way the crowd was dressed.

“Of course it’s you, honey,” shot Michael immediately, “I love those dress-shorts-jumpsuits women wear nowadays.”

“Men can’t resist rompers,” said Serena, “I stopped wearing them once I got a little too many elevator eyes.”

“What are you going to do,” said Michael, “Men are animals.” He took a sensuous drag of his cigar.

“I know,” Monica lifted her chin and looked wistfully into the distance, “everything is just a big mating game, isn’t it?”

“That’s why you have to be careful,” Serena said and clasped Monica’s hand on the table, “Most guys are only looking for that one thing, and once they get it, they discard you like an empty pack of cigarettes.”

Michael began to sense that something was amiss. He had a distinct feeling of being monitored. He stole a glance from Monica to Serena, and he saw the latter looking at him with a smile that strained maniacally to look candid. It was a face of a mortal enemy. He got a fantastic urge to drag her by the hair to the railing, kicking and screaming, and throw her off the rooftop. To make the urge pass, he took another sucking draw on the cigar.

He then looked back at Monica, with an expression that asked if she was really ganging up on him with her airhead friend. Alas, the shades probably didn’t help send through the body language. Monica’s face had the same mannequin expression.

He recognized the look on both girls' faces. It was the look his older sisters would give him when they would play pranks on him. He could taste right at that moment the toothpaste he had eaten when he was six years old when they convinced him that that’s what you are supposed to do with it. He could also taste the disgusting pancakes they force-fed him while playing house with him as the doll. And later, he remembered those same idiot sisters getting used and dumped by a series of douche bags, despite his repeated warnings. They would never listen to him; he was their idiot little brother. And here he was again, twenty years later, fallen for a woman who was evidently nothing but another manipulative idiot - manipulative because she’s trying to test him, and an idiot because she trusts her girlfriend, that witch.

It was full ten seconds before Michael responded.

“Women are animals too though,” he finally offered, “just a different kind. Men are like predator cats, or maybe baboons. They smell pussy and they go into heat. Women are more cold-blooded and calculating, like snakes. They use cunning and set traps. It’s not for nothing that Eve and the serpent cozied up back in the Garden of Eden.”

“Okay, this is getting misogynistic,” offered Sabrina. “If you are implying that women use their clothes to manipulate men, you are wrong. The way a woman dresses is entirely about her feeling good about herself. It’s not about trying to please or manipulate some man.”

“Okay. You are a lying idiot,” said Michael.

“Michael! There is no need to talk like that!” Monica got emotional.

“Don’t act all innocent with me!” flared Michael, “You are complicit in this game. You seem to be playing your part very good of paralyzing some poor horny dude with desire, then guilt-tripping him, like you are trying to now, and then you owe his ass. It’s the female of the species, and all that.”

“Michael, you are overreacting,” pleaded Monica.

“Sometimes you got to feel sorry for the baboons,” Michael continued his rant, “There are so many thirsty hoes on this patio and in this city, a guy sometimes feels like just pulling out his cock and flashing everyone. Everywhere you look! In daily life, on Instagram; one endless, delirious procession of tits and ass. And when you finally capture one, she starts testing you with some snaky questions!”

“Screw you!” hissed Monica, “A girl has every right to wonder what a man’s intentions are after they’ve been dating for a while!”

“So, you can’t just ask me straight up and instead have to bring your bestie to manipulate me into saying the wrong thing? I can’t believe you wouldn’t trust me enough to talk to me face to face!”

“You don’t understand, I am scared,” Monica’s voice began to break.

“You are scared of me? Why aren’t you scared that your fake-ass girlfriend here isn’t jealous of you and trying to destroy our relationship? You idiot! And fuck you too Sabrina, or whatever the fuck your name is!”

Michael got up and went for the exit. He wanted to grab Monica by the arm and drag her out with him, but he was too upset with her. Also, such an act would play right into their side of the argument. It would show that he was a violent jerk. So he walked out alone.

My investigations into the matter included only one short phone call with Monica. She repeatedly refused my requests to meet in person. Nevertheless, during that one phone call I was able to piece together the few bits of her perspective. One of the things she insisted on was that she was still sure that Serena had no ill intentions. She told me that once Michael left the two of them on that patio, Serena said to her that regretted getting involved or coming at all. Monica then cried and Serena comforted her.

Meanwhile, once he rushed outside, Michael walked listlessly up and down the streets. He bought a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store. He then remembered a seedy dive bar Jake had talked about. It was only a couple of blocks away, so he made his way there. He walked into a red-lit space without many guests. He sat at the bar and ordered a lager. He couldn’t get past the idea that Monica tried to test him. He would never try to test her. He couldn’t believe she would trust her friend over him. He thought they had something special, an unspoken connection. But he couldn’t square that conniving move with his idea of sincerity. Yet, he also couldn’t bring himself to reject her. The angrier he got, the more he desired her.

Just as he repeated those thoughts, tripping over them again and again, so he repeated his drink order. He was proper drunk with an hour. The sun was only beginning to set. The bartender offered to call him a cab. By the time he got into the car, his memory was already starting to slip. What must have transpired is that the cabby, seeing his customer’s state of inebriation, suggested that rather than driving him home, he drops him off at a secret “fun spot”. As regards this spot, Michael only recalled being led by a burly bouncer through a dingy, smoky bar filled with a loud crowd, to a back room where he was greeted by several very friendly and attractive women. He remembered ordering a rack of shots for everyone and then ordering another one, and then another. He remembered the women force-feeding him many of the shots he ordered.

Then he remembered making out with one of the women, and some of the others starting to caress him in all sorts of mischievous ways. The next thing he knew, he was the sole male centrepiece of a full-blown orgy. Some wild animal came out of Michael, his own Mr. Hyde, and this Mr. Hyde was a very ravenous man. He had rather more of a pleasing than a domineering repertoire of moves, too, though at the same time he was certainly animated by a powerful feeling of being an alpha-male. The feeling coursed through his flesh like electricity and inspired a variety of generous maneuvers — he was a beneficent master. Thinking back on it, piecing it all together from a series of fragments of a blurred memory, he was shocked himself about a lot of his moves. He didn't expect himself to be so inspired by his secret Tumblr account.

The last thing he remembered from that night was vomiting on his lap while sitting in the back seat of a car. The next thing he knew, he woke up with his face on his arms, seated at a table. He lifted his head for only enough time to see that he was in a diner and that it was raining outside. His head then collapsed back onto his folded arms. He had no energy and felt sick to his stomach. A female voice called him to get up and the hand belonging to the voice shook him by the shoulder.

“I saw you wake up,” it said, “I got you some coffee. Let’s go.”

Listening to it in the darkness of utter exhaustion, Michael couldn’t quite care who was talking to him, but the coffee sounded good. He needed something to drench the rot he felt brewing inside his guts. He lifted his head again and saw on the other side of the table a slim brunette, in her thirties, looking concerned.

“We’ve got to get you sobered up. And we’ve got to get to your apartment so you can pay.”

“Pay for what? I paid already. Didn’t I?”

“You paid for most of it. But then your phone battery died, and you didn’t bring your wallet. Trust me, we checked your pockets. Look, here’s the bill.”

The woman swiped through some photos on her phone and showed them to Michael. “These are the bills you paid, and this one is what you still owe. Five hundred sixty-five dollars.”

“Lady, I barely remember what happened, and I’m pretty sure you put something in my drinks because I’ve never been nearly this drunk in my life.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear you say that. Of course we didn’t put anything in your drink, and you were a really demanding customer. We didn’t even want to do all the stuff you asked for, but you insisted. And you already tried to not pay, but then Marco talked some sense into you, and you promised him.”

“Who the fuck is Marco?”

“The bouncer? And the guy in whose car you threw up all over the back seat? That’s why he kicked us out here rather than driving straight to your apartment, where you are supposed to give us the rest of what you owe in cash. He has your info in the payment system, and we have the bills right here, so he said that if you don’t pay me this morning, he can easily track you down. And trust me, you don’t want to mess with Marco and his gang. He literally has a gang.”

Michael finished the coffee and it stopped raining. It took some fifteen minutes for them to walk over to his apartment building. The lobby of the building had a small section decked out like a hotel lobby, with a set of upholstered armchairs and sofas. As Michael walked with the girl by it to the elevator, he saw Monica sitting there, two coffees and a takeaway bag in front of her, on the coffee table. He stopped, and she looked up from her phone. Her arms dropped to her side. She walked over to him and looked at him and the prostitute in turn.

“I can see why she likes you. You smell nice,” she said and dashed out of the building.

Michael was left paralyzed for a long minute by an acute, violent attack of shame. It was more intense than anything he had ever experienced before.

Over the following days, weeks, and months, Michael kept trying to reach out to Monica. She blocked his social media accounts and his phone number, but he created new accounts and added her, only to be blocked again. He would tell himself to forget about it, but then he would get drunk on some weekend and do it all over again. He would send long friend-request messages, adding jokes or pleading for forgiveness. Yet he knew that no one would ever read them, that he was merely shooting them off into a dark, deaf ether.

He began to drink more. When he would get especially despondent, he would go back to the dive bar, get drunk there again, and again hitch a ride to the orgy bar. It was always the same strange routine. He would go to the dive bar intending to have a couple of drinks and prove to himself that he can resist the temptation of the orgy. He wanted to demystify the place. Then he would meet some strangers or others there and get intoxicated with them, and his resolve would melt away. He would always tell the bartender to call him a cab, and he would always leave alone. 

He never retained a linear recollection of the actual sex act. The next morning, he only remembered still pictures and no sounds. He could figure out how much he had spent only the next morning, when he would check his account balances in horror. He never even figured out the name of the orgy bar or where it was located. He only experienced it in a state of trance. Before the trance there was always despair, during it there was transcendence, and after it always came that same debilitating shame he felt at that moment when Monica dumped him.

He blew all his savings there before he finally confessed what was going on to Jake. It turned out that Jake knew exactly how he felt, and that Jake had been in the same place, both emotionally and literally. Jake talked to Michael at length about his weaknesses and how he overcame them, and this helped Michael overcome his addiction to paid (and very expensive) sex orgies.

Post-breakup brought Michael much closer to Jake, who became his de facto therapist, advising him on how to deal with the heartbreak and how to get over it. There was only one way really to achieve the latter, Jake insisted: move on and find another woman. Michael embraced that idea. To that end, he upgraded his wardrobe and got back into going out just as he did with Monica. Taking fashion cues from Jake, he began wearing leather-soled shoes and floral ties with matching pocket squares. He began leasing a Mercedes. He became much more active on Instagram, updating the world on an almost daily basis on his new self and its glorious exploits. He got into CrossFit and developed a six-pack, which was often featured on the pictures he posted.

The only difference was that he didn’t end up with a girl by his side. He mostly hung out with Jake. They even went on a couple of vacations together, one on a beach destination and one around Spain. Sure, there were sometimes women with them in their Instagram photos, but the women changed often, and it wasn’t clear what relationship they had with them, if any.

One evening, on their third vacation together, this time in Italy, Michael and Jake were sitting by themselves on a terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. They were smoking cigarettes after a Frutti di Mare dinner, which Jake said was exquisite. Michael thought the mussels were a little too buttery and too salty, but he didn’t say anything.

They started talking about their partying lifestyle. Jake talked about how they were living the good life, the Dolce Vita, as they say in Italy. They were young, handsome, and they had money. Those who had negative things to say were “jealous haters”.

“And I’ll bet you one thing,” added Jake, “I’ll bet you that those jealous haters include our ex-girlfriends.”

“Cheers to that!” smiled Michael.

The evening was balmy, and it encouraged the two friends to order another bottle of Chianti. They drank, caressed by the Mediterranean breeze, and they laughed as they told jokes. They talked about their sexual conquests, and Michael went over some spicy stories he had with Monica.

“Dude, you are the man!” Jamie slurred and sniggered, “I still can’t believe you dated such a hot chick!”

“Yeah, she was hot. But whatever. All women are the same. And it was thanks to you that I met her, remember? You brought me out to a party that night! I remember I needed a drink after I got into an online argument with some guy about women. Man, I can’t believe I used to nerd out like that!”

“Yeah, that’s ancient history though. And the way you two broke up, that was hilarious. You ended up getting roofied at Wide Open and banging the entire line-up of hostesses. Ha-ha!”

“That was wild, I’m telling you! I don’t think I’ve ever achieved that level of sex, before or after.”

“No shit,” said Jake, and after a pause he added: “We should go there again, together.”

“Sometimes I think of that as a desperation move,” said Michael. “But sometimes I think, there is this honesty in the transaction, this expedience, that turns me on. And the fact that these women have the balls, so to speak, to act forthright like that, to take charge, also turns me on.”

Unfortunately for the two friends, they did go there again, together. It was on the first weekend after they returned from their Italian vacation. The ethics of the decision aside, it was unfortunate because the night they went to Wide Open for a session of group sex was the night when the police finally raided the joint, catching them en flagrante and charging them with prostitution-related offences.

In retrospect, things could have ended much worse. They were lucky that the judge decided to be lenient, quoting their otherwise clean records and upstanding jobs. She offered to drop the criminal charges under the condition that they both report the incident as a misdemeanour to their company’s HR and seek professional therapy.

As you will guess, I was the HR manager who took on Michael’s and Jake’s cases once they came clean to the company. The protocol for handling sensitive incidents at Stanford includes extensive interviewing of the employees involved. My sessions with Michael led to a much deeper discussion than those with Jake, which is why I chose here to relate Michael’s story.

During our interview sessions, Michael showed signs of genuine remorse. He has taken concrete steps to face up to his issues. He has deleted all his social media accounts. He was especially ashamed of his former activity on the incel forum, and he would often talk of the destructive nihilism that marked that online community. As it happened, a couple of weeks after his arrest there was a mass shooting perpetrated by a person who turned out to be associated with the forum. The website was promptly shut down. 

The same level of contrition was not expressed by Jake. He denied throughout our interviews that he had a chronic problem with sexually inappropriate behaviour. He only confessed to a one-off lapse of judgement induced by intoxication. This despite that the fact that long before it, he had a file riddled with warnings for repeated violations of our workplace romance policy.

At the end of the day, I will not be on the deciding jury. My role was merely to produce an objective, and rather dry, report based on the facts of what happened and offer my expert assessment where needed. This is company policy; the interviewer is likely to acquire bias throughout the interaction with the employee, much like a lawyer acquires a bias for the accused whom he is defending. My formal report submitted, and as we await the review committee’s decision, I decided to write this informal narrative for the entertainment of less judgmental readers. I have decided to put it to paper before the verdict was reached, so as to maintain a sense of suspense to the end, and to free the readers to arrive at their own judgment. 

Perhaps I did develop a soft spot for Michael, though. One of the strongest pieces of evidence against him will probably be his involvement with the now-infamous incel forum. Yet, his comments on it were never exactly hateful. And Michael was not the one who shot up a mall, right? Other than himself, who exactly is the victim of his behaviour? You may say Monica, but if you ask me, they were never going to be a long-term match. Granted, he has made some bad judgments, but throughout this unfortunate - and hopefully instructive - life experience of his, his performance as a financial advisory professional showed no signs of faltering. 

Michael can be viewed as a victim of a certain double bind that arose with the Age of The Internet. On one hand, we are bombarded with seduction, no longer only through the advertising industry - that’s an outdated term even - but by the polycephalic monster of social media that delivers an endless stream of enticing retina-display images, not sparing us even in our most vulnerable times and places: in our living rooms when we are trying to rest from a long day, in our bedrooms at night when we are reaching out to our “social network” for human interaction. On the other end of the rope, we have scientism, that drive to view everything as objects and data, including ourselves and others. It’s an attempt to remove uncomfortable feelings by removing feelings altogether, by denying feelings any Platonic essence of their own and reducing them to side effects of biochemistry. In sum, in this double bind, we have an omnipresent offensive to exploit human emotion, together with a categorical denial of human emotion as an empirical reality.

Between these two sides of the double bind, human beings get torn apart in all kinds of patterns. We saw that Jake stood on one extreme of the double bind, where he gave free rein to the pursuit of pleasure. Perhaps he still stands there. We also saw that Michael at the beginning stood on the other extreme, suspicious of passion and seeking safety in some notion of “facts”. Then we saw how he was stretched across to the other extreme and ripped apart by the strain.

In our meetings Michael rather showed a lot of resolve to turn his life around. He is seeing a licensed therapist retained by our firm. Also, his attitude toward religion has flipped, and he is now going through a spiritual transformation. I referred him to a local church group. The bishop and I have done charity work together; he is a wonderful man. It is not my area of expertise, but I don’t see anything necessarily wrong with the religious approach - there are empirical studies that demonstrate its effectiveness - unless of course, one takes the ideas of divine wrath too literally. But Michael is too intelligent for that, and despite the devastation he has lived through, I can’t imagine he would ever become so morose as to embrace such beliefs.

Michael often tells me about the positivity he now draws from his newfound spirituality. He finds great solace and inspiration in the works of Saint Augustine and the saint’s own struggles with sexual addiction. He prays daily to become chaste, just like this spiritual model of his eventually became. He knows that he faces a formidable adversary, one who intimidates him whenever memories of the humiliation haunt his tormented mind. He knows he faces a long spell of tough times ahead, an arduous journey of personal transformation. He will not feel secure as long as the temptation continues to lurk in the shadows of his broken spirit, but he practices patience and hopes that one day he will overcome this weakness of his animal nature and become a new, transfigured human being.