The partial essay below is an excerpt from the book The Modern Malaise.

In his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, written with two clinical psychiatrists, Girard developed a theory of homosexuality. Only one small section was dedicated to it, and the authors fenced their hypothesis with a claim that it accounts for “at least some of the types of homosexuality.” However, to me, their theory makes a whole load of sense, and I would hypothesize that it can be used as a basis for interpreting not only homosexuality but all sexual deviancies.

In short, Girard stipulates that homosexuality arises when the sexual attention of the subject shifts from the opposite-sex object to the same-sex rival. It is essentially a result of sexual rivalry pushed to the extreme, and Girard states that “all sexual rivalry is structurally homosexual.” Furthermore, he associates the propensity to end up in this homosexual extreme to sadomasochism, or rather maso-sadism, as he redefines it, and which in turn he understands as an obsession with rivals-obstacles in general and a desire to experience their enchanting power either by getting tormented by them, or by tormenting someone else, respectively.

It is best that I demonstrate the theory with an example. It will be a dual example, as you will shortly see. Consider a young married couple, a man and a woman. First, let’s imagine that the guy is a domineering type. He likes to show off, and specifically, he likes to show off his wife to his guy friends. He wants to see them checking out his wife and he wants to see that little spark of envy in their eyes. He likes to get that sense of winning, of feeling like he’s better than the rest of them suckers. We would all agree that such behaviour, though perhaps not morally exemplary, would comfortably fit within the normie spectrum.

Now, consider a different type of guy as the husband. He is the insecure type. He is not very confident in himself and his choices, and he tends to seek validation from his peers. Therefore, he also wants his male friends to check out his wife and be attracted to her, to get a little envious. Preferably, he would want a male friend whom he considers a winner to play this role. The husband is not confident in his choice of women but figures that if his cooler friend thinks his wife is hot, he must have made a good choice. He, too, must be cool. Again, not an ideal situation, but very much commonplace.

Now, let’s turn the dynamics up a notch. The confident husband perhaps gets bored with the small and suppressed little signs of envy. They wear out for him, and his ego begins to demand something more. He may now actively seek situations in which he torments his rivals with envy. To this end, he manipulates his wife into dressing or acting seductively towards his male friends, or perhaps he takes her out to singles bars and watches random men hit on her, only so that he can have the pleasure of snatching her away at the last moment and watching the suckers burn with envy and humiliation. He gets off on the sense of dominance over and humiliation of other males.

How does this next level look for the insecure husband? His ego is likewise not getting enough nourishment from the tiny little hints of admiration he might see in the eyes of romantically successful men looking at his wife. Being insecure, he’s not even sure if those hints are real or if he might just be imagining them. So he manipulates his wife into situations similar to the domineering husband – situations in which she’s exposed to the advances of other males. He, too, snatches her at the last moment before they get their hands on her. But he gets off on something different than the domineering husband. He can never convince himself that he is better than his rivals. Remember, he selects specifically for the rivals he is convinced are better than him; otherwise, his strategy for validation would not work. Rather, he finds that the sense of being humiliated, the sense of comparing himself to the rivals and coming up short, somehow turns him on. It becomes part and parcel of his sexual stimulation.

When we take this triangular game to the next level of intensity, we can imagine that the two husbands will run into each other. They might begin to frequent swingers' parties. They might engage in the “hotwife” fetish, in which the insecure husband would play the role of a “cuck” getting off on having his wife sleep with a “bull,” the domineering third male. In such cases, it is the same pursuit of envy, jealousy, and humiliation that we had on that first, normie level, only now taken to a level of intensity and put into action in a way that is viewed as deviant. The two males are still getting off on humiliation, either humiliating or getting humiliated.

Now, think about what would be the final stage in this progression. What is the simplest and most direct way for one male to sexually humiliate another male while they both get off on it? Of course, it’s gay sex – assfucking, cocksucking. At this stage, the two men have arrived at the point where they can skip all the busywork involving the wife and the teasing charades and go straight for each other. Sexual attention has shifted entirely from the heterosexual object of rivalry, the wife, and now forms a direct line between the two rivals. The wife has disappeared from the picture and homosexuality is no longer “structural” but carnal. The domineering husband has morphed into the top and the insecure husband into the bottom of their gay relationship.

Girard’s take on general sadomasochism adds another significant nuance to this theory. All desire is the desire for a higher being, and sadomasochism is the conviction that the higher being manifests itself through humiliation that it inflicts around itself. The role of the masochist is more fundamental than that of the sadist because the masochist subjects himself directly to humiliation to partake in transcendence. Humiliation is his sacrament. The sadist shares the worldview of the masochist regarding the nature and manifestation of transcendence, but he chooses to role-play the model-obstacle rather than experience him by directly subjecting himself to humiliation. We all know that the sadist is not a transcendental being, and from there we can understand that there is a fundamental theatricality to his domineering role. He identifies with the victim more than he could ever identify with some ephemeral higher being, the god of humiliation. Thus, while the humiliator and the humiliated seem to play opposite and even antagonistic roles, they establish a deep emotional bond based on a shared vision of transcendence and reinforced through the act of humiliation itself.

Homosexual relationship as I described it above is an instance of a sadomasochistic relationship, as described above. By going through the example with progressive stages we saw how, structurally, or psychologically, it stems from a heterosexual rivalry that flares up and leads to a fetish for humiliation, pure and simple. The bond that binds the sexual roles of the top and the bottom is that they both share the same pursuit of transcendence through the act of sexual humiliation. It is in this shared vision of ecstasy through humiliation, if anywhere, that lies the true binding eros of homosexuality.

Finally, it is important to understand that the genesis of homosexuality does not necessarily involve the temporal progression from the normie stage, through wife-swapping, to straight homosexuality. The three stages that have been described in the story outline a sort of phylogenetic tree of various sexualities, of how they connect. How an individual ends up in the homosexual stage can vary greatly: it can happen all in one’s head, in pre-puberty perhaps, due to a traumatic imposition of the rival in the form of childhood sexual molestation, etc.

Lesbianism

I used the examples of men, but what about lesbians? There is something to be said, perhaps, about the fact that the word homosexuality makes people’s minds jump to male homosexuality by default, while female homosexuality is given a separate term, lesbianism, and seems to be viewed as a different type of phenomenon. It must be said that many people find the eros of lesbianism less credible than that of male homosexuality.

Nevertheless, let’s talk about lesbianism. Let’s go through a thought experiment: repeat the whole example above, but reverse the roles, and consider how any biological differences between males and females might produce different reactions. I must admit, for the time being, that I have not dwelt on the lesbian version as much as on the male homosexual one, and that lesbian homosexuality is more distant from me as I’m not a woman.

But I believe that lesbianism is as closely tied in with sexual rivalry as male homosexuality ¬– if we go with the assumption that lesbianism is not a default instinctual state, there must be a strong force, an obsession, to swing a woman’s sexuality from its default objects to its default rivals. Girard also confirms that the role of the rival is the same among men and women (Girard does not develop the idea of homosexuality as humiliation – this is my hypothesis). But what happens once rivalry gets inflamed? Is lesbianism also a humiliation fetish? I think that, perhaps, it’s not as much of a humiliation fetish as male homosexuality, but that humiliation does play a role….

The rest of this essay can be read in my new book The Modern Malaise:

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… along with countless other insights on the ongoing culture war.

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