Counter-Currents
623 words 
Last Friday, Counter-Currents published a piece of mine entitled “A Puzzling Situation”. From the responses in the comments section, it appears to have puzzled a lot of readers. If you have read any of my previous work, you may have gathered the impression that there was something slightly “off” about this new essay. You may even have noticed that it started out in a fairly straightforward manner, but that the farther you read, the more that impression of strangeness grew. If so, congratulations, for this feeling that something was amiss (even if you cannot quite put your finger on it) is itself the sign you are beginning to understand. That oddness was not mere happenstance, but fully intended by the author.
Back when there were fewer schools in the West and students spent far less time in them, people were usually more skilled in the art of reading than they commonly are today. In part this is because those who did go to school made a serious study of English literature. One of the great masters of English literature was Jonathan Swift, best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels, which some of you may have read either in the original version or in an adaptation for children. Swift wrote many other things besides, and one of the most famous was a short essay entitled “A Modest Proposal”. This is a famous example of satire, a literary genre one of whose common (but not invariable) characteristics is that the author does not simply come out and say exactly what he means. He uses language in a non-literal way. The reader has to figure out the real meaning from various hints dropped by the author.
When Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” there was a terrible famine raging in his native Ireland, and many were suffering and dying. Swift’s modest proposal for the relief of this suffering was simple: the Irishmen affected by the famine should eat their own children. Children were abundant in Ireland, and their meat tender and nourishing, so consuming them would greatly reduce the number of deaths and diminish the devastation caused by the famine. Swift published this extraordinary piece openly for the entire world to read. There were probably readers who got extremely angry, concluding that the author was a monster in human form. Such readers had failed to grasp the author’s point. That is because “A Modest Proposal” was a satire, i.e., a sort of writing in which not everything is to be taken literally.
If my essay “A Puzzling Situation” struck the reader as offbeat and confusing, this is because it, too, is a satire and presupposes some familiarity with the genre. I did not come out and state my main point, but merely hinted at it—repeatedly and with some emphasis, as it seemed to me. Those of you fortunate enough to grasp my meaning on a first reading ought to have found “A Puzzling Situtation” funny, as the author certainly did when writing it. But to get to the humor, you have to solve the puzzle. After all, I warned you right in the title itself that what followed would be puzzling. Once you solve it, the humor is your reward.
More specifically, in certain pieces of writing such as this one, the important point is not so much what is said but what is left out. You must identify the crucial point left out in order to solve the puzzle and understand what the author is saying. In this case, the solution is an extremely common English word familiar to everyone who reads Counter-Currents and beginning with the letter “m.”
Now go back and read “A Puzzling Case” once more and see if you can catch my drift.
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12 comments
I’ll buy a vowel. Is there an “E” in it?
I believe the ‘m’ word may refer to betrothal.
He’d still be a villain. Well, not if she reciprocates his feelings. But you still can’t go directly to proposal without going through the necessary steps. Which requires villainy.
The satire is not lost on us – I don’t think there is really any young man who would suggest to the woman’s father that she should not attend college.
But many young men HAVE been completely neutered. They want to be good guys and respect women, not commit sexual harassment.
Spoiler alert:
They mutually want to touch but have no solution as all touching is inappropriate
M = masculinity/manliness on the part of the young man—look at the statue.
I also found the article very strange. Who would ask a gender professor for advice? And such a young, shy, conservative man would have a hard time in today’s world. He’d probably be experiencing something like the main character in Akex Kurtagić’s novel Angel.
Could the word be manhood or manliness?
You might be surprised. A lot of young guys (and even older ones) listen to feminist advice, believing that it’s what women want of them, and that complying will improve their popularity. That’s not how it works…
I also recall Neil Strauss – who absolutely should’ve known better – spending endless hours reading feminist and New Agey relationship stuff. That’s one of the things that bit him in the butt, though his bad decisions were the prime mover in all that drama.
We all made fun of feminism in high school. We’d quote the most ridiculous feminist catchphrases and laugh about it all the time. I always looked forward to the next day when we’d discover another funny feminist line. No one would think of going to feminists for relationship advice or how to pick up a girl, that would be absolutely bizarre, maybe someone would do it as trolling and write down the funniest lines. The girls laughed with us at this crap. Only one girl professed feminism, I felt sorry for her, so I talked to her, but I didn’t agree with her.
I remember when I was young and naive, I bought my first girlfriend flowers to say sorry for something. That’s just what you do, right? It was something minor, I think, but as a result she broke up with me right afterwards. Well, I learned a lesson. Now my wife complains that I never say I’m sorry. Maybe not, but she’s still here after 19 years. 😛
Your experience is utterly typical.
The first time around the solution was obvious, but it didn’t seem all that funny. After reading this update and re-reading your story, I had some good laughs at your cleverly poking fun at the prototypical Baby Boomer and his wHatEveR sHalL wE dO attitude surrounding his young friend’s quagmire.
A similar thing happened when I first read “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”, a novel about a heroic young soldier on a PR tour in early 2000s America—it seemed to ring so true in its opposition to our spectator sport culture of warfare that the label “satire” almost seemed inappropriate. I wonder if I would feel the same on a second reading.
This puzzling situation seems like a poor attempt at satire to me. It was indeed puzzling. I wondered if a paragraph was missing because I didn’t see what the purpose of the young man’s dilemma was. He just sounds like a paranoid incel. I guess that’s the point, but it didn’t come across. It’s no Modest Proposal.
I’ll tell young men who they should NOT emulate: michael knowles and charlie kirk, both of whom I cannot stand and find extremely loathsome. For some it’s the spoon tap on the wine glass or open mouth chewing. It’s those two for me. I’d try on different personalities as absurd splice-experiments like hairstyles or temp fashion trends: who knows? It might actually work for a while in this idiocracy of crazies than any traditional elder wisdom. If fubsy negresses are the new Victoria Secret models corroding the billboards, then just do the inverse using the seinfeld opposite episode logic: “If everything you’ve ever done is wrong then the opposite would have to be right,” like Jeffrey Wright’s character in American Fiction-the more of a stupid fuck gangsta act he put on, the more interest piqued in his book. Commence a test trial with A History of Violence’s Viggo Mortensen fused with Why Him’s? Laird Mayhew merged with DarkCena turned WWE heel. The results await…
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