Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Are we born without gender?

Rhuan was a nine-year-old Brazilian boy with the whole life ahead of him. His mother took him and left his dad when the boy was four. She entered a relationship with a woman, and they formed a lesbian couple. In 2019, the couple mutilated the boy’s body by cutting off his penis and sewing on homemade female parts because the boy, according to them, “wanted to be a girl”. The boy’s mother wasn’t satisfied, and they butchered his little body by attempting to gouge out his eyes and stabbing him multiple times. Until he no longer moved, no longer cried and screamed, no longer wondered why his mommy would do this, why the only person he had in the world would do this. The mother confessed that they did it because he reminded her of his father too much. His innocence, his childhood, his first love, his chance in life all taken away from him, chopped into pieces by the person who gave him life.

This heart-breaking story is an extreme case and no doubt both women are utter and complete monsters who deserve to rot in prison. It happened in a developing country so we can blame it on many factors other than ideologies. However, this horrible crime exposes what lack of education and information can sometimes lead to. It does lead to children being taught in school that it is possible for men to give birth in the name of education. Toddlers are put in front of performing drag queens in the name of entertainment. Kids who are confused about their gender are given “gender reassignment” treatment in the name of progress. A treatment which is often irreversible. The conversation about gender is silenced if it doesn’t affirm the view that men can become women and women can become men. I believe that by muting voices like mine, we are making a big mistake and doing an enormous harm to children, and we strip them off their childhood and take away their future. I will argue that we are not born without gender and that male and female is what mother nature expects of us and we should not disappoint her.

Do you remember when the world was dominated by two genders? There was male and there was female – man and woman, groom and the bride. There was mother and there was father. Things aren’t that simple anymore. Turns out, our gender, as some activists will have you believe, is assigned to us at birth and it’s up to us, later in life, to decide if we identify with the gender given to us or not. If we do, it makes us “cis gender”. If we don’t, we are trans-gender. The activists are convinced that the odds are fifty-fifty.

For as long as I can remember I’ve always been aware of men who thought they were women. I remember, as a kid, even believing they were born in the wrong bodies. Somehow it made sense. Perhaps this is what I heard on TV. We are talking about 20 – 25 years ago in white, Catholic Poland, as well. You’d never see a transsexual, as they were called back in the day, in the real life. They only appeared in American movies from time to time. And the only image I remember from those days is of them existing on the outskirts of society.

Fast forward to 2023 and the words transvestite and transsexual have been deleted from our language and are considered offensive. You’re not only rude if you use one of these words, but also if you “misgender” someone, “deadname” them or fail to acknowledge that men can become women and vice versa. In some cases, being guilty of any of the above has led to social media bans or even home visits by the police. Some trans people even claim that if you don’t refer to yourself as cis-gender, you’re a transphobe.

In 2021, Canadian father was jailed for failing to refer to his daughter by her preferred pronouns. His teenage daughter identified as a man and had her mother’s full support and encouragement. Heartbroken dad not only lost his family, but was ordered to use his child preferred pronouns. Think about it: the court attempted to force someone to speak what he didn’t believe to be true. It’s one thing to censor certain speech, it’s quite another to force speech on someone. When he refused, he was jailed. I’ve heard of many cases like this and it is always the father who fights for his child’s innocence while the mother with the support of the state is fully on board with the child’s transition.

I am sure the majority of trans-people just want to be left alone and live their lives in peace. It is, however, the activists (who aren’t necessarily trans themselves) who push for certain narratives. They’ve even managed to attach their movement to gay and lesbian activism, while claiming that switching genders and being attracted to the same sex doesn’t make anyone gay. It’s all very confusing, indeed.

I don’t want to talk about the many flaws and inconsistencies of the trans movement. I will, instead, focus on something I haven’t seen many people talk about. The idea, as promoted by activists, that we are all born without gender and only later establish our gender identity. The terms “cis-gender” invented for people who identify with their biological sex, and “gender assigned at birth” illustrate this idea perfectly. We’ve never heard these before. They just appeared when the trans movement gained some momentum and attached itself to the left ideology and feminism and now it is considered insensitive to not use these terms when talking about trans issues. It is now considered offensive if you as a straight person, for example, don’t refer to yourself as cis because that means you consider trans to be the abnormal rather than part of the human experience. If you don’t say that your child’s gender was assigned at birth, you’re saying we are born with it, thus rejecting trans ideology. You’re suggesting that being “normal” is the default setting for humans and they don’t like it.

We are – as much as many people hate to admit – just a species of animals. We just happen to be the only ones who are aware of our existence. We can think, predict, hope, dream and regret. We can override our instincts, drives and nature by simply saying no to them. We are much like other animals though. We seek pleasure and avoid pain. That’s how we survive. If an alien scientist came down to study the life on our planet, he would study humans the same way we study frogs or mice. He’d observe our behaviour, feeding habits and mating strategies. He’d make predictions and notice sex differences between males and females. He’d note how bizarre the male competition for females is and how sophisticated the competition between females is. He’d perhaps visit a nightclub and witness human males and human females trying to attract each other in strange but predictable ways. Men would do it by displaying their status or faking it and women by exposing their feminine bodies and hiding their imperfections. The alien scientist would conclude that humans are not much different from the rest of the species. He’d write his alien book arguing that humans have taken over the planet, shaped it to their advantage and even though they are on the weaker side, they’ve managed to make other animals fear them. They’re smart and clever, but they are still largely dependent on their innate instincts and drives for survival. They think they have free will, but their nature and survival instinct keep that free will in check at all times. They’ve recently started to rebel against their nature because they find it doesn’t fit their current lifestyle. 99.99% of them don’t understand their own biology, psychology and evolution and dare to question it with signs and hashtags. They don’t realise that their vary nature has been shaped for millions of years when their world was much different than what it became in the last hundred or so years. They feel burdened by their nature. They want to be free from it but can’t. Some even claim that the diet that has served them well for thousands of generations is, all of sudden, making them ill.

He would also learn about evolution. He would study and understand the process that has led thousands of animal species to where they are now, including humans. He would name the process, sexual selection.

Sexual selection is a simple concept, but one I was unaware of until I started reading about human nature and evolution. Natural selection and survival of the fittest is what we all know from school, but I don’t remember being taught about the sexual selection, which is the driving force of evolution. Perhaps because it wasn’t always the leading theory in evolution. Natural selection told us that animals evolve traits and characteristics which help them adapt to their environment and survive in it. Traits that help them catch prey and avoid being eaten. Those who were best adapted were also popular with the opposite sex and passed on these survival traits to the next generation.

The theory of sexual selection tells us that, while strength, speed or camouflage are good for survival, animals evolve them to attract mates, not solely to live another day. Furthermore, animals evolve many traits and characteristics which have nothing to do with survival and sometimes even put animals at a disadvantage. The peacock’s tail is the most brought up example in the literature. Peacocks grow big and colourful tails because peahens find them attractive. They signal good health and good genes. A big tail is a luxury and it tells the female that this peacock “can afford” to have such an amazing tail because he is healthy, free of parasites and has managed to avoid being eaten so far. It’s like a man driving an expensive car. He is showing his abundance of resources and he increases his status relative to other men. Many women are drawn to a resourceful man because of his ability to provide for their children. Peahens are drawn to an impressive tail of a peacock because they want their sons to be popular with the ladies too. What she will pass on to her daughters is the preference for a big tail. This then keeps the evolution and growth of the peacock’s tail over generations, and it is influenced by the female preference. Males across species spend every waking hour showing off to females and fighting off rivals. This is why males grow big and strong – not to fight off a predator  – but to compete for sexual access to females with other males.

Humans are no different. Men compete with other men for the attention of women. Women compete in their own ways for the attention of high-quality men. Men compete by showing off their resources or lying about them, while women compete by enhancing their looks, exposing parts of the body which signal youthfulness, fertility and health. There are many other ways we try to attract members of the opposite sex and ways in which we compete for them, but I won’t get into them.

Just as other animals, we are born with traits and characteristics passed on to us for countless generations and our job is to use them to attract a partner. It is my personal belief that with billions of people on the planet, our evolution will now significantly slow down because everyone is having children, not just the “fittest” members of both sexes. On the ruthless mating market in the animal kingdom, if you don’t poses superior genes, you’re out of the market and your genes die with you. It is different with humans because all genes are being passed on, not just those that would have been sexually selected in the past.

Sexual selection is still taking place and men and women are enslaved by it when choosing their partner, but it is much more complex than in the savannah. Women still pick men who meet their standards and it’s usually a man who is taller than them (although they often prefer a man taller than other men), fit and has a good job. They prefer a man who is funny and confident and dominant. These are some of the traits our ancestral mothers have always found attractive in men, and these are the traits that have been passed on to their sons and the preference for these traits to their daughters. As I said above, as our population grew larger and larger, women couldn’t marry the best and genetically gifted men but the best out of, let’s say, their social circles. Of course, historically speaking, women couldn’t always marry men they wanted, but they would still pass on their preferences to their daughters. On the other hand, for most of the human existence females had children with top quality males, meaning most males never passed on their inferior genes. I can only speculate that this didn’t change much after the invention of agriculture, when the richest men were the ones who had the most kids and most men, especially young men, died on the field of battle or simply didn’t have anything to offer to a woman compared to a king or a landowner.

Since all our traits, behaviours and characteristics exist to help us on the mating market, it makes no sense that nature would allow men to become women. Nature needs us to be men and women. If it didn’t, it would make it possible to become one or the other. It needs us in our roles – masculine and feminine. It’s gives women mating preferences and it equips men with traits based on those preferences. It even makes our preferences compliment each other. Men are attracted to younger women and women are attracted to older men. Women like taller men. Men like shorter women. Women want someone funny. Men want someone who laughs at their jokes. Nature has made it simple for us to meet a partner and yet it is so difficult and complicated at the same time.

The bottom line is this. We are not born without gender. If someone struggles to accept their identity, it is clearly a mental health issue and should be treated as such. Now, I’m not saying adults shouldn’t be allowed to do what they want with their bodies, but we should at least be able to discuss this subject freely without the fear of cancellation and censorship. The ability to have this conversation would allow parents of “trans kids” to make better choices for their children. By hearing my side of the argument, we can allow these children to develop properly and make their own choices when they are of age to fully understand their consequences. By making people understand that it is impossible to become the opposite sex, they might think twice before putting kids through the irreversible changes and surgeries before they can fully consent to them. By making them understand that you cannot become a boy or a girl, that gender is not assigned at birth but something that is determined at conception, we can save many kids from their parents’ ignorance and ideology poised minds.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Should straight men have to date trans-women

Walking home with my two-year-old son earlier, I stumbled upon this billboard on one of the bus stops. As someone who is allergic to wokeness, I couldn’t help myself but recall the good old days when this garbage only appeared in Marvel movies and on Netflix. It is now everywhere, apparently, including bus stops. You can’t even commute without being reminded about the curse of being a straight white man.

Hinge, the dating site, as it seems, has decided to invade my local town centre with their attempt of raising awareness to the issues trans-women face in the online dating world. Oh the discrimination! Oh the injustice!

After feeding the toddler and putting him for a nap, I googled it to see what it was all about. Mainly because the words that stood out to me before the billboard disappeared and was replaced with an ad of McDonald’s latest vegan burger (another thing I wouldn’t be getting my hands on, thanks very much), were “If you match with someone who identifies as straight and is hesitant or scared […]”. IDENTIFIES? It sounds like whoever wrote this, and as it turns out it was a trans-woman, tries to imply that someone’s sexual orientation is not really set in stone and can be bent and changed as if they weren’t born with it. It sounds a lot like this person thinks being straight is a choice and it is a discriminatory one, too. None of them ever say that being gay is a choice, do they? Somehow we have arrived in a world where it is believed that being straight is bad. Even though we have arrived here precisely because of straight people. LGBTQXYZ+ 0, nature 1.

My Google search landed me in Hinge’s help centre, where I found the entire post. The author says that, if you’re a trans-woman and you match with a straight guy who might be scared or hesitant, you have to remain strategic. STRATEGIC? What does that even mean? Do you mean hiding your cock? Just folding it and gradually sneaking it out hoping he wouldn’t make a big deal out of it? What is the strategy here? You can play hard to get for a while, but eventually, guys get tired of endless hand jobs, especially if the grip is a little too strong and forearms too vascular. Eventually, we want to get to the main meal and we sure as hell hope it’s not a sausage.

The post goes on to say that “as a trans-woman”, you don’t owe anybody an explanation of your gender, sexuality and body. After a few more self-righteous sentences, this person – to emphasise their point – ends on the word “period”, which is another thing they don’t get.

Don’t get me wrong, if you like to put on women’s clothes and pretend you’re a lady, go for it. If you go as far as changing your pronouns and your name and the way you present yourself, more power to you. But don’t expect others to change the way they live, the way they view relationships to make you feel comfortable. You may feel strongly about your decision to transition, but don’t think it doesn’t come without consequences. One of these consequences is that your love life will never be normal. If you’re a trans-woman and you’re attracted to straight, masculine men, chances are, you will not find happiness and you better off getting a cat. The closest thing to a pussy you’ll ever have.

I’m sorry if you’re offended, but I’m offended too. I’m offended on the behalf of men who use dating sites and discover that it is a total minefield out there. When they’re not getting rejected, they get tricked by OnlyFans girls trying to get subscribers or other attention whores fishing for Instagram followers. Now they have to deal with trans people and be nice about it. It seems like nobody stops to consider how men feel about this situation. It’s all about you, isn’t it? The world must revolve around you. It must accept you and your new identity. Men must date you or they are bigots. I’d rather be a bigot than compare cocks with my girlfriend, to be honest.

We need to consider men. A man, often referred to as a partner or the other half, deserves to know what he is getting himself into. Straight men don’t want to date trans people. They might match with you if you hide your Adam’s apple, but as soon as you reveal the truth or they realise it, they will want nothing to do with you. Whether it’s your deep voice, firm handshake or the bulge in your crotch when you’re happy to see him that gives you away, it doesn’t matter. He will run for the hills. You may have all the surgeries done and everything, but no matter how hot of a costume you’ve put on, no straight man will want a relationship with you. It’s kind of like seeing that vegan burger and thinking it looks nice and really convincing, but then realising it’s not a real burger and it will never be the same as the real burger. A real burger is less processed. A vegan burger has to be created because it doesn’t exist in nature. It’s fake and not good for you. Am I still talking about burgers?

If you don’t want to be “constantly coming out” to every potential romantic partner, you have to take a long and hard look at your dating approach. You have to realise that it IS a big deal. I will say it again – looking like a woman is not enough. Nobody gets into a relationship with someone just because they LOOK like the gender they are attracted to. Attraction has so many layers and goes way deeper and way beyond your mascara. Attraction is biological. We are attracted to the opposite sex for the purpose of having children. I know, I know – it’s controversial to say that people mate in order to have kids, but it’s true. We can CHOOSE not to have kids but the mechanism and instincts that motivate us to pursue a mate and sex are still there whether you like it or not. Nature was even so clever (knowing how lazy we are) that she/her even invented orgasm to convince us to have sex with a desirable partner. Of course, we have now outsmarted Mother Nature herself by inventing all kinds of anticonception so we can keep having sex without consequences.

In Evolutionary Psychology this is known as proximate and ultimate explanations. When a man is attracted to a woman, the proximate explanation is that he finds her feminine traits attractive. She has desirable characteristics such as attractive waist to hip ratio, curves in the right places and beautiful, symmetrical and feminine face. When asked about it, he says she’s just hot. The ultimate explanation explains why he finds these characteristics “hot” and it is to do with health, youthfulness and fertility. An attractive adult female body will show signs of good fitness, youthfulness and fertility and these will be enhanced by makeup and clothing by many women. Ultimate explanation, then, tells us that by finding these traits desirable, the man is selecting for a partner to have healthy children with. These are not conscious choices and happen behind the scenes of man’s consciousness. The concept of proximate and ultimate explanation is fascinating because we can investigate any human behaviour using this method.

Using this method, we can assume that sexual attraction is guided by an ancient process that is invisible to us. We get into relationships without consciously thinking about having kids (and like I said earlier, we can override this “need” as many people do), just like we don’t consciously think about providing our body with energy and nutrients when we get hungry. If you’re still with me on this, a trans-woman can change her entire body to appear more feminine, but in the eyes of a straight man, she will always have something missing and will be undesirable. The most she will ever be is “looking very convincing” or “looking good for someone who was born male”. His eyes might like what they’re seeing but as soon as the image is interpreted by the brain, it rejects it because the brain operates in the ultimate explanation which is – be attracted to the opposite sex. Eyes might be attracted to looks but the real attraction happens in the brain. Trans activists hate to be reduced to their genitals, but even though we can’t see what’s between your legs, straight men are attracted (with their eyes) to someone who appears to be a woman BECAUSE she likely has the correct parts and is able to bear children. In other words, men are attracted to feminine traits because they tell them that the person they like is a woman. To make it even simpler – men are attracted to women because they are women. We can say that a straight man is attracted to outside features because they advertise the sex of the other person. If the man is mistaken, he is quickly repulsed by the same trait he just found desirable.

When my wife and I were in early stages of our relationship, she received a Snapchat from a guy who she had talked to around the time we first started seeing each other. We decided to send this guy a snap of my ass pretending it was hers. The guy got aroused and excited. Does that mean he was gay? Absolutely not… I mean, perhaps. What it means is that he found it attractive because he thought it belonged to a female… you know… with a vagina.

This reminds me of something me and my friends laugh about to this day, and it may help illustrate how we can’t just rely on our eyes for attraction.

We were taking a break from playing football all morning. We were about sixteen years old and very interested in the opposite sex. One of my friends wore glasses. I guess he was pretty blind without them. A small group approached the football ground on the other end. His glasses were off. As the group appeared in the distance, he straightened his back and let out a sound of excitement. To get a better look, he put his glasses on and immediately let out a sigh of disappointment. He discovered what we all knew – it was a group of boys. It all happened so quickly but we laugh about it to this day. It’s been twenty years.

It shows that we may be deceived by our eyes. It also shows that, in the context of trans-women, our eyes can be deceived, but upon finding out the truth or taking a closer look, our brain takes over and tells us that this person should not be pursued. The brain acts like my friend’s glasses and tells us that even though the person might appear feminine, they are not a woman.

The author of the Hinge post argues that trans people shouldn’t have to explain themselves to straight people. That they should just enter the dating market and be accepted as they are and that their identity is not a big deal. I mean, you literally used to be a man. You didn’t just change your opinion on the movie Avatar, you chopped off your dick. It’s a pretty big deal. You’d want to know if someone you’re dating used to be married or in prison, right? It’s a big deal. Trust me, I’m a man – your target audience. You try to normalise the idea of trans people not having to explain who they are and how they’ve become who they are. I want to normalise the idea, very controversial, I know, that straight men shouldn’t have to explain why they don’t want to date trans women. I’ve just used two thousand words which could just be narrowed down to – no, straight men don’t have to date trans women and they don’t owe you an explanation.

Think about it.

Think about why you’re hiding the truth from somebody in the first place and ask yourself if it’s even worth getting romantically involved with a person who’d end it if they knew the truth. Your personality might be truly amazing – it’s never going to be enough to override that you are not a real woman. I shouldn’t have to explain it. Without being horrible, straight men feel repulsed and embarrassed at the very idea of performing any sexual act with another man. Yes, it includes trans-women. I’d say these negative emotions and physical disgust act as a defence mechanism against making bad sexual choices that will never lead to procreation. And before you say anything – it’s not the same as putting on a condom. Our brain hasn’t caught up to the invention of condoms so the only information it’s processing in it’s ancient, ancestral software is – “about to put penis in female”.

Sex and food are so powerful that we have created whole subcultures around them. We celebrate sex and worship orgasm by inventing different position to do it in, creating porn and living out our kinks and fantasies. What simply is a matter of survival, we have made into a buffet of flavours and pleasures. Sex and food are both about survival – survival of the genes and of the individual. You can’t feed someone with a plastic apple even if it looks a lot like a real apple. Similarly, you can’t make a man feel attracted to or even aroused by another man even if he looks a lot like a woman. It’s nature’s way.

Normalise men dating women and not having to apologise for it.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Show me the evidence!

Have you ever expressed an opinion or had an argument with someone on social media? Have you ever dared to use your knowledge to debunk somebody’s fragile worldview? I certainly have. Eventually, there comes a point in any of these online discussions when the person on the other side demands proof of your claims.

If you base your views in reality, it’s really hard to argue online. I advise against it all together, but sometimes even I can’t help myself when someone makes outrageous claims. It’s difficult because you start to notice that people are fucking stupid. The source of their stupidity is often ignorance, but still they defend their uneducated opinions like their life depends on it. It often does, metaphorically speaking. People often get attached to their opinions and views so much that they become WHO they are and not just what they believe. If you question their beliefs, you question their egos. That’s why they are almost never willing to change their mind even when presented with clear evidence that they’re wrong. Losing an argument, letting go of an opinion is like losing some part of themselves. That’s why they show signs of discomfort and often get aggressive when their beliefs are doubted by someone. It’s their ego that’s being dismantled not their opinion. We’re all guilty of it, including me. The smartest people in this world hold some kind of beliefs they are not ready to let go of simply because of their attachment to them and because they allowed these beliefs to define who they are. I’ve seen some otherwise intelligent people get swallowed and consumed by one ideology or the other. Many of them are aware of the hypnotizing power of ideologies and “the madness of crowds”, but even they can’t resist this downward pull from the brain hungry zombies. This happens on both left and right and the person can only see their own gullibility and naiveness in hindsight when one day they look back with embarrassment at how easily they were seduced by the slogans.

More often than not, people subscribe to certain beliefs simply because they are held hostage by their ideology. If you’re on the Left, you very likely are a feminist who believes in climate change, that there are more than two genders, that capitalism is evil, and abortion is a human right. If you’re on the Right, you oppose all of these ideas, often relying on religion as your moral compass. You believe in free speech and the right to own a gun, while the left challenges those rights. Both sides clash on the field of battle – Twitter – and are ready to defend their beliefs, which aren’t really their beliefs at all. They are beliefs that are part of the package of the group they have signed up to. Before they know it, they protect ideas they know very little about but feel so deeply connected to that they feel they must defend the honour of their group. They become the righteous warriors who slay dragons and fight evil forces of this world. They are determined to crash the enemy and are fuelled by the support, admiration, likes and retweets from their peers.

I was like this at one point. I remember when I joined a Twitter conversation about abortion. My mostly Right-Wing views (to arms of which I was pushed by the teachings of modern feminism) put me on the autopilot and I assumed the attacking position seeing the other side as my sworn enemies. The enemies in this case were pro-choice activists. At that point I saw the subject of abortion with a black and white filter. I was arguing like I knew the subject deeply even though I had never thought about it much or read anything about it. In other words, before “joining” the Right, I wasn’t that bothered about abortion. When I saw the tweets from pro-choice activists, I had to show them how wrong they were. I had to make sure they knew abortion was never alright. My keyboard was on fire, notifications about how much outrage I caused fed my self-righteous thirst for victory and I didn’t care how many snowflakes I triggered. Every person who disagreed with me, I managed to convince myself, proved me right. I was fighting for the right cause. I was the good guy.

Today, there is more grey area in my views on abortion. In my adopted views there was no room for exceptions. Later, I realised what my true beliefs were, and they’ve remained so to this day. I realise now that I don’t really care about it that much. In my opinion, pro choice people aren’t defending women’s reproductive rights but their rights to not take responsibility for their actions. Pro life activists aren’t fighting for unborn children but for the power of their ideology over others. Understand that I am talking about activists. Not everyone who has an opinion on the matter is an activist. I still think abortion is wrong in most cases, and if people aren’t willing to take responsibility for the consequences of sex, they should either use various forms of anticonception and accept the consequences of them or not have sex at all. I mean, the pill might fuck up your hormones, but at least you’re not killing babies, right? I wish both sides of the debate would be honest in their motivations and admit what they really care about – power and control on the right and being irresponsible and unaccountable on the left.

To sum this section up, if you ever find yourself feeling passionate about a belief system, ask yourself if you truly believe it or if it’s something that’s been forced upon you by your group. You don’t want anyone to be able to predict any of your views based on one or two of your opinions. For example, I am an atheist. Many atheists, especially those in public eye, are hard leftists. They are pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-COVID mandates during the pandemic and many more. If you predicted that I too held these views simply because I don’t believe in God, you’d be wrong. It shows that atheism hasn’t influenced my other views and values. Similarly, if you’re a feminist, you really don’t want me to accurately predict your stance on climate change, gun control and Trump – as these are all completely unrelated to feminism. If your views on the above match those of other feminists then congratulations – your mind has been corrupted by ideology.

Let’s talk about evidence now. As I’ve briefly described above, people have different reasons for believing what they believe and defending those beliefs. As mentioned at the beginning, some people will demand proof of your claims if what you’ve said to them shakes their worldview. They want to see the science. If you can’t produce it, they claim victory even if their own views are formed in their gut and not in a lab. The problem with this type of people is that they aren’t willing to do any heavy lifting (or reading in this case). They want you to give them a quick graph or a short article that proves you right. They don’t realise that the answers lie in thousands of book pages one’s had to go through to come to the conclusions one has come to. There is no single graph or a slide show that can spoon feed these people with information. These people don’t think, they react. Because they themselves often pull their views out of their ass, they think you do too, so you won’t be able to produce any evidence to prove what you’re saying is backed by science.

Let’s say I believed there was a high probability of the existence of intelligent life out there in the Universe. Someone – a deeply religious person perhaps, who believes God created life exclusively on Earth and no more than six thousand years ago, and the rest of the Universe is only for us to ponder and admire – would stand there and say, “Oh yeah, Mulder? Prove it!”. There is of course no way to prove it. But with basic understanding of what conditions need to be met for a planet to host alien life, and knowledge of evolution are, in my opinion, enough to look into the night sky and make an assumption. My “evidence” in this case would consist of at least one book on evolution and one on astronomy. It’s more than you can put in a tweet, and more than most people can handle.

In other words, there is no single proof for anything. Can I prove that God doesn’t exist? No, but I can tell you all about the human nature, our superstitious tendencies and thousands of gods that have been worshipped and forgotten throughout history, to show you that all gods are most likely invention of man to explain the unknown and cope with mortality. It doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but it shows that he probably doesn’t. I used to mock religious people, but as I got older, I’ve come to understand the value of religion and that, as long as it stays out of my bedroom or doesn’t fly planes into sky scrapers, it’s mostly harmless and it actually makes people happy. I used to attend a church service every Sunday for six months only to expose these people to the truth, but what I saw was probably the happiest bunch I have ever seen.

People will want proof, but they will not change their mind, because their belief system wasn’t built with evidence. It was handed to them by the group. The only proof they ever needed was how it made them feel. Unfortunately, you can’t convince feelings with reason. Feelings can often override reason, though. The bottom line is this – don’t argue online, form your own opinions, question the beliefs of your ingroup and educate yourself of what matters to you. Read books, listen to podcasts and live a life of meaning. Social media algorithms are out there to trigger you. That’s how they steal your time and attention. Don’t let them. You’re not changing anyone’s mind and you’re not making your life better. I was once arguing with someone on Instagram, eventually I clicked on their profile. It turned out to be a 17-year-old girl. I was twice her age. Twice her experiences and accumulated knowledge. There was no way I was opening her mind. You never know who the other person is, but it’s pretty dumb to argue with kids online. You’re on different levels and as an adult, you have the responsibility to be wiser and to set an example. We often forget that the avatar we see is another human being and allow ourselves to get carried away. We make assumptions about the person’s character and their morality. Social media brings the worst out of us and these online debates expose that. Don’t get triggered. Move on. You’ll be happier for it.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Why women can’t get away with sleeping around

Social Media algorithms are interesting. After seeing a handful of “red pill” clips and videos on both You Tube and Instagram, this content is almost all they recommend to me. The videos range from podcast episodes to street interviews, and they typically revolve around male-female dynamics and dating. The topic that is discussed the most often is whether a high number of sexual partners is a red flag.

The conversation usually gets heated when it is considered a red flag in women but not in men. It is almost impossible to have a civilised conversation in the comment sections of these videos. So, I have decided to explore this double standard myself. I will give you an answer to why women can’t get away with promiscuity in today’s society and why it’s not the same for men. I will also give you my opinion on the whole thing and whether there is a way we can all get along.

To explain the double standard, I will rely on psychology, dating preferences, our evolved nature and behaviour and social norms and pressures. I will use a couple of examples to argue my points. They will range from scientific studies, celebrity dating to my personal experience and observations over the years I spent on an adult dating site where people meet for sex. It’s a long read, but I feel like it’s needed in order to explore the subject fully.

The modern world is full of double standards. Some of them hurt men and some of them hurt women. These double standards punish one gender for certain behaviours while rewarding or remaining indifferent towards the other. Men can’t still live at home after a certain age without being judged and women, as it turns out, can’t sleep around without consequences. Some might say it shouldn’t be that way, but we don’t live in a world of should and shouldn’t. We live in an unfair world of what is and isn’t.

A man wants to be her woman’s first and a woman wants to be her man’s last

This saying attempts to romanticise a woman’s approach to a long-term relationship (LTR) and to demonise men’s search for innocence and purity. It also highlights how both sexes feel about past sexual partners. Men, on average, prefer to settle down with a woman who doesn’t have a reputation of a “hoe” and women, on average again, are not that bothered about the man’s past. The double standard exists partly because women don’t care enough to pressure men to be more selective and keep it in their pants. While women as a whole and as individuals may not necessarily prefer men who have had many sexual partners, they definitely don’t discriminate against them as much as men do against women with similar experiences.

The Dicaprio Paradox

This difference becomes even more pronounced when the man is a celebrity and known for his promiscuity. Women still pursue this man hoping he will see their value and change his ways and pops the question. Leonardo DiCaprio is a perfect example. Everyone knows he likes to date models in their early 20s. His relationships don’t last very long, and he has had many girlfriends or casual partners since his rise to fame. His reputation does not stop models and young women from getting into relationships with him. Every new girlfriend surely must know she is not becoming Mrs. DiCaprio, so why even bother? The answer partially lies in what I said earlier – every woman thinks she is special and can change any man.

The other side of the coin is the fact that women want men other women want. It is an undeniable fact and one that women will not admit to, and many are probably not aware of. This is well observed, and it doesn’t take a Hollywood celebrity to witness it as it happens in the realm of mortals too. On average, women aren’t concerned about man’s promiscuity because it signals that many women are attracted to him and that he can provide for and satisfy them in more ways than one. Having been with multiple women also signals confidence which means competence, both of which are traits women find attractive.

It is different for men, who know how difficult it is to get in a woman’s pants, so they don’t respect a woman who has made it  easy for multiple men. A man who surrounds himself with attractive women, even if they are just friends, is also more interesting to women than a man with no female friends. A woman with many male friends is less attractive to men. This is possibly because men are aware of each other’s intentions and don’t want to get involved with a woman who keeps around guys who are sexually interested in her. Yes – men are jealous, territorial and competitive just like males of other mammals. Not much can be done by complaining about it.

The difference between male and female dating preferences and promiscuity comes out perfectly when men and women are rich and famous. Above, we focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s preference for short term flings with young and attractive women who know they will be disposed of before they expire on their next birthday. Ricky Gervais even joked that by the time a 4-hour movie ends, DiCaprio’s date will be too old for him.

Similar thing happens with famous musicians or athletes. It’s well known they have attractive women lining up to sleep with them. From rockstars to rappers and NBA players, young women are desperate to use their looks as bait to lure these high performers into bed. They know that nothing will become of it, so they do it for attention, status, and let’s not forget some do it in hopes of getting pregnant or to spread false accusations of assault hoping for a quick payday – all of which are female strategies to gain status and access to men’s resources. Sometimes, when they don’t get what they want from a celebrity (relationship or commitment), they may accuse him of sexual assault as a form of revenge. Revenge for being rejected. There are of course genuine accusations, but we’d have to live in a fairy land to think that false accusations are not the norm. There are genuine victims of influential men, but this is not the focus of this discussion.

Nothing comes even close to it when roles are reversed. Female celebrities don’t have men lined up to sleep with them. They don’t use their power, fame and influence to pick average guys from their Instagram followers to have sex with them. Even the most outrageous, rude and dirty minded female artists you can think of do not have a harem of men at their disposal. We can sit here all day and argue whether it is because of social pressures, men being intimidated by female celebrities or because fucking a new fan every week is not what most famous women want to do. My guess is that Rihanna doesn’t want to go on a date with a guy just because he is twenty-five and has a big dick. You’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong.

Strategies to compete for quality mates

We could speculate that the double standard in question would largely disappear if women (who pull the strings on the mating market) put more value on men’s selectiveness and sexual purity. Men’s dating strategy would change to reflect female preferences and they’d stop searching for meaningless one-night stands and they would focus on offering women what they want. There is only one question: Do women really want every player and bad boy to disappear and be replaced by Mr. Nice Guy?

Chad and Tyrone – the 10% of men who sleep with 80% of women

The key that opens many locks is a master key; the lock that can be opened by many keys is broken

When women hear it, they usually get offended, but is there some wisdom in this phrase?

Women are the gatekeepers to sex, meaning they control access to sex. Without their consent, men aren’t getting any. It is also true that pretty much any woman could have sex with a stranger or a friend within the next 30 minutes if she wanted to. All she has to do is respond to a couple of DMs on Instagram or Tinder.

It’s not the same for men, who are the gatekeepers to commitment and marriage. It is men who have to choose to get married. Men are the prize in a relationship. Sex is what men want, therefore women control access to it, it is their resource as we established earlier. They use it to get what they want from any man. I’m not saying they’re exchanging sex for favours. They’re exchanging the possibility of sex by flirting with a man to get what they want. Men don’t need much to think a woman might want to sleep with them. That’s why it’s easy for women to manipulate men. This form of manipulation can happen in the workplace, nightclub or even a shop and interactions don’t have to last longer than a few seconds. I hate to break it to women, but if you so much as flick your hair or touch a man’s shoulder while asking him if you could get ahead of him in a queue, he will think you want him, and he will do anything for you. What is even more curious about it is that by expressing your interest in him, he automatically finds you more attractive. Women are aware of the power of their body language and use it all the time, sometimes subconsciously and whether they are single or not.

Commitment is what women want, therefore it’s what men bargain with. They can’t use it as a weapon as cleverly as women use sex, but, if they are high-value men, they can withhold commitment and only give it to special women, making all potential partners work extra hard for their attention. Consider a serial womaniser Leonardo DiCaprio again. He uses the possibility of commitment to lure attractive young women into his wealthy kingdom. His commitment is what young women compete for, so they use flirting, body language and sex to win the competition. Even if they want to be with him for the lifestyle he provides, this lifestyle and wealth are worthless without his commitment, so it’s the commitment that is more valuable than money and fame.

90% of single men would have to try very hard to have sex with a newly met woman in the next month, let alone in the next half an hour. 10%, so called Chads and Tyrones of the world (tall, dark and handsome), will have sex more often but they still have to work harder than most, if not all, average looking women. One study showed that when a man approached random women on the street and asked them if they would have sex with him, 0% said yes. When the same experiment was performed on random men, this time with a woman asking the question, a significant percentage of these guys were ready to go. The remaining few who refused either apologised to her or asked for a rain check. It’s interesting that many men felt the need to apologise for rejecting the woman or felt guilty about refusing her offer.

This research suggests that, given the chance, men are naturally more willing to sleep with a stranger than women are. What it also tells us is that there probably isn’t that many women who sleep around, but those that do don’t have to work for it. The number of men who sleep around is also very low, but they still have to work for it by showing confidence, charisma, sense of humour and being able to “woo” multiple women – a hard task, indeed. Out of the men who don’t sleep around, majority of them probably would if given options but they can’t compete with the 10% of Chads and Tyrones who are wanted and desired by 90% of women.

In other words, men have to be funny, confident, charming, well dressed, tall and handsome to have sex. All women have to do is ask.

The adult dating site – who benefits from women’s promiscuity?

The short answer is men. Given a choice, men prefer easy access to low-cost sex with a variety of partners. If we go back to the mating strategy study on college campuses we can see it in broad daylight. Where women had to compete for a small number of quality men, they were willing to have more casual sex because men, on average, are more likely to enjoy casual sex. It was, therefore, men who benefited from this arrangement. Women had to, whether willingly or subconsciously, sacrifice their values or beliefs about sex if they wanted to secure a quality partner. We can conclude, then, that it is men who benefit from female promiscuity.

A common argument to this that women can enjoy sex as much as men do. Yes, they can, but do they enjoy it with strangers as much as men do? They can, if they are prepared to forget about their standards and sleep with anybody and everybody. But are they? The reason men get away with being sluts is that opportunities for sex don’t just come knocking on their door. Even if a man slept with every woman who was interested in sleeping with him, it would still add up to just a handful of women over a long period of time. It is a given that a man would take almost every chance to have sex, but like I said, he’ll be lucky to find more than one woman a month. What if a woman said she was willing to fuck any guy who asks for it? She’d have hundreds of DMs on her Instagram including from guys who live a hundred miles away. Fucking everything that moves does not mean the same for men and for women.

I’ve spent a number of years on an adult dating site. It’s not something to brag about, but my experience definitely illustrates the fact that, on average, men will enjoy sex with complete strangers more than women – even on a dating site where casual sex is the goal of everyone on it. The site also proves that even if a man is willing to have sex with any woman, he will still struggle to get any meets.

Sites like this always suffer from a surplus of men, therefore it is women who set the rules of dating. They get to be pickier and, just like in the real world, 80% of men struggle to get any responses to their messages while 80% of women sleep with 20% of men who are tall, gym fit and have big dicks. Women on this particular site get to be very demanding because they know they can have any guy, so they only want the best of the best. The paradox is that, because of the often extremely low standards of men, even the obese and unattractive women think they get to have demands and deserve Chad or Tyrone. They get hundreds of messages which boost their egos and their self-perception. Now, they think they are in high demand and more attractive than they really are, when, in reality, men just send hundreds of messages a day, hoping for a single reply. They will swallow their pride later.  I’ve been there myself and from talking to women, I know this to be the experience of most men.

Women on the site write extensively about themselves, what they look for in their casual partner and they require that he writes equally as much about himself in his bio. This happens because women don’t understand how men think, and men just want to keep their profiles short and to the point. Men, of course, don’t understand women, that’s why they fail to give them what they want, which in this case is a profile that gives women all the details they need to decide if they want to sleep with them. I’ve seen women who don’t want to hear from men who are below 6ft, 8inches, who aren’t professionals, don’t live alone, don’t drive, don’t have any previous meet verifications from other members. The list of preferences and requirements goes on. Many women on the site don’t even want to meet a man who is a “Tory”.

Men, on the other hand, don’t care what job she does or if she drives. Men don’t care if her profile is blank and, quite frankly, too many verifications are a turn off. This reflects another study on casual and long-term dating, which tells us that women’s preferences and standards remain largely the same when looking for a casual partner as when looking for a long-term relationship. The same study shows us that men lower their standards significantly when looking for casual sex. For women to have sex like men they would have to behave like men, have low standards like men and sleep with whoever is on offer. To put it simply, if men received a hundred sex offers a week, they’d have sex every day. Women do receive hundreds of offers a week and they reject the majority of them.  The picture that’s beginning to paint is that even when all boundaries and judgements are removed, women don’t want to have casual sex the same as men. Instead, they choose to fuck only the type of men they wouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce to their friends and family.

Women are more likely to meet exclusively men of the same age or older while men are more likely to be more flexible while having preference for women in early 20s. Men are more likely to send dick pics even though the majority of women find them repulsive. This happens because men forget that women don’t think like them. Men like to receive nudes and pussy pics because they turn them on, especially if they’ve been taken for them. Women almost never ask for dick pics even if a big dick is their preference. They always want to see a face before any interaction. Women who are obese are more likely to shame men for their preferences by referring to slim and in shape women as bags of bones while men understand (because of being rejected 100s of times) that if they’re fat, they’re not attractive to most women. Most women I’ve seen on the site fantasise about some version of a powerful, mysterious or strong man taking control of them. It goes without saying that this type of man has to have sexual experience, so even though women complain about the double standard, they still prefer a man who knows what he is doing while men don’t really care that much.

Women on the site almost always require a coffee or a drink first to see if things can be taken further, and they almost exclusively look for one friend with benefits as opposed to multiple one offs. Women are also more likely to require men to put more effort into their first messages instead of just saying “hi”. This entitlement to be “woo-ed” in a single message comes from another gender misunderstanding. For men, most of their messages go unread because women are flooded with hundreds of messages a day. Sure, women are bored of seeing the same old “hi, how are you?”, but they fail to understand that whether men put effort in their messages or not, most of the time they get unread or rejected. Men have to spend a lot more time and effort to meet somebody, so sending a quick message without personalising it too much is the best, time-efficient way of achieving that goal. It does create a conflict between the sexes because nobody gets what they want. Women want a personalised message from every man, not realising that men’s experience and high rejection rate discourage treating women as individuals. On a sex site, men don’t care what women write about themselves as long as they have some pictures. Sometimes even they aren’t needed for a man to jump into Uber if it guarantees sex. Reading through detailed paragraphs only to personalise a message is a waste of time for men. More and more women hide special words, such as “princess”, “lollipop” or “cupcake” in their profiles requiring men to use them in the titles of their messages as proof they’ve read their profile. So a man is supposed to read through paragraphs of her preferences and likes, then compose an original message that’s longer than a couple of lines, fun, but not creepy and then get rejected anyway. Much better to just say “hi” to ten different profiles and hope for the best. This female entitlement to being treated special creates male laziness which in turn creates bitterness on both sides. Or perhaps it is the male laziness that creates female entitlement which then creates bitterness?   

As you can see, even on a sex site, where women are sexually liberated, and promiscuity is celebrated they still operate in their default settings and search for quality over quantity.  Men, on the other hand, do exactly what you’d expect of them. They pretend they too want a friend with benefits while actively pursuing multiple women hoping to have as many one offs as possible.  Women’s likes and dislikes are set in stone, while men’s are more flexible depending on who they’re talking to. That’s why women’s profiles are filled with preferences that exclude the majority of men and men’s profiles tend to be short and inviting so they don’t miss out on any woman who might be interested in them.

This mating behaviour of both genders, on a site where sex is the goal of every interaction, where all social pressures and taboos have been removed begs the following questions: Is the double standard a social construct or is it reinforced by our respective natures? Why does there appear to be a self-imposed double standard where women will only have sex with men who’ve previously had sex with someone else? Why do they seek a promiscuous partner while wanting exclusivity and a friend with benefits arrangement?

What needs to happen for a man to enjoy sex with a stranger? Apart from hygiene and at least minimal level of attraction, not much. A man will enjoy sex if it lasts ten minutes or two minutes. He will enjoy it if the girl just lays there not knowing what to do or if she fucks him like a porn star. It is no secret, however, that if a woman offers herself to a man, he better make her cum. It is fair to say then, that sex is hard work for men. It doesn’t take much for a man to have an orgasm. Every man will respond to the same tricks. Not all women are the same, though. What works on one, will be a waste of time with another. There is a research that suggests that women are less likely to cum in a casual hook-up than they are in a committed relationship. Some even go as far as saying the chance of an orgasm in a one-night stand is as low as 10%. It makes sense, if you think about it. A partner that knows what turns you on, when to go faster and when to slow down, when to be gentle and when to be rough, where to kiss and where to bite is way more likely to give her pleasure than someone who might have fucked a lot of women, but has no idea how to please a single one.

If a woman has five one-night stands, she might not have an orgasm once because none of the guys know what to do with her. Some of these guys might be completely inexperienced or too drunk to last long enough. They can be too nervous or too excited to satisfy her. After such encounters, where men enjoy themselves, she feels used and she regrets her decisions. Some might argue that she can guide every man and tell him what she likes so she actually enjoys every hook up. I don’t buy that. From my experience on the site, women don’t want to be reading instructions to men who are on top of them. They want the man to man-handle them and throw them around and this takes a man who is confident and knows what he is doing. No matter what someone might say, no woman wants a man who constantly asks if what he is doing “feels ok”.

Because women are more likely to have disappointing sex, even with men they find attractive, who tick many of their boxes, they are, in my opinion, less likely than men to enjoy sex with complete strangers. They might brush it off, put on a brave face and pretend it doesn’t matter, but it does, and they know it. The website exposes it. Women on it want quality over quantity because they do not want to have a string of disappointing and soul-destroying encounters. Another reason for that is security. Meeting a new man every week is a risk. It’s much safer to have one or two trusted partners and meet them regularly.

Having multiple partners comes with another risk – sexually transmitted diseases. I’ve heard on a podcast, where an expert in the field was interviewed, that women are more likely to get STDs than men. Potentially because female sexual organs are located inside where it’s easier for all this bacteria to thrive.  This is a risk to women, but it could also explain why men are repulsed by a woman who has slept with a lot of men. Evolutionary speaking, our ancestral males valued purity as it ensured paternity, but also because, without sophisticated modern medicine and testing, it helped them exclude females with an STD. Over thousands of generations, males have passed on this preference to their sons so that in the modern-day men have to make a conscious choice to look the other way if a woman they’re interested in is known for her promiscuity. The same evolutionary explanation applies to women valuing quality over quantity. Thousands of generations of females evolved a behaviour to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and other dangers that came from sleeping with a different man every week (partner jealousy and aggression). Males evolved disgust to override their sexual desires and females evolved caution to avoid STDs and physical harm, as well as getting pregnant with a male who is not willing to protect and provide for her and her child. Various forms of anticonception remove many of these risk, but our evolved mechanisms can’t just be turned off. It’s the same as for wild animals that are born and kept in captivity. Their evolved instincts are still there and if released into the wild, those instincts come back online.

Another theory why there is a double standard and that most of slut-shaming is done by other women is quite interesting as well. I believe I read it in The Evolution of Desire, by David M. Buss. He states that women slut shame other women because promiscuous women not only are more likely to take all the good men by making no commitment sex available to them, but also make boyfriends and husbands cheat and leave. Again, sex is women’s weapon. Men can’t use sex in any way other than rape, but this is a whole other subject.  Not all women use their weapon and that is why promiscuous women are a threat to them. They want good men, but even good men will often choose easy access to sex with a variety of partners than a committed relationship. Married men will too be more tempted if there is an opportunity and low chances of getting caught.

What interests me is that male and female sexual behaviour exposes what both really want, and it seems to be natural. In my opinion, society always follows biology and tries (subconsciously) to reinforce it. What I mean by that is that we behave according to our evolved nature and society reinforces that behaviour by rewarding certain aspects of it and punishing other ones. Rewards and punishments come in form of social status. Nobody is in control of it. Our ranking just goes up or down depending on decisions we make. In context of promiscuity, men’s status goes up, although it doesn’t do so indefinitely (although men who have the options to be promiscuous usually are higher in the hierarchy already), while women’s goes down. It happens naturally and both men and women play the game by these rules, whether they like it or not.

The grey matters

It’s not all black and white. Quite a few men online say they don’t care about their woman’s past. I believe we can split these guys into four categories:

  1. Those who genuinely don’t care
  2. Those who care but it’s not a deal breaker for them
  3. Those who care and it is a deal breaker
  4. Those who care but are lying.

The red pill community gets this one thing wrong. They convince themselves that most men are in group three. They believe that most men, as soon as they find out about a woman’s past promiscuity, they call it a day. I think there is nothing further from the truth. I think most men are split between categories two and four.

Group two is the dominant group. These men would prefer if the woman they’re dating didn’t have that past, but they don’t judge them. They wouldn’t choose another woman based on this criteria alone. They don’t think about their partner’s past all the time or with rage and jealousy or they completely overlook it because of their partner’s personality and looks. The red pill gurus would call these men Simps, but that is the majority of men they’re talking about.

Group four lie about their preference for a woman with a low body count because it scores them some brownie points with the ladies. It is simply their dating strategy whereby lying about their preference, they make themselves sexually available to a wider pool of women. In other words, they don’t want to settle down with a promiscuous woman, but they will fake their commitment only to sleep with her. Women can fake orgasms, but men can fake entire relationships. I’ve seen street interviews on social media, where men were asked if body count mattered and those who said that it didn’t received a lot of praise from women in the comment section. Brownie points (and friend zone).

Another grey area is that when a sample of men were asked to choose between a woman who’s slept with, say, at least twenty men and a woman who’s slept with five, but two of them were known to them. They unanimously answered that they would prefer the woman with a higher body count, where they didn’t know any of the men. As a man, I can relate to that. I think it’s within men’s unwritten code that we don’t date our friends’ exes. There is just something wrong about it. I would go as far as say that men are repulsed by the idea of putting their dicks the same place as their friend has had theirs.

Finally, the modern dating scene allows, for the first time in history, for people from different cultures to meet. If you live in a place like London, the options are endless. Men and women come here from all over and they leave their reputations back in their home countries. An Englishman might date a Romanian girl and never find out about her past promiscuity or ex boyfriends.

There is only one problem. Even though a bad reputation doesn’t follow her to the UK and her exes don’t haunt her, the woman’s trauma from the past does. Let me explain. A woman who’s been pumped and dumped too many times, will be, probably rightfully so, more distrusting and judgmental towards men. She will have baggage, in other words. She has been cheated on. Maybe she cheated. She might have had an abortion and can’t stop thinking about. This might cause her to be desperate for a child or to deny fatherhood to her man because she worries he will leave her. One of her exes might have committed suicide and it’s left a permanent mark on her mind.  This is only a few examples of what type of baggage she will be bringing into a man’s life even if he doesn’t know how many boyfriends she’s had before him. This type of baggage can ruing any relationship. It’s almost like dating a man who used to have a gambling addiction and even though he doesn’t gamble anymore, he has accumulated a lot of debt, messed with the wrong guys and he has to pay them back every month for the next ten years. Or it could be like dating a man with a low credit score due to ignoring his multiple credit card bills. He might have a good job now, but his low score might prevent you to buy a new car or get a mortgage.

Men don’t usually bring this kind of trauma into a new relationship. Firstly, because men are used to being rejected but also because after a painful break up, it takes a long time for them to heal, and they often come out as better men at the end of it because they decide to turn their life around. It doesn’t always happen, and some men never move on. Another reason why a string of one-night stands doesn’t break men is that men don’t look at it with shame. Whether it’s right or wrong, men think of the women they have slept with as trophies. There is a reason why “the walk of shame” usually refers to women walking home from a sexual encounter with a guy they’ve just met. Women will, more often than men, feel used after such encounter, especially if it was disappointing. Most men don’t have sex whenever they want but whenever they can.

Past relationships and hook-ups also carry with them another danger. Sexually transmitted diseases.  As mentioned earlier, if females are more likely than males to get infected, it makes sense that, over thousands of generations, males have evolved a preference for females with less sexual partners. When choosing partners, we avoid sick people in general so, from an evolutionary standpoint, there is no reason why people with STDs would be different.

Ensuring paternity is probably the biggest reason why men try to avoid promiscuous women. At least historically and evolutionary speaking. Even in the modern day, when DNA testing is widely available, many men unknowingly raise children which are not biologically theirs. Preferring purity in a partner has been the best way to ensure paternity for men throughout history. I believe this to be an evolved preference or mechanism because being put off by a potential long term partner’s past promiscuity is something men do subconsciously and not by choice. They evolved this over generations to solve the problem in the absence of modern science. In other words, men don’t judge women’s past and think, “I best avoid this type of girl, because I may end up raising another man’s kid”. Rather, just like hunger encourages us to seek food so we don’t have to constantly remind ourselves consciously about eating (we’d starve to death if we had to remember to eat), disgust reminds us to avoid other things, such us poisonous foods, sexual relations with sick people or in this case, women potentially carrying an STD or potentially pregnant with someone else’s child. Men still have the free will to act on or ignore these triggers and in many cases they ignore them. Our brain constantly tries to trick us with strong feelings to motivate us to do things that are beneficial for our survival and wellbeing and the survival of our genes is no different.

There are also studies which suggest that women who have had multiple relationships and one-night stands are less satisfied in their current long-term relationship. In the end, this contributes to higher divorce rates and break ups. There are other factors which play a significant role, in my opinion. Dating apps and social media expose both men and women to endless options which in turn makes them see their partner as just that – an option.

Why do men care and why do women care that men care?

So far, I have explained at length why men might care about body count. My belief is that it is an ancient, biological force driving men to care about it and make them justify it to fit their modern reasoning. A man might explain his preference by saying, “I just prefer a woman with less partners”, or even, “I don’t want to risk catching anything”, but this is just his modern reasoning trying to explain ancient feelings that are hard wired into his brain.

When you look at social media posts, you see plenty of women offended by this. They call men insecure and completely disregard their preference and standards. I believe there are a few reasons for it.

As women approach their thirties they become more aware of the passing time and their youth fading away. Biological clock is ticking and if they haven’t got a long-term partner or children by that time, they start getting worried that they’ve left it too late. More often than not, they think the source of their misery is “lack of good men”, but the reality is good men have always been there, but often invisible to women who just wanted to have fun and live a little before settling down with a “good man”. What they find is that Mr Right was a myth, prince charming never comes, and what remains is left over men and the good men who have their shit together have families now or are happy as they are and don’t want anyone to ruin their peace. They may also prefer slightly younger women.

Like with men, I believe this bitterness is just a manifestation of an evolved fear of the ticking of the biological clock. In this case, women who have slept around through their twenties or had a bunch of failed relationships hate being judged on that because they can’t turn back time. They rationalise their negative feelings by saying it’s unfair that men don’t face the same judgement as they approach their thirties and forties. They are hurt that their one-night stands will haunt them forever and, along with fading youthfulness and looks, reduce their mate value on the dating market while men’s value increases with age and peaks in their thirties. This “inequality” happens because men’s value is judged based on their success, assets, experience and profession. Women’s value is dictated by their fertility which is advertised by youthfulness and attractiveness. These peak in early to mid-twenties. That’s why men find younger women, particularly twenty-two-year-olds, more attractive (there is a study on that) and this is why women usually prefer men slightly older. The heart wants what the heart wants, I guess.

To summarise, women think it’s unfair that men’s value increases and theirs decreases with age and sexual experiences. Not much can be done about it unless women are willing to change what type of guys they like. Almost everything men do is to impress women. If women change what they want, men change what they do.  Across species, it is the females who dictate which males pass on their genes. It is female preferences and standards that make males “show off” their traits. In birds it will be the male who built the nicest nest or a peacock with the most impressive tail. It will be the male frog who calls louder than other males, a male insect that offers the largest meal and so on. Across the animal kingdom, including humans, males show off and risk their lives only to impress females and get laid. It is female preferences that make males sing in the middle of a jungle signalling their location to predators. It is female preferences that make men buy expensive cars or build big shoulders in the gym and it is the male preference that motivates women to hold on to their youthfulness for as long as they can and by any means, from make-up to plastic surgeries.

We all lie and deceive each other to get something from one another. Men lie to get sex. Women lie to get commitment from the man they want. Men lie verbally and tell women what they want to hear and often pretend they are something they’re not. I once heard a story about a guy who was in a nightclub with his friends. His strategy to take a girl home was simple. One of his friend’s job was to pretend he was a football player and played for the local club which was in Championship at the time. A girl next to them got interested and he took her home. Little did she know, he was just a postman.

Women lie differently. They lie about their age, their hair colour, their wrinkles and firmness of their tits and ass. They do it by using beauty products and clothing. I won’t get into the psychological reasons why women wear make-up, but if you’re thinking it’s just to feel pretty, it’s just your ancient brain playing tricks on you to get you to do what it wants. It makes looking good feel nice, so you do what needs to be done to attract mates.

Lying is part of the dating game. If women can lie about their hair colour or natural size of their lips or breasts, then men can pretend they are famous athletes for a night. Preferences are biological and cultural. Their importance varies from individual to individual, but just as most women like guys taller than them, men like women who slept with less partners than them. Not much can be done about it but to embrace our differences, understand them to increase our odds in the dating pool. Realise what the other sex wants and you will find a partner you want, not the partner you can.

One last thought

What if there isn’t a double standard? Women who find offence in the thinking I’ve presented here often say something along the lines of:

“If men can sleep around then so can we!”

“If my partner cares about my body count, he must keep himself to the same standard!”

This reasoning feeds into what I said earlier – 10% of men sleep with 80% of women. This means that the majority of women are interested in fraction of men and then proceed to generalise and assume all men are the same. The reality is that the bottom 50% of men in their twenties are invisible to women. Their experience is completely different to that of the top 10 – 20% of men and a hundred times different to the experience of the majority of women. In other words, 10-20% of men are fucking 80% of women. Those women then go on TikTok and complain about being pumped and dumped all the time and that all men want the same while completely ignoring the fact that the majority of male population is completely invisible to them. This fucked up situation leads women to believe that “if men can do it, so can we”. The problem is, most men don’t do it. They are rejected by all women before they even step out of the house because women’s standards are high and often unrealistic. So, if most women’s experience is that guys are assholes who just want sex, then most men’s experience is that women are only interested in assholes. If women keep choosing the top 20% of men (guys who have options), their experience will reflect that. There is nothing wrong in wanting a top quality mate, it is a sexual preference, but we must realise that on this ruthless dating market, where seduction is seasoned with deception, this preference often leads to heartbreak, unanswered text messages, unwanted pregnancies and bitterness in both sexes.

Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Don’t end up alone

I took my pregnant wife into A&E yesterday. She was having very intense back and abdominal pains and sickness, all of which, according to Dr Google, could be symptoms of miscarriage. We were seen by a nurse right away, but I suppose they weren’t as concerned as us because after the initial verbal examination, they took their sweet time and we spent most of the time sitting in the waiting area. Luckily, the baby was OK, so it is not a post about that. It is about what the waiting area made me realise as sick people were wheeled in.

Across from us sat a young girl. She was no older than twenty years old, although my wife reckoned she was as young as seventeen. She had arrived there a little before us, around 10am. Her hair was blonde, but you could tell it wasn’t her natural colour. She had piercings in her nose. She was very skinny. Not like “unhealthy skinny” but just very thin. I guess you don’t see that very often anymore. She was wearing slippers, blue pyjama bottoms and a black winter coat. She was always in and out of her chair, going either to the toilet or to ask the nurses when she would be seen.

Meanwhile, the door of the department kept swinging open, bringing in new patients or just taking someone through to a different area. Men and women in green ambulance uniforms were standing around with not much to do, probably waiting for the emergency call. They talked about local gyms, broken laptops and mini golf – things colleagues talk about at work. I don’t know what I was expecting, but perhaps I thought staff in the emergency unit would always be armed with seriousness. Instead, they joked around, some even flirted with each other, and they made weekend plans. I’m not blaming them. I’m just painting the picture.

Many people came and went, but the blonde girl and us seemed to be the only ones always going back to the waiting area.

Around 12.30pm, the girl made a phone call. She sat in the corner, her slim body folded in a way she would fit her both feet on the chair. She was talking to her friend. She made the point to be loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to make it obvious. There was a lot of swearing and complaining about not having been seen and about “staff just standing around doing nothing”. From her conversation you could gather two things. One, that she was pregnant and it was still early stages. Two, that her boyfriend, Zac, ignored all of her fifty calls and messages. She had messaged him on all of his social media and at some point her calls went straight to his voicemail. Her pyjamas also suggested that whatever had brought her there was urgent and scared her. None of it excuses her bad manners on the phone, but you couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her.

On the other side of the room, in the corridor was an older man on the stretcher. I’m not very good with ages so I will assume he was in his seventies or eighties. Grandad age. By his side stood his wife. There were plenty of seats next to us, but she stood there next to him. There is not much to say about that couple, but they represent something that a lot of young people will miss out on (and are missing out on already).

I will make a lot of assumptions here, but the manner with which the blonde girl spoke on the phone, swearing and complaining about staff in their close proximity, her piercings and the way she carried herself suggested to me that she brought it all on herself. Her excuse of a boyfriend turned off his phone or blocked her number and didn’t wanna know. I judged that this is the type of guys or boys she goes for. So called fuckboys.

Why is this a problem? It is a problem for young people, especially for women. The female empowerment movement sells young women a lie. A lie that they can have a string of meaningless relationships or hook-ups or that they don’t need men at all. It tells them that they can wait to settle down and as a result they spend their twenties getting pumped and dumped by guys like Zac. By the time they “are ready to settle down”, usually when they approach thirty or thirty-five, they come to a sad realisation – there is no good men left. Never mind that they start blaming all men for there not being any good one. The fact of the matter is that the good ones were invisible to them for a decade of their life and they eventually found someone to settle down with themselves.

I promise I’m getting somewhere with this. The longer you wait to find someone, the more flings, hook-ups and relationships you have before meeting someone for a serious relationship, the less likely you are to make that relationship last. There are many reasons for that and there are studies to prove that. But, just think about it. You’re bringing all that trauma of break ups, being cheated on or having cheated and so on – all that baggage – into a new relationship and expect it to survive this burden? What if all your relationships before were no longer than a year and you don’t know how to survive this post honey moon phase or how to handle an argument in a relationship? You might think that an argument or even regular arguing is a sign of the end. What happens is you never build a bond with anyone and you either end up alone or in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t care about you.

The current message to single women is, “you go girl!”, but in thirty or forty years, you might end up on the stretcher and beside you will be nobody. And if you’re a young girl and aren’t thinking seriously about who you get intimate with and who you let into your life, you will end up with a dickhead of a boyfriend like Zac who will block you if he knocks you up.

The old couple represents what we all should strive for. Our friends will not always be there for us. Our parents will not always be there for us. It’s very trendy nowadays for young women to say they don’t need men in their lives, but one day you will need a partner who will hold your hand, lend his shoulder for you to rest on, bring a bucket for your vomit, unlace your shoes to get you more comfortable and tell you everything will be ok.

If you follow today’s narrative, as a woman, you will end up alone. Men are used to it. We are used to being alone. Are you prepared for it? Choose your partners wisely. Choose who becomes the father of your children or you will one day sit in the emergency unit alone with nobody to call but your friend who has her own shit to deal with.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Under the spell: When your baby has a seizure

Oliver had just woken up from his afternoon nap. We cuddled on the sofa for a while then I offered him scrambled eggs, his favourite meal. Helium balloons from his 2nd birthday were still floating beneath the ceiling.  I put Paddington on to keep him company while I was in the kitchen, preparing the eggs when I heard him.

It sounded like hick ups, only different, consistent. I leaned out of the kitchen to check on him. He was laying on his side. He does that sometimes, I thought. I walked over to tell him to move away from the screen. What happened next is a blur yet the feelings that overwhelmed me still very intense.

Scrapped of expression and emotion, his face looked lifeless. Sparkless eyes stared into nothingness. Pool of saliva had dripped out of his mouth and collected on the sofa around his cheek. Bubbles gathered in the corner of his lips.  His body twitched silently in the rhythm of the sound he’d just made. Desperate, I picked him up and saw his lips had turned purple. His distant eyes looked right through me. Face wiped of all colour. His body limp in my hands. His arms hanging softly by his sides.

‘Oli!’, I cried to the heavens begging to not take my baby away. Paralysed by grief, I feared I was holding him for the last time.

I was shaking. My heart was racing.  Guilt, fear, and sudden awareness of the injustice and cruelty of this cold universe rushed through my mind. I need to snap out of it, I thought, and save my boy.

I thought he was choking, so I bent him over my forearm, felt his belly sink against it, and I started slapping his upper back. His arms stretched towards the floor. I was scared that I wasn’t doing it right. Scared of stopping and losing him forever, but I needed to call the ambulance.

I could barely dial the number. As I heard the voice on the other side, Oliver’s eyes closed. Maybe if I’d put his hearing aids on when he woke up, he would’ve heard my calls. I couldn’t stand the thought he was in there somewhere, scared and alone in silent darkness without his daddy’s voice to guide him.

‘My son is choking!’, I yelled with agony to the calm, almost cold and uncaring voice in the speaker. Her lack of urgency and empathy shocked and offended me.  She told me to stop slapping his back, put him on his side and try to remove saliva from his mouth, but his teeth were clamped with impossible force.

I screamed and cried down the phone. I felt I wasn’t making much sense. She asked me for the address, and this is when I realised I had to calm down and give it to her as clear as possible. Oliver wasn’t responding, his shallow breath reminded me we were running out of time. Help was on its way, she said as I looked at his face wondering if it’d ever light up again.

‘Please hurry!’, I begged as I kneeled next to my boy feeling powerless and exposed. Eggs were burning in the kitchen.

The sound of the ambulance in the distance was getting closer until the blue flashing lights penetrated that black winter afternoon outside the window. He was still unconscious, but still with me. You’re gonna be alright, I said, you’re gonna be alright.

* * *

The A&E was extremely busy. Oliver arrived there in the ambulance with my wife, who I called when the paramedics were examining him. One doctor kept shouting into the waiting area that only one parent per child was allowed, but I didn’t care. Half an hour ago, I thought I was fighting for his life. I wasn’t going anywhere. Oliver would also need his mum because she breastfeeds him and he would find comfort in that surrounded by doctors and nurses wearing masks, gloves and shooting Calpol down his throat. I was also the one who found him and could describe what happened. That’s not the point, however. I was ready to take on anyone who would try to separate us. We needed each other.

It was the shouting doctor who called out our son’s name. Finally, we thought after four hours of waiting, passing Oliver to each other so we could each get some rest.  She was short, slightly overweight and with blonde hair. We followed her into the room where she turned out to be quite pleasant and didn’t mention the “one parent” policy.

She listened to my description of Oliver’s symptoms and took notes. She said that it all sounded like he had had a seizure. She said it was very common in kids and that it happens when body temperature rises suddenly as opposed to gradually. When she said that, I went back to the moment I found him laying on the sofa, in the pool of his own saliva, and I remembered thinking it looked like seizure, but the only seizure I had ever seen was in movies. ‘Why would Oliver even have seizure?’, I asked myself. I dismissed this possibility and assumed he put something in his mouth and choked on it.

Minutes after we sat down in the waiting area, he had another seizure. He shook violently and his eyes rolled and rested in the corner of his eyelids, looking nowhere again. Terrified mothers moved their kids out of the way as we were rushed into a separate room where Oliver was taken care of immediately. Less than a minute later, Oliver was in the same state as when I found him on the sofa, just a few hours before.

Over the next three days, doctors were trying to find out what had caused the seizure. They took swab tests, urine test and the worst of them all, the blood test. They all came back with nothing. We were sent home with some antibiotics, but nobody really knows what happened.

There are parents out there who have lost their children. I know that. My son wasn’t dying, but when I saw him, I thought he was. Even when I thought he was choking and I knew what to do, I knew that there was a chance I would fail. I believe that the pain I felt, is the same pain experienced by anyone who has ever held their dying child in their arms. Nobody who hasn’t been through it will ever know what it feels like, they can only imagine. And I can only imagine what it feels like to go through it and actually lose a child. What I felt cannot be replicated. The same pain cannot be felt when your dog dies or when your team loses the world cup final. It cannot be felt by anybody but the parent who holds their child for the last time or believes it is the last time. Perhaps this post will be found by other parents out there who can relate to these strong emotions or maybe some of them will find comfort in knowing that if a baby has a seizure, it normally goes away within minutes and they don’t even remember it happened. Thank you for reading.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

Why do parents do this to their children?

This is something that has been on my mind for a long time – long before I became a father myself. Why do some parents pierce their infants’ and toddlers’ ears? I can’t get over it. As a parent, your job is to do what’s in the best interest of the child. Are piercings really in their best interest? Are they really necessary? Every time I see a little girl with a shiny dot in her ear, I look at the parents and wish I could ask them why they did this. Was it worth it? It’s not like it’s in the best interest of the child. The child didn’t ask for it and even if she expressed any interest in her mom’s piercings, what kind of mother just goes, “yeah, let’s get you one of these, sweetheart!”? I highly doubt any fathers out there decide to take their daughters to Claire’s and get them an ear piece, but how do they just allow it?

Some people might be sitting there thinking, “Oh, it’s just a little prick, what is the big deal?” Well, the thing is, it’s still not in the best interest of the child. It doesn’t make her life any better and it’s pretty clear it just the mom’s weird desire to put shiny things on her daughter while causing her pain in the process. Just let kids be kids and leave their bodies alone.

It’s not even that I am judging somebody’s style of parenting. This has nothing to do with parenting. Style of parenting would be the way the child is being disciplined or whether she is allowed any screen time, not whether the parents put shiny objects in her ears.

I already know the answer to the question, though. It’s probably something along the lines of, “because it’s pretty”, or “cute”. But is this really a good enough reason? I don’t think so.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

writing again

It’s been so long since I wrote on this page. So long since I wrote anything at all. It seems like, since COVID ended, nothing is worth talking about. Sure there is the war and there is the big abortion debate in America, but I am not really interested in these issues. Life is moving on for me and I haven’t had time to sit down and gather my thoughts on anything for almost a year. Actually, I haven’t made time to do it. But how could I? Between working and being a father to a toddler it’s really not easy to fit many other activities. But writing is such a great tool to find out what we really think that I decided to spend even as little as ten minutes a day to spill my thoughts on the keyboard.

Looking into the notes on my phone, I can see ideas I’ve had for articles – many of them thought provoking and controversial. Many of them, unfortunately, are no longer relevant. I was writing a great piece exposing the behaviour of people during the pandemic – how many people did “the right thing” simply because everyone else was doing it. But then it became old news and I am happy with that. I don’t want to live in the past. I see so many people on social media still exposing the lies, still fighting. I can’t live like this. I even think it’s time to admit that many of our predictions were, in fact, just conspiracy theories and we were simply wrong about them.

It surprises me, for example, how many of the people who were against the lockdowns and everything that happened, were also complete lunatics when it came to other things. The whole anti-lockdown movement has been crowded with people who believe dinosaurs never existed and that the Earth is flat. They believe star signs have a real meaning in determining our past, present and future – also known as astrology. I don’t buy any of that. It’s only when I look at some of the things we have been saying with some distance or when I hear others saying them still today, I cringe with embarrassment that I at some point said the same things.

I think many people who were fighting the good fight now suffer from the same thing they accused others of suffering from – the Stockholm Syndrome. They used to say, we used to say that people wanted to be stuck in an endless circle of lockdowns and were filling to cut the government some slack for their lies and incompetence. Now that everything seems to be back to normal, at least for the most part, people still think we are in the fight between good and evil. They refuse to believe that we’ve either won the battle or that it is over and we were wrong. We were wrong to think there was a conspiracy to get us all vaccinated, microchipped or eliminated. What they think, instead, is that all this is still happening but has been postponed because of the resistance. Resistance? Please! Comparing to the compliance, resistance was fragile and tiny. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still resist if we were faced with the slightest sign of government overreach and tyranny. I’d rather die on my feet than spend my life on my knees.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though the general population were getting fed up with face masks, PCR tests and all that crap we were made to do to go about our lives, the general population have also shown that no matter how inconvenient things get, how wrong they might feel they’d still comply. Especially in the UK, I think, where people don’t have a history of suffering, fighting for independence and against tyranny. If you grew up in Eastern Europe, like me, you’d have it in your blood. In England, people will be walked into by someone and still apologise. You can’t stand up to a tyrant, if you believe there is one, if you apologise for being walked into by someone.

I’m not even sorry. It’s time to admit we were wrong about some things. The sky is probably not being sprayed with chemicals designed to kill some of us. After all, the people behind it would be exposing themselves or their families to the same danger. When I pointed this out to someone, they said, “well, the elite have their way to get away from it”. The dinosaurs most likely did exist and their bones are as old as scientists say they are. Our blue planet most likely is round and not flat and Soros probably doesn’t want to see the world burn.

I won’t edit this. It was just for me to find out what’s on my mind today.

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski · 2 Comments

Lockdown for dummies

It looks like, fingers crossed, the restrictions are finally going away on the 19th July. This article may, therefore, be irrelevant, but there are still people (and a lot of them, too) who wish for the restrictions to remain and for lockdown to continue. This article is for them. It’s something I started writing a couple of months ago, but then a little bit of freedom got in the way and I didn’t see the point. As I work on other material, here is “Lockdown for Dummies”.

About a week ago, the world leaders got on their private jets and gathered in Cornwall to discuss some important issues and pose for some socially distanced pictures before mingling like old friends, laughing and drinking like the issues they had come to discuss were all a joke. Face masks were only worn by the peasants serving them alcohol and clearing their tables. The so called “elites”, including the Queen herself, were enjoying each other’s uncovered faces like the Indian, Nepal, Thai and Delta COVID strains were all made up tales they had been telling us for months to keep us obedient. Kind of like that mother in the shop who tells her naughty toddler that “the man will tell her off” or “the man will take her away”, just to make her settle down. When I worked in retail, I often found myself in the position of “the man” and I never wanted to.

As they discussed, shook hands and posed for fake pictures, we learned that Boris Johnson was planning to postpone the “Freedom Day”. This was no surprise to me, to be honest. I must admit, however, since April 12, things for me have been rather normal. I’ve even seen people commenting on feeling the same – gyms are open, shops are open, pubs are open and so on. Some people even demand that people like me explain why we continue to protest and raise our voices when things are now more or less “normal”. This normality, however, is just an illusion. There are still many things we cannot do, jobs lost, and medical treatments delayed. Many people still fail to understand those real-life consequences of prolonging this nightmare called lockdown. For these dummies, I shall use a real-life analogy to illustrate how locking the country down to protect one group of people negatively affects other groups of people and nobody can or should really claim to know what sacrifice is required by us for the greater good.

(At the moment of writing this, so called experts are calling for another “Winter lockdown”, which makes it even more essential for people to understand why lockdowns are harmful and why they are a mistake we should not only never repeat but hold our politicians criminally responsible for it.)

Back in February of this year, Mark, the CEO of the gym I work at, well, I worked at before the apocalypse, called upon all his employees to give them the good and the bad news. Before I get to them, let me give you a little background.

The gym is only a small part of the well-established charity that operates nationwide. They run charity shops, provide housing, shelter for homeless people and support physical activity by providing access to cheap gym and other fitness activities for all levels and ages, including gymnastics for young kids. They do a lot for the community and they have been for many years.

Mark organised a Zoom meeting with everyone working at the Watford gym. He had good and bad news to tell us. The good news was that the charity was expanding and extending their helping hand to the local homeless people. The heads of the charity had decided to end homelessness in the local area. Everyone agreed that it was a Nobel goal. Unfortunately, the good news was also the bad news. The only way for this to happen was to transform the gym into a living area for the homeless. The idea was to turn the gym into a couple of dozen self-sufficient (and COVID19 secure) rooms for the homeless people already sheltering using the charity’s services to move on and step back into a normal life. In other words, what Mark was telling us was that we weren’t coming back when gyms would reopen, and our jobs were gone.

I was only ever a casual worker and I still had full time job waiting for me in April, but some people had worked there for a couple of decades. I remember Vicky and Joe both working there fifteen years ago when I first signed up to be a member of the gym. We had all felt connected to that place in one way or another and felt like part of us was being ripped out of us and slaughtered in front of us with no justification. Suddenly, ending homelessness wasn’t on our minds. Joe was the most vocal about his feelings. He was devastated. He thought it was unfair. He said that he thought us and the service we provided as a fitness facility, the community we had built didn’t matter to the people signing it all away. He brought up that mental health of people relying on our gym was being neglected and the decision to close us down was disrespectful to our two thousand members and staff. He complained that there was no impact assessment, no consultation and no easy transition and concluded that he had expected better. He acknowledged that helping homeless people was a great initiative but felt betrayed. He didn’t believe that creating twenty-four affordable rooms for rough sleepers justified sacrificing gym staff and members. Mark sat in front of his laptop and responded to Joe’s points in the manner of a politician and he wasn’t taking ownership of the decision and its negative impact on thousands of people, but we all agreed with Joe, who felt very passionate about his views.

After the first lockdown, we had to telephone every member to let them know we were reopening. I was given a list of people to call and welcome them back. Almost all the people on my list were born during WW2. The vast majority of them didn’t own a mobile phone or had an email address and access to the internet. Our gym was the only gym in the area that could accommodate people in that age group. It was quiet, bright and accessible. Most gyms have adopted online joining process, but at our gym everything was still done the old-fashioned way – by filling up the paperwork at the reception, a process a lot easier for people without a computer or a smartphone. Now, these people had virtually nowhere to go to remain physically active.

Our building was also home for local Gymnastic Club, who just over two years ago spent £100k on new equipment and have now been left with nowhere to go. Their small team provided lessons for hundreds of young children a week, who are now also left with limited options. Sure, their parents might find another gymnastic club in the area, but they might not. We were in the heart of our town – easy to get to by car, bus or foot. Other places might not be that accessible for many parents. Many children might also not like the new environment and will simply give up all together.

It’s tempting to say that the gym staff, the gymnastic club team, the elderly gym members and the children and their parents simply must adapt, find a new job, new gym and new venue. It seems easy enough. But it’s not. This place meant something to all these people. They’ve invested their life and career in this place. They’ve committed to it. And for the members and the children change might not be that easy and might never come. It’s not as simple as signing up at a different place. If you’ve ever lacked motivation, focus, determination, passion, willingness to change, found it hard to adapt to a new situation, even temporarily, then you know that a lot of things have to happen inside of our minds for a simple change in our behaviour to take place. Simply put, many of these people will never resume their fitness journey.

The cause – to save the homeless people – was very generous and virtuous, but it came at a cost. It meant that people would lose jobs, careers, way to maintain good mental health and physical wellbeing and quite possibly, the only place where they could make friends. Imagine for a moment that we are not talking about saving every last homeless person in Watford, but about protecting the vulnerable from catching COVID19 or the NHS from becoming overwhelmed. To achieve these goals, the government acts like Mark, the CEO we met earlier. They decide what people need protecting and at what price. This price has been paid by many of us in multiple currencies. We’ve been told to put our own mental and physical health on hold so that we wouldn’t “pass it on”. We’ve had our cancer treatment postponed, delayed or cancelled. We’ve lost our jobs, not been able to pay rent, mortgage or simple bills because of furlough pay cut. Our marriages have suffered, relationships ended. We’ve dived deeper into loneliness and depression. We’ve lived in a state of constant fear and guilt. All this to protect a small number of people who may suffer from coronavirus. All to protect them by treating them like they all want the same thing and COVID19 is their only Kryptonite and nothing else could possibly hurt them. Many of them, just like many homeless people, simply don’t want help. They want to be left alone and do their own thing. They don’t want any authority telling them how to live and that they need their help. It’s insulting.

There you have it. Lockdown for dummies. Looks nice on paper, but in the end, behind the scenes, people suffer greatly as a result of decisions made by government who treat us like a concept, like a collective and not individuals with individual goals, wants, needs and fears. We can’t all be treated like sick people because we won’t all react to coronavirus the same way. We can’t all be protected from coronavirus if the price of this protection is too high and we end up losing valuable time and experiences just to stay alive. That’s why the best policy has always been personal responsibility. Don’t wait for the government to restrict or ruin the lives of everyone so that you can be safe. Take ownership of your life and your health and simply restrict your own life to keep yourself safe. You’ve done it for a year with government’s orders, you can now continue doing it voluntarily. Sure, you might lose your job for continuous self-isolating, but many of us have. Sure, you might lose your relationship because you don’t want to go out, but it’s ok, many of us have. You might get fat because you refuse to go back to the gym, but it’s ok, many of us have.

The choice is yours. Always has been. Are you going to be a dummy?

Posted on by Lukasz Kwiatkowski

You think you are free

Nazi Germany – a dark and shameful chapter in our not-so-distant past. We have written books about it, made movies and documentaries. Some of them attempt to answer the question we all ask ourselves: How was it allowed to happen? The best answer I’ve come across comes from Milton Mayer, a German – American professor and journalist, who in the early 1950s, when the wounds of war, the shame and regret were still healing, spent six months interviewing and befriending ten Nazis to answer that very question. What Mayer hadn’t told his ten Nazi friends was that he was Jewish. In 1955, his book – They thought they were free – composed of the testimonies and memories of these Nazis, was published. It was, in my opinion, not only the answer to the question that haunts us all, but also a warning that humanity is always one obedient step away from walking into the wired fence of a new regime.

This book should, in my opinion, snap anyone out of their daydream. It should be a wake-up call for those who are still under the illusion that we will soon get our lives back, our freedom back. This illusion, this fantasy that if we just keep our heads down, follow along, listen to the guidance, obey the rules and never ask any questions we will get back to normal. But just a few fragments from Mayer’s book, which I quoted below, show that this delusion is nothing new. You will see that all the justifications for your inaction and non-resistance to the restrictions have been made before. All excuses for the existence and necessity of these restrictions have been made before. All your thoughts have been thought before. All your reasons, yes, ALL of them, to passively follow the tyrant and allow him to take your freedoms away, little by little, have been reasoned before. All your arguments have been argued before. All your nightmares, dreams of heroic uprising and resistance have been dreamt (and crushed) before. And in the near future, in five or ten years, or six months, I will tell you that your shame, regret and embarrassment have been felt before. But then, just as it one day was in Nazi Germany, it will be too late.

I am aware that there are people who get offended when COVID restrictions and Nazi Germany are used in the same sentence. But the very reason that Nazi Germany has burdened, traumatised, terrorized and haunted every generation since and yet people who lived through it, participated in it or turned a blind eye to it said EXACTLY the same things we hear today, is why it needs to be talked about. The same obedience existed in Nazi Germany – a far greater horror than “getting paid to stay at home” – and the same obedience was reasoned and excused just the same as it is today. This is what is frightening – the fact that during much worse and clear enslavement people still did nothing. That is why comparing today’s inaction and submission to the state to that in Hitler’s Germany makes sense – because people still did nothing and people today, too, are doing nothing.

Non-resistance to the milder indulgences paves the way to the non-resistance to the deadlier

Milton Mayer (They thought they were free)

Chapter 20
Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks. Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every private act - a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a physician becomes a public act. Every private right - to take a walk, to attend a meeting, to operate a printing press becomes a public right. Every private institution - the hospital, the church, the club becomes a public institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.

Please suspend for a minute your assumptions about the world you know today. Resist the urge to say that your government would never do this or that coronavirus is a different or real threat or that the measures are justified. Whether the powers that be indented or not, in the past year, they have followed the formula of totalitarianism almost to the letter. The author continues:

The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an "authoritarian personality." A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens, 95 per cent or so of the population, duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

Notice how this fragment describes the rise of tyranny without mentioning any atrocity, mass murder or prison camps. It just talks about an emergency.

Haven’t we all been asked, coerced and forced to abandon our individuality, our needs and interests for “the greater good”? Haven’t those who questioned it or refused to do so been disciplined, shamed, arrested, fined and censored? People who have preferred liberty over safety have been patronised and punished if they protested, while the majority have obeyed the rules (even admitting they made no sense), awkwardly at first, but then spontaneously, forming an orderly socially distanced queue and even turning on those who refused to get in line.

The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul, consuming its members for its own purposes. For the duration of the emergency the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city. The harder the city is pressed, the harder its citizens work for it and the more productive and efficient they become in its interest. Civic pride becomes the highest pride, for the end purpose of all one's enormous efforts is the preservation of the city. Conscientiousness is the highest virtue now, the common good the highest good […] 
What if the emergency persists, not for weeks, months, or even years, but for generations and for centuries? Unrelieved sacrifice requires compensation in the only specie available.

The author uses this analogy to show how easily regular people can obediently walk into the trap of a tyrant without even realising it, without even noticing the chains on their ankles. And still, no genocide has been mentioned. Just simple, blind and unsuspecting obedience.

Chapter 13
But then it was too late

Men who did not know that they were slaves, do not know that they have been freed

Milton Mayer (They thought they were free)
What no one seemed to notice[...] was the ever-widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany, and it became always wider.
[...] What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people little by little to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him made it easier to widen this gap and reassure those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Whether it’s deliberate or not, our government is using the same tactics, the same excuses to impose restrictions on us, create legislations and rules. They can’t trust the public to make their own decisions, can’t trust us with the information or can’t trust we would understand it. We are, after all, just ignorant peasants who need to be guided and ruled over. We are incapable of making our own decisions and choosing what’s best for us based on information available to us. We aren’t allowed to make mistakes or poor judgement – these belong in the free world. Those who adore the prime minister, will follow him even to their doom.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised - perhaps not even intentionally - as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crisis and reforms, real reforms too, so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion underneath of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“Temporary emergency measure” – sound familiar? Each rule, each legislation over the last year has been rushed and put in place before it had a chance to be voted on and before people had the chance to familiarise themselves with their rights and how they were being violated. Notice, too, the use of “little by little” and “gradual” – everything about the rise of tyranny was slow and patient.

One had no time to think, there was so much going on [..] the dictatorship and its whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway [...] Most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things and never had, there was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful fundamental things to think about and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crisis and fascinated, yes fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies without and within that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?  
To live in this process it's absolutely not to be able to notice it [...] each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or on occasion regretted that unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures that no patriotic German could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing - one day it is over his head.

Because Nazi Germany is so terrifying to us today, it is even more important to read this man’s words and realise that he (and others in the book) didn’t just live through a questionable crisis or emergency. They were reflecting on what they by then knew had been the biggest crime against humanity. Yet they spoke so casually throughout this book as if all they had done was organising a few illegal gatherings during a pandemic.

Today, people, too, don’t like to think about their fundamental rights and freedoms. They never had to. Compared to safety and obedience, they are trivial and unnecessary to them. They don’t believe they were ever free. Now that they are enslaved they can’t even see the difference.

Notice too, that after the war and the Holocaust, these Germans were able to reflect on what had happened, what they had been blind to or obeyed willingly but had had no idea where all these small steps were taking them. You should, too, reflect on the last year and think on each of these small and inconsequential steps, often introduced as necessary, taken by the government, each small restriction and mandate, each promise and moved goalpost. Ask yourself: What if this is how it happens? What if this is how citizens lose their liberty, privacy and rights?

[...] 'resist the beginnings and consider the end', but one must foresee the end in order to resist or even see the beginnings; one must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done?

Unlike the Germans in 1930’s, we CAN learn from history. We can recognise the beginnings and foresee the end. We would be foolish to think that a modern-day tyranny can’t emerge in our country. Later in the book, the author tells us how those very Germans, living in Nazi regime, were convinced that fascism would never happen in their country. They thought such regime was only possible in Russia or Italy. Isn’t this what we say? That dictatorships are a thing of savage past or savage lands?

Pastor Muller said that 'when the Nazis attacked for the communists, he was a little uneasy, but after all he was not a communist, so he did nothing; and then they attacked the socialists and he was a little uneasier, but still he was not a socialist and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews and so on and he was always uneasier but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the church, and he was a churchman, and he did something but then it was too late.

In other words, you may be comfortable now. You may have convinced yourself by now that what has been taken from you was never of any real value to you anyway. You may think that everyone should be forced to wear a mask, get injected and require proof of it to go into a nightclub. You may believe all that because you have no problem doing any of it. You may not believe in personal choice and freedom in this matter. But there will come a day when they come for you too. On that day, remember pastor Muller and his chilling realisation.

One doesn't see exactly where or how to move; each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse, you wait for the next and the next, you wait for one great shocking occasion thinking that others, when such shocking comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act or even talk alone, you don't want to go out of your way to make trouble. Why not? Well you're not in a habit of doing it, and it is not just fear, fear of standing alone that restrains you, it is also a genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor and instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside in the street, in the general community everyone is happy; one hears no protests and certainly sees none. In your own community you speak privately to your friends, some of whom certainly feel as you do, but what do they say? They say 'it's not so bad' or that you're seeing things or you're an alarmist. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that THIS must lead to THIS and you can't prove it; these are the beginnings, but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end and how do you know the end? On the one hand, your enemy - the regime, the party - intimidate you, on the other your friends poo poo you as pessimistic or even neurotic.

A few weeks ago, I attended the anti-lockdown protest in London. There were tens of thousands of people marching by my side. Last week, there was a round two and an even greater number of people marched through the streets of London, protesting vaccine passports and further restrictions. The mainstream media failed to report on such large and overwhelming gathering and when they did, they claimed there were just a few hundred protesters. Boris Johnson has not addressed any of it, even though we are his people, and we are clearly uneasy and anxious about something. This lack of response creates an illusion that there is no resistance, that everyone is happy and obedient.

And again, we are reminded of how small and insignificant the steps of the tyrant are. We are reminded that calling for resistance and mass disobedience grants you a label of an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist or a denier.

small, insignificant steps – each a little worse than the previous led to concentration camps.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join you never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if let us say, the gassing of the Jews in 1943 had come immediately after the “German firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in 33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than step B, and if you didn't not make a stand at step B, why should you at step C? And so on to step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy and a minor incident [...] collapses it all at once and you see that everything, EVERYTHING has changed and changed completely under your nose. [...] now you live in a world of hate and fear and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves. When everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system that rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

I think the above fragment speaks for itself. I will end on this, however: All ten Nazis interviewed in the book had trouble answering one simple question – what they thought they had done wrong. When trying to explain their actions and what was right and what was wrong, good or evil, they always answered with what had been legal or illegal, popular and unpopular. Think about it for a second – of course they were ashamed of their actions and couldn’t face the responsibility for that shame, so, instead, quoted the rules. Sound familiar? The rules dictated their morality. The law was their moral compass. They thought they were free. Do you think you are free?

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