[Unlocked] What humiliation would you tolerate for a powerful and intelligent man?
an Anglo-Greek tragedy in 3 Acts
I am unlocking this. It is one of my favourites. I felt high writing it. Enjoy my little followers x
Something bizarre happened to me at a Westminster summer party last week. For therapeutic purposes, I have decided to once again write about the indignity and depravity of the Westminster dating scene. Forgive the paywall.
As I like to remind this sinful nation, I suffer from PTSD from my exposure to British sexual norms since moving here at the tender age of 18 from a pious Greek home. My parents were very relaxed about dating; my mom always encouraged me to have as many boyfriends as I liked (she was delusional about my sexual prowess from a young age). Still, as a family, we are very tame and unambitious in our hedonism, limiting our indulgencies to the culinary domain. I am a storyteller and future cult leader, so I am more adventurous and open-minded than the rest of my family, but even if I am walking into a sex club head-to-toe clad in PVC, I am still clutching my pearls.
Prologue
I freak out with the ease with which people kiss and tell in politics. On election night, I was approached by a man who I had never met before but who I knew because we go on the same TV channels. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting me and completely unprompted, he said he ‘shagged’ (I loathe this word, but it is what he used), a woman we both know and occasionally work with. The woman in question is successful and attractive, with about x10 the mating value of the man using and abusing his interactions with her for clout.
By the way, readers, the only man in Westminster who has seen me naked (salivating over my Mediteranean bikini pics on Instagram doesn’t count you Anglo-Saxon freaks!!1!!1) was 6’2”, blonde with blue eyes, a six-pack, a degree from Cambridge and a title as vain as an old boy on his third bag. So if any SW1 ogre ever commits the ultimate sin of exaggerating their experience in the Department of Hellenic Affairs unless they look like a chiselled cherub, please refer them to HR (me) to dispense their punishment (I will #MeToo the bastards like it’s 2020 and Hilary is still running).
Act 1
Anna Karenina opens with the betrayal of a loyal, loving wife, who is replaced by her children's young, pretty governess. Tolstoy tells us the husband, Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, convinced himself that the wife, deep inside, knew what was happening and was happy with the arrangement, as she was getting what she wanted (children, intact home, respectability, resources), and he was getting what he wanted (sexual variety and a younger woman).
I am dangerously susceptible to flattery. Smarmyness repels most people, but it draws me in like a moth with a deathwish to the fire. In my line of work, this makes me a liability.
I started writing in Zest a little over a year ago, and it was a slow burn. My first subscriber was a guy I met one night at a ball and drunkenly followed on Instagram because he had the kind of face, voice, and mannerism that sends electricity through neurons of my brain that most men tuck into bed for a nap.
At the time, I was considering whether to date another guy with the same first name as this one. Whenever I wrote a new post on my substack, his name would pop in my notifications with a sweet, complimenting message, and I would smile, thinking it was the guy courting me. It never was. I asked him what he thought of my writing, and he huffed and puffed and said he hadn’t read any of it because it was not his style. He bought me a WH Auden essay book for my birthday to help me write better.
A little-known secret on Substack is that you can see who has read each post. The other guy, let’s call him Smarmy, has read every single one of my posts. He quotes me back to me. I parked the guy who doesn’t know how to fake a compliment in the friend zone.
Act 2
I am at Tory party conference (for work, though we all know how I get my pleasure) in Manchester and have been cancelled by a bunch of toffs because I wrote in my substack that one of their own is autistic (truth to power etc.). Enjoying the masochistic pain of being crucified in the (Sloane) square of public opinion, I feel greedy. I prepare my sympathy fishing net and reach out to Mr Smarmy Pants to tell him how the rich people have wronged me. How dare they, he says. Your writing is wonderful; I would be honoured to be written about in your blog, Stella.
In the main lobby, all the lobbyists, hacks, and leftover staffers mingle till the early hours, queuing for warm wine, begging for a ciggie, exchanging tattle. I spot our friend and observe a side of him I had never noticed before. It is his unthinkingly cruel side that I am certain, like Stepan in Anna Karenina, he thinks is benign, kind even. He is speaking to a woman with physical attributes that the dating market reserves its most sinister punishments for. He introduces her to me awkwardly (you can tell he is used to speaking to us behind a screen and has no player mode to handle both simultaneously in person).
At 21, I cried watching a TV show called Blind Dates, where strangers are paired for a date with hidden cameras and later share their experiences with the viewers. The show casts all sorts of people: some were popular, successful, and attractive, while others were less fortunate, marginalised, or bruised by life. The beautiful people's stories left me untouched—they had been on dates before and had relationships. I was obsessed with the stories of the unattractive ones. Nobody had told them they were beautiful before; for some, it was their first date ever.
I have a sinking feeling as I watch this woman unilaterally raise her hopes. She’s never been spoken to softly before. She’s probably never had a boyfriend, let alone a lovely one, so she has no idea what clues to look for. She works in a sector that makes her a useful contact for our smarmy prince. And I am not suggesting that there isn’t charity in the manufactured tenderness with which I sense he treats her. Still, he can’t see two steps ahead when she realises there is nothing there. She has to suffer the indignity of realising she was embarrassing herself, seeing him with other women perhaps or having her most vulnerable texts that cross the line go unanswered.
Act 3
Our heroine has resumed drinking and has stopped counting calories. Labour has won the elections and Westminster summer party season is well and truly upon us. She takes her red canvassing dress to Tufton street to pay her respects to the fallen soldiers of the revolution and reassure them they serve badoit in the gulags.
Within the first hour, she is assaulted by Westminster’s relentless rumour mill. This hack was sleeping with that staffer but cheated on her with an editor twice his age. The 12th affair broke the camel’s back for that power couple.
As chilled bubbles make space for leftover warm wine and the hors d'oeuvres work overtime to keep her sobriety levels acceptable for an early morning media grift shift, a small 21-year-old girl jumps out of the darkness. She knows the Greek Gobbess from fascist TV. She says she admires her. Loves her accent. But also knows our heroine knows this guy, he is a bit smarmy. How does the small girl know she knows him? Oh, he mentioned her at a party; a bunch of them were talking about her- only positive things, don’t worry.
She worries. Give her dates, names and exact adjectives.
This guy dated this small girl’s friend, but now she has moved on to another man and told the small girl she can have him. So the small girl wants to know if our heroine thinks it is a good idea to date the man who clicked subscribe on her blog before her best friend, who quotes her words back to her.
Is he a nice guy Stella?
Is he a nice guy Stella?
Is he a nice guy Stella?
It is handy wearing a red dress, no one can see the blood gushing when your heart breaks.
The drunk youth continued, undeterred by the fact that our yapping Queen was for once left speechless. You are so beautiful, why aren’t you married!!1! Damn, our heroine’s mother’s campaign is getting sophisticated. She wondered how much she paid this girl to remind her she is *checks notes* still younger than her mom was when she married her dad.
Stella, is he shaggy? I just want a nice boy, that’s all I want.
Focus on your career, that’s my advice.
Your career rewards effort. Men punish it.
Epilogue
When I was 21, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I would date like a psychopath, obsessively looking for men who were doing the jobs I wanted. I would flock to Tinder like a Tory SpAd flocks to LinkedIn in the Spring. I would show up to dates with copies of my CV and make the men edit my cover letter. I would waterboard their career secrets if I had to. Whatever else I did with them was secondary to my primary aim, becoming them.
My therapist used to play this trick with me whenever I was mad at a man. She would prompt me to offload my complaints about him: He is arrogant, vain, obsessed with himself, in love with his career, addicted to his image and the attention it gets him, etc. Then, she would ask me to repeat the same sentences in the first person.
I am arrogant, vain, and obsessed with myself. I am in love with my career and addicted to my image and the attention it gets me.
The trick is that it also works on the positives.
He is talented, hard-working, disciplined, passionate, ambitious, eloquent, popular, confident, and witty.
Most of us are little narcs. We are in love with our own image. We crave from others what we desire to see in our selves.
The older, more successful men I dated in my early 20s have mostly not aged well. Most of them either had a nervous breakdown or caused one to the women they trapped in their webs.
It is rare for two people in a couple to be obsessed with their legacy. Many women seem not to be, and that’s fine, but you have to be strict and honest with yourself early on if it is important to you. Well-behaved women never made history, goes the saying, but neither do weak women who depend on their boyfriend’s success to bolster their own identities.
You don’t have to be Boris’s wife or any of his mistresses. Thatcher and May had husbands, too.
Afterword
Before writing, my first Art was painting. In high school, to get over a crush, I’d paint them. I’d lift a photo off their Myspace or Facebook profile and study it meticulously. I could then spend whole days and evenings locked in my room with a bottle of wine my non-drinking dad would buy specifically for me, so that I get used to drinking at home before I try it outside, and with great care, love and tenderness paint the boys that lived in my dreams rent-free. By the time I was done, my libidinal energy would be transferred to my art. By painting them, I’d externalise my infatuation and make them mine. I wouldn’t need the real person anymore; I had captured the fantasy.
I get triggered when people talk about Boris, his personality and love life. I have never met him in person, but from the gossip and the rumours and the way he speaks and writes, I recognise the type viscerally. It is the type of man I inevitably attract and the type I am infuriatingly, inexorably, attracted to. Mercifully, I don’t have the mental disability that makes women attracted to men their dads or grandad’s age- I do not make a moral criticism, but it is an impediment, practically speaking, that makes leading a white picket fence, 2,5 kids life harder.
The type I am talking about is not the posh twat, though, as we have extensively covered in this blog, that demographic looms large in my past. I am talking about men who are ambitious, intelligent, extroverted, energetic, with addictive personalities that make them love variety and chasing shiny things. Reddit calls them narcissists. I call them my evil male versions.
Over the years, I have been listening with horror to the stories of the poor women who marry these men. The humiliation they have to suffer as these men cheat and lie their way to sacrificing the peace of mind of everyone around them for the sake of their momentary pleasure and ego boost.
On reflection, how is what these men do any different than what I and these other younger women do? We all use our attributes as cheat codes, we all get drunk on attention.
Despite my social circle's best efforts to educate me on men’s selfish ways, I keep my innocence and hope alive like a child pushing a beached jellyfish back into the water, knowing fully well it will stink me again.
It is almost painful reading this, because it sounds like someone who does not know kinks exist, and tries to chase kinks in a subconscious, unconscious way. Briefly, you are a sub. And that is fine. Cuckquean and a bunch of other kinks. It is even fashionable these days. You can figure out submissive fantasies, there are plenty of books about this such as Screw The Rose, Give Me The Thorns. From that, you can figure out an outline to a scene. And here is the kicker, it is basically method acting, a guy can be mellow and loving outside the scene and acting the role of a dominant asshole inside.
Your basic problem is that you confuse kink with personality, that is, you think someone's whole personality must be dominant in order for things to be exciting, when in reality that can be just negotiated and acted for a scene.
Kink is the realization that we are not so much attracted to people as such, but to actions. Actions that can be very formally negotiated and acted out. Instead you are chasing it in a roundabout informal way, trying to find people whose personality is just so that it results in actions that happens to tickle your kinks.
Needless to say, those people will screw you over all kinds of ways.
Why a country with great universities and science goes nowhere. In a post.