The good thing about coming of age as Clown World truly blossomed into something spectacularly insidious is that it forced me to come to terms with and critically examine my priors, these unassailable shibboleths that proved to be more and more artificial by the day. I have since learned that the foundation of the post-World War II world rests on something rather brown and smelly. What follows is a discussion about one of these topics, one that I know will get your attention: sex.
With a little rock n’ roll thrown in.
Let me take you back to a time, a more innocent time . . .
Scratch that. Let me take you back to the 1990s. This was not an innocent time, as I’ve chronicled here before. This was a time that appears to be innocent relative to the absolute state of dysfunction we are living in now. But the cultural rot was there, and the 90s were the time when if finally started to bear fruit. I have some hypotheses for why this was the case:
The end of the Cold War made everybody realize how tired they were of thinking nuclear annihilation lay around every corner. The old Cold Warriors who had been running the country now seemed passé, relics of a bygone era that nobody needed around anymore.
The end of the Cold War also produced massive, civilization-altering levels of optimism, which made it difficult to conceptualize the merest scintilla of the possibility that we all could die at any moment when some vodka-soaked borscht-eater decided now was the time to blow the capitalist pigdogs to smithereens.
Those stodgy old Cold Warriors were seen as obsolete men of the fifties, that gray decade which for decades had been intellectual-shorthand for bad, oppressive, and boring.
The victory of capitalism and liberal democracy led to a total mindset shift surrounding personal behavior vis-a-vis economics. I’m speaking about among normal people, of course. Those political activists always had deeper theoretical underpinnings to their stated aims of radically transforming American society in their own image.
In light of this, it’s no wonder more libertarian, that is libertine, attitudes around things like sex and drugs became more popular.
This is the milieu we found ourselves in after Mr. Yeltsin tore down the wall, or something.
I hope I didn’t lose you, but I might lose you now. Because I am going to name-drop two people you might hate: Tucker Carlson and Mike Cernovich. I’m not going to get into the relative merits of each man. I’ll post the interview and let you be the judge, but even if you hate someone, they can make a good point. And Cernovich made a great one about how the trashy, sex-drenched 90s culture was essentially a nationwide grooming operation aimed at kids.
You might disagree. “It’s just sex,” you might say. “Everybody does it. Kids are gonna do it anyway so you might as well teach them about it. Don’t be such a prude. Being shy about sex leads to all sorts of mental problems.”1 And so on. Yes, these were actual arguments used in favor of teaching third-graders how to masturbate.
I’m not joking! When I was in the third-grade, a schoolmate’s mother, who was a hippie-type and big-time Democrat party activist, came into our class and delivered a lesson about sex, reproduction, STDs, and how normal and healthy it was to whack it. They also later got the town to foot the bill for a place called The Whole Village Family and Resource Center, but we all knew it as The Place for Kids to Get Free Condoms and Rides to Abortion Clinics.
Why?
Why indeed.
Faith No More’s 1989 single “Epic” from their breakthrough album The Real Thing launched the band into the stratosphere. In it, the group melds funk, rap, goth, and heavy metal into an intoxicating blend that inadvertently spawned a genre2 and made them superstars. Leave aside that the band would quickly abandon this sound by their 1992 follow-up, Angel Dust, an easy top-10 1990s album of all time. This would result in a concomitant fading of the band’s commercial prospects, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much at the time.
The song is known for its chorus: “It’s it! What is it?” I’m tempted to say that “it” is legendary San Francisco-based ice cream snack It’s-It, a theory that gains credence when one learns that the members of Faith No More are also originally from the San Francisco area, but alas, this is not the case.
Lead singer and lyricist Mike Patton, who legend says had just replaced original frontman Chuck Mosley two weeks prior to having to write and record lyrics for The Real Thing before its release, has had this to say about “Epic”’s enigmatic lyrics:3
It was about sexual frustration. Sex and lack of sex. [masturbation] Most people just don't like to admit it, I'm here to tell ya, I love it. That’s kinda of what “Epic” is really about.
- Mike Patton 1990
“Epic” is sort of a warped sexual state of mind. It deals with more material and physical things like sex. The song kind of teases you. But it’s frustrated at the same time because the song want's it too. But at the same time it knows that it can’t have it.
- Mike Patton 1989
The song at least had the common decency to couch its meaning behind layers of abstraction that are open to many levels of interpretation. That’s more than can be said about many other songs. I mean, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had always been horny sex fiends, and their breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magick (1991) lured people in with singles like “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away,” and then hit them with songs like “Sir Psycho Sexy” which had lyrics I’m not going to reproduce here. Yes, sex songs have a long and grand tradition from Mozart (“Leck mich im Arsch”) to Lucille Bogan (“Shave ‘Em Dry”) to Frank Zappa (“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,”4 among others). But society typically wanted to keep these away from kids. My brother and I owned Blood Sugar Sex Magick back in the day. What did we know?
Back to Patton. Check out this still from the “Epic” video.
That t-shirt is for a band called Mr. Bungle, and says “There’s a tractor in my balls . . . again,” which gives you a hint of the level of discourse Mr. Bungle operated at at that time. Mr. Bungle was also Patton’s first band, what he actually viewed as his main band, and a group he used his influence as singer of Faith No More to get signed to Warner Bros. More on Mr. Bungle later, but I leave you with the fact that their name came from both a character on Pee-wee’s Playhouse and a porno.
The late 90s and early 2000s sort of blend together for me. By 1997, the culture had been fully frozen in the state we see it now, a proto-woke era where it wasn’t yet déclassé to be a straight white male, and those in charge of governments and media companies and schools (often the same people) were still mostly squeamish about exposing young children to sexual content.
High school was wild, man. I mean, there was a clothing brand called, I kid you now, Porn Star, and kids would wear the t-shirts and have stickers on their notebooks and lockers and stuff. I am not making this up.
Why? Why did everyone glorify people who performed sex acts on camera? Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson were seen as heroes to emulate. Why? Why were there multiple kids at my high school who made sex tapes? Why did everyone know who Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson were? Why did music videos routinely feature actual adult film performers? Why were kids told all about sex acts by people who were really interested in making sure we knew all about the various things that could be stuffed into other things? Why was the word “pimp” suddenly being used in everyday parlance? Why, on the 7th grade trip to a water park, did a bunch of girls from another school take naked pictures of themselves in the shower and try to give them to boys in our school? Why was the Internet used primarily as a vector for disseminating pornographic material to the masses, often for free?
Many questions. Few satisfactory answers. But know that the 90s was when this all metastasized.
The ideas predated the decade of Clinton. Back in the 1930s, author Aldous Huxley in Brave New World posited a future where children were engaged to engage in “erotic play” while young, and sexual promiscuity was promoted at the expense of sexual monogamy as a means for the government to disassociate sex from loyalty and family, family along with religious faith being effective bulwarks against the power of an intrusive state.
He let out an amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
This and mass-consumerism were used to keep the population docile. Brave New World is fiction, I swear to God, though Vladimir Lenin agreed with the sad part, not so much mass-consumerism, because in Soviet Union, you don’t consume; government consumes you!
He wasn’t the only one. Sexual “liberation” (from what?) was a cornerstone of all radical leftist movements, from the Black Power movement to the anti-war movement. And porn was a piece of it.
Pornography, like many vices, dulls the senses. In particular, it dulls the nous, our sense of the spiritual, the numinous. It is hard to think about God when you’re jacking off, after all.
“These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved forever” (2 Peter 2:17).
The apostle calls impure men wells without water—those who walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise government. Presumptuous are they, self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities . . . But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not (2 Peter 2:10, 12). O waterless wells, adorned on all sides but nonetheless waterless, why are you called “wells,” when nothing comes out of you but thirst? O you mere clouds and mist, why do you proudly inflate yourselves as though you would flood the entire world, when there is not even one drop of water in you—and when a breath of the Spirit of God will destroy and disperse you into nothing in one terrible moment? You care nothing for purity, and so you roll around in fleshly impurity; neither do you care about order, and so you detest authority; neither do you care about honor, and so you are shameless; neither do you care about God’s will, and so you are self-willed; neither do you care about the knowledge of truth, and so you criticize that which you have never labored to understand. The mist of darkness is reserved forever for you. That is not God’s will, but your own will. God did not ordain that road for you; you yourself chose it. God is just and will not be sinned against, but will render unto all according to their sins, and according to their unrepentant hearts.
What, brethren, are the fleshly desires of those who are wells without water and dry clouds and mist? What fruit comes from them but thistles and thorns that need no rain? Men with fleshly desires are no better than their desires, and they are blind because of them, and will be judged according to them.
- Saint Nikolai Velimirovic
Pornography, contra mainstream American thought and libertarian bleatings, is not a harmless victimless crime. It is harmful to the individual, which then redounds onto society at large, considering that society is made up of individuals who have an effect on society, something libertarians are frustratingly unable to grasp, but I digress. There are a litany of dangers related to pornography, which I’m sure you’re aware of, but some that stick out to me are the sexual dysfunction that can make it difficult for mostly males to find spouses with which to effectively reproduce and start families.
Sinister stuff! But yes, let’s make porn free and protect it to the fullest extent of the first amendment. And let’s teach kids about this shit. America!
If “Epic” hid the ball about its true meaning, there’s another Patton-penned song that most certainly does not. Tucked away near the end of Mr. Bungle’s self-titled 1991 debut is a charming little ditty called “The Girls of Porn.” Yes, it’s a disgusting song. No, shockingly, it’s not a celebration of the adult film industry.
I’m going to post the video and share some of the lyrics. It’s not for the fainthearted, so please do consider this a warning. In a change from how I usually do things, I’m going to censor the worst of the lyrical content. You’ll get the gist of it. Trust me.
From the intro which tellingly invites people to “[w]in a chance to butt-b*ng your daughter’s tight virgin, cherry a** to caller number six! Six! Six!” to the depraved litany of X-rated content that was available in 1991, forget today, it’s clear that Patton, an atheist, has at least an instinctual understanding of where this stuff is coming from:
The urge is too much to take (take)
All I can think about is playing with myself
It's time to m*******te
I've got my Hustler and I don’t need nothin’ else
This is sad stuff. These are the words of a man in the throes of a deep addiction, which is possible; I mean, he is one weird, disturbed individual, but not weird in a cool way. While I like the music he makes and enjoy his amazing voice—dude is no joke one of the best rock singers ever—I wouldn’t trust him near my children.
Anyway, Patton accidentally got the nature of pornbrain correct. Atop a porn-flecked funk riff and sleazy saxophone, the man can’t think of anything but self-abuse. No time for the higher things in life, the girls of porn are waiting:
My hand gets tired and my d*** gets sore
But the girls of porn want more
So I flip through the pages one more time
And I just let the j*** fly
Yeah, yeah, yeah. . .
Ain’t got no woman next to me
I just got this magazine
And what’s on the TV screen
But that’s okay with me
My hand gets tired and my d*** gets sore
But the girls of porn want more
So I flip through the pages one more time
And I just let the j*** fly
(Mr. Bungle)
Yeah, yeah, yeahI was trained to f*** you baby
I, I, I, I was trained to f*** you baby
I, I was trained to f*** you baby
I, I, I, I was trained to f*** you baby
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah!
The coda is the crux of the matter: this stuff is designed to rewire our brains, and the younger the brains, the better. “I was trained to f*** you, baby” is absolutely the point.
You see, like many vices—and again, libertarians, I’m begging you, understand that vices are bad and should not be legal and celebrated—porn makes people, particularly men, docile. Coomers don’t march. Neither do stoners or drunks . . . unless you try to put legal restrictions on their vices of choice. But regarding important matters, nah. “As long as I can toke up and spank it,” they say, “what is there to complain about?”
Note: The members of Mr. Bungle grew to together in rural Northern California. We all, boys especially, do and say dumb stuff when we’re teenagers. Mr. Bungle began as a thrash metal band before becoming a weird metal/Zappa hybrid. Their first album is in this vein, but by 1995’s Disco Volante they ditched the potty humor and went full-bore into their avant garde side, while 1999’s swan song California is a survey of 1960s American pop music put through Mr. Bungle’s filter. They still exist as a band playing their pre-record deal thrash stuff with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo replacing original Mr. Bungle Danny Heifetz (no fooling, he is the grandson of violinist Jascha Heifetz) and Anthrax’s Scott Ian providing a second guitar. Other notable members are bassist Trevor Dunn who has also played with the Melvins and other Mike Patton-led projects, saxophonist Clint McKinnon who is not with this incarnation of the band, and guitarist Trey Spruance who was not only in Faith No More for an album5 but later in life became, I kid you not, an Orthodox Christian. The last original Mr. Bungle member, saxophonist Theo Lengyel, who murdered his girlfriend in 2023.
Is it as simple as, per Auron MacInture of
’s famous sign, them just wanting to diddle your kids? I don’t think so, only in that I don’t think all of “they,” whoever “they” are, want to necessarily be the ones doing the diddling, as long as kids are diddled. Whatever dark energy gets released when innocents are defiled is certainly one motivating factor for all of this.These are adults who have a very bizarre interest in ensuring that kids are as sexualized as possible, all before they’re at the age mentally and emotionally where they can handle sex. Even worse, this is a deliberate effort to damage kids’ so much that sex and sexuality get completely divorced from the spiritual dimension, a place it absolutely belongs.
Nearly every aspect of modern life is designed to separate you from God. It has cast anyone who does not want kids to have sex as un-fun prudes who hate love and are trying to constrain human nature.
Well, yeah, a big part of civilization is trying to constrain human nature. But I digress.
Constant overstimulation dulls the physical and emotional senses. Sex becomes divorced from anything resembling anything more than just another bodily function, which was how the Romans viewed the act, at least for men. They even had the same word for urinate that they did for ejaculate. It was no different than taking a dump or something, and anyone would do, man, woman, or child.
Do you want to return (“RETVRN”) to this world? Because we’re going there.
Somehow, the powers that be have succeeded in making those who want to abide by and enforce the sexual mores that existed for thousands of years seem like the kooks. But remember, its freaks like this who are calling you weird:
It’s not just about children though. It’s about adults too. Docile men unable to interact with women normally because of this sort of perversion, this sexual content which is utterly devoid of actual sexiness. Women turned off by these men and wanting to have nothing to do with them. It’s another wedge, another vector of control.
We wuz groomed, my fellow children of the 90s. We were “trained to f***” at a very young age. Maybe it wasn’t full-blown erotic play, but being taught about safe sex, masturbation, and homosexuality in the third grade in a public school was certainly an experience I’ll never forget, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.
They don’t want you forming strong, stable families, because strong, stable families loyal to each other—or even worse, loyal to God—are a threat to state power. It’s sinister, yes, but it’s also just so prurient.
Little kids joking about STDs to each other; I mean, kids are going to pick up on things like this and laugh about it, but why were we told about herpes and stuff like that, if not to encourage us to “experiment” (oh, how I hate that word) with sex at a very young age?
Creepy. Creepy and evil. Any adult who wants to talk to little kids about sex is a pervert and a groomer—and I don’t care how tainted that word has become—and in a functioning society would be shown the inside of a jail cell, if not a rope, after being on the receiving end of a severe beating.
There was little innocent about the 90s. Don’t romanticize them.
- Alexander
Thank you for sticking to the end of a rather difficult post to read. It was difficult for me to write as well. I don’t want to be discussing this topic but it’s hard not to see how everything in our dyscivic and dysgenic society is connected. If you like my writing, please share and subscribe, and check out my books on Amazon, and toss a few drachmas into the tip jar over at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you and God bless.
As if our hyper-sexualized culture is the picture of good mental health!
Rap-rock or funk-metal, whatever you want to call it, which we can forgive Faith No More for, since this was pretty much their only rap-rock/funk-metal song. Quoth Patton in 2010:
Of course I knew straight away it would be a fucking hit! I already had a down payment on the Bentley and the bachelor pad in Paso Robles! However, I realized it wasn't an international smash when my speed dealer wouldn't even let me score on credit. Did “Epic” spawn rap metal? Even it if it did, I wouldn’t tell you. The again, the rest of the world seems to feel that way, so I suppose apologies are in order. OK, I'M SORRY!
Can you feel it, see it, hear it today?
If you can’t, then it doesn’t matter anyway
You will never understand it, ‘cause it happens too fast
And it feels so good, it’s like walking on glass
It’s so cool, it’s so hip, it’s alright
It’s so groovy, it’s outta sight
You can touch it, smell it, taste it, so sweet
But it makes no difference ,cause it knocks you off your feet, sayYou want it all, but you can’t have it
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)It's cryin’, bleedin’, lyin’ on the floor
So you lay down on it and you do it some more
You’ve got to share it, so you dare it
Then you bare it and you tear itYou want it all, but you can’t have it (yeah, yeah, yeah)
It’s in your face but you can’t grab it (yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s alive, afraid, a lie, a sin
It’s magic, it’s tragic, it’s a loss, it’s a win
It’s dark, it’s moist, it’s a bitter pain
It’s sad, it happened, and it’s a shameYou want it all, but you can’t have it (yeah, yeah, yeah)
It’s in your face, but you can’t grab it (yeah, yeah, yeah)What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s itWhat is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?You want it all, but you can’t have it (yeah, yeah, yeah)
It’s in your face, but you can’t grab it (yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
What is it?
It’s it
(Yeah, yeah, yeah)It’s it
At least some of Zappa’s sex songs had broader socio-political points. “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” for example, is about how our lawmakers who pass legislation telling us we can’t do certain things are often creepy sex perverts who want to diddle kids, which is rich coming from a committed sex pervert and overall sexually immoral guy like Zappa. In any event, the kiddie-diddling aspect of ruling-class behavior never changes.
1995’s excellent, challenging King for a Day . . . Fool for a Lifetime.
Excellent work. Sexual liberation is spiritual slavery. We are reduced to lower than the status of animals even, as animals for the most part have sex solely for procreation. It's all part of a multi-pronged depersonalization and dehumanization campaign, in part organized and in part a product of chaotic convergence of different interests. And maybe the blackest and most ironic part is that sex for its own sex leads to the obliteration of sex itself, the submersion of the essential person in a fluid medium of desexualized/ androgynous identity markers.
"Let me take you back to the 1990s. This was not an innocent time..."
That's the big lie that gets pushed.
Remember: THERE ARE NO INNOCENT TIMES. There never have been.
Generations look back to their childhoods (10 to 20 years) and often long to recapture something that they believe is lost. "Happy Days" was a TV show about the 50s that appealed to viewers in the 70s. The "Me Generation of the 80s" (the Boomers) pushed harkening back to the 60s as a lost paradise.
It's fine to look back and remember good times, but you cannot pull them forward to live in them.
There is no way out but through.
Blazing trails is hard, so roll up your sleeves, and "get gud" at what you are good at doing.
"Suck it up and get yourself right with God" is the best advice for anyone, at any time.