An Article About a Book About Porn, Pt. 2

On jumbled prose, non-evidence and alternative explanations

This is part 2 of a review series taking a look at Sadly, Porn by Edward Teach, a writer formerly (and by most, currently) known as The Last Psychiatrist. To read part 1, go here.

Note that this review defies best practices; I’m writing it at page 250 of 1100 pages or so. Part 3 will deal with the rest of the book, should there be any differences.

Where we left off in the previous article I was talking about the prose style of the book, particularly how it relates to finding and interpreting the information in its pages. But for The Last Psychiatrist, the journey of a single sentence’s worth of meaning starts with several thousand words; he is not concerned with such banal concepts as comprehensibility or efficiency. So where he tries to assert that he’s writing in a simple, stripped down style, you get this:

I have not ornamented or stuffed this work with bombastic foot-and-a-half long words, superfluous ornamentation, or any other stylistic graces that might make the rhetoric more pleasing.

If that seems like it might be an attempt at some sort of n-th dimensional chess literary joke where he emphasizes his writing isn’t incredibly complex while simultaneously making it so, that’s possible. As mentioned in the last article, the sheer fuzziness of his writing leaves a lot of stuff up to reader interpretation. But that doesn’t change the fact that all his prose is like this, or worse: to misquote Mark Twain, expect to wade into the ocean of the first quarter of this book and emerge months later in Europe, covered in seaweed and holding a quarter of an actual point.

Once you get past the incredible, convoluted wordiness of the work, the next thing you’d probably note is that TLP does not argue; he asserts. He will make some claim about how people think; this is presented as a fact, no argument needed. There are times where he either feels a point is particularly valid or else knows a particular point is particularly badly supported where he will call you stupid or dishonest for not taking it as true just because he said it. Note here, where he calls you a liar for not agreeing with him on an out-on-a-limb claim about the death of your imagination he has not actually made yet:

I would be wrong to pretend like I don’t call people liars when I do that fairly often; a couple of my articles are dedicated to that purpose. But when I do it’s usually because I think they are lying and would like them to stop, or at least let other people know about what I think is dishonesty. I’m probably not always right, but I can assure you I always at least think I am, that I’m trying to actually disapprove of actual lies whether I’m perfect at it or not.

TLP calls you a liar because he’s trying to make it more likely you will agree with him. Where he’s successful with the tactic, he either pre-emptively daunts you into accepting what he’s saying, or he gets you to say “that’s aimed at the other more foolish readers” and agree with him because it makes you feel better than them. The fact that nobody has actually disagreed with him yet makes no difference - he manufactures something for the reader to say, declares it a lie, and calls them liars because fictional-them said it.

Asserting something is true is not necessarily bad, and often neither is pointing out dishonesty. But when someone does either, it’s usually fair to expect they have some level of argument showing that their position is reasonable. TLP does offer a lot of what you could call support for his points; that’s what the bulk of the book is. But the kind of support he offers is mostly in the form of off-beat, tenuous interpretations of pop culture. For example, he brings up this kinda-ancient-now chain email riddle:

Are you a psychopath? Answer this question!

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, the man of her dreams, and she fell in love with him immediately. However, she never asked for his name or number and afterward could not find anyone who knew who he was.

A few days later the girl killed her own sister.

Question: Why did she kill her sister?

The traditional answer to this riddle is that she wanted to have another funeral the man might be likely to show up to; as a psychopath-as-understood-by-laymen, killing her sister was the most direct path. TLP says no, that’s wrong; she needed the man so she could have an excuse to kill her sister; she wanted to kill her sister, but couldn’t admit it. Psychopaths are super-direct, he says, so it doesn’t make sense she wouldn’t have asked his name if she wanted it. And nobody falls in love at first sight. The only explanation, TLP says, is she wanted an excuse to kill her sister.

Note that the chain-letter-psychopath test is almost universally agreed to be a valid test for exactly nothing; it’s something someone threw together apparently for the express purpose of being in a chain letter. It’s not based on a true story or anything; it’s a little toy example written for the purpose of being an amusing little toy example. It’s a weird thing to use as an example in the first place; trying to draw great truths out of it is like trying to learn anatomy from a stick figure.

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m reliably informed that later in the book he claims that the giving tree is about power-plays because in actual, real-life woodworking apple wood is sub-par in most of the applications shown.

It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is almost without exception how TLP backs up his claims; he finds a piece of fiction, goes way out on a limb with an unusual interpretation of the work, declares this interpretation of the work that only he holds the only possible correct read, and then indirectly asserts that this stands as support for another bald assertion he made somewhere else.

Where he isn’t using off-the-beaten-path interpretations of fiction, TLP finds a couple real-life accounts of psychiatrists psychoanalyzing their patients to use. But neither account supports his case very well until you realize another weird thing: both accounts have to do with dream interpretation, which TLP has an almost religious belief in.

It’s like reading a book on how to take care of your heart, then finding out halfway through that the doctor writing it is a big proponent of blood-letting; it’s a jarring anachronism that TLP treats as simply intuitively true and universally accepted.

If this magic ability to dream the correct things to trick psychologists seems like it would shut down not only TLP’s faith in it as a tool but the whole concept of dream analysis itself, worry not; he has a quick-fix for this. He has just as strong a belief in his ability to detect these defensive alterations to the dreams and then adjust for them by (I am not shitting you) asking his patient to do some free association. He has unqualified confidence in this, like a person who thinks hypnotists can completely control a person, but don’t rule the world out of the kindness of their own hearts.

I know this section is getting really long. It’s almost done.

So we have this situation where a guy is making a bunch of bare assertions, and backing them up with a bunch of off-the-wall interpretations of various things, with no real-world examples except those that are based on pseudo-science that basically nobody takes seriously and that he still has to use wildly heterodox interpretations of to support his point.

But there’s so many words here - so much unnecessary text that’s so very, very hard to read - that it’s only after you fight and strive and eventually get to the point where he finally half-states the claim he’s going for that you realize that’s what he’s doing. And even that only happens if you remember to look back with a critical eye on what you’ve just read. And then you are surprised to find there was no substance, no actual argument. Like the sense of relief that he finally got to his point, the surprise is important; remember it.

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At this point, it seems like I’m coming out very strongly in saying TLP’s conclusions are wrong - that he’s wrong about porn, wrong about people, and that this wrongness bothers me enough to complain about it. That’s not the case; his object-level claims might very well be true. My biases are actually sympathetic to some or all of them; even if I don’t care very much about porn in general, my social and cultural alignments are such that I wouldn’t instinctually hate a book that considers it to have a large net-negative effect, or is symbolic of/connected to something that does.

Instead, I’m worried that people will end up believing what he’s saying - right or wrong - without justification. I’m 250 pages in and TLP has made huge claims about the nature of porn and psychology; those claims are complex and non-intuitive. Where simple explanations like “people enjoy porn because it’s a strong stimulus to sexuality instincts the same way ice cream is a strong, cheap stimulus to hunger, with some of the same implications to one’s health” exist as alternatives, he blows past them with little or no mention. The big problem isn’t that he’s wrong, it’s that he offers no substantial evidence he’s right, and expects you to believe him anyway.

There’s a trick often attributed to old-fashioned car salesmen where they wait as long as possible before giving you their bottom line on the car you are trying to buy; in addition to you already thinking of the car as something you want to get, it sets up the time you’ve already committed to the process as something you don’t want to waste. The theory is that this makes you more likely to buy the car overall; you will accept a worse deal than you otherwise would to avoid a situation where the effort you spent ends up failing to produce results.

I think there’s the risk of a similar effect here. Remember earlier when I told you to keep in mind the sense of relief that comes with finally sussing out an author’s claim hidden in 250 pages of unsupported near-nonsense? When you read TLP, he’s so reluctant to actually make clear what he’s arguing that there’s a legitimate sense of accomplishment once you finally get even a fuzzy idea of what he’s getting at. And this sense of relief mimics to a surprising degree the same kind of reward you’d get from actually assessing an actual argument.

To put it another way: by the time you are proud of yourself for figuring out TLP’s actual thesis, it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t actually supported it in any way; you haven’t learned anything, but it feels like you have. Remember when I said I was surprised, looking back, to find he hadn’t actually offered a shred of evidence for his claim? That’s was real; if you forgot to look back, you’d walk away thinking he had actually proved something.

To put it yet another way: if at page 250 you are convinced he’s right, it’s not because he’s made any stunning logical arguments (he hasn’t) or that he’s presented you with any great evidence (he hasn’t). You’d have to grapple with the idea that you believe it either because you believe things that are written in a certain prose style, or are sufficiently long. I think for most people it’s not hard to see why both of those are bad ways to make decisions on the validity of claims; the reaction you should have here isn’t “I’ll go on believing this” but instead “how can I inoculate myself against this technique?”

I’m presenting this as something like rhetorical trickery; he hasn’t done the work you should expect before you to conclude he’s right but wants you to anyway. But there’s other possibilities. I have a friend who has read about as much of the book as I have; in his read, the book is sort of a double-bluff in its entirety. He points out that elsewhere TLP would be really rough with people asking about narcissism:

"But I want to change, I want to get better."

Narcissism says: I, me.  Never you, them.

No one ever asks me, ever, "I think I'm a narcissist, and I'm worried I'm hurting my family."  No one ever asks me, "I think I'm too controlling, I'm trying to subtly manipulate my girlfriend not to notice other people's qualities."  No one ever, ever, ever asks me, "I am often consumed by irrational rage, I am unable to feel guilt, only shame, and when I am caught, found out, exposed, I try to break down those around me so they feel worse than I do, so they are too miserable to look down on me."

If that was what they asked, I would tell them them change is within grasp.  But…

"I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."

Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness.  Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids?  Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things?  Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar? 

My friend says (I think; disclaimer that I’m relating my understanding of his argument) that TLP would often take this tactic, basically telling people to screw off and go fix themselves already if it was that important to them. Based on this, he guesses that TLP might be working under an assumption that you already know what to do and that you go to books like his to feel like you’ve done something without actually doing anything. TLP’s work differs in that the average person reading it will probably go “well, that was no help at all” and maybe go on to do what they already knew they should have. Basically, the book might be a decoy; it keeps you away from feeling like you’ve accomplished something when you haven’t so you can feel like you’ve accomplished something when you have (Edited to add: friend says he would have ended the previous sentence with the addition of “and his scorn might sting you to action”.)

That feels like a stretch to me, but it’s possible; as I’ve said before, actually arguing about the book in a constructive way would mean hours of pulling quotes and perhaps millennia of debate aimed at trying to squeeze precision out of aimless rambling.

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Both this article and the last on the subject were originally supposed to be one review article summarizing the book and letting you know if you should buy it. The quick answer is that you probably shouldn’t; it’s not very good, and to the extent it has lessons to teach, it doesn’t actually try to teach them in a way you should trust. It’s definitely much different than anything else I’ve read recently, but there’s unique and then there’s unique; like all unhappy families, this book is unhappy in its own way.

One of the few ways I can see someone disagreeing with me is if they really liked his particular prose style; that’s a much more subjective thing. If you like how he writes (clearly I don’t, at least not anymore) then there’s a whole lot of the negatives in this article are actually potentially positives for you; too long might be “plenty of that thing I like” from your perspective. But from my perspective, I’d say give this book a pass; if you wanted therapy, find someone who actually wants to help you. If you wanted a book about pornography, find a book that’s actually about that topic instead of just claiming to be.

From here, I’ll start the long work of actually finishing the book. I think it’s reasonable that I do finish it, if nothing else to be fair to the author; it’s possible he has some trump cards he’s held back and it wouldn’t be right to leave the review as-is without giving him a chance to show them. Expect that some time in the next few weeks, very likely with some not-this articles in between; this isn’t exactly fun-time reading for me so it will take a bit.

In the meantime, if you need any advice of the more distinct, less 1100-page variety, I’m here for you.

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