All Hail The Reverend Lawrence Shannon

So there was an article on Return of Kings about this book, written by the Reverend Lawrence Shannon.  It's sharp, hyperbolic, the distilled essence of everything Rollo Tomassi, MGTOW and others are saying, so much so that I began to wonder if all the Manosphere theorists who weren't PUAs or Married Men were just re-cycling it. It was first published in 1985 and has been re-printed since, but not since 1997.

It's everything I and every other born bachelor believes about women, marriage and dating. I have believed something like it ever since I was about, oh, probably five months old. And you know what?

About half-way through, I realised I didn't give a flying toss whether the Rev Shannon was a raving misogynist, a bitter loser who lives in his sister's basement, or any other of those shaming namings. He was saying what I had always known, and he was saying it out loud and proud.

At that point it hit me: we born bachelors are simply genetically different from you married chumps. Sorry, but with a few exceptions (like maybe Roman Abramovich and Barak Obama) that's how we think about you. What you have done is literally incomprehensible to us. Self-harm, anorexia... and getting married. It's so incomprehensible we assume that you simply don't share the same values, no, it's more fundamental than that, you don't have the same hormone soup and brain structure as us. If we were scrawny green plants with yellow flowers, botanists would deem us different species (there are a lot of species of scrawny green plants with yellow flowers).

Am I kidding when I say it's genetic? Let me see if I can explain this. Not even in the alcohol-soaked depths of the most awful depression and self-pity did I ever think that that marriage would make it better. Not even in my most Gamma moments of guilt-for-being-me did I ever think that I should get married to prove I was a Real Man. Every time I heard people talking or read people writing about how I should be making commitments to women, getting married, having children, how maybe I was gay because I wasn't chasing after a bride (oh yes, but that was back in the Bad Old never-you-minds), how I was shallow and empty because I wasn't sharing my life with a special someone, and yadda yadda yadda... I would wonder why they were lying to me. I never day-dreamed about a house, a wife and mother of my children. I day-dreamed about my future when I was a young boy, of course I did, but it never included a wife and children. Any more than it included a Bengal tiger. There has never been a time in my life when I thought marriage, or even a live-in, would be a life-improving thing to do. No matter what I might have said, thought, felt, or said I thought or felt, I was no more likely to get married than I was to jump out of a fifth-floor window. I could no more do it than a sailor could piss into the wind. It's a reflex, not a policy.

So here's the Rev Shannon on what amounts to MGTOW:

Q. Having been single a long time, I nearly married one of our corporate attorneys last year when I was thirty six. I was rescued solely by the accidental discovery that she was occasionally sleeping with her uncle in New York. But for that windfall, I would have been trapped and put on exhibit in the public square with other married men. I am now happily resigned to remaining off the playing field, watching the fracas from the bleachers and, if a truly remarkable female makes her debut, running down for a quick scrimmage. I would suggest this alternative to anyone who is tired of the daily slamming of heads—the frantic grinding that occurs in the field.

A. You have arrived at the eventual hiding place of most men who have experienced the predatory female, learned something, but still enjoy the game. Most, like yourself, prefer the exhilarating breath of freedom to the sack cloth and ashes that accompany a "commitment." In the end, a predatory female, no matter how beautiful, will always be the succubus: exciting, momentarily thrilling, mesmerizing—but dangerous as a green mamba.

Here's the Rev Shannon on the Good Life:

Condition yourself physically and mentally. Most people look like gunnysacks full of doorknobs. This is partially due to heavy doses of dependency on predatory females. Work out every day and get yourself into good physical shape. Take up a sport and start running. Do what predatory females have done for thousands of years — concentrate completely on yourself. Rid your mind of the garbage dumped into it by the matriarchal society. Occupy it instead with good books, films, and a hobby that benefits you, that you enjoy. If you get horny, don't play the matriarchal society's hackneyed dating game, RENT a woman. For two or three hundred dollars you can rent a sexual partner skilled enough to turn you into a boiled chicken. Spare yourself the tedious sales pitch that accompanies dating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, period.

Damn right - though I don't have the money for prostitutes of that calibre. Reading the Rev Shannon caused me to laugh aloud. Here was someone else saying with zero apology what I have always felt I couldn't say to others. I could quote the whole damn book, I don't think there's one single thing I seriously disagree with. I have been walking around with a lighter heart ever since.