Nurturing Nature

I'm a hummingbird eating flowers, just absolutely gobbling them up

Art: Siegfried Zademack

Welcome to another thrilling, adrenaline filled episode of The Duckstack! After all the spiders¹ last week, you are sure to be on the edge of your seat! But have no fear, there are no spiders in this letter. There may be cookies. I don’t know substack’s web policy there. However, if I decide to offer cookies myself, they will be only for paid subscribers.

Please beware the lengthy section on sex and forgive the shortness of the history section- the reason that it is so brief is that the past has simply run out of events. To compensate for this, we will be adding an additional history section with made up events. Enjoy.

HISTORY

Took my kiddo to a baptism. I was trying to explain what was going on but then had to take him outside during the confirmation because he kept (loudly) asking “WHERE’S THE HOLY GHOST, PAPA?”

EXTRA BONUS HISTORY

Once upon a time there was a moonlit dog named Phideoux, he loved to bark at the moon in effort to change it into the sun. Unfortunately, Phideoux lived on the quasi-planet of Pluto and had poor eyesight and no access to glasses or contact lenses, and therefore could not see the sunrise. One day the glasses fairy came to Pluto. Upon looking upon Phideoux, she had compassion on the poor dog, and gave him a pair of glasses she had nabbed from some kid’s nightstand, and didn’t even charge Phideoux for them. “take these, and if any coppers show up, you never saw me.” she said compassionately, and hastily poofed away back to fairy land. Phideoux tried on the glasses, and they were the wrong prescription for him so he still couldn’t really see that great, but he looked and looked and looked at the stars and the star named the sun, until his eyes watered and fell out² and they all lived happily ever after. The end.

Feminine Fealty

This relationship is photoshopped, I can tell from some of the pixels and from having seen quite a few shops in my day

I'm going to give some sex and relationship advice for a moment, and give a part of the map that works for me for some of the more poorly documented territory, regarding the henpecked. I’m not going to write a full guide to all relationships here³ but hopefully you can get some use out of this framework.

Henpecking is when a wife berates her man too frequently causing him to shut down. It's an entirely natural instinct in women and I don’t think it's bad, but indulged too much and without temperance it can lead to the man becoming “henpecked”- tired and put upon and not really jazzed about fulfilling your needs. Which causes you to resent him more. Which makes you more prone to criticizing him. Which sullenifies⁴ him even more. You should expect to see some of this in your relationship, it isn’t wrong to have some costs associated with your relationships with the opposite sex, but if you are aware of the dynamics beforehand it can really help mitigate the friction. Let me lens some of male psychology to explain.

What men want in a woman is something akin to fealty, and adoration. He takes on a lot of costs in a wife- she will want a nice couch, a nice house, and higher quality foods, and attention, so he wants some things back, and the standard payments like money and stuff aren’t really interesting to him.⁵ Here a lot of people say “well one way she pays him is sex” and that is like saying “well you buy a car with a Honda”- there is stuff behind the sex drive. The sex drive doesn’t drive. There’s philosophy behind it. A man will drift around his core/ideal self throughout life and is attracted to the woman who he thinks will best serve as a meter for how close he is to being his ideal.

The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value . . .

The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem . . . . Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.

-Ayn Rand

After marriage, men judge themselves primarily by their wives - if she is ornery, the man will become a useless peasant because that's what he feels he has to be. This is counterintuitive (which is why this sort of friction slips into relationships so easily) because you would think her disproval would make him want to do better. And maybe it does some, but the man’s psychology is different: When you admire him, you remind him of his ideal self. When you detest him, he feels his meter is broken, and he becomes lost. Without his wife’s admiration, it will be difficult for any man to achieve his dreams.⁶

Criticizing a man while walking a balance with these principles was a great work our ancestors engaged in which we pretty much threw away entirely when we decided boys and girls were the same thing and now everyone is getting divorced and has no idea how to make relationships work. Oops! Anyway:

If a man is working and providing home food money comforts for someone and he has power and authority as payment for that, that man is a king⁷. If a man is providing these things and has no authority in response, the definition of that is “slave”. If a man feels like a slave, he will do the minimum work for as few lashings as possible, and set NO goals for his own ambitions. And then SHE will feel married to a deadbeat! I think this is why God says Eve’s desire must be to her husband. For her own sake.⁸

Edit: Bennett's Demilich’s Substack post this week is on a very adjacent subject which I recommend reading here, where he goes into more depth on the aspect of being worthy of a wife’s desire. Here’s a snippet:

Second, they’re afraid of being tyrannized. Nobody actually wants to be humiliated or hurt or exploited. Women enjoy feeling “owned”, but we no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical, so the idea of being owned & the idea of being abused are deeply connected. There’s a fear that if that desire is ever defined as anything other than “kink” - if it is ever permitted to escape the bedroom - that it would mean literal, actual, unsexy slavery.

Clean Code

Name one thing keeping you from putting jokes in your code's comments.

That thing is of Satan.

Img: Marie Kondo

DUBSTEP

I have never really understood dubstep but I do not think acquired tastes are bad. I think learning how to acquire tastes is an extremely important part of life and attaining the Celestial Kingdom. if you dont like dubstep youre probably going to hell.

My first baby hated dubstep, but my second baby likes it, but they both like Nine Inch Nails (paternity test)

1. I don’t even like spiders.

2. That’s what happens when you use the wrong prescription of glasses for too long.

3. I calculated it out and it would take too many paragraphs

4. Ensullenates. Besullens him. Sullenificates. Sullen’ts.

5. No man is attracted to a girl because of her earning potential, just the way it is.

6. progs will read this and be like “how dare he suggest women be good to their husbands, thats chauvinist” Men should be good to their wives too but its unfortunately a little more complicated because most women’s issues can’t be solved by just blatant ego stoking

7. benevolent, tyrant, comic, whatever

8. Genesis 3:16“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”