Days go by, and the stream of content is endless, the vast majority of it passing without comment, like the infinite flow of trillions of neutrinos through your body at any given point in time. And then sometimes -- much like the occasional neutrino that pings an electron, thus creating an observable reaction in an underground observatory -- you see some dick pills, and these dick pills seem to say something. Something important.
Every little detail is a goddamn masterpiece, isn't it? The dopey name, SWAG, complete with this being the "platinum" edition (memories from my middle school years of Big Tymers' "#1 Stunna" and the video with Bernie Mac selling them platinum rims, along with platinum everything else), the stick figures with crotches on fire looking like something a 5th grader in a ketchup-stained t-shirt he's been wearing for the past three days would get in trouble for drawing on the inside of his Trapper Keeper, the fact that "SWAG" apparently also stands for "sex with a grudge," implying that these are being sold not so much as dick pills but as rape pills. Although if we take the milder interpretation of sex with a grudge, the idea of interrupting a screaming couple-fight hatefuck -- "Fuck you bitch. Oh wait, let me take my SWAG, it should kick in in a few minutes..." -- is just terribly, terribly sad.
SWAG. American flag emoji. Made in USA!
It's apparently available at gas stations and online. For a population that finds its masculinity and purpose and hope for a brighter future stripped away by deindustrialization, wages stagnated for the past half-century, penises numbed by opiates and SSRIs, sapped of energy by morbid obesity, still vaguely imagining the total chads they could have been, the Chris Evans and Channing Tatum characters who seem to embody everything they're not. You imagine the gas station smelling of burnt coffee and nacho cheese in the first flurries of Ohio winter, the solitary man going through the selection of aggressively marketed dick pills stacked with "herbal" extracts, hoping for the equivalent of Monster Energy Drink shot right into their genitalia, itself a recapitulation of late '90s XTREME! marketing, praying they can use it for something other than a two-hour marathon of the greatest hits of Riley Reid and Mia Khalifa.
I wrote all of that before I learned that the actual compounds of SWAG include ant extract (you read that right, which is apparently common?). It was before I learned that the FDA had actually issued warnings for the product because it contained Sildenafil, the active component of Viagra, which I guess means it might work, but which also means that it is a controlled pharmaceutical being sold over the counter under the guise of "herbs." And it was before I learned that fake versions were being widely distributed, and the idea of a man looking for Chinese fakes of gas station dick pills on eBay at a marginally lower cost made me even more terribly, terribly sad than the pausing of a hatefuck to take the aforementioned dick pills.
Because it's the starry eyed yearning that makes it sad.
Because if you want something that's less sad, and more just pathetic, I draw your attention to the upper middle class equivalent, Hims, the Viagra with a millennial-pastels Squarespace website complete with pictures of dashingly handsome and clever-tattooed young men of all races, advertising itself as a positive masculinity lifestyle brand, dick pills for men who don't want to admit that they need dick pills, and need it wreathed in obnoxiously precious therapeutic prose (direct quote: "an open and empowered male culture that results in more proactivity around health and preventative self-care," barffffffff), who feel guilty about their desire for masculinity, and think it can be fixed with an app.
Jesus, if that's the other option, give me the damn gas station anger-sex pills. But it shouldn't be.
We live in a time when maleness has found some weird goddamn outlets, whether that's the parasocial relationship that Americans have to their military, as evidenced by the hideous flag-waving at any sports game, or the legions of mini-Rittenhouses who LARP as elite defenders of the American way, or the attempts by horsefaced tittybaby Josh Hawley (R-MO) to attempt to become an avatar of the American male. When really Josh Hawley is a beta soy cuck who lacks the courage to simply be a beta soy cuck.
It really is an almost perfect pairing, like pinot noir and duck breast, to the shrillest elements of the prudish phony "left," who embody a bourgeois feminism braying about centers and margins and bodies and spaces -- one that calls itself "intersectional" but fails to honestly examine the intersections and prefers to focus on victimhood, not solidarity -- that Simone de Beauvoir or Rosa Luxemburg or Emma Goldman would have proudly squirted fem-jizz all over in contempt.
Personally, I've never felt too attached to masculinity, because I'm not too big on identities of any sort. I mean, I have a cock, and enjoy fucking women with said cock, so I pretty much fit the cishet box, but I'm also pretty effeminate in a lot of ways, and am fairly proud of that, because it would be far too boring to live a gender stereotype, and because, hell, no matter what chaos my adolescence brought me, I was always pretty confident in who I was, even if I wasn't confident in vocalizing that. Maybe I would have identified as some flavor of non-binary if I'd been born 15 years later, but then again probably not. Because why should my love of home scents, my expressive and borderline campy communication, or my nasally West Coast-inflected vocalizations say anything about my gender identity, in the same way my love of football and straight bourbon doesn't, in the same way my aggressively grayscale/a few shades of blue wardrobe doesn't. Call it the David Bowie attitude. A woman I once loved asked to draw a portrait of me, and she drew me as a naked woman in shibari sneering in contempt, a glass of wine in hand. It is the most accurate portrait of me ever drawn.
So I can't say that any of these mediated narratives have ever appealed. But my advice to any young man seeking a guide for the perplexed would always be the same -- chill out, you be you, abandon all labels, be unafraid to love, be unafraid to abandon your ego, live tough and smart and graceful, read and travel and learn different languages, and find those times where you can actually throw a middle finger to the system and stick it to the man, and do it with pride. And do not trust, for a goddamn second, anyone who tries to turn a profit on the myriad holes that inevitably exist in your heart.
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